 Hello, everyone. My name is Dave Moss, and I am a senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And today I'm going to be talking to you about how to spot police surveillance technologies while attending protests. So we're going to split this talk into four different areas and based on where you might find that surveillance. So we're going to talk about the surveillance that might be on the police officer's person. We're going to talk about surveillance that might be on roadways. We're going to talk about the surveillance that's in the air. And then finally, the surveillance that might be permanently placed in the areas that protests are occurring. So let's start with on police officer's bodies. And we mean by that their uniforms and might be attached to their belts. You might see them carrying it in their hands. Now the most common one that you're going to encounter are body worn cameras. These are essentially just small video cameras usually box shaped that are attached to police officer's uniforms. These really became popular in during the Obama administration originally as a measure to counter police brutality. But they've actually become the means of surveilling protesters as well as surveilling other people who have encounters with police departments. So we do know that body camera footage is being used to prosecute activists. For example, here's a story from Flagstaff, Arizona in which protesters weren't arrested at the protest itself, but it based on body worn camera footage police then arrested about 1011 other people three weeks later. So when you're looking at a police officer, there's a few places you're going to want to look for body worn camera. There's going to be a lot of kind of confusing things going on. There's going to be walkie talkies, they're going to be a badge, there might be a name tag. But as far as the technology goes, you're going to really want to look on into the left or right side of the uniform, maybe even in the center or in the person's the police officer's pocket. But you also might look at the shoulder or around the head or helmet or hat that the police officer is using. So the most common type of body worn camera is going to be mounted on the chest. These are also called front facing cameras. But really, you're just going to look for the center of the chest on the left or right. The one that's displayed here on the bottom is the axon camera, and that's going to be the most common one out there. There are other cameras that might be mounted on a police officer's shoulder or on their shoulder epaulet. The axon model that I showed you a second ago actually has a secondary attachment that can go on the shoulder. And the one that's displayed here, the blue line innovations camera is actually a 360 degree camera that can see in all directions. Sometimes you might see something that looks like a cell phone in a police officer's pocket. That actually could be a body worn camera as well. There's a company called Visual Labs that does retrofit or augment mobile phones to work as body worn cameras. There might even be a clip holding that camera. And then finally, you're going to want to look around the police officer's face sometimes. There might be a camera attached to some specialized glasses. There might be something attached to a riot helmet. Or you might even have the lens as part of the eyewear itself, which is what you see in the bottom right. There's a lens right between the lenses of the eyewear. Moving on to the next technology. We want to talk about mobile biometric devices. And by biometric, we mean technologies that can identify you based on a physical characteristic or behavioral characteristic. So the most common one you might be familiar with are fingerprints. The technology maps out various parts of your fingertip and then will match your fingerprint to other versions of your fingerprint, perhaps if you've been arrested earlier or you've been applied for a job. Face recognition works very similarly in which it maybe measures the distance between your eyes and your eyes and the nose and then creates a print of that that can be matched against other images of your face. Now specifically here, we're looking for mobile devices that can do face recognition, fingerprint scanning or other types of biometric collection. And sometimes these devices are going to look just like a cell phone or other device and you're really going to want to look for how police are using them. So if they're holding them up at eye level or they're requiring detainees to put their finger on the device. You're also more likely to see these being used after people have been detained. So either they have been put in handcuffs that have arrested or they've been pulled aside. That's where you might see a law enforcement officer use this technology to show you what these look like. Here's some technology that was used in San Diego. These are just, you know, souped up Android phones, but you can really tell that a police officer is doing something special with these phones in order to do face recognition. Some of the devices can do not only face recognition, but fingerprinting. So this device here is a very common fingerprinting device. It is the DataWorks Plus Evolution. You can see that the little top square there is where a person is required to put their fingerprint to get a fingerprint scan. But on the back of the phone or the back of the device, there's a little lens that will do face recognition. So if you see a, you know, you might see a police officer using a device to collect a single device to collect multiple forms of biometrics. So let's move on to vehicles and roadways. When you think about a protest, you can't just limit your thought to where people are marching or where people are rallying. You have to think about the protest to include the parking lots and the streets around the protest where people are leaving their cars. Because certainly that's what police are viewing as the protest and they're putting surveillance on those entrance and exit points of the protest area. So let's start with the area adjacent to the protests. One of the technologies that we look for are things called license plate readers. Now these are specialized cameras that are designed to look for license plates. And when it sees a license plate, it will take a photograph. It will digitize the letters and numbers and upload that information to a database along with the timestamp and the GPS coordinates. In other words, it will grab the license plate and tell police where and when that license plate was seen somewhere. And that gets added to a database that police can search later on. And we do suspect that license plate readers are being used against protesters. Here's an article from Forward that found that in Long Beach police were confiscating the vehicles of people suspected of attending a protest. And knowing what we know about how the Long Beach Police Department uses license plate readers, we do believe they are being used. One of the ways that police officers will use license plate readers is by dragging specialized trailers to the entry and exit points of neighborhoods. These will look like speed trailers a lot of the time where it tells you how fast you're going. In some cases, these speed trailers use radar, but if they're using radar, they're not putting it near a protest. If they're putting it near a protest, it probably is a license plate reader based speed trailer. Police will also attach license plate readers to the tops of their vehicles, and then police will drive around collecting license plates of cars they pass. Now there's a technique called gridding where police officer will systematically go up and down a parking lot or block by block through a neighborhood collecting everybody's license plates. So if you do see a police vehicle with one of these cameras engaging in that kind of behavior, that could be gridding. So one other element is license plate readers that are attached to stationary locations. We call these fixed license plate readers. And generally they're attached to street lights or traffic lights, or they might even be attached to a standalone solar powered pole. You're going to want to look for these perhaps around intersections on the outskirts of protest zones. Now, there are also technologies that might be moved into protests. So police may want to enhance their surveillance capabilities by, you know, using a specialized surveillance unit that, you know, usually set on wheels. They are either a vehicle itself or is a trailer that can be towed into a protest zone. So what you see here on the right is a surveillance trailer that the Santa Fe Police Department in New Mexico towed into a protest or towed near a protest against a monument and then captured footage of people taking down that offensive monument. So two particular flavors of this I want to call out for you. On the left we might call a surveillance watch tower. These are either trailers or vehicles that have an actual compartment that a human being can sit in to surveil a protest or some other public gathering. These often have cameras and other kinds of technology attached to it. The important thing to note is that these function, regardless of whether somebody is in the watch tower or not, these can broadcast remotely. So even if they seem empty, they could be active. Now the one on the right looks like the one from the previous slide. It is a surveillance trailer or it might be called a surveillance unit. But these usually have a tower that extends up in the air with a few surveillance cameras and these broadcasts remotely as well. And we generally don't see a police officer lingering around these technologies because that's kind of not the point of them. The point is for them to broadcast remotely. So lately protesters have been contacting us saying they've seen trucks mounted with some very strange looking cameras like the ones pictured here. These are actually manufactured by a company called Fleur and Fleur stands for forward looking infrared. And that means they do thermal imaging. This is a technology that police might use at night to identify where protesters or protest groups are moving in a city scenario. One last piece of last vehicle I want to highlight for you are these command vehicles or sometimes called cyber response vehicles depending on their capabilities. These are going to be massive RV sized vehicles that you know you know several people can be inside at any given time. Now these are not going to be in the middle of the protest. They might be a block over a couple blocks over but they're not going to be far for the protest if they're being used inside. There might be the television screens and monitors that you'd use to watch remote video footage or it might be transmitting video footage on to another command center. Sometimes these vehicles have all the technology you need to do mobile phone forensics. If they confiscate people's phones or devices there could be the technology inside these mobile command centers to extract data from those phones and computers. I want to clear up a couple misconceptions just to make sure that you know what you're encountering. Due to assaults on members of the press as well as the fact of equipment, a lot of news organizations have started using unmarked vehicles. Now these are going to look like vans. They might have a satellite dish on top. They might have a giant antenna that extends into the air. Just because something's unmarked and has a satellite dish or antenna, you shouldn't assume that belongs to law enforcement. They could belong to a news organization. Now similarly, some people have come to the conclusion that whenever they see a vehicle that has an antenna or a satellite dish that it might be a technology called a stingray. I'm going to talk about stingrays for a moment. So stingrays are also called IMSI catchers or cell site simulators, but essentially these are technologies that police use to surveil people's phones. Stingrays pretend to be cell towers, people's phones connect to them, and that's how police get data from people's phones. Now, few things to know. First of all, these are generally not going to be visible to an observer, mostly because either they're kept inside of police vehicles or they might be in aircrafts. We've seen cell site simulators that are so small that they can fit in somebody's jacket pocket. Really, to detect the use of one of these technologies, while at a protest, you need some sort of specialized equipment. But to be honest, a lot of the use of cell site simulators tends to come out through litigation, through court filings, or through our Freedom of Information Act requests. So let's move to the air. And the types of technologies that police will put above us to surveil usually large scale protest or surveil protest from a bird's eye view. These come in a couple different categories. There might be planes or helicopters or drones. They often have high definition cameras attached to them. They might even be equipped with thermal imaging or other technologies like license plate readers or face recognition or cell site simulators. A lot of those technologies, though, aren't going to be visible to somebody on the ground, but some technologies would be. And we do know that law enforcement is using footage from aerial surveillance to investigate protesters. So here's a news article out of the Texas Tribune about how the Texas Department of Public Safety used a drone to capture footage of a teenager who had potentially thrown an item towards state police. The DPS then used screen grabs from that footage, posted it along with $1,000 cash reward, and then anonymous tipster identified a particular teenager as the suspect. So fixed wing aircraft. Now by fixed mean fixed wing, we mean the traditional kind of aircraft like traditional airplanes. So they have wings that don't move. There is one particular contractor known as persistent surveillance systems, which uses a small Cessna aircraft to gather images of cities. Now the image on the right here is a Cessna of the similar class that persistent surveillance systems uses, but it's not the exact one. But one of the things you're going to want to look out for are planes like this that are circling the protests. Helicopters. A lot of mid to large sized police departments have helicopters and they frequently use these at large scale public events. Some things to look out for. You know, if you're not sure who it belongs to, you can look for the tail number, but actually the tail number could be useful in a lot of research projects afterwards. You can even look for cameras. Maybe there's a police officer leaning out with a telephoto lens or there might be a camera attached to it like the one here, which is a floor thermal imaging camera. It's kind of an orb shaped thing, but you know, you saw the thermal imaging truck earlier and you noticed how it had some strange lenses. Similar lenses are going to be here. These helicopters will often have spotlights as well as as well as loud speakers for communicating with crowds. Drones. Okay, so it's become very, very common for police departments to have drones, which are also known as unmanned aerial vehicles or unmanned aerial systems. But essentially, these are remote controlled aircraft equipped with cameras that are used to surveil gatherings or protests. Quad rotors are the most common type of drone right now, and you know that you can recognize them by having the four propellers on top. Now, usually they are controlled by remote operator, which you can see in the right hand image, but I do want to call your attention to the image on the left, which is what we would call a tethered drone. This means that the drone has a cord attached to it that allows police to continually charge it. It's usually attached to a battery so it can stay in the air longer. The one on the right that doesn't have that function does have to return to the pilot repeatedly to have batteries swapped in and out. Sometimes you might not see the drone. You know, you might hear the drone in the air or maybe you don't hear or see it. But you might be able to identify the people controlling the drone, the drone pilots. Oftentimes there need to be two pilots at any given time. And so you would look for police standing on the periphery because they do usually have to be within the line of sight of the drone. They'd be on the periphery holding some sort of remote control device with a screen. And maybe you don't even see those. Maybe you see their vehicle they came in. So we've given you two examples here, the two lower images showing that you can identify whether the drone is there based on a vehicle marked with the terms UAV or UAS or aviation or even just the logo of the drone. Now there are going to potentially be other types of aerial surveillance that are watching protests that you are just not going to be able to see because they are high altitude aircraft. So an example of that is the Texas Department of Public Safety has a few spy planes and Customs and Border Protection as well as some other agencies have these very large predator drones, which also are very difficult to see sometimes. Also would like to clear up some misconceptions here about drones and aircraft. Just because you see a helicopter or a drone in the air does not mean it belongs to the police. Journalists and activists are often flying drones and news helicopters are going to be far more common than police helicopters. You know, protests here in San Francisco you might see three or four helicopters and only one police, three or four news helicopters and only one police helicopter. So if you're trying to take notes on what you see at a protest, you really shouldn't classify an aircraft as law enforcement until you visually confirmed it either by noting the pilots on the ground or the markings on the aircraft itself. One other technology you should keep an eye out for is the drone killer, a technology made by a company called IXI. Now there are a few police departments who have this technology which is used to identify, control and take down other people's drones. So drones run by activists, drones run by the press. Basically it's what cops use to kill drones, hence the name drone killer, and it uses radio signals in order to accomplish that task. Let's move on to the final section, where to look for permanent surveillance in the protest environment. And with this, we're mostly talking about camera networks. A lot of neighborhoods, a lot of businesses, a lot of metropolitan areas have started installing not only CCTV cameras all over the place, but CCTV cameras that involve high definition video that are networked together that can have thermal imaging. Maybe they've got AI technology that can identify and track objects or now analyze patterns. Sometimes these technologies might belong to law enforcement, sometimes they might belong to citizens who are sharing that data with the police. So I want to give you some terms to help you identify some of the different cameras out there. So the term bullet camera is going to refer to cameras that are capturing footage directionally. They're called bullet cameras because they're usually in that tubular shape. Dome camera is what it looks like a dome shaped camera and that dome is going to obscure the direction the camera is facing as well as the number of lenses. Now there's one particular brand of camera that we keep an eye out for. It's called a vigil on and you're never going to see just one vigil on camera and you can see it's kind of a dome camera. Other configurations might be more bullet camera based or maybe even more domey for lack of a better adjective, but you're never just going to see one. There's going to be a whole range of them and they're going to be connected to some sort of video analytical software that can be used to track a protest individual protesters or to track the movements of the protest as a whole. Just a call back here quickly to ALPR cameras. Those are those license plate cameras. Those are also going to be somewhat permanently, you know, affixed. And then probably one that you may have noticed but you didn't have the words to describe is a pan tilt zoom camera or PTZ camera. These can be remotely controlled. The operator can pan, you know, all the way around they can tilt up and down and they can also zoom in on particular things they're interested in. Some cities have what are called police observation devices or pods. These are usually clearly marked as belonging to the police department. They may have multiple cameras attached, but as well as other sensors such as gunshot detection or, you know, thermal imaging, you know, it's going to depend city to city. But this example here is from the city of Sacramento. And then some cities have started what are called smart city initiatives where they are installing sensors on street lights. And, you know, sometimes these sensors are designed to, you know, dim the street light when there's no one around or it's dark out, or they might look for seismic activity or, you know, air quality. But more and more we're seeing these these smart street lights including video cameras and microphones and gunshot detection. So for example, here is one from the San Diego police department, and they certainly have used these to investigate protesters. So here's an article from this summer from the voice of San Diego, and that found that in May and early June. There was a lot of investigation going on with these cameras and the Black Lives Matter protests that were happening. So that is, you know, most of the technology that we'd we expect you to see at a protest, but I do want to give you some resources so you can further your your learning on this issue. So the Atlas of Surveillance is a project of EFF that is a database of more than 6000 individual surveillance purchases made by police and sheriff and other law enforcement agencies around the United States. You can go in and you can search by your city, your county, your state, or particular law enforcement agency to see all the technologies they might be using. Spot the Surveillance is a game or an experience that you can use to train yourself to look for surveillance technology. If you have a VR headset, say like an Oculus Go or an HTC Vive, you can actually go into a street scene and look around for pieces of surveillance technology. If you don't have a virtual reality headset, no problem. We've actually got a version that works in your desktop browser. If you wanted to read some more in-depth reports or blogs posts on the surveillance technology, EFF Street Level Surveillance Hub has everything you need. And then if you're wondering how to defend yourself from surveillance at a protest, we've got the EFF Surveillance Self-Defense Guide, and there's an entire section about how to attend a protest, and the things that you can do in advance to protect yourself as well as the things you can do to protect yourself while you're at the protest. And with that, I would just like to thank you for taking the time to learn about surveillance at protests. And if you have any other questions, just reach out. You can find contact information as well as other resources at eff.org.