With Sarah Lamdan, Professor of Law at CUNY and Mizue Aizeki at Immigrant Defense Project

Some of our library vendors are also selling peoples' data to law enforcement surveillance programs, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)'s invasive "big data" policing program. Companies like Thomson Reuters and RELX Group (formerly Reed Elsevier), are supplying billions of data points, bits of personal information, updated in real time, to police as they run our library products and resources. 

Putting surveillance companies under the same corporate umbrellas as our research products raises sticky ethical quandaries. How do we transition the ethics we apply to offline library collections, paper collections and library stacks, to our online research platforms? Can we ensure patron privacy and freedom to research when we rely on data analytics corporations to license digital content on their third-party platforms? These questions don't have easy answers in our current digital library systems.

In this conversation, we will explore how our vendors' practices conflict with library privacy and intellectual freedom standards, and consider how the relationship between our vendors and law enforcement agencies might impact our patrons and coworkers.