Mara Sapon-Shevin always wondered if she had an FBI file. For more than 40 years, the Syracuse University professor has been a political activist for Palestinian liberation, first organizing with New Jewish Agenda and later with Jewish Voice for Peace.
On October 10, 2023 — in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel and amid the rapid escalation of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza — Sapon-Shevin got her answer: An FBI agent was on her doorstep. He unfolded his badges from his wallet and asked for her by name.
“He said, “I’m here because a year ago you co-organized a demonstration for Palestinian justice,’” Sapon-Shevin recalled. “I was smart enough that I didn’t say, ‘Oh, which one?’”
The agent told Sapon-Shevin that nobody was in trouble, but he wanted to know if, “given the current moment,” there were any Palestinians she was “worried about.” When she declined to speak with him or give him names, he left her his business card.
While the interaction was likely intended to serve as a chilling warning, “It didn’t stop me from organizing for five minutes,” Sapon-Shevin said.
This rattling intrusion of the FBI into Sapon-Shevin’s home life was far from an isolated incident. In 2018, the advocacy group Palestine Legal published an advisory for pro-Palestine activists after FBI agents visited a University of California Los Angeles student at home and asked about their campus organizing.
“This is not the first FBI encounter reported to our office,” Palestine Legal wrote at the time. “However, the line of questioning reflects intensifying efforts to criminalize protected political speech and human rights advocacy.”
Those efforts have become more prevalent in the wake of October 7, 2023, and with Donald Trump back in the White House, civil liberties advocates are expecting an even broader crackdown on First Amendment-protected speech and dissent.
If someone does come knocking on your door, you don’t have to say a thing.
Last week, for instance, The Intercept revealed that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is soliciting contract proposals from private companies to monitor social media users — not only for threats of violence, but also for any online criticism of the agency. The procurement notice seeks a company that will provide “proactive threat monitoring” and compile weekly updates on “social media sentiment” and “negative references to ICE found in social media.” Once the private contractor locates a person who is publicly criticizing ICE and identifies them as a target, it is then instructed to rifle through the user’s internet history and gather their personal information — including Social Security numbers, possible work and school affiliations and possible family members — in a dossier. The document also requests “Facial Recognition capabilities” that would enable the contractor to search the internet using the subject’s photo.
Federal contractor Giant Oak has helped ICE surveil the social media of immigrants and non-U.S. citizens in foreign countries since at least 2014. That system flags “derogatory” posts about the United States in a giant database, ostensibly to inform enforcement decisions such as visa applications and admission to the country. But as The Intercept reported, the newly revealed surveillance request “contains specific directions for targets found in other countries, implying the program would scan the domestic speech of American citizens.” Immigrant rights and civil liberties advocates told The Intercept that such an expansion of ICE’s surveillance capabilities could have devastating consequences for free speech under the Trump administration.
The latest ICE announcement underscores what digital privacy experts have been warning about for years: The government’s ability to conduct mass, secretive social media surveillance of protected speech is cause for alarm under any administration. When that power is handed to an administration that is demonstrably hostile to free speech and human rights, it’s all the more likely to be abused.
A 2022 report by the Brennan Center, a nonprofit public policy institute, noted that during the first Trump administration, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI both scoured social media to surveil Black Lives Matter activists. At the time the Brennan Center raised an alarm about the practice, arguing that it was likely to chill individuals’ willingness to talk openly online. Notably, amid protests over the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, the FBI expedited its extension of a contract with Dataminr, a controversial social media monitoring company. City police departments also used Dataminr to surveil George Floyd protesters.
The Biden administration meanwhile readily picked up the baton and continued similar surveillance practices after Trump’s first term: In 2022, Biden’s Defense Department inked another contract with Dataminr. And in 2023, the American Civil Liberties Union obtained documents showing that the Biden administration had quietly been expanding its social media surveillance of noncitizens. It is these types of activities that have laid the groundwork for Trump’s expanded powers upon his return to the White House.
People are often inclined to think that, if they’ve done nothing “wrong,” they won’t get caught up in the federal government’s surveillance dragnet. But we can see from documents like ICE’s recent contract solicitation and Trump’s directive that universities monitor pro-Palestine protesters on student visas, that this simply isn’t true. In simply exercising your First Amendment right to criticize the Trump administration and its agencies, you, too, could be placed under government watch or hassled by a state agent.
Still, if someone does come knocking on your door, you don’t have to say a thing. “Do not answer any questions.… Do not let them in your house/apt,” reads the advice from Palestine Legal. “Only give them permission to enter if they show you a warrant signed by a judge that accurately lists your address and apartment number…. Say, ‘Please leave your business card, my lawyer will call you.’ Repeat it over and over and over again, no matter how nice they are. Do not say anything else.”
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
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Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
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