-: Hello everybody.
Welcome to MIT's Media Lab.
Welcome to Media Lab Conversations.
Media Lab Conversation is an ongoing series where
we bring in distinguished speakers from around the world.
They end up in dialogue with Joi Ito,
the Director of the Media Lab.
The astute amongst you will have noticed that I am not
in fact Joe Ito, Director of the Media Lab.
My name is Ethan Zuckerman, I direct the Center
for Civic Media here at MIT, housed within the Media Lab.
And I'm really thrilled about the conversation
that we've queued up for you tonight.
I think it's an extremely timely conversation
with someone who I'm deeply looking forward to hearing from.
I'm here on stage with Jillian York.
Jillian is Director of International Freedom of Expression
for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
So she is representing one of the most important
free speech organizations in the world right now
at a moment where conversations about privacy, security,
and the ability to use online space as a public sphere
have really come into sharp question.
And EFF with partner and sister organizations
all over the world are really trying to figure out
a lot of open questions about what can we
and can't we say online, who's listening,
what does this all mean for privacy,
for individual expression, for democracy.
It's an incredibly fertile time for these questions.
And I will let you in on a secret, which is that
the people who are really smart about these topics,
spend a lot of time in rooms these days
going, "I don't know."
And Jillian is a terrific person to have this conversation
with us and it's a special treat for me
because she's someone that I've been having
this conversation with for almost a decade now.
When I met Jillian, I was reminiscing
about this with someone earlier.
My first meeting with her was at Lanes and Games,
the legendarily bad bowling alley in Alewife,
where we were drinking dollar beers
and talking about the early world of international blogging
and that's how we got to know each other.
Jillian spent a lot of time in Morocco, knows the country
very, very well, was writing about Moroccan blogs.
I was working with Rebecca MacKinnon
to get Global Voices off the ground.
And we started talking and working together
about nine years ago.
And in that time, Jillian has really emerged
as sort of one of the leading lights thinking about
how the ability to express yourself online
relates to democratic and political freedoms.
She is extremely widely published,
she shows up on Al Jazeera near as I can tell,
every second or third day,
writes for a number of online publications.
She is so famous on Twitter that she recently found herself
quoted in a New York Times article,
but in fact the New York Times had quoted her
while she had changed her Twitter handle for Halloween.
So the New York Times was forced to publish a correction
that she was not in fact Chilean J. Yikes.
She was in fact Jillian C. York.
So with no further ado on that,
I want to give the floor over to Jillian
who wants to talk about what's going on with digital privacy
and security around the globe post Snowden.
She's gonna speak for a while.
She and I are gonna start having a conversation,
the conversation is gonna open up to incorporate the room,
and then eventually incorporate Twitter.
And once we have expanded into the known universe,
you will know that we are then done.
Jillian.
-: Thank you.
And wow, what an introduction.
It's true, Ethan has been really a huge force in my life
as well from the time we were at the Berkman Center together
until now and ongoing.
So thank you for having me here.
I'm mostly gonna speak without notes but I,
there are certain dates and facts and things that I forget,
so, pardon me when I'm going like this.
So I'm gonna go back a little less than a decade to 2006
when Cisco, y'all know Cisco, when Cisco first
came under fire in the United States for its role
in China and the Great Firewall of China.
And that was largely a conversation about censorship.
At the time Rep. Chris Smith called it,
he said that the collaboration between Cisco and the Chinese
government decapitated the voices of dissidents in China.
So the rhetoric at the time was fierce already.
And this was the era in which censorship
of the internet abroad really became part
of the public consciousness in, at least in
Washington, D.C., if not more broadly in the U.S..
This was around when Yahoo was beginning
to come under fire for some of its role in China
and Google was facing the same.
But really what Cisco and what other companies were doing,
and what most countries were doing,
was by and large targeted surveillance.
What we were seeing was, I mean in the case of Cisco in 2008
these slides were leaked from somebody within the company
that referred to the Falun Gong evil religion
and named that as the target of the deep packet inspection
that Cisco was helping to enable in China.
So the attempts were to go after people individually,
really targeted.
And then a few years later, I mean I followed this roughly,
but surveillance wasn't really my focus until about
two years ago when in Egypt some of my friends actually.
I feel like I should be careful where I say this.
But some of my friends were involved in the raid
of the (speaking in foreign language)
state security in Egypt.
I know some of those folks who entered that building.
And some of them found their own files.
And granted, some of these people were people
who'd been detained, who'd been called in over the years,
but some of them were people who had never once had
an encounter with the police, with security, with anyone.
And when we were having these conversations,
this was like right after the internet returned
in January 2011, so as soon as I could start
chatting with my friends again.
Most of these conversations were,
wow, Egypt has been conducting mass surveillance
for surveillance sake.
Not really, I mean, a lot of it, some of it was targeted,
but they weren't questioning a lot of people,
they were just gathering information,
collecting tons of data.
And what we learned around that time,
I want to say that it was an organization called Free Press
that first pointed this out, that the technology
that they were using in Egypt was Narus,
Narus deep packet inspection technology,
which incidentally is the same technology that was used
by AT&T and the NSA in their secret San Francisco office.
So I'm gonna get back to that in just a moment.
Bear with me if that's not an intimately familiar story.
I assume for many of you it will be.
So the Narus STA 6400, love these names,
was used for its ability to sift through large data sets,
looking for pre-identified targets.
So this was still collection of mass data,
but really targeted toward individuals.
And this was as far as we know,
this was the tool that was being used in Egypt.
This was also the tool that was being used
by AT&T and the NSA.
And so if you look back at my organization's history,
EFF in 2006, way before I was there,
I was still living in Morocco at the time.
In 2006, we had a whistleblower walk into our office
and tell us that something really fishy
was happening in San Francisco.
And what that turned out to be was
the NSA's collaboration with AT&T and the secret room
where they were tapping our phones.
If you were an AT&T customer,
which I think that was around the same time
the iPhone came out, so interesting convergence there.
And so we as an organization, were aware of this then,
were aware of the tools being used,
but this was still fairly small as far as the story goes.
And so we sued the NSA and we had a case
that has continued, Jewel versus the NSA.
But it still did not become a major topic in the U.S.
And so while all of this stuff was happening
a couple years ago in Egypt and then in Tunisia,
where you actually had American companies
giving discounts to the Tunisian government
to use their, what am I trying to say here?
Sorry.
American companies giving discounts
to the Tunisian government to do bug testing with the tools
that they were using for both surveillance and censorship.
In the U.S. this still wasn't very much of a conversation.
We knew about warrantless wiretapping
and there were certain groups and individuals
that were really engaged in this, but by and large,
this was not making headlines.
That's where we kind of cut to this year.
This year we've seen, obviously,
I think you're all probably following this pretty closely.
I mean raise your hand if you're
not following this story pretty closely.
Okay, good.
So I will tell you I don't remember if Ethan mentioned it,
but I will say that my expertise is not U.S. law.
I am not the right person to ask if you want to understand
how the FISA Court works, my colleagues are that
and I would highly recommend
reading the stuff that they put out.
But what I've been looking at is, so what is
the impact of this on the rest of the world?
And what is the impact of surveillance
and the awareness of surveillance on us as individuals?
Because when the revelations, the leaks from Edward Snowden
came out earlier this summer, the first thing that I heard
out of most people's mouths, including some family members
and friends was, "I've got nothing to hide."
I'm sure you've all heard that as well.
And there have been some interesting anecdotes
kind of brought forward around that.
Moxie Marlinspike wrote a really great piece
where he described a very obscure law about,
since we're in Boston, I think you'll appreciate their,
sorry Cambridge, you'll appreciate this one.
A law about the possession of
a certain size of lobster being illegal.
And how you don't even realize that you're breaking the law,
but you're possessing this tiny lobster, oops, you know.
But really, I mean the prevailing attitude
that I've encountered thus far in the U.S. is,
"They're not coming after me,
"what do I have to worry about?"
That contrasts really sharply with the prevailing attitude
that I encounter almost everywhere else in the world.
And I don't just mean China or Iran or Saudi Arabia,
where people do genuinely have reasons to fear
for their lives when it comes to surveillance.
But I mean places like Germany or Jordan or other places
that I travel frequently, Brazil where I was
a couple weeks ago, where individuals are very aware,
often of the histories of their own countries,
but also just very aware of the surveillance being conducted
by their own governments and now more so by the U.S.
on their citizens or the concern
that I'm hearing increasingly is, what data is
the U.S. government sharing with my country?
Even if say Germany is not conducting large,
I mean Germany does surveil its citizens to some degree,
but they're not conducting the kind of
mass surveillance that the U.S. is.
And yet Germans are increasingly concerned
that they could be targeted by the NSA
and then have that data shared with their own government.
What I think it comes down to for me,
is that a lot of the arguments have been made
have been about privacy and I think
that that's right on a lot of levels.
But I also think that we should be talking about
the effects that surveillance has
on freedom of speech and freedom of association.
Again I'm not the U.S. legal scholar
that I sometimes wish I were, but I've heard
some really interesting conversations lately about,
okay, the Fourth Amendment,
we're having some trouble with that one.
Well what about the First Amendment?
Where does that play in to the effects of surveillance?
What about the fact that we do have some legal precedent.
Oh God, my lawyers might be watching at home,
so I'm like worried about tripping over my tongue.
We might have some legal precedent around,
for example, the collection of membership lists
of private organizations and there is that,
there is some protection for that.
But now when those membership lists are taking place
on Google groups or even RiseUP groups
or whatever group you're using these days to organize,
you're not protected in the same way
that you would have been where you to conduct
that type of organizing offline or by mail even
or by phone, for that matter.
The kind of organized, and so now the lawsuit
that we have now against the NSA,
we filed another lawsuit in 2013 this year.
First Unitarian versus the NSA and we've got
a number of different groups signed on to that.
And so you've got groups like CAIR,
the council, what does CAIR stand for?
American Islamic Relations, is that correct?
-: Sounds good. -: Sounds good, okay.
Apologies to CAIR if I messed that one up.
I keep looking down there, cameras up there.
So you've got a number of different groups
that are concerned about the privacy and the ability
to associate of their members, the ability to speak.
I worry personally about the chilling effects
that surveillance has, that surveillance has on speech.
So the sense that, actually our friend, our mutual friend,
Rebecca MacKinnon, has a really great anecdote about this
from years ago where someone from Zimbabwe
was talking about the effects on being, of being watched
and the fear that that creates and saying,
"Somebody said, oh yeah, but freedom of speech
"can't be your first priority."
And the person responded, "But yeah, but without
"freedom of speech, how can I fight for things like food,
"food rights and other absolutely inalienable rights
"that nobody out there in the public
"is arguing with us about."
I worry that we can't fight for all of the other things
that we believe in when we're concerned
about being watched all the time.
That seems like such a simple thing,
but that point isn't being discussed in the broader public
in a way that I want it to be and that's one of the things
that I want to talk about tonight.
And Frank La Rue, the Special Rapporteur
on Freedom of Expression to the United Nations said,
and this is just such a great quote
that I'm going to read you it in its entirety.
"Undue interference with individuals' privacy
"can indirectly and directly limit the free development
"and exchange of ideas and infringement upon one right
"can be both cause and consequence of
"an infringement upon the other."
That to me is absolutely what it comes down to,
that this isn't just an argument about privacy.
It's an argument about our speech rights,
our right to associate, our right to change,
our right to civic participation.
That's kind of, I guess I'm gonna leave it at that
and that's sort of what I want to lead into.
-: So let's jump on in from there because you put
some great ideas on the table that I think
we can sort of build on from this.
I think the first one that you put on is this distinction
between individual surveillance and mass surveillance.
And I think this may be where a lot of us
have sort of felt the ground shifting from under us,
which is to say that you and I both do an enormous amount
of work with activists and all sorts of repressive nations.
Those folks are used to being under surveillance
and we're used to the assumption that
if you're an opposition leader in Zimbabwe or in Burma,
you're going to be under surveillance
and you're gonna change your life to live that way.
What we found in Egypt and what we also started finding
in the United States in 2006 was that
we were also under mass surveillance.
And you've identified that we don't seem
to be all that panicked about it.
That you and I and probably most of the people
in this room are panicked about it.
What frightens you about mass surveillance?
What is it about mass surveillance
rather than targeted surveillance that has you
sort of rethinking how you're acting,
what you tell activists in other countries,
how you're sort of going after
these issues and these questions?
-: Well, so I think the first answer to that is that
we never know what might happen tomorrow
in terms of what is politically acceptable.
So I talk about a lot of things that aren't particularly
politically acceptable in the United States.
I've always been pretty outspoken about LGBT rights.
I talk about Palestine.
And these are things where I choose to do it very openly,
I mean I'm not doing any sort of secret organizing.
Even if I were though, let's talk about that,
what's the problem there?
But still, I've chosen to be very open about those things
because then, you know what, here it's all out there,
you wanna come after me, come after me,
and I've been definitely a target of criticism for that.
But what scares me is I know that those things are red lines
for a lot of the American public and for our politicians,
but what I don't know is what's
going to become a red line tomorrow.
What really scares me about mass collection of metadata,
about the things that, the topics,
whatever kind of surveillance we're talking about
is the idea that something that I've been doing all along
could become illegal tomorrow, could become a target
tomorrow, or could become a political red line.
We've seen that happen in other countries
and we think that that's impossible here
and that to me is a problem.
The idea that we've become so secure in this country
that we're safe from that, we're not going to be targeted.
-: I mean I think the U.S. response to that
in many ways is to sort of say,
but we seem to be opening up over time, right?
So, we seem to be getting more positive on LGBT rights,
maybe your activism around it 10 years ago
might have been controversial, but we don't seem
to have a big swing going back.
I'm still looking for responses to this if
you're doing nothing wrong and you have nothing to hide.
And I would go a little further and sort of say,
most of us seem to be using commercial systems
that are explicitly saying to us,
we're gonna collect as much data as we possibly can on you
and we're gonna market the hell out of it.
If that's gonna give us an advantage over terrorism,
what's wrong with that?
-: Yeah. (laughing)
Well, I mean, the first thing I think is prove it.
What's the advantage over terrorism?
-: Right. -: Give me the evidence,
'cause I haven't seen the evidence.
No one in this government has shown me
the evidence that this has helped us.
I mean we're in Boston right now, we're in Cambridge,
I'm sorry, we are in the Boston area right now.
And there have been a lot of, there's been a lot of
kind of bloviating about the ability that surveillance had
to do anything around the marathon bombings and so far
I've seen zero evidence, zero evidence.
And would surveillance, I mean
would visual surveillance have helped?
Visual surveillance did help, I'm sorry.
Does that help in circumstances like that?
I think there's a pretty good argument
to be made in some cases.
But I'm not sure that there's a convincing argument
to be made in terms of electronic surveillance
and more than that is the trade-off worth it?
-: So what I'm looking for I think is sort of
the affirmative case and you've gone in a direction
of First Amendment versus Fourth Amendment, right?
So Fourth Amendment is protecting us from illegal search
or seizure, basically the privacy of my domicile.
First Amendment, which is first for a reason,
has to do with freedom of expression, freedom of assembly.
That one seems to be fairly obvious as we start
thinking about the danger of who are you associated with.
Why are we so willing to sort of blithely
put our social networks online,
when in so much of the world, one of the first things
that happens is when you're arrested as an activist,
the police take your phone and try very hard to document
your social network and then start trying to arrest
all those folks at the same time.
-: So it's a good question.
I mean I think that there are folks much smarter than me
that would argue that the next generation
is thinking a lot more about privacy.
I mean I've read a lot of Danah Boyd's stuff recently
and a lot of the other folks who think a lot more than I do
about young people and about privacy.
And so one thing for example that I remember
from all of this reading is that the norm these days
for Instagram is to be set on private.
That doesn't mean that people can't access it and in fact,
with just a single, even if your account is private,
they can still get to it if you link to it.
But nonetheless, I think people are starting to
pull back a little bit in that sense.
At the same time this is a huge shift in how we think
about our lives and, for me, I'll tell you I hate Facebook.
I've said them publicly so many times,
but I still use it and I still use it daily.
And why am I so willing to put that out there?
Because I know, I mean I worry sometimes that people are,
I don't worry so much about myself,
I worry that people are coming under harm for being
associated with me rather than the other way around,
if someone in a country where that's more difficult.
So, so why are we doing that when we know.
Not sure I've got a good answer to that one, yeah.
-: So, so let's take this sort of into
the international territory where a lot of your work is.
You and I at different times have been
pulled into a dialogue that's usually called
the internet freedom dialogue.
And the internet freedom dialogue
goes a little bit like this.
The internet is the greatest space ever created
to have a political discussion
because it's very difficult to censor.
It knocks down barriers, it opens up closed societies,
and therefore, and this is sort of the Hillary Clinton twist
that got put on this, therefore the U.S. should make this
a central element of foreign policy.
We should be trying to figure out how to bring
the internet into the rest of the world.
This has very much been part of the rhetoric
and part of the focus of the U.S. State Department.
There's substantial amount of funding going on
through the U.S. through things like
the Broadcasting Board of Governors trying to make sure that
there's money to go out and protect online speech
and an uncensored internet in Iran and in China.
What's happening to that space
in the wake of the Snowden revelations?
-: So a couple months ago I was at, I'm on the advisory board
of one of these various groups that that does this funding
and it's through Radio Free Asia under the BBG.
They're independent.
It's called the Open Tech Fund and a couple months ago
I was at their summit in D.C. and, of course,.
that conversation came up, like,
why are we doing what we're doing, what do we,
what do we do now, what do we know?
And it was kind of a depressing conversation.
It was definitely, it felt hopeless at times,
but at the same time, I think that the answer that came out
of that was, let's double down on open source tools,
let's work on technological solutions to this problem.
And I think that when it comes to where
the U.S. government can actually play a role,
I'm of the opinion that that really, that's it.
Open source technology is the only place where
they have any business being at this point,
where they have any kind of ground to stand on.
-: Are people even gonna believe open source technologies,
right, I mean, we're now looking at things like bugs
in the random number generator in Debian
that people are now starting to speculate may have actually
been part of plans to sort of break security.
-: There's, yeah there's speculation about who's compiling
the source code and is there any sort of break in
that process, and, yeah, it's scary times.
-: But beyond this, right, the U.S. has had the great benefit
for quite a long period of time of basically having
governance control over the internet.
Institutions like ICAN have international representation,
but they've tended to be heavily U.S. dominated.
IETF, the Internet Engineering Task Force, tends to have
very strong presence of U.S. based companies.
Is any of that gonna stand or are we gonna start finding
some of the pressures that we've seen from China,
from other governments to sort of say, let's get into
an internationalization of internet governance.
Has the U.S. blown it?
I mean is that the ultimate consequence
of what's gone on with Snowden?
-: So we're in a really important moment right now.
We're seeing Brazil trying to take a step back and say,
okay, we're going to sequester
Brazilians' data in the country.
We want to have total control over our citizens' data.
We want the U.S. out of it.
And I can see why Brazilians are having that reaction.
I can see, I absolutely understand
where they're coming from.
And yet I still wanted to shake them
and say you're so wrong.
I think that there's a fear there that if that, I mean,
people have been talking about the balkanization
of the internet for a long time and to the point
where I'm so tired of that phrase,
but the fact is we're seeing more and more countries
start to think that way, not in terms of
cutting their citizens off from access to information,
but cutting their citizens off from U.S. companies.
And I understand it,
but I also don't think that it's the right answer.
If Brazil's to do this, Brazil is undoubtedly going to have
an influence on other countries thinking about doing
the same, particularly within the BRIC bloc.
Now does the U.S. still have a role?
I mean I think that for one, we do have
the best intermediary protections.
We do, in case that's, I'll just,
I'll explain that really quickly.
The Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act
in the U.S. that protects intermediary platforms
like Google, Facebook, et cetera,
from being held responsible for the content that they host.
Brazil on the other hand is, I think Facebook is facing
something like 1,000 defamation suits in Brazil.
So Brazil's not a good place for data
when you think about that aspect of it.
The U.S. does have those strong data protections.
We have these really awesome, robust companies that come up
with really great products and yet these companies
are doing, they're doing some things to step up against it,
but they're not doing enough.
So I think that's the first thing is,
in terms of, so I know I'm not,
I'm getting to the answer. -: Yeah, yeah.
-: So, I mean, the first part of it is let's take
the companies out of the government for a minute.
-: Yep. -: And talk to them separately.
'Cause that's huge, that's a huge part of the equation,
we do have better laws and we do have often
a better environment for that.
In terms of governance, in terms of where
the U.S. government can play a role in the internet.
It's a hard question because while I would like to see us
take a step back and I would like to see less
U.S. dominance in that space for obvious reasons.
I also don't see any better stewards at this point,
and that's a really, really big conundrum.
I don't know that I've got a great answer beyond that.
-: So I think this is the incredible tension
that we sort of found ourselves faced with, right?
So people who've been working for a long time
on internet governance generally are not folks
inclined to say that the U.S. should run the world, right,
I mean generally it's a bunch of,
fairly progressive anti-colonial sort of folks.
But then we sort of look at what happens if
internet governance moves into the UN
or any of these other task force that have come up
and it very quickly looks like there's
a very strong Chinese presence, there may be a very strong
Russian presence in those international fora.
And it may actually be extremely difficult
to sort of work within those spaces.
Similarly, a lot of us who are very used to,
try to keep a very close eye on corporate America,
we're worried about how much private information
is getting shared, we're worried about
the correlation of databases.
I mean, Jillian York, you're telling me
that the answer at the end of this is that
you want Google and Facebook to do the right thing?
Is that is that gonna happen?
(laughing)
-: Probably not.
No, and I mean one of the conversations
that's gotten dwarfed over the past few months
is with all the talk about U.S. surveillance,
let's remember that Russia and China
are two of the world's biggest offenders.
And let's also remember what they've been doing,
I mean whatever your feelings politically are,
what they've been doing in the Security Council
in respect to Syria, that's exactly what
the kind of thing that they will do
if they gain more control over the internet.
I don't want Russia and China
to have any control over the internet.
But I also don't see the U.S., I mean,
I see the U.S. moving forward.
I don't want to say that I see the U.S.
going the direction of Russia or China,
I think that that's an extreme statement at this point.
But in terms of purely the technological aspect,
the way that they're collecting data,
the way that they're surveilling citizens,
both American and foreign is headed that way
in terms of, just the severity of it,
not the political implications of it,
that's a different question.
Do I think that the companies are the answer?
No, but I don't know what the answer is.
-: So let's pin down and let's actually try to get some
answers on all of this. -: All right.
-: So you've just been in Brazil.
-: Yes.
-: Brazil is proposing that essentially,
they take Brazilians' national data off the internet,
they keep it local to Brazil.
The logic behind this at first is,
well, we certainly can't trust in the U.S.,
it's gonna get intercepted, anyone who's interacting
with anyone who might possibly be a target
of NSA surveillance which near as I can tell
from these definitions seems to be all of us, suddenly has
the ability of having that information compromised.
The downside is that suddenly
you've broken the internet, right?
It's very, very hard for Google to essentially say,
I'll store your data here and I'll store your data here
and I'll store your data here,
so you may have sort of essential services
that we're all used to using, shutting off whole countries
from the internet and then building out national versions
of the services, which in many cases
may actually be subject to much more repressive laws.
Still, you are the government of Brazil,
you have just had this revelation of how badly
your country is being surveilled by the United States.
What do you recommend that result here?
-: I don't know if I've got a recommendation for
the Brazilian government, but I'm gonna take it a step back.
-: Sure. -: (mumbles)
what I thought you were getting at,
which would be my recommendation for the Brazilians
who think that that's the right answer.
-: Great.
-: Realize where you're going before with the big companies,
you're right, I don't think the big companies
are going to do what we want them to do.
We're gonna keep pushing them to
and I don't think that's the wrong or a wrong answer.
But I think it's a piece of a bigger puzzle.
What I would say to Brazilians and what I want
is I want the choice of where I put my data.
I want more choices of what tools I can use.
I want more secure, tools that are built around security
by design where the security is part of the design
of the technology, rather than an afterthought,
which it has been the most of these.
-: So give us an example of what a tool like that looks like.
-: So we were chatting earlier about Mailpile.
So, okay, so I use PGP and I will say that I find PGP
more easier than a fax machine,
but more difficult than Gmail.
Does that make sense?
It really is easier than a fax machine.
So I use it and I use it most of the time
with my professional communications these days.
I don't know if the NSA can crack it or not,
that's a big open question.
But if I assume that PGP is the most secure tool available
to me at this point in time, I am likely to get
about maximum 10% of the people
in my contacts list to actually use it.
-: Right. -: Because it's complicated.
It's, and please don't say it's not complicated
because I will do a Little, little bit of this around you.
It is complicated, it is difficult for people
outside of this room, maybe some people like me
inside this room, and it's cumbersome.
What that looks like is taking something,
we were talking about Mailpile earlier,
which is a tool that has not yet been released,
but is aiming to get the same type of end-to-end encryption
built into the platform in a way that is accessible
and easier to use and has good design.
Because one of the most complicated things about this
is that if you're not a geek,
and by geek I mean, you know, geek.
If you're not a geek, some of these tools
are really complicated to use.
The best one so far for me has been using OTR,
Off-the-Record chatting, that's when I'm teaching people
things if somebody says, "What's one thing I can do today?",
that's the first thing I give them.
But beyond that, then the learning curve goes really steep.
What this means is tools that are built in a way
that incorporate all of those elements but are also
fairly easy to use and often pretty to look at.
-: So the advice that you would end up giving
citizens of Brazil, and possibly it ends up becoming
the nation of Brazil, is (mumbles) and encryption.
So getting the point where people simply assume that
end-to-end encryption, and let's just explain for people
who may not be completely up on what that means.
What this means is that before my message
is hitting the public internet, it is encrypted so that
it is only readable by the person that I am sending it to
and that if it is intercepted along the way,
whether by the NSA, whether my Chinese hackers,
whoever is listening sort of in between,
what they're getting is a garbled message.
Now they are getting something.
They're getting the fact that Jillian and I are in contact
because that message was going between the two of us.
Software like Tor tries to obscure that
to one extent or another, and in some cases
is able to obscure some of that behavior.
But what this really does is essentially harden the internet
against that sort of eavesdropping and tapping.
If we got everyone to use strong encryption,
do we still think we're safe after what
we found out about NSA capabilities?
-: Well, I don't know that any of us know the answer to that.
I think we're safer.
So we do know of course that the NSA
is holding on to encrypted communications longer
than they're holding on to any other communications
and those are essentially if I, the way it looks
in my head anyway, being put aside for a later date.
And it is possible that the NSA will at some point
be able to crack all of those levels of encryption.
But the fact is if we are all using end-to-end encryption,
in all of our communications, which is in fact
what I would like to see happen,
then it becomes much more difficult for them.
And I think that that's one big step forward.
I mean we have no perfect solutions.
I know it sounds incredibly pessimistic,
but there isn't an answer yet.
-: Well, I want to get downright pessimistic, right?
-: Okay, let's get pessimistic.
-: So we have sort of perhaps the hopeful solution in this,
which is at some point if we get a level of activation
around this, we have people trying to figure out
how to do end-to-end encryption.
We start pressuring companies like Google
to make this routine and part of their products.
When they don't do it, we move the new products
like Mailpile and sort of other things out there
that are building this in from the ground up.
My concern is that what we've been learning
in the NSA revelations is that even if you really
have your act together, even if you're PGPing your email
and encrypting your hard drive, it sounds as if
there are enough hackers working for the NSA
targeting individual systems, that if they want
your hard drive, they've got your hard drive.
And I've been hearing from friends who are at
a level of paranoia that you and I sort of look at and go,
wow, that's a little scary, that they no longer feel
completely safe in their ability
to sort of protect their communications.
How do we still talk to activists, Jill?
I mean you and I both go out and we work with reporters.
We work with whistleblowers.
We work with people who if their governments
find out what they're doing are in real trouble.
And one of the things you referenced sort of
in your opening statement is that what people
are now terrified about is what is the U.S. government
sharing with say the government of Jordan?
What do we tell our friends in Jordan
who are looking at corruption within the royal family
or looking at abuses within the security services?
-: Well, my friends in Jordan have told me
that they just have those conversations offline these days,
which is interesting actually, I mean,
I don't want to dismiss that and say,
oh yeah, no, we just we have to go and have
all of our conversations offline, that's how scary this is,
because I think that all along we've gotten
a little too cozy with our relationships with technology
and assume that that's the best way to organize.
And I think that a lot of my friends in other countries
have kind of come full circle in that
and realize somewhere along the way,
probably sometime around 2011 for a lot of them,
that organizing with technology isn't always
the right answer and isn't always necessary.
So I think that's part of it.
And I don't think that that's something
to necessarily cry about.
I mean I also think that there are other
additional measures there that the real tinfoil hats
will tell you, like, "Yeah, but are you
"putting your phone in a Faraday cage?
"Are you, is the phone locked in the freezer things?"
So I mean I do think that's part of it.
What I tell people is, I mean it really what I tell people
is it depends very, very much on who your adversary is
and what your personal level of threat is.
And that's a longer conversation and I'm working
right now actually, I'm just completely embroiled
in trying to put together a huge set
of educational resources that helps bring that
to the public and helps people understand
how to look at their threat model.
But yeah, I mean, what do we tell our friends there?
I think that, I think it does depend
on the individual circumstances.
But I think what I'm hearing from a lot of those circles
is really, "Do I need to be using
"electronic communications for this question?"
-: Which seems just a horrifically ironic moment
in all of this, right?
So you have one branch of the U.S. government
essentially saying we really want the internet free
and unfiltered in Iran so that the Iranian people
will come together and finish the Green Revolution.
And then we have a much better funded part
of the U.S. government, essentially saying,
and by the way, we'll be watching every move of that.
So perhaps what you should actually be doing is
having this instead of conversations in the corner.
So that's horrifically depressing.
So, and you and I actually were talking about
sort of burnout within this community
instead of trying to figure out how we wrestle
with sort of an issue of this sort of size and magnitude.
Before I open this up to the general public on this,
I want to try to get this sort of in
the practical side of this.
You and I are both working on this issue
on different perspectives.
We're working with individual activists.
We're trying to figure out best practices.
EFF is doing wonderful work trying to figure out
how to sue the NSA and bring this into court.
What can we in this room do?
If we are upset about moving into a culture
of mass surveillance in the United States,
something that has implications not just
for our relationship with democracy,
but frankly implications for everybody in the world
who ends up touching and using these systems.
How can we be effective?
How can we somehow channel that anger effectively?
-: So I suspect you're gonna agree on this,
so if I forget any points that you think are key,
add on to it. -: Go for it.
-: So I think that there's,
I think we have to tackle it from all sides.
So we've talked about technology,
we've talked about using end-to-end encryption.
We also need to think about if we have the money to,
we need to start really putting money where our mouth is
and start funding those projects.
And I don't necessarily mean you, I mean,
I give like 10 bucks to RiseUP every month.
But generally speaking I'm not a wealthy person.
No, specifically speaking I'm not a wealthy person,
excuse me.
But encouraging when you, when you have
those channels available, encouraging the funding
of open source and end-to-end encryption focused does,
and privacy by design tools.
So that's one, you've got to think about tech.
There's the legal path which has been EFF's forte
for the past 23 years of our existence, which is doing this
in the courts, fighting for this in the courts.
There's the policy aspect which is actually calling up
your representatives and getting them to think about this
on the same level that we as citizens are.
I think that a lot of the stagnation in Washington
around this issue is because we're not actually
doing enough to convince them.
I mean sure there's a large number of representatives
that are never going to do anything.
But then there are the ones that might be able
to be turned toward, you know, the Ron Wydens of this world,
rather than the other direction.
And I think that we can make progress there.
And then I also think that the last aspect of it for me
is the public education side which is where
I've been putting my time in lately,
doing a lot of speaking, writing, and now building
a set of resources for education around these issues.
What other bits there?
-: No, I think a lot of those are the really big ones.
I think in the U.S. I think we don't yet have a sense
of how badly screwed we are in international circles.
I was in Germany when the revelations around
Angela Merkel's mobile phone came out
and I'm not sure that we in the U.S. actually kind of have
an understanding of just how badly that went over
in say East Berlin, where sort of memories of a population
being regularly surveilled are pretty fresh
and pretty strong in people's minds.
There's an enormous opportunity loss
that's sort of come into place here.
And I think we're starting to see Google and Twitter,
in particular, sort of stand up and say,
we're really furious about the situation,
we can't believe how badly we've been compromised.
And I think it's possible that they are
our allies in this process.
I think the big piece of it that I wanted to emphasize
and I'm really glad that you sort of picked it
as your ending trope there, is I don't think
we've figured out how to have the right discussion
about trade-offs between security and privacy.
And we couldn't do it here either, right,
we're two people who spend a lot of time
talking about this and thinking about this.
I don't know that we have made the persuasive case
that what little or lot of intelligence we got
about the brothers involved with the Boston bombing
was not worth whatever compromises to our individual privacy
and our freedom of assembly that have come into play.
But there's clearly some balance between those interests.
What sort of marginal security do we get
versus what do we lose from losing privacy and what do we
lose from moving in a society of mass surveillance?
And what's really hard about it is in some ways
we know it only at the extremes.
I can say, imagine what it was like in East Germany
where there's a one in 11 chance that you're spying on me,
but we know that that's not the case.
But that we are somewhere between sort of
the state of nature where we end up shaping the constitution
and where spying on someone involves
physically listening to their conversation.
We've moved well into this realm of mass surveillance
and I think none of us quite know
how to talk about it and how to discuss it yet.
I mean this more than anything else is what
I'm really counting on EFF to sort of help us out with.
-: Yeah, so I'll just, I'll give one more final plug
for something that we worked really hard on
over the past year and got almost, oh, God,
I'm gonna under represent, somewhere between 200 and 300
signatures from groups all over the world
and we put up this set of 13 principles,
they're at necessaryandproportionate.net.
And the goal of these is to get countries
and local governments and whatever, what have you,
to sign on to committing to only targeted surveillance
when it is necessary, proportionate,
and gosh, I'm gonna mess up the other 11.
I've got a really bad memory, guys, it's unbelievable.
But you should check those out and we've been doing,
we've been making a lot of headway in Latin America.
One of my colleagues spoke to the Argentinian,
is it congress or parliament,
I'm not quite sure. -: I think it's parliament.
-: Spoke to them and has been just going off
and promoting these all over the world.
And what's been really heartening for me
and really impressive is the number of groups in other
countries that agree that this is the right balance.
Yes there is, I mean, does my ideal world
have any surveillance in it?
Probably not, but that ideal world is also probably
completely unrealistic and I accept that.
If we're looking at a solution that does take into account
the fact that the internet is genuinely used
for criminal purposes, then we need to start thinking
about that in a sense where we are
only going after those people who are using it
for those purposes and not the rest of us.
-: So we put a lot out there.
I know that people who are sitting here
have a lot that they want to share.
So here's how we're gonna try to do this.
There's a mic over there.
We invite people to queue up by the microphone.
There's certain ground rules for asking a question here.
The first that I'm gonna ask for is that
as you come to the mic you introduce yourself.
We are webcasting and so people would like to know
who you are, even if you think
I know who you are, let us know.
The second is the generic reminder that I give
at any academic institution, which is that a question
is an interrogative statement.
You can tell it has a little upturn at the end of it
and it's designed in such a way that someone
on the stage could respond with an answer.
So it is not a short speech followed by a question mark.
So we're gonna take questions there.
And then the other thing that I would like to suggest is
that I know we have a big audience going on online
right now, if you will tweet with the hashtag mltalks,
Media Lab Talks, mltalks, we have monitors here,
we can watch the questions go by and I'm going to try to
alternate between moderating from the internet
and from the floor, depending on glare
and who has stuff to ask and so on and so forth.
But in the meantime, Chris Peterson, the mic is yours.
-: Thank you, Chris Peterson, MIT Center for Civic Media.
So I think one of the struggles that I've had with this
is we can talk about the Boston Marathon,
we can talk about these different situations and say,
well, maybe there are legitimate surveillance purposes.
But the NSA has been so darn incompetent about it.
Where you let LOVEINT, you let Booz Allen contractor
into all of your stuff.
To what extent is abject incompetence a good critique
of the NSA and an effective one from
a public policy and political standpoint?
-: So let me do this as analogy really quickly and I,
Ethan, you might disagree with me on this.
But when I look back at the history of how
the State Department has done its internet freedom stuff
and I use this an analogy because
it's an area of government that I know well.
They fund some really good things,
but they've also funded some vaporware,
they funded some insecure stuff, they've fumbled around,
and I mean I know they've they brought in great experts
from here maybe, from the Berkman Center, as well,
but they've also just kind of really messed up at times
and wasted millions of dollars in some cases.
And if that's happening at the State Department,
I can only assume it's happening
in other areas of government.
It's true that with the NSA, I mean the only brazen,
brazen violations we've seen have been around LOVEINT,
which was the circumstances under which NSA agents,
is that there right term, NSA analysts,
were using their power and their access to this data
to spy on their love interests or their exes or,
and then that's pretty, that's dangerous that, I mean,
don't get me wrong, that can be incredibly dangerous.
I don't know what other types of things like that.
I'm sure that they're gonna come out soon though,
that's the part that when I've heard,
I heard an estimate of how many years it would take
for all of these revelations to be pored through,
all of the stuff that Glenn Greenwald and folks have.
And it's, somebody said it would take seven years
to do all of this and do every leak in detail.
I have no doubt that we're gonna see more of that.
So is it incompetence?
I mean I think we can only count on
a certain level of incompetence.
-: I would say, Chris, it's at least as much
overreach as incompetence, right?
So I think what's interesting is when,
one of the interesting things about intelligence services
in this country is that the budgets are secret.
And because the budgets are secret it's very, very hard
to keep track of how they keep expanding and keep growing.
And because the review of this happens in ways
that are extremely non-transparent and really
because we haven't had this conversation about
what is proportionate, what is necessary,
and I think these are really interesting terms
that EFF is sort of bringing into this.
Once we sort of say, well, what is proportionate
and necessary is whatever it takes
to prevent anyone from being killed by terrorism.
You're willing to go off in any number
of different directions, you're willing to go
extremely broad in your reach in all of this.
Some of it's gonna screw up,
someone's going to leak information.
One of the things that I think we're discovering
is that bureaucracies are incredibly leaky.
The Department of Defense is a bureaucracy,
the NSA is a bureaucracy.
These organizations turn out to be
incredibly vulnerable to whistleblowers.
And of course, what's really tricky about this is
at the same time that we suddenly see
what a single well-intentioned whistleblower,
and a very careful one in Snowden,
has been capable of doing.
Simply how much of this debate
has come up from the Snowden revelations?
We are simultaneously finding out from these revelations
just how dangerous it would be to be that whistleblower
if you were not willing to sacrifice your life
in the way that Snowden has done.
So it's this really interesting sort of
complicated irony going on here.
I want to ask you a question that came off the monitor
'cause I really am trying to multitask here.
-: Yeah. -: Which is someone
asked a question that suggests that EFF
is ambivalent about the Bitcoin movement.
-: Do you have feelings about Bitcoin
and whether they're your personal feelings
or whether they're EFF's feelings about Bitcoin?
Is having untraceable currency an essential part
of trying to figure out how we respond
to these revelations and surveillance?
-: So I don't work on that directly, but I will,
I feel like I should, so EFF accepts Bitcoin donations.
So I mean it's true that ambivalent might be
a good word to describe it, because I think that,
I don't, again I don't follow this closely,
so I'm not gonna try to represent EFF's view.
I don't really know where we are right now on that.
My opinion is that there's been so much
sort of screaming and outrage around the Silk Road
and rightly so on a couple of points
because if murder for hire is really something
that was happening, then that is terrifying.
On the other hand, murder for hire happens every day
in big cities without the enabling factors of the internet.
And also I'm just not that concerned that people
can buy pot on the internet, that just really isn't,
I'm not, that's not a world that scares me.
And so when we're talking about,
sorry, I live in San Francisco.
So when we're talking about some of the things that Bitcoin
could eventually enable, I don't think that we have,
I don't think we've even thought through
the realm of that yet, I don't think
we've gotten to those big questions.
Again I don't, I'm not totally clear
on my organization's position,
but if we seem ambivalent, perhaps that's why.
-: It is really interesting to think about
what people see as the silver bullet, right?
There's certainly, I come out of a generation
of cipher punks who sort of felt like as long as
we could get our information channels completely secure,
we would have control over the governments
and the answer was, well, not so much
and I sort of wonder whether there's now a sense that
if we only had our perfect untraceable currency.
But of course, as we actually find
with the fall of Silk Road these things,
getting something that's purely untraceable
turns out to be incredibly difficult to do.
Although it may actually have really changed the dialogue
around legalization of drugs within the United States,
as we've gone through a period where
for a little while drugs were pretty much
legal and accessible if you had sufficient
technical knowledge to figure out
how to go and purchase them on Silk Road.
-: Hi, Phil Gehr from the MIT Sloan School.
Back to this question of security and the trade-offs.
Since those NSA surveillance findings have come out,
even people in national security circles,
intelligence analysts, have also discussed
this added component that in fact surveillance
may have an insecurity effect within it.
You've seen this kind of breakdown of trust globally,
which reduces coordination between states
and also this other thing where post 911 mass surveillance
generated so much data that intelligence agencies
were overwhelmed with data and given false leads
all the time that waste a lot of time and effort.
I'm wondering to what extent is the EFF willing
or able to engage in a dialogue with
national security people, intelligence analysts
to kind of figure out this question of the trade-offs?
-: I'm not totally sure that I can
answer that question either.
Not because it's a big secret,
but because I most of my work is not domestic.
I guess if I were purely taking off my EFF hat
and giving my own opinion,
I don't think that it's a bad idea, I think we should.
And I mean we, EFF, or we, all of us.
I think that you hit on something really interesting there
around the idea that it's making us less secure.
And I think a lot of times U.S. policy,
outside of surveillance and within, is short sighted.
A lot of our policies around security,
not just technical security, but around airport security,
things like that, have really failed to take into account
the big picture of how these things affect society,
how they affect the perception of people outside
the United States and of our enemies, whoever those may be.
And I do think that if we're to take the long view
then we absolutely need to think about the negative effects
of surveillance, not just on individuals,
but on the ability to conduct good law enforcement.
-: Jillian, we've got a quick question here
which is basically about messaging.
-: Okay. -: So for people who want
to join with EFF, join with other organizations
in the space, what are the basic messages,
what are the quick takeaways
of what we're trying to get across here?
-: Okay, so I think, hmm, the quick takeaways.
Can I ruminate on that one for a minute?
-: Sure, let's go to another question,
let's get Ivan and then we'll get you back
to quick takeaways. -: Alright, I'm gonna think.
-: Hi, Ivan Sigal from Global Voices.
I have a big picture question.
So the NSA surveillance is designed specifically to focus
on terrorism and there's an interesting question
about whether we've built such a system that essentially
by shutting down all avenues of political response
in the space, we ignore the causes of terror itself.
We substitute a policy of repression of speech
in exchange for an honest debate
about the causes of a particular policy issue.
So extrapolating from that framework to the idea
that once we've built a system of surveillance for
one kind of problem, we are tempted to use it for another.
Are you seeing trends about the sharing
or use of information in other aspects of U.S. governmental
and international topics besides terror
and how are you looking at it from an EFF perspective?
And what are the implications for that big picture?
-: Yes, so I've got a really clear example
and I'm gonna step back a second to share
an anecdote that leads into it.
So before I was at EFF I worked at the Berkman Center,
did a lot of work with Ethan, and one of the projects
that I worked on was the OpenNet Initiative.
And that looked at censorship and then a little bit later
surveillance in about 60 countries all over the world.
And we kind of delineated these clear categories
of why governments censor the internet.
And those were basically national security,
sort of obscenity.
There was another one that I can't really remember.
And then the last one was kind of like
tools to circumvent censorship.
And I always thought that was kind of interesting
because it was very meta.
You'd see governments behind censoring Google Translate
because they figured out that people
were using Google Translate as a means to read
censored articles, which does work by the way,
not everywhere, but you can still do that.
So that was kind of interesting to me
and I think that that's actually the first step now.
So if we look at the people beyond actual,
and terrorist is such a hard thing to define,
I mean as we saw this past week
with the attack in Los Angeles, in the airport there.
That wasn't defined as a terrorist attack,
but if it were me I would I would call it one.
The way the U.S. looks at terrorist
is usually kind of synonymous with
Muslim brown person who commits a crime.
But if we put that aside for a minute
and just think about violent terrorism
versus the UK's definition of terrorism,
which includes sort of some sorts of agitation
against the state that are not violent.
I think the next step that the next group of people
that we've seen the NSA already start to target
or that we've seen the U.S. government, sorry,
not specifically the NSA, already start to target
is the people who build the tools.
So we've seen people like Jake Appelbaum
get detained and his devices seized entering the U.S.
Moxie Marlinspike.
This has happened to Nadim Kobeissi who builds Cryptocat.
These people are all public about this.
There are also people that I've talked to who
this has happened to that are not public about this.
So it's not just those big names
who are willing to go on the record.
There are other individuals who build encrypted tools,
who are being detained every time
they enter their own country.
That terrifies me.
It terrifies me for another reason which is not something
I've said publicly yet, but that I keep thinking about.
I keep asking myself why I haven't been detained.
I feel very close to the sun sometimes.
I don't mean to inflate, I don't have
an inflated sense of self-importance, that's not it.
I just mean given all of the people that I have these
little connections to, why am I not being questioned?
And I think about it and I realize that all of the people
who are being questioned are people who have
incredibly good security practices.
Which means that the rest of us don't,
which means the rest of us are easy to spy on.
And I don't mean to say that to scare probably quite a few
people in this room who might also be
a little close to the sun, but yeah,
I think that that's the next step is you go after
the people who can build the tools to protect the rest of us
and that really terrifies me.
-: Ivan, my take on this is that surveillance
is always a slippery slope.
I think it's very much like censorship.
What we found out through Open Network initiative work
was that countries would go into censorship
pretty transparently, right?
So I often use Saudi Arabia as kind of a good example
of a country that went after censorship by sort of
standing up and saying, look, we're gonna censor.
We're not gonna let you look at pornography,
we think it's anti-Islamic.
We're not gonna let you go to the Jim Beam website,
we think that's anti-Islamic.
And after sort of declaring the things that
we're not gonna let you look at because they're haram,
then they started finding ways to censor political content
that threatened the monarchy and very, very quickly
you found ways to sort of go from censorship, we sort of go,
all right, well, maybe that's culturally acceptable
into a space where you sort of go,
oh, I'm really not happy about you doing that.
I think what's so hard in the U.S. is that we have
a number of hot button issues where people
seem to be willing to say, well, if it's gonna help us
go after terrorism or if it's gonna help us
go after child pornography, then we're willing to
sort of let it go and sort of let it slide from there.
And if it sort of goes out a little bit further,
you start finding yourself worrying, are people gonna start
using this for violation of copyright?
Are people gonna start using this for crimes
that most of us sort of think of as recruiting crimes.
This is the Moxie Marlinspike,
the shrunken lobster argument.
So, I'm very worried about letting the cat out of the bag
in the first place and sort of not being able to watch it.
I think it's so easy for us to sort of be able to say,
so many things we'll only be able to get by getting massive
data sets and sort of doing the giant analysis on it.
For me the missing piece in all of this is,
I don't think we've had an intelligent argument
about big data.
I think there's an enormous amount of promises
being made that if we simply surveil
the entire social network of the world.
If we take Facebook's giant graph of who's friends with who,
that somehow we spin it around in a couple of dimensions
and some crazy smart people look at it
and we say, "Oh, those are the terrorists."
And I'm just not convinced that's true.
I'm actually increasingly becoming convinced
that it's not true.
That most of what we know how to do in machine learning,
and there's a lot of people in this room
who know more about machine learning than I do.
But we know how to identify something once we have enough
members of the set that we can identify the features.
Once we can sort of say, oh, that's what this person
looks like, that's what a teenager that I want
to put this particular ad to looks like.
Then we can market to it.
Terrorists are a rounding error.
They are a tiny, tiny, tiny little rounding error.
And I am not convinced that big data
is actually gonna get us to them,
but we don't have the language right now to have that debate
which would allow us to have a debate about proportionality.
Please.
-: Hi, I'm Theresa, I live in Cambridge.
And I guess my question is, and it's a little bit of
like a provocative question is, if you had to choose between
the U.S. government to spy on you or a larger company
like Facebook or Google to stalk,
they're not stalk, but spy on you.
Which one would you choose because one
you could theoretically stop using,
the other, you know you can't choose governments.
-: You just answered my question for you,
you just answered your question for me,
that's exactly what I was gonna say is,
yeah, it's a choice with the companies,
it's not a choice with the government.
I mean granted it's sort of a double non-choice
when you think about it, because you're,
you choose to use a company and then
that's how the government goes through.
But no, I mean if I had to choose, I would choose neither
and I would just go live in a cabin in the woods.
But that obviously doesn't suit my lifestyle
and even if I did stay off the social networks,
I would still have CCTV, there would still be other ways to,
I would use credit cards, I would have a bank account.
Yeah, I think that it's interesting because you've seen
a lot of, I don't want to call them NSA denial lists,
but people saying, oh, what the NSA is doing
is not a big deal, but look at what the companies are doing.
And that thread is really concerning me.
I've heard a lot of that kind of talk lately
from certain commentators.
There was a really good post today actually,
a good article saying why that that's not
a really good argument, I can't remember who wrote it.
I want to say it was in the Washington Post,
but it's something really good anyway, look it up.
But yeah. -: I mean,
I think the other obvious response to this is that Google
doesn't yet have either a police force or an army.
It may happen.
I bet they would be very fashionably dressed,
they'd be kind of funny, they'd be really colorful.
-: On bikes. -: But at that point
it really is a very different sort of set of power.
Corporations have an enormous amount of information
that we've chosen to give them.
In most cases we have really bad choices
and in fact one of the big things
that we should be working on in the space
is better choices and trying to figure out
if we're not happy with a Google or a Facebook,
how would we actually create alternative choices?
How would we create a marketplace
where we sort of go elsewhere?
That the nature of the contemporary nation state
is that you don't get a lot of choice from that.
Most of us are not in a position where we can essentially
emigrate and find ourselves under
a very different legal regime.
In a situation where exit is not the option,
voice is the option.
So you have to find some way to sort of react to the system
by saying, "This is not something we can accept.
"We have to find a way to sort of
"change the government structure somewhat."
So that's one place where there is a bit of good news,
which is that generally speaking, most of us don't have
a lot of voice in corporate governance.
Generally speaking there we use exit.
We just quit the company and we go to somebody else.
With governments we have to use voice
and this is a place where you've heard both of us talk about
how hard it is to find the language.
How hard it is to find the words to talk about this
in a way to persuade an audience sort of beyond
the audience in a room like this one.
-: Right, 'cause people aren't just
gonna listen and say, go off Facebook.
I had this really interesting debate a few months back
with two people that I admire very much.
One was Emin Milli, who's an activist from Azerbaijan,
and the other was Jeremy Zimmerman
who is an activist from France.
And on the left, I had my friend from France saying,
"Yes, well you just don't use Facebook.
"Just get off of Facebook."
And on the right, I have my friend going,
"Are you kidding?
"How do you think we organize things?"
And for me cutting out of those networks means
cutting out of a whole group of friends
out there in the world that I
keep in touch with there because it makes sense.
That's where I see my friends' kids.
I mean I know that that, some people are just not
gonna accept that argument, but I think it's
a really important lifestyle argument too.
-: So we're gonna do two last questions, one from online
and one from the lady waiting on the floor.
-: And I won't forget.
-: And then we're gonna take you back to the,
what are the key messages that we want to take.
-: Cool. -: Ma'am, let's go to you first
then I'm gonna go to my question from the web
and then we're gonna let Jillian's sum up.
-: Okay, I'm Alice Weiss and I think I've been a social
or something activist for 50 or more years.
While my question basically has to do with content.
And it seems to me what you are already said
is that the NSA doesn't know what it has.
Is there some way of finding out,
now we know they're dropping in on everybody.
But what are their categories?
What are they looking for?
But I and I do want you to answer that.
But there is something I want you to know
about social activism and social change
is that if you want to stand up and do it,
and everybody should, but everybody doesn't always do it,
is that you need to know that you are taking the risk
that they will see you and they will read you.
And that has always been true.
I mean the FBI sniffing around in the 60s
when we were making, well, you could hardly blame them.
Right?
We were stopping railroad trains and whatever.
But the thing is, that's what social change is about.
You stand up the way Mr. Snowden did and say this is wrong
and you know you're putting yourself in danger.
Okay.
What I'm very concerned about is that we think about
changing the things that are negative in our society
that we want to change and not just the technology.
-: Miss Weiss, thank you so much for that.
I am immediately reminded of a mutual friend of ours,
Alaa Abdel Fattah, who is an Egyptian activist
who goes in and out of prison regularly depending on
the whims of what government's in power.
And Alaa was sort of chewing me out
after giving a workshop on blogging anonymously.
-: Yeah. -: And this is a workshop
that I've given a lot.
I some years ago developed a pretty good guide
to anonymous blogging and I would go around
and tell people if you don't feel like you can be
a whistleblower without sacrificing your identity,
here's a pretty good way to sort of protect yourself.
And Alaa sort of pulled me aside and basically said,
"Look, change doesn't come from people
"who aren't willing to stand up.
"It comes from the people who are willing to stand up.
"And it really comes from the people
"who are willing to identify as an activist."
Here's what gets tricky.
I may be okay standing up and saying,
I'm willing to say this about my community, my government,
my company, I'm willing to put this out.
But I don't necessarily have the permission of the people
close to me and in the circles around me.
And what we are all terrified about
with the sort of surveillance that's happening right now
is that it is not surveillance of the individuals,
it's surveillance of our networks.
I may be willing to make that change,
but my sister may not or my graduate students may not
or my friends back in Lanesborough may not.
And it's that danger of networks that every activist
who works digitally lives in mortal fear of these days.
I may know the risk I'm taking, but I'm really worried
about everybody else who's connected to me.
-: No, I think that's an incredible point.
I find my job really difficult sometimes
because my job is to fight for privacy and free speech
and anonymity, but the truth is I chose a long time ago
to use my real name online all the time
and I don't have any secret online identity is this is me,
I, literally you can find me at Jillian C. York,
every platform, that's my name.
And I have talked to, I mean, Alaa is a really great example
and actually most of the folks in Egypt that I know
will say, if you're gonna take a stand,
do it with your real name, do it publicly, stand up and,
because they're gonna find you eventually.
So you might as well.
But I absolutely agree,
I think that that's where it gets tricky.
And I think that answers your question
to some degree as well.
I mean I don't know what we know, but one thing that we
do know is that the network mapping is a huge part of this.
One of the things I wanted to mention before
and forgot was when we talked about,
to Ivan's question about who's being watched.
If you look at what the New York Police are doing
infiltrating mosques, just absolutely horrific.
I have no doubt that there's some degree
of electronic surveillance that comes with that.
I don't know if it's happened.
I don't know what level that's happening at.
But when you think about the fact that,
you might have an activist within that community
that's willing to stand up, but you also have a
lot of people who are not activists
who are just going about their daily lives,
but who happen to be Muslim and who might happen to have
some cousin far away somewhere,
who maybe actually did commit a terrorist act
or maybe did not or maybe just had
a case of mistaken identity.
And so that's what scares me is the network mapping
and the fact, it's basically everything that you just said.
-: So I'm gonna close with the opportunity
for a happy answer. -: Yes.
-: Or at least I hope for a happy answer.
We've had two or three questions online
that basically come down to how do we get over apathy?
How do we get over sort of security apathy?
We have so many people who look at these NSA revelations,
essentially say if you have 50,000 smart programmers
trying to break your security,
you're ultimately going to be compromised.
Why should we still think about this?
Why should we still care about this?
-: I think the biggest one is we need to think beyond
the little stuff and I don't mean to say
that this is little stuff.
But we need to think beyond the one issue
and think about what is the world that you want
and how are you going to get there?
Because it's so easy to get caught up in the fact
that we're fighting against this one issue when really,
I mean, if the world that you want is, I don't know,
the end of the Westphalian nation state, for example.
If that's the world you want,
then let's actually just talk about it at this point.
Let's stop fighting bit by bit every four years
on this electoral cycle and let's dream bigger
and let's aim toward whatever, and I'm not saying
that has to be the world you want,
but let's aim toward whatever it is.
That's one thing that I think is positive.
The second thing is I think we are in the past few years
I think we have reached a point of kind of
a global awakening around this, we can't stick with
the status quo anymore, this isn't working.
And it's no coincidence that that kind of converged
with the spread of the internet and the fact that
we're all interconnected now and almost all of us,
probably everyone in this room talks to somebody
in another country online at least on a monthly basis,
if not more frequently.
The fact that we have that ability, I mean, that to me is,
that's what keeps me optimistic.
When I have that Friday night with, where I go home
and drink wine and cry about the NSA.
I then, the next Monday morning is when I go,
okay, who am I gonna talk to you?
And who am I going to get excited about
changing things with?
And I know maybe that sounds naive,
but the biggest part of my life has been for the past,
however long we've known each other,
has been Global Voices really and has been the fact that
that has enabled me to have friendships
in countries all over the world and to find people
who are exactly like me in other parts of the world.
And I know that that's a really simple thing to say.
And I know that I probably sound really quaint right now.
But that's what keeps me going,
is the fact that all of these people that I know
are aiming towards the same types of things,
maybe not the exact same politics, but we all have
a really similar vision of how the world should be.
And the fact that there's so many of us out there
makes me feel hopeful that we can get beyond just this.
And maybe that means that we don't organize online
or maybe it means that we all organize very publicly online
and maybe every conversation that we have about
how the world should be looks something like this.
Maybe you all get up on the stage and you just have
these conversations out in public.
But I think that it's not time to stop talking about
the NSA, we absolutely need to keep fighting that and we've
talked about some of the ways that you can do that.
But I think it's time to move a little bit past that
and think about the next step of what
we want the world to look like.
-: Well, Jillian, you take inspiration from people
around the world who are fighting these good fights.
We can take inspiration from EFF
and the hard work that they're doing.
I take a lot of inspiration from the work that you're doing
and all of us. -: Same.
-: Thank you so much for being with us.
Thank you all for being with us as well.
Great conversation. -: Thank you.
(audience applauding)