 I can't make up my mind. I don't know whether the magic words this morning are Dave Stevens and the Cyber Underground, or whether it's the great hack, that movie on Netflix. This is an awesome movie. We can talk about that as much as you want. I love that. It was a great documentary. And it goes with another great Netflix especially had on Terms of Service, which the two go hand in hand. If you click on Yes for Terms of Service for that free email account, you're clicking, you know, you're given away your eternal soul. If I have to think of a good title, I mean, I know we already have a title. What is the title? What is the title? Watch out. They're stealing our brains. You know, I don't think they're doing it. I think they're installing a remote control. OK. I think that's what's happening is we're being manipulated. And I think just to kick this off, before we go into the deep dive of how they did it, I'd like to discuss why I think it's working. And one of the problems is the American culture is very short-term, very short-term thinkers. And we have this enormous wealth gap. And you'll notice that people that, and I live this way, I'm sure you did, when we were students and we were just starving, we thought about right here, right now, well, how am I going to get through this week and tomorrow or the future later? Yeah, the future is way in the future. I can't think about that now, but that's half of America. That's more than half of America. So if you convince them that something's wrong right now, right before the election, that's the way they're going to vote. So I think 50% of America is thinking about how am I going to feed myself? And then they get the tweet, oh, cricket hillary. And then I'm going to vote for the other person because the election's tomorrow. And I have to eat. And I can't think about this. I don't have the time to investigate. I can't dig down. Twitter told me what's the facts. I got this news off of Facebook. I don't have time to go to the New York Times or the press telegram or read a Canadian newspaper or God forbid Al Jazeera and find out what's really going on. No, I'm just going to take. Yeah, I have soft brains. Then you can enter my brains if you like. And let me take a minute just to talk about this whole thing of the dispute. I don't know if I really call it a dispute between Facebook and Twitter on whether. Difference of opinion. Whether they should take ads or not. And Twitter said we're not going to take ads. But that doesn't mean that you can't sign up and send false information to them all day. You can do misinformation still. You just can't actually publicly declare we're putting a political ad on Twitter. Yeah, so what's the difference? Well, it's actually more pernicious if you say it in the name of news instead of in the name of an ad. It's actually a little bit better if you create what's called an online gang. An online what they call quote unquote grassroots movement, but it's actually a misinformation campaign to get people angry and against each other. And that anger causes the split second decision to vote for the wrong person. You know, at the outset when we learned about Cambridge Analytica and the IRA and research agency in Moscow and all that, I was so impressed. I said, these guys understand mass social psychology. They can figure out how to divide us and figure out how to activate these either kids or adults if you like. This is new. This is PsyOps. This has been around for 70 years. Yeah, and you and I could sit down and we could figure out, hey, what are the weak points in American social structure? Sure. What are the things that people are concerned about? They're going to be that concerned about it. They're a little concerned about it, historically. And then we make a list. And I said, say a dozen things on there. No more than a dozen things. And then we figure out what to say to them to aggravate that division. You and I, in an hour, we could figure it out. So IRA wasn't that brilliant after all. They just understood the notion of figuring out the divisions and then working the divisions. I wouldn't say fake news. It's not really fake news. It's at an angle. It's weighted. It's tilted. And so it tends to exacerbate the division. It's not that hard. And these kids with the soft brains, they don't see it coming. It's not just the divisiveness. If you create a threat to something somebody likes, their way of life, you create the threat of taking away your guns. People are going to vote the other way, because Beto O'Rourke says, hell, yes, we're coming for your AR-15s. Well, I don't think he's going to get voted in Texas for anything anywhere soon after he said that. But that created the threat so people will vote against him. Now, you can create any kind of threat you want on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram. There's all these social media outlets that you can flood. But this is, again, it's nothing new. It's not just the Russians. But Cambridge Analytica figured out that they could gather 10,000 data points from every person on the planet. And they actually got 87 million Facebook users data from Facebook just by hooking up to their application programming interface or API. And they figured out all these data points. But it's not just Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica has an offshoot, another company that is their partner called SCL. They advise the Pentagon. They advise the CIA. Are you using past tense or current tense? Well, Cambridge Analytica said they went out of business. But then, yeah, well, as I've known for many, many years here in Hawaii and experiencing it in my own family, when certain companies go out of business, they pop up as another named business. Wack-a-mole. Yes, Wack-a-mole, right? You can't get it anymore. But Cambridge Analytica will pop up someplace else and keep advising the government, because PsyOps is huge. And when you add millions of data points, you push it all together, you come up with stuff you never expected. And it's not just one big, massive group of people. It's little pockets of people that you have to get excited about something or make them feel threatened. We're all learning more about it, but Brad Pasquale is kind of a genius in this. He's the guy who was the IT director of a social media director of Trump's campaign in 2016. And then he got elevated. He is now the, he can't be 35, maybe less. He's the overall campaign manager for Trump in 2020. It shows you what Trump is doing, what Trump is thinking about. And it also shows you, and I like your view of this, it also shows me, anyway, that this 2020 election is really all about social media. It's all about Brad Pasquale. And the way that Trump keeps that 40%, his hardcore base is with social media. That's why they don't leave him because they're getting twisted information all day long on the only channels they look at. Well, there's a reason they only look at those channels. And there's a lot of America that will only go and watch the news that they like, that agrees with their viewpoint. Fox News tends to do that. They speak to the base. They tell the base what they wanna hear. They'll spin the story so people think, that's right, I knew that already. I'm positive that's happened. And now look, it's reinforced by Fox News. They don't want any dissenting opinions, so they're not gonna turn on NBC, NPR, any of the other stations. They don't get that breadth of news. So when they sign up for like, connections on Facebook or Twitter, they're gonna sign up for the people that they like and agree with. So the only news they get reinforces what they believe. And so it perpetuates itself. Yeah, well, I mean, although there's MSNBC and CNN, you know, on network television that go after Trump every day, spend their entire broadcast time every day going after it. Fact is that NPR and PBS receive money from federal sources and they gotta be careful. They gotta at least appear balanced. So what you have is a dearth of aggressive news information and services that will meet Fox News at the pass. And so I think Fox News sometimes it just rules the day because the democratic side of things is a markers of Queensborough. You know, very gentle, relatively speaking. They don't lie. They don't go out of their way to make false statements. It's actual journalism. Yeah, they're practicing real journalism. Fox News is not doing that. We're actually reliving a period of history. And I don't know if you've studied the early 20th century. We're kind of reliving the teens and the 20s of the turn of the 20th century when, you know, the yellow journalism was big back then. A newspaper could put whatever it wanted out there and it saturated the neighborhood with the story. And sometimes it was the only publication out there and people read it and they believed it. It could be anything. It could be completely false, but they believed it. The moon is made of cheese. Exactly, that could have flown, just fine. And those papers that we have around now, we're practicing this yellow journalism as they call it back then. But it slowly went away. I think we're slowly gonna get out of this, but I don't see a path to that now. It's just so easy to lie and to manipulate. And we're making it easier to collect data on us because we like things for free on the World Wide Web. We like to have free email. We like to have free Facebook and free Google Docs. Every time we sign up for things, there's TOS, Terms of Service. Now, if you really wanna get a good night's sleep, read those, you just go off like a light. It's better than a sleeping pill. However, if you actually do get through that, you know, make a couple of passes at it, but when you read that, you're signing away your eternal soul. They say they will not use your data or anything other than just the purposes of that site. However, there's little provisions in there in the fine print, usually size eight font, light, gray, at the end of the contract before the submit button, that tells you that if the government requests it, they're gonna give them that data. And then- Without a subpoena. Without a subpoena. And here's how they can do that. You gave them your data. Therefore, you're no longer in possession. Therefore, you're giving up your privacy. You gave it to them. So if you're Social Security Numbers in Google, guess what? If the government asks Google for your Social Security Number, they're gonna get it. Not that they need it. It's on the dark web anyway. I found my Social Security card out there. I took a selfie with it. It was pretty funny. But that came from another hack. But Google and on Facebook, have terms of service that say, we will release if we're asked. Well, you know, here's a big question. And I know you have a good answer for it. People say, I don't care. I don't care. You can have my data. I have quote, quote. Nothing to hide. Nothing to hide. But what they don't realize is... So here, let me give you an example of how that could hurt you, right? So say you're an avid Amazon shopper and you do everything on Amazon. You buy all your clothes on Amazon. Well, two years ago, the Republican-led Congress proposed a bill to let medical insurance companies use your data from other online companies to aggregate totals of risk for you and to adjust your rates accordingly, just for you personally. So I'll give you an example of what came up. Someone said, well, what if I'm on amazon.com and all the clothes I buy are plus sizes? And I buy lots of candy. And I got some cookies, right? And I buy lots of kitty treats. So now I'm a cat person. I probably stay at home a lot. I'm immobile and huge. I eat cookies a lot. Medical insurance rates are gonna go up because I'm a greater risk for things like type II diabetes, right? That's pernicious. It's actually, it came to the floor of the house. It got shot down, thank God. But it was on the floor. People were thinking about this. Medical insurance companies using your shopping data to make sure that you're not a high risk for them. Now, coming in from a business standpoint, brilliant. I'm reducing my risk, right? From a personal standpoint, I hate that. I hate people knowing that, okay, I like chocolate. Because your rates are going up? Well, my rates went up 14% this last year. It was insane. In fact, the little raise I got at the university was overcome with the medical insurance cost increase. So I'm actually making less money on my net take home paycheck this year than I was last year, which is a sad case. We haven't even touched exactly how you can use that in a kind of a psycho sociological approach in politics. And right after this break, Dave, I like to talk about that because that is what's happening right now. Okay. I'm Duration. I'm the host of Finding Our Future on Think Tech Hawaii. Think Tech Hawaii needs you. Please help us in our fall fund drive. Every dollar sustains us. Go to thinktechhawaii.com and click on the donate button. Or send your check to Think Tech Hawaii, 904 Street Mall, Suite 888, Honolulu 96813. Your donation is tax deductible and deeply appreciated. Thank you. Aloha, this is Rob Hack. My show is exporting from Hawaii every other Thursday from 12 to 12 30 p.m. where I bring in people involved in the entire exporting infrastructure in Hawaii, including government, academia and manufacturers and shippers themselves. Please join me every other Thursday, 12 to 12 30 p.m. on exporting from Hawaii. Mahalo. Okay, Bingo, we're back. This is so exciting. Dave Stevens and me, and we're talking about, we may change the title again, but we're talking about watch out. They're stealing our brains. The subtitle is because our brains are soft. I mean, let them steal our brains. So just go to politics for a minute. So this fellow, Parsqual, Brad Parsqual, is working on us right now. And he's working on the base right now. But he's holding the base. I'm sure he's got his kind of electronic control room there somewhere, and in the headquarters, probably in the White House actually, using government money. And he's working his base, their base. So the question is, Cambridge Analytica is not out of business, and getting data on us, including what we eat, and how many kitties we have, that's available still today. When they can get a profile on us, it's brilliant the way they do that. Little data here, little data there. They know everything about us from stuff they can get or buy. And if it's not Cambridge Analytica per se, it's the successor to Cambridge Analytica, and the IRA in Russia is all connected to that. So to me, I think we're gonna have a replay. Sorry, of the 2016 election because of it, and because of Brad. And so the question is, why do we let that happen? Why do we let that happen? Let me remind you that Congress hasn't done Jack about this. Well, until just recently, we had a Republican-led Congress who was not motivated to do Jack about this. Just now, we have a House that is Democratic-led. We're still up against a Senate that is completely Republican. We have to cast it in both houses and not get vetoed. Right, and then it's gotta get vetoed, and then you have to, yeah, we can't get a bill through. The biggest problem is we weren't motivated, and the people who are now in office, there's a dearth of people that hold office in Congress now that actually understand what's going on. There's very few of the younger generation that actually realize that when you send a text to somebody, it's open, it's not encrypted, and anybody listening in on that frequency can decrypt that, or decode that, and read your text messages. Your cell phone isn't encrypted. If someone gets your cell phone, they can, I mean, that happened during Bill Clinton's time. That's how they got the whole Monaco-Lewitski thing, right? They were tapping the frequency for the cell phone. This stuff isn't private. And I think- And it can be aggregated. It can be huge amounts of data. That's right, and I don't think Congress or the people that hold Congressional seats right now actually understand this in depth. If they did, they would know. They don't know how to frame a question to Mark Zuckerberg. They really did not. I watched those questions, and I saw the expression on Mark Zuckerberg's face, and every once in a while, he pulled what I called the Scooby, the, oh, what did you just ask? Was that a real question? Do you understand what you just asked me? And I did the same thing, oh, that's just, hey, shaggy, what, what was that? If they actually understood how people feed data and put up profiles and put up every little piece of their day, what they're doing, what they're eating, who they're dating, what their relationship status, where they live, where they went to school, what classes they took. I had to demonstrate to some of my students how easy this was. There was students in my class, and I just picked a random name in the class, and I typed her name into Twitter, and her account was completely public. And one of her tweets, about five minutes before I typed in her name, was, this class is really boring. And there was a picture of me. So I put it up on the screen, and she was really embarrassed. I said, look, you put this up there, this is public, and not only that, it's forever. Nobody's gonna delete this, and even if they did, it's in so many places now, it propagates. You can't erase yourself, and that can be used by these people like Brad Pesquale. You know, the interesting thing is, and I'm sure that AI is involved in the analysis, it's the analysis. It's the frontier, it's the brilliance is in the analysis. So I give you a picture, a picture of Dave Stevens. I know everything about you, I know what you do, I know as much about your activities, your behavior, your conduct, your situation in life as you do. And then I take AI, and I compare that profile against other profiles. I say, gee, he sounds like he'd be soft on immigration. Let's go after him on immigration. He sounds like he'd be soft on a tax reform, reduction, bad reduction. He sounds like he'd be soft on the Middle East, whatever it is, and then they can get you with a soft brain and they can use that information, use your profile in order to send you messaging that where they're pretty sure it's gonna have the intended effect. That's the scary part. So one little data point doesn't mean too much, but when you take a whole composite and then you compare it with AI against a composite, say for somebody who doesn't like immigration, you can really do stuff. You really can and the way they do it is they create fake accounts on Facebook and Twitter and then they like you or they friend you and if you're not paying attention, you accept it. And even on Facebook, by the way, if I accept your invitation to be your friend, but your settings are friends of friends and my setting is friends of friends. Now everybody related to you and Facebook can see everything of me because I've just opened it up to friends of friends. I got to set it to just friends, but the default is everybody, friends of friends. So if you see me, all your friends can see me. So if you're hooked up to somebody who has a fake account, now they see me too and I'll get their posts in my feed. That feed comes up all the time. I get new posts. They can post those things that will push me on the AI identified data points that they think I'm soft on or maybe it's immigration or a tax cut which I'd love and they just push those ads. Hey, if you want a tax cut, this guy or you don't hear, you could vote for him and he's really big on tax cuts. Right, you're in target. I'm a target. That's right. So how in the world do we stop this? I mean, it's not so simple as agreeing to put an ad on because you can get around that as we discussed. It's not so simple as saying, I've asked you this question before, no more anonymous. I want to know everybody who's on the web. That's not necessarily directly related but make it transparent so that you know. One of my ideas is if you post something on the net, we have to know who you are. We're gonna give you a rating and if you lie, you get a low rating. Oh, China does that. Yeah. China has a social score now, right? And if you don't have a high enough social score, you can't even take the train. Yeah. I would argue though that there's a ways around that. As you know, I teach ethical hacking. So I can be dozens of people on the web and quote unquote prove my identity in a dozen different ways and you'd never know. And that's what people did. That's what IRA does for Russia. They have multiple accounts per person. Some persons can handle 100 different fake accounts and post all kinds of information that will manipulate us to go one way or the other. Yeah, and if you require, you know, verification of the individual and you give everybody and I a national ID card or something like that, it's scary on another level. It means some agency, maybe government, you know, knows where you live and every element. So anyway, the other thing is what do we do? What do we do? This reminds me of a combination of 1984 and Brave New World. It is indeed. Where it's this Orwellian society. Did life create the Orwellian or did Orwell create the society? Because this wasn't too long ago that you wrote the book. Yeah, it's a chicken in the egg thing. It kind of gives me the shivers. Really? So what do we do in Congress? What do we do to Zuckerberg? Because we haven't done anything to him. We haven't done anything to Twitter and the others, although they're all consolidating now anyway. So that's a big thing. You bring up something very, very special. So right around the yellow journalism time in the beginning of the 20th century, we also had a president who was a trust buster. So when I broke up these big companies and said, no, no, no, you have monopolies. You know, you say you don't, but just because you own 99.9% of everything and this person has 0.01, you're still a monopoly, even though there's two vendors out there. You're your monopoly. So when Twitter, I'm not Twitter, when Facebook took over Instagram and WhatsApp, people started raising an eyebrow. Something's really big here. Amazon has done the same thing. They controlled not only Amazon, but their entire supply chain. So when people say, well, why aren't wages going up? Because the economy is booming. Well, it's because this is like Amazon. They have the monopoly. They can control all the wages, all the way down their supply chain. All their vendors have to go to them. Walmart does the same thing. Yeah. So is it time for Teddy Roosevelt? I would say so. That's my personal opinion. I would like more options out there. Once a company like Facebook, it gets up into the hundreds of billions of dollars in value or Apple becomes trillions of dollars in value. It's time to throttle back a little bit. Google has now their parent company, Alphabet. If you looked at the amount of companies within there, they're doing brilliant stuff. Don't get me wrong. However, if they all decided to go one way, they'd take half the planet with them. I used to have a slogan, says, we do no evil. Gave it up. It's no longer the slogan. I'm not sure I ever heard that. Okay, do no evil. Way back. Okay, it must have been a way. So yeah, their first business model was, I think they were just gonna create a search engine that didn't suck. That was their business plan. And 1999 to now, 20 years later, they owned most of the land. You know, there'd be a carrot in a stick. How about this, Dave? So on the one hand, you don't want to have to stick. You want Teddy Roosevelt to break these companies up into multiple parts. You want to not let them consolidate this way. Consolidation is dangerous. You know, for example, the conservative radio shows, all being acquired by the Sinclair radio. Oh, Rupert Burdocks. I don't know if it is. Yeah. Is that right? Well, this, yeah. Anyway, when you have consolidation like that, it doesn't favor democracy at all, aside from the economics info. So anyway, suppose I say, not only break you up, but we're also gonna incentivize entrepreneurs, small ones, who compete with you. We want them to compete with you. And maybe some of them will come up with a better mousetrap than your mousetrap. And people will like them better. And it will be threatened by them. And maybe the guys who come up, the new competitors, will say, we're not gonna sell you data. We're not gonna exchange your data. We're not gonna release your data. It belongs to you. And that would be competitive at least for me, wouldn't it? That'd be very utopian. I don't see that happening in this capitalist society. Money's gonna talk. I'll give you an example way back when Microsoft was booming, but a company came up and made Skype. Skype was great. Remember Skype, by 0608, we were using Skype and guess who bought them? Microsoft, because they didn't want to compete with them. And now it's all sucked up into Microsoft. That happens with people that make products. Their dream is to get bought out by someone bigger. And the reason is, if I created a company and I have this great idea, I don't have any money, so go to you venture capitalist. I say, hey, if you give me $20 million, we can make this fantastic thing happen. And you say, great, sell it in five years and give me 20% profit. Because that's what you do. That's your mission. So I have to sell off in five years. Who am I gonna sell it to? Someone who's gonna give me that 20 million plus 20% plus whatever I wanna take home. Which is gonna be another 20 million. So money drives that. So I don't think that's a fix. Yeah. Well, you know what he reminds me of reading a book now about Rockefeller and my other people. It's the Rachel Maddow book, in a fact. Oh, okay. And she talks about Rockefeller and she talks about how Teddy came for him. He was an oil magnate with huge wealth at the top of the throw. He was worth, in those days, in those days, not even converted for current dollars, over $300 billion. Not bad, huh? When they say riches Rockefeller, they're not kidding. That's like as rich as Keanu Reeves. So. Okay. So then it broke up the standard oil monopoly into lots of different parts. Guess what? He made more money after that because he figured a way around it. Sure. Most of those little companies are actually part of mobile oil now. Yeah, right, same thing. So here we are at the end of our show, Dave. It goes fast, doesn't it? We ripped through that. I have one more question for you. This is a hard one now. I never promised you a rose garden day. Okay. So here we are in the state of Hawaii. Legislature created a privacy commission. What is that for? A task force. What are you going to do? Well, it's about privacy status. California adopted a privacy statute, which it's yet to be seen how that's going to play out. But, you know, people in this later are considering similar kinds of legislation to protect the privacy. And privacy means data, that's what it means. So my question to you is what is your advice to the legislature and to this privacy task force on what the state can do? Congress is kind of locked up right now, but what can the state do to protect privacy and ameliorate the risk for us, the consumer? Well, before they make a decision, I'd say go back in the past and see how things have developed from the very beginning. Because I think most of the people that are making decisions now have this much information. When there's this much information available, if you look at the past, you can start to forecast some of the future. So before you make a decision about how you're going to solve a problem, look at the entire problem. I think GDPR came out just a little bit too fast, the general protection data rules for Great Britain. I think for the EU, that was a good thing, but people didn't look at the entire history of this. Otherwise Brexit wouldn't happen. Brexit still happened. And the most popular search after Brexit happened on Google, the most popular search was, what's Brexit? Right, I remember that. Yeah, no one knew what Brexit was. But Cambridge Analytica, through social media, manipulated everyone going that way because the privacy wasn't there. That data was being released and Facebook was leading the way. So look at the whole problem, then make a choice. Right, and including the consequences. That's right. And this brings me to my final point, which I'd like to advise everyone is, this show with Dave Stevens and me covering these issues that he's shown in DOE, in every school, in every college, in every community college in the state. We got to get the level of awareness up on these issues. Just send out the link. Yeah. Thank you, Dave. Thank you. Great to talk to you.