Help inform the conversation
MediaWell relies on members of the public to submit articles, events, and research.
News on Surveillance Technology
When then-Mayor Richard M. Daley ushered in Chicago’s red-light cameras nearly two decades ago, he said they would help the city curb dangerous driving. “This is all about safety, safety […]
By Laila MilevskiSharad Goel is a professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School. He looks at public policy through the lens of computer science, bringing a computational perspective to a diverse […]
Clementine Jacoby is the Executive Director at Recidiviz — a nonprofit building an open-source platform to turn fragmented criminal justice data into actionable insights for practitioners, policymakers, researchers, and the […]
Desmond Upton Patton, associate dean for Innovation and Academic Affairs, founding director of the SAFE Lab and codirector of the Justice, Equity and Technology (JET) Studio at Columbia School of […]
Face recognition technology is a special menace to privacy, racial justice, free expression, and information security. Our faces are unique identifiers, and most of us expose them everywhere we go. […]
By Adam SchwartzIn recent years, police and prosecutors have implemented social media in a host of new ways to investigate and prosecute crimes. Social media, after all, contains a wealth of information—and […]
By Jeffrey Lane and Fanny A. RamirezMaybe it’s a cliché—I think I’ve used it myself—to say that scientists’ and philosophers’ explanations for how the brain works tend to metaphorically track the most advanced technology of their […]
By Author on SourceNew Orleans has spent millions to expand its police surveillance powers in recent years, providing the city with an unprecedented ability to monitor public spaces and track individuals. Similar mass […]
By Michael Isaac Stein, Caroline SindersWinnie YoeWhat does it mean to be fair?
What does it mean for an algorithm to be biased? In U.S. law, unintentional bias is encoded via disparate impact, which occurs when a selection process has widely different outcomes […]
Predictive policing systems are increasingly used to determine how to allocate police across a city in order to best prevent crime. Discovered crime data (e.g., arrest counts) are used to […]