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Hi, everybody, my name is Dockley,
and my pronouns, are they them,
so I just want to let you know a little
bit about who I am and why I care about
this.
So I do a lot of street level work,
what I call street level work in the
States.
So I have been very involved in doing
legal support for things like
Black Lives Matter and Occupy.
In fact, I was arrested in a big
demonstration many years ago.
That's a lot of what led me to this work.
I've also done a lot of community
organizing with the Arab Muslim, Middle
Eastern and South Asian community, as
I'm sure you're aware, aware, they
are targeted by surveillance
to an incredible degree.
And I am Syrian American.
So all of this is very personal
to me.
So before I start, I just want to
talk a little bit about a project, which
was the last thing I worked on at
Electronic Frontier Foundation and give
thanks to the people I worked with.
So this is the street level surveillance
project.
And I especially want to give
thanks to Hani Fakhoury, Jennifer
Lynch, Dave Moss, Jeremy Gillooly,
Galula and Cooper Quenton.
These are the folks who helped compile
information for this project
and the street level surveillance
project. Unite's efforts past and
future work on these sorts of
law enforcement surveillance technologies
into an easily accessible portal.
And it is incredibly important right now.
I'm going to talk about why.
So for those who are not familiar with
the concept of the panopticon, this comes
from the 18th century philosopher
Jeremy Bentham. And it is the perfect
prison.
So the panopticon is a central
tower with the cells placed
around the central tower and
the person in the middle can see
everybody and they know that they're
always being watched.
They cannot see the observer.
And so the idea of the panopticon is that
it will control people's behavior without
the guards ever having to actually do
anything simply by knowing that you are
constantly being observed, you will
change your behavior.
And so are we there yet?
My argument is that today you certainly
don't need to be in a prison to be in a
panopticon, nor do you need to
be online. And I'm going to talk a little
bit more about what I mean by that.
I would say that the Panopticon is all
around us right now.
So takeaways that I hope
you'll get from this talk, street level
surveillance is mass surveillance
and it doesn't affect
everybody the same, but we all need to
fight it. And what I mean
by that is that different communities
are affected by surveillance differently.
It's not as though a camera has the same
impact for a
person with light colored skin or person
with dark colored skin.
And I'm going to talk a lot more about
that in this talk.
And then finally, what are you going to
do about it? We're going to talk a lot
about why this is so bad, but what can
we do?
And I'm going to talk about three points,
how we can prevent this technology, how
we can expose both what
it does and its vulnerabilities and where
it's being used and how we can empower
the most affected, but also all all
of ourselves.
So who you are matters
when it comes to surveillance and
particularly, you know, when it comes to
street level surveillance technologies
and imagine everybody
here is familiar with
the people in the lower right corner.
But if you aren't, that is Martin Luther
King Jr. and Malcolm X.
And that's a reference, of course, to the
incredible degree of surveillance done
on these civil rights leaders by
the United States, which actually led to
the church committee hearings, which
created FISA, which is the law that
governs surveillance now.
So they were subject to an incredible,
disturbing degree of surveillance.
So that Syrian refugee and I talk a
little bit about the sort of surveillance
that they're experiencing right now.
And in the top right corner,
those are worker
workers rights activists.
They are Latino and Chicano people
in Los Angeles who are demonstrating.
They are also, again, as
people who are activists who are out
in the streets and who are coming into
contact with law enforcement.
And as people who are
not necessarily citizens in the United
States, they are subject
to an incredible degree of surveillance.
So throughout my talk, I'm going
to point out places where technology
may be experienced differently by
different communities.
So why street level surveillance?
Why am I talking about this
this topic?
So just to to preface
this a little bit, you know,
particularly after working at ATF for a
year, I really I stopped using the phrase
I'll stop saying in real life,
because, you know, the distinction
between and I'm sure I'm
talking to people who probably already
feel this, but the distinction between
what we do in our everyday lives when
we're walking around and what we're doing
online is rapidly
disappearing.
For instance, you know, I have
family from Syria who
are not on the same continent as me.
And this is the only connection that I
have to many of them is being on Facebook
with them.
So we know that what we're doing online
is absolutely revealing the most intimate
details of our life.
And we need to keep fighting for
for freedom online.
But the fact is that
when it comes to what we're doing in our
everyday lives offline,
the richness of the data that can be
captured by street level surveillance
technologies in the physical world
is moving ever closer to the richness of
the online world.
You know, in many ways, the online world
is already the perfect panopticon,
particularly if you are like
many people who are not using encryption.
Right.
But the physical world is also
becoming a panopticon in that same way.
So the online world and the offline
world are both moving towards
each other and in
particular with street level surveillance
technology.
The data is often easily analyzable
and it often comes with metadata
attached. And so these technologies
are helping us be turned into data
more than ever before and more that only
what we do online
could achieve. So it's everywhere
we are now numbers and we are now
analyzable everywhere.
So, you know, when we're talking about
these things, Isarel
doesn't really work meatspace.
That's a good one. But maybe not what I
would want to use when I'm talking to
lawmakers and policymakers.
So street level surveillance.
So, as I mentioned, I just want to touch
on the fact that street level
surveillance really is mass surveillance,
and the reason this matters is that, of
course, I'm going to be talking very
particularly about how street level
surveillance technologies affect some
specific communities
and how it will affect you if you're
targeted. But if you're not targeted,
this is still going to capture your data.
These technologies are still going to
capture your data and mass surveillance
without ever having any sort of results
from the data that's captured.
We all know that mass surveillance kills
freedom of expression.
And that's what you know, that
is what we want to build our society on.
Is that right?
And so it matters that that this kind
of technology is also mass surveillance.
So if you define mass surveillance
as surveillance of big groups
of people, usually without
suspicion that they've committed a
specific crime, STREET-LEVEL
surveillance technologies do that.
And if you define mass surveillance as
surveillance, that captures data that can
be analyzed in the aggregate, in
particular to that to determine social
networks, street level surveillance data
also does that.
So, again, this this
technology is turning the lives of
everyone it comes into contact with,
regardless of whether or not you are a
target into easily quantifiable
data.
So this is probably a review
for some folks, but I'm going to just go
through what sort of a typical
day in an average city under
a street level surveillance regime is
like.
So I saw some smiles.
I imagine people recognize the image in
the middle and we've all seen it many
times.
This is a notice from
Berlin that you are being recorded
on the right. We have cameras from
the New York Police Department.
The upper left corner is a cleverly
disguised camera from Helsinki.
And then in the lower left corner, that
is mobile CCTV
from Glasgow.
And so
really like just to walk through it,
the second that you leave your house,
you're going to start getting captured by
cameras and
now your face is getting captured,
your movements are getting captured.
And it's not
just law enforcement cameras, of course.
So really interesting example of this is
in San Francisco, the San
Francisco district attorney.
This is the prosecuting attorney for all
the crimes that happen in the county,
has a program where they
actually ask private camera owners.
So businesses and individuals
that might have cameras in their
driveways, things like that, they
ask people to register these cameras.
And once the cameras are registered,
that gives them a map of where every
single one of these cameras is in the
city. So it's not just their network
and it's not just their money, it's
everybody else's as well.
So they have this map and they also have
the owners information.
It makes it incredibly easy for them to
request information any time that they
might want about what's been recorded
on those cameras.
Oh, here is the first place we're going
to talk a little bit about how this is
going to affect you differently,
depending on who you are, who you are.
So another example of non-government
owned cameras is comes from
Oakland, California.
There is a specific part of the
of the Oakland Police Department that
deals with alcohol beverage control.
And in some of
the work that I did working with the Arab
and Muslim community, one of the things
that we heard is that these
teams that were supposed to go in and
check and make sure nobody's selling
alcohol to minors and
that they are that they have their
license displayed, what they would
actually do is go into stores
owned by Yemeni people or
other Arabs.
And these are stores that are primarily
in black neighborhoods in Oakland.
And they would go into the stores, they
would walk around and they would find
maybe a can of expired soup.
You know, maybe they had their
license in the wrong kind of frame or
something ridiculous like this.
And they would go to the store
owner and say, you know, it doesn't
look like you're complying with the law
here, but,
you know, we could work with you.
We can work something out.
If you just give us access to your
cameras, you know, you'll be you'll
be fine.
The other thing that they did is
in in the states, pretty much every
local police department in a big city
also has at least one or two
FBI, Federal Bureau of Investigation
officers that are
sorry, one or two police officers
that work directly with the FBI.
And so they have this very strong
collaboration.
And so they would threaten people with,
you know, I heard that your aunt has a
visa application.
You know, maybe maybe you could work with
us and we could we could see that she's a
good citizen.
So not only is this bias against
the people in the neighborhood, it's the
people who are running the stores.
And it's been very effective.
They've gotten a lot of video that way.
Another example here, and I think
this is a very important example to touch
on, is that,
you know, we are used to seeing cameras
in most places, but
maybe you're not used to seeing a camera
on your front porch facing
your door or something like that.
You know, people who live in housing
projects in the United States,
people who live in states, in the UK,
people who live in favelas, they
are all completely used to having
incredibly pervasive surveillance all the
time, even beyond the degree
that we're used to. And we're seeing
these notifications everywhere on the on
the subway or or, you know,
on the street. This is really invasive,
right. In their homes.
And so I think this is very
important because often
as an activist or as a technologist,
we talk about privacy.
We use it as a theoretical concept.
But the fact is that for many people
in the world in particular, the most the
most marginalized people, the idea of
privacy doesn't make any sense.
And so this is actually this can actually
be very destructive to movement building,
you know, to not take into account the
different circumstances of the people
whom you're talking to.
So just something to keep in mind
if you're an activist and also maybe
something to try to do more activism
around.
You know, I the idea of
talking about privacy to a Syrian refugee
who just. Cross the border or a young
black man in New York who has been
stopped and frisked maybe
every other day for months, for years,
for his whole life, doesn't always
make sense.
So once your image
has been captured, it is subject
to biometrics.
So biometrics work in conjunction with
these cameras.
There are some biometrics that have to be
actively collected.
Of course, this is a
fingerprint scanner being used
in the West Midlands.
And this is I actually got this picture.
They put it on Flickr and it
was Creative Commons and they were very
excited about their mobile fingerprinting
program.
This is mobile fingerprinting.
It goes directly to a database and they
can check it instantly as they really
wanted people to know what good work
they're doing for public safety.
The photo on the left is an Indian
woman who's getting registered
with using iris recognition.
So those are a couple of types of
biometrics. Of course, there's also gait
recognition, there is hand telemetry,
there is scar recognition,
tattoo recognition, iris
and retina scans up there
and voice recognition.
So, again, this is another place
where you're going to have a very
different experience, depending on who
you are. Anybody who has ever
contact with law enforcement is
much more likely to already have their
information in a database.
Right.
And just go back to the previous example.
If you are a young
black man or a man of color
in the United States, the likelihood
that you've ever been stopped and hassled
by the police, the likelihood that
they've taken your picture, the
likelihood that they've taken a cheek
swab to get your DNA or that
you've been fingerprinted is going to be
much higher. And the fact that all of
these things happen to you doesn't
necessarily mean that there was ever any
charges filed against you.
And I think we all now know that it
doesn't necessarily mean that you were
doing anything.
It means that you're in an area that's
crawling with police and they're more
likely to to arrest you, stop
you, hassle you based on the
way that you look.
And so another example here, and
this is one that I would love to get
more information on, is refugees.
So I rischard
recognition technology as of June
and I wasn't able to find any more recent
numbers, has enrolled over
one point six million Syrian refugees
at this point
where now the EU is now also
fingerprinting refugees.
So in Germany, they're using fingerprint
scanners to create a database of
every refugee and their and their
fingerprint.
Another example of how
this may affect you.
This is less about a characteristic, more
about your activities is
if you are an activist who's
out there in the street demonstrating.
So very disturbing example of this comes
from New York. During the Occupy
demonstrations, protesters
were arrested.
And there's sort of a
dance that you do when you're a
protester. You get arrested, you
know, they process you.
They usually release you without bail if
it was for something minimal.
Instead, what the New York Police
Department did is they refused to release
Occupy demonstrators without an IRA scan.
So this is, again, before anybody has
been charged specifically.
You know, they're not necessarily
specific charges. There's a police
report, but they
are simply because of the fact that they
were arrested and they're getting their
iris scanned.
So
you're walking around, you're dealing
with all these cameras, you're dealing
with biometrics, if you want to go
anywhere, either driving or
public transit, you're going
to increase the amount of surveillance
that you're experiencing.
And automated license plate readers
are something that if you're
in a vehicle, you should be concerned
about. So automated license
plate readers, they have a couple of
different names. Also automated number
recognition.
They're called different things, but
these are cameras and they
can be mobile or mounted
that can detect when a license plate
enters the camera's field,
capture an image of the car and the
surroundings, including the plates, and
then convert the image of the license
plate into alphanumeric data.
This also will
get some sort of basic data metadata
like the time that it was captured
as well. So to give you an example
of how powerful this technology is,
Los Angeles Police Department, which
Jennifer Lynch at the ATF has been
suing to try to get some basic data
about how they use this technology.
They do extensive Alpro collection.
They collect combined and on average
data on nearly three million cars per
week.
So that is half of all the registered
vehicles in Los Angeles.
So they're collecting an incredibly huge
amount of data and then they store
that data for two to five years,
whether or not the plates are ever linked
to any sort of criminal activity.
And they share it with nearly 30 other
law enforcement agencies around the
region.
And just a side note there that
this kind of information sharing and
it's very U.S. centric.
So I didn't want to focus on it.
But just to say that in the United
States, the idea that there's sort of
barriers between different law
enforcement agencies, if you move from
one jurisdiction to another
or, you know that that that you might not
be affected, that they might not know
what happened a couple of states over
that, that's just not the case anymore.
All of this data is shared
in the Bay Area, for instance, all
of the license plate reader information
that is captured in the nine Bay Area,
nine counties that make up the Bay Area
all goes to a centralized location
so that Northern California Regional
Intelligence Center, it's a fusion center
that combines all of these different
levels of information.
So when we're talking about this
data as mass surveillance and we're
talking about how it can be analyzed in
the aggregate, you don't just want
to think about the the local agency
that's collecting it. If it is a local
agency and not the Border Patrol or
something like that.
It's also about how the information is
getting shared and combined.
And automated license
plate readers are particularly concerning
because it very rapidly becomes
clear what they can reveal about you,
even without aggregating the data,
you know, having your car parked outside
of a psychiatrist's office or an
abortion clinic or a
demonstration, a church.
This reveals a lot.
But then think about taking all
of that data and taking it for a city
like Los Angeles, a huge city, and the
amount of information that they're
capturing and aggregating that
and being able to see movements and
being able to see associations between
different vehicles.
This is revealing in the same way that
phone call metadata is revealing.
The law enforcement is able to collect
an incredible amount of information.
So a couple of examples of how
this is used in a discriminatory way.
So this is a heat
map from Jimmy Gluey,
Galula and Dave Moscati, if they did some
great work with a week's
worth of automated license plate reader
data that they got from Oakland
Local Police Department.
So the neighborhoods shown here
are the places where automated license
plate reader use is the
heaviest. So North Oakland.
And for those who are familiar with
Oakland, this says North
Oakland, but it's the area
a little bit south.
So this is sort of northwest
Oakland and East Oakland.
These are two of the biggest
concentrations of people of color in
Oakland.
Not only that, they're neighborhoods that
currently have a lot of housing fights
going on because they sort of have like
people are getting pushed out.
So as you can see,
the heat maps overlaid onto
the heat map or the heat map
overlay onto the census data
shows that the use is heaviest
in communities that are already
incarcerated and incredibly
disproportionate rates.
And this sort of street level
surveillance is going to help put them
into prison, helped her their families
apart and is
hardly going to make the communities
safer.
So that's Oakland.
Another example is New York Police
Department.
So New York Police Department.
In 2011, the Associated Press revealed
this wholesale surveillance
of Muslims and people who were
from countries perceived to be
predominantly Muslim.
This was the New York Police Department's
demographics unit.
And it literally mapped out
where all of these populations were
no suspicion, but it mapped out
the populations.
So street by street, you know, there's
mapped out the locations people spent
time in. So looking at
street by street, here's a cafe.
Here's a mosque.
Here's a block that has, you
know, this many Moroccans living on it.
So very detailed mapping out.
They also used informants in churches
and mosques.
And of course, they also used automated
license plate readers.
And this is and I should say for
for the New York Police Department's
surveillance, that I would be curious
what it would look like now, because
it happened several years ago,
but they took these automated license
plate readers and they literally put them
on police cars and drove up and down
the street in front of mosques and
captured the plate data for everybody
who was attending their
religious services.
And so they did this without any
particular suspicion about any of the
people or places surveilled.
And I should say, again, coming from my
work in in the community, that
Muslims in America have made it very
clear that they
feel intimidated from going to church.
They're scared to practice their
religion. And, of course, it's even worse
now.
But that is the kind of impact that this
type of surveillance is having on that
community.
So even if you are
OK and actually one other point about
Oakland, Oakland
has a tiny, rich
town in the middle of it called Piedmont.
I wish I should have included a map of
this. It is literally a town
that is surrounded on all sides by
Oakland, California.
And this town essentially seceded from
Oakland because they were rich and they
wanted to have a rich town.
And so they created their own borders.
And at the only entrances into this
town, it's called Piedmont, there are
automated license plate readers.
So what does that mean?
That means that everybody who's coming
from Oakland into Piedmont, Oakland,
which is less and less so
predominantly black, but
still a large community of color,
everybody who's coming from a community
which Piedmont considers undesirable
is getting their their license
plate captured.
So not only can it be used by
by law enforcement in a way to
attract people and into criminal
investigations, it also because
people know that this is happening.
It also can be used as a way to
to sort of repeat the theme here, keep
communities gated.
So I also just wanted to mention
automatic ticketing and tolls,
and just because they are
even if they're not law enforcement,
sometimes going through an automated toll
system is the only way to get somewhere
in on the Golden Gate Bridge in San
Francisco.
You're either going to go through an
automated toll system or you're going
to have a picture. And actually all of
these they're taking they're also
capturing your license plate
and of course, electronic ticketing
systems again.
Well, they may not be operated by law
enforcement. They are completely
willing, at least in the
United States and Canada and South Africa
and I imagine elsewhere they
are completely willing to hand over
that information to law enforcement
agencies on a voluntary basis,
meaning without even any sort of court
order.
Flight simulators, so
cell site simulators, also known as emcee
catchers, also known as stingrays.
These are for those who don't know, these
are devices that masquerade as cell phone
towers and they trick your phone into
connecting with them in order to capture
the location of your phone.
Now, in the United States,
law enforcement insists that they only do
this to collect location.
But, of course, cell site simulators can
also intercept content.
They can jam communications.
There's been some research into the use
of cell site simulators to
remotely inject malware so they
can do a lot.
And the location information
that they are capturing can very easily
susceptible to aggregate analysis.
And if you are,
these are a perfect example of mass
surveillance in that one of the ways
that law enforcement uses them is to
figure out if they know if they have
a suspect and they're trying to determine
what phone they are using.
So they know the suspect, they don't know
the phone or the
the IMF or the phone.
So they will turn on this cell
site simulator in the in areas where they
know that the suspect will be.
And they do this several times and they
capture the data of everybody there.
And then they sift through it to find the
number that comes up repeatedly.
So by by necessity,
they cannot use this technology without
capturing everybody's information.
And cell site simulators
in particular are a concern for
activists.
Black Lives Matter activists have
reported all sorts of suspicious things
happening with their phones that
they can't explain.
They feel very certain that cell
flight simulators are being used at
demonstrations,
but they can't get the information.
And in the United States, the
image that I have up here is of a
stingray.
This is the device manufactured by Harris
Corporation.
This is the company that manufactures
most of the devices, at least the devices
that are getting attention in the United
States. And the Harris Corporation
has been totally complicit in
forcing local, state and
federal government to not reveal any
information. And their argument is that
it's its trade secrets.
Can't know how the device works, but
in effect, what it has done is made it
impossible to get information about
these devices.
And some of that has changed.
And we know some, but we don't know
everywhere they're being used.
And another thing another thing to point
out here about cell site simulator's is
that, again, in the States, they
are often used for fraud
cases, but they are also often used for
drug cases.
And drug cases disproportionately
are targeting people of color, even when
we know that use of drugs
among white people hire.
But it is people of color who are often
being affected by this.
And also, this is, of course,
in addition to the incredible ease
by which the government can obtain
locational data directly from your cell
phone provider, I don't know
if people have seen the article that
just came out earlier this week about
our last week about Hyde Park
tracking visitors via Bluetooth.
That Bluetooth is another way that people
can be tracked.
But there are myriad ways to obtain,
at the very least, your location data
cell site simulator's can do more.
So this is,
you know, sort of at a baseline what
you would see on any given
day in the city.
So what do we do about it?
Can you encrypt the streets?
Well.
Got we've got some answers
here, not really very practical,
and one of the things that is that is
helpful that I like to tell people about,
of course, when it comes to cell flight
simulators, if you're using end to end
encryption, that's helpful.
There's also, of course, been some
fantastic research
on detecting them.
So security research labs,
Snoop Snitch, that's a fantastic app.
And protecting and knowing
that it's there is part of protecting
yourself.
But typically the advice that activists
get is just don't bring your phone.
That's that's really completely
impractical. Particular, particularly
for people like Black Lives Matter
activists who, you know, the only reason
people started paying attention is
because people were there on the street
with their cell phones, tweeting,
sending videos and communicating
really instantly with the outside world.
So the idea that somebody can't bring
their cell phone doesn't really make
sense.
There are anti drone hoodies,
probably not something that you would
wear every day.
They're like, I couldn't put up pictures
of them because they're copyrighted.
But these are like
reflective hoodies that sort of cover
your shoulders. There's also anti facial
recognition makeup and.
Well, I would totally wear that every day
because I think it looks awesome.
Probably not the case for everybody.
There's also reflective coating on
your license plate in order to avoid a
license plate reader.
Doesn't work. It's been tested.
It doesn't work. And it's also even
though it doesn't work, it's actually
illegal in some states to do, which is
kind of funny.
So what do we do?
That's why I'm here.
I'm hoping that you're all going to help
me out or at least a couple of you.
You don't have to if you're here.
But but what we want to do
is prevent the adoption of these
technologies, expose their
vulnerabilities and expose
where they are.
And we want to empower ourselves
and particularly the most affected
communities to to fight these
technologies.
So prevention, what I'm talking
about, prevention, I mean, actually
convincing lawmakers not
to adopt this technology and this
absolutely goes hand in hand with
exposing it.
So it's kind of a hard decision.
What do I put first?
But this is just my examples,
all coming from the U.S., from very local
grassroots movements.
And I would be really curious to hear
at the at the sort of city
level or things like that what other
people are doing.
But there are a lot of activists in the
Bay Area, in Chicago, in New York and
L.A.
that are doing work on this.
So preventing the adoption
of this technology. This is an example
from San Mateo County, California.
This is part of the Bay Area.
They were considering getting a cell site
simulator and they immediately
had activists who sent them letters and
who showed up at their meetings.
And there was one person
on the board of supervisors, just one
lawmaker, who really became a thorn
in the side of the process to getting
this. And I should say,
in the U.S., a lot of the money for
purchasing this technology comes from
the federal level. So it comes directly
from the Department of Homeland Security
and it's funneled down to local law
enforcement. And they get huge chunks of
money and they have almost no conditions
on the money.
The really the conditions are this is the
kind of technology that you can purchase.
The conditions aren't
you know, you can't invade people's
rights with this.
If we get a certain number of complaints,
we'll take the technology back.
It's nothing like that.
It's really just you can buy these
things. There you go.
Have fun.
Like Big Brother, just giving pocket
money to Little Brother.
So so it's very easy
for law enforcement agencies to get this.
And, you know, I think talking
about the monetary issues with this
technology, it's a whole other talk.
But this was a case where the county
already had the money, you know, so to
lawmakers, it's like free money.
You're going to turn down free money.
But they they were convinced
after hearing from activists who said,
once you get this technology,
Harris Corporation is not going to let
you respond to Public Records Act
requests and it's going to be used to
violate our rights.
We don't support it.
And then with the help of that of that
one lawmaker, they were actually able
to prevent the purchase of the system,
of course. Another example
is the Domain Awareness Center in
Oakland.
This is a project that was
going to take all of the different
cameras in Oakland and
all of the information at the port.
And I'm going to combine
that with just like the system
that law enforcement uses to get updates
with weather updates with
ShotSpotter, which is little microphones
placed in the street that are supposed to
turn on when they hear gunshot.
I was going to combine an incredible
amount of information.
And of course, as I just showed this NPR
map in Oakland and the experience
of store owners in Oakland, it's clearly
a city that has lots of problems of
biased policing.
And the community was pissed off.
They were so angry.
And this was really incredible.
I mean, people showed up at city council
meetings and they would stay for these
city council meetings would last for like
eight or nine hours.
And people would just be sitting there
waiting for their chance to talk.
And they would they would just wait it
out and they would argue with the
lawmakers. So what ultimately happened
with the Domain Awareness Center is that
it was supposed to be Oakland wide and it
got pushed to only the Port of Oakland.
So it was made smaller.
This actually cost the city money because
they had to take out the traffic cameras
that had been integrated into the system.
And the number of times when you can
actually convince a government agency
to spend money to fix rights,
it doesn't happen very often.
So this was really a huge success
in the shrinking of the system.
Now, most community members who came
to these demonstrations made it clear
they didn't want the technology at all.
They just didn't want to have it.
But what ended up happening is that
it was still there for the port and there
was a very extensive and specific
privacy policy put into place.
I was on the committee that helped create
that privacy policy, another member
of the committee in the audience.
And it was a very difficult process.
But it is the first sort of privacy
ordinance like that that has existed,
really a very comprehensive.
So knowing
how the technologies are vulnerable,
this is one of the things that
activists really need to be talking
to technologists more on.
There has been great research and
there definitely needs to be more
on some of the really great
examples that we see are.
For instance, in 2012
at Black Hat, there was a demonstration
of how you can fake an iris scan
quite easily.
Also in 2012, a researcher at the
University of Texas showed how you can
spoof GPS signals
that for satellite controlled drones and
was able to take over a drone.
He actually did it well while people
from the Department of Homeland Security
were watching because he was trying to
demonstrate to them why the technology
was vulnerable, that really didn't
stop them from wanting to use it and
spread the technology everywhere and pay
cities to use it.
And then, of course, a wonderful example.
In 2013, Chaos Computer Club
hacked an iPhone five US.
And for those who don't know about this
hack, incredibly simple.
You know, to somebody like me, I'm not a
technologist. And FBI, when we get into
the Q&A session, if you ask me really
specific technological questions all day,
I'll bet somebody else in the audience
can answer that.
But they so they hacked an
iPhone five is taking a page simply
by taking a photograph of a user's
fingerprint, converting that to a mold
by printing it out and
then using pre coded photosensitive
boards and a little bit of wood glue.
And that was it.
Incredibly simple.
And and this is technology that people
are still using. People are still locking
things with their fingerprint.
Companies are still using fingerprint
access.
But we know that it is vulnerable.
So that's exposing
the technical vulnerabilities.
But we also need to be
waging public information warfare.
So this is an example from Los
Angeles, fantastic
work from a community group called Stop
LAPD Spying.
And so what they did is there is
an inspector general for the Los Angeles
Police Department.
They're supposed to investigate.
They're supposed to investigate special
order one, which is
we'll get into it. But it's a specific
type of surveillance that the LAPD
does that they report directly
to the fusion center there.
So this state, local,
federal information clearinghouse.
So the stop LAPD spying group,
they saw the inspector general's
report and they said, you
know, this doesn't really seem right to
us. We're going to go ahead and file our
own Public Records Act requests and
we're going to analyze that data.
And we're also and this is what's really
important. We're going to include the
stories of the community.
We're going to include stories from
people who have been stopped for no
apparent reason, who have had these
experiences that seem, you know, if you
don't know what sort of surveillance is
happening, it just seems like a very
scary experience to somebody who's
getting stopped in Skid Row in L.A.,
getting asked these questions and they
don't understand why.
So they put together a people's
audit and they have used they've used
this people's audit. I've used this
people's audit.
It's an incredibly detailed report about
the surveillance that LAPD is doing.
And it actually they compare the report
to the report from the inspector
general, from the the police agency
themselves. So that's also exposing
sort of how these internal bureaucracies
do or more likely don't actually
look into technologies very extensively.
So this is another
example of research and how these
technologies work, and this is from if
this is an automated license, this is a
publicly accessible feed from an
automated license plate reader.
So Jeremy Galula and Dave
Moss and Cooper Quenton all looked
at how
they looked at vulnerabilities that have
previously been found by researchers.
And when I say vulnerabilities,
maybe not even the right word,
I mean, maybe just stupidity is the right
word because these are publicly
accessible feeds.
Like literally, if you can find the right
Web page, you can view an Alpro.
These are publicly viewable configuration
Web pages and this is easily,
easily accessible telnet access.
So why does this matter?
This is a perfect example of how expose
and prevent work together.
They responsibly disclosed
their findings to the police departments
involved and they actually got
some police departments to improve their
systems.
And I want to make a note here about
exposing vulnerabilities and about doing
this research.
What I am really encouraging you to do
is,
is not to just
it's not to just find the
vulnerabilities, but politicize them.
You know, if you're just finding the
vulnerabilities, you're giving them a
chance to fix the vulnerabilities and,
you know, maybe giving them free help,
but instead politicize them.
Talk about why it matters so.
So this is another example
of exposure.
This is a camera map from
and I'm going to have to speed through
because I'm almost done and want to
get to questions.
So this is a map from Tampa, Florida.
This is a project that was done for the
Republican National Convention.
The Republican National Convention at the
Democratic National Convention are always
huge demonstrations in the U.S.
Lots of people getting arrested, usually
tear gas, rubber bullets, all all of that
fun stuff.
And so somebody actually just
created a project to map where all the
cameras were prior to the demonstrations.
Some of these cameras were installed
specifically as security for the
demonstrations.
They were left in place, which is always
what happens. It's you know, it's what
happens at the Olympics.
It's what happens whenever we have any
big events.
So this page is still up.
There is also a similar page for the
New York Police Department surveillance
cameras, which has not always
being maintained.
So something you're interested in,
something to think about.
So we need to let people know what's
happening, we need to expose these
technologies, but if
we just do that, it's very frustrating.
So finally, we
want to empower.
We can't just talk among ourselves.
Those of us who understand this
technology can't just have a conversation
and say, well, you know, I'm
not too worried about cell site simulator
because, like, I always use signal and,
you know, I don't care if they know my
location, that's that's not helpful.
What we need to do is educate people
and work with them, especially the most
marginalized. This can be technol
technological.
It could be, you know, your rights if
you're an activist or attorney who has
that information.
But we need to be working with people.
And a great example of this.
So this is a picture from the
the NATO protests that happened in
Chicago a few years ago.
I was there doing legal support.
It's very disturbing, some
very disturbing violence that happened
with law enforcement.
And in Chicago,
there is a technologist, Freddy Martinez,
who has been working with activists
to deploy catcher catchers.
So he actually gave activists
phones that already had Snoop Snitch
installed.
He did all of the work of installing it
and explaining to them how to use it.
And they went around Chicago and they
they figured out where in
Sketchers our flight simulators were
being used.
But he didn't just do that.
He also gave them security trainings.
He also taught them sort of what to be
on the lookout for.
And as a result, activists who previously
never knew about cell flight simulators
are now doing things like listening to
police scanners and saying, wow, we just
heard something really weird.
And it sounds like they're using a cell
site simulator and this is
knowledge that they wouldn't have had.
This is knowledge that we want to have.
But it it doesn't happen unless we're
working together, so.
How can we defend the from the
technologies we already know about, how
can we make things better?
That's for me to work on, but it's also
for you to answer.
And with that, I am open for questions.
Thank you very much.
Are slightly over 50 minutes for
questions and the first two questions, go
to the Internet.
Yes.
Have you actually run into
many companies that do it?
Like, uh, do you know that
Mall of America or something
is actually giving the surveillance
cameras access to the police?
Can you repeat the question,
do you know of many companies
that actually do give their
surveillance camera data to
the authorities?
Well, if you're talking about
it depends on what level you're talking
about. But absolutely.
I mean, at the at the level of the cities
that I've worked in, the sort of program
that I mentioned with the district
attorney in San Francisco, there are
programs like that all over the U.S.
and I can't imagine that that's not
happening in Europe either that.
So I don't know if you're if
you're referring to sort of people who
have actually have
these cameras right now.
But but, yes, certainly there
are specific examples.
And can you get information about
that, using something like the Freedom of
Information Act or whatever is
applicable in your country?
Yes, so the people's
audit that I was mentioning that the Stop
LAPD spying group did
that was through stories
and interviews, but it was also through
Public Records Act requests.
And actually, if street
level surveillance project, one of the
really exciting pieces of it was
that it had a there was a partnership
with Muckrake in order to do
Parra's about biometrics.
So they just had to then actually it's
still up there. Just a little form you
can fill out.
They'll do the pray for you.
Of course, what we see is that
unsurprisingly, you get denials
all the time.
You deal with companies who are actually
colluding with the government to try to
keep things private by arguing that they
have trade secrets.
But, you know, most of what we know is
through Public Records Act requests.
Before we move out of the room itself,
may I remind you that questions are short
sentences?
This question marks and did not include
extensive expressions of your gratitude.
First question over there
in Sweden this year, we actually
looked at Tels.
You briefly mentioned telephones, mobile
phones. So we what we did was
that there was this company that
collected Wi-Fi,
Mac addresses and societies
to measure the flow of people in the city
centers. Yeah, it's actually got
a regulatory agencies to consider
megadoses as personal identifiers.
So that was all of a sudden regulated.
So that is fantastic.
So it sounds like you you actually worked
on pointing out to them why this is a
problem, that sort of surveillance
of Mac addresses.
This happens all along the U.S.
Canada border and over
and over. Government officials just say,
well, it's you know, it's just Mac
addresses.
So that's exactly the kind of strategic
intervention that we need everywhere.
Why do you find it's difficult to get
information about these products
and the features?
Because there are tradeoffs everywhere I
go there. They talk about whatever they
can offer is easy.
So just as I mentioned,
how these technologies affect people
differently, depending on the color of
their skin or what they look like,
I can tell you that I would never be let
into at least in the States I've actually
tried.
There's something that happens in Alameda
County called Urban Shield,
and it is partly really just a
marketplace for this technology.
Even if I put on a suit, they're not
going to let me in.
So if you have a list of publicly
accessible trade fairs, please come talk
to me after, because I would love, I
would love. And actually, some of the
best information that we have does come
from that that source.
I mean, there was a fantastic there's
been a couple of fantastic articles from
journalists who have gone to these trade
barriers and talked about what they
found. Yeah.
And I would like to add that this is a
project in the Hollonds where we are
combining the data, the video
surveillance data of a couple of
organizations to surveil the
whole area and one goal except
instead of setting cameras everywhere.
So we're doing it excellent
at anybody.
If you I would love anybody who
has any of these projects. Come talk to
me after so I can write your information
down because I want to know more.
First off, thank you very much for doing
this talk.
I wanted to ask about your
techniques for reaching out to the
communities who are most affected by
this. How do you what it's
in your mind when you're trying to find
allies in this face and what works the
best for you? And the second is a little
bit of a confirmation
question, because I think we all know
that about gentrification
in San Francisco and in the Bay Area.
The second question is, what is the
reaction of the tech community that it's
coming into this area?
And do they know about it?
And have you seen anybody?
My my gut instinct is
no, they're not aware and they're not
a part of this.
But what would you say?
So those are two excellent questions to
the first. It is it is definitely
important how you reach out and how
you try to work with people.
Again, I know I've mentioned Black Lives
Matter a lot of times, but I think it's
an incredible example of activism in the
United States. And it's also a
community that is very used to having
people come in from outside and say, you
know, you don't know about this and you
don't know about that. And I think I
better explain it to you.
That's definitely not the way to do it.
I think the way to do it is to seek out
individuals to reach out through your
networks, to reach out to somebody
individually and say, hey, this is the
knowledge that I have.
I think it might be helpful, but I'm
curious what you think.
So it's about not like presenting to
somebody a fully formed package of
this is what you need from me.
It's about actually finding out.
So I think that's one important thing.
I've actually done doorknocking in
Oakland, like in
specific areas where things are
happening.
There's a lot of pitfalls to that.
And I'm happy to talk to anybody about it
afterwards.
But it is it does require,
you know, some some humility, some
sensitivity.
I'm sure that that here, you know,
if you want to work with refugees, it's
not like they're going to they're going
to say, oh, great, I want to work with
you. And I don't have any suspicions.
So so I think that's that's a lot of it.
And there I mean, there
is just so much to that
and to that kind of community organizing
that that could be a whole series of
talks when it comes to
sort of tech workers in the Bay Area.
So in Oakland, at least, I
know that with the activism that was
happening in Oakland, again, also we're
getting very rapidly gentrified with the
activism that was happening.
There were some tech workers that were
involved, but for the most part not.
And.
The impression that I get is that
there's not I don't know,
it's not it's not totally my community,
but they haven't been prominently
involved in any of this, certainly.
And they're and they're helping to
capture data.
So it's not surprising that
they wouldn't be.
Hi, I was wondering
if in your research, you mentioned
the interconnectivity between law
enforcement agencies sharing
their data, are
the companies who collect, say,
pictures from the street working with
people who do mobile ticketing
to share their information, to create
like a picture of someone's day to day
life?
So mobile ticketing and
and what was the first like?
Just like are they particularly sharing
data with, say, the people who,
like, captured camera feeds
on the street, like it's obviously
independent companies?
Are they connected as law
enforcement agencies are connected to
like really expose someone's day to
day life?
So I haven't done as much research into
that. I mean, instinctively,
I would say the answer is yes.
And one thing to keep in mind is
that but I can't say it's
not has not been my focus.
One thing I can say is that once your
data is is
collected, you know, it is it
can be considered valuable in the same
way that online data could be considered
valuable.
But I'm not certain and I think that
that's an area that needs to be looked at
more.
Next question is for the Internet.
So how do you find out about
your local governments adopting these
technologies beforehand?
So this very much depends on where
you are.
I can mostly only speak to the states,
and this is one of the sort of pitfalls
of dealing with these these types of
technologies and why it's so important to
be talking about it here, because we get
a chance to talk to each other.
But in the States, it's usually
three things.
One, people who are
on the streets will notice something
weird happening or they'll notice
that they're getting it.
They're getting the police are talking to
them. They're not exactly sure why.
So they'll notice something and they may
actually, you know, go to an organization
like Electronic Frontier Foundation and
they may go to people who they know are
already doing this work and
and they'll actually go analyze.
So like with cell site simulator's,
people will actually go analyze and say,
OK, we're seeing all of these
discrepancies.
Looks like this is maybe in use here.
That's one way, the other way.
And this is very frustrating.
But there are people who do it.
There are people who do it incredibly
well in Oakland is actually
if you if if there are requirements
that before your city council
or the police
department or anything, if there are
requirements that they notify
you about what they're going to be
discussing. So this is, you know, in
the states before any city
council meeting or before any county
board of supervisors meeting, there's
some sort of notice requirement about
what they'll be discussing.
And there are people who just continually
pay attention to these announcements
because they hide things in there
and they expect that nobody will ever see
them. So before it ever gets adopted,
the lawmakers worst nightmare is having
like 40 angry people outside
their door saying, are you kidding?
You're going to give cops this technology
when they're already harassing people.
So paying attention.
And then, of course, the third is doing
public information requests.
So Public Records Act requests,
paying attention and seeing what you get
in there and, you know, really reaching
out to get help because sometimes
you'll get requests. And if the right
person is looking at it, they'll notice
one thing that will then lead them to
make further requests.
So you can sort of follow the follow the
breadcrumbs to the technology.
OK, so societies have a tendency
to penalize and criminalize many things
over time. So first we catch the
murderers and the thieves and then the
people who do who speed with their cars.
It's a tendency we have.
We create more and more law to require
more and more crime to go ahead.
Sorry, what's your question?
My question is, is our answer to society
accept a certain level of criminality
and stop the surveillance?
Or is our answer hire many, many
more policemen who do manual work
and stop the surveillance?
I mean, I think it depends on who you
are, you're talking to me.
So my answer is
that we have all sorts of structural
problems.
Ultimately, I think we should be in a
society without police.
Until we get there, until we get there,
that's my strategy as harm reduction,
particularly as an anarchist who does
sort of policy work.
It's about it's about changing the
effects of this technology right now for
people who are being affected by it.
You know, I will go I will argue
all day long with lawmakers about the
crappy technology that they're adopting,
even though I think they shouldn't have
the right to adopt it in the first place.
And that's harm reduction.
You know, you can have as many ideals as
you want, but that's not fair to the
people who right now are getting sent to
jail. So get rid of the cops.
In the meantime, reduce the harm that
they can do.
I'm curious, in your research
and in your experience what the reaction
is from the police when people try to
protect themselves and each other using
things like makeup or reflective hoodies,
like you mentioned, and then maybe I have
a fantasy about someone rigging up a
bunch of burner cell phones and making
some kind of fancy dos attack
against these cell simulators.
What where do they draw the line when
they start to say you're impeding police
progress and now you're arrested?
Well, I think with the sort of physical
barriers they've always
been, they always get aggressive in
the face of that, you know, and of
course, now you want to put a mask on
your face, at least in the United States,
automatically going to say you're black
block and you're about to break some
windows.
But, you know, even even regardless
of that, if you have your face covered,
the reality is and this comes from my
work doing legal support.
The reality is that even if it's not
legal for police to tell you to take a
mask off, they'll still do it and they'll
still a rescue later.
You can sort out the details of the fact
that they weren't allowed to do the
arrest, but they will they
will be aggressive about it.
And so those physical barriers now
the makeup, I haven't actually ever been
at a demonstration where I saw somebody
using that. So I don't know.
I think they would probably just think
that it's weird makeup.
But but yeah, I mean, they are certainly
going to react aggressively.
And I will tell you, law enforcement
shows up every single time I go to any
sort of meeting to talk about.
That's about this technology.
And they are very aggressive and they
lie about the technology.
They lie about its capabilities.
And they called me a liar.
It's pretty ridiculous.
Next question is for the Internet.
So what's the range of the stingray
devices?
That is a great question, one
that I wish I knew the answer to
in my research.
I the last thing that I did on
a street level surveillance site was put
up a frequently asked questions about
cell site simulators, which if you're
interested in them, I got to say by
the end of my research, I wanted to,
like, throw my phone away.
I was so disturbed.
So just from various sources
and from marketing materials,
there are stingrays that are so strong
and so called boxes
that they can they can read cell phones
from a plane.
So that sort of gives you an idea
of the smaller ones.
They've said like in hearings
before the House Judiciary Committee, the
Department of Homeland Security and the
DOJ has said, I believe
that, you know, the range is something
like a couple of city blocks.
I wouldn't trust any of these companies
as to what they say publicly.
I would love to see their marketing
materials.
OK, last question over there.
Thank you very much for the talk.
First, I was wondering
about facial recognition and
CCTV images.
Everyone knows that that technology
exists. But my question would be, if you
have knowledge about it, how
far is it used as a default
and how far images
are processed automatically to,
well, to create movement profiles
and so on.
So in some places, law enforcement
is adapting.
Is adopting facial recognition ready
cameras? These are cameras that do
automatically process data.
And there are also in the states, there
are some companies, some actual
local law enforcement that have
their own facial recognition databases.
So it's not just that they're capturing
the information, they're processing it,
preparing it for the analysis
of the points of what they're looking at
on everybody's face.
And it's easily accessible to them.
And this is at the local level.
I mean, this is like a city police
department that has this database.
So I think more and more that technology
is getting integrated.
So you should everybody should be scared.
Almost happy. No, thank.
Think you're want
to leave the room.
Please do take your trash.
But trust, but also the trust that
other people have left behind.
Thank you.