The other art intervention element is the rhinestones I used to adorn some of the pages. It's an act of reclaiming, but it's also a loving act to try to heal this violent, aggressive surveillance. My dad was really lucky because it wasn't just that the FBI was surveilling people; people were murdered at the time, people are still in jail. Mumia Abu-Jamal's case is widely known and yet he's still in jail. We're celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Black Panthers, but he's celebrating from a jail cell.

Right. It's also frightening to think about how, at the same time all of this secretive surveillance was occurring, black community organizers were also being publicly demonized so that any action by the government taken against them was seen as acceptable. It's was an entire campaign of managing perception so that the Black Panthers were seen as radical terrorists instead of real people trying to assert their humanity. We see the same sort things happening with the Black Lives Matter Movement, which has also been under surveillance.

I definitely want people to extend this work to the conversation that's happening now. I think it's super important. The levels of surveillance obviously now look a lot different because of digital communication. You don't need to literally follow someone around because you can tell where they are. With the Patriot Act, a lot of people were ready to sign away their rights to privacy in the name of national security. I don't think that less privacy leads to more civility. I think it leads to less ability for people to hold the government accountable.