Join the UMass Boston Office of Community Partnerships and UMass Boston Community Relations on February 7 at 9:30 a.m. in the Alumni Lounge for a dialogue with UMass Boston faculty and organizational leaders across Boston who are focused on working with communities on equity issues:

  • Lorna Rivera, Associate Professor in UMass Boston Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Director of the Mauricio Gastón Institute for Latino Community Development and Public Policy, UMass Boston
  • Cedric Woods, Director of the Institute of New England Native American Studies, UMass Boston
  • Shirley Tang, Associate Professor in the UMass Boston Asian American Studies Program, UMass Boston
  • Celina Barrios-Millner, City of Boston
  • Leverett Wing, Commonwealth Seminar
  • Rahsaan Hall, American Civil Liberties Union

The discussion will be facilitated by special guest, Meghan Irons, The Boston Globe Reporter.

The fireside chat will be an opportunity to deepen the dialogue about community based partnerships, the role of the university in the greater community, and how we can engage in building a more equitable Boston with integral partners. 

This event is open to all – UMass Boston and community members.

For disability-related accommodations, including dietary accommodations, please visit www.ada.umb.edu two weeks prior to the event.

Event Date

Thursday, February 7, 2019 - 9:30am to
Friday, February 8, 2019 - 11:45am

Featured image

More information / register

Venue

University of Massachusetts Boston

Address

Campus Center, 2nd Floor, Alumni Lounge
100 Morrissey Blvd
Boston, MA 02125
United States

Tweet Text

[node:title]

Date

Thursday, February 7, 2019 - 12:00pm

Menu parent dynamic listing

21

By Kade Crockford, director of the ACLU of Massachusetts' Technology for Liberty Project. This was originally published by Rolling Stone.

As FBI director J. Edgar Hoover became increasingly disturbed by the growing political power of the Civil Rights Movement — and paranoid about its possible connections to communists — he directed his agents to step up their surveillance of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Hoover’s obsession with King bordered on the fanatical. In his bid to destroy King, the now-disgraced patriarch of the modern FBI went so far as to send information about King’s private sex life to journalists. It didn’t work. Journalists refused to go along with the bureau’s smear campaign, and King went on to secure passage of the Civil Rights Act and win a Nobel Peace Prize.

But Hoover didn’t give up: He sent a now infamous letter to King, describing King’s private sexual activity and encouraging the reverend to kill himself in order to avoid the public embarrassment of the publication of the FBI’s surveillance records.

The FBI’s surveillance of black Americans isn’t just history. Last year, we learned the FBI has been spying on black activists, labeling them “Black Identity Extremists.” The feds also use powers obtained through national security laws like the Patriot Act to target people in the racially biased drug war.

More disturbing: The FBI that spied on King and today classifies Black civil rights activists as “extremists” is now partnering with Big Tech to amass unprecedented surveillance powers that history has taught us will be used to target communities of color, religious minorities, dissidents and immigrants.

In the 1960s, the FBI relied on rudimentary wiretapping systems and photos taken by informants. Now, it’s piloting Rekognition, Amazon’s facial recognition product that the company is aggressively marketing to police and ICE.

This marriage of Amazon’s face-surveillance technology to the FBI’s troves of Big Data about tens of millions of people threatens to supercharge the government’s ability to track and monitor all of us. This is the dystopian future sci-fi novelists warned us about. Imagine a world in which secretive government agencies can track millions of faces — both in real time and through historical video footage — enabling them to identify political protesters, whistleblowers and journalists’ confidential sources.

That nightmare scenario may already exist in skeletal form at the FBI. Since 2015, the bureau has operated a Facial Analysis, Comparison, and Evaluation Services Unit — a.k.a. FACE — that “provides investigative lead support to FBI field offices, operational divisions, and legal attachés” and “may offer face recognition support to federal partners.”

Photographs of half of American adults are likely in the “Interstate Photo System” accessible to the FBI for face recognition searches. And the FBI has also entered into agreements with more than a dozen states, enabling its agents to access driver’s license databases, massively expanding the number of people who are subject to the FBI’s face-recognition surveillance.

The full extent to which the FBI is using face recognition, or could use Amazon’s technology, to track political protesters, identify whistleblowers or engage in other invasive surveillance remains unknown. That’s why we at the ACLU are filing a Freedom of Information Act request demanding the Department of Justice disclose how federal law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, are using face-recognition technology, and what safeguards, if any, are in place to protect basic rights and liberties.

The FBI’s long-secret harassment of King offers us two lessons. 

The first: Inappropriate government surveillance flourishes behind closed doors. It’s important we fight back against that secrecy and uncover information about what the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies are doing with these high tech tools.

The second lesson is for companies like Amazon, who are arming the government with new surveillance powers despite warnings from lawmakers, academics, consumers, employees and shareholders. As a coalition of nearly 90 civil rights, racial justice and religious organizations recently warned AmazonGoogle and Microsoft, the choices these companies make now will determine whether the next generation will have to fear being tracked by the government for attending a protest, going to their place of worship or simply living their lives. 

For the future of our rights and freedoms, companies like Amazon must stop selling facial-recognition technology to the government, and the FBI must come clean about how it is partnering with Big Tech to implement face recognition across the country.

Date

Wednesday, January 23, 2019 - 5:00pm

Featured image

1964 photo of Martin Luther King Jr. leaning on a lectern

Show featured image

Hide banner image

Related issues

Racial Justice Privacy and Surveillance

Show related content

Tweet Text

[node:title]

Type

Show PDF in viewer on page

Style

Standard with sidebar

Pages

Subscribe to ACLU Massachusetts RSS