Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance with the author Andrew Guthrie Ferguson (BONUS)

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[SPEAKER_00]: Warning, the morbidly curious book club and its companion podcast that you're about to listen to explores heavy topics.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Trigger warnings for each book that we read can be found on thestorygraph.com.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The link to each book on story graph will be available in the description of whatever podcast platform you're listening on.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This is 18 plus and listener discretion is advised.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This book's dedication says thank you to Alyssa, Cole, and Lexa for your love and support.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you to Emma Berry for your excellent edits.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you to Jasmine Fobbs, Emilia Salmo for excellent editing and sight checking.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you to Clara Platter and the entire team at New York University Press for always believing in my books.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This book is about power.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It is about how the digital trails we leave behind undermine our privacy and freedom.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Leaving our most personal information open to police discovery.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This book is also about people, because it's the choices we've made to embrace digital convenience and personal security that have created this web of self surveillance.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Every time we step outside our home with a smartphone or ask a smart speaker to play us a song or Google anything, we create data.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That data reveals who we are.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In a world where everything is data, everything is evidence.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome friends to the morbidly curious booklubs companion podcast.
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[SPEAKER_00]: My name is Patricia or most people call me patches and I am the owner and host of the morbidly curious booklubs.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A global non-fiction only book club diving into the darker macabre corners of your library.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for tuning in.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm releasing this episode on September 17th, 2026, which if you're not familiar in the United States is Constitution Day, a day honoring the signing of the US Constitution back in 1787.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The holiday itself was actually newer than you might think.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It started as citizenship day back in the 1940s, meant to recognize both the Constitution and naturalized citizens.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But it wasn't until 2004 when it was pushed by Senator Robert Bird, that the day was formally named Constitution Day and expanded.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Not pretty much any school or institution that receives federal funding is required to provide some kind of educational programming around the Constitution on or around this date.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So maybe you're familiar with this, but maybe you're not who knows.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So on Constitution Day, it's a reminder of the document that laid out how the country would govern itself.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's branches of power, it's checks and balances, and the rights it would come to protect through later amendments.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So let's talk about the fourth amendment today.
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[SPEAKER_00]: For consumers living in a digitally connected world, smart technologies have built an inescapable trap of digital self or surveillance.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Smart cars, smart homes, smart watches, and smart medical devices track our most private activities and intimate patterns.
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[SPEAKER_00]: While these devices allow users to receive personal insights by monitoring their every move, that data can be accessed by police and prosecutors looking to find incriminating clues.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Digital technology exposes everyone everywhere all at once and we have few laws to regulate it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The book in today's bonus episode is your data will be used against you, policing in the age of self surveillance by Andrew Guthrie Ferguson.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Where he warns us of how the rise of sensor-driven technology, social media monitoring, an artificial intelligence can be weaponized against democratic values and personal freedoms.
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[SPEAKER_00]: At the same time, that data will solve crimes, radically transforming how criminal cases are prosecuted.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Ferguson explores how this proliferation of private data in combination with public surveillance networks promises new ways to solve previously unsolvable crimes, but also leaves as vulnerable to governmental outreach and abuse.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He argues for legal interventions that address the threat of digital self surveillance and provides concrete suggestions about how legislators, judges, and communities should respond.
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[SPEAKER_00]: As consumers, citizens, and potential subjects of surveillance, the questions in this book must be confronted now, before the trap of surveillance captures us completely.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Providing a stark warning of the dangers of digital self surveillance, your data will be used against you as a defense of several liberties against the growing threat of data driven policing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This book was actually brought to my attention by a book club member.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So shout out to Lauren for bringing this to my attention.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I really liked it and I learned quite a bit.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There are copies of this available for purchase and the morbidly curious book clubs online bookstore.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I am waiting on some signed book plates.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We should be getting those soon.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But if you would like to purchase a copy, you can.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The link will be in the description of whatever podcast platform you're listening on.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Let me tell you a little bit about the author, so Andrew Guthrie Ferguson is a professor of law at George Washington University Law School.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He's a national expert on new surveillance technologies, policing, and criminal justice.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He's the author of the 2018 Pro's award-winning book, The Rise of Big Data Policing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He's an elected member of the American Law Institute.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He's a super busy guy, so I'm very grateful for his time.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Please enjoy the episode.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There's so much to go over here, but again, thank you so much for your time, especially because you're now famous, having been on John Oliver and everything at least mentioned on John Oliver.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that the book.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, people don't know this, so that John Oliver kindly showed a picture of the book as sort of the wrap-up of this great episode on police surveillance technologies.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But people don't know like the producers it for that show have been working on this for more than two years like they actually have been doing research They just my original research if people hadn't done before They talked to experts.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I talked to this producer for you on and off for two years and and It's really kind of you know, it's funny and it's cutting and it's just brilliant But it also there's a real depth to it that I think people just don't appreciate because you don't see how it works behind the scenes
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[SPEAKER_00]: How are you able to maintain that conversation for two years with all of the updates?
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[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, when you think back on some of the things, you know, not only surrounding your book but just technology in general, there has been so many updates in the past two years.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Did you guys have to just constantly update these producers and say, like, well, this is happening.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Now, this is new.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, to their credit, they reached out.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And we talked about some of the issues that were discussed in the book.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to give them some leads about, even just.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I'm a fan of John Oliver, so I sort of could hear his voice and do it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe I went overboard.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I actually wrote out a little script with like things and jokes, which maybe they didn't appreciate at all because of the professional.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But I thought it was funny.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But you know, the interesting thing about police surveillance technologies, it's kind of visual, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: So you can, there are clips out there that reveal what is happening and how it works and are, you know, in their own way.
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[SPEAKER_01]: sort of troubling or frightening or revelatory depending on your perspective.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so I sort of showed them some of the clips and gave them background.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And then they reached out just fairly recently to see if they were updates.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And then they were recognizing that this is a world that is evolving quite.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Quickly that the technologies are changing and to their credit, they captured some of the acceleration that's happening and some of the ways that the technology is sort of being integrated in real-time crime centers and other kinds of sort of centralized databases and railing centers.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I just didn't really exist at scale maybe two or three years ago, but do now.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Hmm, and I, my, I very bad at writing reviews for the books that I read and I don't, I don't rate them, but on good reads, I did label this as like a required reading.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This is, you know, you mentioned this in the book too a couple times that there, there are so many things that we implement in our day-to-day lives, so we don't realize can be potentially used against us.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I love how it starts with you kind of talking about how you ask this in a classroom setting.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm assuming you teach your book in your class is that I've heard that a couple times as I find fascinating, but how did we land on a book and do you teach it?
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[SPEAKER_01]: So a couple things.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I teach a seminar class at GW Law School on policing and privacy and surveillance that are about the themes of the book.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I actually have written a lot of articles about many of the issues or underlying the stories in the book.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I purposely do not
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[SPEAKER_01]: give the book to my students, nor do I give them my lobby articles, even though I probably didn't, you know, a full length, you know, 30,000 word article about every subject that we talk about.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But I begin the book with this story where, you know, usually, it's a spring semester class.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It means you start right after the fall break.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Everyone's been traveling and I say, OK, I welcome this class.
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[SPEAKER_01]: How many of you traveled over the break?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, everyone has traveled somewhere because they're coming in and out of law school.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I said, well, how many of you used a map, like a physical paper map when you are traveling?
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[SPEAKER_01]: No one raises their hair.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So as well.
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[SPEAKER_01]: How many of you printed out like one of those like Google direction step-by-step use to have like triptics.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if I'm old enough where we literally had,
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[SPEAKER_01]: a step-by-step way where you would follow MapQuest and it gives you that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: How many of you did that?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, right.
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[SPEAKER_01]: No one raised your hand.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So how many of you ask like a human being?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Like for directions.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Like no, we would never do that.
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[SPEAKER_01]: How many of you used your phone or your the GPS that's in your car to get around.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, I raised their hand.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I said, well, how many of you?
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[SPEAKER_01]: would, how would you know that that data can be obtained by law enforcement and used against you in a court.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, how may you know that you've been tracked everywhere you've gone and people sort of sheepishly kind of, yeah, I guess, throughout we're taking this class and I was like, well, knowing that, how many would change your behavior?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Would you give up your cell phone or your GPS in your car?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, no one would.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And that's the trap of this book that we have trapped ourselves in this world of cell surveillance.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We are dependent on it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We rely on it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I cannot get about my life anymore without the GPS that takes me to some soccer field somewhere to drop off a kid that I've never been before.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And yet at the same time, all of that data reveals who we are and is available to police with a warrant, sometimes without a warrant, if they should get that.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And it is that sort of reality, that trap, that is sort of the reason for writing this book,
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[SPEAKER_01]: you're buying a surveillance device, that's literally what you're purchasing, you're surveilling yourself.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And we should have a world where maybe we can benefit from those innovations and wonders of the world at the same time protect us ourselves and our communities from having that data, maybe weaponized against us in ways that we are uncomfortable with.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And the last point in the last question, but last point is like at this moment in time the reason why this book is so urgent is that we've seen the weaponization of data in ways that we've never seen before across the board, we've obviously seen it against certain communities and other places, but we're seeing it weaponized in a political way with immigration and abortion rights in ways that I think should be deeply troubling to many, many people.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Hmm, I am very curious about the title of this book, but the title of the book is Will Be.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, when did you decide to add the word Will?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Because that to me is kind of this, you know, bomb, that at one point this Will Be used against you.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, it will be used again.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So sometimes for your benefit, obviously, there is a reason why we give up our information that GPS because we got a reward of getting the right place at the right time in the most efficient way possible.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so sometimes that will just consumer usage, which is again sort of what you're paying for when you are buying into surveillance as a service, which is kind of what we sell.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: We are selling use surveillance in your own way.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes it's for your own benefit.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Right, the reason why you have a ring doorbell camera is to give you a sense of security.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This obviously watching you far more than watching anyone else and monitoring your life and your daily existence.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But it does give you something in that sense of...
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[SPEAKER_01]: of convenience.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But the idea is that everything we do in this digital age is potentially evidence and could be used against you.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Obviously we don't have the scalar scope or ability to turn it against everyone, but I want people to wake up.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This is idea that your data can will be used against you in a court of law which kind of mirrors some random warnings.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's where the sort of play on that is.
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[SPEAKER_01]: If you know if you go into an interrogation, you're giving
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[SPEAKER_01]: and that you're given that that warning of your data, you know, we'll be used against your information.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We'll be used against you.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I was listening to another interview that you were doing and you do mention, because I think you might get asked this a lot, is if you wrote this book, you probably don't have a lot of smart devices, but you said that this is more of a meditation, not a condemnation on why we use these convenient devices and you did mention that you were like, well, yeah, I've got my, I have a smart phone and it's similar to how you asked the class, like a lot of these,
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[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of these things that we've implemented in our daily lives are necessary for what we need to do.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Hell, I mean, I moved into apartments before where they had the nest air conditioner thing already installed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Like sometimes it's not even like, you know, up to us in what we install.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So I did appreciate that you were like, this is just to, this is more of a discussion and not necessarily a, you should do this.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You shouldn't do this.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I don't want to shame people.
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[SPEAKER_01]: these new innovations.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, in a perfect world, I think we'd like to encourage more of them.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: There is a real value ad in how we're building smart devices to make our lives better.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The problem is that the legal protections around that information review just haven't caught up.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And the book was trying to get people to see that we have sort of been slowly building the systems of self surveillance.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I use it from self surveillance actually to change the onus from evil tech companies or evil government to say like,
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[SPEAKER_01]: No, no.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You put the ring doorbell on, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: You put the Alexa in your bedroom.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You have a smart watch that records what you're doing in the evenings and bed at the certain times, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: You did that, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so you can cast blame on other places, but we are all complicit in it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Our tax dollars are going to surveillance cameras.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And automated license plate readers, our tax dollars are going into invest in facial recognition systems.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Like, that's, it feels like the other is doing it, but it's us.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This is democratically media itself surveillance.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And that the book is meant to,
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[SPEAKER_01]: open a dialogue, a conversation about, are we comfortable in this moment, where we've essentially exposed ourselves through our digital trails or not?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And if not, what can we do about it?
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[SPEAKER_01]: How can we try to solve these problems?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And that's what I'm trying to get people to see.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And the book tries to walk you, me, everyone through their daily lives.
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[SPEAKER_01]: To say, let's look at how our physical homes have changed.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Never left your home is now being revealed to a third party through Nests through Google or whatever it is.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What happens when all of your information, your phone, those Google certain, I think how intimate your Google searches are, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: The things that you ask Google for, I think you probably are not necessarily telling your partner.
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[SPEAKER_01]: or people you loved, dearly.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But you're willing to trust a multi-billion dollar algorithm for this information.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's only going to get worse in the AI world when we're asking a chat GPT.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And the question is like maybe that's a good thing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe we want to have a safe space to say,
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[SPEAKER_01]: What is this rash?
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[SPEAKER_01]: What are these symptoms and get that information at the same time when you ask like, what are the first signs of pregnancy in Texas or Idaho or South Dakota?
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[SPEAKER_01]: That shouldn't be the opening into a criminal investigation into whether or not you would eventually seek an abortion.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And like that's the that's the tension.
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[SPEAKER_01]: that the book tries to wrestle with, not good or bad, not easier or harmful, not even just scary, because as you read, the book is filled with stories where the police solve otherwise unsolvable crimes through data.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And that's not a bad thing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's a good thing, as long as we have these rules around it that are protective and balance it equitably.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'll touch on that in a second, but I did want to touch on the Fourth Amendment because the focus of this book feels like it is directly touching on the Fourth Amendment and how that can be used in different ways, and I did want to quote here in the book.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You just say the history of the Fourth Amendment makes clear that just because something is available does not mean it should be in the government's hands.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A rule requiring a substantive determination of reasonableness would help bring that logic into the digital age, and I think that there is a lot of
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[SPEAKER_00]: rules and regulations that were created at a certain point of history, that may not completely mold into what we are now in this digital aid.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Walk me through the fourth amendment and how that is basically the bow on this book.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, so I'm a law professor, I teach formal procedure, I teach the fourth amendment.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And if you think back to that original era, the founding fathers, we're writing
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[SPEAKER_01]: the dishes, treasonous ideas on paper.
17:21.611 --> 17:36.222
[SPEAKER_01]: And the thing that they actually wanted protected the most was the ability to write seditious treasonous things on paper not have the then British government or any federal government, because they were definitely afraid of the federal government, coming in to see what they were writing.
17:36.790 --> 17:43.474
[SPEAKER_01]: Their homes were very privileged places, privileged partially by economics and sort of civil norms.
17:44.074 --> 17:49.457
[SPEAKER_01]: Obviously, all of the complications and problems of a patriarchal racist society was also there.
17:50.058 --> 18:00.564
[SPEAKER_01]: But their homes really were their kingdoms, and they wanted a protection where the government couldn't come in and see that they were avoiding taxes, which they were, which is a crime, seeing that they were planning,
18:03.245 --> 18:16.054
[SPEAKER_01]: And they wanted this protection, and the Fourth Amendment arises from this concern of these famous cases, where then the British agents were going into journalists and or critics of the king to do that very criticism.
18:16.514 --> 18:23.840
[SPEAKER_01]: And they wanted to protect papers, they wanted to protect things, they wanted to protect homes, and they wanted to protect persons, which are, again, the language of the Fourth Amendment.
18:24.220 --> 18:24.440
[SPEAKER_01]: Right?
18:24.460 --> 18:27.182
[SPEAKER_01]: There's, you know, unreasonable searches and seizures of persons,
18:27.542 --> 18:38.750
[SPEAKER_01]: papers, homes, and effects, effects, and things, and the requirement of sort of a problem caused a warrant protection and the very fear of general war.
18:38.770 --> 18:45.395
[SPEAKER_01]: It's this idea that we could just write a law that would give some customs agent the ability to go into your house and and rummage through it.
18:46.202 --> 18:58.485
[SPEAKER_01]: And we have forgotten sort of that privacy principle in our modern Fourth Amendment where we actually defer and give great power to police.
18:58.545 --> 19:01.225
[SPEAKER_01]: Police can go into your homes with a warrant.
19:01.265 --> 19:03.286
[SPEAKER_01]: They can read everything you've written with a warrant.
19:03.306 --> 19:09.147
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, the thing that struck me the most writing this book, which again, a source of probably for someone who's supposed to do this for a living was,
19:09.527 --> 19:11.348
[SPEAKER_01]: There's nothing to private.
19:11.368 --> 19:15.249
[SPEAKER_01]: There's nothing to secrets that the police cannot get without a with a warrant.
19:15.449 --> 19:23.212
[SPEAKER_01]: Like the your most secret diaries, the information on your period tracking app, your smart bed data, with a warrant, it's all available.
19:23.232 --> 19:32.736
[SPEAKER_01]: And the problem is there's a lot more stuff available now in a digital age because we have created it because of these various conveniences.
19:32.796 --> 19:34.637
[SPEAKER_01]: I want people to sort of engage in that.
19:35.040 --> 19:40.584
[SPEAKER_01]: But the fourth amendment was, you know, written and ratified in 1791, and the words haven't changed.
19:41.404 --> 19:45.307
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that means courts have to try to interpret it to meet the moment, right?
19:45.327 --> 19:50.491
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a free electricity world now responding to a world of...
19:50.871 --> 19:55.255
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, digital AI surveillance systems.
19:55.275 --> 19:56.976
[SPEAKER_01]: So, of course, it's gonna be a little bit of tension there.
19:57.597 --> 20:04.503
[SPEAKER_01]: But what I was trying to say in that passage, you read is that resableness and unreasonable searches and seizures has always been a key.
20:04.943 --> 20:07.685
[SPEAKER_01]: And resableness, of course, can change with the times.
20:08.106 --> 20:17.574
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we could add in a sort of substantive ability, like I would love to have a world where the police might even with a warrant not be able to get
20:18.107 --> 20:25.351
[SPEAKER_01]: very, very like privilege or private or family information because it would be seen as unreasonable.
20:25.531 --> 20:26.432
[SPEAKER_01]: No, that's not the law.
20:26.512 --> 20:26.952
[SPEAKER_01]: So go to...
20:27.268 --> 20:39.310
[SPEAKER_01]: take the bar, don't say that, that's not the law, don't argue that in court, but those people like me who are trying to say, well, how do we take this old principle and apply to a new age, are trying to figure out ways to sort of strengthen it?
20:39.670 --> 20:54.893
[SPEAKER_01]: And just to be fair, we can talk about this later, if you want, the Supreme Court actually did take a major step toward improving the sort of digital sort of awareness and recognition that digital is different, just this last term.
20:55.453 --> 21:04.242
[SPEAKER_01]: where they required a warrant for your cell site information, the information that's called a part of a geofence warrant basically being able to track you through your phone.
21:05.042 --> 21:08.125
[SPEAKER_01]: They did say there's that you have to get a warrant before getting an information.
21:08.145 --> 21:11.248
[SPEAKER_01]: But again, as I said, like with a warrant, it's all available.
21:12.790 --> 21:18.475
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we could touch on it because I was curious like what exactly where are we now and what's happening so we can we can circle back to that.
21:19.506 --> 21:29.750
[SPEAKER_00]: But I did want to talk about some of the numbers that you mentioned here in this book, because I do think that not a lot of people know that this is happening, unless, of course, it has happened to them.
21:29.791 --> 21:31.731
[SPEAKER_00]: And sorry, this is kind of long, but I did want to touch on this.
21:32.372 --> 21:39.035
[SPEAKER_00]: Transparency reports from technology companies revealed that police regularly ask them to hand over digital papers and that they generally complies on page 91.
21:40.335 --> 21:55.265
[SPEAKER_00]: At least, when there is a warrant, for example, in the six months from January to June 2022, Google received over 30,000 demands via warrant for information on over 42,000 accounts and provided some information of about 86% of them.
21:55.686 --> 22:05.172
[SPEAKER_00]: Google also received a little over 21,000 requests via subpoena on 49,000, just a little over 49,000 accounts and provided some information on 83% of them.
22:05.612 --> 22:06.633
[SPEAKER_00]: Facebook received some
22:06.853 --> 22:19.365
[SPEAKER_00]: 65,420 legal process requests, and this is not broken down by Warren or Sapina, on about 146,000 users and accounts, and granted some information 87%.
22:20.486 --> 22:25.871
[SPEAKER_00]: Microsoft as well responded to 5500 requests from law enforcement for information on around 17,337 accounts.
22:28.033 --> 22:29.775
[SPEAKER_00]: and provided some information on that percent of their quest.
22:30.175 --> 22:39.362
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, there are so many read also prized by some of these numbers or did this kind of make sense to you and can you talk more about how these kinds of subpoenas work?
22:40.343 --> 22:50.391
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it didn't surprise me in part because if you think about it from a law enforcement perspective, where is the best way of revealing what people are doing, where they are,
22:51.302 --> 22:56.128
[SPEAKER_01]: what they might have been doing at that location and who they're connected with.
22:56.188 --> 23:03.538
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, it's our digital trails, whether it's sort of social media, whether it's a geolocation data, that reveals where we go.
23:04.315 --> 23:18.660
[SPEAKER_01]: It really isn't that surprising that the default is becoming to check this or digital clues before the physical clues or even the interview clues and people on the scene because it's easier, right?
23:19.040 --> 23:26.103
[SPEAKER_01]: The companies you mentioned all have like portals like literally just set up portals because they're getting so many of these edges sort of create a process.
23:26.563 --> 23:28.564
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not that difficult to get a warrant.
23:28.890 --> 23:34.713
[SPEAKER_01]: and worse opinion, depending on the level of information, or the privacy level of information you're talking about, to get it.
23:35.194 --> 23:38.616
[SPEAKER_01]: And so it almost has become like a routine practice.
23:38.636 --> 23:47.781
[SPEAKER_01]: That in a case where police want to figure out whether the digital clues match their theory of the case, they just go do this as a matter of course.
23:47.801 --> 23:49.022
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not hard to get a warrant.
23:49.522 --> 23:53.404
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not hard to subpoena these things and so it becomes the normal practice.
23:53.464 --> 23:56.686
[SPEAKER_01]: And in fact, one of the things that was sort of pushing me
23:59.190 --> 24:19.805
[SPEAKER_01]: in the future, my students when they graduate from law school and they go practice in court as prosecutor's defenders are probably going to be trying cases with digital evidence and digital forensics at the beginning and the end of their case like that may be where we go in the future that if you can have a cell site location tracking that shows a person went
24:20.426 --> 24:37.227
[SPEAKER_01]: You know from the crime scene to their home and you know ditched the weapon at a particular place and their phone literally tracks them to those places That's great evidence far better than some like eyewitness who may or may not have gotten right description of the height weight in whatever
24:38.070 --> 25:01.543
[SPEAKER_01]: And so there's a real temptation for law enforcement to do this even when they actually don't have all the information Even if it isn't necessarily Some of the thing they may not even know what will be out there, but they're going to maybe we'll find something might as well try to see whether they have any sort of social media Sort of comments about you know this case or anger any of those things and so since you know if you step back to think about your own life
25:02.219 --> 25:10.683
[SPEAKER_01]: How much of what you do is mediate through some like digital medium, be it a text message and email, an Instagram post or whatever it is.
25:11.023 --> 25:23.930
[SPEAKER_01]: And recognize that if you took that collected like bits of data about your life, it would be a pretty good, you know, a revelation of what you were thinking and where you were and what you were doing with him, and that's what police are doing when they're investigating.
25:23.950 --> 25:28.452
[SPEAKER_01]: So it becomes the new normal to be able to get this kind of information.
25:29.920 --> 25:39.982
[SPEAKER_00]: I do want to not play devil's advocate at all, but I do want to discuss like kind of the great area of kind of what we're discussing here where, yes, a lot of this data can be used to solve crimes.
25:40.442 --> 25:55.004
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I really mentioned there was a really interesting chapter about the guy with the pacemaker or the heart monitor that was sending signals back to his doctor, great for, you know, life-saving events, but it was a it was used against him to find out that he
25:59.365 --> 26:15.690
[SPEAKER_00]: There was also just literally this week I was driving home and I get to one stop light and every, I'm in statesville, North Carolina, every police car I swear in statesville was at this intersection with caution tape and everything and I went to Facebook just to see what was going on.
26:16.850 --> 26:18.771
[SPEAKER_00]: Fatal pedestrian hit and run.
26:18.811 --> 26:22.592
[SPEAKER_00]: This woman hit a lady walking with her car and drove off.
26:23.512 --> 26:27.314
[SPEAKER_00]: flock cameras were provided the license plate.
26:27.334 --> 26:29.214
[SPEAKER_00]: We were able to figure out where this woman went.
26:29.274 --> 26:31.655
[SPEAKER_00]: She just went back home and she was arrested.
26:31.835 --> 26:34.737
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, 24 hours later, maybe.
26:35.457 --> 26:38.878
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's a lot of people out there who see the good in these.
26:38.998 --> 26:42.420
[SPEAKER_00]: So how did you want to cover kind of like that great area?
26:42.640 --> 26:47.862
[SPEAKER_00]: And how do you have conversations with people who say, oh, but flock can do this and
26:50.883 --> 26:53.405
[SPEAKER_00]: spinning in a tube and sending it to a company can do this.
26:54.025 --> 26:57.148
[SPEAKER_00]: But on the other end, like how do you, how do you, how do you have this conversation?
26:57.888 --> 27:13.360
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, here's a great way of putting like the book I think is really trying to wrestle with the gray, you know, maybe it's might have been a best seller or a better seller if I was just completely like, you know, anti-technology and anti, you know, playing to the
27:13.945 --> 27:26.113
[SPEAKER_01]: to the privacy crowd in more extreme ways, but I actually try to wrestle with the need of law enforcement and the recognition that surveillance will help us solve crimes that would otherwise be unsolved.
27:26.153 --> 27:28.635
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, in a world without that flock camera,
27:29.082 --> 27:31.443
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's no eyewitnesses, you may never know, right?
27:31.503 --> 27:35.165
[SPEAKER_01]: If unless someone reveals something themselves, it might be very hard.
27:35.185 --> 27:37.646
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, the lock camera is only one piece of that puzzle.
27:37.686 --> 27:46.131
[SPEAKER_01]: You might also have been able to figure out which cell phones were in the area that that, or which cars were in that area, since your GPS and your car is also revealing things, right?
27:46.151 --> 27:48.772
[SPEAKER_01]: So it might be other ways besides cameras to get it.
27:48.792 --> 27:51.073
[SPEAKER_01]: But again, not taking that away.
27:51.533 --> 27:52.874
[SPEAKER_01]: The question is, well,
27:53.516 --> 28:04.962
[SPEAKER_01]: If we want to use the flock license plates for those kinds of cases, are we also okay with them being used for immigration enforcement or protests, right?
28:04.982 --> 28:08.885
[SPEAKER_01]: So people who are protesting, flock cameras or police brutality, whatever it is.
28:09.725 --> 28:18.450
[SPEAKER_01]: Do we want to have flock cameras outside churches or mosques or gun ranges, that would reveal people who are, you know,
28:18.920 --> 28:21.723
[SPEAKER_01]: using their second amendment, right to bear arms.
28:22.924 --> 28:34.055
[SPEAKER_01]: And the a world without rules, which is kind of currently the reality, means that the discretion of how these technologies get used pretty much ends up in the police.
28:34.316 --> 28:35.777
[SPEAKER_01]: And for some people, that's fine.
28:35.797 --> 28:38.740
[SPEAKER_01]: They trust the police, I think the police will not misuse it.
28:39.077 --> 28:43.862
[SPEAKER_01]: And for some people, they say, wait a minute, I'm very worried about how that information can be used.
28:43.902 --> 28:52.511
[SPEAKER_01]: You have the extreme cases of Washington Post had an article just recently about the 50 cases where officers were kind of misusing flock to track there.
28:53.683 --> 29:02.986
[SPEAKER_01]: explorers or girlfriends, whatever, you know, things would be, but even more so, lawfully, like, you know, ice could get access to them and be able to track those.
29:03.046 --> 29:17.972
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, the tension of the book is to say, look, this surveillance technology that's democratic and mediated on our streets and the data that we're revealing from our homes and our cars and our bodies has this sort of double edge to it.
29:18.472 --> 29:19.692
[SPEAKER_01]: It can be used for good,
29:22.292 --> 29:25.236
[SPEAKER_01]: or William Penopicon surveillance, right?
29:25.656 --> 29:31.944
[SPEAKER_01]: And right now, we don't have a rule set that would say, okay, when you could use it.
29:32.184 --> 29:37.130
[SPEAKER_01]: And just as a TV or a concrete example, you could have a rule set about flock cameras.
29:37.570 --> 29:40.833
[SPEAKER_01]: that says you need to go get a warrant to get access.
29:40.913 --> 29:42.234
[SPEAKER_01]: So please say, hey, guess what?
29:42.615 --> 29:45.077
[SPEAKER_01]: There was a fatal hidden run at this intersection.
29:45.397 --> 29:50.141
[SPEAKER_01]: We know their car was involved, and we believe that this particular camera captured it.
29:50.361 --> 29:56.607
[SPEAKER_01]: Judge, I would like permission to get access to this particular information in order to confirm my suspicions.
29:57.193 --> 29:59.736
[SPEAKER_01]: every judge in the world will sign that war and you get it.
30:00.136 --> 30:06.122
[SPEAKER_01]: Right now the rule is like we can just like quickly like look up flock because there's no warrant requirement.
30:06.142 --> 30:14.351
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no need to go do this and say once one simple compromise would at least be having things like warrant requirements.
30:14.431 --> 30:17.454
[SPEAKER_01]: I personally think that might be too low and we should have something a little bit higher than that.
30:17.774 --> 30:18.135
[SPEAKER_01]: But again,
30:18.993 --> 30:23.774
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't have to live in a binary where it's either no rules or no technology.
30:24.114 --> 30:40.119
[SPEAKER_01]: You can sort of build in that gray, a sort of architecture of respecting the tensions that come with civil liberties, concerns about racial justice and injustice, and the need of law enforcement to solve cases.
30:40.279 --> 30:41.719
[SPEAKER_01]: That's to me as an easier one.
30:41.759 --> 30:43.580
[SPEAKER_01]: You could easily balance those things.
30:43.900 --> 30:54.123
[SPEAKER_01]: by having a very strict process to get it, which would allow police to get the information when they needed it, but not necessarily be able to get it whenever they want and for whatever reason.
30:54.943 --> 31:04.166
[SPEAKER_00]: So I guess when it comes to flock to me is a whole kind of worms, but I guess the person that was arrested for the hit and run here in statesville,
31:12.352 --> 31:25.249
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no actual warrant issued for the use of the flat camera there for and could they say like this is can't be held up in court because there was no warrant issued for flock or is there like a
31:30.203 --> 31:40.409
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's a great question, because the Supreme Court has given us a slight curve ball in this case of the decide to see her that I mentioned called Chaturie versus the United States.
31:40.469 --> 31:48.033
[SPEAKER_01]: And this involved a geofence war, essentially there's a bank robbery in Virginia, police did not know who the bank robbery was.
31:48.493 --> 31:55.457
[SPEAKER_01]: So they asked Google with a war, a three step warm process to say, give me all the phones in this large area around the bank.
31:55.997 --> 31:59.939
[SPEAKER_01]: and Google produced a 19 sort of blinded information that you didn't know what it was.
31:59.959 --> 32:00.899
[SPEAKER_01]: It was just like numbers.
32:00.939 --> 32:02.160
[SPEAKER_01]: These particular funds were there.
32:02.440 --> 32:06.441
[SPEAKER_01]: We're not going to tell you who was in this phone until you go to some more information.
32:06.742 --> 32:16.046
[SPEAKER_01]: And so there's a three-step process where essentially they narrowed it down from 19 to three and eventually they revealed this person who turned out to be the guy accused of the bank robbery.
32:16.326 --> 32:17.006
[SPEAKER_01]: That gentleman.
32:17.709 --> 32:33.979
[SPEAKER_01]: does what you just suggested, are used to the core that, hey, this obtaining information from the, from Google about my location data, violated my fourth amendment rights, a violated reasonable expectation of privacy, and thus the evidence obtained should be suppressed.
32:34.640 --> 32:44.406
[SPEAKER_01]: In this case, because all you have to stream core to determine two questions, one, whether the fourth amendment even applies, because there's an open question about whether we have a reasonable expectation of privacy,
32:47.909 --> 32:51.132
[SPEAKER_01]: private company like Google, when police get access to it.
32:51.572 --> 32:57.577
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, whether the warrant, because of the warrant in this case, was specific enough for particular lives and stuff like legitimate enough.
32:57.977 --> 32:59.659
[SPEAKER_01]: The Supreme Court only handled the first question.
32:59.679 --> 33:05.223
[SPEAKER_01]: They said, yes, we, you, me, everyone else now has a reasonable expectation of privacy.
33:06.104 --> 33:12.209
[SPEAKER_01]: In our location data, such that police need to go to Google with the warrant to get this information.
33:16.055 --> 33:35.800
[SPEAKER_01]: there is now an argument to say that this kind of data that is location data and is a system of tracking devices, essentially the camera didn't just, you know, capture that one instance, captured the license plate wherever it was, is the same thing as your cell phone being tracked around the world.
33:35.840 --> 33:40.001
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, that's not the law, but to the question of will the defense lawyer
33:44.022 --> 33:45.503
[SPEAKER_01]: Violate the fourth one without a warrant.
33:45.904 --> 33:47.085
[SPEAKER_01]: Sure, then they probably should.
33:47.845 --> 33:48.386
[SPEAKER_01]: Will they win?
33:48.626 --> 33:50.007
[SPEAKER_01]: I have no idea how that will come out.
33:50.067 --> 33:59.054
[SPEAKER_01]: But that's sort of the interesting thing of studying this is that you have a case that does say location data is protected by the fourth amendment, and this was a warrantless collection of location data.
33:59.434 --> 34:02.737
[SPEAKER_01]: There is now an open question about whether there's a fourth amount of problem.
34:02.757 --> 34:03.998
[SPEAKER_01]: There wasn't, you know,
34:05.152 --> 34:06.493
[SPEAKER_01]: three months ago, but there is now.
34:06.793 --> 34:07.554
[SPEAKER_00]: It's so interesting.
34:07.794 --> 34:17.922
[SPEAKER_00]: I wanted to touch on to something you mentioned in the book as well, which is just, you know, we've talked about immigration, but just overall racism with some of these facial recognition softwares.
34:17.942 --> 34:21.584
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you can't talk about policing in America without time-out race.
34:21.824 --> 34:26.308
[SPEAKER_01]: It's bound up and sort of the history of policing, how police are, eventually, you know, actually arose.
34:27.290 --> 34:35.613
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, post-slavery as a policing force, it's tied up with the protests around police brutality.
34:36.313 --> 34:44.635
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's not surprising that the places that we have directed our surveillance technologies tend to be poor communities and communities of color.
34:45.315 --> 34:47.456
[SPEAKER_01]: And so race clearly has an impact.
34:47.981 --> 34:56.805
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes that impact is just sort of incidental to the larger structures of racial inequality in America.
34:57.245 --> 34:58.886
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes it's just like poor planning.
34:58.906 --> 35:00.607
[SPEAKER_01]: And facial recognition is an interesting example.
35:00.667 --> 35:13.573
[SPEAKER_01]: So when the original, the first generation facial recognition technologies were being created, the data sets that they use to sort of train the models tended to be white
35:17.305 --> 35:21.768
[SPEAKER_01]: And so they built these models that were really good actually about identifying white men.
35:22.169 --> 35:27.993
[SPEAKER_01]: But when you then applied it to like people of color, especially black women, it did terribly.
35:28.493 --> 35:32.977
[SPEAKER_01]: I could not figure out black women's hairstyles, it could not process the fact that
35:33.918 --> 35:40.708
[SPEAKER_01]: Black women's facial features didn't match up with what had been trained for, and part of that is simply just a training failure, right?
35:40.728 --> 35:48.741
[SPEAKER_01]: These early systems were trained with a particular day-to-day set, so it was good at what it was trained for, bad at what it wasn't trained for.
35:49.161 --> 36:08.868
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, when that data get intersected with the actual criminal justice system, where there are people of all colors and all races and genders involved, if you're using a facial recognition technology, that is trained on one group of people with another, this day is going to happen.
36:09.148 --> 36:15.591
[SPEAKER_01]: The first eight false arrest based on facial recognition technology, or black men, it's
36:19.025 --> 36:28.412
[SPEAKER_01]: Women are white men who are falsely a match, but it has tended to be black men and some women who are falsely accused.
36:28.432 --> 36:30.034
[SPEAKER_01]: Now the technology actually has got a lot better.
36:30.374 --> 36:39.581
[SPEAKER_01]: So those first generation systems, which were unfortunately rolled out before they're ready, have of course gone back to train their models on all sorts of races.
36:39.601 --> 36:47.027
[SPEAKER_01]: So when NIS, like the National Institute of Science Technology, does sort of laboratory testing a facial recognition,
36:48.022 --> 36:49.263
[SPEAKER_01]: I end the new systems.
36:49.443 --> 36:50.083
[SPEAKER_01]: It's really good.
36:50.123 --> 36:53.624
[SPEAKER_01]: It's good across the board, which actually might be more frightening on the strange way.
36:53.944 --> 36:55.485
[SPEAKER_01]: But now it's not going to make those mistakes.
36:55.545 --> 36:59.166
[SPEAKER_01]: It will be able to identify you in a crowd and find you in certain ways.
37:00.286 --> 37:11.170
[SPEAKER_01]: And some of the errors that arose from the choice of model and the choice that early training have been resolved such that the systems like in a perfect way.
37:11.990 --> 37:13.471
[SPEAKER_01]: world will work pretty well.
37:13.811 --> 37:16.653
[SPEAKER_01]: Unfortunately, in policing never happens in a perfect world.
37:16.733 --> 37:38.605
[SPEAKER_01]: So if the grainy photo that you use from the bank is the photo that gets put in to get into the database to get matched, well, if it's not a great photo, it may not be a great match, and you can still get these horrible cases of false arrests, which seem to pop up monthly nowadays, where some technology is identifying someone incorrectly
37:41.442 --> 37:49.257
[SPEAKER_00]: I worked at UCLA very briefly and I was in charge of getting camera set up because there was a school shooter back in 20.
37:51.290 --> 38:19.465
[SPEAKER_00]: 15 or so it was it anyway they were they had this urge to get camera security cameras put up in the departments and I The COVID hit I eventually stopped working there, but I remember we had these meetings not like town hall size, but like we had these meetings with people and a lot of advocates would come for facial recognition and say how these are going to be used against communities Such a great area of like what what we need to do because we wanted to do it for good and that tension is very really so many universities
38:19.945 --> 38:44.947
[SPEAKER_01]: are little microcosms of surveillance worlds, some of the more sophisticated technologies actually are rolled out on campuses, not to surveil the students necessarily, but to surveil the other, the person who might come and do the student's harm, and that's understandable if you're a university or administrator, you want to protect your students, you have this sort of understanding with the family sending their kids there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: At the same time,
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[SPEAKER_01]: I imagine most undergraduates in universities across America.
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[SPEAKER_01]: would rather not have those cameras rolling at 2.30 in the morning as they're stumbling home from the sorority house.
39:00.020 --> 39:04.882
[SPEAKER_01]: And the strange kind of implicit deal is like, well, don't worry, we won't use it against you.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We'll use it against other people.
39:07.023 --> 39:08.424
[SPEAKER_01]: And the question is like, do you trust that?
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[SPEAKER_01]: In some ways, it's a good microcosm of the world.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Like, do you trust that this data that did reveal your most embarrassing mistake on Saturday night won't be used against you in some way?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I think what we've seen when we had protests
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[SPEAKER_01]: Israel and Palestine where we've had protests about free speech and even some, you know, USA policies independent like the politics of the day.
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[SPEAKER_01]: those surveillance devices were still running and they were used in in ways that were helpful to administrations and not to helpful for students.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so I think those are honest questions to ask of you have to trust the person who is using it and there should be rulesets about why this data will not be used against you but will only be used to protect you should someone come and try to harm you.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Let's talk about those rulesets.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Let's circle back to the Supreme
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[SPEAKER_00]: things have changed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You mentioned some things for the better.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What what more can be done though?
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[SPEAKER_01]: So the Supreme Court, if you're just talking about what judges can do in terms of thinking about the fourth amendment, the Supreme Court has only just started
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[SPEAKER_01]: meeting the moment of the digital age.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Unfortunately, we're like moving to the AI age now, so we're still pretty far back.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But the cases I teach every year, I teach Chrome per seager.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I teach these cases that start in the late 60s and go to the 90s.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And the seminal case involving the fourth moment that still controls when we're talking about geofence once the rest involves a standalone headphone.
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[SPEAKER_01]: a quarter in to make a phone call and the FBI were trying to record this phone call there because the guy involved in Charlie Cats was gambling and they put a real-to-real tape recorder on top of the phone booth and they had to press play then run away and let him make his little gambling calls and come back and press stop and like that technology.
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[SPEAKER_01]: is actually the technology that undergirds our current fourth amendment or expectation of privacy.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I've explained to my students, like, what a telephone book is, what a real, real paper quarter is because, you know, in an era of, you know, cell phones and AI listening to in the classrooms.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We're in a different world, and so the courts are only just moving from this analog era where the technologies involve things like microfuge, which again you have to explain, into a world where everything you have purchased using your Apple Pay now exists somewhere and could be accessed in a way if there was a right legal process and war and somewhere
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so those kinds of tensions are very real.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So courts have to sort of
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[SPEAKER_01]: build up the momentum that maybe is growing to move us from the analog age, the digital age.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And recognize that things like expectations or privacy, the fact that we connect with third parties, shouldn't be determined.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Like it shouldn't be the case right now, the law, or, you know, up till the last case of Chaturai was basically if you connected your information through through some third party, like Google, Amazon, whatever it is,
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[SPEAKER_01]: You could not claim an expectation of privacy because you had given it to a third party.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So if Google is to see it, I can't the FBI at least if they have a warrant.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And the question is, should that still hold?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Should that be the reality going forward?
42:43.822 --> 42:48.464
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think judges have to recognize that the world has changed and the law needs to change.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And we need to update that fourth member to recognize some of the real harms of this kind of digital surrounds.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We now can expose
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[SPEAKER_01]: Everyone's like lived experience through their digital trails and we should have a fourth Amendment expectations or privacy that matched that new vulnerability to this policing power
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[SPEAKER_00]: It makes me so angry because I feel like I know what's happening here.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Does that make any sense?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Or it's like I can see.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And a lot of the debate around facial recognition or flock or anything, it's basically a push to not allow the technologies at all.
43:25.606 --> 43:29.928
[SPEAKER_01]: Even though we might be able to see that there's some good use cases.
43:29.948 --> 43:33.289
[SPEAKER_01]: In some cases we get solved because of that fear you're talking about.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It will be abuse.
43:35.130 --> 43:42.820
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no question that if you build the technology, it will be abused, and part because it's really easy to sort of manipulate law.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And we're seeing it now with this administration where, you know, James Comey, who's probably one of the greatest error errors of the world, like a former
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[SPEAKER_01]: directly FBI, career prosecutor, clearly someone who despite his political issue meddling or whatever, like thinks themselves as someone who's above the wall, above a board and follows the law.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Is having his data used against him?
44:04.557 --> 44:15.082
[SPEAKER_01]: He's being prosecuted for an Instagram post of seashells in a way that is sort of a jaw-dropping that anyone would actually go forward with that kind of prosecution because seems to are nakedly political.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But what it means is that we're all sort of exposed.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We can see how this data could be used.
44:21.108 --> 44:34.282
[SPEAKER_01]: If you are someone who speaks up and is critical of this government or even picture or local share for whatever, the data that could embarrass you and crumouring at you or just make your life really uncomfortable,
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[SPEAKER_01]: is there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And the question is, well, what's protecting you?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe a problem caused warrant standard, but that's just not that high a bar.
44:43.061 --> 44:59.744
[SPEAKER_01]: The problem caused standards pretty low in some states, like Virginia, you don't have to be a lawyer to be a judge that signs a problem caused affidavit, that Chastry case I was talking about the stream court, the guy who signed the warrant, that made it to the stream court, was a guy three years out of law school who had just finished his
45:00.744 --> 45:28.142
[SPEAKER_01]: Judging course to become a magistrate judge and here he is signing the document that stands between you and all of the data that Google collects about you and again it's not that protective and if you want to weaponize it it can be and so I think that that fear your articulating is why people are very much anti-technology because they can see how it will be abused and the question is can you put in guardrails such that will create a trust
45:29.142 --> 45:35.864
[SPEAKER_01]: in the system and that those guardrails have to be like multifaceted at the end of the book I have this idea called the tyrant test.
45:36.164 --> 45:42.305
[SPEAKER_01]: This basically the way we should approach technology is to assume the tyrant is reading your most embarrassing Google search.
45:42.325 --> 45:45.886
[SPEAKER_01]: Like assume the directly FBI has access to your Google.
45:45.946 --> 45:51.247
[SPEAKER_01]: What would the laws be that you would create to make sure that isn't weaponized against you?
45:51.287 --> 45:51.967
[SPEAKER_01]: And it would be many.
45:52.067 --> 45:55.008
[SPEAKER_01]: It couldn't just be one, it wouldn't just be a law because that's easy to get around.
45:55.028 --> 45:55.848
[SPEAKER_01]: You'd have to build in.
45:56.188 --> 46:01.411
[SPEAKER_01]: rights and remedies and local and state and other kinds of protections to sort of build against this thing.
46:01.771 --> 46:08.814
[SPEAKER_01]: And if that kind of check and balances and separation of powers seems familiar, well, America was built on a tyrant test.
46:08.834 --> 46:11.216
[SPEAKER_01]: That was our founding recognition.
46:11.256 --> 46:19.600
[SPEAKER_01]: Was that power could be abused if you centralized it if you gave the executive or then the king too much power.
46:19.620 --> 46:22.341
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we built systems to sort of check that power.
46:22.361 --> 46:23.682
[SPEAKER_01]: I think we need to do the same thing
46:25.963 --> 46:31.129
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it offers some concrete solutions and suggestions, but get to that larger principle.
46:32.150 --> 46:41.161
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, to wrap this up, and it's just something you've just touched on, but besides, you know, the advice of act like everybody's watching all the time, do you have any other advice besides read the book, of course?
46:41.521 --> 46:44.144
[SPEAKER_00]: But do you have any other advice that people can take away from listening to this?
46:45.098 --> 46:47.779
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I want people just to be intentional about their choices.
46:47.839 --> 46:54.401
[SPEAKER_01]: Like I think we all recognize that some of these digital conveniences are important.
46:54.521 --> 46:55.641
[SPEAKER_01]: And sometimes necessities.
46:55.681 --> 47:01.663
[SPEAKER_01]: And you mentioned that the smart heart, the pacemaker case, which I think is one of my favorite stories about this case.
47:01.683 --> 47:05.264
[SPEAKER_01]: Here's a guy who literally needed a pacemaker in order to live.
47:05.704 --> 47:13.727
[SPEAKER_01]: The day that was going to him, so he knows heart was, and to his doctor, and detectives one to the doctor's office with a warrant and God has hard to be to use against them in a court of law.
47:15.289 --> 47:22.013
[SPEAKER_01]: there should be a world where we can have smart pacemakers and not have the government get access to it.
47:22.033 --> 47:24.075
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's kind of what the book is pushing forward.
47:24.475 --> 47:27.357
[SPEAKER_01]: Some of those ways to limit it is to make choices.
47:27.417 --> 47:32.200
[SPEAKER_01]: It may not be the case that you need the camera in your home to watch your dog.
47:32.500 --> 47:34.361
[SPEAKER_01]: or your cat, cat, cams are very popular.
47:34.381 --> 47:36.182
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe you don't need to surveil yourself.
47:36.482 --> 47:40.343
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe you don't need the ring door, but I think it's interesting to why people buy these things.
47:41.063 --> 47:48.646
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like 99% of the footage of your ring doorbell and also flock cameras is all about either surveilling you or surveilling innocent conduct.
47:49.367 --> 47:52.208
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not actually capturing the one moment where you might need it.
47:52.528 --> 47:53.228
[SPEAKER_01]: And is it worth it?
47:53.288 --> 47:53.988
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe it is.
47:54.008 --> 47:55.569
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe you say, like, that secured it.
47:55.609 --> 47:56.269
[SPEAKER_01]: I get as worth it.
47:56.309 --> 47:56.709
[SPEAKER_01]: That's okay.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's an intentional choice.
47:58.810 --> 47:59.471
[SPEAKER_01]: or maybe it's not.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe you don't need to buy all of the surveillance devices that are called smart devices in your life.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This is a book walks you through some ways to think about that in your own life.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It offers some suggestions about how we could change the legislative laws or the rules around it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, hopefully causes people to think about the choices they make and starts a larger conversation so maybe we can make different choices as a community or a nation.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for tuning into this bonus episode of your data will be used against you, policing in the age of self surveillance with the author Andrew Guthrie Ferguson.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Again, if you'd like to purchase this book, you can and the morbidly curious booklubs online bookstore, signed a bookplay through on the way, and go check out other stuff in our catalog.
48:47.661 --> 48:53.462
[SPEAKER_00]: I've got other books from past book club picks to some of my favorites books that have been featured on the podcast, The Young Adult, and more.
48:53.702 --> 48:57.483
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, our bookbox subscription service where you can get the book club picks in right to your doorstep.
48:57.643 --> 48:59.784
[SPEAKER_00]: As always friends, stay safe out there, stay curious.
49:00.144 --> 49:03.388
[SPEAKER_00]: And maybe read this book before you purchase that aura ring, something I should have done.