The New American Surveillance State | Byron Tau

✨ DEBRIEF | Ryan & David unpacking the episode: https://www.bankless.com/debrief-the-byron-tau-interview ------ Are we being watched? That’s the question we ask Byron Tau, an investigative journalist and author of “Means of Control'' that covers all about the US surveillance state. Turns out the US Government has a digital dossier of every citizen, but how? How do they collect the data? How are they using it? Can we ever get back our digital privacy? Expect to learn all that and much more in what is a deep dive into digital surveillance. ------ 📣 SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/toku 🌐 CARTESI | APPLY FOR A GRANT https://bankless.cc/CartesiGovernance ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 4:42 State of Surveillance 12:24 Content vs Metadata 18:16 The Surveillance Industry 33:53 Total Information Awareness 49:50 Is the Gov Using Data Against Us? 53:10 Privacy Protections 1:05:29 The Role of Encryption 1:17:23 Surveillance Abroad 1:22:09 US vs China 1:26:04 Surveillance in Crypto 1:31:09 Closing & Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES Byron Tau https://twitter.com/ByronTau Means of Control by Byron Tau https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/706321/means-of-control-by-byron-tau/ ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠

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

• 0:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, wait, wait. Can the data brokers sell the same information, like domestic information about US citizens? They could sell that to the US government, despite what this entire episode's been about. And like, that's crazy enough. You're not telling me those brokers can also sell them to foreign countries.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

• 0:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  What?

• 0:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Welcome to Bankless, where today we're exploring the frontier of privacy. This is Ryan Chon Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. The topic of today's episode, the US surveillance state. We're talking total surveillance. Our guest is an investigative journalist who says the US government has, in quotes, "a digital dossier of every citizen." Everyone listening to this.

• 0:46David Hoffman?

  Yikes.

• 0:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  How do they collect the data? How are they using it? Can we ever get back our digital privacy? And does crypto, does encryption fit into the picture here?

• 0:55David Hoffman?

  Some questions we asked Byron on the episode today. Everyone knows that internet users give up their privacy, but you, listener, do you know how far that actually goes? Do you think that US citizens actually have a right to privacy? Because I wouldn't be so sure. The United States government can't search the contents of your emails, but does that even matter in this day and age when there's so much data out there? And is there even really a difference between the authoritarian state of China and the capitalistic democracy of the United States when it comes to our privacy? These are some of the questions that we asked Byron. So let's go ahead and get right into that conversation with Byron. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors.

• 1:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Station, I'm very excited to introduce to you Byron Tau. He's an investigative journalist and the author of a fantastic book. It's called Means of Control. In that book, he shares just about everything he's learned about government surveillance and control. This has been a multi-year project, and we are excited to have him on Bankless. Byron, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. Okay, so you're talking to crypto people here. We have a crypto audience, so the audience is definitely dialed in, I would say, to the subject matter of surveillance in general. But I think the best place to start would be at the top. So you wrote this book. It's called Means of Control. So the simplest possible question is, who's controlling us and what are their means?

• 2:17Speaker 01

  So it's a title taken from a Thomas Pynchon quote, which I just happened to like because I thought it expressed a lot of the themes in the book. And the quote goes something like, "Once the technical means of control have reached a certain size, a certain degree of being connected to one another, the chances for freedom are over for good." And I think that sort of sums up some of the themes of my book, specifically around large-scale data collection and its use by powerful forces in our society. And those forces, of course, include corporations, but the book documents specifically how governments are acquiring large amounts of this data and using it for various surveillance programs.

• 2:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so I think an underlying theme of your book is if we don't protect these freedoms, then we may actually lose them. And this is something I'm sure we'll return to. I'm curious, though, if you're trying to explain this to like normies, you know, the problem statement, at a dinner party, let's say, and like, you're just trying to explain this in a way that doesn't seem like you are wearing a tinfoil hat, you're a conspiracy theorist. Like, how do you explain it to average, everyday, American citizens? Like, the problem statement, let's say, and why it's a problem?

• 3:34Speaker 01

  Sure. So I think that the thing I would say is that historically in the United States, we have limited government power by limiting the amount of information that governments can obtain about all of us. We, generally speaking, require governments to go get a search warrant or a subpoena when they look at invasive amounts of information about us. That's traditionally how we've limited government power and protected the privacy of citizens. However, in recent years, so much information is available out there in the world for sale. And governments, like every other entity on the planet, they're eager for information, and they are consumers of this commercially available information.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  And that has essentially started to rewrite the social bargain, that when you let governments buy large amounts of data on everybody, it moves us away from that traditional notion where you limit government power by having court oversights, by having, you know, they have to do, they have to get documents together, and they have to go convince a judge to let them look into an individual. With the sheer amount of information that's available out there in the world from data brokers and from all sorts of other sources, that social bargain is being upended.

• 4:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so what's really interesting here, Byron, is this is, there's almost some economics at play and like our listeners will very much understand kind of like the economics of this situation. It's something, again, I want to return back to in the future because it's become very inexpensive in this digital world to collect this information. Like, it's unprecedented. This is, the framers of the Constitution didn't have this kind of data collection, like, cost reduction in their mind when they, when they frame things out. And so I think this is a recurring theme that we'll come back to. And I want to set a roadmap for this episode, maybe. So first, want you to tell us what's going on today.

• 5:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, so how this data marketplace works between corporations and private groups that are collecting this data and the government, how they're using it. Then I think we want to talk about the legal. Like, what protections do we actually have set up today? Because I do, we live in a democratic republic, I think, and there are some protections for citizens, aren't there? And so we'll talk about that. And then also want to get a sense of the incentives and the motivation at play, because it feels like we're, we're stuck in a prisoner's dilemma. It feels like we're stuck in some kind of a system. And like, that's the question of how did we get into this system? And then where does it leave us? And then ultimately, hopefully, how do we change things? And we might bring into,

• 6:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  like, into play a financial surveillance and how crypto fits into all of this. So let's start with the state of this surveillance system today and what's going on. So I will say, Byron, bankless listeners are probably pretty informed internet users. You know, so if you, if you tell them that they have very little privacy on the internet, the first reaction would be like, yeah, tell me something I don't know. Like, they won't be shocked, right? They're like, yeah, of course, the government is spying on me. But like, I want you to get into the details, because I don't think a lot of listeners know exactly how that happens, or the scale at which it's, it's happening. So what is something that you would say to even the informed internet goer, whose immediate reaction

• 6:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  is, yeah, of course, they're spying on me? Like, what's, what's something that they don't know in terms of how it works and, and the level of surveillance that's going on here?

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Well, one thing that seems to shock people is essentially that all of our consumer technologies bleed data in some way, and that goes right down to the tire pressure sensor in your car. You know, even some professional intelligence officers were, you know, a little surprised by some of this when they discovered this a few years ago, but essentially, when you turn on your car in the morning, there's a little display screen on the car that says, you know, the tire pressure is 42 PSI. And that sensor is not a hardwired sensor, it's actually a wireless sensor that transmits information from your car tire to the central computer of your car, and it's there for a perfectly good and legitimate safety reason.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  But very clever governments have figured out, hey, that's a unique identifier that comes off of this car. And if we put the right sensor in the right place, or we put something, you know, in front of a bridge or a tunnel, some choke point that everyone has to go to, we can collect that information. And that's basically the case with almost every system that we use in modern life, whether that's the mail, right? Like, every time you fill out a change of address form, the postal service makes your data available to lots of people. Every time you sign up for one of these loyalty cards, that corporation is going to sell off your data probably, or at the very least analyze your purchases. Even when you're in sort of semi-closed social media sites, you know, people infiltrate

• 8:33Speaker 01

  these spaces, brokers, data scrapers, and they capture what they can see in these closed spaces and open spaces as well, like Twitter or X. And, you know, even the system of using, of delivering targeted advertising to billions of people on computers or on phones, that system leeches tremendous amounts of data, and that data is obtainable by data brokers. And so, almost everywhere there is some sort of information, or some sort of a technology, it's generating a lot of data. And very clever people who know how to take advantage of these systems, that the public largely doesn't quite know how they work, have figured out ways to collect that data, and in many cases, to sell that data.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  And governments have come along and decided to take advantage of these things, to take advantage of systems that were never designed sort of with adversarial privacy or privacy protection in mind, and use them for sort of mass surveillance.

• 9:31David Hoffman?

  I want to put an image into listeners' heads, Byron, that I think they will help them kind of navigate this episode. And this image is again, we're going to have to talk about the difference between content and metadata. And so that'll be my first question to you is like the delineation there. But really, the idea here is of some sort of a Sudoku puzzle that governments are filling out. And they're using metadata to fill out that Sudoku puzzle. And way back in the day, when there wasn't that much data, citizens, users, users of the internet still had a lot of privacy, except for like the small amounts of metadata that we push around the internet in whatever forms. But now with the explosion of devices that we all have,

• 10:14David Hoffman?

  we have smart refrigerators, we have Apple Watches, we have phones, we have our computers, we have iPads, there's metadata everywhere. And now there's a lot more of just like data surface area for Sudoku puzzles of information to kind of get filled out. And for governments, if they really want to, to get a pretty holistic picture of what exactly is going on in the places that they are investigating. And so that's kind of like the image I want to leave with listeners. Can we talk about the difference between content and metadata? And the different level of protections that individuals have as internet goers?

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like that metaphor a lot. If I can just kind of complexify the history a little bit, and maybe this will help answer your question about the difference between content and metadata. In the early history of the internet, actually, a lot of what was being sent along the network was actually quite open and viewable by people like systems administrators and telecoms, right? Because the early internet was actually never designed with privacy in mind, even though it was a Department of Defense network. It was this experimental research network that people were trading kind of messages and research papers and unclassified stuff. It was never really designed with privacy as the primary protocol. But yet, we've all moved our lives onto this entire network. We do everything on it, right?

• 11:35Speaker 01

  We bank, we buy things, we do therapy appointments. There's all sorts of things now that we do on the internet on a system that was just never designed for this, that was designed for Department of Defense researchers and academics to trade some notes and some early drafts of research papers. And so In the early days of the internet, you could actually intercept things fairly easily. And so if you were sending an email on one of the legacy email providers like Gmail, like Hotmail, like Yahoo, Yahoo can see it. If it, you know, in the, in the early days of the internet, even your telecom could see it. Your systems administrator could see all of this information.

• 12:14David Hoffman?

  And by information, you mean the content, like the actual contents of the letter of the email?

• 12:19Speaker 01

  Like what you were, what you were saying to the person you were emailing, right down to, to the actual content of the message. Over the years, people have realized that this is a privacy problem, right? That we, we don't necessarily want telecom to be able to see your emails. We don't necessarily want the guy in IT to be able to see everything that's transiting the network. So we've added extra layers of encryption onto communications that we send across the internet. And sometimes that's truly end to end encrypted. So you have services like Signal and Proton Mail where no one, not even the people running the service can see it. But more, more often, it's a service like Gmail, which Gmail can see what you're saying, but the telecom can't.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  And that's sort of the, this is where the distinction and the importance of metadata comes into play. Because it's increasingly hard to intercept things as they move along telecom networks, and that was the traditional way governments did surveillance, right? That was a lot of what Edward Snowden revealed, was that the government was just plucking things off of the AT&T and Verizon network as data was transiting, and a lot of it was unencrypted and they could see everything. As you start to add encryption into the mix, you stop being able to see a lot of the content of the messages. Now you can go to Gmail and demand them, but you need to get a court order or, you know.

• 13:36David Hoffman?

  There are some user protections around that, yeah.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  There's like procedures and processes built in. But when you, when it comes to metadata, when it comes to data about the information that's being sent, a lot of that is still available. And, you know, the Supreme Court, a long time ago, drew this distinction between information that you share with a third party and information that you keep private. So there are fewer privacy protections for things like metadata. In the context of communications, metadata is like the address on the outside of an envelope, and content is like what's inside the envelope. And governments, by and large now, today, when they're filling out this Sudoku puzzle, can get a lot of metadata. It's a little bit harder to get content. And that's what's led to this world, that a lot of these data brokers are brokering metadata,

• 14:22Speaker 01

  or they're brokering, you know, little puzzle pieces or little signals from a device. And you still have to do some homework, you have to do some tradecraft to figure out how it's helpful and whose device it is, or where this email came from. But if you have powerful enough entities and a large enough budget and a big enough data center, you can pretty much know everything about, you know, communications and people and things, trying to be on the internet.

• 14:48David Hoffman?

  And just to really clearly define data versus metadata, I think there's a metaphor in your book where like the data in the pre-internet world, imagine a letter, snail mail, physical letter on paper. The metadata is the address of the letter and where it's going and where it's coming from. And then there's even some additional metadata one might be able to glean from that. Like, how big is the letter? Like, is it crinkled and old? Or is it brand new? Like, stuff like this, like cursory data, cosmetic data you can see from the outside, even though you can't see the actual contents of the actual, of the actual letter. And like on the internet terms, this is like data packets, or just like other little packages of things that are flying around the internet.

• 15:29David Hoffman?

  And so while the content itself is largely private from the outside view, there's now a growing amount of this out there to the point where like there's still a lot, a pretty solid way to glean what's inside of the actual, of the actual content. And so like, I want to talk about just like the submerged iceberg that's going on here, because I think this is the, the lack of understanding that the average person does not have is like, how big this complex is beneath the surface? Like, how much metadata is and how big the industry is around collecting it? Can you just like illustrate some magnitude of how big this, this submerged iceberg is here?

• 16:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I mean, data brokers themselves are, that's a billion dollar business. And then if you look at sort of targeted advertising, which is, you know, these companies wouldn't call themselves data brokers necessarily, but they are collecting huge amounts of data on people and they're making it available to other parties. That's probably close to a trillion dollar industry. And then never mind all of the tech companies, which they don't exactly broker data. I mean, Google doesn't sell your personal information per se, but they sell access to you and they sell access to your data to lots of other parties who want to serve you targeted advertising. So this is a massive, massive social project. And it's the way that a lot of content on the internet is delivered.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  And it's the reason why so much is free, that there's just the payment for a lot of these apps, for a lot of these services, for a lot of these websites is your data. And that data is probably not that valuable to you. Like if, if you were to tally up individually, how much you're worth to these companies, it's probably not worth a tremendous amount. But in the aggregate of billions of people, all, you know, in their roles as consumers, as, as people who you might advertise to, or you might collect data on, or you might sell data on, then this ends up being a, a pretty large industry. And so, you know, you have all sorts of logs and information and data floating around

• 17:37Speaker 01

  about how devices, how people, how internet browsers, how cars are behaving. And that data is tremendously interesting and valuable in a variety of uses. To advertisers, they don't really care necessarily that it's Byron Tao, but they are interested in what I'm interested in, what websites I visit, what search terms I'm trying to put into Google, what I buy at the supermarket. All that data is interesting to them because they want to build a profile of me. They don't necessarily care about me as an individual, you know, like by name, but they want to be able to serve relevant ads to me.

• 18:13David Hoffman?

  They don't care about you, your soul, but they care about you, the object.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. Like, I'm just, I can be a number to them because, you know, they could synonymize me and just call me some number and they don't have to get too deep into my personal identity, but they want to know a lot about, you know, what that synonymized number is doing on the internet. But governments get very interested in this stuff, too, and they have very, very different missions. And there's a, there's a very interesting quote that I, I put in the book from a senior intelligence community official, and he basically said, you know, "We actually kill people off of metadata, right? We make targeting life and death decisions in the military and the intelligence community based on sort of like small snippets of information that we can glean about people, whether it's their

• 19:01Speaker 01

  social network, whether it's their proximity in a known, to a known terrorist safe house, whether it's who they're communicating with. Those things can inform life or death targeting decisions because basically the behaviors that we all engage in reveal a lot about us, who we're associated with, what we're doing, what we're interested in. You can divine a lot of information off of metadata. You don't have to listen to a terrorist phone call to necessarily know that he or she is a terrorist, right? If you, if they're at a known terrorist training camp and their phone is there, that's a pretty good sign. And so you don't need to wiretap them necessarily. That's a good data point that often that's

• 19:43Speaker 01

  all the military has to sort of identify that this is that person and this is where they are and call in the drones.

• 19:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  So where we are so far is, we're talking about how powerful metadata actually is, and it looks like in this digital world we've, we've moved to, it's tremendously powerful. And there are these data brokers, as you say, so there's this whole industry of data collectors. And I think a lot of people are aware of this from sort of a, I guess, yeah, we are the product, right? We live on the internet, so we are the product. So of course, companies are collecting data about us in order to serve us ads. I think the new part here is that the US government is actually a purchaser of that data set. And when you were just talking about the, the case where there's sort of a, you know, a terrorist and Like the military is going after a certain individual, for instance,

• 20:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  that feels, I think, when you say that to someone who lives in the US, like a foreign adversary type of situation, right? And I guess that's what the military is there to do in the best of cases, right? Where it gets creepy is when they start collecting data about us. And I just want to ask the basic question, like, why are they doing that? So let's say Google, Facebook, all of these data brokers, tire gauge information, you know, Wi-Fi signal information, you go through story after story in your book of all of this metadata that we are essentially leaking. And how are we leaking it? Just by living our lives. You know, we're just trying to live our lives, right? And we're giving off, throwing off all of this data.

• 21:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's one thing if it gives us an ad that, you know, it gets put in front of us and sometimes, you know, that ad is valuable because I didn't know I wanted that thing, so thank you. But it's another thing if our government is using that metadata to what? Like, so why are they collecting it on US citizens? Is there a rationale there?

• 21:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so at the highest levels, all governments, like all corporations and like nosey journalists, are trying to better understand the world in furtherance of whatever mission they have. And, you know, government isn't a monolith, right? Government does a lot of things. Government delivers services to citizens. It does planning, like transportation planning. It tries to fight disease outbreaks and data is useful in all those scenarios. A lot of the data that I talk about that's useful for sort of military operations is also useful for benign transportation planning or trying to understand the COVID-19 outbreak. So not everything the government does with data is sort of necessarily scary or implicates people's civil rights.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  So at the highest levels, governments are collecting this data because they're curious and they have some mission or some problem that they need to solve. And so when you talk about, when you move to entities like intelligence agencies, the military and the police, those are entities with a lot of power to cause very serious consequences to individuals. And that's why I focus primarily on those entities and less on the entities that are trying to figure out where to put a bus stop or where the best route for a light rail line is. Those are important government functions, but they have less of a dramatic impact on individuals and they implicate less government power. So Take these government entities with these law enforcement, intelligence, national security, or public safety missions.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  They're all collecting this data because they have an important function in our society. You know, the military and the intelligence community are charged with keeping us safe largely from foreign adversaries, but domestic law enforcement entities are charged with solving crimes and, you know, ensuring public safety. And governments are obtaining data largely for those purposes. So you have often the military and the intelligence community, they're largely focused abroad. You know, certainly sometimes they acquire data sets on the United States, but at the federal level in the 21st century, there are a lot of checks and balances around what the intelligence community and the military do with data on Americans. Now, what they do with data abroad, that's a sort of a different question, but you

• 23:46Speaker 01

  know, domestic data, that's, that's well protected and there are well-established procedures and civil rights sort of protections built into those systems. When you talk about the police and you talk about entities like DHS or the FBI, that's, those are entities that have much more direct missions that are applicable to US citizens. And this is where sort of thornier civil rights questions come into play. Like, when is it appropriate for the United States government to buy large amounts of data, or even local governments or state governments, to buy large amounts of data to do things like solve crimes, to do things like, you know, figure out where criminals

• 24:30Speaker 01

  are, to try to do surveillance, to try to prevent crime? Those are those thorniest civil rights questions that I think are raised by this kind of data acquisition. You know, and historically, by and large, as I've said, we have limited the power of those entities to sort of root around in the lives of individuals because we think that's the best way to protect liberty. And often things that traditionally require the approval of a judge, like let's take these massive amounts of location data sets that are available. They come off of our phones, they come off of our apps, they come off of targeted ads. And they, they show the movement of, of millions, if not hundreds of millions, if not billions of devices around the world.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  You know, law enforcement has started buying access to those databases. And that data can often show things that one time they needed to fill out a search warrant, go to a judge and say, give me some, you know, historic cell data on this person because I think he or she has committed a crime. And that's where sort of the civil rights and civil liberties problems really start to compound when you're talking about government use of this data.

• 25:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, Byron, it just seems like, and this is the main message of your book, and I think an important message for everyone to hear, not just Bankless listeners, but I hope the broader society hears this, is the government doesn't actually have to be the ones collecting the data, right? They can be a step removed from this process. All they have to do is buy it from someone who has it.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  Who's selling it.

• 26:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  And our surveillance capitalism, like creation, this thing that we've created on the internet and all of the digital information pushing out, means there are companies out there that know just about everything about what we do through metadata, like, period. They know where we are right now from our cell location data, they know what our internet search history is, like, they know everything about us. And if the government can just simply, they don't have to collect it themselves, they could just purchase it, well, that's like, the most obvious loophole in history. And I'm like, almost surprised that we haven't connected these dots yet as a society. But are you telling, like, I just want to understand the mechanics of how this works. Let's say some data broker, data provider, has all of this data.

• 26:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're telling me the government, FBI, let's say, so we'll use kind of like, you know, the internal domestic police type servants, DHS or FBI, you're telling me that they can just like, use our taxpayer dollars, right? And go purchase that data set on their own citizens? And there's like, no, nothing that would prevent them or block them from doing it? And in fact, the companies are kind of happy because like, they get to sell a product? Is that really how it works? It's just like, hey, company, we want this data, will you sell it to us? Yeah, sure, here you go, that's how it works?

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Yep, that's exactly how it works. There are these data sets on the population, on the movement of cars, on the movement of phones, on, you know, people's home address history, or their employment, all sorts of sort of biographical details. There are large data sets on people's social media habits and what they say in either open social media networks like X and Twitter, or semi-open ones like Facebook and Instagram and TikTok. All of that is available for sale, and there is no legal prohibition on the US government going out and purchasing that data on its own citizens for the purposes of public safety, for the purposes of intelligence, for the

• 28:04Speaker 01

  purposes of surveilling people. Now, some of these agencies either don't do it as a matter of policy, because they sort of want to be seen as respecting the civil rights of Americans. Some of them have very strict rules on how they acquire this data, and some have no rules at all. Because in the United States, there are more than 10,000 different law enforcement entities, and those range from very sophisticated, well-funded, well-run ones with histories of abuse that are now overseen very carefully by Congress and the executive branch, to very small police departments that operate with very little oversight from their local governments. And so, there is no legal prohibition on the

• 28:45Speaker 01

  acquisition of this kind of bulk information on Americans from companies, from data brokers.

• 28:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm gonna let David jump in here in a second, but just like, it strikes me how much of a precarious position that puts us in as citizens, because we're, it's basically like, you know, a trust me, bro type model, that the government won't use this vast power of data against us, right? And we'll talk about the legality a little bit later, and what, like, a veneer of civil liberties and laws actually protect us. But wow, that feels like a very vulnerable position to be in, when we can't do anything. We can't just like, not get this data collected.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you know, the United States in its recent history and the lifespan of people who are alive today has experienced intelligence and law enforcement agencies going a little bit too far against domestic groups who have been critical of the government. You know, you you look at what happened during the civil rights movement or the anti-war movement in Vietnam and the way that the FBI and the NSA and the CIA saw those groups as potential threats to social order and use the tools of the state, use surveillance tools to monitor those groups and those individuals in ways that today we would consider unlawful and massive violations of civil liberties. So it's not that long ago that we've seen government

• 30:10Speaker 01

  power be turned in ways against domestic critics that I think today we would be very uncomfortable with. And back then, the amount of data available on people was quite limited. I mean, today, you're talking about, you know, an entire digital dossier on almost every citizen. That's pretty exhaustive and it's not available through, you know, sort of, it's available through the corporations, the largest sort of companies in the world have kind of assembled this information and these tiny data brokers and data aggregators are collecting it all from from these places and making it available for sale to basically everyone. They largely sprung up to cater to corporations, but the government market

• 30:54Speaker 01

  is a nice little secondary, you know, market for them and it's a nice little profit stream.

• 31:00David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that also keeps them on the the good side of the government, too, as a nice little byproduct. At this point in the conversation, Byron, can we introduce the topic, the kind of the concept of total information awareness? Can you define what this is and how it fits into this story?

• 31:16Speaker 01

  Sure. So Total Information Awareness was a program that was stood up after September 11th. And the theory behind it was basically the government actually had a lot of information about the September 11th hijackers. It knew that two people affiliated with Al Qaeda had come into the country. It knew that there were a bunch of people that were taking flying lessons, but were completely uninterested in learning how to take like take off or land, which is very suspicious. And by and large, the intelligence community had a ton of information that Bin Laden was trying to do something in the United States. They didn't know exactly what. And so after 9/11, there was this belief that the government actually had a lot of information already. What it failed to do is connect the dots, to weave together these threads

• 31:58Speaker 01

  into something that was actionable and they could, they could do something about, like pick up these two guys in Los Angeles or, I mean, you know, sort of stop some of these people from boarding planes because their pattern of behavior was suspicious. So Total Information Awareness was a research program set up by the Pentagon. And it was quite controversial from the start. And even in the sort of very fearful days after 9/11, this program prompted a backlash that I think was a little bit surprising to both the Pentagon as well as sort of civil society that, and essentially what they were trying to do, and it was only a research program. It never got actually off the ground and actually stood up

• 32:41Speaker 01

  and actually was running an active surveillance program. But what it was trying to do is take all this corporate data that existed out there and things like travel records and purchase history and credit data and address history, and weave all that data together with the government's secret data. And what they were trying to do was look for patterns and outliers and potential indicators of terrorist attacks in these huge volumes of commercial data. So hypothetically, if you were to have rented a Penske truck and purchased a large amount of fertilizer and purchased a number of hotel rooms along a route towards Washington DC, each of those things individually is not suspicious. But if a single individual is doing that, well, that might be a template

• 33:23Speaker 01

  to someone building a bomb and trying to detonate it in the nation's capital. So that was the aim of this research program. But it prompted this very furious backlash. It was bipartisan back then. This was 2003. Congress got wind of what the Pentagon was doing. You know, ordinary Americans were saying, well, this is a giant spy database and it's not just directed at the Middle East or all these trouble spots in the world. It's directed at me and I'm angry about it. And so Congress actually wound down this program. And it's kind of one of the only times where in the post nine 11, in the immediate post nine 11 era, where the civil libertarians won any sort of real victory on civil rights and privacy.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  But it was seen as a bridge too far back even in 2003, even less than 24 months after the nine 11 attacks. And so it really sort of highlights a couple of themes that America still is a country that's very cranky and very civil libertarian and that, you know, this was a bipartisan effort to wind this thing down. The other theme it highlighted was the government realized that, you know, these tools were valuable, but talking about them too publicly, letting Congress get wind of them and letting the public weigh in too much on them, you know, endangered their use. And so there started to be a lot more secrecy

• 34:48Speaker 01

  around some of these programs. Not that they're classified, right? You can't really classify commercial data per se, but you know, talking about them openly was seen as a mistake and one that really prompted a public backlash. And it was one that, you know, these government contractors and these researchers would learn from and, you know, try to keep this stuff as much as possible from being on the public's radar.

• 35:14David Hoffman?

  But I think I want to bring up a metaphor here and that's kind of adjacent. In 1970, there was the Bank Secrecy Act, which created this like $10,000 reporting requirement to the IRS as part of like the commercial banking layer. So any sort of transaction that was $10,000 or higher had to be reported to the IRS. And this is just like kind of similar concept, just like, you know, we need to make sure that we're not doing any sort of like fraudulent stuff or any terrorists or any like dual taxing taxes, all that kind of things. And this has also kind of encroached on our privacy. Again, we can debate the merits of this, but. That's kind of here nor there. One thing that has happened is that that $10,000 in 1970 is actually in today's dollars, something like $2,300.

• 35:59David Hoffman?

  And so there has been this like, because of inflation, this creeping encroachment on surveillance with our financial transactions. And I want to carry that same metaphor over to the explosion of metadata due to the whole explosion of devices that exist in today's world. There has, it has been easier and easier and easier for governments to fill in that Sudoku puzzle to achieve total information awareness, simply because that data is free on the internet to collect by anyone. Since it's free to collect by anyone, it is collected by anyone. And then the government now has an easier time accessing the data they need to achieve this goal of total information awareness.

• 36:42David Hoffman?

  Now, not every part of the government has this goal. The only a minority of the government has this goal of total information awareness. But when someone has it, like, we know it's achievable. Which, kind of the punchline of this episode to end your book is that, well, if it is so trivially easy to fill in the Sudoku puzzle that induces total information awareness, then what is individual privacy in the world of the 2020s in America and beyond? And so that's kind of like the question I don't really think anyone truly has an answer to, or at least not a very good one, is like, Byron, what is our privacy level in modern times with all of this data that's everywhere? Do we have privacy in this day and age?

• 37:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a good question. You know, I've been asked about this a lot, and I think there's two ways to see it. One, a lot of this data is being collected under sort of the guise of being used for corporate use cases, right? So if you read the privacy policies of any of these services or these apps, they say stuff like, oh, well, you know, we want, we collect your information, but it's all de-identified or it's anonymized. And we only want to serve you targeted ads. And, you know, maybe it makes some noises about having to turn over. Data to the government in the event of a subpoena or some sort of a process. But by and large, you're telling the population that you're collecting it for corporate purposes. But of course, none of these companies can guarantee that.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  Once data is collected, the data could be used for anything. And so, you know, there's a view that sees this collection of data by corporations as sort of a bait and switch when governments acquire it and that there's not really informed consent. And that's one way to see it. The other way to see it is maybe the social bargain is simply being rewritten, right? Like in the seventies, when the government decided that essentially you don't really have a tremendous amount of privacy in your bank records, right? And that we're going to deputize the banks to do, you know, basically our enforcement for us and send us suspicious activity reports and make them report any deposit over this amount of money.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  Well, maybe that was a renegotiation of the social bargain that we've lived with ever since. And maybe the same thing is happening in the digital sphere. Maybe in exchange for all these great technological services and the wonderful ability for us to record a podcast over me sitting in this little booth and you guys sitting in your homes, maybe the social bargain is just, you know, all these powerful entities are going to have our data and there's nothing we can do about it. And I, you know, I don't have a good answer. What really motivated me to write the book is I did want to make this trade off very explicit to people, right? Because I did think, I do think corporations in some ways try to minimize or hide how much data they collect on people because I do think they realize people do consider it a little unseemly.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, they'll still download the app, but they don't love it. And then on the government side, I think it's the same thing that, you know, governments don't want the population to realize how much data is out there for collection and just how much of it ends up in government hands in one way or another. And so it's a great question and I don't know the answer, but I definitely wrote this book as an educational, as a way to educate people about what's happening with data, with government power and with corporate power.

• 40:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think for a lot of people listening and just like, you know, the ordinary American or just like, by the way, we're using the US as the use case. I imagine this happens in Europe and just like in another place in the world to like even more dialed up. But I don't think we ever consciously made that decision to change the social contract. It's just kind of like happened to us. And it always favors those centralized entities that have more power and disenfranchises those with less power and makes them even less powerful. And so that I think is the trade off to acknowledge. I want to go back

• 40:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  to this total information awareness because you were talking about like the early 2000s and it seems like Congress stepped in. They did the right thing, right? I am imagining that, and I want you to verify this from the research that you've done, we're just all assuming there is another database out there that they don't talk about that is basically doing total information awareness, right? Even though Congress said, no, you can't do that Pentagon, they said, okay, lesson learned. We won't tell anyone next time. We won't make a big deal out of it and we'll go do it somewhere else. I'm just operating under the assumption that that is the case. Is that a reasonable assumption

• 41:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  to make? Is that basically the assumption that you're making and the average listener should make?

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Let me put it this way. Everything that that program was researching at the time has basically become reality, right? Like this ability to scan large amounts of data for anomalies that exists. You know, they were trying to do social network mapping. So they were trying to figure out who knows who just based on stuff like who they call or who they associate with or who they're. The government is very good at doing all these things. So basically, all the technologies and those lines of research that they were doing have become reality or operationalized by the government. On the other hand, I do think Americans are a little too cynical post Snowden about just how much data, you know, governments acquire. Like, yes, they acquire huge amounts of data, but the government also tries to be thoughtful

• 42:20Speaker 01

  about privacy and civil liberties. And there really are legitimate rules in place, at least at the national level, about when you access these things. And I'm talking specifically about the military and the intelligence community, these sort of big national, you know, the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, they are not perfect entities, but they have pretty strong rules in place about how you use data on the US population. Often you can acquire it, but you have to minimize it, or you have to do all sorts of other things. When it comes to what happens abroad, I would be a lot more, I would be a lot less circumspect, right? I do think the United States government collects huge, huge volumes of data on the global population due to its, you know, its technological

• 43:04Speaker 01

  power, the fact that so much data is routed and stored in the United States, the fact that our homegrown tech companies are global brands that collect data on the entire planet. You can assume that the US government collects huge amounts of information about the global public. The real issue also is that not every agency is the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI, who have come under scrutiny over the years, who have had their own abuses revealed and are very carefully monitored. When you go down to the level of state police departments, when you go down to the level of local police departments, even some, sometimes the FBI, which has a domestic mission, these are entities with a lot freer hand to acquire the exact same amounts of data

• 43:45Speaker 01

  and do things with a lot less public transparency and oversight. And that's the real sort of concern here. The other concern is that a lot of these intelligence community rules around how you use American data, they're simply that, they're rules. They can be sort of changed at any time, they could be quietly rescinded. We don't know to what extent people violate them and how often they're punished. They don't have the force of law in a lot of cases. And so that's another concern, right? That we're relying on the goodwill and the, and sort of the self restraint of these entities without having strong privacy protections enshrined in law about what these agencies can do at all levels of government.

• 44:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and we don't want to get to what protections legally we have in place today, but just curious, in going through this entire story, did you come across swaths of evidence that the government is using, actively using, this data to breach civil liberties, like right now? Because I think some set of listeners is going to hear all of this and say, "Yeah, Byron, that's terrible, but if they're not using it against us, then what's the actual problem here?" And I'll worry about it when I hear something in the news where the government is systematically doing something nefarious to its population. Did you come across evidence of these kind of civil liberties breaches?

• 45:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was very clear that, for example, DHS was using mobile phone data that was drawn from apps to round up people who were in the country unlawfully. A lot of those people skipped their detention hearings, so it depends on how you feel about immigration enforcement, how you view that government effort. But that was certainly a domestic-focused attempt to go out and find people who jumped bail on their immigration hearing or whatever. Again, that's a perfectly valid, lawful government mission, but they're using data that was available for purchase and data that they didn't go through the process of going to get a court to oversee.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  And then there's another example, again, it was DHS. They were using, again, this commercially available phone location data to surveil the United States border and look for people who are crossing illegally. And they found one guy who had dug a border tunnel underneath the US border fence and was smuggling drugs between the KFC, like this abandoned KFC on his side of the US border.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  A Kentucky Fried Chicken, they, this, this, these carts, they were probably linked to the cartels, they dug a border tunnel under the, under the fence and they, the tunnel surfaced in a, in a, in an abandoned Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant on the US side and on the Mexican side, it was some house that was pretty close to the border. So it wasn't even that big of a tunnel, but you know, to do that kind of a surveillance program, you need to acquire data on the entire US border and probably the entire US population. And there has, there's sort of a, a trust us aspect to this, which is, oh, we won't abuse it. And I don't think we know exactly what DHS did with this data, how many times it was sort of queried improperly, how many times people looked up their spouse or their,

• 47:04Speaker 01

  you know, their Tinder date on it. And we, we just don't know. And because this is commercially available data, again, there's no real sort of law around using it. It's all policies and norms and maybe you get written up and maybe you get disciplined. So we just, we just don't know. These are, these are black boxes. So even if you sort of approve of, you know, locking up cartel members who are digging a, a border tunnel or, you know, going around and deporting people who've skipped their, their detention or immigration hearing or their deportation hearing, you know, again, it's a sort of a black box as to how this data is used and there's no real, there's no real legal teeth behind telling these agencies that they can't query it for improper purposes.

• 47:48David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And I think bankless systems will all be all too familiar with just the general concept that acutely individual instances can be with done with the best intentions. And we can have an entire generation of the best of intentions happening. And maybe all of those events, those acute events of, you know, privacy breaches also do help the public welfare. Yet nonetheless, as a status quo, without strong assurances about individual privacy, it doesn't take too much of a change in the status quo to return like best of intentions into like some sort of authoritarian control. And so that kind of brings us to the legality question, Byron, which is just like, what assurances do individuals actually have where like?

• 48:30David Hoffman?

  Say, God forbid, the United States falls into the hand of an authoritarian leader and we lose our democratic, Western liberal values that we've built up for the past like, you know, over two centuries. And so like, I think maybe listeners think probably intuitively that we have a right to privacy somewhere in our laws. But maybe you could clarify how true that statement actually is. Like, where do citizens of the United States actually get their protection for privacy?

• 48:58Speaker 01

  Sure. So the most basic element of their protection from sort of government intrusion into their lives is the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment requires probable cause for some sort of a search. You know, if it's your house, usually that has to take the form of a search warrant that you go before a judge and swear out. But if you're driving along on a public highway and the cop smells marijuana, you know, that might be enough probable cause to search your car. But the basic protection of the Fourth Amendment derives from this idea of this sort of abstract notion that it has to be something that you wanted to protect and to keep private. So if you have your drug paraphernalia out in the open,

• 49:41Speaker 01

  out on the seat next to you in your car, and it's plainly visible to everyone who walks by your car, you don't really have too much Fourth Amendment protection. However, if you keep some documents in a safe in your basement, and that's clearly an expressed intention to keep information private. So that's sort of the basis of Fourth Amendment law. The problem came about in the modern era, when all these corporations sprung up. First, the telephone company and the telegraph, and then banks and bank transfers, you know, and so American consumers started to have to give information to these companies. And so when you dial phone numbers on your phone, you have to tell the phone company who you want to call. And so the phone company has a little log of what numbers your line is

• 50:26Speaker 01

  dialed and how long you spoke to them. That's how they bill you for the long-distance calls. Same thing with your bank. You have to tell your bank when you write a check what the routing number is of the person you want to pay. And so, you know, as governments started to take advantage of things like wiretapping telephones or telegraphs before that, or acquiring bank records, there became this very interesting legal question, which is, well, does this person have any... Fourth Amendment privacy rights in the data that they've given to a company like a bank or a telephone company. And the answer that the Supreme Court came to in the sixties and the seventies was basically

• 51:06Speaker 01

  no, that you know, you, you don't have privacy protections in information you give to a third party. So in the case of telephone records, the government did need a, a search warrant or some kind of a court order to listen in on your phone call, right? Like to hear what you and your, your, your, the person you're communicating with are saying, they, they need a probable cause of a crime to do that, but they don't need probable cause to get all the phone numbers you've dialed. The same thing happened with, with banking records, right? That, you know, the court's logic was if you provide this information to a third party, you've lost your privacy expectation in it.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  And that maybe make, made sense if, in, for a time in the seventies. But today, there's almost nothing you can do in modern life that doesn't involve conveying information to a third party. Once upon a time, we stored all the documents that were valuable to us in, you know, a file cabinet in our home office. Once upon a time, you know, we spoke to people largely in person. We, we made doctor's appointments over the phone and then showed up in person to the office. Things are changing, right? There's, there's basically nothing you can do on the internet that doesn't involve sending packets to someone else.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  And the problem has emerged that this doctrine is outdated and is, is frankly unsuited for the modern world because it essentially means that anytime we give information to a third party, we sort of lost our core fourth, fourth amendment protections in it, right? So everything you store on Google Drive or every, you know, the, the, you know, communicating with a therapist over a telemedicine. Basically the cloud, all of it. Yeah, the cloud, you've you've lost your Fourth Amendment protections in that information because someone else can see it. Now, again, the government, you know, Congress over the years has put some laws into place. So, you know, Google can't just transfer the entire contents of your cloud to the to

• 53:11Speaker 01

  the police, you know, we've we've written rules that deal with some of these technologies. But by and large, that core Fourth Amendment protection doesn't apply to data that's in the hands of corporations. There's some evidence that the thinking, legal thinking on this is changing slowly. For example, in 2018, a court, the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision that said, hey, actually, people do have an inherent right to privacy in the totality of their movements as revealed through their cellphone. And so you can't just go to a cellphone carrier and demand, you know, a month's worth of my movement records. You have to articulate that you think that this is, you know, shows some criminal activity

• 53:56Speaker 01

  and you have to go get something like a search warrant. So there is a slow emergence of a different strain of thinking on this, but the courts move at glacial pace. And, you know, by the time they get around to seriously considering a lot of these issues, you know, maybe 10, 15, 20 years from now. And so in that intervening time, you have governments acquiring masses of data on, you know, the population with not a ton of legal clarity on on what the future might look like on these outdated legal doctrines.

• 54:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so maybe just to really just to find the problem statement here, the Fourth Amendment actually doesn't formally state that individuals have a right to privacy. It more states that they have a right to be not not be searched without cause, which is very different. And I think really the punchline of your book is talking about the way that that Fourth Amendment has been nerfed just by the the properties of modern day internet. Like, can you be a normal citizen without having a cellphone and internet access? Not not really. You can't. Can't really operate in society without those things. And so you can't really operate as a sovereign individual in society without giving up your privacy.

• 55:11David Hoffman?

  And so there is no amendment, there is no law that provides like a base principles amend like constitutional right to privacy. And that's the thing that is truly missing from this modern sphere where I think everyone would kind of agree that, you know, the values that America stands on would somewhere, somehow provide a right to privacy from a citizen's. But we're just missing.

• 55:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  I just want to add to that, David. So I, it feels very much like the, like the founders would have added that if they could have imagined that world.

• 55:42David Hoffman?

  They thought about the internet.

• 55:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Think about it. So, so imagine the level of information that we're talking about here to create a, as, as Byron put it, a digital, a dossier of every citizen. Imagine how like expensive that would have been in the late 1700s. Okay. So like to go figure out David Hoffman's like location, all of his movements. What he, what he buys on a given basis, like how much money he has, like where he stores all of like his, his wealth. Like what his preferences are, who he votes for. In order to gather all of that information, you would need like a full-time spy assigned to your, to your house that like, like.

• 56:21David Hoffman?

  Your district, right? For your population of people.

• 56:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  And that would just be like not feasible. It would be too expensive. And now the economics of collecting all of that same information have basically dropped to zero. So I think they would have added it if they could have imagined this world. But like, that was just not the, the late 1700s. We haven't really revised the thing, have we?

• 56:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and the Supreme Court has occasionally flirted with the notion that perhaps citizens do have an abstract right to privacy. That if you look at the sort of general gist of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, it really does maybe hint at this idea that you should be, that largely. Citizens should be left alone unless there's a good reason to bother them, right? If you look at, you know, some combination of the Third Amendment, which says, you know, the government can't quarter troops in your house, and the Fourth Amendment, which says they can't search you, and the Fifth Amendment, which says you can't incriminate yourself. Like, if you squint hard enough at all those provisions in the Constitution, maybe you can come up with some doctrine that, yeah, the Constitution does contain some right

• 57:26Speaker 01

  to privacy. And the court did articulate that briefly in the 1970s in a case surrounding marital use of contraception. So, a married couple wanting to use birth control in the privacy of their own bedroom, in the privacy of their home, Connecticut had a law that said, you know, you can't do that. And the court said, no, you know, the constitutional doctrine that we're going to rely on to say, you know, this married couple can have, can use contraception, and this Connecticut law is unconstitutional, is this right to privacy. But the court has grown a little bit more doctrinaire, a little less inclined to see sort of abstract privacy rights just floating around out there and that aren't

• 58:07Speaker 01

  specifically in the text of the Constitution. And so I do think the legal world has sort of moved away from this abstract right to privacy. Maybe it's still in our laws in some vague sense, but it's not something you can walk into court and cite as, you know, if your rights are violated, you can't just march in and claim this abstract right to privacy that the court articulated in the 70s. Now, of course, our lawmakers can still write laws, right? Just because something's not in the Constitution doesn't mean they can't address it through our legal system. And Congress has historically actually been pretty good, at least in the 20th century, about writing privacy laws. You know, if you look at, you know, there's, there's pretty detailed laws about use of credit data, like

• 58:52Speaker 01

  data that credit cards and credit bureaus collect on us. There's pretty detailed rules and laws around healthcare information. And Congress even went, at one point, went so far as to protect the privacy of cable television subscribers from having their information sold by cable companies. And at one time, because of journalists- When and acquired some judges' video rental history, they actually made it illegal for video stores to share people's video rental histories in the 1980s. So Congress can write these rules if it wants to on top of our Constitution. The problem is, in the modern era, as everything has become interconnected, they just haven't done so, right? There is no comprehensive privacy framework for data in the United States, and there have been various

• 59:37Speaker 01

  efforts over the years. And essentially, we are alone among industrialized democratic countries in not having some sort of a national level privacy law that just sets out what expectations and rights Americans have when a corporation collects information about us. And that's a huge problem in the 21st century, when so much of our digital, so much of our lives are collected by these digital services, where there are just no firm rules of the road.

• 1:00:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Byron, one other thing I want to, you know, like, run by you and get your thought on or get your feedback on. And so, you know, the crypto community, the, you know, the crypto part of cryptocurrency stands for cryptography. And so, we are big believers in, yeah, let's do everything we can in Congress and on the legal side to protect civil liberties. There's also some things we can do on the technology side of things, and particularly this encryption thing. So imagine the world where you have no Fourth Amendment protections for your data when it goes to the cloud. And that is not only true for the metadata, but also, all of these companies can

• 1:00:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  just read the contents of your email messages, right? Fortunately, we have fought some wars in the past to maintain encryption. Now, if you ran across in some of your studies that the early 1990s and like what we call the kind of the crypto wars 1.0, where there's this thing called PGP encryption, pretty good encryption, and it was on the munitions list, export list. Like, this is a weapon type of technology, and we can't actually export it outside of the US. And basically, you know, SSL, HTTPS, and this encryption. Technology was illegal. Fortunately, this kind of thing got overturned, but there were cryptographers like Philip Zimmerman, who are actually like, you know, potentially going to be brought to court over these types of things.

• 1:01:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  And it was kind of like the surveillance state pushing back and saying, no, we want a backdoor encryption. Right? We want clipper chips. And so you could do encryption in air quotes, but we just want a way to like see into it and we don't have to tell anyone else. It'll just be our kind of thing. So one tool, I guess I would say, in addition to the law and the constitution and Congress and all of these things that I feel like is in the hands of the people is actually encryption, a defensive tool. And that's the reason we're so passionate about it because it gives max power to the defender. And even the NSA with all of their resources cannot like hack and brute force attack something that is strongly encrypted.

• 1:02:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  What are your thoughts on that in general? The idea that you know, part of the solution here is let's just get cryptography in the hands of everybody. So maybe the protection that you're talking about on metadata, right? It's like we encrypt the contents of our message. Maybe we can also encrypt the metadata too. And then it's not like, it's not up to, you know, whether agencies can see it. They just have no ability to see it. So we don't have to trust them any longer. Do you have any thoughts on that take?

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think encryption is a very, very important tool in, you know, for people who care about privacy, for people who want some security in their digital lives. Encryption is incredibly important and, you know, it's, it's funny. There's actually an anecdote in my book about this metadata, encrypting the metadata question. And, you know, it kind of worked out in a surprising way. So one of the, one of the things Snowden revealed, you know, in the slides that got leaked and in some of the news reports that were published, were that essentially these ad networks that are on all of our phones, were sending the metadata for ads unencrypted. So if you were tapping the

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  Verizon telephone system or the the international cables that connect continents, which the US government and its allies were, you could read all the metadata from ad networks. And so you could see when somebody opened Angry Birds, for example, or whatever app was popular at the time, just because, you know, when you open Angry Birds, it would send some message back to its server. And if you were in the right place and you you could intercept the the information, you know, you could you could say, oh, that this particular device opened Angry Birds right now. And that was just the power you had as monitoring, yeah, monitoring the the fiber optic cables network. Now, after Snowden, a lot of these tech companies were like, the NSA is doing what?

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  So so they encrypted the transmission of of metadata. So a lot of these ad networks now don't send internet information on the open open web. However, at the same time, or around the same time as these companies were adding encryption, some very clever defense contractors figured out, hey, we could just buy the exact same information from a data broker, right? The the data brokers now inside the ad network, they're seeing all the bids. They're seeing every time someone opens Angry Birds, we got to serve them an ad. We're in in the network and we want to we want to bid on it. But we can actually save all the information that every, even if we lose the bid, we can, you know, we can save, you know, all the phones that are opening Angry Birds all the time.

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  And so the government just started buying this data. So encryption is not is very, very important, right? But, you know, it doesn't sometimes solve the fundamental surveillance capitalists or motivations of some of these companies and these clever government agencies that find the exact same way to do something through a commercial arrangement. But I would say that for people who, especially on the content side, you know, I'm very, I use a lot of encrypted technologies, you know, I love Signal. You know, IMSI and WhatsApp aren't perfect, but they are they are encrypted. Apple can't see your communications, Facebook can't see your WhatsApp communications. It I do use Protonmail frequently, you know, I have a Google account,

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

  but I try to primarily use an encrypted email account. None of these things are perfect, right? Your device could be hacked. You can lose your password. There's all sorts of, you could be socially engineered. There's, there's stuff, it's not a hundred percent panacea for everything, but it certainly will give you a lot more privacy and a lot more security than, than the alternatives. And, you know, the funny part is that law enforcement complains constantly about encryption. And, you know, they say, well, it's going dark and all this stuff. But if you, if you were to honestly put, put them on, you know, give them some truth serum and say, you know, are crimes easier to solve in 2023 or 1992?

• 1:06:24Speaker 01

  I think they would have to conclude that even, even if the, the user of the, you know, the, the criminal is using encryption, I'm pretty sure crimes are easier to solve today because there's just more information out there. You know, think about the OJ Simpson case. There'd be, you know, forget the glove or the, you know, there'd be, you know, logs from his Nest thermostat and his Ring doorbell. And the, the car would have, you know, logs about when it was turned on. It would, it would be, it would be very possible to convict OJ Simpson today based on all the metadata that the, you know, smart homes and, and cars and devices all generate in a way that wasn't true in the 1990s. And so, um, you know, encryption is very, very important as a technology and a tool.

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  And, you know, for people that care about their privacy, I would strongly recommend.

• 1:07:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Byron, I think if you got them on that truth serum, not only would they say that, they, they, they'd also confess to fully encrypting all of their stuff. They are using encryption. They are not going to allow their stuff to be unencrypted as well. I mean, they want these civil liberties too.

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. And it's actually, it's funny because, um, you know, when I was doing this reporting on, on the government's use of data brokers, I stumbled onto this amazing, like 300-page FBI document that was like a exhaustive list of how to opt yourself out of every data broker and how to set up your phone to be super anonymous. So government agencies, people that work in these government positions, they know darn well.

• 1:07:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  More than anybody, I'm sure.

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  How much information. Yeah. And, and they are enthusiastic adopters of opting out of data brokers and, and making sure their phone emits very little, if any, digital exhaust.

• 1:08:07David Hoffman?

  Are there any just like tips and tricks that you have? I know you talked about using Proton Mail, using Signal, but either other additional things that you use or things that you've heard other people who are highly informed? Any other tricks that you care to share?

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean philosophically, I would say that if you're uncomfortable with the social bargain of, you know, paying in your data for services, then, you know, I would return the Internet to a more basic arrangement, which is just to pay for the service that you find valuable. You know, I actually pay a few bucks a month for Proton Mail because I think it's a useful and valuable service and it cannot monetize my data. It needs to survive in some other way. You know, I donate a few, you know, like $2 or $3 a month to Signal. Again, this is a nonprofit organization. It's a tool I rely on. I want to support it and I want to make sure that it's a thriving business. And, you know, a lot of these companies that collect data, actually, you know, they're not necessarily evil.

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  They're doing it because there is some public resistance to paying money for things on the Internet. And it's not free to make software. You know, it's not free to pay coders. It's not free to rent the server space. It's not free to have a lawyer and an HR person to draw up a privacy policy and onboard people. None of this is free. You know, I think there's this sort of techno-utopian notion on the Internet that, hey, we can all just have volunteers writing, you know, open source freeware. Well, that's not, that's not how it's shaken out over the past 30 years. And so if you are uncomfortable with this world, I'm not saying that paid services never spy on you or never exploit your data, but it at least moves the Internet towards an arrangement where, you know,

• 1:09:51Speaker 01

  we've returned to the basics of capitalism, which is, you know, you give me something I find valuable and I give you money for it. Beyond that, you know, I would just be generally careful about like permissions. Permissions are very important. You know, you don't need to give every random app access to your location. If you're in the Apple ecosystem, you know, Apple actually makes it very easy to say, oh, okay, I want an Uber right now. I'll allow once or I'll allow when I use the Uber app, but not 24/7. You could do that with your weather apps or you can just type the location where you're at. So be careful about these permissions because people...

• 1:10:30David Hoffman?

  Why that's not standard is beyond me.

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  Right, and people are like giving these random apps from who knows what developer access to their photo rolls, their calendars, their contacts. I mean, a lot of that's valuable information. I mean, you may have some very sensitive things in your photo roll or on your calendar. If you know, if you're a journalist, it shows who you're meeting with. So do you really want to give, you know, some developer who, you know, people don't have a sense that like a human can look at it, but they can, right? Like if you give permission to some app to look at your calendar, like a person could look. Are they? Probably not, but they could. So that kind of being careful with permissions, I think is super valuable. And

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  you know, there's like, there's like all sorts of ad blockers and VPNs. If you want to go down that rabbit hole, there's great resources for it. There's books by this guy, Michael Buzell. The, the privacy community on Reddit is actually super active and is generally a pretty smart group of people. Like there, there are all sorts of, you know, places you could go if you really want to get advanced on some of this stuff. But the basics are just to be careful with what you put on your phone and definitely be careful about the permissions.

• 1:11:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's hard, though. It's, it's bad user experience. Like it takes time. It's more, more difficult to do this, right? And this is why I think like most people don't. And because we haven't seen like the really bad experience of it being exploited in a way that feels very, very threatening, at least up to this point. So I think a lot of people just, just don't do it. I, I'm curious at this point of the conversation, we've primarily been talking about the US. I was wondering, Byron, if you have explored outside of the US, right? So there's an element of, I don't know if it's worse in, in Europe. You mentioned maybe there are some, some better privacy, like rights there, but like maybe, maybe it's like worse in Europe. I don't know. And then, then I think about other countries

• 1:12:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  like, man, if it's like this in the US, which at least has a history of protecting civil liberties in these ways, what's it like in, you know, Russia? What's it like in, in China? It does not have a history of these types of things, or it's just a kind of a constitution that, that, you know, purchased civil liberties in anywhere near the same way. Do you have commentary on outside of the bounds of the US? What's going on?

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  I do, and I'm glad you asked. And I focus my book on the US for two reasons. One, we're, as you say, we're a rule of law country, and we have historically, you know, protected civil rights and civil liberties by limiting government power. So, you know, it's, I focus on the US because it's, you know, my home country. It's where I grew up. It's what I know the best. It's what I cover. But absolutely, all of these things and all of these concerns are equally applicable to foreign governments and in fact are probably more applicable to foreign governments. Now, you know, you should, if you're, you know, a dissident, if you fled an authoritarian country, if you have spoken out against an authoritarian country and you live in

• 1:13:32Speaker 01

  the United States, these foreign governments can get these exact same data sets, you know, and the US government is very aware of this, that even as they use these data sets for their own lawful mission, that they are very, very, very concerned about how China and Russia and other adversaries can acquire data on our population. And that's why you've seen in recent months, the Biden administration in Congress both sort of take some very strong actions to try to crack down on the flows of data to these countries. And again, they can do the same thing to their domestic population, right? That, you know, authoritarian countries with good cyber intelligence programs acquire

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

  this kind of data. There's, you know, there's ample evidence of this, that other countries are aware of these capabilities. You know, Israel's not an authoritarian country, but they do, they do collect this data. There are three Israeli vendors that sell it. And we don't quite know the extent to which they sell the ability to collect large amounts of, say, advertising data to other countries. But these vendors exist. There's, there's been reporting on them. And I've talked to plenty of other national security officials and say, yeah, China gets these data sets, Russia gets these data sets.

• 1:14:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, wait, wait. Can the data brokers sell the same information, like domestic information about US citizens? They could sell that to the US government, just what this entire episode's been about. And like, that's crazy enough. You're not telling me those brokers can also sell them to foreign countries.

• 1:15:05Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:15:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  What?

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  Well, until recently, the Biden administration passed an executive order that says, you know, certain countries of concern, which I believe they're probably going to designate China or Russia and North Korea and a few others, there is a prohibition on transferring data to entities in those countries or connected with their governments or their sort of civil society. And so there are rules coming on this. But until very recently, perfectly acceptable for a data broker to sell to the Chinese Communist Party's Ministry of State Security or whatever. Now, maybe they wouldn't, right? Like, just out of an abundance of caution?

• 1:15:54Speaker 01

  And honestly, probably the Chinese government, if they were doing this, and they almost certainly are, according to my sources, would probably be a little more clever about it, right? They'd probably set up a company in Cyprus or in Singapore that they owned, ownership stake in, and the data would, you know, you'd contract with that company for advertising purposes, and then the data would flow to China after that. And you, and the vendor would be none the wiser. But I mean, as far as I know, there were probably, there was no legal prohibition on selling this data to foreign adversary governments, because it's a commercial product, right? There's no restrictions on this data as of right now, unless you're talking about like video rental histories and some other very narrow categories of stuff. But data

• 1:16:39Speaker 01

  that you've legally licensed and you've legally or sort of legally collected, I mean, that's that's fair game in almost every circumstance.

• 1:16:47David Hoffman?

  Maybe one more punchline that I would like to leave listeners with is that in China, China, the CCP has like a very different relationship with its own tech sector than what we have in the West. Like, it's a much more formal integration between the state of China and the tech sector of China. Like, certain tech startups in China are actually just like formally endorsed, supported, financed even by the actual government to help like boon their own like, you know, GDP and capitalistic growth and, you know, capitalism over there. But also, these are like basically like close to state-run facilities, just with like, just with some capitalism also built in. So like, very formal intimate integration between China's tech sector and the government. And

• 1:17:32David Hoffman?

  I think I know what you're about to ask, David. Go ahead. Yeah, well, inside of the United States, we have a little bit more freedoms, a little bit more protections, a little bit more laws, separation. There's a separation of Silicon Valley and the United States government. Famously, like these, these two entities don't really like each other. But also nonetheless, with these like data broker middlemen, with all of these capitalistic incentives, the United States has just like one of many buyers of data. I'm wondering, is there really all that much of a difference between the United States government and like the tech sector and what China has? It's like, do we have the same thing, just with extra steps? Yeah, exactly.

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

  It's a, it's actually a great question. And it's one I've thought a lot about. Now, the caveat is I'm not an expert in China. But I've done, I've tried to do a little bit of reading as a layperson and a researcher about how things work there. And if anyone's interested, there's an excellent book by my former colleagues at the Wall Street Journal called Surveillance State. I think it's Josh Chin and another colleague of mine wrote that book. And you know, basically, the thing I think is happening here is that the amount of data on the average Chinese citizen, the average American citizen probably isn't wildly different.

• 1:18:53Speaker 01

  And what's different about China is that it's taken a step of taking all this corporate data and, and forcing or compelling these companies to weave it in one giant database. And they push that straight down to the level of kind of the local public safety's police departments. Now, America has a lot of data that's out there for sale on us. But more data in America is locked up in private databases and not every company sells data on its users. Many, many companies, while they have data on their users and could turn it over upon request or upon getting a court order, they don't just blanket give it to the government, right?

• 1:19:33Speaker 01

  Google doesn't give back or access to everyone's Gmail account to the United States government. Now, it has to comply with certain warrants. The government can go get that data under certain circumstances. But it's not just a data dump, but that's so America hasn't quite gotten to the to the point of of weaving together these huge amounts of databases. And it certainly hasn't gotten to the point of just pushing it down to officer friendly at at your local precinct station. And the other thing that's important to say is, you know, while we are trending in similar directions on sort of data collection for public safety and intelligence, America is still a rule of law country. It's a democracy. China is not. China's an authoritarian country. It's it's credibly been accused of genocide in Xinjiang.

• 1:20:18Speaker 01

  And so we don't want to compare kind of the this, the systems directly. We just want to talk about sort of data collection and how, um, so there's, there's no moral equivalence between these countries. But but yes, the the trends are not that different. We are trending towards governments having more power, more information and and for citizens to be subject to much more monitoring than historically they have.

• 1:20:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Byron, this has been great. And as we start to close this out, I I just want to get your your insight into some of the challenges we're maybe facing in in crypto. I I know that um financial financial surveillance is kind of a subset, like a narrow subset of all of the different surveillance that you cover. And you talk about communication surveillance, obviously, location surveillance, all of this various metadata. But you know, financial surveillance is kind of, you know, top of mind for crypto. And David was mentioning the the bank secrecy acts like earlier. And obviously, that's continuing to squeeze and constrict. And one thing that we often talk about is with the the world of digital money, we don't even have the same. We don't even have the same privacy protections as we did with cash.

• 1:21:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like cash is going away, but think about what you actually had with cash. Number one, it was peer to peer. You didn't have to go through a third party at all. Uh, and also it was private, right? So like no one, no one kind of like knows. Whether I gave you a $20 bill or not, it's completely private. And you lose that when cash is converted into into sort of the the digital realm. So part of what we're trying to do is preserve some of that freedom in crypto. But we forgot, we forgot to do. Do one thing, which is make the blockchain itself completely private. And so we've run into this situation where we actually, we have our own set of data brokers. Where if I'm like moving around Bitcoin, or if I'm moving around some Ether and all of my transaction activity, it's actually on a public ledger. Like you can go see.

• 1:22:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Now, I'm pseudonymous, so no one necessarily knows it's me, but a whole bunch of parties do. So like the exchange I'm using do, there's companies, data brokers, like Chainalysis, that you were talking about a digital dossier. I'm sure they have a digital dossier of everybody listening to Bankless right now in terms of like at least user ID. Maybe they don't know your name, but they probably do. And they know your assets, they know your transaction history. Like we've leaked all of this data. And Byron, in the places that we have tried to preserve encryption technology, so privacy layers, we have open source developers actually getting arrested. Almost like Philip Zimmerman style Crypto Wars 1.0.

• 1:22:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Basically court cases saying you can't encrypt, you can't have peer-to-peer transmission of value of data. So there's a court case called Tornado Cash. Now, I don't expect you to be familiar with all of these details. And you know, like of course, because this is sort of, you know, deep bankless topic. But I'm just wondering, do you have any, I guess, advice for us? Do you have any just thoughts to kind of leave the crypto community with with respect to financial surveillance? And yeah, and just any thoughts on this?

• 1:23:28Speaker 01

  Well, it's funny you mentioned Chainalysis because one of the, I think the founder of it actually came out of one of the programs I write about in my book. I think he was working with the FBI on one of these data broker programs right after 9/11 and moved into the crypto space. Yeah. So you know, it's a very, very good question. And I have, I do, I'm not a crypto guy. It's not a topic I'm deeply familiar with. But I have thought a lot about financial privacy and the ways in which, you know, as you, as David said about the Bank Secrecy Act, the ways in which over the last fifty or sixty years, people have been conditioned to give up their financial privacy and to not have

• 1:24:08Speaker 01

  any expectation in the financial, like, the financial transactions will become private and that's, uh, stay private. And that's been supercharged by technology like, like Venmo and instant transfers and all sorts of other things. And so, um, you know, it is a demonstration of the fact that, um, you know, over time, if people don't sort of assert these privacy rights, if they don't push back, if civil society, um, doesn't sort of stand up and, and challenge some of these things, that yes, like the entire industry, an entire aspect of people's lives can be, uh, swallowed up and, and no longer do people have any real expectation of privacy. And in 2024, if you say that you think the Bank Secrecy

• 1:24:52Speaker 01

  Act or the requirement to file a suspicious, uh, activity report is, uh, privacy violation, you're largely seen as a crank. Um, but, you know, by and large, that, that this is true, that, that our, our financial privacy, um, you know, has been sort of whittled away over the years and, and, and the same thing could happen in other aspects of our lives. You know, you, you have seen pushes, um, from companies who wanna scan people's devices or run algorithms on people's email accounts and, or, you know, geofence certain places and, and, and deem everyone who enters sort of suspicious. Um, you know, all of these things are things that today we, civil society pushes back on. But, you know, in, in twenty,

• 1:25:37Speaker 01

  thirty years, I wonder what the state of, of privacy will be in these other areas in our society. So I think that's the, the big picture thought I have on that question.

• 1:25:47David Hoffman?

  Overall Byron, understanding what you know and having learned what you've learned, just are you optimistic or pessimistic about just the the future of our rights as users, as internet goers, as individuals inside the United States as it comes to privacy?

• 1:26:03Speaker 01

  You know, it's a good question. I mean, by nature, I'm a cynical person. And if you look at the long arc of, you know, the ways in which governments access this data, the arc bends towards government access to data. At the same time, you know, you know, these are real social questions that I think we as a society to ask ourselves. And I do think the fundamental civil liberties and civil rights issue of the 21st century is gonna be where do we set the dial on government access to private stores of information, right? I don't think the correct answer to it is to set it at zero, where the government gets access to nothing, but also setting it at 100 isn't acceptable either. And so

• 1:26:44Speaker 01

  where you draw lines, what rules you put into place, how companies and governments and civil society and citizens all make choices about where they, you know, where they put their data and what rules are required and what procedures are required to access it. These are very, very important questions. And I think, you know, my book was aimed at prompting a discussion about them, but I don't have great answers.

• 1:27:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well Byron, you did a fantastic job. This really the first step is in this battle for hearts and minds is just make people aware, just educate them on what's going on, right? And, you know, hopefully, they can kind of like see the see the trade off and fight for privacy in the officials they elect and the laws they support and this kind of thing. So, thank you so much for doing more of that today and educating the folks at Bankless. We greatly appreciate it.

• 1:27:33Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 1:27:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, the book that we talked about today is called Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government is Creating a New American Surveillance State. Absolutely fantastic book. You have to check out and send to your friends. And I will end with this. As usual, crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. The future is in crypto, at least I hope it is. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.