Edward Snowden: How Your Cell Phone Spies on You

button, right, that button doesn't exist. Right now, both Google and Apple, unfortunately, Apple is much better at this than Google, but neither of them allow that button to exist; in fact, they actively interfere with it because they say it's a security risk and, from one particular perspective, it really isn't. bad there, but it's not enough, you know, we have to block that ability from people because we don't trust them to make the right decisions. We think it's too complicated for people to do this. We think too many connections are being made well. that's actually a confession of the problem right there, if you think people can't understand it, if you think there's too much communication, if you think there's too much complexity, it needs to be simplified just like the president can't control it. allso if you have to be the president of the tele

phone

and the tele

phone

is as complex as the United States government we have a problem guys this should be a much simpler process it should be obvious and the fact that it isn't and the fact that we read story after story, year after year, saying that all

your

data was then breached here, these companies are spying on you here, these companies are manipulating

your

purchases or your search results or they're hiding these things from your timeline or They are influencing your you are manipulating it in all these different ways that happens as a result of a single problem and that problem is in whatever quality of information is available, they can see everything about you, they can see everything about what your device is doing and They can do whatever they want with their device.

You, on the other hand, own the device, rather than paying for it, but more and more these corporations own it, more and more these governments own it, and more and more we live in a world where we do all the work right, we pay all the taxes, we pay all the costs but we own less and less and no one understands this better than the younger generation. Well, it seems like our data became a commodity before we understood what it was, it became incredibly valuable to Google and Facebook and all these social media platforms before we understood what we were giving up, they were making billions. of dollars and then once that money is earned and once everyone gets used to this situation, it is very difficult to pull the reins, it is very difficult to turn that horse precisely because the money then turns into marijuana. right, right, information becoming influence, which also seems to be the same kind of situation that would happen with these mass surveillance states, once they have access, it's going to be incredibly difficult for them to give that up. exactly right and this is the theme of the book I mean this is the permanent record and this is where it came from this is how the story of our lives came to be is how intentionally by design a series of institutions both government and business came about realized that it was in their mutual interest to hide their data collection activities to increase the breadth and depth of their sensor networks that were more or less widespread for society.

Remember back in the day intelligence gathering in the United States, even Sigyn used to be for me. send an FBI agent to place alligator clips on an embassy building or send someone dressed as a worker and bug a building or build a satellite listening site, right, we call them foreign equipment or satellite collection Foreigners, we're out somewhere in the desert built a big satellite dish and it only listens to the satellite broadcasts, right, but these satellite broadcasts, these satellite links were owned by the military, they were exclusive to the governments, right , it did not affect everyone in general, all the surveillance was directed because it had to be done.

What's changed with technology is that surveillance could now become indiscriminate, it could become a network of control, it could become mass collection, which should become one of the dirtiest phrases in the language, if we have any kind of decency, but we did it intentionally. This was intentionally hidden from us, right? the government did it they used rating companies they did it intentionally they didn't talk about it they denied that these things were going to happen they said you agreed to this and you didn't agree to anything like this Sorry, sure, they go, we put those Terms of Service up and you click on that, you clicked on a button that said I agree because you were trying to open an account so you could talk to your friends you were trying to get driving directions you were trying to get an email account no you were trying to agree to a 600 page legal form that even if you read it you wouldn't understand it and it doesn't matter even if you understood it because one of the first paragraphs and I said that this agreement can be changed at any time unilaterally without your consent by the company, have built a legal paradigm that assumes that the records collected about us do not belong to us.

This is one of the basic principles on which mass surveillance from the perspective of the government in the United States is legal and must be done. I understand that all these things that we talked about today, the government says everything they do is legal and they go, so it's okay, our perspectives, the public should be okay, that's actually the problem because this is not okay, the scandal is not the way they are breaking up. the law, the scandals about how they don't have to break the law and the way they say they're not breaking the law is something called the third party doctrine. a third party doctrine is a legal principle and it stems from a case and I think the 1970s was called Smith v.

Maryland and Smith was this idiot who harassed this lady who made phone calls to his house and when she answered he just I don't know is that his heavy breathing would ever like a classic creeper and you know he was terrifying this poor lady so he calls the police and says one day I got one of these phone calls and I see this car creeping by my house in the street and she got a license plate number, so she goes to the police and says, This guy called the police again. They are trying to do something good.

They look up his license plate number and find out where this guy is. Then they look up what phone numbers are registered in that house and go to the phone. The phone company says, "Yeah, sure," and he's the guy. The cops got their man right so they arrested this guy and then in court his lawyer brought all this up and they said, "You did this without a warrant I'm sorry that was the problem was they went to the company phone, they got the records without a warrant, they just asked for them or subpoenaed him, some lower standard of legal review and the company gave it to them and they got the guy, they went further in jail and they could have gotten a proper warrant, but it was just a convenience, they just didn't want to take the time with small town cops, you can understand how it happens, they know the guy is a mess, they just want to put him in jail and that's why they did it, I said, but the government doesn't want to let him go, they fight over this and go, it wasn't really that they weren't his records and therefore because they didn't belong to him, he didn't have the Fourth Amendment right to demand that a warrant be issued for them, they were records of. the company and the company provided them voluntarily and therefore Warren was required because you can give whatever you want without a court order, as long as it is yours.

Now here's the problem: The government extrapolated a principle on a single case of a single known criminal suspect who had good reason to suspect the suspect was their man and used it to go to a business and obtain records from them and set a precedent. about these records. They don't belong to the guy, they belong to the company and then they said, well, if a person doesn't have a Fourth Amendment interest in a company's records, no one does, so the company has absolute ownership of all of these. records about all of our lives and we're going to this back in the 1970s, you know, the Internet barely exists in these types of contexts, smartphones, you know, don't exist, modern society, modern communications don't exist, this is the beginning. of the technological age and fast forward 40 years and they're still relying on this precedent about this, you know, perverted, no one has a right to the privacy of anything that's in the hands of a company and as long as they do that, companies are going a are extraordinarily powerful and they are going to be extraordinarily abusive and this is something that people don't understand, they go oh well, it's data collection, right, they're exploiting data, uh, this is data about human lives, a mistake about the people of which these records are processed.

It's not the data that's being exploited, it's the people that are being exploited, it's not the data that's being manipulated, it's you that's being manipulated and this is something that I think a lot of people are starting to understand. The problem is the companies and the Governments still pretend they don't understand or don't agree with this and this is my end of something that one of my old friends, John Perry Barlow, who served with me on the press freedom foundation. I'm the president of the board of directors. He used to tell me, "You can't wake up someone who's pretending to be asleep."