Image: "Domestic Hawks, War Garden series," 2022, Watercolor, graphite and walnut ink on Arches paper, 14 1/2 x 8 inches, courtesy artist Cynthia Mulcahy and Talley Dunn Gallery, Dallas
Issue 12: GOOD AND EVIL
F issue 12: GOOD AND EVIL
Published and distributed by F
Publication
PUBLISHER/EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Adam Marnie
ART DIRECTION
Tuomas Korpijaakko
GUEST EDITORS
Sara Hignite, Dallas
Kevin Zucker, New York
CONTRIBUTORS
Sophie Appel, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Leeza Belkina, Basket Books & Art, Carmen Boullosa, David Brooks, Ciara Elle Bryant, Bureau, Heather Bursch, Chicago Spleen, Jae Choi, Graham Collins, The Jenni Crain Foundation, DXDA / Camille D’Arc, DiverseWorks, Taylor Doran, Dracula’s Revenge, Kayla E., Galveston Artist Residency, Glasstire, Eli Greene, Natilee Harren, Yasmina Hashemi, Rachel Henson, Christopher K. Ho, Miles Huston, Ingrams, KB Jones, Gareth Thomas Kaye, Matt Kenny, Kristina Kite Gallery, Julia Klein, Sophie Kovel, El Franco Lee II, Liz Lee, Daniel Lefcourt, Jennifer Locke, Megan McLarney, Cynthia Mulcahy, Jordan Nassar, NOWORK, Picnic Surf Shapes, The Power Station, Regards, Alex Roth, Violet Saxon, Cauleen Smith, Soberscove Press, Jordan Strafer, Ethan Swan, Cynthia Talmadge, Blair Taylor, Tureen, Kalle Wadzinski, ZAKKA BAKKA
PRINTING
Dan Schmahl, Galveston TX
Domestic Hawks, from my ongoing War Garden series examining American militarism, is a work about our foreign wars abroad coming home, specifically in the form of Orwellian warrantless aerial surveillance of American cities. In this case, aerial surveillance systems invented and employed extensively by the U.S. Military in the Iraq War have been used in recent years by several city police and sheriff’s departments across the United States including those in Baltimore, Compton, Dayton, and St. Louis.
These aerial surveillance systems were being sold to municipal law enforcement by Persistent Surveillance Systems, a private for-profit tech company founded in Dayton, Ohio by an Iraq War veteran who used the same type of aerial camera spying software on battlefields in Iraq, especially in the infamous Fallujah campaign.
In 2016, the Baltimore Police Department began using the Persistent Surveillance System’s Hawkeye II camera spy systems on several planes flown over the city’s 32 square miles to surveil the city’s more than half a million residents, recording footage and data that could be accessed for up to 45 days. And the entire “pilot program” of mass surveillance was being funded secretly and privately, dodging the usual democratic and transparent municipal budget decision process, by Laura and John Arnold, Texas philanthropists who had partnered with Persistent Surveillance Systems in their do-gooder billionaire belief that the city-wide warrantless massive surveillance of Baltimore residents would bring down crime.
Monitoring civilian activities from the sky? Recording folks’ movements anywhere they go? Watching residents in their backyards? Spying on peaceful protesters? Without a warrant? Is that legal?
What about our individual right to free association and privacy under the First and Fourth Amendments? And surely this brings up a plethora of racial equity issues and would doubtless be of concern to residents of over-policed neighborhoods.
As it turns out, Baltimore wasn’t the only American city in recent years using Persistent Surveillance System spy cameras. The private company had already been secretly partnering with the police department of Dayton, Ohio, where the tech company is based. Civil liberty rights activists exposed the test flights claiming the aerial surveillance program undermined the right to free association and privacy and constituted a search under the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, respectively.
And in 2014, the Center for Investigative Reporting broke the story that the Compton, California Sheriff’s Department had also been secretly working with PSS spy systems on a single plane flying over the city recording resident’s movements. Even the mayor and elected officials were not aware Compton citizens were being observed by law enforcement from afar via sweeping aerial surveillance systems. Only in St. Louis was the adoption of the program, also with funding by the Houston-based Arnolds, publicly discussed by the Board of Aldermen, the city’s legislative body. But for the most part these wide-area mass surveillance and location tracking programs were themselves flying below the radar and being implemented secretly by law enforcement throughout the country, often funded by the billionaire class.
Finally in 2020, a Black-led grassroots activist group in Baltimore, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, along with the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights groups sued the Baltimore Police Department on the grounds that warrantless aerial surveillance of civilians was a violation of privacy rights and unconstitutional. In 2021, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Baltimore Police Department’s aerial surveillance program was indeed unconstitutional and the settlement in the perfectly named “Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore Police Department” blocked the city from using any similar aerial surveillance program in the future.
But these issues aren’t going away any time soon. Technologies borne out of our endless wars abroad— all manner of surveilling folks from aerial spying to police CCTV camera networks, AI facial recognition programs to tracking phone data, license plates, even social media posts—are now being used by American law enforcement in our daily lives back home. Concerns about warrantless spying and expanding police tactics undoubtedly will deepen in this brave new world of surveillance, leading to even more questions about constitutional privacy protections, possibly even pushing federal courts to expand Fourth Amendment protections.
-Cynthia Mulcahy, May 2024 for F Magazine's Good and Evil Issue
