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Host: Ok next up we have Trevor Paglen and the six landscapes of the surveillance state.

Something like that. Ok you know we will work it out.

<i>applause</i>

Thank you guys all so much for coming

this is a fantastic honor to be here with you all

Lets get right into it. We don't have as much time as I would like to have.

I have been spending a lot of time in helicopters latly.

I'm an artist, but I'm not somebody who goes into a studio every day

with some paint and makes a mess and comes out at the end of the day with a painting or anything like that.

I have a very empirical practice,

meaning i go out into the world to do things

and i spent a lot of time running around looking at stuff.

And one of the overarching themes of my projects has to do with trying to push vision

and trying to push perception as far as I can.

Usually to the point were it starts to break down.

The reason for that is that I hope by investigating some of these limit cases of vision,

these limit cases of perception, that we can create a vantage point

that we can than use to look back on ourselves with different kinds of eyes, with fresh eyes if you will.

And for me thats really what i want out of art.

A lot of people want a lot of different things out of art.

A lot of people want a lot of different things out of art.

Some people want beauties, some people want something nice that hangs over their sofa.

What I want out of art is things that help us see the historical moment that we are living in.

So thats what I want. So for me thats what this is sort of about.

Today I want to talk about secrecy.

And I want to talk about how to go about trying to see secrecy.

And this is something that I have spend a lot of time thinking about over the years.

A lot of times people think about secrecy as what you get to know vs. what you don't get to know.

So secrecy is stuff that we don't get to know. And stuff that's not secret is stuff that we do get to know.

I think that way of thinking about secrecy is wrong.

I think in the first instance secrecy is more about a way of doing things

its a way of trying to organize human activities and it has political aspects to it

it has economic aspects to it, it has legal aspects to it, it has cultural aspects to it.

And its a way of trying to do things whose goal is invisibility, silence, obscurity.

So in this first instance of what secrecy is i would think of it as an abstract space.

A kind of organizing logic and I call it an abstrakt space, because it doesn't actually exist.

It conceptual thing, its a way of trying to organize things.

And in that first instance secrecy is very immaterial.

However in the real world secrecy only exists in so far as its logic is applied to things in the world.

In other words the material stuff that everything in the world is made of.

So in real life secrecy is composed of infrastructure and institutions things like the CIA or NSA.

Economic institutions like the so called <i>black budget</i> in the United States

It also is composed of social engineering institutions such as the security classification system,

legal institutions such as the fisa court and the states secret president of the United States and so on and so on.

All of that is a way of trying to underline the fact that I don't think about secrecy as what you get to know vs. what you don't get to know.

And think about it instead as a kind of state within a state.

A state that operates according to a very, very different logic than what we would normally think of as a democratic state.

And also as a series of material practices. Things that happen in the world.

So the question than is: 
If secrecy is a way of organizing institutions and human activities in such a way as to try to render them silent, to render them invisible, how do we go about trying to see them?

And sometimes when I talk about how do about trying to see secrecy, I use this metaphor from cosmology.

That metaphor of dark matter, were we know that 97% of the universe is made of dark matter and dark energy

and stuff that we can't see, we can't directly detect, but we can infer its existence by the influence that it exerts on the visible universe

So its something we can only indirectly detect.

In other words by seeing that interaction of this visible matter with the invisible matter we can learn something about it.

And I think perhaps something is true of secrecy as well, because I think that secrecy is an inherently contradictory thing.

Its a self-contradictory thing and the reason for that is that this organizing logic

of secrecy as it has to take hold as is articulated in the material world it's never completely efficient.

In the first instance the idea of secrecy is not efficient

because if it's true that secrecy has to be made of the same stuff that the rest of the world is made out of

stuff in the world tends to reflect light
right it's visible and fundamentally.

So we have this kind of originally contradiction
in the idea of secrecy.

For example if you gonna build a secret airplane.you can't build it in an invisible factory

with ghost workers you have to build in a factory that looks like any kind of other factory.

You have to build it with people that you know do the same things than any other person does.

So secrecy is not efficient it has as originally contradiction.

And I think that that originally contradiction gives rise
to all sorts of other kinds of contradictions

So methodologically what I'm trying to do often
is find those contradictions.

Where does that secret world intersect with something I can see.

Where does it intersect with something that I can find.

Using that methodology trying to get a glimpse
into the aspect of secrecy and the secret state that surrounds us

all of the time but that we really generally have not trained ourselves to see very well.

So I want to talk about a series of these kinds of contradictions.

One contradiction that has been enormously helpful to me has to do with logistics.

If you are going to you as the United States does
if your gonna operate secret wars all over the world

and your gonna have military bases in nearly 200 countries and spying posts and

spy satellites and this sort of thing you need to have logistical infrastructures to to support that

to you know ferry people around with things around that sort of thing.

A crucial part of any logistical infrastructure tends to involve airplanes.

Just because you have to fly people around, documents around so on and so forth.

A number of years ago this is something I picked up quite a lot

I was very interested in the CIA's extraordinary rendition program this is they're kidnapping
and torture program that they're running all over the world.

This is a guy whom I spent some time working with on the stuff.

One of the ideas that I was working with an investigative journalist,

there's about a dozen people around the world from human rights groups,

other journalists who are trying to figure this stuff out

One of the ideas was that if you could track the movements of airplanes that were known to be involved in this program

then you could perhaps get an understanding of what the geography of this a covert action look like.

We knew people were disappearing are from all over the world we didn't know where they were going

the CIA or the military would come out and say something we caught Abu Zubaydah for example

and then this guy wouldn't show up at Guantanamo Bay.

So if you thought about it you thought this guy has to be in the world somewhere.

And because this guy has to be in the world somewhere, there has got to be some secret prisons.

And that's what we are interested in.

The classic way that you organize logistics if your CIA or certain parts of the military is to create front companies.

You create fake companies to do your logistics for you.

This is very good idea for several reasons.

First: it keeps your name off of things. You can create a fake company, its doing stuff around the world.

It never says CIA, NSA, etc. in the paperwork.

Its a very good idea secondly because there is much more freedom of movement to civilians than military.

If you want to charter a plane and go to Pakistan as a civilian, thats appsolutely no problem.



OK, next up, we have Trevor Paglen and the six landscapes of the savait surveillance state. Something like that, you know, we'll work it out. OK, thank hard place for Trevor. Thank you, guys, all so much for coming here, this is a fantastic honor to be here with you all. But let's let's get right into it. We don't have as much time as I would like to have, but it's always like that. I've been spending a lot of time in helicopters lately. I'm an artist, but I'm not somebody who goes into a studio every day with some paint and makes a mess and comes out the at the end of the day with a painting or anything like that. I have a very empirical practice, meaning I go out in the world to do things, and they spend a lot of time running around looking at stuff. And one of the overarching themes of my projects has to do with trying to push vision and trying to push perception as far as I can, usually to the point where it starts to break down. And the reason for that is that I hope that by investigating some of these limited cases of vision of these limit cases of perception that we can kind of create a vantage point that we can then use to look back on ourselves with different kinds of eyes, with fresh eyes, if you will. And for me, that's really what I want out of art. A lot of people want a lot of different things out of the arts and people want beauty. Some people want something nice that hangs on their sofa or whatever. What I want out of art is things that help us see the historical moment that we're living in. So that's what I want. And so for me, that's that's what this is sort of about today. I want to talk about secrecy, and I want to talk about how to go about trying to see secrecy. And this is something that I've spent a lot of time thinking about over the years. A lot of times people think about secrecy as what you get to know versus what you don't get to know. So secrecy is stuff that we don't get to know, and stuff that's not secret is is stuff that we do get t
o know. And I think that that way of thinking about secrecy is wrong. Right? I think in the first instance, secrecy is more about a way of doing things. It's a way of trying to organize human activities. And it has political aspects to it. It has economic aspects to it. It has legal aspects to it and has cultural aspects to it. And it's a way of trying to do things whose goal is invisibility, silence, obscurity. And so in this first instance of what secrecy is, I would think about it as what we might call an abstract space, a kind of organizing logic. And they call it an abstract space because it doesn't actually exist. It's a it's a it's a it's a conceptual thing. It's a way of trying to organize things. It's in an at first instance, secrecy is very immaterial. However, in the real world, secrecy only exists insofar as its logic is applied to things in the world. In other words, the material stuff that everything in the world is made up. So in real life, secrecy is composed of infrastructures and institutions, things like the CIA or the NSA, economic institutions like the the so-called black budget in the United States. It also is composed of social engineering institutions such as the security classification system, legal institutions such as the FISA court and the state secrets, president of the United States, and so on and so on. So all of that is a way of trying to underline the fact that I don't think about secrecy as what you get to know versus what you don't get to know. I think about it instead as a kind of state within a state, a state that operates according to a very, very different logic than what we would normally think of as a democratic state and also as a series of material practices, things that happen in the world. So the question then is if secrecy is a way of organizing institutions and human activities in such a way as to try to render them silent, to render them invisible? How do we go about trying to see them right? And sometimes when I talk 
about how do we go about trying to see secrecy, I use this metaphor from cosmology, the metaphor of dark matter, where we know that ninety seven percent of the universe is made out of dark matter and dark energy. It's stuff that we can't see. We can't directly detect, but we can infer its existence by the influence that it exerts on the visible universe. Right. So it's something that we can only indirectly detect. And so in other words, by seeing that interaction of this invisible matter with the invisible matter, we can learn something about it. And I think perhaps something is true of secrecy as well, because I think that secrecy is an inherently contradictory thing. It's. A self-contradictory thing, and the reason for that is that this organizing logic of secrecy, as it has to take hold, is as is articulated in the material world. It's never completely efficient. And in the first instance, the idea of secrecy is not efficient because if it's true that secrecy has to be made out of the same stuff that the rest of the world is made out of, stuff in the world tends to reflect light, right? It's visible kind of fundamentally. And so we have this kind of original contradiction in the idea of secrecy. So for example, if you're going to build a secret airplane, you can't build it in an invisible factory with ghost workers, you have to build it in a factory that looks like any kind of other factory. You have to build it with people that, you know, do same kinds of things that any other person does. So secrecy is not efficient. It has this originally contradiction, and I think that that originally contradiction gives rise to all sorts of other kinds of contradictions. And so methodologically, what I'm trying to do often is find those contradictions. Where does that secret world intersect with something I can see? Where is it intersect with something that I can find and. Using that methodology, trying to get a glimpse into the aspects of secrecy and the secret state that s
urrounds us all of the time, but that we really generally have not trained ourselves to see very well. So when I talk about a series of these kinds of contradictions. One contradiction that has been enormously helpful to me has to do with logistics. Logistics is logistics. If you are going to, you know, as the United States does, if you're going to operate, you know, secret wars all over the world and you're going to have, you know, military bases in, you know, nearly 200 countries and spying posts and spy satellites in this sort of thing, you need to have logistical infrastructures to support that to, you know, ferry people around, move things around that sort of thing. A crucial part of any logistical infrastructure tends to involve airplanes. Just because you have to fly people around documents around and so on and so forth. And so a number of years ago, this is something that I picked on quite a lot. I was very interested in the CIA's extraordinary rendition program. This is their kidnaping and torture program that they were running all over the world. And one of the theories that that this is a guy who spent some time working with on this stuff. One of the ideas that I was working with an investigative journalist and there was about a dozen people around the world from human rights groups, other journalists who were trying to figure this stuff out. One of the ideas was that if you could track the movements of airplanes that were known to be involved in this program, then you could perhaps get an understanding of what the geography of this covert action looked like, right? We knew people were disappearing from all over the world. We didn't know where there were going. The CIA or the military would come out and say something like, Oh, well, we, we caught Abu Zubaydah, for example. And then this guy wouldn't show up at Guantanamo Bay. And so if you thought about it, you thought, Well, this guy has to be in the world somewhere. And because this guy has to be in the
 world somewhere, there's got to be some secret prisons out there. So that's one thing we were interested in. Now the other kind of classic, the classic way that you organize logistics, if you're the Central Intelligence Agency or certain parts of the military is that you create front companies, you create fake companies to do your logistics for you. And this is a very, very good idea for several reasons. First of all, it's a good idea because it keeps your name off of things. Right? So you don't you can create a fake company that's doing stuff around the world. It doesn't ever say CIA or NSA or whatever it is anywhere in the paperwork that you have to file. So it's a very, very good idea in that sense. It's a very good idea in a second sense as well, which is that there is much more freedom of movement afforded to civilians than there is to the world's military. So for example, if you want to charter airplane tomorrow and fly to Karachi, Pakistan. That's absolutely no problem. You have to pay overflight fees and some landing fees, but it's no big deal. If you're the military to tomorrow and you fly a bunch of planes into Karachi, you just started a war. So it's creating fake companies is a great idea for freedom of movement as well. The problem is with creating fake companies is that you have to file all the same kinds of paperwork that any other company in the world has to file. And the aviation industry is a highly regulated industry. You generate an enormous paper trail. And so the theory was if we can identify what airplane companies we think are involved in this program, we might be able to track them somehow and learn something about the geography of this program. So we're thinking about what are all the things that I would want to be able to do if I was a front company working for the CIA, flying all over the world. And one of the things that we thought of was, well, what I'd want to be able to do is land at military air bases anywhere I wanted in the world.
 I want to be able to refuel at military air bases. And so we had the idea of writing to the military and asking, Hey, can you give us a list of all the civilian companies who have clearances to land at military airfields and what clearances that they what airfields have clearances to land at? So you get this document right here. There's the older version, something called the cap, and it basically is a list of companies who who are allowed to land at military airfields and which ones they can do that. It's so on this list, you'll find things like Alaska Airlines, you know, UPS, DHL, you know, mostly companies that do logistics also for the military. But when you start to get in the guts of the vast majority of these only have clearances to land in Kona's. That means continental United States. But when you get further into this document, some weird things emerge. You start to find companies like this Stevens Express leasing, who has a worldwide clearance. They can land at any military airfield they want. Rich Moore Aviation. We're going to come back to these guys. Rapid air trans. All of these have world wide clearances. These very strange companies. Path Corp. Premiere Executive Transport Services. Anyway, so there's varying degrees of what goes on with these companies, which more aviation has, you know, some actual places. I got really interested in this company, though here premiere executive transport services who had pulled the paperwork from the FAA on file. And it turns out they have an address. Premiere Executive Transport Services three thirty nine Washington Street Suite 202 Dedham, Massachusetts In this building right here, they're located on the second floor. The sign outside says Hill and Plate U.S. attorneys. These are a couple of divorce lawyers outside of Boston. So when I went in there and asked them to talk to somebody about premier executive transport services, they threw me out I. But I did, you know, they just kept looking at this company, you k
now, company, it's a public company has to file all kinds of, you know, articles of incorporation, you know, updates, tax filings, that sort of thing. I got real interested in people who were on the boards and the the the staff of these companies started collecting their signatures, finding people like Colin Barnett, Brian Davis, James Kershaw, Tyler Edward Tait. This is my all time favorite. If you haven't figured this out yet, Tyler, Edward Tate's not a real person. Tyler Edward Tate has a birthday in the 1950s, but a Social Security number issued in the 1990s has no credit rating. Never got a loan from a bank. Never got a driver's license, never got married. Doesn't really have any of the electronic trail that each of us generate really every few seconds in our lives. Tyler Edward Tate's only address was this appeal box at this post office outside the airport in Washington, DC Box two two one nine four three. So I did a reverse record search on the P.O. box and hundreds of names show up. And these are all these are ghosts. These are all of these names are people who don't exist and they don't exist because they're in the business of disappearing other people. But going back to the airplane companies, what you could do because these are civilian airplane companies, you had a list of companies that you're interested in. You go back to the FAA and say, I want to see all the registration numbers and serial numbers for all of the airplanes that are owned by this set of companies. So you get back the list of airplanes, registration number, serial numbers and you go back to the FAA and you say, I would like to see all the flight plans that these particular airplanes have ever filed with the new start to get documents that look like this. You get the registration number of airplane landed iAd. That means Washington Dulles. This one right here BGR is Bangor, Maine. KFYI is the home of the Special Forces Community in Fayetteville, North Carolina III and Shannon Ireland. MG
M Guantanamo Bay. So we started tracking different routes where all these things were flying, the idea being if you could see multiple flights to a single location, perhaps that was a place to pay some more attention to. I'm going to fly through this. I've talked about this quite a lot and there's documentation of these projects online. We had other sources of information as well. This is a map drawn by a former ghost prisoner, a guy named Khalid El-Masri of What do you believe the inside of one of these black or dark prisons look like? And using this combination of information tracking, flight plans and that sort of thing, we're able to figure out the very probable location of a CIA black site north east of Kabul. And so in this this building. So we flew out there and had to spend quite a bit of time finding a taxi driver who knew where this road was. This road had been so dangerous for so long that you wouldn't people from before we had to find someone who'd been driving a cab since before the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. So all of our our fixer goes, We need to find the old man. You know, someone who knows where this road that you're talking about is to start driving out there and you leave the city behind you and you know, you're kind of out in the sticks in Afghanistan and we end up in a traffic jam. But it's not a bunch of cars. It's a herd of goats going across the street waiting for these goats to go by. And we see the shepherd, very old man, you know, the traditional Afghan clothes and the whole thing, big beard exactly what you'd picture in your head. But we know just, hey, this guy, this shepherd, he's wearing a baseball hat. That's weird. Waiting for him to go by the shepherd finally turns to look at us in the car wearing a black baseball hat. The letters KBR are on that baseball hat. KBR stands for something called Kellogg, Brown and Root, which is a company that was a subsidiary of another company called Halliburton, which of course, was the compa
ny that Dick Cheney was on the board of. And so here we are in the middle of nowhere Afghanistan next to what we are ninety nine point ninety nine percent positive is a secret CIA prison. The local goat herder is wearing a Dick Cheney baseball hat. This is another black site also in Kabul. Now when you were, I'm really interested in this front companies and because of what I'm interested in as a want to understand what is the domestic architecture of a covert operation like this look like? What does it look like at home? What does it look like? You know, just what we all imagined covert operations being secret prisons and gruesome scenes of torture and that sort of thing. And that's all true. But I wanted to understand what also facilitates that. What is the other kinds of architecture that enable that? And we've got a huge glimpse into that a couple of years ago when two of these front companies, so these front companies are there, they're sort of in this gray zone sometimes where they do real work and they're real businesses and they have, you know, you know, cash flows and things like that. But they're also primarily doing work for the CIA. So what happened was two of these front companies got in a billing dispute over invoices, unpaid invoices for rendition flights. And one of the companies was this company here, Rich Moore Aviation. The other company was a company called Sports Flight Airways, and this is a company that does organizes charter airplanes for sports teams and the CIA. I'm not making this up. So anyway, this lawsuit, because both of the companies were located in New York, the lawsuit ended up going down in the district court in a small court in New York, and nobody noticed that this thing had happened for like three years, including the CIA, who didn't bother. Nobody, you know, notice that this lawsuit was happening, so nobody invoked the state secrets privilege. Nobody got it thrown out of court. So this crazy thing that happened, so there ended u
p being depositions and, you know, evidentiary findings in that sort of thing. Just thousands of documents were generated. And these people at the human rights group reprieve in the U.K. got their hands on this stuff and I got it from them. And in these documents, you find invoices for rendition flights. This is a fight. Washington, Guantanamo Bay, Bucharest robot, you know, without the bill is one hundred sixty five thousand dollars, something you know, Eurocontrol documents invoices for telephone calls that were made during the in-flight telephone calls that these guys were making back home to to headquarters or whatever it was. These guys are trying to get reimbursed for these satellite phone bills. Depositions. And so I spent a long time with all this stuff and just started making this giant map, just trying to understand what all of the different relationships were that were being outlined in these in these documents. Turns out Dying Core was one of the big people behind it. But then even a dinosaur found out the names of different managers for parts of the program. That sort of thing. You know, sports flight was at the center of it. And the sports site was also charting with this other whole other bunch of companies also doing rendition flights as well that we didn't know about. And I just started going around and photographing these places I wanted to understand. I wanted to see the places that we're talking about in these documents. Here's sports flight in Long Island. It kind of had a failed attempt to try to tape over the name of their sign in the depositions. You have stuff like this who you know who? Ron Dickey is the backup program manager of supporting Bill Vigil. I wanted to know what Bill Vigil looked like, so I sat outside his house. Here's Ron Dickey. Yeah, it was it was one of their talking about another company called the International Group or something in Hauts Head's New York, U.S. Aviation, blah blah blah prime jet in California just wanted t
o see where these places were. The only Larry I know is Larry SEALs, I never met him, do you know if he's employed by anybody as far as I know the State Department? One note he look like what this all adds up to is what I think of as a very everyday landscape. So we're looking at an incredibly secret, incredibly, in my opinion, evil, covert operation and what does it look like? It doesn't look like anything. It looks like the rest of the world that's around us all of the time. And for me, there's something actually quite terrifying about that. Other contradictions. Places to find covert activities. Places to see secrecy where you don't have to go far at all, you can step outside and look up in the sky. In the end, there's many ways that I that I do that I've spent a lot of time out in Nevada. All of the drones, pretty much in the world, are flown by pilots based in Nevada, north northwest of Las Vegas. You drive about an hour out into the desert and there's a little air force base out in the desert called Creech Air Force Base. And you kind of even have to know that it's there. And what you do is you go out there and you park your car and just look up at the sky. You look up at the sky and it takes a minute or so for your eyes to adjust. And then you realize there's all of these little things that look like insects flying around. And what it is is you're seeing drones. And so I've spent a lot of time out there just photographing the sky generally early in the morning. So you have these Big Sky escapes, and when you look a little bit closer, you find these little, you know, guys in there that don't belong. A few months ago, I saw something very remarkable out there. It's something I'm not sure anybody's ever seen one of these, and not just flying around before this, I'm pretty sure this is one of these are que 170 sentinel drones. And it's the weirdest sound. It sounds like a tiny plane or something like that once flying like. This, of course, was the drone that the 
Iranians managed to bring down a couple of years ago. And, yeah, so did these kind of sky gave some really. But when I'm looking at this stuff, I'm not just looking to see like there's a drone, I'm trying to understand. What is it kind of look like historically and I'm thinking about what kind of images do these kinds of things perhaps rhyme with throughout the history of images? I spend way too much time thinking about Turner, and this is Turner Turner's painting an angel in the Sun from the the mid-19th century. I'm trying to think about, Well, what does that look like now? Perhaps it looks like the Reaper in the Sun. And of course, you can't see the Reaper in here because it's like really that big on the giant print. I also spent a lot of time looking at the night sky and particularly what I'm looking for and what I'm doing is tracking satellites and tracking classified satellites, tracking objects in the sky that, you know, aren't there as it were for for political reasons, you know, for all the secret things in the sky. And it turns out, you know, we're on this theme of contradictions, right? That that you hate that stuff. Secret stuff is made of the same stuff that that everything else in the world is made out of in the same is true of some of the most, you know, classified machines in the world, which are above our heads in the night sky. They all have to obey Kepler's laws of planetary motion. So if you put something in in orbit around the Earth and you can get a couple of good observations of it, you can very, very accurately model its orbit and you can predict where it will be to a high degree of accuracy. And there's a group of amateur astronomers around the world, about a dozen guys who are really good at this, who this is what they do every night and they go out with binoculars and telescopes and that sort of thing and measure the locations of reconnaissance spacecraft. And so you get numbers like this, this is called a tele or a two line element. It's 
a series of numbers that describe the orbit of a spacecraft. And you can go and you know, there's various software applications where you can kind of plug your tele file into a basically a sky chart and you can predict where something will be in the sky once you predict where it will be in the sky. You can go out and try to photograph these things. Now this is a lot easier said than done trying to point, you know, photograph a little tiny point of light. This is a photograph of a of a system that, thanks to Ed Snowden, we know it's called a keyhole enhanced crystal system. This is basically like an evil twin of the Hubble Space Telescope that's pointed down at Earth, and there's a whole bunch of these things. And what you're seeing here, that line in the middle of the image is the spacecraft moving through the frame over the course of a long exposure. And the reason this is so orange is that you're seeing this is shot from the city. So you're seeing the street lights and noise pollution bouncing off low clouds. Do you see strange things in the sky? This is an image of a spacecraft called Pan that was launched a few years ago p.a. and and it was launched into a geostationary orbit. That's an orbit that looks like this very, very far away. So it basically orbits around the Earth at the same rate that the Earth itself is rotating. And Pan was very, very strange for a couple of reasons. It right here. It's this little dot, obviously, and I had to actually fly to South Africa to take this picture because pans over the Indian Ocean, but pan. So normally there's all kinds of spy satellites and classified launches that are happening in every single case. A classified launch will either have a military launch, no. Or what's called a National Reconnaissance Office launch? No. So the military will always announce when they're launching some when they're going to launch a rocket because they don't want to think the Russians that they're starting, you know, next World War or som
ething like that. So I say we're launching a rocket. Here's the NROL. No. It's going to be around this day and around this time. This thing, called Pan Pan, shows up on the launch manifest and does not show shows up as a classified payload, but does not have a narrow launch number and does not have a military launch number. So what the hell is this thing? There's a patch for it, says Pan Palladium at night, but word on the street was that Pan just stood for pick a name in the patch as this rocket going off very faintly in the smoke below the rocket, you see this question mark. So pan goes up and turns out later there's a little Lockheed brochure that mentioned in passing that that pan was based on what I believe a Lockheed A220 800 bus. So. So it's basically a kind of communication satellite goes into this geostationary orbit over the Indian Ocean and just sits there. And so what the hell is this thing? What if it's not got an NROL or a military launch? No. Then presumably it's another government agency that would have this communication satellite over the Indian Ocean so that. This point, I'm just making up conspiracy theories, the first idea that I had with some other people was that, OK, who would want to have a whole lot of bandwidth over the Indian Ocean? Who's not the NRA? Who's not NSA? Who's not the military? We started to think, OK, maybe CIA. So on the other agency that I could think of and say it doesn't put their name on anything. So we thought, why would the CIA want to have like a whole lot of bandwidth over the Indian Ocean? The first thing you might think of as maybe they want to talk to their guys around the world? But that's way overkill to have a dedicated communication satellite to do that. So the second thought was thinking about, well, actually, let's think about what's going on here because there's two drone wars. There's the military one that places, you know, in kind of active battlefields like Iraq and Afghanistan and so on. But all of the 
drones assassinations that are going on in places like Pakistan, Yemen and so forth are run by the CIA. And CIA would definitely want to have a lot of bandwidth to to fly those things. The bandwidth on this spacecraft, I think, do 40 simultaneous drone missions, something like that. So that was one theory. But that theory got a little bit more complicated because what Pan started doing was moving around the geostationary belt and parking itself within clusters of other communications satellites, which is highly, highly unusual behavior because this burns up a lot of fuel and it dramatically reduces the usable lifetime of your spacecraft. So what is pan? I don't know. Nobody knows. I mean, who knows what the hell this thing is one of those things. This is another weird little thing that went up in 2009 on the Delta four heavy rocket. In January 2009, a gigantic NASA spacecraft went up again over the Middle East and a friend of mine in South Africa and astronomers said, Hey Trevor, you should go take a look at USA 202, which was the name that we're that there was kind of publicly used for the thing that, OK. So I was out in the Eastern Hemisphere, a place where I could see this thing and I took this photograph and USA two or two, is this thing right here, this really, really bright light? This is apparently one of the biggest, heaviest, most expensive spacecraft that the NASA and a row have ever made. Supposedly, it has a giant antenna about the size of a football field, you know, a big umbrella shaped antenna. And I wrote back to my friend and said, Yeah, I saw, you know, here's got this picture of it. He's like, No, you're not. You're not even pay attention to what you're looking at, are you? And I was like, What are you talking about? He was like, Well, did you notice what it's next to? And I hadn't thought about that, even though it's right there in the picture. He said, Well, go, look that up. And it turns out this little line here is an unclassified spacecraft. 
It's a spacecraft called 3A to what the right to does is all the satellite telecommunications for the Middle East. How? It's just right there, see it through a telescope. Anyway, there's other kinds of images like this to have some fun with this, every photographer has to have their version of Yosemite, so my version of Yosemite is photographing Yosemite and you know, we've got a, you know, one of these enhanced crystal spacecraft in the sky photographing me photographing Yosemite. Yes, as we know from looking at all of the Snowden documents, but we knew this already, that secret societies are obsessed with symbols. This has always been the case, going back to old Roman mystery religions where they had these elaborate, symbolic languages that were sort of kind of elliptically kind of trying to describe the the secrets that these secret societies held. Well, the same turns out to be true for parts of the military and the intelligence community as well. And you often find that in the form of patches that people wear on their uniforms. And it turns out that there's all these black projects in the military and intelligence community, and they make uniform patches for them. And it's the damnedest thing, I mean, I've asked a number of these guys, why the hell are you making uniform patches for black projects? And they said, Oh, well, if we if we didn't have a patch, that would really look weird, right? OK. So you find stuff like this. The special projects flight test squadron, this is a unit they're based at Area 51 in Nevada. This famous secret base and all they do is fly secret airplanes and their patch. It has all these symbols and all mean stuff. So here is this radar. You have a generic airframe, you have this sword here. That sword actually refers to a classified airframe that's now been declassified, codified, called bird of prey. There this thing falling from the sky is a radar calibration target, so it's an aluminum ball with a known radar cross-section that you 
throw out the back of an airplane. You use it to tune a radar. Their mascot is this wizard with a staff. The lightning bolt in the kind of visual language of this stuff usually represents electronic warfare. He's holding this sigma symbol, which when you do the when you're doing the engineering equations to design stealth aircraft. This is like the unknown kind of ideal radar cross section. This is like the goal of invisibility. And then right here you have a collection of five stars and one off to the side five one. These guys work at the famous Area 51 secret base. Now, based on our, you know, like looking at these kind of questions of logistics, you realize that, you know, there's a huge amount of infrastructure that has to go into something like the special projects flight test squadron. If you want to have secret airplanes and secret test pilots and the Secret Air Base, then you need to have things like secret air traffic controllers. You need to have things like secret maintenance crews down to the point where you need to have secret cafeteria people and secret janitor people and secret doctors, you know, flight surgeons and so on, and secret data entry people into one zones on the whole thing. If you're going to fly secret airplanes, you need to refuel them right. And typically in the Air Force, the way that you refuel the plane is with what's called a tanker squadron. You see you have a flying tanker in your airplane, comes up and gets the gas off. The tanker flies away. So we're going to fly secret airplanes. You need a secret tanker squadron. Now this, they're the secret tanker squadrons mascot. Is this phantom guy. The thing he's holding in his hand is a tanker boom. So it's like the boom that you lower down into an airplane to refuel it. And then here at the bottom, we have this it says N.K. A.W. T-G Dot Dot Dot Nobody now and kW tag is something it turns out you find on all the patches for all the tanker squadrons in the entire air force it stands for. 
No one kicks ass without tanker gas. You quickly start to build a whole world when you're building secret airplanes, this blew my mind when I found out that somebody sent me this crap. So it turns out you have all these secret units, the special projects guys and the secret flight tanker squadron guys. They all have football teams for their squadrons, and they all play against the other secret squadrons in the Secret Football League. So I got my hands on this good thing right here, and this is the ring for the football team, for the red hats, right? And the red hats is another secret unit also flying out of Area 51. You got your five stars in one. And their motto is more with less. And their mascot is a bear climbing over the world wearing a red hat. If you can guess what these guys do, you're really good. But I'll tell you what they do is they fly a small squadron of stolen Soviet and Russian MiGs, right? And their motto is more with less because they only have a few of these MiGs that they fly. Now, I knew all these symbols. I knew a lot about the Red Hat's Antarctica had been in that squadron. The guy who sent me this class ring, I wrote back to him. I said, I know what all these symbols mean, but there's something I don't understand right here, b h, as I've never seen that before. Can you tell me what that is? And he said, Oh yeah, I'll tell you blue hats. Ain't shit. Rapid capabilities office, they got their little black world in in the background of their patch. These guys are these guys are in charge of I don't know if you heard about this, the X-37B space plane. So this is the Air Force has their own little drone version of a space shuttle. That's secret. That's flying around right now. It's kind of a reusable vehicle. I think it's on its third mission right now that's been lasting forever. Here's a photograph of it in the sky the the flight crews for the X-37B. This their secret drone space shuttle. This is their patch. And they are all organized by they're
 all working under this rapid capabilities office. The rapid capabilities down office, down here, this their little slogan is doing God's work with other people's money. You know, there's a lot a lot of times you can learn operational details about programs based on these patterns. I mentioned that before this thing, this is an older patch for the for one odd constellation of spacecraft called Onyx that turns out the orbital inclinations on this patch are accurate. So you so you could find out what you know where this constellation of secret spacecraft was, and you can find out what they do this the patch says. We own the night and it has this picture of allies or a cat eyes or this theme of seeing at night. This is an imaging orbit, so they'll only be in this orbit if you're taking pictures, how are you going to take pictures at night? Will you do it with something called a synthetic aperture radar? And yeah, so here's a picture of that thing. I publish this stuff that road. There was a memo saying, Hey, guys, stop putting operational details of the classified spacecraft into the patches. Guys are on to us. So the NRO started having to make patches that look like this. This is for this launched a couple of weeks ago. This is for the second generation of this synthetic aperture in our imaging spacecraft. This one's called topaz. This is an old favorite. Let them hate so long as they fear. And this one kind of sums up the whole thing. This is for one of these spy satellites that suck up, you know, one of these NSA things. The classic in the genre. Don't ask none of your fucking business. And so I want to come back to this original contradiction to begin wrapping up here a little bit. The idea that you know, when you you're making, you're doing all this secret stuff, it fits imperfectly into the world. You can't make invisible factories. You can't, you know, you have to have infrastructures that go into these covert operations. Infrastructures generate paperwork that 
generate, you know, invoices and crap like that. But they also have a material footprint on the Earth's surface. Lot of places that are, you know, associated with classified activities, of course, are all over the world. But there's a lot in the West in particular that are way out in the desert. You can't get anywhere near these things. Many times they'll have buffer zones of 30, 40, 50, 60 miles around them. So there's literally no place that you can stand on public land and see them with your eyes in many cases. So what I started doing was, you know, quite literally using tools designed for astronomy and astrophotography, trying to use them for terrestrial photography, asking myself if what if I buy a telescope that's designed to take a picture of the planet Jupiter and try to take a picture of a military base, you know, 40 miles away or so? What happens would be like if in a traditional landscape photograph like an Ansel Adams is probably using something like a 50 millimeter lens. What happens if you use a 5000 millimeter lens instead, where you start to see a little bit different, little bit of a different landscape? And these are what some of these images look like, this is, you know, the Area 51 that's come up a couple of times here. This is the the massive the big data center that the NSA is finishing up in Utah that keeps blowing up. But this is what this thing is. This is a site in West Virginia called the code. Name of it is Timberline. This is another one of these NSA eavesdropping stations. This is where most recently they were involved in some of the spying on UNICEF in the UN World Health Program was going on from here. This is the aerospace data facility Southwest. This is a downlink for reconnaissance satellites in New Mexico. Classified a classified airbase for operational aircraft, also in Nevada. This is taken from about 18 20 miles away. When you start photographing these, these kind of extreme distances, you're looking through so much heat and s
o much haze that the images, you know, start to break down, quite literally. And so in an image like this, which has taken him about 40 miles away, these are chemical and biological weapons proving grounds in Utah. You start to veer towards total abstraction. And so in an image like this, you're seeing two things it's an image of a classified military base, but it's also a photograph of what it looks like when you push the physical properties of vision so far that they just fall apart at 60 miles. You start to get stuff like this, which looks like stuff like this. So just to conclude, a week ago, a couple of thoughts. The world is constantly changing and I feel like our job or my job as an artist is try to see how it's constantly changing. And one of the things I've been thinking a lot about are images like this earlier today of Travis Godspeed mentioned in passing that there was a, you know, a couple of years ago, there was a group of guys who were pulling video links from drone flights around the world off of on open satellite channels of just regular communication satellites. I got my hands on some of this stuff and made a little film out of it. There's weird stuff that shows up in these feeds, like one of the recurring themes is this clock. No idea why, but guys who look at these feeds like apparently it shows up from time to time. But I think this kind of thing is indicative of a larger thing that is happening within the world of images and within the visible world itself. And I think that images are perhaps fundamentally changing right now. Traditionally, when we think about images, the way the images have functioned historically as they function, as representations, see an image, it represents something you know in the world, but more and more. I think if if we haven't reached that point yet, then we're quickly approaching the point where the vast majority of images and photographs made in the world will be made by machines for other machines, and humans will
 never see them. Although those images will do an extraordinary image like an extraordinary amount of work in actively sculpting the world. And so we're moving away from this regime of images just being representational and moving towards a kind of operational regime of images. And that's something that I'm trying to think about quite a lot. I'll leave you with a final note, which a lot of times the first question that everybody's going to ask me. I'm never going to preempt that by saying that people ask me, Do I get hassled by law enforcement intelligence agencies and that sort of thing? I don't like talking about that, and I don't like talking about that because I fundamentally think that these are civic institutions, right? That I don't think that these guys who make patches who say, let them fear, let them hate as long as they fear, I don't think they get to win. Right? And I don't think that we should have a attitude towards these agencies. I don't think we should live in fear of them. And so this is why I speak about these projects in the way that I do, I'm making fun of them. You know, you laugh about them because I don't think that that we're going to do very well for ourselves if we participate in the culture of fear that we have towards our own civic institutions, which is ultimately what this is all. And I'll take any questions if anybody's got something. Hi. Hi, there. Right. If you've got questions, can you line up between the mike behind the microphones in the aisles? Do we have any questions from the internet? Yes, we do. Go ahead. While we line them up here. We'll take a question from the internet on, OK? There are two questions from the internet. First one is, do you know anything about underground bases? Do I know anything about underground bases? Sure, this underground bases there. Yeah, there's underground bases of places like the Blue Cube at places like NASA. Sure. But if you're talking about, you know, underground bases that are deep in the de
sert, in the bottom of a mountain, there's places like no rad, of course. But but I don't think that there's a big underground bases that have no footprint that we don't know about. Again, the logistics are just insane to, you know, think about what kind of trouble are we going to have to call it? Let's face. Unfortunately, everything starts to get a bit full and we all over time. So if you've got any questions for Trevor Trevor, we'll be down in the lounge, at the bar, at the bar. You can stalk Trevor in the bar, surveil him.