Albert Fox Cahn, Executive Director, Surveillance Technology Oversight Project
What does your work look like, and what have you been working on lately?
Every day brings a new dystopian challenge, whether it’s a once unfathomable technology being secretly rolled out in our neighborhoods in the dead of night, or existing technologies used in new and misguided ways in plain sight. And every day I get to fight back, whether it’s through litigation, legislation, education, coalition building, or working with the press.
My role at S.T.O.P. is my dream job, convening a community of activists, technologists, and lawyers fighting back against the tech that so many insist is inevitable. It’s not, and our work proves that we can stop the future so many fear.
Lately, our projects included campaigns to outlaw technologies like facial recognition and police drones. We campaigned against legal structures like geofence and keyword warrants. I wrote op-eds about novel police abuses and had the chance to speak, lecture, and present on nearly every aspect of this work.
How has your career path unfolded?
I got here through luck, happenstance, and shear absurdity. I’m so grateful to have the role that I have today, but it often feels like it defies reason that I’m here. A mediocre college student, I struggled in the job market after college, never able to land quite the role I sought.
In law school I was very fortunate, transferring after my first year, and securing a spot at a top law firm…which I soon quit. It was then that I found my way to my passion in public interest law, first working at a Muslim civil rights organization at the start of the Trump presidency, finding renewed meaning in the interfaith activism I had first pursued as a teenager.
And a couple years later I took my next big leap, leaving to found my own organization, convinced that seemingly esoteric surveillance issues could resonate with a much broader audience.
How did you get into the field of Public Interest Technology (PIT)?
Public Interest Technology has been a focus of mine since long before I knew the term. As a twelve-year-old, my two biggest pastimes were tinkering with computers and protesting against the NYPD. I saw from an early age the power of technology to either disrupt or augment systems of control. And as a teenager, in the aftermath of 9/11, I saw some of my worst fears come to life, and things far darker than anything I had imagined.
Fighting surveillance has been a passion, an obsession, ever since, looking at how technologies sold to us with the promise of a bright, utopian future could be transformed into the things of nightmares.
When I came to public interest law, representing New Yorkers accused of terrorism, investigated with some of the most invasive systems on the planet, I saw how much worse things might get. But I also saw increasing engagement on the question of how the technologies we use could now control us.
That work as a practitioner led me to expand my writing in the field, first through local, then national, and now scholarly publications. I also found positions as a fellow both at NYU Law School and Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, expanding my work at the intersection of practice and the academy.
If students are interested in pursuing a career in PIT, where might they start?
As technology comes to envelop more and more of our lives, the field of Public Interest Technology will increasingly become intertwined with every type of public interest work. For those of you who want to join the field, there have never been more opportunities…there never has been more need.
There’s no one magic internship or job. The most important thing is finding something that resonates with your passions and beliefs. Don’t look at what issues are in the news or top of mind for everyone else, think instead about the issues that you care about, that you can’t stop talking about, but which others overlook. That’s the path to real impact and a career of true public service.