THE SURVEILLANCE RESISTANCE LAB FIGHTS FOR POWER AND DEMOCRACY, NOT JUST PRIVACY.
Image: Vic Sosa
The Surveillance Resistance Lab investigates and makes visible the often obfuscated ways in which tech increases state and corporate power over our lives—through AI, data collection, and more. By translating research into action, we nurture and accumulate the power of organizing and resistance—locally and transnationally— against technologies of violence and control.
We are senior organizers, researchers and strategists with expertise in legal analysis, corporate investigation, migration control, and domestic policing. We build research, strategy, campaigns, and networks to scale up the ability of communities, workers, and advocates to build power towards a vibrant democracy.
The Challenge
Governments increasingly deploy tech that expands the power of policing and corporations. These infrastructures and tools erode democratic governance and fundamental rights. They threaten the right to dissent and organize, including struggles for migration, racial justice, Indigenous sovereignty, workers’ rights, climate justice, and more. The Lab expands the terrain in which we organize to confront a challenging and urgent problem—how increasing government embrace of technologies increases state control and corporate power at the cost of fundamental rights, struggles for justice, and democracy.
How We Meet The Challenge
The Surveillance Resistance Lab translates research into action, partnering with social movements to understand and make visible this tech-fueled regime of bordering, control and punishment so we can undo it. We collectively confront these harms and realize new visions of security and safety.
We develop research, strategy, campaigns, and networks around the following areas of work:
PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE, tech & DEMOCRACY
Governments procure technologies with hidden carceral and exclusionary consequences—algorithms that limit eligibility for public services, cameras that surveil workers and protestors, and policing tools embedded in public utilities. Policing interests are often foregrounded, and corporations benefit from a lack of regulation, transparency, or accountability. We develop creative interventions to grow democratic governance. We center sites for well-being where technology is shifting the balance of power, such as schools and hospitals, and tools central to governance such as IDs, financial inclusion, and public benefits.
transnational networks to combat digital infrastructures of control
Transnational Networks to Combat Digital Infrastructures of Control — Logics and practices of “national security” threaten civic space, narrowing the terrain upon which we fight for our rights, climate justice, and more. We bring a global lens to our work, and build transnational collaborative networks and learning circles. Our key project areas are: 1) border externalization; 2) “national security”-driven governance; and 3) the internet as an infrastructure of control. This work includes a network to challenge the Everywhere Border connecting advocates in Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean, the EU and beyond.