What's your favorite Halloween movie?

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Happy Halloween, *|FNAME|*! Planning on watching any scary movies today? The genre has always been a storytelling device for projecting the horrors of real-life on the big screen – and there are few things more horrifying than the reality of mass surveillance technology. If you’re looking for a fright this Halloween, check out this list of S.T.O.P.’s favorite spine-chilling allegories for surveillance. Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) & Silence of the Lambs (1991) Leatherface isn’t the only one who knows a thing or two about stealing faces... Police are scraping our images without our knowledge or consent into a massive facial recognition database. Equally terrifying is how inaccurate facial recognition technology can be (Anthony Hopkins delivers us a gory reminder as Hannibal Lecter as he makes his grand escape). Coraline (2009) & Us (2019) Find yourself trapped in a parallel world which mimics your reality? You could be in the Other World, or in the Metaverse... But while “Other Mother” is after your soul, Mark Zuckerberg is after your data – and Big Tech will sell it all to the highest bidder. On the same tilt, Jordan Peele’s film shows us how these virtual other selves are unwilling subjected to exploitative and inhumane conditions. It Follows (2014) It’s enough to drive a person into isolation…the notion that your brief and casual acquaintance can make you the perpetual target of an omnipresent entity. But “it” doesn’t belong just to the supernatural. NYPD and other law enforcement agencies discriminately track the friendships and relationships of BIPOC and undocumented individuals, entering people into so-called “gang databases.” 2001: Space Odyssey (1968) The film that launched a thousand college essays, it’s hard to pick just one metaphor from this classic sci-fi horror. We’ll go with the infamous character of HAL 9000, the AI operations controller that (spoiler alert!) commandeers the Discovery. But we’re also creeped out by HAL’s eerie likeness to the surveillance devices that are progressively being installed in our vehicles and public transportation systems. The Circle (2017) & Severance (2022) Worker surveillance is not just a dystopian vision of the future. From remote employee monitoring systems to more invasive surveillance programs like Palantir Metropolis, we are already living in a nightmarish reality wherein employers can surveil and curtail our freedom of expression. Minority Report (2002) This Tom Cruise thriller is a very on-the-nose allegory for the horrors of so-called “predictive” policing. Predictive policing software amplifies already-biased policing data to facilitate further over-policing of BIPOC communities. A Quiet Place (2018) Don’t make a sound! While the creature might not be real, extremely faulty and racially biased gun detection technology is.   This Halloween, help us vanquish this haunted technology. Support S.T.O.P. today as we fight to exorcise surveillance and make this creepy tech the stuff of fiction once again. In solidarity, Sarah Roth Development and Communications AmeriCorps Fellow Share Tweet Forward Copyright © *|CURRENT_YEAR|* *|LIST:COMPANY|*, All rights reserved. *|IFNOT:ARCHIVE_PAGE|* *|LIST:DESCRIPTION|* Our mailing address is: *|HTML:LIST_ADDRESS_HTML|* *|END:IF|* Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.