Kqed Science News

The tools of high tech surveillance are increasingly all around us: security cameras in public and embedded in doorbells, location data on your phone, online ad tracking. A lot of this has become normalized, utterly mundane. But in the year since nationwide student protests for Palestine, heightened scrutiny of and retaliation against activists in the U.S. have raised new concerns. Government surveillance, particularly on social media, has grown exponentially since the massive Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, but the precedent in this country stretches much further back. In this episode, Columbia University student organizer Jalsa Drinkard shares her experience protecting other students from invasive surveillance and targeting, and Don Bell, policy counsel for The Constitution Project at the Project On Government Oversight, walks us through the long history of government surveillance in American protest movements, and why today’s moment feels different. Guests: Jalsa Drinkard, Columbia University stud