Resources

Episode 1: Your phone knows if you’re staying at home and it is telling the government. The Verge’s Casey Newton explains how location data is helping fight coronavirus, and why even privacy advocates don’t think that’s such a bad thing.
Episode 2: Does stopping coronavirus require more surveillance? The cost of China’s high-tech response to contain the coronavirus.

This is a living collection of mostly Canada-centric information and resources on the criminalization of COVID-19 responses, with other examples from the US and the rest of the world. It contains further resources around mutual aid, petitions, community action, alternatives to policing during the crisis, and more.

Asian Americans have been targeted by racism and xenophobia related to the coronavirus or COVID-19. Asian Americans Advancing Justice offers the resources in response to this hate.

This report details the allotment of financial aid to federal, state, and local agencies during the COVID-19 crisis, including money to the CDC to develop surveillance technology and to law enforcement, homeland security, and the military.

New policies and research suggest there is increasing need to establish protections for facial recognition technology – San Francisco, Somerville, Massachusetts and Oakland have banned government agencies from adopting the technology amid widespread concerns about threats to civil rights and liberties. Compounding these concerns is the quiet adoption of facial recognition technology as a surveillance tool to secretly monitor citizens and non-citizens alike. This policy guide will allow Congress to check the growth of facial recognition technology on a national scale, before the technology becomes too ubiquitous to rein in. This is an opportunity for Congress to develop effective legislation that protects civil liberties and strengthens accountability.

Governments now use the ability to collect and analyze hundreds of data points everyday to automate many of their decisions, but does handing government decisions over to algorithms save time and money? Can algorithms be fairer or less biased than human decision making? Do they make us safer? Automation and artificial intelligence could improve the notorious inefficiencies of government, and it could exacerbate existing errors in the data being used to power it.

MuckRock and the Rutgers Institute for Information Policy & Law (RIIPL) have compiled a collection of algorithms used in communities across the country to automate government decision-making. They have also compiled policies and other guiding documents local governments use to make room for the future use of algorithms.

The use of facial recognition technology by police departments, both small and large, has quietly proliferated throughout the country. MuckRock and Open the Government sent over 112 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the largest police agencies to answer a number of questions about their use of facial recognition technology. This project was launched to help the public investigate their local police agencies’ use of facial recognition technology. This resource includes a guide on the project and a database of all information collected so far.

A New York Times investigation recently introduced the country to Clearview AI, a small and secretive facial recognition company. Clearview says the foundation of their system is a 3 billion strong database of facial images pulled from social networks and the web. The investigation started with records requests by MuckRock and Open the Government, part of the work to keep tabs on those keeping tabs on us.

This is a collection of frequently asked questions around body-worn camera use by police officers in the state of New Jersey, along with answers to them and links to further resources/educational materials.