Just Conversations | 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. This program brings together legal scholars, advocates, and organizers to examine how surveillance operates in practice, and how it is being challenged.

Moderated by award-winning journalist and author Moustafa Bayoumi, the conversation will feature Michelle Dahl, Executive Director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), whose work focuses on government transparency and police accountability; Olivier Sylvain, Professor of Law at Fordham University and a leading voice on communications policy, artificial intelligence, and commercial surveillance; and Derrick “Dwreck” Ingram, 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.

Together, the panel will explore how surveillance technologies shape public life, the legal frameworks that enable or constrain their use, and the strategies communities are developing to ensure that technological advancements don’t come at the expense of age-old rights. Grounded in both scholarship and lived experience, this conversation will ask what it means to safeguard civil liberties in an age of constant monitoring

About Just Conversations

Just Conversations brings into dialogue issues facing our borough, city, and society and gives voice to the change makers who move us towards a more equitable future. It is co-presented by Brooklyn Org and the Center Brooklyn History.

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Participants

Michelle Dahl is a civil rights attorney and nonprofit leader dedicated to community support and government accountability. She joined STOP (Surveillance Technology Oversight Project) as Executive Director after completing a Justice Catalyst Fellowship with the National Police Accountability Project, where she developed nationwide resources to support litigation against law enforcement misconduct in the criminal legal system.

Michelle earned her J.D., cum laude, from New York University School of Law, where she worked in the Civil Rights in the Criminal Legal System Clinic and the Global Justice Clinic and served as an editor for the Review of Law and Social Change. Before law school, she spent several years in nonprofit development and community engagement and is an AmeriCorps alum.

She holds a B.A., cum laude, in Government from Smith College and a Master of Arts in Public Leadership from United Lutheran Seminary in Philadelphia, where she graduated with honors by vote of the faculty. Her graduate work focused on the intersections of interfaith community organizing and social justice movements.

 

 

Derrick Ingram-Guillaume has built a career where power gets uncomfortable — where protest meets policy, narrative shapes legislation, and one man’s megaphone can apparently justify a six-hour police siege.

As co-founder and communications director of Warriors in the Garden, his work isn’t theoretical. It helped repeal 50-A, challenged qualified immunity in New York City, and moved money, votes, and institutions — sometimes within the same news cycle.

His voice has shaped some of the most consequential cultural and political moments of the last decade. He contributed to Nikole Hannah-Jones’ Emmy Award-winning 1619 Project, appeared in Spike Lee’s 9/11 Epicenter, and in 2022 became the centerpiece of Amnesty International’s most successful fundraising campaign of the year. The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Vice have all come calling. So have the campaigns of Cori Bush, Chi Ossé, and Zohran Mamdani — all of whom won.

Then there’s the night the NYPD decided the most pressing threat to New York City was one man with a megaphone. In August 2020, dozens of officers, drones, a helicopter, snipers, and police dogs descended on his apartment in a six-hour warrantless siege in which Ingram-Guillaume, naturally, livestreamed to thousands. The backlash was swift, condemnations were national, and the message unintentionally clear: the system fears a good communicator. Since then, he’s turned state surveillance into a curriculum teaching organizers how to protect themselves in an era of facial recognition, fabricated charges, and digital authoritarianism. With an MBA and a career spanning Fortune 500 boardrooms and frontline protests, Ingram-Guillaume operates by one conviction: the right story, told at the right moment, to the right people, can change everything.

 

Olivier Sylvain is a Professor of Law at Fordham University and a Senior Policy Research Fellow at Columbia University's Knight First Amendment Institute. His research is on information and communications law and policy. His most recent writing, scholarship, commentary, and congressional testimony are on online intermediary liability, commercial surveillance, and artificial intelligence. He just published his first book, Reclaiming the Internet: How Big Tech Took Control—and How We Can Take It Back. 

The National Science Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation have awarded him grants to support this work. He was a Senior Advisor to the Chair of the Federal Trade Commission from 2021 to 2023. He serves and has served on a variety of boards. Before entering academia, Olivier was a Karpatkin Fellow in the National Legal Office of the American Civil Liberties Union in New York City and a litigation associate at Jenner & Block, LLC, in Washington, D.C.

 

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. Bayoumi is also the author of several critically acclaimed works, including How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America, which won an American Book Award and the Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction, and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror, which was also awarded the Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction. Most recently, Bayoumi’s essay “The Destruction of Palestine Is Breaking The World” won the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association’s 2025 award for Excellence in Opinion and Analysis. He is Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York and lives in Brooklyn.