Registration now available: RSVP on this form.

When: November 18, 2024
Time: 10 AM – 6:30 PM
Where: Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C.

Please join us in Washington, D.C. or via livestream, on November 18 for The Color of Surveillance: Surveillance / Resistance. This is the sixth conference in the “Color of Surveillance” series, which was started by the Center on Privacy & Technology in 2016 to put racial and economic justice at the center of conversations about digital era surveillance. This year’s conference—the first in person since 2019—will be co-hosted by the Privacy Center, the UCLA Center on Race & Digital Justice and the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR). 

Our theme, “Surveillance / Resistance,” is broader and more ambiguous than the themes for previous years, and this is purposeful. What does resistance mean when surveillance isn’t just something that occurs in the environments where we live and work and play and think and create and struggle, but is actually the material with which so many of those environments are built? In a context of broad institutional corrosion and capture, in the face of proliferating global catastrophe, this is a question that remains open and difficult. 

The conference will not answer this question, but will offer space for us to riff on it together. The day will be structured around four plenary sessions led by some of the bravest writers, teachers, activists and artists taking on the problems of technology and surveillance that define our moment in history. In addition to participating in conversation with session speakers, attendees will be invited to learn and engage with one another through a variety of other modalities, including poetry, music and art. There will also be unstructured time, and comfortable physical spaces, for talking and reading and resting.

We hope to see you there!

Register to attend in person or via livestream on this form. In-person attendees will be asked to test on-site for COIVD and wear a mask.

Program:

All times are in Eastern Standard Time (EST).

9:30 – 10:00 | Registration coffee, tea, and water will be available 

10:00 – 10:05 | Opening remarks

10:05 – 11:05 | Poetry as Resistance

Michael Colonnese, English professor at Methodist University and the 2023 Watchword Prize winner
Tawana Petty, Executive Director, Petty Propolis, Inc. 

11:05 – 11:25 | Break coffee, tea, and water will be available

11:25 – 12:40 | Grassroots Movements Resisting Surveillance

Timnit Gebru, Founder & Executive Director, DAIR
Esra’a Alshafei, Executive Director of Majal, Founder of Surveillance Watch
Rami Ibrahim, Community Organizer, Palestinian Youth Movement 
David Yambio, President & Spokesperson of Refugees in Libya 

12:40 – 1:40 | Lunch food and beverages will be provided to in person attendees

1:40 – 2:55 | Data Workers’ Inquiry Workshop

Adio Dinika, Research Fellow, DAIR
Krystal Kauffman, Research Fellow, DAIR/Lead Organizer, Turkopticon
Kings Korodi, AI Research and Development Specialist, Co-Founder of TCA (Kenya)
Ann Ngira, Quality Analyst (Teleperformance)/AI Automation Expert/Data Annotator
Mophat Okinyi, Founder & CEO – Techworker Community Africa

2:55 – 3:15 | Break coffee, tea, water, and light snacks will be available

3:15 – 4:30 | From the Barrel of a Gun to an iPhone Camera: Two Sides of the Surveillance Coin and What To Do About It

Safiya U. Noble, Professor, UCLA 
Chris Gilliard
Khadijah Abdurahman, editor-in-chief of Logic(s) magazine

4:30 – 4:45 | Closing remarks

4:45 – 5:00 | Reception hors d’oeuvres and beverages will be available 

5:00 – 5:45 | We Shall Not Inherit The Earth Experimental Opera

Stephanie Mercedes, artist

6:30 | Conference close

Sessions:

Poetry as Resistance

In every era, tyranny depends on the triumph of dogmas which cause us to disparage or forget truths we deeply know. In the digital era, one of these dogmas is the idea that knowledge is nothing more than information, and that thinking is therefore nothing more than the fast and accurate processing of information. This is an idea that asks us to forget our embodiment, to forget our connectedness to one another, and to forget our own experiences of confusion and creation. There is no better way to resist this coerced forgetting than through art. We will open our conference with a session about the practice of poetry—reading it, writing it, and sharing it—as a practice of resistance. Tawanna Petty, a poet and lifelong social justice organizer, and Michael Colonnese, a poet, teacher and winner of the Privacy Center’s first poetry contest, will share reflections from their life and work, and will lead session participants in a short creative writing exercise.

Grassroots Movements Resisting Surveillance

Dr. Timnit Gebru will moderate this discussion with leaders in communities who are known to be ground zero for surveillance experimentation, and therefore, resistance. Rami Ibrahim is an organizer with the Palestinian Youth movement, a transnational, grassroots, volunteer-led movement of Palestinian and Arab youth struggling for the liberation of their homeland. Esra’a Al Shafei is the founding director of Majal.org, a network of online platforms that amplify under-reported and marginalized voices in West Asia and North Africa. She also founded Surveillance Watch, an interactive map that exposes the hidden connections within the opaque surveillance industry. And David Yambio is a community advocate, human rights defender and spokesperson of Refugees in Libya who was forcibly recruited as a child soldier. As a refugee in Libya, David advocated against the European Union’s complicity in human trafficking, and strives for policy changes that safeguard refugee’s rights instead.

Data Workers’ Inquiry Workshop

This session will be led by members of The Data Workers’ Inquiry, a community-based research project which supports data workers around the globe to lead their own inquiries within their respective workplaces. The Data Workers’ Inquiry adapts Marx’s 1880 Workers’ Inquiry to the phenomenon of data workers, who are essential for contemporary digital applications yet precariously employed and politically dispersed. The community researchers guide the direction of the work, such that it is oriented towards their needs and goals of building workplace power but supported by formally trained qualitative researchers. 

The session will explore the complex role of data workers in modern surveillance systems. Data labellers from several different countries will describe their experiences grappling with ethical dilemmas raised by their work, and their attempts at resistance. Attendees will gain insights into the challenges faced by those inadvertently contributing to surveillance technology and explore potential strategies both for ethical navigation of systems from within and for changing the industry as a whole.

From the Barrel of a Gun to an iPhone Camera: Two Sides of the Surveillance Coin and What To Do About It, a conversation with Safiya Noble and Chris Gillard facilitated by Khadijah Abdurahman.

Chris Gillard’s work traverses the involuntary imposition of carceral technologies on Black Detroit and public school classrooms as well as the middle class desire for high status gadgets, like an Apple Watch, which is virtually indistinguishable from something like state sanctioned ankle monitoring of parolees. The throughline that emerges across each of these different domains, is that while minoritized and poor people have the greatest vulnerability to intrusive and experimental forms of surveillance, privileged people are not as exempt from probing sensors as they imagine themselves to be. In fact, their embrace of luxury surveillance technologies expands the surveillant gaze far beyond the eyes of the state for everyone else.

At the heart of this dilemma, is where Safiya Noble’s extensive, path-breaking scholarship on tech policy deeply resonates. Their 2018 book, Algorithms of Oppression deeply established how Google search is structured by antiblackness in a context where funding for public libraries began to steeply decline. Noble truly crystallized how the ascendancy of corporate tech was tied to the defunding of public space, forcing us to reckon with what kind of positive vision should we assert in response. The situation we find the world in today is dire but importantly, both scholars emphasize how the dystopia is not inevitable. The social price of luxury and carceral surveillance is unambiguous and substantial, but the war is far from over. A different kind of world is possible.

The texture and tensions in forging this other world will be addressed at length in this closing plenary facilitated by Logic(s) magazine, editor-in-chief, Khadijah Abdurahman.

We Shall Not Inherit the Earth

Combining improvised Arabic operatic singing, drones, electromagnetic microphones, string instruments, and contemporary dance, “We Shall Not Inherit the Earth” explores the parallels between US funded surveillance as a tool of violence and western classical music. The performance fluctuates between rigid sonic ‘control’ and wild experimental sounds. The dynamic between conductor, performer, and sheet music serves as a metaphor for the police state, while coil pickup microphones capture sounds from destroyed surveillance apparatuses. 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.

This is a boceto, or study, for a larger version of this experimental opera. It is Mercedes’s second opera; their first was *Never In Our Image*, a LGBTQIA+ gun destruction opera produced in collaboration with CulturalDC. The musical score for that work featured the sounds of weapons being destroyed and transformed into queer sonic instruments, blending percussion, opera, and contemporary dance. Mercedes has been melting down weapons for the past eight years and became interested in exploring surveillance as a contemporary tool of war after discovering that many of the foundries where she casts are also used to create drone parts.

Opera Singer: Fairouz Foty
Contemporary Dancer: Mher Kanodyan
Percussion: Anonymous
Sound Designer: Zeos Greene
Main Artist: Stephanie Mercedes

Speakers:

Khadijah Abdurahman, editor-in-chief of Logic(s) magazine 
Khadijah Abdurahman is currently the editor-in-chief of Logic(s), a queer black x asian tech magazine. They have published in outlets like the Funambulist, Columbia Law and Race Journal, Parapraxis and ACM Interactions. Khadijah’s research focus is predictive risk modeling within US family policing and tech in the Horn of Africa. Distinguished Fellow @ Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology. Previous fellowships at AI Now Institute and UCLA C2I2.

Esra’a Al Shafei, Executive Director of Majal, Founder of Surveillance Watch
Esra’a Al Shafei is the founding director of Majal.org, a network of online platforms that amplify under-reported and marginalized voices in West Asia and North Africa. She is also the co-founder of the Numun Fund, which resources and sustains women/trans-led groups who engage with technology in their activism in the Larger World (aka Global Majority.) Most recently, she’s the founder of Surveillance Watch, an interactive map that exposes the hidden connections within the opaque surveillance industry. Esra’a currently serves on the Board of Trustees at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit which hosts Wikipedia. She is also on the Board of the Tor Project, developers of one of the world’s strongest tools for privacy and freedom online, and Mastodon, a free and open-source software for running self-hosted social networking services.

Michael Colonnese, English professor at Methodist University and the 2023 Watchword Prize winner
Michael Colonnese, the 2023 Watchword Prize winner, is the author of Sex and Death, I Suppose, which he describes as a hard-boiled detective novel with a soft Jungian underbelly, of a chapbook, Temporary Agency, and of a poetry collection, Double Feature. His short fiction, creative nonfiction, essays, and poems have appeared in over ninety literary magazines and academic journals, large and small. He’s a retired university professor, and for many decades he served as the managing editor of Longleaf Press at Methodist University, where he held an endowed chair in American Literature. He currently lives in the mountains of western North Carolina, near Asheville.

Adio Dinika, Research Fellow, DAIR
Adio is a Research Fellow at The Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), where he co-leads the Data Workers Inquiry project. This project aims to understand the working conditions of data workers across the globe. His work critically examines the often invisibilized labor behind AI system development, emphasizing the importance of ethical considerations and the inclusion of diverse voices in AI creation. Through his research, Adio has become increasingly aware of the crucial role data workers play in building surveillance systems, and he explores potential avenues for resistance within these structures. He received his PhD from The Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS) in Germany, focusing on critiquing techno-optimistic narratives of platform labour in Sub-Saharan Africa. Recently, Adio completed a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) in Bochum, Germany, further expanding his expertise in digital labor and governance. By combining academic rigor with extensive fieldwork, he illuminates the overlooked human contributions to AI, advocates for ethical standards that consider its socio-economic impacts in the Global Majority, and investigates ways data workers can challenge and reshape the surveillance systems they help create.

Timnit Gebru, Founder & Executive Director, DAIR 
Dr. Timnit Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR). Prior to that she was fired by Google in December 2020 for raising issues of discrimination in the workplace, where she was serving as co-lead of the Ethical AI research team. Timnit also co-founded Black in AI, a nonprofit that works to increase the presence, inclusion, visibility and health of Black people in the field of AI, and is on the board of AddisCoder, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching algorithms and computer programming to Ethiopian highschool students, free of charge. Her scientific work and advocacy has resulted in Timnit receiving a number of awards and accolades including being named one of Nature’s Ten people who helped shape science in 2021 and one of TIME 100’s most influential people in AI in 2023. She is currently writing The View from Somewhere, a memoir + manifesto arguing for a technological future that serves our communities instead of one that is used for surveillance, warfare, and the centralization of power by a few men in Silicon Valley through data theft, labor exploitation, and environmental damage.

Chris Gilliard
Dr. Chris Gilliard is a writer, professor, and speaker. His scholarship concentrates on digital privacy, surveillance, and the intersections of race, class, and technology. He is an advocate for critical and equity-focused approaches to tech in education. His writings have been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Wired Magazine, the Chronicle of Higher Ed, and The Atlantic.

Gilliard is a member of the inaugural (2022 – 2024) cohort of the Just Tech Fellowship. His current project is a book that explores his concept of Luxury Surveillance.

Rami Ibrahim, Community Organizer, Palestinian Youth Movement 
Rami Ibrahim is an organizer with the Palestinian Youth movement, a transnational, grassroots, volunteer-led movement of Palestinian and Arab youth struggling for the liberation of their homeland. He is the product of generational displacement as the grandson of Palestinian refugees who were forcibly expelled from their homes in the Nakba, but will be the first generation to liberate Palestine and return. Rami is passionate about building community power, confronting zionism within every societal sector, and advancing the demands of the Palestinian people: the right of return, ending the 17-year siege on Gaza, the release of Palestinian prisoners and abolition of zionist jails, and liberation from the river to the sea. Rami sees himself in joint struggle with communities around the world who have been impacted by US colonialism, imperialism, and the militarized war-economy.

Krystal Kauffman, Research Fellow, DAIR/Lead Organizer, Turkopticon
Krystal is a research fellow with the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), a data worker on multiple platforms, and the lead organizer of Turkopticon, a nonprofit organization dedicated to fighting for the rights of all data workers. Her research and advocacy efforts focus on the labor conditions and ethics of platform work and workers. Early in her career, Krystal spent a decade organizing political and issue campaigns and four years studying geology. Following the emergence of health issues in 2015, she began working from home on the Amazon Mechanical Turk and Prolific platforms. During this time, she became well-versed in the tasks presented to data workers and the shortcomings of the platforms themselves. Krystal joined Turkopticon in 2020, taking on a worker-advocacy role. Since then, she has worked alongside others to build a community of workers and advocates united in righting the wrongs of the big-tech marketplace platforms.

Kings Korodi, AI Researcher and Development Specialist, Co-Founder of TCA (Kenya)
With over seven years of experience in the AI industry, Kings is currently a Senior Researcher at Techworker Community Africa, where he leads the research and advocacy efforts on ethical AI labor practices. He has deep knowledge of the AI labor market, the challenges and opportunities it presents, and the ethical implications of its development and deployment.

As a Senior Researcher, Kings conducts thorough investigations into the working conditions, wages, and rights of AI workers across the continent, and prepare insightful reports that expose the industry’s gaps and issues. He also uses his strong communication and persuasion skills to advocate for fair and ethical AI labor policies, engaging with diverse stakeholders, NGOs, and industry leaders to foster strategic partnerships and collaborations. Additionally, he designs and delivers impactful educational materials and workshops to raise awareness and empower AI workers, and measure the effectiveness of his campaigns through quantifiable metrics. Kings’ mission is to revolutionize the AI industry by championing the values and interests of AI workers.

Stephanie Mercedes, artist
Mercedes is a uncategorized Queer Latinx artist who works in sculpture, opera, techno, choreography and sound. Their work revolves around creating rituals of mourning and rituals of liberation. Mercedes melts weapons to create instruments and sculptures. She also excavates missing violent histories.

Mercedes has exhibited and performed at the Bronx Museum, the Queens Museum, the Smithsonian, the Kennedy Center and the National Gallery of Art. She has been funded by George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, Light Works, NALAC, The Foundation for Contemporary Art, WPA, The DC Commission for the Arts, the GLB Memorial Foundation, the Warhol Foundation and the Clarvit Fellowship. Mercedes has been an artist in residence at: VisArts, Halcyon Art Labs, the Bronx Museum, Montgomery College, Christopher Newport University, SOMA, Lugar a Dudas, Largo das Artes and La Ira de Dios. Mercedes recently created her first opera “Never In Our Image” with CulturalDC.

Ann Ngira, Quality Analyst (Teleperformance)/AI Automation Expert/Data Annotator
Ann Ngira is a quality Analyst by profession with 3 years of experience in designing, implementing and optimizing quality assurance processes across diverse industries. Skilled in both manual and automated testing methodologies, she excels at identifying defects, streamlining workflows, and ensuring compliance with industry standards and best practices. As a seasoned AI automation Expert, Ann is experienced in leveraging cutting-edge technologies to optimize business processes and drive operational efficiency. With a background in artificial intelligence and machine learning, Ann specializes in designing and implementing automated systems that streamline workflows, reduce cost and enhance decision making. Also, as a freelance data annotator for the past 5 years, Ann is detail-oriented and specializes in labeling and categorizing data to improve the accuracy of machine learning models and AI systems. Ann works with diverse datasets, including text, images, and audio, she ensures that data is meticulously tagged according to project specifications. Her keen eye for detail, combined with a solid understanding of data integrity and quality assurance, allows Ann to contribute to the development of high-performing AI solutions.

Dr. Safiya U. Noble, Professor, UCLA
Dr. Safiya U. Noble is the David O. Sears Presidential Endowed Chair of Social Sciences and Professor of Gender Studies, African American Studies, and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is the Director of the UCLA Center on Race & Digital Justice and Co-Director of the Minderoo Initiative on Tech & Power at the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2). She currently serves as Interim Director of the UCLA DataX Initiative, leading work in critical data studies for the campus.

She is the author of a best-selling book on racist and sexist algorithmic bias in commercial search engines, entitled Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press), which has been widely-reviewed in scholarly and popular publications. In 2021, she was recognized as a MacArthur Foundation Fellow for her ground-breaking work on algorithmic discrimination. Dr. Noble is a board member of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, serving those vulnerable to online harassment, and provides expertise to a number of civil and human rights organizations. She is a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford where she is a chartering member of the International Panel on the Information Environment. In 2022, she was recognized as the inaugural NAACP-Archewell Digital Civil Rights Award recipient.

Mophat Okinyi, Founder & CEO – Techworker Community Africa
Mophat Okinyi is a distinguished AI and human rights activist, widely recognized for his efforts to advocate for the rights and fair treatment of online content moderators, tech workers, and data training professionals. His work aims to ensure that these essential workers, who play a critical role in the development and maintenance of AI systems, are not marginalized or treated as disposable backend labor. In 2024, Mophat’s groundbreaking contributions earned him recognition on the prestigious TIME 100 AI list.

As the founder and CEO of Techworker Community Africa, Mophat leads an organization dedicated to improving the working conditions and rights of tech industry professionals across the continent. His work is driven by a deep commitment to upholding human dignity and fundamental rights in the face of rapid technological advancements. He believes that every worker, regardless of their role or status, deserves respect, fair compensation, and the protection of their basic human rights.

Mophat is passionate about creating an equitable future where AI and technology are tools for global progress, benefiting all of humanity without discrimination. He actively champions the cause of fair labor practices and calls for the inclusion of marginalized voices in shaping the future of technology. Through his advocacy, he envisions a world where the benefits of AI and technology are shared equally, and no one is left behind, regardless of race, color, or economic background.

Tawana Petty, Executive Director, Petty Propolis, Inc.
Tawana Petty aka Honeycomb is a mother, social justice organizer, poet, author, and facilitator. Her work focuses on racial justice, equity, privacy, and consent. She is a 2023-2025 Just Tech Fellow with the Social Science Research Council, a 2024 National LIO Yearlong Fellow with the Rockwood Leadership Institute and she serves on the CS (computer science) for Detroit Steering Committee. Petty is the founding Executive Director of Petty Propolis, Inc., a Black women-led artist incubator primarily focused on cultivating visionary resistance through policy literacy and advocacy, data and digital privacy education, and racial justice and equity initiatives.

She is an alumni fellow of the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford PACS, the Detroit Equity Action Lab, and Art Matters Foundation and convened the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition from 2016 through 2024. Petty is a former co-lead of Our Data Bodies and has previously served as Data Justice Director for the Detroit Community Technology Project, National Organizing Director at Data for Black Lives and Director of Policy and Advocacy for the Algorithmic Justice League.

Selected honors include a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition and Wayne State University’s Center for Peace and Conflict Studies Peacemaker Award in 2018. In 2021, she was named one of 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics and in 2023, Petty was honored with the AI Policy Leader in Civil Society Award by the Center for AI and Digital Policy.

David Yambio, President & Spokesperson of Refugees in Libya
David Yambio is a community advocate, human rights defender and spokesperson of Refugees in Libya. Born in 1997 during Sudan’s civil unrest, he faced displacement and educational deprivation. He was forcibly recruited as a child soldier by the LRA in 2009-2010 and endured multiple conflicts in Africa including forced conscription in his country. David fled his country in 2016 and embarked on a perilous journey through several African countries, enduring torture, exploitation, and detentions. He faced several rejections and pushbacks from the European borders back to Libya where he was enslaved and incarcerated.

After engaging with international organizations like UNHCR and IOM, David’s advocacy work gained momentum in Libya, where he faced adversity for speaking out against human rights violations. In 2021, he cofounded “Refugees in Libya,” striving for policy changes and raising awareness about refugee struggles. In 2022 he led a massive campaign against the UNHCR in Geneva titled “UNFAIR THE UN REFUSAL AGENCY” this led to the release of several arbitrarily detained refugees and rights defenders in Libya. In June 2023 he led another political campaign against the European Union in Brussels under the banner “FROM TRIPOLI TO BRUSSELS AMPLIFYING THE VOICES OF REFUGEES IN LIBYA” His activism led to the release of 221 human rights defenders and he now works for their relocation to safer countries.

He was a fellow of the Allianz Foundation from February 2023 – June 2024 and is currently a Global Fellow on International Crimes and Accountability with European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR).