In progressive NYC, queer community faces rising surveillance.

By Alicia Abramson

Across the United States, a backlash against queer and trans people is accelerating. Bans on gender-affirming care, laws censoring discussion of LGBTQ+ identities in classrooms, and increasingly violent rhetoric from politicians are creating an environment that polices and punishes queerness. The undercurrent to this wave of repression is the sprawling surveillance system that facilitates it, and it grows more dystopian by the day.

For generations, queer communities have been tracked, entrapped, and criminalized by systems of surveillance. That same pattern persists today, but the tools have become far more sophisticated, far-reaching, and opaque, especially as we spend more of our lives online. In the digital age, every click, every post, and every trace of queerness online can become evidence.

This wave of state repression is, in large part, fueled by social media surveillance, where law enforcement uses social media platforms to compile information about anyone deemed suspicious. Unsurprisingly, that means people of color, immigrants, queer people, and other marginalized groups. Advancing technologies and algorithms that can scrape and analyze data from social media platforms in mass quantities — however dubious claims of their accuracy are — allow this machinery of repression to expand at breakneck speed, targeting more and more people in the process.

This isn’t just happening in states where anti-LGBTQ+ legislation is making national headlines — it’s happening here in New York, despite the state’s progressive reputation as a safe haven for queer people. Hospitals have quietly scaled back gender-affirming care under political pressure, and police are now engaging in blatantly homophobic sting operations, rounding up gay people in public restrooms. Since June, Amtrak Police have arrested nearly 200 people for public lewdness at a Penn Station bathroom listed on Sniffies, a hookup app for gay and bisexual men. According to CUNY law professor Jared Trujillo, officers will “approach someone who’s at a urinal, the officer will touch himself or will just peer at the person, and if the person — who is just trying to pee — responds in any way, that person is then arrested or at least charged with lewdness.” One man was trying to use the urinal when he was handcuffed against a wall and overheard an officer boast they had made three arrests, using homophobic slurs. At least 20 of the men arrested have been turned over to ICE. One, an asylum seeker, spent over a month in detention.

This is state-sponsored entrapment, rooted in the same moral panic and homophobia that has led to decades of discrimination against and over-policing of queer people. In no way does it make us safer for cops to patrol public restrooms and arrest people just trying to use them. It doesn’t prevent crime. It doesn’t protect the public. It’s a waste of time, resources, and taxpayer dollars. And this is not the first time police have targeted people for public lewdness based on perceptions of their sexuality. In 2022, Port Authority police agreed to end plainclothes bathroom patrols for public lewdness after a lawsuit by the Legal Aid Society revealed a pattern of “unlawful discrimination, targeting, and false arrests.”

This is just one example of how social media surveillance puts us at greater risk. But there are countless avenues through which law enforcement can surveil people online, many of which are shrouded in obscurity, making it difficult to know exactly what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. It is already known that NYPD has spent millions on contracts with Voyager Labs and Cobwebs Technologies, spyware firms that purport to analyze online behavior to predict crime and have previously been used to target and arrest Black Lives Matter activists. Law enforcement use fake accounts to identify and track people deemed suspicious; in 2022, police in Florida used fake profiles on Grindr to target and arrest 60 people on drug charges. Every week, we are bombarded with reminders that there is no privacy left in the online world — instead, the digital panopticon continues to expand, including into queer people’s sex lives.

Surveillance does not end with police. Private companies and tech platforms have become willing partners in this repression, engaging in surveillance targeting queer people with impunity and turning over people’s data to law enforcement, no questions asked. Apps that track location data, browser search history, sensitive health data from health tracking and fitness apps, messages and communications on social media platforms — all of this can be sold or handed over on a silver platter to law enforcement, which companies are far too willing to do. In the absence of comprehensive data privacy laws, an unregulated data marketplace has flourished that treats our personal information as a commodity to be bought and sold in mass amounts, including to police. This data can reveal sexual orientation and gender identity, allowing for increasingly precise targeting.

Corporations are also active participants in repression through surveillance. A lawsuit filed in September accused MSG Entertainment of illegally surveilling employees and fans and targeting a transgender woman named Mia, a friend of some Knicks players. The lawsuit claims that MSG security used facial recognition to ban Mia from entering the arena, and that during leadership meetings, the chief security officer repeatedly ridiculed and used transphobic language in reference to her. Facial recognition was allegedly also used to “target personal enemies of the Company” — the plaintiff states that he was directed to pore through individuals’ private backgrounds and personal data, from tax records to social security numbers, all in service of MSG executives’ personal vendettas.

This web of state and corporate surveillance functions to intimidate queerness — and anything or anyone else deemed deviant — out of existence. It is dragging us into a world where police stalk bathrooms, where corporations spy on individuals, where every deviation from the norm is grounds for suspicion — where even just looking queer is probable cause. 

We need strong checks on a surveillance apparatus that is spiraling out of control. Legislation like the STOP FAKES Act (S.5923 Cleare / A.1083 Mamdani) would ban law enforcement from creating fake social media accounts and prohibit law enforcement collection of individuals’ account information. A bill banning biometric surveillance in places of public accommodation (S.7135 May / A.6211 Simone) would prevent the use and weaponization of facial recognition in places like MSG, which should be accessible without the threat of privacy violations. A comprehensive data privacy law would curb some of the invasive data practices that leave our personal information exposed and exploited.

We should all take steps to protect ourselves online, but it is the responsibility of lawmakers to take further action to rein in the sweeping surveillance infrastructure that enables the targeting and repression of queer communities. We must demand real oversight of the surveillance practices of both law enforcement and corporations, rather than allow it to grow unchecked. And we must resist the normalization of a world where simply existing as queer can be treated as a crime.

Alicia Abramson is a civil rights intern at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.