Transcripts For CSPAN2 Arthur Holland Michel Eyes In The Sky

CSPAN2 Arthur Holland Michel Eyes In The Sky July 14, 2024

Cspan is also here so before we get to the meat of the program please make sure phones are turned off or in silent mode to hamper our discussion and the q a portion as we get to the end of this and wait for the microphone and then ill have you announce your name and affiliation. Our topic today is this particular fascinating and terrifying book and i have to point out a video version from lord of the rings for the content of this book and what we are discussing but six years ago this month the nsa by the name of edwa snowden with his absolutely amazing revelations about government surveillance taking place with the war on terror. And with those revelations and in some respects and with electronic surveillance. And i guess todayod brings us and with that technological news with those minority reports scenario is not so farfetched but theolog was inspired by a different movie. So now o here a journalist researcher and founder and codirector. A from Johns Hopkins in 2014 and in between is the policy council and progress serving as legislative counsel for the flight foreg the future for the policy manager of the Sunlight Foundation and as a policy fellow at Georgetown Law Institute for public representation. In addition for Progress Education fund he also serves as director in the Advisory Committee he helped cofound on capitol hill with the folks you may have heard of california. His analysis has been published with the chicago tribune. My thanks and welcome to all of you. Id like to begin by having you tell us how you developed this exception. Id like t to thank the Cato Institute for having me. I feel honored to be back here in this space and its been quite an incredible journey when you think about the fact that not seven years ago i was a pretty scrappy undergraduate in upstate new york and every morning i would read the times in the breakfast cafeteria and there would be a story about drum strikes in the undeclared zones and if not that, then a story about how they were increasingly being used in the domestic and civilian airspace, both of which raise the unfamiliar question. In my part i was doing my research about immigration to northern new jersey in the 1960s. I was sitting there one day between my junior and senior year and suddenly i have an idea. I have too study drones for the study at the center of the drones. I told the faculty members we must do this and they are insane and allow me to goth forward wih it. We establish ourselves at the time when people begin to ask these questions in a very broad public forum and those questions have only become more complex and more challenging and more urgent as time has gone on. I was used to working with both systems and also very highly classified satellite imagery programs, some of which i cangr talk about, a lot of whh i can cant though unfortunatey even though its been nearly 25 years since ive been actively doing any of that. But, what you say in the book about this issue of the Service Called tcall to see something fm above, that applies to pretty much any kind of conventional imaging platform including even relatively advanced satellites the things i can point you to in the arena now are things like digital globe satellite. These things all operate on the spectrum you and i use on a daily basis to see each other and see the world around us. What i find terrifying about this you take a picture here and there and you are talking about this technology t tell us what t stands for and what it means in real terms. I should say that i spend a lot of time thinking about pretty frightening technologies, but nothing kept me up at night the way that this technology d did. Over the course of the cold war once youve moved into a terrifying you wanted to follow individual people and so for that you want a video camera. But think of them like telescopes, very good at watching them with a narrow ar area. At a certain point the vehicle reaches an intersection and split up and at that moment they have to make a very difficult position do we go left or right and basically put for the flipa coin. In this technology that cost me 70 hoursrs of sleep you watch an entire city at once the idea being the note of this technology is from the movie enemy of the state may be from 1998 and its about this National Security agency. Rathose technologies and in his pants and shoes with trackers and smoke detectors. It seems the entire eastern seaboard all at once and it has a video capability and watches the will smith character as they scuttle around. One night at a Movie Theater in 1998, an engineer at the national lab went to see the movie with his wife. He was absolutely thrilled. He thought it was amazing and that we shouldth do this. They were able to launch a very large area and the cia got involved and became interested in what they were doing because they could use it to unravel the networks where they were wreaking havoc on the servicemembers. You could rewind that moment in time. You could see where they went but it gets better once you see where they went now you have a location associated and in theory you can find the people who play the really big positions in the group. This is obviously thrilling to the cia. T went through an incredibly rapid series of Development Cycles culminating with the system that graces the cover of my book which continues to be in use this veryte day operating in at least as far as we know afghanistan and syria the report called it an absolutely crucial capability. Its i classified basically butt made a tremendous difference in the original roald. At least it is a claim that is being made on behalf if your source is. What we learn from the history of surveillance over the course of the last almost 100 years now. Stopping the attacks in 2015 the congress and its wisdom would reauthorize its not just about this technology but of technology thats out there right now whether we talk about the facial recognition and other forms of biometrics and things of that nature. These programs have a nasty habit of getting some advanced taking off into developing a lifeer of their own ever getting the kind of scrutiny thatea they need. So to the best of your knowledge, has any Inspector General in the department of defense or the service Inspector Generals ever taken a look at these programs to see if it matches reality . Beta came out about one of these programs, and also there is some evidence that the technology has as you said escaped beyond its original constraint and set of uses. One senior officer who was involved on the analysis and end of the program said that it had been useful for the counternarcotics. That has nothing to do with what they intended for the technolo technology. But once it is there in battle, those checks dont necessarily apply. You use the tools that are at your disposal. So, that being said, i feel like the budget data speaks for itself. There are numerous Ongoing Development programs. The army haspr new programs such as marine corps and air force is continually investing more into new technology and one gets the sense that probably had something to do with the fact that it has shown that th at thy least tremendous potential. There is one data point i was able to give these operations because there was one system, a set of four aircraft. According to one document i saww in a three year time span, it was credited and that is a direct quote, credited with the capture or killing of more than 1,200 people in afghanistan. That to me is a tiny peek to what exists behind the curtain. You just mentioned the use of this technology in a counternarcotics fashion to make sure we are being asked air as we can. Any technology can be used for good or evil purposes as we have seen and a lot of the same equipment that e is used to manufacture pharmaceuticals. There is a flipside to the story, and i think its important that wei talk about them. I prefer to talk about it up front. Lets take a hypothetical if google has its own capability, how much better would the maths b. . The prime contractor was driving in dc and the traffic was incredibly bad. I did a little background on this it can be used to gather data to create traffic models and figured out how to best optimize the flow of traffic in a city and how to space them for example. But there is more to do. About a year before i started working on the book i was riding my bike home and witnessed a shooting. Four people shot a 19yearold and they disappeared into the night and didnt go chasing after them. I contacted the police the next day to try to get the information that i had and i checked in a week or so later and they were never able to solve the crime. Its going a list of unsolved crimes in new york city every year. It would have been a simple question of tracking back in time from where they had come from to where they ended up hiding out even if that havent allowed them that night it would have given them an address to work with. I want those people to be to justice. I saw this teenager lying on the ground. It is kind of incumbent upon us to make use of it. But the story is never so simple because i also heard about some very terrifying thing in a domestic setting was make no mistake it is happening and it is being used and there were groups that are trying to have it be used in domestic setting. To have the technology flight oveflightoverthrows an incredibe areas this fall as he put it, unsolvable crimes. And it is completely legal. This man filming an entire city and me sticking my camera out of the window to take a picture of the landscape. It is a public space. What about the apparatus around it and another similarity to the crisis where the increased collection ability generates way too much information for the intake process and i f have another question on top of that, but i think that we will need you to explain a little bit more in the audience before we get there. A single one generates an unfathomable amount of data andf i calculate that itha would take 2,002 play the imagery at any been time for the real resolution as one engineer put it it takes a Million People to watch a Million People and sure enough, when the air force began analyzing all of this footage, they found themselves completely overwhelmed ending up on the floor. They could find what happened after an explosion was known about, they were not able to find what Donald Rumsfeld refers to as the unknown. There were so many other things happening in the footage but they certainly did have anythine to get to it so the solution to that is Artificial Intelligence. Not only does it spare you the grunt work of having to track individual vehicles a very simple solution to that you just say to the algorithm in theory the vehicle everywhere it itsn industry where its going. Give me a list of every location and then track all the vehicles that have been to those locationsf as well. But theres more. Maybe you dont want to start with someone whos a known terrorist. Maybe ifst the pentagon put it u want to get them before they mount an attack. As it turns out, the groups often exhibit some pretty predictable behaviors. They will drive aimlessly to make sure nobody is following them. Tell me every time a car exhibits one of these behaviors in a city. Now the system even if it doesnt catch every single one, that is a true holy grail to find everything that happens when they have no other way of knowing about it and theres been an intense effort in the last few years to automate this technology a lotte of people in the room have no doubt about the project is a controversial effort google has been involved in another g Silicon Valley firm and first wainterest was to getd capabilities. Now it is turned to the area of the motion imagery it is in part how you use it and why. We talk about this to some e extent in the book there is an upperre bound this would look like. But as a true investigative technique domestically im not so sure that i would agree that it is legal to get involved police use of the gps tracking device on a subjects vehicle not for a day or two but something on the order of the. It is basically a violation of the amman and. So for me the question is is jones applicable here even without the application on the subject vehicle becaus of vehicu are literally down utilizing a different form of the surveillance. You are just not sticking the actual feature if you will, whatever you want to call it on the car so it does make me wonder whether or not he would be operative here. But your point is there is no case you are aware of in the federal jurisdiction right now. But isnt part of the reason this may be the case that pervasive Surveillance Systemth they did everything they could to keep the use of the system secret. They didnt want the public to know about it. To this day they say they had no knowledge of it and isnt this penchant for secrecy and using a designation known as Law Enforcement sensitive to the information in one of the reasons we havent seen a thing . Ge to this kind off without a doubt if you think about how recently the congress has begun to Pay Attention to these locations i think that is largely attributed to the fact. And you are absolutely right in baltimore it was a secret observation and the reason is because it wasnt funded by the city. There was a texas billionaire philanthropist who actually gave the city enough money to run the program to see if the technology hahad the potential it seemed to have. As a result of r that loophole they didnt tell the mayor or mr the state legislature or the city council or the public defender. The list goes on. I was lucky enough to find out about the observation while it isng happening. The briefing on the Murder Investigation ofo the shooting similar to the shootingng eyewitness and the analysts showed how they have been able to track the assailant for hours following the shooting and also leading up to it. One of the detectives said that the most by far the best briefing that he had ever seen in his life. The other almost had no words. He was trying to find a way to make sense of what he had seen n inside its like that movie. I almost fell off my chair because at the same time, nobody knew that the technology had been directly inspired by enemy of the state. Its something that i reveal in the book. The following that briefing i stepped out onto the street and i knew that the airplane was watcng. I looked up into the sky and i could see itir very high. Sure enough it felt uncomfortable to know that i was being watched, but far more uncomfortable i will tell you everybody else going about their business in the city, knowing that they are being watched by the technology that they probably cant even count them where they dont even know it exists and they have no idea. To me, that that felt fundamentally wrong. Its wrong on a sort of lowlevel in that sense. Also in terms of the fact the city council didn council didnn opportunity to weigh in on it on whether this evidence would be admissible in court and it ended up having a width effect because when it was finally revealed, there was so much outrage being kept secret. What struck you about the journalistic techniques and his ability to get these peoplest to talk t to him . I was kind w of floored after agencies as well more like you have to talk to this guy. Its funny when you report on the intersection sometimes it leads to these topics people are excited to talk about. Theyve developed these tools and want to brag about them to a certain extent in the Intelligence Community particularly inn the research lb there is a basic kind of classification if you will and they are scientists and they may have a different frame of mind when discussing this sortnt of thing. I would like to hear more about your process of reporting and the amount of information, but i also on top of that would love to bring up the issue as well as a journalist who has covered the sort of intersection between the Intelligence Community and something im often struck by is the sort of reliance on this tool and a dependency in which in its early stages it is very prone to error. I wrote about the use of the Communications Technology and using that to connect with sources on the ground in china, iran and a webpage mayay be a source they go to and say it looks like they are browsing about yoga but they are communicating. Absolutely. So i will start with the first question and to be up with tremendously high praise. So i started researching the book for the journalist that i navigate writing a book and invariably people would say and i started to get a little nervous myself but it was exactly one of these stories and there were a couple of reasons for that. And with that core development. Of technology and how those outpaced the growth of microchips with Computing Power and thats is an astounding achievement in computing improved in that time and maybe to brag a little bit much more important that they had a sense this was an important story of broad Public Interest and had the obligation to get it out there. One of my sources said in a way i have been waiting for this call for 15 years. I saidid why . Has we have to answer for what we have done. And then at the very outset of the program to create something formidable that was one incredible moment and then every single day was the day they were not in the field to get these networks rolled up. So actually they were doing surveillance without anybody knowing about it on palm beach. Apparently they sat on the beach and are a littleno overwhelmed as they set off the process and not have any control over. And another thing that amazes me about these discussions that every single one i intended even talking about these constraints and without exception every single one brought it up because they were thinking about it to. Which should give you a sense that it is a crucial role they have to play in the public dialogue but technology itself that raisese these questions so your point of Artificial Intelligence you are right one of myot favorite anecdotes there was a group that was developing thisgo recognition algorithm and the system was very impressive but as other researcher

© 2025 Vimarsana