Front Burner - Protesting and police in the age of surveillance

Episode Date: June 15, 2020

We are living in a time of ubiquitous recording. There are cameras are everywhere; capturing the last moments of George Floyd’s life; recording the fatal shooting of Rayshard Brooks by Atlanta Police on Friday night; and documenting another angle of Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation Chief Allan Adam being punched by an officer during an arrest in Fort McMurray. There are also live streams of protests and civilian footage of the police response on the streets. But with cameras everywhere comes surveillance, too. Today we talk with Washington Post technology reporter, Heather Kelly, about the double-edged sword of having digital eyes everywhere.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. We are living in a time of ubiquitous recording. Cameras are everywhere, capturing the last moments of George Floyd's life under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer.

I need people! Please! Recording the fatal shootings of Rayshard Brooks by Atlanta police on Friday night. Hang on to the taser! Stop the plane! Hang on to the taser! Documenting another angle of Athabasca Chippewan First Nation Chief Alan

Adam being repeatedly punched by an officer during an arrest in Fort McMurray. Look at my face! Look at my face! I'm bleeding, man! Then, live streaming the protests that followed, and recording the police response for all to see.

But with cameras everywhere comes surveillance, too. Disconcerting for those in the streets protesting abuses by law enforcement. Today, I'm talking to Washington Post technology reporter Heather Kelly about the double-edged sword of digital eyes everywhere. I'm Josh Bloch. This is Frontburner. Hi, Heather. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me.

I want to start with the flood of videos that we've seen over the last few weeks of what's happening at these protests across the country. Go inside now! Get in the house! They have people trapped down there. across the country. There's so much content out there, it's almost hard to keep track of it. Can you just tell me a little bit about some of the scenes that we're actually seeing play out? What's coming out on social media is mostly stuff filmed by the public and journalists. Things that are filmed by the police

are less likely to be floating around. So we're seeing a lot of peaceful protests, a lot of really cool footage, like drone footage, of streets filled with people in cities across the country and countries around the world. And you're also seeing a lot of examples of police brutality towards protesters, towards looters, and towards journalists.

We've been fired at with rubber bullets. My cameraman has been hit. This is exactly what it looks like. Exactly what it looks like. We're in the States. Exactly. Oh. Whoa. Oh. Amelia, can you hear us? Amelia, are you okay? I want to get to that in a second, but to be clear, we're not just seeing videos that are recorded and then uploaded later. We're actually now able to watch some of these protests play out in real time. Not just from the broadcast news cameras, but actually protesters recording on their phone. The protesters were right in the thick of the action.

right in the thick of the action. Yeah, it's interesting. All the major social media platforms, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, they have options to live stream. And that's something that's kind of really picked up over the past few years from before, from, say, Ferguson protests, where it was less common. And I think a lot of people are very smart

about trying to live stream stuff if they're worried about having their camera taken, say, by the police, or if they want to make sure information is out there right away. So we see them grabbing the umbrella. There's the spray. There's the spray. There's the spray. It's on now. It's on. East Precinct, they're losing control.

State police are trying to open the barricade. But then there's also some reasons not to livestream. A lot of protesters are very careful about having other people's faces show up in videos that go online, mostly because they're afraid of retribution. I don't know if this is just a Silicon Valley origin story, but I read that Periscope, which is that technology that Twitter bought, which allows you to live stream. Actually, the creator of it was at a protest in Istanbul, or protests had broken out

in Istanbul, and he wanted to be able to watch in real time what was going on and came up with this idea for this live streaming. Oh, that's awesome. I have not heard the origin story of Periscope. I'm not positive it's true, but that's the story that's told. Can you just tell me a little bit more about some of the examples of what we're seeing in terms of live streaming? Sure. There was one and it was about, I guess, a week ago now in D.C. There was a curfew. Protests were still going and protesters were trying to get off the streets to avoid being arrested. Police kind of cordoned them, a group of protesters, off at this one block in D.C. one block in DC. And a random person who just lived there opened his door and let, you know,

60 to 75 protesters just come into his house. And there was almost like a standoff between these protesters staying in a stranger's house and the police outside and the police presence grew. And you could tell it was growing because there was somebody down the street doing a YouTube live video. And then there was somebody inside the house, one of the protesters, also doing a live video. And you got anything to say? Because people are still recording. This is going on. And so the incident might not long as you need to because they will not let you leave. And so the incident might not have gotten as much, I guess, attention, but people on Twitter were sharing links to the YouTube and the handle of the Instagram user. And I was, it wasn't even for work.

I'm just like, let's go watch this. So I had it open on multiple windows and you could watch this whole scene unfold. And what ended up happening is you had like thousands of viewers and then the media got involved and there were proper camera crews around. And I mean, I would assume that did influence the action the police took. When the curfew lifted at 6 a.m., the protesters emerged, grateful to the stranger who gave them sanctuary. Get home safe, get some rest, talk to each other.

All right, make sure you take care of that mental health, strength strength so we can go out there and we continue to rise peacefully with intelligence and make a solid argument. All right. I love you guys. I mean, I want to ask, you know, in addition to that, what kind of effect it's having to have this a massive amount of video footage of protesters and the protests, specifically when it comes to police conduct at these protests? Well, it's not so far the impact that I think a lot of people have expected. You know, there's the assumption that if something is being caught on camera, that the police would be more careful about maybe some of the tactics they've deployed. But there's a spreadsheet going around that just lists all the clips that have been found so far from protests. And it's in the hundreds of police doing things that appear to be sort of out of the bounds of how they should be handling protesters and how they should be

treating media. And it doesn't seem to be slowing down necessarily. So, you know, I kind of thought it might discourage that behavior. But what we're seeing is that, you know, they're not too worried about it. There have been some consequences for individual officers if they were caught doing something, if their faces and names were visible, but it seems to be a pretty small fraction. Right. Well, there was the two Buffalo police officers charged with assault after a 75-year-old man was shoved over and he smashed his head. And the police department first claimed that he'd tripped and fallen. And I wonder if those police officers would have been charged if it hadn't actually been for the widely shared video of that incident. The interesting thing is thing is when they released that statement, the video was already out there,

and the person or the group doing the statement didn't know about it. So without that video to hold them accountable, I don't think they would have really shared more details of what happened. And yeah, you could kind of watch that statement change in real time, which is also something similar to what happened when, you know, Trump was going to the church and they cleared out protesters. There's been a lot of back and forth over, you know, what chemical agents or pepper spray was used.

And the official story does keep changing because there's so much documentation and footage and evidence of what happened there. So, of course, it's not just the public that is looking at these videos. They are also available to law enforcement. They can see them as well. What are you hearing from protesters in terms of their concerns about that? I mean, everybody that I've talked to so far is aware that they can be identified. There was, especially when the protests first started,

there was a lot of leaders trying to ask journalists not to capture protesters' faces because they were really worried about the police or law enforcement or being tracked. And not necessarily protesters that are doing anything illegal, just in general. The feeling is if a protester doesn't consent to having their face used, they don't want it to be in news photographs,

which of course is not really how news journalism works. But I think some reporters have tried to be a little more flexible with that. The other things protesters are concerned about are, we don't know what law enforcement does with videos. We know that they have contracts with companies for all kinds of software, facial recognition software, things that can just go through videos and look for objects like might be looking for a certain color shirt in a crowd and trying to track it. And it's a bit of a black box. We don't know how it's being used in different cities. Amazon says it is temporarily banning police and law enforcement from using its controversial facial recognition software. Amazon said it hopes the one-year

moratorium will give Congress enough time to implement specific regulations on the tools to ensure they are used appropriately by law enforcement. So without real answers, I think protesters are just erring on the side of being very paranoid. Right. And careful. And luckily, face masks right now are a thing that most of them should be wearing, and it helps. I mean, it's not going to trick facial recognition completely, but it does help a bit. Right. We know that the Dallas Police Department had hoped to capitalize on this abundance of video that was out there. And they put out this call asking people to upload videos of illegal activity at protests onto this anonymous tip app, which they called iWatch Dallas. Tell me about what happened next.

So this was the first of the great K-pop rebellion, which is one of my favorite stories to come out of the protests. So they put up this app asking anybody, if you've seen anything illegal and you have footage of it, please upload it to our app. It would be really helpful. And the K-pop online community quickly got together and started uploading, I would assume, thousands, if not more, clips of K-pop stars performing to this app. And it was soon overwhelmed, and the Dallas police had to say,

you know, the app is down. It's suffering from technical difficulties. They have never, as far as I know, said it was overwhelmed by K-pop specifically. But that's what all the evidence is pointing to. And since then, this sort of K-pop army has gone on to do this with other apps, other police calls for footage, even one fire department call for footage. We've been talking mostly about cell phone footage, but that's not the only kind of cameras that are out there. Law enforcement have cameras of their own, and then private businesses have security cameras. And there's also this newer development in the proliferation

of home security cameras, things like Google Nest or Amazon Ring. Can you tell me a little bit about those? How do those work? Sure. So they are a consumer product that can turn anybody's house or apartment or small business into its own little security system. And what happens a lot is people will just put them in front of their house to catch people who might steal Amazon packages, or just to keep an eye on the street to look at their car. If you're ever on Nextdoor, a popular activity is to report suspicious people, which is problematic. And so the two products, there's a Ring one, which is owned by Amazon, and then there's Nest, which is owned by Google. And they have one important feature distinction, and that is Ring has a platform called Neighbors. And they

have police departments that are also on that platform. And what happens is if there's a crime, say on my block, the police might push a notification, hey, a crime took place near you where you have a camera, can you send us footage? And I can do it directly through the app. Now some cities are partnering with Amazon to distribute its Ring cameras at a discount to deter crime. The Walcott, Connecticut Police Department says the cameras have already solved three burglaries. Whether it's an inner city, whether it's a rural area, people want to be safe in their own homes. Police have no access to watch the cameras live.

And it's that kind of relationship that can make people uneasy about these little surveillance networks that are popping up. It basically creates a new surveillance network for the police that is outside some of their normal rules. So the police have access to just this vast number of cameras inside people's homes or pointed at the streets out of people's homes? Yes. I mean, they cannot see it without permission. They don't know your name without going through the app. But most people, I think, would be like, oh, there was a crime near my house. Yes, please, let me please share this video with you. like they might camera phone footage. And then the larger companies also use them, but they tend to have their own proprietary,

very large security systems. And they also tend to have relationships with local law enforcement where they will share any footage that's part of an investigation. And that's one of the things, we really don't know how much they're using all of these applications and in what way. But my understanding is there actually is some evidence

that police have used this kind of technology in the past. In fact, the ACLU, after the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, wrote a report about the fact that police were monitoring social media, ran images through facial recognition systems to locate protesters who had outstanding warrants. Yeah, and what's interesting here is, is one, the scale. I mean, this is hundreds of cities across the U.S. And there's a lot more scrutiny on the police departments and their actions.

And also, I think that's sort of the next phase. So right now, it's a lot of reacting to the protests in real time. And I imagine the next phase is going to be trying to track down protesters as things slowly quiet down. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here.

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To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. What are you hearing from protesters about what they're doing to protect their privacy as they now take to the streets? Sure. Well, there, as you mentioned, there is a pandemic still going on. That's kind of not at the forefront of our minds, but protesters seem to be, almost better than police in some situations, very good at wearing masks right now. Masks might throw off facial recognition.

It is not going to completely make it useless. But that is one thing that some protesters are doing. And what about the idea of just turning off your phone or not bringing your phone at all? Police can't track phone locations. There are many different ways to do it. The safest thing to do is if you're really worried about, you know, location tracking is you turn off your phone completely. If you want to use the camera on it, experts recommend putting it into airplane mode and using the camera from there. If possible, you know, only turn it on when you need to really use it or post something.

And then an interesting thing is when you share photos or videos, it has all kinds of metadata. It knows where you are. It knows what time it is. And if that gets spread around, it could help identify the person who shot the video or took the picture. With pictures, it's pretty easy. You just take a screenshot of it and post that instead of the picture itself. And then that screenshot doesn't have that metadata embedded in it.

It will not have that same level of metadata embedded in it at all. And there are even screenshot apps that you can do on your desktop so you avoid anything that might be associated with your phone. You can also do a screen recording of a video, and that will strip out the metadata. And again, there's also desktop software you can use to strip out that information before you share a video. And then when you're live streaming, that's not really included as much. So it's not as much of a concern there. It strikes me, you know, hearing about the fear and concern among protesters about taking pictures at all or, you know, maybe not even bringing their phone. about taking pictures at all or maybe not even bringing their phone, the consequence of that is that you lose the ability to record and share what's happening around you,

maybe even something that's happening to you. There seems like there's kind of a trade-off there. There is, and I think a lot of that is just when you do have your phone, that's what airplane mode is recommended because you can record quickly and right away, whereas if you have to turn your phone on, there's going to be a delay. And it might just be, you know, if there's a big group of you, only one person has a phone and is in charge of recording. Again, most of these protests have been largely very peaceful and huge and there's children involved.

And these concerns aren't as rampant. But it's some of the more intense protests. And these concerns aren't as rampant, but it's some of the more intense protests. It's things that go after curfew where people are doing a lot more of the riskier recording and protesting. Well, thank you so much for your insights into this. Sure. That's all for now. I'm Josh Bloch. Thank you for listening to FrontBurner. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.