It's been like a year, believe it or not, you look exactly the same and the studio looks exactly the same. You might be on another part of the world, no one knows.
Yeah, it's just my apartment that I rent. I don't like to give out a lot of information about where I'm at and that kind of stuff, so it's very smart. A plain wall that I've got the lights down low, so it looks kind of a nice gray. At least I think it's nice. I think it's beautiful. It looks amazing. First of all, congratulations on the recent ruling. It was a 9th District Court of Appeals.
Is that what it was? It said that what you exposed with the warrantless wiretapping was in fact illegal. And there are many people that are calling for you to be pardoned now.
Yeah, it's so much has happened. This ruling, this is actually not the first time the federal government has or the appeals courts have struck down some of the federal surveillance programs as unlawful. But this one is really important because it happened from an appeals court. It wasn't from a single judge. It was from a panel of judges. And what they had ruled was that the NSA's bulk collection of Americans phone records was illegal.
And this is the very first sort of mass surveillance program that I and the journalists really that the news was broken back in 2013. So this is a huge victory for privacy rights. What it means is
There was this provision of the Patriot Act. Like, remember the Patriot Act, remember like a zillion years ago? I do. Everybody was like a Patriot Act, Patriot Act. You friend Alex Jones, you know, I think. He was worried about the Patriot Act. It's a terrible name. There's a real problem with that name. Because if you're against the Patriot Act, it's like against babies. It's like, this is the pro-baby act. But meanwhile, pro-baby act, they get to look through your email.
You know what I mean? It's like the word Patriot is attached to that in a very disingenuous way like calling that the Patriot Act is It's really creepy that they could do they should have like a number like bill a one. Yeah, you know, you know saying so you can debate the merits of it It's just so much propaganda attached to that name like the Patriot Act
This is one of the funny things because it should be a warning for anybody who's in like, you know, just anywhere in the country and they hear on the news, they're talking about like the save puppies, you know, act. There's actually one that's been, they've been trying to push through recently, which is basically outlawing meaningful encryption from the major internet service providers like you've
Facebook or Google for whatever reason got out of bed in the morning and they actually wanted to protect your the security of your communications In a way that even they can't break like right now Google and Facebook they do a great job
keeping other people from spying on your communications. But if Google wants to rifle through your inbox, right, if Facebook wants to go through all your direct messages and give that to the federal government, like you tap one button and boom, they've got all of it. It happens every single day.
Well, companies like Facebook have recently realized this is a real problem for them because first off they get all these censorship demands that you've seen where like there's de-platforming requests and it happens in one country, right? Like if the US
government is allowed to decide what can and can't be said by this person on this platform or the U.S. goes, look, we got a court warrant. They said or a judge said we think this person's a criminal. We want you to hand over everything you have on this person.
And they do it, right? Facebook does this. Well, guess who's next, right? The Russian government shows up at the door the next day. The Chinese government shows up at the door the next day. And if these companies don't play ball, they get shut down in that country. They can no longer, no longer operate.
And so the idea that a lot of them have that they've considered, and this has actually become a bigger thing in the COVID crisis, where we start talking about like contact tracing. These companies want to know where everybody is at all the time, so they can hand this over to medical authorities or whatever. There's this idea called end to end encryption, which what it means is that when you send a message, you know, when Billy sends a message to Bobby,
Billy and Bobby both had the keys to unlock that message. And it could be sent through Facebook. It could be sent through Google. It could be posted on a bulletin board in the town square. But without that key, which the people who run the bulletin board, the people who own the bulletin board, Google Facebook, they don't have that key. Only the phones at the end, the laptops at the end, the people who own those, they're the only people who have the key. So if somebody comes to Facebook and says, we want to see that information,
Facebook hands over the encrypted message, right? And Facebook goes, well, here you go. Here's our copy, but we can't read it. You can't either. Now you've got to actually do some work on the government side and go get that key yourself. And then you can read it, right? But we can't read it.
Congress is trying to stop the basically proliferation of that basic and encryption technology. And they're calling it like the Child Online Predator Act or something like that, where they say it's all about protecting the posting of like child exploitation material and really, really horrible stuff. But that's not actually what the law is about.
The law is about making it easier for spies and law enforcement to reach deeper and deeper into your life with a simple warrant stamped by any court. And the funny thing is this never used to be the way law enforcement worked in the United States. I mean, when you hear about a warrant, what does that mean to you? What can the cops get with a warrant?
Well, usually I think it means that they can come in your house and search. Right. The real issue with warrants and when it pertains to encryption, like when you're talking about the child's safety act or whatever they're calling it,
anyone would say, yes, we have to stop child predators. But the problem with having the ability to use something like that to stop child predators in my eyes, I start thinking, well, if I really wanted to look into someone, what I would do is I would send them some malware that would put child pornography on their computer, and then I would have all of the motive that I need to go and look through everything, like say if there are
If they were a political dissident, if they were doing something against the government, and you were someone who was acting in bad faith and you decided, okay, we want to look into this guy, but we don't have a warrant. What are the laws? What can we get away with it? Well, we have the Child Endangement Act. And so because of that, we're allowed to peer into anything.
but we just have to have motive. So we have to, well, do we have motive? All you'd have to do is, and we both know this, it's very easy to put something illegal on someone's computer if they're not paying attention. It's very easy to install, like you could send someone a text message that looks like a routing number for a package they're gonna get, they click on that, and then you, what is that, what the Israelis have, Pegasus, right? You've read up on this.
Yes. Well, it's from Brian Fogle's new film, The Dissident, which is about Jamal Khashoggi's murder and how the Saudis used that to use, they actually tapped into Jeff Bezos' phone. And that's where all of the, this is the suspicion, is that that's where all of those National Enquirer photos came out and all the attacks on him, because they had access to his actual phone through this.
So someone could easily get into your stuff if you're not paying attention and then they could use, you know, whatever acts they've come up with, whatever it's the Patriot Act or whatever act, where they could just get into everything you're doing. Look at your WhatsApp messages, look at your Facebook messages. It's real sneaky and it's dangerous. It's a dangerous precedent to set.
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot to this. Let me go into some of that in a little depth. So you mentioned the NSO group and their Pegasus malware set. And this is very much a real thing, like you're a well-read guy. This is like...
This company, the CEO's name, I think, is Shalev Julio, is run in Israel. It was previously owned actually by an American venture capital firm. I believe they've been rebought out, but it doesn't really matter. Their entire business
is preying on flaws in the critical infrastructure of all the software running on the most popular devices in the world. The number one target, right, is the iPhone. And this is because the iPhone, as secure as it is, relative to a lot of other phones, is a monoculture, right? Like if you have an iPhone,
You get these little software update notifications all the time that are like, hey, please update to the most recent version of iOS. And that's a fabulous thing. That's a wonderful thing for security. Because the number one way that people's devices get screwed, if it's not just their user error, right? Like you entering your password somewhere you shouldn't. It's like a fake site. It looks like Gmail, but it's not actually Gmail. You just gave the guy your password. Now he uses your password to login. But to actually break into a device,
is that it's not patched. Patch means getting these security updates, these little code updates, that fix holes that researchers found in the security device. Well, Apple's really good about rolling these out all the time for everybody in the world. The problem is
Basically, all these different iPhones, right? You got an iPhone 6, you got an iPhone 8, you got an iPhone X, you got an iPhone 3, whatever. These are all running a pretty narrow band of software versions.
And so these guys go, if they want to target, for example, Android phones, like Google phones, like Samsung Galaxy or something like that, just like a billion different phones made by a billion different people, half of them are completely out of date.
What it means is it's not one version of software that's running, it's like 10,000. And this is actually bad for security on the individual level, but it's good for security in a very unusual way, which is the guys who are developing the exploits. The guys like this NSO report trying to find ways to break into phones.
They now have to have like 50 different handsets running 50 different versions of software. They're all changing. They've got different hardware. They've got different ship sets. They've got different like all kinds of just technical variables that can screw up the way they attack.
your phone. And then when they find one, it only works on like this Samsung Galaxy line. It doesn't work on like the Google Pixel line or it doesn't work on like a Nokia line or something like that. Whereas they realize if they find a way to attack an iPhone, which is actually, you know, this is difficult. This is really difficult stuff.
Now, it works against basically every iPhone. And who has iPhones? All the rich people, right? All the important people, all the lawmakers, all the guys who are in there. So they've made a business on basically attacking the iPhone and selling it to every two-bit thug who runs a police department in the world. They sell this stuff to Saudi Arabia. They sell this to Mexico. And there's a group of researchers in Canada working at a university called the Citizen Lab.
And these guys are really like the best in the world that tracking what NSO Group is doing. If you want to learn about this stuff, the real stuff, look up Citizen Lab and the NSO Group. And what they have found is all the people who are being targeted
by the NSO group, the classes of people, the countries that are using this. And you know, it's not like the local police department in Germany trying to bust up, you know, a terrorism ring or something like that. It's the Mexican government spying on the head of the Mexican opposition.
or trying to look at human rights defenders who are investigating like student disappearances or its people like the friends and associates of Jamal Khashoggi who was murdered by the Saudi government or its people like dissidents in Bahrain and these like petro-states these bad actors nationally will pay literally tens of millions of dollars each year
just to have the ability to break into an iPhone for a certain number of plans because that's how these guys do it. They sell their business plan. They go, we'll let you break into any iPhone just by basically sending a text message to this phone. All you need to find is the phone number or person who's running an iPhone and we will exploit something.
Which will give you total if that happens to someone I'm sorry, but if that happens to someone Could they just get a new phone and does the exploit is the exploit? Specific to their account well or is the exploit on the the physical phone? So the question or the answer to this is it really depends on the exploit like the easiest Forms of exploit or rather the easier types of exploits are where they send you a text message, right? And it'll be like an iMessage or something like that
And it's got a link in it that'll be like, oh gosh, terrible news. Your buddy's father just died. And we're making funeral arrangements. Are you going to be there? It's the day after tomorrow. And when you click the link for the funeral arrangements, it opens your web browser. And the web browser on your phone is always the biggest, most complicated process in it, right? There's a zillion lines of code in this, as opposed to an instant messenger where there's fewer lines of code in it.
And they'll find one thing in that, where there's a flaw that lets them feed instructions, not just to the browser, but basically escape the little sandbox that the browser's supposed to plan, that's supposed to be safe, where it can't do anything too harmful, and it'll run out of this sandbox and it'll ransack your phones like hardwired operating system, the system image.
It'll like give them privileges to do whatever they want on your phone as if they are you. And then as if they have a higher level of privilege than you. They have system level privileges to change the phone's operation permanently, right? And this is the problem is on the phone. You can replace the phone, right? And they'll lose access to that. But if they've already used that,
to gain the passwords that you use to access your iCloud or whatever. When they have control of the phone, they've already got your photo roll. They've already got your contact list. They already have everything that you've ever put in that phone. They already have all your notes. They already have all your files. They already have everything that's in your message history. They can pull that out immediately.
because they have all your contacts and things like that they see that phone stop being active they know you've changed your phone number all they have to do is find the new phone number and then they can try to go after you again the benefit is with that old style of attack if you get that message
And you don't click that link. You're somebody in a vulnerable class, right? You've had these kind of attacks a inch before. It looks suspicious. You don't know who this person is. The number isn't right. Something like that. And you save that link. You don't click the link. You don't do anything with that link. But you send it.
to a group like Citizen Lab, they can basically use that link to basically use like a dummy phone, like a sort of a Trojan horse to go to the site that would attack your phone and catch it. And this is what the sort of process that all of their research is based on. There are other more different types of attacks that actually don't have these defenses against them that are far more scary.
But the bottom line is... Can I stop you for a second? What is Citizen Lab? Citizen Lab? You just said... Yeah, the Citizen Lab is the name of this research group at the University in Canada who basically studies state-sponsored and corporate malware attacks against civil society. It's run by a guy named Ron Deibert, I believe. You guys will have to fact check me on that one. I think he just published a book. Actually, he was publishing a book about all of this.
But it's really they are the world leaders, in my opinion, in basically investigating these kind of attacks and exposing them. It's a true public service. Let's go back to that one thing. I asked you about warrants. And you talked about the fact that like people could plant evidence on things and then get motivation or
Rather, they could show probable cause right to the court to then investigate you. And then they can get everything. And you said, you thought that a warrant meant they can go and search your house. And this is the kind of thing that we modern people are used to thinking of in the context of a warrant. Cops go to a specific place looking for specific things that are elements of a crime.
Now, you know, you've heard all these things where, like, cops find a way to, like, stop somebody and they, like, are like, oh, I smelled pot or whatever, and they try to, you know, toss their car or whatever, or plain sight doctrines where they open the door and the guy sits down and talks to them and they go, oh, you know, I see a bong or something. You know, that's paraphernalia, you're going to jail. But until, I think it was 1967,
warrants in the United States could only be used to gather two things. They were called the fruits and instrumentalities of a crime, which meant even if the cops knew you did it, even if the cops knew you rode the subway or worked for this company or whatever, they couldn't get all the company's records. They couldn't, if they existed, get all the emails that you ever wrote.
They couldn't get your friend to turn over like an exchange of letters that you had with this person. The fruits of the crime were the things that they gained from it, right? If they robbed the bank, the cops could get the sack of money. The instrumentalities were the tools that were used, right? Like if you...
used dynamite or a crowbar or a getaway car that could seize all of those things. But the idea that the cops can get everything, the idea that the FBI can get all these records, you know, all of these things, your whole history, is very much a new thing.
And nobody talks about that today. We just presume it's normal. We presume it's OK. But between 1967 and today, think about how many more records there are about your life and now things like how you live. Private things about you that have nothing to do with criminality and everything to do with the intimacy of who you are. And the fact that all of that now today is exposed and not just to let's say you love the US government. Let's say you, you know, you are like,
throwing cookouts for your local police department, but every other government in the world too. And we really need to ask ourselves, how much information do the authorities of the day need to do their job? How much do we want them to have? How much is proper and appropriately and necessary? And how much is too much?
And if we decide the cops shouldn't have this, if we decide the spies shouldn't have this, well, why in the hell should Facebook or Google or somebody trying to sell unites? Why should they have this?
Yeah, and what's the answer to that? They shouldn't. Yeah, I mean. Right? But nobody wants to go backwards. Once you have gained a certain amount of access and you could justify that access, like we're stopping crimes, like the Patriot Act, and then later the Patriot Act II, which was even more overreaching. Once they have that kind of power, they never go, you know what? We went too far.
we have too much access to your privacy, and even if you've committed a crime, we shouldn't have unrelated access to all these other activities that you're involved in. Yeah, and I mean, that's exactly the thing about the whole Save the Puppies Act, right? If it's got a name like that, you can't be like, no, there's something doesn't smell right here. There's something bad in this. And I mean, this gets back to that
initial topic of what did the court decide? So we had the Patriot Act, and the Patriot Act was this giant law that had been written long before 9-11. It was just sitting on the shelf. And the Department of Justice, the FBI, they knew they couldn't pass this. They knew nobody would live with it because it was an extreme expansion of government authority.
And then 9-11 happened. And that's really where it all started to go wrong. That's where we got the rise of this new authoritarianism that we see continuing in the United States today. If you think and you have problems with what's happening under Donald Trump.
But you also had problems under, like, what was happening with Obama and the expansion of the war on whistleblowing. You had problems with the way drone strikes were going out of control. You got, well, really, where did this all start? Right? Where did it start to go wrong? Personally, I think
9-11 was where we made a fundamental mistake. And that was we were so frightened in the moment because we had had such an extraordinary and rare terrorist attack that succeeded, which by the way could have been prevented. And I think we discussed this in the last episode.
The Congress, they were just terrified. They said, look, intelligence services, cops, FBI, whoever, anything you want, blank check, here you go. That was the Patriot Act. And at the time, groups like the Americans of a Liberty's Union, they were like,
We are worried that this goes too far because God bless them, that's what the Americans of Liberty's Union does. And one of the provisions that they had a problem with was this section 215 of the Patriot Act, which I believe they were calling at the time the Library Records provision. And what it said, basically this tiny little phrase in the law,
said, the FBI can basically get any records that it deems relevant to account on terrorism investigation under warrant.
And the worst thing the ACLU could imagine was that these guys would go to the library and get what kind of books you're reading. And like, shock horror, this is the worst thing these guys could do. And so they protested, then they lost. And this passed and it went on. And lo and behold, 10 years later, we find out in 2013, they had used this provision that people were worried about just going after individuals' library records.
to instead get the phone records of not an individual, not a group, but everybody in the United States who was making calls on US telecommunications providers delivered to the NSA daily by these companies, right? So no matter who you were, no matter how innocent you were, the FBI was getting these because they said, well, every phone call is relevant to a counterterrorism investigation. And the court went, finally, you know, this is seven years after 2013,
Then, guys, that's too much. If your definition of relevance is basically anything, anywhere, all the time is relevant to a counterterrorism investigation, the question is, what then is not relevant? What is the limiting principle on this? Where is the end? And this is a very important thing, because even if it's not enough, right, even if this doesn't shut down all the programs, the program was actually already stopped a few years ago, because previous court decisions and changes in law
The fact that the courts are finally beginning to look at the impacts of these sweeping new technologies that allow governments to see all of these connections and interactions that we're having every day, they're finally putting limits on it. And that is, I think, transformative. It is the foundation of what we will see in the future will begin to be the first meaningful guarantees of privacy rights in the digital age.
Now that you have been, at least according to this court exonerated or justified, what happens to you and what happens to what they've been doing and how much of the breaks do they hit on this? What changes? Does anything change in the government's sweeping surveillance?
It's a great question. I mean, you would think when you get a court, not even a first level court, but an appeals court.
that looks at these issues you know they're talking about serious stuff they're talking about counter terrorism investigations by the way in the same thing uh... in the same decision they said the government has been arguing you know for twenty years now these programs were saving lives they were stopping terrorist attacks they said uh... you know first they said master valence and stop fifty four terrorists attacks in the united states
then they dropped it to seven, and then they dropped it to one. And the one terrorist attack, or terrorist conspiracy, whatever, that they said it did stop was this case that was just decided. And the court found, and this is important.
after looking at the government's classified evidence so this is not just the court deciding on their own this is the government going look here's all the evidence that we have the top secret stuff the stuff that nobody can see please don't you know say our program is ineffective or whatever the court looked at it and they went
Holy crap, this invasion of hundreds of millions of Americans' privacy happening over the span of decades did not make a difference in this case. They said even in the absence of this program, if it hadn't existed, the government had never done it,
they still would have busted this ring because they were already closing in on them. The FBI already had all the evidence they needed to get a warrant to get the records through traditional means. And the fact the government had been saying, Congress had been saying for years and years and years that this program was necessary, the court says that was misleading, which is legal ease for saying the government's effing liars on this. So that raises the question of, okay, like as you said,
Well, what now? How does this change everything? Well, it does mean the government has to stop doing this particular kind of program directly, but that program had already shut down. And the government has a really great team of lawyers for every agency, right? The DOJ has got lawyers, the White House has lawyers, the FBI has lawyers, the NSA has lawyers, and CIA has lawyers.
And the only thing these guys are paid to do all day is to look at basically these legal opinions from the court that says all the ways the government broke the law and go, huh, is there any way we can just rejigger this program slightly so that we can dodge around that court ruling to go, all right, you know, the abuses are still happening, but they're happening in a less abusive way. And then it's business as usual.
So, this is always the process with the courts ruling against the government. This is not an exceptional thing in the case of its NSA and CIA. What happens is when the government breaks the law, as the court has ruled them to do last week,
there is no punishment. There is no criminal liability for all the bastards at the head of the FBI, the head of the NSA, who were violating Americans' rights for decades. Those guys don't go to prison. They don't lose their jobs. They don't even see the inside, you know, smell the inside of a courtroom, where they're the ones wearing handcuffs. And because of that, it creates a culture of unaccountability, of impunity, right?
which means with each generation of government officials, they study this, they study the cases against them, they study where they won, they study where they lost. And what they do is they try to create exactly what just happened, which is a system where they can break the law for 10 years, you know, 2001 to 2013, basically.
And no one even knows that it's happening. Classification protects that, right? Then eventually it gets exposed. There's a leak. Of course somebody blows the whistle on it, right? It becomes a scandal. The government, you know, they'll disown this program. They'll change the law there. But somebody like the ACLU will sue the government. And so the courts will finally be forced to look at these things. But the wheels of justice turn slow, right? The government will try to put the brakes on it.
The plaintiffs, the civil society organizations that are suing, will have to gather evidence. It's really difficult to do because the government's not providing anything. It's all classified. And then basically it takes another five years, another 10 years for the court to get to their verdict. And then we have it.
But then nobody goes to jail, right? Nobody actually faces serious consequences who is responsible for the wrongdoing. And so the cycle continues. But having said that, it might feel disempowering. People might go, oh, we can't win. But this is in the context of a system where we lack accountability, where the government does have a culture of impunity.
This is what winning looks like because things do get better. The problem is they get better by decades. They get better by half centuries and centuries. If you look at the United States, you know, 200 years ago, 100 years ago, things were objectively worse on basically every measure. The fact that we have to crawl to the future
is a sad thing when we know it could be fixed very quickly by establishing some kind of criminal liability for people like James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, who lied under oath to Congress and the American people, saying exactly this program didn't exist. The NSA wasn't collecting any information on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans when in fact they were doing that every day.
Obama did not fire him. Obama did not charge him. Obama let him serve out the end of his days and then retire happily.
But it's not an Obama problem, right? We see the same kinds of abuses happening under the Trump administration. We saw the same kind of abuses happening under the Bush administration. And the only way this changes materially is if our government changes structurally, right? And that's kind of the issue that I think everybody in the country sees. When you look at the economy, when you look at all the struggle, when you look at all the class conflict and divide and the political partisanship that's happening today,
The problem isn't right about this law or this court ruling or this agency. It's about inequality, of opportunity, of access, even of privilege, right? I know people don't like talking about that. It's uncomfortable. People are like, oh my God, you know, are you like whatever.
But the reality is we have a few people in the country, you know, the Jeff Bezos, the Bill Gates, that own everything, like ten people, only half the country, and half the country owning nothing at all. And this applies to influence, right? When you have that kind of disproportionality,
of resources, you have that kind of disproportionality of influence. Your vote means less. Your ability to change the law means less. Your access to the courts means less. And that's how we end up in the situation where we are today. That's very disheartening. Well, it doesn't have to be because the important thing is we can change it.
the particular program that was in place has been shut down but all they do is manipulate it slightly do it so that you can argue in court that it's not the same thing that is a different thing come up with other justifications for it and withhold evidence and then drag the process out for years and years and years and
For you to be so optimistic is really kind of spectacular considering the fact that you've been hiding in another country, allegedly. You might be in Ohio. We don't know.
you know we don't know what but but but you're essentially on the lamb and for exposing something that has now been determined to be illegal so you are correct when you go back to obama's hope and uh... what was his uh... his website hope and change hope and change a big part of hope and change protecting whistleblowers do you remember that that was all deleted later
Later on, they were like, yeah, let's go back and take that shit out. We didn't know. I didn't know what it was like to actually be president back then. I was just trying to get in there. But the hope and change stuff was still there when you were being tried. It was still there when they were chasing you and trying to find your location. When the Guardian article came out, the hope and change shit was still online.
Yeah, and that's the fact that you're so optimistic even though you've been fucked over royally I mean you are in my opinion. You're a hero I really think that and I really and I really think that what what you exposed is hugely important for the American citizens to understand that
Absolute power corrupts absolutely and these people had The ability to look into everything and they just still do they have the ability to look into everything you're doing and the fact that through these years It literally stopped zero terrorist attacks zero so this sweeping overwhelming intrusion of your privacy Had no impact whatsoever on your safety
Well, it wasn't about safety. It was about power, right? They told us it was about safety. That was, again, it's the Save the Puppies Act. If you see government saying all these things are for safety, they're protecting you, and they never establish the efficacy of it. The chances are there probably isn't effective because, you know, the government leaks all the time.
Um, you know, if they say, uh, we saved this person and we did that, you know, whenever they're being criticized, they go on TV and they very seriously go, oh, that's classified and, you know, we can't expose that. And you never hear of the successes we do because it's so important that they stay secret. Uh, look, I worked for the CIA, I worked for the NSA. That's bullshit. Um, when they do something great, you know, it's on the front page of the New York Times by the end of the day because they're fighting for budget. They're fighting for clout. They're fighting for authority. They're fighting for new laws.
Not constantly. So there are no real accomplishments that are in the shadows that they just don't tell us about. I mean, very rarely. Think about when we got bin Laden, right? Yeah. I want to press conference within the next 20 minutes. And again, this is not to bag on Obama. Any president would do this. That's just how it is.
Now, of course, there are some secret successes, but it's about stuff that no one cares about. It's stuff that wouldn't win the political clout. It's like they gained an advantaged negotiating position on the price of shrimp and clove cigarettes, which was actually one of the stories that came out of some kind of classified disclosure that I think was from WikiLeaks. That kind of stuff, it actually does happen, right?
But we're never having a conversation of, do you want to give up all of your privacy rights so that we can get better prices on shrimp and clove cigarettes? Like, that would be a very different political conversation than, do you want to give up all of your privacy rights? Because if you don't, your children will die. And you know, you know, it saved the puppies. Right. Exactly. Save the puppies 2020.
And so this thing you ask about, you know, me and optimism, like I have been criticized relentlessly for being a naive optimist, right? And my answer is that you don't do what I did.
Unless you believe that people can do better. I took a very comfortable life. I was living in a lie with the woman that I loved. I had to do basically no work but go in the office and read spy feeds about people all day long.
And I could have done that, you know, for the rest of my life, quite happily, would have been great. I set that on fire because I believed that what I saw was wrong. And I believed that people deserve to know about it. And I believed that if people did know about it, that things would change. I did not believe it was going to save the world. I did not believe I was going to get, you know, a ticker tape parade and a pardon, you know, be welcomed with open arms. There's actually, if you watch Citizen IV,
which is the documentary from 2013 where I was meeting with reporters and Laura Poitras had the camera rolling in the room when we talked for the first time.
I said, you know, the government's going to say, I harm national security. I put everybody in jeopardy. They're going to charge me under the Espionage Act. And they really did try to destroy my life. They tried to put me in prison forever. And to this day, they are still trying to do the same thing. That's just how it is. You know, this wasn't like, even though, even though, yeah.
Even though the the most recent ruling has showed that you were correct and what they were doing was illegal and you exposed a crime. Yeah. Well, I mean, this is this is a continuing story in 2013. You know, when this first came out, President Obama went out on stage, you know, because he was getting singed in the press and said, you know, take it from me. Nobody is listening to your phone calls.
Even though nobody said- Just metadata. Yeah, nobody said they were listening to your phone calls. It wasn't like they had headsets on. You know, 300 plus million people in the United States. You'd have to have computers do that. But what they did do was they collected the records of your phone calls. And to an analyst, an intelligence analyst, that's more valuable than the transcripts of your phone calls.
We care less about what you said on the phone than who you called, when you called them, what else you were doing, what your phone was doing, right, the websites that you had accessed, the cell phone towers they were connected to. All of those things, that metadata...
creates what's called the social graph, your pattern of life. It says based on when your phone becomes active in the morning, when you start calling people, when you start browsing, when you check your Twitter feed, you're scrolling on Instagram, whatever, that's when you wake up. When it stops, that's when you go to sleep. We see where you are, we see where you live, we see who you live with, all of those things, right? That's just from metadata. You don't need the content of your communications. I don't need to see what picture you posted on Instagram.
to know you're awake and active and you're communicating with this person at this phone, this place, this area code, this IP address, this version of software, whether they're using Android or iOS, all of these things. And now as we get smartphones, as your cars begin connecting to the internet, it's just richer and richer and richer data. I don't know where I was going with that, sorry. I got off topic, but
The bottom line is, things get better. They get better slowly. Oh, right. Sorry. Now Obama was saying, you know, nobody listens to your phone calls, right? That was June 2013. By January of 2014, giving you state of the union address, he went, although he could never condone what I did.
The conversation that I started had made us stronger as a nation. He was calling for the end of this program, the passage of a new law called the USA Freedom Act, another Save the Puppies Act, which was better than the thing it was replacing, but still really bad.
And he did that not out of the goodness of his heart. He did that because the court in December of 2013 had ruled these programmers were unlawful and likely unconstitutional. And this is, again, it's not an Obama thing. It's a power thing. This is how the system works, right?
But year by year, step by step, things get better. We make progress a little bit at a time. And the fact that someone is suing, the fact that the ACLU is bringing this case, and we should thank them for that, for years, which is a difficult and expensive proposition with no guarantee of success, means that we have stronger privacy results right seven years later as a result.
That doesn't mean we save the world. That doesn't mean we relax. We sit down on the couch, you know, there's the golden sunset. That's not how life works. It is a constant struggle. But when we do struggle, when we do stand up, we believe in something so strongly, we don't merely believe in it.
But we risk something for that belief. We work together and we pull the species forward an inch at a time. We move away from that swamp of impunity and unaccountability into a future where, hey, maybe not just a little guy breaks the law and goes to jail, but maybe a senator, maybe an attorney general, maybe a president, right? And that would be a very good precedent to have.
Do you wonder whether or not someone will use you as a political chess piece at this point and decide? I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure you have overwhelming support of the general public.
most people believe that what you did was was a good thing for America and that you are, in fact, a patriot. I think the vast majority of people and the people that I've talked to, I have talked to a few people that disagree with that, they're misinformed. They were misinformed about what you did and what information you released or whether or not people's lives were put in danger because of that and I had to explain the whole chain of events
and where the information actually was, how it was leaked, and what you had done to protect people. Could you please explain that? Because it wasn't just that the information was dumped. Yeah, so I mean, this is really the subject of our last conversation that goes on for three hours, but I wrote a book.
Yeah, but I just want just so this will stand alone. I'll go through it. So the idea and this is the subject of my first book permanent record which was why I came on last year and actually just this week the soft cover came out so it's more affordable for people who didn't want to get it before.
is this story, right? It's who I am, where I came from, why I did this, how and what it meant. I didn't just reveal information, I gave it to journalists, right? These journalists were only given access to the information on the condition that they would publish no story
simply because it was newsworthy or interesting, right? They weren't going to clickbait classified documents. They would only publish stories if they were willing to make an independent institutional judgment and stand by it.
that it was in the public interest that this be known, right? And then as an extraordinary measure on top of that, before they publish the stories, right? And this is not me publishing things, putting them out on the internet or blog or something, which I could have done would have been very easy. It's not me telling them what to write or not to write. They're doing this guardian, the Washington Post, you know, Der Spiegel.
They are then going to the United States government in advance of publication and giving the government a chance, an adversarial opportunity to argue against publication, to go, you guys don't get it. You know, Snowden's a liar, these documents are false.
Or he's not lying, and yes, these are true, but these programs are effective, they're saving lives, whatever. And here's what we can show you to convince you, please don't publish this or leave out this detail. And in every case, I'm aware of that process was followed. And that's why now in 2020, remember, we're seven years on from 2013, the government has never shown a single example of any harm that has come as a result of the publication of these documents back in 2013, the revelation of mass surveillance.
And that's what I wanted to bring out. Yeah. And I mean, it's unscientific, but I've seen polls run on Twitter very recently in the last few weeks when this pardon question came out, where 90%, like 90 plus percent of people were in favor of the pardon. And that's crazy. Even in 2013, when we were doing well, you know, it was like 60%.
in favor among young people. But it was like 40% for older people. But that's because the government was on TV every Sunday, you know, bringing these CIA suits going, who were there with their very stern faces going, oh, this caused great damage and it cost lives and everything like that.
But those arguments stopped being convincing when seven years later, after they told us, and the sky is falling, the atmosphere never catches fire, right? The oceans never boil off, we're still alive. And I think people can see through that. And that was, again, this, exactly which is that people don't know this history, that 10% who are against it, and actually a lot of the 90% who are even in favor of it.
Um, they don't know the details. It wasn't well covered by the media at the time. It was all about this person said that, that person said that. Is it true? Is it false? You know, sort of, uh, they were playing on character. They were trying to make a drama out of it. And that's a big part of why I wrote permanent record.
And it's been tremendously gratifying to see people connect to it. And actually this, you know, I mentioned it, we talked on Twitter when we were talking about the possibility of having this conversation. And I was like, I looked back at our first conversation we had, and it's had like 16 million views. Man, that's for a three-hour conversation.
I like set and then probably an equal amount of people just listen to it in audio right and that that was just for one clip on YouTube there were smaller clips of like talking about cell phones surveillance and that was like another 10 million views 77,000 comments
The book on Amazon has thousands of reviews. It's got a 4.8 rating which is like by the number of people and how it's rated. That's one of the best autobiographies according to ordinary people in the audience in like years. And to see that after these years of attacks.
And to me is evidence that despite all these news guys at night going, well, Senator, you know, no one really cares about privacy these days. These kids with their Facebooks and their Instagrams, you know, people do care.
What they're actually feeling is kind of what you got too early with, like this sensation that nothing changes. Like even when we win, we lose. But the thing is you've got to have a broader view of time. You've got to look at the sweep of history rather than the atmosphere of the moment. Because right now, yes.
Things are very bad. And even if you love Donald Trump, because I know some of your viewers do, you gotta admit a lot of things in the world suck right now. A lot of things in the country suck right now. But the thing is they only get better if somebody does the hard work to make them better. And there's no magic wand, there's no happy ending, right? Life is not that simple, but together we can make it better. And we do that through struggle.
Do you, has there been any discussion about someone pardoning you? Has there been, I mean, this was the question initially that led to this, but I wanted you to expand on what actually went down. But has there been any discussion about you being pardoned or someone using you as, like I said, a political chess piece? Because,
That you would be a smart thing. And if anybody has had a problem with the intelligence community, it is Donald Trump. I mean, he's the only president in any memory that has had open disagreements and been openly disparaging of the intelligence community. Well, that's not true. He's JFK.
That didn't go very long. That's right. I forgot about that. Good point. Yeah, that went terrible for Trump. For Trump, it actually seems to be a positive in some strange way. If anybody is going to pardon you, I would imagine that would be the guy. So this idea of the political bargaining chip has actually been used in a different way. Yeah. There was the idea
And it's funny because this was actually promoted by all these like CIA deputy directors who were responsible for these abuses of Americans rights, who were writing opinion pieces in the newspaper and they were like, you know, what if Vladimir Putin, you know, sends Snowden to Trump is like an inauguration gift? Wouldn't that be terrible for him? I mean, we're like, can't hint, you know. But I don't think when we talk about this stuff,
I don't think there's anything I can do to control. One of the things people have asked is, like, what I accept a pardon from Donald Trump. And I think that misinterprehens what a pardon is and how it works. A pardon is not a contract. A pardon is not something that you agree to. A pardon is a constitutionally enumerated power. I think it's Article II, Section II, where
The reason that it exists is basically a check on the laws and the judiciary where the laws as written become corrosive to the intention of them.
And this is something that I think actually is meaningful. You know, people are like, are you going to ask Donald Trump for a pardon? And the answer is no. But I will ask for pardon for Terry Albert, Daniel Hale, and reality winner, and all the other American whistleblowers who have been treated unfairly by this system. The whole thing that brought this up was two weeks ago, some journalist asked the president, like, oh, you know, what do you think about Snowden? Are you going to pardon him?
And he said, he seemed to be thinking about it. He heard, I have been treated very unfairly. That's accurate. Because it's impossible to get a fair trial under the Espionage Act, which is what I've been charged under. And every American whistleblower, since Daniel Ellsberg in the 1970s, has been charged under this law, the Espionage Act, which makes no distinction between someone who is stealing secrets and selling them to foreign governments,
which neither I nor any of these other people have done, and giving them freely to journalists to advance the public interest of the American people rather than the private interest of these spies, you know, individually. And this is the kind of, this is the kind of circumstance for which the pardon power exists, where the courts and judges will not or cannot
and a fundamentally unfair and abusive circumstance in the United States, either because they're fearful of being criticized of soft on terrorism or whatever, or because the law prohibits them from doing so. The problem with the Espionage Act is it means you can't tell the jury why you did what you did. You cannot mount what's called a public interest offense.
Where you say, hell yeah, I broke the law. I took a class of idea document and I gave it to the journalist and the journalist published it. And then it went to the courts and the court said, this guy was right. The government was breaking the law.
In the courts, if I were in prison today, as reality winners in prison today, or rather Daniel Hale, who revealed government abuses related to the drone program, or Terry Albury, who revealed problems with racial policies in the FBI, how they were being abused.
uh... when these guys are on trial all of that stuff is forbidden from being spoken uh... daniel elsberg's lawyer uh... ask daniel'sberg why did you do it in court in open court under oath you know why did you publish or provide journalists the pentagon papers and the prosecutor said objection objection he can't say that the judge said sustained fine he can't say it and his attorney looked at the judge like he was crazy said i've never heard
of a trial where the jury is not allowed to hear why a defendant did what they did. And the judge said, well, you're seeing one now. And this is why the pardon power exists.
Well, that's what's so creepy about something like the Espionage Act. If you can't even establish a motive, you can't even explain that you were doing this for the American people, that there's a real precedent that should be set for this kind of thing, especially in regards to what you're being charged with, which has now been determined that you were exposing something that was, in fact, illegal.
And this is, it's an incredibly un-American thing. It's very un-American. It really is. But this is... It's disturbingly so. I mean, we see these kind of injustices happening in the United States every day. And it's not about the Espionage Act specifically. I mean, you see with drug charges, you see it with civil forfeiture, asset forfeiture, where like, you know, they take an old lady's car because her nephew was selling weed or something like that. And there's no way for her to get it back.
Whether we're talking civil, whether we're talking federal, whether we're talking, sorry, civil or criminal, whether we're talking federal or state, we see where the system of laws in the United States is letting people down constantly.
But the question becomes, how do we fix this? How does that get addressed? And, you know, you can mount a national campaign. You can try to change the law. But as we talked about before, unless you're Jeff Bezos, unless you're Bill Gates, that's very difficult to do.
But the governor can pardon people for state crimes. The president can pardon people for federal crimes, but we have not developed a compassionate culture that actually looks at this. Like every president has abused their pardon power or their pardon authority to sort of let their cronies off the hook we've seen in order. This president, we've seen in the previous presidents. But it is very difficult to establish
and understanding among average people that it's actually okay for presidents to use this power more liberally, when particularly we're talking about non-violent offenses, when we're talking about things that have not, you know, they're not that controversial, but they are being controversialized because of the political atmosphere of partisanship where everything has to be criticized for political advantage from one side or the other. Everything's become a football.
Well, particularly in your case, when you're talking about polls that show 90% of people support you being pardoned, and this recent ruling that what you exposed was illegal, I wonder how much the president actually knows about your case.
It's a good question. He's famous for barely paying attention in briefings. I can't imagine that in 2013, this was fully on his radar, where he investigated it and read all the documents and really got deep into it. I can't imagine he really knows everything that went down. I bet he hasn't seen Citizen 4.
uh... listen if i had his number i really would uh... and i i do know people who know him and i am going to communicate that uh... after this conversation i think that would be i literally think that would win him a tremendous amount of political favor i really do i think particularly at this point in time
People are really, if there's ever a time where people are fed up about the overreaching power of government, it's during this pandemic lockdown. For good or for bad, whether it's incorrect or incorrect, people are very frustrated right now with power.
They're very frustrated right now with the draconian measures that some states have put in place to keep people from working, and their eyes keep people safe. And all this would contribute to the motivation to pardon you, because I think that it would show people that the president actually does agree that there have been some overreaches. And in your case, not just an overreach, but a miscarriage of justice, a disgusting, un-American overreach.
I think when you ask this question about how much does he know about the case, it's fair to say not a lot because he's intentionally being misadvised by his advisors. You've had the Attorney General William Barr, who says he would be vehemently opposed to a pardon for me. His Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has literally, I think, said I should be killed, John Bolton at least, said I should be killed.
And, you know, I think when this conversation first came up a couple of weeks ago, Mike Pompeo probably hid every pen in the White House because he's trying to make sure things like this don't happen. I think there are a lot of people.
who try and control the president. But this whole question about, you know, what's right for me, what's right for the president in terms of political advantage is the wrong question. This is why I haven't been advocating for part. And I didn't ask for a pardon from Obama. I did ask for a pardon for Chelsea Manning, which we didn't get, but we did get clemency. And that's an important thing.
Because what we need is we need for pardons to be made not as a question of political advantage, but as a decision taken on to further the public interest. And this is why I say pardon, you know, all of these previous whistleblowers, Thomas Drake, John Kiriaku, Terry Albury, reality winner, Daniel Hale.
There are many names. Daniel Alsberg, right? He wasn't convicted, so he got out. But these people deserve recognition as the patriots who stood up and took a risk for the rest of us. There they are. Look at the current cases, right? They don't even require an exercise of the pardon of the worry.
But Julian Assange right now, today, is in court in the UK fighting an extradition trial to the United States. For those who don't remember, this is the guy who's the head of WikiLeaks, right? And he really fell out of favor in 2016 because he published the Hillary emails and everything like that, or Podesta emails.
But he's not being charged for that. The extradition trial has nothing to do with that. Actually, the US government under William Barr, the current Attorney General, is trying to extradite this guy and put him in prison for the rest of his life for the best work that WikiLeaks ever did. That has won awards in every country, basically around the planet, including the United States.
which is the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, right, detainee records in Guantanamo Bay, things that are about explicit war crimes and abuses of power, torture and people who were killed, who shouldn't have been killed, violations of use of force protocols and all of these things, right. And this could all be made to go away if William Barr, the Attorney General, simply dropped the charges. And he should. Why isn't it?
Well, Julian Assange is literally been tortured. I mean, the guy was locked in that embassy for how many years with no exposure to daylight, just completely trapped. And have you seen videos of him skateboarding around the embassy? I mean, he looks like he's going crazy in there. And now he's in jail and on trial. The whole thing is, it's so disturbing because
You know when it boils down to like what what did he do that is illegal? What did he do that? People disagree with that people the United States disagree with in terms of the citizens well he exposed her horrific crimes he exposed things that were deeply that the United States citizens are deeply opposed to and the fact that that
is something that you in this country can be uh... prosecuted for it that they would try to extradite you and and drag you from another country that they kick him out of the embassy and bring him back to the united states to try him for that it seems like we're talking about some kangaroo court seems like we're talking about some some dictatorship where you know you have these uh... with no protection the freedom speech no protection of under the first amendment no no protection there the the rights of the press it's
It's so disturbing that there are workarounds for our Constitution and our Bill of Rights that we all just agree to, just accept that this is happening. There's no riots in the streets for this. There's no ones up in arms that they're trying to extradite Julian Assange. It's not in the news. For whatever reason,
the mainstream news has barely covered it over this uh... the his current core proceedings in the in the uk now i i think a lot of this comes down to the fact that uh... they see julie as such uh... by this day i mean that a lot of the mainstream media the broadcast outlets as a partisan figure now and it's really sad because the most dangerous thing about the charges against julie as such uh... is if they extradite julie as such if julie as such is convicted
He's charged under the Espionage Act, the same act that I'm charged under, the same thing that all these whistleblowers are charged under, but he is not a source.
The way as abuse of these espionage act charges have run in the last 50 years is the government had sort of a quiet agreement. They never charge the press outlets. They never charge the New York Times. They never charge the Washington Post. They don't charge the journalists. They charge their sources. They charge the Chelsea Manning's right. They charge the Edward Snowden's. They charge the Thomas Drake's, the Daniel Ellsberg's. But the press, they're left alone.
they are breaking that agreement with the Julian Assange case. Assange is not the source. He is merely a publisher. He runs a press organization. People are like, oh, Julian Assange is not a journalist. He's not whatever. There is no way you can make that argument in court in a way that will be defensible, particularly given what we've talked about with the government and how careful they are to avoid prior court precedents and to work around it and create obscure legal theories.
that are legal fictions everyone knows they're a lie everyone knows these theories are false but under the law you know they've been just enough that they can pass the argument through and get the conviction they want you cannot convict Julian Assange the chief editor and publisher of Wikileaks under the Espionage Act without exposing the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, Fox whoever
to the same kind of charges under this president and every coming president. And I think people don't think about that. That is disturbing. You know, another thing that's disturbing, well, there's many things that are disturbing about this case, but another thing that's been disturbing was he was a guy who the left supported up until 2016, and then it became inconvenient, right? Yeah, he was driving people. It was great. Then when he's dragging, you know, Clinton, it's not so great.
Right. Right. When, when the footage was revealed from the, uh, I believe it was a helicopter that show it was a collateral murder. Remember that video that was collateral in Iraq. Yeah. It was a Apache helicopter in Iraq firing on two Reuters journalists embedded with local militants or something.
Yes, exactly. That was the left. He was the darling of the left. I mean, they were all free Julian Assange. And it's just, it's so interesting how that narrative can shift
so completely to all of a sudden he's a puppet of Russia and that's what it became in 2016 and that propaganda stuck and people who were pro-Julian Assange before now all of a sudden I've seen these people say fuck Wikileaks you know and fuck Julian Assange like that guy he's a puppet of Russia I'm like how much have you looked into this?
It's amazing how that kind of propaganda, when you just get the surface veneer of whatever the narrative that is that they're trying to push, how well it spreads that all these people who were these educated left-wing people, now all of a sudden, were anti-Wicki Leaks.
And I'm like, do you not remember how this whole thing got started? It was the Iraq War, which we all opposed. Do you not remember this whole bullshit lie about the weapons of mass destruction that got us into this crazy war? And then Julian Assange and WikiLeaks exposed so much of this.
And yet, here we are, in 2016, it turns up on its head, and now he's a puppet of Russia, and WikiLeaks is bad, because inconveniently, the information that he released damaged Hillary Clinton's campaign.
I think a lot of it comes down to people forgetting what principles are and why they're important. You can hate Julian Assange. You can think Julian Assange is a puppet of Russia. You can think he's the worst person on earth. He's a reincarnation of Hitler or Stalin or whatever and still realize
that convicting him harms you. It harms your society. It harms your children's future. People forget about this in today's world where everything's become partisan. But the ACLU cut their teeth. They made their reputation on defending a Nazi march through a Jewish neighborhood.
And this is because it's about the right to assembly, the right to freedom of speech. You do not have a right to be free from offense, right? There is no constitutional right to a safe space.
But that doesn't mean you do nothing. That doesn't mean you have no opinion. That doesn't mean you have no political power. What it does mean is that you have to recognize that everyone has the right to their own opinion. Even terrible opinions. What we have to protect as the speech, as the platform, as the assemblies, the associations, the process,
that allows us to understand and recognize and identify. When people did break the law, when they did harm others to go to a fair trial where the jury can consider why they did what they did, what they did, and not just whether it was legal or illegal, but whether it was moral or immoral, whether it was right or whether it was wrong, and whether they are the lowest person, the most ordinary citizen in the country, or the highest selected official, hold them to the same standard of behavior, the same rule.
of law. Whereas today, you know, we call them public officials and private citizens, but with all of the surveillance, all of the data collection, people in power, commercially or governmentally, they know everything about us. And we know nothing about them. We break the smallest law, we go to jail, we get a fine, we get screwed, we can't get a job, we can't get a loan.
But if they, you know, flagrantly abuse their office, their authority, they get a pass. They go on the speaker's circuit, you know. It's all sunshine and rainbows for them. And the way we change these things is remembering our principles and being willing to stand and defend them.
it's also instinctual for people to be partisan and it's tribal it's a tribal thing and in this day and age people are rapidly partisan and the rejection of nuances so disturbing to me and it's so disturbing that a lot of this happens from the left now whereas the left used to be all about freedom of speech the ACLU is mean it's just you automatically think of the liberal people when you think of the ACLU
The day just for the record is a nonpartisan organization. Yes, but supported overwhelmingly certainly by by left wing people. I mean, obviously they are nonpartisan, but but people are so partisan today that this rejection of nuance
It's so easy for people to look at things as left versus right and ignore all of the sins of their team and concentrate on defeating the other side. And it seems to be a giant part of the problem today, so much so that people are in favor
a lot of people are in favor of de-platforming people that just simply disagree with them and i want to talk to you about that because it seems to be a gigantic issue not seems to be it is a gigantic issue with social media whether it's with twitter or youtube or many things uh... in fact unity twenty twenty is uh... something that
my friend Brett Weinstein is putting together this idea that we should look across
both parties for people that are reasonable and rational people and look at what we agree with rather than simply sitting on partisan policy on party lines and only voting, you know, blue across the board or red across the board. And let's look at reasonable people from both sides, whether it's Dan Crenshaw and Tulsi Gabbard or
Whoever it is, they represent different parties, but they're both reasonable people. Let's get them together and have these communications. They were banned from Twitter. They were simply banned from Twitter for simply saying reject both Trump and Biden. Look for a third choice.
so this is not there's nothing offensive about what they did in fact there they're encouraging choice they're encouraging this idea that we don't have to be a two-party system that in fact even though we have had libertarian green parties
We kind of look at it like bullshit. It's like a protest vote. If you vote Green Party, you know you're not going to elect that person for president. It's kind of like we tolerate it. But when someone like Ross Perot came around, it threw a monkey wrench into the gears and became very dangerous for both sides. Because the Republicans lost a lot of votes and that's how Bill Clinton got into office and George H.W. Bush did not get a second term.
directly because the influence of Ross Perot. So they changed the requirements for getting into the debates. And everything became very different and very more complicated after that.
The fact that Twitter would be willing to ban Unity 2020 specifically because they're calling for people to walk away from this idea that you have to either vote for Trump or Biden and trying to get mainstream acceptance of a potential third party candidate is extremely disturbing. But de-platforming in general, I think, is extremely disturbing because it's a slippery slope. If you decide that someone has
views that are opposite of yours and they bother you. Those views bother you and you could do whatever you can to get them off of a platform. It's very dangerous because someone from the right who gains power or someone from an opposing part of the gains power, if they get into a position of power in social media, if they own gigantic social media company like Twitter or YouTube and they decide in turn to go after people that agree with your ideology.
Well, then we have a freedom of speech issue and you're literally supporting the suppression of freedom of speech if you're supporting deplatforming people on social media. And I've always thought that the answer to someone saying something you disagree with or someone saying something you vehemently oppose is a better argument.
That's what it's supposed to be. It's supposed to be you should expose the problems and what they're doing. And I'm seeing so many people, particularly on the left, that are happy when people get deep platformed. And people that just aren't
just a contrary to their perspective, contrary to their ideology. And it's, it's, I think it's very dangerous. And it's too easy. It's too easy to accept. It's in this, this goes back to what you're saying. This partisan viewpoint that we have today fiercely, rabidly partisan in a way that I've never seen in my life.
Yeah, I think the question of deplatforming, this is one of the central issues of our time that's really overlooked and it's underappreciated. So many people on both sides are in favor of this when it's somebody they don't like, right? Yes. The central issue is this. Do we want companies deciding what can and cannot be said?
Do we want governments deciding what can and cannot be said? If the answer is yes, it is a very different kind of society than what we have had traditionally. I do think we need to understand where this impulse came from, how it came to be and why it seemed reasonable. And a lot of people forget this. And it came from ISIS. If you remember the Islamic State,
It was all over YouTube. They were all over Twitter. They were all over Facebook. And they were literally burning people alive in cages. They were beheading people, you know, pushing people up building. It's just horrible stuff. And that raises a tough question for a lot of these companies.
Now, it's very easy to make the argument that, all right, this is a direct call for violence. This is literally a supporting terrorism. And as a private company, we have no obligation to let people use our platforms. Therefore, we're closing their accounts, right? We're shutting this off. We're raising it. We can do whatever we want. It's our website. Don't like it. Leave.
Constitutionally, there's no freedom of speech issue implicated there because the Constitution restrains the federal government and the state governments in certain circumstances. Not private companies.
But once that precedent had been established that they would do this for ISIS, they started going, well, what about these other people? What about these things that could be construed as calls to violence? OK, what if they're not violence at all? What if it's harassment? What if it's abuse? What if it's racism? What if it's criminality? What if it's drug culture? What if it's pornography? What if it's whatever? And there will always be more, what ifs?
And the categories of prohibited speech will constantly expand. So we need to ask ourselves, well, who is best placed to make those decisions about what can and cannot be said? Traditionally, the access to broadcast was limited. You had radio, you had TV. If you didn't have that, you had the soapbox on the corner, right? Or the local university, the coffee shop.
And somebody owned those places, or somebody ran those places. The college president would say this person would be invited to speak, this person wouldn't be invited to speak.
And I actually think it's right and proper for people to be able to protest speakers to say this person shouldn't speak at our college. But I think the college itself, the institution, has to be willing to make value judgments about why they invite certain people to speak. And if that person is very unpopular, speaker, if that person is representing a viewpoint that is not well supported by the college, if it's not necessarily what students want to hear,
But the administration believes, like the faculty believes that it's something students should hear. Isn't that why we have universities? We don't go to class to learn, you know, necessarily like, you don't go to a literature course to read the things that you want to read. You just go home and read those yourself. You go to study a curriculum to something else. You want to benefit from the experience from the perspectives of others.
The question that people have is how does this expand into the wider audience, right? What happens when you move beyond universities? What happens when you move to news broadcasts? What happens when you move to the internet? What happens when everyone everywhere can broadcast? And this is where I think things get really tricky. Not can people say what they want as long as they're not advocating violence or whatever. I don't think this should be a difficult issue. But
This gets complicated when you have things like YouTube's next video suggestion algorithm. Because the idea of universal speech, universal ability to broadcast, is exactly as you said, well, what is the counter for this? You've got freaking Nazis on the internet. And I'm not talking like whatever the guy's got a Trump sticker on his truck. I'm talking goose stepping, swastika bearing, actual freaking Nazi.
You have those people out there on the internet calling for violence calling for all these terrible things and Normally the way you deal with this even in the case of something like Isis You drag them on to the platform you discredit their ideas before the world because if you don't
If you drive them underground, if you make them, you know, this faction that's, you know, hanging out at a radical mosque, or, you know, they're hanging out at the hardware store, if they're freaking Nazis or whatever, there are places where you create its own community that is sheltered from other perspectives, sheltered from other ideas, and that is where extremism thrives, where it cannot be challenged,
where it cannot be exposed for what it really is. But when you've got YouTube going, oh, you like Nazi A? How about Nazi B? How about Nazi C, right? These people never get exposed to counter speech, and this is where things get tricky.
Well, it also gets tricky when you decide that someone is saying something that's offensive, and you remove them from the platform, and then you open the door for other things being offensive, things that maybe aren't offensive to you.
the slope gets slippery. And then you have wrong speak. You have newly dictated language that you have to use. You have new restrictions on ideologies, things you're not allowed to espouse. I mean, Twitter will ban you for dead naming someone. They will ban you for life, meaning if you transition to be a woman and you call yourself Eddwina, and I call you Edward, I will be banned for the life.
with no recourse, which is madness. It's mad because I can call you fuckface and no one has a problem with it. You know what I'm saying? I could call you a terrible, I could call you that and there's no problem. But if I choose a name that used to accurately represent you,
as a different gender, because this is some new, incredibly important distinction that we've decided. It takes precedence over everything else, including it's more significant than insults, more significance than demeaning of, I can call you a moron. I could demean your intellect. All those things are fine. But if I choose to call you by a name that used to accurately represent you when you were a different gender or when you identified with a different gender,
Because of today's political climate, that is grounds for banning you for life. It shows you how incredibly slippery censorship can get. Because I would have never imagined that. If you said to me 10 years ago, well, when someone becomes a transgender person, 10 years, 10 years ago, if you said this to me,
If someone becomes a transgender person, you call them by their original name. You can be banned from social media for life. I'm like, get the fuck out of here. They'll never get to that. No one's going to be that unreasonable. That's crazy. Because you could call some people so many disparaging and insulting names, but you can't say their name that isn't even insulting.
Dead dead naming that's what it's called. So it just shows you dead naming of today You agree with that today that opens up the door for all kinds of crazy shit Five years from now ten years from now if we still get more more rapidly Politically polarized and we are our idea of PC culture gets more and more extreme You're you're you're on a greased hill
And if you decide to give up a little ground, the slide is imminent. I think this is like you can argue on that axis, but I think incrementalism and the failures of imagination going, you know, 10 years ago, we couldn't imagine this would have been a valuable fence.
is the wrong way to go about it. Because if you go back to the founding of the country saying, you know, women should have the right to vote, black people should have the right to vote, you know, that was unimaginable. That would get you equivalently deplatform not welcomed to the speaking community or whatever. Sure, but those are positive and inclusive things. Right. I'm not singing.
I'm associating these directly. I'm talking about the principle here. Because you can attack these things in that direction and go, oh, you know, this doesn't seem right. But remember, it's Twitter making these rules. It's YouTube making these rules. There's not a court making these rules.
And anybody, technically today, can decide who can and cannot speak on their platforms. The question is, what should we do? What kind of culture should we promote? How should we have these conversations? How should we make them available? And I think civility is not too much to ask people generally. As you say, calling people fuck face or moron or whatever is completely normal on the internet, and that's not really going to get you banned from anywhere.
And now you have all of these companies sort of contorting themselves to fit into these blocks to not isolate or sort of anger all of these different demographics. But if we truly want to have a global broadcast, a public commons, the question I think that's more important here is
Not so much what should and should not be banned because that's accepting the premise of banning. It's how do we create an inclusive platform where everyone can talk and even strictly and harshly disagree with each other without it coming down to name calling, without trying to dox people, without trying to basically dog whistle them or screw them or hurt them or harm them. However,
Now, look, I am not above calling people bad names on the internet. I've said terrible things. I grew up on the internet, right? I was an asshole. Right. And we all were. And the thing is, the worst things that we say at any moment today
They are permanent. The internet never forgets, right? So when you say these things and, you know, there's a young audience listening right now to like everything. And they think it's cool. They think it's funny or they don't think it's cooler. They don't think it's funny, but they think they shouldn't be deplatform for it. They, they, they're edgy, you know, they push the lines or whatever. They get that out there and they start emulating this behavior. They start saying mean things. They start saying cruel things. I did it myself, right?
I'm not in this context, but in whatever the equivalent would be, you know, 20 years ago.
that there are going to be consequences for that. They're going to be judged by that. Whether they should or should not, whether it's right or wrong, because as you said, there's so much tribalism today. And I think we have to create positive examples. I think you're right. The deep platforming is a huge issue. It is a tremendous issue, right? But we should think about what it is that we're actually fighting against. And I don't think like trans issues or whatever, when it comes down to basically civility,
is the hill to die on, because I think there's better arguments. Well, I certainly think we should encourage civility. There's no doubt about it. What I'm getting at is that the idea that you could ban for life for that is it's preposterous. I think civility is one of the most important things our culture could ever promote. And I think it's very difficult to promote civility online because the anonymous aspect of the account of the internet interaction.
right there's no accountability there's you you're not getting social cues from people it's just a completely different world when you're interacting with people specially for kids you know i mean if you give me the internet when i was fifteen years old i would have said the most horrific things to people for sure and i'm sure many fifteen-year-old kids are doing exactly that right now uh... i think
The more we can encourage civility, the better we all are in all aspects of our life, whether it's person to person, face to face, or online. I try very hard to only say things online that I would say to someone's face. And if you online now, I do not interact with people.
In any way shape or form that's negative. I don't do it. I don't I don't believe in it I've I treat it the same way if it's avoidable I avoid it and I think that's incredibly important But this does might be an important point which is I mean what it really gets to the court of the issue failures of civility the fact that people say that
Thanks for the fact that people don't have accountability. There are, you know, there's a whole spectrum of people out there from angels to devils, right? There's ordinary people and even the best of people have bad days and say terrible things. For sure. We do need people to have some responsibility for having a thicker skin. You know, look, guys, I've had people literally advocating my murder, right? Like that.
Just torture and murder. Yeah, literally horrible things. Yeah. Yeah, I've seen in years. And the people that I've blocked on my Twitter account are the ones we're posting about like Bitcoin scams that are like, you know, send me five Bitcoin on 75 Bitcoin back. And I'm not saying this is the example to emulate.
What it is, though, is we have to recognize that some people aren't worth engaging. Some people aren't worth listening to. It's a lesson. Right. But that doesn't mean necessarily that you take their voice entirely.
Yes, I most certainly agree with that, particularly in terms of de-platforming. My question to you about this is, and I've raised this question to many people, and I really haven't got a satisfactory answer, do you think that things that get so huge, like Twitter, or Facebook, or even YouTube, do they become a basic right
Is it like the utilities? Is it like electricity and water? Is like the ability to communicate online seems to me a core aspect of what it means to be a human being with a voice in 2020. And I don't think it's as simple as removing someone from Twitter is simply a company exercising their right to have whatever they want on their platform.
I think when it gets as big as Twitter is, I think we've passed into a new realm, and I think we need to acknowledge that, whether it's Twitter or YouTube or Facebook or what have you. And I think it should be very difficult to remove someone from those platforms. And I think it should probably involve some sort of a trial. I mean, this is a really tough issue. It's much larger than just deep platforming, because what we're really talking about is the internet is a public utility.
Right, the Internet is water and power. And its ability to shape culture. Right, right. When you talk about something like, you know, Twitter and the size of it, when the president is basically directing policy from Twitter,
It's clear something threatening countries. That is our laws were not designed with that in mind. And unfortunately, we have a legislature that's just fundamentally broken. This gets back to the electoral system, which you talked about earlier. Most countries in the world have a wide swab of parties. They're not this two-party binary system where it's just two groups.
Largely new corporatist groups that are just handing power back and forth the president changes But the actual lawmakers the actual structure behind the president the advisors are largely from the same cohorts We we don't have that
legislative. We don't have that governmental structure that allows us to adapt in a way that truly represents, I think, the broadest spectrum of public opinion in a way that allows us to respond to changes in technology in a meaningful way, which is what's left us stranded today where these companies are sort of deciding things for themselves. It's because there is a vacuum of legislation
Now, there's a question, do we want legislation? You know, people on different spectrums from authoritarian to libertarian here will go. We want lots of legislation. We want no legislation.
But there is a push, and there has been a push in Congress for years, actually since the 90s, with the Communications Decency Act and the first crypto war, where the government was treating the ability to encrypt your communications to make them secret or private as you communicate with people online. They were treating that as a weapon.
and saying you couldn't export this code without getting a license from the government and all kinds of craziness. But the Communications Decency Act, the idea that there would be obscenity regulations, some years ago you may remember a scandal involving Backpage, which was like a variant of Craigslist that had a lot of prostitution ads on it.
Government has been trying more and more to say these kind of things can be done on the internet, these kind of things can be set on the internet, these kind of things can't be set on the internet. And they have been doing this largely under the guise, I would argue,
of the Commerce Clause, right? The federal government, where do they get the constitutional authority to regulate what we say and do businesses wherever? Well, they go, well, the internet is global, it's international, therefore, it's interstate commerce, and so we're going to regulate this as if you're, you know, shipping bushels of corn from Iowa to Florida. But it's a little bit different than that, and I think
What we need to recognize is that the internet is a utility and people, individuals and corporate entities, should be criminally liable.
for the things that they do online. That means if they have caused enough harm that you're willing to put them in prison, they've stolen from someone, they have destroyed some piece of infrastructure, they have caused harm to someone, somebody died or they plotted a murder or whatever, you take them through the courts, you try them on this, the jury considers what they did, they consider why they did, they consider the evidence. And then you let the trial system, the traditional system that we've had for thousands of years,
work this kind of stuff out, or at least hundreds of years.
But when you get the government and you get officials in Congress, you get officials at, you know, whatever the local department of this country or that country, you know, Russia's got a telecommunications censorship bureau. China's got one. France, Germany, the United States, all of these guys, I have different regulatory authorities, whether it's the FCC in the United States or Roskomnadzor in Russia. And you cannot substitute their judgment.
for the judgment of a jury, for the judgment of the people and the public broadly. And I think it's dangerous that we are trying to have the government pick winners and losers when whether you win or lose determines whether or not you can engage with the world, whether you can have a public presence on the internet because the internet is real life today.
yeah it is and uh... could it be that the option would be to extend the first amendment rights to the internet in general and to if you want to run a social media platform you know other than what we're talking about putting people in danger doxing people threatening people's lives doing things they can cause direct harm to people but the ability to express yourself in controversial ways should shouldn't we extend
First Amendment protections to social media platforms. I think this is a much more complicated question than it appears because you get into the whole thing of obligation of service. There is like there was a cause celebrate on the right, actually, that would seem like a similar issue. Well, remember there was the cake shop somewhere where they didn't want to serve like a same sex marriage thing. And again, this gets back to civility.
But some people, they have a very strong fundamental belief here that these people shouldn't be able to do this, that or the other. And if you impose that on them, that requirement on them, they've got to serve whatever their business is to these people they don't like, or that they don't agree with. There's a compulsion of service there. You start doing this with the Internet.
And then there's a completely different country, you know, let's say there's a website in Belgium that's now bound by American laws. It's a bound by this. And Twitter can't ban this person, even though they're against them. It seems like... But isn't that a different argument though? Because all these companies we're talking about, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, are all based in America.
Now I agree imposing American first amendment rights on a country from particularly if the U.S. starts changing laws. This is the interesting thing about internet companies. Right. Would that be their loophole? Yeah. Would that be their loophole to get out of that, just sell it to China? Right. But I mean it's more fundamentally we have to recognize either as a society we can compel people to standards of civility
or we can't. And we need to decide how we handle that because that's what all of these tie around, right? And I think we have forgotten in many ways just we're not teaching people the golden rule well enough.
Because we are all angry. We are all in competition. And the funny thing is, the guy on the right who's poor and living in a trailer is not much different than, you know, the hippie on the left who's scrounging out of dumpsters, you know,
and raising their black flag to go to a protest, they act like they could not be more different. But their economic circumstances could not be more similar. And the reality is it's, you know, the government, the lawmakers and the business owners that are setting them at odds.
And we are all getting lost in our own ideological differences and losing sight of the things that actually tie us together and that if we work together maybe we could change in a more meaningful way.
And the more people you meet, the more people you talk to, you more you realize how malleable people really are and about how so many of these ideological perspectives that they so rapidly subscribe to, they've adopted because it allows them to be accepted by their community. By whatever neighborhood they're in, whatever group of people they hang out with, and they choose to adopt
these ideas about how the world is. And so many of those people just don't experience people that are different from them. I mean, that is the case with racism, that's the case with homophobia, that's the case with many of the issues that people have with other folks, is that they just don't know people from those other groups and they haven't experienced, you know, they haven't walked a mile in their shoes, as it were. I think civility should be encouraged as much as possible.
Also though, I'm a comedian and I talk a lot of shit and that's in the sense of humor like you can miss and it's been done Against me many times where they've taken things I've said in jest and put them in quotes completely out of context and it looks horrible
Because that's not what it was. That's not the way it was intended and it was intended in humor. Now, if you do have laws that not just encourage civility, but mandate civility, you're going to have a real problem with humor because you're basically going to cut the ankles out of comedy. Not that I'm saying that all humor has to be mean and vicious. It doesn't, but some of the best is. Well, it's also not saying things that can't be said, you know.
Yes, same things that can't be said. I think there's a giant problem with online censorship today. I think it's one of the biggest problems of our era, and I do think it is because there is a massive slippery slope. And I do agree with you about the cake people.
You know, that was a big issue that caused the labor of the right of these people. They should have the right a lot of people felt to not make a cake for someone who is doing something they think is immoral, right, being involved in a gay relationship. But there's also the problem of sensationalizing these things because the people that did find those people that didn't want to make those cakes, they went to a bunch of people that agreed to make the cake first.
They went and tried to find someone who didn't want to make that cake, and then they turned it into a big story. Now, even though I just think, I mean, I think you should make a cake for gay people because there's nothing wrong with being gay. I think the people that made that decision to not make that, I feel bad for them. I feel bad that they're bigoted in that way and that it's such a foolish thing to care who someone is in love with, whether it's the same sex or an opposite sex, but also,
I think it's weird that someone wants to go around and try to find someone who won't make a cake for them who wants to go from cake place to cake place to take place until I got I found a bigot like and then make a big deal out of it like you know you're you're searching for victimhood. I mean there's an argument that that's I mean that that's one way to look at it. I don't know where to look at it is that's activism. They're searching for injustice. I agree. Yeah. I agree. Yeah. This is the thing like
What is right and wrong? This is what people forget is changing constantly when we're talking about public opinion because public opinion is changing constantly. And this is why doing right by people, it's so sad that we've lost sight of this basic impulse to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Yes.
Because when you talk about the internet, when you talk about deplatform, when you talk about humor, as you said, people are going back and they're looking at your jokes, they're putting them in quotes as a different context, you're being attacked by it. Something you said looks bad. There's things that you've said, things that I've said, things that the person listening right now have said that they believed, that they meant that they said 10 years ago, that they said one year ago, that they said three weeks ago,
that they no longer believe, that they've abandoned, that they've been persuaded otherwise, that they've changed their mind on. And this was one of the central themes in the book, Permanent Record, is we are no longer allowed to forget.
our worst mistakes. They're there, they haunt us, they're used against us, they're weaponized. And this society has become aware of this and activists on all sides have become aware of this. Immediately they use this
to try to attack people on the other side of any issue that they don't like, to go after their credibility, to go after their character. And what we are losing in that conflict, and this is a rational strategy on the part of both sides in the moment because they realize there is a real political advantage to be gained. You can get people canceled very easily nowadays. But the thing is,
When we make everyone, we pin everyone to their worst moment. When we do away with the concept of forgiveness, we do away with the potential for growth, for change, for persuasion. And this gets back to those rat holes of extremism on
YouTube, on Twitter, on everywhere else, where they start self-reinforcing and eventually reaching the bottom of the hole at the worst of the worst with everybody else who's been canceled too.
And part of that is because they can't climb out, or they think they can't climb out. And there's a question, how do we resolve that? One of the nice things about the pre-internet society was as bad as you were, as ignorant, as racist, as exploitative, as whatever you don't like, right? As that person, that character was,
They could find something, they could read a book, they could meet someone, they could change their mind. And even if nobody in their town would ever forgive them, rightly in some cases, because they had done something truly terrible, something truly unforgivable, they could leave. They could move to a different town. They could move to a different state in that history would not follow them. They could reinvent themselves and they could become someone truly, honestly better instead of being married to their prior ignorance.
That is a very important thing because we all are in a constant state of growth. If you're not, you're really making some fundamental errors with your life. We're all in this constant state of accepting and acquiring new information, gaining new perspectives, learning from our mistakes. And unless your doctor Manhattan, unless you're some person who's not making any mistakes,
And you just have this all-knowing vision of the world. You're a finished product. Like, please, if you are, share that with everybody else. But most of us are not. Most of us are in this weird state of being a human being on Earth, where everyone is trying to figure it out in this incredibly imperfect world, incredibly imperfect society. Everything from the structure, the economic structure, to the societal structure, everything, down to the very last things.
Everything's imperfect and the idea should be that we're all communicating to try to grow together and that we're learning together and it's one of the more interesting things about interacting with people online is that you can get different perspectives and if you can let go of your ego and if you can let go of your preconceived notions you can learn things about the way other people see and feel and think about the world that could change and enhance your own ideas.
And I think that it's important that we not just accept the fact that people are growing and getting better and improving, but that we encourage it. We encourage it and we reward it. And I think that's one of the interesting things that
we're struggling with. I mean, you see this in the context of police violence. You see this in the context of mass surveillance. You see this in the context of cancel culture. You see this everywhere. One of the interesting things about this surveillance machine that has been built around us, the sort of architecture of oppression, the turnkey tyranny, as I described it, so much is known about every person, regardless of how innocent or how guilty they are.
It's all in there. The files are waiting to be accessed. The data just needs to be collated. It's just waiting to be requested and analyzed and used.
What this means, there's this old idea of the Panopticon, which is you create a prison that is circular. And in the middle of it, there's this great tower that rises way up. And at the very top of the tower, there's a mirrored glass room that the warden sits in.
And no prisoner knows where the warden is looking because the warden can see out, but they can't see in. And so everyone believes that they are watched. And so the idea is that no one will misbehave because they're all afraid that they'll be retaliated against for breaking the rules or whatever. But what we have seen as this surveillance machine has been built is we all realize
intuitively, innately, inherently, in ourselves. Even if we don't recognize it, even if we don't speak to it, we witness it in the news every night. There are records of wrongdoing, criminality and government at the highest and lowest levels of our government, corporations and prominent figures in society breaking the rules.
ordinary people, jaywalking, littering, you know, polluting, small-scale petty stuff, all of that somewhere there is a record of. But in almost all cases it's not punished. What has happened is we have broken the chain of accountability between knowledge of wrongdoing
and consequence for wrongdoing. And this happened without a vote. It happened without our participation. We weren't asked whether this was okay, but I think in some way that is beginning to change the moral character of people. And what we need to do, starting with the top rather than the bottom, because China is trying to do the reverse, they're going
All right, well, there's a simple solution to this. Let's just start screwing everybody who breaks the rules instantly and immediately. You know, you got a social credit score, you protested, so you're going off to a camp, you know, whatever.
would imagine what it would mean if we saw people where now any official the minute they are guilty of the slightest infraction that immediately exposed in the press they gone trial they gone all this stuff there they're ruined they're disgraced
But it turns out every other member of Congress is going to court in the same week because everybody is in violation of something somewhere. We all have some measure of guilt, large or small, even if we're completely innocent because our legal code is so complex there's no way you can make it through a week without breaking some kind of rule about you can't wear a green hat on Tuesday.
But if this happened, if there was accountability for infractions of the rules, any time an infraction of the rules was witnessed,
The laws would change instantly to enshrine the right to privacy because the people in power wouldn't want to lose their position of power. They would not want to lose this position. And suddenly, when they have skin in the game, they would realize, oh, everybody deserves this. And I think there's just something interesting to that. I haven't thought this out all the way fully. So this could be, you know, give me some slack here. But I think this is really what has changed.
We have built a panopticon, but what sits at the top of it is a computer. That computer witnesses everything we do. In reality, it's a distribution of computers. They're owned by many people and answered to many people. But it does not yet judge us for us.
judge us for it. And what is happening is the audience society. The people have realized that they can see through this computer. They can see through the penopticon from a certain angle, a certain degree in a certain direction at any given time. The cops that have been monitoring all of us for years, they've got surveillance and drones and stuff that they couldn't have imagined in generations prior. But now every person on the street
has a smartphone with a camera too. And the cops are being witnessed for the first time. And now people are trying to impose upon them the same judgment that has classically been imposed upon us. And this I think is one of the dynamics that the changes that is leading to this increasing conflict in society is when you realize that the people that throughout your generations
a youth were told in Hollywood and stories, our common shared national myths. The government's the good guys. The FBI's are going to get the gangsters and the terrorists and things like that. They're the best of the best. The fact that they are people too, they're not only fallible, but in some cases, in a small-minded and vicious, they are political, they are partisan. The same way everyone else is, people start questioning
power and how it is used, the basic legitimacy, the way it impacts our lives, what the limits of it should be. But people, yet, have not realized.
One of the responses to this should be a limitation on the amount of power the government has, or rather not just government, but institution. Institution is a concept, right? Government or corporation. The powers of institution should be limited to interfere in our lives. Instead, what they're trying to do, both sides, you know, blue team, red team, whatever, they're squabbling, they're fighting over who has their hands on the trigger.
who gets to aim the weapon rather than should the weapon exist. Are you talking about police violence when you're saying these things? That's a part of it. Yes. It's every direction. But police violence is very much the public part of it that we see right now.
Yeah, that seems to be one of the most complex abuses of power because the kind of power that you give someone when you allow them to be a police officer is literally the power to end life. It's not just the power to kick you off Twitter. It's the power to decide.
This person who's just a regular person, no different than you or I with all sorts of problems in their own life and stresses and strains and a disproportionate amount of strain and stress for the actual job that they do. It means they spectacularly stressful position to be in life. But yet you give them the ability to literally with a finger pull and someone's life.
