*rC3 preroll music*
Herald: Yeah, and the next talk I'm very proud to announce, we have a speaker who's
coming in from sunny California and he's an attorney, he's working for Harvard.
He's doing so many things and he's fighting for our digital rights. Very
happy to say hi. Welcome. Kurt Opsahl: Thank you!
Herald: And "Spot the Surveillance" is the topic. We'll see what we haven't seen
before. And I'm very happy that you're here and... Kurt Opsahl. Please, let us
know what's up. Thank you.
Kurt: Thank you. Hello, everybody, my name is Kurt, also I'm the deputy executive
director general counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I'm here to talk to
you about observing police surveillance of protests. So why do we want to observe
police at protests? Well, because protests are political expression. And the Council
of Europe put it the right of individuals to gather with other people and make their
collective voice heard is fundamental to a properly functioning democracy. And this
is a right which is protected by the European Convention on Human Rights and
other international rights treaties. But surveillance - consumer's rights. So
knowing what technologies are used can help you understand the threats to your
privacy and security, as well as provide tools to advocate for limits on police use
of surveillance; surveillance that may chill people's right to express themselves
on these public issues. Just as an analog surveillance historically has been used as
a tool of repression. Nowadays, policymakers and the public have to
understand that the threat posed by emerging technologies is a danger to human
rights, and they need to understand that to successfully defend human rights in the
digital age. So journalists who are reporting on protest action should know
the surveillance that is in use. Activists who are advocating for limitations on
police use of surveillance need to know what surveillance is being used to
effectively advocate. And legal observers may need to document the use of
surveillance at protests in order to challenge the police actions at the
protest or challenge the police policies that are being used after the protest with
the footage they've obtained. So where are we going today? We're going to provide a
lot of information about various types of surveillance technologies in use by police
around the world. We're going to look at what the appearance is, how it works, what
kind of data they collect and how they're used by police. And at the end a few other
resources available for those who want to dive a little bit deeper on the topic. So
police surveillance technology is everywhere. It's on the police themselves,
on their vehicles, on the roadways. It could be above you in the air, surrounding
you in the environment, can be a lot of different places and you need to know
where. The police officers themselves often find in the form of either body worn
cameras or additional devices that they're using, which are basically mobile
biometric sensors. Body-Worn cameras or technology that's come out become more
popular over the last decade or so. Originally was something that was being
used as a way to provide police accountability that give a record of their
interactions with the public. And maybe, for example, could you show police
brutality or maybe deter police brutality? But there are two-way streets: these are
often used to surveil protesters, and the footage may later be used to support
arrests and charges. For example, we use this NPR story where after a rally weeks
later, the police went identifying people through body cam footage and brought
action against them for obstructing the roadway, part of the civil disobedience of
the protest, based on finding them on the body camera footage. They can be in a all
variety of places, so if you're looking for Body-Worn cameras, you got to look at
different places to see where they might be. So a couple of places they might see
them: on the head - head mounted camera. So it might be on the glasses on the side,
could be a lens right in the center. The center one is pretty hard to find, but the
ones on the side or might be part of the glasses or the helmet they're wearing are
generally pretty obvious. These ones, they're not particularly common, but they
do happen. Shoulder mounted cameras also a little bit less common, but they have an
interesting feature: in this case they're using the Warrior 360 from Blue Line
Innovations as an example, and it is a dome camera that looks all directions, 360
degrees off the officer's left shoulder. All most cameras like a front facing
camera will capture only 180 degrees. Chest mounted cameras are the most common
and these are being used very, very widely. We give some examples here from
Amsterdam, Middelburg and from West Midlands Police in the EU... or soon to be
not in EU for I guess Britain. And there are several known types: Excelon, Wolfcom
and Watchguard are very common. They operate in similar manners, though, with
some differences. And you can take a look at some of the examples that are available
to those companies webpages where they will explain the products they have an
offer and see what matches up for your jurisdiction. Or you can also look in for
news article. Oftentimes there's a news article about what may the first policy to
bring Body_Worn cameras is introduced in a particular police department. The're also
smartphone based cameras, and these are kind of the low end, it's basically just
an Android cell phone using its internal camera with an app that does recording
placed in a pocket. So the camera is a little bit above the clock and you can see
forward. But it's also a very subtle technique. And it could be easily confused
if you were looking for someone just starting their phone to their pocket. It
also might be clipped somewhere on the on their uniform. But if you see anything
where the camera is facing outward and it's attached to the officer, there's a
good chance that that is a Body-Worn camera and the setup is on play. Last of
the Body-Worn cameras will talk about the semi-obscured cams. So this is an example
for coverable Body-Worn, Body-Worn Utility, and it is
partially concealed, basically looks like a button on someone's uniform that if
you're not looking closely, you might not notice. But if you see, if you know, it
appears where you would expect actually not to have a button, it's slightly
larger, looks a little bit different. It looks like a camera if you look closely.
But if you're looking at a distance, you're not particularly paying attention.
You might not see it at all. In addition to Body-Worn cameras, there are often used
mobile biometric devices, so these can be handheld scanners, could be a tablet or a
camera phone, and in some cases it just is a camera, which had an applicable app on
it. But we'll see that... so how to tell whether they're using a phone or whether
using as a biometric scanner? By the body language. So, for example, if the police
officer is holding up the phone trying to capture someone's face, that is most
likely because they have a capturing of photo and they may be connecting that to a
facial recognition application. And you also will see mobile fingerprinting. So as
an example, in the United Kingdom, they have an app on the officer's phone
combined with a fingerprint scanning device and takes the people's fingerprints
and checks them against some databases. One is a database of everyone that police
have detained, putting them into the database and then checking against it for
new people. And the other one is a database for immigration, collected at the
border when someone comes into the UK. And this allows the police to do a very rapid
check of their records on somebody in the field. Some of these devices are
multimodal. We'll do both of them to be able to do fingerprints and take photos
for facial recognition. This here is the Dataworks Plus Evolution - does it both,
and that can be convenient for the officers, but it's a little bit more
dangerous to civil liberties. And some of the Body-Worn cameras, in this example
Wolfcam, has a biometric capability built in facial recognition so it can use its
regular camera functions and of course, all of them to take the picture. That
picture could be uploaded to a database and facial recognition will be done later.
But this one is designed to streamline that process. So take a moment, as an
aside, to talk about facial recognition in Europe per Algorithmwatch. The
organization says that there are at least 11 police agencies in Europe who use
facial recognition. I show them on the map here. The UK Court of Appeal found that
automatic facial recognition technology used by the South Wales police was not
lawful. However, elsewhere in the UK, they are still using it. The Metropolitan
Police in London is doing a life facial recognition throughout the city of London,
and it contends that the situation is distinguishable from South Wales. So that
doesn't apply to them. We'll see how that turns out. There's also been some pressure
on the European Commission to put a ban in place or put restrictions on facial
recognition. And in September, there was a quote from the commissioners saying that
they were considering whether we need additional safeguards or whether we need
to go further and not allow facial recognition cases in certain areas or even
temporarily, which is not a particularly strong statement. But at least they are
considering the idea and something that one can advocate for the United States, a
number of jurisdictions at the local level, cities have put restrictions on
their police departments so they cannot use facial recognition. It's a growing
movement. And while a national or international law that would limit police
use of facial recognition would be best for civil liberties, you can also start at
your local level. All right, what we wouldn't be on the police officers
ourselves, whereelse - vehicles and roadways and this can come up for the
vehicles, roadways adjacent to the protests and within the protests
themselves. So adjacent to the protests is looking at the exits and entrances to the
protest areas. And they may use existing ANPR or place new ANPR, or ALPR -
automated numberplate reserve called ALPR in the United States. These are cameras.
And they pointed towards a roadway to where cars will be. They are designed to
take a picture, determine what the license plate / number plate is, optical character
resolution. They will eventually... recognition that will eventually be able
to see what it is, check the database and find out who registered for that car. And
it can be uploaded to a central server for police to search, can add vehicles to a
watch list. It is a very powerful tool because many people are using cars to get
to and from protests. And even if they're going in in a group, at least one member
of the group would have to have the car. And it has been used to go after someone
after protest. So in this case, it was from 11 of years back. A citizen of the UK
went to a protest and was later pulled over because they had captured the license
plate while the protest added to database and then used that to pull them on. So if
there is a protest, the police might come in and use a portable number plate reader.
So here's some examples of what they might look like either on a tripod or on a
trailer, and they can set these up basically anywhere. They would often be
used at the entrance or exit to the zone in which the protesters expected, to see
who's coming in, coming out during the protest time period and try to capture the
crowd through their license plates. It also now becoming more and more common on
police cars. You can see a couple of examples we have here. One - it shows a
rather obvious in the top one, it is a UK police car. And see, the camera sticks
out, fairly obvious that they have a camera on the light bar; the lower from
the French police - less obvious, it looks like an ordinary light bar. You might be
able to tell that it's a little bit different than some other ones, because it
has sort of a funny thing in the center, but it's a pretty subtle approach. So
there's all kinds, they might also be mounted on the hood of a trunk and may be
more or less obvious. But take a look at... close and also take a look at what
the police cars behavior. If they are driving, for example, slowly down the
street next to a whole bunch of parked car, as it may be that they are doing
"gridding", a practice known as "gridding", where they are looking for
capturing every parked car's license plate in a particular zone. Slow and steady in
order to do that. And then there are the fixed number plate readers, these are
often at traffic lights and intersections on the highways, any sort of high speed
toll road will have them. They also are... here, they're used for other purposes,
like to establish fines, to check border crossings. They are very common fixtures
on on roadways. So a protest happens in a zone that already has them. The police
will be able to access that information and know who entered or exited that area
to look around. All right, and then within the protest itself. There may be adding
additional surveillance capacities, so in this example, we have a... the Santa Fe
Police Department knew about a protest that was protesting a statue and some
people would take action to remove the statue. So in order to capture that
through surveillance, they placed this trailer, which has a number of camera and
audio capabilities and just have rolled it in right next to the statue to capture the
protest action. And these cameras can come in a variety of forms. In this case we got
watch towers. Personal controling cameras can be in the watchtower or they can be
operating remotely. As you can see, they are using a scissor jack to raise it about
that van, the other one is an assembly. It's not easy for someone to get in and
out of there. So it may have a person, but somehow inconvenient to actually have a
person inside these watchtowers, but it's much more convenient to use their built-In
surveillance capabilities and remotely observe the area around the watchtower
with those cameras. And then there also pure surveillance units. This is an
example here showing four cameras raised pole and just adding surveillance
capability basically to anywhere. Some of them are much more complex: thermal
imaging cameras. Thermal imaging often come from the leading company is FLIR, it
stands for "Forward-looking Infrared". FLIR system makes a lot of these devices
and makes them available to police departments. Thermal imaging cameras allow
the police to be able to conduct surveillance after dark where the lighting
is poor, where they might not be able to identify individuals very easily. Instead,
they can use their heat signature and be able to continue to monitor the protest
when the lighting conditions are less and a lot of things on protest will happen at
night, candlelight vigils were commonplace. So police will be looking to
thermal imaging to make sure that they have strong surveillance capabilities
after dark. Another thing you might see at a protest is an emergency command vehicle.
These are often massive bus sized vehicles and they do have some surveillance
capabilities. They might have some cameras, but more often they are command
and control. So they are the places where somebody would be receiving footage from
cameras and operating cameras remotely, like a communications with another people
in the field. They also may have some built in capabilities and they may provide
the focal point, were a local connection, they're getting information from local
devices and then they have the uplink in the command center. One thing I wanted to
point out, it's a common misconception or something that comes up a lot where people
are concerned about police surveillance, as we'll see an unmarked vehicle or a van
with no windows. It may even have some antennas or satellite. And well that is
possibly an undercover police vehicle, you shouldn't assume that vehicle belongs to
law enforcement. That could very easily be a news media vehicle. News media also goes
to protests. They also have satellite uplinks and antennas, look very similar.
And in some cases, the media has a security situation there. They're worried
that there may be theft of equipment and they have unmarked vans. So it is worth
noting that there is an unmarked vehicle, but you shouldn't necessarily assume that
it is a police unmarked vehicle. Also, sometimes people see especially they see
some antennas or satellite dish vehicles that maybe that's were "stingrays". This
is a misconception. Stingrays are pretty small and they don't require an external
antenna. You could put a stingray inside a trunk of a car, maybe it will be a
briefcase sized. So it would be unlikely that if you're going to use a stingray or
similar, IMSI-catcher that you would want to put it in the vehicle. I don't
need to put in a vehicle that has its own antenna. There have been not very much
documentation of these technologies being used in the US domestic protests. They
have been used, we know it, in some protests and more authoritarian countries.
So it's unclear how often they will are being used and they are very dangerous in
the surveillance. So It's aim is capturing, it is able to determine what
cell phones are nearby, get a unique identifier with that cell phone, and in
many cases be able to use that information to determine while individuals president
protests. That information has been used after some protests in Ukraine, for
example, to send a text message to people telling them: we're onto you, we know you
were there, which can be very intimidating to individuals. But the challenge is that
you're trying to observe police surveillance in the protest, it is hard
for you to observe it because they are often hidden. You may be able to find out
more information later through investigative journalism or public record
requests, or news reports. If somebody is prosecuted using that information, it may
become obvious. It is difficult to see it at the protest itself. So next category,
look it up in the sky. There are lots of forms of aerial surveillance or for the
agencies to surveil protests from above using traditional aircraft, on board
pilots and as well as remotely operated aerial systems - drones. Law enforcement
may also use these aerial vehicles to communicate with the crowd, to use the
loudspeakers to send a message to the crowd. Order them to disperse. And we've
seen this actually drones with loudspeakers being used by the German
police in order to tell people to stay apart - Corona That same technology can be
used for protests. And these planes and drones will often be equipped with high
definition cameras, capable of either extremely wide angle to get the whole
scene or an extreme zoom where they might be able to zoom in on a particular person,
particular license plate, and then use that data later, partnering that the
aircraft with license plate recognition, facial recognition, video analytics and
even a cell-site simulator inside the aircraft. And we know this has happened in
a recent protest in Texas. A Texas police drone got some footage of a protester
allegedly throwing a water bottle. They took that video, they took the picture,
put it out, offered a cash reward, an anonymous tip to turn the kid in and
protester was prosecuted. So police are definitely using these things to gather
information at protesters. So a common method for a larger police departments is
fixed-wing aircraft; for smaller ones - they may use private contractors to
provide these fixed-wing aircraft. So this is an example of the kind of plane you use
by a company called Persistent Surveillance Systems. It rents out a plane
like this, well not this exact one, you look up that tail number, it's going to be
to a different company. But the same model of the Cessna 207-A. And these will circle
around the protest using their cameras to observe protesters below. And the
advantage of planes is they can often circle for quite a long time and provide a
wide view on the area. Also, helicopters, helicopters will often be seen hovering
over a protest, they are a little bit easier to maneuver and be able to go
backwards and forwards over the protest that are used by police to continually
observe. And we'll use two examples here. One of them from the Oakland Police
Department, the other one from the Rineland Police Department. In both cases,
they have a FLIR attached to the helicopter, a forward looking infrared
that would allow them, in addition to regular camera capabilities, to use
thermal imaging to follow someone at a protest or follow what's going on after
dark. We can also see that some helicopters will have spotlights, so that
they can signal to officers on the ground who to follow, who do pay attention to.
Another thing for both fixed wing and helicopters: they look for the tail
number. In most jurisdictions, they're required to have a tail number visible,
and then you could look up that tail number on services like Flight Aware and
be able to find out further information about what that plane has been doing, what
the helicopter has been doing, as well as the ownership. Finally, drones. Drones are
becoming very commonplace because they're getting cheaper all the time and having
additional capacities; drones are also known as unmanned aerial vehicles - UAVs;
UAS - unmanned aerial systems and a lot of police departments are getting them for
their capabilities using what's called a quadrotor. And they can be controlled by
remote control, have a camera built into this and be useful for getting above the
scene view. So one way to spot it... well, first of all - just listen to it, they
make kind of have a distinctive noise, sometimes are really marked as police.
Also look for the pilots operating nearby. So oftentimes a patrol out there,
sometimes they are labeled like in the upper left there, it says "police drone
operator" - pretty easy to identify. All the times they might have like "drone",
"UAV", "aviation unit" on their uniform, or a nearby police vehicle. The other
thing is that if you identify a drone, there're often within line of sight is
going to be the operator. So when do you see the drone look around and see, if
someone has the controls in their hand, is looking up the drone, you can probably
identify the operator and go look for information that might have uniform about
who is operating that particular drone. But also, keep in mind, both for drones
and other aircraft, that it's not necessarily the police. Journalists and
activists will often fly drones over protest, news helicopters for a large
protests are going to be more common than police helicopters. And many times they
are labeled with picture of the BBC News Copter. But this means that just as you
see a helicopter that has both a camera and is flying over the protest, that does
not necessarily mean that it's a police helicopter. Also, the technology, which is
actually not very commonplace outside of protests in war zones, but - the
"Dronekiller" technology, which is basically a real gun that knocks drones
out of the sky, sending radio signals to interfere with the drones operation and
cause it to fall and crash. These have been used in Iraq and Afghanistan and the
technology could be certainly used, but we really haven't seen it used more freely.
Just wanted to tell you about it because... oh, my God, Dronekillers. All
right, last place to look for police technology - in the environment around
you. There will be in many places camera networks. So a lot of the cameras will see
a neighborhood will be private cameras, will be police cameras, will be cameras
being used by city, non police agencies. That can be a lot of cameras. This also
means that you're trying to observe what cameras are going on. There's too much
information. There'll be so many cameras in many areas that you could spend all
your time documenting, observing the cameras and these other things. So you
might not want to spend all your time paying attention to that, because you can
go back later at any point and see the fixed cameras. But there are a couple of
things that... first, identifying them for two different brands to identify. But
here's some information about the kinds of cameras that are available. Bullet cameras
are directional, so you can sort of see which way it's pointing and what it would
be covering from that. Then you have dome cameras, which are designed, so you can't
see which way it's pointing, or at least you can see maybe some of this area one
hundred and eighty degrees. But the exact direction is pointing is obscured by the
dome. Pan-Tilt-Zoom cameras can change which way they're pointing. They can
sometimes be coupled with a dome camera so that the dome camera can both change the
way it's looking and obscure which way its looking. Thermal imaging cameras and ALPR
cameras are also becoming a fixed locations and we are all having to do with
traffic control. Thermal is actually not as common. That is mostly used as a
technology that is vehicles, is kind of expensive. But in this case, the picture
shown is a thermal imaging camera. So sometimes people will go to that
additional expense. And one subcategory of all the cameras that are environment are
going to be police observation devices, so the category of sets of sensors which are
operated by the police and they may included multiple cameras, gunshot
detection, facial recognition. For example, in the United Kingdom, say in the
city of London, is doing live facial recognition as a police observation
devices are a collection of these cameras in one location. Sometimes they're marked
as police, sometimes they are not. And there is the way you would suspect that
it's a police observation device is - if it has a lot of different sensors in one
location trying to cover the whole ground around, then that is the kind of thing you
would see most frequently from a police office image. And then finally, Smart
Street Lights. The Smart Street Lights have a number of wonderful applications.
Some initiatives like in the US Smart Cities and the EU E-Street Initiative are
exploiting cities to use more Smart Street Lights, because they could turn down the
power usage when the light is less needed. And there's some advance towards a project
by the Arnold University of Applied Sciences has a technology, which will use
motion detection, sound detection. Being able to tell that there are people walking
nearby and brighten their path. Sounds great. But the same kind of technology
being able to detect motion, being able to have audio signals, video signals - can be
used for surveillance. So here on the slide we show the smart lighting
capabilities being advertised by Intel. In addition to some things that you might
expect, like being able to adjusted for traffic patterns, provide when needed.
They talk about crime investigations, monitor parking
violations, safety announcements that are coming from the smart cameras. So all of
these technologies are possible and hopefully this will not become a
commonplace use. But if it is, it would mean that a surveillance device is
everywhere along every street where they're putting these devices. Wich
lightning the city you are lightning the city with surveillance. So has it been
used? Yes. The city of San Diego had a number of protests surrounding the protest
around George Floyd, and they used these thirty five times. They searched
information gathered through the Smart Street Light Network for evidence in
criminal cases coming out of that protest. So what additional resources are there?
There's plenty of additional resources, if you wanted to try to read more - and I
encourage you to take this only as a starting point for a lot more to learn. So
we'll start out with a very important resource. If you're someone who's going to
go, whether as an activist, as a protester, as a journalist, you should
prepare yourself for some surveillance self defense: at ssd.eff.org we have an
"Attending a Protest" guide. Go there and learn important tips on protecting
yourself when you're going to protests. Put your device with fulldesk encryption:
a strong unique password, turning off the biometric unlock, use end-to-end
encryption for messages and calls, walking or taking a bicycle to get to the protest,
sort of a vehicle, which couldn't be subjected to a ANPR / ALPR device. Wear a
mask, you should wear a mask for Covid anyway. But if you wear a mask, get a big:
the larger the mask, the more it protects you. There is also recently a study that
showed that they're making efforts to try to make facial recognition continue on
despite people's use of masks. And there was a study that showed that red and black
masks were harder for the AI to be able to determine who was behind the mask. So wear
a red or black mask. If you get one that covers more of your face like a bandana,
it's going to be harder for the facial recognition algorithms. So do some things
to protect yourself, both from Covid and from surveillance. If you want to also
just practice it out, you can go to our Spot the Surveillance. This is an online
program, you can do the desktop version or virtual reality version, where it places
you in a virtual street corner with some surveillance devices nearby. And you can
look around and try to identify all of the surveillance devices that you see. It
takes just a few minutes to go through the exercise, but it's a good way to practice
your skills and identify what surveillance might be around on the street. And if you
want to get a lot more information about any of these devices, go to EFF Street-
Level Surveillance project: eff.org/sls - street level surveillance. This will
provide more detailed information about various technologies that are in use. That
can be a good starting point, especially if you found out what is being used in
your jurisdiction. Go there and find out more about it. And you can also find out
just what is going on more generally with these kinds of technologies: eff.org/sls.
All right. Well, thank you. That comes to the close of my talk. Thank you for
turning in. And now let me turn it over to my future self for Q&A. Thanks you.
Herald: Welcome back. Thanks so much Kurt. Now we have some time for questions and
it's getting more and more. I'm just hurrying up. OK, are there devices, apps
or services developed or run by private companies and who makes sure the data is
not directly sold to third parties? Kurt: So, yes, there are private networks.
And one of the things we talked about just now is there's a lot of private camera
networks that are providing information to the police, sometimes private networks
going through a registry where police from organizers ask people to volunteer, put
their information into a registry. So they are sort of explicitly saying they're
going to turn over their information to the police or other things like Amazon's
ring camera. They have been promoting it as a antitheft tool, trying to stop
package stuff stolen from doors. But this also is creating a panopticon of
everyone's doorbell camera. If they're all using ring will be provided... get the
video and will provide it to the police. So and many of these organizations, you
know, if they're larger than they will have some some privacy practices, probably
policies. But by and large, they will talk about the privacy of the person who owns
the marketplace and not really consider the bystanders, the people walking by. So
if you have a doorbell camera at your front door that can hear audio, so maybe
someone could ring your bell and say hello. It will also capture people walking
by and those people's privacy is important to be considered.
Herald: All right, then we have: what hope do we have against all this, which best
case legal countermeasures do we have by been attending protests? And the another
one, which I would connect directly: is it possible to intervene against surveillance
based on laws or presumption of innocence? Kurt: Yes.
Herald: I don't know if German laws are meant, but maybe you still can say
something? Kurt: Well, I mean, so there's many
different laws that might be an issue. I mean, we have an international audience
here, but I think there are some also basic human rights principles that apply
to many jurisdictions. But I would say actually one of the most effective tools
to push back against this kind of police surveillance is working locally with the,
like, a city, the mayor, the city council and a number of locations have passed
rules about what their police can do against their citizens. So putting
limitations on what police can do at the local level, where your activities in the
city, which you live, taking things to your representative government and saying
we need to have some limitations on this, we need to have it within civilian
controls for the police themselves are not deciding what technologies to use, but it
has to pass through an elected representative. And I think that is
probably one of the most effective ways to at least start change where you live. But
you can also try and promote that to your national legislature, state legislatures,
go up several levels. And one of the things that I hope comes out of this
guide, where people getting more information about what kind of
surveillance is available, so that they can go to their representatives, go
through the political process with the information of what tool use something
that they have drawn a line about. Go to your representative and say we need to
make sure that the information that they're gathered is being used in a manner
consistent with human rights principles. And we need civilian control from the
local government on how to do. Herald: Who's controlling the controler
instances, yes. We have more questions. OK, so the police operate equipment like
ANPR-reader IMSI-Catcher etc. , that get information that they could get in a
cheaper way, like reading traffic signs or license plates, or cell info from
operators. And is there a reason for that? Especially concerning EU, because US
differs a lot. And another question: has police in EU, US been known to use illegal
or questionable tech for surveillance? Kurt: So I think on the first question
about using things like ANPR to determine license plates, this technology is common
in the European Union, though by and large it is being put in place for other
reasons, not to get the protesters necessarily. They are looking for, you
know, making sure that people are paying a toll or might be a speed trap on the
autobahn, where it takes a picture of the license plate of anyone traveling over a
speed limit - in the places that have speed limits on the part of the autobahn.
And I think also it's being used for enforcement of things like traffic
citations: your cars parked on location too long. They know who to send the bill
to. And I think these technologies could be repurposed for surveillance. And that's
what we really need, is policies that are ensuring that if these things are being
used for a purpose, that the sort of the citizenship agrees with in that
jurisdiction to enforce parking, for example, that is not also being repurposed
against political activities and being used at a wider scale than it was
envisioned. Also, maybe, you know, it's not a good thing to have perfect parking
enforcement, you know, a lot of parking fines were based on the notion that, like,
you might not get caught every time and when you change it, a system where
previously the fines were set with the notion that a lot of people would get away
with it.. to I do, like, to make an example of those who didn't. And then you
changed that to perfect enforcement because the computer, the ANPR system,
surveillance knows exactly the minute that a fine is due and then assesses that fine.
That actually changes the dynamic of power between citizenship and the state
significantly. And it will all be freeze and forms of well, we're just trying to
enforce the existing laws. How could you be against that? But really, it changes
the dynamic. And it's something that for those who want to be an activist on this,
again, talk to your local jurisdiction and try and make sure that these things have
safe and sane policies that respect human rights.
Herald: So I would interpret that like prevention of... don't come on the idea
that you need to to protect your data, right? Fun.
Kurt: And just turning to the another one. Do we have information about whether
police are misusing these technologies? So, I mean, there's some isolated examples
where people have misused their technologies. And I use a couple of them
in the slides. And there was someone who went to a political protest. Their car was
put into a database to get pulled over later. And then also in South Wales, the
court found that there the police use of facial recognition was in violation of UK
law, though, as I noted, not the Metropolitan Police in London don't agree
with that. They say it doesn't apply to them. And I think actually use of facial
recognition technologies is a very tempting thing by police. They want to use
it as much as possible, make it easy for them. And I think you will see that. But
the other piece of this is unless there are rules that say here are limitations on
how you can use these technologies and they can use them without having to risk
violating them. So we need to have those rules in place. I hope that the Council of
Europe puts at least a moratorium on facial recognition for use for police. And
until we can figure out how to use this technology safely, it's kind of cool that
you can unlock your phone in your face without having to type in a password,
but... we want to make sure that technology is used properly.
Herald: OK, so I think you're going to be around in the 2D world. You're going to
explore that, you've told me before. Yeah, there's more questions. I hope maybe you
find him in the 2D world and you just ask him there. Thanks so much. Thanks so much.
Very nice having you. Bye Kurt. Kurt: Bye.
*rC3 postroll music*
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