Data Cartels And Our Data | Sarah Lamdan | TMR

Sam hosts Sarah Lamdan, Professor of Law at the City University of New York (CUNY), to discuss her recent book Data Cartels: The Companies that Control and Monopolize Our Information.

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Check out more from the MR crew:

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Emma Vigeland ESVN

Matt Lech LEFT RECKONING

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I want to Welcome you to the program Sarah Lamdan. She is a Professor of law at the City University of New York. and the author of data cartels the companies that control and monopolize our information. Sarah is welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. So let's start with the origin story of this book if it begins when you were a law librarian. and during the Trump Administration when people are starting to think about getting a little more conscious about what ice is up to. yeah yeah, so this book wasn't something that I intended to get into. as you said I was a law librarian at the City University of New York where now I'm a law professor. and I don't know if everybody knows this, but the main tools that lawyers, law students, legal scholars, and judges use to assess the law and do legal research are Lexis and Westlaw. they're the gold standard products for legal research. and as a law librarian, my main job was to teach people how to use these resources and to use these resources on behalf of lawyers and legal Scholars. so and this was and we should be clear just you know I had a little bit of experience with this in another life. This is where you go to find case law essentially. and so if you're wondering if there's that you there's a case you're looking at or you're writing a paper about whatever it is this is like like almost like the Encyclopedia of all the cases and and that have existed. yeah and this is the way you find you know citations essentially. yeah, and I would even go a step further and say that you know this is one of the resources that help make the law. I mean this is what judges use and what all of the legislators use. This is where our law comes from. and until 2017 I thought that these companies were just research companies. You know, like information platforms. you have a password you log in you do your little legal research. and I'd never given much thought to the companies behind the products right? that the products were great. They were robust. They had everything I needed. but in 2017 I saw an article about like you said, companies that were vying for contracts with ice to help ice build surveillance tools. and a surveillance operation. a digital surveillance operation. kind of the same stuff you saw the NSA using after 9/11.