AUG 23, 2019
The case of Ola
Bini, a Swedish data privacy activist and associate of WikiLeaks founder
Julian Assange, has been shrouded in mystery since his arrest in Quito, Ecuador, on April
11. He was detained on the same day Assange was forcibly removed from the
Ecuadorian Embassy in the United Kingdom, inevitably raising questions about
whether Bini was being held because of his connection with Assange and whether
the United States was involved in the case in some form.
Bini, who initially wasn’t
charged with a crime, was accused of being involved in a leak of documents that
revealed that Ecuador’s right-wing president, Lenin Moreno, had several
offshore bank accounts. Bini was released after two months in an Ecuadorian
prison under terrible conditions but is still fighting to maintain his freedom.
He was eventually charged by
Ecuadorian authorities with “alleged participation in the crime of
assault on the integrity of computer systems and attempts to destabilize the
country,” though the evidence to support the accusations is dubious at best.
Speaking with Truthdig Editor
in Chief Robert Scheer, Danny O’Brien discusses why Bini’s case is so important
to follow, despite a general lack of media interest in his arrest. O’Brien,
director of strategy at the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, went to Ecuador to visit Bini on behalf of the EFF in
order to learn more about the case and advocate for the Swedish activist’s
rights.
“Journalists, lawyers, human
rights lawyers, human rights defenders, sort of viewed broadly, are often the
canaries in the coal mines in authoritarian or veering-authoritarian regimes,”
O’Brien tells Scheer in the latest installment of “Scheer
Intelligence.” “I think many governments recognize that if you can either …
silence, or just intimidate and chill, the key journalists or the prominent
public defenders, then you have a huge sort of multiplier leverage effect on
opposition groups, or groups fighting for justice in those countries.
“In the last few years,”
O’Brien continues, “I think that governments around the world have recognized
that technologists also fall into this category, or particular kinds of
technologists.”
Scheer, whose most recent book
“They
Know Everything About You” is about mass data collection, highlights the
threat activists like Bini pose to the powers that be at a time when big data
translates to a mechanism for widespread control.
“You call him a world leader
in trying to build safe places where people can communicate without being
subject to government surveillance,” Scheer tells O’Brien. “And even though
some people have a kinder view of the U.S. government, after all, we’re talking
about a wide world that has to survive in even more overtly controlling
environments, and explicitly totalitarian and authoritarian societies.”
Through his work at the EFF,
an organization that has members from all parts of the political spectrum and
advocates for free speech and privacy in the digital age, O’Brien has come to a
harrowing conclusion that lies at the core of Bini’s case: Governments around
the world are “the most clear and present threat to people’s privacy and
security online.”
Listen to the Scheer and
O’Brien’s full discussion as they discuss the details of Bini’s case and the
origins and importance of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. You can also read
a transcript of the interview below the media player and find past episodes of
“Scheer Intelligence” here.
—Introduction by Natasha Hakimi Zapata
Robert Scheer: Hi, this
is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, and–where I have
to point out, in due modesty, the intelligence comes from my guests. And in
this case it’s Danny O’Brien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. If you
haven’t heard of EFF, you’ve missed out on the most important organization
concerned with the freedom of the individual, privacy, and related issues in
the world of the internet. Danny, welcome. And how long has EFF been in
business, and how long have you been one of the leaders there? Your title has
changed, I noticed.
Danny O’Brien: Yeah, so
the Electronic Frontier Foundation has been around since 1990. So pre the web,
but perhaps not pre the internet. And I’ve been there since 2005, and I’m
director of strategy now, but I used to concentrate on the global side of the
internet. A lot of what EFF does, and continues to do, is domestic in the
United States. We sue the NSA for its mass surveillance of Americans, and we
also sort of deal with the big tech companies in Silicon Valley, too. But of
course the internet’s got international since 1990, and increasingly a lot of
the edge cases, and maybe the indications of where things are going to go,
don’t come from the cutting edge of American technology, they come from around
the world.
RS: OK, but before we get
lost in the weeds here of the technology, let me just explain my respect for
EFF and the reason I wanted to interview you in this particular case involving
Ola Bini–I hope I’m pronouncing it correctly–a renowned Swedish programmer
who’s facing horrendous computer crime charges in Ecuador, the country that
under a different regime supported or allowed Julian Assange to stay in their
embassy in London, and then the government changed, and Julian Assange is now
in jail. And what I want to really get at is the connection between the two
cases. And just so there’s a little background, I haven’t seen much publicity
to your trip or to this case. And one of the things I love about the Electronic
Frontier Foundation is I don’t know whether you guys individually are
conservative or liberal, you know, or libertarian or what have you, but I can
count on you, speaking as a journalist, to really call it as honestly as you
can in any of these situations. So why don’t you tell me the significance of
this case, and really, why isn’t it getting more of a response?
DO: That’s a really good
question. I can talk a little bit about the significance of the case, both kind
of EFF as an organization and also for its wider implications. So EFF started–and
I think this is why we always seem to be a bit hard to place on the political
channel–as a combination of people from all over the political spectrum who all
knew one thing, which was that the rise of digital technology, what we used to
call the digital revolution, was going to transform people’s rights, whether
for good or for ill. So our founders had John Perry Barlow, who was one of the
lyricists of the Grateful Dead. We have Mitch Kapor, who was, still is, a
businessman; he started Lotus 1-2-3, [which] the ancients among us will
remember as the first real popular spreadsheet. [And John] Gilmore, who had a
strong place both in programming and kind of the libertarian space. So our
politics are all over. But one of the areas that we spent a lot of time in the
early years was just trying to explain to people that–this was in the very end
of the eighties–that these technologists who were coming along, especially
teenage technologists with strangely colored hair, were not necessarily the
horsemen of the apocalypse, right. That they had these skills, and there was a
real potential here for them to create things that would be useful and powerful
and good for open societies. So we spent a bunch of time in the courts
explaining it to judges, sometimes actually defending hackers and
technologists. So we have a long tradition of doing that. I think what’s
interesting in the sort of era–the post-WikiLeaks era, you might describe it–is
that that sort of model or fiction of what technologists of that kind are like
has gone from being these are sort of scary teenagers, to these are people who
could, are really going to disrupt society. Whether they’re the head of
Facebook–you know, Mark Zuckerberg certainly describes himself as a hacker. The
address, if you need to send snail mail to Facebook, is 1 Hacker Way. You have
folks like Assange that definitely came from that hacker technologist
community. And then you have people like Ola who are like thousands of people
around the world, who really are keeping the privacy protective parts of the
internet, and the stuff that keeps you safe from governments, corporations, and
cybercriminals–they’re like another camp entirely. But they’re all from this
community of people who understand the technology. And their politics are very
varied, their impact is very varied, and their motivations are very varied. One
of the challenges we’ve always had is that people look at the worst in that
community, and kind of apply it to everyone else. And that’s sort of
understandable if you’re trying to deal with a scary, new entrant into the
power dynamics of modern society. But it can mean that you can throw out not
only the good with the bad, but the people who might be solutions to the
problems that the other actors are creating.
RS: And that’s one of the
things that Ola Bini was a leader in. You call him a world leader in trying to
build safe places where people can communicate without being subject to
government surveillances. And even though people, some people, have a kinder
view of the U.S. government, after all, we’re talking about a wide world that
has to survive in even more overtly controlling environments, and explicitly
totalitarian and authoritarian societies. And he has been one of the people–I
gather he’s been a consultant to the European Union; he’s worked on your very
successful sites to keep people [in] this kind of protection. So why don’t you
just tell us about, you know, who this guy is, and how he connected somehow
with Julian Assange. And then let me just give the punchline. You know, I only
learned about this case because three of you from the EFF bothered to go down
to Ecuador and find out what was going on. I know the justice minister there
didn’t meet with you; you met with other people, and his defense team. And then
you wrote a report when you came back. And for people who don’t get the EFF
report, I would highly recommend it; we’ll cite it at the end. But you were
really doing yeoman work here. And again, I beg the question: Why isn’t this of
greater concern?
DO: So I think there’s
two parts to this. One is sort of unpacking who Ola is, and maybe we can get to
that in a moment. I think that the more pertinent question, certainly for me
right now, is you know, why is there not more attention on cases like this. And
I think that–I don’t think it’s new. I think that there’s a model for what we
see here, which is–I used to work for the Committee to Protect Journalists,
which is a great organization–
RS: I was once on the
board, very early in the day, I myself, yeah. When I worked at the L.A. Times,
yes.
DO: Right, right. And,
well, you’ll know that they do really good and similar work for journalists
around the world. Because I feel like journalists, lawyers, human rights
lawyers, human rights defenders, sort of viewed broadly, are often the canaries
in the coal mines in authoritarian or veering-authoritarian regimes. And that
if you–I think many governments recognize that if you can either tug it, or
silence, or just intimidate and chill, the key journalists or the prominent
public defenders, then you have a huge sort of multiplier leverage effect on
opposition groups, or groups fighting for justice in those countries. What’s
happened in the last few years is I think that governments around the world
have recognized that technologists also fall into this category, or particular
kinds of technologists. Actually, I’m sort of dealing with this right now in
China; China has been building up to intimidate and scare its own community of
technologists who have been primarily involved in creating tools to bypass the
Great Firewall of China. Now, of course, it’s coming a little bit more to a
head, to the technologists who are protecting the privacy of the Hong Kong
protesters. So we see this sort of move, but I think right now we’re sort of in
an era where the world–and I think this is, I’ve already talked about the
post-WikiLeaks world; I think this is the post- or mid-Facebook era–where
people have gone from being, you know, actually quite engaged and excited by
the promises of digital technology, to really quite cautious and intimidated by
them. And so when somebody comes along who has these skills, I think it’s
pretty easy for a government to whip up a moral panic about them. And that’s
what happened with Ola in Ecuador. He was arrested shortly after a press
conference that the current minister of the interior held–hours, I think, after
the U.K. police were allowed into the Ecuadorian embassy, and Julian Assange
was taken out pretty forcefully. So hours after that, the interior minister in Ecuador
held a press conference and said, look, we know that there are members of
WikiLeaks within Ecuador, and Russian hackers who are planning to attack and
bring down the country’s systems. We’re going to arrest them. And then within
hours, Ola–who is Swedish, but lives in Ecuador–was picked up and thrown in
jail.
RS: And what is the
connection between Ola and Julian Assange?
DO: So Ola Bini has–or
the government has accused him of meeting with Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian
embassy, I believe 12 to 13 times. They will know [Laughs], because they’ll
see, they have the visitor’s book in the Ecuadorian embassy. Of course, apart
from the fact that who you associate with isn’t actually, or shouldn’t be a
crime that you can be arrested and thrown in jail for, it’s also the case–and
this is after I spent some time trying to understand better who Ola Bini
actually was, partly in talking to him, but mostly in talking to other
technologists around the world–ah, Ola talks to a lot of people. And also,
during that period of Julian Assange’s sort of exile in the embassy, a lot of
people went and saw that man. From, again, all across the political spectrum,
and with many different interests. So that’s the evidence that the Ecuadorian
government has so far to claim–
RS: Including Google’s
Eric Schmidt, right?
DO: That’s right. I’d
forgotten about that, but yeah, ah–
RS: Yeah, he was in
there, meeting with him and so forth, yeah.
DO: Right, and of course
you’ve got to remember that, like, the arc of Julian Assange’s sort of rise
and, you know, potentially fall, at least amongst the U.S. left, has meant that
he has definitely ended up meeting with or associating with a huge range of different
people. You know, I think he went from a point where he was a cause célèbre to
now, where I think a lot of people accuse him, or certainly feel that he is
implicated in the election of President Trump.
RS: Yeah, and we’re–we’re
going to get to that. I already did an interview with the UN rapporteur on
torture, and you’re familiar with his statement about how Assange was treated.
I think it’s critical to observe here–and it is a real failure of a part of the
left, or liberals, or people who care about individual freedom, whether they’re
left or right–that somehow the whistleblower has gone from being an admired
figure to being a scorned person. And there’s some irony in this. I’ve done
some of these podcasts with Daniel Ellsberg, who I actually, you know, covered
as a journalist during the Pentagon Papers trial. And now Ellsberg is
remembered nostalgically as a heroic whistleblower, and somehow Julian Assange
is a retrograde. And Ellsberg is very quick to point out that actually Julian
Assange, in the case of the Pentagon Papers, would be in the position of the
New York Times and the Washington Post as publishers. And that he, Daniel
Ellsberg, was actually the person who had worked for the U.S. government, had
been given these documents as an employee of the RAND Corporation, which then
had a contract with the U.S. government. And so he was actually in a much more
vulnerable position as a whistleblower. But I do want to stop on that for a
minute. Because when you just said, oh, the guy visited Julian Assange 11 times
or something in the embassy–slam dunk, guilty as charged. How did we get to
this place where whistleblowers–after all, Julian Assange, whatever you think
of him, revealed serious crimes on the part of the U.S. government. Deliberate
shooting and targeting of civilians, journalists and what have you, and others.
And yet no one’s talking about the crimes that were revealed; they’re talking
about Julian Assange as if he’s the criminal.
DO: Right. And I think
some of this is down to the fluidity of roles that we have now. That somebody
can go from being, you know, just an ordinary person to becoming a
whistleblower. You know, it’s really possible for anyone who has access to
corporate or government data now to be able to not only extract that, or know
about it, but also broadcast it to the world, right? You could tweet a zip
file, right; you could do whatever you want. And also, what does it mean for
someone to be a publisher? This is definitely the thing that we’re, the EFF’s
most concerned about in the U.S. side of the Assange case. Which is that the
prosecutors in that case seem very keen to charge Assange with both violations
of the Espionage Act, where there has been a sort of understanding that
publishers would not be prosecuted under that very broad, World War I statute.
And also the CFAA, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which is a similarly broad
law, but on the kind of technological side of things. So there we have a
situation where Assange, as I said, sort of comes from this cybersecurity, technologist
community. He was a familiar face in that community before he went off and
became the face of WikiLeaks. But he had the skills and the ability to
transform himself, or take part in what became one of the biggest publishing
incidents of the last decade. And that’s something that he and millions of
other people can do out of the blue now. And what that means, of course, is if
you’re in a situation where–you know, the New York Times was definitely in a
precarious position when it published the Pentagon Papers. You know, they
were–I’m sure they were, and having read Dan Ellsberg’s books, we know that
there were heated discussions about their vulnerability to prosecution in that
incident. But they were also the New York Times, right? So they had some, they
had some back record. And they had the resources to defend themselves.
RS: Well, let me just
interrupt for a second. I mean, more than that they were–we have this freedom
of the press guarantee in the First Amendment. Now, obviously you can interpret
these guarantees however you want. But the idea of going after the press, as
opposed to what the press is writing about, or principals or actors, was
considered a very basic distinction. And that’s what The New York Times, The
Washington Post, were counting on. Suddenly, that distinction has been
obliterated. And I want to get back to Bini’s case, but I–so let me just put it
in a more pointed way. Is this an extended way of getting at Assange and
driving home a bigger political point? Why have they targeted this fellow?
DO: So I think what’s
happened was that–so the current Ecuadorian administration is composed of
people who were part of the Correa administration, the previous administration,
but have taken a very different line. And in many ways, sort of distanced
themselves from that previous administration. Part of what that involves is
that I don’t think they wanted to take the consequences of holding Assange any
longer. So they wanted a more American-friendly foreign policy. But that also
meant that they had to change the narrative within Ecuador, where the–providing
Assange with refuge was sort of a positive political step that Correa was very
proud of, and talked a great deal about. So they had to shift that around
pretty quickly. And one of the ways that they could do that was to implicate
Assange, or create this idea that WikiLeaks people were going to directly
target Ecuador itself. And we haven’t seen any evidence that any such thing was
planned; we certainly haven’t seen any evidence that Bini himself was at all
involved in this. I think the most important thing to say about Ola Bini is
that there’s a particular set of skills that if you want to hack into
governments, or extract data, or all of these things that you need, and Ola
Bini is not that kind of technologist; Ola Bini builds secure systems that
protect you against that kind of exfiltration. He doesn’t knock them down. But
of course that’s a fine difference if a government needs to find a fall guy
within 24 hours of throwing out Julian Assange from the embassy.
RS: I mean, the reason
I’m doing this, aside from–you know, there’s a certain urgency. This fellow,
Ola Bini, has been used as a fall guy in the effort to get Assange. And he’s
been used as a political prop here. And I get back to my original question: Why
aren’t more people concerned about this? I mean, this is a witch hunt. This is
an effort–I mean, you came back from your trip, you know, more convinced than
ever that this was basically a frame-up.
DO: Right, right. And you
know, like I say, and like you said, we’re not a political organization. So it
takes some steps for us to actually say that this was a political prosecution
rather than a, you know, legitimate criminal prosecution. The question as to
why more people don’t care about this, I think it’s happening in Ecuador; not
everybody knows what’s going on in Ecuador. I think people, as I say, are often
very confused and hazy about what it is that–if somebody says in a press
conference, “This person is trying to bring down our government.” And then they
show a photo, as they did after the arrest, of a person with shaved hair and a
hacker T-shirt, and showed that he had over 10 USB sticks [Laughs], and as they
said in his arraignment, he has books on cybersecurity written in English.
Again, none of those are actual evidence of any malicious action, but to
somebody who’s watched a lot of TV hackers and film hackers, it fits the type,
right? So I think people are very hesitant–were very hesitant to doubt these
statements when they were first made. And I do feel like people on the left,
and more widely, are much more reticent these days to come to the immediate
defense of technologists. Because they look at the big corporations that are
now big tech corporations, and they see those are the people who are
undermining people’s privacy and working in cahoots with repressive
governments. What they don’t realize is that there’s a whole wider community of
free-acting, human-rights defending technologists who look very similar, but
are in fact, I still feel, the first and best hope against–for individuals to
defend themselves against that kind of surveillance and that kind of
insecurity.
RS: Yeah, that’s a good
way to kind of–I don’t want to say wrap it up, but tie this all together. I did
a book called They Know Everything About You, and in the course of it
I interviewed Barlow, one of your founders. And to this day, I don’t know
whether he was a conservative or a liberal or anything else; I guess he was
part of the Grateful Dead organization. But when we talked–he was a really
brilliant fellow–and when we talked we both agreed, and it seemed to me
obvious, that the internet represents the best and worst of all worlds of
communication. And that the only way to keep it from being the worst, and try to
move it towards the best, is by having individual responsibility on the part of
people who know how to work this stuff. That they tell us about the threats to
privacy, which the EFF does; they tell us about the issues with net neutrality,
they tell us about the issues of regulation of one kind or another. And that
they do it in a way that is politically neutral. And so you mentioned, for
instance, you have to be on guard against what the communist government of
China is doing, and you have to be on guard against what the capitalist
government of the United States is doing, and all forms of political activity
in between. And at the core of it is, do you thrill to the act of freedom or
not? That seems to me the big issue here. And the people who are upset with
Julian Assange are saying that he represented an inconvenient truth. You know,
he leaked material about the Democratic Party’s internal leaning towards
Hillary Clinton, or he leaked material about what she said when she went to
Wall Street, or that influenced the election. And then that becomes–the end is
more important than the means in the debate. And what you people are about–I
don’t want to characterize it, your organization–but basically, you think that
if the means are free, the ends are likely to be better.
DO: I think that’s the
hope. I think that sometimes that gets accused of being, and certainly Barlow
was accused of being a techno-utopian. But I think that actually, it’s a
recognition that we could be heading into a utopia, or we could be heading into
a dystopia. And this is the moment where we choose which route we go down. This
is the moment where you actually–and, talk about anybody, really; I mean, we
have 40,000 supporters that pay my bills, and they’re the people who are taking
action right now. And compared to many other levers that you can pull, like
using technology or promoting technology or advocating for the protection of
these systems, is a thing that you can concretely do now that will have a huge
effect in the future. And Barlow recognized that in the early nineties. And
it’s still true now, right; we’re still in the middle of determining whether we
live in a world without privacy, or we live in a world where we can–we do have
the freedom to think, and the freedom to do what we want.
RS: But you know, even
though I wrote a book about privacy and I think it’s very critical, I think
there’s something even more basic here. And it goes to the old slogan of
whether the, you know, the truth will make you free. Whether it’s the truth
about cops beating up protesters in Hong Kong, or beating them up in the
streets of Chicago at different points. The fact of the matter is, there’s
either an intrinsic utility to getting at the truth of what governments are
doing, and the difference between what they claim they’re doing and what the
real force is–or anybody, which is really what whistleblowers are about.
Whatever their motives, whatever drives them, the very act of whistleblowing is
to challenge secrecy. If you’re going to do it, do it out in the open, and
let’s debate what you’re doing. And I think we’re at a pretty depressing moment
where a whistleblower like Julian Assange, or even somebody who was only
tangentially connected with him, Ola Bini, is without support from people who
would normally value that act of the whistleblower, of the truth-seeker.
DO: Yeah. I think that–
RS: That was a–that
“yeah,” tell me what’s behind that “yeah.” Is that [Laughs]–
DO: That is, it–I will
unpack my “yeah” there. So I think right now, people feel very conflicted about
the truth. In that they see a world where there appears to be hundreds of
truths being pushed, right? “Truths” in quotation marks. Where they see people
being misled by misinformation, and they begin to think, well, maybe what we
need to do is to sort of quench this torrent of data at the source. Maybe the
problem here is that we have too much, too many truths, too much information.
And so they’re beginning to turn to the ideas of censorship, of punishing
whistleblowers, of controlled and constrained sources of information. And I
think you can concede one part of the world we live in, which is definitely
awash with misinformation now, without coming to the conclusion that these old
methods–which never worked before–are the correct response to that. I think
people are turning away from whistleblowers, and turning away from the idea
that finding out these secrets will help you better understand the world and
better tackle the world. Because that responsibility is–feels too much to bear.
And again, putting my EFF hat back on, I think that one of the things that
we’re waiting for, and working towards, is to give individuals the tools to
piece together what’s going on, right. Rather than have Facebook hand you what
either the government thinks, or what its advertisers think, on a plate, you
should have the tools to be able to pick what’s true and what’s not. And in
order to do that you need both whistleblowers to, like, present the actual
information that will build those conclusions, and you actually need people
like Ola Bini who are, you know, complementary to that. I don’t think they’re
strongly connected to it, but they allow you to have control over your own
devices, control over your own communications, so that this technology you’re
using is working for you, not for Mark Zuckerberg, not for Donald Trump, not
for the Russian GRU. You know, not for anyone else.
RS: Yeah, let me
challenge that. [Laughter] No, because I hear this all the time. The world
is–what did you say, we’re now awash in false information, or misinformation.
Somehow this is blamed on the internet. And I’m not always a defender of
technology, but my goodness, when was the world not awash in misinformation?
DO: Right.
RS: I mean, how did the
most advanced, well-educated, scientifically oriented community of the last
century embrace Nazism in Germany? You know, and how did we–and I grew up in
this country, I’m an old guy now. I grew up with a–always wondered, why are
there no black baseball players? I mean, segregation was hardly discussed. We
had a segregated armed forces in World War II; that was hardly discussed. You
know, you could go down the list of controlled information, wars that were
fought without reason–give me the photos, I’ll give you the story, and et
cetera, et cetera. And so I think, frankly, I think this is a very dangerous
argument. And it justifies the status quo of yore. You know, oh, if we could
just go back to the good old days of three networks and four dominant
newspapers, and you know, and Time magazine–why, we would have never had
something as stupid as the Vietnam War. Or, you know, we wouldn’t have had a
segregated South. But that’s garbage.
DO: Yeah.
RS: And I think right
now–you know, I’m doing this from the University of Southern California, I’m
going to have students in a week and a half. And I tell my students, look,
thanks to the internet–and hopefully it’ll stay that way; we can get into
discussions of net neutrality and freedom. But hopefully, as it is now, if I
say something and you have the slightest doubt, question that it’s true, you
can call me out within 20 minutes of research. You can just be googling
anything I ever said, and anything I referred to, and you can get original
documents. And so in many ways, this is exactly the wrong moment to be afraid
of freedom. And certainly freedom from whistleblowers who add to the mix of
information you can find out, you can get. And so I just wonder whether
you’re–you’re losing heart here [Laughs], by entertaining this argument.
DO: I think I have to
entertain it because so many people across the political spectrum feel it.
Here’s what I think, is that when we look–you know, because we have to have
these moments of doubt. You know, it’s like that old British comedy sketch–
RS: Doubt about freedom?
DO: Not so much about
freedom, but like, what are the pros and cons of this technology, right. Is
this technology–what’s our trajectory with this technology? And so we sit and,
like, we do our research and we talk to people. And the conclusions that we
came to, first of all, is that I think one of the biggest engines that people
point to, is increasing polarization. And I think there are a couple of things
about that. One, that polarization, at least in the United States, has been
going on for a very long time. At least in the public space, right? Some of it
may be that the public space was slowly introducing more points of view, and we
went from kind of a WASP-dominated, public discourse to one that actually
included the huge spectrum of opinions that exist within the United States. The
other part of it, though, is that if there is a sort of greater polarization
going on, it’s certainly pre-internet. And as you said, I think you have to
separate sometimes what you see happening from changes in what you are able to
see happening. I think that on the internet, a lot of people suddenly got to
hear the things that people were saying in private, [that] perhaps they hadn’t
wanted to know about, or hadn’t heard about before. And this is, you know, both
positive and negative; both people who turned out to be much bigger racists
than they would be in the public space, and also people who were suffering far
more privation and isolation from the rest of the society than people were
aware of.
RS: Let me cut to the
chase here.
DO: Yeah.
RS: Let’s take, say,
Edward Snowden, and what he revealed about the NSA. We didn’t know that our
government was reading our emails and checking our phone conversations and
doing all of these things, thanks to conventional journalism. Not the extent of
it. And we didn’t know, really, what activities our government was up to, which
was in violation of a number of laws, and what have you. Except that this
whistleblower who had this, you know, bit of information, revealed it to us.
Now, everyone’s conceded that that’s information that in a free society you
should have. Right? You should know what your government’s doing; you should
know what they can read. I don’t think the utility of that information can be
disputed. And I don’t think even people can make an argument that it made us
weaker in any way. But the fact is, it wouldn’t have happened if not for this
rather rare, odd bird. Because after all, there were thousands of people who
knew what Edward Snowden knew, but only one, really, who had the courage–or
whatever, the motivation–to reveal it.
DO: Yeah. I mean, I–
RS: So what is the value
of–we were emphasizing fake news. But the fake news was most of the news we
were getting from the government.
DO: Right, right. And I
think–well, so here’s the thing–
RS: And by the way, China
is another example, since we don’t want to only be about the U.S. What are
people getting in most of China about what’s happening in Hong Kong? They’re
getting fake news. What is the alternative to it? People who can hack information
and get the word out and get their own little [things] going, and so forth.
That’s the only corrective we have in this state of civilization, no?
DO: So I’ll push back a
little, but only to kind of agree with you more. Which is that we did actually
know a huge chunk of what Edward Snowden said. I mean, we were–NSA court cases
were based around evidence that we’d had, but it wasn’t the kind of evidence
that gets headlines in the way that Ed Snowden was able to attract the world’s
attention to this. So–
RS: Because he had–he had
the thumb drive. Because he had the data–
DO: Yeah.
RS: –and they couldn’t
dispute it. But let me push back. One of those cases–one of those cases
involved the use of AT&T facilities in the Bay Area, right?
DO: Yes, it did.
RS: To spy on people. And
the government had an agency there. And when that story came to the Los Angeles
Times, where I had worked for 29 years, that story was discounted.
DO: Yeah.
RS: And in fact, I
believe Dean Baquet was the editor then; I may have to check that, and now he’s
the editor of The New York Times. But however that happened, I can’t hold up to
that specific, somehow then The New York Times finally ran with that story. And
what I’m saying is that, yes, maybe some aficionados of this world knew what was
going on. But even the big–you know, Apple and Google and Facebook, they all
said they didn’t know the extent. At least they claimed that.
DO: Well, I think that
lots of–I mean, as you said, that’s not–thousands of people knew what Snowden
knew, you know. There aren’t really secrets in the sense that, you know, no one
knows it except for, like, a couple of people at Area 51. What is important is
how you manage to propagate that more widely. And we have this incredible,
powerful tool for doing that, for propagating. We have some parallel tools that
we’re just beginning to learn to use to ascertain when somebody is propagating
something, whether it is the truth or not, right? I think it’s fascinating to
understand the process that journalists and the public alike had with something
like the Snowden revelations. Which is, yeah, he had a USB key full of
information–well, I mean, I could fill a USB key with fake information. How do
we know that this is true? And part of the reason we know it’s true is because journalists
went through it, and corroborated it, and double-checked it, and connected all
of those dots. And also felt free to do that, right? I think that part of this
is about why did the L.A. Times–you know, when Mark Klein, who was the
whistleblower before Ed Snowden, came to them and came to EFF with this
information. Well, they had a certain–perhaps, I’m just guessing here–a certain
lack of confidence. Both in, like, their knowledge that they would have about
this; maybe they were facing political pressures. Maybe, you know, there was
some other story that they wanted to run that had political risks, and they had
to choose the pros and cons of this. It’s great that we have millions and
millions of people who have different motivations, and different inclinations,
and different technical abilities to be able to get this information out. But
we do also, part of that system has to also be to empower people to tell
the–not the truth from the lies, but you know, the wheat from the chaff. Maybe
that’s the best way of doing it. And right now we’re handing that
responsibility either to Facebook or Google to do that for us, or the
government is actually demanding that these big companies become the
gatekeepers again. And like you say, I think this is a solution that didn’t
work in the past [Laughs], and it’s a solution that demands better answers than
having, you know, the moderators at YouTube or Twitter or Facebook have to
decide what the truth is and what isn’t for billions of people around the
world.
RS: Well, let me conclude
by my own source of optimism. And that’s because even these big companies are
multinational. And commerce is multinational, and travel is multinational. In
fact, one could even argue the nation-state is a kind of dangerous anachronism,
but that’s a whole ‘nother discussion to have. But the fact is, you’re very
quickly up against the argument, if we–if our government can do it here, then
why shouldn’t the Chinese government or the Saudi government be allowed to do
it there? And that’s an argument that no sane person would really want to
argue. Because the fact is, there’s a utility to searching for contrarian
views, for facts that are inconvenient, and so forth. We know that. And what’s
at risk here now is that people, because their ox was gored, their election was
hurt, the wrong guy won, and so forth and so on, are losing sight of what I
thought the EFF–its most valuable contribution, whether it comes from a
libertarian bias or what have you–I thought its most valuable contribution is,
really, you don’t trust any government to make that decision. Because any
government–and that’s the whole warning of our Constitution–will seek to
protect its own power. And that power will corrupt. Isn’t that the assumption?
At least that’s what Barlow told me.
DO: Yeah, I think it goes
wider than that, though. I think that you–I think that technology is incredibly
empowering. And one of the things that we’ve been very fortunate to sort of
stumble into is that the bulk of that power has landed in our pockets, rather
than in Washington, D.C., or even Silicon Valley, right. That we have an
opportunity to take that technology and spread it–spread its empowering ability
as thinly and widely as possible. And I think that that’s probably the way I’d
interpret what–for a huge chunk of when we were working, or EFF was working,
the government was the most clear and present threat to people’s privacy and
security online. And I take your point, I’m going to–let’s say freedom online,
right? That’s much broader than those two, those two characteristics. I think
we shifted into a place where people understandably are just as worried about
the rise of these monolithic companies based not 50 miles away from where I’m
sitting right now, and their capabilities. And I think what it’s about is about
making sure that they don’t get to hoard this power, but we still keep it in
people’s pockets. We still make sure that you can, you know, trust your phone
or trust your laptop to collect all of this information and then give you what
you want or need, based on what you’ve decided you want your life to be. And
that’s a, that’s a big challenge right now, because I think people really do
feel overwhelmed and frightened. And I think fear is always a very, very
difficult place to make an argument for freedom.
RS: Yes, except it was
Franklin Roosevelt who warned us the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
And I want to conclude this, after this interesting discussion, bringing it
back to Ola Bini. And the reason I want to bring it back is, you know, it
always turns out it’s the Tom Paines. It’s the Edward Snowdens. It’s the Ola
Binis. It’s the Martin Luther Kings. There are these individuals who say, no,
that doesn’t smell right, that doesn’t sound right, I’m not going to go along.
You know, I’m going to reveal this. Whether it’s Chelsea Manning, or you know,
you could go down the list. You may not like all these people, they may not be
people you want to have as your closest friends, or what have you. But the fact
of the matter is, they’re indispensable to human sanity. Because they are
willing to, like the guy in Tiananmen Square who could stand in front of the
tanks, it’s just a universal truth, anywhere in the world, most people will go
along with power. Whether that’s power because they’re working at Facebook and
they go along with it for their career, or they go along with a totalitarian
government just for their safety. And what’s really at stake in this Ola Bini
case–if I could make a feature film on it, maybe Oliver Stone or somebody will–here–tell
us, let’s just end, and how do people get more information about this? You
know, here’s a guy who, what, he just wanted to make the internet safer for
dissent, for independent thought? Wasn’t that what drove him?
DO: Yeah. Yeah, and I
think, you know, one of the reasons why people turn their suspicion on him is
that, you know, he built things that were super-secure; he, all his software
was, his laptops were encrypted. And when they asked the passwords, he said no.
Well, I’m not sure everybody would do that in that situation, particularly if
they were innocent. But that’s an important principle, right? That’s an
important principle, to be able to be secure in your documents and effects.
And–
RS: Well, it’s what the
Fourth Amendment guaranteed, yes.
DO: Right, right. And
they didn’t have any evidence to charge him. He made that stand. I wonder
sometimes if I would be as brave and stick to my principles as well as that
when I was under, you know, that kind of pressure. But that’s what it takes, I think.
That’s what it takes, and it is a shame when standing on a point of principle
is the thing that gets you into trouble, far more than anything that they might
imagine that you’re doing that might actually cause damage to the world, rather
than maybe have a chance to fix it.
RS: So for people who
want to–and they should want to follow up on this, what’s the best way? What is
it called, the EFF EFFector or whatever?
DO: You can sign up for
EFFector. You can also go to our blog and sign up for our Twitter. We’re at
EFF.org, wherever you go. The Ola Bini campaign themselves have a website
called Free Ola Bini, which can give you much more information on Ola himself.
I sat and talked to him; he’s a very impressive young man, and I hope more
people pay attention to what he’s having to face, and what he represents.
RS: So we just need John
Lennon to come up with a song to free Ola Bini. And you know, I actually, I
want to criticize myself here. I routinely, every month, give money to
WikiLeaks–Wikipedia, Wikipedia, not WikiLeaks. [Laughter] Wikipedia, just
because I think it’s, you know, good that they’re nonprofit and everything, and
should be around. I don’t give a lot, but I give, you know, just some bucks.
And I realized I haven’t done that with EFF. I’ve used EFF as a journalist; I
didn’t know that your support base was 40,000 people who want to help you. And
I want to end this the same way I began, by saying I really admire the
independence of what you guys do there, or men and women do there. And that, you
know, you call it as it is without fear or favor. And that’s really what’s
required here, and that should apply to the internet world. So that’s it
for this edition of Scheer Intelligence. We’ll be back next week. Our producer
is Joshua Scheer. Here at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and
Journalism we have Sebastian Grubaugh, who pulls it all together. And at Sports
Byline in San Francisco, Darren Peck provided the services to bring our speaker
to us. So, see you again next week with another edition of Scheer Intelligence.
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