Anonymity, Privacy, and the Surveillance State

Our University of the Streets Café public conversations are much like any you’d have with friends or family around a dinner table, except with more people, more points of view, and slightly more structure. Conversations are hosted by a volunteer moderator who is there to welcome everyone and keep things on track. To get things started, there’s a guest, or sometimes two, who get the ball rolling by sharing their ideas, experiences and questions. After that, it's all up to the participants.

This conversation will consider privacy rights and our relationship to the surveillance state. In a world of centralized data banks, to what extent can we control access to our personal information and data? Is privacy a right or a privilege and what steps should be taken in order to secure our privacy rights? Alternatively, are there benefits to be gained in relinquishing our hold on our information?

Guest:
Cleve Higgins has, since moving to Montreal more than a decade ago, worked as a system administrator at koumbit.org and thelinknewspaper.ca, a promoter of encrypted communications, a student on strike, a union organizer, web developer, and boot importer. He aspires to neighbourhoods without gentrification, cities without police or military, lands without industrial extraction, internets without surveillance-capitalism, and a world without borders.

Lex Gill works at the intersection of law, technology and social change. She is a researcher for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, a BCL/LLB candidate at McGill University's Faculty of Law, and a former Google Policy Fellow at the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic. She has worked extensively on issues of surveillance by police and national security bodies, particularly in terms of their impacts on marginalized and disadvantaged communities.

Moderator:
Abby Lippman is a longtime feminist activist with special interests in women's health and women's health policies. Now a professor emerita, she has one foot still based in academia (specifically at McGill and Concordia Universities) and the other, the foot she favors, remains firmly planted in social justice and reproductive activism with diverse community groups in Montreal and beyond its borders.

Accessibility info: Dawson College is wheelchair accessible via all of its entrances. Once in the College, the New School can be reached by elevators. There are wheelchair accessible washrooms equipped with grab-bars in proximity to the New School.