Joe Rogan Experience #1536 - Edward Snowden

[Laughter] [Music] good to see you again man good to see you thanks for having me it's uh been like a year it's been like a year believe it or not you look exactly the same and the studio looks exactly the same you might be on another part of the world no one knows yeah it's just uh my my apartment that i rent you know i i don't like to give out a lot of information about where i'm at and that kind of stuff so it's very smart a plain wool that i've got the lights down low so it looks kind of a a nice gray at least i think it's nice i think it's beautiful it looks amazing uh first of all congratulations on the recent ruling was a ninth district court of appeals is that what it was it said that what you exposed with the warrantless wiretapping was in fact illegal and there are many people that are calling for you to be pardoned now yeah it's so much has happened this ruling this is actually not the first time the federal government has uh or the appeals courts have struck down uh some of the federal surveillance programs as unlawful um but this one is really important because it happened uh from an appeals court it wasn't from a single judge it was from uh a panel of judges um and what they had uh ruled was that the nsa's bulk collection of americans phone records uh was illegal and this is the very first um sort of mass surveillance program that i and the journalists um really that the news was broken back in 2013 so this is a huge victory for privacy rights uh what it means is there was this provision of the patriot act like remember the patriot act remember like a zillion years ago i do everybody was laying out patriotic patriotic your friend alex jones you know i think he was worried about that it's a terrible name the there's a real problem with that name because if you're against the patriot act it's like against babies it's like like this is the pro-baby act but meanwhile pro-baby act they get to look through your email you know what i mean it's like the word patriot is attached to that in a very disingenuous way like calling that the patriot act is it's really creepy that they could do they should have like a number like bill a1 yeah you know you know what i'm saying so you can debate the merits of it it's just so much propaganda attached to that name like the patriot act this is one of the funny things because it should be a warning for anybody who's in like you know just anywhere in the country and they hear on the news they're talking about like the save puppies you know act uh there's actually one that's uh been they've been trying to push through recently which is basically outlawing meaningful encryption from the major internet service providers like if facebook or google for whatever reason got out of bed in the morning and they actually wanted uh to protect your uh the security of your communications uh in a way that even they can't break like right now uh google and facebook they do a great job keeping other people from spying on your communications but if google wants to rifle through your inbox right if facebook wants to go through all your direct messages and give that to the federal government like you tap one button and boom they've got all of it happens every single day well companies like facebook have recently realized this is a real problem for them uh because first off they get all these censorship demands um that you've seen uh where like there's de-platforming requests and it happens in one country right like if the u.s government is allowed to decide what can and can't be said by this person on this platform or uh the u.s goes look we got a court warrant they said uh a judge said we think this person's a criminal we want you to hand over everything you have on this person and they do it right facebook does this well guess who's next right the russian government shows up at the door the next day the chinese government shows up the door the next day and if these companies don't play ball they get shut down in that country they can no longer no longer operate and so the idea that a lot of them have uh that they've considered and this has actually become a bigger thing in the covid crisis where we start talking about like contact tracing these companies want to know where everybody is at all the time so they can hand this over to medical authorities or whatever there's this idea called end to end encryption which what it means is that when you send a message you know when billy sends a message to bobby billy and bobby both have the keys to unlock that message and it could be sent through facebook it could be sent through google it could be posted you know on a bulletin board in the town square but without that key which the people who run the bulletin board right the the people who own the bulletin board google facebook they don't have that key only the phones at the end the laptops at the end the people on those they're the only people who have the key so if somebody comes to facebook and says we want to see that information facebook hands over the encrypted message right and facebook goes well here you go here's our copy but we can't read it you can't either now you've got to actually do some work on the government side and go get that key yourself and then you can read it right but we can't read it congress is trying to stop the basically proliferation of that basic and encryption technology and they're calling it like the child online predator act or something like that where they say it's all about protecting uh the posting of like child exploitation material and really really horrible stuff but that's not actually what the law is about the law is about making it easier for spies and law enforcement to reach deeper and deeper into your life with a simple warrant stamped by any court the funny thing is this never used to be uh the way law enforcement worked in the united states i mean when you hear about a warrant what does that mean to you what can the cops get with a warrant well usually i think it means that they can come in your house and search right the the the real issue with warrants in when it pertains to encryption like when you're talking about the child safety act or whatever they're calling it anyone would say yes we have to stop child predators but the problem with having the ability to use something like that to stop child predators in my eyes i i start thinking well if i really wanted to look into someone what i would do is i would send them some malware that would put child pornography on their computer and then i would have all of the motive that i need to go and look through everything like say if they're if they were a political dissident if they were doing something against the government and you were someone who was uh acting in bad faith and you decided okay we want to look into this guy but we don't have a warrant what what are the laws what what can we get away with it well we have the child endangerment act and so because of that we're allowed to peer into anything but we just have to have motive so we have to well do we have motive all you'd have to do is and we we both know this it's very easy to put something illegal on someone's computer if they're not paying attention it's very easy to install like you could send someone a text message that looks like a routing number for a package they're going to get they click on that and then you what is that um what the israelis have uh pegasus right yeah you you've read up on this yeah so well it's uh it's from brian fogle's new film the dissident which is uh about jamal khashoggi's murder and how the saudis used that to use they actually tapped into jeff bezos's phone and that's where all of this is the suspicion is that that that's where all of those uh national enquirer photos came out and all the attacks on him because they they had access to his actual phone through this so someone could easily get into your stuff if you're not paying attention and then they could use you know whatever acts they've come up with whatever it's the patriot act or whatever act where they could just get into everything you're doing look at your whatsapp messages look at your your facebook messages it's real sneaky and it's it's dangerous it's it's a dangerous precedent to set yeah i mean there's a lot to this let me go into some of that in a little depth so you mentioned the nso group in their their pegasus malware set and this is very much a real thing like you're a well-read guy um this is like this company uh the ceo's name i think is shalev julio um is uh run in israel it was previously owned uh actually by an american venture capital firm i believe they've been uh re-bought out but it doesn't really matter their entire business is preying on flaws in the critical infrastructure of all the software running on the most popular devices in the world the number one target right is the iphone and this is because the iphone as secure as it is relative to a lot of other phones is a monoculture right like if you if you have an iphone you get these little software update notifications all the time that are like hey please update to the the most recent version of ios and that's a fabulous thing that's a wonderful thing for security because the number one way that people's devices get screwed if it's not just through user error right like you entering your password somewhere you shouldn't it's like a fake site it looks like gmail but it's not actually gmail you just gave the guy your password now he uses your password to log in but to actually break into a device is that it's not patched right patch means getting these uh security updates these little code updates that fix holes that researchers found in the security device well apple's really good about rolling these out all the time for everybody in the world the problem is basically all these different iphones right you got an iphone 6 you got an iphone 8 you got an iphone x you got an iphone you know three whatever these are all running a pretty narrow band of uh software versions and so these guys go if they want to target for example android phones like google phones like a samsung galaxy or something like that there's like a billion different phones made by a billion different people half of them are completely out of date but what it means is it's not one version of software they're running it's like 10 000 and this is actually bad for security on the individual level but it's good for security in a very unusual way which is the guys who are developing the exploits the guys like this nso group who are trying to find ways to break into phones they now have to have like 50 different handsets running 50 different versions of software they're all changing they've got different hardware they've got different chip sets for like they've got different like all kinds of just technical variables that can screw up the way they attack uh your phone and then when they find one it only works on like this samsung galaxy line it doesn't work on like the google pixel line or it doesn't work on like a nokia line or something like that whereas they realize if they find a way to attack an iphone which is actually you know this is difficult this is really difficult stuff now it works against basically every iphone and who has iphones all the rich people right all the important people all the lawmakers all the the guys who are in there so they've made a business on basically attacking the iphone and selling it to every two-bit thug uh who runs a police department in the world you know they sell this stuff to saudi arabia they sell this to mexico and there's a group of researchers in canada uh working at a university called the citizen lab and uh these guys are really like the best in the world at tracking what nso group is doing if you want to learn about this stuff the real stuff look up citizen lab and the nso group uh and what they have found uh is all the people who are being targeted um by the nso group the classes of people the countries that are using this and you know it's not like the local police department in germany trying to bust up you know a terrorism ring or something like that it's the mexican government spying on the head of the mexican opposition we're trying to look at human rights defenders who are investigating like student disappearances or it's people like the friends and associates of jamal khashoggi uh who was murdered by the saudi government or it's people like dissidents in bahrain and these like petro states uh these bad actors nationally will pay literally tens of millions of dollars each year just to have the ability to break into an iphone for a certain number of times because that's how these guys uh do it they sell their business plan they go we'll let you break in any iphone uh just by basically sending a text message to this phone all you need to find is the phone number or a person who's running an iphone uh and we will exploit something uh which will give you total if that happens to someone i'm sorry but if that happens to someone could they just get a new phone and does the exploit is the exploit specific to their account or is the exploit on the the physical phone so the question or the answer to this is it really depends on the exploit like the easiest uh forms of exploit or rather the easier types of exploits are where they send you a text message right and it'll be like an imessage or something like that and it's got a link in it that'll be like oh gosh terrible news you know your buddy's father just died um and we're making funeral arrangements are you gonna be there it's the day after tomorrow and when you click the link for the funeral arrangements it opens your web browser and the web browser on your phone is always the biggest most complicated process in it right there's a zillion lines of code in this as opposed to an instant messenger where there's fewer lines of code in it and they'll find one thing in that where there's a flaw that lets them feed instructions not just to the browser but basically escape the little sandbox that the browser's supposed to plan that's supposed to be safe where it can't do anything too harmful and it'll run out of this sandbox and it'll ransack your your phone's like hard-wired operating system uh the the system image it'll like give them uh privileges to do whatever they want on your phone as if they are you and then as if they have a higher level of privilege than you they have system level privileges to change the phone's operation permanently right and this is the problem is on the phone you can replace the phone right and they'll lose access to that but if they've already used that to gain the passwords that you use to access you know your icloud or whatever when they have controlled the phone they've already got your photo roll right they've already got your contact list they already have everything that you've ever put in that phone they already have all your notes they already have all your files they already have everything that's in your message history right they can pull that out immediately and now not because they have you know all your contacts and things like that they see that phone stop being active they know you've changed your phone number all they have to do is find the new phone number and then they can try to go after you again the benefit is uh with that old style of attack if you get that message and you don't click that link you're somebody in a vulnerable class right you've had these kind of attacks answered before it looks suspicious you don't know who this person is the number isn't right something like that and you save that link you don't click the link you don't do anything with that link but you send it to a group like citizen lab uh they can basically use that link to basically use uh like a dummy phone like a sort of a trojan horse to go to the site that would attack your phone and catch it and this is what the sort of process that all of their research is based on there are other different types of attacks that actually don't have these defenses against them that are far more scary but the bottom line is can i stop you for a second what is citizen lab citizen lab you just said yeah the citizen lab is the name of this research group at the university in canada uh who basically studies state-sponsored and corporate malware attacks against civil society it's ron run by a guy named ron dieber i believe you guys will have to fact check me on that one i think he just published a book actually or is publishing a book about all of this but it's really they are the the world leaders uh in my opinion in uh basically investigating these kind of attacks and exposing them it's true public service um let's go back to that one thing i asked you about warrants and you talked about the fact that like people could plant evidence on things and then get motivation or um rather they could show probable cause right to the court to then investigate you um and then they can get everything and you said you know you thought that uh a warrant man they can go and search your house and this is the kind of thing that we you know modern people are used to thinking of in the context of a warrant cops go to a specific place looking for specific things uh that are elements of a crime now you know you you've heard all these things where like cops find a way to like stop somebody and they like are like oh i smelled pot or whatever and they try to you know toss their car or whatever or plain sight doctrines where they open the door and the guy sits down talks and they go you know i see a bong or something you know that's paraphernalia you're going to jail but uh until i think it was 1967 warrants in the united states could only be used to gather two things they were called the fruits and instrumentalities of a crime which meant even if the cops knew you did it even if cops knew you you know rode the subway or worked for this company or whatever they couldn't get all the company's records uh they couldn't if they existed uh get all the emails that you ever wrote they couldn't get your friend to turn over like an exchange of letters that you had with this person the fruits of the crime were the things that they gained from it right if they robbed the bank the cops could get the sack of money the instrumentalities were the tools that were used right like if you used dynamite or a crowbar or a getaway car they could seize all of those things uh but the idea that the cops can get everything the idea that the fbi can get all these records you know all of these things your whole history is very much a new thing and nobody talks about that today we we just presume it's normal we presume it's okay but between 1967 and today think about how many more records there are about your life and how things like how you live private things about you that have nothing to do with criminality and everything to do with the intimacy of of who you are and the fact that all of that now today is exposed and not just to let's say you love the us government let's say you you know you you are like throwing cookouts for your local police department but every other government in the world too and we really need to ask ourselves how much information uh do the authorities of the day need to do their job right how much do we want them to have how much is proper and appropriately and necessary and how much is too much and if we decide the cops shouldn't have this if we decide the spies shouldn't have this well why in the hell should facebook or google or somebody trying to sell you nikes why should they have this yeah um and what's the answer to that they shouldn't yeah i mean right but nobody wants to go backwards once you have gained a certain amount of access and you could justify that access like we're stopping crimes like the patriarch and then which later the patriot act two which was even more overreaching once they have that kind of power they never go you know what we went too far we we have too much access to your privacy and even if you've committed a crime we shouldn't have unrelated access to all these other activities that you're involved in yeah and i mean that's exactly the thing about the whole save the puppies act right if it's got a name like that you gotta be like no there's something doesn't smell right here this is this is this there's something bad in this and i mean this so this gets back to uh that uh initial topic of uh what what did the court decide right so we had the patriot act and the patriot act was this giant law that had been been written long before 9 11. it was just sitting on the shelf uh and the department of justice the fbi they knew they couldn't pass this they knew nobody would live with it because it was an extreme expansion of government authority and then 9 11 happened right and that's really where it all started to go wrong that's where we got the rise of this new authoritarianism that we see continuing in the united states today right like if you think and you know like you have problems with what's happening under donald trump but you also had problems under like what was happening with obama and the expansion of the war on whistleblowing uh you had problems with the way drone strikes were going out of control you go well really where did this all start right where did it start to go wrong personally i think 911 was where we made a fundamental mistake and that was we were so frightened in the movement because we had had such an extraordinary and rare terrorist attack uh succeed which by the way could have been present prevented and i think we discussed this in the last episode the congress you know they were they were just terrified they said look intelligence services cops fbi whoever anything you want blank check here you go that was the patriot act and at the time groups like the american civil liberties union they were like uh we are worried that this goes too far because god bless them that's what the american civil liberties union does and one of the provisions that they had a problem with was this section 215 of the patriot act uh which i believe they were calling at the time the library records provision and what it said basically this tiny little little uh phrase in the law said the fbi can basically get any records that it deems relevant to a counter on terrorism investigation under a warrant and the worst thing the aclu could imagine was that these guys would go to the library and get what kind of books you're reading and like oh shock horror this is the worst thing these guys could do and so they protested then they lost and this passed and it went on and lo and behold 10 years later we find out in 2013 they had used uh this provision that people were worried about just going after individuals library records to instead get the phone records of not an individual not a group but everybody in the united states who was making calls on u.s telecommunications providers delivered to the nsa daily by these companies right so no matter who you were no matter how innocent you were the fbi was getting these because they said well every phone call is relevant to a counter-terrorism investigation and the court went finally you know this is seven years after 2013. then with guys that's too much if your definition of relevance is basically anything anywhere all the time is relevant to a counter-terrorist investigation the question is what then is not relevant what is the limiting principle on this what where is the end and this is a very important thing because even if it's not enough right even if this doesn't shut down all the programs the program was actually already stopped a few years ago because of previous court decisions and changes in law the fact that the courts are finally uh beginning to look at these the the impacts of these sweeping new technologies that allow governments to see all of these connections and interactions that we're having every day they're finally putting limits on it and that is i think transformative uh it is the foundation of what we will see in the future will begin to be the first meaningful guarantees of privacy rights in the digital age now that you have been uh at least according to this court exonerated or justified what what happens to you and what happens to what they've been doing and how how much of the breaks do they hit on this like how what changes does anything change in the government's sweeping surveillance it's it's a great question i mean you would think uh when you get a court not even a first level court but an appeals court that looks at these issues you know they're talking about serious stuff they're talking about counter-terrorism investigations by the way in the same thing uh in the same decision they said the government has been arguing you know for 20 years now these programs were saving lives they were stopping terrorist attacks they said uh you know first they said mass surveillance had stopped 54 terrorist attacks in the united states then they dropped it to seven and then they dropped it to one and the one terrorist attack uh or uh terrorist conspiracy whatever that they said it did stop was this case that was just decided and the court found and this is important after looking at the government's classified evidence so this is not just the court deciding on their own this is the government going look here's all the evidence that we have the top secret stuff the stuff that nobody can see please don't you know say our program is ineffective or whatever the court looked at it and they went holy crap it did this invasion of hundreds of millions of americans privacy happening over the span of decades did not make a difference in this case they said even if or even in the absence of this program if it hadn't existed the government had never done it they still would have busted this ring because they were already closing in on them the fbi already had all the evidence they needed to get a warrant to get the records through traditional means and the fact the government had been saying congress had been saying for years and years and years that this program was necessary uh the governor the court says that was misleading which is legalese for saying the government's effing liars on this uh so that raises the question of okay like as you said well what now how does this change everything well it does mean the government has to stop doing this particular kind of program directly but that program had already shut down and the government has a really great team of lawyers uh for every agency right the doj has got lawyers the white house has lawyers the fbi has lawyers the nsa has lawyers and the cia has lawyers and the only thing these guys are paid to do all day is to look at basically these legal opinions from the court that says all the ways the government broke the law and go huh is there any way we can just rejigger this program slightly so that we can dodge around that court ruling to go all right you know uh the abuses are still happening but they're happening in a less abusive way and and then it's business as usual so this is always the process um with the court's uh ruling against the government this is not an exceptional uh thing in the case of the you know it's nsa and cia what happens is when the government breaks the law as the court has ruled them to do last week there is no punishment right there is no criminal liability uh for all the bastards at the head of the fbi the head of the nsa um who were violating americans rights for decades those guys don't go to prison they don't lose their jobs they don't even see the inside you know smell the inside of a courtroom where they're the ones wearing handcuffs and because of that it creates a culture of unaccountability of impunity right which means with each generation of government officials they study this they study the cases against them they study where they won they study where they lost and what they do is they try to create exactly what just happened which is a system where they can break the law for 10 years you know 2001 uh to 2013 basically and no one even knows that it's happening classification protects that right then eventually it gets exposed there's a leak of course somebody blows the whistle on it right it becomes a scandal the government you know they'll disown this program they'll change the law there but somebody like the aclu will sue the government and so the courts will finally be forced to look at these things but the wheels of justice turn slow right the government will try to put the brakes on it um the plaintiffs the civil society organizations that are suing will have to gather evidence it's really difficult to do because the government's not providing anything it's all classified and then basically it takes another five years another 10 years for the court to get to their verdict and then we have it but then nobody goes to jail right nobody actually faces serious consequences who is responsible for the wrongdoing and so the cycle continues but having said that like it might feel disempowering might people might go oh we can't win but this is in the context of a system where we lack accountability where the government does have a culture of impunity this is what winning looks like because things do get better the problem is they get better by decades they get better by half centuries and centuries if you look at the united states you know 200 years ago 100 years ago things were objectively worse on basically every measure the fact that we have to crawl to the future is a sad thing when we know it could be fixed very quickly by establishing some kind of criminal liability for people like james clapper the former director of national intelligence who lied under oath to congress and the american people saying exactly this program didn't exist the nsa wasn't collecting any information on millions or hundreds of millions of americans when in fact they were doing that every day obama did not fire him right obama did not charge him obama let him serve out the end of his days and then retire happily but it's not an obama problem right we see the same kinds of abuses happening under the trump administration we saw the same kind of abuses happening under the bush administration and the only way this changes um materially is if our government changes structurally right and that's kind of the issue that i think everybody in the country sees when you look at the economy when you look at all the struggle when you look at all the class conflict and divide and the political partisanship that's happening today the problem isn't right like about this law or this court ruling or this agency it's about inequality of opportunity of access uh even of privilege right i know people don't like talking about that it's uncomfortable for people like oh my god you know are you like whatever but the reality is we have a few people in the country you know the jeff bezos the bill gates that own everything like 10 people owning half the country and half the country owning nothing at all and this applies to influence right when you have that kind of disproportionality uh of resources you have that kind of disproportionality of influence your vote means less your ability to change the law means less your access to the courts means less and that's how we end up in the situation where we are today that's very disheartening well it doesn't have to be because the important thing is we can change it can we though i mean like what can we do and what can anybody change this point to stop this overwhelming power that the government has to invade your privacy and to all the things that you exposed when you talk about how the particular program that was in place has been shut down but all they do is manipulate it slightly do it so that you can argue in court that it's not the same thing that is a different thing come up with other justifications for it and withhold evidence and then drag the process out for years and years and years and to for you to be so optimistic is really kind of spectacular considering the fact that you've been hiding in another country allegedly we don't even know you might be in ohio we don't know you know we don't know like but but but you are essentially on the lamb and for exposing something that has now been determined to be illegal so you are correct when you go back to obama's hope and uh what was his uh his website hope and change hope and change a big part of hope and change was protecting whistleblowers do you remember that and that was all deleted later later on they were like yeah let's go back and take that [ __ ] out we didn't know i didn't know what it was like to actually be president back then i was just trying to get in there but the hope and change stuff was still there when you were being tried was still there when they were chasing you and and and trying to find your location when the guardian article came out the hope and change [ __ ] was still still online yeah and that's the fact that you're so optimistic even though you've been [ __ ] over royally i mean you are in my opinion you're a hero i really think that and i really and i really think that what what you exposed is hugely important for uh the american citizens to understand that absolute power corrupts absolutely and these people had uh the ability to look into everything and they just still do they have the ability to look into everything you're doing and the fact that through these years it literally stopped zero terrorist attacks zero so this sweeping overwhelming intrusion of your privacy had no impact whatsoever on your safety well it wasn't about safety it was about power right they told us it was about safety that was again it's the save the puppies act um if you uh if you see government saying all these things are for safety they're protecting you and they never establish the efficacy of it the chances are there it probably isn't effective because you know the government leaks all the time um you know if they say uh we saved this person we did that you know whenever they're being criticized they go on tv and they very seriously go oh that's classified and you know we can't expose that and you never hear of the successes we do because it's so important that they stay secret look i worked for the cia i worked for the nsa that's [ __ ] um when they do something great you know it's on the front page of the new york times by the end of the day because they're fighting for budget they're fighting for clout they're fighting for authority they're fighting for new laws not constantly uh and so there are no real accomplishments that are in the shadows that they just don't tell us i mean very rarely think about when we got bin laden right you know obama was like i want a press conference within the next 20 minutes and again this is not to bag on obama any president would do this um that's just how it is now of course there are some uh secret successes but it's about stuff that no one cares about it's stuff that wouldn't win the political clout it's like they gained an advantaged negotiating position on the price of shrimp and clove cigarettes which was actually one of the stories that came out of some kind of uh classified disclosure that i think was from from wikileaks that kind of stuff it actually does happen right but we're never having a conversation of do you want to give up all of your privacy rights so that we can get better prices on shrimp and clove cigarettes like that would be a very different political conversation than do you want to give up all of your privacy rights because if you don't your children will die and you know you know it saved the puppies right exactly save the puppies 20 20. um so this this thing you ask about uh you know me and optimism like i have been criticized relentlessly uh for being a naive optimist right um and my answer is that you don't do what i did unless you believe that people can do better i took a very comfortable life you know i was living in hawaii with the woman that i loved i had to do basically no work but go in the office and read spy feeds about people uh you know all day long um and i could have done that you know for the rest of my life quite happily would have been great um i set that on fire because i believed that what i saw was wrong and i believe that people deserve to know about it and i believe that if people did know about it that things would change i did not believe it was going to save the world i did not believe i was going to get you know a ticker tape parade and a pardon you know be welcomed with open arms there's actually if you watch citizen 4 which is the documentary from 2013 where i was meeting with reporters laura poitras had the camera rolling in the room when we talked for the first time um i said you know the government's gonna say i harm national security i put everybody in jeopardy they're gonna charge me under the espionage act uh and they really did try to destroy my life they tried to put me in prison forever and to this day they are still trying to do uh the same thing that's just how it is you know this wasn't like even though even though yeah even though the the most recent ruling has showed that you were correct and what they were doing was illegal and you exposed a crime yeah well i mean this is this is a a continuing story in 2013 uh you know when this first came out uh president obama went out on stage uh you know because he was getting singed in the press and said uh you know uh take it from me nobody is listening to your phone calls uh even though nobody says just metadata yeah nobody said they were listening to your phone calls it wasn't like they had headsets on uh you know 300 plus million people in the united states you'd have to have computers do that um but what they did do was they collected the records of your phone calls and to an analyst an intelligence analyst that's more very valuable than the transcripts your phone calls we care less about what you said on the phone then who you called when you called them what else you were doing what your phone was doing right the websites that you would access the cell phone towers they were connected to all of those things that metadata creates what's called the social graph your pattern of life it says based on when your phone becomes active in the morning when you start calling people when you start browsing when you check your you know twitter feed you're scrolling on instagram whatever that's when you wake up when it stops that's when you go to sleep we see where you are we see where you live we see who you live with all of those things right that's just from metadata you don't need the content of your communications i don't need to see what picture you posted on instagram to know you're awake and active and you're communicating with this person uh at this phone this place this area code this ip address you know this version of software whether they're using android or ios you know all of these things and now as we get smartphones as your cars begin connecting to the internet uh it's just richer and richer and richer data i don't know where i was going with that sorry i got off topic but um the the bottom line is things get better they get better slowly all right sorry now obama was saying you know nobody listens to your phone calls right that was june 2013. by january of 2014 giving a state of the union address he went although he could never condone what i did the conversation that i started has made us stronger as a nation he was calling for the end of this program the passage of a new law called the usa freedom act another save the puppies act uh which was better than the thing it was replacing but still really bad um and he did that not out of the goodness of his heart he did that because the court in december of 2013 had ruled these programs were unlawful and likely unconstitutional and this is again it's not an obama thing it's a power thing this is how the system works right but year by year step by step things get better we make progress a little bit at a time and the fact that someone is suing the fact that the aclu is bringing this case and we should thank them for that for years which is a difficult and expensive proposition with no guarantee of success means that we have stronger privacy result rights seven years later as a result that doesn't mean we save the world that doesn't mean we relax we sit down on the couch you know there's the golden sunset that's not how life works it is a constant struggle but when we do struggle when we do stand up we believe in something so strongly we don't merely believe in it uh but we risk something for that belief uh we work together and we pulled the species forward an inch at a time we move away from that swamp of impunity and unaccountability uh into a future where hey maybe not just a little guy breaks the law and goes to jail but maybe a senator maybe an attorney general maybe a president right and that would be a very good precedent to have do you wonder whether or not someone will use you as a political chess piece at this point and decide i mean i i believe if correct me if i'm wrong but i'm pretty sure you have overwhelming support of the general public most people believe that what you did was was a good thing for america and that you are in fact a patriot i i think the vast majority people and the people that i've talked to i have talked to a few people that disagree with that they're misinformed they were misinformed about what you did and what information you were leaked or whether or not people's lives were put in danger because of that and i had to explain the whole chain of events and where the information actually was how it was leaked and what you had done to protect people there's there's a could you plea please explain that because it wasn't just that the information was dumped yeah so i mean this is really the subject of our our our last conversation goes on for three hours but i wrote a book yeah but i just would just so this will stand alone i'm yeah i'll go through it so uh the idea and this is the subject of my first book permanent record which was why i came on last year and actually uh just this week the soft cover came out so it's more affordable for people who didn't want to get it before um is this story right it's who i am where i came from why i did this how and what it meant i didn't just reveal information i gave it to journalists right these journalists were only given access to the information on the condition that they would publish no story simply because it was newsworthy or interesting right they weren't going to click bait classified documents they would only publish stories if they were willing to make an independent institutional judgment and stand by it that it was in the public interest that this be known right and then as an extraordinary measure on top of that before they publish the stories right and this is not me publishing things putting them out on the internet or blog or something which i could have done would have been very easy uh it's not me telling them what to write or not to write they're doing this the guardian the washington post you know der spiegel they are then going to the united states government in advance of publication and giving the government a chance an adversarial opportunity to argue against publication to go you guys don't get it you know snowden's a liar these documents are false or he's not lying and yes these are true but these programs are effective they're saving lives whatever and here's what we can show you to convince you please don't publish this or leave out this detail and in every case i'm aware of that process was followed and that's why now in 2020 remember we're seven years on from 2013. the government has never shown a single example of any harm that has come as a result of the publication of these documents back in 2013 the revelation of mass surveillance and it's that's what i wanted to bring yeah and i mean it's unscientific uh but i've seen polls run on twitter uh very recently uh in the last few weeks when this pardon question came out where 90 like 90 plus percent of people were in favor of a pardon and that's crazy uh even in 2013 when we were doing well you know it was like 60 percent um in favor among young people but it was like 40 percent for older people but that's because the government was on tv every sunday you know bringing these uh cia suits going uh who were there with their very stern faces going oh this caused great damage and cost lives and everything like that but those arguments stopped being convincing when seven years later after they told us and the sky is falling the atmosphere never catches fire right the oceans never boil off we're still alive uh and i i think people can see through that and that was again this exactly what you said people don't know this history uh that that 10 percent who are against it and actually a lot of the 90 who are even in favor of it um they don't know the details it wasn't well covered by the media at the time it was all about this person said that that person said that is it true is it false you know sort of uh they were playing on character they were trying to make a drama out of it and that's a big part of why i wrote permanent record uh and it's been tremendously gratifying to see people connect to it and actually this uh you know i mentioned it uh we talked on on twitter when we were talking about the possibility of having this conversation and i was like i looked back at our first conversation we had and it's had like 16 million views man that's for a three hour conversation uh i like set and then probably an equal amount of people just listen to it in audio right and that that was just for one clip on youtube there were smaller clips like talking about cell phone surveillance and that was like another 10 million views 77 000 comments uh the book on amazon has thousands of reviews it's got a 4.8 rating which like by the number of people and how it's rated that's one of the best autobiographies according to ordinary people the audience in like years and to see that after these years of attacks to me is evidence that despite all these news guys uh at night going well senator you know uh no one really cares about privacy these days these kids with their facebooks and their instagrams uh you know people do care what they're actually feeling is kind of what you got to earlier with like this sensation that nothing changes like even when we win we lose but the thing is you've got to have a broader view of time you've got to look at the sweep of history rather than the atmosphere of the moment because right now yes things are very bad and even if you love donald trump because i know some of your viewers do you got to admit a lot of things in the world suck right now a lot of things in the country suck right now but the thing is they only get better if somebody does the hard work to make them better and there's no magic wand there's no happy ending right life is not that simple but together we can make it better and we do that through struggle do you uh has there been any discussion about someone pardoning you has there been i mean this was the question initially that led to this but i wanted you to expand on what would actually went down but has there been any discussion about you being pardoned or someone using you as like i said a political chess piece because you it would be a smart thing and if anybody has had a problem with the intelligence community it is donald trump i mean he's the only president in our in any memory that has had open disagreements and been openly disparaging of the intelligence community well that's not true it was jfk but that didn't go very well that's right i forgot about that good point yeah that that went terrible for him uh for trump for trump it actually seems to be a positive in some strange way um if anybody is going to pardon you i would imagine that would be the guy so this idea of like the political bargaining chip has actually been used in a different way uh there was the idea um and it's funny because this was actually promoted by all these like cia deputy directors and whatnot who were responsible for these abuses of americans rights who were writing opinion pieces in the newspaper and they were like you know what if vladimir putin you know sends snowden to trump as like an inauguration gift wouldn't that be terrible for him and they were like intent you know um but i don't think when we talk about this stuff uh i i don't think there's anything i can do to control one of the things people have asked is like would i accept a pardon uh from donald trump and i think that apprehends what a pardon is and how it works uh pardon's not a contract a pardon is not something that you agree to uh pardon is a constitutionally enumerated power i think it's article two section two um where the reason that it exists uh is basically a check on the laws and the judiciary uh where the laws as written become corrosive to the intention of them and this is something that i think actually is meaningful you know people are like are you gonna ask uh donald trump for a pardon and the answer is is no um but i will ask for pardon for terry albert and daniel hale and reality winner and all the other american whistleblowers who have been treated unfairly by this system the whole thing that brought this up was two weeks ago some journalists asked the president like oh you know what do you think about snowden are you going to pardon him and he said he seemed to be thinking about it he heard i have been treated very unfairly that's accurate because it's impossible to get a fair trial uh under the espionage act which is what i've been charged under and every american whistleblower since daniel ellsberg in the 1970s has been charged under this law the espionage act which makes no distinction between someone who is stealing secrets and selling them to foreign governments which neither i nor any of these other people have done and giving them freely to journalists to advance the public interest of the american people rather than the private interests of these spies you know individually and this is the kind of uh this is the kind of circumstance for which the pardon power exists where the courts and judges will not or cannot end a fundamentally unfair and abusive circumstance in the united states either because they're uh fearful of being criticized of soft on terrorism or whatever uh or because the law prohibits them from doing so the the problem with the espionage act is it means you can't tell the jury why you did what you did you cannot mount what's called a public interest offense where you say hell yeah i broke the law i took a classified document and i gave it to the journalist and the journalist published it and then it went to the courts and the court said this guy was right the government was breaking the law in the courts if i were you know in in prison today uh as reality winners in prison today or rather daniel hale uh who revealed uh government abuses related to the drone program or terry albury who revealed problems with uh racial policies in the fbi how they were being abused um when these guys are on trial all of that stuff is forbidden from being spoken daniel ellsberg's lawyer uh asked daniel ellsberg why did you do it in court in open court under oath you know why did you publish or provide journalists the pentagon papers and the prosecutor said objection objection he can't say that and the judge said sustained fine he can't say it and his attorney looked at the judge like he was crazy and said i've never heard of a trial where the jury is not allowed to hear why uh a defendant did what they did and the judge said well you're seeing one now and this is why the pardon power exists well that's what's so creepy about something like the espionage espionage act if if you can't even establish a motive you can't even explain that you were doing this for the american people that there's a real precedent that should be set for for this kind of thing especially in regards to what you're being charged with which has now been determined that you were exposing something that was in fact illegal and this is it's it's it's an incredibly un-american thing it's it's very un-american it really is but this is it's disturbingly so i mean we see these kind of injustices happening in the united states every day and it's not about the espionage act specifically i mean you see with drug charges you see it with civil forfeiture asset forfeiture where like you know they take an old lady's car because her nephew was selling weed or something like that and there's no way for her to get it back whether we're talking civil whether we're talking federal whether we're talking um sorry civil or criminal whether we're talking federal or state we see where the system of laws in the united states is letting people down constantly uh but the question becomes how do we fix this how does that get addressed and you know you can mount a national campaign you can try to change the law but as we talked about before unless you're unless you're jeff bezos unless you're bill gates that's very difficult to do but the governor can pardon people for state crimes the president can pardon people for federal crimes but we have not developed a compassionate culture that actually looks at this like every president has abused their pardon power or their pardon authority to sort of let their cronies off the hook we've seen this president we've seen in the previous presidents sure but it is very difficult to establish an understanding among average people uh that it's actually okay for presidents to use this power more liberally when particularly we're talking about non-violent offenses when we're talking about things uh that have not you know uh they're not that controversial but they are being controversialized because of the political atmosphere of partisanship where everything has to be criticized for political advantage from one side or the other everything's become a football well particularly in your case when you're talking about polls that show 90 percent of people support you being pardoned and this recent ruling that what you exposed was illegal i wonder how much the president actually knows about your case you know because it's a good question i mean he's famous for barely paying attention in briefings and you know i mean i just i can't imagine that in 2013 this was fully on his radar where he investigated it and read all the documents and really got deep into it i i can't imagine he really knows everything that went down i bet he hasn't seen citizen four i mean i bet i sure i really you know what i mean listen if i had his number i really would um and i i do know people who know him and i am going to communicate that uh after this conversation i think that would be i literally think that would win him a tremendous amount of political favor i really do i think particularly at this point in time where people are really look if there's ever a time where people are fed up about the overreaching power of government it's during this pandemic lockdown you know for good or for bad whether it's incorrect or incorrect people are very frustrated right now with power they're very frustrated right now with the draconian measures that some states have put in place to keep people from working and and their eyes keep people safe and all this would contribute to the motivation to uh to pardon you because i think that it would show people that the president actually does agree that there have been some overreaches and in your case not just an overeat but a miscarriage of justice a disgusting unamerican overreach i think when you ask this question about like how much does he know about the case it's fair to say not a lot because he's intentionally being misadvised by his advisors you've had the attorney general william barr who says he would be you know vehemently opposed to a pardon for me uh his secretary of state mike pompeo has literally i i think said i should be killed john bolton at least said i should be killed um and you know i i think when this conversation first came up a couple weeks ago mike pompeo probably hid every pen in the white house because he's trying to make sure things like this don't happen i think there are a lot of people uh who try and control the president but this whole question about you know uh what's right for me uh what's right for the president in terms of political advantage is is the wrong question this is why i haven't been advocating for pardon i didn't ask for a pardon from obama i did ask for a pardon for chelsea manning which we didn't get but we did get clemency uh and that's an important thing because what we need is we need for pardons to be made not as a question of political advantage uh but as a decision taken on uh to further the public interest and this is why i say pardon you know all of these previous whistleblowers uh uh thomas drake john kiriakou terry albury reality winner daniel hale there are many names daniel ellsberg right he wasn't convicted so he got out but these people deserve recognition as the patriots who stood up and took a risk for the rest of us that they are look at the the current cases right that don't even require an exercise of the pardon at the party but julian assange right now today is in court in the uk fighting an extradition trial to the united states for those who don't remember this is the guy who's the head of wikileaks right and he really fell out of favor in 2016 because he published the hillary emails and everything like that or podesta emails but he's not being charged for that the extradition trial has nothing to do with that actually the us government uh under william barr right the current attorney general is trying to extradite this guy and put him in prison for the rest of his life for the best work that wikileaks ever did that has won awards in every country basically around the planet including the united states which is the iraq and afghanistan war logs right detainee records in guantanamo bay things that are about explicit war crimes and abuses of power torture and people who were killed who should have been killed violations of use of force protocols and all of these things right and this could all be made to go away if william barr the attorney general simply dropped the charges and he should why isn't he well julian assange has literally been tortured i mean the guy was locked in that embassy for how many years with no exposure to daylight just completely trapped and you've seen videos of him skateboarding around the the embassy he looks like he's going crazy in there and now he's in jail and on trial the whole thing is it's so disturbing because you know when it boils down to like what what did he do that is illegal what did he do that people disagree with that people the united states disagree with in terms of the citizens well he he exposed her horrific crimes he exposed things that were deeply uh that were that the united states citizens are deeply opposed to and the fact that that is something that you in this country can be uh prosecuted for that they would try to extradite you and and drag you from another country they'd kick him out of the embassy and bring him back to the united states to try him for that it seems like we're talking about some kangaroo court it seems like we're talking about some some dictatorship where you know you have these uh no protection of freedom of speech no protection under the first amendment no no protection under the the rights of the press it's just it's so disturbing that there are workarounds for our constitution our bill of rights that are with that we all just agree to just accept that this is happening there's no riots in the streets for this there's no no one's up in arms that they're trying to extradite julian assange no no no one i mean it's not in the news like for whatever reason the mainstream news has barely covered it over this uh his current court proceedings in the in the uk well i think a lot of this comes down to the fact that uh they see julian assange by this day i mean the a lot of the mainstream media the broadcast outlets as a partisan figure now and it's really sad because the most dangerous thing about the charges against julian assange is if they extradite julian assange if julian assange is convicted he's charged under the espionage act the same act that i'm charged under the same thing that all these whistleblowers are charged under but he is not a source the way as abusive as these espionage act charges have run in the last 50 years is the government had sort of a quiet agreement they never charge the press outlets they never charge the new york times they never charge the washington post they don't charge the journalists they charge their sources they charge the chelsea mannings right they they charge the edward snowden's they charge the thomas drake's the daniel ellsbergs but the press they're left alone they are breaking that agreement with the julian assange case assange is not the source he is merely a publisher he runs a press organization people like oh julian assange is not a journalist he's not whatever there is no way you can make that argument in court in a way that will be defensible particularly given what we've talked about with the government and how careful they are to avoid prior uh court precedents and to work around it and create you know obscure legal theories that are legal fictions everyone knows they're a lie everyone knows these theories are false but under the law you know they bend just enough that they can pass the argument through and get the conviction they want you cannot convict julian assange the chief editor and publisher of wikileaks under the espionage act without exposing the new york times the washington post cbs abc nbc you know cnn fox whoever to the same kind of charges under this president and every coming president and i think people don't think about that that that is disturbing you know another thing that's disturbed well there's many things that are disturbing about this case but another thing that's been disturbing was he was a guy who the left supported up until 2016 and then it became inconvenient right it was great then when he's dragging yes clinton it's not so great right right when when the the footage was revealed from the uh uh i i believe it was a helicopter that showed it was uh collateral murder remember that video that was collapsing out in iraq yeah it was a very helicopter in iraq firing on two reuters journalists uh yes local militants or something yes exactly um that was the left's he was the darling of the left i mean they were all free julian assange and it's just it's so interesting how that narrative can shift so completely to all of a sudden he's a puppet of russia and that's what it became in 2016 and that propaganda stuck and people who were pro julian assange before now all of a sudden i i've i've seen these people say [ __ ] wikileaks you know and [ __ ] julian assange like that guy he's a puppet of russia i'm like like how much have you looked into this it's amazing how that kind of propaganda when you just get the surface veneer of the the the whatever the narrative there that is they're trying to push how well it spreads that all these people who were these educated left-wing people now all of a sudden were anti-wikileaks and i'm like do you not remember how this whole thing got started it was the iraq war which we all opposed do not remember this whole [ __ ] lie about the weapons of mass destruction that got us into this crazy war and then julian assange and wikileaks exposed so much of this and yet here we are in 2016 it turns up on its head and now he's a puppet of russia and wikileaks is bad because inconveniently the information that he released damaged hillary clinton's campaign yeah i i think a lot of it comes down to people forgetting uh what principles are and why they're important yes right um you can hate julian assange you can think julian assange is a puppet of russia you can think he's the worst person on earth right he's a reincarnation of hitler or stalin or whatever and still realize that convicting him harms you it harms your society it harms your children's future people forget about this and today is a world where everything's become partisan but the aclu cut their teeth they they made their reputation on defending a nazi march through a jewish neighborhood and this is because it's about uh the right to assembly the right to freedom of speech you do not have a right to be free from offense right there is no uh constitutional right to a safe space but that doesn't mean you do nothing that doesn't mean you have no opinion that doesn't mean you have no political power what it does mean is that you have to recognize that everyone has the right to their own opinion even terrible opinions what we have to protect is the speech is the platform is the assemblies the association is the process that allows us to understand and recognize and identify when people did break the law when they did harm others to go to a fair trial where the jury can consider why they did what they did what they did and not just whether it was legal or illegal but whether it was moral or immoral whether it was right or whether it was wrong and whether they are the lowest person you know the the most ordinary citizen in the country or the highest elected official hold them to the same standard of behavior the same rule of law whereas today you know we call them uh public officials and private citizens but with the all of the surveillance all of the data collection uh people in power commercially or governmentally they know everything about us and we know nothing about them uh we break the smallest law we go to jail we get a fine we get screwed we can't get a job we can't get a loan uh but if they you know flagrantly abuse their office their authority uh they get a pass they go on the speakers circuit you know it's it's all uh sunshine and rainbows for them uh and the way we change these things is remembering our principles of being willing to stand and defend them it's also instinctual for people to be partisan and it's tribal it's a tribal thing and in this day and age people are rabidly partisan and the rejection of nuance is so disturbing to me and it's so disturbing that a lot of this happens from the left now whereas the left used to be all about freedom of speech the aclu is i mean it's just you you automatically think of the liberal people when you think of the aclu but the academy just for the record is a non-partisan organization yes but supported overwhelmingly certainly by by left-wing people um i mean obviously they are nonpartisan but but people are so partisan today that this rejection of nuance it's it's so it's so easy for people to look at things as left versus right and ignore all of the sins of their team and concentrate on defeating the other side and it seems to be a giant part of the problem today so much so that people are in favor a lot of people are in favor of de-platforming people that just simply disagree with them and i want to talk to you about that because that seems to be a gigantic issue not seems to be it is a gigantic issue with social media whether it's with twitter or youtube or many things um in fact unity 2020 is uh something that my friend my friend brett weinstein uh is putting together this idea that we should look across both parties for people that are reasonable and rational people and look at what we agree with rather than simply sitting on on partisan policy uh on on party lines and only voting you know blue across the board or red across the board and let's look at reasonable people from both sides whether it's dan crenshaw and tulsi gabbard or who whoever it is that are they represent different parties but they're both reasonable people let's get them together and have these communications they were banned from twitter they were simply ban banned from twitter for simply saying reject both trump and biden look for a third choice so this is not there's nothing offensive about what they did in fact they're they're encouraging choice they're encouraging this idea that we don't have to be a two-party system that in fact even though we have had libertarian and green parties we kind of look at it like [ __ ] it's like a protest vote if you vote green party you know you're not going to elect that person for president it's kind of like we tolerate it but when someone like ross perot came around it threw a monkey wrench into the gears and became very dangerous for both sides because the republicans lost a lot of votes and that's how bill clinton got into office and george h.w bush did not get a second term directly because the influence of ross perot so they changed the requirements for getting into the debates and everything became very different and very more complicated after that the fact that they would that twitter would be willing to ban unity 2020 specifically because they're calling for people to walk away from this idea that you have to either vote for trump or biden and trying to get mainstream acceptance of a potential third party candidate is extremely disturbing but deep platforming in general i think is extremely disturbing because it's a slippery slope if you decide that someone has views that are opposite of yours and they bother you those views bother you and you could do whatever you can to get them off of a platform it's very dangerous because someone from the right who gains power or someone from an opposing party that gains power if they get into a position of power in social media if they own gigantic social media company like twitter or youtube and they decide in turn to go after people that agree with your ideology well then we have a freedom of speech issue and you're you're literally supporting the suppression of freedom of speech if you're supporting deep platforming people on social media and i've always thought that the answer to someone saying something you disagree with or something someone saying something you vehemently oppose is a better argument that's what they it's supposed to be yeah it's supposed to be you should expose the problems and what they're doing and i'm seeing so many people particularly on the left that are happy when people get de-platformed and people that just are just are contrary to their perspective contrary to their ideology and it's it's i think it's very dangerous and it's too easy it's too easy to accept it's in this this goes back to what you're saying this partisan viewpoint that we have today fiercely rabidly partisan in a way that i've never seen in my life yeah i i think the question of d platforming this is one of the the central issues of our time that's really overlooked and it's under-appreciated uh so many people on both sides are in favor of this uh when it's somebody they don't like right yes the central issue is this do we want companies deciding what can and cannot be said do we want governments deciding what can and cannot be said if the answer is yes uh it is a very different kind of society than we have had traditionally i do think we need to understand uh where this impulse came from how it came to be and why it seemed reasonable and a lot of people forget this and it came from isis if you remember the islamic state it was all over youtube they were all over twitter they were all over facebook and they were literally burning people alive in cages they were beheading people you know pushing people off buildings just horrible stuff um and that raises a tough question for a lot of these companies now it's very easy to make the argument that all right this is a direct call for violence this is literally uh supporting terrorism um and as a private company we have no obligation to let people use our platforms therefore we're closing their accounts right we're shutting this off we're erasing it we can do whatever we want it's our website don't like it leave um constitutionally there's no uh freedom of speech issue implicated there because the constitution restrains the federal government and the state governments in certain circumstances not private companies but once that precedent had been established uh that they would do this for isis they started going well what about these other people uh what about these things that could be construed as calls to violence okay what if they're not violence at all what if it's harassment what if it's abuse what if it's racism what if it's you know criminality what if it's drug culture what if it's pornography what if it's whatever and there will always be more what ifs and the categories of prohibited speech will constantly expand so we need to ask ourselves well who is best placed to make those decisions about what can and cannot be said traditionally the access to broadcast was limited you had radio you had tv if you didn't have that you had the soapbox on the corner right or the local university uh the coffee shop and somebody owned those places or somebody ran those places you know the college president would say this person would be invited to speak this person wouldn't be invited to speak um and i actually think it's right and proper for people to be able to protest speakers to say this person shouldn't speak at our college but i think the college itself the institution has to be willing to make value judgments about why they invite certain people to speak and if that person is very unpopular speaker if that person is uh representing a viewpoint that is not well supported by the college uh if it's not necessarily what students want to hear but the administration believes like the faculty believes that it's something students should hear isn't that why we have universities we don't go to class to learn you know necessarily like you don't go to a literature course to read the things that you want to read you just go home and read those yourself you go to study a curriculum to something else you want to benefit from the experience from the perspectives of others the question that people have is how does this expand into the wider audience right what happens when you move beyond universities what happens when you move to news broadcast what happens when you move to the internet what happens when everyone everywhere can broadcast and this is where i think things get really tricky not can people say what they want as long as they're not advocating violence or whatever i don't think this should be a difficult issue but this gets complicated when you have things like youtube's next video suggestion algorithm because the idea of universal uh speech universal ability to broadcast is exactly as you said well what is the counter for this you've got freaking nazis on the internet and i'm not talking like whatever the guy's got a trump sticker on his truck i'm talking goose stepping you know swastika bearing actual freaking nazi um you have those people out there on the internet calling for violence calling for all these terrible things and normally the way you deal with this even in the case of something like isis you drag them onto the platform you discredit their ideas before the world because if you don't if you drive them underground if you make them you know this this faction that's you know hanging out at a radical mosque or you know they're hanging out the hardware store if they're freaking nazis or whatever there are uh places where you create its own community that is sheltered from other perspectives it's sheltered from other ideas and that is where extremism thrives where it cannot be challenged where it cannot be exposed for what it really is but when you've got youtube going oh you like nazi a how about nazi b how about nazi c right these people never get exposed to counter speech and this is where things get tricky well it also gets tricky when you decide that someone is saying something that's offensive and you remove them from the platform and then you open the door for other things being offensive things that maybe aren't offensive to you the the slope gets slippery and then you have wrong speak you have you have newly dictated language that you have to use you have new restrictions on ideologies things you're not allowed to espouse i mean twitter will ban you for dead naming someone they will ban you for life meaning if you transition to be a woman and you call yourself edwina and i call you edward you i will be banned for life with no recourse which is madness it's matt because i can call you [ __ ] face and no one has a problem with it yeah you know what i'm saying i could call you a terrible i could i could call you that and there's no problem but if i you choose a name that used to accurately represent you as a different gender because this is some new incredibly important distinction that we've decided it takes precedence over everything else including it's it's more significant than insults more significance than a demeaning of i'd call you a [ __ ] i could demean your intellect all those things are fine but if i choose to call you by a name that used to actually accurately represent you when you were a different gender or when you identified with a different gender because of today's political climate that is grounds for banning you for life it shows you how incredibly slippery censorship can get because i would have never imagined that if you said to me 10 years ago well when someone becomes a transgender person 10 years 10 years ago if you said this to me if someone becomes a transgender person you call them by their original name you could be banned from social media for life i'm like get the [ __ ] out of here they'll never get to that no one's going to be that unreasonable that's crazy because you could call some people so many disparaging and insulting names but you can't say their name that isn't even insulting dead naming that's what it's called so it just shows you dead naming of today you agree with that today that opens up the door for all kinds of crazy [ __ ] five years from now 10 years from now if we still get more and more rabidly politically polarized and we are our idea of pc culture gets more and more extreme you're you're in you're on a greased hill and if you decide to give up a little ground the slide is imminent i i think this is like you can argue on that axis um but i think incrementalism and the failures of imagination going you know 10 years ago we couldn't imagine this would have been abandonable offense is the wrong way to go about it because if you go back to the founding of the country saying you know women should have the right to vote black people should have the right to vote you know that was unimaginable that would get you equivalently d platform not welcomed to the the speaking community or whatever sure but those are positive and inclusive things right i'm not saying uh right i'm associating these directly i'm talking about the principle here uh because you can attack these things in that direction go oh you know this doesn't seem right but remember it's twitter making these rules it's youtube making visuals there's not a court making these rules um and anybody technically today can decide who and can and can't uh who can and cannot speak on their platforms the question is what should we do what kind of culture should we promote how should we have these conversations and how should we make them available and i think civility is not too much to ask people generally as you say you know calling people [ __ ] face or [ __ ] or whatever is completely normal um on the internet and that's not really gonna get you banned from anywhere uh and now you have all of these companies sort of uh contorting themselves to fit into these blocks to not uh or sort of anger all of these different demographics but if we truly want to have a global broadcast a public commons the question i think that's more important here is not so much uh what should and should not be banned because that's accepting the premise of banning it's how do we create an inclusive uh platform where everyone can talk and even strictly and harshly disagree with each other without it coming down to name calling without trying to dox people without trying to uh basically dog whistle them or screw them or hurt them or harm them however now look i am not above calling people bad names on the internet i've said terrible things i grew up on the internet right i was an [ __ ] right and we all were and the thing is the worst things that we say at any moment today they are permanent the internet never forgets right so when you say these things and you know there's a young audience listening right now to to like everything um and they think it's cool they think it's funny or they don't think it's cooler they don't think it's funny but they think they shouldn't be the platform for it they they they're edgy you know they push the lines or whatever they get that out there and they start emulating this behavior they start saying mean things they start saying cruel things i did it myself right not in this context but in whatever the equivalent would be you know 20 years ago um and that's there are going to be consequences for that they're going to be judged by that whether they should or should not whether it is right or wrong because as you said there's so much tribalism today and i think we have to create positive examples i think you're right the deplatforming is a huge issue it is a tremendous issue right but we should think about what it is that we're actually uh fighting against and i don't think like trans issues or whatever uh when it comes down to basically civility is the hill to die on because i think there's better arguments well i i certainly think we should encourage civility there's no no doubt about it what i'm getting at is that the idea that you can be banned for life for that is it's preposterous i think civility is one of the most important things our culture could ever promote and i and i think it's very difficult to promote civility online because the anonymous aspect of there's no accountability internet interaction right there's no accountability there's you're not getting social cues from people it's just a completely different world when you're interacting with people especially for kids you know i mean if you had given me the internet when i was 15 years old i would have said the most horrific things to people for sure and i'm sure many 15 year old kids are doing exactly that right now i think the more we can encourage civility the better we all are in all aspects of our life whether it's it person to person face to face or online i try very hard to only say things online that i would say to someone's face and if you uh online now i do not interact with people in any way shape or form that's negative i don't do it i don't i don't believe in it i treat it the same way if it's avoidable i avoid it and i i think that's incredibly important but this does an important point which is i mean what it really gets to the core of the issue failures of civility the fact that people say bad things that people don't have accountability that there are you know there's a whole spectrum of people out there from angels to devils right there's ordinary people and even the best of people have bad days and say terrible things for sure we're all we do need people to have some responsibility for having a thicker skin you know hey look guys i've had people literally advocating my murder right like that just torture and murder literally horrible things yeah yeah i've seen it in years um and the people that i've blocked on my twitter account are the ones who are posting about like bitcoin scams that are like you know send me five bitcoins um i'm not saying this is the example to emulate uh what it is though is we have to recognize that some people aren't worth engaging some people aren't worth listening to um it's a lesson right but that doesn't mean necessarily that you take their voice entirely yes i i i most certainly agree with that in in terms particularly in terms of de-platforming my question to you about this is and i've raised this question many people and i really haven't got a satisfactory answer do you think that things that get so huge like twitter uh or facebook or even youtube do they become a basic right is it like the utilities is it like electricity and water is like the ability to communicate online seems to me a core aspect of what it means to be a human being with a voice in 2020. and i don't think it's as simple as removing someone from twitter is simply a company uh exercising their right to have whatever they want on their platform i think when it gets as big as twitter is i think we've passed into a new realm and i think we need to acknowledge that whether it's twitter or youtube or facebook or what have you i mean and i think it should be very difficult to remove someone from those platforms and i think it should probably involve some sort of a trial i mean this is much uh this is a really really tough issue it's much larger than just d platforming because what we're really talking about is the internet is a public utility right the internet is water and power um and its ability to shape culture right right um when you talk about something like you know twitter and the size when the president is basically directing uh policy from twitter uh it's clear sometimes threatening countries that is our laws were not designed with that in mind and unfortunately we have a legislature that's just fundamentally broken uh this gets back to the the electoral system which you talked about earlier you know most countries in the world have a wide swath of parties they're not this two-party binary system where it's just two groups largely new corporatist groups that are just handing power back and forth the president changes but the actual lawmakers the actual structure behind the president the advisors are largely from the same cohorts we we don't have that legislative we don't have that governmental structure that allows us to adapt in a way that truly represents i think the broadest spectrum of public opinion in a way uh that allows us to respond to changes in technology in a meaningful way which is what's left us stranded today where these companies are are sort of deciding things for themselves it's because there is a vacuum uh of legislation now there's a question do we want legislation people on different spectrums from authoritarian to libertarian here will go we want lots of legislation we want no legislation um but there is a push and there has been a push in congress for years actually since the 90s uh with the communications decency act and the first crypto war uh where the government was treating um the ability to encrypt your communications to to make them secret uh or private as you communicate with people online they were treating that as a weapon and saying you couldn't export this code without getting a license from the government and all kinds of craziness but the communications decency act the idea that there would be obscenity regulations the some years ago you may remember a scandal involving backpage which was like a variant of craigslist that had a lot of prostitution ads on it um government has been trying more and more uh to say these kind of things can be done on the internet these kind of things can be said on the internet these kind of things can't be said on the internet and they have been doing this largely under the guise i would argue of the commerce clause right the federal government where they get the constitutional authority to regulate what we say and do businesses wherever well they go well the internet is global it's international therefore it's interstate commerce and so we're going to regulate this as if you're you know shipping bushels of corn from iowa to florida but it's it's a little bit different than that and i think uh what we need to recognize is that the internet is a utility and people uh individuals uh and corporate entities you should be criminally liable for the things that they do online that means if they have caused enough harm that you're willing to put them in prison they've stolen from someone they have destroyed some piece of infrastructure they have caused harm to someone uh you know somebody died or they plotted a murder or whatever you take them through the courts you try them on this the jury considers what they did they consider why they did they considered the evidence and then you you uh let the trial system the traditional system that we've had for thousands of years uh worked this kind of stuff out or at least hundreds of years um but when you get the government and you get officials in congress you get officials you know whatever the local department of this country or that country you know russia's got a telecommunications censorship bureau china's got one france germany the united states all of these guys i have different regulatory authorities whether it's the fcc in the united states or ra's comrades or in russia and you cannot substitute their judgment for the judgment of a jury for the judgment of the people and the public broadly and i think it's dangerous that we're trying to have the government pick winners and losers when whether you win or lose determines whether or not you can engage with the world whether you can have a public presence uh on the internet because the internet is real life today yeah it is and could it be that the option would be to extend the first amendment rights to the internet in general and to if you want to run a social media platform you know other than what we're talking about putting people in danger doxxing people threatening people's lives doing things that can cause direct harm to people but the ability to express yourself in controversial ways should shouldn't we extend first amendment protections to social media platforms i i think this is a a much more complicated question than it appears because you get into the whole thing of obligation of service there is uh like there was a cause celebrate on the right actually that would seem like a similar issue i remember there was the cake shop somewhere where they didn't want to serve like a same-sex marriage thing uh and again this gets back to civility um but some people are they have a very strong fundamental uh belief here that these people shouldn't be able to do this that or the other and if you impose that uh on them that requirement on them they've got to serve you know whatever their uh business is to these people that they don't like or that they don't agree with there's a compulsion of service there you start doing this with the internet and then there's a completely different com country you know let's say there's a website in belgium that's now bound by american laws that's bound by this twitter can't ban this person even though uh they're against them it seems like isn't that a different argument though because all these companies were talking about twitter facebook and youtube are all based in america now i agree imposing american first amendment rights on the country particularly if the u.s starts changing laws but this is the interesting thing about internet companies is they can right would that be their loophole yeah would that be their loophole to get out of that just selling right but i mean it's it's more fundamentally um we have to recognize either as a society we can compel people to standards of civility or we can't and we need to decide uh how we handle that because that's what all of these tie around right um and i think we have forgotten uh in many ways just we're not teaching people the golden rule well enough because we are all angry we are all in competition and the funny thing is uh the guy on the right who's poor and living in a trailer uh is not much different than you know the hippie on the left who's scrounging out of dumpsters you know uh and and raising their black flag to go to a protest they act like they could not be more different but their economic circumstances could not be more similar and the reality is it's you know the the government uh the the lawmakers and the business owners that are setting them at odds and we are all getting lost in our own ideological differences uh and losing sight of the things that actually tie us together and that if we worked together maybe we could change in a more meaningful way and the more people you meet the more people you talk to you more you realize how malleable people really are and about how so many of these ideological perspectives that they they so rabidly subscribe to they've adopted because it allows them to be accepted by their community by whatever neighborhood they're in or whatever group of people they hang out with and they choose to adopt these uh these ideas about how the world is and so many of those people just don't experience people that are are different from them i mean that that is the case with racism that's the case with homophobia that's the case with many of the issues that people have with other folks is that they just don't know people from those other groups and they haven't experienced you know they haven't walked a mile in their shoes as it were i i think civility should be encouraged as much as possible also though i'm a comedian and i i talk a lot of [ __ ] and that's in in the sense of humor like you can miss and it's been done against me many times where they've taken things i've said in jest and put them in quotes completely out of context and it looks horrible because that's not what it that's not the way it was intended and it was intended in humor now if you do have laws that not just encourage civility but uh mandate civility you're gonna have a real problem with humor because you're basically gonna cut cut the ankles out of comedy um not that i'm saying that all humor has to be mean and vicious it doesn't but some of the best is well it's also about saying things that can't be said you know yes yes saying things that can't be said um i i think there's a there's a giant problem with uh online censorship today i i i think it's one of the biggest problems of our era and i do think it is because there is a massive slippery slope um and i do uh agree with you about the cake people you know that that was a a big issue was that cause celebrate the right of these people they should have the right a lot of people felt to not make a cake for someone who is doing who is doing something they think is immoral right being uh involved in a gay relationship but there's also the problem of sensationalizing these things because the people that did find those people that didn't want to make those cakes they went to a bunch of people that agreed to make the cake first they went and tried to find someone who didn't want to make that cake and then they turned it into a big story now even though i i just think i mean i think you should make a cake for gay people because there's nothing wrong with being gay but i think the people that made that decision to not make that i feel bad for them i feel bad that they're they're bigoted in that way and that it's such a foolish thing to care who someone is in love with whether it's the same sex or an opposite sex but also i think it's weird that someone wants to go around and try to find someone who won't make a cake for them who wants to go from cake place to cake place to cake place until i go aha i found a bigot like and then make a big deal out of it like you know you're you're searching for victimhood i mean there's an argument that that's uh i mean that that's one way to look at it another way to look at it is that's activism uh they're searching for injustice right yeah i agree yeah this is the thing like what is right and wrong this is this is what people forget uh is changing constantly when we're talking about public opinion because public opinion is changing constantly and this is why doing right by people it's so sad that we've lost sight of this uh basic impulse to do unto others as you would have them do unto you uh yes because when you talk about the internet when you talk about de-platforming when you talk about humor as you said you know people are going back and they're looking at your jokes they're putting them in quotes there's a different context you're being attacked by it uh something you said uh looks bad there's there's things that uh you've said things that i've said things that the person listening right now have said that they believed that they meant that they said ten years ago that they said one year ago that they said three weeks ago that they no longer believe that they've abandoned that they've been persuaded otherwise they've changed their mind on and this was one of the central themes in in the book permanent record um is we are no longer allowed to forget our worst mistakes right they're there they haunt us they're used against us they're weaponized uh and this society has become aware of this and activists on all sides have become aware of this uh immediately they use this to try to attack people on the other side of any issue that they don't like to go after their credibility to go after their character and what we are losing in that conflict and this is a rational strategy on the part of both sides in the moment because they realize there is a real political advantage to be gained you can get people cancelled uh very easily nowadays but the the thing is when we make everyone we pin everyone to their worst moment when we do away with the concept of forgiveness we we do away with the potential for growth for change for persuasion and this gets back to those those rat holes of extremism on on uh youtube on twitter on everywhere else where they start self reinforcing uh and eventually reaching the bottom of the hole at the worst of the worst with everybody else who's been canceled too and part of that is because they can't climb out or they think they can't climb out and there's a question how do we resolve that one of the nice things about the the pre-internet society was as bad as you were as ignorant as uh a racist as exploitative as whatever you don't like right as that person that character was they could find something new they could read a book they could meet someone they could change their mind and even if nobody in their town would ever forgive them rightly in some cases because they had done something truly terrible something truly unforgivable they could leave they could move to a different town they could move to a different state and that history would not follow them they could reinvent themselves and they could become someone truly honestly better instead of being married to their prior ignorance that is a very important thing because we all are in a constant state of growth if you're not you you're really making some fundamental errors with your life we're all in this constant state of accepting and acquiring new information gaining new perspectives learning from our mistakes and if unless you're dr manhattan unless you're some person who's not making any mistakes and you just have this all-knowing vision of the world you're a finished product like please if you are share that with everybody else but most of us are not most of us are in this weird state of being a human being on earth where everyone is trying to figure it out in this incredibly imperfect world incredibly imperfect society the the everything from the structure the economic structure to the societal stuff everything down to the very last things everything's imperfect and the idea should be that we're all communicating to try to grow together and that we're learning together and it's one of the more interesting things about interacting with people online is that you can get different perspectives and if you can let go of your ego and if you can let go of your preconceived notions you can learn things about the way other people see and feel and think about the world that could change and enhance your own ideas and i think that that's it's important that we not just accept the fact that people are growing and getting better and improving but that we encourage it we encourage it and we reward it and i i think that's one of the interesting things that we're struggling with i mean you see this in the context of police violence you you see this uh in the context of mass surveillance you see this in the context of cancer culture you see this everywhere one of the interesting things about this surveillance machine that has been built around us the the sort of architecture of oppression the turnkey tyranny as i describe it um so much is known about every person regardless of how innocent or how guilty they are it's all in there you know the files are waiting to be accessed the the data just needs to be collated it's it's just waiting to be requested and analyzed and used what this means like there there's this old idea of the panopticon right um which is you you create a prison that is circular and in the middle of it there's this great tower right that rises way up and at the very top of the tower there's a mirrored glass room that the warden sits in and no prisoner knows where the warden is looking because the warden can see out but they can't see in and so everyone believes that they are watched and so the idea is that no one will misbehave because they're all afraid uh that they'll be retaliated against for breaking the rules or whatever but what we have seen as this surveillance machine has been built is we all realize uh intuitively and intuitively innately inherently in ourselves even if we don't recognize it even we don't speak to it we witness it in the news every night there are records of wrongdoing criminality in government the highest and lowest levels of our government uh corporations and uh you know prominent uh figures in society breaking the rules ordinary people jaywalking littering you know uh polluting small-scale petty stuff all of that somewhere there is a record of but in almost all cases it's not punished what has happened is we have broken the chain of accountability between knowledge of wrongdoing uh and consequence for wrongdoing and this happened without a vote it happened without our participation we weren't asked uh whether this was okay but i think in some way that is beginning to change the moral character of people and what we need to do starting with the top rather than the bottom because china's trying to do the reverse they're going all right well there's a simple solution to this let's just start screwing everybody who breaks the rules instantly and immediately you know you got a social credit score you you protested so you're going off to a camp you know whatever um but imagine uh what it would mean if we saw people where now any official the minute they are guilty of the slightest infraction that immediately is exposed in the press they go on trial they go on all this stuff they're ruined they're disgraced um but it turns out every other member of congress is going to court in the same week because everybody is in violation of something somewhere we all have some measure of guilt large or small even if we're completely innocent because you know our legal code is so complex there's no way you can make it through a week without breaking some kind of rule about you can't wear a green hat on tuesday but if this happened if there was accountability for fractions of the rules any time an infraction of the rules was witnessed the laws would change instantly to enshrine the right to privacy because the people in power wouldn't want to lose their position of power they would not want to lose this position and suddenly when they have skin in the game they would realize oh everybody deserves this um and i i think there's just something interesting to that i haven't thought this out all the way fully so this could be you know i give give me some slack here but i think this is really what has changed um we have built a panopticon but what sits at the top of it is a computer uh that computer witnesses everything we do in reality it's a distribution of computers they're owned by many people an answer to many people but it does not yet judge us for us judge us for it and what is happening is the audience society the people have realized that they can see through this computer they can see through the panopticon from a certain angle a certain degree in a certain direction any given time the cops that have been you know monitoring all of us for years right they've got surveillance and drones and stuff that they couldn't imagine they imagined in generations prior but now every person on the street has a smartphone with a camera too and the cops are being witnessed for the first time and now people are trying to impose upon them the same judgment that has classically been imposed upon us and this i think is one of the uh dynamics that the changes that is leading to this increasing conflict in society is when you realize that the people that throughout you know uh your generation's youth were told in hollywood and stories are our common shared national myths you know the government's the good guys the fbi's are going to get the gangsters and terrorists and things like that they're the best of the best the fact that they are people too they're not only fallible but in some cases you know small-minded and vicious they are political they are partisan the same way everyone else is people start questioning power and how it is used the basic legitimacy the way it impacts our lives what the limits of it should be but people yet have not realized uh one of the responses to this should be a limitation on the amount of power the government has or rather not just government but institution institution is a concept right government or corporation um the powers of institutions should be limited to interfere in our lives instead what they are trying to do both sides you know blue team red team whatever they're squabbling they're fighting over who has their hands on the trigger who gets to aim the weapon rather than should the weapon exist are you talking about police violence when you're when you're saying these things that's a part of it yes it's it's every direction but police violence is very much the public part of it we see right now yeah that seems to be one of the most complex uh abuses of power because the the kind of power that you give someone when you allow them to be a police officer is literally the power to end life it's not just the power to kick you off twitter it's the power to decide this this person who's just a regular person no different than you or i with all sorts of problems in their own life and stresses and strains and a disproportionate amount of strain and stress for the actual job that they do it means a spectacularly stressful position to be in life but yet you give them the ability to literally with a finger pull end someone's life i think that's being exposed in a way that we've because of these cell phone cameras and because of uh social media it's being exposed in a way that we no one ever would have ever dreamed uh imaginable before and exposing how almost impossible it is to have that position as a human being and i mean this the position of power like that over folks and just to have a regular person with a normal psychology and and not some incredibly brilliant zen master who's in charge of uh you know overseeing drug crimes or pulling people over or or you know assault or whatever it is it's it it i don't know the solution to that i you know there's all sorts of things at play ignorance foolishness racism anger but at the end of the day it's about a human being's ability to have a massive amount of power by law over other human beings which is always going to be a problem it's just going to be a problem yeah i mean i i think we've known about this you know there's aphorisms that go back a zillion years you know absolute power corrupts absolutely um you know you give a monkey a stick the first thing he's going to do is he's going to look for something to hit with it but this is also one of the things you asked earlier about like how i can be hopeful how i can be idealistic when i see the scale of the problems the challenges the rate against us when i understand not just that mass surveillance exists but i understand the mechanics of it i understand how systemic it is i understand the resources behind it that want to prevent the change of it and instead want to entrench it and expand it to make it more powerful and have more influence over the direction of our lives down to this basic stuff about you know we are told the cops are the best among us people sign up to be cops i genuinely believe because they want to serve and protect more so than they just want to be the big tough cop guy and some people say you know that's naive some people say that's petty but i i think it's different i think the reason that i feel this way the reason that i am okay with seeing how much we fail uh seeing how much incivility and violence and and just ignorance that we have in the world today is is i have a lower expectation of the individual at the moment but a higher appreciation for their potential and the reality is we are all inherently flawed i'm a terrible person uh and i i think in a lot of ways uh you are not as good as you want yourself to be but i know that i have become a better person with time you have become a better person with time i think we all have and we all can or those of us who have not could if they chose to or if they had guidance or if they had love or friendship or someone who cared and directed them and helped them become better uh yeah and that's i mean that is the story of human history because we were all the monkey and then we found a stick uh we could use it to beat somebody or we could use it to build a bridge but if you look around at the world today there's a hell of a lot of bridges there are in the i think in terms of police brutality there's very few reasonable solutions that seem to be actionable seem to be something that you could just put into play right away in terms of like how do you how do you deal with these violent encounters that police officers often have with people how do you deal with the ptsd that i believe a vast majority of these police officers suffer from completely stressed out every time they pull someone over it could be the end of their life they might not go home to their families they really don't know and i think there's also a bunch of them that are emotionally and psychologically unqualified for the job to begin with and then here we are uh with these calls in america at least to defund the police which i think is even more ridiculous i think if anything they need more funding and more training and a more stringent uh process of elimination of removing people that aren't qualified for that job because i believe very few people actually are qualified i think there's great police officers out there i really do and i think most of them most of the interactions that people have with police officers aren't horrible but there's enough of those horrible ones that are captured on video that we have this bias towards these negative results that we see over and over again and we don't take into account the full data set we're not taking into account all the interactions that people have with police officers because those aren't documented what we're getting in front of our face day in day out are the terrible interactions and um i don't see nor do i hear a real workable way of improving this um you you get people that are either calling to defund the police or you're calling for people to support police officers that's all you hear i i from a few people like jocko willink you see uh really great suggestions that they should be treated the same way they treat navy seals where you're spending literally 20 of your time training and you're going through psychological training you're going through uh actual real world uh situations where you're you're going over what's the correct protocol and how to handle certain situations and i i think it's it's a giant problem in our society today and i think that's an understatement that every time someone gets shot that shouldn't have gotten shot particularly if it's a person of color it becomes a a gigantic flash point uh for our society well let me challenge you on that a little bit because i mean we can we can have civil disagreements in the way uh you know that's that's why we have discussion i think there are things that we can do uh that don't require you know the idea of shutting down every police department i i think that's sort of far beyond what people talk about when we they talk about defunding the police i think the most common sense uh measure that is being discussed and it's not being discussed as uh broadly in terms of like the mainstream news it should be is ending police unions right now why do we talk about that um this gets back to the same thing that we talked about earlier with the court cases and the government you know they get caught doing something wrong but there's no consequence right and people learn from that each generation learns from the cases prior right it's in training and people learn rules things like that the reason a lot of police violence occurs um even if it's not all it's not again there's there's no magic wand we wave that saves the world is the lack of accountability uh we know there are cops and even cops say this right uh there are cops out there who aren't good people uh there are cops out there who have used their authority uh there are you know really tragic cases uh where a cop has done something straight up criminal and they have faced no meaningful consequences as a result maybe they lost their job right but if it was anybody else they would have gone to prison and so there's a question of how do we remediate this in a way that preserves the legitimate interest of you know police officers as a class but it also preserves the rights of the people who are being policed in by your own admission at least some cases people who are abusing their authorities and again i'm not saying all cops are bad or anything like that but if we recognize there are abuses and this is a class that is invested as you said with the power over life and death we have to be willing as a society and the people occupying this position have to be willing to assume a higher standard of accountability than ordinary people right and if we can agree on that everything else follows from it i think we don't want to have a gun-toting immunized class walking among us and i think even you know police officers among themselves at least would recognize this but it is rational for them to resist this from the interests of their class they're in a privileged position why would they give that up the same way our spies are in a privileged position why would they give that up but as a society we exist to ask more and you raise valid points right there's cops out there go up to a dark car in the middle of the night they're afraid they're not going to make it home to their family that's reasonable and legitimate right but being a police officer is a dangerous position that people have signed up to we give our police officers every advantage that could be given to them today i can tell you from having lived all around the world uh there's no cops in the world uh that are kitted out like cops in america are like the you know these these guys look like you know something from a sci-fi movie um and if there is a kind of well some of them do some some of them are going to riot and look there's good cops out there um i had a lot of interactions with cops as a young man uh that were nothing but positive uh it's not that police as an idea are the enemy it is the system that is rotten and i think even honest cops recognize that the system is funnily been mentally broken the question is not or the question from their side should not be can we stop reform because if they are if that's their position i think they're doing the public a disservice and i think to themselves they know they're doing a disservice it's how do we handle this appropriately how do we handle this in the right way and if there's cops out there who legitimately have served you know they've been out there for years they've been exposing themselves to danger to keep people safe at night they've done a good job uh and they don't want to walk the beat anymore that should certainly be an option that's available to them and from my perspective as not a cop uh but i think when you look at um the the state of law enforcement in the united states that very much is an option you know do they want to work on dispatch do they want to work on investigation they want to be cross-trained in forensics there are ways uh that we can end issues or at least mitigate some of the issues that we see with policing today uh without saying cops are the worst people in the world and without saying you know these guys should be above the law well i don't think anybody's saying they should be above the law but but factually to you so your feelings are excuse me i said factually today like as a matter of fact whether we like to or not you gotta admit in most cases cops are bulletproof well i don't know i don't think i agree with that i mean if you you look at what happened in the george floyd case obviously they were caught on camera so we're we're fortunate we got to not fortunate but we got to see what happened and they reacted accordingly you're you're what you were saying before you started this though was that we need to stop police unions right and that but do you think police unions aren't only around to protect people from the consequences of uh terrible policing they're also to provide health insurance and and reasonable amounts this is a great argument for everybody to have health insurance oh for sure yeah no i agree i think health insurance is a i think it's a fundamental right of being a human being in a in a civilized society i think it should be treated the same way we treat the fire department i think it should be something that we we all agree we should pay into because it benefits all of us i mean i just think uh if if we are a community and that's what uh really a country is supposed to be we're supposed to be a large community wouldn't we want to protect the most vulnerable members of that community that if you have a small knit family and something happens to someone in the family everybody chips in to help that person you know the that's what i think health insurance should be i think it should be an important part of a culture of a community of a group of human beings that decide they're all on the same team we have to take care of the most vulnerable people i mean i think that across the board and i mean that's really the argument that i'm making for how we want our police to be when i say you know cops are bulletproof i don't mean in the literal sense there are a lot of cops who have given their lives uh to stop very bad people and we should honor them we should provide for their families but the way that we do that is providing a better society that's more fair to police by being more fair to everyone right as long as as long as we've got any occupation that has it it's really this simple as long as we have an occupation that is invested with exceptional authority they must be investigated invested with a extraordinary standard of accountability it's that simple from my perspective like it doesn't have to be a terrible thing it doesn't have to be aggressive attack but it's this basic principle today in the world of business in the world of government in the world of policing anywhere you look right it's a common issue what we have is a disproportionate allocation of influence a disproportionate allocation of economic resources disproportionate economic or a disproportionate allocation of authority without an equal allocation of responsibility well i i think we both agree on that and i think we also both agree that it's not a shock that a disproportionate amount of criminal activity exists in a place where there's a disproportional amount of poverty sure and a disproportionate yeah i mean this is an and very few economic opportunities i mean this is something people don't that is a real problem but you're exactly right i mean when you talk about yes uh where terrorist movements arise from when you talk about where criminal groups uh really thrive it's where there is poverty uh poverty breeds desperation uh desperation breeds anger uh and resent and and sadly due to the nature of our species uh that in many cases inevitably tends toward violence uh if we want to solve the uh uh which are criminality right uh because people forget terrorism is a crime it's very grave crime but it's still a crime uh we have to go to the core causes yeah and you know we were talking about this previously on a different show in regards to the way people reacted to the pandemic in terms of economic support to businesses and trillions of dollars that were allocated to all these various businesses to try to stimulate them and keep them active and and alive and keep people working and my thought was like imagine if that same attention to detail had been to impoverished neighborhoods if they had decided like listen there's obviously a disproportionate amount of crime and poverty in these neighborhoods we've got to figure out a way to lessen that burden and strengthen those neighborhoods and in a real simplistic way of putting it the way i've always said if you want to make america great you want less losers right what's the best way to have less losers have more people with an opportunity to succeed more people who grow up in an area where it's actually safe where there's economic possibilities where you're you're you're given more access to education more access to health care more access to counseling more access to uh community centers any kind of support that you could possibly give people that gives them more of an opportunity to get by in life and that this is something that we've conveniently ignored this this this need to strengthen these core and significant areas of our culture but yet we do when something comes along like a pandemic that might close down business and already thriving economic businesses i think we should have put i think a long time ago we should have put similar resources and attention into these impoverished neighborhoods that have been impoverished for decades and a lot of it because of slavery and a lot of it because of redlining laws and jim crow laws and all the things that happen after slavery there's so many areas of our country that just don't get better and we don't do anything about it and we just assume that these cr these crime-ridden areas will remain that way forever and they send cops there and then the you you see the videos of the interactions the cops have with people and it just creates more and more anger and more and more frustration without any real uh so some sort of uh socially responsible action by by the government and some some sort of a program where it's explained to people explain to the general public how this is going to benefit everyone that we will have less crime that we will have more opportunity we will have more people that are that are educated and empowered entering into the workforce will have more competition they'll strengthen the country as a whole it'll be better literally for every one of us and that this is something that they didn't pursue and they haven't pursued in this country forever well i mean this is this gets back to that the question that i was asking earlier it's one that i ask myself you know when you look at all the problems of today and you know for for somebody who's focused on privacy and surveillance issues it's easy to be reminded every day of how deep in the hall we are where did these things really you talked earlier about like a greased hill where where did the incline increase where did things start to really go wrong because they've always been going wrong in in in some area again that's our burden uh we've got to make things better because they're never going to be good enough uh where we start but in recent decades things have gone bad and i think it goes back to patriot act and you ask about economy you talk about poverty you talk about opportunity how do we fix this everybody is rehabilitating him now as this you know nice little old guy painting his feet in the bathtub uh but the patriot act george bush in the iraq war um and the policy of endless war that is continuing sadly today it's a bipartisan thing continued under obama continued under trump um we have spent trillions of dollars trillions of dollars uh killing far away people who literally going by the statistics are more likely to be non-combatants than combatants i think um collateral damage is a real thing and even if every one of those people was someone we didn't like uh was the level of effort was the level of resources that we invested in it uh was the cost to our national soul worth whatever it is we can be said to have gained uh and i think the answer is that we have been uh generationally diminished not by that president alone but by the policies that that administration uh popularized that had been embraced and continued uh by the administration since until we learned that lesson um we you me everyone else will have an obligation uh to try and change things to return us to a better path i i agree with you and i also think there's a real good argument that there's certain aspects of technology that have been implemented in in terms of like warfare and how we deal with terrorism that you could say short term perhaps might have eliminated some targets but i would argue long term probably encouraged more people towards radical fundamentalism particularly drones when i tell people the efficacy of drone attacks and how many people who are killed by drone attacks what i've gone into with people that really haven't focused on it the amount of people that are innocent that are killed by drones and the the vast majority of that being the case that when you're dealing with a hundred drone deaths it might be like 84 of them are innocent like imagine that being anything else imagine if the police did that if you know they prevented crime by killing 84 percent completely innocent people you would say that's insane like we have to stop that immediately but because it's done with a robot that flies through the sky remotely from nevada by some guy with an xbox controller and he's launching missiles into some sort of a a car convoy that we've accepted this and i think there's a real argument that that is it's being accepted because of the remote aspect of it because we don't we don't see it we don't feel it it seems distant and even seems distant from the person that's holding the remote control they're saying that the people that are doing that that are responsible for operating these drones are experiencing a new level of ptsd and a very severe form of it many of them they're they're haunted by the idea of what they've done and the fact that even though their own hands have done it they weren't there to see it it's some sort of a bizarre disconnect and that they're murdering literally who knows what percentage but it's a very high percentage of innocent people now this gets us back to uh what i was talking about in in calling for the pardon of these different whistleblowers um this is the core issue of daniel hale daniel hale is an american who i believe is still on trial they have yet to be convicted but the government is going to bury this man if they get the chance for revealing abuses in the drone program and the failures of the drone program uh and this also gets you know you talk about this question of efficacy and percentages we we talk about mass surveillance uh just last week this was covered nowhere in media that i've seen so far in a prominent way i think the washington post uh wrote an article but it you know it was buried it wasn't like a front page a1 sort of top of the fold splash on the fisa court a lot of people have heard about the fisa court because the relationship to the trump thing um i hope one of your guys who works in production can pull out uh you know a headliner front page or the the the twitter thread from elizabeth coyteen i think it's at liza goyten who went through this it was published and declassified version of the fisa uh reauthorization for last year where the court goes through every year and the fbi submits this request for basically a blanket surveillance warrant that they can use on all these different people for all these different um sort of categories of behavior that they want to monitor and the fisa court reauthorizes this annually um and in this uh annual review they look at is the system functioning is it effective were the rules broken uh and uh one of these experts i think she worked at the brenner brennan center for justice um correct me and edit me out if i'm wrong here but um there were thousands of cases in the last year thousands of cases where the fbi looked people up under uh the aegis of a fisa warrant right and this is like a mass warrant that's used for multiple people instead of one for everyone else and we know how bad these fisa warrants can be and over the course of thousands of cases the court found that they had been unjustified in uh looking up these people's background in all but seven cases i think it was seven cases out of thousands and this is uh where it's at we have created a procedural state a bureaucratic state an uh automated system for policing and i mean that broadly don't just mean you know guys in in in in shiny shoes on the ground with a pistol on their waist uh i'm talking about is it platform behavior and speech on twitter i'm talking about is it surveillance behavior both domestically against american citizens and abroad around the world we are trying to create a system that observes everyone and judges everyone in a way that we already know is not fair it is not used properly it is not used appropriately it is not used effectively and i believe uh does more harm than good and why are we trying to create a system that sees everything we do and judges us which is effectively trying to invent god uh when we know that it is a dark and vengeful one we need to think about the kind of technologies that we are putting in place that rule us but we do not effectively control well i think there has to be repercussions when you're talking about that where all case seven of them the court said oh yes the fbi broke the rules routinely they did it all the time uh so we're gonna go ahead and reauthorize this for next year here's your rubber stamp come back in you know 12 months exactly but what i'm saying is i think we as a society need to demand repercussions for these overreaches because it's it's it is a violation of law and if it's a violation of law with no consequences then it's not then they're we're not talking about law anymore we're talking about nonsense we're talking about things you could just get away with it really is it's a king class it's someone could just get away with things what's the law it doesn't make any sense or a law that's only enforced against the powerless but not against the powerful right particularly if you or me or jamie had done the same thing we would for sure be in jail for a violation of privacy for invading someone's privacy for for doing something that is against the law if we were tried we would be convicted we would wind up doing time or pay some extraordinary fine we would be in real trouble is my point but they're not in any trouble at all that you cannot have that we can't have that in a society because if you have that ability to completely bypass and any liability and any responsibility for a violation of law then we've created two classes of human beings we've created uh human beings that are the governed and then we've created human beings that are the governors and the governors are exempt and that's not that's not government anymore now you're into some you're in a monarchy you're in some craziness yeah you're yes you're rulers and the ruled and you can't have that we can't have that because of what you said earlier absolute power corrupts absolutely that is absolute power there's no repercussions whatsoever for violating laws that can greatly impact people's lives in a negative way that's crazy you can't have that we can't have that and we need to agree as human beings particularly now because of the age that we live in and the access to information that we enjoy we're aware of this acutely it's obvious it's it's right in front of our faces and it's one of the many reasons why i think you should be exonerated well i think you should be pardoned i mean you you've exposed this and you've opened people's eyes to this the the exponential increase in people's understanding and appreciation for that based on your work and what the guardian put out and and and how you exposed all that it's changed the conversation it's changing and it needs to be changed and the repercussions needs to be changed as well well thank you you know i i guess there's not much more uh to say than that but i hope uh one day i will be able to come back um if i want to see you in real life man i'll come on the show and be in the same room for once yeah well hopefully covert will be gone then well i'll test you first we'll test each other first yeah yeah um but listen i said it before i really do believe this i think i think you're a hero and i think that what you've done history will be kind to you you know um they will look back on what what has been done to you and i i think our government is on the wrong side of history i really do believe that and uh i i think if people really did know know the facts and particularly the way you uh explained it earlier about how the information was distributed and and the way it was handled ethically and morally you did the best you possibly could have done with that situation and i think it's a it's an incredibly bold move that you've done and and i i feel like uh the time has come i really do and i i hope i hope i hope trump listens to this i really do i hope he listens to this and i hope he he understands also what a a political piece it would be i mean this is a a massive if he pardoned you i think you would be a a a massively positive move for his own the way the you know the united states citizens view him well i hope what we see uh under this administration or any other but certainly we don't have to wait much longer for is ending the war on whistleblowers because as much as i would like to come home as much as i would like to see recognition uh from the system uh that there are times when the only thing you can do is tell the truth and that should not be a crime it's not about me it's about what happens to all of us it's what happens to the system and it's how we restore or rather realize the ideal of a country that we were always told we had uh but in reality we have never been as good as what we dreamed but we're getting closer and the way we do that is by admitting where we were wrong and doing better thanks so much for having me on again i i really appreciate thanks for being on man those words and that mentality are what make you a hero and your actions so i appreciate you very much man thanks so much stay free brother you too my friend take care [Music]

Channel: PowerfulJRE

Views: 8,170,674

Rating: 4.8527708 out of 5

Keywords: Joe Rogan Experience, JRE, Joe, Rogan, podcast, MMA, comedy, stand, up, funny, Freak, Party, Joe Rogan, JRE #1536, Edward Snowden, Permanent Record, Snowden

Id: _Rl82OQDoOc

Length: 148min 40sec (8920 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 15 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/pattylousboutique]

Twitter needs to back off of unity 2020. Let the people decide for themselves whether a two party system is worth keeping. Preventing them from ever hearing about it is an insult to their intelligence.

[u/whats-reddit123]

Biden must do it

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[u/MastermindHour]

Why not a 3 way with Biden, Trump, and Tulsi?