EFFecting Digital Freedom

by Jason Kelley

Who Watches the Watchmen?  You Do.

When you're crossing a city street, you probably already know to look left and right.  But, for your safety, we also want you to look up: cameras, drones, license plate readers, and more are likely hidden in plain sight and watching you as you cross.  That's why EFF has created a new virtual reality tool to train anyone to be on the lookout, and fight back against the growing number of surveillance devices being deployed by law enforcement across communities large and small around the country, often targeting anyone who happens to be in the area.

At EFF we call these "street-level surveillance" technologies, and their privacy implications are vast.  Without ever obtaining your consent, law enforcement could record your car's location as you travel from your home to a private meeting.  Advanced face recognition could be applied to photos and video taken of you while at a concert or sporting event.  And your movements could be tracked by drone simply because you exercised your free speech at a protest or rally.  With some technology, like license plate readers, the data collected by contractors is shared far and wide in databases that are available for later use by local police or larger organizations such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).  Not only does this mean that your data sometimes ends up in places that you'd never expect, but it also creates a significant danger for data breaches.  And as the technology used for these types of surveillance gets cheaper, more sophisticated, and more accurate, it will become more ubiquitous, and we'll be subjected to it more and more often - usually without even knowing, because a particularly nefarious aspect of street-level surveillance is that the devices hide in plain sight.

Together, we can change that.

To make it easier for everyone to recognize surveillance "in the wild," we're fighting back with our own anti-surveillance technology: Spot the Surveillance.  Spot the Surveillance is an immersive virtual reality tool that you can load on a VR headset or on a standard computer browser (for a less-immersive version) that trains you to notice some of the more inconspicuous, but widespread, surveillance devices.  Once you load it, you'll be placed in a 360-degree street scene and asked to identify a variety of common street-level surveillance technologies.  Upon finding each type of device, you'll unlock information about how it works.

Why VR?  Several reasons.  First: it's a much closer analogue to how you experience street-level surveillance in your own life.  The explanations we give about the dangers of surveillance - whether by local law enforcement, the NSA, or tech companies - often lie in spreadsheets, or on maps, or in thousand-word blog posts explaining what the laws do and don't allow.  But during many people's first-hand contact with the most prevalent types of street-level surveillance - in tense moments like police encounters or protests, for example - it can be difficult to be on the lookout.  With Spot the Surveillance, you can step directly into a virtual police encounter scene and learn how to be more vigilant, especially during those moments.

Second, EFF has a long history with VR: our co-founder John Perry Barlow first waxed poetic about it 25 years ago, when it was barely more than an idea.  "Most of what humans do with computers is merely an improvement over what they did with other keyboard-bound devices, whether typewriters or calculators," he wrote.  But with VR, "we can now see the potential for technology, long about the business of making the metaphorical literal, of reversing the process and re-infecting ordinary reality with luminous magic."  That is to say: it was a very cool idea, even then.  It's taken a long time, but the experience has started to catch up with the enthusiasm around the theory.  There's nothing quite like putting on a headset and disappearing into another world: slightly disorienting, slightly magical, and extremely cool.

While the experience is basic for now, the distinction is clear: learning to recognize a Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) camera being used by law enforcement while in an immersive environment will help you gain a unique perspective on privacy that remains with you even after the headset is removed.  As Barlow wrote, VR is a great learning tool that can give us "means to communicate which are based on shared experience."  If a picture is worth a thousand words, creating a 360-degree scene will often be worth more than that lengthy blog post, the spreadsheets, and the map combined.

One important note: the coolest technology often presents new dangers.  EFF is very concerned about biometric systems, or any other tech, designed to identify or verify the identity of people by using their intrinsic physical or behavioral characteristics.  And VR relies on tracking our physical characteristics to function.  In the future, virtual reality could be used to enable novel forms of surveillance by tracking or identifying users in great detail, even recording everything from the shape of your face to your breath and movement.  But EFF's VR experience, built using Mozilla's open-source system A-Frame, loads from the browser and does not collect information from the user.  And we're optimistic: you can't fight threats until you can recognize them, and VR is too terrific a training tool to pass up.  In addition to learning more about police snooping, we hope you'll come away from Spot the Surveillance reminded that with great technology comes great responsibility.

You can visit Spot the Surveillance directly at eff.org/spot.  Also, please check out our comprehensive Street-Level Surveillance site (eff.org/sls) to learn more about police spy tech, including iris, face, and tattoo recognition, as well as cell-site simulators/Stingrays.