I started volunteering for the Council on American Islamic Relations, and working with them I started learning even more about how the government was surveilling our communities. I actually started working with them part-time in college and there was a leak at Camp Pendleton of someone who’d taken a whole bunch of confidential information out.…
Part of the reason that this work is so hard is… it feels like part of the work that we’re constantly doing is peeling back the curtain and trying to see what’s happening. Then, trying to understand what’s happening. Then, how do we explain it to people? How do we fight it? It’s a constant…
There’s a lot of people who do research on Black families and speak for Black families and it’s like, you have a degree of separation [and] you think you can just separate the research from your personal life and you probably can, because you have that privilege. I can’t. A lot of us can’t. That’s…
[I]t’s like every time we need something as a community… if our community is a food desert, and we want grocery stores, what do we get? Policing. Surveillance. We need housing. We need places to live. And all this gentrification. What do we get? Policing and surveillance in some type of way is woven into…
[Original illustration and credit for Coda Story: Aigerim Ismagulova] Police stations across the United States increasingly rely on gunshot detection technology, extolling its virtues under the guise of increased safety and quicker, more predictive responses to “crime.” However, in-depth investigation reveals this technology functions as an add-on to police surveillance systems that egregiously target those…
I find the privacy frame as an approach to only challenging intrusions by technology has also help put us in this position where we don’t have laws that actually grapple with the diversity of the people in our society and how technology affects them differently. —Rashida Richardson Our Data Bodies (ODB) is excited to present…
Image Credit: Ruha Benjamin (website) This past July, Dr. Dorothy Roberts and Dr. Ruha Benjamin participated in Policing without the police: Race, Technology, and the New Jim Code, an online talk facilitated by Haymarket Books. The two scholars spoke about their work and the current moment of racial justice uprisings, which fit into a…
[Cover photo credit: Mir Suhail ] Can you tell me about the oral history project at Roosevelt island- how it got started, what are the desired outcomes? So in response to all kinds like a racist debate on an online parent network, I did a public screening of Jordan Peele’s Get Out, which was really…