Surveilling the surveillers (33c3)

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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