Transcripts For CSPAN2 Arthur Holland Michel Eyes In The Sky

Just want to go over a few admin items before we get to the meat of the program. I i would ask everybody make sue cell phones are turned off or at least in silent mode and that apply to smartphones as well and any other Electronic Device that would make noise while were having our discussion. We will have a q a as we get close to the end of this and when that goes down ill ask folks to please wait to be called upon, wait for the microphone so everyone in the audience has an opportunity to hear you and that ill ask you to announce your name and affiliation. Our topic today is this particular outset absolute facd terrifying book, eyes in the sky the secret rise of gorgon stare and how it will watch us all by Arthur Holland michel. And at the point out a little digital version of what im calling from the lord of the rings, very, very apt for the content of this book of what well be discussing today. It was literally six years ago this month that an innocent contractor turned whistleblower by the name of Edward Snowden burst upon the worlds seen with this absolutely amazing revelations about massport was covert surveillance had been taking place during the socalled war on terror era. There were literally dozens if not hundreds of stories about snowden and his revelations that poured out 2013 and continue to this particular day. Thats all been about electronic surveillance in terms of the listening variety, listen in our our cell phone conversations, intercepting text messages, things of that nature. Our guest today brings us what may be as scary or even scarier technological news, which is the tom cruise minority report scenario is not exactly so farfetched anymore. In fact, the technology we will talk about today was inspired by different movie which i will not steal his thunder. Let me introduce our guest. Over here in the far wing is our guest today, Arthur Holland michel is as a researcher, four and codirector. Arthur is written for wired, u. S. News, fast company, motherboard, the list goes on and on. He is the coauthor of the drone primer. Sitting directly next to me is jenna mclaughlin, a reporter for yahoo news where she focuses on the Intelligence Community Foreign Policy and other issues. She has been succumb Intelligence National for cnn, Foreign Policy from the intercept and mother jones recalled her graduation from Johns Hopkins in 2014. In between our next is sean vitka, legislative counsel for the fight for the future, federal policy manager of the Sunlight Foundation and as a google policy fellow at Georgetown Law Institute for public representation. In addition to serving as policy council, the also served as director of the Fourth Amendment Advisory Committee which he helped cofound on capitol hill with folks you mefford of, former representative ted poe of texas. His analysis and commentary on price Effect Technology been published in the chicago tribune, the washington post, again on and on. The legislative fight is been a part of include passing reforms to the freedom of information act and most recently the june 2019 effort in the house to rein in Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act section 702 mass surveillance programs. My thanks and welcome to all of you. Arthur, id like to begin by having you tell us how you develop this obsession with the drones. So first, id just like to think the Cato Institute for having me. I feel tremendously honored to be here with such a venerable panel. It really does mean a lot to be back in this space. Its been quite an incredible journey when you think about the fact that not seven years ago i was a pretty scrappy undergraduate at bard college in upstate new. Every morning i would read the times in the breakfast cafeteria, and it would be a story about drone strikes in undeclared war zones. And if not that it would be a story about how drones were increasingly being used in the domestic civilian airspace. Both of which raced unfamiliar questions. For my part i was to my research as a history student about immigration to northern new jersey in the 1960s. I was seating and a bar one day between my junior and senior year, and suddenly i had an idea. I have to study drones and have two great something called the center for the study of the drone hit a return to the college had told the administration. I told the faculty members we must do this. Because they are likely completely insane they allowed me to go forward with it, and we created this Little Research experiment, and the rest so to speak is history. I guess our timing was fortunate because we established ourselves at a time when people begin to ask these questions in a very broad public forum, and this questions that only become more complex and more challenging and more urgent as time has gone on. I spent my time at ca as an imagery analyst essential during the very tail end of the cold war. Period into the mid90s essentially. I was used to working with both air breather systems like for you to and also very highly classified satellite imagery programs, some of which i can talk about. A lot of which i still cant, unfortunately, even though its been 25 years since ive been actively doing any of that. What you say in in the book abt the sole issue of the soto struck in terms of trying to see something from above, that applies to put much any kind of conventional imaging platform, including even relatively advanced satellites, the things i can point to do that are in the unclassified arena for things like digital globes satellites. These things operate on what we call the electrical optical spectrum, the spectrum you and i use on a deal basis to see each other and the world around us. There are other spectrums the course that are of great interest from a military standpoint, from a lawenforcement standpoint. That includes infrared. But what i find, what i really find terrifying about this is were not out of you take a picture here, you take a picture there, youre talking about this web technology. Tell us what that acronym stands for and what it means in real terms. I should say as he turned researcher spent a lot of time thinking about pretty frightening technologies but in a way nothing me up at night the way this technology did, this gorgon stare as it is most formidable iteration is called. As was mentioned, over the course of the cold war the pinnacle areal surveillance of the settlers that took still images, when she moved into me counterterrorism style paradigm you want to follow individual people. With that you want moving images. Images. You want a video camera. The aerial surveillance needed system that by and large are in use operate under whats called the soda straw principle. Think of them as telescopes. They are very good at watching a very narrow area, very high fidelity. But if something happens outside of the area youre looking at, you are out of luck. An example was given to me by one source, the air force and several agencies were tracking a senior insurgent leader who was in a convoy of vehicles. They knew he was in the conflict but they did know which vehicle precisely he was in. At a certain point the vehicles reach an intersection and split up. At that moment these analysts had to make this very difficult decision. Do we go left or give a it basically came down to the flip of a coin. What if you could watch the whole area at the same time . That is the principle behind what i wrote about in the book, this technology that cost me some hours of sleep, but you basically get a giant camera and you watch an entire city at once picked the idea being you can follow thousands of vehicles. Even if you dont see the vehicle and the think of interest in real time, you always have the footage to view later eric the sort of genesis i should note of this technology is actually from the movie any of the state it was a movie from 1998 with will smith. Its about this rogue fellow within a National Security agency that pursues will smith because he has evidence they want. They deploy an array of technologies, they put trackers in his pants and issues. They put a camera in his smoke detector. But without a doubt the most Terrifying Technology is a surveillance satellite which is able to view the entire eastern seaboard all at once and it has a video capability and watches the will smith character as he scuttles around d. C. Things settle in operation is truly, truly terrifying your ken starrs anybody knows it didnt exist at the time. One night at a a movie theatern 1998 an engineer working at a lab went to see the movie with his wife. Where is it what else in the audience was no doubt terrified by what they saw on screen, he was absolutely thrilled. He thought it was amazing and he thought we should do this. So he rushed home and left a message with the supervisor saint something very simple. I have a great idea call me. And so this scrappy team, it worked on some ideas. They wanted to think about digital surveillance could be used in airborne capacity. Ultimately they strap some cameras together, all pretty scrappy but theyre able to watch very large areas. In the cia got involved and became very interested in what they were doing because they could use it to unravel networks of insurgents in iraq where these networks were really wreaking havoc on u. S. Service members with ambushes and ied attacks. You have a pretty wide area of view, it doesnt matter if you dont cvid go off at the remote. You can rewind to the moment in time and see whether people who planted that ied came from. Not only that you can see where they went but it gets better. Once youve seen where they went, night at the location associate with this Insurgent Group are so that you can track all the other conflict into the location over to other locations. There you can find the people who made the really big decision and the screw. This was thrilling to the cia because they were really trying to find a way to identify these groups that were essentially look like any other civilian. And so they fast track this technology. The incredibly rapid series of development cycles, culminating with the system that graces the cover of my book which continues to be in use this very day operate at least as far as we know afghanistan and syria, congressional report just called an absolutely crucial capability. Anything about it is classified basically but what we knew is it has made a tremendous difference in that original role. At least that is the claim that is being made on behalf of your sources, right . Right. Because what i think we learned from the history of surveillance programs and the United States over the course of the last almost 100 years now, is that oftentimes these claims of efficacy dont necessarily pan out. An example would be the patriot act section 215 telephone Metadata Program which is more, no as the call detail record program. Even though the program was exposed as stopping exactly zero attacks on the United States in 2015, congress in its infinite wisdom went ahead and reauthorized the program easily. Thats what are the things that concerns me about not just this technology but a lot of the technology that is out there right now whether we talk with facial recognition, other forms of biometrics, things of that nature. These programs have a nasty habit of getting funded and taking off and developing a life of their own and never really getting the scrutiny they need. To the best of my notes had seen the Inspector General the department of defense or any of the service Inspector Generals ever take a look at any of these programs to see if the claims match reality . They certainly have. The technology faced very much an uphill battle. There were a lot of skeptics, a lot of people who said it you get one megapixel camera with the predator, why would anybody need more than that . There was also some very scathing development and testing Evaluation Data they came out about some of these programs. And also there is some evidence that the technology has, as you said, escaped beyond its original constrains set of uses. One senior officer who was involved on the analysis and of the gorgon stare program said itd been useful for counternarcotics operations in afghanistan. That had nothing to do with what the cia initially intended for the technology, but once it is there in battle, those checks dont necessarily apply. You use the tools that are at your disposal. That being said, i feel like e budget data in a way speaks for itself. There are numerous ongoing developer programs. The army has new programs to develop similar capabilities, so does the marine corps. The air force is continually invest more in the technology. One gets a sense that probably has something to do with the fact it has shown at the very least tremendous potential in one form or another. I should add there is one data point i was able to get about these operations can which is there was one system, a set of four aircraft called blue devils with one of these wide area cameras, and according to one document, in a threeyear time spent it was credited, direct quote, credited with the capture or killing of more than 1200 people. In afghanistan. That to me is a a very tiny pek into what exists behind the curtain. You just referenced kind of the use of this technology in counternarcotics fashion to panic sure we are being us there as we be with respect to the technology. Any technology ultimately can be use for good or evil purposes as weve seen. A lot of the same equipment that is used to manufacture pharmaceuticals can use to make nerve gas. Theres a flip side to the story at a think its a we actually kind of talk about iraq for to talk with upfront rather than what we are pressed for time at the end. Lets take a hypothetical here. If google had its own capability here, how much better would google maps be and how much better would your Traffic Management and control system be if you able to employ this technology . Absolutely. I interviewed one official, or rather sort of Senior Executive at sierra nevada, which is the contractor, prime contractor for gorgon stare. He was actually driving in d. C. While i was speaking to him, and obviously the traffic was incredibly bad. I did a little background on this and the technology can be used to identify chokepoints in realtime. They can be used to gather data to create traffic model to figure out how to best optimize the flow of traffic through cities, how to space time in traffic lights, for example. But theres more to that. About a a year before i start working on the book i was writing my bike home from a bar in brooklyn. I i witnessed the shooting of fr people it seems shot a 19yearold. They disappeared into the night. Obvious obviously didnt go chag after them. I contacted the police the next day and doesnt touch with the detectives to try to give information i had and then i checked in a week or so later and they were never able to solve the crime. Virtually, the teenager survived but it joined this list of thousands of unsolved crimes in new york city every year. Had this camera been watching that night it wouldve been a very simple question of the tracking, the say assailants back in time for the came from and also for in time to the internet hiding out. Even if that had not allowed the police to catch up with them to bring it them an address to work. I want those people to brought to justice. I saw this teenager lying on the ground. If you have the capacity to do so, in a way its of incumbent upon us to at least make use of it, but the story is never so simple. Because i also heard about some very terrifying things that can be done with the technology in a domestic setting, which lets make a mistake, is happening. It is being used, or the r groups that are trying to have it be used in domestic setting. Its been used extensively in baltimore, testing and a bunch of other cities. Just last week a man who live for two as a henry at this technology announced he now has his sights on st. Louis and chicago to have the Technology Fly over the cities to solve, as he put it, unsolvable crimes. And the last thing ill say about that is it is completely legal. As far as the law is concerned there is no difference between this man filming an entire city with 190 megapixel military grade camera and me sticking my camera out of the window of an airplane to take a picture of the landscape as a flat across the country, the later part of my book, its public space and have a First Amendment right to do so. Sean, youre the attorney. Do you buy that . I think its fair to say that the law has not kept pace with what you describe in this book. Maybe before diving into this, i think theres another part you got to get that you explore in depth in the book, which is you call it avi, talk about the Artificial Intelligence apparatus around this other similar to the 215 collection with the increased collection ability generates way too much information for the normal intake process. I have a specific question on the other side of that that does start to tilt towards illegal sites but i think we need you to explain more before we get there. Sure. One of these cameras, a single one, generates an unfathomable amount of data. I calculated that it would take like 2000 ipads to play the imagery of a single camera frame at any given time if youre looking at realtime, real size resolution. As one injured put it to me it takes a Million People to watch a Million People, and sure enough when air force began analyzing all of this footage they found themselves completely overwhelmed, a vast majority of it was ending up on the cutting room floor. They could obviously find what happened after an explosion was known about but they were not able to find what Donald Rumsfeld refers to as unknown unknowns. Shortly though some of the things happening in the footage but they simply didnt have time to get