Surveillance is real-time social control. Criminalizing data is often created by surveillance: the non-consensual observation of individuals and communities by state, corporate or academic entities who have power to make meaning from, exert control over, exploit or otherwise profit from an observed population.
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Data criminalization describes the creation, archiving, theft, resale and analysis of seemingly objective data that courts and police use to argue that certain people are threats or risks, based on information created by and culled from state and commercial sources.
Criminalizing data is often created by surveillance. Surveillance is the non-consensual observation of individuals and communities by state, corporate or academic entities who have power to make meaning from, exert control over, exploit or otherwise profit from an observed population.
Surveillance is active intervention in the form of behavior prediction for modification; it is real-time social control. In every era, criminalizing discourses have made use of pseudoscientific concepts that are supposedly backed by data in order to justify dehumanization, collective punishment, social control and biometric registration of individuals and groups that are targeted by the state. In this tradition, concepts like “mental degeneracy,” “loose family morals,” “criminal,” and “high-risk,” are deployed.
Having a criminal history is the material outcome of decades of racist policing and mass incarceration policies. Today, popular technocratic tools, such as predictive algorithms, relationship-mapping and data-indexing software systems allow current and future arrests to resurrect and wield the full weight of that history, all while using abstracted and sanitized data.
These technical processes that target and “vet” migrants are engineered to guarantee that a person who was criminalized in the past will continue to be criminalized in the future, whether or not they break any laws. Furthermore, migrant surveillance is automated so that any person who was born outside the US always remains suspicious.
This project articulates prison abolitionist perspectives on data and criminalization, because data has long been used by the criminal legal system to justify the need for and legitimacy of the criminal legal system. As corporations and governments become increasingly enamored with prediction tools and biometric capture, we see data criminalization strategies used for immigrant and traveler stalking creep further into currently non-criminalized spaces, expanding the pools of whom are subject to surveillance and control.
We must be ready to fight data criminalization on our terms. This report and project provides a framework to reject and denaturalize criminal legal procedures and categories, border control and securitization, identity capture and registration regimes, and “data-driven” predictive and sorting practices used to justify punishment and social exclusion.
Rather than being drawn into arguments on what constitutes “risk,” whether to limit technologies or improve oversight and the accuracy of datasets, we must understand that these datasets are inherently illegitimate, and creation and use of them should be abolished. We propose the framework offered by “Our Data Bodies” — that in this digital age, data about us, or that is created by us, is us. Our biometric data is not available for others as raw material to mine, buy, or resell.
The time is ripe for a new mass movement to dismantle criminalization on the road to abolition.
