CISI Research and Products
We believe that stewards of timely, accurate local knowledge (TALK) deserve tools for self-advocacy. CISI offers tip sheets for civil society and truth-telling practitioners who are navigating their work through volatile times while protecting community safety and privacy.
Our mission and ethos inspires us to increasingly explore modes of knowledge mobilization outside the traditional academic report. Feedback from our engagement work inspires new learning products that resonate with real-world best practice. Taking our inspiration from the rebel spirit of DIY community media, CISI is partnering with creative luminaries on forthcoming zines and other tactile media products that are easy and cheap to reproduce and distribute locally.
Five Steps to Stronger Security:
A CISI Guide for Knowledge Workers
Strengthening institutional resilience means supporting collective privacy and security, which starts with the individual. This introductory CISI tip sheet on digital security gives practitioners, especially journalists and civil servants working under pressure, five basic steps to take when protecting their information while fostering timely, accurate local knowledge.
Research Program: Luxury Surveillance Lab
Dr. Chris Gilliard
Traditionally, we think of surveillance technologies as imposed upon unwilling or unwitting groups and individuals. The concept of luxury surveillance, however, complicates this power dynamic with consensual tracking devices that extend the scope of the state. Luxury surveillance is defined as consensual surveillance that users pay for directly, and whose tracking, monitoring, and quantification features are understood by the user as benefits that they are likely to celebrate. CISI’s Luxury Surveillance Lab tracks companies' efforts to influence policy, investigates how these technologies are being normalized despite having the potential to disrupt bodily autonomy, and analyzes the role of non-diagnostic uses of health metrics in an arena where health care itself is becoming a luxury good.
The embrace, proliferation, and normalization of consumer surveillance technology is not so simple as a top-down or bottom-up process. Imposed surveillance––in the form of ankle monitors, fusion centers, and city-run automated license plate readers––are supplemented by data from these same, or similar technologies in the form of wearable and installable objects. For example, video doorbell data feeds into home owners’ association monitoring.
The stakes of this adoption process range from changes in legislation (for instance, regarding "porch pirates") to challenges to people's bodily autonomy as states begin to assert their role in the surveillance of pregnant people, often with the aid of wearables and social media. As companies like Apple, Oura, and Amazon attempt to move these devices from optional consumer gadgets to essential health care aids, researchers must monitor attempts to track and manage our increasingly surveilled bodies, movements, mental health, and emotional states for profit.
Research Program: Networked Incitement
Dr. Joan Donovan
“Networked incitement” describes how influential figures organize large-scale political violence via social media, coordinating shifting political factions across multiple communication platforms to mobilize group action during civic unrest. Civil society and truth-telling institutions must experiment with strategies to diminish the impact of disinformation, which is often the precursor to networked incitement via acute incidents of violence or longer harassment and intimidation campaigns. CISI’s new research lab detects and documents networked incitement by gathering data and engaging with institutions affected by real-time disruptions. We compile weekly reports and provide direct advisory support to those stakeholders hoping to understand actors, incidents, and trends.
Over the last decade, intimidation tactics like swatting and doxing became popularized online as a way for malicious actors to harass, defame, and threaten women, gender-nonconforming individuals, and journalists. Now, these tactics are used to intimidate election officials and perceived ideological adversaries. Schools, hospitals, election sites, political offices, state capitols, and civil society organizations–no public place is safe from threat. Hoaxes and false news are propagated by a mixed group of actors – political operatives, brands, influencers, social movements, and unaffiliated trolls – who develop and refine new techniques to influence public opinion and profit from it, often coalescing around specific wedge issues and then disappearing after unrest. Such shifting political factions employ media manipulation techniques; circumventing traditional gatekeeping institutions and, if that doesn’t work, impersonating them, while also leveraging algorithmic filtering and recommendation systems to their advantage.
Because the internet is not a neutral, but a crucial global technology, failure to create regulatory processes and enforce corporate policy about media manipulation on social media threatens the civil liberties of all. CISI researchers track networked incitement to build an evidence base of actors, incidents, and trends while informing stakeholders who need the tools and knowledge to build institutional resilience to novel threats, with or without the support of industry.