00:00:10 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Welcome everybody. It is the 25th of September 2023, but you are listening to this podcast of Citizen D on the 15th of November 2023. With us today is Sarah Lamdan, professor of law with a master’s degree in library science and legal information management.

Professor Lamdan works with immigration groups on government surveillance issues, library advocacy organizations on Open Access and research and privacy projects, and with open government advocates on federal records preservation and access initiatives.

She recently authored a book called Data Cartels, the companies that control and monopolize our information and you guessed it, this will be the topic of our conversation, Professor lent and welcome. Welcome to the show.

00:00:56 Sarah Lamdan

Hi, it’s great to be here.

00:00:59 Domen Savič / Citizen D

It’s such an interesting read and it’s such a great topic to discuss because you start with the issue of open data, of data cartels, of companies that control and monopolize our information from a very, I should even say, personal experience. So I would like to know, to get us going, what was the reason you developed an interest in this topic and how did you go about how did you go about researching it.

00:01:28 Sarah Lamdan

Those are two really good questions. So to answer the first question, I kind of fell into this topic by chance. In a way, I’m kind of the ideal person to write about it, cause I didn’t come in with any sort of agenda. I was a law professor and also I’m a librarian, so I deal a lot with information access and informational resources.

And I actually saw in the news that a lot of our research providers in the United States were vying to work with our Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Agency, so ICE. And I’m not sure how it’s viewed across the world, but in the United States, especially in 2017, when I first started digging into this issue, ICE was problematic.

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement in the United States was known as committing human rights abuses. Basically, separating families at the border, putting children in cage like enclosures and just doing all sorts of really icky gross things. So working with ICE wasn’t positive, right? It wasn’t about helping immigration agency reunite families or help people ascertain citizenship, it was really about human rights issues.

So I became very interested in why our research providers were working with ICE and what they were giving ICE and I started asking, you know, I started asking our research vendors at the school that I worked what is your company doing with ice? And I asked in my professional organization, the American Association of Law Libraries what exactly is Lexus, our main research provider and Westlaw, our main research provider. How exactly are their companies working with ICE?

And instead of getting the answers, I got kind of censored, the American Association of Law Libraries wouldn’t allow me to ask that question on their web pages and at my law school, my vendors became very agitated when I asked them about about their work with ICE.

I wasn’t getting answers and that’s really what started the research process behind data cartels and kind of all the research I’ve uncovered then. And really what came after that even-though I’m an academic, the research process for digging up those connections that I described in the book, it was almost journalistic. It was almost more of an investigative reporting type of research where I was trying to look at corporate filings and advertising and what work that other journalists had done to connect the dots between our research products and government data brokering and surveillance, which is what I uncovered ultimately.

00:04:44 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Do you have any reasons… you mentioned in the book and you just mentioned the journalistic way of researching the topic, it seems that on one side there’s let’s say a fair amount of information on these systems in the public, you just have to find a way to get it, at the same time or on the opposite side people, as you’ve mentioned just now, are very are being very obtuse about it in terms of, you know, they’re not giving you answers and stuff. How do you reason those two extremes? Why do you think there’s such a such a code of silence related to to these systems in, in, in academia and in a broader society?

00:05:31 Sarah Lamdan

That’s a good question. So I think most of it is obtuse for kind of public relations reasons. I don’t think that Reed Elsevier, Lexus Nexis or Thomson Reuters or any of the other entities that are doing government surveillance… I don’t think… let me turn the negative into a positive. I do think that these companies recognize that the public generally doesn’t like to be surveilled by the government and that the work it’s doing with government agencies probably doesn’t have a good public relations base. It doesn’t look good.

So the companies themselves are purposely obtuse about the work that they’re doing with the government, in fact. I work with a bunch of organizations that do legal work around these issues, and they’ve actually in the United States found that American agencies actually have non-disclosure provisions in their contracts with Lexis Nexis that prohibit government agencies from discussing their contracts so they recognize it.

They they know that the public doesn’t think it’s great that they’re working with ICE or that they’re sharing information with the FBI or the, you know, or other government agencies. It doesn’t look good and I think one of the reasons in academia that we feel a lot of discomfort around this topic… I think there are two reasons. I think the first is that we recognize how much we depend on Elsevier in science, direct and you know all of the other products that these companies provide us, we need them, right?

We need to have good working relationships with Elsevier in order to get contracts in order to make sure that our academics get their work in the right journals, right? So it’s important for us and for all librarians and for our administrative staff and to work with these.

And also the other reason. The other reason is that we don’t know a lot about what is going on in these companies, right. And more information about that is starting is to come out. And when it does, people like me or brands or everybody else who kind of does work in this area, we tend to get a lot of push-back from the companies. We get nasty letters from them in the mail. They call our deans and our and people in our academic institutions to to tell them that we are spreading rumors or false information.

So it can be kind of scary for an academic who stand up to these companies without a lot of backing from their institutions or their professional groups.

00:08:37 Domen Savič / Citizen D

So in your book and in the debate around data cartels.. you have, let’s call them two sides, right? You have government agencies, government institutions, public institutions that are buying or that are using these data sets that are working with these private companies, essentially, that are putting together these data sets. So who do you think started this, should we say the ball rolling?

Is it the government coming to individual or independent companies, saying OK, we need that. Can you provide that or was it the other way around? Was it the public private companies putting together these data sets and asking or, you know, pitching this to the government saying “I’m sure you could find a way to use this?”

00:09:32 Sarah Lamdan

That’s also a good question. I’m going to say that after every question cause they’re all good questions, but the that question just got an entire book answering it, so one of my favorite journalists who writes about data analytics companies, his name is Mackenzie Funk, his book is coming out, I think in the next few weeks. It’s called the Hank Show and it’s actually about the man who created these data analytics systems and it’s it’s a really fascinating story, I urge everybody to go out and get The Hank show, it is from Saint Martin’s press, it’s coming out I believe at the end of this month or maybe next month, so keep your eye out for it.

But in the book he describes how the data analytics systems were created actually in the private sector. They were created in Florida by this man, jh created a company called Citizen and Citizen became Matrix and after September 11^th, the man who created these systems, named Hank Asher, actually