The New American Surveillance State | Byron Tau

wait wait wait wait can can the data Brokers uh sell the same information like domestic information about US citizens they could sell that to the US government do but what this entire episode's been about and like that's crazy enough you're not telling me those Brokers can also sell them to foreign countries oh yeah yeah absolutely what welcome to bankless where today we're exploring the frontier of privacy this is Ryan Sean Adams I'm here with David Hoffman and we're here to help you become more bankless the topic of

today's episode the US surveillance State we're talking total surveillance Our Guest is an investigative journalist who says the US government has in quotes a digital dossier of every citizen everyone listening to this thanks how do they collect the data how are they using it can we ever get back our digital privacy and uh does crypto does encryption fit into the picture here some questions we asked Byron on the episode today everyone knows that internet users up their privacy but you listener do you know how far that

actually goes do you think that US citizens actually have a right to privacy cuz I wouldn't be so sure the United States government can't search the contents of your emails but does that even matter in this Dayan age when there's so much data out there and is there even really a difference between the authoritarian state of China and the capitalistic democracy of the United States when it comes to our privacy these are some of the questions that we asked Byron so let's go ahead and get right into that conversation with Byron but first a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors B station I'm very excited to introduce to you Byron TAA he's an investigative journalist and

the author of a fantastic book it's called means of control in that book he shares just about everything he's learned about government surveillance and control this has been a multi-year project and we are excited to have him on bankless Byron welcome to the show thanks so much for having me okay uh so you're talking to crypto people here we have a crypto audience so the um audience has definitely dialed in I would say to the subject matter of uh surveillance in general um but I think the best place to start would be at the top so you wrote this

book it's called means of control so the simplest possible question is who's controlling us and what are their means um so it's it's a title taken from a Thomas Pinchin quote which I just happened to like um because I thought it expressed a lot of the themes in the book um and it the quot goes something like once the technical means of control have reached a certain size a certain degree of being connected to one another the chances for Freedom are over for

good and I think that sort of sums up some of the themes of my book specifically around large-scale data collection and its use by powerful forces in our society and those forces of course include corporations but the book documents specifically how governments are acquiring large amounts of this data and using it for various surveillance programs Okay so I I think an underlying theme of your book is if we if we don't protect these freedoms then we may actually lose them and uh

this is something I I'm sure we'll return to I'm curious though if if you're trying to explain this uh to like normies you know the problem statement in at a dinner party let's say and like you're just trying to explain this in a way that doesn't seem like you're wearing a tinfoil hat you're conspiracy theorist like how do you explain it to average everyday American citizens like the problem statement let's say and why it's a problem sure so I think that the thing I would say is that historically

in the United States we have limited government power by limiting the amount of information that governments can obtain about all of us we generally speaking require governments to go get a search warrant or a subpoena when they look at invasive amounts of information about us that's traditionally how we've limited government power and protected the privacy of citizens however in recent years so much information is available out there in the world for sale and governments like every other

entity on the planet they're eager for information and they are consumers of this commercially available information and that has essentially started to rewrite the social bargain that when you let governments buy large amounts of data on everybody it moves us away from that traditional notion um where you limit government power by having Court oversights by having you know they have to do they have to get documents together and they have to go convince a judge to let them look into an

individual with the sheer amount of information that's available out there in the world from data Brokers and from all sorts of other sources that social bargain is being upended okay so what's really interesting here U Byron is this is um there's almost some economics at play and like our our listeners will very much understand kind of like the economics of this situation it's it's something again I want to return back to uh in the future because it's become very inexpensive in this digital world to collect this information like it's

unprecedented this is the framers of the Constitution didn't have this kind of data uh collection um like cost reduction in in their mind when they when they frame things out and so I I think this is a recurring theme that we'll come back to and uh we want to set a road map for this episode maybe so first want um you to tell us what going on today like so how this data market play place works between corporations and and private groups that are collecting this data and the government how they're using it then I think we

want to talk about the legal like what protections do we actually have set up today because I I do we live in a Democratic Republic I think and there are some protections for Citizens aren't there and so we'll talk about that and then also want to get a sense of the the incentives and the motivation at play because it feels like we're we're stuck in a prisoners dilemma feels like we're stuck in some kind of a a system and um like that's the question of how how did we get into this system and then where does it leave us and then ultimately hopefully how do we change things and we

might bring into uh like in into play Financial surveillance and how crypto fits into all of this so let's start with the state of this surveillance system today and and what's going on so I I will say Byron bankless listeners probably pretty informed internet users um you know so if you if you tell them that they have very little privacy on the internet the first reaction would be like yeah tell me something I don't know like they won't be shocked right they're like yeah of course the government is um you know spying on me but like I I want

you to get into the details because I don't think a lot of listeners know exactly how that happens or the scale at which it's it's happening so what is something that you would say to even the informed internet goer whose immediate reaction is yeah of course they're spying on me um like what What's um what's something that they don't know in terms of how it works and and the level of of surveillance that that's going on here well one thing that seems to shock people is essentially that all of our consumer Technologies um bleed data in

some way and that goes right down to the tire pressure sensor in your car um you know even some professional Intelligence Officers were um you know a little surprised by some of this when they discovered this a few years ago but essentially when you turn on your car in the morning um there's a little display screen on the car that says you know the tire pressure is 42 PSI and that sensor is not a hardwired sensor it's actually a wireless sensor that transmits information from your car tire to the

Central Computer of your car and it's there for a perfectly good and legitimate safety reason um but very clever governments have figured out hey that's a unique identifier that comes off of this car and if we put the right sensor in the right place or we put something you know in front of a bridge or a tunnel choke point that everyone has to go to we can collect that information and that's basically the case with almost every system that we use in Modern Life um whether that's uh the mail right like every time you fill

out a change of address form um the Postal Service makes your data available to lots of people um every time you sign up for one of these Loyalty cards uh that Corporation is going to sell off your data probably or at the very least analyze your purchases um even when you're in sort of semi-closed social media sites um you know people infiltrate these spaces Brokers uh data scrapers and they capture what they can see in these closed spaces and and and Open Spaces as well like like Twitter or X and you know even the system of using

of delivering targeted advertising to billions of people on computers or on phones that system leeches tremendous amounts of data and that data is obtainable by data Brokers and so almost everywhere there is some sort of information um or some sort of a technology it's generating a lot of data and very clever people who know how to take advantage of these systems that the public largely uh doesn't quite know how they work have figured out ways to collect that data and and in many cases to sell that data and governments have

come along and decided to take advantage of these things um to take advantage of systems uh that were never designed sort of with adversarial privacy or privacy protection in mind uh and and use them for sort of mass surveillance I want to put an image into listeners heads Byron that I think they will help them kind of navigate this episode uh and this image is we're going to have to talk about the difference between content and metadata uh and so that that'll be my my first question to you is like the delineation there but really the idea here is of

some sort of a Sudoku puzzle that governments are are filling out and they're using metadata to fill out that Sudoku puzzle and way back in the day when there wasn't that much data citizens users um users of the internet still had a lot of privacy except for like the small amounts of metadata that we push around the internet in whatever forms uh but now with the explosion of devices that we all have we have Smart refrigerators uh we have apple watches we have phones we have our computers we

have iPads there's metadata everywhere and now there's a lot more of just like data surface area for Sudoku puzzles of information to kind of get filled out and for governments if they really want to to get a pretty holistic picture of what exactly is going on in the places that they are investigating so that's kind of like the image I want to live uh leave uh with with listeners can we talk about the difference between content and metadata and the different level of protections that individuals have as Internet goers yeah I like that metaphor

a lot um if I can just kind of uh complexify the history a little bit and and maybe this will help answer your question about the difference between content and metadata in the early history of of the internet actually a lot of what was being sent along the network was actually quite open and viewable by people like systems administrators and telecoms right because the early internet was actually never designed with privacy in mind even though it was a Department of Defense Network it was this experimental research Network that people were trading kind of messages and research

papers and unclassified stuff it was never really designed with privacy as the prim AR protocol but yet we've all moved our lives onto this entire network we do everything on it right we um we Bank we buy things we we do therapy appointments um there's all sorts of things now that we do on the internet on a system that was just never designed for this that was designed for Department of Defense researchers and academics to trade some some notes and some early drafts of research papers and so in the early days of the internet you

could actually intercept things fairly easily and um so when if you were sending an email uh on one of the Legacy email providers like Gmail like Hotmail like Yahoo Yahoo can see it um if it you know in the in the early days of the internet even your Telecom could see it your systems administrator could see all of this information and by information you mean the content like the actual contents of the letter of the email like what you were what you were saying to the person you were emailing right down to to the actual content of the message

over the years people have realized that this is a private problem right that we we don't necessarily want Telecom to be able to see your emails we don't necessarily want the guy in it to be able to see everything that's transiting the network so we've added extra layers of encryption onto um Communications that we send across the internet and sometimes that's truly endtoend encrypted um so you have you know services like signal and proton mail where no one not even the people running and service can see it um but more more often it's a service like gmail which

Gmail can see what you're saying but the Telecom can't and that's sort of the this is where the distinction and the importance of metadata comes into play because it's increasingly hard to intercept things as they move along Telecom networks and that was the traditional way governments did surveillance right that was a lot of what Edward Snowden revealed was that the government was just plucking things off of the AT&T and Verizon network as data was transiting and a lot of it was unencrypted and they could see everything as you start to add encryption into the mix you stop being

able to see a lot of the content of the messages now you can go to Gmail and demand them but you need to get a court order or um you know there some protections around that yeah there's like procedures and processes built in um but when you when it comes to metadata when it comes to data about the information that's being sent a lot of that is still available and um you know the Supreme Court a long time ago Drew this distinction between um information that you share with a third party and information that you keep private so there are fewer privacy protections for

things like metadata in the context of um Communications metadata is like the address on the outside of an envelope and content is like what's inside the envelope and governments by and large now today when they're filling out this Sudoku puzzle can get a lot of metadata it's a little bit harder to get content and that's what's led to this world that a lot of these data Brokers are brokering metadata or they're brokering you know little puzzle pieces or little signals from a device and you still have to do some homework you to do some

tradecraft uh to figure out how it's helpful in whose device it is or where this email came from but if you have powerful enough entities and a large enough budget and a big enough data center you can pretty much know everything about you know Communications and people and things um trying to be on the internet and just to really clearly Define data versus metadata uh I I think there's a metaphor into your book where like the data uh in the pre- internet World Imagine a letter snail mail physical letter on paper uh the metadata

is the address of uh the letter and where it's going and where it's coming from and then there's even some uh additional metadata one might be able to glean from that like how big is the letter like is it crinkled and old or is it brand new like stuff like this like cursory uh data cosmetic data you can see from the outside even though you can't see the the actual contents of the actual uh of the actual letter and like on the internet terms this is like data packets or just like other little packages of things that are flying around the inter and so while the content itself is uh

largely private from the outside view uh there's now a growing amount of this out there to the point where like there's still a lot a pretty solid way to uh glean what's inside of the actual uh the actual um content and so like I want to talk about just like the um uh submerged Iceberg that's going on here because I think this is the uh the lack of understanding that the average person does not have is like how big this complex is beneath the surface like how

much metadata is and how big the industry is around collecting it can you just like illustrate some magnitude of how big this the submerged iceberg is here yeah so I mean data Brokers themselves are that's a billion- dooll business and then if you look at sort sort of targeted advertising which is um you know these companies wouldn't call themselves data Brokers necessarily but they are collecting huge amounts of data on people and they're making it available to other parties that's probably close to a trillion dollar industry um and then never mind all of

the tech companies which they don't exactly broker data I mean Google doesn't sell your personal information per se but they sell access to you and they sell access to your data to lots of other parties who want to serve you targeted advertising so this is a a massive massive um social project and it's the way that a lot of content on the Internet is delivered and it's the reason why so much is free that there's just um the the the payment for a lot of these apps for a lot of these services for a lot of these websites is your data

and that data is probably not that valuable to you like if if you were to tally up individually how much you're worth to these companies it's probably not worth a tremendous amount but in the aggregate of billions of people um all you know in their roles as consumers as people who you might advertise to uh or you might collect data on or you might sell data on um then this ends up being a a pretty large industry and so you know you have all sorts of logs and

information and data floating around about how devices how people how internet browsers how cars are behaving and that data is tremendously interesting and valuable um in a variety of uses um to advertisers They Don't Really Care necessarily that it's Byron TOA um but they are interested in what I'm interested in what websites I visit what Search terms I I'm trying to put into Google um what I buy at the supermarket all that data is interesting to them because they want to build a

profile of me they don't necessarily care about me as an individual um you know like by name but they want to be able to serve relevant ads to me government they don't care about you your soul but they care about you the object exactly exactly like I I'm just I can be a number to them because it you know they could synonymize me and just call me some number and they don't have to get too deep into my personal identity but they they want to know a lot about you know what that synonymized number is doing on the internet um but

governments get very interested in this stuff too and they have very very different missions and there's a there's a very interesting quote that I um I put in the book uh from a senior intelligence Community official and he basically said you know we actually kill people off of metadata right we make targeting life and death decisions in the military and the intelligence Community um based on sort of like small iits of information that we can glean about people whether it's their social network whether it's their proximity in a known uh to a known terrorist safe

house um whether it's who they're communicating with um those things can inform life or death targeting decisions because basically the the behaviors that we all engage in reveal a lot about us who we're associated with what we're doing what we're interested in you can Divine a lot of information off of metadata you don't have to listen to a terrorist phone call to necessarily know that he or she is a terrorist right if you if they're at a known terrorist training camp and their phone is there that's a pretty good sign and so you

don't need to wiretap them necessarily that's a good data point that often that's all the military has to sort of identify that this is that person and this is where they are and call in the drones so where we are so far is um we're talking about how powerful metadata actually is and it looks like in this Digital World we've we've moved to it's tremendously um powerful and there are these data Brokers as you say there's this whole industry of data collectors and I think a lot of people are aware of this from sort of a I guess um yeah we are the product right we live

on the internet so we are the product so of course companies are collecting data about us in order to serve Us ads I think the new part here is that the US government uh is actually a purchaser of that data set and when you were just talking about the the case where there's sort of a you know a terrorist and uh like the military is going after a certain individual uh for instance that feels I think when you when you say that to someone who lives in the US like a foreign adversary type of situation right and I guess that's what the military is is there to do in the in the

best of cases right um where it gets creepy is when they start collecting data about us and I just want to ask the basic question like why are they doing that so let's say Google Facebook all of these data brokers tire gauge information you know Wi-Fi signal information you go through story after Story in your book of all of these this this metadata that we are essentially leaking and how are we leaking it just by living Our Lives you know we're just trying to live our lives right and we're

we're giving off throwing off all of this data that's one thing if it gives us a an ad that you know get gets put in front of us and sometimes you know that ad is valuable because I didn't know I wanted that thing so so thank you but it's another thing if our government is using that metadata to what like so why are they collecting it on uh US citizens what is there a rationale there yeah so at the highest levels all governments like all corporations and like nosy journalists are trying to better understand the world in furtherance of

whatever Mission they have and you know government isn't a monolith right government does a lot of things government um delivers services to Citizens it does planning like transportation planning it tries to fight disease outbreaks and data is useful in all those scenarios um a lot of the data that I talk about that's useful for sort of military operations is also useful for benign transportation planning or trying to understand the covid-19 outbreak so um not everything the government does with data is sort of necessarily scary

or implicates people's civil rights um so at the highest levels governments are collecting this data because they're curious and they have some Mission or some problem that they need to solve um and so when you talk about when you move to entities like um intelligence agencies the military and the police those are entities with a lot of power to cause very serious consequences to individuals and that's why I focus primarily on those entities and less on the entities that are trying to figure out where to put a bus stop or where the

best route for a light rail line is um those are important government functions but they have less of a dramatic impact on individuals and they they implicate less government power so take these uh government entities with these law enforcement intelligence National Security or Public Safety missions they're all collecting this data because they have an important function in our society you know the military and the intelligence Community are charged with keeping us safe largely from foreign adversaries um but domestic law enforcement entities are charged with

solving crimes and and you know ensuring Public Safety and governments are obtaining data largely for those purposes um so you have uh often the military and the intelligence Community they're they're largely focused abroad um you know certainly sometimes they acquire data sets on the United States but at the federal level in the 21st century there are a lot of checks and balances around what the intelligence community and the military do with data on Americans now what they do with data abroad that's a sort of a different question but you know domestic data

that's that's well protected and there are wellestablished procedures and civil rights um sort of protections built into those systems when you talk about the police and you talk about entities like DHS or the FBI that's those are entities that have much more direct um missions that are applicable to US citizens and this is where sort of thornier civil rights questions come into play like when is it appropriate for the United States government to buy large amounts

of data or even local governments or state governments to buy large amounts of data to do things like solve crimes to do things like you know uh figure out um where criminals are to try to do surveillance to try to prevent crime those are those thorniest civil rights questions that I think are raised by this kind of data acquisition you know and historically by and large as I've said we have limited the power of those entities to sort of root around in the lives of individuals because we think

that's the best way to protect Liberty and often things that traditionally required the approval of a judge um like let's take these massive amounts of location data sets that are available they come off of our phones they come off of our apps they come off of targeted ads um and they they show the movement of of millions if not hundreds of millions if not billions of devices around the world um you know law enforcement has started buying access to those databases and that data can often show things that one time they needed to fill

out a search warrant go to a judge and say give me some you know historic cell data on this person because I think he or she has committed a crime and that's where sort of the Civil Rights and civil liberties problems really start to compound when you're talking about government use of it it just seems like and this is the main message of your book and I think an important message for everyone to hear not just Bank list listeners but I hope the broader Society uh hears this is the government doesn't actually have to um be the ones collecting the data right they can be a

step removed from this process all they have to do is buyas from someone who has it and our um who selling it and our surveillance capitalism like creation this thing that we've created on the internet and all of the the digital information pushing out means there are companies out there that know just about everything about what we do through metadata like period they know where we are right now from our you know cell location data they know what our internet search history is like they know everything about us and if the

government can just simply they don't have to collect it elves they could just purchase it well that's like the most obvious loophole in history and I I'm I'm like almost surprised that we haven't connected uh these dots yet as a society but are you telling like I I just want to understand the mechanics of how this works let's say some data broker data provider has all of this data you're telling me the government FBI let's say we we'll use kind of like um you know the the internal uh domestic police type servants DHS or FBI you're

telling me that they can just like use our taxpayer dollars right and go purchase that data set on their own citizens and there's like no uh nothing that would prevent them or block them from doing it and in fact the companies are kind of happy because like they get to sell a product is that really how it works it's just like hey company uh we want this data will you sell it to us yeah sure here you go that's how it works yep that's exactly how it works um there are these data sets on the population on the movement of cars on

the move of phones on um you know people's home address history or their employment all sorts of sort of biographical details there are large data sets on people's social media um habits and and and um what they say in either open social media networks like um X and Twitter or semiopen ones like like Facebook and Instagram and Tik Tok all of that is available for sale and there is no legal prohibition on the US government going out and purchasing that

data on its own citizens um for the purposes of Public Safety for the purposes of intelligence for the purposes of surveilling people now some of these agencies um either don't do it as a matter of policy because they sort of want to be seen as respecting the civil rights of Americans some of them have very strict rules on how they acquire this data and some have no rules at all um because in the United States there are more than 10,000 different law enforcement entities and those range from very Soph phisticated well-funded

well-run ones with histories of uh abuse that are now overseen very carefully by Congress and the executive branch two very small police departments that um operate with very little oversight from their local governments and so there is no legal prohibition on the acquisition of this kind of bulk information on Americans from companies from data Brokers I'm to let David jump in here in a second but just like it it it strikes me how much of a precarious position that that puts us in as um citizens

because we're it's basically like you know a trust me bro type model that the government won't use this vast power of data against us right and we we'll talk about the legality a little bit later and what like a veneer of of uh civil liberties and laws actually protect us but wow that feels like a very vulnerable position to be in when we can't do anything we can't just like not get this data collected yeah and you know the United States in its recent history in the lifespan of people who

are alive today has experienced intelligence and law enforcement agencies going a little bit too far against domestic groups who have been critical of the government you know you you look at what happened during the Civil Rights Movement or the anti-war movement in Vietnam and the way that the FBI and the NSA and the CIA saw those groups as potential threats to social order and used the tools of the state used surveillance tools to monitor those uh groups and those individuals in ways

that today we would consider unlawful and massive violations of civil liberty so it's not that long ago that we've seen government power be turned in ways against domestic critics that I think today we would be very uncomfortable with and back then the amount of data available on people was quite limited I mean today you're talking about um you know an entire digital dossier on almost every citizen that's pretty exhaustive and it's not available through um you know sort of it's available through the

the corporations the largest sort of U companies in in the world have kind of assembled this information and these tiny data Brokers and data aggregators are are collecting it all from from these places and making it available for sale to basically everyone um they largely sprung up to cater to corporations um but the government Market is a nice little secondary um you know market for for them and and it's a nice little Profit Stream yeah that also keeps them on the the good side of the government too as a nice little