YouSaid · the spoken record

Karim Amer

lines on the record: 69
first: 2019-07-31
most recent: 2019-07-31
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

“These words. We didn't know what to call the phenomena yet. People were feeling the anxiety of the planet. Now, the thing that the environmental movement had that we don't have here was that at least you could show the imagery of the wreckage sites, right? So if we're, you know, as data has surpassed oil, as we mentioned in the film, when we were living in the advent of oil, when there was an oil wreckage site, you could see the spillage, right? You could see the marine life destroyed. You could see that image of a bird barely able to fly because of the covered in oil. And that image could transcend language and travel the world, right? We have had all of these data breaches, these hacks, these big headlines, yet we don't have the imagery. And so part of our task became similar to what David Carroll says in the film is how do you make the invisible visible? And so we really wrestled with that for a while. And it took a combination of things. One was finding characters, as we always do in Verita style of filmmaking who can inhabit the story, people who you feel are...”
2019-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Great Hack” director Karim Amer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's important to know that this film, when we initially began it with Netflix, it was not about this topic. So it was about actually the Sony hack. It had nothing to do with this. And so Netflix has allowed us to kind of shift course as we started looking at this word hack and realizing that the hack that was more interesting was not physical hacks that were happening to infrastructure or places, but actually the hack of the human mind. And so we became really obsessed with trying to look at how we could show how people's minds had been hacked and changed and how we could change people's minds and the vulnerability that's amongst us. But the problem we faced was one that I think this entire conversation faces, which is Pedro was just alluding to, is that there's a deficit of language, right? Essentially, the only thing I can compare it to is similar to the environmental movement, which many people in this community are very familiar with. In the early days of environmental movement, people weren't using the words global warming. We didn't have...”
2019-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Great Hack” director Karim Amer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So, Kareem, when you're thinking about wanting to do that, to create this question, what do you want people to do from watching this? I think one of the things that I find really interesting is this is going to appear on Netflix, correct, which is run by Reed Hastings, who was on the board of Facebook and has since left the board of Facebook for reasons unknown. What were they trying to do here and what were you trying to do here”
2019-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Great Hack” director Karim Amer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but political will starts with us. And if we're not asking those questions. Not going to act upon that. And I think one of the things, as Roger said, when I came into this, it was complete, I didn't know anything. And I had a deficit of language. I didn't understand the space. To me, it was this black box, this magic box. Oh, I can go online and connect. And grade, I get instant gratification for a lot of things. What I needed to do is kind of peel back and learn at least what questions to ask because we don't even have that. And I think we wanted to To approach this in a way where we can at least begin to tackle and have a conversation because we're not even having that conversation. So for us, it was very important to spark that and to ask the questions and the ethical questions that I think are desperately needed to be asked.”
2019-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Great Hack” director Karim Amer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, where do you feel we are? Pedro, where do you feel? Because just again, this week, the FTC settled with YouTube over children, data around children and with Facebook over breaking a decree that they had agreed to in 2011. So when you have stuff like this, look, here we are, we've gotten this lesson. Have our regulators, especially in this country, because that's who's responsible for these U.S. largely US-based companies, have they learned their lesson or do they, I feel like the FTC was asleep at the wheel for a decade with Google and everyone else, and now that they've woken up, they don't have staff, they don't have funding, they don't have the political will to do something about it.”
2019-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Great Hack” director Karim Amer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, I think one of the most interesting quotes was actually Julian's There was always going to be a Cambridge Analytica, it just was unfortunately for me, Cambridge Analytica, which was the idea that they were taking advantage of what was already existing and all kinds of companies do that, all kinds of campaigns do that to manipulate election results now. Roger, how did you look at what was here? Because I do think there wasn't a whole lot about Facebook's behavior in this because since they've been doing this, they've sort of now seems to have slipped out of it now at this point. Their stock is at an all-time high. They paid what I call the parking ticket to the FTC. They are enjoying, once again, Wall Street celebrating what they're doing. And they've made changes, of course, to their behavior, but it seems as if they have slipped out of it. Let me start with Roger and then Pedro.”
2019-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Great Hack” director Karim Amer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We agreed to that. We allowed for this country to have the largest marketplace when it comes to elections. And if you're an aspiring entrepreneur in the election business, this is the megaship. And the American public has allowed that, has supported that, has encouraged that. So you can't blame companies for wanting to profit off the fact that we've commoditized our election process. You can't blame companies for then realizing that our technology platforms have designed this incredible system whereby we have access to so many people's data and have inoculated people to not realize that their data can be used against them. And so I think that the idea of blaming someone for the discontent that we're in is challenging for me because I think that we're all complicit in building it. And I think that companies like Facebook are far more”
2019-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Great Hack” director Karim Amer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My impression of Cambridge Analytica is that Cambridge Analytica was involved in a lot of things that are ethically very, I think, morally bankrupt. And when you look back at some of them for sure, but to blame Cambridge Analytica is, I think, a little short-sighted because Cambridge Analytica is not the reason why our democracy is for sale.”
2019-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Great Hack” director Karim Amer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's always been done, but I think the sophistication and weaponization of it to a far more exponential level of power has happened with the advent of that mixed with some of the power of Silicon Valley. So Silicon Valley's government contracts that allow for some of this testing to happen. Oftentimes this testing is happening in third world countries.”
2019-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Great Hack” director Karim Amer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so, Kareem, you spent a lot of time in the piece trying to paint a very powerful company that did have these capabilities. When you finish this, what did the, because one of the parts I thought was the Andrew Nick's testimony, which I'd forgotten about that he made, was the victimization of Cambridge Analytica to being thrown under the bus essentially for other more powerful players, which I think Julian talked about, that it was about a bigger thing in the movie. How do you look at Cambridge Analytica in this? Is it just a useful idiot that managed to overstate itself or what?”
2019-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Great Hack” director Karim Amer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, but what I'm trying to, I can't get what you're saying so that you didn't, he was overselling it, so he was lying about the capabilities, but he didn't do the bad things that he said he did. That's correct, is that correct?”
2019-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Great Hack” director Karim Amer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“groundwork came back to BISOS. So you're basically saying you're stupid and you were liars, which I find it's kind of interesting to think about that”
2019-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Great Hack” director Karim Amer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then I suppose the other thing I would say about Alexander is that Alexander's favorite expression is never let the truth get in the way of a good story. And he is, to say the very least, a consummate overseller. Of services. So I think what you heard him there was trying to take credit for the Brexit result, for example, without actually saying it or taking credit, but with a nod and a wink. And also I think in the Trump campaign we took too much credit, more credit than we warranted. And there was a reason for that. And that's because we thought Trump was going to lose. And so we had started a PR campaign in advance of the election to try and explain, well, it would have been worse if we hadn't been there and we didn't choose the candidate and things like that. And then, of course, he won.”
2019-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Great Hack” director Karim Amer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And certainly stuff on the undercover video with Alexander Nix, which I'm almost certain was never done. I don't think the company ever had any capability to do it, and I think he just got carried away, if you ask me honestly, I think they both look drunk in that undercover video.”
2019-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Great Hack” director Karim Amer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Part of it to do with the data analytics and the digital targeting and the Trump campaign and the cruise campaign and commercial work as well. Then there was a whole other part of it which was political campaigns elsewhere around the world. And that was really very different work. It was very strange work. It was on the ground doing a lot of research trying to understand people and view them as groups rather than the one-to-one, the attempt at one-to-one targeting for digital. And I think that, well, I'll be honest with you, there was lots of stuff this movie about what was being promoted there and proposed there that was news to me.”
2019-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Great Hack” director Karim Amer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what I think was that the company made some significant mistakes when it came to its use of data. They were ethical mistakes. And I think that part of the reason that that happened was that we spent a lot of time concentrating on not making regulatory mistakes. And so for the most part, we didn't, as far as I can tell, make any regulatory mistakes, but we got almost distracted by ticking those boxes fulfilling the regulatory requirements. And it felt like, well, once that was done, then we'd done what we needed to do and we forgot to pause and think about ethically what was going on. So that was part of it. Then there's a whole other part of it, which I'm sorry, that was the...”
2019-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Great Hack” director Karim Amer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll try. So I was the chief operating officer and the chief finance officer of the company from the beginning of 2015 until early in 2018 when Alexander stepped down and I took over, but really with the aim of closing the company down at that point.”
2019-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Great Hack” director Karim Amer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So this was a tremendous, I really enjoyed this. I've been covering this stuff for years, and there was a lot of sex I didn't know that was in it was really interesting, especially Brittany Kaiser, which I thought was really interesting. So I actually want to start with you, Julian, because I don't know what you think from this thing. I don't know if you think Andrew Nicks is a victim or a hero or Brittany is or if you think Chris is. So I'd love to get your take. And Julian Whitehead, correct? Wheatland, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, was the COO of Cambridge Analytica. So I can't tell what you think happened here.”
2019-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Great Hack” director Karim Amer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that was a laugh riot, huh? That was great. Last night I got to interview Megan Rapino. That was really fun. This was not quite as fun. So I'm going to bring up our panel. Oh, Roger's already here hovering behind me. Why don't we all come up, Roger McNamee? Julian, thank you. Pedro? Kareem. Thank you”
2019-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: “The Great Hack” director Karim Amer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT