03/25/14 – Catherine Crump – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
And coming up later on the show, we got Gareth Porter and Trevor Tim.
But first, we're going to talk with Catherine Crump.
She's from the ACLU.
Let me see here.
It says here, a staff attorney with the ACLU's Speech Privacy and Technology Project.
And here she's got a piece with our friend Matthew Harwood at TomDispatch.com.
Tom Englehart's great site.
And it's called The Net Closes Around Us, Invasion of the Data Snatchers.
Welcome to the show, Catherine.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us here.
And man, you scared the hell out of me this morning before I even had my coffee.
I'll tell you.
Well, I'm glad to hear it.
That was part of the point.
Yeah, well, and the thing about it is, the scary part is just how close we are.
To this entirely new society that you describe us as, you know, destined to be living in here in the very, very near future.
Tell us, I guess, first of all, and maybe some people know about this a little bit, but can you describe for us briefly what is meant by the Internet of Things?
So the Internet of Things is an idea that instead of browsing the internet, and just sitting on your computer and going to websites, pretty soon everything is going to be connected to the internet in some way.
Your refrigerator, for example, will be able to be connected to the internet and, you know, perhaps tell you when you run out of food, your thermostat will be connected to the internet.
And so all of these objects around us, which have been dumb objects, will suddenly become smart.
But one of the things that the ACLU is concerned about with this is that this is just going to enable data collection about what each and every one of us does in our day-to-day lives that has not even been possible in the past.
Yeah, I think, you know, I've been paranoid about this kind of thing for way too long, I guess.
And the response from the normals has always been that, yeah, but come on, I mean, what you're talking about is so much data that nobody's going to have that or do anything with it.
It's impossible to even imagine that you could really have total information about everybody.
I mean, there are 300 million of us.
What mainframe could ever keep track of us all?
But that argument seems to have really just washed away in the face of, you know, everybody has a three terabyte hard drive and super high bandwidth and everything now.
And it just seems very possible, even if we don't really know how many spinning disks they have at the new NSA facility in Utah or something.
It doesn't really seem technically impossible anymore, does it?
No, it doesn't.
In fact, it's not.
The cost of storing data has plummeted dramatically.
Things that wouldn't have been possible to store a few years ago now can be stored simply and easily.
And so I think the whole default is changing.
The question used to be that you wouldn't store something unless you really had a reason to.
But now that storage is so easy, people think, well, why not store this?
Unless you have a special reason to delete data, you tend to keep it.
And I think one of the things that's really changing is it used to just be, for instance, as I was saying earlier, when you were surfing the internet, that you would be tracked.
But the big change now is that offline space is going to be tracked extensively, right?
So if you go to a store, for instance, increasingly, the store is using the signals emitted by your cell phone to figure out, for instance, how long you linger in front of one display as opposed to another.
As you walk down the street, your cell phone, again, is creating a record of where you go.
And so I think there's a big difference here, which is that it used to be possible to opt out of a lot of this tracking, right?
If you didn't want to go online, where we all know we're tracked, you could stop at a physical store.
But as technology is continuing to evolve, that kind of opt out just isn't going to be practical anymore.
Right.
Yeah, I guess people might remember Minority Report, where everywhere he goes, you know, every 10 feet or 50 feet or something, there's a camera that's taking a picture of his iris.
And so then I guess it starts out with, oh, yeah, they're kind of beaming ads at you.
Oh, you hungry?
There's a Burger King ahead.
We know you like Burger King and that kind of deal.
But then it ends up where, you know, it's totalitarian living death slavery, where they literally have, you know, like a principal Skinner joke on The Simpsons.
And that's going on your permanent record.
Yet everything about you, every second of your day is going on your permanent record from now on.
I mean, nobody's ever had to deal with that before.
There's the Panopticon where maybe they could be looking at you every minute of the day.
But who has ever actually been watched every moment of the day like that?
It's incredible to even think of what it's going to be like.
It is incredible.
One of the technologies we talk about in our report is called automatic license plate readers.
And these are devices that can take pictures of the license plate of every passing car.
And while at first you may not care about that because you think, hey, it's my license plate.
I'm out in public.
What's the big deal?
This technology is being used for is actually tracking people's locations.
And there are now companies that have amassed over a billion plate hits, so individual pinpoints of where people have gone.
And while some people think where they go in public isn't sensitive, if you add all of that data up, you can get a really rich portrait of people's lives.
And some trips are quite sensitive.
So if the technology really proliferates, you might be able to use it, for example, to know who visited a gun range, who went to a particular church, so on and so forth.
So one of the things we think we all need to be looking out for are these technologies that are technologies really of mass tracking, right?
Because it used to be that the police wouldn't expend resources to investigate someone unless they had a good reason to think they're engaging in the main part, right?
But now, because it's easy, law enforcement agencies and private corporations can simply collect data about many, many of us, the vast majority of us.
And they do it just in case it may become useful at some point in the future.
Right.
Well, Neil Postman, in his book, Technopoly, talked about this kind of a future and said, there's really nothing left in our culture that can withstand it.
But one of his real complaints and his fear about how we would live, how we are living now already, is the pretense of automated knowledge, where the responsibility becomes outsourced to the computer.
So, you know, some algorithm decides whether your three-hop association with someone is relevant to this or that investigation or not, or whether you should have a SWAT rate at your house tomorrow or not is a matter of...
And we've even seen this, right, where they...
I forgot if...
You know, they give you like a number, right?
The same way they measure your points for traffic violations or whatever.
They give you a threat assessment number.
There was a story where they decided that the qualifying factor for this guy getting a SWAT rate instead of the knock on his door was he was known as a constitutionalist.
So they went ahead and violated his constitution, kicked his door right in.
That kind of thing, right?
And it's not really humans making the decision, or at least they always have a computer readout to point at that says, well, this guy scored a six on the system, and a six means a SWAT rate.
And then no one has to take responsibility for what happens because it's automated somehow.
Some police departments do seem to be experimenting with that already.
The most recent story was about police departments in Chicago, which have tried to use these algorithms to come up with particular factors why people might be suspicious and then sort of expend more resources to try to, you know, prevent them from ever doing anything wrong.
But obviously the people who are subject to that kind of monitoring are quite offended and rightly feel that they've been singled out and it makes them feel even more alienated from the system than they would have been previously.
But, you know, before all of this, all of these new technologies and mass surveillance arose, it would have been much more difficult to engage in that type of algorithmic profiling of people.
But now that's going to be, I think, increasingly common.
Well, you know, one of the creepiest parts of this thing, I'm so glad that it's you and Matthew Harwood and writing for Tom Dispatcher.
I don't think I'd have believed it.
The part about the smart, quote, unquote, streetlights.
This is the future that I'm going to have to live in five or 10 years from now, where the streetlight has a high debt, where all streetlights have high definition cameras in them, where, again, it's not like there's a pair of police eyeballs necessarily on every monitor.
But as you put it in here, I think talking about the blimps and the drones, they'll just be able to rewind and investigate anything that happened anywhere that they feel like they can go back and it'll all be stored there.
So I think this is an interesting point.
And I think it shows that this technology is just becoming cheaper and cheaper.
And so we need not just to imagine the world we live in today, right?
Where, for instance, a license plate reader, what I was talking about before, might cost $15,000.
We need to imagine when these types of technologies, you know, cost pennies, they can be installed in every streetlight or in every traffic light.
And we need to think about to what extent do we want to live in that type of world?
Because it's actually our choice.
One of the actually optimistic things that's happening right now is, I think, particularly because of Edward Snowden's revelations and especially that there's been a lot more attention to surveillance technologies.
And a lot of technologies which previously were secret and therefore completely unregulated, the public is now catching on to, right?
So we now actually have a good opportunity to try to put rules in place to limit when the police should use this stuff.
Because the police alone shouldn't be deciding when they use powerful surveillance technologies.
That ought to be a democratic decision.
Unfortunately, so far that hasn't happened.
The police have simply purchased things when they became available.
But I think, you know, if we want to prevent some of the most egregious, invasive mass surveillance techniques, then now is the time.
This is the time we need to seize the opportunity to try to push back against that.
Right.
And I'll always encourage people to support the ACLU.
I mean, there's nothing more heroic than suing the U.S. government all day.
There's just no question about that.
But you know what I wonder?
Are you guys on board with the 10th Amendment Center and the nullification fight?
Because I think people feel like they could even be bothered to try at the state level.
We're at the national level.
They just don't feel like they could possibly do anything at all, you know?
Oh, and you've got about 20 seconds, sorry.
I think one of the most hopeful things that's happening right now is happening in the state legislatures.
There have been increasingly bills pushing back at the state level, and I am behind that.
Great.
All right.
Thank you so much.
That's Katherine Crump, everybody from the ACLU.
I sure appreciate it.
Thank you.
It was fun.
Bye.
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