What gets their attention is the simplicity of the process. Whitehas everything he needs: a writing implement, a piece of paper, and a receptaclefor all the sentences that didn’t come out the way he wanted them to.

platforms can increase the users’ perception of crime in their communities, which drives sales of more devices. Amazon’s Ring, for example, was hiring for a journalist earlier this year to join a “team of news editors” to produce crime stories for the Neighbors platform. Nextdoor already has a partnership with the Seattle Police Department to have police content throughout the platform.

This digital panopticon has civil rights advocates worried.

In a 2014 report by the Sentencing Project, a national nonprofit, 68% of Black respondents said the U.S. justice system is biased against Black people compared with 25% of whites. The report went on to say that white perceptions of overall fairness led to greater levels of punitive sentencing for people of color.

it is safe to say that Black people have always been and – at this rate –  will always be under the watchful eye of the state, whether they are on the street or online.

n the early 2010s, as grassroots Black demonstrations emerged after the killings of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York City, both state and federal government were again there to watch. Protest and advocacy organizations such as Black Lives Matter and government-labeled “Black Identity Extremists” are being monitored and infiltrated.[15]

ervasive government surveillance in America is not a new phenomenon. Government monitoring and suppression of Black speech and conduct has been an essential feature of American society far before the public at large realized the potential dangers of widespread surveillance. Although privacy is a national value, it has been an elusive concept for Black people in America.

let’s not forget the speech-stifling history of US government spying that has targeted communities of color.  

Many people know that during World War II, innocent Americans of Japanese descent were surveilled and detained in internment camps. Fewer people know that in the wake of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson openly feared that black servicemen returning from Europe would become “the greatest medium in conveying Bolshevism to America.” Around the same time, the Military Intelligence Division created a special “Negro Subversion” section devoted to spying on black Americans. Near the top of its list was W.E.B. DuBois, a “rank Socialist” whom they tracked in Paris for fear he would “attempt to introduce socialist tendencies at the Peace Conference.”

We now find ourselves in a new surveillance debate—and the lessons of the King scandal should weigh heavy on our minds. A few months after the first Edward Snowden revelation, the National Security Agency disclosed that it had itself wiretapped King in the late 1960s. Yet what happened to King is almost entirely absent from our current conversation. In NSA reform debates in the House of Representatives, King was mentioned only a handful of times, usually in passing. And notwithstanding a few brave speeches by senators such as Patrick Leahy and Rand Paul outside of the Senate, the available Senate record suggests that in two years of actual hearings and floor debates, no one ever spoke his name.  

Algorithms are taking over – and woe betide anyone they class as a 'deadbeat' This article is more than 1 year old Zoe Williams

The more difficult question concerns whether scoring systems’ source code, algorithmic predictions, and modeling should be transparent to affected individuals and ultimately the public at large. Neil Richards and Jonathan King astutely explain that “there are legitimate arguments for some level of big data secrecy,” including concerns “connected to highly sensitive intellectual property and national security assets.”146 But these concerns are more than outweighed by the threats to human dignity posed by pervasive, secret, and automated scoring systems

05 - Citron & Pasquale Article.docx (Do Not Delete)3/26/2014 2:47 PM14 WASHINGTON LAW REVIEW[Vol. 89:1 and data behind them.73 Software engineers construct the datasets mined by scoring systems; they define the parameters of data-mining analyses; they create the clusters, links, and decision trees applied;74 they generate the predictive models applied.75 The biases and values of system developers and software programmers are embedded into each and every step of development

05 - Citron & Pasquale Article.docx (Do Not Delete)3/26/2014 2:47 PMTHE SCORED SOCIETY: DUE PROCESS FOR AUTOMATED PREDICTIONSDanielle Keats Citron* & Frank Pasquale**Abstract: Big Data is increasingly mined to rank and rate individuals. Predictive algorithms assess whether we are good credit risks, desirable employees, reliable tenants, valuable customers—or deadbeats, shirkers, menaces, and “wastes of time.

One of the most shocking things that many of us learned when the Covid-19 pandemic was first landing on our shores, and we were weighing the pros and cons of closing the schools, was that for tens of millions of American kids, going to school represents the only guarantee of a decent meal on any given day. I’m pretty confident that most of the kids we’re talking about here aren’t white. And whatever you think about the opportunities in this country and whatever individual success stories you can call to mind, there is no question that some of us start on third base, or second base. Everyone has a lot to deal with, of course. Life is hard. But not everyone is a single mom, or single grandparent, struggling to raise kids in the inner city, all the while trying to keep them from getting murdered. The disparities in our society are absolutely heartbreaking and unacceptable. And we need to have a rational discussion about their actual causes and solutions. We have to pull back from the brink here. And all we have with which to do that is conversation. And the only thing that makes conversation possible is an openness to evidence and arguments—a willingness to update one’s view of the world when better reasons are given.

How much of this is inequality due to the legacy of slavery? And how much of it is due to an ensuing century of racist policies? I’m prepared to believe quite a lot. And it strikes me as totally legitimate to think about paying reparations as a possible remedy here.

with social media, we’ve all been enrolled in a psychological experiment for which no one gave consent, and it’s not at all clear how it will turn out. And it’s still not clear how it will turn out, but it’s not looking good. It’s fairly disorienting out there. All information is becoming weaponized. All communication is becoming performative. And on the most important topics, it now seems to be fury and sanctimony and bad faith almost all the time.

In some cases, our use of cellphone cameras has the potential to liberate us when directed at the state, subjecting the powerful and privileged to forms of accountability that they’re not used to. That’s been made plain by the significant role of cellphone video in the movement against police brutality.

The story’s charm disguises the invasion of privacy at its heart: the way technology is both eroding our personal boundaries and coercing us in deleterious ways.

unintended consequences

Online vigilantism has been around since the early days of the internet. So has “doxxing” — originally a slang term among hackers for obtaining and posting private documents about an individual, usually a rival or enemy.

’m talking with professor Ibram X. Kendi, New York Times bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist and the Director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University. We talk about racial disparities, policy, and equality, but we really focus on How to Be an Antiracist, which is a groundbreaking approach to understanding uprooting racism and inequality in our society and in

Why are so many unarmed black people being killed by police while armed white people are simply arrested? Why are officials addressing violent crime in poorer neighborhoods by adding more police instead of more jobs?

Ms. Williams, a real estate marketing director and food blogger, also tweeted at the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, which took an immediate interest.

The Friday that Mr. Williams sat in a Detroit police interrogation room was the day before his 42nd birthday. That morning, his wife emailed his boss to say he would miss work because of a family emergency; it broke his four-year record of perfect attendance.In Mr. Williams’s recollection, after he held the surveillance video still next to his face, the two detectives leaned back in their chairs and looked at one another. One detective, seeming chagrined, said to his partner: “I guess the computer got it wrong.”

The stakes are too high in criminal investigations to rely on unreliable—or wrong—inputs. It is one thing for a company to build a face recognition system designed to help individuals find their celebrity doppelgänger6 or painting lookalike7 for entertainment purposes. It's quite another to use these techniques to identify criminal suspects, who may be deprived of their liberty and ultimately prosecuted based on the match. Unfortunately, police departments' reliance on questionable probe photos appears all too common.

Gregory McMichael “stated he was in his front yard and saw the suspect from the break-ins ‘hauling ass’” down the road, according to the police report. McMichael “stated there have been several Break-ins in the neighborhood and further the suspect was caught on surveillance video,” the report said. But where is the surveillance video linking Arbery to a recent burglary? And McMichael’s neighborhood had gone seven weeks without a reported burglary, a local police lieutenant recently told CNN. The last reported burglary was on January 1, when a 9-mm pistol was stolen from an unlocked truck outside the McMichaels’ home.

nationwide protests over the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor are met with police brutality, John Oliver discusses how the histories of policing and white supremacy are intertwined, the roadblocks to fixing things, and some potential paths forward.

Trevor shares his thoughts on the killing of George Floyd, the protests in Minneapolis, the dominos of racial injustice and police brutality, and how the contract between society and black Americans has been broken time and time again. #DailyShow #TrevorNoah #GeorgeFloyd Subscribe to The Daily Show: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwWh... Follow The Daily Show: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheDailyShow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thedailyshow Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thedailyshow Watch full episodes of The Daily Show for free: http://www.cc.com/shows/the-daily-sho... Follow Comedy Central: Twitter: https://twitter.com/ComedyCentral Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ComedyCentral Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/comedycentral About The Daily Show: Trevor Noah and The Daily Show correspondents tackle the biggest stories in news, politics and pop culture. The Daily Show with Trevor Noah airs weeknights at 11/10c on Comedy Central. Show less Show more

On Saturday May 30th filmmaker and photographer David Jones of David Jones Media felt compelled to go out and serve the community in some way. He decided to use his art to try and explain the events that were currently impacting our lives. On day two, Sunday the 31st, he activated his dear friend author Kimberly Jones to tag along and conduct interviews. During a moment of downtime he captured these powerful words from her and felt the world couldn’t wait for the full length documentary, they needed to hear them now. Show less Show more

Face surveillance is the most dangerous of the many new technologies available to law enforcement. And while face surveillance is a danger to all people, no matter the color of their skin, the technology is a particularly serious threat to Black people in at least three fundamental ways.  First, the technology itself can be racially biased. Groundbreaking research conducted by Black scholars Joy Buolamwini, Deb Raji, and Timnit Gebru snapped our collective attention to the fact that yes, algorithms can be racist. Buolamwini and Gebru’s 2018 research concluded that some facial analysis algorithms misclassified

Joy Buolamwini, who conducted the MIT study and is the founder of the Algorithmic Justice League.

Aircraft filmed demonstrations in Dayton, Ohio; New York City; Buffalo and Philadelphia, among other cities, sending video footage in real time to control centers managed by Air and Marine Operations, a branch of Customs and Border Protection.The footage was then fed into a digital network managed by the Homeland Security Department, called “Big Pipe,” which can be accessed by other federal agencies and local police departments for use in future investigations,

It also shows that data from the marketing industry can be used as an alternative to obtaining data from cellphone carriers,

Governments’ use of purchased location data has exploded in recent months, as officials around the world have sought insights on how people are moving around during the Covid-19 pandemic. In general, governments have assured their citizens that any location data collected by the marketing industry and used by public health entities is anonymous. But the movements of a phone give strong clues to its ownership—for example, where the phone is located during the evenings and overnight is likely where the phone owner lives. The identity of the phone’s owner can further be corroborated if their workplace, place of worship, therapist’s office or other information about their real-world activities are known to investigators.

ut never before have the cries carried this kind of muscle. Among American voters, support for the Black Lives Matter movement grew in the first two weeks of protests almost as much as it did in the preceding two years.

supplement protests with other actions, such as supporting black-owned businesses and donating to bail funds and advocacy groups.

The killing of Mr. Floyd, Mr. Boyer said, brought a shift in perceptions of what Mr. Kaepernick was trying to achieve. “Whereas kneeling was received as such a divisive gesture, it’s sort of become a uniting gesture,” he said. “But it takes a lot more to actually change” the system that athletes like Mr. Kaepernick are protesting against.

The ACLU of Southern California has fought for decades against police abuse and for policing that is equitable, transparent and democratic. In the courts, in city halls, in the legislature, the ACLU SoCal has challenged excessive force, racial profiling, broken-windows policing and dragnet surveillance.

The FBI came under heavy criticism in 2017 for creating the designation ”Black Identity Extremist” as a discriminatory measure to target racial-justice advocates for surveillance and prosecution. Similarly, the DHS memo appears to wrongly characterize peaceful, anti-racist groups carrying out protests as worthy of invasive and persistent surveillance. “We are concerned that biases and inaccuracies reflected in the ‘Race Paper’ could result in unconstitutional law enforcement activities throughout the country that disproportionately impact activists, protesters, and communities of color,” reads the letter. The signers include 18 Million Rising, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Brennan Center for Justice, the Center for Media Justice, Color Of Change, Free Press, the Muslim Justice League, the NAACP, the National Lawyers Guild, Project Censored, the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

digital literacy needs to start with the mirror and head-checks before it gets to automotive repair or controlled skids. Because it is these simple behaviors, applied as habits and enforced as norms, that have the power to change the web as we know it, to break our cycle of reaction and recognition, and ultimately to get even our deeper investigations off to a better start.

So here it is. And here is what it expresses — my utter shock that when talking to some otherwise intelligent adults about the fact that we are not educating our students to be critical consumers of web content, or to use networks to solve problems, etc — my utter shock that often as not the response to this problem is “Well, if students would just stop getting information from the web and go back to books, this whole problem would go away.”

We already get shot and profiled and people treat us with alarm just walking in the store to buy some Skittles. Literally. Just wearing a hoodie can be a death sentence in some communities. So the idea you're gonna be wearing a hoodie and a mask, if that's going to be the new social norm, then people need to adapt to see -- to give African American men and young women and other people of color more the benefit of the doubt. This virus is hitting different communities differently.

The despair of so many Americans in this moment of naked exposure of racism’s persistence in the U.S. should not lead us to deny the successes of the civil rights revolution. Black Americans are now included in the public domain of the nation. They form an integral part of its political life and an important component of its military, and they play an outsize role in its intellectual and cultural life.