 So my name is James Kilgore. I am the director of the Challenging E-carceration Project at Media Justice. My pronouns are he, him. And I first got interested in the issue of e-carceration and electronic monitoring in 2009 when I was put on an electronic monitor for about a year as a condition of my parole. And it brought out a lot of questions from me, who was making money off of it, who made up the rules for it, and where was this technology going? And so I've kind of been researching it ever since then. In 2017, we kicked off a campaign here at Media Justice to kind of interrogate this technology and really try to produce a counter-narrative to the idea that this is going to be an alternative to e-carceration. So we considered an alternative form of e-carceration. And we're going to go through that and explain some of that, why we do, and what other alternatives we might put forward instead. But I want to, first of all, give you a brief outline of what we're planning to do. So if I could have the next slide to look at the aims of this event. So basically, this is a 101, right? So we're going to introduce basic ideas and technologies of e-carceration, highlight key debates and struggles concerning e-carceration with a particular focus on electronic monitoring. And then we're going to, and this is very important for Media Justice, connect to the lived experience of people with electronic monitoring, particularly black and brown folks, and finally provide some basic tools to resist e-carceration and fight for justice and abolition. So if I can get the next slide, we'll look at what our workshop journey is going to be. So we're going to start by introducing the voices of impacted people with some video clips of people that we've interviewed over the years. Secondly, we're going to define and describe e-carceration with an electronic monitoring focus. Third, we're going to do a deep dive into the Media Justice hotspots of electronic monitoring map, which we've just launched recently, which is kind of our database of electronic monitoring, kind of a counter database, if you like, to endless spreadsheets and algorithms and standard deviations and so forth. Fourthly, we're going to look at electronic monitors as a surveillance tool, and then our fifth stop is going to be looking at the powers and the presence of e-carceration, the broader notions of electronic monitoring and other tracking technologies. And sixth, we're going to be challenging e-carceration, looking at strategies for challenging this technology. So if we can move to the next slide. So like I said, we want to begin with the voices of the impacted people. And so I'm going to play for you now a set of videos of about, it's about five minutes of a whole variety of experiences of people who are on electronic monitors. And I mean, one of the highlights of people who are resisting electronic monitoring is Mohawk Johnson, who's been on a monitor since September of 2020 after being charged in connection with BLM demonstrations in Chicago. So he's been sitting in his home. We'll see a little bit more of him later, but this is one of his rather profound quotes about electronic monitoring. I wake up every fucking day and a part of my body doesn't fucking belong to me anymore. It belongs to the state. It's like I'm not a person anymore. So this is really some sort of philosophical framework of what it feels like to be on a monitor. I think we can begin and look at some of the other voices that we have captured in our research and in our conversations. Would you like to video play, James? Sorry, I think before we do that, we need to do introductions. I'm sorry, I skipped over that. So if I can just ask people to introduce in the chat, put their name, organization, pronouns in the chat. And if you have time, name one thing that helps make us safe. All right, so we'll give you a couple of minutes just to put your details in there. Welcome to Song. Song's been a great crusader against electronic monitoring. Welcome to people from Minneapolis. Appreciate you taking the time to join us here. Trust in our community makes us safe. Welcome to people from Sacramento. I know I've been doing a lot of work in decarcerate Sacramento. Trust seems to be coming in. Big welcome to Expo, Wisconsin, formerly incarcerated folks coming together. Okay, Louisville, welcome. Welcome IMC, my hometown here. Hello there, Emmett, challenging incarceration community and one of the major architects of our map. We will see you later. Jobs with justice, yes, yes, yes. Okay, so we have a good variety of people from different parts of the country and different struggles. So welcome, welcome, it's great to be with you. And I hope this will be enjoyable for us and for you and we all learn something together. Okay, can we move ahead to the videos in the next slide? Go ahead and play the videos. The familiar case of the disappearing video. Right, do we wanna play around with the video a little bit and we'll go ahead with this address what's on this slide and then we can come back and hopefully play the videos. Is that okay? So I'm gonna talk a little bit about what is e-carceration and what is electronic monitoring the kind of basics. So e-carceration for us is the use of technology to deprive people of their liberty, to deprive people of their freedom. And we like the term e-carceration because it combines both the technological element with the E and the incarceration element because we believe that all of these things deprive people of their liberty. Electronic monitoring is the most sort of familiar form of e-carceration but it's not the only one. So we see electronic monitoring as a subset of this greater technology of e-carceration and we're going to explore e-carceration a little bit further in a little later in the workshop when we look at how we respond to this technology. So I wanna just go through some of these basics of electronic monitoring. So who's on electronic monitoring? There's basically four sectors of people who are on electronic monitors. There's people who have finished a prison sentence who are on parole or some form of supervision with an electronic monitor. There are people who are involved in the juvenile justice system who are put on electronic monitors. There are people awaiting trial, pre-trial release maybe on bail, maybe not on bail but electronic monitoring is a condition of their release. And then fourthly, we have probably the fastest growing and the most complicated sector of electronic monitors and that's people who are under the authority of ICE. So there's also a smaller subset of people who are on scram monitors which are monitors that monitor your alcohol, the alcohol content of your perspiration. So how many people are on electronic monitors? The truth is we don't know. There's no national database of electronic monitoring unlike the populations of jails and prisons. And electronic monitoring is done contracted at a local level each county that has an electronic monitoring program has its own individual contract. So we have thousands of contracts. There's no way to gather that information. Many of these are under the judiciary. So they're not subject to freedom of information act. So we frankly don't know. We know some places like Cook County has about three and a half thousand people on electronic monitors. Indianapolis, which is the capital of pretrial electronic monitoring in the United States has over 4,000 people on electronic monitors. But we don't have a national picture. Our guess is it's about 350,000 people on electronic monitoring as we speak. What's the argument for electronic monitoring? I think you could probably imagine the electronic monitoring is that it keeps us safe. We don't need trust. We need devices around our ankles, devices in our phones to monitor us, to keep us safe, to protect the community from criminals, to control people, to punish people. There's a whole range of arguments for electronic monitoring. We're gonna show you how we refute them in a minute. Who makes money from electronic monitoring? Well, not surprisingly, a lot of the same companies that make money from incarceration. So we have BI is the largest electronic monitoring company in the country, and they are, not surprisingly, a subsidiary of the geo group, the largest private prison operator in the world. We have satellite tracking of people, which is a subsidiary of Securus. And for people who might be familiar with prison phone systems, Securus is a major player in prison phone systems and in prison video visitation systems. So there's also two Israeli-based companies, Attenti and Supercom, that are big players in electronic monitoring, as well as a number of small kind of mom and pop kind of operations. We have a database here of about 57 companies nationwide that are offering electronic monitoring and profiteering from it. What are the grievances from electronic monitoring? Well, you're gonna see those when you come to the videos, but the prime, I think there's two of the most important, two of the most important grievances about electronic monitoring is it restricts movement. So you have to get permission from a parole agent or a probation officer in order to leave your house, in order to work, in order to spend time with your family, in order to seek medical treatment. And many people may be on 24-7 electronic monitoring and not be allowed out at all, other than to go to medical appointments or to go to court. So the lack of movement, but the other big issue is finances. Electronic monitors typically cost between five and $40 a day to be on a monitor. So for the people who are directly impacted by electronic monitoring, it can be a huge financial burden. So if I can just look at the next slide, I wanna talk just a little bit about what our counter narrative to electronic monitoring is about. The first is, which we mentioned already, it's an alternative form of incarceration. It's not an alternative to incarceration. To say that it's better than jail makes us think that there's only two options, jail or electronic monitors. The third option is freedom. That's the option we try to opt for and try to push for. It widens the carceral net. It actually increases more people are now under the control of the state with the growth of electronic monitors and these devices, now that they have GPS tracking, they're part of the surveillance state. They track location and this location data gets saved to the cloud and it gets mingled with a lot of other databases that we'll talk about a little bit later. And this is not new. The idea of tracking is not new. Tracking has historical roots in settler colonialism. It has historical roots within the tracking of Native American people when the first settlers arrived, but it also has deep roots in tracking of enslaved black people during the period of chattel slavery. Black people were often physically branded with the sort of icon of their owner. They might have been forced to carry lanterns in the dark. If they went outside at night, a whole range of ways in which enslaved people were tracked. So this is part of the tradition of systems of oppression is to track the oppressed and electronic monitoring and e-carceration is but the most recent iteration of this. And then I think this is a very important point that we emphasize a lot in our work that electronic monitoring and e-carceration impact what we call the criminalized sector of the working class, especially black and Latinx people. So people are criminalized by their survival activities not because they're necessarily in the criminal legal system but because their activities, whether it's selling Lucy's, whether it's doing sex work, whether it's sleeping in a park, all of these survival activities are criminalized and tracking then adds more information to people who are already likely to be in databases of school discipline, of mental health, of juvenile justice, of foster care. All of these things are come together on the cloud and we're going to talk about that when we get to the e-carceration section. And lastly, and this is really important for those people who are fighting against electronic monitoring in your jurisdiction, there's no evidence that says it has positive outcomes. There's no meaningful research. The limited research that's done is mostly with very dubious kind of research methodology. There is no evidence. Ask people who want to implement electronic monitoring to produce evidence they won't because it does not exist. Okay, can we move to the videos? Yes, absolutely. Can folks see this? No, on the other hand, maybe if you can stop sharing your screen and then just share the... There we go. There you go, yeah. Folks can see the video? Oh, yes. Yes. Okay, let me know if you can hear it when I press play. It's just like being locked up but you pay your bills, all right? So you get to feed yourself. Sorry. It's good? Tea? Okay. You don't have to fight for the telephone. You don't have to fight for the shower. But you're still in jail. It's not just you but your family. And people say, well, I'm way you're lucky to be out. I'm not out. Yeah, physically I'm out of the prison but you know, this is another form of incarceration. The ratio of false positives was 77 to one. Wow. Okay? We're sending people back to prison on one chance out of 77 that they might have done something wrong. That's gotta stop. That's gotta stop. I passed every drug test they'd given me. I made every required meeting and I have managed to go by all the other rules of my parole agreement. But I've been picked up by the Milwaukee Police Department multiple times because of the electronic marketing system that is supposed to track me wherever I go. Has reported I was someplace where I shouldn't be. One time the system reported that I was in the middle of Lake Michigan. And for real, I mean, no, this is not, I mean, it's funny, but this is serious, y'all. I was in jail for five days before they came to install new braces to lease me. If I had a regular job, I would have lost it. I'm thankful that Redeemer Lutheran Church where I cook for the community meals, understand and let me come back for my job. And please some residents, right, whether it's the, like, Hathley House, or the place of residence kind of becomes, it's like a satellite prison. Right now, we're only talking about ankle monitors and tracking devices. But I got a little white dog that we have inserted a chip into the back of his neck to tell if he's lost, they can identify that dog as me being the owner. What happens when we actually take that technology and that tracking device is inserted in our bodies because ultimately that's where they go on with the tracking. My mother actually has quite a few things going on medically and there's times where she has to be rushed to the hospital. I don't mind that. If that happened, I'm just gonna go. If I ended up getting, I probed, I laid it up, stood up, I was gonna take it to the hospital. My name is Timothy Williams. In October of 2017, I was pulled over for act while driving. I was taken into custody where I was given a bond of $100,000, which means 10,000 to walk. My wife contacted CCBF. They paid my bond and I was released on electronic monitor. I was on electronic monitor for nine months. I was not able to pay the mortgage because I was incarcerated. So my wife and kids wind up getting evicted. When I was released, I could not go back to my home and do page. I had to go stay with a relative in Chicago because I could not be on electronic monitoring and do page. I had just had my two-year-old and he was about maybe four months old. We ended up at his sister's house on her floor in the blue bed with our two youngest children. I would describe electronic monitoring as, I would say hell, the same as jail. There's no difference. You can't go outside. You can't work. You can't take the kids to the school bus. I'm not gonna say that it wasn't good because he was home and we wanted him there. But once we got into our daily habits, it began to be a little bit much because he couldn't do anything. He couldn't even take the garbage out. I actually had a court order to be released on electronic monitoring and go back to work. But once I was released, I still had to send documents to the sheriff's department and they had to give me permission to go back to work. So that took about six to eight weeks to do. Those are a few benefits. I still think that the overall retooling of the system still needs, it still needs to be constructed to be more human because if you think about it, it's just another form of control and slavery. 21st century electronic style. Okay, great. All right, man. Thank you. And so I don't see how electronic monitoring addresses the underlying issue of toxic masculinity and or white supremacy in the patriarchy that shows up in our society every single day. Okay, thanks very much, Delani, for the video. And I'd just like to get a few responses from people. What stood out or was there anything that surprised you, literal chattel slavery? We feel free to put in the chat or raise your hand if you wanna add something. Any surprises that people found from seeing things in the video? Yeah, I think that, you know, the question of attending to people's loved ones when they're outside, you know, you could see the emotion that was Augie Torres who did about two decades in prison in Illinois, but he wasn't gonna be denied the right to look after his mother if she got ill. Yeah, that reincarceration for being in the middle of Lake Michigan. I don't think he was swimming. So this is, I mean, you could see at the beginning of that video, this was in Wisconsin and they were talking about the proliferation of false alarms, false locations and people ended up, technical malfunctions can end in violent apprehension. That's a spot on comment that you never know. And that's part of the fear that you have when you're on an electronic monitor that you think you might do something wrong or the device might do something wrong even if you don't do anything wrong. So there's a whole set of fears that accompany this that are very much like being incarcerated in prisons and jails. Paying bills, you're saying who's paying for your food? And how do you support your family? How are you able to make a contribution even if you're released from jail pre-trial or if you've just got done doing a long sentence in prison, one of the things you wanna be able to do is to contribute to your own survival and your families, but electronic monitoring often makes that very difficult, if not impossible. Well, thanks very much for your comments. I mean, I hope these videos at least give you, I don't wanna see, there's something here makes me think of the comparison of externalizing costs and capitalism move people's workplaces into their home. So what we're saying, we're moving people's prisons and jails into their home. And then they have to pay for the costs that were previously borne by the state. We know that prison food is not something that people cherish, but you're having to pay for something that might not be even any better when you're living at home on an electronic monitor. So I thank people for those comments. I hope it helps people get your head around what it means to be on an electronic monitor and why we emphasize the fact that this is a punitive technology that is an alternative form of incarceration and not an alternative to incarceration. Okay, we're gonna move now to our next activity which is looking at our map. So if I could just have the map slide here. Okay, so we put together a map which we call hotspots of electronic monitoring which has been years of work, years of doing interviews with people, years of doing our own research on electronic monitoring. As I said, recognizing that we weren't gonna be able to compile the perfect database with spreadsheets and all the machinations of algorithms and statistics, but we could create a living kind of document that would represent those stories and the data that goes along with them. So if I can have the next slide. So what we did is we created a map of the U.S. with links to various stories that pertain to electronic monitoring. And we have about 50 videos on this map as well as links to a whole lot of stories that are about electronic monitoring, about the struggles that people have on electronic monitoring and about some of the issues that come up like in local government and state government that relate to electronic monitoring. So our map not only has that, but we have links to other resources on electronic monitoring. So we have a links to our bibliography of electronic monitoring research in relationship to COVID-19. We have a bibliography of the works of media justice on electronic monitoring. We have about 30 blogs along with several research papers looking at some of the reasons why to oppose the use of electronic monitoring. We have a database of electronic monitoring companies, their location, their websites and so forth. And then we also have a request form where you can put in your own story into our map and we can add it to the map so you can put in your individual story, a story in your community, an issue that's of interest to you that you think should be included in the map, you can fill in this Google form and we will then record that data and find a way to capture it on our map. And you'll see when we go back to the map now how that will look. So what you can do here, first of all, if we scroll to the bottom, you see that we can filter our, we can filter, we have a number of filters on the map that relate to the different issues that pertain to electronic monitoring or the different sets of people that are on electronic monitoring. So we have post-prison, we have pretrial, we have youth justice, we have new technologies, we have immigration. So let's say you wanna look at pretrial, if you unclick everything except pretrial, then all of the states that are dark have stories about pretrial electronic monitoring. So if we, for instance, click on Missouri, we'll find that there's a sidebar and that sidebar has a number of stories about electronic monitoring. So for example, and under the subheadings that correspond to the filters. So we have pretrial, we have a couple of stories under pretrial. We have a story about the Eastern Missouri Alternative Sentencing Program, which sounds like a wonderful thing, but it's actually an electronic monitoring company that's sucking money out of people. So if you wanna just click on that story, Adriana, we can just have a quick look at that. So you can pull up these kinds of stories about what's really happening with electronic monitoring and how it's impacting people in communities. If we go back to the Missouri, we go back to Missouri, we can also click on the video there and we'll listen to a little bit of Adriana and her experience of being on electronic monitor, pretrial in Missouri. I think we have no sound. First, I'm gonna say my name is Ariana and I'm 22 years old. I can be really, really shy sometimes, but I am like a big ball of energy. Like I'm always somewhere hopping and bopping. I live with my mom and my brother and that is my solid foundation. Like that's all I need. I was an outside person. I was always on the go, but now, uh-uh. So the day that Amber came to the jail that I was at. Yeah, so that's just a little bit of a clip. I mean, it's obviously there's a longer video there, but we don't have time to go into it in full. But we have about 50 clips like that. Most of them are stories of people in different situations in regard to electronic monitoring. So what I wanna do, because I know you don't, on Zoom, it's not always so nice to just be talked at for an entire work day. So we're gonna put you into the entire workshop, even though we're trying to live in it up with some videos and some music, but I want you to explore this map yourself. So we're gonna put you into breakout groups, into pairs. And there's the link to the map is in the chat. So you might wanna copy that link and then spend about five minutes just kind of looking around at the map together, highlight anything that sort of sparks your interest that looks like it needs more exploration that you find outrageous that you wanna know more about, or if you think there's ways in which the map isn't working or other people might, or other things that could be added to the map, feel free to give that to us. So when we come back, we'll ask a few groups just to report back on what they found and other people can put stuff in the chat. So spend about five or six minutes just looking around the map and then we'll talk to you when you return. I'm just interested in getting a few responses from the map, but did anyone find anything that they found particularly striking, interesting, unusual, outrageous that they'd like to share? You can raise your hand or unmute yourself. I don't think you can unmute yourself actually. Do we have any volunteers here? I can, hi James, I can go. Thank you everyone. Thank you. Hi everybody. Well, we didn't get into much discussion. It was so brief, but we, in my group, we were talking about how it would be interesting to know the different types of technologies that are used in different states. And I was kind of curious just looking at the map and then I was looking at like what the states are, because there's this area on the like center west coast of the country, right? There's these states that aren't like, when you select all of the categories, immigration laws, all those things on the website, there are states that don't seem to have any of those things. And so I'm kind of curious about why that chunk of states in the US are kind of untouched so far by these e-carceration techniques. And so that was a couple of takeaways. Okay, thanks for that. I mean, I think it's not so much that they're untouched by this technology as that there's not a lot of public information about them. And a lot of this stuff happens at county level and local level and it's difficult to actually get information. And a lot of counties don't even keep data on electronic monitoring. So that's why there's not very much there. I mean, we've tried to scour these states and we've sent FOIAs to a lot of places but we haven't been able to get information back. I think your question about who's using what technology? Yeah, it's a really interesting one. Because we're finding in some places they're using these devices that actually talk back to you. They can listen to you and they can talk back to you, which is very problematic if you're in any kind of public place, for example, and all of a sudden your ankle starts talking to you. It's very humiliating, aggravating, et cetera, et cetera. So I think, I mean, this is probably a whole other workshop is where is this technology going? I mean, what other data is it gonna be able to capture? Is it gonna be in watches? We saw Dorsey Nunn in that video talking about the chip in his dog. So is that one of the places where we're headed with this kind of technology? That's the good question. I can chime in as well. And thank, grateful for this resource. I think it's super helpful, especially the fact that it also includes immigration because I feel like incarceration and immigration sphere is something that a lot of folks are still not aware of. But in terms of, I do a lot of policy work and so I was really interested to see if each, there's a way that we kind of know the policies that allow for ankle monitors and other forms of incarceration apparatus in different states. For example, in the states where we don't have data, if we even know the kind of policies that exist, whether it's something that is used, like if it's at the discretion of the police officer or at the discretion of the attorney or the courts, like who holds the power, then we know sort of who to target with the data. So I think that's something that's interesting as well. And also appreciating the articles that are included there. So we're not just reading data, but also hearing real life experiences. So excited to share this out with, especially immigration folks so that we can build it up. And then the last thing is the notes on the companies are super helpful to see. Within our organization, we have something called Investigate, which looks at folks funds and like your investments and whether you're investing in companies that are expanding the casserole system. And so being able to see this here and cross-checking that as well for your like divestment campaigns and colleges and other spaces is super necessary. Well, thanks so much for that. So it's who holds the power? It really depends on jurisdiction to jurisdiction. But in general, the state prison system will have an electronic monitoring program, which will have to be enacted by some kind of state law, but the implementation might be primarily done by the parole board. It might be primarily done by private companies. It just depends. It just does vary from place to place. We are part of a larger kind of research project at the moment that is trying to gather policies from different states and try to piece together what are the different laws and different policies in different states that are in place at the moment. At the same thing at a county level, it's really county boards that tend to make the decision about electronic monitors, but whether or not they outsource that to a private company, whether or not they have county employees running it, all of those things really vary depending on the decision makers. And then when it comes to the individual, the rules that are set up for you, that may be largely set by the individual parole agent or probation officer that you have a lot of times, they have a lot of leeway to do whatever they want, which is very problematic for most people. And I do wanna thank you also for connecting up with immigration. It's one of the things we try to do in our work is to bridge the different sectors that are impacted by electronic monitoring and e-carceration. We know that many people who work in either the immigration space or in the mass incarceration space often don't recognize the parallels and the similarities and the same players who are impacting their struggles. And we need to be able to come together and push back and have a broader front against that. I mean, particularly if you look at BI, for example, BI is the company that is the biggest electronic monitoring company in the country, but it also has the contract with ICE to monitor virtually all the people who are under ICE electronic monitoring somewhere around 50,000 people. So there's lots of connections that we can build on. And I'm sorry, we didn't have longer to engage with the map, but we're just trying to give you a taste of it. And I hope, I'm hoping that people will follow up and look at it and also share information with us and fill in some of those blank spaces that everyone talked about in the map, but you really appreciate that. Okay, I think we're good. I see we have a lot of messages here. Seeing somebody was raising their hand earlier. Okay, let's have, I'll have one more hand here and then we'll have to move on. So who's the hand? Who's the hand? Where's the hand here? That was Evelyn. Hi, good afternoon, everybody. My name's Evelyn. I'm a DBB fellow with courage. I just wanted to mention, just like everybody else was mentioning, I really liked the fact that there's specific topics and you can just like check the boxes and get to the specific one that you like. I also liked, like the last speaker was just saying how you were able to see like the specific companies and who like they've contracted with. For example, I think I clicked on Colorado's and I learned that it said that boulders are headquarters of BI Incorporated and that BI contracted with US Immigration. That's just like a really important fact. I really appreciate like she said as well, how it's real stories from people that have actually been impacted by EM because I think that's important, right? We can't just have people giving stories about what they think it's doing, you know, or the harm they think it's doing to people. We have to actually have real stories from real people that have actually been through it. So I just appreciate the whole website as a whole and I'm definitely interested on giving my story and being a youth on EM multiple times in California. So that's fantastic. Thank you so much for that. There's been some, there's been a fair amount of research done on youth EM in California, but I don't think it's really captured a lot of the voice of people who are directly impacted and obviously a lot of times youth aren't really in a position to come forward and talk about their experience because they're more vulnerable than adults. So we'd really appreciate having that added on. And I see somebody talking about ShadowTrack as one of these companies, it's a new app. And I think they had thousands of people in Virginia, something like 11,000 people were on ShadowTrack in Virginia during the pandemic. So I mean, I'm just add the point that the pandemic has been a windfall for electronic monitoring companies and it's also been an opportunity for them to develop their technology in the name of public health. They're coming up with ways to track people in the same way that you contact tracing, they're coming up with ways to use that in the criminal legal system. Okay, well, I'm sorry we don't have more time but I really appreciate what people have offered here and I hope we can connect up. I hope people will share stories and we'll also maybe have an opportunity to have a conversation with you more one-on-one, maybe even we'll get to see you in person sometime rather than behind some dark square where we don't know what's going on but we try our best to cope with it all, right? Okay, so we are going to move on and talk a little bit about e-carceration but and we're gonna give you a slight break and you're gonna get to listen to we're gonna do a poll and that is we're gonna ask people how many people have their GPS tracking function turned off on their phones and we also are gonna give you a minute of Mohawk Johnson which I'm sure people will appreciate. So can we play Mohawk and while people can answer yes or no or I don't know, there we go. There's the poll. So you click on that and submit while we listen to Mohawk. I don't think we have sound. I think your headphones do money. Oh, okay, okay. Can I play it again? Yeah. I am sitting on my couch watching Captain America. Can you hear? Yes. All right, you too, bye. Y'all see the TV. I got Jake with me. I was playing Yu-Gi-Oh, Dual Links, this Captain America, play the movie so they can see that I was telling the truth about one movie I was playing. Captain America, Winner, Soldier, y'all see that shit? I ain't told not one lie. I ain't told not one lie this entire fucking time. Not one. Here we go. We move on and look at this. Look at this, y'all. Look at this internal light on for this shit. This is the beacon that I've been waiting months for that seems to not fucking work. Here we go. I'm in my fucking house. I don't know what the fuck else I can do. So that's Mohawk Johnson who's been chronicling his experiences on electronic monitor. He says he's been falsely accused of being out of his house more than 60 times since he was put on the monitor in September. So he was, he posts a lot of these things on Twitter. So if you wanna follow him on Twitter, at Mohawk Johnson, it's definitely worth checking out. It really highlights how crazy this technology is. Even on its own terms, it doesn't do what it's supposed to be doing. Okay, we're gonna move on and talk a little bit more about the notion of e-carceration. So just to clarify this, I mean, I think electronic monitoring on the surface, it seems like it's kind of records information in isolation. And when we look at it through the lens of a criminal legal system, an electronic monitor seems like a policy tool to control people, to keep them in their house, to keep them away from areas or people where criminal activity may occur. Or maybe it's just simply a way of inflicting punishment on people much in the same way as a jail. But if we look at it through a different lens, the wider lens of e-carceration, the use of technology to deprive people of their liberty, when we use this lens, we find an electronic monitoring, electronic monitor is one of many devices that gather data from our daily lives. In the present system, that data is weaponized and commodified. Our location becomes a weapon that can be used against us. It also becomes data that can be bought and sold in different ways, to private companies trying to sell goods, to security companies or collection agencies. While our data comes from our daily lives and our bodies, it ultimately resides in the cloud, where it belongs to Amazon, Google or Microsoft. If we are activists, that data may be sold or shared with intelligence or law enforcement agencies. And in the future, that data may also be made into investment vehicles, enabling people to buy and sell our data, much like the buying and selling of derivatives in the financial markets. So that we know that data gathering is almost universal in the US and much of the world today. But if you have a smartphone, they are gathering your data. How many people have their smartphone function turned off? Do we have any results from our poll? Yeah, are you able to... Oh, wait here, let me use your shirt. There you go. Are you able to see it? Yeah, so 38% is no, 33% is yes and 29% fall no offense in the most dubious category of not knowing whether it's on or off. So innocent workshop on incarceration, let's hope if one thing comes out of this we'll at least be thinking about whether or not our phones are on our GPS function is on or off. But I just want to point out that not everyone's data is equal or weaponized in the same way for vulnerable populations, what I refer to. Once again, as a criminalized sector of the working class, this data deprives people not only of movement as we've seen with Mohawk Johnson, but it may have deprived them of access to employment, housing, medical treatment, credit, travel, parenting, education and other services. And of course, electronic monitoring and electronic monitoring is not the only tool of e-car duration. We have many more. We have facial recognition, license plate readers. We have fusion centers which bring together lots of data. We have shot spotters, which are supposed to tell us where gunshots are happening. We have risk assessment tools. We have, then we have the databases themselves, the data that's in that, that's in those massive databases, whether it's school discipline records, mental health records, records from the criminal legal system, substance abuse program records, foster care systems, et cetera, et cetera. All of these rest on the cloud and then it's in the hands not only of companies like AWS and Microsoft, but also the data reapers, the Thompson Reuters, the Lexus Nexus, the Palantir. And these are the main companies which are gathering data on immigrants and using it to target people for deportation, to target people for criminal charges on immigration violations. And I wanna just highlight one example of how this works in immigration and then kind of move into some discussion. So in Mississippi in August of 2019, there was a massive factory raid on poultry factories where many immigrants were working. And something like 600 ICE agents showed up and took away about a similar number of immigrants who are working in these poultry plants. And one of the ways they track people to these plants was by looking at the GPS devices that were put on them by ICE in order to see who was working at the plants, what their immigration status was, what their work permit status was, and so forth. So this is a way that these databases connect across different government agencies to criminalize people and to punish them. So we have to begin to use our imagination about how this might impact us. So I wanted to just ask a couple of questions for people before we move into the last sections here, but can anyone give me some ideas about how your locational data could be weaponized without of course revealing anything about yourself that you don't want people to know, but how could your location data be criminalized? How could it be used to get you into trouble? You can share it with hands or in the chat, whatever works. We have a whole pile of messages here. Can GPS locations be used in predictive policing companies? Of course. Could lead to further surveillance of local Muslim communities. I see a hand up James from Sam. Okay, go ahead. Do we have a way to... Yeah, hi. I have a girlfriend who in the state of Arizona received like a camera violation in the mail. The state of Arizona has all these cameras, well, all over the world now, they're all these cameras at stop lights. And she got some violation for running a red light in her, I mean, she was smoking pot. She was clearly smoking pot in the photo. And she was further, further convicted, I'm sorry, words have left me, for the marijuana offense as well. Okay, yep. The eyes of e-carceration. I see geofence warrants on there. I don't know if people are familiar with geofence, but geofences are basically, well, if you're on an electronic monitor, for example, they can give you an exclusion zone, which means you can't enter a certain part of the town. I mean, I know someone who has an exclusion zone for the state of Maine, they're not allowed to enter the state of Maine. So these devices can be, they can keep you out of parts of town where you're not supposed to be, where maybe you have past criminal activities or maybe there seem to be high crime areas that you shouldn't be moving in if you have some kind of a background. All right, so I just wanted to get some ideas, and then ideas about how your locational data can be weaponized and how can be commodified when the examples of how your location data can be commodified, bought and sold. Okay, I'm sure you all get things popping on your computer trying to sell you stuff, right? All these ads that come up, I mean, some of them are from location data or they're sort of virtual location data about where you've been, where you're shopping, where you're buying stuff online. So this is all the commodification of your data and how does it get to you, somebody's buying access to that data in order to be able to then research it, re-cycle it to you in order to look for, in order to look for potential customers. But I see people are looking a lot about thumbprint scans, retinal scans, facial recognition to open your smartphone. So these are all ways we're surrendering what we call biometrics, data that comes from our bodies that should belong to us that we're surrendering one way or another because either for convenience or because somebody just tells us it's a good idea and we're not really thinking about what, yes, fit this, what does that data tell them about us and how can that make us vulnerable? So all of this, I mean, we consider this to be e-carceration. We wanna look at these things through a broad lens and not through just the lens of an ankle monitor because we think this technology is growing both in its capacity and in the net of people that are inside, that are captured by this technology. So I wanna wind us down here by just talking, we don't wanna leave on notes of despair, right? We wanna leave on notes of hope, we wanna leave on notes of what can we do to resist e-carceration? So we're gonna put a few examples of organizations that have resisted e-carceration into the chat in a second, but I just wanna hear some ideas from people about how can we resist this besides turning off our GPS on our phone or throwing our phone away? Is that uplifting the work that other organizations do like Electronic Frontier Foundation? Organize, organize, organize, ah, yeah, man. Organize what for what? Any other sit? I just want to chant, man. Right, well, we can get there, we'll get there. Any other ideas on how we resist this stuff? Try and get citizen states to ban the use of e-carceration tools. So pretty good, we've had a number of jurisdictions that have opted to ban or at least restrict the use of facial recognition. So that's one piece. We put forward a law in the Illinois in 2019 to ban the use of electronic monitors for people coming out of prison. It managed to pass the house and then COVID came and it kind of disappeared. But that was something that was useful for us as an educational tool. Be visual with your data, educate yourself on how to limit leaky points of contact in your personal metadata. Leaky points of contact, who are we leaking to? The people that are watching us, right? The people who are poised to either prosecute or profit. Air drops, okay. Being aware of your digital footprint and forming others and being aware of your digital footprint, opting out of cookies and we don't mean oatmeal raisins, my favorite, exposing the lies and promises of predictive policing like Fred Paul. So I'm gonna bring this to some of the organizations that we have in the chat. So Stop LAPD Spine Coalition has done a lot of work against predictive policing and they in fact got one of the key companies, Palantir, to have their contract severed by Los Angeles and they were using a lot of predictive policing technology there. They have a wonderful set of, if you have a lot of time to be on Zoom, they've been doing weekly webinars on issues related to e-carceration and the surveillance state really since the beginning of the pandemic. So if you really have some time, you need to check out their webinars because they're really fantastic, but there's about 60 or 70 of them. So you can set aside a couple of days to binge watch LAPD Spine, Stop LAPD Spine's Zoom conferences. I also wanna highlight the No Tech for Ice campaign, which has been led by Immigrant Rights Activists to try to block big tech from accessing ice and stopping ice from using the technology to deport people and criminalize people who are under their control. I think there's been a lot of work done by various organizations working against cash bail and against local jail building. So the No New USA Jails Coalition is one and then we also have a national organization, the National Bail Fund Network, which is a network of bail funds across the country, which has been doing a lot of work on looking at the ways in which eliminating cash bail may open up the opportunity for the expansion of electronic monitors. So this is part of the politics of organizing these campaigns, be aware of what you're asking for, be aware of what does victory mean? What are the complications that come with victory? Before we celebrate, I mean, I can remember celebrating where I live in Champaign, celebrating the fact that we stopped the jail building and then the next week we came back and there was another proposal to build the jail. So premature celebration can be, can be far from that it can be dangerous. We have to be thinking about what are the implications of winning on certain kinds of demands because in the long run, some reformers may take us backwards or sideways rather than forward. Okay, we're winding down. We have about five minutes left. We really appreciate people hanging on and sharing your experiences. I'm hoping that at some point we can have a workshop like this in people's hometowns, home spaces and oh, we can't copy and do you want some pastimes and some copy time at the end here, but I just want to hear if anyone wants to, we want to just talk a little bit about things that we have upcoming. I'm just asking people to remember to send your information to us so we can put it on the map, whether it's your story, whether it's your organization. Also, you can join our listserv. You can reach out to me at, that's james at mediajustice.org to be put on our email, our listserv. It's not one of those heavy traffic ones, but it should give you some interesting information. I think Tedes and Doulani want to wind up with some, to talk a little bit more about the work of media justice and be on the lookout for us reaching out to you because we're going to be moving ahead with more campaigns around the issue of e-carceration very shortly. Thank you so much. I'll hand over to Doulani or is it Tedes? I'm going to actually hand it over to Adrianne who's going to talk about membership. I'm sorry, okay, Adrianne, off you go. All good, yeah. Thank you, folks, for joining. If you're interested in learning about our media justice network, which is our movement building power hub of organizations and advocates from all across the country, please feel free to reach out to me. I will go ahead and put my email in the chat and I'm happy to tell you more in a conversation. Teresa, would you like to share about our network? Hearing none, okay, cool. Thank you everyone for joining. Thank you all for joining us. We have the participant guide and we've asked, we shared some of our work in there. So please feel free to add any resources you have there to share with others. And if you have any feedback for us on any of our workshops, we welcome that as well. Absolutely, would love to hear from you. Any comments on the workshop? And I want to just say that we are now, you can remember this as a workshop that finished two minutes early. So we're giving you back two minutes. Thank you very much for giving us an hour and 28 minutes of your time. So we have a great debt to you now. We pay back, let me make a down payment of two minutes and we'll owe you the rest some other time. Thank you so much.