Breaking Point? Faculty Speaker Series: State surveillance and technological development: New Infrastructure or Old Foundations

The Trump administration's expansion of data collection, biometric screening, and interagency information sharing has renewed attention to the scope of state surveillance, raising the question of whether these practices depart from prior administrations or extend dynamics already embedded in American governance. Panelists in this session will examine this question in terms of the history of surveillance and artificial intelligence, the implications of artificial intelligence and big data for racialized groups, as well as the relationship between AI and human rights. This second installment of the Breaking Point? Faculty Speaker Series brings together four scholars to question how patterns of advantage and disadvantage are shaping, and being reshaped by, this moment of American political upheaval. About the Speakers: Aaron Gluck-Thaler is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, where he holds the Professorship in Data Sciences and a cross-appointment to the Institute for the History & Philosophy of Science & Technology. He is a Faculty Affiliate at The Citizen Lab. Aaron’s research focuses on the history of surveillance, artificial intelligence, and science and technology in the Cold War. His current book project examines the role that scientists played in the emergence of data-intensive surveillance in the 20th century. Aaron received his PhD in History of Science from Harvard University. Miron J. Clay-Gilmore is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto. He is the first Black philosopher to earn a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. His research examines the racialized applications of artificial intelligence, big data, and predictive policing within broader regimes of counterinsurgency and state violence. Drawing from Africana philosophy, Black male studies, and the thought of Dr. Huey P. Newton, his work explores how emerging technologies reproduce militarized systems of racial control. Dr. Clay-Gilmore has published in AI and Ethics, Res Philosophica, and the Journal of African American Studies. He also teaches in the Department of Philosophy. Anna Su's primary areas of research include the law and history of international human rights law, comparative constitutional law, technology and international law, and law and religion. She is currently a Research Lead at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. She is also a Nootbaar Institute Fellow on Law and Religion at Pepperdine University School of Law. Anna holds an SJD from Harvard Law School where her dissertation was awarded the John Laylin Prize for best paper in international law. She received her JD and AB degrees from the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines. Prior to coming to Toronto, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy based in SUNY Buffalo Law School, and a graduate fellowship in ethics with the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. She worked as a law clerk for the Philippine Supreme Court and was a consultant to the Philippine government negotiating panel with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. Matthew Farish is a historical geographer whose work examines the relationships between militarization, geographical knowledge, and landscapes in the twentieth-century United States. He is currently working on two book projects. The first, funded by SSHRC, is a history of the US militarization of the planet in the mid-twentieth century. It looks backward and forward from that period through the construction and use of climate laboratories, proving grounds, and survival schools. The second is a series of overlapping essays on urban culture in the United States from 1940 to 1990.