Digital Public Infrastructure and Surveillance—mobile drivers license, digital wallets, and centralized city databases—a new triad of carceral tech


Contributor(s)

Cynthia Conti-Cook and Ed Vogel


Session

Surveillance and Systems of Marginalization


Abstract

This workshop will introduce the Surveillance Resistance Lab’s research on new digital public infrastructures and how they create foundations for expansive state control and violence. This cross-city and cross-sector strategy is focused on government procurement of technologies that expand surveillance, deepen corporate power, and weaken democracy. These technologies become embedded into public infrastructures in ways that increase bias, inequality, and solidify a particular path dependency towards increased surveillance. We focus on technologies with often concealed carceral and exclusionary consequences (for example, mobile driver’s licenses and other digital ID systems, digital wallets, and centralized benefits distribution portals). We also focus on sites where the use of technology is increasingly shifting the balance of power to more coercive state control and corporate power—in schools, healthcare, and workplaces.


Video