Edward Snowden at New Hampshire Forum

##########################################
Put your mask up put your mascot .
Plays so good so to get right into it uh as mad i want to thank Matt and Carla particular but all of you for everything you're doing with the free state project to create a Liberty in our lifetime.
Edward Snowden thank you so much for joining us we're talking from the Liberty forum of the Free State Project which 2003 they created a project where they said we're gonna get 20,000 people to agree to move to New Hampshire and make the state a freer and more interesting more innovative and fun place recently passed the 20,000 mark so the great migration has become has started and at some point i've been asked to welcome you to come to New Hampshire to a free state when you have time and I've been told that among other things it will be a free and independent New Hampshire those are even getting rid of the state liquor stores and they're not going to have extradition with the rest of the United States so coupling control.
Let's talk about the story that's very much in the news now the issue of Apple being requested by a court order to unlock the cellphone of one of the San Bernardino shooters you recently tweeted this is the most important tech case in a decade.
Silence means that google picked aside but it's not the public's can you elaborate on that and is Apple really on the public side and how does strong encryption of personal communication even when utilized by terrorists strength and freedom and liberty right so this is this is an incredibly complex sort of to happen when you think about the whole google apple first off of google did come forward their CEO made some comments in my sort of the defense of the ability of private enterprises not to be conscripted by government to sort of do software work at their direction rather than at the direct from their customers now it was very tentative but hey it's a start.
I mean when you think about sort of Apple you know are they the big champions of liberty of individual rights.
It's not really about that we're not looking for the perfect heroes here right it's a don't love the actor love the act and what we see is that what the FBI is asking for here right is in the wake of the San Bernardino shootings which are you know of course legitimate crimes this is an act of terrorism as it's been described and they said all right we've got this private product out there that was designed to protect the security of all customers not a particular individual customer but it's a binary choice either all of us have security or none of us have security and so the FBI went well yeah that's great but we want you to strip out some essential protections that you built into this program so that we can attack the program certain way and as a.
Technologist this is deeply disturbing to me because I know that we had laboratory techniques since the nineteen nineties that allow us apologize laboratory techniques since the nineteen nineties that allow the FBI and other organizations that have incredible resources to unilaterally mountain hardwear tax and security devices to re-engineer their software with out compelling private actors private enterprises private individuals to work contrary to their will.
Now prior to this there important Court precedents that have equated code to speech it's an act of creation and active expression when your program something which is no different than sort of writing a paper or building a house.
These are things that are guided by your intention and if the government can show up at any time anyhow of any individual and say regardless of your intention regardless of your ideas regardless of your plan you don't work for you you work for us that's a radically different thing and whether it's Apple or Google or anybody else somebody else who at least challenges on that assertion of authority and allows us to litigate that both in the courts in the public domain.
This is critical because prior to this moment these things were being litigated in secret and from the secret chord the so foreign intelligence.
Surveillance court that in 33 years was asked by the government 33 thousand nine hundred times to authorize a surveillance or.
Reinterpretations of statutory law that are more favorable to the government that we never knew about because all these decisions are classified and in those 30 3900 x 33 years the government gotta know from this court only 11 x 33.
That's why rollers here at my things can I ask a follow-up question and part of this is legal but part of it is also kind of technological I mean is any communication really secure anymore either David Brin 20 years ago talked about the transparent society about your privacy is done.
Get over it and if no communication is really secure anymore is it a problem or is there a way to actually hold the government accountable or to restrain it or corporations for that matter I mean what you know is this beyond a question of government acting and corporate acting and individual acting because certainly Brynn was writing long before Facebook and social media where people are giving away you know just noodles of information again and again.
So you know is is any communication private anymore and if it isn't then what next so this is a again really complex question that we could talk for a longer than the time we have on but the idea here is there there are different kinds of surveys right there's mass surveillance which is typically done of communications in transit right as they cross the internet over lines that you don't own but you don't have a choice not to use because of the nature of the modern.
Communications grid you can say i want my communications only route with this network arm once they leave your home wants to leave your handset for yourself on whatever device you're using outside of your control it gets routed invisibly across borders across systems across enterprises the danger of this is that any one of these actors whether their corporate actors were governments and we know for a fact that governments particularly are using this sort of capability as they transit if they're transmitted.
Electronically make it that is unencrypted anybody can read these they can capture these they can store these they can do whatever they want with them and there's no indication that it happened uh so this is the property of course that's eyes like whether their corporate were state its that nobody they don't people don't even know that LARPing assuming that they're right does this does this mean that there's nothing that works no I'm there are ways to shelter the content of the communication which is basically if you think about what's in the email of what's in the order to register with amazon.com or you know that the call that you made a voice over IP system for the text message that you sent through a certain app they can no longer read that all they can see what you're doing is those communications that were electronically make it has now been closed.
They've been armored in a kind of thing that means you know they can't just kind of look under your skirt and see what's happening there.
All they can see is that now there's a covered wagon sort of moving down the trail that cover allows you to have some measure of privacy but there's still a danger here which is they can monitor the movements of the wagons and this is what the government refers to as metadata how non-expert should think about is me data it's doing about you.
They're perfect records of private lives in the activities since they can't see what you're saying they can see.
You're saying to when you're saying with what frequency intelligence agencies use this information to derive what we call the pattern of life of individuals and it's very much the same as what a private I would develop and create store if they were falling around all day they can't sit beside you whatever cafe you going to because you'll notice hey that's the same guy that was there all the time or why is this guy leaned over the table to hear my conversation but they'll be mere enough to see who you meet with you got there with the license plate of your car was when you left where you traveled where you slept at night now this stuff is being done on a mass indiscriminate scale to all of us even today in sort of after these reforms on the government stopped holding these repositories of data for a particular phone collection program who everybody in the country calls but they said the phone companies can still hold this information and we'll just ask them for but for the internet they haven't made any changes to those programs as a result now when we talk about the the direct factual challenges there there are two points one is armoring the intrinsic communications this is a principle called end-to-end encryption now the founding fathers in the united states use encryption to protect their communications Benjamin Franklin created a number of ciphering systems himself because he recognized that when great power has intensely detailed private information about the political activities of groups that are acting manners that they would find it inconvenient or burdens I it's going to be very short revolution and we would have lost so they've sort of a certain means of defense that is what is happening today for the internet is standard it's not targeted against the United States government its targeted against all actors who seek to subvert the intention of the users we're trying to protect everyone everywhere across borders.
We're not just fighting the NSA it right this is about China Russia North Korea Iran whoever more afraid we can protect everyone from all of them by working together now there is still that further measure of metadata sort me date again at the private records where how do we conceal the fact that a communication occurred as opposed to the details that occurred within it and that's still an area of active research there are programs that are developed that you help with this but this is still actively top research but what you don't like people like William Binney and Kurt we be Thomas Drake you're you're not against the government actually acting in to ensure to help the safety of citizens can you talk a little bit about what what would what would a government surveillance program that is legal and effective look like for you what are you know how how would they play that out without inevitably you know at some point you talked about our you've written about how what the government can do and what it should do are or what it will do are merging there's no sense of morality but how do we put that kind of stopping point where we have a government that can help protect us but not ultimately you know surveillance constantly well the first point here is to recognize that the nature of open societies free societies right nations at liberty is that life does new tail some measure of risk you're only going to be perfectly protected if you sort of bury yourself underground or live in prison and then you'll still be at risk from the inmates are sort of walking the assignment with you life involves risk involved shorts involves contest that's where it derives its value from that's where we progress from we are tested every day by our environment.
Now that doesn't mean we we sort of open the vest and assume that we should be vulnerable to any act or anywhere he wants to us are of course we should take reasonable measures and we should work to create capabilities and measures that allow us to identify wrongdoing and punish the wicked as things have always worked throughout human history now the method of law enforcement that we know works has been modeled for thousands of years that has done so and that is that we use of what's called a particularity requirement which is really what the Fourth Amendment is about $MONEY in legal terms the ideas we don't have a general war where the court says the anybody you think might be related to some class of activity whether that's political radicalism or anything like that is going well we think they're like that so we're gonna look at them instead you need some probable cause that you can demonstrate to the court right this isn't just a gut feeling you have to be able to lay out the evidence that this individuals engaged in some kind of wrong again they are a criminal and it means a threshold God that allows the court and the public sort of by proxy to go the interest in a sort of limiting these rights for this particular period of investigation for the public outweighs that of the natural right that we all enjoy to be left alone without reasonable cause now this is what has changed in the wake of 911 and particularly what 2013 revealed if the government is targeting a particular device of an individual or they're trying to attack a phone in office that they know is involved in mob activity there's nothing wrong with that.
That's what we've always done we've done this for hundreds of years we have to have those methods of Investigation but at the same time free criminal investigation that is watching all of us all of the time because we might someday become interesting right they want to go back in time and look at all the records that they correct collected in advance the government calls this ball collection everyone else causing mass surveillance and say well you know you've come to our attention today but we no what you did on you know june fifth 1992 and we all like that that's a problem because it radically reorders the balance of power in society it is pre-emptively restricting our rights without any calls to do so to create a sort of surveillance time machine that allows them to go back and say no matter what you've done we know what that was we can analyze you we can assess you and why this matters is it's no longer justice.
It's only order and these are very different things I'm you know six years ago this month in $MONTH 2010 an artist technical forum under your unfortunate pseudonym the true haha you asked did we did we get to where we are today via slippery slope that was entirely within our control to stop and i'm quoting you or was it a relatively instantaneous see change that sneaked in undetected because of pervasive government secrecy you know with what you were just talking about how would you answer that question now was it you know are we are we frogs in a pot of water that's getting warmer and warmer or was there a switch that was turned on and that's that's how this happened so first let me caveat as a privacy advocate I've never publicly owned these posts and this is not to say in all these are like that the individual in question who authored these posts seems to have a suspiciously large amount of correlating events in their life that match mine.
Here the point here is that when individuals right under soon right.
There's a reason for that so individuals can be judged on the basis of their ideas their engagement in a particular conversation rather than their personalities and this has been a concept that has moved for public discussion I think the public comes you know not necessarily on that is certainly in American history the constant the Federalist Papers I mean we are a country that was founded on anonymous speech in many ways so your participation hurts you or whoever was were dissipated in the grand tradition for it for the sake of argument let's presume that individual was me ah the idea here is could we have arrested this line and at the time contemporaneous to that I think it was circuit 2009-2010 I was still working for the CIA had just moved to the NSA actually and I didn't have the same kind of comprehensive insight as to how the system had arisen and of course if I would have been in this position writing is this individual the idea would be well we should have seen this coming right it would've been incremental there would have been some public indications but when you look at the public record of house or the institutions of Master and security states they occurred under a veil of secrecy and when officials were challenged by them even under oath even on camera they lied about them and this is something important if we sort of rewind that host 2013 moment there were stories published in $YEAR in 2006 really more or less wiretapping more james bamford in 2012 and when you look at a sort of statements in front of Congress they looked a lot like this between representative Hank Johnson and former director of the the earth sorry uh former director Keith Alexander the NSA does d NSA routinely and acceptance.
American citizens emails now there's the NSA intercept Americans cell phone.
Conversations now Google searches now text messages no amazon.com orders no bank records.
No does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans no sir it does not not wittingly there are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect but not not winning one so this is sort of the challenge.
Can we stop policies can we arrest them can we have a voice in them can we have a vote on them if they're intentionally and wittingly concealed from us talk about how does the government you know by all indications if you look at gallup you or other surveys trust and confidence in government to either be effective or to do the right thing these are at at or near historic lows how does government win back the trust because again you know and i'm going to ask the libertarian question in a second but most of us here are libertarians not anarchists and the anarchists crying in the background there but but how does government gain back the trust and the confidence of the American people because we saw this in the seventies with the church Commission hearings and a general hollowing out of belief in government and you know we want a government that is smaller than it is perhaps but is effective and his legitimate how does government went back the people's trust.
Accountability.
I mean the whole idea behind the divide and in the simple language.
Of a private citizen and a public official is that we know everything about them and they know nothing about us because they are invested with powers and privileges that we don't have they have the ability sort of direct the future society and as a result it is incumbent upon them to assume a level of responsibility and.
Accountability to the public for the exercise and abuse of those authorities that simply does not exist today and that's the problem they know more about us than they ever have in the history of the united states and some would argue in any society that is a certain existed before at the same time that thanks to aggressive expansion of the state secrecy authorities use of classification and so on so forth and even simple management of the press we're usually they play leaking games they don't give comment on this that or the other or more directly aggressive things like we just solved the Director of National Intelligence who's the most senior intelligence official United States their excusing themselves from accountability to us at the same time they're trying to exert greater power over us and that I think leads to an inevitable result of the time whether through good intentions or bad that the public is no longer partner to government but merely subject to it.
You are clearly from your Twitter feed you are following the presidential nomination process in the United States answered this because this goes to the question of.
Accountability you've talked about how there's really no difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party the two major parties on these issues how does a country that offers up you have something like three dozen varieties of pop tarts in every supermarket.
How are we reduced to a non choice in the political process and and not just despair but how do we how do we change that so that there are voices that are saying you know what maybe surveillance state needs to be talked about more I should cavea this with the fact that i'm an engineer.
Not a politician so my opinions being what they are i look at systems in terms of incentives where are the incentives and how does human behavior emerged in response to those incentives we've approached wedding Game three terms is called a Nash equilibrium which is where you've got a polluted set of choices that each player in game to make and they've identified what is the most optimal move that they can make within the context of that game and so they play the same move every time hoping that in some rounds that win at even if over time it means to lose because they'll have the maximized score possible for the given set of constraints that exists now what this means is that people go well I dislike this side I just like this individual I just like this tribe more than I just like the other therefore i'll pick this one so they start voting against how many it's important have the principle of understanding of who I will vote for but also who I won't look for but we need to disentangle this from parties one of the reasons that i have endorsed and won the elections that I don't believe there's anyone in the race that represents my values at the current set a time now this isn't to say this won't develop this will change but it's not about who you hate the most.
Right it's about who represent you and not voting is also a powerful action right you're revoking a mandate now this can't work forever.
It works in the tactical sense but we need to think more broadly back in the kind of samuel adams sense right that small groups of people who are politically passionate can sort of like brush fires of Liberty in the minds of men that us by the way leave it is the ethos behind a free state project so very much so yes.
So can I ask on a technical question that you can you vote in the election.
I mean do where do you can you send in a absentee ballot this would be and if you do will you will you make your vote public is a secret ballot but it would be kind of an interesting observation to see who you voted for talking you just is this is still a topic of active research ok you know that as i mentioned before this is an overwhelmingly libertarian crowd and one of the things that libertarians talk about besides reducing the size scope and spending of government and maximizing into individual freedom is recognizing that economic liberty and civil liberties are conjoined and inseparable in some of the the shots that you showed people were saying like you know are you tracking amazon purchases are you tracking cell phones and we see the surveillance covers economic activity as well as civil kind of your personal communication how do you define your politics or ideology and where did it come from do you consider yourself a libertarian or a classical liberal or these terms that are meaningful to you or how do you think about ideology I guess I you know there there's a whole field of political theory that I don't really subscribe to in terms of classifying people on the basis of their beliefs because what it's trying to do is trying to establish tribes trying to establish common identities and well I do think that is valuable and important for the sense of collective action for me it's not really the right fit I i do see sort of the a clear distinction between people who have a larger faith in liberties and rights than they do in states and institutions and this would be sort of the.
Authoritarian libertarian axis in the traditional sense and i do think it's clear that if you believe in the progressive liberal tradition which is that people should have a greater capability to act freely to make their own choices to involve enjoy a better and free your life.
If over the progression of sort of human evolution you're going to be pushing away from that authoritarian axis at all times because authoritarianism is necessarily about the ordering and control out society now they can argue that will produce a better quality of life but it cannot be argued that it will provide a a free life and for me I'm on the set free like you are you have written in the pastor said our rights are not granted by governments they are inherent to our nature.
It's entirely the opposite for government their privileges are precisely equal to only to only those which we suffer them to enjoy that's coming out of a classical liberal tradition of the American feather birth of American Founding you're an autodidact in many ways you do you know you don't have fancy degrees and you know i don't see diplomas on the wall behind you talk a little bit about the process of you know of how were you how did you educate yourself and how does that play into larger roles of the types of Education Act that governments or societies give people is it deliberate them is it to kind of subjugate them and talk about where you came from in terms of your ideas and your yourself learning I don't want to necessarily say that the modern education system is intended to to subjugate people but we do know clearly then its own learning a certain set of values upon everybody was engaged in that system now those matters don't fit everyone and one might say they're not even appropriate values for a broad and I person little body particularly one which has to go to cast votes I in a self informed critically thinking way rather than one where you know the majority of education is this is the history of this part in that party for me yes i did not graduate from high school instead I got a GED are and I don't have the formal education and that's probably back in a lot of ways in terms of just wanted to have some kind of formal education it's difficult to go back again later on like chemistry right i'm really interested in chemistry but lacking the formal education it's just kind of a pain or back into the textbooks later on at the same time I have a very broad and diverse educational number of different topics and this has helped me in my professional career because I was a much more conversion and threw it on a number of topics that end up being very highly valued in the national security space that really aren't taught in school particularly when it comes to sort of system security and that anonymity online in certain ways how to combat at this illustrates a key point which has been reflected by other thinkers before it's it's not original to myself which is there is a very strong difference a bright-line difference between your school and your education and we should all be careful not to let the one influence the other talk about.
I mean you because you were working with people and you've talked about this.
Who had similar backgrounds and technical skills but then you brought a moral dimension to what you were seeing what you were working for the government as a subcontractor did your education.
I mean is it a moral education that was lacking in the people around you or was there something in the way that you learn that triggered that sense of saying you know what we all know this is unconstitutional or this is wrong but it was you who decided to actually bring it to the public's attention well I i represented a different generation many ways the majority sort of the the institutional structure at the NSA and CIA because of course i was i was the new group in but i was also sort of the first generation of children of the internet right when you think about where my biggest influence are in that.
Context my reading my writing well of course yeah we read the history of course.
Yeah we read the books and the traditions the classics as well which classics do you get directed to which come to your attention that becomes part of sort of zeitgeist bait that occurs all around the world you have a much larger mixing of perspectives and because of that nationalism is blind nationalism is less effective in many ways because there's a very real difference between allegiance to country allegiance two people an allegiance to state which is what nationalism today is really more about the institution can come and go with the people with me and this is kind of of context is what different i brought a constitution in and put it on my desk because i had a personal interest and I thought it was relevant to the work I never number of the people that I work with coworkers and colleagues particularly when i started raising sort of alarm apparently about these programs and saying something doesn't smell right here who agreed with me were interested who had different interpretations who challenged of back and forth but who care and then there were others who didn't who said the Constitution doesn't really matter and would literally say you know who cares about the fourth member of the Fifth Amendment it's also important to First Amendment it doesn't really matter these things from hundreds of years ago.
It's no longer relevant and look we've got a job to do this bad guys out there and we're going to decide who they are and what we're going to do about the problem with that i would argue I is how designations of national security army in the first place there's a real-life case here that I think is relevant to a lot of people know where the FBI had a lead on individual religious leaders or community leader that the government state believed was in contact with or under the sway of sort of agents of foreign power.
And this is common with all people were involved in any kind of radical politics if you challenge the prerogatives of state they presume it's at the direction of another state because that's simply help thinking works the Attorney General's brief in the case they said yes wiretap this guy even though he's a US citizen some of the popular clerics really well-known um and they couldn't to watch list said in the event of a national emergency martial law you know him and so on so forth.
We're going to detain this person because they're dangerous there a destabilized that they are eight radicalizing modern vernacular anything I eventually made the determination that of all of the similar radicals in the United States this individual was the most dangerous from the standpoint of national security just anybody in the room notice case you're recognizing know and the determination was made two days after he gave the I have a dream speech that is what a threat to national security.
Looks like there's a very real different between the public interest in the national interest in the international interest when you hear national security think state interest think state security will be on the right track.
Let me uh finish with three quick questions so if i might first in the case of ross ulbricht it was prosecuted for founding the Silk Road website and it's now effectively he's appealing about a life sentence do you assume or should we assume that the NSA was involved in corroborating are gathering evidence which they might have denied in the actual trial yes yeah okay that that was easy enough to question just to elaborate on that I apologize because I don't maybe pad their do with the NSA in the United States member of a larger group called the five eyes network right this is the United States the UK Canada New Zealand and Australia and these five countries they sort of mix everything together and common pot and they share and share alike they're not allowed to ask a partner to violate their laws but partners can share information that would have been a violation of their laws if they didn't ask for it not to say that particular strategy to applied in this context but the difference between the national security agency's authorities and particularly the British equivalent of the essay called the GCHQ their authorities is the UK is allowed to use NSA systems right that we built the work in the United States and everything else against are under the Mandate of what's called a serious crimes authority that's completely unrelated National Intelligence prerogatives and this includes drug trafficking they're literally mandated for this they use our systems for this and the fruits of their investigations they can share freedom with us so i would say yes of course and it was foolish in the court case I understand why they did it he didn't want to own the server at the time he didn't want that yes this is mine.
Therefore the judge will allow him to make sort of Fourth Amendment argument here that investigatory restrictions have been violated our but it seems unthinkable to me that there was not intelligence angle internationally was involved in that can do you know we've talked about governments will do what they can do is there with something like silk road and you could throw in something like some of the activities of people like him . com and whatnot will the government at a certain point where world governments at a certain point when they relation to the minute that silk road was closed other sites crept up that were dealing in larger numbers and more traffic will they give up i Meanwell em will they come up with a different way of either regulating or minimizing harm that might arise from this or will they always be perpetually chasing after and kind of trying to you know and I mean this in the broadest terms possible always going after kind of nickel nickel and dime dealers in in activities that they don't want or will they finally say we can't really surveil everything nor should weigh and so will come up with a different way of dealing with technical technological innovation and human Commerce I'm not sure again this is something that is quite beyond my expertise but i would say there are models in history to look at this withdrawal from look at the prohibition on alcohol eventually crime groups gained influence they gain power and they were difficult at-bat as a result.
Therefore the government re-evaluated also found that it would be more in line with their interest not publications for their interests if they end in that prohibition and we see similar things happening with provision of marijuana today now that's not to say that I think there will be necessarily global free-for-all but we are technologies providing new means to enforce human rights and traditional compact concepts of human interaction through technology rather than law across borders regardless of jurisdictions which allow people to communicate privately associate privately care about one another privately without you know for example in Russia there prohibitions on who and how you can love one another as they were in the united states by recently and this this kind of thing is being challenged in ways that i think will be difficult to support does this mean that sort of great powers are just going to you know throw their hands up give up and walk away.
I think that's unlikely however the individual is more powerful today than they ever has been in the past and this is why you see government's that feel threatened by an individual like Julian Assange who's trapped in an embassy because despite the fact that they can control the physical location someone the power of the reliable sort of old bad.
Lolz little regression are increasingly losing their way and I you know the irony is not lost where you're sitting in an authoritarian leader of the red and authoritarian regime talking about how people are freer and more empowered than ever so you know i mean the dead that is an irony that I hope that people will cogitate on for a long time talk about it you know when we talked about the presidential election.
What would a candidate have to do in order for you to say you know what that is the type of thinking on surveillance or on individual freedom and liberty from surveillance that I could get behind what what would they have to do i I mean again this this sort of political direction gets beyond my expertise so I don't like to talk too much about that but you know you've heard of an interesting point there about Russia that I think is actually important to contextualise there's a lot of fair criticism reasonable criticism that's like hey this guy's Russia and it's important to understand that i never attended a tendon in Russia originally i was hoping to get to Iceland after that latin america in Iceland fell through but the State Department cancelled my passport wrapping Russia of when I was initially as soon as they heard I was in the air and despite the fact that i've asked several times they refused to reinstate it which is quite interesting the United States of course criticized for being rushed at the same time they won't let me leave but not as it be that as it may there's there's there's a deeper . here philosophical point here about hypocrisy that is it hypocritical not to be somewhere else and not be concerned.
Alright as concerned with that locality as you are with your home and i would argue that it's not i owe my first will be my first allegiance my first loyalty to fixing my country before i try to solve the problems of the rest of the world right we've got to get our house in order first.
That's not to say that I haven't criticized the policies of the Russian government which i think in many cases are.
Clearly indefensible.
Particularly when it comes to how they reach into the internet how they reach into private life private homes in ways that are not ok sure they're not okay in the United States and I'm not okay.
Anywhere and this is something that I expect to continue but the thing that I hope for the most the thing that I care about the most is let's set the standard in the united states that it has embodied.
Traditionally that is we are the example for the rest of the world to emulate we don't want people to hold us up as an example as in today and recently this week in this Apple versus FBI case where the Apple by the way just yesterday I had a call with the press where they said no country in the world has asked us to provide the authorities that the FBI is doing today we don't want Russia or China or North Korea or Iran or France or Germany or Brazil or any other country in the world to hold us up as an example for why we should be narrowing the boundaries of Liberty around the world relevant expanding sadly uh so that's another way of saying you definitely won't be voting in this election that.
Final question and this goes to you know part of what the free state project is about because it is a brush fire for freedom and for liberty and it's 20,000 people and even already with less than 2,000 people have moved here they've changed various types of laws and culture which is as important of new hampshire which is already a pretty free free willing place you talked about being a kind of a child of the internet you know what many of us are parents what you are children should read the internet in its entirety but what are the places right now and it is true because it d centralizes knowledge and you come across you know the serendipity of all sorts of perspectives which is incredibly empowering and an important but what are the what.
How should children you know what are the text that they should read or what are the what are the practices that are good that would give them in independent critical you know ability to kind of move into a world which is both.
Nationalistic in a good sense you're an American and you seem to be still proud of being an American and there's something there worth preserving but but third you know so we can be nationalist but not status where do we go on the internet where should we be asking our children to spend some time I think it's less important to go to specific texts is to demonstrate how specific texts are written if I weren't trying to help my child understand the internet the key exercise that I do is I would be to go look at cases that are super partisan today right extraordinarily charge and i would get to radically different rewritings of the same story and I make the rebound and I do this on a number of different things to show because this is something that a lot of older people fall prey to who aren't so familiar with the internet you know just get their news from their single landing page portal or whatever and also young.
Get super filter bubbles because they sort of popped into communities that creates a regroup think where it's always people who are green with what they say which was not available in the same way 20 years ago on the internet and 10 years ago on the internet really where it there was there weren't walls that were quite so high separating communities and the idea here is to show that the truth lies spread across the abundance of sources and the beauty of the internet is that you no longer have to rely on a single source you no longer are vulnerable to the broadcast that is this is sort of the voice of truth this is the voice of fact but it's important to understand the voice that the sources that you prefer can still be wrong even if they've got the operating principles the right against the right values getting the facts right matters more than anything else so this i mean you're talking about the internet really as the fulfillment of the Enlightenment project of kind of competing versions of truth a marketplace of ideas and an understanding about the construction of knowledge and truth rather than its self-evident presentation without argument following you can just not so.
Okay well let me out for a final final question what what would be the conditions under which you you would voluntarily returned to the united states are there are there concerns are rather are there are their terms that you would be happy for that and this is something again not to harp on politics because all of us I think are living our lives beyond politics but that's one of the things you hear like well you should come back and you know have your day in court etc but what would be the conditions under which you might return right so if this is interesting it's actually all quite a bit originally I volunteered myself to prison but I said that I wouldn't be I wouldn't allow myself to be held up as a deterrent to other people who are.
Trying to do the right thing and that was fundamentally contrary to what the government wants to do.
Of course they wanted to sort of nail a scalp on the wall as a warning to the others and even though i was quite flexible here it was Daniel Ellsberg who leaked the pentagon papers the secret classified history of the war in Vietnam in 1971 that showed the government had not only like us into war but they kept lying to keep us and it despite the fact that they knew there was no way to win and he told me that this was a mistake and eventually convinced me of this in the sense of to what do we owe our first loyalty to law or to justice and to submit ourselves to sort of a government that is intentionally trying to deter the political beliefs and political acts of other people merely on the basis of law as though that were a substitute for morality or superior to morality is a very dangerous precedent to set now i'm still this is why i think most people might be surprised by this but but fairly more trusting in the value of government institutions than Daniel Ellsberg who sent his initial work has just he's been an extraordinary Crusader and a true radical can be best way for more than a generation now but when it comes to with what's the current context was current state of play that we've been had I told the government that I would return if they guarantee a fair trial where I can make a public interest defense of why this was done and allow the jury to decide if it was right or wrong in the context of both legality and morality and the United States government responded with letter from the Attorney General saying they promised they would not I'm not kidding i have that i have that letter so it's it's not going to work in progress but we'll see where it goes well thank you so very much for your time and from again beaming from an incredibly more and more free free state project in New Hampshire thank you for your time and for your comments so much.
Yeah.
Zoom.


##########################################