How Governments Spy On Protestors—And How To Avoid It | Incognito Mode | WIRED
protests almost by definition are points of contention between citizens and their governments police tracking of protesters is multiaceted and includes a variety of tactics and gear that generate different data some surveillance is done at the protests while other methods are used outside of it it's just like all different ways to get at this core thing of who was there what are they up to what do they think about things i think that's sort of how I break it down because so many of these technologies are unseen or not intuitive in this episode we'll discuss the technologies used by law enforcement that put citizens privacy at risk this is incognito [Music] mode the movies were way ahead on this right like they were depicting like the yellow box that goes around the face type of thing now that is very real this technology is more and more available to law enforcement although law enforcement have had access to facial recognition tools for about 20 years they previously were only able to search government images such as mug shots this changed in 2018 when many police departments started using Clear View AI a facial recognition app that allows them to match photos from around the web once a photo is uploaded the app pulls up matches found online along with links to the source of those photos clear View says more than 600 law enforcement agencies across the country use this software based on the person's facial geometry the images are converted by the system into a formula measuring things like eye distance this means that law enforcement can use any image to search for a person who doesn't currently have a police record and isn't known to authorities and potentially identify them in seconds i wanted to ask you since you've covered this a lot how do you view the risk of these platforms as they proliferate to be quite frank it freaks me the hell out image recognition is just really really good now and cheaper to deploy and so you know I think it's more just kind of accepting that this is just part of life like just commuting every day you're probably being subjected to some of these systems in one form or another it's not just the systems where you have face wreck built in it can be deployed after the fact if you're if you're in people's pictures that are posted on social media it can get uploaded to these systems and then you can get picked out of a crowd in that way we saw that with you know the January 6th insurrection videos that were posted to Parlor and other social media platforms new tonight an Auburn man has been found guilty of federal charges for his actions during the January 6th insurrection you know the FBI took those they saw people in the videos they went back and and kind of looked to see like okay here's proof you were there governments in 78 countries use public facial recognition systems with varying degrees of support from their citizens many countries use the technology without transparent regulations in Russia facial recognition tools have been used not only to detain people protesting the war in Ukraine but also to identify and arrest opponents of the government before they joined any demonstrations reuters reported that the facial recognition systems used in Moscow are powered by Western companies including Nvidia and Intel other companies such as Amazon have also launched software that allows users to build a facial recognition database using their own photos these systems they're everywhere and things that you might think could kind of thwart these systems even like wearing a mask and these kinds of things some of the technologies can get around that i don't know what to do with that information to be honest there are a lot of police here are you not frightened uh we are but you know we are together that's that gives a really power i am frightened of course I'm frightened that's why I'm just covering up all my face just so that they cannot even you know find find my ID but me being afraid doesn't mean that I'm not going to be here today and fight for my future i agree 100% with what you were saying about how masks and other deterrent uh measures aren't always effective at defeating these identification technologies but clearly they are at least somewhat effective sometimes because you know in a lot of crackdowns we've seen in the last few years by multiple governments like one thing they'll do is try to ban maskearing in certain settings yeah are there any other things please tell me that you have more yeah I mean I think there are ways to uh minimize the data and minim and thus minimize the risks just simple things like not shooting pictures and videos while you're at a protest so you're not capturing yourself and anybody else who's around you is one way to keep it out of some types of systems avoiding some systems is better than avoiding no systems you are going to be subjected to this technology in one way or the other and you just kind of have to proceed as best you can and and and minimize your contributions to those systems as much as you as possible cctvs or security cameras have been ubiquitous for a few decades now one could have thought 20 or 30 years ago like well now everything is going to be captured on film all the time but there are limitations still to just how much data is stored for how long you know there have been a lot of high-profile events around the world in recent years where there wasn't adequate security footage to really know what had happened it's not like every step you take someone is paying to run the system and store the data to identify you in 2010 Wired reported on federal agents friending crime suspects on sites like MySpace in order to see their photos communications and personal relationships more recently police have used companies like Data Miner to more easily sift through massive amounts of data in order to glean information about how protests are organized to identify activists and to piece together people's connections to each other so social media accounts right it's a lot of data on everyone who's using these platforms but I kind of think of these surveillance technologies in two buckets one would be if authorities want to find out more about a specific person right what has Andrew been posting about or saying and are there photos you know of Andrew uh online things like that but then the other one would be coming out at the flipped where it's like they're looking for anyone who has been talking about X thing or you know anyone marking their location in a certain place on a certain day authorities can go directly to the sites or they might want to use a service that kind of pulls a ton of data from social platforms together you know aggregates all of it and getting kind of lists of names it gives the ability to like have this vibe check like those platforms themselves aren't inherently a surveillance tool right sometimes we use them for journalism i've used some of these services like data minor before and once you see just the fire hose of information that you can get access to when you use it it's becomes clear just how easy it is to kind of figure out what is going on even if it's not obvious to you and your own like curated timeline just the use of them has become more widespread you wouldn't know without doing some investigating definitely my local police department is using this or not that creates an environment where you have to assume that that's what's happening steps like making your account private or setting something to expire quickly maybe they can help but I wouldn't assume those types of settings can really truly protect data on big mainstream platforms an example of how social media surveillance was used can be found through the MPD surveillance of the George Floyd protests in 2020 it was found that the MPD collected data about protest events including dates locations organizers and estimated crowd sizes the MPD shared this information with the Secret Service National Park Service and the Department of Defense so I think the other huge advice is about data minimization and not posting about things that you worry about getting into other people's hands there's a tension here with chilling speech right the nature of the internet is to share information right that's like the whole purpose of the platform when you put stuff out there it's hard to say like okay it's out there but only for certain people and control it our perspective on it is probably a little bit different because we're journalists we're kind of in the public eye in a way that some other people aren't but I think anybody no matter if you have one follower or a million you should be really careful about what you post online and when you post it online you know if you're going to post vacation pictures I never post them while I'm actually on vacation because then that signal to somebody like "Hey my house is empty." You can apply that to all different types of of risks and I think generally posting less is the way to go so some people really want to post or that's their like job or you know that's their how they make money it's just helpful to understand that the greater volume you're posting the more there could be things you didn't think of that's exposing information that you didn't realize is now out there mc catchers also known as cell sight simulators and formerly referred to as stingrays are devices that impersonate cell towers causing cell phones within a certain radius to connect to them initially designed for military and national security purposes this technology has emerged in routine police use until recently the use of MC catchers was withheld from the public the FBI has even forced state and local police agencies to sign NDAs in order to use their devices i mean I find MC catchers fascinating just in that their their use is really secretive like there was a long time that police weren't allowed to say that they had them or that they were using them so there's just And no one had seen one right yeah exactly can you tell us just a little bit about what how that works these are devices that at its core just identify that your phone was physically in a certain location like that's the baseline thing it's trying to achieve sometimes called an MC catcher because of this IMSI number uh that it's trying to pick up they can work in different ways they can work passively to just sort of sweep around and say what devices are in the area and let me try to you know decrypt their signal and catch that you know an ID number more often they're they work actively as like a fake cell tower taking advantage of the way the system works that your phone is going to connect to the cell tower that's emitting the strongest signal in the area to give you the best service and then grab that ID number sometimes uh they can also potentially grab other stuff like unencrypted communications like uh SMS text messages it's important to know that one of the things that can happen when you bring a phone to an event like a protest is that the fact that you were there and potentially some other information could be sort of pulled out of the air by one of these devices records show that INC catchers are used by 23 states in the District of Columbia the DEA ICE FBI NSA and DHS along with many additional agencies in terms of how people gauge the risk of these i mean for one thing like you said a lot of times they're looking to target one person or maybe a couple of people and it does end up looping in a lot of people just by the nature of how the it works but it's also one that I think is expensive and complicated to deploy and so it's probably not going to be the top concern if I were going to a protest I don't think it's the thing I would be so concerned about just as an average person another thing in that vein you know if this technology that we're talking about is rogue cell towers it means that actual cell towers also have all this information right like your wireless provider knows where you go so that data exists anyway and there are potentially other ways that you know authorities can get that information geoffence warrants or reverse location warrants allow law enforcement to request location data from apps or tech companies like Google or Apple for all devices in a specific area during a set time authorities can then track locations identify users and collect additional data like social media accounts this is yet another layer in this multiple approaches to getting the same information who was at a certain place at a certain time and what can we find out about what they were up to a lot of it's advertising data or what's being shared all the time from your device that you probably aren't paying much attention to and is used in a much more innocuous way typically and it's sort of slurping up all the data from this area which is constrained in a way but doesn't account for passers by people you know getting coffee at the deli next door people just sort of coming up to a location to see what's going on like this is just bulk indiscriminate data i am worried about it but maybe not specifically like it it's in the category to me of all the reasons that I might consider leaving a device at home or putting it in a Faraday bag it's sort of just on that list of reasons that you might want to minimize the data that your device is emitting data brokers collect and sell personal data from public sources websites and apps people use every day they aggregate all this info to build detailed profiles of people and to group them into simplified categories such as high-income new moms pet owners impulse buyers and more while advertisers are usually their primary clients police can also purchase this data some of the largest data broker companies include Experian Axiom and Equifax the amount of data Equifax collected came to light in 2017 when a data breach exposed 147 million people's personal data i think it just fuels this ability to identify someone and track kind of their behavior across the web and potentially their speech similar to the way law enforcement can track people and surveil people through social media platforms information from data brokers can aid investigations in two ways they can be coming at it from a person of interest who they're trying to find out more about or authorities can be coming at it from I want information on anyone who has had an IP address in this area or anyone who has keywords searched you know for and been shown these types of ads so how do data brokers collect information the most common ways include web browsing history everything from your Google searches sites or apps you visit cookies social media activity or even a quiz you just filled out for fun all of that can be scraped and tracked this data creates each person's online history map which in turn allows brokers to build a profile on each user the data that companies collect often include name address phone number and email address date of birth gender marital and family status social security number education profession income level cars and real estate you own it also comes from public sources this can be anything in the public domain such as birth certificates drivers or marriage licenses court or bankruptcy records DMV records and voter registration information it can also include commercial sources such as your purchase history loyalty cards coupon use and so forth and finally some websites or programs will ask for your consent to share your data sometimes it's anonymized in certain ways especially when it comes to advertising data but it's it's pretty trivial for law enforcement or other investigators to tie certain advertising behavior to a specific device especially if it's collecting precise location data and there's also data brokers that are building network profiles so you can not just get information about yourself but everybody you've interacted with whether it's on social media or actually in real life in the United States at least we just lack laws that kind of regulate what these companies are able to collect and if you have to participate in modern society as nearly everyone does there it's almost impossible to avoid i think in the context of protests it's not an acute concern I would say but it is generally speaking really freaky when sky's the limit on what they could potentially use because there's just so much data i agree with what you said sort of low on the acute scale but high on the existential scale [Music] one of the big surveillance technologies that probably everyone who's driven on a highway knows about is license plate readers really just capturing what your license plate is and showing that your vehicle was at a certain place at a certain time similar to like your phone your car it's a proxy for you maybe you were in the car maybe you weren't but that's where your car went there are three types of ALPR systems stationary or fixed ALPR cameras which are installed in a fixed location like a traffic light telephone pole or a freeway exit ramp the second type are mobile ALPR cameras which are attached to police patrol cars garbage trucks and other vehicles and allow them to capture data from license plates as they drive around the city they can also assist law enforcement in gridding which is when police officers drive up and down a neighborhood collecting license plates of all parked cars there are also private vendors like Vigilant Solutions which collect license plate data and sell that back to police the third type are ALPR trailers which are trailers police can tow a particular area and leave for extended periods of time it's been reported that the DEA has disguised ALPR trailers as speed enforcement vehicles and placed them along the US Mexico border the things I'm concerned about aren't necessarily even it being used for license plates our colleague Drew Marotra has done some reporting showing that license plates readers can also capture any words that are visible so that can be what's on your t-shirt that could be political signs in your yard this technology may be able to be used in ways that we're not even familiar with or or would imagine you know a lot of times when we're talking about any surveillance technologies it's really about creating data that then is there and could potentially be used in any number of ways at any point in in the future depending on who gets access to it and what they want to do with it [Music] the key thing here is that these drones even small quadcopters like what we think of as consumer drones they can carry a fair amount of cargo meaning like cameras there are a number of different drones used by law enforcement varying in size and ability for example some drones have thermal imaging capabilities for night operations while others specialize in long periods of surveillance protesters have in the past reported drones flying overhead for example in Minneapolis during the George Floyd protests police and government drones usually fly in the range of 11,200 feet above the ground however it's been reported that the drone used to surveil protests in Minneapolis in 2020 flew at 20,000 ft nearly invisible to protesters on the ground this was a customs and border protection drone which are often equipped with advanced cameras radar and potential cell phone geolocation tools in terms of how freaked out are you about drones how do you think about that yeah I would say fairly freaked out uh but again like you were saying about the layering of these technologies I think it's not the drones themselves it's everything they can do and how cheap they are and how easy it would be to deploy even more of this tech when we talk about sort of evolution of different technologies this capability is sort of similar to police helicopters and now it's just cheaper lighter easier even these sort of benign seeming quadcopters that we see around all the time could be carrying equipment on them to do like very granular detailed surveillance of something like a protest there are some technologies that are really just emerging and we don't even know if they've been used at protests or even used by authorities in the United States right and your face isn't the only thing sort of outside your body that can potentially identify you for example analyzing your gate like how you walk gate recognition technology can identify individuals by analyzing their unique walking patterns using machine learning it captures movements through cameras motion sensors or even radar it then processes this information breaking it down into contours silhouettes and other distinguishing features it offers high accuracy but its effectiveness can be influenced by things like injuries or the types of terrain the subject is traversing this tech is especially useful for authorities when people's faces are obscured while there haven't been any reports of widespread use of this tech by law enforcement agencies in the US Chinese authorities have been utilizing it on the streets of Shanghai and Beijing since at least 2018 in recent years there have also been a number of companies working on creating emotional detection technology where AI uses biometric data to determine a person's emotional state and the likelihood they will become violent or cause a disturbance wired reporting found that Amazon powered cameras have been scanning passengers faces in eight train stations in the UK to try out this new technology the trials were testing the system for age and gender recognition as well as the emotional state of the person on camera while there's no current documentation of this tech being used at protests the BBC reported that emotional detection tech has been used on weaguers in China some of these could be really invasive because you know reading your emotions there start to be maybe inferences that someone could make about how you were feeling in a certain moment that may or may not be accurate right because it's sort of being taken out of context so it's difficult to have an algorithm just sort of come to one conclusion like sometimes I think you're doing your angry walk coming over when I haven't filed my story but really then you're really nice about it and you're like "It's okay Lily you can do it." And you know I could I took it totally the wrong way but potentially there are more sort of in terms of just identifying someone in a certain place it is scary that there's something characteristic about your walk they're not saying "Oh it's Andrew's angry walk." But they're saying "Oh that's Andrew." Certainly creating
more systems that are replicating what other things like facial recognition do and and applying it in to other biometrics of a person that definitely is going to create all the same concerns as we've seen with these other technologies that were emerging you know years or decades ago but now it's your entire body how you walk and like you mentioned like if we're having computers analyze like how I'm feeling in a certain moment effectively establishing intent of whatever my actions are in that moment that gets really scary because it might be completely inaccurate every time there's one of these new AI technologies there's always some bias built in there are going to be people who suffer consequences unnecessarily because these systems are deployed without being fully debugged experts in the AI field have previously noted that emotional detection tech is unreliable immature and some even call for the technology to be banned altogether here are a few simple and effective ways to protect yourself and your personal information at a protest first if you can leave your phone at home I know this might sound drastic but the most effective way to ensure that your personal data isn't compromised and that your phone won't fall in the hands of law enforcement is by not having it with you if that's not an option you can put your phone in a Faradayig bag so data can't be accessed you should also turn off biometrics on your phone like facial recognition or fingerprint scanner meaning you'll need a code to access it that way your face or fingerprints can't be forcefully used to access your personal information you can always say you just don't remember the code to unlock it another thing to keep in mind is posting on social media jay Stanley a senior policy analyst at the ACLU says if you post something online you should do so under the assumption that it might be viewed by law enforcement you should always check your sharing settings and make sure you know what posts are public try to minimize the amount of other people's faces you capture in your photos or videos use end-to-end encrypted messaging services like Signal when possible wear a mask in case photos or videos are taken and finally know your personal risks is your immigration status exposing you to additional dangers are you part of a minority group that is more likely to be targeted by law enforcement keep these things in mind for yourself and your loved ones when deciding if you should go out to a protest for more information about surveillance at protests check out wire.com this was incognito mode until next time [Music]
2025-04-20 22:51
