LFI Course Materials 2020/Week eight

Week 8: New surveillance infrastructures

• Real time lecture April 27th 11 Pacific/2 Eastern on Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/9129428892

Overview

Many of us remember (and the rest of us have read about) the months and years after September 11th when enterprising lawmakers, intelligence agencies, and private industry worked together to use that tragedy in justifying the creation of the most complex surveillance apparatus the world had ever seen, whose size and form and capacity we wouldn't learn in full until years later when Edward Snowden told The Guardian all about it. Today, we are still living in that fallout, and we've already seen the new ways that the same types are using this crisis to justify even more surveillance infrastructure. By infrastructure, we're talking about laws, technology, and policy, created with the pandemic in mind, but inevitably designed to outlive the original mission. This week, we're joined by tech and media scholar Jasmine McNealy to talk about these new infrastructures, like the Apple/Google contact tracing collaboration, other tech orgs working on devices and apps, and new proposed laws and policies that will lead to the expanded collection of personal information.

Readings

• We saw NSO's Covid-19 software in action, and privacy experts are worried https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/epg9jm/nso-covid-19-surveillance-tech-software-tracking-infected-privacy-experts-worried

• Privacy experts say responsible coronavirus surveillance is possible: https://theintercept.com/2020/04/02/coronavirus-covid-19-surveillance-privacy/

• The expansion of mass surveillance to stop coronavirus should worry us all: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/18/mass-surveillance-coronavirus-technology-expansion

Guest lecturer

Jasmine E. McNealy is an associate professor in the Department of Telecommunication, in the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida, where she studies information, communication, and technology with a view toward influencing law and policy. Her research focuses on privacy, online media, and communities.

Discussion

TBD

Tasks

• Lecture, readings, discussion forum, and final project work