 The County Sheriff's Department Deputy here in East Bay, and we have Hassan and Lahai, an artist and professor at the University of Maryland, and we have Shiniri Tatashunde, who works at the Center for Media Justice. We'll be talking about these issues. They're going to each come out and do their moment of about five to seven minutes. And then I'll bring them all back out together where we'll have a moderated discussion on some of these issues and how they're impacting our lives. So without any further ado, please put your hands together for Piper. We're standing here in front of the old Oakland auto plant. What was once a source of employment for many Oakland residents is now a crime scene. Witnesses say that an Oakland police officer shot a man across the street from this plant. The man then returned fire, wounding the officer, and managed to escape into the plant. Witnesses then say that the officer gave chase and neither the man nor the officer have emerged from the plant since. What we have here is a blatant example of police terrorism at its worst. You see, instead of serving and protecting, they are murdering and neglecting those that they should be most obligated to serve and protect. OK. You know, I mean, you're talking about a people that spend more time and energy trying to take down a flag, a flag of heritage in American history, has nothing to do with race, heritage in history. Read a book. They spend more time and energy trying to take down that flag than they do raising their own children. God damn it! Johnson, Taylor, you get your asses in here. I want everything on that goddamn suspect. He's got to be on parole, probation, all his priors. He shot a fucking cop. He didn't just start his career today. You know, I wouldn't give a damn if all he did was steal a bag of chips. I want it. I want to spin it. And I want to get it to that bitch journalist immediately. She's telling us out there. And Taylor, make sure she knows about all the community police we're doing around here, the fucking programs for kids and soccer and shit. Going back to jail, I grew up in jail. I was born with an umbilical cord wrapped around my wrist. Put it in my lungs so I couldn't say shit. She should have just let me die. What kind of sick motherfucker saves the life just to kill it a thousand times? Shit, my mama's mama was my mama. She and her daughter, she was just Tamika. And my father was everybody and nobody. She shot ramen and motto meal. Shit, now or later. Can't sit still. My mama said I'm special. And that's why I was in special education. Teacher taught me how to get in line and shut up. She says that's how I knew I didn't need school because she already knew how to get in the welfare line and shut up when the police talking to me. Now, fuck that. I got hatred walking through me, bubbling to the surface dripping from my lips like vomiting venom. This is the vernacular of a virgin who has never known love but fucks the world every day in every way. Maria, you stupid to pull a gun on me. You got two rounds in you. Point blank range. You'll come out soon. You're going to bleed to death. And with Maria, you'd rather die than go back to the pen. At least to the pen, you got options, right? Thank you. So give it up again for Piper. Giving us an excerpt of this piece called Cops and Robbers. Next, we will have Hassan, who's an interdisciplinary artist working with issues in surveillance, privacy, migration, citizenship, technology, and the challenges of borders. His work is frequently in the media and has appeared on Al Jazeera, Fox News, and on the Colbert Report. He is currently Associate Professor of Art at the University of Maryland, ranked the number one most in militarized university in the US by vise.com, and equidistant from the CIA, FBI, and NSA headquarters. Please put your hands together for Hassan. Thank you, Carlton. Thanks for having me here. Man, that's hyper. That's going to be a tough one to follow after you. But thank you all so much for coming out. So I'm Hassan, I'm an artist. And often when I tell people I'm an artist, often the first question I get is, well, what kind of art do you make? And I get called to all sorts of things. I call like a photographer, sculptor, a media artist, con artist, I mean, you name it. It kind of goes through all of them. But you know what? I'm perfectly okay not having to qualify that term. I'm perfectly okay with just using the term artist. And I really like to think about, like I think the business that we're in is kind of a creative problem solving and come up with different ways of solving problems and come up with hopefully the most creative way about it. So I had a little bit of a problem a few years ago. So Hassan, Muslim, the brown guy, shortly after 9-11, I got reported as a terrorist. And basically, I was coming back from overseas and got taken into the airport and then all sorts of lovely things. I spent six months of my life justifying every moment of my existence at the FBI, trying to tell them, look guys, I'm not a terrorist. And so basically, it's just went on and on and on. It's one of those things that's like, so there was a report that there was an Arab man who fled who was hoarding explosives on September 12th. And never mind, it wasn't the 12th, never mind, I'm not Arab, but you know, all those brown guys, they're kind of all the same kind of thing. If you see something, say something, even if you only see it in your head, you're just kind of like making it up. So yeah, so I had a little bit of an issue. So basically after six months, it all ended with nine consecutive polygraphs in one setting, which is kind of interesting that you can't use polygraphs in court, but the FBI uses it for terrorism related things. And I think anyone that talks to me for more than a couple of minutes realizes I'm not exactly a terrorist threat, but once you're looped into this mess, you're never actually getting out of it. It always kind of hounds you forever. So at the end of this whole thing, the FBI agent that was dealing with me, my FBI agent, he walks in and he's like, hey, everything's okay, everything's great. I was like, yeah, I know, that's what I've been trying to tell you guys all along. Can you guys give me a letter saying everything's okay? And there's a little problem here because the way our judicial system works, it's really hard to be not guilty of something you never did because it was never within the law, it was all extra judicial. So I said, guys, I travel a lot. All we need is the next guy at the next airport not to get this memo and here we go all over again. How do I avoid this? How do I avoid further altercations? And at that moment, my FBI agent said, here's some phone numbers, give us a call, we'll take care of it. So ever since then, I'd always call him and say, hey, I gotta go, okay, where are you going? Oh, I'm going to Tokyo, okay, what's your flight numbers? Continental eight coming into Houston on this day. Okay, no problem, I got it. And then a few weeks later I'd call him up again and then I'd be like, where are you going this time? Okay, I gotta go to this thing in Frankfurt. Okay, what's your flight numbers? It's not because I had to but I chose to. I voluntarily decided to preempt the whole action and say, you know what guys, here's where I'm going, I don't want you to make it look like I'm running off or raising the red flags, just letting you know this is what I'm doing. So basically this went on and on and the phone calls turned to emails and the emails got longer and longer and longer to like really long with lots of pictures and I was telling them where I was hanging out, giving them travel tips and it's like, hey, I'm in Cambodia this week, the beaches are really nice, the food is great. You should consider vacation here. You like Americans now? You know all these little things and you'd always write back, thank you, be safe. So it's a really, really, really unbalanced relationship. You know, here you think you're like telling somebody your whole life story and every little detail and you think they're actually listening to you and it's like, thank you, be safe. So it's like this, and I was like, wait a minute, what? I'm gonna tell you like everything and that's all you're only gonna give me four words? So then I felt a little hurt and then I started thinking to myself, wait a minute, why isn't this FBI agent is so special? And why is it only that he gets to know everything about me? So you've been looking at these pictures. So what I basically did, this is way before the, I guess these days would be called an app but back then, this was 14 years ago that I started this. The word app didn't even exist in the way that we use in the common language today. And what I basically decided, I took my old school Nokia 6600, not so smart smartphone for back then and I basically turned it into a tracking device and basically I started like reporting in where I was at what point. So you can see these are all the grocery stores I've visited around. You can see the food that I eat. This I got on this, there was this train over here. You could get, actually that was a boat. Or on May 1st I was at this airport getting on this plane. So I was like, tell them my FBI agent, look I could have been involved in that attack because I was at this place at this point at this time. And people thought I was crazy. 14 years ago people were like, why do you wanna tell everybody what you're doing? Why do you wanna give them a map to where you are? And then interestingly enough, not even just a few years later it's become so commonplace that we're all kind of doing this. It's kind of interesting, I'll talk to some of my students, they're like, well I don't get it, this looks like an Instagram feed. So if you think about it, here's the interesting thing. So right now there are roughly one and a half billion users on Facebook alone. And so at 1.5 billion, I mean that's the world's largest country. There are more people on Facebook than the population of China. And once you factor that in, that's roughly one in six, one in seven of the world's population. Once you start factoring that in, how many of those people have access to clean water or access to education or even access to reliable electricity? The fact that there's more people that are on Facebook globally sharing their information than basically access to education. I mean that's kind of frightening. So the reality is basically I've come to this realization it's like guys, you guys wanna watch me? I'm perfectly okay with that. But I can watch myself so much better than you guys ever could and I could get such a level of detail that you'll never have access to. So basically this is where this project starts. So I've shared 80,000 images with the FBI and you. And you can go online and see the exact same thing that the FBI sees. But here's an interesting thing. So intelligence agencies, it doesn't matter who they are but they all operate in an industry where their currency is information. And the restricted access to the information is what makes it valuable. So basically because no one else can access my FBI file, the FBI files, well it has value. But if I borrow the simplest principles of economics and flood the market to the point where I just basically bypass the middleman and just give you all my information, then the information that the FBI has has zero value and thus it devalues their currency. Now I realize on an individual basis this is purely symbolic. But if 300 million people were to start doing this, you would force an entire restructuring of the way we categorize and we collect information. And I think this is a huge shift that we need to do. So I'd like to wrap it up with the thing is we need to rethink what the idea of privacy means and what privacy meant at an era in the past. It is no longer about that. It's no longer about having access, it's no longer about having the information but it's actually about the analysis of the information and what that means. So with that, thank you very much and thank you. Thank you, Hassan. Next we will have Shinieri Tatashuna who works for the Center for Media Justice, who's a policy advocate on issues of media and she's gonna talk to us about some of the work that she's been doing around predictive policing. Hello everyone, how y'all doing today? I'm responsive, okay, thank you. So I'm gonna kind of go back and forth to just wanna be transparent. So my name is Shinieri Tatashuna. I work for the Center for Media Justice. I'm home of the Media Action Grassroots Network, lots of acronym there, but we essentially do media and policing technology surveillance policy work, right? And outside of that, I'm an organizer. I'm an organizer that's really active here in the Bay Area and throughout the country with the movement for Black Lives and understand not just firsthand but historically what surveillance has meant for our communities, right? So I come from Oakland, home of the Black Panthers and have known since I was a really young person then that at one point in time, the Black Panthers were the number one targeted group in the country, right? They were operation zero all eyes on them and the FBI went in intentionally targeting, surveilling, infiltrating in order to break them up and we understand as a Black person and as people of color that this is not the first time this has happened, that the government has always used whatever apparatus and technologies were available at the time to survey our communities, to imprison us, to watch us from fugitive slave laws, to internment camps, to be able to have eyes on us when they wanted to, right? And then fast forward in 2013, Edward Snowden released a set of documents that proved that the NSA is not just watching us but watching everybody, every phone call, every text message, every email, everything from everyone in this country. And in the privacy world and security world, people are like, oh my God, this is the worst thing ever and it was but for us and for the communities that I'm a part of, we're like, well, duh. Welcome to the club, like we've known this, right? And they are many tools that they have used in the past and now with the 21st century, they have introduced new tools, right? And these tools are a little different in the ways in which they are targeting our communities now. And I'm gonna talk about two in particular. So one is the idea of predictive policing. Who in here has seen Minority Report? Yes, a lot of us, right? And we saw it and this came out almost 15 years ago and you're watching like, oh my God, you have pre-cogs who are like deciding, oh, the future is here, this crime happened and we're gonna stop it before it happened. And now we have technology that is doing something really similar. They're taking this huge amounts of data, huge, huge, huge amounts of data of where crime has happened, who has committed crime, where it might happen again and putting it into algorithms and into computer software that then tells police officers, actually you should go here because this is where crime is going to happen again. Now, when I first heard of that, the thing that kind of struck me the most was, well, I can tell you where crime might happen. I've lived in communities, I don't necessarily need data to tell me that, right? And I know even more than where it's happening, I know where you think it's gonna happen, right? Cause one of the problems with it is that we take old data, data that relies on humans, data that's relied on really systematic structures and racial structures that have set up that have over-policed our communities. We know, there have been studies and studies and studies that have talked about the over-drug use that happens in white communities, yet the people who get arrested and over-policed for drug use are communities of color. So we're taking in that data and using it to say, well, this is where crime is gonna happen, it's going to give us the same results. And the problem with that is two-fold, right? So outside of the fact that they now have all this information on us, is that you have millions and millions of dollars going into these programs. Millions of taxpayer dollars that are going in from the Department of Justice, millions of city dollars with very little oversight and very little proof that these programs work. And are continuing to then be able to say, and police officers can say, and departments can say, well, actually, you know, the program said this is where it was gonna be, it wasn't me. And looking at how they're taking the individual and being able to then say, well, data is neutral. And what we know is that it's not. It's informed by humans, it was created because humans then created the data and this math then is going to give us the exact same results that we've always gotten. So that's a little bit about what predictive policing is and why it's that. The other technology that I think that people really need to know about are stingrays or IMS catchers. So here's a little bit about what they do. So right now we are a community, we are a group who is here. Outside across the street in a van, there could be a device. And it would get the cell phone information of every single person in here. It can track all of your contacts, it can get all of your call records, it can get all of your text messages, instantly without permission, right? And there's nothing we can do about them. And police departments across the country have them, use them and won't tell us about them. So I say all of this not to scare you, not to be like, oh my God, it's really freaky, which it is, but more importantly, to say that we need to know. As artists we need to know, as activists, as communities of color and as impacted communities, we need to know the tools that are being used against us. We need to be able to know because we need a pre-able to protect ourselves. And right now organizations like mine, the ACLU, there's a wonderful group down in LA, Stop LAPD spying that are saying, how do we get more communities of color and more organizers and more activists to be aware of this because it's hurting us. And it's not just the people that want to keep everything private and use the guise of we're fighting terrorists or we're fighting the criminals and understand that those eyes are on us. So thank you everyone. I want to bring all the panelists back to the stage so that we can have a conversation. I was rushing through all of my intros because I was more interested in us having the conversation than you hear in me talk and tell you what you've already got in your program book. So I have a few questions to kind of get everybody started. I want to start with Piper. As an artist that has witnessed firsthand the effects of police brutality in your community, speaking specifically about the Oscar Grant situation, how did you make the decision to work in law enforcement and how does your art and your creative practice inform the way that you work as an officer? Well, I had thought about it a couple of times, but the Oscar Grant situation basically gave me the boost and was the defining situation for the most part. I went to San Francisco State. I got a degree in black studies. I have fantastic professors. I had a great education in high school. My mother educated me before that on what it means to be black in this country. And then growing up during the crack epidemic, provided more information. But going to that first protest at the Fooville Bar Station. And there were hundreds, if not thousands of people there. And I just remember being hurt and passionate and wanting justice, whatever that meant. And talking to everyone there, I remember I was interviewed. It's on the internet. And talking to everyone there, we wanted to get rid of the bad cops. The cops that didn't care about our community or were racist or were brutal for no reason or made stops for no reason. We wanted to get rid of them. But then the thought crossed my mind, if we could identify all of them, first of all, and then get them fired or indicted, get rid of all of them, who's gonna replace them? Because I knew that I wouldn't. I knew that none of my friends would. And I looked at everybody's face that was at that protest and I couldn't imagine anyone there doing it. And the protests look exactly like this auditorium, this theater right now. Different races, genders, whatever. So it became clear that if nobody that thought like us or had the education that we had or just watched that movie or just read that same book, if nobody like us was willing to go in and replace the bad cops, it's an incredibly high probability that someone that thinks like them is going to replace them. So even if Darren Wilson gets indicted, who replaced them? Who replaced Mezerly? Who got hired in his place? Cause he left a vacancy, you know? And that kind of haunted me for a year. And then like a year later, I had the opportunity, my band had been touring in Europe and we had a lot of success. But you know, my friend, my singer, the friend of mine, he got on drugs and we knew we couldn't tour. We were just making music to license it. So I was gonna be home. I knew I was gonna get a job for a couple years, but I still didn't think they would hire me. But I found out that I could pay my way through the academy. So I said, you know what? I've been talking all this shit. I've been on stage in India, rocking the crowd in India about what's going on in Oakland. Nobody in Oakland got my band's album. The police in Oakland ain't listening to it. I'm rocking India though. I'm rocking Germany. I'm rocking Ohio State. And artists know that. When you go out on stage, you're rocking people for the most part that are not the demographic that you wrote the material for, if you're from the conscious community. I said, I'm at least gonna pay my money and go into the academy. And if I get kicked out, cause I'm all over the internet talking crazy. If I get kicked out because of that, so be it. At least I did what I was supposed to do. I ended up graduating and giving the commencement speech at the end of that academy. So I've been in there for about five years, working hard. And it's been the best education that I could have gotten. Second to the San Francisco State. Appreciate it. Appreciate it. Someone has to step up into those roles, right? You know, and if we're not actively involved and engaged, and part of that is like that stigma between us versus them and who wants to be part of the cops cause they've terrorized our communities and neighborhoods for so long. So it's a very interesting and important distinction to make in terms of taking the accountability and putting yourself in that space to be a part of your community in that way. Hassan, since you begin this project of what I'm calling hyper self-surveillance, are you running into- Aggressive compliance. Aggressive compliance. Aggressive compliance. Yeah. Are you running into ways that surveillance is being used now that surprises you? Or, you know, I'm thinking a lot about the Apple encryption case and what those things mean. Yeah, you know, there's always a lot of details that are left out when we hear about some of the things. So, Cheneer, you're talking about these, how the NSA and the Snowden things. Well, one of the things that we very quickly forgot about was that in 2007, literally right around the corner from here, right at Second and Folsom, is AT&T's data center. Hawkeye is their internal name for it. And in, so prior to, sometime between, sometime prior to 2007, the NSA approached 16 telecom companies and said, we'd like to copy your data stream. And 15 of the 16 said, sure, be our guest, help yourself. The only company that objected to that quest, no longer exists, by the way, they said, you know, we're not really sure about the legality of this, please come back with the warrant, we'll give you what you're looking for. So, I think this is a really interesting thing about like, that was what, seven years ago, or eight years ago. And now, and then when you see the papers from Snowden, we're all shocked. It's like, wait, didn't we just see that? That this is what's going on? So, I think this is the thing that we keep forgetting, and I think we have very short term memory about this. And I think that's a little bit of a problem in terms of how we run across these types of things. Now, in my case, I've decided to just open it all up. And I've just decided to put everything out there. I figure if they're gonna have the information, well, why don't we just put it to everybody? You've done a preemptive strike. It's exactly, yeah. And I think what also happens, it's all opting in. And that's actually an ultimate, that's really is an incredible form of power is when you opt in on your terms. But the other thing that's also happening is, as I'm telling you all the stuff, as I'm giving you all this information, or telling the FBI, and you saw the kind of material that I'm putting out there. It's very hard to decipher which one of this is, what piece of information is valuable and which information is useless. So what it really is, is this idea of living in, hiding in plain sight, or camouflage. His data camouflage. Historically, the camouflage, we tend to think of warfare and soldiers would wear specific patterns. So therefore, the enemy cannot distinguish between the soldier and the landscape warfare. But the interesting thing is, when you look at the new camouflage that our troops are wearing now, this is pixely, greenish, grayish type of thing. There's no trees that color anywhere. And there's no blocky, pixely trees. No, what that's meant for is so the enemy cannot distinguish between the soldier and the noise and the night vision goggles. So we have this huge shift now where in the past, we had to be in the landscape of warfare, but now we have to embed it and the machinery's embedded and now it's about how do we distinguish our bodies from the data noise of the artifact? Wow. Right. That's a lot, that's a lot to think about. Shinieri, I'm thinking about all the things that you talked about in terms of predictive policing. What is this doing in terms of like, how does this changing the landscape of activism? We saw like these militarized systems roll out on protestors in Ferguson. We saw things that were used in battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan. Supposedly for the war on terror being turned against civilians in our own communities. You know, civilians that look like us, not regular civilians, but what is that? How is predictive policing and this hyper racial profiling? How is that playing out? I mean, I think it's playing out in a couple of ways, right? So predictive policing, I've talked about it a little bit here, it did start. It started in the battle in Afghanistan and Iraq in order to find out which like combatants they were going to go after, what neighborhoods, and then they are putting that here. One of the things that we've seen within like organizing communities is the use of the same tools. So stingrays, there started to be reports about a year and a half ago. People like, well, I'm at an action around a protest and my phone just doesn't work anymore. And one of the things that as stingrays, as the devices are collecting information and as they start to target then who they want to, it blocks everyone else from the cell to sour. And it doesn't do it permanently, but you'll notice you're there and all of a sudden you have no signal. And it comes back within like 30 seconds or so, but you're like, what happened in between that, right? And there are reports that like the New York NYPD has used it several times at actions in the last two years. You have reports of even Oakland most recently who has a, it's called, I think it's like Geosphere, which is a program just to be able to mine social media, right? And you have people at different protests and actions who are being called out by their Instagram names or by their Twitter names, which shows right there that they are not only just following you, but they're tracking it, and you have people who are from various communities, like I have friends who've gone and were in Baltimore who are being called out by Baltimore police departments by their Twitter names, right? They're showing just the ways in which it's being used and there's so much that we don't know right now. So currently Color of Change has started a FOIA project, a Freedom of Information project, really working with people within the Movement for Black Lives to be able to get as much information about not just the big actions and protests that have taken place, but also individuals, individuals that are in the limelight and in the media, and those who are also doing work behind the scenes to be able to find out. And what we're finding in anyone who's done FOIA requests know it's a long process, is that there's a lot of blocks. It's a lot of like, well, we can't give you that, you actually need to go to this department, or you need to go to this department. Not saying we don't have information on you, it's around who do you need to go to to be able to get the information. So we know that they're using these tools, and we know that they're collecting data. That's, it's amazing. It's changing the landscape of activism, right? And so, but this, it's always been this idea out there of people who are advocates for, you know, don't see any problem with this to say that, well, if you're not doing anything wrong, then you ain't got nothing to worry about. Like, how do you feel about that? Like, what does that mean? Like. That's not true. It's not true. And I've always known it's not true, but I actually learned firsthand. People always ask me what's the most racist thing I've seen since I've been in law enforcement. And it was right after I finished the street program. And I made it out to the streets and I told myself, I'm going to knock on every door in the community that I police, because I want to meet everybody. Because I believe knowing people is like, you got to do the majority of the work before the confrontation even happens. Because in the confrontation, likely won't happen. I'm knocking on doors. I'm going to different apartment building complexes, speaking to apartment building managers, tenants. And the next day, an email went out to everybody on patrol that a black male in his 30s has stolen a uniform and was impersonating a cop. And this is, I mean, this is, this is in the Bay Area. This is in San Leandro, 2013. So I don't know what's happening in Ferguson or Arizona, because that happened in the Bay Area in 2013. And I really, it took me 30 minutes to write the reply to that email. I mean, the woman that did it, white woman, late 20s, early 30s. She's not just an apartment building manager. She probably serves on a jury. She's looking over applications. Who's going to live here? She's probably, she's an average American, just like cops are average Americans, just like teachers are average Americans. And just going into law enforcement was a profound education on the mindset of an average American, because they're the ones that call the police when they're scared. So you see what they're afraid of, you know? And you begin to learn the language over the radio. You begin to learn what's going on and why. Like the situation in Cleveland, where the brother's looking at the replica AR-15 and like Walmart or something. And he gets shot up. If you're looking to listen to the 911 calls, the callers are saying there's a black male in here pointing a machine gun at everybody. Callers, plural. They look at the tape, he never once pointed it at anybody. Police came in, confirmed that he's still pointing the weapon. Affirm, went in, dropped the gun. He turned around, they lit him up. And it's like, it's just, it goes from the police are sick. The major, the dominant culture within law enforcement is sick. It goes from that to America's sick. And it's in your face on a daily basis. There's a sickness and it's fluorescent. And you can see it everywhere. Cause you're the one that's supposed to deal with it. So no, if you're not doing anything wrong, you still may have something to worry about. That's the day I stopped telling brothers to pull their pants up. So speaking of that is like, that's a really good segue into trying to understand how predictive policing, how creating these mass surveillance states and communities, how is that playing into roles of property rights and human rights like gentrification, which I know San Francisco and Oakland are going through some huge transitions right now. Like how is that playing out here? I think that, so what's interesting is like the use of technologies, right? So predictive policing and predictive sentencing and all that are like one brand and like one batch of policing technologies, right? But you have all of these different ones that add up that give us the results, right? And the results are over-criminalization, the mass incarceration actually rising, not depreciating and over-policing, but this time without being able to say that it wasn't us, right? And what you see, so that's happening in like the police world, local, state, federal kind of all the way up. And then what you have on the citizen side is an example of like the deputizing of citizens to be able to then survey their communities, right? So that's always, they've always been a back and forth. So even when we look at like historically, you had slave patrols and fugitive slave laws that then deprotized regular citizens to be able to say if they saw any black person who looked suspicious at the time or was not where they were supposed to be to be able to capture them and enslave them because they now were deputized. And what you see is the use of technologies to do that today. You have apps like Next Door where you have communities writing and talking about each other. You have suspicious activity reports where nothing has to be happening. You can just call because something just doesn't feel right, right? And that happens in the Bay. There's apps that are similar to that in New York. There's whole websites that are around like Ghetto Raider where you can go on and raid your neighborhood and be able to see if that's a place where you wanna live based on how ghetto a neighborhood is, right? And these aren't policing sites. These aren't tools that, although police do interact with them, they're not set up for them. They're set up for average citizens being able to then survey their neighborhoods and survey their communities. And what you're finding is that you have people who are going into communities that they are not used to, they are not from have not fully become a part of and then are surveying everyone else. And are scared. And you have that average American who grew up watching the news every night, who grew up with these ideas of what does it mean to be a person of color? What does it mean to be black or Latino? What does it mean to be an undocumented person or an immigrant? And that's playing out in these sites. Yeah, so we've been in the news lately. What has been in the news lately is this iPhone encryption case. And of course, we're in iPhones, Apple's somewhere around here. They're building like the mothership of all buildings. Yeah, right on 280. Yeah, so tell us about that encryption case. Yeah, this is an interesting thing because on the outside, it seems as if Apple's like, no, no, this is for privacy and such. We've seen on the Snowden papers that Apple joined the prison program in October of 2009. No, sorry, October 2013. So it's not necessarily something that's relatively new. We have proof that Apple actually has been cooperating with the NSA. Now, interestingly enough, there's a little detail that's left out of when we have this conversation about this Apple iPhone is that the iPhone that's in concern with the San Bernardino shooter is that it's a government-owned phone. It is his work phone. It is not his personal iPhone. And the shooter's job was that he was a medical inspector for San Bernardino County. So therefore, the phone that's in consideration is a government-owned phone that has medical records on it. So therefore it has, I mean, you want your medical inspectors to have encrypted data. You don't want just that information going to anybody. So there is some usefulness to this encryption. So that part is very conveniently left out about the fact that this is a government phone with medical records. And all of a sudden now it's like, it's okay to take notes. No, no, pay no attention to that. We just need to get in and Apple's putting up this. And of course at the end of the day, this benefits Apple financially to say, hey, we care about your privacy, even though there's papers that clearly show that Apple has been involved in this conference. So this is one of the things. And also another thing to keep in mind is that how we generally tend to think of surveillance as this old school model of being followed around and things. And that's easy, that may be easy to spot, but a lot of this stuff happens underneath, that we just don't even see. And because it's not necessarily physically tangible. I don't know, do we have time to go into the phone things? But maybe we could do that a little bit later. We'll end with that. Okay, I wanna show you something that might totally freak you out about, you know. Maybe not. And maybe not. Maybe you're like, okay, yeah, well, you know what I mean. I know that this is what I do all the time. Yes. So the reason why I spoke to Kristen and Roberta and it was really important to have this conversation here. And this isn't necessarily just about the arts, but it is about what is the response? How do the powers that be stay in power when everything around them is changing? And this is one of those ways in which the government, those entities, corporations are using data and information to justify all types of things. And so the question that I would like to just lay out there is, is this the new normal? Is this what life will be for us moving forward? And or are there ways to disrupt that? Are there ways to think about how do we figure out ways to slow down the developing surveillance state? Yes, is the first question. Not only is it the new normal, it's been the normal for a while, right? What we're finding is that we're learning about some of the newer technologies, but that doesn't mean they haven't been used, right? And it's going to be getting worse. So we have, there are stingrays, there are the body cameras that point at us, not at the police. You have surveillance cameras everywhere, right? You have track record cameras that not just can take a picture of you, but it takes your license plate and you have track record cameras in some cities on every single corner. So if it can take a picture of your license plate there, it can also follow that, right? So there's so many ways in which we're being surveyed. There are drones that are being used by police departments that can come in and take pictures and swarms of whole neighborhoods. And they're getting smaller. Like I just saw a report the other day that talked about bug drones. And they're the size of bugs that can fly into your house, take pictures, at some point you can probably weaponize them and you would never know what happened, right? We've all seen the movies from, you know, when I asked around like Minority Port, that's real. And that was 15 years ago. You have movies like Enemy of the State that talk about the ways in which cameras can follow you around. And that's now, right? So yes, I think that it's the future. What I think that we can do though is start to demand accountability and start to demand transparency where there is none. Because police departments are not required to tell us that they have them. The department, the feds are not required to tell us where they use them. And all of this is happening so secretly and so covertly that we're not paying attention. As organizers and activists, when it comes to like the fight around privacy, we've been so far away just dealing with, I mean for very good reasons, just the ability to survive and to live, but not understanding the ways in which this is impeding our survival. And we have to pay attention and we have to get into this fight. I would say ways to kind of slow that down outside of demanding transparency. Encrypt, encrypt, encrypt, encrypt, encrypt everything. Everything that you can, encrypt it. Make sure your phone is locked, right? So I was on a call the other day and one of the things, like iPhone, your standard lock is a four digit code. Change it, if you go in your privacy settings, you change it to a 10 digit one. It would take the machines eight years to be able to crack that code. Do it. It's 10 digit numbers, right? Which is just thinking about it as like a phone number. You used to know phone numbers, you can remember a 10 digit code, right? Make sure if you are an organizer or an activist, whether you are doing the most like peaceful non-civil disobedience kind of stuff, use an app called Signal. It is free. You can make phone calls, you can text, you can send pictures. It is encrypted end to end and safe, right? There are tools out there that are here to protect us. So I would say to use them, utilize them, research them. There are organizations like the ones that I work on that are working on the policy end, but there are also organizations that work on the technology end and education. So we're here in the Bay Area. You have the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Go to their website. They will give you so much information about how to protect yourselves in the digital world and using like digital surveillance. Thank you. So we're gonna end with a quick treat. So one of the things that we're talking about. So, you know, talking about this thing of like surveillance systems. And we tend to really get caught up on cameras and pictures, but there are more cameras and people in this room right now. Because every one of you have at least two cameras in your hand, one in the front and one in the back. And then never mind the surveillance cameras and never mind, but why is it that we're also worried about our pictures being taken because it's really the data that's underneath it. So why don't we do this thing where, okay. All right. Okay, we're getting the soundtrack. That's for us. It's pretty cool. Moving right along. All right, so real quickly. If you have an iPhone do this, pull out your iPhones and go to your settings. Some of you may already know about this and you may already have this off, but for those that don't have it off, this might be a little bit of a shock. So go to your settings. Go to privacy, scroll down, well scroll up, sorry, into location services. Are you in location services? Go down towards the bottom. You'll see system services. Go into system services and then scroll towards the bottom and you'll see frequent locations. Do you see that? Go in it and then go into each of those. Okay, so why should a police agency or a government agency invest thousands of people and following you around when you can just pull that data right off of it? Your phone is your biggest buy. Your phone is the biggest informant that there is. All right, anyway, sir, thank you. Just a little fun to end the session. Please give a hand to our panelists. Thank you so much. Much needed conversation. Really appreciate you all and what you had to offer. And we're done. We're gonna move on. Thank you. And by the way, you can just turn your frequent locations off if that creeps you out.