The Last American Vagabond - James Corbett Interview - Wordpress Plugin Connected To Large Email Data Leak, Yet Few Discuss It

Episode Date: August 12, 2025

Joining me once again is James Corbett, here to discuss a very important story regarding a recent plugin vulnerability that was exposed by his supporters. This vulnerability allowed the email addresses of those using the plugin to be posted within the source code. No other sensitive information was leaked, and they have since secured the plugin with an update, but this still constituted a very large breach of security, be that accidental or not. We discuss the implications of this leak and whether or not this could be more than it seems. We also discuss the importance of personal security in the technocratic age and why -- regardless of the extent to which the government already spies on you -- everyone should take any and all actions they can to security their personal data.Source Links:The Corbett ReportReportage – Essays on the New World Order – The new book by James CorbettData Leak at Corbett Report (and Many Other Sites)! | The Corbett Reportgithub.comGiveWP Privacy Incident: What Happened and What's Next - GiveWPSalting Your Data - #SolutionsWatch | The Corbett ReportHow to Set Up An Email Alias - #SolutionsWatch | The Corbett ReportTwitter Still Using AU10TIX & Israeli Soldiers Arrested For Gang Rape Protected By LeadershipEpisode 473 - Algocracy: Government for the New World Order | The Corbett ReportBitcoin Donations Are Appreciated:www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/bitcoin-donation(3FSozj9gQ1UniHvEiRmkPnXzHSVMc68U9f)The Last American Vagabond Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Last American Vagabond Substack at tlavagabond.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to the Last American Bagabond. Joining me today is James Corbett to discuss the give WP security vulnerability that we've been mentioning on the show. And something that is quite confounding. We were briefly talking about it before we started and just kind of the issues, not just about the email addresses that were exposed, but what else could be going on there, the issues of transferring people from one thing to the other and what that does of the platform itself. And I want to get into a couple different things with him about what this could mean, what he thinks, you know, might have driven this.

But just in general, really just kind of an informative discussion so you guys know what's going on. You can, you know, see the options on the table and, you know, plan accordingly. So, James, how are you today? I'm doing all right. How are you doing? You know, ups and downs. We're talking about before. You know, every day it's another thing.

But, you know, you almost kind of get used to the chaotic nature of how this all works. But, you know, again, I think to start on a positive note, that the reason anything like this, assuming this is something deliberate or not. but stuff like this that is, I think we're at a time where people are starting, at least in my experience, tell what you think, more than I've ever seen doing this.

And you've been doing this a lot longer than me. People are asking questions. People are skeptical of things. Like, even in the partisanship. And I just think that's an important thing to recognize. There's a lot of, you know, it feels bad because I think we're in a point where the system doesn't like what's happening.

And so it's making it feel crazy. But I'm on a weird way hopeful and how things have been going, you know? I hear you. And I share that quiet optimism, because I do certainly see that there are more people that are more aware of more issues than I have ever seen in the couple decades I've been doing this at any rate. And that is something. And we shouldn't. I know it's easy to dismiss or poo-poo that or go black pill and who cares.

It doesn't matter. But I think it does matter. And it's actually a point I made on New World next week last week. You know, the fact that the UK government is so freaking out over people talking freely online, it means that people talking freely online does make a difference. It really does. They are actively scared of this. putting up, you know, entire information teams, national security and online information teams to try to coordinate against this threat of people talking to each other online, it's because

what you say and what you think actually does make a difference. And I think it's easy for people to get, you know, blackpilled on this sort of thing. Oh, it doesn't matter. Who cares? Whatever. We can't do anything. They control everything. No, they don't. That's enemy propaganda. And I wish, I wish more people would stop basically taking that, that bait and start realizing that, you know, No, what we're saying, what we're doing, what we're thinking really does matter. And they are scared of it. They show it by their actions. Well, and I've been, I totally agree.

And what I've been seeing lately, you know, how do you, like, how does it not feel like, look at it this way, despite the power, the money, the resources, the influence, the censorship of the platform, the, you know, the financial censorship, everything. We're still getting through. You know what I mean? Like, that's powerful to think about. Like, where the information is still forcing its way through and they're still trying to censor it. It's just, you know, so that's.

That's a win, however you slice that, even if we're struggling and suffering to get it out, you know? But James, didn't you know that we're the ones that are black-filled, right? Oh, right. Oh, I forgot. Yeah. Yeah. We're the ones just because we don't believe in Lord, Savior Trump or something, right?

Yeah. Which, by the way, many of them are now on that same page. You know, it's just funny how that works, but different conversation. But yeah, I do definitely think that that's where we are, you know, and so that's what I want to get into, not to start, but that, you know, wondering about why you think this might happen before we get to that. So let's just start with you breaking this down for people and how, you know, how you came about this, what you found, what the implications are, and that we can jump into some of the

parts as we go through. Okay. All right. So, I don't know, you know, the relative level of web development of any people out there, but corporate report.com is my website. It runs off of the servers that have been graciously provided to me by EurovPS. And so this website is built on WordPress. CMS, a content management system, which for people who don't know, again, there are different

types of content management systems. A very common one is WordPress. There are, again, this can confuse people. There's WordPress.com versus WordPress.org. WordPress.com is so very recently. Yeah. Yeah. It's a separate thing. WordPress.org is the open source version of it. WordPress.com is hosted by WordPress and organization, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, long story short, I use the open source version of this. It's extremely common. Think of your favorite websites. Most of them probably operate on WordPress. But the thing about WordPress is, so on the back end, there are all these plugins that are developed by different developers and presumably go through security checks and what have you. Also, generally, the source code is posted GitHub and other places so people can

go through it and check for security vulnerabilities themselves if you are coding inclined. But so there's a bunch of WordPress plugins that you can get that will help your website operate in different ways. One of them that I was using for about a year and a half from about 2024 until a couple of weeks ago was give WP. And this is a donation management plugin. So the reason I was using that, it was recommended by my developer, Harley at Expand Designs. He liked using this particular one for a number of reasons. One, it did make it the sign-up process essentially a lot easier. I was using just direct like PayPal or stripe buttons that people would click and then they'd get shunted off.

But this one tied in directly with the membership system that's on the back end of the WordPress database, et cetera. So it made it all connect very easily and also allowed for people to enter, which a lot of people ask for me for some reason. They want a specific link, no, I want to give you this much money. And all I had for like, you can donate this much or you can donate this much. And I kept getting people, no, I want to donate this specific amount. So anyway, this plugin helped to do all of that. And it worked fine until it didn't. Specifically Thursday, I want to say Thursday, July 24th, there was, I'm not sure if that's exactly when the update happened.

But there was an update that I updated the plugins because you have to update the plugins as you go, because there's always security patches and things that are happening. So I updated the plug-ins, as usual. And lo and behold, unbeknownst to me or literally anyone else in the world at that time, there was a vulnerability, a strange vulnerability in this update, that took all of the information that had been entered into the back end, that had been entered into this membership sign-up form at some point, names, specifically names and email addresses.

And for some reason started printing that information, all of the people who had ever put, their name and email address into this form, printing that information into the source code of the website. And again, for people who aren't developers or whatever, you couldn't see the email addresses on the screen. It wasn't there for you to see, but it was in the source code that was being put out by the website that what you see is constructed from. And for no discernible reason in the universe, suddenly it started putting all these donor names and email addresses in the source go to the website. And you said it was just through that just through the membership sign up, but not all of them,

but just do that sign up, right? That's right. Again, I don't know how other people did it. But for me, I had had members signing up, you know, years before. I have people signing up through Substack and other places that never touched that membership form. So they, their email addresses were not exposed. But anyone who had used that particular form had entered their information in there.

For whatever reason, it started coughing it up. And again, I didn't know. no one saw it at that time until it was, I think, maybe Sunday the 27th or Monday the 28th, somewhere in that time frame, I got an email from someone who said, hey, I have an email alias, you know, whatever, Corbett Report, 1,2,3 at blah, blah, blah.com. So for people who don't know an email alias is a sort of, not a fake email address, but in a sense, it's an email name that you create. Like a burner phone.

Like a burner phone. Yeah, it's a burner email address. You create, when you sign up to something, you can sign up with a specific email alias for that one. And that points back to your real email. But the point is, when you start getting, for example, spam, you'll know, oh, it's coming to that particular address that I use to sign up for that particular website. So you know, oh, they've sold my info or somebody's, you know, hacked it or whatever.

So I started getting emails, multiple emails from multiple users of mine who did this, who said, hey, I'm getting spanishable. spam to my corporate report email alias. I think you might know what's going on, but it happened to several people. So like, okay, there's clearly a leak here somewhere, which began this frantic search for like, what is

how is this happening? And eventually found in the source code eventually. And I will credit where credit is due. I have a user called a Freud, Krestavul, who I've interviewed actually on Solutions Watch, for example. So my listeners might be familiar with

him. He was the one who managed to find that in the source code and figure out, oh, it's from this GWP plug-in. So big props to food. And he was, as far as I can tell, literally the first person on the planet to figure this out. And this was, at this point, I think it was Tuesday the 29th. So it was like five days into this update. Finally, someone had discovered it. And it happened to be a Corby Report user.

And so then begins the Odyssey. So of course, immediately upon discovering that, literally the second that was discovered, okay, I disabled the GiveWP plugin because at that point, there was no update. You know, they hadn't seen it, they hadn't patched it. GiveWP didn't know that their own plugin was doing this. And it wasn't just Corbett Report. It was literally every website that used GiveWP that updated to 4.6.0. And I don't know exactly how many that is, but I did find a website that said there was something like 46,178, whatever, websites that used the plugin generally.

How many of them updated to 4.6? Who knows, but some significant number. And I did personally confirm a number of websites. I saw several that I confirmed. Oh, yeah, there's email addresses in the source code. There's email addresses in the source code. So it was a, it's a big deal. And one of the interesting things about this to me is that, okay, I get the average person just out there,

like, maybe doesn't know or care about or understand the implications of this. But surely these, you know, the hacker news websites and tech dirt and places like that would be interested in a story like this. This is a pretty big thing. It's not, it's not as big as it could have been. There was no financial information or passwords or anything like that. But it is names and email addresses, specifically of donors. And I can't imagine there are many organizations that would be totally blasé about, oh, okay, you know, here's the names and email addresses of all the donors who've ever donated to me, especially in independent media where people are all raised. very concerned about their privacy, rightfully so, and like who, you know, what three-letter

agencies might be interested in knowing who's watching The Last American Vagabond or Corbord or what have. So it's a big deal. But I only saw and I only found one news article on one website that covered this. And they were only covering it because there was a what I believe is an ad blocker of some sort called piehole. I don't use it myself. But anyway, they, They discovered that it had happened to them, and they had inadvertently leaked something like 30,000 email addresses. So they were freaking out about this because they take their privacy very seriously. And so they did a press release about this. And as a result, it got covered by, as I say, exactly one news article that I found out about this whole situation.

So I don't know where you want to take it from there, but it's, to me, it's a crazy story in a number of different ways. Well, even just today, as I'm getting ready, I'm looking at the story and, you know, researching just the general idea of it. And there's, I don't, I don't see, don't see any mainstream platforms or like you're talking about. Like, to your point, I mean, it's, yes, it's just emails and names. And I shouldn't even say, Jess. It's not just about that. It's the vulnerability, right? So who knows if there's even more than that than we don't know about, right?

And so the point that nobody's talking about that is really telling to me. I mean, what are you, what is your kind of gut about that? Because I wanted to get your thoughts about, you know, whether this, because, you know, So you said, what, 40, the number you said, was 45,000, something like that. 46,000 websites. So, again, to put that in perspective for people who don't know. Yeah, there might be, like, again, WordPress is an open source thing. Any developer can develop any plugin they want.

And so there's, I'm sure there's a million plugins out there. And some of them have, like, you know, 10 installations or 100 installations, like Mickey Mouse kind of things. But this is not a Mickey Mouse thing, 46,000 websites. And even one of those websites alone, the pie hole one, had 30,000 users. emails exposed. So we're talking hundreds of thousands, millions of emails, who knows? Yeah, email addresses. Yeah.

And what I mean, though, is that is that, like comparing that to, I don't know, something that Fox News uses, right? Like, it's not or whatever, you know, something large. That's, I think in the eyes of somebody who might do this for a, like, it seems like small potatoes to something like that. Not in the sense of how many were leaked. That's a big deal. But I mean, like, I get what I'm getting at is why focus on give WP if this was an effort?

And then what I'm kind of wondering if your thoughts on whether or not like, so to me, this seemed like something that was created for the kind of person that can't, you know, it's like a little bit of a circumvention of the normal processes, right? And so I would just, I wonder if this was like a trap. You know what I mean? Like just what do you think about that or just the possibility of that today in general? So, okay, so give WP's official explanation is that they were updating a legacy database system that they'd been using since, I guess, for years.

and they were updating that to a completely different format. And in that process, they had to basically reconfigure all sorts of things in the back end. And wouldn't you know it, lo and behold, oops, we kind of did the wrong thing and that happened. But they fixed it right away. As soon as they found out within 24 hours of finding out about it. But to me, first of all, the response is crazy because their official response, which I've linked to from their website, actually talks more about, oh, don't worry, we fixed this. so that now people can report vulnerabilities to us secretly rather than out in the open so people

won't see them. That seems to be their main point. It's crazy to me. But also, I mean, just the fact that it had to be some third party person, in this case, a corporate report member who managed to find this and then report it to them, that should be kind of a big deal in and of itself, because that means they are not checking their own updates for these kinds of critical security flaws. And a huge shout out to the, and this is just, this goes beyond even just your, you know, fantastic audience. But like this is something that I try to emulate in, in my platform is just the idea of, you know, open source investigation.

Like I love that. That's what I was saying earlier. I just really think that's worth noting on that that's what you've cultivated, like this group of people that aren't just passive, you know, that are out there looking and checking. I think that's fantastic. And I think that's, you know, one of the reasons why where this direction is right now is making power structures uncomfortable. But, you know, it's funny as it says, what's worse is that we didn't communicate

it well and we're owning that. I thought that was funny. You know, like wait until we, That's sort of retro, you know, active after the fact, doesn't really make as much impact. And specifically what they're talking about there is the GitHub thread that was opened about this issue. That was what brought it to their attention, right? That one. And in that one, they're like, oh, okay, well, we took care of it.

And so what? It's only been like four hours since you let us know about it. So what's the big deal, guys? Why are you getting all busy? So I think they're trying to cover their tracks on that particular. And that's why they say, oh, now we've opened this new channel that people can report. bugs to us directly. You don't have to go to like places like GitHub, you know, where we'll see that we've made a major, major security violation here. Because if it weren't for the

GORBOR report and that computer website and last American vagabond and pie hole, I guess, would anyone even know that this happened? I mean, yeah, because I've, I have heard from all, a lot of the people that were, unfortunately, their emails addresses were exposed. They said, yeah, I have definitely seen an uptake in spam since this happened. But for, for. Everyone, see, this is another great thing about the audiences that we've cultivated is that people not only know about email aliases, but use them. Precisely for things like this so that they can come and tell me, hey, your website is leaking data. Wow, thank you. Awesome.

And if it weren't for that, who knows? How would you ever know, oh, I'm getting more spam than usual? It must be because of some plug-in on the back end of Corby report or whatever, right? So in regard to, so we're at the moment, it has been updated, right? So at least what we're being told is it was only emails names and I think the ID number associated with the donor, you know, but other than that, no passwords, no vulnerability. And they have updated. So at the moment, they're claiming there's no more risk.

But, you know, where do you feel like that's going to be going? Like, do you have a, let me ask you, like point blank or just specific, do you think give WP should be not just responsible because they clearly weren't looking, but like you feel there's any more potential? Yeah, again, do you think this is something that's patched up in that regard that only is, you know, was it laziness in your mind? Do you feel like there's more to the story?

Just I guess to make it broad. Okay, 100% speculation here. Right, right, right. I do not have any inside skinny, but my web developer was at least contemplating the idea that this was some sort of deliberate sabotage from within. It's at least a possibility because certainly when we discovered it, I mean, my jaw dropped when I figured out,

oh, this plug-in is, literally printing it to the source. Again, that is not a minor thing. That's, that's the most, essentially that is the most sensitive information that GiveWP specifically is collecting, because all the financial information is going through Stripe or PayPal or the payment gateway. So I don't think give WP even has that information. Essentially, the most sensitive information that's getting is names and email addresses. And it just barfed it all up. But how did that even happen, too? Like, how does that end up? I mean, I'm not an expert in this fee in regard to, you know, coding in general, but printing the email addresses on the source code?

Like, do you know enough about it to know whether that's something that's even, like, how does that happen accidentally? That seems very same. I am not enough of a coder to understand if that is likely to just sort of randomly happen. Again, according to them, it's something that was supposed to be happening on the back end, but oops, it got printed and basically published to the websites. I don't know. Could it have happened, you know, just stupidity and incompetence and whatever?

I think it's possible. but could it have been some sort of deliberate thing on the inside? Maybe that's possible too. And I, again, I had heard, but I don't, I haven't been able to confirm this, that there was some sort of, some sort of management swap or takeover or something that was happening with give WP and there might have been some disgruntled employees. I haven't been able to verify any of that. So if that's true, that might add another layer to this story.

I don't know. But anyway, is it possible that this was some sort of deliberate thing? Yeah, it's certainly possible. The other part that I wanted to talk about is the spam aspect of it. You know, is it, you know, like thinking in a broader sense, like I wonder, like, here's what's interesting. The fact that this took your audience to show that like this, I guess the reason it's even being discussed by us and literally nobody else, it's possible there's plenty more of

these happening that aren't being highlighted, aren't being discussed. So my worry in that is the, so one, here's what I'm dealing with every day. And I, we were laughing before we went on that in Corbett's video about this, he makes a joke about, you know, the emails he sent out about this, but it probably went to spam. Literally the one he sent me, went to spam. I showed him today, a little spam marker on it. It's like, this is just funny. The point is that in my world right now, I barely, I almost, I'm almost gravitating away from email in general because it's so impossible for me, unless I know what I'm looking for. And even then, half the time I don't even see it and spam when I look for it,

blah, blah, blah. It's just so muddled together. And I don't think that's by accident, personally. I think TLAV has been blacklisted in all these places. My point is that it gets to a point to where one of the most used communication tools starts to become, hard to use. And I wonder if there might be some level of that direction. Because, you know, like some people might even care. They're like, well, I already get a bunch of spam. So I've heard that from a lot of people too. Yeah. My email has been leaked many times, whatever. So yeah, unfortunately, that is true. And yeah, again, for people who've never tried to maintain a mail server, man, just trying to get it in compliance with all the million

rules so that you don't get marked as spam is an ongoing struggle. And that's just me doing just regular sort of email. I mean, I'm not out there trying to email, you know, thousands of people at a time. I use substack as my email list, essentially. And so they have to handle the problem of sending out emails to thousands of people at a time, you know. However, again, it's a pay for play system like everything else. If you're a big, if you're a big organization, a big company, a big corporation, you can probably afford all the dedicated IT team to keep your mail server functioning in a way that you can send emails out on that scale, but I'm not. So, yeah, the big irony here.

Yeah, the spammers, of course, scraping websites at all times immediately found us and immediately started spamming the email addresses. But me sitting here, having, I'm going through and informing every, I'm emailing every single person whose email was exposed. And I have to do it one by one because I'm not going to send out a mass email that's going to end up in people's spam if it gets delivered at all. And I'm not going to take all those email address. and put them into some other, you know, newsletter service or something in order to send out a mass email because, again, I'm not going to give people's information out a second way.

Right. The second potential exposure. So, so I'm doing it the manual way. And, you know, that's, that's the difference. That's, that is exactly the whole dynamic here. Again, if you're a big corporation that has dedicated IT teams, you can, you can handle things like this a lot easier than us fly by night independent, independent people who are doing it literally by ourselves. or in my case, I have a web developer, but it's still, it's a huge battle. Right. And that's, that's kind of the kind of extension of the point is that, you know, it's, it's just, it's not designed, like it's almost meant to be, I mean, it is.

It's two steps back, one step forward, or rather, I guess, two steps forward, one step back if we're making progress. But it's clear that it's, you know, just overly complicated. So where I come into it, I didn't even hear about this until Brock had to reach out to me because I didn't see James email. Same thing, by the way, different email, and ended up seeing this after. it had already updated to force the new one where they claim there's no issue. And so at the moment, at least as it seems, I'll be talking to James more about this after.

It doesn't seem that I can't even access the emails that were manipulated. You know, so it's just this, you know, where do you go forward from here, James? Like with, especially with where, you know, so right now, especially with TLAF having a huge portion of the donations coming through here, you know, like, what do you recommend people go to, you know, other than the things they already have, like the options, like, is there another avenue that you recommend for somebody, you know, or what do you think? I mean, this is the big problem of online communication at all. If you want to do this, how are you going to do it in a way that isn't going to expose one of your email addresses to the potential vulnerabilities?

And I've had a lot of responses from people, very kind responses from my listeners to say, hey, I appreciate the integrity of you admitting this and getting in touch with me. It shows that my trust in you is not misplaced or whatever. And that's great. I truly hope I can continue to earn that kind of trust because I truly do not want things like this to happen. But actually, it goes to show kind of the opposite point that even if you do trust and even if you validly trust the person with your information because you know they're not going to sell it, they're not trying to leak it out, there's still a thousand points of potential vulnerability that work, you know, 99.999% of the time, but that one time suddenly done. Right. So yes, there's so many vulnerabilities out there that you can't. possibly really contain them all. I guess the only things you can do is basically disconnect from

the internet altogether, which, hey, maybe that is a solution for some people. And if you can do it, I wouldn't try to dissuade people from doing that. But for most people who are already online in some way and who get information online, what do you do? I have, for example, a couple of years ago, I had a Solutions Watch that seems incredibly pertinent now, which is called salting your data. and for people who don't know about that concept, the idea is, yeah, websites and various places, they're always asking for your name and email and birthday and next-of-kin and whatever else.

And 99% of the time, it's not like you're signing some kind of legal contract that you're going to be hauled into court for, you know, you told me your birthday was January 7th, 1908. You're lying. Not yet anyway. Yeah, well, that's the point, right? So, yeah, exactly right.

actually, that's a good point because when I made that episode, the idea of online age verification was still a, you know, pipe dream kind of thing. But now it's a very, very real conversation, especially for people in the UK and elsewhere. Yeah. But the point at that time was if you don't have to give your real, true, accurate, valid information, don't do it. And I would say, yeah, well, when I was using that give WP form, again, don't give me your name. Like, whatever. I'm Arthur B. Blabavir, whatever. Who cares? Make something up. I don't need your name. I do need a valid email address that will work in so that I can contact you and that you can sign in and all that kind of stuff. But even then, again, so that's why the very first Solutions Watch after this whole kerfuffle was on email aliases, how to set up an email alias.

So I talked to Hakeem Anwar of a phone, right? Because again, this is a simple thing that actually only takes a few minutes, really. and he showed demonstrated exactly how to do it on on the screen there. So it can be done and it should be done. And again, that's one of the things I'm so glad about is I have the audience that, you know, actually I have a fair few number of people who actually did this, but hopefully more now, people who know to set up an email address, an email alias. Why?

Precisely for things like this. At the very least, number one, you know that when you start getting the spam to that email alias, you start knowing, okay, so something happened with that website or they're selling my data or something. And two, it's like a burner email. You can just delete that email alias and boom, spam problem gone. Just never give out your core actual real email address. And then you'll be okay, right? Yeah.

I mean, it's just about privacy. You know, it's one of the most obvious things in the world right now that we're going in a rapidly in a direction where privacy will be a thing of the past, or at least that's the effort, you know? And I think that one step in the right direction, there's probably a thousand other way. that this very thing could be done in all aspects of our life, you know, but this is something that is still one of the largest tools people use to communicate. So why not keep yourself private in that regard? So in the overlap to this, to, you know, kind of, I guess we can finish on this

point, you know, where the vulnerability aspect of it, you know, it's clear that there's a lot around this, like where this world's going, you know, technocracy, whatever, whatever word you see, we all see in some ways what's being built to the Palantir and all the surveillance. You know, so where do you see this, you know, in a broader sense, like what this is about? Like, right now, go ahead. No, no, it's just such an excellent, important, pertinent question about this because, yes, this is a big deal. Certainly for me, for you, for other sites that were affected by it. But in the bigger picture, what does this mean?

And again, one of the interesting and perhaps disturbing aspects of this is how many responses I've gotten from people, ah, you know, whatever, my email's been out there so much. And I get spam all the time anyway, so whatever. Maybe just in solidarity with you, really. Yeah, I get it. And I understand why people are like that and they're just basically saying, don't worry about it too much, James. Okay, thank you.

I appreciate that. But the bigger point is exactly as you're saying, like email is becoming a more and more troublesome, bothersome thing that is not nearly as useful as it used to be. And I get why everyone's on group chats and things these days. I don't use any of that stuff, which makes me incredibly, A, an old fuddy-duddy, and B, hard to contact.

So sorry, Ryan. I know. I should get with the time. But it is, it does seem, again, maybe not this particular thing, maybe, but the bigger picture of all of these leaks and vulnerabilities and problems that happen, they all add up to the, essentially the growing, I'm trying not to use that word that you wouldn't use on air. The embattification of services like email and other things that can be genuinely used. useful, genuinely helpful tools that are becoming more and more basically not worth people's time. And it's not, of course, just email, but that's one aspect of this. And what, so what ultimately becomes the solution to this?

You know, as, as Hakeem was making the point on the Solutions Watcher just did about email al-a-laces, you know, Yahoo, oops, leaked whatever, however many hundreds of millions of people's data. And there was, I can't remember which other one he cited with credit card data and passports and things like this. So now, now, what are we doing? The online age verification laws that obviously just got passed in Britain, they're working on it in Europe.

I covered this on New World next week a couple of years ago. We're entering the age of online age verification. How do you do that? Well, increasingly, you know, take a selfie of you holding your government-issued ID and whatever. And you better believe there's going to be, you know, the big scandal, the next big scandal. Oops, one of those companies got hacked. And they said they were deleting your selfies. actually they're all there.

And so now all of your data is gone. You know where this ultimately leads with enough security breaches and data breaches and privacy breaches. You know, sorry, guys, the only way to do this now is some sort of biometric digital ID. Right. The only way you can do it is you've got to scan your fingerprint and eyeball to get on the internet. That is where this is ultimately heading.

And that's why I think we need to, we need to present the alternative to all of this, which, again, is to the extent possible using privacy protecting tools and salting your data and email aliases and everything else we can think of to make it so that people are not putting their personal lives online. Right. You know, and again, that's harder and harder for people to do. Oh, I'm already online for my work and whatever and blah, blah, blah. But to the extent that it is possible to stop feeding this beast, we have to stop feeding this beast. Absolutely. I mean, as you're saying this one thing could be part of, you know, even or just used, but very well could be a, you know, multifaceted effort to drive the idea that these things are no longer secure,

you know, and they're not in many cases, you know, it's one of the main things here that is, that in this, more and more I'm seeing authentics pop up in these things. Twitter is still using it despite the fact that he publicly said he would stop using it and they're still there, which if they don't know out there listening, it's an Israeli, I mean, it's literally tied into Israeli intelligence, not through some side thing. it's a major part of Israeli intelligence, and it is being used right now on Twitter to, at least for some people,

like I actually saw an interesting point where somebody showed me what the one that came up for them was different. To me, I do whatever, I check it all the time. It still says, check here to approve that authentics can take your biometrics and hold onto them for a period of time. And at this moment,

they still don't even need that for signing for Twitter. Yet it's happening. And I saw it for other platforms popping up. And it's not just about Israel, but it's about where it's going and the scooping up of this and the scooping of all the data they can get their hands on

from everything U.S., you know, it's like the, the Palantier element of it all. Like, it's very rapidly going in this direction. You know, when do you think that shoe's going to drop? You know, the idea where it's like not just digital ID, but like the, you know, this is the new norm kind of a thing in regard to going into a store or, you know, this kind of stuff. Like China, do you think that that's close in this country? Yeah. Well, so I've been talking about this on New World next week with Pilato for, I don't know,

15 years now. So people are probably sick of hearing about it. But I truly, I really do think that the stage has been set for the digital Pearl Harbor. I think at this point, there still needs to be that punch in the Facebook, as Pilato says. Something that's, actually that, we need to update that because no one uses Facebook anymore, right? But the point is, like, I still feel they need that shocking, shock and awe moment of, oh, my God, you know, look what just happened to get everybody on board. I think they're at, for the last. couple of decades, they've been trying the inching towards just more and more and more and more, putting, you know, more of this normalizing this sort of stuff. But I still, at this point,

if they wanted to do it tomorrow to get everybody to have to, like, face scan or whatever to get online, I think there'd still need to be that big event. Maybe not. Maybe not, because as we are seeing, again, right now with the UK, I mean, to get onto Reddit, I guess, on the UK, or at least certain subredits, people are like having to show their government. or take selfies or whatever. For Reddit? Like, what is going on? And of course, this is about the normalization of essentially giving up all your personal data

in order to access websites. And again, I just see so clearly where this is going. There's going to be some kind of big breach, some kind of amazing, like, oh, my God, you know, all these people's records just got leaked and is all their data and everything. So we need now the digital ID. That's, that's, it's so obvious where this is. setting and that's where all the infrastructure is. Again, it's like back in, whatever, 2009 when I did the medical martial law podcast. It's not because I'm some sort of Nostradamus. It's because

they've been by that point already setting up the infrastructure for medical martial law for at least a decade in terms of the institutional legal infrastructure for it. Well, now they've been working on the digital ID infrastructure for a couple of decades. I remember reporting back in, I think, like 2008 or something like that about digital driver's license for the internet. This was a phrase that was being slung around by Microsoft VPs and people like that talking about, you know, we're going to need some sort of driver's license for the internet. I remember the Obama White House was doing trial runs of government issued digital ID back in 2012 or whenever it was. So this has been in the works for a long time.

The only question, I mean, it's not a technical question at this point. The only question is how do they get people to adopt it on mass? And they're trying it already in the UK and EU and places like that. maybe I'd like to think people in America are still stubborn enough and still have at least the idea of sort of freedom and privacy and stuff. Maybe there's enough of that that it would require a spectacular false flag. But if that's what it'll require, do we really think they wouldn't do it? Yeah, right.

And I think both our audiences are already well aware. That's the most likely thing in this conversation. But the last thing on last thing, you know, when you say for those that may not know, which is probably few and far between for both of our audiences, but digital Pearl Harbor. You know, what do you mean by that? And what would that look like, however you want to go with that? Because I think that's important. What's the citation on this?

It was a half moon bay technology conference. I think it was 2007 or something along those lines. I've cited it so many times that now I forget these specifics. And it was Lawrence Lessig, who's the Harvard IP lawyer, whatever,

law professor guy, who was talking about a conversation that he had. And it was, I believe, shortly, after 9-11 and the Patriot Act and all of that. And he was talking to Richard Clark, the ex-security intelligence czar of Clinton and then Bush, who was the intelligence czar at the time of 9-11, who, by the way, later, years later, told Duffy and Novoselski

about that story about how he was being deliberately deceived by Tenet at the CIA, about what they knew about al-Hasmi and al-Midar, Hosme and Al-Mindar, whatever, you know, the 9-11 hijacker Patsis. Anyway, whole other digression there. But Lawrence Lessig was talking about this conversation he had with Richard Clark where he said, like, so, you know, do you have some sort of Patriot Act equivalent

for the, you know, some sort of internet event? And Richard Clark said, yeah, of course, it's on the shelf, it's ready to go. In the event of the, you know, I Pearl Harbor, there will be the I Patriot Act. And they have it all, you know, in the same way that they didn't just come up with the Patriot Act, all several hundred pages of densely worded, you know, legalese referring to all these different sections of U.S. Code and everything.

They didn't just whip that up in a few weeks. That was ready to go. And in fact, Biden actually bragged at one point about having essentially, you know, not written it. Of course, he didn't write anything, but having essentially tried to forward it back in the Clinton days. Anyway, so that was already on the shelf and ready to go, of course. and then when 9-11 happened, boop, here's the Patriot Act. And oh, by the way, there's since anthrax thing,

so you get a close down Congress, and you better vote now and you've no time to read the bill, just pass it. Well, that's exactly the blueprint. And Richard Clark even said it and admitted it. Yes, there is an I Patriot Act that's ready to go in the event of the next I Pearl Harbor. So we know this already exists.

And who knows what's in it? I mean, Lawrence Lessig never, if he asked Richard, if Clark said anything about it, we don't know. But so who knows exactly what's in it? but you got to believe there's going to be essentially the crackdown on the internet, which, of course, powers that shouldn't be have been lusting after essentially since the internet or the World Wide Web came along and started offering us this Gutenberg 2.0.

Now, because I have studied the bigger picture of the history of mass media and media matrix and my online mass media course, I know that ultimately censorship is not going to win out over the technology. That's not how it worked with Gutenberg 1.0. Yes, absolutely. Kings and popes and tyrants of various sorts tried their best to essentially put the cork on the bottle of the Gutenberg Revolution, but they were not successful at that ultimately. It worked for a time in various places, but it didn't work forever. And, you know, licenses to print, to run a printing press and things like this. It worked for times, but not forever, because you can't really put the cork on that technology once it's out there. So I'd like to think that this Gutenberg 2.0, yeah,

they'll try to censor and keep people off of these platforms and things. But there will always be cracks in the system. There will always be ways around it. And, you know, Quardle and whatever, a million other ways of essentially using the internet for what it's actually supposed to be for peer-to-peer connection will exist, will continue to be developed, will not easily be suppressible and to some extent maybe even the powers that shouldn't be will recognize the utility of such platforms and will leave cracks in the system so that you'll be a pirate you know illegal person if you try to communicate in ways that aren't approved but they'll always leave back doors like that open for their intelligence cutouts and what have you as well so so you know like drug running and things

like if they actually wanted to stop drug running into the u.s they could but they don't because of course the CIA you know funds their black budget with it and things like that right so yeah It's the same thing. Yeah, like crypto and other things. Like, yeah, if they really wanted to absolutely crack down on it, they could, but they don't because they want to use it for their own purposes. So I think those cracks always exist. You'll always be a pirate, you know, and on the run from the law if you're, you know,

in those spaces. But those will always exist. So I don't think they'll actually be able to cork the bottle. Yeah. And again, also, as people know from the Gutenberg 1.0 revolution and what ultimately happened, the thing that ultimately happened is that the technology became so capital-intensive and so out of the reach of just an average marpaw to run their own personal printing press. Suddenly you've got these corporations running these massive newspaper syndicates and it gets corporatized.

And then you get the oligopoly and then you have the gatekeepers and all of that. That's, I think, probably the model that may work for Gutenberg 2.0. And we've already seen it to some extent as everybody starts to pile on to the same handful of websites. The internet now is YouTube. and Instagram and meta and X and whatever. That is the internet to a lot of people. And to the extent that that sciop has worked, it's,

well, that's the end of the internet revolution to whatever extent it existed. Luckily, our audiences, obviously, are not, you know, totally in the grip of that sciop,

but a lot of people are. Yeah. And well, hopefully they're out there doing, which I know they are doing the same thing, talking to people, sharing the information, which is the whole point,

right? I'll include this since you mentioned, And the word, the other term for another time, Algocracy is where we're going in the future. You know, it's clear this is kind of the direction. And I'll leave you with, you know, I mean, you've mentioned this to yourself. But what we just discussed there at the end, let's not forget that, you know, you got PNAC and, you know, the new 9-11. We've also had Trump who in his first term made it clear we need another 9-11 like event. He said that on record, you know, and so it's not new.

Or what I forget her name off top of my head, that blonde lady in front of Congress that kind of said the same thing. And it's clear that, you know, I think that's what it's pointing to. And whether that's a written out plan that the current administration is planning out or it's something that's on a shelf somewhere, it's very clear that there is a building momentum that way. And so, you know, things like this is, you know, if you're out there thinking this is a small thing, like recognize that this is, I think, one part of a much larger thing happening, even if it's just, you know, random things popping up that are being used.

So thank you, James, for, you know, forcing this into the conversation that people don't seem to want to talk about because I do think it's important that we do our best to make sure these things are tied up and that we're, you know, privacy. It has to matter. Don't get that mindset out there where it's like, well, like James was saying, they already got this, they already on my phone. You don't know that for sure, right? You do everything you can where you can.

Also, yeah, also let me address that because, yeah, sometimes, again, people kind of get black pilled or doom-pilled on this sort of thing and just go, well, you know, they're going to find it one way or another. But even if that's true, even if the NSA or, you know, whoever is looking at the trunk line of the internet truly can see everything and monitoring you and trying to expose you. Okay, even if that's the case, there are still just garden variety criminals and, you know, people that you should still be protecting your data from.

Yeah, good point. Yeah, right. So, um, exactly. So just be careful as much as you can be. And let me also clarify, yes, I stopped using the YVWP, um, uh, plug in. I have a new plug in that's managing the membership form on the back end right now. So I have a new membership sign up thing. at my corporate report.com.

If people are, you know, reticent about all of this now, I understand. But if you want to continue support corboreport.com, again, I am doing my level best to make sure that this absolutely never happens again. And I'm implementing new checks for every time I run an update to plugins and other such things that I think might be a good way of at least determining if something is leaking. But anyway, I have a new membership form, a new sign-up thing. So if people want, they can go to corboreport.com slash members and support the work and hopefully, again, support the independent media that's fighting the uphill battle against

the Goliaths of the world. Yeah. And honestly, I would just recommend, at least for me, I don't know, I believe you probably have something at the same. Go, go snail mail, go through the direction. That's where at least I'm at. A lot of people are going that direction. You know, that's how, you know, ultimately, I think it's important that if this, you know, don't be scared away. Keep supporting James, right? That's the important thing is that we, the support. I honestly think some of these things can be just like that to sort of, you know, like I said earlier, I think off there with James, when Patreon happened with Whitney and I, it's, you know, you follow over and you probably

retain like 20% of the people that were donating there. And I think that's kind of by design. Because I get it. People get frustrated. They don't want to go through it again. And, you know, so just don't let them win. It's the point. Keep fighting out there. But thank you, James, for coming on. I appreciate all that you do, man. And I look forward to talk to me in the future. Well, thank you, Ryan, for being one of the, what, three outlets in the world that are talking about this now. Anyway, we'll keep letting people know this happen. Anything you want to shout up before we leave up to upcoming events?

I think that's it. It's August here in Japan, and it's getting to the sweaty, uncomfortable weather. So I am going to be probably taking a couple of weeks, not off. I'm not going anywhere. I'm not doing any vacation stuff.

I'm going to be working behind the scenes, but I will be probably posting less in the next few weeks. But anyway, people can stay tuned to corporate report because I have some pretty interesting and important stuff coming out next month. So I hope people stick around for that. All right.

I'm sure we'll be talking about it. So as always, out there question everything come to your own conclusions stay vigilant