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tonight on eventing the future we're taking a close look at the collision between open society and surveillance with guests bruce schneierer and julian sanchez stay tuned for what's next after what's next 100 000 bc stone tools 4000 bc the wheel 9th century a.d gunpowder 19th century eureka the light bulb 20th century the automobile television nuclear weapons we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other thing not because they are easy but because they are hard the future doesn't belong to the think-hearted it belongs to the brave everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it you can influence it you can you can build your own things that other people can use people want their technology to have a sense of humanity they wanted to understand you specifically we have three billion new minds coming online to work with us to solve the grand challenges the rate at which the technology is getting faster is itself getting faster to a point that we have the potential to create a world of abundance so thank you thank you i'm happy to be back here tonight with inventing the future you know tonight's show is a little bit different than our usual show uh usually i come out i talk about technologies that get me really excited things that are coming in the future that i think hold great promise tonight it's going to be a rather different perspective because it turns out that the digital technologies that so delight us and brought us so much abundance in terms of information and new ways to communicate new ways to share ideas well those technologies also have a dark side to them and we're going to take a look at that tonight it turns out that these technologies are in use around us right now for instance you're probably familiar with the idea of a hacker who might be going after your password to your social network account or maybe your credit card information or something like that but it turns out that they have a convention uh in las vegas yes just like any organization that the the black hat conference and in 2011 just a couple years ago one of the uh one of these hackers presented a paper uh where he proved that he can actually wirelessly hack into an insulin pump or a um a um a heart um meter and uh actually hack it from distance in a way uh he could send a jolt to that person and commit the perfect crime by killing him in a way it'll be totally undetectable that's a scary thought some of the manufacturers are already working on cloaking technologies to prevent that from happening just last week the national intelligence estimate was published and this is a document that details how china has a massive sustained campaign underway right now to hack into multinational corporations and as it turns out more than 50 corporations are under almost constant assault in this way more more than 50 corporations per week are hacked into an average of almost two times a week their uh internet defenses are successfully penetrated so this is a real present threat that's happening uh and it's not just uh these the the overseas threats that are happening this technology is starting to pervade our life it's becoming actually scarily commonplace uh there are already corp companies retailers that are experimenting with cameras that'll track you as you walk into the store and they'll compare your uh your face to faces that face images that have been tagged on facebook this facial recognition technology that's so prevalent not just on facebook but also apple and google and other companies have promoted and that's not all some companies are starting to use this in a way that i feel is almost unfair where in a job interview situation a corporation may demand that you relinquish your uh facebook credentials or your twitter account so that they can get a better understanding of your habits and how you communicate who you're connected to and that's a little bit orwellian i think and perhaps most creepy of all just this last week raytheon a major defense contractor announced a new program called riot it's the rapid information overlay technology what this allows them to do is assess in massive scale people's behavior and social networks so that they can predict future behavior and this starts to take on a kind of creepy sci-fi uh theme now some people feel that privacy is over just a decade ago the ceo of sun microsystem scott mcnealy said this he said you have zero privacy anyway so folks get over it that's the world that he envisioned we want to hear from you we'd like to know what you think about this issue and you can certainly use the hashtag itf to let us know i noticed that some people before the show have already started to send in questions on facebook and on livestream you can chat in and offer your questions and comments as well after tonight's show we're going to stick around a little while for some live q a with the audience about this but first what i want to do is introduce our experts we have two fantastic guests for you tonight and first let's bring on stage one of the most renowned security experts in the world bruce schneierer bruce welcome to the show thanks for joining us so you are well known as a kind of pundit about security and uh and the issues that we're going to talk about tonight and your services are also in high demand with organizations all over the world what people might not know is that you have a fantastic newsletter they can sign up for it's where i learn about these issues and i've been following for quite a while and bruce also recently published this book liars and outliers tell me a little bit about this book is this on this topic or well it it is in sort of a meta way what i'm looking at is the notion of why security exists and i'm looking at trust and really if you think about society we need trust to make it work you got this audience here and i'm looking at them and not one of them has jumped up and attacked the person sitting next to them right you laugh but if that was an audience full of chimpanzees we couldn't get away with it right humans are the only species that can sit there quietly and society works because of this and there's a whole bunch of reasons right one of them might want to mug the other person or you know steal my ipad back in the dressing room but they don't for a whole bunch of reasons right a lot of security there and we have sort of a social construct that keeps us all looking out for each other it's social legal there's a lot of things going on there so the nature of uh the nature of society requires some measure of trust to function but in some respects this might be getting undermined for instance this topic of hackers it keeps coming up people are very familiar with it but from what i've read you think it's kind of an overblown idea sometimes it's overhyped well we do tend to over hype the criminal threats and you know it's really what makes headlines what sells newspapers we like to hype the attacks from china cyber terrorism cyber war basic cyber crime and stealing money i think is is underreported okay a lot more happy people that accounts for almost uh two-thirds of all crime is now internet crime uh i don't know if that if that number is accurate but i've heard that yeah it's really hard to count it's hard to move there's certainly a lot of it uh okay and it's so we can't dismiss it it's a real thing but tonight we're going to cover a number of threats i thought we'd start though with a funny idea here so a hacker in montana hacked into a local tv station and he got into the emergency alert system there and he sent out the message that the zombies are attacking right now so sometimes it's malicious hacking sometimes it's just for fun it's like a prank and we've seen many examples of that one thing you might not know is the prevalence of this how often this is happening so for the audience you might wonder what these four things have in question here in the picture on the screen the new york times twitter the bush family and the u.s federal reserve uh well the answer is that last week these guys were all subject to massive hacking uh intrusions and so it's a wide range of targets and this is going on so frequently we hear about it so frequently we kind of get numb too and it's interesting it's a different people in each case you know we believe new york times was was was chinese uh the bush family was i think politically motivated federal reserve was uh was the anonymous group so as some kind of political statement twitter i don't know let's pretend it was a criminal right you've got an array of different threats here so so the paranoia justified a little bit we hear about the hackers but let's turn to another subject which is these chinese intrusions because we heard so much coming out of davos we heard so many companies grumble complain in some ways they were a little bit ashamed to admit that they have this problem kind of a growing problem that they're being hacked constantly and it seems to be true i mean everyone's pretty much hacked constantly all the time there's a lot of hacking coming out of china yeah largely politically motivated the attack against new york times the attackers were looking for names of informants a very political thing presumably for government reprisal we don't know if the attacks were done by the government they were done by independent people working within china with nationalistic uh rights in china we don't know it sounds like it's the government there's no way to prove that allegation it actually is no way to prove it's china one of the problems we have is you don't know where attacks are coming from you can't trace and tack backwards often when we know we know from other channels one of the things that's most chilling about that new york times hack is that more than 50 computers were actually penetrated and they stole all the passwords which means that it's probably likely that some of those computers have a trojan horse in them somewhere or back door that's been opened up or they can come back in any time it's hard to tell if you read the reports and it turns out everyone gets hacked but if you hack the new york times you end up with a 2400 word newspaper article about it so we know a lot about this they say they they caught it early they let it go on for a couple of months to track exactly what was happening they knew where all the back doors were and they closed them were they perfect we have no idea they think they were and and they look like they did a good job we don't know but that certainly is a problem uh the wall street journal admitted they were hacked as well new york times wall street journal you know there are going to be others yeah that's true some that might not have even realized it and some companies couldn't really reveal that information a newspaper can because it's that's news for them well but it's also embarrassing in a lot of cases if you're a bank if you're a big company you admit this your stock price might go down you might lose customers so yeah customers worry how about how safe is my data how state how much can i rely on this partner now some people characterize this as cyber warfare and i've actually read where people say we have a massive cyber war that's underway right now and it's the us versus china but other countries are involved as well iran sometimes they mention israel or france how serious do you think this this cyber war concept is now i think cyber wars is largely rhetoric i mean it's not war we know what war looks like i mean this is espionage it's it's not a military action that involves guns and bombs and people dying uh the cyber war rhetoric i actually think is largely put in place by the u.s by government corporations that are profiting from it right the u.s cyber command announced last month that they're expanding from 900 people to about 5 000 people oh so if we bang the drum of war we can kind of stir up people and get support for a massive experience we're really weird with war we love to use the word war and there's no war war on terror war and crime war on drugs we love rhetorical wars we hate using the word war when there's an actual war will you still say anything else other than war and this is a metaphorical war is accepted it's politically acceptable what's going on here has kind of aspects of both so i mean the war on drugs is clearly not a war right these cyber attacks well you know there's some kind of stuff going on that involves military and it involves nations in some respect and they're sick and they're they're uh they're spooks you know so in a way it is kind of a war but that's a shadow war i mean my fear is that we're in the early years of a cyber arms race that there's a lot and not just china the u.s too nato other countries we're pouring a lot of money
into cyber attack cyber defense it's a huge growth industry that's true and if you think about and the drum beat gets louder every single day you coined the term wholesale surveillance to describe the way governments are kind of hoovering up data and in the us's case it's frankly because of the massive expansion of homeland security after 9 11. let's take a look at wholesale surveillance by the numbers so the first number i'm going to show you is 300 this is the number of times a citizen of the united kingdom is is videotaped on average every single day as they pass through the uk there are about five million cctv cameras in the uk it's the most heavily surveyed country in the world one-third this number represents the percentage of us air force craft that are autonomous drones most people are unaware that we have 7 500 drone aircraft in the u.s air force right now that number is increasing rapidly and by the way the air force isn't the only government branch that has drone aircraft we'll get into drones a bit more but the number that struck me was 40. 40 is the number of attacks every single day by drones in afghanistan i was unaware of this until i started to put together the research for this show so last year on average every day there were 40 drone attacks in afghanistan 76 this is the number of nations that are rapidly scrambling to get their own drone air force fleet so soon the united states won't be the only country that has drone aircraft and they're seeking to either develop the technology themselves or acquire it on the market now this big number 878 000 that's a number of hours of audio that have been recorded in 2012 by the fbi in surveillance here in the united states and this number staggering 29 million electronic files that were gathered by the fbi last year in surveillance in the united states so this is the some some respect these numbers reflect the massive expansion of electronic surveillance that's happening right now and to help us talk about this let me introduce our next guest uh who comes to us from washington dc folks it's julian sanchez from the cato institute hi welcome to the show thanks for joining us so julian you actually have been covering these topics on the web as part of your responsibility at the cato institute but also as a journalist for some time you're an expert in the subject of privacy and law and this electronic surveillance as far as anyone can be okay well that's a rapidly evolving topic one of the things we talked about earlier today we're getting ready was the the expansion really began after 9 11. we had kind of a state of emergency and my observation is it's a permanent state of emergency it doesn't seem like there's any end in sight well that's right it's not a conventional war where you beat the enemy and then they're gone it's a a war in a sense on a concept terror and as long as there are angry young men somewhere who hate the united states there'll be a a justification for that threat so as long as we keep lobbing in predator drones with tomahawk missiles we'll probably create a whole new generation of terrorists who wish to seem to be running out yeah that's right now um tell me a little bit about homeland security which really is a it's a relatively new thing but that's been the locus of this big government expansion and what they really did was they combined a whole bunch of different uh government departments together under one mandate uh tell me a little bit about the growth of that and then some of the other organizations well you know that's one part of it dhs you know gets a lot of attention they're perhaps the most visible in the form of tsa the people who are groping you as you you get on a plane it's really though i think not the biggest expansion of the surveillance state since 9 11. the problem is that a lot of the stuff happens below the surface it's hard to get numbers frankly about a lot of the the activity that's going on ron wyden uh senator from oregon has been trying to get data from the national security agency about how many americans they've gotten their database and they essentially refuse to provide even an estimate they say they can't even provide a ballpark guess as to how many americans are sitting in their database and that's a database that is enormous because they actually required them to build a multi-yatta byte data center in utah to store the products of the 1.7 billion communications they're intercepting every day
a yacht by the way is about a quadrillion gigabytes uh they don't actually have a higher unit than that so one thing that's happening we talked about this earlier is that the price of storage has dropped so much that we can now do something that's totally unprecedented which is store everything right so in the past if you were going to do surveillance or wiretap you had to be kind of selective about it because there wasn't a way to record it easily but now they can and they can also do analysis later after the fact to find out if there was any evidence of a crime or even a pattern that might suggest illegal behavior well this fundamentally changes how surveillance works right we're used to how we see it on television follow that car right that's surveillance that's right but now it's follow every car and actually it's follow every car all the time and we can follow that car six months ago because we've saved the data right so surveillance changes and it's a lot of ways it's not because of malice computers produce data right whenever you use your credit card your cell phone your computer data about what you're doing and where is produced and as data storage drops to free as data processing drops to free it's easy to save it why not save it then and so you have companies saving it like a facebook or google so they're saving it governments are saving it they're trading data right right you know uh google provides data to governments when asked understand sometimes not sometimes not and and often we don't know i mean last month a bunch of human rights uh individuals asked politely microsoft to tell them who they're letting spy on skype video calls right so we're asking nice did they get an answer we did not yet this is one of the concerns it's a there's a growing world of surveillance we know that a lot of it's happening we know a lot of money is being spent we don't know where we don't know what they're recording and and we often have no choice i mean i like to think you know i don't like to think this but it's sort of true that google knows more about my interest than my wife does yeah that's a little freaky and they're able to predict better what you might do next because of the pattern they can match your pattern against another cohort and i've kind of never even met google let alone gone out here's a question from twitter and the question is minority report how long until we can predict when people will commit crimes so how soon do you see that coming in the future well i mean bill what are we asking how long before we can predict probably never i mean that's i don't think that's the things we can predict how long before we're going to start using the ability that we think we can predict we're doing it today that's true that's what the raytheon writes that's what the no-fly list is that's true we predict that you are so dangerous that you're not allowed to fly for any reason yet so innocent we can't arrest you kind of a weird mixed bag of people so those things are coming and i think they're going to become more and more i think as technology gets more dangerous as the things a bad guy can do increase i mean think about bio printers think about homemade i mean all the things we're scared of homemade people some of the topics we've covered on the show as those things get scarier the desire to stop someone before the fact i mean the only normal crime prevention is after the fact right we're gonna i'm gonna let you murder somebody is gonna happen and i'm just gonna arrest you after the fact that only works if i can live with the murder rate right but that's not gonna work if you're able to print a pathogen that drops a species so there will be an incredible push for this before the fact preemptive strikes right which is the minority port type of future it's going to be lousy it's not going to work but people are going to want it arguably that's what's going on in yemen today right so we now last week signature strikes exactly nbc released this you know this uh pearline document from the from the attorneys that basically gives obama a permission slip to go ahead and assassinate american citizens off u.s soil using a robot in the sky okay so that occurred what are they actually aiming for they're not going for people who are in the process of conducting some sort of terrorist incident or building a bomb or something they're targeting people who are at home they're targeting people who are at a celebration a wedding party or something people aren't actually doing anything necessarily criminals the intent the possibility as you say they're targeting them based on behavior and some measure of prediction so i mean they're a moderately higher bar for american citizens this is a strict standard right is they have to be an imminent threat and capture is infeasible except imminent it turns out doesn't really mean imminent because it doesn't have to be any kind of particular plot that they know is ongoing so imminent means something other than imminent and capture being infeasible means i i mean i think basically it would be easier to kill right inconvenient i think rather than feasible um now if you had the bad taste to be born somewhere other than the united states um you know you don't even get that level of protection again most of the drone strikes that are happening now are so called signature strikes meaning it's not there's a particular person who's targeted but uh you know five 20-year-old uh you know arab males are congregated somewhere and well that's either a terrorist plot or a wedding but better be safe than sorry take him out tell me a little bit about total information awareness this program that admiral poindexter proposed more than a decade ago but i thought it went away but it seems maybe it's coming back right i mean the problem there was they had terrible branding they called it total information awareness which sounds creepy and then they had a logo that was like an eye in a pyramid with beams coming down on the earth so this sounded terrifying bill sapphire wrote a column you know freaking out about it everyone was duly alarmed congress nominally killed it uh but it ended up getting essentially fragmented into a bunch of different programs that were farmed out to parts of dhs or darpa i think the nsa's pinwheel database is in some sense a an offshoot of that pinwhale is uh again on this model a kind of vast database that that allows kind of googling for communications they've shifted from that kind of targeted model get a warrant have an individual wiretap their conversations much more toward a model that involves some people call it sitting on the wire suck in everything and then after the fact figure out the search parameters are interested go through pull stuff up and that's concerning i think because you know when j edgar hoover ran the fbi and and was abusing surveillance for political purposes at least he had to target particular people you know he's going to decide that martin luther king is going to be spied on and then they're going to try and drive him to suicide now this stuff is sitting in a database for 30 years if they happen to sweep you up and then in 10 years you're running for congress someone can after the fact decide you're worth scrutinizing it's even possible that behavior that's legal today could change in the future and there'll be some record of it and that could be embarrassing on the one hand but it even might be that after the fact it's illegal or or even not i mean we all do things that are embarrassing because we're human yeah you know if everything is swept up then the likelihood of it being uncovered by somebody and if you can selectively edit it we see this now in political campaigns you know now we're living in a world where pretty much every candidate is followed 24 7 by the opposing party with a camera because they're gonna say something that's embarrassing you've got 10 seconds and it's it's a beautiful embarrassing quote and you run they run like crazy we know one of the one of the things the intelligence agencies like to do with the fruits of surveillance information um is use it to coerce people into becoming informants you know uh the fbi now has 15 000 informants like 10 times more than you've ever had at the peak of cointelpro the kind of vast spying and infiltration network uh you know looking at civil rights and anti-war groups and one way to do that is to say hey we found out uh that you're having an affair why don't you spy on your mosque for us there was a case here in chicago and a guy named ibrahim michal i think uh they said look we know that you had communications with a cleric in the middle east they were innocuous but that's enough of a pretext to get someone put on the no-fly list if your business requires you to travel that's a huge obstacle and they said well we can get you off the no-fly list if you're willing to cooperate if you're willing to tell us what people are saying at your mosque and he's actually currently now suing the justice department over this so the information is gathered up in this kind of broad sweep sometimes without a warrant in any case warrants are targeted individually here we're taking information wholesale as you put in hoovering it up and then it's analyzed later and then if something embarrassing awkward emerges now they've got leverage on somebody might not even be illegal activity as you point out but it's leveraged to coerce them into cooperating with the government and doing the government's bidding and this is our government now i'm assuming that this is happening all around the world and probably countries that don't have the same due process and constitutional rights and privileges that we have in this country um and i mean it's certainly true and we know that u.s technology is being exported to totalitarian regimes for for various purposes government of syria government of egypt government iran we know those technologies are being used to identify people who are who are blogging who are tweeting anti-government that's right after the arab spring it's almost a certain bet that every authoritarian government now has a system in place to track those people who are outspoken bloggers tweeters and so forth now bruce i i put this picture in for you uh so why don't we why don't we go to this picture full ken if we can show this to the audience uh it says premise is protected by a false sense of security you coined the term security theater and tell me a little bit about that because this is how most americans experience the federal government most frequently now is as we go through an airport we get an encounter with a federal federal official right it's actually amazing that for most of us are the way we interact with uh with national security is the tsa at airports so security theater is security that looks good but doesn't do anything so a great example is enough people remember right after 9 11 if you were flying you saw national guard troops at airports they were just after security checkpoints they were on a rubber mat they had uniforms carrying a big gun they were like 20 i mean they were kids those guns had no bullets because i mean right they were kids they wouldn't this would be dangerous that's the right security theater it looks good it might make you feel better but it's not going to not going to do anything has has the tsa program been effective i mean are there that many people trying to smuggle weapons on airplanes are they going to repeat the same attacks of 9 11. you know so it seems not i mean i always think of the game this way right it's of us versus the terrorists so we we screen for guns and bombs the terrorists use box cutters we take away box cutters they put a uh they put a bomb in their shoes we scream shoes they use liquids we limit liquids uh they put a bomb in their underwear we have full body scanners they're going to do something else right this is actually a dumb game it is dumb way it's like shutting the gate after the horse is gone i mean so the smart game is you pick your attack i pick my defense we see who wins the dumb game is i pick my defense you look at my defense you pick your attack to bypass the defense and so it seems that the tsa has largely been irrelevant and they will talk about their their success stories and it's how many knives they take away and they find uh they found somebody wearing a fake army uniform and they you know confiscated a snake this stuff is actually on their website and they're proud of it they used to show some of the confiscated weapons in the early days but i think that's tapered off now because most people have learned don't bring a weapon or or people do forget i mean people do bring guns on airplanes because they forget it's it is kind of weird you'd think everyone would know by now but also you know people buy souvenirs and there's not like a knife and then the wooden statue they didn't realize it that's true you know uh new uh snow globes are now legal again you couldn't bring snow globes on airplanes we're not actually sure why but now they're okay so collectors can i mean the sort of elephant not in the room here right is that there's just a limited number of terrorists this is like a line of work where if you're really competent you blow yourself up as a sort of anti-darwinian effect and you know and so you know what we find is that no one wants to admit this because there's hundreds of billions of dollars in grants from homeland security and then contracts for intelligence uh contractors and defense contractors um you know but it increasingly looks like the fbi is being forced to manufacture terrorists so it can uh you know give us a sense of success and i think there's been about 150 uh sting operations by the fbi that resulted in convictions since uh in the decade after 9 11 and at least a third of those cases and maybe more these are cases where the weaponry the fine the funding and the actual plan all were provided by the fbi informant these are mostly again you know this world is full of young angry people who spout off on the internet and you know are easily led enough or mentally disturbed enough that if you give them a plan and a bomb you know they'll follow they'll make the motions of following through it's not clear that these are people who are otherwise dangerous so in a way we're manufacturing our own terrorists just to give ourselves the illusion that this is that that does seem that does seem to be true i mean i mean whether our successes is intelligence in operations we're actually are looking at for the bad people and when you look at something like uh airport security it only makes sense to focus on the plot right a liquid a shoe bomb if plots are few and targets are few if all we do by spending billions on shoe scanning is to force the terrorists to make a minor change in their tactic right we're wasting our money yeah yeah and that's fundamentally the problem right and it's inefficient on a massive scale speaking of inefficiency these scanners that we're looking at the rapid scans now i guess they're going to phase them out of the airports because they've been proven to be ineffective after radiating us for a couple of years now they're finding out that doesn't actually fart any kind of criminal activity and because some of these uh makers of these things fell through on on contracts that were supposed to allow them to to use a blob uh to show objects instead of actually showing you naked but there's a bit of poetic justice they're apparently being repurposed at the entrances to various federal agencies so right they're actually not going away that that's important and and all the full body scans aren't going away there are several technologies and the millimeter wave is staying so you know holding their hands up and and being scanned is not going away just a particular radiation technology because the one company wasn't able to do some of their anonymization uh things on the visuals julian said and there was a case in florida where some of those images did leak out oh yeah so undermine the claim that somehow this information would never get out in the web and you know here we have the pictures right here so you can see that yeah all right well now let's take us down to the local scale and so you know as it turns out it isn't just our federal government that's out there combating terrorists or maybe other nations we don't really know in some shadowy cyber war but actually in a weird way that i think the dhs has kind of co-opted your local police force they've turned them into deputies of this national effort to find find terrorists talk a little bit about the spread of homeland security dollars to local police forces so i think we'll maybe get to fusion centers in more detail later but yeah there's lots of federal money out there if you say you want to run a counter-terror program you may not have terrorists but that's no reason to turn down the money um you know so we find some fusion centers for example something like 250 billion dollars in grants that went out um you know supposedly for counter-terror a two-year senate investigation found that they never actually produced a single shred of actionable useful intelligence about terrorism it did end up buying a lot of range rovers for local sheriff's departments plasma tvs so that they could display the fusion center calendar and watch cable news and in san diego dhs has given out i think 50 million dollars in grants for local police departments to photograph license plates to your point earlier in in a wholesale level you know not going after an individual car or doing it as they drive by on patrol but they're setting up cameras now at different public i know in san diego they're doing this on a massive scale they're just routinely photographing the license plate of every car on the freeway that goes down there's a lot of technology it's license plates uh it's all the cctv cameras you produce the uh the uk number we know better there's cameras everywhere in the united states also that's right a lot of cities have them in intersections with automatically scooping up camera uh license plates again that's being saved uh the money's being used for other surveillance for uh cell phone surveillance for just collecting up lots of data and we'll get into cell phones but because it's data it sloshes around i mean this is the fundamental problem it doesn't matter who collects it once it's in the system it goes into a fusion center it goes into the nsa's computers it goes into some marketing computer and the data stays and what it's very hard to get rid of it and now it's being used for all sorts of purposes and and we have no control over it really even any visibility into what we don't know yeah we don't know how it's being used or who's using it we also don't know when it's going to come back to haunt us because it may turn out a few years later something that you did was of interest to them and they may have been tracking you for quite some time you're probably taping the show i'm sure we are so so there are um billions at stake and it's a rapidly growing business uh we know now that the surveillance business itself just that segment of it is now something like a five billion dollar business outside of government to private corporations i thought it might be nice to take a look at the snooper market take a look at all the devices some of the devices that are on sale uh for instance the watch hound which allows people allows police forces to listen to cell phone conversations the same way you might if you were using say a radio band scanner so you can actually tune in to the cell phone conversations you probably didn't think that people could hear you when you're talking to your cell phone in fact that's widely available these are widely in use the stingray stingray this is an interesting device it can be mounted in a van in a police van and driven around a neighborhood and if they're trying to find a particular individual even if that individual is not using his cell phone what it does the stingray pretends to be a cell phone tower and so it'll find that phone connect with it and then they can drive a few more blocks and eventually triangulate the location of that particular phone so they can find you with your phone in a weird way your cell phone is like a little spy that's in your pocket leaking out information about you and then celebrate this is one that troubles me the most so for a routine traffic incident moving vehicle violation you can be pulled over by a policeman and if you have your cell phone on your body or if you're using it when they pull you over then they have the right to take your cell phone and they plug it into this thing celebrate in just about two minutes you can download everything that's on your phone now think about that that technology is actually accessing my whole life in my cell phone i you're with the cato institute at this point i need to disclose that the cato institute is known as a libertarian organization a libertarian think tank what's your take on this device this celebrate i mean are you outraged by this this is a little bit of an intrusion i i think it's uh the question of course is whether this is actually something that happens routinely we don't know what a court would say about a situation like this but certainly the setup is there the supreme court has held that it's not just you know felonies that a police officer can arrest you for it's any crime including not having your seat belt buckled or a traffic violation it's up to their discretion whether to perform an arrest and then once they've decided to arrest you there's a fourth amendment exemption for searches incident to arrest it's certainly not beyond the realm of possibility that they could decide that that is covered within the scope of a search incident to arrest and effectively use a pretextual stop to gather a full record of your electronic life i've also heard that um when you enter the us sometimes customs important support and security will do the same with laptop computers cell phones and so forth and usually you're right it's for an individual of interest to them uh not necessarily a suspect but it might be someone we know of documentary filmmakers and volunteers who work on organizations uh you know even people affiliated with aaron sports i have been detained in this way and seen their elections and the privacy watchdog at dhs actually just issued a finding that suspicionless searches of laptops and other electronic devices basically should be allowed to continue no reasonable suspicion of any kind is necessary uh and they they concluded bizarrely that there would be no civil liberties benefit to curtailing these searches at the border and border search here sort of a term of art uh it's also their view that the sort of constitution free zone extends for about 100 miles in from the border and the constitution not a phrase i'd heard before this is all temporary i mean so what's the outrage here that my phone has my email my contacts my calendar my life potentially my credit card information could be stored but think about what's really happening i have a smartphone it's probably that google has my email my calendar that's true my contacts right it's it's just in a convenient cell phone shaped package for me to carry around with me you're right if the police wanted it they could just do it they could go get it elsewhere that's true so data's moving around one of the problems with these debates is we always focus on one thing we focus on cameras focus on cell phones we focus on cctv whereas the problem is everything put together right it's not drones it's drones with cameras it's not drones with cameras it's drones with cameras and face recognition the ability to track between different drones and day to day tied that back to databases so you can see in real time from a drone everybody's name and income level as they walk around town in a way getting your data from the phone is super inefficient because one the person knows that you've done it probably they see you you know plugging their phone into something uh and you know you you have to get one person at a times data you know what a drag um unfortunately since a series of misguided rulings from the late 70s um fourth amendment doctrine is that once your data is in third party hands once it's google or facebook holding on to it uh in principle that's now their business records you've surrendered your fourth amendment privacy interest and so a lot of that data that we naturally expect to be protected by the fourth amendment's requirement of a warrant issued by a judge isn't protected in that way and can be gained people are totally unaware of that that that actually pertains to your gmail account for instance it's stored on google servers or any other but pretty much everything these days cloud computing we have our pictures somewhere our email somewhere all of our data is very rarely on our devices because it makes a lot of sense but now as julian said the rules no longer apply that protect them in a weird way our protections our first amended fourth amendment protections haven't really caught up with the 21st century and the technology is evolving much faster than laws ever will let's bring it right back home here in illinois you may we're shooting the show here in chicago and you may be unaware that right here in illinois there are 91 organizations working on counter-terrorism efforts and what's interesting about that number of 91 is that more than three quarters of them didn't exist before 9 11. so these are brand
new organizations that are involved in some way or another in surveillance that's why we call it illinois the land of surveillance welcome to this place what we have to have here is two fusion centers you talked a little bit about these here's a really ugly diagram from the government it's non-confidential so it's been released for us to show to you tonight and um tell me a little bit more about these fusion centers your view they haven't been very effective right well i mean in the view of a bipartisan uh report that the senate put out despite years of being assured that these were a proven vital tool the theory was you synthesize information from local law enforcement lots of different agencies bring that together with information at the federal level information that you know various intelligence agencies have gathered and this will give you a better window into incipient terrorist groups of course you know right after 9 11 we assumed there had to be lots of other sleeper cells waiting to strike and it again it seems to be that's not the case and so you've got a lot of people looking for something that doesn't appear to be there uh your history of intelligence suggests that unfortunately the problem is if the if the thing that you are convinced is there isn't there you just keep looking harder that's true and redouble your efforts and argue in the future we need more resources to go after this you know one of the funny ironies that you think i think has emerged here uh the statement actually was made by julian assange and we put on this picture here we we got this picture from the web but it's actually worth zooming into so if we can put this on screen for the folks at home uh you have here you have julian assange of wikileaks and he's saying i give private information to the public for free and i'm a villain meanwhile mark zuckerberg of facebook well he's taking your personal information and he's providing it to private enterprise for for money and he's the man of the year your take on this slightly different i think you're not you're not going to go with this parody 100 well it's funnier than it is true i mean i mean just sort of for for for reasons of greed basically zuckerberg wants to keep your information so the corporations have to keep coming back to him to target their ads you give out all that information they don't need you but these these companies and it's not just facebook it's also google it's also apple they're subject to literally thousands of subpoenas and and these really creepy national security letters can you tell us a little bit about that because i think a lot of people are unaware of what an nsl actually is so national security letters they're a tool that existed in a much more limited form before 911 where in a series of stages expanded they allow fbi agents basically the head of any one of 52 fbi field offices to authorize without judicial supervision or approval the seizure basically of non-content telecommunications records and uh financial records and financial records now has been expanded to mean any record from any one that uses money essentially and you know obama when he was campaigning said he wanted to do away with these he wanted to do away with national security being used to seize sensitive information about people who are not even suspected of a crime they're really used in a kind of six degrees of separation way to say well we have one target let's look at everyone they're friends with and let's look at who they're emailing and what websites they're visiting um so we can get a kind of social graph or pattern out of it uh actually in 2010 the obama administration broke bush's record for the number issued it was about 26 000 uh only this is a pertaining to americans and the number of people affected it was more than 14 000 again that's only americans and it doesn't include national security letters for basic information like you know who is associated with a certain ip address this is only more detailed transactional laws there's no warrant there's no judge involved there's no secret court that you have to go to you don't have to show any evidence in fact you can use these to troll for evidence and then go back to the court saying well now we've got the evidence we were looking for thanks to the nsl and now please give us the warrant so we can go after these people there's a lot of belief that's happening and and to google's credit they will tell say quarterly how much of these they're getting i mean they they'll tell us don't give us details twitter is also right and even some telcos have not our very big ones they seem to have kind of been co-opted by the government a lot of companies will not tell us at all how many of them they get whether they comply how much they comply it is all very secret google and twitter are rare in sort of volunteering some of this information about how much they get there's no aggregate reporting as there is with wiretaps that would give us a kind of overall picture of how much these different electronic surveillance tools are used uh the telcos normally are not so forthcoming but uh congressman ed markey sort of requested the major cell phone carriers to give a tally of how many requests from different kinds of law enforcement agencies they got added up to about 1.3 million a year a lot of that is cell phone tracking a lot of that is calling patterns also just the compliance with that think of those number of requests i'm certain that the person receiving those requests at that volume would just automate the process and not even pay attention to the sprint has done that uh they created a back end called elsight because they said we're getting so many requests we just couldn't deal with them it's like the information smorgasbord they allow them to just dial straight in we've heard rumors about that too with some of the other social networking sites kind of a creepy thought one question here comes have you developed your own ways to combat or accept this new world order of constant surveillance so i guess the question pertains to you guys what do you do in your own lives to keep your lives private and secret yeah i mean what we do is around the edges right what can you do you cannot have a credit card you cannot have a cell phone you cannot go outside you can live in a cave they kind of make no sense you know i don't have a facebook account that makes me kind of a freak i keep all my email on my computer that makes me a double freak so i'm doing some things around the edges but by and large there's not a lot we can do i mean you you have to accept it simply because you're being surveilled what we learned from the general petraeus scandal is that even the director of the cia can't keep email secret i mean if he can't do it i don't stand a chance you know that actually that is a very troubling case isn't it that gmail hacking it's a major intrusion not not just the fact that it was kind of a comedy of errors with our two generals and they're flirting with this woman in florida and so forth that was funny and had a comic element to it but in fact this gmail hacking by the fbi with really no prefix no evidence of criminality and they trolled through until they found some evidence of something that they could hold him accountable he's bizarre in a couple levels this nominally started as an investigation into cyber stalking meaning she had sent some harassing paula broadwell had sent some harassing emails to a woman who was friends with petraeus this is not normally the kind of thing the fbi would involve itself in at all um having tracked these emails back to broadwell because again you never private she had used an anonymous gmail account but then logged in from the same ip address to her real gmail account even if you're using stuff like something like tor usually the ip address is persistent over time so if you log into anything that's connected to you uh within that window you can be traced back again they can they can link to those two things and then having figured out who sent the emails if that was like they decided i think ultimately that actually the emails didn't rise to the level of criminal harassment but having identified who sent them instead of then confronting broadwell they decided to do a phishing expedition through all of her email and it's not clear what conceivable connection that had to the thing that they were supposed to be investigating so at that point the the supervisors when they found no evidence of criminality they should have called the investigation off and they didn't that seems like a real breach we'll probably hear more about that story i need to move on i'm loving the conversation but we have to get into what's next so in this show we like to talk about what's now and what's next and then what comes next the next things we're going to talk about are drones phones and super cookies and these it gets creepier folks so check this out predator drone you're familiar with these they've been in use since 2001 there's one on display at the national air and science museum so they're already kind of a part of american history massive expansion of that program but as bruce mentioned just a minute ago the scientists from darpa has been experimenting with different ways to modify these there's all sorts of new weird versions of drones that'll be coming out in the near future one of them is called argus and what they've done is they've taken 368 of those cell phone cameras the camera the 5 or 10 megapixel camera that's on your cell phone today and they've assembled those into sort of a beach ball shape uh mounting and they can put that at the front of one of these drones and this argus program that allows that drone to hover over a particular place and record everything that's happening on the ground now the device itself the the drone itself has literally millions of terabytes of storage on board but they're also streaming that data out down to the ground and so in real time someone who's back in the base station can see an image kind of like this it's a composite image of all those different eyes in the sky and they can start to see what's happening on the ground but what's even more troubling because of the degree of accuracy in each of those cameras is that they can zoom in and they can actually today get to a level of detail that allows them to see from 14 000 feet in the air a six inch long object they can also using gate analysis technology face recognition some of the other technologies you mentioned they can actually start to identify the people on the ground today these technologies are being used in afghanistan to to fight the war there tomorrow those drones will be in the united states it seems to be a near certainty more than 358 different uh law enforcement groups and counterterrorism groups in the united states have asked the faa for permission to start to fly their own autonomous drawn unit drone units and we can expect those to be mounted with similar surveillance technology this is clearly coming now when we chatted about this you you gave what was a really chilling prediction to me which is that basically you're like it's here it's happening yeah i mean i mean coming seems like an overstatement we we use drones this week to hunt down that uh california cop killer was holed up in his mountain hideout and there are they're being used in cities that's right and we have a picture here of the um well these are some of the cheap ones that are coming but here we have the border patrol right and they're used they have 10 they have a fleet of 10 and they've asked for 14 more so you're right it's already here it's not really out in the future i mean what's coming is i mean what's what's coming next right they're going to get better at resolution right they're able to be able to read documents be able to better identify faces and once you identify faces when you have a lot of good public face databases even facebook has a phenomenal database of tagged photos thanks to your friends who tagged you you'll now be identified by the drone in the sky even if you're not on facebook it's not like you're their customer right i don't have a facebook account they're tagged photos of me on facebook they have a network of my friends there because they'll pull people's cal uh address books so five years out what do you expect to be the case there'll be drones in every city there will be so much my expectation is that there will be drones everywhere 24 7. i mean it's not going to make sense for companies to fly their own drone feeds there's going to be you know drones over america inc and they'll have drones everywhere and you know like google street view it'll be drone sky view real time and and you just rent time on it you get what you want like a backbone internet provider you'll just lease capacity on the drone because that's that's that's s
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