Mask bans are a surveillance issue

If you’ve been tapped out of the pandemic, protest, and Palestine, you might not have heard of mask bans. We’re here to tell you to tap in—before it’s too late.

As we approach one year of Israel’s escalated genocidal campaign in Gaza and five years of the COVID-19 pandemic, mass suffering, disablement, and death continue at an unbearable pace. We all deserve so much more: arms embargoes, well-funded public health programs, free protest in the streets, and masks as commonplace as coats and glasses in public. 

Instead, lawmakers across the political spectrum are choosing to ban masks in response to anti-genocide protests. So far, anti-mask legislation has been threatened in Los Angeles, New York City, New York State, New Jersey, and Chicago, and passed in North Carolina and Nassau County, NY. These bans don’t just threaten free speech—they put everyone’s health at risk. And when we’re on the tail end of yet another massive COVID surge, that’s a big deal. 

If you’ve been tapped out of pandemic and Palestine organizing, you might think mask bans have nothing to do with you. But as a team that cares deeply about fighting surveillance on all fronts, we’re here to tell you to tap in. Here’s why mask bans are a surveillance issue.

The surveillance battleground

At Fight for the Future, we refuse to think of tech policy and internet freedom in a vacuum. From Amazon ring cameras to the social media censorship of Palestinians to the spread of facial recognition at baseball stadiums, the majority of the issues we mobilize against have a common cause: surveillance capitalism and the surveillance state.

Surveillance capitalism is the extractive business model that defines the information age. Big Tech companies market their technology as essential for the everyday, then use it to gather intimate and extensive data about our lives. Then, they sell our data and use it to manipulate our consumer and political behavior. Amidst all that, they’re more than happy to hand our information over to the cops, often without a warrant.

It’s that last part that makes the legal implications of surveillance capitalism extra concerning. As tech companies grew, so did government surveillance programs. Now, the two are completely intertwined. This relationship is sometimes parasitic, as when government agencies demand backdoors and access to consumer data, and sometimes symbiotic, as Big Tech companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Palantir increasingly acquire multi-million dollar government contracts.

This lethal combination has likely reached your local police department, too. Cops are making use of Big Tech tools and national surveillance programs to track and criminalize people like never before. Some call this the “digital police state”—an intricate web of public-private partnerships that weaponizes consumer data collection into a tool for control. Paired with increasing militarized repression of protests worldwide from Black Lives Matter to Palestine, and escalation of student and worker surveillance since 2020, where does this leave us? 

It’s only getting harder to speak out against the oppressive systems we’re up against and organize effectively against them. If we want to win, we have to stop ceding ground to surveillance. One simple, crucial way to fight back is to stop mask bans.

Mask bans in context

Lawmakers pushing anti-mask legislation from both sides of the aisle don’t shy away from telling you who they intend to target. New York Democrats pushing mask bans have compared pro-Palestinian protestors to KKK members, claiming that bad actors and “criminals” mask up to anonymously harass Jewish Americans. When a Latino man standing on a street corner was stopped and frisked under Nassau County’s new mask ban, police and Republican lawmakers openly lauded the ban as a profiling tactic. The same ban was used less than a month later to single out a pro-Palestine protestor and arrest them, simply for wearing a keffiyeh.

It's clear that mask bans are first and foremost a tool for criminalizing protestors and profiling marginalized people. By associating masking with criminal activity, the bans give police (who are often equipped with facial recognition tech) a blank check to approach anyone wearing any kind of mask and force unmasking, interrogation, and arrest. Even if those detained under mask ban ordinances are released soon after, they are photographed, fingerprinted, and dressed down for their personal details as a standard part of booking. This surveillance, along with the inherent violence of the criminal legal system, can be life-shattering.

Despite lawmakers attempting to make masking synonymous with criminal intent, the targets of these bans have been clear about their reasoning for continuing to mask up. Disability justice and COVID justice advocates have fought hard to maintain masking at mass gatherings to resist the ongoing spread of COVID-19 and name disease as a tool of genocide, while others cite the very real threat of doxxing and online harassment. Still others maintain their right to anonymous protest and refuse to be intimidated into silence.

This raises yet another danger posed by mask bans. Once people’s faces are captured by cameras at a rally, an event, or simply on the subway, they’re vulnerable to unscrupulous data brokers packaging their participation data and selling it to whoever wants it. Having our movements and political beliefs permanently and universally exposed in this way can supercharge discrimination and endanger people’s futures. We can’t change our faces like our phone numbers—once someone is doxxed on social media in an attempt to harass them, their families, or their employers, the harm can be permanent. Anti-mask legislation will only make this worse.

But in the era of commercial facial recognition, you don’t have to be an activist to want to cover your face. From grocery stores to pharmacies, facial recognition data is being collected everywhere, and the profiles it creates can be sold to scammers, stalkers, and advertisers alike. The troves of info that data brokers collect on us also leak all the time, creating further dangers at a mass scale. Criminalizing people’s right to cover their faces prioritizes the profits of  the companies harvesting our data for profit over our health, our privacy, and our safety.

Mask up, fight back

With six state-level mask ban bills proposed in just the last year, and two bans passed already, we’re running out of time to build strong opposition to this trend. Luckily, there are plenty of places to plug in—in large part because this is a truly intersectional issue.

Efforts to push back on mask bans have thus far been led by majority-Disabled COVID justice advocates who are worried about the implications of forcing people to choose between protection from COVID and protection from cops. Anti-surveillance advocates must join them in solidarity– after all, the fight to keep our data safe from Big Tech and the cops is also a fight to keep our communities healthy. Sign the petition, make calls, and find ways to resist mask bans in your home state at StopMaskBans.com.

And lastly, don’t obey in advance. If you’re masking, keep masking. If you’ve stopped, consider starting again. If the privacy implications haven’t convinced you, the health impacts certainly should. When we extend solidarity and protect each other, we keep ourselves in the fight against surveillance capitalism and the surveillance state for the long-run. And we’re planning to be in this fight until we win. 

~Alex at Fight for the Future