Why activists need to think about cybersecurity

Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel and policy editor Russell Brandom talk to founder of CryptoHarlem and cybersecurity expert Matt Mitchell, who works with activists to develop strategies to leave less data behind and help mitigate threats to their cause. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:56Nilay Patel?

  Hey, everybody. It's Dan from The Vergecast. On this week's interview episode, Russell Brandam and I talk to Matt Mitchell. He's the founder of Crypto Harlem, an organization in New York City that helps activists protect themselves from hackers and cyber attacks. Obviously, activists of all kinds want to use digital tools. Matt calls them a force multiplier. But there's a lot of interest in hacking and disrupting those tools, from governments, from rivals, from foreign adversaries. Matt talks a lot about the FBI and the NSA. When their files get declassified, you can see the amount of interest they have in investigating activist groups. So Matt works with those activists to outline their threats, research new ones, and develop strategies for mitigating those threats. I love this conversation because it's way beyond just like using Signal. Matt talks about the capabilities and methods that attackers use

• 1:41Nilay Patel?

  to go after activists, and how he works with those activist groups to get more sophisticated and protect themselves. So check it out. It's Matt Mitchell on The Vergecast.

• 1:50Nilay Patel?

  Matt Mitchell, you're the founder of Crypto Harlem. You help activists protect themselves. You're a hacker yourself. Welcome to The Vergecast.

• 1:57Speaker 03

  Thank you. It's great to be here.

• 1:59Nilay Patel?

  Russell Brandom is joining us too. Welcome, Russ.

• 2:01Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, I'm here.

• 2:02Nilay Patel?

  So, real quick, tell me, what is Crypto Harlem?

• 2:04Speaker 03

  Crypto Harlem is a space where we all come together and we learn about overpolicing, surveillance of folks in the inner city, and what we can do to circumvent that surveillance and protect ourselves from it. So it's a thing that I've been doing for like six years now. Wow.

• 2:23Speaker 03

  And um, maybe, maybe more than that now, I'm losing count. And, you know, um, normally it takes place in Harlem, hence the name. Kind of weird if it was in the middle of Williamsburg. And um, we have folks from the inner city. We have grandmas, grandpas, we have cybersecurity professionals. I go through my uh, network and always invite people. And they get a kick out of it, they get a kick out of it. The, the folks who are there to be like, oh wow, like this is a person uh, I'm learning about. It's very cool and they actually do this hacking thing. And the cybersecurity professionals, they don't really get to talk to regular folks a lot. So they really enjoy being able to talk to you, a different kind of audience that's really diverse and a, a big mix. But, you know, that's what it is and I think it's a, a really important effort.

• 3:08Speaker 03

  And I try to do it as often as I can, as my schedule allows. And I've even thrown them in um, like one offs in like Oakland and in Miami and in Chicago. And you know, just trying to do my thing.

• 3:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Uh, so Matt, the other thing you do is you train activists on how to protect themselves. There's a lot of ways activists are in danger, but particularly when you're working online, so many of us now do. Those dangers spread. What is that work of helping activists protect themselves? What does that look like for you?

• 3:37Speaker 03

  Well, you know, technology is a force multiplier, to use a military term. Technology could allow one podcaster, you know, one person in a basement with a microphone to reach millions and millions of people. Uh, without needing like distribution networks or media, et cetera. Activism heavily relies on technology and, you know, technology used to be the wheel and fire. But technology now are, you know, encrypted messages, emails, uh, social media, et cetera. And the first thing I do when I'm talking to activists is explaining to them that while they are actively trying to do this thing. That's why they're an activist, they're active and other people are non-active, right? They're pushing against the status quo, they're trying to create positive change.

• 4:20Speaker 03

  And they're doing it because they just feel this is the right thing to do. And I explain to them that, look, this thing that you're doing, it's a little bit more complicated. And it's a little bit like a balancing act or a tug of war. And every time you have a small win, those little victories that keep you going. Someone else has a small loss. And every time you have those big, like, you know, headline grabbing wins, the things that you never thought were possible. Someone had a huge loss. And it's like an inversely proportional relationship. And it's really complicated. And those people are not used to losing because they made the game, they made the rules. And you become a very popular, you know, more like notorious thorn in their side. And they will come at you with anything they have.

• 5:04Speaker 03

  If you make someone late to a fancy dinner, that's embarrassing to them and they don't get embarrassed and they're gonna, they're gonna want to, you know, to end this whole thing that you're doing. And a lot of times, more often than not now, it comes through a digital first way.

• 5:20Nilay Patel?

  So give me some examples of, of what that is.

• 5:22Speaker 03

  There's so many examples. Um, for example, I was just watching this documentary about environmentalist, animal rights activist, right? And so, um, it was called, um, The Animal People. Because during their trial, they were called The Animal People. These are the bad animal people, right? And The Animal People were just a group of kids from the suburbs, right? Seven kids who were like, you know, we're gonna go after this, uh, you know, laboratory in Europe that's doing vivisection and torturing monkeys and beating up puppies and punching dogs in the face and things like that, right? The, these activists successfully, through nonviolent means, closed this, um, annoying and aggravating the means, but still nonviolent, forced this lab to close, forced them to get delisted from NASDAQ,

• 6:07Speaker 03

  all kinds of issues for them financially. Long story short, these folks all went to prison, right? And, uh, part of the trial, we find out through Freedom of Information Act, many years later, was the FBI rolled out a hacking team to hack these activists, get into their computers. They have really good security culture, right? They, they, they knew not to say too much, not to do too much, et cetera, all that stuff that, you know. Need to know basis, all the stuff that activists will stick to. But they also used PGP encrypted emails, which is the new thing. A lot of people weren't doing that back then. This is like basically like the 90s. And the FBI could not get their keys, could not get their passwords.

• 6:49Speaker 03

  So used malware and attacks on their laptops and computers to try to get into their machines. And no one even knew what this stuff was back then. Like, there's a million examples. I'd use this one because I watched this movie the other day because it came out on Netflix. There's countless examples of this happening and you'll never know. It's very quiet. And in this particular case, they also had audio surveillance of their plane phone calls because they didn't have apps like Signal at the time for them to use the easy encrypted voice communications. And there are more recordings here than in any other federal investigation. So this is real. The amount of time, money and resources, it doesn't make sense to your average activist. They're like, why would they? We're not even doing anything crazy. We're just trying to do what's right.

• 7:32Speaker 03

  Why would they spend millions of dollars on hackers, plainclothes police to follow us around? Or video and audio media of like hours and hours, days worth of footage? Why would they do that just for us, for me? It's true, though. It happens all the time. And when you look at the vault, FBI vault, which is like a public available, released and declassified videos and audio and things like that, you'll see a lot of stuff there that pertains to activism.

• 8:01Speaker 04

  So this is, I mean, it's funny because I feel like when it pops in the news, a lot of it is around some particular vendor that would sell these tools to like the company that would then get used on. So like, I mean, I think FinFisher was like, and then we had hacking team and now more of the focus is on NSO Group. And they're always sort of these, a lot of times based in Europe and like, you never know how many people they're selling to. But then I often, I mean, I don't want to like get discouraged, but it does sort of feel like you pull out one weed and then there are just five more. I mean, are you, do you feel like there is some path towards these tools not being available

• 8:45Speaker 04

  to powerful people anymore? Or is this just sort of what the landscape is now?

• 8:49Speaker 03

  It's an industry. There's money to be made. And it's completely deregulated. And so it does make sense to go after the worst of the worst, but. You know, you, there's another one behind it. You wanna go after the worst industrial polluter? There's another one behind them because there's money to be made. And worse of all, there are nation states that have militarized this hacking situation. And the tools and resources available are now leaked online. So, you know, even our, and our being USA. The United States, through the NSA, through the CIA, through the FBI. Each of these law enforcement and intelligence entities has their own group of hackers that work there.

• 9:30Speaker 03

  And then they collect and find major bugs in commercial software and also ways to exploit tools that we use every day. They say something like 80% in the case of the NSA, they report to the company so they can fix it. But the 20%, that really good golden stuff, they keep that and weaponize that. But a lot of times, those weapons are not well defended and they leak onto the public internet. And, you know, that's what happened with a lot of these tools. And therefore, the price of these cyber weapons have dropped. Imagine if you could go into the black market and get a machine gun or bazooka for $20. That's basically where we are now. Because those advanced tools leaked onto public domain and you can, any hacker worth their salt has a copy of it or understands how these things work.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  The price of committing these cyber attacks has dropped. To the point where a lot more companies, a lot more countries, a lot more militaries, a lot more law enforcement, a lot more intelligence agencies and also random people are able to give it a go.

• 10:29Speaker 04

  So, I mean, that's like, pretty scary.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  It is scary.

• 10:32Speaker 04

  I guess if you're, you know, when you're meeting these folks and you're telling them this is what you're up against, where do you go with that, right? Like, you're not telling them, hey, like, give it up, let DuPont win, or whoever it is. You know, how should they operate in a world where this is just out there?

• 10:48Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, I don't just start that with a, hey, thanks for taking me to your cool, patchouli-smelling coffee shop. I just wanna tell you how horrible it is. Yeah, no, I mean, well, first of all, I'm lucky because the audience is not one that's easily discouraged, right? They're not risk averse. Like, these are people who, they're really to take the next step or whatever, do that thing that the non-active people are not, that's why they're activists. But I don't start with that. I try to keep it really basic and I try to use a community health style of talking to them. Or I'll just say, like, for example, like, you know, I always tell people, if you're like Doctors Without Borders and you show up in a village of people who don't know what modern western medicine is and they have their own ideas on how to stay healthy and safe. You can't tell them about like, this is cancer, or let me talk about Ebola on day one.

• 11:32Speaker 03

  Like, that's just, that's, you're just gonna crush their spirits. It's not helpful at all. So what you wanna do, as someone who's about harm reduction, and that's where you focus on, harm reduction, right? And minimizing and mitigating risk. That's all you can do. You say, look, there's these invisible monsters, these creatures that live on your hands. They're called bacteria, and you gotta use open water to get rid of them, and if you do that, you'll be okay. And if you just get that baseline up, where everyone's washing their hands, and like, the chief is washing their hands, and, you know, the medicine person's washing their hands, and the little kids, elderly, then you're like, that rules out a lot of problems, right? So it's the same thing here. So I'll just talk to them about the different baselines that they need to get to. But I will explain it, so, you know, that this is a non-stop effort.

• 12:16Speaker 03

  You always can, like, level up a little bit. If you go to the gym, you also can get a little more swole, right? So, but, it really is like, do you lift or do you not lift? And that's about, that's where it is.

• 12:26Nilay Patel?

  So there, there's like activist stuff, right? Like, okay, you have founded a group, you're all gonna protest de Blasio, that's an easy one. There's the basic stuff, right? Which is, don't send unencrypted emails, like, move all your stuff to Signal. There's like a, a basic set of, I think, pretty well-understood stuff. You're teaching them how to use Signal, or are you saying, what I worry about, which is the massive amount of attack surface area that comes just from using the internet now, and buying devices, and having that stuff in your life and in your home.

• 12:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I, I actually don't teach them about Signal and stuff like that. Cause like, I come at them from like, a, I'm a professional, and I'm an expert in this. So I teach them about the capabilities and methods of their adversaries. Like, this is what's gonna stop you from moving forward. And this is also where every tool you use has a problem, and it breaks. And so you just decide, so they can be an educated consumer. Cause you might tell people, like, hey, use this thing, send these encrypted emails, use Signal, and you're good. That's for like, a normal, boring person, not for activists. Activists need a different game plan. They need to learn about, like, do you have a data retention policy? What data are you creating every day? What's your exhaustive data, your data footprint? And how quickly do you remove it, do you delete it?

• 13:41Speaker 03

  So, that's a big problem, cause they usually amass large amounts of data. And I tell them, look, This is gonna end, not with you, uh, you know, your favorite movie, whether it's like hackers and someone's gonna be like hack the planet, or whether it's Braveheart and someone's like freedom. Like, that's not how it ends. This ends with you in a courtroom with a lawyer next to you, and you're talking about deciding whether that lawyer has a folder worth of evidence that you're defending against, or those cardboard boxes, upon cardboard boxes, upon pallets of evidence that you're defending, that they're defending against. So, we're just talking about when you have your day in court, how can we make sure that your sentence is as low as possible? Because that's reality, right?

• 14:23Speaker 03

  Uh, if you're an activist today, there's a huge amount of data that is being collected about you that you do not control. And then there's even more amounts of data that's being collected about you that you do control. And I just try to get them to get that down to as little as possible.

• 14:39Nilay Patel?

  Give you an example of data that activists don't control that you help them get into line or manage more efficiently?

• 14:45Speaker 03

  Sure. Let's talk, let's go about the six people who decided to meet at that Starbucks about your, your de Blasio meeting. They all had to get there, and we all have phones. Some of us have the fanciest, newest iPhone, like you, and other people have, you know, like some basic Boost mobile phones. But we all have phones. Those phones are on. Those phones are connecting to cell towers so they can maintain service. And the location of those phones, you cannot turn off location services of how your cellphone works, right? So, you can say, oh, I put it in a Faraday bag, wrapped it in foil, put it in airplane mode, and I moved forward into the, to get to the Starbucks. But then you passed all kinds of cameras, whether they're attached to an ATM, or whether they were attached to a, a police box

• 15:29Speaker 03

  that's just surveilling that corner, or that street, or that block, and you passed through it. And these are pieces of data that you don't control, right? You might have, uh, you know, like, of course, you don't want to have like a, a home assistant in your house, like an Alexa, or an Amazon, or something like that. You wouldn't want that in the space, but there's people around you who have data, and there's an imprint, an outline that's missing, and that's your movements, right? So, the pictures, the video, all the data that's collected, that's the data that you do not control. Uh, you might be getting junk mail. That means that your address, your name, first and last, whether it's your actual government or some alias, that's just easily findable. Like, I could search a data broker's website, or I can pay a data broker to collect and find that information on you. That's very hard for you to control. But then there's the information you do control.

• 16:14Speaker 03

  That's the meth of the words you say, the words you type, you control that. And where you put them and how you manage them, you can control that. You know, so when you go to that Starbucks, did you pay with cash or do you pay with your credit card? Did you pay with your Starbucks app? So it's about that more holistic viewpoint, not just the basics that we talk about when you're reading a quick article or things like that, because activism, it's different from living in this crazy world that we all live in. Right, we've all seen the the great hack or the big hack or whatever that is. We've we've all understand, you know, from, I get it, like, they can see my tweets or something, right? So this is deeper, it's another level, right? Because you're actually not just a regular boring person who has to deal with hackers, who just criminally want to just take your credit card or just create chaos, right?

• 16:58Speaker 03

  Or a normal person who has to deal with, you know, over policing or has to deal with ridiculous rules against them because of what law enforcement is able to do or what the city is able to do or whatever. Data brokers who make an industry out of, especially in the United States, where we don't have a lot of privacy protections. If you don't live in California, your your data trail and selling and monetizing that. That's a normal person. But now you have to deal with that, plus it's compounded with your activism. So it's about having that deeper conversation, but also explaining that you can win this and it's a hopeful conversation at the end of the day.

• 17:30Speaker 04

  So this is what's so interesting about like this side of cybersecurity to me, because it feels like 99% of the time when people are talking about a lot of the same things, you're talking about data exhaust, retention, what's your footprint? It's in the context of corporate cybersecurity where, you know, I'm running this app, I'm holding all this user data and I need to make sure that, you know, I promised the person when they signed up for the app, hey, I'm not going to let this sort of get out onto the just whoever wants it. But it's fundamentally sort of maintaining the status quo, right? It's like, we have the data and we want to maintain control over everything that happens to it

• 18:12Speaker 04

  so that these sort of forces of chaos that are coming from, you know, the criminal parts of the internet can't bust through, right? Whereas, you know, the people you're talking with They're really kind of going out there into new territory. And it's sort of, how do I protect myself once I'm on, once I'm on the other guy's turf?

• 18:32Speaker 03

  Exactly. It's a completely new territory and there aren't a lot of professionals in this area. So the first thing is, people do have an idea what the digital risk and threats are, but they actually don't understand what's in the wild. Like, what's an actual, you know, capability or method of law enforcement? Or de Blasio, you know, or, you know, anything like that. So it's really just guessing, which is not good. So you want what people say are an evidence-based approach. You want to defend against what's probably likely out there based on past research. So a lot of my work is reading cases. Whether the cases are about the worst of the worst, as they say. So that might be people who are in the trade of illegal images,

• 19:16Speaker 03

  or images of child abuse, or people who are selling narcotics to folks, you know, things like that, right? It's the same methods that are used to go after those folks, or to go after maybe like a terrorist, or, or whatever the, the, the bad person of the day is. And people are more likely to speak on those methods, right? Because we all, no matter what your viewpoint is, this is an enemy, and this is criminalized behavior, that everyone's on board, this is bad, right? So people tend to get a little bit too much into it, and they'll share a lot more information than they will if you research what happened to that person with the Greenpeace placard or something yesterday. Like, that case is gonna be really tight. There's gonna be a lot, a lot of information about how evidence was gathered there.

• 19:59Speaker 03

  But it's the same, maybe, individual out there that, after they're done catching this person, they're gonna go after catching the Starbucks anti-de Blasio people, right? So it's about understanding that. And it begins with things like, you know, when you're, when you read a privacy statement from a company, let's say it's like, you know, they talk about normal cybersecurity. A normal, kind of like, I understand, I wanna control my data person, might read, oh, how do we sell your data, right? Or what do we, how do we collect your data? While an activist might read that section that says, how do we deal with legal requests and government requests, right? For, for information, which may or may not... Be a subpoena or a warrant, it could just be someone saying, hey, can we look at that user's account?

• 20:42Speaker 03

  And you know, when I talk to activists, the first thing I tell them is every technology that you use has to deal and has to work with the people who you're worried about, right? Which is mostly someone who's gonna try to paint you as a horrible person for trying to create positive change. And that is usually, um, could be, you know, there's a force that has power, people who are sitting on the seats of power who do not want to be removed from those seats of power, and they enforce the status quo that you're trying to change. So those folks are involved in this as well. And they're gonna use these requests to find out more about you and criminalize your behavior and eventually stop what you're doing. And that is a, there's a red carpet that technology companies roll out for these people, right? And you need to know about it.

• 21:25Speaker 03

  So when I talk to folks, the first thing I'll tell them is like, hey, you use Google and everyone uses Google, right? So then I'm like, look, there's a website, that's Google's red carpet, law enforcement requests, um, system for Google, right? And that's L E R S dot Google dot com. Go there, look at that thing, see what that looks like. That's what someone just says, hey, I wanna know what Russell's searching on a Tuesday night, you know, um, at home, right? And Twitter has the same thing, Instagram has the same thing, Facebook has it as well. Facebook's red carpet is Facebook dot com slash records, right? If you have a domain name that's like NYPD in the de Blasio case, or maybe it's like, um, you know, uh, Pakistani intelligence, right? It doesn't matter. If your domain name matches, they just put in your email, it's on the database of known domains,

• 22:09Speaker 03

  you'll get an email that's like, hey, if you wanna know how to make a request about a Facebook user's profile, fill out this form, tell us what you want, and our legal team will look at it. And depending on where you are and who you are, depends on whether we'll push back hard or we might just fulfill the service.

• 22:25Nilay Patel?

  This is great, when you go to the Facebook one, all you have to do is check a box that says, I'm an authorized law enforcement agent or government employee investigating an emergency, and this is a request. And you just like, check it.

• 22:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, but then you gotta put in your email. You're, if you're a law enforcement, your, your email isn't at Gmail. But it does, but the problem is, maybe... That it doesn't matter whether you're day one out of police academy, or whether you're a lieutenant on the, or someone who's on a special, special caseload that's like looking for certain things, right? So it doesn't matter who you are, long as you are law enforcement, you can fill this thing out. So that's problematic.

• 23:01Nilay Patel?

  As you talk to activists, that's one side, protect yourself. Do you, do you talk to these platform companies?

• 23:07Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 23:07Nilay Patel?

  About how to better, because you know, so many of the CEOs of these companies believe that they are helping activists change the world by connecting them, by, you know, giving them a voice.

• 23:18Speaker 03

  You know, there's a, there's a department in that company that tells you, be yourself, show us, you know, what you're about. And they'll latch on to movements that are, you know, and, and commercialize those movements. So, you know, they'll say like Twitter is like, oh, Black Lives Matter, you know, like, you know, we're going to wear this, um, Jack's going to wear a shirt, you know, whatever, right?

• 23:36Nilay Patel?

  Jack loves the shirt.

• 23:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, but that's totally different from the department that's like, oh yeah, you want to know what this person's doing? And you want to read their DMs? Okay, you know, totally different, you know? And, and they also have the problem of Twitter had these people who were working there, one guy who was on the payroll of United Arab Emirates, working with the Saudis, who then compromised another person who got them on the payroll, right? And then, you know, Twitter's not used to looking at that. So you have many different inroads to these organizations. You have the legal department, which is maybe working against Black Lives Matter, with Jack's wearing a shirt. And then you have people who are trying to actively get individuals into the company because they're in positions of trust.

• 24:18Speaker 03

  They have access to data and that data, it's like, well, we can buy $3 million worth of malware, or we could pay this dude some gambling debt from that last trip he went to Vegas, and also lean on him with these videos of what he was doing last night. And boom, give him 30,000 and get the data we want that way. So you got to understand like what is actually happening out there. This is a real thing. So Twitter looked into this employee, tried to figure out like whether, what was going on is really that they were searching people who worked on the Tor projects, um, DMs, and what they were doing online and trying to get data on like where their phones were connecting to Twitter from and things like that, or whether this is not true. And that employee disappeared, only to pop up in the UAE working for the government. So this is the, the kind of thing that you'll tell an activist. It's not just install Signal.

• 25:03Speaker 04

  It is weird to have that as like part of the threat model is like probably Facebook can pay the like people with access enough that they're not susceptible to blackmail, but maybe Twitter can't like rents in San Francisco getting pretty high.

• 25:18Speaker 03

  It's getting hot.

• 25:19Speaker 04

  So you were talking about like, you know, reading the news to find out sort of what tools people are using. I'm curious. So you, as you're probably aware, like the, this Clearview app has been a huge sort of wave just rolling through and, you know, essentially saying, I have a picture of this person's face. Is there, can you put a name to this face? Right? And this is very much like, we're in the Starbucks, we talked to the Starbucks manager, maybe slipped him a hundred bucks. He gave us the surveillance video and we found, we have this sort of surveillance footage of this person's face, but we don't know who they are. Can we plug it into Clearview AI and it'll give us the name? And it turned

• 26:01Speaker 04

  out that there were some really significant sort of companies and just sort of all sorts of, you know, sketchy outfits using this. I guess, was that a surprise for you? Was that, is that changing the way you're thinking about like controlling the data and everything?

• 26:16Speaker 03

  No, no, it's not a surprise. But I mean, like, it's kind of like people were like, Trump is so bad. It's crazy Trump stuff. And I'm like, well, it was always bad. Now that you're with me, that's great. So same thing with Clearview AI. I'm like, that is great. You know, like, I'm so happy that that story broke. And I'm, you know, there's a lot of other people I know who do the work that I do, and they were involved in like helping make that story happen. And I'm like, that's dope. But, you know.

• 26:40Speaker 04

  And we should say, Cashmere Hill, New York Times, like, did an amazing job on that.

• 26:43Speaker 03

  Yes. Cash, you did a great job. You know, hit me up. And the people who were able to say, we research what law enforcement is spending their money on. We saw this come up multiple times. We can't find info. Let's hit up Cash. So there's people who did that too. Right? So that's important too. And, you know, there's a lot of us out here who we have to see what's not there by putting together what is there. You see these weird outlines. And you're like, what is that shape? What is that shape? And it's things like Clearview AI. But how did Clearview AI even work? Well, here's how it worked. It just grabbed your face. It wasn't like, wow, this guy's a genius. No offense, the guy who made Trump hair. Like it grabs your face from the open internet.

• 27:24Speaker 03

  Like just sits there browsing the internet, acting like it's a user of Facebook, acting like it's a user of Google, acting like it's user of Flickr, and it just collects and collects faces. A huge ridiculous face database. And then it uses facial recognition software that's out there. And you can make a poor man's version of ClearView AI with enough patience and TensorFlow from Google's like, you know, free tech. So the problem isn't that they made this, and if they made it, who else maybe made it before they made it? Collective consciousness is not the most, it's a really simple idea. Even when Google Glass was out there, like, we're not going to make a version of this that can take a face and run it through a search database. But I can do that today. I can take your face.

• 28:05Speaker 03

  I could run it through Yandex, I could run it through TinEye, I could run it through Google Images, and I'll get my own results. And then that's like a really basic search. That's a five-minute search. Now you can just use technology and make it run faster, smarter, better, and you'll end up in the best search, right? So is it a surprise to me? No, but it's important that it changes the game and the outside. It changes the game for one, the average person is like, you know what? I don't really have any skin in this game, but that's weird. I don't know why, but I feel like that's wrong. Like, that's important. And then the person who cares about their data who's like, I'm a privacy person. I just like, you know, I'm a paranoid and I don't like what they're doing that, and that's crazy. It blew my mind. But the activists, they need to already know that this technology exists.

• 28:48Speaker 03

  And let me tell you who's using that technology before this story drops, right? And how they're using it. So like, you know, we're talking about going back to protest where the law enforcement had airplanes flying in circles, taping videos of individuals. And when the ACLU asked like, hey, you know, we see that there is these protests, whether it's like a protest in Baltimore, let's say, right? And We, we think that these planes were picked up by these nerds who are just looking with their, with their basic data solutions to just look at radio signals and see these planes that aren't repeating certain call signs and let's figure out where these things are. And A C U said, hey, FBI, if you have, if these planes exist, we want evidence on these planes.

• 29:33Speaker 03

  And when they put in that FOIA request, they got back videos of hours and hours of infrared and, and like high resolution shots of zooming in on protests where you can see people's faces, things like that. It's on vaults. If you go to the FBI vault, you could pull those, um, those videos today. So it's like, well, why did they want this video? It looks weird. Why are they scanning this particular way? It's obviously like the face is an important asset here, right? Not just because I could see that face, but I could turn the measurements of where their shadows of their noses and their eyes and their ears into more information.

• 30:08Nilay Patel?

  Right? Let me, uh, try to play devil's advocate here. I know that's the right phrase, but I'm gonna go with it. Isn't some of this technology also good for the activists? I think about face recognition a lot. I think the killer app for the A R glasses, you mentioned dual glass, but the killer app for Apple's A R glasses is you put them on and you never have to have that moment where you recognize a face but don't know the name again in your life. Apple puts out that product, I buy it immediately. No, no questions asked. I will, I'll have a superpower. I'll know everybody. I remember I, I got drunk with you six years ago. We talked about these five things, like that would be incredible. There's also an element of you're an activist, you're protesting a, a board meeting, you're

• 30:51Nilay Patel?

  seeing the lawyers go in and out. Suddenly you can identify them, right? Suddenly you can, you, you know who the players are who are talking to this company who are involved in these spaces. You know where they're, you can build other sets of connections. You can, you can do all kinds of things. Is there a value to, to having it more broadly and democratically available as a technology? Or is it, wow, this is getting really creepy and the cops are over using it. We should, we should turn it off.

• 31:15Speaker 03

  That's a good question, and I would say there's zero value, but I'll, I'll explain because it's basically, technology is a beautiful thing. I got into hacking because, you know, I was a kid and I had a computer. I thought this is amazing and I wanted to share that, you know, I wanted to be able to like play chess with someone in the Middle East who's on millions of miles away, but felt like it's just milliseconds. That's great. That's the promise of it. But technology, like all other things in science, can be weaponized, right? Like, you know, nuclear power can be used to run a city for. Pennies, or it could destroy a city and turn to ashes, right? So depends on who you are. Same thing. So if we say surveillance technology, we're going to weaponize surveillance and we're going to weaponize like this kind of basic doxing, right? And we're going to use it to help us in our protest. It's kind of like saying, well, they have weapons like guns and we just have rocks.

• 32:00Speaker 03

  We're going to start using guns. Well, you're going to start this arms race where there's a ceiling you're going to hit and they don't have one. So it doesn't actually end well when you're using like, hey, they have an NSA. We're going to start our own NSA. Well, their NSA is sitting in a position that your NSA is not. Cause their NSA is plugged into the people sitting on the seats of power who have disposable income and have everything to lose, right? With having you have a minor win here, right? So it's not David and Goliath. It's just stupid. So it does not make sense.

• 32:37Speaker 04

  The one, the one Evans, you do see, you were talking about the Yandex face search, right? Which is if, if a person has, if you have a photo and you want to know who is in it, or even like a car and you want to find another picture of the car, the Yandex reverse image search is, is one of the better ways to do that. One of the places you see it used most is the folks at Bellingcat who are doing the open source intelligence. And often, you know, in a very sort of pro-social activist-y way of saying like, hey, Russia did this thing. They're trying to say that there aren't these troops in Ukraine, that they weren't involved in this, like, but we can see that this car was, a- a- and really sort of, you, you know, it is similar to putting together the evidence file as you're describing.

• 33:21Speaker 04

  Uh, of course, it, you know, also as you're saying, like, it's a little difference when the, and the evidence file is like this compelling blog post versus like a legal proceeding to put someone in prison, like.

• 33:31Speaker 03

  But it's important. We need compelling blog posts and, you know, Brown Moses, Elliot, you know, what's up? Bellingcat? Yeah, I mean, I've got people who do this work, you know, like Bellingcat, they're, they're good folks over there. There's many OSINT, open source intelligence teams working on stuff like who was that neo-Nazi in that photograph, right? Or who was the person that punched this, this person in the face or whatever? And I'm not saying that that is not important work and I'm not saying that that's not valuable. But what I'm saying is these are weapons that are built with a mindset and by a, a group that we're. We're not, we shouldn't follow their playbook, right? Their playbook was built on to like oppress and stop certain things from happening,

• 34:13Speaker 03

  not to create this beautiful freedom of awesome possibilities, things happening. And yeah, sometimes it is good to identify, but having like some kind of database of faces searched, it's gonna burn you more than it's gonna assist you. So yeah, OSINT makes sense, understanding what you're up against makes sense, intelligence gathering makes sense, all of that makes sense. But it's not like, you know what, there's a good side to this. We're better off if there was none of this technology. If you were to meet Martin Luther King, or Gandhi, or anybody today, they'd be, you know, a young person trying to organize people on social media and all this other stuff. And that version of them is going to be a lot less successful

• 34:56Speaker 03

  than the version that was handing out things on paper and just talking to people over some tea and chai, right? And all the tools and wonderful things that we could use as activists, people who want to create positive change, with technology, all the tools we could use it for are not worth what could be, it could be used against us, the ways it could be used against us. But we have to live in today, right? We have to live in the day. So there are people who are hacktivists, and people who are, you know, like they're gonna say, look, I'm gonna take out the power in this place, or I'm gonna disrupt or create chaos, or I'm gonna spread rumors about Oprah, or whatever it is, right? Like, you know, whatever you wanna do, you know, like have at it.

• 35:34Speaker 04

  That was QAnon, right? They were, they were saying Oprah was about to strike.

• 35:38Speaker 03

  That's right. So, and whatever you wanna do, like that's disruptive too, and that does put ripples on the status quo. But in the long game of positive change, like, is this generationally gonna make things better for your kids? Probably not, but we have to deal with what's going on right now. So, you know, that's, that's where I live, and that's how I talk to people. And that's why the, the work that I do, it's, I'm in service to these folks. And, you know, I, I really idolize and, and I look up to the people who are willing to really put themselves at a lot of risk to just make a, move the needle a little bit on positive change.

• 36:14Nilay Patel?

  So, I wanna come back, you made this claim, these famous activists of the past would have not been as successful if they had tried to use the tools of today. And I just wanna push on that a little bit. There have been some remarkably effective activist movements that are primarily digital.

• 36:31Nilay Patel?

  I don't know they're as effective as we want them to be. But you brought up Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter went from a hashtag to a cultural phenomenon that is like shorthand for a lot of things for a lot of people now. That only happened because of the power of social platforms. And you know, hopefully one day it's even more successful at its goals. It's going to take some times. It's not that old. But how do you square that? That idea that the previous kind of activism may have been more successful over time, but the new tools put sort of a limit or a cap on how successful activists might be?

• 37:06Speaker 03

  I wouldn't say a cap. I would say a danger.

• 37:09Nilay Patel?

  I mean, like the FBI was all over Dr. King, right? I mean,

• 37:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it took some time. And there's a lot that when you look at the FBI files that are public, they didn't have that they would have had in seconds, right? If he was on Facebook doing that. So that's like his entire social network of thousands of other religious leaders in five minutes would have been drink up by Geofedia or data miner and plotted and mapped and searched and, you know, sentiment analysis on everything they said. And, you know, it's just a completely different ballgame. And, um, you know, when you bring up organizations, like for example, the movement for black lives, where I worked to do digital safety training and working with the founders of a lot of these organizations. And, you know, there's 60 organizations in the plus in that, um, that coalition, that umbrella group.

• 37:55Speaker 03

  And we know whether it's in BYP 100 or Black Lives Matter and Million Hoodies, groups you might know, groups you might not know. You know, there's the commercials and TV and like, you know, a Kardashian wants to throw you a Pepsi. There's that version, right? And then there's the reality, the real version. And what we can in the move for black lives, we have made real change happen, right? But real, but there's an effort. Let's not, let's not confuse real change with commercial change, right? There's an effort to let the steam out, right? When people are angry and they don't like their mayor and they're like, de Blasio has to go. If you said no protest, no one could say anything bad. There is a steam and that would lead to pressure and that pressure would lead to a high enough

• 38:39Speaker 03

  level that it would be higher pressure than the container that was holding it and it would blow.

• 38:44Speaker 04

  But so, I mean, are you saying like the real change is like not actually international like consciousness of the thing, but it's local organizations putting pressure on local governments, right? I mean, especially for the movement for black lives, it's a policing thing. It's not about like setting federal policy necessarily. It is really like, you know, I live in Ferguson, the police chief in Ferguson is the problem, and I'm going to get a bunch of people in Ferguson and sort of in the area to to sort of make this hyper local change.

• 39:17Speaker 03

  Well, it's a lot of change. It's it's a whole, like, if you can read, they're like, hey, this is what we're, this is our platform, this is what we want to change globally, nationally, but it actually goes all the way down to to right outside, right? So and it does begin with, hey, you know, who's the district attorney here in Ferguson? Things like that. And, you know, like, just to say, like, you know, I am lucky to work with these people who are in their history books, and we look back, they're going to be the people who we read about, who are really making positive change happen. And, you know, I remember, like, I was in Ferguson, and I was looking at things, and there's, it's just, it's really complicated. We have to use technology because those are the tools that are available to us, right? But they're also the tools, they're the master's tools, right? And the technology we we use tends to be the commercial technology that's weaponized

• 40:02Speaker 03

  against us as more than it's like, yeah, for every benefit of being able to get, like you say, like, uh, how many likes and follows, people retweeting my message? That's great, but how many people are putting requests in through the back door, through that red carpet against me? So, yeah, it's like, it's, it's, it's, real change happens with real people, real lives in the real world. It's not that the people in, on the other side of the planet can read about me and and know that I I wanted something.

• 40:29Speaker 04

  Well, and so, and this is the Audre Lorde quote you're like referencing, like, you can't use the master's tools to to tear down the master's house. And it's like, for you, these technology things are are those tools, like?

• 40:39Speaker 03

  Hundred percent. So those are the tools that are in our technologies that we can't, um, We can't use, but we have to understand how to exploit, right? Like, we don't abolish and stand away from them. They're there, and there's ways you can use them. So, when I'm speaking to activists, the first thing I'll tell them is, "Look, it's great the things you're doing. Please understand, like, how every little thing positive you do is gonna, is, there's a backlash there, there's blowback there, and you can mitigate that. Understand that technology is wonderful and amazing, that's why you're talking to me, I'm a tech person, right? And so, everything I tell you is gonna be how you use technology in a good way, but there's a negative side to that, too. There's a dark part of that technology you gotta prevent and protect yourself from. And some technologies are better than others. So, the technologies that are those commercial technologies where you're gonna get the non-active

• 41:24Speaker 03

  people to activate them and reach them, there's a price for reaching in, right? But then there's other technologies, like, you know, open-source technologies and surveillance, circumvention technologies that are, they're gonna be protecting you, and they're gonna, there's less of that. And how to make those measurements is most of what we talk about.

• 41:43Speaker 00

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• 42:41Nilay Patel?

  So if I pull back from this a little bit, there's the sense that, okay, you can't use Twitter and Facebook and YouTube to really foment the movement because they have these red carpets for law enforcement, for big business, for whoever. What are the alternatives? Is there a decentralized, open source set of tools that helps people gather, organize, make change that are not subject to... Because there was an older internet in which there were a lot of those tools. We are constantly talking about how the big platforms have taken those tools away.

• 43:16Speaker 03

  What I'll say to that is, you have to use both. And that other suite of tools are, I explained that instead of there being a silver bullet tool, or a silver bullet Microsoft Office suite for activists, understand that there's a drugstore, you know, whether it's like Walgreens or CBS, depends on where I am, what country I'm in, might be the aperitif or whatever it is, right? I do this work globally, it's, understand that there's a difference between aspirin, you might, like Signal's like aspirin, right? You just discovered aspirin, you're gonna use it for everything. You get a bullet wound, you're gonna start rubbing aspirin in there. You know, it's just not always effective. So, yeah, Signal is great. It's a secure messenger and it's wonderful. And I have an article that I wrote about how to create an online persona. And it's about like, look, but the weakness of Signal, the first weakness is, it has

• 44:00Speaker 03

  to decrypt the message so you could read it, right? So anyone looking over your shoulder can see your message. But the second weakness is, it's your phone number. And your phone number is linked to a lot of data about you. Like, I could take your phone number, do a reverse search on it, and tell you who pays that bill, right? I can tell you what carrier it's on, and tell you what address that bill gets mailed to you. And so, it might be good to maybe put a Google Voice number, or a virtual number, as your Signal number, because that doesn't work anymore. So, it's about mitigating the harms of these one, of these good tools as well. Because everything, you have to make design decisions when you roll out security tools and software. And some of the design decisions are, it needs to be good at this, it'll be weak over here. So, just explaining that to folks and giving them the ability to now understand that.

• 44:44Speaker 03

  Right, so they can, they don't need to be technical, but now they can shop correctly and get the correct medicine for them. And so they're like, oh, I get it now. So like, maybe you wanna use this thing called Wire from one of the founders of Skype. It's good for some things and then it falls down in other areas, right? But if you wanted to have a conference call, don't use Uber Conference or Free Conference Call. You know, maybe you're having an encrypted group call on WhatsApp, but then you hit the size limit and you wanna have a bigger call, you use Wire. Then it has a size limit, then you guys decide what to do after that. So then maybe you Zoom, but then Zoom, they're not so good on privacy side of things. So it's just about explaining that, like, understand what to look for.

• 45:25Speaker 03

  So just real quick, it is like, if this thing is built, someone had to write it. That person has to feed themselves and pay their rent. And if they're basically doing it for free, that's not good for you. It's not good for your safety and security, long term, right? So they need to be like, so how is it funded? Where do they make their money? How do they monetize and how do they maintain it? How large is the team that builds this? And where are they located? What laws can they not fight? They have to abide by. Like if I, if I'm in India, in India, the law is like, look, if we're doing forensic analysis on your phone, you have to give us the password. If I'm like, hey, I need to decrypt this email, I must have your GPG password. You legally have to give it. So understand like, how, where these groups are, how that affects their viewpoint on the

• 46:09Speaker 03

  tool that they built and how, and then as legal requests come in, what can they and can they not provide? That's very important, right? So and then when in the privacy side of things, like, how do they deal with government requests and law enforcement requests? That's important too. So it's completely different criteria for shopping for what tool to use. And you could just ask people, you could ask support, you could email the people who write the thing, you could put it up on Twitter. InfoSec Twitter loves battling on, going back and forth about what the number one tool is all day. You know, I'm like, we could have built a better tool in the time you went to the this flame war started on.

• 46:44Nilay Patel?

  Oh, that but that's how you end up with forty five tools. I'm pretty sure this is Google's entire messaging strategy you just described.

• 46:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. But I feel like, you know, at the end of the day, there should be different medicines for different things. And there's you just need to understand like for everything, there's a side effect. And there's a negative side effect and you balance it and then you can just decide based on that. And then you can say, we can have a meeting without people tracking where we are. And if they do check where we are, we did it in a way that disrupts that. And now they think that there's fifty meetings when there's only one or something like that. So sometimes you you also understand how to use the data creatively.

• 47:18Nilay Patel?

  You know, you brought up Zoom and I this moment, uh, I think in American cultural history is bizarrely media. We're on a Zoom right now, as it happens, but like everyone's using Zoom for all kinds of things. Zoom was not built for this. They're not ready. I mean, this is enterprise software, uh, built for bosses to use to talk to their employees. And I think that the call that Zoom should be more aggressively monitoring what happens on Zoom calls. Pairs with the Zoom is pretty bad at privacy. Like, that is exactly the clash that all the software has, right?

• 47:52Speaker 03

  Right, but at the end of the day, like, you know, you gotta know, like, well, who made Zoom? If I'm using my criteria for measurement, right? Homie was just like, I work at Webex, the number one streaming video for conferences. But I I can't use Webex to talk to my girl. And she's in China and I'm in China and I'm trying to talk to her like that's what happened. So this guy was just like, I'm gonna make the best software because I'm lonely and horny, you know?

• 48:14Speaker 04

  So that's that's Facebook, too. That's that's all great inspiration.

• 48:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, nerds need social contact and they'll try to find a way to make it.

• 48:22Speaker 04

  But I'm you were talking about before about like the law enforcement portal stuff. Zoom doesn't even have, I think, because they never they they've sort of been thrust into the spotlight and all this. But they don't do a transparency report in the way that you can go and look to see how many law enforcement requests Google got last quarter or Facebook got last quarter. And, you know, they don't break the data down as intricately as we might like. But they're sort of out there publishing these reports. And Zoom, because they were mostly enterprise product, because, you know, a couple of months ago, no one really thought that they were going to be using it for anything sensitive, or at least not personally sensitive, they've just never sort of disclosed any of that. And and so now they're getting more pressure to do it.

• 49:07Speaker 04

  But it really is this question of like.

• 49:09Nilay Patel?

  How much are these tools getting held to this higher standard?

• 49:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean transparency reports are such a pain. Like, you know, Dropbox, I love their transparency report, but there's no standard on what they're supposed to look like. It's the first problem. And if you look at the evolution of Google transparency report, it used to have a lot more information than it does now. But they update that every six months. So even then, you're looking into a crystal ball of the past and it's pretty vague. And they only do it because of pressure. So you have to put pressure on companies to do it. Like Zoom Enterprise, they're dirtier than regular. So you think like regular consumer visit product. There's mad cases about industrial espionage, sexual harassment, like Zoom calls where they said this and this and that happened. Like, it's purposely designed. Why would we have our legal team build it up to write these reports and make it beautiful, design a website? And that's a real hassle.

• 49:57Speaker 03

  So it really has to come from pressure. And not every company will bow down and be like, okay, we'll do that for you. There's not like, there's no regulations that they have to do it, or it has to be correct. So I think that there's a lot of, a lot behind the motivation of a company to add more insight and transparency and what, and how they deal with these things than others. And it has to do with the founder and the, the attitude, the corporate culture of that, of that company. Cause they're human beings inside this company. They're like, you know, there's no good or bad company in my eye, right? There's no like, this company's evil, that company's right. There's a rumor that someone from that company walks into, people are happy to see them. No matter how much of a horrible person we might think they are. So some companies don't care about privacy.

• 50:42Speaker 03

  They don't, they never will. Some companies don't care about legal requests and they do the very least. Some companies, if you just tap them on the shoulder, they'll give you everything. You know, so, and that'll never change. And it's about understanding what the motivations are and how to tell what company's what. So if you don't see a transparency report, it's more about, there's a lot more behind it than you might just think. It's not just because nobody asked them or there wasn't enough pressure. They might just not care at all.

• 51:09Nilay Patel?

  All right, Matt, so we've been, I think, talking at a high level. This is, this is the work you do. You've been doing it. But let me bring it to now. Everyone's at home. Everyone's communicating on digital platforms all the time. There is some shady business happening in our government, at company, like we see it. How should people think about these platforms right now from the perspective of activism, from the perspective of even just basic stuff? You've got a candidate coming up in the election. You want to organize that candidate. You want to have a town. Like, how do you think about it now when we're forced to communicate online?

• 51:44Speaker 03

  Well, I think now is the time to sit, like, know the privacy policy of the tools that you're using. If you're lazy, not to blow up a free service and make it not free anymore, but there's visual search, like, to visual difference software out there, like Change Tower or Visual Ping. If you're lazy, just have it watch the privacy policy of your cable provider or your favorite software that you need to use every day for work. And just watch for when it changes, if it changes, because we're in a day and age of uncertainty and people, maybe with the best intentions, want to know everyone you talked to and you might have been around by looking through your cellphone records. Like, that's real talk right now. And in a moment of desperation, that's when people

• 52:27Speaker 03

  are less likely to fight for their civil liberties. But once you give something up now, it's there forever, right? So we have to be really careful about these rules. So if you work at a company, watch their agreement to people who, that you signed, like, dust off that contract you signed when you got the job, you're so excited, or ask HR for a copy of it, and make sure that you can check for deltas and differences in it, because that's where the civil liberty encroachments and things that will hurt you, that's where they come from. Also, understand that when you're on the internet 24 hours a day, you're creating more data exhaust and more trackable information about yourself than ever now, right? So take more precautions and think about it. So, you know, you might clear the history when you're on a browser or use incognito mode

• 53:12Speaker 03

  to the original history, but when you visit a website, because it has to look up the DNS, unless you're using some browser that has DNS security on it, but let's not get into that. Your cable provider is, through their hardware, they're the default lookup for all of your, everything that's going on, on your phone, on your laptop, every app, every tool, right? So they're getting what sites your apps are using, like tinder.com all day, right? And they can see what time you're visiting them, and that paints a picture about who you are, what websites you're on. And even if those websites are HTTPS encrypted, you get the domain name of that website. So you're on ESPN, and then you're on this other site, and then you're on Tinder, and I can see that, and it paints a picture. But if you're using a VPN, that picture is blurred because the cable provider doesn't

• 53:57Speaker 03

  get it. You're giving that list, which has to exist technically, to someone who promises to throw it out. So I would recommend, like, use a VPN like BitMask, where you can use it anonymously for free, right? Or use Proton VPN with an email that you just made throwaway, right? Or, you know, install TunnelBear and use the free 500 megabytes of encryption on it, on the VPN, just so you have a virtual private network that you can use. And yeah, it might disrupt your email speed, and you might be a little blurrier on your video conference, but thus is the price of privacy. So it's just about understanding, like, now more than ever, your home, feeding all your data through one source, it's not compartmentalized.

• 54:40Speaker 03

  You're not like, this is the data that I create when I'm at work, this is the data I create when I'm in my bedroom, this is the data I create when I'm on the subway or on the street, right? It's now all in one, easy-to-read, easy-to-drink straw, right? Pool. So now more than ever, use privacy-protecting software to blur that image.

• 54:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's really smart. All right, Matt, thank you so much for joining us today. I know it's a weird, a weird time, and I know that everyone's real busy.

• 55:06Speaker 03

  It is a weird time, but the positive thing from this time is that biologically, we're being forced to realize that everything that we do affects our, our friends, our family, our enemies, every human being, whether you identify as male, female, gender nonconforming, you have a biological system, and we're all in this together. And I try to think of it as like, we're all united, and we can, we can help each other by small sacrifices. And that's what activism's all about, right? Just taking those small sacrifices to help for the greater good, you know? So, you know, be, be an activist by just sitting your ass at home.

• 55:41Nilay Patel?

  That's about right. It feels like this is the beginning, so there's, it's just, there's a lot of panic and chaos. But on the other end of it, it feels like a lot of assumptions, a lot of attitudes might be reset by all of America taking a break for some time. And I'm, I'm interested to see, we're gonna spend a lot of time tracking how that works with our, through online and digital lives, because having the entire country mediated by the internet for almost all interaction is unlike anything that's ever happened.

• 56:07Speaker 03

  It's, it's never, never happened before. Yes, you all can work from home if you got that kind of job. But there are a lot of people who can't, a lot of people who are not working from home, like homies bagging groceries for you. There's no, there's no Zoom version of that.

• 56:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 56:19Speaker 03

  Um, let's also remember those folks.

• 56:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, for sure. But even that, like the, your entertainment now, all, you know, Disney's shifting their movies to streaming, like...

• 56:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, Universal's like, we're dropping movies on streaming instead of theaters, because there are no theaters, right?

• 56:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and just that, just that alone, like, okay, now my, all the entertainment that I consume happens over one pipe.

• 56:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a lot of people who are excited by that, because now more than ever, they can get it all from one place, right? Like, that's the finger, the detail of who you are through your data have never been this crystal clear.

• 56:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right, I gotta go install a VPN, so I gotta run.

• 56:53Speaker 03

  Do it.

• 56:55Nilay Patel?

  Matt, thank you so much. I would love to have you back sometime soon. This was an amazing conversation.

• 57:00Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 57:00Nilay Patel?

  Russell, you are also good.

• 57:01Speaker 04

  Well, I thank you.

• 57:03Nilay Patel?

  All right, my thanks to Matt Mitchell, founder of Crypto Harlem, and as always, to Russell Brandom for joining me. We'll be back on Friday with a chat show, Tuesday with the interview show. Tweet at me, I'm at Reckless. I love your feedback, love hearing who you want me to talk to. We'll talk to you soon.