 Okay good afternoon everybody. Let's get started. I'm so excited to welcome you all here for today's session. My name is Ben Green. I'm an assistant professor in the Ford School, a postdoctoral scholar in the Michigan Society of Fellows, and an affiliate of the Science Technology and Public Policy Program or STPP. STPP is an interdisciplinary university-wide program dedicated to training students conducting cutting-edge research and informing the public and policymakers on issues at the intersection of technology, science, equity, society, and public policy. If you'd like to learn more about STPP, you can do so at our website stpp.fordschool.umich.edu. Before I introduce today's event, I want to make one quick announcement. For students interested in our graduate certificate program, there will be an information session on October 19th at 4 p.m. If you're interested, please sign up on our website. The next deadline to apply for the certificate is November 1st. And now for today's event. I'm so thrilled to have Cade Crockford here as our guest speaker. Cade is the director of the Technology for Liberty program at the ACLU of Massachusetts. This program aims to use unprecedented access to information and communications technology to protect and enrich open society and individual rights by implementing basic reforms. In this role, Cade recently led the ACLU of Massachusetts' press pause on face surveillance campaign, which has thus far won the passage of a state law regulating police use of facial recognition and eight municipal bans on government use of face surveillance technology. In other endeavors, Cade's blog, Privacy Matters, discusses the latest news regarding policing, surveillance and privacy and the terror and drug wars impact on liberty both abroad and at home. Cade is also a co-founder and manager of the ACLU of Massachusetts' data for justice project. I've known Cade for several years and have always been inspired by their commitment to justice, tenacity in facing entrenched power structures and vision for a better world. Cade will be in conversation with Molly Kleinman, STPP's managing director. Molly oversees the day-to-day operations and provides strategic direction for STPP, including our Community Partnerships Initiative, which works with community organizations to provide research and other support that helps them engage in technical and policy advocacy. In addition to her role at STPP, Molly is involved in local advocacy of her own. She serves as chair of the Ann Arbor Transportation Commission, is an elected trustee of the Ann Arbor District Library, and is a member of the coalition for re-envisioning our safety, the group that is organizing for unarmed, non-police crisis response in the city of Ann Arbor. This event is hosted by the Science, Technology and Public Policy Program and the Ford School of Public Policy. It is co-sponsored by the Center for Ethics, Society and Computing, or ESCAPE, the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, the Arab and Muslim American Studies Program and the Science, Technology and Society Program. I also want to thank our STPP staff who made this event possible, Kristen Burgard, Miriam Nagarin, and Annabella Vidrio. Cade and Molly will talk for 40 minutes, and then we will open it up to the audience for questions. For those of you with us in person, you got a note card and pencils when you came in. You can write questions on your card and Annabella will come around to collect them. If you need more note cards, you can just flag her down. For those of you watching online, you can send your questions to stpp.umich.edu and Miriam will pass them on to me. And without further ado, let's welcome Cade and get started. Awesome. Thanks, Ben. Thanks so much for being here, Cade. I have so many questions for you. And I think a lot of them end up centering around questions of how to regulate and control the impacts of surveillance technology, how to successfully advocate for the kinds of regulations that we think we need, you think we need, and then also how to use technology to advance positive agendas. But to start, I would love to hear, just tell us a little bit about the Technology for Liberty project, and also maybe the Data for Justice project, which it sounds like is maybe the flip side of that coin. Sure. So first of all, thank you for having me. It's really nice to be here. I really like Ann Arbor. I just want to thank everyone involved, especially Kristin, who's done a tremendous amount of work to make sure that I'm comfortable and happy everywhere I go. So thank you. So the Technology for Liberty program, we founded at the ACLU of Massachusetts about 10 years ago. And the initial goal of the program was to ensure that the law keeps pace with technology wherever technology rubs up against civil rights and civil liberties issues. So in the beginning, that was really mostly around issues related to privacy and surveillance. You know, we had been seeing for many years that on the government side and on the corporate side, the decreasing cost of storage, computer storage, data storage, the increasing power of computing, these two things were combining along with a failure of lawmakers at the state and federal level to really do anything in response to those two pretty profound and dramatic changes. All of that was leading to a situation in which power asymmetries were growing really, really fast between ordinary people in the government and between ordinary people like those of us in this room and powerful tech companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. And so we realized that somebody needed to step into this void to find out what was, you know, going on behind the scenes at police departments and other government agencies with respect to, you know, how these institutions were using new technologies to collect information about people, how they were using that information in new ways, and try to figure out what we think the response should be among lawmakers and then similarly, you know, try to understand what's going on behind the scenes at big tech companies and how, you know, what people have called data capitalism, some people have called surveillance capitalism. I just call it like the business model of the internet is impacting our rights, our choices, you know, maybe constraining our choices in ways that we don't totally understand, showing us a picture of the world that is not neutral at all and may not be the one that we think we're accessing when we open up Google to look for information or, you know, search for jobs or whatever. So we realized that lawmakers need to step into this area and pass some laws to ensure that basic rights keep pace with technology and in the beginning, again, that was really simple stuff. Like, you know, we all carry these devices around in our pockets and we're doing that in 2013 when we started the program, but at that time, police nationwide did not need a warrant to ask our cell phone companies where we were three weeks ago, you know, six months ago, a year ago, based on the information called cell site location data that our cell phones communicate to cell phone towers, like every second of every day, that cell phone companies retain and keep for long periods, you know, there was no law in the books in Massachusetts regulating how police could use facial recognition or any of these new technologies that for a long time were more like the, you know, the kind of purview of shows like CSI or like the military or the CIA or something, but increasingly are being and were being used by local police. So basically we wanted to make sure that the law kept pace with technology and then the Data for Justice project is really about using data science to advocate for some other important law reform goals that we have at the ACLU, primarily in the area of police practices, looking at, for example, how to use government data sets like stop and frisk data or drug prosecution information to show people what's actually going on in our criminal legal system so that, for example, people can see the vast majority of people who are being arrested for marijuana possession are black, right, or that you're three times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession if you're black than if you're white. Using data science to paint a picture of what's going on in a really clear way to try to convince lawmakers and the general public that we ought to change the law in ways we think are appropriate. Yeah, so that all sounds really exciting, I think, probably for a lot of the students in this room today. One thing that we talked about earlier during lunch is you were telling us a story about specifically facial recognition, which you just mentioned, and the opportunity that you saw to sort of jump on this technology before it had become so entrenched, and I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit more about that story. Yeah, sure. So for a long time, those of us who have worked on issues at the intersection of technology and the law we did talk about facial recognition as like a future problem that it seemed like we always kind of thought someone else had solved. It was like, yes, you know, in a few years facial recognition is going to be very powerful and like it's going to be very dangerous. And at one point I was like, I don't think we can just say that anymore, like we actually like we're the ones who have to do something about it. We should figure out what needs to be done, right. And so got together with some colleagues from Northern California and Seattle who also have programs similar to this at the ACLU. It's there. And we spent the day thinking through, well, what do we think this solution ought to be? What do we think, you know, if we could snap our fingers and pass a law right now, what would it be? And we came up with the idea that this was in 2017. We came up with the idea that we should ask governments to ban government use of facial recognition technology. And I remember when we started saying that publicly people laughing at us, you know, people would say like, make jokes, oh, you're so ridiculous, you know, you people are so stupid, you know, this technology is here, it's going to be used no matter what you do in every conceivable context, by every conceivable actor. This sort of like technological determinism that I think infects a lot of people in our society. And we proved them wrong. And I think, you know, obviously we haven't solved the problem for the whole country everywhere, but we have made some important progress. And what was so key, I think, about that moment is that there were a number of things that were happening. One is that governments were starting to use facial recognition technology. It was, you know, one of the problems in this work is that sometimes we'll go to lawmakers and say, here's an ascendant technology, we really think you need to regulate it, and they'll say, well, it doesn't seem like it's really ripe, you know, not a lot of people are using it, it's not really a problem to come back when it's a problem. And then if we come back and we say, okay, this is a, you know, a lot of police departments are using this technology, we really need to regulate that. It's too late, horse is out of the barn. Like, are you kidding me? So anyway, we found like it was like just kind of the right time where some police departments were using it, but not really advertising that they were doing that. It was like, you know, not in widespread use in government really, but starting to creep in. And so there were some examples we could point to as like, you know, warnings, basically. The other thing that was really important is that Joy Bulamwini and Timnit Gibru at the MIT Media Lab had just published their groundbreaking research showing that a bunch of facial recognition algorithms available commercially were exhibiting pretty serious race and gender bias. So just like misclassifying, specifically black women's faces that really alarmingly high rates, like one in three, whereas, you know, they were classifying white male faces almost 100% of the time correctly. And so we knew, you know, we're not stupid. We knew like the technologies could get better. It's definitely going to get better in terms of addressing some of those race and gender disparities. But it wasn't at the time and it was creeping into government use. And there was this nationwide Ascendant Black Lives Matter movement that was successful, I think, particularly at the time at getting people to think a little differently and more critically about police, police power, maybe police technology. And so we thought, you know, now's a really good time. We should we should do this now. So we did. Awesome. So what's are there things that you see as ripe now? So you mentioned that there was that there was a moment facial recognition was in this like perfect moment to to go after it really. Are there technologies that you are seeing in that space right now? Or is it was that just sort of like a one time deal where like the stars? I think we're still in that moment. Okay, facial recognition technology. And yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I guess I would just say that part of my job is thinking about new technologies, how they're interacting with civil society, how companies and governments are using them. Then the next part is thinking through what the law ought to say, right, what kinds of law reforms we ought to be fighting for. A part of it is also though, trying to figure out what might succeed based on like what's going on outside of the realm of tech policy and technology generally. And so I think right now what's going on is a nationwide attack on fundamental rights like reproductive rights, right. And people are starting to understand in a way that they have not previously, how absolutely fundamental privacy is to basic human dignity, right, to the ability to control your own body. And so that I think provides us with a real opportunity to make headway in the law in states where people and lawmakers, you know, care about reproductive autonomy and reproductive justice. We can now say to lawmakers in Massachusetts, for example, you know, you might hear from the location data industry that there are all these good things that can be done with cell phone and mobility data, and that you shouldn't regulate that market or, you know, cut it off in any way. But don't you think it's a little concerning that the police in Texas or some person who wants to sue someone even in a civil case in Texas could just, with their credit card, buy access to every single person who travels to a Planned Parenthood in Massachusetts? Don't you think that's really troubling? Don't you think we ought to stop that from happening? So, you know, there are political opportunities everywhere. And sometimes, frankly, they're in really awful situations like the one that we're in now. Yeah, right. And I think that there's, there's a lot that I'm seeing too about the way people's eyes are opening to both to the idea of privacy in general and to specific technologies that they might not have seen the concerns before, but now it's like, oh, so you know everywhere a car travels at all times and when it leaves the state and they start to under, they're starting to understand in a way they maybe didn't a little earlier. Yeah, exactly. Like people for a long time have said, well, I don't really care about my privacy. You know, what do I have to hide? Or I'm not doing anything wrong. You know, why should I care if the government is doing XYZ thing? And there are a lot of arguments, you know, I got a lot of arguments to deal with those, those claims. Yeah. But people aren't really saying that anymore. You know, I didn't hear that after, after the Dobs decision, at least half of the country is like, Oh, yeah, privacy really matters. You know, it's fundamental. Yeah. Yeah. So let's talk about regulation and oversight. And on the local level, we're seeing this approach of like community control, especially over police surveillance technology, right? So they're creating oversight boards or requiring transparency and purchasing and use. And I would love to hear your thoughts on what's working in that local control space and what is not. So here, recently, Detroit passed a policy that a lot of advocates are actually pretty unhappy with, like advocates were fighting pretty hard for some oversight. And then what they ended up passing felt so toothless that advocates ended up saying, no, to like, we don't want it. Whereas I know you were involved in like passing a policy in Boston that I think has some teeth. And I'm curious about both what goes into that policy and also what goes into the advocacy to get a policy like that. You know, okay, so I forget who was who said this, but I just read this great book by Astra Taylor about democracy called to democracy doesn't exist, but we'll miss it when it's gone. And there's a great line in that book that's something like life is a series of meetings, you know, and like, this is the most real comment I've ever heard about what it actually means to be an active, engaged human being in the citizen in the society that you live in. You have to go to a million meetings. That's your life. But that's it, you know, and it's super annoying. And it's super boring sometimes and people are annoying and they drive you crazy. But like, yeah, that's what it is. And so the answer to the question is like, you know, we've passed these laws, we've passed three of them in Massachusetts, one of them most recently in Boston, that say, it's not up to the police department anymore to decide unilaterally what kinds of surveillance technologies they're going to buy or how they're going to be used, what policies will dictate their use, etc. It is now the city council's decision. And the city council will make those decisions informed by the public. Well, sounds good. The trick is people have to be involved, right? Or it doesn't work. Like, and so it's a lot of work, you know, we're in the process right now of dealing with the first round of implementation in Boston. And there was a point when I first got the like, you know, 1200 pages of documentation that the administration sent over to the city council, documenting all the surveillance technologies and all the policies and stuff that I was like, what have I done? Why did I do this, you know? But that's democracy. It's really hard work. So the answer is, it's better than the previous system where the police made all the decisions by themselves with no public input in secrecy. But it really only works if people are engaged and it's hard work. So I think the jury's out. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that that seems like kind of a big weakness when you're demanding so much time and energy and engagement of the people who just want to move safely through their communities, or, you know, yeah, I mean, it's true with every issue, right? You said you work on transportation. It's true on transportation too. Like, you know, the people who are in charge aren't necessarily going to make the best decisions on behalf of all of us. And so we need, you know, weirdos like you and me to be obsessed with some things so that we can kind of like, fret over it maniacally and, you know, get other people involved if we can. But we do, we do what we can. Right, right. Yes. So yeah. And it's so it is. It's so much time. It's so much time and a lot of meetings and meetings. So, so many meetings. So all right. So then expanding out a little bit, we've got the local control, but then there are also attempts to do some national level governance or like in Europe, we've got the whole like continent level with the general data protection regulation, the GDPR. And we don't have something like that in the US right now. We don't have protection for everyone so that they can ignore privacy and just move through their life and have privacy. And I'm curious about your thoughts on the prospects. We've got this thing in Congress right now moving through the American, I wrote it down, the American Data Privacy and Protection Act. What, like, are you hopeful about that? Are you skeptical? What are you thinking? A lot of mixed feelings about that bill. I mean, I'll say that the National ACLU's official position on that bill is about 30 pages long. It's not in favor or against. We have there are a lot of things that we like about it. There are a lot of things that we think ought to be strengthened and improved. I'll just say two things. One is that there's preemption language in that legislation that would essentially block all states from passing laws to protect people's privacy in a way that goes above and beyond what Congress does. So that's called ceiling preemption. In other words, the law that Congress passes would be the ceiling for all consumer privacy law in this state or in the country rather. And we have very serious problems with that at the ACLU of Massachusetts for a number of reasons. One of which is that technology changes. As we know, Congress is not very responsive nor agile in terms of responding to developments in the tech space or really anything, human developments. And so I don't think it's a great idea to say that states have no, there's no room here for states to play in terms of developing, advancing consumer privacy law and that it's strictly going to be the purview of Congress and the federal government. The second reason is that there's some stuff in the bill that's really not that great. So it would be one thing if this was the best possible consumer privacy law that had a very, very strong private right of action allowing for individuals to sue, to enforce the law, to protect their own rights. There is a private right of action. It's kind of weak. We think it ought to be strengthened a lot. So the combination of those two things makes it very difficult. That said, there are a lot of people in the advocacy community who support the law or the bill rather and think that it's important for Congress to do something because there are a lot of states that are never going to pass any kind of consumer privacy law or if they do it'll be a law that's even more pro-industry than the one that Congress has worked out. I don't think it's going to pass this session. It's a pretty safe heuristic generally to just like assume that nothing will come out of Congress. But I think on this issue in particular Nancy Pelosi obviously is a very powerful person in the house, the most powerful person, and has heard from state lawmakers in California where she comes from that they would be very upset if this bill passed with its strong preemption language. So I think it's probably dead for this session. The real problem as we know with so many other issues is that big tech companies have way too much power in D.C. and lawmakers are making decisions that do not reflect the public interest and instead reflect the needs and demands of a tiny, tiny fraction of people in Silicon Valley. So that's the problem. Yeah. So then Europe is a little bit farther from Silicon Valley. They've got they've had the GDPR in place for a few years now. How is that working out? Does that feel like a model that we would want to emulate? Are there lessons that we can learn from it to do better maybe? Yeah. So I have a lot of complicated feelings about the GDPR. The GDPR basically uses like a consent model. So you've probably seen this when you log onto websites. There's a little thing at the bottom that says accept or maybe there's another button. And if you click that, it might say like I deny all cookie tracking or you know only accept required cookies or whatever. So the idea is that the GDPR puts on each internet user, you know, they would describe it as like giving people control over their own information. I kind of describe it as like putting the responsibility of dealing with all that stuff on individual people. And I think at the beginning when the GDPR was first being worked out, a lot of us thought like, yeah, this is right. This is great. You know, privacy is about control. This is really effective. The GDPR also gives people the ability to request their data from big tech companies to ask that it be deleted. You know, the problem there obviously is that the vast majority of people are never going to do that. And the vast majority of people just click whatever to like, you know, get to the webpage that they're trying to access because the vast majority of people don't really know anything about this stuff and don't care. Not because it doesn't affect them, but just because they've got other pressing stuff or because they're like 17. You know what I mean? And most 17 year olds are not super concerned about data privacy. So I certainly wasn't when I was 17. So I think that's a real shortcoming of GDPR and Consent Model legislation. I think an area that is ripe for exploration in the United States is thinking about following Illinois' model, which is to put in place really, really rigid and strongly enforceable privacy protections around particularly sensitive types of data. So Illinois has one of the best privacy laws in the world. It's called the Biometric Information Privacy Act. And it requires that private companies, Facebook, whatever, Walmart, get your affirmative opt-in consent. So that's not opt-out. That's not like click a button to use the service. It's actual meaningful consent before collecting your biometric data. So your voice print, your face print, whatever. And these models, I think, are going to be more effective because it's not so much like a click to use as it is meaningful consent. The other model I like is just like banning certain practices. Instead of saying that a company has to get your permission through by clicking something to collect and sell your cell phone location data, we should just ban the selling of cell phone location data because I don't think that's acceptable really under any circumstances. So yeah, thinking about ways of treating particularly sensitive types of data differently, that to me is like low hanging fruit. There are a lot of other really complicated problems that we could spend a lot more time talking through, but that is one that I think we should all be taking a lot more seriously and working on, and I'm going to do that. Awesome. I mean, to get to bans, it seems like we really, this is where we start to be thinking about advocacy and the role that regular people have in pushing for changes around the way we govern these things. So I know we've got some folks listening today. I don't know if anyone's in the room today, but I know we have people listening who are in the midst of organizing resistance against automated license plate readers, specifically in Ypsilanti Township, which is our neighboring township. Ypsilanti Township fully surrounds Ypsilanti City. Ypsilanti Township is generally wealthier and whiter, Ypsi City is generally poorer and blacker, and the idea would be that there would be cameras at every entrance and exit to the township, which would mean fully surrounding Ypsi City with cameras managed by the Sheriff's Department. This is the thing that's happening right now that they're talking about doing. And so license plate readers have been around for a long time actually. There's an ACL report, ACLU report from like 10 years ago, but they're becoming much more popular. I think it's partly that there's a new way of monetizing them that's out there and what you were talking about earlier with data like storage getting bigger and everything else getting smaller. It's much easier to do. So I thought that these might be a good example for us to start talking about how local advocacy around some of these issues can work. And we've been talking about sort of privacy and data, but when we get into specific technologies that can sort of feel like whack-a-mole. But I know you've been successfully involved in some fights against stuff like this. And so I'd love to hear your thoughts about what works. Well, I think it won't always work to just say, we want to work with the elected officials that we have right now and do something that is disfavored by the police or another influential powerful actor in local government. It's sort of a prerequisite to getting good things done in local government to have good people elected in local government. So I would say that if that condition hasn't been met then there needs to be some homework or prerequisite courses taken in fixing that problem and getting some good people elected to represent you in local government. And once you have that, it's a lot easier. It is very difficult and very similar to like banging your head up against a wall to try to organize, to convince people who do not represent you, who represent a different constituency, right? I mean, Boston politics is a good example of how things have changed quite a bit in this way over the years. 15, 20 years ago, the Boston City Council was almost entirely white, was entirely white, I think, was mostly like, you know, somewhat conservative people who were very like pro-police, you know, would never do anything that the police didn't want done. And Ayanna Presley ran maybe 15 years ago, she's now a congresswoman, became the first woman of color person, woman of color ever elected to the Boston City Council. And now the Boston City Council in a very short time period is like half women of color, and it's a lot of people who are very willing to challenge the power of the police. So maybe that's not the answer that you're looking for, but I really would not waste my time trying to organize in a community where it's like a bunch of elected officials who do not care what you think. And you can organize as many people as you want to show up to community meetings and council meetings, unless you get someone to run against them, and you can mobilize an effective coalition that actually scares them, you're probably not going to convince them to vote your way. So yeah, people need to get involved. Yeah, at every level. And this is where things like serving on commissions and volunteering for boards can make a difference in the long run, because you start to learn about how like the inner workings of the city, which seem very arcane and boring and involve lots of meetings. But that's where these decisions get made. But then once you have that, pretend that we have those people. So if you have a decent decision making body, you find out what's going on to the degree possible using public records requests, partnering with journalists, there are a lot of great investigative journalists who care about these issues and will do their own investigation with you. Try to find allies in strange places. Sometimes there are, surveillance is an interesting issue, because it's one where typically people on the left and the right are suspicious of police powers, of government powers, and are more likely to want to impose some rules or take certain tools away from the police. It's really people in the middle who who you tend to be the ones who are the most friendly to to, you know, state power, police power generally. So strange bedfellows are always good. It's, you know, always good in a coalition to be able to say, you know, we have people from across the political spectrum as a part of this effort. It's, I think, important to have a multi-generational coalition. That's another thing I would say is that working with young people is really important. It's also really important to work with older people. Not a great idea if your meetings are like people who all look the same and that's not just like race. It's also age and, you know, different parts of the city or the community or whatever. Not only is that helpful because people bring different ideas to spaces, but it's helpful because you are all representing different political constituencies that, you know, politicians care about. And then, you know, figure out your talking points. There's some, there's some basic like campaign 101 stuff that needs to be done. You know, what's the most effective message, I think, is a really, really important piece of organizing and finding some people who can convey that message, finding people who want to be a part of the movement who also have a story to tell about that's compelling about why this issue impacts them. You know, people are typically not really that moved by super academic arguments about, you know, why something is problematic, but are much more likely to care about something like facial recognition, for example, if the story is being told by Robert Williams, a man from Detroit who was wrongfully arrested because the police used facial recognition in a very sloppy way and arrested him. You know, it's extremely helpful to have people like Robert involved in movements and at the table determining the strategy and the messaging and things like that. So yeah, I mean, there's a lot more to say, but those are some thoughts. Those are all great. That's fantastic. So, all right, so we've been talking a lot about fighting things. But a lot of the students in the STPP program are interested in going to work in tech or learning or engineers of various flavors and are thinking about how to build things and build things that are going to move us towards justice. And so I'm curious about what, like a little bit about the role of technology that you see in advancing positive agendas like the Data for Justice project or other similar projects. Yeah, I mean, I think information when it's publicly available is not controlled by, you know, profit seeking entities that want to hoard it and use it in ways that could hurt people can be really powerful in positive ways. And that there's actually, there's a growing movement of organizations and institutions like the Ford Foundation that want to fund public interest technology. So I didn't know this until I got involved with the Ford program. But in the 1960s, the Ford Foundation funded similar fellowship programs for law students and early career lawyers. And it's essentially established the public interest legal profession. I wasn't aware of this. I always thought that it was just like a naturally occurring thing, but it wasn't. It was purposefully created by Ford. The idea was, you know, people coming out of law school at that time thought there are only really two career paths for me. I could go into big law or I can work for the government. And the Ford Foundation thought, you know, who could really benefit from lawyers, you know, poverty organizations, housing groups, education rights groups, you know, groups that are working in the public interest, nonprofit organizations. But it was hard for them to convince these really cash strapped organizations that they should hire lawyers. Well, what the hell do we need a lawyer for? They don't know anything about, you know, poor people or whatever. And so they funded the Ford Foundation funded this fellowship program of, you know, placing law students, early career lawyers with nonprofit organizations. And now we live in this world where it is a very well established career path for lawyers to go into public interest legal work. And so they're essentially trying to do the same thing with technologists. And that's actually part of the reason why we started the Data for Justice project. We had a technologist that was a fellow paid for by the Ford Foundation. And it was really great. I mean, she worked on litigation with our legal department was instrumental in helping us develop a very strong database case for legalizing marijuana recreationally in Massachusetts in 2016. And so, yeah, we were convinced. And so we've had a data scientist on staff at the ACLU ever since the National ACLU also has a whole analytics team at this point, like maybe a dozen different people working on data science across the organization. And I think, you know, increasingly other groups like ours are realizing how central it is to have have some nerds on our side, you know, not just on the other side. So so I would look into that, you know, if you're if you're interested in the kind of stuff that I've been talking about and in other civil rights issues, there are organizations that are looking for people who have really technical skills to join up the fight. Awesome. I think this is a great moment to move it to audience questions. So as a reminder, for people who are watching at home, you can send your questions to stpp at umich.edu. And for folks in the room, you can write them down on the little note cards and Annabella is going to come around and start bringing them up to Ben. And I think you probably have some questions already from the registration form that can get us going. Yeah. Cool. Well, this has been a really fascinating discussion. A lot of questions already from some of the registrants and of course from myself coming in. So, you know, one question that comes up, you know, when you've talked about this legislation that's been passed is to really think about what is the aftermath that happens after the legislation gets passed and sort of two directions that come up there is, you know, one, how do you know that government agencies are actually following through on those laws and not, you know, carrying out operations in secret that to avoid being caught by them? You know, how do you sort of ensure that the laws are being followed? And then in a similar sense, one of the recent sense of stories, especially from the past six months, have been certain cities like San Francisco passing certain retrenchments of facial recognition bands. So how do you think about, you know, there's this moment of getting a policy passed, but there's also the continued advocacy to ensure that it's not chipped away at as that political moment or political incentives change? Well, like I said, life is a serious mix. So to the first question, wait, what was the first question again? First question was about how do you know that the government is actually following the laws? Yeah, you don't. I mean, you know, the police in Boston can very well have a whole wing of secrets or technology that they're not reporting to the city council. You know, the reality is in this country, we don't have any effective oversight of the police period. There's none. The courts don't do it. You know, they do it very sporadically. I feel like the defense bar is the closest thing that we have to actual, you know, police oversight in the United States because the courtroom is, it seems to be the one place where police feel some obligation to provide information. You know, they still try to resist it a lot, but are sometimes required by courts to provide information that they really don't want to provide. And through criminal cases, stuff often leaks out, you know, that they wish hadn't leaked out. So a great example of that is the use of stingrays. These are devices that trick cell phones into communicating directly with the spy police technology called a stingray or MC catcher instead of communicating with your cell phone company, cell phone tower. And so for a long time, the FBI was helping local police departments acquire and use stingray devices. And the FBI even had a confidentiality agreement that they would require that local police and prosecutors sign that said, believe it or not, if a defense attorney asks about whether a stingray was used in this case, drop the prosecution. Because we would rather that this, the existence of this surveillance technology not be mentioned in court than actually convict this murderer or, you know, accused bank robber or whatever. So I think that, you know, speaks exactly to the question that you're asking, which is that we don't have any way of knowing and it's likely that they are lying about some things and we'll find out, you know, at another time and then people will be mad about it. I mean, I don't know. I mean, you know, we do the best. At least then we'll be able to say you've violated the law and sue them. So, yeah. And then the second question. Sorry, remind me again. Right. Retrenchment. I mean, you know, I saw what happened in New Orleans, which was like a bit of retrenchment. And in San Francisco, there was a, there's been a very, I might even say like hysterical campaign in San Francisco to convince voters that, you know, all of their problems have to do with the former DA, Chesa Boudin, who was like kind of a lefty prosecutor and that, you know, giving the police access to people's private surveillance cameras in their homes is going to magically make homeless people disappear. And like, you know, those are sort of like political problems that don't really have anything to do with surveillance or technology and are much more about, I think how, you know, the failure of our society to adequately provide for people's basic needs, you know, is leading to a real crisis where, you know, wealthy people in San Francisco don't want to look at poor people. And that's kind of what all of this is about. It's not, it's not about technology. So it's a bigger problem. Yeah. Absolutely. And so one, one thing that, that discussion connects to you then is sort of the broader ubiquity of some of these technologies like facial recognition and cameras in ways that are often targeted not to the government, but to exactly these types of say like wealthy people in San Francisco that you're talking about, whether that's facial recognition on your phone or ring, you know, the Amazon ring cameras on front doors, you know, how do you think about not just the police use of technology, but how this technology gets, you know, infiltrates all aspects of daily life. And then what should an individual's relationship with that tech be as a consumer who maybe finds it really helpful or comforting to have those, you know, technologies in your house or on your devices? Well, I'm going to tell a story because I think you'll remember this and probably tell other people. Anybody follow basketball? Big fan of the Boston Celtics here. We almost, you know, one, one almost won the whole thing last year is really sad that we didn't speak about San Francisco. But anyway, our head coach, former head coach, Eme Udoka, incredible coach, just got in a lot of trouble last week. It was revealed that he has essentially been fired because apparently he was sleeping with a vice president of the Celtics organization's wife. And they did not look kindly upon this, you know, she actually worked for the organization as well. So it was like a workplace kind of harassment situation. And it was revealed last week by a sports reporter that the woman's husband, who's the vice president of, you know, operations or whatever at the Celtics, first became aware that Eme was sleeping with his wife when he heard them having a conversation. She was on the front porch and he heard through the ring doorbell camera, this like lovey-dovey conversation that she was having on her way into the house. So I would just say that you're bringing some danger into your life if you willingly subject yourself to surveillance through companies like Amazon's ring doorbell system or whatever. And there's convenience, certainly. People think it's funny that they can see whatever walking down the street when they're not home. It may give you a sense of safety, but it could really change your life in ways that are not positive. So yeah, be careful, I guess. Be careful what you wish for. I don't think that there's anything that we can do about that as a society. Like if people want to spy on themselves and open up their lives to, you know, the rapacious desire for Amazon to collect every word that's ever been spoken and every image that's ever been, you know, available to human eyeballs, then, you know, they're going to do that. And we can't ban it under the law. You know, the First Amendment pretty broadly protects people's ability to create video. And, you know, I think it's kind of like a social thing that we ought to try to work on. So I try to very gently encourage people not to adopt those technologies at home, but mostly people don't listen. So now I'm just going to tell them the email doka story. That changes their minds. We'll see. Although probably a lot of people will be like, yeah, I want to know if my wife's cheating on me. I'm getting all of this. Not the moral of the story. You walked into that one. So yeah, I really appreciated your sort of real talk about the mundane aspects that go into your job. You know, from the outside, it sounds really glamorous, right? I've seen you interview Celtics player Jalen Brown. You've gotten articles about you in the New York Times and other places. That was a highlight, though. The Jalen Brown thing. Yeah, that was very cool. It doesn't happen every day. But right. So from the outside, you know, this flashy, exciting life with these great wins. But the day to day is, you know, just a lot of meetings, a lot of conversations that are often very frustrating. And so I'm curious, you know, what was your path into this work? So when you said you weren't excited about technology or privacy when you were young, you know, how did you get into this work? And how do you, you know, think about what makes this job exciting for you, you know, despite or because of all of these meetings that you have to do that sort of balance between the longer term things you're fighting for and the day to day challenges? Meetings can be fun. There are, they can be really difficult, but I actually do like talking to people. So, you know, if you don't like talking to people, don't get involved with politics because it's a lot of talking. It's mostly talking. But I came to this work, not, like you said, not through studying technology. I did do some STS work in college. You know, I was interested in the history of technology. But I studied history and was, and actually came to this work through thinking about power really and thinking about, you know, like I said, asymmetries and power. I've always been interested in social movements and in democracy generally and got a very part-time job working at the ACLU of Massachusetts in late 2009, analyzing thousands of pages of documents that the prior legal director had obtained by suing something called the Commonwealth Fusion Center, which was a spy center essentially established in the wake of 9-11 by the federal government at the Massachusetts State Police. And the purpose of this, there's one in Michigan, I'm sure you might have two, even they're all over the country run by state and major metropolitan police departments. And the purpose of these places is to facilitate the sharing of information and intelligence, they would call it, among state, local and federal law enforcement. And it was a response to one of the recommendations in the 9-11 commission report after the 9-11 attacks. Congress had this big long process. They gathered a lot of information. They wrote a big report. And one of the findings in the report was that there was a failure to connect the dots between state, local and federal law enforcement. And this was one of the things that led to 9-11. That's not true. It's really had nothing to do with local police at all. The failure to communicate with between the FBI and the CIA about the hijackers that were in Los Angeles, but whatever. It doesn't matter that it's not true. It developed a life of its own. It was part of the reason why the Department of Homeland Security was created. And then DHS spent billions of dollars funding the creation of these fusion centers all across the country. And also funding state and local police to acquire and use new technologies like license plate readers and drones and electronic fingerprint readers. That's basically what's paid for all of the surveillance camera networks in every metropolitan area in this country is Homeland Security money. So anyway, I started looking into this in a very part-time way. And I was fascinated because none of this was in the newspaper, none of it at all. I mean, there was no place you could find information about fusion centers in the press at all, even though they had existed at that point for like six or seven years in some places. And so I just got, yeah, I got really interested in how the police were using new technology, how they were accessing database systems created by corporations like LexisNexis. We don't often think about police when we think about it legal database like Lexis, but the police are using those like big data broker systems to access information about everyone, not just people who are suspected of crimes. And that really got me thinking about, like I said at the beginning, these like power asymmetries that, you know, I've now explored from the rest of my life. Yeah. So, you know, thinking about the audience here, both in terms of their relationship to technology and for the students at all levels, sort of their paths both within the University of Michigan and beyond, what are the key things that you recommend for individuals in terms of how they can protect their privacy or how they should think about what privacy means to them or in their communities? And for students who are interested in having some more knowledge or impact in these areas, you know, what do you recommend in terms of courses or majors or, you know, types of ways to get involved in these issues? Great questions. Well, what can people do individually? You know, there are privacy preserving technologies that everybody should be using. Probably the best one is signal. So, who in here has heard of signal? Anybody? Great. Self-selected group. But for those of you who don't use signal, you should absolutely download it and use it. It's an encrypted messaging and communications app that works on androids and iPhones. It's totally free. The only thing about signal is that it only works if the person you're communicating with has also downloaded the app. So, just get all your family that's on WhatsApp to switch to signal. No problem, right? I pretty much only communicate with people on signal. My friends and family and co-workers. And it's even better than iMessage, actually, because you can use way more emojis to react, just so you know. So, you should get with signal. It's really fun. And, you know, to use more secure, to protect your online communications and stuff, you know, you can use encrypted email. I would just recommend that you consider email to be public. That's, you know, I think it's just a better strategy that like, if you're going to use, if you really need something to be private, to use a communications platform like Signal, recognizing that the only way that anybody else could read those messages is if they had your physical phone or the physical device of the person you're communicating with. Also, turn on disappearing messages because that way probably won't be there anyway for anybody to find if they get your phone or the person you're communicating with, their phone. But, yeah. So, Signal, and what was the other thing I was just saying? Sorry, I got lost. Oh, yeah. Email, again, I would consider public. We have a rule in my office, which I think is really smart, which is like, don't write anything in an email unless you want to read it on the cover of the Boston Globe. So, we try to adhere to that. Some of you who work for this institution, your emails probably are public, actually, because they're subject to the public records law. Yeah. So, but there are, you know, encrypted email services like Proton Mail, if you really need something like that, if you're, you know, into technology, you could, you know, actually use your own encrypted mail. But, and then, sorry, repeat the second question again. The second question was about sort of career paths and recommendations for students who want to get more involved or knowledgeable about this space. Yeah. I mean, I'm not aware of all the classes that exist in this enormous institution, but I'm guessing that there are a lot of them. I mean, you know, I think that the purpose of undergraduate education is to teach you how to think, you know, and to teach you how to contextualize your own existence. And so, in order to do that, I think you need to learn some history. So, I would recommend that you take some history classes. You know, one of the benefits of learning history is that you'll realize that things have always been horrible for human beings. And it helps to put some perspective on the world that we live in today. You know, even just in this country, like 60 years ago, we lived in an apartheid society that was a formal apartheid society, right? So, actually, we had an ACLU dinner a couple weeks ago and Andrew Young, the former ambassador who is a very important civil rights figure in this country, spoke at our dinner and he was like, it was really amazing to hear from him because one of the things that he said was, you know, I know that you guys are really worried about what's going on in this country, but like, have you ever had the shit beaten out of you by the Ku Klux Klan, you know? Like, things have been bad in this country for a long time and like, you're going to be okay, you know, like, get up and fight. And so, I think learning about history is really important because it can help you understand why we're here, you know, how we got here, how the tech industry became what it is, right? And then, yeah, I guess that's all I really have to say about that. Yeah. I'm sorry, I don't have any better advice. No, I think that's really wonderful advice and a great note to end on. Unfortunately, we're out of time. The audience and I have many more questions we'd love to ask you, but that brings us to the hour. So, thank you so much for being here, Molly. Thank you for being in conversation and raising such fascinating questions and thank you to everyone here in person and online. Thank you so much. Thank you, Kade. What's that?