 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Okay, hello everyone, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We're here with Meet the Analyst segment Sunday morning. We've got everyone around the world here to discuss really the news around the EU, killing the privacy field or striking it down among other topics around data privacy and global commerce. We've got great guests here. Ray Wong, CEO of Constellation Research, Build Move Founder and CEO of Cyber Crisis Management from the Firm Crisis Team. And JD, CEO of Spearhead Management JD, I can let you say your name because I really can't pronounce it. How do I pronounce it? Doctor? I wouldn't even try it unless you are Dutch otherwise it will seriously hurt your throat. So JD works perfect for me. Dr. Dukag. And Sabichewal, who's obviously influencer, a cloud awesome native expert. Great guys, great to have you on. Appreciate it. Thanks for coming on. And Bill, thank you for initiating this. I appreciate all your tweets. Happy Sunday. You guys have been really tweeting up a storm. I want to get together kind of as an analyst. Meet the Analyst segment. Let's go through it. The news is the EU and US privacy shield for data is struck down by the core. That's the BBC headline, variety of news, different perspectives. You got an American perspective and you got an international perspective. Bill, we'll start with you. What does this news mean? I mean, basically half the people in the world probably don't even know what the privacy shield means. So why is this ruling so important and why should it be discussed? Well, data sharing between Europe and America is based on a two way promise that when data goes from Europe to America, the Americans promise to respect our privacy. And when data goes from America to Europe, the Europeans promise to respect the American privacy. Unfortunately, there are big cultural differences between the two blocks. The Europeans have a massive orientation around privacy as a human right. And in the US, there's somewhat more of a prioritization on national security. And therefore for some time, there's been a mismatch here. And it could be argued that the Americans haven't been living up to their promise because they've had various different laws and we'll come up to talk about FISA and the cloud act that actually contravene European privacy and make our incompatible with the promise that the Americans have given. That promise, first of all, was in the form of a treaty called Safe Harbor. This went to court and was struck down. It was replaced by privacy shield, which was pretty much the same thing really. And that has recently been caught as well. And that has been struck down. There now is no other means of legally sharing data between Europe and America other than what have been called standard contractual clauses. This isn't a broad treaty between two nations. These are drawn up by each individual country. But also in the ruling, they said that standard contractual clauses could not be used by any companies that were subject to mass surveillance. And actually in the US, the FISA courts enforce a level of mass surveillance through all of the major IT firms at all major US telcos, cloud firms or indeed social media firms. So this means that for all of the companies out there and their clients, business should be carrying on as usual apart from if you're one of those major US IT firms or one of their clients. So why, I mean, why did this come about? Was there like a major incident? Why now? What's the court? Was it stuck in the courts where people bitching and moaning about it? Why did this go down? What's the real issue? For those of us who've been following this attentively, things have been getting more and more precarious for a number of years now. We've had a situation where different measures have been taken in the US that have continued to erode the different protections that there were for Europeans. FISA is an example that I've given and that is the sort of secret courts and secret warrants that are issued to seize data without anyone's knowledge. There's the Cloud Act, which is a sort of extra judicial law that means that warrants can be served in America to US organizations and they have to hand over data wherever that data resides anywhere in the world. So data could exist on a European server if it was under the control of an American company. They'd have to hand that over. So whilst FISA is in direct conflict with the promises that the Americans made, things like the Cloud Act are not only in contraversion with the promise they've made, there's conflicting law here because if you're a US subsidiary of a big US firm and you're based in Europe, who do you obey? The European law that says you can't hand it over because of GDPR or the American law that says they've got extra judicial control and that you've got to hand it over. So it's made things a complete mess and to say, has this suddenly happened? No, there's been a gradual erosion and this has been going through the courts for a number of years and many of us have seen it coming and now it just hit us. So if I get you right, what you're saying is it's basically all this mishmash of different laws and there's no coherency and consistency. Is that the core issue? On the European side, you could argue there's quite a lot of consistency because we uphold people's privacy in theory. There have been incidents which we could talk about without but in theory that we hold your rights dear and also the rights of Europeans. So everyone's data should be safe here from the sort of mass surveillance we're seeing. In the US, there's more of a direct conflict between everything, including there's been in his first week in the White House, Donald Trump signed an executive order saying that the privacy act in the US which had been the main protection for people in the US, no longer applied to non-US citizens which was if you wanted to try and cause a storm and if you wanted to try and undermine the treaty there's no better way than doing it than that. By the way, Ray, I mean simplify this for me because I'm a startup, I'm hustling or I'm a big company. I don't even know who runs the servers anymore and I got data stored in multiple clouds. I got in regions and your Oracle just announced more regions, you got Amazon, a gazillion regions I could be on-premise. I mean, bottom line, what is this about? I mean, well- Bill's right. I mean, when Max Shrems, Bill's right, when Max Shrems, the Austrian activist actually filed his case against Facebook for where data was being stored data residency wasn't as popular. And what it means for companies that are in the cloud is that you have to make sure your data is being stored in the region and following those specific region rules. You can't skirt those rules anymore. And I think the cloud companies know that this has been coming for some time and that's why there's been announcement a lot of regions, a lot of areas that are actually happening. So I think that's the important part. But going back to Bill's earlier point, which is important is America is basically the Canary Islands of privacy, right? Privacy is there, but it isn't there in a very, very explicit sense. And I think we've been skirting the rules for quite some time because a lot of our economy depends on that data and the marketing of that data. And so we often confuse privacy with consent and also with value exchange. And I think that's part of the problem of what's going on here. Companies that have been building their business models on free data, free private data, free personally identifiable information are the ones that are at risk. And I think that's what's going on here. It's the classic Facebook as you're the product there and the data is your product. Well, I want to get into what this means because my personal takeaway is not knowing not knowing the specifics is and just following and say cyber security, for instance, one of the tenants there is that data sharing is a valuable, important ethos in the community. Now everyone has their own privacy or security data and they don't want to let everyone know about their exploits but it's well known in the security world that sharing data with each other, different companies and countries is actually a good thing. So the question that comes in my mind is this really about data sharing or data privacy or both? I think it's about both. And actually what the ruling is saying here is all that we're asking from the European side is please stop spying on us and please give us a level of equal protection that you give to your own citizen because data comes from America to Europe. If that data belongs to a US citizen or a European citizen it's given equal protection. It is only if data goes in the other direction where you have secret courts, secret warrants, seizure of data on this massive scale and also a level of lack of equivalence that has been imposed. And we're just asking that once you've sorted out a few of those things, we're saying everything's back on the table away we go again. Why don't we merge the EU with the United States when that's all the problem? We just left Europe. I actually, I also take over of the UK maybe the 15 second state. I always pick on Bill. Bill, you guys are screaming loud and clear about all these concerns but UK is trying to get out of that economic union. It is a union at the end of the day. And I think the problem is the institutional mismatch between EU and US. US is old democracy, bigger country, population-wise bigger economy whereas Europe is set of countries trying to put together a band together as one entity and the institutions are new. Like, you know, they're 15 years old, right? They're maturing. I think that's where the big mismatch is. Well, Ray, I wanna get your thoughts on this. Ray wrote a book, I feel what year it was, this digital disruption. Basically it was basically digital transformation before it was actually a trend. And, you know, it was, I mean, to me it's like do you do the process first and then figure out where the value extract is? And, you know, this may be a Silicon Valley or an American thing, but go create value then figure out how to create process or understand regulations. So if data and entrepreneurship is gonna be a new modern era of value, why wouldn't we wanna create a rule-based system that's open and enabling and not restricted? So it gets a great point, right? And the innovation culture means you go do it first and you figure out the rules later. And that's been a very American way of getting things done. And a very Silicon Valley perspective, not everyone, but I think it's in general that's kind of the trend. I think the challenge here is that we are trading privacy for security, privacy for convenience, privacy for personalization, right? And on the security level it's a very different conversation than what it is on the consumer and personalization side. On the security side, I think most Americans are okay with a little bit of spying at least on your own side, you know, to keep the country safe. We're not okay with a China level type of spying which we're not sure exactly what that means or what's enforceable in the courts. We look like China to the Europeans in the way we treat privacy just and I think that's the perspective we need to understand because the Europeans are very explicit about how privacy is being protected. And so this really comes back to a point where we actually have to get to a consent model on privacy as to knowing what data is being shared you have the right to say no and when do you have the right to say no and then if you have a value exchange on that data then it's really like sometimes it's monetary, sometimes it's non-monetary, sometimes there's other areas around consensus where you can actually put that into place. And I think that's what's missing at this point saying, you know, do we pay for your data? Do we explicitly get your consent first before we use it? And we haven't had that in place. And I think that's where we're headed towards and you know, sometimes we actually say privacy should be a human right. It is in the UN Charter but we haven't figured out how to enforce it or talk about it in a digital age. And so I think that's the challenge. And so I totally lose it. They don't really understand what it means. I mean, look at Americans not to say that we're idiots on this front but you know, the thing is is most people don't even understand how much value's getting sucked out of their digital exhaust like our kids, TikTok and whatnot. So, I mean, I get that and I think there's some that's gonna be a blowback for America for sure. I just worry it's gonna increase the cost of doing business and take away from the innovation for citizen value, the people. Because at the end of the day, it's for the people, right? I mean, at the end of the day it's like what's my privacy mean if I lose value? Even before we start talking about the value of the data and the innovation that we can do through data use you have to understand the European perspective here. For the European, there's a level of double standards and an erosion of trust. There's double standards in the fact that in California, you have new privacy regulations that are slightly different to GDPR but they're very much GDPR-like. And if it was, the boot was on the other foot to say if we were spying on Californians and looking at their personal data and contravening CCPA the Californians would be up in arms. Likewise, if we having promised to have a level of equality had enacted a local rule in Europe said that when data from America's over here actually the privacy of Americans counts for nothing. We're only gonna prioritize the privacy of Europeans. Again, the Americans would be up in arms and therefore you can see that there are real double standards here that are a massive issue. And until those addressed, we're not gonna trust the Americans. And likewise, the very fact that on a number of occasions Americans have signed up to treaties and promised to protect our data as they did with Safe Harbor, as they did with Privacy Shield and then have blatantly failed to do so means that actually to get back to even a level playing field where we were you have a great deal of trust to overcome. And the thing from the perspective of the big IT firms they've seen this coming for a long time as Ray was saying, and they've sought to try and have a presence in Europe and other things. But the way that this ruling has gone is that I'm sorry that isn't gonna be sufficient. These big IT firms based in the US that have been happy to hand over data or some of them even more happy than others but they all need to hand over data to the NSA or the CIA. They've been doing this for some time now without actually respecting this data privacy agreement that has existed between the two trading blocks. And now they've been called out and the position now is that the US is no longer trusted and neither are any of these large American technology firms. And until the snooping stops and equality is introduced they can now no longer even from their European operations they can no longer use standard contractual clauses to transfer data which is gonna be a massive restriction on their business. And if they had any sense, they'd be lobbying very, very hard right now to the Senate, to the house to try and persuade US lawmakers actually to stick to some of these treaties to stop introducing really mad laws that ride roughshod over other people's privacy and have a certain amount of respect. Let's let JD weigh in because he just got in and sorry on the video I made him back on the hose because he dropped off just real real quick. I mean, I think it's like when I go to Europe it's a line for Americans and it's a line for EU or EU and everybody else. I mean, we might be there but ultimately this has to be solved. So JD, why don't you weigh in Germany has been at the beginning forefront of privacy and they've been very core and how's this all playing out from your perspective? Well, the first thing that we have to understand is that in Germany there is a very strong love for regulation. Germans panic as soon as there are no regulation. So they need to understand what am I allowed to do and what am I not allowed to do and they expect the same from the others for the record, I'm not German but I live in Germany for some 20 years so I got a bit of a feeling for that. And that sense of need for regulation has spread very fast throughout the European Union because most of the European member states of the European Union considered this that it makes sense. And then we found that Britain had already a very good framework for privacy. So GDPR itself is very largely based on what the United Kingdom already had in place with their privacy act. Moving forward, we try to find agreement and consensus with other countries, especially in the United States because that's where most of the tech providers are only to find out. And that is where it started to go really, really bad. 2014 when the mass production by Edward Snowden came out to find out it's not just data from citizens, it's surveillance programs which include companies. I joined a purchasing conference a few weeks ago where the part of a large European multinational where the purchasing director explicitly stated that the usage of US based tech providers for sensitive data is prohibited as a result of them finding out that they have been under surveillance. So it's not just the citizens. There is a mess. There you have it guys, we did trust you. We did have agreements there that you could have abided by, but you chose not to. You chose to abuse our trust and you're now in a position where you are no longer trusted. And unless you can lobby your own elected representatives to actually recreate a level playing field, we're not gonna continue trusting you. So I mean, innovation has to come from somewhere and has to come from America. If that's the case, you guys have to get on board, right? Is that what it does? Innovation without trust? Is that the perspective? But I don't think it's a country thing. I mean, like, it's not you or them. I think everybody, no, but I think everybody does, everybody is looking for what the privacy rules are and what's important. And you can have that innovation with consent. And I think that's really where we're gonna get to. And this is why I keep pushing that issue. I mean, privacy should be a fundamental right and how you get paid for that privacy is interesting or how you get compensated for that privacy. If you know what the explicit value exchange is, what you're talking about here is the surveillance that's going on by companies which shouldn't be happening, right? That shouldn't be happening at the company level. At the government level, I can understand that that is happening. And I think those are treaties that the governments have to agree upon as to how much they're going to impinge on our personal privacy for the trade-off for security. And I don't think they've had those discussions either or they decided and didn't tell any of their citizens. And I think that's probably more likely the case. I mean, I think that what's happening here, Bill, you guys are pointing out, Ray, you articulated there on the other side as in my kind of colorful joke aside, is that we're living a first generation modern sociology problem. I mean, this is a policy challenge that extends across multiple industries, cybersecurity, citizens rights, geopolitical. I mean, when we were looking, even when we were doing CUBE events that overseas in Europe and in North American companies were going abroad, they were just recycling the American program. And we found there's so much localization value. So Ray, this is the digital disruption. It's the virtualization of physical digital worlds. And it's a lot of network theory, which is computer science, a lot of sociology. This is a modern challenge. And I don't think it's so much as a silver bullet. It's just that we need smart people working on this. That's my takeaway. But I think we can describe the ideal endpoint being somewhere where we have meaningful protection alongside the maximization of economic and social value through innovation. So that should be what we would all agree would be the ideal endpoint. But we need both. We need meaningful protection and we need the maximization of economic and social value through innovation. Well, I had another access security as well. Security, well, I put meaningful protection as both covering both security and privacy. Well, I'll speak for the American perspective here and I won't speak because I'm not the president of the United States, but I will say as someone who's been from Silicon Valley in the East Coast as a technical person, not a political person, our lawmakers are idiots when it comes to tech, just generally. They're not really... They really don't understand. They really don't understand the tech at all. So the problem is... I'm not claiming ours are a great deal better. Well, I think this is a modern problem. Like the young people that I talked to are like, why do we have these rules? They're all lawyers that got into these positions of Congress and the American side. And so with the American Jedi contract, you guys have been following very closely is it's been like the old school Oracle IBM and then Amazon was leading with an innovative solution and Microsoft has come in and repiped it. And so what you have is a fight for the digital future of citizenship. And I think what's happening is, is that we're in a massive societal transition where the people in charge don't know what the hell they're talking about, technically. And they don't know who to tap to solve the problems or even shape or frame the problems. Now there's pockets of people that are working on it, but to me, as someone who looks at the same, it's pretty simple solution. If no one's ever seen this before. So this metaphor as you can draw, but it's a completely different problem space because it's physical, digital. We've got a lot of lobbyists out there and we've got some tech firms spending an enormous amount of lobbying. If those lobbyists aren't trying to steer their representatives in the right direction to come up with laws that aren't gonna massively undermine trade and data sharing between Europe and America, then they're making a big mistake because we got here through some really dumb lawmaking in the US. There are none of the laws in Europe that are a problem here because GDPR isn't a great difference. It's a great deal different from some of the laws that we have already in California and elsewhere. The laws are at issue here. Bill, you have to back off a little bit from that rhetoric that the EU is perfect and the US is not. That's not true. I'm not saying we're perfect. No, you say that all the time. There's a massive lack of information. No, you say that all the time. Yeah, yeah. I hear that all the time. I'm wrestle. Yes, yes. Come on. When I'm being critical of some of the dumb laws in the US and not saying Europe's perfect, what we're trying to say is that in this particular instance, I said there was an equal balance here between meaningful protection and the maximization of economic and social value. On the meaningful protection side, America's got it very wrong in terms of the meaningful protection it provides to certainly European data. On the maximization of economic and social value, I think Europe's got it wrong. I think there are a lot of things that we could do in Europe to actually have far more innovation. Yeah. It's a cultural issue. The Germans want rules. That's what they crave for. America's out of the way. We don't want rules. I mean, pretty much it's a rebel society. And that's kind of the ethos of most tech companies. But I think, to me, the media, there's two things that go on with this tech business. The companies themselves have to be checked by state government. I believe in not a lot of regulation, but enough to check the power of bad actors. Media, so-called checking power, both of these major roles, they don't really know what they're talking about. And this is back to the education piece. The people who are in the media, so-called checking power and the government checking power, assume that the companies are bad. So yeah, if there's eight out of 10 companies like Amazon or other, actually try to do good things, if you don't know what good is, you're in the wrong game. So I think media and government have a huge education opportunity to look at this because they don't even know what they're measuring. I think that we are un-reeling. I think we're un-reeling from the globalization. Like we are undoing the globalization and that these are the side effects. These conflicts are side effect of that. Yeah, so what I'm saying is I support the focus on innovation in America. And that has driven an enormous amount of wealth and value. What I'm questioning here is, do you really need to spy on us, your allies, in order to help that innovation? And I'm starting to, I mean, do you need mass surveillance of your allies? I mean, I can see you, you may want to have some surveillance of people who are a threat to you, but we're guys, we're meant to be on your side. And you haven't been treating our privacy with a great deal of respect. You know, Saudi Arabia was our ally. You know, 9-11 happened because of them. They're people, right? It is no ally here and there's no enemy in a way. We don't know where the rogue actors are sitting. Like we don't know, it can be within us. It's well understood, as I agree, sorry. It's well understood that the nation states are enabling terrorist groups to take out cyber attacks. That's well known. All the source enables it. So I think there's the privacy versus- I'm not sure you're accusing your parents just during this though. No, no, I won't let you. I'm a former officer in the Royal Navy. I stood shoulder to shoulder with my U.S. counterparts. I put my life on the line on NATO exercises in real war zones and I'm now a disabled ex-serviceman as a result of that. I mean, if I put my life on the line, shoulder to shoulder with Americans, why is my privacy not respected? Oh, hold on. Bill, I was gonna say actually that it's not that. Even in the U.S., the part of the spying internally is we have internal actors that are behaving poorly. We have Marxist organizations posing as whatever it is. I'll leave it at that. But my point being is we've got a lot of that. Every country has that. Everyone country has actors and citizens and people in the system that are destined to try to overthrow the system. And I think that's what that surveillance is about. The question is we don't have treaties or we didn't have very explicit agreements. And that's why I'm pushing really hard here. They're separating privacy versus security, which is the national security. And privacy versus us as citizens in terms of our data being basically taken over for free, being used for free. And I think we have some agreement on. I just think that our governments haven't really had that conversation about what surveillance means. Maybe someone agreed and said, oh, okay, that's fine. You guys can go do that. We won't tell anybody. And that's what it feels like. And I don't think we deliberately are saying, hey, we wanted to spy on your citizens. I think someone said, hey, there's a benefit here too. Otherwise, I don't think that you would have let this happen for that long unless Max had made that case and started this ball rolling. And Edward Snowden and other folks. Yeah. I want to add to that. I mean, we need to, whether we're domestic terrorists, we need to stop them. And we need to have local action in UK to stop it happening here. And in America to stop it happening there. But if we're doing that, there is absolutely no need for the Americans to be spying on us. And there's actually no need for the Americans to say that privacy applies to U.S. citizens only and not to Europeans. That's a fair point. These are duff. That's a fair point. I'm sure GCHQ and everyone else has this covered. I mean, I'm sure they do. Bill, I know for, I've been involved in some, and I know for a fact the U.S. and the UK are discussing, and I know a company called IronNet, which is run by General Keith Alexander, funded by C5 Capital. There's a lot of collaboration because this is, again, they're trying to get their arms around how to frame it. And they all agree that sharing data for the security side is super important, right? And I think IronNet has this thing called IronDome, which is actually like, they say, hey, we'll just get consistency around the rules and share data. We can both, everyone can have their own little data. So I think that there's recognition at the highest levels of some smart people in both countries that, hey, let's work together. The issue I have is just policy. And I think there's a lot of clustering going on, cluster F here around just getting out of their own way. Are we a PG show? Wait, are we a PG show? I just gotta remember that. It's internet, there's no rules. There's no regulation. Are we the European rules or is it the American rules? I would like to jump back quickly to the purpose of the surveillance. And especially when mass surveillance is done under the cover of national security and terror prevention, I work with five clients in the past decade who all have been targeted under mass surveillance, which was revealed by Edward Snowden. And when they did their own investigation and partially was confirmed by Edward Snowden in person, they found out that their purchasing department, their engineering department, big parts of their pricing data was targeted in mass surveillance. There's no way that anyone can explain me that that has anything to do with preventing terror attacks or finding the bad guys. That is economical espionage. You cannot call it in any other way. And that was authorized by the same legislation that authorizes the surveillance for the right purposes. I'm all for fighting terror. And anything that can help us prevent terror from happening, I would be the first person to welcome it. But I do not welcome when that regulation is abused for a lot of other things under the cover of national interest. This is back to the lawmakers again and again America has been victim to the Chinese, something of illegal properties, well documented, well known in tech circles. But just because the Chinese have targeted you doesn't give you a free reign to target us. I'm not saying that. But if the US can sort out a little bit of reform in the Senate and the House, I think that would go a long way to solving the issues that Europeans have right now and a long way to sort of reaching a far better place from which we can all innovate and cooperate. Here's the challenge that I see. If you want to be instrumenting everything, you need to close society. Because if you have a free country like America and the UK, democracy, you're open. If you're open, you can't stop everything. So there has to be a trust to your point, Bill. That's to me that I just can't get my arms around that idea of complete lockdown and data surveillance because I don't think it's gettable in the United States like it's a free world. It's like open, it should be open. But we've got the grids and we've got the critical infrastructure that should be protected. So that's one hand. I just can't get around that because once you start getting to locking down stuff and measuring everything, that's just a series of walled gardens. So to JD's point on the procurement data and pricing data, I have been involved in some of those kind of operations. And I think it's financial espionage that they're looking at and financial security trying to figure out where to track down capital flows and what was purchased. I hope that wasn't in your client's case, but I think it's trying to figure out where the money flow was going more so than trying to understand the pricing data from competitive purposes. If it is the latter where they're stealing the competitive information on pricing and that data is getting back to a competitor, that is definitely a no-no. But if it's really to figure out where the money trail went, which is what I think most of those financial analysis are doing especially in the CIA or in the FBI, that's really what that probably would have been. Yeah, I don't think that the CIA is selling the data to your competitors as a company, as a Microsoft or as a Google. They're not selling it to each other, right? They're not giving it to each other, right? So I think the one big problem I studied with FISA is that they get the data, but how long they can keep the data and how long they can mine the data. So they should use that data as exhaust, means like they use it and just throw it away, but they don't, they keep mining that data at a later date. And FISA is only good for five years. Like I learned that every five years, we revisit that. And that's what happened this time, that we renewed it for six years this time, not five for some reason, one extra year. So I think we revisit our laws. Could be an election cycle maybe. Yes, exactly. So we revisit all these laws with Congress and Senate here, periodically just to make sure that they are up to date and they're not infringing with human rights or citizens rights and stuff like that. When you say you're up to date to check they're not conflicting with other, did you not spot that it was conflicting with privacy shield and some of the promises you'd made to Europe in? At what point did that fail to become obvious? It does, it does because there's a heightened urgency. Every big incident happens, 9-11 caused a lot of new sort of regulations and laws coming into the picture. And then the last time the Russian interference in our elections, that created some high sort of heightened sort of urgency about like we need to do something guys here. Like if some country can topple our elections, right? That's not acceptable. So we- And what was it that your allies did that forced you to spy on us and to downgrade our privacy? I'm not expert on the political systems here. I think our allies are little, okay, lose on there. And like, okay, let's say like, I call it village politics. Like, the world is like a village. Like it's only a few countries. It's like, it's not millions of countries, right? Like, that's how I see it, the city versus village. And then that's how I see the countries out there like village politics. Like there are two camps, like there's Russia and China camp and then there's US camp on the other side. Like we used to have Russia and US, two forces, big guys, and they manage the whole world balance somehow, right? Like some people are with one camp, the other are with the other, right? That's how they used to work. Now Russia is gone. Hold on, let me finish, let me finish. Russia is gone, that there's a void, right? And the China is trying to fill that void. Chinese are not like, like I think diplomat enough to fill that void. And it's all like we are in this imbalance, I believe. And then the Russia becomes a rogue actor kind of in a way that that's how I see it. And then they are funding all these kind of bad people. You see that all along. Like what happened happened in the Middle East and all that stuff. You said there are different camps. We thought we were in your camp. We didn't expect to be spied on by you or to have our rights downgraded by you. No, I understand but you guys have to trust us also. Like in village, let me tell you, I'm from a village, that's why I call me use the villager as a hashtag in my Twitter also. Like in village there are usually one or two families which keep the village intact. That's how it works. I don't know if you have lived in a place that's not entirely intact. Bill, you make us some great statements. Where's the evidence on the surveillance? Where can people find more information on this? Can you share? I think there's plenty of evidence and I can send some stuff on. And I'm a little bit shocked given the awareness of the VISA Act, the Cloud Act, the fact that these things are in existence in there. They're not exactly unknown. And many people have been complaining about them for years. I mean, we've had safe harbor overturned. We've had privacy shield overturned. And these weren't just on a whim. What does JD have in his hand? I want to know. The Edward Snowden book. A book by Edward Snowden, which gives you plenty. But it was not that. And that's something that we have to keep in mind because we can also, we can always claim that whatever Edward Snowden wrote, that he made that up. Every publication by Edward Snowden has an avalanche of technical confirmation. One of the things that he described about the Cisco switches, which Bill prefers to quote every time, which is a proven case, there were bundles of researchers saying, I told you guys, nobody paid attention to those researchers. And Edward Snowden was smart enough to get the mass media representation in that. But there's one thing I question I have for Sabin because in the two parties' strategy, it is interesting that you always take out the European Union as a partner. And the European Union is a big player and it will continue to grow. It has a growing amount of trade agreements with the growing amount of countries. And I still hope that the number of countries is reducing, you've just lost one. Well, only one. And actually, those are four countries under one kingdom. But that's another point. Guys, final topic with 5G impact because you mentioned Cisco couldn't help to think about. Let me finish, please, Mike. My question, John, how would the United States respond if the European Union would now legalize to spy on everybody and every company and every governmental institution within the United States and say, no, no, that's our privilege, we need that? How would the United States respond? You can try that and see economically what happens to you. That's how the village politics work. You have to listen to the mightier than you and we are economically mightier. That's the fact. Actually, it's hard to swallow fact for anybody else. If you guys build a great app, I would use it and surveil all you want. Yeah, but so this is gonna be driven by the economics. Exactly what John said. Yeah, this is gonna be driven by the economics here. The big US cloud firms are gonna find this ruling enormously difficult for them. And they are inevitably gonna lobby for a level of reform. And I think a level of reform is leading. Nobody on your side is actually arguing very vociferously the cloud act and the discrimination against Europeans. It's actually a particularly good idea. The problem is that once you've done the reform, are we gonna believe you when you say, it's all good now, we've stopped it because with the crypto AG scandal in Switzerland, you weren't exactly honest about what you were doing. With the FISA courts, so I mean, these are secret courts of secret warrants. How do we know and what proof can we have that you've stopped doing all these bad things? And I think one of the challenges, A, gonna be the reform and then B, gonna be able to show that you actually got your act together and you're now clean. And until you can solve those two of many of your big tech companies are gonna be at a competitive disadvantage and they're gonna be screaming for this reform. Well, I think that general matter said in his book about Trump and the United States is that you need alliances. And I think your point about trust and executing together without alliances, it really doesn't work. So unless there's some sort of real alliance, like understanding that there's gonna be some teamwork here, I don't think it's gonna go anywhere. So otherwise it'll be continued to be siloed and network-based, right? So to the village point, if TikTok can become a massively successful app, they're surveilling to there. And then we have to decide that if they're gonna put up with that or no, that's not my decision. But that's what's going on here. It's like, what is TikTok? Is it good or bad? Amazon sent out an email and they retracted it. That's because it went public. I guarantee you that they're talking about that at Amazon. Like, why would we want infiltration by the Chinese? And I'm speculating, I have no data. I'm just saying, you know, an email goes out and then they pull it back. Oh, we didn't mean to send that. Really? Yeah. So this is fine. It's like a troubleman's good. You always want to get a troubleman out there. Yeah, let's say exactly. There's some spying going on. So this is the reality. So John, you were talking about 5G and I think, you know, the rollout of 5G, you know, the battle between Cisco and Huawei, you just have to look at it this way. Would you rather have the US spy on you? Would you rather have China? And that's really your binary choice at this moment. And you know both is happening. And so the question is, which one is better? Like the one that you're in alliance with, the one that you're not in alliance with, the one that wants to bury you and decimate your country and steal all your secrets and then commercialize them or the one that kind of does it but doesn't really do it explicitly. So you've got to choose. We can say no, we're going to create our own standard for 5G and kick both out. That's an option. It's probably not a straightforward question or an answer to that question, as you would say. Because if we were to fast forward 50 years, I would argue that China is going to be the largest trading nation in the world. I believe that China is going to have the upper hand on so many of these technologies. And therefore, why would we not want to use some of their innovation and some of their technology? Why would we not actually be more oriented around trading with them than we might be with the US? I think the US is throwing its weight around at this moment in time. But if we were to fast forward, I think if looking in the long term, if I had to put my money on a Huawei or some of its competitors, I think given its level of investment in research and whatever, I think the better long term bet is Huawei. No, no, actually, you guys need to pick a camp. It's a village again. You have to pick a camp. You can't be with both guys. It's a global village. All right, so we have to go with the guys that have been spying on it. Well, which one? How do you know the Chinese haven't been spying on you? I think I'm very happy you find a backdoor in the Huawei equipment and you show it to us. We'll take them to task on it. But don't start bullying us into making decisions based on what ifs. I don't think I'm not qualified to represent the US, but what I would wanna say is that, I mean, if you look at the dynamics of what's going on in China, and we've been studying that as well in terms of the geopolitical aspects of what happens in technology, they have to do what they're doing right now because in 20 years, their population dynamics go like this, right? Because of the one child policy and they won't have the ability to go out and fight for those same resources where they are. So what they're doing makes sense from a country perspective and country policy, but I think they're gonna look like Japan in 20 years, right? Because the xenophobia, the lack of immigration, the lack of inside stuff coming in and aging population. I mean, those are all factors that slow down your economy in the long run and the lack of bringing new people in for ideas. I mean, that's part of it, their closed system. And so I think the long-term dynamics of every closed system is that they tend to fail versus open systems. So I'm not sure. They may have better technology along the way, but I think a lot of us are probably in the camp now, thinking that we're not gonna aid and abet them in that sense to get there. You're conflicting a country with a company. I didn't say that China had necessarily everything rose in its future. It'll be a bigger economy and it'll be a bigger training for it. But it's got its problems of the one child policy and the repercussions of that, but that is not one of the same thing. Among other things. And Huawei's a massively innovative company that has got a massive lead, certainly in 5G technology and may continue to maintain a lead into 6G and beyond. Oh, yeah, yeah. Huawei's done a great job on the 5G side. I don't disagree with that. I mean, they're ahead in many aspects compared to the US and they're already working on the 6G technologies as well and the rollouts have been further ahead. So that's the point there. And they got a great backer, too, the finance of the country, China. Okay, guys, let's wrap up. Let's wrap up this segment. Thanks for everyone's time. Final thoughts, just each of you on this core issue of the news that we discussed and the impact that it was conversation. What's the core issue? What should people think about? What's your solution? What's your opinion of how this plays out? Just final statements. We'll start with Bill, Greg, Shobit and JD. All I'm gonna ask is stop spying on us. Treat us equally. Treat us like the allies that we are. And then I think we've got a bright future together. Greg? I would say that Bill's right in that aspect in terms of how security agreements work. I think that we needed to be more explicit about those. I can't represent the US government, but I think the larger issue is really how do we view privacy and how we do the trade-offs between security and convenience and what's required for personalization and companies that are built on data. So the sooner we get to those kind of rules and understanding of what's possible, what's a consensus between different countries and companies, I think the better off we will all be as a society. Yeah, I believe the most important kind of independence is economic independence, like economically sound parties dictate the terms. That's what US is doing. And the smaller countries have to live with it or pick the other bigger player, number two in this case is China. John said earlier, I think I also, as Lee said, it's the fine balance between national security and the privacy. You have to strike that balance because the rogue actors are sitting in your country and across the boundaries of the countries, right? So it's not that FISA is being fought by Europeans only. Our internal people are fighting that too, like when you're mining over data, like what are you using for? Like I get concerned too, like when you can use that data against me that you have some data against me, right? So I think it's the fine balance between security and the privacy. We have to strike that. Awesome, JD. I'll include a little fact check. At the moment China is the largest economy. The European Union is the second largest economy followed directly by the USA. It's a very small difference. And I recommend that these two big parties behind the largest economy start to collaborate and start to do that eye to eye. Because if you want to balance the economical and manufacturing power of China, you cannot do that as being number two and number three. You have to join up forces. And that starts with sticking with the treaties that you signed. And that has not happened in the past almost four years. So let's go back to the table. Let's work on rules where from both sides, the rights and the privileges are properly reflected and then do the most important thing, stick to them. Yeah, I think that's awesome. And I think, you know, I would say that these young kids in high school and college, they need to come up and solve the problems. This is gonna be a new generational shift where the geopolitical landscape will change radically, you mentioned the top three there. And new alliances, new kinds of re-imagination has to be there. And from America's standpoint, I'll just say that I'd like to see lawmakers have, instead of a LinkedIn handle, a GitHub handle. You know, when they all go out on campaign, talk about what the code they've written. So I think having a technical background or some sort of knowledge of computer science and how the internet works with sociology and societal impact will be critical for citizenships to advance. So, you know, rather than a lawyer, right? So maybe there's some law involved that I don't mean to critical all lawyers, but today most people are lawyers in America, politics. But show me a GitHub handle on a congressman and a senator. I'd be impressed. So that's what we need. Ray, you wanna say something? Thank you guys. I wanted to say something because I thought the US economy was 21 trillion. The EU was sitting in about 16 and China was sitting about 14. But okay, I don't know. Yeah, maybe you need to do math, man. And we went over our 30 minute time. We can do an hour with you guys. So you're so good. Okay, don't worry. No, go ahead and get it in there. You got something to say. I don't think it's immaterial the exact size of the commit. I think that we're better off collaborating on even and fair terms. We're all better off collaborating. Yeah. Gentlemen. Collaboration has to be on equal and fair terms, you know. How do you define fair? Good point. Fair and balanced, you know, get the new. We did define fair. We struck a treaty that absolutely defined it. Absolutely. And then once I didn't stick to it. Oh, we will leave it right there and we'll follow up in great conversation. Gentlemen, you guys are good. Thank you.