Surveillance Baits (#H4yR)

Pitch for the Hack4YourRights 2013 EU hackathon.
The presented visualization is available at http://mattischneider.fr/h4yr
For more info, see http://2013.euhackathon.eu/

Transcript

1. 1 Surveillance baits Matti Schneider @matti_sg This pitch was given at the end of the 2013 EU hackathon, on the topic of government surveillance.
2. “What does government surveillance around the world look like?” 2 Question asked. “citizens should know when and why governments demand access to their information” To help answer that question, I obviously did NOT visualize government surveillance.
3. datavisualization 3 Indeed, to do a datavisualization, you first need… data.
4. datavisualization 4 We'll never get proper data. Transparency reports are nice but limited to a few big US companies that accept to deliver them, and no one can validate their content. And what about users that don't use their services? But, more importantly, I don't think they are about the kind of activity that comes to citizen's minds when they hear the word “surveillance” today. They are not thinking about the nice and polite requests from administrations, that can be refused is due process is not respected.
5. 5 This is about mass surveillance. The kind that is so secret that states would hunt the ones hinting about its existence through the whole world. The kind that grounds presidential planes for hours on a suspicion. The kind that relies on secret courts that can give secret orders that violate the very constitution the institutions are supposed to protect. Are we actually expecting to obtain _data_ on such activities?
6. 6 That's impossible. Now, the good question is: what can we actually see that could help us think about government surveillance, if we can never see how it is done?
7. 7 Well, there is one thing we know. And that is, what a state willing to do mass surveillance is after. Just like us, they are after data. So, if we can't observe the bear, what about spotting the honeypots it is interested in? This is my main hypothesis: if we shed a light bright enough on the weak points and potential targets for surveillance, then we'll at least get an idea of which states could do surveillance, and to what extent.
8. 8 mattischneider.fr/h4yr Classical geographical map with features. Best suited here. Why so? Because states are defined by their physical boundaries. Try to change them to check. Yes, as said in intro, “there are no foreigners in cyberspace”, and there should not be. Nor is surveillance limited to the physical ground of a country, of course. But, as the NSA admitted itself in internal documents, the US were able to get so much data mostly because they are such an important node for worldwide communications. For EU citizens in particular, an interesting point could be: considering how much data we now know the US acquired with its infrastructure…
9. 9 mattischneider.fr/h4yr …what could states in the EU do if they were to do the same kind of surveillance?
10. Thanks! mattischneider.fr/h4yr • Images • Evil Eye designed by Cengiz Sari from The Noun Project • Thanks • Chloé Chevalier • Clément Schneider • Anouchka Labonne • Lætitia Carrara 10 Thanks for your attention.