Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence

Mizue Aizeki is the Director of Surveillance,Technology, and Immigration Policing at the Immigrant Defense Project (IDP). Aizeki’s photographic work appears in Dying to Live, A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid and Policing the Planet. Matt Mahmoudi is Researcher/Adviser on Artificial Intelligence & Human Rights at Amnesty Tech, where he has spent the last two years leading the effort to ban facial recognition technologies. He is an Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge. Mahmoudi is co-author of the book Digital Witness, published by Oxford University Press. Coline Schupfer is a consultant working with the International Institute for Environment and Development and Open Society Foundations on community-based public interest litigation. She has written for publications including the International Justice Monitor, Border Criminologies, Opinio Juris, and the Asia Pacific Journal on Human Rights and the Law. Ruha Benjamin is an internationally recognized writer, speaker, and professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, where she is the founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. She is the award-winning author of Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code and editor of Captivating Technology, among many other publications. Her work has been featured widely in the media, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, The Root, and The Guardian.

FOREWORD: Borders & Bits: From Obvious to Insidious Violence by Ruha Benjamin

Introduction: Resisting Technologies of Violence and Control By Mizue Aizeki, Matt Mahmoudi, and Coline Schupfer

SECTION 1: Ideologies of Exclusion:
Title? By Harsha Walia
Multiplying State Violence in the Name of Homeland Security by Mizue Aizeki
Empire’s Walls, Global Apartheid’s Infrastructure by Joseph Nevins and Todd Miller
Fortress Europe’s Proliferating Borders by Miriam Ticktin
Frontex and Fortress Europe’s Technological Experiments by Katy Fallon and Petra Molnar
Abolish Migration Deterrence by Jenna M. Loyd
Cruel Fictions in the Black Mediterranean by Ida Danewid, The Black Mediterranean Collective
CASE STUDY: Why We Need Local Campaigns to End Immigration Detention
CASE STUDY: Why We Took the U.K. to Court for their Discriminatory Visa Streaming Algorithm

SECTION 2: Conjuring the Perfect Threat: Techno-Securitization and Domestic Policing
Building the #NoTechforICE Campaign: An Interview with Jacinta Gonzalez
Big Tech, Borders and Biosecurity: Securitization in Britain after Covid-19 by Nisha Kapoor
Targeting Muslim communities in NYC: Interview with Fahd Ahmed
Global Palestine: Exporting Israel’s Regime of Population Control by Jeff Halper
Chicago’s Gang Database Targeting People of Color: Interview with Xanat Sobrevilla and Alyx Goodwin
Building Community Power in Unequal Cities: Interview with Hamid Khan
CASE STUDY: Why We Are Suing Clearview AI In California State Court
CASE STUDY: How We Fight Against (Tech-Facilitated) Persecution of Uyghurs in China and Abroad
CASE STUDY: Stop Urban Shield: How We Fought DHS’ Militarized Police Trainings



SECTION 3: Digital IDs: The Body as a Border
Digital ID: A Primer by Sara Baker, The Engine Room
IDs and the Citizen: Technologically Determined Identity in India by Usha Ramanathan
The cost of recognition by the state: IDs card as coercion: Interview with Rodjé Malcolm and Matthew McNaughton
The UK’s Production of Tech-enabled Precarity: An Interview with Gracie Mae Bradley
On Donkeys and Blockchains: A Conversation with Margie Cheesman
CASE STUDY: How We Mobilized Civil Society to Fight Tunisia’s Proposed Digital ID System
CASE STUDY: Why We Must Fight for Alternatives to the UK’s Digital-Only ID System



SECTION 4: Bordering Everyday Cities
Apartheid Tech: The Use and Expansion of Biometric Identification and Surveillance Technologies in the Occupied West Bank by Marwa Fartafta
The Encroachment of Smart Cities by Ben Green
CONTROL-X: Communication, Control, & Exclusion by Brian Jefferson
Data Justice in Mexico: How Big Data is Reshaping the Struggle for Rights and Political Freedoms by Arely Cruz-Santiago, Ernesto Schwartz-Marín, and Conor O’Reilly
Corporate Tech and The Legible City by Ryan Gerety, Mariah Montgomery, Mizue Aizeki and Nasma Ahmed
Seeing the Watched: Mass Surveillance in Detroit By Tawana Petty
Necropolitics and Neoliberalism Are Driving Brazil’s Surveillance Infrastructure By Rafael Evangelista
CASE STUDY: Why We Must Fight Against COVID-19 Surveillance and Technosolutionism
CASE STUDY: How We Challenged the German Migration Office’s Surveillance Technology
CASE STUDY: Fighting San Diego’s Smart Streetlights Super Surveillance System

SECTION 5: Looking Forward
Abolish National Security by Arun Kundnani
The First Step is Finding Each Other by Timmy Châu
The Red Deal: Indigenous Liberation and The Fight to Save the Planet by Nick Estes
Trying Harder to Build a World Where Life is Precious: An Interview with Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Editors and Contributors
Acknowledgments