YouSaid · the spoken record

Edward Snowden

lines on the record: 146
first: 2019-11-01
most recent: 2019-11-01
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

“Thank you. Thank you for everything you do in keeping. All right, it's not working, Edward. It's not working in any way. All right. Thank you so much.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I was very fortunate I got a good friend of mine, one of my closest confidants and lawyer, Ben Weisner. He's a very literary guy and he had a very literary friend, Joshua Cohen, which for me I had never written a book on my own before. He's one of the greatest novelists. I believe alive today And so he was a tremendous resource to help me structure this and think about how I could best tell my story”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The thing, sorry, just to get to that, people say VRX, Speaker of Truth. I don't want anyone to trust me. That's actually the point. The whistleblower doesn't matter. The provenance of the information doesn't matter. The authenticity of it, the truth of it, that's what matters. It's okay to doubt me. It's okay not to trust me. It's okay to think I'm a bad guy. Fine, but use that skepticism that I lacked so many years ago. And then apply that to the people in society who actually wield power, who actually wield influence, not whistleblowers who are going to spend so much of their life in exile.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a really interesting that was very. But that's okay. Like that disagreement, that space for just completely contrasting ways to see the same things, that spectrum of human perception, that's what makes it beautiful.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have never been more connected to a wider world than when I'm looking at a screen and to a lot of people that seems weird. But for me, that's what I love. I like to be able to reach different people in different places. And I think this is the fundamental promise of the internet. It ties us beyond distance. It ties us beyond culture. It ties us beyond language. And it builds bonds of fraternity. It can create an understanding. And that, for me, is the great hope. We are today living in a time of division. And we are living in a time of constant exploitation. And it is because an imbalance of power. When I think about the future, I don't think about, you know, when I think about what the good future looks like, it's not the good future for me. It's how we heal. It's how things get better. If things get better for the internet, if things get better for the United States, they will get better for me. And there will be a day when I will.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is the irony that I think a lot of people don't understand or appreciate about technologists. I was far more alone before 2013 than I am today. As you said, I'm with Lindsay, and hopefully I'll never be alone again, which is a great comfort even in exile. But I signed up to serve overseas, right? I volunteered to go to Geneva, a place I didn't speak the language. I volunteered to go to Japan. This for me, from my perspective, is just another foreign tour on behalf of the United States. I'm just working for the people broadly rather than an agency. But when you think about that thing,”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, I'm going to read the first sentence, and this is the last question. It actually is from Monica Lewinsky. My name is Edward Joseph Snowden. I used to work for the government, but now I work for the public. It took me nearly three decades to recognize that there was this distinction. And when I did, it got me into a bit of trouble at the office. Made me laugh out loud. Yeah, a bit of trouble, Edward. What would you feel? This is from Monica Lenski, what would you feel is the best ending to your story, i.e., where does he hope to see himself in five to ten years? And I would add on, it seems like a lonely life, Edward, which you've done, where many people think you're a spy, other people think you're a traitor, some people think you're a hero, but you are essentially by yourself with Lindsay, who you've since married, and a cat. I'm sure there's cats involved. Apparently you love cats.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of laissez-faire. I don't care. As a psychological coping mechanism, otherwise you are being victimized. And that's a difficult thing to live with.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But in that context, I think it's actually very common to say people don't care, to say they accept it, but I've given talks all around ages about this. And the response that I get when I hear questions about that when I ask about that is people actually care. They care very much, but they feel powerless to change. That's a very fair point. And so they adopt a position”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Although you could argue a certain Malay sets in and everyone just accepts it. But that's another topic we're not going to get into that. You know, people are like, yeah, I'm being spied on. I got it.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Surveillance was the topic of conversation, but the importance of the conversation was about democracy. It's so clear today when we see all of the allegation, all the rhetoric being passed around, that if we are going to forge a public consensus, we have to have access to a shared set of facts that are mutually agreed upon. And what 2013 did was it moved the conversation from speculation to certainty, from allegation to fact and the distance between speculation and fact in a democracy is everything because it does not matter what you know. It does not matter what you are sure is true. It only matters what you can prove to other people.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The question is really more public consciousness. There were people who had good grounds to believe mass surveillance existed or even had a certainty that mass surveillance existed before I came forward. Again, there had been reporting on this. There had been court cases about this, but it didn't penetrate the public consciousness. Because it was allegation, right? It was speculation. And this is what people miss again about the importance of 2013.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be God, I'm committed guilty of so many crimes. Are you guilty of any crimes? Have you sped, you know, have you jaywalked? Jaywalked. That's the thing. You can't exist into society today. I think they're talking about the”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Paradigms, the more the balance of power shifts. And now these companies, now these governments begin to need asking for permission, whether it's from courts or whether it's from people.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Should be able to read your email. There is no good reason why Google should know the messages that you're sending to your friend. Facebook shouldn't be able to see what you're saying when you're writing to your mother. Today, in most cases, they can because communications are encrypted between your device and these companies. We are beginning to see an increasing shift to what is called end-to-end encryption, which means while your communications may pass through Google servers or Facebook servers or any other intermediating entity, they are encrypted between your device and the person on the other end of the communication, the person you're actually writing to. So the only people who can read the communication are the people at the ends of the communication. Not all of these faceless men in the middle. The closer we get to these...”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, we already see a global awareness among young people and academics and sort of the older, now regretful generation of technologists who built the first generation internet, thinking about how they can make it better, thinking about people like Tim Berners-Lee here, who I believe are positive force was on the internet. And they're going, well, how do we correct for all the problems we see today? When you think about what is causing all of the internet's ills today, I believe they derive largely from a single mechanic, which is the centralization of data. The more Google knows about you, the more Facebook knows about you, the more they are able, even intelligence services, to create permanent records of private lives, the more influence and power they have over us. There is no good reason why Google”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's goofy. It's fantasy. It's a different thing. It is true, of course, that the intelligence community can try to sink White Houses, but that's not specific to Donald Trump that happens under every White House. You have someone like Barack Obama who campaigned saying he's going to end warrantless wiretapping, saying he's going to shut down Guantanamo, saying that's not who we are. That's not what we do. And after less than 100 days in the chair of the president, where he has these guys coming into his office every day, he goes, ooh, you know what? Maybe I won't do that. There's a reason for that.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not a conspiracy, right? These aren't men in smoky rooms, but who simply survive presidents. They're not political appointees. They see presidents come and go. They see the calendars change, but they are always there. And so they have long-term policy preferences that if they're blocked by one president, they can simply try to institute them under the next president. And over time, they are extraordinarily effective in doing so. And this is why, unfortunately, we have seen the policies of the United States government become more and more authoritarian for the entirety of the existence of these agencies, right? Ever since you saw JFK saying things he's like he's going to smash up the CIA and scatter it to the winds, you've seen people working over decades to make sure that doesn't happen. And they've been very successful. Is that a greater threat? Again, I think it's completely...”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, I think there's a presumption in this question that I've said something previously that I'm not sure is supported on the record. When I talk about the deep state, it's a very different thing than when sort of Donald Trump talks about the deep state. When I say the deep state, what I'm talking about is the career government, really. These are very senior officials and intelligence agencies.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I'm not familiar with the details of any particularized legislation. It's not related to surveillance, but what I will say in general is I believe in protecting and enforcing human rights wherever they are. If Russia is violating human rights, they should be held to account for that. If the United States is violating human rights, they should be held to account for that. I don't care if it's France. I don't care if it's Fiji. The only way that we can enforce human rights is by imposing consequences for their violation. And so we should do everything we can to support efforts to do such.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, when people think about my life in Russia, I'm a nerd, right? I've always been an indoor cat. I don't go out to the club. That's not my scene. There's not much difference between whether I'm staring at a screen in an apartment in New York or Tokyo or Moscow for my daily life. I speak a little bit of Brussels, but not very much. I don't watch Russian media. I get all of my news online. My daily life and my work is primarily the Freedom of the Press Foundation in the United States, where we're working on projects to make sure that sources and journalists can maintain The confidentiality of their communications. Even in the midst of what we see is an increasingly hostile environment all around the world.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would be interested in mobile operating systems for people not to use standard Android provided by Google with all of their sort of Google Services malware baked into it. It tracks everything you do, or even an Apple device. Although iOS is much more privacy respecting than Google's equivalents, they have some serious security issues right now. There is graphene OS, which is an Android variant that's much more secure developed by a young man by the name of Daniel McKay, who I've spoken with and I think quite highly of his work. And then there is, which I cover in the book quite extensively, the Tor project, which I believe is still the most important anti-censorship network on the internet today.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't normally like to give endorsements of particular tools because the landscape changes so quickly. I have used the signal messenger, wire messenger. I use cubes as an operating system. This is a more secure kind of operating system that creates compartmentation. So if one of your applications, for example, one of your uses like your browser, Is hacked, it doesn't mean you lose everything on your entire computer”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Against the majority, right? People seem to be missing that today, saying that I don't care about privacy because I have nothing to hide means I don't care about anyone who might. Have something to hide, and you are destroying their future for your convenience.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of people go if I'm not doing anything wrong, you know, if I have nothing to hide, I have nothing to fear. Setting aside the fact that that is a line originated by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, and it should alarm us when we see particularly members of Western governments repeating it. Privacy exists to protect you from systems of power regardless of what you're doing. If you have to prove your innocence, if you have to prove why you need a right, it is not a right. If you have to establish that you're not unusual, that you're not a threat, that you are not different, what is the purpose of the right? The majority that is saying, I'm normal, they don't need rights because they decide the laws. Rights exist to protect the minority.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you're trying to protect information from the US government or from a US company, it might actually make sense to use a foreign app. And that's obviously going to make the U.S. government nervous. But if you're trying to protect information from the Russian government or the Chinese government, you definitely shouldn't use a Russian app or a Chinese app, right? So the answer on that is always, it depends. Who are you trying to be protected from? And this is fundamentally what I think people miss about the particular danger of mass surveillance.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it depends on your threat model. When you are looking from a defensive standpoint in architecting a system to be more secure, right? Because perfect security in the computer context doesn't exist. You go, well, what is the risk I'm trying to mitigate? Who am I trying to protect this information from?”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Precisely. I always try to explain this. And this is the concern that I think we miss. The United States is perhaps the only...”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And everything Google has, and everything Verizon has, and everything ATT has, and every other company that they can get their fingers into, right? Government is restricted in some ways by the Fourth Amendment. Whether it's federal government, state government, government generally, when you're talking school systems and things like that, the Fourth Amendment actually restricts their activities. Facebook is not bound by the Fourth Amendment. Google is not bound by the Fourth Amendment.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Google has a very similar model, and they go, oh, we're connecting people. They go, oh, we're organizing data. But we can see privately what they're doing, right? You open your weather app and it's communicating with Facebook because someone baked the Facebook APK SDK into it. And you didn't even realize that. You don't see it. It's intentionally kept invisible to you. And yet it's collecting material on you. Facebook has all this information about all these people. But what is the limit? The limit is everything that Facebook has collected. They have access and total dominion of. Google the same. They have access to everything that they have collected and they have total dominion over that. But what makes government such a unique threat in this context is that government has access to everything that Facebook has.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think it's actually a mistake to see them as different threats. That is actually one of the biggest misunderstandings of this. When we think about that first slide, that prism slide that everybody on the internet got excited about that showed Apple, you know, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, all of these guys were cooperating with the government secretly beyond what the law required. You think about the NSA, you think about let's take Facebook, for example, right? Facebook's internal purpose, whether they stated publicly or not, is to compile perfect records of private lives to the maximum extent that they're capability, and then exploit that for their own corporate enrichment and damn the consequences. This is actually precisely the same as what the NSA does.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Strange world that we have. What did Monica I'm not sure that I've ever said the government is a bigger threat than companies.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you can't keep it for more than a year, right? That's the bottom bar. And then you slide the bar down and then you start to limit the kinds of collection that they can engage in. And bit by bit, you go, shift that ratchet until you've got something that serves the public interest a little bit better.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the United States. And that is why every app that's out there is so fundamentally insecure. We do not have any criminal liability laws for companies that aggregate what are effectively databases of ruin, where even the most innocent life has enough information in there to ruin them. And I think there's a lot of ways to deal with this. You can limit what these companies are able to collect. And I think it's very, one of the easiest things to do is limit retention, how long companies can have data. That's the first step is go, all right, you guys can collect anything you want. We don't care.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is the hard question. Again, just like when I came forward, I didn't want to be the guy. Who published anything? I didn't want to say where the public shouldn't know. I didn't want to say how policies should be changed. I don't want to be the president of the internet. I don't want to tell people how these things should be changed because I think there are folks that are better qualified to do that. But in my opinion, what I can say is we have serious liability laws in every other sector. If you produce medicine and put it on the shelves and your baby aspirin kills babies, you get sued. You go to jail, right? If you build a car and it catches on fire and kills people, you get sued, your company might get shut down. You might go to jail. We have no software liability laws”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The far greater. So, what do we do about the massive amounts of information these companies are collecting? What do we do about the lack of transparency and the fact that people are mass surveilled by these companies too? I mean, in terms of their activities, how would you regulate them?”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Term always caused greater harms than they have prevented. It's not that the initial arguments were the great harms. It's that the precedent enabled the far greater harms to come out of it.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. But once you get to that point where you go, all right, we're moving out of these things and we're going into, you know, we say this thing is a lie. We say this thing is fake news, which again, they had deleterious effects on democracy that we don't want to exist. But if you say Facebook gets to decide what can and cannot be set on its network, Facebook gets to determine what is true and false on its network. What you're doing is you're setting a precedent where whether it's driven by US legislation, whether it's driven by court orders, all these other countries have laws and courts too. And if you set a standard to precedent that says we are going to start limiting or placing restrictions of freedom of speech on internet platforms that are procedural, they're standard, their routine, I fear that when we look at history, these kind of policies have in the long term”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From their responsibility to police their own networks, which I think we all agree they've done a pretty bad job of doing. But I do think there is An actual dangerous impulse from a lot of people who see the bad behavior that's happened online to go look, we want to deputize Facebook and Twitter and whoever to be the internet police. And we want them to occupy a quasi-governmental role where they go, these people are allowed to use our network. These things are allowed to be settled on our network, and these things aren't. There are good arguments for saying, you know, why this might be. You talk about hate speech. You talk about terrorist propaganda. You talk about child exploitation, right? That's their responsibility.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In this kind of scale, it's a team sport. And when you are talking about people who are looking at Chinese hackers, Russian hackers, whatever, people who are top tier adversaries who actually know what they're doing, the people working at Facebook, the people working at Twitter, these guys aren't NSA tier analysts, and they don't have access to NSA tier systems. They can't see communications in Russia, right? They can only see things that are connecting to Twitter and Facebook servers now. If the US intelligence community shared indicators of Russian activity or Chinese activity with Twitter and said, hey, search your network, see if these IP addresses logged into accounts, see if there's any kind of mass account campaigns coming from this, that, or the other, or dealing with this, that, or the other, connecting to this website or this document, these companies could do more. So actually, I would say yes over classification does have a lot involved. This is not to excuse companies.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. And they all have different units that try to investigate these things. Some of them are better than others. Some are have more realistic budgets than others. But the bottom line is when you're dealing with intelligence,”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What about these companies? I would argue what about these companies themselves? What was their responsibilities that the overclassification is not something that might have hindered them in knowing what was happening?”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was accused of hacking Sony, the FBI put out a report and said, here's our evidence, here's why we believe it's the case. And then when we see people like reality winner showing the At the NSA does have, at least internally, these assessments that say we think it's this people doing it for this reason, there is no reason that these kind of reports can't be declassified and should not be declassified. And so this is what I'm getting to. Not that the intelligence community didn't know or that they did know and they didn't stop it, but that over classification is a much greater threat to our democracy. The excessive embrace of secrecy is a much greater threat than increased transparency.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When the US intelligence community says things, like we believe it was the Russians, I actually do believe they could have the evidence to prove that. And I think it would be actually quite trivial to produce. What should concern us is when that information is not shared, but it is shared in some cases. Like, for example, when North Korea...”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even if you're using encrypted communications, even if you are very good at what you do, every communication on the internet has a source and a destination. It has to get from phone A to phone B. It has to get from computer A to computer B. And so it has to travel through a path from one system to its internet service provider to its upstream router to its communication service provider has to go transatlantic over cable. It's got to go through England. It's got to go through France. It's got to go through Germany. It's got to go through Denmark. Your point is they should have. And then all the way to Russia, right? So you can see the chain of communications, even if it is encrypted, even if they're very careful going from here to there.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when you look at all of these guys, none of them are invisible, right? Some of them are better than others. And again, I was working on one of the hardest teams, so I know what the good trade draft looks like. And here's the thing.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the thing here is I was assigned to one of the hardest targets that we had in China because that's what they were bringing extra people on, right? The ones that we already have good data on, we know what they're up to. It's easy to sort of follow their activities, but it takes a lot of time to develop those kind of analytics for a new target that's unfamiliar. So they got to bring on new people. That was me. And you just go step by step on that. I talked to the guys who had dealt with Russian teams. I talked to the guys who dealt with Iranian teams. I talked to the guys who dealt with counterterrorism activity, right?”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I actually don't think they were. And this is a different argument. But look, in my final position at the NSA, a lot of people think I was entirely and always a systems administrator or systems engineer or sort of an operations and systems guy. I was working in an operative role behind a mass surveillance desk and I was working surveilling Chinese hackers in my final position for Booz Allen Hamilton in Hawaii. This is the position where I actually laid my hands on the keyboard where I could bring up anybody's email. The ex-sticker. What is it called? The ex-key score. X-Key score is Google for spies, basically. It's our ability to sort through and query all of the collection we have for all of our programs that affect digital communications and a lot of phone-based communications.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this is what is sort of lost in that conversation, the breakdown between technology companies and government. I don't actually think it's accurate or fair to say Russian influence campaigns or whatnot are stopped by this change in 2013 because Twitter provided all their information to the government. Facebook provided all their information to the government on these campaigns. You can read the reports online. The fact that they would require the government to go through some legal process to demand that data is a good thing, not a bad thing because any judge in the world will stamp a warrant for that kind of request. If it's proper and appropriate, legal process is not a restriction. The only people who resist this are people on a completely different fork in the road government power maximalists who want that institution.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But they have access to all the levers of influence to shape our behavior, to shape our buying decisions, to shape our voting decisions. And then you have this other fork in the road where there are people who are of, shall we say, a closer to like-mind to myself, where they go, the advance of technology is inevitable, and technology can do very good things for the world. But we need to understand that there must be limits on how that technological power and influence can be applied. Because all these guys on the other path, right, they talk in very abstract terms. They talk about data collection. They talk about data analysis and exploitation. It's not data that's being exploited, it's people. Data is about people, right? It's not data that making that distinction.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT