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What It's Like to Undergo and Uncover Government Surveillance

Daniel Hautzinger
The Feeling of Being Watched film. Image: Watched Film, LLC
'The Feeling of Being Watched' investigates a government surveillance campaign in a Muslim community in Bridgeview. Image: Watched Film, LLC

“Perhaps the only way to disrupt surveillance is to make sure that those who do the watching are also being watched.” That’s the conclusion the Chicago-based journalist and filmmaker Assia Boundaoui comes to at the end of The Feeling of Being Watched, a documentary in which she fights to investigate a massive government surveillance operation carried out on her family and their surrounding Muslim community in the southwestern Chicago suburb of Bridgeview.

Bridgeview’s tight-knit Muslim community has long suspected surveillance by the government beginning in the 1990s, to the point where one mother tells Boundaoui that she became fearful when her children said something was “the bomb,” as in slang for “cool,” lest someone listening mistook it as a terrorist threat. FBI agents had interviewed numerous people in the community over the years, including Boundaoui’s mother, on the grounds of a counterterrorism operation. No one in Bridgeview has ever been convicted of anything related to terrorism.

Boundaoui sets off to confirm the surveillance, understand why it was instituted and continues, and learn what information the FBI has collected. She eventually finds herself in court suing to gain access to government documents – she discovers that there are some 33,000 pages related to the operation surveilling people in Bridgeview. It’s a battle that continues to this day.

We spoke to her about what it is like to be surveilled, how her community has reacted to it, and how she continues to fight for government transparency in this surveillance operation.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Why did you choose to investigate this suspected surveillance in Bridgeview now?

I think it was a story that was inside of me for a long time. I had a lot of personal reasons for wanting to dig into it. I grew up in a community where there was a lot of gray area. We felt that we were under surveillance and we rarely had any evidence to back it up, and I really wanted to know: did this happen, did this not happen.

What was it like to discover concrete evidence that you were actually being surveilled, to know there were thousands of pages of records, including pages that have your house and your family member’s names?

It was sort of two things. It was validating to have primary evidence to back up all of these feelings and experiences that so many people in my community and in my family have had, and at the same time it was very disconcerting to see the magnitude of this. I think maybe that was the thing that surprised me the most. This was so much bigger than anybody had thought.

It was a five-year-long process making this documentary, and I think it was three years in that I received that response to my FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] request that they had 33,000 pages of documents. I had tried to interview dozens of FBI agents and so many people didn’t want to talk on the record or would distance themselves from this investigation. I had some people who talked to me off the record try to gaslight me and tell me, “What you think happened in your community didn’t happen, actually you guys are just paranoid.” So getting that piece of paper that said there are at least 33,000 documents about this investigation was the first moment in my entire investigation that I had confirmation that this wasn’t a wild goose chase, that I was onto something and that it was a lot bigger than any of us had expected.

Assia Boundaoui in The Feeling of Being Watched. Image: Watched Film, LLCJournalist Assia Boundaoui discovered that there were some 33,000 pages of government documents on the surveillance of her community in Bridgeview. Image: Watched Film, LLC

Did learning the extent of it scare you?

Sure, the extent definitely scared me. But also, in the process of making a film about surveillance, we felt more and more under surveillance as we progressed, so there were things that happened that were scary. I felt like I’d been poking a bear and the bear woke up, and what’s scarier than having the strongest law enforcement power in the world focus on you?

I think in those moments when it felt very scary, when we felt that we were under surveillance, the only thing that made us feel safe was having a camera and being able to document it. Knowing that whatever happened wouldn’t happen in the dark, and our entire process was going to be documented and shared publicly.

Do you think this situation that your community was in is unique, or is it pretty much the standard for Muslim American communities across the country?

What we found out in the documents is that it’s not at all unique. There were references to dozens of other cities that had similar investigations. In fact, the Chicago field office of the FBI sent leads to 40 other field offices around the country asking them to investigate their local Muslim communities, mosques, charities, etc.

Just from anecdotal experiences, the experience of being watched as a Muslim in America is as ubiquitous as the experience of driving while black in America. It’s something that we all know very intimately, that I would say every Muslim in America understands: what it’s like to censor yourself on the phone, to not say things like “the bomb,” or “terrorist,” or “Osama bin Laden.” The result of these decades of investigations has been a real chilling effect on our communities, and a lot of self-censorship. Even larger than that, the experience of communities of color in the US and the history that the FBI has had surveilling and investigating communities of color in the US using these mass profiling campaigns is quite common.

Assia Boundaoui and members of her family going over government documents about their surveillance. Image: Watched Film, LLCBoundaoui and members of her family going over government documents about their surveillance. Image: Watched Film, LLC

How has your family and the community reacted as you have been able to confirm this surveillance?

It’s been really wonderful to share it with folks. I remember first sharing the documents with some of the fathers of friends of mine who were directly investigated and having them look at the long list of other organizations and people who were investigated, and there’s just kind of a sigh of relief to know that they were not alone, that this was not personal, it was systemic and really large-scale. I think that was very validating for a lot of people who felt very alone when they were targeted.

Is this investigation and court battle still your main project, or what else are you working on?

I’m working on this hybrid journalism project, it’s more of an artistic project, I think. Basically, it’s trying to deal with the frustration of going to war for transparency and getting [documents back that are] 70% redacted. So I have a fellowship at the MIT Open Documentary Lab Co-Creation Studio, where we’re working on an artificial intelligence project that can help predict what might be behind the black holes and the redactions.

It’s a co-created project with the community. Folks in the neighborhood have a lot of primary evidence: for example, the FBI came and interviewed my mom several times and they asked her a series of questions and then they left. The memos that were generated as a result of those interviews are fully redacted, but my mother remembers what they asked her, she remembers when they came, she remembers how many people were there, and that is all primary evidence. So we’re working on collecting the anecdotal stories of people in the community who have experience firsthand interactions with the FBI and using that to help us use machine learning to predict what’s behind the redacted record.