 Main Street Policing meets military great surveillance. Imagine you have a huge, huge, huge, huge military organization and you do wars and the wars end and you can't leave your military equipment on site, on place because someone else might use it for its own purposes. So you take all your stuff home. What do you do with this stuff? You can give it to the police. You can bring military technology into more civilian regions so that suddenly the police looks more like a military organization, like a militia or so, and that you suddenly have tanks on protests or so. Similar things happen with surveillance technology that when the war is over the companies want to sell, want to continue to sell surveillance technology. So whom do they sell to the more civilian world? Funny and not so funny idea. Catherine Crump is talking about. I want to give you a warm, I want to give, want you to give her a warm welcome, applause to Catherine Crump and have fun. Thanks so much and thanks for coming. You're the die-hards who are still going to talks on the last day of camp. I want to spend some time today talking about surveillance by local law enforcement agencies. We've spent a lot of time over the last few years talking about the NSA and the FBI. For good reason, Edward Snowden revealed a great deal of information about what those agencies are doing. But I think that for many Americans the FBI seems pretty remote to them and they can't imagine being subjected to surveillance by the FBI. But their local law enforcement, sorry I'm getting a fair amount of feedback, local law enforcement agencies on the other hand are more realistic. And today, military-grade technology is increasingly being used in local law enforcement agencies in the United States. The best known example of this are of course military weapons. But what most Americans still don't realize is that sophisticated surveillance technology is also in the possession of even police in small towns. Fueled by billions of dollars of federal money, local communities are acquiring these technologies often without the population knowing about it and even without elected representatives being aware of it. But there's hope. Fortunately in liberal communities like Oakland and Seattle thanks to activists, some of whom are with us at camp, communities are starting to push back and to put regulations on this technology. And I think we need more people to join them. But first, a bit of background. There's been a huge amount of controversy about policing in the United States when the police in Ferguson shot and killed Michael Brown. There were a tremendous number of protests after the fact. And Americans were shocked not only by what happened to Michael Brown and then unfortunately many others before and since but also by how the police responded to the protests that took place. Armored vehicles called Bearcats rolled down the street. Heavily armed SWAT agents confronted the protesters. And I think it was the first time many Americans woke up to the fact that military-style tactics and equipment were being used in local policing. Now activists had been raising the alarm about this for years but it took this particular event to galvanize the American public and it's even resulted in some reforms to programs that donate surplus military equipment to local law enforcement agencies. And just last week, the Ferguson Police Department itself was compelled by the Defense Department to return to Humvees that had been donated to it. But we need a similar moment of awakening when it comes to local police department's use of surveillance equipment because Americans still don't realize that in particular tools of mass surveillance are available to their local police. Facial recognition technology I think is in some sense exhibit A for this. It's commonly was used in Afghanistan and Iraq to identify people but now local police departments are rolling it out as well. The best example of this is actually San Diego in California. San Diego started working on facial recognition technology back in 2007 but it took six years until the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Investigative Reporting uncovered the use of this program for anyone, even people who live in San Diego, to become aware of this and what we learned was that not even elected officials realized that this type of technology was being adapted. So I want to talk a little bit about it. The San Diego program is called TACIDs. These slides that I'm going to show you, they aren't actually my slides. They're slides from an organization called ARGIS which is a regional law enforcement collective in the San Diego area. So TACIDs leverages a database of 1.4 million photos taken at local jails and in the field officers use a mobile device to snap a photograph of an individual that photograph is cross-referenced with the booking photos and then up to 10 matches are displayed to officers so they can see if the person they're interacting with is someone who's been subjected to, has been arrested previously. Doesn't necessarily mean they were actually convicted of anything. It just means that they had some interaction with a criminal justice system that resulted in a booking. So right now this database is limited to arrest photos but it's not clear how long it'll stay so limited. The police department has speculated in public documents that perhaps all driver's license photographs in California could be integrated into this database and perhaps also instead of just snapping photographs of people you can see on this slide that they have suggested integrating this technology into fixed cameras in places like courthouses and on public transportation so you can engage in a sort of scanning of the local population. And what I think is striking about this is again, law enforcement agencies did this themselves without the public being aware of it or without any elected representatives actually having a say which is obviously quite undemocratic. So as of February there were about 800 registered users of this technology representing 28 different cities and law enforcement agencies in the San Diego area. Incidentally that includes not just local law enforcement agencies but also ICE which is the entity that is responsible for detaining and deporting individuals unlawfully in the United States and many other organizations. So this is not a crowd that needs an explanation for why facial recognition has some privacy implications, right? And precisely because it eliminates much of the practical obscurity many of us appreciate in everyday life this is exactly the type of technology that ought to be subjected to public scrutiny. Now it used to be that if you were a police department in the United States it was actually pretty difficult to roll out a substantial new technology without there being some oversight and the reason for that is you generally needed money to do so and to get money you had to go to the local city council and the consequence of going to the local city council to ask for money was there was at least some chance for local officials to scrutinize what you were doing and because of open meetings laws there would be some pieces of paper out there available in the world that local activists could see to know that this technology was being that a new technology was being considered by their local law enforcement agencies but that's not how it works anymore and I think it's worth talking about why. Well as in so much with policing in the United States a lot of it goes back to September 11 after that tragic event there was something called the 9-11 commission which examined and conducted a comprehensive examination of why the US intelligence services didn't manage to detect and deter this event before it occurred and one of the primary conclusions that this entity drew was that homegrown terrorism was actually a substantial risk in the United States and that far more information needed to be gathered about individuals in local communities and this I think is where a lot of the drive to collect it all on the local level came from and once you've reached that conclusion that integrating local law enforcement agencies into the broader federal surveillance system is really the only game in town. The United States unlike some countries doesn't actually have a national police force and in fact there are ten times as many local law enforcement agents in the United States as there are federal agents and so pumping large quantities of money into local law enforcement agencies to acquire more invasive and comprehensive surveillance technology has been the strategy in the United States ever since. So I want to show you a few numbers because sometimes that helps there are these various grant programs that the federal government created a lot of them come out of the Department of Homeland Security they have a variety of names so here are just some examples and you can see that the amount of money is often quite large so billions and billions of dollars are going into these programs and there are in fact so many different pots of federal money that you could now use to acquire surveillance technology if you're a local law enforcement agency that despite best efforts it's actually really difficult even to count them all and the other thing this audience will be aware of is surveillance technology is cheap, right? The Department of Justice also runs many of these programs and in an era when you can buy a license plate reader for $15,000, having billions and billions of dollars feeding into local law enforcement agencies has really expanded their surveillance technology it's also undermined democratic control and because as I said before law enforcement agencies used to have to go to local governments in order to get funding now they don't need to do that they need to apply for federal grants and that's exactly what happened in San Diego the program was rolled out by this regional law enforcement collective it applied directly to the Department of Justice for a grant to fund its facial recognition software and in fact the program still appears to be almost wholly supported by federal money rather than state money so ARGIS is actually a form of a fusion center that existed before fusion centers existed it has 82 members of different law enforcement agencies and the way it works is agencies deploy different technologies they join the collective one of the conditions of joining is that they feed all of their data into the overall collective and then they have access to everyone else's data and now ARGIS which was based in San Diego is experimenting with broader sharing so instead of just being limited to San Diego they're now exchanging a lot of information with other states like Arizona and you can see how this is sort of a bottom-up approach to trying to broaden information aggregation about everyday citizens movements in the United States so I've been talking about San Diego and the fact that no one knew what was happening with law enforcement acquisition of technology there but it's not the only example and in fact probably the most prominent example is in Seattle in 2010 news reports came out that Seattle had acquired a drone it was a small drone this again is a slide from the local law enforcement agency that they put out after the fact describing the drone which I think is relatively modest compared to a lot of other drones but one of the striking things about it is the city council members found out about the technology the same way as everybody else they read about it in the newspaper and they were really both surprised and upset to know that this kind of technology was being acquired without their knowledge so ultimately the public outrage was so vigorous in Seattle that they actually ended up having to get rid of their drone they tried to donate it back to the manufacturer who refused to take it and ultimately their solution was to donate it to Los Angeles where ultimately it actually also prompted such a vigorous reaction that it's been sitting in a warehouse ever since this little drone has actually never flown Oakland is another community where this happens and I know there are a lot of activists from Oakland here so in 2013 individuals in Oakland learned that through a port security grant from the federal government Oakland was developing what's called a domain awareness center and the idea here was to integrate sensor data around Oakland into one station for more comprehensive monitoring you know I think again this is an effort by the federal government to build up information collection and so it was first funded with three million dollars of federal money back in 2009 and then in 2013 they needed more money to implement phase two which involved an integration of a more broad range of data and they came back and asked for approval to accept two million more dollars of federal money and at that point the activist community caught on and it was really important that they did so because they could raise the type of basic questions about this technology that the city council members despite good intentions really didn't know how to ask and so the activist community really came together around this and really took advantage of public comment periods to voice their opposition so someone said had a comment like this which is pretty representative about a city-wide surveillance program in which they might implement facial recognition we don't know how long the data is going to be stored we don't know what other agencies it's going to be shared with we don't know they were at that point talking about giving police agents in the street access to all of this sort of information on their tablets and laptops and we don't know anything about how this data is going to be secured is it going to be available to any officer to only a few officers and the person ended by saying there are so many unanswered questions that you really should put a stop to this until you've engaged in some sort of oversight and the city council in Oakland listened and responded to that and ultimately as I'll talk about later and as aesthetics talked about yesterday in a talk really put some restrictions in place I think there's something important to note about both the Seattle and Oakland examples which is that they were both funded by federal anti-terrorism prevention grants right but they were used for law enforcement purposes and I think it's just an example about how a lot of this technology is obviously multi-purpose and because there's very little terrorism and lots and lots of crime its most routine use ends up being for local law enforcement sort of routine policing and so I think it's particularly damaging that sort of undermining accountability structures that have often been in place but I want to talk about a hopeful note which is actually both in Seattle and in Oakland the activist community successfully pushed back on surveillance Seattle did something really path breaking which I hope will be a model for a lot of other cities in the United States which is they passed the first ordinance in the country requiring the local law enforcement agency to give it notice before acquiring surveillance technology and then to present a plan explaining how they're going to collect, use, store and share the data that's there and so they mandated that people who live in communities actually have some shot at being able to control the technologies that will be used to surveil them and one of the heartening things was that a lot of the city council members were just as upset about this as the activist community and the person who sponsors this bill a local legislator named Nick Licata had this to say about it he said I want to talk about how we got into this situation to begin with one day some of us showed up to committee and there were some objects on the table it turns out they were drones we didn't even know we owned drones we looked at each other and said where did this come from and someone said oh you approved it two years ago which by the way was true but they'd been asked to approve the acceptance of three million dollars of federal money to quote prevent terrorism and had never been told it would be used to buy a drone and the city council members said what is this about and so this is the basic problem I wanted to tackle with this legislation I want to say we are not going to be in this situation again and so I think we're all hoping that what Seattle did will lead to similar movements across the United States and the ordinance has provided for greater transparency it's not perfect but it's a start and I've talked to people who live in that community and they've told me that they actually think it has made a really big difference because when police departments have to sit down and actually think okay what am I going to say to the public about how we're going to collect, use, store and share their information that has actually slowed down the roll out of surveillance technologies because those are going to be very difficult questions to answer and they also mean that you have to figure out whether you can come up with a politically palatable response for people when you're gathering that type of information Oakland also successfully pushed back against the acquisition of surveillance technology thanks to several people who were here with us today it was a really interesting debate to watch as in Seattle there are just a lot of people in Oakland who work in the tech industry and are sophisticated about technology and they were very concerned but the other people who were really crucial in pushing back about this technology were members of the local lighthouse mosque who just came out and drove we have been subject to all sorts of surveillance already which we think violates not only our privacy but also our fundamental right to exercise our religion right free from government scrutiny and it's not helpful city council members if you then also start aggregating this information in a way that it can be further shared so these two communities came together and they succeeded first in limiting the scope of the domain awareness center so that it focused only on the port of Oakland since it's a port security grant to begin with you know the port is already in such extensive surveillance that in some sense I think limiting to the port rather than integrating sensor data city-wide actually substantially cut down on the scope of the program they then did something really innovative which is that they formed a city citizen committee to draft a privacy policy for the DAC and after about the domain awareness center and after about a year of work the city council signed off on that policy and it's a really good policy that really thoughtfully addresses all of the questions that we all think about when you think about the sharing and storage of data that I hope will be a model and this partnership was so successful that now they're going on to try to create an ordinance to regulate surveillance technology city-wide a more blanket ordinance so I think it might be fair to ask who cares right so two liberal cities on the west coast of California on the west coast of the United States managed to actually poke some holes in this but I actually think it's deeply threatening to what the federal government is doing or wants to do because its objective is to collect all of the information about all of the people all the time and although I know some of you will hand me a tinfoil hat when I say that, I think that's the natural conclusion of having such a fear of homegrown terrorism that you want to make sure that you've got the whole country covered and so by poking a few holes in this surveillance net I think that the activist community will tee up a very interesting question and that question is can you opt out at all what will happen as a result of these efforts one option is that the activists declare victory and everything runs along fine the other option is that the federal government comes in and installs its own surveillance equipment and there's precedent for this so for example in 2001, shortly after the 9-11 attacks the FBI decided that it was going to conduct interviews of approximately 5,000 Middle Eastern men living in the United States and some communities were appalled by this and basically said the police departments themselves said for which they deserve credit we've spent a long time cultivating relationships with these communities we don't want to sabotage them now by engaging in these sort of baseless interviews with the FBI and the FBI said okay, no problem, Portland which is one of the places that said this we'll get the interviews done ourselves so I don't actually know what will come of these efforts but I think the activist community is starting to at least poke a stick at the bear and I think that's a really productive thing to do not every place has the sophistication of an Oakland or a Seattle or that kind of activist community that can really draft the types of things that they've done and so my ultimate hope is that this is the beginning and that other communities can see what Oakland has done and can essentially copy paste those policies and use them in their own communities because I think if we can keep doing this we may be able to affect some real change so with that I'll stop and I'll thank you and I think it would be particularly interesting if folks who've actually worked on this in their communities wanted to say a thing or two about it so thank you very much yeah, thank you very much we have five minutes left for Q&A so we have only five minutes come to the microphones, ask your questions and see how the answers will be such an amazing topic no one has a question how come? please get up folks yeah great, please go ahead you mentioned that these activists were in liberal, educated cities and I'm curious how you see that coming over to places like Ferguson where there aren't such activism communities around yeah, you know I think Oakland really benefited from the tech community and the fact that there were people who could who weren't thinking for the first time gee, what kind of sharing restriction should be put in place I think the best hope is that what they do ends up serving as models because places like Ferguson do especially now have activist communities but if we could find a way to bridge the gaps between activist communities I think that would really help and you saw that happening in Oakland where you saw these public comment periods where you get really disparate communities there but I think some models is what we really need that can be implemented in other places that don't have the same knowledge base thank you very much this is hugely eliminating and of course as Americans we really appreciate hearing all this summed up I'm wondering whether there are sort of counter examples are there any cities where we're not seeing the push back we should and things are really being rolled out yeah, what are the concern cities I guess yeah, I think there's more of those cities unfortunately than there are of cities that have pushed back but it's because of the way this stuff gets adopted the local law enforcement agency applies for a federal grant they get the grant maybe then they have to go to the city council at that point they're confronted with a bunch of free money the city council signs off and the technology gets implemented and we never hear about it again so overall the picture is a little bit bleak but I think Edward Snowden has given us an opening here and although his particular revelations were about spying by the NSA what you see city council members willing to be skeptical about surveillance efforts in a way that they weren't five years ago and so the fact that we're seeing these examples now of push back I think is heartening yeah, please go ahead hello, thanks for your talk what do you think will the democratical approaches to fight against such surveillance initiative help against the government which seem not to follow democratical rules I think that's a fair question if you believe that the government isn't going to follow the rules that it probably doesn't matter what the rules are but I guess I'm I'm not so skeptical about about every department as that I think there are places where these things just haven't been put in place and then if you have the right rules the police departments will ultimately follow them and what Oakland did actually was impose penalties for violating the rules they created a requirement that individual citizens had a private right of action to actually bring a lawsuit if the privacy policy they created for their domain awareness center wasn't followed so I do think maybe the courts are allies here thanks okay, thank you very much for this very interesting talk wow if you need asylum come to Germany as I said before thank you very much I think we have less problems with drones right now so please, great applause for her