Police and lawmakers have pushed laws to ban masks, saying they’re necessary to surveil protesters. But surveillance technology already provides them and others lots of ways to identify people. Instead, the bans will likely have more profound impacts on speech, physical health and how easily extremists can dox someone. What else do you want to know about protecting your privacy from surveillance tech? ✍️: Ilica Mahajan; 🎥: Mahajan & Chris Vazquez / The Marshall Project Transcript: ILICA MAHAJAN: Why are some cops and elected officials pushing laws to ban masks? Police say… SOME POLICE: We need to see people’s faces to identify violent protesters. ILICA: But that’s not totally true. Police can already surveil you, regardless of the masks. We’re gonna have a dox off to show you how. For round one, Chris is doxing me without a photo. I’m only gonna give you my TikTok username, and you have to figure out where I work from there. CHRIS VAZQUEZ: I’m gonna go into your followers… Who’s [redacted]? ILICA: Ahh. If you can deduce I’m a Marshall Project employee from, like, oh, I follow like a bunch of Marshall Project people and The Marshall Project account, you could be like, who of [redacted]’s friends work at The Marshall Project? That’ll actually probably get you to me. CHRIS: It took me like 10 minutes. ILICA: Now he’s gonna dox me with these photos. PimEyes is a website. It’s basically like a fancier reverse image search but only for people’s faces. CHRIS: Oh! “Region is not supported…restricted in certain areas.” ILICA: I think this is actually only Illinois. Send me the two photos, and I’ll upload them here. For round two, I will be doxing myself. It pulled up a lot of embarrassing photos of me. Some of these are from a conference that I was speaking at. You could get to the website, so that would be an easy way of figuring out my name, where I work, all from this one photo where I’m not wearing a mask. Let’s try this again with the masked photo that Chris took of me. There’s a lot fewer photos here. Two of them are also notably not me. So doxing me with a maskless photo of me was really easy, and a lot of doxers are gonna take that low-hanging fruit. And these bans make it easier for them to find you. And advocates have raised concerns about physical health and free speech and accessibility. So aside from wearing a mask, how else can you protect your privacy from surveillance tech? Privacy advocates have suggested that protesters put their phones on airplane mode and turn off wifi during demonstrations, cover other visible markings like tattoos and avoid driving to protests since license plates can be tracked.