M. C. McGrath

The surveillance state is driven by secrecy. But everything leaves a data trail and the intelligence community itself is no exception -- even the NSA is vulnerable to surveillance. Transparency Toolkit is a free software project that helps anyone investigate surveillance programs.

By making tools to help collect and analyze publicly available data like resumes, job listings, social media, and government contracts, we are using free software and open data to track and expose the surveillance state. In this talk, I'll discuss some of the interesting things we've found, how Transparency Toolkit's software works, and how people can use our tools to investigate issues they care about.

Governments post reports and data about their operations. Journalists publish documents from whistleblowers. But there is a third type of open data that is often overlooked- the information people and companies post about themselves. People need jobs. Companies need to hire people. Secret prisons do not build themselves. By making it feasible for anyone to collect public data online in bulk and exploring ways to effectively use this data for concrete objectives, we can build an independent, distributed system of accountability.

Intelligence analysts regularly use Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) in their work. With ICWatch, we showed that it's possible to use open data online to watch the intelligence community too. Now, Transparency Toolkit has built free software anyone can use to collect OSINT without coding. This talk discusses techniques for collecting OSINT on surveillance and human rights issues. It also explores pathways for using this data in journalism, litigation, and policy change.