Tracking movements: Black activism, aerial surveillance, and transparency optics

Abstract

This article examines the 2015 Baltimore uprisings that emerged in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) covert aerial surveillance of the protesters. It does so by investigating the records that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) extracted from the government agency through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The article first traces the process of discovering and circulating this corpus of information. It then considers what the digital disclosures, including 18-plus hours of aerial surveillance footage, can reveal about the racial and technological dimensions of contemporary state surveillance. In considering the agency’s strategies of public admission, I develop the concept of transparency optics and identify some of its potential logics at work. I then discuss these records’ epistemological limits, such as the shortcomings of analyzing digital processes through ocularcentric approaches. Finally, this article contrasts the FBI videos’ panoptic vantage of the protests with the embodied, ground-level perspective of a local participant’s documentary film.