Surveillance Tech in Latin America: Made Abroad, Deployed at Home

Tools to identify, single out, and track us everywhere we go are inherently incompatible with our human rights and civil liberties. Unfortunately, many Latin American governments are eagerly purchasing this technology and ramping up the implementation of mass biometric surveillance — even as the movement to ban technology for biometric surveillance gains traction worldwide. Meanwhile, the companies supplying the tech are flying under the radar, selling surveillance technology that is deployed across Latin America without sufficient transparency or public scrutiny. Our latest report, Surveillance Tech In Latin America: Made Abroad, Deployed At Home, exposes the companies behind these dangerous products and the government policies and practices that are undermining people's rights.As we highlight in the report, most of the biometric surveillance tech deployed in Latin America is acquired directly or indirectly from companies in Asia (Israel, China, and Japan), Europe (U.K. and France), and the U.S. They include AnyVision, Hikvision, Dahua, Cellebrite, Huawei, ZTE, NEC, IDEMIA, and VERINT, among others. These companies have a duty to respect human rights, yet their tools are often implicated in human rights violations perpetrated against civil society globally — journalists, activists, human rights defenders, lawyers, and members of targeted and oppressed groups. Latin America has a long history of persecuting dissidents and people in marginalized communities, and authorities continue to abuse public power. The COVID-19 pandemic has now given governments a new excuse to deploy dangerous surveillance tools in the name of public safety, even as they fail to protect human rights. The bottom line: the backroom deals pursued in countries like Argentina, Brazil, and Ecuador are exposing the public to unacceptable risk. Our report, a research collaboration with our partners at Asociación por los Derechos Civiles (ADC), the Laboratório de Políticas Públicas e Internet (LAPIN), and LaLibre.net (Tecnologías Comunitarias), not only documents the agreements to procure dangerous technology, it also presents case studies to show how the technology is deployed. Finally, we offer recommendations for government, companies, and other stakeholders to increase transparency and prevent rights violations.

Volume 20

Discourse, Power, and Refusal in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things and Fadia Faqir's Pillars of Salt by Lisa Benesch / In This Particular body by Elizabeth Bradfield / Essential Representation by Erin Calder / Where Bruises Count as Comfort by TC Epperson / Sei Shonogan and Peter Greenaway: Appropriating a 10th Century Heian Text by Maryann Frazier / Crime in the Suites: An Analysis of Why Corporations Become Criminals by Carol Giannini / Batti, Batti from Don Giovanni by W.A. Mozart by Lauren Green / Sex, Lies and Authorship: Metafiction in Muse Asylum and Atonement by Cortney Jackson / Toward a Practical Reading of The Meno by Alexander Jacobs / True North 2003 by Jenny Jones and Bob Martinson / A New Phylogeny of the Dromaeosauridae by Zachary Miller / United States Land Laws in Alaska 1867-1912 by Elaine Nefzger / Other PresentersYe

Ancient Manuscripts in Digital Culture

Ancient Manuscripts in Digital Culture presents an overview of the digital turn in Ancient Jewish and Christian manuscripts visualisation, data mining and communication, edited by David Hamidović, Claire Clivaz and Sarah Bowen Savant. Readership: Scholars and PhD and master students in Biblical studies, Early Jewish and Christian studies

38th Annual WKU Student Research Conference

Western Kentucky University 38th Annual Student Research Conference program and student abstracts. Saturday, April 12, 2008, Carroll Knicely Conference Center, Bowling Green, Kentucky

Counter-Terrorism, Ethics and Technology

This open access book brings together a range of contributions that seek to explore the ethical issues arising from the overlap between counter-terrorism, ethics, and technologies. Terrorism and our responses pose some of the most significant ethical challenges to states and people. At the same time, we are becoming increasingly aware of the ethical implications of new and emerging technologies. Whether it is the use of remote weapons like drones as part of counter-terrorism strategies, the application of surveillance technologies to monitor and respond to terrorist activities, or counterintelligence agencies use of machine learning to detect suspicious behavior and hacking computers to gain access to encrypted data, technologies play a significant role in modern counter-terrorism. However, each of these technologies carries with them a range of ethical issues and challenges. How we use these technologies and the policies that govern them have broader impact beyond just the identification and response to terrorist activities. As we are seeing with China, the need to respond to domestic terrorism is one of the justifications for their rollout of the “social credit system.” Counter-terrorism technologies can easily succumb to mission creep, where a technology’s exceptional application becomes normalized and rolled out to society more generally. This collection is not just timely but an important contribution to understand the ethics of counter-terrorism and technology and has far wider implications for societies and nations around the world

ICS Materials. Towards a re-Interpretation of material qualities through interactive, connected, and smart materials.

The domain of materials for design is changing under the influence of an increased technological advancement, miniaturization and democratization. Materials are becoming connected, augmented, computational, interactive, active, responsive, and dynamic. These are ICS Materials, an acronym that stands for Interactive, Connected and Smart. While labs around the world are experimenting with these new materials, there is the need to reflect on their potentials and impact on design. This paper is a first step in this direction: to interpret and describe the qualities of ICS materials, considering their experiential pattern, their expressive sensorial dimension, and their aesthetic of interaction. Through case studies, we analyse and classify these emerging ICS Materials and identified common characteristics, and challenges, e.g. the ability to change over time or their programmability by the designers and users. On that basis, we argue there is the need to reframe and redesign existing models to describe ICS materials, making their qualities emerge

Counter-Terrorism, Ethics and Technology

This open access book brings together a range of contributions that seek to explore the ethical issues arising from the overlap between counter-terrorism, ethics, and technologies. Terrorism and our responses pose some of the most significant ethical challenges to states and people. At the same time, we are becoming increasingly aware of the ethical implications of new and emerging technologies. Whether it is the use of remote weapons like drones as part of counter-terrorism strategies, the application of surveillance technologies to monitor and respond to terrorist activities, or counterintelligence agencies use of machine learning to detect suspicious behavior and hacking computers to gain access to encrypted data, technologies play a significant role in modern counter-terrorism. However, each of these technologies carries with them a range of ethical issues and challenges. How we use these technologies and the policies that govern them have broader impact beyond just the identification and response to terrorist activities. As we are seeing with China, the need to respond to domestic terrorism is one of the justifications for their rollout of the “social credit system.” Counter-terrorism technologies can easily succumb to mission creep, where a technology’s exceptional application becomes normalized and rolled out to society more generally. This collection is not just timely but an important contribution to understand the ethics of counter-terrorism and technology and has far wider implications for societies and nations around the world

Percier, Fontaine and the rise of the architectural interior in post-revolutionary France

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. "February 2013."Includes bibliographical references (p. 269-290).This dissertation explores the collaborative work in interior decoration undertaken by the French architects Charles Percier (1764-1838) and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine (1762- 1853), in order to argue that their shared aesthetic positioned the interior at the crux of a modem architectural discourse no longer dependent upon a Vitruvian theory of the orders. Percier and Fontaine's influential decoration book, the Recueil de décorations intérieures (1801-1812) serves as my point of departure for investigating their idea of interior decoration and its engagement with the complex cultural milieu of France, circa 1800, from the end of the ancien régime to the rise of a militarized empire under Napoleon Bonaparte. Approaching Percier and Fontaine's interior decoration partnership from different thematic angles, this interdisciplinary study demonstrates their vital role in shaping the unexpected contours of modem architectural thought. Against the widespread revolutionary destruction of monuments, ornament, rather than the orders, ensured architecture's survival. Percier and Fontaine's vision of the interior signaled a movement away from an architecture of monumentality towards one of mobility, a shift precipitated by the violence of political events, the disciplinary pressure of engineering and the emergence of new conceptions of history. Scholars have argued that the utilitarian techniques of engineering constituted the primary impetus behind the formation of a post-Vitruvian building culture in France. By contrast, Percier and Fontaine reaffirmed architecture's alliance with sculpture, painting and engraving, harnessing these artistic forms to new ends in their design practice. Through the Recueil, Percier and Fontaine claimed the interior-untouched by the spatial symbolics of the revolution-as architectural theory's proper terrain. Yet their publication simultaneously presented a fragile discourse of fragments, in which architecture was subject to the vagaries of fashion, commerce and history. Percier and Fontaine turned to their experiences designing theater sets in order to construct settings that would legitimize Napoleon's military conquests, beginning with the bellicose motifs at the château de Malmaison. Although the architects sought to colonize the interior as a site of Napoleonic power, it proved to be a porous and itinerant site of meaning that could not be claimed as the central domain of imperial force-or architecture alone.by Iris Moon.Ph.D