Senior Staff Attorney Jennifer Lynch will be speaking in a public lecture at the U.C. Davis law school as part of the 2015-2016 Mellon Sawyer Seminar Series: "Surveillance Democracies?" The subject of her talk is "Preserving Democracy in a 24/7 Surveillance Society."

The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution protects us from “unreasonable searches and seizures.” But what does that mean in a world where the government can use simple, widely-available, and often secret surveillance tools to figure out where we’ve been, where we’re going, who we associate with, and ultimately who we are—all without a warrant and without our knowledge? And how do we ensure we can continue to engage in First-Amendment protected activity without fear that the government is watching and recording our every move? Lynch’s lecture will cover these topics, focusing on some of the new surveillance technologies the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has seen in the last few years and discussing the evolution of courts’ understanding of what these technologies can do and how that impacts the development of the law.

The Mellon Sawyer Seminar Series brings together artists, anthropologists, legal scholars, historians, media scholars, political scientists, science and technology studies practitioners, computer scientists, and foreign policy scholars to enrich the political debate around global surveillance and give it a much broader context. Read more about the series here.