Who We Are
We are senior organizers, researchers and strategists with expertise in legal analysis, corporate investigation, migration control, and domestic policing. We build research, strategy, campaigns, and networks to scale up the ability of communities, workers, and advocates to build power towards a vibrant democracy.
The Lab is informed by decades of base-building and community organizing, fighting for concrete policy changes and engaging in deep narrative work towards alternative visions of safety and security.
The Lab launched as an independent project in January 2023 to ensure effective interventions at the intersection of technology, carcerality, securitization, democracy and power. The Lab was formerly housed at the Immigrant Defense Project.
The Surveillance Resistance Lab is fiscally sponsored by the Fund for the City of New York (EIN 13-2612524).
To learn more about our staff and our advisors, please contact us.
Our Work
We fight for power and democracy, not just privacy.
The Surveillance Resistance Lab investigates and makes visible the often obfuscated ways in which tech-fueled governance increases state and corporate power over our lives. It undermines our right to dissent and organize, and intensifies the policing of migrants, workers, communities of color, and more. By translating research into action, we work with movement partners to nurture and accumulate the power of organizing and resistance—locally and transnationally. We challenge how dominant notions of “security” fuel criminalization, exclusion, and dispossession, and protect our ability to build a world where we can all thrive.
Our key program areas are:
- Public Infrastructure, Tech & Democracy
- Democratizing procurement
- Digital cop cities
- Tech surveillance in schools
- Resisting digital driver’s licenses
- Repro x Tech
- Workers & Tech
- AI Policy & Tech
- Transnational Networks to Combat Digital Infrastructures of Control
- US border externalization
- “National security”-driven and governance
- The internet as an infrastructure of control
How We Work
We work IN SERVICE OF BUILDING movement power by:
Undertaking investigative action research
We engage in investigative and community-centered action research, to support the work of movement partners. Our approach is grounded in reciprocal forms of knowledge production and exchange.
Building Strategies for Change
We identify interventions and develop strategies for concrete changes, including narrative change strategy and popular education resources.
Expanding networks
We fight the expansion of globalized infrastructures of control by building across movements, cities, and borders. We work in partnerships with human rights defenders, community-based organizations, research and policy organizations, and more.
Translating Research Into Action
Our research is oriented towards strategy and campaign development that expands the terrain upon which we are organizing. We do this to redefine what democracy is and reclaim our ability to define our future collectively.
