Watching Your Back: Identifying Organization and Movement Counter-Surveillance via FOIA Requests (1989 – 1992)

• In Event: Recent Advances in Social Network Analysis

Abstract

This paper models a novel dataset of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request logs from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as a bipartite network. FOIA enables individuals to request information from government agencies (Pozen and Schudson 2018). Existing work demonstrates that most requesters are from private sector agencies seeking information on regulatory processes (Kwoka 2018). However, since the FBI is a law enforcement agency without a private sector counterpart and has historically been the subject of conspiracy theories practices (Weiner 2012), I hypothesize that requesters are seeking information on their surveillance practices. This paper addresses the following questions: 1. How does FOIA serve to obtain knowledge on state surveillance and 2. How do different orientations to state power shape differences in information retrieval and use? This paper engages with questions around knowledge and power while contributing to literature on surveillance and conspiracy by examining how individuals make sense of surveillance.

Author

• Stephanie Zhang, University of California-Los Angeles