Military pots. Left in the drawing board. Good afternoon. I want to welcome those of you who are here in the auditorium. Here in washington dc as well as those of you who are watching online. On our website or on cspan. I believe they are in fact on site here. According to them. Just wanted to go over a few items before we get to the meat of the program here. I would ask that everybody here turn off their cell phones or at least have them in a silent mode and those other Electronic Items as well. We will have a q a portion as we get close to the end of this, and when it goes down, it will ask folks to please wait to be called upon and wait for the microphone so everyone in the audience has an opportunity to hear you. That i will ask you to announce your name and affiliation. Our topic today is this particular absolutely fascinating and terrifying book eyes in the sky, by arthur hall and michelle and i have to. Out that the digital version that when i call the eye of saffron i will compare it to the lord of the rings. It was literally six years ago this month, that an nsa contract whistleblower by the name of edward snowden, burst upon the world scene with his absolutely amazing revelations. About mass Government Survey blades and being taken place on the socalled war on terror error. Dozens of not hundreds of stories on snowden and his risen revelation that out from the 2013, and continuing to that talk about that specific day. Thats all been about electronic surveillance. In terms of the listening variety. Our cell phone conversations, our Text Messages and things of that nature. Our guest today, brings us but maybe as scary or even scarier technological news which is the tom cruise minority report scenario is not exactly so far fetched anymore. In fact the technology we are going to talk about is actually inspired by a different movie which i wont steal his thunder on. Let me introduce our guests. Over here in the far right is our guest today arthur hall and michelle was a journalist researcher and founder and codirector of the center of the drone bar college and arthur is written for us news, fastcompany, motherboard, the list goes on and on. He is a coauthor of the drone primer a of key issues and Close Encounters in the international airspace. Sitting directly next to me as Jenna Mclaughlin who is a National Security and Investigation Report of our yahoo news. She focuses on the Intelligence CommunityForeign Policy and other issues. Jenna has previously covered National Security for cnn Foreign Policy the intercept and mojos following her graduation from john hopkins in 2014. In between, next to josh is shaun vega whose policy county the demand progress. John has served as legislative counsel for policy and insured for foundation and a google policy fellow for public representation. In addition to sort of policy, the domain progress fund, he also served as the director which he helped covan on capitol hill. You may have heard of a law firm in california. Tadpole of texas. An analysis and Commentary Technology in the chicago tribune, the Washington Post and on and on. The website that he has been a part of including passing reforms to the free information act and the june. Weighing in on the foreign intelligence act. Mass surveillance programs. My thanks and welcome to all of you. Arthur i like to begin by having you tell us how you developed this obsession with drones. [laughter] id like to think the institute for having me and i feel tremendously honored to be here on such a memorable panel. It really does me a lot of good to be back in the state. This is been a quite incredible journey of anything about the fact that not seven years ago, i was a pretty scrappy undergraduate in college in upstate new york. Every morning i would read the times and the breakfast cafeteria and invariably there would be a story about drone strikes in undeclared war zones. If not that, there would be a story about how drones were increasingly being used in the domestic civilian airspace. Both of which raised unfamiliar and urgent questions. Now for my part, i was doing my research with history students about immigrations in northern new jersey in the 1960s. I was sitting in a bar one day between my junior and senior year, and suddenly i had an idea. I have to study drones. I have to create something called the center for the study of the drones. I returned to the college and i told the administration and until the correct members we must do this and because they are likely completely insane, they allowed me to go forward with this. 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 the time when people began to ask these questions in a very broad public forum. Those questions have only become more complex and more challenging and more urgent as time has gone on. And so, i spent my time at cia as an analyst essentially during the very tail end of the cold war. Into the mid 90s essentially. I was used to working with both breather systems. Also very highly classified satellite imagery programs some of which i can talk about and a lot i cannot even though its been nearly 25 years since ive actually been active in doing any of that. But, what you say in the book about this whole issue of the soda straw in terms of trying to actually see something from above, then applies to pretty much any kind of conventional imaging platform including even relatively advanced satellites. The things that i can. To that are that in the unclassified now are things like digital gloves satellites. These things all operate and what we call the electrical optical spectrum. As a spectrum that our eyes use on a daily basis to see each other and to see the world around us. There are other spectrums of course that are of great interest of course as far as the Law Enforcement military which includes infrared and wave infrared. I wanted talked about some of that in more detail later. What a find kind of terrifying about this is we are now out of the you take a picture here and you take a picture there, youre talking about this whammy technology. Tell us what that acronym w ami stands for. What does it actually mean a real terms. Well i should say that im a drone researcher and i spent a lot of time thinking about these frightening technologies but in a way nothing kept me up at night the way this technology did. This levels tear is what its called. So as pat was mentioning, over the course of the cold war, this sort of pinnacle area defense the satellite that take images. Once you move more into anti arabism paradigm. You can focus in on individual people you want a video camera. But the aerial surveillance videos session them which are by a margin use, operate on whats called live sort of the soda straw printable. Think of them as telescopes, they are very good and watching a very narrow area and a very high fidelity. But if something happens outside of the area that youre looking at, well you are out of luck. An example was given to me by one source says the air force and several agencies were tracking a senior and first leader who was in a convoy of edo they co cults. He was differently in the vehicle but they didnt know which vehicle precisely he was in a certain. , they reach an intersection and they split up at that moment these alice had to make this very difficult decision. To be a left do we go right. It basically went on the flip of a coin. What if you could watch the whole area at the same time. That is the principle behind what i read about in this book whammy. This technology that cost me so many hours of sleep. Where you basically get a giant camera, and you watch an entire city at once. The idea being that you can follow thousands of vehicles and even if you dont see the vehicle and the thing of interest in real time, you always have the footage to view later. This sort of genesis i should note of this technology is actually from the move enemy at the stake. Its from 1998, with will smith, is about this road sell within this National Security agency which will smith has some evidence that they want. They deploy a whole dazzling array of technologies, they put trackers in his pants and his shoes, they put a camera in his smoke detector. Without a doubt, the most Terrifying Technology is the surveillance satellite which is able to see the entire eastern seaboard all at once and it hamza video capability and watches the will smith character as he stumbles around dc. Seeing the satellite and operation is truly truly terrifying. As far as anybody knows, it didnt even exist at the time. But one night at a Movie Theater in 1998, an engineer working at the lab, went to see the movie, with his wife and where is everyone else in the audience was no doubt terrified with us on the 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 his supervisor saying something reasonable, i have a great idea, tommy. And so the scrappy teen that work of some ideas and have digital surveillance could be used in that capacity, ultimately they stuck some cameras together and it was all pretty scrappy, but they were able to watch a very large area. 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 habit in their Service Members with ambushes and ied attacks. You have a very wide area view, it doesnt matter if you dont see the id go off at the very moment. You can rewind that moment in time and see where the people planted that id came from. None of that, you can see where they went but it gets better. Once you see where they went, now you have a location associated with this Insurgent Group so then you can track all of the other cars that came to that location. In two other locations in theory you can find the people who like the really Big Decisions in this group. This is obviously thrilling to the cia because they were really trying to find a way to identify these groups that were essentially look like any other civilians. So they put this Technology Together and it went through as incredibly rapid series of it Development Cycles culminating with system that races cover in my book global stair, which is therefore system which is continues to be in use this very day operating in at least as far as we know, afghanistan, and syria and congressional reports act absolutely crucial capability. The thing about it is it is classified but it is made a tremendous difference in that original role. At least as the claim that is being made on behalf of your sources right. Yes. I think what we learn from the history of surveillance programs in the United States over the course of the last and most 100 years now, is that often times these claims of efficacy dont necessarily and out. An example of course would be the patriot act 215 Telephone Program which more commonly known as the call detail record program. Even though that program was exposed, stopping exactly zero attacks in the United States in 2015, the Congress Went ahead and reauthorized the program anyway. I think thats one of the things that concerns me about not just this technology but a lot of technology that is out there right now whether we talk about facial recognition and other forms of biometrics and things of that nature. These programs have a really nasty habit of getting funded and taking off and developing a lot on their own and never getting really the scrutiny that they need. To the best of your knowledge, has any Inspector General either within the department of defense or any of the service Inspector Generals ever taken a look at any of these programs to see if the claims actually match reality . They certainly have, the technology is an uphill battle, there were a lot of steps and skeptics lot of people who said if you get one megapixel camera with a predator why would anybody need more than that. There was also some very scathing Development TestingEvaluation Data that came out about some of these programs. Also, there is some evidence that the technology has as you said, escaped beyond its original constraints sort of set of uses. One, senior officer who was involved on the analysis and, of the golden step program, said that its been useful in a narcotics operation in afghanistan. That had nothing to do with what the cia initially intended for the technology but once its there in battle, is those checks are necessarily applied. You use the tools that are at your disposal. So, that being said, i feel like the budget date is sort of speaks for itself. There are numerous ongoing programs, the army has new programs that develop some capabilities better than the marine corps, air force is continually investing more into technology and one gets the sense that probably has something to do with the fact that it has shown at the very least tremendous potential in one forum or another. There is one data that i was able to get about these operations. There was one system, a set of four aircraft or blue devils, wide area cameras. According to one documentation, and a three year time span, it was credited, credited with the capture or killing of more than 1000200 people. In afghanistan. 1200 people. That is a very tiny pick in to what exists behind the curtain. You just reference kind of the use of the technology in a narcotics faction. Lets make sure as we can be as fair as we can with respect to the technology. Technology can ultimate be used for good or evil as we have seen. While the same equipment thats used in pharmaceuticals can be made to make nerve gas. There is a flipside to the story too. I think its important that we talk about that. I prefer to talk about it upfront then when 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 control system be if you are able to kind of employ this technology. Absolutely, i interviewed one official rather a Senior Executive at Sierra Nevada which is the contractor the prime contractor for golden stair, he was actually driving in dc while i was speaking to him. Obviously the traffic was incredibly bad and i did a little background on this in the technology can be used to identify points in realtime. It can be used to gather data to traffic models to how to best optimize the traffic and city. How to space your time in traffic lights for example. There is more to that. About a year before i started working on the book, i was writing my bike home from a bar. In brooklyn. I witnessed a shooting. It was a shooting of four peop people, they were shot at 19 yearold in the gut. They disappeared into the night and obviously i didnt go chasing after them. I contacted the police the next day and i was in touch with the detectives trying to give the information that i had and i checked in public or so later and they were never able to solve that 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 would been a very simple question of tracking, back in time to where they came from and also forward in time to where they ended up hiding out. Even if that hadnt allowed the police to catch up with them every night, he wouldve given them an address. I want this people to be brought to justice. I saw this teenager lying on the ground. If we have the capacity to do so in a way its kind of encampment to at least make use of it. But the story is never so simple, is it. I also heard about some very terrifying things it can be done with the technology in a domestic setting which thus make no mistake its happening. It is being used and there are groups that are trying to have it be used in domestic setting. They are testing in baltimore and a lot of other cities and just last week though as i referred to as the henry ford of this technology, announced that he now has insight on a place in chicago, to have the Technology Fly over the cities st. Louis and congo incredibly large area to solve unsolvable crimes. And, the last thing ill say about that is that it is completely legal. As far as the law is concerned, there is no difference between this man droning an entire city within a hundred and 92 megapixel military grade camera and me sticking my camera out of the window of an airplane to take a picture of the landscape. Its a public space and i have the right to do so. Sean, the attorney due by that question. I think that is fair to say that the law in this book that there is anothers part of this that you are not god into yet. You call it abi at one point is a technical term. We are really talking about the Artificial Intelligence apparatus around it and the other similarities around it. The increased collection ability generates just way too much information for the normal intake process. I have a specific question on the other side of that it does start to go to the site but i think we will need to have you explain a little bit more about that before we get there. One of these cameras, single one, generates an unfathomable amount of data. I calculated that it would take like 2000 ipads to play the imagery from a single camera frame at any given time if youre looking at sort of realtime of real size resolution. As one engineer put it to me, it takes a Million People to watch a Million People. And sure enough, when the air force began analyzing all of this footage