Stopping Mass Surveillance with Albert Cahn, Founder of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to Albert, founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, or STOP. And they discuss STOP's mission to push back against surveillance and avoid having a dystopian surveillance state in the future, evaluating the effectiveness of surveillance for stopping crimes versus the invasion of privacy, and why it takes organizing on a local level to curtail state surveillance. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:38) This is the Modern CTO Podcast. So I was just curious, could you give me a little bit of background about what you do?

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:00:51) Yeah. Well, I used to represent a lot of those big tech companies as a corporate lawyer, but that was not really a path for me. And instead, I went the public interest route. So I'm the founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. We're a New York-based nonprofit that tries to make trouble for the surveillance industrial complex, sues the police, sues surveillance vendors, does a lot of work trying to think, okay, what's the threat that's on the horizon that people haven't quite woken up to yet? And how can we try to stop it before, well, before Black Mirror becomes a documentary, right?

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:01:24) We've been dreading how this technology is going to impact our lives for so long, and now we're at this point where we can actually see it happening and having this effect, and we get to choose. Do we go down that path to this dystopian future, or do we actually push back and try to make sure this technology doesn't get to fundamentally alter the way our society works?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:54) And obviously, it's a huge problem. I mean, Snowden's still not back in the U.S., right? So they're going to be doing it secretively, but you can't just be pessimistic and just let them overrun you. You have to try. You have to do something. How do you actually move the needle? Is it getting our privacy back, or at least what are we talking about here?

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:02:14) So my focus is on state and local government, right? Because you've had amazing people fighting the fight in DC for generations, and it's a stalemate. Right? If anything, we keep losing ground bit by bit. But we don't just have to worry about the CIA and the NSA. Every American police department is increasingly a mini intelligence agency, more than 15,000 of them. They're using military-grade surveillance equipment. They're using drones. They're using social media monitoring. They're using predictive policing. They're using all of this invasive, discriminatory, and unproven tech to monitor us and our communities.

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:02:43) And so what we're trying to do is stop it, trying to outlaw things like facial recognition, trying to pass bans on some of the most abusive practices, trying to educate lawmakers, and trying to really organize here in New York because we believe that a handful of committed activists can do something at the local level that's just impossible even for millions of people at the national level, and that's to make real lasting change.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:21) That's crazy. That's right. I had heard that the local police department, at least in my city, they had this system. It was like a shark. I can't remember the acronym. It was something, but they could essentially just listen right into telephone calls. I was blown away by that. I was like, they can just do that? You mean a normal police officer at the police station? Yeah. Obviously, they have some rank there, but you can just do that? And they're like, yeah, we can do it.

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:03:46) Yeah. So that's probably a Stingray or an IMSI catcher. And those are fake cell towers that police departments will set up, and they can use these to track every device that's nearby because our devices are set up to look for the strongest cell signal. So if suddenly there's this new tower and it's nearby and it's got a great signal, sure, I'll connect through that. I'll send all my data packets through that. And that tower just happens to be mounted to the back of an NYPD van. And that can be a way to suck in our data. It can be a way to track our locations. It can be a way to harvest our metadata.

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:04:10) And almost all of it, it's happening in secret in this really anti-democratic way because at least Congress gets these confidential classified briefings on what's really going on. Most city councils have no idea how taxpayer dollars are being used to create this intelligence apparatus.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:41) So the intelligence companies, they sell directly to police departments, and then there's no sort of governance or understanding from, at least in my city, the city council. I think average age is 70. There's no understanding of what's going on, but there should be, right? How do you make the change? Are you saying that the city council should have to approve and get these sort of briefings?

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:05:05) So we have a few different things. So the easiest forms of laws for us to pass are just bans. Ban things that are so dangerous that we shouldn't allow it. Ban facial recognition completely. You don't create some sort of regulatory structure. You don't create some sort of oversight board. You just ban it. But we always know that there are new technologies that are coming down the pike. And so for those, what we try to do is push for civilian oversight.

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:05:20) So there's a national movement called CCOPS, Community Control of Police Surveillance, and the idea is to pass laws where the public gets to know what tools are being purchased before they're used, that there's notice and comment. In some cities like Oakland, there's even an independent body that can actually block these tools from being used and can actually use real power to stand in the way. And so it's saying, you know, in a democracy, we don't trust any other agency to really call its own shots without oversight, and we can't do that with police.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:10) So when you ban facial recognition in a city, does that mean I can't unlock my phone anymore with my face in that city?

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:06:19) Oh, no. So this is talking about government action. So it's saying a police department cannot use facial recognition. Some of the more aggressive bans will even say, you know, a store, a place of public accommodation, Target can't use it to track your identity when you're going in. But that sort of facial recognition tracking is very different than Face ID. You know, when you're unlocking your phone, that's you using your device, exercising agency, and it's doing a really simple thing. It's saying, is this you? Is this Joel?

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:06:41) But when you're using facial recognition, the people who are being surveilled don't have any consent. They don't have any choice. They don't actually get to decide if their face goes in that database, and that's why it's very different. And so with these bans, they say, sure, use your face to unlock your device, but don't use this technology to track other people using their bodies without their consent.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:15) That's a hard thing. As a technologist, I'm kind of split. Because on one hand, if I were the owner of Target, I'd be like, these are my cameras. You're in my store. We're in public. I think there's some sort of legal stuff about you being able to take pictures of people in public, and it's my data. But on the other hand, I'm like, this is going to give us a very bad future, and we need to stop it.

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:07:38) Well, but Wheaties can't take Michael Jordan's photo and put it on a cereal box and say, well, it was a photo we took in public, and you're now on Wheaties. We don't have to pay you. Right? That's been settled law in the United States for decades. You have something called personality rights. You have this set of privacy rights that goes beyond copyright and trademark that says, hey, this is your image. You're being used. You have a say in that. And that's also true when your data is being sold by these surveillance vendors. It's also true when your body is being turned into a tracking device by these sorts of biometric surveillance systems.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:15) So then what's the answer? Do we just—there should be more transparency, right? If I apply for credit or something, it should tell me the variables that it used for the algorithm, right?

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:08:27) I think it's very different with credit versus policing. So most of my work, it's looking at, well, what's going to get a SWAT team at your front door? What's going to have you arrested or detained at the airport when traveling? I've been there while people face dozens of armed FBI agents carting away their life in boxes. And so there's such a pronounced cost when one of these criminal justice systems get it wrong that our solution is just ban it.

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:08:59) We shouldn't be allowing these sorts of predictive policing systems to use artificial intelligence to decide who's a threat and who's not. Because not only is there a lot of examples of them being biased, there's a lot of examples of them being really bad at predicting the future. And we just don't have a mechanism to really hold them accountable. So this is where I'm the techie who also gets to be the Luddite.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:31) Yeah, right? I love that. So I'm on the same page with you on policing, right? Let's say we ban it. And then what we—so we do broad bans, and then we let specific use cases come in after approval or something like that? Is that what it is?

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:09:50) Well, so when we look at police surveillance, there are a bunch of different types of technologies. So there's the types of police surveillance that are just gathering information about us. A lot of those, it's a much more direct question of, is this sort of invasiveness worth any sort of benefits? So ShotSpotter, for example. This is software that will listen to directional microphone arrays that are placed throughout a city and will try to identify when there's a supposed gunshot.

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:10:21) It's creepy that there's a bunch of microphones that can potentially listen to a conversation that I'm having in my house if the window's open. But what's even worse is we know that 90% of the time, according to the Office of the Inspector General for the Chicago PD, it didn't actually help. The gunshots that were being reported didn't actually lead anywhere. And so for me, that's a case where, well, we look at the cost. It's millions of dollars. We look at the benefits. It's minimal. We look at the privacy impact, and we say, okay, let's not have that technology.

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:10:50) I think with the algorithmic decision-making, it's a lot harder to come up with governance models other than just the clear bans because we don't have consensus over how to audit a lot of these systems and how to regulate them. So for example, you know, we have this software vendor called PredPol, which sells software which is going to try to predict where crimes take place in the future. That's a very different scenario, a very different sort of trade-off than, and a very different type of technology to evaluate than something like ShotSpotter that's just listening and taking in data. So it's really, yeah, part of it is banning technologies we hate. Part of it is setting up civilian oversight and transparency. And part of it is creating just all of the civil rights protections and good government standards that we expect. You know, if your rights are violated, you should get your day in court. You should get to sue.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:57) I agree with you that this technology is super early, and I sort of like the idea of saying, hey, let's hold on everybody. Let's not just—if a company creates it, run and sell it to the police department. If they want to create something and go sell it to private industry, fine, right? Because we don't want to interfere with the economy. But if you're selling it to airports or police, I'm a fan of the let's ban it and then take every use case on a case-by-case basis and approve it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:39) So for example, let's say I'm a police officer, and I've got my body cam, right? And some guy fires a shot at me. Okay? And my body cam saw his face, and then he runs into a crowd. Shouldn't the helicopter above be able to scan the crowd and identify that person if that technology exists? I think so. But I also believe that that should be a very specific approved use case for it.

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:13:03) You know, we have this expression as lawyers, bad facts make bad laws, right? And when you're talking about that sort of scenario, I mean, sure, under those facts, I'd want to say, yeah, I want to do whatever it takes. The problem is when we're creating the legal structures, we have to actually look at how those rules are enforced. And unless you have bright clear lines about when this technology can be used, they tend to get blurred over time and they tend to erode.

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:13:37) So I don't think that we've seen an example of a technology or a police power that we allow in those very narrow circumscribed circumstances that doesn't later expand. I bring up the history of spying under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, so FISA. So we created this after Watergate because the American people were shocked how the CIA and other agencies were being used to spy on Americans. And so they said, look, we're going to have this court, this special secret court, it's only going to allow surveillance under these really extreme circumstances.

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:14:35) And what happened was, you know, the slippery slope became real, and suddenly we saw the number of cases go up from a couple dozen to thousands, and we saw the court side with the government 99.7% of the time. That's not an exaggeration. And so I think that, you know, there's a reason why a lot of the most enduring protections, like freedom of speech, like freedom of religion, the things that are really bedrock protections for democracy are oftentimes so absolute and so clear-cut because anything else tends to erode over time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:02) I want to talk a little bit about survivors of surveillance abuse. It says in the profile that STOP works with them. Can you explain what you do?

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:15:12) Well, we help people who've been targeted by the government. You know, we work a lot with, for example, in New York, there's been an NYPD program that forced Muslim women who wear the hijab and other religiously observant New Yorkers to remove their head coverings when they got their mugshot so that their faces could be fed into a facial recognition database. And so we've been part of a class action lawsuit for a few years now to push back on that. We ended the policy. We're fighting to get monetary damages now for all the people who were subjected to that policy. And that's one of our cases.

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:15:50) So a lot of our work is trying to pull back the curtain on how the government is surveilling us, suing for public records, suing to uncover what's being done in our name. But then part of it is also trying to just end the abusive practices.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:12) And then is this your full-time job or something you contribute to?

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:16:17) Oh, yeah. No, so it's definitely more than a full-time job. I founded it back in 2019, and, you know, like any startup, in the beginning, it's your all-consuming passion. And really fortunate that we've grown to be 12 folks today, 20 total, and, you know, are continuing to grow. I'm also a visiting fellow at Yale Law School. I'm also a practitioner in residence at NYU Law School. And then most recently, there's this whole fellowship circuit. And the most recent one I got was I'm also a TED Fellow. So I got to go out to Vancouver to give a TED Talk back in April, which was a lot of fun.

(Albert Fox Cahn at 00:17:02)
Oh, and what was that on this topic? Exactly. And, you know, in Vancouver, I was specifically saying how I think there's this big distinction between the way private companies collect data to use in their business and then when that data is commandeered by the government. So I was talking about this idea of creating legal firewalls between private companies and the police, because right now our default rule in America is basically that if police get a warrant, they can seize any data, any data that's held by a company about us. And that's something that, you know, is so powerful that, to me, it's incompatible with democracy.

(Albert Fox Cahn at 00:17:47)
And I specifically think of, you know, the example of geofence warrants, for example, which is something we've been talking a lot about lately because of the way they're used to target abortion care. Explain that. So under a traditional warrant, I would go to a judge and be like, "Hey, you know what? I think Joel, he's committed this crime. Here's probable cause."

(Albert Fox Cahn at 00:18:11)
And then I would just get a warrant and seize all your stuff. And I would go to Google, and I'd seize all your account data. I'd go to Facebook and seize all of it. And it becomes this really, really powerful tool to target one individual. With the geofence warrant, it's really a digital dragnet.

(Albert Fox Cahn at 00:18:30)
And so what you do is you say, "I believe someone in this area has committed a crime." And that area could be a single room. It could be an entire city. And you say, "I want Google to identify every account holder who is in this area at this time." And it allows you to really just track huge numbers of people in a way that you never could before.

(Albert Fox Cahn at 00:18:56)
And we're terrified because this tactic can be used, for example, to go and get a court order to identify every single person who's in a Planned Parenthood clinic and to identify the people who are seeking abortion care.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:14)
So this geofencing warrant, that happens today? Like, the city I live in, the police could say, "Hey, this specific area, I want all the data," and they can just go to Google and Google's like, "Sure, no problem. Here you go."

(Albert Fox Cahn at 00:19:28)
Well, Google's counsel would say that they aggressively fight these, but the truth is that we did a lot of work to pressure Google to disclose how often this happens. And according to their transparency report, they then revealed that these first started in 2018, and then they grew to include more than 10,000 warrants a year, more than 10,000 geofence warrants, which is the majority of warrants that Google received in the United States. So, you know, police in basically every state were using it, and they would go to—we know that, for example, during the Black Lives Matter protests that Minneapolis police used this to identify protesters. We know that it's been used at other political events. And, you know, it's something that is being used as we speak to track large numbers of people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:26)
That's pretty crazy. I didn't know about those geofencing warrants.

(Albert Fox Cahn at 00:20:29)
Oh, it gets way worse.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:32)
What's worse? Tell me more.

(Albert Fox Cahn at 00:20:33)
Well, first off, it's not just Google that gets it. Anyone who collects geolocation data can get these warrant requests as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:41)
So cell phone?

(Albert Fox Cahn at 00:20:43)
Cell phone providers have long been a target, and they also get what are called tower dump warrants, which are where they say, "Hey, we want to know everyone who is connecting to this cell tower at this time," which oftentimes is as good as a geofence warrant at identifying everyone in the area. And then we also see keyword warrants, where police will go to Google and say, "Hey, we want to know everyone who searched for this search term or this address or this name." So if you're a Texas police officer and you want to identify people looking for abortion care, you can go to Google and say, "Hey, I want to know everyone who searched for Mifepristone in the state of Texas." If you get a judge to sign on it, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:29)
I mean, that act isn't criminal, is it? Is it criminal to search certain things?

(Albert Fox Cahn at 00:21:34)
Well, but that's the thing. Right now, it certainly is criminal to obtain Mifepristone in Texas, and a lot of states have outlawed abortion. But worse than that, we see this as sort of the first step in identifying who is pregnant and who's seeking abortion, right? Because abortion is being driven underground. They don't know who's pregnant and seeking care. So they use this digital dragnet as the first step to identify someone. And once they identify a suspect, then they can look at everything else. Then they have probable cause to pull, you know, their call history, their location data, their payment records, everything else in their electronic lives. And it's so increasingly hard for people to travel out of state without leaving some sort of digital footprint.

(Albert Fox Cahn at 00:22:26)
Even if you put your phone in a Faraday bag, even if you are paying cash, even if you're taking public transit, there are so many different forms of tracking in America today that, you know, it's going to be terrifying to see how these sorts of abortion laws are enforced using surveillance out of state.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:46)
So they can get a warrant for somebody for this search term, and they then use that as probable cause to get additional warrants on all of these people's data. And then they try to connect all these dots to see if they're more likely to get an abortion. Then what do they do? Then they go and investigate it, or what happens then?

(Albert Fox Cahn at 00:23:06)
We've already seen people arrested and convicted of, you know, causing miscarriages. This was even when Roe was still good law, just because based off of their search histories, based off of, you know, emails and text messages. Right? This is how police enforce laws in, you know, 2022. They take our data and try to figure out who we are and, you know, what we do.

(Albert Fox Cahn at 00:23:31)
And so, you know, I think that really for a lot of abortion seekers right now, anonymity is their best defense. Because once they do fall into government crosshairs, that's when there are all of these other search tools to try to, you know, identify who's got an abortion and who hasn't. I really—it sounds like this just alarmist thing, I know, but I'm telling you, it doesn't.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:58)
It sounds super reasonable. I'm a software engineer for seventeen years. I mean, this is what we do. It's go find the data, collect as much data, and do as many cool things as we can do with it, you know?

(Albert Fox Cahn at 00:24:09)
Yeah. The problem is that the things they're doing with it now are really just targeting such fundamental, you know, human rights.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:18)
Yeah, I know. I agree. That's whoo. I bet you I'm on a bunch of lists. The research I do for this show, yeah. Because we have to research all—you know, we've done over 500 episodes. We have to research all these topics. And so that's just interesting to think that I could be out there on so many search term lists that warrants have had, not my name's in some sort of database at some police station because they got one of those data warrants and then downloaded it and saved it all to their servers, you know?

(Albert Fox Cahn at 00:24:48)
Yeah. And, I mean, but at the same time, I feel like you and I, we're pretty safe, right? We're not those people who are on the top of most, like, FBI lists or most police lists.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:59)
Speak for yourself. No, I'm just kidding.

(Albert Fox Cahn at 00:25:02)
Fair. I don't know what you're doing in your free time. But we—but, you know, I know I have so much more freedom than a lot of my clients do to just use my phone without second-guessing it, to tweet whatever's on the top of my head. But I do fear that we increasingly create this society where anyone who's on the margins, anyone who's, you know, undocumented, anyone who is, you know, seeking abortion care, anyone who has had a run-in with the cops suddenly has to second-guess every decision they make and how it could be misinterpreted by the surveillance web. And that to me is something inconsistent with the democratic society.

(Albert Fox Cahn at 00:25:44)
Yes. I mean, our justice system is so broken. And, you know, part of what's so frustrating for me is, like, I think we oftentimes are told that, like, all this surveillance stuff, it's going to somehow be the magic bullet to fix things that, like, oh, if we just, you know, digitize government, we can make everything seamless and efficient. But what we end up doing is pouring a ton of money into the stuff that doesn't actually work and creates all of these, like, civil rights threats. And I think really painful examples come from New York where we've had a bunch of high-profile shootings on the subway lately.

(Albert Fox Cahn at 00:26:23)
It's heartbreaking. It's scary. And the camera systems just never have worked. And we've spent billions installing cameras around New York City in the subways in particular since 9/11. And they were supposed to be this amazing way to prevent crime. And they can't even use it, you know, to figure out who's, you know, committing these crimes after the fact. And so it's just like, I feel like we've been sold a bill of goods.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:50)
Yeah. Well, I love what you're doing. I think it's super smart where you're spending your time, and I like the strategy. By the way, yeah, I was a little bit hesitant at first at, like, the ban everything, but after this conversation, that does seem to be, like, the smartest method for, you know, government-related entities. I mean, at the end of the day, it's our tax dollars that are paying for these institutions to exist. So it's not really us or them. It's like we—we're all doing this, and we need some boundaries because you can get really far out there really quick.

(Albert Fox Cahn at 00:27:21)
I think anyone who's ever, you know, coded or built a system knows it's a lot easier to make the glossy sales pitch that this software will solve everything than it is to actually build the system and have it actually live up to the test. And we see all of these surveillance companies are profiting in secrecy because they never actually have to show their results. They never actually have to prove that they've worked, because at the end of the day, they'll just claim, "Well, it's national security. We can't tell you how well we've actually done our job."

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:55)
What else should I be scared about? Social media stuff?

(Albert Fox Cahn at 00:27:59)
Yeah, social media is slightly terrifying. So right now, like, the fact that police officers can, you know, send you friend requests, can pretend to be anyone at any time, that they're running botnets so that one officer can run more than a thousand accounts and just use these fake accounts to get you to accept their friend request so then they don't need a court order to access your account. To me, that's reprehensible. We wrote a law here in New York that will hopefully outlaw it next year, just because you shouldn't be able to click away your civil rights like that.

(Albert Fox Cahn at 00:28:38)
You know, it should be—to me, it's just there's no justification for it. So, you know, we continue to see a ton of social media monitoring. We continue to see a ton of, you know, predictive analytics and natural language processing on social media. And again, it's just when you look at how they actually design these systems, if the consequences weren't so deadly, it would almost be laughable. Like, especially when you look at some of the products that are being designed to identify harmful behavior in non-English conversations where they're literally porting the stuff through Google Translate to figure out the meaning. This is not cutting-edge tech. It's just being priced like it is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:25)
Wow. Now I'm curious. You kept referring to our civil rights. Is that what you were saying?

(Albert Fox Cahn at 00:29:31)
Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:31)
Where do we get those from?

(Albert Fox Cahn at 00:29:33)
Yeah, I can definitely go into law professor mode and talk about, you know, the Enlightenment movement and all of that. But really, in the United States, it's our federal constitution, our state constitutions, and a lot of statutory protections. So with a lot of this, with a lot of these search issues, it comes down to the Fourth Amendment, which at the federal level says, you know, the right of the people to enjoy protection against unreasonable search and seizure shall not be abridged and basically requires that a warrant be issued upon probable cause. So it protects our papers, houses, persons, and effects.

(Albert Fox Cahn at 00:30:16)
And that's one of the main pillars of our civil rights when it comes to this sort of technology. But there's also rights against discrimination under the Fourteenth Amendment, and, you know, that's something that comes up with a lot of this police technology because there's something called the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment that blocks state governments from discriminating. And that's something that, you know, is oftentimes violated by police use of this technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:50)
Which is stronger, the state constitution or the federal constitution?

(Albert Fox Cahn at 00:30:54)
Well, the federal constitution's highest law of the land, so it preempts anything else. But oftentimes, state constitutions are, you know, amended much more often. They can have protections that are stronger. And also, there are lots of statutory protections. So if you're in California or if you're in Illinois, there are laws on the books that, you know, they don't violate the federal constitution, but they provide more protections.

(Albert Fox Cahn at 00:31:21)
So in Illinois, you cannot have your biometric data used without your consent. That is a law. That is your right. And that's because of a bill that the state lawmakers passed. But, you know, that's something that I'd like to see become law in basically every state.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:40)
Yeah, I would like the biometric data to have to have some sort of conscious consent before being used. I would like, actually, most of my data to have consent before being used. But what they do is they make these terms of service checkboxes, and there's no other option. And you need to be on this utility for work or for your societal interactions. And so you check the "I agree," and, I mean, you try to read it, and it's 800 pages of, you know, no offense, but, like, lawyer nonsense.

(Albert Fox Cahn at 00:32:08)
Oh, no, they're designed to confuse. Yeah. And that's the thing. Like, any terms of service are a lie. No one actually reads them. If you read them, you couldn't understand them. Like, I'm a pretty well, you know, regarded expert on a lot of these issues. I can't understand my own terms of service just because of how convoluted they are.

(Albert Fox Cahn at 00:32:34)
And I think this gets back to the idea that you can't have checkbox democracy. You can't have checkbox civil rights. It shouldn't come down to whether you click "I agree" or not that you have these safeguards against being tracked, against having your data taken, against all of these other abuses. It should be way stronger than that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:55)
Yeah. So what do we do about the "I accept" boxes? I know you focus mostly on state and local, but do you have any sort of solutions for these checkboxes?

(Albert Fox Cahn at 00:33:02)
Well, I mean, I do think we will see growing pressure to push back against terms of service. I mean, we've seen people both at the federal and the state level pushing back over the years. And I think part of the problem is there's so much money being made from these terrible terms of service. But the more of our lives that get, you know, suspended in these contractual terms, I think the more we'll see a giant push for real consumer protections. And but I think this is really a generational fight.

(Albert Fox Cahn at 00:33:36)
You know, tech moves really quickly, but political movements are much slower and legal movements are slower still. And so I do think it's going to take mass mobilization to get the sort of, you know, protections we deserve.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:53)
And then are you a fan of the federal government or that the state should be making decisions?

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:33:59) I mean, for me, I would say I'm a fan of when people get to make decisions. And so I think the more popular engagement, the better. I think we see some states with really good laws, and we see states with terrible laws. I think we see agencies within the federal government that are fighting to protect people, like the Federal Trade Commission, certainly the CFPB, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. So there are good agencies at the federal level, but we also see a lot of abuses at the state and the federal level.

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:34:36) So I think it's really a question of fighting at all of these levels and pushing for protection so that it doesn't take constant vigilance and all of this constant fighting to push back against the worst of the surveillance abuses.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:55) Yeah. Because, I mean, I would love to have federal stuff for surveillance because then it would just take effect everywhere, and that would be really easy. But me personally, and maybe you can help provide some perspective or show me how I'm wrong because I don't know much about the laws. But I imagine the more things you push down to the state level, right, the closer it gets to the people. So, for example, if you were to push everything down to the county level, right, then I know the county commissioner. I know these people. We can go have a conversation. I can't go have a conversation with some bureaucrat in Washington.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:33) I have to live my life. I have work. I've got stuff to do. Right? But if it were more local or at least on the state level, the people don't seem so impossibly far away. The idea of meeting with the president seems impossibly far away. But the idea of meeting with the mayor or the governor, that doesn't seem too impossible.

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:35:52) I definitely think there's a lot of virtue to local work. And, you know, I tend to do a lot of work at the city council level and the state level. But I think that there's a lot of room for the federal government to provide a floor, not a ceiling to protections, to say, here are the minimum rights that you're entitled to, and then for states to go farther. And what I think we worry about is there's a lot of people in the tech space who try to use Congress as a way to pass really weak laws and then use that as a way to preempt the state and local laws to say, oh, sorry, San Francisco. We know you wanted stronger civil rights protections, but you don't have it anymore.

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:36:38) Sorry, Oakland. You have to allow these sorts of things after all. And so that's something we want to avoid. But we also see some really, really messed up decisions at the local level too, so we can't take it for granted. Look at school boards. Right? You have school boards that have installed thermal imaging scanners and drones and all of these things in the name of preventing COVID-19 exposure even though they didn't do a bit of good to actually help with the pandemic. We see them getting taken for a ride by surveillance vendors. They'll just market their tech to these part-time or volunteer officials who don't have the expertise to know when they're being sold a bill of goods. And, you know, I think that it takes a lot of local organizing to push back because it's great when you want to meet with the county supervisor.

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:37:36) But how do we make sure there's a Joel who's doing that in every county? Because oftentimes, what happens at the local level is that when no one's watching, the worst deals are made.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:49) Well, I mean, I bought that $10 million thermal imaging system because I got a dinner at Ruth's Chris. So...

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:37:56) I mean, if it's that quid pro quo, you might be looking at a federal indictment as well. Usually, they're a little... At least get a Tesla if you're gonna ask for some sort of bribe. But, no, it's really... Sometimes it's that reason, but sometimes it's just like, hey, he had a good PowerPoint, and it sounded like a good option.

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:38:18) So why not?

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:21) What other things did we want to talk about before we wrap up today? I want to make sure that we get to all the topics you were interested in as well.

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:38:28) Yeah. I think that some of the stuff we're looking at is how do we create smart cities in the future where we can use the technology to solve issues without having it create more of these problems. So we have a campaign called Just Cities. It's justcities.tech. And we have these frameworks for how you can actually invest in technology to deal with real problems, but then have the legal and the technical barriers to prevent that from being turned into a policing tool.

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:39:02) Right? So I shouldn't have to worry that suddenly my smart meter is going to be a way to tell when I'm home and when I'm out. I shouldn't have to worry that, you know, my acoustic monitor isn't just going to try to detect community noise violations, but listen in on what I say. But those are the sort of risks we have today because we don't have those safeguards. So it's really about, like, how do we create that structure so we can have technology without having the abuses that often it enables.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:38) Yeah. I don't want to end up like China with their social credit system and the amount of surveillance that they have openly.

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:39:44) And one of the things I always say is, you know, if you compare the US, China, and Sweden, we're a lot closer to China than we are to Sweden when it comes to privacy protections. We have so much of this already, and really it's time to start actively rolling it back. We also do a lot to talk about the way our cars are being tracked, whether it's automated license plate readers, E-ZPass data, all of these ways that, you know, again, you can create this perpetual map of someone's life. And to me, that's far too much power for anyone to be entrusted with.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:24) Yeah. I think that's unreasonable to have all of that data on me. The Alexa is... My Nest thermostat knows when I'm home and when I'm not. My cell phone's tracking me. There's eight cameras in this room pointed at me.

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:40:40) Alright. You may be a special case. Alright. You may have a bit more tracking than most people. But, yeah, you shouldn't have to worry that your Amazon Echo is going to be turned into a wiretap, but that's what we have to deal with today.

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:40:55) And again, it's so broad that really it's gotten to the crisis mode, and we have to start pushing back the other way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:10) Absolutely. How do you maintain hope and not just be like, man, there's so much stuff tracking me everywhere. This is just what it's going to be.

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:41:18) Look, I grew up as an activist. I grew up as someone who is tinkering with computers. I have seen since I was in middle school, this as a looming threat. And it was something where if I talked to people about surveillance risks in the '90s or the 2000s, they looked at me like I was crazy, and now everyone thinks, oh, yeah. It's gotten out of control.

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:41:44) So I think this is what it takes for us to have a popular movement that really... Things in America only are fixed once they're so bad, they no longer can be ignored. And I think that's the place we've gone to with surveillance. And I think that, you know, the ability to take action locally, to be able to push through those state laws, those city laws, to be able to use those sorts of protections, that to me gives me hope every day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:17) Yes. What can people do? How can people help?

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:42:20) Well, we're a small feisty nonprofit, and right now, as we try to scale up to push back against abortion surveillance, to push back against other novel forms of surveillance, donations are really key. Stopspying.org is our website, not exactly subtle. And really, if people are able to give some support, even if they're willing to volunteer, it goes such a long way in being able to build on this movement, to build the momentum, and to push back against this technology. Because, you know, the technology does not get to control the contours of our Constitution or the trajectory our country takes. That's our choice.

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:43:04) That's our democratic choice. That's a choice we're making every day. That's a choice that I continue to hope we'll make in order to preserve an open society.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:16) And there it is. That's a mic drop moment, my friend. We made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Albert (Albert Fox Cahn) at 00:43:21) Amazing. So great getting to chat with you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:25) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague that you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn, or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.