 Hello everyone, my name is Dave Moss. I am, actually I have two hats here. I am director of investigations at a non-profit organization called the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I'm also a Reynolds School of, sorry, I'm also a Reynolds scholar in residence at the Reynolds School of Journalism here at UNR. If you're unfamiliar with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we've been around since 1990. We are a advocacy and legal organization that defends civil liberties and human rights as technology rises in society. Happy to talk to you in-depth about all the stuff we do, but I don't have time for it in this presentation. What I do have time to tell you about is a partnership that EFF has had with the Reynolds School since 2019. We teach a lot of things to journalism students, particularly about investigating technology, but the centerpiece of our partnership is a project called the Atlas of Surveillance, where we are trying to map out what police departments are using what technology across the United States, whether that's face recognition or drones or any number of technologies. But one of the specific things that we've been working on is technology at the US-Mexico border. I think there's this conception in the popular psyche that the border is just all of what you see in the foreground here, just a desert barren wasteland, where what falls to the background is the fact that people live at the border. There are communities at the border. There are quite large communities at the border, and so when folks in Washington are talking about putting more and more surveillance or so-called virtual wall at the border, one of the side impacts is that it does actually impact communities who live there. And so we've been mapping this out. And so some of the things that we deal with when it comes to the virtual wall are things like surveillance towers, and there are at least three different models of surveillance towers along the US-Mexico border. We have the integrated fixed tower, which you find in Arizona on the left. You have the remote video surveillance system by General Dynamics in the middle, and then you have the new AI-controlled towers called Autonomous Surveillance Towers by Andrel Industries, which we'll talk a little bit more about in a second. But we also have a couple of different kinds of spy blimps across the border. We have technologies called license plate readers that track your vehicle. Some of them are very obvious. Some of them are covert, but you find those throughout the border as well. And so the question comes, well, how should we be documenting this? How should we be mapping this out? And I'm gonna actually show you the output first. One of the things we've been doing is actually mapping the precise locations of as many surveillance towers we can find along the US-Mexico border. So as of this week, we have mapped out 467 towers. We think they're probably close to 1,000 between both the southern and the northern border. We are not doing the northern border at this point, but I do think this is the sort of best map that exists. And it may actually be a better than the map that CBP has itself because they seem to lose track of where their towers are. So how did we go about it? Well, a lot of different methods. Going someplace in real life, still underrated. We've gone down to the border several times now on research trips. And sure enough, we see things we didn't know existed, like a blimp over Columbus, New Mexico. This is another anderal tower we found in New Mexico as well that we didn't know about until we were there in person. But oftentimes we do stuff with public records and FOIA documents and things that we find online. And if we're lucky, we find a document like this that tells us the name of the tower and actually gives us GPS coordinates. That makes it really easy. What gets a little bit harder is when we have to deal with things like environmental assessments, where they give us a map and they say, well, it's kind of generally in this area, go fish. Sometimes we'll get like a map like this where they won't tell you where it is, but they'll give you a very close-up look. And then you spend a lot of time on Google satellite trying to match up the bends in the Rio Grande until you can find the location of the tower. But thankfully, they have a very distinct fingerprint or aerial fingerprints, we're able to find them a lot better. And Google Street View itself ends up being really great because you can explore and you can confirm whether you can see it on the ground. So this is a thing called relocatable remote video surveillance system and you can zoom in with Google Street View to actually find it. That's the same tower as before. Just that's as close as we could get in Google Street View. And here's where VR comes in. So this is actually the shelf next to my desk at home. I have multiple headsets now. This has become part of my daily sort of work process. And what I'm gonna talk about how we're using is you can use like kind of one or two different apps depending on what system you use. Most of what I'm gonna talk about will work well with Google Earth VR. I specifically use Wander, which is available for the Quest systems. And just a little bit of an irony alert here. As you all know, probably Palmer Lucky was one of the creators of the Oculus headset. He is also the creator of the Andral Century Tower. So there's a little bit of irony in using one of his technologies to investigate another one of his technologies. So some of the benefits of using Wander is basically what Wander does is take Google Street View and makes it immersive. Makes it a series of 360 degree photos that you can move around with. It also includes user submitted 360 degree images. So if the Google Street View card didn't go someplace but a hiker did, you're gonna have access to those images. It also interestingly has a very large screen version of Google satellite. So instead of looking at it on your desktop, I'm able to have like a movie theater, like a screen essentially this size in my headset to analyze a satellite footage. You can also bookmark things, which isn't so easy on my browser. You know, the fact that it's using Street View means you can go back in time and treat it like a time machine with historical imagery. But it also has a social component that allows you to take other people into the experience and show them around. So just to give you an example of how this might look and how my process of finding these surveillance towers, I might just open up the map and zoom very deep in satellite mode and just go up and down every road looking for one of these three aerial fingerprints of these surveillance towers. And you can see this is me finding one of the Andrel ones which corresponds to the one on the bottom right. Or I might just open up the map and when you see blue lines on that, those are places that I can go in Street View. And so I'll just see how close I can get to the border, drop myself in there and just look around like I was driving around in real life. And that's how I was able to find a whole series of towers in Nogales. Interestingly, the Google Street View car actually gets closer to the border on the Mexican side very often as compared to the US side. So oftentimes I'll be looking for the surveillance towers from Mexico. One of the other cool things that we can do is border checkpoints. So there are dozens of checkpoints if you're driving in the borderlands. Normally you have to go through them very quickly. If you are not going through them quickly then that's bad news for you because you have been stopped and you are being detained. However, because the Google Street View car went through these checkpoints we can go through leisurely and slowly and look at all the different kinds of technology that have been installed in one of these places. And so this is someone from the news organization Bellingcat, I'm taking them on a tour this is them, me showing them the tour. So then there's a question of how do we present this to the public? How do we help people better understand surveillance technology? Now back in 2018 when there was the Oculus Go we actually built an app called Spot the Surveillance which puts you on one street corner in a one still 360 degree image. This was in San Francisco and we created a little game where people would look around trying to spot pieces of surveillance technology and then it would tell them when they found what it would tell them what the technology could do. So here's somebody looking at a body worn camera and learning about body worn cameras. Took a lot of effort to put this together so it's very useful to be able to have some piece of software that somebody else built that we do not have to maintain and continually do updates to. So now what we do is take people on tour virtual reality tours at the border and I've done this for Oscar winning documentary filmmakers, for academics, for journalists and I'm able to do a lot of cool things with them that I wouldn't have been able to do in real life. For example, on the left we have the San Diego side of the border where the wall meets the Pacific Ocean. On the right we have the Tijuana side. This is an hour and a half of travel to go what is like essentially a few hundred feet but in VR I can just jump back and forth and actually show people very quickly the difference between the militarized U.S. side of the border versus the very party time side of the Tijuana border. And we're able to still do spot their surveillance like activities. I will put people into situations and I will say look around, do you spot something? And then they do and they're able to get the context of this is a spy blimp over your house, over your neighborhood. This is not just the middle of a desert monitoring people who are like drug mules. This is monitoring people going about their daily lives and we find that people respond well when we give them pictures of things when they are able to look at like, you know, a slideshow presentation like I'm showing you but the ability to look around and see the full 360 environment that is being captured by one of these towers really does change people's perspective of border surveillance. And that is all I got for you today so thank you for coming.