‘Strategies of Resistance’: Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology Hosts 2024 Color of Surveillance Conference
November 21, 2024
L-R: DAIR Research Fellow Adio Dinika, data worker and Turkopticon organizer Krista Pawloski and Techworker Community Africa Co-Founder Kings Korodi spoke on a panel about the challenges faced by data workers.
On Nov. 18, more than 800 scholars, advocates, artists and others working to address issues of privacy and surveillance technology convened in person and online for the sixth conference in the Color of Surveillance series hosted by Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy & Technology.
Held in partnership with the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), the day-long conference was organized around the theme “Surveillance / Resistance” and featured four plenary sessions that examined the role of surveillance in light of emergent technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and in domestic and global contexts ranging from international armed conflict to the U.S. public school system.
In addition to hearing from expert panelists, guests contributed actively throughout the day during question-and-answer sessions, a participatory poetry wall and unstructured time for further discussion and reflection.
“Mass surveillance is one of the most powerful weapons of autocracy, because resistance movements cannot flourish unless people are able to gather and deliberate and organize in spaces outside the apparatus of control,” said Center on Privacy & Technology Executive Director Emily Tucker. “Our conference foregrounds the hope that such spaces are still possible, and the intention to make such spaces real, even now at the nadir of the algorithmic age.” Past Color of Surveillance conference themes have included government monitoring of: African American communities; American immigrants; religious minorities and poor and working people.
Crafting ‘strategies of resistance’
An afternoon session hosted by the Data Workers’ Inquiry, which supports data workers worldwide in researching and reporting on labor practices in their workplaces, brought together panelists to discuss their experiences in the AI industry.
During the Data Workers’ Inquiry workshop, panelists shared first-hand accounts of carrying out tasks such as content moderation and AI model training for social media companies and other platforms.
Data workers are not only vulnerable to harmful workplace conditions such as low pay and repeated exposure to graphic content, the panelists explained, but can be subject to forms of workplace surveillance, such as computer eye-tracking programs, while unknowingly helping to develop the surveillance technology used by private companies and government bodies.
Krystal Kauffman, a DAIR research fellow and the lead organizer of Turkopticon, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of data workers, recounted being tasked with identifying non-traditional border crossings, such as tire tracks and footpaths, in aerial photographs taken in an unknown location.
“Were people coming to help? Or were people coming to detain these people?,” reflected Kauffman, who joined the panel remotely. “I still wonder today, … ‘Did I bring harm to somebody?’ That stays with you,” she said.
In a statement, DAIR Founder and Executive Director Timnit Gebru, a leading AI ethics researcher and Google whistleblower who co-authored a seminal paper demonstrating the potential for racial and gender bias in facial recognition technology, emphasized the importance of highlighting the first-hand impact of surveillance on vulnerable communities.
“Our conference highlights voices from communities who encounter surveillance systems before they are proliferated elsewhere, educating us on the many dimensions of surveillance and sharing strategies of resistance,” said Gebru, who moderated an earlier panel entitled Grassroots Movements Resisting Surveillance.
An experimental opera premiere
Contemporary dancer Mher Kandoyan faces off with a drone during “We Shall Not Inherit the Earth.”
Following the panel sessions, the conference concluded with the premiere of “We Shall Not Inherit the Earth” an experimental opera by local D.C. artist Stephanie Mercedes that explored the parallels between U.S.-funded surveillance as a tool of violence and Western classical music.
Director and composer Stephanie Mercedes (center) conducts opera singer and celloist Fairouz Foty (right).
The standing-room-only audience gathered under the floodlights of the Sport and Fitness Center basketball court for the immersive performance, which combined a cello composition and operatic vocal improvisation with contemporary dance and other dramatic elements, including a hand-operated drone that hovered among the performers, who interacted with — and ultimately destroyed — the device.
“This experimental opera does not offer a solution, but creates space for performers to grapple with themes of power, control, agency, and the privileges of silence,” the event program noted. “We have no answers, only questions.”