Update: Privacy Law Scholars Conference drops Palantir as a sponsor.
Update: A week after Oakland Privacy sent our letter, Mijente started a petition to Berkeley Law School. The petition is here.
Update: The Privacy Law Scholars Conference and Berkeley Law School responded to our letter and offered to let Oakland Privacy-affiliated activists attend the conference on a no-fee basis and to faciliate a meeting with Palantir Technology. Oakland Privacy respectfully declined. We reiterate that corporations complicit in violations of the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, United Nations charters and basic principles of racial justice and human rights should not be acceptable sponsors of academic privacy law conferences hosted at the University of California at Berkeley.
Oakland Privacy sent a letter to the Berkeley Law School’s Center for Law and Technology, the host and co-administrator (with George Washington Law School) of the 2019 Privacy Law Scholars Conference objecting to event sponsorship by Palantir Technologies.
The letter states that Palantir’s projects which include the FALCON asset forfeiture database, ICE’s Investigative Case Management System (ICM) and the recently discontinued LASR predictive policing program for the LAPD, “represent the cutting edge of high-tech surveillance wielded against the public and are used to track, profile, detain and incarcerate targeted groups, often in violation of due process and the Bill of Rights, and always in violation of basic principles of racial justice and human rights.”
The letter goes on to express concerns about the safety of “researchers whose work may focus on the company’s civil rights violations and who may be targeted by some of the company’s technologies in the hands of federal authorities, including many “junior and unfunded” scholars” and asks the conference program committee to “to reverse this decision and end Palantir’s endowment of the Privacy Scholar’s Conference in solidarity with the large citizens’ movement in the State of California that seeks to end corporate complicity in blatant violations of human rights.”
The conference schedule and sponsorship list can be found here. It gets underway on May 30 at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall. The program committee’s statement regarding their sponsorship policy can be found here.
Letter-Regarding-Sponsorship-of-PCLTMay 20 Response from PLSC Co-Chair Chris Hoofnagle
UC-Berkeley-Law