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- [00:18]
A
Hello and welcome. This is Gabriel Custodiet of Watchman Privacy privacy practitioner, consultant, author, and frontline fighter in the push for privacy. I know why you're here. Like the rest of us here in the resistance, you're trying to escape the technocratic apparatuses that you see enveloping you and crushing your freedoms. That's why I created all of this, all without sponsors. I hope you enjoy this show. But then when you're ready to take the next steps to secure your privacy and your future, Visit my website, escapethechnocracy.com to start the real journey. Your support alone does determines the future of the show. See you there. I'm very pleased today to be joined by Naomi Brockwell. Now, a lot of you will be familiar, familiar with Naomi, but I'll read her bio here. She's the president and founder of the Ludlow Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing freedom through technology. Their media arm, nbtv, creates educational content to help people reclaim their privacy and autonomy online. They have over 1 million subscribers across platforms and over 65 million views of their videos. So I think, Naomi, a lot of people will be familiar. You're the one who goes out there who braves proselytizing to, to some of the normies out there. You're very well spoken, very articulate when it comes to breaking down privacy and, and these sorts of things. So welcome to the show. How are you doing?
- [01:36]
B
Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here.
- [01:39]
A
Absolutely. Now, I think my audience will definitely fall into the category of people who get it about privacy, but I'm sure we'll have a good conversation here. The first thing I just want to ask you, Naomi, is you're clearly a multi talented person. When did you decide, why did you decide on privacy content creation as one of the main career paths that you wanted to take?
- [01:59]
B
Yeah, I don't think I ever decided on it as a career path. I'm still not sure I decided on it as a career path. It just kind of happened. It's just a mission that I. It just took my focus and I kind of see privacy as this existential threat right now. I should say surveillance is an existential threat. I feel like we have a window of opportunity where we can make a difference and we can push back and we can proliferate privacy tools. And when that window closes, I think we may hit a tipping point where society is so heavily surveilled that it will no longer be possible to freely proliferate such tools. People like you And I, and your audience will already have access to these tools and that's great. But I think that window of opportunity of getting them out to more people will close when the surveillance state gets too, too powerful. And you already see that in countries like, like China. You just don't see opposition parties, you don't see independent media, you don't see protesters, you don't really have that underground network of people trying to spread freedom tools. And the population has largely given up from what I can see in terms of fighting back. I, I have some, some friends over there who call it lying flat, where instead of like, they just realize that there's very little that they can do when the surveillance state is so powerful and every piece of communication is monitored and dissidents are targeted before they can even make an impact. And so they decide to just kind of extricate themselves from the situation and not participate and not contribute to government power. And I worry about that for the rest of the world because I see us all going there and how I got to this point was a God, I have no idea. I mean, I started out in economics. I was very interested in the idea of separation of money and state. I guess when cryptocurrency came along that was a moment for me where I realized this could be a tool for freedom because it's that Hayekian idea of separation of money and state and competing currencies. So that interested me. But after focusing on decentralized tech for a long time, I realized that it doesn't matter if you have a protocol that's uncensorable. If a government doesn't want you using it and you don't know how to use the Internet privately, they will just target you. So the, you know that, that point of vulnerability shifts from the protocol where sure we've, we've created these anti fragile networks in terms of actual protocol layer, but governments can still target individuals. They can make examples of individuals, they can send them to Prism for using tools. I realize if this decentralized tech is going to have any meaningful impact on freedom in the future, people need to know how to use the Internet privately. We need to be able to share this tooling. It needs to be available to. So that's when I kind of pivoted many years ago now, just from my own personal journey trying to understand, okay, well if I want to use these tools, how do I even navigate this world? You know, my background is in classical music, it's not in computer science. But I guess one of the overlaps between Classical music and computers is. You tend to be very obsessed. You're a type of person that just gets very obsessed with things. And so I just. Once I started realizing this was something that I needed in order to reclaim future freedom, it became quite an obsession of mine. And I just began documenting things that I discovered. A lot of the things I discovered were kind of shocking to me. I'd be like, well, if this were actually going on, surely more people would be talking about it. And I soon realized that no one was paying attention. No one's talking about the surveillance state. No one understands how the tech in their life works. No one knows how to protect themselves. And there's so much noise out there that people really can't figure out, you know, a clean path to protecting themselves. So I just started documenting what I was doing in my life, and I guess it was helpful to a lot of people. So I'm just going to keep doing that as long as there are, you know, surveillance obstacles out there. Just going to keep trying to figure out how to navigate them and let people know what I've learned and point them in the direction of other awesome people who are helping others navigate, like the content that you're putting out on your channel and a lot of other privacy people out there. I think we just need to amplify this message right now because, as I said, I think that window of opportunity is closing.
- [06:15]
A
Very great answer. Didn't expect anything less because you are probably the most articulate person talking about privacy to the masses, Naomi. And I want to ask you specifically about that topic. You spent a lot of time trying to boil your content, your message, give a lot of public talks. You Obviously have your YouTube channel and the videos on Odyssey and various other places. What do you think you've learned about the most successful approach to onboarding the why should I care about privacy people? What do you think is the most successful approach or approaches that you've learned over your time?
- [06:53]
B
I would say that when I see people who are pushing back against the message, often it's because they feel disempowered. And often it's because they trying to justify, like, oh, well, sure, that's going on, but what can I do about it? And they're trying to justify their helplessness and make themselves feel better about not doing anything. When you give people reasonable alternatives, they generally take them. So when I talk to people and just let them know about messengers, and then they're like, well, everyone's spying and there's nothing you could do. And I'm like, well, actually, you could download these tools. Let's do it right now. And then once they realize it's easy, they actually kind of switch. They tend to become evangelists. They tend to be happy that they're part of this cool club that. Oh, yeah, well, I'm a, you know, I'm a privacy protector too. I'm part of a mission that's larger than myself. I, I think it's learned helplessness that, that we're seeing a lot of the time, because one, I think it's a giant psyop, honestly. I think that people are made to feel way more helpless than they are. The overarching narrative is there's nothing you can do and privacy is dead. And, and also there's a shameful aspect of it. You know, what have you got to hide? And so you have people in this very, you know, conformist society that we've, we've entered being shamed for stepping outside the norm and actually seeing privacy as important. I think these are all things to push back on. People are far more empowered than they realize. They're far more empowered than people would have them believe. And obviously it's in a lot of companies and government's best interest to make people feel disempowered because then they give up and then it becomes a lot easier to surveil the population if they're not using the readily available tools at their disposal. So I think that just giving people actionable alternatives is important. Like right now I'm working on a piece about what companies can do because, you know, you see a lot of companies, they're worried about security breaches, as they should be. And why are they worried about that? Because they're worried about people from the outside getting in. And so they're protecting that internal data. Well, what about all the data inside that's getting out from employees? Because a lot of that data exfiltration comes from employees just sending out troves of sensitive information to third parties through telemetry, through ChatGPT, through Gmail, through all of these tools where all this sensitive information is also leaving the protected vault of the company. And we're not really focused on that. So what I'm looking at right now is, well, how can companies stop that? I mean, they're not going to stop using ChatGPT. You have these tools that supercharge society and enable, you know, 10x productivity. They're not going to be competitive unless they're actually, actually using a lot of this stuff. So they're just going to keep Using things like chat GPT unless you give them viable alternatives. So as a company, what can you do? Well, you can offer them, you know, hybrid approaches. There are some platforms out there that have no logging policies. So that would obviously be an improvement over sending things to companies that have been mandated to log everything regardless of whether you opt to delete it or not. And that's the current situation with all of the big players, you know, perplexing and anthropic and OpenAI, they've all been mandated to keep every single chat query that they're given and there's nothing users can do about it. They've been stripped of their right to decide whether or not things get deleted or not. So obviously that's an improvement if you choose an entity that has a no logging policy. But a lot of companies are large enough that they could probably host infrastructure themselves and they can get access to and give their company and their employees access to really large models and give them a viable alternative where all of that data stays in house. Like if you're dealing with donor information or sensitive financials or you know, protected IP or any of that stuff, I think that companies need to be really concerned that they're just, you know, their employees are just sending that data out in troves and what happens, well, that could be subpoenaed and end up in public record. That could end up in a data breach and hackers could get access to it. The company itself that's collecting the data could engage in some sort of corporate espionage. There are all kinds of reasons why companies should be more focused on this. So just comes down to viable alternatives. Employees are not going to make better choices if they don't have those alternatives in front of them. Think of that applies to everyone. You give them actual viable alternatives and they tend to switch. So if people are on Gmail and they just don't see a way out and you explain that, you know, the Proton ecosystem has a button that you can click and it literally ingests your email history, your entire contacts list it end to end, encrypts your entire calendar. I think that they start to realize this stuff is easier to achieve than they originally thought and they're not as disempowered as they've been led to believe. So that's probably where I've found the most effective messaging comes from, is just those actionable steps that people can take and just making them aware that they can start small. And it actually all makes a difference. They don't have to go right to the extreme right at the bat. They can start small and see how they go and as they get used to this new tooling, add new things, see what works, what doesn't, and they're absolutely empowered to make those decisions for themselves.
- [12:14]
A
Yeah, I think that's a very good approach. And as you were talking there, I'm thinking of there is certainly a convenience to some privacy tools. I've been setting up some tablets lately and of course I, you know, skip the Google account and we just go straight to Aurora and F Droid. And you know, when I show people that, they say, oh, you know, I can just skip it and this is a lot easier, so it can be convenient. I think, you know, my colleague and I were making more just plain HTML websites these days. Very simple loads very fast, you know, no, no problems whatsoever. So. And some of these privacy services, they don't have any account creation like Nano GPT. You just kind of top it up, no account and you're on your way. So I do think there is a convenience to privacy services that certainly we should be emphasizing.
- [12:58]
B
Yeah, I completely agree with that. That's a value proposition people don't lean on enough. Because for a long time privacy tooling has been terrible. You know, 10 years ago I wouldn't have been able to recommend a bunch of things that you could easily replace some of the mainstream options with. But these days you can. You know, I personally like Brave and they have this nice little landsc where when you open up a new browser window, it'll tell you, hey, you've saved X amount of time and X amount of bandwidth loading pages because we're not showing you any ads or sometimes I'll just tell people, hey, you don't need to pay for YouTube Premium. You can just use Brave and it'll block the ads. So understanding that actually there's a good reason to use privacy tools outside of the privacy benefits can actually be a powerful messaging as well.
- [13:44]
A
Great point. Yeah. Adblock on a browser certainly helps people in so many ways. Okay, let's just hit on some of the topics that you've covered in some of your very good videos. I have to say, the videos that you make through your 15 to 20 minute videos, very high production value, you cover a lot of ground in them. Certainly easy recommendation for people to be sharing with their friends and family and whatnot.
- [14:07]
B
I appreciate that.
- [14:09]
A
Yeah. Flock cameras. So I've. These have been cropping up just very rapidly, Naomi. Just they're, they're, they're everywhere and I kind of want to Take a different approach to this topic, because it's the case that people can put cameras. And let's just kind of connect this to the ring doorbells as well, because people can put cameras, and they're just. They're just collecting all the people who are driving by their area that is not even their property, necessarily. So I want to, you know, instead of a super easy question here, just wanted to get your thoughts. I suspect you have libertarian tendencies and the. But I wonder if. Right. The problem with ring doorbells, as I'm saying in flock cameras, is that I don't know that the private property arguments really helps us when it comes to these things, because they are collecting, basically, the community. I can phrase that better. But you. I think you kind of get what I'm saying. What are your thoughts on libertarianism? Can it help us in the case of, let's say, flock cameras and ring doorbells?
- [15:07]
B
It's a really nuanced and tough area because you're absolutely right that taking a photo of someone's license plate is something that anyone can do. These license plates are in public, and there is no reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to driving around with your license plate in public. Someone can take a picture. So there are two areas where I think this gets a little. There are three areas where this gets a little muddy. So first of all, there's the Mosaic theory of privacy. Um, so it's like, what checks and balances do we have on governments to aggregate data? Because, as you said, a lot of this stuff is public. So is it okay for the government to take a photo of a license plate or to collect a photo of a license plate and look at it? It's fine, and it gives you a single snapshot into someone's life. But courts have ruled on this idea of Mosaic theory, and it's starting to get more popular in the courts about what happens when you aggregate 10,000 snapshots of a person's life. And one tile doesn't necessarily reveal much about a person. But Once you have 10,000 tiles, you start to get a complete picture of their life. At what point does it become a search? And under the search, under the Fourth Amendment, searches are not meant to be done without a warrant. So there is a very gray area between that point of a single snapshot and 10,000 snapshots that we're trying to navigate as a society, and we haven't gotten there. Courts have not ruled on, you know, the constitutionality of flock cameras yet. We're starting to get piecemeal Reports and different, different lawsuits coming out of, like ij, for example, in Norfolk, where they're suing the government because of everything that I just mentioned. But yeah, so that's one way of looking at it. This, this, this mosaic theory of privacy. And at what point it becomes a search. There's the other side of contracting out things to become a search. If we have guardrails on government power that says in order to protect individuals against overreach and tyranny, we are meant to have checks and balances. And those checks and balances mean that if you want to do a search of someone, you need a warrant. And then the government says, well, we're not going to do the search, but we are going to contract out a third party and they're going to do the sear. There really needs to be a reevaluation of whether or not that's the government actually doing the search, because we're meant to have protections that stop egregious overreach. Now, Flock can't scale a mass surveillance network without government permission because their cameras are on public roadways, their cameras are on public intersections, they're on public infrastructure. So they literally need government approval in order to set up their entire network. And government is granting that approval in exchange for data. I really think this needs to explore, be explored in terms of fourth Amendment violations, because from where I stand, they're just using, you know, semantic backflips in order to get around this responsibility. They have to actually have proof and have warrants signed off of by a judge. And instead they are using the third party doctrine as this giant loophole to get huge visibility into people's lives. The Constitution is meant to protect us from, from government overreach and getting huge visibility into our lives. And I also am not convinced that the government should have the authority to simply grant that privilege to companies, because I don't want companies without my permission just getting meaning like deep access to my life either. You know, the CEO of Flock has been on the record calling maps publicly accessible maps, showing people where Flock cameras are. He's called them terrorist organizations. For me, it looks like these are just tools to inform the public, and they're giving people a map of publicly accessible vlog cameras. So by you, I mean he's literally, he's trying to use that same argument of this is publicly accessible, therefore we're justified. And yet he's turning it around saying, but the maps that show where these cameras are that are publicly accessible, no, no, they're terroristic organizations. So there's just. That's really dangerous rhetoric from my standpoint. When you start talking about communities of people referring to them as terrorists simply because they're pushing back against egregious overreach into their lives, that's hugely dangerous. And I think people should be kind of outraged at the way that this is being framed. And then there's another side of this flock camera. So we've got like the Mosaic theory, we've got these outsourcing of warrant requirements. But I also think that, I mean, the idea of ring doorbells, right, we have the right to put things on our own property. And I think that's completely fine. And the problem comes with all of these partnerships with law enforcement. You know, ring itself, they were able to scale because they literally gave law enforcement access to footage, no warrants required, once again, and gave them free equipment and encouraged police departments to encourage communities to put these up, knowing that the police could basically be their marketing wing, get these devices into more homes. And again, the end result is that government's just law enforcement just gets access to this stuff without a warrant. I think that this really insidious relationship between the public and private sector that we're seeing is very dangerous because both sides are conveniently skirting all of the checks and balances we're meant to have protecting individuals. And we talk about this in terms of safety, like this is protecting us. Why wouldn't you want to catch bad guys? But we're also just seeing ample reports about this being abused. And we also are presuming that the person in charge of this network is only ever going to use it to catch terrible criminals. Like, let's catch the child molesters and the terrorists. And that's all it's ever going to be used for. You just can't guarantee that in five years we're not going to have an administration that isn't turning this back on the people and saying certain demographics are going to be targeted and we're going to use this to find those people. Or, you know, suddenly dissent is dangerous. We're worried about civil unrest. And so we are going to use this to track people who attend protests and who, you know, support opposition parties or do anything that is not in the mainstream view because we just want to protect society. Like, these things get warped all the time. There's feature creep. And I don't think people are looking long term about the terrifying implications of this, this surveillance infrastructure that we are now setting up and just hoping that a benevolent person will always be in charge. It's just a terrible security posture if you're. If the safety of everyone in the country relies on some benevolent person being in control, when you have a giant, powerful switch, it becomes a target for people who don't necessarily have your best interests at heart. And we've just learned that lesson throughout history. To ignore it right now is a terrible mistake, just because we're looking at immediate gains.
- [22:17]
A
So you can correct me if I'm wrong, Naomi, but you do talk a decent bit about the Mac ecosystem, and I suspect that's partly because you have some sympathy in your own life for Mac products. But you can correct me if I'm wrong.
- [22:31]
B
So I was using iOS for a long time. When I switched to graphene, I even carried around two devices. For a long time. I carried around an iPhone and my graphene devices. I was getting used to it as I just continued and realized graphene was just orders of magnitude better. I eventually just got rid of my iPhone altogether. I think that it's really distasteful for a company to talk so much about privacy, but then do things like just bypass your VPN whenever it wants to for core functionality and not tell the users. And it's that transparency I have an issue with. It's not data collection. If a company wants to collect my data, you know, collect it, but tell me about it so I can make an informed decision. And I think that Apple has a lot of marketing that makes it seem like they have a lot more privacy than users have, a lot more privacy than they do. And I, on the one hand, think that even Apple participating in the privacy conversation actually helps elevate the status of privacy as a virtue in society. So I do like the contribution that they've made there. I do like the R and D that they're putting into things like homomorphic encryption, because I think that's going to be a hugely important tool for privacy, meaningful privacy in the future. And the more companies that are doing this research, the better. And so there are a lot of good things that they do. My personal standpoint is I don't use iOS anymore. And for the difference between Linux and Mac, obviously I don't use Windows. It's just because I'm a film editor. So given that there are already so many, oh, gosh, obstacles that work their way into your workflow when you're dealing with video and dealing with video editing, I just have to use a lot of spyware. So, you know, we're on Adobe Suite, we're on Mac systems, because that generally tends to be the best for using this software. I am careful to silo devices for different purposes though. So I don't just use Mac and I'm careful with what software I have on machines depending on which other tools that I'm using. So it's definitely a trade off in privacy for my workflow. I mean I use little snitch so I'm locking down outgoing connections and monitoring that. And it's when I first added Little Snitch a few years ago, just could do nothing, right. Oh my God. Like you open one Adobe system and you get like 30 pop ups that are like we want to connect to all of these advertisers. It's like holy shit. Like sorry, I don't know if I could swear but it's just egregious how many outbound connections from all the software were happening and from Apple itself. You know, I have app bound connections that I'm blocking from core software and from icloud features that I don't use. So I, I try to turn off a lot of of that stuff, as much of it as I can. Like I don't have an Apple ID on my computer, I don't use icloud. I block all of these tools that again people I think have false ideas of privacy. Like there is no end to end encryption even with ADP turned on when you use email. There is no AD10 encryption with your contacts list. There is no end to end encryption with your calendar. I just think that people don't realize this and they hear the word privacy, they think everything's protected. So I would say that I would want to see Apple doing a better job of that transparency. And now I mean you're even looking at. There was a great talk at DEFCON this year from a researcher who looked into Siri and Apple Intelligence. Now Apple Intelligence is this interesting like kind of privacy tool. They're using AI, but they're doing it in a private way. A lot of it's local and then some of it is using what they're calling private compute. So it's going to servers where Apple says it doesn't get access to things. So like that's, that's a great improvement over things like ChatGPT. But then you integrate that with existing Apple infrastructure like Siri and suddenly you realize that like it doesn't matter if you're using Apple Intelligence if you're integrating it with Siri. Siri is a completely non private infrastructure. And so Siri is like undermining the privacy of so many things. On your device, if you're using Siri dictation, suddenly your imessages, which are meant to be enter and encrypted are being sent off in the clear. And there's just so much of this stuff that people don't realize are giant holes. I think that for most people, like, I would just like to see people being better informed about the actual privacy protections that they're getting. I don't like hyperbole, I don't like giant sweeping statements about, you know, privacy that's iPhone. It's just not. And I think that I would like to see just more transparency. I mean, you try and look at these privacy policies and it's, it's so difficult to even see just reading these policies. You end up in this rabbit warren of clicking through links and more hyperlinks and finding more hyperlinks to find other obscure policies because the back end of this stuff is so complicated. They need like, you know, it's 30 different modules that are band aided together and you have to try to, from that gauge what kind of privacy you're actually getting. It's almost impossible. I think as a society we should be really upholding privacy as a virtue and a noble aim and we should be pushing for more transparency in the privacy that we're actually getting with these systems.
- [27:59]
A
I set up an iPhone just the other day for an article in our newsletter. And I try to keep up with, you know, iPhones, obviously help people out so that I know what's going on, help clients and also so that I can, you know, give some advice on it. And I, I'm sitting there and I'm, you know, I'm turning off Siri and there's going to be no AI on this phone and there's no face verification, no, no, you know, Apple messages. I'm not gonna use an Apple Watch, I'm not gonna interconnect it with my MacBook, with my, with a MacBook. And I realized at some point, like, what, why, what am I getting from this? Like, why did I pay the Apple tax? Because it's just a, it's just a dumb device now that I've shut off everything.
- [28:37]
B
Yeah, I had the same experience. I was chatting to a client and they're talking about Apple ID and they're like, well, you know, I have Apple ID on my computer because it just syncs seamlessly with my iPhone. And what do you think about that? Because I was explaining that I don't think anyone should ever connect an Apple ID to a computer. There's no need. You can sideload any software that you want. There's no need to buy anything through the Apple Store. And, and so when he said that he just gets that seamless integration again, I asked like, what exactly is being integrated? Your entire history of digital exhaust, you know, associated with every app you've ever downloaded. Why on earth do you need a record of something you downloaded 10 years ago that you're not using anymore? Like cut that off and also that seamless integration. Okay, so contacts, great. So Apple's getting a complete list of all of your contacts that's actually not something you should be using. And then they're saying, well, you know, email. It's like, right, again, I wouldn't encourage you to use the Apple ecosystem when it comes to email. There are more private options out there. So all of the benefits that they were getting from this linking of Apple ID between devices were all so that they could use tools that I think really undermine their privacy and people shouldn't be using in the first place.
- [29:53]
A
Yeah. And I was going to ask you, is there Because I assume that you're pretty pared down in the things that you use. What's a technology out there that you see and you say, wow, that would be really convenient and cool if I was using that, but I'm not going to use it.
- [30:08]
B
I mean, there's always a spectrum. It's not like you can ever have 100% privacy with anything. So I like to just lay out my options and say, well, what exactly are the features that this technology providing? And like, at the end of the day, I think it's kind of a strawman argument because I'm doing a piece right now on wearables and I have a researcher looking into different wearables and just data collection and I'm testing out a bunch of them and it's cool, right? So I'm testing out some incredibly egregious privacy invasive fitness devices that give me incredible insight into my health and I love that and I love people having access to more data so that they can make empowered choices. The problem is, is I just don't understand why an end to end encrypted device doesn't exist. Is it because there's just no market for it? Because I would pay the privacy tax and I would pay more money to have a device that wasn't shipping off all my personal data to a company. What we're seeing right now is incredible insight into health. They're giving you like sleep monitoring and recovery scores and you know, have you done enough exercise today? No. Well, we've noted this amount of strain. You should increase it a little more, go for a light jog, whatever. Like it's really helpful stuff that I think actually makes people's lives better. I just don't understand why they need access to that data. Like why can the compute not be done on an app in my phone and the company actually doesn't get access to it? Why? There's no reason why we couldn't have a company doing that. Why can't I exfiltrate the data from this device and use a third party app on my phone that is privacy preserving and does it all locally? You know, these companies don't allow that exploitation of data because obviously they want to keep everything in house. I just feel like surely there's a market opportunity here that companies are missing. Or maybe I'm just, you know, delusional and I think that privacy is more valuable to people than it is. But I wish that we had private alternatives. What I'm seeing right now is when we're comparing the super private wearables to the mainstream wearables, the super private ones have no functionality. They're just not giving any insights. They're giving like step counts and that's kind of it. And they're super janky to set up and they're, you know, going to break and they're not reliable and, and I just, oh, it feels like we're at super early stages when it comes to that sort of stuff. If I could, I would just adore one of these apps, like, let's get, get one of these, these providers like Oura Ring, you know, they have a pretty decent privacy policy where they're saying we're going to keep this stuff in house. But the problem is even with a privacy policy, it's just, we're just trusting in good faith because the government has decided that if we ever give data to a third party, we have no reasonable expectation of privacy, regardless of whatever privacy policy they fed us. Which means that that data could be subpoenaable at any time. It could end up in public record. All kinds of things could happen. On top of that, there's just the breach risk, you know, my data getting out there in some centralized database. And so I just wish we had private alternatives. Maybe this will happen, maybe we, some company will come along and provide this. I think it's solely needed because from where I see it, people are caring more and more about privacy and it's going to be something on their radar.
- [33:33]
A
Right you started off, as you were saying, getting into cryptocurrencies, especially bitcoin. I believe you also have a book on bitcoin. How are you feeling about bitcoin these days though?
- [33:45]
B
Bitcoin? Well again, it's a spectrum. So a lot of the work that we do focuses on tech that gives people back freedom. And so there are a lot of ways that people can be given back freedom. Decentralized technology eliminates choke points that governments can target and corporations can target. And so it makes it more antifragile. So I love bitcoin for just that decentralized nature of the technology and also that it's kind of grown in public perception as being this hedge. And so more people are getting involved just to one, have sovereignty over funds. So a lot of people just want money that they can control in their own bank instead of having to rely on a third party. And two, just knowing that this network is resilient enough that it's very hard to shut it down at this stage. So I think all of those are really strong value propositions that still hold my biggest, I think one of the biggest weaknesses of bitcoin is the lack of privacy in it. And so I think that solving that issue is really important. You're seeing, you know, some attempts to add privacy to it. It's very hard to add privacy to a non private thing. But I again, I applaud any effort in that direction. If a lot of people are going to be using Bitcoin regardless, I definitely want them to have more privacy rather than less. I think that cryptocurrency in general is a super important tool because of that separation of money and state. And just because it empowers individuals, it allows them to control their own finances. And a lot of people don't understand that value proposition if they're in a country where they've never had their bank account shut down or where protesters are not targeted or opposition parties disbanded. But unfortunately, all over the world, governments use the financial system and the controlled financial system as a weapon. If you get cut off from your money and from the international economy and from banking rails, your business is just destroyed. You don't need to ban an industry. You can literally just cut them off from financial resources and they will just suffocate. So I think that it's still a hugely important tool. It's not the my like tool, my tool of choice when it comes to everyday usage because I think that digital trail makes people a lot more vulnerable than they realize. And privacy is only really Just starting to come into the mindset of a lot of these users. They, they came into Bitcoin because of that value proposition of decentralized and your financial sovereignty. But they're not quite aware of the privacy implications and how a lack of privacy can make them super vulnerable. So, yeah, I'm excited for a lot of the privacy focused projects out there, even especially in the crypto scene, because I think financial privacy is really important.
- [36:42]
A
I've noticed Michael Bazell was like this. He was very. You didn't hear him talking about cryptocurrency very often. And I kind of understand that because when you start talking about cryptocurrency, there's all these factions, you know, you're talking about a money technology that has all these consequences. People, you know, they associate with investing and speculation. And I find that a lot of cybersecurity people just avoid it because, you know, it has that taint, it has that kind of association as we're talking about right now. But I, I don't hear you talk about it too much. Is that kind of a problem with, with cryptocurrencies is that it still has this, like, there's all these scams happening, like huge amounts of scams in cryptocurrency. And there's the website, I think it's called Web3 is going great. The ironic website Web3 is going great. Is that part of it that makes it difficult to talk about cryptocurrency?
- [37:32]
B
I think it's a huge part of it. I think that when people get involved in crypto and I get a lot of people asking me questions about how they can get started, and it is a heavy lift. And so I try to make it very clear to people that when you start taking responsibility for your own finances, that involves a lot of steps and you're being really careful. The crypto space is filled with scams and crypto is terrible money. It is incredibly volatile. It is hard to protect. You are dodging landmines of scammers everywhere you go. You are dodging landmines of just shitty projects everywhere you go. It's hard to separate signal from noise. It's just a really hard place to navigate. And despite all of the criticisms of crypto and why it's terrible money, it is the only possible way to send a digital transaction with meaningful privacy today. So it is both terrible and incredibly important and necessary if you want privacy in your life and autonomy. So I try to remind people of that because their skepticism and their criticism of crypto is not Wrong. I just think that the value proposition of a decentralized network, separation of money and state and the possibility of privacy far outweighs all of these criticisms that they have. You have a market based currency. Yes. Obviously it's going to be more volatile than something that governments have mandated to have a certain price and they fix that price. So yeah, it's, it's kind of a wild west when you get to individual responsibility. And I think that's okay. It's just a, an overton window shift as people start to recognize they need to take more control and more responsibility over their finances and everything. And it's not easy. So it's definitely not something that I try to throw people in the deep end with. If they're interested in this and they want to put in the effort, I think it is worth their while. And I think it's going to become increasingly more important into the future as the financial system just becomes more of a surveillance system with CBDCs, etc. I think it's going to become ever more important for people to extricate this themselves from the system and learn how to use tools in parallel economic systems that aren't part of the surveillance infrastructure. When you're talking about this stuff, I kind of. It's kind of similar to VPNs. VPNs are a necessary evil. Most of the VPN world are just scams.
- [39:59]
A
Naomi, don't do it. Don't insult my VPN sponsor. I won't tell you which.
- [40:04]
B
Yeah, no, I also want to talk about my sponsor. You get 99% off and it's going to be great. Yeah, no one time fee and the last 25 years. So the VPN world is the scammy, scammy place when most of the companies are shell companies that are just extracting your data. And at the same time, a VPN is a necessary privacy tool. You do not want to be giving every website you visit your IP address. It's really bad for your privacy. So what are your options? Well, you can host your own VPN which still identifies you and allows people to build a profile. It does hide your home address, I guess, but there's still a trade off of having that single unique identifier that you know, websites can correlate activity across or you can trust a third party and really hope that they're not a honeypot and don't have back doors, which is increasingly hard. Every VPN provider I've spoken to says that, yeah, they get knocked on the door by law enforcement. All the time. There's nothing you can do about it. So huge implications of trust when it comes to VPNs, and yet I still think that they are a necessary evil. When I say evil, I just mean because the amount of trust you have to place in a third party is so extreme. You got to really make sure that you know who you're placing your trust in. You got to know who that company is and feel pretty confident that they're a good company. So it's kind of like the crypto scene. There's just a lot of scams, it's hard to navigate. But I feel like it's a necessary part of individual autonomy today because we, we need individuals to have control over their finances. You can't allow some authoritarian regime or even some corporation, some bank who decides that they don't like you to come in and be able to seize your assets or freeze them for something that is just politically uncomfortable or, you know, it's an industry that they don't like. It's not illegal, but they're still going to freeze your assets and make it hard for you to conduct your business. We need more resilient tooling than that if we want meaningful privacy. And obviously in the West, a lot of people don't quite understand this. They're not really seeing different industries get targeted. But in a lot of countries, it's very difficult for certain people to own, to have a bank account. It's, you know, you look at Afghanistan, it's difficult for women to even open a bank account, to have a bank account for them to earn any sort of money. Crypto becomes a lifeline for people like that. And, and so it's necessary that we keep building out this infrastructure because money is just an essential in people's lives. And if we can have money that is grounded in freedom and privacy, that's just an incredibly powerful tool for the globe.
- [42:41]
A
One final topic for you, Naomi, and then we'll wind down here. You had a video recently talking about why parents should be a little bit more selective about the photos that they post of their kids. I think it's a very good point. Obviously, you get into some privacy circles and people just get very hardcore and we forget about all these use cases. And family, you know, people talking about families and such becomes a very niche topic. What was your point in that video? And what do parents need to understand about not just raising their kids to appreciate privacy, but exposing their kids while they're kids?
- [43:21]
B
Yeah, I mean, there was a statistic that, that we found that children are 50% more likely to be victims of identity theft because their parents have just filled the Internet with so much personal information about them. It becomes so easy for criminals to just fake their identity. So if you are trying to. If you're posting pictures to get, like, kudos points from your friends and, you know, demonstrate what a cool person you are, building family and all of this, you need to take a step back and.
- [43:55]
A
Yeah, but they're doing a synchronized dance with their baby. Naomi, come on.
- [43:58]
B
I know it's important. And. And you need to fuel TikTok. Otherwise, how will we get our entertainment? So parents need to understand how vulnerable they are making their children in doing that. And I, I don't blame parents because the Internet is this beautiful and insidious tool at the same time where so much of what we do has been hijacked by entities that have perverse incentives. They're incentivized to keep us on these platforms as long as possible. They're incentivized to make us outraged in order to spark more engagement on these platforms. They have entire R and D departments focused on how to make these tools more addictive in order to maximize profit. And so we're rewiring our brains when we use these tools. And I don't blame people that have been caught up in all of this and don't quite realize their brains have been rewired. So, like, when you put that photo up and. And you're just waiting for that, like, you know, and that is, you know, dopamine that is being created just from the expectation, not even from the reward. And so then you'll keep refreshing until you get that, like. And if you do get that, like, you'll feel validated and you'll feel good for two seconds until you need the next hit. And then you'll just keep refreshing again to see what likes. And so people are using parts of their. Their private life in order to feel validated. They're trying. They're looking for that external validation. And the Internet has trained us to behave this way. I just don't begrudge people who've fallen into that trap. I just think we need more awareness that this is going on so that people can start to make better choices and understand that they are not fully autonomous when they are using these systems. They're kind of at the behest of other people's propaganda campaigns. They're at the behest of, you know, companies, you know, addictive mechanisms trying to pull them in and, and put them into A vortex. Like, I had such a huge life quality improvement when I removed all social media from my phone because I found that, you know, I'd get home, I'd have a really busy day, I'd be like mentally fried and I'd think, okay, I'll sit on the couch for 10 minutes and just scroll and just, you know, catch up. Who's online? What can I look at? What are some cat videos that look great today? And one, you know, 10 minutes would turn into an hour and I realized that I'd been hijacked. I literally could not pull myself away because it was so addicting. You know, the autoplay features, the trending topics that of course I want to look at what Taylor Swift is up to now. Maybe there'll be some cool photos there. And once you start to understand all these tricks that companies employ to maximize engagement and keep you on these platforms, and then you realize you, you have to start thinking, how am I spending my life? How am I when I, when I get to the age of 90 and I look back, do I want to have spent my time on meaningful projects or passively consuming someone else's algorithm according to their agenda? And I think that people deserve respect and we need to help them extricate themselves from this mindless vortex. When it comes to parents, again, they're looking for validation. You tend to have sleepless nights when you have children. They're exhausted. They're just looking for some joy in their life. And they've learned that uploading a social media and that social connection that they seem to get and that dopamine hit, it all feels good. But we need to provide alternatives. We need to provide more real world, like meet space, opportunities for engagement. And we need to remind them that they are making their children more vulnerable by putting all this information out there. And yeah, it may be a quick dopamine hit for them as an individual, but their children are bearing the cost of that. And also their children deserve the respect that when they turn 21 and they look back and there's just like a treasure trove of data where AI has just, just analyzed their faces and their moods and learned all about their, their predilections from all of your tweets that you've been posting about them and all these like naked photos, they had no choice and no say in that. I think parents really owe their children more respect when it comes to those choices because you can't remove this stuff from the Internet. This is not like making a scrapbook that hides in your cupboard. This is a public, you know, town square where you're broadcasting this. And I think parents really need a reality check when it comes to their involvement with these systems.
- [48:34]
A
Well said. And this has been Naomi Brockwell. Definitely go check out her videos. We're going to have all the links, Naomi, to your. Your various channels. Very good to consume and also to share with others. I think they're. They're fantastic to share with. Normies, especially, you're very good at getting people onboarded, I would say. So. So we'll certainly have all of those links. And if you have a platform and you want to invite Naomi, I'm sure she would be happy to talk to you about that. How else, Naomi, can people support your work?
- [49:07]
B
Yeah, I would say just spread the message. You don't even need to support our work. Just support the message. Just find a way to contribute to the privacy space. There are countless projects that need test users, that need feedback, that need people to contribute code, that need people to transcribe manuals, that need people to create documentation about how to use things, and they just need people to spread awareness. Or maybe you're someone who just wants to change culture. So, yeah, find opportunities to make privacy a talking point more often, and let's just renormalize it. I think that this movement, as I said, it's. It's an existential moment where we are at a. This, this juncture. We can choose a future where we're continuing to feed these surveillance systems, or we can write a better future and proliferate privacy tools and give us a hope and a chance in the future of reclaiming privacy. And if we do that, I think the future looks incredibly optimistic, filled with abundance and wonderful things. But it's a huge if right now, and I'm not sure we're going to make it if we continue down the path of just total surveillance. So if you can contribute to the privacy movement at all, continue to make content or whatever people want to do, I think it's a really good time to have an outsized impact right now with every small step you might want to take.
- [50:29]
A
Hey, thanks for listening. I could really use your help. Real quick, if you could share this episode with someone, engage with me, leave a review anywhere. This helps me to break the technocratic shadow banning that is happening with my brand. And of course, if you really want to escape the technocracy, go to escapethetechnocracy.com privacy tutorial series, books, newsletters, consulting, and of course, you can leave a donation. Thank you very much.
- [51:12]
B
Sam.