Source: https://open.substack.com/pub/bendprivacyalliance/p/understanding-surveillance-data-and
Publisher: Bend Privacy Alliance (Substack)
Date Published: July 1, 2026
Relevant To: BPA’s own flagship educational primer; research toolkit template
Verification Status: Verified
Notes: Confirmed via full-text fetch. This is BPA’s own official Substack publication (bendprivacyalliance.substack.com) — a comprehensive ~45-minute educational primer titled “Understanding Surveillance, Data, and Power,” covering: Part I (datafication, state legibility, surveillance/classification/prediction as concepts), Part II (history of the police data state — census tabulation, crime statistics, fingerprinting, LEAA federal crime-control expansion, COINTELPRO, community policing), Part III (homeland-security infrastructure — fusion centers, RTCCs, legal landscape/Carpenter v. US, social-media/OSINT monitoring with specific documented cases like Atlanta PD’s Stop Cop City monitoring and the Delaware Valley Intelligence Center’s data-center-criticism bulletin), Part IV (AI systems explained, data centers as physical infrastructure, the “data center industrial complex,” hidden labor in AI, algorithmic opacity/State v. Loomis), Part V (racial capitalism and organized/extractive abandonment frameworks per Gilmore, Robinson, Adler-Bolton/Vierkant), and Part VII (movement-building strategy, data sovereignty distinctions, and a detailed practical research toolkit/question list for surveillance contracts and data-center proposals). Sourced throughout with citations and explicit “source note” caveats where figures are contested or need verification (e.g. flags the often-cited “$10 billion LEAA” figure as unverified and declines to use it). This is a flagship BPA educational resource — recommend cross-linking prominently from the Surveillance Series and Sources pages, and treating its research toolkit (Section 7.4) as a template for BPA’s own PRA/contract-review workflow going forward.