Racism

Wisconsin schools use a racially discriminatory Dropout Early Warning System built by the state to identify incoming 9th graders who may be at risk of failing to graduate on time in order to offer them help. The system’s machine learning algorithms make their assessments based on test scores

Over 2020, EFF supported the right to protest without being surveilled by bringing lawsuits, offering protesters legal support, teaching protesters surveillance self-defence, and providing tools for people on the ground to use to determine what equipment their local police departments are using to

Hundreds of emails and documents obtained in response to a freedom of information request by BuzzFeed News show that US federal agents monitored social media for information on planned Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Minneapolis, Washington DC, Los Angeles, and other cities. Researchers and

Human rights activists and Democratic members of the US Congress wrote to top law enforcement officials in the Trump administration to demand they cease surveilling Americans engaging in peaceful protests. Trump and others in his administration called those protesting the killing of George Floyd

During the Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020, US police took advantage of a lack of regulation and new technologies to expand the scope of people and platforms they monitor; details typically emerge through lawsuits, public records disclosures, and stories released by police department PR

New US federal data released by the CDC in response to freedom of information requests show striking racial and ethnic disparities in all parts of the country in who gets infected and hospitalised with coronavirus. A survey of 640,000 infections in nearly 1,000 US counties found that Latino and

The pandemic has exacerbated the effects of the “hostile environment” on the UK’s undocumented migrants, many of whom have lost income, are working in unsafe and exploitative conditions, are scared to seek help even though the government has promised there will be no charging or immigration checks

The Atlantic’s COVID Tracking Project, in collaboration with the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research, has begun gathering up-to-date race and ethnicity data relating to COVID-19 in the US. Nationwide, black people are dying at a rate 2.5 times higher than white people. Different

UK police were almost seven times more likely to issue fines to black, Asian, and minority ethnic people than white feel for lockdown infractions. The exact figures varied around the UK; in Cumbria, which is mostly white and where people from a BAME background are more likely to be visitors, it was

A study published in January 2019 found that a form of facial recognition technology that interprets emotions in facial expressions assigns more negative emotions to black men's faces than white men's faces. The problem is the latest in a series of ways that facial recognition has failed for non

Days after the 2018 shooting that killed 11 Jewish congregants in a Pittsburgh synagogue, The Intercept found that Facebook still allowed advertisers to choose "white genocide conspiracy theory" as a targeting criterion, capturing 168,000 members of the social network. The technique used was the

Following the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the New York City Police Department installed thousands of CCTV cameras and by 2008 in partnership with Microsoft had built the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center to consolidate its video surveillance operations into a single command centre that also

In a draft January 2018 report obtained by Foreign Policy and produced at the request of US Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan, the Department of Homeland Security called for continuous vetting of Sunni Muslim immigrants deemed to have "at-risk" profiles. Based on studying 25

In 2013, Harvard professor Latanya Sweeney found that racial discrimination pervades online advertising delivery. In a study, she found that searches on black-identifying names such as Revon, Lakisha, and Darnell are 25% more likely to be served with an ad from Instant Checkmate offering a