 When you're a younger person who runs for office, the last thing you want to do is kiss babies, especially when you don't have your own. That just looks weird, and so, I don't want to go there. All right, my name is Daniel Zomacov, and I'm a Montana State Representative, and we're going to talk about politics and the surveillance state. And if there's one thing that might be a, some of you kind of catches, all of this is obscure. For example, I'm from a town called Roundup, Montana. I'm 31 years old. I actually first served in the legislature at 25 years old. Currently, I chair the House Energy and Technology Committee in the State House. Yeah, they let a Russian help dictate energy and technology policy for not only Montana, but the Northwest. That's a scary thing, especially in today's politics, if you ask me. I am a Republican, and that may even seem crazier with this issue, but I'm going to talk about the politics on these issues and try to help clearly dictate how you can approach from both sides of the aisle and hopefully pass some of the laws we passed in Montana. We have two year terms in Montana, so again, we have term limits after four terms. I'm running for my fourth term. The fact that we have term limits allows us to go up and influence and power quicker, and that's why I get to chair the committee, do one more chairmanship, and then I'm out. And it also means each of our voices are a lot stronger, even if we're younger or newer. Random facts about me, I am a swimmer. I am a current MBA student. I previously spoke at DEF CON 21, where I did not do my shot, so that's why I had to come back. I'm half Russian, I'm half Italian, and that's a lot of chaos mixed in at all. And last fun fact is I still use a Blackberry. I just thought I'd throw that out there at a tech conference to just... Okay, so why am I here? What have I done? What is the legislation I've worked on and passed into law? A lot of politicians say what they've worked on, but they never talk about if it passed or not. These all passed into law. In 2013, I passed a bill that required a warrant for GPS location. No one knew about it, no one cared. And then Edward Snowden came out. We'll talk a little more about all these later on. 2015, I passed the nation's strongest freedom of the press law in Montana. I also passed a bill for medical immunity for minors. That has nothing to do with this speech, but it's a really good bill that if you're under 21 and dying, you call 911, no one gets an MIP, you just get them to the hospital. Co-sponsored asset forfeiture in 2015 as well. Also in 2017, more recently, I carried a bill that required a warrant for electronic devices, all devices. That bill is state law in Montana. Carried a bill that required a warrant or Fourth Amendment subpoena requirements, which was like a special kind of subpoena that had appalled the Fourth Amendment for electronic communications that passed into law. I put severe limits on license plate readers in Montana. That passed into law and did major reforms and restrictions for vehicle spot checks in Montana. Also law. So we're gonna go through a series. Oh, thank you. I'm actually just here to get you guys to move to my state and invest in a big tech companies and things along those lines, especially like skiing and hiking. Shameless promotion for Montana. So first and fourth amendment. I know some of this I'm gonna cover you're gonna know a little bit about and that's fine. I just am doing it, just it's nice to touch on it again. First amendment protects the freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly, and to petition the government. I am a, what you'd call a liberty conservative or a constitutional conservative, very similar lines where I like the constitution and I like all, I think all of it. I like all of the constitution. I'm especially the bill rights is what I focus on. So first amendment, freedom of speech. The nation is founded on a concept that we can share ideas, be who we want, do what we want with our lives. If you wanna go into technology, you can do it. Education, you can do it. It doesn't matter, we have opportunity here and the idea to talk and have conversations is huge in this nation. The fourth amendment prevents the government from unreasonable searches and seizures of their houses on them, their cars, papers, and effects. And you need probable cause for that. Well, without probable cause, you know, the government's listening, looking, watching, and you're more likely to sense your freedom of speech, express, discuss, talk, live, and now you are no longer in a free society. So why isn't our data ours? And this is why the fourth amendment doesn't apply to our data is third party doctrine, which is a legal theory, states that your information really isn't yours. If I send you a text message, it goes through Verizon. Verizon is the third party. Now there's no expectation of privacy through that digital communication and through court cases and legal doctrine, legal theory, this isn't considered your private information anymore. You shared it with somebody. That's why your data can be mass collected by government agencies. There are also outdated laws from the 80s, a little bit updated in the 90s that also have very limited protections of your digital communications. Also the Patriot Act, which I'd like to rather say the Unpatriot Act is the expanded government's ability to monitor, collect, and retain the data of Americans and then they can delay or not even notify you of some of these searches. So your data technically is just not yours. And that lead to these other problems. Technically the data's not yours, so then we have the NSA who of course we all have learned five years ago and continuously the mass data collection of your digital communications and then there are private companies that took part in this through backdoor channels with Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, YouTube, Skype, Apple, they all participated. So there's a problem of you have your data, it's not considered yours and now through large companies it's siphoned into a database of the federal government to simplify this. I know it gets a lot more technical but let's just keep it simple. Then there's secret courts that are supposed to have checks and balances over the government, which of course we know these secret courts. A court that secret is not open to the public, the public cannot be critical and hold them accountable when nobody really knows plus the people who are appointed on the secret court are appointed by the Supreme Court Justice who's appointed by a president. So there's like three or four levels of not being accountable to the people once again. And from the late 70s to the early 2013s the court rejected like 11 out of 33,000 requests. All I know it was a very low number which means they were rubber stamping basically every request. Then the National DEA License, Play and Facial Recognition Tracking Program is another one that came out a few years ago that we learned about through the ACLU FOIA request Freedom of Information Act that the DEA had a national database of your driving information. So if you are a local individual where in Las Vegas driving around you are likely having your picture taken with these license plate readers either on vehicles or on bridges and infrastructure of your vehicle, of their license plate and of the people in it. This is me taking pictures of you. So they're just taking these pictures all the time. Well, a lot of times local law enforcement work with national agencies, they upload the data. And so even if there's good rules of the data short-term in your state this data is being uploaded nationally into a database that's forever and can connect all the license plates across the country and the people in the vehicles. And that's permanent. And we don't know what's happening with it and how big of a database and where it's going. So not my favorite route of where the third party doctrine has led us. And then they got people, well this is like the worst thing. This just bothers me completely is we have nothing to hide. I, there's so many philosophies based on the freedom of speech and expression that we kind of talked about already but there are major problems with self-censorship. First off, if you have nothing to hide you're probably really boring and haven't lived a single day of your life because I don't know about you but I have a lot to hide, right? I went to college and I had a great time. Let me get a good example of the problems of self-censorship. So we're driving in rural Montana which all you will one day visit I hope. And the radio is on is some great like 80 song pops on that you love and you just crank it up. There's nobody out there. There's nobody listening. There's nobody watching. Your windows are down because it's not 100 degrees like it is here. You're just cruising and you just start singing that song and you don't care and you sing that song when you just scream because you know you have the best voice, right? Put that same person in a scenario in a city say Las Vegas, driving down the street and their favorite song comes on and they crank it up and they start singing. They look over and somebody's looking at them. They're most likely going to turn the volume down and maybe not scream at the top of their lungs because it's their favorite song in the world. That is a form of censorship because when you know somebody's watching you you change your actions even if you don't know you actually changed your actions. And that applies to government. So if I'm having a conversation with you then we can talk about whatever you want. You bring a microphone in it. I'm a politician. I might censor myself a little bit. You know, I know that my phone is recording everything I'm saying in a national database. You will most likely keep that in the back of your mind. You may not censor a lot. If you're talking about what pizza you're gonna get who cares? If you're talking about something else that's known as business, some idea, whatever that will likely force you to change your actions. And if you're changing your actions due to the fear and threat of government you are no longer in as free of a country as you thought you were. And that means you're reacting out of fear even if it's a fear that has not led to any logical conclusions yet. It's something to keep in mind. One other thing I wanna touch on was Montana. Literally 100 years ago had some of the worst sedition acts in the country where if you spoke German you were beaten, you were arrested, beaten and imprisoned. If you said you didn't support the war you were arrested, beaten and imprisoned. If you said some of the companies had horrible conditions for work and labor you were arrested being imprisoned and so really bad laws where you were not allowed to have anything, say anything, if you didn't buy bonds then you were also considered like maybe treasonous. Really bad. So in 100 years we wanted to, we were basically able to go from the worst, one of the worst states in the nation which these laws were passed federally for a period of time too, to literally one of the best states in the nation regarding having some solid privacy rights. The last thing I wanna touch on is you may have nothing to hide, but one day you might. We only know what we know and what we live through but all scenarios change, all governments change and history has proved that everything that has ever existed 1,000 years ago has changed and almost 500 years ago, 400 years ago in forms of governments they always change. Okay so we're gonna touch on some quick historical examples of why this is relevant today at least in the last 50 years. First one, J. Edgar Hoover, he had documents information on congressmen, senators and he would leverage them and say, hey we know you had sex with this person over here, you really don't want your wife to know or your voters to know, so please do what we want. That happened in our government which means that our legislative branch, the voice of the people was actually not truly representing the people as representing fear at one point. Now it's not like J. Edgar Hoover was asking for a lot at all these times but the whole concept was our government was hijacked for a period of time out of fear. Even presidents feared the guy and he tried to blackmail Martin Luther King, Jr. to stop with sex tapes actually that did not stop him but one person with data can do crazy scary things in our country. Watergate is just proof how political parties will do whatever they can to collect, obtain data on their adversaries or enemies or their opposition to beat them. This speech after I give it, if it's uploaded or whatever, it will be sought through, it will be gone through, they'll be looking for me to say one or two lines that I said something wrong or dumb which I say that all the time so they have plenty of material. Last one's East Germany with, and East Germany was the part that was held by communist Russia and with the Stasi they were only able to tap 40 phones at a time, they were able to silence and keep an entire country or at least that region of the country in fear of their government where people would actually tell on their families and friends, very scary but real example. So we kind of talked about how to use these tools to take over the world but they are real because you have a huge amount of data on everybody in this room and everybody and especially people running for office, you have examples of how data was used to blackmail, leverage, expose discredit individuals and as you know in politics today, I know it's everybody's favorite topic but you get one person who can bend the oversight or access that information, they could stop anybody they want to and that is a real thing, that's not like some conspiracy theory. If you're in that powerful position, you could stop anybody politically. So there are some limits and standards worth imposing. I would love the data to be deleted, if it's not, how about we do what this country is based on which was checks and balances, required records of searches of the mass data collected, who searched it, why were they searched and at some point release this collected information and ensure that that way, knowing that what you searched and who you searched and why you searched is released one day will know that one day you'll be held accountable so you might think twice about what you do today. Have a better court system that is overseeing this, either have it have a more public process or again a more transparent one, have Burns approve for the data that is requested for when people's information is being sought through these mass databases that there's fourth amendment standards or notification standards. If your information's ever sought through to see if you were involved in any criminal activities with your cell phone number and all the messages or your email or whatever they use, have notification standards to ensure that one day you're gonna know, so unless they really know you're guilty of something they're gonna think twice. These are pretty solid and easy and basic limits and standards worth considering. So story time, I ran for office at 25. I knocked a lot of doors. I knocked doors for four months. I called people for months. I had to raise money, it was a great time. It's something that I wish everybody else would acknowledge and appreciate because you think of politicians, you think of these guys who are being like money and doing all these evil deeds, but it is a lot of, it is not glamorous, put it this way, it is a lot of a loan and you're trying to just talk to people and knock on doors and get elected so you can actually do something good, especially the newer politicians, like not newer as in the guys who used to run, but someone who's new and running for the first time, there's a lot of idealism behind that and a lot of effort and they're challenging an entire system that they've never really experienced most likely before. So every state's different, my state's a smaller state, other states are larger, some have donation limits, some represent more people, some represent less people, some are rural, some are urban, more urban states. Anyone can run, but keeping that in mind, if people do run, it is smart to have a strategy, not a plan, I know a lot of people who are like, I'm gonna run, I'm gonna go talk to people, people are gonna care about what I say and then they're gonna like me and I'm gonna get elected and really it's no, you gotta obtain fundraising and you have to use that to mark yourself because people care about the presidential race, maybe the governor race, but our lesser races, they kind of go by the wayside, so you have to have a strategy. Everybody has a plan to get elected and change the world, you gotta have a strategy. So I'm gonna talk about a little bit of my experiences, I befriended colleagues on both sides of the aisle when I first was elected. I just didn't like politics, but I liked people, so I just saw no reason not to be friends, somebody super far left, I'm pretty conservative, liberty, there's people in the middle on both sides and it was very valuable and it was not a strategy, it was just luck that I tried to do a privacy bill at rights until 2013, it failed, said your dad is yours, you need consent to collect, there's gotta be security. It was well intended but not well written, so where it landed was probably where it should've, but the lobbyists wanna make an example of me because I told them I don't like them in other words and I just created a reputation that I am not easy to work with and that it's not true, I'm very easy to work with if you don't lie to me and you negotiate so I make sure whatever bill I'm working on gets 90% of what I want. Okay, so, but then I talked to a Democrat Senator who's like, Daniel, your bill failed, but we really like what you attempted to do or I like what you attempted to do, so why don't you try to do a GPS warrant requirement bill? And I said, okay, and so Democrats knew I didn't care about working my way up, Republicans knew that I have pretty conservative values, especially taxes and I really like our freedoms a lot, enough passionately to basically ruin my political career in three weeks of being elected. So I think that basically not being, I mean, you can use this motto for life but don't be a dick, like that applies to life but it also applies really well to politics because it gave me a really good simple bill that we ended up passing in Montana being the first one to pass it. 2015 went back and I was like, and I had a whole slew of these privacy bills that needed to have good precedent set nationally. And the one that ended up passing was the freedom of the press for privacy saying the digital communications of the press cannot ever be obtained. There are no exceptions, they can never be obtained. Freedom of the press is the watchdog of the government although it's very partisan and biased and probably not doing as well the job as it could be from when this was historically written. Without it we look like North Korea where you don't know anything and the only government or the only media you hear is state sponsored and that's never good. It's never good. So that bill ended up passing my warrants for devices and digital communications bill failed in 2015, later passed until 2017. But that ended up failing because of politics and there was a lot of misinformation from prosecutors and law enforcement and how if we pass these bills like we're never gonna catch rape victims and I don't know make up the argument that's what I had to defend against. The bill limits on license plate readers and spot check legislation that also failed. There were some people on the other side of the aisle who tried to leverage my vote which I did not give up. There were some people on my side of the aisle who just thought I was a arrogant punk and they wanted to put me in my place. And I can't really always argue with the guys on my side of the aisle. Sometimes I can be a little bit of a punk but I don't think they should kill legislation based on my personality. They thought they should have. So I'm gonna tell you one thing. I spoke at DEF CON 21. Edward Snowden came out. It was realized I passed the first privacy bill that's typed in the nation five years ago. Forbes put me on their 30 under 30 list and all of a sudden I got more positive national press than anybody else in Montana politics. That's not a bragging thing. What I'm telling you that is it helped me because people wanted to take me out politically. They wanted to remove me from office and I was not removed because you can't take out the guy who's getting all the positive press in your party. And so it was the conservative guys were more on my side. There were just some of the other guys who were not and a lot of the industry was not. So the power of DEF CON 21 is actually what allowed me to come back up here with successes that I'm gonna talk about in a few minutes. So thank you all. So one thing about this legislation though that I realized is the importance of model state legislation. We passed that GPS privacy bill. Other states started passing that GPS privacy bill and there was a proof that we can do it successfully. So Montana being that passed in that bill was about Utah then passing it and Maine and then passing it. And as some of you may or may not know until 2018 the Supreme Court case ruling stated that there is a warrant, there should be, or it deems there is a warrant requirement for GPS location to obtain that which means that the entire country is now under that ruling. So one state it can create a whole precedent. So next was my third term. So I didn't explain one thing. We served four months every other year. So we had to do all these bills in four months every other year. So I actually only had a year to do these bills. And we actually only have two months to pass it through our body and then the other body. So it's like very time crunch period. So third term out of the election I had the second most expensive primary. My seat became more conservative because it's redistricted. So I had a very expensive primary with industry at law enforcement, basically anybody from the contractors, hospitals, the utilities, a lot of money spent against me because they knew if I won I would first off I'm gonna keep trying to do my privacy bills and also I'd be the chair of the energy and technology committee, Montana's an energy state. That wasn't some people's ideal result and that's not who they wanted to be chairing that committee. So again with term limits I won that election. I got to chair that committee and when you're chairing a committee people are a lot nicer to you because they know something of theirs might go through that committee in the near future. So it's amazing how some of these bills had a lot less, there is a lot less leverage for my vote on the house floor because people are like, yeah that's a bad idea. Let's just leave Daniel alone and bother somebody else. So nice, nice term limits do have their benefits, right? So 2017, these are the bills I kind of touched on but we passed the warrant requirement for digital communications and there was, some of these model bills that are now in law in Montana there had to be a few meeting a little bit in the middle like notification was 90 or it was six months versus three months of notification standards if they ever go through digital communications. There are some other things along those lines but I still think it's a pretty solid model bill on Montana passed. For requirements for devices you need a warrant to go through electronic devices. They can't pull you over say are you texting let me go through your phone. That's not gonna happen in my state. That's like legally it can't happen. Or your computers or whatever and we define devices as things that haven't been invented yet either. That's not what it says in the definition but it's a very broad definition. A lot of times when you pass laws you've made the definitions too tight to not apply to the future. I do not wanna do that. Then license plate readers. We did not have these yet in the state in my state but they were trying to get these put into the place. And so I worked with one of the main guys in law enforcement in the state and probably one of the most reasonable guys and he's like Daniel why do you wanna ban these? I was like national databases of where we've driven in Montana being applied and held forever by our federal government. I don't want to take any part of that. So with the exception of a few certain things like kidnappings, they can be used. The data is collected 90 days I think at max. Whoever goes through the data has to be recorded of what data they went through, why they went through it. And then if any other law enforcement group wants to obtain that information they have to get a warrant. So if the sheriff's office wants the police department to have to get a warrant, if the federal government wants the state police department or one of the police departments to have to get a warrant with the defined license plate number they're looking for. That way they can't get a warrant for all the information ever. It's the warrant of just one license plate. So that's either means they have to do a few million requests daily or they aren't gonna get our information and hopefully they're not, I don't, I'm not a prosecutor. So maybe there's some loophole I missed but I try to basically say you could use it for very close limited things but not for pulling somebody over because they have a license that's expired or something. Like it's not really the big crimes we're worried about. So that's the license plate reader law that's in place. Then vehicle spot checks, we really reform those so you can't just pull people over. I keep that has nothing to do with technology but it has to do with the civil liberty side of things. And then also this whole time I was working on handfuls of energy policy that were good. Some remove special laws from huge corporations which I know a lot of people in this group would probably like. So passing the bills, this is a little bit more important. This is where it becomes more applicable to you if you want to apply it in the future. So my question here is what do gun groups, the ACLU, like family, like Christian organizations, hackers, citizens and I forgot to add in there, libraries have in common. Those were the people who supported my legislation. So unique coalitions are key. So let me say again, you got gun groups and ACLU and like family organizations and hackers, citizens and libraries. That is the island of misfit toys politically. Like... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You want to talk about like a funky like family dinner time or that like nobody should have even been there and had a conversation. And that's what my committees were looked like when you had prosecutors who've been doing it for 15 years could argue, could really influence. You got the department of justice. You have members of law enforcement. Who else did we have? Those were the main ones that showed up in opposition and they were good. They were very good at what they did. There was a lot of misinformation. They would leave the argument. Well, if my kid got kidnapped and you didn't have this in place and this could really go and we couldn't catch these people when the whole argument would go into like license plate readers that aren't even in place yet. So it's like, well, if we don't have something in place that's not in place yet, how could that impact you catching the person who's guilty? So I had to defend against these impossible arguments or the whole like, so there's distractions or they're just buildup arguments where they burn the whole thing down. And all I was saying was all I'm doing is just requesting a fourth amendment warrant requirement. You can email, you can get it. This is like for the warrant requirements for devices. You can email the judge. They can sign it in minutes. They can send it back to you. Boom, that's it. Not really some crazy stuff. Like I'm not saying you can't ever access this information. Just do it the proper way. So one thing I'm gonna touch I think with the yeah, you need coalitions a little bit later but that goes back to be nice to people. There is a lot of Republicans who never talked to the ACLU and there's a lot of Democrats who haven't talked to the family groups. You'd be surprised somewhere along the lines what you have in common. We have 95% of everything in common. I don't care if your politics are diametrically opposed. You're a member of the NSA and love every second of it. We still have almost everything in common. I know it's a crazy statement to hear but it is very true. I'll touch on that a little bit later. Our efforts, so there were a lot of efforts to become a privacy technology expert. I'm not a natural public speaker. Reading isn't my favorite thing, especially technical reading, especially technical reading of laws. Especially then looking up court cases and amending them, learning how to negotiate. All these things I had to teach myself over four, five years. So when somebody came up to me with an argument I was able to stand up and have the reasoning, understanding and oppose it. We don't have staff in my state. We don't have personal staff. So I had to learn it all, negotiate it all and get on the ground, call people out on committee, lobby the votes, do all the work. It wasn't like a lot of politicians come up, their staff do 90% of the work. They're the ones, the staff are talking to their constituents. No, I had a 10 minute little break. I'm on my computer emailing back my constituents while in session, then sitting back down, just going in the hallway, negotiating a bill that were pretty big pieces of legislation, emailing people out till nine or 10 at night with new amendments, getting it to the people to get them written legally for our bill drafts and then going back at it in the morning. Non-stop, so basically how to become a privacy technology and legislative expert. One thing is there were groups who showed up, like I mentioned, and there were groups who did not show up. I talked about the ACLU showed up. Other tech groups that you think are very helpful weren't even in the room or even in the state. So I was trying to pass some good precedence, they didn't show up. I won't call them out just to be respectful, but they almost actually at one point derailed my legislation and it impurated me since I've been working on it for four years. So here's what we got. We got multiple model bills for your states and that's good regarding government, but here's my main failures. I tried to amend a bill saying you cannot collect browser data and that failed 52 to 48, 48 to 52 on the house floor. I believe your data belongs to you. It's like my philosophy that's weird in politics, but your data is your personal information and if it's obtained just ask for consent. So we're gonna be working on a bill like that a little bit more and it's more for ISPs not edge providers and consent to collect is huge and also the other one that I'm gonna be putting more of my political capital into is biometric data. I firmly believe even more than personal data, personal browsing data that biometric data is completely your property. I'm working on the legislation. I've got smart people working on that. I think it would go through my committee. So at least they'd have a good chance of going through half the legislature. See, that's what happens when you get people in power for too long and they start to move bills through their committee, but hopefully I think that's a really good precedent policy that we could pass in Montana. So what drives politicians? Influence, power, change, anger, political involvement. Some people want to influence an industry that they're part of. They think it's the best way to do it. Some people just want power. They were treated poorly as a child and now it's their way to get back to the world. Who knows? I don't know their family background, but people want power and you can see it. They just, you feel it. They want that influence. If there's an edge, they're gonna find it. Some people truly want to make change. Some people are just angry at the whole system and the angry people are harder to work with because they're angry and they want to be angry at you and at everybody and then there's people who have been following politics their whole life and then they buy into the rhetoric of both sides and so they are just, there's through political involvement that they're driven and they listen to their left wing or right wing media all the time and that's, so those are the five major points I'd say drives politicians. One thing to keep in mind if you ever talk to politicians in your state about these issues because that's what I'd like you to do, you'd be surprised how much influence you have as an individual on your politician is there are hundreds of issues. People run for energy, education, healthcare, transportation, taxes, family issues, gun issues. I don't care. There are hundreds of issues, hundreds of issues and a lot of the people who are elected are older so your issues, my issues aren't really relevant to them. They're not as important to them. That doesn't mean they're not important issues. It means that they don't just study all hundreds of issues. They kind of focus on theirs and somebody else focuses on another one in my legislature, I focus on technology issues and other, and energy issues and then other people focus on healthcare and education all along, all across the board. But to expect people to care about your issue is it's not a fair expectation. Yes, there is a lot of issues. Yes, it's your job to know about them but to be an expertise and be like, why don't you have fourth amendment standards? My digital communications, they're gonna be like, what are you even talking about? Because it's just not an issue really that people would know about and you have to be okay with that so then you can sit down and explain to them what you're talking about and why it's important. There are political issues versus policy issues. Political issues are in the news, crazy, rhetoric. Policy issues can be political issues but sometimes they're just like, how do we make the budget really fund this group and what's going on over here and this tax is not bringing in a lot of money and this one's bringing in a lot more and we have like extra surplus here and then pre-summon gets really wonky and nobody really wants to talk about it because it's really boring. So political issues can be trendy but they're not the same as policy issues and political issues usually are the extremes on both sides. So if you jump on board with that, you're gonna be missing the policy side. It's okay to not follow the trends, it's even better to do legislation that's not trendy. No one's really talking about the some of the legislation we talked about here and that's okay because it's not partisan. It's okay because no one's really talking about it so it's not like if a Republican stands up for it, a Democrat's gonna be against it. In other words, it's not political, it's not full partisan politics. There's a chance that people could be like, this is an easy bill we can all support and push it through. So the fact it's not political is on your side if you use it that way. One last thing to remember with politicians, say I have five bills. I have my two priority bills. I know they're popular, I know they're important, I know I can get them passed. Then I got three or four other bills, maybe two are for constituents. One's kind of important, it's a technology bill that is important to some constituents who bother me but it's not my major priority. I'm just using that as an example. My political capital is gonna be focused on my most important bills to me which means you could be leverage, you could have your trading votes. You could be just asking the committee to pass these ones because the more you ask, the more they kinda get annoyed with you. It matters per state how they do their politics, cutting deals, there's all the stuff behind the scenes you'll never see. But there's so much political capital. So when someone's like, oh this guy sold out, well maybe he did four great things or she did four great things and then the other two things they didn't end up passing was it just was not politically feasible and it's really hard to put it into words but it's something to keep in mind that there is a limit on how much and what you can push through a legislature. Having said that, I just pushed my political capital to the max, I try to do everything because we're only there for a few months, we're only alive for a hundred years or less so might as well just go all in and results in primary elections so maybe be smarter than me if you ever do this. Parsonship, so I kinda talk about this a little bit but politicians divide and conquer the electorate. If you are married to a political party completely, I ran for office so it's maybe a little bit different but if you're married to one, really question it, question what drove you, question the rhetoric. I see so many times people jump on the board with one political party because of one issue, they don't know much about the other issues so they just follow and jump on board with it completely. Like, I know social issues really drives people either side the aisle, we don't have to go into details on the issue but if you're pro-life or pro-choice, you tend to say these are really important to me and then you look at these other issues, say these are my guys on my side and you know what, I agree with their issues as well so you have one or two main issues and people jump on board with the political party and pretty soon they're married to everything the political party has and what happens is you lose your independence as an individual and a voter when it becomes that and you're actually playing into a game where you're divided and conquered, do not lose that independence, that is a, the independent vote is the most valuable vote so by maintaining that you can have a little bit more influence is what I would suggest. Let me give a great example of politics, sorry, I'm just, I'm trying to cover a lot of information. There is, let me give you the best example, blue lives matter and black lives matter, okay? I'm not gonna talk about the politics what was right or wrong and that's not what I'm here to do. I do think it's a very funny example that blue lives matter are the people who support law enforcement but it's usually the right side of the aisle who hates more government and more laws in their life yet they strongly support the guys in force in the laws. While black lives matter is the group that tends to be more laws, I'm doing some stereotypes so just work with me, they do, they want, they're usually more Democrat leaning, they want more laws in place but then they don't like the guys who are enforcing the laws as much. So you see the irony in politics and nobody even questions it, you got the one group who's on one side but they're really fighting their own ideas and then you got the other group who's on this side and they're really fighting some of their own ideas over here. It's a crazy concept. So in Montana, we passed, most of those laws would fit under the black lives matter mantra of politics that we want more rights for people to make sure that if they're arrested they're following the right procedures but instead of jumping on that like political partisan division path these were sold as constitutional bills as well because they are, they were First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, mostly Fourth Amendment pieces of legislation that fit the same argument in California of what the black lives matter group was doing. The differences is my approach wasn't saying this is a constitutional conservative issue, I'm just saying we're following the constitution we left all the division out of it. So although some of the people on the left would say you know, this really fits what's going on politically the people on the right were like these are really good constitutional bills that are worth in putting into law. If I'm saying anything, it's don't jump on a bandwagon too early because there are reasons why it's leading you down that path and it is not always for, there's usually some reason behind it and just don't be blinded by it. Okay, partisan politics invokes partisan behavior. Here's a whole other thing, tribalism. You are, let's say I'm the Republican there's a Democrat they say he's a Republican. First off they're opposing my election so that's like we don't like those guys. Second off, they were like therefore the exact opposite of the beliefs that I want. So now it's like anything I say I don't like third off they're just these greedy people and we don't like them. So they found reasons to just like something before they even met them. So, but their party helped them raise money helped them knock on doors helped them win and now they're all working together on common issues. What you have is tribalism where you hate the other person and you really like your people. When what you lost was your ability to question the people internally what they're going for and figure out if you have any common ground across the aisle. Our politics right now is huge differences where you can't even trust and there's very limited dialogue. My legislation all passed because I had people on both sides of the aisle jump on board with me and say this is good legislation because I did not adhere to tribalism and follow those basic rules of this is my team and I hate that team. If you have that mindset politically this is this type of legislation will never move forward. This legislation can move forward in the US Senate and Congress at the Patrick Leahy's, Rand Paul's and the Mike Lee's and the what Wyden out of Oregon if those guys really spearheaded it and held back their political capital together. Thing is a lot of those guys literally hate each other and so it's hard when you have a coalition of people who can agree with the idea but they sometimes can't get past the personalities and tribalism and like I said keep this issue nonpartisan. If do not make it a one group or another group especially if it's a more of a liberal legislature that you know that it follows more with like I said Black Lives Matter concept it was more conservative one these are complete conservative issues. You're not lying to either group. You're not like telling them half a story you're just talking to somebody how they wanna be spoken to and the way that they can relate to what you're doing. The last thing, one of the last things is forced politicians to listen so people think of federal politics as everything but state politics is everything. We make a lot of rules and we are very accessible so you can literally sit down with almost any state representative or senator some of them are not the nice people but a lot of them you can reach out to ask their office and say I wanna meet them I wanna talk to them for 15 minutes you can talk about the easiest issues that are important to them. You say these guys should represent me but most people don't ever reach out to them they don't even know who their representatives and senators are at the state level. So make them represent you you're the constituent is literally your job to figure it out and ask them to hear you. Especially more importantly make a politician in a tight election earn your vote. If you say hey I know you're running I know this is expensive race this is important to me they're so likely to placate and give you their support on an issue that's not important to them you can literally get them on your side get their support and if the bill comes up hold them accountable you can do that so a tight election is very powerful for you. Again be persistent but do not be offensive do not insult these people they don't listen to you that doesn't get you anything it actually makes you look obnoxious and makes your issue look obnoxious and it makes their support of your issue or opposing you a lot easier for them. So be persistent call, call, call just don't be rude. If they don't care you can always challenge them for office you can make it the main issue while you're running and if they don't do what you want people will like to be on Facebook it's their solution it's not a solution it makes you feel good but it's not the best way to do it I would go and use opinion editorials in papers write something say this guy he wants the government going through your emails you know who wants the government going through their emails and phones nobody because everybody's got something to hide again unless they're really boring which we talked about so then the last thing is politicians fear controversy they hate to be bothered they hate to have something so this is an easy thing for them to support where they're never going to lose a vote or gain a vote really so you want to make it so it's easy for them to vote for and not easy for them to vote against and go hide but it's very easy for them to vote for and just be left alone if you ever push any of these types of legislation just the last thing is expecting them to know better is never reasonable because sometimes they just don't know about these issues it's not even in their generation so I'm going to go a little bit farther I have a cement that there are two left but I identified the bill sponsor you got to have somebody carry the bill in the legislature that's really important to do and then organize you need to just contact the people contact committee members of where the bill would go through and you could get support of this type of legislation work with groups the other group that was very helpful was the Center for Democracy and Technology with this legislation they gave me the original model bills before they were in law so that I got to kind of disrupt so work with groups doesn't matter what your politics are find the commonality and in the end testify I've worked on legislation for people who didn't show up to testify that's really annoying so please if you ever do this and have somebody work on this legislation testify this is the last slide of why you matter and this is a little bit different than everything else we talked about regarding technology if technology is used inappropriately it could really ruin our republic and it could put a lot of fear into people so I think this law or this quote is proper when law and morality contradict each other that the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law so in other words if you're gonna follow a bad law you might lose your morality but if you refuse to follow that law you lose respect for the law but you know what you might actually be some of the most important people if the worst case scenario comes into fruition so with that thank you for having me and I appreciate having this opportunity