Who We Are
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.
To learn more about our staff and our advisors, please contact us.
Our Work
The Surveillance Resistance Lab is focused on challenging technologies that fuel state and corporate power. The 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. Our local and transnational projects include:
- Digital Public Infrastructure & Democracy
- Digital Infrastructures of Migration Control
- The Internet as an Infrastructure of Control
The Lab launched as an independent project in January 2023 to ensure effective interventions at the intersection of technology, carcerality, securitization, democracy and power. The Lab was formerly housed at the Immigrant Defense Project.
The Surveillance Resistance Lab is fiscally sponsored by the Fund for the City of New York (EIN 13-2612524).
How We Work
We work to increase movement power by:
Undertaking investigative action research
We engage in investigative and community-centered action research. We build the capacity of movement partners by sharing research methodologies, analysis, and resources.
Building Strategies for Change
We identify interventions and develop strategies for concrete changes. This includes a narrative change strategy that uplifts alternative visions of safety. We develop popular education resources through grounded engagement with key stakeholders.
Expanding networks
We fight the expansion of globalized infrastructures of control by building across movements, cities, and borders. We work in partnerships with human rights monitors, community-based organizations, research and policy organizations, and more.
Translating Research Into Action
Our research is oriented towards strategy and campaign development that expands the terrain upon which we are organizing. We do this to redefine what democracy is and reclaim our ability to define our future collectively.
