YouSaid · the spoken record

Bart Gellman

lines on the record: 86
first: 2020-06-08
most recent: 2020-06-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It's very interesting. It's about to start, but there are all kinds of bookstores and public events like New York Public Library That we're going to have in person events. They're now switching to virtual, and they're expecting to have actually more people attend. And the virtual side then would have come in person. I wish I could sign the books that way.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's not gonna matter. Elon Musk just broke rules in Alameda County and his factory's opening. Memo to everybody. They have as much power as they want, and we have to figure out a way. The only thing.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is so much economic momentum and power in the private sector side that is in favor of greater and greater and more granular surveillance, that it is, I don't know, I don't know what kind of society we're moving into, but I worry about it a lot. I worry a lot about the capacity to be tracked at all times in my behavior, in my location, in my associations. I think it is dystopic in its implications, and I don't know how to stop it. And unaccountable. It is absolutely unaccountable. And you were right, week after week, I listened to your.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the good thing was just far greater consciousness of and a far greater investment in electronic security. The internet was an open book not only to governments but also to hackers and criminals in 2013 in ways that it just is not nearly so much today. The average person has a great deal more digital security now than they had then and they have that because of Snowden and because of the forces he set. In motion. And I think the same goes for the public debate about the boundaries of intelligence in a free society. The thing that I worry about is that”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. All right, so finishing up, it's seven years, I guess it's 2013 when this information was leaked out since this has been leaked out. If you had to pick one thing that you think good came out of this, of what he did, and one thing that you are worried about, the thing that you are focused on going forward, what would those two things be?”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, of course, you have people who will refuse to report themselves to be positive or refuse to use the thing at all. You could also have people who would pretend to be positive in order to, I mean, let's suppose you go into a meeting or an encounter with your competitors, your competitors are all gathered together in one place and you report yourself to be positive. Now, all those people have to be quarantined. There are worse ways that I've heard of that I'm not going to broadcast here that the system could be abused that sound to me as though they'd be very damaging.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Designed their API to be privacy protecting. So it does not send data about individuals back to some central server. It does not track location. It tracks proximity using Bluetooth of devices. And so the design of it is intended to protect privacy. I think it is nonetheless open to all kinds of abuse. and of unclear actual value. I mean, this strikes me as being a tech project that tech people initiated saying, we have a cool idea for something that we can do that would help you. It's not clear to me that public health people actually want or need this tool. And it may very well be that to make it more effective would make it much more privacy invading. It's also... easy to come up with scenarios in which someone could game or troll the system in very damaging ways. For example, it relies on self-reporting.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So contact tracing is really important. It's one of the fundamental ways that we defend ourselves against. A highly transmissible disease. Testing, tracing, quarantine, and so on. And contact tracing has always been done, and it's been done by hand by interviews. Apple and Google have come into this project with admirable openness, I think. And they have”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, unless I'd be remiss in our last question, what about in the age of coronavirus where they want to do contact tracing, where there's going to be that they're looking to collect a lot of data, although that seems mostly to be not working out so well due to incompetence. But would you worry about that idea of Apple and Google building a contact tracing app? The government having all this information about you? Leaking elsewhere? Do you think people will be more willing to give up information?”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Somewhere else. And so you have to worry about the potential of certain kinds of surveillance machinery of being misused. There are some machines that are so dangerous that maybe we shouldn't build them.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They find a reason. And especially when it happens in secret, there's no defense. That's one thing, the slippery slope. The other part is the bad actors. You have within living memory, President Nixon who used the resources of the state for domestic espionage, for political espionage, and to punish political enemies. You have a plenty of examples of things that Donald Trump has at least tried to do. NYPD spying on mosques. You have the FBI spying on the private life of Martin Luther King because he's a dangerous and effective negro that was their words and inviting him to commit suicide if he wanted to prevent the disclosure of tapes of his affairs with other women. Bad people sometimes get their hands on the levers of power. It happens in this country just as it does.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All the metadata on everybody. And then it turns out that they don't just use it For counterterrorism operations or the Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act allows something called the PRISM program. And it turns out that they're collecting a lot of American data that way. What if they start using it for any other investigation? This tends to be a one-way valve. Somebody says, Well, we have this big pile of data, it would be very valuable in order to stop this or that or improve this or that.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We should worry about slippery slopes, I think, and we should worry about bad actors. So the slippery slope part is you say we're going to collect information only about terrorists to stop terrorism episodes, to catch terrorist networks for terrorism networks. And next thing you know, you're collecting every phone number from every American. That's literally what happened. The Bush administration called the terrorist surveillance program, which really became a program to collect.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But if someone decided that I own the data about me and no one can take it and sell it and And aggregate it without my permission. And if permission didn't just mean clicking a 15,000 word privacy policy, then this could all change substantially. There's a gigantic multibillion dollar industry that depends on that not changing. So it's a heavy lift if we're going to make any progress here. But I don't know what else could do it.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have nothing to hide, and you're wrong about that. Your friends and family have something to hide. Someone has told you that she's thinking of leaving her boyfriend. Someone's told you he's about to quit his job. Someone's told you that their kid has a drug problem. You are the keeper of other people's secrets in your digital space. And you're not entitled to behave as though you don't care about the privacy of those things. very unclear what we can do about it. I mean, people have to care more. People have to demand more in terms of privacy. But I think there would actually have to be a huge change in the legal regime of information and property for our relationship with these companies to change. We don't own our data. And that's a legal construct. Someone decided we don't own our data.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, there are a lot of people who say, first of all, I've got nothing to hide. Those people never really mean it. And if you, if you've... Can show them in any sort of granular way how much is known about them. They are mortified and humiliated. And even if you think”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I So what is one to do? How do you look at the state of American surveillance? Is it just a continuous state? Because what I say is I agree with you on the second point is that people don't realize quite how much they're taking, along with the stuff you know that they're taking. But we become these sort of cheap dates to internet companies in that we get a map or a app or a dating thing and they get everything else, including making money off of it. What should people be worried about from a government level and a consumer level?”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I'm sure Facebook has a hundred copies of it because they've persuaded people who don't understand what they're doing to upload their address books to Facebook. So any number of my friends who know my cell phone number click the button without paying much attention that said, sure, take all my contacts, Facebook. And so now they know my cell phone number. I can't protect myself against that.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you said earlier, and a lot of people say this, and I know you understand the nuances, but you said that we give so much information freely to these big companies Just by carrying our phones around or shopping or making a posting on Facebook. And what hardly anyone understands is how much information is taken from us without our knowing it. What Facebook knows about you, only a small percentage of it is what you tell Facebook deliberately. Facebook collects thousands of different signals about you that come from your machine, that come from your behavior around the internet that is surveilled by Facebook, Java applets that are placed on websites around the world that come from your friends. I, for example, would never give Facebook my cell phone number.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not a million or a billion, a trillion. That's with 12 out of the 21. And then you start to feel like you've been lied to I mean, if your teenage daughter told you she had a party while you were out of town, but she only invited 12 people, no problem, you would be distressed and pissed off to find out that she actually had a trillion people attend. You would feel you were lied to, and we were lied to.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, look, here's an example. The problem was Simulation by the government. There was a famous provision of the USA Patriot Act, Section 215. People called it the library proviso because people imagined that the government would be getting copies of people's library borrowing records and spy on them that way. But what it really said was the government with a warrant could get access to any business record, any tangible thing. And the FBI, which made use of this power, would report every year, look, we only use this 21 times. We're doing it discreetly, proportionately, narrowly, and you don't have to worry about us abusing this power. Now they're all secret because they're all classified, but we're telling you the number. It was only 21 times this year. Then you find out by inference from the documentation provided by Edward Snowden that with 12 of those 21 warrants, they were obtaining a trillion telephone records.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, the American surveillance establishment is bound by law and under a legal structure. The problems have been that we didn't know what the law was, that there is such a thing as secret law in this country. And that's a scary and dangerous thing. About one or another's disclosure, about the NSA, you would have people like Bob Litt come out and he was the general counsel for the Director of National Intelligence. And say every single thing of this story you describe, you describe here is lawful. It's done under color of law. And there is a great saying by an author named Michael Kinsley that sometimes the scandal is what's legal, especially if you didn't know it was legal, especially if you had been led to believe by public statements that it wasn't legal.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it's like a party. It's a party for them. It's an intelligence party in a lot of ways. So what is the current American surveillance state? Obviously, we've read a lot about China and the use of facial recognition and AI and what they're doing to the Uyghurs and everything. What is it here? How do you look at the American surveillance state in the United States? Probably, I mean, I've written this. We're the most surveilled people on the planet, not just Americans, but across the globe because of cell phones. And a lot of it is we decide to let that happen. But talk about what you consider to be the dangers of what's coming up given this vast trove of data that people now have, intelligence officials especially have to follow us and track us.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is therefore going to be some intelligence that they could have gathered in the past that is harder for them to gather now. There's just no getting around that. It's impossible for me to know what the harm is because the harm would itself be classified and I don't have access to that now. It's impossible for the government to know itself what it doesn't get. That it might have got otherwise. So there has to be some harm there. I still would maintain that there is no intelligence official who would trade the access to information they have right now in the post-Snowden era with what they had access to 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, or any other time in American history. The landscape of digital data is so vast, the ability to home in on”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think Snowden's disclosures and the countermeasures taken by large players on the Internet, primarily the hardening of communication links, make it much harder for the NSA to collect everything now. It still has the ability to crack into just about any target in the world. It has the best hackers and an extraordinary Infrastructure, extraordinary resources. And if the NSA says, I'm going to come and surveil Kara, they're going to do it. There's almost no stopping them. There's hardly anyone in the world who can protect against a targeted attack. What Snowden made hard was collecting the whole bulk.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, let's talk about the risk. I would love you to what harm do you think it did? I'm curious, you talked about it in the book, but some harms to intelligence gathering, but not to democracy. That's a very good way of putting it. What has changed in the gathering of information by intelligence agencies”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so government, I mean, I guess you could say Snowden did some harm to intelligence gathering, and he did some good, I think a great deal of good to democracy. Snowden also did a great deal of good for internet security because of him, you have a vast transition from an unsecured internet to a secured internet so that today almost every website starts off with HTTPS secure socket layers encryption that makes it much safer to do your banking and your shopping and to secure your personal information and also to secure yourself against surveillance by any government.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, Snowden does not like to talk about harms. I can see that there must have been some, but you have two very fundamental priorities of society that are colliding here, as they often collide. I mean, sometimes, for example, maybe the economy and public health in the time of coronavirus may pull you in opposite directions. It's also true that self-government and self-defense can pull you in opposite directions. If we know, then our enemies know. If we don't know, then we can't make basic decisions about how we want to run ourselves as a society. We can't make basic decisions about what we're willing to grant in terms of power to our government. And if the government is spying on us in secret, it is changing the nature of the relationship between governed and government in ways that citizens can't accept.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sorry, literally, trader means that you have changed your allegiance from the United States to an enemy state and that you do what you do with an effort to harm your own government and society. That's literally the opposite of what's Snowden did. Whether you agree with it or not, Snowden believes that he was acting on our behalf. Snowden believes that he was acting on behalf of democracy and on behalf of the citizens' right to understand what was being done in their name and done to them. And he explicitly was looking to create reform in Arrow inside not to harm it.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So what do you think his motivation is? How would you describe for what he was doing? Because he's a complex person. And again, I don't mean to make it seem small, but he reminds me of a lot of the people I cover. He has the same sort of attitudes, same level of arrogance, the righteousness. Do you consider him a traitor?”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This widget attaches to that widget or this system collects from that collection point, I found those things to be remarkably accurate over time.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We still talk from time to time, although there can be long, long gaps between. And the truth is I spent so much time with my head down writing this book that I wasn't much good company for anyone for a while there. The relationship has ebbed and flowed. It was always fraught. It began with suspicion. I didn't know who this guy was, whether he knew what he was talking about. He didn't know whether he could believe in me to do what I said I would do to publish over government pressure. And we did have government pressure. There were government efforts to dissuade us at least from publishing certain parts of the story. And there are certain parts of the story we didn't publish. We were suspicious of each other, but we came to build a considerable amount of trust. I found him to be very reliable about things that he could state as facts. He had opinions. He had sort of”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Either speaking their minds or being suspected of being the kinds of people who will speak their minds. And you have nakedly political and unqualified people at the top of the intelligence community now who are just obvious cronies of the president without experience in the intelligence world, the kind of people who would never have been appointed by any other president, Republican, or Democrat to these jobs. So yeah, they're trying to wait it out and keep their head down and avoid any further damage if they can. It's really what the cyber experts would call security by obscurity. They're trying not to be noticed.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the intelligence community is trying to wait it out and is doing the best it can. But every time someone sticks his head up or her head up, you've had a decapitation of some of the finest intelligence officers and managers in the government. You've had people fired for”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So what will happen now from your perspective of this? And then when we get back after the break, I want to talk about what is the American surveillance state right now. But the impact being is they're going to wait it out or what do you imagine?”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, look, I think if you were at a certain level of government and you go to work for a guy like Donald Trump, you have to be prepared to be fired. It's the only defense you have against being entirely corrupted if things go in that direction. The intelligence community likes to talk about speaking truth to power. That is one of many ways in which they actually resemble journalism. They gather information, they sift it, they analyze it, they publish it for whatever publishing means in their world. And they feel a very strong norm of speaking truth to power, of telling people what is happening, whether or not it's what their consumers want to be happening. And they have to live up to those words. And if they can't live up to those words, they have to resign. That's my view. As a citizen, that's what I would want my public servants to be doing.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, they gave that talk, and their honest assessment using the best intelligence and the best analysis they could bring to bear was different than what Trump said about Iran, was different than what Trump said about North Korea. And he freaked out. And he reamed people out. And this year, when it came time for this annual threat assessment, the intelligence community said, we're not going to make one. We're not going to give public testimony. We're going to give it only in classified form, in written form, to Congress. So there won't be any public disclosure, which is a huge damage to the ability of this democracy to understand and debate its own national security priorities. They did it solely for the reason that they were afraid of the president.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there's a huge struggle inside the institutional arms of government to maintain standards, to maintain rules and norms. And it's an ongoing battle, and I don't think we have seen the end of it yet. It's most obvious and most in the public eye in the Justice Department. But let's take an example. A year and a half ago, the US intelligence community gave its annual assessment of the world. It's a public testimony in which the Director of National Intelligence and the heads of some of the large intelligence agencies come to both houses of Congress and explain the state of the world. What's the threat landscape? Facing Americans. And they talk in detail about terrorism and regional disputes and nuclear proliferation and hacking and cybersecurity and so on.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, where does that put us right now? Where does that put us right now in the National Intelligence? That you keep reading through its sources set and that there's fighting back, that they're trying to keep their standards up, but where are they actually from your perception? Where is this given how far we've traveled since Edward Snowden, where do you put them right now?”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, then comes Trump. And it's not that he disdains national security, although he does. And it's not just that he disdains their advice, although he does. It's this fundamental sense that he is not constrained by rules, that the law and the regulations and the traditions that they rely on are of no value to him, and that he has demonstrated a remarkable ability to suborn people, to lure them across lines that they did not think that they would cross. And this is... One of Trump's superpowers is that he manages to tank people. He manages to get them to do things they thought they would never do. And suddenly they find themselves without quite understanding how they got there saying things and doing things that would have been out of the question a year or two earlier.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the members of this club, the members of the National Security Establishment, people who grew up and spent careers in it and did their best and had honest motives and believed that what they were doing was critical to the survival of the country. They recognized the power and the potential and the intrusiveness of what they do. They understood that in the wrong hands bad things could happen, but they believed in the system. They believed in the values of the workforce. They believed in the potential of rules to constrain behavior. They thought the system was working just as it should be. Everyone knew what the Fourth Amendment was. Everyone knew what the regulations were. There were well-developed levels of oversight inside the system. And so the fact that the public couldn't oversee what was happening was of no consequence.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So talk about how that's changed now. How do you perceive how it's changed? Do you think there is a rethinking of Snowden? And then the next section I'd like to talk a little bit about your relationship with him, because I think and what he represents from your perspective as you depict him in this book. But talk a little bit about what's changed. How has, it's just because Trump disdains national security, that he's more interested in surveillance or he's not interested in surveillance because right now he's accusing Obama gate as whatever that crime is that he seems to be talking about. It has to do with this idea of surveillance.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From those groups. And then it was sort of like we'd like to see it so we could see whether we should hate you or not. But it was sort of the idea that we're doing this in your best interests. This is good for you, whether you know it or not, and you don't even know what we've stopped, essentially, all the different attacks that you didn't know were happening, which is also the staple of movies and things like that, or homelands.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This visceral sense of betrayal and that this kid, Snowden, who was 29 at the time the first stories appeared, that this kid should take it upon himself to disclose their secrets. They're disposed to believe in the early days that the damage is greater even than it is. I mean, the sense of betrayal, the sense of feeling that there could be no possible justification for this conversation. There could be no possible justification for not trusting them. Why didn't everyone”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“summer camp for the national security establishment out in Colorado for four days a year. I've been going there for years. I would get on stage. I would interview people, moderate a conversation. It's all done at arm's length, but it's ultimately a friendly enterprise. It just happened that I was scheduled to be moderating on stage a conversation between Denny Blair and John Necroponte. Both of them former directors of national intelligence. We were supposed to talk about something else, but six weeks after the Snowden stories broke, there was no doubt we were going to talk about this. And I lost the room in five minutes. I mean, they just hated me”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the state of my relationship with US government officials is not especially concerning to anyone but me. But the fact is that from the moment the first Snowden story appeared under my byline, I was absolutely persona non grata. Among sources and acquaintances and even friends, I had known in the national security community over the years. I was scheduled at a place called the Aspen Security Forum, which is almost like a...”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, so talk about that because right after, in the wake of doing these stories, you had been not close to the intelligence, but you had sources there and you were covering it from a mainstream media organization. It wasn't sort of, you weren't at odds with them necessarily doing reporting. And sometimes you were at odds. But in this case, you became at odds with them. Talk about that reaction, and especially to even to this day the reaction to Snowden is visceral from many intelligence people I talk to or government officials and the State Department, Susan Rice, for example, almost turned blue when I said his name when I didn't interview. I had done an interview with Ham and then I heard right after and it was really fascinating. It was years and years later. So talk a little bit about the reaction and then what happens now that they've changed in the idea that it could be abused. I'm amazed that they can't believe that it can't be abused.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At such a good scenario to put to people, imagine that someone you don't trust as much as yourself. has access to that power. And I tried that with U.S. government officials too, by the way, who refused to conceive of it until Trump came along. And then they saw someone take control of the arms government who actually did have bad intentions and actually did have disrespect for the rules and norms. And they started changing their tune. That was one of the most interesting parts of the book, in my view, is the conversations I was able to have with people like James Clapper and Jim Comey about what it's like to look at these extraordinarily intrusive arms of government through the lens of their control by a guy like Trump.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And although it's true that private companies, private internet companies have enormous amounts of data about us, it's different, first of all, when the government has it, because the government has compulsory power over our lives. And it's also true that the government has a breadth of access to information that even the Facebooks of the world don't have. If you can actually stand at the crossroads of the internet and take whatever you like in bulk, And put it through systems that cost billions of dollars. You could do things that no private company can reproduce. Even a giant like Google or Facebook.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it was Paul Oma, I believe, in an article, if I remember correctly, in a Harvard journal, who coined the term database of ruin to describe a situation in which any sufficiently large collection of information is bound to have data in it, which, if revealed, could destroy lives. It could put people in danger. It could expose victims of crimes to their victimizers. It could expose personal secrets that would destroy marriages. It could expose trade secrets that would destroy jobs. That if you put together enough information, There are going to be connections in there that are terribly damaging.”
2020-06-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Bart Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT