>>Thank you very much. Uh Twenty-two years is a long time to watch this grow from uh- what it was to what it is. We used to be able to say what it was, we don’t know how to say what it is. Uh, because there are so many minor Cons going on and the industry has exploded. And as long as we keep selling something that we don’t deliver, it’s gonna just get bigger. So I- I think it’s important to keep selling security to people who keep needing it. Kind of like self-help books. If they worked, there wouldn’t be another one, you know? But that’s just an aside. Uh, it’s great to be here. I do want to mention just briefly, the last year, when I spoke, I addressed a pretty serious issue which was the traumatic impact of uh, security work and intelligence work on professionals who do it over a prolonged period of time. And those first time I heard people crying at Def Con because it brought forth what some of you, um, have experienced over many, many years, and I’m just sharing that to say, uh, if you go look at the youtube video, it’s online. A lot of people have looked at it. Uh, it’s a serious subject that is seldom addressed directly and and successfully inside the agencies, or often by corporate. Uh, and yet it gets bigger and bigger as the space gets bigger and bigger. So I, I invite you if you have any insight or anything to share with me to please uh follow up on that. Uh, it continues to plague people. I got an email just last week from a good friend, long time friend at NSA. Uh, who said they were advised to be sure they watch each other’s backs. Well that’s the kind of advice that is easy to give and impossible to take, because it’s not very specific. But the reason he found out was because uh, three people had committed suicide that week, an- and one the week before. And I did quote a friend, uh well, a fellow, at CIA, who said he bears through his life, 23 and they were inordinately proud of having the highest rate of suicide, alcoholism and divorce and adultery in the government. That was D.O., the Director of Operations. Um, that’s the sobering part of the talk. Uh, keep in mind, it’s an uphill climb to get people to look at it, including people who are suffering from it, because there are antidotes. We all bear scars but there are ways we can live with them um- more successfully than some other ways. So that’s what that’s about, is looking at all the different things we can do to ameliorate the impact of uh- what it does to us over- over time, to do this work and to engage with people who are uh, on the cutting edge. 


Well what I want to do today, uh, it’s not a very sexy topic privacy, why it’s gone. Everybody knows it’s gone, and you can do a very short speech on that. Uh, I was in Amsterdam not long ago and I was talking to a friend who works at a pretty high level and uh- asked if we will ever get back any semblance of a protections or freedoms from intrusion and privacy and she said in a tone that I’ll never forget, “Oh Richard, of course not, of course not.” Because the technologies of intrusion and surveillance are so deeply embedded in all of our means of working, living and communicating with one another today, uh- and it is so profitable to have them, and so unprofitable to remove them that we will never get back the freedoms that we thought we had, so. She sounded kind of like Michael Corleone in the Godfather when uh- Kay said, “but Michael, Senators don’t kill people” and Corleone said, “Okay, who’s being naive now?” Um- implying that senators did indeed kill people. I should ask at this point because it’s something that just happened to me. How many of you know what I mean when I say “The Godfather”? How many of you-? [laughter] Okay, good, good. 


Let me do a test because if it happens here, then I know I’ve got to make some changes. I was doing a talk uh- for a pretty sizeable audience, uh- and in Montreal. And I said- I referred to Chinatown, uh- Jake Gittes saying-, uh, when they said, “come on, it’s Chinatown, Jake, it’s Chinatown.” And someone came up and said nobody knows what you mean. How many of you have seen the movie Chinatown? Okay. Thats- thats pretty good. How many of you have seen the movie, The Conversation? Fewer, okay, I encourage you to see The Conversation to see what it’s like. Um- It- it’s a terrific movie, uh- with Gene Hackman about surveillance. But the point is, I’d like to be able to refer to popular culture um- markers and signals that people recognize. And I learned my lesson when uh Adam Shostack got up after me and all he had were slides from Starwars and Rogue One and everybody knew exactly what he was talking about, whenever he- he used them. Uh we’ll touch on that a little later. So, everybody knows that privacy in the way I just referred to it is gone but that's the view on the ground and I want to take us up to maybe uh- 30, 40, 50, 60 thousand feet to look at what it really means that privacy is gone because of what it means that our identity has so radically been altered by the digitalization and other factors in the world, uh of the 21st century that privacy is literally nonexistent. Uh- it’s not whether we can recapture it or have it. It’s that it doesn’t exist in the same way that it existed and I want to talk about why that is with a broad view over what’s happened to society, uh, including a look at a few things like words over the last few hundred years. Privacy is defined as freedom from damaging publicity, public scrutiny, secret surveillance, unauthorized disclosure of one’s personal data or information as by a government corporation or individual. Uh, as if ordinary citizens have a right to privacy. When I read that definition, it is laughable, because all of that is gone. Uh- we do not have that freedom. We are not free from any of those things. Uh and I don’t think we will be. But what I want to do is try to get us to see that the 20th century framework, within which we think about these things and our identity is effectively ending, and it’s very important to know who you are, so that you can determine what you do with effectiveness and uh- and and some clarity. Uh- when- the uh VGA cable comes, if it ever comes, um- I’ll put a picture up or two, but let me get into the talk.


I’m going to start with a quote from Nietzsche. You like to do that at Def Con ‘cause everybody reads Nietzsche, right? He said with the unknown one is confronted with danger, in other words somebody says something to you that’s totally unknown, uh it’s dangerous it’s causes discomfort and great care and the first instinct is to abolish the pain of being in those states. So this is his first principle, any explanation is better than none. And since at bottom what you really wanna do is get rid of the oppressive information or representation, you’re not too particular about the means of getting rid of them. So the first representation, the first idea, the first theory that explains everything uh and explains the unknown in a familiar way, using the categories of the past, it feels so good that you call it true. You say we consider that true. Uh the proof of pleasure is the criterion of truth in other words, does it alleviate your cognitive dissonance, does it downplay your anxiety, does it make you feel better in the face of the fearfulness of the unknown and the new and so the fear is the real problem that confronts us and therefore we have to abolish that feeling uh and the strange, and the new, and the hitherto inexperience, must disappear into habitual, comfortable, familiar, explorations. And that’s why he says too, we must tell stories that are untimely by which he means the consensus reality in which we live at any given moment is our time, but the truths that are coming at us faster and faster of the kind I’m speaking are untimely, we’re speaking to a future state which is already here but as Gibson said ‘unevenly distributed’. In other words, truths the deepest truths you believe about who you are and your identity are illusions that we have comfortably and conveniently forgot were illusions in order to live with them. And truths held collectively by a group or organization have to be confronted on behalf of a future people that will not hold those truths naively. So we often embrace truths by which we live because they make us feel better and alleviate cognitive dissonance but they're not true. Uh what’s true is what’s real and as Philip K Dick said, “reality is that which when we refuse to believe in it won’t go away” and here we are living inside a Philip K Dick nov- now how many of you know who Philip K Dick is? Okay. Pretty savvy crowd on edge thinkers. Now I spoke in Canada about privacy about 4 years ago and I thought I don’t have to ever change the speech I gave in Canada because it’s the same issues year, after year, after year, and I spoke for the minister’s privacy not long ago uh tried to give a different slant on it and one of the minister’s of privacy from uh British Columbia said, “That was a very provocative keynote, but let us hope it’s not true” and did not realize she was a proof of concept of that Nietzschean statement I just made which is, “it’s provocative, but I don’t want it to be true and therefore because my job is to be the minister of privacy I have to treat it as if it is not true even though I know it is.”
 
Okay. Man’s plugging stuff in here. Let me make sure the soft porn is not [laughter] on there


>>Like the hardcorestuff [speaker laughs] [offmic chatter continues] 
>>Woops this file was encrypted [speaker laughs]


>>Okay, alright, so that’s gonna be my image for the hour that Def Con image I guess. Um somebody's probably doing something to try to get the other image up. Um okay so one of the minister’s of privacy got up and um gave a very very passionate speech about all the restrictions they have on the government uh and on society to try to save privacy and I asked if uh if they really work for the intelligence community, do they really adhere to these things? And she said, “Well in theory, in theory” [laughter] 


Um and all you can say is in theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice they’re not. [laughter] Okay so, privacy and security, Matt Blaze once said a long time ago, “The weakest link in the security chain is the frequently the definition of the problem, and the definition of the problem is often not what we think” that applies to privacy too, and we’re gonna see how. Because these are- these are difficult concepts I’m- I’m trying to advance because they like the Zen Buddhists say, uh “Enlightenment is a nightmare in daylight and when you grasp it suddenly everything else explodes and you have nothing but space to create new possibilities if you can stand it” uh and and that’s what we’re talking about. We’re living by 20th century concepts, and they don’t fit anymore and therefore we talk about privacy and security uh actually. Um- as if we know the definitions of the problems but they’re not what we think. “A wise person under these conditions steers their course by the torchlight of doubt and chaos” and as Niels Bohr said of quantum physics, “Anyone who isn’t confused, doesn’t understand what’s going on” I think that’s true about privacy and security as well.

Okay now let me provide some history. Printing press with moveable type was introduced to Europe by Gutenberg in 1439. It played an unimaginably huge role in the development of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment, and the whole scientific revolution because now could share standardized tables and- and data for the first time uh in in history. It laid the material basis for our knowledge based economy and the spread of learning to the masses, you cannot overstate the importance of the printing press. And it was revolutionary in England when William Caxton brought the printing press there in 1476. When something changes the world so radically we exaggerate the impact, think of what we said about the internet when it first came, but in the long term we always underestimate the impact, again think of the internet. The printing press, like the internet, like digital reality is an engine of revolution that is now a catalyst for ev- revolution in all the other areas as well, bio, and nano, and uh space technologies, and material science. Uh and the acceleration of change has made change happen faster and faster. 


So we usually respond to this the way Virginia St. Pier said we do to grief; first by denying it and then we get angry about it, and then we get depressed, and then we uh negotiate with it, and finally we accept it. Um but remnants of past behaviors. No you’re not getting an image, don’t worry about it, don’t worry about it


>>Sorry

>>It was beautiful and it was very important, but ft- don’t worry about it [laughter] Um I’ll look at it, it’s the cover of my- the third volume of my novel Foam and it says, “Identity is destiny” and it shows a man standing before the universe and it’s a gorgeous picture- it really is a gorgeous picture and I mention that only because I will be signing a few books that I brought after the talk, at 2:30 and 3 at the uh vendor space uh the other one was going to be just a picture of mind games because those are the kinds of games I’m playing with you and I was always gonna- also gonna show you a picture of the UFOs in Government book because I continue to get feedback from numerous sources about the accuracy of our historical analysis of how the government responded to that phenomena over s- sixty years but I won’t show you those pictures we’ll just leave that aside. [laughter]


The uh remnants of past behavior persist and how prior technology socialized us and taught us to behave as they framed our lives, then they went in the background, but they’re still there, we just don’t see them, like the electric grid, you didn’t see the lights, you saw by the lights when you came in here, you see by virtue of the lights illuminating, but electric lights like these they’re only 125 years old, we’re barely up from the swamp we’re new creatures in the galaxy and- and so arrogant and proud like a toddler. Um- but it’s new, but you still don’t see the power grid, you don’t plug in uh all of your equipment and say, “I’m going on the power grid now, so shhhh! Quiet, I’m on the power grid” you don’t even see the power grid but if somebody came back here from the 19th century and looked at the landscape around us, probably the first thing they would notice is all of the lines and dynamos uh that are semblance of a power grid that they never experience and it goes into the background. The first automobiles had sockets in the dashboard for buggy whips. Because uh buggies drawn by horses had sockets in which to put the buggy whips. Uh then after awhile they stopped making cars with holes for buggy whips. A friend remembers when um uh this is some time ago but it’s a historical statement uh when they were firing cannons um this was during World War I that’s how back, far back I go right? Um and there were people standing there where they fired the cannons, with their arms out like this uh at attention he said, “What are they doing?” he said, “They’re holding the horses, because the cannon spooked the horses and they have to hold the bridle,” and he said, “But we don’t have any horses anymore, it’s all mechanised” and there was that dull look of, “Oh.” Uh- so the people holding the horses stayed long after the horses were gone, that’s- that’s what we do. And when Caxton brought the printing press to England printed- printing revolutionised the world, and the social worlds in which people lived, the religious world, the scientific world, the cultural world, everything. They had to choose a dialect in which to print, and that became what we call standard English. And as standard English permeated a larger and larger group it permeated what we later called England, which did not exist yet until the social institutions that supported it had been created by the technologies which people no longer as saw as causal but were. So the language printing imposed homogenized a culture over time and political, and economic, and social consequences soon followed. So it changed how we thought. It changed more fundamentally, who we were. Now we need the language to use to understand who we have become that we are in the process now of inventing. You can’t think what you can’t say, and the language of the past is inadequate to describe what a human being has become today by virtue of technologies. Give you an example of words that you use all the time that were um that were invented during a very fecund period, a very fertile period, 1918 to 1923 after World War I when the flapper era had exploded uh and the- and the good- good feeling era followed before the depression.


Um these are words which did not exist before then. Cool, extrovert, fascist, mass-media, debunk, encode, hyper-modern, multipurpose, powerplay, teenage, which was invented as a stage of life at the same time. Post-feminist, biracial, slinky, sado-masochistic, homosexuality, fundamentalism, psyching, devalue, uh one of my favorites uh ‘cause I can’t imagine the Samuel L Jackson movie without it, the word motherf**ker came into play in 1918 for the first time. One can only imagine the circumstances under which that took place [laughter] right? 


Frenchkiss, f**koff, I’m not telling you to f**koff I’m telling you that’s a phrase that, uh deflationary, merchant bank, arbi- I could go on and on and on these did not exist but now we can say them and think them because the language emerged to describe new social and cultural realities that previously we had no way of identifying. Um it’s it’s like hacker, you know what’s happened to the word hacker, right? Overtime. Uh it used to mean a hacker, uh when I first started speaking at Def Con, Def Con 4, it was a convention of hackers um now there are some we used to play ‘spot the fed’ here, now you’re all feds so we play spot the hacker [laughter] it’s uh, it’s a more appropriate game uh what is a hacker today? Well you hear black hat hacker, gray hat hacker and white hat hacker. uh I’ll tell you the real definitions those, the black hat hacker is a hacker, right? A gray hat hacker is a hacker who put the truth down somewhere, but knows where he put it. [laughter] A white hat hacker is someone who put the truth down somewhere and forgot where it is. In other words, I haven’t met yet a white hat hacker who is only a white hat hacker, it’s a definition of convenience, because in the old days at any rate the only way you learn by hacking uh the only way you learned to hack was by hacking and it was a passionate commitment to doing anything you needed to do, to look at things in a new way and learn from them. We need new language to articulate what we experience and grasp the nature of the context in which we live, we need new language today to discuss ethics, spirituality, and identity, and privacy. The weakest link in the discussion in privacy, is the definition of privacy, and the definition of privacy is not what we think. Let us give, give true props to what this technology has done. When we invent a technology like this Langdon Winner computer scientist said, “Society also invents the kinds of people who will use it, older practices, relationships, and ways of defining identity fall by the wayside. New practices, relationships and identities take root. In case after case the move to computerise and digitize means pre-existing cultural forms have suddenly gone liquid, like an ice cube in your hand, losing their former shape as they are restructured for computerized expression and as these new patterns solidify, both useful artifacts and the texture of human relationships that surround them will be much different than what existed previously.” In other words I’m trying to emphasize how big this really is and yet our minds keep it small in order to let us live in it day by day.


It wasn’t long ago that people spoke of going on the internet. I mean, really not long ago. Uh but I talk to children today who don’t know what it means to ‘go on the internet’ because they are always on the internet. And I’m- I could show you a picture if if they could get the technology to work, it’s very complicated [laughter] um of a recent dinner, I moved to Minneapolis a great city and um my wife and daughter and two grandchildren were sitting uh and eating and every single person, except me who had a digital camera to take the picture, was on an ipad or an iphone uh in the booth and I have to believe some of them were texting each other so that the communication among family was not totally down but from the bleeps and squeaks of the games the kids were playing I don’t think that’s what was happening. So new technology socializes us to their context. Uh telephone voices sounded weird back when the telephone was invented they sounded unnatural and yet when the internet first came forward somebody at a radio station wanted to interview me about all of this and she said, “Uh call me, don’t send me an email, I wanna speak to a real person” [laughter] and I had to explain how telephones work ‘cause it was electronic signal blah blah blah wasn’t a real person uh and- and yet today you get an email or a text from a real person, you assume it’s real, well and then there’s that whole other problem that it is- often isn’t but that’s a totally different question.


Okay so I talked about England briefly in order to introduce that subject and when I used the words English and England I bet you thought we had a common understanding of what we meant but in fact what we mean when we say the name of any nation’s state is no longer what it used to be. It uh isn’t the same because the boundaries around nation states have become first semi permeable and porous and then they went down. In the 90s when I was talking to people in the intelligence community about the impact this had on the work, CIA and NSA and others were doing, because they’ve gotta be well ahead of us. When I talk to people at CIA about scientific, biological stuff, it’s- keep in mind that anything I tell you uh was 20 years ago and anything anybody knows out there is gonna be 20 years ago because we’re- the- we’re working uh a little further ahead than that and and so um [clears throat] how many of you been to a Shakespeare play in the last year? Really?


What a group, honest to god, I mean it’s- it’s wonderful. How many of you seen the Star Wars movie? Oh more than went to a Shakespeare play okay [laughter] okay. Uh when you’re going to a Shakespeare play, we think we are understanding Elizabethan English which is being spoken unless it’s been changed to make it more palatable. But at least 25 percent of the words being used mean something different than what you think they mean. In other words, language is a dynamic process in which meanings are constantly changing, adding, disappearing, and morphing and it’s uh a matrix, a social, cultural matrix that evolves evolution early as we do and yet we think that what we say and what we see by virtue of what we say is what’s real and what’s always been, and I’m trying to make the point that it isn’t. And the word I want emphasized is individual. When you hear the word individual as Shakespeare used it, it meant something, some quality that was unified or indivisible. Now we’re talking about the late 1500s early 1600s, it did not mean an individual person. When you say, “I’m an individual” you think of yourself as an individual being, that didn’t show up for another couple of hundred years, until the 17th century, 18th century, the definition of individuality meant quote, “The state or quality of being indivisible and inseparable” it didn't’ mean a human being.   


In other words the notion and the appropriation of the notion of what it meant to be a human being, an individual human being, emerged as an emergent property for the cultural and social changes, the technology, the times, and especially the printing press which I’ll get back to were occasioning. So the change in the meaning of the word individuality is related to the breakup of the entire medieval social, economic, and religious order. We think that is a historical event, but at the time it was monumental and transformational and so is our own. But if we look at it in too granular of a way, we don’t see what’s happened. 


The new use of individual helped define a person’s place in a society that was emerging into reality as well because an individual human can live independently of society and make his or her own decisions. The person has enough knowledge to exist alone without clinging to society and therefore what it meant to be human fundamentally changed from being just part of a whole to having a boundary around you which defined your identity in the same way that the boundaries around nation states grew during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries and defined nations states uh up until Westphalian and and the treaty that helped define them in a way that no longer holds. I got a good example of this when I was speaking for the FBI and I was talking about how places uh entities invented for this country and or to work in this country and to work abroad, uh used to be distinctive uh but now foreign and domestic no longer have the same meanings uh anymore than natural and artificial have the same meanings, we’ve blurred those lines so much and the head of the office, the agent in charge of the Chicago office the FBI said, “Bingo, that explains why I’m getting the reactions I am.” 


What he was talking about was- now the FBI was set up as a police organization in this country, the CIA was set up uh to do espionage in every other country. That’s why at that first talk I gave at Def Con 4 I could say, “You wanna hack? Come on in, come in under the umbrella, you get the best tools, the best techniques, and the best mentors in the business if you come into the agency, and you get a get out of jail free card as well”, because all of the hacking that you know is just part of the vast subset of hacking that we have developed as many people now know more than they did, in more detail uh to hack other countries. Uh we don’t have any friends someone said, Deputy Director of- Sigit actually at NSA we have only targets. And he was trying to calm down the guy who said the English are special friends, we have a special relationship, he said we have no friends, we have only targets, and it’s everybody else.


So CIA was set up to be that way in 1947 it’s what our security world, our national security state has developed as a necessity and I’m not criticizing that I’m just saying it’s it’s what’s so. So the FBI was supposed to be here and the CIA was supposed to be there, but here and there no longer mean the same things so the FBI works all over the world now, and CIA is of course operating overtly now as for example with the New York Police Department by s- by design, statements are by design to make a point, but the CIA is all over the place, inside as well, because the boundaries are down and the nature of the information state that we inhabit means you have to go where the information goes and see where it comes from and nation state boundaries don’t matter anymore. What the FBI man was saying is that the real sources of power and influence on us, on our lives, that which directs our behavior, are transnational. They are sometimes entities that again, have no names, that don’t have names, but they’re not just nation states, so we kind of co-exist like a parallax view between seeing nation state as operative and knowing that the real source of our behavior is something else. How much business is Microsoft or Apple doing somewhere else? Much more than 50 percent, we think they’re American companies, they’re not, they’re companies and they have their own independence and their own operations and their influencing power on us supersedes that which we think is patriotic and that’s what the FBI special agent was trying to say. “I used to be able to invite people to cooperate with the FBI, and they always did out of patriotic motivation” he said “but now more and more I’ll get the answer, ‘I’d like to help you but-’” And that ‘but’ is the substantiation of the- they know that the true source of their power is not the country in the same way that it was. Which is why the political rhetoric we’re hearing today which is so 20th century, or before, uh the political rhetoric is a 20th century framework that’s not describing any of the realities that are impacting people’s lives, and that’s why the solutions defined in 20th century terms can’t work in the 21st century because we’re a totally different kind of su- economy and society. 


Well why am I bothering going into all this? Well, because privacy as we have used the word has meaning only for an individual. Which was an emergent property, I say. Only for an individual. Privacy is something that an individual has. And this meaning of individual no longer applies to humans today, not in the same way, not really. We always knew we were cells in the body, but we used to emphasize the fact that we were cells, individuals, now we have to see bodiness. And when digitalization took over people experience themselves more powerfully as nodes in a network and it restructured how we had to work in teams. You never heard of uh work teams or- in in the same way, you never heard of teachers having to teach people how to work in teams. In my day when we tried to work cooperatively I was usually nailed for cheating, ‘cause that’s what we called it then it- we were told to do your work alone, individually, don’t look at any other- anybody else’s work. That’s been totally transformed by the technology or learning and action. So what is privacy mean in this new world? And what is contingent on it, and why does it matter? Well Andrew Grove whose one of the founders of Intel said long ago, almost 20 years ago, “Privacy is the big problem of the electronic age, at the heart of the internet culture is a source that wants to find out everything about you, and once it has found out everything about you and 200 million others, that’s a pretty valuable asset so people will be tempted,” isn’t that naive? “That they’ll be tempted” today they do it all the time, “to trade and do commerce with the asset,” which is the information about you that you have freely given them a la Facebook, etcetera uh all unknowingly given them the commodity that is yourself in terms of the data that you provide simply by existing in that online world. 


That wasn’t the information that people were thinking of, he said, when they called that- called this the information age. Commentators said we think of privacy is tremendously valuable, we call it uh a human right, but we live in the Facebook age and the only thing more cherished than privacy is publicity. We share personal data in flagrant ways but believe we have a right to privacy when we choose to keep things private which we can not do anymore. So privacy is a human right? Well privacy became real around the same time that rights became real. 


You know that people, before this transformation in society, you lived in one room. I mean you didn’t say, “I’m going upstairs to have sex now.” Everything took place- the animals lived with you, you know you look at a castle keep in the winter, everybody lived in one place, the idea of wh- uh we uh entitled Americans saying, “I want a room of my own” every child gets a room of their own? It It was literally unthinkable because nobody did that. Well privacy emerged at the same time that rights emerged. In other words they became cognitive artifacts, what I call the structures we have internally that we believe in as if they’re real, but which have emerged as a response to the changes in society and above all the information flow which defines um and limits.


So rights. We say rights came from the Magna Carta but until they were conceived as we do recently, we didn’t see the Magna Carta that way at all. The people doing the Magna Carta did not see it as an instantiation of rights. Intellectual property and intellectual property rights only became possible after the printing press externalized the products of our thinking as if they were artifacts with boundaries around them. And boundaries, as I keep saying, determine identity and boundaries around everything from individuals to nation states and I suggest planetary culture are going down. Everybody knows we’re not alone in the universe, but we don’t know that we know it, because the authoritative voice continues to refuse to validate the observations of thousands of people uh that suggest something else is going on. That’s a whole other talk. Uh the fact is we are not alone in the universe, we are part of a sentient web of intelligence that spans galaxies and we have been thinking we’re the apple of God’s eye, and the product of a special intelligence that only wanted us on this Earth to evolve the way we did. So vain. As the president would say, “sad. Sad.” [laughter] Doesn’t speak in paragraphs, gets his point across though. 


Paragraphs are going the way of cursive writing, honestly um Richard Stallman who many of you know, great new guru uh defending open source sof- software said, “there’s no intrinsic right to intellectual property.” The idea of copyright didn’t exist before when authors copied everything from one another um and you know that if you look at manuscripts made in monasteries you see that people wrote in the margins all the time, copied each other, there was no thought, “I’m stealing” and I tried to get some professors who I once consulted with to understand this, they were very upset about plagiarism which their students were doing, but in a cut and paste world where pieces of information came and went without identity, without source, without retribution uh or attribution. Um plagiarism was ceasing to mean what it did when things were defined in a textual environment so substitute privacy for Stallman’s statement on copyright, “there’s no intrinsic right to privacy, because the forces that made it viable, the social, economic, religious, legal forces have been transformed and are blurring and disappearing and so printing changed everything. That’s my point. And so has the internet. And so are the other domains of advancement to which I can only allude, like bio.  


The revolution in information and communication is the axis around which a 20th- first century world turns right now. Privacy is on in lip service but not in the marketplace where it is violated or taken away every single day. It’s not honored intelligence operations certainly we all all know that. It- it can’t be, it can’t be. And it’s not honored in how computers and softwares are built. A rockstar once said, “If voting were important, they wouldn’t let us do it” well if privacy was important, it would be honored in fact, and it isn’t. I mean you have to take a good look sometimes, look at the vendor space sometimes at a thing like Black Hat, a friend of mine who's been in the business a long time looked out and he said “every single one of these people is selling something they can not deliver,” because they guarantee they’re going to ensure safety and security for the enterprise and they can not do that. But that’s an aside.


Someone said, well I said that uh other things are much more important than privacy. Power is more important and money is more important. The Onion run- once ran an article saying customers are our most important, second most important factor. Um of course everybody says customers the most important, but they mean after money, after money. The internet of things, you know what it’s like, we’ve got a village dedicated to hacking all the aspects of it here, it ignores privacy as software companies do in a rush to market. I remember Bill Gates saying  years ago, um “show me something that I can fix, I’ll spend a million dollars to do it, show me something that makes me 2 days late to market forget it” Time to get to market matters more. 




Privacy advocates and they’re all over here, well meaning, righteous, and sincere are fighting a rearguard reaction- action with reality itself, and reality always wins. So children today are growing up without an expectation of privacy, and without an understanding of what we mean by privacy, because their social world has taught them a different way of being, which is, it’s all out there. Sure you can have great movies about living off the grid, but try it. Um you you wind up looking like the unabomber, right? And even he had to use a bus to get his bombs to San Francisco so he could trust others to mail them. You can’t really live off the grid unless you’re living with wolves in a cave. I said in a forecast of security issues I was asked to identify years ago, 20 years ago, that the only way to protect data is not to collect it in the first place. That was true, it’s still true, and it’s totally ignored. We give it away, or we allow it to be taken. As if it is of no account because we can not see or feel the ends to which data analytics put our autobiographical bits, every daily choice that we make, and everyone who can collects data, and everyone who knows how to do it parses it together, not data but information. “Information,” remember Claude Shannon said, “is the difference that makes a difference.” Well this information makes a huge difference, not the noise but the data that creates information, the signal and it gives those that know how to extract it from the data leverage, power, and money. Bits of data that make up us our gestalt, our identity. They now are combined at that level of abstraction in different ways. And they see something different when they look at us than we see ourselves.


The point of this talk, if you want a takeaway, is that the level of abstraction at which you can view either an entity, an organization, or a human being, determines what you believe is real and people who do data analytics are looking at a level of abstraction which is so very real, as as yo- as we all know, but we act as if we are still the 20th century selves that emerged when we were children or growing up, and we haven’t really grasped that we are known better than we know ourselves. It’s like the zen statements about the illusion of the self, well we believe in ourselves, we believe ourselves are ourselves, and I’m trying to make the point, it’s very hard to get, this is why it’s a nightmare in daylight if you really grasp it, that the fundamental assumptions we make about d***n near everything are no longer workable in the frame we have unknowingly created by participating, as all of us have in this  room, in this new technological society. We are not the same people we once were, and so defining who we are and our prerogatives and needs has to be done in light of who we have become. We’re talking about identity. 


Uh in uh Blade Runner, he was looking at the photographs, I know you know that movie, and he said,  “Memories, you’re talking about memories,” well now we know we can create memories in different ways, in my talk on biohacking one of the things I looked at which my friend at the CIA helped me understand was that we really are working seriously in implanting memories, implanting memories of someone else’s experience, not just using techniques to efface memory uh the way we have in the past which is what media does, media creates memory uh and then we share our memories if it’s real, and if it comforts us uh we become a voting block. Alright. So Walter Ong looked at all of this some time ago, looking at our reality and literacy and the technology as in the word and he said, “the shift from our reality to literacy in non electronic processing engages social, economic, political, religious, and other structures, and creates an entire difference in mentality, in who we think we are,” he said “in who we experience ourselves to be.” Writing, restructured consciousness, you see. Writing transformed human consciousness. Oral cultures contained human beings who were not the same humans but began to write, and the printing press did it again, and engaging as we do immersively in the digital world is doing it one more time. Our consciousness is literally being restructured in a different way. 


So all of the arguments against computerization were the same ones they used against the printing press and writing. Plato said the same things when the oral culture was ending, “It’s going to destroy humanity,” No it’s going to transform humanity and the humanity you thought- thought you were a part of is no longer going to exist. Kids today are criticized because they multiply in their heads, or write cursive, they use Google instead of remembering things, but they don’t know any loss from their experience, they experience no loss, why should I write cursive when I can type with my thumb, or write block letters? Uh why should I multiply when all I have to do is enter in the data and it multiplies it for me? Why should I remember something which is so ready at hand? Why should I ask somebody how to get to Grandma’s house when all I have to do is- pointing at the clock, watch? Where are we? Wrap it up? You told me you were going to tell me when I had 10 minutes? [inaudible off-mic comment] you should have put it in my uh presentation, I would have seen it on the screen [laughs] [laughter] Well. Sorry. Uh he’s telling me to stop uh I hate to stop ‘cause I love to talk [laughter] but uh uh I uh I’m just gonna quote a couple of people and then I’m gonna wrap it up uh this is an old quote but it still tells you how they were thinking at MIT some years ago uh when we do the kind of data analysis I was talking about we get a God’s eye view of human behavior uh we can tell how they’re gonna vote, we’re gonna tell when they- can tell when they’re getting sick, we’ve turned society into a laboratory where behavior can be effectively followed but also we’re effecting in changing behavior and you think you have privacy, we’re getting genetic sniffers that when you walk through a space you inhabit, somebody will be able to pick up your DNA from the shed skin cells that you are fusing into the air and they will be able to do a DNA analysis as we increase our ability to do that quickly and cheaply uh there is no place to hide. Uh so, the good news is uh that someone wanted is that it’s real and we can always deal with what’s real but we have to grasp who we really are in terms of what I’ve been describing uh the world can not be talked about as if it’s a 20th century world, not politics, not ethics, not religions, not anything. And the good news is, we can become conscious of this, as we have in the past, and then make reasonable, powerful decisions about who we are in light of it, and rethink what it means to be ethical uh rethink what it means to be human because humans have always had a different definition of self understanding in different cultures, and it’s no different now, it’s just a different kind of challenge because it continues to change so  radically and so rapidly. So those who wanna be in the cutting edge will at least know how to surf the waves of information that restore our sanity and wholeness in health to the being who is doing this and that here more than anywhere else that I go, is you men and women. Thank you for your attention. [applause] Thank you. Thanks!