The History of Technology and Surveillance

The History of Technology and Surveillance The impact of technology on surveillance across protests, resistance figures and policing View this email in your browser

Welcome to the NYC Media Lab Innovation Monitor.

This week Amazon, IBM and Microsoft all announced some form of limitation on their facial recognition programs. To better understand why, let’s take a look at the public sector’s uses of computer vision and facial recognition tech, and the technologies that have historically powered domestic surveillance.

Beginning in the early 1960s, the NSA operated Project MINARET. This domestic espionage project’s watch list included — among politicians, journalists, and various organizations — civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Whitney Young, and boxer Muhammad Ali. It followed the FBI’s COINTELPRO (1956 to 1971), which targeted black civil rights activists, supporters of Puerto Rican independence, as well as feminist organizations, and anti-Vietnam War organizers.

More recent examples of surveillance tech include Baltimore police’s use of facial recognition to monitor protestors during the Freddie Gray protests in 2015. In 2005, the NY Times published an investigative dive into the use of illegal wiretapping and eavesdropping after the September 11th attack. Today, facial recognition and surveillance helicopters monitor peaceful Black Lives Matter protests. Amidst announcements by Amazon, IBM and Microsoft, the public is asking: Who benefits from Ring’s partnership with police departments, or the data brokerage firms that enable deportations, or Microsoft’s JEDI contract?

Could this be a moment to question AI’s guise of neutrality and rethink uses of surveillance tech? In past newsletters, we’ve explored the topics of Unjust Systems, Facial Recognition, and, ultimately, the Digital Divide, so feel free to check out previous issues.

Next week, we will be covering the future of payments. Will our slow return to a “next normal” accelerate the transition to digital-only currency transactions? Please reply or email me at erica@nycmedialab.org if there are any startups or corporate initiatives in the space you’d like us to recognize!

We wish you and your community safety, calm, and solidarity as we support each other through this unprecedented time. Thank you again for reading.

All best,
Erica Matsumoto

These Free Tools Easily Blur Protesters’ Faces and Anonymize Photos

In the past week, developers have rushed to build apps to help protesters avoid detection by authorities. Secure messaging app Signal has introduced a blurring feature; Everest Pipkin developed a browser-based app, Image Scrubber, that strips images of their metadata and blurs or masks the face completely; and developer Sam Loeschen built an iPhone app that masks images in real-time.

TechCrunch — 3 min read Read More

State Surveillance Amid Mass Protest — The Startup

Police have powerful protest surveillance tools at their disposal. Clearview AI, which has reportedly partnered with over 200 local police agencies, has built a database of over 3B faces scraped from public social media pages and other sources that can be used to identify suspects with just their images. Then there are more extreme methods such as aerial surveillance using drones or military planes.

A Motherboard report indicates that military surveillance planes, such as the Cessna 560 (which the FBI equipped with dirtboxes in the past), have been flown over multiple US cities during the anti-police brutality protests. Dirtboxes “pose as fake cell phone towers and trick phones into connecting with them.” A Predator drone, which is typically capable of capturing high precision images from a distance, was flown over Minneapolis protests last week.

Medium — 10 min read

Read More America Is Awash in Cameras, a Double-Edged Sword for Protesters and Police

With facial recognition technologies such as Amazon’s Rekognition and Clearview AI, low-quality images of faces grabbed from cameras can be matched with databases of mug shots or images scraped from the Internet to find a person’s name and contact information. Also, videos and photos shared online carry phone metadata that provides device and location information. Washington Post reporters Heather Kelly and Rachel Lerman explain how cameras can be used by law enforcement to surveil protestors.

Washington Post — 8 min read Read More Big tech companies back away from selling facial recognition to police. That’s progress.

After IBM, Amazon, and Microsoft upend their facial recognition businesses, attention turns to federal lawmakers.

Vox — 6 min read Read More Protesters Are Weaponising Memes to Fight Police Surveillance

Digital activists have found new ways to get their messages across. On Sunday, protestors “jammed” a Chicago police radio system by playing N.W.A and Chocolate Rain. That same day, K-pop “stans” flooded the Dallas Police Department’s informant app, iWatch Dallas, with a deluge of fancams after the department called for videos of illegal activity from the protests. On Twitter, #BlueLivesMatter searches return photos of Squirtle, Smurfs, and other cartoon characters in place of the usual pro-police posts.

“Activists are always adopting the latest finds in technology because of the simple fact that it’s the only thing that can give them the edge over the far well-resourced and staffed forces,” says Paolo Gerbaudo, director of the Centre for Digital Culture at King’s College in London.

WIRED UK — 6 min read Read More How to Protect Your Identity While Protesting Police Brutality

Now that it’s clear law enforcement can use technologies such as facial recognition and aerial surveillance to track protestors, Tech journalist Andrew Tarantola gives tips on how to protect your identity during the protests:

• Wear a mask that covers as much of your face and head as possible.
• Turn off your Face ID and fingerprint readers — police can easily force you to unlock your phone using these methods.
• Encrypt your phone, and if possible don’t carry your primary phone — use an older model with no personal data.
• Do not communicate using the phone’s standard call and text features — use secure messaging apps such as Signal.
• Keep your phone in airplane mode unless you are actively using it.

Engadget — 7 min read Read More A Case for Banning Facial Recognition

A leader of Google’s ethical AI team, Timnit Gebru, believes that facial recognition is too dangerous to be used now for law enforcement purposes: “It should be banned at the moment. I don’t know about the future.” She points to bias against people with darker skin and misuse by authorities, like when Baltimore police used the tech to monitor protestors during the Freddie Gray protests in 2015.

NY Times — 6 min read Read More Feds Flew an Unarmed Predator Drone Over Minneapolis Protests to Provide “Situational Awareness”

Following reports that law enforcement is using powerful tools such as military-grade drones to monitor protestors, Congress on Tuesday sent letters to several federal agencies, including the CBP and the FBI, demanding that they “cease any and all surveilling of Americans engaged in peaceful protests.”

On June 5, members of Congress sent a letter to the DHS seeking a list of jurisdictions where the department had participated in the surveillance of protestors, what it intends to do with the data it collects, and whether any local police departments are using facial recognition.

Vox — 8 min read Read More This Week In Business History

June 16, 1980: In a 5–4 vote on the case Diamond vs. Chakrabarty, the Supreme Court rules that living organisms that are products of human ingenuity are patentable.

Genetic engineer Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty was working for GE and developed a bacterial solution that could help in treating oil spills by breaking down crude oil. At the time the idea that one could patent a living organism was considered highly controversial.

The decision could become even more relevant as the field of synthetic biology explodes with advances in CRISPR technology.

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