Resources

A discussion with Professor Bita Amani from Charles Drew University and Co-Chair, COVID-19 Task force on Racism and Equity at UCLA; Pete White from LA CAN; and Jamie Garcia from Stop LAPD Spying Coalition to address questions and concerns such as 1) what is the disproportionate impact of COVID on Black, Brown, and poor communities?, 2) what are the various “road maps to recovery” being proposed?, and 3) what is Contact Tracing, what type of public health surveillance apparatus is being proposed, what’s our defense?

Technology companies are working with ICE to increase arrests, detentions, and deportations. Mijente, Immigrant Defense Project, and National Immigration Project worked with Empower LLC to create this report exposing how tech is fueling the current deportation crisis. Learn more and join us to demand #notechforICE

This report delves into great detail about these lucrative contracts and the web of insider connections bankrolling Palantir, in particular, the private data firm at the center of ICE operations. This is a disturbing reality that has largely evaded public scrutiny until now.

This policy paper outlines general principles that should guide the consideration of any proposal for technology-assisted contact-tracing, or TACT. This document does not address fine-grained details, either technical or legal, but sets out principles to help evaluate any TACT proposal. Given the trans-jurisdictional nature of many of these schemes, specific legal protections may take different forms in different contexts. But architectural and design principles will have an impact anywhere such a system is deployed.

In the fight against COVID-19, one of our most powerful weapons is manual contact-tracing, the time-consuming process of interviewing patients to find who they might have exposed to the virus. Alarmingly, new technological alternatives to manual contact tracing threaten to distract from these public health efforts, creating products that likely won’t improve public health, but which will pose an existential threat to the public’s privacy. If Apple and Google’s Bluetooth method goes forward, it’s also clear that existing legal protections are insufficient. Under existing laws, the use of Bluetooth proximity detection will just become another deeply invasive tool in federal, state, and local governments’ arsenal of surveillance technology.

This resource is a living document as part of an ongoing series in response to COVID-19. This crisis is not an isolated moment in time. Policing, capitalism, and public health in the US have always been a crisis, and everything we’re fighting for right now is what we’ve long demanded.

Every city and every organizing campaign are different. Some organizing efforts have chosen to call for outright bans,
others believe that pursuing policy goals to regulate the industry is a tacit acceptance of these technologies, while others have chosen to try regulatory policies as a way to mitigate the harms. Every organized community will have to consider the political conditions and the capacity they have to win their demands. The purpose of this toolkit is to describe the menu of options and pose questions that we can ask ourselves as we approach our cities to ensure that our efforts are helping abolish surveillance and not reinforce it.

Every day, new policies stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic are making it far easier for government and private companies to collect and share vast amounts of personal and private health information. While this data is critically important from a public health standpoint, there are many unknowns around its future use. We must be aware and informed to ensure that public health emergencies are not misused to increase deportation, criminalization, and further harm to the health of immigrant, Black, and Brown communities.

In response to concerns over the potential privacy implications of its gunshot detection technology, ShotSpotter Technologies, Inc. (SST) approached the Policing Project to conduct a thorough personal privacy assessment of its product, ShotSpotter. The primary privacy concern identified was the possibility that the technology might capture voices of individuals near its sensors, and could conceivably be used for targeted voice surveillance. Although ultimately concluding that the risk of voice surveillance was extremely low in practice, Policing Project offered SST a variety of recommendations on how to make ShotSpotter even more privacy protective.