 Good afternoon everybody. Thank you so much for coming today and thanks for the organizers of the conference for inviting me as somebody who Participates in a lot of conferences over the years I sometimes recoil whenever I get an invitation to come to a conference because so often they end up Doing a little more than just kind of spreading dreariness in part because the intent is to Gather together and talk about institutions in the way They're so fundamentally corrupted and the ways in which it creates all kinds of social pathologies And it's sort of true that these institutions are corrupted and occasionally at these conferences people will remember Oh, maybe it's not such a great idea to spend 15 minutes just talking about the reasons why everyone should be so Pestimistic and they kind of add on this cursory nod to the fact that oh if we come together maybe we can fix things but it's a very sort of cursory and trivial attempt to Spread optimism and what excited me about this conference what excites me about it the reason I came a pretty far distance to participate in it It's because it's animated in the first instance By the notion that we can reimagine something that is better. That's exciting It's not just an afterthought but the primary focus this idea that we can create societies from scratch We can reimagine a way that so many of the pathologies that we're all aware of can be Eliminated or cured by starting from a different foundational point All that said I do think it's necessary to spread a little bit of dreariness because in order to imagine a Kind of better new alternative. I think it's important to talk about the reasons why That's even necessary in the first place What went wrong with our current institutions in part because that's the key context for the idea of creating something different But also because there's so much to learn in Looking at and deconstructing and analyzing the current the status quo in order to learn what went wrong So as to not replicate it in whatever new is being created and so this group of the conference is intended to think about Media and the way in which it can be freer and more constructive and healthier and the way in which I think civic Liberties just core civic rights can be better preserved not allow their erosion things like free speech free press Due process the kind of foundational points for a just society and for me when I think about Those concepts and in particular how things can go off track so easily my frame of reference is The 9-11 attack not the attack itself But the response to it and in the West generally in the United States in particular one of the lessons that I think is so crucial to always keep in mind is How easily and how quickly? things can go awry as a result of Either a genuine attempt to respond to a crisis or a cynical attempt to exploit one to wield the even greater power in the part of institutions of authority and I think one example is Particularly vivid in understanding that concept and that was the enactment of the Patriot Act in the days and weeks After the 9-11 attack at the time after 9-11 happened in the United States There was a sense that we need to unite we need to give the government anything it asked for in the name of Keeping the population safe of avoiding a repetition of an event like that that really was the climate things were 80 and 90 percent in favor of whatever measures the government wanted But even in that climate where there was a lot of acquiescing a lot of Acceptance of new proposed laws the Patriot Act even then was considered very radical almost unthinkably so this kind of a radical departure from the promise of the American founding of the way in which we thought about the United States and how powers of detention and surveillance were supposed to function and People said that even when they weren't saying that about many other things. This seems dangerous. It seems authoritarian This seems over the line And in fact that sentiment was so widespread that they needed a way to assuage those concerns And the way they found was to say we're going to enact the Patriot Act But when we do we're going to put in a provision that saves it's just temporary It's only designed to address the immediacy of this particular crisis But don't worry. It's going to go away after four years Unless in the extremely unlikely case Congress says this emergency is still Present and still just is acute and then they'll renew it unless that happens And is extremely unlikely four years from now that emergency will still be so acute it will go away Here we are 22 years later and not only is the Patriot Act still Completely in place and exactly the form that it was when it was enacted almost no reforms When it comes up every four years for renewal, it's barely even debated anymore. Nobody even notices it There's nothing there's nothing radical anymore that people think about the Patriot Act because it's been so normalized It's just part of the political woodwork and it became that way really very quickly even in 2005 when it was time to renew it the sense that this was something radical had Disappear because it was no longer radical it was now foundational to how our society functions and that I think is a crucial lesson that these things happen Very quickly and imperceptibly but very potently and the next I time that I really kind of Focused on the way in which these dangers can happen is as you see here the work that I did in 2013 along with the And several other of my colleagues in journalism when I worked with Edward Snowden the NSA whistleblower to reveal Something people had suspected but never had confirmation of and had no idea it was so extreme Which was the revelations of mass indiscriminate spying that had taken place in the United States justified by the threat of 9-11 and this was the story the very first story on June 6th that we Published it's about exactly ten years ago just a few months Beyond ten years and you can see the story was that the NSA and at the time it was just Verizon We came very quickly to realize it was not just Verizon But every company was collecting Millions and tens of millions and even hundreds of millions of records of every telephone call that Americans were having soon after We realized it was extended the internet and the reason it made such an impact was because of the magnitude of it The fact that there was basically Nothing that the NSA either wasn't seeking to collect to collect and analyze or in fact had collected and analyzed There was a slide here whenever anyone asked me what was the most significant story? I always say there's no one significant story the most significant part was how Unlimited was their vision of what a surveillance state should be that it was literally the elimination of privacy in the digital age here You see just one of the slides that came from the NSA describing what their surveillance posture was and there you see Sniff at all know it all collected at all process at all exploited all Partner at all it was not collect all terrorist communications collect all threatening Communications it was collected all and so many of the documents demonstrated that wasn't just an aspiration But something that had in fact taken place But the thing that was different about the Patriot Act was that in this case there was an attempt There was a reaction to it a sense that well There are things we should be able to do to guard against it to try and limit its reach and Edward Snowden himself after he enabled us to do this reporting didn't just disappear In fact, he began working on what those solutions were and a lot of people had already been working on them as well here you see an interview in 2015 he's with the intercepts security chief Michael Lee and Informational security chief and he had an interview about how to reclaim your privacy and it focused a lot on encryption and private sector means an individual means to guard against this sort of incursion and encryption became the focal point of Privacy activists and it was like an arms race where the NSA was trying to invade encryption and people were Trying to build it and here you see one of the stories actually That the NSA had targeted encryption very complicated sophisticated encryption that a lot of security experts assumed had been impenetrable or at least very very difficult to breach and in fact the NSA Was spending a quarter of a billion dollars a year and had in fact breached them You see there the subhead line security experts say programs undermine the fabric of the internet. It was the foundational means of safeguarding privacy the NSA had breached it and people were shocked by that But over the last ten years this has been the kind of back-and-forth the attempt to Find a way to ensure we still have privacy in the digital age while the governments that want to surveil not just the West but all over Are working constantly to overcome it And so for me this framework of how to ensure that the internet cannot be a place where people can freely organize and speak without being monitored Has an analog in the similar attempt to ensure that the internet is a place where free expression can no longer exist where There are ways that governments have to essentially Control the flow of information on the internet the internet itself was supposed to be this innovation that ensured a new way of Communicating that citizens around the world could organize and speak with one another Without having to be dependent upon a centralized state or corporate authority and yet exactly the opposite is true I think one of the most potent examples that really Indicated to people the extremity of the problem was in the wake of the banning by all big tech companies of Donald Trump When he was still the sitting president of the United States an alternative site was created where that said we're not going to allow Censorship we're not going to accept orders from institutions of authority about what to censor we're going to allow free speech to flow and it was a Application called parlor and in the wake of Donald Trump's banning from Twitter and Facebook. It became the number one most downloaded app in all of the United States more than Facebook and tiktok and Twitter itself. It was the most popular people were Going in droves to it because of the promise of free speech and the ability to be free of censorship And yet once people in Washington saw that it was that popular they began publicly calling on Apple and Google to excluded from its Download store so you couldn't download parlor any further you couldn't get updates and then they also demanded that Amazon booted off of its hosting services and with 48 hours parlor was crippled and Really never recovered and that showed what happens when there's a dependency on Companies that are so centralized that they're vulnerable to these kinds of censorship demands and there's also a kind of related attempt to Create this industry called the disinformation industry that is intended to ensure that censorship looks Not like political censorship or an intent to quash dissent But as a sort of data-based or politically neutral way of arbitrating truth and falsity So that we promise people you're gonna have an internet free of falsity who wouldn't want that? But of course the question becomes who are the people issuing these determinations? And when you look just a little bit below the hood you always find the same things here is One group that the media loves to cite for what is and is not disinformation It's called the Institute for Strategic Dialogue They always have these very benign sounding names who could be opposed to that It's just Institute for Strategic Dialogue everybody loves Strategic Dialogue And if you look though at who funds it you always find the same set of billionaires that have a certain ideology behind it and then you also have Sites that are related to the US security state or British intelligence or Western European intelligence that also funds This arbiter of what is truth and falsity? And if you look at media outlets like the Washington Post whenever they say oh, we have to censor something It's Russian disinformation They'll always cite this group the Institute for Strategic Dialogue or one that's very similar to it that is funded by Western governments even though you wouldn't know that they sound like a very neutral sounding name. So this is created genuine Problems with free expression on the internet and what a lot of people are now doing is seeking to find ways to rectify that I Last year agreed to move to rumble, which is a site devoted to free expression. They Have they're not available in France if you're in France and you want to watch my program or other programs on rumble They're not available in France because France ordered rumble to remove Certain platforms certain programs from its platform and they said we're not going to take orders from the French government about who We can and can't allow in our site. We're free speech platform We allow everybody and the French said if you don't we're going to cut you off the IP level So rumble is not available in France. They are very devoted to this idea They'd rather lose markets than accept censorship The problem is that even though rumble has done so much to avoid the problem that parlor had they they built their own servers They are completely insulated at the end of the day. They're still dependent upon Things like governments governments can cut them off at the IP level or there can be pressure put on Advertisers and there are a lot of people who believe that no matter how devoted to free a free internet and free Speech a company like rumble is it's never going to work until It's everything is decentralized until there are protocols like Odyssey Jack Dorsey is a big believer in this he says his biggest regret about Twitter is that there was a centralized place You could go to Twitter and governments did go there and pressure those People there to censor and they have the power to do it And they're always going to be vulnerable to those kinds of demands That the only way to have a free internet or a free media is once you have full decentralization And so I think when we're talking about creating new communities new leaders new Parallel cities we have to understand that these dynamics are very intoxicating They're part of human nature to want to control the free flow of ideas and even the most benevolent people often succumb to them for malevolent reasons were out of self-interest and I think there are a lot of lessons to learn from how these Erosions have taken place, but also the reactions to try and guard against them. Thank you very much