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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

2022-07-22

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