LIVE from the NYPL: Cory Doctorow with Edward Snowden: Dystopia, Apocalypse, and other Sunny Futures

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May 3, 2017

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nypl.org, craphound.com

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«In Walkaway, Cory Doctorow imagines a world in which people are no longer needed by the super-rich and the clever machines that can print all of life's basic necessities -- food, clothing, shelter. The 99% might be obsolete, but they're not going to take it lying down. They walk away, living on the exhaust stream and stolen code of the default world, surviving threats, and, ultimately, war. Doctorow, co-owner of Boing Boing, Activist in Residence at the MIT Media Lab and special consultant for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, will be joined virtually by Edward Snowden to discuss dystopian futures and the struggle between the haves and the have-nots in this special LIVE event.»

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[Introductions]

[02:34] As you know, for the last seven or so years I've asked my guests to give me a biography of themselves in seven words. Seven words that might define them or not. A haiku of sorts or, if you're modern, a tweet. And Cory Doctorow gave me these seven words: "Burning geek. Activist. Boing Boing maker man. Edward Snowden gave me these seven words: Engineer. Activist. Citizen. Stateless, but not voiceless. Here they come.

[03:29] Cory Doctorow: Hi Folks, hi Ed. Thank you all for coming tonight and thank you, Ed. It's a pleasure to see you again. I'm very excited and honored to be on stage with you. So I understand you said you had some questions so if you'd like to start you can start, otherwise I have some for you, as you might imagine.

[03:52] Edward Snowden: Yeah, I do, and people have, you know…

[03:57] Cory Doctorow: Hold for applause. Spontaneous applause are technically challenging whan you've got a high latency link.

[04:10] Ed: The beauty of technology is, you know people don't realize it because we're so connected, there's such a togetherness. We got this invisible fabric tying us together across the world. I mean I live in exile today, I'm not allowed to return home without facing threat of arrest. But I can be here with you tonight in New York. The only trick to it is, when we're throwing these messages, when you're hearing my voice right now you actually hear me two seconds from the past. It takes that long to travel across the world. When you raise a question or interrupt or make a comment or applaud it takes two seconds to reach me. So this conversation is actually a bit like fencing, we tend to dance a little bit with the exchange. But with that said. Yeah, people who have followed my my public engagement, when it's not on the front page… You see, normally I get asked the question. This is a really exciting opportunity for me to ask some questions. I want to thank Sam. Because I also read and enjoyed Pirate Cinema, and I'm really, really just glad to be here with everybody tonight.

[05:27] I want to start with something simple. You know, this is a very challenging book. It's written in a very, sort of 'casual technical' language. People who are from your tribe, my tribe understand this. But there are actually references to things that are less familiar to many, like memes. A lot of the concepts are all over the place, ranging into things like copyright law, things like immortality, the march of the progress of not just the systems that are around us in a technical sense, but in a political sense. However it covers a broad sweep of time and one of the most interesting things about it is, despite talking about things like immortality, you can't help but wonder, from the author's position, is this an optimistic or a pessimistic book?

[06:30] CD: So that's a question I get asked an awful lot. And as a science fiction writer I am keenly aware that we have no business, as a field, laying claim to being good at predicting the future. I call us 'Texas marksmen'. We're the people who fire the shotgun into the side of the barn and then draw the target around the place where the pellets hit, hoping no one sees all those misses. Because science fiction, although it's made a lot of predictions, is not a particularly faithful predictive literature. And speaking as someone who spends a lot of his time trying to change the world, I'm pretty glad that the future is not predictable. If the future were predictable, then I don't know why I'd bother getting out of bed.

[07:15] So I often say that if I were optimistic and I thought we would look back on this period – where our technology had run ahead of our ability to understand it,[ to come up with good regulatory and policy frameworks for it, and so we had these weird science fictional things where, like, a copyright law from the Clinton era is making it so that John Deere can decide who can fix its tractors and also who can disclose vulnerabilities in pacemakers – I would say 'if that's going to be like this blip in our rear view mirror we should still get up every morning and do everything we can to try and change it, because the stakes are very high'. and if I were pessimistic and I thought that this stuff would come no matter what we did – that we'd be Huxleyd into the full Orwell – I would still get up every morning and do everything I could to fix it because, again, the stakes are so high.

[08:07] So for me, I try not to think about optimism or pessimism. I try to think about hope. Which is the idea that if you run up against a system that is untenable, a situation that is dire – and you don't know how to get from that situation into a good one, but you can find a way to make it incrementally better, that maybe having made it incrementally better you can find another perch that reveals new terrain that may reveal a position that's better still. In computer science we call this 'hill climbing'; that we don't know the path from A to Z, but we know the path from A to B. And we know the vector for Z. And so we just head in that direction.

[08:48] And I can't help but think – to bring this back to your own work – that I'm sure that when you went to Hong Kong you did not have an A to Z path that starts with 'I use wget to crawl Wiki[leaks?] and then I go to Hong Kong and hang out with portraits and Greenwald, tam, tam, tam, tam… Progress!' I'm sure that there are some steps in the middle. But I'm sure you also thought 'if I sit here in Hawaii, looking at this stuff through my terminal every day, things are not going to get better no matter what I do.' There's that quote from Joe Lewis, when they asked him why a civil rights fighter was going to join the US Army and fight World War two, and he said 'well there's plenty wrong with this world, but Hitler's not helping.'

[09:39] Ed: Yeah, I mean there's… In my own case, and I think this is one of the central struggles that we all face. It's not 'can we save the world? Can we make things better? Can we solve the problem?' but 'can we lay down a brick? A foundation upon which other people can place their brick and together we can build a home, we can build something that will withstand the dangerous forces of an unpredictable world.' For those who aren't familiar – although I presume most people in this particular audience, given the give me applause, probably are – when I worked in Hawaii, at the NSA, I didn't have this grand plan. I signed up for the Iraq war for the US Army in 2004, when everybody else was protesting it. I then went on to work for the CIA undercover overseas. Then I moved over to the NSA in Japan, bounced back to the CIA as a private contractor in the US, then I went to Hawaii for the NSA again. Back and forth, back and forth, different levels, climbing clearance ladder in these secret agencies. And I believed the government. I didn't believe that they would lie, that they would deceive. In a way that mattered. Yeah, sure they would hide this or that operation to catch terrorist. But the idea that they saw journalists as the enemy, that they saw the American people as an adversarial force which things should be hidden from – this is not to say that they want to destroy the American people, but that they want to rearrange the furniture in the political conversation, they want to bound things in a way that they decide what can and can't be said – was something that I was not prepared for.

[11:42] And this is something that I think happens a lot in Walkaway in different ways, perhaps less concretely for me it was realizing that the NSA actually ran a covert system of mass surveillance which violated the constitution and the state laws on the books in the United States. Mind you that's not me saying it. Now - post twenty thirteen - that's our federal courts saying they confirm that even at the appellate level.

[12:14] But to get back to the book here, there's a recurring theme of this sort of, not just governmental bad action, but powerful bad action. It's really about privileged positions in the world. There's this recurring theme of villains taking, stealing or destroying what others have sacrificed to build. And this is frequently happening by those in power. The mechanisms change, sometimes it happens through broken laws or unfair system - something that's all too familiar for Americans in the wake of the financial crisis - but other times it happens via things that are more concrete, more direct - coercion threats, violence or theft. One reading of Walkaway is not just as a novel but it's sort of a political argument, an attempt to figure out how to respond to a world or a system that's gone too far to be reformed through traditional means. How do you see this and what were you trying to work through?

[13:21] CD: So Walkaway is a novel that is sat at this moment of rupture when an unbearable system becomes untenable and starts to unravel. And you know, I'm a science fiction writer which means I write in the pulp tradition which I'm actually quite proud of. We were talking about William Gibson earlier. In the introduction Gibson gets this interview with the Paris Review where they asked him something like 'What do you say when literary types tell you that science fiction is just greasy kid stuff' and he says 'Whenever I rub up against that I just say to myself 'I am writing in the pulp tradition and that means I can plot Goddammit! You know, I got wheels on my tractor!'' And Pulp has two main stories - story themes - depending on how you cleave it; 'Man against man' and 'man against nature'. And it likes to get a two for one and tell a 'man against man against nature' story, where, like, the earthquake knocks your building down and then your neighbors come over and eat you - you know as they say in like Pearl sights circles - now you have two problems. And that story of man's barbarism - humanity is barbarism in moments of extremis - it doesn't actually line up well with reality. When you really talk to people who've lived through crises, you hear the stories that spring to mind for them are stories of people rising to the occasion in spectacular ways, that make you have faith in the human condition. It's narratively convenient to have than otherwise nice neighbor turn out to be a total bastard and ninety nine percent of the world turn out to be a total bastard which is you know this like profoundly statistically illiterate belief, cause if ninety nine point nine percent of the world are total bastards but everyone you know is more or less OK, then somehow you've managed to lock into the world's least representative set of friends, right?

[15:28] And when we are moving fast, and breaking things, and getting worried and not thinking rationally, we deploy the availability heuristic - things we can imagine vividly we assume are likely to come true. And all those man against man stories they come to mind so easily in crisis and the kinds of abuse and rupture that you describe in Walkaway those are things that happen around us they happen periodically disaster happens all the time. Right now you know even well organized societies are subject to these exhaustion and shocks of you know belligerent jerky neighboring states and rising seas and mutating microbes and whatnot and if the availability heuristic that you've acquired by reading bad Pulp Fiction is that you should grab a shotgun and take it over your neighbor's house instead of a covered dish and taking it over your neighbor's house it's much harder to rebuild and so. This is a novel written in the anticipation that the future will be pretty much like the present in as much as we will have crises and that there will be people in those crises trying to figure out what the other people around them are going to do and just like a little brother was a novel about the present right where the computers and little brother the thing that made them different from all the other computers and techno thrillers was not that they acted futuristically but they just acted like real computers as opposed to imaginary computers that do what the plot demanded that made that book really evergreen here we are a decade later trumps an office and people like you wrote this book that's all about how people use crypto to defend themselves from cops and how cops will try to put back doors in their crypto well like that's an actual techno thriller plot that nobody bothered to tell because nobody bothered to figure out how computers work before they before two thousand and eight when they're writing technique thrillers and this is a book about crisis in which the actual lived experience of people who go through crises is the thing the drama spills spreads from and it's not that there isn't drama in fact the drama is way more intense because there are people who fundamentally like each other and disagree which is so much harder than people who hate each other and disagree you know so much harder to go to bed after an argument with someone you love that you think you will maybe never be able to heal from than having an argument with someone you hate and so that that I thought was like a way that I could pull together a dramatic story a tense thriller type science fiction story a tractor with wheels on it that was nevertheless something that was realistic and that really referred to things that are likely to happen in the future and so would feel predictive as the moments roll around.

[18:14] Ed: You know there's a sort of theme here that I just want to follow up on because it's so interesting to me. I know this is probably not what people expect from me but. There's a former NSA director out there who would tell you that I'm quite fond of the element of surprise, so that doesn't really bother me. There is a strong theme of economics that underlies this. This isn't really a book about economics, but there's ideas in it. That are fascinating, because they actually recall similar problems that obsessed another famous American author in the last century, Ayn Rand. And she arrived at a similar conclusion in terms of political response, which was this idea of walking away. But for a very different reason, and for a very different result. The idea of walking away, generally right, could be seen as the withholding of labor from a broken and unjust system. But there's a plot point, a significant one, in Walk Away that is typically contrary to Ayn Rand – who, for those who are unfamiliar, famously argued the only objective really moral basis for human cooperation is in exchanging value for value. Charity and altruism that didn't benefit an individual was not just seen as not a good thing but particularly a bad thing, because it was seen as self-sacrificing, led to all these ruinous things.

[19:58] But in Walk Away there's point where, let's say the most valuable invention in history is suddenly achieved, and then immediately given away freely. In fact a running theme in the book is a kind of argument against traditional, capitalist arguments; that this sort of Randian Virtue of Selfishness is what drives progress and distributes resources in, if not the most fair way, then at least the most meritocratic one. Where do you think those arguments – those old Randian arguments – are strongest, and where do they go wrong?

[20:40] CD: So, you're right that in some ways this is the novel about all the people who, when Atlas shrugged, said good riddance. And so it is a response and [??] around people say that Rand is proof that if you only ever read one book you're always going to get into trouble. And yet the thing that is definitely visibly true market capitalism is that it produces, through competition, enormous enormous gains in productivity that are to the great benefit of the long human project of figuring out not how to bring every lower down to live like a peasant but how to elevate every peasant to live like a lord. Which is a thing we can only do if we have lots of stuff that's produced in a way that doesn't exhaust the earth's resources. So consider, here we are in this nineteenth-eighteenth century library which is a beautiful old pile and markedly different from the new towers going up around Manhattan. One of the reasons it's markedly different is that cubic foot for cubic foot it has orders of magnitude more embodied labor, material and energy. That your car, your computer, your phone, your chair, your furniture are all – in terms of their material labor and energy budget – in free fall. Some Bank of Canada economist just did a beautiful little study by looking at Ikea catalogs over time, and they found that the thing that predicts weather a piece of Ikea furniture will stay in the catalog or be dropped is whether the cubic footage of it packed and its overall weight declines over time. So material and production efficiencies are what predict the longevity of a piece of Ikea furniture. And so if you own a Billy book case from today and you have a Billy book case from twenty years ago, that Billy bookcase from twenty years ago is probably twice as heavy as the Billy book case you own today.

[22:42] So we ask 'how will we all sustain a livelihood that will require six earths?' Well we would do it by reducing the material inputs into our life into our lives by five sixths. And that is a thing that market capitalism has done extremely well, and not coincidentally this is a thing that Marx's [or Marxists?] predicted market capitalism would do extremely well. But Marx's also predicted that the efficiency of the engineering craft deployed by market firms would be bounded at the edges of what the firm considered it's self interest, and that anything that could be externalized to the wider world would happen. And this is also visibly true. So Apple has figured out how to make a laptop like the one I'm talking to you on that is orders of magnitude less material energy and labor intensive than the laptops I had ten years or twenty years ago, the last time I was an Apple user. But what they what they have also done is they have arranged their affairs so that the official Apple recycler ensures that there is no secondary market in Apple equipment, by shredding everything that's sent to them. And they have designed their machines so that it is virtually impossible to gracefully degrade them back into the material stream. And they've designed their machines so that none of the components that may be usable in a subsequent device are surface mounted and easily removed.

[24:10] I know you just did a hardware project with Bunny Wang. Bunny is a virtuoso engineer, and one of his design principles is designing for the end of life of that system. Of having surface mounted components, screws not glue. All of those elements are part of his engineering practice because it's good engineering practice. But it's not engineering practice the market selects for. It's engineering practice that you need to – either in the form of a state or in the form of a norm – have some wider belief in your shared destiny with people outside of your firm, outside of its shareholders, in order to arrive at. And Walk Away does the science fictional trick of cleaving a technological system from its economic and social context and imagining – just as Steampunk says 'what would it be like if we had the productivity of the assembly line and the working style of the craftsman, you know if we could love the machine but hate the factory?' – Walk Away says 'what could we do if we expanded the scope in which we engineered beyond the boundary of the firm, into the boundary of the world. Not by gaming it with carbon credits or trying to find a regulator that can run ahead of the corporation, trying to figure out how to get around the rules that it's making with expert employees at the regulator who can't make as much as the people who are trying to get around them, and generally are not as plugged in and switched on as they are. What if we did it instead through a non-market means, through an ethical means. And so that's what Walk Away is about. It's a world that doesn't just work well, it's a world that fails gracefully. You know, the first duty of every engineer; to design systems that fail gracefully.

[26:06] Ed: So if I can push back on this a little. [Cory: Yeah] Because there's going to be people in the audience who are thinking you know 'that's well and good and it's wonderful' but there's always whenever we start hearing words like 'Marxism' people start going 'um-hmm'. But there's an idea here, and that is sort of the magic underlying the setting of the story. We have this explosion of productive technological capability. For those in the audience, we're talking about things like advanced 3D Printing. Right now we have 3D Printers that are, you know, 50 000 dollars and they print in metal in a factory and they can print something, you know, about you know yea high, couple cubic feet, by depositing little particles of metal and then centering them together with lasers or heat or using plastics and melting them or different kind of things to be able to print physical objects out of lattice work. Eventually this will move on to where you can print a desk. If we can do this with cell cultures you'll be able to print a liver, a heart. Perhaps even bodies, if you can start moving consciousness and really radical sort of far future, imaginary things, that is one of the other explorations in the book Steam[?] right.

[27:35] But one of the challenges, one of the interesting things is – all right, let's say we have this magical productive capability. The factories, the capital has to come from somewhere. There's an early scene in Walk Away where there's a factory of a place like Ikea. It's been mothballed, shut down. It's not running anything, because they've relocated the factory to another area to get a tax credit. This is something that happens every day. That factory is not doing anything, while it could be serving people in the communities around it. It could be producing things. All they need is what you in the book refer to as 'feedstocks', the raw materials. Which are presumed to be pretty much low value. Basically they're rounding error in the productive cost of this equipment. But at the same time, when we've got all these magical machines, where you put in raw products on some side – recovered fabrics, textiles, plastics, steel, concrete, whatever – and you get your magical outputs on the other side. Most of the people in the walkaway community, these aren't miners, these aren't lumberjacks, they're scavengers. They're finding things that have been abandoned, they're no longer useful, and they're using this to create new things. They're taking the old, the things that has failed, and sort of gracefully creating something new.

[29:02] And this gives rise to the modern technologists dream. There's a lot of people in the technology community who think today we're on the cusp of what's described as a 'post scarcity society'. And this is all of our old economic models are about to be overthrown in some span of decades – we don't know whether it's going to be three decades, we don't know whether it's going to be twenty decades – but they see it coming, and the idea is as long as you can gather up the inputs – robotic automation, advanced artificial intelligence's, the interconnectedness of human design where one person – whether they're in Albuquerque or whether they're in Berlin – can produce a blueprint that can be sent to one of these machines instantly around the world and reproduced by anybody for free. And suddenly anybody can have a Ferrari, let's say, as long as you can get the things. That's the dream, right. But this post scarcity idea, in real life is bound by sort of the tyranny of physics that we have. In a world with a finite number of [??] How would you say a post scarcity society can ever be achieved, is this something that we will get to, or is this more of a goal, something we want to achieve but will never actually reach?

[30:29] CD: So I've been writing about scarcity and abundance since my first novel, Down and out in the Magic Kingdom is often talked about as a post scarcity novel. Makers was a novel about scarcity and post scarcity, 3D Printing and highly automated manufacturing techniques. And I've come to the conclusion that scarcity and abundance, they are a triangle. And up at the apex here there's what we want. So in 1930 Keynes wrote this famous paper where he predicted that by 2015 we would struggle to fill our three day work weeks because we could produce all the material things that humanity could reasonably want. And you know the word 'reasonably' there is the tell, because in the intervening years we've turned out to have a lot of what the economists call 'demand elasticity'. And demand elasticity is not something that occurs in the third person, passive voice: 'demand elasticity has arrived'. People make demand elasticity. It's a manufacturing technique generated through marketing, through storytelling, through lots of the… you know we have demand elasticity where people convince other people that they should have five kids and we have demand elasticity where the people around you convince you that you should have none. We have Mary condo, who started an entire cottage industry out of convincing reasonable people that all they really want is a single smooth river stone that reminds them of their mother, as [??] likes to say. So post scarcity is either here, if we say that we want too much, or it will never arrive if we say we could always want more.

[32:12] And then down in this bottom corner is what you were just talking about, the 3D Printing stuff. So I wrote the 'what we want' novel in 2000, I wrote the 'what we can make' novel, the 3D Printing novel, in 2009 with Makers. And we've been over that. IKEA furniture, massively reduced labor, material inputs. Clearly if we want more one of the ways to solve that is by making what we want better. But over here in the other corner, this is the main event. And it's so ubiquitous that we even miss that it's there. And that's the logistics. So what we want is to get from A to B conveniently, pleasantly. And so the way we do it is by owning cars. And some cars are positional goods, like Ferrari's, where the fact that I have a car and you don't means something. Some cars are valued for their objectness, because they are beautifully made cars and you want to have it to look at when you're not driving around in it because it's a piece of engineering that's very nice.

[33:15] But mostly cars are utility function embodied in a ton and a half of steel. And that utility function we now have lots of super efficient and often horribly exploitative ways of delivering – sometimes that's Uber and sometimes that's Zip Car – but it turns out that we can actually deliver the experience of getting from A to B without necessarily giving everyone a car. And then in fact we can deliver a better experience of getting from A to B without giving everyone a car by making the experience of not owning a car to get from A to B better. That's what we really want. We don't want the car, we want the travel. There were people who said 'how could we ever have cities or long highways of a certain density' – that eventually the horse manure would overwhelm us. And they were underestimating the likelihood that we just wouldn't use horses as the main means of traversing the territory.

[34:12] But there's another really key piece, and this is the Internet-ish piece of the logistics story; which is the fungibility under conditions of abundance of many different kinds of things. So when you go to a theme park – which is another thing I've written a lot about – I don't imagine you go to a lot of theme parks these days, but when you go to a theme park you're there to do fun stuff. And there may be a ride that you have to go on or it's not a day at the theme park, but the people – and I speak as a former Imagineering employee – the people who go to a theme park with a checklist that they have to do in order never have a nice time. And the people who are with them have a terrible day. The people who show up and is like 'I just want good stuff all day long', those people have an awesome day. And if we have networks that tell us where the good thing to do right now is, where the fun, useful, functional thing to do is at any given moment, then we can actually deliver a lot more through the logistics piece. So smelting aluminum is super electricity intensive. We need a certain amount of aluminum smelted. It's pretty easy to get it from A to B wherever we smelt it. There are places where renewable energy is delivering more power than we can use, and more power than you can usefully store. Smelting aluminum is effectively a battery for that. Because we know we're eventually going to have to smelt it – rather than smelting it someplace where energy is scarce in the future we smelt it now where energy is abundant. So this is a logistical way to bank something that is abundant when it's abundant and then get it to where it's needed when it scarce. Google runs a data center in Belgium where two thirds of the time it doesn't need chillers and the rest of the time they switch it off. Because the data doesn't care which metal it's running on, it just cares that there is metal to run on. So in the cloud we put our stuff in Docker and then if our data center turns out to be no good we move the Docker somewhere else, and two seconds later we're up and running again. So that fungibility is another piece.

[36:21] Ed: So let's say you've got all of these economic things in this model sort of accounted for. There's another thing that's quite interesting, and I think is also reflective of current political dynamics, which are worrying, I think, to every American right now. This is a country that, you know many people forget, is born from an act of treason. We were all rebels willing to risk the rope in order to create something that was less ordered and more free. These people were all fighting for liberty. They were instituting and asserting new rights that hadn't really existed before, such as the Fourth Amendment; Freedom from unreasonable search, or seizure, of your private communications. This is not just going in your house and looking at your things. It's not just reading your emails or your letters as they sort of transit through government hands. But simply collecting them in the first place and saving them even if they don't… [Connection broken]

[37:33] CD: Oh, there is the NSA. [Laughter in the audience] So Ed warned us that this might happen and said that we should just make a joke about the NSA and wait for him to come back. [Laughter] So a little housekeeping stuff while we're waiting. When the talk is over we're going to do some questions and answers. And I like to call alternately on people who identify as women or non-binary and people who identify as male or non-binary, and that way it's not a total sausage fest. So if you can start thinking about how you might ask depending on how you identify, when you might come up, that way it won't be a surprise when it comes to the end. Does someone want to come up and see what we can do about this laptop? We have a 'this site can't be reached' Google error, which suggests that this is actually a network level problem here. Is there anyone who understands computers at the…? [Laughter] Sorry.

[38:45] So let me tell you what I was going to ask Ed. So I was going to ask Ed more or less the same questions he just asked me. I wanted to know whether he thought that coming in out of the cold was an optimistic or a pessimistic act. Because it strikes me, when you see Laura Poitras' documentary, that he didn't know what was going to happen afterwards. And he had seen other people engaged in similar acts who had been not thanked for their trouble, but really horribly, horribly abused for it. People like Bill Binney, who had blown the whistle on what was going on at the NSA. And it struck me that he was really looking at these strategies that other people who had come out of the cold had deployed and he was trying to think about how he might learn from their lessons. So he did a lot of work, I thought, to keep out of the public eye in those early weeks of the leaks. As someone who was both someone who's interested in his political message, but also someone who's really interested in the media strategy and the human story of it, you know someone who writes stories about rebels who take on authority against all odds and sometimes end up broken for their trouble, I wanted to know more about this mysterious guy. And even I, who was hanging on every bit of news that I could find about Ed, I could find out very little about him. And it was a real gamble, I thought, because I thought that that would be an opportunity for the press to smear him horribly in the absence of him being there to say something in his defense. But it would also, I thought, be a gamble that the press would eventually be starved of the story, without anything to write about Ed that they would have to write about what he'd done, that they'd have to write about his leaks. And I thought the gambit paid off beautifully.

[40:4] And the question I wanted to ask him was 'Was he optimistic then?' – and I think there is a certain optimism in what he did, or at least hopefulness as I define it – 'but how do he feel now?' You know we do have an ongoing debate about privacy and liberty that is alive and well around the world. But that debate cooled down a lot after 2014, 2015 rolled by, there is a shield of boringness to so much of the surveillance, that it's hard to remain really engaged with that debate, you know. How many of you know that there's this section 702 bill coming up for renewal in the Foreign Intelligence Amendment Act? Which is this gobbledygook of numbers and official sounding, ridiculous terms that means 'can the government continue to intercept all of our phone calls and e-mails forever?' And trying to keep track of which program is which, because so many of the programs do the same thing and overlap, and trying to figure out which program is up for renewal and when, it's such a tedious job and so hard to keep on the front page, let alone the front of your mind, that over time – especially when you have flamboyant people promising to do things that are less likely, but arguably more harmful, like repealing the First Amendment to make it easier to sue journalists, which is a grotesque thing to say, but also a terrible bit of plotting that has very little plausibility that none of us should really be suspending our disbelief for – that it's very hard to keep that alive in your mind.

[42:15] And so I wonder now whether Ed feels like in retrospect he could do something different. And the reason I ask that is because I want to know what he would tell someone else who's thinking about doing this. We just saw the Vault 7 leaks come out of the CIA, which revealed that the CIA was paying people to discover vulnerabilities in computers that we rely on for our safety, our privacy, our integrity, and that rather than remediating those vulnerabilities so that we couldn't be attacked by them, they hoarded them and weaponized them so that they could attack their adversaries. And when those leaked Stanford did work on them and found that about 20% of those vulnerabilities that the CIA identifies and doesn't tell the rest of us about, 20% of those are independently rediscovered and weaponized by petty criminals and other governments and used to attack us every year. And so 'what would you say, Ed, to the next Vault 7 whistleblower, how can we address those people?' And the reason I wanted to ask him that is it's a question I sometimes get asked – sometimes in backwards ways. so I went to West Point last year to speak at the cyber Institute, which is an excellent institution full of people who believe in good things and who want very badly to keep the world safe, who have the same kind of thoughts in their mind that Ed had when he signed up for the special forces and broke both of his legs and ended up with a career in intelligence instead of on the front lines. And afterwards there was a signing and all of these cadets who'd been assigned to read my book came up and had my book signed by me, and this one kid hung back until the very end. And West Point's a really interesting institution because it's like an Ivy League or a Big Ten, but it's like an Ivy or a Big Ten of meritocracy wasn't a joke told by rich people to convince themselves that they deserve their money. Because it's full of brown people and poor people who are able to get a really first rate education provided that they're willing to also lay down their lives.

[44:14] And this kid hung back till the very end and he came up and he said 'I heard what you said during your lecture' – I talked about the grave risks that we arrive at thanks to the problems of cyber security being used in an offensive way by our intelligence agencies instead of to defend us – 'and I think you're absolutely right and no one in my family knows the first thing about computers and they're horribly exposed, their finances, their personal lives, they have cameras in their homes attached to their phones, attached to their laptops. They can be attacked in every single conceivable way, and so that's why I'm joining the NSA. What do you think about that?' And I looked at this kid and I said 'well, you know about Ed Snowden right?' It wasn't entirely sarcastic, if you have security clearance you're not supposed to read the Snowden leaks. Even when they're on the front page of The New York Times you're not supposed to read the Snowden leaks, because they might go above your security clearance. It's this incredibly specialized, esoteric definition of secret that is the thing that everyone except you knows. And he said 'I'm familiar with them' and I said 'so when you read the Snowden leaks and you see that the US government was breaking its own rules and launching into this program of mass surveillance that beggars all imagination, what makes you think that you'll be able to do something about it?' and he said 'well, I don't know, but I do know that if nobody gets into the stuff except people who are OK with that – if I don't get into it, if people of goodwill and principle never get involved with this stuff, then this situation will never ever get better. So now what do you say?' and I said 'Well, so the thing about Snowden, and this is stuff you can discover by reading the Vanity Fair profile where there's nothing that would get you in trouble with your security clearance, the thing about Snowden is he was like you – he was gung ho, multigenerational military family, about as different from my background as you could get. Joined the special forces, broke both of his legs, went to the CIA, was the best and the brightest. And he tried everything. He notoriously walked around with a copy of the Bill of Rights in his back pocket, and when he was asked to do things he thought fell afoul of it he would pull it out and say 'Show me where in the Bill of Rights it says I'm allowed to do this' right, and they would show him executive orders, and he would send the executive orders to the council for his department, and he would say 'explain to me how this executive order is in any way consistent with this constitution I carry around in my back pocket.' He tried going through the Ombudsman, he tried going through channels, and in the end he risked a firing squad because he was so desperate that he thought there was no way you could possibly get get out of it.'

[47:19] And I realized that I was describing, in some ways, a situation familiar to another kind of Q and A that I do from time to time. Because oftentimes when I give a talk I'll have someone come up to me and say 'I've been trying to send my books to publishers for years, none of them want to publish them, I'm going to publish my own books, what do you think about that?' And what I always say is 'there are people who've done remarkably successful things by self publishing, but do you know how they did it? Do you have a theory that matches some observed reality that you can deploy in order to figure out whether or not publishing your own book will cause anyone to read your book?' And usually the answer is 'No.' And I say 'that's where you need to start. You're asking me for advice on how to publish your own book. The advice I have for you is to figure out why you think people buy books like yours and try and see if you can figure out a way to get them to buy your book.' And I said to this kid 'Do you have a theory about what you can do that Ed didn't try that would end in a result that's better than you facing a firing squad or being complicit in the kind of thing you said you wanted to end?' and I saw that hit home and he walked off looking very pensive. And it's a conversation I've returned to a lot, and it is something I really wish I could have asked Ed about tonight.

[48:44] Are you having any luck getting him back on? Oh. Yeah, go ahead Paul. We like to improv here at the NYPL. It's characteristic of the Internet age that we have this fluid, improvisational style.

[49:05] [Presumably Paul] What keeps you up at night?

[49:06] [CD] What keeps me up at night? So I mentioned earlier that fights between people who agree with each other are always a lot harder than fights between people who disagree. And the open Internet is on the ropes.

[49:23] Paul: But in a way you can argue best with people you agree with.

[49:28] CD: Yes, that's true, you share a lot of premises. But it's also hard to convince them that it's nothing personal. So the open Internet is on the ropes. Organizations that have stood steadfast for the open web are facing a declining relevance, declining finances, and they've started to make bad compromises. So for example there's an organization I hold in very high esteem called the World Wide Web Consortium, that Tim Berners Lee, who invented the web, also founded. And they decided that they would standardize digital logs for the web – to make it easier for companies like Netflix to control your computer while you were watching it – and that they would do so in a way that would not make members of the consortium promise not to sue people who discovered security vulnerabilities in this that might expose people who use browsers to problems.

[50:23] Ed, welcome back. It's nice to see you again! I was vamping.

[50:29] [Lots of technical problems with the video conference system]

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