 Welcome back on the channel of Carl's Sonet TV. And now we have an English speaking contribution. And for that, I welcome Pandemonium, who is a historian and documentary filmmaker. And therefore, we will also not have a normal talk, but we will see the documentary information. What are they looking at, a documentary on privacy? And afterwards, we can talk about the film. So feel free to post your questions and we can discuss them. Let's enjoy the film. Because the great promise of the internet is freedom. Freedom of expression, freedom of organization, freedom of assembly. These are really seen as underpinning rights of what we see as democratic values. Just because you have safety does not mean that you cannot have freedom. Just because you have freedom does not mean you cannot have safety. Why is the reaction to doubt it, rather than to assume that it's true and act accordingly? We need to be able to break those laws that are unjust. Privacy is in essence becoming a de facto problem, that somehow you're fighting something. So just to be sure, let's not have any privacy. One editor to many, it's peer-to-peer. So, you know, I touch the button. People have opportunity to reach millions of people. It's revolutionizing the way we communicate. One of the things that Facebook and to a lesser degree Twitter allowed people to do is be able to see that they weren't alone and it was able to create a critical mass. And I think that that's a very important role that social media took on. It was able to show people in a very easy way in people's Facebook feeds. Oh wow, look at Tahir Square. There's people out there in Bahrain and Pearl Square. What people could feel before walking out their door into real life action that they could see that they were not isolated in their desire for some sort of change. The great promise of the internet is freedom, where the mind is without fear and the head is held high. And the knowledge is free, because the promise was this will be the great equalizer. Before the social web, before the web 2.0, anything you were doing was kind of anonymous. By the very concept of anonymity, you were able to discuss things that would probably be not according to the dominance, the dominant trends or values of your own society. One of the things about privacy is that it's not always about you. It's about the people you love and what and how. I think this sentence is always a bit unsolidified because at the same time we don't use it for one sentence but for the other who might be able to do that. That risk all the time both in their home country and often in their host countries as well. And so I might say that I have nothing to hide. I might say that there's no reason that I need to keep myself safe but if you've got anyone like that in your network, any activists, any people from countries like that, it's thinking about privacy and thinking about security means thinking about keeping those people safe too. Privacy is important because if we think of the alternative, if everything is public, if the norm is public, then anything that you want to keep to yourself has an association of guilt attached to it. And that should not be the world that we create. That's a chilling effect. It's a chilling effect on our freedoms. It's a chilling effect on democracy. To me human rights are something which has been put in place to guarantee the freedoms of every single person in the world. They're supposed to be universal, indivisible. Having those rights makes you human in the eyes of this system. They're collecting data and metadata about hundreds of thousands, millions of people and some of that data will never be looked at. That's a fact. We know that. But at the same time, assuming that just because you're not involved in activism or you're not well known that you're not going to be a target at some point, I think that's what can be really harmful to us. Right now, you may not be under any threat at all, but your friends might be, your family might be, or you might be in the future. And so that's why we need to think about it this way. Not because we're going to be, you know, snatched out of our homes in the middle of the night now, but because this data and this metadata lasts for a long time. So my observation is that we're currently experiencing that the private space, the space that should be in the digital world, private, should be and should remain, is slowly starting to erode, or at least become transparent. Not only in terms of fact, of course, but also in terms of perception. I imagine the digital world as a panopticon. This is a ring-shaped building designed by Jeremy Bentham. In the ring are the individual cells, the main lines, and in the middle is a watch tower. And there is a watchman sitting there. And this observer, he can observe the cells around him all the time, and the trick is that the watchmen don't know if they're just being watched. They only see the tower, but they don't see the observer. But they know very well that they can be constantly watched at any time. And this fact creates a changing, decisive impact on them. I think surveillance is a technology of governmentality. It's a technology, it's a biopolitical technology. It's there to control and manage populations. It's really propelled by state power and the power of entities that are glued in, that cohere around the state. So it's there as a form of population management and control. So you have to convince people that it's in their interest. And it's like every man for himself and everyone is out to get everyone. I take my cue from a former general counsel of the NSA, Stuart Baker, who said on this question, metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody's life. If you have enough metadata, you don't really need content. It's sort of embarrassing how predictable we are as human beings. So let's say that you make a phone call one night. You call up a suicide hotline, for example. You're feeling down, you call that hotline. And then a few hours later maybe you call a friend. A few hours later you call a doctor, you send an email, and so on and so forth. Now the contents of those calls and those emails are not necessarily being collected. What's being collected is the time of the call, the place that you called. And so sometimes in events like that, those different pieces of metadata can be linked together to profile someone. David's description of what you can do with metadata, quoting a mutual friend, Stuart Baker, is absolutely correct. We kill people based on metadata. But that's not what we do with this metadata. Thankfully. Wow, I was working up a sweat there for a second. You know, the impetus for governments for conducting this kind of surveillance is often at least in rhetoric to go after terrorists. And obviously we don't want terrorism and so that justification resonates with most of the public. But I think that there's a couple problems with it. The first is that they haven't demonstrated to us that surveillance actually works in stopping terrorist attacks. We haven't seen it work yet. It didn't work in Paris. It didn't work in Boston. It didn't work elsewhere. So that's one part of it. But then I think the other part of it is that we spend billions of dollars on surveillance and on war, but spend very little money on addressing the root causes of terrorism. I think power is concealed in the whole discourse around surveillance. And the way it's concealed is through this legitimization that it's in your interest, that it keeps you safe. And so, but there have been many instances where citizens groups have actually fought against that kind of surveillance. And I think there's also sort of the mystique around the technologies of surveillance. There is the whole sort of like this notion that, ah, because it's a technology and it's designed to do this, it's actually working. But all of this is a concealment of power relations because who can surveil who is the issue, right? It isn't the majority of the English population here who get stopped and searched. It's non-white people. It isn't the majority of the non-white people who get approached to inform on their community. It's Muslim communities. Surveillance that one does on the other. So at the airport, it's the other passengers that say, ah, so-and-so is speaking in Arabic. And therefore that person becomes the subject, right? The target of that hyper-surveillance. So it's the kind of surveillance that are being exercised by each of us on the other because of this sort of like culture of fear that has been, ah, nourished in a way. And that's mushrooming all around us. And these are fears that I think are, they go anywhere from the most concrete to the most vague. In this way, I think this is another way of creating an semblance of control where this identity is very easily visible. It's very easily targeted and it's very easily defined. It's inherently disenfranchising. It's disempowering and it's isolating. When you feel you're being treated as a different person to the rest of the population, that's when measures like surveillance, things that are enabled by technology, really hit home. And that's when you feel you're being treated as a different person to the rest of the population. That's when measures like surveillance, really hit home and cause, you know, and cause you to sort of change the way you feel as a subject. Because at the end of the day you are, you are a subject of a government. How is it that these mass surveillance programs have been kept secret for years when they are supposedly so meaningful and effective? Why didn't anyone get justice for it? Why was it kept secret from secret courts? With secret court cases. Why does the Commission of Secret Service have put in place their own Obama after the release of the North in addition to the result that no single zero of terrorist attacks by these huge telecommunications and media data was only declared in action? In trying to stop something from happening before it happens, they can put in a measure and that thing might not happen. But they don't know if that measure stopped that thing from happening because that thing never happened. It's hard to measure, you can't measure it. And you can't say with certainty that it's because of this measure that that didn't happen. But after 9-11, after, you know, the catastrophic level of that attack, it put decision-makers into this impossible position where citizens were scared, they needed to do something. One part of that is trying to screen everybody objectively and have that sort of panopticon surveillance of saying that, no, no, we can see everything, don't worry. You know, we have the haystack, we just need to find the needle. But then, you know, obviously they need ways to target that. You can see it most clearly over here, you got leaflets through your door a few years ago, basically saying, if you've seen anything suspicious, call this hotline. And it listed things like the neighbour who goes away on holiday many times a year or, you know, if, like, you know, another neighbour whose curtains are always drawn, you know, it just changes the way you look at society, you look at yourself. And it shifts the presumption of innocence to a presumption of guilt already. If someone who is a potential threat, as a potential threat or as a potential terrorist suspect, without a terrorist to say, if someone like that, so to speak, is allowed to be awakened or even arrested. That means, if certain people have a specific danger for the community, it could cause fundamental human rights to be removed. First of all, we face an unequal threat that will last. Two days after the attacks in Brussels on December 22, 2016, John Claude Juncker and the French Prime Minister attended a press conference. We are living our life's way. But we also think that the Union of Security and all the important elements... In this hearing, the minister announced a proposal to take the Commission on the protection of the outside borders of Europe. As an anti-terrorist line of law, the law was abolished by the law-abiding law. The Green-elected Jan-Philippe Albrecht wrote a statement on netpolitique.org that defined the line of law as terrorism could be used by the government to criminalize political actions or political protests. At the national or local level, they will tell you that most likely these people are Muslims. And this is Edward Said's point of view, right? That the Western self came to define itself in relation to this Eastern other. So everything that the West was, the East wasn't. And everything that the East was, the West wasn't. And so the East became this province of emotionality, irrationality, and the West became this source of reason. Everything controlled and controlled and contained and so forth. And it's this dichotomy that continues to play itself out. The proposal of the directive says that it complies with human rights. It actually does not. Because they want to increase surveillance measures in order for the population to feel safer. However, we've seen that more repressive measures do not necessarily mean that you would have more security. And the way you sell it to people is to appease their sense of anxieties around, oh, this is the right thing to do. Oh, this is an insecure world. Anything could happen at any time, right? And so if anything can happen at any time, what can we do about it? You get the feeling that this text is trying to make sure that law enforcement will be able to get access to communications by any means that they wish. To be able to stop something from happening before it happens, you have to know everything. You have to look at the past, look at what's happened, but then also predict the future by looking at the past and then getting as much information as you can on everything all the time. So it's about zero risk. When we are afraid to speak, either because of our government coming after us or because of a partner or a boss or whomever, all sorts of surveillance causes self-censorship. But I think that mass surveillance, the idea that everything we're doing is being collected, can cause a lot of people to think twice before they open their mouths. When all your likes can be traced back to you, of course it affects your behavior. Of course, it's usually the case that sometimes you think if you like this thing or if you don't, then you would have some social repercussions for you. But if you look throughout history, the Reformation, the gay rights movement, all of these movements were illegal in some way, if not by law, strictly then by culture. And if we'd had that kind of mass surveillance then, would we have had those movements? If all laws were absolutes, then we would never have progressed to the point where women had equal rights because women had to break the laws that said you can't have equal rights. Black people in America had to break the laws that said that they could not have equal rights. And there's a common thread here. You know, a lot of our laws historically have had the harshest effects on the most vulnerable in society. It's also common that you think that if you have something to hide, you're also guilty, especially in the last few years. Especially the former boss of Google, Eric Smith, who is known for that, he actually said that. But of course, this is a friendly way of thinking. It's almost funny. You could think again and sort it out. But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. Big corporations that have this business model of people farming are interested in you because you are the raw materials, right? Your information is the raw materials. What they do is they process that to build a profile of you. And that's where the real value is. Because if I know enough about you, if I have so much information about you that I can build a very lifelike, constantly evolving picture of you, assimilation of you, that's very valuable. The economy of the net is predicting human behavior so that eyeballs can be delivered to advertising and that's targeted advertising. This system in one way is set up for them to make money and sell our little animals. This system in one way is set up for them to make money and sell our little bits of data, our interests, our demographics for other people and for advertisers to be able to sell things. And these companies know more about us than we know about ourselves. Right now we're feeding the beast and right now there's very little oversight. It has to reach one person the same at a particular time. If at 3 p.m. you buy this soda and you eat your lunch, how about 255 you get an ad about discount of a pizza place next door or a salad place and where exactly the soda comes. That's what targeted advertising is for. It's true, it is convenient. You know, I always laugh every time I'm on a site and looking at, let's say, a sweater that I want to buy and then I move over to another site and an advertisement for that same sweater pops up and reminds me how much I want it. It's both convenient and annoying. It's a pity that some of the greatest minds of our century are only wondering how to make you look at some advertisement and that's where the surveillance economy begins, I would say, and not just ends. To a lot of people that may seem much less harmful but the fact that they're capturing that data means that that data exists and we don't know who they might share it with. There's a whole new business now, you know, data brokers who draw upon, you know, thousands of data points and create client profiles to sell to companies. You don't really know what happens with those kind of things so it's hard to tell what the implications are until it's too late, until it's happened. The Stasi, compared to Google or Facebook, were amateurs. The Stasi actually had to use people to surveil you, to spy on you. That was expensive, it was time consuming. They had to pick targets. It was very expensive for them to have all of those people spy on people. Facebook and Google don't have to do that. They use algorithms. That's the mass in mass surveillance. The fact that it is so cheap, so convenient to spy on so many people. And it's not a conspiracy theory. You don't need conspiracies when you have the simplicity of business models. When we talk about algorithms, we actually talk about a logic. When you want to, for example, buy a book on Amazon, you have always seen a few other suggestions. These suggestions are produced for you based on the history of your preferences, the history of your searches. They learn by making mistakes. And the thing is, you know, that's fine if it's like selling dog food. But if it's about predictive policing and about creating a matrix where you see which individuals are threatening, that's not okay. To me, you know, there has to be limits. There has to be lines. And these are all the dynamics that are coming from the bottom-up. These are all the discussions that need to be had, but they need to be had with all the actors. It can't just be an echo chamber. You can't talk to the same people who agree with you. So one consequence of this would be many minorities or many people who have minority views would be silenced. And we always know that when a minority view is silenced, it would empower them in a way and it would radicalize them in the long run. This is one aspect. The other is that you would never be challenged by anyone who disagrees with you. We have to understand that our data is not exhaust. Our data is not oil. Our data is people. You may be not doing anything wrong today, but maybe three governments from now, when they pass a certain law, what you have done today might be illegal, for example. And governments that keep that data can look back over 10, 20 years and maybe start prosecuting them. When everything we buy, everything we read in a way, even the people we meet and date is determined by these algorithms. I think the amount of power that they accept on the society and on individuals in the society is more than the states, to some degree. So there, I think, representative democracies have the duty to push the government to open up these private entities and to at least expose to some degree how much control they accept. Hello. Welcome back from the movie. Now I welcome also our producer. It was showing very good what information can do and what could be done with information. I give the people a bit more time to ask more questions. And in the meantime, I could ask, well, this movie was obviously not in here and was not shown today for the first time. So what would you do different if you think has maybe changed in the meanwhile since you made it? What I would change is I would definitely try much harder to secure funding to just simply make a better movie and have more time and edit it faster because the editing process, because I had to work on the side, was quite long. And this film, in the way it stands now, is actually only funded by a few very great people who supported me on Patreon and helped me with their private money, so it was essentially an almost no-budget production, so I would definitely change that. But documentary scene in Germany being what it is, it's very hard to secure money if you're not attached to a TV station if you don't have a name yet, since I didn't have a name, but I still wanted to make the movie, I made the movie. I am still very happy with the general direction of it, but of course, since it was mainly shot in 2015 and 2016, some of the newer developments in terms of especially biometric mass surveillance and police, especially in the U.S. the way police uses body cams, et cetera, isn't really reflected. But I still think that the... I would still go with the whole angle on colonialism and racism that is deeply entrenched in the discussions around surveillance and privacy, and we can see that in discussions about shutting down telegram in Germany at the moment because right-wing groups assemble there. We see it in discussions about how to deal with hate speech online, on Facebook, or the metaverse, as it's going to be called soon. And all of these things are already kind of in the movie, but I would have probably focused a bit more on them if I'd known, well, six years ago, what would happen and if I would make it now. But yeah, generally the direction I would choose the same. Yeah, that's quite fascinating that you did it with nearly no budget. And so... And it was also an interesting point to end it up now because in principle, I understood the idea that body cams should be actually a means of protecting the people against the police and not the other way around as it happens sometimes. Now definitely, and the problem with especially body cams or also other means of surveillance is that a video is always thought to be an objective recording of the reality. But of course it always depends on the angle, in cases of body cams quite literally the angle, but also the interpretation. And since humans are always full of biases and always full of presumptions about who might be in the right and who might be in the wrong, these images or videos tend to never, even if they would be showing the objective truth, they're barely ever interpreted that way and it's exactly the same with any sort of film or photography that we're doing. I mean, for this movie I assembled a ton of interviews and they were very long, there were several hours long in many cases and I could have edited probably a hundred different versions of this movie going in essentially almost opposite directions with exactly the same material and it shows very strongly how important it is at the end of the day that we overcome our own biases as humans, as judges, as police people, as people walking down the street and trying to actually overcome any sort of surveillance that is possible on a technical level because that always is always connected to the way we see and understand world. Yeah, by this regard I also actually remember an old talk we had several years ago. It was about one of the Freihardstadangs demonstrations in Berlin and there was also a case where somebody, I think it was, the term was established, the guy with the blue t-shirt got beaten by police and then it was very hard to assemble different videos and so on to really tell the whole story what had happened and you should be able to find that there was a talk then on Congress where these words were constructed somehow. I would definitely look that up. But I'm not sure about the year anymore, but you will find it. Now we have some real questions from our audience and the first one is, can I find the movie anywhere to show to somebody else? Yes, it's on YouTube. You can literally find it just by typing in the title and my name which is Teresia Reinholt and then you can find it. That's very good, so I hope you're happy. It's the 21st century short attention span for non-technical friends with the biggest claim. Okay, I don't really get the question. I guess the idea is if there is a way of explaining to non-technical people what is the problem with I do have nothing to hide. Yes, if there is anything in your life that you're happy no one is watching you do whether it's an embarrassing YouTube video you don't want other people to know that you're watching or singing in the shower or anything, then that is your absolute right that you are not really known as judging you on them and that's the same with mass surveillance and surfing online or walking down the street. We have a very basic comfort zone that should be protected. We have a human right to privacy and whether it's in a technical realm or in an analog realm like being in a shopping mall and picking up whatever you don't want other people to know that you're buying you should have to write to do that in private and not have it be known to other people and when we are surfing the internet everything we do is constantly analysed and watched in real time and our movements online are sold to the highest bidder there's a whole massive advertising industry behind it and that's just immoral because humans should have always the ability to share only what they want to share that's how I try to explain it to non-tech people and if the non-tech people are from the former east just hit them with the Stasi and they know exactly what you're talking about Yes, thanks for this explanation again and I think also what is important what was also mentioned in the movie is the thing with that since it can be stored now so that future can hunt your history kind of and actually the question was now be more precise and actually it was not what I asked you actually the question was whether there is or there could be a short teaser that people could send to their friends to watch the whole movie Oh yes, there is and that is also on YouTube and on Vimeo Sorry, yes Well, I also didn't get it from the question Okay, so people will find it, very good So then I guess we are through with the questions and I thank you again for your nice movie and for being here and then this talk is over here and Karlsruhe.TV comes back to you at 4 p.m. where the talk tails from the quantum industry and till then watch some other streams go to the world or have some lunch and I'll see you