Trial by File Formats: Exploring Public Defenders' Challenges Working with Novel Surveillance Data

In the United States, public defenders (lawyers assigned to people accused of crimes who cannot afford a private attorney) serve as an essential bulwark against wrongful arrest and incarceration for low-income and marginalized people. Public defenders have long been overworked and under-resourced. However, these issues have been compounded by increases in the volume and complexity of data in modern criminal cases. We explore the technology needs of public defenders through a series of semi-structured interviews with public defenders and those who work with them. We find that public defenders' ability to reason about novel surveillance data is woefully inadequate not only due to a lack of resources and knowledge, but also due to the structure of the criminal justice system, which gives prosecutors and police (in partnership with private companies) more control over the type of information used in criminal cases than defense attorneys. We find that public defenders may be able to create fairer situations for their clients with better tools for data interpretation and access. Therefore, we call on technologists to attend to the needs of public defenders and the people they represent when designing systems that collect data about people. Our findings illuminate constraints that technologists and privacy advocates should consider as they pursue solutions. In particular, our work complicates notions of individual privacy as the only value in protecting users' rights, and demonstrates the importance of data interpretation alongside data visibility. As data sources become more complex, control over the data cannot be separated from access to the experts and technology to make sense of that data. The growing surveillance data ecosystem may systematically oppress not only those who are most closely observed, but groups of people whose communities and advocates have been deprived of the storytelling power over their information.