(GUEST) On The U.S. Census And Procurement As Surveillance
If databases serve as the architecture of surveillance, the procurement process serves as the architect disguised as insidiously inaccessible policy.
📝 Monthly Round-Up
Bianca Wylie on Toronto’s proposed partnership with Pay-It, a private company based in Kansas City, to make an easy to use interface to pay for city services. Sole-sourcing key digital infrastructure is a huge vulnerability and allows companies to lobby governments and use freebies and prototype trojan horses to gain a lot of power. In Spacing Magazine. Read the report from City Hall with recommendations to boost accountability and oversight.
Searches without Borders by STOP: Surveillance Technology Oversight Project on how a U.S. Citizen was detained at the US-Canada border and within minutes and without a warrant his phone and vehicle were stripped and searched. Read here.
Center for Court Innovation’s Youth Justice Board, a group of 15 teenage students who come together and interview experts to have a voice in policies that affect their lives. This report entitled All Eyes on Us investigates how law enforcement uses social media to disproportionately target and surveil Black and brown youth in New York City and key recommendations to decision makers to better support young people as their lives become more intertwined with the internet and minimize their involvement with the justice system. Read here.
On August 11, tens of thousands of Census Bureau workers began officially knocking on doors across the United States as part of the once-in-a-decade population count called the Decennial Census. Masked and tasked with a smartphone, workers participate in what the Bureau calls the Non-Response Follow Up period to count each and every individual who has not completed the Census already either online, via phone, or using a mail-in questionnaire.
National response rates in the past have hovered around the 65-76% and this year, accounting for many factors the Census Bureau estimated a 60.5% national response rate which it has surpassed. As of early August 2020, New York City has a response rate of 55.3% with response rates as low as 38% in mostly Black, brown, and foreign-born neighborhoods in New York City. And now, people have a shorter period to complete the form. The Administration has proceeded with yet another operational change, bringing the deadline to complete the Census up by one month, to September 30th.
Fear and distrust with the Census contributes to the low response rates that New York City is facing but it’s about more than just the count. Black, brown, low-income, and immigrant communities often see the Census as an extension of the country’s surveillance and racist documentation history. Historically, the Census and documentation ledgers have been used to enslave Black communities, record white men and the people they enslave as three-fifths of themselves, and intern Japanese-Americans in camps. Many immigrants to this country come from nations that conduct Census-type enumeration for equally pernicious motives, to pursue ethnic supremacy, and where relationships with governments are tyrannical. It’s no surprise many Black and brown residents see the Census as a continuation of a system that seeks to attack and oppress them.
In 2020, the Census can be completed online for the first time. And while the US has been recognized for its online survey methodology during a pandemic, an increasing distrust with digital technology and fears pertaining to data collection identified by Greta Byrum at the Digital Equity Laboratory has only compounded distrust with the Census leading to lower response rates.
The Census is one example of a major government initiative to collect and use data to make policy decisions. Other examples include immigration records, CRM tools to manage personnel, public consultations, traffic violations, criminal records, and even the NYPD’s gang databases and so many more. The Census and these foundational databases constitute what Mutale Nkonde of Data & Society calls the “informational infrastructure” of the United States. In order to challenge the system that enables the pernicious collection of data and surveillance of Black and brown communities, we have to understand what enables this infrastructure and understand procurement policy.
If databases serve as the architecture of surveillance, the procurement process serves as the architect disguised as insidiously inaccessible policy. Procurement is a process by which governments purchase goods and services including digital technology like personnel management tools, payment platforms, databases and more. This process is made up of a nebulous web of complex jargon, institutionalized public-private relationships, and resource-backed lobbying led by persistent companies looking to score multi-million dollar contracts.
Procurement is important to understand because it determines which companies gain contracts, how often we grant them public funds to solve public problems, and how we keep them accountable.
Governments need procurement policies to acquire services and goods outside their wheelhouse. And while not a panacea, partnering with small to mid-sized entrepreneurs and challenge competitions can sometimes boost public engagement and support city service delivery. Governments pursue RFPs and opaque bidding systems with private companies over and over again who dazzle governments with fancy powerpoints and shiny prototypes to score lucrative contracts. Oftentimes, the companies are not even prepared to operate at the scale of government, such as Pay-It and the recent Iowa Caucuses. A combination of these occurrences leads to a system that favors private companies with little to no accountability from the public.
Because of the complexity of both the tool and the procurement system, governments — and by extension, government agencies — tend to partner with the same companies over and over again. For example, more than 1300 law enforcement agencies across the United States have partnered with Amazon Ring, a home security system, allowing a person’s actions in one jurisdiction to theoretically be compared to a database of people and actions across 1300 jurisdictions. The app works with “crowd-sourced” contributions allowing neighbors to flag incidents for themselves, which could and has disproportionately criminalized Black and brown people.
The procurement process then often operationalizes and facilitates surveillance even when the plan is not to. Take for example sanctuary policy. Wilmer Catalan-Ramirez and family’s house was raided by ICE in 2017 after he was added to a local gang database in Chicago, even though the city of Chicago had declared itself to be a “sanctuary city” meaning they did not share local law enforcement information with the federal government. These “sanctuary” policies are rendered meaningless when databases interact with one another. Databases at the local, state, and federal level procured by the same company also serve as a vulnerability for public citizens.
Databases are just one example of the tools used to surveil our families and neighbors. In acquiring databases, many have written about the framework and best practices governments keep in mind when soliciting proposals from vendors. Some examples:
Minimizing data retention: limiting how long we keep information on a particular individual, so that individuals who were put in a criminal or personnel as a suspect and then released do not remain in the database with a shadow account.
Company disclosures: Ranking Digital Rights ranks private technology companies with the type of disclosures around user policy and harm they have released.
Pursuing federated interoperability: Access Now’s report on data protection dos and don’ts lists database security and compliance.
The fear then, that many Black, brown, low-income, and immigrant communities have of the Census and government data collection represents a sophisticated understanding of the linked nature of databases, even if the Census data itself is ironclad. Advocates have an opportunity to look at surveillance through the eyes of procurement to address the system that enables it. Challenging the surveillance state and the pernicious uses of technology to track, monitor, and target our actions then has to begin at the procurement level.
📌 Organizing
“E-Carceration is still Incarceration” - Uchechukwu Onwa, Queer Detainee Empowerment Project. Basma Eid from Freedom to Thrive and team launched a new organizing poster to talk about e-carceration particularly of Trans Black women, Black and brown immigrants, and many other communities. Download the poster here and contribute if you can.
Playground Community Fridges: If you live in Brooklyn, New York and can donate fresh produce, books, and $$$, consider contributing to Playground Coffee Shop and Annex. Playground manages a few community fridges in Brooklyn to provide food-insecure families with fresh produce. Find out more and contribute.
Tech is Not Neutral. More than 1300 police departments across the country have contracts with Amazon Ring, a home security system. Private vendors and contractors of the law enforcement are facilitating the kidnapping, incarceration, and worse of Black and brown bodies. Sign this petition to fight for a future where tech works for everyone.
Mijente’s #TakeBackTech Toolkit: How can you talk to community members and translate the surveillance facilitated by technology companies? This folder features slides for your own organizing and narrative-development work.
Aliya Bhatia is a policy professional working at the intersection of technology access and immigrants’ rights from Mumbai and Toronto. Most recently she worked to increase access to the 2020 Census in New York City and in the past has written about aunties and surveillance and ‘smart’ neighborhoods. If you haven’t already, please complete your Census at my2020census.gov. Email her at aliya.sbhatia@gmail.com or tweet her at @aliyabhatia.