A Conversation with Edward Snowden (Part 1)

Neil deGrasse Tyson chats with whistleblower Edward Snowden via robotic telepresence from Moscow. In Part 1, they discuss Isaac Newton, knowledge and learning, the Periodic Table, encryption and privacy, and much more.

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. You can follow us on Twitter at @StarTalkRadio or of course on the web at StarTalkRadio.net. And personally, I also tweet if you're interested in my own little cosmic brain droppings, and that's @NeilTyson. This week, we're going to break format, and it is not often that we do this. And when we do it, it's only to accommodate someone or something exceptional, something out of the ordinary.

• 0:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, on this episode of StarTalk, I'll have neither my comedian co-host nor an in-studio expert with me, as usual, but instead, we'll listen together, one-on-one, to my exclusive interview with Edward Snowden, a man of living controversy. He's simultaneously referred to as a whistleblower, a fugitive, a traitor, a national hero, an activist. It all depends on who you talk to. I think of him as a sort of fellow card-carrying member of the geek community, as do many geeks, and this is a community with room for all walks of life,

• 1:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  regardless of one's international status on the lists of the FBI.

• 1:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's his story? Well, he was a CIA agent. Of course, Central Intelligence Agency. A CIA agent turned international fugitive. And he's been a household name since 2013, when he leaked secret documents from within the National Security Agency, or the NSA. These documents unveiled the government's top-secret mass surveillance programs aimed at collecting huge amounts of personal data via phone records from all United States citizens. It created an uproar among citizens who claimed their constitutional right to privacy had been violated without their knowledge, and of course, by their own government. This is no small grievance,

• 2:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  and Ed's top-secret disclosure was no small act. Less than a month after The Guardian published Snowden's claims, the United States charged Ed with theft of property and espionage, leaving him with no choice but to leave his family and friends behind and seek asylum in another country. So, two years later, two years after this disclosure, Snowden is still in isolation, but not without some tricks up his sleeve. He was able to communicate with me inside my office at the Hayden Planetarium in the form of a robot. When you're geek fluid, you could pull this kind of stuff off, which is exactly what he did. And the voice you'll soon be hearing

• 3:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  emanates from his virtual face displayed on a BeamPro Remote Presence System. It's essentially an iPad on wheels that he controls. He controls it directly from Russia, where he has been offered asylum and is currently in exile. In this way, we were able to share ideas and go back and forth about our thoughts on education, the learning process, encryption, human rights, a whole host of topics. And it's really geek to geek. That's the kind of conversation we have, or that's how I think of it. I'm not a journalist. He's been interviewed before by journalists, but that's not what I am.

• 4:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, our conversation is different from what you might have seen him have with others. So let's go to my first part of that conversation, in which he recalls his love for science, and the importance of experimentation outside of the classroom, and how he landed an early career at the National Security Agency at the age of 16.

• 4:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Ed, I tried to find you on Twitter. And I could, what's your handle?

• 4:31Speaker 01

  I don't actually have one yet, but I gotta say, I follow your Twitter.

• 4:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, well, thank you, thank you. But still, you're kind of the, you kind of need a Twitter handle. So like, @Snowden maybe? Is this something you might do?

• 4:46Speaker 01

  That, that sounds good. I think, I think we gotta make it happen. You and I have a Twitter brother.

• 4:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, nice, nice. But we'll get the legal to approve your, your, your every move here. But, but if they give you that thumbs up, we're good for good.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  Your followers will be, you know, the internet, me, and the NSA. It'll be great.

• 5:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I'm certain you are in the universe right now.

• 5:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A little less certain about whether you're on Earth. But rumor has it you're somewhere in Russia. Is that, is that accurate?

• 5:17Speaker 01

  That's correct, yes, I'm in Moscow.

• 5:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, in Moscow? Oh, good, okay. You allowed to say that?

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Well, I, I think the NSA probably already knows.

• 5:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're currently triangulating on your position.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 5:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what kind of school background did you have?

• 5:34Speaker 01

  I, I went to high school and quite famously, I actually dropped out and went to community college early on.

• 5:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So were you famous for going to college before you graduated high school? Or famous for dropping out of high school?

• 5:45Speaker 01

  Famous for dropping out, that's the part everybody likes.

• 5:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That gives hope to everyone else, if that gets it right.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Right, but I, I actually, uh...

• 5:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you can, you can be a fugitive too, by dropping out of high school.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  You can be hunted all over the world. Stay in school. But less, uh, less well-known is the fact that I actually was admitted to a master's program in the UK, studying computer security. But I, I do have to say that I think there's a real distinction between schooling and learning. You know, your education is full of many different things and... Although guided learning and traditional learning in a classroom by mentors, by instructors, by peers is important, there's also a critical element of experimentation. That, you know, in college and university settings, they often try to replicate in labs. But the people who I think really understand the concepts fundamentally the most are the

• 6:40Speaker 01

  ones who make experimentation a part of their daily lives, continue it outside of the classroom, and make it a part of sort of who they are and how they live.

• 6:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, here at a museum, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, it's what we're about. We're about not handing you a curriculum. We're about empowering you to just explore the world around you and learn on your own. In fact, the self-learners are the ones who actually end up changing the world. There was never someone behind them, "Learn this, learn that, learn that, then you'll be great," right? At some point, they step away and say, "I am compelled to learn, and now I will take myself to where I want." And so, it sounded like that's what you were headed there.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a fundamental principle, I think. When you break it down, when you look back through history, sort of through your own idols, I think, like Isaac Newton, you know, the question arises, "Who teaches something that's never been taught?"

• 7:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait a minute, how did you know he was one of my idols?

• 7:38Speaker 01

  I watched Cosmos, and you're talking about it.

• 7:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What secret access to my files have you read?

• 7:45Speaker 01

  Right, right, right. Well, there's that, and you know, the whole NSA thing, the files on everybody.

• 7:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then the YouTube videos where I say it a hundred times.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  What are the others?

• 7:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, the idols, you were saying, about idols?

• 7:59Speaker 01

  Well, really, it's a question of who teaches the untaught, right? Knowledge has to originate from somewhere. There has to be sort of a fountainhead from which it flows, and that can't be a classroom, because the teachers themselves have to have learned it from somewhere. Original research, you know, the scientific method, the pursuit of the unknown and the questioning of sort of accepted conventional wisdom, and probing at the unknowns. The fact that the most interesting thing for someone who's really interested in how knowledge is created are the problems that haven't been solved. It's not, "What do we know?" It's, "What don't we know?"

• 8:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I felt that my whole life. In fact, people often ask me, what's the biggest question I want solved today? And I say, I have an unorthodox reply. It's not the question that I can pose that I want answered. It's the question that I don't even know to ask yet that I want to ask. And these only arise after you have breached some next frontier and then you have a new place to stand. And then you observe some new place, you observe a new trove of questions never before dreamt of. So that's how I'm feeling it.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  You know, and I think that makes a lot of sense, particularly from your background, your area of study, when you think about, you know, cosmology, astronomy and things like that. So much of it was from people looking up and going, hmm. You know, they see a transit or something. They have no idea what's going on.

• 9:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I will not soon forget Isaac Asimov reflecting on creativity and scientific discovery. And most people think that scientists, they scratch their head all night and say, eureka, by morning. But no, the word that triggers discovery is always, that's funny. Hmm. I don't know what that is. There opens floodgates. And that's how most of science has ever come out of the, out of the, out of the, out of the starting block.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  It's when we realize how little we know and try to correct.

• 10:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, precisely. So after you went to community college, then what?

• 10:11Speaker 01

  I actually entered the workforce. During this period, I was switching between contractor and contractor in the private sector, in the government space. I signed up for-

• 10:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this would be contractor to the government. So this is a privately owned company that is then paid for their services by the government, correct?

• 10:33Speaker 01

  Right, people aren't really familiar with this generally, but at least in the intelligence community, sort of the secret agency space, the way it works is they all have congressionally mandated sort of human resources caps, the maximum amount of people that they can hire. But that's not enough for what they want to do. They're constantly trying to expand the reach, expand the budgets, and so the way they get around those manpower caps is they use private companies to basically rent people to them that are not officially on government roles. They can be added to new projects, they can be removed from other projects, as long as they have the money for it, they can get the people.

• 11:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, NASA's been doing that from the beginning. I mean, there are people representing major aerospace companies that are working in and among and with NASA employees.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  Right, and they work in government spaces, at government desks, on government equipment, they take orders from government officials, and they're indistinguishable from sort of a government employee, except when you look at what their status is on paper. But that's how I got my start.

• 11:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, but throughout your schooling, even though you dropped out of high school, did you like math and science? Did you know this? Was this a latter-day thing?

• 11:47Speaker 01

  No, I was always fascinated with science. And actually, one of the great grievances I have about dropping out of high school early is the fact that I never finished chemistry. I've always loved chemistry.

• 12:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, most people would say they never went to their prom, so you're saying... This is, in the history of the world, the person who drops out of high school regrets not having had chemistry. This is the first time, that sentence has never been uttered in the history of the world by a college dropout.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  If you haven't noticed, I'm a little bit of a nerd.

• 12:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you missed some chemistry there.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, but you know, people who are contemplating dropping out, people who are contemplating sort of leaving college early and things like that, and getting a start... They realize, and they may be very correct, in going, you know, I don't need this. I can still get through life without it. I can still achieve my goals. And I'm already an expert in sort of the areas where my valuable skills lie. And they go, I'm not going to be a chemist, you know, I'm not going to be a physicist. I'm not going to be a linguist, so I don't really need those courses. And they may be right. They may never use algebra again, or calculus, or something like that. But at the same time, they may find later in life that they're working on a project,

• 13:03Speaker 01

  or their own sort of independent research or exploration, whether it's intellectual or whether it's practical, where had they learned that, there would be some synergy there. They've got holes in sort of their body of knowledge that are very difficult when you're not going through sort of a structured lifestyle path, which is what sort of the university and public education model offers us.

• 13:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what you're saying, I don't know.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  Go back and fill those in.

• 13:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not to put words in your mouth, but what you're saying, I think, is, yes, you need the curriculum-based learning, because that assures that you don't have any obvious gaping holes in your proper education. But the rest of the learning really can't happen in a classroom. It's got to happen in the real world.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Right. It's really a preparation, a structure to continue your own learning. Now, there are always people who can self-educate, who can make up for the gaps and things like that. But it's really rare, and I don't think we should encourage, as a matter of course, people to simply go out on their own and just hope for the best, hope they can make it. Because it's very difficult, particularly when you're young, to foresee the kind of decisions you're going to make, the kind of topics you're going to be interested in 20 years from now.

• 14:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So did you actually pick up some chemistry since then?

• 14:17Speaker 01

  I have, actually, yeah. I've done some really weird things. You know, I once read a metallurgy textbook, just for fun. And it was actually a textbook. You know, a lot of people think, oh, what are you reading this weekend? And they mention a novel and whatnot. But the actual, the actual process of learning, of understanding sort of the structure of our world, the way it all fits together, for me, as an engineer, is fascinating. You know, I can't get enough of that. Learning something new about, whether it's phase changes, whether it's deformation, whether it's law, all of these things, these intricate variables that sort of fit together to give us a framework to live in, that surrounds us and that we interact with.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Is amazing not just for understanding, but also for power. You have to understand how everything fits together and where the levers are before you can start to manipulate them and see what changes.

• 15:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if you picked up chemistry on your own, that means I can't drop any chemistry bombs on you. I was gonna offer you, I was gonna say Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto in the solar system have three consecutive elements named after them. Uranium, Neptunium, and Plutonium. I don't know if you knew that. So Plutonium is actually named after Pluto. And now that Pluto's been demoted, Pluto got an element on false pretense. Back when everyone felt sure it was a planet, so.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  You know, it's interesting when we look back through the origin of the names on the periodic table and things like that, how many of them are named after their origins or things that inspired the investigation or looked into them. For example, sodium. You know, when we think of sodium, we think about salt. But soda, in sodium, the root from it is actually from plant from which the element was originally derived, if I'm recalling that correctly. But because it grew in sort of alkalized salty soil, the plant absorbed all of the salt and everything like that. And when it was burned down, early, sort of more primitive people, primitive societies,

• 16:21Speaker 01

  realized that its ashes were different from all of the other ashes. And then, you know, a thousand years later, hundreds of years later, we find out through electrolysis and things like that, that you can reduce and isolate the element within the plant. And suddenly, the element derives its name from the plant, in which we first sort of realized there was something different about it.

• 16:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, the whole periodic table is, I relish in it because it's a record of the progress of our civilization from the beginning, right on up through modern time. A favorite one from my field is there's an element that was discovered on the sun before it was discovered on Earth. And we named it of the sun. And that element came to be known as helium, named after Helios, the Greek sun god. And so, it's not often when a chemist can think that we discover something not even on Earth and later on find it on Earth, but we got the cosmic name attached to it. We got to wrap up this segment of StarTalk.

• 17:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we've been following my exclusive interview with government whistleblower Edward Snowden, where he spoke with me through a robot-controlled video screen that he manipulated while in asylum from Russia.

• 17:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. We've been following my interview with CIA and NSA agent-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden. He first made headlines when he leaked top-secret documents to journalist Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, who published an article in The Guardian instigating "a public awakening to the nature and extent of privacy rights and laws in the 21st century." So, September 11th, 2001, a day none of us will forget. In particular, I live in New York City, in Manhattan, and my residence is within four blocks of Ground Zero. So, it's not just a point of history or newspaper headlines.

• 18:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For me, it's a point of life experience to be at home watching the towers get attacked and fall. And that event rocketed the issue of Fourth Amendment violations on a national level and put it right into the limelight. And it created a juxtaposition of national security and individual constitutional rights. Let's find out where Snowden was at the time of that crisis and how it affected him.

• 18:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I do some fast math. September 11th, 2001, you were 17, 18? How old were you?

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was 17 or 18 years old, I believe. And actually, maybe even slightly under that, 16 years old.

• 19:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, 16, uh-huh.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  But I was already working for a private company out of someone's home on Fort Meade, Maryland, the home of the National Security Agency. So I was actually driving into the office past the NSA when I was hearing on the radio what was happening.

• 19:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, if you were 16, you only just got your driver's license.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  Right, correct.

• 19:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're saying that so casually. You're just saying that so casually. Yeah, I was driving to work, yeah, at the NSA. When I was sixteen, I got my driver's license ten minutes before then, you know.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  I had sort of an early start on the independence.

• 19:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you were driving to work at the NSA?

• 19:45Speaker 01

  At the NSA. But of course, not in the building, I mean, on the, on the same military.

• 19:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On the campus.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  Right. And as I was working that day, right as I got to the office, there was sort of an all-hands message that I guess went out to everybody that said they were going to lock the base down and everybody should evacuate and so on and so forth. And so as I was driving out, right after I had arrived there the day, the parking lot was a madhouse, you know, there were, there were Humvees when it was not common for there to be Humvees out there at checkpoints. At this time, it was an open base. Anybody could drive on, anybody could drive off. And nobody knew what was happening. And I, I think that's what really caused a lot of concerns for people, not just on the public level, but the private level, particularly the intelligence agencies,

• 20:37Speaker 01

  was simply that idea that they didn't know what was going on. And that same fear of the unknown that can cause us to investigate, to expand knowledge, to sort of increase the level of capability and liberty and quality of life within human society, can also, you know, if it's unchecked and it's given to a powerful people with significant privileges and authorities, cause precisely the opposite. It can cause a chilling, it can cause a narrowing of civil liberties and freedom in a society. Because through good intentions, we can simply do bad things.

• 21:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, you're all about good intentions at the time, right? You are talented, there's a government agency, you're patriotic. So for you to be in the middle of this and be affected by it firsthand, in a sense, the intelligence agency is, is the number one, you know, why didn't you know about it? Right, people are grabbing your lapels, asking you. Was this, was there some phase shift in your brain at that point regarding?

• 21:40Speaker 01

  So I wasn't working in the intelligence community at that time. I was sort of peripheral to it. But yeah, I mean... My mindset on September 11th, you know, I come from a federal family. My mother worked for the federal government. My father worked a 30-year career in the military. My grandfather retired as an admiral in the military. And then he began working again for the FBI. And at the time, this, you know, on September 11th, my family was calling each other because we thought he may have been in the Pentagon on that day. And if you recall, you know, the cell phone towers weren't working, everything like that, everything was down. So it was very personal for me. And as things developed, as we moved from that 9/11 moment toward the 2003 Iraq period,

• 22:24Speaker 01

  I felt that I had an obligation to do my part for society. I signed up for the US Army when everybody else was protesting the Iraq War because I really believed that the government was telling the truth, you know, that this was an effort to try to free the oppressed, to liberate people living in, you know, unfortunate circumstances. And it took a very long time for me to develop any kind of skepticism at all, even to sort of the most overextended claims about the intentions of programs or policies.

• 22:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so about how long, 10 years, 5 years, 2 years? I mean, you're 16, so a long time means something different when you're 16 than if...

• 23:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is, that's very true. That's a good point. I'd say probably the better part of a decade.

• 23:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a kind of virtual battle raging at all times between those who seek and those who protect online information. The language spoken in this battle is mathematics, particularly encryption. This is the machinery, the engine, the gears behind what is driving this debate. And Ed and I spoke at length about what encryption technology does and the challenges of protecting one's online data. Let's check it out.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  The idea of encryption is to encode a given message in such a way that it looks like random noise. You can't distinguish the signal that's hidden in the communication. When we think about the current communications paradigm that we use around the world, we know from the NSA revelations and other things about corporate collection of communications and so on, that most of the things that we send every day are electronically naked. And when these communications are observed, they can be intercepted, they can be abused, they can be subverted to purposes that are contrary to the intent of the person who originally sent it.

• 24:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So electronically naked, that's code for...

• 24:24Speaker 01

  Unencrypted.

• 24:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Unencrypted. You are naked if you are unencrypted.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  Right, you have unprotected communications that anybody observes, because when you send a communication across the internet, for example, you don't own a wire that goes from your house to your friend's house. That has to go over somebody else's infrastructure. And you don't know what those people are doing with the signals that cross their infrastructure. You know, when we look at it bluntly, that's the problem, is the fact that whenever we send a communication in our home, we're sending it within the four walls of our home. We're sending it to a friend, or a loved one, or someone else around the world, to those four walls of their home. And these are private spaces, these are private communications. We expect that they remain private. The problem is, due to the practicality of how the engineering of these systems was

• 25:12Speaker 01

  designed back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, we inherited architectures that did not foresee the problem of electronic interception by both civil and governmental authorities, or sorry, by civil and private authorities, that would sort of interfere with them and do whatever they want with them. So now, our expectation of privacy is being abused. So, this, I think, is a natural trend that all societies will encounter, and eventually resolve, by going communications that are sent in transit, because this is where it's most cost-effective to intercept them. We'll need to armor them to prevent this problem. You armor them with encryption.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  And we saw this in radio, for example, where in the last century, we discovered that radio broadcasts could be picked up by anybody with an antenna. So you couldn't have a private communication that went over the air.

• 26:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, including aliens.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Including aliens.

• 26:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  This is actually, I think, an interesting factor is when you think about the fact that you've got communications that go over the air or under the ground, and they're unencrypted, until society realizes how dangerous that is. And then they begin to protect them with encryption. When you look at encrypted communications, if they are properly encrypted, there is no real way to tell that they are encrypted. You can't distinguish a properly encrypted communication, at least in the theoretical sense, from random noise, from simple random behavior.

• 26:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so, but I thought those are two separate things. You're telling me a perfectly encrypted message is actually indistinguishable from the noise? Because then you wouldn't even know to intercept it. That's what you're telling me?

• 27:03Speaker 01

  In theory. For example, there's an old method of encryption called a one-time pad. And the idea here is you create a key, or encryption and decryption, that is the same size as the message that you're going to encrypt it with. And when you overlay these, for example, you have a message that says, "My name is Neil deGrasse Tyson", and you encrypt it with any random key, those letters will be something completely different. Rather than saying, you know, "My name is Neil deGrasse Tyson", it'll be a random jumble that's indistinguishable from any other random jumble. And even if you have the right key, if you sort of stumble across the right key by trying every possible key

• 27:48Speaker 01

  for every possible letter in the space, there's no guarantee that "My name is Neil deGrasse Tyson" is the proper solution to it. It could just as well be another message, the decryption of this one-time pad encrypted message, that has the same number of letters as "My name is Neil deGrasse Tyson".

• 28:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And happens to spell something.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  Instead spells something completely different, like "Meet me for lunch at whatever". So this is, this is when we think about theoretically perfect encryption. The idea here is you can't tell that it's encrypted.

• 28:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So of course I couldn't leave it at that. I had to take this conversation up a notch and question how encryption might affect the way we communicated with aliens. Of course, that's my next thought. I come to this conversation not as a journalist, but as an astrophysicist. Let's hear what Ed has to say about encryption on a universal scale. We're going to ask ourselves, how will an alien want to communicate with us? Let's say, and let's say the civilization is intelligent or more intelligent than we are, they would find a pretty efficient way to send a signal to reduce the energy cost for them, perhaps. I'm making this up, but it's not a stretch to imagine this.

• 29:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By doing so, they would try to find any reducible information in the signal they want to send us and represent that in some other kind of way that is less representative of information. Isn't that correct? Isn't that what they would want to do? Am I even saying that right?

• 29:25Speaker 01

  You know, when, when you mention that, it brings up a really interesting idea, which is that, let's say, all societies that have open communications, they have communications over the air, under the ground, eventually discover that they need to encrypt their communications to protect them. So if you have an alien civilization trying to listen for other civilizations, or our civilization trying to listen for aliens, there's only one small period in the development of their society when all of their communications will be sent via the most primitive and most unprotected means. So when we think about everything that we're hearing through our satellites, or everything that they're hearing from our civilization, if there are indeed aliens out there, all

• 30:09Speaker 01

  of their communications are encrypted by default. So what we are hearing that's actually an alien television show, or you know, a phone call, or you know, a message between their planet and their own GPS constellation, whatever it happens to be, is indistinguishable to us from cosmic microwave background radiation.

• 30:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, but they wouldn't necessarily, you're assuming that they have the same security issues that we have here.

• 30:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That, you know.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  That's true, maybe they're politically a little bit more enlightened.

• 30:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But is it, is it the same thing to speak of encryption as it is to speak of compression? Because if they maximally compress their signal, to me, that would be indistinguishable from noise, isn't that correct?

• 30:55Speaker 01

  Well, when you think about compression and maximum compression, you think about maximum reversible compression.

• 31:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  Or lossless compression. Uh, you have to be able to go back. Uh, so there's always a point when you're compressing information, uh, at which you have to stop, where you begin, uh, losing some of the original data. When you, when you shrink the size past a certain point, and the way this shrinking occurs is by looking for patterns. For example, let's say you write a book, and when you try to compress the book, uh, you create a system to say, rather than reprinting a very long word like government, uh, in your compression scheme, you'll replace every instance of the word government with the letter G. And then when you go to decompress this, uh, you'll simply replace every instance of the letter G by itself.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  Now, you wouldn't use the letter G, you'd use some other symbol that wouldn't appear in the text. Uh, but it will then reverse it and replace that with government again. That's the basic idea behind it.

• 31:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lossless compression.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  Lossless compression. Uh, but this relies on dictionaries. Uh, dictionary is basically of patterns that are found within a given, uh, a given communication, sort of a, uh, an example of entropy being, you know, the maximum possible, uh, set of states within a data set or within the universe or whatever. When you start reducing these and reducing these and reducing these, eventually you get to a point where you can't go any further without not being able to do so perfectly. Encryption is actually different from this, uh, because if you, uh, encrypt something, it must be reversible.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  If even a single bit changes, uh, under a modern encryption algorithm, for example, uh, you can't reverse it back. Uh, you've broken it entirely because what encryption is, uh, on a fundamental level is it's a math problem.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  The solution to the math problem, for example, if we're talking about encrypting your smartphone, after you've solved it, is the picture of you, or the SMS message that's encrypted on your phone, or something like that. But the problem itself is a given prime number combined with a password, or some other method of unlocking, and some other key. When you combine those things together, you get the result. The problem is, if you change 1, 0, or 1 within the complexity of a digital file that has to be able to translate perfectly because it's based on mathematics, that solution no longer works. You put in the answer, but the answer no longer computes to what the result is supposed

• 33:40Speaker 01

  to be, because you're saying 1 plus 2 equals 3, which is, the 3 being the representation of your pictures, or whatever. But your problem is now 2 plus 2 equals 3. It doesn't work. You can't reverse it anymore.

• 33:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've got to wrap up this segment of StarTalk. We've been following my exclusive interview with government whistleblower Edward Snowden, who spoke with me through a robot-controlled video screen that he manipulated and maneuvered from Russia, where he's currently seeking asylum.

• 34:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. This is a special edition of StarTalk. We chose to break from our usual format in favor of a little one-on-one time. Edward Snowden, former CIA and NSA officer, now a whistleblower, international fugitive in exile, wheeled into my office via a remote-controlled robot.

• 34:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Through this virtual medium, Ed and I were able to speak at length about his scientific pursuits, the technology of encryption and encoding, and why he believes the Constitution trumps all other law. Because it's possible to think of him as just somebody who has no clue about due process, legal matters, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. And it's easy, at first glance, to just think of him as just some kind of ignorant renegade who has no sensitivity or understanding to American laws. But I learned that that clearly was not the case. In this final segment,

• 35:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  we're going to listen to part of my exclusive interview with Ed Snowden and get his take on Fourth Amendment protection and why he believes having nothing to hide is never a justification for rights violations.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  When you're talking about invading everybody's private communications, their associations, the network of who they call on the phone, you're getting their political affiliation. You're getting the people who matter the most to them based on the frequency of the communications. You get indications of their travel. You get the books that they read. You get the things that they buy. You get the people that they love. And you can even get indications, not only of who they are today, but who they want to be. For example, maybe they're looking at applying to a certain college program or a method of study or a fellowship. Or they're, you know, looking to get a job at a certain kind of company. These are all intensely private things that have always traditionally

• 36:30Speaker 01

  been up to the individual to disclose and share with people they trust. But if the government knows all of that about all of us, regardless of whether we've done anything wrong, it invests them with an extraordinary and unprecedented measure of power, not only to know about us, but to act upon this information. And particularly when these programs are regulated by secret policy. Rather than public law, what that means is they can disempower the public, the citizens, you know, in their country or around the world at the flip of a switch. And that's something that we've never trusted government with before, and there's no prevailing reason why we should today.

• 37:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's, so you, you raise a very good point. Now I'll feel more comfortable about going through airport security because even though they've got my ticket and they know and I checked in and they saw my passport and everything, when you're going through the detectors, they're not asking you your name. Your name isn't attached with that moment. They just want to see if you're carrying anything. Plus, I can choose to drive. I can leave the airport and choose to drive. So that's a different fact, at least traveling domestically, right?

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Right. There is a distinction between the voluntary disclosure of information, where you have a choice whether to engage in it or not, and the involuntary subversion of your intent, particularly unlike airports where everybody knows this is the law. We can vote for officials who would repeal it and whatnot, and secret programs where they impose this sort of surveillance on us without our awareness, without our intent, without our approval, or even without the approval of many members of Congress. In May, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York found that the National Security Agency's mass surveillance programs, one of which I revealed in June of 2013, was illegal.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  It had not been authorized by any law, and for the entire period of its operation, you know, this was not only contrary to law, but it was in violation of it. And as a result, this program needs to be changed or ended. Now, this happened without the majority of Congress knowing that it was occurring at all. For example, when we talk about the oversight of intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency or the Central Intelligence Agency, we have 535 members of Congress, all of whom represent a proportional amount of Americans who are supposed to represent us at the table of government. But rather than having them all understand and be able to influence the direction of

• 39:07Speaker 01

  these programs for what are called covert action programs, only eight members of Congress out of 535 are told the truth of what's going on. This is called the Gang of Eight. And I think what the court held in May was that you cannot substitute the judgment of eight individuals, particularly given that these eight individuals receive more donations from intelligence contracting companies and defense contractors, sort of the military-industrial complex, than any other senators or representatives in the Congress for the judgment of the Congress as a whole and the public.

• 39:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So suppose, this is a very supposy thing. Suppose the public says, "I really care about my security, and I want the government to spy on everybody so that I can be safe." And they then turn that law into something legal. You'd have no problem with that because there was disclosure on it, I presume. Is that correct? In a democracy, we would vote for it, possibly.

• 40:13Speaker 01

  On the point of disclosure, I would argue, yes, that's much better than what we have today. But on the point of righteousness and morality, I could still contest it. And I think the argument there, that anybody who works in sort of the civil liberties space, who believes in robust rights, who believes in the Constitution, would argue that Congress actually cannot pass such a law that allows the monitoring of people, that allows sort of the unreasonable search and seizure of individuals in advance of any criminal activity, because the Constitution forbids it in the Fourth Amendment. If they want to do that, they would have to amend the Constitution. But even if they chose to, there's fundamentally a deeper, I think, moral point here, which

• 40:54Speaker 01

  is the majority cannot vote away the rights of the minority. You cannot simply say, "Well, because I feel this way, and because I have, you know, six out of my 10 friends who agree with me, I'm going to reduce the circumstances of everybody else in this four out of 10." When we talk about the basis of actual human rights, you know, you can change standards, you can change regulations, but when we think about fundamental rights, and these are rights that the US government itself has actively and aggressively advocated in the past. For example, the right to privacy is guaranteed not only in the Fourth Amendment of our Constitution or in the associational rights of sort of the First Amendment.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  But through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which the United States and most other countries in the world have agreed to, or the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which, again, the US itself promoted. So, we have treaty obligations, which in the American system are counted as the supreme law of the land, similar to the Constitution. And then we have mere statutes, which are passed by the Congress. Can a statute, passed in a time of sort of a political passions, overrule basic, fundamental rights that are guaranteed not only in our founding documents, but in our treaties and our obligations that we've set are timeless? And even if they were, would that be a good thing? I think that's very much an argument to be had.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  And sort of a corollary argument that we hear against this, to try to get us to accept invasive surveillance or violations of rights, is that, "Well, if you have nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear. What are you worried about?" But that argument is premised on a fundamental misunderstanding of rights. For one, you don't have to justify why you need your rights. That's not how they work. Any intrusion into your rights have to be justified by the government, rather than by you. You don't have to say, "Why I need this right." They have to say, "Why it is absolutely vital to society to take that right away." But beyond that, when we think about what people are really saying, when they say, "Oh, I don't really care about that. I don't really care about privacy.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  I've got nothing to hide." Is there saying they don't care about that right? Saying that, "I don't care about the right to privacy because I've got nothing to hide", is no different than saying, "I don't care about freedom of speech because I have nothing to say." You're asking for a less liberal, more constrained society simply because that right is not valuable to you in that moment, when you're thinking about it today. But rights don't have to be used by you individually to be valuable to a society. You can't have a free press without freedom of speech. And you can't have a free society without the right to privacy.

• 43:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  An issue many people have about whistleblowers such as Ed Snowden, and of course Daniel Ellsberg from back in the 60s and 70s when the Pentagon Papers were released, is that they were under oath by the government to protect its secrets, and that they directly violated this understanding or trust. I raised this point. What he said took me to a new place, because part of me is saying, "Look, you're making America a less safe place. These are secrets. Of course, we're gonna have secrets, and you can't have all secrets that everybody knows, because then you cannot conduct operations that would be in the interest of protecting Americans' lives." This was a clear point to me and presumably others, but why did he not get it?

• 44:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was there some other thought process going on in his head that I had yet to glean, or perhaps others had yet to see? Let's check it out. Where's your allegiance? Wasn't it to the NSA? Didn't you swear allegiance to be Secret Agent Man? I mean...

• 44:48Speaker 01

  You know, that's a really good question, because that's actually a fairly common criticism, was some say, "You know, I've broken oath." But they actually aren't familiar with the way that the oath and the nondisclosure agreements and so on, the secrecy agreements work in the intelligence community. I didn't swear an oath to secrecy. There's no such thing when you join the CIA or the NSA. It doesn't exist. There is a government form called SF 312, a standard form of bureaucratic legalities, that's a civil nondisclosure agreement, that says you should not disclose secret or classified information, or whatever. There would be possibly civil criminal penalties and so on if this occurs.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  But then, at the very first day, you walk into service as a government officer, a staff officer at the Central Intelligence Agency, you take what's called the oath of service, which is not to secrecy, which is not to protect classified information, it's to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. So, the question is, what do you do when your obligations come in conflict? When you have a standard government form on one hand, a civil agreement, a nondisclosure...

• 45:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  SF 113, whatever.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  SF 312.

• 46:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  312, okay.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  And then you've got... The Constitution on the other. And it also matters, what is the significance of these breaches? There's a question here of, is this something that's a, some sort of minor, one-off departure from regulations? Or is this a fundamental, continuing, and massive violation of the Constitution? When you have the National Security Agency, for example, as the courts say, operating outside of the law, in fact, in violation of it, and violating the Fourth Amendment rights of 330 million Americans, every second of every day, that, I think, for most people would change their calculus.

• 46:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is Ben Franklin's famous quote your favorite motto? Excuse me, I have to like, write it down here. "Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve either."

• 47:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's amazing how many lessons we can draw from history, from people who lived so far before us, without the benefit of our knowledge, without the benefit of our technology, and yet, they realized that there are certain fundamental principles, certain fundamental values, that are not dependent on time or place. They're valuable to everyone, everywhere. But the funny thing about rights is, they should never be restricted over time, or they should never become more rare over time. Rather, they should expand. We should all, members of any liberal society, or even authoritarian society, should be

• 47:41Speaker 01

  tremendously concerned when they see governments beginning to redefine and narrow, to limit the boundaries of the borders of rights. Because when we think about the progress of our quality of life, of the quality of our governments, of the human condition, it's very much premised not on what we believe in, but what we stand for, what we promote, what we challenge, what we bring out from the dark and present to the world. And when we have a few political voices in a society who argue that rather than be brave to move forward, to confront new risks with courage and principle...

• 48:26Speaker 01

  And instead say, "We should be careful. We should be afraid. We should retreat within our homes. We should retreat within ourselves and distance ourselves, not just from our adversaries, but our agencies, from the world around us." I think that's a fundamentally illiberal direction that all free people should resist.

• 48:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've been listening to StarTalk Radio, and this has been my exclusive one-on-one interview with Edward Snowden. Call him what you want, but I call him a geek. As always, I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, bidding you to keep looking up.