Secrecy and Transparency

00:00:00 my name is Beth H I'm a psychiatrist in private practice and a member of the executive committee for the Helix Center um and I've been asked to moderate this a little bit last minute so bear with me um it's not my area but we're here today to talk about secrecy privacy transparency openness and related Concepts you know since Freud's early when Psychopathology stemmed from secrets that one part of the Mind kept from another to win aot's idea that for the development of self and to allow the child to overcome shame and narcissistic humiliation psychoanalysis is always

00:00:30 been interested in secrets and Western literature also has been interested in secrets from edus to Prometheus bound where the main character spends the entire play resisting the attempt of one character after another to get his secret out from him so the secret and its gradual Revelation serves uh many many uh literary and psychoanalytic functions and L liberal political thought is obviously predicated on the autonomy of individual selves and the maintenance of Secrets as an aspect of selfhood so we're here to talk about these ideas today

00:01:00 in an age of NSA surveillance and prison access to our Google and Facebook and Yahoo records drones big data and the internet creation of secret and revealed selves and we will look to our wonderful panelists to help us open up these concepts of secrecy and transparency and their current relevance so I'm going to introduce the panelists now we are pleased to have here with us today Alex ABDO on the far left here Alex is a staff attorney for the ACLU and for their National Security project he is the current Council to the aclu's

00:01:31 challenge to the nsa's phone records program and has been involved in the litigation of cases concerning the patri Patriot Act and the uh foreign intelligence surveillance act the international emergency economic Powers Act and the treatment of detes at guano and elsewhere um Alex is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School and prior to working at the ACLU clerked for several different judges um he recently participated in a panel at the University of Pennsylvania which was called on the very idea of secret laws

00:02:03 transparency and publicity and deliberative democracy so welcome Alex um next we have Jack bradic over here who is associate professor and chair of the journalism and media studies department at Ruckers University his work applies autonomist social theory to popular culture and social movement media he is the author of conspiracy panics political rationality and po popular culture in 2008 his most recent Publications include adventures in the public secret sphere police Sovereign

00:02:35 networks and Communications Warfare in cultural studies critical methodologies is that right okay um he's also a Zion librarian at the Abc NE Rio and has co- co-taught courses at Blue talking bookstore in New York city so welcome welcome um our next panelist is Ted Jacobs Ted is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the the NYU school of medicine he's also a training and supervising analyst for adults and children both here at nipy and at four

00:03:06 other psychoanalytical institutes around the country and the editor of um at least four analytic Journal journals Dr Jacobs has published over 60 papers and book reviews and among them are secrets alliances and family fictions psychoanalytic observations and notes on the unknowable analytic secrets and the transference Neurosis he has two new books out for 2013 neither of which have much to do with Secrets One is the year of du Roche a novel about the turmoil created when the manager of the Brooklyn

00:03:37 Dodgers moved to a different team the New York Giants in 1948 and the possible profession the analytic process of change so welcome and finally we have Michael Lewis Michael is a university distinguished professor of Pediatrics and Psychiatry and director of The Institute for the study of child development at Rucker Robert Wood Johnson School his research has focused on normal and deviant emotional and intellectual development um and among his books are lies and deception in everyday life which he has

00:04:08 brought for us here and a handbook of emotional development which was awarded the critic's choice award um most recently his latest book which he also has with him is the rise of Consciousness and the development of emotional life which is out for 2014 and he's also working on a new book my life as development so these are our panelists I hope that they will help us get access to the psych ology and National psychology of secrecy and transparency um I wanted to start out just with a quote from JFK the word secrecy is repugnant in a free and open

00:04:39 society and we as a people are inherently and historically opposed to secret societies secret Oaths and secret proceedings um seems like JFK was not particularly up to dat but I would start out with a question related to that what is our modern conception of secrecy privacy transparency and openness and is there something uniquely American about the way that we approach it so I leave it to you guys to open that up well I'll uh I we were talking just before we came up and um many of you

00:05:12 will remember that uh Isen Howard was going to meet with the Russian premere it was uh brv or it was KF I don't remember must have been kushta and um right before they were to meet uh a YouTube plane with powers flew over Russia taking pictures and they shot the plane down and so they had

00:05:43 us Eisenhower was asked uh did you have knowledge of this he said yes uh that terminated the first meeting since Yalta or ban between the American president and Russian premere because in in diplomacy uh it is recognized that indeed if you tell the

00:06:15 truth um uh that's an insult had he said I didn't know I have this as you do this large government and all sorts of things happen je would have uh the meeting would have taken place that he chose Eisenhower the All American American chose to tell the truth which from a diplomatic point of

00:06:47 view was not the thing to do to have that meeting take place so um I guess I'm GNA start off as sort of the other side of the view I think that secrecy deception and lying have a very important place in human life and I spend my time not as uh uh legal or

00:07:22 helping folks with their problems uh uh media issues I I studied development I study infants and their development and one of the extraordinary things is how early children Lie by two years of age children have pretend play which is a kind of self-deception they lie to spare the

00:07:54 feelings of others and they lie not to uh get punished for transgressions um so and we are not unique this goes on we studied in Japan we studied in Europe uh this is all children it's best we could say so extraordinary early in life secrecy

00:08:25 deception um is part of the human I I I'll stop you know I I agree with you that there's a very important place for secrecy and deception in our in our private lives but I think that you know in America we've always had a double standard when it comes to secrecy uh we expect to maintain our private spheres but we expect that the government will not maintain a significant private sphere um you know we we expect that the government will to the extent possible I

00:08:56 think be open and transparent although you're right that there's obviously even there a very important uh role for secrecy to play diplomacy doesn't work uh in the open generally uh many national security policies can't function if entirely open uh but we there's always been a deep-seated hostility I think toward excessive secrecy in government and the question that you know when we were discussing a moment ago that we at the ACLU are concerned about is the question of when excessive government

00:09:27 uh makes Dem rtic self-governance difficult and maybe another way of thinking about it though just to take it on the terms that you've started us out with if secrecy is uh you know so important for private development and private life which I agree with you it is you can think of surveillance government surveilance uh as being what undoes private secrecy what unmasks self-deception uh It Gets behind the veil that we construct for ourselves in you know maintaining a private and dignified life and so there's a question

00:09:58 as to to what extent should we allow that surveillance and obviously we have decided there should be some of it uh and to what extent should we allow secrecy about the extent of that surveillance uh which is another you know interrelated question yeah follow up on that too um around democracy I really like the figure uh of Eisenhower so he could have said as you said he could have said yes we have secrets but I didn't know about this one right it's it's an acknowledgement but he said yes we have secrets and I know about them right so I

00:10:29 mean those are two different ways of revealing one's knowledge about about secrecy and I think that's the it's that tactical uh approach to Revelation that that interests me as uh part of US history so around around democracy so you think about the emergence of uh the American Revolution so much of it was also hatched in things like lodges and freemasonic lodges and secret societies right so here's this F fundamental U moment of the the foundation of democracy itself that's also partially

00:11:00 hatched in some people saying well there's a certain kind of secrecy that we don't like monarchical secrecy um but we're going to start plotting some things in secret because we have to do that because it's a revolution and so there there are moments that uh right that it's to me the issue is who gets to decide when secrecy and transparency are uh allowable right so that to me is the interest around sovereignty um is it is there something a difference between say a popular secrecy and something more

00:11:31 like State secrecy can we think about something about secrets that belong to a population that's part of democracy um and not just antithetical to democracy know in some sense Secrets just like um I think who who I forget who it was who said that all politics is local so relates to the community and even if it's National politics it's people tend to experience

00:12:02 in terms of their own their own Community their own private lives Secrets also are always in some deep sense always personal in the sense that they resonate with our own experience with the secrets and the deepest part of ourselves is as as you've said Dr Lewis that secrets are always a part of development and a necessary can you imagine if a child didn't have any secrets that the parents

00:12:33 knew everything about the child there'd be no sense of separateness no sense of development and the largic question that Alex raises is when does this necessary aspect of secret become intolerable and he says well a certain amount of State secrets are necessary for any government to exist um if if the Germans knew where we were going to land in D-Day we would

00:13:04 have lost thousands of more troops or maybe even the war but at what point does the individual right to privacy conflict with the national interest in let's say discovering secret plots that may go on if if the if the government had been able to discover the secrets of the 9911 bombers as they

00:13:35 were preparing their plans we would have been saved a great deal so let me ask Alex that in your work that you've been doing um have you been able to Define at all that borderline between the necessary and the intrusive and immoral aspects of Secrets let me yeah I think I think there's some agreement

00:14:10 between having them and how much is a good thing so I think that's a lot of progress uh really just as an opening uh because we could have folks sitting here uh as panelists who would say that Secrets aren't good uh so for example in there's a a very famous philosopher Bor uh uh who

00:14:40 talks about lying as a set of Secrets as a first daughter moral failure um now one could argue with that what I think might concern us is what has changed for those of us who have lived long enough in terms of what is public and what is was not public so how how have we ex how many of

00:15:11 us have not experienced walking down the street and having someone in full voice in a conversation on the phone with someone to which we could listen into uh or go to the movies where people talk and the idea of private versus public Behavior so I think there's been a real transformation uh in this um uh uh move

00:15:41 toward public Behavior Uh that private behavior and I think it's part of this movement that is probably at least 50 to 70 years old in this society in which we are not supposed to have secrets that good relationships don't involve privacy uh um uh if you go to a dinner party and it wasn't uh uh a good dinner

00:16:15 or Pleasant company and the um uh you can say something about it instead of what we used to do was write remember we actually wrote things and we sent a thank you note for uh inviting us to their home and so on so I think there's an enormous change and I think there's a lot of pathology that goes on with both at the society at large which will mean government will be communicative and and

00:16:48 individuals I think that we're when we're supposed to not have a secret if you get a present that you don't like from from your grandmother who's netted you with arthritic fingers a sweater uh you're supposed to say you like it but people chafe at that idea you're not being honest with your grandmother you should tell your grandmother the truth uh so I think there's a strange

00:17:19 thing going on in our society in this domain of public private which of course is some that's what we're talking about as you were saying private we have to have private but this idea is we're not supposed to if my wife uh comes home with a you know a jacket that I don't like it I'm supposed to tell I don't like it uh so all sorts of things are

00:17:52 going on and I think at multiple levels and and I think that we have to understand them in that context I don't know historically whether in this country there was ever a period of time when the government didn't have secrets I mean it's inconceivable to me that you could have a government in the same way that Ted was saying you could have a person a child who didn't have

00:18:22 secret any functioning organization has to have secret handshake uh uh secret uh uh uh code uh secret language in fact I don't I don't know that I disagree with your kind of description of how Society has changed over the last 50 or 60 years I'm not sure I I know enough to agree or disagree but you know one of the questions that concerns us so much is to what extent the government

00:18:54 gets to capitalize on those changes so if you look back at you know the the late 1700s one of the reasons that the uh early Americans rebelled was actually about secrecy uh one of the last straws was the fact that King George insisted on using similar Authority that was being used in England uh what were known as general warrants in the colonies as well uh and these were issued by courts and they gave conable the authority to enter Homes at will to search for tax

00:19:24 evaders uh and people who are you know evading uh import taxes uh and that was one that was the the foundation of the fourth amendment that was where our right to privacy came from was a notion that unregulated government access to our secret lives uh is wrong but then for the next 200 years the primary protector of secrecy was not actually legal the primary protector of secrecy in the country was practical the government couldn't record all of the information that was being spread around in public and maintain it in databases

00:19:56 um and I think the real kind of governmental shift over the last 15 years is that you know and this is actually a really kind of fundamental shift in the way intelligence gathering takes place is that it is now possible for the government to keep a record of all of these conversations uh that are spoken in public uh or to keep track of all of the digital Trails we leave whenever we interact with uh an internet service because those things are in a sense made public we share them with

00:20:26 Google we share them with Yahoo but now the government can keep track of them can keep them forever uh and that search first you know search first suspicion later approach to surveillance is really you know a revolution in the way our agencies conduct intelligence gathering and so you know the question is is that okay um and uh and if it's not why isn't it if you're right that this is information that we're just volunteering anyway why do we care if the government keeps a repository and you know and one

00:20:56 answer is is that uh you know when you this is a phrase I heard recently when you calcify the present um you you might say to yourself suppose you had the world's best detective and he were always able to reconstruct the past would that be a bad thing would you you know maybe that's a great thing maybe you want a police officer who's always able to reconstruct the investigative path um and a log you know one logical leap from that is well why not preserve the path now so you don't have to rely on the Superhuman investigator

00:21:28 uh and then you can just give the government access to these databases of information and the answer to that question I think is that when you calcify the present in that way when you uh when you get rid of the Practical protection for secrecy we had for 200 years you also encumber the present every current decision is encumbered by the possibility of future liability not necessarily legal liability um but the the possibility that in 20 years something you said will be covered in a way that never existed that there was in

00:22:00 essence a right to for to be forgotten uh for most of our country's history and that that is being practically threatened um you know we now live in a world where virtually everything we do is digitally tracked in some way or other and we have to wrestle with the question of whether we whether we want to preserve this practical ability to have those actions forgotten or not well I I don't want to talk about the government but the you don't object to governments

00:22:31 having secrets you object to them knowing about our secrets that is knowing about our private life is that the argument are governments allowed to have secrets because I don't see how they could function you know I think they have a question they can have secrets the question is what level of secrecy is allowable in a a Dem and how about recoverable recoverable well in the sense that you know what they know about you Freedom of Information Act and so on there was an attempt there the

00:23:05 government makes records takes gets information about people and you have a right to know what they know right okay is that a safe gone I think it is but it's it's kind of telling in our country that that's a statutory right and not a constitutional one you would think in a democracy that the constitution would protect access to information about government but in fact you know the Supreme Court as hell it doesn't right you know there's not actually a constitutional right to that information and the statutory right and as someone who litigates a lot under the

00:23:35 Freedom of Information Act I can tell you is a weak one um and you know so the question if you went back to the 70s which is when the foreign intelligence surveillance Act was passed and this is the main law that the government has used for National Security intelligence gathering for the last quarter Century uh 35 years uh you could have made an argument that 1978 that statute statute itself should have been secret that our uh prospects in the Cold War would have been better had uh the KGB not been able to read the

00:24:08 law that governed the intelligence activities of the NSA um but we rejected that we didn't because you know there was a recognition that certain things should be public um and so I agree you know the governments need Secrets the very difficult question is when the secret becomes illegitimate uh and you know to take the modern-day example you have Edward Snowden who leaked the existence of a program in which every phone record every single day is being captured by the NSA uh you know the

00:24:39 phone call that you were talking about made on the streets of New York City by tomorrow morning will be in an NSA database um is that a is that a secret that the government should be allowed to keep and I think that's a that's a difficult question uh in a democracy you know we we have a strong view of what the answer is but not everyone agrees with us um and it's a difficult question at the same time that there's been a kind of um maybe defanging of Foya has there also been an increase my understanding is an increase in

00:25:09 classification of certain kinds of domains of government activity so at the same moment that uh public is disempowered increasingly disempowered from accessing things more and more things are becoming inaccessible is that a kind of characterization of of the recent every government official to have left government the in the past last 30 years has complained about over classification but even more of late and they're now I think I forget what the exact number is but millions of people who have security clearances to access this Trove of information that is

00:25:40 growing exponentially particularly in the digital age things are now born classified they say because they're derivative of other digital documents you email something around internally on a on a classified Network and all of a sudden you have a whole new classified chain you know of information so yeah you're right and so to me I mean some of the changes I think that are happening in the political environment include precisely what you've been talking about an expansion of of a National Security State specifically in the last dozen years or so around Terror War right and

00:26:10 a kind of War context and a war environment that makes every question about uh Freedom uh democracy suddenly tied to security and that security suddenly becomes the um the most important kind of value through which all these others have to be run through so that kind of discursive environment is something I think that's changed uh over the last 15 years the other thing that I think has changed a bit um and which is my interest is on how how that do get revealed um take place in a public sphere and it almost doesn't

00:26:40 matter right so so one of the things I look at is so the early Bush years and some of the things that did get revealed um and all the books that came out around you know bush is a liar bush is this and that and then it made no difference for the uh election right in 2004 because it's almost like there's a belief somehow an American belief that if you expose secrets that leads to action um and I think that is the connection that I'm interested in how do we move from information to action and does exposure and Revelation actually lead to action or is there something

00:27:10 else going on that might prevent that from happening so that's that's sort of my interest and my favorite figure during that time period is one of the Masters of revealing secrets and that was Donald Rumsfeld right who was this um I mean he just listened to these press conferences and he's uh he's almost a wizard at where he says things like remember that that list of uh the known and the unknown that he brought up but there are these known knowns then then there were the known unknowns about a rock where these are justifications then the unknown unknowns right what he

00:27:41 forgot though he only mentioned three and then that 2 by two monohybrid there's a fourth right which is the uh the unknown knowns is that right yeah right so so he didn't mention that one I'm like okay why what is that one about so that for me is the interesting moment of of things that we know are happening U but we forget right or we deny or we repress um so things like Abu gra I mean it was a revelation of particular activities that were being done but atrocities during Warfare are something that we almost have to forget in order

00:28:13 to engage in it um as a society so so these moments of things that get revealed uh at the same time other things get concealed at the very same moment um I was sort of tracking that as a cultural media phenomenon U and I think a lot of that has changed too so we get Revelations I like before the panel started the round table panel um on the screen we had my friend Trevor paglin was up there the artist who uh studies uh government secrets and tries to map them and visualize them uh he's he's collected the patches of uh you

00:28:44 know units in the military and such that are secret units right and he finds their patches and he's collected them um he did some work on Area 51 before it was acknowledged that it existed right which just happened in the last year or two right before that area 51 never existed so he went and tried to give tours of it great artist performance artist to run this anyway so uh so that kind of question too like what you know uh even if things get revealed what happens what happens now that Area 51 is revealed or you know more documents about the Kennedy assassinations start

00:29:15 coming out right I mean what is the action component that to me is the crucial part of democracy not just the things that we know about the government but the things that we can do about it and I think that's that's one of the things that's so frightening about the say leaks is that people have this feeling now that they're releasing this massive amount of information in anonymity and that someday in the future it's going to come back and bite them but it's very hard for them to conceptually keep it in mind as to when would that be well let's take let's take this back down to uh uh interpersonal to

00:29:46 to sort of get it back and I think Ted and I represent more of that perspective so it is not possible for a parent to go on the computer of their child and find out things about their child so let's talk about parents and kids and a technology that allows parents to find out things about their

00:30:19 kids and what we might feel about that course you couldn't do that before now since you wouldn't open mail and so on but it is now possible with computers in the home to do that there I think you would there would be more argument about whether that was a good thing or a bad thing or how to regulate that and so on I I don't have a an answer to that I'm I'm just sort of trying to bring the your point about new

00:30:50 technology uh changing the complexity of the problem we have to making it now interpersonally I mean we could even do it not therapeutically but now with brain Imaging and all this kind of work that is leading to find out what is going on in someone's head without asking them or without interacting with them so what we have is a technology uh that is allowing all sorts

00:31:23 of challenges to this idea of privacy or secrecy whether it be at the level of the individual to the government or the level of the person to themselves to the therapist to parents and so on that technology is changing that well the the people have responded so much to this idea of the government listening in on phone calls getting listening being able to obtain

00:31:54 private messages that people send to one another it's a sense of violation that goes back to Early Childhood I mean that child is entitled to have some privacy the parent who is looking at the diary looking at the computer is violating something very essential in the child's development but it's an interesting question Alex let's just say for argument's sake that there are some people in this country sent by some

00:32:26 foreign power and they're planning another another attack of a major kind 911 and I think most people would say if we can identify those individuals or have some suspicion we're entitled to tap their phones get whatever information we can to avoid this this massive disaster but what if the government says

00:32:56 well but we can't actually do this without listening to everybody because maybe they have some contacts here with private citizens or US citizens that we won't know about unless we listen to everybody is that Justified on the basis of a clear and present danger or should we say no you can't do that regardless even if there's a danger because that's that's just too invasive of an individual's right

00:33:27 right you know I I I would dispute the factual premise of the question which is that you actually would ever need to listen to everyone's Communications in order to conduct a targeted investigation uh but even if it were the case you know you you could prevent an extraordinary amount of crime in this country if you gave police officers authority to open up houses without uh warrants uh to install video cameras in houses and then only access them later on if a need arose

00:33:58 um you know maybe through judicial authorization maybe through an automated scan of what's going on in the house so it's just a computer looking it's not a human um and I think that you know there are a lot of people who kind of observe very provocatively that the optimal level of crime in a society is not zero because the only way you can achieve zero crime in a society is to become a surveillance State uh and that we've rejected that path and that's a weird cost benefit way of looking at it uh that we tolerate a certain amount of

00:34:31 Civil Disobedience or crime in order to not to sacrifice every bit of Freedom that we have um and that question becomes a lot more difficult when you ratchet up the one side when you make it about uh you know a terrorist attack in the country uh but you know but I spent a lot of time listening to uh people who conduct these investigations and I've looked at all of the examples that they government has made public in that event about how these programs are used um and there's

00:35:03 not really a convincing case that pervasive surveillance is necessary in a strong sense it's of course useful it makes the job easier sometimes it's always easier if you don't have to go to a judge to get a warrant why trouble the police officers you but that inefficiency is has a purpose um and it's to protect the private sphere from uh you know unjustified Invasion and to you know to get back to the question of when do we accept that Invasion and

00:35:34 you know and the the balance that was originally drawn in in the 1700s you know with the ratification of the fourth amendment was with cause and the question always is what what's sufficient cause and we can have that debate um but with cause means something it means that you don't accept pervasive surveillance at the outset you don't uh accept Dragnet surveillance um you know that's what the the founding was a rejection of uh you know of King George's draget surveillance um you know I I used to do a lot of most of my early

00:36:05 work at the ACLU was relating to mistreatment of daines and so we all we heard the same argument there which was well maybe torture does work maybe in that one situation the ticking Time Bomb scenario uh you'd want to use torture uh and you know the the kind of uh Civil Society uh groups that work on these issues are divided over whether to engage in that hypothetical uh because torture is is immoral no matter what is the argument and we shouldn't engage on

00:36:36 this practical question um but they always you know at the end of the day you want to convince people that uh it doesn't actually work um and even if it did this tick and time bum scenario is is is actually just a hypothetical doesn't actually exist those situations never really do exist um so I don't think we'll find ourselves in a situation where the the butt for limit um on cracking a terrorist attack is collecting every American's communication um uh but if we did I I think our our

00:37:08 principles uh would reject pervasive surveillance to accomplish that result why do you think pervasive surveillance is going on now since there doesn't seem to be a clear and present danger but it's still going on you know there's been a shift in the way the NSA conceives of its role it really has switched from an agency that used to be uh targeted in his investigations to one that tries to collect everything at the outset to preserve for later searching and that that technological shift has just happened to H you know occurred over the last 20 years the war of

00:37:38 terrorism they've redefined so that there's always a threat and given there's always a threat you always could be in this mode of trying to prevent it which then allows um allows them to do this there was another and and we were talking about it briefly earlier which is the role of people in the society to uncover what in fact the

00:38:13 secrets or what the government is doing and there we were talking about investigative reporting well that is all but disappeared given the state that the print media is in now um hopefully the new technology the internet blogging will pick up this but um uh uh we get in our home times every

00:38:44 day and says then all the News That's fit to print well that's that's silly it's uh clearly we know that they selectively don't tell things uh as uh uh as they've admitted but investigative reporting has for the most part disappeared and now what we have are individuals who take it upon themselves to reveal some of these secrets that are

00:39:15 going on of course they're labeled as traitors and they have to flee the country and and so on but I have a concern that that given that there has to be a certain tension between the public and private always that one of The Regulators of that uh uh uh is uh investigative reporting uh and there is much I think much less of that it's not much less of

00:39:48 it in since it isn't happening but you know I read Mother Jones well Mother Jones I don't know if it has 50 ,000 subscribers or the nation uh where things break much earlier than or eye of stone in another generation where in fact there were people who took up reporters the media who took it upon themselves to in fact uh report and to try to regulate this private public kind

00:40:21 of activity and and I'm really placing and I understand uh the position of of of preventing the government but I see it as a broader issue between a public and a private what is private and what is public and I think we're in trouble with this uh there is much too much private Behavior that's public now uh for some of us we're uncomfortable with it we

00:40:52 don't really want to hear the conversation the regul ation of conversation in restaurants for those of us who are New Yorkers come on I mean it's we can't go in the noise level is so high and it's because people don't modulate their voices any longer and so but investigative reporting what what's happened to that uh you know better than I how many people get their news from

00:41:25 the uh you know from television uh how many get it from newspaper or from the uh the internet uh in fact we know how little people know about what's going on in the world our citizens I forgotten the figures but 5% couldn't name who the vice president is and probably 90 couldn't name who was the last vice president so it's something

00:41:56 happening in this balance now um that that needs writing uh interesting legal ACLU uh the such organizations attempt to to try to maintain this balance but it's a lonely place to be you would be much more Health right I mean if there were a lot of people out there uh who could as part of the J reveal these things and you know

00:42:31 confront some of these issues I mean this last uh event uh with uh can't remember his name at the moment but you know had to reveal what an uh the NSA was doing and and then he had to uh certainly leave the country so that's kind of investigative reporting but then you get classified as a trait so so I don't know I don't know even

00:43:01 know how I mean from a legal point of view obviously it has to be fought to regulate it no one could argue with that but I think if we take a broader perspective of and maybe it is what happens when technology changes and indeed it's only going to get more amazing uh with this balance between public and private uh it clearly is

00:43:32 we're in the midst of change which in a single lifetime we can witness uh sometimes it's quite scary I think the the right to privacy has been based on the idea of habius Corpus typically right if you I'm sorry the right to privacy has been based on the idea of habius Corpus typically right and there's been these metaphors of the body or the home or like concrete things that are in violet that you have ownership over and I was curious what are the rights to information that we have now and how what is considered to be owned by the person I in terms of

00:44:04 language or data or things like that what are the legal principles behind ownership in that way one of the people that I talked to for this panel is starting a company where you would actually own your data and could monetize bits of information that are used about you because that is something that belongs to you you know vidin find start that once you put something in language it no longer belong to you so you know how is that sort of tension being played out between people as a legal matter I think it's difficult to answer this question of what what preserves our uh our ownership of information but as a practical matter

00:44:34 it's a lot easier to describe it which is that you know if you think of your relationships with various internet companies uh if you're not paying for the service chances are that you're not the customer uh you know that's that's the adage that's been cropping up these days that if you're not paying for it you're actually the product um and that's true for a lot of the companies that monetize the information uh if you're a Gmail user you you're only a customer in a very attenuated sense uh because what funds your uh use of that service is actually the information that you volunteer to Google that they then

00:45:06 scrape to uh create their ad-based business model um you know and so I I think this is part of what uh Dr Lewis is getting at which is that people more and more these days are volunteering this information uh but I you know there's there's a way in which we've always done that it's just uh now we have have an internet to facilitate the exchange of the information and so by necessity so much of it resides with someone else um you know we used to keep journals now we just keep them in the

00:45:37 cloud uh and what does that say about who owns that information should technology change uh what we think of the ownership of that information I I don't think so um you know right right now the government takes the position throughout much of the country that it doesn't need a warrant to open email uh that it needs a warrant to open mail but all of a sudden when we move to the digital analog uh they don't um and that's a that's a bizarre you know conception of

00:46:09 privacy just to follow up with that too about the kind of corporate surveillance and data Gathering that happens when people um do this so so one way is to yeah we used to write journals now we put them in the cloud and we make it in a Vicken steinan sense open and public right and it's no longer ours but what's happening with corporate surveillance is um we give it over to another private entity right who then captures and reorganizes the data and we do that when we sign those we check mark those boxes right terms of service agreements or the and user licensing agreements the things that people tend to just like check yeah

00:46:40 I've got to get to my mail or I've got to get to this uh I want to start this platform um uh but that's when this sort of it's almost like the last Bastion of this true like older form of sovereignty where you give up your rights to your data because youve you've told them you know um whatever you want to take from here you can and then the some of the battles that are happening both legally but also culturally around um how platforms like Facebook have to then respond to its users that say well you might want to alter those terms of service agreements before um you know

00:47:13 unless you want to alienate a lot of people so there is a a cultural Dimension I think there too as well as Legal Information has become a a sellable item so you know on your uh if you write a check uh I mean there are so many of public things we do that get us into the private domain I mean Social Security uh uh uh secret is probably the the the the

00:47:47 most secret thing we have I mean if you have a package sent to you they have your address they have your zip code and Commercial thinking of commercial I mean there's an enormous you go on and buy something online so people are harvesting um bits of information which are now extraordinarily valuable supposedly now there's something interesting about it which is that the

00:48:17 algorithms to analyze these bits are very primitive and what really scares me is when they develop really good algorithms and that's of course where a lot of our tax dollars are going as they try to figure out how to take in every phone message every uh interet message and try to get information that's useful for whatever their purpose might be uh it's it's not easy there's

00:48:48 an awful lot of information out there and one of the things that may save us in some sense is that there's so much of it that's going to take a long time uh they can't analyze sentences and phrases and they can't really analyze emotional tone uh they can analyze words so if you say president and you say U murder uh uh the simple algorithm can put that

00:49:20 together in a sentence and bring it up to some other level so but it would be nice to go back to the beginning when privacy was greater but I think we're losing that and while it would be nice to go back to the end of the 18th uh Century I don't think we can anymore I think we have to confront that bits these bits which make

00:49:55 a part of our lives are just available they're in the clouds and there's there's no way around that except if we go back to writing letters and they can't open the letters of course they can probably but you know I don't tell us so it just seems to me you know here's another etiquette there used to be rules of behavior you could keep your private but you can act appropriately

00:50:26 well there's you know the 60s well let it all hang out what did that mean it simply mean that you didn't have to have a private if you didn't like something you could say it instead of saying which would you could call a lie or deception thank you very much for the gift when in fact you didn't like the gift at all so I think lots of things are happening emotional expression uh Pride if you

00:50:58 look at any sports and by the way it's all over the world when people used to succeed in a sport then baseball they tip their hat if they hit a home run with the bases loaded now you see the full display of the pride response as if it's perfectly okay to express yourself so this public private thing is Shifting and where private is

00:51:30 less uh less valued and now you said that I I said it more from my perspective than yours but it's true it's it's less valued now so what we're confronted with was in fact governments which tell us we're always a threat there's always an enemy there the war on terrorist is endless we don't declare war anymore we haven't had who was the last

00:52:02 president Rosevelt I suspect who went before Congress and asked for a declaration of war which is a requirement so I mean not only are we our secrets being our private being invaded But the the certainly the rule that the president needed a congressional act to uh declare war more has has disappeared too so I don't think the I don't the

00:52:33 solution I mean I hope you find the solution but I don't think it's going to be going back to the end of the 18th century I don't we just live in a totally different world I I think that's right as a practical matter we're not going to go back to the the modes of communication of the you know but I think the principles are are are worth thinking about anyway um you know but there's always been this tension between you know private and public and what you share and if you

00:53:04 want to live a meaningfully social life you construct your private sphere and then you choose what to share with people every time you have a conversation you're sharing of your private life um and that's what it means to engage right and you know I I don't know that people now value their privacy less it just might mean that they share their private information in a different way as part of their social engagements um you know but there there's a a way in which you can think about this uh from the governmental perspective which is that private people share

00:53:36 information uh you know to engage meaningfully but governments share information often with the public anyway to maintain credibility uh and there's a you know there's a a certain amount of sharing you have to do as a government in order to maintain legitimacy otherwise you're viewed as a repressive government you're viewed as one that um you know isn't uh Democratic isn't governed by the people uh but that you know that require you know that credibility is only at stake when there is kind of an adversity between the government and some other strong actor

00:54:07 it used to be as you were saying uh investigative journalists who would uh hold the government's feet to the fire when they didn't share enough um now you know large media organizations don't fulfill that role as well perhaps as they used to they're now you know there's a flatter business model when it comes to to the media but that essence of adversity needs to be there there needs to be someone who has an adverse interest to the government to force the government to maintain his credibility by sharing information um Can Can an individual decide that we've had two

00:54:38 examples one of the weeky leaks and this last recent one where someone exposed the yes and so can an individual decide this is immoral I'm going to expose this yeah it's a very interesting question because one may feel that they've done a a service and yet do they have the right to do that yeah suppose they decided that some democratic principle was was entirely wrong and should be exposed I mean you know there is a whole

00:55:08 interesting argument to be made about all of this yeah it's a hard question about who should be making the decision when it comes to government secrecy uh and you know it's difficult to tell the director of the NSA that one of his employees should be the one making the decision about uh what should be public and what shouldn't be I think an equally uh intolerable answer is that the executive alone should decide what should be secret and what shouldn't be um and the Practical answer is you know our constitution is one that sets up a

00:55:39 system of checks and balances it it PS there were two Secrets wasn't there one that they were doing it and two they're doing it to us and and that's kind of interesting because in a certain sense he exposed they were doing it uh and which then allows us to be prepared to act in a certain way to protect our privacy so maybe what we need is not that they do

00:56:11 it but that we know that they do it because you would be pretty stupid if you were plotting to overthrow the government to do it in an email you know to a list of your colleagues who going to blow up something I mean they know that okay the Germans didn't know we I mean yeah the Germans didn't know we broke we broke their code um so the secret was not only getting their secrets where they were going to bomb and where they were going

00:56:42 to be but it was the secret that we could find out their secrets so maybe what we need to do is some something around finding out what the secrets are aren't we protected in a certain sense now there's also a notion of the legitimacy of the relationship right I mean that that any situation where you give somebody authority over you you're saying I I know something about this person they've represented themselves fairly and there's a

00:57:12 legitimacy to the authority that I'm giving you and I think when people feel that that legitimacy has been undermined that they've been tricked or in some way that that's when they start to react against against it and feel that they have the right then to reveal or leak or something like that well if you wanted to tell someone that you didn't want the government to know you wouldn't send an email you wouldn't go on the phone you probably meet them in some public place to exchange so we have some protection by know surprisingly by

00:57:45 knowing that they can they can invade us and so in a certain sense I think the revelation of that rather than anything particular secret but that secret is what so infuriates the government because now it prevents them from doing the one thing they hoped to do at least they say they hope to do is to catch these bad folks doing the thing now if

00:58:16 you're a smart bad folk you're not going to do it in a way that the government would find out I'm not sure the revelations change that though for you know if uh I think we all knew the government had the technological capability to do what's been revealed um and if you were a terrorist you would certainly expect that there would be no barrier to the government using that capability against you any system that requires cause you know suspected terrorist will pass that threshold they

00:58:48 will be targetable under any system the biggest surprise I think from our perspective anyway was that it was so untargeted um um and so the only people I think who have been who have learned information that they didn't already assume uh was happening you know who who learned that a form of surveillance was happening they didn't already assume was happening were the ordinary public um you know innocent Americans who are uh who are not plotting terrorist attacks and so don't think daily about how to disguise uh their Communications

00:59:18 um and that's that's our concern uh you know that it's difficult to quantify the cost of an invasion of privacy uh you know you might say that uh foregoing a particular international call with a controversial colleague or for going visiting a particular website is not much of a harm in isolation but in the aggregate I think it is I mean I think it isn't in isolation but in the aggregate it certainly is that those hesitations add up um you know in in a in a sense it allows

00:59:52 the government to break down our ability to instruct the private life that you're that you started out this conversation by describing um you know it it takes away from the private citizen agency the ability to to manage his Private Affairs you've written about this as a Battleground right say uh yeah um yeah there lots of battles Battleground I'm trying to think what what the pluck out one thing is

01:00:23 about yeah going back to the 7 1800s we shouldn't go back there yes um again technically speaking but in terms of Technology but yeah the principles of democracy um and a nation's Foundation were forged there so it's important I think to go back for that reason otherwise we go back to the 60s in which it was said in during the Vietnam war we had to destroy it in order to save it right and I think if that logic starts appearing as um part of what we exist in now then we have brought that kind of

01:00:53 War to the Homeland right and so that that concerns me um in terms of the the freedom and the spaces of dissent uh so if everyone if the there's a blanket uh notion that citizens are potentially connected not they're not potentially terrorists they're just potentially connected to someone who might be connected to a terrorist um then uh dissenters who've already been determined to be terrorists in different kinds of discourses the FBI considers you know lots of different kinds of

01:01:24 protests to be actually forms of terrorism domestic terrorism um then we may have already gutted uh the foundation under which people can have uh a democratic life as well as a rich interior personal life and so that's the Battleground that concerns me is also where descent can take place um both through surveillance the counter surveillance I was thinking about Copwatch right so instead of these sort of also grand figures like Snowden who do these International things how about very local while politics is local you

01:01:56 know very local things like copat that are tracking you know police abuse on the streets and then the ways those people who are you know documenting that you know who might be a kind of investigative journalist are being preemptively arrested their equipment confiscated um all the sort of NYPD techniques against Occupy Wall Street uh attempts to visualize what was going on by the police during especially during the clearing out of zucati I mean these are ways that there's a prevention a preemptive intervention into the forms

01:02:28 of transparency that can happen from bottom up from the people on the streets so that to me concerns me that's why I think it's a Battleground and so think about it more in terms of warfare um in which case law is very important to uh you know to find curbs and to be part of that but when I think of at least the stories I've heard about the NYPD having built into their budgets the fact that these they're going to predict these lawsuits uh because because of their extra legal detention preemptive Detention of um

01:02:58 protesters on the streets of New York right so they figure that they're going to do this it's going to be illegal they're going to lose in court and they're going to have to pay out a civil case right so that's already built into the way that the strategy Works to manage descent and that to me is um where we need to think about who gets to be who who gets to uh produce a kind of transparency upon whom and under what conditions so would it be interesting to if there was

01:03:31 someone uh Among Us who was a Hightech person who could tell us what we would have to do to counter now they Google and some of the others are saying that in fact they're going to build devices that will prevent them from doing it um now I mean clearly one way is to try to prevent them by arguing from principles

01:04:01 of Law and Justice and so on another way of course is as in evolution you know something evolves and then uh those that survive have to evolve new things to do those old things and so that there is this kind of balance there's this kind of always tension that that exists in life so I can't imagine I mean I cannot imagine but I cannot not imagine that

01:04:34 there are Hightech folks who are figuring out ways that you might be able to scramble phone messages in some way or uh internet and so on and maybe what we need um uh to uh uh uh to equalize some of this this Injustice because it's happening to us but we don't have much lead except through the law to try to counter it maybe we need to develop you

01:05:05 know a new technology that I attach it to my phone for any phone call that I don't want anyone to be able to decipher I can tell you a little bit about that you know you know it turns out it's relatively simple to disguise the content of your internet communications your emails most people uh most people won't take the extra steps necessary and Gmail has no incentive to facilitate it because their business model is based upon access to

01:05:36 your email um but there are ways to encrypt those Communications what's much more difficult is to disguise your metadata uh and it turns out and the reason is because you generally need to expose your metadata so that your Communication Service knows where to send your information you if you're sending an email the the two line needs to be exposed so that the next computer knows where to send it there had you know there's a lot of research that's gone into had a disguise that originally funded by the Navy uh because the government wanted a way of securing its

01:06:07 internal Communications and so they invested heavily in uh what's a system of what's called onion routing where you would sequentially encrypt your Communications through a series of hops with the idea that no one hop knows the full path and it's very difficult to reconstruct um but these are you know difficult Technologies to use for most people um and I think they're part of the solution but they're not the full solution but if we have to do something like that what kind of society are we living in and what what is the

01:06:38 implication of having to protect ourselves and what's the implication of the government having the power to find out information about a private individual without regard to the you might say the basic rights of that person for privacy I mean where what's the implication have we undermined really the whole sense of democracy and a sense of of of trusting government it seems like the whole world is beginning

01:07:09 to shift in terms of what is really what are our values what are we dealing with here you know well you know some some of it's not new you know we we use envelopes when we send a mail generally most people don't send send truly private pieces of mail uh on uh postcards you know they don't write something very sensitive on a postcard they put it in an onvelope and uh it turns out that just the way the phone system is developed they're all like postcards uh when you are talking over

01:07:39 the phone there is nothing to prevent anyone who has access to the line anywhere along it from listening to the conversation there's no protection it's a postcard um and we have kind of a system of blind trust for the intermediaries but it's a trust that we're now learning is under Justified the same has largely been true of email email for most of its history has been communicated entirely unencrypted um if you send you know give you an example if you send a Gmail from a Gmail account to another Gmail account that's generally

01:08:10 encrypted internally to Gmail but if you send a Gmail email to someone on Yahoo's account the connection between Gmail and Yahoo is not encrypted so anyone and not just our government and not just a government but even a relatively unsophisticated hacker uh could intercept that communication so some of it I think is just common sense is putting the envelope on your communication um but I agree that we shouldn't have to it's sad it's a sad commentary that uh people in The Tech

01:08:40 Community are now thinking of their products from the no trust model right they're assuming that nothing can be trusted the server can't be trusted because the NSA has access to it the telecoms can't be trusted because they'll roll over and give up the information so let's design a system that is secure even if you can't trust the servers which is possible um you know but this is sad commentary but following up why would somebody want to have and you

01:09:11 can hear it a private conversation on their phone in a public place um uh I'm sure we all have experience people having fights on on the phone and and or o other kinds of things which are really private now we couldn't have done that before at best we could have been in a booth and they on the street but uh usually you were in office or home where you did those so we now have a

01:09:42 device um which promotes it um and it I believe promotes the idea that the isn't private that is I I don't only see it as the government uh I and and I guess I'm trying to think it through with something not just the government and us but something is happening uh commercial you were mentioning I mean there are some incredible things on online dating

01:10:16 now um you can fill out a form to begin with and you say you really want you're interested in dating brunettes and so the pictures and the information they send you are brunettes but they're not all brunettes now the uh devices now can monitor if you start hitting not on brunettes but on blondes let's say or or or blackhaired uh uh people and they will now switch they

01:10:49 will take your action rather than what you stated so we now have the and we know that in terms of buying things uh um um uh some these devices these algorithms can come up and and present you with things that you've done before that so even commercially they're they're keeping track of your behavior so it's endemic I guess is what I'm saying uh we've always had to protect

01:11:19 ourselves from the our government and our our our con institution our our initial struggle was to try to figure out how to do that for for this country but it's not only uh uh it's ourselves allowing ourselves uh less privacy and it is our Commerce in our commercial worlds in our everyday lives in which um people are keeping track of what we do what we're

01:11:51 buying and and so on on so um I guess I mean you know you read some of scal you know he would like us back to uh you can't go into your house well that's what it says uh you know fundamental interpretation it says you can't need a warrant to come into your home well talking on a phone is not your home so they could

01:12:21 argue we're not going to take take technology into account and of course the more Progressive arguments are that indeed it's the idea of privacy uh and protection but it just seems to me that we need a kind of of a balance a kind of Protection One in terms of understanding why we are giving up privacy and two mechanisms by which

01:12:52 those of us who want could reestablish it learning how to encode or getting the the tech folks to give us really very simple algorithms to make our job of uh encoding encrypting easier to do I'm going to I'm going to butt in here in the interest of time so I'm going to sum up and say that we're very trusting and we want to be close to people and be known and we're very curious and therefore very prying and we'll have to Grapple with that in the area of secrecy we're now open for questions for the next 20 minutes please to the microphone

01:13:24 if you'd like to ask you didn't really discuss and I'm interested in this because it's got to do with human nature I think the mechanism by which the NSA obtains the data for instance I suspect they don't really hack like you were saying I don't think they hack the lines and servers and stuff I think it works like this I'm guessing they get a court order and you

01:13:54 could help me here they get a court order that says okay you can go to Google or AOL and present it to the president and say we want your permission to tap into your memory your service Etc and the president of uh AOL thinks and says hey what if I said

01:14:27 no uh what would the government do if I refuse to obey the court order uh so I would like to know really the mechanism by which they're doing all this stuff and um maybe someone could tell me yeah there are a couple ways a number of ways they do it you know the vast majority of the information the NSA collects is not through hacking they do

01:14:58 do some hacking and there are you know documented cases of the FBI for example seeking hacking orders in order to remotely turn on the video camera on someone's uh laptop without that person knowing so hacking happens but the vast majority of what the NSA does is not through hacking it's either through court orders directing companies to turn over information so for example the very first document that Edward Snowden revealed to the world was that order from the secret foreign intelligence surveillance Court uh compelling Verizon business Network

01:15:29 Services which is a subsidiary of Verizon to turn over on an ongoing daily basis uh records of every single call that came across the network that either started in or ended in the United States um so that is an example there are similar types of orders that allow programs of surveillance directed at Google Yahoo uh Microsoft Etc um and then there there's a lot of surveillance that takes place outside the United States um either through uh alliances

01:15:59 with uh other countries with their intelligence Services uh or through uh picking up information off the wire kind of physical hacking or tapping um or picking it up out of the air using satellite uh and radio wave surveillance which happens um but the vast is not through hacking and you're absolutely right about that don't H well they're compelled by court order they can challenge those orders uh they don't have a great

01:16:29 incentive to it's interesting you know this type of order the one that was directed to Verizon there have been similar ones to all the major companies and they've been going to those companies every 90 days since 2006 uh so each one of them has received dozens of orders not a single one of the telecoms has challenge that order even though on its face it's uh extraordinary you know every single a record of every single call that comes across your network whether it's related to a terrorist or not hand over um and not a single one has challenged them but they

01:17:01 could challenge them the reason they don't have an incentive is because a they have a very close working relationship with the government they have a lot of government contracts so they have an a financial incentive not to B the statute immunizes them so they're they're not they don't suffer any legal liability for turning over your call records you can't sue them uh and see they're compensated at fair market value by the statute for their cooperation so they're getting paid um so they don't have much of an incentive you know on the other side on the the side of the uh service providers the internet the tech companies as opposed to the telecoms the tech companies have

01:17:33 occasionally pushed back um the the the last major one was by Yahoo uh back in 2007 um haven't really been any major challenges from the tech companies since although they're starting to ramp up their efforts now and they're pushing back a little bit uh but they have the same uh you know relationships with the government they have the same immunity provided by the statute and they have the same provision for fair market compensation please introduce yourself when you come up um Greg Burke um it

01:18:04 seems we've heard that there has been a tcid kind of balance between individuals and institutions right institutions I mean maybe governments or Societies or businesses things like that over time where there's a an understanding that there's a certain amount of uh less than um free discussion going on between each other in terms of what information we've heard about the you know being polite and uh we all tacitly

01:18:35 never believe anything that we see on television for instance um in terms of advertisements and stuff like that and it's been acceptable over the years there's been a certain balance um now we have this huge amount of technology that seems to shift the balance away from from the individual towards institutions with regard to how to manipulate this interaction of the dance of uh social commerce and um particularly I'm concerned now with um

01:19:08 how is the individual uh as a responsible in the Democratic Society supposed to get the information that is uh necessary to make decisions about voting um the issue here is is uh believing what you hear from politicians from people who are actually in the government um the it seems to me that we have in our society now created a uh paranoia about terrorism that requires a

01:19:41 lot of people to want to give up certain rights and um this is a an opportunity to manipulate and uh I just see this huge imbalance now because people I can't figure out what's true I mean how can you all on the panel here figure out what's true uh in terms of being able to make a informed decision as a citizen to vote both from what the government is telling you and what you see on the news I I read Wiki and that's how I found out about the prison program and

01:20:12 how uh Google collaborated with the government with the leak so that's my source of but this is not just happening to us we are participating in this and I guess that's been the psychological Point I've been trying to understand is to what degree have we psychologically moved away from this idea of the

01:20:43 private and I think that one could find many many examples of a shift during the same period and maybe even longer to that makes it easier for the government to in fact do some of these things um the shift to telephone conversations in public just simply that now my wife and I were in Paris we've

01:21:13 just come back and shockingly there are not many people on the phone walking the streets uh and it was striking the difference uh in the two MA you know two major cities in the world in this city you can't go a block without someone talking and hearing them and that's not the case in a week of walking in Paris

01:21:43 so I think there's something happening psychologically uh and I and I think we can even find it in some of our theories and and and uh uh that suggest that um uh uh privacy in terms of uh not expressing what you really think or not uh um uh

01:22:15 doing such I'll be brief um is in fact changing us and making us more susceptible to it now it was interesting because you asked what we could do I mean there is some outrage and and it's going on for a while but it's shocking how little there is and I'd be very curious if people don't use their phone as much or don't use email as much

01:22:46 knowing that potentially someone could be listening in and Gathering data so are we it's happening to us but I think some other things are happening there's a psychology that is happening at the same time uh which is playing into this can can I just suggest one thing because we've had this conversation a little bit today but is it possible that most of that shift is at the margins because I I suspect that if you ask the person who's on their phone walking down New York

01:23:17 having what is usually an conversation with a mom or a dad not it's not usually the most private conversation in the world but suppose even if it is if you ask that person would you share with me your Gmail password uh tell me your Social Security number uh allow me to install video equipment in your home they'll say no to those things so you know I I I think there's a core of privacy that persists even if there is a shift at the margins sure but is it is it just at the margins I think the question question is is it is it at the well do you mean margin in terms of

01:23:49 people or not I mean I've been in restaurants where uh you know a young woman is talking to her mother and having an argument about something and which I'm privy to and she does not uh she is not uh this doesn't seem to bother her that a complete stranger is listening to this going on now do does everyone do it no of course not people lots of people don't talk on their phones unless they really need to or

01:24:20 just small exchange of information so in some sense it's not everyone doing it but um I do think um for example etiquette which disappeared in the 60s when the idea was no you let it all hang out um uh there's a struggle etiquette books disappeared there actually have reappeared which is kind of is a kind of an interesting phenomena but it uh it

01:24:50 now is you you you can't have a private for you uh you you have to make it public if someone asks you a question good interpersonal life was you gave L the answer so I don't know how marginal it is uh but I would be concerned in in the struggle with this with government which is what are a major concern is here I would be concerned that it's not them just doing it to us and if they are

01:25:21 doing it to us in that we are becoming more compliant uh psychologically to it time for a couple more questions I hope you I think people waiting or no um I just want to ask uh about what you guys think is the role of the psychology of fear in the way lots of this policy has been crafted because it seems to me that the way that the nsa's role has grown comports with what

01:25:53 millions of years of evolution have forged in us there's the classical example of you have an animal in the savannah it hears the GL grass rustling behind it and it could make two types of mistakes in that situation it could uh worry that there's the threat uh and turn around and there's nothing which is a mistake or it could assume that it was just the wind but it's actually a predator and a de um and so of course Evolution like pushes Us in the direction of uh leaping at a threat that may not be present and it seems

01:26:25 that um our reaction to one very significant but I relatively isolated terrorist events has uh had a very profound effect on our governmental policy and the way that we all have sort of accepted changes in our own security and so because this is such a deep-seated strong evolutionarily formed uh predisposition I I wonder if there's a real plausible way of of of fighting against it because it's such a um um such a strong urge I'll just add I mean before the the human nature component of

01:26:57 this we just add that there's a whole layer of mediated repetition of the trauma that happens that reactivates that moment too right so the annual um replaying of the images the you know the the you know Bush's um you know the security codes and the color codes and the constant reminding of people that we're at we're at War right so I think regardless of whether this uh you know what it touches in terms of sort of the the sort of basic dimensions of being a human the cultural mediated dimensions

01:27:28 are very political in terms of that can be changed like there's no reason why we have to say Okay well this is a defining moment of our entire senses of self as As Americans because we've been attacked um and which is something that you know other countries around the world go through on a daily basis right so this sort of American exceptionalism is something also I think that is a cultural dimension of this fear that it's not just we have been at War as a society we haven't stopped from the second world war we have the Korean War

01:28:00 we have been we have had an enemy I mean we could start looking at paranoia and charge understand or or or or uh um uh uh we've had an enemy for the last 75 years there's always been an enemy true but at the same time the 911 acted like an acute trauma in some sense was unexpected I

01:28:31 mean we we should have expected it but people didn't expect it because we've been fighting out there we haven't had something hit us in quite this way so it acts like a a traumatic event to which it's almost like we're acting all of us in a post-traumatic Neurosis I mean in the sense that we're always on guard against the repetition of the trauma and that gets extended into policy and into the public arena in such a way as to cause a

01:29:04 whole shift in our world since that happened we've had a major shift in this country towards alarm alarm signal reaction and I don't think that's going to be easily reversed you know um I have a slightly different Focus I was struck by your analogy of the uh the supernatural detective who could figure anything out

01:29:36 retroactively and the uh Assumption of this broad data collection is essentially I think that if we have the data somehow we can reconstruct the past and do so with great accuracy uh or with sufficient accuracy and I'm thinking immediately of a couple things one is um Google Books where Google is going around uh scanning books uh I don't know if any of you have

01:30:08 ever had the experience of actually looking at these books they're terrible uh no they scan them but they don't proofread them and I know I mean I got downloaded some of these books some of them are unreadable they're goblook uh I noticed for example even here we have to have technicians coming around constantly adjusting to get I mean this

01:30:40 is open recording you know there's no secrecy about it uh and yet it takes apparently a great deal of uh tending to make sure that you get a good recording um you know great deal of data who obviously if we if we record everybody's data technically if it were all listened to it would mean that everybody would

01:31:10 have to be working to listen to everybody's data uh you know there's a mathematical problem almost um um the the existence of the data I think often gives people the idea that somehow that data is knowledge whereas often I think it's not data but interpretation and I'm also responding to uh the personal experience of having

01:31:42 been the subject of a government investigation many years ago for political activity during the Vietnam war and I got a copy of the the investigative report and I wrote a response to it which began with the sentiment that as a taxpayer I was greatly disappointed in the low quality of the investigation uh I I mean I'm not going to bother to go but it was it was I was

01:32:15 appalled this is what they came up with how much did they spend for this um so I um I think I'm part what I'm I'm saying here is yeah there's an issue about the collection of data but there's also an issue I think about the perception of almost um you know Supernatural knowledge and so forth which I think is very very questionable but it you know knowledge

01:32:48 or the perception of knowledge also is power so I don't know if anybody wants to comment on those comments but those are some of M I would say right I mean that could be very politically disabling to think that there's nothing that can be done all this data is is out there the government is perfectly efficient as we're talking about efficiency like creating the algorithms that can detect all these things so so the notion of that actually shifts a kind of power Dynamic that says we we can't do anything about it um but it's also it's just so perfectly done I mean that when

01:33:19 I study conspiracy theories sometimes The Sassy at the end of U East Germany and the efforts to reconstruct and understand what people thought they they knew and also of course to find out in many cases with great sadness who had been informing exactly that's the thing I think that was also the the feeling of distrust uh and the ability the inability

01:33:49 to to to have a working democracy basically in in a an environment of such potential betrayal and distrust you know the lesson of the the 911 Commission report was not that we didn't have enough information but but that we didn't analyze it properly but the response was to collect more uh out out of a fear that or or suspicion I suppose that if we just have more information we'll solve but you're right you know data can

01:34:20 lie which is one of the reasons why the government relies more heavily on metadata because metadata is doesn't lie as easily um or or it's more easy it's more difficult to to you know to obscure but um I think it's a good point Carl clean from New York um I think the panel's covered a whole variety of different things and it's hard to be um focused I wanted to bring the discussion back a little bit more to what Dr Lewis was starting to talk about

01:34:51 I think uh which is rather than the issue of National Security and spying and the threat to civil liberties or the uh restrictions of civil liberties that have always happened when those things have been threatened and how much worse all of this could be now with and is with the explosion of information and the explosion of the technology and the accessibility to information what interest uh what interests me more uh in no way to slight the importance of all that but what

01:35:22 interests me more is the information that we give away so and willingly and the implications uh of that and that is you know all U given the accessibility on the internet of uh all the data including our financial data our Medical Data our legal data our personal lives what we do and what we don't do how we spend our money Etc uh I wondered if the uh if the panel could comment more about this

01:35:53 psychological social and even political ramifications of that leaving out for the moment the special issue of National Security and and uh and national Safety and versus but the whole change in privacy uh or the way and the way in which at least in America and maybe in the rest of the world we kind of willingly are that's sort of gone or largely compromised sorry that so so it's a question about the freely and

01:36:23 willingly um this I think it was maricio lerado who said right in the 60s self-expression was a sign of Freedom um uh today it's a it's it's an obligation and a compulsion um which is and not just a psychological one but an economic one it's an imperative that people create digital profiles um young people do right in order to be able to get jobs right so so that's one way it's like there's constant need to express oneself to show oneself uh digitally Communication in order to connect with

01:36:54 the world there's partially that I think there's also there is a a change in what it means to share um I don't think it means people just you know produce everything and and without thinking about it I mean um there are new words I say in our vocabulary only adolesence on sorry only adolescence texting to each other um sorry are adolescence texting to each other I mean that's a particular form of communication I mean texting sure sure um do that too yeah so so I'm

01:37:24 thinking about words that have entered the vocabulary like oversharing and TMI which young people also use right too much information right um so it's not as though it's it's un unfiltered um I think the questions of etiquette protocol and what these filters are um haven't been part of a discussion enough um but we're not also asking young people um enough like how are they already managing this privacy they don't want parents looking they don't want employers looking at at everything right um they don't even want their Partners

01:37:55 their romantic Partners looking at all of their communication either um so the I would just want to complicate the notion that it's the sort of this flood um that almost is is is coming from individuals rather than a social um compulsion again around um express yourself or there's something questionable about you if you don't express yourself if you're not available um uh if you're not on call 247 says the family says uh the job um says reality TV right you're hiding something so I think that what we've lost is a notion that yeah that we might want to say like

01:38:26 there's something worth hiding which is a different one than just saying people are just giving uh freely and willingly but but but what is it worth um protecting not just as privacy but as secrecy which might be a little different too and you know I'd also suggest that it's it's may be more a difference in degree and not necessarily a difference in kind you've always had to share extraordinarily personal information uh in order to obtain certain Services it's true now your medical records for example are often available online but those medical records used to reside in your doctor's office the digitization makes them more easily accessible and brings you know

01:38:58 with it complicated questions about informational security and privacy there's another con though uh again the audience has more gray hair than uh uh than the population at large but clearly I mean you're going to a restaurant and someone's taking a picture of what they're eating to send to someone as they're eating it or

01:39:29 describing what they're doing in the here and now and um so these are another kind of information but but it's hard to compare that to what would have happened 50 years ago when the technology didn't exist if you put that technology in the hands of someone point my point is the technology allows for it yeah and I do believe there are social rules psychological uh or uh things that are changing uh in modern uh um uh

01:40:02 societies which are inducing this uh loneliness I mean silence not having uh you know not having it light all the time or you know being in the dark uh we evolved with light and dark uh we we don't have to be in the dark anymore uh uh we can go on and on uh you can talk to someone in a continuous fashion uh we're texting in cars as we're driving I

01:40:34 mean there is a lot of insanity uh if you look at it from a cultural point of view that are going on I mean it yes you you come you have a nice dinner and you talk about it uh you say gee we went to the wonderful restaurant and you should go if and we had this dish and you describe it if you're a foodie but now you could take a picture of it and not only show it later but show it at the time you're eating it you're not going to show it later that's

01:41:04 the thing I mean so so why not just think of it as temporality like I'm doing it now I don't have to deal with it later um so it's a moment where it interrupts the present but it it just because tempor present does it it takes it out of the private takes it out of eating the meal at least either by yourself or with the person you're eating with and now you make it a public eating this dessert is now a public act now if you think about it okay I mean

01:41:36 maybe that's a good thing I don't know but it sure as hell is a new thing well it's always a Public Act you're in a restaurant doing it the question is how big the audience is we're streaming this event right or or it'll be streamed at some point has the has the role of privacy changed in in child development in families and I think it has changed yes it's an evolving thing it's no longer the strict kinds of demarcations that used to exist as a historical artifact that my father was not my friend he was my father and now fathers

01:42:06 have to be friends uh you know uh and what what what does friendship require Well friendship requires to you know a reciprocality uh which means giving up some of your privacy I I actually have been trying to understand that I'm not sure it's a good thing uh I'm just not sure that it isn't leading indeed our parenting is not in fact leading uh a whole gener a whole new set

01:42:38 of generation almost two now to in fact not to just to know everything and and and this is part of it it's ongoing knowing everything now that's a setup when you say there's danger out there and we're going to protect you because you used to it to begin with and now you've got a they giving you some kind of what seems like a good reason uh which of course as you were saying isn't

01:43:11 I mean uh one you have to analyze this huge amount that you're collecting which is not easy to do but but the fact is I think there is a psychological change and I think we as older people in fact are not as susceptible to it and I know as I the young and look at the public Behavior Uh I mean others in the room look at a therapeutic sense and and a and a different kinds of behavior but uh

01:43:43 in a public Behavior I see things which are just out of out of my experience I think we have time for one more question so that's two short ones okay I'm Alexi crais I'm an analyst here at New York psychic so I had I think going through a few of the things I'm here closer sorry um trust and mistrust can you believe anything or can you you know uh certainly at the governmental to

01:44:15 private citizen level but I think it also comes up in the use of the technology in families and talking about Child Development um sometimes I'll have parents in my office who will say you know um my kids new phone has GPS on it should I track them um well maybe uh and then hopefully we can get into a discussion of what would the purpose of tracking them be what information would they gain from

01:44:46 that what would they do with that information um and uh then it doesn't become an easy yes or no answer at that point which I think is good um it could come up in other ways uh you know is the government benevolently listening to everything or are they really just looking for terrorists or you know one of I think Obama's not finest moments was basically telling us don't worry about what the NSA is doing right but in a family that might be okay in a

01:45:16 family uh a teenager might come home with alcohol on his breath and a parent may think should I say something should I not say something well that depends have you talked about this before is this the first time is this the 10th time and hopefully what's there is a situ a relationship in which you can maybe trust your teenager to a certain point but not too much uh but that it's established and that you can count on it in some way obviously when

01:45:47 we're talking about private citizens and the government we can't do that some people feel you can't trust anything they say some people feel well you know they probably know what they're doing so that's why we have rules and I'm very thankful we have people like you uh guarding our uh but the balance of those things uh but I think it comes up uh in in other ways too one other comment just on the uh issue of uh sort of groups and descent uh who was it one of the Times oped columnist from many years ago wrote

01:46:19 a column saying never use your credit card always pay cash right it was the libertarian guy I can't remember his name uh and I thought well why I mean I it's easy to use a credit card it's convenient well okay but I'm not doing anything terribly embarrassing on my credit card or subversive but if I were a little bit then I would probably want to be able to pay cash and not worry about it and not have myself targeted in some way so I think uh with texting and

01:46:49 with every email being possibly recorded we may be making a whitebred society where it's really dangerous to say anything that's a little too provocative if you're a student who wants to go to college one day God forbid somebody from the admissions office somewhere should see your Facebook where maybe you were holding a beer and you were underage uh etc etc I'll just say that in the 1980s de kenned had a had a an album called give me convenience or give me death and I

01:47:19 think 40 years ago to today it still works um quick comment I don't have a Facebook profile and I have experienced a certain amount of peer pressure to get one I've had friends say to me come on it's fun and and I feel like an anomaly that I don't and and um so it's been that's been interesting I know I'm missing out on certain information from from the community too um but my quick question is were you recommending that individuals encrypt their email correspondence and if so how do we get

01:47:51 the information I'm happy to talked about the technology effort if you like uh you know it turns out if you encrypt your emails there are special rules that apply for the nsa's collection and they can collect and keep that information indefinitely under pretty much any one of their programs uh so the more you try to protect your privacy the more susceptible you are to NSA surve now they may not be able to decrypt it immediately but they can keep it so long as uh as they deem fit I think this is really one of the fundamental paradox of the situation it's the hackers are the

01:48:22 people that are like you know involved in protecting our privacy it's these kinds of dichotomies no don't draw attention to yourself and there are Ro you know there are interesting questions about the role of attention and direction of attention in terms of constructing the self when you have all of this information equally available the one thing that technology can do is make passive or pervasive or drag net surveillance costly enough not to be effective it can force the government to engage and targeted rather than draget surveillance and the virtue

01:48:53 of that is that uh you know the government then will use its limited resources where it should and it turns out even if you encrypt your Communications it's very easy to encrypt your Communications in transit but it's very difficult to secure your endpoints it's very difficult to sec to secure your laptop or to secure your uh your desktop and that's because Windows and Mac and all these operating systems are fundamentally insecure because they're too complicated to make secure um and so if the NSA wants to get you in a targeted way they can and there's nothing to stop them and that might be a good thing because they're generally

01:49:24 when they use their resources in a targeted way are focusing on the right people um and so technology can make untargeted surveillance difficult and force the government to engage in the type of targeted surveillance it should be engaging in so if I could say yes to you and 350 million other people I would um but if if it's just yeah you know we can talk about it right thank everybody for coming and for participating so thoroughly and thank our panelists very very much