What We Learned at San Diego Comic-Con

Shambling along the mobbed exhibition hall floor at San Diego Comic-Con, I spotted a familiar t-shirt at a booth. Wearing it was Patrick Race, an Alaskan computer-science major who founded the web-comic and short-film outfit, Alaska Robotics. What struck me, like Thor’s hammer to the noggin, was that while so many Comic-Con fans spend hours crafting intricate superhero costumes or picking out witty T-shirts riffing on entertainment franchises, Patrick was proclaiming his passion for digital civil liberties and supporting the organization that fights to protect them.

It wasn’t the only EFF member shirt we spotted among the geek masses around the San Diego Convention Center and surrounding Gaslamp District, nor was it the only symbol of enhanced interest in digital issues manifested at the largest celebration of pop culture in the world. Whether it was the preview for Alyssa Milano’s new graphic novel Hacktivist or the new CBS show Intelligence, the core law and technology issues we grapple with daily are bleeding into the public consciousness and sparking new and enthralling storytelling.

Here are some of the things we learned this year at Comic-Con.

Surveillance, privacy and science fiction

Watch_Dogs: One of the most impressive debuts at Comic-Con was the gameplay preview for Watch_Dogs, a new video game from Ubisoft. Sequestered in a booth in the far corner of the exhibition hall and decorated with surveillance cameras—ironic, given the prohibition on recording devices inside—the exclusive trailer and walk-through presented a wander-through-an-open-world game with an enticing, embellished new mechanic: “hacking is your weapon.” (If you're unfamiliar with open-world gaming, Watch_Dogs is reminiscent of other urban-crime games such as Grand Theft Auto and Saints Row.)

The game takes place in a speculative extrapolation of the present: Chicago is a city managed by a central and highly vulnerable electronic infrastructure. The player controls a hacker with the ability to tap into the network and access controls for streetlights, WiFi networks, and cameras with facial recognition and crime-prediction technology. As the player explores the environment, icons flash above the city’s residents indicating whether they’re carrying hack-able mobile phones. For each one, he's able to pull up their personal information instantly, such as occupation, salary and medical conditions. The interconnectivity of the environment is illustrated by tiny lines linking your character to other devices in the city. In one example, the hacker is able to access a webcam in an apartment, spot a cell phone on the kitchen table, access the bank details contained on the device, then withdraw money from the victim’s account.

In the voice-over, the lead game designer explains that the game challenges the player’s morality. Do you hack an unwitting victim? Do you intercede when the prediction technology indicates a crime is about to occur? Act maliciously, and you’re vilified on the TV stations within the game; act as a vigilante and you’ll be hailed as hero.

The technological flourishes are, of course, a dramatic and entertaining caricature of the computer security activity we see today, but the core premise of Watch_Dogs is something already true. Much of our urban world is no longer simply sidewalks and streetways, and an always-active communications network—while viewed as a matter of convenience by most—is exploitable in unpredictable ways. We hope to see the game inspire a more intuitive understanding of the risks presented by dangerous and insecure policies around digital security.

Person of Interest: Like EFF, the creators of the CBS series Person of Interest find themselves suddenly thrust into the limelight in the wake of a series of high-profile leaks regarding massive government data collection programs. In fact, the highlight reel screened during the show’s panel prominently featured the same exchange between Sen. Ron Wyden and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper that EFF uses to illustrate how the government has not been honest with the public about the extent of its intelligence-gathering programs. (Also, we have to give props to EFF suppo