 So the classic feature of surveillance that makes it a mechanism of power is that it is unequal. And the Jeremy Bentham Panopticon, the prisoners in this ultimate surveillance prison know that they are under potential observation. They can be seen, but can't see the viewer. So when it comes to public networks of cameras monitoring us, maybe one of the most effective things we can do in order to encourage people to react to the changes that are happening around them is to be aware of them. And so I was really fascinated by a tool that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has developed to try and help people recognize the ways in which surveillance in public is exploding around us. When I talk about that, I want to invite Dave Moss of EFF. My name is Dave Moss, and I'm with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And if you're not familiar with who we are, based in San Francisco, we've been around since 1990. And we exist to make sure that our rights and liberties continue to exist as our society's use of technology advances. I particularly work on EFF's Street-Level Surveillance Project, which aims to ensure there is transparency, regulation, and public awareness of the various technologies that law enforcement is deploying in our communities. And a lot of times that work looks like filing public records requests. So for example, with license plate readers, EFF teamed up with the organization Muckrock to file hundreds and hundreds of public records requests around the country to find out how law enforcement agencies were sharing license plate reader data amongst themselves. Or let's say drones. We'll file a public records request for mission log reports to show how UC Berkeley police used drones to surveil protesters in 2017. Or we'll file a public records request with the San Francisco District Attorney's Office to get a spreadsheet with geolocations of every surveillance camera in their database, similar to what Jake was just talking about. And this is all a problem because too often our work looks like this. We are chucking public records at people saying, here you go. Here's some documents on document cloud. Or here's a white paper we wrote. Or a 3,000 word blog post. Or even worse, it's me standing in front of you doing a PowerPoint presentation. And if we're lucky, I have a funny cartoon to go with it. I don't have one today, so I had to use this one. Really, our work should look like this to the public. It contextualized within their communities. If I could, I would run a walking tour company where I could take people around and show them the various surveillance technology around them. I'm a very busy person, and I don't know that doing tour groups of six or seven people is really the most effective way to get our message across. However, maybe this concept can transfer over to something like virtual reality. Taking a step back, we look at virtual reality and we look at law enforcement technology. Police are already working on virtual reality stuff. So this is a company out of Georgia called Motion Reality that has a warehouse-sized space where police officers put on virtual reality helmets. They're given realistic feeling, fake electronic firearms. And they're wired up head to toe, and they go and they run scenarios. And that can be replayed back so they can see what they did right, what they did wrong. One of my favorite things about this is that they are also covered in, I guess, electrodes. And so if they're shot, they get shocked. And they're demobilized in that part of their body. There's a company that has taken one of these Oculus Go's and modified it to work as a replacement for field sobriety tests. So the whole flashlight thing would happen within a VR visor. And then there's a surveillance aspect. This is something called bounce imaging. And it is a little ball covered with little cameras. And a SWAT team officer might chuck that into a hostage situation or whatever. And then somebody could sit outside in virtual reality looking around before they go in and then recording a 360 view of everything that's going on. So having looked at that, what can we do on the other side with VR? I'm going to give you a quick background, a little brief history of our organization in VR. This is one of our founders, both a lyricist for the Grateful Dead as well as a digital pioneer. And in 1990, he wrote an essay in which after he had gone and visited some of the early VR companies, and he came back and he was amazed. He thought it was a psychedelic experience. Of course, he thought a lot of things were a psychedelic experience back then, because I think he was on psychedelics quite a big chunk of the time. But he was excited. This is the next big thing. Welcome to virtual reality. We've leapt through the looking glass. Now we're going to jump 25 years because not a lot happened since then. But in 2015, we finally saw VR start to move towards the mass commercial market. This was the Oculus Rift. This was the HTC Vive. This was the PlayStation VR. They all kind of came out early 2016. And for our organization, there were two big questions we were looking at. First of all, what are the digital rights implications of virtual reality technology on our society? And two, what is the potential for virtual reality as an advocacy tool and an educational tool? We'll start with what I think is a privacy element. The Intercept had a great piece in 2016 about hypothesizing that virtual reality might be the most nefarious kind of digital surveillance with regards to the internet yet. And I tend to agree with this. This voiced a lot of the concerns I was having. And we were talking amongst ourselves. And we hadn't seen really floated publicly yet. And the reason is biometrics. Virtual reality tends to rely on our physical characteristics in order to function. So on a very basic level, that is how your head is moving, the distance between your hand and your head, how long your arms are, if you left-handed or right-handed. But even something so simple as how your head is moving in a virtual reality environment can be correlated to mental health conditions. More advanced VR technology is starting to involve devices that measure your breath or track your eyes or map out your facial expressions. And that's a whole other word of biometrics. And then one of the creepiest things is when you have companies that in order to gather sort of reactional biometrics are throwing stimulus at you in a fairly quiet manner without saying why, so they can find something measurable and how you respond to it. We're not gonna get too much into augmented reality, but that's gonna also present even more problems because a lot of the devices are scanning the world around you in order to produce content. Something interesting that came up as well is that there was a research study by the Extended Mind in Pluto VR that found that current state of play, 90% of VR users are already taking some sort of steps to protect their privacy, whether that is adjusting their Facebook settings or using an ad blocker. And while three quarters of users were okay with companies using their biometric data for product development, the overwhelming majority was very much opposed to that biometric information being sold anonymized or not to other entities. Now as far as VR as an advocacy tool, we're not the first ones to try this. Planned Parenthood has an experience called Across the Line that puts people in the position of a woman trying to seek reproductive health services at a clinic that has a whole lot of angry protesters there. PETA has a couple of experiences that they take around to college campuses and other locations where they challenge people to step inside a factory farming situation. What does it like to be a calf at a factory farm or a chicken? And then there's some groups out of Brooklyn, Massachusetts that worked with the United Nations Environmental Assembly to do virtual reality visualizations of data on air pollution. And they took that and they ran that through a bunch of UN delegates in Nairobi. So that brings us to EFF's Spotless Surveillance Project. And this is, at its base, a virtual reality experience that uses a very basic simulation to teach people about the various spying technologies that police may deploy in their communities. And when we were starting to pursue this in the early stages, we had some considerations. We wanted it to be a meaningful advocacy experience. We wanted to not collect biometric information. We wanted it as an organization that supports open source and accessibility to technology. We wanted to make sure it worked on multiple platforms and not just the Oculus Store, the Vive Store. We wanted it to be also functioned on a modest budget because we are a nonprofit and we are not Sony. When I say a meaningful advocacy experience, we didn't want to rely on the novelty factor of VR. You can basically take anything and put it in VR. If it's somebody's first time using the VR, they'll be like, wow, this is amazing, regardless of what it is. But we wanted to make sure that ours was presenting our research in a way that only VR could allow. And we didn't want people to just be watching a movie in VR. We wanted them to be doing something, interacting with the world and to be challenged by it. And we wanted people to learn information that even though they were experiencing it in a virtual world, we wanted them to be able to carry that back to the real world. So the concept is once you put the headset on, and people will have demos during the lunch break, but you can put it on. You're placed in a street scene. It's in Western Edition neighborhood of San Francisco, where there is a police encounter going on between a young citizen and two officers. And you look around, and as you find something, you get a pop-up and a voiceover explaining what it is. It's not meant to like how quickly can you go through it and score points about the surveillance technology. It is supposed to be an educational tool. And there were four goals. One was can we do a virtual reality? As a nonprofit, can we do a virtual reality experience? Can we do it cheaply? And if we can do it the first time, maybe we can do other things down the road. Number two was just to educate people about the forms of surveillance. Then we also wanted to help them figure out where they are in their communities. And then finally, we had this thought that police encounters are very stressful situations. Protests are very stressful situations sometimes. Things move very quickly, but it can be useful for people to take note of what surveillance technology they saw in those scenes. So perhaps by putting people in a simulation, in a controlled environment, where they're able to gain practice looking for these technologies, it might carry over to these higher stress situations. So we decided not to go with a computer generated environment and just go with a 360 degree photo. This is the Ricoh Theta V. You can see it right here. It's also on the screen. It's got two concave lenses, one on each side. And it captures just beyond 180 degrees on each side and then stitches them together. So you're able to take a photo of everything. If I used it right now, you would get all of this. You would get all of this. The only thing that you might not get is just the very base of the tripod underneath the camera. But this helped us get past of what people referred to as the uncanny valley. When it comes to video games, the more you try to create a realistic person or a realistic environment, the more creepy it is to people. But by using an actual photo with a real scene, with a few things photoshopped in, it bypassed that all together. This is what the photo looks like that we took. It's obviously, once you're in the virtual reality headset, it wraps all its way around you. But you can see there is a scenario there going on. And you can kind of see us at the bottom here. I'm going to show you a little bit. This is what it actually looked like. And you don't see this in the game. So this is like a behind the scenes kind of exclusive here. We were just kind of hiding under a longer version of this pole that went about this high. And we're just kind of hiding there outside this police station, hoping police would come outside. And eventually they did. And it being San Francisco, they didn't question two people with a weird piece of technology on the street, which was great, because it was kind of the perfect shot for us. For those of you who are not going to have a chance to try it today, this is what it looks like in there. If you looked over at the body cam, you would get a pop up about it that explains what it is. And it has a voiceover, because we didn't want to make sure it's such a visual medium. We didn't want it to just be that you have to be fully sided to enjoy this experience or to learn from it. So if you are only able to see out of one eye or you all have limited visibility, but you have a certain amount of awareness of an environment, you can actually go in and still learn things through audio. We did our beta launch on November 5. This is at the Internet Archive at the Aaron Swartz International Hackathon. That's actually Brewster Kale, the founder of the Internet Archive, testing it out, which was a real honor. But I think for the most part, we are looking at having tables like this. This would most like there's not a lot of, at this point, not a lot of people have these devices in their homes, even though this one here just kind of dropped down to $200 recently. Not a lot of people have it, but it is something that we can take to conferences. We can have our grassroots activists when they're going to visit community groups, with them just like they would bring one-pagers or brochures or things like that. They could actually bring one of these with them. We've run it through probably about 500 people in the last month, which if you think about it in terms of an activism organization, if you're able to spend seven to nine minutes with somebody, getting them to only exclusively focus on surveillance, that is incredible. I mean, that's like thousands of, that's a lot of time. But it was available on the internet. And so one of the things that I found really gratifying is Portland, Maine is about as far from San Francisco as you can get while staying in the United States. But we see that there are maker spaces and hacker spaces and media labs that are trying this out and having people demo it. And we started to see social media respond to it as well. My favorite tweet is this one in the middle. VR tech is so effin' rad. I just went spitting through my apartment pinging spy tech on the screen of my tracking device, lolsob. And I think lolsob is exactly what we were going for with this. So I feel pretty good about that. So as far as next steps for us, we're still in beta mode, so we're gonna continue in doing demos to gather user feedback. We're gonna improve the experience. One of the things with working open source technology is that sometimes there might be a tweak in the language and then everything breaks. And so sometimes we've had some bugs come up and we have to fix them and we need to get everything stable for an April 2019 launch. And once we have that, we'll start sending it out into communities. So maybe it'll come up with an educational curriculum so teachers can do it. But then after that, we have to look at, well, what would the next version of this project be? And we have a few ideas. Some of them are, well, let's do an internet of things version. Let's do a home office where you look around and you see the nest, you see a printer, you see all these ways that you might be surveilled through your devices in your home. Or maybe we do one where not everyone is like into San Francisco and they wanna know what it's like in Iowa, they wanna know what it's like in New York City. So maybe we just build the same thing for various areas. Or maybe we just abandon VR all together and we go on to AR and we have some way for people's phones to be able to project things for them into the world. I mean, all of these depend on how the technology develops, what kind of interest we get into it, whether there is a return on investment, what kind of grants there are. I mean, it's kind of a new world and we don't know where it's gonna be in a year and we don't know where it's gonna be in five years. But I can't tell you, I know where it's gonna be after lunchtime and that is just outside the lunch room where if you can come try it out, I've got two of the devices and I'm happy to show you how the camera works or anything like that. And that is all I have. You can, if you do have a headset at home or you just wanna play around with it on your computer browser, it's at eff.org slash spot.