1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:13,950 *Music* 2 00:00:13,950 --> 00:00:18,750 Herald: The man standing right from me is Martin Reiche. Martin Reiche is a former 3 00:00:18,750 --> 00:00:23,090 computer scientist with Karlsruhe Institute for Technology. He went to study 4 00:00:23,090 --> 00:00:29,340 media art and now is a self-employed media artist covering space perception, 5 00:00:29,340 --> 00:00:37,300 digitalization, power relations, and minimal aesthetics. That sounds a bit arty 6 00:00:37,300 --> 00:00:45,770 and it will be arty *laughs* in the best way. His work was seen at exhibitions 7 00:00:45,770 --> 00:00:50,419 festivals worldwide like in Spain, in Russia, and of course, in Germany. For 8 00:00:50,419 --> 00:00:58,170 example he used a border barbed wire fence to accommodate Wi-Fi modems and connecting 9 00:00:58,170 --> 00:01:03,690 people by a fence that's not supposed to connect people. We're living in times 10 00:01:03,690 --> 00:01:09,010 where there is architecture that's purpose only seems to be to disconnect people or 11 00:01:09,010 --> 00:01:15,080 for surveillance purposes or both, and Martin Reiche here shows how to connect 12 00:01:15,080 --> 00:01:19,930 this architecture with the arts and thus reclaiming them against the actual 13 00:01:19,930 --> 00:01:25,700 purpose. Please welcome Martin Reiche! *applause* 14 00:01:25,700 --> 00:01:32,800 Oh I'm sorry, it's been late yesterday! The closing ceremony will be streamed 15 00:01:32,800 --> 00:01:39,120 into this hall so you can just stay sit until 18:30. Now Martin Reiche! Try this 16 00:01:39,120 --> 00:01:46,070 with the applause again. *applause* 17 00:01:46,070 --> 00:01:50,509 Martin Reiche: Thank you and thanks everybody for coming, especially against 18 00:01:50,509 --> 00:01:57,460 this other talk in the other room it's quite a hard, yeah quite a hard thing to 19 00:01:57,460 --> 00:02:02,200 compete against that, yeah. My name is Martin Reiche, I'm from Berlin, I'm a 20 00:02:02,200 --> 00:02:06,479 media artist. We just had that all introduction thing, so I'm just going to 21 00:02:06,479 --> 00:02:11,049 talk about what this talk will be about, this talk, "Surveilling the Surveillers", 22 00:02:11,049 --> 00:02:15,739 which is maybe more of a provocative call for action than really an actual 23 00:02:15,739 --> 00:02:20,650 description of what I'm going to talk about. But don't run away because you will 24 00:02:20,650 --> 00:02:25,070 understand in the end why I'm giving you this disclaimer right now. Because I will 25 00:02:25,070 --> 00:02:31,609 talk about current important critical topics that are important for my own 26 00:02:31,609 --> 00:02:36,341 practice and I'm gonna give some examples not only from my own artistic practice but 27 00:02:36,341 --> 00:02:42,590 also from other people's work that deal with the same topics and I think it's 28 00:02:42,590 --> 00:02:49,340 always important to really understand the context where artistic work is situated in 29 00:02:49,340 --> 00:02:55,909 order to understand the work itself. I will also talk a bit about modern form of 30 00:02:55,909 --> 00:03:01,459 activism and that I see computer science and computer programming as this modern 31 00:03:01,459 --> 00:03:07,530 form of activism. I will talk about regulation of technology and the policies 32 00:03:07,530 --> 00:03:13,400 concerning technology and the institutions that make these policies. I will also talk 33 00:03:13,400 --> 00:03:17,900 about quantification of the world, somehow, and I will finish with a 34 00:03:17,900 --> 00:03:22,199 something like a closed formula to describe the whole world; which sounds a 35 00:03:22,199 --> 00:03:28,099 bit impossible and it actually is, but well that's where it will be going and 36 00:03:28,099 --> 00:03:34,679 we'll see how that will evolve. So my background, so we don't really need this 37 00:03:34,679 --> 00:03:38,999 again, but I want to tell you a little bit about some works that I did because it's a 38 00:03:38,999 --> 00:03:44,189 variety of works that I'm dealing with, in a variety of topics, for example topics 39 00:03:44,189 --> 00:03:52,069 like electronic waste, digital footprints, complexity, visual or conceptual glitch, 40 00:03:52,069 --> 00:03:55,959 generative systems, generative architecture, cybernetics, belief systems, 41 00:03:55,959 --> 00:04:00,219 so it's a lot of buzzwords somehow that always come up when you talk about 42 00:04:00,219 --> 00:04:06,989 critical art. But before starting with that I will tell 43 00:04:06,989 --> 00:04:13,169 you a little story or we gonna talk about this concept of the Laplace's demon which 44 00:04:13,169 --> 00:04:18,320 will be important for the general scope of this talk. Laplace's demon has been 45 00:04:18,320 --> 00:04:24,120 postulated by Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1814 and it's basically an articulation of 46 00:04:24,120 --> 00:04:35,159 scientific determinism and I'm starting to quote this he Pierre-Simon Laplace says an 47 00:04:35,159 --> 00:04:39,620 intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion 48 00:04:39,620 --> 00:04:44,490 and all positions of all items of which nature is composed if this intellect were 49 00:04:44,490 --> 00:04:48,850 also vast enough to submit these data to analysis for such an intellect nothing 50 00:04:48,850 --> 00:04:53,179 would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its 51 00:04:53,179 --> 00:04:58,650 eyes. I would just leave this here and I will come back to that at the end of the 52 00:04:58,650 --> 00:05:04,900 talk to have something like a closed loop for this talk and I will start to talk 53 00:05:04,900 --> 00:05:10,930 about critical topics which is topics that are right now interesting especially also 54 00:05:10,930 --> 00:05:17,370 for the arts which deal with technology or with technological artifacts 55 00:05:17,370 --> 00:05:21,659 and I will just start with something that always comes up it's surveillance of 56 00:05:21,659 --> 00:05:26,580 course surveillance and reconnaissance. I'm putting this here together not because 57 00:05:26,580 --> 00:05:33,919 I think it's the they are identical things but because both topics have been I would 58 00:05:33,919 --> 00:05:38,520 say far too widely discussed already in an artistic context. So I'm just going to 59 00:05:38,520 --> 00:05:43,849 show you some examples of artistic works that deal with surveillance and 60 00:05:43,849 --> 00:05:51,500 reconnaissance and especially works that are important to me. 61 00:05:51,500 --> 00:05:56,669 So yeah I just said that I'm not gonna talk that much about surveillance which 62 00:05:56,669 --> 00:06:02,780 sounds counterintuitive if I call this talks surveilling the surveyors but it's 63 00:06:02,780 --> 00:06:09,389 not really the optical surveillance like taking a nice panchromatic shot of the 64 00:06:09,389 --> 00:06:15,259 Earth's surface that I'm interested or this is a work by me it's called scan 65 00:06:15,259 --> 00:06:21,580 lines of Aleppo that's also consisting of panchromatic satellite imagery from a 66 00:06:21,580 --> 00:06:26,860 former classified now declassified US reconnaissance satellite used by the 67 00:06:26,860 --> 00:06:34,439 military they now have a vast archive where they publish these old well data 68 00:06:34,439 --> 00:06:39,819 from overflights and you can basically take them from different times 69 00:06:39,819 --> 00:06:45,740 in different years you can stack them upon each other which I did here and I was also 70 00:06:45,740 --> 00:06:54,610 producing this work it has a glass on top of it and I was basically engraving the 71 00:06:54,610 --> 00:06:59,990 flight path of the satellite in order to give somehow a physical idea of the 72 00:06:59,990 --> 00:07:10,219 trajectory of an actual satellite that is flying over the Earth's surface. I'm also 73 00:07:10,219 --> 00:07:14,840 going to talk a bit about electronic tracking especially electronic tracking 74 00:07:14,840 --> 00:07:21,999 through unique identifiers so well that's SIM cards at least in Germany they are 75 00:07:21,999 --> 00:07:27,780 mapped to a person's identity by law so if you buy SIM cards you have to give away 76 00:07:27,780 --> 00:07:33,340 parts of the data about your identity in order to be allowed to have one. So these 77 00:07:33,340 --> 00:07:37,569 SIM cards are unique identifiers to your person and make it very easy of course to 78 00:07:37,569 --> 00:07:44,919 track you and your behavior and so on. And I just want to start with one work of 79 00:07:44,919 --> 00:07:51,029 friends of mine that, at least Dania was here at this conference he's now not here 80 00:07:51,029 --> 00:07:57,650 anymore. This work is called prism the beacon frame and it's a work that 81 00:07:57,650 --> 00:08:05,139 takes this idea of I have a SIM card and it identifies me somehow and it takes also 82 00:08:05,139 --> 00:08:11,340 the idea of the authority that actually is allowed to put cell phone towers it takes 83 00:08:11,340 --> 00:08:17,389 this they just create their own cell phone tower and they send you messages when you 84 00:08:17,389 --> 00:08:22,819 come close to these cell phone towers like this welcome to a new NSA partner Network 85 00:08:22,819 --> 00:08:28,940 so this is basically produced IMSI catcher that just tells you very decently that 86 00:08:28,940 --> 00:08:36,909 well you're just being surveilled in a sense. It's a work that's been also 87 00:08:36,909 --> 00:08:41,649 legally problematic of course because usually in Germany you are not allowed to 88 00:08:41,649 --> 00:08:47,560 do these things in an artistic context you have a bit more freedom to deal with these 89 00:08:47,560 --> 00:08:54,651 kind of things. So that's maybe an example for surveillance in a sense that you 90 00:08:54,651 --> 00:09:02,200 already know it's the no longer in effect actually directive 2006 24 EC which 91 00:09:02,200 --> 00:09:10,070 is a well European Union directive that we just tend to call the 92 00:09:10,070 --> 00:09:13,990 "Vorratsdatenspeicherung". In Germany we now have unfortunately since 93 00:09:13,990 --> 00:09:18,750 December 2015 the "Gesetz zur Einfuehrung einer Speicherpflicht und einer 94 00:09:18,750 --> 00:09:21,310 Hoechstspeicherpflicht fuer Verkehrsdaten". We just heard a very 95 00:09:21,310 --> 00:09:27,089 interesting talk in the first hall also about how this now developed in the last 96 00:09:27,089 --> 00:09:32,930 couple of months on also the last couple of days unfortunately and you can see 97 00:09:32,930 --> 00:09:40,431 this as the National predecessor of this directive so here I put this in the same 98 00:09:40,431 --> 00:09:44,620 corner as also the artworks about surveillance because I 99 00:09:44,620 --> 00:09:50,279 think one thing is very important is these things about policies because policies are 100 00:09:50,279 --> 00:09:54,980 basically the rules that define how we live together but they're 101 00:09:54,980 --> 00:10:02,089 also the rules that are mostly well problematic for us as people working in 102 00:10:02,089 --> 00:10:08,180 technology because they somehow have to adhere to them even if you do not 103 00:10:08,180 --> 00:10:15,540 ethically agree to them. That's another maybe nice example for that 104 00:10:15,540 --> 00:10:19,130 biometric surveillance is something very prevalent right now especially taking 105 00:10:19,130 --> 00:10:24,560 fingerprints for example at airports International airports or getting DNA or 106 00:10:24,560 --> 00:10:34,420 having a DNA screening of your person and these things are usually right now 107 00:10:34,420 --> 00:10:41,399 unfortunately mostly taken from immigrants and especially we have this 108 00:10:41,399 --> 00:10:50,800 problem in Germany with the influx of immigrants where at what the first thing 109 00:10:50,800 --> 00:10:55,899 of course that came up was well how do we identify them and how do we make this 110 00:10:55,899 --> 00:11:01,480 basically as smooth as possible which of course the easiest way to do it is just to 111 00:11:01,480 --> 00:11:04,760 take as much data from the people as possible which is of course ethically a 112 00:11:04,760 --> 00:11:12,000 bit problematic, a lot. So another topic that falls in this 113 00:11:12,000 --> 00:11:16,032 category of surveillance and reconnaissance is predictive analysis and 114 00:11:16,032 --> 00:11:19,752 that's not the computer scientist in me speaking because that's where I'm coming 115 00:11:19,752 --> 00:11:26,399 from. I was dealing with machine learning and distributed algorithms so predictive 116 00:11:26,399 --> 00:11:31,529 analysis is something that I think is extremely important and like three 117 00:11:31,529 --> 00:11:36,320 examples of predictive analysis is for example prediction of the user behavior 118 00:11:36,320 --> 00:11:44,220 which goes directly hand-in-hand with user tracking but also market prediction 119 00:11:44,220 --> 00:11:49,190 through for example if you have a high- frequency trading algorithm you want to 120 00:11:49,190 --> 00:11:55,560 predict the the future development of the market to make very fast decisions on 121 00:11:55,560 --> 00:12:01,350 these predictions and these brought us a lot of problems lately. This is an 122 00:12:01,350 --> 00:12:08,500 example for such a problem they're usually called flash crashes which is very short 123 00:12:08,500 --> 00:12:16,130 time frames in which some stocks lose a lot of value this is a thing the stock of 124 00:12:16,130 --> 00:12:25,880 natural gas around 2011 in June and what you can see here in this stock market 125 00:12:25,880 --> 00:12:32,339 development over time and this is just a couple of minutes, this is 1940 until 126 00:12:32,339 --> 00:12:37,040 1955, so that's 15 minutes of market movement data. And you see these nice 127 00:12:37,040 --> 00:12:41,170 oscillations that get worse and worse so there's something that doesn't look very 128 00:12:41,170 --> 00:12:45,509 natural and at some point it just ends in a crash which 129 00:12:45,509 --> 00:12:52,500 is, I think, a loss of 20% of equity for the company, which is quite a lot and it's 130 00:12:52,500 --> 00:12:59,410 actually in 15 seconds, happening around 15 seconds, so your predictive analysis is 131 00:12:59,410 --> 00:13:06,360 a problem. You can go even further and say, "Well predictive analysis also right 132 00:13:06,360 --> 00:13:13,730 now is used for crime prediction." So there's companies selling software to 133 00:13:13,730 --> 00:13:19,410 cities in order to predict where the next crime is supposed... or is probably 134 00:13:19,410 --> 00:13:25,600 happening and take some pre-cautionary measures to make sure that the crime is 135 00:13:25,600 --> 00:13:35,230 actually not happening or just go and catch somebody and just see what happens. 136 00:13:35,230 --> 00:13:42,230 So yeah, that again, of course, is ethically problematic. So, coming to the 137 00:13:42,230 --> 00:13:47,920 next topic would be regulations and policies... and especially enforcing 138 00:13:47,920 --> 00:13:54,400 policies on citizens. What does that mean? Well, the easiest way how to understand it 139 00:13:54,400 --> 00:14:01,560 is laws. The laws of a country are basically the easiest and the easiest-to- 140 00:14:01,560 --> 00:14:08,990 comprehend way to enforce a policy upon your citizens, but it's not only these 141 00:14:08,990 --> 00:14:16,980 kind of laws, but then you have some policy, some regulations, which are a bit 142 00:14:16,980 --> 00:14:20,589 harder to grasp or harder to get access to. So you really have to do a lot 143 00:14:20,589 --> 00:14:25,209 of research to understand what is actually going on here, but it still has an effect 144 00:14:25,209 --> 00:14:31,410 on you. This, for example, is a NATO document, which shows the basic military 145 00:14:31,410 --> 00:14:36,259 allocation for the radio frequency spectrum and I'm showing you this, because 146 00:14:36,259 --> 00:14:43,019 it will get a little bit more important for a work that I did on some research on 147 00:14:43,019 --> 00:14:51,784 these military regulations for the radio frequency spectrum. And I'm staying in 148 00:14:51,784 --> 00:14:55,970 this realm of radio frequency, I'm actually going to show you... If that 149 00:14:55,970 --> 00:15:00,820 works... No, I don't have the other screen; that's very nice... Show you some 150 00:15:00,820 --> 00:15:09,790 example. [Music] 151 00:15:09,790 --> 00:15:18,839 So, this is a recording at 13.3 megahertz. The recording is somewhere in Germany and 152 00:15:18,839 --> 00:15:25,519 it's the so called "Chinese firedrake AM jammer" It's a jammer that is used 153 00:15:25,519 --> 00:15:32,310 by... or has been used by the government of the People's Republic of China and they 154 00:15:32,310 --> 00:15:40,300 use it against other states' radio stations. So, they basically use it to jam 155 00:15:40,300 --> 00:15:48,779 the stations of other countries. For example, this was the sound of Hope Taiwan 156 00:15:48,779 --> 00:15:51,610 Radio, which you cannot really hear anymore, because the only thing you hear 157 00:15:51,610 --> 00:15:57,269 is this strange Chinese folk song. And that's somehow also a way to enforce a 158 00:15:57,269 --> 00:16:06,029 policy on your people by just blocking access to something that the people could 159 00:16:06,029 --> 00:16:12,740 have access to if you wouldn't enforce your policy on there... That doesn't work 160 00:16:12,740 --> 00:16:20,500 now... Another example here is an artwork: It's an artwork called "All about you". 161 00:16:20,500 --> 00:16:26,589 It's by Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša, which is an artist group from 162 00:16:26,589 --> 00:16:31,001 Slovenia, that... It's an artist collective, that at some point decided, as 163 00:16:31,001 --> 00:16:35,829 an artwork, to all change their names to "Janez Janša", who is a former Slovenian 164 00:16:35,829 --> 00:16:39,629 prime minister, so they now all have the same name and it's the same name as the 165 00:16:39,629 --> 00:16:46,060 prime minister, which is in itself a... quite an interesting work of art. And this 166 00:16:46,060 --> 00:16:53,439 is one of their newer works, where they basically had this contract with one 167 00:16:53,439 --> 00:16:58,230 Slovenian bank, where they could, whenever they lose a credit card, they can just 168 00:16:58,230 --> 00:17:03,070 replace it with a new one and they can, at the same time, also just specify the 169 00:17:03,070 --> 00:17:08,020 photograph that they want to have on their credit card, so they decided to make... 170 00:17:08,020 --> 00:17:15,640 How many are there? I think about 120, 150... to reproduce the Slovenian passport 171 00:17:15,640 --> 00:17:22,000 of one of the members of Janez Janša. And there actually exist 3 of these collages 172 00:17:22,000 --> 00:17:26,430 for all the 3 members of the artist collective and I think they're not yet 173 00:17:26,430 --> 00:17:32,310 complete or some got lost, I'm not sure what's the reason that some are missing, 174 00:17:32,310 --> 00:17:40,200 but it's a nice way to subvert this idea that there is this policy that also says 175 00:17:40,200 --> 00:17:44,840 that every... there's one identity mapped to one person, 176 00:17:44,840 --> 00:17:49,340 especially if you think about what a name means. Now you have 4 people having the 177 00:17:49,340 --> 00:17:53,280 same name, also kind of having a very similar, at least these three people, kind 178 00:17:53,280 --> 00:17:56,890 of similar biography by working together, so if you see a work of art, you don't 179 00:17:56,890 --> 00:18:01,380 even know who it was, that was the first... maybe the first person that came 180 00:18:01,380 --> 00:18:05,200 up with the idea. And even if they tell you, you don't really know what that 181 00:18:05,200 --> 00:18:12,470 means, because everybody has the same name; it doesn't really make sense. 182 00:18:12,470 --> 00:18:16,670 Thinking more about policies: Another interesting important work here is 183 00:18:16,670 --> 00:18:24,140 "Loophole4All" by Paolo Cirio. He got, I think, the Golden Nica 2014 for this work, 184 00:18:24,140 --> 00:18:29,930 where he basically sold for very cheap, I think for 99 cents, these certificates of 185 00:18:29,930 --> 00:18:36,270 incorporation from some companies in the Cayman Islands. I think, basically all 186 00:18:36,270 --> 00:18:40,341 companies in the Cayman Islands, they are, of course, not valid, but they also, which 187 00:18:40,341 --> 00:18:43,700 is interesting in these certificates, they don't really need official stamps or 188 00:18:43,700 --> 00:18:47,820 anything. You can basically also incorporate a company there extremely 189 00:18:47,820 --> 00:18:53,690 easily and, of course, it's a loophole for tax evasion that's used by companies 190 00:18:53,690 --> 00:18:59,380 worldwide, and he wanted to make it more accessible to people, so he just thought 191 00:18:59,380 --> 00:19:04,580 about "Why not sell that for a dollar to people?" or "a dollar, then you can 192 00:19:04,580 --> 00:19:11,867 download it and $2 or $3 and then you get a real certificate out of it". So that's 193 00:19:11,867 --> 00:19:17,940 also quite an artistic way to deal with policy. 194 00:19:17,940 --> 00:19:25,090 And probably another quite prominent picture is this of the Liberator gun I 195 00:19:25,090 --> 00:19:31,100 think you've probably all heard of this one it's been around for a couple of years 196 00:19:31,100 --> 00:19:37,320 now and popped up on on the Pirate Bay and it's basically a completely 3D-printed 197 00:19:37,320 --> 00:19:42,800 working one-shot gun and, yeah, it actually has a predecessor which is 198 00:19:42,800 --> 00:19:47,950 interesting which a lot of people don't know which was also called liberator. It's 199 00:19:47,950 --> 00:19:54,860 called FP 45 liberator and it's from World War II and it had, it also was a one-shot 200 00:19:54,860 --> 00:20:00,200 gun, and the idea there was a little bit different though. It was 201 00:20:00,200 --> 00:20:04,890 produced for around 2 US dollars, so it was a very, very cheap cheap gun, just 202 00:20:04,890 --> 00:20:09,880 created out of scrap metal parts and it had one shot and it was given out to 203 00:20:09,880 --> 00:20:15,090 resistance forces in the occupied territories and the idea was that one shot 204 00:20:15,090 --> 00:20:20,900 is enough to kill an enemy and take his weapon so we can basically rearm yourself. 205 00:20:20,900 --> 00:20:31,300 Hence the name Liberator. So I was talking about enforcing policies on citizens but 206 00:20:31,300 --> 00:20:35,460 there's not only citizens but there's also the others not saying the others the 207 00:20:35,460 --> 00:20:40,950 non-citizens of your country, so enforcing policies on others is also obviously an 208 00:20:40,950 --> 00:20:45,940 important thing to talk about and I'm just going to show you one picture which sums 209 00:20:45,940 --> 00:20:53,370 up enforcing policies on non-citizens which is the US drone program bringing 210 00:20:53,370 --> 00:21:04,790 democracy to a country near you. So another topic is the obsolescence of 211 00:21:04,790 --> 00:21:12,090 political borders and that's also now we're where my work comes up and I was 212 00:21:12,090 --> 00:21:16,820 very happy to be able to take part in a project that was initiated by two artists 213 00:21:16,820 --> 00:21:22,890 that gave a talk last year here. It's an artist collective, KairUs, they gave a 214 00:21:22,890 --> 00:21:29,701 talk because they went to Ghana to a site called Agbogbloshie, which is an 215 00:21:29,701 --> 00:21:33,590 electronic waste dump, it's actually, I think right now the biggest electronic 216 00:21:33,590 --> 00:21:38,790 waste dump in the world and they were collecting hard drives. They were buying 217 00:21:38,790 --> 00:21:44,300 hard drives, basically, from this e-waste dump. And it's quite cheap you can get a 218 00:21:44,300 --> 00:21:48,780 hard drive for a dollar and they sell them usually in bulk, like you get a big box 219 00:21:48,780 --> 00:21:56,620 and supposedly take a big box with you and they also tell you this story that usually 220 00:21:56,620 --> 00:22:03,510 people come and buy, well a lot of them, not one box but 20 boxes. Of course not to 221 00:22:03,510 --> 00:22:07,290 have in the end these old hard drives because they're like, from a technical 222 00:22:07,290 --> 00:22:12,050 perspective quite useless, but because of the data that's on the hard drive that's 223 00:22:12,050 --> 00:22:18,950 potentially useful because you can use it for abuse schemes against the previous 224 00:22:18,950 --> 00:22:29,240 owners. So, they brought 22 hard drives back to Europe, to Austria and then did a 225 00:22:29,240 --> 00:22:35,022 forensic analysis and were able to recover a couple of, I don't know, 226 00:22:35,022 --> 00:22:38,607 it was something about 200 gigabytes of data. And it was a bit 227 00:22:38,607 --> 00:22:42,360 too much for them, so they decided to give it out to other artists and to somehow 228 00:22:42,360 --> 00:22:47,420 deal with it, to dig through it, and we somehow did and it ended up in having, we 229 00:22:47,420 --> 00:22:52,760 had a nice exhibition about electronic waste and the remainders of data that you 230 00:22:52,760 --> 00:22:58,140 will find in this electronic waste. And just saying that what I've seen cannot be 231 00:22:58,140 --> 00:23:04,320 unseen you don't really want to deal or to dig through the private data of a lot of 232 00:23:04,320 --> 00:23:10,200 people that you don't know, especially because I was interested especially in 233 00:23:10,200 --> 00:23:17,070 video and images. Um, yeah, I made a work out of it I will tell you about it in a 234 00:23:17,070 --> 00:23:27,490 second. What we also did in this project was to try to get a understanding for what 235 00:23:27,490 --> 00:23:34,830 are the problems of this whole electronic lifecycle. So, before you have your phone 236 00:23:34,830 --> 00:23:38,780 in your hand of course, well, it was assembled somewhere and before it was 237 00:23:38,780 --> 00:23:43,890 assembled, you needed to have the resources in very physical terms, the 238 00:23:43,890 --> 00:23:48,990 rare earths that you need to produce the components and you have to 239 00:23:48,990 --> 00:23:53,800 mine them somewhere and usually it happens in countries which are rather poor and it 240 00:23:53,800 --> 00:24:02,390 happens under extreme conditions. People that work there are dying very fast, so we 241 00:24:02,390 --> 00:24:07,370 created a project that tries to map this, well, what is behind this smart world, 242 00:24:07,370 --> 00:24:14,360 like all this life cycles of electronic components and 243 00:24:14,360 --> 00:24:18,390 exhibited at US Electronica this year. So, that was actually quite a nice project, 244 00:24:18,390 --> 00:24:21,990 also to just get an overview that this is really a global problem and a global 245 00:24:21,990 --> 00:24:28,500 phenomenon. Yeah, what I wanted to tell you, is this, about this project called 246 00:24:28,500 --> 00:24:33,280 Shell Performance. That's one of the projects that I did based on the data, so 247 00:24:33,280 --> 00:24:40,130 you already see someone in the middle of the, of the the middle screen to the the 248 00:24:40,130 --> 00:24:48,100 lower part is something that well you could probably identify as a female 249 00:24:48,100 --> 00:24:54,990 person, and I was interested in the private data and especially the private 250 00:24:54,990 --> 00:25:02,130 videos and images that were still available on these hard drives. And the 251 00:25:02,130 --> 00:25:05,890 more I was interested in it, the more I was disgusted by it, a disgust that is 252 00:25:05,890 --> 00:25:12,720 specifically because it's one of these things that 253 00:25:12,720 --> 00:25:16,910 sounds interesting when you think about it and sounds like you really learn something 254 00:25:16,910 --> 00:25:22,280 from it. But you learn too much, too fast, you kind of start to feel into the 255 00:25:22,280 --> 00:25:27,011 identity of, not only one identity, but sometimes more identities of the people 256 00:25:27,011 --> 00:25:34,200 that were the former owners of the hard drives and so I decided to just work with 257 00:25:34,200 --> 00:25:39,290 the material that I found on the hard drives that I could definitely make out to 258 00:25:39,290 --> 00:25:49,090 be commercial productions. Which was still a lot. So I'm going to show you a video, I 259 00:25:49,090 --> 00:26:04,360 hope it works. Internet. Yeah, there's no sound. So the work is, it's basically a 260 00:26:04,360 --> 00:26:08,340 shell script, so it's a program that runs through the contents of the hard drives 261 00:26:08,340 --> 00:26:15,100 which are attached to, to the, to the computer and spits away, basically puts 262 00:26:15,100 --> 00:26:21,570 out images or stills of videos and renders them as, in ASCII fashion, just on that 263 00:26:21,570 --> 00:26:25,570 screen and it looks a bit like matrix tiles, so we have a little, well that's 264 00:26:25,570 --> 00:26:32,070 quite hard, quite easy to understand what's happening there and it puts out all 265 00:26:32,070 --> 00:26:36,720 these files which at some point are pornographic, mainstream pornographic 266 00:26:36,720 --> 00:26:42,190 images. The other side are sometimes just party photos of the former owners, so it's 267 00:26:42,190 --> 00:26:51,040 a very diverse and a bit strange collage of a person's life, of a person's digital 268 00:26:51,040 --> 00:26:56,150 life that you get and it's quite unsettling in what it evokes in you I 269 00:26:56,150 --> 00:27:09,070 think when you look at it. So and in this, I hope, and in this exhibition there were 270 00:27:09,070 --> 00:27:12,190 also a couple of other projects that happened, for example of that group 271 00:27:12,190 --> 00:27:18,830 KairUs, that actually got us the hard drives, they were able with actually a lot 272 00:27:18,830 --> 00:27:24,600 of effort to identify or personally identify one of the former owners of one 273 00:27:24,600 --> 00:27:30,380 of the hard drives and decided to create a project in which they hypothetically sent 274 00:27:30,380 --> 00:27:35,970 back this hard drive to the former owner. They knew that the hard drive has been 275 00:27:35,970 --> 00:27:40,890 discarded about ten years ago, they still were able to figure out the new address 276 00:27:40,890 --> 00:27:45,900 because they were able to figure out the new employer of that specific person and 277 00:27:45,900 --> 00:27:50,320 they named this project Not A Blackmail because, well, they actually 278 00:27:50,320 --> 00:27:55,820 don't want to send it to the person, but in a gallery you see it as, like the work 279 00:27:55,820 --> 00:28:03,610 already basically having the stamps and and address of the person on it. But 280 00:28:03,610 --> 00:28:08,770 they're not sending it, unfortunately. So, if I'm talking about the obsolescence of 281 00:28:08,770 --> 00:28:13,130 national borders, one thing that immediately comes to mind is satellites. 282 00:28:13,130 --> 00:28:20,680 Yeah, satellites. But then if you think about a much, much older concept than 283 00:28:20,680 --> 00:28:25,890 satellites, there's short wave propagation so that's it's our nice radio frequency 284 00:28:25,890 --> 00:28:32,710 phenomenon that or shortwave radio, you know it's AM radio for example, so the old 285 00:28:32,710 --> 00:28:42,870 school radio that some people still have in their cars for example. This technology 286 00:28:42,870 --> 00:28:50,220 is interesting because its, first it's meant to be for a, let's say a closer 287 00:28:50,220 --> 00:28:55,970 space, like for example a little, little country or a state so you can have a 288 00:28:55,970 --> 00:29:02,590 statewide radio program. But it also has this property that it gets reflected from 289 00:29:02,590 --> 00:29:08,300 the ionosphere if you just have an angle which is high enough and you just sent the 290 00:29:08,300 --> 00:29:12,470 signal basically to the sky. It gets reflected there and it comes back to earth 291 00:29:12,470 --> 00:29:17,000 and it also gets reflected there again and then you can, you can basically hop quite 292 00:29:17,000 --> 00:29:23,980 far up to a couple of thousand kilometres across earth. So it's one of the reasons 293 00:29:23,980 --> 00:29:29,210 why you sometimes, especially at night where propagation of radio frequency is, 294 00:29:29,210 --> 00:29:34,690 it's much better than at day, you're able to listen to Chinese radio here for 295 00:29:34,690 --> 00:29:43,710 example, like the Fire, FireDragon, Fire Drake Jammer. So, and then based on this 296 00:29:43,710 --> 00:29:48,020 technology, you have some other technology. It's called Over-the-Horizon 297 00:29:48,020 --> 00:29:55,580 Radar, for example. Which is interesting, somehow obsolete now after having 298 00:29:55,580 --> 00:30:01,830 satellites for reconnaissance, but it's still widely used. And Over-the-Horizon 299 00:30:01,830 --> 00:30:07,930 Radar is interesting because it uses this short wave propagation characteristics in 300 00:30:07,930 --> 00:30:15,860 order to locate enemy troops on the ground. And one way how you can use it 301 00:30:15,860 --> 00:30:21,790 basically, is you create these stations in your own territory, you just point them to 302 00:30:21,790 --> 00:30:27,060 your enemy territory or just other territory and you get quite a good 303 00:30:27,060 --> 00:30:31,600 and close look of what's happening there. It's not only the 304 00:30:31,600 --> 00:30:39,110 US that's doing this, it's also I think, Russia, Japan and Australia have active 305 00:30:39,110 --> 00:30:45,230 systems. And right now it's actually quite active, one of these systems is quite 306 00:30:45,230 --> 00:30:51,130 active here in in Germany but it's coming over the horizon from the Russian 307 00:30:51,130 --> 00:31:02,620 Federation. So, yeah, this is a also VLF transmitter, it's called Cutler, it's also 308 00:31:02,620 --> 00:31:06,960 a US Navy transmitter. By the way all these images are also taken 309 00:31:06,960 --> 00:31:11,630 from the US Navy. So, one of the reasons why I can use them here, because 310 00:31:11,630 --> 00:31:15,640 everything that's produced by a governmental agency in the United States 311 00:31:15,640 --> 00:31:23,510 is in directly public domain, which is very nice also to to work with the 312 00:31:23,510 --> 00:31:26,360 interesting thing with these very low frequency transmitters which are usually 313 00:31:26,360 --> 00:31:30,690 used to communicate to submarines at the other side of the world and it works quite 314 00:31:30,690 --> 00:31:37,711 well is that they have a very nice geometric structure like this one, for 315 00:31:37,711 --> 00:31:43,930 example. So, this geometric structure is usually important for the correct 316 00:31:43,930 --> 00:31:50,930 functioning of this transmitter and I was quite happy to see this nice geometry 317 00:31:50,930 --> 00:31:57,700 especially coming from computer science being kind of mathematically educated and 318 00:31:57,700 --> 00:32:04,470 I somehow wanted to work with that. That's what was coming out of it. It's not that 319 00:32:04,470 --> 00:32:10,090 geometrically sound I would say, but it's a project that's now been going on since 320 00:32:10,090 --> 00:32:19,060 2015. It's called “Kilohertz” and it's quite an international project I would say 321 00:32:19,060 --> 00:32:27,500 and this site is right now in Brazil. It's somewhere between São Paulo and Rio de 322 00:32:27,500 --> 00:32:33,550 Janeiro. There's not that much going on there, so it's quite a rural place to be. 323 00:32:33,550 --> 00:32:41,645 I created this installation in order to listen to specific frequency ranges. So 324 00:32:41,645 --> 00:32:46,790 kilohertz is an antenna and that's something that is quite hard to see even 325 00:32:46,790 --> 00:32:50,981 quite harder to see even if you're standing in front of it, because the the 326 00:32:50,981 --> 00:32:59,150 antenna is – looks a bit like this. The antenna is comprised of very fine copper 327 00:32:59,150 --> 00:33:04,780 wire which has a diameter of about 0.3 millimeter, so it's almost not – you can 328 00:33:04,780 --> 00:33:08,460 almost not see it if you're not standing in front of it and actually know where it 329 00:33:08,460 --> 00:33:15,720 is and you can focus with your eye on it. But it apparently is quite good in order 330 00:33:15,720 --> 00:33:23,130 to receive military radio communications and transmissions and that is what I'm 331 00:33:23,130 --> 00:33:33,810 interested in this project is to receive these military radio communications I was 332 00:33:33,810 --> 00:33:39,140 just talking about that shortwave radio, because of the propagation characteristics 333 00:33:39,140 --> 00:33:45,371 is an interesting thing to use for the military, not only for this radar, but 334 00:33:45,371 --> 00:33:53,441 also, for example, to have a uni- directive call – a channel – to, for 335 00:33:53,441 --> 00:34:00,290 example, submerged submarines and it's also quite actively still used for 336 00:34:00,290 --> 00:34:07,840 communications between military bases. So this happened to be just about 60 337 00:34:07,840 --> 00:34:13,199 kilometers away from a federal police / military. That's kind of the same thing in 338 00:34:13,199 --> 00:34:19,989 there in Brazil. Complex that most people don't really know what's going on there, 339 00:34:19,989 --> 00:34:26,619 but when I was there I was interested to see if I can actually somehow get 340 00:34:26,619 --> 00:34:32,379 something out of there – if I can actually prove at least that there's some military 341 00:34:32,379 --> 00:34:38,668 communication towards the space going on. And it turns out to be, of course, quite 342 00:34:38,668 --> 00:34:45,159 hard to do so, but what I was really interested in is not only to see how this 343 00:34:45,159 --> 00:34:54,000 happens in Brazil, but how is that everywhere else in the world – because 344 00:34:54,000 --> 00:35:00,390 listening or trying to listen to military communications is legally always a kind of 345 00:35:00,390 --> 00:35:04,789 complicated thing in Brazil. Usually, when I give these kind of talks that say in 346 00:35:04,789 --> 00:35:09,700 Brazil they have other problems they don't need to think about somebody receiving 347 00:35:09,700 --> 00:35:15,980 military transmissions. They should work on other problems, but in other countries 348 00:35:15,980 --> 00:35:20,690 that might be seen in a different way. So I executed this project also in Estonia 349 00:35:20,690 --> 00:35:28,000 just 20 kilometers to the Russian border. I also executed this project in Norway and 350 00:35:28,000 --> 00:35:32,599 in Berlin. Actually, there is one active instance running right now in Berlin 351 00:35:32,599 --> 00:35:41,440 always listening to the same basically frequency ranges which are military 352 00:35:41,440 --> 00:35:47,160 classified, well, classified military frequency ranges that you could see or you 353 00:35:47,160 --> 00:35:51,540 were able to see just longer ago on one of these slides. 354 00:35:51,540 --> 00:35:57,069 So, the way how these things, these antennas work is very, very simple. So, I 355 00:35:57,069 --> 00:36:02,299 take the, basically, simplest way how to build an antenna and build it. This is a 356 00:36:02,299 --> 00:36:07,569 very, very easy setup. So, it looks like an inverted “V”. It works quite well for 357 00:36:07,569 --> 00:36:12,990 very potent signals and the rest of the hardware that you need is very cheap and 358 00:36:12,990 --> 00:36:17,700 the antenna itself is very cheap, because the only thing you need for the antenna is 359 00:36:17,700 --> 00:36:27,460 basically copper wire and for the rest of the station a Raspberry Pi – with a little 360 00:36:27,460 --> 00:36:34,869 bit of software and a RTL SDR dongle is enough to do it. So it costs less than 50 361 00:36:34,869 --> 00:36:39,529 bucks to create a surveillance or counter- surveillance station against these 362 00:36:39,529 --> 00:36:44,279 military facilities. There's a couple of other ways how you can actually build 363 00:36:44,279 --> 00:36:50,619 these antennas. Some this again, these images are now taken from, I think, it's a 364 00:36:50,619 --> 00:36:57,910 navy field manual. So, it's a manual that's given to people in the field for 365 00:36:57,910 --> 00:37:03,049 the scenario that their antenna is broken, so they need to build a new one and I'm 366 00:37:03,049 --> 00:37:08,010 kind of using this knowledge against them, which is just a interesting sidenote, I 367 00:37:08,010 --> 00:37:12,549 think. So, there's different ways how to build these antennas. They even have that 368 00:37:12,549 --> 00:37:19,779 military radio transmitter. That's another way how you could potentially build that 369 00:37:19,779 --> 00:37:27,349 and in the end you get very interesting nice power sweeps, nice images out of it. 370 00:37:27,349 --> 00:37:31,539 They are power sweeps – what that means is I'm just defining a frequency range that 371 00:37:31,539 --> 00:37:36,690 I'm interested in and then I basically have a computer program that just goes 372 00:37:36,690 --> 00:37:42,109 just step by step and measures the intensity of signal that's there and in 373 00:37:42,109 --> 00:37:50,180 the end, over time, which is the y-axis if you want. It creates these images which 374 00:37:50,180 --> 00:37:55,599 don't tell you what exactly is going on there, but it gives you proof that 375 00:37:55,599 --> 00:37:59,820 something is going on there and that some communication is taking place. 376 00:37:59,820 --> 00:38:05,940 The only thing you have to do then is to verify that it's actually a military or 377 00:38:05,940 --> 00:38:12,890 civilian usage and you can do that by looking into the policies, that have to be 378 00:38:12,890 --> 00:38:17,490 somehow made available to the public usually through the regulatory 379 00:38:17,490 --> 00:38:23,630 institutions in the specific countries, for example, the FCC in the US or – what 380 00:38:23,630 --> 00:38:29,461 was it in Europe – the Bundesnetzagentur in Germany which have to publish it, in 381 00:38:29,461 --> 00:38:37,059 order to make sure that nobody interferes with official signals military or 382 00:38:37,059 --> 00:38:43,670 governmental or signals as part of a frequency bands which have been sold for a 383 00:38:43,670 --> 00:38:53,319 lot of money to institutions in the country. So, publishing – I think, for the 384 00:38:53,319 --> 00:38:58,750 first time now – an official call for participation and I'm doing this because 385 00:38:58,750 --> 00:39:03,890 the “Kilohertz” project, I've talked about this project a couple of times already in 386 00:39:03,890 --> 00:39:08,710 different countries and everybody at these places was interested somehow to 387 00:39:08,710 --> 00:39:16,029 offer two square meters of space to build a little antenna somewhere and to push all 388 00:39:16,029 --> 00:39:20,410 the information that this antenna spits out into a public GitHub repository and 389 00:39:20,410 --> 00:39:26,690 just give out information to the rest of the world. And the reason is why should 390 00:39:26,690 --> 00:39:32,460 you actually do that – like what is the real gain in doing that. And one gain is 391 00:39:32,460 --> 00:39:38,570 to understand that some parts of the frequency spectrum that are reserved to 392 00:39:38,570 --> 00:39:43,569 the military – and the military has most of the frequency spectrum reserved for it 393 00:39:43,569 --> 00:39:52,420 – is actually never used and that could also be made available to the public. It 394 00:39:52,420 --> 00:39:57,680 could also be made available for resale to commercial companies. I'm not in favor of 395 00:39:57,680 --> 00:40:02,529 that, but I would like to be “Kilohertz” a project that's able to provide evidence 396 00:40:02,529 --> 00:40:13,470 for non-usage of radio frequency bands in order to support groups that are active in 397 00:40:13,470 --> 00:40:18,960 trying to reclaim parts of the RF- frequency spectrum for civilian usage. 398 00:40:18,960 --> 00:40:23,009 That would be very nice to have and there's a couple of initiatives in other 399 00:40:23,009 --> 00:40:30,249 countries that already start to deal with that, but what they always lack is 400 00:40:30,249 --> 00:40:37,200 actual information about the usage of the frequency spectrum that they want to 401 00:40:37,200 --> 00:40:42,099 reclaim for the public. So, yeah if you're interested in that you 402 00:40:42,099 --> 00:40:48,960 can find everything. Well, you have that. So, I'm just moving on to the next section 403 00:40:48,960 --> 00:40:55,779 which is a critical topic of protectionism and this is a new project. I'm presenting 404 00:40:55,779 --> 00:41:00,269 to you, also, I think for the first time now, in Germany, it's a project which 405 00:41:00,269 --> 00:41:04,569 stems from my idea that I actually wanted to go to these fences that are everywhere 406 00:41:04,569 --> 00:41:09,920 right now in Europe. Fences that were supposed to protect us from an influx of I 407 00:41:09,920 --> 00:41:16,670 don't know what and they are, well, especially prevalent in Slovenia and in 408 00:41:16,670 --> 00:41:26,480 places around Slovenia. So, I went there for a residency and first went to the 409 00:41:26,480 --> 00:41:32,480 fence between Slovenia and Austria. This is from the Slovenian side, obviously. So, 410 00:41:32,480 --> 00:41:36,589 it has this police marker on there and it's quite a solid, if you want so, 411 00:41:36,589 --> 00:41:41,019 fences. It actually says if you want to go through, please call us and we let you 412 00:41:41,019 --> 00:41:46,890 through. it obviously is not valid for non-citizens, but it's interesting because 413 00:41:46,890 --> 00:41:52,710 they really cut through all the very nice hiking trails and I'm an active hiker 414 00:41:52,710 --> 00:41:58,430 I'm kind of saddened to see these kind of things. But at the same time you have a 415 00:41:58,430 --> 00:42:02,569 street just 200 metres of that, which goes through the border and it doesn't have a 416 00:42:02,569 --> 00:42:06,559 fence, so I don't really understand what's going on there, but they were very happy 417 00:42:06,559 --> 00:42:14,130 to build these fence and now they have it there and don't know what to do with it. 418 00:42:14,130 --> 00:42:18,730 So I took this trip to the fence and did some field research. What I'm doing there 419 00:42:18,730 --> 00:42:25,660 is I was measuring conductivity of the fence, cause it's a metal construct, 420 00:42:25,660 --> 00:42:31,670 right, and I was also measuring the potential towards ground to see if 421 00:42:31,670 --> 00:42:38,190 I have a short-circuit there or not, if I can work with it somehow, just to give you 422 00:42:38,190 --> 00:42:42,240 an idea of where that is: It's actually somewhere you see Ljubljana there in 423 00:42:42,240 --> 00:42:46,369 Zagreb, it's kind of half the way it's in the middle of nowhere, it's a little 424 00:42:46,369 --> 00:42:55,109 village called Lastnič and where the next, actually, the next video was taking 425 00:42:55,109 --> 00:43:00,430 place. I'm now just gonna show you a little excerpt. 426 00:43:00,430 --> 00:43:07,109 Person 1 in Video: As the migration summit kicks off in Malta, Slovenia has started 427 00:43:07,109 --> 00:43:11,990 erecting a wire fence along it's border with Croatia, to help control the flow of 428 00:43:11,990 --> 00:43:15,140 people arriving daily. Person 2 in Video: Last year authorities 429 00:43:15,140 --> 00:43:19,819 rolled out more than 150 kilometers of barbed wire to stave off an influx of 430 00:43:19,819 --> 00:43:23,569 migrants, which never came. Person 3 in Video: Stories abound in the 431 00:43:23,569 --> 00:43:31,030 villages here, of farmers having lands cut into, of bears and deer cut to ribbons, of 432 00:43:31,030 --> 00:43:36,999 kids falling off their bikes into the wire and nobody has ever seen a refugee. 433 00:43:36,999 --> 00:43:41,630 Martin Reiche: So that last sentence is actually quite important, because they 434 00:43:41,630 --> 00:43:47,140 built this barbed wire, razor wire fence, which is stacked razor wire, military 435 00:43:47,140 --> 00:43:56,249 grade, for this border between Slovenia and Croatia, for zero refugees that 436 00:43:56,249 --> 00:44:02,339 ever even attempted to cross the border there, so they now have this huge fence, 437 00:44:02,339 --> 00:44:09,240 which is absolutely useless, and you just have animals that get somehow into the 438 00:44:09,240 --> 00:44:16,891 fence and then die being inside of this fence or at least get hurt a lot, but 439 00:44:16,891 --> 00:44:20,140 you still have this fence and everybody's kind of disgusted by this fence, so I 440 00:44:20,140 --> 00:44:25,249 thought that's quite lovely, I just should just go there and see what I can do and if 441 00:44:25,249 --> 00:44:32,650 I can do something, so I went to this fence, see that looks like this then, and 442 00:44:32,650 --> 00:44:37,249 I did the same thing again: I measured conductivity, measured ground potential of 443 00:44:37,249 --> 00:44:43,119 the fence, to get somehow an overview of how I could use the fence for an 444 00:44:43,119 --> 00:44:49,440 electronic intervention, to say it like this and finally - this is almost a 445 00:44:49,440 --> 00:44:55,150 religious position I like that somehow - finally I built a little device that's 446 00:44:55,150 --> 00:44:59,529 something that's hanging around there, it's very very rudimental, has been almost 447 00:44:59,529 --> 00:45:06,930 basically built on site, it's a little transmitter and an amplifier 448 00:45:06,930 --> 00:45:11,450 hanging at the border fence and the other one in the ground, that's just one 449 00:45:11,450 --> 00:45:18,839 meter there, doesn't really matter, was a proof of concept to send a signal over 450 00:45:18,839 --> 00:45:25,420 this fence, so I was interested in seeing how can you use this defensive 451 00:45:25,420 --> 00:45:32,720 architecture, which is really just there to make sure people can not be together, 452 00:45:32,720 --> 00:45:37,530 basically how can you use that as a network infrastructure, just to be honest, 453 00:45:37,530 --> 00:45:41,180 how can you just use that. Because it's conductive material, already lying there 454 00:45:41,180 --> 00:45:47,109 for free, why not use it for something actually useful or at least try to see if 455 00:45:47,109 --> 00:45:49,151 we could do something actually useful with it. 456 00:45:49,151 --> 00:45:58,500 It ended up in a project called razor wire modem of this year. It's a still somehow 457 00:45:58,500 --> 00:46:04,220 work-in-progress, because the modem part got a little omitted in the process of 458 00:46:04,220 --> 00:46:08,819 being there in Slovenia. In Slovenia was really just a transmitter and one 459 00:46:08,819 --> 00:46:13,769 receiver; the transmitter was sending some data on this fence and you had a receiver 460 00:46:13,769 --> 00:46:19,720 taking the data from the fence. They were connected through a ground return in the 461 00:46:19,720 --> 00:46:24,240 actual soil, so that you have the two connections that you need and I was 462 00:46:24,240 --> 00:46:30,329 sending data through this fence and I actually sent the Universal Declaration of 463 00:46:30,329 --> 00:46:35,539 Human Rights through the fence. *Applause* 464 00:46:35,539 --> 00:46:43,440 Martin Reiche: Especially article 14: Everyone has the right to seek and to 465 00:46:43,440 --> 00:46:52,220 enjoy in other countries Asylum from persecution. So I want to talk to you very 466 00:46:52,220 --> 00:46:56,910 briefly about new modes of activism I already said that: It's 467 00:46:56,910 --> 00:47:00,910 programming is the modern and the new form of activism and has to be understood as 468 00:47:00,910 --> 00:47:06,059 that, programming is something that you should learn right now from primary 469 00:47:06,059 --> 00:47:10,980 school as soon as possible, because it's just the way how to express in our modern 470 00:47:10,980 --> 00:47:18,990 world and actually how to be a bit a step ahead of the regulators. And coming to 471 00:47:18,990 --> 00:47:24,080 regulation that's going to get important. You have something I would call techno 472 00:47:24,080 --> 00:47:28,480 regulation which is the regulation of technology, which plays a lot of roles 473 00:47:28,480 --> 00:47:32,900 especially two: It's making sure technology functions as intended, so 474 00:47:32,900 --> 00:47:37,460 planes should, for example, not fall from the sky, radio frequency radio 475 00:47:37,460 --> 00:47:41,230 applications should not interfere with each other, and that's quite important, 476 00:47:41,230 --> 00:47:45,369 also making sure technology will function in the future in somehow 477 00:47:45,369 --> 00:47:50,589 predictive ways. So this is a problem for me, especially that predictive ways, 478 00:47:50,589 --> 00:47:55,670 because it limits freedom of expression and it's also a future-oriented policy 479 00:47:55,670 --> 00:47:59,550 that serves the goal, again, to predict some future scenarios. 480 00:47:59,550 --> 00:48:05,759 So there's of course counter examples of things that oppose this techno regulation, 481 00:48:05,759 --> 00:48:10,780 for example peer-to-peer protocols and anonymity networks or decentralized 482 00:48:10,780 --> 00:48:20,940 cryptographic currencies as an example, but it's not enough yet. So the next topic 483 00:48:20,940 --> 00:48:28,525 that directly speaks to me in that whole realm is quantification, because it is 484 00:48:28,525 --> 00:48:33,950 directly related to the regulation of technology, because it's basically the 485 00:48:33,950 --> 00:48:38,940 understanding or the trial to understand every occurrence of something in the world 486 00:48:38,940 --> 00:48:43,499 and to understand that as a signal that has to be processed, stored and later 487 00:48:43,499 --> 00:48:47,970 analyzed. And it happens on all levels, this quantification, not only analog to 488 00:48:47,970 --> 00:48:52,460 digital conversion, but the creation of symbols from electronic impulses and then 489 00:48:52,460 --> 00:48:59,069 to induce structure on the symbols, for example over predefined protocols or just 490 00:48:59,069 --> 00:49:06,029 learned, like in predictive analysis; I just talked about that. The question is 491 00:49:06,029 --> 00:49:12,319 here: Who is the enemy? I would say the enemy is everybody who sees us as their 492 00:49:12,319 --> 00:49:19,239 enemy, which is not really a solid definition, but I want to make sure that 493 00:49:19,239 --> 00:49:23,380 the enemy is not the institutions that create the policies, but it's the policy 494 00:49:23,380 --> 00:49:27,700 itself, so I'm not against the state if I'm building a system that deals with the 495 00:49:27,700 --> 00:49:32,440 policies that have been created by the people in this state, but I'm against that 496 00:49:32,440 --> 00:49:39,509 policy in the first place and that's quite important to me. So I talked to you about 497 00:49:39,509 --> 00:49:43,230 Laplace's daemon and I think if I stick together these two concepts of techno 498 00:49:43,230 --> 00:49:47,970 regulation and quantification I get Laplace's demon. 499 00:49:47,970 --> 00:49:53,769 It's an internal justification mechanism for complete surveillance, if you want, so 500 00:49:53,769 --> 00:49:57,710 it's the old concept of the world formula and I was I was telling you I'm telling 501 00:49:57,710 --> 00:50:02,510 you about the world formula and it's dangerous, because it creates a loop. I 502 00:50:02,510 --> 00:50:05,800 will give you one example: If you have a predictive system, which is built on 503 00:50:05,800 --> 00:50:11,410 some models of the world, it will predict somehow within this model and the more 504 00:50:11,410 --> 00:50:17,059 correct the predictions get, the more you will understand that if we change the 505 00:50:17,059 --> 00:50:22,840 world according to the prediction of this model then we will be better at 506 00:50:22,840 --> 00:50:31,390 understanding our world, so why not just change the world to our model, at least in 507 00:50:31,390 --> 00:50:35,519 some sense? Not very actively in saying: "Okay we should make our world a lot 508 00:50:35,519 --> 00:50:41,390 easier or a lot more more formal" but I think that's something that happens 509 00:50:41,390 --> 00:50:46,599 already and I said I'm coming from computer science, a bit mathematics and in 510 00:50:46,599 --> 00:50:51,369 statistics we have a term for the outcome of this process and we call it 511 00:50:51,369 --> 00:50:55,730 overfitting, so techno regulation and quantification somehow lead to an 512 00:50:55,730 --> 00:51:02,480 overfitting of the world formula. I just want to show you two outcomes, what it 513 00:51:02,480 --> 00:51:07,269 means to apply this world formula, which basically creates a justification for 514 00:51:07,269 --> 00:51:15,630 everything, is something that we heard in the news for a long time: Iraq's weapons 515 00:51:15,630 --> 00:51:20,980 of mass destruction. That's some of the or one outcome of the 516 00:51:20,980 --> 00:51:31,319 application of the world formula that you trust a Secret Service, because it's the 517 00:51:31,319 --> 00:51:38,980 Secret Service, it should know these kind of things. And the other thing that 518 00:51:38,980 --> 00:51:43,130 can happen, if you apply this world formula, is of course also extremism in 519 00:51:43,130 --> 00:51:48,411 the other way and in this sense I wanted to quote - not really quote but show you 520 00:51:48,411 --> 00:51:51,510 this because I was interested when I read about that. 521 00:51:51,510 --> 00:51:56,039 It's it's a kind of a security bulletin, published on the Internet Archive in 522 00:51:56,039 --> 00:52:00,809 November 2016: The general scope I will tell you about it is: How can you use 523 00:52:00,809 --> 00:52:06,769 information technology to conceal extremist activity and of course they are 524 00:52:06,769 --> 00:52:14,339 using the same some of the same visual metaphors that also the Bundeswehr in 525 00:52:14,339 --> 00:52:18,810 German is using. So but I don't want to end this talk on this very depressing 526 00:52:18,810 --> 00:52:22,419 topic, because kind of the application of the world formula is actually a depressing 527 00:52:22,419 --> 00:52:27,339 thing and I would urge you to understand that we have to do something against that. 528 00:52:27,339 --> 00:52:32,190 I want to quote something against that: "We have grown, but there's still much to 529 00:52:32,190 --> 00:52:36,230 be done. Many that live in darkness that must be shown the way, for it is the 530 00:52:36,230 --> 00:52:41,089 dawning of a new day." Thanks. *Applause* 531 00:52:41,089 --> 00:52:48,289 Herald: Martin Reiche. Martin Reiche. Jetzt geht's. 532 00:52:48,289 --> 00:52:56,499 Martin Reiche: Jetzt geht's Herald: Jetzt geht's. Martin Reiche, 533 00:52:56,499 --> 00:52:59,761 vielen Dank. Any questions? Martin Reiche: In German or English. 534 00:52:59,761 --> 00:53:06,698 Herald: In German or in English, feel free to attend one of our microphone stands. 535 00:53:06,698 --> 00:53:09,190 No questions? Martin Reiche: No questions 536 00:53:09,190 --> 00:53:12,193 Herald: Well then, let's go home. *both laugh* 537 00:53:12,193 --> 00:53:14,620 Martin Reiche: Thank you. Herald: Thank you. 538 00:53:14,620 --> 00:53:18,377 Thank you for listening. Martin Reiche. *Applause* 539 00:53:18,608 --> 00:53:36,726 *music* 540 00:53:36,726 --> 00:53:43,000 subtitles created by c3subtitles.de in the year 2020. Join, and help us!