Spot the Surveillance: How EFF Is Using VR to Take on Big Brother
The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Spot the Surveillance project is a virtual reality (VR) experience that teaches people how to identify the various spying technologies that police may deploy in communities, including body cameras, license plate readers, and drones. EFF’s Laura Schatzkin and Dave Maass will discuss EFF’s work, the concepts behind the project, and how they were able to build it open source, cross-platform, and on a budget.
Laura Schatzkin is a front-end web developer who works with EFF’s amazing designers and brilliant engineers. In 2018, Laura was selected to participate in the Mozilla XRStudio Residency program, where she coded EFF’s first virtual reality project, Spot the Surveillance, from scratch using Aframe. She has also worked on many of EFF’s digital activism projects, including the team behind EFF’s net neutrality campaign, Check Your Reps; the digital privacy guides Surveillance Self-Defense and the Security Education Companion; and the recent redesigns of EFF’s main page and newsletter. She has worked in tech for over 20 years with a focus on working with non-profits and artists. She’s also worked as a software engineer, database manager of large-scale conversions, IT manager, and software quality analyst. She has a parallel life as a visual artist and shows her art locally in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Dave Maass is a senior investigative researcher for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where he covers issues related to police surveillance, criminal justice, free speech, transparency, and government accountability. In addition to deep-dive investigations, Dave coordinates large-scale public records campaigns, advocates on state legislation, and masterminds special projects, such as a science fiction collection and EFF’s first VR project, Spot the Surveillance. Prior to joining EFF, he worked as a reporter for alternative newsweeklies in every state along the U.S.-Mexico border and studied visual anthropology at the University of Manchester.