Georgetown Law Technology Review (not EFF) will host this event. EFF Director of Strategic Campaigns Sarah Hamid will be speaking.
From the Organizers:
This panel is part of the Georgetown Law Technology Review (GLTR) biennial Symposium. The day-long event will bring together scholars, practitioners, and advocates for a series of panels and a keynote discussion centered on this year’s theme, Data, Power, and Authoritarianism.
Data, Power, and Authoritarianism will explore how digital technologies, data-driven systems, and platform economies are shaping political and social life in the United States and beyond. Through conversations on data governance, labor, surveillance, and the public sphere, participants will examine how power is concentrated in digital systems and what legal, policy, and organizing strategies might help build more accountable and democratic technological infrastructures.
About the Panel:
This panel will examine how AI-driven surveillance has become a central infrastructure of contemporary authoritarian governance, linking domestic policing, immigrant deportations, and political repression to broader projects of militarization and empire. Panelists will explore the deepening entanglement between technology corporations, security agencies, and the military-industrial complex, and how this paradigm union is eroding civil rights, due process, and democratic accountability. The conversation will also explore what it takes to confront surveillance as a governing strategy rather than a policy failure, and how collective alternatives grounded in justice, care, and democratic control might be built.
When:
Friday, January 30
Time: 4:30 PM - 5:45 PM ET
Where:
500 First St NW
Floor 9
Georgetown Law campus
Cost:
None
Event Requirements:
Online registration required by January 25, 2026
About the Speaker:
Sarah T. Hamid (she/any), Director of Strategic Campaigns, has been a community organizer working at the intersection of technology, global/domestic warfare, and punishment-based criminal and bordering systems for the past decade. In 2018, she co-founded the Carceral Tech Resistance Network, a knowledge-sharing network connecting grassroots efforts against the design, testing, and deployment of violent technologies. Now sunsetting, CTRN’s network grew to include 76+ advocacy groups across the Midwest, Southwest, and West Coast at its height.
At EFF, Sarah supports strategic campaign initiatives across domestic and international contexts, developing coordinated action infrastructure and expanding the range of remedies available to lawmakers and frontline communities.
About Georgetown Law Technology Review:
The Georgetown Law Technology Review marks the beginning of a journal dedicated to providing Georgetown students and faculty—as well as students, scholars, and practitioners across the country—with the opportunity to explore the intersection of law and technology, to understand the remarkable dialectic that exists at this nexus, and to contribute to the ongoing dialogue that helps makes possible the evolution of our laws and our legal system.
This event is organized not by EFF, but by Georgetown Law Technology Review.
