Our country is waking up to the pervasiveness and brutality of policing in black communities. At the same time, we are engaged in the most important surveillance debate in a generation. Conversations about these trends rarely intersect.

On April 8, 2016, Georgetown Law and the Center on Privacy & Technology will hold a landmark conference to begin bridging that gap. Entitled The Color of Surveillance: Government Monitoring of the African American Community, the conference will explore the role of law enforcement and national security surveillance in the relationship between African Americans and their government – beginning with the colonial era and continuing to the present day.

The conference will bring together Pulitzer Prize-winning historians, scholars, activists and members of the criminal justice, law enforcement and national security communities. Confirmed speakers currently include:

• Brandon Anderson, developer of the Safety With Accountability and Transparency (SWAT) App, an app that helps citizens stream video of police interactions to secure servers, encouraging positive law enforcement interactions with community members

• Sahar Aziz of Texas A&M University School of Law, a scholar on the surveillance of Black Muslim communities after 9/11

• James A. Baker, General Counsel of the Federal Bureau of Investigation

• Khiara Bridges of Boston University School of Law, a scholar of the monitoring experienced by populations receiving public benefits

• Simone Browne of the University of Texas at Austin, a theorist and scholar of the history of surveillance of the African American community and author of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness

• Brandi Collins of ColorofChange.org, the organization leading the effort to release records of the Department of Homeland Security’s monitoring of Black Lives Matter activists

• Anthony Cook of Georgetown Law, a scholar of civil rights, community development, social movements and constitutional law

• Andrew Ferguson of the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law, a leading scholar on predictive policing

• Jonathan Frankle, Staff Technologist at Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy & Technology, where he researches technical facets of facial recognition and co-teaches the inaugural offering of Computer Programming for Lawyers.
  

• David Garrow, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., author of The FBI and Martin Luther King

• Clare Garvie of the Center on Privacy & Technology, author of an upcoming national FOIA survey on the deployment of facial recognition systems by state and local police departments

• Kristin Henning of Georgetown Law, a scholar of criminal law, director of Georgetown Law’s Juvenile Justice Clinic, and former public defender

• Hamid Khan of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, a privacy advocate and critic against racial profiling in urban and immigrant communities

• David Levering Lewis, the twice Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of W.E.B. DuBois and author of W.E.B. DuBois: Biography of a Race and W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century

• Freddy Martinez, technologist and co-founder of Lucy Parsons Labs, a grassroots organization that is using the Freedom of Information Act to uncover the Chicago Police Department's use of Stingrays on urban communities

• Matthew Mitchell, a security researcher, operational security trainer and data journalist who leads Cryptoparty: Harlem and has worked as a data journalist and developer for The New York Times and CNN
  

• Osagie Obasogie of the UC Hastings College of the Law, author of Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind, a study of how blind people perceive race and racial identity

• Robert Patterson of Georgetown University, is a scholar of literature, the civil rights movement, Black popular culture, and the politics of gender

• Eugene Puryear, a Washington, D.C.-based organizer active in the Black Lives Matter movement and who works daily on issues around affordable housing

• Kristi Lane Scott, Acting Director of the Department of Justice’s Office of Privacy & Civil Liberties

• Arjun Singh Sethi of Georgetown Law & The Sikh Coalition, a writer and frequent commentator on civil rights and racial and religious profiling

• Sonja Starr of the University of Michigan, a scholar on the use of demographic and socioeconomic factors in criminal sentencing

• Chinyeré Tutashinda of the Center for Media Justice, a communicator and organizer who has worked for years in social justice campaigns in the Bay Area

• Harlan Yu, a technologist from Upturn and an architect, with the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, of the civil rights scorecard for police-worn body cameras

The conference will be hosted by Paul Butler, a criminal law scholar and Professor of Law of Georgetown Law and Alvaro Bedoya, founding executive director of the Center on Privacy & Technology, who recently penned a Slate essay entitled “The Color of Surveillance.” A full list of speakers, along with the conference schedule, will be released in March.

The conference is free and open to the public. Advance registration is strongly encouraged.