SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
For Immediate Release
July, 08 2021, 04:46pm EDT
Contact:
19 Human Rights, Civil Liberties, and Youth Advocacy Organizations Demand That School Administrators Stop Using Eproctoring
WASHINGTON
In June, Fight for the Future launched a scorecard detailing which universities plan to continue using harmful eproctoring apps like Proctorio, ProctorU, and Proctortrack, despite outcry from students and human rights organizations. Now, 19 organizations have published a letter calling on school administrators to ban the use of eproctoring.
Fight for the Future and 19 human rights, civil liberties, and youth advocacy organizations have published a letter calling on school administrators to ban eproctoring. The letter details serious concerns about eproctoring, including its invasive data collection, risk for academic harm, inefficacy at preventing academic dishonesty, and the potential to perpetuate racism and ableism. Signatories are calling for a complete ban on eproctoring technology in both university and K-12 settings.
The letter reads in part:
Eproctoring programs are invasive, dangerous, and fail to prevent academic dishonesty. They demonstrate systemic bias against non-white students, are harmful for students with testing anxiety, and discriminate against students with disabilities. They also treat students as if they are guilty until proven innocent, which is a disrespectful and harmful stance for any academic institution to take."
View the full letter and list of signatories at BanEproctoring.com/#Letter
Eproctoring companies exploited educators' panic at the beginning of the pandemic, but many schools are still deciding whether to sign new contracts for the upcoming fall semester. Princeton, MIT, and Stanford are among those that have stated they do not intend to use eproctoring software. The scorecard of where universities stand on the embattled technology, as well as a widget that allows anyone to test whether eproctoring software could detect their face, is available at BanEProctoring.com.
Leaders from the sign on organizations issued the following statements, and are available for comment upon request:
"Eproctoring is spyware, and forcing students to use it is dangerous and unethical. Schools and eproctoring companies claim that students are consenting to the surveillance, but privacy policies are complicated and deceptive, and often students don't actually have a choice about using eproctoring. In order to protect students, school administrators must ban eproctoring." said Erica Darragh, Campaigner and Community Manager at Fight for the Future.
"Eproctoring has a demonstrated track record of being racist, ableist, invasive, and harmful for students' mental health," said Amanda Kloer, Campaigns Director with ParentsTogether, a parent-led organization with 2.5 million members. "Parents have shared horror stories of their children being accused of cheating for minor eye movement, feeling scared showing strangers their bedrooms, and not being able to take tests because of their skin color. E-proctoring software invades student privacy and discriminates against kids, and it has no place in K-12 schools."
Bob Schaeffer, Executive Director at National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest), said, "Eproctoring technology is clearly not ready for prime time. Based on complaints FairTest has received from test-takers and teachers, the software often mislabels totally normal behaviors as 'cheating.' The false positive warnings appear to be more common for African American and LatinX students. From both the equity and education quality perspectives, eproctoring products should not be used for administering either K-12 or college exams."
"Eproctoring is an invasive, unaccountable, and discriminatory practice that has no place in an educational environment built on mutual trust and respect. Educators should reject eproctoring and rethink the way students are evaluated in many courses to avoid the use of these toxic surveillance tools," said John Davisson, Senior Counsel, Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).
Sean O'Brien, founder of Yale Privacy Lab, stated: "Eproctoring tech is classroom surveillance, period. Not only is it invasive from a privacy perspective, but it's a nightmare from an accessibility standpoint and inherently biased against people of color. If you care more about student cheating than the success of your students, you're looking for answers to the wrong questions and embracing bad pedagogy."
Tracy Rosenberg, Advocacy Director at Oakland Privacy, said, "Electronic proctoring software that uses facial recognition and/or tracks eye movements and keystrokes during testing processes treats students like criminals, creating anxiety and fear. Inadequacies in the software can have powerfully disparate impacts for numerous reasons, including skin color, exam taking techniques, and student temperament. Students should be focused during examinations on demonstrating what they know about the subject, not on controlling the lights, the direction of their eyeballs, or the speed of their keystrokes to manage imperfect and invasive software. Redirecting test taking from demonstrating subject matter mastery to coping with buggy surveillance software defeats the educational purpose of tests and examinations."
"E-proctoring is harmful, unreliable, and invasive, compounding long-standing practices of school surveillance. As a coalition of student organizers against algorithmic injustice, Encode Justice firmly opposes the use of e-proctoring, which disproportionately penalizes Black, Brown, and LGBTQ+ students while creating an atmosphere of fear and anxiety for test-takers," said Sneha Revanur, founder of Encode Justice, a youth-led organization fighting for digital rights.
Sarah Noon, US Federal Policy Liaison at Students for Sensible Drug Policy, stated, "Algorithmic test proctoring software has not been designed to be inclusive of all students and identities. This surveillance technology will lead to more students being wrongfully accused of academic dishonesty, particularly those with disabilities and marginalized groups who already face systemic bias. E-proctoring is invasive and endangers the most vulnerable students. The software would surely exacerbate the disparities culminating in the school-to-prison pipeline. We must trust students, respect their privacy, and refrain from technology that is sure to make mistakes and wrongfully target, invade, and hurt people."
Signers include:
Access Now
Center for Democracy & Technology
Electronic Privacy Information Center
Encode Justice
Fight for the Future
Kairos
Media Alliance
MPower Change
National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest)
National Lawyers Guild
Oakland Privacy
ParentsTogether
PDX Privacy
Restore the Fourth Minnesota
S.T.O.P. - The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project
Secure Justice
Students for Sensible Drug Policy
X-Lab
Yale Privacy Lab
Fight for the Future is a group of artists, engineers, activists, and technologists who have been behind the largest online protests in human history, channeling Internet outrage into political power to win public interest victories previously thought to be impossible. We fight for a future where technology liberates -- not oppresses -- us.
(508) 368-3026LATEST NEWS
'Era of Unconstrained Nuclear Competition' Looms With US-Russia New START Treaty Expiring
“The United States and Russia already have enough deployed nuclear weapons to kill tens of millions of people in an hour and devastate the world," said one expert, warning a lapse will "only make the world less safe."
Feb 03, 2026
If New START expires on Thursday, it will be the first time in decades that the United States and Russia don't have a nuclear arms control treaty, and experts have been sounding the alarm about the arms race that likely lies ahead.
“The expiration of New START would be massively destabilizing and potentially very costly both in terms of economics and security," said Jennifer Knox, a research and policy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists' (UCS) Global Security Program, in a Tuesday statement.
"The United States and Russia already have enough deployed nuclear weapons to kill tens of millions of people in an hour and devastate the world," Knox pointed out. "Letting New START lapse would erase decades of hard-won progress and only make the world less safe."
New START was signed in April 2010, under the Obama administration, and entered into force the following February. A decade later, just days into the Biden administration, it was renewed for five years. In 2022, Russia invaded neighboring Ukraine—an ongoing conflict—and the next year, Russian President Vladimir Putin suspended his country's participation in the treaty, though he has not withdrawn.
"The global security environment facing the United States is very different from when New START was first negotiated, but it remains true that bounding an open-ended, costly arms race will still require some form of agreement between Washington and Moscow," said Ankit Panda, the Stanton senior fellow in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Nuclear Policy Program, in a statement.
"The public and lawmakers alike must recognize that we are on the cusp of a fundamentally new nuclear age—one that is more unpredictable, complex, and dangerous than anything we've witnessed post-Cold War," warned Panda, one of the experts participating in a Wednesday briefing about the treaty. "A big risk is that without any quantitative limits or hands-on verification, we'll end up with compounding worst-case-scenario thinking in both capitals, as during the Cold War."
While Putin has halted US inspections of Russian nuclear facilities, he has still proposed extending the treaty for a year. Tara Drozdenko, director of the UCS Global Security Program, said that "abiding by New START for another year would be a win-win-win for the United States, Russia, and the rest of the world... The Trump administration should take swift action to publicly acknowledge that the United States will continue to abide by New START in the interim."
However, US President Donald Trump—who fancies himself as a deal-maker—hasn't expressed an interest in fighting for the pact, telling the New York Times last month that "if it expires, it expires," and "I'd rather do a new agreement that's much better."
Trump has called for China—which has the most nuclear weapons after Russia and the United States, and is building up its arsenal—to be part of a new deal, but Beijing hasn't signaled it will do so. Putin has proposed participation from France and the United Kingdom. The other nuclear-armed nations are India, Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan.
Noting Trump's comments to the Times and aspiration for the Chinese government to join, Jennifer Kavanagh, director of military analysis at the think tank Defense Priorities, declared that "this is wishful thinking–if the administration thinks getting a new 'better' treaty after this one lapses will be easy, they are mistaken."
"New START's end brings few benefits and lots of risks to the United States, especially as Washington tries to stabilize relations with rivals like Russia and China," she said, suggesting that Trump "would be better off hanging on to the agreement he has a little longer before trying to get a better one."
Dmitry Medvedev, a Putin ally who signed the treaty while serving as president and is now deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, said in a Monday interview with Reuters, TASS, and the WarGonzo project that "our proposal remains on the table, the treaty has not yet expired, and if the Americans want to extend it, that can be done."
"For almost 60 years, we haven't had a situation where strategic nuclear potentials weren't limited in some way. Now such a situation is possible," he noted. "I spent almost my entire life, starting from 1972, under the umbrella of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty."
"In some ways, even with all the costs, it is still an element of trust," Medvedev said. "When such a treaty exists, there is trust. When it doesn't, that trust is exhausted. The fact that we are now in this situation is clear evidence of a crisis in international relations. This is absolutely obvious."
Considering New START's potential expiration this week, the Russian leader said that "I don't want to say that this immediately means a catastrophe and a nuclear war, but it should still alert everyone. The clock that is ticking will, in this case, undoubtedly accelerate again."
According to Reuters, he was referencing the Doomsday Clock. Last week, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Science and Security Board set the symbolic clock at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to global catastrophe, citing various developments, including a failure to extend the treaty, Russian weapons tests, and China's growing arsenal.
"In 2025, it was almost impossible to identify a nuclear issue that got better," Jon B. Wolfsthal, a board member and director of global risk at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), said last week. "More states are relying more intently on nuclear weapons, multiple states are openly talking about using nuclear weapons for not only deterrence but for coercion. Hundreds of billions are being spent to modernize and expand nuclear arsenals all over the world, and more and more non-nuclear states are considering whether they should acquire their own nuclear weapons or are hedging their nuclear bets."
"Instead of stoking the fires of the nuclear arms competition, nuclear states are reducing their own security and putting the entire planet at risk. Leaders of all states must relearn the lessons of the Cold War—no one wins a nuclear arms race, and the only way to reduce nuclear dangers is through binding agreement to limit the size and shape of their nuclear arsenals," he argued. "Nuclear states and their partners need to invest now in proven crisis communication and risk reduction tools, recommit to preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, refrain from nuclear threats, and pursue a more predictable and stable global security system."
Regarding New START specifically, FAS Nuclear Information Project associate director Matt Korda stressed this week that "we are about to enter an era of unconstrained nuclear competition without any guardrails. Not only will there no longer be anything stopping the nuclear superpowers from nearly doubling their deployed nuclear arsenals, but they would now be doing so in an environment of mutual distrust, opacity, and worst-case thinking."
"While New START was a bilateral agreement between Russia and the United States, its expiration will have far-reaching consequences for the world," he said. "There are no benefits from a costly arms buildup that brings us right back to where we started, but there would be real advantages in pursuing transparency and predictability in an otherwise unpredictable world."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Human Rights Watch Israel-Palestine Team Quits Over Blocked Report on Right of Return
“I have lost my faith in the integrity of how we do our work and our commitment to principled reporting on the facts and application of the law,” said resigning staffer Omar Shakir.
Feb 03, 2026
Two Human Rights Watch employees—the group's entire Israel-Palestine team—resigned after senior staffers blocked a report calling Israel's denial of Palestinian refugees' right of return to their homeland a crime against humanity.
Jewish Currents' Alex Kane reported Tuesday that HRW Israel-Palestine team lead Omar Shakir and assistant researcher Milena Ansari are stepping down over leadership's decision to nix the report, which was scheduled for release on December 4. Shakir wrote in his resignation email that one senior HRW leader informed him that calling Israel's denial of Palestinian right of return would be seen as a call to “demographically extinguish the Jewishness of the Israeli state.”
“I have lost my faith in the integrity of how we do our work and our commitment to principled reporting on the facts and application of the law,” Shakir—who is also member of Jewish Currents' advisory board—wrote in his resignation letter. “As such, I am no longer able to represent or work for Human Rights Watch.”
In an interview published Tuesday by Drop Site News, Shakir—who was deported from Israel in 2019 over his advocacy of Palestinian rights—said: “I’ve given every bit of myself to the work for a decade. I’ve defended the work in very, very difficult circumstances... The refugees I interviewed deserve to know why their stories aren’t being told."
Ansari said that "whatever justification" HRW leadership "had for pausing the report is not based on the law or facts."
The resignations underscored tensions among HRW staffers over how to navigate a potential political minefield while conducting legal analysis and reporting of Israeli policies and practices in the illegally occupied Palestinian territories.
As Kane reported:
The resignations have roiled one of the most prominent human rights groups in the world just as HRW’s new executive director, Philippe Bolopion, begins his tenure. In a statement, HRW said that the report “raised complex and consequential issues. In our review process, we concluded that aspects of the research and the factual basis for our legal conclusions needed to be strengthened to meet Human Rights Watch’s high standards.” They said that “the publication of the report was paused pending further analysis and research,” and that the process was “ongoing.”
Kenneth Roth, a longtime former HRW executive director, defended the group's decision to block the report, asserting on social media that Bolopion "was right to suspend a report using a novel and unsupported legal theory to contend that denying the right to return to a locale is a crime against humanity."
However, Shakir countered that HRW "found in 2023 denial of a return to amount to a crime against humanity in Chagos."
"This is based on [International Criminal Court] precedent," he added. "Other reports echoed the analysis. Are you calling on HRW to retract a report for its first time ever, or it just different rules for Palestine?"
Polis Project founder Suchitra Vijayan said on X Tuesday that "the decision by Human Rights Watch’s leadership to pull a report on the right of return for Palestinian refugees, after it had cleared internal review, legal sign-off, and publication preparation, demands public reckoning."
"This was not a draft in dispute and the explanation offered so far evades the central issue of 'institutional independence' in the face of political pressure," added Vijayan, who is also a professor at Columbia and New York universities. "Why was the report stopped, and what does this decision signals for the future of its work and credibility on Palestine?"
Offering "solidarity to Omar and Milena" on social media, Medical Aid for Palestinians director of advocacy and campaigns Rohan Talbot said that "Palestinian rights are yet again exceptionalized, their suffering trivialized, and their pursuit of justice forestalled by people who care more about reputation and expediency than law and justice."
Sarah Leah Whitson, HRW's former Middle East and North Africa director and currently executive director at Democracy for the Arab World Now, told Drop Site News on Tuesday that “We have once again run into Human Rights Watch’s systemic ‘Israel Exception,’ with work critical of Israel subjected to exceptional review and arbitrary processes that no other country work faces."
The modern state of Israel was established in 1948 largely through a more than decadelong campaign of terrorism against both the British occupiers of Palestine and Palestinian Arabs and the ethnic cleansing of the latter. More than 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homeland, sometimes via massacres or the threat thereof, in what Arabs call the Nakba, or catastrophe.
More than 400 Palestinian villages were destroyed or abandoned, and their denizens—some of whom still hold the keys to their stolen homes—have yet to return. Today, they and their descendants number more than 7 million, all of whom have been denied the right of return affirmed in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194.
Many Palestinians and experts around the world argue that the Nakba never ended—a position that has gained attention over the past 28 months, as Israel has faced mounting allegations of genocide for a war that's left more than 250,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing in the coastal strip and around 2 million people forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened.
Bolopion told Kane Tuesday that the controversy over the blocked report is “a genuine and good-faith disagreement among colleagues on complex legal and advocacy questions."
“HRW remains committed to the right of return for all Palestinians, as has been our policy for many years," he added.
Keep ReadingShow Less
‘This Rogue Agency Should Not Receive a Single Penny,’ Progressives Say of ICE as Trump Signs Funding Bill
As some Democrats suggest compromising in order to reform the agency, Rep. Rashida Tlaib said that “ICE was built on violence and is terrorizing neighborhoods. It will not change.”
Feb 03, 2026
President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed a bill to end a brief government shutdown after the US House of Representatives narrowly passed the $1.2 trillion funding package.
While the bill keeps most of the federal government funded until the end of September, lawmakers sidestepped the question of funding for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which Democrats have vowed to block absent reforms to rein in its lawless behavior after the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis and a rash of other attacks on civil rights.
The bill, which passed on Tuesday by a vote of 217-214, extends funding for ICE's parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), for just two weeks, setting up a battle in the coming weeks on which the party remains split.
While most Democrats voted against Tuesday's measure, 21 joined the bulk of Republicans to drag it just over the line, despite calls from progressive activists and groups, such as MoveOn, which Axios said peppered lawmakers with letters urging them to use every bit of "leverage" they can to force drastic changes at the agency.
House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), who voted for the bill, acknowledged that it was "a leverage tool that people are giving up," but said funding for the rest of the government took precedence.
The real fight is expected to take place over the next 10 days, with DHS funding set to run out on February 14.
ICE will be funded regardless of whether a new round of DHS funding passes, since Republicans already passed $170 billion in DHS funding in last year's One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Democrats in both the House and Senate have laid out lists of reforms they say Republicans must acquiesce to if they want any additional funding for ICE, including requirements that agents nationwide wear body cameras, get judicial warrants for arrests, and adhere to a code of conduct similar to those for state and local law enforcement.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the chair emerita of the Congressional Progressive Caucus who voted against Tuesday's bill reiterated that in order to pass longterm DHS funding, "there must be due process, a requirement for judicial warrants and bond hearings; every agent must not only have a bodycam but also be required to use it, take off their masks, and, in cases of misconduct, undergo immediate, independent investigations."
Some critics have pointed out that ICE agents already routinely violate court orders and constitutional requirements, raising questions about whether new laws would even be enforceable.
A memo issued last week, telling agents they do not need to obtain judicial warrants to enter homes, has been described as a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment. Despite this, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said on Tuesday that Republicans will not even consider negotiating the warrant requirement, calling it "unworkable."
"We cannot trust this DHS, which has already received an unprecedented funding spike for ICE, to operate within the bounds of our Constitution or our laws," Jayapal said. "And for that reason, we cannot continue to fund them without significant and enforceable guardrails."
According to recent polls, the vast majority of Democratic voters want to go beyond reforms and push to abolish ICE outright. In the wake of ICE's reign of terror in Minneapolis, it's a position that nearly half the country now holds, with more people saying they want the agency to be done away with than saying they want it preserved.
"The American people are begging us to stop sending their tax dollars to execute people in the streets, abduct 5-year-olds, and separate families," said Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who gathered with other progressive lawmakers in the cold outside DHS headquarters on Tuesday. "ICE was built on violence and is terrorizing neighborhoods. It will not change... No one should vote to send another cent to DHS."
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who comes from the Minnesota Somali community targeted by Trump's operation there, agreed: "This rogue agency should not receive a single penny. It should be abolished and prosecuted."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular