We will have a q and a portion as we get close to the end of this. Please wait to be called upon, wait for the microphone. Our topic today is this particular fascinating and terrifying book, eyes in the sky. By Arthur Holland michelle, i have to. Out the version of what i call from the lord of the rings, for the content of this book and what we are discussing today. It was six years ago this month that a contractor said snowden burst upon the world with his amazing revelation about surveillance taking place. During the socalled war on terror era. There were dozens, if not hundreds of stories about revelations that poured out from 2017. The development of our electronic surveillance in terms of listening in on her cell phone conversations. Our guest today brings us what may be as scary or scarier technological news, which is the tom cruise minority scenario, is not exactly so farfetched anymore. The technology we will talk about today was started by a different movie, which i almost feel his this. I will introduce our guest. Over here is our guest today, Arthur Holland michel who was codirector of the senator from the study of our college. He is a coauthor, drew sightings and Close Encounters in national airspace. Sitting directly next to me is National Security and investigation reporter where she focuses on the Intelligence Community. Previously covered seamen, foreign policy. In between is shown, policy counsel, back to the future, policy manager of the foundation and google policy at georgetown clause. In addition to serving policy counsel for the education fund, also serves as director of the fourth a moment Advisory Committee which he helped to cofound on capitol hill. In Privacy Technology published, on and on. The legislative fights include passing reforms to the act and most recently the june 2019 effort in the house and surveillance act, section seven otay so i welcome all of you. Id like to begin by having you tell us how you developed this. I like to think the Cato Institute for having me here. I feel it does mean a lot to be to be back in this space. When you think about the fact that not seven years ago, i was a pretty scrappy undergraduate in upstate new york. Every morning i would leave the cafeteria and there would be a story about drone strikes on declared war zone. If not back then there would be a story about how drones were increasingly being used in the civilian airspace. Both raised unfamiliar questions. For my part, i was doing research about immigration, northern new jersey. I was sitting in a barr one day between my junior and senior year and suddenly i had an idea. I have to study drones and create something at the center of the drones. I returned the administration, we must do this. Because they are completely insane, they allowed me to go forward with it. We created this Research Experiment and the rest is history. I guess our timing was fortunate because we established it at a time when people begin to ask these questions in a very broad public forum. The questions have only become more complex and challenging and urgent. I spent my time in the cia doing the tail end of cold war. I was used to working with systems and also very highly classified satellite imagery programs. Some of it i can talk about and some of it i still cant. What you say in the book about this issue in terms of trying to actually see something from above, that applies to pretty much any conventional imaging form including evenly relatively satellite. Things like digital globes satellite, the electrical optical spectral light that you and i, archives use on a daily basis to see each other and the world around us. There are other spectrums of course that are of great interest. I want to talk about some of that in detail later. What i find terrifying about this is, we are now out of the, take a picture here and there, youre talking about this technology, tell us what that w ami acronym stands for. Is a drunk researcher, i spent time thinking about frightening technology. In a way, nothing kept me up at night the way this technology. As pat was mentioning, over the course of the cold war, there were satellite systems, once you moved into counterterrorism file paradigm, you want to follow individual people. For that, you want moving images, a video camera. There Surveillance Video system that are in use, operate under this principle, think of them as telescopes. They are good at watching a very narrow area, high fidelity if something happens outside of the area youre looking at, youre out of luck. An example given to me by one source is that the air force and agencies were tracking senior insurgent leader who was in a convoy vehicle. They didnt know which vehicle precisely he was in the. Then the vehicles reach an intersection and split up. At that moment, they had to make a difficult decision. Do we go left or right . What if you could watch the whole area at the same time . Thats the principle behind what i wrote about in the book. This technology that crosses so many aisles. You basically get a giant camera and watch an entire city at once. The idea being that you can follow thousands of vehicles and even if you dont see the vehicle anything of interest in real time, you always have footage to view later. The sort of genesis i should note of this technology is from the movie, enemy of the state. Its from 1998 with will smith and its about this so within the National Security agency, they lack the evidence they want. They deploy a whole dazzling array of technologies, they put trackers in his pants and shoes and put a camera in his Smoke Detector but without a doubt, the most Terrifying Technology surveillance which is able to be seen through the entire eastern seaboard all at once. It has a video capability and watches the will smith character as he scuttles around. Seeing it in operation truly is terrifying. As far as anybody knows, it didnt exist at the time. One night at the Movie Theater in 1998, an engineer was at one of the labs, went to see the movie with his wife. The audience was terrified by what they were seeing, he was thrilled though. He thought it was amazing. He thought we should do this. So he rushed home and left a message with his supervisor saying, i have a great idea. Call me. So this scrappy team, they worked up some ideas, ultimately they strapped some cameras together and they were able to watch a very large area. They became interested in what they were doing. In iraq where the internet works and wreaking havoc, ambushes and ied attacks. You have a wide area view, it doesnt matter if you dont see it go off at the moment. You can realign to that moment and see where the people who find it came from. You could see where they went also and it gets better, once youve seen where they went, now you have a location associated. Then you can track all the other locations. In theory, you can find the people who made the big decisions. They were trying to find a way to identify these groups. They look like any other civilian so they fasttrack this technology. They have this rapid series of development culminating with the system that graces the cover of my book. Theyre operating and at least as far as we know, afghanistan and syria, they called it a crucial capability, its classified basically but what we knew is it made a tremendous difference in the original world. The claims being made on behalf of your sources. What we learn from the history of surveillance programs in the u. S. , almost 100 years now, is that oftentimes these claims of efficacy dont necessarily pan out. An example would be act 215 program, a record program, even though the program was exposed as zero tax in the u. S. , congress reauthorized the program anyway. I think thats one of the things that concerns me about not just this technology but a lot of technology out there right now, facial resignation recognition,f that nature. These programs have a nasty habit of getting funding and taking off and developing a life of their own and never getting the kind of scrutiny they need. Has any Inspector General, either in the department of defense or service ever taken a look at any of these programs to see if they actually have . They certainly have. The technology is very much an uphill battle. There are a lot of skeptics, if you get one megapixel camera, why would you need more than that . There was also some very high testing data by came out about the programs. Also, theres some evidence that has escaped beyond its means, one senior officer involved on the analysis and of the program said it would be useful for the operation in afghanistan. That had nothing to do with what the cia initially intended for the technology. It doesnt necessarily apply, you use the tools that are at your disposal. So i feel like the budget data speaks for itself, there are numerous development programs, farming has new programs that are similar. They are investing more in technology. It has shown the very least, tremendous attention. There is one data. Mark, which is that there was one system, a set of four with one of these wide area cameras and according to one document i saw in a three year time span, it was credited with capturing or killing more than 1200 people. That, to me as a very kind of peek into what exists behind the curtain. You just referenced the use of this technology in a narcotics doctrine, to make sure we are being where we can be with respect to technology. Any technology can be the use of good or evil purposes. A lot of the same equipment you have used to manufacture pharmaceuticals can be used for that gas. The flipside is a story, too, its important we talk about that upfront rather than being pressed for time at the end. If google had its own capability here, how much better would google maps be in your Traffic Management control system . If you were kind of able to employ this technology. Interview one official, or rather a Senior Executive in nevada, the contractor that was there and he was driving in d. C. And obviously the traffic was bad and i did a little background on this. It can be used to gather data to create traffic models to figure out how to best optimize the traffic for the city. Theres more to that though. About a year before i started writing in the book, i was writing from afar in brooklyn. I witnessed the shooting, for people, shot a 19yearold in the gut. They disappeared into the night. Didnt go chasing after them. I contacted the police the next day and i was in touch trying to get the information that i had. I checked in a week or so later and they were never able to solve that crime. Fortunately, the teen survived but their listing these thousands of unsolved crimes in new york city every year. Had this camera been watching that night, it would have been a very simple question of tracki tracking. Back in time, where they had come from, also forward in time when they were hiding out. Even if it allowed the police to catch up with them, it would have given an address work with. I want the people to be brought to justice. I saw this teenager lying on the ground. If we have the capacity to do so, its kind of incumbent upon us to make use of it. I also heard about some very terrifying things that could be done with the technology in a domestic setting. It is being used. There are groups trying to hide their views in a domestic setting. Other cities and last week, a man who i refer to as the henry ford of the technology now has his sights on chicago to have the Technology Fly over the cities to solve as he put it, unsolvable crimes. The last thing, it is completely legal. There is no difference between this man filming an entire city, military grade camera and me sticking my camera out the window of an airplane to take a picture of the landscape as i fly across country late at night. I have a right to do so. Can you do that . Its fair to say the law has not maybe before diving into t the, i think theres another part, talking about Artificial Intelligence, similar to the 215 collection where the increase collection ability generates way too much information and i have a specific question but does tilt sort the legal side. One of these cameras, a single one generates an unfathomable amount of data. I calculated it would take 2000 ipads to play the imagery from a single camera frame at any given time. Well size resolution. It takes 1 millionth to watch 1 million people. When airports begin analyzing the footage, they found themselves overwhelmed. They could obviously find what happened after an explosion was known about but they werent able to find unknown unknowns. Surely there were so many other things happening in the footage but they didnt have time to get to it. So the solution is Artificial Intelligence because not only does it spare you the grunt work of tracking individual vehicles, a simple solution to that, save the algorithm and theory. You can also say every other vehicle is associated with it. Give me a list of every location and then track the vehicles at those locations as well. But theres more, then you dont want to start with someone who is a no, maybe you want to left, before they mount an attack. As it turns out, these groups exhibit some pretty predictable behaviors for an attack. They will do simple surveillance, theyll drive endlessly to make sure no one is following them. What if you polled the system and every time a car exhibits one of these behaviors in a city, now the system will catch every single one, it will catch some number of unknown unknowns. That is the true holy grail of surveillance. Find everything that happens you have no other way of knowing about. There has been an intense effort to automate the technology. Its first was to give them some automated capabilities to have footage. Now it turned to wide area emotion imagery. Its something that we should definitely be thinking about. Every time someone does a uturn, it seems a little suspicious. They all of a sudden have a cross over the head. From a legal perspective, the question of whether or not its legal is how and why you are using it. Generally speaking, there is an upper bound to what this would look like. As a private application but the idea of introducing this for a true technique domestically, im not so sure i would agree with that, unaccounted for unchallenged. We will see. [laughter] so heres the thing. The jones decision in 2012, it involves police use of a gps tracking device on the subject vehicle. Not for a day or two something for weeks. So youre talking about essentially placing a specific device on the vehicle and having that person track for roughly a month. The court said no, that is basically a violation of the fourth amendment. For me, the question is, is it applicable here, even without the application of an actual device on the subject vehicle quirks you are literally now utilizing a different form of persistent surveillance. Youre just not sticking the actual perceiver, the tag on the car. It does make me wonder whether or not jones would potentially be operative here. Theres no actual case for this is actually this is part of the reason why it may be the case that like in baltimore, they did everything they could to keep the use of the system secret. They didnt want the public to know about it. Officials maintained that they had no knowledge of it. Isnt this penchant for secrecy . Isnt that essentially one reason why we probably havent seen that challenge . Without a doubt. Think about how recently congress has begun to Pay Attention to locations. I think its largely attributed to the fact that the fbi allowed local Law Enforcement agency to use back. In baltimore, it wasnt the operation. The reason it was secret was because it wasnt funded by the city. There was a texas philanthropist who gave the city enough money to run the program to see if the technology did have the potential. As a result of that loophole, they did not tell the mayor or the state legislature or the city council or public defender. The list goes on. I was lucky enough to find out about this operation while it was happening. I spent two days in baltimore along with the analysts in baltimore. It was incredible but technology was able to do. I sat in on a briefing. The shooting was very similar to the shooting that i witnessed. In fee analyst showed how to track this mans surveillance four hours following also was leading up to it. I stepped out onto the street and i knew that the airplane was watching me. I looked up into the sky and i couldnt see it. Sure enough it felt pretty uncomfortable to know that i was being watched. Knowing that they are being watched by a technology that they probably cant even fathom. And they have no idea to me that felt wrong fundamentally wrong this technology watches everybody and so it was wrong on a moral level in that sense of visceral level in terms of the fact that secrecy the city council did not have an opportunity to weigh in on it. It ended up having a whiplash effect because was when it was finally revealed there was so much outrage. What struck you about that journalistic techniques in the ability to actually get these people to talk to him. I was floored that people who had worked with some of the most secret labs in the country and it worked on supersecret stuff. They were actually eager to talk to this guy. When you report on that. Sometimes you happen upon these topics the people are excited to talk about. They had worked on these things. They had developed the new godlike tools. Particularly in the research lab. There is a space that exists pre classification if you well. They may have a different frame of mind when discussing the sorts these sorts of things. And i would like to hear more about the process of reporting. As a journalist who has covered the Intelligence Community. Something im often struck by is the reliance on this godlike tool and the tendency in which it is very prone to error. The use of a Corporate Communication technology. In the sources on the ground and china and iran. Essentially, a webpage may be a source. It looks like they are browsing about yoga. Who is those secure lead to the depths around the globe. If we rely too much on ai i think its super dangerous computers will make mistakes. Did people talk about how dumb they are. And if we are rushing headlong into something that we are not really prepared for. I will start with the first question. My reporting is tremendously high praise. And i will probably get that tattooed on my arm later. It was funny when i started researching the book i would tell people that i was writing a book and invariably people would say are these guys get to talk to you. I started to get a little nervous myself. It was exactly one of the stories that you refer to where people were willing to speak to me. And there were a couple of reasons for that. I think. One, with the Core Development time of this technology the growth in the power of the cameras actually outpaced the growth of computing powder power. That is an astounding achievement if you think about it because were talking about the time in the early 20005 years ago where computing really improved in that time. But much more important i think was that and they almost have some obligation to get it out there. One of my sources when i finally reached it he said in a way ive been waiting for this call for 15 years we have to answer for what weve done. They had have a sense since the very outset of this program that they were creating something mutable. There was one incredible moment right in the heaviest moments of the cycle where they felt like every single day was a day where they were not saving those services in the field. Everything broke down. And they were in florida actually doing surveillance over all of these towns without anyone knowing about it. They just all sort of sat on the beach and they were a little overwhelmed by the enormity of what they have done but they had set up a process that they would no longer had any control over and another thing that really amazed me. I intended to bring up the question of privacy. Even if theyre talking about a fairly constrained set of military uses i wanted them to talk about privacy and without exception every single one brought up privacy before i have a chance. Because they were thinking about it also. It just gives you a sense of their role in this discussion. The crucial role that they have to play in this dialogue but also the technology itself. You are right. One of my favorites in favorite in adults is that there was a group at Colorado State the system was a very impressive and being able to detect a woman. It missed that she was carrying a bowl of fruit. You cant trust the system i thought it was kind of strange to use there are a couple of things at play there. I dont care if they miss even a large number of the suspicious activities as long as they catch more than they would be able to catch by human analysis alone thats a pretty compelling idea. This step is getting way more capable overtime. They were all just starting to use this technology for deep learning and they found that it have tremendous potential in this application. But your question raises what i think is the key issue with regard to automation and is the that is the question of trust. Not every analysis by the computer is going to be based on fully robust data. The computer needs to give you a sense of how much it trusts its own analysis. It needs to say to you this is 99 likely true port needs to tell you im not really sure. If you think of it in the Law Enforcement context that is incredibly problematic. I have a 71 confidence rate that there is supposed to be an armed robbery. Do you send the police in with the guns drawn. And what if the computer gets it right and you did not Pay Attention. Next time it gives and gives you a 71 conflict analysis you can ascend in the whole swat team. 95 and it was just some teenager playing ball in the street. The next time it gives you a 95 confidence analysis youre not going to trust it at all. I feel like its i can be long before a lot of the Police Departments had very dysfunctional relationships with their ai in that not only is problematic because it means the effectiveness will become for mice but its also problematic because people could really get hurt. There is another layer below that as well. Its not just that 71 is a completed number to interpret. Im get a read two passages that really stood out to me. Most behaviors involved here track vehicle events of interest in keeping distance far in close. Flipflop driving. Approach, retreat. Presumably those factor of things. Even more alarming. I just think this is incredibly important and think you for doing research and building the record here. For anybody that likes to follow that. Those include name, gender, age weight religion. And i think how this question is framed as wildly important. Im curious about where you fall in the broader spectrum for the evangelist for this kind of work. It inspires so many deep philosophical questions. Even in a war zone i think these would inspire some pause in terms of triggering life and death. All of these great interviews in this book pretty much every take that one could imagine. All the way to i have to stop working on it. Its not clear that they are all talking about these issues. What are we can do about the 71 percent. How do we address transparency but these are fundamental issues and makes me question how will do they work in the absence. It touches on a really important point that the reason this technology is significant is not fully because it is powerful in a vacuum on its own but because it is emerging at a time when we have the capability to find a persons name and gender in religious beliefs and their associations using things like social media analysis and wireless communications. When you bring all of this information together and then when you apply big data a person is not only doing a suspicious set of terms in the middle of the night but they also posted some information on facebook that shows that they have a particular meaning. That is tremendously powerful. Not only because it has a granularity element because it touches on the automation element. It raises the questions of whether it leaves anything that can remain private in this day and age. There was an incredible passage that i found in one document talking about how a system would bring all of this information together and have been used to find osama bin laden. And it does so my doing exactly these things. The answer that these folks would give you to your broader question is that they have a Single Mission in mind. They will stop at nothing to do that. They are dedicated to saving peoples lives and in a way i came to realize after initially being a little bit frustrated by that answer that that is the role that they play. You cant accept expect the lion to decide as i can eat a gazelle. These folks are in this Technology Space and they will do everything that they can and yes they have a sense that something needs to be done. In a way there are others in the ecosystem that they need to respond to. To make you spoke to an earlier question about whether there was anybody auditing the stuff within the Intelligence Community. Not particularly perhaps when they talk about the use of drones effectively. I dont think it is gone far enough. And in a way thats why the guys were willing to speak to me. Theyve done what they did maybe they are happy with it maybe they are not and now its our problem to deal with in a way i wouldnt put those words exactly in their mouth. But that is a situation. The cat is out of the bag. It is turning into this frightening tiger with many eyes and ears. In other ways of listening to us. It is miniaturizing. Now one that used to wait a weight a thousand pounds weighs 30 pounds. One engineer i spoke too. You can watch the entire island of manhattan. They are low flying drones as opposed to one single high flying aircraft. You can see around buildings. You could build a 3d model so now the police would be able to have an explorable environment of the city imagine a really realistic videogame where people are moving around. You can kind of fly around in this 3d space. That is where we are headed. I dont think these guys are going to pause. One sort of more proper vector. What happens if an adversary steals that information. How are they protecting it because constantly we charge into the spaces where we collected all but we dont actually protect it. Our people thinking about that. Trust us we secure this data. Im not a Cyber Security expert so i dont ask them to show me the code but that is another huge question in the scenario that i imagine is that you have a city with a very well regulated area. In the city. There happens to be a black lives matter protest. The hacker associated with the group gets access to that data. And now they can track everything go every single protest. Its not just that. If this continues to be deployed domestically. That the terrorism that is a stuff that the government has. The specific way that they use this detailed record. Everybody i talk to afterwards. And by the time you get 2 degrees out you are talking about a program in this case it would be under constant monitoring youre talking about surveilling people that are not only suspected of not doing anything they havent even been in contact with the original person. That is so much different than what we have before. One of the tactics that the Baltimore Police department experimented with was not to just be involved in shooting but people that appeared to be witnesses so that they could track them back to their home addresses and had two Police Officers knock on their door and try to extract testimony. Inman intimidating that might be. This is a way for seeing the network. That is by definition what it is for. And we are so interconnected that the only possible effect that i can imagine from this now that i know that the Surveillance System will put across here on me if i drive through a neighborhood with a high concentration of people who appear to be involved in the drug trade because it determines that i parallel parked next to a car. Im going to go to the neighborhood anymore. I found this one report that talked about some of the principles of wide area surveillance. We want to give a close paraphrase we want to give the adversary that we can give them the intent. We want them to constantly look over their shoulder and if they are not directly watching. But Technology Well have the exact same effect domestically and it doesnt help that its called the golden stair. Thats very much intentional. All of them have very forgettable names. We know that the fbi has taken a great interest in it. Is that really toning it down very much. There is another great mythology there. It teaches them many things. And it typically tends to happen. But it further doesnt help and it brings Different Things that we touched on. These programs are predicated on race. And religion when you interview people like that. They talk about transparency. What are they doing to get to these fundamental questions do you see a way for them to actually strip out some of these more problematic components i suppose i dont see how i can possibly happen in the absence of tackling these first. There is no doubt that there needs to be strict controls. They have a Company Privacy there will be a meticulous log of every action they create minimum optimum in a way it is not these folks is responsibility to hold themselves completely to account nor is it particularly rise wise. I will not do political surveillance and this was literally in his next sentence if you look at the historical record some very fine people have been referred to as agitated. The Civil Rights Movement was spoken about. At the time. There was another really chilling story is trying to commercialize it. Following the shooting of this black teenager. It is simply a test he just wanted to test out some algorithms against the large crowd. They were test subjects. Hed also told me and conversation that he has that and its considered thugs. Fair enough you werent breaking any laws but if you saw anything that raised concern would you have told the police . And he said of course thats my responsibility. I think this picture on the screen here is his address. If that capability have existed during the summit who knows where we would be today. Those are exactly the same rationales that were used against those groups. I have no reason to doubt that these guys and i should be sensitive to the gender element. In fact, the only person i spoke to who said i would not want to have this in my own backyard was one of the women that i interviewed. They were mostly white. It is irrelevant relevant that the engineer has white his wife opposes the movement and is black. There is a subject it was very palpable in all of this even though they have the best of intentions. They want to have a peaceful a site society and how to get there. And they would have access to that technology within the Law Enforcement community is an extremely Mission Oriented culture but the issue is how is that mission to find . And it is always get the bad guy. That is the message that the public politicians and a big slice of the press send im pretty much a regular basis. Thats what i think a lot of skepticism has to be applied to some of the claims and advocates here on page 180 it has overlapped with me on the hill. And he was on the majority side. This is what he said in response to some of the issues that you are raising. The fact of the matter is. Peeling a line to get home. The Intelligence Community has the ability to spy on you and it does not they dont care about you. Mike, if youre watching buddy, you might want to rephrase that. When mike was on the hill is when senator Chuck Grassley revealed that the Inspector General had found an employee that they were misusing systems to listen in on the conversations of the current spouses or former spouses or lovers. This is not one or two people this was at least a dozen and this is just the ones that caught. I think because they had been in the town for so long. I had been around for a lot of these battles. What always concerns me is the mac and process essentially for training keep tabs on the this stuff. You can pass a law and this is what the act was designed to do. It was designed to actually prevent the stuff that they are actually being used to do today. It is engaged in a lot of the americans. The problem that we have in what we want to engage you on our system is supposed to be selfcorrecting but my caveat to that is that it only self corrects if we as citizens engage. What gives you reason to believe that we have a better than even shot a been able to kind of get it right with this technology. Im fascinated by the technology i love this book. Its beautifully edited. But i know at the mentality that drives a lot of folks in the Intelligence Community and i worry especially about the mentality of folks on capitol hill. We have this just last week. Another example of congress not doing its job of taking a hard look at a program in fact we have the men that offer that. In previous years has easily passed the house and in one year passed it by a live majority. This year it fell short by 175. I think what i fear and what i want to hear you address to the extent that you can is what is our hope for actually kind of been able to get it right with this technology. It would be that there are cases where we have it right before. I dont think the people who are pessimistic challenge the technologies in the court, so one of the, i guess, saving graces about this technology in particular is that it is scary, it is not scary in a sort of abstract sense. You talk to people about Big Data Analytics and its lard to wrap ones head around it but when you tell someone that theres an eye in the sky watching them unblinkingly, that makes sense on a more intuitively level. Every time so far a city has revealed that it either has this Technology Use or intending to use it, it has been derailed by publish pushback, perhaps we reached technology that is one step too far. We care about privacy but we will not be watched from the sky, thats just not going to happen. I think we can use that to our advantage. Today there has not been a single congressional hearing about Surveillance Technology. No public hearings. We dont know how they have held closed hearings, to jump in here as historical note, not a single document or Senate Intelligence committee has been transferred to national archives. I had to get that plugged in because its so important to our ability to see actually whether or not the committee, committees are not doing their job but when committees themselves are themselves not being transparent in a way essentially but the law and the constitution requires them to be, we should have concern. At the state and local level we see hope. Do i see hope because its easy in a way to talk about it, its easy to explain why it could potentially be beneficial and why it can potentially be dangerous. Theres not been a single Congressional Service report that has addressed the topic. My hope is that begins with 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 a desire to take action. Law enforcement by nature, not according to what the rules do say. Lets say we create a law thats very, very robust, aerial versions of this technology. So the regulation for this technology has the one taken to context for potential iterations what the solution is thinking about this as a process rather than a single goal of developing challenge like regulation that would be tight forever and that theres emphasis on making sure that the rules are complied to as they are written but also to what they do not say as well. Then i should also say that those reasons to be hopeful about all of this because we have seen cities take the action. Some passed a very robust municipal ordinance that requires the city to disclose its intentions to purchase new Surveillance Technology, so the the baltimore operation would have had. Regular order to make sure that no one gets lazy in enforcing, i think thats a pretty solid step forward, but for that to happen, you know, at a larger scale a lot of people are going to need to participate and so the one final thing i will say is that a lot of the way we talk about these things can be alienating. Id imagine that some of my sources feel alienating alienated by seeing us on stage, how evil the technology is and i think thats unhealthy, i think that even these groups need to be brought in to the conversation and i think at tend of the day that is probably healthier and so i do hope that happens. Maybe analog here with respect to the whole debate of bodyworn cameras and one of the issues there and im sure it applies orders of magnitude is a cost, branched out, you know, having their officers go out for 11hour shifts and all the stuff is recorded, how long do you keep it, what is Public Access for, et cetera, et cetera. Talk if you can about the magnitude of the storage challenge here . Its absolutely huge, but in a way the technology also creates interesting loophole that doesnt really work with Something Like a bodyworn camera. Baltimore has a city wide policy that if they have any Surveillance Data that is not relevant to an ongoing investigation, it has to be deleted within 30 days, fair enough. But when you have a camera that watches the entire city, there are crimes happening every single day, so you can hold onto that data indefinitely, data storage is becoming a lot cheaper, you know, that did not come up as a big concern among these groups, they seem to not worry that they are losing things, maybe now you have only one, you had previously and then you automate it and you can press it and do all sorts of things, technological fixes that need to be considered in that. And 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 the costs and moving towards drones. Do you see a Movement Like that accelerating or potentially being a factor that accelerates the adoption of technology we are talking about . Very much so, because now Police Department in town of 300 people can put an eye or something, they couldnt do. Getting more than 900 Public Safety departments in the country operate drones, these are very small drones, they still could not carry one of the very large cameras but a few things, the Surveillance Technology is getting smaller, eventually it will fit in a drone of that size but the air space is continuing opening more to large drones that would be able to carry Something Like this and then you have drones that can watch the whole era persistently and intelligently and thatll be a few more years down the line. Something to keep an eye on. And looking more closely at technology, i think you can easily sell the idea of the eye in the sky, thats going to solve all of the problems, catch every bad thing before it happens but just immediately thinking, i can think of all the different problems it might have, for example, north korea, like its very cloudy, the terrain is very mountainous. I heard a lot of imagery and heard its a really difficult target because of issues, you can have that, you can people shooting down drones and we saw with iran, the middle east, its easier to use technology and i do think that people thought about these issues and are starting to work to counter that and on the other side do you feel like its being built as a way that gets them a lot of money but might leave out the potential issues that they run into. Mike gave us a good answer to that question. Okay. Our job never ends, we can develop the best system ever and can seem that it would watch everything but our job is not done, we will continue to do what we do, we will go better and we will go better. If we want to see didnt exact i will say, you know, reflected in the program if you want to see through a cloud, we will see through a cloud. The system that could pick up faint traces picked up through the crowds and extrapolate those and you can see through clouds, maybe you dont use a camera, you use imaging system. These are all minor roadblocks in the way, no one is throwing up their arms and if another system comes along that is able to achieve these same goals more effectively, then, you know, it will get put to the side, but and i should say no one is referring to it as cure or the only gain in town, they all repeated le told me and it was an important point to stress that this is an Important Technology in context, in context of all the other systems that are out there, in fact, a lot of the whammy systems that arent used today probably have other surveillance devices so that once it detects something suspicious happening in another part of town it cues camera to take a closer look or cues simulator to track a cell phone or radar to see if theres cloud cover. When all that stuff comes together you get to that style of viewing. More godlike style of viewing, thats a way to phrase. We kind of started with enemy of the state and im kind of like to before we go to q a end with enemy of the state and the whole idea of a satellitebase capability. Walk us through your understanding of where things stand with that kind of development . So as we know from recent events, drones have very vulnerable antiaircraft systems, we are approaching a time when the wars where we had access unfettered access to the air space and now transforming into wars where we dont have that, that privilege and so in theory a simple solution to put technologies into space and what i found out trend lines that take us in that direction whereas satellite used to cost half a billion dollars and cost enormous amounts of money and resources to launch into space, now you can launch for less than a hundred thousand dollars, the technology is enough to put in wide area that creates video. Satellite travels 17,000 miles an hour, they only get 90 seconds over a target before they close to horizon. Since its cheap why not put a whole bunch of them. You start to get to a point where you can see things pretty persistently. We will point today where most is on photograph basis, thats still relatively time in what people refer to it as new space revolution which as one engineer put it to me leads to inevitable conclusion, the idea of wider surveillance at large as he put it. The whole viewed persistently like google but moving. You know, i took that with a little bit of pinch of salt, the way one might respond to someone saying, oh, we all will have flying cars but then a couple of months after the conversation, a company, not only that, they had financing from bill gates, softbank and other eminent investors who dont take bets on ludicrous ideas but they didnt say who they are going to allow to use it or what they are going to use it for, we still have information void when it comes to us, now, but theyve got their eye. Weve got a little bit of time for some q a and i would like to avail us with the opportunity to do that, wait till the microphone come to you and then i will ask you to identify yourself and affiliation and please do phrase it in the form of a question. I wanted to ask you how we move to the permissible to impermissible if we start with a policeman on the street corner, then we have four policemen on the same street corner, one in each intersection and then we have 4 policemen on each corner of a socalled bad neighborhood and then 4 policemen on every intersection of the city and then to the spy in the sky, when do we go from what is permitted to what is not permitted . Sure, its a good question, this in a way one of the fundamental questions of modern life, is how we balance safety and privacy. You know, some will tell you that its a very simple answer to that question, anything that makes us safer, we should embrace because itll only be a problem for those of us who dont make society safer which is a pretty troubling way to think about it. But we i think are coming to the point that we realize that, no, thats not a onesided equation. Look at all of the cities in the country that have removed traffic light cameras, traffic light camera is, you know, pretty, you know, Pretty Simple technology, not hard to argue with. You dont want people running traffic lights, but people said, yes, we understand that, but we still dont want everyone to the City Department to photograph us every time we run through one of these systems, and so my sense is that theyll be more of a conversation similar to how the equation about a relationship with social Media Companies has changed before we say how it is. Now like actually hold, i dont think that giving up all my data is worth the minor increment of convenience that i gained as a result, so i think that could be a change happening. You know, again i want to be optimistic, you want to Say Something . Questions down front, right here. [inaudible] often times when a technology develops, there are good applications for the civilian society, i mean, 50, 60 years there was no such thing as private satellite. I think its an important question. Cameras around the city to try to find everybody, you have Something Like vigilance with infrared capability particularly, just park it over a city and everybody who is stranded on a cool rooftop will light up and youll be able to find them in theory much more quickly, so Disaster Response is one, the service operates a small fleet of the systems because you can watch a very large section of a fire all at once and you can anticipate before the fire closes them in. Theres a lot of interesting use in technology to monitor borders andpipelines, for example, that can go either way, one company that has used the technology to find polar bears in alaska to make sure that oil and Gas Companies operating in the area maintain minimum distance to disperse the animals, one of the models that was propose today me proposed to me that since technology is so expensive instead of having a single entity operating it and keeping the data to themselves, you could have a Company ProvideSomething Like a Google Service where they put the information out there and anybody who wants it can buy in, and that is predicated on the notion that there are potential applications of the technology but we havent even imagined yet and by doing so you distribute the cost, you give rise to innovation and we could have this everywhere, you know, maybe you have a Real Estate Company that wants to track foot traffic in location and setting price, Insurance Companies, Insurance Companies taking great Interesting Technology for appraising damage and to see what happened in a traffic accident. So that is one of the models that has been proposed of sort of winning options. Again, though, costs, i mean, i guess i would use it but make sure before i decide to go there. I can imagine. Yes. [inaudible] this is a drone. We have time for one more. Lets go up over here, gentleman in the blue stripes, shortsleeve shirt. Peter higgins, form early in the Intelligence Community. I see in many u. S. Cities large drones over the city and move occasionally and im curious if you think that part of maybe this type of activity and why wait till dusk . Lights on them. Yeah, thats 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 very constrained circumstances, so if theyre not operating in restricted air space its because they have a single individual commission, the thing like search and rescue or wild fire sighting, support, so, again, im not totally familiar with it, if youre talk about a drone with infrared capability really only shows its value at night as opposed to a daytime system. Not legal domestically. Thats a good point, the aerial surveillance testimonies that are legal are the daytime camera versions, so the ones would be like my iphone pointing out to have airplane window but thats a strong legal precedent that bars the use of infrared technology to surveil people not just from the sky but from ground level too without a warrant because it is much more powerful and because it has this odd standard of being a nonpublicly Accessible Technology as the Supreme Court would put it, that being said, you know, billion pixel military grade camera does not sound publicly Accessible Technology either, so perhaps it is time that as you mentioned the law begin to catch up a little bit with the reality that we live in. That being said, we have seen how originally it was only the government itself that had the resources to buy drones because of the costs, now any of us could basically go to a best buy or, you know, online its an interesting possibility in both, the camera recorded a number of police shootings, and that could be used to audit the claims of Police Officers on the ground, the camera also recorded movements around location that is were later searched under a warrant and found that the basis for that warrant was actually dubious at best but did not exhibit patents that resembled those of the sight associated with the drug trade. Raised very interesting possibilities that perhaps we should all think about. Yeah. All right, i i want to thank, arthur, michelle for great panel, there are books available out here in the lobby for those who have been fortunate enough to come to auditorium, those of you and online thanks for coming out. [applause] here are some of the current bestselling nonfiction books, according to the washington post, topping the list account of living in idaho mountains and introduction to formal education at age 17 in her book educated. Its been on the bestseller list for over a year. Next in american carnage, Politico Magazine chief Political Correspondent tim explores divisions in the Republican Party that led to the election of president trump. Then its former first Lady Michelle obamas memoir becoming the bestselling book of last year. Following that is beyond charlottesville, former virginia democratic governor recount of the leadup of the tragedy in charlottesville following the 2017 unit the right rally, best selling tv radio host, all of the authors have appeared on book tv and you can watch them online at booktv. Org. Nobel prize winning novelist Tony Morrison died on monday at the age of 88, shes appeared on cspan and book tv many times over the years including joining us for 3hour indepth interview in 2001, you can watch all the programs by visiting booktv. Org and searching her name at the top of the page. Next her appearance on book tv from 2004 in a discussion about school desegregation. The book is remember. [applause]