Thank you very much. 22 years is a long time to watch this grow from what it was to what it
is. We used to be able to say what it was. We don't know how to say what it is. Because
there's so many minor cons going on. And the industry has exploded. And as long as we
keep selling something that we don't deliver, it's going to just get bigger. So I think it's
important to keep selling security to people who keep needing it. Kind of like self-help
books. If they worked, there wouldn't be another one. But that's just an aside. It's great to
be here. 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. And it was the first time I heard people
crying at DEF CON. Because it brought forth what some of you have experienced over many,
many years. 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. It's a serious subject that is seldom addressed
directly and successfully inside the agencies or often by corporate. And yet it gets bigger
and bigger as the space gets bigger and bigger. So I invite you, if you have any insight or
anything to share with me, to please follow up on that. It continues to plague people. 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. That's the kind of advice that's easy to
give and impossible to take because it's not very specific. But the reason he found out was
because three people had committed suicide that week and one the week before. And I did
quote a friend, well, a fellow at CIA, who said he bears through his life 23 suicides. And
they were inordinately proud of having the highest rate of suicide, alcoholism, divorce and
adultery in the government. That was the DO, the Director of Operations. That's the sobering
part of the talk. 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. We all bear scars, but there are
ways we can live with them more successfully than some other ways. 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.
But what I want to do today, it's not a very sexy topic, privacy, why it's gone. Everybody
knows it's gone. And you can do a very short speech on that. 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. And she said in a
tone I'll never forget, Richard, of course not. Of course not. 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.
She sounded like Michael Corleone in The Godfather when Kay said, Michael, senators don't
kill people. And Corleone said, okay, who is being naive now? Implying that senators did indeed
kill people. 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? How many of you? Okay. Good. Good. Let
me do a test, because if it happens here, then I know I've got to make some changes. I was
doing a talk for a pretty sizable audience, and in Montreal, and I referred to Chinatown. Jake
said, come on, it's Chinatown, Jake, it's Chinatown. And someone came up and said, nobody knows
what you mean. How many of you have seen the movie Chinatown? Okay. That's pretty good. How
many of you have seen the movie The Conversation? Fewer. Okay. I encourage you to see The
Conversation and see what it's like. It's a terrific movie with Gene Hackman about
surveillance. But the point is, I like to be able to refer to popular culture markers and
signals that people recognize. 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. We'll touch on that a little later. So everybody knows
that privacy in the way I just referred to it is gone, but that's the view on the ground. 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, that privacy is
literally nonexistent. It's not whether we can recapture it or have it. 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. 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. When I
read that definition, it's laughable, because all of that is gone. We do not have that
freedom. We are not free from any of those things, and I don't think we will be. 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. When the VGA
cable comes, if it ever comes, I'll put a picture up or two, but let me get into the talk. I'm
going to start with a quote from Nietzsche. You like to do that at DEF CON, because
everybody reads Nietzsche, right? He said, with the unknown, one is confronted with
danger. In other words, somebody says something to you that's totally unknown, it's
dangerous. It causes discomfort and great care. The first instinct is to abolish the pain of
being in those states. So this is his first principle. Any explanation is better than none.
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. 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. You say we consider that true. The proof of pleasure is the criterion of truth. In other
words, does it alleviate your cognitive dissonance? Does it downplay your anxiety? Does it
make you feel better in the face of the fearfulness of the unknown and the new? And so the
fear is the real problem that confronts us. And therefore we have to abolish that feeling. And
the strange and the new and the hitherto unexperienced must disappear into habitual,
comfortable, familiar explanations. 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. We are speaking to a future state which is already here, but as Gibson said,
unevenly distributed. 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. 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. So we often
embrace truths by which we live because they make us feel better and alleviate cognitive
dissonance, but they're not true. What's true is what's real. And as Philip K. Dick said,
reality is that which when we refuse to believe in it won't go away. And here we are living
inside of Philip K. Dick. How many of you know who Philip K. Dick is? Okay, pretty savvy
crowd on edge thinkers. 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. 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. 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, even though I know it is. Okay?
Man's plugging stuff in here. Let me make sure the soft porn is not...
Okay? So that's going to be my image for the hour, that DEF CON image, I guess. Somebody is
probably doing something to try to get the other image up. Okay. 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? And she said, well, in
theory. In theory. And all you can say is, in theory, theory and practice are the same, but in
practice, they're not. Okay. So privacy and security. 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. 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, and you have nothing but space to create new
possibilities if you can stand it. And that's what we're talking about. We're living by 20th
century concepts, and they don't fit anymore, and therefore we talk about privacy and
security, actually. As if we know the definitions of the problems, but they're not what we
think. 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. I think that's true about privacy and security as well. Okay, now
let me provide some history. Printing press with movable type was introduced to Europe by
Gutenberg in 1439. 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. It
laid the material basis for our knowledge-based economy and the spread of learning to the
masses. You cannot overstate the importance of the printing press. And it was
revolutionary in England when William Caxton brought the printing press there in 1476.
When something changes the world so radically, we exaggerate the impact. Think of what we
said about the Internet when it first came, but in the long term we always underestimate the
impact. Again, think of the Internet. 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. And the
acceleration of change has made change happen faster and faster. So we usually respond to
this the way Virginia said we do to grief. First by denying it, then we get angry about it,
then we get depressed, then we negotiate with it and finally we accept it. But remnants of
past behaviors... no, you're not getting an image. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it.
It was beautiful and it was very important, but don't worry about it. I'll look at it. It's the
cover of my... the third volume of my novel, Foam, and it says, Identity is Destiny. And it shows a
man standing before the universe. It's a gorgeous picture. It really is a gorgeous picture. 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. 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. 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. But I won't show you those pictures. We'll just leave that aside. The remnants of past
behavior persist and how prior technology socialized us and taught us to behave as they framed
our lives. Then they went in the background. But they're still there. We just don't see them.
Like the electric grid, you didn't see the lights. You saw by the lights when you came in here. You
see by virtue of the lights illuminating. But electric lights like these are only 125 years old.
We're barely up from the swamp. We're new creatures in the galaxy and so arrogant and proud like a
toddler. But it's new. But you still don't see the power grid. You don't plug in all of your
equipment and say I'm going on power grid now. So shh, quiet, I'm on the power grid. You don't
even see the power grid. 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. And it goes into the background. The
first automobiles had sockets in the dashboard for buggy whips. Because buggies drawn by horses
had sockets in which to put the buggy whips. Then after a while they stopped making cars with
holes for buggy whips. 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? And there were people standing there when they fired the cannons with their arms out like
this at attention. He said, what are they doing? They're holding the horses. Because the
cannons spooked the horses and they have to hold the bridle. He said, but we don't have any
horses anymore. It's all mechanized. And there was that dull look of, oh. So the people
holding the horses stayed long after the horses were gone. That's what we do. And when
Caxton brought the printing press to England, printing revolutionized the world and the social
worlds in which people lived. The religious world, the scientific world, the cultural world,
everything. They had to choose a dialect in which to print. And that became what we called
standard English. 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. So the language printing imposed homogenized the culture over time and
political and economic and social consequences followed. So it changed how we thought. It
changed more fundamentally who we were. Now, we need the language to use to understand who
we have become that we are in the process now of inventing. You can't think what you can't
say. And the language of the past is inadequate to describe what a human being has become
today by virtue of technologies. 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. These are words which did not exist before then. 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. Post-feminist, biracial, slinky, sadomasochistic, homosexuality,
fundamentalism, psyching, devalue. One of my favorites, I can't imagine a Samuel L. Jackson
movie without it. The word motherfucker came into play in 1918 for the first time. One can
only imagine the circumstances under which that took place. French kiss, fuck off. I'm not
telling you to fuck off. I'm telling you that's a phrase. Deflationary, merchant bank,
arbitrary. I can go on and on and on. 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. It's like hacker. You know what's happened to the
word hacker right over time. It used to mean a hacker. When I first started speaking at
DEF CON, DEF CON 4, it was a convention of hackers. Now there are some. We used to play
spot the fed here. Now you're all fed, so we play spot the hacker. It's a more appropriate
game. What is a hacker today? You hear black hat hacker, gray hat hacker and white hat
hacker. Black hat hacker is a hacker. A gray hat hacker is a hacker who put the truth down
somewhere but knows where he put it. A white hat hacker is someone who put the truth down
somewhere and forgot where it is. In other words, I haven't met yet a white hat hacker who
is only a white hat hacker. It's a definition of convenience. 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. 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. We need new language to articulate what we
experience and grasp the nature of the context in which we live. We need new language today to
discuss ethics, spirituality and identity and privacy. The weakest link in discussions of
privacy is the definition of privacy. And the definition of privacy is not what we think. Let us
give true props to what this technology has done. When we invent a technology like this,
computer scientists said, society also invents the kinds of people who will use it. Older
practices, relationships and ways of defining identities fall by the wayside. New practices,
relationships and identities take root. 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. Losing their former shape as they are restructured for computerized expression. 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. 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. It wasn't long ago that people spoke of going on the Internet. I mean
really not long ago. 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. And I could show you a picture if they could
get the technology to work. It's very complicated. 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. And I have to believe some of them were texting each other so that the
communication among the family was not totally down. But from the bleeps and squeaks of the
games their kids were playing, I don't think that's what was happening. So new technology
socializes to their context. Telephone voices sounded weird back when the telephone was
invented. They sounded unnatural. 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. And I had to explain how telephones work. It was
electronic signal, blah, blah, blah, wasn't a real person. And yet today you get an email or text
from a real person, you assume it's real. Well, and then there's that whole other problem that it
often isn't. But that's a totally different question. Okay. So I talked about England briefly
in order to introduce that subject. And when I used the words English and England, I bet you
thought we had a common understanding of what we meant. But in fact, what we mean when we say
the name of any nation state is no longer what it used to be. It isn't the same because the
boundaries around nation states have become first semipermeable and porous and then they went
down. 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.
When I talk to people at CIA about scientific biological stuff is keep in mind that anything I
tell you was 20 years ago. And anything anybody knows out there is going to be 20 years ago.
Because we're working a little further ahead than that. And so how many of you have been to a
Shakespeare play in the last year? Really? What a group, honest to God. I mean, it's wonderful. How
many of you have seen a Star Wars movie? Oh, more than went to a Shakespeare play. Okay. 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. But at least 25% of the words
being used mean something different than what you think they mean. In other words, language is a
dynamic process in which meanings are constantly changing, adding, disappearing and morphing. And
it's a matrix, a social cultural matrix that evolves evolutionarily as we do. 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.
And I'm trying to make the point that it isn't. And the word I want to emphasize is individual. When
you hear the word individual, as Shakespeare used it, it meant something, some quality that was
unified or indivisible. Now, we're talking about the late 1500s, early 1600s. It did not mean an
individual person. When you say I'm an individual, you think of yourself as an individual human
being. That didn't show up for another couple of hundred years. Until the 17th century, 18th
century, the definition of individuality meant, quote, the state or quality of being indivisible
and inseparable. It didn't mean a human being. 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, which I'll get back to, were occasioning. So the change in the
meaning of the word individuality is related to the breakup of the entire medieval social,
economic and religious order. We think that is a historical event, but at the time it was
monumental and transformational and so is our own. But if we look at it in too granular way, we
don't see what's happening. The new use of individual helped define a person's place in a
society that was emerging into reality as well. Because an individual human can live
independently of society and make his or her own decisions. 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, 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. 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. But now foreign and
domestic no longer have the same meanings. Any more than natural and artificial have the
same meanings. 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. What he was talking about was, now the FBI was set up as a police organization in
this country. The CIA was set up to do espionage in every other country. That's why at that
first talk I gave at DEF CON 4 I could say, you want to hack? Come on in. Come in under the
umbrella. 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. 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. We don't
have any friends, someone said, deputy director of SIGINT actually at NSA. We have only
targets. And he was trying to calm down the guy who said, the English are special friends. We
have a special relationship. He said, we have no friends. We have only targets. And it's
everybody else. So CIA was set up to be that way in 1947. It's what our security world, our
national security state has developed as a necessity. I'm not criticizing that, I'm just saying
it's what's so. 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. So the FBI works all over the world now. And
CIA is, of course, operating overtly now as, for example, with the New York Police
Department by design. Statements are by design to make a point, but the CIA is all over the
place inside as well. 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. And
nation state boundaries don't matter anymore. 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. They are sometimes entities that, again, have no names, that don't have names, but
they're not just nation states. 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. How much
business does Microsoft or Apple do somewhere else? Much more than 50%. We think they're
American companies. They're not. They're companies. And they have their own independence and
their own operations and their influence and power on us supersedes that which we think is
patriotic. And that's what the FBI special agent was trying to say. I used to be able to invite
people to cooperate with the FBI and they always did out of patriotic motivation, he said. But now
more and more I'll get the answer, I'd like to help you, but. 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. 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. Well, why
am I bothering going into all this? Well, because privacy, as we have used the word, has meaning
only for an individual. Which was an emergent property, I say. Only for an individual. Privacy
is something that an individual has. And this meaning of individual no longer applies to
humans today. Not in the same way. Not really. We always knew we were cells in a body, but we used
to emphasize the fact that we were cells, individuals. Now we have to see bodiness. 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. 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. In my day, when we
tried to work cooperatively, I was usually nailed for cheating. Because that's what we called it
then. You were told to do your work alone. Individually. Don't look at anybody else's work.
That's been totally transformed by the technology of learning and action. So what does privacy
mean in this new world? And what is contingent on it? And why does it matter? Well, Andrew
Grove, one of the founders of Intel, said privacy is the big problem of the electronic age. At
the heart of the Internet culture is a force that wants to find out everything about you. And
once it has found out everything about you and 200 million others, that's a pretty valuable
asset. So people will be tempted. Isn't that naive? They'll be tempted. Today they do it all
the time. 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. That
wasn't the information that people were thinking of, he said, when they called this the
information age. Commentators said we think of privacy as tremendously valuable. We call it a
human right. But we live in the Facebook age and the only thing more cherished than privacy is
publicity. 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. So privacy is a human
right. Well, privacy became real around the same time that rights became real. You know the
people before this transformation of society, you lived in one room. I mean, you didn't say I'm
going upstairs to have sex now. Everything took place, the animals lived with you. Look at the
castle keep in the winter. Everybody lived in one place. 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. Because nobody did that. Well, privacy emerged at the same time that rights
emerged. 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. 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. The people doing the Magna Carta did
not see it as an instantiation of rights. 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. 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. Everybody knows we're not alone in the universe. But we
don't know that we know it. Because the authoritative voice continues to refuse to validate
the observations of thousands of people that suggests something else is going on. But that's
a whole other talk. The fact is we are not alone in the universe. 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.
So vain. As the president would say, sad. Sad. Doesn't speak in paragraphs. Gets his point across
though. Paragraphs are going the way of cursive writing, honestly. Richard Stallman, who many of
you know, a great GNU guru, defending open source software, said there's no intrinsic right to
intellectual property. The idea of copyright did not exist before when authors copied everything
from one another. And you know that. If you look at manuscripts made in monasteries, you see
people wrote in the margins all the time, copied each other. There was no thought I'm stealing.
And I tried to get some professors I once consulted with to understand this. 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. Substitute privacy for Stallman's statement, copyright. There's no intrinsic right
to privacy. Because the forces that made it viable, social, economic, religious, legal forces
have been transformed and are blurring and disappearing. And so printing changed everything.
That's my point. And so has the Internet. And so are the other domains of advancement to which I
can only allude, like bio. The revolution in information and communication is the axis around
which our 21st century world turns right now. Privacy is honored in lip service, but not in the
marketplace where it is violated or taken away every single day. It's not honored in intelligence
operations, certainly. We all know that. It can't be. It can't be. And it's not honored in how
computers and softwares are built. A rock star once said, if voting were important, they
wouldn't let us do it. Well, if privacy was important, it would be honored, in fact. And it
isn't. I mean, you have to take a good look sometimes, look at the vendor space sometimes,
a thing like Black Hat. 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. But that's an aside. Someone said, well, I said that. Other things are much more
important than privacy. Power is more important and money is more important. The Onion once
ran an article saying, customers are our second most important factor. Of course,
everybody says customers are the most important, but they mean after money. After money. The
Internet of Things, you know what it's like. We've got a village dedicated to hacking all the
aspects of it here. It ignores privacy. A software company is doing a rush to market. I
remember Bill Gates saying years ago, show me something I can fix, I'll spend a million
dollars to do it. Show me something that makes me two days late to market, forget it. Time to
get to market when there's more. Privacy advocates, and they're all over here,
well-meaning, righteous, and sincere, are fighting a rear-guard reaction, action with reality
itself. And reality always wins. 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. Sure, you can
have great movies about living off the grid, but try it. You wind up looking like the
Unabomber, right? And even he had to use a bus to get his bombs to San Francisco so he could
trust others to mail them. You can't really live off the grid unless you're living with
wolves in a cave. 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. That
was true. It's still true, and it's totally ignored. 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. And everyone who
can collects data, and everyone who knows how to do it, parses it together, not data but
information. Information, remember Claude Shannon said, is the difference that makes a
difference. Well, this information makes a huge difference. 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. The bits of data that make up us, our gestalt, our identity,
they now are combined at that level of abstraction in different ways. And they see
something different when they look at us than we see ourselves. 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. And
people who do data analytics are looking at a level of abstraction which is so very real, as
we all know. But we act as if we are still the 20th century selves that emerged when we were
children or growing up. And we haven't really grasped that we are known better than we know
ourselves. It's like the Zen statements about the illusion of the self. Well, we believe in
ourselves. We believe ourselves are ourselves. And I'm trying to make the point. It's very
hard to get. 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. We are not the same people we once were. And so defining who we
are and our prerogatives and needs has to be done in light of who we have become. We're
talking about identity in Blade Runner. I was looking at the photographs. I know you know that
movie. And he said, memories. You're talking about memories. Well, now we know we can
create memories in different ways. 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, which is what media
does. Media creates memory. And then we share a memory as if it's real. And if it
comforts us, we become a voting block. All right? So Walter Ong looked at all this some time
ago, looking at orality and literacy and the technologizing of the word. 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. Writing
restructured consciousness, you see. Writing transformed human consciousness. Oral cultures
contained human beings who were not the same humans who began to write. And the printing
press did it again. And engaging as we do immersively in the digital world is doing it one
more time. Our consciousness is literally being restructured in a different way. So all the
arguments against computerization were the same ones they used against the printing press
and writing. Plato said the same things when the oral culture was ending. It's going to
destroy humanity. No, it's going to transform humanity. And the humanity you thought you
were a part of is no longer going to exist. Kids today are criticized because they can't
multiply in their heads or write cursive. They use Google instead of remembering things. But
they don't know any loss from their experience. They experience no loss. Why should I write
cursive when I can tap with my thumb or make black letters? Why should I multiply? All I have
to do is enter the data and it multiplies it for me. Why should I remember something which is so
ready at hand? 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? Wrap it up. You told me you were going to tell me when I
had ten minutes. You should have put it in my presentation. I would have seen it on the
screen. Well, sorry. He's telling me to stop. I hate to stop because I love to talk. But I'm
just going to quote a couple of people and then I'm going to wrap it up. This is an old quote, but
it still tells you how they were thinking at MIT some years ago. When we do the kind of data
analysis I was talking about, we get a God's eye view of human behavior. We can tell how they're
going to vote. We can tell when they're getting sick. 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. 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. There is no place to hide. So the good news that someone wanted is that
it's real. 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. The world cannot be talked about as if it's a 20th century
world. Not politics, not ethics, not religions, not anything. 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. Rethink what it means to be
human. Because humans have always had a different definition of self-understanding in different
cultures and it's no different now. It's just a different kind of challenge because it continues
to change so radically and so rapidly. 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. And that, here more than anywhere else that I go, is you men and women.
Thank you for your attention.