A talk at DEF CON 25 claimed that privacy is "gone and never coming back." This talk offers a different view, inviting the audience to see privacy as fundamentally about equality-something we have never fully had but also should never regard as gone.
The speaker is a human rights lawyer and investigator, and will draw on decades of human rights thinking about state surveillance as well as her 2017 revelations about Defense Department monitoring of "homegrown violent extremists." Adopting a feminist and race-conscious perspective and inviting audience participation, the talk will challenge received wisdom about basic concepts such as privacy, national security, the warrant requirement, and online radicalization. With a view to the future, it will also offer a thought-provoking history of the connections between privacy and equality in the United States-and the ways unchecked surveillance operates to categorize us and reinforce divisions between us.
It is easy to forget that 1984 was partly a story about poverty and economic inequality. This talk embraces Orwell's insight into the connection between the erosion of privacy and a dangerous loss of equality, and carries it forward.
Sarah St. Vincent is a researcher and advocate on national security, surveillance, and domestic law enforcement for the US Program at Human Rights Watch. She has investigated and documented the deliberate concealment of surveillance-based and other evidence from US criminal defendants, the Defense Department's monitoring of "homegrown violent extremists," and the potential use of US intelligence surveillance for anti-drug purposes. Before joining Human Rights Watch, she was a legal fellow on international human rights and surveillance at the Center for Democracy & Technology. She writes regularly about surveillance, privacy, and related issues under US and European Union law and is a member of the New York bar. @SarahStV_HRW