Citizen Spies: The Long Rise Of America’s Surveillance Society

238 Pages·2017·2.64 MB·English

by  Joshua Reeves

Citizen Spies

Citizen Spies
The Long Rise of America’s Surveillance Society
Joshua Reeves
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
www.nyupress.org
© 2017 by New York University
All rights reserved
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ISBN: 978-1-4798-0392-7
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Seeing, Saying, and Civic Responsibility 1
1. The Power of the Crowd: Police Crowdsourcing 21
2. Citizen Equipment: The Rise of 911 Emergency 51
3. Neighborhood Watching: Regulating the Citizens’ Patrol 77
4. Recognize, Resist, Report: D.A.R.E. America and the
Kid Police 109
5. Terror Citizenship: Surveillance and Civil Defense 137
Conclusion: Looking the Other Way 169
Notes 181
References 205
Index 221
About the Author 229
v

Acknowledgments
My friend and mentor Hans Kellner once told me that academic debts
are many and varied, and over the years I’ve learned that he was certainly
right. Many people have helped me along the path to this book: above
all, Jeremy Packer has been a constant source of creativity and guidance.
I am also enormously grateful for the generosity displayed by Chris
Ingraham, Matt May, and Ethan Stoneman as they endured years of
exhausting monologues on surveillance, communication, rhetoric, and
violence. I owe special thanks to Mark Andrejevic, Vicki Gallagher, and
Hans Kellner for their encouragement and guidance while this project
was in its infancy. All of my colleagues at the University of Memphis—
especially Tony de Velasco, Patrick Dillon, Leroy Dorsey, Joy Goldsmith,
Rika Hudson, Marina Levina, and Camisha Smith— helped keep me
sane and happy while this book took shape between 2013 and 2015. The
ILL staff at the University of Memphis proved to be tremendous sleuths
who repeatedly impressed me with their tenacity and success. I would
also like to thank my old pal Adam Chandler of Cornell University
Library for tracking down a number of archival documents that were
crucial to this project. My anonymous reviewers were incredibly gener-
ous and insightful, and I couldn’t be more grateful for the challenges
they set before me. Thanks, as well, to the staff at NYU Press, especially
Alicia Nadkarni; it’s been a wild and joyful three years. And to all the
friends whose work I learn from and whose company I enjoy— folks like
Carole Blair, Jack Bratich, Fernanda Duarte, Rachel Dubrofsky, Dan Fal-
tesek, David Gruber, Rachel Hall, Colin Hesse, Nate Hulsey, Jason Kalin,
Ashley Kelly, Kelsy Kretschmer, Kate Maddalena, Torin Monahan, Alex
Monea, Ned O’Gorman, Kathy Oswald, Ehren Pflugfelder, Chris Russill,
Dawn Shepherd, Dan Sutko, and Ken Zagacki, just to name a few— I
look forward to whatever comes next. To my new friends in the College
of Liberal Arts at Oregon State University— especially Krystal Canales,
Loril Chandler, Sally Gallagher, Lee Ann Garrison, Trischa Goodnow,
vii
viii | Acknowledgments
Jeff Hale, Robert Iltis, Todd Kesterson, Bill Loges, Katrina Machorro,
Elizabeth Root, Kim Rossi, Marion Rossi, and Gregg Walker—I would
like to say thanks for making this such an interesting place to be. And
finally: thanks to Surveillance & Society for providing an outlet for the
very earliest iterations of this work. Small parts of the Introduction and
Chapter One previously appeared in “If You See Something, Say Some-
thing: Lateral Surveillance and the Uses of Responsibility,” Surveillance
& Society 10.3/4 (2012): 235– 48.
I should also thank the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which
has trademarked the original title for this book (“If You See Something,
Say Something”) and thus forced us to come up with a new title at the
last minute. I like this one much better. And thanks, above all, for pro-
viding such a clear illustration of one of the book’s main themes: how
the state regulates the communicative conduct of its citizens.
Fortunately, my personal debts are just as many and varied as my
academic ones. Although I cannot begin to list them all here, at the very
least I should thank all the family and friends who were sidelined dur-
ing the years I worked on this book. Finally, my wife Leslie deserves the
most credit of all. This book— like so many other things I work for and
enjoy—w ould be impossible without her. So it is to Leslie, as well as to
Austin, Annelie, Amelia, and Oliver, that I dedicate this book.
Introduction
Seeing, Saying, and Civic Responsibility
When Neighborhood Watch volunteer George Zimmerman was acquit-
ted for the murder of Trayvon Martin, public discourse was flooded with
reflections on what the verdict said about America in the twenty- first
century. Millions of Americans traced Martin’s death— and then, Zim-
merman’s acquittal—t o the nation’s enduring legacy of racist violence.
Anthea Butler, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, stirred
up controversy by remarking, “When George Zimmerman told Sean
Hannity that it was God’s will that he shot and killed Trayvon Martin, he
was diving right into what most good conservative Christians in Amer-
ica think right now. Whatever makes them protected, safe, and secure
is worth it at the expense of the black and brown people they fear.”1 For
Butler and many other Americans,2 the Trayvon affair was an explosive
symptom of structural racism in the United States. From their point of
view, Zimmerman’s appeals to self- defense and neighborhood security
simply rationalized interracial suspicion and increased the likelihood of
further violence against marginalized groups.
Many Americans, however, had a different take on the Trayvon trag-
edy. For instance, rightwing activist and southern rock icon Ted Nugent
praised the verdict, arguing that Zimmerman simply displayed “the fun-
damental responsibility of a neighbor who cares.”3 According to Nugent,
Zimmerman’s brand of neighborhood surveillance and inter- citizen vig-
ilance is as American as apple pie. Offering his own version of the events
that led to Trayvon’s death, Nugent placed Zimmerman’s actions within
a context of rising local crime and neighborhood anxiety: “So this guy’s
neighborhood has been burglarized off and on and the residents are very
concerned for their safety and well-b eing. Neighbors agree to upkick
their vigilance and overall level of awareness to watch out for each other
and keep an eye out for suspicious individuals and behavior. It could be
1