IJLA investigations often center on whether a district attorney or police officer has violated the Constitution. In the course of our investigations, we have frequently uncovered evidence that our clients were wrongfully convicted because someone in official power misused their authority to send the wrong person to prison. The evidence of this misconduct has led to the exonerations of dozens of people and given some clients grounds to pursue lawsuits against police and prosecutors in federal court. Unfortunately, the evidence of misconduct we uncover has also become vulnerable to the misuse of power.   

We are one of many justice and human rights organizations worldwide whose work focuses on exposing how government actors have broken the law. Globally, these organizations face increasing political pressure to stop their work. One way that governments exert this pressure is through control of the organizations’ data and technology when that data and technology is hosted or provided by a Big Tech company. With the agreement to build and expand a Meta data center in Richland Parish over broad opposition, we have already seen the close partnership between our government and Big Tech.

That is why IJLA is a founding partner of a new collaboration called the Technology Freedom Cooperative. The Cooperative members- Human Rights Data Analysis Group, Invisible Institute, Data Cívica, Kilómetro Cero, and IJLA–have worked together to explore how nonprofit organizations can better protect critical evidence, reduce their dependence on major technology platforms, and build independent capacity to work with large language models.

With support from the MacArthur Foundation, the Cooperative is providing distributed data backup systems and local AI infrastructure for organizations documenting human rights violations, state violence, wrongful convictions, and other abuses of power. In its first stage, cooperative partners are hosting local servers with secure backups of each other’s data to protect our access to it, and building large language models using cooperative-owned hardware and data, keeping our information safe from Big Tech. 

Joining the Technology Freedom Cooperative may seem adjacent to our mission of freeing wrongfully convicted and unjustly punished people. But in fact, our membership recognizes the vulnerability of our work, and that of our partners, to new threats, and declares that we will not stop seeking the truth for our clients simply because some would prefer that truth remain buried. As an organization, IJLA is committed to preserving the data and evidence that communities everywhere need to seek justice, expose hidden truths, and bring transparency and accountability to the institutions that govern our lives.