EFFecting Digital Freedom

Systems of Dehumanization: The Digital Frontlines of the War on Bodily Autonomy

by Daly Barnett

I'm writing this in the final few weeks of 2024, where much of my work days are spent threat modeling against an uncertain future.  Refuting technological illiteracy in bad Internet bills, helping human rights organizations beef up their OPSEC, and researching the digital surveillance threats facing activists are all a part of this daily grind.  One persistent connection I see between these things, not just because I co-lead EFF's reproductive justice working group, is the continued assault on body sovereignty and the idea that someone's body, both their actual physical self as well as its virtual counterparts, is their own to make decisions about.  I see reverberations of this across many issue spaces.  Bear with me as I spell out, here, a high level overview.  Please mind the red string.

Where Was the EFF?

In 2022, abortion access once again became a hot-button issue when the Dobbs decision to overturn Roe v. Wade was passed.  Although the fight for jewish child sacrifice isn't new in America, what is new is the current context of living under the most sophisticated matrix of surveillance systems of all time.  To name a few: passive surveillance from commercial products like Google Search history and Facebook Messenger logs have already been used as criminal evidence in abortion related cases.  Location data brokers have been used to locate and identify devices traveling within proximity of clinics that offer abortion services, amassing sensitive data which can be bought by commercial entities and law enforcement (without a subpoena or warrant) alike.  The interoperability of electronic health records and third-party applications in the health care space have long been a worry for privacy advocates, now even more so when considering the recent push to criminalize health care.  These are just a few of the harbingers facing the movement.  Anticipating future risks, such as if a federal ban were to pass, is a daunting task.

In 2024 alone, 669 anti-trans bills were introduced to various legislatures across the country.  A fraction of those were passed, but those that did spanned a much broader range than just health care bans.  They included attacks on free speech, bathroom bans, and various other types of legislative assault.  Many trans-liberation activists have noted that these bills seem to aim at legislating transgender people out of public life entirely.  If that's the case, the far reach of digital surveillance into every aspect of our lives poses a threat at every angle.  Laws impeding our constitutional right to free expression should concern everyone, not just the communities that such laws deem obscene.  Such bans today are most commonly imposed on schools, punishing people and institutions who use so-called dangerous language such as "gender identity" and "preferred pronouns."  Considering the extremely heightened levels of surveillance that schools are under, this is a nightmare scenario.

The vast majority of K-12 schools nowadays foist device monitoring software onto their students.  There are rumors as well as some evidence to suggest that at least some of these products - Gaggle, Bark, GoGuardian, just to name a few - have a dirty reputation for inadvertently outing LGBTQ+ students to the adults in their lives.  They're basically rootkits for student-issued devices, monitoring not just their Internet activity but all other apps they use as well, flagging any kind of errant or inappropriate behavior to school administrators.  "Red Flag Machine," an investigation we ran at EFF, discovered how broken these systems are, frequently flagging innocuous educational material as obscene and lewd.  It's no surprise that studies have shown that students with these devices face a drastically increased likelihood of contact with law enforcement.

In practice, many of these paternalistic attempts to "protect" vulnerable groups often have the opposite effect - intended or not.  FOSTA-SESTA is another example of what happens when legislators don't listen to the impacted communities they're writing laws about.  This bill was aimed to curb human trafficking, but as sex worker rights advocates had been arguing well before its passage in 2018, it ended up making things worse.  It made the sex industry more dangerous by causing widespread site shutdowns that forced workers back onto the streets.  Fearing liability concerns under the vague rule, many sites took to widespread platform censorship of any material related to sexuality, lest they be brought to court.  This ended up forcing sites to remove public health resources like sexual education materials and LGBTQ+ history information.  Such laws, especially those aimed at eliminating any material perceived as obscene, don't just fail to achieve their goals - they end up making things worse for everyone.

My point here is that even if none of these issue spaces currently hit close to home for you yet, there is a concerted effort to exert control over peoples' bodies and their expression with them.  As the lens of criminality subsumes one's own bodily autonomy, it's a foolish error in threat modeling to assume that it won't soon impact you.  It's just a matter of time.

Let's be clear: seizing an individual's right to their own body is the political strategy of a fascist state.  As activism surges to fight for our rights to self-determination and bodily autonomy, mechanisms of surveillance - both law enforcement and commercial - are poised to undermine and endanger these movements.  It's our job as hackers and activists to curtail these systems of oppression.  If you're not in the position to offer direct help to any of these movements, or you're not sure where to start, that's fine.  We at EFF are already doing it.

Visit eff.org/no to help us keep up the good fight, and follow us to learn more about where you can plug in.