Surveillance Tech & Biased AI: The ACLU Fights Back

that show, you definitely need to check it out. She's doing amazing work having incredible conversations with thought leaders in the tech space and the social space, and this particular episode I think is really important and one that really needs to be heard by as many folks as possible. She sits down with a CLU president, Susan Herman, and together they talk about the issue of racially biased face

recognition technology. And you've heard me speak on episodes of Tech Stuff in the past about bias artificial intelligence, facial recognition, you know, image recognition, that sort of stuff, and how that is a real problem in tech and it's something that we absolutely have to get our heads wrapped around and address. So, without further ado, I'm going to have that episode play in lieu of a Tech Stuff episode for today, and I highly recommend you check out First Contact.

It's a great show and one that I think really dove tails nicely with Tech Stuff. So if you enjoy tech stuff, I think you're really gonna like First Contact as well, and we will catch you next week with new episodes of tech Stuff. Thanks. First Contact with Lori Siegel is a production of Dot Dot Dot Media and I Heart Radio. There's a great quote on the A

c l U website. The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the founders fought. Exactly. I like to talk about, you know, one of the whole points of the Constitution adding the fourth Amendment, which is the protection of privacy, is they wanted to protect what was in Benjamin Franklin's disk.

Nobody should know if he was writing some things that were anti government, and we now have that on our cell phone, so of course, but that's where I think that a lot of the protection of civil liberties is applying our fundamental principles in different circumstances. We are in a moment of reckoning as we enter an age of ubiquitous surveillance, questionable data collection practices, even algorithms that discriminate.

It's minorities, especially black and brown communities that are disproportionately affected. Over the last months, as the nation has grappled with a conversation around police brutality, we've seen predator drones used for aerial surveillance at protests, facial recognition technology that wrongfully accused a black man of a crime he didn't commit,

and it wasn't a coincidence. Reports say the tech is a hundred times more likely to misidentify African, American and Asian people, and as COVID nineteen continues to spread, there are serious questions being raised about contact tracing apps and how that data collected could be misused. These issues raise ethical questions about technology and its impact on our civil liberties, equality,

and the future of our country. For Susan Herman, it is an extraordinary time to be sitting in her seat as president of the a s l U. Over the years, the American Civil Liberties Union has filed lawsuits fighting for free speech, reproductive rights, and privacy. But as technology continues to muddy the waters, the tradeoffs become more complicated. Where do we draw the line between security and privacy and how do we prevent technological innovation from outpacing the law.

I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is first contact, Susan, thank you for being virtually with me today. Thank you for inviting me, Laurie. Yeah, you know, I I always start out these interviews with our first contact. I talked to guests about how we met, and we don't really have a first contact. We've never met in person, but we met on an email chain because we were going to do an interview together for something else and it and

it fell through. So I said, you've got to come on the podcast because you are just sitting in such an extraordinary seat at such an extraordinary moment in time. So that's our first contact. Well, thanks, It just seems to me like our first contact was total serendipity. Yeah, exactly, so you know, to get started. You've been the president of the a c l U since two thousand and eight, and I said this before, but you know, what an extraordinary time to be sitting in your seat. You know,

how are you feeling? Oh my, it's just sort of overwhelming. You know. As president, I'm go the chair of the board, so you know, I'm not the one doing the day to day work as all of the members of our

staff are. But to be a member of the a c l U staff right now is just it's mind boggling because we had, you know, a lot of work that we were already doing before two thousand and sixteen, with all of the states making worse and worse laws about reproductive freedom and voting rights and immigrants rights, and

you know, all sorts of other things. Then came the election, and since that we have brought a hundreds and seventy three legal actions against the Trump administration for things like family separations and the travel BAM and prohibiting trans in the military. Then in March, COVID hit, and at that point, you know, since then, we've also brought over a hundred lawsuits, including with a hundred lawsuits just about people who are incarcerated in jails and prisons and ice attention and who

are just in a hotspot. You know, they have no control over whether they can social distance, and so we've been working very hard to get vulnerable people out of

those terrible situations, out of basically death traps. Plus, the COVID also led to a number of states opportunistically restricting things like freedom of abortion, declaring abortion to be a non essential procedure so people could just wait until the pandemic is over to get an abortion right, and voting rights has also just been a really braught area right now because all the restrictions on voting and the ways

in which the vote was becoming distorted. Have you just been magnified by all the difficulties of So there's a lot to talk about. So I was a gonna say, what what what I'm hearing from is you're sleeping really well at night. You know, there's no work to do, almost nothing to do this stuff that they're just sitting around polishing their nails. Yeah, I mean, like, take me to March, like coronavirus hits. You have been involved in some of these monumental cases that have just shaped society

in our civil liberties, like coronavirus hits. And now you know, we have a little bit I don't even think we have the luxury of perspective at this point, but we have a little bit more perspective. But let's take me to March, Like in your role at this extraordinary moment, like what was going through your head? What were you concerned about at the time. Well, you know, one of the first concerns is just you have to close the office.

So the first concern is how can people do all this umcity It increases the work and makes it more difficult to do the work. So we just had to really make sure that our technology was up to doing things. So one thing that the a c l YOU did was to buy new laptops for some stuff. People who are going to be working and you have to worry about how the technology is working um which has been a question for us every time there's something really big hits.

When the travel band hit, there were so many people wanting to donate to the a c l U. There are website crash so even things like that, you know, that's you know, like number one of how do you handle this? We have been fortunate so far that the a c l U is so well managed and we had not spent every penny that all of our donors had given us up until that point, so have not had to laid people off, which is very fortunate because as you know, saying, there's more than enough work to do.

But yeah, that's the first concern of just you know, how do you keep the organization up to speed and ready to do you know what. Staff members now need to be doing an incredible amount more work. But for some of them, it's well, they're juggling a toddler and a dog. Yeah. Can you give me a run through of some of the cases that you've been involved in that correct me if I'm wrong. You started out as an intern, right, and really just worked your way up.

I mean, I can imagine you've been involved, and I know you've been involved in some pretty extraordinary cases. To give listeners some context, can you explain some of the cases that kind of stick out to you. Well, I wasn't intern for the a c l U back, you know, in the nineties seventies, you know, around the time when I was in law school. And just to make sure that everybody understands, I don't actually work at the a c l U. Day job is I'm a law professor,

and I don't generally work on the cases. What I'm generally doing is we run the organization. But I'll tell you I think it would be interesting start um. But the first a c l U case that I actually did work on, which was while I was a law student,

and this was the case. One of my connections with the a c l U originally was that one of my law professors in the first year was connected with the New York Civil Liberties Union, and he had some clients who came to him who were graduate students at Stony Brook on Allowland, and they had just discovered they

were not allowed to live together. They had rented a house together, there were six of them, and they had just discovered they weren't allowed to live together because there was an ordinance in their village village called belt Hair, that prohibited more than two persons unrelated by blood, marriage or adoption from living together. So, you know, they were

pretty shocked. And it turned out that under the laws it was at the time, by the time they were talking about this, they were liable for all sorts of criminal fines and punishment. It was really a very heavy stuff.

So I started working on that case with my law professor and um we went to a federal job to ask for a temporary restraining order, which means to just until we had litigated whether or not that was a constitutional thing to do, to tell people who they couldn't couldn't live with that the village should not be allowed to either kick them out of their their house or to you know, start walking them up because you know, they owned too many fines for having been illegal residents.

So um, the judge ended up signing the order, and he was signing the order about that, and then one of the ways they which actually the original way in which our clients had discovered that they were illegal residents, was that they had applied for residents only beach permit and they were told they couldn't have one because they were illegal residents. So the judge who we had the district judge, who was a very nice man, looked at the order we had written out and he said, well,

you know, it's the summer. Don't your clients want to go to the beach while the litigation is pending? Do you mind if I write that in that they have to be allowed to park in the parking lot of the beach. So we said sure, you know, that's very nice,

so he wrote that in. Then, as the junior member of the team, I was sent out to explain to our clients, to show them the order and explained to them what was going on, and they gave me a tour of you what the village looked like in the residents only beach and the minute the wheels of their car hit the parking lot is very large. Your fierce looking man comes striding across and says, what are you doing here? You're not allowed to be in this parking lot.

And they all look at me, and I'm thinking, what am I? I'm like, you know, twenty something, I'm not very tall, but what am I supposed to do with this large man who doesn't want us in there in

his parking lot? And then I remembered that I had a federal court order right on my person, so I kind of drew myself up, but I showed him my federal court order and I said, well, I'm with the New York Civil Liberties Union kind of, and I have a federal court order saying that these people are allowed to be in this parking lot and go to the beach. And he melted. And that that was, I think, in one of the points at which I thought, Wow, you know this, this is really powerful stuff. Yeah you saw

that there was my first day case. Yeah, exactly, that's great. And I saw I read that. So maybe your your earliest memories, um of speaking up to authority involved I think a dispute over a book at your school library. Yeah, that's right, even before the Belchair case. My first civil liberties hero was my mother. So when I was in third grade, we were doing a school play about a story called Johnny Tremaine, about a boy in the American Revolution,

and I like, I thought the play was interesting. Players don't have that many words, and we were told that this was based on the book. So I went to my school library, my public school library, and I asked to take out the book, and the librarian said, oh, you can't take out that book, dear, that's in the boys section. And I was I was surprised to find

this out. I've been reading books in the girls section, which were all collections of fairy tales and biographies of president's wives, but it had never occurred to me that I wasn't allowed to take out a book from the boys section. So I went home and I told my mother about this. You're just thinking, you know, that's the way things are, and she just exploded and she called the librarian the next day and say, how dare you told my daughter you know what she's not allowed to read.

So the librarian told me that from then on, I could take out any book I wanted, and you know, not long after that, they changed the policy for everyone. So you know, there was another example of how you know you can kind of speak up to authority when they kind of tell you who to be and prevent you from making your own choices. Were you always like that? Well, you know, that's third grade and I feel like yes, I think for most of us are values of form

when we're pretty young. Yeah, so you know, seeing my mother do that, I'm sure you would have had an impact on me. Yeah, that's such a good story. And did you I mean, did you always know you wanted to go into law? No? I actually really didn't, because having grown up as a woman during that era, my father was a lawyer and he always used to talk about the fact that law was really not a good

profession for women. Why would you want to do that if you could be an English teacher and have the summer off, you take care of your children, so you have to be a while. I graduated from college and then spent a few years doing other things and then decided to go to law school. Well, I mean, it's it's so interesting and now to seeing where you're at um and seeing this moment, it does feel like a moment.

And I was looking at something you said about you know, this feels like a moment we can be optimistic because so many Americans are beginning to really understand the scope and the depth of structural racism. It certainly feels, you know, I'm based in New York City. You can just feel it right on the streets with the protests, and they hear the sirens and the helicopters, you know, as we sit here, um and we hear you know, your rich

history and covering and caring about these issues. What is the challenge for you guys ahead, Well, you know, the challenge on that particular subject is that this is work

that we had already been doing. One of our top priorities for the past several years has been trying to break our addiction to mass incarceration, which, as everybody is now really coming to terms with, has been really it's a system that has disproportionately affected people on the basis of race and income and disability of co to the people who are arrested or people who are mentally ill, And our feeling is that the system has been fundamentally

broken and misguided for a long time. So part of what we're trying to do with this moment is to capitalize on the fact that people want to look at what the police do. We're trying to encourage people to look beyond the police. It's not just you. Who are the police arresting and how are they treating the people they arrest? I think behind that is the question of what do we really want to treat as a crime.

So when you treat all sorts of very minor misconduct as a crime, you're really setting up a situation where they're going to be more contacts and therefore potentially more arbitrary and discriminatory context. So, if you think about it, Eric Garner ended up dying because he was selling single cigarettes on which the tax had not been paid. George Floyd. The basis for that encounter was that they thought he

might be passing a counterfeit twenty dollar bill. So I think that if you look at why are we criminalizing some of the things we criminalize, especially if you're talking about people who are mentally ill and are having problems.

Do we really want the police to be the people who are the first responders to people who are having a mental health crisis or is there some more effective way to deal with that that would avoid putting those people into the criminal justice system, which isn't really good for anyone, and to maybe recommit, reallocate some of the resources we're using on arresting people and locking them up to actually dealing with the mental health crises. You have

mental health treatment. So instead of viewing everything as well dysfunction as a matter of policing, why don't we spend more time reinvesting and to try to prevent more dysfunction. Instort of like the old saying, you know, if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Well, you know, not every problem in our society is a problem for the criminal justice system, and an occasion to arrest people and lock them up a lot of them really should

be an occasion for thinking about public health treatments. I'm thinking about how we want to approach homelessness, and you have a lot of much deeper thoughts about how you prevent dysfunction. Rather than answering everything with you we're going to send in the police. It certainly seems also like this moment, even coming out of the pandemic, I can only imagine the mental health crisis is going to be even worse. Yeah, that could well be um and I

think the pandemic is also showing us. Somebody asked me the other day whether the protests over policing and police brutality are related to the pandemic, and I was in a webinar and one of the smart people in the room said, oh, no, no, they're two entirely different things. But I said, what do you mean. The same people who are being disproportionately affected by policing and police brutality are the people who are being disproportionately affected by COVID.

The statistics is that people of color are much more likely to die, and there are a lot of reasons for that. You're having to do with your underlying health and having to do with the fact that minorities and people who are not affluent don't get to work from home, they don't get to work through zoom. There are the people who are out there on the streets being the first risk wanders, being the people who are picking up the garbage, being the people who was talking the supermarket shills.

And I feel like the virus is really amplifying so many of the inequities we've had in our society. And I think especially you know, I don't know what it's like for everyone else. But I live in Brooklyn and in New York City. It really felt like a lot of the people who were out on the street, they were out on the street because they were upset about George Floyd. But I think it was more that they recognized that George Floyd was the chip of the iceberg and that there were just a lot going on that

they really just you could not tolerate any longer. More from Susan after the break, and make sure to subscribe to First Contact in Apple podcasts or wherever you listen so you don't miss an episode putting on the tech hat.

You know, I think most people probably don't think of tech when they think of the a c l U, But there's quite a bit of litigation in regards to security and privacy issues around contact tracing, surveillance, algorithmic bias, and obviously the a c l U has a hand in checks and balances and a lot of the issues that are merging from the pandemic. You know, what are some of the tech developments that you guys are most

concerned about. Well, since you were mentioning the COVID and the the contact tracking and tracing, I'll start with that. So the upshot is that we are neither for nor against contact racing. Contact tracing is something that really will contribute to public health. Our concern is not to say no, you can't do it, or you just go right ahead and do whatever you want. What we're concerned about is to minimize the damage to privacy, the damage to equity. Again, Uh,

there are a lot of concerns that we have. The other thing that we're concerned about is discrimination. Again, because there are ways in which the technology could also increase pre existing social inequities. We think that people should not

be coerced into participating and in testing. We think it should be voluntary, and we also think that it should be nonpunitive, because if you start having the criminal justice system enforcing whether or not people are willing to use their phone to take a test or whatever it is, you're just creating more opportunities for police interactions that will at some point be arbitrary or discriminatory. So we don't want to see rules and regulations that are good to

public health rules. Even if they really are good public health rules, we don't want to see those become occasions for filling up the jails with the people who aren't complying, because we've already seen there were some statistics in New York that when you ask the police to start enforcing who's wearing a mask and who's not wearing a mask, that right away, excuse excuse, racially truly disproportionate in terms of who they were questioning and who they weren't questioning.

So I think there's just a lot of issues they were which is very much prop your reality, because they're very much ethical issues. Yeah, you know, UM one of the one of the cases that I'm fascinated by. UM and I you know, I honestly I felt like it was just it was only a matter of time until we saw this headline. And then we saw the headline, you know, a man was arrested after an algorithm wrongfully identified him. You know, I've been covering for so many years.

AI is biased. AI is trained on you know, on data online, which can be very racist, you know, And I think for so many years we've been having this conversation. But the question of okay, well, what happens when it gets into the hands of the police, what happens, you know, if if it could go for policing, And so I think it's such a fascinating case. And and you guys that a cl you filed an administrative complaint with Detroit's police department over what you guys are calling the country's

first known wrongful arrest involving facial recognition technology. I mean, for context, a man was arrested because he was wrongfully identified by an algorithm. The police department thought he had robbed I believe, like stolen watches, and he was arrested. I mean, can you talk to me about the significance of this case. I can't help put put on my tech hat and scream. You guys, this is a really big deal. Yeah, it is a really big deal. And as you're saying, Laurie, we were aware of this problem

for a long time and we've been complaining. So going back for a minute before getting to the case you're talking about, Robert Williams UH the National Institute of Science and Technology says that African American and Asian people are up to a hundred times is likely to be disidentified by official recognition. So yeah, that's the background problem. And so we knew that, right, you know, we knew that before the case came up in Michigan. Um, and it's

not the algorithm's fault. Obviously, there's something that's being put into the algorithm that that is, you know, that has a bias. And I people tend to think that algorithms are you know, are so neutral and that we can rely on algorithms. That's what I was saying about the contact tracking and tracing, that you you start relying on algorithms or apps that you think are neutral, and you

really have to be very wary of that. So again, before getting to the Robert Williams case, uh An, a c l U staffer at the ah LU of Northern California, had the really interesting idea of trying out Amazon's facial recognition program Recognition with the K because yeah, they were just offering this to the police or whatever. This is great, it will help you identify and see if you have

somebody who matches a mug shot. Well, what they tried to do, which I thought was very clever, was they tried to match mug shots against the members of Congress. They got the facial pictures of all the members of Congress. This was in July and there were twenty eight members of Congress who were misidentified as matching the mug shots. There were twenty in mistakes out of that, and not only that, but that the false matches were disc apportionately

people of color. And one of the people who was identified as matching a mug shot, and therefore, you know, probably you know this criminal was civil rights legend John Lewis. You're the guy who was beat up on the bridge in Salma to know, to get us all voting rights. So yeah, we know that almost of the false matches there were of people of color, even though people of color made up only twenty of the members of Congress. So in some ways, you know, the Robert Williams case

is completely predictable. We knew that we allowed for that to happen. It might have already happened elsewhere, but you know, subterranean lee in a way that we don't really we didn't see the case. But what's amazing about the Robert Williams cases that it happened right there, you know, visible

to everybody where you can just see it. So what happened was that they told him that he was being arrested because they believed that he was that the algorithm has said that that that he was a match for this mug shot, and they showed him in the mug shot, and he said to them, do you guys think all

black people look alike? That looks nothing like me. So, you know, it was pretty clearing that if you used your eyes and looked at the picture yourself, if you didn't trust the algorithm, and if you looked at the picture in this man's face, they didn't look alike. But nevertheless, he spent thirty hours in jail under some pretty miserable conditions because the algorithm said it was a match. So

I think that's really important. In some ways, the fact that you know a problem exists is not as inspiring to make people want to do something about it as when you see it. So that's what happened with all the protests about George Floyd. You people could watch that horrible video. They could see it. It was recorded on the video, And here we have an actual person, not just hypothetically statistics are showing, but an actual person who did get arrested and did have a miserable time. He

was arrested in front of his family. It was really traumatizing and based on again, the officers involved were trusting the science more than they were trusting their their own eyes. When anybody cook he didn't look like the picture right. And you know, he wrote an offed in the Washington Post and he he asked the question, He said, why is law enforcement even allowed to use this technology when it obviously doesn't work? So, I guess asking a legal

scholar the question. You know, police departments all around the country are using different variations of facial recognition software. So you know, what regulations should we see as we enter this era of algorithmic discrimination. Yeah, that's a great question.

And again we've been urging, you know, long before Robert Williams turned up, we've been urging police departments not to rely on the facial recognition technology that it was just it was not reliable enough to you know, to hold people's face in the hands of the algorithms don't have hands, but for people's face to be dependent on the spatial

recognition technology which was being touted. And again, it's great if a company is doing something to make money, but if wanting to make money is your only consideration, and if you're not considering whether you are unleashing something that is really going to be disruptive of people's lives unfairly, either because it's just going to be wrong or because it's going to be wrong in a racially skewed way.

I think that's just really a problem. So um, we've been urging police departments not to buy and use the technology. And I'm sure you know Amazon has withdrawn the facial recognition technology temporarily and they're not sure whether or not they'll bring it back. So the probability of a wrongful arrest is one thing, but when you draw the camera back and look at all the technology in the bigger picture.

In addition to facial recognition, one thing that police departments have been doing with facial recognition and different law enforcement agencies is to try to see who attends a demonstration or see who's in the crowd. So it ties not into are you, like, is somebody likely to be wrongly arrested like Robert Williams because they just there was a

false match. But it starts becoming big surveillance too that an agency has the cameras on and then they have the facial recognition and they're purporting to identify all the people in that crowd, so that then they contract those people.

They now know that you were at the George Floyd demonstration, and that person was in the the the anti war demonstration, And at that point, the government starts having more and more information about all of us, to the point where it feels like instead of we're controlling the government, it's like the government controls us. So I think the facial recognition is only one part of the whole tendency of technology. Two amplify government power to be kind of watching, watching

what we do. Yeah, I mean, it's it's interesting to hear you say that. Um. You know, that type of technology is just a part of it, especially when it comes to this moment where people are out protesting police brutality, when people are out fighting for their civil liberties. You know, there's all sorts of technology that's being built. Their cameras that are are being built that can recognize people in real time that are police, police are wearing. There's all

sorts of technology. This is just the beginning of it. Um. I I know you mentioned Amazon put a hold on their sales of recognition software. Microsoft said it's not going to sell face recognition software to police departments until their federal regulations. I know. IBM said that it was going to announce a ban on general purpose facial recognition? Is that enough? Like? What is I guess, you know, what is the government's role here? Like? What do you think

should happen? Especially since this is just, as you say, one small part of a larger issue that we're facing as a society. I think that's right, and I think that there could be, you know, government regulation, but that's not going to happen unless the public wants to urge

their representatives to start controlling this. And what we've seen is that an enlightened public can make something happen even without regulation, right, So, you know, it was that the public is becoming concerned and that's the reason why Amazon acted to withdraw this. They started being concerned that their customers were not going to be happy with them. And I think at this point that's almost more effective than government regulation. And once you have that wake up call,

then you can start having serious debates. And I think those debates have to take place in many places. They should be taking place in legislatures where people can talk about the trade off between privacy and mass surveillance and whatever the government is trying to accomplish, why do they

need this technology? Is it really worth it? You are their crimes that they wouldn't be solving without it, and are they crimes that we're concerned about solving or do they fall into the category of, you know, is that something that we don't think should be a crime at all. People are generally unaware in terms of what the police do that only four to five percent of all arrests

involved crimes of violence. So when people think about we want to enable law enforcement to be at catching criminals, where we're concerned about divesting or defunding the police because who's going to protect us from physical harm? Almost none of what the police and law enforcement do is about physical harm. It's a tiny percentage. Everything else that they're doing is about this whole array of all sorts of

other things that we criminalize. And I think that in addition to having better conversations about is there a potential for some of these technologies that the government is using to create arbitrary or discriminatory enforcement, I think we need to dig deeper behind that question, in the same way that you need to dig deeper beyond the George Floyd murder and to ask if there's something systemically wrong here.

Do you need to rethink the whole question. So when people say, well, you know, but we need the facial recognition technology because it helps the police solve crimes, well, okay, but you know what crimes and what are the costs? So I think once people are educated enough and once they realize what the nature of the problem is kind of what's being unleashed, they can start really being read

to have that broader conversation. And I think it should take place in legislatures, but I think it also should take place and evidently is taking place in boardrooms at Amazon, Facebook, and Google and Microsoft. They should be talking and they do sometimes if the people demand it. And it also has to take part just among people, you know, among you know, tech communities and people just beginning to talk

about what are our responsibilities here? Is it okay for us to create products just to make money if we know that there are dangers, that the products are going to be misused, or maybe aren't reliable enough, or that they just feed into this enormous surveillance date. So let me compare this to an earlier moment. After nine eleven, we had a kind of similar phenomenon that in order to deal with catching terrorists. We changed a lot of laws that ended up really sacrificing a lot of privacy

and allowing a lot more government surveillance. And for a number of years that went unchallenged, and people kept saying, oh, well, you know, if if that's what we need in order to be safe, we're willing to give up a little privacy. So, first of all, I think people didn't think about the fact that they weren't giving up their own privacy, they were giving up somebody else's. And second of all, people didn't realize how extensive the surveillance really was until Edward Snowden.

So then after Edward Snowden came along and people realized how the government was just scooping up tons of information about people and just keeping it in government databases and started realizing the horrifying potential of all that. What happened was that Congress made a couple of little changes to the law. But more important, Microsoft and Google and other places started to realize that their customers were concerned, and

they started being a little less cooperative. At the beginning, right after nine eleven, all of the telecoms, all these companies were just saying to the government, you want information here. Take it all your verizons are sure, you know, hear all the records of all our customers. Take it all. You're keeping us safe. And I think that to me,

the most important thing is an informed public. That if people can examine for themselves, but that they really think that we're being kept safe by all of this, and really examine you both the costs and the benefits in an educated way, I think we get much better discussions. And I think not only do you have the possibility of getting better legislation or regulation, you also have the possibility that private companies and you know, the tech the tech companies are not going to want to do it

anymore because their customers don't want them to. Yeah. I mean it's hard to have an informed public and to have these discussions, even in this current environment. To some degree. I mean, people I think are struggling with the idea

of truth. People are um, you know. And I remember, by the way, I remember this note in leaks, like I remember being in the news room covering technology and thinking to myself because I wrote the tech bubble all the way up right, and thinking, this is an extraordinary moment, because we saw that we've been sharing all our data. But we saw for the first time that, you know, the government had a lot of access to things that

we had no idea they had access to. And I think it was a fundamental shift, and the lens on tech companies changed at that moment, and tech companies behavior has changed quite a bit after that. You know, I wonder this moment we're sitting in where we're having these

debates about surveillance and privacy and whatnot. These are sticky debates and they're very politicized as we're heading into an election, as we have misinformation spreading online, as a lot of people don't know what to believe and what not to believe. As the media landscape has changed, it's it certainly seems like a harder environment to even to even have some of these conversations. Well, I think in some ways it's

harder in some ways. I think the other thing that is a catalyst for the discussions is realizing that there's a dimension of race to all of us, I think, and talking about artificial intelligence and facial recognition, not many people saw that as an issue of structural racism. You know, that there's something wrong with how we're putting together the algorithms and it ends up that John Lewis is going to be misidentified as somebody who matches a mug shot

and that Robert Williams is going to be arrested. So I think that the fact that we now know that that is an additional concern enables us to have richer conversations. So we're not only talking about is there a trade

off between security and privacy? Plus, I think the other thing that people are feeling much more open to is to have that deeper conversation about what are our goals here and if we're enabling all this government surveillance in order to help the government to catch criminals, well, you know what do we mean by criminals? What crimes are they solving? And how are they using you know, how how are how is this actually being used in services?

Wood So I feel like in some ways, you know, with the election coming up, I think that gives people more impetus to want to talk about these issues, because the elections aren't only about the president. They're also about local prosecutors and sheriffs and the people who make the decisions about whether to buy surveillance equipment and what they're gonna do with their authority over the criminal justice system.

So one thing the a c l U has been doing in addition to everything else, as we've been very involved in elections of prosecutors because that's the place where almost people never used to pay attention to, you know who, who were these people running and maybe they would vote for somebody without really knowing what they voted for. So what we're urging, and I think this is very much

what we're talking about about having an educated public. We're urging people to go to elections or to go to debates, to go to campaign events, attend I guess on zoom these days, to attend campaign events and ask the candidates questions, what would be your policy about whether or not you're going to accept military equipment from the federal government in your police department? Are you going to buy tanks? Are you going to buy you know, these horrible weapons that

are used. Is that something you would do? Are you going to buy you know, facial recognition software? Is that how you would use your power? If we left you um say that the prosecutors, would you support a reduction in cash bail and increase of increased alternatives to incarceration?

So that's a place where without way for the government to do something, we can ourselves affect what's happening in our communities by encouraging candidates to think about what positions they're taking on these different issues and letting them know that they're gonna lose votes. The more people educated, the more they are educated, the more they can tell people that they'll lose votes, and to try that. This is something that's worked in some places to encourage candidates to

take a better position. Yeah. Yeah, they might never never thought of that, but you know, once they commit themselves, you know that that's going to be better. So there are all sorts of ways that we can affect things. More from Susan after the break and make sure you set up for our newsletter at dot dot dot media

dot com. Backslash newsletter will be launching this summer. Before I move on from specifically some of the tech issues, I have to bring up predator drones right right, you know, the the U S. Customs and Border Protection flew a large predator drone over the Minneapolis protests. You know, people were protesting police brutality and the killing of George Floyd, and for many reasons, it almost felt symbolic. You know, it was raising all these questions about aerial surveillance, about

what data was being collected, where was this going? What is your take on this? Well, you know, as you're saying, Laurie, and you know that really it really magnifies the opportunity to gather more information because you don't even have to have the helicopters or whatever. But so you know that of course is a concern just you how much information is the government gathering, what are they going to do with it, who's going to have access to it? Will would ever be deleted or will it just got to

stay there in the government databasis forever. But I think the other thing that the Predator drone brings to mind is a question that people were also asking, which is about the new live touris aation of law enforcement we've had for years in this country, a passi Comma tat us Act as it's called, which says, you don't want the military doing everyday law enforcement, because that's that's not

our country. We don't want the military to be quote dominating the streets, and we don't want the people who are out protesting to be considered the enemy of the United States, there are people who are expressing their opinions, and so the whole idea of you know, it's one thing. It's enough if the police held helicopters are flying overhead and trying to keep track of, you know, who's in

the crowd and what the crowd is doing. But once you start adding an element of something the military helicopters or the military drones or things that feel like we are being treated as the enemy of the government, instaid that the people who are the government, who are supposed to be controlling the government, I think that that's just it. It's a very bad paradigm. You think it's a slippery slope, Well,

it's a slippery slope unless we stopped the slipping. And as we saw with you with Amazon and the facial recognition, if people say, wait a minute, yeah, I think we can make that stuff. But I think if people don't pay attention, I think we have a very slippery slope. And that's what I've been saying about most of the issues we've talked about you, starting with the contact tracing and the surveillance and everything else. It seems to me

that what's really important is transparency. We should know what the government is doing and accountability. Back on the issue of contact tracing, one thing that the AHL you do, together with the a l U of Massachusetts, is we

have filed a lawsuit. We're actually a records request demanding that the government, including the CDC, release information about the possible uses of all the location data that they would be collecting in connection with contact tracing, because you know, once if you don't know what they're doing, then you can't have a discussion about what they should be doing.

And one reason why I was bringing up all the post nine eleven changes of law is that I think that the whole idea that we can't know the government is doing. The government has to act in secret in order to keep us safe or else the enemy will be able to know what they're doing and you know, and work around it. But the government can know everything that we're doing. I think that just has democracy backwards. You know, we have to be able to know what's

happening inside the government. And that applies to why are they sending the Predator drone? What are they going to do with the information? What does this mean? Are they going to do it again? And it also has to do with the contact track tracking and tracing. Once they get that data, what happens to it? Are they going to erase itever? You know, who do they share it with?

What are they going to do with it? And I feel, you know, those are really important issues in a democracy, that we just have the right to know what the government is doing so that we can talk about it. And I feel like to sort of say, well, this is what the government is doing and that's really bad, and that upsets me. I think that kind of misses the point. If the government is doing something bad, then it is the duty of every American to find out

what they're doing and to push back. And so at the a C. O you we have a program that we call People Power. We first invented that and used it to explain to cities and localities all over the country about how they could fight back against draconian immigration rules by becoming quote sanctuary cities, what what their rights actually were. We then used it for voting rights. We're

about to use it some more for voting rights. But what we have really urged and I hope that you know, some of your listeners will go to the a C l U website and see about what people power is doing in addition to what the a c l U is doing, Because what is the A c L you doing? And that's all the staffers at home trying to you know, work on their new laptops while they're trying to, you know,

keep their talkers quiet. But people power is about what every single person can and I think should be doing. You know, if people really educate themselves and think about the ethical issues, the costs and benefits of all this technology in addition to a lot of other things going on, I think we get a lot better results if people pay attention. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to watch the A c L you take on issues like surveillance, facial recognition.

I know, the A C L you out a lawsuit against clear View AI, which was this very controversial company that was using biometric data. I think facial recognition technology helped them collect something like three billion face prints, and they were giving access to private companies, wealthy individuals, federal,

state and local law enforcement agencies. And you know, coming from the tech space, it certainly feels like sometimes these stories, you just don't know what these companies are doing until you start, you know, peeling back the layers and seeing all the data went to here and here, and why did it go there? And why wasn't this disclosed? And and oftentimes it takes the watchdog to really understand where some of this can can go wrong and how it's being used in ways in ways that can be dangerous

in many ways. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And that's why I was saying before that aren't concerned before everybody jumps on the bandwagon about let's have more contact tracing and then you know, like everybody should just be doing all this information. I think we have to get a dog. Yeah, you're not gonna have the watch dog telling you things unless you build a watchdog into the system.

And if everything is just you know, a company has invented this and is selling it to the police, or a company who has invented this and now we're all going to buy it. If you just leave out any sort of oversight, then you really have a tremendous potential problem. Are there any other examples of tech that we're not thinking about the unintended consequences for our rights or privacy yet? Well, you know, a AI is really big altogether across as

you're saying across many different kinds of issues. I was just actually, this is not a tangential to your question, but you were asking me before about cases that I had worked on, and there was another case that I worked on that was about tech where I wrote the A c l Use brief in the Supreme Court. It was an ancus brief. It wasn't about our client, but

it was a kid called Riley versus California. And what the police were saying they're most law enforcement places, the federal government as well as the state of California and many other jurisdictions, was that when you arrest somebody, the police get to do what is called a search incident to arrest, so they get to see what you have in your pocket. Makes some sense, right, you know, if you have a gun in your pocket, that's a problem, or you know whatever, So they get to do a

surgeon sent in to arrest. And the law had been that if they find something in your pocket like that's that's a container, they can search inside the container to see if there's anything in it that that could be harmful. And in fact, there was one situation where they opened up a cigarette package that somebody had and they you know, they could find a razor blade, they could find marijuana,

cigarette whatever. So that was law where the Supreme Court said, yes, you're allowed to search people and search the containers that are on them. Well, what law enforcement said was, your cell phone is a container. When we arrest you, we can search your cell phone. It's a container. We have the right to search incident to risk. And so we wrote a brief saying no, it's not you know, it's a container, but it's a container that essentially is your home,

it's your library, it's your desk. So allowing the police to look in your cell phone when they only had really very feeble and very unlikely scenarios, things just wouldn't happen too often for what the need was. You know, maybe you had some remote thing that would go off and would blow something up, you know, oh come on, yeah, but yeah, there were other ways to deal with a lot of that, and so the Supreme Court actually agreed

with that. They said, yeah, you know, this is really is just a technological way of finding out what's in your your papers and books and records. It used to be they were in your desk, and now they're in your cell phone. So that to me, it's a sort of a whole thread of what we've been talking about. But the challenges to civil liberties are different and in some ways greater when the technology builds up. Yeah, there's there's a great quote on the A c. L U website.

The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the founders fought. The U. S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts exactly. I like to talk about, you know, one of the whole points of the Constitution adding the Fourth Amendment, which is the protection of privacy, is they wanted to protect

what was in Benjamin Franklin's disk. You know, nobody should know if he was writing some things that were anti government, and we now have that on our cell phone, so of course, But that's where I think that a lot of the protection of civil liberties is applying our fundamental principles in different circumstances. Taking a gigantic step back, what do you think is the biggest threat to civil liberties in the new World Order? In the New World Order, Well,

you know, it's hard to just select one. In sort of like Sophie's choice, you know which, which is your favorite child? Right now, I think one of our very top priorities in Adenia. Mass incarceration is a big one because so many people's lives are just being totally disrupted their families, and often the question really has to be

for what. One thing that we're hoping is that the work we've been doing around trying to get vulnerable people released from prison so that they won't get the virus and get seriously all possibly die is we're helping that once jurisdictions see that they were able to release thousands of people from prisons and jails and that it's not going to cause a spike in the crime rate, it

really is pretty safe thing to do. We're hoping that that's going to stick and that long run will be able to rethink, well, did we really need to put all those people in prison and jail to start with? What are we doing with the criminal justice system? So that's really big. But the other thing that I think

is really big right now is voting rights. I have alluded to this at the beginning of our conversation, but the premise of democracy is that the people get to decide on who should be running the government and who should be making the policy about all these things we're talking about here. You know, what, what are the regulations about technology? What are the regulations about your reproductive freedom? Everything else? LGBT rights? Uh, And it's the people's vote

is distorted. That's a real problem that people can't vote. So we have litigation going on right now in I think it's like thirty different states trying to get people the opportunity to vote. So one of the things that has happened in addition to all way is that incumbents had been using to try to protect their own seats, is that the virus has really made it dangerous for

people to vote in public places. So we saw the election in Wisconsin where people were just lined up for you know, tremendous distance is waiting for a really long time to vote because Wisconsin would not allow them to submit absentee ballots. And in fact, a study showed afterwards that at least seventeen people got got the virus from voting.

Many many polling places were closed because they, first of all, the poll poll workers are generally elderly people, and the poll workers were not able and willing to to man the polling places. There are a number of states that don't allow absentee ballots at all unless you have a particular situation, like if you're disabled, and the states are saying, oh, well, you know, the pure the virus are getting yill, that's not a disability. Or before you get an absentee ballot,

you have to have it notarized, you have to have witnesses. Now, how is all this going to happen? So it's very concerning that people are going to have to choose between their health and they're right to vote, and we don't

think that that should happen. And that's something that has to be attended to right now, because if states don't come up with plans for trying to enable everyone who wants to vote to be able to vote, and for counting absentee ballots and for administering this program, if you don't come up right now with the plan and the resources, a lot of people are going to be left out and they're going to find that either you know, they can't vote because they're afraid to go out to the poll,

or the vote is not going to be adequately counted. So I think that right now, making democracy work is really one of our top projects. What is the solution to some of these problems? What are your tangible solutions? But one tangible solution is that more states have to make absentee balloting available to people without having all these conditions and you know obstacles. Uh. The other solution is

you were talking before about truth. A lot of the reason that's given the very thin veneer of justification that's given for we don't want absentee ballots or we need voter i D keep to carry government to approved voter i D, which means you have to go down to a governmental office live and get your voter i D and show it at the polls. The excuse for a lot of this is is that there could be fraud. Well, studies have shown that there's virtually no voter fraud, and

it's just it's really a real unicorn. And again, I think if people understood that, that might sound good, but it's not true. I think truth is another thing that we're really fighting for these days. Can you listen to the evidence. Can you listen to the public health officials? Can you listen to what you what's real? I know for a fact that tech companies are very concerned about

voter suppression, you know, and misinformation spreading online. This idea of countering truth around a lot of these very important initiatives, whether it's absentee ballots, whether it's showing up to the polls, all that kind of thing. You know. I'd be curious to know your take. There's a current battle happening right now. You have seven fifty advertisers boycotting Facebook asking for better

policing of hateful content. Our social media companies doing enough to police harmful content, especially as we head into an election where voter suppression and the spread of misinformation will most certainly be attacked. It used to manipulate voters. Well, let me actually break your question down into two different parts, because you were starting by saying about the concern about voter suppression. I think one thing that everybody should be doing is to increase awareness of what is a fair

way to improve access to the ballot for everybody. And some of those things are tech solutions. We've had tech solutions for years that are available and not widely enough used. How to enable differently able people to vote. You can blind people, do they have the technology? So there are a lot of places where we need the tech community and we need everybody to find out how you vote, to find out a voting can be made easier, and to let people know what the rules for voting are

where they live. So one thing the a c l U Is doing is we have on our website you know your rights, you know what you're voting regulations are, and that's something that I think people really have to start thinking a lot about and to let let all their community is all their friends and family know about the importance of voting and how they what they have to do to vote, and to urge them to just get out and vote in whatever form that's going to take.

So I think that's really important. In terms of disinformation on social media, people talk about the First Amendment and whether you know there's a First Amendment problem with Facebook telling you what you can't do. Well, there isn't, because the First Amendment only applies to the government, so you don't have a First Amendment right to say whatever you

want on Facebook. However, I have to say that we're you know, we don't regard that issue is altogether a simplistic issue that Facebook should be telling everybody what they can't say, because even though the First Amendment does not apply to private companies, there's still a tremendous value to free speech. And there are a number of examples which you know, are we've come up with about people who are have speech suppressed for bad reasons. I'll give you

one example. There was a woman who African American woman who posted something on Twitter and she got all the it is horrible racist responses, and she posted a screenshot of the responses that she got to show people what she was up against, and Twitter took it down because it included racist words that you know, okay, you know

kind of this is the point. There was another uh An CLU lawyer wrote about a statue in Kansas that was a topless statue is a woman who were bare aggreasted, and so whatever the locality was in Kansas decided to take it down because yeah, that was they considered that

to be important. So the A. C. L You lawyer who was challenging whether or not the I think it was city could take it down, posted a portrait a picture of the statue and that was it wasn't Twitter as I think Facebook, and that was taken down on the ground that it was obscene, so she couldn't post the picture of what she wanted to do. So we think that social media control is really a two age sword.

What I liked is at one point Facebook had a protocol for about you what's true and what isn't true, And what they did was they gave you a flag. So they were concerned that something that was said wasn't true, they would have a neutral fact checker check it, and then if it didn't turn up well, they would put a little flag over it and say this has been questioned, and you could click on the flag and you could see why it was questioned. But they didn't just take

it down. So you know, I I agree that, you know, disinformation is a tremendous problem, but I think that the idea that the solution is asked the tchech companies to decide what we should and shouldn't see. Yeah, I don't think that's so great either, And certainly they should not be doing it without a lot of transparency and accountability. If they're going to be taking things down, they should tell us what their protocols are, and you know, there

should be more public discussion about where the balance is there. Yeah, It certainly seems like the protocols changed quite a bit, especially having covered tent for for this many years. It certainly seems like Facebook changes at Twitter changes it, and oftentimes it depends on public pressure. I'm curious to see what happens with all these advertisers boycotting. I think personally, I have a feeling it won't impact the bottom line

much and they'll go back to business, says normal. But but who knows, you know, I do know that Zuckerbird cares uh deeply about his employees and and but they've been kind of up against you know, public scrutiny for a very long time. But but it certainly is interesting, especially when the stakes get higher and disinformation can go further, and especially as we get closer to an election, it

certainly feels like everyone feels more triggered around it. Yeah, yeah, well, you know, one of the classics statements about the First Amendment is that in the marketplace of ideas, the best antidote to bad speech is more speech, right, so, you know, suppression. I think we always have to worry every time somebody's censoring and suppressing. Yeah, who are we giving that power to? You know, nearing a clothes because we don't have you

for too much longer. I saw that you gave a talk um a Democrat and a Republican walk into a bar, and you're saying that it seems like these days Democrats and Republicans can't really agree on anything, but we all need to agree on fundamental American principles like do process, equality and freedom of conscience. So is that possible? Do you believe are you? Are you an optimist? Do you believe that in this current environment? Is that possible? Well?

I think that's that's a great wrap up question. Where so that speech I gave it the Central Arkansas Library, And my chief point, as you're saying, is I think that people have to be able to agree on neutral principles. The Constitution was designed not to say what we're going to do about everything. It was designed to have everybody have a fair opportunity to be part of the process

of deciding what we're going to do. So it sets up all these democratic structures where we get to vote for the people who are the policy makers and we all get to decide. But the principles there, the underlying principle is that everybody should have a fair and you know, the principle should be neutral. Everyone should get to vote. It's not like, you know, if you're a Democrat, your vote doesn't count in this area, and if your republic and your vote doesn't count in that area, is that's

not fair. And the basic ideas of the freedom of speech, freedom of religion, they're all to be they manage the stations of the Golden rule that if I want the ability to just choose my own religion and decide what religion I'm going to practice, I have to respect your right to make a different choice and have your own religion, because that's the golden rule. If I want to say something that's unpopular, I have to respect your right to

say something that's unpopular. And if I want to be treated fairly and not locked away for you know, doing something minor and never given a fair trial, I have to respect your right to have the same thing happened to you and to be all those fundamental principles are things that we really all should agree on. I think people get into arguing and assuming that they can never agree on the principles because they're differing on what they

think the results should be. And I think to be part of the point of civil liberties is it's all about process, it's not about results. The a c l U is nonpartisan. We don't try to get Republicans elected, we don't try to get Democrats elected. We don't favor or disfavor individual politicians or individual parties, but we we favor or that there should be neutral principles that everybody can agree to to say, okay, here's what's fair. And the analogy I used in that talk at the Central

Arkansas Library. It was one of the nights during the World Series, but fortunately not a night where there was a game, so people were able to come. And I said, okay, so what happens before a baseball game is that everybody has agreed on the underlying rules, and everyone agrees that the your umpires, your referees, and any sports should be neutral. And you don't want somebody who's partisan. If they were favoring one team, you get rid of them at all.

Sports fans could agree to that. You know, maybe there would be a few who would be just so you know, matchiavellian, that they would rather have the biased umpire to always rule for their side. But I think sports fans can agree what you really want for a fair game. Is you want a fair game, you want everyone to agree

on the principles beforehand. And I think that if we could sit down in small groups around the country and really talk about what the fundamental principles are, I am an enough of the patriot to think we actually could agree about a lot. And let me give you an example of why. I think there's some basis for hope. Maybe not optimism, but certainly hope. We were talking about

voting rights. So one of the major problems is gerrymandering, the way when a party is in power they try to distort all the district and they try to stack the deck so that their party will remain in power. Or if the party in power in a particular state thinks it's to their advantage to not have that many people vote, they try to make it harder to register

to vote for new voters, etcetera. Uh, we have had the A C l U and a number of other organizations working in coalition with US have had a fair amount of success doing ballot initiatives going to the people of the state in states like Michigan and Nevada and Missouri and Florida, where we were part of getting the amendment for a past that gave the vote back to people who have been convicted of a felony at some

point and the people of the state. When you us the people of the state, you can get a majority sometimes the super majority of people who say no, we want the rules to be fair. Who doesn't want the rules to be fair are legislators who want who are incumbents and who want to keep their seats even if

it takes unfair procedures to do it. So that's a real problem right where we have right now that the incumbents, the people who are trying to maintain power and not allow any sort of regime change, are pulling all the levers. But what I think, I think the chief grounds for optimism is that when you go to the American people themselves and say, well, do you want a fair system or do you want a system where you think your

side is more likely to win? You talk to them about that, and I think that you're going to get them to say they would really like to see a fair system, and that is the promise of America. UM. Last question, you have taught at Brooklyn Law School since what is the lesson your students will take from this moment in history. Well, I know there are lots of lessons, but if you could extract it, what is the lesson

your students will take from this moment in history? Well, you know, in an individual setting, one thing I'm doing for the fall is I am preparing of course that I'm calling COVID nineteen and the Constitution. So what we're gonna do in this seminar is we're going to be looking at the way in which the Constitution has been challenged and to see, you know, how well it holds up.

What does the Constitution have to say about whether you can quarantine people and whether you can allow people to be at a religious assembly but not to go to a protest, and etcetera, etcetera. So I think there's a lot of interesting things there which I think are very much this particular moment, But big picture, what I would like the students to take away the constitutional law students especially is essentially what I just said to you, that

the Constitution is about process. It's not about results. It's not about you know, you're a Republican and you're a Democrat, and we have two different countries depending on what your party is I think that we have one country and it's all about a neutral process for very good reasons, and I would like people to think more about that. After my speech at the Central Arkansas Library, I had

two examples of people who talked to me. One guy came up to me, he said, I'm the Republican who walked into that bar, and he said, you know, you're making a lot of sense to me. And then there was another guy who talked to me who was a Democrat. He said, you know, I never really thought about that, that maybe it's not right if we're only trying to win. I never thought about you know, that's that's not what we do in sports. And that's what I'd like people

to think about. You know, do you really want to do things that are only about how you think it's going to come out and cheat and destroy the system and you know, put a film on the scale and you know, stack the deck in order to make things come out to what your preferred result is in the short run or a long term. Is that just a

really bad idea because it's just totally inconsistent. You know, we've just come from fourth of July and totally inconsistent with the premises on which we would like to believe our country was founded. Does technology throw a wrench in the system? I mean it does. It does create lots of things you can't control, and and it it always

it's always you know, it's always new environment. So you know, different kind of example, we were talking about technology and surveillance, where of course technology has enabled a whole lot of surveillance that we then have to deal with. But technology also enabled a whole lot of new marketplaces of ideas.

So the A. C. L. You did a lot of litigation you a few decades ago on applying first two Moment principles to the Internet, right, you know, because the government censor what was on the Internet because you know, child, a child might see it. Yeah, And so you know, every new generation of technology, there are new challenges about how you apply our principles like privacy and free speech, et cetera to the Internet, but the principles remained the same.

I hope everyone is doing well in these strange and surreal times and adjusting to the new normal. Most of important, I hope you're staying healthy and somewhat saying follow along on our social media. I'm at Lorie Siegel on Twitter and Instagram, and the show is at First Contact Podcasts on Instagram and on Twitter. We're at First Contact pod and for even more from dot dot dot sign up for our newsletter at dot dot dot media dot com

Backslash Newsletter. And if you like what you heard, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. We really appreciate it. First Contact is a production of dot dot dot Media, Executive produced by Laurie Siegel and Derek Dodge. This episode was produced and edited by Sabine Jansen and Jack Reagan. The original theme music is by Zander Sing. First Contact with Lori Siegel is a production of dot dot dot Media and I Heart Radio