Presented at
The Circle Of HOPE (2018),
July 22, 2018, 10 a.m.
(60 minutes)
Through highly sophisticated surveillance technology from drones and license plate readers to facial recognition, law enforcement agencies have sweeping and unprecedented abilities to compile databases of the people. But despite these capabilities and the prevalence of police abuse of power, the public is largely left in the dark about law enforcement and their activities. In this political context, it's on the people to hold police accountable, and surveillance technology and data collection are methods that should not be unilaterally in the hands of law enforcement. OpenOversight is a project developed by data liberation collective Lucy Parsons Labs that consolidates police information from public records, public submissions, and web scraping into an open-source, community governed database. In this session, Jennifer and Camille will discuss how it works, how you can bring it to your city, and what's next.
Presenters:
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Jennifer Helsby
**Jennifer Helsby** (@redshiftzero) is a co-founding member and CTO of Lucy Parsons Labs. She also works as lead developer of the SecureDrop anonymous whistleblowing platform at Freedom of the Press Foundation. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Data Science and Public Policy at the University of Chicago, where she worked on applying machine learning methods to problems in public policy. Jennifer got her Ph.D. in astrophysics at the Center for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago.
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Camille Fassett
**Camille Fassett** (@camfassett) is a journalist and researcher interested in public records, digital security, and witchcraft. She investigates police departments’ use of surveillance technology and relationships to private corporations at Lucy Parsons Labs. She also works as a reporter at Freedom of the Press Foundation, where she co-runs a project systematically documenting all attacks on press freedom in the United States and writes about civil liberties and government transparency.
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