 Because now we have reclaimed your face, biometric mass surveillance and how we can act against it. This will be presented by two interesting colleagues. On the one hand, we have Kantorkel, certified tele-shopping alcher, as I've heard from Hamburg, who is involved with Freifunk as well. And he is involved in the Reclaim Your Face initiative and is a kind of a driving force behind it, too, and it's always good to have those. And number two of that duo in finale that we have is Vick. One or other of you, as soon as they see the big image, will think, well, I've seen him on TV, haven't I, on this electro punk band that always connects privacy awareness with punk. Kind of the best combination you can imagine, System Abstools or System Crash in English. That's the setup. And he will be giving part of this talk. So at this point, before I spoil it all, let's get you involved and give you a pause and the stage is yours. Thank you for that nice introduction. I am Kantorkel. I am Vick. Hi. And we are going to tell you about biometric mass surveillance in Germany and a little in Europe as well. And then we will talk about the initiative Reclaim Your Face. As a short reminder, this is about biometric data. These are data that relate to our body or our behavior and describe it. That could be our fingerprint, our face. But these data can also be about the way we walk. For example, all the way, we type on a keyboard. And these data, in principle, are unique. So we could be identified using these data. And they are normally not changeable, constant across time, and they are measurable and universal. And the problem is that the technologies used for biometric surveillance are often discriminating, discriminatory and error-prone. And we have a certain belief in technology, of course, always. And that makes it dangerous if you have a surveillance camera that claims to be intelligent. And if that device tells us, oh, we have a criminal walking around here and I then imprison that person and later realize that person wasn't a criminal at all, then that is not good. And the whole thing is also dangerous because it's hard for me to protect myself or hide from biometric surveillance. I can't really change my face in a significant way. And if I change it somewhat a little, then it won't help. I've brought a few pictures along. That's one person, sometimes with longer hair, sometimes shorter, sometimes older, sometimes with makeup or with a beard. But all does not help to protect that person against biometric recognition. And just as much face mask that we now use due to the pandemic at large, that doesn't help you much either. So this is about biometric data. And in Germany, biometric data is experimented with in the public arena. So all of us are turned into guinea pigs without us being asked. Many people know the example from the Berlin-Südkreuz Station, a regional station, where the police wanted to play around with recent technology. This experiment started in 2017 and the police were fairly happy with the result. But the results were doctored quite a lot. And they were only really usable under ideal conditions for the imaging. And if several systems would take the images and would be combined, which normally in practice you would not do. So actually in reality, this experiment was a failure. But still in 2020, there was an exchange between Federal Police in Berlin and a similar experiment at the airport of Prague in the Czech Republic, where similar technologies were tried. We tried to obtain information about this exchange using freedom of information requests. And we had members of parliament that were kind enough to ask the questions for us as well. But we did not get any information. So all we know is that in 2020, there was an exchange between the airport of Prague and the police in Berlin, the transport police or federal police. But we don't really know what was being talked about. But we still do know that the police said in 2020 that face recognition can be used in regular practice. And they said that this was shown through the results in the 2017 experiment. But with the current legal situation, no further exchange of information with Czech police is being planned. The experiment has finished. But in the background, apparently things are still happening. But it's very difficult to obtain transparency and information. Another not so nice topic is the G20 summit that took place in Hamburg in 2017. During the summit and after it, police had more than 100 terabytes of image and video material and a large part of that was biometrically processed as well. And that, again, was without asking the people concerned. So police simply went ahead and processed very sensitive data and probably without a legal foundation either. There's a legal dispute about that still going on. The video material was from various sources. Cameras from underground stations were tapped into public transport cameras in buses as well. But there was also a portal where people could upload their private videos. So all kinds of data were processed with a certain software in retrospect and analyzed biometrically. So normal imaging material was used where no biometrics was actually involved in the recording. But then afterwards it was processed and analyzed biometrically. And the data protection commissioner didn't find that so funny and ordered police in Hamburg to delete these data. But the police ignored that. They thought they were in the clear legally. And the data protection commissioner was not able to enforce anymore, which is why there is still a legal dispute I think at the higher administrative court in Hamburg still pending. And I hope that soon we will see that what police did back then was not legal. Another nice topic also from 2017 that's at least when it started was the face search engine clear view AI. This search engine was got known in 2020 because there was a report the New York Times that was the first one to report about this at large scale. So three million pictures on the internet were searched biometrically and analyzed and as a service. This search engine was not only made available for law enforcement but also to rich people as a toy who would perhaps upload people from passers-by. And this search engine would then point out all various places where this that same face could be found on the internet and that is exactly the problem. The engine doesn't look for similar pictures but similar faces. So if I using a standard search engine would upload a current picture to have it searched for I would probably not find a similar face but using clear view AI I can upload a current picture and the face would then be noticed and analyzed and then search engine would show me all kinds of findings on the internet where that same face had appeared earlier. So this search engine provides a technology where it could happen to me that I am standing around at some rally and I could just go ahead and identify everyone present at the same rally as long as these people would have appeared somewhere on the internet in the last few years. I actually wrote to that search engine actually sent them a photo of mine and asked them for a copy of my data and I called on them to delete my data because according to the GDPR face data are sensitive data and under particular protection and I was kind of surprised when the search engine actually responded and you see the response here the first image is the one I sent to be searched for and the images one and two actually were photos of mine that were somewhere on the internet and then seven others were shown that did not show my face. So you can see here again even clear view AI is not delivering perfect search results even there you can have false hits. Yeah. Once I had received this answer from Pliwio I complained to the Hamburg data protection authority and there was a bit of a back and forth because I thought that they would be responsible due to the GDPR and the protection authority thought that the GDPR would not be applicable. We did agree on a position in the end and a procedure was opened and supported through the NGO none of your business. We managed to get clear view AI in February 2021. So after about one year that they would delete that would have that had to delete my personal data and it was also found that the processing of the data had been illegal at least in the European Union. The problem was though that I had to complain and only my biometric data was subsequently deleted and even though we know that many other Europeans are in this database and therefore affected the order by the Hamburg data protection authority only affected my person. So again we are still looking how and what can be done. Clear view AI sadly is not the only faith search engine by far these days. PIMEI is another one originally from Poland. This has existed since 2019. You see the two founders. These two don't want to be shown on the Internet so much. The two faces seem to be on a blacklist if you use these in that same search engine. You used to get results and you no longer do. And when first protests occurred the company relocated very quickly from Wroclaw to the Seychelles Islands but still there is a company that is somehow connected to these two people. You see the address on the slide so if you have connections to that area we will be very interested about information of what is happening in these offices right now because it could be very interesting if PIMEI's de facto still has a subsidiary in the European Union or a branch. And what was also interesting is that if that we could get new allies because police trade unions don't like face recognition that much either at least not if everyone can use these services because and that's why the police trade unions want PIMEI's to be outlawed. And with that I'll hand over to Victor right. We are going to continue with our overview of what is going on in Germany. We prepared a best of biometric surveillance projects just to give you a picture of what's happening starting with Mannheim. In Mannheim since 2018 there is behavior recognition in the pedestrian area in the center and we've kind of tied it up according to where does it happen what is happening. So the people that operate this is the Mannheim local police and they say no there's no problem no privacy problem because there's no identification just a recording of conspicuous behavior. So the police can be sent out quickly. And this is solved by allegedly having a very minimal procedure where all the faces are pixelated immediately so people don't see who is actually behaving conspicuously but only that a behavior is occurring and a police patrol can then go there but of course to pixelate images I first have to recognize images so to some sense I have to have processed biometric data. They do say they do need a legal foundation and probably there is no legal foundation I think there is no agreement there yet and it should be possible to clarify this in the future but you are allowed to remain skeptical. And similarly in Karlsruhe that is still planned the cameras haven't been installed yet but there are some interesting things here because a behavior analysis project is to take place in the public arena not run by police though but by a company the electricity provider in the federal state of Barton-Württemberg and they again say this is all okay it's all anonymized not about people and all the laws that regulate personal data do not apply here we tried to get more information through the freedom of information laws the city says we can't say anything there are no contracts yet so this is continuing to be interesting but something seems to be happening. Let's move on to the state of Saxonia and you have a whole zone here not just a dot and that is because the police law in the federal state of Saxonia there is an authorization to survey the whole border zone to the Czech Republic and use faith to recognition there to the Czech Republic and Poland I should say and this is to find and punish misbehavior and I don't know about a single camera having been installed but the legal foundation has been installed and the Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte engages in strategic litigation has said they would pursue this and on to Cologne in our round trip there are no cameras in Cologne yet but there are many cameras in Cologne which are quite high quality so they often are biometric ready as they say so through their specifications they are so good that they without any further ado could be re purposed to a system that does face recognition not to the police control room and that could get face recognition going immediately and against these very high quality cameras in Cologne there is an organization cameras stop them dot orgs stop cameras dot org they've had some successes as well they are trying to get these cameras banned through legal procedures and we so bottom line more and more dots and and points objects are turning up on this map and all in all you can say there are cameras here that may not be able to recognize faces yet but in principle the first steps have been made for towards biometric face recognition because as cameras they would be able to be that link in the chain and many people are really keen many people are really have really have itching fingers to start on this police's ministries really want to try these technologies so it's high time to get active because in principle you can say hey let's look at this map there's more and more if we keep still for 10 years we'll have we'll have it everywhere so this is just an extrapolation into the future now from these cameras you could draw further dots it becomes much more scary if you look at Europe because there are so many projects there that within the space of this talk I would not be able to introduce all of them all of them you can just scan through them and the best of normally if it's about face recognition these has been used to recognize people at public demonstrations or rallies the one that the one thing that we are most afraid of because that is the highest damage to democracy if people cannot be go to rallies demonstrations without being identified so that has happened in Austria and many other countries have entered into contracts Greece for example both face recognition systems for four million Netherlands paid 1.3 million they have 1.3 million in a database people that is we have schools in some countries Belgium has tracked airports Slovenia has identified demonstrators Sweden could not resist to use clear view AI although that probably was illegal in bergrade and Serbia systems were put in place it's a long list and you can see the map is turning more and more blue this is turning up everywhere and it's spreading fast and those that follow this follow European politics closely and security laws can just consider who is missing people that like to get creative of course Frontex Frontex is very keen to the European border and Coast Guard agency so I think they don't really have the technology yet but it's documented that they're really keen to enter that kind of arms race and invest money and well they are buying weaponry but also digital surveillance technology which often is dual use for the military at least produced for dual use as well it's about face recognition pattern recognition behavior recognition lie detectors fingerprinting that is supposed to be taken from all non EU citizens that are going in or coming out so they would like to get involved heavily and what else do we have well let's just get into a small overview summary of the whole situation face recognition as such is kind of the escalation of video surveillance video surveillance is an intrusion into people's rights already and video surveillance can produce chilling effects that is what you call the negative effects of surveillance mechanisms and it means that people then restrict themselves so if you have a feeling that if I do this then the information could be detrimental to me in the future then maybe I won't go to this demonstration that happens with video surveillance so it's not that great already but it's getting much worse with face recognition just through scaling effects because face recognition of so video surveillance at a underground station for example very you have a conventional camera you may feel watched but you still have a person watching you on the other at the other end now that changes with face recognition algorithms because with a normal camera it's simply not practical to watch the whole city across the area because you don't have enough people so there is an upper limit about how many places and squares and then you can surveil but if you digitize all this and have an algorithm run across it then that no longer applies and the data format is much more precise and handy because with video surveillance all you have is that stream and if you consider all these cameras and store all that from all the various locations that's a huge amount of data but with a face recognition algorithm and good timestamps and GPS data and if you store all that about who you've seen when that is not that much it's quite plausible to um store this across the whole city and remember it or because you never know it could be useful in the future so beyond those scaling effects it's much more dramatic and much more dangerous you have real mass scale use of this technology potentially because there are no human factors limiting limiting it anymore and it's also important to say that in Germany since the last ID card law there is an automatic access of more or less all police authorities and secret services to the data that's already been digitized of all the passport photos or ID card photos so the collection exists of all people in Germany with which they could be identified so if you consider what is necessary for an for a functioning face recognition system it would be the good camera they are in place it would be a photo of the person you want to identify that does exist and the last thing that's missing are the computers that the analysis systems they don't they're not there yet but we have to make sure that they don't come into existence and with that i'll hand over to kanto because of course we don't want these this to happen and this is about the campaign so this is the initiative reclaim your face that was started in november last year and since february 2021 it's a real official citizens initiative in the he he the aim is to prohibit mass video face recognition first of all the situation is good there was a leaked white paper of the eu where the regulation of mass surveillance face recognition was talked about in the final version this wasn't the case anymore but even in the eu level people are thinking about this subject also the large number of examples we have discussed is that we need to act the technologies extend further and further just yesterday i read in the newspaper that robot dog walked through hamburg with an advanced uh camera from boston dynamics and if we do not want that soon we can if we want to ensure that we are not biometrically recognized everywhere we have to act now because it might be much late later on this initiative requires one million signatures and from at least seven countries there are limits by for each country because that needs to be in european subject but we know that it's a european subject because it was accepted this initiative was verified by the european union and they are only accepted if the european union can change something there this initiative was accepted um you can find it under your face dot eu and sign it there and that is a first success but the large amount of work to collect the one million signatures is still ahead of us that's not something we on our own but there is a large number of different organizations that all are part of the idri network um for example uh yeah some different organizations and more than 45 organizations try to help us and we have left the data protection bubble behind ourselves amnesty international is part of it um but german watch tv for example and in european level the a different organization um with more than seven million members that's a large wide network that is still in growing we have 46 000 signatures more than half of which are from germany that's like a lot but we are quite far away from the one million but we are quite sure that we can reach that aim because the we are still growing the initiative is still growing in recent weeks we were looking at finding new partners mostly political organizations uh some of which want to support us and we wrote a lot of us the government questions to get more information about surveying the government but more and more the organizations that would are required to publish the data but are not willing to give us the data because they claim they do not have the documents uh we just started so um the large challenge how can we work for a complete year we will have subject weeks have different specific subjects we are going to talk about with who work in that area for example uh soccer stadiums because and something is uh that's a group that is hard hit by it if it ever created people who flee the front takes wants to use that but we also know that front takes wants to use technology that's not that good for those people who are are most hardly hit another group is the surveillance in the workplace for example the but there are a lot of subject areas we need to look at and we need to build a colorful and large organization uh our initiative where as many people as possible outside of the data protection area uh our participants so if you ask if you want to participate um first of all it's it's great to create transparency we there are many areas we do not know about if organizations about your data ask organizations that might have used face recognition ask them hey what did you do why how do you take care of that is that biometric data for you because biometric data are need to be protected and also ask public organizations ask creative questions we are always looking for documents you find because we know there are many more interesting things to do you need to read news and ask information freedom requests nothing um create publicity many people in different organizations may not think about face recognition if you are able to talk with your local representatives because that way you tell show them that you are looking at it and that you think it's not working that well and last point perhaps join our self organized session to help people who listen to this and want to participate we have a self organized session we've entered a self organized session here on the art war monday 15 30 and you're all welcome to join us there if you want to participate in the campaign if you know an organization that really really should be part of it we can talk about it there and with that we are at the end of the talk here this is how you can contact us and yes thank you for your thank you for listening so great applause for our pre-interest uh i can see that there are many questions pouring into the pad so i think you've hit a nerve there so i'm just going to scroll into the pad and ask the first question uh from my point of view all steps and actions taken so far against this madness are too soft what can be done in a sustainable way can you break this somehow well yeah maybe maybe it would help to make this surveillance more visible and get this onto the streets that would be good but of course there are reasons for that to be kind of difficult and what is also i think the tool of the european citizens initiative isn't that bad either if we reach the limits then there has to be a public hearing and the commission has to provide a written statement about whether they are going to implement our aims or why not if not so we have pressure to create that way are there actions against clear view ai already is it worth to ask to hand in more of these deletion requests yes without a doubt i did this once it took me over a year but now it's very clear how this should be done so if you want if you get responses i would love to hear them and we'll see what we can do with them can i have clear view i delete my photos are there templates for that for for that kind of request ah the company isn't in the EU so probably there is no uh believer that we can pull yes true that is difficult in my case all that we reached was that the biometric data concerning my face was deleted but not the copies of pictures we didn't hear about this but we're not finished with this yet just for understanding isn't it the case with gdpr that as long as the service is offered in the EU you are you are affected by the law yes that is true but officially there are no european customers swedish police had to pay 250 000 as a fine i think manheim what is classified as conspicuous behavior to make the police show up and take a look yeah that is an interesting question because that is not so well documented and that is another threat of these automatic procedures because either there is no transparency when they're distracted all the people don't actually know themselves there is a kind of magic foo ai there and i think the talk was about public scuffles someone runs away after a theft or hits someone punches someone so um but that could be misconstrued if it's a if it's a hug it might be construed as a scuffle so if it would be open source it would be nice perhaps but it would be even better if these systems didn't exist at all yeah then video surveillance in the border zone is it use is it a normal thing that basic rights are softened 30 kilometers away from the border how do they reach this 30 kilometer figure how they reach this 30 kilometer figure i don't really know and in the european area it would was not normal to kind of dilute your basic laws and this is Saxony right and someone actually linked to an article on the german Wikipedia about the custom border areas and i think in these areas i live near i come from a place near the dutch border and i think there are ways there to have the police get more involved i think i don't know if that is connected with the 30 kilometers now how do you see the topic or the issue of passengers in an autonomous car sharing vehicle would it be wrong to perhaps recognize sexual assaults automatically in a place like that well i didn't get the answer um yes but it's also suggesting that you have so many cameras in cars looking out these days and uh to european countries exchange these data already share them is there any concrete knowledge about this for example for following people i'm sure that's for police searches images are exchanged whether that is connected to biometric processing i don't know how what is the best way to convince your friends to sign this petition well maybe just point to how urgent the issue is and many people don't actually know that is something that something is happening and many people don't know that there's a problem there and my in my experience the most important thing is to talk about the urgency why does it have to happen right now because there are always 20 other things that are going on so it's important to tell it to talk to them about the fact there was two things um the all of europe is simply itching to get involved in in this technology and if we don't act now then for at least 10 years the system will be in place if you look at the history of intrusions into basic laws in germany even if it was not legal under the constitution it takes about 10 years until a procedure complained at the constitutional court as processed and that is the amount of time that the technology will be there to prevent this from happening for at least 10 years if not all the time and for us to get to feel monitored all the time the logical and best consequence is to take action now and that's what you should say and maybe just share the link from media.ccc.de with this very talk because that would be a very good way to get involved next is there a list of companies that you could ask uh do you prepare a how-to in the self-organization and is there a documentation about this are you going to do a how-to a list of companies we don't have yet we have started to collect names but i think we are a long way from a complete list and the self-organization will be about how to concretely approach such a company find one of them and then approach them the next question i think is an impulse that i find interesting what does zoom do is that a biometric mass experiment with all the data that is handed to them zoom is the ideal goldmine for faces voices eye colors skin colors next to behavior connected to an immense content fund what the people talk about so the zoom terms actually provide for the data to be further protest well i don't want to speculate about zoom's intentions but for reasons they are very coy about they them being present in the EU so the EU protection authorities are still not in agreement about who is actually responsible to deal with zoom because zoom simply doesn't tell them what the situation is and i think you can imagine the rest yeah parts of the answer would be disconcerting to quote or misquote a a german interior minister who used that phrase to not respond at some point about something else i what about humorous actions about cameras well there is this endemic but we still plan to do things on the streets in various cities so everyone not in berlin not in a large city you may think well it would be cool to have something happening in our city talk to us because we have plans about the centralized photo actions and get things onto the streets so please join us for that and a concrete case in the center of chemnitz in saxony there are too many high resolution cameras those with the eight objectives and they were installed against the resistance of the town council how can i enter into legal proceedings to to get them removed we would love to get in touch with camera stoppen.org stopcameras.org okay i think we've just hit the time mark exactly they have a few notes so the link to reclaim your face and other links and we had feedback saying that this was a very nice talk very well done so i think i'm just going to repeat this thank you very much and vik and kantorke and not just for the talk but also for the work you do on this because you as you said we have to get other people infected to sign this petition and we need a mutation we need a devog to our mutation virus that gets you to talk with people and and gets you to say to people that they should sign and and spread that around the world viral you should go viral exactly so thank you very much for your talk reclaim your face biometric mass surveillance and how we can defend against it so i'm going to wave into the cameras and i'll have a few