*Music*
Herald: The man standing right from me is Martin Reiche. Martin Reiche is a former
computer scientist with Karlsruhe Institute for Technology. He went to study
media art and now is a self-employed media artist covering space perception,
digitalization, power relations, and minimal aesthetics. That sounds a bit arty
and it will be arty *laughs* in the best way. His work was seen at exhibitions
festivals worldwide like in Spain, in Russia, and of course, in Germany. For
example he used a border barbed wire fence to accommodate Wi-Fi modems and connecting
people by a fence that's not supposed to connect people. We're living in times
where there is architecture that's purpose only seems to be to disconnect people or
for surveillance purposes or both, and Martin Reiche here shows how to connect
this architecture with the arts and thus reclaiming them against the actual
purpose. Please welcome Martin Reiche! *applause*
Oh I'm sorry, it's been late yesterday! The closing ceremony will be streamed
into this hall so you can just stay sit until 18:30. Now Martin Reiche! Try this
with the applause again. *applause*
Martin Reiche: Thank you and thanks everybody for coming, especially against
this other talk in the other room it's quite a hard, yeah quite a hard thing to
compete against that, yeah. My name is Martin Reiche, I'm from Berlin, I'm a
media artist. We just had that all introduction thing, so I'm just going to
talk about what this talk will be about, this talk, "Surveilling the Surveillers",
which is maybe more of a provocative call for action than really an actual
description of what I'm going to talk about. But don't run away because you will
understand in the end why I'm giving you this disclaimer right now. Because I will
talk about current important critical topics that are important for my own
practice and I'm gonna give some examples not only from my own artistic practice but
also from other people's work that deal with the same topics and I think it's
always important to really understand the context where artistic work is situated in
order to understand the work itself. I will also talk a bit about modern form of
activism and that I see computer science and computer programming as this modern
form of activism. I will talk about regulation of technology and the policies
concerning technology and the institutions that make these policies. I will also talk
about quantification of the world, somehow, and I will finish with a
something like a closed formula to describe the whole world; which sounds a
bit impossible and it actually is, but well that's where it will be going and
we'll see how that will evolve. So my background, so we don't really need this
again, but I want to tell you a little bit about some works that I did because it's a
variety of works that I'm dealing with, in a variety of topics, for example topics
like electronic waste, digital footprints, complexity, visual or conceptual glitch,
generative systems, generative architecture, cybernetics, belief systems,
so it's a lot of buzzwords somehow that always come up when you talk about
critical art. But before starting with that I will tell
you a little story or we gonna talk about this concept of the Laplace's demon which
will be important for the general scope of this talk. Laplace's demon has been
postulated by Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1814 and it's basically an articulation of
scientific determinism and I'm starting to quote this he Pierre-Simon Laplace says an
intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion
and all positions of all items of which nature is composed if this intellect were
also vast enough to submit these data to analysis for such an intellect nothing
would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its
eyes. I would just leave this here and I will come back to that at the end of the
talk to have something like a closed loop for this talk and I will start to talk
about critical topics which is topics that are right now interesting especially also
for the arts which deal with technology or with technological artifacts
and I will just start with something that always comes up it's surveillance of
course surveillance and reconnaissance. I'm putting this here together not because
I think it's the they are identical things but because both topics have been I would
say far too widely discussed already in an artistic context. So I'm just going to
show you some examples of artistic works that deal with surveillance and
reconnaissance and especially works that are important to me.
So yeah I just said that I'm not gonna talk that much about surveillance which
sounds counterintuitive if I call this talks surveilling the surveyors but it's
not really the optical surveillance like taking a nice panchromatic shot of the
Earth's surface that I'm interested or this is a work by me it's called scan
lines of Aleppo that's also consisting of panchromatic satellite imagery from a
former classified now declassified US reconnaissance satellite used by the
military they now have a vast archive where they publish these old well data
from overflights and you can basically take them from different times
in different years you can stack them upon each other which I did here and I was also
producing this work it has a glass on top of it and I was basically engraving the
flight path of the satellite in order to give somehow a physical idea of the
trajectory of an actual satellite that is flying over the Earth's surface. I'm also
going to talk a bit about electronic tracking especially electronic tracking
through unique identifiers so well that's SIM cards at least in Germany they are
mapped to a person's identity by law so if you buy SIM cards you have to give away
parts of the data about your identity in order to be allowed to have one. So these
SIM cards are unique identifiers to your person and make it very easy of course to
track you and your behavior and so on. And I just want to start with one work of
friends of mine that, at least Dania was here at this conference he's now not here
anymore. This work is called prism the beacon frame and it's a work that
takes this idea of I have a SIM card and it identifies me somehow and it takes also
the idea of the authority that actually is allowed to put cell phone towers it takes
this they just create their own cell phone tower and they send you messages when you
come close to these cell phone towers like this welcome to a new NSA partner Network
so this is basically produced IMSI catcher that just tells you very decently that
well you're just being surveilled in a sense. It's a work that's been also
legally problematic of course because usually in Germany you are not allowed to
do these things in an artistic context you have a bit more freedom to deal with these
kind of things. So that's maybe an example for surveillance in a sense that you
already know it's the no longer in effect actually directive 2006 24 EC which
is a well European Union directive that we just tend to call the
"Vorratsdatenspeicherung". In Germany we now have unfortunately since
December 2015 the "Gesetz zur Einfuehrung einer Speicherpflicht und einer
Hoechstspeicherpflicht fuer Verkehrsdaten". We just heard a very
interesting talk in the first hall also about how this now developed in the last
couple of months on also the last couple of days unfortunately and you can see
this as the National predecessor of this directive so here I put this in the same
corner as also the artworks about surveillance because I
think one thing is very important is these things about policies because policies are
basically the rules that define how we live together but they're
also the rules that are mostly well problematic for us as people working in
technology because they somehow have to adhere to them even if you do not
ethically agree to them. That's another maybe nice example for that
biometric surveillance is something very prevalent right now especially taking
fingerprints for example at airports International airports or getting DNA or
having a DNA screening of your person and these things are usually right now
unfortunately mostly taken from immigrants and especially we have this
problem in Germany with the influx of immigrants where at what the first thing
of course that came up was well how do we identify them and how do we make this
basically as smooth as possible which of course the easiest way to do it is just to
take as much data from the people as possible which is of course ethically a
bit problematic, a lot. So another topic that falls in this
category of surveillance and reconnaissance is predictive analysis and
that's not the computer scientist in me speaking because that's where I'm coming
from. I was dealing with machine learning and distributed algorithms so predictive
analysis is something that I think is extremely important and like three
examples of predictive analysis is for example prediction of the user behavior
which goes directly hand-in-hand with user tracking but also market prediction
through for example if you have a high- frequency trading algorithm you want to
predict the the future development of the market to make very fast decisions on
these predictions and these brought us a lot of problems lately. This is an
example for such a problem they're usually called flash crashes which is very short
time frames in which some stocks lose a lot of value this is a thing the stock of
natural gas around 2011 in June and what you can see here in this stock market
development over time and this is just a couple of minutes, this is 1940 until
1955, so that's 15 minutes of market movement data. And you see these nice
oscillations that get worse and worse so there's something that doesn't look very
natural and at some point it just ends in a crash which
is, I think, a loss of 20% of equity for the company, which is quite a lot and it's
actually in 15 seconds, happening around 15 seconds, so your predictive analysis is
a problem. You can go even further and say, "Well predictive analysis also right
now is used for crime prediction." So there's companies selling software to
cities in order to predict where the next crime is supposed... or is probably
happening and take some pre-cautionary measures to make sure that the crime is
actually not happening or just go and catch somebody and just see what happens.
So yeah, that again, of course, is ethically problematic. So, coming to the
next topic would be regulations and policies... and especially enforcing
policies on citizens. What does that mean? Well, the easiest way how to understand it
is laws. The laws of a country are basically the easiest and the easiest-to-
comprehend way to enforce a policy upon your citizens, but it's not only these
kind of laws, but then you have some policy, some regulations, which are a bit
harder to grasp or harder to get access to. So you really have to do a lot
of research to understand what is actually going on here, but it still has an effect
on you. This, for example, is a NATO document, which shows the basic military
allocation for the radio frequency spectrum and I'm showing you this, because
it will get a little bit more important for a work that I did on some research on
these military regulations for the radio frequency spectrum. And I'm staying in
this realm of radio frequency, I'm actually going to show you... If that
works... No, I don't have the other screen; that's very nice... Show you some
example. [Music]
So, this is a recording at 13.3 megahertz. The recording is somewhere in Germany and
it's the so called "Chinese firedrake AM jammer" It's a jammer that is used
by... or has been used by the government of the People's Republic of China and they
use it against other states' radio stations. So, they basically use it to jam
the stations of other countries. For example, this was the sound of Hope Taiwan
Radio, which you cannot really hear anymore, because the only thing you hear
is this strange Chinese folk song. And that's somehow also a way to enforce a
policy on your people by just blocking access to something that the people could
have access to if you wouldn't enforce your policy on there... That doesn't work
now... Another example here is an artwork: It's an artwork called "All about you".
It's by Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša, which is an artist group from
Slovenia, that... It's an artist collective, that at some point decided, as
an artwork, to all change their names to "Janez Janša", who is a former Slovenian
prime minister, so they now all have the same name and it's the same name as the
prime minister, which is in itself a... quite an interesting work of art. And this
is one of their newer works, where they basically had this contract with one
Slovenian bank, where they could, whenever they lose a credit card, they can just
replace it with a new one and they can, at the same time, also just specify the
photograph that they want to have on their credit card, so they decided to make...
How many are there? I think about 120, 150... to reproduce the Slovenian passport
of one of the members of Janez Janša. And there actually exist 3 of these collages
for all the 3 members of the artist collective and I think they're not yet
complete or some got lost, I'm not sure what's the reason that some are missing,
but it's a nice way to subvert this idea that there is this policy that also says
that every... there's one identity mapped to one person,
especially if you think about what a name means. Now you have 4 people having the
same name, also kind of having a very similar, at least these three people, kind
of similar biography by working together, so if you see a work of art, you don't
even know who it was, that was the first... maybe the first person that came
up with the idea. And even if they tell you, you don't really know what that
means, because everybody has the same name; it doesn't really make sense.
Thinking more about policies: Another interesting important work here is
"Loophole4All" by Paolo Cirio. He got, I think, the Golden Nica 2014 for this work,
where he basically sold for very cheap, I think for 99 cents, these certificates of
incorporation from some companies in the Cayman Islands. I think, basically all
companies in the Cayman Islands, they are, of course, not valid, but they also, which
is interesting in these certificates, they don't really need official stamps or
anything. You can basically also incorporate a company there extremely
easily and, of course, it's a loophole for tax evasion that's used by companies
worldwide, and he wanted to make it more accessible to people, so he just thought
about "Why not sell that for a dollar to people?" or "a dollar, then you can
download it and $2 or $3 and then you get a real certificate out of it". So that's
also quite an artistic way to deal with policy.
And probably another quite prominent picture is this of the Liberator gun I
think you've probably all heard of this one it's been around for a couple of years
now and popped up on on the Pirate Bay and it's basically a completely 3D-printed
working one-shot gun and, yeah, it actually has a predecessor which is
interesting which a lot of people don't know which was also called liberator. It's
called FP 45 liberator and it's from World War II and it had, it also was a one-shot
gun, and the idea there was a little bit different though. It was
produced for around 2 US dollars, so it was a very, very cheap cheap gun, just
created out of scrap metal parts and it had one shot and it was given out to
resistance forces in the occupied territories and the idea was that one shot
is enough to kill an enemy and take his weapon so we can basically rearm yourself.
Hence the name Liberator. So I was talking about enforcing policies on citizens but
there's not only citizens but there's also the others not saying the others the
non-citizens of your country, so enforcing policies on others is also obviously an
important thing to talk about and I'm just going to show you one picture which sums
up enforcing policies on non-citizens which is the US drone program bringing
democracy to a country near you. So another topic is the obsolescence of
political borders and that's also now we're where my work comes up and I was
very happy to be able to take part in a project that was initiated by two artists
that gave a talk last year here. It's an artist collective, KairUs, they gave a
talk because they went to Ghana to a site called Agbogbloshie, which is an
electronic waste dump, it's actually, I think right now the biggest electronic
waste dump in the world and they were collecting hard drives. They were buying
hard drives, basically, from this e-waste dump. And it's quite cheap you can get a
hard drive for a dollar and they sell them usually in bulk, like you get a big box
and supposedly take a big box with you and they also tell you this story that usually
people come and buy, well a lot of them, not one box but 20 boxes. Of course not to
have in the end these old hard drives because they're like, from a technical
perspective quite useless, but because of the data that's on the hard drive that's
potentially useful because you can use it for abuse schemes against the previous
owners. So, they brought 22 hard drives back to Europe, to Austria and then did a
forensic analysis and were able to recover a couple of, I don't know,
it was something about 200 gigabytes of data. And it was a bit
too much for them, so they decided to give it out to other artists and to somehow
deal with it, to dig through it, and we somehow did and it ended up in having, we
had a nice exhibition about electronic waste and the remainders of data that you
will find in this electronic waste. And just saying that what I've seen cannot be
unseen you don't really want to deal or to dig through the private data of a lot of
people that you don't know, especially because I was interested especially in
video and images. Um, yeah, I made a work out of it I will tell you about it in a
second. What we also did in this project was to try to get a understanding for what
are the problems of this whole electronic lifecycle. So, before you have your phone
in your hand of course, well, it was assembled somewhere and before it was
assembled, you needed to have the resources in very physical terms, the
rare earths that you need to produce the components and you have to
mine them somewhere and usually it happens in countries which are rather poor and it
happens under extreme conditions. People that work there are dying very fast, so we
created a project that tries to map this, well, what is behind this smart world,
like all this life cycles of electronic components and
exhibited at US Electronica this year. So, that was actually quite a nice project,
also to just get an overview that this is really a global problem and a global
phenomenon. Yeah, what I wanted to tell you, is this, about this project called
Shell Performance. That's one of the projects that I did based on the data, so
you already see someone in the middle of the, of the the middle screen to the the
lower part is something that well you could probably identify as a female
person, and I was interested in the private data and especially the private
videos and images that were still available on these hard drives. And the
more I was interested in it, the more I was disgusted by it, a disgust that is
specifically because it's one of these things that
sounds interesting when you think about it and sounds like you really learn something
from it. But you learn too much, too fast, you kind of start to feel into the
identity of, not only one identity, but sometimes more identities of the people
that were the former owners of the hard drives and so I decided to just work with
the material that I found on the hard drives that I could definitely make out to
be commercial productions. Which was still a lot. So I'm going to show you a video, I
hope it works. Internet. Yeah, there's no sound. So the work is, it's basically a
shell script, so it's a program that runs through the contents of the hard drives
which are attached to, to the, to the computer and spits away, basically puts
out images or stills of videos and renders them as, in ASCII fashion, just on that
screen and it looks a bit like matrix tiles, so we have a little, well that's
quite hard, quite easy to understand what's happening there and it puts out all
these files which at some point are pornographic, mainstream pornographic
images. The other side are sometimes just party photos of the former owners, so it's
a very diverse and a bit strange collage of a person's life, of a person's digital
life that you get and it's quite unsettling in what it evokes in you I
think when you look at it. So and in this, I hope, and in this exhibition there were
also a couple of other projects that happened, for example of that group
KairUs, that actually got us the hard drives, they were able with actually a lot
of effort to identify or personally identify one of the former owners of one
of the hard drives and decided to create a project in which they hypothetically sent
back this hard drive to the former owner. They knew that the hard drive has been
discarded about ten years ago, they still were able to figure out the new address
because they were able to figure out the new employer of that specific person and
they named this project Not A Blackmail because, well, they actually
don't want to send it to the person, but in a gallery you see it as, like the work
already basically having the stamps and and address of the person on it. But
they're not sending it, unfortunately. So, if I'm talking about the obsolescence of
national borders, one thing that immediately comes to mind is satellites.
Yeah, satellites. But then if you think about a much, much older concept than
satellites, there's short wave propagation so that's it's our nice radio frequency
phenomenon that or shortwave radio, you know it's AM radio for example, so the old
school radio that some people still have in their cars for example. This technology
is interesting because its, first it's meant to be for a, let's say a closer
space, like for example a little, little country or a state so you can have a
statewide radio program. But it also has this property that it gets reflected from
the ionosphere if you just have an angle which is high enough and you just sent the
signal basically to the sky. It gets reflected there and it comes back to earth
and it also gets reflected there again and then you can, you can basically hop quite
far up to a couple of thousand kilometres across earth. So it's one of the reasons
why you sometimes, especially at night where propagation of radio frequency is,
it's much better than at day, you're able to listen to Chinese radio here for
example, like the Fire, FireDragon, Fire Drake Jammer. So, and then based on this
technology, you have some other technology. It's called Over-the-Horizon
Radar, for example. Which is interesting, somehow obsolete now after having
satellites for reconnaissance, but it's still widely used. And Over-the-Horizon
Radar is interesting because it uses this short wave propagation characteristics in
order to locate enemy troops on the ground. And one way how you can use it
basically, is you create these stations in your own territory, you just point them to
your enemy territory or just other territory and you get quite a good
and close look of what's happening there. It's not only the
US that's doing this, it's also I think, Russia, Japan and Australia have active
systems. And right now it's actually quite active, one of these systems is quite
active here in in Germany but it's coming over the horizon from the Russian
Federation. So, yeah, this is a also VLF transmitter, it's called Cutler, it's also
a US Navy transmitter. By the way all these images are also taken
from the US Navy. So, one of the reasons why I can use them here, because
everything that's produced by a governmental agency in the United States
is in directly public domain, which is very nice also to to work with the
interesting thing with these very low frequency transmitters which are usually
used to communicate to submarines at the other side of the world and it works quite
well is that they have a very nice geometric structure like this one, for
example. So, this geometric structure is usually important for the correct
functioning of this transmitter and I was quite happy to see this nice geometry
especially coming from computer science being kind of mathematically educated and
I somehow wanted to work with that. That's what was coming out of it. It's not that
geometrically sound I would say, but it's a project that's now been going on since
2015. It's called “Kilohertz” and it's quite an international project I would say
and this site is right now in Brazil. It's somewhere between São Paulo and Rio de
Janeiro. There's not that much going on there, so it's quite a rural place to be.
I created this installation in order to listen to specific frequency ranges. So
kilohertz is an antenna and that's something that is quite hard to see even
quite harder to see even if you're standing in front of it, because the the
antenna is – looks a bit like this. The antenna is comprised of very fine copper
wire which has a diameter of about 0.3 millimeter, so it's almost not – you can
almost not see it if you're not standing in front of it and actually know where it
is and you can focus with your eye on it. But it apparently is quite good in order
to receive military radio communications and transmissions and that is what I'm
interested in this project is to receive these military radio communications I was
just talking about that shortwave radio, because of the propagation characteristics
is an interesting thing to use for the military, not only for this radar, but
also, for example, to have a uni- directive call – a channel – to, for
example, submerged submarines and it's also quite actively still used for
communications between military bases. So this happened to be just about 60
kilometers away from a federal police / military. That's kind of the same thing in
there in Brazil. Complex that most people don't really know what's going on there,
but when I was there I was interested to see if I can actually somehow get
something out of there – if I can actually prove at least that there's some military
communication towards the space going on. And it turns out to be, of course, quite
hard to do so, but what I was really interested in is not only to see how this
happens in Brazil, but how is that everywhere else in the world – because
listening or trying to listen to military communications is legally always a kind of
complicated thing in Brazil. Usually, when I give these kind of talks that say in
Brazil they have other problems they don't need to think about somebody receiving
military transmissions. They should work on other problems, but in other countries
that might be seen in a different way. So I executed this project also in Estonia
just 20 kilometers to the Russian border. I also executed this project in Norway and
in Berlin. Actually, there is one active instance running right now in Berlin
always listening to the same basically frequency ranges which are military
classified, well, classified military frequency ranges that you could see or you
were able to see just longer ago on one of these slides.
So, the way how these things, these antennas work is very, very simple. So, I
take the, basically, simplest way how to build an antenna and build it. This is a
very, very easy setup. So, it looks like an inverted “V”. It works quite well for
very potent signals and the rest of the hardware that you need is very cheap and
the antenna itself is very cheap, because the only thing you need for the antenna is
basically copper wire and for the rest of the station a Raspberry Pi – with a little
bit of software and a RTL SDR dongle is enough to do it. So it costs less than 50
bucks to create a surveillance or counter- surveillance station against these
military facilities. There's a couple of other ways how you can actually build
these antennas. Some this again, these images are now taken from, I think, it's a
navy field manual. So, it's a manual that's given to people in the field for
the scenario that their antenna is broken, so they need to build a new one and I'm
kind of using this knowledge against them, which is just a interesting sidenote, I
think. So, there's different ways how to build these antennas. They even have that
military radio transmitter. That's another way how you could potentially build that
and in the end you get very interesting nice power sweeps, nice images out of it.
They are power sweeps – what that means is I'm just defining a frequency range that
I'm interested in and then I basically have a computer program that just goes
just step by step and measures the intensity of signal that's there and in
the end, over time, which is the y-axis if you want. It creates these images which
don't tell you what exactly is going on there, but it gives you proof that
something is going on there and that some communication is taking place.
The only thing you have to do then is to verify that it's actually a military or
civilian usage and you can do that by looking into the policies, that have to be
somehow made available to the public usually through the regulatory
institutions in the specific countries, for example, the FCC in the US or – what
was it in Europe – the Bundesnetzagentur in Germany which have to publish it, in
order to make sure that nobody interferes with official signals military or
governmental or signals as part of a frequency bands which have been sold for a
lot of money to institutions in the country. So, publishing – I think, for the
first time now – an official call for participation and I'm doing this because
the “Kilohertz” project, I've talked about this project a couple of times already in
different countries and everybody at these places was interested somehow to
offer two square meters of space to build a little antenna somewhere and to push all
the information that this antenna spits out into a public GitHub repository and
just give out information to the rest of the world. And the reason is why should
you actually do that – like what is the real gain in doing that. And one gain is
to understand that some parts of the frequency spectrum that are reserved to
the military – and the military has most of the frequency spectrum reserved for it
– is actually never used and that could also be made available to the public. It
could also be made available for resale to commercial companies. I'm not in favor of
that, but I would like to be “Kilohertz” a project that's able to provide evidence
for non-usage of radio frequency bands in order to support groups that are active in
trying to reclaim parts of the RF- frequency spectrum for civilian usage.
That would be very nice to have and there's a couple of initiatives in other
countries that already start to deal with that, but what they always lack is
actual information about the usage of the frequency spectrum that they want to
reclaim for the public. So, yeah if you're interested in that you
can find everything. Well, you have that. So, I'm just moving on to the next section
which is a critical topic of protectionism and this is a new project. I'm presenting
to you, also, I think for the first time now, in Germany, it's a project which
stems from my idea that I actually wanted to go to these fences that are everywhere
right now in Europe. Fences that were supposed to protect us from an influx of I
don't know what and they are, well, especially prevalent in Slovenia and in
places around Slovenia. So, I went there for a residency and first went to the
fence between Slovenia and Austria. This is from the Slovenian side, obviously. So,
it has this police marker on there and it's quite a solid, if you want so,
fences. It actually says if you want to go through, please call us and we let you
through. it obviously is not valid for non-citizens, but it's interesting because
they really cut through all the very nice hiking trails and I'm an active hiker
I'm kind of saddened to see these kind of things. But at the same time you have a
street just 200 metres of that, which goes through the border and it doesn't have a
fence, so I don't really understand what's going on there, but they were very happy
to build these fence and now they have it there and don't know what to do with it.
So I took this trip to the fence and did some field research. What I'm doing there
is I was measuring conductivity of the fence, cause it's a metal construct,
right, and I was also measuring the potential towards ground to see if
I have a short-circuit there or not, if I can work with it somehow, just to give you
an idea of where that is: It's actually somewhere you see Ljubljana there in
Zagreb, it's kind of half the way it's in the middle of nowhere, it's a little
village called Lastnič and where the next, actually, the next video was taking
place. I'm now just gonna show you a little excerpt.
Person 1 in Video: As the migration summit kicks off in Malta, Slovenia has started
erecting a wire fence along it's border with Croatia, to help control the flow of
people arriving daily. Person 2 in Video: Last year authorities
rolled out more than 150 kilometers of barbed wire to stave off an influx of
migrants, which never came. Person 3 in Video: Stories abound in the
villages here, of farmers having lands cut into, of bears and deer cut to ribbons, of
kids falling off their bikes into the wire and nobody has ever seen a refugee.
Martin Reiche: So that last sentence is actually quite important, because they
built this barbed wire, razor wire fence, which is stacked razor wire, military
grade, for this border between Slovenia and Croatia, for zero refugees that
ever even attempted to cross the border there, so they now have this huge fence,
which is absolutely useless, and you just have animals that get somehow into the
fence and then die being inside of this fence or at least get hurt a lot, but
you still have this fence and everybody's kind of disgusted by this fence, so I
thought that's quite lovely, I just should just go there and see what I can do and if
I can do something, so I went to this fence, see that looks like this then, and
I did the same thing again: I measured conductivity, measured ground potential of
the fence, to get somehow an overview of how I could use the fence for an
electronic intervention, to say it like this and finally - this is almost a
religious position I like that somehow - finally I built a little device that's
something that's hanging around there, it's very very rudimental, has been almost
basically built on site, it's a little transmitter and an amplifier
hanging at the border fence and the other one in the ground, that's just one
meter there, doesn't really matter, was a proof of concept to send a signal over
this fence, so I was interested in seeing how can you use this defensive
architecture, which is really just there to make sure people can not be together,
basically how can you use that as a network infrastructure, just to be honest,
how can you just use that. Because it's conductive material, already lying there
for free, why not use it for something actually useful or at least try to see if
we could do something actually useful with it.
It ended up in a project called razor wire modem of this year. It's a still somehow
work-in-progress, because the modem part got a little omitted in the process of
being there in Slovenia. In Slovenia was really just a transmitter and one
receiver; the transmitter was sending some data on this fence and you had a receiver
taking the data from the fence. They were connected through a ground return in the
actual soil, so that you have the two connections that you need and I was
sending data through this fence and I actually sent the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights through the fence. *Applause*
Martin Reiche: Especially article 14: Everyone has the right to seek and to
enjoy in other countries Asylum from persecution. So I want to talk to you very
briefly about new modes of activism I already said that: It's
programming is the modern and the new form of activism and has to be understood as
that, programming is something that you should learn right now from primary
school as soon as possible, because it's just the way how to express in our modern
world and actually how to be a bit a step ahead of the regulators. And coming to
regulation that's going to get important. You have something I would call techno
regulation which is the regulation of technology, which plays a lot of roles
especially two: It's making sure technology functions as intended, so
planes should, for example, not fall from the sky, radio frequency radio
applications should not interfere with each other, and that's quite important,
also making sure technology will function in the future in somehow
predictive ways. So this is a problem for me, especially that predictive ways,
because it limits freedom of expression and it's also a future-oriented policy
that serves the goal, again, to predict some future scenarios.
So there's of course counter examples of things that oppose this techno regulation,
for example peer-to-peer protocols and anonymity networks or decentralized
cryptographic currencies as an example, but it's not enough yet. So the next topic
that directly speaks to me in that whole realm is quantification, because it is
directly related to the regulation of technology, because it's basically the
understanding or the trial to understand every occurrence of something in the world
and to understand that as a signal that has to be processed, stored and later
analyzed. And it happens on all levels, this quantification, not only analog to
digital conversion, but the creation of symbols from electronic impulses and then
to induce structure on the symbols, for example over predefined protocols or just
learned, like in predictive analysis; I just talked about that. The question is
here: Who is the enemy? I would say the enemy is everybody who sees us as their
enemy, which is not really a solid definition, but I want to make sure that
the enemy is not the institutions that create the policies, but it's the policy
itself, so I'm not against the state if I'm building a system that deals with the
policies that have been created by the people in this state, but I'm against that
policy in the first place and that's quite important to me. So I talked to you about
Laplace's daemon and I think if I stick together these two concepts of techno
regulation and quantification I get Laplace's demon.
It's an internal justification mechanism for complete surveillance, if you want, so
it's the old concept of the world formula and I was I was telling you I'm telling
you about the world formula and it's dangerous, because it creates a loop. I
will give you one example: If you have a predictive system, which is built on
some models of the world, it will predict somehow within this model and the more
correct the predictions get, the more you will understand that if we change the
world according to the prediction of this model then we will be better at
understanding our world, so why not just change the world to our model, at least in
some sense? Not very actively in saying: "Okay we should make our world a lot
easier or a lot more more formal" but I think that's something that happens
already and I said I'm coming from computer science, a bit mathematics and in
statistics we have a term for the outcome of this process and we call it
overfitting, so techno regulation and quantification somehow lead to an
overfitting of the world formula. I just want to show you two outcomes, what it
means to apply this world formula, which basically creates a justification for
everything, is something that we heard in the news for a long time: Iraq's weapons
of mass destruction. That's some of the or one outcome of the
application of the world formula that you trust a Secret Service, because it's the
Secret Service, it should know these kind of things. And the other thing that
can happen, if you apply this world formula, is of course also extremism in
the other way and in this sense I wanted to quote - not really quote but show you
this because I was interested when I read about that.
It's it's a kind of a security bulletin, published on the Internet Archive in
November 2016: The general scope I will tell you about it is: How can you use
information technology to conceal extremist activity and of course they are
using the same some of the same visual metaphors that also the Bundeswehr in
German is using. So but I don't want to end this talk on this very depressing
topic, because kind of the application of the world formula is actually a depressing
thing and I would urge you to understand that we have to do something against that.
I want to quote something against that: "We have grown, but there's still much to
be done. Many that live in darkness that must be shown the way, for it is the
dawning of a new day." Thanks. *Applause*
Herald: Martin Reiche. Martin Reiche. Jetzt geht's.
Martin Reiche: Jetzt geht's Herald: Jetzt geht's. Martin Reiche,
vielen Dank. Any questions? Martin Reiche: In German or English.
Herald: In German or in English, feel free to attend one of our microphone stands.
No questions? Martin Reiche: No questions
Herald: Well then, let's go home. *both laugh*
Martin Reiche: Thank you. Herald: Thank you.
Thank you for listening. Martin Reiche. *Applause*
*music*
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