C (3:28)

Yeah, we're at this juncture right now where we get to choose our path. And I am just imploring people to write the best future possible. If we continue on our current trajectory. The future looks dark and that's scary. The good news is, is that if we take control of the situation and start to lean into the tech we want to see in the world, the future looks amazing. So it's, it's really interesting if you think about the history of the Internet and how it was conceived as this beautiful space where people could connect peer to peer with someone on the other side of the world. And there was, there were no barriers to entry with information, you know, interconnected ideas and, and just freedom really. It was this digital freedom that we created in the ether. And what started out as this idea of freedom has been co opted for the most oppressive totalitarian surveillance tool we have ever seen. And right now, governments and working in collusion with corporations because there's jawboning, there are mandates, there's subpoenas for data, there's buying data from data brokers, there is this insidious, incestuous relationship between the private and government sector right now. And it's all leading us in a direction that looks pretty scary. You know, there's a lot of stuff going on. First of all, I think it's a big threat because people don't really know what's going on. You know, it is not in the government's best interest to tell us what kind of surveillance programs they're enacting. Because surveillance works best when people don't know about it. And it's not in company's best interest to tell us what data they're collecting. Because if we knew, we wouldn't agree to this. When people are explicit in their privacy policies, we will be collecting your sexual activity. You know, people will say, actually I'm going to opt out of that, thanks. Instead it's all cloaked in vague legalese. And then we give over this data, not understanding the consequences with this, you know, idea, this myth of consent, when we have these privacy policies written more like liability insurance instead of actually to inform users. And then we have governments just coming in and either taking that data, you know, either with, you know, explicit threats, either doing it surreptitiously through programs like the prison program or other programs where they're tapping into corporate service or through jawboning. So they're implied threats. There you have companies that are threatened with antitrust lawsuits. But, you know, maybe we'll go easy on you if you, you know, toe the line here and give us this information. So all across the board, we're really.

A (5:57)

Stephen, it's even more symbiotic than that, isn't it? Because it's. And another sort of red pill moment during lockdowns is that corporations are basically clients of the government and they're. They're selling all of your data. Oh, yeah, the naive days when we would say, well, if it's a private company and you sign the consent form, we mistake.

C (6:20)

Like the private company days. That was the days of the brick and mortar, the Blockbuster Video Store. Let's talk about how the government used to have to get your information. If they wanted information from that store, they'd have to actually go to the physical store, you know, get their data. Maybe they had a computer, maybe they just had like, you know, physical records, paper records. They had to have this mechanism to extract that data. And exactly as you said, it's more symbiotic than people realize because one of the largest clients of data brokers is the government. So you go to D.C. and it's just filled with this cottage industry of, of countless data brokers you've never heard of who are all providing certain aspects of data collection for different government interests.

A (7:00)

So status quo today. The Fourth Amendment's out the window.

C (7:03)

It's disappeared. You know, we have this thing called the third party doctrine. Now, this third party doctrine came about before the Internet, this idea that if you give your data to a third party, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy because you handed that off anyway. Right. The problem is, is that in the digital age, the entire Internet runs on third parties. And we are now in a situation where even if I go, you know, go to a company and I say, hey, I agree to give you this data, let's sign a contract, you'll promise to keep it private. In my mind, that's a reasonable expectation of privacy. If we have a contractual agreement, you' I'm going to keep this data private. I feel safe. The government says no, we do not recognize you have any reasonable expectation of privacy because you entered into some sort of an arrangement with a third party. That's insane. And so we have created this complete imbalance of power where the government has more insight and access into our lives. Than ever before. And the whole reason of the fourth amendment was the checks and balances. If the government wanted information about people, they needed a warrant. And that is no longer a case. Now they just need to buy it. And so this loose loophole, I think really endangers civil liberties. It endangers our ability to transact, it endangers our ability to interact with people. Freedom of choice, freedom of thought, it is all going downhill because we no longer have private spaces in our lives.

A (8:26)

It all started. Well, I'm sure it started before this, but the so called war on terror and the Patriot act and all this. And I remember now, five or six years ago, Rand Paul was debating the worst senator in the entire Senate, Lindsey Graham, who and Rand, of course, is fighting against mass surveillance and the surveillance of people not accused of a crime or anything. And he's like, well, if Senator Lindsey Graham says, well, if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide. And your point at the beginning of this conversation is like, what happens 10 years from now when President Ocasio Cortez has gone to China, met with President Xi and said, I like this because there's certain types of free behavior that should not be tolerated in my vision for America, and I want people to appreciate that future is not so far off.

C (9:26)

Absolutely. This idea of I have nothing to hide is completely naive. First of all, regimes come and go, governments come and go, social norms change. But your data is forever. And it can be picked over at any time in the future by any future regime or any future hacker who gets access to that database or anyone. We have no control over who gets access to our data. And so this idea that I have nothing to hide now, therefore, I'm going to allow this treasure trove of sensitive information to be collated about me and every personal detail. You know, it's first of all, naive, like, second of all, I think that it's not just about you, right? Because people say I have nothing to hide as a way of hand waving away the importance of privacy. If you diminish the importance of privacy, you know, just because you personally don't feel that you need it right now because you happen to be toying the line or you happen to be in the mainstream view, or you happen to not be an activist or pushing back against powerful interests, well, first of all, good for you, but that's not something to brag about.

A (10:25)

You're a very uninteresting person.

C (10:27)

You're a very uninteresting person. You have no plan to ever be interesting in the future. Second of all, you know, the question is, do you want to live in a society when no one ever has the option of privacy? Because our society functions with self correcting mechanisms. We have whistleblowers and investigative journalists and activists and opposition parties and all these people who work to, you know, somehow push back when things go too far in one direction. We have these mechanisms that help us push back. And what happens in a society when there's total surveillance and you lose that freedom because you can be targeted before you've even taken these dissenting viewpoints or actions. You know, a really scary society. So the people who hand wave away the importance of privacy need to remember they're benefiting tremendously from brave people out there who are doing hard work and who rely on privacy as a matter of life and death. You know, for them, it's a matter of safety. And so we cannot as a society get rid of this or allow governments to take it away. Because if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide. You know, like, it's just so naive to think that way.

A (11:33)

Thank you for joining me today on.

B (11:34)

Kibbe on Liberty and for being part of our fiercely independent audience. Every week, my organization, Free the People, partners with BlazeTV to bring you this show. My guests bring smart perspectives on everything from current events to timeless philosophical debates. If you like what you hear, go to freethepeople.org kol and support Kibbe on Liberty so we can continue to produce these honest conversations with interesting people. Now, let's get back to it.

A (12:05)

So when you gave your workshop yesterday morning, I utterly failed my personal privacy test because I have a Gmail account. And, and I rationalize this by thinking I'm already on the list. I, I assume that, that the bad guys are going to come get me and put me in the gulag when the time comes. But you offered some very practical advice and I've started doing all of this stuff.

C (12:31)

Amazing.

A (12:32)

I'd love for you to walk through some of this for people that, you know, if you're not a tech bro, it can be quite intimidating to figure out, oh, what do I do with this, this encrypted messaging system? And what's this personal AI thing? And yeah, so, so help us, help us protect ourselves, because I think, I think you're right. And when Terry and I were talking about the very first adapters in social media was something called the. Well, and it was just a bunch of deadheads that figured out how to create rules of the road for this social network, and mutual respect and a code of free and open speech and all of these things. And obviously a lot of social media doesn't feel like that today. But what they really did was they made it safe for other people to join. And eventually what sounds complex and esoteric becomes a cultural norm. That's why we all have to do it.

C (13:30)

Yeah, yeah. It's the trailblazers who need to be brave and step forward. And if the people who don't care, you know, if the people who care about freedom are not the ones leading the way here, no one is going to follow suit. No one is going to feed the privacy ecosystem. They're going to continue to feed the surveillance machine. You know, we have a market decision. We can vote with our dollars, we can choose which tech gets developed and which doesn't. If we continue to fe the surveillance apparatus, we're doing everyone a disservice. And if we're not the ones brave enough or courageous enough or, you know, with enough discipline to actually say, okay, I'm going to make an effort, no one's going to do this. And we're not going to give that market signal that says, hey, we want more of this stuff. Politicians are going to presume that we don't want any of the stuff and it's going to be easy to take away. But, but what you were saying about, oh, I'm already on a list, you know, is it too late? I think that we need to remember, if you cut it off now, if you find ways to start plugging this data leakage now, who cares what the government knows previously? They don't know anything going forward. So obviously you can make tremendous improvements on your life. You know, the most valuable data is going to be the most up to date data. Right.

A (14:40)

So start saying what I really think.

C (14:43)

Exactly. I know you're so timid, you're just.

A (14:46)

Not outspoken, always self censoring.

C (14:48)

I wish I could know what your thoughts are on things. You're just, you don't express yourself clearly. Yeah, no, you can really start expressing yourself and, and standing up for your beliefs for the first time. Matt. Yeah, there are lots of easy things people can do. There are five things that I think people can start with. If they are overwhelmed and they're like, what do I even do? You know, it seems overwhelming. Right. There are all this dark data leakage. First of all, probably messenger is the easiest one. So if you're using SMS, if you're using social media, DMs, if you're using messaging apps that are not End to end encrypted. That's all just a digital trail you're creating. And companies are storing that information in databases attached to this permanent record of you that's being sold to data brokers and who knows whom and, and governments are coming in and buying this. You're just creating unnecessary digital exhaust. So using an end to end encrypted Messenger. I personally like Signal, but there are a lot of cool ones out there. Switching to, that's a huge thing you can do for privacy. You know why, if you have something sensitive or personal or embarrassing, why would you to create a permanent digital record when we have amazing tools that just allow you to opt out? So I'd say start with messenger is a great thing. You and I connect on Messenger.

A (16:03)

That is, that is the one part of your test that I passed because I've been on Signal for some time.

C (16:08)

You're ahead of a large percentage of the curve then, so you're doing well. I would say the next area where you could probably look that's super easy is probably a browser because a lot of people are going to use Chrome. They have the largest market share by far. And if you switch to something like, I personally like Brave, but there are other good browsers out there as well. If you switch to something like that, it's so similar to the Chrome experience, except it's actually even better because every time you use Chrome, you are basically being attacked from all fronts by Google's ad machine, which means that you're taking up bandwidth with all of these ads to populate. Everything loads more slowly. You use Brave and they're going to block all of that so your pages will load faster, you won't use as much bandwidth. And actually when you go to their landing page, it gives you a tracker and it says how many hours you have saved thanks to all of this ad blocking software. It also means that if you're watching YouTube, if you use Brave, you don't get YouTube ads. A lot of people don't know that, but they block ads. And as part of that ad EcoSystem, it blocks YouTube ads, which means that, you know, you don't have to just be pulled into this manipulation machine that's being created. So browser is an easy one. When you go to a browser, you need a search engine. That's a way that we index the Internet and navigate our way around. I use Brave Search. It's also a search engine because it's default. But there are some really great search engines. If you like Google search results, you could use something like startpage.com and that provides Google quality search but with a privacy focused front end. So they use different proxies and they basically are a private layer for accessing those Google index. I personally don't like the Google index because I think there's a lot of bias and manipulation imbued in that and well, there always is going to be. Right. And, and I just don't want to be subject to that. For me, my privacy is, is about autonomy. So I, I like the idea that, well, I mean, if you think about it, the more a company knows about you, the easier you are to manipulate. And so I really like anything that kind of blocks companies getting access to information about me because it makes me feel like I can maintain my independence of thought a little more. And so I actually like using search engines other than Google because they do a lot of that manipulation as well. They have a lot. People will pay to put things in front of you. They will specifically target you so they know how susceptible you are at any given time, what you're going to click on. And so I try to avoid that.

A (18:34)

I've made some stupid decisions.

C (18:37)

Right. And so Brave has their own index. They're what's called a pure search engine. So a meta search engine will take someone else's search results, they use their indexes and they'll basically put a different wrapper on them. Brave has their own indexing tool. So I like to use that because I'm not going to be subject to the same biases. So those are the first three.

A (18:57)

And I've downloaded Brave for your recommendation. And we also got to meet the founder.

C (19:03)

Well, yeah, well, he's the head of privacy, so. Amazing. Privacy researcher Pete Snyder was in a panel earlier today just talking about how easy it is to track people in their browser. It is by far the most vulnerable part of your Internet interaction. And there are so many ways that browsers are integrating surveillance into their mechanism. And so I really love when you see cutting edge technology, user focus, not ad focus. You're no longer the product, you know, you're the customer. And so that refocus is everything. And they're just looking out for your user experience. How do we make pages load faster? Not how do we get more ads in front of you to manipulate your worldview and get you to vote a certain way or, you know, hate certain people because you think they're hating you. Like, it's just so nice to have that different perspective. So, yeah, those three things to start and then we start to get into email Everyone uses Gmail. They again have by far the largest market share. So Gmail is absolutely scanning all of your emails to and from your inbox and they're analyzing that, they're adding that to a profile about you. And I asked the question in my workshop earlier, like what, what kind of company is, is Google? You know, got all kinds of different answers. It's a tech company, it's a search engine, it's a browser. They make hardware, all this. Google is an ad company and we need to remember that. So all these free tools we're getting from Google, what's their incentive to create them? Well, they're not going to give us all this free software unless they're getting data from us. So all of these tools feed into these tools that we think are free feed into this mechanism where they're just aggregating profiles so that they can more easily target us with content. So the same goes for your Gmail. That free Gmail account that you have is really just a tool whereby you're selling your information in exchange for an inbox. I've opted out of that. I use Proton. There are also other email providers like Tutor, that are very good and it's really easy. So you could go into Proton, there's a single button that you can click that says import my entire Gmail history. It'll import all of your messages and you can just use the Proton ecosystem there on forward. So it's just a simple way to get out of that data extracting environment. And for me, me, it's a principal thing. So I just don't want to feed that surveillance ecosystem anymore. I want to support the people who are building the privacy tools. So I pay for an account on Proton and I love that I'm spending my money on this rather than, you know, data that's kind of intangible and I don't quite know who's getting access to it or what they're using it for. And so it's shielded from my views. So I have the bliss of ignorance. I actually like just saying, no, let's have a transaction. I'm just going to spend $4 a month, you know, on one of these things.

A (21:51)

And to reiterate, it's not just about getting a lot of annoying ads and them knowing your commercial habits. They're selling that data to the government.

C (22:00)

Yeah, that's what people don't realize. They think this is all about commercial enterprises. Why do I care if someone is trying to sell me a better pair of Nike sneakers? It's not about that. They are trying to get you to think in a certain way. They are selling data to people who have entrenched interests or an agenda to, you know, move the political spectrum or to, you know, some sort of a, like whatever their agenda is. I can think of criminals who might use this. I could think of governments. Some people might say that there's a lot of overlap between those two areas. But there are so many ways that this data could be misused and we need to be a little more realistic with it. I don't think ignorance is an excuse anymore because we're getting more and more transparency into actually how this harms people. I gave an example earlier and Josh. Who is the Josh? Josh Swihart from Electric Coin Company gave a really great anecdote where he's talking about how this information can be used. So, you know, we hand over mandated KYC information when we purchase something, right? We don't think twice about it. That's how finance works. And people have normalized this surveillance apparatus we've created in the financial industry. So people, you know, perhaps, maybe they bought a crypto wallet, right? There was a giant ledger attack. Ledger is a type of crypto hardware wallet. Now, what kind of information can you get from a data breach where the government's mandated you hand over your financial details and you've given your home address for a product that is identifiable as crypto related. You have just told all the people on the dark web who have access to this breached data that you are a crypto user. And here is your home address. So the response to that was just a wave of extortion attempts, kidnappings. There's so many things. Josh gave a personal story of a friend of his where, where they use databases like this. And this isn't the only one. You know, exchanges go through the same thing. If you sign up to one of these exchanges and this is just the crypto space, you can apply this to anything. Maybe you buy gold, maybe, you know, you're in some sort of industry as lucrative or people think they can extort you. What happened was criminals got access to this information that this person had crypto. They correlated it with financial data that was leaked in a different database, you know, from financial transactions. And then they correlated it using unique identifier like cell number and email with a running app that he was using. So they figured out every morning this guy runs this specific route around his home and a group of like a gang of criminals followed him on this run and tried to kidnap him, right? That stuff is happening more and more. And it's not just the crypto space, it's actually across the board. That's just one example. But think about a woman who has had a violent ex lover. Think about a police officer who has a vendetta and he's turned really Cor. There are so many ways that all of this information can be misused. And we're just starting to get a glimpse into this abuse that happens when we mandate the collection and we normalize the collection of so much personal information. It's almost like humans are too good. We have this good faith interaction with people like, oh, I'm a good person, so I presume they're going to go do good things with this data. And we actually need to address the reality of the situation, which is we need to take more care aware of our choices and actually start to think about what kind of information we're allowing to be collected.

A (25:24)

It's probably naivete, not, not realizing that that's possible.

C (25:28)

Yeah.

A (25:29)

And that's, that's kind of a creepy story.

C (25:31)

Absolutely.

A (25:32)

And you're like, oh, okay, yeah.

C (25:33)

I mean when I first heard some of this stuff, like I've been doing this for years now, just like focusing on privacy leaks and teaching people how to plug them. But there are some things I discovered where I'm like, wait, what is this real? I, I'm sure if this were real, I would have heard about it. But that's the thing, no one's really talking about this. And there is an entrenched interest to keep this stuff under the radar. So, you know, there's very little research being done into it. The people who do the research are generally technologically advanced enough that the language they're speaking isn't the language of everyday people. So they'll put out a white paper. People don't understand it. This, it's very hard to get information about all this. But for example, just knowing that your cell number, which you've given to your doctor and the government and a thousand merchants you've interacted with and that table reservation service to go to that restaurant and know whatever else, they all have your cell number, if you have someone's cell number, you can find their real time location at any given time. Because cells, numbers, they work with the baseband processor in your phone, your phone is constantly singing, spinging, pinging cell. Your phone is constantly pinging cell towers to say, hey, this is the nearest cell tower to me. You know, if I need to get a call, route it through this one and then you move and then you ping the next cell tower. Oh, now I'm closest to this one. If you need to get a call to me, me, ping me through this cell tower. And what happens is you've created a trail of everywhere you are. And cell towers have this thing called a home location registry where they will keep a record of all of that. And it turns out this home location registry is actually easier to get access to than people would understand, whether it's by cell phone providers, telecom providers that are selling this data, and there's lawsuit after lawsuit. They just seem to keep doing it because it seems the selling data seems to be more lucrative than, you know, just paying the fines.

A (27:22)

So, yeah, this was another lockdown discovery of me because there was these stay at home orders and they were using cell data to discover that no one gave a damn about the rule and they were going about their lives. But. But you can. You can.

C (27:36)

It's not just aggregate, it's.

A (27:39)

It's aggregate.

C (27:39)

It's personal. Yeah, it's personal. So if someone wants to find you, they can. And so we've normalized just handing over this information without a second thought, thinking it's kept secure, thinking that it's private, you know, and not really understanding the consequences and how it could be used against us. You know, there's a great quip by the former president of Cisco, and he says there are two types of companies in the world, those that have been hacked and those that don't yet know that they've been hacked. And so, you know, we're handing over data and we're presuming companies can keep it safe and they can't. It is far harder to create this defensive barrier that thinks of every possible hole that should be plugged and, you know, safeguarding it. All a hacker needs to do is find one entry point. All the government needs to do is find one entry point. And so we're starting to realize through breach after breach after breach that we really can't secure this data. So the next step is to start teaching individuals how to be more discerning about protecting themselves. You don't have to give your number to a restaurant. You know, you don't have to give your home address to a merchant when you're getting something delivered it. You can use masked credit cards to hide your billing address, where you can put in any address, any name, and your payment will still go through. So I like privacy.com is a great service. You can use aliases, generate new email addresses for every service so people can't correlate that data, you can generate voip numbers. You know, you can do all of these things and deliver things to a P.O. box if you want. There, there are kinds of layers depending on how much effort you want to put in. But there's some super low hanging fruit you could do immediately that would just make people so much safer. But they just don't realize that they're things that they have to do.

B (29:23)

If you made it this far into the show, it means I must be doing something right. Key Beyond Liberty is just one of the amazing products we create at Free. The people we tell emotionally compelling stories and produce educational videos for the Liberty Curious. Our award winning documentaries personalize all things liberty. Independence, creativity, hard work, integrity and perseverance. After the show, check out our work@freethepeople.org and if you like what you see, donate to support what we do. That's freethepeople.org now back to the show.

A (30:00)

So a lot of people are freaked out about AI and after everything you've just said, I should be more freaked out because I know that the government wants to use this as a weapon against me. But you talked about this some as well.

C (30:16)

Yeah. So technology is neutral and it could be used for good or bad. We have to remember that. And AI is just another technology. It could be used for good or bad. And I think it has been largely co opted for a lot of surveillance right now, which is scary, but people forget that we could recoup it, we could make privacy tools. At the end of the day all AI is, is really just powerful compute. So we should start to think about how do we leverage this amazing in our best interest. So already off the top of my head, right. I could create a tool that uses AI to analyze what kind of telemetry it leaves my device and teaches me how to plug it and shows me what kind of data is being extracted and how I can protect myself. Or I could use AI as like a white noise generator so I can render the business model of data brokers obsolete because they can't tell fact from fiction. They can no longer have a business model selling verifiable information about me. There's all kinds of stuff that we could be using with this technology. And I think it's really important that we play this game right where the people using surveillance are using AI against us. If we want to have a chance of protecting ourselves, we're going to have to use this, this very powerful tool as well. And I think we need to lean into this real quick because if we don't. The surveillance tech is just going to have such a head start that we're going to have a hard time, you know, catching up with all this.

A (31:36)

Yeah, tell, tell us about personal AI.

C (31:38)

Yeah, so I mean there's a spectrum of AI right now if you just want to use AI in your day to day life, on one end you are giving all your most personal data to the centralized database that the government has mandated they have to collect for all of eternity. They haven't given an end date for how long this data needs to be collected. Right. And so things like OpenAI and anthropic and all of these places are scanning your prompts, they're flagging law enforcement if there's anything that you know, they don't like. And of course all this stuff can be taken out of context. You might be a journalist and you might be saying like, you know, where can I, where can people buy fake IDs because I'm doing a piece Nissan or something. I mean, that's the kind of stuff that can get taken out of context. You flag law enforcement, suddenly there's someone at your door because you thought you were chatting to something personal and ends up. It wasn't a privacy tool at all. So what happened with them is Chat GPT actually had an option that said, well, maybe I don't want a permanent database of every prompt. These are quite personal. Maybe I want them to delete my prompts after a certain time so you could opt in and have them deleted. And then the government just turned around and said, actually we're going to strip users of their right to decide whether they want their data deleted or not. You are no longer allowed to delete any prompts you have to keep.

A (32:53)

This is the U.S. yep.

C (32:54)

You have to keep a permanent record of all of them because of some lawsuit with the New York Times. And so they, it was one fell swoop, just eliminated a huge amount of individual choice when it comes to privacy by doing that. But regardless, you know, everything you're feeding into these systems is, is aggregated in a database associated with your identity. On the other side of things, you can download an incredibly powerful model with, you know, 70 billion parameters and run it on a local computer. On an average consumer grade laptop you could run a model that's like 7 billion parameters. So when you do that locally, nothing touches the Internet. These models are self contained things you can host locally with no connection whatsoever and use them. And they are very, very powerful. They're only going to get more powerful. And computers are Only going to get beefier. So we really don't need this trade off of if I want to use amazing tools, I have to give up on my privacy. There's a spectrum, you know, and in the middle you've got some hybrid models where you can send things to the Internet, you can send it to the cloud. But maybe this company has a no logging policy so they've decided they're not going to log anything. Or maybe they have privacy preserving techniques. For example, I use Braves leo, they have an AI agent built into the browser. They have a no logging policy, they run everything through a proxy to delete your IP address. There's another great service called Venice AI AI. They do a similar thing. So there are kind of these like middle grounds as well. When I use AI personally I think, okay, well what do I need? How powerful a tool do I need and how personal is the information? If I'm dealing with sensitive questions, I'm not going to give them to the company that's just, you know, hoovering up all of my data and keeping it for the government to peruse. Any time I'm going to choose a more private option and it's great that people have that choice now.

A (34:41)

Now so I use Grok and there's a little ghosty button in the upper thing which is supposedly private. Is it private at all?

C (34:50)

Gosh, I have no idea. I mean as much as I am addicted to X the platform, I am addicted to reading people's threads and it's the way I kind of tune into the, the cyber security industry and all of that. They are running on an ad based model as well as well. So you know, I presume that there's going to be an accountability issue or fraud if that were not private. But privacy can be a squishy word.

A (35:18)

You know, I'm sort of testing it and obviously when I grock something without hitting the ghost button, I immediately can see in everything else that they're, they're failing me. But I'll have to keep testing it.

C (35:33)

Yeah, no, privacy is one of those squishy words where people are increasingly using it as a buzzword because they're realizing people are start to care about this. So you have to be discerning in that. But like another thing about AI, it's interesting because people are suddenly up in arms about maybe AI itself being this awful tool and we should be afraid of AI because of surveillance capabilities and all this. Like companies and governments have been using powerful compute and ML to aggregate data and get inferences from our lives and all of our activities online for like decades. You know, this has been going on for a long time. We've only just lifted the veil, but it's going on. What's happened with the advent of AI is we've just democratized the tooling. We've just given individuals access to the same powerful compute that governments have been using against citizens for decades at this stage. And so for me, it's a misdirect for people to look at AI and say that's the problem. It's like, no, the problem is that you have this imbalance of power. You have some entities who have the resources and the computing power to be doing so much stuff that invades our lives. And individuals had no recourse course. Suddenly the tables have flipped. Everyone has access to powerful compute. You know, now is not the time to be up in arms about this. It's the time to be rejoicing that we finally have tools to fight back. Now the next step is deciding at this juncture which path are we going to feed, right? We have a choice. We have these tools in our back pocket. We have all this cutting edge cryptography that's being developed. We have things like zero knowledge proofs, homomorphic encryption, amazing technology for privacy. And we have to decide are we going to actually lean into building more tools with this stuff? Are we going to continue to feed the surveillance apparatus because we've been told that privacy is dead and there's no point in even trying? Or we've been told that we should be ashamed of wanting privacy? You know, what have you got to hide that you want this? We have to make a decision right now because we could paint a very dark future or we could create abundance, we could create an amazing future where individuals suddenly have reclaimed the right to have freedom in so many areas of their life that we've lost over the last decade.

A (37:43)

I lean towards techno optimism and I look at just the history of the last 20, 30 years and how they've democratized learning and knowledge and people's ability to speak up for themselves and dissidents ability to organize against oppressive states. And every step of the way the government comes back hack and tries to ban that and they try to regulate that and they tried to just outlaw it. And then we come up with a new hack. And I wonder, are you optimistic or pessimistic? Because it strikes me that in a lot of ways Terry and I talked about the censorship industrial complex and I think it's almost comical that some gray suited Soviet in one of those Alphabet agents, probably the FBI, the CIA, Homeland Security was monitoring your Uncle Bob's tweets to see if he told in an untoward joke about Joe Biden's cognitive ability. That's. That's like a joke. That's like. That's like a Coen Brothers movie Burn after reading.

C (38:51)

Right?

A (38:52)

It's not a serious attempt at that point. And. And with blockchain and all this stuff, how are they going to stop us?

C (39:01)

That's a great question. I am an optimist, an absolute optimist, because we have never had such exciting tools at our fingertips. If we were in a timeline where we had all this surveillance and we still had that imbalance of power and only certain people had access to these amazing tools, and we didn't have blockchain technology and distributed systems and. And all this other amazing tooling, we'd be in real traffic trouble. But the tables of power have actually turned, and I think governments are starting to maybe get a hint of that, which is why we're seeing them on the offensive. But they can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. This tech exists now. So think about the kind of, like, empowering technology we're talking about. 3D printers have changed the game. You know, we, in the future, might be able to have the right to try for everyone in the country, regardless of whether they have a terminal illness or at all. They may be able to just print pharmaceuticals, you know, that could help save lives. But we have to instead wait 10 years for the FDA and, you know, billions of dollars to get these things to the market so we could start to empower people to take their health into their own hands. You know, we've got things like Bitcoin, which was the separation of money and state. Suddenly you actually have an alternative financial system. So if you want to support a political party and your government says no, we have options. I mean, we have all this encryption technology, we have mesh networks, we have these distributed systems, we have blockchain technology where, you know, we. We are able to basically bypass the choke cults that have been created on the Internet. And if we look at the latest wave of ID mandates rolling out across the globe, you know, in Australia, in the UK and the eu, America, in certain states where they're mandating ID verification, government id, in order to use basic Internet functionality. You know, this stuff is really scary. And so what are we seeing? Well, people leaning into a lot of decentralized tech. Let's get rid of the choke points, like those central companies that are performing those ID checks and let's create a decentralized social media platform. Let's create a mesh network where you don't even need to go through the Internet. So that if India wants to shut off Internet connectivity again for the third time this week because they're scared of political unrest, they just can't do it because people are connecting in other ways. I think right now what we're seeing in this decentralized tech movement is incredibly empowering. Now the only caveat here is that in order to use these tools, like yes, you can have an uncensorable protocol, an uncensorable tech, but if the government knows that you're accessing it and they don't want you to use it, they can target you. So suddenly you like, even if the system itself can't be shut down, individuals can still be targeted. So that's where privacy comes in. We need to learn how to use the Internet privately so that we can continue to access these freedom enhancing tooling no matter what regime might come to power tomorrow. It's about safeguarding our ability to preserve freedom into the future and the freedom of our children. And so it's so important that people have this twofold approach as we move towards a better future. When we decide what future we want to write, it has to include a web3 kind of technology where we make use of this cutting edge tech that is freedom enabling and distributed and can't be shut down. And we have to learn about privacy on the Internet so that we can continue to use these no matter what.

A (42:16)

Okay, we have our assignments, homework, so, so people are intrigued, where do they find you and this work so that they can actually fill in some of the blanks.

C (42:25)

So Ludlow Institute is our nonprofit. We are focused on advancing freedom through technology and we do both media and research. So we have a grant giving program where we unearth, you know, hidden surveillance in everyday technology. And then we have a really large platform where we give out free tutorials. So they're video content, there are small sketches, there are articles that we write. All of it is basically to try, try to bring down the barriers to entry to a lot of this stuff, make it as easy as possible and spread as much awareness as possible. So if you go to ludlowinstitute.org, you'll see links to our videos. We're on all of the major platforms, so you could watch us on YouTube, you could choose to watch us on an alternative platform like Odyssey, and you can get access to these resources. And we're very online. We're not people who believe that privacy is about hiding. Privacy is about choice. It's about about regaining our ability to decide for ourselves what information we want to reveal to the world. So we have decided to reveal our signal username. If you have questions, feel free to reach out. You know, you can reach us on all these platforms. We're regularly checking the comments. We just want to help people get access to this stuff because if we continue down the path that we're currently going on and don't course correct, it's pretty scary. So we want to be there to answer as many questions as possible as people start to become brave and step out and try to these things. You know, we are that guiding hand that will hold you, you know, as you try out this stuff and, and help you along the way.

A (43:51)

And you're out there pretty big yourself, right?

C (43:54)

Yeah, no, I'm pretty not hard to find like you. I'm a little outspoken as well. You'll find me ranting on most platforms.

A (44:01)

You're probably on a list.

C (44:02)

I'm probably on a list. There's that lovely Valentine's Day quote. Right. You know, if our names are on a list, I hope they're touching. So to all of the freedom focused people out there, there, you know, be brave and let's be in this together, right?

A (44:17)

Yep. Okay. Thank you for doing this.

C (44:19)

Thank you.

B (44:21)

Thanks for watching. If you liked the conversation, make sure to like the video, subscribe and also ring the bell for notifications. And if you want to know more about free the people, go to freethepeople.org.

C (44:39)

SAM.