Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Nolite te bastardes carborundorum

Episode Date: November 23, 2016

Donald Trump promises women he will make Surveillance great again. Plus Digital Security Training!

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Nolite Te Bastardes Carborondorum. Just before 11 a.m. on the morning of November 8, 2016, Donald Trump and his wife Melania walked into PS59, their Manhattan polling place, to vote. They were met with boos and hisses from their fellow New Yorkers. Someone screamed out, Rapist! Los loser. There was a large media contingent as well. Dozens of reporters, video cameras, photographers.

So when Donald Trump craned his neck out and tilted his head down for a quick peek at his wife's ballot, he was absolutely aware that he was on camera. Things were extremely tense on the SUV ride over. Melania was still fuming over the news that had come out over the weekend about Donald's affair with a Playboy model and how the National Enquirer had paid this woman not to go public with her story. You are a pig, Donald. An insult to all women, Melania snarled as they got out of the car. Donald didn't reply. This too will pass,

he thought to himself. He looked for the construction workers Steve Bannon had promised would be lined up across the street to cheer for him. He thought he spied one. See, not everyone hated him. But once he was inside, once they were both given their ballots and in position behind their voting desks, a wave of doubt washed over him. And Donald Trump realized he wasn't sure if Melania was going to vote for him. And so, as they were finishing up, he craned his neck out and tilted his head down and took a quick peek. That's one of the scenarios that went through my head when I first saw that photo of Donald Trump spying on his wife as she voted.

But there were many variations. I would come up with a new one every time I looked at it, and I must have looked at that photo a thousand times on election day. It was the most amazing image ever. I think I sent it to over 50 people. Around 2 o'clock, my friend Tim texted me back. He sent a photo of Eric Trump and his wife Laura taken at their polling station at the 53rd Street Library. And like father, like son, Eric too was photographed blatantly spying on his wife as she filled out her ballot.

For me, these images were all the proof I needed. The election really was going to be a bloodbath. Even the Trump men knew it. They knew women were not going to vote for Donald. They weren't even sure if they could count on their own wives. I wasn't always so confident about the election. Over the summer, I actually feared Trump was going to win. Because of American misogyny.

Now, Hillary Clinton herself just might offer us the best lens to gaze upon the particulars of American-style sexism, because she has been subjected to a campaign of contempt, abuse, and demonization that has lasted for over 30 years. But what you have to understand is that her enemies weren't just out to beat her. They wanted to see her punished. That's what those chants were really all about. Punishment for a woman. A woman who dared. A quick peek online provides us with more of a landscape view of American-style sexism.

Again, what's remarkable about all the harassment and abuse women are subjected to on Twitter and other social media platforms is not just how awful the threats of death, rape, and mutilation are, it's their relentlessness. Once a woman finds herself in the threats of death, rape, and mutilation are, it's their relentlessness. Once a woman finds herself in the crosshairs, there's just no escape, no going back. So, last summer, whenever I would share my theories with my smart friends,

my fears that Hillary Clinton would lose because of sexism and misogyny, they would laugh at me. Okay, not everyone laughed. Mostly it was just my smart male friends. They were all just so confident that there was nothing to worry about. A bunch of my smart female friends, they laughed at me as well, but they also offered me a counter-narrative. Hillary Clinton was going to win, I was told, because of American sexism.

You see, all American women, no matter what their political beliefs are, have the shared lived experience of harassment. Whether it be comments in the workplace or catcalls in the street, an uncomfortable encounter on an elevator or a subway, many American women, in fact, unfortunately, have the shared lived experience of physical harassment. And thus, it was ludicrous to imagine that women would be voting for Donald Trump, because a vote for Donald Trump would be a vote to legitimize, normalize, and incentivize more sexual assault. Think about it, one of my female friends told me. No woman wants to go back to a time where it's open for debate if being grabbed by the genitals is locker room talk or assault.

That's just one too many steps backwards. I will admit, once the pussy-grabbing story broke in early October, I had internalized these arguments, and I would repeat them like a mantra to anyone and everyone who would listen. There was just no way that women were going to vote for Donald Trump. No way. He was going to lose. My favorite dystopian novel has always been Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale because she shows us a future that is both unrecognizable and one barely two or three steps removed from our own reality.

I read it at the age of 14, so it only compounded all the anxiety and questions I had about the relationship between men and women. Of course, in her book, the relationship is crystal clear. Women have been stripped of all power. They don't even have names.

Our protagonist is called Of Fred because she is the property of a man named Fred. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, The Handmaid's Tale has cropped up in a number of conversations, mainly because the authoritarian government that rules the Republic of Gilead comes to power when the United States government is taken out by supposed Islamic fundamentalists. But I think it's also important to note that the new rulers were able to strip women of all of their assets because of electronic records, big data. With just the flick of a switch, women went from owning property to being property.

Just one step backwards. I totally misread that photo of Donald Trump spying on Melania. It's still an amazing image. In fact, you could almost run it as the cover image for a new 2016 edition of The Handmaid's Tale. I'm definitely just someone who has in the past felt paranoid about my security and my privacy. So do you feel vindicated now? I don't feel vindicated. I think people should just take basic precautions more so than they have in the past.

After the election, almost every mailing list and online community I participate in lit up with talks about digital security. So I asked Dan Pfeiffer, a friend of mine who writes software and teaches workshops on topics like digital security, to stop by so I could get a sense of what I might need to change about my digital habits and my threshold for paranoia. There is some paranoia involved, but it's like a healthy, realistic kind of paranoia because things can happen. Like say you're just going through security somewhere at the airport and like suddenly you don't have your laptop or like someone, you know, who looks official is asking you questions about the contents of your emails. You want to avoid a situation where it's already too late. When you use your

internet, whatever network you're on at home, at an office, whoever controls that network can see all the stuff you're loading, potentially. So just taking precautions against not just the NSA or law enforcement generally, but anyone who might have a reason to threaten your so-called assets. There's certain language around this that's a little clunky, but there's risks, there's assets, there's threats, and there's adversaries. And these things are all related. Basically, your risk is the possibility that a certain threat will actually happen. There's adversaries who are actually going to carry out those threats. And you have to just keep in mind which things you're protecting, and those are the assets.

So let's talk about risk then. For most people who maybe are a little paranoid and maybe, you know, make a podcast, like what kind of risks would someone like that have? Well, I mean, so anyone with access to others or, you know, with a valuable social network, you're a popular target for whoever the most influential slash rich person who you know personally is. What they'll do is they'll hack your email and send a crafted message to someone who trusts you and trick them into logging in, get their email address. So you're saying I could be attacked

and think it's because I'm doing the important work of standing up to the man, but in reality, it's just that I've had somebody famous on my podcast. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, for you, that would be probably the most likely risk that you have. It turns out that I've had some pretty convoluted ideas about data security. For example, I never update any of the software or operating systems I use

because updates could lead to things no longer working or things no longer being secure. Dead wrong. That's definitely not the case. I use a lot of Apple products, and Apple does this really unfortunate thing where the updates that fix all of the security problems are always the most recent versions of everything. So I have not the newest version of the iPhone. And it runs really slowly,

because it wasn't designed for, you know, iOS 10, or whatever it is now. And I do that because I know if I don't upgrade, I'm my stuff is at risk. I mean, there's like these crazy vulnerabilities in all software on the iPhone, there was one where someone could send you a text message with an image, and that would give them root access to your phone. And Android has a similar problem that's come along too. You really just have to always install the security updates immediately. There's just no way to get around it. I mean, even if you're just like a random person, even if you don't have Rolodex with lots of interesting people, I don't even think of it as optional.

So I could show you my phone and I just keep blasting through the T-Mobile Android update because I just don't want to do it. It's been on there for like two weeks now. You should do that right after we finish this update. There's a few other things you can do right now, dear listener. Things that are just as easy as updating your operating system. One is two-factor authentication. Two-factor authentication is probably the easiest, most valuable thing to set up. What it means is that if I know your password, I still need the second factor. Second factor is just something else

like a text message that gets sent to your phone number. And it's a little bit of a hassle, but it's a hassle that makes it much more difficult for someone to actually steal your account without your phone. So basically, they need to know the password and have access to your phone. Another simple step you can make, sign up for a password manager. You can use OnePass or U-O-O. I think, I mean, a lot of the automatic login ones, like OnePassword, is actually quite easy to run. My feeling is the more I can stay away from the mainstream software that is more likely to get hacked, the better. Because people are going to attack, release vulnerabilities and exploit them for the most popular software.

So if I use unpopular software, this is my theory anyway. I love this theory. And so I'm going to bleep out the one you told me to use. We'll have everyone else who's listening go to the other one. Okay, I couldn't resist that one. A serious need for levity here at DOE HQ. But if you want to know the service that Dan and I now use, just drop me a line and I'll tell you.

The best piece of advice that I got from my friend Dan Pfeiffer, though, was a polite reminder. No matter how awful things might seem, it is imperative that we do not let the fascist bastards grind us down. I mean, the most important thing is to understand two things which may seem contradictory, that we have seen a degradation of the social contract insofar as we assume Trump may actually be an autocratic leader. He hasn't

taken office. Everything he's said, all the appointments he's made have pointed to this as a likely outcome. So probably we need to be a lot more careful. Everyone collectively needs to be a lot more careful about communications because of the many capabilities that we've built up over the years. And the second thing, which may seem contradictory, is that we should also not feel like that increased threat should change our behaviors significantly. Because that's its purpose, that means de facto that Donald Trump and his very powerful surveillance apparatus has won. And for me, the most important thing is to not let chilling effects, and for all this talk about good security practices, to make people too afraid to actually go to the protest or to start organizing or to do the many important things that we need to... Or even tweet out, Donald Trump is a fucking fascist. Exactly.

These tactics can be effective when you feel too afraid to mention fascism on Twitter because you know that someone's running a search and finding all the people who talk about it. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Nolite te Bastardes carborondorum. I spent the last two weeks with, hiding in the dark. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia, home to the world's best podcasts. You can check them all out at Radiotopia.fm. And special thanks to Radiotopia's launch sponsors, MailChimp, The Knight Foundation, and listeners like you.

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