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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 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, escapethetechnocracy.com to start the real journey. Your support alone determines the future of the show. See you there. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm very pleased today to be joined by the Hated One. Now, because he has a curated presence online, I'm sure a few of you are instantly know who that is. He makes excellent short videos about privacy and related topics on YouTube Bitshoot. He also has a Patreon and he. You can get like a podcast feed if you're subscribed to the Patreon and such. And I'm sure some of you are very familiar and excited to hear that he is on the show. Others of you might not be familiar with him. And as I said, he makes these really high quality videos on YouTube under the name the Hated One. So I'm very pleased to have him here. And we're going to have a conversation about a number of maybe privacy influencer related topics and some other things that he covers on a regular basis. And so I want to welcome you, hated One. And just start with this question since you like the, you like these kind of interesting first questions. So who exactly hates you, huh?
- [01:54]
B
Well, that's a question that I cannot really fully answer. But I like that some people have the interpretation. Are you hearing me?
- [02:02]
A
Well, maybe the Hated One is not you then. Is that what you're suggesting?
- [02:07]
B
It has multiple meanings, right? So some of that is personal. Some of that is also because I was looking for other names when I was creating my channel and all of the cool names that I could come up with were already taken by some weird Minecraft channels. So I wanted to have something that is really unique and I was thinking about myself, like what really, you know, like if you knew me personally, like what would kind of like give away my personality. And I just found that it is very cringe. Maybe to some people it might have some religious meaning. To some people it has this meaning that, you know, I'm hated by the, by the elite in power, by the corporations that I'm criticizing So maybe that could be true. So various reasons, but I can't get to all of it, unfortunately.
- [03:00]
A
What was the goal of this brand that you created, the Hated One? Because you talk about some interesting stuff, as you say, you do a lot of investigative reporting on corporations, especially privacy related tech, and you also give some good advice on privacy as well. What was the goal when you started the Hated One?
- [03:17]
B
Well, I always wanted to make essays on these really complicated topics that are shaping the world and are changing the society. And I wanted to do it in a way that people could understand. And I always enjoyed the idea of teaching people, educating people, explaining them things that they normally do not follow. Because, you know, like, you cannot expect people to be uniformly informed about everything when they have to cover daily bills. And the second reason was that I was also very closely following the Julian Assange leaks and Edward Snowden leaks, of the NSA files and surveillance. And I was really moved and inspired by not just those leaks themselves, what they revealed about how the government is betraying our rights, but also about the personality of Edward Snowden himself especially, but also to a smaller extent, Julian Assange. Because I was really moved by the bravery and courage that these people had to stand up to power and really face everything that I had. Specifically, Edward Snowden could have had a very comfortable life, but he gave that all up, running away, hiding. Now he's in exile in Russia and is now actually a Russian citizen. But at the time, it was a very difficult situation and very difficult move to make. And I was very inspired by that. And I wanted to follow in those footsteps. And I realized that whatever I'm doing, I also need to get other people to be on the same page. So I wanted to show people that all of these things that may sound complicated to you, that you might not really all know because it may be too technical or you just don't want to learn new things. I want to show you that you can do this, that you can be very empowered, very sovereign in how you exercise your rights. And you're not alone. You have things that you can do to stand up to power, just like these people could. And that's essentially the primary message of what I'm trying to do with everything, every single step of my life, to be honest.
- [05:23]
A
Right, Interesting. Yeah. I think Assange is a good person to have in mind. When you said Assange, that makes a lot of sense. Kind of some of the things you can you talk about your worldview, potentially. I see some similarities there. You've been doing all this, presumably anonymously just curious, you know, how difficult has that been? Have there been any hurdles? Of course you're trying to raise funds for this endeavor as well. What has been the. The struggle of doing all the videos that you do? Obviously you come under, you know, the big tech doesn't exactly like you and such. What have been your struggles doing this, all this anonymously? You know, any blunders that you're willing to discuss that maybe people can learn from, or just your general experience doing this as a business?
- [06:07]
B
I don't know if I could reasonably consider myself to be fully anonymous because I think in that order, I would have to be completely unknown to every single entity out there. And there are entities that know me and. And for that reason, I would consider myself mostly pseudonymous. And for me, anonymity is not the end goal necessarily. It is just to protect myself at the moment for the time that I'm growing into this. And if I get to ever grow to a more influential or more important position, I am very okay with essentially doxxing myself to the point where people would be able to look up where I am or who I am. Maybe I'm thinking of if I can get to a more institutional position where I'm not just one person, but I can be, let's say, a nonprofit and get people to work for the nonprofit and have a more influential impact on the mainstream and on the discourse. That would be kind of like not necessarily the final goal or an ideal, but something that I realized that is needed. Maybe not by me, but I can get there. The hardest part of doing what I'm doing is balancing the ethics with actually sustaining this operation. And one of the hardest parts of activism and standing up for what you truly believe in is that at some point you're going to be at these crossroads moments and they're going to come multiple times throughout your journey. And you're going to have to decide whether you're going to stick to the most ethical decision or you're going to make compromises. And I understand both positions because sometimes compromises do have to be made. And this is the beautiful story of MLK and Malcolm X. Or if you are into fantasy and sci fi, you can get Magneto and Charles Xavier, like people that are fighting for a common goal, but have totally different means and totally different understanding of making compromises. And I'm usually on the side that I don't think I want to make any compromises. I don't want to compromise my mission. Where people could say, well, you're saying this but you're being paid, so you have incentives to say this. And that was really the. And still is the most difficult part of doing this, because I could have easily just said yes to so many things, and I could have gone and asked. And I've actually went and asked some companies to sponsor my content, but I never went through that because I was like, I like this company. I use their things. But I can't just justify myself getting their money and then telling people that my view is still unbiased and still critical. The biggest problem with this approach is that you might struggle to even sustain that operation. And because I have a relatively higher threshold of maybe this sort of pain tolerance, let's say, to the aspect where I'm really sacrificing, maybe probably too much for my own good to be really honest. And there might actually be a time where I will very soon have to hit a crossroad where I will shut down the operation. Like the Lavabit founder, he could compromise the service or shut it down. He decided to shut it down. I don't know if I'm going to be able to sustain this going forward. So for now, I've just kept moving forward, kept going through it. And, you know, Even though, like, YouTube revenue is dog shit, like, that's, that's. I'm sorry for swearing. That's not allowed on this podcast. All right, so never going to make any reasonable income out of that, no sponsors, means that it's going to be very difficult to get sustainability. And then it is really up to the people to decide whether whatever they are getting out of me, out of the value of my work, is for them to support, to help sustain or not. So I'm at the hands of the, of the market, of the, of the people's ability and willingness to. To keep this going.
- [10:10]
A
Yeah. One of the things that I, I appreciate about you, I mean, we have different political views about certain things, and, you know, I think that's pretty obvious to people who compare our stuff. But one thing I really appreciate about you is your level of integrity. And I think that's clearly on display in what you just described and how thoughtful you are. And you, you know, I want to ask you later on about if a profit motive is always incompatible with. With privacy. We can have that discussion a little bit later. But for now, I would definitely encourage people go check out his Patreon. If you've ever watched his stuff, consider supporting this guy, because this guy's really good and I want him to continue. Let's give people Then a little bit of a taste of some of the things that you cover, some of your recent videos. Let's just start there because you've been talking about the company Proton and I, you know, I really appreciate what you're saying about this. Basically we have a company that started off as an email provider and now has a ton of different privacy offerings, right? They have their password manager, their Bitcoin wallet, they bought standard notes, they have their AI, their vpn. What is the problem in your view? People will definitely should track down the video. What do you see as the problem with a company like Proton? And if you were at the reins of Proton, what do you think they should be doing?
- [11:26]
B
That's a very good question. And obviously I'm not a great businessman or entrepreneur, so I cannot actually make these choices with any level of authority or expertise. But I do have my critique where I think it's very, very valid. And before I get into that, I just want to briefly say to who, whoever is going to be listening to this, that if you have just moved to Proton and you have made this journey and it's difficult for you to be truly compartmentalized, feel free to just stay with Proton. Right? Every single Proton product is individually very good, very solid. The company is also quite good. But there are problems where I think we need to move forward. We cannot just stay here. And this is very similar to my criticism that I have of signal, but quite different. But I get a lot of flack from people saying that, oh, don't go after Proton. Finally we have a company that's an ecosystem that's good, it's better than Google and Apple. So we should be happy with what we got. And on your side, I'm okay, I'm happy with what we got. But I think we need to be careful here, right? Because Proton is a for profit company. Not all for profit incentive is bad, but the problem with the for profit incentive is that somebody is going to inherit that company. And it feels like to me that what Proton is doing is that they are building the ecosystem of many various products, many of which are actually conflicting with a proper privacy strategy. For instance, a VPN is conflicting with an email because if a, if your email provider is asked to provide your IP address to the authorities, they will have to do it as Proton has been asked to do so in the past, many, many times. And if you can protect yourself if you simply move your IP address to a totally different company and even better, totally different jurisdiction. So let's say you have your jurisdiction for email in Switzerland, that's fine with Proton, right? But then you move your IP address to a VPN company to Mullvad, which is in Sweden, and then you are making it much more difficult for authorities or even hackers to get your IP address and also get your data from your email provider. Proton is giving people an illusion that this is not a problem. It is a problem because it happens all the time, that the more data a company has, the more users it has, the more eyes it's going to get from the regulators and from the prosecutors and authorities, people that are going to be looking for people's data. And don't think that because these people are authorities, that because they're law enforcement, that every single request that they send to these companies is completely illegitimate and just they are abusing their power all the time. And they're not going after individuals alone, they're going after entire categories and groups of people through geofence, warrants and other things. So they're doing essentially a dragnet surveillance that they say is for your good or for human security or national security. But that's not always the case. And you also have a problem with hackers targeting that data, state sponsored adversaries. So the more you diversify to an extent, the less likely it will be for you to fall victim to have all of your information stolen by a single entity, which is something that you should want to avoid. Another problem is also availability. There are obviously like countries and places where you cannot access Proton services. And it may be that at some point Proton is accessible in your country, but at another point it could be inaccessible. So if you lose your password manager, if you lose your second factor authentication, you lose your emails and your aliases and your drive and all the backups, suddenly just one company being inaccessible, one company services being accessible to you for whatever reason, one of them could also be suspension of your account means that you lose your entire digital presence. There should be an obvious red flag. It is this triangle of security, which is CIA, that's confidentiality, integrity, availability. Availability simply means that it's not that the data is protected, but also the data is there that when you need it, right? So you need to think about that too. And Proton is again giving people an illusion that this is not a problem, that it's actually a good idea to put all of your eggs into one basket, that you don't face any threats. So when it comes to a business decision that I have no expertise to make because obviously I'm bad at doing business, I talked With TUTA spokesperson. I had an interview with them and they were very nice to say that for them, they've elected not to build an ecosystem. They've elected not to have a VPN precisely because they believe it's a compromise of your privacy strategy and it's compromising for their company too. So they are saying for this specific reason that we want our users to be able to use their own vpn, which you're always able to, but they don't want to encourage them with some false advertising that, oh, no, use our VPN because we'll get more money out of you. No, they want their users to use their own agency to full extent and only use Tuta for emails and calendar. Right, Emails and calendar, that goes well together, maybe even drive, because you might save attachments from an email to the same drive. But other things are becoming more and more questionable, especially the VPN and now the passwords and the second factor, authentication and AI. I like to test stance on AI too. They're very adversarial to AI. I am also, for many reasons. But for the privacy reasons, it's impossible, even if you're running local AI, to keep it secure because AI can be tricked to execute malicious prompts. It's kind of like the same vulnerability as JavaScript introduces into browsers. So you can have a malicious prompt that is hidden from your eye, but the AI will see. It could be hidden in YouTube subtitles, it could be hidden in invisible text in an embedded frame on a website that you're viewing or seeing. It could be in an email that you receive. That could be a spam email, it could be a newsletter, it could be anything that your email address could just leak anywhere. Even if you have an email alias, you're going to get an email, right? And any of that could contain a malicious prompt. The AI will read the prompt, it will execute the prompt, and it could say something like, oh, visit the website with a malicious payload, or give me credit card credentials or something like that, depending on what AI has access to, or give me summaries of confidential messages of this, of this person's emails or something like that. Right? And the AI might be able to do that. So it is impossible to secure yourself against this. So my usual approach is to just not use something that is so inherently vulnerable. And these AI vulnerabilities are uncharted territory. They're out there and it's always going to be a cat and mouse game. Categorically, they're going to be impossible to mitigate completely unless you don't use them. So, yeah, I would take the TUTA approach to Proton, which is elect yourself to limitation to minimization. Minimize the company's exposure to data collection, because the more services you have, the more data you have also. So I think this is. Proton is really starting to navigate into the territory where they are making a decision between profit and privacy and they are electing for privacy for profit.
- [19:13]
A
Yeah, I think that's very well reasoned and I really appreciate that video that you did and you just gave a good sampling of what you talked about. And when you get into the idea of an ecosystem, almost by definition that is anti privacy because you have all these integrated parts, all these different parts of your life and it's just more data that can be used to make connections. And absolutely, I agree with that. If somebody's using ProtonMail, for example, they should definitely not be using the VPN. And for Proton to have just all these different things as part of their operation now it is like I would not be using, as you say, I would not be using more than one Proton product, you know, one or two or something of this sort. Maybe you could, maybe. This is an interesting time to talk about. You have a fairly big Presence on. On YouTube. You talked about getting invitations from people for affiliates and that controversy, that obvious conflict of interest. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your affiliate experience, the things that people reach out to you for, how you have to stand your ground, and maybe some of the weird or shady stuff that happens in the privacy affiliate world.
- [20:22]
B
So I've been approached by many companies that are both good and bad. The bad ones that I don't care about, I don't respond to at all. The good ones that I do care about, I do respond to. And I tell them I'm not going to accept your money, but I would really like to talk to your CEO or someone from your company way back, like many, many years ago, maybe like four or even five years ago, maybe even more, I guess. I don't know. I had an interview with. What is the service called? Quant. I think it's Quant and it's a search engine based of France. And they wanted to pay me money to promote Quant. But at the time I was making videos about DuckDuckGo being better than Google and how you should be using these different search engines and compartmentalizing. And I was also including Quant in that, but also startpage and Ecosia and all these other options just to give people more things that they can use. And rely upon. And I told them that there is no possible way that I could reasonably make this video and still claim that my recommendations are unbiased. Like, that doesn't make sense. And they were very nice to get me that interview to allow me to talk with a CEO of, of Quant that was also former CEO of Mozilla for Europe. And that was a fascinating experience. And I really like that in other cases, companies sometimes get offended by my rejection of their money. This was unfortunately the case with Proton. Proton did want to give me their affiliate program or some kind of, I think it was like $70 per signup program. And I told them that that is a very lucrative offer. I was almost going to take it, but I said, I talked to my audience and I asked them if they think I'm stupid or not. That's what I literally asked. Because I was like, okay, this is a good company, we all use it right? But I still have these problems, these critiques and obviously the ethics of taking this conflict of interest money. So a lot of the people said that I should take the money. But more people than not said that, yeah, I'm correct. And the reason they subscribe to me is because I don't take the money. So that gave me the reassurance on the intellectual level, on the logical level, arguing for in your head that, yeah, this is actually still right to do. It's still right to reject the money.
- [22:48]
A
And I hope that everybody, by the way, I hope everybody in your audience who said, no, don't take it immediately donated you $70.
- [22:57]
B
I don't know if they. I don't know if they donated $70. But yeah, most of the people that said that I think were Patreons, which is already very good. I'm very appreciative of all the support. I understand my position that I'm asking for people to do charity, right? So I don't know how much I deserve any of that. But I'm trying to give the best value I can there. And really it is so, how should I say it? Uniform on YouTube especially, but across social media, for creators to just take the money and to shill for the products and you ask about some of the stuff of how this works. I've never actually signed any deal. I've never actually, I signed like when I had like 3000 subscribers, I signed a deal with NordVPN out of all people. That was actually before NORDVPN had this data breach scandal. And after a couple of months, I stopped actually promoting that link and Then I cancel the affiliate contract. It lasted less than a year, I think. And I deleted all of the mentions of NORDVPN out of my channel. And that was like the only dirty thing I did on my YouTube channel. That was like, before anyone even knew me. And really, like, these affiliate programs are probably the least evil. I think sponsorship deals are much more evil. But what these affiliate programs do is that they give incentives to creators to just overly promote whatever the products in the links are over the products that are not in the links. That is the biggest problem. So I've criticized, for instance, but very, very late, just slightly, I think a reasonable level of criticism of all things Secured also a big YouTube channel or over 400,000 subscribers. Because he takes so much money from Proton, he has these Proton links. And I was like, see, this is a problem. He always puts Proton links all the time. He does mention other companies, but he makes so much Proton content. Techlore has also taken some money from Proton, also making obnoxious Proton content. And I'm like, you're proving my point, guys, right? You're proving what, me, right? That you think there is no bias. There is clearly bias. You may be criticizing these companies, but you still say you recommend them. I come out here and say, well, maybe I do recommend them, but only one or two services at a time. Then use something else, right? You don't say that. And maybe you don't say that because you haven't arrived at a conclusion intellectually. Maybe you don't agree with that argument, but maybe you've arrived to that argument because you have an affiliate link, right? And regarding the Proton deal, that was actually the longest conversation that I've had with regarding a sponsorship deal or an affiliate deal was that they initially said that, oh, I could choose anything, any Proton product, and they would just give me the link. And I was like, well, I only really like ProtonMail. I mean, I like a bit of some other of your products, but ProtonMail is really solid. That's what I would use and recommend, but not your other stuff. And they were like, well, we said you could use anything, but we have a lot of ProtonMail signups already, so we'd want you to use something else, like vpn. And I was like, well, I'm not sure about that too, but I'll ask my audience about that. And then they moved the goal post again and said that, oh, well, we want to recommend Proton paas. And I was like, well, I would recommend Proton Paas the least out of all of your services, I think Bitwarden is already good. Keepass is even better if you want to keep it offline only. So that's the thing. Some of these companies, they should be working with you when you're giving them a free offer. I gave them free exposure. Not that I need that out of me. Right. Proton is already popular, but I gave them a chance to talk to me, asking nothing in return, and they rejected that. Or rather, they ghosted me after I rejected their money. So, I don't know, Weird, weird stuff. Maybe they were really seeking to talk only to people that I can control, that I can give money to and have that incentive structure built in there so they have more, I guess, probability for positive feedback and coverage out of that creator.
- [27:43]
A
Yeah, I totally understand what you're saying. When I was on your show, we had a conversation about this kind of influence over people. And I do think if you're talking about something as sensitive as people's freedom and privacy, I don't think you, you can have any sponsors or anything like that, because. And so what we've done on this channel is we make our own tutorials, courses, books and things of this sort, and we sell that kind of information. We'll do some consulting. But yeah, I agree that any kind of influence, even if it's just this tangential kind of influence, is a problem. And people need to find other ways. I'm not saying to do this for free. Absolutely not. But definitely to. To find other ways. And that's why, you know, I'm glad you have your Patreon, so that people can, you know, get some extra stuff, obviously, and find a way to, to reward you for your efforts. Yeah. And I'll just say a couple thoughts about this, the whole sponsorship sort of thing. I'm not as big of a platform as you are, but I've had some companies reach out, and obviously I'm pretty public about not taking sponsorship. So a lot of times they don't reach out, but some still get through. And, you know, I've also interviewed plenty of these privacy companies, and a lot of them are a lot more corporate and big tech than you would think. Even some of the common privacy services that are bandied about. I've been in interviews with them where they have like, multiple people, including their media managers. And at the end they're like, yeah, you know, maybe you shouldn't have said that. I'm like, okay, we're not, we're not publishing this interview. So it gets a lot more scummy than, you know, people would would realize. And that's why you and I are big advocates of FOSS and kind of the FOSS ethos. Are there any companies out there? I mean, you like to call out these companies. I think it's good to do. So. Are there any other companies out there in the privacy sphere that let's say either you find underrated and that should be talked about more, or that you think are particularly overrated and people should be talking less about them? Just your assessment of some of the privacy products and services out there, the good ones and the bad ones.
- [29:46]
B
Well, I have to give my biggest shout out to Coach and Briar. So Coach, that's a Welsh word for a hug. I think it's a C W T C H K IM. And so the Kuch im. Right. And that is a project that is actually trying to do what I am always pressuring these other services, including Signal and Proton, to focus on as well. That. Okay, we fixed the problem of. What is it? Content surveillance. Right. So we encrypted the content. Good job. You can pat yourself on the backs. Amazing. But we have to move forward because there is also metadata. And you can have this famous clip from the Director of National Intelligence saying that the United States kills people based on metadata. Right. And that's how the famous example with Proton that, you know, they had to snitch on this French journalist, the police was looking for the metadata, not context, not, not the, not, not the content of the emails. They knew that was encrypted. They were looking for the browser fingerprint and for the IP address. That's metadata. You can get arrested based on metadata. You can get harassed based on metadata. All kinds of horrible things are happening to everybody, to many people on the planet based on metadata. And all of this algorithmic targeting with advertising and these campaigns, changing your insurance plans and all that stuff that's happening based off metadata. So these projects like Kutch and Briar, the Briar project, what they are doing is that they are trying to build a consent based metadata resilient platform, especially kutch. The Kutch is really more focused on the consent side and that is something that I truly like. And if you pair that with even a completely sovereign and decentralized backbone infrastructure, then you're talking. Right? This is kind of like my utopian level of freedom. That could happen maybe at some point in the future. I don't know how feasible that is. All the experts in the audience could correct me, but what I'm imagining is that we have Kutch that has now figured out a way to have complete metadata surveillance. You don't have to trust any server. There is no way to collect anyone's information. No IP addresses, no fingerprints, none of that data. You can also introduce other things to prevent deep packet inspection and preventing traffic analysis by AI and other advanced tools that can even inspect what is inside encrypted traffic. Right? So Kutch is trying to defend against that. And it's a messaging platform. It's very small. Pretty much nobody uses it, right? Because it's mostly just a research project. But that's, I think, where we should be headed. And I really think that a project like Signal, which is obviously good, it's encrypting the content of your messages very well, as well as all the attachments. But the metadata is still out there. Everybody can see if you're talking who you're talking to over Signal. They can see if you're talking to your friends, if you're talking to your family. They can see how often and when for how long. They can figure out your social graph. Now, Signal has the sealed sender, but the implementation, for one, is not strong. It can be broken just over a few messages. And you know why that is? That's actually because Signal has this design feature which you cannot disable, which is when you send somebody a message, it gives you that one circle with a check mark. It says that you send the message. If you get two circles, you get kind of like notified that they received the message into their client, into their device, right? And then you can have this optional feature where if that thing is the circle is empty, but if it's filled out with white color, it says that they've read the message. It's a read receipt. So the thing that breaks Signal metadata protection is there by design. You cannot disable it. It's called a delivery receipt. It's completely useless. But it's there because normies like it. And it allows these passive adversaries that are looking through the network on the global level, like ISPs, for instance, they can figure out who is communicating with who. And the only way to protect yourself against that is with a really strong VPN like mullvad or tor, right? But then you have to convince your friends to also use that, which is already hard enough if they're just normies, and you barely got them to use Signal. And my problem with this is that Signal has the notoriety, the. The possibility for them to push for something that what Kutch is doing, they could have done that. There was this massive drama way back in 2018, between Signal and Matrix. And Matrix is this decentralized protocol, right? That is open source, so you can build your messenger on top of Matrix, just like you can have your own email on top of the email protocol in a very similar way. Now there are problems with protocols too, but Matrix was quite good, right? And Matrix was arguing against Signal, saying that, well, you should open up, right? You should decentralize the protocol. And then under the leadership of Moxie Marlinspike, Signal just refused to even entertain that debate for good security reasons. I understand those that protocols are often frozen in time. That's why, for instance, email doesn't have any inherent default encryption, right? That's bad. But you know, Kutch solved that problem. Coach is something where you can just generate identities to message with other people, right? So you are not stuck with just one account like you are with Signal. You are completely metadata resilient. So you don't have to worry about these passive adversaries and state sponsored groups, hackers and NSA and law enforcement surveilling on your social graph. You can have total freedom. And these messengers work even over Bluetooth. So even if the government takes down the Internet in your country, you can still have that connection over Bluetooth or over wireless networks. And that term is confusing to people that are not technical. But wireless network does not mean Internet. It just means that it's a WI fi, right? So you can connect to WI Fi. The Internet could be down and for as long as there are some mesh towers that people could set up completely independently, you could broadcast your messages over the entire continent. I hope that people can get into my head what I'm trying to imagine here. So Kutch and Briar, definitely they deserve a shout out. And I think the most overrated project would be, I don't know, maybe. Well, I'm not going to say Signal because Signal is not overrated. It is rated just right, maybe slightly more than it needs to be. But I would say Proton, but I have already criticized Proton way too.
- [37:03]
A
Yeah. Or to phrase it differently, what are some common privacy services that people just bandy about that you think should not be talked about as often as they are? Maybe like the big VPN companies, stuff like that.
- [37:14]
B
Oh, for sure. I mean all the VPN companies, right? Except for Mullvad and ProtonVPN is also fine if you only use ProtonVPN and not anything else. But I think as the singular best service out there, it's Mullvad. But literally any other vpn, it's garbage. IVPN is also fine, but IVPN does not have the AI analysis resistance built in yet, which is a problem. Yeah, but definitely all these VPNs that you see sponsored by YouTubers like ExpressVPN by Marques Brownlee and NordVPN, of course, and all the other ones, like they're all garbage. They're garbage, you don't need them. This military grade encryption doesn't mean anything. HTTPs is already rolled out to 99% of the Internet. So yeah, for sure that would be the case. Also, some people think that Linux is inherently private. That is absolutely not the case. Linux is in fact even less private than something like macOS or even Windows if you install just garbage on there. So Linux is only more private in terms where if you're very careful, if you know what you're doing, then you're hopefully not installing all kinds of terrible spyware on your device. Right, but lots of people just use Linux the same way as they use their Windows machine. So the more stuff you install on Linux, the more you're exposing yourself and your data to these other companies. The biggest benefit of Linux is that yes, it doesn't have an online account, but up until Windows 11 you could also have had a local only account and you would be even more secure in fact than on Linux and you could have disabled a lot of the telemetry with other tools. So yeah, Linux is not necessarily a privacy tool. You would have to choose the right distro and you would have to know what you're doing. It is not a tool that you can just install and forget what, forget about it because it does things for you. It doesn't.
- [39:15]
A
Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. I'm tracking with you on that. Now. Let me insert a little bit of a social political question here, which is that I think you'd be in agreement with me that technology itself is not going to give people the maximal amount of privacy that they're looking for. Simply because, as we've discussed this whole time, these privacy technology, a lot of them come from these companies or individuals and these people are in a particular place and they're subject to particular laws and governments. And even if they go between governments, there's all these agreements between governments. And so for example, we have Samurai Wallet who was arrested and suddenly, just overnight, you basically don't really have the ability to have privacy on Bitcoin. Just because the US government went and scooped up a guy in the us scooped up a guy in Portugal, really, they Would have had to been living in Russia or something, doing this, and you start to get to unrealistic levels of geographical disbursement and such. So at the end of the day, privacy is a, you know, it has to also be fought politically and I would argue socially as well. And now I'm, I'm kind of listening to your view on, on, on the world and it seems you have a little bit of this kind of revolutionary mindset standing up to power. And I understand that. Right. And that's what we get a lot of the stories in the last many decades about the rebels in Star wars standing up to the empire and such. And then there's a question though, of what happens when the rebels become the new order. Right? Or maybe they don't. Right? Maybe they just destroy the empire and then they just fully relinquish all power. And then there's the question of how do other people, you know, how do other. How do you prevent power from becoming power again? So I guess my question to you is what would you see as an ideal world? How big would the government be? How many governments would there be? What would the world look like? Would there be laws? Who would be enforcing those laws?
- [41:21]
B
Those.
- [41:21]
A
Would there be privacy laws? Would it be an anarchic type of world? What would be the world where, okay, you're, you're talking to, you're speaking truth to power. The power gets diminished. What then would that ideal privacy focused world and freedom focused world look like according to your perspective?
- [41:40]
B
Well, this is way too broad a question for how many, however many minutes we have left for this. But I've been thinking about this every day. I am reading a lot of literature on anarchism. There's a lot of good studies that you can have on Catalonia in the 1930s. That's very fascinating. I would recommend everybody to, to go ahead and give it a read on any of those things, even from authors that are criticizing that. You will just find a lot of factual information there that could be quite inspiring. And you will see that, as you asked in the example of what happens if the rebels get into power and become the new order? Well, the true purpose of anarchy is that there will be no power, right? The rebels would dismantle the power and they would not capture the power. Unfortunately, what happened in history in the two most prolific examples, that's the Soviet Union and China, was that the Bolsheviks captured the power and they kept it themselves. They did not allow for the anarchist revolution to flourish and take place in Russia. And what they did instead is they became the new czars, right? They just created this new authority, an authoritarian system that was probably even worse than the one that came before. But you know, over the span of many, many decades. So hard to really compress that into just a few seconds or minutes of sound bite. But to be honest, the way this would need to go forward is that the, the power, the dominion over people would have to be dismantled permanently or to the effect where no meaningful entity would be able to gain that dominion again. And really some primary principles would have to happen first. That is people would need to actually hold the power between themselves in a distributed manner. That's not allowing for, for collusion or coalescence of dominion. Basically trying to abide by the rule of no man should have dominion over another man. Extending that definition of man to all mankind and enforcing that principle whenever that primary rule is being threatened. That of course means that there will be no monopoly on violence. That entire principle of social contract would have to be dismantled to. Now I want to warn your audience that I understand that these are high level ideas that for my galactic brain, I'm just kidding, right, These are ideas that are just not possible to talk about within the span of few minutes. But we live in the world of this social contract where we have monopoly on violence that is coming from the government in exchange for stability and security. You can have security and stability even without monopoly and violence. People think that whenever you dismantle that monopoly that the state has that they say, oh, that's going to be anarchy, there's going to be chaos, there's going to be violence in the streets. That's not necessarily going to be the case because people are still going to be constrained by different factions of violence that could occur and therefore the violence will be less likely. There are some mathematical equations there, some studies that have been done on this. Some of them I have saved. If I find them, I could send them to you. They are very like high level political theory. So not very easy for just a regular person to understand what they're necessarily talking about. But at least their conclusions are very interesting. That yes, it is possible to have sort of like market or non monopolistic order on violence because that's what all it really is about. So for as long as you can have a community that can stand for its rights and does not have to rely on a dominion of someone else to protect those rights, then you can have reasonably anarchic system. The world order is fundamentally anarchic. I mean, when I'm talking about literally the International order, Right. There is no global authority. You could argue that maybe some country is a hegemon. But even if a country is a hegemon, there is still anarchy because there is no above authority that would dictate what the hegemon can and cannot do or what other countries that are not the hegemon can and cannot do. Now, the hegemon could do things that non hegemons cannot do. But non hegemons are also not bound by any rules that they would not be allowed to break. So, like the situation. Venezuela is a perfect example of this. Or the invasion into Ukraine is another example. There is this fascinating case study of the war in Sudan that is such a perfect case study of this anarchic system. But because Sudan is such a large country, it is all happening just within the country and it's also throwing their neighboring countries as well as Egypt into that. Right. And it's just really fascinating from the perspective of political theory to study that. So we are already living in anarchy. Right. There is no monopoly and violence in the international order. And more or less the international order is relatively safe. Right. We haven't had a major conflict between two superpowers, more or less. Right. For over 70 years now, which is quite good. For the vast majority of the history, we haven't had that. And you can just apply that to within a borders of a country and you can still have a reasonably safe place. I mean, I've cited the example of Sudan. It's a violent example. It's not a good example. Right. I'm just saying, likewise, Venezuela, Ukraine, these are not good examples. They're just manifesting the extremities of the anarchic order. And I'm just trying to lay out from this perspective of theory that it is possible to not have any monopoly and violence, not have any dominion of anyone, where people just come together, work together. Even people that hate each other, they might be able to work together because that's what sustains their existence. That's what helps them grow, prosper, have progress. So people are motivated by other things than just completely dominating over someone else. And I think that's a way where it can make it work. And I don't know if you want me to lay out exactly how dismantling the monopoly and violence would look like, but yeah, that's kind of like that. Go ahead.
- [48:43]
A
Yeah, that was a good overview. Let's say that for another discussion. But then presumably in how you describe things, if there were, which there are psychopaths and people who are interested in dominating others, then the collective would step up and just stamp that out as a way of dealing with would be tyranny in the future. Is that kind of the idea?
- [49:04]
B
Well, they have to do this, right? They already do do this and under, under this establishment. So yeah, you deal with these people. Maybe the only problem is that the current establishment is not allowing you to do that on your own.
- [49:19]
A
Yeah, as you say, that's a big discussion. I like the overview. Let's let people think about that and maybe we'll have some follow up questions in another discussion down the line. I did want to ask you some other stuff though. Privacy cryptocurrencies. This is something that one of my big influences was Michael Bazell. I read all his books and such. And one thing he left out several things. But one thing he never really talked about, privacy cryptocurrencies. And when I was trying to find a solution for financial surveillance, and not just financial surveillance, but sovereignty, right. End to inflation, these sorts of big problems with the, with the monetary system and banking, I got into cryptocurrencies as a solution. Now there's a lot of scams and stuff out there, but things like Bitcoin and increasingly Monero are pretty decent options for evading financial surveillance. And I do notice that plenty of people don't talk about privacy cryptocurrencies. I don't think you talk too much about them. And I'm just curious if there is a reason why you don't talk about privacy cryptocurrencies or really cryptocurrencies in general?
- [50:21]
B
Yeah, I've covered Bitcoin and Monero. I think I have only one video on Monero and maybe like mentioning Bitcoin a couple of times. And I've been really inspired by the Bitcoin white paper, mostly by the ideals that it had in it because it was trying to be this peer to peer censorship resistant, decentralized, anonymous payment method. And at the time it achieved none of those things. It was just what was written into the paper. And there was this protocol. And I took it really just as a proof of concept, right. And that was in 2008. Since that time, Bitcoin has pretty much developed nowhere, right? It didn't really establish this anonymous payment network because Bitcoin is not anonymous. Every single transaction is public. You could change your addresses and be changing your addresses all the time, every single time you make a transaction. And that could help to a very small extent. But it doesn't change the fact that everything is still public. So whenever you Make a transaction, it is just going to stay on the ledger for everybody to see forever. That's essentially worse financial privacy than you get from a bank, because at least the bank does not make that information public. Then I was hoping that maybe there would be a change in the core, right. I saw all of these new solutions that were coming up called layer two or even layer three solutions, the lightning network and other things built on top of that. And the problem with this is that whenever you're just having other companies and projects built on top of the core that you're trying to spread, then the people that get into that now have to have another thing that they need to enable to get that private transaction. Now, it's possible to have a market where people only get into Bitcoin through that layer two solution. But the layer two solution then also diminishes the decentralization aspect of the core of the layer one. And the more people simply trust these layer two companies, the less options we have. And for instance, we could argue that Samurai Wallet would be a layer 3 solution or something like that, right? Something that's not in the core, but it is trying to give you privacy that the core Bitcoin does not give you. And now, see, the problem is availability. Again, it was a good product. It was able to give you that level of privacy that you would now have to go for. Optionally, you would have to go out of your way to use that service, but it's gone because the government cracked down on it. But the government is not cracking down on Bitcoin or Monero, because these are understood to be protocols that anyone can use and deploy at their own disposal. So these are not services that someone else is running. Now, that doesn't mean that government is not going to crack down on them. I'm pretty sure that it will. But the issue is that you need to have something that is really strong regarding your privacy from the get go. That is like imagine if Signal was this super duper awesome privacy solution, but you would have to enable several toggles to get all the encryption that you want. Nobody would want to use Signal and nobody should recommend Signal for those reasons. It's kind of like Telegram is a shit show when it comes to privacy, because nothing is encrypted end to end. And in order to have end to end encryption, you have to jump through so many hoops. It's a terrible thing for private conversations. So I saw that Bitcoin was not developing through 2013, 14, 15. We've seen the Snowden leaks and Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, we've seen all of that. And bitcoin was still not changing. And then we saw 2017, the first bubble that went through the NFTs, non fungible tokens and all that stuff people still remember. And then just bitcoin price just kept going up. And we even had some countries beginning to adopt Bitcoin, maybe in their reserves, maybe as a currency. And we've seen other companies taking large bitcoin reserves, even big banks talking about Bitcoin. And the bitcoin price would just keep going up and nothing would change about the protocol. Literally nothing. No, no privacy innovation, no anonymity innovation. It would just essentially stay the same. And the only thing that everyone around Bitcoin would care about is for the price to go up. Whenever I would go to Bitcoin forums on Reddit or anywhere else, and the only thing that people would be talking about would be the price going up, when to buy, when to sell, buy the dip, sell and catch your boat. That's it. I'm interested in none of those things. I wanted Bitcoin to be this decentralized, censorship resistant private payment solution. I didn't, did not want Bitcoin to be this gold, what do they call it? Digital gold. That's stupid. I don't care about digital gold. I care about an anonymous payment method so that I can pay rent anonymously or buy things anonymously and do things anonymously. I can't do that with Bitcoin. Now there is Monero and Monero is much better because it is trying to do that on the core level so that you don't actually have to do anything other than using Monero, perhaps over Tor, tails, Unix, something like that. Right. But on itself, the blockchain is going to be opaque. You're not going to see the transactions. Maybe there are ways to break into that, maybe there are ways to hack into that, but more so on the individual level rather than on the global level for dragnet surveillance. And I like Monero. I would still probably say that I follow the project, although I don't follow it on any kind of regular basis. I just wish that the project would be more successful and other than that, maybe zcash would get my respect. All I know about zcash is that it offers an option for private transactions, but you have to again go for that option and everything is by default non private. But maybe my knowledge is outdated a little bit, you can correct me on that. So these are the reasons why I essentially given up on the entire crypto sphere, Bitcoin is a shitcoin at this point. And the only cryptocurrency project that I care about is Monero or any other project that cares about privacy and does everything that they can to introduce privacy into the protocol itself.
- [56:47]
A
And since we're kind of coming up on, on, on time here, I did want to throw one more question in here because I'm very interested. And you make very many compelling videos, I have to say, and you put a lot of time and attention into these things. And I want to get your thoughts on the. You had a video like how Luigi Mangione was tracked down.
- [57:05]
B
Okay.
- [57:06]
A
And this is the guy who shot the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. And let me phrase it this way, what did you learn when making that video about how sophisticated tracking has become in 2025?
- [57:22]
B
Well, I've learned that it's not really that sophisticated as people would think. Mostly it's reliant on a lot of luck, as was the case with the shooter of Charlie Kirk. But also people think that we have this advanced facial recognition that can just capture your face out of a snippet from a frame through a surveillance camera. Most definitely that's not going to be the case because the surveillance camera in the streets is going to be high angle, dark lighting or just very bad lighting, grainy footage. You also have these things like atmospheric turbulence that's over a longer distance. You have these aspects that's completely wobbling and distorting the image where, you know, you can't have that level of recognition. Now there are actually, there are projects that are trying to solve that, government funded, of course, and they are trying to build up these AI tools that can go through bad footage, that can enhance even through atmospheric turbulence and all that stuff. But really the way that they. I think the most interesting part would be how were they able to get the first picture? Because we got the first picture of Luigi Mengioni smiling at the receptionist in the hostel or wherever he was staying in the New York City. And that would be the one where I would be most interested in how they got that one, because we don't have any other leads really anywhere else. We have these other photos that were later on provided to catch the guy. But the fact that he was able to travel some, I think, 300 miles or so to a totally different state. I mean, a neighboring state, right, but a totally different state, leaving the city in the first place just really told me that the surveillance state is not really equipped at protecting human security, human Security is exactly these things, right? So whenever you have a criminal doing a crime and you have this level of surveillance, you should be able to cache them immediately. Well, this mass surveillance system is collecting so much data that you cannot have reasonable methods of getting through that in time. So oftentimes, you end up with so much data that before you have a chance to sift through it and get to your target, you're just wasting time. So oftentimes, like regular police work and proper targeted investigation, getting all the sources that you can on that, that's what ends up catching these people. And in fact, what ended up catching Luigi and Gioni was allegedly a simple tip from a restaurant worker. Maybe there are some other things that have led to that, too, that we'll maybe know about once the trial goes through, which is something that we actually need to get more data. But another thing that I've learned from this manhunt was that Luigi himself, while he was on the run, was considered to be this hitman, right? Professional, something like that. But then I saw these pictures, and he was just, like, looking straight into the camera in a taxi. And then he was just eating in a Starbucks or something like that and eating candy bars or protein bars and disposing the garbage. The police were able to collect the garbage. This is obviously not professional behavior. You should not be leaving trails behind. You should not be leaving garbage behind. You should not be eating in places. You should just be changing your profile. He was changing his profile, but very poorly. He was changing his clothes to a different set of clothes that looked very similar to the first one. So if you want to change your profile, you need to look like a completely different kind of person. So going from a businessman to a street junkie to a soccer mom or something like that. Right. So it was very clear to me through the manhunt on Luigi Manjoni, even before we knew who that guy was, that he was not a professional. He was making mistakes, and maybe if he was more careful, he would be able to escape. I mean, Edward Snowden was able to escape. The NSA didn't know who Edward Snowden was until he, you know, gave up his name to the. To the press and came forward with the press. So he knew what he was doing. He knew how to hide his tracks. In his book, actually, he lays out how he did that. So maybe if you follow that, you can escape even the National Security Agency.
- [61:59]
A
Right, right, right. And, you know, we're just talking about privacy generally here. We're not advocating for one action or another, of course. Not yeah, and I mean obviously that goes without saying now. So this is one reason I would encourage everybody listening. Go check out the hated one on YouTube also has a bit shoot presence and if you've watched any of his videos, consider contributing to him on his Patreon or sending him a donation. He does excellent work on very interesting topics. It's basically required listening as far as I'm concerned if you're interested in these sorts of topics. So I want to definitely say that up front and then I'll give you the final thoughts. The hated one. Any anything else you'd like to say as as parting remarks?
- [62:43]
B
I wish we can do this more often, to be honest.
- [62:45]
A
Well, perfect and hopefully we can. I slowing down on the podcast, but I'd always be happy to talk to you and so thank you again so much and best of luck in 2026.
- [62:57]
B
Same to you. Thank you for all of this and all the listeners. Also support Watchmen Privacy this is very interesting. I do not agree with everything that you have to say. I know, and the same goes for you regarding my things. But you know I enjoy these talks and I even enjoy the disagreement to an extent.
- [63:20]
A
There we go. Perfect me as well. All right folks, take care. 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.