Edward Snowden at Web3 Summit 2019

all right well this has been an incredible past day and a half of web 3 summit and we are so excited to have you here today there's a number of talents of developers and researchers and advocates building a decentralized web focused in privacy and censorship resistance our vision of this new web is transparency for the Commons and privacy for the individual and no one has done more to validate this need than our next speaker Edward Snowden [Applause] thank you so much for joining us thanks for joining us we have this incredible room of developers and technologists and people who are passionate to hear what you have to say so I will just let you take it away okay cold-open first of all thank you all for bringing me to speak with you you know it's tough for me to get over to Berlin these days but I'm still hoping in the future you know I might be able to come in person when I give these talks since 2013 you know I've been asked many different things about what's happening with journalism about what's happening with government what's happening with the Internet what's happening with technology and the funny thing is I think they're actually all centralized around similar factors and most of you are familiar with them right and anybody who is into technology and is not simply a developer right but is also a user anyone who's interested in privacy anybody who's working with you know online financial technology who's thinking about you know crypto currencies or it could just be Bitcoin or competitors to it is is seeing that increasingly there's all of these threads connecting to one another and it's not a single thing but rather we have an entire ecosystem that is decaying right because it's actively under threat you know in the the earlier half of this century or this last century scientists and engineers were committing their lives to the pursuit of a new science nuclear physics and you know it was an incredibly passionate work publications went all over the world in every language um and it just energized an entire generation with the possibilities of free nearly unlimited clean energy advances in medical technology advances in transportation it was obvious how these new advances could be applied for the betterment of every but it was also not long until the work of that cohort began to be applied to private needs and this is interesting because most famously were talking about nuclear weapons and people don't think about that as private needs people think about what the government does is as the public good well what's good for the state is very different than what's good for the people in many cases and I think what we are seeing today is the work of our greatest minds of the last 50 years now increasingly their work being indentured to the service of the private good now this isn't just the state this is of course the corporate state that we see the Facebook's the googles that are launching on our common backbone and they're trying to insert themselves into every human transaction and these aren't merely trade transactions these are communications transactions and this is how we see the same thing that happened in the last century beginning to repeat again a science that was developed in pursuit of the ideal of the common good being captured and distorted for the private benefit of certain groups right this can be a a private elite corporate segment or of course the the national elite now this is the reason that I say what we're living through today is the atomic moment of computer science this is where we really have to look at what our work isn't done and I don't mean your work personally because a lot of you guys in the room you know free software guys you tend to be on the the better side of a lot of these conflicts but we all have to realize that everything that we do isn't enough you know when I was sitting in 2013 and I saw what my government was doing behind closed doors without consent of the governed in the United States without the knowledge or consent of anyone in the world flagrant violations both of us law constitutional rights and more importantly human rights around the world I really wanted to tell somebody about it because I thought it was wrong it took me a very very long time to decide to come forward and tell people about it yeah even though I was increasingly certain that this was something that that was in many cases contrary to what the government can even be permitted to do if they pass a law but I knew that if I did there were gonna be consequences for me it was gonna be difficult for me personally I didn't know quite how difficult but I did have an idea and it is this kind of natural pressure the incentives and disincentives to a given move that a person can take in our lives and our communities and our societies that I think all of us who work with systems understand very well because this is how systems work this is how systems are regulated and as it stands today all of the pre-existing laws and all of the loopholes that governments use to violate the spirit of the law even if not the letter of the law or more importantly indirectly just to violate our rights or the dignity of a given person these are all achieved by exploiting their deep understanding of where the incentives are in the disincentives are primarily they can break the law without punishment because they're the ones who applied the wall so what does it mean when the greatest safeguard of human rights that we've ever had in history the law begins to fail I know some people who have thought about this a lot more deeply than talking about it at the conference but I think this is where we see a lot of excitement coming from technology recently and particularly people who are working on these new decentralized sort of ledger based type applications is this idea that maybe when the law fails us our technology can catch us the problem of course is that technology has been catching us general members of the public people who know don't know a fraction some of the people in the room know and harming them quite significantly so what do we do and what are the actual problems I I think it's this identification of the problem that really helps us now I think we're moving quite far along here but the thing that keeps me up at night the thing that I've been thinking about for years the reason that I wrote a book about this that actually comes out of like a month is that when I was a child and and I was in high school even before high school because of I think you guys know the personality type you probably struggled the same way now you have someone an authority who's telling you what to do they don't explain why you don't understand the system and yet the system is applied to you you have no power within the context of the system you are not allowed to change the rules you're not even allowed to petition to change the rules that's simply the way things are and someone says do this and you ask why and they said because I said so this is the way a lot of power relationships work today whether it's in the United States where our electoral system is gerrymandered so much that we can't change power even if we campaign to the operations of Internet giant's where you see everybody complaining you see everybody trying to boycott you see everybody pressuring them and saying bad things about them but they only change their policies at the very smallest edges if at all and the reason I think they feel so comfortable all of these these types of authorities throughout history is they have a mastery of our fear of what happens if we break the rules what happens if we try to change the way the system works and when I was young the way this this worked was if you cut up in class if you you know got out of line they'd say and of course a very concerned manner for for you because it's you that are always worried about not not them not their convenience but you you need to think about your future you need to think about what its gonna look like if everybody else is following rules and you're the only one breaking them if you get out of line if you get a bad grade if you get a detention if you do whatever if you talk back if you question everything all the time this will go down on your permanent record and then it will follow you to high school and then it will follow you to college and then it will follow you workplace and then it'll follow you through the rest of your interactions with power and you know as a kid when you don't know anything about anything that's actually terrifying and over time bit by bit as you do more and more the threat begins to lose its power because you realize that there actually isn't the permanent record nobody cares what you did in elementary school nobody cares what you did in middle school nobody cared about high school or college or honestly nobody really cares about what you do in your workplace besides your employer and then your next employer but at best the records have never been permanent they've never been perfect until now and this is the problem of the world we live in the younger you are in this room relative to the person next to you the more of your life is known recorded by people you have no influence over and these records at least under the laws in the United States which have been unfortunately exported around the world into a kind of status quo mmm says that you don't own records about your private life these companies that created them they're their records not you even if they're entirely and exclusively about you and this is I think the central problem that we're struggling with is all of these companies all of these governments everybody who has any sort of aspirations of power is recognizing that understanding as much as possible about as many as possible is the lever of influence we see target news we see this being used to write news we see this being used to change politics we use see this being used to try to influence purchasing decisions right all of these things are about shaping human behavior and all of these things which I would argue are fundamentally anti-democratic forces and actually I would argue these are antisocial forces are really about shaping the behavior of other people to your benefit right and if this can be done secretly if this can be didn't done privately all the better and when I look at this and I think about my own history and I think about what's happening on the Internet I think one of the biggest vulnerabilities in our system right the vulnerability that's being exploited by all of these forces is identity in the modern world we are not permitted a sense of ownership without identity to be able to make a trade in many cases and God if you live in some place like Sweden where they're trying to get rid of cash right you've got to use a card the card is connected to your bank account that goes on if you're trying to buy something like property right how are they even gonna register that they need you to show your ID they need you to get it stamped you go to the people at the desk the people the desk and bless you to be able to participate in this transaction if you want to be about able to buy a bottle of water at the gas station this has been and should be a cash transaction it should be traceless but now increasingly there's cards involved now increasingly there's cameras involved now increasingly there's Bluetooth beacons in the store that look at your phone and they see oh it's got its Bluetooth active because it was just connected to its car so we know it's this device we've seen this device this mall they've got license plate readers all of these things form big constellation of richness especially when compounded with the fact that your cell phone is constantly a hundred percent of the time that it's turned on screaming out into the sky Here I am Here I am register me to the nearest tower and then they're there tracking where this goes and all of this all of these things mean we're never anonymous we're never just a person we're always this specific entity and we are this specific entity we can be nudged we can be shifted we can be shaped by all of these people because we have universally unique identifiers now programmers developers they love universally or globally unique identifiers right they want their metrics they want their analytics they want to see what's happening on you know this app push they want to see what's happening on this kind of device and so they collect everyone from everything for everything from everyone everywhere right that's no different than what the NSA does now that's no different one what Facebook does that's no different than what Google does and they do it because it grants them increased power right they can be better developers and I understand that I'm sympathetic to that but I think we need to sit back and really take a look at the fact that when we are gating access to the infrastructure that's necessary for life through this process of proving who you are rather than proving a right to use right that you paid for this that you should be able to access to this that you have a blinded token of some type it could belong to anyone but it's the digital equivalent of cash that's going look you know it doesn't matter who I am I'm allowed to be here right I'm basically supporting the infrastructure I've done my part that's all it should be because otherwise we're being forced to give up ownership of our identities we're giving up ownership of our histories right we're allowing others to control the story of our private lives they get to shape it they get to tell it they get to say this is the narrative of this person this phone this car this whatever this browser right and when we have this pervasive collection of our sorry not pervasive collection but this pervasive creation of records what we fundamentally have is the disempowerment of the individual and we have the empowerment of the institution and you know a lot of people are fans of institutions and institutions have done a lot of good throughout history but they've also done a lot of bad and the question is what happens when you have institutions that are so strong that there is no alternative what happens when you have institutions around the world in every country and they don't don't even answer to your country right it's like a Mark Zuckerberg who won't go and talk to UK Parliament because he doesn't care about UK Parliament he'll just send some Lackey right and the people of these countries they ask why why do you do this how do we change this we don't like this and entities can't simply respond well that's the way it is because I said so I'm the one in charge we need to be able to create data right move data process data and transact on this data without creating a history that it happened and what I mean by a history that happened is I mean the history of you connecting the person to the thing the transaction does not need to belong to you the transaction belongs to itself you know you can balance the books without knowing everything's connected everyone and I know a lot of you guys believe in this but I'm afraid that we see a lot of people who don't believe in it enough one of the biggest criticisms that I have of the Bitcoin blockchain today is the fact that it's not at all private they're not even pretending to try to be private there are arguments and I know there are proposals that they're gonna try to bring things on chain they're gonna try to integrate you know these enhancement proposals or improvement proposals but they're not fast enough we've seen this happening for years everybody knows the problems we see the KYC sort of cancer spreading across the entire ecosystem where now there are no on ramps and off ramps of any meaningful size that will allow a normal individual a teenager right now who doesn't even have a bank account to go I want to buy Bitcoin right and you guys who are working on alternatives you can do better right and as you do better that will pressure the bigger actors to do better because again it's about this incentives and disincentives in the system if you build a better model and no one else is willing to reform their own model you become the standard model and that's a good thing for you but even if you don't become you know the the new unicorn whatever who cares your decisions in designing these things create pressure on those incumbents to reform even in failing you can win for the world for the community even if you don't win for yourself personally and that's what got me out of paradise in Hawaii in in 2013 was I thought look you know I I didn't graduate from high school guys I'm largely self-taught and I was doing all right you know I'm not gonna say I'm the world's greatest anything but I was doing alright I was pretty good and somehow I ended up working for the government worked for the CIA they put me overseas I was undercover you know living as a diplomat in Switzerland I went over to Japan working as a contractor for the NSA and each time I moved I got more and more seniority I got more and more pay until eventually I end up in Hawaii with the woman I love doing a job that was like so ridiculously undemanding in the office of information sharing that I had time to do anything I wanted and that meant reading and so what I did was I read what was going on everywhere because it was the first position I had where I could truly read without lines because in the intelligence community right there's very much this because I said some kind of worldview where there's a system called compartmentalization our compartment ation where the person in this office isn't supposed to know what the person in this office is doing you're not supposed to be curious you're not supposed to even ask because you don't have a need to know right well when I worked in the CIA and when I worked in the NSA previously as a tech just as a Systems Administrator I had broad access much broader access than other people and I could read many different things so I already know a lot about what's going on relative to the average person but when I reach the office of information sharing of which I was the only employee I was the office of information sharing now I had basically the same access to go around and read whatever I wanted as the director of the NSA and so what did I do I wrote some scrapers and I started to see everything that was out there and everything got centralized in Hawaii and this was so I could share it out the treat a little system that showed people this goes here and this goes there and this might be useful for you in your office in that office but I got to see what was going on in every office and there weren't a lot of people in NSA who got to see this and when I did it it started to it started to really trouble me now you guys know what happened when we go back to the history this is of course the the most famous slide for you guys because it's not about phones it's about the Internet this was where the largest Internet service providers in the United States had secretly been going far beyond what the law required of them to cooperate with government and hand over in many cases without warrants the entire Google histories you know Facebook histories whatever is in your iCloud account and so on and so forth over to the government under a system of secret court orders this was unfortunately just where it it began and it wasn't just the internet there was a program that the people saw that actually wasn't related to me this was follow up recording that came by I think actually some years later in the United States about the phone companies AT&T is one of our largest of course phone networks and what they found was that ATT had been collecting the phone records of everyone who crossed their system and never getting rid of them for ages right if you're younger if your birth date is after 1987 and either you're an American or you've called the United States right because anything across their network went there - they have every call that you ever made because that's how far their records go back they were keeping the tower data which is of course the the ledger of your cell phones ringing Here I am Here I am Here I am going all the way back to July 2008 right so they have more than a 10 year history of everyone's movements as they cross their the path of their cell phone towers and this is this is the kind of thing that was just spreading and spreading and spreading everywhere on the internet because we hadn't been encrypting things by default we saw the NSA and their partners the the the five eyes countries as they're called that's the United States the United Kingdom Australia New Zealand and Canada that the Anglophone guys had just been looking across the backbone for anything that was even remotely interesting and then what were they doing they were just writing a scraper right they were just pulling things off the wire and then they were filing away into their little databases and so they we're getting pictures of your webcams they were getting everything that you typed into the search box before Google finally went and encrypted it and then they had to ask Google for it but who would still handle it over all because things were not encrypted - they were in transit now the thing I love about this chart of course is if you look at the time line I think this is the right one you see there's a big spike right after June of 2013 which was the month that these revelations of mass surveillance first came forward and this is where I want to talk about you guys as a cohort not just as the people working on on web three sort of initiatives but as technologists you did that right that spike is you I didn't do that you know who's on the run from the greatest manhunt you know that we've we've had in the United States in in quite some time but somebody read the news and somebody went you know what we're gonna shift our site to HTTPS you know we're gonna retool our browser to prefer these kind of things we're going to make our applications and these things that's just in chrome right but I can tell you from a lot of conversations that it's happening across the internet and so what did these agencies do in response they go oh no people are collecting things in transit and of course this is the problem they've always had throughout history that goes you know these people know what they're doing they use encryption so we can't catch them in transit well what can we do instead and we see that you know it doesn't matter whether you're an ally or an enemy the British version of the NSA put together a really complex operation to actually hack into Belgium's national telecommunications provider Belgic on right now mind you they had legal means to get all of the information they wanted they could use what's called a mutual legal assistance treaty to simply go right to the Belgian law enforcement agencies and go we need this we need that you know please provide it to them and take a little time because people would have to actually check it then they would get it instead they went well why don't we just let ourselves in then we don't have to deal with their encryption because we have their keys we can reroute their traffic we can change the traffic flows to be more preferential to us to route communications of interest past our interception points iolite oh because we said so then as we've gone further and further away from this 2013 moment as encryption has become more in fact effective as it's become more pervasive we've seen malware and hacking attempts really explode and go beyond the government specifically into private industries there's this Israeli company called the NSO group I'm sure many of you have heard about them one of the things they really love to do is look for weaknesses an iMessage iMessage of course is enabled by default on every iPhone in the world we just got some CVEs about iMessage I think out of project zero at Google just a couple weeks ago and it's great that these holes are finally being closed but you need to think about how long they were open how many others there are and what's next right when I message is finally a little bit more secure and it's just too difficult to find our fully remote bug easily where will they move next right encryption is not the answer to every problem but encryption is the standard basis for every conversation we need to have and this is the thing if we have companies NSO is valued privately at 1 billion dollars or more right now because they were just sold for that these guys are selling malware toolkits to governments for millions and millions of dollars I think the Mexican government bought it for 18 million dollars I think the Saudis bought it for more than 50 million dollars five zero not one five again fact check me on these because it's all public now these these records are out there but who were they using it against they were using against the head of their opposition domestically now they were using a journalist that we're reporting on the corruption of the president and so this is this is what we start to see we start to see corporations going well why don't instead of making security safer why don't we make it weaker and of course the NSA has always been doing this they've been discovering vulnerabilities they've been exploiting vulnerabilities and then they've not been reporting them well the problem is those things leak too they can't even keep their weapons safe and then they hit us they shut down the National Health Service in the UK they shut down shipping around the world with Maersk and all of these are derived from NSA bugs right that should have been reported and patched years ago unfortunately proprietary software you guys know how that works but even when this doesn't happen I want you guys to remember look you can make your software more secure you can increase the security of the route as you're in transit but we see things moving increasingly more and more to the physical layer this is Baltimore Maryland in the United States on the day of a black lives matters protest this is a minority protest movement against police brutality and one of the interesting things we saw was an FBI surveillance plane during the entirety of the protest was simply doing orbits and again and again and again the only reason they do that in this kind of way is to form a census of which phones are in the area on the basis of their radio identifier right again those globally unique or universally unique identifiers that are baked into hardware and so I want you guys to constantly be thinking about where can we strip these identities out because now it's not on planes right now it's on the cell phone tower next to you now it's in the gas station now it's at the mall right at the gates and every store and this is something that's going to continue to continue or continue to get worse and like where is this going we see in China where they really don't care about the public narratives because they can use their information control to maintain public support despite the abuses this is not going to be theory this is not going to be fearful conversations from paranoia acts like myself and hopefully yourself this is gonna be everyone this is gonna be your your neighbors this is gonna be your family is gonna be people who don't understand politics who don't understand technology because they don't have time right they have other obligations they have other things they've dedicated their lives to and they're just trying to get through the day and if we don't do something about that if we simply let the world continue on the same dynamic of an increasingly identified world we are going to find that we no longer have the power to resist because we no longer have the power to coordinate the power to collaborate because all Authority has become centralized centralized through decentralization and I know everybody in here sees decentralization is the holy word right and it can be good particularly when we're talking about disrupting these established orthodoxies but what they are doing and centralizing authority through D D centralizing it is they're actually just spreading what used to be quasi or fully governmental authorities to deputies right that worked very closely with God when you think about Facebook you think you know centralized repository and you're absolutely right when you think about Google and Facebook now you're talking to central authorities when you talk about Google and Facebook and Apple now you're talking about three centralized authorities and I know we've got Richard Stallman here and he's been at this a lot longer than I have and you know we should all be grateful for that kind of work where they're trying to make people understand the risks of having unquestionable authorities that control your operating system that control your decisions that control your life when we have a dynamic where you have great power spread very unequally along around a few deputies and these can be deputy companies these can be deputy governments what we ultimately find ourselves living you know what we ultimately find ourselves in is a world where we're living in the midst of a net and if we ever walk too far or we run into that kind of grid of you can't do that because I told you so so I know I've rambled for a while here and I don't want to go on too far but if I could just summarize the points that I'm concerned about the real value of I think any kind of web 3 movement isn't making decentralization work for the public and I don't question for a minute that that is actually the intention of the people in this room that's why I agreed to speak here the thing is make sure you're doing enough right whenever we start talking about eight identity and we're like oh we can prove identity and do this and that you don't want to prove identity proving identity is a problem recording identity is a problem that's dangerous what you want to prove is a right of use what you want to prove is a token for access right we need to make sure that everything we do happens encrypted by default as it goes in transit you guys are way ahead of the game on that and that's simply just because that's the the price for entry to even a nominally private Internet but then we have to disempower ourselves we have to make sure that we are not replacing the old central authorities with new central authorities and I know this gets dicey when we get into business bottles I know everybody's you know out there and doing different things and I know that is very much the purpose of what you guys are working on is decentralization but as you get bigger or as you get smaller and start to become desperate I want you to remember the danger of temptation to succeed right because we're all human and we all get hungry and we all make compromises I compromised my values for a long number of years right I was working at the CIA I was working at the NSA and I was happy to do so I was in fact proud to do so I could defend myself a little bit by saying well I didn't know everything that was going on and when I did I I changed but the reality was I knew enough that I shouldn't have been ok with it but I was and that's because I was doing better than I ever thought I deserved to we need to make sure that we make a world that is safe and we need to make sure we do more than that we need to make sure we have a world that is free for all those people who were born after 1987 right for people to be able to make a phone call again without people making a note of it we need people to be able to buy something you know a gift for their mother you know without there being a record of it we need people to be able to go to the gas station you know and and get a sandwich and not have that left somewhere we need someone to be able to post something truly idiotic on the internet and not have it haunt them for the rest of their life because if we can't make mistakes we can't learn and if we can't learn we can't progress and if we create this world of just an escalator of authorities right where we go yes the old authorities were bad we're gonna create new authorities and they'll do better and then eventually we'll realize how bad those weren't somebody else will do that you know we might survive but I don't think we're actually fulfilling the promise of what we can really be fundamentally when we think about all of these these conversations you know governments like say oh oh security and privacy you know they're different things they're actually the same security is provided by privacy when everything is known about you you are vulnerable your decisions can be anticipated and you can be acted against if the government wants to grant itself security by denying all of us privacy that should not be reassuring that should be concerning and we need to think about why privacy matters like why this push for decentralization matters you guys know and you have people who will make the arguments better than I do but but when I think about this I think it's really that that question of when somebody tells you that's the way things are because I said so we humanity whether we're talking individuals whether we're talking in families whether we're talking communities whether we're talking Nations whether we're talking the global tribe we need the ability to question them and we need the ability to change that and the only way that can happen in the face of extraordinary entrenched powers is if we can collaborate and coordinate and do this quietly if we can talk to people that we trust if we can sharpen our arguments if we can find our good ideas and test and then discard our bad ideas we can create a movement that changes the world that that sort of overturns this this old regime and can hopefully in the future do away with the need for any regime but how does that happen that's a long way off right come on guys we're talking we're talking about flipping bits on the Internet but those bits matter because it's a foundation when we zoom out when we talk about the concepts that everybody's discussing here like the failure loft the failure of governance the failure of all these old institutions to guarantee the rights and the freedoms that we all expected that we all were taught in school exist in free and open societies what then what's our next resort what's our last resort you are some of the only people in the world that can guarantee some measure of Liberty for people in Russia for people in China for people in Iran right and if you can do it there you can do it anywhere and you do it by flipping bits let's go to questions thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] Edward Snowden the best-dressed man at web 3 summit you're amongst a crowd of t-shirts and hoodies but we appreciate you showing up today so we're gonna have some questions from the audience but first I wanted to kick it off with with a question that at web 3 summit we're quite curious about is we kind of look at this as a rallying call a statement that you made in 2013 you said I'd rather be without a state than without a voice so it's six years later and how do you feel about that honestly this is um this is one of the ideas and it's the most dear to me it's one of the ones that I get a lot of flack from actually when I speak in in prominent settings on it because they're like oh my goodness you know some kind of anarchist whatever and the funny thing is I don't think it's about anarchism I I don't think this is a radical statement I think it's simply order of operations what are the things that are most essential most vital to human liberty what are the things that allow us to be people right not not simply to to exist not simply to survive but to live if we can't think right if we can't speak if we can't express ourselves if we can't become the person that we want to be if we cannot disagree if we can't have something of our own even if it's only an idea uh then we don't have anything it doesn't matter you know if we have a state right the state comes after it's not the state that grants all of these things to us it is the state that is supposed to at best protect these things for us to act as a kind of guarantor of them and when a state becomes contrary to these guarantees well I think it's time to reform it [Applause] so you kind of mentioned this but for like for you to go further so it's obvious that one of the largest problems we face is surveillance capitalism it's a business model and when you can't make money advertising you're just gonna sell personal data to the highest government bidder and that's gonna be used for social control the bet the fundamental bet of blockchain technologies is that there is the alternative based on tokenization as you put it but do you think that's actually gonna happen like do you think that we could really build a sustainable alternative so that we're not all to be very frank starving to death building free software I think honestly it's inevitable look there's gonna be a lot of failures and there's gonna be a lot of people who don't do this well well like think about the internet that if you're anywhere near the age I am I guess I'm 36 you know it's hard to keep track the early internet was not commercially driven right the early internet was was goofy it was crude it was you know BBS's and web forms and mailing lists and then it moved to this thing where you know it's people are figuring out how to put up their own web servers on the new web right and then we get the early sort of granted access from these guys who are trying to become the new web Giants you remember like geo cities you remember like Angel Fire these were still big silos they didn't have the kind of sophistication and data mining that they have quite today but the web was chaotic it was terrible there was no like slick design there was no great you know formal artistic beauty in it there but it was beauty in a different way because it was original because everything was driven by a purpose for a constructive sharing purpose and look there's there's two things that we need to look at here there is build community there's building a Commons there's interacting and exchanging and building a cultural identity and a commercial existence where we can survive but then there's also the take over the world model and I think this is where a lot of technologists are coming in conflict with their soul if when they realize they can design a service one way to get by and increase you know the value of human connection but then they can make one little tweak and take over the world and now they're a billionaire and they got a private jet and whatever it is difficult to resist that what I'm saying is there's a medium where you can have something between and I do think a prerequisite for that in a way that that protects human liberty requires a fundamentally anonymous currency right to be able to engage in private trade is one of the basic human freedoms right to be able to go look I painted this rock do you want this rock and not to have someone at the desk you know deciding can you do something with this rock or not no on the internet today you can't do that without incredible technological familiarity this is why you know people have gotten on me they're like oh my god you know he's saying all this stuff about these other French currencies he's not a he's an altcoin or not whatever I I don't care about any of that guys but when you look at what's happening with like zero knowledge proof sand how they're being applied and something like Zee Cash when you see what the guys am on there or doing even though they have some pretty terrible community management on that side when you look at all of these things where they're going can we make things where right now it's still too hard for both of them right the wallets are inaccessible it's the stories the narratives are not easy to understand for average people who don't understand anything about technology the on ramps and the off ramps they don't exist but there is no reason in my mind why you shouldn't be able to go to the gas station and when you lay down cash for you know a bottle of water you can lay down cash to get a bucket of right tokens that you can use for any service that you can use for any product that you can use for any anything and then when we get beyond that we don't even need that anymore people can actually get paid for their labor people can get laid paid directly into their economy and then they're getting bucket of internet for for everything because why not but this is the thing where we start running into friction with these old institutions and you guys know that very well you see this very well in the KYC thing for those of you who follow the economy today and what's going on with the bond markets what's going on with the currency markets all of these government's are you know in their inverting yields and they're starting to ask you to pay them for the privilege of them holding your money right the idea of what currency is we are at the very early moment of that being called into question I do not think currency as it has existed in you know on paper issued by a central authority is going to exist over the long scope of history but how long it takes to get there is very much an open question because you guys have no idea the kind of resistance we're going to face when the government really feels threatened right now the government you know every now and then you get officials out their legislators out there get their hackles up they go oh my goodness Facebook right and Facebook's being really stupid and what they're doing now because they're too early right and they're going too aggressive and they're doing it in the centralized stupid way because of course they're Facebook but the main thing is right now everything what every person in this room is doing is a novelty the state does not care because you are not a threat but you will be and when you will be you need to very quickly move from being a threat to being an just completely irresistible wave right that cannot be undone it what your work becomes a fait accompli and that is the only way that this really works but I think that actually is going to happen because there's simply too many people working on in too many jurisdictions in too many languages and ultimately when we're talking about the network so long as we can establish those essential foundations that I talked about before you know you connect from one state to server in a completely different state and nobody knows because it's encrypted and more importantly the metadata is munge right you've got tor like mix nets that are preserving privacy where new technologies that I don't know about right we've got I think we've got David Shum at this conference who's done amazing work in the past as well we need to solve these metadata problems and we need to do this not just for money we need to do this not just for wonky protocols on the edge we need to do this everywhere for everything and we need it to be invisible because the user is not going to become an expert the user doesn't care the user just wants to exist they just want to live they just want to do they just want to be but if you give them a voice they will feel the value of that and they will love that and they will be willing to defend that when it comes under attack but only if they're able to know that it is possible that it exists and they're not going to know that without you I like that z cash your bucket of Internet they should really run with that I was Canales it I was in the my background is a investigative journalist for The Guardian before I work for now streamer and I was in the newsroom when the what we call the NSA revelations but are now generally known as the Snowden revelations were revealed as I sat next to you and McCaskill and Luke Harding and and there was this discussion after discussion in the days that followed about where was the public reaction right where were these riots on the streets I was kind of the expectation did you so the question is this did you expect the public outcry on the streets but then did you also expect this which is this room of people who are pretty well-funded fairly well-funded coming together and technologists fighting technology yes I mean it's a great question it's hard to answer because so much happened in so many places in the United States actually we did get the Marches right we got protest movements eventually we even got our laws changed not far enough right but we got the first substantive reforms to intelligence collection authorities in the United States since the 1970s sitting in the UK you know in London with the Guardian it was a very different reaction and it's interesting because you know the British media system you know better than I do is unique and in unfortunately in many ways uniquely terrible I mean that the government puts out D notices and you know the BBC and whatnot all these competitors of the Guardian didn't do follow-up reporting right they they didn't want to share the story they didn't want to be a part of the story instead they tried to just ignore it and so only the Guardian was actually out there running with this so readers the Guardian were well informed but everybody else broadly socially they didn't even realize it was happening in a meaningful way and where they did know something was happening they didn't know the significance of it and that was actually an intentional strategy now this is one of the challenges with the media environment around the because we see this sort of news distortion happening on topic after topic in country after country it's not unique right but I did know and I did believe from the beginning that this was not likely to be you know the kind of thing that they gets people burning down buildings I didn't want to burn down buildings in that very first interview with you and McCaskill actually I said you know I'm not trying to burn down the NSA if I wanted to do that I could do that in that afternoon right I had access to everything what I was trying to do was give people the information that had been withheld from them that belonged to them that they needed to know in order to actually exercise their role as citizens in a democracy and that means a lot of things and it's not just voting right in a democracy the pageantry of voting is absolutely meaningless if the citizenry is not informed right consent is not meaningful if it's not informed and unfortunately that's the way our governments have been operating in the long war period since since 9/11 and there are arguments that that's the way it's actually always been I'm a good friend of Daniel Ellsberg and he told me in the 1970s you know during presidential elections one of the Opposition folks who was trying to win the presidency were secretly telling the Vietnamese not to end the war until after the election and all of these these kind of things politics are a dirty dirty thing but when we move beyond the politics we have the individual action all right and we have the collective action that happens at a sub-national scale and the unfortunate reality of a lot of surveillance right 2013 was as much about democracy as it was about surveillance but surveillance and technology was a significant portion of this discussion and when we look at what happens with that whole surveillance segment it is an expert conversation that's an unfortunate reality right when you start talking to my average person about metadata they can understand it absolutely when you start talking to them about you know even an exploit chain and how it works something that's very much arcane and seeing you know beyond the can of the average person you're wrong they can understand it but it takes a lot of time it takes a lot of explanation right and a lot of people one of the things they don't have today is a lot of free time to engage in a lot of obscure conversations legislators today have no idea what the actual meaningful outcomes of these surveillance economies these global mass surveillance systems really mean and they don't care because the systemic incentives are such that they are rewarded for turning a blind eye and they're punished for acting against it because there's a giant corporate machine behind this and these are the guys who ultimately in the United States will pay you directly if you don't pay pass a law or in other countries will work very hard to make sure you get positive coverage and opportunities to establish your continue to Kumbha see if you do what they like that doesn't work the same with individual technologists that doesn't work the same with the people in this room that doesn't work with Richard Stallman right who could be a very very rich man but is instead sitting in this room with you over over this this week and I think that is one of the things that we have to remember when you talk about problems and conflicts that are happening on a social scale on a human scale elections are not your only recourse right an election is not going to be changed by a peer-reviewed paper an election is not going to be changed by the academic consensus unfortunately we see this kind of thing within discussions about climate change right science is settled but political opinion is still for its own self-interest pretending that it's not what technology is different because when you talk about how science when you talk about hard math when you talk about Coda's law you can export values digitally to every jurisdiction in the world so long as your protocol can't be identified and excluded right if you make your protocol look like every other protocol if your protocol looks like HTTP 443 right you can change the status quo not in your country you can change the status quo in the worst of countries and that is a fundamentally powerful thing that has always given me out the optimism since the beginning the one thing I will tell you about 2013 that I did not expect is I didn't think we'd still be talking about this in 2019 I thought this was very much gonna be a two-week story because it was so specialist I thought things would be very different than they are today but rather far more to the negative than the positive I have been surprised and gladdened to see the contrary to what the conventional wisdom is which is that nobody cares that nothing's changed privacy is a front page story every week all around the world today right it not a month goes by when you don't see some kind of legal hearing when you don't see people talking about changing laws it could be the GD P R and EU it could be all of these lawsuits against Facebook's and Google's the world is changing and public opinion is changing and it's very much going in the favor of people who do not like what these companies are doing rather than a company's favors the difference is the companies control the system today the companies control the incentive today the question is can they maintain that control and in all honesty I think over the span of time the answer is No hi Edward thanks for the insights there's one sort of question that's on the back of my mind I think as we develop the software and these technologies were doing so I think I think you sort of mentioned earlier that broadly in in reaction to the way that the world seems to be going the way that the social structures that we have the way that the establishment seems to be behaving the software is increasingly allowing distributed anonymous or very you know very very pseudonymous individuals to come together and perform the services that would otherwise have been very focused very targeted by the powers that be so you can see this with you know BitTorrent allowing the hosting of information that would otherwise have to have been placed on a server run by a particular operating company that could have been taken now so increasingly software is moving its latest you know it's technology it's the unstoppable force and it's it's gonna eventually but it's head against the immovable object which is national governments national laws and the establishment something's going to have to give either either the laws are going to change in the same way that copyright law kind of changed a bit with the advent of VCRs or things that we take for granted today and by that I basically mean writing software will become controlled and illegal in parts and we already got a taste of this right with with crypto in the 90s and early noughties there was this notion of you know crypto being weaponized software the u.s. made it illegal to to allow other countries to downloads that which way do you think it's gonna go well just a couple comments first was about like you know the Bitcoin protocol or Bitcoin sorry BitTorrent protocol and the idea that you know previously these files would be stored you know on servers on particular hosts and that could be taken down really that's all the BitTorrent protocol is doing is making everyone a server and that's the reality everything is a server if you're brave enough right when you look at this kind of dynamic I think that's what the promise of decentralization is all about it is erasing the old paradigms of how we think about connection the idea that there was one big server and many clients when it said it could be many clients who are also many servers and when the client finishes they become a server right and then then then serve others these these dynamics are transformative and when the law takes a particular paradigm into consideration at the time it's written and then that paradigm no longer exists the law necessarily has to change or it is no longer respected it's no longer sort of man excuse me there's some construction noise here when we look at that future we can't say which direction it's gonna go I can't say one way or the other with certainty but my suspicion is that it's gonna be both the laws will change the technologies will change but the trend of progress over time will be in favor of Liberty right it's very easy to look at the problems we have today and give up go the world sucks life sucks things are Donald Trump is president right when you look over 50 years when you look over a hundred years when you look over five hundred years we're doing very well and I think that will continue thank you [Applause] [Music] do you still have time for one more question I'd like to take one but with the construction noise I think it's not gonna work okay got it I saw a different time clock but ladies and gentlemen Edward Snowden [Music] [Applause] thank you for your service and for your sacrifice and for everything you do for this community thank you and the dramatic construction music [Applause]

Channel: Web3 Foundation

Views: 181,025

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Id: pXksLYW4380

Length: 63min 44sec (3824 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 24 2019