Lilly Irani (UC San Diego), Jacinta Gonzalez (Mijente), and Ryan Mac (Buzzfeed)

*All Spring 2020 Design@Large talks will be hosted online. This aligns with UC San Diego policy that all events be hosted virtual during the Spring 2020 quarter.

Surveillance, Migration, and Civil Rights in the Age of a Global Pandemic

This panel will discuss how emerging technologies are used to monitor and harm minority communities during a crisis. As part of COVID-19 containment measures, governments are increasingly adopting emergency powers, which includes the surveillance and policing of their own populations, often with the support of new and emergent AI technologies. At the same time, companies like Palantir and Clearview AI are using this moment to sell technologies that risk civil liberties in the name of public health. This event will bring together researchers, journalists, and organizers to discuss what they are seeing and what these developments mean for our democracy and civil rights in the age of a global pandemic.

About the Speakers

Lilly Irani (UC San Diego) – Panel Moderator
Lilly Irani is an Associate Professor of Communication & Science Studies at University of California, San Diego. She also serves as faculty in the Design Lab, Institute for Practical Ethics, the program in Critical Gender Studies, and sits on the Academic Advisory Board of AI Now (NYU). She is author of Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India (Princeton University Press, 2019), winner of the 2019 Diana Forsythe Prize for feminist anthropological research on work, science, or technology. She has a Ph.D. in Informatics from University of California, Irvine.

Jacinta Gonzalez (Mijente)
Jacinta Gonzalez is a Senior Campaign Organizer with Mijente and is based in Phoenix, AZ. Previously, she worked at PODER in México, organizing the Río Sonora River Basin committees against water contamination by the mining industry.  Jacinta was the lead organizer for the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice Congress of Day Laborers (2007-2014). In Louisiana Gonzalez helped establish a base of day laborers and undocumented families dedicated to building worker power, advancing racial justice, and organizing against deportations in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Ryan Mac (Buzzfeed)
Ryan Mac is a senior technology reporter with BuzzFeed News and is based in San Francisco, CA. He covers the intersection of wealth and power in Silicon Valley and has broken stories on companies including Facebook, Google, and Tesla. Most recently, Mac has focused his reporting on Clearview AI, a previously little-known facial recognition company that has amassed a database of more than 3 billion photos that have been scraped from social media and other websites. His work has also appeared in Forbes Magazine, Bloomberg News, the Orange County Register, and the New York Times. You can follow him on Twitter at @Rmac18.