Surveilling the surveillers
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:14
The man standing right from me is Martin Reicher. Martin Reicher is a former computer scientist with Karlsruhe Institute for Technology.
00:22
He went to study media art and now is a self-employed media artist covering space perception, digitalization, power relations and minimal aesthetics. That sounds a bit arty and it will be arty in the best way.
00:44
His work was seen at exhibitions festivals worldwide like in Spain and Russia and of course in Germany, for example he used a border barbed wire fence to accommodate Wi-Fi modems and connecting people by a fence that's not supposed to connect people.
01:03
We're living in times where there's architecture that's purpose only seems to be to disconnect people or for surveillance purposes or both. And Martin Reicher shows how to connect this architecture with the arts and thus reclaiming them against their actual purpose.
01:21
Please welcome Martin Reicher. Oh I'm sorry, it's been late yesterday. The closing ceremony will be streamed into this hall so you can just stay sit until 1830. Now Martin Reicher, try this with the applause again please.
01:41
Thank you and thanks everybody for coming, especially against this other talk in the other room. It's quite a hard thing to compete against that. My name is Martin Reicher, I'm from Berlin.
02:02
I'm a media artist, just had that old introduction thing. So I'm just going to talk about what this talk will be about. It's called surveilling the surveyors, which is maybe more of a provocative call for action than really an actual description of what I'm going to talk about. But don't run away because you will understand in the end why I'm giving you this disclaimer right now.
02:25
Because I will talk about current important critical topics that are important for my own practice and I'm going to give some examples not only from my own artistic practice but also from other people's work that deal with the same topics.
02:42
And I think it's always important to really understand the context where artistic work is situated in order to understand the work itself. I will also talk a bit about modern form of activism and that I see computer science and computer programming as this modern form of activism.
03:03
I will talk about regulation of technology and the policies concerning technology and the institutions that make these policies. I will also talk about quantification of the world somehow, and I will finish with something like a closed formula to describe the whole world,
03:22
which sounds a bit impossible and it actually is, but well that's where it will be going and we'll see how that will evolve. So my background, we don't really need this again, but I want to tell you a little bit about some works that I did, because it's a variety of works that I'm dealing with and a variety of topics.
03:43
For example, topics like electronic waste, digital footprints, complexity, visual or conceptual, glitch, generative systems, generative architecture, cybernetics, belief systems. So it's a lot of buzzwords somehow that always come up when you talk about critical art.
04:03
But before starting with that, I will tell you a little story, or I'm still going to talk about this concept of the Laplace's Demon, which will be important for the general scope of this talk. Laplace's Demon has been postulated by Pierre Simon Laplace in 1814,
04:22
and it's basically an articulation of scientific determinism. And I'm starting to quote this, Pierre Simon Laplace says, an intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion and all positions of all items of which nature is composed.
04:43
If this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future, just like the past, would be present before its eyes. I will just leave this here and I will come back to that at the end of the talk, to have something like a closed loop for this talk.
05:03
And I will start to talk about critical topics, which are topics that are right now interesting, especially also for the arts, which deal with technology or with technological artifacts. And I will just start with something that always comes up.
05:20
It's surveillance, of course, surveillance and reconnaissance. I'm putting this here together, not because I think they are identical things, but because both topics have been, I would say, far too widely discussed already in an artistic context. So I'm just going to show you some examples of artistic works
05:41
that deal with surveillance and reconnaissance, and especially works that are important to me. So, yeah, I've just said that I'm not going to talk that much about surveillance, which sounds counterintuitive if I call this talk surveilling the surveyors.
06:02
But it's not really the optical surveillance, like taking a nice panchromatic shot of the earth's surface, that I'm interested. Or this is a work by me, it's called Scanlines of Aleppo, that's also consisting of panchromatic satellite imagery
06:21
from a former classified, now declassified US reconnaissance satellite used by the military. They now have a vast archive where they publish these old data from overflights, and you can basically take them from different times in different years,
06:41
you can stack them upon each other, which I did here. I was also producing this work, it has a glass on top of it, and I was basically engraving the flight path of the satellite in order to give somehow a physical idea of the trajectory of an actual satellite
07:03
that is flying over the earth's surface. I'm also going to talk a bit about electronic tracking, especially electronic tracking through unique identifiers. Well, SIM cards, at least in Germany,
07:21
they are mapped to a person's identity by law, so if you buy a SIM card you have to give away parts of the data about your identity in order to be allowed to have one. So these SIM cards are unique identifiers to your person and make it very easy, of course, to track you and your behavior and so on.
07:43
And I just want to start with one work of friends of mine, that at least Danya was here at this conference, he's not here anymore. This work is called PRISM, The Beacon Frame, and it's a work that takes this idea of,
08:01
I have a SIM card and it identifies me somehow, and it takes also the idea of the authority that actually is allowed to put cell phone towers. It takes this, they just create their own cell phone tower and they send you messages when you come close to these cell phone towers, like this, welcome to your new NSA partner network.
08:23
So this is basically a produced MC catcher that just tells you very decently that you're just being surveilled, in a sense. It's a work that's been also legally problematic, of course, because usually in Germany, you are not allowed to do these things.
08:42
In an artistic context, you have a bit more freedom to deal with these kind of things. So that's maybe an example for surveillance, in a sense that you already know. It's the no longer in effect, actually, directive 2006-24 EC,
09:02
which is a European Union directive that we just tended to call the Führerstätten Speicherung. And in Germany, we now have, unfortunately, since December 2015, the Gesetzt so einführung einer Speicherflicht und einer Hüss-Speicherflicht für Verkehrstätten. We just heard a very interesting talk in the first hall,
09:24
also about how this now developed in the last couple of months, and also the last couple of days, unfortunately. Yeah, you can see this as the national predecessor of this directive. So here I put this in the same basically corner
09:41
as also the artworks about surveillance, because I think one thing that's very important is these things about policies, because policies are basically the rules that define how we live together, but they are also the rules that are mostly problematic for us as people working in technology,
10:03
because you somehow have to adhere to them even if you do not ethically agree to them. That's another maybe nice example for that. Biometric surveillance is something very prevalent right now, especially taking fingerprints, for example,
10:21
at airports, international airports, or having a DNA screening of your person. And these things are usually right now, unfortunately, mostly taken from immigrants. And especially we have this problem in Germany
10:44
with the influx of immigrants, where the first thing, of course, that came up was, well, how do we identify them, and how do we make this basically as smooth as possible? Which, of course, the easiest way to do it is just to take as much data from the people as possible,
11:03
which is, of course, ethically a bit problematic, a lot. So another topic that falls in this category of surveillance and reconnaissance is predictive analysis. And that's not a computer scientist in me speaking, because that's where I'm coming from.
11:20
I was dealing with machine learning and distributed algorithms. So predictive analysis is something that I think is extremely important. And to give three examples of predictive analysis is, for example, prediction of user behavior, which goes directly hand-in-hand with user tracking.
11:41
But also market prediction through, for example, if you have a high-frequency trading algorithm, you want to predict the future development of the market to make very fast decisions on these predictions. And yeah, these brought us a lot of problems lately.
12:01
This is an example for such a problem. They're usually called flash crashes, which is very short time frames in which some stocks lose a lot of value. This is, I think, the stock of natural gas around 2011, in June.
12:21
And what you can see here in this stock market development over time, and this is just a couple of minutes, this is 1940 until 1955, so that's 15 minutes of market movement data. And you see these nice oscillations that get worse and worse, so there's something that doesn't look very natural.
12:43
And at some point, it just ends in a crash, which is, I think, a loss of 20% of equity for the company, which is quite a lot. And it's actually in 15 seconds, happening around 15 seconds. So yeah, predictive analysis is a problem.
13:02
And you can go even further and say, well, predictive analysis also right now is used for crime prediction. So there's companies selling software to cities in order to predict where the next crime is supposed or is probably happening and take some precautionary measures
13:23
to make sure that the crime is actually not happening. Or just, well, go and catch somebody and just see what happens. So yeah, that again, of course, is ethically problematic.
13:41
So yeah, coming to the next topic would be regulations and policies. And especially enforcing policies on citizens. What does that mean? Well, the easiest way how to understand it is laws. So the laws of a country are basically the easiest and the easiest to comprehend
14:01
way to enforce a policy upon your citizens. But it's not only these kind of laws, but then you have some policies, some regulations which are a bit harder to grasp or harder to get access to. So you really have to do a lot of research
14:21
to understand what is actually going on here. But it still has an effect on you. This, for example, is a NATO document which shows the basic military allocation for the radio frequency spectrum. And I'm showing you this because it will get a little bit more important for a work that I did on some research
14:42
on these military regulations for radio frequency spectrum. And I'm staying in this realm of radio frequency. I'm actually going to show you if that works. No, I don't have the other screen. That's very nice.
15:00
Show you some example. So this is a recording at 13.3 megahertz. The recording is somewhere in Germany. And it's the so-called Chinese fire drake AM jammer.
15:24
It's a jammer that is used by or has been used by the government of the People's Republic of China. And they use it against other states radio stations. So they basically use it to jam the stations of other countries.
15:46
For example, this was the sound of hope Taiwan radio, which you can't really hear anymore because the only thing you hear is this strange Chinese folk song. And that's somehow also a way to enforce a policy on your people
16:00
by just blocking access to something that the people could have access to if you wouldn't enforce your policy on there. That doesn't work now. Another example here is an artwork. It's an artwork. It's called All About You.
16:20
It's by Janes Janja, Janes Janja and Janes Janja, which is an artist group from Slovenia. It's an artist collective that at some point decided as an artwork to all change their names to Janes Janja, who is a former Slovenian prime minister. So they now all have the same name and it's the same name as the prime minister,
16:41
which is in itself quite an interesting work of art. And this is one of their newer works where they basically had this contract with one Slovenian bank where they could, whenever they lose a credit card, they can just replace it with a new one and they can at the same time also just specify
17:02
the photograph that they want to have on their credit card. So they decided to make, how many are there? I think about 120, 150, to reproduce the Slovenian passport of one of the members of Janes Janja. And there actually exist three of these collages
17:21
for all the three members of the artist collective. And I think they're not yet complete or some got lost. I'm not sure what's the reason that some are missing, but it's a nice way to subvert this idea that there's this policy that also says
17:40
that there's one identity mapped to one person, especially if you think about what a name means. Now you have four people having the same name, also kind of having a very similar, at least these three people, kind of similar biography by working together. So if you see a work of art, you don't even know who it was that was maybe the first person
18:01
that came up with the idea. And even if they tell you, you don't really know what that means because everybody has the same name. It doesn't really make sense. So yeah, thinking more about policies, another interesting, important work here is a loophole for all by Paulo Seria. He got, I think, the gold nikka in 2014 for this work,
18:24
where he basically sold for very cheap, I think for 99 cents, these certificates of incorporation from some companies in the Cayman Islands. I think basically all companies in the Cayman Islands, they are of course, not valid, but they also,
18:40
which is interesting in these certificates, they don't really need official stamps or anything. You can basically also incorporate a company there extremely easily. And of course it's a loophole for tax evasion that's used by companies worldwide. And he wanted to make it more accessible to people. So he just thought about, why not sell that for like a dollar to people
19:03
or like a dollar, then you can download it and $2 or $3 and then you get a real certificate out of it. So that's also quite an artistic way to deal with policy. And probably another quite prominent picture
19:22
is this of the Liberator gun. I think you've probably all heard of this one. It's been around for a couple of years now and popped up on the Pirate Bay and it's basically a completely 3D printed working one shot gun.
19:41
And yeah, it actually has a predecessor, which is interesting, which a lot of people don't know, which was also called Liberator. It's called FP-45 Liberator and it's from World War II. And it also was a one shot gun. And the idea there was a little bit different though. It was produced for around two US dollars.
20:01
So it was a very, very cheap, cheap gun just created out of scrap metal parts. And it had one shot and it was given out to resistance forces in the occupied territories. And the idea was that one shot is enough to kill an enemy and take his weapon so you can basically rearm yourself.
20:22
Hence the name Liberator. So I was talking about enforcing policies on citizens, but there's not only citizens, but there's also the others. Know what I'm saying? The others, the non-citizens of your country. So enforcing policies on others is also obviously an important thing to talk about.
20:43
And I'm just going to show you one picture which sums up enforcing policies on non-citizens, which is the US drone program bringing democracy to a country near you. So another topic is the obsolescence of political borders.
21:06
And that's also now where my work comes up. And I was very happy to be able to take part in a project that was initiated by two artists that gave a talk last year here. It's the artist collective Kairos.
21:22
They gave a talk because they went to Ghana to a site called Ebo Blossi, which is an electronic waste dump. It's actually the, I think right now, the biggest electronic waste dump in the world. And they were collecting hard drives. They were buying hard drives, basically, from this e-waste dump.
21:42
And it's quite cheap. You can get a hard drive for a dollar and they sell them usually in bulk, like you get a big box and supposedly take a big box with you. And they also tell you the story that usually people come and buy, well, a lot of them, not one box, but 20 boxes.
22:02
Of course, not to have in the end these old hard drives, because they're, from a technical perspective, quite useless. But because of the data that's on the hard drive, that's potentially useful, because you can use it for abuse schemes against the previous owners.
22:22
So they brought 22 hard drives back to Europe, to Austria, and then did a forensic analysis. And were able to recover a couple of I don't know, it was something about 200 gigabytes of data. And it was a bit too much for them. So they decided to give it out to other artists
22:41
and to somehow deal with it, to dig through it. And we somehow did. And it ended up in having, we had a nice exhibition about electronic waste and the remainders of data that you will find in this electronic waste. And I'm just saying that what I've seen cannot be unseen. You don't really want to deal
23:01
or to dig through the private data of a lot of people that you don't know, especially because I was interested, especially in video and images. Yeah, I made a work out of it. I will tell you about it in a second.
23:21
What we also did in this project was to try to get an understanding for what are the problems of this whole electronic life cycle. So before you have your phone in your hand, of course, well, it was assembled somewhere. And before it was assembled, you needed to have the resources
23:42
in very physical terms, the rare earths that you need to produce the components. And you have to mine them somewhere. And usually it happens in countries which are rather poor and it happens under extreme conditions. People that work there are dying very fast.
24:01
So we created a project that tries to map this, well, what is behind the smart world, like all these life cycles of electronic components and exhibited at Ars Electronica this year. So that was actually quite a nice project also to just get an overview that this is really a global problem
24:21
and a global phenomenon. Yeah, what I wanted to tell you is about this project called Shell Performance. That's one of the projects that I did based on the data. So you can already see somewhere in the middle of the middle screen to the lower part.
24:41
That's something that, well, you could probably identify as a female person. And I was interested in the private data and especially the private videos and images that were still available on these hard drives.
25:02
And the more I was interested in that, the more I was disgusted by it. Disgusted specifically because it's one of these things that sounds interesting when you think about it and sounds like you really learned something from it, but you learn too much too fast. You kind of start to feel into the identity of,
25:23
not only one identity, but sometimes more identities of the people that were the former owners of the hard drives. And so I decided to just work with the material that I found on the hard drives that I could definitely make out to be commercial productions,
25:42
which was still a lot. So I'm gonna show you a video. Hope it works. Internet, yeah. There's no sound.
26:02
So the work is basically a shell script. So it's a program that runs through the contents of the hard drives which are attached to the computer and basically puts out images or stills of videos and renders them as in ASCII fashion,
26:21
just on that screen. And it looks a bit like matrix style. So you have a little, well, that's quite easy to understand what's happening there. And it puts out all these files, which at some point are pornographic, mainstream pornographic images. The other side are sometimes just party photos
26:40
of the former owners. So it's a very diverse and a bit strange collage of a person's life, of a person's digital life that you get. And it's quite unsettling in what it evokes in you, I think, when you look at it.
27:01
And in this exhibition, there were also a couple of other projects that happened. For example, of that group, Kairos, that actually got us the hard drives. They were able with actually a lot of effort to identify or personally identify
27:22
one of the former owners of one of the hard drives and decided to create a project in which they hypothetically sent back this hard drive to the former owner. They knew that the hard drive has been discarded about 10 years ago. They still were able to figure out the new address
27:41
because they were able to figure out the new employer of that specific person. And they named this project Not a Black Male because, well, they actually don't want to send it to the person. But in a gallery, you see it as like the work already basically having the stamps and the address of the person on it.
28:02
But they're not sending it, unfortunately. So if I'm talking about the obsolescence of national borders, one thing that immediately comes to your mind is satellites, yeah, satellites. But then if you think about a much older concept
28:20
than satellites, there is shortwave propagation. So that's now a nice radio frequency phenomenon that, or shortwave radio, you know it's AM radio, for example, so the old school radio that some people still have in their cars, for example.
28:41
This technology is interesting because it's, first it's meant to be for a, let's say, a closer space like, for example, a little country or a state. So you can have a statewide radio program. But it also has this property that it gets reflected
29:02
from the ionosphere. If you just have an angle which is high enough and you just send the signal basically to the sky, it gets reflected there and it comes back to Earth and it also gets reflected there again. And then you can basically hop quite far up to a couple of thousand kilometers across Earth.
29:22
So that's one of the reasons why sometimes, especially at night, where propagation of radio frequency is much better than a day, you're able to listen to Chinese radio here, for example, like the fire dragon, fire drake jammer.
29:43
And then based on this technology, you have some other technology. It's called over the horizon radar, for example, which is interesting, somehow, obsolete now after having satellites for reconnaissance, but it's still widely used.
30:01
And over the horizon radar is interesting because it uses this shortwave propagation characteristics in order to locate enemy troops on the ground. And one way how you can use it basically is you create these stations in your own territory.
30:20
You just point them to your enemy territory or just other territory, and you get quite a good and close look of what's happening there. That's not only the US that's doing this. It's also, I think, Russia, Japan, and Australia have active systems.
30:41
And right now it's actually quite active. One of these systems is quite active here in Germany, but it's coming over the horizon from the Russian Federation. This is also a VLF transmitter.
31:00
It's called Cutler. It's also a US Navy transmitter. By the way, all these images are also taken from the US Navy. So one of the reasons why I can use them here because everything that's produced by a governmental agency in the United States is in directly public domain, which is very nice also to work with.
31:23
The interesting thing with these very low frequency transmitters, which are usually used to communicate to submarines at the other side of the world, and it works quite well, is that they have a very nice geometric structure like this one, for example.
31:40
So this geometric structure is usually important for the correct functioning of this transmitter. And I was quite happy to see this nice geometry, especially coming from computer science, being kind of mathematically educated. And I somehow wanted to work with that.
32:02
That's what was coming out of it. It's not that geometrically sound, I would say, but it's a project that's now been going on since 2015. It's called Kilohertz, and it's quite an international project, I would say. And this site is right now in Brazil.
32:24
It's somewhere between Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. There's not that much going on there, so it's quite a rural place to be. I created this installation in order to listen to specific frequency ranges.
32:41
So Kilohertz is an antenna, and that's something that is quite hard to see. It's even quite harder to see even if you're standing in front of it, because the antenna looks a bit like this. The antenna is comprised of very fine copper wire, which has a diameter of about 0.3 millimeters,
33:03
so you can almost not see it if you're not standing in front of it and actually know where it is, and you can focus with your eye on it. But it apparently is quite good in order to receive military radio communications and transmissions.
33:22
That is what I'm interested in this project, is to receive these military radio communications. I was just talking about that shortwave radio because of the propagation characteristics is an interesting thing to use for the military,
33:43
not only for this radar, but also, for example, to have a unit directive call a channel to, for example, submerge submarines. It's also quite actively still used for communications between military bases.
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So this happened to be just about 60 kilometers away from a federal police slash military. That's kind of the same thing in Brazil, complex that most people don't really know what's going on there.
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But when I was there, I was interested to see if I can actually somehow get something out of there, if I can actually prove at least that there is some military communication towards the space going on. And it turns out to be, of course, quite hard to do so.
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But what was really interesting is not only to see how this happens in Brazil, but how is that everywhere else in the world? Because listening or trying to listen to military communications is legally always a kind of complicated thing in Brazil.
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I usually, when I give these kind of talks, I say in Brazil they have other problems. They don't need to think about somebody receiving military transmissions. They should work on other problems. But in other countries, that might be seen in a different way. So I executed this project also in Estonia,
35:21
just 20 kilometers to the Russian border. I also executed this project in Norway. And in Berlin, actually, there is one active instance running right now in Berlin, always listening to the same, basically listening to the same frequency ranges, which are military classified,
35:43
well, military classified, military frequency ranges that you could see or you were able to see just longer ago on one of these slides. So the way how these things, these antennas work is very, very simple. So I take basically the simplest way how to build an antenna and build it.
36:01
This is a very, very easy setup. So it just looks like an inverted V. It works quite well for very potent signals. And the rest of the hardware that you need is very cheap. And the antenna itself is very cheap because the only thing you need for the antenna is basically copper wire. And for the rest of the station,
36:24
a Raspberry Pi with a little bit of software and a RTL-SDR dongle is enough to do it. So it costs less than 50 bucks to create a surveillance or counter surveillance stations against these military facilities.
36:42
There's a couple of other ways how you can actually build these antennas. This again, these images are now taken from, I think it's a Navy field manual. So it's a manual that's given to people in the field for the scenario that their antenna is broken
37:01
so they need to build a new one. And I'm kind of using this knowledge against them, which is just a interesting side note, I think. So there's different ways how to build these antennas. They even have that military radio transmitter. That's another way how you could potentially build that. And in the end, you get very interesting,
37:23
nice power sweeps, nice images out of it. They are power sweeps. What that means is I'm just defining a frequency range that I'm interested in. And then I basically have a computer program that just goes just step-by-step and measures the intensity of signal that's there.
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And in the end over time, which is the Y-axis if you want, it creates these images which don't tell you what exactly is going on there, but it gives you proof of that something is going on there and that some communication is taking place.
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The only thing you have to do then is to verify that it's actually a military or a civilian usage. And you can do that by looking into the policies that have to be somehow made available to the public, usually through the regulatory institutions in the specific countries.
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For example, the FCC in the US, or also in Europe, the Bundesnezangentur in Germany, which have to publish it in order to make sure that nobody interferes with official signals, military or governmental, or signals as part of frequency bands
38:42
which have been sold for a lot of money to institutions in the country. So I'm publishing, I think for the first time now, an official call for participation. And I'm doing this because the killer's project,
39:01
I've talked about this project a couple of times already in different countries and everybody at these places was interested somehow to offer two square meters of space to build a little antenna somewhere and to push all the information that this antenna spits out into a public GitHub repository
39:20
and just give out information to the rest of the world. And the reason is why should you actually do that? What is the real gain in doing that? And one gain is to understand that some parts of the frequency spectrum that are reserved to the military and the military has most of the frequency spectrum
39:43
reserved for it is actually never used. And that could also be made available to the public. It could also be made available for resale to commercial companies. I'm not in favor of that, but I would like to be killer's a project that's able to provide evidence
40:02
for non-usage of radio frequency bands in order to support groups that are active in trying to reclaim parts of the RF frequency spectrum for civilian usage. That would be very nice to have.
40:22
And there's a couple of initiatives in other countries that already start to deal with that. But what they always lack is actual information about the usage of the frequency spectrum that they want to reclaim for the public. So yeah, if you're interested in that,
40:42
you can find everything. Well, you have that. So I'm just moving on to the next section, which is a critical topic of protectionism. And this is a new project that I'm presenting to you. Also, I think for the first time now in Germany, it's a project which stems from my idea
41:02
that I actually wanted to go to these fences that are everywhere right now in Europe, fences that were supposed to protect us from an influx of I don't know what. And they are, well, especially prevalent in Slovenia and in places around Slovenia. So I went there for a residency
41:22
and first went to the fence between Slovenia and Austria. This is from the Slovenian side, obviously. So it has this police marker on there and it's quite a solid, if you want so, fence. It actually says, if you want to go through, you please call us and we let you through.
41:42
It obviously is not valid for non-citizens, but it's interesting because they really cut through all the very nice hiking trails. And as I'm an active hiker, I'm kind of saddened to see these kind of things. But at the same time, you have a street just 200 meters of that,
42:00
which goes through the border and it doesn't have a fence. So I don't really understand what's going on there, but they were very happy to build these fence and now they have it there and don't know what to do with it. So I took this trip to the fence and did some field research. What I'm doing there is I was measuring conductivity
42:21
of the fence because it's a metal construct, right? And I was also measuring the potential towards ground to see if I have a short circuit there or not, if I can work with it somehow. Just to give you an idea of where that is, it's actually somewhere.
42:41
You see Ljubljana there in Zagreb, it's kind of half the way, it's in the middle of nowhere. It's a little village called Lastnic where the next video was taking place. I'm just going to show you a little excerpt.
43:03
As the migration summit kicks off in Malta, Slovenia has started erecting a wire fence along its border with Croatia to help control the flow of people arriving daily. Last year, authorities rolled out more than 150 kilometers of barbed wire to stave off an influx of migrants which never came.
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Stories abound in the villages here of farmers having lands cut in two, of bears and deer cut to ribbons, of kids falling off their bikes into the wire and yet nobody has ever seen a refugee. So that last sentence is actually quite important
43:41
because they built this barbed wire, this razor wire fence, which is stacked razor wire military grade for this border between Slovenia and Croatia for zero refugees that ever even attempted to cross the border there. They now have this huge fence which is absolutely useless
44:05
and you just have animals that get somehow into the fence and then die being inside of this fence or at least get hurt a lot. But you still have this fence and everybody's kind of disgusted by this fence. So I thought that's quite lovely.
44:21
I just should just go there and see what I can do and if I can do something. So I went to this fence. Let's see, that looks like this then. And I did the same thing again, measured conductivity, measured ground potential of the fence to get somehow an overview of how I could use the fence
44:42
for an electronic intervention to say it like this. And finally, this is almost a religious position. I like that somehow. Finally, I built a little device. That's something that's hanging around there. It's very, very rudimental. Has been almost basically built on site.
45:02
It's a little transmitter and an amplifier hanging at the border fence and the other one in the ground. That's just one meter there. It doesn't really matter. It was a proof of concept to send a signal over this fence.
45:22
So I was interested in seeing how can you use this defensive architecture which is really just there to make sure people can not be together basically. How can you use that as a network infrastructure just to be honest? How can you just use that? Because it's conductive material
45:40
already lying there for free. Why not use it for something actually useful or at least try to see if we could do something actually useful with it. It ended up in a project called Razor Wire Modem of this year. It's still somehow a work in progress because that modem part got a little omitted
46:03
in the process of being there in Slovenia. In Slovenia it was really just a transmitter and one receiver. The transmitter was sending some data on this fence and then you had a receiver taking the data from the fence. They were connected through a ground return in the actual soil
46:20
so that you have the two connections that you need. I was sending data through this fence and I actually sent the Universal Declaration of Human Rights through the fence, especially article 14.
46:42
Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum for persecution. I want to talk to you very briefly about new modes of activism. I already said that. Programming is the modern and the new form of activism and has to be understood
47:00
as that programming is something that you should learn right now from primary school as soon as possible because it's just the way how to express in our modern world and actually how to be a bit of a step ahead of the regulators. Coming to regulation that's going to get important,
47:22
you have something that I would call techno-regulation, which is the regulation of technology, which plays a lot of roles, especially too. Making sure technology functions as intended. Planes should, for example, not fall from the sky. Radio frequency, radio applications should not interfere with each other. That's quite important.
47:41
Also making sure technology will function in the future in somehow predictive ways. This is a problem for me, especially the predictive ways, because it limits freedom of expression. It's also a future-oriented policy that serves the goal again to predict some future scenarios.
48:00
There's, of course, counter-examples of things that oppose this techno-regulation. For example, peer-to-peer protocols, anonymity networks, or decentralized cryptographic currencies, as an example. But it's not enough yet. The next topic that directly
48:22
speaks to me in that whole realm is quantification. It is directly related to the regulation of technology, because it's basically the understanding or the trial to understand every occurrence of something in the world, and to understand that as a signal
48:40
that has to be processed, stored, and later analyzed. It happens on all levels, this quantification, not only analog to digital conversion, but the creation of symbols from electronic impulses, and then to induce structure on the symbols. For example, over predefined protocols, or just learned, like in predictive analysis.
49:02
I just talked about that. The question is here, who is the enemy? I would say the enemy is everybody who sees us as their enemy, which is not really a solid definition. I want to make sure that the enemy is not the institutions
49:21
that create the policies, but it's the policy itself. I'm not against the state if I'm building a system that deals with the policies that have been created by the people in the state, but I'm against that policy in the first place. That's quite important to me. I talked to you about Laplace's demon,
49:41
and I think if I stick together these two concepts of techno-regulation and quantification, I get Laplace's demon. It's an internal justification mechanism for complete surveillance, if you want. It's the old concept of the world formula. I'm telling you about the world formula, and it's dangerous because it creates a loop.
50:02
I will give you one example. If you have a predictive system which is built on some models of the world, it will predict somehow within this model. The more correct the predictions get, the more you will understand that if we change the world according to the prediction of this model,
50:22
then we will be better at understanding our world. So why not just change the world to our model? At least in some sense, not very actively in saying, okay, we should make our world a lot easier or a lot more formal, but I think that's something
50:41
that happens already. I said I'm coming from computer science, but mathematics and in statistics, we have a term for the outcome of this process, and we call it overfitting. Techno-regulation and quantification somehow lead to an overfitting of the world formula. I just want to show you two outcomes,
51:02
what it means to apply this world formula, which basically creates a justification for everything. It's something that we heard in the news for a long time, Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. That's one outcome
51:20
of the application of the world formula, that you trust a secret service because it's the secret service, it should know these kind of things. The other thing that can happen if you apply this world formula
51:41
is, of course, also extremism in the other way. In this sense, I wanted to quote, not really quote, but show you this, because I was interested when I read about that. It's a kind of a security bulletin published on the Internet Archive in November 2016. The general scope, I will tell you about it, is how can you use
52:01
information technology to conceal extremist activity? And of course, they are using the same, somehow the same visual metaphors that also the Bundeswehr in German is using. But I don't want to end this talk on this very depressing topic, because the application of the world formula
52:21
is actually a depressing thing. And I would urge you to understand that we have to do something against that. I want to quote something against that. We have grown, but there is still much to be done. Many that live in darkness, that must be shown the way, for it is the dawning of a new day. Thanks.
52:58
Any questions? German or English?
53:00
In German or in English, feel free to attend one of our microphone stands. No questions? No questions. Well then, let's go home. Thank you. Thank you for listening. Martin Reiche.