Posing A Vital Intervention: Or, Understanding Data Criminalization
Posing A Vital Intervention: Or, Understanding Data Criminalization
Part one of NAZAR's roundtable interview with the Community Justice Exchange.
📝 Monthly Round-Up
How Surveillance Has Always Reinforced Racism, Simone Browne — “White people attending these lynchings would photograph the bodies, share postcards, people would take body parts, this was a part of white community formation and white supremacist formation were these ritualized acts. And so what are the rituals that are happening now, when it's platforming or mediated through YouTube?”
A US Surveillance Program Tracks Nearly 200,000 Immigrants. What Happens To Their Data?, Johana Bhuiyan —”ICE and B.I. have issued conflicting information about how often it tracks the location of the people it surveils, that BI’s app collects a broad swath of information on its users, and that BI encourages its law enforcement and government clients to share crime data with each other.”
The Prison-to-Deportation Pipeline for Black Immigrants, Shamira Ibrahim — “[I]f being black makes you a police target, then being black and undocumented in a poor neighborhood will make you vulnerable to surveillance, punishment, and exile.”
i strive to be clear about what informs my work — whether it is academic texts, fiction, speeches, tweets, or my general relationship with a person. part of it is because citing people is important. if i’m out here playing a key role in someone’s analysis, i’d like them to shout me out, you know? plus, being aware of what shapes someone’s work can illuminate a lot that otherwise goes unsaid.
but honestly?
i just really enjoy sharing whatever i think is neat.
most of these works i’m talking about don’t offer me immediate clarity in the sense that everything falls into place in my head. actually, they make an absolute mess out of me by stirring shit up in the best possible way. the inside of my brain is like a series of webs. not necessarily organized; it is a mess. but everything is connected to each other someway, somehow. when i come across these foundational works, i can feel myself rushing to build them into the tapestry.
that’s how i felt when i came across the Community Justice Exchange’s report on data criminalization which is the “the creation, archiving, theft, resale and analysis of datasets that mark certain people as threats and risks, based on data culled about them from state and commercial sources.” reading the report affirmed many things i already knew about surveillance more broadly. but i was immediately drawn in by these alternate (and vastly more encompassing) ways of describing what’s been going on.
this was captured not only through terminology but the crafting of the website itself. so of course i wanted to share it with y’all. i figured instead of doing a simple write up, why not speak with CJE themselves? this week, i’m bringing to you the beginning of my two-part roundtable discussion with CJE’s research director Puck Lo and migrant justice organizing director Ana María Rivera-Forastieri. (this interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.)
Can you introduce the Community Justice Exchange?
Rivera-Forastieri: CJE is a prison abolitionist organization that focuses on building a world without incarceration, surveillance, and social control. That means fighting against all forms of incarceration. We work with community based organizations across the country that are experimenting with bottom up interventions that can pass the criminal, legal, and the immigration system. We also host the national bail fund network which is a network of over 90 communities bail and bond funds across the country who use bail and bond to get people out of the systems as one intervention.
I feel like there's these other little side projects that are somewhat less visible. Part of why they're less visible is because they're more in the developmental stages. Like, we have a partnership with the Debt Collective working on criminal legal debt [and] strike ideas. We're in conversations with other groups that are looking at community defense, so people who are out of jail on pretrial but fighting their cases in some way.
In February, CJE shared a new website and report on data criminalization. This is a multi part question. First: What is data criminalization? And then second: What are the origins of this report? Basically what were you all seeing that made you think, "Oh, this term needs to exist and it needs to be shared in this way."
Lo: I can walk you through what led to it. In 2019, we were starting to look more deeply into immigrant surveillance. That was sort of the container and the framework. In particular, we were working with folks who had a lot of questions about GPS ankle monitoring devices that they saw some of their clients being made to wear. I'd sort of known about these things because many years ago, I had a friend who had to wear one. I was like, "Oh, this is still a thing? What has even happened?"
There was enough anecdotal evidence that people really latched on to this as a visible symbol of "immigration surveillance". I was really surprised to learn just within Google searching in the day that these ankle monitors were part of this program called ISAP [Intensive Supervision Appearance Program], which has been run out of ICE since 2004 or something like this.
ISAP began as a way that people could bond out of immigrant detention if they had, say, criminal charges on their record or something like this. In lieu of [not] being able to get, they were given [ankle monitors]. Over time, that morphed into a program where pretty much all asylum seekers were made to wear these monitors. But I was surprised to learn was that this subset was a really small part of ISAP — which was a small part of who ICE was even tracking. The monitors were the tiniest, tiniest thing and, actually, the technologies were changing rapidly enough that we were already seeing at the end of 2019 [a] really obvious shift from a clunky ankle monitors to regular ass phone tracking.
Really quickly, [we realized] the term surveillance doesn't cover this.
ICE had hired a contractor, B.I., which is part of the private prison industry group GEO, to make this app on your phone that would do voice recognition, be capable of facial recognition, GPS locate you. Beyond that, there was a lot of reporting coming out [about] ICE using big data models to find people. There was this New York Times article that was really well researched where the reporter exposed [that] in the small town in Washington, ICE was trolling people on Facebook with fake accounts. Also, [ICE was] coordinating with employees at the Department of Licensing and using all of these digital resources — between utility bills and fancy fusion centers — to stalk people.
Eventually, that person [being] stalked by her Facebook marketplace post was cornered in a parking lot when she was going to sell a piñata and taken from there. Our questions were: How does ICE decide who it's going to go after? What are their sources for information? That led into an exploration of what data they even collect. How was it used? It was pretty impossible to answer that question. But what we could get was lots of documentation written by the state for the state about its data systems. So I had to shift my approach in a moment because it was like, "Okay, the main way that people have been trying to find out about ICE and its motives have been through FOIA." These things take forever. I have used FOIAs before but they're worthless unless you can litigate the hell out of them. That's a many, many years process.
I thought, "What can we do that makes use of what we already have?" There's a lot out there and even if you have to read against the grain, it's actually quite constructive. I decided to go in and with the go ahead from my colleagues, it was like...Let's get deep into these data systems. Figure out how they talk to each other, what they want, how they sort and prioritize information, and see where that takes us. Really quickly, [we realized] the term surveillance doesn't cover this. The other thing that was fascinating to sink into was we talk a lot about [how] the criminal legal apparatus and then the immigration enforcement systems are unmatched. I think a lot of people who work on similar things will know this. In practice, we haven't figured out good ways to fight at that cross section productively and meaningfully.
What became immediately clear was a) It's not about ICE. That's almost an arbitrary target. DHS has made use of the criminal legal system as its main way to create a narrative about who does not belong, who was suspicious, and who was already criminal. They use this entire apparatus — which is white supremacist and anti-Black — as the main dragnet to find other people who are criminalized or made to not belong. That was a moment where it felt like, "Oh, God, we need a totally different word for this."
The other thing about surveillance is that it's sort of anachronistic. What is the opposite of surveillance? Privacy. And it was like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, we don't want to do that. That doesn't get at the heart of the problem. Privacy doesn't apply to almost all the people we care about. If you're criminalized, you are exempt from privacy. If you are incarcerated, you get no privacy and there's no entitlement to it. Within the law, it's not even a thing. One of the ways that data criminalization has been able to expand so well is because privacy laws don't even cover technological advances period. But then especially when you're fighting at it from this framework of white property rights, nobody we care about is covered by that.
Rivera-Forastieri: For the past decade, I've been organizing at the intersection of the criminal, legal, and immigration system. [I've been] doing a lot of organizing with other folks to stop ICE from grabbing people from local jails and courts. We always knew we might be slowing down the machinery for a period of time but it's not actually stopping it. Our people were still being grabbed as they were driving. They get out of jail and then a couple weeks later, they get stopped by ICE. We knew that the work that we were doing was important because we were slowing down the machinery but it was simply not enough.
[We asked ourselves] how do we make sure that the research is being translated into different ways for people to engage with new frameworks?
ICE was always figuring out new ways to go after people and the arrests never stopped. We did not decrease the number of people getting arrested by ICE in the state that I used to live in. This process of learning through the research that Puck has done has been really clarifying in terms of think[ing] about strategy and targets. We need to have a clear analysis of the big picture and then choose our targets based on a clear sense of the problem. Of course, we don't know everything. There's a lot still that we don't know. But this opened up possibilities for organizers to think about what is happening at the computer level [and] how is it interacting with individuals. What we don't see at the computer level is important to have some basic understanding [of] because that will allow us to be better organizers.
We wanted this project to not just be like "Okay, we've uncovered all of this like information that we didn't know before," but connect it to organizing. Which is why we developed the website and, you know, Puck had the idea of the bestiary. [We asked ourselves] how do we make sure that the research is being translated into different ways for people to engage with new frameworks?
The report’s introduction was clear about hoping to provide a framework to organize against data criminalization. It offers several key interventions. For example, Puck, you were talking about [how] technology changes so fast. The report mentioned, "There is no end to pilot programs and contract vendors, and as long as we focus exclusively on the latest iterations of these, we may miss the bigger picture.” I wanted to hear more about having the report speak to / with movements and how you would like to see it used.
Lo: I'm gonna back up for one second. One thing I didn't say was that I was reading two books side by side. They were Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff and Dark Matters by Simone Browne. Those were the parents of this report, honestly. What Surveillance Capitalism did well — and not many people have seemingly tried to do this because tech writing is so fucking inane — but [it laid out] what big data is and how controlling it is of our lives. We take for granted mapping a route somewhere or ordering something in the mail. All of [Zuboff's] concerns about the repercussions of surveillance capitalism were concerning but none of it even touched on what would happen when people are criminalized.
Simone Browne offers a perspective that is much more historicized. She argues that the precursor of what we see today in terms of surveillance [and] incarceration is not the panopticon but rather the slave ship and the ledger. That framework set everything up to come. So to answer your current question, what we hoped to do was historicize some of this thinking. There's a lot of knee jerk reactions to what is out there as surveillance, policing technologies. There are lots of campaigns that find their footing on attacking, say, automatic license plate readers or facial recognition technologies. All of these things are part of the problem but in isolation they do not feel like they will do much.
If we ground ourselves in the oldness of the problem, it will actually give us much more of a level head about how to approach this stuff.
There's an element where it's all about catering to the news cycle. What's gonna generate attention? And attention is like this commodity. We have so little of it now and you have to recreate that same attention getting mechanism every fucking week. That felt really tired and wasn't a good place to work from. We wanted to figure out what is new and what here isn't. Most of this is not new. The "newness" aren't the problems that we might think they are. If we ground ourselves in the oldness of the problem, it will actually give us much more of a level head about how to approach this stuff. We can ban and restrict technologies all day. That is not gonna attend to the fundamental anti-Blackness of the ledger. The ledger that has been updated.
What we're hoping to shift was some of the foundational thinking about this. That same knee jerk reaction comes from this place of manufactured outrage, where it's kind of like, "Oh, I can't believe they've stolen our data." And it's like, "Really? You can't believe that because they did it the whole way through!” We're also experimenting with more concrete, in the moment ways of responding. We're creating curriculum right now which has been such a humbling process. It is so different to think you know something and then try to share what you think you know — and then build on that with people in the world. We're in the middle of that and have learned about approach[ing] people with huge ideas and then incorporat[ing] their realities into it.
Rivera-Forastieri: It's not about saying to organizers, "Don't focus on this." It's when you're crafting your strategy and your targets, have the analysis so that you're going in with eyes wide open. Of course, there's a lot that we don't know, so I don't know if that's even the right phrase. But a perfect example is [what] Puck gave around the GPS monitoring. There's been so much focus on ankle shackles and for good reason. People that wear them really suffer. You can see like the physical and the mental impacts of it. So it's not about saying don't highlight the issue with that particular technology. But SmartLink is now taking over and, in a few years, there will be another new technology that is introduced into this.
So the problem is the entirety of how that program was designed and how it came to be. I'm seeing a lot more folks focus less on the individual technologies of that program and more [on the] whole apparatus [as] the problem. I'm hoping this will be a contribution to that conceptual shift that I think folks are grappling with right now. Help us think deeper on how historically this has actually taken place and why these technologies [exists]. One of the co-panelists that Puck had at the Haymarket event recently talks about [how] they're like ghosts. These are ghosts that are coming from a different time but they're the same ghosts. They just have perhaps a different form and we need to be informed about that in order to be able to be smarter in our in our strategy.