The Boston Tea Party 1773-1773: Innocence, Disguise, and Implications for the Social Media and Public Safety of the American Civil War
On December 16, 1773, a group of protesters in Boston donned handkerchiefs and smeared their faces with soot, disguising themselves as Native Americans, as they hurled tea into the sea. Some of these Boston Tea Partiers were apprentices who worked for pro-government masters and worried about losing their jobs. Others feared retribution from the British crown. Most of the protesters who dumped tea into Boston Harbor still remain unknown, but the conditions making that kind of anonymity possible may be gone forever.
Government officials around the country are banning masks for protesters as a way of holding them accountable for their actions.
The article was written by The Marshall Project, a news organization about US criminal justice. If you want to keep up with their latest news, subscribe for their newsletters and follow them on social media.
While today’s activists have more reliable communication tools than did Revolutionary War-era agitators, the Boston Tea Party’s ringleaders didn’t have to contend with surveillance technology, like Stingrays that impersonate cell phone towers to track nearby cell phones en masse, geofence warrants that let law enforcement request location data from companies about all the devices in a certain area (often without a warrant), professional social media monitoring firms that maintain scores of clandestine accounts to surveil activists, networks of automated license plate reading cameras that can track protesters’ vehicles, and even gait analysis technologies that can identify someone based on how they walk.
How should we protect ourselves in the presence of a second Trump administration? The case of at-risk groups, like Runa Sandvik, Granitt, and Harlo Holmes
President-elect Donald Trump has promised to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. He’s vowed to jail his political foes and journalists. A Republican government could further limit women’s reproductive rights. Conservatives want a tougher approach to left-leaning activist groups like the one that Trump used to violently attack protesters in his first administration.
That means now is the time for anyone in an at-risk group, those who communicate with them—or even those who want to normalize privacy and create cover for more vulnerable people—to think about how they can upgrade their data security and surveillance resistance ahead of a second Trump administration.
Runa Sandvik is the founder of the security firm Granitt, which focuses on protecting, and she said that anyone who doesn’t support him should rethink their personal privacy safeguards. To limit who can see what you are doing, you need to know what kind of data you are generating and use the controls that are available.
Harlo Holmes is the director of digital security at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. “This is the last recourse of a lot of people in vulnerable positions,” says Holmes. “We’re just going to have to increase our efforts to make sure that people have the best tools in their hands and their pockets to maintain their privacy. And it’s going to matter more and more.”