i'll come out and say in my opinion edward snowden is a hero he is the classic example of a whistleblower who had no alternative who brought valuable information to the public at great cost to himself he understands that there is sensitive information that it's not always clear where the boundaries are and he did not trust himself to make those judgment calls he deliberately turned over all of his documents to the media first the guardian  and then the times in the post and said you decide what to publish you do the stuff to verify the authenticity to get the  out you are the guys who have the wisdom and the knowledge lot of revelation of how much hacking the n s a been doing where we like to portray ourselves as the good guys and those evil chinese hackers breaking into our systems there's a lot of evidence that the n s a is not just defense of operations but doing fence of operations and has inserted mao where on to close to one hundred thousand computers around the world we are the best hackers in the world one of the more disturbing things that has come out is how the n s a has attacked encryption not just in some sense you want your guys to be able to break codes i mean that's the whole reason we have a code breaking organization but you don't want them to do is to undermine the whole encryption infrastructure and is increasingly clear that the n s a has done just that by both influencing standard stops in and by working on back doors in various places we still don't know the extent of what they have done one claim the in my opinion is possibly the most scary thing and has gotten it got some press around the time but very little ongoing press is the claim that the n s a has basically broken most standard internet  yption and what that exactly means whether s s l was broken given recent things with her bleed i wonder is there some connection between the two i don't know but potentially you know encryption on the internet as a video surveillance they honestly i don't think of it as much different than when i was a kid and first saw it in the you know convenience store or whatever but it really is significantly different today they in the old days it was one poor quality camera pointed in one direction and fixed a recording on to tape if they remembered to put the tape in now if you're talking about a new installation a video technology going in such as for example the seattle network  they first broken the news because along alcott actually is all along the waterfront and even in lending even though it's supposedly port security any of that those cameras now have it's much higher definition it has the capability of being remotely controlled changing the field  zooming in getting a whole lot of really hidden control of the camera you don't necessarily know where it's pointing when it's pointing who's controlling it and there's also although not associated with those cameras but with cameras in a lot of areas the potential for tying to facial recognition so it's not just we have you know the old model is some bad act there was shoplifting in the store and it maybe would catch that would have individuals now it's the capability of automatically without human intervention going and randomly or regularly picking out whoever happens to be in the field of vision of the camera and trying to identify that person which can itself lead to different actions even if the person wasn't doing anything to a groups of people that were much more followed than anyone else and i mean a lot of the video surveillance time was spent on them one was the kind scruffy home was you know not doing anything wrong but a you know we don't really trust that kind of person the second group pretty women now  the hottest thing is not just having a video camera on a pole but drones which there's been a lot of news about so far there's not a whole lot of implementation of in the wild partly because the f a a has a highly regulated at the moment but the technology is certainly the gliding and flying and various kinds of sensors are attached to it again the obvious one is video of some sort but there's also audio detection  radiation detection thermal imaging if you think of situations like the oso mudslide being able to try to locate people where they could not get in physically to see what was going on fighting forest fires one of the interesting things when we were talking to the seattle police department on this that i  of that they said is really a common problem where they would love to be able to do heat sensors on these is in our large parks in lincoln park discovery park they them heat rather than having to try to search the so those are all fabulous uses of drones they really i don't think anyone would have a problem with that's the utopia then there's the nightmare scenario where these drones particularly small drones potentially now solar powered drones hover almost silently and quite possibly invisibly or for all practical purposes invisible wireless communication could blanket city have random surveillance of everything going on have targeted surveillance of political rallies you can courses them for voyeurism he thought you were safe sunbathing on your roof i guess not or again with the capability of the smaller drones it's not even necessarily from a height but you can hover outside windows at low level areas where you really don't think of yourself as being exposed but it could happen so that's a very scary technology and i will get to in a moment what we can do about some of these but i would like to talk about another one that has received much less public attention in the media and people may or may not be aware of a l p r automatic license plate recognition which really is a fancy name for pretty simple technology a lot of this also just like drones the major concern has to do with video l p r it's just a combination of video and optical character recognition but nonetheless you put those together and you end up with a powerful tool when tied in to other data bases so the basic concept is you have an lp our camera typically mounted in a vehicle occasionally fixed to a pole but most common situation is mounted in a vehicle in a patrol  car as it's just driving along it is capturing the license plate of every vehicle that passes either direction off to the side including highway speed it can literally be capturing thousands of images a minute and then time that into a database to find out what card is  typically save that information and interesting side note is this is not just a government issue in our research on this we found out that there is actually one other industry they is using these at least as much as or maybe even more than law enforcement i would never have guessed it  both their purposes of wanting to locate cars and then they are using it as kind of a sideline they are now repo men and data brokers selling this information  so there are literally commercial databases now with hundreds of millions of records in them again a technology with some really good  the ones they launch foresman usually talks about are ones that i totally applaud two scenarios they talk about one is located in stolen cars and the other one is amber alerts to my car gets stolen i would love it if i please and happens to be driving by glasses and says hey that's doug's car there's also the nightmare side of you have hundreds of millions of records which can be used then to track where i have been even if you don't follow me continuously if you just have readers here here and here you can know when i drive there other big method of location tracking which again one part of that people may be familiar with which is your cell phone is giving information to the cell towers every few seconds saying where you are beyond the cell tower aspect of that though there's another aspect where these may be being tracked not just your cell phone but tablets all of our desires to connect to why five all over the place if you're searching for  i networks you're also prague casting to the wife i network that you are there and there are companies commercial companies they use this for tracking purposes  just to identify for example people walking into a store by their tablet or their cell phone people on the one hand people say you know it's no big deal sure you know where i was here and now once or twice but when you build up that information over time all of a sudden it really does star potentially painting a picture of a person in ways they never thought of they they happen to go every week for one hour to medical dental building  maybe they're good therapy and the question is so what do we do to allow all those good things the stolen car fine nane the forest fires the  mudslide the emergency hand lane without getting the bad side and the answer is really regulation and it is possible to do this regulation technology is not the force in and of itself that will overcome everything we can put rules on how technologies are used especially by government actors but even by private actors we we do tend to follow these rules because there are sanctions that can be discovered and we have norm as you know old fashioned that it used to be illegal to wiretap people and it wasn't all that hard to do but we put into place regulations of how that can be done and really those are pretty much followed so what regulations should we do the first one to look at is just making sure that our elected officials those accountable to us have a say in technology you think that would be kind of obvious but the reality is typically they don't to day the vast majority of these technologies get put into use because somebody in the police department or occasionally some other department gets a grant from  elected officials may not even know about it they go out because it's a cool new toy and by this start using it nobody even finds out about it until potentially years later  that's what happened with the drones in seattle seattle had drones for three years before they made the news they weren't using the much they were in training but they'd already purchase them so if we can have an ordinance that says before you obtain any surveillance technology the council needs to sign off on it has two big purposes one we make sure that the council knows about it but to make sure that the public knows about it not just for accountability purposes but also to take advantage of crowd wisdom they often when something like this is proposed the proponents are seen only the good side of something because they're trying to solve a problem this technology solves the problem that's what they're looking at and then somebody from the public may say but what a bout if this is happen here what that legislative approval should require is not just should we get cameras well you know that's a pretty simple discussion and especially if you have this big problem that's been solved but needs to be approval of how they're going to be used how the information is going to be collected how it's going to be retained who's going to have access what the safeguards are whether the technology is temporary permanent what's the training going to be associated with it and very important in any of this is to have some audit capability both to see that they're following the rules but perhaps even more important to see are these effect of is this actually worth the money there are some technology specific regulations that can be put in place for video surveillance that regulation actually is really simple don't do it the studies out there show there's no point in them they're always how did as this is going to stop the crime problem or decrease the crime problem and study after study shows that they don't there is one narrow situation where they have been shown to have a little bit of value and that's to stop car prowls and parking lots beyond that and that's typically not the big high profile thing that they're touted as stopping terrorism stopping gunshots stopping all this not stopping car prowls all of those situations the study is and there have been studies of studies growing on this show maybe they do some displacement but mainly they just don't end up having an effect after all certainly not anything compared to what we know are cost  effective methods of dealing with crime better lighting better patrols of a riot of proven things they just don't have the cool new technology associated with them drones really do change the game there's a big difference between even manned helicopter guardian one or whatever they call it in king county there's a lot of costs associated with  there's a lot of noise associated with it and that's much different than having a very low cost and practically invisible unknown surveillance so there's a quantitative difference there or a qualitative difference there but even the quantitative difference can really change things and an analogy i like to use  has nothing to do with aerial surveillance or surveillance even in general but why it's different if i could always see this from the airplane now i can again this is a crowd that will understand this analogy when i was a kid libraries you had in the back of the book the registration card and in fact if you wanted to put in the time you could find out not just who read the book by going down the list but you could open every book and find out what all i had read particular was a smaller paranjpe people didn't worry about this a lot even though it was in a sense public information because practically speaking nobody would do that when computers were introduced for library use back in the early seventy's all of a sudden people got worried about it and that's when regulations went in all around the country including washington saying library information is confidential and it's simply because it was cheaper to find out exactly the same information drones are the same way yeah we didn't worry about it when you had to hire a helicopter but we're going to worry about it when with your little gizmo you can do it for basic principles they our concern from a privacy standpoint was when it's used to look at people not at things or places looking in forest fires fine looking at people at least partially questionable tying on top of that our concern again is around surveillance not about rescue situations hostage situations it's about  really to look at people for to find out what they are up to rather than to help them and related to that law enforcement needs to be more highly regulated than say artificial wildlife because law enforcement i will say bolt has a history of overreaching  d abusing their powers but also they have more powers of and that really does change things they need to be more tightly regulated and finally we needed objective standards we don't want to leave to the judgment of the operator as to what's sufficiently protective of again in our discussions with the seattle police department and one point that's essentially what we were told by very nice guy who was heading there to man drone team and were saying so how do we know it won't be used for these bad things and he's because i authorize it and i i authorize every use and i won't do it for that and that may well be true he you know probably was a good guy wouldn't do it but what about the next guy what about when things change you can't just leave it up to discretion there is no use for generalized surveillance no weapons on drones no use with biometrics u se of drones only when it's necessary so if it's not their first line of investigation it's when other things don't work minimize collection of other information than the target so for example something as simple as if you're you know flying over a building to get to the part you want to look at keep the camera pointed up until you get past the building get to the park and for law enforcement use for criminal purposes criminal investigation get a warn have probable cause you're going to find criminal activity to justify use of the drone so get the warn or sometimes there are emergency situations in an emergency situation you can do it first you know you don't have time to get the warrant but get a warrant afterwards to justify it if you can't justify it after the fact get rid of the information you collected don't keep the information around longer if you're collecting information not on say the target of a warrant if you incidentally picked it up get rid of it immediately if it's for search and rescue operations don you don't need any of that data get rid of it quickly and have ways to audit it log to find out how useful it was generally our approach to privacy is informed consent and if you want to share information you should have that right if you want to protect it you should have that right when it comes to d what if i decide i'm happy sharing it but my brother isn't it turns out i've already disclosed a lot about my brother but does my brother get a veto over me do i