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Yeah. Welcome to the second talk
of the day you could guest tonight.
This talk is going to be in English
because it's about a European initiative.
It's about Reclaim your face.
LA will take over the main part,
and I works for Italy
Louella Um,
and she will explain why a ban
of biometric mass surveillance is
so important.
And what?
Yeah, what is the state of the laws
at the moment and why do we do
support this initiative?
And then we'll
have, uh, two, two short
videos from from Italy and from
out and see what's what
other organizations are
doing because the Reclaim Your Face
campaign is I don't know
how many, how many initiatives
are in there.
It's quite a few.
Sixty eight
sixty eight.
Wow. Wow.
That's a that's quite a bit.
Yes.
Um yeah.
But before we start, we do
have the honor of world
premiere of a short film
explaining what
to reclaim your face is all about its,
uh, animation film by
Alexandre Liman, and the
film will be available under
CC licenses after this talk
at media, CCC, digital collage
and, well, the
the regular sources.
I guess you know of them.
OK, so let's
let's watch the watch
the video first. They.
At a time when injustice is growing,
populists and racists are on the rise
as we are also trying to combat
discrimination based on appearance and
origin.
The EU supports the research and
use of technology that further
intensifies these problems.
Biometric mass surveillance systems
The hope associated with this is
understandable.
More security, more efficiency.
Less crime.
But from a scientific point of view,
it is not justified
because every artificial intelligence
has to be trained with selected data,
so it always learns the unconscious
biases of its programmers.
In practice, they are self-reinforcing.
Fully automated and incredibly fast,
these people cause problems quite often.
They need to be watched more closely.
These people cause problems quite often.
They need to be watched more closely.
These people cause problems quite often.
They need to watch more closely.
Is what happens.
And if you are thinking, Oh, that doesn't
concern me, I have nothing to hide.
It is worth looking at how this typically
progresses.
Even harmless looking systems, which
were initially intended only for
convenient selective identification,
are subsequently also used for large
scale monitoring.
It makes sense if the technology
exists. It was expensive to purchase
and can recognize suspects.
Up until now, virtually every
system that was potentially capable of
surveillance has sooner or later been
used for it.
And with biometric data, it becomes
especially dangerous.
For example, even without your knowledge,
your face can end up in databases which
can always identify you everywhere
completely automatically.
If your data is then shared or sold on
and linked with other data, it could have
a devastating impact on your life.
Your credit worthiness, for example,
could be restricted.
You could lose just your freedom to
travel, or you could lose all
your freedom.
But even if a perfect, safe, fair
and completely neutral monitoring system
existed, there would always be a side
effect. The so-called chilling
effect
According to this effect, people who feel
that they are being watched automatically
behave in a more conformist way
because they want to avoid attracting
attention.
As a result, resistance to injustice
and solidarity within society decrease
with far reaching consequences.
But the EU has the opportunity
to stop this trend now.
Help us and reclaim our public space.
Claim your rights to privacy,
to freedom of speech, to protest
and to freedom from discrimination.
What we need now are fair,
nondiscriminatory systems with a
human sense of proportion and reason.
This creates jobs and frees up urgently
needed resources because
the biggest problems that threaten our
security cannot be solved
with biometric surveillance profiling
and associated questionable fortune.
On the contrary, these are an
additional danger to our rule of law
and our most important fundamental
rights. So sign the European
Citizens' Initiative for a new law
for a ban on biometric mass
surveillance.
Reclaim your faith, Scott EU.
Yeah, so thank you very much to
Alexander Lehman and the Chaos
Computer Club for producing this video.
I know we're talking about mass
surveillance at an event like this is
always like preaching to the choir.
But I think the video is very
helpful if you want to explain others
what the whole problem is all about and
also all your 10 thousands of hackers out
there. Please sign this petition.
So, um, now,
uh uh,
olah. Um, I give give
the word so you um,
and you're going to.
Yeah. Explain us what what the
initiative and the
ECI is all about, right?
That's exactly what I'm going to do, so
thank you and I will jump
into it right now.
Hopefully, you can see my slides.
Yes, we do.
Fantastic. All right.
I will get straight to it then.
Hello, AC three, I'm
Ella Yakabuski coming live
to you from Brussels, the home
of EU law and policy making.
So it's quite convenient that I work here
for an organization called Every European
Digital Rights, which probably many of
you are familiar with.
I work as a policy analyst, researcher
and a campaigner against biometric
mass surveillance and lots
of other digital rights topics as well.
And I'm one of the coordinators
and I helped to found and and
shape the Reclaim Your Face campaign,
along with the now 68
organizations that are part of the
movement.
We started with just 12, so we've come
such a fantastic way in a really short
space of time.
And I'm going to try and outline
a bit more about biometric mass
surveillance and real examples of
it from across Europe because
we're not talking in hypotheticals here.
We're not scaremongering.
We're actually talking about real
things that are happening right now with
real consequences for people's
lives.
And then I'll talk just to touch about
the political context and why
it's so important that we all act
now and do everything we can
to ban biometric mass surveillance.
And so, yeah, you've already had a little
bit about Reclaim Your Face, but as a
recap, we're a coalition of European
and international organizations
fighting against biometric mass
surveillance.
And when we refer to biometric mass
surveillance or BMWs,
and that's us referring to
the phenomenon where governments
or corporations are pervasively
tracking us using our most
sensitive and intimate characteristics
our faces, our bodies and
our behaviors.
And they're doing this across time and
place, as you saw in Alexander's
wonderful video, obliterating
our privacy and anonymity.
And when we're talking about BMWs, we're
thinking very much about the use
of these systems.
These devices in our public
and public makes less accessible spaces
because if these these systems
are in use in those spaces, it
stops us from having a free choice
to participate in public
life and in public services.
And it's already happening across
European public spaces like
streets, parks, supermarkets,
hospitals, college campuses, football
stadiums, train stations and
much, much more.
And although facial recognition is
probably the best known type of biometric
mass surveillance when we're talking
about VMS, where we're talking about
so much more than just faces,
we're talking about gate, which is the
way people walk.
We're talking about specific bits
of people's faces.
We're even seeing research being done
that looks to uniquely identify
people by that breadth.
And so creating breath prints
and even the way that people smell, you
know, individual scents
being used to uniquely identify us,
which can then track us across time and
place. So really, there's there's no
frontier of our identities,
of our existence, of our bodies, what
makes us us that isn't being experimented
right now as a way to surveil and
track us.
And we're seeing it being done through
traditional CCTV cameras,
but kind of CCTV on steroids
because sometimes there's a smart
technology and you can't see right now,
but I'm doing air quotes for
smart because it's not so smart.
After all, this is smart surveillance
cameras.
We're seeing biometric analytics
being applied retrospectively,
and we're seeing sensors often as part
of again in inverted commas, smart
city projects where
really what was being rolled out is
widespread surveillance infrastructures.
And this issue of permanently
identifying us isn't the only
issue in biometric mass surveillance.
Although, of course, this destruction
of our anonymity and the chilling effect
that comes with it is a huge issue.
But also, we're seeing these systems
being used to analyze and
judge us on the basis of how we look
and whether that's putting us into boxes
in order to sell to us because we look
like somebody that might buy a particular
product and all
the way through to deciding if we look
like a security risk, if we look
like a terrorist.
And sometimes some of these systems
even claim to know our emotions,
what we're thinking or how we're
going to act in the future based
really on total junk science.
So briefly, I'm just going to explore
some of the facets that actually make up
biometric mass surveillance and get some
of those real examples that I talked
about.
So the kind of general monitor in
these cases is one of the main methods
of BMWs that we're seeing across
Europe, and we're so
worried about it. And it's not just
asset. We've got the UN's High
Commissioner for Human Rights and
several UN special rapporteur has
spoken out about what a risk it poses
to people's rights and how it can
threaten journalists and their ability
to speak to sources,
how it can threaten human rights
defenders and stop them from doing their
work. And that's actually led
the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
to say that it should be banned
and its best practices
in Europe. We've seen this kind of
general monitor monitoring being used
against people who are expressing their
legitimate right to protest at a
minimum in Slovenia, Germany,
Sweden, the UK and Serbia.
But we have suspicions that it's even
broader than this.
But often it's so hard to get information
about what's actually happening because
it gets hidden and buried
and on a kind of broader global context,
we've seen it being used, for example,
against Black Lives Matter protesters
in the US and against
pro-democracy protesters in Hong
Kong and Russia with really,
really chilling results and
real this incentivisation
of people's ability to express the
rights and freedoms and raise
their voices against government practices
that they don't agree with.
In Germany specifically, for example,
we've got so many examples, but just
a couple, we've actually seen this facial
recognition being used outside places
of worship and outside
queer bars. So if you think about the
capacity for these systems, not just
to identify and target people, but also
to link them to protected
characteristics like their religion or
their sexual orientation, the
potential for discrimination
and misuse is just enormous.
The use of these general monitoring
systems to treat all of us
as guilty until proven innocent
in a twisted trial by algorithm,
which goes against the rule of law
and our fundamental principles of
democracy and and also
due process is something that often gets
forgotten when we're talking about
biometric mass surveillance.
But part of having,
you know a democratic society
means having investigations
being done into criminals or suspects
in a way that has accountability,
that follows rules, follows due
process. And we've even spoken
to some police officers off the record
who have said that they feel that
this quick resort to facial
recognition is a bit
like a shortcut. It's an attempt to
get away from following processes
and doing more resource intensive
and complex police work.
And some of them have actually said to us
that they prefer good old fashioned
police work because it works better
and it's more likely to get justice for
victims than this attempt to
kind of shortcut these democratic and
procedural processes.
Another facet that's often linked to
biometric mass surveillance and that we
saw in the video at the beginning,
is this predictive policing
and how have discriminatory
patterns of who gets
targeted for police intervention,
who get stopped and searched
and how that then gets encoded and
amplified as multiple systems
across policing, but often
also linked with social
services and welfare systems
and how it really amplifies
and concretize these discriminatory
patterns.
So we're not just talking here about bias
in the sense that facial recognition
and other biometric systems are less
accurate for people of color, although
we know that they are.
And we know that the more that biometric
systems are used in our society,
the more of a risk there is for certain
people to be pushed out,
everything from it not
working as well on certain skin colors,
but also if you've got biometric
kiosks for people to identify
themselves and it's not been set at the
right height for people with
disabilities like people in a wheelchair,
or it's not configured to work whilst
they're manual laborers whose
fingerprints, for example, can
often be less readable.
So that's a whole world of potential
discrimination.
But even more so than that.
And again, I think it's the video
fantastically touched on.
The bigger issue is how these systems are
systematically disproportionately
deployed against certain
communities and
really chillingly, we've seen across
Europe that people who
are on the margins of our societies are
the ones that almost experimented
with and subjected to these
technologies and people
who often have the least power
to be able to speak up against it.
So to just give a couple of examples
in the city of Como, Italy,
we've seen smart systems
used to detect if
migrants are loitering in a park,
which is an incredibly
inhumane response to
a humanitarian issue.
And that in itself is a wider trend that
we see with this tech is the
attempt to try and shortcut these
more meaningful, sustainable
interventions into social problems.
Instead, with a quick fix that's offered
by a tech company that stands
to profit from these systems being
everywhere.
And speaking of those companies
that profit, this one in Spain, for
example, called her to security.
They're a biometric surveillance company
and they advertise, and we've been
calling this out for over a year, and
they're continuing.
They still haven't taken it off their
website, advertising that they
do racial profiling
for both law enforcement surveillance
purposes and also commercial
purposes, shopping, advertising.
And when we challenged them about it,
they said, Oh, well, we don't use
that feature within the EU.
It's just people outside of the EU that
get racially profiled by our technology.
It's another issue
that kind of underpins by that.
Surveillance is the issue of biometric
IDs, and that's because
I'm attracted to the more that all
of us have identity cards, identity
documents that contain sensitive
biometric data.
The more the conditions are created for
us to be permanently and constantly
identified everywhere we go, every
person we meet with, even years later
to never be able to have privacy
again.
And just two examples are the Netherlands
and France, where we're seeing this
boom in huge biometric residence
database or biometric databases.
And we've seen in some of these databases
of systemic inclusion of people
who've never been convicted
and been put in these criminal
or quasi criminal databases.
So what we're saying earlier about
these systems treating people as
criminals is exactly what we're seeing
in practice.
Payment is another good example
where some research that we
commissioned earlier this year
showed that biometric identity cards
which were rolled out even for children
as young as 12.
Using the justification of national
security, that's what the government said
when they brought these cards and have
only ever been used for access to
services. So again, we're seeing this
trend of how national security
and people keeping people safe is
used as the excuse
and in reality, our ability
to take part in public life.
Our ability to access welfare or other
services is actually what
is being controlled.
We then have border biometrics, and
for me, this is one of the most harrowing
and dystopian examples that we come
across because we're seeing EU
member states and the U.S.
The EU itself using public money
to conduct biometric surveillance
experiments against people on the
move.
It's often people seeking asylum.
One really egregious example
of that is called AI border control, and
which German MEP Patrick Breyer
actually took to court recently.
And because there was complete
secrecy surrounding this
project by border control that was
funded with millions of euros of
public money and which was
trying to predict or detect if
people on the move,
people seeking visas were
telling the truth or if they were lying
in the immigration
interviews, which
you're going back to my point earlier
lacks a credible scientific foundation
and is part of this broader pattern of
people in vulnerable positions being used
to experiment on.
And another related story broke just
a few days ago just before Christmas
about the center project, which is
another partially EU funded project
in Greek refugee camps against
people who are in incredibly vulnerable
situations.
And they're rolling out these systems,
which include a lot of biometric
surveillance for identifying
threats. So rather than
investing in the
sorts of resources and help that
these people who are in these already
really punitive situations
are in fact just investing in yet
more technology to further
punish people
at the edges of Europe.
And then kind of my last case study
is around social media and other online
scraping.
And that's because this is one of the
final puzzle pieces and how we're seeing
biometric mass surveillance explode
across Europe.
And this is where most of us,
many of us are having our faces
scraped from our social media profiles,
even if we're not on them.
We've seen people being scraped from
their friends social media profiles.
It's there in the background of a photo,
for example, creating
these vast databases
not compatible with EU data protection
law.
But that hasn't stopped companies like
Clearview AI from creating these
databases and selling their services.
We know that Clearview AI is used
by several EU police forces
and some of the Reclaim Your Face
Coalition has been fighting back against
that and raising complaints
and trying to take action.
We've also got PimEyes, which is a bit
like the UAE, except it's
able to be used by individual.
How would the potential for stalkers
for harassment if any random person
on the street when you walk down, when
you sit in a coffee shop can identify
you and find out personal information
about you.
And it's really scary.
And then other kind of online scraping
that biometric mass surveillance connects
to. And we see an example, such
as a company called Koechner, where
in Czechia, which is
a company that offers a service
called Insights Company, where insights
and we know it's being sold or is
kind of in use by the Czech police.
And although we don't know exactly what
functionality the Czech police are using
through that company, what insights
it is a facial recognition system.
And the company on their website
advertise that they can connect people
using facial recognition not
just to that person's identity, but also
to information about that person's
colleagues, the meetings they've been
to, where they've driven that predicted
emotions and all sorts of incredibly
invasive information about
people.
So without wanting
to be too doom and gloom, hope is
not lost. There is so much that we
can do about this. Here we've established
why biometric mass surveillance is a
problem.
And so being a bit more hopeful,
I want to share a little bit about how
we're taking action and fighting
back. And that's where the Reclaim
Your Face coalition of all these
organizations comes in.
Tirelessly investigating
taking companies and governments to
court, doing research analysis,
organizing all sorts of manifestations
and public events, and organizing
across different social justice and
human rights groups to try and take.
So this is just a tiny snippet, because
we've got this big coalition have all
been engaged in so many acts of
resistance.
But just to show a couple of them,
we've got digital freiheit who
did this fantastic demonstration
with the camera heads of
trying to highlight the problem.
And then you see all these people with
paper bags on their heads, and that's
part of the Paper Bag Society
stunt that a lot of the organizations
in the Coalition have run
to just try and show how ridiculous
biometric mass surveillance is.
The fact that when it's in public spaces,
we can't avoid it.
We can't escape it.
And the only thing we can do is
put it back on our heads.
And of course, that's not practical.
That's not safe.
That's not a good idea.
And so it's a
fun stunt, but with a serious message
underlying it, which is that the only way
to actually protect us is not to rely
on individual responsibility, but to
call on the EU to ban these
biometric mass surveillance practices.
There's been other acts of resistance.
This one, called Paolo Soraya, is
a story by artist Paolo Soraya
is a an art installation
called Capture, where Paolo
is one of the members of a
coalition created this really provocative
piece of art that stirred up a huge
reaction in France
and made a really critical
point about facial recognition.
Paolo decided to turn the camera back
on police officers
and to capture their faces
and to ask the public to identify
these people to do a manual form of
facial recognition.
And there was an outcry
that was censorship of his
exhibits and
which I think really shows how much
some of our states don't want us
challenging them, don't want us turning
the camera back on them.
But as you can see here, you know, these
are real life photos of
police officers carrying out their duties
in France and some of them
policing protests, for example.
And I think it's quite
powerful to stare down the barrel of a
gun and realize why
it's so dangerous and how it further
heightens the imbalance of power between
us and our governments.
If they have this technology to use
against us, when really instead, we
should be focusing on transparency
and accountability.
So moving on to the political dimension,
I'm getting close to the end of my slides
now, and so bear with me.
Really, what I want to emphasize here is
why we should do something right now.
And that's because we have something
called the Artificial Intelligence Act,
which is a new law that the EU
proposed at the beginning of this year.
And the EU have chosen to deal with
issues of biometric surveillance,
including practices that we say would
clearly amount to biometric mass
surveillance in the Artificial
Intelligence Act.
And we already had some
great successes.
We've had an in-principle prohibition
of some forms of bayonets, so
specifically remote biometric
identification by law enforcement
prohibited in the Draft Air Act
and the European Commission actually
specifically said that civil society like
the Reclaim Your Face Coalition played a
big role in getting this prohibition
into the draft act, which
is fantastic news.
But at the same time, we've got pushback,
we've got resistance from countries
and from certain ministries
that are trying to weaken this
prohibition when in fact we should be
strengthening it because it's a good
start, but it's not where it needs to be.
It's not currently going to protect
people's rights and freedoms.
So we have this window to act
to convince our governments
to put pressure on our governments.
And so, yeah, that really
is is is why we have this
moment to make history before this law
gets passed. It's it's being negotiated
now and it will be fought
a lot next year.
So we need all the help we can get.
But we've also got some other
developments across the EU law and policy
space.
We have the European Parliament adopt a
report a few months ago where
they said that we should ban biometric
mass surveillance in the EU
and we've had a couple of national
successes as well.
Of course, the new German Government
Coalition's commitment against
biometric mass surveillance was
a fantastic symbol.
Italy has also had a symbolic moratorium
on facial recognition and
biometric mass surveillance laws that
were being introduced in Portugal and
Serbia have both been scrapped.
So there's a lot of reasons to be hopeful
and a lot of momentum.
But this is also a crucial time for us to
be able to make a difference.
So one of the major
ways that we are trying to do this and
where we need your help is.
If our European citizens'
initiative and also
known as an ECI and an ECI
is somewhere between a
petition and voting, and so
it's actually an official legal
instrument for participatory
democracy and EU laws and policies.
So it's created by the EU, it's given
to citizens, by the EU.
And and if you succeed
in your ECI, so that means you get one
million signatures and reach a minimum
threshold in seven countries, then
the EU has to put your topic on
the political agenda.
You go when you meet with the European
Commission. That could be a debate in the
Parliament and you're really
kind of showing the EU and
making sure that they take notice of your
topics in case biometric mass
surveillance.
So by running an ECI, which we've
been doing throughout this year, we have
a chance to push and encourage
national governments and the EU
to ban biometric mass surveillance, which
will make a difference not just for now,
but for future generations.
And it's an expression of solidarity for
all those that can't participate because
it is limited to EU citizens,
whereas a lot of the people, as I've
already explained, that are affected by
biometric mass surveillance are actually
people who are not EU citizens.
So people that are most harmed are the
ones that need us, those of us that can
to raise our voices.
And the ECI is a fantastic
way to raise your voice.
So what about our
ECI specifically?
We have it online and you can also sign
on paper has been running for most of
this year.
People can sign it in 15 European
languages.
And we also have resources in some
other dialects, for example, very
many dialects.
But you can only sign the ECI in an
official EU language, but it's all on our
website.
And in case you're wondering how we're
doing so far.
These are our top seven countries
in terms of those that are closest to
reaching the threshold that we need of
signatures to succeed in our ECI,
and we still have about seven months
to go. And so a huge
well done to Germany and to all
the organizations that have been
campaigning so hard in Germany
for Reclaim Your Face because it's thanks
to them that we're at almost
43 percent of our threshold for Germany.
But we do have a big way to go.
Overall, we have just under 65000
signatures and we need a million,
so we really do need your help.
We've got all our evidence is here,
we've got our arguments, but we need to
get the message out and we need to
convince people beyond
OK and privacy and data protection
space. And again, our
grandmothers and uncles
and cousins and the person
that runs the shop down our road.
You're equally convinced about why this
is a problem and why we need to act.
And signing the ECI is one
really easy way that people can do that.
So how can you help?
Well, you can join Reclaim Your
Face if you're an organization
or if you're an individual, you can
support the organizations that are
already in the campaign by volunteering
for them, donating to them, doing
research or investigations for them.
You can spread the word and raise
awareness across your network, and we
have resources that we make available
for this.
You can kind of help us translate stuff.
You can create resources, you
can help us collect signatures online
or on paper.
We've got big camps coming
in the first quarter of next year where
you can get trained up in how to collect
ECI signatures in a data protective
way and also be a part
of our community.
And you can write to local and national
representatives to ask them for a city
ban on biometric mass surveillance.
We have templates for that and
you'll find all of these things and more
on our website, so I'd link that to
a bit of information about it.
And our email address, if you want to get
in touch with the coordinators.
So yeah, that's that's my bet.
Done a huge thank you from
the 68 organizations and
thousands of people in the Reclaim Your
Face campaign.
And you can go to our website right
now and sign and join
us and the impact the movement.
Thank you very much.
Yeah, that was quite
shocking. There were actually a few
details that I did not know about.
Uh, yeah, crazy, crazy
stuff happening there.
OK. Don't have your picture right
now. Still have your your screen
background, but I guess you're still
with us any.
I'm still here.
Yeah, OK.
I think they're calm
again.
Yeah, thank you. That was very, very
detailed.
And I do think
that even even here at the
Congress, I the of free experience, there
are still still some things that
people did not know.
Um, yes, we do have
a guest here at this time,
Andreas Gebert from the digitalization
of Switzerland.
And he will.
Uh, tell us a bit about
how things are going over there in
Switzerland
and, uh,
no instructions for this.
Come on.
Um.
You know, getting old work
is like.
Hmm.
OK.
Sorry.
Something is definitely not happening
here.
Yeah.
Hmm. There we go.
OK. Yeah.
So welcome,
Andrea Shepherd from DigitalGlobe
Switzerland and.
Back in a minute, thank you.
You, punk. Yeah, I'd like to give you
a quick overview on
the Swiss perspective what
reclaim your face is doing in
Switzerland?
So in Switzerland,
the situation is so that that facial
recognition and biometric
identification are not
allowed.
There's no there's no
in the sense, there's no legal basis
currently that would allow
police or law enforcement to
do it. But it's also not forbidden, so
it's a bit unclear
what the situation actually is, and
that allows police departments,
for example, to experiment with it.
We know that that it has been used on an
experimental basis.
And of course, these experiments tend
to turn into regular practice,
and that's something we we want to avoid.
To that end, Digital Legal Center of
Switzerland has joined Reclaim Reclaim
Your Face. Early on, with a view
to achieve a ban of biometric
mass surveillance and facial
recognition also in Switzerland.
And digging guest is
also part of the NCAA right
from the beginning, so you might
ask as as mentioned, it's
a youth thing.
You might know that Switzerland is not
part of the EU.
So why are we?
Why are we a part of the ECI,
actually?
You don't have to be an EU
resident. You if you are a citizen,
if you have citizenship of
an EU country, you are entitled to sign.
And so what we do, we
collect signatures among
the EU citizens living in Switzerland.
So it's residents,
but EU citizens.
Additionally, or we we are
encouraging people to to sign very
why our various channels.
So in addition to blog post, for example,
on newsletters, these are our
window conquerors where we reach
typically a couple of hundred people.
For example, in this year's Winter
Congress in February, we had to talk and
to podium, and
there will be presentations
on Reclaim Your Face
and the ECI in next year's
Winter Congress as well.
Also, we had recently a roundtable
astonish in German in
November 21, also
about face recognition
and reclaim your face.
In addition, we have
on on a national level, we have
a Reclaim Your Face collaboration with
other partners, namely
Algorithm Watch Switzerland and
the Swiss section of Amnesty
International, an algorithm
watch and I are both
partners of Reclaim Your Face and
as well.
And this
alliance has started a national campaign
campaign, namely a petition
in November 2021.
It's called in Germany.
It's called Clintonistas should think it
needs to stop.
So the aim is
a fan of biometric
mass surveillance and face recognition in
Switzerland.
In addition, there have been
in the context of that campaign,
there have been postulates requesting
a ban of biometric surveillance in
selected cities submitted
by local politicians,
members of the local parliament, for
example.
The two cities have been Lausanne and
Zurich.
And why these
two?
It was important that we have two cities
and one each from the
two to large parts, the French
speaking part, which is the son and
and one from the Trump speaking parts.
Unfortunately, we don't have one yet from
the Italian speaking part.
Maybe or hopefully that will come later.
Also
then there's a good chance in both
both cities that we
that we get a majority
based on the on the political
majorities in these cities that we get
that the ban
comes through and we
hope that there will be further cities in
the future.
Once we have,
hopefully we have achieved
a ban on the local level, we will take
it to the next level, which would be the
cantons and finally the federal level,
hopefully in the future.
So if you're if you're watching this and
if you if you're a Swiss citizen,
please sign the petition,
then the link is the well is
because these are the kind of stopping
the age.
And I don't know if the slides
will be available, but the link will then
be there on this light as well.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Yes.
Yeah. Not a part of the EU, but
the same problems.
The same questions.
Thank you very much for that
update.
OK,
well, we have a little video message
from our friends in Italy.
So we'll have a look how things
are going there.
They have some successes as well.
But uh yeah,
have a look at it for yourself.
2021 has been a great year for
the Italian National Coalition of Reclaim
Your Face.
We managed finally to
a public events to to
enter into our public spaces.
And for example, in this picture, you can
see where we stage of our actions
of people society.
So we wanted to raise awareness
towards the public of how our
societies might look like in the future
if we don't act now
against biometric surveillance.
When it comes instead to results
and our direct advocacy,
we see it for sure as
one of the biggest news.
So our Italian Data Protection Authority
to intervene against a university
in Italy, which was using Proctor and
softwares to monitor students who were
doing exams so that a protection
authority basically say that this
university, the University of Bokoni,
doesn't have a legal basis to
process biometric data
of their students. So while taking exams,
this software was monitoring their face,
checking that their face was still in
front of the monitors.
And this is something that was legal and
this was a great win
for Italy. Also, it shows
that domestic surveillance is entering
into all sorts of areas,
including universities, for example,
and as a great result of our national
coalition was the introduction of a
moratorium in a recent law introduced
at the beginning of December.
This moratorium?
It's a great initial steps
because shows that the subject
of domestic surveillance is something
that it's it's reaching the politicians
and they're willing to act.
However, this temporary ban
has some caveats used carrots,
for example, this law
doesn't include systems such as those
developed by Clearview AI.
At the same time, the good news
is that this temporary ban applies
to all sorts of entities
and also some public authorities.
It's is going on until
December 2023 and in a place
to be the surveillance systems that use
facial recognition technologies in public
spaces and public accessible spaces.
So this means, for example, sports
centers, shopping malls, public
transports, all these sorts of areas
of public spaces won't
be under the monitoring of this kind
of facial recognition technologies.
At the same time, there are two major
drawbacks from this law, which is the
first one is that the police can use
these kind of technologies subject to
a case. Becky's approval returning to the
position of authority.
The other one is the judicial authorities
and prosecutors.
Instead, they can do whatever they want,
so basically they are exempted from any
sorts of preemptive control.
And these two exemptions
are quite worrisome from our perspective.
Another activity that we did as the drama
center in Italy that they did together
with my colleague Laura, there was a
researcher regarding the use and
collection of biometric data belonging
to migrants.
This this was a fascinating work because
it shows that the technological
infrastructure of Italy when it comes to
dealing with migrants is basically
one of four criminalization.
What does it mean? It means that
the pictures and fingerprints are
included in the scene at the base in
which there are criminals like thieves,
killers and so on.
So basically, migrants
arrive in Italy asylum seekers to
apply for protection in Italy, but also
visa holders. So foreigners to come to
live in Italy are basically all
included in the device, which is an
office.
These offices are easy to use during
police investigations, and the facial
recognition system used be defended
police search faces in
this very scene that obese.
So this is a real criminalization
of foreigners that is happening in Italy.
So again, these actions, these
activities shows that a moratorium
isn't enough. So the temporary ban that
these are introduced is not enough.
First of all, because these broad
exemptions for criminal investigations
are unacceptable, they're too broad.
And at the same time, because we need to
remember that biometric surveillance is
not the only facial recognition,
there are other sorts of surveillance
that use our biometric data.
And at the same time, the very
existence of biometric data, for example,
as in the case of migrants, is something
that we should take into account and we
should act against.
So that's why we are still calling
for a ban.
Yes, thank you.
Ricardo, from Italy.
Usually we do some kind of hello as
and we go directly to the famous
guitar Khwaja as a campaigner.
I am happy to report on the reclaiming
face team and work towards
a ban on facial recognition and
other forms of biometric mass
surveillance.
With this amazing team, campaigning
during the pandemic has been quite
challenging for us because it couldn't
organize as many in-person events as we
would normally like to do.
However, this summer, when I
got to speak at October in Berlin,
that was one of the highlights because it
allowed us to engage with people in
person to have conversations
with other activists that want to strive
for a more healthy democracy
and see that a lot of them would support
our demand for a ban of biometric
mass surveillance.
At other times, we would choose more
indirect forms of communication to get
the word out.
For example, at the Paperback Society
Challenge that we participated in,
for example, in Brussels and Bielefeld,
I was going to say that's where I can see
my. Yeah, if you can see me now, that's
good.
Fond of landmarks, Du
Groupe France have been checking our
pictures
to simply portray a society
that is under constant surveillance where
people cannot leave the house without
masking their head
together with the Italy network.
We also contacted members of the European
Parliament to tell them that we are
closely watching how they are regulating
artificial intelligence and the upcoming
act.
We want to make sure that they know we
demand strong regulation and protects our
fundamental rights and freedoms.
Meanwhile, in Germany, there were federal
elections and we drafted a position
paper in which we carried the Reclaim
Your Face demands towards drum politics.
We told politicians and political
parties that we expect them
to reject the state ification
of our faces and bodies and
that we want a clear
statement against biometric mass
surveillance.
And we were quite happy that we found out
that the new coalition plans to
reject biometric surveillance in public
spaces.
That was the result of a strong civil
society in Germany, among others.
The CCC
de Cattolica that shaft and us
carrying these demands towards Berlin
and having conversations with
digital politics.
Representatives of the political parties.
We know that facial recognition and
similar technologies conveyed on our
privacy on a mass scale and that they
amplify discrimination.
That's why we also fight biometric mass
surveillance and other forms.
For example, last year at the asked if
we represented the passport on a thing,
a campaign in which we all
called upon people to
make a new I.D.
before a new law takes effect,
this law would regulate that every
citizen has to record their fingerprint
on their ID card.
And we believe that is an unjustifiable
infringement of our rights.
We were quite thrilled to see that a lot
of you followed our call to action
because this bought us time now is suing
in court against a new regulation,
and we are hoping that eventually the
Court of Justice of the European Union
will decide to strike it down.
Just one more thing
if we want to get the European Commission
and member states to respect
our rights and follow suit on our
demands, we need to work together.
So please join us and sign the reclaiming
face ECI and tell everyone about
it. If you haven't done that already
and then have a great answer for you.
OK, so thank you,
Constantine.
Welcome back alive.
We only have a few minutes, so
we'll try to answer some some questions
from our online audience.
And the first one, I can answer myself
for the introduction VIDEO
It is available in three languages
and is in German, in English and
in Italian.
And if you know some
sound engineers and speakers or whatever,
there's always the possibility to
to produce another language.
Also, there are, I think
right now we add 12 languages
in subtitles, so
I hope one of the languages is
understandable for you.
And if there's a language missing, you
can still get in touch with
the producers of this video and
do a subtitle in your language.
The second question was How
do I mess with cameras?
The best is the possibility to hide from
biometric cameras.
I know that the masks alone
are not enough anymore.
How can can you give us some some tips
on staying anonymous in
public?
For sure. And yeah, you're totally right
about the masks.
Actually, there's one company in
particular and that got a
seal of excellence from the European
Commission during the pandemic for
making their facial recognition five
times more accurate during
the pandemic, with people wearing masks
because they invested in being
able to identify people just from that
little strip of their face.
So, yeah, a mask is no longer
going to cut it, and we've seen
some awesome acts of resistance
and camouflage against
these surveillance cameras.
There's a project called CV Dazzle
by some activists and artists where
people have experimented with using
hairstyles, face paint, contouring
kind of dramatic makeup as
a way to fool the cameras so that
can work.
There are some people who've developed
even sunglasses that have
lights in them that kind of scramble the
cameras and also
fabrics like scarves that you can wear
around your neck and your head that will
actually also mess with
the cameras.
We've also done some of our own research
into messing with the cameras.
We created a face mask for the reason
your face campaign and which we gave
to people that donated to help us
with our fight, and that also had
a pattern in it that would scramble some
facial recognition algorithms.
But the big issue here is that these
systems are constantly under development.
They're constantly being improved.
A lot of them are not
and not publicly available the kind of
system. So it's really, really
hard to have a
method of resistance is going to work
against all the different types of
biometric mass surveillance.
And so really, that's why we say
we need a legal ban because as an
individual, there are things you can do.
This is a political question
unless you're going to put a paper bag on
your head or take yourself out of
society.
Really, we need to stop this being done,
tackle it at the root.
And that's why we have the ECI, which
calls for a law that will protect us.
Yes, I think the next speaker
here at CVS says she will try
to hide herself behind makeup.
That could could be interesting.
One more question was how
these issues also tackled on a
more international level, like
at the United Nations.
So like a worldwide ban on
surveillance.
Absolutely. There's actually a coalition
that we're apart of called
ban biometric mass as I ban biometric
surveillance or bands.
And that's a coalition of over
200 organizations globally campaigning
for the same thing.
And different organizations are working
in different fora so that there is
there are discussions happening at the
United Nations.
We have some special rapporteurs
that we're working with who recognize
some of the human rights experts
of the United Nations who have already
been speaking out against biometric mass
surveillance. And we're hoping to do more
with them and with organizations
like Amnesty International who are doing
projects in New
York, in India and
also organizations like
of the name.
But there's organizations in India who
are doing a lot of work about biometric
mass events there because India is
actually one of the most biometric
surveillance countries in the world.
So absolutely, this is a global
thing. And for those
of you that are interested in in laws
like the GDPR General Data Protection
Regulation, we saw the GDPR
have a knock on effect around the world.
And we really hope if we can get a strong
law against biometric mass surveillance
in the EU, that that might also help
push the needle in other
jurisdictions that sometimes look to the
EU for the leading the way in privacy
and data protection.
Yes, and as far as I know, there are some
cities in the United States that
already banned the
use of cameras in public, right,
that are and a lot of the places where
there are bans on facial recognition
and other biometrics surveillance in
public as cities where there
are a high proportion of tech startups,
which I think is is pretty telling
that the people who are creating this
tech and the ones that don't want it
because they know how dangerous that can
be. And some cities
like Portland, for example, have did
some fantastic work where they
did a lot of outreach into the community.
They spoke to the queer community,
the Latino community in Portland,
lots of different people that have
historically been targeted by the police,
for example, or have been marginalized.
And they had a resounding message from
people in Portland that they don't want
this technology. They don't want to be
treated as walking barcodes and suspects.
And so they decided to ban it.
So really, the EU and across
Europe, we're lagging behind a bit, so
we've got a long way to go.
OK, I'll see.
It is
almost 10 o'clock, so we have
to wrap it up here.
Thank you so much.
Allow for for joining us here and
giving us so detailed information
on the whole thing.
And thanks a lot and I am.
Yeah, wish you a good start in the new
year.
And of course, thank you to
Andreas, who who joined us here
from the Italian section of Switzerland,
thanks to the seabass for hosting
us once more.
After my death and it's
my dream, you know?
OK, I'll think of think the next people
are preparing, so I say
to them they don't need it, had said.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So we'll finish here, and we have one
more video to motivate you and please
sign this petition.
Thank you very much.
Everything is licensed under CC
by 4.0.
And it is all for the community, 2.0
and for everybody.