Music
Herald: The man standing right from me is
Martin Reiche. Martin Reiche is a former
computer scientist with Karlsruhe
Institute for Technology. He went to study
media art and now is a self-employed media
artist covering space perception,
digitalization, power relations, and
minimal aesthetics. That sounds a bit arty
and it will be arty laughs in the best
way. His work was seen at exhibitions
festivals worldwide like in Spain, in
Russia, and of course, in Germany. For
example he used a border barbed wire fence
to accommodate Wi-Fi modems and connecting
people by a fence that's not supposed to
connect people. We're living in times
where there is architecture that's purpose
only seems to be to disconnect people or
for surveillance purposes or both, and
Martin Reiche here shows how to connect
this architecture with the arts and thus
reclaiming them against the actual
purpose. Please welcome Martin Reiche!
applause
Oh I'm sorry, it's been late yesterday!
The closing ceremony will be streamed
into this hall so you can just stay sit
until 18:30. Now Martin Reiche! Try this
with the applause again. applause
Martin Reiche: Thank you and thanks
everybody for coming, especially against
this other talk in the other room it's
quite a hard, yeah quite a hard thing to
compete against that, yeah. My name is
Martin Reiche, I'm from Berlin, I'm a
media artist. We just had that all
introduction thing, so I'm just going to
talk about what this talk will be about,
this talk, "Surveilling the Surveillers",
which is maybe more of a provocative call
for action than really an actual
description of what I'm going to talk
about. But don't run away because you will
understand in the end why I'm giving you
this disclaimer right now. Because I will
talk about current important critical
topics that are important for my own
practice and I'm gonna give some examples
not only from my own artistic practice but
also from other people's work that deal
with the same topics and I think it's
always important to really understand the
context where artistic work is situated in
order to understand the work itself. I
will also talk a bit about modern form of
activism and that I see computer science
and computer programming as this modern
form of activism. I will talk about
regulation of technology and the policies
concerning technology and the institutions
that make these policies. I will also talk
about quantification of the world,
somehow, and I will finish with a
something like a closed formula to
describe the whole world; which sounds a
bit impossible and it actually is, but
well that's where it will be going and
we'll see how that will evolve. So my
background, so we don't really need this
again, but I want to tell you a little bit
about some works that I did because it's a
variety of works that I'm dealing with, in
a variety of topics, for example topics
like electronic waste, digital footprints,
complexity, visual or conceptual glitch,
generative systems, generative
architecture, cybernetics, belief systems,
so it's a lot of buzzwords somehow
that always come up when you talk about
critical art.
But before starting with that I will tell
you a little story or we gonna talk about
this concept of the Laplace's demon which
will be important for the general scope of
this talk. Laplace's demon has been
postulated by Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1814
and it's basically an articulation of
scientific determinism and I'm starting to
quote this he Pierre-Simon Laplace says an
intellect which at a certain moment would
know all forces that set nature in motion
and all positions of all items of which
nature is composed if this intellect were
also vast enough to submit these data to
analysis for such an intellect nothing
would be uncertain and the future just
like the past would be present before its
eyes. I would just leave this here and I
will come back to that at the end of the
talk to have something like a closed loop
for this talk and I will start to talk
about critical topics which is topics that
are right now interesting especially also
for the arts which deal with
technology or with technological artifacts
and I will just start with something that
always comes up it's surveillance of
course surveillance and reconnaissance.
I'm putting this here together not because
I think it's the they are identical things
but because both topics have been I would
say far too widely discussed already in an
artistic context. So I'm just going to
show you some examples of artistic works
that deal with surveillance and
reconnaissance and especially works that
are important to me.
So yeah I just said that I'm not gonna
talk that much about surveillance which
sounds counterintuitive if I call this
talks surveilling the surveyors but it's
not really the optical surveillance like
taking a nice panchromatic shot of the
Earth's surface that I'm interested or
this is a work by me it's called scan
lines of Aleppo that's also consisting of
panchromatic satellite imagery from a
former classified now declassified US
reconnaissance satellite used by the
military they now have a vast archive
where they publish these old well data
from overflights and you can
basically take them from different times
in different years you can stack them upon
each other which I did here and I was also
producing this work it has a glass on top
of it and I was basically engraving the
flight path of the satellite in order to
give somehow a physical idea of the
trajectory of an actual satellite that is
flying over the Earth's surface. I'm also
going to talk a bit about electronic
tracking especially electronic tracking
through unique identifiers so well that's
SIM cards at least in Germany they are
mapped to a person's identity by law so if
you buy SIM cards you have to give away
parts of the data about your identity in
order to be allowed to have one. So these
SIM cards are unique identifiers to your
person and make it very easy of course to
track you and your behavior and so on.
And I just want to start with one work of
friends of mine that, at least Dania was
here at this conference he's now not here
anymore. This work is called prism
the beacon frame and it's a work that
takes this idea of I have a SIM card and
it identifies me somehow and it takes also
the idea of the authority that actually is
allowed to put cell phone towers it takes
this they just create their own cell phone
tower and they send you messages when you
come close to these cell phone towers like
this welcome to a new NSA partner Network
so this is basically produced IMSI catcher
that just tells you very decently that
well you're just being surveilled in a
sense. It's a work that's been also
legally problematic of course because
usually in Germany you are not allowed to
do these things in an artistic context you
have a bit more freedom to deal with these
kind of things. So that's maybe an example
for surveillance in a sense that you
already know it's the no longer in
effect actually directive 2006 24 EC which
is a well European Union directive that we
just tend to call the
"Vorratsdatenspeicherung".
In Germany we now have unfortunately since
December 2015 the "Gesetz zur Einfuehrung
einer Speicherpflicht und einer
Hoechstspeicherpflicht fuer
Verkehrsdaten". We just heard a very
interesting talk in the first hall also
about how this now developed in the last
couple of months on also the last couple
of days unfortunately and you can see
this as the National predecessor of this
directive so here I put this in the same
corner as also the
artworks about surveillance because I
think one thing is very important is these
things about policies because policies are
basically the rules that
define how we live together but they're
also the rules that are mostly well
problematic for us as people working in
technology because they somehow have to
adhere to them even if you do not
ethically agree to them.
That's another maybe nice example for that
biometric surveillance is something very
prevalent right now especially taking
fingerprints for example at airports
International airports or getting DNA or
having a DNA screening of your person
and these things are usually right now
unfortunately mostly taken from immigrants
and especially we have this
problem in Germany with the influx of
immigrants where at what the first thing
of course that came up was well how do we
identify them and how do we make this
basically as smooth as possible which of
course the easiest way to do it is just to
take as much data from the people as
possible which is of course ethically a
bit problematic, a lot.
So another topic that falls in this
category of surveillance and
reconnaissance is predictive analysis and
that's not the computer scientist in me
speaking because that's where I'm coming
from. I was dealing with machine learning
and distributed algorithms so predictive
analysis is something that I think is
extremely important and like three
examples of predictive analysis is for
example prediction of the user behavior
which goes directly hand-in-hand with user
tracking but also market prediction
through for example if you have a high-
frequency trading algorithm you want to
predict the the future development of the
market to make very fast decisions on
these predictions and these brought
us a lot of problems lately. This is an
example for such a problem they're usually
called flash crashes which is very short
time frames in which some stocks lose a
lot of value this is a thing the stock of
natural gas around 2011 in June and what
you can see here in this stock market
development over time and this is just a
couple of minutes, this is 1940 until
1955, so that's 15 minutes of market
movement data. And you see these nice
oscillations that get worse and worse so
there's something that doesn't look very
natural and at some point it just ends in
a crash which
is, I think, a loss of 20% of equity for
the company, which is quite a lot and it's
actually in 15 seconds, happening around
15 seconds, so your predictive analysis is
a problem. You can go even further and
say, "Well predictive analysis also right
now is used for crime prediction." So
there's companies selling software to
cities in order to predict where the next
crime is supposed... or is probably
happening and take some pre-cautionary
measures to make sure that the crime is
actually not happening or just go and
catch somebody and just see what happens.
So yeah, that again, of course, is
ethically problematic. So, coming to the
next topic would be regulations and
policies... and especially enforcing
policies on citizens. What does that mean?
Well, the easiest way how to understand it
is laws. The laws of a country are
basically the easiest and the easiest-to-
comprehend way to enforce a policy upon
your citizens, but it's not only these
kind of laws, but then you have some
policy, some regulations, which are a bit
harder to grasp or harder to get
access to. So you really have to do a lot
of research to understand what is actually
going on here, but it still has an effect
on you. This, for example, is a NATO
document, which shows the basic military
allocation for the radio frequency
spectrum and I'm showing you this, because
it will get a little bit more important
for a work that I did on some research on
these military regulations for the radio
frequency spectrum. And I'm staying in
this realm of radio frequency, I'm
actually going to show you... If that
works... No, I don't have the other
screen; that's very nice... Show you some
example.
[Music]
So, this is a recording at 13.3 megahertz.
The recording is somewhere in Germany and
it's the so called "Chinese firedrake
AM jammer" It's a jammer that is used
by... or has been used by the government
of the People's Republic of China and they
use it against other states' radio
stations. So, they basically use it to jam
the stations of other countries. For
example, this was the sound of Hope Taiwan
Radio, which you cannot really hear
anymore, because the only thing you hear
is this strange Chinese folk song. And
that's somehow also a way to enforce a
policy on your people by just blocking
access to something that the people could
have access to if you wouldn't enforce
your policy on there... That doesn't work
now... Another example here is an artwork:
It's an artwork called "All about you".
It's by Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez
Janša, which is an artist group from
Slovenia, that... It's an artist
collective, that at some point decided, as
an artwork, to all change their names to
"Janez Janša", who is a former Slovenian
prime minister, so they now all have the
same name and it's the same name as the
prime minister, which is in itself a...
quite an interesting work of art. And this
is one of their newer works, where they
basically had this contract with one
Slovenian bank, where they could, whenever
they lose a credit card, they can just
replace it with a new one and they can, at
the same time, also just specify the
photograph that they want to have on their
credit card, so they decided to make...
How many are there? I think about 120,
150... to reproduce the Slovenian passport
of one of the members of Janez Janša. And
there actually exist 3 of these collages
for all the 3 members of the artist
collective and I think they're not yet
complete or some got lost, I'm not sure
what's the reason that some are missing,
but it's a nice way to subvert this idea
that there is this policy that also says
that every...
there's one identity mapped to one person,
especially if you think about what a name
means. Now you have 4 people having the
same name, also kind of having a very
similar, at least these three people, kind
of similar biography by working together,
so if you see a work of art, you don't
even know who it was, that was the
first... maybe the first person that came
up with the idea. And even if they tell
you, you don't really know what that
means, because everybody has the same
name; it doesn't really make sense.
Thinking more about policies: Another
interesting important work here is
"Loophole4All" by Paolo Cirio. He got, I
think, the Golden Nica 2014 for this work,
where he basically sold for very cheap, I
think for 99 cents, these certificates of
incorporation from some companies in the
Cayman Islands. I think, basically all
companies in the Cayman Islands, they are,
of course, not valid, but they also, which
is interesting in these certificates, they
don't really need official stamps or
anything. You can basically also
incorporate a company there extremely
easily and, of course, it's a loophole for
tax evasion that's used by companies
worldwide, and he wanted to make it more
accessible to people, so he just thought
about "Why not sell that for a dollar to
people?" or "a dollar, then you can
download it and $2 or $3 and then you get
a real certificate out of it". So that's
also quite an artistic way to deal with
policy.
And probably another quite prominent
picture is this of the Liberator gun I
think you've probably all heard of this
one it's been around for a couple of years
now and popped up on on the Pirate Bay and
it's basically a completely 3D-printed
working one-shot gun and, yeah, it
actually has a predecessor which is
interesting which a lot of people don't
know which was also called liberator. It's
called FP 45 liberator and it's from World
War II and it had, it also was a one-shot
gun, and the idea there was a little bit
different though. It was
produced for around 2 US dollars, so it
was a very, very cheap cheap gun, just
created out of scrap metal parts and it
had one shot and it was given out to
resistance forces in the occupied
territories and the idea was that one shot
is enough to kill an enemy and take his
weapon so we can basically rearm yourself.
Hence the name Liberator. So I was talking
about enforcing policies on citizens but
there's not only citizens but there's also
the others not saying the others the
non-citizens of your country, so enforcing
policies on others is also obviously an
important thing to talk about and I'm just
going to show you one picture which sums
up enforcing policies on non-citizens
which is the US drone program bringing
democracy to a country near you. So
another topic is the obsolescence of
political borders and that's also now
we're where my work comes up and I was
very happy to be able to take part in a
project that was initiated by two artists
that gave a talk last year here. It's an
artist collective, KairUs, they gave a
talk because they went to Ghana to a
site called Agbogbloshie, which is an
electronic waste dump, it's actually, I
think right now the biggest electronic
waste dump in the world and they were
collecting hard drives. They were buying
hard drives, basically, from this e-waste
dump. And it's quite cheap you can get a
hard drive for a dollar and they sell them
usually in bulk, like you get a big box
and supposedly take a big box with you and
they also tell you this story that usually
people come and buy, well a lot of them,
not one box but 20 boxes. Of course not to
have in the end these old hard drives
because they're like, from a technical
perspective quite useless, but because of
the data that's on the hard drive that's
potentially useful because you can use it
for abuse schemes against the previous
owners. So, they brought 22 hard drives
back to Europe, to Austria and then did a
forensic analysis and were able to recover
a couple of, I don't know,
it was something about
200 gigabytes of data. And it was a bit
too much for them, so they decided to give
it out to other artists and to somehow
deal with it, to dig through it, and we
somehow did and it ended up in having, we
had a nice exhibition about electronic
waste and the remainders of data that you
will find in this electronic waste. And
just saying that what I've seen cannot be
unseen you don't really want to deal or to
dig through the private data of a lot of
people that you don't know, especially
because I was interested especially in
video and images. Um, yeah, I made a work
out of it I will tell you about it in a
second. What we also did in this project
was to try to get a understanding for what
are the problems of this whole electronic
lifecycle. So, before you have your phone
in your hand of course, well, it was
assembled somewhere and before it was
assembled, you needed to have the
resources in very physical terms, the
rare earths that you need to produce the
components and you have to
mine them somewhere and usually it happens
in countries which are rather poor and it
happens under extreme conditions. People
that work there are dying very fast, so we
created a project that tries to map this,
well, what is behind this smart world,
like all this life cycles of
electronic components and
exhibited at US Electronica this year. So,
that was actually quite a nice project,
also to just get an overview that this is
really a global problem and a global
phenomenon. Yeah, what I wanted to tell
you, is this, about this project called
Shell Performance. That's one of the
projects that I did based on the data, so
you already see someone in the middle of
the, of the the middle screen to the the
lower part is something that well you
could probably identify as a female
person, and I was interested in the
private data and especially the private
videos and images that were still
available on these hard drives. And the
more I was interested in it, the more
I was disgusted by it, a disgust that is
specifically
because it's one of these things that
sounds interesting when you think about it
and sounds like you really learn something
from it. But you learn too much, too fast,
you kind of start to feel into the
identity of, not only one identity, but
sometimes more identities of the people
that were the former owners of the hard
drives and so I decided to just work with
the material that I found on the hard
drives that I could definitely make out to
be commercial productions. Which was still
a lot. So I'm going to show you a video, I
hope it works. Internet. Yeah, there's no
sound. So the work is, it's basically a
shell script, so it's a program that runs
through the contents of the hard drives
which are attached to, to the, to the
computer and spits away, basically puts
out images or stills of videos and renders
them as, in ASCII fashion, just on that
screen and it looks a bit like matrix
tiles, so we have a little, well that's
quite hard, quite easy to understand
what's happening there and it puts out all
these files which at some point are
pornographic, mainstream pornographic
images. The other side are sometimes just
party photos of the former owners, so it's
a very diverse and a bit strange collage
of a person's life, of a person's digital
life that you get and it's quite
unsettling in what it evokes in you I
think when you look at it. So and in this,
I hope, and in this exhibition there were
also a couple of other projects that
happened, for example of that group
KairUs, that actually got us the hard
drives, they were able with actually a lot
of effort to identify or personally
identify one of the former owners of one
of the hard drives and decided to create a
project in which they hypothetically sent
back this hard drive to the former owner.
They knew that the hard drive has been
discarded about ten years ago, they still
were able to figure out the new address
because they were able to figure out the
new employer of that specific person and
they named this project Not
A Blackmail because, well, they actually
don't want to send it to the person, but
in a gallery you see it as, like the work
already basically having the stamps and
and address of the person on it. But
they're not sending it, unfortunately. So,
if I'm talking about the obsolescence of
national borders, one thing that
immediately comes to mind is satellites.
Yeah, satellites. But then if you think
about a much, much older concept than
satellites, there's short wave propagation
so that's it's our nice radio frequency
phenomenon that or shortwave radio, you
know it's AM radio for example, so the old
school radio that some people still have
in their cars for example. This technology
is interesting because its, first it's
meant to be for a, let's say a closer
space, like for example a little, little
country or a state so you can have a
statewide radio program. But it also has
this property that it gets reflected from
the ionosphere if you just have an angle
which is high enough and you just sent the
signal basically to the sky. It gets
reflected there and it comes back to earth
and it also gets reflected there again and
then you can, you can basically hop quite
far up to a couple of thousand kilometres
across earth. So it's one of the reasons
why you sometimes, especially at night
where propagation of radio frequency is,
it's much better than at day, you're able
to listen to Chinese radio here for
example, like the Fire, FireDragon, Fire
Drake Jammer. So, and then based on this
technology, you have some other
technology. It's called Over-the-Horizon
Radar, for example. Which is interesting,
somehow obsolete now after having
satellites for reconnaissance, but it's
still widely used. And Over-the-Horizon
Radar is interesting because it uses this
short wave propagation characteristics in
order to locate enemy troops on the
ground. And one way how you can use it
basically, is you create these stations in
your own territory, you just point them to
your enemy territory or just
other territory and you get quite a good
and close look of
what's happening there. It's not only the
US that's doing this, it's also I think,
Russia, Japan and Australia have active
systems. And right now it's actually quite
active, one of these systems is quite
active here in in Germany but it's coming
over the horizon from the Russian
Federation. So, yeah, this is a also VLF
transmitter, it's called Cutler, it's also
a US Navy transmitter.
By the way all these images are also taken
from the US Navy. So, one of the reasons
why I can use them here, because
everything that's produced by a
governmental agency in the United States
is in directly public domain, which is
very nice also to to work with the
interesting thing with these very low
frequency transmitters which are usually
used to communicate to submarines at the
other side of the world and it works quite
well is that they have a very nice
geometric structure like this one, for
example. So, this geometric structure is
usually important for the correct
functioning of this transmitter and I was
quite happy to see this nice geometry
especially coming from computer science
being kind of mathematically educated and
I somehow wanted to work with that. That's
what was coming out of it. It's not that
geometrically sound I would say, but it's
a project that's now been going on since
2015. It's called “Kilohertz” and it's
quite an international project I would say
and this site is right now in Brazil. It's
somewhere between São Paulo and Rio de
Janeiro. There's not that much going on
there, so it's quite a rural place to be.
I created this installation in order to
listen to specific frequency ranges. So
kilohertz is an antenna and that's
something that is quite hard to see even
quite harder to see even if you're
standing in front of it, because the the
antenna is – looks a bit like this. The
antenna is comprised of very fine copper
wire which has a diameter of about 0.3
millimeter, so it's almost not – you can
almost not see it if you're not standing
in front of it and actually know where it
is and you can focus with your eye on it.
But it apparently is quite good in order
to receive military radio communications
and transmissions and that is what I'm
interested in this project is to receive
these military radio communications I was
just talking about that shortwave radio,
because of the propagation characteristics
is an interesting thing to use for the
military, not only for this radar, but
also, for example, to have a uni-
directive call – a channel – to, for
example, submerged submarines and it's
also quite actively still used for
communications between military bases. So
this happened to be just about 60
kilometers away from a federal police /
military. That's kind of the same thing in
there in Brazil. Complex that most people
don't really know what's going on there,
but when I was there I was interested to
see if I can actually somehow get
something out of there – if I can actually
prove at least that there's some military
communication towards the space going on.
And it turns out to be, of course, quite
hard to do so, but what I was really
interested in is not only to see how this
happens in Brazil, but how is that
everywhere else in the world – because
listening or trying to listen to military
communications is legally always a kind of
complicated thing in Brazil. Usually, when
I give these kind of talks that say in
Brazil they have other problems they don't
need to think about somebody receiving
military transmissions. They should work
on other problems, but in other countries
that might be seen in a different way. So
I executed this project also in Estonia
just 20 kilometers to the Russian border.
I also executed this project in Norway and
in Berlin. Actually, there is one active
instance running right now in Berlin
always listening to the same basically
frequency ranges which are military
classified, well, classified military
frequency ranges that you could see or you
were able to see just longer ago on one of
these slides.
So, the way how these things, these
antennas work is very, very simple. So, I
take the, basically, simplest way how to
build an antenna and build it. This is a
very, very easy setup. So, it looks like
an inverted “V”. It works quite well for
very potent signals and the rest of the
hardware that you need is very cheap and
the antenna itself is very cheap, because
the only thing you need for the antenna is
basically copper wire and for the rest of
the station a Raspberry Pi – with a little
bit of software and a RTL SDR dongle is
enough to do it. So it costs less than 50
bucks to create a surveillance or counter-
surveillance station against these
military facilities. There's a couple of
other ways how you can actually build
these antennas. Some this again, these
images are now taken from, I think, it's a
navy field manual. So, it's a manual
that's given to people in the field for
the scenario that their antenna is broken,
so they need to build a new one and I'm
kind of using this knowledge against them,
which is just a interesting sidenote, I
think. So, there's different ways how to
build these antennas. They even have that
military radio transmitter. That's another
way how you could potentially build that
and in the end you get very interesting
nice power sweeps, nice images out of it.
They are power sweeps – what that means is
I'm just defining a frequency range that
I'm interested in and then I basically
have a computer program that just goes
just step by step and measures the
intensity of signal that's there and in
the end, over time, which is the y-axis if
you want. It creates these images which
don't tell you what exactly is going on
there, but it gives you proof that
something is going on there and that some
communication is taking place.
The only thing you have to do then is to
verify that it's actually a military or
civilian usage and you can do that by
looking into the policies, that have to be
somehow made available to the public
usually through the regulatory
institutions in the specific countries,
for example, the FCC in the US or – what
was it in Europe – the Bundesnetzagentur
in Germany which have to publish it, in
order to make sure that nobody interferes
with official signals military or
governmental or signals as part of a
frequency bands which have been sold for a
lot of money to institutions in the
country. So, publishing – I think, for the
first time now – an official call for
participation and I'm doing this because
the “Kilohertz” project, I've talked about
this project a couple of times already in
different countries and everybody at
these places was interested somehow to
offer two square meters of space to build
a little antenna somewhere and to push all
the information that this antenna spits
out into a public GitHub repository and
just give out information to the rest of
the world. And the reason is why should
you actually do that – like what is the
real gain in doing that. And one gain is
to understand that some parts of the
frequency spectrum that are reserved to
the military – and the military has most
of the frequency spectrum reserved for it
– is actually never used and that could
also be made available to the public. It
could also be made available for resale to
commercial companies. I'm not in favor of
that, but I would like to be “Kilohertz” a
project that's able to provide evidence
for non-usage of radio frequency bands in
order to support groups that are active in
trying to reclaim parts of the RF-
frequency spectrum for civilian usage.
That would be very nice to have and
there's a couple of initiatives in other
countries that already start to deal
with that, but what they always lack is
actual information about the usage of the
frequency spectrum that they want to
reclaim for the public.
So, yeah if you're interested in that you
can find everything. Well, you have that.
So, I'm just moving on to the next section
which is a critical topic of protectionism
and this is a new project. I'm presenting
to you, also, I think for the first time
now, in Germany, it's a project which
stems from my idea that I actually wanted
to go to these fences that are everywhere
right now in Europe. Fences that were
supposed to protect us from an influx of I
don't know what and they are, well,
especially prevalent in Slovenia and in
places around Slovenia. So, I went there
for a residency and first went to the
fence between Slovenia and Austria. This
is from the Slovenian side, obviously. So,
it has this police marker on there and
it's quite a solid, if you want so,
fences. It actually says if you want to go
through, please call us and we let you
through. it obviously is not valid for
non-citizens, but it's interesting because
they really cut through all the very
nice hiking trails and I'm an active hiker
I'm kind of saddened to see these kind of
things. But at the same time you have a
street just 200 metres of that, which goes
through the border and it doesn't have a
fence, so I don't really understand what's
going on there, but they were very happy
to build these fence and now they have it
there and don't know what to do with it.
So I took this trip to the fence and did
some field research. What I'm doing there
is I was measuring conductivity of the
fence, cause it's a metal construct,
right, and I was also measuring the
potential towards ground to see if
I have a short-circuit there or not, if I
can work with it somehow, just to give you
an idea of where that is: It's actually
somewhere you see Ljubljana there in
Zagreb, it's kind of half the way it's in
the middle of nowhere, it's a little
village called Lastnič and where the
next, actually, the next video was taking
place. I'm now just gonna show you a
little excerpt.
Person 1 in Video: As the migration summit
kicks off in Malta, Slovenia has started
erecting a wire fence along it's border
with Croatia, to help control the flow of
people arriving daily.
Person 2 in Video: Last year authorities
rolled out more than 150 kilometers of
barbed wire to stave off an influx of
migrants, which never came.
Person 3 in Video: Stories abound in the
villages here, of farmers having lands cut
into, of bears and deer cut to ribbons, of
kids falling off their bikes into the wire
and nobody has ever seen a refugee.
Martin Reiche: So that last sentence is
actually quite important, because they
built this barbed wire, razor wire fence,
which is stacked razor wire, military
grade, for this border between Slovenia
and Croatia, for zero refugees that
ever even attempted to cross the border
there, so they now have this huge fence,
which is absolutely useless, and you just
have animals that get somehow into the
fence and then die being inside of this
fence or at least get hurt a lot, but
you still have this fence and everybody's
kind of disgusted by this fence, so I
thought that's quite lovely, I just should
just go there and see what I can do and if
I can do something, so I went to this
fence, see that looks like this then, and
I did the same thing again: I measured
conductivity, measured ground potential of
the fence, to get somehow an overview of
how I could use the fence for an
electronic intervention, to say it like
this and finally - this is almost a
religious position I like that somehow -
finally I built a little device that's
something that's hanging around there,
it's very very rudimental, has been almost
basically built on site, it's a little
transmitter and an amplifier
hanging at the border fence and the
other one in the ground, that's just one
meter there, doesn't really matter, was a
proof of concept to send a signal over
this fence, so I was interested in
seeing how can you use this defensive
architecture, which is really just there
to make sure people can not be together,
basically how can you use that as a
network infrastructure, just to be honest,
how can you just use that. Because it's
conductive material, already lying there
for free, why not use it for something
actually useful or at least try to see if
we could do something actually useful
with it.
It ended up in a project called razor wire
modem of this year. It's a still somehow
work-in-progress, because the modem part
got a little omitted in the process of
being there in Slovenia. In Slovenia was
really just a transmitter and one
receiver; the transmitter was sending some
data on this fence and you had a receiver
taking the data from the fence. They were
connected through a ground return in the
actual soil, so that you have the two
connections that you need and I was
sending data through this fence and I
actually sent the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights through the fence.
Applause
Martin Reiche: Especially article 14:
Everyone has the right to seek and to
enjoy in other countries Asylum from
persecution. So I want to talk to you very
briefly about new modes of activism I
already said that: It's
programming is the modern and the new form
of activism and has to be understood as
that, programming is something that you
should learn right now from primary
school as soon as possible, because it's
just the way how to express in our modern
world and actually how to be a bit a step
ahead of the regulators. And coming to
regulation that's going to get important.
You have something I would call techno
regulation which is the regulation of
technology, which plays a lot of roles
especially two: It's making sure
technology functions as intended, so
planes should, for example, not fall from
the sky, radio frequency radio
applications should not interfere with
each other, and that's quite important,
also making sure technology will
function in the future in somehow
predictive ways. So this is a problem for
me, especially that predictive ways,
because it limits freedom of expression
and it's also a future-oriented policy
that serves the goal, again, to predict
some future scenarios.
So there's of course counter examples of
things that oppose this techno regulation,
for example peer-to-peer protocols and
anonymity networks or decentralized
cryptographic currencies as an example,
but it's not enough yet. So the next topic
that directly speaks to me in that whole
realm is quantification, because it is
directly related to the regulation of
technology, because it's basically the
understanding or the trial to understand
every occurrence of something in the world
and to understand that as a signal that
has to be processed, stored and later
analyzed. And it happens on all levels,
this quantification, not only analog to
digital conversion, but the creation of
symbols from electronic impulses and then
to induce structure on the symbols, for
example over predefined protocols or just
learned, like in predictive analysis; I
just talked about that. The question is
here: Who is the enemy? I would say the
enemy is everybody who sees us as their
enemy, which is not really a solid
definition, but I want to make sure that
the enemy is not the institutions that
create the policies, but it's the policy
itself, so I'm not against the state if
I'm building a system that deals with the
policies that have been created by the
people in this state, but I'm against that
policy in the first place and that's quite
important to me. So I talked to you about
Laplace's daemon and I think if I stick
together these two concepts of techno
regulation and quantification I get
Laplace's demon.
It's an internal justification mechanism
for complete surveillance, if you want, so
it's the old concept of the world formula
and I was I was telling you I'm telling
you about the world formula and it's
dangerous, because it creates a loop. I
will give you one example: If you have
a predictive system, which is built on
some models of the world, it will predict
somehow within this model and the more
correct the predictions get, the more you
will understand that if we change the
world according to the prediction of this
model then we will be better at
understanding our world, so why not just
change the world to our model, at least in
some sense? Not very actively in saying:
"Okay we should make our world a lot
easier or a lot more more formal" but I
think that's something that happens
already and I said I'm coming from
computer science, a bit mathematics and in
statistics we have a term for the outcome
of this process and we call it
overfitting, so techno regulation and
quantification somehow lead to an
overfitting of the world formula. I just
want to show you two outcomes, what it
means to apply this world formula, which
basically creates a justification for
everything, is something that we heard in
the news for a long time: Iraq's weapons
of mass destruction.
That's some of the or one outcome of the
application of the world formula that you
trust a Secret Service, because it's the
Secret Service, it should know these
kind of things. And the other thing that
can happen, if you apply this world
formula, is of course also extremism in
the other way and in this sense I wanted
to quote - not really quote but show you
this because I was interested when I
read about that.
It's it's a kind of a security bulletin,
published on the Internet Archive in
November 2016: The general scope I will
tell you about it is: How can you use
information technology to conceal
extremist activity and of course they are
using the same some of the same visual
metaphors that also the Bundeswehr in
German is using. So but I don't want to
end this talk on this very depressing
topic, because kind of the application of
the world formula is actually a depressing
thing and I would urge you to understand
that we have to do something against that.
I want to quote something against that:
"We have grown, but there's still much to
be done. Many that live in darkness that
must be shown the way, for it is the
dawning of a new day." Thanks.
Applause
Herald: Martin Reiche. Martin Reiche.
Jetzt geht's.
Martin Reiche: Jetzt geht's
Herald: Jetzt geht's. Martin Reiche,
vielen Dank. Any questions?
Martin Reiche: In German or English.
Herald: In German or in English, feel free
to attend one of our microphone stands.
No questions?
Martin Reiche: No questions
Herald: Well then, let's go home.
both laugh
Martin Reiche: Thank you.
Herald: Thank you.
Thank you for listening. Martin Reiche.
Applause
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