Transcripts For CSPAN2 Arthur Holland Michel Eyes In The Sky 20240714

Just want to go over a few admin items before we get to the meat of the program. I i would ask everybody make sue cell phones are turned off or at least in silent mode and that apply to smartphones as well and any other Electronic Device that would make noise while were having our discussion. We will have a q a as we get close to the end of this and when that goes down ill ask folks to please wait to be called upon, wait for the microphone so everyone in the audience has an opportunity to hear you and that ill ask you to announce your name and affiliation. Our topic today is this particular outset absolute facd terrifying book, eyes in the sky the secret rise of gorgon stare and how it will watch us all by Arthur Holland michel. And at the point out a little digital version of what im calling from the lord of the rings, very, very apt for the content of this book of what well be discussing today. It was literally six years ago this month that an innocent contractor turned whistleblower by the name of Edward Snowden burst upon the worlds seen with this absolutely amazing revelations about massport was covert surveillance had been taking place during the socalled war on terror era. There were literally dozens if not hundreds of stories about snowden and his revelations that poured out 2013 and continue to this particular day. Thats all been about electronic surveillance in terms of the listening variety, listen in our our cell phone conversations, intercepting text messages, things of that nature. Our guest today brings us what may be as scary or even scarier technological news, which is the tom cruise minority report scenario is not exactly so farfetched anymore. In fact, the technology we will talk about today was inspired by different movie which i will not steal his thunder. Let me introduce our guest. Over here in the far wing is our guest today, Arthur Holland michel is as a researcher, four and codirector. Arthur is written for wired, u. S. News, fast company, motherboard, the list goes on and on. He is the coauthor of the drone primer. Sitting directly next to me is jenna mclaughlin, a reporter for yahoo news where she focuses on the Intelligence Community Foreign Policy and other issues. She has been succumb Intelligence National for cnn, Foreign Policy from the intercept and mother jones recalled her graduation from Johns Hopkins in 2014. In between our next is sean vitka, legislative counsel for the fight for the future, federal policy manager of the Sunlight Foundation and as a google policy fellow at Georgetown Law Institute for public representation. In addition to serving as policy council, the also served as director of the Fourth Amendment Advisory Committee which he helped cofound on capitol hill with folks you mefford of, former representative ted poe of texas. His analysis and commentary on price Effect Technology been published in the chicago tribune, the washington post, again on and on. The legislative fight is been a part of include passing reforms to the freedom of information act and most recently the june 2019 effort in the house to rein in Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act section 702 mass surveillance programs. My thanks and welcome to all of you. Arthur, id like to begin by having you tell us how you develop this obsession with the drones. So first, id just like to think the Cato Institute for having me. I feel tremendously honored to be here with such a venerable panel. It really does mean a lot to be back in this space. Its been quite an incredible journey when you think about the fact that not seven years ago i was a pretty scrappy undergraduate at bard college in upstate new. Every morning i would read the times in the breakfast cafeteria, and it would be a story about drone strikes in undeclared war zones. And if not that it would be a story about how drones were increasingly being used in the domestic civilian airspace. Both of which raced unfamiliar questions. For my part i was to my research as a history student about immigration to northern new jersey in the 1960s. I was seating and a bar one day between my junior and senior year, and suddenly i had an idea. I have to study drones and have two great something called the center for the study of the drone hit a return to the college had told the administration. I told the faculty members we must do this. Because they are likely completely insane they allowed me to go forward with it, and we created this Little Research experiment, and the rest so to speak is history. I guess our timing was fortunate because we established ourselves at a time when people begin to ask these questions in a very broad public forum, and this questions that only become more complex and more challenging and more urgent as time has gone on. I spent my time at ca as an imagery analyst essential during the very tail end of the cold war. Period into the mid90s essentially. I was used to working with both air breather systems like for you to and also very highly classified satellite imagery programs, some of which i can talk about. A lot of which i still cant, unfortunately, even though its been 25 years since ive been actively doing any of that. What you say in in the book abt the sole issue of the soto struck in terms of trying to see something from above, that applies to put much any kind of conventional imaging platform, including even relatively advanced satellites, the things i can point to do that are in the unclassified arena for things like digital globes satellites. These things operate on what we call the electrical optical spectrum, the spectrum you and i use on a deal basis to see each other and the world around us. There are other spectrums the course that are of great interest from a military standpoint, from a lawenforcement standpoint. That includes infrared. But what i find, what i really find terrifying about this is were not out of you take a picture here, you take a picture there, youre talking about this web technology. Tell us what that acronym stands for and what it means in real terms. I should say as he turned researcher spent a lot of time thinking about pretty frightening technologies but in a way nothing me up at night the way this technology did, this gorgon stare as it is most formidable iteration is called. As was mentioned, over the course of the cold war the pinnacle areal surveillance of the settlers that took still images, when she moved into me counterterrorism style paradigm you want to follow individual people. With that you want moving images. Images. You want a video camera. The aerial surveillance needed system that by and large are in use operate under whats called the soda straw principle. Think of them as telescopes. They are very good at watching a very narrow area, very high fidelity. But if something happens outside of the area youre looking at, you are out of luck. An example was given to me by one source, the air force and several agencies were tracking a senior insurgent leader who was in a convoy of vehicles. They knew he was in the conflict but they did know which vehicle precisely he was in. At a certain point the vehicles reach an intersection and split up. At that moment these analysts had to make this very difficult decision. Do we go left or give a it basically came down to the flip of a coin. What if you could watch the whole area at the same time . That is the principle behind what i wrote about in the book, this technology that cost me some hours of sleep, but you basically get a giant camera and you watch an entire city at once picked the idea being you can follow thousands of vehicles. Even if you dont see the vehicle and the think of interest in real time, you always have the footage to view later eric the sort of genesis i should note of this technology is actually from the movie any of the state it was a movie from 1998 with will smith. Its about this rogue fellow within a National Security agency that pursues will smith because he has evidence they want. They deploy an array of technologies, they put trackers in his pants and issues. They put a camera in his smoke detector. But without a doubt the most Terrifying Technology is a surveillance satellite which is able to view the entire eastern seaboard all at once and it has a video capability and watches the will smith character as he scuttles around d. C. Things settle in operation is truly, truly terrifying your ken starrs anybody knows it didnt exist at the time. One night at a a movie theatern 1998 an engineer working at a lab went to see the movie with his wife. Where is it what else in the audience was no doubt terrified by what they saw on screen, he was absolutely thrilled. He thought it was amazing and he thought we should do this. So he rushed home and left a message with the supervisor saint something very simple. I have a great idea call me. And so this scrappy team, it worked on some ideas. They wanted to think about digital surveillance could be used in airborne capacity. Ultimately they strap some cameras together, all pretty scrappy but theyre able to watch very large areas. In the cia got involved and became very interested in what they were doing because they could use it to unravel networks of insurgents in iraq where these networks were really wreaking havoc on u. S. Service members with ambushes and ied attacks. You have a pretty wide area of view, it doesnt matter if you dont cvid go off at the remote. You can rewind to the moment in time and see whether people who planted that ied came from. Not only that you can see where they went but it gets better. Once youve seen where they went, night at the location associate with this Insurgent Group are so that you can track all the other conflict into the location over to other locations. There you can find the people who made the really big decision and the screw. This was thrilling to the cia because they were really trying to find a way to identify these groups that were essentially look like any other civilian. And so they fast track this technology. The incredibly rapid series of development cycles, culminating with the system that graces the cover of my book which continues to be in use this very day operate at least as far as we know afghanistan and syria, congressional report just called an absolutely crucial capability. Anything about it is classified basically but what we knew is it has made a tremendous difference in that original role. At least that is the claim that is being made on behalf of your sources, right . Right. Because what i think we learned from the history of surveillance programs and the United States over the course of the last almost 100 years now, is that oftentimes these claims of efficacy dont necessarily pan out. An example would be the patriot act section 215 telephone Metadata Program which is more, no as the call detail record program. Even though the program was exposed as stopping exactly zero attacks on the United States in 2015, congress in its infinite wisdom went ahead and reauthorized the program easily. Thats what are the things that concerns me about not just this technology but a lot of the technology that is out there right now whether we talk with facial recognition, other forms of biometrics, things of that nature. These programs have a nasty habit of getting funded and taking off and developing a life of their own and never really getting the scrutiny they need. To the best of my notes had seen the Inspector General the department of defense or any of the service Inspector Generals ever take a look at any of these programs to see if the claims match reality . They certainly have. The technology faced very much an uphill battle. There were a lot of skeptics, a lot of people who said it you get one megapixel camera with the predator, why would anybody need more than that . There was also some very scathing development and testing Evaluation Data they came out about some of these programs. And also there is some evidence that the technology has, as you said, escaped beyond its original constrains set of uses. One senior officer who was involved on the analysis and of the gorgon stare program said itd been useful for counternarcotics operations in afghanistan. That had nothing to do with what the cia initially intended for the technology, but once it is there in battle, those checks dont necessarily apply. You use the tools that are at your disposal. That being said, i feel like e budget data in a way speaks for itself. There are numerous ongoing developer programs. The army has new programs to develop similar capabilities, so does the marine corps. The air force is continually invest more in the technology. One gets a sense that probably has something to do with the fact it has shown at the very least tremendous potential in one form or another. I should add there is one data point i was able to get about these operations can which is there was one system, a set of four aircraft called blue devils with one of these wide area cameras, and according to one document, in a threeyear time spent it was credited, direct quote, credited with the capture or killing of more than 1200 people. In afghanistan. That to me is a a very tiny pek into what exists behind the curtain. You just referenced kind of the use of this technology in counternarcotics fashion to panic sure we are being us there as we be with respect to the technology. Any technology ultimately can be use for good or evil purposes as weve seen. A lot of the same equipment that is used to manufacture pharmaceuticals can use to make nerve gas. Theres a flip side to the story at a think its a we actually kind of talk about iraq for to talk with upfront rather than what we are pressed for time at the end. Lets take a hypothetical here. If google had its own capability here, how much better would google maps be and how much better would your Traffic Management and control system be if you able to employ this technology . Absolutely. I interviewed one official, or rather sort of Senior Executive at sierra nevada, which is the contractor, prime contractor for gorgon stare. He was actually driving in d. C. While i was speaking to him, and obviously the traffic was incredibly bad. I did a little background on this and the technology can be used to identify chokepoints in realtime. They can be used to gather data to create traffic model to figure out how to best optimize the flow of traffic through cities, how to space time in traffic lights, for example. But theres more to that. About a a year before i start working on the book i was writing my bike home from a bar in brooklyn. I i witnessed the shooting of fr people it seems shot a 19yearold. They disappeared into the night. Obvious obviously didnt go chag after them. I contacted the police the next day and doesnt touch with the detectives to try to give information i had and then i checked in a week or so later and they were never able to solve the crime. Virtually, the teenager survived but it joined this list of thousands of unsolved crimes in new york city every year. Had this camera been watching that night it wouldve been a very simple question of the tracking, the say assailants back in time for the came from and also for in time to the internet hiding out. Even if that had not allowed the police to catch up with them to bring it them an address to work. I want those people to brought to justice. I saw this teenager lying on the ground. If you have the capacity to do so, in a way its of incumbent upon us to at least make use of it, but the story is never so simple. Because i also heard about some very terrifying things that can be done with the technology in a domestic setting, which lets make a mistake, is happening. It is being used, or the r groups that are trying to have it be used in domestic setting. Its been used extensively in baltimore, testing and a bunch of other cities. Just last week a man who live for two as a henry at this technology announced he now has his sights on st. Louis and chicago to have the Technology Fly over the cities to solve, as he put it, unsolvable crimes. And the last thing ill say about that is it is completely legal. As far as the law is concerned there is no difference between this man filming an entire city with 190 megapixel military grade camera and me sticking my camera out of the window of an airplane to take a picture of the landscape as a flat across the country, the later part of my book, its public space and have a First Amendment right to do so. Sean, youre the attorney. Do you buy that . I think its fair to say that the law has not kept pace with what you describe in this book. Maybe before diving into this, i think theres another part you got to get that you explore in depth in the book, which is you call it avi, talk about the Artificial Intelligence apparatus around this other similar to the 215 collection with the increased collection ability generates way too much information for the normal intake process. I have a specific question on the other side of that that does start to tilt towards illegal sites but i think we need you to explain more before we get there. Sure. One of these cameras, a single one, generates an unfathomable amount of data. I calculated that it would take like 2000 ipads to play the imagery of a single camera frame at any given time if youre looking at realtime, real size resolution. As one injured put it to me it takes a Million People to watch a Million People, and sure enough when air force began analyzing all of this footage they found themselves completely overwhelmed, a vast majority of it was ending up on the cutting room floor. They could obviously find what happened after an explosion was known about but they were not able to find what Donald Rumsfeld refers to as unknown unknowns. Shortly though some of the things happening in the footage but they simply didnt have time to get to. And so the solution to that is Artificial Intelligence. Because that only does it scare you the quick work of having to track individual vehicles, a very simple solution to that, you just say to the algorithm in theory, look at this vehicle, tell me a poor its been in it where its going. You could also say that only tell me where its been but every other vehicle it is associate with. Give me a list of every location. And then track all the vehicles that up into those locations as well. But theres more. Maybe you dont want to stop someone who is a known terrorist that maybe want to get, as the pentagon would put it, left of bank. You want to get them before they mount an attack. As it turns out these groups often exhibit some pretty predictable behaviors in the lead up to an attack. They will do some Pretty Simple counter surveillance. They will take uturns or drive aimlessly to make sure no one is following the. What if you told an Artificial Intelligence system, tell me every time a car exhibit one of these behaviors in a city. Now, the system even if it doesnt get every single one it will catch some number of unknown unknowns. That is the true holy grail of surveillance. To find everything that happens that you have no other way of knowing about. There has been an intense effort over the last few years to automate this technology. A lot of people and some have heard about project maven, this controversial effort that google has been involved in and of the Silicon Valley firms. Its first sprint so to speak with you get some automated capabilities to soda straw footage. Now it is turned to wide area motion imagery. Though that is received far less attention, its something we should all definitely be thinking about it because im not sure we want to live in the city where every time someone does a uturn it seems a little bit suspicious. They all of a sudden have a crosshair painted on their head. I i want to get that out thee because a legal perspective, question was not this is legal depends in part as well on how you use and why you are using it. You talk about this in the book as well. We have recent Supreme Court decisions which it referenced in the book, that generally speaking there is an upper bound to what this could look like. Theres the private application of the idea of introducing this at trial, using it as a true investigative technique domestically. Im not so sure i would agree with the convention it is legal. Unaccounted for perhaps. Unchallenged as yet. Some of that might disagree. Heres the thing, the jones decision that sean is referring to was in 2012. It involved police use of a gps tracking device on the subjects vehicle, not for a day or two but for something on the order of weeks i believe 28 days. Sorry talk about essentially placing a specific device on a vehicle and having that person tracked literally in this case for roughly a month. The court said no, that is basically a violation of the Fourth Amendment. So for me the question is, is johns applicable here even without the application of an actual device on the subjects vehicle . Because you are utilizing a very different form of persistent surveillance. You are just not sticking the actual receiver, if you will, the beeper or what of your to call it, on the car. It does make me wonder whether or not jones would be operator here. But your point is theres no actual case that you are aware of in any federal jurisdiction right now with this is and is a a part of the reason why that may be the case that as was the case in baltimore, they did everything they could, baltimore pd, to keep the use of the system absently secret. They did not want the public to know about it city officials maintain that no knowledge of it. Let the committed outrage, all the rest of that. Isnt this penchant for secrecy, this penchant for using a designation known as Law Enforcement sensitive on information, isnt that essentially one of the reasons why we probably havent seen a challenge to this kind of thing . Without a doubt. If you think about how recently congress has begun to Pay Attention to sell flight simulators, these devices to track our cell phones locations. Thats largely attributed to the fact the fbi has allowed local lawenforcement agency use the technology. They had to sign a nondisclosure agreement. You apsley right in baltimore it was a secret operation. The reason was it wasnt funded by the city. There was a texas billionaire philanthropist by the name of john who gave the city enough money to run this program to see if the technology really did have the potential it seemed to get as result of the people, the Baltimore Police department did not tell the mayor. It did not tell the state legislature. It did not tell the city council. It did not tell the public defender. The list goes on. I was lucky enough to find out about this operation while it was happening. Although i was sworn to secrecy and i spent to mechanism baltimore observing the city along with these analysts and a counterpart in baltimore, police department, and it was incredible what this technology was able to do. I sat in on a briefing for three detectives who are working on a murder investigation, of a shooting that the seller to the shooting that i witnessed. The analyst showed how they been able to track this mans the senate for hours following the shooting and also leading up to it. One of the detectives that it was by far the best he had ever seen in his life. The other detective almost had no words, was trying to find a way to make sense of what he just seen. He said its like that movie, in any of the state, which i b i almost fell off my chair because at the time nobody knew that the technology had been directly inspired by enemy of the state, something i review with the book. Following that briefing i stepped out onto the street and a new the airplane was watching me. I looked up into the sky and i couldnt see it, flying very high. And sure enough it felt pretty uncomfortable to know that i was being watched. But are more uncomfortable i will tell you is seeing everybody else going about their business in the city knowing that they are being watched by a technology that they probably cant even fathom. They dont even know exists and they have no idea. To me that felt wrong. That felt fundamentally wrong, this technology watches everybody and nobody knew about it. So its wrong on a sort of moral level in that sense, a sort of visceral level. Its also wrong in terms of the fact that because at that secrecy, the city council didnt have an opportunity to weigh in on it. The states attorney didnt get an opportunity to to weigh in e weather this evidence would be admissible in corporate and it ended up having a whiplash effect of the program because when it was finally revealed, there was so much outrage that itd been kept secret that they had to cancel it. As you were reading the book what struck you about the journalistic techniques and his ability to actually get these people to talk to him . I was kind of floored that people would work at some of ofe most secret labs in our country and it worked on supersecret stuff at my former employer cia, but other agencies as well, were actually eager to talk to this guy . Absolutely. Its funny when you report on this intersection between technology and Intelligence Community, sometimes you happen upon these topics that people excited to talk about. It worked on these things, 50 felt these new godlike tools and one to brag about them to certain extent. Especially within the Intelligence Community particularly sorted within the research labs. There is this space that exists reclassification if you will. These people are scientists that may have a different frame of mind when discussing the sorts of things and i would like to more about your process of reporting. I was astounded by the amount of information in there. I also have that would love to bring up the ai issue as well as a journalist who has covered the intersection between Technology Ai and Intelligence Community, something im often struck by is sort of the reliance on this godlike tool and the tendency in which in its early stages is very prone to error. I wrote about the cias use of Communications Technology and using that to connect resources on the ground in china, iran, and essentially a webpage may be a source, a webpage they could do and say it looks like theyre browsing about yoga but in reality theyre communicating with the agency. Over a light on this tool that was not a secure lead to the deaths of the sources around the globe. I feel like looking at the errors of that, haired particularly with the eye. If we rely too much on ai i think that is super dangerous point where will Computers Make Mistakes . When you look at these algorithms to people talk about how dumb that are at this current stage and we are rushing headlong into something were not really prepared for . Absolutely. Ill start with the first question, and coming from jenna to say my reporting was up to scratch is tremendously high praise. I will probably get that tattooed on my arm later. It was funny when i started researching the book, i would tell people in the community, journalist that i navigate, that i i was writing a book about ramey and gorgon stare and beverly people would say wami these guys would talk to . I i started to get nervous myse. It was exactly one of the stories where people were willing to speak to me. And it were a couple of reasons for that. One was that they are proud of what theyve done. In the sort of Core Development period of this technology, the growth in the power of the cameras actually outpaced the growth of microchips, of computing power, which is described by moores law. That is an astounding achievement if you think about it because were talk about from the early 2000s, sort of five years ago, computing really improved in that time. I want to talk about that, maybe brag a little, but much more importantly was they had a sense this was an important story. This was a story of broad public interest. And it almost had some obligation to get it out there. In fact, one of my sources when i i finally reached him, he said arthur, in a way ive been waiting for this call for 15 years. And i said why . He said because we have to answer for what weve done. They have had a sense since the outset of this program that they were creating something formidable. There was one incredible moment right in the heaviest moment of the settlement cycle when they felt like every single day was a day that they were not saving u. S. Service members in the field. And everything broke down. They were in florida actually doing surveillance over all these towns around palm beach, without anybody knowing about it. Apparently they all just sort of sat on the beach, a little overwhelmed by the enormity of what they had done, but perhaps that set off a process that they would no longer have any control over. Another thing that really amazed me about these discussions i had, in every single one i intended eventually to bring the question of privacy. Even if these guys are talking about a fairly constrained set of military uses, i one thing to talk about privacy. And without exception every single one brought up privacy before i had a chance. Because they were thinking about it, too. Which just gives you a sense, one of their role in this discussion, a crucial they hae to play in the dialogue, but also the technology itself, that it does raise these difficult questions. To your point about Artificial Intelligence, youre right that its failure prone. One my favorite anecdotes is there was a group at Colorado State who is developing this recognition algorithm for looking at video surveillance, and this system was very impressive in being able to detect a woman and detect she was turning around, but as researchers put it, it missed that she was carrying a bowl of fruit. You cant trust the systems that misses a woman carrying a a bol of fruit, can you . I thought it was kind of strange, strange proper to use. Theres a couple of things, one, i dont care if they miss even a large number of suspicious activities. As long as they catch more than he would be able to catch by human analysis alone. Thats a pretty compelling idea. Theres also the fact they know this stuff is going to get way more capable overtime. They were all too starting to use this technology called deep learning. They found it had tremendous potential in this application. But your question raises what i think is the key issue, with regards to automation, which is the question of trust. Not every analysis by the computer is going to be based on fully robust data. The computer needs to keep a sense of how much it trusts its own analysis. It needs to say to you, this is 99. 9 likely to be true, but needs to tell you im not really sure. But if you think about it in a a lawenforcement context, that is incredibly problematic because it says to you i have a 71 competence rate that theres about to be an armed robbery. Do you send the police in with their guns drawn . To you be and are over with a single patrol car . What if the computer gets it right and you didnt Pay Attention . Next time it gives you a 71 confidence analysis you will send in the whole swat team. What if it has a very confidence rate, 95 , and it was just some teenager playing ball on the street . Well, the next time it gives you a 95 confidence analysis you are not going to trust it at all. I feel like its not going to be long before a lot of these leased departments start a very dysfunctional relationships with their ai. That not only is problematic because it needs the effectiveness of this technology will be compromised, but it is also problematic because people could really get hurt. But theres another layer below that as well and you do get into the book and if it its one of the most fascinating parts. Its not just that 71 is a complicated number to interpret. I will read passages that will stood out to me. Most behaviors one of the pieces of software involved here, track vehicle events of interest and included in those our quote keep distance far, keep distance close, passing, flipflop driving when cars passed each other republican approach, repeat, parallel driving, dropping off, aimless driving and weaving. Presumably they factored into the 71 number, or some analog to it. And even more alarming, this goes back to some of those legality questions, i just think its incredibly important in building director, additional markers identified by a secret pentagon report, so for anybody who likes to file foia request, theres one out in the next 24 hours had those include name, gender, age, weight, religion, skills, values, race, email addresses and even red flags. So i think how this question is rain is widely important. I am curious about generally speaking where you fall in the broader spectrum for this kind of work type and maybe the more privacy hogtie. Just the granularity inspires so many deep, not just legal questions but philosophical questions. These are qualities that even in a war zone i think would inspire some pause in terms of triggering lifeanddeath decisions. Is that, what are they doing about that . If you get all these great interviews in this book about come from the evangelists who have every take one could imagine including lets do it, all the way to i had to stop working on this. Its not clear theyre all talking about these issues. They recognize the issues you bring a broad of what was going to do with 71 . How do we address transparency, but these are fundamental issues. It makes the question how well do these were in absence . Absolutely. It touches on a really important point which is the reason this technology is significant is not solely because it is powerful and a vacuum on its own, but because it is emerging at a time when we have had the capabilito find out a persons name and gender and religious beliefs and their associations using things like social media analysis and wireless medications interception. When you bring all of this information together and then when you apply Big Data Analytics to it to find that a person is not only doing a suspicious set of uturns in the middle of the night, but they also posted some information on facebook that shows they have a particular leaning, political leaning that may be of interest, that is tremendously powerful. That is tremendously whirring, not only because it has the granularity element but also because it touches on the automation element and the idea of confidence scores. And also because it raises these questions of whether it leads anything that can remain private in this day and age. There was this really incredible passage that i sat in one document talking about a system bringing this together couldve been used to find osama bin laden. It does so by doing exactly these things, identify suspicious driving behavior, crosscheck and so on and so forth. The answer is that these folks would give you to your sort of broader question is they have a Single Mission in mind. They have a single task and it will stop at nothing to do it. They are constantly dedicated to saving peoples lives. And in a way i came to realize after initially being frustrated by the answer, that thats the role they play in this ecosystem. You cant expect the line to decide that it is something not going to eat a gazelle because there are not any gazelles left anymore. These folks are in this Technology Space and they will do everything that they can. And they have some sense that something needs to be done and some will go further than others in suggesting what can we do about it. But in a a way there are othern ecosystem at the need to respond to it. Its like you spoke to in your earlier question about whether this anybody auditing this stuff within the intelligence and defense community. My answer is no, not particularly. Perhaps when type of use of drones domestically there are some privacy audits but it dont think it has nestle gone far enough. Thats what i wrote the book. Thats why these guys are willing to speak to me because they have done what they did, maybe theyre happy with it, maybe theyre not, and now it is sort of our problem to deal with in a way. I wouldnt put those words exactly in the mouth, that is the situation. The cat is very much out of the bag. Not only is out of the bag, the cat is evolving, turning into this writing i quit when eyes and ears and other ways of listening to us. Its automated and can do all these frightening things. Its miniaturizing so now a a chemically used way 1000 pounds now weighs 30 pounds. You can put it on a drum. One engineer i spoke to calculate that with 702 drones equipped with one of these 30pound cameras, you could watch the entire island of manhattan. They are no flying drones as opposed to one single highflying aircraft, you can see around buildings. You could build a 3d model so that now the police would be able to have a 3d explorable environment of the city. Imagine a really realistic videogame of manhattan, right, where people are moving around. Those are real people and you can fly around in this virtual but not virtual 3d space. Thats where we are headed. These guys are not going to pause. Talking about this level of granularity in the data can one more popular effective conversation recently is what happens if an adversary steals that information . Did you talk to your sources about how theyre protecting it . Because constantly we seem to charge into the spaces where we collect it all but we dont actually protected. Then wait, china has it all now and are adding to the opium data and equifax dated, and our people thinking about that . Yes, very much so. The answer you get is trust us, we secure this data. Im not a cybersecurity expert, so i dont ask him to show me the code theyre using to security systems. But that is another huge question, the scenario that i imagine is that you have a city with a very well regulated Surveillance System. In this city on monday the system is operating, there happens to be a black lives matter protest. A hacker associate with a White Supremacist Group gets access to that ditty, another contract every single protester who attended that protest back to the house. The entire city of baltimore just got hit. Its not theoretical. If we assume that if this gets deployed well, if this continues to be deployed domestically i should say, thank you for the work again, that International Terrorism and pleasant clandestine use, those are the bases for surveillance. Thats the stuff that the government employs stands for accessing for National Security. The specific way that the jews, for instance, the call detail records they get is the context. Its not just the one person youre looking at. Everybody that they talked afterward, all that contacting on the other side. But the time you get to decrease out which is the law under section 215, you are talking about a program, in this case it would be under constant monitoring, under the wami system, talking up surveilling people who not only are not suspected doing anything, the vast majority of them have been in contact with the original person you were trying to follow. That is just so much different than what we had before. Absolute. One of the tactics the Baltimore Police department extremity with was not just to track people who would been involved in shootings, but people who appeared to be witnesses to shootings. So they could track and back to their home addresses and then to the Police Officers knocked on the door to try to extract testimony. We all have a right to withhold testimony if we dont want to get if its a Police Officer casually dropping by our house, intimidating, though that may be. This is a way of seeing networks. That is by definition what its for. We are so interconnected, as sean mentioned, and all these giveaways that the only possible sort of effect i can imagine from this is his chilling effect. Now that i know i Surveillance System will potentially putting crosser on me if i drive through a neighborhood with a high concentration of people who appeared to be involved in the drug trade, because it determines because i panel next to the scar, i had some association with the person, im not going to go to that neighborhood anymore. Its interesting, i found this one report that talk about some of the principles of wide area surveillance. It said with wide air surveillance, this is a pentagon report, joint operating manual, we want to give this is pretty much a very close paraphrase, we want to give the adversary the sense that we can see even a very intense. Not just what theyre doing but with the plaintiff you. We want them to look over the shoulder even if we are not directly them. Thats all well and good if you did with a violent terrorists, but the technology while have the exact same effect domestically. And it doesnt help its called gorgon stare. [laughing] its very much intentional. All the systems have very formidable names. The surveilling version of gorgon stare which is not been as far as we know deployed domestically, in active operations although we know fbi and department of homeland secret had taken a interest in, its called vigilance stupid thats not toning down very much. Thats also constant hawke, be devil as imaging, angelfire. A lot of greek mythology there. History teaches in anything though, change into something boring once they get scrutiny. That typically tends to happen. But for the doesnt help it brings to get a lot of the Different Things you touched on already, you know, these programs are predicated on race and religion. You know, im really curious, when you interview people, they talk about transparency and about these issues, and someone who supports transparency around these lines, but what are they doing to get to these fundamental questions . Do you see a see a way for theo actually strip out some of these were obviously problematic components . Such that it would be something that would be powerful to get set to be it ever would be but you clearly see vectors for use domestically and i do see how that could possibly happen hidden the absence of tackling these first. Absolute. There is no doubt that the need to be strict controls. Theres a Company Privacy policy something to a bubblegum whats required of them. Theres sensible rules in the comp things like there will be a meticulous log of every action by the analyst access imagery so that no analyst stop following their spouse for example. They create minimum operating altitudes to ensure that technology doesnt have the resolution to identify peoples faces. But in a way its not these folks responsibility to hold themselves completely to account, nor is it particularly wise. Because they are subjected at the end of the day. He said to me i will not do political surveillance. But, and this was literally his next sentence, i will do a world bank type of thing where you have 20 agitators, and orcas trying to make trouble. You know, if you look at the historical record, some very fine people have been referred to as educators. Think about how the Civil Rights Movement was spoken about at the time. There was another really chilling story, another engineer who develop this technology and is trying to commercialize it says that he used it one day to fly over the Michael Brown protests in st. Louis, ferguson, following the shooting of this black teenager. And he said that it was simply a test, that he just wanted to test out some algorithms against the large crowd. So the people were test subjects. Very much so. He also told in conversation that he the opposes the black lives matter protester even refer to some of the protesters as thugs. So i asked him, okay, fair enough, youre not breaking any laws, but if you saw anything that raised concern, what you have told the police . And he said, of course, thats my responsibility. As an upstanding citizen. But what is his threshold . What counts as a concern activity . He said i think this pixel on the screen through a through ak through a patrol cars window. Heres his address. If that capability had existed during the Selma Montgomery march, who knows what well be today . Because those are exactly the same rationales that we use against those groups. Thats why you cant just, you know, i have no reason to doubt that these guys, and i should be sensitive to the ginned element. By and large they are men, most of the people spoke to our mentor in fact, he only person i spoke to who said i would not want this flight of my own backyard was one of the women i interviewed. With a mostly white as well . Yes, they were mostly white. At a think it is relevant at the agent who flew over st. Louis is white. His wife, however, who also the mainly opposes the plaque Lies Matter Movement is black. I was fairly confused by that point. But, you know, there is that subjectivity aliment that was very, very palpable in all of this. Even though they have the best of intentions, i mean, they want to have a Peaceful Society but we all have different ideas about how to get there. Perhaps the people with access to that technology are not the ones who should be calling the shots. Within the Law Enforcement community and within the National Security committee especially, its an extremely Mission Oriented culture. But the issue is how is that mission defined, right . Mission is always get the bad guy, get the bad guy, if the bad guy. That is the message that the public politicians sense on pretty much a regular basis. Thats why i think a lot of skepticism essentially has to be applied. To some of the claims are some of the advocates here. On page 180 you have a passage, ive got to read this, my has overlap with me on the hill when i i was up there and he was on the majority side, the republican side on the House Permanent Select Committee on intelligence. This is what he said kind of in response to some of the issues you are raising. The fact of the matter is, he told me the first time we spoke with being a line he atone from use operative in the surveillance industry is, the u. S. Intelligence community has the ability to respond you but it doesnt because, heres a secret, listen closely, he paused for effect, the u. S. Intelligence community doesnt care about you. Mike, if youre watching, buddy, you might want to rephrase that. You might want to go back and rethink about that. When mike was on the hill is when senator Chuck Grassley revealed in 2012 that the nsa Inspector General had found that nsa employees were misusing nsa systems to listen in on the conversations of either their current spouses or former spouses or former levers. This wasnt what are two people. This was at least a dozen, and those are just the ones they cant. So i think for me, because ive been in this town for so long because i worked both in the Intelligence Community but also on the hill, and like sean ive been around for a lot of these surveillance battles over the last 15 years, what always concerns me is the backend process essentially for trying to keep tabs on the stuff. You can pass a law, and this is what the fort Intelligence Surveillance act was ostensibly designed to do when this past in 1978. 1978. It was designed to actually prevent the stuff that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is used to do today, which is engaging and awful lot of mass spying on americans. The problem that we have and this is the point i would want to engage on is, our system as my former employer representative hold would take him our system is mostly selfcorrecting but my caveat to that is it only self corrects if we as citizens engage. Congress basically not doing its job of taking a hard look at an existing surveillance program, in this case the fisa section 702. The amendment offered by mister amash of michigan on the republican side and the democratic side which in previous years has eagerly passed the house and in one year passed it bya veto override majority of 293 vote and this year it fell short by 175. So i think what i fear and what i want to hear you address as best as you can is what is our hope for actually being able to get it right with this technology . The symbol philosophy that there are cases that have gotten it right before. We are at least at the local level we have very strong protections against warrantless wiretapping of identification. I know thats complicated at the National Level as far as foreign intelligence, but the more abstract answer i give to that question is that we really have no choice but to be optimistic. So you would think that having spent the better part of four years working on this book about all these frightening technologies, i find it hard to sleep at night and i would be fairly pessimistic about our prospects. But i dont see that as being an option because i dont think that people who are pessimistic will do anything. I dont think people are pessimistic go to their town council, i dont think they write for their congressman, i dont think people who are pessimistic challenge these technologiesin the courts. So one of the i guess saving graces about this technology in particular is that it is palpably scary. It is not scary in a sort of abstract sense. You talk to people about Big Data Analytics and they find it a little hard to wrap ones head around but when you tell someone there is an eye in the sky watching them unblinkingly, that makes sense on a more intuitive level and i think the recent History Speaks for itself in that regard but every time so far a city as revealed that it has this technology in use or is intending to use it, it has been derailed public pushback so perhaps weve reached a technology that is, has gone too far where people say wait a second, we care about our privacy but were not going to be watched from the sky persistently, thats just not going to happen. I think we can use that to our advantage. To date there has not been a single congressional hearing about wide area Surveillance Technology. No public hearing that we know of. So we dont know whether or not house and Senate Intelligence committee have held those hearings and just to jump in quickly as a historical note, not a single document from the house or Intelligence Committee has been transferred to the national archives. At another area where we need more transparency, i had to get plugin because i think its so important to our ability to see whether or not the committee in many obvious ways are not doing their jobs but when the committees themselves who are charged with overseeing these are not being transparent in a way essentially that the law and i think the constitution requires them to be, we should have some concerns but at the state and local level you see hope. I do see hope because its easier to talk about it, its easier to explain what it does and why its potentially beneficial, why it could potentially be dangerous. There has not been a single Congressional Research reports that addressed the topic in depth. My hope is that that begins with a level of public awareness, that was one of the main motivating factors behind this book and i think that when people do know about it, they do have the desire to take action but theres a very important caveat to that which is that more enforcement by nature will always operate according to what the rules do say, not according to what the rules do not say. And ill give you an example of that. Lets say we create a law thats very robust that creates all of the limitations you could possibly imagine on aerial versions of this technology and the Police Departments are put on top of the skyscraper. No, this is a groundbased system with these rules so the regulations of the technology have to take into context all the potential iterations. It has to be future proved which the only solution to his thinking about this as a process rather than a single goal of developing a golden chalice like regulation that will be completely watertight forever. And that there is an emphasis on making sure that the rules are complied to as they are written but also as to what they do not say as well. And i should also say that theres a reason to be hopeful a lot of this because weve seen 10 cities take these actions. San francisco just passed a robust municipal ordinance that requires the city to disclose its intentions to purchase any new Surveillance Technology so the baltimore operation had a patent and to submit that technology to a thorough review with strict vendors and regular orders to make sure that no one gets lazy. I think thats a pretty solid step forward but perhaps for that to happen at a larger scale i think a lot of people are going to need to participate so the onefinal thing ill say is that a lot of the ways that we talk about these things can be alienating. And id imagine that some forces might feel alienated by seeing us on stage talking about their intentions, how evil this technology is and i think thats a bit unhealthy. I think that even these groups need to be brought in to the conversation. I think at the end of the day that is probably healthier so i just hope that happens. Theres maybe an analog here with respect to the whole debate over body worn cameras. And one of the issues there has been and im sure it applies in orders of magnitude here is the cost of storing this. There are a lot of Police Departments that have branched out having the officers go out for 12 hour shifts while this gets reported. How long doyou keep it, what is the Public Access process, etc. Talk if you can about the magnitude of the storage challenge here. Its absolutely huge but in a way, the technology also creates this interesting loophole that doesnt really work with a system like body worn cameras and ill give you the case of baltimore. Baltimore has a citywide policy that if they have Surveillance Data that is not relevant to an ongoing investigation, it has to be deleted within 30 days. Fair enough, when you have a camera that watches the entire city, there are crimes happening every single day you can hold onto that data indefinitely. Data storage is becoming a lot cheaper. That actually did not, as a big concern among these groups. They seem to not worry that they would be losing things. They could chop up the data in certain ways, the end of the day you tie every third frame of it so that now you only have onestatus of storage , that you previously had. Then you automated, you do all sorts of things. There are technological fixes that need to be considered in that. Then the other driver that ive heard about with respect to a lot of state and local Police Departments moving away from helicopters because of cost and moving towards drones. Do you see a Movement Like that accelerate or potentially being a factor that accelerates the adoption of technology . Very much so because now Police Departments in hand with 300 people, they can put an item in the sky. There are the most recent counts of my colleagues on getting more than 900 Public Safety departments in the country to operate drones. These are very small drones, they can carry one of these large cameras but they can do things that areconverging , that Drone Technology is getting smaller so eventually it will fit on a drone of that size but also opening up more and more to large drones that would be to carry Something Like this and then eventually you get to appoint you have swarms of drones, its a terrible name that can watch a whole area. Persistently and actively and intelligently. And that will be a few more years down the line. Its a thing that we will have to keep an eye out for quicks looking more closely at the urgency of this technology you can sell the idea of an eye in the sky as kind of its going to solve these problems, its going to see these things and catch every bad thing before it happens but just immediately thinking, i can think of all these different problems we might have. For example, its very cloudy. Theterrain is very mountainous. Ive heard a lot of people talk about how thats a difficult target because of the various issues. You have, you can have people shooting down drones literally we saw that in iran. With the middle east its this then this flat area. Its easier to use an Aerial Technology like that to see these things but do you think that people have thought about these issues and are starting to work to counter that . And on the other side, do you feel like its being billed as this mgs in a way that gets them a lot of money but might leave out the potential issues that theyve run into . Like demons gave a good answer to that. He said that our job never ends. We can develop the best system ever and it will seem like it will watch everything but our job is not done. It will continue to do what we will do, we will know better, go bigger. If we want to see and in this he didnt exactly say but its certainly reflected in the program, we will see the request. About a system that could pick up everything traces of stuff through the clouds and actually sort of extrapolate those views. You can see through clouds and maybe you dont use a camera, you use a multifacial technology, synthetic aperture radar. These are all minor roadblocks. In the way. No ones going up there are and if another system comes along that is able to achieve these same goals more effectively, then we are unable to get put to the side but i should say no one is referring to it as a sort of cureall or as the only game in town. In the context of all the other technologies out there. A lot of the systems in use today probably have other surveillance devices so that one when one detects something suspicious if use another camera to take a closer look or a simulator. Or she was a radar. Uses additive cloud cover. Its when all that stuff comes to fruition you get to that challenge of doing more godlike stuff. We started this with enemy of the state but id like to before we go to the q a and enemy state and this whole idea of a satellitebased capability and you spend time talking about that, walk us through your understanding of where things stand with that development. As we know from recent developments, drones are vulnerable and that we are reaching a time when the wars where we had access, unfettered access are now transforming into wars that we dont have that privilege. So in theory the solution to that is to put these technologies into space. What i found is there is a convergence on the number of technology trendlines that take them in that direction. Whereas the satellite cost a halfmillion dollars and cost enormous amounts of money and resources for launching into space. Now you can launch a cube satellite for lessthan 100,000. Once the Imaging Technology is Strong Enough to put on a cute sack, now you have a set that can collect video. Okay. Satellite travels about 17,000 Miles Per Hour so you only get about 90 seconds over its hard for the crossover. Because thats so cheap one i just put a whole bunch up there so that once the first one crosses over the horizon, the second one is ready to pop up on the other side and pick up the slack. You start to get to a point where you can see things pretty consistently. Were already at a point todaywhere most of the area , the air is i believe autographed on a daily basis. That is still a relatively narrow time in what people refer to as sort of view based revolution. Which is as one engineer put it to me leads to a fairly inevitable conclusion. Wide area surveillance writ large. The whole view consistently unblinkingly. Like googleearth , but moving. I took that with a little bit of a future grain of salt way away one like respond to someone saying we will have flying cars in a year. But then a couple of months after that, a Company Called now announced they would do exactly that and not only that they had finer things in softbank and a number of others that dont take bets on totally ludicrous ideas. But they didnt say who is going to be allowed to use it, what they will be allowed to use it for. Still have information to employ when it comes to earth now they got there i on it. Weve got a little bit of time for some q a so id like to give us the opportunity to do that again. Wait for the microphones to come to you. And then ill ask you to identify yourself and any affiliation and please you phrase it in the form of a question. Down over here in front. Joe, if youre going to strike there. Thank you, im leon weintraub, retired member of congress and i want to ask you how we move from the permissible to the impermissible if we start at one end with a policeman on a street corner. Then we have four policeman on that same street corner, one at each intersection and we have four policeman on each corner of a socalled bad neighborhood. Then four policeman on every intersection of the city. Then four on the spot on in the sky. Where do we go from what instruments to which is not permissible. Its a good question. This in a way is one of the fundamental questions of modern life. Is how we balance safety and privacy. Some will tell you that its a very simple positive that question. Anything thatmakes us safer , we should embrace because it will only be a problem are those of us who dont make society safe. Which is a pretty troubling way to think about it. But we i think we are now coming to a point where no, that is not a onesided equation. Look at all the cities around the country have removed traffic light cameras. There are traffic light cameras and they are Pretty Simple technology. Its not hard to argue with. We dont want people running traffic lights but yes, we understand that. But we still dont want everyone, the City Department tophotograph us every time we run one of these. So my sense is that there will be more of a conversation around this similar to how the equation about our relationship with social Media Companies has changed. Beforehand we said this is a great service, im happy to give them all mydata. Now hold on, i dont think that giving up all my data is worth the minor increment of convenience that i gain as a result so i think that could be ac change happening. I want to be an optimistabout this. Other questions, down front, right here. Often times when a technology is developed there are complications for the civilians, 50, 60 years ago there were private satellites. Today i dont dare go anywhere on 95 s. Without google maps. What are some of the positive applications that you see out of thistechnology . Its a great question and i think an important question and in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina there were hundreds of people stranded on the rooftops around new york and the responding agencies had to spend a great deal of time flying helicopters with cameras around the city to try to find everybody. If you had Something Like vigilance there with an infrared capability particularly, you could just parked it over a city and everybody whos stranded on a rooftop will light up and youll be able to find themin theory much more quickly. So Disaster Response is one, Forest Service operates a small fleet of these systems as you can watch a very large section of area at once so you have Smoke Jumpers and there behind the line of the fire, and anticipates before the fire closes them in, there is a lot of interest in using the technology to monitorborders and pipelines for example. And that could go either way obviously. There is one company that has used the technology to find polar bear dens in alaska to make sure that oil and Gas Companies that operate in the area maintain a minimum distance so as to not disturb the animals. One of the models that was proposed to me is that since the technology is so expensive, instead of having a single entity operating it and keeping the data for themselves, you could have a company abide something a google Earth Service where they put the information out there and anybody who wants it can buy in and that that is predicated on his notion that there are potential applications of this technology that we havent even imagined yet and that by doing so, you distribute the cost. You give rise to innovation and we could have this everywhere. Maybe you have a Real Estate Company that tracks the traffic at a location. Or insurance company, Insurance Companies take advantage of this technology were seeing what happened and whos to blame. So that is one of the mortals that has been proposed, sort of winning option. Again though, we need to ask ourselves whether we want to have a moving earth. I guess i would use it to make sure the beaches are not crowded before i decide to go there, but i can imagine there are more in the various uses that we can conceive of that we havent thought of yet. And i would think the Us Coast Guard would be interested in this technology. A keep testing system called lidar which is incredible actually. Its a fairly small camera but it has a tremendously powerful Computer Vision algorithm that is able to detect any object on the surface of the water that is not the water itself. Which sounds simple enough, it is not because when youre operating it , dc is not one monolithic plane of color. All the reflections that very much like objects floating in the water but they have shown tremendous success with that. And the benefit is you could put it on a pretty small drone and one exercise, it puts one of these drones about 50 hours to scan in detail an area the size of wales and this is a drone that maybe cost 100,000. Oh yes, the coast guard is definitely exciting. I think we have time for one more. Lets go up over here. The gentleman in the blue striped shorts and blue shirt. Peter hagan, formally in the Intelligence Community. Many us cities launched very large drones that are all over the cities in many locations. And im curious if you think theyre part of maybe this type of activity and why dawn till dusk. At an interesting question. Im not familiar with that happening. At the moment, the only groups that are using very large drones are the military under some very constrained circumstances. So if theyre not operating in restricted airspace, its the cause they have a single individual mission or Something Like search and rescue or wildfire fighting. So again, im not totally familiar with it. I mean, if youre justtalking about a drone with infrared capabilities, maybe it only shows its value at night. A daytime system. Which notably is not legal. Thats a very good point. This technology is, the aerial Surveillance Systems that im talking about our legal are the daytime camera version so the ones that would be like my iphone pointing out in an airplane window. But there is a strong legal precedent that bars the use of infrared Camera Technology to surveillance not just from the sky but also from ground level to without a warrant because it is much more powerful and because it has this large standard of being a nonpublicly Accessible Technology. As the Supreme Court would put it. That being said, 1 billion pixel military grade camera was not to me like a publicly Accessible Technology either. So perhaps it is time that as you mentioned, the law needs to catch up a little bit with the reality. That being said, we have seen how originally it was only the governmentitself that had the resources to buy drones because of the cost. And now any of us can basically go to a best buy or a blank online. Which raises an interesting possibility, in baltimore the camera recorded a number of police shootings. And that could be used to audit the claims Police Officers on the ground. The camera also recorded movements around locations that were later purged under a warrant and found that the basis for that warrant was actually dubious at best. That it did not exhibit patterns that resembled that of a drug trade. It raises a very interesting possibility. That perhaps we dont think about. I want to thank Arthur Holland michelle, sean vick and Jen Mclaughlin for a great panel. There are books available out here in the lobby or those of you who have been fortunate enough to come to the hide auditorium. For all of you in the auditorium and online, thanks for coming out. [applause]. Boutique attends over 25 book fairs and festivals every year. Recently at the la times festival authorroxanne day discussed her book on Sexual Assault, not that bad. A lot of times when we are sexually assaulted, we believe that we did something wrong. We did something to invite the assault and we have no language for that eon its my fault and also theres a lot of shame, a lot of times attached with these crimes. And so you know, the title not that bad comes from the ways in which we can to minimize our experiences and we can to be joyful that he didnt have a gun, he didnt kill me. It wasnt my family that did this to me. It was a stranger or it was my family this to me, at least it wasnt a stranger area and when we minimize our experiences, we can flatten the experience of Sexual Assault and deny the truth is that bad area no matter what and certainly violence exists on a spectrum. But we can still say that any point on that spectrum is that bad. Watch the rest of this program, visit our website. Search for the authors name the top of the page. The city tour is exploring the american story as we take pd and American History tv on the road. 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