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The epistemic crisis Trump has accelerated is now morphing into a full-fledged crisis of democracy.

As Voltaire famously put it: “Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.”

The right, in all its organs, from social media to television to the president, is telling a well-worn, consistent story: Opposition from the left and Democrats is fraudulent, illegitimate, a foreign-funded conspiracy against the traditional white American way of life.

Having two versions of reality constantly clashing in public is cognitively and emotionally exhausting. To an average person following the news, the haze of charge and countercharge is overwhelming. And that is precisely what every autocrat wants.

every aspiring tyrant in modern history has made the independent media his first target

Then they go after the courts, the security services, and the military. Once they have a large base of support that will believe whatever they proclaim, follow them anywhere, support them in anything — it doesn’t have to be a majority, just an intense, activated minority — they can, practically speaking, get away with anything.

One two-letter word cannot possibly hold all of the varied experiences of data, specifically those of the people are at the most immediate risk: visible minorities, LGBTQ+ people, indigenous communities, the elderly, the disabled, displaced migrants, the incarcerated

At least twenty-six states allow the FBI to perform facial recognition searches against their databases of images from drivers licenses and state IDs, despite the fact that the FBI’s own reports have indicated that facial recognition is less accurate for black people. Black people, already at a higher risk of arrest and incarceration than other Americans, feel these data systems in a much different way than I do

last week, the Department of Justice passed a brief to the Supreme Court arguing that sex discrimination protections do not extend to transgender people. If this ruling were to be supported, it would immediately put trans women and men at more risk than others from the surveillant data technologies that are becoming more and more common in the workplace. Trans people will be put in distinct danger — a reality that is lost when they are folded neatly into a communal we

I looked at the list of speakers for the conference in Brussels to get an idea of the particular we of Cook’s audience, which included Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai and the King of Spain. Of the presenters, 57% were men and 83% where white. Only 4 of the 132 people on stage were black.

another we that Tim Cook necessarily speaks on the behalf of: privileged men in tech. This we includes Mark and Sundar; it includes 60% of Silicon Valley and 91% of its equity. It is this we who have reaped the most benefit from Big Data and carried the least risk, all while occupying the most time on stage

Here’s a more urgent question for us, one that doesn’t ask what we want but instead what they need:How can this new data world be made safer for the people who are facing real risks, right now?

“The act of listening has greater ethical potential than speaking” — Julietta Singh

the spread of persistent surveillance technologies is particularly worrisome because they remove any limit on how much information police can gather on a person’s movements. “The border is the natural place for the government to start using them, since there is much more public support to deploy these sorts of intrusive technologies there,”

the company’s ultimate goal is to build a “layer” of electronic surveillance equipment across the entire perimeter of the U.S. “Over time, we’ll expand not only to the northern border, but to the ports and harbors across the country,”

In addition to fixed and mobile surveillance towers, other technology that CBP has acquired and deployed includes blimps outfitted with high-powered ground and air radar, sensors buried underground, and facial recognition software at ports of entry. CBP’s drone fleet has been described as the largest of any U.S. agency outside the Department of Defense

Nellie Jo David, a Tohono O’odham tribal member who is writing her dissertation on border security issues at the University of Arizona, says many younger people who have been forced by economic circumstances to work in nearby cities are returning home less and less, because they want to avoid the constant surveillance and harassment. “It’s especially taken a toll on our younger generations.”

Border militarism has been spreading worldwide owing to neoliberal economic policies, wars, and the onset of the climate crisis, all of which have contributed to the uprooting of increasingly large numbers of people, notes Reece Jones

In the U.S., leading companies with border security contracts include long-established contractors such as Lockheed Martin in addition to recent upstarts such as Anduril Industries, founded by tech mogul Palmer Luckey to feed the growing market for artificial intelligence and surveillance sensors — primarily in the borderlands. Elbit Systems has frequently touted a major advantage over these competitors: the fact that its products are “field-proven” on Palestinians

Verlon Jose, then-tribal vice chair, said that many nation members calculated that the towers would help dissuade the federal government from building a border wall across their lands. The Tohono O’odham are “only as sovereign as the federal government allows us to be,”

Leading Democrats have argued for the development of an ever-more sophisticated border surveillance state as an alternative to Trump’s border wall. “The positive, shall we say, almost technological wall that can be built is what we should be doing,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in January. But for those crossing the border, the development of this surveillance apparatus has already taken a heavy toll. In January, a study published by researchers from the University of Arizona and Earlham College found that border surveillance towers have prompted migrants to cross along more rugged and circuitous pathways, leading to greater numbers of deaths from dehydration, exhaustion, and exposure.

“Walls are not only a question of blocking people from moving, but they are also serving as borders or frontiers between where you enter the surveillance state,” she said. “The idea is that at the very moment you step near the border, Elbit will catch you. Something similar happens in Palestine.”

CBP is by far the largest law enforcement entity in the U.S., with 61,400 employees and a 2018 budget of $16.3 billion — more than the militaries of Iran, Mexico, Israel, and Pakistan. The Border Patrol has jurisdiction 100 miles inland from U.S. borders, making roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population theoretically subject to its operations, including the entirety of the Tohono O’odham reservation

Between 2013 and 2016, for example, roughly 40 percent of Border Patrol seizures at immigration enforcement checkpoints involved 1 ounce or less of marijuana confiscated from U.S. citizens.

the agency uses its sprawling surveillance apparatus for purposes other than border enforcement

documents obtained via public records requests suggest that CBP drone flights included surveillance of Dakota Access pipeline protests

CBP’s repurposing of the surveillance tower and drones to surveil dissidents hints at other possible abuses. “It’s a reminder that technologies that are sold for one purpose, such as protecting the border or stopping terrorists — or whatever the original justification may happen to be — so often get repurposed for other reasons, such as targeting protesters.”

The impacts of the U.S. border on Tohono O’odham people date to the mid-19th century. The tribal nation’s traditional land extended 175 miles into Mexico before being severed by the 1853 Gadsden Purchase, a U.S. acquisition of land from the Mexican government. As many as 2,500 of the tribe’s more than 30,000 members still live on the Mexican side. Tohono O’odham people used to travel between the United States and Mexico fairly easily on roads without checkpoints to visit family, perform ceremonies, or obtain health care. But that was before the Border Patrol arrived en masse in the mid-2000s, turning the reservation into something akin to a military occupation zone. Residents say agents have administered beatings, used pepper spray, pulled people out of vehicles, shot two Tohono O’odham men under suspicious circumstances, and entered people’s homes without warrants. “It is apartheid here,” Ofelia Rivas says. “We have to carry our papers everywhere. And everyone here has experienced the Border Patrol’s abuse in some way.”

Tohono O’odham people have developed common cause with other communities struggling against colonization and border walls. David is among numerous activists from the U.S. and Mexican borderlands who joined a delegation to the West Bank in 2017, convened by Stop the Wall, to build relationships and learn about the impacts of Elbit’s surveillance systems. “I don’t feel safe with them taking over my community, especially if you look at what’s going on in Palestine — they’re bringing the same thing right over here to this land,” she says. “The U.S. government is going to be able to surveil basically anybody on the nation.”