What I can tell you from experience is that people of color, and religious people, are the most likely to get activated on this idea at the early stages. They can be among the most impacted by the harms of mass surveillance technology, and are among those that stand to gain the most from controlling it.

They also are often already organized, and often already have the ear of elected representatives from their past activism.

All of these things combine to make it a very good idea to engage those communities at the outset of an effort. I am not a person of color, nor am I religious, but I have been able to play an important role in my city's effort.

Technologists need to help, not necessarily lead, these community efforts. Email me if you'd like more support on getting started!

Perhaps, but when courting support, dumping half to a local majority of the potential audience in the first paragraph is ill-advisesd. Locally, police surveillance is equal opportunity.

There is no such "dumping." The plight of those communities is real, and it is used as an example. There are many more examples not mentioned, but that doesn't mean they are excluded from the inventory of harms a coalition will represent and work to fix.

Perhaps you don't have any rural republican friends but as a centrist, I do. And I can assure you they wouldn't make it to the second paragraph. Diversity is important in more ways than one. Not including "white" voters is a recipe for failure.

I appreciate you pointing this out as I stopped reading right there.

When I read "people of color" anywhere, I assume myself excluded.

> When I read "people of color" anywhere, I assume myself excluded.

Maybe you should keep reading, then.

This is the first bit of one of those ACLU articles. IMHO it doesn't sound like anyone is being "dumped", rather, the ACLU is choosing to focus on a particular audience. Which there are a lot of legitimate reasons to choose to do.

Also the statistical makeup each community is going to vary; so in some places you might be correct about "half to a local majority" of the community being white (not sure if that's what you meant), in other places, it'll be the other way around.

"The increasing use of surveillance technologies by local police across America, especially against communities of color and other unjustly targeted groups, has been creating oppressive and stigmatizing environments in which every community member is treated like a prospective criminal. Many communities of color and of low income have been turned into virtual prisons where residents’ public behavior is monitored and scrutinized 24 hours a day."

Many such decisions are made statewide. Even in one as blue as California there are significant voters in red counties. Exclude them at your peril, as was proven in 2000 and 2016.

The biggest failing with the democratic party is thinking that centrists or conservatives are not worth addressing, and it continues to earn them defeat.

It's disingenuous to think that People of Color aren't Republicans. Many immigrants who fled communist regimes identify as such.

Pedantic comments are not very helpful. Statistically, that group exists but is not a significant portion.

They matter in swing States like Florida, where 57% of Cuban-Americans voted for Trump and 66% of all Latinos voted for the Republican Governor DeSantis.

That conservatives see no ownership of problems characterized as specific to their black and brown neighbors (family, selves...) is orthogonal to the issue of what to do about those issues.

Republicans are just as concerned about crappy government.

They just want to solve the problem with less government instead of an oversight agency.

Which Republicans? There are several flavors these days.

Also the question would be if reducing the area of government in question also reduced the ability of that part of the government to perform it's function; if so, than a reduction vs oversight agency is not an apples-to-apples comparison, imho.

There's several flavors of democrats. Wanting authoritarian government seems to be common to a subset of both parties.

It's like two heads of the same coin. Barely a metaphor because it's coin that holds them together.