We will have a q and a portion as we get close to the end of this. Please wait to be called upon, wait for the microphone. Our topic today is this particular fascinating and terrifying book, eyes in the sky. By Arthur Holland michelle, i have to. Out the version of what i call from the lord of the rings, for the content of this book and what we are discussing today. It was six years ago this month that a contractor said snowden burst upon the world with his amazing revelation about surveillance taking place. During the socalled war on terror era. There were dozens, if not hundreds of stories about revelations that poured out from 2017. The development of our electronic surveillance in terms of listening in on her cell phone conversations. Our guest today brings us what may be as scary or scarier technological news, which is the tom cruise minority scenario, is not exactly so farfetched anymore. The technology we will talk about today was started by a different movie, which i almost feel his this. I will introduce our guest. Over here is our guest today, Arthur Holland michel who was codirector of the senator from the study of our college. He is a coauthor, drew sightings and Close Encounters in national airspace. Sitting directly next to me is National Security and investigation reporter where she focuses on the Intelligence Community. Previously covered seamen, foreign policy. In between is shown, policy counsel, back to the future, policy manager of the foundation and google policy at georgetown clause. In addition to serving policy counsel for the education fund, also serves as director of the fourth a moment Advisory Committee which he helped to cofound on capitol hill. In Privacy Technology published, on and on. The legislative fights include passing reforms to the act and most recently the june 2019 effort in the house and surveillance act, section seven otay so i welcome all of you. Id like to begin by having you tell us how you developed this. I like to think the Cato Institute for having me here. I feel it does mean a lot to be to be back in this space. When you think about the fact that not seven years ago, i was a pretty scrappy undergraduate in upstate new york. Every morning i would leave the cafeteria and there would be a story about drone strikes on declared war zone. If not back then there would be a story about how drones were increasingly being used in the civilian airspace. Both raised unfamiliar questions. For my part, i was doing research about immigration, northern new jersey. I was sitting in a barr one day between my junior and senior year and suddenly i had an idea. I have to study drones and create something at the center of the drones. I returned the administration, we must do this. Because they are completely insane, they allowed me to go forward with it. We created this Research Experiment and the rest is history. I guess our timing was fortunate because we established it at a time when people begin to ask these questions in a very broad public forum. The questions have only become more complex and challenging and urgent. I spent my time in the cia doing the tail end of cold war. I was used to working with systems and also very highly classified satellite imagery programs. Some of it i can talk about and some of it i still cant. What you say in the book about this issue in terms of trying to actually see something from above, that applies to pretty much any conventional imaging form including evenly relatively satellite. Things like digital globes satellite, the electrical optical spectral light that you and i, archives use on a daily basis to see each other and the world around us. There are other spectrums of course that are of great interest. I want to talk about some of that in detail later. What i find terrifying about this is, we are now out of the, take a picture here and there, youre talking about this technology, tell us what that w ami acronym stands for. Is a drunk researcher, i spent time thinking about frightening technology. In a way, nothing kept me up at night the way this technology. As pat was mentioning, over the course of the cold war, there were satellite systems, once you moved into counterterrorism file paradigm, you want to follow individual people. For that, you want moving images, a video camera. There Surveillance Video system that are in use, operate under this principle, think of them as telescopes. They are good at watching a very narrow area, high fidelity if something happens outside of the area youre looking at, youre out of luck. An example given to me by one source is that the air force and agencies were tracking senior insurgent leader who was in a convoy vehicle. They didnt know which vehicle precisely he was in the. Then the vehicles reach an intersection and split up. At that moment, they had to make a difficult decision. Do we go left or right . What if you could watch the whole area at the same time . Thats the principle behind what i wrote about in the book. This technology that crosses so many aisles. You basically get a giant camera and watch an entire city at once. The idea being that you can follow thousands of vehicles and even if you dont see the vehicle anything of interest in real time, you always have footage to view later. The sort of genesis i should note of this technology is from the movie, enemy of the state. Its from 1998 with will smith and its about this so within the National Security agency, they lack the evidence they want. They deploy a whole dazzling array of technologies, they put trackers in his pants and shoes and put a camera in his Smoke Detector but without a doubt, the most Terrifying Technology surveillance which is able to be seen through the entire eastern seaboard all at once. It has a video capability and watches the will smith character as he scuttles around. Seeing it in operation truly is terrifying. As far as anybody knows, it didnt exist at the time. One night at the Movie Theater in 1998, an engineer was at one of the labs, went to see the movie with his wife. The audience was terrified by what they were seeing, he was thrilled though. He thought it was amazing. He thought we should do this. So he rushed home and left a message with his supervisor saying, i have a great idea. Call me. So this scrappy team, they worked up some ideas, ultimately they strapped some cameras together and they were able to watch a very large area. They became interested in what they were doing. In iraq where the internet works and wreaking havoc, ambushes and ied attacks. You have a wide area view, it doesnt matter if you dont see it go off at the moment. You can realign to that moment and see where the people who find it came from. You could see where they went also and it gets better, once youve seen where they went, now you have a location associated. Then you can track all the other locations. In theory, you can find the people who made the big decisions. They were trying to find a way to identify these groups. They look like any other civilian so they fasttrack this technology. They have this rapid series of development culminating with the system that graces the cover of my book. Theyre operating and at least as far as we know, afghanistan and syria, they called it a crucial capability, its classified basically but what we knew is it made a tremendous difference in the original world. The claims being made on behalf of your sources. What we learn from the history of surveillance programs in the u. S. , almost 100 years now, is that oftentimes these claims of efficacy dont necessarily pan out. An example would be act 215 program, a record program, even though the program was exposed as zero tax in the u. S. , congress reauthorized the program anyway. I think thats one of the things that concerns me about not just this technology but a lot of technology out there right now, facial resignation recognition,f that nature. These programs have a nasty habit of getting funding and taking off and developing a life of their own and never getting the kind of scrutiny they need. Has any Inspector General, either in the department of defense or service ever taken a look at any of these programs to see if they actually have . They certainly have. The technology is very much an uphill battle. There are a lot of skeptics, if you get one megapixel camera, why would you need more than that . There was also some very high testing data by came out about the programs. Also, theres some evidence that has escaped beyond its means, one senior officer involved on the analysis and of the program said it would be useful for the operation in afghanistan. That had nothing to do with what the cia initially intended for the technology. It doesnt necessarily apply, you use the tools that are at your disposal. So i feel like the budget data speaks for itself, there are numerous development programs, farming has new programs that are similar. They are investing more in technology. It has shown the very least, tremendous attention. There is one data. Mark, which is that there was one system, a set of four with one of these wide area cameras and according to one document i saw in a three year time span, it was credited with capturing or killing more than 1200 people. That, to me as a very kind of peek into what exists behind the curtain. You just referenced the use of this technology in a narcotics doctrine, to make sure we are being where we can be with respect to technology. Any technology can be the use of good or evil purposes. A lot of the same equipment you have used to manufacture pharmaceuticals can be used for that gas. The flipside is a story, too, its important we talk about that upfront rather than being pressed for time at the end. If google had its own capability here, how much better would google maps be in your Traffic Management control system . If you were kind of able to employ this technology. Interview one official, or rather a Senior Executive in nevada, the contractor that was there and he was driving in d. C. And obviously the traffic was bad and i did a little background on this. It can be used to gather data to create traffic models to figure out how to best optimize the traffic for the city. Theres more to that though. About a year before i started writing in the book, i was writing from afar in brooklyn. I witnessed the shooting, for people, shot a 19yearold in the gut. They disappeared into the night. Didnt go chasing after them. I contacted the police the next day and i was in touch trying to get the information that i had. I checked in a week or so later and they were never able to solve that crime. Fortunately, the teen survived but their listing these thousands of unsolved crimes in new york city every year. Had this camera been watching that night, it would have been a very simple question of tracki tracking. Back in time, where they had come from, also forward in time when they were hiding out. Even if it allowed the police to catch up with them, it would have given an address work with. I want the people to be brought to justice. I saw this teenager lying on the ground. If we have the capacity to do so, its kind of incumbent upon us to make use of it. I also heard about some very terrifying things that could be done with the technology in a domestic setting. It is being used. There are groups trying to hide their views in a domestic setting. Other cities and last week, a man who i refer to as the henry ford of the technology now has his sights on chicago to have the Technology Fly over the cities to solve as he put it, unsolvable crimes. The last thing, it is completely legal. There is no difference between this man filming an entire city, military grade camera and me sticking my camera out the window of an airplane to take a picture of the landscape as i fly across country late at night. I have a right to do so. Can you do that . Its fair to say the law has not maybe before diving into t the, i think theres another part, talking about Artificial Intelligence, similar to the 215 collection where the increase collection ability generates way too much information and i have a specific question but does tilt sort the legal side. One of these cameras, a single one generates an unfathomable amount of data. I calculated it would take 2000 ipads to play the imagery from a single camera frame at any given time. Well size resolution. It takes 1 millionth to watch 1 million people. When airports begin analyzing the footage, they found themselves overwhelmed. They could obviously find what happened after an explosion was known about but they werent able to find unknown unknowns. Surely there were so many other things happening in the footage but they didnt have time to get to it. So the solution is Artificial Intelligence because not only does it spare you the grunt work of tracking individual vehicles, a simple solution to that, save the algorithm and theory. You can also say every other vehicle is associated with it. Give me a list of every location and then track the vehicles at those locations as well. But theres more, then you dont want to start with someone who is a no, maybe you want to left, before they mount an attack. As it turns out, these groups exhibit some pretty predictable behaviors for an attack. They will do simple surveillance, theyll drive endlessly to make sure no one is following them. What if you polled the system and every time a car exhibits one of these behaviors in a city, now the system will catch every single one, it will catch some number of unknown unknowns. That is the true holy grail of surveillance. Find everything that happens you have no other way of knowing about. There has been an intense effort to automate the technology. Its first was to give them some automated capabilities to have footage. Now it turned to wide area emotion imagery. Its something that we should definitely be thinking about. Every time someone does a uturn, it seems a little suspicious. They all of a sudden have a cross over the head. From a legal perspective, the question of whether or not its legal is how and why you are using it. Generally speaking, there is an upper bound to what this would look like. As a private application but the idea of introducing this for a true technique domestically, im not so sure i would agree with that, unaccounted for unchallenged. We will see. [laughter] so heres the thing. The jones decision in 2012, it involves police use of a gps tracking device on the subject vehicle. Not for a day or two something for weeks. So youre talking about essentially placing a specific device on the vehicle and having that person track for roughly a month. The court said no, that is basically a violation of the fourth amendment. For me, the question is, is it applicable here, even without the application of an actual device on the subject vehicle quirks you are literally now utilizing a different form of persistent surveillance. Youre just not sticking the actual perceiver, the tag on the car. It does make me wonder whether or not jones would potentially be operative here. Theres no actual case for this is actually this is part of the reason why it may be the case that like in baltimore, they did everything they could to keep the use of the system secret. They didnt want the public to know about it. Officials maintained that they had no knowledge of it. Isnt this penchant for secrecy . Isnt that essentially one reason why we probably havent seen that challenge . Without a doubt. Think about how recently congress has begun to Pay Attention to locations. I think its largely attributed to the fact that the fbi allowed local Law Enforcement agency to use back. In baltimore, it wasnt the operation. The reason it was secret was because it wasnt funded by the city. There was a texas philanthropist who gave the city enough money to run the program to see if the technology did have the potential. As a result of that loophole, they did not tell the mayor or the state legislature or the city council or public defender. The list goes on. I was lucky enough to find out about this operation while it was happening. I spent two days in baltimore along with the analysts in baltimore. It was incredible but technology was able to do. I sat in on a briefing. The shooting was very similar to the shooting that i witnessed. In fee analyst showed how to track this mans surveillance four hours following also was leading up to it. I stepped out onto the street and i knew that the airplane was watching me. I looked up into the sky and i couldnt see it. Sure enough it felt pretty uncomfortable to know that i was being watched. Knowing that they are being watched by a technology that they probably cant even fathom. And they have no idea to me that felt wrong fundamentally wrong this technology watches everybody and so it was wrong on a moral level in that sense of visceral level in terms of the fact that secrecy the city council did not have an opportunity to weigh in on it. It ended up having a whiplash effect because was when it was finally revealed there was so much outrage. What struck you about that journalistic techniques in the ability to actually get these people to talk to him. I was floored that people who had worked with some of the most secret labs in the country and it worked on supersecret stuff. They were actually eager to talk to this guy. When you report on that. Sometimes you happen upon these topics the people are excited to talk about. They had worked on these things. They had developed the new godlike tools. Particularly in the research lab. There is a space that exists pre classification if you well. They may have a different frame of mind when discussing the sorts these sorts of things. And i would like to hear more about the process of reporting. As a journalist who has covered the Intelligence Community. Something im often struck by is the reliance on this godlike tool and the tendency in which it is very prone to error. The use of a Corporate Communication technology. In the sources on the ground and china and iran. Essentially, a webpage may be a source. It looks like they are browsing about yoga. Who is those secure lead to the depths around the globe. If we rely too much on ai i think its super dangerous computers will make mistakes. Did people talk about how dumb they are. And if we are rushing headlong into something that we are not really prepared for. I will start with the first question. My reporting is tr