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What has the European Convention on Human Rights ever done for us?

Alkibiades — Tue, 23 Oct 2018 10:48:21 +0000

Speaker(s) Patrick Stewart Speaker(s) Adrian Scarborough Speaker(s) Sarah Solemani

Language spoken English

Date of Recording Mon, 2016-04-25

Tags: Monty Python´s Flying Circus European Court of Human Rights European Convention on Human Rights United Kingdom Theresa May Dan Susman The Guardian

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As one of the victorious parties that emerged from the Second World War in 1945, the United Kingdom has played a key role in drafting new binding laws for Europe’s common future to prevent the abuse of state powers witnessed during the war and before. This set of laws, overseen by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, would soon emerge as the ‚Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms’. In our time, it is known (and further developed!) as The European Convention of Human Rights.

In June 2016, however, the electorate of the United Kingdom held a referendum on whether it should stay in the European Union at all. With a majority of 1,9% and an overall 37% of the populace, the decision was made to leave the Union. Despite grave concerns about its legitimacy, e.g. in relation to resource spending of the Vote Leave/BeLeave campaigns as well as the manipulative data usage including Facebook profiles of firms like SCL-Group/Cambridge Analytica a.o., the ‚Article 50’ of the Treaty of Lisbon to unilaterally leave the Union was triggered by the new Prime Minister Theresa May on March 29th, 2017. This development is now known in popular culture as ‚Brexit’, as in: Britain´s Exit from Europe. It is putting to end a 43 years long process of membership in the ongoing evolution of economic, academic, juridical, environmental and other aspects of European culture and lifestyle.

A fact less known is that Theresa May had already argued before that Britain should leave the European Convention on Human Rights and create a ‚British Bill of Rights’ due to her experiences as Home Secretary starting in 2010. In reaction to her ongoing controversial statements on the issue, the Guardian published this satirical play by Dan Susman featuring actor Patrick Stewart, most widely known for his role as Capt. Jean-Luc Picard of the starship Enterprise, and other important British actors and authors.

In their take on the classic scene from Monty Python’s movie ‚The Life of Brian’ (1979) where a group of plotting revolutionaries discuss the merits of life under Roman reign while mimicking the dynamics of contemporary ideological discourse, Patrick Stewart, Adrian Scarborough and Sarah Solemani expose the problems in the Conservative plan for a ‘British Bill of Rights’.

Just as the Roman Empire had nothing substantial to offer to Monty Python’s zealots - apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, fresh water system, and public health – Stewart’s prime minister can’t find anything positive about the European Convention on Human Rights. Apart from the right to a fair trial, the right to privacy, freedom of religion, freedom of expression, freedom from discrimination, freedom from slavery and freedom from torture, that is. And of course, that it was the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland that helped to bring it to life in the first place.

Additional information

Michael - Hywel John, Fiona - Susie Fugle, Humphrey - Clive Mendus, George - Dan Curshen Ministers: Russell Wootton, Brendan Hooper, Sarika Lynch, David Cann, Prijay Taylor, Sophie Nasseemullah

Written and directed by Dan Susman, produced by Jess Gormley a.o.

With thanks to Abdullah Mutawi & Monty Python´s Flying Circus

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Source file: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptfmAY6M6aA

published: 25.04.2016; retrieved 10 2018

Published by The Guardian.

Prime Minister: Good morning

All: Good morning, Prime Minister.

Prime Minister: Before we start, I want you to be absolutely clear about one thing: We are here to serve the British people, not the whims of some European imperialist state.

All: Hear, hear.

Prime Minister: We are a proud nation and no bureaucrat in Brussels can tell us what to do.

All: Hear, hear.

Prime Minister: We are a democracy, not some perverse genuflecting mouth puppet on a European finger; the idea of that makes me physically sick.

All: …

Prime Minister: They took our sovereignty, our dignity, the very essence of our Britishness, and what has the European Convention of Human Rights ever done for us in return?

All (but Francis): Hear, hear.

Francis: Oh, the right to a fair trial.

Prime Minister: What?

Francis: The right to a fair trial.

Prime Minister: Well, that´s true I suppose …

Susan: The right to privacy?

Prime Minister: Well yes, all right, I grant you fair trials and privacy are two things the European Convention of Human Rights has given us, but …

Susan: What about freedom from torture and degrading treatment?

Humphrey: Oh, eh, freedom of religion?

Fiona: Hmm, freedom of expression?

Michael: Freedom from discrimination!

Susan: Uh, how about freedom from slavery?

Prime Minister: Yes, of course, freedom from slavery goes without saying, but …

Francis: Protecting victims of domestic violence!

Prime Minister: Okay, okay, but apart from the right to a fair trial, the right to privacy, freedom of religion, freedom of expression, freedom from discrimination, freedom from slavery and freedom from torture …

Susan: … and degrading treatment …

Prime Minister: … and degrading treatment, and protecting victims of domestic violence, but apart from these, what has the European Convention on Human Rights ever done for us?

Susan: Peace in Northern Ireland?

Prime Minister: What?

Susan: Well, I mean the Good Friday Agreement depends on the European Convention of Human Rights. So without it, we’d have to make peace all over again - and what a palaver that would be? … No, thank you …

Francis (gesticulating): No, ah, no …

Prime Minister: Now, look here, I’m not against human rights, of course not, but I say: We don’t need lectures from the frogs and the krauts. This is Britain, the land of Magna Carta, we invented human rights for God’s sake! We should be writing our own Bill of Rights and foisting it on the Europeans, ha ha ha. Let’s see how they like it then …

Francis: We have already done that, actually.

Prime Minister: What?

Francis: Well, after we won the war, British legal experts did draft a bill of Human Rights to help Europe sort itself out, you know, protect people from abuses of state power, that kind of thing.

Prime Minister: Really? You are sure?

Francis: Oh yeah.

Prime Minister: Uh, well, well that’s good. What’s it called?

Francis: The European Convention on Human Rights.

Prime Minister: Oh fuck off.

Downloadfile:

Stewart_sketch_ECHR.ogg

The European Union lacks a sense of its own history

leo — Mon, 13 Aug 2018 20:33:13 +0000

Speaker(s) Timothy Snyder

Language spoken English

Date of Recording Tue, 2018-05-29

Tags: European Union Politics of Inevitability Politics of Eternity Russia United States nation-state empire history

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The European Union is among the largest economies in the history of the world and the most important zones of contiguous democracies today. What it lacks is a sense of its own history, which creates a surprisingly important opportunity for those who wish it ill, above all in Moscow. Here, a historical perspective is employed to explain what has made the European Union possible, and what will be necessary to defend its future.

Timothy Snyder is a historian at Yale University, specializing in Eastern Europe, totalitarianism, and the holocaust. In his most recent book, “The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America,” he reveals the big picture on how the rise of populism, the British vote against the EU, and the election of Donald Trump were all Russian goals, and how these achievements reveal the vulnerability of Western societies. He is also the author of “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” which explores the everyday ways a citizen can resist the authoritarianism of today. His other works include “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning” and “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.”

This video is part of an ongoing series called ‘Timothy Snyder Speaks’ published online.

Additional information

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nziEATOj5Yk

License:

Standard Youtube Licence

Hi, I’m Timothy Snyder. This is the latest of my little talks about current events, it is the 29th of May, 2018.

What I thought I would like to talk about is the European Union. Most of what I have done thus far is talk about Russia or talk about the United States. But the European Union, in some sense, is more important than either. Its economy is bigger than the American economy, its economy is eight times bigger than the Russian economy, at least. It is the most important collection of contiguous democracies in the world and unlike Russia, and unlike the US, it doesn’t really have a clear story about itself and it doesn’t really have a clear profile, at least in the American news.

00:44 History vs. memory - Why does it matter that there is no common European history?

So, what I want to do today is talk about how this notion of ‚Inevitability becoming Eternity,’ or the ‘absence of history,’ how this affects the European Union. Now, if you’re European, you are probably going to get your back up when you hear someone with an American accent talk about how Europeans have a problem with history. But you do. I am stopping myself from saying ‚y’ all do’, which is a code-switch which I won’t use with you Europeans, so: you - plural – do. And the problem has a couple of parts.

The first is that there isn’t a European history that is common, so it just doesn’t matter, not just of historiography but of pedagogy, European schoolchildren going to European schools don’t get anything like a European history which allows them to recognize one another as Europeans. I am saying this on the basis of teaching Europeans at the university level for more than two decades, in the US, but also in European institutions. It is just the case that students from Finland or Portugal or Poland and Denmark or Germany and Greece don’t have a common history. It is actually worse in Europe than in the United States if it comes down to that.

The second way that Europe doesn’t have history is that much like in the United States there has been a substitution over the last 25 years of the notion of ‚memory’ for ‚history’. And the problem with memory is that - I mean, obviously, remember, we talk about memory when we do not remember anything, it is a classic Freudian type situation where the more you talk about something, the less you have of it - so, when we talk about memory, we don’t mean things we actually remember, we don’t mean historical detail. What we mean is a kind of ‚public culture of remembrance’, or the things that we are ‚supposed to remember’. Now, the problem with that is that ‘memory’ is even more national than history, so Portuguese or Spanish or French or German or Polish or Ukrainian memory is going to tend to be even more contained and even less subject to translation than national history. So, where we are in the early 21st century, is that we have a bunch of national histories that are taught separately and then, on top of that, and in in some sense making matters worse, is the cult of national remembrance.

Okay, why does all that matter? If you have come with me this far - you know, dear Europeans, dear Americans, dear others -, why does it matter that there is no European history? Well, because how we think about the past and how we think about the present and future may be the most important political issue in the world right now. Or, to put it in a slightly pompous way, a pretentious way, the most important metapolitical issue. If you don’t have a sense of history, then you become very vulnerable to the kinds of myths that I have been talking about the last couple of years and have been writing about in ‘The Road to Unfreedom’, the ‘myth of inevitability’ - that everything is going to turn out right -, or the ‘myth of eternity’ - that you are doomed, no matter what you do.

What the ‚Road to Unfreedom’ means is going from a sense of progress to a sense of doom, going from a kind of blithe sleepwalking story about ‚How there are no alternatives and therefore what we are doing is going to turn out okay,’ to a catastrophic story of ‚How everything has surprisingly gone wrong and we used to have a good history and now someone has taken that away from us.’ That shift is common to Russia, it is common to America, but it is also common to the European Union.

04:20 European storytelling – a fable of the wise nation

What I would like to do in the next few minutes is to show you what it looks like inside Europe. So where do we start? What is the European ‘Politics of Inevitability?’ What is the story that Europeans tell themselves? What is the thing that is believed under the skin? What is the thing which is axiomatic? What is the thing that the Europeans take for granted? The thing that Europeans take for granted is this: I call it the ‚Fable of the wise Nation.’ Europeans take for granted that their nations have been around for a long time, that those nations have had nation-states for a long time, that the nation-states have learned from the past, that the main thing they have learned from the past is that they have learned from the Second World War, that war is a bad thing; Therefore, European nation states chose wisely, on the basis of this wise experience, to form a policy of integration which led to the peaceful European Union of today.

Now, that is an extremely convenient story, because for one thing, it allows Europeans to look at Americans and say: “We have learned from war and you haven’t’,” which is, of course, very comfortable. Another reason why it is comfortable is that it blocks out completely what is actually the truth, or the central truth, of European history, which is that the 20th century, or the ‘long 20th century’ from the 19th to 21st century, is not about the nation-state at all, which hasn’t really existed. It is about European empires around the world falling apart and the fragments of those empires, the European metropoles, what was left after the empire collapsed, those bits, those European bits coming together to form European integration.

Now, let me try to take this a little bit slowly, because the idea that Europeans never had a nation-state is on the one hand factually totally obvious, but, on the other hand, the nation-state is so embedded in European memory and in European pedagogy that it takes a few seconds to try to extract it. So, I am going to take a few seconds to do it.

Think of the big European countries - the big European histories: Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, the Netherlands, Spain - all of these major European powers with their broad and impressive and very interesting histories have something in common, which is that they were empires. Britain was an empire, the French were an empire, Portugal, Spain: empires; the Dutch: an empire. These are all maritime empires. These are maritime empires built from the 16th century forward, which collapsed in the middle decades of the 20th century - the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s. There is not a moment in the history of those countries where they were a nation-state, it just didn’t happen. The process of the empire falling apart takes place at the same time as the beginning of the European integration process, or, to put it in a different way, trade all around the world - as it becomes more difficult and as it collapses, is replaced by trade inside the European Union. This happens in Great Britain in the 1960s, Great Britain joins the European Union in the 1970s.

Now you might be thinking ‘Germany was not a big maritime empire,’ and that is true: Germany is the most important case. Germany could not be a great maritime empire, what Germany tried to be instead - under Hitler – was the last frontier empire, the last empire to conquer great amounts of territory. Hitler, very consciously by the way, looking at the American example, thought that he could build up Germany as the last great European empire, but over territory, by conquering Poland, by conquering the Soviet Union, above all, by mastering Ukraine. Now, what this means is that when the Germans fail at that, when they lose the Second World War, the lesson, the most important lesson, is “Empire is impossible - Germany has to be European.” This is, of course, what Konrad Adenauer says, “Germany has to be European, there are ‚no alternatives’, in that sense, left.”

And so when Germany - along with France and Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg - begins the process of European integration, they are just confirming this general lesson: When you cannot have an empire, what you have instead is Europe. So, what the Europeans have done in the last 50 years or so - 60 years now -, is they have brought together the fragments of shattered empires into this thing called the European Union, meanwhile telling themselves that it is ‚just nation-states making a choice’.

That story is entirely false, they were never. Nation-states do not appear on the stage at all, at least in western Western and Central Europe, but it is a very comforting story, it is a story which gives you continuity, it is a story which allows you, in your school rooms, to talk only about yourselves, which is always fun, and it is also a story then - this is making them a serious point – it is also a story which allows you to completely sideline the atrocities and the humiliations of losing imperial wars. The main thing that happens, or, one of the main things that happens in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s into the 80s, is that European powers lose wars across Asia and across Northern Africa. That, we just completely removed from the story, and talk instead about ‚how we learn from the Second World War,’ ‚the nation is wise,’ ‚the nation has made good decisions’ - entirely false, but a good story.

Now, if you are an East European, you might be saying, “Wait, we did have nation states!” and that is true, you did have nation states, but this is the exception which confirms the rule: Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, the Baltic states Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and a few others, these were indeed nation states, in the 1920s and the 1930s, and this confirms the rule. These nation-states lasted for around two decades. All of the new nation-states created after 1918, every single one of them, collapsed in the late 1930s to early 1940s. All of them were overcome by larger powers - the Nazis, the Soviets, in some cases both - and as soon as these places emerged from communist rule in the late 80s, early 90s, the first thing that their leaders said - because their leaders understood at that time their own history - the first thing their leader said was, ‚We have to get into Europe.’ The process of forming a state was the same thing as the process of going into Europe.

11:00 The European Union – a process of integrating failed empires and failed nation-states

Which is where I want to now go in the 21st century. There was a tremendous confusion in the European Union about the relationship between the European Union and sovereignty. From a neutral, objective, cold historian’s point of view, what the European Union seems to have done is permit sovereignty; What it has done is, it has taken all these imperial fragments, the metropoles of the old, failed, West-European maritime empires, and the weak, threatened nation-states that emerged from the Soviet empire after the 1980s. It has taken all these fragments, all these bits, central or peripheral, as the case may be, and it has put them into something which has actually allowed enough trade and enough economic prosperity and enough general contentment - everyone measures that - to permit sovereignty, whether it is British sovereignty, Portuguese sovereignty, or Polish sovereignty.

Or, to put it more sharply: The main myth inside the European Union is that, ‚Well, we would be a sovereign nation-state, except we gave some of our sovereignty to Europe.’ I think it is actually the other way around: If it were not for Europe, there is no particular reason to believe that any of these places would be sovereign. And the reason why a historian suspects that, is, a historian looks back at the history of Eastern Europe and says, ‚The sovereign nation-state existed briefly and collapsed,’ or looks at the history of Western Europe and says, ‚The sovereign nation-state never actually existed.’ The European Union, in both cases, is a kind of rescue mission for sovereignty.

So, the way that Europeans are vulnerable to shifts in time, vulnerable to illusions about history, is that they have a politics of inevitability which says, ‚We have a nation-state, it was old, it was wise, it made good decisions.’ If you think that is true, if you think you have a nation-state, if you think the nation-states has been around for a long time, if you think the nation-state makes decisions, then you misunderstand what the European Union is about and you can think, ‚Well, since we decided to go in, all we have to do now is decide again whether we are going to go out.’

13:10 Britain has (always) been an empire, never a nation-state

The problem with that is that then the whole discussion of whether to be inside the European Union, whether this is not about Brexit, or about any other member of the European Union, the whole discussion gets warped. In Brexit nobody - and I mean literally, nobody, there are more than 70 million British subjects, or more than 80 million now, I think - not a single one of them said, ‚Hey, wait, we have never actually been a nation-state.’ I think it is fair to say that nobody said that, and that seems to me a critical point in the debate. The debate was about‚ ’Should we be inside Europe, or should we be a nation-state outside Europe?’, but nobody pointed out that Britain had never been a nation-state. The whole discussion was‚ ’Well, if we leave Britain, then we can return to some warm familiar sense of being Great Britain’, that is nice, that is comfy, that is appealing. But it is totally mystical, it is not actually based on any historical experience. Great Britain has never been a nice, comfortable, intimate nation-state, it has never happened. Great Britain was a world power, it was the greatest power in the world, it was a maritime empire, it won the Second World War - all true. But as an empire, not as a nation-state. It has never been a nation state. As it lost its imperial possessions, it integrated into the European Union.

So Brexit - and I am just using Brexit as the most important example- is not some kind of loop back into a comforting past. There is no such thing as a loop back to a comforting past, as nice as the idea is. It is instead a step into the abyss, because nobody knows what a British nation-state would look like, there is just no history of a British nation-state. And therefore, there is, in my view, no presumption at all that after Brexit, a British nation-state would exist. Why should we think that it would, when it never has? Is it not more likely that, after leaving the European Union, further changes involving Ireland, or involving Scotland, or even involving Wales, would then ensue, leaving us with a whole bunch of different nation-states? And why would we expect that Britain would be more sovereign outside the European Union than within the European Union? If the historical function of the European Union has actually been to guarantee – and, in my view, to magnify - sovereignty, it is, I think, lazy mentally, to just assume that as soon as we get out of a relationship, we are going to be stronger. It seems much more likely that after Britain leaves the European Union, it will A: cease to be Britain and B: the England that is left over will be much less strong vis-à-vis the United States, vis-à-vis China, vis-à-vis Russia, and, by the way, vis-à-vis the European Union. Because you are much stronger vis-à-vis Europe inside the European Union than you are outside the European Union.

So, I give Brexit as an example of a general problem: all throughout Europe, whether it is France with the ‘Front National,’ or whether it is Germany with the ‚Alternative für Deutschland’, or whether it is the governing parties of Poland and Hungary - we have this idea that somewhere back in the past 1930s and 1940s, usually, we were a nation-state and perhaps we should go back in that direction. This is a temptation, and, in my view, it is a dangerous temptation. And as I have talked about in chapter three of ‚The Road to Unfreedom’ or as I have talked about elsewhere, the one country that truly understands all this is Russia. And so the way that Russia plays Europe is by appealing to this subjective sense that ‚Yes, there was this comforting past, perhaps you should go back to this past as a nation-state,’ which is why Russia supported Brexit with bots and otherwise. It is why Russia supports the ‘Alternative of a Deutschland’ in Germany with bots. It is why Russia loans money to the ‘Front National’ in France, and it is why Russia supports, by way of the internet and other means, the forces in Central Europe which are pushing against the European Union. Because the Russians understand just what I am talking about, they know that the European Union does not have a history of nation-states, they know that it has a history of empires, they know that this is all a trap, and they are pushing Europe back towards what I call the ‚Politics of Eternity.’ They are just taking a ball which is already spinning, and spinning it just a tiny bit more.

As with the United States, what they do is they see a subjective or a psychological weakness inside Europe which is already there for its own reasons, and they just nudge it in a particular direction.

17:43 History as a form of political security

So what does this mean for Europeans or what follows from this? Can I do something besides just criticize? I will briefly, and then I will be done.

The first thing it means for Europeans - and this is very simple, and I have been saying this for 25 years: It would be really good to have a European history. For all kinds of reasons: for Europeans to recognize one another, for European leaders, when there is a moment of crisis, not to fall back on appalling national stereotypes which is what happens all the time. But, finally, as a kind of form of political security. If you do not have history, something else rushes in to fill the gap, something else will, some myth of progress, a myth of doom. So, history is a kind of political self-defense. So why not have a common history, why not just have European high school students read a book which is a good book, why not have them read Tony Judt’s ‚Postwar’, for example, why not pick out a text which is good and critical and have all high school students read it their second year in high school? Why not?

The second thing which the European Union has to do is that it has to have some idea of the future. This may seem paradoxical since I have been talking about history the whole time, but since there is Europe’s ‚Politics of Inevitability’ - this notion that ‚everything is always going to be fine, because the nation is wise’ – and because that is not true, because the ‚Politics of Inevitability’ is never true, you cannot count on it, right? It will eventually break, people eventually become dissatisfied, their faith in the future will eventually dissipate – that is happening now.

You have to have some vision of the future which appeals especially to the younger generation. You can not just say ‚Europe is going to go on, you know because we were a wise nation and we learned from the Second World War’, because, A: the young generation doesn’t care, and, B: that was never true in the first place anyway. So you have to have some idea of how Europe is going to be appealing, and you have to have some measures - like exchange programs, whatever it might be - whereby young people associate their current lives and their future lives, their families, the children they are going to have, the jobs they are going to have with Europe. Not some grand story, necessarily, but measures which help people between 15 and 30 think of their lives in European terms.

Of course, it’s encouraging that some European leaders like Macron, for example, seem to be thinking in those terms.

Okay, so thanks for your patience. What I have been trying to do here is explain how this general shift from inevitability to eternity is, indeed, general, it’s not just about America, it’s not just about Russia, it’s also about Europe; and also try to explain how Europe is threatened and what Europeans might be able to do to rescue the good things which integration and the nation-state have brought them. Because those two things go together. Thanks a lot.

Downloadfile:

TSnyder_The_European_Union.ogg

An Insight, an Idea

Alkibiades — Sun, 28 Jan 2018 10:16:11 +0000

Speaker(s) Joi Ito Speaker(s) David Kirkpatrick

Language spoken English

Date of Recording Fri, 2017-01-20

Player-image:

Joi Ito, the director of the MIT media lab, attended the 2017 World Economic Forum in Davos (Switzerland). In this interview, he elaborates on what he calls the “power of pull,” that is, the possibilities that arise from using technology to bring together people and ideas quickly and efficiently while outmaneuvering the constraints that come with hierarchies and authorities.

Drawing on comparisons with the history of the early internet and its effects on communication, Ito argues that Bitcoin - and, to a certain degree, cryptocurriencies in general - will continue to empower individuals by reducing society’s need for centralized services and governance.

Additional information

Video source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_O4x6xdDZY

Joi Ito’s book Whiplash: How to Survive our Faster Future was co-authored by Jeff Howe and is available at https://whiplashbook.com/ along with a few other talks.

License:

Published under Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed)

00:03 Introduction

David Kirkpatrick: Ok, well, thank you everyone for being here, I’m David Kirkpatrick, I have a company called Techonomy that curates conversations like this one as much as possible. I think we’re really going to have a great conversation here and I really am a believer in and a curator of conversations about technology transforming everything, because I really think it is happening, more than most leaders realize.

And I’m very pleased to be here with Joi Ito, who probably, as much as anyone, is making that case on a methodical basis globally right now. He is really an extraordinary person in terms of his influence thus far and his activities in the tech realm over decades. So, he started as an entrepreneur in Japan, and let me just… This is very incomplete, but I’m going to tell you some of the things he has done.

He helped start the first internet service provider in Japan, which is called PSI net Japan, he started… co-started Infoseek Japan, which was the first search engine in Japan, then he was very involved in a company called Six Apart in the US, which was a big, big key blogging software company in the earlier phases of the internet, and one of the first companies, probably, of any type that kind of made any type of institutional product commitment to giving individuals a voice on the global internet. So that was actually kind of a breakthrough company, he was very associated with that.

Then, as an investor, he has invested in Flickr, Twitter, Kickstarter, and a number of other very important companies. And then, on top of all that, he has become head of the Media Lab at MIT, which, I’m sure most of you know, is one of the great sources of innovative thinking in the world today. And it was especially noteworthy when he got that job of running a major research institution at one of the world’s leading academic centers, because he does not even have an undergraduate college degree, is that correct? Not to mention, he does not have a graduate degree, he does not even have an undergraduate degree.

So, anyway, he also has a new book out that he has co-written called Whiplash, which I’m just going to read a few thoughts out of it before I go and start asking him things. And some of these will result in questions later, possibly. But when I was reading it on audible, I was just scribbling away at some of the things that jump out and in the first few chapters of the book there’s a few phrases that are really memorable.

One is that he says, “Moore’s law plus the internet equals an explosive force in society.” Not a shocking idea, but well said. Then he talks a lot about this idea of emergence and pull as a guiding tool for how we are to advance society, and I’m going to ask about it. In fact, I’m going to write down the word “pull” so that you can find what that means. But a phrase that goes along with that is, “Emergence over authority.” He is not a believer in authority. He thinks people without college degrees should be able to run academic institutions.

And then the other stuff that is really fun that we will get into is he talks about the will, that admitting what we don’t know is one of the great assets of success in the modern economy and that a key function we have to learn is the willingness to be foolish and to look foolish, because otherwise we are never going to advance. So, Joi,…

Joichi Ito: Thank you, David.

DK: Thank you for giving me so much great stuff to say to introduce you. So, when you talk about pull, which is one of the key things you are interested in now and that the book really, I think, very emphatically and repeatedly tries to explain as a critical function of modern society, what do you mean and why is it so important?

03:35 Emergence and the power of pull in a networked society

JI: So, first, I want to credit John Hagel, John Seely Brown who had this great book called Power Pull, and that is where I got my inspiration. But the idea is to pull things as you need them rather then stocking and holding them. Actually, you can trace it back to the early Japanese manufacturing with its just-in-time inventory instead of stocking a bunch of stuff that you may run out of need. What you do is you get all the suppliers to give you the stuff just in time. But what happens on the internet and more and more in information systems is that the network allows you to pull ideas, pull resources as you need them.

And the problem is that if you learn a computer programming language that you don’t use for ten years, it’s likely to not be that programming language in ten years. There is innovation that happens on the edges where the company touches the consumer or where the media touches the user. And instead of having a central R&D that focuses on something for ten years and then sort of pushes it out to the edges, what you do is you pull the innovation from the edges, whether you are talking about Google’s 20 % time or you…

And it’s not a new idea. 3M’s famous masking tape story about a field engineer figuring it out and then having that save the company through the depression is also an example of the power of pull. So the power of pull is less command and control, and a lot more sort of pulling things from the edges.

DK: But another key component that is absolutely central to the idea that pull works is, and you are such a deep believer in this, that individuals have more power, more capability, more authority in the world we live in, and that is somewhat the structure of modern society, which you have been an apostle of for a long time. So let’s talk about that part.

JI: Yes, and I think this ties to the idea of emergence. The example that I often give is that after the earthquake in Japan, my family was in Japan near where the radioactive fallout was going, and there were a lot of people on the internet trying to figure out how to measure the radiation, how to talk about the radiation. And what we did was we found each other on the internet, on mailing lists, on web, and so we got the people mapping the stuff, we got the people making the Geiger counters, we got the volunteers in Japan, and very quickly…

Ray Ozzie just happened to be just retired from Microsoft and so he had a bunch of time and he wanted to work on it. So there were resources of famous people who have time, you have kids who know how to make the tubes for Geiger counters, and then, within months, we had a group with Geiger counters we designed in cars driving around Japan. And we have got over five million records now.

But at the same time, all of these government systems and these NGOs were prepared and all ready to go, none of them were successful in deploying these sorts of measurements. And we were just able to sort of pull a ragtag team together. But now what has happened is this group has become one of the best citizen science groups, it is called Safecast. And all the scientists that were sort of shaking their fingers that it was kind of like Wikipedia… well if you are so concerned about our data, come help us! And so it turned into a global movement, and what’s neat is that it’s not, like, one person. That is one of the keys, it is individuals, it is an emergent system where when anybody wanted to work on it, we just sort of co-opted them together. And what is key is that we use the latest technology for everything, whether it is microcontrollers that we use, or wireless systems that we used for mesh networking. We use the latest technology, and we bring on people as we need them.

And the problem is, if you create a bureaucracy, and you are all planned, you will be into the third generation, you will be using old hardware, and people will be tired, you won’t have passion. And the neat thing is, we did not know anything about radiation or hardware after the earthquake. But we were able to ramp that up within months.

DK: And the bottom line is you built a system that was better at monitoring and identifying where the radiation risk existed than what the Japanese government was able to do using its traditional top-down methodology.

JI: That’s right.

07:36 Early experiences with internet precursors

DK: Let me ask you a related question then. Would you say that in some way your whole career has been devoted to sort of empowering the individual and perceiving the power transformation that the world… and accelerating the power transformation that the world is undergoing since the internet came along?

JI: Yes, I think so. And I think part of it is that I was just an odd… I think every kid learns in a different way. I learned in a peculiar way. I really did not like to study things that I was not interested in, but if I was interested in something I just learned. And when I was in high school in Japan, I was at the American school, we had just started getting network connectivity. This was sort of before the internet, this is X 25, and I found video games, I found communities, I found all kind of things on the network that were much more interesting than the classes I was taking.

I learned that I could get on to the MIT computer, even from high school, and say, “I’m a little Japanese kid and I just read your book, will you answer me?” Then, in 1983 and 84, if your professor got a letter, an email, from some high school kid in Japan, they would spend a long time writing you a very thorough response. Then I would go to my physics teacher and I would say, “Well, I just got an email from the physics professor at Berkeley,” and they said, “You’re wrong.” I was not a very popular kid, but I realized early on that this was an amazing tool, and then, quickly, I got into the community.

Back then, in the early days, Howard Rheingold wrote a great book called Virtual Communities. Even before the internet, there were these bulletin boards, and I started hanging out with professors and students all over the world. And that became my fascination. And then I realized, not only can you hang out in communities, these communities can generate things, like Wikipedia, or communities of creative learning.

So, my whole life has been on sort of understanding how communities develop, and how communities are self-managed, how culture affects them and what communities can do. And so, communities, again, at scale, are societies, and in small sizes, they are really teams.

09:34 Different layers and communities behind the internet

DK: Well, I don’t know how much this ties to what you just said and if you can connect them, I might be especially interested, but talk to this point I made introducing you on how it is impossible to know what is really going on and because of that, we have to be willing to look foolish as we explore it.

JI: So, first of all, the world is messy, and I think our brains try to make it feel like it’s not. And if you talk to neuroscientists, a lot of what we think of as consciousness is a way for our brain to give us a self-deception that we meant to do that, that it all sort of makes sense, but it is often a deception that we do afterwards. So that is one thing. And so, let’s take an example off the internet.

So, I worked on building many of the layers of the internet with other people, and we worked on ICAN. Linux, which is the core of most of the servers we use, is kind of a slightly ragtag team of open source and free software people who sort of make that. The domain name system, where you sort of… When you type in a URL and it gives you the number, the servers tell you what number is connected to what name. They are run by a bunch of volunteers. I mean, when I was on the ICAN board, somebody attacked the root servers, which is really the address book. And only one survived. This was the F root server, run by this guy named Paul Vixie…

DK: Ok, just quickly, ICAN is the body that governs the internet naming system, he used to be very involved in that. Root servers are the point where all of the traffic of the internet passes through…

JI: So, let’s think about it as a switchboard for the internet. It was attacked, and there is a whole bunch of redundancy, but the one that survived was run by a little non-profit in California run by this somewhat curmudgeonly guy Paul Vixie. And so, the government goes – I hope I am allowed to tell the story, because I was not before, but I think it has been a while ago. They said, “We are afraid that some non-profit is running the only one that survived. You have got to let us sort of figure out how to duplicate that. And he said, “You would never be able to figure out how to duplicate that.”

On every layer of the internet, there is some group of people who, if you met, you would think we are kind of weird, running critical infrastructure.

DK: People like Howard Rheingold who deliberately wears every item of clothing that doesn’t match, right?

JI: Yeah, and a lot of people are not doing it for the money, they are doing it for the passion, because they love the internet. And so a lot of what we depend on them… When you open up a web page for a bank, and you see this really shiny thing, like a picture of a vault. But, in fact, every layer of the internet is a community of people who are doing it because they love it. And, obviously, there are commercial layers in between. But so much of what we already think of as a very structured and critical path depends on a lot of people who are not doing it because they are afraid of authority, they are doing it because they want to. And that could be scary, if you really thought about it.

DK: But you also anticipate that more of that is inevitable.

JI: Yes, and I think that is one of the points I am trying to make in the book, that a lot of what we think of as rock solid is not, but it works. And it actually works better than if you tried to make them rock solid, that was sort of my resilience and strength. You sort of have to assume failure. The internet is designed… by design is a system that, when it fails, it recovers very quickly, which is a much better way to design a system than assuming they won’t fail.

12:46 On authority and group culture

DK: When you look at the systems of authority in the world which are certainly very evident here at Davos, you know, the leaders of the world tend to converge here, do you think they tend to think they know what is going on more than they actually do?

JI: Yes. There is a famous joke where they say, you know, everybody bullshits their boss by 10%. And then you go up, and up, and up, and by the time you get to the CEO it is mostly…

DK: That’s a great formula.

JI: But the more authority you have, the more opaque things are because people tend to not tell you the truth, right? As a director of the Media Lab, what I focus on – because I used to work in a night club, and this is where I learned. I was a DJ in a night club, and I learned that I can get people on the dance floor, off the dance floor, in the club, out of the club, by the music I play.

So I use that metaphor when I work at the Media Lab. I am trying to… all I have is the ability to tweak the culture. Sort of changing the music. Do we du Friday lunches, do we move the furniture around? And by tweaking the culture, you can get people to start to feel like they have permission to do things. And part of it is, this is also a night club thing, certain people you don’t let in, certain people you kick out, that is also pretty important. But the key is, how do you get the culture buzzing?

And one of the key things is the permission to question authority and think for yourself. So I often use the term “disobedience or bust.” Our faculty meeting, I think, is a faculty meeting where we can have vigorous disagreements. We have polar opposite beliefs. But somehow, we cherish the other. And so, when we did a faculty search, we had…

That’s one other thing: Nicholas Negroponte, the founder, was running it, and to be a professor you had to have two fields that were orthogonal that you were interested in. You could not do… If you could do your work anywhere else, in any other institution, don’t apply. And you had to be sort of different from anything we had. And we were looking at one of the candidates, “Oh, this person is awesome, it’s really neat how they…” And then Nicholas said, “That’s not other. That’s another.” And we said, “No way, right.”

So the idea is that most institutions are afraid of the other, but at the Media Lab, we embrace the other, and then we allow it. And this requires a pretty confident culture to be able to allow people to feel that they can express their disobedience and their questioning of authority. And that has to be built into the DNA. And I think good night clubs and punk rock is like that. So there are certain cultures that have it. Punk rock is really important.

15:18 The working mechanisms of blockchain technology

DK: I love punk rock. But I want to go to a specific – one of several specific technologies I hope we can explore in this conversation, and that is blockchain. And the reason is that in your book - and it is related to the points you have just been making, and again, I would like you to connect this thought - you say with your co-author that blockchain is likely to restructure the relationship between individuals and society, more or less, or individuals and governance, broadly.

Why is that likely, and what is blockchain, and why is it likely to do that, and how is it going to fit into this world you are describing?

JI: So, I am an internet guy, so maybe this metaphor works for me better than for others, but I think the best way to think about it is: It is like the internet. So, with the internet, you had email, which was a wonderful tool that crushed certain types of hierarchies, that allowed you to email the president, the company, or the president of a company or a country. And the email really pushed the dissemination of the internet protocol. And once the internet protocol had been disseminated, people started building the web, and eBay, and Amazon, and now Google and Facebook. But the killer app for getting the internet really out was, I think, email.

Similarly, Bitcoin is, I think, the killer app for pushing out the blockchain, and the blockchain is like the internet in that it is like the infrastructure that is built by Bitcoin, but it is also the thing that delivers Bitcoin.

DK: Maybe a little definition? Just explain in more detail what Bitcoin is, what blockchain is. I know, most people in here might have heard it, but it always bears more definition, because I always forget how to explain.

JI: Right, absolutely. So, the blockchain is – we call it a public ledger. So, it is like… If you imagine a sheet of paper, a ledger where you have lots of transactions. And what happens is that there are these things called miners. If you imagine that they are running a whole bunch of calculations and try to win a puzzle contest. And winning the puzzle contest has the side effect of cryptographically locking in that page of transactions so that it can’t be fiddled with, and it ties it to the previous page. And there are pages and pages of this ledger that are being created by these tons of servers that are all racing to try to win this contest. And occasionally, you win the contest and as a reward for winning the contest, you get some Bitcoin.

DK: But the history of the ledger cannot be altered.

JI: It cannot be altered, yes. And the biggest difference between the internet and blockchain is, the internet is just about sending information around and it is just a communication network. The blockchain is to try to create an immutable record of everything that happens that can never be changed. And right now, we do these sorts of things by having banks, and governments, and notaries, and trusted people handle these. Does this person own this title, how much money do you have in the bank, are you married to this person, and so on and so forth?

The blockchain is really interesting in that by using the calculations of these miners, it is able to generate a general public ledger without having to trust anyone. And in fact…

DK: But first, let me interrupt. The blockchain was invented along with Bitcoin as a methodology that was necessary for Bitcoin to operate?

JI: That’s right. So, Bitcoin is the currency that is used as a reward for creating this system, and then the reward itself, the Bitcoin, can be traded as currency. The neat thing: The ledger talks about who is transferring Bitcoin to who. So, the basic form is just a digital currency in a completely decentralized way which is generated by these miners so that other people can use it.

But the blockchain itself, just like the email network that was created using the internet, can now be used for other things. So, you can do changing of titles, the idea is that you could maybe put smart contracts on top of it.

DK: Record keeping of any kind?

JI: Record keeping of any kind, moving assets. And that is – the main problem with the internet is, I can send the same file to you, I can send it to Rebecca, and the whole point is that one person can send the same thing to millions of people and copy. The thing about the blockchain is that you cannot copy things. But the key thing is, on the internet it is hard to move assets around. This is why it was so difficult for copyright. And so, one of the applications now that people are thinking about for Bitcoin is keeping track of who’s copyright it is, who’s house it is, who’s car it is. This is very good for creating assets out of information.

19:40 How the blockchain might change society

JI: The same way that the internet has changed society – you have Aerospring, you have ISIS, you have good things, you have bad things. So, one of the things that I learned in the early days of the internet when we first met, I was pretty optimistic. I thought that the internet was designed in a way that would just democratize everything. And Rebecca is here, we did this thing called Global Voices, because if everyone could just talk, we would have peace. That turns out not to be true, right? It turns out bad things happen, good things happen.

So, now I am a little bit wiser at fifty years old and I feel that Bitcoin is really interesting because you don’t need central banks, although they might want to use it, too. But it takes the notion of fiat currency, of systems of exchange through the notary - all these things that required authority to sort of stamp the approval that this is the official ledger - and has decentralized that. So just in the same way that the internet has both created opportunities as well as destabilized authority, I think the blockchain will have a similar effect. It will have good things, but it will have bad things.

DK: But, to go to this point of restructuring the nature of the individual’s relationship to society, you are saying because it will allow individuals to authenticate all kinds of ownership, behavioral authentication of all kinds without the requirement of a government, it really allows for a certain kind of autonomy of the individual that has not been possible.

JI: So the super easy example would be: If you are a musician in – I’ll just use India because India is interested in this – and you make a song, you post it onto the internet, but what you do is you post it with some sort of tool that says, “If you want to pay me, here is my Bitcoin address.” And let’s say you download it on your browser and you use it in your YouTube song, you could say, “Oh, I want to pay that person.” So it could go from, if you are using, say, Brave, the Bitcoin wallet in your browser directly into the wallet of the woman who made the song and then she could go with her phone to the corner store and pay for her milk. And typically, you would have had governments and banks doing transfers, you would have had a music rights collection agency in between, but you can do all of this just in software, peer to peer.

So that is just on the money side, but you could do a similar thing for energy. So there is an idea one of our guys at the Media Lab, Michael Casey, has been working on, which is if you had a solar panel, and you pay Bitcoin to get energy from the battery of the solar panel, and the solar panel has a digital contract, so if someone wanted to make a whole array of solar panels, they could sell the rights to the solar panels online and you could buy a solar panel that was there. And then anybody who bought energy from the solar panel – you would get money directly. And then you could buy and sell the rights to the solar panel on the market. So you can imagine a capital flow directly to India without a whole bunch of layers of finance and other people in between that could be sort of moved around. And you can do this with derivatives and all these other things.

22:36 When and how to regulate Bitcoin?

JI: Now, obviously, there are regulatory issues. What happens with scammers? So there is a whole governance layer that we have not figured out yet, but similarly to the internet, I think… So the US was very successful when [unintelligible] and others sort of let the internet go without too much regulation at the beginnings. So you were allowed a lot of interesting ideas to pop up. And after the ideas popped up and we sort of saw what the lay of the land was, then the regulators came in and said, “Well, let’s do this, let’s think about net neutrality.”

I think we need to be careful with Bitcoin, because it has more to do with money, and there are more regulators that are interested in it. And, also because it has to do with money, there are tons of people investing in this. So, one sort of word of warning that I have is that I think Bitcoin is still very early. It is kind of like before we figured out the internet protocol. It is a very mushy set of standards. It is like 1998 on the internet. But people are investing as if it is 1997. So, I think there is kind of a bubble in this sort of fin-tech space right now, and I am a little bit concerned that we are not ready for it.

23:39 What about other cryptocurrencies?

DK: I know that you have some strong opinions about the relative importance of some of these derivative technologies like – what’s the one that we were discussing earlier?

JI: Ethereum?

DK: Ethereum, right. Sorry for not remembering that. And there is a number of sort of blockchain-like systems that have been proposed as commercial alternatives, because for various reasons they are said to be better. And you don’t really see too much promise in that.

JI: Well, I see. So what is really important about the internet is it has got this thing called ethernet which is the wires, we have got TCP/IP which is the protocol. Each of these layers were communities of experts, and they were not necessarily the best technology, but they were the ones that people decided to choose. I think that there is no other sort of Bitcoin-like cryptocurrency that has had the attention and has the community size that Bitcoin has. So even though it is hard to deal with, and it is slow, I think Bitcoin is likely to become the default.

But they are not moving very quickly, so a lot of the features that Ethereum has is a great place to experiment. But the key point here is that I think there are big fin-tech companies getting created, just like Time-Warner and the telephone companies made Minitel and these sort of monolithic media systems. You will get some great ideas there, but what is happening on Bitcoin is, we are building the layers one by one, like we are on the internet. And some companies, like AOL, if you remember, or even Compuserve, they used other technologies. But they eventually moved over to the internet.

I think that most of the things will eventually move over to Bitcoin, and I think Ethereum might survive as a thing, but I think that the majority of the people who are really, really well-versed in this are working on the Bitcoin core.

DK: But it is clear that you believe that for this world where empowerment at the bottom is so critical and pull is a managerial methodology we need to use, that Bitcoin and blockchain both are absolutely essential technologies we are going to use moving forward.

JI: I think so. I mean, I think that when you talk to central bankers, when you talk to other people, the technical people are looking at it very carefully. I think you can think about it like the internet, but you can also think of Bitcoin kind of like the Linux kernel. And the Linux kernel is made by a bunch of free, open source software people, but it is used in so many different things. So if you think about Bitcoin becoming the engine that a central bank could use to issue its own fiat currency, I think that is definitely a possibility.

26:02 Complex systems and the fourth industrial revolution

DK: Okay. So, I want to try to pull a whole bunch of ideas together here. We have only got relatively few minutes left, sadly. But, you know, I was at a session which I was talking to you about last night, which was for a bunch of the journalists here, where we were talking about genetic modification, and brain manipulation, the development of AI, the use of quantum systems to try to replicate brain function. And one of the things that came out for me, and I think it has come out at a lot of the fourth industrial revolution sessions here at Davos is that idea that we are kind of gaining, in various domains, what might be said to be kind of quasi-godlike powers as humans to do things, to manipulate systems that we could never before manipulate. And yet, the bottom line message to me was, yeah, we don’t have a clue how to use them.

How worried are you about that, and what do you think we should do about that sort of a landscape, and do you agree that is the landscape?

JI: So, I think that is the key message from the book. If you are going to take away one thing, it is that the more you know, the more you know that we know less. I mean, the more you know, the more you know that we don’t really understand where we are going, whether you talk about micro-biome or the relationship between quantum and bio and stuff like that. So, you have to become extremely humble.

And the problem is, even though we know less and less in a sense – we know that we know less – our ability to destroy the world is increasing because our power is increasing. We are using the term participant-designer. You have to imagine that you are fiddling with something that is part of a number of different complex systems you have no control over. You have to be responsible as a scientist or a policy maker about what you do, but you can’t control it. It’s like with AI. It’s like giving birth to a child. You are responsible for the child, not legally maybe in all cases, but it is your child and you better take care of it. And if you are a scientist, you should worry about how it will affect the microbiome, how it affects the climate, not just on that specific place where you think you are responsible. You should be responsible for everything.

And then, the idea that you have an objective view, like a scientist that is looking at something – no, no. The phrase that we use is, “You are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic.” So imagine what it feels like to be designing something where you are also a participant, and it is about you as much as about anybody else, and really focus on yourself. Try to get the thing.

So, on the internet, we used to say, David Weinberger said, “It’s small pieces, loosely joined.” And when I invested in Twitter, lots of people said, “That’s not a company, that’s just a feature. It’s not even a product.” But the great thing about the internet was that all of the great companies figured out how to connect to each other, being agile and nimble, being responsible for their own thing, but also connecting to the system. I think it is systems thinking, it is humility, it is the idea that you are responsible for everything.

And this is totally the topic of Davos this year, which is “responsible and responsive.” That is the way scientists have to be, product designers have to be. But you also have to throw in a big dose of humility.

DK: Okay, but another word that is thrown around in regard to this stuff is governance, and it is often said that we don’t have much if any. How do you think about that, how we move towards this idle governance of these really fast-moving technologies and social changes that result from them?

JI: Governance is an unfortunate word, because it invokes government, and governments are not very functional ways to deal with the complexity that we have today. I think there is a governance, but governance in the way that nature governs complex systems through feedback loops. And the self-adaptive in “Self-adaptive complex systems” is really important. When nature takes a hit, it will take different resources in the biodiversity to try and patch that problem that it has, and it is adaptive, right?

So, what we want to do, and this ties to the word “resilience,” is that we want to create systems that self-heal rather than some central agency that says, “Oh, we better go send FEMA now, we better send a bunch of aid because there is Ebola.” What we want is, we want the local systems to be resilient. And that is a very different approach than having some authority be in charge of everything.

DK: Okay. Unfortunately, we are very close to being finished here. And I would say, both Joi and I really believe in dialogue, and we would have loved to take questions, but this format does not really allow for it. But, is there anything that you wanted to talk about when coming in here that we have not gotten to yet?

30:18 AI and empowering people via technological literacy

JI: Well, this whole conference has been – well, a lot of it has been about AI – and so I don’t want to overstate this, but just like thirty years ago, when we were talking about the internet, and everybody was like, “Oh, what does that have to do with me?”, I think AI is going to affect everything in sort of a similar way but in an even more amplified way than the internet did. And AI seems like a computer science problem, it is not. The computer scientists have to make it accessible to us, not as a solution – I don’t want you to sell me an AI system that solves my problem – I want the AI people to create tools, so that like Visicalc and spreadsheets allowed the accountants to become creative on the computer, AI computer science should allow all of us to take our expertise and express it directly using the tools and actually make our tools.

It’s about empowering people to understand AI, that literacy. Like if a CEO does not understand the internet, they don’t have an internet strategy. They can’t give it to the IT guys. It is the same thing with AI: You don’t just hire an AI guy.

DK: One of the things that a lot of your comments remind me of is another thing that has come up gratifyingly often this year at Davos, which is the idea that we don’t just need to teach people STEM, we also need to emphasize the liberal arts, because at all levels of society, and particularly those that are inventing it, and governing it, and leading it, a bigger picture view is required. And I love the way you articulate that, your book is a great way, a whiplash for people to follow this thought through further, but it was great to talk to you Joi and I just wish we would have more time, and thanks again.

JI: Thanks David.

Downloadfile:

An_Insight_An_Idea_Joichi_Ito.ogg

We are in jeopardy of losing our democracies

Alkibiades — Sun, 20 Sep 2015 01:09:40 +0000

Speaker(s) William Binney

Language spoken English

Date of Recording Sun, 2014-06-29

Player-image:

This is a special keynote the whistleblower and former NSA intelligence official Bill Binney gave in Munich in January 2014 on the occasion of the annual Handelsblatt-Tagung “Strategisches IT-Management”.

During his speech, he outlined the procedures he helped to develop to manage the enormous amount of data gathered via automated analysis of electronic communication, ways to analyze metadata to generate profiles of suspicious groups, and how to use this information to predict potential dangers.

In the second part of his presentation, Binney emphasized that NSA operations (as well as the use of their data by other agencies) are fundamentally unconstitutional, as the US constitution does not only prohibit intelligence agencies from gathering information on domestic matters, but also from using or dispersing it for other purposes, such as criminal investigations.

With reference to the technical specifics of the fiber optic network used by phone companies, he deduced that all officials who claimed that they did not intentionally collect data on US citizens were deliberately lying and obfuscating their operations, and that secrecy and dishonesty have thus become general characteristics of the US intelligence agencies and their allies in other countries.

Throughout his talk, Binney linked these practices to the inner workings of totalitarian states, such as the GDR, and to the totalitarian reign of English king George III which had directly preceded the Declaration of Independence. He expressed his worries that not only the US, but democracies all over the world are endangered by an erosion of their fundamental principles.

Additional information

video source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ERzOywUxqI

License:

Photo credit: CC by sa 2, Jacob Applebaum

00:10 Introduction

WB: It’s unfortunate I have to talk about that but since I started some of the programs that they’re using I feel kind of obligated to do this. Because I’ve opposed their use of these programs from the very beginning in October 2001. I mean they’re violating the civil rights of everybody in the world.

Moderator: So, please start.

WB: Ok. Well, allright, let me get the pointer and the… ah, here we are. Yes.

As I said, you know, I was developing these programs back in the 90’s. The problem we were facing there was that the be digital explosion was occurring starting in the late eighties and into the nineties and when the cold war ended, the wall fell, and we lost the opposition we always referred to - they couldn’t hold up their end so we didn’t have that balance in the world anymore. So they fell apart. So we had to find a new target to work. Well, the problem was:we had those targets there all along, nobody was working them, okay. That was the real problem. So, when you looked around at the communications the world all going digital, and we’re looking at mobile phones and the Internet exploding, and we couldn’t… They called that the “volume, velocity, and variety” problem in an essay. And we were falling behind. Actually, I was telling them that we couldn’t keep up with the rate at which we were falling behind. So, in other words, we were falling behind continuously worse year after year.

01:42 Foundation of the Signal Oriented Research Center [factcheck]

So we decided to – that is, Dr. Taggert and I – originally started this Signal Oriented Research Center to address these kinds of problems. It was a center, it was like a skunk works. We brought all the talents together in one place and we then would address a certain problem. I would come from operations, I had the requirements, and I knew exactly what needed to be done, what kind of information we needed to have to be able to produce intelligence that would give us indications about intentions and capabilities of potential enemies - like terrorists or international crime or things like that. And Dr. Taggert brought some of the engineering and computer science expertise, plus we had access to physicists and other mathematicians, of course; I brought in crypto-mathematicians as well as analysts, and linguists, and things like that. So we brought all those skills together in one place.

So when we had a problem, we would sit down and say: “So this is the problem we’re going to work and here’s your part of it, here’s your part. And what we were trying to do is get to that goal.” So everybody knew what the goal was, they knew their part in that effort. So it was all the technology people were all together and everybody understood what we were doing, where we were heading, what the objectives were. So then we would start to iteratively develop. Since we knew where we wanted to go, we didn’t have to lay out a plan, we just started the development almost immediately. And we let documentation come up later, because we were “rapid development, rapid prototyping”, that kind of thing. So, this iterative developed technique was the way we did it.

And so we started to attack the internet, and the first problem was acquisition of information. So we needed to have sessionizers that would sessionize at the rate of fiber optic lines. So 155 megabits per fiber line, and we had our objective to go to individual deployments to handle 64 or 10 Gigabit lines. That was our intent. But I had to set the objective as to what the overall capacity was that we were aiming at, and I set that at 20 terabytes a minute. So we had to be able to not collect the data, but be able to look into the twenty terabytes a minute, to see what was important in there, decide what that was, and pull it out for collection, and following analysis, and reporting of threats.

That was - we made it not a collection problem, but a selection problem. So it was a totally different perspective. Before, they had always considered it a collection issue. We’ll just collect it, you’ll end up getting what you need, and you can sort it out later. But we wanted to make that decision right up front, so that we could eliminate the transport of useless information, the storage of useless information, only focusing on what was important and relevant to the issues that we wanted to analyze and report on, or had National Safety requirements to do.

So, in that case, we ended up needing the kinds of information you see here for tracking Bob, which is: where, when he turns on his computer or or uses credit card or his phone, or he has a smart card that he used to go down a toll road to pay the tolls. So he’s making individual events that are getting electronic recognition and electronic recording. So all those things. Then, in your cell phone - if you have GPS on your cell phone we can track you as you move along. That’s the estimates that I heard - the most recent estimates that have been from the Snowden material - they’re collecting on the order of five billion cell phone GPS locations every day. So that’s on the mobile phone network around - I assume it’s around the world, and it’s on everybody, US citizens included.

05:28 Who uses the collected data?

By the way, this… I should start by saying: this bold collection started against US citizens first. And then it moved to foreigners. So you’re being treated just like a US citizen, okay? That’s the problem. I had a problem right from the beginning, I mean I didn’t only have a problem with the US citizen part because it was unconstitutional, it’s against our laws; we had our laws applied to US citizens, not the acquisition of intelligence about foreigners. But also I objected to the principle of collecting every foreign person, because they weren’t relevant to any national security requirements we had. And so I didn’t really realize the real true intent behind NSA’s bold acquisition until much later, when for example in 2011, in an interview with Bart Gilman, director Mueller of the FBI said he’d been using the Stellar Wind program - which is the domestic spying program - since 2001. That means the FBI - it’s for law enforcement - they were using this data.

And then, later on, in last year the DEA… Reuters gave a report on the DEA use of NSA information. They saw a Special Operations Division which looked into the NSA collection, and they used it to target for law enforcement. And the procedures - and I’ll get into them - simply violated our entire constitution and the entire judicial process, and they are subverting it around the world. So this is really very serious, and you really start objecting to this and doing really vigorously. I mean we have a real chance of losing our democracies around the world. This is a totalitarian process to the nth degree.

I mean even your Chancellor came out and said “This is just like the Stasi.” Well, it’s much better than the Stasi, okay, and your… There was a fellow Wolfgang Schmidt, who was a former Lt. Colonel in the East German Stasi, who commented - I think it was in June 2013, just after the Snowden material started coming out – that… He said about the NSA surveillance program that “for us, this would have been a dream come true”. Well, that’s telling you. I mean, these are totalitarian procedures, we’re going down this path. And now the police forces using - we’re heading towards that police state also. And it fits right in with the passing at the latest NDA. There’s all the stuff is going on; people in the United States are starting to object about this. I mean the congress almost succeeded in un-funding NSA, and I’m still supporting that, by the way. They need to be un-funded because they need to stop this. It’s not acceptable for a democracy, it is not compatible with democracy anywhere, so…

This is the kind of information they need to do this kind of tracking of individuals, also of groups. I mean they would look at the entire group of people who were involved in terrorism, or just your group or a few of the Tea Party. They have the tracking of the Tea Party, or they track even religious groups, or any group in the country, or in the world. It’s not just NSA. In copying and doing the United States it’s now the entire world. And I’ll show you how that works. But this is the key kind of information you need to get it.

08:50 Extracting information from telecommunication fiber lines

Now, in order to get that, they need to tap into the fiber optic line. So, I don’t know that any of you – ah, [pointing at someone in the audience] Deutsche Telekom, I looked at Deutsche Telekom… And I took AT&T Verizon, which I knew were cooperating with NSA, and British Telecom, which are probably cooperating with GCHQ, and of course later Deutsche Telekom in order just to show how they would attack the network. And it’s - the principle is to look at the fiber lines and how they converge to given points in the world, and then you want to put the collection devices at the points where multiple lines converge. Because then those devices can see multiple lines simultaneously.

And you could take, you know, most lines aren’t fully uploaded anyway. So you have the capacity to take mobile lines by one. One Neris [factcheck] device can maybe do to 10 Gigabit lines simultaneously. Until it gets over later, then you have to add another number to back it up. But that’s the idea. So that you can put them in those points where the convergence occurs, then you see many more, many more lines that way. So I looked at that and I went on the web and I pulled down all the fiber lines that people were advertising: the three-year AT&T Verizon bridge, also Deutsche Telekom and just looked at the cities were three or more fiber lines were converging. And then I said: “These are likely points for acquisition of data. Most of them were in the United States, about - for AT&T 2232, I think, were in the United States. Simply because eighty percent of the entire fiber network goes through the United States, by design, I might say.

That was no coincidence that the lines from South America go up to Miami then back down to South America. Because that gives them the opportunity to see what’s on those lines. Anyway, these are some of the converging points, and I was simply listing out the cities were multiple lines converge for AT&T in New York and also Verizon.net multiple lines, and British Telecom. That gives you the opportunity to put a forwarding position in New York for example and then have acquisitions, and taps if you will, knowledge at… either with or without the knowledge of these companies, and then take that data off and pass it back to a central point to forward back, using perhaps the unused fiber lines of the existing telecoms.

So, it’s a matter of how you get data back. It’s a way to organize and simplify data for them. So these were some the ones in the US, there are a few more here in the US. Then, of course, I just went to other locations around the world. And these are just highly likely places they would place these devices to collect the information. Now, I know that in a newspaper in the Netherlands they just published a number of locations of the fiber optic taps that they had for NSA along with a comment that said greater than 50,000 implants.

Now, that meant of course they were implanting software in different switches, and different servers to… and computers, to own them basically. So that the routers can be effectively used for orders of information: like if Chancellor Merkel went somewhere in the world, then her phone number could be a task on those routers, and if they were sought, wherever it was, her stuff could be routed back to the United States. That’s the way you can use these implants. So, but that’s over 50,000 of them. So, basically, NSA owns the net, ok? So, that’s the idea.

12:30 Organizing acquired data through the analysis of social networks

Now, once you acquire the data, you have to analyze it. Now, the principle we used is being able to look in the twenty terabytes minute is kind of a difficult thing. You have to organize it so efficiently so you don’t… If any part of that process starts to back up, it starts to fail, and it falls. So you have to make sure you do everything as rapidly as you can to keep up with the rated input, because this input is 24 hours/day.

So we had to do this with looking at metadata relationships. Now metadata relationships allow you to at least group social networks together with people, and also cooperative networks in that community, companies collaborating, or things like that will show up in the social networking. And so, what that means is if you have, for example, a set of targets that’s known, then you can look through this entire social networking up to probably the order of 4.5 billion people in the world using either telephones, or email, or some sort of network that you can acquire here. And you can look at that and see… we defined it as the area’s suspicious area, or the zone of suspicion is within two degrees of a known bad guy, or a…

Like, if these were terrorists you got two degrees [pointing at projection]: that’s like the first degree, and then that’s the second. But you don’t go beyond that to the other seven billion people in the world. That’s a targeted attack, and now you add other kinds of information to it, like, for example in terrorism: if you have a satellite phone coming out of the mountains in Afghanistan, or something out of the jungles in Columbia, a satellite phone, than you have a pretty good idea that that’s probably - in the one case a dope dealer, in the other case the terrorist. So, and that gives you a reason to target that, so you add those to the zone of suspicion, okay, in UT.

That’s what you work. But it’s a finite, focused effort. And now it’s a manageable set of data. I mean you have about 45 thousand handlers that would look at that, and you could do perhaps have a hundred thousand targets in any given day, so it’s a manageable problem now. That was the whole objective, because up to that point everybody was doing things like Google searches with words or phrases, and they would get tens of thousands of returns every day. All that data would go away the next day, they would get another group of tens of tousends groups coming in. So it was making their job almost impossible.

That’s why they missed all the terrorist attacks: the bomber in Boston, and the shooter in Fort Hood, the bomber in Times Square New York City, and the Underwear Bomber. Not that they didn’t have the data, they just - they were buried in other kinds of data that they were looking through. So it made them dysfunctional. So, one of the reasons I opposed collecting on everything and everybody in the world is because of this dysfunctionality, when you get buried with data. I mean, they don’t have smart approaches to sort it out. That’s why they continually fail. So… But the idea is to do this.

15:26 Unconstitutional data acquisition

Now, I’ll just take the public switched telephone network for case, a case in point. It’s all organized by zones, so that the world is divided into nine zones. After you dial 00 or 01, if you’re in the US, then the next number is the area of the world. Or it could be you’re going internationally, which is own country to country. So they could see a country code or an area code to the world, so… But, if you looked at that, and use that information, it boils it down into this kind of relationship. Yep. So you have 00, than one end is guaranteed to be foreign. It may be foreign to foreign, like country to country, or from one zone to another, but it’s still, at least one end is foreign.

If it’s the United States to foreign, it’s 01 or 011. If you have that case, you always know which one end is foreign also. So, just by the prefix numbers to get to the switches for international communications, you know that at least one end is foreign, or both ends are foreign. These numbers starting with these switch excesses here… If it goes to one, then you know it’s internal: US to the US. That, to me, separated the constitutionality issue out immediately, with the phone system anyway. For others, you do it by the ipv4, ipv6 numbers, or Mac numbers, or user ID and service provider combinations, or a combination of all of that. But those kinds of things separate these groups of things out, so the one end is foreign, or both ends are in the United States. And that’s the place where you want to delete all of this. We didn’t want to have any of that, because it’s against our Constitution.

This is acquired without a warrant. That’s why I objected to visa court, I think all the visa court should be fired. They have done a disservice to the United States, to the constitution, and everything, every law we ever had. They the gone back to issuing general warrants like they used to call them when King George was in charge. You know, George III, 240 years ago. We got a really totalitarian state back then, and the problem is: we don’t recognize in the United States what a totalitarian state is, or what it’s like.

You here have some experience personally, the people living here and experienced it: in East Germany. So, I mean, and I’ve been… you know I used these quotes from Chancellor Merkel or Wolfgang Schmidt. The cases in point where people have first-hand experience are saying what this is, and we should listen to that in the United States. We should listen. It’s the fact that we have no experience in it, for several hundred years anyway. So, except in the case of Nixon, and there was only involved a finite number of people. I mean, what Nixon did is finite. This is orders of magnitude more than that. I mean, even Nixon did a few thousand people, this is, like, everybody, 300 million, plus - just in the United States.

So, but, any rate, so this would be a way to separate it out. And then of course you use the two degrees of separation in the foreign, US to foreign, or foreign to foreign, and then that separates it all down. That’s an acceptable attack for every country in the world. I mean, there you are going after terrorists calling somebody in your country, or who those people in your country are calling. That’s the limit. That’s this zone of suspicion, you don’t go beyond that. That gives it a focus for your analysts in your… in the BND, or any of the other services, or GCHQ. It makes it manageable now.

19:02 Handling Big Data – problems and goals

And it gives privacy to everybody else. All that data that’s being passed around your password isn’t in the databases anymore. Whereas now, they took the total approach of saying: “Let’s collect everything and not delete anything”, and that’s what they’re doing, that’s why they have to build Bluffdale, that million-square-foot facility to store all this data. They’re getting all the data, they just don’t know what to do with it. Because again their analysts are buried, they are storing, and I hope that somebody under the… or requesting aid for the private industry. About a year and a half ago, it was the White House Big Data Initiative, where they were soliciting companies to come in with algorithms that would look through big data and figure out what was important in there for them to take out of that and give it to their analysts to analyze and report on.

I’ll show you some the objectives that they’re trying to do here, too. One is - going back to that graph - is trying to do new development, new target development, automatically - which we had achieved already. But they threw that away. But the other is to try to get profiles of transactional relationships in communities. That means their profile in the community and what is the community, and what it’s doing, to try to predict what they’re intending to do. Like, for example, if you have a dope ring that’s run out of Columbia and they’re trying to sell dope to somebody in United States, you have to have a transaction for a contact there to make the deal. Then you have to have the transaction for transfer of funds, they have other transactions that would evidence in that transactional profile or their community, which show movement of the dope to the transporters, and the transporters moving it to the customer in the United States. So you could see all those transactions. The point is: how many of those transactions show a profile that proves that that’s what they’re doing. And that’s the kind of automated analytic processing they want.

They want to look at transactional profiles, get profiles of interest to do automatic reporting, and then do intervention - this should be before the fact, so… this is what intelligence is supposed to do: prediction of intentions, of intentions and capabilities, not forensics. What they’re doing now is forensics. You know, they look at the Boston bombers, and they go back and see what they did, and they come back and say “Oh yeah, they did all this.” Well, that’s a police job. The intelligence job is to do prediction of intentions and capabilities, so that there’s an opportunity to intervene, to stop something, or to influence it in some way or another – diplomatically, or militarily, or something. That’s not the job, police forensics is not the job of intelligence but that’s what they’ve adopted. That’s because their main support is now for law enforcement. That’s real, and nobody’s talking about that. But they’re spreading it around the world. Now I’ll get into that.

So: so the idea is just to take one bad guy and look at the first contact, and only go out two degrees. Now, when you do this, and you input the attributes that the people that want to select out of the database, out of the dataflow - 20 terabytes, we are going to scale up after twenty – so, you only need the attributes of these two to get that entire group. If you start putting the attributes here at these, now you get the third degree down. So, then everything goes up exponentially in terms of numbers of targets you’re looking at. So you need again to try to keep it finite as best you can, so that only these two were the ones. So that gets to be a finite number of attributes you looking for in this flow of information which is going on. So now it’s a manageable thing to detect, a device can automatically do that for you.

22:50 Incompetence and misinformation at the NSA

So, then, as an example, to show you the idea - this is all done by code, by the way: if you had two people who… these two came into California. This is [pointing at projection] … these are the two, they came into the West Coast from Kuala Lumpur after they had a terrorist meeting over there. And the Malaysian intelligence reported that they were on their way. So, we also knew they were on the way, but they also made phone calls - these two made phone calls to Yemen, to the facility, the Al-Qaida facility in Yemen. And General Alexander got there and said we couldn’t tell the other end was in California. And I said “ay” [facepalms].

I said: “This is impossible, he must not have had his caller ID on.” I mean, the entire switched network works automatically. Either the switch notes the data and they can route the calls back and forth, or they don’t. And if you don’t have all that, then you can’t make the connection. So the switches have to know when they have to pass that data, and that data is there, and that’s how caller ID works. So, I mean, all the data was there. I mean if you are looking at Yemen and making the calls to the West Coast you would see the number being dialed. If you are looking at the West Coast, you see that number associated with the number that it was calling, which was the Yemen facility. So, I mean, you know it’s just impossible for me to concede that they would actually expect us to believe that. OK. But it’s a way of covering up their level of incompetence, that’s all.

So any rate, the ideas: this [pointing at projection] goes along, and you have rules in there. If you don’t know who someone is, you do things like, encrypt it, until you get multiple attributes that will show where… multiple characteristics that will show who are, in fact, targets. In this case here we knew: this the guy who financed everything out of Dubai, and so we didn’t have that. We couldn’t uncover him. All this, by the way, is on the web, and we pulled this off the web and built this profile to show what they should have been doing, which they killed by the way. This process could have worked for them.

And another thing: they said they didn’t have the Connected Dots program before him; that is absolutely false, they had a Connected Dots program since 2000. So they had it years before 9/11. They also killed it, that was the problem, and didn’t resurrect it until they wanted target everybody in the world, starting with everybody in the United States.

So, this this kind of thing just keeps going on. They will simply take it all, it can be email or phone, and as you see, once you identify people, you begin to target them. If it’s US-protected, you’ll see someone show up here, like in the United States. Than you do an encryption of the attributes, we can’t tell who it is, but we can still encrypt it, so you can follow the actions and what they’re doing, who they are associated with, and that just continues through the entire… This [pointing at the slide] was all we compiled about the 9/11 hijackers prior to 9/11, but you can see how that would work.

And I think that’s the last one [the last slide]. And then, finally, what you do is: every year, every…. See, the trillions of transactions will collapse down to billions, tens of billions of relationships. So you get a graph about that size for phone calls, and a similar graph for email, or computer communication.

But then you will want to do a timeline, you want to put things together in a time sequence by community. So here [points at slide] would be the phone numbers and emails of that community over this period of time, and you could see the relationships here, and say: “There is something going on here, what is that?” Then you can… If, for example, there is data with it, like a transcript of a phone call, or an email, or a file transfer, or something you can read, there’s data. So this tells you: there’s data with that transaction, in in this time line. So then you could click on that symbol for the data and read the data and try to get an idea what’s going on with the transactions there.

But their idea here is to try to automate the process of doing that, so that they can look at these relationships and the combinations of relationships along with the data and see if they can automatically discover and automatically predict what their intentions and capabilities will be, by what they’re doing in this timeline. That’s one of the things they want with the Big Data initiative. Which is all possible, by the way. In fact, you can even… We were planning to write reports with that, taking this data, doing a diagnostic of the content up there together with the combinations and the community, the people the community was that we knew about. But it was a terrorist and we had certain rules that we would look for, a combination we would look for in statements over here in the data that we would then use to infer directly what their intentions were, what their actions were, what they were planning - an attack or something. We would use that to do that, and you could automatically make that suggestion from just this kind of combination updated.

28:00 Abuse of collected intelligence information

Fortunately, I never got to finish that job for NSA because they could have used against everybody in the world. And it could have been against the Tea Party, for targeting for the IRS - the IRS is a part of the sixth Special Operations Division, the DEA, and the FBI and NSA. You’re looking at NSA data, so they’ve got all the scrapping. So… and they also could attack the user to attack religious groups, or the Occupy group, or any political group that they don’t agree with.

I mean, after all, it’s what they did with the emails that General Petraeus and General Alan… They went back to thousands of personal emails. Well, where do you think they got it? They got it from the NSA database, from the upstream collection on the fiber optic taps that they’ve got in all the wires. That’s how they are collecting all this data. That, plus the other side of the prism program is that they fill in the missing 20 percent that they didn’t get from the upstream collection. This gives them a fairly good idea on the entire collected…

But then, all of this data is now being used by law enforcement. I didn’t have any evidence of exactly how they were doing it until the Reuters report came out about it, the Drug Enforcement Agency, where they had this Special Operations Division setup that includes the FBI, CIA, DIA, NSA, the IRS, the DHS – a part of Homeland Security, basically the big intelligence agencies, and they’re going through all of his data.

And here are the rules for using this data: you can’t reveal it to investigative reporter files - you never document. Okay, and you don’t write any affidavits for the court, or you don’t tell attorneys in in the case you arrest… They’re using it to arrest people. So these are the rules: you don’t tell the attorneys and you don’t tell it anyone in the court, you don’t tell it to the judge or at any of the court proceedings, and you don’t add any documents for them. And don’t tell state or local officials, people going to do the arrest. And you don’t tell your foreign counterparts, and that means to all the foreign counterparts to the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the FBI are getting is information this way, but they’re not being told the source of it.

And what they’re doing is: they’re not telling the courts. In our side, that means to me: I call this a plant programmed perjury policy by the attorney, run by the Attorney General of the United States. In fact, we had a lawsuit that was challenging the constitutionality. That was called Amnesty International vs. Clapper. That just recently got thrown out at the Supreme Court. And it was thrown out based on the assurances of the Solicitor General of the United States to the Supreme Court that they would… that they were using NSA data to prosecute or take try anybody in the courts, that they would ensure that they were told that the source of their original arrest was the NSA data. That was a lie. They’ve never told anybody. Now the Solicitor General’s trying to figure out how to recover. He’s going to try to go back and see how many cases we used NSA data on.

31:14 Dishonesty and secrecy as a repeating pattern

So, I don’t have any firsthand knowledge, all I have is that Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee said that hundreds of people were arrested using this data every year. Well, this is a total violation of their constitutional rights in our - in my country. They have the right to challenge discovery. That means you have the right to know what the original evidence was to arrest them. So they’re violating their rights and their constitutional… actually it’s the Freedom of Association, that’s a violation of that because going by these associations are violating that right under the First Amendment, you’re violating the privacy rights under the Fourth Amendment and you’re violating the right not to testify against yourself under the Fifth Amendment, because they’re using that to acquire them.

One of the arresting officers in state and local law enforcement, one that did the actual arrest, said: “All we’re told is like, to go to this parking lot, wait here, wait for this truck to pull into that slot, and then go arrest them, and send the drug dogs in, and have them sniff out the drugs.” Well, they don’t do that from metadata, right? Metadata doesn’t tell you that. That comes from content, and again that’s from the upstream collection in the prism program, that’s where they’re getting all this content, including the hundreds of millions of messages sent from phone to phone by everybody in the world every day. So that’s…

The problem here for you is that we’re infecting your judicial system with the same process. You are not being told the original source here, so I don’t know how your courts operate, but at ours it would simply be unconstitutional as cases would be thrown out of court immediately.

So any rate and to take evidence into the court, they do what’s called a parallel construction, that is, they take… You think about how, how would you normally come around to get evidence to arrest them in the first place and substitute that evidence with the NSA evidence. So that’s where the perjury comes in: they’re lying about the evidence they used to arrest people and try them. Actually, the primary way they do it is: they get a plea bargain from the defendant, because they show him all the evidence, and they get him to plead. They don’t say that it came from NSA collection without a warrant, you know. Because that would kill the case.

So that’s the question of honesty and end up being honest, but that’s not new, right? We have a consistent pattern here. These people lie all the time. I mean if Clapper can lie to congress and Alexander can lie to them, they can lie to the public, and they can get the President to say things that aren’t true. I mean it’s the whole, the whole foundation at this process that is going on here, it’s a pack of lies. It’s all being managed by a secret court, in secret, with secret interpretations of laws that were written. Representative Sensenbrenner, who helped the right, the Patriot Act, said: “We wrote this Act so that you couldn’t do what you’re doing. We wouldn’t even know you were doing this if not for Snowden’s releases.” When they found out what they’re really doing, that came out of the documentations that Snowden took out of the NSA. He said: “We wrote this law, this was never intended.” That’s because they had a secret interpretation of the words in this law.

34:44 Are the USA becoming a totalitarian state?

Well, I mean it’s a secret and they’re making a court, the secret court is making decisions about what is constitutional and what isn’t. So that’s a secret court making… setting up a secret constitution. So here, this is what a totalitarian state does. They do everything in secret. Our entire country was formed on the principle that the people were supposed to know what the government was doing, not the reverse. I mean, that’s why we had the Bill of Rights. That’s why those freedoms are stated there. Because we came out of George III, and George III was violating all those principles that we held: privacy and all of that. And so we substituted George the W. for George III. And then from there, it went downhill.

Because it’s only getting worse. Now, they’re doing - under Obama – they’re doing more and more. So any rate, this is the most serious problem I’ve ever seen, the most serious challenge to democracies around the world. I mean even the Russians of course are envying this, I’m sure they would like to be able to do this. And we’re only in a position to be able to do it because we’ve got the resources to apply against it. I mean if you had similar resources, I’m sure that your governments may be in in jeopardy of doing the same thing. The problem is, I think, one of human nature: if you give that kind of power to people, eventually they use it, somehow. So it’s really a built-in human problem.

36:18 Finding ways to counteract

I mean that we have to find out ways and means of checking it. So we… for whoever whistleblowers from NSA constructed 21 suggested recommendations for the President to correct and make sure NSA is not going down the bad path anymore. I mean this is the result of the Vice-President Cheney saying “we’re gonna go to the dark side”. This was the dark side. This is what they were trying to cover, this was the hospital visit to Ashcroft at Brigham sign, saying this was legal to do. This is what this was all about that was all about a mystic spy. Which was primarily where our laws are coming in. But it’s about everything.

I mean, in my mind they’re making the entire intelligence network dysfunctional. That’s the problem I see. But if we don’t stand up and do something, we have a… we are in jeopardy of losing our democracies, all of us. And this is not… it’s not a pleasure to have to sit here and talk to you about this, but this I felt I was obligated to do. Thank you.

37:40 Discussion

Moderator: Thank you very much for this wonderful speech and presentation, and Mr. Koenen (?) wants to ask you two questions. So, go ahead.

Question: One short question: Would you call America a police state?

WB: Yes.

Question: It is a police state. Oh, okay. Second question, maybe of interest for all of you on the floor: Is there any protection for individuals, and as well for companies, beyond shut down any communication?

WB: Actually, there are ways to do it, but you have to… you can’t use publicly available encryption systems, because they’re all compromised. And you have to create your own encryption system, that’s not hard to do. Okay, that’s not really hard. And that will really drive them crazy, because now they will have to work to get the answers. Right now, they see all the users on the network, or across the network. If you have keys in their lingo penetrate your system, pull the keys down, you know. Your encryption is useless.

Or else, they have… Under, what is it, Bull Run program, they have all the people who work generating these publicly available encryption systems. They put weaknesses in them, so they can break them, and they know that weakness. So the problem with that is: everybody else can find these weaknesses, too. So, you know, that’s a problem too. So if I’m recommending, okay, I recommend this: Get your own computer programmer in your own spaces and it does become your intellectual property. You design your own encryption system, and use it within your network of your business.

If you want to secure it, you have to define what you want to secure first. And that becomes your intellectual property. Now you’ve created a problem, because it’s not shared, they don’t know the algorithm, and they don’t know necessarily who. They have to start working on it. That’s not an easy job. I know, because I’ve done that, okay. So - but once you do that, you have to also keep your encryption/decryption system separate an isolated as offline. You have to have an air gap. If you don’t have an air gap, they can be penetrated, okay? So, and the other thing is: you have to tempest it so that it doesn’t radiate, so that the radiation can’t be detected and also translated, you know, back into the data that’s in the computer. So, all of that, you have to that, then keep it isolated and… If you want to protect our intellectual capital and so we have to do it. And then you’re pretty much secure.

Downloadfile:

Keynote_Binney_2014_small.ogg

"Freedom Box": Internet free of government control?

Lindsy — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 06:11:08 +0000

Speaker(s) Eben Moglen Speaker(s) Peter Eckersley Speaker(s) Daniel Sieberg

Language spoken English

Date of Recording Sun, 2011-03-06

Player-image:

What if there were a network of computers all over the world that operated outside government or corporate control? As Daniel Sieberg reports, that is the premise for the so-called “freedom box”.

European Copyright Directive rejected by European Parliament

Alkibiades — Tue, 10 Jul 2018 12:43:29 +0000

Speaker(s) Catherine Stihler; Pavel Telička; Axel Voss

Language spoken English

Date of Recording Thu, 2018-07-05

Player-image:

On July 5, 2018, the European parliament voted on the EU committee’s proposal for a new European Copyright Bill. The video clip shows the last two speeches before votes were cast: one by German MEP Axel Voss, a member of the European People’s Party Group, in support of the EU committee’s position, and another by British MEP Catherine Stihler of the Socialists & Democrats group against.

The new law, particularly articles 11 and 13, had faced serious opposition by prominent internet personalities such as Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf, digital rights activists, and YouTube content creators alike. Had the law been passed, it would have likely resulted in an even more widespread implementation of automated content filters on platforms for user-generated content. At the same time, article 11 would have led to mandatory licensing fees for preview snippets of linked content. In the worst-case scenario, this would have led to smaller news platforms being forced to shut down for being unable to afford those fees.

In the end, votes against the proposed copyright bill prevailed by a very slight margin of only 40 of a total of 596 votes (and 31 abstentions).

An English translation of the German parts of the video is available at the bottom of the transcript.

For more information on the Copyright Directive and its potential impact, visit

https://saveyourinternet.eu/

Additional information

Video source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbn05GMDr_w

00:01 Introduction

Pavel Telička: We will now proceed with the next item on the agenda, which is on the decision by the jury committee to enter into negotiations on the basis of the report of Mr. Voss on copyright in the digital single market. Mr. Voss has asked for the floor, he has two minutes.

00:22 Statement by Axel Voss – Why the proposed bill is so favorable for artists and users

Axel Voss: Herr Vorsitzender, recht herzlichen Dank. Wir alle haben intensive Diskussionen hinter uns, aber um was geht es bei dieser Reform? Es geht um die Beendigung der Ausbeutung der europäischen Künstler, die im Internet stattfindet. Wir reden hier von den großen US-Plattformen wie Google und Facebook, die seit Jahren Riesengewinne einfahren und das auf Kosten der europäischen Kreativen. Das sollten wir nicht weiter hinnehmen, und mir ist völlig unerklärlich, wie man eigentlich diesem extremen Internetkapitalismus von einigen auch noch befördern kann, während die anderen „America first!“ rufen und unsere Daten missbrauchen und unsere künstlerischen Inhalte ausbeuten. Da sollten wir langsam mal anfangen auch an der Seite unserer europäischen Kreativen zu stehen, unsere Werte schützen, ansonsten droht hier eine kreative Insolvenz.

Es geht bei dieser Reform aber auch darum, existierendes Recht, nämlich Urheberrecht und das Grundrecht auf Eigentum hier in eine Balance zu bringen und nicht dem kulturellen Diebstahl hier weitestgehend die Türen zu öffnen. Was spricht denn dagegen, dass wir Urheberrechtsverstöße vermeiden wollen? Was spricht dagegen, dass wir eine faire Vergütung für Journalisten, Verlage und Künstler wollen? Und was spricht dagegen, dass große Plattformen mehr Verantwortung übernehmen müssen?

Die extreme Kampagne, der wir im Moment ausgesetzt sind, vor allem von Google, Facebook und Amazon, die hier ins Haus getragen werden, die sogar Kinder von Abgeordneten betreffen da sie angerufen werden, das alles beruht auf Lügen. Sie finden keinerlei Beeinträchtigungen für den Einzelnen der User. Jeder kann weiterhin seine Links setzen, jeder kann weiterhin mit Rechtssicherheit seine Uploads durchführen. Und zum ersten Mal haftet der Einzelne sogar…

Pavel Telička: Mr. Voss, please conclude. You have run out of your two minutes, please.

Axel Voss: …haftet der Einzelne sogar nicht mehr für Urheberrechtsverletzungen.

Pavel Telička: Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Voss.

02:44 Catherine Stihler on the need for more time to address public concerns

Pavel Telička: So, we will now proceed with Mrs. Stihler, who can speak for two minutes. [unintelligible]

Catherine Stihler: Thank you, Mr. President and colleagues. I want to thank everyone for the work they have done on this important file. We are all united in our shared mission to protect artists and cultural diversity in Europe. And I speak as rapporteur in the IMCO committee, which is the only committee to share joined competency on one of the most controversial articles, article thirteen. In our committee, we were able to reach a broad compromise which makes meaningful progress on the value gap, but at the same time safeguarding the rights of European internet users, SME’s and start-ups.
I deeply regret that the IMCO position has not been taken into account, and the jury text has not achieved the needed balance. There are real concerns about the effect of article thirteen on freedom of expression, raised by experts ranging from the UN special rapporteur David Kaye to the inventor of the world-wide-web Sir Tim Berners-Lee. And there are real concerns voiced by our citizens. Just yesterday, I received a petition signed by almost a million people, against the jury committee mandate. And although…

Pavel Telička: Colleagues, I would appreciate your patience. Mrs. Stihler has the right to speak in opposition for two minutes. Mrs. Stihler, please continue.

Catherine Stihler: …there is consensus about the goals behind this law, huge controversy still exists about the methods proposed. Something is not right here. We owe it to the experts, stakeholders, and citizens to give this directive the full debate necessary to achieve broad support.
Dear colleagues, I ask you to refuse to fast-track this law, to allow for a broad, fact-based debate in September. Please reject the mandate and vote against the jury proposal. Thank you, colleagues.

04:44 Voting begins

Pavel Telička:Thank you, Mrs. Stihler, we will now proceed with the vote. It is local vote. The vote is open.

04:53 Voting results

Pavel Telička: The vote is closed. And that has been rejected, which means that the…
The committee’s decision has been rejected, and therefore the committee may not start the negotiations. The committee’s report will be placed on the agenda of the following part session.

00:22 English translation of the statement by Axel Voss – Why the proposed bill is favorable for artists and users

Axel Voss: Thank you very much, Mr. President. All of us have intense discussions behind us, but what is this reform all about? It is about ending the exploitation of European artists that is taking place on the internet. We are talking about the big US platforms such as Google and Facebook, which have been making huge profits for years on the backs of European creatives. We should no longer stand for that, and I am completely baffled that one might even be able to support this extreme internet capitalism of a few, while others are yelling “America first!”, misusing our data, and exploiting our artistic content. We should slowly but surely start to stand side by side with our European creatives and protect our values, else we face creative bankruptcy.

This reform is also about finding a balance between existing right, that is, copyright, and the fundamental right to ownership instead of opening our doors to cultural theft. What is to be said against striving to avoid copyright infringement? What is to say against wanting fair remuneration for journalists, editors, and artists? And what is to say against more accountability for big platforms?
The extreme campaign we are seeing right now, especially from Google, Facebook, and Amazon, which is brought inside of this house and which also affects the children of delegates who receive phone calls, relies on lies. You will find no impairments for individual users. Everyone can continue to link to something, everyone can continue to upload content with legal security. And, for the first time, the individual is not liable for copyright infringement any more.

Downloadfile:

Copyright_bill_rejected_European_Parliament.ogg

The Chinese Room Argument revisited

Alkibiades — Mon, 23 Oct 2017 09:14:21 +0000

Speaker(s) John Searle

Language spoken English

Date of Recording Mon, 2015-11-23

Player-image:

In the midst of 2015’s debates on the risks and possibilities of artificial intelligence which were fueled by the progress of self-driving cars, autonomous robotics, and the signature of an open letter in favor of AI security, Google invited philosopher John Searle to elaborate once more on his Chinese Room Argument of 1980.

The Chinese Room Argument was designed to demonstrate the impossibility of creating true intelligence out of computer code by comparing it to a hotel room that contains detailed instructions on how to respond to sequences of Mandarin characters. While a person who follows these instructions impeccably could lead an observer to believe that a dialogue between two Chinese speakers is taking place, the user of these instructions would in fact not need to understand a single character. Therefore, Searle argued, the Turing Test is inadequate, as it does not take true understanding of the input into account, but rather judges only the quality of the output. At its core, the Chinese Room Argument defends the notion of intelligence as a unique property of biological entities, something machines can at best simulate but never replace.

For an in-depth discussion of the thought experiment and its reception over the last three decades, see e.g. the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Additional information

First published on December 4, 2015.

Video source:

https://talksat.withgoogle.com/talk/consciousness-in-artificial-intelligence

00:01 Introduction

John Bracaglia: My name is John Bracaglia. And I’m a Googler working in YouTube operations. I also lead a group called the Singularity Network, an internal organization focused on discussions and rationality in artificial intelligence. I’m pleased to be here today with Mr. John Searle.

As a brief introduction, John Searle is the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California-Berkeley. He is widely noted for his contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy. John has received the Jean Nicod Prize, the National Humanities Medal in the Mind and Brain prize for his work. Among his noble concepts is the Chinese room argument against strong artificial intelligence.

John Searle, everyone.

John Searle: Thank you Thank you. Many thanks. It’s great to be back at Google. It is a university outside of a university. And sometimes, I think, this is what a university ought really to look like. Anyway, it’s just terrific to be here.

And I’m going to talk about some— well, I’m going to talk about a whole lot of stuff. But, basically, I want to start with talking about the significance of technological advances. And America, especially, but everybody, really, is inclined to just celebrate the advances. If they got a self-driving car, who the hell cares about whether or not it’s conscious. But I’m going to say there are a lot of things that matter for certain purposes about the understanding of the technology. And that’s really what I’m going to talk about.

Now to begin with, I have to make a couple rather boring distinctions because you won’t really understand contemporary intellectual life if you don’t understand these distinctions.

01:49 Objectivity vs. subjectivity

In our culture, there’s a big deal about objectivity and subjectivity. We strive for an objective science. The problem is that these notions are systematically ambiguous in a way that produces intellectual catastrophes. They’re ambiguous between a sense, which is epistemic, where epistemic means having to do with knowledge— epistemic— and a sense, which is ontological, where ontological means having to do with existence. I hate using a lot of fancy polysyllabic words. And I’ll try to keep them to a minimum. But I need these two, epistemic and ontological.

Now the problem with objectivity and subjectivity is that they’re systematically ambiguous—I’ll just abbreviate subjectivity— between an epistemic sense and an ontological sense. Epistemically, the distinction is between types of knowledge claims.

If I say, Rembrandt died in 1606, well— no, he didn’t die then. He was born then. I’d say Rembrandt was born in 1606. That is to say, it’s a matter of objective fact. That’s epistemically objective.

But if I say Rembrandt is the greatest painter that ever lived, well, that’s a matter of opinion. That is epistemically subjective. So we have epistemic objectivity and subjectivity.
Underlying that is a distinction in modes of existence.

Lots of things exist regardless of what anybody thinks. Mountains, molecules, and tectonic plates have a mode of existence that is ontologically objective. But pains and pickles and itches, they only exist insofar as they are experienced by a subject. They are ontologically subjective.

So I want everybody to get that distinction because it’s very important because— well, for a lot of reasons, but one is lots of phenomena that are ontologically subjective admit of an account which is epistemically objective.

I first got interested in this kind of stuff. I thought, well, why don’t these brain guys solve the problem of consciousness. And I went over UCSF to their neurobiology gang and told them, why the hell don’t you guys figure out how the brain causes consciousness? What am I paying you to do?

And their reaction was, look, we’re doing science. Science is objective. And you, yourself, admit that consciousness is subjective. So there can’t be a science of consciousness. Now you’ll all recognize that’s a fallacy of ambiguity. Science is indeed epistemically objective because we strive for claims that can be established as true or false, independent of the attitudes of the makers and interpreters of the claim.

But epistemic objectivity of the theory does not preclude an epistemically objective account of a domain that’s ontologically subjective.

I promised you I wouldn’t use too many big words, but anyway there are a few. The point is this. You can have an epistemically objective science of consciousness, even though consciousness is ontologically subjective. Now that’s going to be important.

And there’s another distinction. Since not everybody can see this, I’m going to erase as I go along. There’s another distinction which is crucial. And that’s between phenomena that are observer-independent. And there I’m thinking of mountains and molecules and tectonic plates, how they exist regardless of what anybody thinks.

But the world is full of stuff that matters to us that is observer-relative. It only exists relative to observers and users. So, for example, the piece of paper in my wallet is money. But the fact that makes it money is not a fact of its chemistry. It’s a fact about the attitudes that we have toward it. So money is observer-relative. Money, property, government, marriage, universities, Google, cocktail parties, and summer vacations are all observer-relative. And that has to be distinguished from observer-independent.

And notice now, all observer-relative phenomenon are created by human consciousness. Hence, they contain an element of ontological subjectivity. But you already know that you can have, in some cases, an epistemically objective science of a domain that is observer-relative. That’s why you can have an objective science of economics even though the phenomena studied by economics is, in general, observer-relative, and hence contains an element of ontological subjectivity.

Economists tend to forget that. They tend to think that economics is kind of like physics, only it’s harder. When I studied economics, I was appalled. We learned that marginal cost equals marginal revenue in the same tone of voice that in physics we learned that force equals mass times acceleration. They’re totally different because the stuff in economics is all observer-relative and contains an element of ontological subjectivity. And when the subjectivity changes— ffft— the whole thing collapses. That was discovered in 2008. This is not a lecture about economics. I want you to keep all that in mind.

Now that’s important because a lot of the phenomena that are studied in cognitive science, particularly phenomena of intelligence, cognition, memory, thought, perception, and all the rest of it have two different senses. They have one sense, which is observer-independent, and another sense, which is observer-relative. And, consequently, we have to be very careful that we don’t confuse those senses because many of the crucial concepts in cognitive science have as their reference phenomena that are observer-relative and not observer-independent. I’m going to get to that.

OK, everybody up with us so far? I want everything to sound so obvious you think, why does this guy bore us with these platitudes? Why doesn’t he say something controversial?

08:50 The emergence of cognitive science

Now I’m going to go and talk about some intellectual history.

Many years ago, before any of you were born, a new discipline was born. It was called cognitive science. And it was founded by a whole bunch of us who got sick of behaviorism in psychology, effectively. That was the reason for it. And the Sloan Foundation used to fly us around to lecture, mostly to each other. But anyway, that’s all right.

We were called Sloan Rangers. And I was invited to lecture to the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Yale. And I thought, well, Christ, I don’t know anything about artificial intelligence. So I went out and bought a book written by the guys at Yale. And I remember thinking, $16.95 plus tax— money wasted. But it turned out I was wrong. They had in there a theory about how computers could understand.

And the idea was that you give the computer a story. And then you ask the computer questions about the story. And the computer would give the correct answer to the questions even though the answer was not contained in the story.

A typical story: A guy goes into a restaurant and orders a hamburger. When they brought him the hamburger, it was burned to a crisp. The guy stormed out of the restaurant and didn’t even pay his bill. Question, did the guy eat the hamburger?

Well, all of you computers know the answer to that. No, the guy didn’t eat the hamburger. And I won’t tell you the story where the answer is yes. It’s equally boring. Now, the point was this proves that the computer really understands the story.

So there I was on my way to New Haven on United Airlines at 30,000 feet. And I thought, well, hell, they could give me these stories in Chinese. And I could follow the computer program for answering stories. And I don’t understand a word of the story And I thought, well, that’s an objection they must have thought of. And besides that won’t keep me going for a whole week in New Haven.

Well, it turned out they hadn’t thought of it. And everybody was convinced I was wrong. But interestingly they all had different reasons for thinking I was wrong. And the argument has gone on longer than a week. It’s gone on for 35 years. I mean, how often do I have to refute these guys?

11:17 The Chinese Room Argument

But anyway, let’s go through it. The way the argument goes in its simplest version is I am locked in a room full of Chinese— well, they’re boxes full of Chinese symbols and a rule book in English for manipulating the symbols. Unknown to me, the boxes are called a database, and the rule book is called a program.

In coming in the room, I get Chinese symbols. Unknown to me, those are questions. I look up what I’m supposed to do. And after I shuffle a lot of symbols, I give back other symbols. And those are answers to the questions.

Now we will suppose— I hope your bored with this, because I am. I mean, I’ve told this story many times. We will suppose that they get so good at writing the program, I get so good at shuffling the symbols, that my answers are indistinguishable from a native Chinese speaker. I pass the Turing test for understanding Chinese. All the same, I don’t understand a word of Chinese. And there’s no way in the Chinese room that I could come to understand Chinese because all I am is a computer system. And the rules I operate are a computer program.

And— and this is the important point— the program is purely syntactical. It is defined entirely as a set of operations over syntactical elements. To put it slightly more technically, the notion some implemented program defines an equivalence class that is specified completely independently of any physics and, in particular, independent of the physics of its realization.

The bottom line is if I don’t understand the questions and the answers on the basis of implementing the program, then neither does any other digital computer on that basis because no computer has anything that I don’t have. Computers are purely syntactical devices. Their operations are defined syntactically.

And human intelligence requires more than syntax. It requires a semantics. It requires an understanding of what’s going on. You can see this if you contrast my behavior in English with my behavior in Chinese.

They ask me questions in English. And I give answers in English. They say, what’s the longest river in the United States? And I say, well, it’s the Mississippi, or the Mississippi-Missouri, depending on if you count that as one river.

They ask me in Chinese, what’s the longest river in China? I don’t know what the question is or what it means. All I got are Chinese symbols. But I look up what I’m supposed to do with that symbol, and I give back an answer, which is the right answer. It says, it’s the Yangtze. That’s the longest river in China. I don’t know any of that. I’m just a computer.

So the bottom line is that the implemented computer program by itself is never going to be sufficient for human understanding because human understanding has more than syntax. It has a semantics.

There are two fundamental principles that underlie the Chinese room argument. And both of them seem to me obviously true. You can state each in four words. Syntax is not semantics. And simulation is not duplication. You can simulate— you’re going to have plenty of time for questions.

How much time we got, by the way? I want to—

John Bracaglia: We’ll leave time for questions at the end.

John Searle: I want everybody that has a question to have a chance to ask the question.

Anyway, that’s the famous Chinese room argument. And it takes about five minutes to explain it. Now you’d be amazed at the responses I got. They were absolutely breathtaking in their preposterousness. Now let me give you some answers.

A favorite answer was this: You were there in a room. You had all those symbols. You had a box. You probably had scratch paper on which to work. Now, it wasn’t you that understood. You’re just a CPU, they would say with contempt, the Central Processing Unit. I didn’t know what any of these words meant in those days. But it’s the system that understands.

And when I first heard this, I mean, the room understands Chinese, I said to the guy. And he said, yes, the room understands Chinese.

Well, it’s a desperate answer. And I admire courage. But it’s got a problem. And that is the reason I don’t understand is I can’t get from the syntax to the semantics. But the room can’t either. How does the room get from the syntax of the computer program of the input symbols to the semantics of the understanding of the symbols? There’s no way the room can get there because that would require some consciousness in the room in addition to my consciousness. And there is no such consciousness. Anyway, that was one of many answers.

One of my favorites was this: This was in a public debate. A guy said to me, but suppose we ask you, do you understand Chinese? And suppose you say, yes, I understand Chinese. Well? Well, OK, let’s try that and see how far we get. I get a question that looks like this. Now, this will be in a dialect of Chinese some of you won’t recognize. Unknown to me, that symbol means, “Do you understand Chinese?” I look up what I’m supposed to do. And I give them back a symbol that’s in the same dialect of Chinese. And it looks like that. And that says, “Why do you guys ask me such dumb questions? Can’t you see that I understand Chinese?”

I could go on with the other responses and objections, but I think they’re all equally feeble. The bottom line is there’s a logical truth. And that is that the implemented computer program is defined syntactically. And that’s not a weakness. That’s the power. The power of the syntactical definition of computation is you can implement it on electronic machines that can perform literally millions of computations in a very small amount of time. I’m not sure I believe this, but it always says it in the textbooks, that Deep Blue can do 250 million computations in a second. OK, I take their word for it. So it’s not a weakness of computers.

18:09 Semantics and the definition of understanding

Now, another argument I sometimes got was, “Well, in programs, we often have a section called the semantics of natural understanding programs.” And that’s right. But, of course, what they do is they put in more computer implementation. They put in more syntax.

Now, so far, so good. And I think if that’s all there was to say, I’ve said all of that before. But now I want to go on to something much more interesting. And here goes with that.

Now how we doing? I’m not— everybody seems to understand… There’s going to be plenty of time for questions. I insist on a good question period.

So let me take a drink of water, and we go to the next step, which I think is more important.

A lot of people thought, well, look, maybe the computer doesn’t understand Chinese, but all the same, it does information processing. And it does, after all, do computation. That’s what we define the machine to do. And I had to review a couple of books recently. One book said that we live in a new age, the age of information. And in a wonderful outburst, the author said everything is information. Now that ought to worry us if everything is information.

And I read another book. This was an optimistic book. I reviewed— this for “The New York Review of Books”— a less optimistic book by a guy who said computers are now so smart they’re almost as smart as we are. And pretty soon, they’ll be just as smart as we are. And then I don’t have to tell this audience the next step. They’ll be much smarter than we are. And then look out because they might get sick of being oppressed by us. And they might simply rise up and overthrow us all. And this, the author said modestly— I guess this is how you sell books— he said this may be the greatest challenge that humanity has ever faced, the upcoming revolt of super-smart computers.

Now, I want to say both of these claims are silly. I mean, I’m speaking shorthand here. There’ll be plenty of chance to answer me. And I want to say briefly why.

The notion of intelligence has two different senses. It has an observer-independent sense where it identifies something that is psychologically real. So I am more intelligent than my dog Tarski. Now, Tarski’s pretty smart, I agree. But overall, I’m smarter than Tarski. I’ve had four dogs, by they way— Frege, Russell, Ludwig, and Tarski. And Tarski, he’s a Bernese mountain dog. I’m sorry I didn’t bring him along, but he’s too big for the car. Now, he’s very smart. But he does have intelligence in the same sense that I do. Only he happens to have somewhat less than I do.

Now, my computer is also intelligent. And it also processes information. But— and this is the key point— it’s observer-relative. The only sense in which the computer has intelligence is not in an intrinsic, but it’s in an observer-relative sense. We can interpret its operations in such a way that we can make— now, watch this terminology— we can make epistemically objective claims of intelligence even though the intelligence in question is entirely in the eye of the beholder.

This was brought home forcefully to me when I read in the newspapers that IBM had designed a computer program, which could beat the world’s leading chess player. And in the same sense in which Kasparov beat Karpov so we were told Deep Blue beat Kasparov. Now that ought to worry us because for Karpov and Kasparov to play chess, they both have to be conscious that they’re playing chess. They both have to know such things as “I opened with pawn to king four, and my queen is threatened on the left-hand side of the board.” But now notice, Deep Blue knows none of that because it doesn’t know anything.

You can make epistemically objective claims about Deep Blue. It made such and such a move. But the attributions of intelligent chess playing, this move or that move, it’s all observer-relative. None of it is intrinsic in the intrinsic sense in which I have more intelligence than my dog, my computer has zero intelligence—absolutely none at all. It’s a very complex electronic circuit that we have designed to behave as if it were thinking, as if it were intelligent.

But in the strict sense, in the observer-independent sense in which you and I have intelligence, there is zero intelligence in the computer. It’s all observer-relative. And what goes for intelligence goes for all of the key notions in cognitive science. The notions of intelligence, memory, perception, decision-making, rationality— all those have two different senses, a sense where they identify psychologically real phenomena of the sort that goes on in you and me and the sort where they identify observer-relative phenomena.

But in the intrinsic sense in which you and I have intelligence, the machinery we’re talking about has zero intelligence. It’s no question of its having more or less. It’s not in the same line of business. All of the intelligence is in the eye of the beholder. It’s all observer-relative.

24:24 Is it even relevant if a computer has consciousness?

Now, you might say— and I would say— so, for most purposes,
it makes no difference at all. I mean, if you can design a car that can drive itself, who cares if it’s conscious or not? Who cares if it literally has any intelligence?

And I agree. For most purposes, it doesn’t matter. For practical purposes, it doesn’t matter whether or not you have the observer-independent or the observer-relative sense. The only point where it matters, if you think there’s some psychological significance to the attribution of intelligence to machinery which has no intrinsic intelligence.

Now, notice the intelligence by which we— the mental processes by which we attribute intelligence to the computer require consciousness. So the attribution of observer-relativity is done by conscious agents. But the consciousness is not itself observer-relative. The consciousness that creates the observer-relative phenomena is not itself observer-relative.

But now let’s get to the crunch line then. If information is systematically ambiguous between an intrinsic sense, in which you and I have information, and an observer-relative sense, in which the computer has information, what about computation? After all, computation, that must surely be intrinsic to the computer. That’s what we designed and built the damn things to do, was computation. But, of course, the same distinction applies. And I want to take a drink of water and think about history for a moment.

When I first read Alan Turing’s article, it was called “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Now why didn’t he call it “Computers and Intelligence”? Well, you all know the answer. In those days, “computer” meant “person who computes.” A computer is like a runner or a piano player. It’s some human who does the operation. Nowadays nobody would think that because the word has changed its meaning. Or, rather, it’s acquired the systematic ambiguity between the observer-relative sense and the observer-independent sense.

Now we think that a computer names a type of machinery, not a human being who actually carries out computation. But the same distinction that we’ve been applying, the same distinction that we discovered in all these other cases, that applies to computation in the literal or observer-independent sense in which I will now do a simple computation. I will do a computation using the addition function.

And here’s how it goes. It’s not a very big deal. One plus one equals two.

Now, the sense in which I carried out a computation is absolutely intrinsic and observer-independent. I don’t care what anybody says about me. If the experts say, well, you weren’t really computing. No, I was. I consciously did a computation.

When my pocket calculator does the same operation, the operation is entirely observer-relative. Intrinsically all that goes on is a set of electronic state transitions that we have designed so that we can interpret computationally. And, again, to repeat, for most purposes, it doesn’t matter. When it matters is when people say, well, we’ve created this race of mechanical intelligences. And they might rise up and overthrow us. Or they attribute some other equally implausible psychological interpretation to the machinery.

In commercial computers, the computation is observer-relative. Now notice, you all know that doesn’t mean it’s epistemically subjective. And I pay a lot of money so that Apple will make a piece of machinery that will implement programs that my earlier computers were not intelligent enough to implement. Notice the observer-relative attribution of intelligence here. So it’s absolutely harmless unless you think there’s some psychological significance.

Now what is lacking, of course, in the machinery, which we have in human beings which makes the difference between the observer relativity of the computation in the commercial computer and the intrinsic or observer independent computation that I have just performed on the blackboard, what’s lacking is consciousness.

All observer-relative phenomena are created by human and animal consciousness. But the human and animal consciousness that creates them is not itself observer-relative. So there’s an intrinsic mental phenomena, the consciousness of the agent, which creates the observer-relative phenomena, or interprets the mechanical system in an observer relative fashion. But the consciousness that creates observer relativity is not itself observer-relative. It’s intrinsic.

30:00 The problem of using an obsolete vocabulary

Now, I wanted to save plenty of time for discussion. So let me catch my breath and then give a kind of summary of the main thrust of what I’ve been arguing. And one of the things I haven’t emphasized but I want to emphasize now, and that is most of the apparatus, the conceptual apparatus, we have for discussing these issues is totally obsolete. The difference between the mental and the physical, the difference between the social and the individual, and the distinction between those features which can be identified in an observer-relative fashion, such as computation, and those which can be identified in an observer-independent fashion, such as computation.

We’re confused by the vocabulary which doesn’t make the matters sufficiently clear. And I’m going to end this discussion by going through some of the elements of the vocabulary.

Now, let me have a drink of water and catch my breath. Let’s start with that old question, could a machine think?

Well, I said the vocabulary was obsolete. And the vocabulary of humans and machines is already obsolete because if by machine is meant a physical system capable of performing certain functions, then we’re all machines. I’m a machine. You’re a machine. And my guess is only machines could think. Why?

Well that’s the next step. Thinking is a biological process created in the brain by certain quite complex, but insufficiently understood neurobiological processes. So in order to think, you’ve got to have a brain, or you’ve got to have something with equivalent causal powers to the brain. We might figure out a way to do it in some other medium. We don’t know enough about how the brain does it. So we don’t know how to create it artificially. So could a machine think? Human beings are machines.

Yes, but could you make an artificial machine that could think? Why not? It’s like an artificial heart. The question, can you build an artificial brain that can think, is like the question, can you build an artificial heart that pumps blood. We know how the heart does it, so we know how to do it artificially. We don’t know how the brain does it, so we have no idea.

Let me repeat this. We have no idea how to create a thinking machine because we don’t know how the brain does it. All we can do is a simulation using some sort of formal system. But that’s not the real thing. You don’t create thinking that way, whereas the artificial heart really does pump blood.

So we had two questions. Could a machine think? And could an artificially-made machine think? Answer to question one is obviously yes. Answer to question two is, we don’t know yet, but there’s no obstacle in principle. Does everybody see that?

Building an artificial brain is like building an artificial heart. The only thing is no one has begun to try it. They haven’t begun to try it because they have no idea how the actual brain does it. So they don’t know how to imitate actual brains.

Well, OK, but could you build an artificial brain that could think out of some completely different materials, out of something that had nothing to do with nucleo-proteins, had nothing to do with neurons and neurotransmitters and all the rest of it? And the answer is, again, we don’t know. That seems to me an open question.

If we knew how the brain did it, we might be able to define— I mean, be able to design machines that could do it using some completely different biochemistry in a way that the artificial heart doesn’t use muscle tissue to pump blood. You don’t need muscle tissue to pump blood. And maybe you don’t need brain tissue to create consciousness. We just are ignorant. But notice there’s no obstacle in principle.

The problem is no one has begun to think about how you would build a thinking machine, how you’d build a thinking machine out of some material other than neurons because they haven’t begun to think about how we might duplicate and not merely simulate what the brain actually does. So the question is, could a machine think, could an artificial machine think, could an artificial machine made out of some completely different materials, could those machines think?

And now the next question is the obvious one. Well, how about a computer? Could a computer think?

Now, you have to be careful here. Because if a computer is defined as anything that can carry out computations, well, I just did. This is a computation. So I’m a computer. And so are all of you.

Any conscious agent capable of carrying out that simple computation is capable, is both a computer and capable of thinking. So my guess is— and I didn’t have a chance to develop this idea— is that not only can computers think— you and me— but my guess is that anything capable of thinking would have to be capable of carrying out simple computations.

But now what is the status of computation? Well, the key element here is the one I’ve already mentioned. Computation has two senses, an observer-independent sense and an observer-relative sense. In the observer-relative sense, anything is a computer if you can ascribe a computational interpretation.

Watch. I’ll show you a very simple computer. That computer just computed a well-known function. s equals one-half gt squared.

And if you had a good-enough watch, you could actually time and figure out how far the damn thing fell. Everybody sees. It’s elementary mathematics.

So if this is a computer, then anything is a computer because being a computer in the observer-relative sense is not an intrinsic feature of an object, but a feature of our interpretation of the physics of the phenomenon.

In the old Chinese room days, when I had to debate these guys, at one point, I’d take my pen, slam it on a table, and say that is a digital computer. It just happens to have a boring computer program. The program says: stay there.

The point is nobody ever called me on this because it’s obviously right. It satisfies a textbook definition.

You know, in the early days, they tried to snow me with a whole lot of technical razzmatazz. “You’ve left out the distinction between the virtual machine and the non-virtual machine” or “You’ve left out the transducers.” You see, I didn’t know what the hell a transducer was, a virtual machine. But it takes about five minutes to learn those things.

Anyway, so now we get to the crucial question in this. If computers can think, man-made computers can think, machines can think, what about computation? Does computation make a machine a thinking process? That is, is computation, as defined by Alan Turing, itself sufficient for thinking? And you now know the answer to that.

In the observer-relative sense, the answer is no. Computation is not a fact of nature. It’s a fact of our interpretation. And insofar as we can create artificial machines that carry out computations, the computation by itself is never going to be sufficient for thinking or any other cognitive process because the computation is defined purely formally or syntactically. Turing machines are not to be found in nature. They’re to be found in our interpretations of nature.

Now, let me add, a lot of people think, ah, this debate has something to do with technology, or there’ll be advances in technology. I think that technology is wonderful. And I welcome it. And I see no limits to the possibilities of technology. My aim is this talk is simply to get across, you shouldn’t misunderstand the philosophical, psychological, and, indeed, scientific implication of the technology.

38:41 Questions from the audience

John Bracaglia: Thank you, John.

John Searle: I’m sorry I talk so fast, but I want to leave plenty of time for questions.

John Bracaglia: We will start with one question from Mr. Ray Kurzweil.

Ray Kurzweil: Is this on?

Well, thanks, John. I’m one of those guys you’ve been debating this issue for 18 years, I think. And I would praise the Chinese room for its longevity because it does really get at the apparent absurdity that some deterministic process like computation could possibly be responsible for something like thinking.

And you point out the distinction of thinking between its effects and the subjective states, which is a synonym for consciousness. So I quoted you here in my book “Singularity is Near,” about the equivalence of neurons and even brains with machines. So then I took your argument why a machine and a computer could not truly understand what it’s doing and simply substituted human brain for computers, since you said they were equivalent, and neurotransmitter concentrations and related mechanisms for formal symbols, since basically neurotransmitter concentrations, it’s just a mechanistic concept.

And so you wrote, with those substitutions, “The human brain succeeds by manipulating neurotransmitter concentrations and other related mechanisms. The neurotransmitter concentrations and related mechanisms themselves are quite meaningless. They only have the meaning we have attached to them. The human brain knows nothing of this. It just shuffles the neurotransmitter concentrations and related mechanisms. Therefore, the human brain cannot have true understanding.”

So — [Laughter]

John Searle: There’s something interesting variations, again, on my original.

40:50 How to recognize consciousness

Ray Kurzweil: But the point I’d like to make, and that I’d be interested in your addressing, is the nature of consciousness because, I mean, you said today, and you wrote, the essential thing is to recognize that consciousness is a biological processes like digestion, lactation, photosynthesis, or mitosis.

We know that brains cause consciousness with specific biological mechanisms. But how do we know that a brain is conscious? How do you know that I’m conscious? And how do you—

And how do we know if a computer was conscious? We don’t have a computer today that seems conscious, that’s convincing in its responses. But my prediction is we will. We can argue about the time frame. And when we do, how do we know if it’s conscious of it just seems conscious? How do we measure that?

John Searle: Well, there are two questions here. One is, if you do a substitution of words that I didn’t use and the words I did use, can you get these observed results? And, of course, you can do that. That’s a well-known technique of politicians. But that wasn’t the claim.

What is the difference between the computer and the brain? In one sentence, the brain is a causal mechanism that produces consciousness by a certain rather complex and still imperfectly understood neurobiological processes. But those are quite specific to a certain electrochemistry. We just don’t know the details. But we do know, if you mess around in the synaptic cleft, you’re going to get weird effects.

How does cocaine work? Well, it isn’t because it’s got a peculiar computational capacity. Because it messes with the capacity of the postsynaptic receptors to reabsorb quite specific neurotransmitters, norepinephrine— what are the other two? God, I’m flunking the exam here. Dopamine. Gaba is the third.

Anyway, the brain, like the stomach or any other organ, is a specific causal mechanism. And it functions on specific biochemical principles.

The problem of the computer is that it has nothing to do with the specifics of the implementation. Any implementation will do, provided it’s sufficient to carry out the steps in the program. Programs are purely formal or syntactical. The brain is not.

The brain is a specific biological organ that operates on specific principles. And to create a conscious machine, we’ve got to know how to duplicate the causal powers of those principles. Now, the computer doesn’t in that way work as a causal mechanism producing higher level features.

Rather, computation names an abstract mathematical process that we have found ways to implement in specific hardware. But the hardware is not essential to the computation. Any system that can carry out the computation will be equivalent.

Now, the second question is about how do you know about consciousness. Well, think about real life. How do I know my dog Tarski is conscious, and this thing here, my smartphone, is not conscious? I don’t have any doubts about either one.

I can tell that Tarski is conscious not on behavioristic grounds. People say, well, it’s because he behaves like a human being. He doesn’t. See, human beings I know, when they see me don’t rush up and lick my hands and wag their tails. They just don’t. My friends don’t do that. But Tarski does.

I can see that Tarski is conscious because he’s got a machinery that’s relatively similar to my own. Those are his eyes. These are his ears. This is his skin. He has mechanisms that mediate the input stimuli to the output behavior that are relatively similar to human mechanisms. This is why I’m completely confident that Tarski is conscious.

I don’t know anything about fleas and termites. You know, your typical termite’s got 100,000 neurons. Is that enough? Well, I lose 100,000 on a big weekend. So I don’t know if that’s enough for consciousness. But that’s a factual question. I’ll leave that to the experts.

But as far as human beings are concerned there isn’t any question that everybody in this room is conscious. I mean, maybe that guy over there is falling asleep, but there’s no question about what the general— it’s not even a theory that I hold. It’s a background presupposition. The way I assume that the floor is solid, I simply take it for granted that everybody’s conscious. If forced to justify it, I could.

Now, there’s always a problem about the details of other minds. Of course, I know you’re conscious. But are you suffering the angst of post-industrial man under late capitalism? Well, I have a lot of friends who claim they do. And they think I’m philistine because I don’t. But that’s tougher. We’d have to have a conversation about that. But for consciousness, it’s not a real problem in a real-life case.

46:03 The difference between running a simulation of a brain and a thinking maching

Audience: So you’ve said that we haven’t begun to understand how brains work or build comparable machines. But imagine in the future we do.

So we can run a simulation, as you put it, of a brain. And then we interface it with reality through motor output, sensory input. What’s the difference between that and a brain, which you say you know is producing consciousness?

John Searle: In some cases, there is no difference at all. And the difference doesn’t matter. If you have got a machine— I hope you guys are, in fact, building it because the newspapers say you are. If you have got a program that’ll drive my car without a conscious driver, that’s great. I think that’s wonderful. The question is not, what can the technology do?

My daddy was an electrical engineer for AT&T. And his biggest disappointment was I decided to be a philosopher, for God’s sake, instead of going to Bell Labs and MIT as he had hoped. So I have no problem with the success of the technology.

The question is, what does it mean? Of course, if you’ve got a machine that can drive a car as well as I, or probably better than I can, then so much the better for the machinery. The question is, what is the philosophical psychological scientific significance of that?

And if you think, well, that means you’ve created consciousness, you have not. You have to have more to create consciousness. And for a whole lot of things, consciousness matters desperately.

In this case of this book that I reviewed, where the guy said, well, they got machines that are going to rise up and overthrow us all, it’s not a serious possibility because the machines have no consciousness. They have no conscious psychological state. It’s about like saying the shoes might get up out of the closet and walk all over us. After all, we have been walking on them for centuries, why don’t they strike back? It is not a real-life worry.

Yeah?

47:59 Causal similarities of brains and current or future artificial systems

Audience: The difference that I’m interested in— sorry, the similarity I’m interested in is not necessarily the output or the outcome of the system, but rather, that is, it has the internal causal similarity to the brain that you mentioned.

John Searle: Yeah, that’s a factual question. The question is, to what extent are the processes that go on in the computer isomorphic to processes that go on in the brain? As far as we know, not very much.

I mean, the chess-playing programs were a good example of this. In the early days of AI, they tried to interview great chess players and find out what their thought processes were and get them to try to duplicate that on computers. Well, we now know how Deep Blue worked. Deep Blue can calculate 250 million chess positions in one second. See, chess is a trivial game from a games theoretical point of view because you have perfect information. And you have a finite number of possibilities. So there are x number of possibilities of responding to a move and x number of possibilities for that move. It’s interesting to us because of the exponential problem. And it’s very hard to program computers that can go very many steps in the exponents, but IBM did.

It’s of no psychological interest. And to their credit, the people in AI did not claim it as a great victory for— at least the ones I know didn’t claim it as a victory for AI because they could see it had nothing to do with human cognition.

So my guess is it’s an interesting philosophical question— or psychological question— to what extent the actual processes in the brain mirror a computational simulation. And, of course, to some respect, they do. That’s why computational simulations are interesting in all sorts of fields and not just in psychology, because you can simulate all sorts of processes that are going on.

But that’s not strong AI. Strong AI says the simulation isn’t just a simulation. It’s a duplication. And that we can refute.

50:06 Attempts to refute the Chinese Room argument

Audience: Could you prove to me that you understand English?

John Searle: Yeah, I wouldn’t bother. [Speaking with British accent] When I was in Oxford, many people doubted that I did. I happened to be in a rather snobbish college called Christ Church. And, of course, I don’t speak English. I never pretended to. I speak a dialect of American, which makes many English people shudder at the thought.

Audience: So you’ve said you understand English, but how do I know you’re not just a computer program?

John Searle: Well, it’s the same question as Ray’s. And the answer is all sorts of ways. You know, if it got to a crunch, you might ask me. Now I might give a dishonest answer. Or I might give an honest answer.

But there’s one route that you don’t want to go. And that’s the epistemic route. The epistemic route says, well, you have as much evidence that the computer is conscious as that we have that you are conscious. No, not really.

I mean, I could go into some detail about what it is about people’s physical structure that makes them capable of producing consciousness. You don’t have to have a fancy theory. I don’t need a fancy theory of neurobiology to say those are your eyes. You spoke through your mouth. The question was an expression of a conscious intention to ask a question.

Believe me, if you are a locally produced machine, Google is further along than I thought. But clearly, you’re not.

51:49 The definition of consciousness

John Bracaglia: We’re going to take a question from the Dory.

John Searle: Is he next?

John Bracaglia: We had some people—

Audience: Almost.

John Bracaglia: We had some people submit questions ahead of time.

John Searle: OK.

John Bracaglia: So we’re going to read those as well.

John Searle: OK. All right. Right.

John Bracaglia: So the first question from the Dory is, what is the definition of consciousness you’ve been using for the duration of this talk?

John Searle: OK. Here goes.

John Bracaglia: Please be as specific as possible.

John Searle: It is typically said that consciousness is hard to define. I think it’s rather easy to define. We don’t have a scientific definition because we don’t have a scientific theory. The commonsense definition of any term will identify the target of the investigation. Water is a clear, colorless, tasteless liquid. And it comes in bottles like this. That’s the commonsense definition. You do science and you discover it’s H²O.

Well, with consciousness, we’re in the clear, colorless, liquid, tasteless sense. But here it is. Consciousness consists of all those states of feeling or sentience or awareness that begin in the morning when you awake from a dreamless sleep. And they go on all day long until you fall asleep again or otherwise become, as they would say, unconscious. On this definition, dreams are a form of consciousness. The secret, the essence, of consciousness is that for any conscious state, there’s something it feels like to be in that conscious state.

Now, for that reason, consciousness always has a subjective ontology. Remember, I gave you that subjective-objective bit. It always has a subjective ontology. That’s the working definition of consciousness. And that’s the one that’s actually used by neurobiological investigators trying to figure out how the brain does it. That’s what you’re trying to figure out. How does the brain produce that? How does it exist in the brain? How does it function?

53:43 Could a true AI emerge organically?

Audience: I’d like to propose a stronger boundary on your observation that we do not know how to build a thinking machine today. Even if we knew how to build it, because, I mean, our thinking machine was built by the process of evolution, I’d like to propose— well, what do you think about stating that, actually, we may not have the time? And that it actually may not matter.

The reason we may not have the time is the probabilities that need to happen, like the asteroid falling and wiping the dinosaurs and whatnot, may not happen in the universe that we live in. But if you subscribe to the parallel universes theory, then there is some artificial consciousness somewhere else.

John Searle: Yeah. OK, about we may not have the time, well, I’m in a hurry. But I think we ought to try as hard as we can. It’s true. Maybe some things are beyond our capacity to solve in the life of human beings on Earth. But let’s get busy and try.

There was a period when people said, well, we’ll never really understand life. And while we don’t fully understand it, but we’re pretty far along. I mean, the old debate between the mechanists and the vitalists, that doesn’t make any sense to us anymore. So we made a lot of progress. There was another half to your question.

Audience: It may not matter because all universe—

John Searle: Oh, yeah. Maybe consciousness doesn’t matter. Well, it’s where I live. It matters to me.

Audience: Philosophically speaking.

John Searle: Yeah, but the point is there are a lot of things that may or may not matter which are desperately important to us: democracy, and sex, and literature, and good food, and all that kind of stuff. Maybe it doesn’t matter to somebody, but all those things matter to me in varying degrees.

Audience: Your artificial heart analogy that you mentioned. I think you included the idea that it’s possible, just like with the artificial heart, that we use different materials and different approaches to simulate a heart and, in some ways, go beyond just— come closer to duplication, that we might, in theory, be able to do the same thing with an artificial brain.

I’m wondering if you think it’s possible that going down the path just trying to do a simulation of a brain accidentally creates a consciousness or accidentally creates duplication, even if we don’t intend to do it with exact same means as a brain is made.

John Searle: I would say to believe in that, you have to believe in miracles. You have to— now think about it.

We can do computer simulations of just about anything you can describe precisely. You do a computer simulation of digestion. And you could get a computer model that does a perfect model of digesting pizza. For all I know, maybe somebody in this building has done it. But once you’ve done that, you don’t rush out and buy a pizza and stuff it in the computer because it isn’t going to digest a pizza. What it gives you is a picture or a model or a mathematical diagram. And I have no objection to that.

But if my life depended on figuring out how the brain produces consciousness, I would use the computer the way you use a computer in any branch of biology. It’s very useful for figuring out the implications of your axioms, for figuring out the possible experiments that you could design. But somehow or other that the idea that the computer simulation of cognitive behavior might provide the key to the biochemistry, well, it’s not out of the question, it’s just not plausible.

John Bracaglia: Humans are easily fooled and frequently overestimate the intelligence of machines. Can you propose a better test of general intelligence than the Turing test, one that is less likely to relate false positives?

John Searle: Well, you all know my answer to that is the first step is to distinguish between genuine intrinsic observer-independent intelligence and observer-relative intelligence. And observer-relative intelligence is always in the eye of the beholder. And anything will have the intelligence that you’re able to attribute to it.

I just attributed a great deal of intelligence to this object because it can compute a function, s equals one-half squared. Now this object has prodigious intelligence because it discriminates one hair from—I won’t demonstrate it, but in any case take my word for it that it does, even in a head that’s sparse with hair.

So because intelligence is observer-relative, you have to tell me the criteria by which we’re going to judge it. And the problem with the Turing test— well, it’s got all sorts of problems, but the basic problem is that both the input and the output are what they are only relative to our interpretation. You have to interpret this as a question. And you have to interpret that as an answer.

One bottom line of my whole discussion today is that the Turing test fails. It doesn’t give you a test of intelligence.

Audience: So you seem to take it as an article of faith that we are conscious, that your dog is conscious, and that that consciousness comes from biological material, the likes of which we can’t really understand. But forgive me for saying this, that makes you sound like an intelligent design theorist who says that because evolution and everything in this creative universe that exists is so complex, that it couldn’t have evolved from inert material.

So somewhere between an amoeba and your dog, there must not be consciousness. And I’m not sure where you would draw that line. And so if consciousness in human beings is emergent, or even in your dog at some point in the evolutionary scale, why couldn’t it emerge from a computation system that’s sufficiently distributed, networked, and has the ability to perform many calculations and maybe is even hooked into biologic systems?

John Searle: Well, about could it emerge, miracles are always possible. How do you know that you don’t have chemical processes that will turn this into a conscious comb? How do I know that? Well, it’s not a serious possibility.

I mean, the mechanisms by which consciousness is created in the brain are quite specific. And remember, this is the key point. Any system that creates consciousness has to duplicate those causal powers. That’s like saying, you don’t have to have feathers in order to have a flying machine, but you have to duplicate and not merely simulate the causal power of the bird to overcome the force of gravity in the Earth’s atmosphere. And that’s what airplanes do. They duplicate causal powers. They use the same principle, Bernoulli’s principle, to overcome the force of gravity.

But the idea that somehow or other you might do it just by doing a simulation of certain formal structures of input-output mechanisms, of input-output functions, well, miracles are always possible. But it doesn’t seem likely. That’s not the way evolution works.

Audience: But machines can improve themselves. And you’re making the case for why an amoeba could never develop into your dog over a sufficiently long period of time and have consciousness.

John Searle: No, I didn’t make that case. No, I didn’t make that case.

[Interposing voices]

John Searle: Amoeba don’t have it.

Audience: You’re refuting that consciousness could emerge from a sufficiently complex computation system.

John Searle: Complexity is always observer-relative. If you talk about complexity, you have to talk about the metric. What is the metric by which you calculate complexity? I think complexity is probably irrelevant. It might turn out that the mechanism is simple. There’s nothing in my account that says a computer could never become conscious. Of course, we’re all conscious computers, as I said.

And the point about the amoeba is not that amoebas can’t evolve into much more complex organisms. Maybe that’s what happened. But the amoeba as it stands— a single-celled organism— that doesn’t have enough machinery to duplicate the causal powers of the brain.

I am not doing a science fiction project to say, well, there can never be an artificially created consciousness by people busy designing computer programs. Of course, I’m not saying that’s logically impossible. I’m just saying it’s not an intelligent project. If your thinking about your life depends on building a machine that creates consciousness, you don’t sit down your console and start programming things in some programming language. It’s the wrong way to go about it.

Audience: If we gave you a disassembly of Google Translate and had you implement the Chinese room experiment, either it would take you thousands of years to run all the assembly instructions on pen and paper, or else you’d end up decompiling it into English and heavily optimizing it in that form. And in the process, you’d come to learn a lot about the relationships between the different variables and subroutines. So who’s to say that an understanding of Chinese wouldn’t emerge from that?

John Searle: Well, OK, I love this kind of question. All right.

Now, let me say, of course, when I did the original thought experiment, anybody will point out to you if you actually were carrying out the steps in a program for answering questions in Chinese, well, we’d be around for several million years. OK, I take their word for it. I’m not a programmer, but I assume it would take an enormous amount of time.

But the point of the argument is not the example. The example is designed to illustrate the point of the argument. The point of the argument can be given in the following derivation.

Programs are formal or syntactical. That’s axiom number one. That’s all there is to the program. To put it slightly more pretentiously, the notion some implemented program defines an equivalence class specified entirely formally or syntactically. But minds have a semantics, and— and this is the whole point of the example— the syntax by itself is not sufficient for the semantics. That’s the point of the example.

The Chinese room is designed to illustrate axiom three, that just having the steps in the program is not by itself sufficient for a semantics. And minds have a semantics. Now, it follows from those that if the computer is defined in terms of its program operations, syntactical operations, then the program operations, the computer operations by themselves are never sufficient for understanding because they lack a semantics. But, of course, I’m not saying, well, you could not build a machine that was both a computer and had semantics. We are such machines.

Audience: You couldn’t verify experimentally what the difference might be between semantics and what would emerge from thousands of years of experience with a given syntactical program.

John Searle: I think you can— I don’t inherit this. He does.

I think you don’t want to go the epistemic route. You don’t want to say, well, look, you can’t tell the difference between the thinking machine and the non-thinking machine. The reason that’s the wrong route to go is we now have overwhelming evidence of what sorts of mechanisms produce what sorts of cognition.

When I first got interested in the brain, I went out and bought all the textbooks. By the way, if you want to learn a subject, that’s the way to do it. Go buy all the freshman textbooks because they’re easy to understand.

One of these textbooks, it said cats have different color vision from ours. Their visual experiences are different from ours. And I thought, Christ, have these guys been cats? Have the other cats mind problem? Do they know what it’s like to be a cat?

And the answer is, of course, they know completely what’s the cat’s color vision is because they can look at the color receptors. And cats do have different color vision from ours because they have different color receptors. I forget the difference. You can look them up in any textbook.

But if in real life we’re completely confident that my dog can hear parts of the auditory spectrum that I can’t hear. He can hear the higher frequencies that I can’t hear. And cats have a different color vision from mine because we can see what the apparatus is.

We got another question? You’re on.

John Bracaglia: This will be our final question.

John Searle: OK. I’m prepared to go all afternoon. I love this kind of crap.

Audience: So at the beginning of your talk, you mentioned an anecdote about neuroscientists not being interested in consciousness. And, of course, by this time, a number of neuroscientists have studied it.

And so they’ll present stimuli that are near the threshold of perceptibility and measure the brain responses when it’s above or below. What do you think about that? Is that on the right track? What would you do differently?

John Searle: No, I think one of the best things that’s happened in my lifetime— it’s getting a rather long lifetime— is that there is now a thriving industry of neuroscientific investigations of consciousness. That’s how we will get the answer.

When I first got interested in this, I told you I went over to UCSF and told those guys get busy. The last thing they wanted to hear was being nagged by some philosopher, I can tell you. But one guy said to me— famous neuroscientist said— in my discipline, it’s OK to be interested in consciousness, but get tenure first. Get tenure first.

Now, there has been a change. I don’t take credit for the change, but I’ve certainly been urging it. You can now get tenure by working on consciousness.

Now, neuroscience has changed, that now there’s a thriving industry in neuroscience of people who are actually trying to figure out how the brain does it. And when they figure that out— and I don’t see any obstacle to figuring that out— it will be an enormous intellectual breakthrough, when we figure out how exactly does the brain create consciousness.

Audience: But in particular, that approach they’re using now— I use the example of presenting stimuli that are near the threshold of perceptibility and looking for neural correlates, do you think that’s going to be fruitful? What particular questions would you ask to find out?

John Searle: I happened to be interested in this crap. And if you’re interested in my views, I published an article in the “Annual Review of Neuroscience” with a title “Consciousness.” It’s easy to remember. You can find it on the web. And what I said is, there are two main lines of research going on today.

There are guys who take what I call the building block approach. And they try to find the neuronal correlate of particular experiences. You see a red object. Or you hear the sound of middle C. What’s the correlate in the brain? And the idea they have is if you can figure out how the brain creates the experience of red, you’ve cracked the whole problem. Because it’s like DNA. You don’t have to figure out how every phenotype is caused by DNA. If you get the general principles, that’s enough.

Now, the problem is they’re not making much progress on this what I call the building block approach. It seems to me a much more fruitful approach is likely to be think of consciousness as coming in a unified field. Think of perception not as creating consciousness, but as modifying the conscious field. So when I see the red in this guy’s shirt, it modifies my conscience field. I now have an experience of red I didn’t have before.

Most people— and the history of science supports them— use the building block approach because most of the history of science has proceeded atomistically. You figure out how little things work, and then you go to big things. They’re not making much progress with consciousness.

And I think the reason is you need to figure out how the brain creates the conscious field in the first place because particular experiences, like the perception of red or the sound of middle C, those modify that conscious field. They don’t create a conscious field from nothing. They modify an existing conscious field. Now, it’s much harder to do that because you have to figure out how large chunks of the brain create consciousness. And we don’t know that.

The problem is in an MRI, that conscious brain looks a lot like the unconscious brain. And there must be some differences there. But at this point— and I haven’t been working on it. I’ve been working on other things.

But I want somebody to tell me exactly what’s the difference between the conscious brain and the unconscious brain that accounts for consciousness. We’re not there yet.

However, what I’m doing here is neurobiological speculation. I mean, I’m going to be answered not by a philosophical argument, but by somebody who does the hard research of figuring out exactly what are the mechanisms in the brain the produce consciousness and exactly how do they work.

John Bracaglia: John, it’s been an immense, immense honor to be here with you today. Thank you so much for your time. And thank you for talking to Google.

John Searle: Well, thank you for having me.

Downloadfile:

John_Searle_AI.ogg

'Excuse me' by - delta t, 1984

Alkibiades — Thu, 03 Aug 2017 16:41:16 +0000

Speaker(s) Minus Delta T

Language spoken English

Date of Recording Sun, 1984-01-01

Tags: music;

Player-image:

- delta t (Minus Delta t) has been - and still, in variants, is - a group of artists who created seminal works in performance and media art since 1978. Early members included Bernhard Müller, Mike Hentz and Karel Dudesek as well as Chrislo Haas or Gerard Couty. Aiming to initiate a processual and participatory form of art, many of them would re-join their expertise to develop emancipatory structures and novel modes of using new media technology for art experiments. The Iron Curtain had just fallen when in 1992, the “Piazza Virtuale” project connected 17 studios on three continents over satellite from its headquarter, hosted in containers in central Germany.

de: Die Gruppe verfolgte einen prozeßhaften und partizipatorischen Kunstbegriff, der zunehmend den emanzipatorischen Gebrauch der Medien umfasste. Ihr wichtigstes Projekt war Anfang der achtziger Jahre das »Bangkok Projekt« – es wurde ein Felsblock auf dem Landweg bis nach Bangkok transportiert, um Ereignisse im öffentlichen Raum auszulösen. Ab Mitte der achtziger Jahre begann Minus Delta t, sich umzuorientieren, die Medien wurden immer mehr als der zentrale Ansatzpunkt für eine Kunst, die einen gesellschaftsverändernden Anspruch hat, erkannt; Nutzung eines Busses ab 1985 als mobiles Medienlabor; die Gruppe nannte sich dann »Ponton« als Label für übergreifende Aktivitäten.” Mitglieder der ursprünglichen Gruppe sind später unter den Pionieren von Interaktionskunst in alten Medien mittels neuer Mit-Schaltungen des Diskurses unter Sendeformaten wie “Eye of Moby Dick” oder XYZ.

This sound piece is taken from their album “The Bangkok Project”, published at the Ata Tak label, Germany 1984.

“Excuse me!” - First released on the LP record The Bangkok Project, Ata Tak, Germany 1984.

Additional information

Quelle: http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/kuenstler/minus-delta-t/biografie/ (retrieved 08/17)

Excuse Me

Pardon me
I’m sorry
I’m very sorry
I’m awfully sorry
I’m terribly sorry
That´s alright
That´s quite alright

Five

Excuse me
Which is the way to Washington
Pardon me
Excuse me
I beg your pardon
I´m sorry

Seven

I’m sorry
I’m sorry I’m late
I’m sorry I kept you waiting
I’m sorry I can´t help you
I’m sorry I inconvenienced you

I’m sorry to have kept you waiting
I’m sorry to have troubled you
I’m sorry to delay you
I’m sorry to be late
I’m sorry that my explanations weren’t very clear

Eight

To apologize is an apology
I apologize
I must apologize
I must apologize to you
I must apologize for what I said
I must apologize for what I did
I must apologize for my rudeness
I must apologize for my thoughtless remark
I must apologize for breaking my promise
I must apologize for forgetting your book

Nine

That´s alright
That´s quite alright

Ten

It was my carelessness
It was my fault

—

First released on the LP record The Bangkok Project, Ata Tak, Germany 1984

Downloadfile:

Minus_Delta_T_Excuse_Me_audio.mp3

The Yes Men and Edward Snowden at Roskilde Festival

Alkibiades — Tue, 19 Jul 2016 15:05:46 +0000

Speaker(s) The Yes Men; Roskilde Festival 16; Edward Snowden

Language spoken English

Date of Recording Mon, 2016-06-27

Player-image:

During the Roskilde festival 2016, activist art group The Yes Men had set up fake signs stating that the festival would be collecting and infinitely storing all text and phone conversations of visitors on festival grounds.

Before the nature of the signs was revealed as a provocative prank, many festival-goers showed both despair and anger. The group’s stunt culminated in a live performance with a fake Edward Snowden who got on stage in the role of an almost tech-illiterate imposter, and finally a talk given by the real Snowden via web stream.

The whole process has been documented by The Yes Men as a 12-minute film about digital surveillance, the data stunt, and Edward Snowden’s talk.

Additional information

Video source: http://www.roskilde-festival.dk/news/2016/watch-the-snowden-film-from-ro…!

00:03 National security threats are not (only) about terrorism

Narrator: This crowd of thousands of people is eagerly awaiting the next act at Northern Europe’s largest music festival. They’re not waiting for a band, they’re waiting to see NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The Yes Men: …the data collection and user surveillance. How would you recommend we
get rid of it?

Edward Snowden: We better raise awareness. We have to talk. But we have to also be skeptical of the fact that “national security threats” as they like to call them are just about terrorism, because they’re not. Most famously demonstrated by Dr. Martin Luther King.

The day after he gave his most famous speech, his “I have a dream” speech, the FBI created a classified memo that declared him the number one national security threat facing our nation. They considered him someone who injected instability into our political systems. And you know what? They were right. But free and open societies benefit from that instability because what that instability is actually called is progress.

Loving the people that you choose to love. Something as basic as that has been against the law all too frequently. Sometimes the only moral decision is to break the law. And if we… [Applause] That’s pretty popular with you guys. This is normally quite a controversial point, I have to say.

01:32 Staging a political intervention at a music festival

Narrator: This is the largest crowd Snowden has ever addressed. We just spent two days trying to piss off as many people as we could so they would show up. We call that “anger marketing.”

We’re about to start putting up these fake signs about the festival’s new data policy. People are going to be given the impression that this year Roskilde is collecting their text messages, monitoring all their internet activity, and even recording their phone calls. Of course, the festival isn’t actually doing this.

Edward Snowden: But governments are. Every border you cross, every purchase you make, every call you dial is touched by a system whose reach is unlimited but who safeguards or not.

The Yes Men: The gates are about to open and 100,000 people are going to flood in. Let’s see how they react to the festival’s new surveillance policies.

Christina Bilde: Someone put up the signs on — I think it was actually on Twitter or Instagram to begin with. It went on to Facebook, a dialogue started there. And the media are always looking into our social media, tweaking off the arguments and stuff from there.

People here, you know, they’re not used to this. There’s a group of volunteers sitting here. This just landed at their tables as well.

Roskilde employee: We’re getting some very negative press on this. So my suggestion would be that we meet up with at least a handful of these people to explain.

The Yes Men: So we’ve set up a feedback booth where people can complain. The problem is, they’re going to be complaining to Sean Devlin, who is a comedian and not actually part of the staff here.

Sean Devlin: You know, we could have the guards identify the people who look like terrorists on the way in and then give them, like, a special wristband or something or maybe we write like T on their hand.

Festival visitor: I mean that that wouldn’t be a thing… I mean if there was some guards over there, outside, and go “OK, that guy is white, that guy is black, maybe he’s a terrorist. There’s a possibility that you just miss the terrorist.

Edward Snowden: There is no single race or religion that’s involved in terrorist incidents. Now people might focus on the threat of Islamic extremism, but there are extremists from every religion. In fact, in the United States, the worst single terrorist bombing that ever occurred was the Oklahoma City bombing, which was two white guys driving a van.

Sean Devlin: Well if we know what you look up online, then we can know if you’re a terrorist.

Festival visitor: So if I look up nitro online, then I’m a terrorist?

Sean Devlin: Uh, is that something for a bomb?

Festival visitor: It’s called trinitrotoluene. TNT.

Sean Devlin: What’s your name?

Festival visitor: [laughs]

Edward Snowden: A computer can’t tell the difference between someone who’s saying they want to bomb the White House and someone who thinks that last song was the bomb.

Narrator: Clearly, Ed had much better answers than we did, so we wanted him to speak to people directly.

The Yes Men [Speaking on voice chat over a mobile phone]: We’ve got a great idea. Why don’t you come to this awesome festival and give a talk here?

Edward Snowden: [laughs] I’d love to guys, that would be great. But that’s gonna be a little bit difficult.

The Yes Men: You don’t like the festival lineup? But there’s some pretty good bands here this year.

Edward Snowden: There’s the whole “life in prison thing,” the US government chasing me around the world, big international manhunt, remember that?

The Yes Men: Uh, right, yeah.

So we did the next best thing. We found an actor who looked a bit like Snowden and we gave him a little makeover.

05:26 Snowden lookalike performance

Actor playing ES: Hi, I’m Edward Snowden.

Moderator: Please welcome the most wanted man in the entire world: Edward Snowden.

ES actor: This year Roskilde has instituted a new data policy. If a high school dropout like me could walk out of a US military facility with a treasure trove of information, how powerful could information be in the hands of this music festival? Let’s find out.

I’m going to hack into the “main frame” of the Roskilde fest. This should only take me a few minutes. [Switching to a second notebook] I’ll use this one, sorry.

Oh, caps lock. Caps lock is on. Or off. Now it’s off. It’s off, right? I hit it twice. Okay, off. And… here we go, it’s fro… what? Okay, I got the wheel. You know, the little rainbow wheel… I… okay, what does that wheel mean? Is that a wheel, or is it a beach ball? I liked it back when it used to have just an hourglass. At least you knew it’s time. Maybe that’s… Anyway.

[Addressing his notebook] Come on, come on, cancel. Cancel.

07:26 The hoax is revealed

The Yes Men: Actually, I am — we are — actually investigative reporters and we have a major announcement. We’ve sniffed the routers and we’ve found that all of this is actually false.
It’s not true and I’m very sorry, Mr. Snowden, that this project has misled you.

ES actor: May I? I actually have something to admit too. I’m not Edward Snowden. My name is David Neal, I am an actor from Los Angeles.

The Yes Men: Thank you for that apology Mr. Snowden, and we have an apology too. We are not actually investigative journalists, we’re actually a group called The Yes Men, we do hoaxes, and in fact we hired you, Mr. Snowden, to do this.

Now some of you seem like you’re pretty worked up about it. Does it make you frustrated? [Pointing at a young man in the audience] He is. He’s angry. He’s pissed about this.

ES actor: Please don’t kick my ass.

Narrator: The anger marketing had worked. Now it was time to give people what they wanted. We harnessed the power of the Internet and connected people directly to the real Edward Snowden.

08:58 Edward Snowden live at Roskilde

Edward Snowden: Arguing that you don’t care about privacy because you’ve got nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.

Boy from the audience: I want to ask, if the US government catch you, how long are you going to prison?

Edward Snowden: [laughs] If you’re ten, the minimum sentence that they are threatening right now is three charges, each ten years apiece. So I would spend in prison basically three times the length that you’ve been alive today. If they didn’t add any other charges. But the government in the United States said that for every document, every new story that these journalists have published, that’s another ten years. So it’s very likely that I would be in jail for longer than you will be alive, no matter how long you live.

The Yes Men: Okay, he had one other question.

Boy from the audience: How old are you?

Edward Snowden: I just turned 33.

[Audience sings “Happy Birthday”]

Edward Snowden: Thanks everyone, thank you. Really. [laughs] You guys staying with me on my personal case, again, is overwhelming. But this is not about me. This is about us. What matters is the kind of world you guys are building today.

11:16 Outro

[Credits roll, background music plays]

ES actor: Oh damn. Damn. Oh that’s why caps lock was on. Caps lock is off. Is it off? The light off means it’s off? Oh, I’m sorry, I’m getting one of the circle… the circle thing. That’s why. Adobe wants to install… I don’t… I never even had an account with them.

It’s the usual password. Eddie Snowballs.

Downloadfile:

Snowden_YesMen_Roskilde.ogg

Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age

Alkibiades — Tue, 24 May 2016 20:08:12 +0000

Speaker(s) Manuel Castells

Language spoken English

Date of Recording Thu, 2012-08-23

Player-image:

Sociologist Manuel Castells examines the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and other social movements that have emerged in the Internet Age. He shares his observations on the recurring patterns in these movements: their origins, their use of new media, and their goal of transforming politics in the interest of the people. Castells presents what he sees to be the shape of the social movements of the Internet age, and discusses the implications of these movements for social and political change.

Additional information

picture credits: photo by jjn1, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0),

https://www.flickr.com/photos/naughton/6351948340,

video source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lfPg_5iaGQ

Transcript partially based on the raw transcript available at

http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/transcripts/2012/120823klu1600.txt

00:23 Welcome address

CB: Well, good afternoon everybody. I am Carolyn Brown. I direct the Office of Scholarly Programs and the John W. Kluge Center here at the Library of Congress. And it’s my great and sincere pleasure to welcome you here this afternoon for what I know will be a very interesting and mind-expanding lecture by Dr. Manuel Castells. And the title of the lecture is “Networks of Outrage and Hope.”

Before we begin the program which is about networks and digital things, I’m going to ask you though to turn off the buzzing of your digital things. If you would turn off cellphones and anything else that will go off and interfere with the program recording and the speaker. The John W. Kluge Center which has organized this event was established by none other than John W. Kluge with a very generous endowment to create the scholarly venue on Capitol Hill with the finest mature scholars might have opportunities to bring their wisdom and their knowledge to the nation’s leaders and policy makers. A space where as we like to say, the world of affairs and the world of ideas with the thinkers and doers might have the opportunity to come together in mutually enriching conversation.

The center also supports a rising generation of the world’s most promising junior fellows as well. And the idea was that these two groups, the seniors and the juniors will have an opportunity at least from time to time to come together and form a very vibrant intellectual community. In connection with that, we also have a number of lectures occasionally, small symposium, based primarily on the work of our scholar’s allocation will do a small conference on something else. If you want to know more about the center and the programs, you can sign up at the back table, leave your email and we’ll send you RSS feeds and there are also brochures that will tell you more about the Kluge Center.

Today’s speaker, Dr. Manuel Castells, is the Kluge Chair in Technology and Society and authority on the information age and in sociological implications. Dr. Castells is a University professor and the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society at the University of Southern California. He is professor emeritus of sociology and professor emeritus of city in regional planning at the University of California Berkeley where he taught for 24 years. He has other appointments but I’m not going to go into all of those. I could go on to won about him but I am going to say that Dr. Castells is a member of the Library Scholar’s Council. And in his time here, this summer which is been too short, but in his time here this summer he’s been very helpful to the Library as we thought through for ourselves the implications of the digital age on our work.

Dr. Castells has been tracking and studying the communications revolution for 25 years. Many of us may really realize he’s been going on that long but in fact it has. I’m not going to provide the titles and details of the over 26 books, his art—he’s authored. But to give you what I think is the most concise of what he’s been up to for these 25 years, well, I guess it’s more than 25 years, but over the major part of his career, I want to site—to read a citation—oops, that was—right here in March, he received the Holberg International Memorial Prize from the Parliament of Norway. And I think their citation very wonderfully and concisely sums up his accomplishments.

Manuel Castells is the leading sociologist of the city and new information and media technologies. His ideas and writings have shaped our understanding of the political dynamics of urban and global economies in the network society. He has illuminated the underlying power structures of the great technological revolutions of our time and their consequences. He helped us to understand how social and political movements have co-evolved with the new technologies. So this is an opportunity for all of us to understand and learn in new ways from our distinguished colleague and I can now say my friend, Manuel Castells.

05:30 Introduction

MC: Thank you, Carolyn. Let me just, in one second, express my gratitude to the Kluge Center and particularly to its Director, Dr. Carolyn Brown, for giving me the opportunity to share with you this afternoon my most recent research which concerns precisely the relationship between a new technologies and new social movements. Certainly, these social movements are not created by technology. Technology in itself doesn’t produce anything. It’s the technology we’ve include the fabric of society, culture, politics, which really become significant.

So in the last two years, unexpectedly, in number of major social movements spread in countries around the world, from Iceland where the most important movement started, to Tunisia, and then from Tunisia to most Arab countries, and then from Spain to the United States, and all these are specific connections. There’s no conspiracy but this by reality. There are specific connections and then from there to the world. In fact, there had been in the last two years, there had been demonstrations, occupations in thousands, thousands of cities around the world including over one thousand in the United States. They are mapped in my book. And this goes on.

Just this week, the student movement in Chile just searched again. And this is a relentless way of social movements, luckily beyond the attention of the media and the indifference of the politicians. So even, you know, in specific country that didn’t have this kind of social movement, Israel, in July, October 2011, had the largest social mobilization of Israel in history with more than 500,000 people in the country or 1,000,000 people participated in demonstrations, sittings, et cetera, for several months. And again, the media have not reported carefully unless there is violence and then of course, this nice footage.

The motives and outcomes of this movement are very diverse. In the west, they were mainly prompted by protest against the mismanagement of government, of the major financial crisis that started in 2008 and still goes on as Europe these days. In the Arab countries, by combinations of food crisis and the rejection of the dictatorial regimes, that have had many specific expressions of protest but that were savagely repressed and destroyed over the years, including the last one in Egypt in 2008. And suddenly, the governments could not cope with it. Even if there has been such a diversity, in old cases, there was an individual and collective feeling of outrage towards social injustice and of humiliation by the arrogance of the authorities. These are two key fillings in the matter.

But what I want to argue in this lecture on the basis of observation is that there is a lastly common pattern that transcends cultural and institutional context. To identify this pattern, I did over all these past two years, fieldwork in—by myself and by network of collaborators, colleagues, students, in a number of countries including Spain, United States, several European countries, the Arab countries, and also we examine a number of secondary sources and reports on the internet.

The result is a book about to be published, I could say even this is the first time I specifically address the content of this book, you could considered it the launching of the book, I—probably the regulations of the library would not allow the actual launching of the book. That will take place in London in early October, is a book title, Networks of Outrage and Hope and is published Polity Press. And the only reason I’ve said that - it is not a commercial advertising - is simply to tell you that I will go to the essence of the matter and you can find in this book all the empirical details, all the data, all the appendixes, all the things that I’m saying, I’m not saying they are demonstrated but at least they are illustrated by the material that is gathered and presented in this book.

And more than that, the analysis that I will present here and in the book is still preliminary because we lack sufficient perspective and we don’t have enough information. So it—all these are very tentative. However, this analysis in fact is rooted in a much broader framework of theory what I call grounded theory which is theory always supported by evidence. This is the only theory I do, presented in a book published in 2009 by Oxford University Press, “Communication Powe”r.

Communication Power, that book, presents a theory of power as based on communication with number of case study, but fundamentally it’s a theory of power. And I will give you this theory in a nutshell, so that’s the convenient way to summarize 600 pages, to express the notion that we—this is the background of what we are going to go in specifically into the movements, because it fits; it fits. And when that’s unfit, I will change the theory. I will not change the data.

12:43 Studying power relations

My point is that power relations are the most important subject of study in social sciences at large. For the very simple reason, that they are the foundation of relationships of society, because those who have power shape the institutions of society according to the values and interest, as simple as that. So let’s say, power relationships are the DNA of society, right? Cherchez la femme? No. Cherchez le pouvoir. So power in social theory, we have a ton of tradition of theories and power. Basically, you can reduce to two forms of power which are often combined in history.

One is that trajectory of intellectual understanding of power that comes from Machiavelli to Max Weber, power as the monopoly, the legitimate monopoly of violence. In myself, I take out the legitimate. Power as monopoly of violent, legitimate or not legitimate, of course, that state power.

But there’s another tradition which throughout the history of social theory has been extremely important, unless often cited by both right and left. Power as persuasion, power as cultural hegemony, from Gramsci to Michel Foucault, power is the ability to shake the minds. I believe in the saying, in the formula just to simplify things, that shaping the minds in the long run is more effective than torturing the bodies because ultimately, our decisions, our behavior, is governed fortunately by our brains, by our minds that include of the heart, the brain. And therefore, if people ultimately think otherwise that when this established in the values and interest of the institutions, ultimately, this will permeate the institutions or will change the institutions and therefore we change.

Until fundamentally, fundamentally, the power is in our minds although there is always a combination between question and intimidation and persuasion and framing the mind as just like of on a whole steam in political cognition, cognitive science are used now. Framing the minds is the most important thing. However, this does not mean that we are all governed by ill intention people, manipulating or repressing us. This is our relationships. And therefore, relationships, our relationship is not one side, it’s both sides, is power, and what I call counter power. In all societies, we would have the one rule to understand history in the human species is wherever there is domination, there is resistance to domination. Now how these resistances repress with which kind of outcomes, but it’s a different matter and a matter of specific content.

But fundamentally, the whole dynamics of history is institutions being shaped by those in power and then being resisted by those who don’t have enough influence or representation in terms of their values and interest, and ultimately over running the resistance of the dominant hindrance in the institutions, sometimes through violence, sometimes through election, sometimes through moral persuasion, and ultimately creating new institutions which reproduce new power relationships which we’ll be challenged later by a new people who are not represented, et cetera, but you would say it’s a romantic vision of history but they say it’s an empirically grounded reason of history.

That’s why revolutions are always betrayed. But in the way of betraying them, there is some changes in relationship to what happened before. Now, if persuasion and reframing the human mind is a fundamental part of social dynamics, how this happens? Well, it happens through the minds, right? By necessity and how the mind work, I’m not at all a neuroscientist, but neuroscientist have already detected that they were through communication processes. Meaning, what reaches our brains are signals from social networks, natural networks that through communication networks reach our neuron networks. And our network process, these signals, this information in relationship to the stock of knowledge, ideas, images, et cetera, that are already installed in our networks and they work with this material. Communication being understood of course are the process of sharing meaning through information exchange.

Now, if communication networks are critical for the formation of our intentions, our values, our behavior, it becomes obvious that if there is a transformation of communication in society, there has some effects on the transformation of these networks and therefore, on the transformation of the human mind and the pro—and the way in which human mind processes the signals of our social and natural environment. And there has been, as we know, a dramatic transformation in communication, technology, organizational transformation and institutional transformation in the last, let’s say, 20 years.

Carolyn was mentioning that what people think is the future in fact is the past. In many case, it remind you that the internet was deployed for the first time in 1969 so it’s an old technology. They are simply new incarnation and new forms of communication from this matrix of a network, computer networks. This transformation which is multidimensional has many aspects and that what this analyzing my Communication Power book, but in one work is the shift from mass communication to mass self-communication.

20:06 Reshaping mass communication

Not that traditional mass communication disappeared but it’s also being reshaped by the new forms of mass communication which are self-communication. They are much bigger, they can reach everywhere like the traditional mass communication. But at the same time, these are networks that are multimodal, interacting, but the messages can be self-directed, self-created, self-retrieved, and self-combined. And since everybody does this, ultimately, the network of communication becomes a multimodal, interactive global-local communication network. This is mass self-communication. You can say is internet plus a mobile wireless communications, now the internet is basically all and will be increasingly.

So—and wireless is the combinations of both that provides the technological basis in the broadest sense of this social destructor of the—what I defined time ago as the network society, but in more specific terms in relationship to a transformation of socialize communication, of communication that can reach everybody in society is deep a transformation of this system.

Now, counter-power has been organized here on social mobilization throughout history, always, which is what we usually call at least, I call, and we can discuss it later, social movements, which are not necessarily political targets but they are social movement aiming at changing the values of society, the way we think about everything. Women movement, environmental movement, but in history, the movement for liberty, the movement, the civil rights movement, so movement that are specifically aim at changing the way we think things in society. And by the way, they can be of different political and ideological tonalities. They are not the good guys of the social movement and again, the big bad wolf for the political system. No. Political system can be nice and evil and the same thing for the social movement. It can be racist social movement, sexy social movements, to restore patriarchalism, et cetera, et cetera, in both ways. It’s simply analytical distinction.

Now, from this point of view, what I’m going to analyze and present is the common patterns of social movements in the internet age, not the—is essential that they are in the internet age. It is essential that they use the internet and wireless communication platform. But of course, this is not—this is the medium. This is not the cost, this is not the search, but is important, has specific consequences, and this is what I will try to show. Attention, here, I’m not normative at something that usually gets people enrage with me in my work and in my lectures that the even if my sympathies are obvious, although not very clear, they—when I do my analysis, when I do my research, I take a huge analytical distance and I am not normative.

So regardless of my personal sympathy with some of these movements, not with all, please take it as an attempt to report back to you what I have found and then we can discuss on that. And when—you will argue well but this is not right, I will tell you what the movement would respond not what I will be responding. That’s very important because as a person, as a citizen, I’m fully involved in society. As an analyst, I am the most traditional kind of academic, trying to establish what I find in terms of the traditional practices of scientific research, whatever scientific means in every context. And so here is my report.

24:04 Historical patterns in the emergence of social movements

Social movements throughout history usually emerge from a combination of two things. The deterioration, the degradation of living conditions that make the life of people at one point unbearable, and on the other hand, by the deep distrust, these are the political institutions that manage their lives. It’s the combination of two. We are in trouble and people who should manage our lives are not responsive and they do their thing and not our thing, throughout history, in every instance, the two things. And we know that in the last years, the two elements had conquered in most of the world.

We can later talk in the discussion about the different—the state of affairs in different part of the world which should provide some nuance to this analysis. But fundamentally, this is the combination of both. So when this happens, that this life deteriorates or something outrageous happened and then institutions are not responsive, then people take matters into their own hands. And by doing so, they quit. The institutional avenues, the procedure institutionally defined to express their protest and to present their ideas and their projects.

Well, this is a risky behavior because the institutions are constructed to reward you when you follow the rules and to punish you when you don’t. In many different ways, starting with delegitimizing all actions in the media, anarchist, terrorist, Nazis, whatever, so not only repressing with the police but repressing in the mind, these responsible people who want to destroy democracy. They just forgot to say that most people in the world think regional democracy and this include the United States and the Western Europe, with the exception usually of Scandinavia. All the data, all the opinion polls, all different sources of the lasting years, are in my book and you can check it there. That’s crisis of legitimacy and the traditional political science of analysis.

Now, in the historical experience and in the movements that I have observed, social movements are emotional movements. They start with emotions. And here I connect with the most recent, neuro-scientific research, Antonio Damasio and others that show the fundamental role of emotions in triggering, shaping, organizing, the human mind from their feelings follow and from their—this more rational decision making follow but at the roots, emotions are fundamental. So this was a movement and not problematic movements are emotional movement that starts with emotions, which kind of emotions. And here we have a whole field of research in political science and in political communication which is associated with the—fell of thought has a little label.

Well, the label of this one is the theory of affective intelligence would be in political communication, political science, equivalent of the emotional and intelligence in psychology. Because all comes from the main source and the neuroscience as understanding emotions are the motivation of human behavior. So in the specific terms where the theory of effective intelligence on the basis of experimental psychology, experiments in psychology, argue, this is not me, these are just incorporating a whole stage of studies, they argue that the trigger of social mobilization is anger, which is a psychologically defined emotion. Under repressor is fear. A repressor is fear.

And by the way, in some interpretations on why fear is the most fundamental emotion of human life, this is not scientifically proven but some of the psychologists play with that is linked to evolutionary theory. Why? Because we are all the successors, the heirs of cowards, because who didn’t run fast enough, because they were courageous, they were eaten up. And therefore, they say selection of the species in which the more courageous you are, the less likely you are to survive and the less likely your children and grandchildren will be there to exist. So self-preservation is linked to cowardice, therefore, to fear. And fear is the repressor. Now, but this is not fatality. Fear can be overcome and is overcome. Fear triggers anxiety which is associated with the avoidance of danger, but fear is overcome by sharing and identifying with others.

30:02 Emotions and people gathering on the internet

I am trembling but you are trembling too, let’s hold hands. And you are trembling too, let’s hold hands, and then it becomes a circle. Why people hold hands in any social [inaudible] while we are all trembling. And when we cannot hold hands in the street because the police comes too quickly, we hold hands in the internet. We get together in the internet. We share. We identify. And just by being together not agreeing on anything, just agreeing on the anger, on the anger, not agreeing on a program, not voting for a party, just we are all angry. And then by sharing anger but sharing it together through togetherness, fear is overcome. And when fear is overcome, then there is a process of mobilization, we then shifts again psychological research, shifts to another very potent positive emotion, enthusiasm.

So you go from anger that overcomes fear to then enthusiasm, that things can be different, hope, that the title of my book, Outrage ans Hope, the connection between the two. Now, this hope and this mobilization is organized from the very beginning through this sharing, through what people called communicative action. Meaning, people communicate, they share, and then they share process, they share enthusiasm, and they keep growing together, building networks of communication. The recent transformation, in the field of communication, allow people to build autonomous communication in the internet networks with much less, I wouldn’t say not control, but much less control than ever in history on the part of the established powers, the political or economic or media corporations.

We can discuss later about that but it’s clear that even if the internet is still control and so on, in fact, it’s not. It’s surveilled, surveilled. What is the difference between controlled and surveilled? Well, if the important things to share the message and to build a networks, if you are surveilled, what the repressors will find is who said that and then go and get it. But the message goes, the message goes. So if you are the messenger, that’s a problem. But if you are the messenger, you live forever, you don’t care. And therefore, this communicative autonomy built into the new system which therefore can form and reform networks constantly by the simple ability of these networks to reprogram themselves.

So the movements that I have studied and those that are similar and are around the world come from this part, come from crisis of the economy, crisis of legitimacy, simultaneously, outrage provoked by just actions. And at the same time, they are able to form quickly and autonomously in the internet networks and then they go into collective action. They require an emotional mobilization, triggered by outrage and by hope of a possible change.

33:56 Social movements of the internet age

I would argue that more and more, these types of movements represent the emergence of a new pattern of social movements which I call in the internet age because they could not take place without the internet in this particular form. Again, it’s not they’re caused by the internet but their shape is caused by the internet as let’s say the working class movement in the 19th century could not have perform without the presence of industrialization and the connection to largest scale assembly factories where the working class was materially form in addition to the thoughts where the movement and could be connected, so the factories where the moments of formation of the networks and the thoughts where the moments of hope towards the future.

There are a number of characteristics of these movements, of all these countries, of what I have studied. So rather than giving you nice anecdote from here and there which we can do later if you resist until the end of the discussion, I am going to synthesize what I have found that is common in all cases. And look, we are talking about Tunisia, we are talking—I did not talk about [inaudible] but the 2009 movement in Iran was quite similar. We’re talking about Tunisia and Iceland, nothing can be more different but they are common patterns. We are talking about Spain and the United States. We are talking about Chile. We are talking about England.

Now, the intensity of the movement, the success of the movements and the outcomes of the movements are very different, but the pattern is very similar. Why similar? First of all, I’m going to give you my laundry list about the different aspects that together form the pattern.
The art network, of course, the art network. First, always first in the internet because it’s the space of communicative autonomy where they can form and organize and emerge from this chaotic system of outrage and so that people without often knowing each other get together in the networks. The most important case is Egypt in which the 2008 mobilization in traditional terms was crushed before it could emerge. While in 2011, they started in the internet following the example of Tunisia and they form in the internet on a large scale, a critical scale before going into the streets, before going into demonstrations. So they form first in communication networks.

Why? Because communication networks have always been at the search of social movements like history, would be pamphlet, would be preaches, from the church or from the—at mosque, where it could be led later on radio, television, communication has always been at the center of social movement because only by people get in together in their minds, they can knock together. Otherwise, they are already puzzled, organized, institutionalized, control by the institutions of society. However, the networking, even if it’s always starts in the internet or in some cases in the mobile phone networks, which of course more and more is the same thing than the internet but this both things at the same time.

But even so, the networking form is multimodal. It includes social networks, online and offline, as well as preexistent social networks, family networks, friend’s networks, and very important in the case of the Arab countries, soccer club networks, funds networks, very important. Remember why, unfortunately, a few months ago in Port Said, a police provocation killed the many little—hand little fans, the Al-Ahly, the Cairo—on the Cairo soccer team because the Ah-Ahly fan networks have actually been decisive at the beginning of the revolution, contact through the internet but once the thing were in the street, the soccer fan network. So everything that this network, meaning what, connection between individuals, not organizations, not banners, not flyers, not party, no leaders, networks. People connected to each other, trusting each other.

Moreover, networks are within the movement, with other movements on the world, with the internet blogosphere, with the media, and with society at large. Networking technologies are essential because they provide the platform for a continuing expensive networking practice that evolves with the changing shape of the movement. The movement evolves, the networks in the internet evolve easily without anything to be decided or agreed upon.

Moreover, they do not need a formal leadership and no commandment control center. They organize themselves in terms of the decision. There’s no anyone who would say, “Do that,” it would be debated in the networks. And where things go, go where the network goes. Again, a fundamental characteristic. This—the center structure maximizes chances of participation in the movement because they are open-ended networks. You don’t need a membership card, you don’t need to agree on anything, you go into the debate and you go insert the mobilizations and not in others depending on how you connect to the network.

40:00 Networking protects movements

It also reduces the vulnerability of the movement to the threats of repression because of how you kill a network. You kill one note in the network, the characteristic of the network, they reproduce themselves. They have a biological logic. They keep going. You cut a node, there are many other nodes. That’s why I have proposed the term that these are rhizomatic revolutions, they are rhizomes. They’re underground, they emerge, they go down but they all are connected all the time. And sometimes emerge in the internet, sometimes not, sometimes going to the square, sometimes going to political mobilization, et cetera.

Moreover, networking of the movement protects the movement, not only against repression but against its own threats of bureaucratization and manipulation. Anyone trying to manipulate or assume that he has to put the movement with no one telling him or her about that is similarly flamed, not survival. The more you want to be leader the less you will be leader. The more people will kill you on the net. Second, while they stuck in the internet, they become a movement by occupying the urban space. They always grow into the urban space.

Why? There are couple of things. First, the togetherness which is fundamental requires at some point the most direct expression of emotional bonding. You touch the other. Internet, you connect but you don’t still touch the other. But when you are together, when you share the danger and when you share space, when you share a new form of being together in the city, then something else happen. There’s a moment of psychological and personal reformation. Moreover, if you are to govern a space, anyone can join by just going there, even disagreeing with the discussions, with the goal, with everything, but you don’t have to agree on anything. Just by being there, you are part of the movement, simply by being there. So it’s literally open-ended in that sense.

And then the problem starts. Some people join for the opposite reason that why are there. Whereas, you know one part of the Tea Party Movement in the United State joined the movement that fundamentally worth more on the democratic side when at both they share the same thing. They share the rejection of traditional political institutions. So in that sense, that’s why I say it depends on your opinion if you are for the movements or not, but the movements are such are autonomous, potent, and sharing certain projects.

The other reason why movement needs urban space is because since they don’t have a form of institutional action, they have to exist in society by being there, by being visible, visible for the media, visible for society, and also by challenging the institutions. If you say, “I cannot occupy this space” and now you occupy this space, well, you can send the police but you have to acknowledge that something is going on in terms of the protests of society. That’s why technically speaking, in all these movements, they always have a simple norm. If we are 20, they are going to kill us. And if we are 2,000, much less, and if we are 20,000 they will let us be quiet as long as we’re 20,000. So there is—the capacity to challenge society, each—is a different form when go through physical occupation.

The space that is organized between this autonomy of these internet networks and the autonomy of urban space occupied by the movement, that space is a form what I call the third space which I call the space of autonomy, the space of autonomy in the networks, the state—the space of autonomy in the communities that are formed locally. This space of autonomy is the form of existence of the new social movements.

Thirdly, these movements are all local and global at the same time. They rise for local condition, local culture, local values, in their own terms, in their own language, and root it into the specific conditions that provoke their outrage. They have different faiths. They have different political orientation. They have different relationship to gender, to class, to race, et cetera. They are local. But at the same time, they immediately connect to the world and they immediately bring problems of the world into their discussion, into their debates. They are both things at the same time. They are local and global as the internet. Internet is local and global. These movements are local and global.

In terms of their genesis, these movements are largely spontaneous in their origin. Usually, they are triggered by spark of indignation, are the name of the Spanish movement, the Indignants. People are indignated by something. In some cases, in the cases of the Arab revolutions, self-emulation, repression, savagery, from the dictatorship, in the case of Syria, 19 children younger than 12, younger than 14 being tortured for having had even a graffiti, that’s how it started the Syrian revolution. In other cases like in Europe or in American [inaudible], Spain, United States, is indignation against the behavior not so much of the finance elite but of the political elite being subservient to the financial elite, the obvious thing in the United States. They say the [inaudible] is not us, that’s the typical thing. There are solid opinion polls that yes, that people consider that in America. 47 percent of the people are against the financial executives and consider them responsible from—for the economic crisis.

But when asked about the relative responsibility between government of all political orientations and bankers say government, government. I think our governments were supposed to protect us and in fact they protect the voters against us and that’s where the indignation comes. And that’s why there is a reaction link to the economic crisis both in European and the United State. The financial crisis has meant for people of all persuasion. The bankers have the government in their pockets. They ring the world, they ring the economy, they control everything. And when they are in trouble, they are paid a lot with our money. And this goes from Greece to Ohio.

These movements are vital. They follow the logic of the internet networks. First, because of the vitality of messages in the internet and particularly images, images have a tremendous vital effect. People talk a lot of Facebook and Twitter, et cetera, the most important social network in the internet in terms of the internet world are the YouTube because the power of the images that everybody can generate citizen [inaudible], remember. You have—anybody can with their cellphone, medially record an image, make a video, upload it, and seeing people like you being massacred, being brutalized, being in the United States, being paper gas in your eyes for doing nothing, in other country just machine gun, but depending on every context, people immediately become indignant.

The more there is a violent repression, the more they support for the movement. There’s more fear but more support at the same time. The transition from outrage to hope is accomplished in all movements by deliberation in the space of autonomy. There is indignation, there is outrage. But then when people construct their space of autonomy, meaning, both in the internet and they occupy the space, they start debating. Why so? What can we do?

Deliberation in the traditional [inaudible] sense, in the traditional [inaudible] just that’s not happened in the parliament, it happens in the civil society. Horizontal networks both in the internet and the urban space create this togetherness that I was mentioning about and the horizontality of networks supports corporation and solidarity with—while undermining the need for formal leadership. Now, here’s at one point. These movements have been considered to be very ineffective. They debate for hours, for days, about what to do a little thing. So they are ineffective. Well, except that they are asking them to be effective on a logic this is not theirs. Because the fact that everything can be challenged, it means that everybody feel that they are nobody’s there, that they can be there and talk and contribute. And yes, grassroots, deliberate democracy is very slow and very painful, and many people get fed up, but they have tried.

50:09 New, non-programmatic notions of democracy

Our societies, they have tried and the largest every other possible avenue. Give me a leader, give me pro and we go. Well, we go, it usually doesn’t work and when it works, it ends up in institutional blockage. But very important, these movements are extremely critical from traditional, radical politics, from—particular from less with of level [inaudible], formal anarchist, organized anarchist, with by definition if they’re organized, they are not anarchist, that’s the point. They are extremely critical of all these groups because they say, well, they keep repeating the revolutionary mantra forever and nothing happens. So—and they are organizing the revolution but in their minds, in their homes, nothing happens in society. So let just see together what we can do.

No ideology, except the ideology of [inaudible] which is not an ideology of course, but it’s a different one, less formalized and less blocking. They are highly self-reflective. They keep all the time asking themselves, what do we want? Who we are? How we can contribute or not contribute? There are endless debates and endless proposals. There’s a fury of every possible proposal. People invent here. I have seen in the Barcelona occupation some of the most sophisticated discussion about Heidegger, Heidegger and the revolution, Heidegger and democracy. By the way, people in [inaudible] usually much more educated than the average of society. And some people say, “Well, that’s a problem so these are the real working class guy.” Well, that’s insulting the working class guy. But in addition who—what happens is that some people debate at the very high levels, self-reflective but you have not read Plato, you still can say your thing and will be discussed and will be integrated into the debate and into the proposal.

Now, in their origin, they are all nonviolent movements. And I emphasize that because this is absolutely critical. Including in the Arab revolutions, we are now fortified by the civil war in Libya, first, and then now in Syria. Well, the Syrian movement started as absolutely peaceful movement for months and months and months. And quite they were massive. Before there was any arm resistants in Syria, over 7,000 people have been killed in peaceful demonstrations in the streets. Yes, at one point, they keep massacring you, there’s a moment in which people cannot overcome that. But by not overcoming that, and this has been debated many times in the movement, you destroy yourself even if you win.

Why? Because who are going to win, the peaceful demonstrators, the civil society, no. The people financed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, who organized the Free Syrian Army in the Sunni-Shia debate in the Middle East, okay? So then, yes, you can overthrow aside but, but who is overthrowing aside. And they lose and then they start fracturing and then they say—they lose the legitimacy [inaudible] southern population. At the same time, it’s logical, it’s normal. I’m just saying, when a social movement goes from social movement, democratic, nonviolent social movement to a contending faction in a civil war. Even if you win the civil war, you have lost already your existence as a social movement, but it is very difficult to just keep the nonviolence going. And in every country, the debate of a violence and nonviolence is fundamental because nonviolence means heroic resistance in the long term.

Violence means losing the legitimacy in the society in the short term. Movements are also rarely programmatic. They are not programmatic. They don’t have a program. But in other words, they have thousand programs. You know, everybody has an idea and many commissions and many committees elaborate programs. I—in Spain I participated in elaborating a reform of the electoral law which is one of the most important things because all the laws in all the countries are pipe. They are made in the interest of the party who wrote a lot and not in the interest of democracy.

This crazy thing about the American Electoral College from the medieval institutions of the United States makes everybody crazy. The notion of one person on vote is not respected. Anyway, well yes, one country, Israel, and that’s interesting. That’s interesting, direct proportionality. Then political scientist and they have said, “Well, it’s ineffective, how everybody can have an opinion. We have to consolidate blogs.” Yeah, sure, you can do that, it’s very effective but you lose the people.

And in the case of Greece, if you want a blatant example, in the last Greek election, that the entire Europeans Standish men pushed to vote for the two large parties, the Conservative Party that won the election got 30 percent of the vote. The opposing left party got 28 percent of the vote. But why then they got absolute majority in the Conservative Party? Because a little clause in the Greek law says that in a pattern of 300 people, the party that wins by one vote gets 50 seats more than allocated by the proportional vote, okay? So again and again and again. So the reaction is that, first, we have to change the power structure before any program can be implemented.

And in the meantime, they are so many proposals on every aspect of life. And one of the most patent movements in Europe has been for agricological food, inside the movement and trying to practice in the movement new principles for agricology. People cannot eat whatever they want. They have to debate before distributing food of any kind. But over all, what they are in essence in terms of the program, they are not programmatic in the sense. They don’t have any specific program. They are fundamentally democratic movements.

The most important thing is the search for democracy, a new form of democracy but not in a program but in a practice. Practicing this kind of democracy and experimenting with ii to see what it is, what is grassroots democracy, what is—they are not challenging representative democracy in the traditional way. They are saying, you know, this representative democracy does not represent. The norms or representation are bias, are changed. The principle is to compliment this democracy which is they don’t use the traditional [inaudible]. Formal democracy will drive democracy, no, no, no.

They say, the representative democracy is okay, it’s not representative. And therefore we have to invent new forms of democracy who—through what people call network democracy which of course is nice and easy to say and try to find it in the debate, in the assembly’s, the local assembly’s, but no one knows what it is. But you know what it is? It’s in Utopia. It’s Utopian. And people say, “So what?” Utopias are not fantasies, are not stupidities. Utopias are ideas about how the world should be and how the political world should be. And Utopias are material force because Utopias take over the minds and the minds can generate new proposals.

All major political ideologist and political systems had been Utopias. Liberalist is the Utopia. Communist is a Utopia. Anarchist is a Utopia. Socialism is the traditional sense of socialist is a Utopia. Utopias are the matrixes of what happens then in real life to a number of intermediation to a number of negotiations between what people want and what really happen in society. And this leads me to final point on what is the connection then between political change and the social movement. Well, social movements per se are not political movements. Although, they are very political, you see, in which sense they are not trying to seize the state. No one seems to turn for into political party and seize the state. When they do that, they become a political party and that’s the different thing. They are trying to transform consciousness to—through this transformation of consciousness, through this awareness of this deliberation then they expect that at some point, citizens will change differently the forms of the state. Crazy? Well, no. Iceland? Yeah, 330,000 people, but not the silly idiots.

01:00:01 A comparison of European and US politics

The highland—Iceland, Iceland as you know, not only brought down the entire government coalition that had been governing since 1927, one part or the other and brought in an eco-social democratic coalition that was always marginal, brought into the government, but not only that. They reformed the economy. They nationalized the banks. They sent to jail all the bankers. They put on trial the Prime Minister. And moreover, they have source in new constitution. Over the internet, 16,000 people participated and they now have a new constitution from source in the internet. Not that this is the end of Iceland but it’s something there. And by the way, the Icelandic economy is the best performing economy in Europe nowadays, better than Germany. According to all the rating agencies, you better trust the sovereign death of Iceland than the sovereign death of Germany because they are stable, because they have control who they are and how they connect.

While Germany ultimately depends in the Spain or Italy go rarely up, Germany goes rarely up. So don’t invest in Germany yet. Now, if they are not trying to transform the political system directly, what happened then? Well, a lot will depend on how the political system reacts. That’s why the title of my conclusion, the book, is Social Movements and the Formed Politics, an impossible law. Maybe, maybe not because if the political class understands that these are symptoms, whatever distorted, whatever exaggerated, whatever in rate sometimes, of a fundamental distrust in society toward the current political institutions.

If they sincerely want to construct and reconstruct democracy rather than get away with crime, if they do that and some may do, Obama is not doing it, some may do, well, things could change. Because throughout history, this has always been the movement of social movements external to the system that at one point open up spaces of debate and freedom into the system. And then the parties that don’t follow that fall apart. I make a comparison with late 19th century Europe in which the political status in the democratic countries, in the democratic countries, England that they—France to some extent, where the conservatives and the liberals, right? And suddenly, the society is transformed. There are new social movements.

We knew ideology that seemed to be crazy, anarchism and socialism, because they represent the new society that was emerging and was not represented in the political institutions. What happened? The liberals disappear, basically. Not the conservatives. Why the conservatives not? Because the conservatives don’t change fundamentally. They change the names, the labels, the framing of the ideology, defending the dominant interest of society is the easiest way. You just go with the flow. We just go whoever is in society. But if you are rest on that in society for the liberals, for the less of the political system, is to represent the interest of society not the interest of the elites, then you have a problem if you don’t do that. The same thing is happening now in Europe, and maybe to some extent, in the United States with the democrats. If they do not represent all the outrage in the nation and lack of hope vis-a-vis the subservience of the political elite, on the financial elites, well, you will have the party and they all—at all you will have or we will have Europe in here, the notion that no government is good, so let’s do it ourselves and [inaudible].

Do we know ourselves to start with? Our taxes, our money, why I should give it to you if I don’t trust you, so not taxes. My defense, I have my gun. Why need—when Europe grabbed his arm already but maybe you’re not—could we—in Washington they use tank that will start distributing, diffusing in Europe the idea that armed citizens are the only ones who can really defend the republic. So to a large extent, if the—let’s say progressive elements on the political system do not respond to the new condition of society, then move and fill in. But at the same time, they don’t have the institutional capacity to do it. But ultimately, the most positive influence of the movement in politics may happen to the change of the basic ideas and the basic themes of society.

In the United States, the notion that there is a cleavage, regardless of the statistical demagogue between the 9 percent and the 1 percent and the 99 percent, no one talks about this. We knew about income inequality. We knew about this, and now the whole society including comedians and let alone in the congress. They started to talk about the 1 percent and the 99 percent. That means what for people? Well, this society, apparently, the society of over 20, no, is with fundamental social inequality. This changes up here, up here. Now, the political response to that depends and the thriving politics can be demagogue, et cetera, but changes the terms of the debate.

You know, one very interesting opinion poll data in the United States is that states has always has refused in the [inaudible] in the notion of social conflict between rich and poor. Classes trouble if you want to call it. Well, according Pew Institute in 2009, the proportion of people who thought that the conflict between rich and poor was the defining conflict in society, were 45 percent. In 2011, 70 percent, meaning, the notion that there is a conflict between rich and poor that is exactly contrary to the American ideology in which the only problem for the poor is that they are not rich yet. But they will. They will eventually become rich. Well, people are saying, no, because of the 99 percent of it because—now—and lastly, the people in the movement, the language of the movement, say all this discussion about what are we accomplishing, what is ultimately the result, they say this is in fact the reflection of the productivity logic of capitalist. If you don’t produce something, you are nothing.

Well, maybe the debate is wrong. Maybe the outcome, the important thing is not the outcome but the process because the process is a transformative force. Why? Because it’s what you do materially. Deliberation, discussion, projection, all these is the material practice and it’s the material practice that changes people’s mind. And that finally, may have necessarily has to translate into something that’s what the movement people say. We don’t—we are going to vote for sure but who cares. We know we are not going to solve the problems in the next election, but what about in the election 20 years from now?

That’s what social movements like the women movement, the environment movement, the civil right movement were saying 20, 25 years ago. It has its different timing. If it’s not in this election, it’s the next society. And that’s the space where social movements are being from. Still the most important thing is how communicative autonomy has impacted the overcoming of fear. And I want to continue by reading a tweet from Tahir Square, from a woman named [inaudible] but the tweet she signed Sullia Strong [phonetic] that read like this. “We have brought down the world of fear. You brought down the world of our house. We’ll rebuild our homes. But you will never build again that world of fear.” And that is the transformation. Thank you for your attention.

01:09:45 Q & A

CB: Okay, Dr. Castells, Dr. Castells has agreed to take questions. Please wait for the microphone.

MC: You handle that. You point at it.

01:10:00 Can social media change the corporate world?

Q: Hi, I’m Mike Nelson and I am a writer for Bloomberg Government. I’m also a professor of internet studies at Georgetown University. I think you’ve done a wonderful job of giving us an overview of what’s happening in social movements targeted at changing national governments. I’m curious if you could talk a little bit about how social movements might change corporate government and how—why cuts by consumers, shareholder action might be enabled by social media and whether you’re optimistic or pessimistic that that will change the way a corporations function.

MC: Thank you very much. Absolutely. You know, the interesting thing about these movements is that they are multidimensional. They touch on everything. And—but this everything ultimately means how things are managed everywhere. So you’re absolutely right. They focus on government because of the right of the movement was linked to the financial crisis and the disastrous management that government have done with the financial crisis. In some cases, they could even tame the financial crisis. But even when they had more like in the United States has been on the expense of breaking the trust of the citizens in that management. So therefore, the main steam of the movement has concentrated there.

But there are all kinds of discussion on one, of although that you mentioned is absolutely about corporate government. Remember all they discussions about the bank fees, with the bank of America, about the—many people have actually switched from their banks to credit unions in a number of states. But even though in Washington State there are number of experiments in which people are creating their own community banks. And they don’t worry worse than the others at this point. In—I have been investigating in Europe a huge movement of what they call ethical banking in which are literally at this point there are over 5 million people in Europe doing ethical banking, meaning you is part of the cooperative.

I mean, you—and the profits are for the members of the bank. And they invest only in terms to get enough return to keep the bank going. And I have not mentioned because I focused on the more political oriented movement, I have not mentioned my other research which is my next book meaning published in November, not in October, which is called Another Life is Possible, alternative economic culture beyond the crisis, which is also empirically grounded and it’s about all the forms in which people are transforming their lives. And this is a huge debate within the movement. People who are more traditional and social movement, we have to change the counselor. We have to go through a political institute, many other people who are in the movement as well. So when, you know, these are going to be long term. Yeah, we’ll do it. But it is going to be long term. I’m 35, what the hell? I want my better life now, not when we make the revolution. The revolution can wait but I cannot wait. And therefore, a huge movement of time sharing, time banks, and alternative financing, and self-consumption, self-production, economic practices, but under a complete economic logic. And they would actually conquer with time implicit.

In your statement, this in the short term is going to be more materially, practically effective because people know that they already lived differently. At this point in Europe, here I don’t think so. But I don’t know the precise data. In Europe, the majority of people agree with the notion of working less and being faithless. And why? Because, well, life is something else than just work for a pay. Interesting which at the same time is massive unemployment. Well, you can take massive unemployment as a tragedy or as an opportunity.

Since they are not going to employ me anyway, let’s organize the life here on different set of values. And there is an increasing movement in those and even in the most ideological factions, there’s a huge de-growth movement. And they’re arguing for slow in economic growth and actually they’re starting growing negatively, not growing more in terms of the national growth. And as you know, there’s a huge branch of economics now developing, economics of happiness which in other things use the Bhutan, Bhutan for places, the Bhutan Gross National Happiness Index which has been debated in the world. In other words, what I’m saying is that beyond the more specifically political movement.

There is a tectonic change in the culture because there is universal distrust in global financial capitally—not in capitalist, not in other forms of capitalism, in this particular form of capitalism. When you ask people, they are not—the majority, they said, no, capitalism is okay. Is this capitalism? Is this global financial capital with no control speculative, no entrepreneurial, no creating wealth, but inventing wealth and taking power wealth from us? That is one, is a fundamental movement coupled with the crisis of political legitimacy. You link together the two things. People don’t trust those who have their money and don’t trust those who have their votes, we are in a tectonic change, and that has different expressions.

01:16:18 Do common or universal cultural norms exist?

Q: Interested in the intercultural aspects if—of your theory, you didn’t touch much on China or Eastern cultures of other—quite distinctive cultural characteristics is a lot of universalism that you talk about. But when we get to these issues of governance and the way societies work, it reflects some sort of cultural norm, some common values, and the internet phenomena that you talk about communications, the theory you’re espousing, has to affect that in some way or another. Could you perhaps address the intercultural aspects in what makes this universal in your mind so that normality of values, what’s right, wrong, good, bad, what defines the society or affected by your theory.

MC: Thank you. Well, two layers of this. On the one hand, there is no cultural homogeneity in the world, empirically speaking, but cultural diversity is increasing, not diminishing. Except that on top of this, some kind of a global cosmopolitan culture of two kinds. Consumerism that’s in global universal culture and at the same time, humankind as a species with common values of preservation, preservation of the species, preservation of nature, let’s say, ecology in the broader sense. They are the two things. So one is clearly capitalist, the other is not. And these are the universal cultures expanding. And in that sense, there is cultural identity in terms of national, ethnic, religious, et cetera, increasing, but two—these two major cultures that are increasingly shared.

There is another aspect of the shared culture which I think is new and is linked to internet. What this shared is the culture of sharing. Meaning, that I go into the internet, I find my people and I connect and I construct a new subculture, but at the same time in combination with other cultures. But we all agree that the internet is fundamental. That’s the culture of sharing. And that’s why a battle is being already launched, not on the anonymous, many other things in terms of defending the internet. Why? Because the internet is the common grounds of our age. If people feel expropriated from the internet, particularly teenagers or the young people, that’s the only way they can start making bombs. If you take away what they can do in the internet or whatever they want, that’s really something. And so this culture of sharing is quite fundamental.

The political culture, I would say, is to a large extent—still, I would say liberal democracy in the traditional term is growing as they share political culture. In most countries, people agree that the elections are important, are fundamental, but on this and therefore, there is the contradiction within China nowadays. But on the other hand, the sharing of this political culture, in most cases particularly in the social movements, incorporate another dimension. Participatory democracy becomes the new frontier of democracy. Pure representative democracy, we thought participatory democracy, it’s in fact empty and will soon be ineffective in managing the processes of self-government.

Now why is participatory democracy now possible? And there are very interesting discussions about—in terms of the history of the movements that we’re arguing about, racial democracy, participatory democracy, and always in the 19th century, early 20th century, to think everybody agreed with that but was not practical because they have to at one point decide and you could not scale up. Internet allows you to scale up. So the age of network democracy seems to have arrived. So there is an old discussion between marxists and anarchists. Marxists says, “No, power has to be centralized because otherwise it’s not affective.” And anarchists says, “Well, but when he centralizes, then it becomes a dictatorship.” But now anarchists, what they call the neo-anarchist are—because they are not organizational anarchist, are saying, “You know what? You Marxist always said, the development of the productive forces allows different forms of social organization.” That’s exactly what happened but it was not communist. So communist what they tell you of the 19th century, anarchist is the one of the 21st century because now the internet allows decentralize democracy, decentralize participation, collective decision making, et cetera, and I find it’s a fascinating discussion.

01:21:22 The Internet and the question of autonomy

CB: We already have overtime, overtime, but just one last question. [Inaudible] is waiting.

MC: Not my fault.

CB: I think you are the next one - in white.

Q: Profits and people that work in social movements or building them fit in with all these technology. So what do you have to think about that?

MC: Thank you very much. This is a fundamental question, both theoretically and practically. Look, to give a short answer and we can continue the discussion later. Without social networks in the internet these movements would not exist, simply. It would be other social movements. It could be others. But this is a hypothetical question. Every—of this movement, all the protest, all the actions, everywhere, start with the internet. And therefore, the only relevant question in my opinion is which are the material and cultural consequences of going through the internet at least for a substantial part of the movement and the interaction.

The discussion that I found frankly empty about and the revolution be tweeted or not and the revolution was not tweeted, oh, yes, it was tweeted. Well, empirically it was tweeted actually. You cannot explain the wonderful analysis by Gillard, Lawton, and others in tweet flow, good researchers that show empirically how their tweets organizes the Arab revolutions.

But at the same time were not only the tweets, but without the tweets you cannot explain the process, the development, the participation, et cetera, et cetera, so that’s the point. Technology as always is embedded into the social practice. So starting with other reasons for—but without that this movement would have been crashed again. And for me, the most important thing in Egypt is the comparison between how the 2008 attempt particularly in the working class city, northern of Cairo was crushed with thousands of people killed. And the same people who survived that created the April 6th movement that then using Tunisia as the trigger, the same people started another kind of movement on the internet in January 2011 and it worked, you see. So therefore, I think at this point, you cannot imagine social movement or nonprofit organizations, or advocacy groups, or the Tea Party for that matter, without the internet had the implications of the internet. But the internet has implications. It needs interactivity. It needs horizontality.

You know, when politicians decided that “Oh, sure, we forgot the internet” and Obama were the first one in the world who really understood what the potential of the internet and that was decisive for the financier of the campaign, from the organizer of the campaign, we know that. Now all politicians want to do the same. How? The magic potion. If you have a good website, a good internet, in other words, and we win. Well, internet in one word, the cultural definition of internet is one word, autonomy.

Internet is the technology of autonomy. If you are not ready to give autonomy to the movement behind you, you better don’t try the internet because you may have a problem. And because if people really take seriously their autonomy and have the technological tools to be, they will not need you. So—and now Obama continues with his scenes about the internet but it doesn’t work in the same way, right, because people autonomously decided otherwise.

Downloadfile:

Networks_of_Outrage_and_Hope.ogg

On Apple vs. FBI, privacy, the NSA, and more

Alkibiades — Thu, 10 Mar 2016 12:48:52 +0000

Speaker(s) Edward Snowden; Nick Gillespie

Language spoken English

Date of Recording Thu, 2016-02-25

Player-image:

On February 20, Edward Snowden addressed a wide range of questions during an in-depth interview with Reason’s Nick Gillespie at Liberty Forum, a gathering of the Free State Project (FSP) in Manchester, New Hampshire. FSP seeks to move 20,000 people over the next five years to New Hampshire, where they will strive to secure “liberty in our lifetime” by affecting the political, economic, and cultural climate of the state.

Snowden’s cautionary tale about the the dangers of state surveillance wasn’t lost on his audience of libertarians and anarchists. He believes that technology has given rise to unprecedented freedom for individuals around the world—but he says so from an undisclosed location in authoritarian Russia. And he reminds us that governments also have unprecedented potential to surveil their populations at a moment’s notice, without anyone ever realizing what’s happening.

In the midst of a fiercely contested presidential race, Snowden remains steadfast in his distrust of partisan politics and declined to endorse any particular candidate or party, or even to label his beliefs. But he stresses that the U.S. government can win back trust and confidence through rigorous accountability to citizens and by living up to the ideals on which the country was founded.

Additional information

Produced by Todd Krainin and Nick Gillespie. Cameras by Meredith Bragg and Krainin.

video source: http://reason.com/reasontv/2016/02/25/edward-snowden

image source: twitter.com

0:00 Meet the Free State Project.

NG: So to get right into it, I want to thank Matt Philips and Carla Gericke in particular but all of you in New Hampshire for everything you’re doing with the Free State Project to create “liberty in our lifetime.”

Edward Snowden, thank you so much for joining us. We’re talking from the Liberty Forum of the Free State Project. In 2003, [the organizers] created a project where they said, “We’re going to get 20,000 people to agree to move to New Hampshire and make the state a freer and more interesting, more innovative and fun place.” They recently passed the 20,000 mark so the great migration has started and at some point I’ve been asked to welcome you to come to New Hampshire, to a free state when you have time.

And I’ve been told that among other things, it will be a free and independent New Hampshire. They’re even getting rid of the state liquor stores and they’re not going to have extradition with the rest of the United States. So hopefully you can join us.

Let’s talk about the story that’s very much in the news now: The issue of Apple being requested by court order to unlock the cell phone of one of the San Bernardino shooters. You recently tweeted, “This is the most important tech case in a decade. Silence means Google picked a side, but it’s not the public’s.” Can you elaborate on that? Is Apple really on the public’s side? And how does strong encryption of personal communication, even when utilized by terrorists, strengthen freedom and liberty?

00:53 Apple vs. the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Why should strong encryption be legal?

ES: This is an incredibly complex sort of topic. When you think about the whole Google/Apple thing, first off, Google did come forward. Their CEO made some comments in sort of the defense of the ability of private enterprises not to be constricted by government but to sort of do softer work at their direction rather than at the direction of their customers. Now it was very tentative, but hey, it’s a start.

When we think about sort of Apple, are they the big champions of liberty and individual rights, it’s not really about that. We’re not looking for the perfect heroes here, right? It’s “don’t love the actor, love the act.” And what we see is that what the FBI is asking for right is in the wake of the San Bernadino shootings which are of course legitimate crimes, this is an act of terrorism as it’s been described. And they said “alright, we’ve got this private product out there that’s designed to protect the security of all customers, not a particular individual customer, but it’s a binary choice. Either all of us have security, or none of us have security.

And so the FBI went “yeah yeah yeah, that’s great but we want you to strip out some essential protections that you built into this program so we can attack the program in a certain way.” And as a technologist, this is deeply disturbing to me because I know that we’ve had laboratory techniques since the 1990s that allow the F.B.I. and other organizations that have incredible resources to unilaterally mount hardware attacks on security devices to reengineer their software without compelling private actors, private enterprises, private individuals to work contrary to their will. Now prior to this there are important court precedents that have equated code to speech. It’s an act of creation, an act of expression when you program something, which is no different than someone writing a paper or building a house. These are things that are guided by your intention. And if the government can show up at any time, at any house, at any individual and say “regardless of your intention, regardless of your idea, regardless of your plan, you don’t work for you, you work for us, that’s a radically different thing.

And whether it’s Apple or Google or anybody else who at least challenges that assertion of authority and allows us to litigate that, both in the courts and in the public domain, this is critical. Because prior to this moment, these things were being litigated in secret in front of a secret court, a foreign intelligence surveillance court. In 33 years, [FISA courts were] asked by the government 33,900 times to authorize surveillance or reinterpretations of statutory law that are more favorable to the government, that we never knew about because all of these decisions are classified. In those 33,900 times in 33 years, the government got a no from this court only 11 times in 33 years. And that’s why it matters and that’s why I think this is important.

NG: Can I ask a follow up question and part of this is legal and part of this is kind of technological, I mean is any communication really secure anymore? David Brin 20 years ago talked about the transparent society: privacy is done, get over it. And if no communication is really secure anymore, is it a problem or is there a way to actually hold the government accountable and to restrain it, or corporations for that matter? Is this beyond a question of government acting and corporate acting and individual acting because certainly Brin was writing long before Facebook and social media where people are giving away oodles of information again and again (and all freely).

So is any communication private anymore and if it isn’t, then what next?

05:02 Is privacy dead? Should we just get over it?

ES: Well this is again, a really complex question. I could talk for a lot longer than the time we have on it. But the idea here is that there are different kinds of surveillance. Mass surveillance, which is typically done on communications in transit right, as they cross the internet over lines that you don’t own, but you don’t have a choice not to use because of the nature of the modern communications grid.

You can’t say “I want my communications to only route this network.” Once they leave your home, once they leave your handset or your cell phone or whatever device you’re using, it’s out of your control and it gets routed invisibly across borders, across systems, across enterprises. The danger of this is that any one of these actors, whether they’re corporate actors, whether they’re governments, and we know for a fact that governments particularly are using this sort of capability. As they transit, if they are transiting electronically naked, that is unencrypted, anybody can read these. They can capture these, they can store these, they can do whatever they want with them and there’s no indication that it happened. So this is the property of course that spies like, whether they’re corporate or they’re state.

NG: It’s that nobody even knows they’re being spied on.

ES: Right. Does this mean that there’s nothing that works, no. There are ways to shelter the content of the communication which is basically, if you think about what’s in the e-mail, what’s in the register with Amazon.com or the call that you made on a voiceover IP system, or the text message that you send through a certain app, they can no longer read that.

All they can see, what you’re doing is those communications that were electronically naked have now been closed. They’ve been armored in the kind of thing that means I can’t just look under your skirt and see what’s happening there. All they can do is see that now there’s a covered wagon sort of moving down the trail. That cover allows you to have some measure of privacy but there’s still a danger here which is they can monitor the movement of the wagons. And this is what the government refers to as metadata.

How non-experts should think about it is “me data.” It’s data about you. There are perfect records of private lives in the activities sense. They can’t see what you’re saying but they can see who you’re saying it to, when you are saying it, with what frequency. Intelligence agencies use this information to derive what we call “the pattern of life” of individuals. And it’s very much the same as what a private eye would create and store if they were following you around all day. They can’t sit beside you at every cafe you go into because you’ll notice “that’s the same guy that was there all the time” or “why is this guy leaning over to my table to hear my conversation?”

But they’ll be near enough to see who you’re meeting with, when you got there, what the license plate of your car was, when you left, where you traveled to, where you slept at night. Now this stuff is being done on a mass, indiscriminate scale to all of us, even today, even sort of after these reforms. The government stopped holding these repositories of data for a particular phone collection program who everybody in the country calls, but they said the phone companies can still hold this information and we’ll just ask them for it. But for the internet, they haven’t made any changes to those programs as a result.

Now when we talk about the direct factual challenges there, there are two points. One is armoring the in-transit communications. This is a principle called end-to-end encryption. Now the Founding Fathers of the United States used encryption to protect their communications. Benjamin Franklin did a number of enciphering systems himself because he recognized that when great power has intensely detailed private information about the political activities of groups that are acting in manners that they would find inconvenient or burdensome, it’s going to be a very short revolution and we would have lost.

So they sort of asserted means of defense. That is what is happening today, for the internet is a standard. It’s not targeted against the United States government, it’s targeted against all actors who seek to subvert the intention of the users. We’re trying to protect everyone everywhere across borders. We’re not just fighting the NSA, right, this is about China, Russia, North Korea, whoever you’re afraid of, we can protect everyone from all of them by working together. There is still that further measure of metadata, sort of “me data” again, the private activity records, where how do we conceal the fact that a communication occurred as opposed to the details that occurred within it. And that’s still an area of active research. There are programs that are developed that do help this, but this is still actively a topic of research.

10:48 What would a legal and effective government surveillance program look like?

NG: People like William Binney, Kirk Wiebe, and Thomas Drake [whistleblowers against surveillance]: You’re not against the government actually acting to ensure the safety of citizens. Can you talk a little bit about what would a government surveillance program that is legal and effective look like for you? How would they play that out without inevitably [abusing their reach]? You’ve written about that what the government can do and what it should do, are merging, that there’s no sense of morality. But how do we put that kind of stopping point where we have a government that can help protect us but not ultimately surveil us constantly?

ES: Well, the first point here is to recognize that the nature of open societies, free societies, right, nations of liberty, is that life does entail some measure of risk. You’re only going to be perfectly protected if you sort of bury yourself under the ground and live in prison. And then, you’ll still be at risk from the inmates that are walking the asylum with you. Life involves risk, it involves choice, it involves contest.

That’s where it derives its value from, that’s where we progress from. We are tested everyday by our environments. Now that doesn’t mean we sort of open the vest and assume that we should be vulnerable to every actor anywhere who wants to do us harm. No of course, we should take reasonable measures, and we should work to create capabilities and measures that allow us to identify wrongdoers and punish the wicked, as things have always worked sort of, throughout human history. Now the method of law enforcement that we know works has been the model for thousands of years that has done so. And that is that we use what’s called a particularity requirement, which is really what the Fourth Amendment is about in legal terms. The idea is we don’t have a general warrant where the court says that anybody you think might be related to some class of activity, whether that’s political or you might even call it radicalism, or anything like that, you just go “Well, we think they’re like that so we’re going to look at them.”

Instead, you need some probable cause that you can demonstrate to a court. This isn’t just a gut feeling, you have be able to to lay out the evidence. If this individual is engaged in some kind of wrongdoing, if they are a criminal, and it meets a threshold that allows the court and the public sort of by proxy to go, “The interest in sort of limiting these rights for this particular period of investigation for the public outweighs that of the natural right that we all enjoy to be left alone without reasonable cause.”

This is what has changed in the wake of 9/11 and particularly what 2013 revealed. If the government is targeting a particular device of an individual or they’re trying to tap a phone of an office that they know is involved in mob activity, there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s what we’ve always done. We’ve done this for hundreds of years. We have to have those methods of investigation but at the same time, pre-criminal investigation, that is watching all of us all of the time, because we might someday become interesting, they want to go back in time and look at all the records that they collected in advance. The government calls this bulk collection, everyone else calls it surveillance, and says “Well you’ve come to our attention today but we know what you did June 5th 1992 and we don’t like that.”

That’s a problem because it radically reorders the balance of power in society. It is preemptively restricting our rights without any cause to do so to create a sort of surveillance time machine that allows them to go back and say no matter what you’ve done, we know what that was. We can analyze you, we can assess you. And why this matters is it’s no longer justice. It’s only order, and these are very different things.

14:53 Could we have stopped the slide into mass surveillance?

NG: Six years ago this month, in 2010, in an Ars Technia forum under your unfortunate pseudonym “TheTrueHOOHA,” you asked, “did we get to where we are today via a “slippery slope that was entirely within our control to stop or was it a relatively instantaneous sea change that sneaked in undetected because of pervasive government secrecy?” With what you were just talking about, how would you answer that question now? Are we frogs in a pot of water that’s getting warmer and warmer or was there a switch that was turned on and that’s how this happened?

ES: So first off let me caveat as a privacy advocate, I’ve never publicly owned these posts. And this is not to say “oh these aren’t me” or anything like that. The individual in question who offered these posts seems to have a suspiciously large amount of correlating events in their life that match mine. But the point here is that when individuals write under pseudonyms right, there’s a reason for it. [It’s] so individuals can be judged on the basis of their ideas, their engagement in a particular conversation rather than their personalities.

NG: And certainly in American history, such as the Federalist papers [which were published anonymously], we are a country that was founded on anonymous speech in many ways. You, or whoever it was, was participating in a grand tradition….

ES: For the sake of argument, let’s presume that individual was me. The idea here is, “Could we have arrested this slide?” And at the time, contemporaneous to that, I think it was circa 2009, 2010, I was still working for the CIA, I had just moved to the NSA. I believe. And I didn’t have the same kind of comprehensive insights into how the system had arisen. And of course, if I would have been in this position writing as this individual, the idea would be, “Well, we should’ve seen this coming, right?” It would have been incremental, there would have been some public indications. But when you look at the public record of how the institutions of mass surveillance occurred in the United States—they occurred under a veil of secrecy. And when officials were challenged on them, even under oath, even on camera, they lied about them.

And this is something important. If we sort of rewind to that post-2013 moment, there were stories published in 2006 on warrantless wiretapping, more by James Bamford in 2012, and when you look at statements in front of Congress, they looked a lot like this between Rep. Hank Johnson and former Director Keith Alexander of the NSA:

[clip of exchanges runs]

Johnson: Does the NSA routinely intercept American citizens’ e-mails?
Alexander: No.
Johnson: Does the NSA intercept Americans’ cell phone conversations?
Alexander: No.
Johnson: Google searches?
Alexander: No.
Johnson: Text messages?
Alexander: No.
Johnson: Amazon.com orders?
Alexander: No.
Johnson: Bank records?
Alexander: No.
Sen. Wyden: Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?
James Clapper No sir.
Wyden: It does not?

Clapper: Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly.

ES: So this is sort of the challenge. Can we stop policies? Can we arrest them? Can we have a voice in them? Can we have a vote on them if they are intentionally and wittingly concealed from us?

19:04 How can government earn back the trust and confidence of the American people?

NG: By all indications—look at Gallup or Pew or other surveys—trust and confidence in government to either be effective or to do the right thing, these are at or near historic lows. How does government win back the trust? I’m going to ask the libertarian question in a second, but most of us here are libertarians, not anarchists [groaning and baby crying]. And the anarchist is crying in the background there, but how does government gain back the trust and the confidence of the American people?

Because we saw this in the 1970s with the Church Committee hearings and a general hollowing-out of belief in government. Libertarians want a government that is smaller than it is perhaps, but one that is effective and is legitimate. How does government win back the people’s trust?

ES: Accountability. I mean, the whole idea behind the divide and the simple language of a private citizen and a public official is that we know everything about them they know nothing about us, because they are invested with powers and privileges that we don’t have. They have the ability to sort of direct the future of society, and as a result it is incumbent to assume a level of responsibility and accountability to the public for the exercise and abuse of those authorities that simply does not exist today. And that’s the problem. They know more about us than they ever have in the history of the United States and some would argue in any society that sort of ever existed before.

At the same, thanks to aggressive expansions of state secrecy authorities, the use of classification and so on and so forth, and even simple management of the press where, you know, they play leaking games and they don’t give comment on this, that, or the other, or more directly aggressive things like we just saw with the Director of National Intelligence, the most senior intelligence official in the United States. They’re excusing themselves from accountability to us at the same time they’re trying to exert greater power over us. And that I think leads to an inevitable result over time. Whether through good intentions or bad, that the public is no longer partner to government, but merely subject to it.

21:40 What’s wrong with the political parties in the US?

NG: From your Twitter feed, it’s clear you are following the presidential nomination process in the United States. Answer this because this goes to that question of accountability: You’ve talked about how there’s really no difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, the two major parties on these issues. How does a country that offers up something like three dozen varieties of Pop-Tarts in every supermarket—how are we reduced to a non-choice in the political process? How do we change [things] so that there are voices that are saying, “You know what, maybe the surveillance state needs to be talked about more?”

ES: I should caveat this with the fact that I’m an engineer, not a politician. My opinions being what they are, I look at systems in terms of incentives. Where are the incentives, and how does human behavior emerge in response to those incentives? We’ve approached what in game theory terms is called a Nash equilibrium, which is where you’ve got a limited set of choices that each player in the game can make and they’ve identified what is the most optimal move that they can make in the context of that game and so they play the same move every time hoping that in some rounds they’ll win even if over time they’ll lose because they’ll have the maximized score possible for the given set of constraints that exist. Now what this means is that people go, “Well I dislike this side, I dislike this individual, I dislike this tribe more than I dislike the other one and so I’ll pick this one.” And so they start voting against. It’s important to have the principle of understanding who I will vote for, but also who I won’t vote for. But we need to disentangle this from parties.

One of the reasons I haven’t endorsed anyone in the election is I don’t believe there’s anyone in the race that represents my values at the current time. Now this isn’t to say that won’t develop, this won’t change, but it’s not about who you hate the most, right? It’s about who represents you. And not voting is also a powerful action, right, you’re revoking a mandate. Now this can’t work forever, it works in the tactical sense, but we need to think more broadly, back in the kind of Samuel Adams sense right, small groups of people who are politically passionate can sort of light brushfires of liberty in the minds of men…

24:27 What are Snowden’s political beliefs? Is he a libertarian?

NG: That by the way is the ethos behind the Free State Project—very much so. So can I ask on a technical question: Can you vote in the election? Can you send in an absentee ballot? And if you do, will you make your vote public? It’s a secret ballot, but it would be kind of an interesting observation to see who you voted for.

ES: This is still a topic of…active research [laughter].

NG: You know, as I mentioned before, this is an overwhelmingly libertarian crowd and one of the things that libertarians talk about besides reducing the size, scope, and spending of government and maximizing individual freedom is recognizing that economic liberties and civil liberties are conjoined and inseparable.

In some of the clips that you showed, people were asking, “Are you tracking Amazon purchases? Are you tracking cell phones?” We see that surveillance covers economic activity as well as civil or personal communication. How do you define your politics or ideology and where did it come from? Do you consider yourself a libertarian or a classical liberal? Are these terms that are meaningful to you? Or how do you think about ideology I guess.

ES: Well you know there’s a whole field of political theory that I don’t really subscribe to in terms of classifying people on the basis of their beliefs. Because what it’s trying to do is it’s trying to establish tribes, it’s trying to establish common identities. And while I do think that is valuable and important for the sense of collective action, for me, it’s not really the right fit. I do see sort of a clear distinction between people who have a larger faith in liberties and rights than they do in states and institutions. And this would be sort of the authoritarian/libertarian axis in the traditional sense.

And I do think it’s clear that if you believe in the progressive liberal tradition, which is that people should have greater capability to act freely, to make their own choices, to enjoy a better and freer life over the progression of sort of human life, you’re going to be pushing away from that authoritarian axis at all times. Because authoritarianism is necessarily about the ordering and control of society. Now they can argue that that will produce a better quality of life, but it cannot be argued that it would provide a freer life. And for me, I’m on the side of freedom.

26:27 How did Snowden educate himself? Is he helped or hurt by his lack of formal education?

NG: You’ve said, “Our rights are not granted by government. They are inherent to our nature. It’s entirely the opposite for government. Their privileges are precisely to equal to only those which we suffer them to enjoy.”

That’s coming out of a classical liberal tradition [which gave] birth to the American founding. You’re an autodidact in many ways. You don’t have fancy degrees and I don’t see diplomas on the wall behind you. Talk a little bit about the process of how did you educate yourself and how does that play into larger roles of the types of educations that governments or societies give people. Is it to liberate them? Is it to kind of subjugate them? Talk about where you came from in terms of your ideas and your self-learning.

ES: I don’t want to necessarily say that the modern education system is intended to subjugate people. But we do know clearly that it’s [designed to teach] a certain set of values upon everybody who is engaged in that system. Now those values don’t fit everyone, and one might say they’re not even appropriate values for a broadened, diverse, or liberal body, particularly one that has to be able to cast votes in a self-informed, critically thinking way, rather than one where you know the majority of your education is, “this is the history of this party and that party.”

For me, yes, I did not graduate from high school. Instead I got a G.E.D., and I don’t have the formal education and that’s held me back in a lot of ways. In terms of just wanting to have some kind of formal education, it’s difficult to go back and get later on. Like chemistry, right? I’m really interested in chemistry but lacking the formal education, it’s just kind of a pain to go back and read textbooks later on. At the same time, I have a very broad and diverse education on a number of different topics and this has helped me in my professional career because I was much more conversant and fluent on a number of topics that ended up being very highly valued in the national security space that really aren’t taught in school, particularly when it comes to system security and anonymity online, in certain ways, how to combat that.

This illustrates a key point which has been reflected by other thinkers before, it’s not original to myself, which is there is a very strong difference, a bright line difference between your schooling and your education. And we should all be careful not to let the one influence the other.

28:48 Why did Snowden see bulk surveillance differently than his NSA coworkers?

NG: You were working with people and you’ve talked about this, who had similar backgrounds and technical skills but then you brought a moral dimension to what you were seeing when you were working for the government as a sub-contractor. Was it a moral education that was lacking in the people around you? Or was there something in the way that you learned that triggered that sense of “You know, we all know this is unconstitutional or this is wrong?” Why was it you who actually decided to bring it to the public’s attention?

ES: Well, I represented a different generation in many ways than the majority of sort of the institutional structure at the NSA and CIA because of course I was the new group in.
But I was also sort of the first generation of children of the internet, right? When you think about where my biggest influences are in that context, my reading, my writing, well of course yeah we read the history of course yeah, we read the books and the traditions and the classics as well, which classics do you get directed to, which come to your attention? That becomes part of a sort of zeitgeist debate that occurs all around the world. You have a much larger mixing of perspectives. And because of that, nationalism— blind nationalism—is less effective.

Because there’s a very real difference between allegiance to country, allegiance to people and allegiance to state, which is what nationalism today is really more about. The institution can come and go but the people remain. And this kind of context is what differed. I brought a Constitution in and put it on my desk because I had a personal interest in it and I thought it was relevant to the work. And there were a number of people that I worked with, co-workers and colleagues, particularly when I started raising sort of alarm internally about these programs and saying, “Something doesn’t smell right here” who agreed with me, who were interested, who had different interpretations who challenged back and forth, but who cared.

And then there were others who didn’t, who said the Constitution didn’t really matter, who would literally say, “You know, who cares about the 4th Amendment, the 5th Amendment?” and so on and so forth, the 1st Amendment. It doesn’t really matter, this thing is from hundreds of years ago. It’s no longer relevant and look, we’ve got a job to do. There’s bad guys out there and we’re going to decide who they are and what we’re going to do about them.

The problem with that that I would argue is how designations of national security are made in the first place. There’s a real-life case here that I think is relevant to a lot of people where the FBI had a lead on the individual. They were a religious leader, a sort of community leader that the government state believed was in contact with or under the sway of sort of agents of foreign power. And this is common with all people who are involved with any kind of radical politics. If you challenge the prerogatives of the state, they presume it’s at the direction of another state because that’s simply how the thinking works.

The attorney general was briefed on the case, they said, “Yeah, let’s wiretap this guy even though he’s a US citizen, son of a popular cleric, fairly well known” and they put him on a watch list. They said “in the event of a national emergency, martial law you know, F.E.M.A. and so on and so forth we’re going to detain this person because they are dangerous. They are a destabilizer, they are a radicalizer, in the modern vernacular.” And the FBI actually made a determination that out of all of the similar radicals in the United States, this individual was the most dangerous from the standpoint of national security.

Does anyone in the room know this case? Do you recognize him? And the determination was made two days after he gave the “I Have a Dream” speech. That is what a threat to national security looks like [displays image of Martin Luther King, Jr.]. There’s a very real difference between the public interest and the national interest. When you hear national interest, when you hear national security, think state interest, think state security and you’ll be on the right track.

33:03 Was the NSA involved in gathering evidence against Ross Ulbricht?

NG: Let me finish with three quick questions if I might. First, in the case of Ross Ulbricht, who was prosecuted for founding the Silk Road website and is now effectively [serving] a life sentence. Do you assume, or should we assume that the NSA was involved in corroborating or gathering evidence which they might have denied in the actual trial?

ES: Yes.

NG: Ok, alright. That was easy enough. Two more…

ES: Just to elaborate on that… But the NSA and the United States is part of a large group called the Five Eyes Network, right. This is the United States, the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. And these five countries, they sort of mix everything together in a common pot, and they share and share alike. They’re not allowed to ask a partner to violate their laws, but partners can share information that would have been in violation of their laws if they didn’t ask for it.

Now not to say that particular strategy applied in this context, but the difference between the National Security Agency’s authorities and particularly the British equivalent of the NSA, the G.C.H.Q, is [that] the UK is allowed to use NSA systems that we built, that work in the United States and everything else against, or under the mandate of what’s called a serious crimes authority that’s completely unrelated to national intelligence prerogatives. And this includes drug trafficking. They are literally mandated for this. They use our systems for this. And the fruits of their investigations they can share freely with us.

So I would say yes, of course, and it was foolish in the court case, I understand why they did it, he didn’t want to own the server at the time, he didn’t want to say “yes, this is mine” therefore the judge wouldn’t allow him to make a sort of 4th Amendment argument here that investigatory restrictions had been violated. But it seems unthinkable to me that there was not an intelligence angle internationally that was involved in that case.

35:39 Will the government eventually give up fighting internet commerce? Or will they just change tactics?

NG: You know we’ve talked about governments will do what they can do. With something like Silk Road—and you can throw in something like some of the activities of people like Kim Dotcom and what not—will government at a certain point give up? When they realize that the minute that Silk Road was closed, other sites crept up that were dealing in larger numbers and more traffic? And will they come up with a different way of either regulating or minimizing harm that might arise from this? Or will they always be perpetually chasing after and kind of trying to, and I mean this in the broadest terms possible, always going after kind of nickel and dime dealers in activities that they don’t want? Or will they finally say “We can’t really surveil everything nor should we and so we’ll come up with a different way of dealing with technological innovation and human commerce?”

ES: I’m not sure. Again, this is something that is quite beyond my expertise. But I would say there are models in history to look at to sort of draw from. Look at the prohibition on alcohol. Eventually crime groups gained influence, they gained power, and they were difficult to combat as a result. Therefore, the government reevaluated the policy and found that it would be more in line with their interests, not the public’s interests, but their interests, if they ended that prohibition.

And we see similar things happening with prohibition of marijuana today. Now that’s not to say that I think there’ll be necessarily a global free-for-all, but technology is providing new means to enforce human rights and traditional concepts of human interaction through technology rather than through law, across borders, regardless of jurisdictions which allows people to communicate privately, associate privately, care about one another privately.

For example, in Russia there are prohibitions on who and how you can love one another as there were in the United States quite recently. And this kind of thing is being challenged in ways that I think will be difficult to subvert. Does this mean that sort of great powers are just going to, you know, throw their hands up, give up, and walk away? I think that’s unlikely. However, the individual is more powerful today than they ever have been in the past.

And this is why you see governments that feel threatened by an individual like Julian Assange, who’s trapped in an embassy. Because despite the fact that they can control the physical location of someone, the power of the reliable sort of old, bad tools of political repression, are increasingly losing their weight.

37:32 How can Snowden advocate freedom from a place like Russia?

NG: And the irony is not lost where you’re sitting in an authoritarian regime talking about how people are freer and more empowered than ever.

That is an irony that I hope people will cogitate on for a long time. When we talked about the presidential election, what would a candidate have to do in order for you to say “you know what, that is the type of thinking on surveillance or on individual freedom and liberty from surveillance that I can get behind?” What would they have to do?

ES: I mean again, this sort of political direction gets beyond my expertise so I don’t like to talk too much about it. You know you brought up an interesting point there about Russia that I think is actually important to contextualize. There’s a lot of fair criticism that’s like, “Hey, this guy’s in Russia.”
It’s important to understand that I never intended to end up in Russia. Originally, I was hoping to get to Iceland. After that, Latin America when Iceland fell through. But the State Department cancelled my passport, trapping me in Russia when I was initially on the move, as soon as they heard I was in the air. Despite the fact that I’ve asked several times, they’ve refused to reinstate it, which is quite interesting. The United States of course criticizes me for being in Russia but at the same time they won’t let me leave.

Be that as it may, there’s a deeper point here, a philosophical point here about hypocrisy. Is it hypocritical to be somewhere else and not be as concerned with that locality as you are with your own? And I would argue that it’s not. I owe my first duty, my first allegiance, my first loyalty to fixing my country before I try to solve the problems of the rest of the world, right? We’ve got to get our house in order first.

That’s not to say that I haven’t criticized the policies of the Russian government, which I think in many cases are clearly indefensible, particularly when it comes to how they reach into the internet, how they reach into private lives, private homes in ways that are not ok in Russia. They’re not ok in the United States and they’re not ok anywhere. And this is something that I expect to continue. The thing that I hope for the most, the thing that I care about the most is, “Let’s set the standard in the United States [so that] we are the example for the rest of the world to emulate.”

We don’t want people to hold us up as an example as today, and recently this week, this Apple vs. FBI case, where Apple by the way, just yesterday, had a call with the press where they said “No country in the world has asked us to provide the authorities that the FBI is doing today.”

We don’t want Russia or China or North Korea or Iran or France or Germany or Brazil or any other country in the world to hold us up as an example for why we should be narrowing the boundaries of liberty around the world instead of expanding them.

41:00 How should we teach children about the Internet?

NG: So, that’s another way of saying you definitely won’t be voting in this election I think.
A final question, and this goes to what the Free State Project is about because it is a brushfire for freedom and for liberty and it’s 20,000 people and even already with less than 2,000 people who’ve moved here, they’ve changed various types of laws and culture in New Hampshire, which is already a pretty free place.

You talked about being a kind of child of the internet. You know, many of us are parents, and our children should “read” the internet in its entirety, but what are the places, what are the texts that they should read? It is true [that the internet] decentralizes knowledge and you come across the serendipity of all sorts of perspectives, which is incredibly empowering and important. What are the practices that are good, that would give [children] an independent, critical ability to kind of move into a world which is both nationalistic in a good sense -you are an American and you seem to still be proud to be an American - but not statist. Where do we go on the internet? Where should we be asking our children to spend some time?

ES: I think it’s less important to go to specific texts as it is to demonstrate how specific texts are written. If I were a parent trying to help my child understand the internet, the key exercise that I would do is I would go look at cases that are super partisan today right, extraordinarily charged. And I would get two radically different rewritings of the same story and I’d make them read both. And I’d do this on a number of different things to show, because this is something that a lot of older people fall prey to who aren’t so familiar with the internet and they just get their news from a single landing page or portal or whatever.

And also young people who get super-filter-bubbled because they sort of opt into communities that create a sort of groupthink, where it’s are always people sort of agreeing with what they say. [That] was not available the same 20 years ago on the internet or 10 years ago on the internet really. There weren’t walls that were quite so high separating communities. The idea here is to show that the truth lies spread across the abundance of sources. The beauty of the internet is that you no longer have to rely on a single source. You no longer are vulnerable to the broadcast that is “this is the voice of truth, this is the voice of fact” but it’s important to understand that sources that you prefer can still be wrong, even if they’ve got the right principles, the right ideas, the right values. Getting the facts right matters more than anything else.

NG: You’re talking about the internet really as the fulfillment of the Enlightenment project of kind of competing versions of truth in a marketplace of ideas and an understanding about the construction of knowledge and truth rather than its self-evident presentation without argument following. You can just nod.

ES: Yeah.

43:43 Under what conditions would Snowden return to the United States?

NG: For a final-final question, what would be the conditions under which you would voluntarily return to the United States? Are there terms that you would be happy for? And this is something, again not to harp on politics because all of us I think are living our lives beyond politics but, that’s one of the things you hear, like: Well you should come back and you know, have your day in court, etc.” What would be the conditions under which you might return?

ES: Right, so this is interesting, it’s evolved quite a bit. Originally, I volunteered myself for prison, but I said that I wouldn’t be, I wouldn’t allow myself to be held up as a deterrent to other people who are trying to do the right thing.

And that was fundamentally contrary to what the government wanted to do. Of course, they wanted to nail a scalp on the wall as a warning to the others. And even though I was quite flexible here, it was Daniel Ellsberg who leaked the Pentagon papers, the secret classified history of the war in Vietnam in 1971, that showed the government had not only lied us into the war, but they kept lying to us to keep us in it despite the fact that they knew there was no way to win. And he told me that this was a mistake. And eventually he convinced me of this in the sense of to what do we owe our first loyalty? To law or to justice? And to submit ourselves to sort of a government that is sort of intentionally trying to deter the political beliefs and political acts of other people merely on the basis of law, as though that were a substitute for morality or superior to morality, is a very dangerous precedent to set.

Now, I’m still, this is I think, most people might be surprised by this, but fairly more trusting in the value of government and institutions than Daniel Ellsberg, who since his initial work, has just been an extraordinary crusader and a true radical in the best way, for more than a generation now. But when it comes to what’s the current context, what’s the current state of play that we’ve been at?

I’ve told the government that I will return if they guarantee a fair trial where I can make a public-interest defense of why this was done and allow the jury to decide if it was right or wrong in the context of both legality and morality. And the United States responded with a letter from the attorney general saying they promise they would not torture me. I’m not kidding, I have that letter. So it’s still kind of a work-in-progress but we’ll see where it goes.

NG: Well, thank you so very much for your time.

ES: Thank you. I look forward to seeing you in New Hampshire.

Downloadfile:

Edward_Snowden_Apple.ogg

Music for Computers

Alkibiades — Wed, 03 Feb 2016 17:25:31 +0000

Speaker(s) Goodiepal; Leo Findeisen

Language spoken English

Date of Recording Wed, 2015-02-11

Player-image:

At the Berlin transmediale 2015, Danish musician and performer Goodiepal presented his performance-installation “Drop-In or Drop Out!”, a continuation of his acclaimed “El Camino Del Hardcore - Rejsen Til Nordens Indre…” (2009-12). Through his installation, he focused on the way technological inventions such as the Internet have formalized knowledge and the capability of the human psyche to imagine things beyond this formalization.

In order to reclaim a space of imagination, Goodiepal has been engaged in the creation of what he calls “unscannable” objects and practices in the past few years. The publication of “El Camino Del Hardcore” follows this logic, as it is constantly evolving, handmade and not available online, contains encrypted texts and is assembled from the author’s sometimes incomplete personal memories.

The short interview he gave during the festival provides additional information on the development of Goodiepal’s work as a traveling performer on a self-made bike, his former occupation as a lecturer at the Danish Royal Academy of Arts, and his personal outlook on the relation of artificial intelligence and the arts.

Additional information

Audio recorded at transmediale 2015.

Image source: https://vimeo.com/105115205

00:05 Introduction

LF: Hello, this is Leo Findeisen for transformingfreedom.org/.com, we are here at the transmediale 2015, and the main theme is “Collect it all”, or “Collect all”. So it’s not… it’s a very obsessive theme in a way. But now, what we do with our beautiful digital culture, with all these great and beautiful things that we carry with us and that we have at home, and type in, and so on… And then there was somebody pointing me to a quite well-known artist, a sound artist, maybe also a meaning artist, which would be a concept artist, called Goodiepal from, if I’m correct, Denmark and Iceland.

G: No, the Faroe Islands.

LF: The Faroe Islands

G: Yeah, right in between.

LF: And so, Denmark and the Faroe Islands have been visited by Goodiepal. Also, they have visited him in his world, in his music, and, so I have been told, that Goodiepal actually has different thoughts for these things called machines that blink and that do things; that we type in and that can record our voice, like this machine here. So, hello Goodiepal.

G: Good day.

LF: So, can you make meaning out of this little hint that somebody said: you think we should treat machines more ethically?

G: That’s what I have been talking about, but I don’t really know if… That is, treating other people, or treating other beings more ethically is something – it’s an option, it’s not something you have to do, but to choose kindness is always a beautiful thing.

01:55 Communicating with artificial intelligence through art

It started out with me being a teacher at the Royal Academy of Music in Denmark. And I realized that my students needed some new thought in their music, basically. And I said: I mean, a lot of people say that art forms culture, but I think it’s very important sometimes to say – maybe art does not form culture, but maybe at least it can comment on (was: come from) culture. So instead of being so big about that it actually forms the culture we’re living in, maybe it just comments on (was: come of) it. I mean, I’m not saying it does, I’m not saying it doesn’t, but that’s basically where it started out.

I thought it would be interesting to ask my students what the computers have promised us but have not given us, and they did not really understand my question. So, I went to the library and I looked up a whole lot of things and I found an article from the 60s, stating “In twenty years of time, the computer will be more intelligent than the human brain,” and another one from the 70s, saying “In twenty years’ time, the computer will be more advanced than the human brain,” and one from the 80s, et cetera, et cetera. So that singularity is something that keeps getting pushed in front of us. And this was in 2003.

I started working with these ideas, and I presented them in 2007, and my students thought they were relatively boring and they didn’t understand if I was going down some kind of Ray Kurzweil path, which at that time had become sort of “the big thing” and blah blah blah.

LF: In what? Can you just quote it?

G: In… artificial intelligence, computers predicting the future, blah blah blah, but from an American perspective. But, see, I believe that, if the computer is going to be more intelligent than the human brain, than we have to take it in as human beings, accepting that it is more intelligent and then, instead of saying “What are we going to do about it?” we can say, “How can we go into a cultural dialogue with another intelligent being here, on planet Earth?”

And it was very interesting, because a lot of my friends at the time did not want to go into such a dialogue. They said, “Nah, music is for human beings only.” And I think it’s very interesting to do such a distinction, saying: “Music is only for human beings”, because who are you to say that? If you, for example, perform music here and two foxes come running in through the door, and they like the music, were you to say, “Get out! You’re not human beings?” So, basically, why do you do the distinction? Because the next logical distinction is, then, to say that music is only for men, or only for women, or only for women and not for men, or saying that music is only for a certain kind of homo sapiens – that could be white people, black people, whatever. It could also be, “This kind of music is only for people with red hair,” and things like that. So why do you want to discriminate? Why don’t you just say, “My music is for everyone that listens, or everything that listens?”

And that started some interesting philosophical discussions. Generally speaking the more culture a country had, or the more pride in its own culture, the more unlikely the people living in the country… the more unlikely the people were to embrace the idea of performing for some other beings from other… and that’s very interesting.

So when I was teaching at King’s College in London, there was a guy called John Deathridge, and he really, really did not like… he was very against it. He said, “Music is only for human beings, period. That’s about it.” He was not interested in performing for another intelligence, or for aliens, or whatever. This is not… And he was very interesting, because he was very pro-European culture, and every time he talked about European culture, he clenched his right hand and talked about it. He has also written a book called “Wagner beyond Good and Evil” and he was very pro-European music. But I only believe that European music, or music in that way that he was seeing it, as some supreme art form, can be supreme if it’s shared. You have to bring it all over the place and share it with anybody and everybody you can share it with; that is wonderful. And if it’s something better, than let’s embrace that instead. But he was very protective of his European ideals and I thought that was very strange – but he’s an English person, and English people are very protective of their…

German people have a different way, I presented here at the interartica in Berlin as well, and they were very different, they had a different approach to it. Still, they were very… They considered making music for the computer in the future as something of a stupid idea; and so did the Danes, but less, somehow. Not because they were not as pro-European culture, but because they simply did not really understand the question, I think, so that is, basically, where it ended.

Anyways, so generally speaking, we play music for purposes. That is what a lot of my students said, they said, “I play music to get laid”, or “I play music to dance”, or “I play music to get a grant”, or “I play music for this and that.” And I thought, yeah, that’s ok, but generally speaking, the things that we consider art are generally dealing with things too big for the human mind to understand, such as love, death, time and the universe, themes like that. That is going for most poetry, most composers talk about these things, most painters try to incorporate these things. And, therefore, I think that was a good place to start out and say, well, if basically what we consider art is things that we do not understand, than potentially also things that a computer would not understand would then be going into a dialogue with such a being.

Then, we can say, ok, it is all very speculative. So, worst case scenario, we will never get in contact with artificial, alternative intelligence of the computer, but we will learn more about what it means to be a human being in the first place, so that’s not so bad. That is the worst case. In the best case, we will actually do that and we will have a rock-‘n-roll time.

07:52 Disagreements with academia

But most people who deal in or who are interested in artificial intelligence in a speculative manner are not interested in communicating with that artificial intelligence. They are interested in talking about when it happens, and then, what the devastating effect of such a thing is. And that is the wrong way of approaching this. You have to say, as soon as you have created such an intelligence, you also have to find out how to have a dialogue, or how to have something with that thing.

So, I don’t think we are really ready to accept artificial intelligence yet, simply because we still call it “artificial.” We do not call it “another intelligence,” we call it an “artificial intelligence.” So I started out dealing a lot with this, and then I was thrown out from being a teacher at the Royal Academy of Music in Denmark. And then I was also thrown out from King’s College in London. And then I was doing my lectures more in a performative manner because that was the way I could get away with it. And that’s basically what I still do today: I perform my lectures, and I perform my things in different ways, and that’s what we are doing here.

LF: I would be interested to know how many years you have been teaching at the Royal Academy.

G: I was teaching for five years.

LF: When you were thrown out, was it because of your funny questions?

G: Yeah, yeah. It took them about four years to realize what I was teaching to the students, and then they said I had to stop teaching that, and I had to teach them computer music; and I said, well, I am teaching computer music, I’m teaching next-level computer music. So that was it, and then I was thrown out. But that’s a whole other story. Well, it was not so bad to be thrown out, because I have been teaching at most at other places after that, so that was good. I mean, I am here, partially, for that reason as well.

LF: Did you have to care for a family already?

G: I do not have a family, so I was lucky with that, I think. It would have been a completely different situation. No, but that’s good. So, no more teaching, and on the road, that is basically where I’m at.

LF: And can you tell me: did you come… If I understand correctly, you evolved that question, and the project of developing a creative process, of answering it. You developed this there, in the academic setting, or…

G: Yeah, somehow. I mean, I … I think I… One of the most interesting questions along with… I was raising the questions and my students had a space to raise them. In order to create a future for the students as well. Because usually, if you go to an academy, an art academy, where people are taught to paint and things, then painters are very interested in talking about their work. If you ask them, they have a lot to talk about. Composers generally don’t want to talk about their work, they are very protective of it, somehow. They think you are not allowed to find out. They are, like, whew. But it’s also interesting because the academies – well, that’s the place where you learn. But a conservatory – that’s a place that conserves music, somehow.

So I thought it was important to raise some of the questions inside music. But music is a limited structure. It is a very free structure, but the understanding of music is limited. So you always have things that happen: if you want to question music, you have to go outside of music and then wait until music can accept what you are doing as music, basically. And that’s not a new thing, but if you take all the Fluxus things, which people today are performing as music: they were all happening at art galleries, etc., etc., etc.

So, at the same time, here we have… I mean, I don’t blame these people for not being able to raise the questions, but, generally speaking, at the conservatories around Europe at that time, I was… There were not many that were able to question what we were doing. Most people were interested in just refining and… I mean, they were very happy when we understood, for example, what electronic music was, and made an agreement, basically, that was they came out with two speakers. That it evolved from academic tape work but moved into some kind of electronic hack crap, and that was basically acceptable enough. But that’s not radical computer music. The radical computer music is to say, “Ok, let’s try to make music not necessarily with computers, but for computers.” And that was what kind of came up.

12:35 Distribution and the value of knowledge

But now, it’s been a completely different story ever since, because – well, long story. But now, I have built a bike with which I travel. It has two dynamos on it, which allows me to make my own electricity, so I can say that real computer musicians make their own electricity and potentially build their own bikes as well. And that comes down to another few things that I think are interesting. One of them is that I don’t believe – I’m not so interested in the context and content of information any longer, I’m more interested in how the information is actually distributed.

I think we have to look into that more. And now, when we have mostly all information available, it’s much more interesting to say “But how is that information actually distributed?” And most of what is over-information these days is also based on distribution, and not on the actual information any longer. For example, if there is a Hollywood film out there, then various people will fight each other because you are not allowed to upload it to YouTube, but you can go to another site and download it, etc.

So, distribution of knowledge is much more important now, or much more aesthetically interesting than actually the information itself, which comes down to the only interesting thing I have ever said and that I call the Goodiepal equation: and that is basically that in this idea of technology, in that we move further, and further, and further into a spinning wheel of knowledge, and everything has to move faster and faster and faster and faster.

We do forget one thing, which I think is very true, and that is that the further a message has traveled over space and time, the more importance can you add to its content, meaning that anything that you and I are talking about here is of very little importance, simply because it happens right now. But if you keep this recording for, let’s say, ten years, then it will be of more importance already, simply by the time that will have passed. Anything that the Beatles talked about when they were playing in Hamburg will be much more interesting than anything Metallica talked about when they played in Berlin, simply because it has traveled further over space and time. So anything – yeah, but it’s true.

Anything John Cage said in New York in the 60s will be of more importance than anything Metallica said in Berlin, or even the Beatles in Hamburg, simply because it traveled further over space and time. And you can go… you can move further and further down the line, and anything written in ancient Egypt, even graffiti on the wall, just saying da-da-da, or something, or anything written in ancient Greek is something that scholars would be “Mhmmm!”

So, if we take that to the furthest distance than we can say that anything that is transmitted from another planet, that travelled maybe a thousand light-years, and has therefore been on its way for a very long time, would be therefore the most important message we have ever … no matter what it says. If it just says “Crap!” or “Yo!” than that is the most important thing that ever happened to the human race. So, I would say that actually importance is added to information simply by the amount the information travels, and that’s the Goodiepal equation.

Downloadfile:

Musicforcomputers_0.ogg

The Lifecycle of a Revolution

Alkibiades — Thu, 21 Jan 2016 22:22:33 +0000

Speaker(s) Jennifer Granick; Jeff Moss; Phillipe Courtot

Language spoken English

Date of Recording Mon, 2015-08-10

Player-image:

In 2015, Jennifer Granick was the keynote speaker at Black Hat, the annual conference of the global InfoSec community held in Las Vegas (UT). In her talk, she argued that 20 years from now, the internet might complete its shift from liberator to oppressor. According to her, centralization, regulation, and an increasingly divided community of users have slowly subverted the dream of a free and open internet. These developments will continue to form the future of communication and information, and transform the internet into a slick, controlled, and closed thing. While it might still be possible to prevent this from happening, Granick believes that in the next 20 years we will need to get ready to smash the Internet apart and build something new and better.

Jennifer Granick is the director of Civil Liberties at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. Outside of academia, she is mostly known as the attorney who defended some of the more notorious criminal hackers around, including Kevin Poulsen, Aaron Swartz, Jerome Heckenkamp and the hackers in the Diebold Election Systems case.

The video of the speech as well as a revised written version are also available at https://medium.com/backchannel/the-end-of-the-internet-dream-ba060b17da6…

Additional information

video source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tjvw5fz_GuA

image source: https://medium.com/backchannel/the-end-of-the-internet-dream-ba060b17da6…

00:01 About Black Hat

Jeff Moss: Okay, so welcome to the largest Black Hat ever. I say that every year, I’m just going to take a recording of myself. And it starts to make me really wonder: Where does this all end? Because I really feel that we are all employed for life. I mean, we really can keep doing this forever, because, as far as I see, I see problems and challenges. And so, on one hand, I’m really excited, on the other hand, I just want to sleep sometimes, you know?

So, this is our 18th Black Hat, and the second year at the Mandalay Bay, and every year, I do a little bit of talking about statistics of how many people show up, how many countries are represented. I’m just going to get that out of the way before I move into some of my remarks, and so: 102 countries represented, that’s a pretty good proportion of the planet is here around you. And 20 of those countries have only sent a single person. And you can guess who the biggest countries are – United States and… Come on, who is the second country?

[Inintelligible voice from the audience]

China? No. I would have guessed Canada, but it turns out to be the UK. Ok, so they did their own count. So we have a lot of representation, and we also have some new things we have been doing this year. Last year, we announced our academic scholarship program, where we are trying to get more students involved from computer science programs around the country, and, so, to get a crack at a free admission to Black Hat, you write a white paper about a security topic, and you get it submitted, and they all get reviewed. And we don’t really have a cap on how many we accept right now, and, so, this year, we accepted 153 that we thought were interesting enough. Yeah. So if you are in the audience, and you are in here because of that program, let’s hear it! Come on, guys! So, now this is your time to make the most of it. Right? Take advantage of any opportunity you have, because next year we’re probably not going to accept your writing. It might be a one-time offer [laughs].

We also, for the second time, are doing a donation to the EFF. And the EFF has really been involved in a lot of legal battles over the years, and sometimes you agree with them, sometimes you don’t agree with them, but what you can agree on is that they’re dedicated, and they’re motivated, and they get results, and they understand our community. And there’s not that many other legal groups that really understand us and go out of their way to reach out to us and to involve us in their process. And so we are doing another 50,000 $ donation, for the work they are doing not just on behalf of our speakers but also on behalf of our community. So I want to thank EFF for that, and their good work this year.

So, I have a couple of remarks, you can see how well they have been laid out [shows notes scribbled on a sheet of paper]. And so for the theme this year, I have been trying to think of: “How have I been feeling last year about the direction not just of the United States, but of the direction of information security in general?” And it’s really feeling to me like a pendulum, a pendulum has been swinging and it’s accelerating. It started maybe a couple of years ago, and what’s happening, I think, is… When I started off in information security, when I was a hacker, it was not illegal to pirate software. How many people were alive back then? Or: took advantage of that loophole? Non-commercial copyright infringement was not illegal. You could not make a profit off of somebody else’s work. But you could enjoy it yourself, for no profit. How far have we come, right?

Now, they are talking about mandatory minimum sentencing in the UK for software piracy. So, in the course of a short… of about 20 years… Well, actually, in the United States, non-commercial piracy changed, and the case started essentially in about 1994 to 1997, with the Net Act, it became illegal. So, less than 20 years ago, it was legal. So [gestures from left to right] on one side of the pendulum, and here we are today. And if you take that metaphor, and you start looking around, you can see it in many areas [repeats gesture]: very little legislation, lots of legislation today.

And so, when I was making notes to talk about, I realized that everything that is happening now, we are in the middle of. We are sort of the gatekeepers on this. We are going to be the trusted advisors. When we want to understand the implication of the Internet of Things, liability is, what is possible? We are the people building it, or we are the people securing it, we are going to have to be the ones who are advising on it. Is it possible to remote update 100.000,000 Internet of Things devices? We are going to be the ones to be sort of in the middle of that. There are security implications.

So you might not think that you are going to be in this battle, but you’re going to be pretty central to this fight over the next five to ten years. And, make no mistake, what we decide what happens in the next five to ten years, we’re going to live with for the next 30. And so you really have to start thinking a little bit more broadly about what you are working on, where you are donating your time, and what kind of world you want this to be.

You can see this just with the Crypto Wars starting all over again: mandatory backdoors, golden keys. These are not new concepts to us, but they are new concepts to the new players. And we have to bring some perspective and some history to let them know why it wasn’t a good idea then, and why it’s not a good idea now, even worse idea now.

So, if you think about it, we have insurance coming on the scene, cyber insurance is going to suck up maybe a quarter to a third of your budget in the next, say, five to ten years. That’s not going to make you any more secure, that’s not going to patch any of your routers, but when your routers do fail or get hacked, you are going to have some insurance, right: a classic risk-avoidance strategy. But how are going to still do your job if some of your budget is moved to insurance? You are going to have to play in a world where there is more regulation, there is more insurance, there is more involvement of the legal system. So, for example, I ask people this, and I have not got a good answer. So, if you can tell me an answer to this question, I’ll put it in my brain, I’ll think about it, and I’ll write something.

And why, when your company is under attack, do you not employ all the tools that are at your disposal? Right? You deploy your technical tools, but how many of your companies have actually gone out and sued someone for attacking you? It’s really rare. But if you think about it, in any other instance, you would be deploying lawyers: intellectual property theft, disgruntled employees, competitors stealing, but in certain areas, when you are being hacked, we don’t deploy our lawyers. Why is that? They are sort of like our army. Governments have armies, they have state departments; as a company, you don’t have any of that. You don’t have the law on your side, the law to use force, all you have got is civil law. Why are you not using civil law? I think this is going to become a bigger component in your toolbox in the future. You are going to start having to reach into that box and use it. So you should start to get familiar with what tools to use.

Another one I am thinking about is liability. This was not a concern of ours 20 years ago. It’s going to be a big concern for us going forward. Do you think that we can solve all of our problems that we are facing in security and the ones we have in the future if there is no software liability? I hate saying this, but I do not see a way forward without software liability. Which is going to be more of the same, as far as you can see. It is going to be like turtles all the way down. No software liability of any – it could be a dollar, it could be ten dollars – I’m not saying it has to be punitive, I’m just saying if normal, legal functions are not injected into the process, we are going to have more of the same.

Can you imagine Boeing, or Airbus, or Tesla – they are essentially moving data centers, flying through the sky. Yeah, they are data centers with wings, or wheels, but they are data centers. And they operate under liability. Right? They have some pretty strict software liability around their moving data centers. But an Oracle data center without wheels? No liability. So do you think someone like, I don’t know, Elon Musk, or someone at Boeing, they are going to feel that they are in a great competitive situation when everything they do requires so much more engineering and liability protection, but over there, the Microsofts and Oracles of the world – no protection? No, I think they are going to want a level playing field at some point. And it’s going to be competitive. And so I think even if we do nothing, market forces are going to start driving us toward liability. But what is that going to mean? For you, and for the way you run your business?

09:40 Introduction of Jennifer Granick

And so, just more and more of these issues are becoming ripe, and, so, for that reason, when we were looking for a keynote this year, I was trying to think of someone that encompasses the big perspective, the long view, that’s familiar maybe a little bit more with the legal side, and maybe a little bit less with the technical or the geopolitical side, to really kind of help us understand what these big shifts in social direction, legal direction, what this means. And so for that we have Jennifer Granick as our keynote.

And I first met Jennifer at DefCon 2, I believe, and we have been talking about it back there… Besides being a rare occurance of a woman in a hacking conference 20 years ago… I can’t imagine: was I hitting on her? How did I meet her? No, it turns out she was signing in, and she put her name down, and she put “lawyer.” And I was so excited that there was a lawyer there, and of course everybody wants free advice from a lawyer, so I started talking to her, and we stayed in touch. And over the years, Jennifer became the go-to person. I mean, if anybody in the scene anywhere got into trouble, Jennifer was there to help. She was a defense attorney.

And I remember at one point, she… If you remember Peter Shipley, who invented wardriving: he was being accosted by the hotel because he was doing something, and she busted into the hotel security and pulls out her little barrister association ID, and she was like: “I’m his attorney, let him go!” And she is not afraid of controversy. She has helped, over the years, Max Butler, was involved in his case, Mike Lynne, ten years ago she was involved with, the MTBA charge card hackers, helping them, Kevin Poulson, helped weave, she helped Aaron Schwartz, she has even helped me several times. I mean she has really helped everybody. So that’s why I’m so proud to have her finally on stage.

11:48 Thanks to Qualis and their CEO

And to introduce her, I am equally proud to reintroduce you to Philippe Courtot, chairman and CEO of Qualis. And Qualis has been a sponsor for Black Hat since about, probably, 1999. They have had a long view. And back then, there was no cloud, there was SAS. I think SAS had just been invented as a tool. So they were offering their services SAS, and then the cloud came along so they had to rebrand. So now they are offering their security in the cloud. But, you know how the technology is, it’s essentially the same stuff. But what’s different, I think, maybe, with what I see from Qualis is that they are making their stuff more accessible, and they are offering more free services, so you can get sort of play around with their stuff.

And I asked him what his longterm goal is, I mean, what’s after cloud? If there’s SAS, cloud, mobile, mobile SAS, mobile SAS cloud, mobile [gibberish]… Those acronyms don’t work. But really, what it is, they are trying to basically build security, simple security, into the fabric of the cloud sort of as a background, and if it was coming from somebody else, who doesn’t have an almost 15 years track record with us, I would not really give him a lot of credit, but for Philippe, I’ll give him a lot of credit for the longterm visionary view. So, with that, I want to see how Philippe makes his entrance on the left here. Thank you very much.

13:28 Laudatio

Phillipe Courtot: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you, Jeff, for this very nice words. And it’s an honour and a pleasure for me to have the opportunity of introducing our keynote speaker. And this is because Black Hat is very special, it’s very special to me, because I think it brings the best minds and the best hearts in our industry so we can continue moving forward. And I think this is very important, in fact, especially now, in 2015. 2015, which I believe we may end up calling the Year of the Megabreach in reference to the office of personal management.

But also, I believe, it’s a pivotal year for all of us, because in fact, I think, there is two – not one, but two – mounting challenges in front of us, which are, as we well know, on one hand cybersecurity and on the other hand privacy. And when you think it through, it’s not possible to disassociate both of them. And this because, in fact, they represent our digital freedom and the digital freedom of our children. And with this in mind, I’m very honored and pleased to introduce our speaker, a lady and a lawyer who in fact dedicated her career to our digital freedom. And also, as Jeff mentioned, a lady and a lawyer who also was, since the very beginning of our industry… became known as the person, the first person that hackers call. So with that I’m very happy to introduce Jennifer Granick who is the Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. Thank you very much, Jennifer.

16:00 Jennifer Granick’s personal background within the hackers’ community

Jennifer Granick: Hello, ladies and gentlemen. I’m really excited to be here. I think I have come to almost every Black Hat since the show started and it’s a real honor to be invited to be the keynote.

So, it was twenty years ago that I started coming to these events and that I went to DefCon. And I was interested in going to DefCon because I believed in the dream of a free, and open Internet. And I believe that we want a world where information is freely accessible. And I believe in the freedom to tinker, the hands-on imperative that people should be able to study, manipulate, reverse-engineer the devices, the software, that define the world around us, that that’s what it means to engage with and to understand our world. And I went to DefCon because I wanted to be part of making these dreams true, and as an attorney, I thought I could use my services to protect hackers, the people who were making this world happen, from the predations of law. But today, that Dream of Internet Freedom that brought me to DefCon twenty years ago is dying.

17:26 General trends

And it’s dying because – nobody is murdering the dream – but it’s dying because, for better or for worse, we’ve started to prioritize other things, we have put other values ahead of openness and freedom. We are looking at security, online civility, improving the user interface, protecting intellectual property interests, and we are valuing these above freedom and openness. And so, through neglect and other evolutionary trends, what we are seeing is an Internet that is less open and more centralized. We’re seeing an internet that is more regulated. We used to not have very much regulation, now we do. And in terms of where these rules are coming from, we’re seeing an Internet where the United States’ dominance over the network is fading and other countries are getting in on the regulatory business. And this is really important, because the next billion internet users are going to come from countries that don’t have a Bill of Rights, that don’t have a 1st Amendment. And it’s going to be those governments that are getting in on the business of regulating the internet.

So, these trends are accelerating. We can see them now, but they are accelerating. And what I think this means is that the dream, today, is in danger, but we can kind of see forward into the future and what the future will look like twenty years from now. And twenty years from now, you won’t necessarily know anything about the decisions that are made that affect your life and your rights. The software is going to compute on data, and it’s going to decide whether you get a loan, whether you get a job, whether a car runs over you, or drives off a bridge. And these things are going to happen, and you’re not going to know why, and maybe the people who design the software are not going to know why either.

Now, when the public learns about these things, how are we going to feel? Well, it’s going to work well enough. It’s going to work well enough. And what is going to happen is that there will be a lot of mistakes, but the mistakes are going to be on the edge cases, and as long as those mistakes disproportionally affect edge cases and minorities, people are going to accept this state of affairs. But that’s not ok. Because it’s the edge cases and the minorities that are the ones that are the innovators, that are the early adopters, that are the first movers, that are the ones that evolve our society forward.

The Internet is going to become more like TV instead of this global conversation that we envisioned 20 years ago and that attracted many of us to computers. And rather than technology being revolutionary, and overturning existing power structures, we are seeing that technology is being used to reinforce existing power structures. This is particularly true in security. People want and need a certain level of safety online. But what we have learned is that people are not able to protect themselves. And so the idea of security has been centralized: companies and devices need to provide security to the public. Well, that’s not working well enough, but that is the enterprise that everybody here is engaged in trying to provide. But when we centralize in order to achieve that goal of security, what happens is that we create these choke points where regulation can happen. And we are seeing that regulation in things like the push for crypto backdoors. The regulation is going to be done by governments that have domestic, local concerns, not global concerns. It’s going to be influenced by elites, and that is people with money and companies with money. And so, powerful groups are going to get to decide who gets security, and who doesn’t.

And then, finally, we see that… finally we see that the way the internet is currently operating – for technological and for business reasons – instead of routing around censorship, is actually facilitating surveillance, censorship, and control. It doesn’t have to be this way. But if we are going to change things, we need to start doing it now. And it needs to start with us making… asking some difficult questions and making some hard decisions.

What is it going to mean when computers know everything about us, and computer algorithms decide about life and death decisions? Should we be worrying more about another terrorist attack in New York, or about the ability of journalists and human rights workers around the world to do their jobs? How do we value and weigh those two things? How much free speech does a free society really need? We see that technology has created this golden age of surveillance. Can we also use technology to readjust the balance of power between people and governments so that we can have some privacy back? Given that decisions by private companies are going to be determining individual rights, how can the public interest be communicated into that process? How can we democratically control what these important platforms and private companies do, without squelching innovation? Who is responsible for digital security? Is it the US government, is it governments’ role, is it private responsibility for corporations? And what is going to become of the Dream of Internet Freedom?

23:50 The Dream of Internet Freedom in the 1980s and 1990s

For me, the Dream of Internet Freedom began in 1984 when I read Steven Levy’s book “Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution” in which he talks about computer scientists and engineers who built the early internet. And these people had a value called the Hacker Ethic. And the Hacker Ethic was that information should be freely accessible. The Hacker Ethic was that… was the hands-on imperative: that people should be free to manipulate, change, modify, study, reverse-engineer the technology around them. And the Hacker Ethic was built into the technology itself. The decentralization was a design principle that had a political impact. And the important thing about decentralization is that it empowered people to make their own decisions about what was right and wrong.

Decentralization was built into the very DNA of the early Internet, where there would be dumb pipes, smart edges, and the innovation could take place and the network could run it. And the idea was that when we have this global network, and the global network would allow us to communicate with anyone, anywhere, anytime, and that would bring us all of the hopes and dreams and glories that the human mind and heart could dream up. I wanted to live in that world.

And that idea, that we could be in charge of our intellectual destinies, and that thechnology would help, carried with me to college, when I went to college. And my college, it was New College, a liberal arts school in Sarasota, Florida. Do we have any New Collegians here? Oh, too bad. Yeah.

So, New College is a place where the motto of the school is that “Everybody in the final analysis is responsible for his or her own education.” And it was around that time that I read the Hacker Manifesto, in Phrack magazine, written by The Mentor. And I learned from that that hackers were a lot like my fellow academic nerds at New College. We were tired of being fed intellectual baby food. We wanted to take responsibility for our own lives. We thought that information should be freely available, and that we should be able to communicate and think freely. We wanted to… We mistrusted authority, and we wanted to change the world. And we wanted to live in a place where, in The Mentor’s own words, we would exist, without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias, just based on the quality of our thoughts. So, this is what I was into when I was starting to use the internet in 1991.

And I remember the day that everything clicked for me. We had a small ISP called hallownet and I needed some help, I didn’t know what I was doing, so I asked a question of the system administrator. And he started to respond to my question and I could see him typing, his letters, one by one, appearing on the screen I was looking at, and this, just, connection over the technology. And it made me realize, viscerally, for the first time that this idea that we could talk to anyone or everyone, in real time, could be a reality. So, twenty years ago, when I became a criminal defense attorney, I had this love of technology.

And I learned that hackers were getting in trouble for doing things that I thought were actually pretty cool tricks. One of the instances that really affected me was – I was a legal aide person for the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department, working in the jail and giving the people legal advice and representation. And one of the jail inmates was looking at having all of his jail credit time taken away because he had been basically hooting into the pay phone and getting himself, and all of his pod mates, free phone calls home. And I was like, you are going to get time away from that, that’s pretty cool. And as I was investigating the case, that’s where I learned that hackers were getting in trouble for all kinds of things. And there were all these laws out there that were impacting the Hacker Ethic, and I thought as a lawyer I should get involved and maybe I could help.

28:40 First attempts at online regulation laws in the US

So, this was also the same year that the Internet Civil Liberty Wars really started, at least from a legal perspective. That year, 1985, a guy named Marty Rimm wrote a “study” saying that the internet was running rampant with pornography. A law journal published the story, and then Time Magazine did a discover story on it, and the cyberporn scare was off and running. And there’s nothing that gets Congress more excited doing something than the scourge of pornography, so Congress quickly passed this law, the Communications Decency Act of 1996, the CDA. Ok, so this was an attempt to regulate online pornography.

So for those of you who are pornography fans out there this is already a bummer. But it was actually worse than that, because in order to regulate pornography, the government had to argue that the internet wasn’t going to be fully protected by the First Amendment. So the internet was going to be more like TV and less like a library, ok. And it was worse than that, because we had bigger hopes for the internet than that it would be a library. The internet was better than a library, because on the internet, everyone can be a creator, too. On the internet, it’s global. And on the internet, unlike in a library or a bookstore, everything is always on the shelves. So this idea that we will take this promise and basically cut its legs off, so early on, was anathema. We were very upset.

So, what happened was… So at that point, a lot of people became activated, and at that point entered John Perry Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead, rancher, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a great man who has lived a wonderful life. Barlow has been in the hospital these past couple of weeks, so I send a shout-out to him and I hope people will keep him in their thoughts.

What Barlow wrote was, as could be expected, lyrical. And what he wrote was revolutionary, it was really a revolutionary document, the Declaration of Independene of Cyberspace. And in it, Barlow wrote: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.“

Now, Barlow was reacting to the CDA and the assertion that the Internet should be lessfree than books and magazines. But he was also expressing a weariness, and I think a weariness that a lot of us shared, with business as usual. He was expressing a hope that the Internet would be able to place our reading, our friendships, our very thoughts beyond government control. And it was maybe naïve, and maybe a little bit radical, but the core, I think, attracted a lot of people, and definitely attracted me.

So, as it turned out, Marty Rimm and the Communications Decency Act didn’t kill the internet. In fact, it’s a little bit ironic, because what ended up happening was in the law suit challenging the CDA the Supreme Court struck down almost every part of the law. The Supreme Court said the First Amendment applies fully and completely to the internet. But there was one part of the CDA that the court did not strike down, and that part seems to have had… It seems to be, read alone, sort of the opposite of what Congress’s goal was in passing the CDA, because it said that online service providers don’t have to police the content on their services and can’t get in trouble for content except in certain, specific categories. So the idea there is that, you know, the provider doesn’t have to be a policeman.

And together, the Hacker Ethic, the Hacker Manifesto, the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, ACLU vs. Reno – the Supreme Court case, and this part of the CDA describe what’s a more or less radical dream, depending on who you are. But it’s one that many, if not most of us in this room share, or shared, and maybe even have spent our lives working for. So, the dream is that we overcome age, race, class, and gender. The dream is that we can communicate with anyone, everywhere at any time. This enhanced individual liberty. The dream is that you have free access to information. And the dream is the hands-on imperative, the freedom to tinker, that we will be able to study, know, and ultimately understand the devices and software around us. The dream, in sum, was that computers were going to make our lives more free and better.

34:28 Inequality in the digital world

But I’m here to tell you today that this dream of internet freedom is dying. And if you look from here at the trends, and look twenty years on, it doesn’t just look like the internet could be a lot less revolutionary than we had hoped. It looks like in a lot of ways it might be a lot worse. Today, we have seen that race, gender, class are more than resilient enough to thrive in the digital world. We have seen that our ability to communicate with anyone anywhere is being limited by both government control and corporate policies about what speech is acceptable online. We have seen that free access to information is also limited, particularly our ability to study software and hardware around us. So many laws now interfere with what computer hackers do and reverse engineering. So, the question that’s left is: will computers liberate us? Is that dream still possible?

Now, I want to talk first about equality. Race, gender, and class discrimination are proving remarkably resistant to change. Now, I have to say, this has not been my experience: being here, at DefCon, at Black Hat, being part of the world of computer security, I have always felt respected and I have always felt welcome. But there’s too much evidence that other people’s experiences are not the same, and I want just to illustrate this with one simple set of statistics. At Google, 30 percent of the workforce is female, but only 17 percent of the people in tech jobs are. At Facebook, that number is 15 percent, and at Twitter, it’s 10 percent. So we are very far away from equality.

My other piece of evidence is anecdotal: This field in particular has a reputation for being overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly white. Now, I have never understood why that’s true. Because, from what I have seen, the hacker community is unbelievably great at recognizing talent and skill in unconventional candidates. I mean, we have people who are unbelievably successful who never finished college, nevermind highschool. We have people all over the autism spectrum who are doing incredibly well. Age is irrelevant. I mean, Aaron Schwartz, when he was 15 years old, hung out with Doug Engelbart, the creator of the mouse. Inclusion is at the very heart of the hacker ethic and community. And I think we have a choice: we can kind of persist the way that we have been going, or, I think, this field could really be a leader and take leadership in evolving a more equal society, starting with security. I think we have consciencously try to do so, and try to cultivate that talent though.

37:52 Defending the freedom to tinker

Next, I want to talk about the freedom to tinker. And when I say “Freedom to tinker,” it sounds a little bit like a hobby, but I want to impress on people how important this is. Because it’s not the ability to, like, go putter around in your garage. It’s the ability to study, modify, and ultimately to understand the technology around us. And as technology is more and more important, that understanding is necessary for a democratic society. And there are two things that are limiting our ability to… ah, the freedom to tinker. One of them is law, and one is just our natural human capacity to understand things. Now, there are many, many examples of how the law has interfered with the freedom to tinker, but I am just going to give you two.

It was exactly ten years ago that Mike Lynn who worked for ISS was scheduled to give a talk about a new class of vulnerabilities in routers. And Lynn’s employer ISS and Cisco, the router producer he had studied, decided at some point that they did not want him to give the talk. And so they pressed Black Hat with threats of copyright lawsuits to actually rip the pages with Mike Lynn’s slides out of the conference books and reprint and re-do all of the CDs. I mean, there’s nothing that looks more like censorship than people actually ripping pages out of books. So, on stage the next morning, Mike got on stage, put on a white baseball cap?—like ?literally a white hat?—?quit his job and gave the original talk anyway.

Now, I was Mike’s lawyer in this case, and we successfully fought back the civil law suit for copyright infringement, we were able to fight back against the criminal investigation that the companies had implemented against him. But the message was loud and clear, and not just to Mike. The message was: This is our software, not yours. This is our router, not yours. You’re just a licensee and we’ll tell you what you are allowed to do, and you’ll just do that and no more. You can’t decompile this, you can’t study it, and you can’t tell anyone what you find.

The other case I want to mention is the criminal prosecution for computer fraud and abuse act against my fried Aaron Swartz. Aaron got in trouble for writing a script that automated the download of academic journal articles. And he was authorized to access these articles as a student at Harvard, but he was doing it really, really fast. Aaron was a hacker, and he challenged the system in all kinds of ways, and they went after him with a vengeance and charged him with CFAA on multiple counts, and he was looking at a lot of years. And the stress of the case ultimately contributed to his killing himself. But again… which is an unbelievable tragedy. But again, the idea that anything Aaron did was unauthorized to a computer scientist is crazy. But yet, here too, the message was clear: You need our permission to operate in this world. If you step over the line, we will come for you. If you automate, if you download too fast, if you type something weird in the URL bar on your browser –if we don’t like what you do, or if we don’t like you- than this law is vague enough that we can come and get you.

41:44 Political measures and cyber security

Now, the question is, in the future, are we going to have the freedom to tinker? What would it take for us to change the path that we are on now?

Well, first Congress would have to stop this tough-on-cybercrime hand waving, and actually do something for real about cyber security instead of saying “Oh, we’re going to have bigger penalties under criminal law.” Noone cares about bigger penalties under criminal law. If you look at any of the big breaches, we have had over the past two or three years, there have been no criminal prosecutions in any of them. And, you know, China or North Korea, or whoever is behind these breaches… we are not putting China or North Korea in prison. So what’s happening though is that these heavy sentences are chilling the good guys and are not protecting people online.

We’d also have to declare that users and people who buy software have the right to modify that software, and that laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act can’t get in the way of that. So this is really important, because in the next 20 years, we are going to have all these network devices. There is software in everything. It’s true now, and it’s only going to get more true. And if we are not allowed to study that, basically what it means is that we are going to just be surrounded by black boxes that do things that we can’t understand. So we need to get rid of the CFAA, and we need to get rid of the DMCA, we need to get rid of this idea that license agreements can limit what we do. There is a public interest in the freedom to tinker that needs to be protected.

43:32 Technological advances and software liability

The other problem is the idea of… is just our natural intellectual limitation on understanding the world. So in the next 20 years, we are going to see these amazing advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence. And one of the things that is going to happen is that software is going to do stuff and we are not going to be able to really understand why. Some of that opacity will be because we don’t write the software, but increasingly it may be that the very people who actually wrote the software don’t know either.

And a law professor, Frank Pasquale, wrote a book about this, called The Black Box Society. And the idea of the book is that we are going to be surrounded… that algorithms are going to be making these life and death decisions about us, and we are not going to be able to understand them. Really the first step to doing anything about something is to understand it, is transparency. And transparency is actually going to become increasingly hard. So, you know, you take secrecy and you take profit motive, you add a couple hundred million pieces of data about all of us, you shake, a result comes out, and that’s what we live with. We need to think very hard about how we take advantage of AI and machine learning without ending up in that kind of terrifying world. And part of that is talking about who is responsible when software fails. Who’s job is it? And so far, we have had almost no regulation of software. There have been very few cases, mostly where the vendor has misrepresented to the customers, you know, what the software does.

But people who, you know, are not big into regulation are sick and tired of crappy software and they are not going to take it anymore. And that feeling is going to be accelerated by the Internet of Things. Because now we have industries that are very used to product’s liability that are also software vendors. Autonomous cars that crash? Somebody is going to sue. When your networked toaster catches on fire, somebody is going to sue. And there is going to be software liability. We have already had Chrysler recall 1.4 million cars based on research that Charlie and Chris are going to talk about later today.

So, what is going to happen then when we have software liability? I think software liability is inevitable. I also think that it’s necessary. But without question, it’s going to make coding more expensive. And it’s going to make coding more conservative. I think that we will do a very crappy job of imposing software liability for a very long time. And I think that people who are going to suffer are going to be the innovators and the start-ups and not the incumbants. So we have to pay a lot of attention to that and be wary of it. But it is going to happen, because it’s a very short step from suing Tesla to suing Oracle, with all the good and bad that will come of that.

46:54 The evolution of public interest in relation to the use of the internet

So, next I want to talk about privacy, and security, and free speech, but we need to take a step back and talk a little bit about how we got here. So I said… I mentioned that when I was reading Stephen Levy’s book, I was learning about the concept of the decentralized internet, and the end-to-end principle. And the idea of the end-to-end principle was that… was intentional. Innovation happens on the edges. And what that meant was that the internet would not just enable communication – the phone network did that – but that it would do it in a democratized, decentralized, radical way. Power to the people and not to the governments or companies that own the pipes. That model has evolved. It has evolved for business reasons, and it has evolved for technological reasons.

Today, broadband users want to build smart pipes to enable quality of service, to do malware and spam filtering, and to have new business models where they can make more money off the fact that they control the underlying network. Today, hundreds of millions of people conduct their social interactions over highly centralized platforms like TenCent or Facebook. And so what does this mean for the public interest, this evolution away from end-to-end?

If you have not read professor Tim Wu’s book “The Master Switch” then you should. And in this book, Tim takes a look at the other great communication technologies of our lifetime: phones, radio, television, and movies. And what Tim says from studying the history of these technologies is that there is a cycle, and this cycle is this: History shows a progression of information technologies, from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from a jury-rigged contraption to a slick production marvel. I’m thinking BBS to web here. From a freely accessible channel to one controlled strictly by a single corporation or cartel?—?from an open to closed system. Eventually, entrepreneurs or regulators smash apart the closed system, and the cycle begins anew. And Tim traces the cycle through these technologies and then he asks the question I’m asking you guys here today: Is the Internet going to follow this cycle? Is the internet going to become centralized, strictly controlled, and closed?

If we don’t do things differently, the Internet will end up like TV. And, as I said, some of that is because we have neglected the goals of freedom and openness in favor of other values. But I think that we have to recognize that some of it is because people have lost their allegiance to the dream of internet freedom. Some people will say, maybe even people in this audience that the internet is not the utopia that I have made it out to be.

Rather, the Dream of Internet Freedom has clashed head on with the ugly reality that other people can suck. Nasty comments, 4chan, /b/tards, revenge porn, jihadists, nazis. These things are so affecting the public sensibility about whether the internet is a nice place to be or not that increasingly I even hear law professors, experts in the First Amendment who are supposed to know about the chilling effect and the doctrine of overbreadth, talk about what’s the best way to legislate this stuff they don’t like out of existence.

Second, the trends I told you about that are affecting the network. Ant these are centralization, regulation and globalization. Centralization is a problem because it is a cheap and easy point for regulation, control, and surveillance. Regulation is on the rise. It is the exercise of government power in favor of local or domestic interests and private entities with economic power. That’s just the reality of our system, and it’s even more so in other places. And globalization means that other governments are going to get into the mix: other governments who are not constrained by the First Amendment, who don’t have a Bill of Rights, who maybe don’t even have due process or the rule of law.

51:50 Users’ preferences and the golden age of surveillance

Now, when I say that corporate control is a problem, it may sound like I’m blaming corporations. And when I say that the government … the internet is becoming more closed because governments are censoring the internet, it may sound like I’m blaming governments; and I am. But I’m also blaming you, and I’m blaming me. Because it’s the things that we want that are driving these trends. So, just as an example: Who here ever had a blog? [Raises left hand] Did anybody ever have a blog? Okay, a couple of bloggers out there. Who here still blogs regularly? I don’t; I post my updates on Facebook, the centralized server.

Who… Probably a lot of people in this room run their own e-mail servers, but almost nobody else I know does. They all use gmail; and they like gmail because they like the user interface, they like the spam filtering, and they like the malware detection. I’m no different. When I had an iPhone, I didn’t jailbreak it. I downloaded the pre-approved, you know, a-ok apps from the app store, I trusted Apple’s judgement about what was secure and what was, you know, available, and I download apps now, because I don’t like the interface, the mobile interface, on my mobile browser. And when they ask me to say “Yes” to the permissions, I click “Yes” because I want it to do what it’s going to do, and so I give it access to all kinds of information about me, and I love it. I love when I’m at the store and my phone buzzes and reminds me that I need to get milk. I’m thrilled that it’s ubiquituously tracking my location. I mean, because otherwise – no milk, and that would be really bad.

So, my point is that we want lots of cool products in the cloud. But the cloud is such a terrible metaphor, because a cloud is billions of little droplets of water, and the internet cloud is not like that at all. The internet cloud is actually a finite and knowable number of companies that have… together have control over almost all of the internet that we use. And it’s Level 3 for fiberoptics, or amazon for servers, or google for the search enginge and for android; and the fact that there are these chokepoints, these particular companies that are subject to government regulation, whether US or other, means that this is an opportunity – this more centralized cloud is an opportunity for control, for surveillance, and for regulation. And this is not looking like it is going to change.

So, as things keep going in this direction, what does it mean for privacy, security, and freedom of expression? Well, privacy is central to liberty, and that means that without privacy the future will be less free. This is the golden age of surveillance. People know how much information technology today collects about you. But what you might not realize is this:

Here’s a quiz. What do e-mail, buddy lists, drive backups, social networking posts, your web browsing history, your bank records, your medical data, your fingerprints, your face prints, and your shedded DNA have in common? The answer is: The Department of Justice doesn’t think any of these are private. Right? The Department of Justice’s view is that these are all things that either happen in public, or what you voluntarily reveal to service providers, and so there’s no expectation of privacy, and the Fourth Amendment doesn’t apply. Okay. And what that means is that as technology has proliferated all these data, the law has not stepped in to protect it. The law has utterly fallen short on the job.

In fact, quite the opposite: The law is enabling surveillance in all kinds of ways. We have these national security surveillance laws that are supposed to apply to foreigners and particular categories of information, but we have learned through secret interpretations of law that our government in the United States is actually using it to spy on us. We have provider assistance provisions that the government is using not just to say “Well, you have this data, I’d like to get a hold of it”, but to try to force companies to do things like turn over their encryption keys. We have lots of laws, and more are being proposed, that will give corporate immunity for helping out the government in giving your data over, even when there’s other laws, narrow laws, that would say “No, actually this information is private.”And increasingly, particularly in other countries, but we are going to see it here, too, data retention obligations, where companies are going to be basically commissioned to be police officers and spies for governments.

Now, you might think, like, “But there’s got to be some law on this, right?” We have had the internet for a while, e-mail has been around for a long time. But really surprisingly, there is actually only one case that has ever been decided on this, from, you know, a regular or public court. And it was in the Sixth Circuit, which is Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and one other state – sorry for the other state in the Sixth Circuit that I forgot – oh, Kentucky, Tennessee, Michigan, and Ohio; sorry Ohio. But, as a result… But basically, in this case, the Sixth Circuit said “Ok, e-mail is a communication, communications are like phone calls, it’s protected by the Fourth Amendment.” And this case has been really important, but the Department of Justice, in public and in private, continues to say that it is wrongly decided and needs to be overturned.

Now, I want to also take a moment to impress upon people, because you might not really get this (not being lawyers), what a warrant means and how important it is. Now, a warrant means that a judge has to authorize the search. And basically it’s a guard against arbitrary government action: The police cannot just come in and run rampant through your house, or just, you know, investigate you for no reason. And that’s important. But a warrant is also important because it requires you to specifically describe the place that is being searched and things to be seized. So a warrant is also a guard against mass surveillance.

When there is no warrant requirement, it means that searches can be arbitrary and massive, turned against everybody. So, this is really important, but all this data is not being protected.

So, and, you know, with globalization, it really only makes things worse. And it is going to get worse as we see the Internet of Things and networked devices. So, you know, we have got the centralization problem, there’s all this regulation, and countries are getting in on it. I mean, particularly now that other countries know how excessive the United States surveillance is, they want to have the same stuff.

59:14 Security vs. openness

Next, I want to talk about security. We often talk about security as the opposite of privacy, but we know that that’s not true. You can help security without invading privacy, like by locking cockpit doors. Sometimes, to protect security, you need to protect privacy: A homosexual person in India or a human rights worker in Syria is safer because of privacy.

One thing we don’t talk about that much is the relationship of security to openness. You know, as you lock down your network, as you make things more secure with sign-ons and there’s no open wi-fi anymore, and all of that, security has a tension with openness. But it’s also true at the same time that if the network is not secure and safe, people are not going to use it. What good is an open network that is too dangerous to use? Those of us who try to check our e-mail at DefCon already know that.

So the idea that should have been is that people can choose security when it’s appropriate and choose openness at other times. Right? The fact that we need to secure the electrical grid or data systems that control water doesn’t mean we have to have closed wi-fi, or that the government has to sit on the domestic network and spy on our e-mail. But that’s what we are seeing. We are seeing that, in the name of security, we are having this greater exercise of power, particularly by the US government, over our use of the network.

So, instead of having a global view, that security on the internet should be a rising tide that will float all boats, what we are seeing is this very provincial idea that security is “cyber.” And cyber means, in my usage, what General Hayden, former head of NSA and CIA said it means, which is that the US has the ability to use the network whenever we want, and we have the ability to deny that use to our adversaries. That does not sound like an open and reliable internet to me. That’s not my internet. And so what that’s meaning is that, you know, instead of us protecting the security of everybody, the government wants to have crypto backdoors, sit on the network and do surveillance, be able to blackout the internet in North Korea or wherever. And that means that there is going to be security-haves and security-havenots. I think the better analogy for security to understand it is that increasingly, we are seeing security becoming about power, where people in power want security for themselves and want to deny security to others. So, if security is a power relationship, then people are going to loose. And the people who are going to loose are the vulnerable communities, and the minorities, and the religious minorities, that actually need security most.

And, you know, here in the United States, people don’t care enough. Because we think “Oh, we have the Bill of Rights, and we have all of these laws that protect against discrimination.” I think a lot of people know that those laws, like our privacy laws, do not work well enough, but certainly in other parts of the world people don’t have those safeguards, people don’t have that security. And if we are not going to be a leader in providing it to them, they are going to loose out on the democratic benefits and on the human rights benefits of providing security to everybody. But I don’t hear that being the model from our government.

1:02:58 Freedom of speech is being undermined

Finally, I want to talk about freedom of expression. And, just briefly, you know, for all kinds of reasons, we have seen censorship on the internet, whether it’s copyright or that sort of thing. But now that the physical architecture is so centralized, it’s easier to control. So, here is an example: Our government and the UN have started to ask platforms to police their networks for political speech. And now it’s radical speech, or terrorist speech, ISIS videos, or jihadist things, but they are even starting to ask to watch out for people who are becoming radicalized.

So, I can tell you, if you look at what the FBI thinks of as signs of radicalization, we have no idea. The FBI doesn’t know, or psychologists, nobody knows what makes somebody a radical and what makes somebody curious; what makes somebody have legitimate, you know, non-violent political viewpoints, and what makes somebody who is going to be dangerous and violent.

But people are not rebelling against this. I don’t see people booing when google says “Ok, I’m going to, you know, I’m going to take ISIS videos off of YouTube.” People are not upset about that. So it’s ISIS videos, then it’s revenge porn, but we have to understand that this censorship, these censorship decisions, are inherently political, because we don’t see the same call for racist speech, or pictures of the Confederate flag, or that kind of thing. And in the United States, we are not even seeing these laws that we can protest against. What we see is that the government, or interest groups, put pressure on the companies, and the companies make these decisions because they want to have a service that appeals to the majority of their users – not to the edges, not to the fringe, not to the radicals. And so they censor, and most people don’t care.

But the end result of that is that for people, particularly the new adopters around the world… These new adopters around the world, they don’t really have a sense, necessarily, of the broader internet. There was a poll of internet users in Indonesia, and a lower percentage of people said that they use the internet than said they use Facebook. They don’t think about Facebook as “using the internet.” In a lot of the news stories I saw, that was like, “Funny, they don’t know that Facebook is the internet.” And I actually had the opposite reaction, which was: Facebook is not the full internet, Facebook is a community, a narrower community that allows you to do particular thins, shows you particular information, based upon what Facebook thinks you are going to like. But it doesn’t give us that global conversation. It doesn’t give us that radical freedom. It doesn’t have everything on the shelf.

1:05:48 Conclusions for the future

So what does this mean for the next 20 years? You know, in the next 20 years, things will happen, and no one will really know why. You will be more ignorant about the world around you. In the next 20 years, you will mostly feel ok about it. People will mostly accept it because it is going to affect minorities and edge cases, and it is going to work ok. It is going to work ok, and the internet is still cool, so we are still going to have enough good stuff.

The internet is going to become a lot more like TV. We are going to be watching videos, and consuming, and we are not going to be able to reach that global audience. I mean, even if you have a blog now, to reach an audience, you need search engine optimization, and CDNs, and all of that stuff. It’s not the level playing field that we once thought it would be. And existing power structures are going to be continued, replicated, and strengthened, whether that’s in the field of security, in the field of surveillance, or in the field of censorship.

Or, we have an alternative. We could think globally instead of locally and nationally about what we would want. Yes, we need to guard against more terrorist attacks in New York, but we cannot ignore the impact that something like crypto backdoors would have on journalists and human rights workers around the world.

We can start thinking about technology as something where we want to build decentralization back in, where possible. Give that power back to the people where we can. And part of restoring that balance of power is end-to-end encryption. We need end-to-end encryption, so that when the government needs your data, instead of secretly going to Level 3, or to Google, or to Microsoft, or to Apple, they have to come to us for it.

We need to have the government have hands off private technology development. It’s not the government’s business to tell us to design networks to be surveillance friendly, it’s our business to try to create technology that will give people the tools they need to have a better life and a freer life.

We need to start to be afraid of the right things. Humans are really bad at understanding risk. People are way more afraid of sharks than they are of cows, but cows kill something like 8 times more people a year than sharks do. It’s true, look it up. The most dangerous thing we do everyday is get in our car – by far the most dangerous thing we do everyday. So we need to start being afraid of the right things. We need to learn what to accept, and we need to address the right problems.

We need to modify our laws to be better. We need to get rid of the Computer Crime Law the way it is written, we need to modify the DMCA so that it doesn’t interfere with security research, we need to look at provisions of the Patriot Act and revise those as well as other foreign intelligence surveillance laws, and we need to do away with secret law. We have secret law in this country, and it is an abomination in the face of a democracy to have that.

At the same time, privacy isn’t dead. We may have all this technology collecting information, but we can use law to provide safeguards where technology can’t. But we won’t do it. Why don’t we amend the Electronic Communications Privacy Act to protect your e-mail fully? Why don’t we amend the Electronic Communications Privacy Act to protect our geolocation data? These are very simple, basic proposals, but Congress won’t do it. We have to get behind it, and we have to push.

Now, there is a possibility that these provisions -and these are just a few ideas - but there is a possibility that these things are not going to work, that these ideas are not going to work. And what that means is that in the next 20 years, instead of seeing the dream of internet freedom come true, we are going to see it getting sicker, and sicker, and sicker, until it finally dies. And then the internet is going to be this slick, stiff, controlled, closed thing. It will be good, it will be better than TV and radio, but this is what it will be. And if that’s true, then what we need to do in the next 20 years is: We need to get ready, and we need to get ready to smash it apart and make something new and better.

Thank you.

Downloadfile:

Granick_Blackhat.ogg

Europe vs. Facebook

Alkibiades — Fri, 30 Oct 2015 12:16:22 +0000

Speaker(s) Max Schrems; John Kennedy

Language spoken English

Date of Recording Wed, 2015-01-28

Player-image:

“It is essential to me not to spread apocalyptic sentiments. It is about to call on people, like I do in my book, that improvements can actually be achieved and that we, the citizens, are in no way helpless when it comes to our rights.”

The story of Mac Schrems is one of engaging in a hard, long struggle that reached a pivotal moment in October 2015, when the European High Court ruled that the US can no longer portray themselves as a ‘safe harbor’ for the data trails of European citizens.

On 26 June 2013, the law student turned privacy activist filed a complaint against “Facebook Ireland”, the international headquarter of Facebook Inc., with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner. Schrems argued that the transfer of customer data to the US, where these data were processed, constitutes a “transfer to a third country,” which is only legal in the European Union if the receiving country can guarantee adequate protection of these data. Because the data is forwarded from Facebook Inc. to the NSA and other US authorities for mass surveillance programs, the core claim was that personal data transferred to the US is not adequately protected once it reaches the United States. About one year later, the Irish High Court referred the case to the European Court of Justice.

Max Schrems and his thousands of supporters did not give in. On 6 October 2015, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that the regulation of data transfers under the ‘Safe Harbour’ agreement between the European Union and the US, which allowed tech firms to share their data, was invalid. The court followed Schrems’ interpretation, stating that Facebook and other digital operators do not provide customers with protection from state surveillance, and concluded that the US thus “does not afford an adequate level of protection of personal data.

In a first reaction, Schrems stated that “this case law will be a milestone for constitutional challenges against similar surveillance conducted by EU member states.” He also thanked the bravery of ex-security analyst Edward Snowden, whose revelations about mass surveillance had played a pivotal role for the Strasbourg decision. In this interview with award-winning technology journalist John Kennedy, he provides background information on the case against Facebook, how end users’ lack of technical knowledge fosters their lack of necessary mistrust and how business interests outrank the question of legality.

Additional information

More details on the CJEU ruling, the subsequent ruling of the Irish High Court, and to the ongoing class action suit in Austria can be found at http://europe-v-facebook.org/EN/en.html

image source: http://europe-v-facebook.org

video compiled from the following sources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3z9xXZPADxw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR3sHSu7TV4

00:06 Background information on the case against Facebook

JK: Hey Max, welcome to Ireland. You first crossed our radar when, as a student, you took a case against Facebook’s Irish operations over privacy. Can you tell me about your motivation then, and the current class action suit now, and just what we have learned in that whole process?

MS: My motivation? I don’t know, I think the whole privacy thing is kind of the debate of the next 20 or 30 years. I see the whole thing like the environmentalist movement in the 60s, where, like, the first people come up and say: there is that fish we should do something about it… And that is kind of where I come from, I guess.

And on Facebook: it was really that I was studying in the US for half a year, and there were guys from Facebook and other companies as guest speakers at my university. And they were pretty much saying: “You can fuck the US … ah the American … ah the European rules, nothing is ever going to happen if you break them.” And, quite honestly, nothing does ever happen if you break them. We usually pride ourselves about all these privacy laws in Europe, and point fingers at the US for not having them, and for being, like, the badass spying people, but the reality is that we are not really enforcing these laws. And it is really interesting how, I do not know, every parking violation is enforced, but if you just suck up the data of millions of people illegally, the worst thing that can happen to you - for example in Ireland - is an enforcement notice, which is a piece of paper saying: “Dear company, don’t do that anymore. Kisses, your Data Protection Commissioner.” That is the worst that can realistically happen to you.

But that is not necessary an Irish issue, we see that in a lot of other countries too, like, in Austria the maximum fine is 25,000 Euro, which usually means that getting a lawyer to tell you what the law says, and to be fully compliant, is more expensive than just breaking it. And I think that is an overall problem that I think is really interesting, because we are talking about fundamental rights here, not just some consumer rights…

01:50 Shifting responsibilities to end users

JK: What will tech companies do? As people, we were sleepwalking into this mess, and we still do.
We publish stuff about ourselves and about others but at the same time we do not realize that, or we didn’t realize how well-protected our information is going to be. Would you say, thus, when it comes to policy and governments that we have all been sleepwalking into this kind of situation?

MS: I think the biggest problem we have is that it is not tangible for the average person. Like, if you talk about Big Data analytics as an example: that is something where even the representatives of the companies cannot really tell you what these guys are doing there. And that’s the biggest problem of the whole privacy debate: just like, as I said Chernobyl before, as an atomic power debate; that it’s so complicated that the average user just doesn’t get it, and therefore ignores it. We don’t shift this responsibility to an average guy in all other fields. I usually compare it to building codes: we expect that in a modern country, buildings are not just collapsing and falling on our head. No one of us has checked if this building is correctly built, we just expect it. And same thing for hygiene laws: if you go to a supermarket and buy an apple, you have the expectation that you can eat it without throwing up.

In the privacy field, however, we feel that the individual consumer should know about all these things and make these decisions, even though it’s impossible for the average guy to do that, because no one has a lab in the basement to figure out what is, I don’t know, on the apple, or to check on the building. However, whenever it comes to apps on your cell phone, which are even much more opaque than these analog things, suddenly the user should have the responsibility, and that’s something I think is really interesting.

03:24 Irish policies and their implications for data protection

JK: Interestingly, the case you took against Facebook’s Irish operations, because that’s where the international headquarters are… How did you find the experience of chasing this, in Ireland, in terms of dealing with the Data Protection authorities here and, you know, where you see this going from here, as a strategy with the European Courts?

MS: You pretty much have a safe haven here when it comes to privacy, and that is something that is seriously criticized outside of Ireland, that we do have this tech cop here, and legally, they are responsible for it, but they are not taking on the responsibility of enforcing things. I know that things have changed now with the new Commissioner, that at least it got much more people, much more resources, which is really necessary. I do not know if the actual approach has changed by any means; that is something I don’t have any idea either way. So far, I still see that people who make complaints are all turned down. If you look at the statistics of Billy Hawkes’ times (ed. note: the former Data Protection Commissioner of Ireland, 2005-2014) at least, two to four percent of the complaints were even decided, all the others were not decided.

Most of them - in my experience all of them - actually got an email saying: “We are not taking on this complaint,” even though they have a legal obligation to go after every complaint. And in the end, pretty much, they said: “If you want us to do our job, you have to go to court and sue us,” knowing that this costs an insane amount of money and is impossible for anyone, especially outside of Ireland, to force them to do it. So, what we see internationally now, also with the new regulation, is that the European Union tries to pull out of Ireland and away, to give cooperation in some way, because there is just this feeling that certain data protection authorities are not doing their job properly. Unfortunately, that is oftentimes connected with a kind of – how do you call it – a “nice business environment.”

But actually the representative of the DPC in the High Court case has actually pointed out that, in our case on the Prism mass surveillance that, if the DPC would enforce things like that, it would harm the businesses in Ireland, which pretty much says that businesses are more important than your fundamental rights.

05:28 Technical possibilities vs. political questions

JK: I was watching something interesting yesterday: I think the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the United States had… put out a master plan for ending mass surveillance. And one of the points - and I think it was one of the first points - was getting the tech companies to harden their approach to protecting data. The tech companies themselves. On one hand, you can say – look, the technologies evolve faster than we could ever realize them and we are all carrying computers in our pockets. But on the other hand they are making money, vast amounts of money out of this infrastructure they have created. What kind of leadership position should the tech companies take, or are they willing to, in your opinion?

MS: I think that is a hard question, because, to be fair, one problem they really have is that they have to stick to different jurisdictions. So, for example, in the US, they have to give out all this information under the law. Under European law, that is prohibited. The problem they have is that they try to get international companies take advantage of, I don’t know, the tax regime here, or the access to the stock market in the US, and all these kind of different things, and now they are under a lot of jurisdictions that are actually in conflict. I think, the overall problem here is something that not necessarily the tech companies can actually deal with. That is something that has to be solved politically.

What they could do, however, is to change their systems in the more privacy-friendly way. For example, in Facebook they keep all your deleted information, saying that it is a centralized database and, if person A deletes a message… If we have in common conversation and I delete my side of the message, they still need to keep the conversation displayed to you. Now, the problem is that they can still centrally get all my messages that I have ever written, and there is no way I can practically delete them. That is a systematic failure. That is something where… If you have separated in- and outboxes, if you have them spread out on the network in a way that you cannot recover it anymore, which is the typical case for email: if I delete my inbox, they have to go after hundreds of thousands of other email providers to really get the information. These are things that you could possibly solve technically. There are also things that… With encryption, it’s really the keys is only with the individual users. The company can say: “We don’t have the keys, I am very sorry, you got to get it from somewhere else.” That are things that they can technically solve.

Legally, that is really a thing; that if they have access to the information and there is a legal procedure to get it, they have to give it out. What we were going after in the Facebook case was to exactly go after this difference in jurisdiction. So we sued Facebook Ireland for participating in the PRISM program by forwarding the data to Facebook US.

And to get them into the trouble of these two sides. Because if we win the case by any means, you can totally see Silicon Valley line up with the White House and be, like: “We have got a serious problem here, because either we get rid of the text version over there, or we get rid of, like, the servers over here.” And that is kind of really getting them into the position of solving this conflict. So far, this conflict was mainly solved by Europe not really applying the law.

08:18 The relation between mistrust and knowledge

JK: When you look at what PRISM, at what Snowden had done by doing what he had done, revealing all that information, you know, it is nearly possibly to say that in technology every secondary artery disease has something to do with trust and privacy. And it was debated last week at Dallas by Merce Meyer and salesforce.com’s SEO that we are talking about, basically, no trust when it comes to the most important things in the next while. Would you be optimistic that this issue will one day be resolved, or is it a long road ahead?

MS: I don’t think the trust issue is that big. It would be necessary that the average guy on the street knows what is going on to mistrust. And that is the basic problem: that the average guy on the street just doesn’t remotely understand what is going on. I have seen in a lot of cases that even the privacy freaks to come to that kind of speeches I do, as soon as I show them the actual datasets from Facebook, telling them that, I don’t know, there is a category called “last location” where they exactly have your GPS coordinates even though you never shared anything with them, stuff like that… If you show that to them, they are outraged. And that is even the people that are concerned about privacy that come to a conference like that.

And that is, I think, the underlying problem; that there is not as much mistrust as would be necessary, or would be reasonable, just because of a lack of understanding, and knowledge. That is one of the biggest problems in the whole privacy debate, that you have a black box where all of this is happening. It is some server in the US – you roughly know what is going in, you roughly know what is coming out. Sometimes, they have mistakes, so you have a better understanding of what is going on. Sometimes you have people like Facebook that for “internal communication problems” shift you a bunch of data out of it so you can get a rough idea what’s going on.

This debate is too complicated to really get through on arguments, on really understanding everything. I usually compare it to the atomic power plant thing. No one of us understands how an atomic power plant works, we just roughly know: “Do I want to have that in front of my front yard, or not?” And we get kind of a rough idea of what the consequences there can be, we have a couple of cases where things went wrong, and then you can have a debate, in a way, and we make a decision.

And unfortunately, we will very likely end up on the same side on the privacy thing, that people just have cases like Snowden, where they see “Oh my God, that’s the amount of data they have!” In my case, it was these 1,200 pages which all the media went after, because it was, like, physical and tangible. And I think on this side you can possibly get people shift and think about this, but the idea that people really fully understand what thousands of companies hold about them, what they do in the background…

10:48 Business interests outrank the question of legality

JK: …the words that come to my head is “playing with fire” here, because you’re gathering all this data, and ultimately it is still in the hands of human beings who can make mistakes.

MS: Yeah, I am notorious to make mistakes, yeah…

JK: Exactly, and hardly a week goes by without some breach happening, or some nefarious activity by a hacker for example, who breaks in, because that is what they do, they try to break in. The tech industry…does the moral hazard, or the moral obligation in line has taken to try and figure out how to do things better and more safe?

MS: I think there are two things that oftentimes makes the… One thing is really data security, where you are usually in the boat with the industry, because both don’t want to have a breach. That is something where you usually don’t have too much of a conflict between the company and the person; of course the people are outraged because the company X didn’t secure it well enough, but usually you are like on the same side, you want to have it secured.

In a market-driven society, you do - as a big, especially US-based company, with a cultural approach from there, you try to make as much money as possible; that is your obligation, no matter what the laws are. And that was one key difference between a US perspective and my legal training: We did not talk about what is legal or not legal, we talked about how likely it is you are going to be uncovered, you are going to be persecuted, how much you are going to pay; and if that is cheaper than sticking to a law or breaking the law. That was the question.

So it is a very business-style approach, and if the only consequence we have in Europe is a couple of thousand bucks that you may pay, the answer is: Let us break the law and make money. And this is something that Europe has to understand and realize. Right now, we are more in this whiny position of people, like: “But why are they not sticking to our laws, are they not nice?” which it is just totally, like, naive if you look at the realities out there.

Downloadfile:

schrems_complete.ogg

To be an artist but not noticed as an artist

Alkibiades — Thu, 26 Mar 2015 21:24:54 +0000

Speaker(s) Marcel Duchamp

Language spoken English

Date of Recording Wed, 1968-06-05

Player-image:

In the early years of his career, Marcel Duchamp set out to revolutionize the art world: he invented the ready-made and declared art to be dead. In doing so, he did not only shock the audience, he also alienated many of his fellow artists - including the French cubists and those he deemed to be ‘optical’ painters who only seek to please, like Matisse. By the 1960s, when Joan Bakewell interviewed him for the BBC, Duchamp had become a legend who inspired the young artists of the time, especially those involved in Pop Art.

In the interview, Duchamp talks about his attitude towards his own work as well as about distancing himself from groups and artistic movements alike to follow his vision, and boredom as a strategy to attract a public after shocking the audience became impossible.

Additional information

Photograph from http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2013/12/08/marcel-duchamp-interview-at-ubu…
Video: http://www.toutfait.com/auditorium.php

0:10 Early years of Duchamp’s career

JB: Marcel Duchamp, at the age of 15, you were painting pictures that look very much like the impressionists.

MD: They were.

JB: Within a few years of that, you challenge the whole of the artistic values that existed. What did you so dislike about them that made you launch that attack?

MD: Well, when you are 15 and paint like the impressionists, then you are experimenting with yourself. People you don’t know what you’re going to do, it you don’t know even you aren’t you going to do anything else.

It took me 10 years or more to change the style, at least to say where there’s nothing more in impressionism to find, and I tried to find something else. At first I went through Fauvism, I went through cubism, and in only nineteen twelve or thirteen I found more or less what I wanted to do, which would not be influenced by movements that i’ve been through.

1:18 Retinal painting

JB: you attacked what you called retinal painting. Can you define it?

MD: Yes, of course. Everything since Courbet has been retinal, that is the only - you look at a painting for what you see, what comes on your retina. You and add nothing intellectual about it, nothing else then what visual is on the - I mean the visual side of the painting. Because it would be, it would have been, an estimate to say “well this is the psychoanalytical analysis of painting. It was absolutely an estimate then - you should look and register with your eye what you would see, that’s why I called them retinal.

Since Courbet, all the impressionists were retinal, all the Fauvists were retinal, the cubists were retinal and, well, the surrealists did change a bit of that, and Dada also, by saying “why should we be only interested in the visual side of the painting. There may be something else to put.”

2:34 Relationship to artistic groups

JB: And you even … while you were working in the cubist style, you nonetheless managed to produce a cubist painting, “Nude descending a staircase”, which shocked the cubists. Why did it shock them so much?

MD: Because they had already even very soon in their production, they decided to write a book, at least miss Angie and Gleize wrote a book, on cubism, with sort of a theoretical exposé on what cubism should be. So early, one year or so, after they had started painting.

So, when I came with my new “descending the staircase”, they didn’t see that it applied to their theory, it was not an illustration over their theory, and in fact it had - more than cubism had in these days - the idea of movement, which the futurists had at the same time. So they thought it was too much either - neither one. No futurism, no cubism and they condemned it.

JB: Throughout your life, you really kept very much separate from groups. Did you at that particular time enter into any debate with the cubists?

MD: Hardly any. No, I was always in the margin of it.

JB: You in fact have been associated with Dada and with surrealism, also. But nonetheless you’ve very seldom been a key figure in the group activities.

MD: I never was, at least I tried to keep away from it, to keep away from … From the group expression, the group activity of it.

JB: Why?

MD: I don’t know, it’s a form of individualism, nothing else.

JB: Did you not enjoy it?

MD: No, I never enjoyed being part of the group. I’ve always wanted to make something of a personal contribution to it, which can only be done if you think by yourself and not follow the general rules of the group, you see.

JB: When you arrived in New York, this cubist painting was that enough had arrived before you and was already a great scandal/success. So your reception was obviously colored before you arrived by your work. Did you enjoy that?

MD: Yes, it was very nice to come to a new country and be accepted and received in very nice terms, you see. That was what probably made me like America to begin with, but it’s always like that. With an individual issue, if you are flattered, you just fall in.

JB: And you enjoyed it ever since?

MD: Yes.

5:19 The “Great Glass”

JB: Now, perhaps the most famous work of yours is the work “The great glass” on which you spent eight years, and some years prior to that thinking about it. Now, this was really bringing an intellectual approach into a work of art ,which well known as seen for many years.

MD: Yes.

JB: There is in fact a published text which is published sometime after the glass was - not finished but - was abandoned. Do you wish the great glass to be appreciated with the text to inform it?

MD: Yes, exactly. That’s where the difficulty comes in, because you cannot ask the public to look at something with the book in his hand and following sort of a diagram as explanation of what they can see on the glass. So it’s a little difficult too for the public to come to understand it, to accept it, but I don’t mind that, or I don’t care, because I did it with a great pleasure, it took me eight years to do part of it at least, and the writing and so forth. And it was for me as an expression really that I had not taken anywhere else, you see, from anybody or any movement, anything, and that’s why I like it very much. But don’t forget, it never had any success until lately, much very much lately [sic].

JB: Well, you worked on it for eight years and enjoyed it very much, why did you stop working on it? It’s not completed, is it?

MD: Well after 8 years of a very tedious film wait because you make first the sketch, you transfer the sketch on the big glass, it’s my own motion mechanical work, it was… Then, what you call the splash, you know the special … The brushing or something of a painter.

There was nothing of this satisfaction, see, the physical satisfaction of painting and looking at it and finishing it in 10 minutes in your sitting area. It was the opposite of it all long. So after eight years of it, you just say: enough, enough, it’s enough.

And sometimes there’s something in abandoning a work before the finishing, because the finishing - sometimes you know, the schubert (?), etc., etc.

JB: It is known as the meticulous as a piece of work of calculation, that is a combination of chance elements, carefully organized with mathematical calculation. Is it - in fact you did make it almost more tedious for yourself.

MD: Yes. In plotting several of the points on the glass? Yes, it was full of …

JB: Why did you make it so - make it so difficult?

MD: Well because I didn’t want to make it easy. In other words well why shouldn’t I? It was my pleasure, call it masochism if you wish, but I mean it was like this. In fact

JB: The plotting of the nine holes, how long did that take to decide where they would be placed?

MD: Well, in fact, in the first place I’m at eight only, and then I had a remorse of some kind, because the whole thing was more or less based on the number three: not a clairvoyant legacy, what I mean number three. As three for me is neither unity, neither dualism, but three is everything, the end of the Newman numbering machine, and with three, three units you have enough for the whole thing of counting things. You see, millions don’t count, 3 is makes it, does it for them.

So eight was not, eight cannot be divided by three, nine can. So I made it nine, added this one of the called it the station master, the last one I think, added to the eight to make nine, so there you are.

JB: And how did you place them on the glass?

MD: Well according to the perspective, because the whole glass is based on the usual, ordinary perspective, nothing very difficult.

So in order to keep this thing is certain widths, the glass itself, see, when you paint on and have the perspective help you would use that but at a distance so that I could put my nine mule Malik’s in the in the certain area and they would be seen. Not outside of the glass. Because she had to keeps saying the glass after, so that helped me to find a place for each one.

JB: You said that the ideas in the glass a more important than its visual realization.

MD: Yes.

JB: Are these ideas a personal pleasure to you only are the ideas you wish to communicate?

MD: Well, they are communicated by the fact that the other and especially with the notes in the green box, they are all there, explained. There was no the idea is in like the chance I do you those things with the holes, the bullet holes, to with it who loves to see bulletholes done by the new Canon. But imagine it with blue paint on top at the end. Imagine never like a baby playing, you see.

JB: And you shot the cannon?

MD: Nine and nine shots to see and how they marked on the glass which should be in. And then after that, I had the points boorda, you see, as a whole to keep it more no visible.

JB: You abandoned the glass, you never embarked on anything exactly like that again.

MD: No, never, this is too long an affair, too difficult too, because after all you’re so you cannot remove the vein makes your search for a new CEO you on one thing at a wraparound I the air on twenty years have age thirty is a vein. After that you cannot invent anymore. They seldom do, you do.

Is not true painters that been on canvas and think they can repeat, repeat, repeat, and repetition is good because you know why? Because the collectors can collect if they even if it’s a repetition of Renoir, it’s a Renoir. And it has a gate value so it goes into the market indexes and it pays.

JB: The glass was broken in transit to an exhibition in 1926, how did you feel when it was broken?

MD: Nothing, not much at least.

I was soon were no I was not, because I’m fatalist maybe enough to take anything as it comes along and fortunately, a little later, when I look at the breaks, I loved the breaks. It happened to be that two panes, two glass panes on top of one another with paints on it upholding a bit when they break on VEF aberration referring transported flat, to see on it on a truck branded, the breaks take a similar direction in the two panes so when you put them on top over one another, they seem to continue the same the same breaks as though I had it done in the name purpose.

JB: Now, chance in our something that dada set out to really exploit, to use. Yet in fact this is it and an example of chance that you welcome in the glass itself.

MD: Oh yes, letters with that was a yes exactly without even thinking about it came of itself.

JB: What do you think not the element of chance in work of art is? Having try to control and devised chance to serve your ends, do you think it’s something subconsciously the artist projects into the work?

MD: Yes, because chance said may be unknown to us - in other words we don’t know the results of chance because we haven’t got enough range for that. See i mean the divine brain for example could surface and say there’s no chance, I know what’s going to happen is you we don’t know because we are ignorant enough not to be able to detect what chance is going to bring. So it’s a kind of admiration for a chance so I the consideration of chance as a almost a religious element. So it’s a very interesting to have introduced, to put it at the service of art productions

14:20 Ready-mades and the importance of indifference

JB: Didn’t chance mostly played some part in your other most renowned achievement which is the ready-made which you began about the same time one work was taking eight years…

MD: Yeah.

JB: And at the same time, you designated certain objects as ready-mades. Now, what sort of effort went into the choice of the object you designated?

MD: That’s another story, completely different and in that case maybe I was too fine to descend to find a new member not even decide is vendor to decide a year the choose an object that would not even attract me either by its beauty a by its ugliness.

To find a point of indifference in made looking at it, see? Because I might - you might say that found in the number of those but at the same time it’s not so much because it’s hardly difficult.

After a while, when you look at something, it becomes very interesting, you can even like it. And needed I liked it I would be discarded. So the choice came on if I feel very supported disparage very different from one another.

Enough so that two days looking at the thirteen ready-mades I made in coercive 30 years maybe, I and says however the fact that it is they don’t look like one another. See what I mean? In other words, there’s a different completely strangeness from one to the other which shows there’s no style there and no taste and no liking and no disliking either.

JB: But in fact you have to do you have to live with these objects before you decided you were indifferent to them, is that right?

MD: No, no, because I do really didn’t have them with me along this year they were somewhere then in fact for 20-30 years I never saw them very much. It’s only in the last twenty years that people have been interested in them an ask me questions and things about them.

JB: And the people now say that the objects you chose have an aesthetic value and in this if the bottle drive chairs you felt indifferent to it used to feeling that UPS horse and Sydney less

MD: Because ash to after twenty years or forty years of looking at it, you begin to like it. Yeah I mean yes you might and might have disliked it, but I happen to like it. Okay. That’s the fate of everything, see? Any painting or anything at all you look at for twenty years very often every day you have a liking or disliking. If you dislike it you discard it and throw it away.

But if you like it then that liking augments and goes on with the time with time there so that’s this I feel and their liking it,

JB: You can come to know and love all the ready-mades?

MD: Yes.

17:27 Devaluation of the concept of art

JB: What you are also attempting to do, as i understand it, was to devalue the art as an object, simply by saying: “If I say it’s a work of art, that makes it a work of art.”

MD: Yeah, but you my word work about to see is not so important for me, I don’t care about the word ‘art’ because it’s been so … You know, discredited, that’s the word.

JB: But you you effect contributed to the discrediting didn’t you gradually?

MD: Deliberately, yes, so in a way to get rid of it. You because the way many people today have done away with religion. It is sort of unnecessary over a duration of art today which has been and is unnecessary and I think I know, this is a difficult position because i’ve been in it all the time and still want to get rid of it, you see?

It’s not … And I cannot explain all I everything I do because I do things the waypeople to do things and don’t know why they do it.

JB: You see, the anti-art movement of dada in fact was proven to be in the interest of art because it regenerated and revived and freshened in people’s attitude to it.

MD: Yes.

JB: Do you in fact anticipate that your own contribution when it the final reckoning comes will have in fact contributed to something called art?

MD: I didn’t inspired myself if you wish to say that. I’m sorry you know there was I would have liked but at the same time if I did or I had done it I would completely have been not even noticed, or people who hadn’t said anything you will read moreday by be a hundred people like that would who have given up art and condemned it and proved to themselves it wasn’t is necessary, no more religions over and who cares for them?

Nobody could nominees

19:26 Rarity and the value of the artwork

JB: But nonetheless, if you care about art because it was money, and is in fact in designating certain object and signing them with your own name, you have created a highly commercial object in fact 9064
MD: yeah

JB: A new product with actually manufactured yet so that you could sign it, so this would produce in addition a ready-made with the value of something like two thousand-pounds?

MD: Were alright but this is not high enough. I’ll tell you why: because any when you compare this to a painting by anybody you might name you last a difference of price between the painting at least of an well-known painter.

So even so and in the certain lower bracket that means and excuse for that reason by being in the low bracket instead of a high bracket, so 20020 million pounds if you wish to say when you come to Cézanne, say, or even to Picasso. See, that doesn’t compare with the painting.

JB: No, it doesn’t, but if if you are following through your determination to devalue art, what would happen if in fact these manufacturers readymade were mass-produced and we could all buy one?

MD: No, no, no, you have to sign them, yes sign. Yes signed and numbered. Yes in addition to the eighties of any sculpture. So it’s still in there realm of art in the form of technique you just make 8 and you sign them and number them. So that’s the end of it, you should never have one more, even if you could find them in there in the shops.

JB: So in fact it follows that to side if you would have gotten the actual production in signing in selling: you stayed very much within the accepted standards?

MD: Yeah fact that I had to, because otherwise where would I be? I’d be in an insane asylum.

JB: Why did you limit the number of ready-mades?

MD: Because you have to limit it an issue to make it a little more than … Not too easy to find, I mean, eight you have to buy when at the age you wanted and there are only 8 people in the world who have this.

JB: And now I’m into the time when you were the 13, you you chose my wanting to end.

MD: Yes.

JB: Why do you not over the years go on choosing more norms?

MD: Because yet in the same as the end and it has a … I didn’t finish my glass, you see, there’s an end to everything in a long life like mine.

22:08 Pop art and Op art

JB: Your choice of ready-mades has appealed enormously to the pop art is the the Martin de hmm. They in fact regard them as very aesthetic pieces of sculpture.

MD: Unfortunately. But also they, they use it in a way, not the ready-mades themselves, they use ready-made objects to in do it in to use them in their paintings or in their sculptures. You know and it’s it’s a form of communion, friendship if you want na got. I mean homage really doesn’t mean the same.

JB: The effects of the Dada movement, then the Surrealist movement seems to have been absorbed by the world of art and today, the figurative elements go very much to the fore in modern painting as though they had absorbed all the discoveries made by this realists and were returning … Are they returning to work? In fact you cool retinal?

MD: No, no they are not.I mean people like the Pops - you mean the pops and the ops?

JB: Yes.

MD: The Ops naturally that the ups do retention, pure retinal painting, original art andi deplore it, because I am against retinal, as you know, we began that way, and we have to get into it with the retinal with the ops, the optical old ones. But I’m afraid there is so much repetition in the sensation and visual sensation the retinal activity that it made me mad now and develop very long though get to an end even if they are many many different cases.

I like the pops much more than the ops.

24:11 Shock and boredom

JB: In terms of the activities of the dada group, other than painting, the sort of happenings they devised are in fact happening again. They are called happenings today. Do you ever see or engage in these or feel any fellow feeling towards them?

MD: Oh, happenings enough for happenings and no Capello in on these and it’s always amusing LA the point that they’ve brought out so well and interesting one is they play for you a play of boredom. It has been … I’m not discovering that, but it’s a very interesting to have used boredom as an aim to to attract a public.

In other words, the public comes to a happening not to be amused but to be bored. And that’s quite an invention a contribution to new ideas is in it.

JB: When you set out to and challenge all the established values your means will shock: you shock the Cubists, you shocked the public, you shock the buying public. Do you think the public can be shocked any more by anything?

MD: No, finished. Finished, that’s over, you cannot shock the public, at least with the same means. To shock the public we have to, I don’t know what… Even that thing, that happening, boring people, boring the public doesn’t prevent them from coming. Public becomes and sees anything a couple does though Goldenberg (?) And all these people and i’ve been there, and I go there every time. You accept boredom as a name, you see, an intention.

JB: Do you regret the last shock or do you think it’s a little artist full the public simply always expect additional …

MD: No, but the shock would be a different way, a different character. You see, by shocking at that time, shocking alongside the old channels so to speak, but the publisher shock will come have something entirely different we as I said.

Non-art, not art you see, in the sea with that not know either Dalton and yet something would be put to use because after all I think whom the word art from ancient Arabic means “to do”, means not even “to make” but “to do”, so… And with me to do some DUI not issue no that would but you are not

So you don’t sell your work but you do. The action lol art is means action in activity onek then everyone any gay everyone but we’ve got our society has decided to make a group that be called artists, a group of doctors, and so forth, which is purely artificial.

JB: You said in the twenties - you proclaimed: “art is dead”.

MD: It is, it is. it yes we’re left with the amendment that you see and meant to that aided by the fact that incentive being singular sized in eighty in a little box like that so many others in so many square feet. I … By the fact it would be universal it was to be a human, a human factor in anyone’s life. To be an artist, but not noticed as an artist. You see what I mean?

JB: Marcel Duchamp, thank you very much.

MD: Well, I’m delighted.

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