This post is part of a series featuring interviews with some of the fascinating individuals who joined our community for the 2014-2015 year. Conducted by our 2014 summer interns (affectionately known as "Berkterns"), these snapshots aim to showcase the diverse backgrounds, interests, and accomplishments of our dynamic 2014-2015 community.
Profile of Mitali Thakor
Berkman affiliate and Anthropology Ph.D student at MIT
@mitalithakor
interviewed in summer 2014 by Berktern Emily Hong
A new Berkman affiliate for 2014-2015, Mitali Thakor’s research investigates the transnational politics of digital forensics technology developed to address sex trafficking and sex work. Mitali is a fifth year graduate student in the MIT HASTS PhD program, and her fieldwork traverses three continents – she’s currently in Bangkok, where she chatted with me over Skype about herself and her work.
As part of her research, Mitali has been interviewing people affiliated with law enforcement, anti-trafficking organizations, and relevant technological applications, including some people working on cutting-edge image and facial recognition software. “My mouth just falls open when you hear about some of the things people are working on” she says. Before Thailand, Mitali was conducting similar fieldwork in DC and the Netherlands, and this multi-location approach allows her to look at global patterns of how information travels from policing hubs in Europe and the US to South East Asia.
She describes the issue of policing sex crimes, particularly child pornography and child trafficking, as a unique vantage point to study the development of online policing, online law enforcement, and carceral regimes. “The issue of child exploitation online has created new partnerships between law enforcement and computer scientists,” she says. “Technologists will develop a software [to apprehend those who engage sex trafficking] and then donate it, and this actually raises all kinds of questions of policing, privacy, and surveillance.”
As an example, she points to Project Sweetie, developed by the NGO Terre des Hommes in the Netherlands. Developed to address the issue of webcam sex tourism, a kind of child pornography where videos of child abuse are shared over the web, “Sweetie” refers to a hyper-realistic computer avatar of a 10-year-old Filipina girl. Deployed in a chat room, Sweetie was used in a sting operation to investigate individuals soliciting webcam sex acts. The visceral reaction to Sweetie’s human-like face is what Mitali finds interesting. “We focus on the CGI girl – this ten year old, Filipina child who isn’t real,” she says. What exactly does it mean to have such a highly gendered, racialized virtual body out there?
“Viewing this CGI girl engages my background in queer science and technology studies (STS), particularly in the light of new law enforcement technologies” explains Mitali. “Webcam sex tourism and pedophilia is vilified; these people are referred to as ‘offenders,’ ‘as perpetrators,’ and anything related to it is made an outsider, othered and queered in some way. When an NGO develops a CGI image, I want to ask, what kind of queer object is that? Looking at the design team, we see that there are no Filipino people. It’s entirely Dutch or English, and 80% men. Already within the design process there is potential for bias.”
“I earned my BA from Stanford in Anthropology and Feminist Studies, so a gender studies analysis is very much a part of my academic work and goals,” says Mitali, describing the importance of scrutinizing cultures of power and control where technology decisions are made.
Interviews of sex trafficking survivors often garner attention and interest, but Mitali is more interested by those in positions of technological power, who are rarely interviewed or publicized. What about the NGO professional, sitting at their desk and writing reports, she queries. Who are these people and where do they come from? What are their cultural biases? How do people think about their work, and how does that influence or shape the technologies or carceral systems they design and enforce?
In addition, Mitali notes that new technologies are simultaneously driving shifts in policing structure. Traditionally, a sting operation might have someone posing as a sex worker to catch potential perpetrators. But what happens this entire process migrates online? Anyone can pose as anyone in a chatroom, and technologies exist to track IP addresses and create online records of behavior. Does this kind of online surveillance and policing pose a problematic intervention? Given that no prior arrest records or warrants are utilized in an online sting, once individuals have been documented engaging in webcam sex tourism, what does response look like from police and NGOs, or what should it be? To address these questions, online child exploitation units are now drawing from multiple different disciplines, employing psychologists and technologists and others along with law enforcement agents.
Mitali sees Berkman as a good place to explore these issues, particularly the Center’s rights-focused projects and technology driven activism. Individuals working at tech companies and computer scientists are usually very aware of the privacy and surveillance concerns implicated in their work, she notes. However, “child pornography has always been a twist in the free speech debate… when we see images of child exploitation, that is a classic case in which every one sort of pauses. If you believe that people who commit child sex abuse must be imprisoned for life, you will take any steps necessary to convict them in anyway [including pushing the boundaries of surveillance and technological capacities].” Mitali’s analysis reveals this kind of bias in technological decision-making; one could imagine a hypothetical in which respect for online privacy in technology development could go out the window.
Outside of her dissertation work, Mitali loves dancing and yoga: “I do Indian classical dance, and in college danced competitively with an Indian folk dance group.” She’s also engaged in anti-violence organizations at MIT, efforts that focus on both sexual assault response and proactive efforts to promote healthy sexuality “I get to work with the LGBTQ community and with cultural community centers, sides which rarely gets attention,” she says. She also works with East Coast Solidarity Summer (formerly known as DC Desi summer), a program to build up a progressive South Asian youth movement by bringing together high school and early college students to discuss issues of racial identity, sexuality, activism, and mental health in South Asian communities. “ECSS is a safe and inclusive space for radical youth passionate about social justice,” she says, describing it one of the most rewarding things she does outside of her thesis work. “For me, it’s a constant reminder of power and potential. As a grad student, and hopefully one day a professor, I want community and youth engagement to remain a central and grounding force in my work.”