Observing Police Surveillance at Portests
Opsahl, Kurt
he Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Kurt Opsahl with show you how to identify surveillance technologies that law enforcement may use at protests and other public gathering to spying on people exercising their fundamental rights. Learn how to spot the surveillance so you can advocate effectively for the policies necessary to protect your rights and bring transparency to the police surveillance. If you attend a protest, demonstration or any mass gathering in a public space, the police are probably surveilling you. Whether it’s sophisticated facial recognition, ubiquitous video recording, or the instant analysis of our biometric data, law enforcement agencies are following closely behind their counterparts in the military and intelligence services in acquiring privacy-invasive technologies, from automated license plate readers to body-worn cameras to drones and more. In this talk, Kurt Opsahl with show you how to identify surveillance technologies in use: • Where to look for these devices • How these technologies look • How these technologies function • How they are used by police • What kind of data they collect • Where to learn more about them Knowledge is power. Knowing what technologies are in use can help you understand the threats to your privacy and security, as well as tools to advocate for limits on police use of surveillance that may chill people’s rights to express themselves on public issues. Just as analog surveillance historically has been used as a tool for oppression, policymakers and the public must understand the threat posed by emerging technologies to successfully defend human rights in the digital age.
 Yeah, and the next talk. I'm very proud to announce we have a speaker who is coming in from sunny California. And he's an attorney. He's working for Harvard. He's doing so many things and he's fighting for our digital rights. And I'm very happy to say hi. Welcome. Thank you. Yeah. And spot the surveillance is the topic. We will see what we haven't seen before. And I'm very happy that you're here and Kurt Abso, please let us know what's up. Thank you. Thank you. Hello, everybody. My name is Kurt Abso. I'm the deputy executive director at General Counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I'm here to talk to you about observing police surveillance at protests. So why do we want to observe police at protests? Well, because protests are political expression. At the Council of Europe put it, the right of individuals to gather with other people and make their collective voice heard is fundamental to a properly functioning democracy. And this is a right which is protected by the European Convention on Human Rights and other international rights treaties. But surveillance can chill that right. And so knowing what technologies are used can help you understand the threats to your privacy and security, as well as provide tools to advocate for limits on police use of surveillance. Surveillance may chill people's right to express themselves on these public issues. Just as analog surveillance historically has been used as a tool for oppression. Nowadays, policymakers and the public have to understand that the threat posed by emerging technologies is a danger to human rights. And they need to understand this to successfully defend human rights in the digital age. So journalists who are reporting on protests and these action should know the surveillance that is in use. Activists who are advocating for limitations on police use of surveillance need to know what surveillance is being used to effectively advocate. And legal observers may need to document the use of surveillance and protests in order to challenge or police actions at the protest or challenge police policies that are being used after the protest with the footage they've obtained. So when we go up today, we're going to provide a lot of information about various types of surveillance technologies in use by police around the world. We're going to look at what the appearance is, how it works, what kind of data they collect, and how they're used by police. And at the end, we'll have a few other resources available for those who want to dive a little bit deeper on the topic. So police surveillance technology is everywhere. It's on the police themselves, on their vehicles, on the roadways. It could be above you in the air. It's surrounding you in the environment. It can be a lot of different places and you need to know where to look. On police officers themselves, you'll often find it in the form of either body worn cameras or additional devices that they're using, which are basically mobile biometric sensors. Body worn cameras are technology that's come out and become more popular over the last decade or so. And originally it was something that was being used as a way to provide police accountability that give a record of their interactions with the public. And maybe, for example, could be used to show police brutality or maybe deter police brutality. But there are two ways streets. Devices are often used to surveil protesters and the footage may later be used to support arrests and charges. For example, we use this NPR story where after a rally, weeks later, the police identified people through body cam footage and brought action against them for obstructing the roadway, which is part of the civil disobedience of the protest, based on finding them on the body cam footage. They can move in a variety of places. So if you're looking for body worn cameras, you got to look in different places to see where they might be. So a couple places, they might see them on the head, head mounted camera. So it might be on your glasses on the side. It could be a lens right in the center. The center one is pretty hard to find, but the ones on the side or might be part of the glasses or maybe a helmet that they're wearing are generally pretty obvious. These ones, they're not particularly common, but they do happen. Shoulder mounted cameras also a little bit less common, but they have an interesting feature. In this case, we're using the Warrior 360 from Blue Line Animations as an example. And it is a dome camera that looks all directions. So 360 degrees off the officer's left shoulder. On most cameras, like a front facing camera, will capture only 180 degrees. Chest mounted cameras are the most common. Nears are being used very, very widely. We give some examples here from Amsterdam, Madelberg, and from West Midlands Police in the EU, or soon to be not in the EU for a case of Britain. And there are several moon types. Axon, Wolfcom and Watchguard are very common. They operate in similar manners though with some differences. And you can take a look at some of the examples that are available on those companies' web pages where they will explain the product they have and offer and see what matches up for your jurisdiction. Or you can also look in for news articles. Oftentimes, there's a news article about when the first policy to bring body worn cameras is introduced in a particular police department. There are also smartphone based cameras. And these are kind of the low end. It's basically just an Android cell phone using its internal camera with an app that does recording placed in a pocket. So the camera is a little bit above the clock and can see forward. But it's also a very subtle technique. It could be easily confused if you weren't looking with someone just storing their phone in their pocket. It also might be clipped somewhere on their uniform. But if you see anything where the camera is facing outward and it's attached to the officer, there's a good chance that that is a body worn camera. At least that app is in play. Last, the body worn cameras. We'll talk about the semi obscuring cameras. This is an example from a company called Body Worn. It's a product called Body Worn, company called Utility. And it is partially concealed. It basically looks like a button on someone's uniform. That if you're not looking closely, you might not notice. But if you see as you go in, it appears where you would expect actually not to have a button. It's slightly larger. It looks a little bit different. It looks like a camera if you look closely. But if you're looking at a distance and not particularly paying attention, you might not see it at all. In addition to body worn cameras, please we'll often use mobile biometric devices. So these can be handheld scanners or could be a tablet or a camera phone. And in some cases, it just is a camera, which is a pretty good app on it. But we'll see that you can sometimes tell whether they're using a phone or whether they're using as a biometric scanner by the body language. So for example, if the police officer is holding up the phone, trying to capture someone's face, that is most likely because they have a capturing a photo, and they may be connecting that to a facial recognition application. And you also will see mobile fingerprinting. So here's an example in the United Kingdom. They have an app on the officer's phone combined with a fingerprint scanning device. And it takes the people's fingerprints and checks them against some databases. One is a database of everyone the police out of detain, putting it into the database, and then checking against it for new people. And the other one is a database for immigration to collect it at the border when someone comes into the UK. And this allows the police to do a very rapid check of their records on somebody in the field. Some of these devices are multimodal. They'll do both. They'll be able to do fingerprints and take photos for facial recognition. This here is the DataWorks Plus Evolution does both. And that can be convenient for the officers, but it's a little bit more dangerous to some of the rates. And some of the body warm cameras, this example Wolfcom, has a biometric capability built in facial recognition. So it can use its regular camera functions. And of course, all of them take the picture that picture could be uploaded to our database and facial recognition will be done later. But this one is designed to streamline that process. So I'll take a moment as an aside to talk about facial recognition in Europe. Per algorithm watch, the organization says that there are at least 11 police agencies in Europe who use facial recognition. I showed on the map here, the UK Court of Appeal found that automatic facial recognition technology used by the South Wales police was not lawful. However, elsewhere in the UK, they are still using it. The Metropolitan Police is doing in London is doing a live facial recognition throughout the city of London. And it contends that its situation is distinguishable from South Wales. So that doesn't apply to them. We'll see how that turns out. There's also been some pressure on the European Commission to put a ban in place or put restrictions on facial recognition. And in September, there was a quote from the commissioners saying that they were considering whether we need additional safeguards or whether we need to go further and not allow facial recognition in certain cases, in certain areas, or even temporarily, which is not a particularly strong statement, but it is a, at least they are considering the idea and something that one can advocate for in the United States. A number of jurisdictions at the local levels, cities have put restrictions on their police departments so they cannot use facial recognition. It's a growing movement. And while a national or international law that would limit police use of facial recognition would be the best for civil liberties, you can also start at your local level. All right, once we move beyond the police officers or cells, where else? Vehicles and roadways. And this can come up for the vehicles, roadways, both adjacent to the protests and within the protests themselves. So adjacent to the protests is looking at the exits and entrances to the protest areas. And they may use existing ALPR or place new ALPR or ANPR, automated number plate research called ALPR in the United States. These are cameras generally we pointed towards a roadway to where cars will be that are designed to take a picture, determine what the license plate, number plate is, optical character resolution. They will eventually, recognition that we're eventually able to see what it is, check the database, and find out who's registered for that car. And it can be uploaded to a central server for police to search, can add vehicles to a watch list. It is a very powerful tool because many people are using cars to get to and from protests. And even if they're going in a group, at least one member of the group would have the car. And it has been used to go after someone after a protest. So in this case, it was from a number years back, but a citizen in the UK went to a protest and was later pulled over because they had captured the license plate while on the protest, added to a database, and then used that to overload. So if there is a protest, the police might come in and use a portable number plate reader. So here's some examples of what they might look like, maybe they're on a tripod or on a trailer. And they can set these up basically anywhere. It would often be used at the entrance or exit to the zone in which the protest is expected to see who's coming in or who's coming out during the protest time period and try to capture the crowd through their license plates. It also is now becoming more and more common on police commas. You can see a couple of examples we have here. One shows it rather obvious. In the top one, that's a UK police car, and you can see the camera sticks out fairly obvious that they have a camera on the light bar. The lower one from the French police, less obvious. It looks like an ordinary light bar. You might be able to tell that it's a little bit different than some other ones because it has sort of a funny thing in the center, but it's a pretty subtle approach. So there's all kinds. They might also be mounted on the hood or the trunk and may be more or less obvious. But take a look at what the police car's behavior is. If they are driving, for example, slowly down the street next to all sorts of parked cars, it may be that they are doing gritting, a practice known as gritting, where they're looking for capturing every parked car's license plate in a particular zone. You're trying to run slow and steady in order to do that. And then there are the fixed number plate readers. These are often at traffic lights and intersections on the highways. Any sort of high speed toll road will have them. They also are used for other purposes like to establish fines, to check border crossings. They are very common fixtures on road ways. So when a protest happens in a zone that already has them, the police will be able to access that information and know who entered or exited that area to move around. All right. And then within the protest itself, they may be adding additional surveillance capacities. So in this example, we have a Santa Fe police department knew about a protest that was protesting a statue. And there's a question like maybe some people wouldn't take action and remove the statue. So in order to capture that through surveillance, they placed this trailer, which has a number of camera and audio capabilities, and just rolled it in right next to the statue to capture the protest action. And these cameras can come in a variety of forms. In this case, we're going to watch towers. Personal control cameras can be in, personnel controlling the cameras can be in the watch tower or they can be operating remotely. As you can see, they are using a scissor jack to raise it about that ban. The other one is an assembly. It's not easy for someone to get in and out of there. So it may have a person, but it's somewhat inconvenient to actually have a person inside these watch towers. But it's much more convenient to use their built-in surveillance capabilities and remotely observe the area around the watch tower with those cameras. And then there are also the pure surveillance units. This example here showing four cameras, raised pole, and just adding surveillance capability basically to anywhere. And some of the, some of them are much more complex, thermal imaging cameras. Thermal imaging often comes from the leading company is FLIR, that stands for Forward Looking Infrared. FLIR system makes a lot of these devices and makes them available. Police departments, thermal imaging cameras allow the police to be able to conduct surveillance after dark, where the lighting is poor, where they might not be able to identify individuals very easily. Instead, they can use their heat signature and be able to continue to monitor the protests when the lighting conditions are less. And a lot of things not a protest will happen at night. Candlelight and vigils are very common place. So police will be looking to thermal imaging to make sure that they have strong surveillance capabilities after dark. Another thing you might see around a protest is an emergency command vehicle. These are often massive bus-sized vehicles and they do have some surveillance capabilities. They might have some cameras, but more often they are commanded control. So they are the places where somebody would be receiving footage from cameras and operating cameras remotely, making communications with other people in the field. Though they also may have some built-in capabilities and they may provide the focal point where the local connection, they're getting information from local devices and then they have the uplink in the command center. One thing I wanted to point out is a common misconception or something that comes up a lot when people are concerned about police surveillance is they'll see an unmarked vehicle of man with no windows. It may even have some antennas or satellites. And while that is possibly an undercover police vehicle, you shouldn't assume that that vehicle belongs to law enforcement. That could very easily be a news media vehicle. News media also goes to protests. They also have satellite uplinks and antennas. They look very similar. And in some cases, the media has a security situation. They're worried that there may be theft of equipment and they have unmarked vans. So it is worth noting that there is an unmarked vehicle, but you shouldn't necessarily assume that it is a police unmarked vehicle. Also, sometimes people see, especially they see, some antennas or satellite dish on a vehicle, that maybe that's where a stingray is. This is a misconception. Stingrays are pretty small and they don't require an external antenna to operate. You could put a stingray inside a trunk of a car, maybe about briefcase sized. So it would be unlikely that if you're going to use a stingray or a cell-side simulator or MC catcher that you wouldn't want to put it in a vehicle, you don't need to put it in a vehicle that has its own antenna. There have been not very much documentation of these technology been used in the U.S. domestic protests. They have been used, we know, in some protests in more authoritarian countries. So it's unclear how often they will be are being used. And they are very dangerous things, simple. So an MC catcher, it is able to determine what cell phones are nearby, get a unique identifier with that cell phone, and in many cases be able to use that information to determine what individuals present in the protests. And that information has been used after some protests in Ukraine, for example, to send a text message to people all the time, remember, you know, we're on to you, we know you were there, which can be very intimidating to individuals. But the challenge is if you're trying to observe police surveillance on every desk, it is hard for you to observe it because they are often hidden. You may be able to find out more information later through investigative journalism or public records or news reports. If somebody is prosecuted using that information, it may become obvious, but it's difficult to see at the protest itself. So next category, looking up in the sky. There are lots of forms of aerial surveillance along with the agency will surveil protests from above using traditional aircraft with onboard pilots, and as well as smaller remotely operated aerial systems, drones. Law enforcement may also use these air-convicts to communicate with the crowd, to use the loudspeakers to send a message to the crowd, order them to disperse. And we've seen this actually drones with loudspeakers being used by the German police in order to tell people to stay apart. Corona, that same technology can be used for protests. And these plans and drones will often be equipped with high definition cameras, capable of either an extremely wide angle to get the whole scene or an extreme zoom where they might be able to zoom in on a particular person, a particular license plate, and then use that data later partnering that the aircraft with license plate recognition, face recognition, video analytics, and even a cell-side simulator inside the aircraft. And as you know, we know this has happened in a recent protest in Texas, a Texas police drone caught some footage of a protester allegedly throwing a water bottle. They took that video, they took the picture, put it out, offered a cash award, and anonymous tip to turn the kid in, and protest was prosecuted. So police are definitely using these things to gather information at protests. So a common method for especially larger police departments is fixed wing aircraft. For smaller ones, they may use private contractors to provide these fixed wing craft. So this is an example of the kind of plane used by a company called Persistent Surveillance Systems. It rents out a plane like this. We're not this exact one. If you look up that tail number, it's going to be two different companies, but this same model of plane assessment 207. And these will circle around the protest using their cameras to observe the protesters below. An advantage of planes is they can often circle for quite a long time and provide a wide view of the area. Also helicopters. Helicopters will often be seen hovering over a protest. They are a little bit easier to maneuver and be able to go backwards and forwards over the protest and are used by police to continually observe. And we use two examples here. One of them from the Oakland Police Department. The other one from the Rhyanland Police Department. In both cases, they have a flur attached to the helicopter, a forward-looking infrared that would allow them, in addition to regular capabilities, to use thermal imaging to follow someone at a protest or follow what's going on after dark. You can also see that some helicopters will have spotlights so that they can signal to officers on the ground who to follow, who to pay attention to. And another thing for both fixed wing and helicopters. You look for the tail number. In most jurisdictions, they're required to have tail number visible. And then you can look up that tail number on services like Flight Aware and be able to find out further information about what that plane has been doing, what the helicopter has been doing, as well as the ownership. Finally, drones. Drones are becoming very commonplace because they're getting cheaper all the time and have many additional capacities. Drones are also known as unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs, UAS, unmanned aerial systems. And a lot of police departments are getting them for their capabilities using most commonly a quad rotor. And they can be controlled by remote control, have a camera built into this, and be useful for getting above the scene view. So one way to spot it, well, first of all, just listen to it. They make kind of a distinctive noise. Sometimes they'll be marked as police. You also look for the pilots operating nearby. So oftentimes a drone, well, first of all, sometimes they're labeled, like in the upper left there, it says police drone operating. Pretty easy to identify. Other times they might have like drone, UAV, aviation unit on their uniform or a nearby police vehicle. The other thing is that if you identify a drone, they're often within line of sight, is going to be the operator. So once you see the drone, look around and see if someone has the remote controls on their hand, is looking up at the drone, you can probably identify the operator and you'll look for information they might have on their uniform about who is operating that particular drone. But also keep in mind, both for drones and other aircraft, that it's not necessarily the police. Journalists and activists will often fly drones over protests. News helicopters for a large protest are going to be more common than police helicopters. And many times they are labeled, which is a picture of the BBC News Copter. But this means that just as you see a helicopter that has both a camera and is flying over the protest, that does not necessarily mean that it's a police helicopter. Also another technology, which it's actually not very commonplace outside of protests in war zones, but the drone killer technology, which is basically a ray gun that knocks drones out of the sky, sending radio signals to interfere with the drone's operation and cause it to fall and crash. These have been used in Iraq and Afghanistan and the technology could be starting to be used, but we really haven't seen it used more frequently. I'm sure I'll tell you about it because, oh my god, drone cameras. All right, last place to look for police technology in the environment around you. There will be, in many places, camera networks. So a lot of the cameras that you'll see in a neighborhood will have, will be private cameras, will be police cameras, will be cameras being used by city non-police agencies. There can be a lot of cameras. This also means that you're trying to observe what cameras are going on. There's going to be too much information. There'll be so many cameras in many areas that you can spend all your time documenting and observing the cameras and this other things. So you might not want to spend all your time paying attention to that because you can go back later at any point and see the fixed cameras. But there are a couple of things that I'm getting one more. So first, identifying them. There are too many different brands to identify, but here's some information about the kinds of cameras that are available. Bullet cameras are directional so you can sort of see which way it's pointing and what it will be covering from that. Then you have dome cameras which are designed so you can't see which way it's pointing or at least you can see maybe somewhere in this area, 180 degrees, but the exact direction it's pointing is obscured by the dome. Pan-tilt zoom cameras can change which way they're pointing. They can sometimes be coupled with a dome camera so that the dome camera can both change the way it's looking and obscure which way it's looking. Thermal imaging cameras and ALPR cameras are also going to be common at fixed locations. ALPR, a lot of what we do with traffic control. Thermal is actually not as common and is mostly used as a technology that is on vehicles, is kind of expensive, but in this case, the picture shown is a thermal imaging camera so sometimes people will go to that additional expense. One subcategory of all the cameras that are in the environment are going to be police observation devices. This is the category of sets of sensors which are operated by the police and they may include multiple cameras, gunshot detection, facial recognition. For example, in the United Kingdom, just said the city of London is doing live facial recognition. Police observation devices are a collection of these cameras in one location. Sometimes they're marked as police, sometimes they are not. The way you would suspect that it's a police observation device is if it has a lot of different sensors in one location trying to cover the whole ground around, then that is the kind of thing you would see most frequently from a police observation. Finally, smart street lights. Now, smart street lights have a number of wonderful applications. Some initiatives like in the US, smart cities, in the EU, the E Street initiative are imploring cities to use smart street lights because they can turn down the power usage when the light is less needed. There are some advanced ones. A project by the Ardholt University of Applied Sciences has a technology which will use motion detection, sound detection, being able to tell if there are people walking nearby and brighten their path for them. Sounds great, but the same kinds of technology being able to detect motion, being able to have audio signals, video signals can be used for surveillance. So here on the slide we show the smart lighting capabilities being advertised by Intel. In addition to some things that you might expect like being able to adjust it for traffic patterns, provide better lights, they talk about other things, crime investigations, monitor parking violations, safety announcements that are coming from the smart cameras. So all of these technologies are possible and hopefully this will not become a commonplace use, but if it is, it would mean that a surveillance device is everywhere along every street when they're putting these devices in. If you're blanking a city, you're blanking a city with surveillance. So has it been used? Yes. The city of San Diego had a number of protests surrounding the protests around George Floyd and they used at least 35 times. They searched the information gathered through the smart streetlight network for evidence and criminal cases coming out of that protest. So what additional resources are there? There's plenty of additional resources if you want to drive in more and I encourage you to take this only as a starting point. There's a lot more to learn. So we'll start out with a very important resource. If you're somebody who's going to go, whether as an activist, as a protester, as a journalist, you should prepare yourself for some surveillance, self-defense. ssd.eff.org. We have an attending a protest guide. You can go there and learn important tips when protecting yourself when you're going to the protest. Put your device with full disc encryption, a strong, unique password, turning off the biometric unlock, use end-to-end encryption for messages and calls, walking, or taking a bicycle to get to the protest instead of a vehicle which can be subject to an ALPR and PR device. You wear a mask. You should wear a mask for COVID anyway, but if you're going to wear a mask, get a bigger, the larger the mask, the more it protects you. There's also recently a study that showed that they're making efforts to try and make facial brick recognition continue on despite people's uses of masks. There's a study that showed that red and black masks were harder for the AI to be able to determine who was behind the mask. So wear a red and black mask. To get one that covers more of your face like a bandana, it's going to be harder for the facial recognition conference. Do some things to protect yourself both from COVID and from surveillance. If you want to also just try and practice it out, you can go to our spot the surveillance. This is an online program. You can use a desktop version or virtual reality version where it places you in a virtual street corner with some surveillance devices nearby and you can look around and try to identify all the surveillance devices that you see. It takes just a few minutes to go through the exercise, but it's a good way to practice your skills and identify what surveillance might be around on the street. If you want to get a lot more information about any of these devices, go to EFF's street level surveillance project, EFF.org, street level surveillance. This will provide more detailed information about various technologies that are in use. That can be a good starting point, especially if you have found out what is being used in your jurisdiction. You can go there and find out more about it. You can also find out just what is going on more generally with these kinds of technologies. EFF.org slash SLS. Thank you that comes to the close of my talk. Thank you for tuning in. Now let me turn it over to my future self for Q&A. Welcome back. Thanks. Thanks so much, Kurt. We have some time for questions and it's getting more and more. I'm just tearing up. Okay. Are there devices, apps, or services developed or run by private companies? And who makes sure the data is not directly sold to third parties? So, yes, there are private networks. I mean, one of the things we talked about just now is there's a lot of private camera networks that are providing information to the police. Sometimes private networks go into a registry where police are organized as people volunteer, put their information into a registry so they are explicitly saying they're going to turn over their information to the police. Other things like Amazon's Ring camera, they have been promoting it as an anti-theft tool, trying to stop packaged theft people's doors. But this also is creating an opticon of everyone's doorbell camera. If they're all using Ring, we'll get the video and we'll provide it to the police. And many of these organizations, if they're a larger one, they will have some privacy practices, policies. But by and large, they will talk about the privacy of the person who owns the KS Smart device and not really consider the bystanders, the people walking by. So, you have a doorbell camera at your front door that can hear audio, so maybe someone can ring your bell and say hello. It will also capture people walking by. And those people's privacy is important and should be considered. All right. Then we have, what help do we have against all this? Which best case legal countermeasures do we have when attending protests? And another one which I would connect directly, is it possible to intervene against surveillance based on laws or presumption of innocence? I don't know if German laws are meant, but maybe you still can say something. Well, I mean, so there's many different laws that might be an issue. I mean, we have an international audience here. But I think there are some principles of basic human rights principles that apply for many jurisdictions. But I would say actually one of the most effective tools to push back against this kind of police surveillance is working locally with the, like a city, the mayor, the city council, and a number of locations have passed rules about what their police can do against their citizens. So putting limitations on what police can do at the local level where your activism in the city, which you live, taking things to your representative government and saying, we need to have some limitations on this. We need to have it in civilian controls where the police themselves are not deciding what technologies to use, but it has to pass through an elected representative. And I think that is probably one of the most effective ways to at least start change where you live. But you can also try and promote that to national legislature, state legislatures, go up several levels. And one of the things that we hope comes out of this guide, people getting more information on what kind of surveillance is available, is so that they can go to their representatives, go through the political process with the information of what tools to use. Ah, I saw you use by damp, they have drone flying above, go to your representative and say, we need to make sure that the information that they're gathered is being used in a manner consistent with human rights principles. And we need civilian control from the local government on how to do it. Who is controlling the control of the stencils? Yes. Okay, we have more questions. Okay. So the police operate equipment like a PR reader, in the catchers, etc. that get information that they could get in a cheaper way, like reading traffic signs or license plays or cell info from operators. Is there a reason for that? Especially concerning EU, because US differs a lot. And another question, has police in EU, US been known to use illegal or questionable tax for surveillance? So I think I'll hurt the first question about, you know, using things like ANPR to determine license plates. This technology is common in the European Union, though by and large it is being put in place for other reasons, not to get after protesters necessarily. They are looking for, you know, making sure that people are paying a toll or maybe a speed trap on the Autobahn, where it takes a picture of the license plate of anyone traveling over a speed limit in the places that have speed limits, only partly on the Autobahn. And I think also it's being used for enforcement of things like traffic citations, your car is parked in a location too long, they know who to send the bill to. And I think these technologies could be repurposed for surveillance. And that's what we really need is policies that are ensuring that if these things are being used for a purpose that the sort of the citizenship agrees with in that jurisdiction to enforce parking, for example, that it's not also being repurposed against political activities and being used at a wider scale than it was envisioned. Also, maybe, you know, it's not a good thing to have perfect parking enforcement. You know, a lot of parking fines were based on the notion that like you might not get caught every time. And when you change it where a system where previously the fines were set with the notion that a lot of people would get away with it, you had to like make an example of those who didn't. And then you change that to perfect enforcement because the computer, the ANPR system surveillance knows exactly the minute that a fine is due and then assesses that fine. That actually changes the dynamic of power between the citizenship and the state significantly. And it will often be phrased in forms of, well, we're just trying to enforce the existing laws. How would you be against that? But really, it changes the dynamic. And it's something that for those who want to be an activist on this, again, talk to your local jurisdiction and try and make sure that these things have safe and sane policies that respect human rights. So I would interpret that like prevention of, don't come into the idea that you need to protect your data, right? Yeah. And just turning to the other one, you know, do we have information about whether police are misusing these technologies? So I mean, there's some isolated examples where people have misused their technologies. And I used a couple of them in the slide. So there was someone who went to a political protest, their car was put into a database they got pulled over later. And then also in South Wales, the court found that there the police use of facial recognition was in violation of UK law, though as I noted, not, you know, the Metropolitan Police in London don't agree with that. They say it doesn't apply to them. And I think actually use of facial recognition technologies is a very tempting thing by the police. They want to use it as much as possible, make it easy for them. And I think you will see that. But the other piece of this is unless there are rules that say here are limitations on how you can use these technologies, then they can use them without having to risk violating them. So we need to have those rules in place. I hope that the Council of Europe puts a at least a moratorium on facial recognition for use for police. And, you know, until we can figure out how to use this technology safely, like it's kind of cool that you can unlock your phone or your face without having to type in a password. But we want to make sure that technology is used properly. Okay. So I think you're going to be around in the 2D world. You're going to explore that, you told me before. Yeah, there's more questions. I hope maybe maybe you find him in the 2D world and you're just asking there. Thanks so much. Thanks so much. Have a nice having you. Bye, Kurt.
 Yeah, and the next talk. I'm very proud to announce we have a speaker who is coming in  from sunny California. And he's an attorney. He's working for Harvard. He's doing so many  things and he's fighting for our digital rights. And I'm very happy to say hi. Welcome. Thank you.  Yeah. And spot the surveillance is the topic. We will see what we haven't seen before. And I'm  very happy that you're here and Kurt Abso, please let us know what's up. Thank you. Thank you. Hello,  everybody. My name is Kurt Abso. I'm the deputy executive director at General Counsel of the  Electronic Frontier Foundation. I'm here to talk to you about observing police surveillance at  protests. So why do we want to observe police at protests? Well, because protests are political  expression. At the Council of Europe put it, the right of individuals to gather with other people  and make their collective voice heard is fundamental to a properly functioning democracy. And this  is a right which is protected by the European Convention on Human Rights and other international  rights treaties. But surveillance can chill that right. And so knowing what technologies are used  can help you understand the threats to your privacy and security, as well as provide tools to  advocate for limits on police use of surveillance. Surveillance may chill people's right to express  themselves on these public issues. Just as analog surveillance historically has been used as a tool  for oppression. Nowadays, policymakers and the public have to understand that the threat posed by  emerging technologies is a danger to human rights. And they need to understand this to successfully  defend human rights in the digital age. So journalists who are reporting on protests and  these action should know the surveillance that is in use. Activists who are advocating for  limitations on police use of surveillance need to know what surveillance is being used to effectively  advocate. And legal observers may need to document the use of surveillance and protests in order to  challenge or police actions at the protest or challenge police policies that are being used  after the protest with the footage they've obtained. So when we go up today, we're going to provide a  lot of information about various types of surveillance technologies in use by police around  the world. We're going to look at what the appearance is, how it works, what kind of data  they collect, and how they're used by police. And at the end, we'll have a few other resources  available for those who want to dive a little bit deeper on the topic. So police surveillance  technology is everywhere. It's on the police themselves, on their vehicles, on the roadways.  It could be above you in the air. It's surrounding you in the environment. It can be a lot of  different places and you need to know where to look. On police officers themselves, you'll often find  it in the form of either body worn cameras or additional devices that they're using, which are  basically mobile biometric sensors. Body worn cameras are technology that's come out and become  more popular over the last decade or so. And originally it was something that was being used  as a way to provide police accountability that give a record of their interactions with the public.  And maybe, for example, could be used to show police brutality or maybe deter police brutality.  But there are two ways streets. Devices are often used to surveil protesters and the footage may  later be used to support arrests and charges. For example, we use this NPR story where after a  rally, weeks later, the police identified people through body cam footage and brought action  against them for obstructing the roadway, which is part of the civil disobedience of the protest,  based on finding them on the body cam footage. They can move in a variety of places. So if you're  looking for body worn cameras, you got to look in different places to see where they might be.  So a couple places, they might see them on the head, head mounted camera. So it might be on your  glasses on the side. It could be a lens right in the center. The center one is pretty hard to find,  but the ones on the side or might be part of the glasses or maybe a helmet that they're wearing are  generally pretty obvious. These ones, they're not particularly common, but they do happen.  Shoulder mounted cameras also a little bit less common, but they have an interesting feature.  In this case, we're using the Warrior 360 from Blue Line Animations as an example. And it is a dome  camera that looks all directions. So 360 degrees off the officer's left shoulder. On most cameras,  like a front facing camera, will capture only 180 degrees. Chest mounted cameras are the most  common. Nears are being used very, very widely. We give some examples here from Amsterdam,  Madelberg, and from West Midlands Police in the EU, or soon to be not in the EU for a case of Britain.  And there are several moon types. Axon, Wolfcom and Watchguard are very common. They operate in  similar manners though with some differences. And you can take a look at some of the examples that  are available on those companies' web pages where they will explain the product they have and offer  and see what matches up for your jurisdiction. Or you can also look in for news articles.  Oftentimes, there's a news article about when the first policy to bring body worn cameras is  introduced in a particular police department. There are also smartphone based cameras. And these  are kind of the low end. It's basically just an Android cell phone using its internal camera with  an app that does recording placed in a pocket. So the camera is a little bit above the clock and  can see forward. But it's also a very subtle technique. It could be easily confused if you weren't  looking with someone just storing their phone in their pocket. It also might be clipped somewhere  on their uniform. But if you see anything where the camera is facing outward and it's attached to  the officer, there's a good chance that that is a body worn camera. At least that app is in play.  Last, the body worn cameras. We'll talk about the semi obscuring cameras. This is an example from a  company called Body Worn. It's a product called Body Worn, company called Utility. And it is  partially concealed. It basically looks like a button on someone's uniform. That if you're not  looking closely, you might not notice. But if you see as you go in, it appears where you would  expect actually not to have a button. It's slightly larger. It looks a little bit different. It  looks like a camera if you look closely. But if you're looking at a distance and not particularly  paying attention, you might not see it at all. In addition to body worn cameras, please we'll  often use mobile biometric devices. So these can be handheld scanners or could be a tablet or a  camera phone. And in some cases, it just is a camera, which is a pretty good app on it. But we'll  see that you can sometimes tell whether they're using a phone or whether they're using as a  biometric scanner by the body language. So for example, if the police officer is holding up the  phone, trying to capture someone's face, that is most likely because they have a capturing a photo,  and they may be connecting that to a facial recognition application. And you also will see  mobile fingerprinting. So here's an example in the United Kingdom. They have an app on the  officer's phone combined with a fingerprint scanning device. And it takes the people's  fingerprints and checks them against some databases. One is a database of everyone the police out  of detain, putting it into the database, and then checking against it for new people. And the other  one is a database for immigration to collect it at the border when someone comes into the UK. And  this allows the police to do a very rapid check of their records on somebody in the field. Some  of these devices are multimodal. They'll do both. They'll be able to do fingerprints and take photos  for facial recognition. This here is the DataWorks Plus Evolution does both. And that can be  convenient for the officers, but it's a little bit more dangerous to some of the rates. And some of  the body warm cameras, this example Wolfcom, has a biometric capability built in facial recognition.  So it can use its regular camera functions. And of course, all of them take the picture that  picture could be uploaded to our database and facial recognition will be done later. But this  one is designed to streamline that process. So I'll take a moment as an aside to talk about  facial recognition in Europe. Per algorithm watch, the organization says that there are at least  11 police agencies in Europe who use facial recognition. I showed on the map here, the UK  Court of Appeal found that automatic facial recognition technology used by the South Wales  police was not lawful. However, elsewhere in the UK, they are still using it. The Metropolitan  Police is doing in London is doing a live facial recognition throughout the city of London. And  it contends that its situation is distinguishable from South Wales. So that doesn't apply to them.  We'll see how that turns out. There's also been some pressure on the European Commission to put a  ban in place or put restrictions on facial recognition. And in September, there was a quote  from the commissioners saying that they were considering whether we need additional safeguards  or whether we need to go further and not allow facial recognition in certain cases, in certain  areas, or even temporarily, which is not a particularly strong statement, but it is a, at  least they are considering the idea and something that one can advocate for in the United States.  A number of jurisdictions at the local levels, cities have put restrictions on their police  departments so they cannot use facial recognition. It's a growing movement. And while a national or  international law that would limit police use of facial recognition would be the best for civil  liberties, you can also start at your local level. All right, once we move beyond the police officers  or cells, where else? Vehicles and roadways. And this can come up for the vehicles, roadways,  both adjacent to the protests and within the protests themselves. So adjacent to the protests is  looking at the exits and entrances to the protest areas. And they may use existing ALPR or place  new ALPR or ANPR, automated number plate research called ALPR in the United States. These are cameras  generally we pointed towards a roadway to where cars will be that are designed to take a picture,  determine what the license plate, number plate is, optical character resolution. They will  eventually, recognition that we're eventually able to see what it is, check the database,  and find out who's registered for that car. And it can be uploaded to a central server for police  to search, can add vehicles to a watch list. It is a very powerful tool because many people  are using cars to get to and from protests. And even if they're going in a group, at least one  member of the group would have the car. And it has been used to go after someone after a protest.  So in this case, it was from a number years back, but a citizen in the UK went to a protest and was  later pulled over because they had captured the license plate while on the protest, added to a  database, and then used that to overload. So if there is a protest, the police might come in and  use a portable number plate reader. So here's some examples of what they might look like,  maybe they're on a tripod or on a trailer. And they can set these up basically anywhere. It would  often be used at the entrance or exit to the zone in which the protest is expected to see who's  coming in or who's coming out during the protest time period and try to capture the crowd through  their license plates. It also is now becoming more and more common on police commas. You can see a  couple of examples we have here. One shows it rather obvious. In the top one, that's a UK police car,  and you can see the camera sticks out fairly obvious that they have a camera on the light bar.  The lower one from the French police, less obvious. It looks like an ordinary light bar.  You might be able to tell that it's a little bit different than some other ones because it has  sort of a funny thing in the center, but it's a pretty subtle approach. So there's all kinds.  They might also be mounted on the hood or the trunk and may be more or less obvious.  But take a look at what the police car's behavior is. If they are driving, for example, slowly down  the street next to all sorts of parked cars, it may be that they are doing gritting, a practice  known as gritting, where they're looking for capturing every parked car's license plate  in a particular zone. You're trying to run slow and steady in order to do that.  And then there are the fixed number plate readers. These are often at traffic lights and intersections  on the highways. Any sort of high speed toll road will have them. They also are used for other  purposes like to establish fines, to check border crossings. They are very common fixtures on road  ways. So when a protest happens in a zone that already has them, the police will be able to  access that information and know who entered or exited that area to move around.  All right. And then within the protest itself,  they may be adding additional surveillance capacities. So in this example, we have a Santa Fe  police department knew about a protest that was protesting a statue. And there's a question  like maybe some people wouldn't take action and remove the statue. So in order to capture that  through surveillance, they placed this trailer, which has a number of camera and audio capabilities,  and just rolled it in right next to the statue to capture the protest action.  And these cameras can come in a variety of forms. In this case, we're going to watch towers.  Personal control cameras can be in, personnel controlling the cameras can be in the watch  tower or they can be operating remotely. As you can see, they are using a scissor jack to raise  it about that ban. The other one is an assembly. It's not easy for someone to get in and out of  there. So it may have a person, but it's somewhat inconvenient to actually have a person inside  these watch towers. But it's much more convenient to use their built-in surveillance capabilities  and remotely observe the area around the watch tower with those cameras.  And then there are also the pure surveillance units. This example here showing four cameras,  raised pole, and just adding surveillance capability basically to anywhere. And some of the,  some of them are much more complex, thermal imaging cameras. Thermal imaging often comes  from the leading company is FLIR, that stands for Forward Looking Infrared. FLIR system makes a lot  of these devices and makes them available. Police departments, thermal imaging cameras allow the  police to be able to conduct surveillance after dark, where the lighting is poor, where they  might not be able to identify individuals very easily. Instead, they can use their heat signature  and be able to continue to monitor the protests when the lighting conditions are less. And a lot  of things not a protest will happen at night. Candlelight and vigils are very common place.  So police will be looking to thermal imaging to make sure that they have strong surveillance  capabilities after dark. Another thing you might see around a protest is an emergency  command vehicle. These are often massive bus-sized vehicles and they do have some surveillance  capabilities. They might have some cameras, but more often they are commanded control. So they  are the places where somebody would be receiving footage from cameras and operating cameras remotely,  making communications with other people in the field. Though they also may have some built-in  capabilities and they may provide the focal point where the local connection, they're getting  information from local devices and then they have the uplink in the command center.  One thing I wanted to point out is a common misconception or something that comes up  a lot when people are concerned about police surveillance is they'll see an unmarked vehicle  of man with no windows. It may even have some antennas or satellites. And while that is possibly  an undercover police vehicle, you shouldn't assume that that vehicle belongs to law enforcement.  That could very easily be a news media vehicle. News media also goes to protests. They also have  satellite uplinks and antennas. They look very similar. And in some cases, the media has a  security situation. They're worried that there may be theft of equipment and they have unmarked vans.  So it is worth noting that there is an unmarked vehicle, but you shouldn't necessarily assume  that it is a police unmarked vehicle. Also, sometimes people see, especially they see,  some antennas or satellite dish on a vehicle, that maybe that's where a stingray is.  This is a misconception. Stingrays are pretty small and they don't require an external antenna  to operate. You could put a stingray inside a trunk of a car, maybe about briefcase sized.  So it would be unlikely that if you're going to use a stingray or a cell-side simulator or  MC catcher that you wouldn't want to put it in a vehicle, you don't need to put it in a vehicle  that has its own antenna. There have been not very much documentation of these technology  been used in the U.S. domestic protests. They have been used, we know, in some protests in more  authoritarian countries. So it's unclear how often they will be are being used.  And they are very dangerous things, simple. So an MC catcher, it is able to determine what cell  phones are nearby, get a unique identifier with that cell phone, and in many cases be able to use  that information to determine what individuals present in the protests. And that information  has been used after some protests in Ukraine, for example, to send a text message to people  all the time, remember, you know, we're on to you, we know you were there, which can be very  intimidating to individuals. But the challenge is if you're trying to observe police surveillance  on every desk, it is hard for you to observe it because they are often hidden. You may be able  to find out more information later through investigative journalism or public records  or news reports. If somebody is prosecuted using that information, it may become obvious,  but it's difficult to see at the protest itself. So next category, looking up in the sky.  There are lots of forms of aerial surveillance along with the agency will surveil protests from  above using traditional aircraft with onboard pilots, and as well as smaller remotely operated  aerial systems, drones. Law enforcement may also use these air-convicts to communicate with the  crowd, to use the loudspeakers to send a message to the crowd, order them to disperse. And we've  seen this actually drones with loudspeakers being used by the German police in order to  tell people to stay apart. Corona, that same technology can be used for protests.  And these plans and drones will often be equipped with high definition cameras,  capable of either an extremely wide angle to get the whole scene or an extreme zoom where they  might be able to zoom in on a particular person, a particular license plate, and then use that data  later partnering that the aircraft with license plate recognition, face recognition, video analytics,  and even a cell-side simulator inside the aircraft. And as you know, we know this has happened in a  recent protest in Texas, a Texas police drone caught some footage of a protester allegedly  throwing a water bottle. They took that video, they took the picture, put it out, offered a cash  award, and anonymous tip to turn the kid in, and protest was prosecuted. So police are definitely  using these things to gather information at protests. So a common method for especially larger  police departments is fixed wing aircraft. For smaller ones, they may use private contractors  to provide these fixed wing craft. So this is an example of the kind of plane used by a company  called Persistent Surveillance Systems. It rents out a plane like this. We're not this exact one.  If you look up that tail number, it's going to be two different companies, but this same model  of plane assessment 207. And these will circle around the protest using their cameras to observe  the protesters below. An advantage of planes is they can often circle for quite a long time  and provide a wide view of the area. Also helicopters. Helicopters will often be seen  hovering over a protest. They are a little bit easier to maneuver and be able to go backwards  and forwards over the protest and are used by police to continually observe. And we use two  examples here. One of them from the Oakland Police Department. The other one from the  Rhyanland Police Department. In both cases, they have a flur attached to the helicopter,  a forward-looking infrared that would allow them, in addition to regular capabilities,  to use thermal imaging to follow someone at a protest or follow what's going on after dark.  You can also see that some helicopters will have spotlights so that they can signal to officers  on the ground who to follow, who to pay attention to. And another thing for both fixed wing and  helicopters. You look for the tail number. In most jurisdictions, they're required to have  tail number visible. And then you can look up that tail number on services like Flight Aware  and be able to find out further information about what that plane has been doing, what the  helicopter has been doing, as well as the ownership. Finally, drones. Drones are becoming  very commonplace because they're getting cheaper all the time and have many additional capacities.  Drones are also known as unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs, UAS, unmanned aerial systems.  And a lot of police departments are getting them for their capabilities using most commonly a quad  rotor. And they can be controlled by remote control, have a camera built into this, and be useful for  getting above the scene view. So one way to spot it, well, first of all, just listen to it. They  make kind of a distinctive noise. Sometimes they'll be marked as police. You also look for the  pilots operating nearby. So oftentimes a drone, well, first of all, sometimes they're labeled,  like in the upper left there, it says police drone operating. Pretty easy to identify. Other times  they might have like drone, UAV, aviation unit on their uniform or a nearby police vehicle.  The other thing is that if you identify a drone, they're often within line of sight,  is going to be the operator. So once you see the drone, look around and see if someone has the  remote controls on their hand, is looking up at the drone, you can probably identify the operator  and you'll look for information they might have on their uniform about who is operating that  particular drone. But also keep in mind, both for drones and other aircraft, that it's not  necessarily the police. Journalists and activists will often fly drones over protests. News helicopters  for a large protest are going to be more common than police helicopters. And many times they are  labeled, which is a picture of the BBC News Copter. But this means that just as you see a helicopter  that has both a camera and is flying over the protest, that does not necessarily mean that it's  a police helicopter. Also another technology, which it's actually not very commonplace outside of  protests in war zones, but the drone killer technology, which is basically a ray gun that  knocks drones out of the sky, sending radio signals to interfere with the drone's operation  and cause it to fall and crash. These have been used in Iraq and Afghanistan and the technology  could be starting to be used, but we really haven't seen it used more frequently. I'm sure I'll tell  you about it because, oh my god, drone cameras. All right, last place to look for police technology  in the environment around you. There will be, in many places, camera networks. So a lot of the  cameras that you'll see in a neighborhood will have, will be private cameras, will be police  cameras, will be cameras being used by city non-police agencies. There can be a lot of  cameras. This also means that you're trying to observe what cameras are going on. There's going  to be too much information. There'll be so many cameras in many areas that you can spend all your  time documenting and observing the cameras and this other things. So you might not want to spend  all your time paying attention to that because you can go back later at any point and see the  fixed cameras. But there are a couple of things that I'm getting one more. So first, identifying  them. There are too many different brands to identify, but here's some information about the  kinds of cameras that are available. Bullet cameras are directional so you can sort of see  which way it's pointing and what it will be covering from that. Then you have dome cameras  which are designed so you can't see which way it's pointing or at least you can see maybe  somewhere in this area, 180 degrees, but the exact direction it's pointing is obscured by the dome.  Pan-tilt zoom cameras can change which way they're pointing. They can sometimes be coupled  with a dome camera so that the dome camera can both change the way it's looking and obscure  which way it's looking. Thermal imaging cameras and ALPR cameras are also going to be common at  fixed locations. ALPR, a lot of what we do with traffic control. Thermal is actually not as common  and is mostly used as a technology that is on vehicles, is kind of expensive, but in this case,  the picture shown is a thermal imaging camera so sometimes people will go to that additional expense.  One subcategory of all the cameras that are in the environment are going to be police observation  devices. This is the category of sets of sensors which are operated by the police and they may  include multiple cameras, gunshot detection, facial recognition. For example, in the United Kingdom,  just said the city of London is doing live facial recognition. Police observation devices  are a collection of these cameras in one location. Sometimes they're marked as police, sometimes they  are not. The way you would suspect that it's a police observation device is if it has a lot  of different sensors in one location trying to cover the whole ground around, then that is the  kind of thing you would see most frequently from a police observation. Finally, smart street lights.  Now, smart street lights have a number of wonderful applications. Some initiatives like in the US,  smart cities, in the EU, the E Street initiative are imploring cities to use smart street lights  because they can turn down the power usage when the light is less needed. There are some advanced  ones. A project by the Ardholt University of Applied Sciences has a technology which will  use motion detection, sound detection, being able to tell if there are people walking nearby  and brighten their path for them. Sounds great, but the same kinds of technology being able to  detect motion, being able to have audio signals, video signals can be used for surveillance.  So here on the slide we show the smart lighting capabilities being advertised by Intel.  In addition to some things that you might expect like being able to adjust it for traffic patterns,  provide better lights, they talk about other things, crime investigations, monitor parking  violations, safety announcements that are coming from the smart cameras. So all of these technologies  are possible and hopefully this will not become a commonplace use, but if it is, it would mean  that a surveillance device is everywhere along every street when they're putting these devices in.  If you're blanking a city, you're blanking a city with surveillance. So has it been used?  Yes. The city of San Diego had a number of protests surrounding the protests around George Floyd  and they used at least 35 times. They searched the information gathered through the smart  streetlight network for evidence and criminal cases coming out of that protest.  So what additional resources are there? There's plenty of additional resources if you want to  drive in more and I encourage you to take this only as a starting point. There's a lot more to  learn. So we'll start out with a very important resource. If you're somebody who's going to go,  whether as an activist, as a protester, as a journalist, you should prepare yourself  for some surveillance, self-defense. ssd.eff.org. We have an attending a protest guide. You can go  there and learn important tips when protecting yourself when you're going to the protest.  Put your device with full disc encryption, a strong, unique password, turning off the biometric  unlock, use end-to-end encryption for messages and calls, walking, or taking a bicycle to get  to the protest instead of a vehicle which can be subject to an ALPR and PR device. You wear a mask.  You should wear a mask for COVID anyway, but if you're going to wear a mask, get a bigger,  the larger the mask, the more it protects you. There's also recently a study that showed that  they're making efforts to try and make facial brick recognition continue on despite people's  uses of masks. There's a study that showed that red and black masks were harder for the AI to be able  to determine who was behind the mask. So wear a red and black mask. To get one that covers more of  your face like a bandana, it's going to be harder for the facial recognition conference. Do some  things to protect yourself both from COVID and from surveillance. If you want to also just  try and practice it out, you can go to our spot the surveillance. This is an online program. You  can use a desktop version or virtual reality version where it places you in a virtual street  corner with some surveillance devices nearby and you can look around and try to identify  all the surveillance devices that you see. It takes just a few minutes to go through the exercise,  but it's a good way to practice your skills and identify what surveillance might be around on the  street. If you want to get a lot more information about any of these devices, go to EFF's street  level surveillance project, EFF.org, street level surveillance. This will provide more detailed  information about various technologies that are in use. That can be a good starting point,  especially if you have found out what is being used in your jurisdiction. You can go there and  find out more about it. You can also find out just what is going on more generally with these  kinds of technologies. EFF.org slash SLS. Thank you that comes to the close of my talk.  Thank you for tuning in. Now let me turn it over to my future self for Q&A.  Welcome back. Thanks. Thanks so much, Kurt. We have some time for questions and it's getting more  and more. I'm just tearing up. Okay. Are there devices, apps, or services developed or run by  private companies? And who makes sure the data is not directly sold to third parties?  So, yes, there are private networks. I mean, one of the things we talked about just now is there's  a lot of private camera networks that are providing information to the police. Sometimes private networks  go into a registry where police are organized as people volunteer, put their information into a  registry so they are explicitly saying they're going to turn over their information to the police.  Other things like Amazon's Ring camera, they have been promoting it as an anti-theft tool,  trying to stop packaged theft people's doors. But this also is creating an opticon of everyone's  doorbell camera. If they're all using Ring, we'll get the video and we'll provide it to  the police. And many of these organizations, if they're a larger one, they will have some  privacy practices, policies. But by and large, they will talk about the privacy of the person who  owns the KS Smart device and not really consider the bystanders, the people walking by. So, you have  a doorbell camera at your front door that can hear audio, so maybe someone can ring your bell  and say hello. It will also capture people walking by. And those people's privacy is important  and should be considered. All right. Then we have, what help do we have against all this? Which best  case legal countermeasures do we have when attending protests? And another one which I would connect  directly, is it possible to intervene against surveillance based on laws or presumption of  innocence? I don't know if German laws are meant, but maybe you still can say something.  Well, I mean, so there's many different laws that might be an issue. I mean, we have an  international audience here. But I think there are some principles of basic human rights principles  that apply for many jurisdictions. But I would say actually one of the most effective tools to push  back against this kind of police surveillance is working locally with the, like a city, the mayor,  the city council, and a number of locations have passed rules about what their police can do against  their citizens. So putting limitations on what police can do at the local level where your  activism in the city, which you live, taking things to your representative government and saying,  we need to have some limitations on this. We need to have it in civilian controls where the police  themselves are not deciding what technologies to use, but it has to pass through an elected  representative. And I think that is probably one of the most effective ways to at least start change  where you live. But you can also try and promote that to national legislature, state legislatures,  go up several levels. And one of the things that we hope comes out of this guide, people getting  more information on what kind of surveillance is available, is so that they can go to their  representatives, go through the political process with the information of what tools to use. Ah,  I saw you use by damp, they have drone flying above, go to your representative and say, we need to  make sure that the information that they're gathered is being used in a manner consistent with  human rights principles. And we need civilian control from the local government on how to do  it. Who is controlling the control of the stencils? Yes. Okay, we have more questions.  Okay. So the police operate equipment like a PR reader, in the catchers, etc. that get  information that they could get in a cheaper way, like reading traffic signs or license  plays or cell info from operators. Is there a reason for that? Especially concerning EU,  because US differs a lot. And another question, has police in EU, US been known to use illegal  or questionable tax for surveillance? So I think I'll hurt the first question about, you know,  using things like ANPR to determine license plates. This technology is common in the  European Union, though by and large it is being put in place for other reasons, not to get  after protesters necessarily. They are looking for, you know, making sure that people are paying  a toll or maybe a speed trap on the Autobahn, where it takes a picture of the license plate of  anyone traveling over a speed limit in the places that have speed limits, only partly on the Autobahn.  And I think also it's being used for enforcement of things like traffic citations, your car is  parked in a location too long, they know who to send the bill to. And I think these technologies  could be repurposed for surveillance. And that's what we really need is policies that are ensuring  that if these things are being used for a purpose that the sort of the citizenship agrees with in  that jurisdiction to enforce parking, for example, that it's not also being repurposed against political  activities and being used at a wider scale than it was envisioned. Also, maybe, you know, it's not  a good thing to have perfect parking enforcement. You know, a lot of parking fines were based on  the notion that like you might not get caught every time. And when you change it where a system  where previously the fines were set with the notion that a lot of people would get away with it,  you had to like make an example of those who didn't. And then you change that to perfect  enforcement because the computer, the ANPR system surveillance knows exactly the minute that a fine  is due and then assesses that fine. That actually changes the dynamic of power between the citizenship  and the state significantly. And it will often be phrased in forms of, well, we're just trying to  enforce the existing laws. How would you be against that? But really, it changes the dynamic. And  it's something that for those who want to be an activist on this, again, talk to your local  jurisdiction and try and make sure that these things have safe and sane policies that respect  human rights. So I would interpret that like prevention of, don't come into the idea that  you need to protect your data, right? Yeah. And just turning to the other one, you know,  do we have information about whether police are misusing these technologies? So I mean,  there's some isolated examples where people have misused their technologies. And I used a couple  of them in the slide. So there was someone who went to a political protest, their car was put  into a database they got pulled over later. And then also in South Wales, the court found that  there the police use of facial recognition was in violation of UK law, though as I noted, not,  you know, the Metropolitan Police in London don't agree with that. They say it doesn't apply to them.  And I think actually use of facial recognition technologies is a very tempting thing by the  police. They want to use it as much as possible, make it easy for them. And I think you will see  that. But the other piece of this is unless there are rules that say here are limitations on how you  can use these technologies, then they can use them without having to risk violating them.  So we need to have those rules in place. I hope that the Council of Europe puts a at least a  moratorium on facial recognition for use for police. And, you know, until we can figure out  how to use this technology safely, like it's kind of cool that you can unlock your phone or your  face without having to type in a password. But we want to make sure that technology is used properly.  Okay. So I think you're going to be around in the 2D world. You're going to explore that,  you told me before. Yeah, there's more questions. I hope maybe maybe you find him in the 2D world  and you're just asking there. Thanks so much. Thanks so much. Have a nice having you. Bye, Kurt.
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Yeah, and the next talk. I'm very proud to announce we have a speaker who is coming in from sunny California. And he's an attorney. He's working for Harvard. He's doing so many things and he's fighting for our digital rights. And I'm very happy to say hi. Welcome. Thank you. Yeah. And spot the surveillance is the topic. We will see what we haven't seen before. And I'm very happy that you're here and Kurt Abso, please let us know what's up. Thank you. Thank you. Hello, everybody. My name is Kurt Abso. I'm the deputy executive director at General Counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I'm here to talk to you about observing police surveillance at protests. So why do we want to observe police at protests? Well, because protests are political expression. At the Council of Europe put it, the right of individuals to gather with other people and make their collective voice heard is fundamental to a properly functioning democracy. And this is a right which is protected by the European Convention on Human Rights and other international rights treaties. But surveillance can chill that right. And so knowing what technologies are used can help you understand the threats to your privacy and security, as well as provide tools to advocate for limits on police use of surveillance. Surveillance may chill people's right to express themselves on these public issues. Just as analog surveillance historically has been used as a tool for oppression. Nowadays, policymakers and the public have to understand that the threat posed by emerging technologies is a danger to human rights. And they need to understand this to successfully defend human rights in the digital age. So journalists who are reporting on protests and these action should know the surveillance that is in use. Activists who are advocating for limitations on police use of surveillance need to know what surveillance is being used to effectively advocate. And legal observers may need to document the use of surveillance and protests in order to challenge or police actions at the protest or challenge police policies that are being used after the protest with the footage they've obtained. So when we go up today, we're going to provide a lot of information about various types of surveillance technologies in use by police around the world. We're going to look at what the appearance is, how it works, what kind of data they collect, and how they're used by police. And at the end, we'll have a few other resources available for those who want to dive a little bit deeper on the topic. So police surveillance technology is everywhere. It's on the police themselves, on their vehicles, on the roadways. It could be above you in the air. It's surrounding you in the environment. It can be a lot of different places and you need to know where to look. On police officers themselves, you'll often find it in the form of either body worn cameras or additional devices that they're using, which are basically mobile biometric sensors. Body worn cameras are technology that's come out and become more popular over the last decade or so. And originally it was something that was being used as a way to provide police accountability that give a record of their interactions with the public. And maybe, for example, could be used to show police brutality or maybe deter police brutality. But there are two ways streets. Devices are often used to surveil protesters and the footage may later be used to support arrests and charges. For example, we use this NPR story where after a rally, weeks later, the police identified people through body cam footage and brought action against them for obstructing the roadway, which is part of the civil disobedience of the protest, based on finding them on the body cam footage. They can move in a variety of places. So if you're looking for body worn cameras, you got to look in different places to see where they might be. So a couple places, they might see them on the head, head mounted camera. So it might be on your glasses on the side. It could be a lens right in the center. The center one is pretty hard to find, but the ones on the side or might be part of the glasses or maybe a helmet that they're wearing are generally pretty obvious. These ones, they're not particularly common, but they do happen. Shoulder mounted cameras also a little bit less common, but they have an interesting feature. In this case, we're using the Warrior 360 from Blue Line Animations as an example. And it is a dome camera that looks all directions. So 360 degrees off the officer's left shoulder. On most cameras, like a front facing camera, will capture only 180 degrees. Chest mounted cameras are the most common. Nears are being used very, very widely. We give some examples here from Amsterdam, Madelberg, and from West Midlands Police in the EU, or soon to be not in the EU for a case of Britain. And there are several moon types. Axon, Wolfcom and Watchguard are very common. They operate in similar manners though with some differences. And you can take a look at some of the examples that are available on those companies' web pages where they will explain the product they have and offer and see what matches up for your jurisdiction. Or you can also look in for news articles. Oftentimes, there's a news article about when the first policy to bring body worn cameras is introduced in a particular police department. There are also smartphone based cameras. And these are kind of the low end. It's basically just an Android cell phone using its internal camera with an app that does recording placed in a pocket. So the camera is a little bit above the clock and can see forward. But it's also a very subtle technique. It could be easily confused if you weren't looking with someone just storing their phone in their pocket. It also might be clipped somewhere on their uniform. But if you see anything where the camera is facing outward and it's attached to the officer, there's a good chance that that is a body worn camera. At least that app is in play. Last, the body worn cameras. We'll talk about the semi obscuring cameras. This is an example from a company called Body Worn. It's a product called Body Worn, company called Utility. And it is partially concealed. It basically looks like a button on someone's uniform. That if you're not looking closely, you might not notice. But if you see as you go in, it appears where you would expect actually not to have a button. It's slightly larger. It looks a little bit different. It looks like a camera if you look closely. But if you're looking at a distance and not particularly paying attention, you might not see it at all. In addition to body worn cameras, please we'll often use mobile biometric devices. So these can be handheld scanners or could be a tablet or a camera phone. And in some cases, it just is a camera, which is a pretty good app on it. But we'll see that you can sometimes tell whether they're using a phone or whether they're using as a biometric scanner by the body language. So for example, if the police officer is holding up the phone, trying to capture someone's face, that is most likely because they have a capturing a photo, and they may be connecting that to a facial recognition application. And you also will see mobile fingerprinting. So here's an example in the United Kingdom. They have an app on the officer's phone combined with a fingerprint scanning device. And it takes the people's fingerprints and checks them against some databases. One is a database of everyone the police out of detain, putting it into the database, and then checking against it for new people. And the other one is a database for immigration to collect it at the border when someone comes into the UK. And this allows the police to do a very rapid check of their records on somebody in the field. Some of these devices are multimodal. They'll do both. They'll be able to do fingerprints and take photos for facial recognition. This here is the DataWorks Plus Evolution does both. And that can be convenient for the officers, but it's a little bit more dangerous to some of the rates. And some of the body warm cameras, this example Wolfcom, has a biometric capability built in facial recognition. So it can use its regular camera functions. And of course, all of them take the picture that picture could be uploaded to our database and facial recognition will be done later. But this one is designed to streamline that process. So I'll take a moment as an aside to talk about facial recognition in Europe. Per algorithm watch, the organization says that there are at least 11 police agencies in Europe who use facial recognition. I showed on the map here, the UK Court of Appeal found that automatic facial recognition technology used by the South Wales police was not lawful. However, elsewhere in the UK, they are still using it. The Metropolitan Police is doing in London is doing a live facial recognition throughout the city of London. And it contends that its situation is distinguishable from South Wales. So that doesn't apply to them. We'll see how that turns out. There's also been some pressure on the European Commission to put a ban in place or put restrictions on facial recognition. And in September, there was a quote from the commissioners saying that they were considering whether we need additional safeguards or whether we need to go further and not allow facial recognition in certain cases, in certain areas, or even temporarily, which is not a particularly strong statement, but it is a, at least they are considering the idea and something that one can advocate for in the United States. A number of jurisdictions at the local levels, cities have put restrictions on their police departments so they cannot use facial recognition. It's a growing movement. And while a national or international law that would limit police use of facial recognition would be the best for civil liberties, you can also start at your local level. All right, once we move beyond the police officers or cells, where else? Vehicles and roadways. And this can come up for the vehicles, roadways, both adjacent to the protests and within the protests themselves. So adjacent to the protests is looking at the exits and entrances to the protest areas. And they may use existing ALPR or place new ALPR or ANPR, automated number plate research called ALPR in the United States. These are cameras generally we pointed towards a roadway to where cars will be that are designed to take a picture, determine what the license plate, number plate is, optical character resolution. They will eventually, recognition that we're eventually able to see what it is, check the database, and find out who's registered for that car. And it can be uploaded to a central server for police to search, can add vehicles to a watch list. It is a very powerful tool because many people are using cars to get to and from protests. And even if they're going in a group, at least one member of the group would have the car. And it has been used to go after someone after a protest. So in this case, it was from a number years back, but a citizen in the UK went to a protest and was later pulled over because they had captured the license plate while on the protest, added to a database, and then used that to overload. So if there is a protest, the police might come in and use a portable number plate reader. So here's some examples of what they might look like, maybe they're on a tripod or on a trailer. And they can set these up basically anywhere. It would often be used at the entrance or exit to the zone in which the protest is expected to see who's coming in or who's coming out during the protest time period and try to capture the crowd through their license plates. It also is now becoming more and more common on police commas. You can see a couple of examples we have here. One shows it rather obvious. In the top one, that's a UK police car, and you can see the camera sticks out fairly obvious that they have a camera on the light bar. The lower one from the French police, less obvious. It looks like an ordinary light bar. You might be able to tell that it's a little bit different than some other ones because it has sort of a funny thing in the center, but it's a pretty subtle approach. So there's all kinds. They might also be mounted on the hood or the trunk and may be more or less obvious. But take a look at what the police car's behavior is. If they are driving, for example, slowly down the street next to all sorts of parked cars, it may be that they are doing gritting, a practice known as gritting, where they're looking for capturing every parked car's license plate in a particular zone. You're trying to run slow and steady in order to do that. And then there are the fixed number plate readers. These are often at traffic lights and intersections on the highways. Any sort of high speed toll road will have them. They also are used for other purposes like to establish fines, to check border crossings. They are very common fixtures on road ways. So when a protest happens in a zone that already has them, the police will be able to access that information and know who entered or exited that area to move around. All right. And then within the protest itself, they may be adding additional surveillance capacities. So in this example, we have a Santa Fe police department knew about a protest that was protesting a statue. And there's a question like maybe some people wouldn't take action and remove the statue. So in order to capture that through surveillance, they placed this trailer, which has a number of camera and audio capabilities, and just rolled it in right next to the statue to capture the protest action. And these cameras can come in a variety of forms. In this case, we're going to watch towers. Personal control cameras can be in, personnel controlling the cameras can be in the watch tower or they can be operating remotely. As you can see, they are using a scissor jack to raise it about that ban. The other one is an assembly. It's not easy for someone to get in and out of there. So it may have a person, but it's somewhat inconvenient to actually have a person inside these watch towers. But it's much more convenient to use their built-in surveillance capabilities and remotely observe the area around the watch tower with those cameras. And then there are also the pure surveillance units. This example here showing four cameras, raised pole, and just adding surveillance capability basically to anywhere. And some of the, some of them are much more complex, thermal imaging cameras. Thermal imaging often comes from the leading company is FLIR, that stands for Forward Looking Infrared. FLIR system makes a lot of these devices and makes them available. Police departments, thermal imaging cameras allow the police to be able to conduct surveillance after dark, where the lighting is poor, where they might not be able to identify individuals very easily. Instead, they can use their heat signature and be able to continue to monitor the protests when the lighting conditions are less. And a lot of things not a protest will happen at night. Candlelight and vigils are very common place. So police will be looking to thermal imaging to make sure that they have strong surveillance capabilities after dark. Another thing you might see around a protest is an emergency command vehicle. These are often massive bus-sized vehicles and they do have some surveillance capabilities. They might have some cameras, but more often they are commanded control. So they are the places where somebody would be receiving footage from cameras and operating cameras remotely, making communications with other people in the field. Though they also may have some built-in capabilities and they may provide the focal point where the local connection, they're getting information from local devices and then they have the uplink in the command center. One thing I wanted to point out is a common misconception or something that comes up a lot when people are concerned about police surveillance is they'll see an unmarked vehicle of man with no windows. It may even have some antennas or satellites. And while that is possibly an undercover police vehicle, you shouldn't assume that that vehicle belongs to law enforcement. That could very easily be a news media vehicle. News media also goes to protests. They also have satellite uplinks and antennas. They look very similar. And in some cases, the media has a security situation. They're worried that there may be theft of equipment and they have unmarked vans. So it is worth noting that there is an unmarked vehicle, but you shouldn't necessarily assume that it is a police unmarked vehicle. Also, sometimes people see, especially they see, some antennas or satellite dish on a vehicle, that maybe that's where a stingray is. This is a misconception. Stingrays are pretty small and they don't require an external antenna to operate. You could put a stingray inside a trunk of a car, maybe about briefcase sized. So it would be unlikely that if you're going to use a stingray or a cell-side simulator or MC catcher that you wouldn't want to put it in a vehicle, you don't need to put it in a vehicle that has its own antenna. There have been not very much documentation of these technology been used in the U.S. domestic protests. They have been used, we know, in some protests in more authoritarian countries. So it's unclear how often they will be are being used. And they are very dangerous things, simple. So an MC catcher, it is able to determine what cell phones are nearby, get a unique identifier with that cell phone, and in many cases be able to use that information to determine what individuals present in the protests. And that information has been used after some protests in Ukraine, for example, to send a text message to people all the time, remember, you know, we're on to you, we know you were there, which can be very intimidating to individuals. But the challenge is if you're trying to observe police surveillance on every desk, it is hard for you to observe it because they are often hidden. You may be able to find out more information later through investigative journalism or public records or news reports. If somebody is prosecuted using that information, it may become obvious, but it's difficult to see at the protest itself. So next category, looking up in the sky. There are lots of forms of aerial surveillance along with the agency will surveil protests from above using traditional aircraft with onboard pilots, and as well as smaller remotely operated aerial systems, drones. Law enforcement may also use these air-convicts to communicate with the crowd, to use the loudspeakers to send a message to the crowd, order them to disperse. And we've seen this actually drones with loudspeakers being used by the German police in order to tell people to stay apart. Corona, that same technology can be used for protests. And these plans and drones will often be equipped with high definition cameras, capable of either an extremely wide angle to get the whole scene or an extreme zoom where they might be able to zoom in on a particular person, a particular license plate, and then use that data later partnering that the aircraft with license plate recognition, face recognition, video analytics, and even a cell-side simulator inside the aircraft. And as you know, we know this has happened in a recent protest in Texas, a Texas police drone caught some footage of a protester allegedly throwing a water bottle. They took that video, they took the picture, put it out, offered a cash award, and anonymous tip to turn the kid in, and protest was prosecuted. So police are definitely using these things to gather information at protests. So a common method for especially larger police departments is fixed wing aircraft. For smaller ones, they may use private contractors to provide these fixed wing craft. So this is an example of the kind of plane used by a company called Persistent Surveillance Systems. It rents out a plane like this. We're not this exact one. If you look up that tail number, it's going to be two different companies, but this same model of plane assessment 207. And these will circle around the protest using their cameras to observe the protesters below. An advantage of planes is they can often circle for quite a long time and provide a wide view of the area. Also helicopters. Helicopters will often be seen hovering over a protest. They are a little bit easier to maneuver and be able to go backwards and forwards over the protest and are used by police to continually observe. And we use two examples here. One of them from the Oakland Police Department. The other one from the Rhyanland Police Department. In both cases, they have a flur attached to the helicopter, a forward-looking infrared that would allow them, in addition to regular capabilities, to use thermal imaging to follow someone at a protest or follow what's going on after dark. You can also see that some helicopters will have spotlights so that they can signal to officers on the ground who to follow, who to pay attention to. And another thing for both fixed wing and helicopters. You look for the tail number. In most jurisdictions, they're required to have tail number visible. And then you can look up that tail number on services like Flight Aware and be able to find out further information about what that plane has been doing, what the helicopter has been doing, as well as the ownership. Finally, drones. Drones are becoming very commonplace because they're getting cheaper all the time and have many additional capacities. Drones are also known as unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs, UAS, unmanned aerial systems. And a lot of police departments are getting them for their capabilities using most commonly a quad rotor. And they can be controlled by remote control, have a camera built into this, and be useful for getting above the scene view. So one way to spot it, well, first of all, just listen to it. They make kind of a distinctive noise. Sometimes they'll be marked as police. You also look for the pilots operating nearby. So oftentimes a drone, well, first of all, sometimes they're labeled, like in the upper left there, it says police drone operating. Pretty easy to identify. Other times they might have like drone, UAV, aviation unit on their uniform or a nearby police vehicle. The other thing is that if you identify a drone, they're often within line of sight, is going to be the operator. So once you see the drone, look around and see if someone has the remote controls on their hand, is looking up at the drone, you can probably identify the operator and you'll look for information they might have on their uniform about who is operating that particular drone. But also keep in mind, both for drones and other aircraft, that it's not necessarily the police. Journalists and activists will often fly drones over protests. News helicopters for a large protest are going to be more common than police helicopters. And many times they are labeled, which is a picture of the BBC News Copter. But this means that just as you see a helicopter that has both a camera and is flying over the protest, that does not necessarily mean that it's a police helicopter. Also another technology, which it's actually not very commonplace outside of protests in war zones, but the drone killer technology, which is basically a ray gun that knocks drones out of the sky, sending radio signals to interfere with the drone's operation and cause it to fall and crash. These have been used in Iraq and Afghanistan and the technology could be starting to be used, but we really haven't seen it used more frequently. I'm sure I'll tell you about it because, oh my god, drone cameras. All right, last place to look for police technology in the environment around you. There will be, in many places, camera networks. So a lot of the cameras that you'll see in a neighborhood will have, will be private cameras, will be police cameras, will be cameras being used by city non-police agencies. There can be a lot of cameras. This also means that you're trying to observe what cameras are going on. There's going to be too much information. There'll be so many cameras in many areas that you can spend all your time documenting and observing the cameras and this other things. So you might not want to spend all your time paying attention to that because you can go back later at any point and see the fixed cameras. But there are a couple of things that I'm getting one more. So first, identifying them. There are too many different brands to identify, but here's some information about the kinds of cameras that are available. Bullet cameras are directional so you can sort of see which way it's pointing and what it will be covering from that. Then you have dome cameras which are designed so you can't see which way it's pointing or at least you can see maybe somewhere in this area, 180 degrees, but the exact direction it's pointing is obscured by the dome. Pan-tilt zoom cameras can change which way they're pointing. They can sometimes be coupled with a dome camera so that the dome camera can both change the way it's looking and obscure which way it's looking. Thermal imaging cameras and ALPR cameras are also going to be common at fixed locations. ALPR, a lot of what we do with traffic control. Thermal is actually not as common and is mostly used as a technology that is on vehicles, is kind of expensive, but in this case, the picture shown is a thermal imaging camera so sometimes people will go to that additional expense. One subcategory of all the cameras that are in the environment are going to be police observation devices. This is the category of sets of sensors which are operated by the police and they may include multiple cameras, gunshot detection, facial recognition. For example, in the United Kingdom, just said the city of London is doing live facial recognition. Police observation devices are a collection of these cameras in one location. Sometimes they're marked as police, sometimes they are not. The way you would suspect that it's a police observation device is if it has a lot of different sensors in one location trying to cover the whole ground around, then that is the kind of thing you would see most frequently from a police observation. Finally, smart street lights. Now, smart street lights have a number of wonderful applications. Some initiatives like in the US, smart cities, in the EU, the E Street initiative are imploring cities to use smart street lights because they can turn down the power usage when the light is less needed. There are some advanced ones. A project by the Ardholt University of Applied Sciences has a technology which will use motion detection, sound detection, being able to tell if there are people walking nearby and brighten their path for them. Sounds great, but the same kinds of technology being able to detect motion, being able to have audio signals, video signals can be used for surveillance. So here on the slide we show the smart lighting capabilities being advertised by Intel. In addition to some things that you might expect like being able to adjust it for traffic patterns, provide better lights, they talk about other things, crime investigations, monitor parking violations, safety announcements that are coming from the smart cameras. So all of these technologies are possible and hopefully this will not become a commonplace use, but if it is, it would mean that a surveillance device is everywhere along every street when they're putting these devices in. If you're blanking a city, you're blanking a city with surveillance. So has it been used? Yes. The city of San Diego had a number of protests surrounding the protests around George Floyd and they used at least 35 times. They searched the information gathered through the smart streetlight network for evidence and criminal cases coming out of that protest. So what additional resources are there? There's plenty of additional resources if you want to drive in more and I encourage you to take this only as a starting point. There's a lot more to learn. So we'll start out with a very important resource. If you're somebody who's going to go, whether as an activist, as a protester, as a journalist, you should prepare yourself for some surveillance, self-defense. ssd.eff.org. We have an attending a protest guide. You can go there and learn important tips when protecting yourself when you're going to the protest. Put your device with full disc encryption, a strong, unique password, turning off the biometric unlock, use end-to-end encryption for messages and calls, walking, or taking a bicycle to get to the protest instead of a vehicle which can be subject to an ALPR and PR device. You wear a mask. You should wear a mask for COVID anyway, but if you're going to wear a mask, get a bigger, the larger the mask, the more it protects you. There's also recently a study that showed that they're making efforts to try and make facial brick recognition continue on despite people's uses of masks. There's a study that showed that red and black masks were harder for the AI to be able to determine who was behind the mask. So wear a red and black mask. To get one that covers more of your face like a bandana, it's going to be harder for the facial recognition conference. Do some things to protect yourself both from COVID and from surveillance. If you want to also just try and practice it out, you can go to our spot the surveillance. This is an online program. You can use a desktop version or virtual reality version where it places you in a virtual street corner with some surveillance devices nearby and you can look around and try to identify all the surveillance devices that you see. It takes just a few minutes to go through the exercise, but it's a good way to practice your skills and identify what surveillance might be around on the street. If you want to get a lot more information about any of these devices, go to EFF's street level surveillance project, EFF.org, street level surveillance. This will provide more detailed information about various technologies that are in use. That can be a good starting point, especially if you have found out what is being used in your jurisdiction. You can go there and find out more about it. You can also find out just what is going on more generally with these kinds of technologies. EFF.org slash SLS. Thank you that comes to the close of my talk. Thank you for tuning in. Now let me turn it over to my future self for Q&A. Welcome back. Thanks. Thanks so much, Kurt. We have some time for questions and it's getting more and more. I'm just tearing up. Okay. Are there devices, apps, or services developed or run by private companies? And who makes sure the data is not directly sold to third parties? So, yes, there are private networks. I mean, one of the things we talked about just now is there's a lot of private camera networks that are providing information to the police. Sometimes private networks go into a registry where police are organized as people volunteer, put their information into a registry so they are explicitly saying they're going to turn over their information to the police. Other things like Amazon's Ring camera, they have been promoting it as an anti-theft tool, trying to stop packaged theft people's doors. But this also is creating an opticon of everyone's doorbell camera. If they're all using Ring, we'll get the video and we'll provide it to the police. And many of these organizations, if they're a larger one, they will have some privacy practices, policies. But by and large, they will talk about the privacy of the person who owns the KS Smart device and not really consider the bystanders, the people walking by. So, you have a doorbell camera at your front door that can hear audio, so maybe someone can ring your bell and say hello. It will also capture people walking by. And those people's privacy is important and should be considered. All right. Then we have, what help do we have against all this? Which best case legal countermeasures do we have when attending protests? And another one which I would connect directly, is it possible to intervene against surveillance based on laws or presumption of innocence? I don't know if German laws are meant, but maybe you still can say something. Well, I mean, so there's many different laws that might be an issue. I mean, we have an international audience here. But I think there are some principles of basic human rights principles that apply for many jurisdictions. But I would say actually one of the most effective tools to push back against this kind of police surveillance is working locally with the, like a city, the mayor, the city council, and a number of locations have passed rules about what their police can do against their citizens. So putting limitations on what police can do at the local level where your activism in the city, which you live, taking things to your representative government and saying, we need to have some limitations on this. We need to have it in civilian controls where the police themselves are not deciding what technologies to use, but it has to pass through an elected representative. And I think that is probably one of the most effective ways to at least start change where you live. But you can also try and promote that to national legislature, state legislatures, go up several levels. And one of the things that we hope comes out of this guide, people getting more information on what kind of surveillance is available, is so that they can go to their representatives, go through the political process with the information of what tools to use. Ah, I saw you use by damp, they have drone flying above, go to your representative and say, we need to make sure that the information that they're gathered is being used in a manner consistent with human rights principles. And we need civilian control from the local government on how to do it. Who is controlling the control of the stencils? Yes. Okay, we have more questions. Okay. So the police operate equipment like a PR reader, in the catchers, etc. that get information that they could get in a cheaper way, like reading traffic signs or license plays or cell info from operators. Is there a reason for that? Especially concerning EU, because US differs a lot. And another question, has police in EU, US been known to use illegal or questionable tax for surveillance? So I think I'll hurt the first question about, you know, using things like ANPR to determine license plates. This technology is common in the European Union, though by and large it is being put in place for other reasons, not to get after protesters necessarily. They are looking for, you know, making sure that people are paying a toll or maybe a speed trap on the Autobahn, where it takes a picture of the license plate of anyone traveling over a speed limit in the places that have speed limits, only partly on the Autobahn. And I think also it's being used for enforcement of things like traffic citations, your car is parked in a location too long, they know who to send the bill to. And I think these technologies could be repurposed for surveillance. And that's what we really need is policies that are ensuring that if these things are being used for a purpose that the sort of the citizenship agrees with in that jurisdiction to enforce parking, for example, that it's not also being repurposed against political activities and being used at a wider scale than it was envisioned. Also, maybe, you know, it's not a good thing to have perfect parking enforcement. You know, a lot of parking fines were based on the notion that like you might not get caught every time. And when you change it where a system where previously the fines were set with the notion that a lot of people would get away with it, you had to like make an example of those who didn't. And then you change that to perfect enforcement because the computer, the ANPR system surveillance knows exactly the minute that a fine is due and then assesses that fine. That actually changes the dynamic of power between the citizenship and the state significantly. And it will often be phrased in forms of, well, we're just trying to enforce the existing laws. How would you be against that? But really, it changes the dynamic. And it's something that for those who want to be an activist on this, again, talk to your local jurisdiction and try and make sure that these things have safe and sane policies that respect human rights. So I would interpret that like prevention of, don't come into the idea that you need to protect your data, right? Yeah. And just turning to the other one, you know, do we have information about whether police are misusing these technologies? So I mean, there's some isolated examples where people have misused their technologies. And I used a couple of them in the slide. So there was someone who went to a political protest, their car was put into a database they got pulled over later. And then also in South Wales, the court found that there the police use of facial recognition was in violation of UK law, though as I noted, not, you know, the Metropolitan Police in London don't agree with that. They say it doesn't apply to them. And I think actually use of facial recognition technologies is a very tempting thing by the police. They want to use it as much as possible, make it easy for them. And I think you will see that. But the other piece of this is unless there are rules that say here are limitations on how you can use these technologies, then they can use them without having to risk violating them. So we need to have those rules in place. I hope that the Council of Europe puts a at least a moratorium on facial recognition for use for police. And, you know, until we can figure out how to use this technology safely, like it's kind of cool that you can unlock your phone or your face without having to type in a password. But we want to make sure that technology is used properly. Okay. So I think you're going to be around in the 2D world. You're going to explore that, you told me before. Yeah, there's more questions. I hope maybe maybe you find him in the 2D world and you're just asking there. Thanks so much. Thanks so much. Have a nice having you. Bye, Kurt.
Electronic Frontier Foundation. I'm here to talk technologies are used can help you understand the threats to your privacy and security, as well as provide tools to advocate for limits on police use of surveillance. Surveillance may chill people's right to express themselves on these public issues. Just as analog surveillance historically has been used as a tool for oppression. Nowadays, policymakers and the public have to understand that the threat posed by emerging technologies is a danger to human successfully defend human rights in the digital at the protest or challenge police policies that various types of surveillance technologies in use kind of data they collect, and how they're used what the license plate, number plate is, optical communications with other people in the field. protests from above using traditional aircraft protest using their cameras to observe the helicopters. You look for the tail number. In at the drone, you can probably identify the mind, both for drones and other aircraft, that you can go to our spot the surveillance. This is more information about any of these devices, go the police use of facial recognition was in