We will have a q a portion as we get close to the end and when that goes down ill ask folks to wait to be called upon and wait for the microphone so everyone has an opportunity to hear you and ill ask you to not to name and affiliation. Our topic today is this particular absolutely fascinating and terrifying book, eyes in the sky, i have to point out, the little digital version of what im calling the eye from lord of the rings which i think its apt in what were going to be discussing today. Six years ago this month it in a say contractor whistleblower named edward burst upon the world scene with his absolutely amazing resolutions about mass surveillance taking place during the socalled war on terror. And of course there was literally dozens if not hundreds of stories about the revelations up or down from 2013 and continue to this particular day. That has all been about electronic surveillance in terms of listening and listening to her cell phone conversations, Text Messages and things of that nature. Our guest today brings us what may be as scary or scarier with technological news which is tom cruise minority report scenario is not so farfetched anymore and in fact the technology we will talk about today is inspired by a different movie which i wont still his thunder. Over here on the far wing is a journalist researcher and founder and codirector of the the list goes on and on. He is a coauthor of primer, key issues and drone sightings and Close Encounters in the national airspace. Sitting directly next mr. Mclaughlin and National Security investigation reporter for yahoo news where she focuses on the Intelligence Community foreignpolicy and she has previously covered interNational Security for cnn, foreignpolicy and mother jones following her graduation from john hawkins in 2014. And in between, and shawn, policy council demand progress, he is a counsel for the future and federal policy manager in the google policy fellow of georgetown law for representation. In addition to serving as policy counsel for the progress and demand Progress Education fund he serves as director of the fourth Advisory Committee which he cofounded on capitol hill which you may have heard of in california and former representative ted crow of texas. The privacy and technology have been published because of the chicago tribune, washington post, on and on. The legislative fights hes been a part of reforms to the information actor most recently the 2019 effort in the house weighing in Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act section 702 mass Surveillance Programs. Thank you and welcome to all of you. I would like to begin by having you tell us how you developed the obsession with drones. First i would like to think the institute for having me. I feel honored to be here with such a great panel. It really does mean a lot to be back in the space. And its been an incredible journey when anything about the fact that seven years ago i was a pretty scrappy undergraduate in upstate new york. Every morning i would read the times and the breakfast cafeteria and there would be a story about drone strikes in war zones. And if not that there would be a story about how drones were being increasingly used in the civilian airspace. Both raised unfamiliar and urgent questions. I was doing my research with history students, immigrations 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 and have to create something called the study of the drone and i returned to the college and i told the administration, yeah lets do this. And because they are completely insane they allowed me too go forward and we created a Research Experiment and the rest so to speak is history. I guess her timing was fortunate because we established ourselves with the time when people began to ask these questions in a very broad public form. And those questions have only become more complex and challenging and urgent. I spent my time at cia as an analyst during the tail and of the cold war. Into the mid90s. I was used to working with both. Also very highly classified satellite programs. Some of which i talk about. A lot of which i still not unfortunately even though its been 25 years since have been actively doing any of that. But what do you say in the book about the whole issue of the soda straw and trying to see something from above, that applies to pretty much any conventional imaging platform including relatively advanced satellite, the things i can put you to during the unclassified arena are digital globes satellite. These things operate in the electro spectrum that we use on a daily basis to see each other in the world around us. There are other spectrums that are of great interest for the military standpoint and the Law Enforcement standpoint and i want to talk about some of that in some detail later. But what i find terrifying about this, we are now you take a picture here and you take a picture there, you are talking about a we made technology. Tell us what it stands for. And tell us what it means in real terms. I should say is a drone researcher i spend a lot of time about raising technologies but in a way nothing kept me up at night the way that this technology did. The golden stair. So as pat was mentioning, over the course of the cold war the pinnacle area of the satellite systems would take images preyed when she moved into a counterterrorism paradigm there was individual people. With that you wanted moving images and a video cam. The Surveillance Video system in large are in use operate under the footprint. They give them as telescopes, they very good at watching a narrow area and high fidelity but if something happens outside of the area that you are looking at then youre out of luck. An example was given by one source, the air force in several agencies were tracking a Senior Leader who was in a convoy of vehicles and they knew this was in the convoy but they did not know which vehicle precisely was in. At a certain point they reach an intersection and split up. At that moment it was very difficult decision, do we go left or do we go right. It came down to a flip of a coin. What if you can watch the whole area at the same time. That is the principle behind of what i wrote about in the book whammy. The technology that cost me so many hours of sleep and you basically get a giant camera and watch in entire city at once in the idea being you can follow thousands of vehicles and even if you do not see the vehicle and the thing of him interest in realtime its a footage to view later. In the genesis of the technology is from the movie enemy of the state. From 1998 with will smith. In will smith has evidence that they want. And they play a whole array of technologies and they put tracking in his pants and smoke detector. But without a doubt the most Terrifying Technology is a surveillance satellite which seems the entire eastern seaboard all at once and has a video capability and it watches the will smith character as he scuffles around and saying the satellite operation is truly terrifying. And besides anybody knows it did not exist at the time and one night at a Movie Theater in 1998, an engineer went to see the movie with his wife, everyone else in the audience was terrified of what they saw on the screen, he was absolutely thrilled. He thought it was amazing and he thought we should do this. So he rushed home, left a message with his supervisor saying something very simple, i have a great idea. Call me. So the scrappy team worked out ideas and thinking about how digital surveillance could be used in airborne capacity and ultimately they strapped cameras together pretty scrappy and able to watch a large area. Then the cia got involved and became very interested in what youre doing because they could use it to unravel networks in iraq were these networks were really wreaking havoc with ambushes and attacks. Give a very wide area. It does not matter if you dont see the id go off at the very moment. You can rewind and see where the repo responded and where it came from. And you could see were the actually went, once youve seen where they went, now you have a location associated with the group. So then you can track all the other ones that came about. In theory you can find the people who played the Big Decisions in the group. This is obviously thrilling to the cia because they were trained to find a way to identify the groups that were essentially looking like any other civilian. So this went through an incredibly rapid series of Development Cycles culminating with the system that braces the cover of my book and thats what continues to be in use this very day operating as far as we know in afghanistan, syria and congressional reports called it a crucial capability and everything is classified but what we know it has made a tremendous difference in that original role. And is a claim is being made on behalf of your sources. Asked. What we learn from the history of Surveillance Programs in the United States over the course of the last 100 years the often times these claims of efficacy dont necessarily pan out. An example would be the preacher iraq to 16 program which is commonly known as a wrecker program. Even though that program was exposed and stopping 0 attacks on the United States in 2015 the congress had to reauthorize the program anyway. Thats one thing that concerns me about a lot of the technology out there right now whether we talk about facial recognition and other forms of biometric and things of that nature. These programs have a nasty habit of getting funded in taking off and developing a life of their own and never getting the scrutiny that they need, to the best of your knowledge, as any Inspector General either within the department of defense or service Inspector Generals taken a look at any of these programs to see if the claims naturally . They certainly have. The technology has faced an uphill battle. There are a lot of skeptics and people who have said one megapixel camera, why would anybody need more than that. There was also very Development TestingEvaluation Data that came out about these programs and also there is some evidence that the technology has as you said, escaped beyond its original constraint. One senior officer who was involved on the analysis and of the golden stair program said there being useful for capturing aquatics in afghanistan. That had nothing to do with the cia initially intended for the technology. Once its there and battle, those checks dont necessarily apply, use the tools that are at your disposal. So that being said, i feel like the budget data in a way speaks for itself, there are numerous Ongoing Development programs, the army has new programs that develop similar capabilities and so does the marine corps, air force is continually investing in the technology and one gets the sense that that probably has something to do with that it has shown the very least tremendous potential. There is one data point i was able to get about the operations. One system, a set of four aircraft, blue devils and according to one document, and a three year time span it was credited with the capture of killing of more than 1200 people in afghanistan. That to me is a very tiny peak into what exists behind the curtain. You just referenced the use of this technology and counter narcotics to make sure we are being as furs we can be with respect to technology. Any technology can be used for good or evil purposes as we have seen. A lot of the same equipment to manufacture ferguson locals can be used to make aspirin there is a flipside to the story too. I think its important that we talk about that and i prefer to talk about upfront and warmer pressed for time at the end. Lets take a hypothetical. If google had its own capability how much better would google maps be and how much better would your Traffic Management control system be if you were able to control that. I interview one official Senior Executive at Sierra Nevada which is the contractor, the prime contractor. And he was driving in d. C. And obviously the traffic was incredibly bad and i did a little background on this and technology can be used to identify checkpoints and be used to gather data to create traffic models to figure out how to optimize the flow of traffic through a city and save time in traffic. But there is more to that. About a year before started working on the book i was riding my bike home from a bar in brooklyn and i witnessed a shooting, for people in 19yearold was shot in the gut. And they disappeared into the night obviously i did not go chasing after them. I contacted the police the next day and i was in touch with the detective trying 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. Fortunately the teenagers survived but it joined a list of thousands of unsold crimes in your city. Had this camera been watching that night it wouldve been a very simple question of tracking his assailants. Back in time from where they came from and forward to where they ended up hiding out. Even if the police could not have caught up that night it would give them an address to work with. I want those people to be brought to justice. I saw the teenager lying on the ground and if we have the capacity to do so, its incumbent upon us. So lets make use of it. The story is never so simple. I also heard about terrifying things that can be done with the technology in the domestic setting which lets make no mistake is happening and being used and there are groups that are trying to have it be used in a domestic setting and being used in baltimore and other cities and just last week man who i reflected who is henry ford of this technology and he now has his sights on chicago to have the Technology Fly over the citys recording large areas. And he called the unsolvable crimes. And the last thing i will say, is completely legal. As far as the lawyers are concerned, theres no difference between this man owning an entire city with 120 megapixel camera and me sticking my camera out of it airplane to take a picture of the landscape as a fly crosscountry is a public space and operate to do so. You buy that . I think its fair to say the law has not kept pace with what you described in the book. It may be before diving in, theres another part of the book that you have not gone to. You see in the book, abi and the technical term talking about the Artificial Intelligence apparatus around it and other similarities where the increased collection ability generates way too much information for the normal intake process. I have a specific question on the other side but i think we need you to explain a little more before we go. One of these cameras, a single one generates an unsalvageable amount of data. I calculated that it would take 2000 ipads to play the imagery from single camera at any different time if youre looking at realtime and real size revolution. As one engineer put it to me it takes 1 Million People to watch 1 Million People. And sure enough when air force began analyzing all of the footage they found themselves completely overwhelmed, a vast majority was ending up on the cutting room floor. They could obviously find what happened after an explosion but they were able to find the unknown unknown. There were so many other things happening in the footage but they simply did not have time to get to. So the solution to that is Artificial Intelligence. Not only does this. The grunt work of having to track individual vehicles a simple solution that states the algorithm and theory but everywhere it is been in everywhere its going. You can also say, every other vehicle its associated with. Give me a list of every location and then track the vehicles in those locations as well. But theres more. Maybe they dont want to start with somebody who is a known terrorist. Maybe you want to get them before the amount and attack. As it turns out, these groups often exhibit pretty predictable behaviors in the lead up to an attack. Pretty simple counter surveillance. Take uturns or drive aimlessly to make sure no one is following them. Tell me every time a car exhibits on these behaviors in the city. Now the system even if we dont touch every single one it will touch some number of unknown unknowns. And that is true holy grail of surveillance. And despite everything that happens youre no other way of knowing about. And there has been an intense effort and a lot of people have not heard about project david that google has been involved in another firms. It was to give some automated capabilities to central footage. Now it is turned in those that have received less attention is something that we should all definitely be thinking about. Im not sure we want to live in a city where every time someone does a uturn it seems suspicious. From a legal perspective, question about whether this is legal but in part and you talked about this in the book, we have two recent both have good reference in the book that there is an upper bound to what this looks like. So theres a part of applications but the idea of introducing the trial for true investigative technique. Im not so sure i would agree with it even though it is legal. Unaccounted for perhaps. Unchallenged as yet. Here is the thing, the jones decision sean is referring to was in 2012 and it involves police use of a gps tracking device on the subject vehicle, not for a day or two but Something Like weeks. Replacing a specific device on a vehicle and having that person track literally for roughly a month and they said no, thats a violation of the fourth amendment. So for me, the question is is jones applicable here . Even without the application of a natural device on the subjects vehicle. Your literally utilizing a different form of persistent surveillance. Youre ju