Olivier Sylvain at the Brooklyn Public Library

Watching the Watchers: Surveillance, Power, and the Fight for Accountability

As surveillance technologies grow more sophisticated and more embedded in everyday life, questions of privacy, power, and accountability have taken on new urgency. From facial recognition and predictive policing to the monitoring of protest movements, today’s surveillance landscape raises profound concerns about civil liberties, who is being watched, and why.

Olivier Sylvain will join Michelle Dahl and Derrick “Dwreck” Ingram for a conversation examining how surveillance operates in practice, and how it is being challenged. Moderated by Moustafa Bayoumi.

This event is part of Brooklyn Public Library’s Just Conversations series

About the panel:

Olivier Sylvain a Professor of Law at Fordham University, a Senior Policy Research Fellow at Columbia University's Knight First Amendment Institute, and the author of Reclaiming the Internet: How Big Tech Took Control—and How We Can Take It Back.

Michelle Dahl is Executive Director of STOP (Surveillance Technology Oversight Project), whose work focuses on government transparency and police accountability

Derrick “Dwreck” Ingram is co-founder of Warriors in the Garden, who brings firsthand insight into the surveillance of protest movements and the lived experience of organizing under watch.

Moustafa Bayoumi is an award-winning author, journalist, and educator. He is an opinion columnist for The Guardian, where he also regularly contributes feature articles.

Center for Brooklyn History
128 Pierrepont Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201

In Reclaiming the Internet, Olivier Sylvain, a leading legal scholar and former senior advisor at the Federal Trade Commission, exposes the incentives behind social media design, revealing how they trap users in cycles of addiction, misinformation, and harm.

“Sylvain meticulously exposes how a handful of corporations hide ruthless systems of surveillance, addiction, and commercial exploitation behind legal and cultural myths around neutrality and free expression.”
—Zephyr Teachout, Fordham Law School, author of Break ’Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom From Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money

Learn more about Reclaiming the Internet