The Joe Rogan Experience - #1536 - Edward Snowden

Episode Date: September 15, 2020

Former CIA contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden shocked the world when he revealed the misdeeds of the US intelligence community and its allies. Now living in Russia, he is a noted privacy advocate and author who serves as president of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. His book, Permanent Record, is now available in paperback from Henry Holt and Company.

the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day good to see you again man good to see you thanks for having me it's uh been like a year it's been like a year believe it or not you looked exactly the same and the studio looks exactly the same you might be on another part of the world. No one knows. Yeah, it's just my apartment that I rent. I don't like to give out a lot of information about where I'm at and that kind of stuff. So it's just a plain wall that I've got the lights down low so it looks kind of a nice gray. At least I think it's nice.

I think it's beautiful. It looks amazing. a nice gray at least i think it's nice i think it's beautiful it looks amazing uh first of all congratulations on the recent ruling was a ninth district court of appeals is that what it was it said that what you exposed with the warrantless wiretapping was in fact illegal and there are many people that are calling for you to be pardoned now. Yeah, so much has happened. This ruling, this is actually not the first time the federal government has, or the appeals courts have struck down some of the federal surveillance programs as unlawful.

But this one is really important because it happened from an appeals court. It wasn't from a single judge. It was from a panel of judges. And what they had ruled was that the NSA's bulk collection of Americans' phone records was illegal. And this is the very first sort of mass surveillance program that I and the journalists, really, that the news was broken back in 2013. So this is a huge victory for privacy rights. What it means is there was this provision of the Patriot Act. Remember the Patriot Act? Remember like a zillion years ago?

I do. Everybody was like, Patriot Act, Patriot Act. Your friend Alex Jones, you know, I think he was worried about the Patriot Act. It's a terrible name. There's a real problem with that name. Because if you're against the Patriot Act, it's like against babies. It's like, this is the pro-baby act, but meanwhile,

pro-baby act, they get to look through your email. You know what I mean? It's like the word Patriot is attached to that in a very disingenuous way. Like, calling that the Patriot Act is it's really creepy that they could do that it should have like a number like bill a1 yeah you know you know i'm saying so you can debate the merits of it it's just so much propaganda attached to that name like the patriot

act this is one of the funny things because it should be a warning for anybody who's in like you know just anywhere in the country and they they hear on the news, they're talking about, like, the Save Puppies, you know, act. There's actually one that's been, they've been trying to push through recently, which is basically outlawing meaningful encryption from the major Internet service providers. Like, if Facebook or Google, for whatever reason, got out of bed in the morning and they actually wanted to protect the security of your communications in a way that even they can't break. Like right now, Google and Facebook, they do a great job keeping other people from spying on your communications. But if Google wants to rifle through your inbox, right, if Facebook wants to go through all your direct messages and give that to the federal government, like you tap one button and boom, they've got all of it.

It happens every single day. Well, companies like Facebook have recently realized this is a real problem for them. Because first off, they get all these censorship demands that you've seen where like there's deplatforming requests. And it happens in one country, right? Like if the U.S. government is allowed to decide what can and can't be said by this person on this platform, or the U.S. goes, look, we got a court warrant. They said, or a judge said, we think this person's a criminal. We want you to hand over everything you have on this person.

And they do it, right? Facebook does this. Well, guess who's next, right? Facebook does this. Well, guess who's next, right? The Russian government shows up at the door the next day. The Chinese government shows up at the door the next day. And if these companies don't play ball, they get shut down in that country. They can no longer operate. And so the idea that a lot of them have that they've considered, and this has actually become a bigger thing in the COVID crisis where we start talking about like contact tracing these companies want to know where everybody is at all the time so they can hand this over to medical authorities or whatever

there's this idea called end-to-end encryption which what it means is that when you send a message you know when Billy sends a message to, Billy and Bobby both have the keys to unlock that message. And it could be sent through Facebook. It could be sent through Google. It could be posted, you know, on a bulletin board in the town square. But without that key, which the people who run the bulletin board, right, the people who own the bulletin board, Google, Facebook, they don't have that key. Only the phones at the end, the laptops at the end, the people who own Facebook, they don't have that key. Only the phones at the end, the laptops at the end, the people who own those, they're the only people who have the key. So if somebody comes to Facebook and says, we want to see that information, Facebook hands over the

encrypted message, right? And Facebook goes, well, here you go, here's our copy, but we can't read it. You can't either. Now you've got to actually do some work on the government side and go get that key yourself and then you can read it right but we can't read it congress is trying to stop the basically proliferation of that basic and encryption technology and they're calling it like the child online predator act or something like that where they say it's all about protecting the posting of child exploitation material and really, really horrible stuff. But that's not actually what the law is about. The law is about making it easier for spies and law enforcement to reach deeper and deeper

into your life with a simple warrant stamped by any court. And the funny thing is, this never used to be the way law enforcement worked in the United States. I mean, when you hear about a warrant, what does that mean to you? What can the cops get with a warrant? Well, usually I think it means that they can come in your house and search. Right. The real issue with warrants when when it pertains to encryption like when you're talking about the child safety act or whatever they're calling it

anyone would say yes we have to stop child predators but the problem with having the ability to use something like that to stop child predators in my eyes i i start start thinking, well, if I really wanted to look into someone, what I would do is I would send them some malware that would put child pornography on their computer, and then I would have all of the motive that I need to go and look through everything. Like, say, if they were a political dissident, if they were doing something against the government,

and you were someone who was acting in bad faith and you decided, okay, we want to look into this guy, but we don't have a warrant. What are the laws? What can we get away with it? Well, we have the Child Endangerment Act. And so because of that, we're allowed to peer into anything. But we just have to have motive.

So we have to, well, do we have motive? All you'd have to do is, and we just have to have motive so we have to well what do we have motive all you'd have to do is and we we both know this it's very easy to put something illegal on someone's computer if they're not paying attention it's very easy to install like you could send someone a text message that looks like a routing number for a package they're going to get they click on that and then you you, what is that? What the Israelis have, Pegasus. Yeah, you've read up on this. Yeah.

So. Well, it's from Brian Fogle's new film, The Dissident, which is about Jamal Khashoggi's murder and how the Saudis used that to use, they actually tapped into Jeff Bezos's phone. used that to use they actually tapped into jeff bezos's phone and that's where all of the this is the suspicion is that that that's where all of those uh national inquirer photos came out and all the attacks on him because they they had access to his actual phone through this so someone could easily get into your stuff if you're not paying attention and then they could use you know whatever acts they've come up with whatever it's's the Patriot Act or whatever act, where they could just get into everything you're doing.

Look at your WhatsApp messages. Look at your Facebook messages. It's real sneaky, and it's dangerous. It's a dangerous precedent to set. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot to this. Let me go into some of that in a little depth. So you mentioned the NSO group and their Pegasus malware set. And this is very much a real thing. Like, you're a well-read guy. This is like, this company, the CEO's name, I think, is Shalev Julio, is run in Israel. It was previously owned, actually, by an American venture capital firm. I believe they've been re-bought out, but it doesn't really matter. Their entire business is preying on flaws in the

critical infrastructure of all the software running on the most popular devices in the world. The number one target, right, is the iPhone. And this is because the iPhone, as secure as it is relative to a lot of other phones, is a monoculture, right? Like if you have an iPhone, you get these little software update notifications all the time that are like, hey, please update to the most recent version of iOS. And that's a fabulous thing. That's a wonderful thing for security because the number one way that people's devices get screwed, if it's not just through user error, right? Like you entering your password somewhere you shouldn't. It's like a fake site that looks like Gmail, but it's not actually Gmail. You just gave the guy your password.

Now he uses your password to log in. But to actually break into a device is that it's not patched, right? Patch means getting these security updates, these little code updates that fix holes that researchers found in the security device well Apple's really good about rolling these out all the time for everybody in the world the problem is basically all these different iPhones right you got an iPhone 6 you got an iPhone 8 you got an iPhone X you got an iPhone you, you've got an iPhone 8, you've got an iPhone X, you've got an iPhone 3, whatever. These are all running a pretty narrow band of software versions.

And so these guys go, if they want to target, for example, Android phones, like Google phones, like a Samsung Galaxy or something like that. There's like a billion different phones made by a billion different people. Half of them are completely out of date. But what it means is it's not one version of software they're running. It's like 10,000. And this is actually bad for security on the individual level. But it's good for security in a very unusual way, which is the guys who are developing the exploits, the guys like this NSO group who are trying to find ways to break into phones, they now have to have like 50 different handsets running 50 different versions of software. They're all changing. They've got different hardware.

They've got different chipsets. They've got different, like all kinds of just technical variables that can screw up the way they attack your phone. And then when they find one, it only works on like this Samsung Galaxy line. It doesn't work on like the Google Pixel line, or it doesn't work on like a Nokia line or something like that. Whereas they realize if they find a way to attack an iPhone, which is actually, you know, this is difficult. This is really difficult stuff. Now it works against basically every iPhone. And who has iPhones? All the rich people, right? All the important people, all the lawmakers, all the guys who are in there. So they've made a business on basically attacking the iPhone and selling it to every two-bit thug who runs a police department in the world.

You know, they sell this stuff to Saudi Arabia. They sell this to Mexico. And there's a group of researchers in Canada working at a university called the Citizen Lab. And these guys are really, like, the best in the world at tracking what NSO Group is doing. If you want to learn about this stuff, the real stuff, look up Citizen Lab and the NSO Group. want to learn about this stuff, the real stuff, look up Citizen Lab and the NSO group. And what they have found is all the people who are being targeted by the NSO group, the classes of people, the countries that are using this. And, you know, it's not like the local police department in Germany trying to bust up, you know, a terrorism ring or something like that. It's the Mexican government spying on the head of the Mexican opposition, or trying to look at human rights defenders who are investigating

like student disappearances, or it's people like the friends and associates of Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered by the Saudi government, or it's people like dissidents in Bahrain. And these, like Petro states, these bad actors nationally, will pay literally tens of millions of dollars each year just to have the ability to break into an iPhone for a certain number of times. Because that's how these guys do it. They sell their business plan. They go, we'll let you break into any iPhone just by basically sending a text message to this phone.

All you need to find is the phone number of a person who's running an iphone and we will exploit something which will give you total if that happens to someone i'm sorry but if that happens to someone could they just get a new phone and does the exploit is the exploit specific to their account well or is the exploit on the physical phone itself? So the question, or the answer to this, is it really depends on the exploit. Like, the easiest forms of exploit, or rather the easier types of exploits, are where they send you a text message, right?

And it'll be like an iMessage or something like that. And it's got a link in it that'll be like, oh gosh, terrible news, you know, your buddy's father just died, and we're making funeral arrangements. Are you going to be there? It's the day after tomorrow. And when you click the link for the funeral arrangements, it opens your web browser, and the web browser on your phone is always the biggest, most complicated process in it, right? There's a zillion lines of code in this as opposed to an instant messenger where there's fewer lines of code in it and they'll find one thing in that where there's a flaw that lets them feed instructions not just to the browser

but basically escape the little sandbox that the browser is supposed to play in that's supposed to be safe where it can't do anything too harmful it'll run out of this sandbox and it'll ransack your phone's hardwired operating system, the system image. It'll give them privileges to do whatever they want on your phone as if they are you. And then as if they have a higher level of privilege than you, they have system level privileges to change higher level of privilege than you. They have system level privileges to change the phone's operation permanently, right? And this is, the problem is on the phone. You can replace the phone, right, and they'll lose access to that. But if they've already used that to gain the passwords that you use to access, you know, your iCloud or whatever,

when they have control of the phone, they've already got your photo roll. They've already got your contact list. They already have everything that you've ever put in that phone. They already have all your notes. They already have all your files. They already have everything that's in your message history. They can pull that out immediately. And now, because they have all your contacts and things like that, they see that phone stop being active. They know you've changed your phone number. All they have all your contacts and things like that. They see that phone stop being active. They know you've changed your phone number. All they have to do is find the new phone number, and then they can try to go after you again.

The benefit is, with that old style of attack, if you get that message and you don't click that link, you're somebody in a vulnerable class, right? You've had these kind of attacks against you before. It looks suspicious. You don't know who this person is. The number isn't right, something like that. And you save that link. You don't click the link. You don't do anything with that link, but you send it to a group like Citizen Lab. They can basically use that link to basically use like a dummy phone, like a sort of a Trojan horse to go to the site that would attack your

phone and catch it. And this is what the sort of process that all of their research is based on. There are other more advanced types of attacks that actually don't have these defenses against them that are far more scary. But the bottom line is... Can I stop you for a second? What is Citizen Lab? Citizen Lab? You just said... Yeah, the Citizen Lab is the name of this research group at the University in Canada who basically studies state-sponsored and corporate malware attacks against civil society. It's run by a guy named Ron Deibert, I believe. You guys will have to fact-check me on that one. I think he just published a book, actually, or is publishing a book about all of this.

publishing a book about all of this. But it's really, they are the world leaders, in my opinion, in basically investigating these kind of attacks and exposing them. It's true public service. Let's go back to that one thing. I asked you about warrants. And you talked about the fact that people could plant evidence on things and then get motivation, rather they could show probable cause right to the court to then investigate you and then they can get everything and you said you know you thought

that a warrant man they can go and search your house and this is the kind of thing that we you know modern people are used to thinking of in the context of a warrant. Cops go to a specific place looking for specific things that are elements of a crime. Now, you know, you've heard all these things where, like, cops find a way to, like, stop somebody and they, like, are like, oh, I smelled pot or whatever, and they try to, you know, toss their car or whatever. Or plain sight doctrines where they open the door and the guy sits down and talks to them and they go, oh, you know, I see a bong or something. You know, that's paraphernalia, you're going to jail. But until I think it was 1967, warrants in the United States could only be used to gather two things.

They were called the fruits and instrumentalities of a crime, which meant even if the cops knew you did it, even if the cops knew you rode the subway or worked for this company or whatever, they couldn't get all the company's records. They couldn't, if they existed, get all the emails that you ever wrote. They couldn't get your friend to turn over like an exchange of letters that you had with this person. The fruits of the crime were the things that they gained from it, right? If they robbed the bank, the cops could get the sack of money.

The instrumentalities were the tools that were used, right? Like if you used dynamite or a crowbar or a getaway car, they could seize all of those things. But the idea that the cops can get everything, the idea that the FBI can get all these records, you know, all of these things, your whole history, is very much a new thing. And nobody talks about that today. We just presume it's normal. We presume it's okay. But between 1967 and today, think about how many more records there are about your life and how you live. Private things about you that have nothing to do with criminality and everything to do with the intimacy of who you are. And the fact that all of that now today is exposed, and not just to, let's say you love the U.S. government.

Let's say you are throwing cookouts for your local police department, but every other government in the world too. And we really need to ask ourselves, how much information do the authorities of the day need to do their job? How much do we want them to have? How much is proper and appropriately and necessary and how much is too much and if we decide the cops shouldn't have this if we decide the spies shouldn't have this well why in the hell should facebook or google or somebody trying to sell you nikes why should they have this yeah um and what's the answer to that they shouldn't yeah i mean right but nobody wants to go backwards.

Once you have gained a certain amount of access and you can justify that access, like we're stopping crimes like the Patriot Act and then later the Patriot Act 2, which was even more overreaching. Once they have that kind of power, they never go, you know what? We went too far. We have too much access to your privacy. that kind of power, they never go, you know what, we went too far. We have too much access to your privacy. And even if you've committed a crime, we shouldn't have unrelated access to all these other activities that you're involved in. Yeah. And I mean, that's exactly the thing about the whole Save the Puppies Act, right?

If it's got a name like that, you've got to be like, no, there's something doesn't smell right here. This is, there's something bad in this and i mean this so this gets back to uh that uh initial topic of uh what what did the court decide right so we had the patriot act and the patriot act was this giant law that had been written long before 9-11. It was just sitting on the shelf. And the Department of Justice, the FBI, they knew they couldn't pass this. They knew nobody would live with it because it was an extreme expansion of government authority. And then 9-11 happened, right? And that's really where it all started to go wrong. That's where we got the rise of this

new authoritarianism that we see continuing in the United States today, right? Like, if you think, and you know, like, you have problems with what's happening under Donald Trump. But you also had problems under, like, what was happening with Obama and the expansion of the war on whistleblowing. You had problems with the way drone strikes were going out of control. And you go, well, really, where did this all start, right? Where did this start to go wrong? Personally, I think 9-11 was where we made a fundamental mistake. And that was we were so frightened in the moment because we had had such an extraordinary and rare terrorist attack succeed, which, by the way, could have been presented, prevented.

And I think we discussed this in the last episode, the Congress, you know, they were just terrified. They said, look, intelligence services, cops, FBI, whoever, anything you want, blank check, here you go. That was the Patriot Act. And at the time, groups like the

American Civil Liberties Union, they were like, we are worried that this goes too far, because God bless them, that's what the American Civil Liberties Union does. And one of the provisions that they had a problem with was this Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which I believe they were calling at the time the Library Records Provision. and what it said basically this tiny little little phrase in the law said the FBI can basically get any records that it deems relevant to a counterterrorism investigation under a warrant and the worst thing the ACLU could imagine was that these guys would go to the library and get what kind of books you're reading, and like, shock horror, this is the worst thing these

guys could do, and so they protested, and they lost, and this passed, and it went on, and lo and behold, 10 years later, we find out in 2013, they had used this provision that people were worried about just going after individuals' library records to instead get the phone records of not an individual, not a group, but everybody in the United States who was making calls on U.S. telecommunications providers delivered to the NSA daily by these companies, right? So no matter who you were, no matter how innocent you were, the FBI was getting these because they said, well, every phone call is relevant to a counterterrorism investigation. And the court went, finally, you know, this is seven

years after 2013. They went, guys, that's too much. If your definition of relevance is basically anything, anywhere, all the time is relevant to a counterterrorist investigation, the question is, what then is not relevant? What is the limiting principle on this? Where is the end? And this is a very important thing, because even if it's not enough, right, even if this doesn't shut down all the programs, the program was actually already stopped a few years ago because of previous court decisions and changes in law. The fact that the courts are finally beginning to look at these,

the impacts of these sweeping new technologies that allow governments to see all of these connections and interactions that we're having every day, they're finally putting limits on it. And that is, I think, transformative. It is the foundation of what we will see in the future will begin to be the first meaningful guarantees of privacy rights in the digital age. Now that you have been, at least according to this court, exonerated or justified, at least according to this court, exonerated or justified. What happens to you and what happens to what they've been doing?

And how much of the brakes do they hit on this? What changes? Does anything change in the government's sweeping surveillance? It's a great question. I mean, you would think when you get a court, not even a first level court, but an appeals court that looks at these issues, you know, they're talking about serious stuff. They're talking about counterterrorism investigations. By the way, in the same thing, in the same decision, they said the government has been arguing, you know, for 20 years now. These programs were saving lives. They were stopping terrorist attacks.

They said, you know, first they said mass surveillance had stopped 54 terrorist attacks in the United States. Then they dropped it to seven. And then they dropped it to one. then they dropped it to seven and then they dropped it to one and the one terrorist attack or terrorist conspiracy whatever that they said it did stop was this case that was just decided and the court found and this is important after looking at the government's classified evidence so this is not just the court deciding on their own. This is the government going, look here's all the evidence that we have, the top-secret stuff, the stuff that nobody can see, please don't, you know, say our program is ineffective or whatever. The court looked at it and they went, holy crap.

This invasion of hundreds of millions of Americans' privacy happening over the span of decades did not make a difference in this case. They said even if, or even in the absence of this program, if it hadn't existed, if government had never done it, they still would have busted this ring because they were already closing in on them. The FBI already had all the evidence they needed to get a warrant to get the records through traditional means. And the fact the government had been saying, Congress had been saying for years and years and years that this program was necessary, the court says that was misleading, which is legalese for saying the government's effing liars on this. So that raises

the question of, okay, like, as you said, well, what now? How does this change everything? Well, it does mean the government has to stop doing this particular kind of program directly, but that program had already shut down. And the government has a really great team of lawyers for every agency, right? The DOJ has got lawyers, the White House has lawyers, the FBI has lawyers, the NSA has lawyers, the CIA has lawyers. And the only thing these guys are paid to do all day is to look at basically these legal opinions from the court that says all the ways the government broke the law and go, huh, is there any way we can just rejigger this program slightly so that we can dodge around that court ruling to go, all right, you know, the abuses are still happening,

but they're happening in a less abusive way. And then it's business as usual. So this is always the process with the courts ruling against the government. This is not an exceptional thing in the case of the, you know, it's NSA and CIA. What happens is when the government breaks the law, as the court has ruled them to do last week, there is no punishment, right? There is no criminal liability for all the bastards at the head of the FBI, the head of the NSA, who were violating Americans' rights for decades. Those guys don't go to prison. They don't lose their jobs. They don't even see the inside, you know, smell the inside of a courtroom where they're the ones wearing handcuffs. And because of that, it creates a culture of unaccountability, of impunity, right?

Which means with each generation of government officials, they study this. They study the cases against them. They study where they won. They study where they lost. And what they do is they try to create exactly what just happened, which is a system where they can break the law for 10 years, you know, 2001 to 2013, basically. And no one even knows that it's happening. Classification protects that, right? Then eventually it gets exposed. There's a leak. Of course, somebody

blows the whistle on it, right? It becomes a scandal. The government, you know, they'll disown this program. They'll change the law there. But somebody like the ACLU will sue the government. And so the courts will finally be forced to look at these things. But the wheels of justice turn slow, right? The government will try to put the brakes on it. The plaintiffs, the civil society organizations that are suing, will have to gather evidence. It's really difficult to do because the government's not providing anything. It's all classified.

And then basically it takes another five years, another ten years for the court to get to their verdict and then we have it. But then nobody goes to jail, right? Nobody actually faces serious consequences who is responsible for the wrongdoing and so the cycle continues. But having said that, like it might feel disempowering, people might go, oh, we can't win. But this is in the context of a system where we lack accountability, where the government does have a culture of impunity. This is what winning looks like, because things do get better. The problem is they get better by decades. They get better by half centuries and centuries.

If you look at the United States, you know, 200 years ago, 100 years ago, things were objectively worse on basically every measure. The fact that we have to crawl to the future is a sad thing when we know it could be fixed very quickly by establishing some kind of criminal liability for people like James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, who lied under oath to Congress and the American people saying exactly this program didn't exist. The NSA wasn't collecting any information on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans when in fact they were doing that every day. Obama did not fire him, right? Obama did not charge him. Obama let him serve out the end of his days and then retire happily. But it's not an Obama problem. Right. We see the same kinds of abuses happening under the Trump administration. We saw the same kind of abuses happening under the Bush administration. materially is if our government changes structurally, right? And that's kind of the issue that I think everybody in the country sees. When you look at the economy, when you look at all

the struggle, when you look at all the class conflict and divide and the political partisanship that's happening today, the problem isn't, right, like about this law or this court ruling or this agency. It's about inequality of opportunity, of access, even of privilege, right? I know people don't like talking about that. It's uncomfortable. People are like, oh my god, you know, are you like whatever? But the reality is we have a few people in the country, you know, the Jeff Bezos, the Bill Gates, that own everything, like 10 people owning half the country, and half the country owning nothing at all. And this applies to influence, right? When you have

that kind of disproportionality of resources, you have that kind of disproportionality of influence. Your vote means less. Your ability to change the law means less. Your access to the courts means less. And that's how we end up in the situation where we are today. That's very disheartening. Well, it doesn't have to be, because the important thing is we can change it. Can we, though? I mean, like, what can we do do and what can anybody change at this point to stop this overwhelming power that the government has to invade your privacy and to all the things that you exposed when you talk about how the particular program that was in place has been shut down but

all they do is manipulate it slightly do it so that you can argue in court that it's not the same thing that is a different thing come up with other justifications for it and withhold evidence and then drag the process out for years and years and years and to for you to be so optimistic is really kind of spectacular considering the fact that you've been hiding in another country allegedly we don't even know you might be in ohio we don't know you know we don't know like but but but you're essentially on the lam and for exposing something that has now been determined to be illegal so you are correct when you go back back to Obama's hope and what was his website? Hope and change.

Hope and change. A big part of hope and change was protecting whistleblowers. Do you remember that? And that was all deleted later. Later on, they were like, yeah, let's go back and take that shit out. We didn't know. I didn't know what it was like to actually be president back then. I was just trying to get in there.

But the hope and change stuff was still there when you were being tried was still there when they were chasing you and and and trying to find your location when the guardian article came out the hope and change shit was still still online yeah and that's the fact that you're so optimistic even though you've been fucked over royally i mean you are in my opinion you're a hero i really think that and i really and i really think that what what you exposed is hugely important for uh the american citizens to understand that absolute power corrupts absolutely and these people had uh the ability to look into everything. And they still do. They have the ability to look into everything you're doing. And the fact that through these years, it literally stopped zero terrorist attacks. Zero. So this sweeping, overwhelming intrusion of your privacy had no impact whatsoever on your safety well it wasn't about safety it was about power right they told us it was about safety uh that was again it's the

save the puppies act um if you uh if you see government saying all these things or for safety they're protecting you and they never establish the efficacy of it. The chances are it probably isn't effective. Because, you know, the government leaks all the time. You know, if they say, we saved this person, we did that, you know, whenever they're being criticized, they go on TV and they very seriously go, oh, that's classified and, you know, we can't expose that. And you never hear of the successes we do because it's so important that they stay secret. Look, I worked for the CIA.

I worked for the NSA. That's bullshit. When they do something great, it's on the front page of the New York Times by the end of the day because they're fighting for budget. They're fighting for clout. They're fighting for authority.

They're fighting for new laws constantly. So there are no real accomplishments that are in the shadows that they just don't tell us about? I mean, very rarely. Think about when we got bin Laden, right? Obama's like, I want a press conference within the next 20 minutes. And again, this is not to bag on Obama. Any president would do this. That's just how it is. Now, of course, there are some secret successes, but it's about stuff that no one cares about. It's stuff that wouldn't win them political clout. It's like they gained an advantaged negotiating position on the price of shrimp and clove cigarettes, which was actually

one of the stories that came out of some kind of uh classified disclosure that i think was from from wiki leaks that kind of stuff it actually does happen right but we're never having a conversation of do you want to give up all of your privacy rights so that we can get better prices on shrimp and clove cigarettes like that would be a very different political conversation than do you want to give up all of your privacy rights because if you don't your children will die and you know you know it's save the puppies right exactly save the puppies 2020 so this this thing you ask about uh you know me and optimism like i have been criticized relentlessly uh for being a naive optimist. And my answer is that you don't do what I did unless you believe that people can do better.

I took a very comfortable life. I was living in Hawaii with the woman that I loved. I had to do basically no work but go in the office and read spy feeds about people, you know, all day long. And I could have done that, you know, for the rest of my life quite happily. It would have been great. I set that on fire because I believed that what I saw was wrong. And I believed that people deserved to know about it. And I believed that if people did know about it, that things would change.

I did not believe it was going to things would change. I did not believe it was going to save the world. I did not believe I was going to get, you know, a ticker tape parade and a pardon, you know, be welcomed with open arms. There's actually, if you watch Citizen Four, which is the documentary from 2013, where I was meeting with reporters, Laura Poitras had the camera rolling in the room when we talked for the first time. I said, you know, the government's going to say I harm national security. I put everybody in jeopardy. They're going to charge me under the Espionage Act.

And they really did try to destroy my life. They tried to put me in prison forever. And to this day, they are still trying to do the same thing. That's just how it is. You know, this wasn't like... Even though. Even though, yeah. Even though the most recent ruling has showed that you were correct

and what they were doing was illegal and you exposed a crime. Yeah. Well, I mean, this is a continuing story. In 2013, you know, when this first came out, President Obama went out on stage, because he was getting singed in the press, and said, take it from me, nobody is listening to your phone calls. Just metadata. listening to your phone calls. It wasn't like they had headsets on, you know, 300 plus million people in the United States. You'd have to have computers do that. But what they did do was they collected the records of your phone calls. And to an analyst, an intelligence analyst, that's more valuable than the transcripts of your phone calls. We care less about what you said on the phone

than who you called, when you called them, what else you were doing, what your phone was doing, right? The websites that you would access, the cell phone towers they were connected to. All of those things, that metadata creates what's called the social graph, your pattern of life. It says based on when your phone becomes active in the morning, when you start calling people, when you start browsing, when you check your, you know, Twitter feed, you're scrolling on Instagram, whatever, that's when you wake up. When it stops, that's when you go to sleep. We see where you are. We see where you live. We see who you live with. All of those things, right? That's just from metadata. You don't need the content of your communications. I don't need to see what picture you posted on Instagram to know you're awake and active and you're communicating

with this person at this phone, this place, this area code, this IP address, you know, this version of software, whether they're using Android or iOS, you know, all of these things. And now as we get smartphones, as your cars begin connecting to the internet, it's just richer and richer and richer data. I don't know where I was going with that. Sorry, I got off topic. But the bottom line is things get better. They get better slowly. Oh, right. Sorry. Now, Obama was saying, you know, nobody listens to your phone calls, right? That was June 2013. By January of 2014, giving his State of the Union address, he went, although he could never condone what I did, the conversation that I started had made us stronger as a nation. He was calling for the end of this program, the passage of a new law called the USA Freedom Act,

another Save the Puppies Act, which was better than the thing it was replacing, but still really bad. And he did that not out of the goodness of his heart. He did that because the court in December of 2013 had ruled these programs were unlawful and likely unconstitutional. And this is, again, it's not an Obama thing. It's a power thing. This is how the system works, right? But year by year, step by step, things get better. We make progress a little bit at a time. And the fact that someone is suing, the fact that the ACLU is bringing this case, and we should thank them for that, for years, which is a difficult and expensive proposition with no guarantee of success, means that we have stronger privacy

rights seven years later as a result. That doesn't mean we save the world. That doesn't mean we relax. We sit down on the couch. You know, there's the golden sunset. That's not how life works. It is a constant struggle. But when we do struggle, when we do stand up, we believe in something so strongly we don't merely believe in it. But we risk something for that belief. We work together and we pull the species forward an inch at a time. We move away from that swamp of impunity and unaccountability into a future where, hey, maybe not just the little guy breaks the law and goes to jail, but maybe a senator, maybe an attorney general, maybe a president, right? And that would be a very good precedent to have. Do you wonder whether or not someone will use you as a political chess piece at this point and decide. I mean,

I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure you have overwhelming support of the general public. Most people believe that what you did was a good thing for America and that you are, in fact, a patriot. I think the vast majority of people and the people that I've talked to, I have talked to a few people that disagree with that. They're misinformed. They were misinformed about what you did and what information you leaked or whether or not people's lives were put in danger because of that. And I had to explain the whole chain of events and where the information

actually was, how it was leaked and what you had done to protect people. There's, there's a a could you please explain that because it wasn't just that the information was dumped yeah so i mean this is really the subject of our our last conversation goes on for three hours but i wrote a book yeah but i just just so this will stand alone i'll go through it so uh the idea and this is the subject of my first book permanent Permanent Record, which was why I came on last year, and actually just this week the soft cover came out, so it's more affordable for people who didn't want to get it before, is this story, right?

It's who I am, where I came from, why I did this, how, and what it meant. I didn't just reveal information. I gave it to journalists, right? These journalists were only given access to the information on the condition that they would publish no story simply because it was newsworthy or interesting, right? They weren't going to clickbait classified documents. They would only publish stories if they were willing to make an independent institutional judgment and stand by it That it was in the public interest That this be known right and then as an extraordinary measure on top of that before they publish the stories, right?

And this is not me publishing things putting them out on the internet or blog or something, which I could have done Would have been very easy It's not me telling them what to write or not to write. They're doing this, The Guardian, The Washington Post, you know, Der Spiegel. They are then going to the United States government in advance of publication and giving the government a chance, an adversarial opportunity to argue against publication, to go, you guys don't get it. You know, Snowden's a liar.

These documents are false. Or he's not lying. And yes, these are true, but these programs are effective. They're saving lives, whatever. And here's what we can show you to convince you, please don't publish this or leave out this detail. And in every case I'm aware of, that process was followed. And that's why now in 2020, remember, we're seven years on from 2013. The government has never shown a single example of any harm that has come as a result of the publication of these documents back in 2013, the revelation of mass surveillance. That's what I wanted to bring up. It's unscientific, but I've seen polls run on Twitter very recently in the last few weeks when this pardon question came out, where 90%, like 90 plus percent of people were in favor of a pardon. And that's crazy. Even in 2013, when we were doing well, you know, it was like 60% in favor among young people, but it was like 40% for older people. But that's because the government was on TV every Sunday, you know, bringing these CIA suits going, who were there with their very stern faces going, oh, this caused great damage and it cost lives and everything like that.

But those arguments stopped being convincing when seven years later, after they told us the sky is falling, the atmosphere never catches fire, right? The oceans never boil off. We're still alive. And I think people can see through that. And that was, again, this exactly what you said. People don't know this history, that 10% who are against it, and actually a lot of the 90% who were even in favor of it, they don't know the details. It wasn't well covered by the media at the time. It was all about this person said that, that person said that. Is it true? Is it false? You know, sort of,

they were playing on character. They were trying to make a drama out of it. And that's a big part of why I wrote permanent record uh and it's been tremendously gratifying to see people connect to it and actually this you know i mentioned it uh we talked on on twitter when we were talking about the possibility of having this conversation and i was like i looked back at our first conversation we had and it's had like 16 million views man that's for a three-hour conversation. And then probably an equal amount of people just listened to it in audio. Right.

And that was just for one clip on YouTube. There were smaller clips talking about cell phone surveillance. And that was like another 10 million views. 77,000 comments. The book on Amazon has thousands of reviews. thousand comments. The book on Amazon has thousands of reviews. It's got a 4.8 rating, which like by the number of people and how it's rated, that's one of the best autobiographies, according to ordinary people, the audience, in like years. And to see that after these years of attacks, to me, is evidence that despite all these news guys uh at night going well senator you know uh

no one really cares about privacy these days these kids with their facebooks and their instagrams uh you know people do care what they're actually feeling is kind of what you got to earlier with like this sensation that nothing changes like even when when we win, we lose. But the thing is, you've got to have a broader view of time. You've got to look at the sweep of history rather than the atmosphere of the moment. Because right now, yes, things are very bad. And even if you love Donald Trump, because I know some of your viewers do, you got to admit, a lot of things in the world suck right now. a lot of things in the world suck right now. A lot of things in the country suck right now. But the thing is, they only get better

if somebody does the hard work to make them better. And there's no magic wand. There's no happy ending, right? Life is not that simple. But together, we can make it better. And we do that through struggle. make it better. And we do that through struggle. Do you, has there been any discussion about someone pardoning you? Has there been, I mean,

this was the question initially that led to this, but I wanted you to expand on what actually went down. But has there been any discussion about you being pardoned or someone using you as, like I said, a political chess piece. Because it would be a smart thing. And if anybody has had a problem with the intelligence community, it is Donald Trump. I mean, he's the only president in any memory that has had open disagreements and been openly disparaging of the intelligence community. Well, that's not true. There was JFK but that didn't go very long that's right i forgot about that good point yeah that that went terrible for him for trump for trump it actually seems to be a positive in some strange way um if anybody is going to pardon you i would imagine that would be the guy so this idea of the political

bargaining chip has actually been used in a different way there was the idea and it's funny because this was actually promoted by all these like cia deputy directors and whatnot who were responsible for these abuses of americans rights uh who were writing opinion pieces in the newspaper and they were like you you know, what if Vladimir Putin, you know, sends Snowden to Trump as like an inauguration gift? Wouldn't that be terrible for him? And they were like, hint, hint, you know. But I don't think when we talk about this stuff, I don't think there's anything I can do to control it. One of the things people have asked is, like, would I accept a pardon from Donald Trump? And I think that misapprehends what a pardon is and how it works.

A pardon's not a contract. A pardon is not something that you agree to. A pardon is a constitutionally enumerated power. I think it's Article 2, Section 2. innumerated power. I think it's Article 2, Section 2, where the reason that it exists is basically a check on the laws and the judiciary, where the laws as written become corrosive to the intention of them. And this is something that I think actually is meaningful. You know, people are like, are you going to ask Donald Trump for a pardon? And the answer is no. But I will ask for a pardon for Terry Albury and Daniel Hale and Reality Winner and all the other American whistleblowers who have been treated unfairly by this system. The whole thing that brought this up was two weeks ago. Some journalist asked the president, like, oh, you know, what do you think about Snowden? Are you going to pardon him? And he said he seemed to be thinking about it. He heard I had been treated very unfairly.

That's accurate, because it's impossible to get a fair trial under the Espionage Act, which is what I've been charged under. And every American whistleblower since Daniel Ellsberg in the 1970s has been charged under this law, the Espionage Act, which makes no distinction between someone who is stealing secrets and selling them to foreign governments, which neither I nor any of these other people have done, and giving them freely to journalists to advance the public interest of the American people rather than the private interest of these spies, you know, individually. And this is the kind of circumstance for which the pardon power exists, where the courts and judges will not or cannot end a fundamentally unfair and abusive

circumstance in the United States, either because they're fearful of being criticized, of soft on terrorism or whatever, or because the law prohibits them from doing so. The problem with the Espionage Act is it means you can't tell the jury why you did what you did. You cannot mount what's called a public interest defense, where you say, hell yeah, I broke the law. I took a classified document and I gave it to the journalist and the journalist published it. And then it went to the courts and the court said, this guy was right. The government was breaking the law. In the courts, if I were, you know, in prison today, as reality winners in prison today, or rather Daniel Hale, who revealed government abuses related to the drone program, or

Terry Albury, who revealed problems with racial policies in the FBI, how they were being abused. with racial policies in the FBI, how they were being abused. When these guys are on trial, all of that stuff is forbidden from being spoken. Daniel Ellsberg's lawyer asked Daniel Ellsberg, why did you do it? In court, in open court, under oath, you know, why did you publish or provide journalists the Pentagon Papers? And the prosecutor said, objection, objection. He can't say that. And the judge said, sustained, fine. He can't say it. And his attorney looked at the judge like he was crazy and said, I've never heard of

a trial where the jury is not allowed to hear why a defendant did what they did. And the judge said, well, you're seeing one now. And this is why the pardon power exists. Well, that's what's so creepy about something like the Espionage Act. If you can't even establish a motive, you can't even explain that you were doing this for the American people, that there's a real precedent that should be set for this kind of thing, especially in regards to what you're being charged with, which has now been determined that you were exposing something that was, in fact, illegal. And this is – it's an incredibly un-American thing. It's very un-American. It really is.

But this is – It's disturbingly so. I mean, we see these kind of injustices happening in the United States every day, and it's not about the Espionage Act specifically. I mean, you see it with drug charges, you see it with civil forfeiture, asset forfeiture, where like, you know, they take an old lady's car because her nephew was selling weed or something like that. And there's no way for her to get it back. Whether we're talking civil, whether we're talking federal, whether we're talking, sorry, civil or criminal, whether we're talking federal or state, we see where the system of laws in the United States is letting people down constantly. But the question becomes, how do we fix this? How does that get addressed? And addressed and you know you can mount a national campaign

you can try to change the law but as we talked about before unless you're unless you're Jeff Bezos unless you're Bill Gates that's very difficult to do but the governor can pardon people for state crimes the president can pardon people for federal crimes but we have not developed a compassionate culture that actually looks at this. Like every president has abused their pardon power or their pardon authority to sort of let their cronies off the hook. We've seen it under this president. We've seen it under previous presidents. But it is very difficult to establish an understanding among average people that it's actually okay for presidents to use this power more liberally when particularly we're talking about nonviolent offenses when we're talking about things

that have not you know, they're not that controversial, but they are being controversialized because of the political atmosphere of partisanship where everything has to be criticized for political advantage from one side or the other. Everything's become a football. Well, particularly in your case, when you're talking about polls that show 90% of people support you being pardoned, and this recent ruling that what you exposed was illegal, I wonder how much the president actually knows about your case.

You know, because... It's a good question. I mean, he's famous for barely paying attention in briefings. And, you know, I mean, I just, I can't imagine that in 2013, this was fully on his radar, where he investigated it and read all the documents and really got deep into it. I can't imagine he really knows everything that went down. I bet he hasn't seen Citizen Four. I mean bet i sure i really you know i mean i mean i just i bet listen if i had his number i really would um and i i do know people who know him and i am going to

communicate that uh after this conversation i think that would be i literally think that would win him a tremendous amount of political favor. I really do. I think particularly at this point in time where people are really, look, if there's ever a time where people are fed up about the overreaching power of government, it's during this pandemic lockdown, you know, for good or for bad, whether it's incorrect or incorrect, people are very frustrated right now with power. They're very frustrated right now with the draconian measures that some states have put in place to keep people from working and their eyes keep people safe. motivation to pardon you, because I think that it would show people that the president actually does agree that there have been some overreaches. And in your case, not just an overreach, but a miscarriage of justice, a disgusting un-American overreach. I think when you ask this question

about like, how much does he know about the case?'s it's fair to say not a lot because he's intentionally being misadvised uh by his advisors you've had the attorney general william barr who says he would be you know vehemently opposed to a pardon for me uh his secretary of state mike pompeo has literally uh i i think said i should be killed john bolton at least said i should be killed um, you know, I think when this conversation first came up a couple weeks ago, Mike Pompeo probably hid every pen in the White House because he's trying to make sure things like this don't happen. I think there are a lot of people who try and control the president. But this whole question about, you know, But this whole question about, you know, what's right for me, what's right for the president in terms of political advantage is the wrong question.

This is why I haven't been advocating for pardon. I didn't ask for a pardon from Obama. I did ask for a pardon for Chelsea Manning, which we didn't get. But we did get clemency. And that's an important thing. Because what we need is we need for pardons to be made not as a question of political advantage, but as a decision taken to further the public interest. And this is why I say, pardon all of these previous whistleblowers. Thomas Drake, John Kiriakou, Terry Albury, Reality Winner, Daniel Hale.

There are many names. Daniel Ellsberg, right? He wasn't convicted, so he got out. But these people deserve recognition as the patriots who stood up and took a risk for the rest of us that they are. Look at the current cases, right? They don't even require an exercise of the pardon authority. But Julian Assange, right now, today, is in court in the UK fighting an extradition trial to the United States. For those who don't remember, this is the guy who's the head of

WikiLeaks, right? And he really fell out of favor in 2016 because he published the Hillary emails and everything like that, or Podesta emails. But he's not being charged for that. The extradition trial has nothing to do with that. Actually, the U.S. government, under William Barr, the current Attorney General, is trying to extradite this guy and put him in prison for the rest of his life for the best work that WikiLeaks ever did. That has won awards in every country basically around the planet, including the United States, which is the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, right,

detainee records in Guantanamo Bay, things that are about explicit war crimes and abuses of power, torture and people who were killed who should have been killed, violations of use of force protocols and all of these things, right? And this could all be made to go away if William Barr, the attorney general, simply dropped the charges. And he should. Why isn't he? Well, Julian Assange has literally been tortured.

I mean, the guy was locked in that embassy for how many years with no exposure to daylight, just completely trapped. And you've seen videos of him skateboarding around the embassy. I mean, it looks like he's going crazy in there. And now he's in jail and on trial. The whole thing is, it's so disturbing because when it boils down to like, what did he do that is illegal?

What did he do that people disagree with, that people in the United States disagree with in terms of the citizens? Well, he exposed horrific crimes. He exposed things that the United States citizens are deeply opposed to. And the fact that that is something that you in this country can be prosecuted for, that they would try to extradite you and drag you from another country, they'd kick him out of the embassy and bring him back to the United States to try him for that. It seems like we're talking about some kangaroo court. It seems like we're talking about some dictatorship where you have no protection to freedom of speech, no protection

under the First Amendment, no protection under the rights of the press. It's so disturbing that there are workarounds for our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, that we all just agree to, just accept that this is happening. There's no riots in the streets for this. No one's up in arms that they're trying to extradite Julian Assange. No one, I mean, it's not in the news. Like, for whatever reason, the mainstream news has barely covered it over this, his current court proceedings in the UK. the mainstream media, the broadcast outlets, as a partisan figure. Now, and it's really sad because the most dangerous thing about the charges against Julian Assange is if they extradite Julian Assange, if Julian Assange is convicted, he's charged under the Espionage Act, the same act that I'm charged under, the same thing that all these whistleblowers are charged under, but he is not a source. The way as abusive as these Espionage Act charges have run in the last 50 years is the government had sort of a quiet agreement. They

never charged the press outlets. They never charged the New York Times. They never charged the Washington Post. They don't charge the journalists. They charge their sources. They charge the Chelsea Mannings, right? They charge the Edward Snowdens. They charge their sources. They charge the Chelsea Mannings, right? They charge the Edward Snowdens. They charge the Thomas Strakes, the Daniel Ellsbergs. But the press, they're left alone. They are breaking that agreement with the Julian Assange case. Assange is not the source.

He is merely a publisher. He runs a press organization. People are like, oh, Julian Assange is not a journalist. He's not whatever. There is no way you can make that argument in court in a way that will be defensible, particularly given what we've talked about with the government and how careful they are to avoid prior court precedents and to work around it and create, you know, obscure legal theories that are legal fictions. Everyone knows they're a lie. Everyone knows these theories are false. But under the law, you know, they bend just enough that they can pass the argument through and get the conviction they want. You cannot convict Julian Assange, the chief editor and

publisher of WikiLeaks, under the Espionage Act without exposing the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, Fox, whoever, to the same kind of charges under this president and every coming president. And I think people don't think about that. That is disturbing. You know, another thing that's disturbing, well, there's many things that are disturbing about this case, but another thing that's been disturbing was he was a guy who the left supported up until 2016, and then it became inconvenient. Yeah, when he was dragging Bush, it was great.

Then when he's dragging Clinton, it's not so great. Right, right. When the footage was revealed from the, I believe it was a helicopter that showed it was a collateral murder remember that video that was put out in iraq yeah it was a apache helicopter in iraq firing on two reuters journalists uh who were embedded with like local militants or something yes exactly um that was the left's he was the darling of the left. I mean, they were all free Julian Assange. And it's just it's so interesting how that narrative can shift so completely to all of a sudden he's a puppet of Russia. And that's what it became in 2016. And that propaganda stuck.

and that propaganda stuck and people who were pro julian assange before now all of a sudden i i've i've seen these people say fuck wiki leaks you know and fuck julian assange like that guy's a puppet of russia i'm like like how much have you looked into this it's amazing how that kind of propaganda when you just get the surface veneer of the the the whatever the narrative there that is they're trying to push how well it spreads that all these people who were these educated left-wing people now all of a sudden were anti-wiki leaks and i'm like do you not remember how this whole thing got started it was the iraq war which we all opposed. Do you not remember this whole bullshit lie about the weapons of mass destruction that got us into this crazy war? And then Julian Assange and WikiLeaks exposed so much of this and

yet here we are in 2016 it turns up on its head and now he's a puppet of Russia and WikiLeaks is bad because inconveniently, the information that he released damaged Hillary Clinton's campaign. Yeah, I think a lot of it comes down to people forgetting what principles are and why they're important, right? You can hate Julian Assange. You can think Julian Assange is a puppet of Russia. You can think he's the worst person on earth, right? He's a reincarnation of Hitler or Stalin or whatever. And still realize that convicting him harms you.

It harms your society. It harms your children's future. People forget about this in today's world where everything's become partisan, but the ACLU cut their teeth. They made their reputation on defending a Nazi march through a Jewish neighborhood. And this is because it's about the right to assembly, the right to freedom of speech. You do not have a right to be free from offense, right? There is no constitutional right to a safe space. But that doesn't mean you do nothing. That doesn't mean you have no opinion. That doesn't mean you have no political power. What it does

mean is that you have to recognize that everyone has the right to their own opinion, even terrible opinions. What we have to protect is the speech, is the platform, is the assembly to their own opinion, even terrible opinions. What we have to protect is the speech, is the platform, is the assemblies, the associations, the process that allows us to understand and recognize and identify when people did break the law, when they did harm others, to go to a fair trial where the jury can consider why they did what they did, what they did, and not just whether it was legal or illegal, but whether it was moral or immoral, whether it was right or whether it was wrong. And whether they are the lowest person, you know, the most ordinary citizen in the country, or the highest elected official, hold them to the same standard of behavior, the same rule of law.

rule of law. Whereas today, you know, we call them public officials and private citizens, but with all of the surveillance, all of the data collection, people in power, commercially or governmentally, they know everything about us, and we know nothing about them. We break the smallest law, we go to jail, we get a fine, we get screwed, we can't get a job, we can't get a loan. We go to jail. We get a fine. We get screwed. We can't get a job. We can't get a loan But if they you know flagrantly abuse their office their authority They get a pass they go on the speaker's circuit, you know, it's it's all sunshine and rainbows for them And the way we change these things is remembering our principles of being willing to stand to defend them It's also instinctual for people to be partisan.

And it's tribal. It's a tribal thing. And in this day and age, people are rabidly partisan. And the rejection of nuance is so disturbing to me. And it's so disturbing that a lot of this happens from the left now, whereas the left used to be all about freedom of speech the aclu is i mean it's just you you automatically think of the liberal people when you think of the aclu but the aclu just for the record is a non-partisan organization yes but supported overwhelmingly certainly by by left-wing people um i mean, obviously they are nonpartisan,

but people are so partisan today that this rejection of nuance, it's so easy for people to look at things as left versus right and ignore all of the sins of their team and concentrate on defeating the other side. And it seems to be a giant part of the problem today, so much so that people are in favor, a lot of people are in favor of deplatforming people that just simply disagree with them.

And I want to talk to you about that because that seems to be a gigantic issue. Not seems to be. It is a gigantic issue with social media, whether it's with Twitter or YouTube or many things. This idea that we should look across both parties for people that are reasonable and rational people and look at what we agree with rather than simply sitting on partisan policy, on party lines, and only voting blue across the board or red across the board. And let's look at reasonable people from both sides, whether it's Dan Crenshaw and Tulsi Gabbard or whoever it is. They represent different parties, but they're both reasonable people. Let's get them together and have these communications.

They were banned from Twitter. They were simply banned from Twitter for simply saying, reject both Trump and Biden. Look for a third choice. this is not there's nothing offensive about what they did in fact they're they're encouraging choice they're encouraging this idea that we don't have to be a two-party system that in fact even though we have had libertarian and green parties we kind of look at it like bullshit. It's like a protest vote. If you vote Green party, you know you're not going to elect that person for president.

I mean, it's kind of like we tolerate it. But when someone like Ross Perot came around, it threw a monkey wrench into the gears and became very dangerous for both sides because the Republicans lost a lot of votes. And that's how Bill Clinton got into office. And George H.W. bush did not get a second term directly because the influence of ross perot so they changed the requirements for getting into the debates and everything became very different and very more complicated after that the fact that they would be that twitter would be willing to ban unity 2020 specifically because they're calling for people to walk away from this idea

that you have to either vote for trump or biden and trying to get mainstream acceptance of a potential third party candidate is extremely disturbing but de-platforming in general i think is extremely disturbing because it's a slippery slope if you decide that someone has views that are opposite of yours and they bother you those views bother you and you could do whatever you can to get them off of a platform it's very dangerous because someone from the right who gains power or someone from an opposing party that gains power if they get into a position of power in social media, if they own a gigantic social media company like Twitter or YouTube, and they decide in turn to go after people that agree with your ideology, then we have a freedom of speech issue. And you're literally supporting the suppression of freedom of speech if you're supporting deplatforming people on social media. supporting, deplatforming people on social media. And I've always thought that the answer to someone saying something you disagree with

or someone saying something you vehemently oppose is a better argument. That's what it's supposed to be. It's supposed to be you should expose the problems and what they're doing. And I'm seeing so many people, particularly on the left, that are happy when people get de-platformed and people that just are just are contrary to their perspective contrary to their ideology and it's it's i think it's very dangerous and it's too easy it's too easy to accept it's in this this goes back to what you're saying, this partisan viewpoint that we have today, fiercely, rabidly partisan in a way that I've never seen in my life. Yeah, I think the question of deplatforming, this is one of the central issues of our time that's really overlooked and it's underappreciated.

So many people on both sides are in favor of this when it's somebody they don't like, right? Yes. The central issue is this. Do we want companies deciding what can and cannot be said? Do we want governments deciding what can and cannot be said? If the answer is yes, it is a very different kind of society than what we have had traditionally. I do think we need to understand where this impulse came from, how it came to be, and why it seemed

reasonable. And a lot of people forget this. And it came from ISIS. If you remember the Islamic State was all over YouTube, they were all over Twitter, they were all over Facebook, and they were literally burning people alive in cages. They were beheading people, you know, pushing people up buildings, just horrible stuff. And that raises a tough question for a lot of these companies. Now, it's very easy to make the argument that, all right, this is a direct call for violence. This is literally supporting terrorism. And as a private company, we have no obligation to let people use our platforms. Therefore, we're closing their accounts, right? We're shutting this off. We're erasing it. We can do whatever we want. It's our website. Don't like it? Leave.

Constitutionally, there's no freedom of speech issue implicated there because the Constitution restrains the federal government and the state governments in certain circumstances. not private companies. But once that precedent had been established that they would do this for ISIS, they started going, well, what about these other people? What about these things that could be construed as calls to violence? Okay, what if they're not violence at all? What if it's harassment? What if it's abuse? What if it's racism? What if it's, you know, criminality? What if it's drug culture? What if it's pornography? What if it's abuse? What if it's racism? What if it's, you know, criminality? What if it's drug culture? What if it's pornography? What if it's whatever? And there will always be more what-ifs. And the categories of prohibited speech will constantly expand. So we need to ask ourselves, well, who is best placed to make those decisions about what can and cannot be said?

Traditionally, the access to broadcast was limited. You had radio, you had TV. If you didn't have that, you had the soapbox on the corner, right? Or the local university, the coffee shop. And somebody owned those places, or somebody ran those places. You know, the college president would say this person would be invited to speak, this person wouldn't be invited to speak. And I actually think it's right and proper for people to be able to protest speakers to say this person shouldn't speak at our college. But I think the college itself, the institution, has to be willing to make value judgments about why they invite

certain people to speak. And if that person's a very unpopular speaker, if that person is representing a viewpoint that is not well supported by the college, if it's not necessarily what students want to hear, but the administration believes, like the faculty believes, that it's something students should hear. Isn't that why we have universities? We don't go to class to learn, you know, necessarily, like, you don't go to a literature course to read the things that you want to read. You just go home and read those yourself. You go to study a curriculum to something else. You want to benefit from the experience from the perspectives of others. The question that people have is how does this expand into the wider audience, right? What happens when you move beyond universities? What happens when you move to news

broadcasts? What happens when you move to the internet? What happens when everyone everywhere can broadcast? And this is where I think things get really tricky. Not can people say what they want as long as they're not advocating violence or whatever, I don't think this should be a difficult issue. But this gets complicated when you have things like YouTube's next video suggestion algorithm. Because the idea of universal speech, universal ability to broadcast, is exactly as you said. Well, what is the counter for this? You've got freaking Nazis on the internet. And I'm not talking like whatever, the guy's got a Trump sticker on his truck. I'm talking goose-stepping, you know,

swastika-bearing, actual freaking Nazi. You have those people out there on the internet calling for violence, calling for all these terrible things. And normally the way you deal with this, even in the case of something like ISIS, you drag them onto the platform. You discredit their ideas before the world. Because if you don't, if you drive them underground, if you make them this faction that's hanging out at a radical mosque, or they're hanging out at the hardware store if they're freaking Nazis or whatever. There are places where you create its own community that is sheltered from other perspectives, it's sheltered from other ideas, and that is where extremism thrives, where it cannot be challenged, where it cannot be exposed for what it really is. But when you've got YouTube going, oh, you like Nazi A? How about Nazi B? How about Nazi C,

right? These people never get exposed to counter speech. And this is where things get tricky. Well, it also gets tricky when you decide that someone is saying something that's offensive and you remove them from the platform and then you open the door for other things being offensive things that maybe aren't offensive to you the the slope gets slippery and then you have wrong speak you have you have newly dictated language that you have to use you have new restrictions on ideologies things you're not allowed to espouse i mean twitter will ban you for dead naming someone they will ban you for life meaning if you transition to be a woman and you call yourself edwina and i call you edward you i will be banned for life with no recourse which is

madness it's mad because i can call you fuck face and no one has a problem with it yeah you know i'm saying i could call you a terrible i could i could call you that and there's no problem but if i choose a name that used to accurately represent you as a different gender because this is some new incredibly important distinction that we've decided. It takes precedence over everything else, including it's more significant than insults, more significant than demeaning of, I can call you a moron, I could demean your intellect, all those things are fine. But if I choose to call you by a name that used to accurately represent you when you were a different gender or when you identified

with a different gender because of today's political climate, that is grounds for banning you for life. It shows you how incredibly slippery censorship can get because I would have never imagined that. If you said to me 10 years ago well when someone becomes a transgender person 10 years 10 years ago if you said this to me it was if someone becomes a transgender person you call them by their original name you could be banned from social media for life i'm like get the fuck out of here they'll never get to that no one's going to be that unreasonable that's crazy because you could call some people so many disparaging and insulting names but you can't say their name that isn't even insulting dead naming

that's what it's called so it just shows you dead naming of today you agree with that today that opens up the door for all kinds of crazy shit five years from now ten years from now, ten years from now, if we still get more and more rabidly politically polarized and our idea of PC culture gets more and more extreme, you're on a greased hill. And if you decide to give up a little ground, the slide is imminent. I think this is – you can argue on that axis. You can argue on that axis, but I think incrementalism and the failures of imagination going, you know, 10 years ago we couldn't imagine this would have been a bannable offense, is the wrong way to go about it. Because if you go back to the founding of the country saying, you know, women should have the right to vote, black people should have the right to vote, you know, that was unimaginable. That would get you equivalently deplatformed, not welcomed to the speaking community or whatever. Sure, but those are positive and inclusive things. I'm not saying I'm associating these directly.

I'm talking about the principle here. Because you can attack these things in that direction and go, oh, you know, this doesn't seem right. But remember, it's Twitter making these rules. It's YouTube making these rules. It's not a court making these rules. And anybody technically today can decide who can and cannot speak on their platforms. The question is, what should we do? What kind of culture should we promote? How should we have these conversations? How should we make them available?

And I think civility is not too much to ask people generally. As you say, you know, calling people fuckface or moron or whatever is completely normal on the internet, and that's not really going to get you banned from anywhere. And now you have all of these companies sort of contorting themselves to fit into these blocks to not isolate or sort of anger all of these different demographics. But if we truly want to have a global broadcast, a public commons,

the question I think that's more important here is not so much what should and should not be banned, because that's accepting the premise of banning, it's how do we create an inclusive platform where everyone can talk and even strictly and harshly disagree with each other without it coming down to name calling, without trying to dox people, without trying to basically dog whistle them or screw them or hurt them or harm them. However, now look, I am not above calling people bad names on the internet. I've said terrible things. I grew up on the internet, right? I was an asshole.

Right. And we all were. And the thing is, the worst things that we say at any moment today, they are permanent. The internet never forgets, right? So when you say these things, and you know, there's a young audience listening right now to like everything. And they think it's cool, they think it's funny, or they don't think it's cool, or they don't think it's funny, but they think they shouldn't be deplatformed for it. They're edgy, you know, they push the lines or whatever. They get that out there, and they start emulating this behavior. They start saying mean things. They start saying cruel things.

I did it myself, right? Not in this context, but in whatever the equivalent would be, you know, 20 years ago. And that's, there are going to be consequences for that. They're going to be judged by that, whether they should or should not, whether it was right or wrong, because as you said, there's so much tribalism today. And I think we have to create positive examples. I think you're right. The deplatforming is a huge issue. It is a tremendous issue, right? But we should think about what it is that we're actually fighting against. And I don't think like trans issues or whatever, when it comes down to basically civility, is the hill to die on, because i think there's better arguments well i i certainly think we should encourage civility there's no no doubt about it what i'm

getting at is that the idea that you can be banned for life for that is it's preposterous i think civility is one of the most important things our culture could ever promote and i and i think it's very difficult to promote civility online because of the anonymous aspect of internet interaction. Right. There's no accountability. You're not getting social cues from people. It's just a completely different world when you're interacting with people, especially for kids. I mean, if you had given me the internet when I was 15 years old, I would have said the most horrific things to people for sure. And I'm sure many 15 year old kids are doing exactly that right now. I think the more we can encourage civility, the better we all are in all aspects of our life, whether it's person to person, face to face or online.

I try very hard to only say things online that I would say to someone's face. And if you, online now, I do not interact with people in any way, shape, or form that's negative. I don't do it. I don't believe in it. I treat it the same way. If it's avoidable, I avoid it. And I think that's incredibly important. But this my been important point which is I mean what it really gets to the core of the issue failures of civility the fact that people say bad things yes the people don't have accountability that there are you know there's a whole spectrum of people out there from angels to devils right there's ordinary people and even the best of people have bad days and say terrible things. For sure. We do need people to have some responsibility for having a thicker skin.

You know, look, guys, I've had people literally advocating my murder, right? Like just torture and murder. Yeah, literally. Horrible things. Yeah, yeah. I've seen it. For years. And the people that I've blocked on my Twitter account are the ones who are posting about, like, Bitcoin scams that are like, you know, send me five Bitcoin, I'll send you five Bitcoin back.

That's hilarious. I'm not saying this is the example to emulate. What it is, though, is we have to recognize that some people aren't worth engaging. Some people aren't worth listening to. It's a lesson. Right. But that doesn't mean necessarily that you take their voice entirely. Yes, I most certainly agree with that, particularly in terms of deplatforming. My question to you about this is, and I've raised this question with many people,

and I really haven't got a satisfactory answer. Do you think that things that get so huge, like Twitter or Facebook or even YouTube, do they become a basic right? Is it like the utilities? Is it like electricity and water? Is it like electricity and water? The ability to communicate online seems to me a core aspect of what it means to be a human being with a voice in 2020. And I don't think it's as simple as removing someone from Twitter is simply a company exercising their right to have whatever they want on their platform.

I think when it gets as big as Twitter is, I think we've passed into a new realm. And I think we need to acknowledge that, whether it's Twitter or YouTube or Facebook or what have you. And I think it should be very difficult to remove someone from those platforms. And I think it should probably involve some sort of a trial. I mean, this is a really, really tough issue. It's much larger than just deplatforming, because what we're really talking about is the Internet as a public utility. The Internet is water and power.

And its ability to shape culture. Right, right. When you talk about something like Twitter and the size of it, when the president is basically directing policy from Twitter, it's clear something has changed. And threatening countries. Yeah, right. Yeah. That is, our laws were not designed with that in mind. And unfortunately, we have a legislature that's just fundamentally broken.

This gets back to the electoral system, which you talked about earlier. with that in mind. And unfortunately, we have a legislature that's just fundamentally broken. This gets back to the electoral system, which you talked about earlier. You know, most countries in the world have a wide swath of parties. They're not this two-party binary system where it's just two groups, largely neocorporatist groups that are just handing power back and forth. The president changes, but the actual lawmakers, the actual structure behind the president, the advisors, are largely from the same cohorts. We don't have that legislative, we don't have that governmental structure that allows us to adapt in a way that truly represents, I think, the broadest spectrum of public opinion

in a way that allows us to respond to changes in technology in a meaningful way, which is what's left us stranded today where these companies are sort of deciding things for themselves. It's because there is a vacuum of legislation. Now, there's a question of do we want legislation? People on different spectrums from authoritarian to libertarian here will go we want lots of legislation, we want no legislation. But there is a push and there has been a push in Congress for years, actually since the 90s, with the Communications Decency Act and the first crypto war where the government was treating

the ability to encrypt your communications to make them secret or private as you communicate with people online. They were treating that as a weapon and saying you couldn't export this code without getting a license from the government and all kinds of craziness. But the Communications Decency Act, the idea that there would be obscenity regulations, some years ago, you may remember a scandal involving Backpage, which was like a variant of Craigslist, a lot of prostitution ads on it. Government has been trying more and more

to say these kind of things can be done on the Internet, these kind of things can be said on the Internet, these kind of things can't be said on the internet. And they have been doing this largely under the guise, I would argue, of the Commerce Clause, right? The federal government, where do they get the constitutional authority to regulate what we say and do businesses wherever? Well, they go, well, the internet is global, it's international, therefore it's interstate commerce, and so we're going to regulate this as if you're, you know, shipping bushels of corn from Iowa to Florida. But it's a little bit different than that. And I think what we need to recognize is that the internet is a utility, and people, individuals, a utility and people, individuals, and corporate entities should be criminally liable for the things that they do online.

That means if they have caused enough harm that you're willing to put them in prison, they've stolen from someone, they have destroyed some piece of infrastructure, they have caused harm to someone, you know, somebody died or they plotted a murder or whatever, you take them through the courts, you try them on this, the jury considers what they did, they consider why they did it, they considered the evidence. And then you let the trial system, the traditional system that we've had for thousands of years, work this kind of stuff out, or at least hundreds of years. But when you get the government and you get officials in Congress, you get officials at, you know, whatever the local department of this country or that country.

You know, Russia's got a telecommunications censorship bureau. China's got one. France, Germany, the United States, all of these guys have different regulatory authorities. Whether it's the FCC in the United States or Roskomnadzor in Russia. And you cannot substitute their judgment for the judgment of a jury, for the judgment of the people and the public broadly. And I think it's dangerous that we are trying to have the government pick winners and losers when whether you win or lose determines whether or not you can engage with the world,

whether you can have a public presence on the Internet, because the Internet is real life today. Yeah, it is. Could it be that the option would be to extend the First Amendment rights to the Internet in general? And if you want to run a social media platform, other than what we're talking about, putting people in danger, doxing people, threatening people's lives, doing things that can cause direct harm to people. But the ability to express yourself in controversial ways, shouldn't we extend First Amendment protections to social media platforms? I think this is a much more

complicated question than it appears, because you get into the whole thing of obligation of service. There is, like, there was a cause celebrate on the right actually that would seem like a similar issue where remember there was the cake shop somewhere where they didn't want to serve like a same-sex marriage thing uh and again this gets back to civility um but some people are they have a very strong fundamental uh belief here that these people shouldn't be able to do this that or the other and if you impose that on them that that requirement on them, they've got to serve, you know, whatever their business is to these people that they don't like or that they don't agree with. There's a compulsion of service there. You start doing this with the internet, and then there's a completely

different country. You know, let's say there's a website in belgium that's now bound by american laws that's a bound by this uh twitter can't ban this person even though uh they're against them it seems like isn't that a different argument though because we're all these companies we're talking about twitter facebook and youtube are all based in america now i agree imposing american first amendment rights on a country from particularly Will they be forever, particularly if the U.S. starts changing the laws? This is the interesting thing about Internet companies, is they can headquarter wherever they want. Right, and would that be their loophole?

Yeah. Would that be their loophole to get out of that, just sell it to China? Right, but I mean, it's... More fundamentally, we have to recognize, either as a society, we can compel people to standards of civilityility or we can't. And we need to decide how we handle that because that's what all of these tie around, right?

And I think we have forgotten in many ways just we're not teaching people the golden rule well enough because we are all angry. We are all in competition. And the funny thing is, the guy on the right who's poor and living in a trailer is not much different than, you know, the hippie on the left who's scrounging out of dumpsters, you know, and raising their black flag to go to a protest. They act like they could not be more different. But their economic circumstances could not be more different,

but their economic circumstances could not be more similar. And the reality is it's, you know, the government, the lawmakers, and the business owners that are setting them at odds. And we are all getting lost in our own ideological differences and losing sight of the things that actually tie us together. And that if we work together, maybe we could change in a more meaningful way. And the more people you meet, the more people you talk to, the more you realize how malleable people really are.

And about how so many of these ideological perspectives that they so rabidly subscribe to, they've adopted because it allows them to be accepted by their community, by whatever neighborhood they're in, whatever group of people they hang out with, and they choose to adopt these ideas about how the world is. And so many of those people just don't experience people that are different from them. I mean, that is the case with racism. That's the case with homophobia. That's the case with many of the issues that people have with other folks, is that they just don't know people from those other groups, and they haven't experienced,

you know, they haven't walked a mile in their shoes, as it were. I think civility should be encouraged as much as possible. Also, though, I'm a comedian and i i talk a lot of shit and that's in in the sense of humor like you can miss and and it's been done against me many times where they've taken things i've said in jest and put them in quotes completely out of context and it looks horrible because that's not what it that's not the way it was intended. And it was intended in humor. Now, if you do have laws that not just encourage civility but mandate civility, you're going to have a real problem with humor. Because you're basically going to cut the ankles out of comedy. Not that I'm saying that all humor has to be mean and vicious.

It doesn't. But some of the best is. Well, it's also about saying things that can't be said, you know? Yes. Yes. Saying things that can't be said. I think there's a giant problem with online censorship today. And I think it's one of the biggest problems of our era.

And I do think it is because there is a massive slippery slope. And I do agree with is because there is a massive slippery slope and I do agree with you about the cake people that was a big issue that caused Celebre of the Right of these people, they should have the right a lot of people felt to not make a cake for someone who is doing

something they think is immoral, right, being involved in a gay relationship but there's also the problem of sensationalizing these things because the people that did find those people that didn't want to make those cakes, they went to a bunch of people that agreed to make the cake first. They went and tried to find someone who didn't want to make that cake and then they turned it into a big story. Now, even though I just think, I mean, I think you should make a cake and then they turned it into a big story now even though i i just think i mean i

think you should make a cake for gay people because there's nothing wrong with being gay but i think the people that made that that decision to not make that i feel bad for them i feel bad that they're they're bigoted in that way and that it's such a foolish thing to care who someone is in love with whether it's the same sex or an opposite sex. But also, I think it's weird that someone wants to go around and try to find someone who won't make a cake for them, who wants to go from cake place to cake place to cake place until they're like, aha, I found a bigot, and then make a big deal out of it. Like, you know, you're searching for victimhood.

I mean, there's an argument that that's, I mean, that's one way to look at it. And another way to look at it is that's activism. They're searching for injustice. Agreed. Agreed. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. This is the thing, like, what is right and wrong? This is what people forget is changing constantly when we're talking about public opinion, because public opinion is changing constantly. And this is why doing right by people, it's so sad that we've lost sight of this basic impulse to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Yes. Because when you talk about the Internet, when you talk about deplatforming, when you talk about humor, as you said, people are going back and they're looking at your jokes. They're putting them in quotes. This is a different context. You're being attacked by it. Something you said looks bad.

There's things that you've said, things that I've said, things that the person listening right now have said that they believed, that they meant that they said 10 years ago, that they said one year ago, that they said three weeks ago, that they no longer believe, that they've abandoned, that they've been persuaded otherwise, that they've changed their mind on. And this was one of the central themes in the book, Permanent Record, is we are no longer allowed to forget our worst mistakes, right? They're there, they haunt us, they're used against us, they're weaponized. And this society has become aware of this, and activists on all sides have become aware of this. Immediately they use this to try to attack people on the other side of any issue

that they don't like, to go after their credibility, to go after their character. And what we are losing in that conflict, and this is a rational strategy on the part of both sides in the moment, because they realize there is a real political advantage to be gained. You can get people canceled very easily nowadays. real political advantage to be gained. You can get people canceled very easily nowadays. But the thing is, when we make everyone, we pin everyone to their worst moment, when we do away with the concept of forgiveness, we do away with the potential for growth, for change, for persuasion.

And this gets back to those rat holes of extremism on YouTube, on Twitter, on everywhere else, where they start self-reinforcing and eventually reaching the bottom of the hole at the worst of the worst with everybody else who's been canceled too. Part of that is because they can't climb out or they think they can't climb out. And there's a question, how do we resolve that? One of the nice things about the pre-internet society was as bad as you were, as ignorant, as racist,

as exploitative, as whatever you don't like, right, as that person, that character was, they could find something new. They could read a book, they could meet someone, they could change their mind, and even if nobody in their town would ever forgive them, rightly in some cases because they had done something truly terrible, something truly unforgivable, they could leave. They could move to a different town. They could move to a different state in that history would not follow them. They could reinvent themselves and they could become someone truly honestly better instead of being married to their prior ignorance. That is a very important thing because we all are in a constant state of growth. If

you're not, you're really making some fundamental errors with your life. We're all in this constant state of accepting and acquiring new information, gaining new perspectives, learning from our mistakes. And unless you're Dr manhattan unless you're some person who's not making any mistakes and you just have this all-knowing vision of the world you're a finished product like please if you are share that with everybody else but most of us are not most of us are in this weird state of being a human being on earth where everyone is trying to figure it out in this incredibly imperfect world incredibly imperfect society the the everything from the structure the economic structure to the societal

everything down to the very last things everything's imperfect and the idea should be that we're all communicating to try to grow together and that we're learning together and it's one of the more interesting things about interacting with people online is that you can get different perspectives and if you can let go of your ego and if you can let go of your preconceived notions you can learn things about the way other people see and feel and think about the world that could change and enhance your own ideas and i think that that's it's important that we not just accept the fact that people are growing and getting better and improving but that we encourage it i we we encourage it and we reward it and i i think that's one of the interesting

things that we're struggling with i mean you see this in the context of police violence. You see this in the context of mass surveillance. You see this in the context of cancel culture. You see this everywhere. One of the interesting things about this surveillance machine that has been built around us, the sort of architectural repression, the turnkey tyranny, as I describe it. So much is known about every person, regardless of how innocent or how guilty they are. It's all in there. You know, the files are waiting to be accessed. The data just needs to be collated. It's just waiting to be requested and analyzed and used. to be requested and analyzed and used. What this means, like there's this old idea of the panopticon, right, which is you create a prison that is circular

and in the middle of it there's this great tower, right, that rises way up and at the very top of the tower there's a mirrored glass room that the warden sits in and no prisoner knows where the warden is looking because the warden can see out but they can't see in and so everyone believes that they are watched and so the idea is that no one will misbehave because they're all afraid that they'll be retaliated against for breaking the rules or whatever but what we have seen is this surveillance machine has been built is because they're all afraid that they'll be retaliated against for breaking the rules or whatever. But what we have seen as this surveillance machine has been built is we all realize intuitively, innately, inherently in ourselves,

even if we don't recognize it, even if we don't speak to it, we witness it in the news every night, there are records of wrongdoing. Criminality in government at the highest and lowest levels of our government. Corporations and, you know, prominent figures in society breaking the rules. Ordinary people jaywalking, littering, you know, polluting. Small-scale petty stuff. All of that somewhere there is a record of.

But in almost all cases, it's not punished. What has happened is we have broken the chain of accountability between knowledge of wrongdoing and consequence for wrongdoing. And this happened without a vote. It happened without our participation. We weren't asked whether this was okay. But I think in some way that is beginning to change the moral character of people. And what we need to do, starting with the top rather than the bottom, because China is trying to do the reverse, they're going, all right, well, there's a simple solution to this. Let's just start screwing everybody who breaks the rules instantly and immediately. You know, you got a social credit score, you protested, so you're going off to a camp, you know, whatever. But imagine what it would mean if we saw people where now any official, the minute they are guilty of the

slightest infraction, immediately is exposed in the press. They go on trial. They go on all this stuff. They're ruined. They're disgraced. But it turns out every other member of Congress is going to court in the same week because everybody is in violation of something somewhere. We all have some measure of guilt, large or small, even if we're completely innocent because, you know, our legal code is so complex there's no way you can make it through a week without breaking some kind of rule about you can't wear a green hat on Tuesday. But if this happened, if there was accountability for infractions of the rules, any time an infraction of the rules was witnessed,

the laws would change instantly to enshrine the right to privacy because the people in power wouldn't want to lose their position of power. They would not want to lose this position. And suddenly, when they have skin in the game, they would realize, oh, everybody deserves this. And I think there's just something interesting to that i haven't thought this out all the way fully so this could be you know like give give me some slack here but i think this is really what has changed um we have built a panopticon but what sits at the top of it is a computer. That computer witnesses everything we do.

In reality, it's a distribution of computers. They're owned by many people and answered to many people. But it does not yet judge us for it. And what is happening is the audience, society, the people have realized that they can see through this computer. They can see through the Panopticon from a certain angle, a certain degree, in a certain direction at any given time. The cops that have been, you know, monitoring all of us for years, right, they've got surveillance and drones and stuff that they couldn't have imagined in generations prior. But now every person on the street has a smartphone with a camera too.

And the cops are being witnessed for the first time. And now people are trying to impose upon them the same judgment that has classically been imposed upon us. and this I think is one of the dynamics that the changes that is leading to this increasing conflict in society is when you realize that the people that throughout you know your generations a youth were told in Hollywood and stories our our common shared national myths you You know, the government's the good guys. The FBIs are going to get the gangsters and the terrorists and things like that. They're the best of the best. The fact that they are people too, they're not only fallible, but in some cases, you know, small-minded and vicious. They are political. They are partisan. The same way

everyone else is, people start questioning power and how it is used, the basic legitimacy, the way it impacts our lives, what the limits of it should be. But people yet have not realized one of the responses to this should be a limitation on the amount of power that government has, or rather not just government, but institution. Institution is a concept, right? Government or corporation. The powers of institution should be limited to interfere in our lives. Instead, what they're trying to do, both sides, you know, blue team, red team, whatever, they're squabbling, they're fighting over who has their hands on the trigger, who gets to aim the weapon rather than should the weapon exist. Are you talking about police violence when you're saying these things? That's a part of it, yes. It's every direction, but police violence is very much the public part of it that we see right now. much the public part of it we see right now. Yeah, that seems to be one of the most complex abuses of power, because the kind of power that you give someone when you allow them to be a police officer is literally the power to end life. It's not just the power to kick you off

Twitter. It's the power to decide this person who's just a regular person, no different than you or I, with all sorts of problems in their own life and stresses and strains and a disproportionate amount of strain and stress for the actual job that they do. I mean, it's a spectacularly stressful position to be in life. But yet you give them the ability to literally, with a a finger pull end someone's life. I think that's being exposed in a way that we've, because of these cell phone cameras and because of social media, it's being exposed in a way that we, no one ever would have ever dreamed imaginable before and exposing how almost impossible it is to have that position as a

human being and i mean this the position of power like that over folks and just to have a regular person with a normal psychology and and not some incredibly brilliant zen master who's in charge of, you know, overseeing drug crimes or pulling people over or, you know, assault or whatever it is. It's, I don't know the solution to that. You know, there's all sorts of things at play, ignorance, foolishness, racism, anger. But at the end of the day, it's about a human being's ability to have a massive amount of power by law over other human beings which is always going to be a problem it's just going to be a problem yeah i mean i i think we've known about this you know there's aphorisms that go back a zillion years you know know, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

You know, you give a monkey a stick, the first thing he's going to do is he's going to look for something to hit with it. But this is also one of the things you asked earlier about, like, how I can be hopeful, how I can be idealistic when I see the scale of the problems, the challenges arrayed against us.

When I understand, not just that mass surveillance exists, but I understand the mechanics of it, I understand how systemic it is, I understand the resources behind it that want to prevent the change of it and instead want to entrench it and expand it to make it more powerful and have more influence over the direction of our lives. And down to this basic stuff about, you know, we are told that the cops are the best among us. People sign up to be cops, I genuinely believe, because they want to serve and protect more so than they just want to be the big tough cop guy. And some people say, you know, that's naive. Some people say that's petty,

but I think it's different. I think the reason that I feel this way, the reason that I am okay with seeing how much we fail, seeing how much incivility and violence and just ignorance that we have in the world today is, is I have a lower expectation of the individual at the moment, but a higher appreciation for their potential. And the reality is we are all inherently flawed. I'm a terrible person. And I think in a lot of ways, you're not as good as you want yourself to be. But I know that I have become a better person with time. but I know that I have become a better person with time. You have become a better person with time. I think we all have and we all can,

or those of us who have not could if they chose to, or if they had guidance, or if they had love or friendship, or someone who cared and directed them and helped them become better. And that is the story of human history, because we were all the monkey, and then we found a stick. We could use it to beat somebody, or we could use it to build a bridge. But if you look around at the world today, there's a hell of a lot of bridges. There are, and I think in terms of police brutality, there's very few reasonable solutions that seem to be actionable, that seem to be something that you could just put into play right away

in terms of how do you deal with these violent encounters that police officers often have with people? How do you deal with the PTSD that I believe a vast majority of these police officers suffer from, completely stressed out. Every time they pull someone over, it could be the end of their life. They might not go home to their families. They really don't know. And I think there's also a bunch of them that are emotionally and psychologically unqualified for the job to begin with. And then here we are with these calls in America, at least, to defund the police, which I think is even more ridiculous. I think, if anything, they need more funding and more

training and a more stringent process of elimination, of removing people that aren't qualified for that job, because I believe very few people actually are qualified. I think there's great police officers out there. I really do. And I think most of them, most of the interactions that people have with police officers aren't horrible, but there's enough of those horrible ones that are captured on video that we have this bias towards these negative results that we see over and over again. And we don't take into account the full data set. We're not taking into account all the interactions that people have with police officers because those aren't documented. What we're getting in front of our face day in, day out are the terrible interactions. And I don't see nor do I hear a real workable way

of improving this. You get people that are either calling to defund the police or you're calling for people to support police officers. That's all you hear. And from a few people like Jocko Willink, you see really great suggestions that they should be treated the same way they treat Navy SEALs, where you're spending literally 20% of your time training. And you're going through psychological training, you're going through psychological training you're going through uh actual real world

uh situations where you're you're going over what's the correct protocol and how to handle certain situations and i i think it's it's a giant problem in our society today and i think that's an understatement that every time someone gets shot that shouldn't have gotten shot, particularly if it's a person of color, it becomes a gigantic flashpoint for our society. Well, let me challenge you on that a little bit, because, I mean, we can we can have civil disagreements in the way, you know, that's that's why we have discussion. I think there are things that we can do that don't require, you know, the idea of shutting down every police department. And I think that's sort of far beyond what people talk about when they talk about defunding the police. I think the most common sense measure that is being discussed, and it's not being discussed as broadly in terms of like the mainstream news, it should be, is ending police unions, right? Now, why do we talk about that? This gets back to the same thing that we talked about earlier

with the court cases and the government, you know, they get caught doing something wrong, but there's no consequence, right? And people learn from that. Each generation learns from the cases prior, right? It's in training, people learn the rules, things like that. The reason a lot of police violence occurs, even if it's not all, again, there's no magic wand we wave that saves the world, is the lack of accountability. We know there are cops, and even cops say this, right? There are cops out there who aren't good people.

There are cops out there who have abused their authority. There are, you know, really tragic cases where a cop has done something straight up criminal, and they have faced no meaningful consequences as a result. Maybe they lost their job, right? But if it was anybody else, they would have gone to prison. And so there's a question of how do we remediate this in a way that preserves the legitimate interest of, you know, police officers as a class. But it also preserves the rights of the people who are being policed, by your own admission, at least some cases, people who are abusing their authorities. And again, I'm not saying all cops are bad or anything like that. But if we recognize there are abuses, and this is a class that is invested, as you said, with the power over life and death, we have to be willing as a society, and the people occupying this position have to be willing to assume a higher standard of

accountability than ordinary people, right? And if we can agree on that, everything else follows from it, I think. We don't want to have a gun-toting, immunized class walking among us. want to have a gun-toting, immunized class walking among us. And I think even, you know, police officers, among themselves at least, would recognize this. But it is rational for them to resist this from the interests of their class. They're in a privileged position. Why would they give that up? The same way our spies are in a privileged position. Why would they give that up? But as a society, we exist to ask more. And you raise valid points, right? There's cops out there.

Go up to a dark car in the middle of the night. They're afraid they're not going to make it home to their family. That's reasonable and legitimate, right? But being a police officer is a dangerous position that people have signed up to. We give our police officers every advantage that could be given to them today. I can tell you from having lived all around the world, there's no cops in the world that are kitted out like cops in America are. Like, you know, these guys look like, you know, something from a sci-fi movie. And if there is a cop...

Well, some of them do. Some of them do. Fair enough. They're going to riots. And look, there's good cops out there. I had a lot of interactions with cops as a young man that were nothing but positive. It's not that police as an idea are the enemy.

It is the system that is rotten. And I think even honest cops recognize that the system is fundamentally mentally broken. The question is not, or the question from their side should not be, can we stop reform? Because if they are, if that's their position, I think they're doing the public a disservice. And I think to themselves, they know they're doing a disservice. It's how do we handle this appropriately? How do we handle this in the right way? And if there's cops out there who legitimately have served, you know, they've been out there for years, they've been exposing themselves to danger to

keep people safe at night. They've done a good job. And they don't want to walk the beat anymore. That should certainly be an option that's available to them. And from my perspective, as not a cop, but I think when you look at the state of law enforcement in the United States, that very much is an option. You know, do they want to work on dispatch? Do they want to work on investigation? Do they want to be cross-trained in forensics? There are ways that we can end issues issues or at least mitigate some of the issues that we see with policing today without saying cops are the worst people in the world and without saying you know these guys should be above the law well i don't think anybody's saying they should be above the law but but factually today you're feeling are excuse me i said factually today like as a

matter of fact whether we like to or not you gotta admit in most cases cops are bulletproof well i don't know i don't think i agree with that i mean if you you look at what happened in the george floyd case obviously they they were caught on camera so we're we're fortunate we got to not fortunate but we got to see what happened and they reacted accordingly your your what you were saying before you started this though was but we got to see what happened, and they reacted accordingly. What you were saying before you started this, though, was that we need to stop police unions, right? But do you think police unions aren't only around to protect people from the consequences of terrible policing? They're also to provide health insurance and reasonable amounts of counseling. This is a great argument for everybody to have health insurance. Oh, for sure. Yeah, no, I agree. I think health insurance is a, I think it's a fundamental right

of being a human being in a civilized society. I think it should be treated the same way we treat the fire department. I think it should be something that we all agree we should pay into because it benefits all of us. I mean, I just think if we are a community, and that's what really a country is supposed to be, we're supposed to be a large community, wouldn't we want to protect the most vulnerable members of that community? That if you have a small knit family and something happens to someone in the family, everybody chips in to help that person. You know, that's what I think health insurance should be. I think it should be an important part of a culture, of a community, of a group of human beings that decide they're all on the same team. We have to take care

of the most vulnerable people. I mean, I think that across the board. And I mean, that's really the argument that I'm making for how we want our police to be. When I say, you know, cops are bulletproof, I don't mean in the literal sense. There are a lot of cops who have given their lives to stop very bad people, and we should honor them. We should provide for their families. But the way that we do that is providing a better society that's more fair to police by being more fair to everyone, right? As long as we've got any occupation that has, it's really this simple, as long as we have an occupation that is invested with exceptional authority, they must be invested with an extraordinary standard

of accountability. It's that simple from my perspective. It doesn't have to be a terrible thing. It doesn't have to be a aggressive attack, but it's this basic principle. Today, in the world of business, in the world of government, in the world of policing, anywhere you look, it's a common issue. What we have is a disproportionate allocation of influence, a disproportionate allocation of economic resources, disproportionate economic or a disproportionate allocation of authority without an equal allocation of responsibility. Well, I think we both agree on that,

and I think we also both agree that it's not a shock that a disproportionate amount of criminal activity exists in a place where there's a disproportional amount of poverty. Sure. And a disproportionate, yeah, I mean, and very few economic opportunities. I mean, this is something people don't want to talk about with terrorism. But you're exactly right. I mean, when you talk about where terrorist movements arise from, when you talk about where criminal groups really thrive, it's where there is poverty.

Poverty breeds desperation. Desperation breeds anger and resentment. And sadly, due to the nature of our species, that in many cases inevitably tends toward violence. If we want to solve the symptoms,

which are criminality, right? Because people forget terrorism is a crime. It's a very grave crime, but it's still a crime. We have to go to the court causes. Yeah, and we were talking about this previously on a different show in regards to the way people reacted to the pandemic in terms of economic support to businesses

and trillions of dollars that were allocated to all these various businesses to try to stimulate them and keep them active and alive and keep people working. And my thought was, like, imagine if that same attention to detail had been to impoverished neighborhoods. If they had decided, like, listen, there's obviously a disproportionate amount of crime and poverty in these neighborhoods. We've got to figure out a way to lessen that burden and strengthen those neighborhoods. And in a real simplistic way of putting it, the way I've always said, if you want to make America great, you want less losers, right? What's the best way to have less losers? Have more people with an opportunity to succeed, more people who grow up in an area where it's actually safe, where there's economic

possibilities, where you're given more access to education, more access to healthcare, more access to counseling, more access to community centers, any kind of support that you could possibly give people that gives them more of an opportunity to get by in life. And that this is something that we've conveniently ignored, this need to strengthen these core and significant areas of our culture. But yet we do when something comes along like a pandemic that might close down business and already thriving economic businesses. I think we should have put, I think a long time ago, we should have put similar resources and attention into these impoverished neighborhoods that have been impoverished for decades. And a lot of it because of slavery and a lot of it because

of redlining laws and Jim Crow laws and all the things that happen after slavery. There's so many areas of our country that just don't get better. And we don't do anything about it. And we just assume that these crime-ridden areas will remain that way forever. And they send cops there. And then you see the videos of the interactions that cops have with people. And it just creates more and more anger and more and more frustration without any real, some sort of socially responsible action by the government and some sort of a program where it's explained to people, explained to the general public how this is going to benefit everyone, that we will have less crime, that we will have more opportunity, that we will have more people that are educated

and empowered entering into the workforce. We'll have more competition. It'll strengthen the country as a whole. It'll be better literally for every one of us. And that this is something that they didn't pursue and they haven't pursued in this country forever. I mean, this gets back to that question that I was asking earlier. It's one that I ask asking earlier. So it's one

that I asked myself, you know, when you look at all the problems of today, and you know, for somebody who's focused on privacy and surveillance issues, it's easy to be reminded every day of how deep in the hole we are. Where did these things really, you talked earlier about like a greased hill, where, where did the incline increase? Where did things start to really go wrong? Because they've always been going wrong in some area. Again, that's our burden. We've got to make things better because they're never going to be good enough where we start. In recent decades things have gone bad, and I think it goes back to the Patriot Act. And you ask about economy, you talk about poverty, you talk about opportunity, how do we fix this? Everybody is rehabilitating him now, as this, you know, nice little old guy painting his feet in the bathtub. But the Patriot Act, George Bush, and the Iraq War, and the policy of endless war that is continuing, sadly, today,

it's a bipartisan thing, it continued under Obama, it continued under Trump. We have spent trillions of dollars, trillions of dollars, killing faraway people who, literally going by the statistics, are more likely to be non-combatants than combatants, I think. Collateral damage is a real thing. And even if every one of those people was someone we didn't like, was the level of effort, was the level of resources that we invested in it, was the cost to our national soul worth whatever it is we can be said to have gained? And I think the answer is that

we have been generationally diminished, not by that president alone, but by the policies that that administration popularized that have been embraced and continued by the administration since. And until we learn that lesson, we, you, me, everyone else will have an obligation to try and change things to return us to a better path. to try and change things to return us to a better path. I agree with you, and I also think there's a real good argument that there's certain aspects of technology that have been implemented in terms of warfare and how we deal with terrorism that you could say short-term perhaps might have eliminated some targets,

but I would argue long-term probably encouraged more people towards radical fundamentalism, particularly drones. When I tell people the efficacy of drone attacks and how many people who are killed by drone attacks, what I've gone into with people that really haven't focused on it, the amount of people that are innocent, that are killed by drones, and the vast majority of that being the case, that when you're dealing with 100 drone deaths, it might be like 84 of them are innocent. Like, imagine that being anything else.

Imagine if the police did that, if they prevented crime by killing 84% completely innocent people. You would say that's insane. Like, we have to stop that immediately. But because it's done with a robot that flies through the sky remotely from Nevada by some guy with an Xbox controller and he's launching missiles into some sort of a car convoy, we've accepted this. And I think there's a real argument that that is it's being accepted because of the remote aspect of it because we don't we don't see it we don't feel it it seems distant and even seems

distant from the person that's holding the remote control they're saying that the people that are doing that that are responsible for operating these drones are experiencing a new level of ptsd and a very severe form of it many of them they're just they're haunted by the idea of what they've done and the fact that even though their own hands have done it they weren't there to see it it's some sort of a bizarre disconnect and that they're murdering literally who knows what percentage but it's a very high percentage of innocent people this gets us back to uh what i was talking about uh in in calling for the pardon of these different whistleblowers um is the core issue of daniel hale uh daniel hale is an american who i believe is still uh trial. They have yet to be convicted, but the government

is going to bury this man if they get the chance for revealing abuses in the drone program and the failures of the drone program. And this also gets, you know, you talk about this question of efficacy and percentages. We talk about mass surveillance. Just last week, this was covered nowhere in media that I've seen so far in a prominent way. I think the Washington Post wrote an article, but it, you know, it was buried. It wasn't like a front page, A1, sort of top of the fold splash. On the FISA court, a lot of people have heard about the FISA court because of the relationship to the Trump thing. I hope one of your guys who works in production can pull out a headline or a front page or the Twitter thread from Elizabeth Goitin. I think it's at Liza Goitin, who went through this.

It was published in a declassified version of the FISA reauthorization for last year, where the court goes through every year and the FBI submits this request for basically a blanket surveillance warrant that they can use on all these different people for all these different sort of categories of behavior that they want to monitor. And the FISA court reauthorizes this annually. And in this annual review, they look at, is the system functioning? Is it effective?

Were the rules broken? And one of these experts, I think she worked at the Brennan Center for Justice. I can't correct me and edit me out if I'm wrong here. But there were thousands of cases in the last year, thousands of cases where the FBI looked people up under the aegis of a FISA warrant, right? And this is like a mass warrant that's used for multiple people instead of one for everyone else, and we know how bad these FISA warrants can be. for everyone else, and we know how bad these FISA warrants can be. And over the course of thousands of cases, the court found that they had been unjustified in looking up these people's

background in all but seven cases. I think it was seven cases out of thousands. And this is where it's at. We have created a procedural state, a bureaucratic state, an automated system for policing. And I mean that broadly. I don't just mean, you know, guys in shiny shoes on the ground with a pistol on their waist. I'm talking about, is it platform behavior and speech on Twitter? I'm talking about, is surveillance behavior, but domestically against American citizens and abroad around the world. We are trying to create a system that observes everyone and judges everyone in a way that we already know is not fair. It is not used properly. It is not used appropriately. It is not used appropriately. It is not used effectively. And I believe does more harm than good. And why are we trying to create a system

that sees everything we do and judges us, which is effectively trying to invent God, when we know that it is a dark and vengeful one, we need to think about the kind of technologies that we are putting in place that rule us, but we do not effectively control. Well, I think there has to be repercussions. When you're talking about that, where all but seven of them...

In this case, there weren't. The court said, oh yes the fbi broke the rules routinely they did it all the time uh so we're going to go ahead and reauthorize this for next year here's your rubber stamp come back in you know 12 months exactly but what i'm saying is i think we as a society need to demand repercussions for these overreaches because it's it's it is a violation of law and if it's a violation of law with no consequences then it's not then they're we're not talking about law anymore we're talking about nonsense we're talking about things you could just get away it really is

it's a king class it's someone who could just get away with things what's a law it doesn't make any sense or a law that's only enforced against the powerless but not against the powerful. Right. Particularly if you or me or Jamie had done the same thing, we would for sure be in jail for a violation of privacy, for invading someone's privacy, for doing something

that is against the law. If we were tried, we would be convicted, we would wind up doing time, or pay some extraordinary fine. We would be in real trouble, is my point. But they're not in any trouble at all. You cannot have that. We can't have that in a society because if you have that ability to completely bypass any liability and any responsibility for a violation of law, then we've created two classes of human beings.

We've created human beings that are the governed, and then we've created human beings that are the governors, and the governors are exempt. And that's not government anymore. Now you're into monarchy. You're into some craziness. Yes, you're rulers and the ruled, and you can't have that we can't have that because of what you said earlier absolute power corrupts absolutely that is absolute power

there's no repercussions whatsoever for violating laws that can greatly impact people's lives in a negative way that's crazy you can't have that we can't have that and we need to agree as human beings particularly now because of the age that we live in and the access to information that we enjoy we're aware of this acutely it's obvious it's it's right in front of our faces and it's one of the many reasons why i think you should be exonerated why i should i think you should be pardoned i mean you you've exposed this and you've opened people's eyes to this. The exponential increase in people's understanding and appreciation for that, based on your work and what the Guardian put out and how you exposed all that, it's changed the conversation. And it needs to be changed. And the and it needs to be changed and the repercussions

needs to be changed as well well thank you uh you know i i guess there's not much more uh to say than that but i hope uh one day i will be able to come back um if i want to see you in real life man i'll give you a hug i'll come on the show and be in the same room for once. Yeah. Well, hopefully COVID will be gone then. We'll test you first. We'll test each other first. Yeah, yeah.

But listen, I said it before. I really do believe this. I think you're a hero. And I think that what you've done, history will be kind to you. You know, they will look back on what has been done to you. And I think our government is on the wrong side of history. I really do believe that. And I think if people really did know the facts, particularly the way you explained it earlier about how the information was distributed and the way it was handled ethically and morally, you did the best you possibly could have done with that situation. And I think it's a it's an incredibly bold move that you've done.

And I feel like the time has come. I really do. And I hope I hope I hope Trump listens to this. I really do. I hope he listens to this and I hope he understands also what a political piece it would be. I mean, this is a massive, if he pardoned you, I think it would be a massively positive move for his own, the way the, you know, the United States citizens view him. Well, I hope what we see under this administration or any other, but certainly we don't have to wait much longer for, is ending the war on whistleblowers.

Because as much as I would like to come home, as much as I would like to see recognition from the system, that there are times when the only thing you can do is tell the truth, and that should not be a crime. It's not about me. It's about what happens to all of us. It's what happens to the system. It's how we restore or rather realize the ideal of a country that we were always told we had.

But in reality, we have never been as good as what we dreamed. But we're getting closer. And the way we do that is by admitting where we were wrong and doing better. Thanks so much for having me on again. I really appreciate it. Thanks for being on, man. Those words and that mentality are what make you a hero and your actions. I appreciate you very much, man.

Thanks so much. Stay free, brother. You too, my friend. Take care. Bye. thanks so much stay free brother you too my friend take care