Edward Snowden Interview with Peter Van Valkenburgh of Coin Center | Blockstack Berlin 2018

so we talked a little bit beforehand and you mentioned that this talk might be slightly different than the normal talks that you've done lately because of this focus on architecture as well as politics and morality so I wanted to start out off the bat saying let's talk about what it was like when you were still with Booz Allen when you were still working as a contractor for the NSA before you blew the whistle on government surveillance you had to collect all the evidence what about the actual architecture of the systems that you were using in your job made that job that collection of information easy what made it possible for an outside contractor such as yourself to obtain so much secret information well I think the first thing to understand here is actually did it that it wasn't easy and this is actually a little bit chilling when we look at the statements of Congress for example in response to what happened in June of 2013 when I provided information evidence about serious crimes by the United States government against its own people and people around the world they said many of them including the authors of the laws that the intelligence community our spies were saying they were acting under the people who wrote these laws said they had no idea that the laws were being applied this way they said they had no idea that these programs existed the the companies that were involved in these kind of activities some of the largest names on the Internet right when they were being sort of outed on the front page of the newspapers they said they had no idea that they were part of these programs in fact initially they denied that there was any cooperation and only later today this was the case so the key point that I'm making here is that the government was carving silos within sort of the american space of government into which not only the public had no visibility but the vast majority even of the government itself had no visibility and so then there was a question of how could this imbalance of power between the governing and the governed be corrected how could this be made more equal how could our democracy be strengthened and I would argue this is through equal access and information or at least more equal access of information and this was intentionally designed into the system to be impossible at the NSA for example at the CIA for example where I also worked uh every time you access a document a record would be made it would say your name this person at this time access to this document so if something went missing they could try to find it but no system is perfect and I had the rare good fortune of working both at the CIA and the NSA meaning I had seen both our human intelligence collection capabilities and our electronic intelligence collection capabilities I knew how we spied on others and I knew how we spied on ourselves and what that meant was I was one of the rare people with both the knowledge of what was going on and where was going wrong and the ability to gather this information and provide it to journalists but this begs the question then all right you're me or someone like me you'd have discovered that your government is up to no good they're breaking the law they're violating the rights of the public and you've gotten the proof let's presume you you have the evidence how do you get it to journalists without being caught right when the story is about how the Internet is being monitored pervasively you can't use your gmail account when that is Oh an open door for government Google Hangouts what we're using right now you know they get a copy of sort of any call that they want like so just a quick sort of illustration for those in the audience who are a little bit more technical you've got journalists on one side of the internet who you don't know you have to identify them you have to find methods of contact for them then there's you on the other side who has the information that they need to tell the public what's going on and then you have this hostile path to them through the internet that is monitored that it is is exploited and some of these journalists on the other side don't know how to use secure communications at the time this there is no end to end encryption that is commonplace right not everyone is using signal messenger whatsapp isn't using the signal protocol it's amazing watching you explain to gren greenwald how to set up a TV like but the beautiful thing is bitcoin still exists right the knowledge the capabilities were there but just like the knowledge of mass surveillance was still there it was unequally unevenly applied what we've been doing in these past five years is raising the average level of education we're expanding the communities that have these capabilities ago all right I'm on an island in Hawaii different side of the world I have to find a way to get this across the internet okay you encrypt your communications right but then when the government is investigating these journalists who they know are writing these stories they're going to simply pull their internet histories and go I want to see every connection that's made to this person I want to see every email that's been written to this person for last 30 days six months 90 days 180 days whatever and I want to see every IP address that sent that they one just follow the chain back go see which server sent that who connected to that server and eventually you get a list of IP addresses if you're doing this from home that could lead back to you if you're doing this from a coffee shop does the coffee shop have cameras in it did you make a credit card purchase at that can the government simply CrossRef it's a list of its employees at the local facility with the list of people who made credit-card purchases at that cafe at that day that that email was sent to that journalist these were the kind of things that I was thinking about I used things like the Tor project to route my communications I did not use my home access I did not use public cafe access in fact I've constructed probably the largest non-public map of wireless access points in Hawaii by going war driving around in my car and looking for ones that weren't locked down there were in places that were not near my home and using them like George Costanza with back they were very helpful you know all the Wi-Fi hotspots in Hawaii that's interesting but briefly the point here is that every system will have methods of control built into it where whoever if we had a central authority for the Internet be they government being a Google view they Facebook will try to limit what you can do they will try to instruct you as to how you can use the system and the only way to change that the only way to revolutionize that is to look for the spaces that they do not understand as well as those who live there if you have a better understanding of the network than your adversary you can change that Network because you can operate it on it in ways that they cannot control yeah so here's a question you use tor do you like using tor is it a good user experience I know I love tour but for the average person they would they would say it's too slow but I would say it has gotten faster every year for you know the last 10 do you think there are enough relay nodes in the network to make it robustly private and secure I think it's a mistake to count on any kind of mixed net for perfect privacy the better question is does it provide more robust privacy thinner home can action through your ISP does it provide more robust protection than a VPN which is a single point of failure right if government goes to that VPN provider and sort of holds them by the ankles and shakes them upside down until records fall out of their pockets will yours be in that will that lead back to you if it is a volunteer run Network where there are no payment records such as tor you have a larger layer of protection you've got a bigger buffer but to rely on any single system to make you invisible on the Internet is to must make it a mistake you have to understand how the system works and most critically you have to always be thinking about what happens when this layer of protection fails where are you then exposed and that way you can shim in new layers redundant layers of protection so that if one fails you have defense-in-depth yeah I bring it up in part because we had we had folks from the orchid project here today explaining what they're trying to build which may interest you if you're not familiar with it already it's a decentralized market place for via VPN providers that also includes some level of Onion Routing or multi-hop anonymization and the idea is with Tor we rely on the goodwill of a bunch of volunteers to run nodes and we hope that there are enough of them that it makes it impossible to fully identify both the origin and destination of the communication why not find a way to create an open market for paying for these services the problem being that you have a centralized choke point in the form of a payment processor and that could defeat the system I'm curious if that idea is provocative to you interesting they're not the only ones working on that project there are a few it's pretty exciting stuff yeah in general we always want to be what what they're doing there's they're looking at the known weaknesses in the Tor project right which is briefly the I'm sure they explain this but there's three hops in any tor circuit sort of an entry node a relay mode and and an exit node the exit mode can see the requests for you but they don't know which user sent it the entry node knows who is sending requests but they don't know what the requests are for but if you get sort of three bad notes the odds of this are pretty low but if they can get that whole chain and it's a single person a single adversary cooperating they can see the whole network right or the whole circuit that you have until it changes and this of course is something that we should be planning for what is the next best step I don't know enough about this project to say that's the case but the idea is the more robust we make any work the more layers of decentralization that we put in the more layers of trustless cooperation that we put in the safer we all are and I imagine part of the reason that you would want to use tor or VPNs but preferably tor would be your day-to-day experiences on the internet are use are primarily communications IP address to IP address and that's all a record of your activities correct and what can you tell us about the architecture of you know the internet when it comes to IP addresses when it comes to how computers connect to each other that to your mind is is one of these vulnerabilities one of these centralized repositories that makes it easy for government to collect information from us that makes it easy it makes it hard to be private or hard to be able to feel like you can speak without your expression chilled okay so imagine that someone wants to know what you're doing it could be a government doesn't have to be could be a jealous ex could be a company could be you know a litigant they decide to hire someone to follow you around all day there are limits on what they can see about you they can sit outside your house all day long they don't see what happens inside your home but they know when you leave they can follow your car get your plate number know where you go I know we've got sort of license plate recognition cameras all over the place so this makes it even easier they see you stopped at a restaurant they see who you meet with take a photograph of them but they don't sit directly behind you in the cafe where they can hear everything you're saying because you might be suspicious who this person is that's following you around everywhere you go but they know where you were when you were there who you met with how long you met with them where that person went afterwards if they choose to follow that person so on so forth this is what we would call generally metadata even if you encrypt your activities online this same information is still available for everyone everywhere no matter what they're doing unless they're taking extraordinary care to hide the methods of their communication because when you think about encryption in the internet and everything at large metadata the metadata problem is the signaling problem everywhere communication is occurring there is a signal that is being broadcast on the IP layer and there is a destination for that the sort of communication so as long as you can see that addressing information the source of it and the destination of it the source of it and the destination of it you can create a network of human relationships you can create perfect records of private lives particularly when you start gaining access to what those private eyes could not get now you have Amazon Alexa sitting on yourself they could hear what's happening inside your apartment we are carrying around and paying people to put cameras in our pockets microphones in our pockets that are tracking our movements as we move from a cellular network cell site as we move across town these things happen to G 3G 4G LTE it doesn't matter what network they'll function the same way ultimately they have a perfect record of your activities and what this means is that your digital communications are fundamentally qualitatively different than the ones that you have face-to-face because the ones that you have face-to-face are in at least some way if ephemeral they're forgotten you speak your words into the air the sound attenuates as it travels out and then it is gone lost to history but for those who are there to hear it right when it crosses the Internet these are entering databases both by commercial providers like Facebook or trying to exploit them for commercial value and for governments who are trying to exploit them for intelligence value who want to know what their public's are doing who want to know what foreign groups are doing and this this is what we need to take care to guard against yep so so you've suggested that there's a little bit of a selling ourselves down the river with respect to privacy you know people are putting Alexa's in their home we pay to have cameras in our pocket and I think for the average person the non-technical person this doesn't seem like a bargain about privacy it seems like just better services so it's rather like if you put the frog into boiling water it jumps out if you put the frog in cold water it and gradually heat it up it cooks itself you know we didn't think we were selling our privacy we thought we were just getting more friends on Facebook a lot of what people at this conference are excited about is the idea that we could have user friendly and engaging apps games services Bitcoin being an early version something like a decentralized PayPal but other things being maybe more whimsical or fun like crypto kitties are you familiar with crypto kitties yeah you owned a bunch of crypto kitties don't you has anyone said yeah and and and so the idea here is maybe if if we can deliver services that that are more engaging and more important to people things like money not just speech things like collectibles that they get affinities over not just visiting a website through tor maybe that's one motivation to get people to actually start using systems that would otherwise be more difficult than their centralized counterparties so like it's hard to use tor the other approach is you've got to make the user interface better signal is a much better user interface than GPG and and are they of equal security it's hard to know but a lot more people are using signal now what do you think what would you want to tell this developer community who really wants to build decentralized apps about the the the pitfalls of that approach or what excites you about that approach do you think we can remove the amazons of the world slowly from the equation or the googles of the world slowly from the equation by turning them into protocols like that koiner aetherium yeah I mean this is this is the dream that we're talking about an open society is dependent upon the concept of privacy right people say you know if you don't have anything to hide why do you care but arguing that you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying that you don't care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say it misses the point privacy isn't about something to hide privacy is about something to protect and that thing is an open society of free society that understands the value of the individual and that understands that the value of those individuals is the fact that they we are all different that we are irreplaceable it is our minority opinions from which progress derives if everybody thought the same thing if everybody believed the same thing if we were all on the same page we wouldn't have that wonderful Harith heresy against the orthodoxy of a new idea and what this this ultimately means in the context of protocols and commerce and decentralization is the problem of the Internet today is that all of our transactions are irrevocably tated by the standard of method of operation to our identity you pay for internet service in your true name it is registered to your home address right it is using your personal payment information so everything that occurs on the internet connection can be traced back to you it's not just the books that you buy on amazon.com that Jeff Bezos has a you know permanent record of since sitting in some database somewhere it's who can see that you are connecting to amazon.com in first place that would be your internet service provider it would be anyone who has access to that line encryption provides us a better level of protection but fundamentally so long as our transactions on the Internet are connected to our identities they are not private no what we need to do is change internet transactions from being the equivalent of going to a gas station and buying a bottle of water with a credit card to being able to buy a bottle of water with cash anywhere right where there is no transaction and just like our words our interests can be as ephemeral in this new modern society as they have been in every generation past people need a right to be forgotten to feel secure in their ideas well it's interesting if you're paying with cash too instead of a credit card it can be a vending machine instead of a gas station it can be something quite sloppy you don't need a person right because these lumpy gas stations that exist on the internet there is peas as you were saying there DNS providers domains domain name systems the thing that makes google.com match up with Google server addresses their certificate authorities for saying yes this is the real Google com not an impersonator trying to collect your personal information a sock puppet if you will another project in this space is the idea that we can take those centralized repositories which are just Ledger's DNS is just a ledger you know a certificate authority is just a ledger and turn them into things like the Bitcoin ledger I think that's that's one of the key visions behind the the folks that I've talked to a block stack that's a vision behind a lot of the architecture that people are building in this room do you think that do you think there's this is a good approach do you think this is approach that might have more impact in the next 20 years to protect our privacy than taking an alternative approach the alternative approach is the systems we're gonna assume aren't going to change much they're gonna continue to be leaky and have these centralized intermediaries but maybe we can get back involved in the democratic process as young people who are excited about technology and know about it and push governments to lay off of it to use democracy and government and the Constitution to get our privacy back is that more fruitful less fruitful than rebuilding the architecture they're both hard problems I just thought I'd get yeah I mean this is a great question it's you know what's gonna save us are we going to improve our technology or are we going to rescue our democracy and these are troubled times or democracy around the world it's it's not hard to see in country after country ones that have traditionally been seen as sort of the champions of the free liberal world order now struggling very hard against some quite dark forces internal as often as not and the question becomes if it's happening in in many different countries that have many different systems what is it that's really changed and how do we correct it I'm not a politician so I don't want to prescribe solutions there but I think the first thing to understand is that we are the only ones who are going to solve this we cannot wait for someone else to fix this for us this is the the sort of paralysis that I faced when I was at NSA and saw that my government was violating the rights of everyone in my home and around the world and hoping someone else would do something about this I I saw Barack Obama get elected earlier on and he campaigned on a platform of ending warrantless wiretapping right he said that's not who we are we're not gonna do this anymore and in fact he expanded the system rather than ending it he expanded sort of drone strikes unlawful killings so so many other programs it's not about Obama right it's about the idea that when we have politicians who are campaigning on platforms of reform who are credible who we have reason to believe in and yet even they make the system worse maybe we have to stop looking at the status quo now technology is not going to solve all of our problems but if we have looked at the law for you know the history of civilization as the guarantor the sole guarantor of rights in society and we see that the law is beginning to become brittle as that guarantor of Rights can we find new means of enforcing our rights our laws our values through technology through protocols to enshrine our values in a system that is not going to fall to the same typical predictable corruptions of human behavior right we all have weaknesses we all make mistakes we all come under pressure but machines do not in the same way now yes we have bugs and yes we will screw things up but can we build a brick upon which someone else can lay another brick which will eventually create a foundation for a better and freer world in which no one is worse off right but we are all better off let us not make a zero-sum society let's make a cooperative progressive society by thinking about the core values the core capabilities that we need we need to be able to trade permissionless ly and privately we need to be able to communicate without fear without interdiction if we're not doing something wrong this doesn't mean there needs to be no surveillance whatsoever right government can't still have a job to do until we move to a world that has matured and is beyond government right but today we don't know what that world looks like what we do know are what the problems today are and these are having a serious impact it's quite easy to be in Germany to be in the United States and think yes the government is breaking the law yes they're spying on us but it's really no big deal my neighbors aren't being marched off to camps and for now that's true but in other places this is not the case think about Turkey think about Russia think about China and if we are going to make a better world a freer world a more private world we have to protect the rights of everyone if it is selective and any authority is trusted to be able to pick and peel away these rights adhoc whether they be a government or corporation or anyone else inevitably they will and they will not always fairly and in fact one could say more often than not they can be based on history sure to pick preferentially to violate the rights of those who are their adversaries regardless of whether what they're doing is wrong it becomes a question of whether what they're doing or not is approved yeah yeah it's interesting that you suggested and I don't think it's I think I disagree but I see your point that law has historically been the only guarantor of rights although I think that does almost approach on a kind of legalism I think to use a word that you've used frequently this idea that we should just be subservient to the written word of law and and not have you know other opinions as of course you do but I think it's true that law and the physical reality that we find ourselves in the architecture that we find ourselves in the nature of how difficult it is to do something are working together in most cases so when a police officer searches your house it's hard they have to have somebody in your location get through your door through your things and it also sends a big signal to everyone else in the world that this is happening it doesn't happen surreptitiously you know if it's a small community oh they knocked down Peters door the other day technology I think has made it easier to do top-down law so the kind of law that says we're going to declare certain things permissible and impermissible we're going to organize society through regulatory control we're going to have a Securities Exchange Commission that protects investors by top-down dictates we're going to have a anti-money laundering authority that's going to stop the illicit flows funds from top-down dictates as to where you can and cannot send money what countries you can send money to and you can technologies made that easier while it's made it harder to have the kind of private law that also protected our rights the rights of property the rights of contract the rights to say I'm sorry you can't come on my property police officer you don't have a warrant the technology with respect to digital property made it impossible to know whether the police officer came onto your property or not and I think so we had Nick Szabo here earlier Nick Szabo wrote all about smart contracts how can we make that private law that person-to-person law that of contracts work in the digital world where normally agreements are hard to enforce because people are all anonymous or people are pseudonymous or things like that how can we make property law work in the digital world he developed the bitgold protocol a precursor to Bitcoin and bitcoins a great example of property law working in the digital world so do you think accepting this thesis that maybe we're just now catching up with matching technology with private law so the way technology was matched with top-down administrative law are you optimistic do you do you think this plan could work that we could actually may so maybe it's not a trade-off between getting rid of surveillance illicit surveillance or impermissible surveillance through technology versus politics it's that we need through law we need technology to work with the right types of laws we need technology that backs up private law the law of citizens when they bump into each other and they use the courts to dispute right yeah I mean I think there's a little bit of uh it's not a contention but our our understanding of what the argument means here that is the distance between us I'm not saying we get rid of law right because as you sort of imply technology code is a different kind of law we are setting rules at a different layer right law is simply code that's written in black ink on a page that has no sort of motivating force of its own I can't jump off the page and defend your rights it's not going to open the door for you it's not going to keep a bank from admitting you as a customer or telepak what to do but people's belief in that piece of paper will people's choice to follow that it is what motivates and creates these systems of rules what we are doing is we're creating systems in this private law context that you're speaking about basically contract law in in technology that is useful because we're not relying on that distinction that distance between the letters on the page and the people who carry out the ads we have the machine and its instructions and so long as it is well instructed it has no choice but to execute those instructions and can this create basically a layer that creates a kind of trustless trust which seems like a an impossibility but this is what we're reaching at we have in the universe the only things that really count on are our physical universal laws the Apple is going to fall off the tree it's going to hit the ground because gravity is always there can we make contracts that function on the same principle it cannot be abrogated with the kind of casual ease that we've been talking about in these government contacts these corporate contacts in these person-to-person sort of verbal contexts before can make trust more reliable by creating it in a new kind of way that's fundamentally what this questions about it's not about should we have law or should we have technology of course we can it should have both but how do we make them work to their optimal advantage for the veteran of all people and I think this is what decentralization that the sort of relentless pursuit for decentralization is all about we talk about it in different ways we talk about it in commercial contexts because whether we like it or not capitalism is what's driving a lot of our progress forward because it incentivizes the creation of these new experimental systems but if we get them right the people in this room right now thinking about the markets thinking about their customers thinking about what they can do fundamentally we're talking about new human capabilities or allowing people to interact safely and reliably 10 times out of 10 and if they achieve that that's what changes the world yeah so if there's one big thing that your revelations have shown us is that technology changed the nature's of our freedoms and rights it nibbles away at them thus far primarily it diminishes them somewhat insidiously have you thought about this topic in relation to money and the financial system rather than communications rather than the question of the intermediary being Google with respect to your emails its Bank of America or Credit Suisse with respect to your bank accounts or PayPal or venmo to pick tech to pick on tech companies instead so for example we used to transact with cash all the time in America I'm fairly new to Germany and I'm actually quite excited to see that a lot of people still transact with cash here people don't use cash in America they use credit cards and that means that every transaction you make leaves a record are these issues analogous with the problem of interim Ares collecting too much metadata or too much information about our communications or is money somehow different and not worthy of the same privacy or free speech type protections I mean trade is communication when we are talking about communication of trying to make this distinct for money I think we're missing what it really is to be human and what is to sort of engage with someone else when you're communicating with someone that is an exchange of values its exchange of ideas right and it's an engagement a recognition that this person is worthy of your time of your attention money is simply a different layer of the same exchange it is a different quality that is being communicated you're passing your time in a unit of accounting kind of way rather than that time being used to convey your you're sort of a symbolic expression verbally of a method of context or I wasn't really expecting have to go to this level of abstraction today but the idea here is is look yes private trade is the basis of all human cooperation you know they countered when we go down sorry good yeah the counter to that would be we talk about rights especially in the US with the Constitution but also internationally we talk about rights as trumps and unfortunately it's hard to use that term now without invoking the Donalds but we talk about rights as trumps that are more important than any rational calculation between whether people will be better off or worse off we're not supposed to calculate it's supposed to be something that's just a right it's not a not something that's subject to trade-offs and free speech gets a lot of that protection generally in the u.s. we say the communication shouldn't be censored when it's in transit you shouldn't have authorities able to interject and stop someone from speaking because the answer to you know to bad speech is more speech we need you know if someone has a terrible idea we need to have more people speaking to outweigh that idea we don't try and stop the idea now with money and the idea that we could you know not have a mechanism to step in and stop money as it flows from one person to another as it's flowing no prior restraint on money would would fit into that right if money was like speech if we should just have a right to do it without prior restraint you can police the activities afterwards but you shouldn't be able to interject and stop the money as it flows but the counter-argument to that I think is if you can't stop the flow of funds like a million dollars through the Internet isn't that riskier than not being able to stop a couple of paragraphs of propaganda especially if at the other think about transaction is a terrorist's or at the other noon that transaction is someone who's not laundering money every human capability not just technology will be abused this has been the case since before we knew to pick up a rock in club someone on the head we used our fists right when you talk about speech as being sort of qualitatively different in the zone of rights that's a very American idea right in the United States we do have stronger protections but in Europe there have long been prior restraints on speech Germany has regulations on this when you talk about certain types of extremism we have seen even in the United States corporations particularly falling prey to new kind of restraints on this in the context of terrorism as you mentioned your concern was about money being sent Isis being different than sort of Isis speech but indeed we saw Isis use of Twitter and Facebook and things like that raising precisely these things the question is not do you have a right to do something if that right can in any context any edge case possibly reduce if it can be than it is not a right then we cannot do this I think there's a presumption there that we do not have a right to engage in private trade that no monetary transaction can occur without the permission and regulation of the state you know we can think of this as the little girl selling lemonade on the street outside of her house does this fall within the purview of government regulation of course the government would say yes the law strictly would say yes but practically pragmatically realistically humanistically should that be the case should that be different than having a conversation I'm not sure that it does our laws are structured this way because the people who wrote them had to create space for government and they found that the best means of delineating where the boundaries of government should lay were money because money could be easily tracked money could be reported it was being accounted for and this created shall we say the first concrete database before computation and data storage was a sort of modern device and it made it easily regulatable but there is a larger question here is ease of regulation equivalent to the value or the strength of Rights and I'm not sure that's the case right you know it's interesting or should be right yeah so moving on from censorship resistance which is sort of a feature that Bitcoin has to privacy which is a feature that some other crypto currencies have developed with respect to the Fourth Amendment in the US and our right against illegal search and seizure right against warrantless search and seizure our financial privacy kind of went out the window in the u.s. actually faster than it then it went out the window in Europe and that was in large part because of a Supreme Court case called California bankers versus Shultz where our Fourth Amendment right to not have information taken without warrant was backdoored if you will through the creation of a doctrine called the third party doctrine the third party doctrine goes like this if you've already handed your private information to an intermediary like a bank or like Google you've lost your reasonable expectation that that information should be free of warrantless search and long before we got into this conversation about internet surveillance and intermediaries and whether it's constitutional for the government to go collect information from Google the courts already hadn't hashed out this problem with respect to the Constitution because of bank records so I think you're right that money is sort of the progenitor a lot of these questions it's the beginning of the conversation because it's the first thing that we kept records off of and I think it's interesting that money might be the birth of a new decentralized system that doesn't rely on intermediaries that the first decentralized protocol is Bitcoin later we move on to things like DNS or certificate authorities or identity using block chains and things like that as a TF this is all a T up for you do you have any crypto currencies do you have any digital money are you excited about crypto currencies so as a as a privacy advocate I would recommend no-one ever say that they have crypto currencies but what I can say very good I like this audience what I would say is this when I was working on the sort of great project of my life back in 2013 and trying to figure out things like how could I get this archive of material to journalists how could I persuade them that this is real that this you know is practical how could they see things in a safe way that's uncontrolled that's unseen that's happens permissionless Lee there's a question of well do I need server infrastructure of my own maybe the answer is yes okay how do I pay for that anonymously maybe maybe someone like me may have used Bitcoin for something like that so I think there are a lot of technologies that we are here there are a lot of technologies that are we are here for today or they have served our interest in the past that have never gotten the kind of public shoutouts that maybe they could have but when you create new human capabilities people will use those and yes it is true these things will absolutely be abused but if we do not believe that people will use these new capabilities more often for good things than for bad things we might as well pack up the game and say the human race is over it's done progress needs to stop and we need to become less capable as people we need to focus not on limiting what humans are able to do we need to focus on creating better people right and the way we do that is by living good lives living positive examples by being good people right who touch other lives in positive ways and make them want to be creative successful you know even self-sacrificing in certain contexts when we talk about which cryptocurrencies are interesting to me I've said before and I'll say again Z cash for me is the most interesting right now because the privacy properties of it are truly unique but we see more and more projects that are trying to emulate this and I think this is a positive thing monaro is out there I've used Manero just like everything else out there and this is the idea here is you see these little tribal battles happening in the cryptocurrency space where they pick up a flavor you know they pick a team and it's like a team sport and whoever uses anything else is the enemy and this is an enormous mistake because the entire sort of population of cryptocurrencies users is a tiny minority of the human population and that has to change if you want your rights to be sort of asserted and defended when this gets to the democratic stage of regulation yeah we need more teams we need more projects we need more users I don't care what you're particularly gence or affiliation is because we already see government's finally reaching the point where they're becoming very very nervous and moving closer and closer to the muscular intervention in how these technologies can be used and we do not have broad public biliary use that's willing to defend not just their coin but everybody else's we're gonna run into real problems so we had a speaker earlier today who referred to the maximalism that we see in cryptocurrency communities Bitcoin will be the coin to rule them all the theory and will become the only global computer things like that they compare that maximalism to nationalism as a destructive force that is generally net negative when it comes to human flourishing and the kind of making better people objective that you were talking about earlier do you worry though about some cryptocurrency or related cryptocurrency projects I mean you mentioned that you may have paid for server space using Bitcoin at one point it ideally because it was first probably because it was a censorship resistant payment no one visa wouldn't you know process your transactions at that point I imagine your credit cards didn't still work do they well this was actually sort of before well I was known to the world wasn't wearing the quiet period right so it wasn't the censorship resistance then because you you could have made the payment this was actually Sudan private rights but if I was to ever find out your Bitcoin address I could point straight to that transaction which is kind of interesting and sure back when question is how is the Bitcoin procured the Bitcoin was that perjured it this way and on this way right so the only thing I'm driving at is the Bitcoin blockchain is actually extremely public devastatingly published from up from a privacy and Human Rights standpoint if you wanted to design a technology that would afford someone perfect visibility into the economy you design Bitcoin and then try and get everything to use it does that worry you are you worried about the emergence of we talked earlier in the day about state-run cryptocurrency projects like the the petro in Venezuela do you worry about these tools being being co-opted just as internet technologies have been co-opted by dictators by powerful entities corrupt entities and absolutely they it's not a question of if they will be it's a question of when they will be and it's a question of how do we design competing systems that are simply so attractive that they will not be ignored by sort of the global consumer base but also the governments themselves who are seeking to compete against them will not simply be able to outlaw them and have that be meaningful right and that's that's a tall order but when you look at Bitcoin right like what are the central benefits of Bitcoin what are the central flaws of Bitcoin everybody is focused on the transaction rate limitations of bitcoins being a central flaw and that is a major one right but I would argue actually the much larger structural flaw the long lasting flaw is its public letter that is simply incompatible with having a enduring mechanism for trade because you you cannot have a lifelong history of everyone's purchases all of their interactions be available to everyone and have that work out well at scale the limitations of how people engage with these these cryptocurrencies are the the limiting factor on the sort of apocalypsis that we've had from it so far and it's I think a natural relief of pressure on it ah but I don't think Bitcoin will last forever and this is something that I I think will be perhaps less popular with some people in the room but you know we need to think about all the technology projects that we have seen in the past the first browser created is not the best browser that we have ever seen Bitcoin does important work and I do think it will have enduring value for a long time but particularly when we look at the core development team and their rate of improvement to the protocol they simply need to do better or they will not be able to compete interesting so you have tweeted about Zika she mentioned it earlier commonly repeated vulnerability or fear that people have with respect to C cache is the fact that well it's somewhat twofold it's that it uses rather novel cryptography zero knowledge proof ZK snarks specifically to obtain its level of privacy so somewhat different than RSA or the gold standard encryption that we see in other products and the second criticism is that it's a smaller group of developers that have worked on it because almost by Nature there's only a small number of people in the world who understand zero knowledge proof and understand block chains the Venn diagrams small enough that the people who can build these two things into one is is is centralized it's it's it's a trusted intermediary in a way but of course they're not actually they're holding everyone's data like Google is they have a different kind of power they have the power of the pen with respect to a protocol that once given life might be fundamental infrastructure they in theory would be in positions to put backdoors in although the software's open-source so maybe if enough eyes are on it we're safe do you think that we're moving towards a world where those will be the new vulnerabilities where people who architect systems are then almost like godlike because they lay down the rules and will never be able to catch up with their knowledge and so they may always retain some secret power into the future even once these systems are decentralized do you worry that we will lose touch with the ability to oversee and try and democratically if you will move those rules to where we'd like to see them because it's this intelligence see a class of coders who who design them are those concerns of yours and after you answer that question do you think we're already there our our encryption standards already hopelessly backdoored maybe encryption standards that I think are actually not backdoored certain elliptical curves and things like that are they alright what is what are the likelihood send them not being backdoored at all and encryption standards that Bitcoin and Zee cash and other things actually rely on deeply yeah okay so there were about 136 questions let me see if I didn't I can try to turn a word of the back so the tower the elder s idea right the power of the elders but first the the encryption part because I think that's the fundamental building block right we have to have a table that we can we can put everything else on in our discussion here and we know encryption works encryption like anything else is you know vulnerable to advances in our understanding of mathematics maybe suddenly we know how to factor numbers in in a way that just simply was not possible before and nothing works right we don't see a road to that now but maybe someday it happens the thing that we have to deal with in reality practically today is we have to build based on what we know and what we know is right now we can't factor these numbers these are reliable and we have real-world examples of that I'm a great case right so we have this giant cache of top-secret documents that are held by multiple groups of journalists around the world the New York Times their Spiegel Washington Post the intercept multiple groups of move of multiple institutions have this cache and there are many documents in here that have never been published because as a condition of access to the journals acquired them to agree to a couple conditions the first the foremost of which was they would never publish any story simply because it was interesting or simply because it was newsworthy they had to agree that they would only publish stories that they were going to make an institutional judgment or in the public interest to know we're better off but this would of course make it a target for you know the US government to see what's in there what sort of Secrets they have they got loose the journalists know it didn't print other governments right maybe that Russians want to break in maybe the Chinese want to break in maybe the Germans won't break in and see if anybody's spying on Merkel's other cellphone right it's been five years since 2013 and it's never happened we know this has never happened because even the NSA's number-two official former deputy director Chris Inglis said on camera it had happened the USA has the penetrations in all of these other governments and the earth master man's abilities to know they would see indications of the people they're trying to spy on have changed their methods of communication and it hasn't happened right over five years with the world's most well resourced attackers against the groups of sort of well trained but let's be honest here still journalists it's a bug bounty if they can TEKT the world's best cache of secrets right for five years against the world's most motivated attackers what does that mean for the average guy trying to protect his wallet pretty good thing is I just to build on that book so we talked about in the Bitcoin community we talked about how there's a multi hundred million dollar bug bounty now for elliptic curve digital signature algorithm and for sha-256 because if you can mess those up you can potentially reassign balances to yourself right there's some good way to manage you maybe feel a little better though you can break private keys you could Forge transactions you can do so many things it's worth so much money now and nobody's doing right the Satoshi blocks are still not moving around anywhere but the idea when we go back into the the larger scoping out a little bit about what does this mean for the world when we have this kind of technocratic elite will they gain a power that we can't compete with the realities were already there when we look at Facebook when we look at Google some of these people like the head of Facebook are already campaigning for the presidency in 2020 it is quiet but they're they're laying the groundwork I went to Iowa yeah I'm sure it's a very exciting place for for those who aren't familiar with American presidential candidates Iowa is the sort of very important swing state they they they got to start campaigning you go there you talk about what be the idea here is when we have technology and our debates are based on people's knowledge and they have an advantage in terms of knowledge that's problematic but it is not insurmountable because fortunately human intelligence is unevenly distributed and there are young smart people in every corner of the earth that every live will be income bracket inequality is a serious and growing problem right but I would rather be fighting a battle of brains than a battle of dollars right so we only have a few minutes left now with the last bit of time I just wanted to turn to a subject that comes up a lot at least in the US and the media the fact that you're in Russia you could say look this guy says he's all about privacy and civil liberties and rights and yet look where he's ended up he's ended up in Moscow he's ended up in many places in many ways in the in the heart of totalitarian control do you how do you feel about being where you are yeah I mean look this is something we hear again and again again and I'm glad you asked it because this is something that's on everybody's mind right the important thing to understand is that I didn't choose to be in Russia as soon as the US State Department stops ringing phones in Europe and threatening Chancellor's the minute they they seem like they might let me in we'd be okay I applied for asylum in 21 different countries around the world right that's not Russia there were places like Ecuador that said okay you know you you'll be able to come over or at least it looked like they were leaning in that direction as soon as that happened vice president of the United States Joe Biden calls the phone starts threatening him and says if you do this there will be consequences we say Angela Merkel is you know happy with any kind of immigrant in the world so long as they don't come from the US intelligence community and this is not to criticize anyone in particular this is to comment on the nature of power right I am in exile this is not a choice of convenience it's a question of if I go to prison for the rest of my life for what I believe was doing the right thing right it's not question what this means for me right I don't matter it sucks for me listen let's not have any doubts about that but what does it say to the next whistleblower what does it say to the next person sitting in the United States in France in Germany wherever when they know no matter how careful they are and I was very careful right again there are documents that have not been published I could have put this stuff out on the internet myself completely unredacted I did not I chose to make sure only things that would benefit the public came now this has been the case for more than five years the government has never shown a single case of anyone coming to harm as a result of these disclosures and despite that the only outcome is that that person goes to jail for the rest of their like they don't even get to make their case to the jury because it's forbidden in the United States to say why you did what you did if you charged for whistleblowing and so it becomes a larger question of well where is the responsibility am I an American who does not speak Russian right I speak English I am literally a former CIA agent going to be able to reform Russia which in case you haven't heard has historically had a couple of problems in this area or should I try to fix my own country first now rationally people would say yeah it should probably be the United States I should try to fix and that's what I spend the majority of my time on but despite that despite the precariousness of my position despite the fact that the Russians could very easily force me out even if it is unlawful to do so because I am legitimately protected because the charges against me or political under international law I still criticize the Russian government routinely I have criticized the Russian president for violations of human rights for passing new laws that I considered that the repressive they are repressive in Russia they would be repressive anywhere I do not believe that any government in any country should be doing these kind of things it's not up to them to decide who and how we can love one another it does not it is not up to them to decide where the boundaries of human rights lie today and tomorrow these are fundamentally public decisions right these are inherent decisions your rights are a part of your nature they are natural and I know to some lawyers this is a little bit contentious here because they talk about natural rights and you know this sort of diminishes the value of law because this is law can't regulate certain things but I do believe there are certain things that not just governments should not be able to do but they do not have the right to do and I'm not afraid to criticize Russia for that I have not been so far and I will in the future no matter what the cost is I don't ask you to trust me I don't ask you to think I'm the most wonderful person in the world in fact I want your skepticism in doubt me question me criticize me but for God's sake question the people with the most power just as frequently as you question those like myself who have the least thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] and hey if it's excuse me for for all of you who are there today thank you thank you so much for listening this has been really a pleasure to be part of this but if you are tired of me being in Russia by all means please give the Chancellor call and ask I have one last when I'll be welcome I have one last question to end on a happy note could you possibly share an aetherium address so we can send you some crypto kitties because that would be awesome lazy dumb and please thank Ed Snowden for coming and joining us [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Stacks

Views: 43,456

Rating: 4.9203982 out of 5

Keywords: Edward Snowden, Snowden, Peter Van Valkenburgh, Coin Center, snowden facebook, facebook, snowden message on facebook, snowden about facebook, snowden on facebook, snowden facebook data leak, data leak, facebook data leak, cambridge, facebook leak

Id: YUhFf6K-SU8

Length: 66min 2sec (3962 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 22 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/sarahjiffy]

Strive to be as forward thinking and selfless as he. Some day they might create the Snowden Medal. Thank you Mr. Snowden for all that you endure for humanity.