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Karan Tripathi

@karantripathi.bsky.social
152 followers 350 following 94 posts

PhD at University of Cambridge, MSc at University of Oxford. Researching impact of emerging technologies on criminalisation and punishment.

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Reposted by Karan Tripathi
Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
New paper 🚨 I examine digital policing harms that exceed any single system, showing how distributed, multiparty production generates production-mediated harms and simulacral accountability: formal responsibility without real knowledge or control. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
papers.ssrn.com
Configuring Control: Production-mediated Harms and Simulacral Accountability of Digital Policing in India
Digital policing scholarship has developed sophisticated accounts of both how human rights harms arise and how accountability for such harms can be organised.&n
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
New paper 🚨 I examine digital policing harms that exceed any single system, showing how distributed, multiparty production generates production-mediated harms and simulacral accountability: formal responsibility without real knowledge or control. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
papers.ssrn.com
Configuring Control: Production-mediated Harms and Simulacral Accountability of Digital Policing in India
Digital policing scholarship has developed sophisticated accounts of both how human rights harms arise and how accountability for such harms can be organised.&n
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
Pleased to share the 2nd publication from my MSc dissertation, conducted at @oxfordcrim.bsky.social but honed at @cambcriminology.bsky.social . This paper theorises nature and generativity of parole punitivity grounded in comparative penology journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
journals.sagepub.com
Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 21/06/2026
Materiality and production can’t be bracketed from emancipatory politics of AI. Especially when the AI-vangelists try very hard to occlude the same @criticalai-journal.bsky.social
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Reposted by Karan Tripathi
Tech Policy Press @techpolicypress.bsky.social · 21/06/2026
Code can be forked overnight; fabrication plants can’t. Javier Serrano, Nicholas Gates and Johan Linåker argue Europe’s tech sovereignty push stops at software—and that real independence means opening up hardware too, not just the code that runs on it.
buff.ly
Without Open-Source Hardware, There Is No EU Tech Sovereignty
Javier Serrano, Nicholas Gates, and Johan Linåker make the case for focusing on open-source hardware and the design layer in Europe's tech sovereignty strategy.
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 21/06/2026
I fail to understand the paradigmatic claims in criminology: “we now live in a risk society” (there are other mechanisms in play as well + risk did not germane in the 90s); “we are in ultramodern society” (I thought we were in risk society! What is “ultramodern”?)
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
It was so much fun organising this conference. The future of critical criminology is in great hands
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
Yesterday, I presented a part of my doctoral project at a seminar at @cambcriminology.bsky.social It felt very special to finally share some of the fruits of my labour with peers, mentors, and colleagues in the field. Next stop: @bschcnetwork.bsky.social conference
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 07/05/2026
Felt great to present fruits of my PhD research at Institute of Criminology, Cambridge’s PhD conference. Both my theory and humour were well received. So much more to come, I’m so excited.
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 16/04/2026
It’s never restricted to “verification”. Learn from India: modularisation and modulation are bedfellows. Verification is a smokescreen for dehumanising, tokenising, and assetising of being
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Reposted by Karan Tripathi
jon ben-menachem @jbenmenachem.com · 16/04/2026
it's become so hard to do quick web searches about events that aren't in the immediate past. I feel like I need to develop some kind of news article library or notetaking system
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Reposted by Karan Tripathi
MIT Press @mitpress.bsky.social · 30/01/2026
#OpenAccess in the February issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (@jocn.bsky.social): Context Matters: Human Faces Hinder Face Pareidolia
direct.mit.edu
Context Matters: Human Faces Hinder Face Pareidolia
Abstract. The human visual system readily processes illusory faces (IFs) as faces, a phenomenon known as face pareidolia. Building on evidence that IF processing elicits face-like neural activity and…
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 25/11/2025
Actor-Network Theory (as per criminologists)
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 27/10/2025
Just read an article in @theoreticalcrim.bsky.social that has completely misattributed and misinterpreted Deleuze, and re-signified concepts without sufficient reason. Don’t even get me started on argumentative flaws. Sad to see this on our discipline’s only theoretical journal
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 26/09/2025
UK is getting its Aadhar
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Reposted by Karan Tripathi
Law + Tech News Bot @news.bot.suffolklitlab.org · 26/09/2025
TL;DR: Verizon is being held accountable for unlawfully tracking and selling customer location data without proper disclosure or consent, raising serious privacy concerns.
techdirt.com
Verizon Remains On The Legal Hook For Illegally Spying On You And Selling Your Movement Data (For Now)
For decades, major U.S. wireless providers have collected sensitive customer movement and location data (often down to the meter), then sold it to a long list of random dipshits — usually without b…
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 23/09/2025
The silence of certain immigration scholars on Far Right marches, rise of Reform and its policies, and everyday embodied harms of migrantphobia is alarming and concerning. Pick a side, speak up, before it’s too late. Don’t compel us to expose your duplicity and hypocrisy.
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 16/07/2025
My fieldwork has now brought me to Hyderabad, where I am conducting research with India’s most technologically advanced police force. I look forward to developing a deeper, more contextually grounded understanding of the social life of algorithmic evidence in criminal investigations and prosecutions
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 10/07/2025
As part of my PhD fieldwork, I have joined Bureau of Police Research & Development - India’s state-owned policing think tank. I’ll be working as a research assistant for Tech & Modernisation Division - looking at use of AI in criminal investigation and evidence construction
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 27/06/2025
I love sharing reports from left-leaning media outlets in my right-wing heavy family WhatsApp groups just to redistribute the pains of cognitive overloading.
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
Proposed changes to tax laws are simply providing a remote legal backing to an already prevalent police practice - confiscating devices and roving inspection of personal chats
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Reposted by Karan Tripathi
Inquest @inquest.bsky.social · 10/05/2025
This week Inquest covered false promises: that the “new” drug war would be less punitive and more focused on public health (it is not), and that big tech policing product ShotSpotter makes communities safer (it does not). Read the full recap: mailchi.mp/inquest.o...
Quote card on a black background with a subtle tiled repeating image of a blue neon sign of a machine gun. Quote from Ed Vogel, author of "Turning Death into a Commodity," reads: "ShotSpotter is a way to monetize death by gun violence. It is constructed to extract profit from the murder of people in Black, brown, and poor communities rendered surplus by organized abandonment—a form of profit extraction that the prison–industrial complex had previously been unable to fully activate." Directly above the quote is Inquest magazine's colophon, a transparent serifed capital I in a white circle.
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 09/05/2025
It’s all in the ground truth (or the lack thereof)
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 09/05/2025
Defence AI is built by, and for, war capitalists.
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Reposted by Karan Tripathi
Philip Di Salvo @philipdisalvo.bsky.social · 05/05/2025
U.S. Companies Honed Their Surveillance Tech in Israel. Now It’s Coming Home. theintercept.com/2025/04/30/i...
theintercept.com
U.S. Companies Honed Their Surveillance Tech in Israel. Now It’s Coming Home.
After deploying AI tools in Israel and on the U.S. border, American tech companies are now powering domestic repression.
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 24/04/2025
Authoritarian regimes have not just Co-opted “decolonisation” and “sovereignty”, but also “privacy” and “data protection”. State is claiming privacy against its own citizens.
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 21/04/2025
Delhi Police arresting people based on facial recognition match score of 32%! At this point, such machine-driven ‘intelligence’ is simply a legitimation/rationalisation exercise.
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 03/04/2025
Thinking of Karen Barad’s relational ontology. ‘Identification’ here is no longer a search for pre-existing reality but a discursive tool to actively shape and produce reality. The reality here being “criminality”.
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 31/03/2025
An important thread on the new Sentencing Council guidelines on pre-sentencing reports
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 22/03/2025
Facial recognition is not about identification, it’s about labelling. The state doesn’t want to ‘see’ you, it already sees you and wants to ‘unsee you’ by legitimising its ways of (un)seeing as the only appropriate way of seeing.
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Reposted by Karan Tripathi
Maike Osborne @maosbot.bsky.social · 18/03/2025
Tenure should empower academics to pursue radical research, to speak truth to power and to fight for transformative progress, but my tenured colleagues seem to just chase the money, obediently follow power and fight only for the progress of their CVs
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 18/03/2025
Columbia is as example of why protestors/encampments were demanding review/divestment of funding sources. Universities have failed this litmus test, rather, shown their true colours. But guess what, so called tenured “critical scholars” will continue to benefit from this.
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 17/03/2025
SOCMINT research needs to be revived.
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 15/03/2025
While aggregated data on attacks on police is publicly available, the same for attacks by the police is nowhere to be found - and now being actively denied under “right to privacy” of the officers involved. Classic case of weaponising liberal reforms discourse
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 12/03/2025
Theft in India is punishable with up to 2 years in jail, deemed a petty offence as per settled law. Arrest should only be made in exceptional circumstances. But FRT cameras has turned this upside down - amplifying the criminalisation and detention of those accused of petty, not serious offences
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 19/02/2025
Police tech providers in India are moving from “here’s our product” to “you can’t do it without us” - I’m guessing what would be the obvious next step!
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 16/02/2025
Indian state of UP spent 400 million INR to procure “AI crowd management tool” which was only used for counting footfall. Despite this, a tragic stampede took place where hundreds (still counting) lost their lives. Later, more money was spent in pushing positive ads for “digital kumbh”
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 16/02/2025
Senior police officers in India call themselves “data fiduciaries”, but in the same breath go on to share their visions of a data warehouse that integrates static and real-time data from both state and private entities (delivery apps, e-commerce apps, home IOTs).
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 14/02/2025
Funny how European scholars keep using “risk profiles” instead of “control profiles” to refer to group-based profiling of people. ‘Risk’ both sanitises and legitimises the deeply political, dehumanising, and subjugating logics (and legacies) of racialised group-based profiling.
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 13/02/2025
Love archival research - as someone who does empirical research in criminal justice, archives (to an extent) are the least triggering, traumatising, and exhausting, source for data. Fun fact: colonial archives are more easily accessible than postcolonial ones 💀
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 12/02/2025
Digital infrastructures in policing - both materially and symbolically - are mobilised arbitrarily. ‘Efficiency’, thereby, both in its functional and discursive operation, is multivalent, fluid, contingent to the context in which it is invoked - becoming complicit in punitive-political policing
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 07/02/2025
From the Field: “We don’t use them much, given Delhi’s traffic, we prefer bikes or our normal cars … they’re too big, if we use them, we’ll never reach the spot in time” … “but they look cool, right? mostly for the show, I’d say” - patrol officers on the new “mobile” high-tech fleet.
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Reposted by Karan Tripathi
Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 31/01/2025
The DeepSeek saga teaches us that nothing spurs tech innovation like extreme US regulatory interference
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 27/01/2025
My observations from the field reveals how a combination of road infrastructure, driving habits, ease of obtaining fake number plates, traffic, dust pollution, and monkeys, disrupt the seamless sociotechnical imaginaries of Automatic Number Plate Reader (ANPR) cameras in a Himalayan state.
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 21/01/2025
In India, it’s really difficult to do quant research on criminal justice decision-making. Not just due to access, but sheer terrible recording practices. Judges often omit vital details while recording orders/judgements - making secondary data analysis very unreliable
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 15/01/2025
Honored to have my work on sentence review of lifers in India featured in this article by the Institute of Criminology @cambridgeuni.bsky.social Grateful for the opportunity to be interviewed for this piece and share insights on how my research contributed to the release of a lifer after 26 years!
crim.cam.ac.uk
PhD student’s research helps reform Delhi’s process for lifetime sentencing | Institute of Criminology
karan_tripathi_photo.jpeg Research from an Institute of Criminology student has helped secure a significant legal victory in Delhi, India. A prisoner sentenced to life, Vikas Kumar Shukla, was grante...
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 14/01/2025
Hybridisation of public/security/policing infrastructures is not just the question of efficiency, but also of politics of recognition, resistance, and redemption.
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 06/01/2025
Notes from the field: immune (so far) from race to algorithmic policing, this police station in a hilly state in India still uses pin-maps for patrol allocations
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 04/01/2025
Notes from the field: I was surprised to see how the neatly drawn boundaries of public-private divide collapse in digital policing projects. (1/2)
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Karan Tripathi @karantripathi.bsky.social · 01/01/2025
From the fieldwork: software engineers in India’s state-owned computing agency reveal the ‘boundary-work’ required to work on policing projects. One theme is the value of having a govt job - the prestige it brings. So one must focus on the task and not the “noise”, on the code and not the coded
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