ALVARO BEDOYA HAS been working on surveillance, privacy, and technology in Washington for years now. Before founding Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology, he served as chief counsel to Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., and the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law. But as surveillance became a major national issue thanks to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Bedoya saw something disturbing amid the Washington wonkery: a huge gulf between the discussions of government spying, on the one hand, and aggressive policing tactics in minority communities on the other.

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“We’re having these two separate debates that are running in parallel and never intersecting,” Bedoya explains. “There’s no recognition that those issues constantly overlap. The level of policing of the black community is facilitated by the surveillance laws and surveillance technology developed for the war on terror.” Today’s much anticipated all-day conference, “The Color of Surveillance: Government Monitoring of the African American Community,” is an attempt to bridge the gulf. The conference, organized by Bedoya and Georgetown Law professor Paul Butler, runs from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. ET, and is being live streamed here, hashtag #ColorofSurveillance. In January, Bedoya wrote an essay in Slate exploring the history of FBI surveillance of activists and people of color, using the example of Martin Luther King Jr., and how those practices have advanced with technology. Similarly, the conference will start with the history of surveillance reaching all the way back to the days of slavery and plantations, when policies like lantern laws, enacted in the 18th century, forced black, mixed race, and other enslaved people to carry a light at night to identify themselves. The timeline will then jump to World Word I, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the “negro subversion” division of military intelligence, which was formed to spy on black activists. Then, attendees will hear about Martin Luther King Jr. and the days of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his COINTELPRO program focused on monitoring of social and political activists.