Netgain Challenge

Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Everything we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.” While some tout the visible benefits of predictive policing as crime prevention, the invisible harms criminalize dissent and result in high-tech racial profiling. Legal and policy advocates have focused on the threat of mass surveillance to civil liberties. But activists in the Black Lives Matter movement against anti-Black policing and the Not One More movement against mass deportation are concerned with targeted surveillance in which the indiscriminate collection of private data leads to racial profiling, racially discriminatory treatment, and disparate outcomes. To the degree the Internet is democratized, it can be where 21st century social movements are born or where they die. Whether expanding mass incarceration, driving mass deportation, or criminalizing movements—the surveillance technologies of predictive policing are quickly becoming the tools of racial bias, and should not be ignored.