00:00Let me know when you start to record.
00:02Yeah.
00:03I got my questions on my phone, so...
00:05Can't even use paper and pencil anymore, huh?
00:08Can, but sometimes...
00:10This is exactly, exactly what it's all going to, man.
00:14It's really what this is all about, too.
00:18Not, you know, making everything a robot or technology.
00:24Alright, sorry, man. Go ahead.
00:27It starts as novel and fun.
00:31They make it fun for you.
00:34And then, soon enough, it creeps over your life.
00:38That's my biggest concern with all of technology,
00:43is that it's fun for a little bit,
00:45and then it's no longer fun.
00:47And then you won't have a choice.
00:56Everywhere we go, we are being tracked and monitored.
01:03And as technology evolves,
01:05it may seem like surveillance culture is unavoidable.
01:07For Brute, I'm meeting up with three people
01:10who are using fashion and art to disrupt surveillance.
01:13♪
01:23People call me Skitch,
01:25and I'm an eyeglasses maker
01:28who also cares about privacy,
01:30so I combine the two.
01:32I've always just been private,
01:36and I've never liked being on camera,
01:39even when I was a kid.
01:42Reflectacles work on two concepts.
01:44One is an infrared-absorbing lens,
01:48and then the other concept is a reflective element
01:51that is applied to the frame.
01:53The camera doesn't really know how to process that information,
01:55and it can make your face exposed
01:58with a bright light that you're sending back
02:01to its original source, which is the camera.
02:04Yeah, the manufacturer actually...
02:07I don't like the design on this one,
02:09so I actually have to bend it around a little bit.
02:12You can tell them a million times how to do it,
02:15but it still doesn't get done right.
02:18I focused all my energy on learning
02:21about the technologies of facial recognition
02:25and how I could defeat them with a simple pair of glasses.
02:29And I'm always trying to be one step ahead of them,
02:33because it's going to come.
02:35You know, technology is not stopping.
02:37It's on a roll.
02:39So I'm ready to go.
02:45Surveillance is no longer about criminal.
02:48It's about making money.
02:50So it's not that you don't have anything to hide anymore.
02:53It's do you want to be a product?
02:56I think it basically takes away a sense of our humanity.
03:00So all I'm trying to do with, you know, privacy eyeglasses,
03:05it's just an option to say I don't want to participate
03:10in, you know, being tracked and monitored everywhere I go.
03:20After meeting with Skitch, I came to Providence, Rhode Island,
03:23to meet with Leo Silvaggio,
03:25who instead of protecting his identity, decided to sacrifice him.
03:29So tell me about this mask.
03:31Well, this mask is my face.
03:37Yeah, yeah, it's my face.
03:39I created it as a way to thwart facial recognition systems.
03:43When someone goes out into public and they put on this mask,
03:47surveillance cameras will essentially attribute
03:49all of their actions as my own.
03:52While at the same time,
03:54While at the same time,
03:56anyone who is performing my identity in public as, you know, a Leo,
04:00if you will, creates disinformation and feeds it back into the system.
04:04And that's just one way that I'm thinking about
04:06how we can resist surveillance culture.
04:15I created You're Me Surveillance because I'm really concerned
04:18about what surveillance culture will do to what it means to be human.
04:22When we are watched or observed, we alter our behavior.
04:26The reality is, is that we're always constantly watched and observed.
04:30I remember being like a kid and like, if I knew my mom was watching me,
04:34like, I was just like a much better kid.
04:36I was like a much, much better kid than when I was alone.
04:39Like, and like now, like literally big brothers watching us all the time.
04:44Who are we going to be when we're constantly on guard
04:48Who are we going to be when we're constantly on guard
04:52and being measured to a value system that we didn't sign up for?
05:01I started with a white male face because that is my face.
05:06If you want to be invisible to surveillance, just be a white man in a suit.
05:11The sad reality is we don't live right now in a country where,
05:16where you could say the same about other faces, right?
05:22So there's this concept called sousveillance,
05:24which is using surveillance technology against the surveillers
05:28or against the party in power.
05:32I wanted to create a project that encouraged people to record video
05:36when they're going to protests or other actions
05:40so that they had a way of defending themselves in court
05:43should they be arrested or should someone that they were recording be arrested.
05:47So I found some flip-flops and just about figuring out the right size I want.
05:53What it is, is it's an online archive of DIY tutorial design for body cameras
05:59that can be made out of household materials
06:02or things that you can switch from the dollar store.
06:06To not be concerned about surveillance, especially in this day and age,
06:11in the time of George Floyd and all of these Black, Indigenous, people of color
06:17who have been murdered by the police,
06:19is to also not empathize with an entire community
06:24who is prey to this kind of culture.
06:35With the body cam project, I am very inspired by the materials that I find.
06:48There's a huge part of me that just wants to try stupid things to try stupid things.
06:55Why not take two steering wheel covers and a flip-flop and see what you could do with it?
07:06I think my balance is about showing people what something that's functional could be
07:14and then the more spectacly, kind of like fun, weird, crazy things
07:19are all about like opening your mind to what could be.
07:22I'm actually shocked that that worked.
07:26You know, I didn't do all of the other things that I did to the other one,
07:30but like, I mean, you know, with all of the straps and the security stuff,
07:36like, that might actually be better.
07:38That's not what was supposed to happen.
07:43Hopefully I can get this in correctly and I don't pop a staple.
07:49There we go.
07:52So I've got that there.
08:00Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun.
08:05There's something to be said for a kind of humor that feeds into something
08:11that is way more serious than it might look to be.
08:15Hey everyone, I'm here in Providence and we're going to be participating in the protest.
08:22So I'm going to put this hands-free on top of my head
08:25and hopefully you'll be able to see it if you're not able to participate here.
08:28Okay, cool.
08:32George Floyd!
08:33Say his name!
08:34George Floyd!
08:35Say his name!
08:36I think that my work ends up asking more questions than it provides answers.
08:42I don't think that any of my projects offer a kind of panacea of sorts.
08:46I think what they offer is one take, one perspective on what you could do.
08:54Hopeful disruptor.
08:55That's what I like to think of myself as, a hopeful disruptor.
09:06I drove out to the Columbia River Gorge in Washington to meet with Kate Bratash,
09:10who created a fashion line that floods license plate readers with fake data.
09:18It's been fun also to see the resurgence of hacker fashion.
09:22You know, we're all living in a very dystopian time
09:25and cyberpunk is kind of resurging both as a fashion influence in the world
09:31and it's kind of nice then to have a place in that conversation
09:34and say that some of the ideas that we take from these images of the world gone wrong
09:39can actually be used to bring a little bit of fun to the everyday world right now.
09:45This is a live demo test using a mobile phone version of a mobile license plate reader
09:52meant to be used by maybe like a business owner or a landlord or somebody.
09:58It actually does use the same systems that some of these commercial systems sold to police actually use.
10:05You can see the different boxes that are lighting up across all of the different parts of the shirt
10:12where it thinks it detects various license plates.
10:15And this is one of my favorite bits.
10:17It's like the Fourth Amendment plate design really, really goes wild on some of these systems.
10:23You can see like the captured screen, the number of plates is counting.
10:28So it was really important to me that these things also work not just hypothetically but live.
10:32I think something that people don't realize about license plate readers is like, you know,
10:36you might see one on a police car or at a stop sign,
10:40but unfortunately they are always reading all the time and they can ingest thousands of plates a minute.
10:46They create a very detailed map of your day.
10:56Hopefully by showing that they could be affected by something as simple as like a piece of clothing
11:02that we kind of question sort of the places these systems have in our society.
11:10These systems are not that smart and they don't work most of the time.
11:15And even if they did, we should ask very important questions about, you know,
11:19like should this be something we have to accept in the world?
11:25I was living in Los Angeles up until very recently.
11:28And Los Angeles is one of the surveillance capitals of the country.
11:31We imagine that people have different values between like city people versus like rural country folk.
11:36But like I think all of us together have an intuitive sense of the fact that we have the right to privacy.
11:42And I think that that's something that I think can really, really, if we let it, like bring us all together.
11:51Future facial recognition, I think it's going to be a battle.
11:54And honestly, I'm not very optimistic with people's rights to privacy.
11:59I think it'll continue to erode.
12:02So right now, I believe our best option, you know, I'm trying to fight the system.
12:10One of the things that kind of comes up also through these art projects is that, yes, I'm showing mistakes in these systems.
12:15But they should also invite us to ask questions about like, would this be right for me to use it,
12:20even if it worked perfectly all the time? And in my opinion, the answer is no.
12:26When you look at the resources of myself compared to like the government, I'm not going to win.
12:31But if I can make their job a little bit harder, a little bit more annoying, I'm here for it.
Comments