Josh Begley

In 2011, the Associated Press revealed the existence of the Demographics Unit (later renamed the Zone Assessment Unit), a secret unit within the New York Police Department (NYPD) that monitored the daily lives of Muslims. Using census information and government databases, the NYPD mapped ethnic neighborhoods—in places such as the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, New York, and Newark, New Jersey—and dispatched plainclothes detectives to photograph, observe, and create extensive files on Muslim owned or affiliated businesses, gathering places, and sites of worship.

The harms of this program have been well documented by groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the City University New York School of Law's Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility project, and the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition. According to these groups and others, the Demographics Unit did more than engage in systematic racial and religious profiling: it created a climate of fear and suspicion that encroached upon all aspects of everyday life.

But what did this surveillance actually look like? What were the images and information that populated these files? What might the visual vernacular of NYPD surveillance tell us about the nature of spying and secrecy today?

Plain Sight is an attempt to catalog the banality and violence of the visual culture of the NYPD’s secret spying unit. Using the Associated Press-released NYPD documents as source material, the project brings attention to maps produced by the unit that identify “locations of interest” where people ate, shopped, and prayed, as well as photographs and observations made by undercover detectives at those sites. By pulling apart the various elements in these documents and re-arranging the material in the form of collage, Plain Sight re-presents that which has already been made public, and draws attention to the often mundane, innocuous, and indiscriminate nature of the information collected. Through this work, viewers are provided with different entry points through which they can see surveillance and examine this historical archive in a new light.

—Josh Begley, November 2014

Update: On April 15, 2014, the New York City Police Department announced the closure of the Zone Assessment Unit. While this is considered a positive step, advocates stress that overbroad surveillance of Muslim communities continues.

Hasan Elahi

After an erroneous tip linking me to terrorist activities led to a six-month long FBI investigation, I decided to give the FBI a helping hand by sending them my itinerary whenever I traveled and turning my camera phone into a tracking device. Although multiple polygraph tests and interviews eventually cleared me, I wanted to make sure that the bureau knew that I wasn’t making any sudden moves, and inform them of what I was doing at any given time. My approach was:  “OK, you want to watch me? That’s perfectly fine, but I can watch myself better than you guys ever can.”

As I monitored myself, I started thinking about what else the FBI might know about me. During the investigation, I told them every detail of my life. But were they really paying full attention? I wanted to make sure we both had the same information. So, I created my own parallel file and sent the FBI visual evidence documenting everything I did and when I did it. Over a decade later, I continue to voluntarily monitor myself and conduct this self-surveillance project.

Currently, I have sent nearly 70,000 images, and I trust that the FBI has seen them all. Similar to the detailed files kept by the Stasi security agency in the former German Democratic Republic, the FBI has access to records that track the stores I’ve shopped in:  where I’ve bought my minced crab paste, my kimchi, or my laundry detergent. But unlike the Stasi, the FBI knows all of this because I’ve shown them everything. They have seen the airports I’ve transited through, the food I’ve eaten at home and on the road, the hotel beds I’ve slept in, and every toilet I’ve ever used.

By disclosing mundane details about my daily life, I am simultaneously telling everything and nothing about my life. I am flooding the market with banal information, and questioning its inherent meaning and value for intelligence purposes. As we generate and archive more data than ever before through digital tools and social media, we need to examine the perpetual surveillance that we direct at ourselves and that is directed at us by others, and consider the efficiency of both information gathering and information analysis within this context.

—Hasan Elahi, November 2014

The New Town is a series of photographs made throughout 2013 that examine an idealized planned community in the American Midwest. The images were made by accessing a publicly-available, networked CCTV camera that was installed by the developer on a cell phone tower atop a church in the center of town. The goal was to monitor and publicize the construction. The camera is an example of the many non-secure internet-ready devices that actively and indiscriminately stream information to the internet.

In addition to the visual stream of information from the camera, any person could get online access to the device’s entire control panel. This allowed me to remotely operate the camera, and pan, tilt, zoom, focus, and adjust the exposure. With these tools, I could take control of the camera as if it were my own and subvert its intended purpose in order to make photographs.

Maintaining such dynamic control and close observation of New Town and its residents yielded a considerable amount of imagery. These photographs allude to the visual language of amateur and surveillance footage. As popular news and social media distribute surveillance film and photographs depicting suspected criminals, missing persons, and national tragedies, grainy film and pixelated imagery become part of a vernacular image culture that often equates with “suspicious” or threatening activity.

The increasing use of domestic surveillance continues to be a complicated issue that raises concerns of privacy invasion and loss of personal freedom. The use of mass surveillance through the interception of internet traffic is a powerful tool for monitoring and manipulation. Emerging technologies and the appropriation of existing devices and networks provide the main conduits for modern invasions of privacy.

This project follows the daily lives of New Town residents to reflect on the expansive use of surveillance technologies, the increasing loss of privacy, and the heightened sense of anxiety and vulnerability that are part of American life in the early 21st century. My role as both narrator and image-maker complicates the ethical boundaries between my own acts of surveillance and social critique. Through my photography, I hope to question the ethical failures, structures, and abuse of power that arise from a  “see-something-say-something” culture rooted in fear and social manipulation.

—Andrew Hammerand, November 2014

Mishka Henner

When Google introduced its free satellite imagery service to the world in 2005, views of our planet only previously accessible to astronauts and surveyors were suddenly available to anyone with an internet connection. Yet the vistas revealed by this technology were not universally embraced.

Governments concerned about the sudden visibility of political, economic, and military locations exerted considerable influence on suppliers of this imagery to censor sites deemed vital to national security. This form of censorship continues today and techniques vary from country to country with preferred methods generally including use of cloning, blurring, pixelization, and whitening out sites of interest.

Surprisingly, the Dutch have been one of the most vociferous enforcers of this form of censorship. The government has hidden hundreds of significant sites including royal palaces, fuel depots, and army barracks throughout this relatively small country. The Dutch method of censorship is notable for its stylistic intervention compared to other countries; imposing bold, multi-colored polygons over sites rather than the subtler and more standard techniques employed by others. The result is a landscape occasionally punctuated by sharp aesthetic contrasts between secret sites and the rural and urban environments surrounding them.

Dutch Landscapes, the title of the series, is a nod to the tradition of 17th-century Dutch landscape painting. Almost four centuries later and post-September 11th terrorist attacks, the Dutch have created a new kind of visual legacy that captures the fear and paranoia of authorities at the turn of the 21st century. Seen from the distant gaze of Earth’s orbiting satellites, the result is a landscape unlike any other. These recently imposed digital polygons protect the Dutch government's locations of interest against the prying eyes of an imagined human menace. With the vertical view of the satellite's gaze, and in the abstract polygons hiding military sites of strategic and logistical importance, the Dutch censors have inadvertently invented a new form of landscape painting suited to our age.

—Mishka Henner, November 2014

Simon Menner

While conducting research on surveillance, I realized that the public has very limited access to images   showing the act of surveillance from the perspective of the surveillant. What actually is it that the Orwellian “Big Brother” gets to see when he is watching us?

For over two and a half years, I applied this question to materials from the former East Germany’s Ministry for State Security, commonly known as the Stasi, which had become publicly available after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Stasi was one of the most effective surveillance apparatuses ever. The quantity and breadth of the images I was able to unearth was surprising: images documenting Stasi agents being trained in hand signals, or perfecting the art of disguise; Polaroids taken during clandestine searches of people’s homes, to ensure everything could be put back where it belonged; photographs made by Stasi spies photographing other spies.

Many of the images shown here might appear absurd or even funny to us. But it is important not to lose sight of the original intentions behind these pictures—photographic records of the repression exerted by the state to subdue its own citizens. The banality of some of these pictures makes them even more repulsive. Many of the images are open to wide interpretation and could feed or confirm the suspicions of the Stasi agents viewing them. For example, the photograph of a Siemens coffeemaker: Is this West German consumer product evidence of contacts with Western agents? Or merely a present from relatives? The difference can mean years in prison, demonstrating one of the fundamental problems and limitations inherent to any and all forms of surveillance.

Presenting most of these pictures can be a double-edged sword. Many represent an undue intrusion into people’s private lives. Does reproducing them repeat the intrusion and renew injustices committed years ago? I grappled with this difficult issue and concluded that the pictures should be presented because they make an important contribution to discussions about state-sanctioned surveillance systems.

—Simon Menner, November 2014

Mari Bastashevski and Privacy International

“You see, I would be perfectly happy to have all my personal things burned up in a fire because I don't have anything personal. Nothing of value. No, nothing personal except my keys, you see, which I really would like to have the only copy of, Mrs. Evangelista.” —Harry Caul, The Conversation (1974)

The installation, It’s Nothing Personal, is part of a broader series of reports and artworks on the lawful interception and communication surveillance industry. It presents the dichotomy between what global surveillance firms promote in their self-representation, and what the testimonies of those who are directly affected by these technologies disclose.

State surveillance is nothing new, but the industry that satisfies governments’ demand for surveillance of mass communications has skyrocketed, and it is one of today's most rapidly burgeoning markets.

Five years from now, the lawful interception industry will earn five times the U.S. $251.5 million profit it generated in 2014. Most surveillance technologies will be produced by American, European, and Israeli companies and pitched to law enforcement or intelligence agencies across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, often to entities that don’t require an additional permit to intercept, and are answerable to no one.

A variety of products sold includes ready-to-use monitoring centers that are able to silently access, process, and store years of electronic communications of entire countries. Forged SSL certificates and HTTP aggregators allow state agents to stand between the server and the user, and collect user names, passwords, and trace movements across cyber space. And governments and companies can seamlessly and remotely insert eavesdropping viruses into mobile phones and computers.

While most of these products are undetectable by design, those who sell them have developed a strong corporate image. Branding concepts applied in promotional materials—brochures, videos, and websites—emphasize protection against vague but potent threats, technical capacities, and an ease of application. Access to intimate details of correspondence is presented as impersonal data, petabytes stored and packets inspected.

The detached technical jargon and sanitized clip-art aesthetic work to obscure a deep-rooted partiality. Communication surveillance is a fundamental part of law enforcement operations meant to benefit those it vows to protect, in as much as it is a weapon for preserving power by infringing on the privacy of those who oppose it.

—Mari Bastashevski, November 2014

Julian Roeder

Mission and Task deals with the technologization of security and the infrastructure of Europe‘s external borders, which have become exponentially more controlled through new systems of surveillance.

On December 2, 2013, the border security system EUROSUR went into operation with the function of unifying and interconnecting all current systems. Under the coordination of Frontex, the European Union agency for external border control, EUROSUR enables border control authorities of individual EU member states to now directly exchange information with the assistance of national coordination centers. EUROSUR evaluates data from transmitters such as satellites, radar stations, airplanes, and drones.

With this, the EU has granted Frontex new power. Current law and accepted practices allow every newcomer the possibility to reach land and submit an application for asylum. As Frontex increases its ability and authority to intercept migrants in international waters, these laws and practices may change. Going forward, the border protection agency might eventually gain the authority to stop boats found in international waters, search them, and turn them back.

Direct contact between EU border controllers and migrants will become less frequent in the future. Upstream, a system of satellites, radar installations, and infrared cameras is in place It will register planned crossings long before the EU borders are even in sight. The system’s highly sensitive, multipartite nature strengthens EU boundaries and renders them far more resistant than water, barbed wire, or cement. The system will keep people out long before they even see or approach the border.

With my work, I intend to portray a border security system consisting of surveillance infrastructure that ensures the relative affluence of life in Europe. I know of many works dedicated to representing the fate of migrants. I wanted, however, to create works that do not focus on “the other” itself, but on the systems and mechanisms used to construct and control “the other.”

In making these images, I was particularly dedicated to showing how technologization turns the handling of migrants into an abstraction. The focal point is a technology that records humans as data, currents, points of light, and as signals—not as individuals. Through an excessive enhancement of the photographic aesthetic, this technology can become a tool and symbol for alienation instead of a responsible means of dealing with people. 

—Julian Roeder, November 2014 

Tomas van Houtryve

In October 2012, a drone strike in northeast Pakistan killed a 67-year-old woman picking okra outside her home. At a U.S. Congressional hearing on October 29, 2013, held in Washington, D.C., the woman’s 13-year-old grandson, Zubair Rehman, spoke to a group of five lawmakers. “I no longer love blue skies,” said Rehman, who was injured by shrapnel in the attack. “In fact, I now prefer gray skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are gray.”

According to strike reports complied by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, Zubair Rehman’s grandmother is one of several thousand people killed by covert U.S. drone strikes since 2004. Although we live in the most media-connected age in history, the public has scant visual record of the drone war and its casualties.

In response, I decided to attach my camera to a small drone and travel across America to photograph the very sorts of gatherings mentioned in strike reports from Pakistan and Yemen —weddings, funerals, groups of people praying or exercising. I made a list of “targets” to observe from the sky by reading hundreds of these reports. I also used a map of drone flights in the United States authorized by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that had recently become public due to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Guided by these FAA records, I sent my camera over places where domestic drone use had been approved, including prisons, oil fields, and the U.S.-Mexico border.

By creating these images, I aim to draw attention to the changing nature of personal privacy, surveillance, and contemporary warfare. As Albert Camus said, “By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.” In many ways, drones, particularly those used by the military, are the ultimate representation of delivering a policy without conscience, without empathy. As more drones fill the sky, we should consider how this technology will be used and experienced. Will the sight of drones overhead eventually seem as ordinary as an airplane or bird? Or will people start wishing for gray skies like Zubair Rehman?

—Tomas van Houtryve, November 2014

Edu Bayer

This series of photographs depicts the surveillance apparatus of Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi’s regime—once one of the most feared authoritarian dictatorships in the world. The images encourage us to reflect on surveillance of citizens by state powers.

Qaddafi was a controversial figure. His supporters lauded his anti-imperialist stance, as well as his pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism, while his detractors saw him as an obsessive autocrat who systematically violated the human rights of Libyan citizens. The regime intentionally marginalized areas and suppressed efforts at democratic reform until the Arab Uprisings of 2011.

I went to Libya in early 2011 to cover the conflict; and like many journalists, I was attracted to the idea of revolution and wanted to witness the power of people collectively fighting to improve their lives.

In August, the Wall Street Journal assigned me to photograph Qaddafi’s internet surveillance center and intelligence headquarters in Tripoli, which had been abandoned by the regime. The surveillance center was a six-story building where the government monitored citizens’ movements and correspondence. By summer 2011, it had become the empty core of a repressive machine. It was an evocative scene, and I imagined what must have taken place there, the people involved, and the conversations they had.

My intention behind these images lies in the sense of chaos that is left behind, and freezing the moment just after the escape of the last occupants and before the arrival of the new residents. Many believe that the Libyan authorities destroyed the extremely sensitive files and information before they abandoned the building, and that the rebels removed the remaining documents when they arrived.

The photographs of this strange and usually off-limits place reflect the absurdity and ugliness of control, repression, and fear. They also serve as evidence that even the most powerful regime can be reduced to an empty building with shredded documents on the floor.

—Edu Bayer, November 2014

Paolo Cirio

In this project, I expose the specters of Google’s lasting realm of private, misappropriated data: the people captured by Google’s Street View cameras. I physically mark these bodies’ ghostly, virtual presence by re-inserting them—in street art fashion—in the precise spot where they were originally photographed.

These images do not offer details. Rather, their blurred quality gives a gauzy, spectral aspect to the human figures, unveiling their presence like a digital shadow haunting the real world.

The collections of data owned by Google and similar corporations have become the material of everyday life, yet their source is the personal information of private individuals. By remixing and reusing this material, I explore the boundaries of ownership and exposure of this publicly-displayed, privately-held information about our personal lives.

With Street Ghosts, the artwork becomes a performance, re-contextualizing not only data, but also a conflict. The work takes place on a battlefield in an information war between public and private interests aiming to win control of our intimate lives and habits. Who has more strength in this war?  And whose interests will prevail?  Those of artists? Corporations?  Legislators? The public? Or technology? And—depending on the victor—what permanent changes will result?

These ghostly human bodies are casualties of the information war, a transitory record of collateral damage. Affixed to walls in various urban environments, these obscure figures are at the murky intersection of two worlds: the real world of things and people, from which these images were originally captured, and the virtual afterlife of data and copyrights, from which the images were retaken.

Street Ghosts confronts the public with visual traces of the kind of data collected about us daily. We are forced to reckon with the possibility of our own likeness appearing as specters, forever trapped in a digital world.

—Paolo Cirio, November 2014