 So, we're here to hear from Dan, and if you don't know Dan, and the range of people and interests here is absolutely astounding, and I think it is testimony to Dan and his interests and what he's going to be talking about today. If you don't know Dan, this is a wonderful opportunity to get to know you a little bit. I knew Dan first as a reader of his really influential and important column in the San Jose Mercury News a while ago, where Dan was one of the earliest and most incisive and trustworthy commentators on the tech scene, really central to forming many of our understandings of what was going on. Dan has gone on to write ahead of his time leading, I think, it's safe to say, discussions about the involvement of readers with journalists, civics and journalism, a very broad range of intersections that Dan is at. He's currently the founding director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and it's been one of the great pleasures of my life that over the past few years we've actually, I've gotten no Dan beyond his print. So I will leave you to introduce your topic and thank you so much for being here. Thanks. Okay, a technology issue. I played music when I was a lot younger and getting fairly deaf and I wear hearing aids and one of the battery and one of them just died. So when you ask questions which we will do as quickly as I can get to them, please like speak up because otherwise I'll have to get David to interpret them for me which wouldn't be fun. Thank you for that and I say as well that David Weinberger is one of my heroes in life and it's a joy to know him. So let's jump right in. This is a little bit like something I did here a few years ago. I was working on a book, getting just going on it and wanted to sound out this incredible crowd about where I thought I was heading and basically pick the collective brain in this room and think about and figuring as always that there's a lot more knowledge and brains in here than I can provide that it would really help me think it through and people were great and gave me great ideas. So I'm counting on that happening today. The new project I want to before I even start say that this really starts from two in particular books that are influential for me. One is Jonathan Zitron's The Future of the Internet and How to Prevent It. I think that's the full time. How to stop it. Yeah, better work. And where he talks about generativity and the lockdown of devices. And Rebecca McKinnon's The Consent of the Network. And I think they've both framed some issues brilliantly. You should read their books. I'm kind of starting with that and trying to go further and I'll get back to that in a minute. Thinking again about these issues of lock-in and the trade-offs that we're making for convenience versus freedom and security, et cetera. We really are in a world of trade-offs and I don't want to minimize that. In the earlier days, I think, of computing and the internet, the convenience and freedom kind of overlap because the stuff wasn't that easy to use. So it was relatively inconvenient but relatively free. And I think we've drifted kind of in a bad way for lots of good reasons to something like this. And I could add a lot more circles and make this more complicated, but you get the idea. This is early thinking. I thank David for the idea of the crude Venn diagram as a way of helping to explain this. I'm going to just go through some of the crap that's going on in slides and show you it's pretty horrible, a parade of horribles here of what we're doing and it's companies, it's governments, it's a whole bunch of people. You go on. This one struck me. This is some years ago. Loak Lemur is an entrepreneur and when he tweeted this once, I thought, wow, that's really interesting and in a way it's becoming true and that raises questions about, well then, maybe there are utility. And what do we do with utilities if we have any sense? We regulate them. Monopolies need regulation. I'm not really a fan of regulation, by the way, but we have to think about that on and on the horribles continue. This is the permissions for a single application that you give up on Android, at least they tell you. That's screen two, screen three. It actually goes longer than this. That's the things you let this application do, which is to say everything. Your phone becomes theirs. And, by the way, the application I'm referring to here is Skype for Android, owned by Microsoft. Interesting. Another recent one, eBay has always been a control freak, but this is ridiculous. And Bruce Schneier, whose work you should all follow in the area of security, has framed it quite well that we're heading toward feudalism and security, but actually in a lot of things. That's true, not just security. So this goes on and on and on. By the way, I've never assumed that Skype did not have a backdoor because they've never answered the question. Even when it was run by the founders in Estonia, they never would answer the question in a direct way. They said it's secure. Yeah, thank you. And you couldn't, the lack of answer to that question was the answer, and of course now that Microsoft owns it, you should just assume whether or not it's true. You should just assume there's a backdoor for the feds and whoever else. So that's my little one-millionth of the problem that you just saw. He's getting more so, the lock-in, the platform stuff. And again, we do this partly for convenience. I use a Kindle, or Kindle app anyway. I use a lot of the stuff that locks me in, makes me worry, but I can't avoid it at some level, and we make choices. And these questions that we have to ask are pretty obvious ones, especially the people in this room, I think. I know all these are things that we must think about if we're going to be digitally literate in the world that we're in. And there are things that happen that make me feel better, at least for a minute or two. Blocking SOPA was one, but keep in mind that the copyright cartel is a well-funded smart group of people who never quit. They will keep sneaking stuff into law however they can. They're going to come after it again and again, and I expect the people on the side of not getting screwed are going to keep fighting it, and it's going to be, I hope, just a standoff. And we obviously need better laws, and we need better regulations, we need better rules. I don't dispute that. And a lot of what Jay-Z and Rebecca have talked about is in the policy arena, which is key, crucial. And I'm planning to address that to a little extent in this new project. But I don't think it's enough. I think we have to take some responsibility ourselves in this to the extent, again, that we choose to. I'm not going to tell everyone to do it my way, but I'm going to say at least I think that there are some things we can do. And today's thing, I have a lot of other things I'm working on for this project, but I want to just focus in a minute on the security and countermeasures side of it, which are not enough, by the way. I've got to repeat that. It's not enough. And then I want to kind of hear what you all think I should be, things I'm missing and what I could include in this. So it'll range from the very simple. Again, this book is not going to be aimed, book or something. I'm not even sure it's a book. It's aimed at people not like the super digitally smart crowd here, but regular folks who need to actually hear stuff like when the update shows up, install it. Again, one of the most important security things on any computer, if we can assume that they're remotely secure to begin with. Full disk encryption, I think that should be the default. It's not, Microsoft charges extra for it. It's Apple makes it a lot easier, Ubuntu, it's now relatively easy. And on most Linux installations, Ubuntu makes it quite easy. Things like extensions in our browsers that will lock some stuff down. I experiment widely with those and to the point that a lot of sites that I use get really upset and don't work right, because I'm blocking their spying on me and or they're enabling a third party spies on me, for the most part. I've rooted my phone, of course, and have an app that actually will block specific permissions within the app. So Angry Birds wants to do a lot of stuff that I don't want it to do. Well, so I can just block those permissions. Now in some cases, when they see that you're blocking their ability to track you everywhere on the planet, they'll say, sorry, I'm not going to work. I'll make that trade. That's fine. What I don't like is having to accept these permissions or not use it. It's sort of all or nothing. That's the world we live in is long agreements that you click through that give you zero rights and the vendor all the rights. This is a countermeasure. It's not perfect, but it's better than nothing. Tor using some of the stuff that people are doing like this that I think is interesting. Incidentally, if the CIA is not running or the NSA is not running a lot of the exit nodes on Tor, I'd be really surprised. I would assume that some of the exit nodes are being run by the bad guys or the good guys, depending your frame of mind. And by the way, some of the exit nodes are undoubtedly being run by criminals. Think about that. We have there's no perfect. That's why I think lots more people should be Tor relays and exit nodes. We should try to make that a very common thing. The onion router, basically, I won't get into the technical details. But basically, it's a way of browsing the web. You shouldn't do it for much more than that. With some reasonable likelihood that your ISP doesn't know what you're actually looking at and what you're looking at doesn't know where you're coming from. Does that capsulize it? And this is a valuable thing for, it's not just people who want to do bad stuff or who want to watch porn, but for people who need some security for whistleblowing and a lot of other things. There's real reasons to use Tor that are incredibly important, and we need more of this kind of thing. I got well over a decade ago when the supermarket loyalty cards first started coming out. A bunch of friends and I used to get together once a month and put them all in a hat, shake the hat, and then we'd each pick one out. It was not ours if we were, for the odds were we wouldn't pick out our own if we did, we'd trade it. And the purpose was obvious, which was to make the data useless. Now, the loyalty supermarket stuff, they've gotten wise to this, and they've stopped really insisting on you telling the truth when you sign up for it. In fact, the last time I got one, I gave my address to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC, and the guy looked up and said, you know, it's amazing how many people live there. And so they're in on the joke, right? But the thing about that that kind of troubles me is that if I do that with a supermarket loyalty card, the absolute worst thing that can happen is they'll say, you can't use it. You do that online. According to the Obama Justice Department, you have just committed a felony. That's a policy we need to fix. And I read this morning from someone I trust that, in fact, the rewrites that are now being contemplated, the CFA, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, apparently, they're going in the wrong direction that our friends in Congress are trying to make it even easier for us to all be felons, which this is terrifying. That's a case where we can't do anything individually. We have to do something collectively, or we're screwed. And this is really worrisome. Again, another countermeasure of sorts is to pick your platforms. I was the biggest Apple person you could find from a long way back, a decade ago or more, when I'd be at a press event, I'd be the only one with a Mac laptop, maybe one of two. John Markov actually was using them before I was. And I was a Mac bigot for years. But I started, especially when the iPhone, there was a whole bunch of things that happened, including Apple suing websites that wanted to do journalism about Apple, things like that where I started to worry. And then the iOS platform and the control freakery that Apple was engaging in there made me worry more. Their fundamental arrogance as a company worried me more. And then they got incredibly big and powerful. And when they were the underdog upstart, fine, be a control freak, nobody's going to, we have lots of choices. Now that everybody but me at a press event has a Mac, I think this is starting to get worrisome. So I moved away from the iOS and even from the Mac, which is regressing, in my opinion, in its allowance for me to do what I want. This is amazing how the Mac OS is starting to get kind of restrictive. And Apple has good reasons for everything that are plausible in some ways, like insisting, they're moving app developers, application developers into their store even on the Mac and saying, we won't let you sell it unless you sandbox everything, change the way you've done your programming. And there are some reasons for that that aren't bad. There are some things you lose when you do that. I want to do what I want with my own computer. And all computer makers are moving toward devices that are actually really hard to open physically. I'm absolutely overjoyed with this particular ThinkPad because I can replace damn near anything I want to in here and have. But Lenovo is starting to move toward Apple. Everyone wants to be Apple. And that's one of the ways they want to be Apple. I don't like that. So if you have an Android phone, and I'm not saying you should just root it for the hell of it. In fact, rooting it makes you vulnerable in other ways. Rooting means giving yourself more control. But there are reasons. And there are third-party OSes once you do give yourself more control, third-party operating systems based on Android that do everything Android does and then let you lock it down again for yourself. I want to be the one who turns the key and the lock. I don't want them to do it. I want to be the one who gets to turn it in whichever direction. So that's one platform choice that I make whenever I can. And it's one reason I'm really interested in some of the new mobile operating systems that are starting to come along, including the Firefox OS, which I don't know if any of them are going to get traction. But they offer the possibility at any rate of control back to the user at some level. Again, this is trade-offs that we're going to make because there are some apps that will just never work on this because of that. Another, this is sort of unrelated in a sense, but as we move more of our stuff into other people's cloud applications and on their things. And I put this to journalists a lot. Why are you pouring your journalism into Facebook when you don't control it anymore? Why are you putting it on other people's platforms? And the answer, of course, is, well, it's distribution. It's attention. We're getting people to pay attention to us. And as a promotional tool, fine. But we have to remember that we do things on these free platforms at the sufferance of them at their whim. Google Reader Demise is an example of this. And you know the cliche. If you're not paying for it on the web, then you're not the customer. You're the product being sold to advertisers. This is all true. And it's increasingly things we need to individually be aware of and make decisions about. So I think we all should have a presence on the web in the online world that is owned by us. May not be the place we do most of our work or even much of it. But I think we should have a home base that's ours to the extent we can own anything in the digital world. And it's not total ownership given the way that works. But I've been telling students that I'll give them extra credit if they get their own domain name and create a site. I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm going to make it mandatory to pass the course that they get their own domain name and put something there. I want them to define themselves on their place, not on someone else's. And I think this is something we should all be doing as we move forward. And then in the project I'm working on the book, I'm going to try to get people no matter what platform they use to do the stuff that's easy and doable on all platforms. And then kind of go in a gradient of difficulty or hassle or trade off to what's the most you can do. And right now, Linux is the last bastion of operating system freedom. And I've made the switch to Linux a year ago. And it's been almost painless. It's really finally gotten ready for prime time. Now there's still hassles. No one should ever have to use the command line if they don't want to. And Linux is not perfect on that. There are still times I have to type apt get and things that normal human beings don't want to do and shouldn't have to. But even there it's improving. And I don't care which distribution of the major ones you use, they're actually all pretty good. I personally use Ubuntu. But even there they're starting to be some control freak stuff going on. And Mark Shulloworth, who I admire enormously, I think is making some decisions that I would not make myself. So who knows? I may be on just plain BSD one of these days. But I've tried Linux every year for more than a decade waiting for it to be ready for prime time. I think it's ready. Doesn't solve the issue of preloading. Most people want it just to work with the thing they bought. And Microsoft has made new initiatives to make that hard. I won't describe them in detail, but there's a whole lockdown thing going on with Microsoft. Again, there's some security reasons for it that are not wrong, but that are not a coincidence that it's really screwing up the Linux community at the same time. That's a benefit. That's a feature, as far as Microsoft is concerned, that it makes Linux hard to use. That's a feature. In my world, it's a bug. So these are some of the things. That's where I'm heading. And I really do want to make clear. I'm not going to be accusing people of evil, at least not often, in this thing. There are some evil things being done, but it's always about self-interest, almost always anyway. But I want to move these back together. I don't think we're ever going to get them to be completely concentric, but I think we can get a lot closer again. And I hope we will. And that's where all of you and anyone who's listening to the webcast now or forever are actually, by the way, my real of thumb on the forever part of the web is that anything that you absolutely need to have and that you will be in trouble if it disappears, you must relentlessly back it up yourself in many different ways because the minute something goes wrong, it will disappear forever. Anything that could possibly embarrass you will live forever with no intervention on your part. So keep that in mind. I need your help. This is the, I've made a little website for it. The working title is Permission Taken. Probably the title, since now I'm using this domain, even my agent likes the title. So that's a good, but I suspect because I always do Creative Commons in my work that this will end up being a self-published book, at least here. Anyway, this is the talk, and again, I've been thinking about this hard for about a year, and now I'm sort of jumping in and pushing ahead. And I really do need your help in thinking about where to go with it. So this is Q&A, but I hope to hear a lot of A from all of you as well. So with that, any more? Thank you. Yes, sir. The logic that started with that you should have your own domain, it would seem like what would have to follow if you really want to avoid the problems you're talking about is that you have to have your own machine, do all of your own hosting, run your own Apache server, basically become a system in addition to your regular job. If that's not necessary, how do you avoid becoming dependent on some external service? You cannot avoid being dependent on some external service unless you want to do that. Again, all of this is about there's a slider here that we're going to have to make choices. I have my hosting is done by someone I know personally who I trust. And I don't have a good answer for that. I think one of the things that's really needed and is not, as far as I know, widely available is systematic and universal encryption in the cloud so that whoever is storing your stuff actually can't muck with it unless you give them permission. Now, that raises legal questions for them. But at least, I think we have to move in that direction for any of this to be working. Yes? Thanks. I really like what you're saying. I'm not a specialist, and as a non-specialist, it sounds to me like a conversation among a very small number of people who are real, who aren't just interested but are really refined specialists in this area. And so my interest is how to get this out and have it be more accessible and broadly understood. And that leads me to wonder about schools and literacy in schools. Could this be included in basic media and telecommunications literacy in all our public schools? On the one hand, on the other hand, I worry that there's a kind of individualism at its core that you can figure it out, you get to do it, nobody else can figure it out. They don't get to do it. They're at the mercy of all this. And how do we build a default position that protects individuals who can't develop a specialized knowledge? Let me repeat for those who may not have heard, at least try and get the gist of it, that a lot of this sounds like it's for geeks. And as a proud semi-geek, I worry that that's true. And how do we first of all get people to understand this better? And I'll answer that partly that I said I'm not aiming this at my friends who are geeks. I think I'm aiming it at my students who have grown up and thinking that Facebook is the internet. And that Macbook Air is a computer that gives them absolute freedom, neither of which are true. And again, that's where I'm aiming in this book or whatever this is, early chapters are what you can do no matter what you use, things that are relatively easy to do that will help, won't solve the problem. And try and take people on a ramp, hopefully accelerating, I don't have a good metaphor here, but finding a way to get them as far as they are personally comfortable with going and in really clear language, I hope, that will demystify this stuff, although a lot of it still mystifies me. And then your idea about getting this as part of a media literacy, technical literacy part of schools, I think is a really fine idea, and that we should be encouraging that. My last book was about media literacy in this digital world, and I'm a huge fan of, what's the project in New York about? No, no, I'm talking about the coding one, Code Academy. Code Academy, where you can learn programming skills. And Douglas Rushkoff, a friend of many of us, wrote a wonderful book called Program or Be Programmed that gets to this issue. I think programming, some simple programming should be a basic literacy for everybody, not because we're all going to be programmers, but because we need to understand how software works. I feel like I'm in the same place I was with the beginning of the last book, which because the last book was aimed at not the supply side of journalism and information, but the demand side a lot harder. This is a demand side issue. I have no illusions that it's going to be big demand anytime soon. But I hope people will start to see, A, what's at risk, and B, what they're losing. And also recognizing what they gain by being locked down. And there are gains to being locked down that I have to acknowledge. But yes, I'd love to see schools get into this, but this is the United States. And I'd love to see schools get into a lot of things that they don't even touch. Let me go to here, and then there, and then here. Thank you so much for that. Speak loudly, please. I'm hardy hearing. I'll try to talk loud. So at the beginning of their talk, you're saying that in the early days of the internet, the freedom and convenience aspects were kind of merged together in that main diagram, and now they're moving apart. And you hinted at some of the factors that led to that change, one of them being self-interest and desire for security, information, power, convenience, and so forth. And on the other side, what's bringing them back together seems to be things like the educational literacy that the previous gentleman was asking about, as well as the rise of technologies and software like Ubuntu. So looking into the future, do you feel like this trend will reverse or will continue that freedom and convenience will go further apart? And what are the major factors in how we understand this? Well, I think if you throw everything on scales for good direction, bad direction, I think the bad direction one is still getting heavier, than the good one. That's why I'm doing this. I'm hoping to throw a few weights into the good side, and under no illusion that I can reverse this or that it's going to reverse anytime soon. But I think that we have to do what we can. And I think people are just simple. I don't think people are generally aware of what the issues are. And that's the first thing. And it will help the more we can get the word out about what's going on and what's at stake. And if people want to make choices that I don't agree with based on knowledge, I'll live with that. I'll keep doing what I can to do things my way. But I also live in a country that now goes through machines that basically do these strip searches and your hands up in the air like you're a criminal, about to be frisked completely willingly, with no indication of whether or at least some of them are safe. I don't call that a good trend either. I think we have been trading convenience for the illusion of security for a long time. And the illusion of it's we have to, I think we just do what we can. But right now it's not going the right way. You've got the large structural level, the most important thing to add more weights on the good side is awareness. Well, I think that'll help. There's more money on the control side, more power on the control side. This is a, every major institution from government to powerful corporations is aligned on fundamentally the same side of this, which is re-centralizing the technology that promised radical decentralization and all of the benefits that would come from that. That's a problem. Again, we're going to, I don't know, I'm going to try to convince people to use stuff that doesn't do that to them, to the extent possible, have better policies, but start with the individual for now. Yes, sir? Not even a semi-gig. But I'm wondering, what are the risks? What do you, I'd like to hear more about exactly, what are you concerned about? I mean, I'm not, I feel free to do anything I want on the internet. Maybe people are monitoring me. Maybe the government is, marketeers surely are. I'm concerned about hackers, surely. I don't want my identity stolen, but what are the risks? Well, some, let me, let me, let me address that in two ways. First of all, the same vulnerabilities that give hackers inroads are used in a pretty, they're used by people you think are okay. In some ways. The, but at a more, I have a more philosophical problem with this, and that is, I think a society that's under pervasive surveillance is a deadened society in the long run. I think that's a, I think that that whole process is bad for us in every way that I can imagine, except one, which is the possibility of stopping a certain amount of crime. But you know, in dictatorships, the chief criminals are the government and the police. So it's, it's not like you, you get a, you know, it doesn't solve the problem. And if we, going to the, you know, the FBI wants a back door and do every technology, I promise you, if they have one, it's going to be used by bad people. Within their organizations and the fact that you've created a vulnerability deliberately, it's, this stuff doesn't stay secret forever. That others will find it and use it. That the more you, the more you unharden the defenses, the more room there is for bad, really bad actors to get in. So there, there are a lot of different reasons, but I'm, those are some of the key ones. Over here, yes. Talk a little bit about how tort can help protect whistleblowers, can you hear me? Can you speak a little louder towards how tort can help? You talked about how tort can help protect people who are whistleblowers, and I'm curious if you have other advice for journalists about how to do that. And then if you had a chapter for journalists that you do not think they're doing every day, that they don't realize any of that? I did a chapter of a multi-author book that's coming out this spring about journalists and closed platforms. Didn't address security that much, except to say that journalists need to really learn about security and do so right away, because they're threatening the lives of their sources if they don't in places where lives are in jeopardy and they're threatening their sources in other ways, and themselves, especially in an environment where journalism is under attack around the world. The committee to protect journalists in particular has done really important work on helping journalists understand what the risks are and to mitigate them. And it's a crucial issue, and it's one that I don't think has gotten enough attention inside the craft, because it's, you know, I know. It just, from when I was there, it was, I was the only one who would even heard of PGP. Although I have to say, I had my PGP fingerprint on my column at the bottom of it for six years and got two emails as a result of it that were encrypted, one of which said, I just wanted to see if this works. So, yeah, it's not like our sources are just ready to jump. But, yeah, increasingly journalists who really are appropriately paranoid in the right situations are learning not to use technology if they can avoid it. And by the way, the security thing is a, it's shifting ground, you can't prepare for every possible risk. You just can't, without doing extraordinary measures for the most severe ones. I take for granted, if the United States government, and it's all powerful ways, wants to find out what I'm talking about online, they're gonna find a way to do it. If nothing else, they're gonna find a way to get my computer when I'm not at it and install a key logger. That's, you know, or break into my house and put up cameras. If they really want to surveil me, they're gonna find a way. But like the better deadbolt lock on your house will stop, you know, amateur criminals and not the dedicated ones who know how to hack a lock. You know, you prepare your best for the situations you're likeliest to see. So I'm, you know, I'm reasonably careful. I'm, as an example, and a journalist could, this is an example possibly for journalists. When I do my online banking, I do it from a virtual machine that has one purpose only that's inside of this computer. It has one purpose only and that's online banking. That's it. It has never, ever gone to any other place on the internet that I'm aware of, that virtual machine. I don't think that's totally paranoid. I think that's a, it's not that you're gonna lose all your money unless, you know, businesses have a bigger risk than individuals. But again, prepare for the risk appropriately but not, you can't be comprehensive about the worst you adjust thing. And journalists have to understand all that. You, sir, and then, and then Harry. You've talked a little bit about this, there's a wider context and I think perhaps you weren't the online part of this, but you also had a recent court case which I think was knocked down where corporations were saying, you can't resell our stuff, we still own it if we have a copyright on it. And I believe that that was knocked down. There's, there is a rise of corporate feudalism and corporate branding where it seems that late stage capitalism wants to own their market, literally own their market the way that Barron's own serves. And this is offline as well as online and it's governments and corporations and sometimes shadowy combinations thereof so there's a wider context of this and I'm wondering how much of that wider context do you actually want to get into because I think it will inform what you're talking about. And one last thing, there's an idea in the right wing about sovereign citizenry. I'm perpetuating a mean, the only sovereign citizens are corporate citizens. And I think that may be a stocking force. Actually, it was a stocking force for corporate feudalism. The only sovereign citizens are corporate citizens. These are good points and I think the copyright case you're talking about was someone, you know, publishers sell books and other material at different prices in different parts of the world because then they basically getting what the market will bear, supply and demand. So people in Thailand can't pay on average as much for a book as they can pay here. So someone bought a book in Thailand and brought it back and sold it in the US and the copyright cartel and the publisher arm of it said this is illegal because we say so and there's a right of first sale in the US and they said it doesn't apply to something you buy outside. Now if the Supreme Court had upheld that the immediate result would have been the offshoring of manufacturing of every media product there was. That would have been the immediate result because then they could say you can't resell your book or you can clearly under a book made here. Anyway, Supreme Court wisely in my view said that's nuts, you bought the thing, you can sell it. You do an agreement when you buy a piece of software with most companies that you cannot resell it although that's not widely, they don't try to enforce that much except unless they know it's running on two systems and you're buying a license for things and that's what you're getting at. Here's two things. One is that as we move forward everything we buy, physical good that we buy, not everything but increasingly so, every physical good is going to have a component called software because we're embedding processing memory and often connectivity into physical goods at a very rapid rate. So that's an opportunity for the control crowd to exert control and not let you own anything that you buy. And by the way, that's growing more powerful. In Massachusetts, the people who fix cars, who are not dealers, got a ballot measure, I believe it was approved, saying, your software machine on wheels can be fixed by anybody and therefore you have to provide access to the software, to anybody. That's a marvelous thing and I'm sure you're gonna talk about that as an analog to this because actually it's less and less of an analogy but more and more of the reality. So that, yes, but we have to, and by the way, I'm making common cause on this thing with some friends on the political right who we have in this, this is a space where some of the more far-seeing people on the right are ahead, far ahead, of most people on the left, a guy named Derek Kana who David knows and I know who used to be working for the Republican Congress and got fired for daring to tell the truth about copyright. Okay, I saw Derek over the weekend and we talked a lot about this stuff and he's one of the people, I don't agree with on anything except this. And you know what, I will be an ally of anybody on the stuff I care about no matter what crazy stuff they think on things that I may also care about but that I don't agree on. We can be, let me get to some other questions. Harry. Great project, congratulations for doing it. Here's your problem, I think the most important question. I knew Harry would, or water on this. Most important question that was asked is what are you worried about? Okay, because we're dealing in a different kind of surveillance society than the one that we're used to thinking about where people know that they're being surveilled, right? We're kind of at the opposite extreme from the Panopticon thing where everybody is frightened because everybody knows that they might be surveilled all the time. Until these reaches, the consequences become evident to the individual, their bank account suddenly has had $10,000 taken out of it without their recognizing, they're not gonna go to the trouble of setting up a VM just for their online banking. And the incentive system for the people who are doing the surveillance is to do it as unobtrusively as possible so that you will never, never notice that the average person going through their life will never, never notice even in the commercial marketing thing because people get weirded out when, you know, and so I think that on the commercial side there's gonna be more and more incentives not to be so aggressive that you notice the kind of surveillance that's happening. And the problem comes that you will never know why your life insurance premium is $100 higher than mine or vice versa, right? You will never know what the data paths were that led to that and you will never know that not only why it is, but that it is because the surveillance will be happening at a level that is completely invisible to the individual. And as long as it's invisible to the individual you can put scary stories about what's probably happening to all of us, but you're gonna have a hard time making people wake up. I think that's the real challenge for all of us. I'm not just critiquing your book, but it's, you know, it's this whole world that we're living in. So you said a surveilled society is a deadened society, but only if people know that they're being surveilled. If they don't believe they're being surveilled because they see no evidence of it, their behavior isn't gonna change. So he's telling them, he's telling them yes, I know that. Telling people that they're being surveilled is, as Harry says, they say, yeah, right, that's okay. And, but if nothing, if they don't see anything happening, they don't see a consequence, then, you know, and this is, but we, you know, awesome, I, I'm just telling you what your challenge is. I don't disagree. I don't disagree. As somebody else said, this is not an original thought. If you had told us a 25, a generation ago, if it's a government a generation ago, it said, you will henceforth carry with you a tracking device that we can, that where we can see where you are at any time, there would have been, you know, a bit of an uproar. Guess what, we did it voluntarily. One of the countermeasures, incidentally, that I wanna do, you know, you can't stop the, I mean, the cell tower has to know where you are. I'd like to find a way to spoof everything else for everyone else and basically notify these app developers that I'm gonna, I'm, you know, they want, they think they know where I am, don't use this data, it's wrong. I think that's actually a better countermeasure than just blocking it. But tell them, you know, I'm sending you data back, but actually I'm really not in Catman do today. But you're not, I'm not gonna tell you exactly where. So things like that. But again, it doesn't solve the problem. Harry raises and he's right. I mean, that's what happened here with the email blow up, right? I mean, at some level, everybody knew, but at some level nobody cared until it didn't. No one employed by anyone else should assume their email is not being read on their, on the employer's server period. End of story, I don't care. Here, here, and there, and then there. Presentation, thank you so much. Another comment mostly, what I worry about, you know, I think these are all great things and, you know, we should all do them clearly. But what I worry about creating is a privacy of the elite. That is a privacy that only certain people can access leaving large segments of our population and our communities behind. And I think that that creates a very dangerous, dangerous scenario. If I have access and the skills and ability and time and resources to make sure that my computer is safe and private, but maybe the person next to me doesn't, or, you know, others in my community, should there be government regulations in order to make sure that we're all operating within the same level of privacy? And what's the answer there? The, it's a completely important point, and we, I don't know about making rules, but because the government rules won't be the ones you'd like. We, I think we can be assured of that for the most part. But the haves and haves-nots in this case are, this is a real issue. One of the things we all have to do is, is create a market. You know, the, I want, there needs to be, I want to say, I'd look for, I would hope for a market-based solution to this, because markets do work better than advice or edicts. And, I, a friend of mine is actually working on a mobile hardware startup. I can't say anything more about it that will address some of these on the mobile side. But with a fundamental thought about separating layers in various software stacks from each other to think about, to really deal with this at a basic level. I'm, you know, I'll be his third customer. But, you know, because I want to, I want to try it. I want to help. But yeah, we've got to find a way to make stuff available to people. And again, I, I, we haven't seen a much of a marketplace for privacy. If it's a marketplace solution, isn't the iPhone and the lockdown map, are that what the market is? Well, it's a part of the market once. And by the way, the iPhone is more secure in certain ways by far than all but the most recent Android releases. And it's sandboxing of applications. It's, it's, it's separating them so one can't muck with another things like that. It's, there, there are elements of the iPhone that are extremely secure and better secure in terms of that level of what you do than, than other stuff on the market. I'm not, you know, I'm only against Apple's bad stuff, not their good stuff. And, but yeah, we haven't, again, and this goes to Harry's point. I don't think enough people are scared enough yet because they, you know, otherwise, you know, when people get scared, there is a market. Right now, not yet. Let's, we have to end fairly soon. Let's make it kind of a lightning round of there was a question, why don't we go to you and then you had a question. So we'll make it a lightning round, ask a really quick question in order and then I will answer as much of it as I can at the end. So the ACLU is basically, it's raised on death where it's on issues similar to privacy and privacy and a couple of other issues. And they do put out pamphlets like what to do if they're at the icon, actually, what to do if they're stopped by a policeman. And I don't see why they couldn't be, groups couldn't be formed to advise them in creating pamphlets that at least would reach one level of actively involved citizens and it might filter down from there or it should filter down from there as in these other cases. So that's just about, yes. So much of hacker culture and open source culture is based on being elite and things being difficult to view. The privacy tools that we have work pretty well. It's that no one can take the time to use them. There's a distinct lack of design in these things. And in not just that, it's difficult to move from something beautiful like an Apple product to something that is funky like Linux has stopped being quite so much lately. But also that we don't see things that are poorly designed as legitimate. And that's a fairly easy fix if you just bring in more designers. Great point, yes. Just wanted to ask real quick about the generational shift we're seeing that younger people don't actually seem to care that much about privacy and are willing to put stuff out on Facebook that older folks would never dream of putting in the public domain. Good, another point. Yes, and you could, okay, two more here. There are some of those resources out there that try to teach people how to use these tools excessively. So CryptoParty.org has a lot of resources. We and other groups run crypto parties here in Boston. We do the Massachusetts Pirate Party and all around the world. To bring people to a basic level of understanding, questions, to what extent do you worry about, in addition to all of the chilling effects that you'd have if people know they're being surveilled as another anxiety to have in a society where people don't know they're being surveilled, the way that shifts power between an individual and the firms or governments who have their data and have the social science or other levers to manipulate them. And if social media, second question, if social media are a huge lure of getting people to reveal things about themselves, are there alternatives to the mediated social media that are ready for prime time? Okay. My question is fairly basic. Much of your discussion, while acknowledging the need to build a better market for privacy work and I do firmly believe that there's a number of privacy-related software and other things available that are just not being found. But a lot of your discussion has a little bit dismay at the substantial interest against it in the government, the general laws and the marketplace. I just want to know if you would have any thoughts about ways to actually use these mechanisms to promote your aspirations. We've seen a lot of progress under the banner of protected children as far as what any website that's directed towards kids can and cannot do. And I was wondering if you thought there's any ways of broadening this. Okay, I'll start with the last question. I'm going to rename this Protect the Children. And then everyone will do what I want. Good idea. But yeah, you can get the worst laws passed by claiming you're about to protect the children. Going first question, there are things out there. You just heard one about Crypto Party, which for all its attempts to be non-geeky is still pretty geeky, but a great start. But there are these meetings people have. It's a start. It's a wonderful start and needs to get even easier. Which also is addressing another question. The ease of use is not there yet for this stuff and needs to be. The other problem is that to get these privacy add-ons, you often have to buy them. And all that free stuff, free end quotes, which has a cost, people don't want to know or don't care. The generational shift, two things on that. One is that we are, this is absolutely the case that younger people are putting stuff out into the wild that we in my generation would not have done. There's only, there are really two possibilities for the future. One is my hope that we are all gonna start cutting each other more slack, which I've written about before and that everyone will recognize that we all did unbelievably stupid, even possibly criminal things when we were in our 20s. And fine, who are you today? And by the way, I still do plenty of stupid things. I think I've left the criminal stuff behind. But if we don't cut each other slack, we're kinda screwed on that basis. But what worries me is that our society at some level is more tolerant today than it was. But society's changing, they grow less tolerant too. This could be catastrophic for a bunch of people if our society goes the way that the right wing, for example, would like it to go. And that's not out of the question. So people may learn this the hard way and there's not much we can do. The last one before we have to stop. No, we got that. The power shift. The power shift, yeah. Yes, that's the basis of this, is that the power is being pulled back from the edges where the best innovation in the last 50 years is going on, or 25 anyway, back to the center. Where innovation does happen, but at a very different pace and in a very different way. And I'm a resistor. But yes, that's what's happening. And I think that has consequences for us in the long term that are not positive when that happens. But it's speculating on what consequences will be is never as persuasive as demonstrating what they are now. The problem, but that's part of our society. We never think very far ahead. Do I have answers? Not particularly. I could use some help on this. But I want the power to be in this room and wherever you go from here. I don't want it to stay in this room or in the capital or in our Monk, New York or in Palo Alto. I want it to be distributed and I don't have, I'm pretty worried. But I'm kind of a relentless optimist or I would not do the stuff I do in general. So if we don't try, we're not going to get very far. That's my trite closing remark. Thank you. Thank you.