There are moments during a talk when you can tell you’ve surprised your audience, and this was one of them. I was standing behind a microphone in an anonymous-looking, overly air-conditioned conference room in Las Vegas on a Saturday night, giving a philosophical presentation on privacy and equality to a wonderfully engaged group of hackers, programmers, and surveillance wonks. Thinking about government spying is my job; I research warrantless snooping for a human rights organization. And the authorities’ ability to know everything about everyone, all the time, and use that information as they see fit certainly inspires some reflection.
So when somebody raised a hand to ask how I reconcile the need for strong privacy laws with the government’s need to keep people safe, I was ready with the thing I’d always wanted to say.
“Do you realize,” I asked, “how enormously more likely I am, as a woman, to be killed or maimed by a current or former partner than by anyone the government thinks of as a terrorist?”
We haven’t given up on the idea that police need to get a warrant to monitor abusive partners or most other people suspected of assault or murder, I went on, nor should we. The insistence of the sprawling national security apparatus that “security” means safety from threats ostensibly posed by foreigners overseas—especially Muslim men—and that everyone should be willing to give up their rights for that purpose, but not for others, reflects a perspective that is prejudiced and limited in multiple ways. I could have said the same about the government’s failure to regard the “incel” movement as a national security threat despite its international nature and proven record of horrific public violence, including by using firearms and vehicular attacks in the US and Canada.
When the government decides to convince us that we should accept being spied on, it points to threats it believes the public will find frightening and important. And violence against women never makes the list.Massive warrantless surveillance violates human rights and historically has never been a sign of a healthy democracy. But when the government decides to convince us that we should accept being spied on, it points to threats it believes the public will find frightening and important. And violence against women never makes the list—as if the deaths of women were not significant; as if this violence weren’t really violence.
There was a silence in the room after I said these things, then some murmurs and nods. Feminist scholar Catherine MacKinnon took up this issue long ago, but it’s possible that most of us had never previously thought about the hundreds of annual deaths of US women from domestic violence as relevant to the national security state—or had been keeping quiet about that notion, the way I used to. After all, we’ve been socialized our whole lives to think of women’s concerns as trivial—even when “concerns” means “murder in large numbers,” and even in the face of growing evidence that perpetrators of mass shootings and other large-scale attacks in the United States often have histories of violence against women.
One of the ironies here is that while a large proportion of the attorneys and activists who fight to rein in US government surveillance are women, we seldom rely on feminist arguments. This could be because the government officials with whom we meet to discuss dragnet spying tend to be male, as is disproportionately true of the intelligence agencies in general. As women working at the intersection of law and technology, we already deal with perceptions that we are less expert than men. To draw on women’s experiences when faced with a row of dark suits and somber ties would be to risk further dismissal, maybe even laughter.
Yet, as women, we probably have an especially keen sense of what constant, intrusive, arbitrary monitoring can do to a person. Our speech, appearance, and movements are relentlessly scrutinized every day, often by strangers. We know how this kind of watching both flows from and reinforces our subordination. And we know how oppressive it is.
We would also have an especially good counterargument to lectures from officials who say we simply don’t grasp the severity of the threats the country faces or the risk that people will die if we don’t all hand over more of our constitutional rights. We would be right to point out that people are dying right now in large numbers due to entirely foreseeable violence, and that it’s the government that doesn’t seem to grasp the severity of the threat at least half the population is enduring. The government has chosen to devote its considerable security budget and human resources elsewhere.
These contradictions didn’t occur to me for many years—even as I critiqued out-of-control intelligence monitoring by day and went home to write a novel about domestic violence, Ways to Hide in Winter, by night. The protagonist of that book, who’s rebuilding her life after the death of the abusive man she married at seventeen, clings to her privacy like a life raft. Even as I told her story, it took me some time to understand why: her privacy is her dignity, her equality, her growing confidence in demanding that the world treat her as a human being and recognize her worth.
On the night I gave the talk to the room full of hackers, the seriousness with which these ideas were received was downright inspiring. No one dismissed them simply because they were the words of a woman offering a gender-sensitive perspective. If that response took root in both law and literature, we would all be better off. Change won’t happen immediately, but as more of us become willing to challenge the national security state and prod it to justify its decisions, I think hope for all of our security—as it ought to be understood—will grow, too.
