YouSaid · the spoken record

John Tye

lines on the record: 91
first: 2019-09-25
most recent: 2019-09-25
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

“That and sowing that browser that Internet Explorer, Firefox, or whatever Chrome, this is a special browser called Tor browser that was actually initially funded by US government. Now it's its own nonprofit. And it is a way to access a whole bunch of hidden sites pejoratively called the Dark Web. So there's definitely some illegal things that happen on there, but it's also the main tool used by human rights and democracy activists and repressive regimes all over the world.”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People in that position. Now, we don't want them to tell us classified stuff, we don't accept classified information, but to give them legal advice and even just Using an encrypted app or asking a warrior for advice can be enough to trigger a counterintelligence investigation against intelligence offs.”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so our clients are targeted by Russian intelligence and Chinese intelligence, which means that my communications with my clients would be targeted by those groups. Now, obviously, they would be operating illegally, but they definitely do it. Then there's the FBI and the CIA, which run their own counterintelligence investigations. And there are legal protections in place, and I wouldn't say they're universally ignored. I would say that a lot of these decisions about who to investigate and which tactics to use happen in secret, there's never reported to Congress or to a judge, and anyone who's at that level with such a compartment and clearance, some of these programs have like five people who know what's going on, right? And so they can vary, if it leaks out, they already know who the five people are and they just go search everything they've ever done. So, you know, we have to credibly be able to recommend our systems.”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Methods, and I know they're different in different cases. Yeah, yeah. So the threat model is pretty extreme for us because especially with some of our CIA clients, I mean, these are current US intelligence officers handling the most top secret things.”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Including Ronan. I'm going to get off on a tangent here, actually. Talk about that protecting yourself from a technological point of view. Why is it so important? And what do you do today to do that? What are the various methods? And I know they're different in different cases.”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that was the thing that we worked with him on in his reporting. It'll be in his book coming out next month. Basically, this company Black Cube was hired, which is Israeli private intelligence firm was hired by Harvey Weinstein to go after both the women accusing him of rape and the journalists recording this, including Ronan. And we have helped a former subcontractor of Black Cube become a whistleblower with respect to the Southern District New York.”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So I've been, you know, it's a pretty tight group. And there's a lot of effort to control the information flow, obviously to protect the clients, to protect the disclosures. So we implement a huge amount of security. We give our clients all special devices that are all specially set up and encrypted and use, et cetera, et cetera. And we had actually gone through that process with Ronan several months ago for a different matter. So Ronan was already on to R secure kind of system. And so that made it easier to talk to him. Yeah.”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we would be very careful about thinking about who is the right person to tell this story. I mean, Ronan clearly has a strong track record on this stuff, but there's other stories that aren't necessarily up his alley. And some of our litigation we'll get to, you know, we just a couple weeks ago won a reprisal case against the CIA. That's very significant, actually, but it's not something that Ronan would probably write about. But this one.”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you have an NDA? Look, you know, there had been policies in effect at the time she worked there, but they were no longer in effect and they had still given her access to these emails. They had never cut it off. In that case, there wasn't really an issue.”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Showing that you've gone through your chain of command or other things or sort of laying the groundwork for you to be on stronger ground later on so we help people walk through that. For instance, me going to the IGs, I know that the IGs did not roll back the NSA's. Collection. Really? Yeah. I'm surprised. But we knew that we had to do that so that I showed I was doing the right way. And so that's a lot of what we do for people is we help them walk this path and everyone is different, but how to insulate themselves from blowback.”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and often on enforceable. And so it comes down as a legal judgment. You explain to the client, look, you sign this thing and you might be violating this thing, but that's up to you to decide and we can help you if you want to do. But there's a good chance this wasn't a legal binding contract to begin with. You won't ever know until you get to the court, which hopefully doesn't happen. And there's all kinds of things you can do to mitigate it along the way. I mean, especially if you're currently working at a company.”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“NDA documents, I mean, any kind of security policies for the tech system, I mean, certainly it would be a mistake to hack into your employer system without appropriate access. You could definitely be prosecuted for that.”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Well, I would start by saying every case is very context specific, so I can't. It's hard to make generalizations. So some people have signed documents that make it.”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think like a lot of people have been concerned about protecting a democratic form of governance, small D, protecting the rule of law, worried about accountability. And so it just seemed like this was the time I had been through this myself. I was well positioned to do it. There was a huge need there, yeah.”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so the concept is to allow people with very important concerns about how our government and private companies are behaving to get out without being in trouble themselves, which is often the case. Now, a lot of times when people leak, they also get in different kinds of trouble that aren't necessarily being arrested, but being fired, retribution, all kinds of things. You have the Google walkout people who talk publicly about stuff there that several of whom are alleging that Google's come down on, but let's focus on this. So you start a whistleblower aid, and it's funded by who?”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was good. I mean, a couple things. First of all, I'm very lucky. I was a lawyer. I knew how to put my concerns into a legal argument. I knew enough to hire a lawyer, actually. And I had a bunch of friends who were lawyers and just started talking to them and found Mark. I had the money to pay Mark. One of the things here is until we launched, there was basically no free capacity, legal capacity to help whistleblowers. So we're pretty much it now, which obviously I'm very proud of, very happy with. But I was lucky that I could pay a lawyer and a lot of people can't. I mean, I paid $13,000 to two lawyers. And just was able to write that check, and not everyone can do that. And so the concept.”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then the lawyers, you know, would want to look at any kind of NDAs that people had signed and try to help avoid any kind of issues there. Of course, right.”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's how I do my task. It's not typically legal. It's not typically illegal. And things like that. I get a lot of them on Uber, a lot of memos. A lot of memos. They didn't want out, but I got my hands on them, and that's different.”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, there are millions, tens of millions of classified documents classified by the US government, and most of those, some of those probably do show evidence of law breaking by the U.S. government, but probably 99% don't. And if you leak any of those 99%, then you're leaking classified information. You'll go to prison, but you're not actually a whistleblower because you're not showing any kind of misconduct. You're just leaking this kind of.”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is sharing information that you are not authorized to share. Now, typically that's used with respect to classified information. So if you leak classified information, you can and often will go to prison. So again, these are overlapping circles of the Venn diagram. So you could have someone who has both a whistleblower and a leaker. You could have someone who is a whistleblower but is not a leaker. So if you have unclassified evidence that US agency or a company is breaking the law, you're not leaking classified information when you come forward with that, right? I mean, Sydney is an example of that. She was a whistleblower without leaking doing anything illegal. You could also leak information without being a whistleblower.”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think of it as there's two concepts whistleblowing and leaking. These are overlapping circles in a Venn diagram. So blowing the whistle is defined as reporting violation of a law rule regulation, ethical violations, even lying in public would be a reason to blow the whistle, right? So you are reporting some kind of misconduct. Now that's clearly protected within bounds. And obviously, as you get into class of information, it becomes very, very touchy. But in general, that's not only legal, it's legally protected and valuable. Leaking...”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the idea of a whistleblower, this idea is to do whistleblowing in a way, again, that doesn't break the law. And to make it clear for people, I know a lot of people who follow it do understand this. It is perfectly legal to whistleblow. But it's thought of because of just the word. It's a really interesting and weighted word, as perhaps not because of what's happened just recently with Ukraine. They're saying this bad whistleblower, like it's bad to do that. Explain why it isn't.”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So that actually went well. And I was able to publish most everything in op-ed in the Washington Post. There's a couple. Interesting things here. One is, you know, the mechanisms to protect whistleblowers are not sufficient, but they're actually more powerful than many people understand. And what's classified changes from moment to moment, I mean, based on the decisions of senior leadership, I was basically able to get some things declassified through this process that were classified when I started the process. Like they didn't want to take it to court and have me file a First Amendment lawsuit, so they just declassified it and let me publish it. So I didn't break any laws. I went through the process and showed that this process can be used to push the boundaries of what Americans can learn about how our data is being treated.”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then ended up, so that went well. And then within a month or so, I had submitted an article for pre-publication review. So the way this works is whenever you get a security clearance, you have to sign all these NDAs and things saying anytime you write about your work, especially if it relates to classified material, you have to submit it for review. They get to redact things.”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They kind of raise their eyes and said, Wow, yeah, this is something, but you know, we're not the ones running these programs. You know, you need to talk to the NSA Inspector General. So in my lab, I was. Quitting my job for other reasons. I actually love my time at the State Department, but got another job. And my last week before I quit, I met with State Inspector General. I met with staff from the House and the Senate Intelligence Committees. And then a couple weeks later after I had left government, met with NSA Inspector General staff”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“happening well that the NSA is breaking the Fourth Amendment it's collecting all of this Americans data basically most of what you put on the internet not inside the United States but in these cloud servers around the world it's not even telling Congress that it's doing this and it's writing its own rules in secret for how to handle this information and that's you know constitutional”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there were several things. President Obama gave a speech. This would have been Early 2014 gave a speech about reforms to intelligence practices. I had worked before that speech to get some changes to the practices under 1233, which had really gotten lost in the whole shuffle. Failed to do so, there was none mentioned in that speech, and at that point decided it's time to become a whistleblower, had no intention of going to prison or fleeing the country, so hired a lawyer. And his name is Mark Sade. He's my partner now with the whistleblower aide.”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So they're using this because we become this global communications. Which has been helpful to a lot of people that our global communications are everywhere, and therefore they have So, this was going on, and what happened to you?”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dozens of countries, all the Google data centers. And that's treated by the NSA as foreign person data by default because it's stored outside the United States. And so this is a huge loophole that the NSA is going, collecting, sucking up all this stuff with some safeguards, I will say, but probably not enough. And then sharing it with other U.S. intelligence agencies using it to seed criminal investigations and prosecutions in a way that I certainly don't think is permissible under the fourth.”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so it's not a statute. It was never passed by Congress. There's no oversight, basically no oversight from Congress. And Diane Feinstein said as much on the record. And so this is basically the president says under the Constitution he has the authority to do this. And they're basically using this loophole where now that we have the cloud and the internet, Americans' data is stored in dozens of countries around the world. Before the internet, there was a geographical boundary distinction between what the NSA could do inside our borders and outside our borders, which made sense because most Americans' data was inside our borders. It had higher privacy”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, yeah, so I was part of that response. We dealt with resolutions in the General Assembly at the UN, the Human Rights Council in Geneva. And then I had two briefings with the NSA at a top secret level. I won't go into those details, obviously, but most of it is now I can talk about. Basically, learn that even for the whole year after the Snowden disclosures, there hadn't been a single article about the main legal authority that the NSA is using to collect Americans' data. And that's an executive order called 1233.”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I was part of that diplomatic response. And as you may remember, there was a lot of anger from Germany, from Brazil. Others, you know, hacking Angela Merkel's cell phone others, I mean, including Human Rights Watch and other groups in Geneva, you know, so there was a vast scale of hacking that we're familiar with.”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me say the intelligence I was reading. Was like, wow, the US government has some serious capabilities here. And so it was pretty clear that We're collecting a lot of stuff, right? And I would have conversations kind of after meetings with people like trying to get some hints about what's going on. So it was pretty clear, I wasn't surprised.”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I had been for a couple of years at that point thinking, wow, when is this stuff going to come out? It's so huge. I mean, what the U.S. government is doing is so huge. I wasn't personally read into those programs. I had no need to know.”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was a whistleblower. So our motto is report government and corporate law breaking without breaking the law. So we're definitely trying to distinguish ourselves from people who do break the law. And really that's meant to attract more disclosures. You're not going to have high-level intelligence officers come. To a group like WikiLeaks, I mean, for obvious reasons. So I worked at the State Department. I was under both Secretary Clinton, Secretary John Kerry. I was in the Internet Freedom basically section of the Human Rights Bureau. And it was part of all of the open internet initiatives around the Arab Spring and other things, resolutions at the Human Rights Council. And then the Snowden Leaks happened. And I was actually not surprised by the snow”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can you help us kind of thing So talk a little bit about, I want to go into that case in detail, but let's talk about what you guys do. So what you did is you helped her do this legally. And it's really important in this internet age with emails and who owns these emails and things like that. I want to get through that. But explain how whistleblower aid started and you yourself. Yeah, I was a whistleblower.”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And she happened to have a whole stack of emails basically all of her emails from her time there where once you review the emails it's very clear that there's a deliberate effort to cover up the relationship to Epstein and some really creepy stuff where they brought Epstein into the lab. So try to picture this. Epstein is inside a glass paneled room meeting with Ito and other male professors. And meanwhile Epstein's air quote assistants, as they were called, these young Russian women were outside dressed like models and the female staffers are going through the trash cans looking for notes about whether or not they're there voluntarily. Can you help us kind of thing? That was happening at MIT Media Lab in Sydney obviously was not happy.”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sydney Swenson is the whistleblower in the MIT case. So she had formerly been a development officer at MIT Media Lab. And she was very uncomfortable with what she saw there really for several years, especially related to Jeffrey Epstein, some other things as well.”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. Your whistleblower. Yeah, that's right. So Ethan Zuckerm Who was a professor there and is leaving now, he basically got in touch with me. We use special apps for security and everything, and he said, I have someone I want to send to you. So Signy got in touch and we had...”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hi, I'm Kara Swisher, editor at large of Recode. You may know me as someone who tried to buy a whistle on Pennsylvania Avenue the other day, but how weird they're all sold out. But in my spare time, I talk tech and you're listening to Recode Decode from the Vox Media Podcast Network today in the red chair is John Napier Ty, the founder and CEO of the nonprofit law firm Whistleblower Aid. Its clients are all government employees and private sector workers who want to report violations of the law by their employers without breaking the law themselves. John previously worked at the State Department, leading the Internet Freedom Section. John, welcome to Recode Decode.”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 month plan required, $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees extra. Initial planned term only greater than 50 GB is busy.”
2019-09-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Whistleblower Aid CEO John Tye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT