Edward Snowden: How Your Cell Phone Spies on You

the Joe Rogan experience are you aware at all of the current state of surveillance and what if anything has changed since your revelations yeah I mean the the big thing that's changed since I was uh in in in in 2013 is now its mobile first everything mobile was still a big deal right and the intelligence community was very much grappling to get its hands around it and to deal with it but now people are much less likely to use laptop then use a desktop than then use you know god any kind of wired phone than they are to use a smartphone and both Apple and Android devices unfortunately are not especially good in protecting your privacy I think right now you got a smartphone right you might be listening to this on a train somewhere and in traffic right now or you Joe right now you got a phone somewhere in the room right the phone is turned off or at least the screen is turned off it's sitting there it's powered on and if somebody sends you a message the screen blinks to life how does that happen but how is it that if someone from any corner of the earth dials a number your phone rings and nobody else's rings how is it you can dial anybody else's number and only their phone rings right every smartphone every phone at all is constantly connected to the nearest cellular tower every phone even when the screen is off you think it's doing nothing you can't see it because radio frequency emissions are invisible it's screaming in the air saying Here I am Here I am here is my IMEI I think it's individual manufacturers Equipment Identity and IMEI individual manufacturers subscriber identity I could be wrong on the break out there but the the acronyms are the IMEI and the IMSI and you can search for these things there are two globally unique identifiers that only exist anywhere in the world in one place right this makes your phone different than all my other phones the IMEI is burned into the hand side of your phone no matter what SIM card you changed to it's always gonna be the same and it's always gonna be telling the phone network it's this physical handset the IME SI is in your SIM card right and this is what holds your phone number right it's the basically the key the right to use that phone number and so your phone is sitting there doing nothing you think but it's constantly shouting and saying I'm here who is closest to me that's the cell phone tower and every cell phone tower with its big ears is listening for these little cries for help and going alright I see Joe Rogan's phone and I see Jaime's phone I see all these phones that are here right now and it compares notes with the other network towers and your smart phone compares notes with them to go who do I hear the loudest and who you hear the loudest is a proxy for proximity for closeness distance right they go whoever I hear more loudly than anybody else that's close to me so you're gonna be bound to this cell phone tower and that cell phone tower is gonna make a note a permanent record saying this phone this phone handset with this phone number at this time was connected to me right and based on your phone handset and your phone number they can get your identity right because you pay for this stuff with your credit card and everything like that and even if you don't right it's still active at your house overnight is still active you know on your nightstand when you're sleeping it's still whatever the movements of your phone are the movements of you as a person and those are often quite ly uniquely identifying it goes to your home it goes to your workplace other people don't have it sorry and anyway it's constantly shouting this out and then it compares notes with the other parts of network and when somebody is trying to get to a phone it compares notes of the network compares notes to go where is this phone with this phone number in the world right now and to that cell phone tower that is closest to that phone it sends out a signal saying we have a call for you make your phone's start ringing so your owner can answer it and then it connects it across this whole path but what this means is that whenever you're carrying a phone whenever the phone is turned on there's a record of your presence at that place that is being made and created by companies it does not need to be kept forever and in fact there's no good argument for it to be kept forever but these companies see that is valuable information right this is the whole big data problem that we're running into and all this information that used to be ephemeral right where were you when you were 8 years old you know we're worried where'd you go after you had a bad breakup you know who did you spend the night with who'd you call after all this information used to be ephemeral meaning it disappeared right like like the morning dew it would be gone no one would remember it but now these things are stored now these things are saved it doesn't matter whether you're doing anything wrong it doesn't matter whether you're the most ordinary person on earth because that's how bulk collection which is the government's euphemism for mass surveillance works they simply collected all in advance in hopes that one day it will become useful and that was just talking about how you connected phone network that's not talking about all those apps on your phone that are contacting the network even more frequently right how do you get a text message notification how do you get an email notification how is it the Facebook knows where you're at you know all of these things these analytics they are trying to keep track through location services on your phone through GPS through even just what wireless access points you're connected to because there's a global constantly updated map there's actually many of them of wireless access points in the world because just like we talked about every phone has a unique identifier that's globally unique every wireless access point in the war right UK promote them at home whether it's in your laptop every device that has a radio modem has a globally unique identifier in it and this is standard term you can look it up and these things can be mapped when they're broadcasting in the air because again like your phone says to the cell phone tower I have this identifier the cell phone tower responds and says I have this identifier and anybody who's listening they can write these things down and all those Google Street View cars that go back and forth right they're keeping notes on whose Wi-Fi is active on this block right and then they build an in a giant map so even if you have GPS turned off right as long as you're connected to Wi-Fi those apps can go well I I'm connected to Joe's Wi-Fi but I can also see his neighbor's Wi-Fi here and the other one in this apartment over here and the other one in the apartment here and you should only be able to hear those four globally unique Wi-Fi access points from these points in physical space right the intersection in between the spreads the domes of all those wireless access points it's a proxy for location and it just goes on and on and on we could talk about this for four more hours we don't have that kind of time can I ask you this is there a way to mitigate any of this personally I mean is me shutting your phone off doesn't even work right well so it does in a way it's just no um the thing was shutting your phone off that is a risk is how do you know your phone's actually turned off it used to be when I was in Geneva for example working for the CIA we would all carry like drug dealer phones you know the old smart phones there sorry old dumb phones they're not smart phones and the reason why was just because they had removable battery backs where you could take the battery out right and the one beautiful thing about technology is if there's no electricity in it right if there's there's no go juice available to it if there's no battery connected to it it's not sending anything because you have to get power from somewhere you have to have power in order to do work but now your phones are all sealed right you can't take the batteries out so there are potential ways that you can hack a phone where it appears to be off but it's not actually off it's just pretending to be off whereas in fact it's still listening in and doing all this stuff but for the average person that doesn't apply right and I got to tell you guys they've been chasing me all over the place I don't worry about that stuff right and it's because if they are applying that level of effort to me I don't probably get the same information through other routes I am as careful as I can and I use things like Faraday cages I turn devices off but if they're actually manipulating the way devices display it's just too great a level of effort even for someone like me to keep that up on a constant basis also if they get me I only trust phones so much so there's only so much they can derive from the compromise and this is how operational security works you think about what are the realistic threats that you're facing that you're trying to mitigate and with the mitigation that you're trying to do is what would be the loss what would be the damage done to you if this stuff was exploited much more realistic than worrying about these things that I call voodoo hex right which are like next level stuff and actually just a shout out for those of your readers who are interested in this stuff fun I wrote a paper on this specific problem how do you know when a phone is actually off how do you know when it's actually not spying on you with a brilliant brilliant guy named Andrew bunny Huang he's an MIT PhD and I think electrical engineering called the introspection engine that was published in the Journal of open engineering you can find it online and it'll go as deep down in the weeds I promise you it as you want we take an iPhone 6 this was back when I was fairly new and we modified it so we could actually not trust the device to report its own state but physically monitor its state to see if of spying on you but for average people right this academic that's not your primary threat your primary threats are these bulk collection programs your primary threat is the fact that your phone is constantly squawking to these cell phone towers it's doing all these things because we leave our phones in a state that is constantly on you're constantly connected right airplane mode doesn't even turn off Wi-Fi really anymore it just turns off the cellular modem but the whole idea is we need to identify the problem and the central problem with smart phone use today is you have no idea what the hell it's doing at any given time like the phone has the screen off you don't know what it's connected to you don't know how frequently it's doing it Apple and iOS unfortunately makes it impossible to see what kind of network connections are constantly made on the device and to inter mediate them going I don't want Facebook to be able to talk right now you know I don't want Google to be able to talk right now I just want my secure messenger app to be able to talk I just want my weather app to be able to talk but I just checked my weather and now I'm done with it so I don't want that to be able to talk anymore and we need to be able to make these intelligent decisions on not just an app by app basis but a connection by connection basis right you want let's say you use Facebook because you know for whatever judgment we have a lot of people might do it you want it to be able to connect to Facebook's content servers you want to be able to message a friend you want to be able to download a photograph or whatever but you don't want it to be able to talk to an ad server you don't want it to talk to an analytic server that that's monitoring your behavior right you don't want to talk to all these third-party things because Facebook crams they're garbage and almost every app that you download and you don't even know what's happening because you can't see it right and this is the problem with the data collection used today is there is an industry that is built on keeping this invisible and what we need to do is we need to make the activities of our devices whether it's a phone whether it's computer or whatever more visible and understandable to the average person and then give them control over it so like if you could see your phone right now and at the very center of his green icon that's your you know handset or it's a picture your face whatever and then you see all these little spokes coming off of it that's every app that your phone is talking to right now or every app that is active on your phone right now and all the hosts that it's connecting to and you can see right now what's every three seconds your phone is checking into Facebook and you could just poke that app and then BOOM it's not talking to Facebook anymore Facebook's not allowed Facebook speaking privileges have been revoked right you would do that we would all do that if there was a button on your phone that said do what I want but not spy on me you would press that button right that button is not a does not exist right now and both Google and Apple unfortunately Apple's a lot 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 a particular perspective they they actually aren't wrong there but it's not enough to go you know we have to lock that capability off from people because we don't trust they would make the right decisions we think it's too complicated for people to do this we think there's too many connections being made well that is actually a confession of the problem right there if you think people can't understand it if you think there are too many communications happening if you think there's too much complexity in there it needs to be simplified just like the president can't control everything like that if you have to be the president of the phone and the phone is as complex as the United States government we have a problem guys this should be a much more simple process it should be obvious and the fact that it's not and the fact that we read story after story year after year saying all your data then breached here this companies spying on you here this companies manipulating your purchases or your search results or they're hiding these things from your timeline or they're influencing your you are manipulating it in all of these different ways that happens as a result of a single problem and that problem is in any quality of available information they can see everything about you can see everything about what your device is doing and they can do whatever they want with your device you on the other hand owns the device well rather you paid for the device but increasingly these corporations on it increasingly these governments own it and increasingly we are living 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 nobody understands this better than the youngest generation well it seems like our data became a commodity before we understood what it was it became this thing that's insanely 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 being earned and once everyone's accustomed to this situation it's very difficult to pull the reins back it's very difficult to turn that horse around precisely because the money then becomes pot right right the information that becomes influence that also seems to be the same sort of situation that would happen with these mass surveillance states once they have the access it's going to be incredibly difficult for them to relinquish that right yeah no you're you're exactly correct and this is the the subject of the book I mean this is this is the permanent record and this is where it came from this is how it came to exist the story of our lifetimes is how intentionally by design a number of institutions both governmental and corporate realized it was in their mutual interest to conceal their data collection activities to increase the breadth and depth of their sensor networks that were sort of spread out for society remember back in the day intelligence collection in the United States even at Sigyn used to me sending an FBI agent right to put alligator clips on an embassy building or sending in somebody disguised as a workman and they put a bug in a building or they built a satellite listening site right we called these foreign set or foreign satellite collection we're out in the desert somewhere they built a big parabolic collector and it's just listening to satellite emissions right but these satellite emissions these satellite links were owned by militaries they were exclusive to governments right it wasn't affecting everybody broadly all surveillance was targeted because it had to be what changed with technology is that surveillance could now become indiscriminate it could become dragnet it could become bulk collection which should become one of the dirtiest phrases in the language if we have any kind of decency but we were intentionally this was intentionally concealed from us right the government did it they used classification companies did it they intentionally didn't talk about it they denied these things were going they they said you agreed to this and you did agree to nothing like this I'm sorry right they go we put that Terms of Service page up and you click that you clicked 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 you weren't trying to agree to some 600 page legal form that even if you read you wouldn't understand and it doesn't matter even if you did understand because one of the very first paragraphs and I said this agreement can be changed at any time unilaterally without your consent by the company right they have built a legal paradigm that presumes records collected about us do not belong to us this is sort of one of the core principles on which mass surveillance from the government's perspective in the United States is legal and you have to understand that all this stuff we talked about today government says everything they do is legal right and they go so it's fine our perspectives the public should be well that's actually the problem because this isn't okay the scandal isn't how they're breaking the law the scandals that 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 derived from a case and I believe the 1970s called Smith versus Maryland and Smith was this knucklehead who was harassing this lady making phone calls to her house and when she would pick up he just I don't know is that their heavy breathing would ever like a classic creeper and you know it was terrifying this poor lady so she calls the cops and says one day I got one of these phone calls and I see this car creeping past my house on the street and she got a license-plate number so she goes to the cops and she goes is this the guy had the cops again they're trying to do a good thing here they look up his license-plate number and they find out where this guy is and then they go what phone numbers registered to that house and they go to the phone company and they say can you give us this record the phone company says yeah sure and it's the guy the cops got their man right so they go arrest this guy and then in court his lawyer brings all this stuff up and they go you did this without a warrant that was sorry that was that was the the problem was they went to the phone company they got the records without a warrant they just asked for it or they subpoenaed it right some lower standard of legal review and the company gave it to him and got the guy they marched more in jail and they could have gotten a warrant right but it was just expedience they just didn't want to take the time with small-town cops you can understand how it happens they know the guy's a creeper they just want to get him off to jail and so they made him I said but the government doesn't want to let go they fight on this and they go it wasn't actually they weren't his records and so because they didn't belong to him he didn't have a Fourth Amendment right to demand a warrant be issued for them they were the company's records and the company provided them voluntarily and hence Warren was required because you can give whatever you want without a warrant as long as it's yours now here's the problem the government extrapolated a principle in a single case of a single known suspected criminal who had they had real good reasons suspect suspect was their guy and used that to go to a company and get records from them and establish a precedent these records don't belong to the guy they belong to the company and then they said well if one person doesn't have a Fourth Amendment interest in records held by a company no one does and so the company then has absolute proprietary ownership of all of these records about all of our lives and we're going to this is back in the 1970s you know the internet hardly exists in these kind of contexts smart phones you know don't exist modern society modern communications don't exist this is the very beginning of the technological era and flash-forward now 40 years and they are still relying on this precedent about this one you know pervy creeper to go nobody has a privacy right for anything that's held by a company and so long as they do that companies are going to be extraordinarily powerful and they're going to be extraordinary abusive and this is something that people don't get they go oh well it's data collection right they're exploiting data huh this is data about human lives mistake about people these records are about you it's not data that's being exploited it's people that are being exploited it's not data that's being manipulated it's you that's being a manipulated and this this is this is something that I think a lot of people are beginning to understand the problem is the companies and the government's are still pretending they don't understand or Oh disagreeing with this and this is my my ends me of something that one of my old friends John Perry Barlow who served with me at the freedom of the press foundation I'm the president of the board used to say to me which is you can't awaken someone who's pretending to be asleep [Applause]

Channel: JRE Clips

Views: 11,212,450

Rating: 4.9105873 out of 5

Keywords: Joe Rogan, JRE, Joe Rogan Experience, JRE Clips, PowerfulJRE, Joe Rogan Fan Page, Joe Rogan Podcast, podcast, MMA, Joe Rogan MMA Show, UFC, comedy, comedian, stand up, funny, clip, favorite, best of

Id: VFns39RXPrU

Length: 24min 16sec (1456 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 23 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/naaarff]

Shit.

That is just downright terrifying.

I want to get rid of my phone. I should get rid of my phone.

But I can’t.

[u/cmdrAD]

not a mealtime video but if you haven't seen it, check out the documentary "Citizenfour." the filmmaker was the person Snowden chose to reveal the NSA spying program to and the whole doc is the five day interview he gave them right before the whole thing broke in the news. it's bone-chilling

[u/jotsalot]

If Snowden starts a YouTube channel, as Joe suggests elsewhere in this interview, I would watch the hell out of it.

[u/turbodude69]

there's an android app called 3g watchdog. it shows you which apps are sending and receiving and how much.

i just checked and pretty much every single app on my phone has sent/received data today. even found an app service communicating that i UNINSTALLED already. it left part of itself behind just to send/receive data. creepy!

[u/NomadChild]

Based on the various comments this post is receiving I think it might be helpful to direct people's attention to Shoshana Zuboff's work on what she calls "surveillance capitalism." Not only is surveillance a booming business model between platforms and advertisers, but it is actively eroding democratic forms of governance, political agency, and almost all forms of privacy. Zuboff is an academic focusing on how these new forms of power and manipulation (what some have called "algorithmic power" and what she calls "instrumentarian power") are unprecedented. She makes a very convincing case that our behavior is not only tracked and preyed on, but it is actively manipulated to coerce us into particular kind of consumer habits.

Source: Currently writing a thesis on ways of resisting this (and they do exist!)

[u/deadfermata]

This whole video is one big ELI5

Snowden would make a great teacher. He explains things so succinctly.

[u/the-ox1921]

This is the reason why I don't have Facebook anymore. I don't use Chrome and I don't use Google search.

I still have a gmail, still have an android and I can guarantee that there's some company out there that has linked my email with my reddit account so it knows everything that I'm posting.

My friend tells me "open a facebook because it doesn't matter, you are a drop in the ocean for these companies, come and join the ocean". Fuuuck that, on principle I will not allow Facebook to collect my data (although that doesn't matter anyways because they collect data on -everyone- even if you don't have an account).

Scary stuff.

[u/Fast_Biscotti]

The entire interview is one of the most important I’ve ever seen. I highly recommend watching it, or listening to it on Joe Rogan’s podcast.

[u/[deleted]]

Technology has made us advanced but also made us come backwards a long time.

I believe technology was to help us overcome difficulties but I believe now it is made for dominance?