An artist considers a new form of machinic representation: the statistical rendering of large datasets, indexed to the probable rather than the real of photography; to the uncanny composite rather than the abstraction of the graph.
By Hito Steyerl for New Left Review on April 28, 2023
Because of a bad facial recognition match and other hidden technology, Randal Reid spent nearly a week in jail, falsely accused of stealing purses in a state he said he had never even visited.
By Kashmir Hill and Ryan Mac for The New York Times on March 31, 2023
It’s become increasingly difficult to know when your secrets are safe.
By Alejandra Caraballo for Slate Magazine on February 24, 2022
Campaigners concerned that ‘same racist technology used to repress Uyghurs is being marketed in Britain’.
By Alex Hern for The Guardian on December 4, 2022
Among global movements to reckon with police powers, a new report from UK research group No Tech For Tyrants unveils how police use surveillance technology to abuse power around the world.
From No Tech for Tyrants on November 7, 2022
During the pandemic, Dutch student Robin Pocornie had to do her exams with a light pointing straight at her face. Her fellow students who were White didn’t have to do that. Her university’s surveillance software discriminated her, and that is why she has filed a complaint (read the full complaint in Dutch) with the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights.
Continue reading “Dutch student files complaint with the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights about the use of racist software by her university”
Following the terror attack in Denmark of 2015, the state amped upits data analytics capabilities for counter-terrorism within the police and their Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET). Denmark, a country which hosts an established, normalised, and widely accepted public surveillance infrastructure – justified in service of public health and greater centralisation and coordination between government and municipalities in delivery of citizen services – also boasts an intelligence service with extraordinarily expansive surveillance capabilities, and the enjoyment of wide exemptions from data protection regulations.
From No Tech for Tyrants on July 13, 2020
The KNVB (Royal Dutch Football Association) is taking a tech approach at tackling racist fan behaviour during matches, an approach that stands a great risk of falling in the techno solutionism trap.
Continue reading “‘Smart’ techologies to detect racist chants at Dutch football matches”
Investigative journalism of the NRC brought to light that the Dutch NCTV (the National Coordinator for Counterterrorism and Security) uses fake social media accounts to track Dutch activists. The agency also targets activists working in the social justice or anti-discrimination space and tracks their work, sentiments and movements through their social media accounts. This is a clear example of how digital communication allows governments to intensify their surveillance and criminalisation of political opinions outside the mainstream.
Continue reading “The Dutch government wants to continue to spy on activists’ social media”
An alarming report outlines an extensive pattern of racial discrimination within the city’s police department.
By Sam Richards and Tate Ryan-Mosley for MIT Technology Review on April 27, 2022
Hiring sociocultural workers to correct bias overlooks the limitations of these underappreciated fields.
By Elena Maris for WIRED on January 12, 2022
In Wired, Chris Gilliard strings together an incisive account of the racist history of surveillance: from the invention of home security system to modern day surveillance devices and technologies, such as Amazon and Google’s suite of security products.
Continue reading “Intentional or otherwise, surveillance systems serve existing power structures”
Surveillance systems, no matter the intention, will always exist to serve power.
By Chris Gilliard for WIRED on November 14, 2021
Technology rarely invents new societal problems. Instead, it digitizes them, supersizes them, and allows them to balloon and duplicate at the speed of light. That’s exactly the problem we’ve seen with location-based, crowd-sourced “public safety” apps like Citizen.
By Matthew Guariglia for Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on October 21, 2021
Activists say the biometric tools, developed principally around white datasets, risk reinforcing racist practices.
By Charlotte Peet for Rest of World on October 22, 2021
Chris Gilliard grew up with racist policing in Detroit. He sees a new form of oppression in the tech we use every day.
By Chris Gilliard and Will Oremus for Washington Post on September 17, 2021
Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield MEP in conversation with Laurence Meyer, from the Digital Freedom Fund, about the dangers of the increasing use of biometric mass surveillance – both within the EU and outside it, as well as the impact it can have on the lives of people who are already being discriminated against.
By Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield and Laurence Meyer for Greens/EFA on June 24, 2021
Surveillance expert Chris Gilliard reflects on 2020’s racial justice protests, the hypocrisy of tech companies’ commitments, and where we are one year later.
By Chris Gilliard and Katharine Schwab for Fast Company on June 16, 2021
The enduring idea that technology will be able to solve many of the existing problems in society continues to permeate across governments. For the EUObserver, Fieke Jansen and Sarah Chander illustrate some of the problematic and harmful uses of ‘predictive’ algorithmic systems by states and public authorities across the UK and Europe.
Continue reading “Racist and classist predictive policing exists in Europe too”
“Far from a ‘human-centred’ approach, the draft law in its current form runs the risk of enabling Orwellian surveillance states,” writes @sarahchander from @edri.
By Sarah Chander for Euronews on April 22, 2021
The use of software to automatically detect cheating on online exams – online proctoring – has been the go-to solution for many schools and universities in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, Shea Swauger addresses some of the potential discriminatory, privacy and security harms that can impact groups of students across class, gender, race, and disability lines. Swauger provides a critique on how technologies encode “normal” bodies – cisgender, white, able-bodied, neurotypical, male – as the standard and how students who do not (or cannot) conform, are punished by it.
Continue reading “Online proctoring excludes and discriminates”
Charlton McIlwain, author of the book Black Software, takes a good hard look at IBM in a longread for Logic magazine.
Continue reading “IBM is failing to increase diversity while successfully producing racist information technologies”
Race, tech, and medicine: Remarks from Dr. Dorothy Roberts and Dr. Ruha Benjamin.
By Dorothy Roberts, Kim M Reynolds and Ruha Benjamin for Our Data Bodies Project on August 15, 2020
Cheating is not a technological problem, but a social and pedagogical problem. Technology is often blamed for creating the conditions in which cheating proliferates and is then offered as the solution to the problem it created; both claims are false.
By Shea Swauger for Hybrid Pedagogy on April 2, 2020
The EU is preparing its ‘Action Plan’ to address structural racism in Europe. With digital high on the EU’s legislative agenda, it’s time we tackle racism perpetuated by technology, writes Sarah Chander.
By Sarah Chander for EURACTIV.com on September 3, 2020
Technology has never been colorblind. It’s time to abolish notions of “universal” users of software.
From The Internet Health Report 2020 on January 1, 2021
As many of us had our attention focused on the use of biometric surveillance technologies in managing the COVID-19 pandemic, in a new UN report prof. E. Tendayi Achiume forcefully puts the spotlight on the racial and discriminatory dimension of biometric surveillance technology in border enforcement.
Continue reading “Racism and “Smart Borders””
Today, on the Attack Surface Lectures – a series of 8 panels at 8 indie bookstores that Tor Books and I ran to launch the third Little Brother novel in Oct: Race, Surveillance, and Tech with Meredith Whittaker and Malkia Devich-Cyril, hosted by The Booksmith.
By Cory Doctorow for Pluralistic on November 18, 2020
A conversation about how to break cages.
By Sarah T. Hamid for Logic on August 31, 2020
Special rapporteur on racism and xenophobia believes there is a misconception that biosurveillance technology is without bias.
By Katy Fallon for The Guardian on November 11, 2020
Insiders say Dataminr’s “algorithmic” Twitter search involves human staffers perpetuating confirmation biases.
By Sam Biddle for The Intercept on October 21, 2020
Surveillance capitalism turns a profit by making people more comfortable with discrimination.
By Chris Gilliard for Real Life on October 15, 2018
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