surveillance

John Oliver interviews Edward Snowden about NSA surveillance, including street interviews showing people have not thought about what the government can see. The segment famously frames the issue through private photos.

Slavoj Zizek and Paul Holdengraber discuss surveillance and whistleblowers at the International Authors' Stage, ranging over Snowden, Assange, Pussy Riot and humor.

A one-minute trimmed clip from The Dark Knight showing the cell phone sonar surveillance system.

A short clip about DARPA's ARGUS-IS, a 1.8 gigapixel wide-area camera array flown on a Boeing unmanned helicopter. It produces a huge mosaic video that can watch a city-sized area from 20,000 feet.

A 29C3 panel with whistleblowers Jesselyn Radack, Thomas Drake and William Binney. They talk about what happens when exposing secret government power becomes a crime, and about surveillance abuses.

A VPRO documentary in which Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff explains her book on surveillance capitalism. It covers how Google and Facebook turn personal data into raw material for prediction and behavioral influence.

Craig Heffner's Black Hat 2013 talk on exploiting network surveillance cameras, covering how insecure their firmware is. It shows how easily such devices can be compromised.

Benn Jordan details security vulnerabilities in Flock Safety license-plate-reading cameras and how easily they can be compromised. It includes citations from security researchers and discussion of police surveillance.

A 1080p widescreen capture of the Deus Ex conversation between JC Denton and the AI Morpheus. It is a philosophical exchange that includes surveillance as a replacement for God.

VICE News reporter Elle Reeve investigates China's rollout of facial recognition and mass surveillance technology and what it means for citizens. The report originally aired on VICE on HBO.

A Philosophy Tube video essay on data, surveillance and the algorithms built on personal information, touching on Cambridge Analytica and the 'nothing to hide' argument.

Clip from The Dark Knight in which Batman uses a sonar-based system that turns phones into a city-wide surveillance network.

Bloomberg shows Ross McNutt demonstrating his wide-area aerial surveillance system, following a shooting and the getaway car and piecing together a crime network.

A short Harris Corporation (L3Harris) promotional video showing wide-area airborne motion imagery, a sensor system for persistent real-time aerial surveillance of large areas.

Moxie Marlinspike's DEF CON 18 talk on changing threats to privacy argues that surveillance arrived through convenient services and network effects, so opting out is not a real solution. It also includes his framing of getting social democracy rather than the fascism people feared.

Benn Jordan explains how Flock Safety's license plate cameras log and share vehicle locations, and explores how adversarial AI can defeat them. It covers weak security and the surveillance risks of private police-camera networks.

Aral Balkan's re:publica 2015 talk argues that people are the product of surveillance-based business models. It makes an ethical case against data monopolies and for privacy as a human right.

Part 2 of a Q&A workshop with security researcher Jacob Appelbaum from April 2012, covering mobile phone security, cellphone forensics, state repression and surveillance. Topics include booting Tails from USB and surveillance self-defense resources.

VICE News reporter Isobel Yeung goes undercover as a tourist in Xinjiang, documenting heavy surveillance, policing and internment of Uighurs. It also covers children taken into state-run institutions.

Poul-Henning Kamp's FOSDEM 2014 talk presents a fictitious NSA program called ORCHESTRA, satirizing how intelligence agencies could influence startups and open source. It is a humorous but pointed look at surveillance and subverted software.

A clip from the film The Lives of Others showing Wiesler as a ruthless, efficient Stasi interrogator who uses a recorded interrogation to train new officers. HN uses other scenes from the same film as well.

Benn Jordan concludes his Flock trilogy, filmed on a publicly deployed Flock Safety camera, covering a leak of camera feeds reported by 404 Media. He shows the cameras' capabilities, including panning to track people.

A short NYT Op-Doc by Laura Poitras profiling NSA veteran William Binney, who says a program he helped design collects Americans' personal data.

A one-minute 2007 clip of Barack Obama, during his campaign, opposing warrantless wiretaps. It was later reposted with a campaign call to action.

A Johns Hopkins Foreign Affairs Symposium debate between former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden and constitutional law professor David Cole, moderated by Major Garrett. They argue over NSA surveillance, its constitutionality and the balance between privacy and security.

A short clip based on Zbigniew Brzezinski's views about the erosion of national sovereignty and his criticism of the war on terror. It is titled Political awakening.

A New York Times Op-Doc by Laura Poitras profiling William Binney, a 32-year NSA veteran who helped design a secret program he says collects Americans' personal data.

Dan Geer's Black Hat 2014 keynote argues that cybersecurity is a matter of power and policy rather than wishful thinking. He covers surveillance, the vulnerability market, software liability and privacy as the capacity to misrepresent yourself.

Senator Ron Wyden asks DNI James Clapper in a March 2013 Senate hearing whether the NSA collects data on millions of Americans, and Clapper answers 'No, sir... not wittingly.' The question became notable after the Snowden revelations later that year.

A short satirical Onion News Network segment presenting Facebook as a CIA project. It plays on surveillance and data-collection fears.

A DEFCON 20 panel with NSA whistleblower William Binney, journalist James Bamford and ACLU lawyers on the NSA's mass collection of communications and its conflict with the Constitution.

A short Australian dystopian film in which a man returns home to find citizens fining each other for infractions via a government app, with cameras everywhere.

A creator runs an informal live test of whether Google or Facebook listen through the microphone to target ads, using Chrome on Windows 10. The description admits the methodology is flawed, including that live streaming itself records the microphone.

A short clip of Senate testimony in which Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is asked whether the NSA collects data on Americans and answers in the negative. The uploader presents it as a flat-out lie, later contradicted by the Snowden disclosures.

Edward Snowden appears by telepresence robot at TED2014 to discuss surveillance, privacy rights, and Internet freedom, interviewed by Chris Anderson with Tim Berners-Lee.

Zoz's DEF CON 22 talk on operational security in the age of pervasive surveillance. He shows how hard it is to avoid mistakes even for people who should know better.

Cory Doctorow's Talks at Google lecture on the coming civil war over general-purpose computing. He argues that locked-down devices, DRM, and surveillance threaten user control of computers.

An Extra Credits episode on China's Sesame Credit, which gamifies obedient citizenship through a social score. It covers how the system rewards conformity and pressures people through their friends' behavior.

A 32C3 talk dissecting Red Star OS, North Korea's state-built operating system. The speakers explain its internals and how it invades users' privacy, including file watermarking.

MIT researchers show that sound can be recovered from silent video by analyzing tiny vibrations in objects such as a potato chip bag. It works even with consumer cameras by using rolling shutter.