SMART PRISONS - Tracking, Monitoring & Control

Das sagt der/die Veranstalter:in:

Investigating systems of surveillance around prisons, detention centres and borders, and the effects of technological violence and discrimination directed at migrants, activists, and dissidents in Europe and worldwide.

Machine learning, image and speech recognition, semantic analytics and algorithmic policing are developing the future of prison systems. These types of networked technologies, from connected sensors, tracking wristbands, and data analytics, are progressively being used to recognise and track prisoners, individual locations, and activities of potential targets.

In the Chinese Yancheng prison, a system of networked cameras and hidden sensors developed by private corporations and public research, uses 24 hour facial recognition and movement tracking, generating daily behavioral analysis reports on all 1600 prisoners, flagging anything deemed suspicious or abnormal.

In the U. S., several tech companies have helped developing surveillance systems, such as Amazon’s Rekognition software, which has already been sold to police departments, expanding the government’s surveillance capabilities. Also in Europe, surveillance and monitoring technologies including cameras, drones, biometrics, and motion sensors, are in use to control and monitor borders, to stop unwanted migration and to track migrants in detention centers.

Although automatised technologies of tracking, monitoring and surveillance are developing at a fast pace, there is nothing radically new in the integration of networks of tracking, monitoring and control for surveillance and detention of potential targets. The conference SMART PRISONS: Tracking, Monitoring & Control traces back the creation of “algorithms of security” through the past twenty years, reflecting on the effects of technological violence and surveillance directed at migrants, activists, and dissidents in Europe and worldwide. If an algorithm is a set of step-by-step procedures, what has been implemented in the post-9/11 society, has been a process of controlling dissent by enforcing new sets of shared rules, making security an integrated part of our daily lives.

Alongside ethical questions around the abuse of privacy, these technological implementations need to be analysed to hold governments and corporations accountable and socially responsible. Deploying automatised technologies may increase problems of bias, discrimination, and wrongful punishments, and raise psychological pressures to conform, furthering a culture hostile to dissent.

SMART PRISONS looks at how specific targets, whether prisoners, migrants at borders, or dissidents, have been progressively marginalised, trapped inside prison facilities, detention centres, or within systems of automatised control, being labeled as threats or suspects, due to intersectional biases or critical political activity. The concept of “smart” should not be interpreted as purely technological, but as an integrated system of tracking, monitoring and control, encompassing bureaucracy, power, psychology and propaganda, accelerated by technology over the last decades.

While automatised discrimination and human rights violations of “unwanted” people is already a fact, this conference also aims to propose possible solutions and future developments in the field of counter-surveillance, civic technologies and grassroots investigations.

The conference connects artists, activists, human rights advocates, tech experts, and critical thinkers around the topics of automatised tracking and surveillance in the framework of prisons and detention centres through a multiplicity of experiences, investigations, and researches: the keynote of Sean Vegezzi, a New-York born artist who has examined New York City’s topography since 9/11, who presents his new artistic production, documenting the Vernon C. Bain Center (VCBC), an 800-bed, 191-meter floating detention facility anchored off the Bronx's southern shore, across from Rikers Island; the story of Srishti Jaswal, an independent journalist based in India that became the target of right-wing trolls on the internet and wrote an extensive reportage on their modus operandi; the 10-years long grassroots forensic investigation of Segreteria Legale (The Legal Secretariat) related to the G8/Genoa events of 2001 in Italy, set up to assist lawyers in the trials of protesters, and to investigate the police brutality and torture of protesters at Diaz and Bolzaneto, the killing of Carlo Giuliani, and other incidents during the street demonstrations; and finally the case of Julian Assange, through a panel with Stella Assange (among others) and the screening of Ithaka which revolves around Assange’s persecution, trial and incarceration at the Belmarsh high-security prison in the United Kingdom since April 2019, and the looming threat of extradition to the United States, facing prosecution under the draconian Espionage Act.