"Surveillance State of the Union" - from the 2019 MIT/Harvard Assembly Showcase
Channel: The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society
Date: 2019-07-03

B Cavello and Carl Governale describes their team's project "Surveillance State of the Union," in this final presentation from the MIT Harvard 2019 Assembly Showcase on June 13, 2019. 

Surveillance State of the Union is a data visualization and set of short illustrative cases that seeks to raise awareness among tech workers, academics, military-decision makers, and journalists about the risks of pursuing surveillance-related work in AI. Work that may, to a researcher, be thought of as theoretical has very real consequences for people who are subjected to state surveillance, as evidenced in the suppression of the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang province of China and other marginalized communities around the world.

The project leveraged a variety of data sources such as government contracts, co-authored papers, and public releases to begin to map the surveillance research network. The work shows, for example, overlap between universities collaborating on US state-funded surveillance research and similar research by Chinese companies implicated in Xinjiang.

Learn more about Assembly and how to get involved at http://bkmla.org/