 Hello, everyone. Thank you for coming to my talk. The man in the middle is a short history of the black community's battle with big tech and government surveillance. My name is Lexa Sandcott. I am the director of engineering at the electronic frontier foundation, a nonprofit organization that helps to protect your digital liberties online. It's been around for a little over 30 years. And I've been a technologist for about 10. So I've been everything from web developer to sysadmin, to software engineer, one, two, three, all of those things at different companies and nonprofits and agencies. I currently manage two open source projects, certbot and HTTPS everywhere under the encrypted web initiative at EFF. I also create security education content when I can and also give security trainings when I can. I also research digital identity technology and in a security policy, especially as it pertains to government network surveillance and censorship and occasional mobile security research, especially on Android. So the background to this was in 2019. I had just finished reading this book in particular and had a few questions about how did we successfully circumvent surveillance and organize with each other between not only plantations but different, you know, community pockets over time all the way through Jim Crow. When we were under such heavy surveillance by the government, even to this day, we still are in many different respects, especially if you are involved with Black Lives Matter in any way, respect, shape, or form, you're probably be have been, you know, or known someone who's targeted by surveillance in some way. And I will tie all of that to modern times from this period where I had questions, especially since the story goes over maroons in particular or the American maroons. We know about the maroons in Jamaica. A lot of people may know about the revolution of Haiti when they had liberated themselves from slavery, but not much is said it besides, you know, the Nat Turner rebellion or, you know, Harper's Ferry rebellion and those different bigger events, but those bigger events were all led up to the smaller events of rebellion and resistance. And those smaller networks that were created outside of plantations where enslaved people had ran away and freed themselves and actually lived within miles of the plantation that they ran away from to stay connected with the family. And so they were able to traffic information between plantations with this network, especially with enslaved Africans that were a little bit more mobile like boatmen, ferrymen, cargo carriers and such of people who were allowed to at least go plantation to plantation. And they were very pivotal in that network of communication between plantations as they couldn't read and write they had to pretty much use their voice. And so they had used a lot of verbal cues and communication. And I think the most prevalent example of this is probably the Underground Railroad. Like we're all familiar with that. But that was these actions were like the precursor to help build something like the Underground Railroad because we were already kind of in practice with that. And then this book confirmed to me something that was very important that, you know, enslaved being enslaved during this time was such a traumatic situation for a mass group of people who spoke different languages, you know, and were able to come together and actually create a new language Creole and others that were similar in dialect. And also the fact that they never gave their enslavers a night of sleep like never. And it was, you know, it's not so much as comforting, but it's a it's a fact that this book portrays where it's like, they had to outsmart them all the time. They're enslavers, the people who were overseers, the people who were plantation owners, like they never really got to rest while they enacted this horrible system on this group of people. And I'm glad they never got rest, you know, you know, and you don't want these type of people to sleep at night. And they never gave them a wink of sleep. There was always a rebellion. There was always something in question. And this book kind of paints that picture of the fact that this type of system was not easy to maintain because people were always organizing, always communicating with each other, despite the fact that all odds were against them, terrain, language, written communication, you know, this book kind of highlights that really powerful story behind the scenes of not just, you know, defeat, but large amounts of triumph in a way because, you know, we're still here because of them. And a lot of this too was about, you know, the fact that hacker history and stuff doesn't really get told in tandem with black history. And I think there's definitely particular reasons for that. But I try to group in certain types of situations like wiretapping in the United States and the development of the telecommunications technology we use today. So wiretapping in public opinion on wiretapping was largely shaped by how it was being used. And so the first major case of talking about how law enforcement was using wiretapping was Olmstead versus United States. Olmstead was a bootlegger. This was during the time of prohibition. And they had deployed wiretapping against his ring of importing liquor and shipping it around. So found out that this wiretapping happened. And Olmstead said that his fourth and fifth amendment rights were violated. And this case in the Supreme Court had determined that his fourth and fifth rights were not violated. This was later overturned by different casecats versus United States, I believe. But that was decades later. But this particular case in 1928 was very important in terms of shaping public opinion on why law enforcement wanted to wiretapping and saying like, hey, look, the moral fabric of America is in danger. And this terminology and this usage of moral fabric and public safety gets used a lot when talking about law enforcement and wiretapping. And then you go into 40s, which was that was during wartime. And a lot of secret communications tactics were developed during that time of war. And then you push forward into the 50s and 60s. And I point out this particular movie called the called wiretapper is based off a really real person named Jim Vaughn, Jim Voss, sorry. And Jim Voss used to be more engaged with criminal activities. And then later on, helped the police to wiretap because he had very innovative devices he would create where they didn't even need to break an inner in order to wiretap. So they called on him. And then this movie was kind of created based off his character and his story because he later on converted to being a Christian. And there's even I think the movie ends on a Billy Graham speech, if you're familiar with Billy Graham and televangelist type days. So this all kind of pushed wiretapping into like you can he used it for good and wiretapping is almost like an act of God, in order to increase morality in the United States and maintain, you know, safety and morality. And then you had in 1968 were that same language of morality and safety gets pushed into the omnibus crime and control crime control in the Safe Streets Act, where a particular senator, Senator McClellan from Arkansas, he was a Democrat and a staunch segregationist. And he had pushed for this act to have provisions for law enforcement to be able to wiretap, because he wanted to stop the extremist groups out there who were an extremist groups, also including, you know, anyone involved with the civil rights movement, whether to be Black Panther or not, to to be investigated without, you know, warrant, you know, have a warrantless search with wiretapping without being notified without being served a warrant. So this act was very pivotal in that case where I don't even believe that the senator even knew about co until pro at the time that wasn't declassified until later, because the FBI was already doing warrantless wiretapping by 68, like we all sort of know that, but this act kind of put it in the public light and put it on the books as a very legal thing to do rather than a behind the scenes operation by the FBI. And there was a lot of adjacent public sentiments that came along with extremist Black groups. It was also a lot of red scare tactics of, you know, getting organized crime. There was even a lot of, you know, push to catch gamblers and even other like mob crime, stuff like that to actually deploy wiretapping on other organized crime and kind of like reel in these groups through wiretapping and showing these cases as like, see, look, this is a good example of wiretapping. And this is why we need to do this. And so tracking back to 1964 and the type of technology that the Black community used at the time in order to organize, in order to get information out there was radio and phone. So radio is most often used for public information and phone lines were used for communication between civil rights organizations. And so this goes into AT&T or the localism, the term mob bell, if you remember hearing that term growing up, where mob bell was the monopoly AT&T dominated telecommunications from 1877 to 1983, that's over a century. So they were just one entity that the police could go to and ask, okay, we need a wiretap. And, you know, there was no other companies go through two at the time was just them. And you still see remnants of the bell system today, because AT&T still exists today, today, even after the anti trust big breakup. So they're still doing fine. And then you have bell system breakup, and it was kind of like kept this naming convention of bell, so Pacific Bell, Southern Bell. Southern Bell was very much so involved in a lot of the issues with the civil rights movement being wiretapped. And so even after the breakup, it was still an issue. AT&T from 1960 to 1975 to pushing a little bit of phone free history. They were aware about blue boxes in 1961. If you're not aware what blue boxes are, they are multi frequency communication devices that mimic that dial tone numbers that you hear. And we're able to get free phone calls essentially and phone freaks were very into this device during this time, especially through 64 was very popular then. And they ran master recordings, they being AT&T to detect this toll fraud. But they didn't really want to admit to publicly say like, hey, we're recording without consent. And they didn't want a lot of heat on them. So they had a very cozy relationship with law enforcement to make sure that, you know, I guess the heat was off of them because they look, we are helping the police catch the bad guys. So they, you know, allow them to wiretop tap whenever warrantless search whenever on phone calls. And in exchange, it kind of kept anti trust at bay because they were pretty much seen as friends of the law. And it didn't keep it long for that long to keep it off for that long, you know, because in 83, they were broken up. But still, they were still very much so involved with keeping their power in this way of forging your relationship with the law, which became terminate in the 90s. But I will get to that point a little bit later. And so a particular type of phone line that was used by civil rights organization was called wide area telephone service or watch phone lines. They were the precursor to 800 numbers. Back then, long distance, even through the 90s was still considered pretty expensive. And even then during the 60s, 50s and 60s, like county to county calls were built as long distance. So if you had an watch phone line that your company or organization paid for anyone making that call to that phone line, it would be for free for them and you would have to pay a flat monthly fee to maintain that line. So organizations with watch lines were SNCC, CORE, COFO, SCLC are organizations that we probably are very familiar with in passing of learning about civil rights organizing. And they use these lines in order to get information out there fast between each other and now would actually have like something called watch reports, which is widely documented. And you can see like the list dump online of what's reports from different organizations and how they were able to communicate with each other. They had a format for these things. And they were in taken usually by black women on the phones 24 seven these lines were open. So they were taken in shifts, very, very organized work on getting information out there in between each other. So traditional oops, sorry, traditional phone pairing. You know, you would go through a switchboard operator at the time. This was when things were a little bit more manual. And that switchboard operator was usually a white woman. And if that particular person wasn't really sympathetic to civil rights movement in any way, shape or form and knew that you were trying to get a call to like say, COFO, they could just end the call, drop the call and the other person would never receive the information. And often they would possibly tip off law enforcement in the area to saying that, you know, there's a high mass volume of requests going to this organization for a particular reason you might want to watch out for this organization. So this was often unprompted, you know, relationship with the law at the time to capture activity by civil rights organizations. And so with phone calls in Watts, what ended up happening was you could bypass the switchboard operator and directly call the organization. Now I did not stop wiretapping, but a lot of coded language was used to kind of confuse the police. And it would buy them enough time because Watts phone lines weren't necessarily for, I would say, communications for long term events or things. It was to get quick information out there. So while they're trying to figure out what these, what this coded language meant, they could get the information to the organization, even if they were being recorded, because the important thing was making sure that the other person or the organization knew what was going on. And so the ways that the FBI wiretapped during co-intel pro, they would just do like drag net records of tapped phone lines of either through the company, and they would have like a pair of number with the cable connecting to the FBI in the field office, or they would do install microphones like on the target's home device. So what ended up happening there was wiretaps were a lot more easier to accomplish because they didn't need to enter a target's home, even though that was fairly easy to do most times anyway, but wiretaps were just more convenient. So there was interference a lot with organizations, and this was actually a Watts report that had talked about how a Kofo office was denied installation of a phone from a local telephone company, because what ended up happening here was during this time, a lot of people didn't exactly own the phone, think about it as like internet service providers in the way they provide modems, but it's not your modem in particular, you just rent it out, and you could use your own modem in your own router if you knew how to like pair it up with your system, and had to know how to configure it. But a lot of people just accept the modem router device that's from their ISP today, and just run it out. So it's kind of like the same system here where you would get a phone from the Bell system, and it would say like property of Bell system under the phone, like emboss under the phone, so it's kind of like the same relationship so they could deny installing their device, even though any telephone probably could have done pretty well, but it would have to be a telephone established by the company. So this Watts report was interesting to see like kind of how this was going on still how unprompted by law enforcement, different entities like telecommunications companies were still interfering with the civil rights movement. And if you're familiar with the cyber security term, man in the middle or monster in the middle attacks used to be very literal during this time where clan night writers and such would be out here and actually attack different organizations, burn down buildings, things of that nature, or even kill someone, you know, these Watts reports get really dark. Some of it gets a little light where it's like, okay, someone was doing a protest to someone was denied admission somewhere to a car, you know, being lit on fire outside someone's home to someone showing up missing or dead, it was very dark stuff. So this information was important to get out quickly. And that was the main goal of Watts phone lines and it literally saved lives. And so going back to like a small take on radio really quickly, radio was very important too, because it got out public information quickly to a lot of people. And so voter education, especially when people weren't really quite aware of how to register or how to circumvent the dangers that involved with registering to vote because it was very high dangers on that where people were getting threatened. So this information was sent out, it's like, hey, watch out for this group on this corner, or hey, there's these police blocks, then they would code it language will come in again saying traffic, you know, jams or something like that, in order to kind of, you know, give the feeling that they weren't necessarily guiding anything with protests, but still giving that indicator to the community and black owned radio stations were definitely interfered with as well, but they did sustain during this time. And so you had this like picture illustrates from a really good book that I also read called radio and the struggle for civil rights in the South by Brian Ward. And this picture is from that book where it kind of described the relationship between WERD Atlanta, black owned radio and SCLC office sharing the same building. So that was a very, very, a great visual indicator of like what the relationship looked like at this time, despite the barriers and the issues. And so I want to talk about really quickly the permit systems from times of fear. So you have crying, you know, being, you know, you have to stop crime, you have to stop socialists or commies like during the Red Scare tactics during like the labor movement, and then, you know, the language shifts to a war on something, war on drugs, war on terror, war on nouns, but it was very much war on people. And so when you talk about war, this is a very specific case of wartime, you know, tactics and things that wouldn't normally be deployed during saying times of quote unquote peace. War on drugs, you know, had entire organizations created like DEA, war on terror, you had a DHS and then subsequent organizations out of the DHS like TSA and ICE. And, you know, you have all of this language that sort of justified creation of systems and also justified immense amounts of a warrantless search in different areas. And even if you push on towards today, you'll have things like the Patriot Act, right, that definitely was invoked to just bypass all means of like warrants or any sort of procedure or due process. So you look at this language shifting to war on a noun, but it's very much so beyond that. It's not about the drugs. It wasn't about the terror itself. It was about monitoring or justifying a group of people. And it would be justified if it was just like, oh, we're just catching the bad guys. But then you see something like the war on terror, where it goes from trying to surveil bad guys to just monitoring mocks, wholesale, wiretapping, mosque communications. And then you really have to question, you know, who is framed as the person perpetuating the fear and who is the entity trying to push towards even more violation of privacy and rights. So it's really hard to come back from this type of thing where you're establishing permanent systems during times of like immense amount of fear for public safety. And we really do have to check ourselves during these times of fear on what are we pushing for exactly when we ask for certain solutions to things. And so I want to talk about really quickly a case that the FBI had used to try to expand wiretapping beyond just requesting telecommunications. So a lot of you may be familiar with the case that happened where there was like this huge crackdown on computer hackers in the early 90s. And, you know, groups like Masters of Deception and such were like brought in, they were wiretapped for their communications as well. And then what ended up happening is like the FBI got involved, wiretapped them and said, look, like this case was successful because we caught the bad guys, we caught the computer hackers, and we did it through wiretapping. So therefore, every device in any home should be installed with some sort of wiretapping mechanism that we can just tap into ad hoc. And that was a really extreme request that the electronic frontier foundation had spoke on. Mike Guy went at the time with staff council and had talked about it with the actual representative with the FBI who had problems with the EFF's take on denying the FBI's request to do this. And the telecommunications companies weren't really to hype about this either. So it was really interesting to kind of see them finally sort of fight back for once. And this is post antitrust breakup. So this was not as much money and resources to do this stuff. So this type of wiretapping was getting a little expensive and installing device on everybody's phone was probably very expensive. So I'm going to go ahead and say it was more about money than privacy from the telecommunications standpoint. But this is kind of like the precursor to what's going on today with the FBI, too. So I wanted to talk about that. So today you have backdoors on encryption or the requests from the FBI for backdoors on encryption. Once again, large companies like Apple, Google, who, you know, dominate iOS, dominate the creation of Android, and especially with iPhone, since they Apple controls the operating system and manufacturing of the phone, FBI went to Apple many times to tell them, like, to give us a key that will allow us to tap into phones ad hoc. And so far, they have denied them this. But this is yet another private company that's left up to their own whims on why they would say no or not. Thankfully, a lot of public pressure has been put on Apple to uphold their word. But then you see that the FBI is like labeling encryption as a barrier to good police work like this is not giving us a key to see people's communications ad hoc is is not good for our own work and not being able to cash the bad guys, even though the FBI has been fully capable of being able to do this without needing to break encryption tools for everyone. There's a recent story that came out in motherboard advice about how they had a whole operation that that pushed out, you know, fake encrypted messaging apps that actually was secretly managed by the FBI called Enom. And so they are able to do police work without breaking encryption for everyone. And that's not the main point here because the fact that now bad guys aren't the only ones using encryption is journalists as activists. And if we don't have encryption, it actually leaves everyone susceptible to bad guys even more, especially people who get targeted by different governments or people who get targeted by different groups, or even their abusive partner. So you have to really think about these things when you're talking about framing things as we're trying to save the children, we're trying to save, you know, people from mass amounts of crime, we're trying to save them and help them not be targeted by the bad guys. But for the most part, if you break encryption for everyone, you actually make everyone more susceptible to said bad guys. And so I talk about this framing the FBI actually monitored heavily monitored Freddie Gray protests, the spy planes, and this was really like unprecedented in a certain way because of the type of aircraft that was deployed, the way that they had monitored people who were involved with the Freddie Gray protests. And these are people who weren't an extremist group, these are people who were out there trying to get justice for a particular person that was shot by police. And the fact that the FBI got involved and also framed them as the bad guys and tried to like push this narrative on to people exercising their right to protest, it makes you it gives you pause when they make requests to break encryption. And you know, so black movements and encryption encryption have, you know, developed a really close relationship because this technology is out there now for our usage, and we can use it to organize with each other. And so this byline says that civil rights activists sided with Apple against the FBI, Apple for you, but I wouldn't say that they sided with Apple, I would say that they are enforcing the notion that no company no matter who controls the keys should be saying yes to the FBI to just give a backdoor. And if that company is Apple or Google, then that's the company that you're going to go after to actually uphold their word because we've all know that we have the most experience here with Cointel Pro, we don't want to go back to that realm again where we have end to end encryption and they're using quote unquote once again, black extremist groups to kind of push towards this mass surveillance again, in order to keep the public safe. And so signal downloads have been way up. And we don't want to impede on those things because an encryption is for everyone is not just for nerds. It's for activists is for journalists is for people who are trying to organize. And we want to be able to keep using these tools despite the fact that we're being targeted and monitor for trying to organize for our rights. And so a lot of people may be out there, you know, this group can be I guess can consider, you know, hackers in this group, right. And there's some people that may be making calls like black owned communication apps. But if you do make an app that's targeted towards our community. Also, once you know you will also be susceptible to law enforcement requests. So be very careful about creating stuff as well that, you know, have ETE encryption, because you will see requests come your way as well. And then you'll have to answer the same question that Apple has answered, do we succumb to law enforcement or want that consequence. And also shout out to Crypto Harlem for teaching the community about signal and tour and other devices out there in tools. So my takeaways from this, you know, open protocols are very important, interoperability with different systems are very important, because obviously monopolistic communication companies are a single point of failure. And this that's been a big thing for me when I did this research was like, wow, you know, this is kind of like the trend that I'm seeing because it's very easy to ask one entity versus many. So open protocols and interoperability with those protocols are very important, because then other people can create their own systems outside of big tech or whoever in the future is considered too big to fail, right. And then black movements have already always been monitored. But the main point of them was getting information out there quickly to the community. And so that was something for me to always consider is like, what is the safest, fastest way for information to be spread. So I want people to think on these things and think about how our ancestors were, you know, surveilled, but also they use the technology at hand to get information to each other in order to keep each other safe. And they did such an amazing job, despite the fact that co until pro was in full force in the 60s, right. So thank you for coming to this talk. I hope you all learned a little something out of this, I try to merge in a little bit of hacker history here to to kind of see the parallels. And I hope you also go out there and push for encryption or ETE on normal communications for everyday lives. Thank you so much.