STOP x RadTech: Spying on Activists and Policing Protest

Spying on Activists and Policing Protest

Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_dDlWNqM5RIu6Otdoqup0ew

The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP) litigates and advocates for the privacy rights of New Yorkers, fighting for effective regulations of local and state police surveillance. Our work highlights the discriminatory impact of warrantless, suspicionless surveillance on Muslim New Yorkers, immigrant New Yorkers, and New Yorkers of color, and the threat to the civil rights of all New Yorkers from the growing high-tech surveillance state.

RadTech is a meetup offering monthly workshops and teach-ins on the intersection of technology, social justice, and community.

Imagine social media monitoring, aerial drone footage, geo-location tracking, facial recognition processing, and DNA harvesting being deployed to keep an eye on perceived enemies of the state. It seems dystopic, doesn’t it? Yet we’re not talking about the plot of a futuristic sci-fi movie. Over the past month, these very tools were used on protestors across America assembling in the streets and speaking out online against police violence and in support of Black lives.

And yet, this high-tech spying is only the latest version of a centuries-old tradition of U.S. state surveillance of activists, protestors, and people of color. Police have long used surveillance to suppress social movements, penalize free speech, and enact violence on marginalized groups seeking justice. We’ll discuss what we know about the tech being used to police the recent wave of Black Lives Matter protests, why it’s being used, and what steps we can take to fight for our right to demonstrate.

nash leads the Electronic Frontier Foundation's grassroots, student, and community organizing efforts. As the lead coordinator of the Electronic Frontier Alliance, nash works to support the Alliance's member organizations in educating their neighbors on digital-privacy best practices, and advocating for privacy and innovation protecting policy and legislation. Before joining EFF, as co-founder of Black Movement Law Project and a member of Mutant Legal, nash spent close to a decade training communities in crisis on how to document police conduct, exercise their legal rights, counteract state repression and actively participate in their own legal defense.

Saye Joseph works as Policy and Advocacy Manager at Black Youth Project (BYP) 100 and is a member BAJI, both of which are abolitionist spaces organizing and fighting to create structures that foster and nurture Black Freedom. Saye is passionate about creating a transformative and restorative system of accountability while dismantling our current carceral punishment system. Saye is also a member of STOP’s Community Advisory Board.

Albert Fox Cahn is S.T.O.P.’s founder and executive director and a fellow at the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy at N.Y.U. School of Law. As a lawyer, technologist, writer, and interfaith activist, Mr. Cahn began S.T.O.P. in the belief that emerging surveillance technologies pose an unprecedented threat to civil rights and the promise of a free society.