For the love of god, cover your damn face.
No, it’s not for the reason you might think.
As I’m writing this, we’re on Day 51 of the George Floyd/Black Lives Matters protests here in the United States. I’ve been (depending on how you view my situation) fortunate/unfortunate enough to travel through 8 major cities and see how people have geared up. The constant between all of them? People aren’t taking covering their faces seriously enough.
No — it’s not COVID I’m concerned about; It’s not tear gas, either. It’s the one looming threat none of us can defeat: facial recognition.
Let me walk back a bit here and explain my background — For years, I’ve been obsessed with archiving all sorts of things. VHS Tapes of old news broadcasts to 100,000+ games of Nethack to that weird erotica you wrote and put on Fanfiction.net as a teenager. Alone I currently have over 3 Petabytes of data after multiple years of doing this and collaborating with others. I’ve also been an activist for awhile, too. I helped write software, manage servers and do research for large antifascist networks. Those two combined put me in a really conflicting position with these protests, and all the footage of them: Is it immoral to save livestreams?
Personally, I don’t know where I stand on the issue anymore. Regardless, I’ve gone ahead and started archiving thousands of hours of video from protests all over the country and the world. My goal is to enable protesters to have evidence of police brutality and other crimes (or lack thereof) for their own legal defense. Hell, our first amendment right is under attack, after all. But while there might be myself and other individuals using that for good, we’re easily outnumbered 10:1 with folks who have more sinister intentions.
Through these protests, there’s been lots of folks who’ve taken it upon themselves to become independent journalists and document it. Before I continue, let me make this 100% clear: THIS IS A GOOD THING. I’ve witnessed multiple events that have received no media coverage at all, including individuals being killed by federal agents and police officers via less lethal munitions, neglect, etc. The issue with this is actually the same reason it’s good: 99.9% of the people out at protests documenting have no formal background as journalists. “In Defense of Smashing Cameras” inadvertently addresses this towards the end with it’s proposed guidelines. Many journalists are taught these simple practices (even though they might not follow through with them), but average people out on the streets with nothing but their phone likely don’t know the possible repercussions of their journalism.
To put in perspective how simple, cheap and effective it is to easily capture large amounts of protest footage, I’d like to break down the numbers. To be extremely conservative, we’re going to say the average police officer is making $20 an hour. Well, for a little over what our fictional police department might pay an officer for 2 hours, they can have a server in Germany with unmetered Gigabit internet, 2 2TB hard drives and 2 240GB SSDs for an entire month — This would be enough to capture all livestreams of protests going on in a large city at once. For another hour’s worth of pay, they can have a GSuite Business user for an entire month, enabling them to leverage unlimited storage on Google Drive. Combined with a little searching on Github for scripts and then Twitch to find some broadcasters, congratulations: our fictional police department is now fully capable of recording almost every livestreamer at their city’s protests, saving that footage indefinitely to then use facial recognition software on, or give to DHS/FBI/any 3 letter federal agency to do so themselves. This is significantly more cost effective than replacing street cameras every night when protesters destroy them, spray paint over them, etc.
If that doesn’t absolutely terrify you, I don’t know what will.
What can be done about this? Surprisingly, a lot. I highly advocate AGAINST “In Defense of Smashing Cameras”’s stance in this situation — like I said earlier, these folks are normal people with good intentions. They don’t deserve to have their gear destroyed. The biggest thing you can do is mask up, and mask up heavily. Sunglasses and a T-Shirt tied around your head + a hoodie is more than sufficient for most people. Combine that with common sense security practices (think before you speak, don’t use social media at a protest, leave your ID at home, etc etc) and you’re about as safe as you reasonably can be from any bad actors capturing footage from livestreams. If you’re even more paranoid, there’s facial recognition masks that use patterns that have been proven to trip up certain software/algorithms (I’m not linking any because I can’t vouch for their effectiveness with newer software).
There’s no reason any of this should stop you from going out and demonstrating — if anything, I hope this article makes you mad as hell and you go out even more! But when you go out, know that your friends’ Periscope stream is very likely snitching on you and others’ activity — straight to the people you’re demonstrating against.
