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Thank you very much.

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22 years is a long time to watch this grow from what it was to what it is.

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We used to be able to say what it was.

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We don't know how to say what it is.

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Because there's so many minor cons going on.

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And the industry has exploded.

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And as long as we keep selling something that we don't deliver, it's going to just get bigger.

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So I think it's important to keep selling security to people who keep needing it.

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Kind of like self-help books.

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If they worked, there wouldn't be another one.

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But that's just an aside.

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It's great to be here.

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I do want to mention just briefly the last year when I spoke, I addressed a pretty serious issue, which was the traumatic impact of security work and intelligence work on professionals who do it over a long period of time.

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And it was the first time I heard people crying at DEF CON.

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Because it brought forth what some of you have experienced over many, many years.

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And I'm just sharing that to say, if you look at the YouTube video, it's online and a lot of people looked at it.

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It's a serious subject that is seldom addressed directly and successfully inside the agencies or often by corporate.

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And yet it gets bigger and bigger as the space gets bigger and bigger.

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So I invite you, if you have any insight or anything to share with me, to please follow up on that.

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It continues to plague people.

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I got an e‑mail just last week from a good friend, long‑time friend at NSA, who said they were advised to be sure they watch each other's backs.

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That's the kind of advice that's easy to give and impossible to take because it's not very specific.

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But the reason he found out was because three people had committed suicide that week and one the week before.

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And I did quote a friend, well, a fellow at CIA, who said he bears through his life 23 suicides.

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And they were inordinately proud of having the highest rate of suicide, alcoholism, divorce and adultery in the government.

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That was the DO, the Director of Operations.

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That's the sobering part of the talk.

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Keep in mind, it's an uphill climb to get people to look at it, including people who are suffering from it, because there are antidotes.

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We all bear scars, but there are ways we can live with them more successfully than some other ways.

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So that's what that's about, is looking at all the different things we can do to ameliorate the impact of what it does to us over time to do this work and to engage with people who are on the cutting edge.

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But what I want to do today, it's not a very sexy topic, privacy, why it's gone.

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Everybody knows it's gone.

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And you can do a very short speech on that.

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I was in Amsterdam not long ago and I was talking to a friend who works at a pretty high level and asked if we will ever get back any semblance of protection of freedoms from intrusion and privacy.

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And she said in a tone I'll never forget, Richard, of course not.

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Of course not.

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Because the technologies of intrusion and surveillance are so deeply embedded in all of our means of working, living and communicating with one another today, and it is so profitable to have them and so unprofitable to remove them, that we will never get back the freedoms that we thought we had.

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She sounded like Michael Corleone in The Godfather when Kay said, Michael, senators don't kill people.

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And Corleone said, okay, who is being naive now?

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Implying that senators did indeed kill people.

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I should ask at this point, because it's something that just happened to me, how many of you know what I mean when I say The Godfather?

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How many of you?

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Okay.

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Good.

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Good.

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Let me do a test, because if it happens here, then I know I've got to make some changes.

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I was doing a talk for a pretty sizable audience, and in Montreal, and I referred to Chinatown.

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Jake said, come on, it's Chinatown, Jake, it's Chinatown.

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And someone came up and said, nobody knows what you mean.

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How many of you have seen the movie Chinatown?

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Okay.

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That's pretty good.

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How many of you have seen the movie The Conversation?

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Fewer.

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Okay.

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I encourage you to see The Conversation and see what it's like.

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It's a terrific movie with Gene Hackman about surveillance.

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But the point is, I like to be able to refer to popular culture markers and signals that people recognize.

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And I learned my lesson when Adam Shostak got up after me, and all he had were slides from Star Wars and Rogue One, and everybody knew exactly what he was talking about whenever he used them.

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We'll touch on that a little later.

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So everybody knows that privacy in the way I just referred to it is gone, but that's the view on the ground.

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And I want to take this up to maybe 30, 40, 50, 60,000 feet to look at what it really means that privacy is gone, because of what it means that our identity has so radically been altered by the digitalization and other factors in the world of the 21st century,

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that privacy is literally nonexistent.

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It's not whether we can recapture it or have it.

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It's that it doesn't exist in the same way that it existed, and I want to talk about why that is with a broad view over what's happened to society, including a look at a few things like words over the last few hundred years.

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Privacy is defined as freedom from damaging publicity, public scrutiny, secret surveillance, unauthorized disclosure of one's personal data or information, as by a government corporation or individual, as if ordinary citizens have a right to privacy.

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When I read that definition, it's laughable, because all of that is gone.

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We do not have that freedom.

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We are not free from any of those things, and I don't think we will be.

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But what I want to do is try to get us to see that the 20th century framework within which we think about these things and our identity is effectively ending, and it's very important to know who you are so you can determine what you do with effectiveness and some clarity.

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When the VGA cable comes, if it ever comes, I'll put a picture up or two, but let me get into the talk.

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I'm going to start with a quote from Nietzsche.

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You like to do that at DEF CON, because everybody reads Nietzsche, right?

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He said, with the unknown, one is confronted with danger.

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In other words, somebody says something to you that's totally unknown, it's dangerous.

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It causes discomfort and great care.

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The first instinct is to abolish the pain of being in those states.

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So this is his first principle.

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Any explanation is better than none.

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And since at bottom, what you really want to do is get rid of the oppressive information or representation, you're not too particular about the means of getting rid of them.

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So the first representation, the first idea, the first theory that explains everything, explains the unknown in a familiar way, using the categories of the past, it feels so good that you call it true.

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You say we consider that true.

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The proof of pleasure is the criterion of truth.

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In other words, does it alleviate your cognitive dissonance?

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Does it downplay your anxiety?

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Does it make you feel better in the face of the fearfulness of the unknown and the new?

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And so the fear is the real problem that confronts us.

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And therefore we have to abolish that feeling.

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And the strange and the new and the hitherto unexperienced must disappear into habitual, comfortable, familiar explanations.

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And that's why he says, too, we must tell stories that are untimely, by which he means the consensus reality in which we live at any given moment is our time, but the truths that are coming at us faster and faster of the kind I'm speaking are untimely.

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We are speaking to a future state which is already here, but as Gibson said, unevenly distributed.

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In other words, truths, the deepest truths you believe about who you are and your identity are illusions that we have comfortably and conveniently forgot were illusions in order to live with them.

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And truths held collectively by a group or organization have to be confronted on behalf of a future people that will not hold those truths naively.

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So we often embrace truths by which we live because they make us feel better and alleviate cognitive dissonance, but they're not true.

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What's true is what's real.

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And as Philip K.

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Dick said, reality is that which when we refuse to believe in it won't go away.

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And here we are living inside of Philip K.

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Dick.

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How many of you know who Philip K.

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Dick is?

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Okay, pretty savvy crowd on edge thinkers.

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Now, I spoke in Canada about privacy about four years ago and I thought I don't have to ever change the speech I give in Canada because it's the same issues year after year after year.

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And I spoke for the ministers of privacy not long ago, tried to give a different slant on it, and one of the ministers of privacy from British Columbia said, that was a very provocative keynote, but let us hope it's not true.

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And did not realize she was a proof of concept of that Nietzschean statement I just made, which is, it's provocative, but I don't want it to be true, and therefore, because my job is to be the minister of privacy, I have to treat it as if it is not true,

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even though I know it is.

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Okay?

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Man's plugging stuff in here.

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Let me make sure the soft porn is not...

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Okay?

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So that's going to be my image for the hour, that DEF CON image, I guess.

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Somebody is probably doing something to try to get the other image up.

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Okay.

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So one of the ministers of privacy got up and gave a very, very passionate speech about all the restrictions they have on the government and on society to try to save privacy, and I asked if they really work for the intelligence community, do they really adhere to these things?

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And she said, well, in theory.

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In theory.

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And all you can say is, in theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice, they're not.

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Okay.

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So privacy and security.

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Matt Blaze once said a long time ago, the weakest link in the security chain is frequently the definition of the problem, and the definition of the problem is often not what we think.

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That applies to privacy, too, and we're going to see how, because these are difficult concepts I'm trying to advance, because they, like the Zen Buddha say, enlightenment is a nightmare in daylight, and when you grasp it, suddenly everything else explodes,

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and you have nothing but space to create new possibilities if you can stand it.

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And that's what we're talking about.

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We're living by 20th century concepts, and they don't fit anymore, and therefore we talk about privacy and security, actually.

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As if we know the definitions of the problems, but they're not what we think.

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A wise person under these conditions steers their course by the torchlight of doubt and chaos, and as Niels Bohr said of quantum physics, anybody who isn't confused doesn't understand what's going on.

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I think that's true about privacy and security as well.

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Okay, now let me provide some history.

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Printing press with movable type was introduced to Europe by Gutenberg in 1439.

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It played an unimaginably huge role in the development of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment, and the whole scientific revolution, because now it could share standardized tables and data for the first time in history.

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It laid the material basis for our knowledge-based economy and the spread of learning to the masses.

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You cannot overstate the importance of the printing press.

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And it was revolutionary in England when William Caxton brought the printing press there in 1476.

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When something changes the world so radically, we exaggerate the impact.

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Think of what we said about the Internet when it first came, but in the long term we always underestimate the impact.

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Again, think of the Internet.

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The printing press, like the Internet, like digital reality, is an engine of revolution that is now a catalyst for revolution in all the other areas as well, bio and nano and space technologies and material science.

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And the acceleration of change has made change happen faster and faster.

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So we usually respond to this the way Virginia said we do to grief.

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First by denying it, then we get angry about it, then we get depressed, then we negotiate with it and finally we accept it.

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But remnants of past behaviors... no, you're not getting an image.

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Don't worry about it.

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Don't worry about it.

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It was beautiful and it was very important, but don't worry about it.

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I'll look at it.

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It's the cover of my... the third volume of my novel, Foam, and it says, Identity is Destiny.

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And it shows a man standing before the universe.

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It's a gorgeous picture.

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It really is a gorgeous picture.

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And I mentioned that only because I will be signing a few books that I brought after the talk at 2.30 and 3 .00 in the vendor space.

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The other one was going to be just a picture of mind games, because those are the kind of games I'm playing with you.

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And I was also going to show you a picture of the UFOs in government book, because I continue to get feedback from numerous sources about the accuracy of our historical analysis of how the government responded to that phenomena over 60 years.

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But I won't show you those pictures.

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We'll just leave that aside.

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The remnants of past behavior persist and how prior technology socialized us and taught us to behave as they framed our lives.

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Then they went in the background.

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But they're still there.

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We just don't see them.

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Like the electric grid, you didn't see the lights.

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You saw by the lights when you came in here.

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You see by virtue of the lights illuminating.

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But electric lights like these are only 125 years old.

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We're barely up from the swamp.

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We're new creatures in the galaxy and so arrogant and proud like a toddler .

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But it's new.

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But you still don't see the power grid.

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You don't plug in all of your equipment and say I'm going on power grid now.

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So shh, quiet, I'm on the power grid.

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You don't even see the power grid.

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But if somebody came back here from the 19th century and looked at the landscape around us, probably the first thing they would notice is all the lines and dynamos that are emblems of the power grid that they never experienced.

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And it goes into the background.

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The first automobiles had sockets in the dashboard for buggy whips.

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Because buggies drawn by horses had sockets in which to put the buggy whips.

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Then after a while they stopped making cars with holes for buggy whips.

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A friend remembers when, this was some time ago, this historical statement, when they were firing cannons, it was during World War I, that's how far back I go, right ?

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And there were people standing there when they fired the cannons with their arms out like this at attention.

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He said, what are they doing?

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They're holding the horses.

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Because the cannons spooked the horses and they have to hold the bridle.

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He said, but we don't have any horses anymore.

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It's all mechanized.

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And there was that dull look of, oh.

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So the people holding the horses stayed long after the horses were gone.

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That's what we do.

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And when Caxton brought the printing press to England, printing revolutionized the world and the social worlds in which people lived.

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The religious world, the scientific world, the cultural world, everything.

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They had to choose a dialect in which to print.

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And that became what we called standard English.

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And as standard English permeated a larger and larger group, it permeated what we later called England, which did not exist yet until the social institutions that supported it had been created by the technologies which people no longer saw as causal but were.

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So the language printing imposed homogenized the culture over time and political and economic and social consequences followed.

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So it changed how we thought.

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It changed more fundamentally who we were.

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Now, we need the language to use to understand who we have become that we are in the process now of inventing.

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You can't think what you can't say.

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And the language of the past is inadequate to describe what a human being has become today by virtue of technologies.

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I'll give you an example of words that you use all the time that were invented during a very fecund period, a very fertile period, 1918 to 1923 after World War I when the flapper era exploded and the good feeling era followed before the depression.

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These are words which did not exist before then.

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Cool, extrovert, fascist, mass media, debunk, encode, hyper-modern, multipurpose, power play, teenage, which was invented as a stage of life at the same time.

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Post-feminist, biracial, slinky, sadomasochistic, homosexuality, fundamentalism, psyching, devalue.

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One of my favorites, I can't imagine a Samuel L.

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Jackson movie without it.

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The word motherfucker came into play in 1918 for the first time.

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One can only imagine the circumstances under which that took place.

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French kiss, fuck off.

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00:18:24,820 --> 00:18:26,220
I'm not telling you to fuck off.

206
00:18:26,220 --> 00:18:27,860
I'm telling you that's a phrase.

207
00:18:29,080 --> 00:18:31,000
Deflationary, merchant bank, arbitrary.

208
00:18:31,000 --> 00:18:32,560
I can go on and on and on.

209
00:18:32,560 --> 00:18:44,840
These did not exist, but now we can say them and think them because the language emerged to describe new social and cultural realities that previously we had no way of identifying.

210
00:18:45,580 --> 00:18:46,640
It's like hacker.

211
00:18:46,640 --> 00:18:49,420
You know what's happened to the word hacker right over time.

212
00:18:50,100 --> 00:18:51,460
It used to mean a hacker.

213
00:18:52,100 --> 00:18:57,100
When I first started speaking at DEF CON, DEF CON 4, it was a convention of hackers.

214
00:18:58,180 --> 00:18:59,580
Now there are some.

215
00:18:59,580 --> 00:19:01,580
We used to play spot the fed here.

216
00:19:01,580 --> 00:19:03,900
Now you're all fed, so we play spot the hacker.

217
00:19:04,360 --> 00:19:09,300
It's a more appropriate game.

218
00:19:09,720 --> 00:19:11,000
What is a hacker today?

219
00:19:11,000 --> 00:19:14,320
You hear black hat hacker, gray hat hacker and white hat hacker.

220
00:19:16,080 --> 00:19:18,340
Black hat hacker is a hacker.

221
00:19:19,260 --> 00:19:24,100
A gray hat hacker is a hacker who put the truth down somewhere but knows where he put it.

222
00:19:24,680 --> 00:19:29,240
A white hat hacker is someone who put the truth down somewhere and forgot where it is.

223
00:19:30,140 --> 00:19:35,400
In other words, I haven't met yet a white hat hacker who is only a white hat hacker.

224
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It's a definition of convenience.

225
00:19:38,020 --> 00:19:44,940
Because in the old days, at any rate, the only way you learned by hacking, the only way you learned to hack was by hacking.

226
00:19:45,140 --> 00:19:51,760
And it was a passionate commitment to doing anything you needed to do to look at things in a new way and learn from them.

227
00:19:51,760 --> 00:19:58,040
We need new language to articulate what we experience and grasp the nature of the context in which we live.

228
00:19:58,040 --> 00:20:04,080
We need new language today to discuss ethics, spirituality and identity and privacy.

229
00:20:04,220 --> 00:20:08,560
The weakest link in discussions of privacy is the definition of privacy.

230
00:20:08,560 --> 00:20:11,340
And the definition of privacy is not what we think.

231
00:20:11,340 --> 00:20:16,660
Let us give true props to what this technology has done.

232
00:20:16,660 --> 00:20:24,580
When we invent a technology like this, computer scientists said, society also invents the kinds of people who will use it.

233
00:20:24,580 --> 00:20:29,380
Older practices, relationships and ways of defining identities fall by the wayside.

234
00:20:29,380 --> 00:20:32,560
New practices, relationships and identities take root.

235
00:20:32,560 --> 00:20:41,260
In case after case, the move to computerize and digitize means preexisting cultural forms have suddenly gone liquid like an ice cube in your hand.

236
00:20:41,260 --> 00:20:45,900
Losing their former shape as they are restructured for computerized expression.

237
00:20:45,920 --> 00:20:54,720
And as these new patterns solidify, both useful artifacts and the texture of human relations that surround them will be much different than what existed previously.

238
00:20:54,840 --> 00:21:03,360
In other words, I'm trying to emphasize how big this really is and yet our minds keep it small in order to let us live in it day by day.

239
00:21:03,700 --> 00:21:07,120
It wasn't long ago that people spoke of going on the Internet.

240
00:21:07,500 --> 00:21:09,680
I mean really not long ago.

241
00:21:09,940 --> 00:21:17,160
But I talk to children today who don't know what it means to go on the Internet because they are always on the Internet.

242
00:21:17,740 --> 00:21:21,580
And I could show you a picture if they could get the technology to work.

243
00:21:21,580 --> 00:21:22,880
It's very complicated.

244
00:21:24,020 --> 00:21:41,520
A recent dinner, I moved to Minneapolis, great city, and my wife and daughter and two grandchildren were sitting and eating and every single person except me who had a digital camera to take the picture was on an iPad or an iPhone in the booth.

245
00:21:41,860 --> 00:21:48,320
And I have to believe some of them were texting each other so that the communication among the family was not totally down.

246
00:21:48,320 --> 00:21:53,760
But from the bleeps and squeaks of the games their kids were playing, I don't think that's what was happening.

247
00:21:54,380 --> 00:21:58,740
So new technology socializes to their context.

248
00:21:59,520 --> 00:22:03,460
Telephone voices sounded weird back when the telephone was invented.

249
00:22:03,460 --> 00:22:05,140
They sounded unnatural.

250
00:22:05,460 --> 00:22:15,060
And yet when the Internet first came forward, somebody at a radio station wanted to interview me about all this and she said, call me, don't send me an email, I want to speak to a real person.

251
00:22:15,500 --> 00:22:18,160
And I had to explain how telephones work.

252
00:22:18,300 --> 00:22:21,740
It was electronic signal, blah, blah, blah, wasn't a real person.

253
00:22:22,380 --> 00:22:27,000
And yet today you get an email or text from a real person, you assume it's real.

254
00:22:27,240 --> 00:22:30,260
Well, and then there's that whole other problem that it often isn't.

255
00:22:30,260 --> 00:22:32,720
But that's a totally different question.

256
00:22:33,260 --> 00:22:33,580
Okay.

257
00:22:33,580 --> 00:22:36,840
So I talked about England briefly in order to introduce that subject.

258
00:22:37,000 --> 00:22:41,180
And when I used the words English and England, I bet you thought we had a common understanding of what we meant.

259
00:22:41,180 --> 00:22:46,900
But in fact, what we mean when we say the name of any nation state is no longer what it used to be.

260
00:22:47,520 --> 00:22:55,000
It isn't the same because the boundaries around nation states have become first semipermeable and porous and then they went down.

261
00:22:55,280 --> 00:23:04,280
In the 90s when I was talking to people in the intelligence community about the impact this had on the work CIA and NSA and others were doing, because they've got to be well ahead of us.

262
00:23:04,280 --> 00:23:11,540
When I talk to people at CIA about scientific biological stuff is keep in mind that anything I tell you was 20 years ago.

263
00:23:11,640 --> 00:23:15,340
And anything anybody knows out there is going to be 20 years ago.

264
00:23:15,340 --> 00:23:20,740
Because we're working a little further ahead than that.

265
00:23:21,060 --> 00:23:27,960
And so how many of you have been to a Shakespeare play in the last year?

266
00:23:28,220 --> 00:23:29,160
Really?

267
00:23:29,600 --> 00:23:31,800
What a group, honest to God.

268
00:23:31,800 --> 00:23:33,400
I mean, it's wonderful.

269
00:23:33,400 --> 00:23:35,580
How many of you have seen a Star Wars movie?

270
00:23:36,360 --> 00:23:38,580
Oh, more than went to a Shakespeare play.

271
00:23:38,580 --> 00:23:39,340
Okay.

272
00:23:40,800 --> 00:23:49,100
When you're going to a Shakespeare play, we think we are understanding Elizabethan English, which is being spoken, unless it's been changed to make it more palatable.

273
00:23:49,220 --> 00:23:55,480
But at least 25% of the words being used mean something different than what you think they mean.

274
00:23:55,780 --> 00:24:01,420
In other words, language is a dynamic process in which meanings are constantly changing, adding, disappearing and morphing.

275
00:24:01,660 --> 00:24:08,900
And it's a matrix, a social cultural matrix that evolves evolutionarily as we do.

276
00:24:08,940 --> 00:24:14,700
And yet we think that what we say and what we see by virtue of what we say is what's real and what's always been.

277
00:24:14,700 --> 00:24:17,160
And I'm trying to make the point that it isn't.

278
00:24:17,180 --> 00:24:19,600
And the word I want to emphasize is individual.

279
00:24:20,180 --> 00:24:28,680
When you hear the word individual, as Shakespeare used it, it meant something, some quality that was unified or indivisible.

280
00:24:29,080 --> 00:24:32,240
Now, we're talking about the late 1500s, early 1600s.

281
00:24:32,240 --> 00:24:35,820
It did not mean an individual person.

282
00:24:35,980 --> 00:24:40,720
When you say I'm an individual, you think of yourself as an individual human being.

283
00:24:40,820 --> 00:24:45,180
That didn't show up for another couple of hundred years.

284
00:24:45,800 --> 00:24:56,640
Until the 17th century, 18th century, the definition of individuality meant, quote, the state or quality of being indivisible and inseparable.

285
00:24:56,960 --> 00:24:59,040
It didn't mean a human being.

286
00:24:59,220 --> 00:25:13,140
In other words, the notion and the appropriation of the notion of what it meant to be a human being, an individual human being, emerged as an emergent property from the cultural and social changes the technologies of the time and especially the printing press,

287
00:25:13,140 --> 00:25:16,460
which I'll get back to, were occasioning.

288
00:25:16,520 --> 00:25:25,060
So the change in the meaning of the word individuality is related to the breakup of the entire medieval social, economic and religious order.

289
00:25:25,280 --> 00:25:32,420
We think that is a historical event, but at the time it was monumental and transformational and so is our own.

290
00:25:32,880 --> 00:25:37,320
But if we look at it in too granular way, we don't see what's happening.

291
00:25:37,560 --> 00:25:45,080
The new use of individual helped define a person's place in a society that was emerging into reality as well.

292
00:25:45,080 --> 00:25:51,020
Because an individual human can live independently of society and make his or her own decisions.

293
00:25:51,520 --> 00:26:09,720
The person has enough knowledge to exist alone without clinging to society and therefore what it meant to be human fundamentally changed from being just part of a whole to having a boundary around you, which defined your identity in the same way that the boundaries around nation states grew during the 17th,

294
00:26:09,720 --> 00:26:20,440
18th and 19th centuries and defined nation states up until Westphalia and the treaty that helped define them in a way that no longer holds.

295
00:26:20,440 --> 00:26:33,460
I got a good example of this when I was speaking for the FBI and I was talking about how places, entities invented for this country or to work in this country and to work abroad used to be distinctive.

296
00:26:33,700 --> 00:26:37,960
But now foreign and domestic no longer have the same meanings.

297
00:26:37,960 --> 00:26:41,620
Any more than natural and artificial have the same meanings.

298
00:26:41,620 --> 00:26:52,480
We've blurred those lines so much and the head of the office, the agent in charge of the Chicago office of the FBI said, bingo, that explains why I'm getting the reactions I am.

299
00:26:52,480 --> 00:26:57,000
What he was talking about was, now the FBI was set up as a police organization in this country.

300
00:26:57,000 --> 00:27:00,980
The CIA was set up to do espionage in every other country.

301
00:27:01,220 --> 00:27:05,260
That's why at that first talk I gave at DEF CON 4 I could say, you want to hack?

302
00:27:05,260 --> 00:27:06,360
Come on in.

303
00:27:06,580 --> 00:27:07,880
Come in under the umbrella.

304
00:27:07,880 --> 00:27:16,480
You get the best tools, the best techniques and the best mentors in the business if you come into the agency and you get a get out of jail free card as well.

305
00:27:16,880 --> 00:27:29,640
Because all of the hacking that you know is just part of the vast subset of hacking that we have developed, as many people now know more than they did in more detail, to hack other countries.

306
00:27:29,860 --> 00:27:36,020
We don't have any friends, someone said, deputy director of SIGINT actually at NSA.

307
00:27:36,380 --> 00:27:38,340
We have only targets.

308
00:27:39,080 --> 00:27:43,440
And he was trying to calm down the guy who said, the English are special friends.

309
00:27:43,440 --> 00:27:44,700
We have a special relationship.

310
00:27:44,700 --> 00:27:46,140
He said, we have no friends.

311
00:27:46,280 --> 00:27:47,700
We have only targets.

312
00:27:47,700 --> 00:27:49,040
And it's everybody else.

313
00:27:49,260 --> 00:27:51,860
So CIA was set up to be that way in 1947.

314
00:27:51,980 --> 00:27:56,720
It's what our security world, our national security state has developed as a necessity.

315
00:27:56,920 --> 00:27:59,800
I'm not criticizing that, I'm just saying it's what's so.

316
00:27:59,800 --> 00:28:04,920
So the FBI was supposed to be here and the CIA was supposed to be there, but here and there no longer mean the same thing.

317
00:28:04,920 --> 00:28:07,840
So the FBI works all over the world now.

318
00:28:07,840 --> 00:28:15,900
And CIA is, of course, operating overtly now as, for example, with the New York Police Department by design.

319
00:28:15,900 --> 00:28:21,660
Statements are by design to make a point, but the CIA is all over the place inside as well.

320
00:28:21,740 --> 00:28:30,920
Because the boundaries are down and the nature of the information state that we inhabit means you have to go where the information goes and see where it comes from.

321
00:28:31,020 --> 00:28:33,180
And nation state boundaries don't matter anymore.

322
00:28:33,180 --> 00:28:42,940
What the FBI man was saying is that the real sources of power and influence on us, on our lives, that which directs our behavior are transnational.

323
00:28:42,960 --> 00:28:49,340
They are sometimes entities that, again, have no names, that don't have names, but they're not just nation states.

324
00:28:49,340 --> 00:28:57,060
So we kind of coexist like a parallax view between seeing nation state as operative and knowing that the real source of our behavior is something else.

325
00:28:57,060 --> 00:29:00,060
How much business does Microsoft or Apple do somewhere else?

326
00:29:00,060 --> 00:29:01,360
Much more than 50%.

327
00:29:01,360 --> 00:29:03,200
We think they're American companies.

328
00:29:03,200 --> 00:29:03,840
They're not.

329
00:29:03,840 --> 00:29:04,860
They're companies.

330
00:29:05,200 --> 00:29:13,520
And they have their own independence and their own operations and their influence and power on us supersedes that which we think is patriotic.

331
00:29:13,520 --> 00:29:15,900
And that's what the FBI special agent was trying to say.

332
00:29:15,900 --> 00:29:23,280
I used to be able to invite people to cooperate with the FBI and they always did out of patriotic motivation, he said.

333
00:29:23,280 --> 00:29:28,460
But now more and more I'll get the answer, I'd like to help you, but.

334
00:29:28,680 --> 00:29:50,860
And that but is the instantiation of they know that the true source of their power is not the country in the same way that it was, which is why the political rhetoric we're hearing today, which is so 20th century or before, the political rhetoric is a 20th century framework that's not describing any of the realities that are impacting people's lives.

335
00:29:50,860 --> 00:29:59,940
And that's why the solutions defined in 20th century terms can't work in the 21st century because we're a totally different kind of economy and society.

336
00:30:00,100 --> 00:30:02,980
Well, why am I bothering going into all this?

337
00:30:02,980 --> 00:30:10,340
Well, because privacy, as we have used the word, has meaning only for an individual.

338
00:30:10,360 --> 00:30:12,960
Which was an emergent property, I say.

339
00:30:13,100 --> 00:30:14,880
Only for an individual.

340
00:30:14,960 --> 00:30:18,220
Privacy is something that an individual has.

341
00:30:18,580 --> 00:30:22,720
And this meaning of individual no longer applies to humans today.

342
00:30:22,720 --> 00:30:24,520
Not in the same way.

343
00:30:24,900 --> 00:30:26,160
Not really.

344
00:30:26,220 --> 00:30:32,460
We always knew we were cells in a body, but we used to emphasize the fact that we were cells, individuals.

345
00:30:32,840 --> 00:30:35,960
Now we have to see bodiness.

346
00:30:36,200 --> 00:30:44,700
And when digitalization took over, people experienced themselves more powerfully as nodes in a network, and it restructured how we had to work in teams.

347
00:30:44,700 --> 00:30:53,220
You never heard of work teams or, in the same way, you never heard of teachers having to teach people how to work in teams.

348
00:30:53,320 --> 00:30:58,340
In my day, when we tried to work cooperatively, I was usually nailed for cheating.

349
00:30:58,380 --> 00:31:00,920
Because that's what we called it then.

350
00:31:01,280 --> 00:31:03,580
You were told to do your work alone.

351
00:31:03,780 --> 00:31:04,440
Individually.

352
00:31:04,440 --> 00:31:06,600
Don't look at anybody else's work.

353
00:31:06,600 --> 00:31:10,740
That's been totally transformed by the technology of learning and action.

354
00:31:11,260 --> 00:31:14,840
So what does privacy mean in this new world?

355
00:31:14,840 --> 00:31:16,340
And what is contingent on it?

356
00:31:16,340 --> 00:31:17,620
And why does it matter?

357
00:31:18,080 --> 00:31:25,520
Well, Andrew Grove, one of the founders of Intel, said privacy is the big problem of the electronic age.

358
00:31:25,680 --> 00:31:29,520
At the heart of the Internet culture is a force that wants to find out everything about you.

359
00:31:29,560 --> 00:31:34,680
And once it has found out everything about you and 200 million others, that's a pretty valuable asset.

360
00:31:34,680 --> 00:31:36,240
So people will be tempted.

361
00:31:36,240 --> 00:31:37,180
Isn't that naive?

362
00:31:37,180 --> 00:31:38,000
They'll be tempted.

363
00:31:38,000 --> 00:31:39,480
Today they do it all the time.

364
00:31:39,480 --> 00:31:57,380
To trade and do commerce with the asset, which is the information about you, that you have freely given them on Facebook, et cetera, all unknowingly given them the commodity that is yourself in terms of the data that you provide simply by existing in that online world.

365
00:31:57,760 --> 00:32:03,760
That wasn't the information that people were thinking of, he said, when they called this the information age.

366
00:32:04,060 --> 00:32:07,080
Commentators said we think of privacy as tremendously valuable.

367
00:32:07,080 --> 00:32:08,780
We call it a human right.

368
00:32:08,780 --> 00:32:13,380
But we live in the Facebook age and the only thing more cherished than privacy is publicity.

369
00:32:14,160 --> 00:32:22,060
We share personal data in flagrant ways, but believe we have a right to privacy when we choose to keep things private, which we cannot do anymore.

370
00:32:22,800 --> 00:32:24,740
So privacy is a human right.

371
00:32:25,300 --> 00:32:29,960
Well, privacy became real around the same time that rights became real.

372
00:32:29,960 --> 00:32:34,680
You know the people before this transformation of society, you lived in one room.

373
00:32:34,680 --> 00:32:37,040
I mean, you didn't say I'm going upstairs to have sex now.

374
00:32:37,040 --> 00:32:39,260
Everything took place, the animals lived with you.

375
00:32:39,260 --> 00:32:41,620
Look at the castle keep in the winter.

376
00:32:41,620 --> 00:32:43,080
Everybody lived in one place.

377
00:32:43,080 --> 00:32:52,380
The idea of we entitled Americans saying I want a room of my own, every child gets a room of their own, it was literally unthinkable.

378
00:32:52,400 --> 00:32:54,200
Because nobody did that.

379
00:32:54,640 --> 00:32:57,940
Well, privacy emerged at the same time that rights emerged.

380
00:32:57,940 --> 00:33:13,240
In other words, they became cognitive artifacts, what I call the structures we have internally that we believe in as if they are real, but which have emerged as a response to the changes in society and above all the information flow which defines and limits them.

381
00:33:13,660 --> 00:33:24,100
So rights, we say rights came from the Magna Carta, but until they were conceived as we do recently, we didn't see the Magna Carta that way at all.

382
00:33:24,100 --> 00:33:28,960
The people doing the Magna Carta did not see it as an instantiation of rights.

383
00:33:29,080 --> 00:33:40,780
Intellectual property and intellectual property rights only became possible after the printing press externalized the products of our thinking as if they were artifacts with boundaries around them.

384
00:33:40,780 --> 00:33:50,600
And boundaries, as I keep saying, determine identity, and boundaries are on everything from individuals to nation states, and I suggest planetary culture are going down.

385
00:33:50,600 --> 00:33:52,760
Everybody knows we're not alone in the universe.

386
00:33:53,060 --> 00:33:55,380
But we don't know that we know it.

387
00:33:55,380 --> 00:34:04,880
Because the authoritative voice continues to refuse to validate the observations of thousands of people that suggests something else is going on.

388
00:34:04,880 --> 00:34:06,300
But that's a whole other talk.

389
00:34:07,320 --> 00:34:09,940
The fact is we are not alone in the universe.

390
00:34:09,960 --> 00:34:21,580
We are part of a sentient web of intelligence that spans galaxies, and we have been thinking we're the apple of God's eye and the product of a special intelligence that only wanted us on this earth to evolve the way we did.

391
00:34:22,140 --> 00:34:23,400
So vain.

392
00:34:23,400 --> 00:34:26,220
As the president would say, sad.

393
00:34:26,260 --> 00:34:27,620
Sad.

394
00:34:28,700 --> 00:34:30,840
Doesn't speak in paragraphs.

395
00:34:31,000 --> 00:34:33,040
Gets his point across though.

396
00:34:34,600 --> 00:34:38,340
Paragraphs are going the way of cursive writing, honestly.

397
00:34:39,340 --> 00:34:49,140
Richard Stallman, who many of you know, a great GNU guru, defending open source software, said there's no intrinsic right to intellectual property.

398
00:34:49,260 --> 00:34:54,140
The idea of copyright did not exist before when authors copied everything from one another.

399
00:34:54,800 --> 00:34:55,760
And you know that.

400
00:34:55,760 --> 00:35:00,460
If you look at manuscripts made in monasteries, you see people wrote in the margins all the time, copied each other.

401
00:35:00,520 --> 00:35:02,520
There was no thought I'm stealing.

402
00:35:03,000 --> 00:35:06,560
And I tried to get some professors I once consulted with to understand this.

403
00:35:06,560 --> 00:35:26,000
They were very upset about plagiarism, which their students were doing, but in a cut and paste world where pieces of information came and went without identity, without source, without retribution or attribution, plagiarism was ceasing to mean what it did when things were defined in a textual environment.

404
00:35:26,840 --> 00:35:30,520
Substitute privacy for Stallman's statement, copyright.

405
00:35:30,520 --> 00:35:32,700
There's no intrinsic right to privacy.

406
00:35:32,820 --> 00:35:40,080
Because the forces that made it viable, social, economic, religious, legal forces have been transformed and are blurring and disappearing.

407
00:35:40,580 --> 00:35:42,660
And so printing changed everything.

408
00:35:42,980 --> 00:35:44,320
That's my point.

409
00:35:44,320 --> 00:35:45,800
And so has the Internet.

410
00:35:45,840 --> 00:35:49,860
And so are the other domains of advancement to which I can only allude, like bio.

411
00:35:50,540 --> 00:35:56,620
The revolution in information and communication is the axis around which our 21st century world turns right now.

412
00:35:57,320 --> 00:36:03,800
Privacy is honored in lip service, but not in the marketplace where it is violated or taken away every single day.

413
00:36:04,300 --> 00:36:07,260
It's not honored in intelligence operations, certainly.

414
00:36:07,260 --> 00:36:09,320
We all know that.

415
00:36:09,500 --> 00:36:11,040
It can't be.

416
00:36:11,320 --> 00:36:12,620
It can't be.

417
00:36:13,880 --> 00:36:17,380
And it's not honored in how computers and softwares are built.

418
00:36:17,920 --> 00:36:21,460
A rock star once said, if voting were important, they wouldn't let us do it.

419
00:36:21,860 --> 00:36:26,180
Well, if privacy was important, it would be honored, in fact.

420
00:36:26,180 --> 00:36:27,480
And it isn't.

421
00:36:28,020 --> 00:36:33,340
I mean, you have to take a good look sometimes, look at the vendor space sometimes, a thing like Black Hat.

422
00:36:33,400 --> 00:36:45,400
A friend of mine who's been in the business a long time looked out and he said, every single one of these people is selling something they cannot deliver, because they guarantee they are going to ensure safety and security for the enterprise, and they cannot do that.

423
00:36:46,380 --> 00:36:47,960
But that's an aside.

424
00:36:52,450 --> 00:36:55,130
Someone said, well, I said that.

425
00:36:55,350 --> 00:36:57,830
Other things are much more important than privacy.

426
00:36:57,930 --> 00:37:00,570
Power is more important and money is more important.

427
00:37:00,950 --> 00:37:06,710
The Onion once ran an article saying, customers are our second most important factor.

428
00:37:08,070 --> 00:37:12,190
Of course, everybody says customers are the most important, but they mean after money.

429
00:37:12,570 --> 00:37:13,490
After money.

430
00:37:13,530 --> 00:37:15,370
The Internet of Things, you know what it's like.

431
00:37:15,370 --> 00:37:18,530
We've got a village dedicated to hacking all the aspects of it here.

432
00:37:18,530 --> 00:37:20,010
It ignores privacy.

433
00:37:20,050 --> 00:37:22,030
A software company is doing a rush to market.

434
00:37:22,030 --> 00:37:27,010
I remember Bill Gates saying years ago, show me something I can fix, I'll spend a million dollars to do it.

435
00:37:27,010 --> 00:37:30,190
Show me something that makes me two days late to market, forget it.

436
00:37:31,050 --> 00:37:34,230
Time to get to market when there's more.

437
00:37:34,230 --> 00:37:46,590
Privacy advocates, and they're all over here, well-meaning, righteous, and sincere, are fighting a rear-guard reaction, action with reality itself.

438
00:37:46,590 --> 00:37:50,110
And reality always wins.

439
00:37:50,350 --> 00:38:06,510
So children today are growing up without an expectation of privacy, and without an understanding of what we mean by privacy, because their social world has taught them a different way of being, which is, it's all out there.

440
00:38:06,510 --> 00:38:10,390
Sure, you can have great movies about living off the grid, but try it.

441
00:38:11,510 --> 00:38:15,270
You wind up looking like the Unabomber, right?

442
00:38:15,270 --> 00:38:21,810
And even he had to use a bus to get his bombs to San Francisco so he could trust others to mail them.

443
00:38:22,250 --> 00:38:26,370
You can't really live off the grid unless you're living with wolves in a cave.

444
00:38:27,250 --> 00:38:36,390
I said in a forecast of security issues I was asked to identify years ago, 20 years ago, that the only way to protect data is not to collect it in the first place.

445
00:38:37,150 --> 00:38:38,330
That was true.

446
00:38:38,430 --> 00:38:40,690
It's still true, and it's totally ignored.

447
00:38:40,950 --> 00:38:51,990
We give it away, or we allow it to be taken, as if it is of no account, because we cannot see or feel the ends to which data analytics put our little biographical bits, every daily choice that we make.

448
00:38:51,990 --> 00:38:58,190
And everyone who can collects data, and everyone who knows how to do it, parses it together, not data but information.

449
00:38:58,310 --> 00:39:02,950
Information, remember Claude Shannon said, is the difference that makes a difference .

450
00:39:03,110 --> 00:39:05,330
Well, this information makes a huge difference.

451
00:39:05,330 --> 00:39:14,410
Not the noise, but the data that creates information, the signal, and it gives those who know how to extract it from the data leverage, power and money.

452
00:39:15,730 --> 00:39:24,430
The bits of data that make up us, our gestalt, our identity, they now are combined at that level of abstraction in different ways.

453
00:39:25,030 --> 00:39:30,870
And they see something different when they look at us than we see ourselves.

454
00:39:31,230 --> 00:39:44,090
The point of this talk, if you want to take away, is that the level of abstraction at which you can view either an entity, an organization, or a human being, determines what you believe is real.

455
00:39:44,090 --> 00:39:51,790
And people who do data analytics are looking at a level of abstraction which is so very real, as we all know.

456
00:39:51,790 --> 00:39:58,690
But we act as if we are still the 20th century selves that emerged when we were children or growing up.

457
00:39:58,870 --> 00:40:03,590
And we haven't really grasped that we are known better than we know ourselves.

458
00:40:04,230 --> 00:40:08,190
It's like the Zen statements about the illusion of the self.

459
00:40:08,230 --> 00:40:10,150
Well, we believe in ourselves.

460
00:40:10,150 --> 00:40:12,830
We believe ourselves are ourselves.

461
00:40:12,830 --> 00:40:14,390
And I'm trying to make the point.

462
00:40:14,550 --> 00:40:15,490
It's very hard to get.

463
00:40:15,490 --> 00:40:32,610
This is why it's a nightmare in daylight if you really grasp it, that the fundamental assumptions we make about damn near everything are no longer workable in the frame we have unknowingly created by participating, as all of us have in this room, in this new technological society.

464
00:40:32,730 --> 00:40:35,710
We are not the same people we once were.

465
00:40:36,130 --> 00:40:41,070
And so defining who we are and our prerogatives and needs has to be done in light of who we have become.

466
00:40:41,070 --> 00:40:44,730
We're talking about identity in Blade Runner.

467
00:40:44,730 --> 00:40:46,130
I was looking at the photographs.

468
00:40:46,130 --> 00:40:47,570
I know you know that movie.

469
00:40:47,570 --> 00:40:49,370
And he said, memories.

470
00:40:49,370 --> 00:40:50,650
You're talking about memories.

471
00:40:50,650 --> 00:40:52,950
Well, now we know we can create memories in different ways.

472
00:40:52,950 --> 00:41:11,430
And when I talk on biohacking, one of the things I looked at, which my friend at CIA helped me understand, was that we really are working seriously on implanting memories, implanting memories of someone else's experience, not just using techniques to face memory the way we have in the past,

473
00:41:11,430 --> 00:41:12,690
which is what media does.

474
00:41:12,690 --> 00:41:14,310
Media creates memory.

475
00:41:14,770 --> 00:41:17,230
And then we share a memory as if it's real.

476
00:41:17,230 --> 00:41:20,830
And if it comforts us, we become a voting block.

477
00:41:21,050 --> 00:41:21,690
All right?

478
00:41:22,410 --> 00:41:29,850
So Walter Ong looked at all this some time ago, looking at orality and literacy and the technologizing of the word.

479
00:41:29,850 --> 00:41:43,020
And he said, the shift from morality to literacy and onto electronic processing engages social, economic, political, religious, and other structures and creates an entire difference in mentality, in who we think we are, he said, in who we experience ourselves to be.

480
00:41:43,060 --> 00:41:45,760
Writing restructured consciousness, you see.

481
00:41:45,760 --> 00:41:48,900
Writing transformed human consciousness.

482
00:41:48,960 --> 00:41:54,600
Oral cultures contained human beings who were not the same humans who began to write.

483
00:41:54,600 --> 00:41:56,380
And the printing press did it again.

484
00:41:56,380 --> 00:42:01,440
And engaging as we do immersively in the digital world is doing it one more time.

485
00:42:01,440 --> 00:42:06,720
Our consciousness is literally being restructured in a different way.

486
00:42:07,480 --> 00:42:13,100
So all the arguments against computerization were the same ones they used against the printing press and writing.

487
00:42:13,100 --> 00:42:15,660
Plato said the same things when the oral culture was ending.

488
00:42:15,660 --> 00:42:17,200
It's going to destroy humanity.

489
00:42:17,200 --> 00:42:19,580
No, it's going to transform humanity.

490
00:42:19,620 --> 00:42:24,440
And the humanity you thought you were a part of is no longer going to exist.

491
00:42:24,640 --> 00:42:29,220
Kids today are criticized because they can't multiply in their heads or write cursive.

492
00:42:29,220 --> 00:42:32,020
They use Google instead of remembering things.

493
00:42:32,380 --> 00:42:35,280
But they don't know any loss from their experience.

494
00:42:35,280 --> 00:42:36,880
They experience no loss.

495
00:42:36,880 --> 00:42:41,420
Why should I write cursive when I can tap with my thumb or make black letters?

496
00:42:42,340 --> 00:42:43,620
Why should I multiply?

497
00:42:43,620 --> 00:42:46,880
All I have to do is enter the data and it multiplies it for me.

498
00:42:46,920 --> 00:42:50,140
Why should I remember something which is so ready at hand?

499
00:42:50,380 --> 00:42:57,500
Why should I ask somebody how to get to grandma's house when all I have to do is point to the clock, watch, where are we?

500
00:42:59,500 --> 00:43:00,220
Wrap it up.

501
00:43:00,220 --> 00:43:02,160
You told me you were going to tell me when I had ten minutes.

502
00:43:04,580 --> 00:43:06,880
You should have put it in my presentation.

503
00:43:06,880 --> 00:43:08,360
I would have seen it on the screen.

504
00:43:12,000 --> 00:43:13,940
Well, sorry.

505
00:43:14,920 --> 00:43:16,380
He's telling me to stop.

506
00:43:17,120 --> 00:43:20,080
I hate to stop because I love to talk.

507
00:43:20,480 --> 00:43:29,080
But I'm just going to quote a couple of people and then I'm going to wrap it up.

508
00:43:29,460 --> 00:43:35,340
This is an old quote, but it still tells you how they were thinking at MIT some years ago.

509
00:43:35,640 --> 00:43:40,420
When we do the kind of data analysis I was talking about, we get a God's eye view of human behavior.

510
00:43:40,700 --> 00:43:42,140
We can tell how they're going to vote.

511
00:43:42,140 --> 00:43:44,840
We can tell when they're getting sick.

512
00:43:44,840 --> 00:43:53,560
We've turned society into a laboratory where behavior can be effectively followed, but also we're affecting and changing behavior and you think you have privacy.

513
00:43:53,560 --> 00:44:07,760
We're getting genetic sniffers that when you walk through the space you inhabit, someone will be able to pick up your DNA from the shed skin cells that you are effusing into the air and they will be able to do a DNA analysis as we increase our ability to do that quickly and cheaply.

514
00:44:08,200 --> 00:44:10,120
There is no place to hide.

515
00:44:10,860 --> 00:44:16,000
So the good news that someone wanted is that it's real.

516
00:44:16,000 --> 00:44:22,140
And we can always deal with what's real, but we have to grasp who we really are in terms of what I've been describing.

517
00:44:22,220 --> 00:44:26,660
The world cannot be talked about as if it's a 20th century world.

518
00:44:26,660 --> 00:44:31,620
Not politics, not ethics, not religions, not anything.

519
00:44:31,960 --> 00:44:43,440
And the good news is we can become conscious of this, as we have in the past, and then make reasonable, powerful decisions about who we are in light of it and rethink what it means to be ethical.

520
00:44:44,100 --> 00:44:46,180
Rethink what it means to be human.

521
00:44:46,480 --> 00:44:53,020
Because humans have always had a different definition of self-understanding in different cultures and it's no different now.

522
00:44:53,020 --> 00:44:57,780
It's just a different kind of challenge because it continues to change so radically and so rapidly.

523
00:44:58,040 --> 00:45:08,940
So those who want to be in the cutting edge will at least know how to surf the waves of information that restore sanity and wholeness and health to the being who is doing this.

524
00:45:08,940 --> 00:45:13,800
And that, here more than anywhere else that I go, is you men and women.

525
00:45:13,800 --> 00:45:15,480
Thank you for your attention.