ToorCamp9 2026 - Naomi Brockwell - The New War on Privacy, and How We Win

Did you have a good time last night? Some stuff the night market. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Well, uh our next talk here is Naomi Brockwell. Um I met her a couple years ago here at tour camp and um quickly discovered that she's working on a lot of really cool stuff uh related to privacy and just informing people on you know all the technologies out there and how to protect themselves on the internet. And so um I'm very excited to uh have her here today. Um if you don't know uh she's the president of the Lelo Institute which is a nonprofit focused on uh helping people protect their privacy. Uh she's also the creator of on MBTV um a YouTube channel with 1 million plus subscribers across you know various platforms and also the lead drafter of HR 8470 the uh surveillance accountability act introduced to the US house on April 23rd 2026. The bill closes the third party doctrine loophole, bans warrantless ALPR, uh, biometric and location drag nets, voids contractual waiverss of fourth amendment rights against the government, and creates a private right of action against federal agents who violate the Fourth Amendment. So, all sorts of awesome stuff. So, please uh, welcome Naomi to the tour camp stage. >> Hello. Hello. So, thank you all for being here. I think that privacy is one of the most important battles uh to fight right now because I see the trajectory that we're going in and we're kind of heading towards surveillance dystopia and the worst part is that most people don't quite realize it's going on. Um so my institute focuses on giving people back control over their digital lives. So we try to find ways where um that control is being stripped from them and then we teach them how to use tools that where they can just simply reclaim that control themselves. We work a little as David said on the the policy front as well. Um ultimately I believe that policy isn't going to save us. It will slow things down long enough hopefully that we can get tech um up and running that will save us and ultimately the solutions are going to be technical. But I do believe we have to fight on all fronts right now. Uh because things are really moving very fast. So, uh, I'm going to start on a more optimistic note and I'm going to try and frame my surveillance dystopia hell ho, uh, presentation, uh, in a positive light. So, let's see if I can succeed. Um, so I'll start off by talking about tour camp. Um, as was already mentioned, I came to my first tour camp two years ago and it was incredible and I feel like this camp in particular really epitomizes hacker culture because it's just it's wild. like the whimsy and just the joy that everyone here brings to wanting to create and build and break things apart and rebuild them into something of their own choosing. You know, you guys are not satisfied with tech as it is. You're like, "Well, this tech is great, but what if I break open the box and then like add a bunch of plugins and add some wires and connect it to an entire campsite?" Um, and so it's just so wonderful. And I just like I I know that people will probably be watching this who haven't been to talk camp and um to them I would say absolutely come. Um because you know just an anecdote like I remember just kind of walking around my first year and suddenly like a phone starts ringing and I'm like I'm in the middle of a forest. Why is there a phone ringing? And then I noticed that the phone has deer antlers. I was like is it for me? Like what am I going to do? So yeah, I went and picked up the phone and the person on the other end in a very serious voice, very serious seven-year-old, I'm sure. Hello, can I please have a deer fact? And I was like, I why? And then lo and behold, I realized there's a book of deaf facts right there. So I'm like, okay. Um female deers are called a dough. They're like, thank you very much. And they hang up and it kind of like sums up just like how how beautiful this place is. you know, you you have a very self-aware um like an entire kind of village dedicated to bureaucracy. Like what? So, you take the the drudgery of life, the the worst things, the paperwork and the rules, and you turn it into like something where, you know, we repackage it with a wink and we make it into something fun. So, that's the kind of culture that we need right now. We need people who are builders. We need people who are creative. We need people who want to understand how things work, who aren't just happy with the status quo and just taken what is given to them. They want to make things their own. We need those people with high agency. And so I think that hacker conferences in general have very high agency people because there's no way you would lug, you know, a 1970s computer on a ferry along with five phone booths like to an island and you know like no one does that unless they are high agency people. So right now we we need high agency people, high agency builders, curious people because we've got a giant battle ahead of us, right? But the people in this tent are exactly the kind of people who I think can save the world. And you may think like there are only a handful of us and we're up against every other force in existence. So in this talk basically what I'm going to talk about is uh first of all why we're losing the war uh on privacy right now. We'll talk about how this front has escalated um and uh and the different areas where it's escalated so we can pinpoint what the problem is right now. Then I'll talk about what's at stake because I'm not going to take it as a presumption that we're all on the same page um about why privacy is important. Uh I I mean I mean this is a you guys are self- selecting obviously but I talk at way too many conferences where the entire presentation has to be explaining why privacy is important. So I definitely don't take it for granted that people understand that. that um for me privacy is the foundation of a free society. You just cannot push back against power unless you have the protection of privacy. So I'll go into detail about what's actually at stake if we don't course correct. Uh and then I'm going to explain how to win. Um and luckily we have an entire history of hacker culture to learn from. We have incredible battles that were absolutely unwinable. Like there's no way you can look back at some of these battles and say like, "Oh yeah, that the hacker guy is obviously going to win this." And yet they did. So let's look at their playbook. Let's look at what they did. How were they able to create the ground swell that they did? How were they able to go against forces that seem so much more powerful? Had so many more lawyers, had so much like more more resources at their disposal. So I'll talk about um what that playbook is and how you guys might be able to utilize that. Again, high agency people here. So I feel like I can just kind of give you this stuff and you'll be like great, that's percolating now. Let me go and um proliferate those ideas and and build. So let's talk about the serious depressing stuff. So the war has just escalated and um the way I see it, it's escalated mainly on on two big fronts. So the first one is AI and uh I I believe that tech is neutral. you know it could be used for good or bad but we have seen just huge resources hijacking um powerful compute you know AI for surveillance capabilities and we haven't seen that same um uh you know usage of this powerful compute for building privacy tools on the protection side of things and it's a little bit worse than that because as you all know I mean it's not just AI AI's kind of like you know 10xed it but uh we've all seen the collection of data in the digital era just ramp up and up and up and then you get AI on top of that which just makes everything explode. So let's talk a little bit just about the data collection side and give you a kind of idea of like what's going on right now. Um so like one anecdote I mean I has anyone here read Byron Ta's book uh means of control really great book. All right. So, he's a a journalist who sued the government many times with foyer requests to try to get information um about data collection and like hidden surveillance. And what he found was he kind of talks about these four epochs of data collectors. And the fourth apoch is is these SDKs and this idea that you know you're going to build a side app like you in your spare time build a compass app. And um and then suddenly a million people download it because they're like yeah I love compasses. Is that really cool? Cuz they're so popular. And then like suddenly you're this app developer who's like, "Cool, I have a popular product." Well, you will invariably get someone reach out to you saying like, "Hey, I really like your Compass app. I'll pay you $1,000 a month to just put this SDK. Just put these lines of code in your app. Um, and we're just an analytics company and uh you'll get paid." And that app developer has gone from like you know learning how to make apps and a side project to suddenly monetiz a lot of the time they don't even understand what they have just put into their apps. You can presume that that's in like basically every app on your device right now. There's going to be some code there that someone paid to put into that app that even the developer doesn't even know what it's there for. And what Byron Tal did was he did a bunch of foyer requests to try to dive into like who are these companies who are like putting this stuff in the apps. Turns out that a lot of governments are doing this. So um one of the examples he gives was the one of the most um uh popular apps for Muslims in the United States. And it turns out that it was just harvesting all the location data and contact data and everything from like every Muslim who downloaded this app. and it was um like a government shell company in in the United States that was doing this. So that that's wild. You know, we're not meant to be able to target specific demographics. Like the we can't let power get so imbalanced that we can like be doing things like that. And the the biggest imbalance of all is the the knowledge imbalance, you know, that no one understands that this stuff is going on, right? So like you'll download a weather app and there was another like court case recently um Kachava some company in Idaho that you've never heard of but you know you you um give a weather app a permission to to get access to your location. Obviously you need it. It's a weather app and then suddenly that permission quietly cascades to this company um that you never agreed anything with and uh this is has tracking code in it um in over 10,000 apps. They found this code uh they built profiles on hundreds of millions of people. They can pinpoint people's devices to within 10 meters. And this is available for anyone to purchase anyone. So people tried, you know, um testing this out. It's like on Amazon marketplace and you can literally just sign up an account on Amazon marketplace and then buy all of this test data of people's location up to 10 meters. That's how easy it is to get all of this data that is being siphoned from your devices right now. Um so there's just countless examples of this kind of stuff. But let's let's talk about government access uh for a second because I think that you know the there are two camps of this. A lot of people say well we got to let the government have access to everything because we've got to keep people safe and you know I trust my government. And then there's the other side that is saying well you don't know who's going to be in the government and you're just handing over the reigns to this infrastructure to whoever gets in power. So like there are two different you know frames of reference here. One of them is um you know trusting the person right now that you know is controlling this and the other side is looking a few steps into the future and understanding that this is a ticking time bomb, right? This is just sitting there waiting for someone to come and abuse it. Um so like how does the government even get access to this data? Like who's heard of the fourth amendment? Surprise any of you have because it's not used anymore. Um so how do like we get away from the fourth amendment right now? So the governments can literally just ask for data without a warrant. Why are they allowed to do this? Well, because of the third party doctrine. Any data that we give to a third party is considered that we've relinquished our reasonable expectation of privacy in it. It doesn't matter if you have a contract with that company. I can sign a contract with my doctor that says you will not give my data to anyone and this is private and we both sign it and I would feel like I reasonably expect to have privacy in that, you know, relationship. uh under fourth amendment law you actually don't fourth amendment law does not take into account any contractual agreement you have with a company they override it and say no doesn't matter if you have a contract you have relinquished your protection of privacy there we can get access to that so sometimes companies will just hand it over if the government asks nicely sometimes there are just subpoenas you do not need a um you know a judge to sign off on a subpoena you just need mild curiosity like I would like this data permission slip from me to you like you know Oh, this is from them. They gave themselves permission. I better do it. Um, so the third party doctrine is like a giant loophole in fourth amendment rights in the digital age because the entire internet runs on third parties. So like we first of all migrated our lives into digital data points and uh and then it became just this treasure trove that anyone can get at. Um, also there's things like FISA 702. You might have been watching some of the debates going on right now um where you know uh some people are trying to do a clean reauthorization of this. This is a a sweeping law that um just allows a lot of data to be swept up in the database that uh anyone who has access to 702 data can query at any time basically. So it's data that is meant to be incidental. So uh FISA 702 is specifically targeted to foreign communications. The problem is is that foreigners often will talk to Americans. Anytime it's a between two people, one of them is in America, you're getting a bunch of American data in this 702 database. And unfortunately, this has just seen rampant abuse. So, the last count um is like 350,000 queries that had nothing to do with um you know, foreign surveillance or national security law um from just like domestic criminal law investigations. That's what this is being looked for. looking for, you know, you you search this database using um identifiers like your name, your email address, and these they're all just searching Americans in this database. So 350,000 was was the last one. In 2025, it rose by 35% the number of searches um of this uh queries of this database. So like this is a big loophole as well. Um and then purchasing it is they're just buying the data. So who even cares about any of these loopholes? At the end of the day, governments are just uh buying this. Now, why am I I I focusing on governments right now? Because, you know, we've got corporations who are doing this, who are abusing us, who are abusing our trust, who kind of exploiting our data. Well, I'll explain why. You know, we have a few anecdotes. So, currently ICE is paying Palanteer $30 million to build a platform called Immigration OS, right? They have signed over $80 million in ICE contracts in a single year. Um, this is like a private company and a government just saying like, "Hey, let's do this together because we'll be stronger that way." Um so one of its tool elite reaches into Medicaid records to pull out maps where targets live. Medicaid data should not be accessible or like be able to be sold and used in this way. Um so ICE got access to the personal data of nearly 80 million Medicaid patients. Um so this is a health program that people trusted um with their information and it was quietly turned into a targeting system. So that's kind of an idea of how this stuff can be used, right? Government is not a monolith. It has all these different departments. They have sometimes competing purposes, you know. Um and uh and a lot of people really want access to what you guys are doing every single day, who you are, what your beliefs are, whether you might be problematic in the future. Um another example, who has heard of flock cameras? I hate flock cameras. All right, so we got like what 80,000 cameras that we know about, but we don't even know about these cameras, right? Because every time someone puts up a website trying to, you know, pinpoint like if you see a camera, put it here. The CEO of Luck calls everyone like a terrorist. So, you guys are domestic terrorist organizations because they want knowledge about how they're being tracked. Like, this is wild that the narrative has flipped like that. People should have the ability to know when they're, you know, getting pictures of them um taken everywhere they move. So in under a year, the EFF documented more than 12 million searches of that network. So Flock is not just like individual cameras. What Flock is selling is aworked database. So for example, if you're a police department that signs up for Flock, first of all, there's like that weird Fourth Amendment thing, right? So, it's like this interesting circular permission slip they're giving to each other because block u well the government can't put up this you know mass surveillance apparatus without probably I don't know some executive order or a congressional approval or something like that um but they can buy data from a private company and flock can't put their cameras on public infrastructure without permission so the government gives them permission to put it stuff on their infrastructure and in return gets access to all this data and um and what then happens is if you're a police department that opts into this database um you share all of your flock data with this giant you know data map of the entirety of the United States and you get access to everyone else who has opted into this process. So it becomes this comprehensive database tracking the movements of every single person in this country basically. You know we're ramping up um fast even the areas that don't have cameras. You can imagine that it's going to go real fast. like this is well I don't even know a billion dollar company at least but um it it's huge um this whole uh apparatus. So like what does that mean in an ordinary day? Well like okay so you want to drive to a protest movement and you think you're being smart because you have a burner phone. No, that's out the window. Like you're now in a database. We have like all this footage from people at protests where you have like, you know, people saying, "Ha, you're now in a domestic terrorist database as if it's some like joke that they're not allowed to protest anymore." Like, it's it's terrible. Um, you know, if you want to go to a family planning clinic, if you want to go to a gun range, if you want to go to a place of worship, like all of this stuff now is in this comprehensive database that someone can search at any time to track your your movements. And it doesn't just track where you are, it tracks your social graph, you know, the people that you're meeting. It tracks what you're interested in. There's so much you can infer from this data. So, we just get deep granular insight into all of these individuals lives. And the reason why this is problematic is because again, it's that balance of power. You want a society where there are checks and balances, right? Um, and unfortunately, we've gotten to a stage where we've just eliminated so many of those checks and individuals lose so much power. And I really worry about a future where individuals no longer have that power. And privacy used to be that power that allowed us to protect ourselves. You can, you know, if someone authoritarian got to rule, you could like secretly go to a protest and organize and push back. Or you could, you know, do civil uh disobedience and push back. Like now we're entering a stage where you can do preemptive law enforcement and just squash that before it even happens. Like, oh, I watched her YouTube history. She's been watching too many privacy videos. She seems problematic. you know, let's uh like I mean there's so many mechanisms where you can try to derail that, but like you you understand the picture here that this is so much data and when you have unfeted access to everything in a person's life, first of all, it becomes very easy for you to piece together fragments to build any narrative you want. So if you want to go after someone, you can build a case easily. But also, I feel like like just from a principal standpoint, I should have the right to live my life on my terms without having to live, you know, tread on eggshells and worry what other people are thinking and worry is this the social norm right now. Like maybe I want to fly my freak flag and I be outside the norm. Well, am I now going to get persecuted for that because the people who currently control this apparatus don't like people like me. This is all stuff to think about when we build, you know, tools that are so powerful. We cannot just trust that good people will always be in control of them because history shows us that good people aren't always in charge. So we need to start thinking about the apparatus itself. All right. So AI, let's now take all of that and now let's imagine these individual silos. So we've got the Google silo where everything you've ever done because your entire life is Google, let's be honest. But it's in a silo. You got the Facebook silo. again everything you ever does in that Facebook silo because they have tracking pixels on every website and then you've got you know your I don't know Netflix silo and you've got your flock silo and you all of this now you've got and you there used to be kind of a a theoretical ceiling on what could be done with this data right oh humans can only do so much with this I'm probably safe who's going to go fishing through this I'm not important you know um take AI fuse all of that data together and build the most powerful comprehensive profile about every single person that you can think of. And now we have like the preemptive law enforcement capabilities that every tyrant in history has like just dreamt about. Like wow, imagine just being able to pinpoint exactly who your opposition party members in the future might be by looking at just everything that they've done and figuring that stuff out. That is a powerful weapon right there. So that is uh that is the first area where um everything is escalated. That's scary enough. Who's terrified now? Have I ruined anyone's day? Great. Definitely my intention. Uh no, we got to scare you into action, guys. But no, I want to inspire you into action. So this just we'll we'll get to the inspiring stuff and the playbook in a sec, but let's get to more scary stuff first. Yeah. All right. Regulation is crazy right now. Does everyone remember that period um that that happened like I I it was last year where like within the space of two weeks every government in the world rolled out mandates for ID verification there there was like a twoe period it's like you have the UK online safety act does their thing and then Europe is like we're doing checkrol again and you have Switzerland saying we used to be great for privacy but let's not do that anymore let's become the worst for privacy like you had Australia saying like you now need an ID to use a web browser please give us your papers, citizen, like every country in lock step. And like it made me think, you know, it like was this coordinated like where where are the people pulling the strings? But honestly, we just did this to ourselves, right? Because this stuff has slowly become normalized for decades with just incremental like encroachments into our lives. And um yeah, I mean, we've had to add our email address to access that, you know, platform for a while. Oh, and then they changed to cell number. Um, first you could have any number, but then they made it sell only, so you can't use VOIP. And we just slowly got used to all of these identifiers, like little modules being put on top of our entire internet experience. So by the time all of this mandates came out, we were all like, well, I mean, or handing over my idea anyway. Like, why does it really matter? Like, can you imagine if they tried to roll this stuff out 10 years earlier? We would have been in the streets. We would have been like, absolutely no way will I give my ID so I can browse the internet. like I have the right to look at stuff that I want to like look at like my cat photos in private, you know, and um and instead this stuff I think happened because it was time you the they could do it. So they did do it, you know. Um so some of the laws I I'll just go through um quickly uh some of this stuff we're up against. So Texas has the App Store Accountability Act. It's requiring Apple and Google to verify the age of every user before an app download. And remember, all of this has been focused on children, right? Um because you always need to package the stripping of your rights in something that is favorable. And I want to protect children. I just don't think this is the way to do it. And I think this hurts children. Um but this is the way they've decided to package it. It's all about let's have age caps for children. Like pardon me, like just an aside, right? You know, they have these ids and for everyone in the world to use anything digital. like they're that concerned about children. Why doesn't someone just bring like a ch children's phone device to the market and let let's just have parents decide to put their, you know, children on the phone that's just for children that has those apps make him. Instead, we're baking it into the infrastructure of every living person. Like red flags have to be flying with that when we have so many better options for handling this and yet we're going for the one that controls all of us, allows everyone's actions to be tracked, you know, it creates a giant database in perpetuity of everything we've ever done or said or liked or thought, you know, exchange a conversation with. I I don't know. I got major red flags and alarm bells going. We've got Utah and Louisiana. Um they passed their own versions. We've got the California's Digital Age Assurance Act. This takes place uh takes effect in 2027. So the device will ask your age at setup and then broadcast an age bracket to every app that you open. This is going to be built into the operating system. Now the guy who put this act forward um and got it passed uh everyone was like oh what about Linux and graphine and graphine was great. Graphine was like no way we are not doing that. And then there were even some people who um uh they launched something called ageless Linux. Who's heard of that? It's like it's real cool. So like they literally said um that like in in full dis civil disobedience they declared themselves like in full knowing and intentional non-compliance like I I like that. So anyway, the same guy who wrote the original bill was like, "All right, yeah, you're right. Um we'll do a new amendment and it will exempt these like open sourcy type things. We we'll exempt things like Linux." That seems good, right? until you realize in the same bill he was like, "And let's also expand where we need to add all of this. It now applies to all apps and it now applies to all websites." So in the same bill that they're like, "Yeah, I'm going to appease the Linux crowd." They literally just like widened the scope of this bill. Like something unimaginable. Um so we've got uh like two dozen plus states who have now have age verification laws on the books. That's probably why every website you're going to is now starting to block content for you and like Discord and Spotify, like everyone is saying verify yourself before you can access things. Like I used to be able to I don't have any social media on my phone, but people will send me um you know Instagram reels or whatever um to watch and it's getting harder and harder for me to see things like that without logging into something. I can't just like you know connect and share things that um we all want to see. like I have to be in an app logged in as my ID before I can see this stuff now. Um so we've got the kids act. Has anyone been following this saga? Oh, so this is kind of came from KOSA. You might have heard of that. Um but so now this is um folded into this um broader bipartisan package, the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act. It always sounds so wholesome like I want digital safety for kids. That sounds great. Um, basically it creates a new federal body, the kids internet safety partnership. It is appointed. It is not elected. So you guys will not get to elect the people in charge of this. Other people will just decide for you. Um, and it's housed under the secretary of commerce. So um, this is the department that sets federal standards um for technology and uh, NTIA which is the internet policy arm. So this has been housed directly uh it's a it's a government body that is um appointed not elected that will get to decide basically internet policy for everyone. Um so they have been uh basically tasked within the next two years to create a playbook. Um this will be a federal playbook of best practices but it will be enforceable. This will become the new federal standard for what everyone has to do. So they don't even have to pass different state laws about like age verification IDs. This creates a government body that is just going to enforce it and say, "Well, in order to protect children, we now need infrastructure where everyone gives their government ID and everyone will just have to comply with that." So, it will become the national compliance standard, whatever this body comes up with. Um, in the UK, you know, online safety act, which is crazy. Uh, chat control, anyone been following that? Um, who doesn't know what chat control is? All right, so it's a big European um, it's kind of crazy what's going on over there. It's in lock step like everyone's doing the same thing all over the globe. Uh it wants uh backdoor access to all endto-end encrypted apps. So um government wants to be able to access your signal and anything else that you have running that is endto-end encrypted. Um, and so they keep fighting it and basically in order to get this passed, you need these enough member states to sign on to this and there was all this stuff where it partially expired. Like it's been an ongoing debate. But what's crazy is like it keeps getting voted out and then like a week later they'll be like, "All right, let's have another revote." It's like, "Wait, you just had a vote and we we just won." And then like a week later they do another one and then it loses again, but this time they manage to get one more state like Denmark decides to flip or whatever. Finland decides to to flip. And so they just keep putting it up for vote. They they are just it doesn't matter what the people want. The the politicians have decided we want this and we're going to keep pushing it until we get it passed. Like it's just such reckless um you know disregard for the people that they're meant to serve, you know. Um so I I don't know. It's wild what's going on over there. They're currently uh in closed door negotiations uh between like three EU institutions and uh they will reconcile the differences between their various chat control laws and come up with language that they all agree with behind closed doors and then they'll put it out to vote again. Um so that's going on. You've got the digital services act verification. Same thing. Australia, same thing. You now need an ID uh to access a browser there. Um, we've only enforced the uh social media ban so far, but now they're currently working on adding that to browsers as well. So, it's uh, you know, now they've just got to write the law that says what standards you have to apply to show an ID before you can use Google search. It's just wild. Um, Canada, the C22, Switzerland, you know, they used to be the bastion of of um, uh, of privacy. Then they put forward this atrocious bill. Luckily enough, people pushed back that they've kind of partially repealed that and they're like, "All right, this was uh not good politically for me." So, um, so like it kind of shows you that's like a glimmer of what can happen there, right? It's a glimmer that like the the track control, you know, we we keep winning. We keep winning. Um, and uh and with this uh Switzerland law, they did repeal it. Like when people are vocal, it actually does make a difference. So, just something to keep in your mind when we go into the playbook. So anyway, that's the current state of like craziness. Who feels overwhelmed and exhausted and like this is a giant like David versus Goliath story. What hope do we have? Like this is never going to win. All right. So I should go in. This should be the moment where like I've got good news for you. But instead I just want to double down. Let's talk about what's at stake, right? Because this is important. We need to like make let's feel really riled up about this. Okay, like privacy is the foundation of a free society. Okay, I agree with whatever that siren. Let's that's good ambience. The warning bells are ringing and we're ignoring them, guys. Um, so like think about how society functions, okay? You give a group of people enormous power and you give them the trust and with that the responsibility where you say I am giving you this power but like I'm there's responsibility that comes along with that. You're not going to abuse it. And uh and it's interesting because like there's the 250th of the Declaration of Independence right now. So I kind of like to look at what was going on in the UK when all that was going down like just atrocious like totalitarian searches into everyone's lives. You know, that's why the founders wrote the fourth amendment. Like we've got all this kind of context that kind of shows like right now currently you see like tyrants all over the world abusing power. You know, there's there's so much at stake right now. But basically in that society and that kind of contract, you want to have self-correcting mechanisms. If you are going to give an entity a lot of power and say like, I'm trusting you with this. Don't abuse it. And if you do, we're going to elect different people. That's kind of how democracy is meant to work. Um, and then in that situation, if someone bad comes to power, we have these self-correcting mechanisms that help us readjust. So, what are the self-correcting mechanisms? Well, we've got things like whistleblowers, you know, we've got investigative journalists, we've got independent media, we've got opposition parties, we've got protest movements. All of these things help us balance those scales and make sure that people could be held accountable if there's abuse of power. What happens when you strip a society of privacy and everything they do becomes monitored and tracked and you know there's inference done on it? You you figure out patterns, you learn about people, you get granular insight. You lose those self-correcting mechanisms. What investigative journalist can do their job if a a government that they're meant to be like blowing the whistle on knows their every move? I mean, that's why movements like um uh um Lishard uh what's what's his or anyone know what I'm talking about? The um journal Forbidden Stories. That's right. So, Lauren Rishard um has this great organization. He's the one who first blew the lid off Pegasus and this mercenary spyware that every government loves using. Um so, he set up an entity where there was so many countries where journalists were just being killed. like there's there's an entire Wikipedia page of all the journalists that have been killed in Mexico, right, for talking about cartels and government corruption. Um, so he had created this entity that was like, let's become this like unified block of journalists so that if like you can let people know you've signed up to be part of this forbidden stories group and if anything happens to you, you will be constantly putting your information into this locked box and if anything happens, every other journalist in this consortium is just going to release that information anyway. So it just takes away that incentive to target the individual voices. So these are the kinds of self-correcting mechanisms we can build in a society that can help keep that balance of power, keep those checks and and things like that. But again, like if if you're uploading to some box and that box no longer has endtoend encryption and the government's looking at it, like they're just going to silence everyone that like you can't have this kind of a working accountability system in a world without privacy. You know, you can't have autonomy of thought without privacy because suddenly if everything you like gosh, if people knew my search history, they'd be like, she's crazy and likes cats way too much. So like you, you know, it it's it's like you you just need that sacred space in your life to build who you are without having to always be at the whim of thinking about how my actions will appear to someone else. When we know we're being watched, we self censor. we change our opinions, we become a more conformist society. So that means that whatever the mainstream narrative is, it wins. Um because people get scared to step out of those bounds. And especially in a digital age where it's all permanent, right? We no longer have ephemeral conversations that disappear and we can change our mind and you know, we all have fallible memories and it's kind of nice in a way because we can grow and evolve and learn and change our opinions. Now we have our digital identity etched in stone forever and we just keep building on it. So now it doesn't matter if you've changed someone will go back you know 20 years in time and say like oh my god do you know what she used to believe 20 years ago like people are fallible like we make mistakes we go through our entire life growing and trying to learn and trying to do our best and we do like dumb [ __ ] all the time right like we and so like it's really bad when we get these these permanent repositories of everyone that we used to be it stops us growing as a society and it makes society static now. No one can push back against bad laws. They're kind of like etched forever. Whoever's in charge gets to decide that instead of people changing that. So that's kind of what we're dealing with right now. Like if we don't reclaim the right to privacy and protect it, we're moving to a very dark place where society is going to get more and more self-censoring um scared. It's just not going to be a good way to live. it could go really dark, but even like best case scenario, you know, we're kind of ripping apart the social fabric right now by not giving people that autonomy and freedom of expression. Um, so it's something to keep in mind as we all kind of think, you know, I've got nothing to hide. Well, it's not like it is not about whether or not you think you're important or have anything to hide. It's whether you want to create a world where no one ever has the option of privacy anymore. That's the battle right now. is understanding like am I feeding a system and a future where privacy is no longer something we can even choose if we wanted to if we did feel like we're important like we don't want to take that choice away that's kind of the current battle right now cuz it's about to disappear right we're at the precipice right now so is everyone ready for some good news >> yeah I'm ready for some good news how do we win this right giant battle more money and lawyers and resources than any of us were just a group of rag tag hackers. You know, what could we even do? Well, luckily, history provides just rich examples of rag tag hackers who fought and won against like the most powerful entities in the world. Let's look at their playbook. Let's look at how they did it. Let's learn from them and let's get inspired. So, Bill Zimmerman is great place to start. Who knows about Phil Zimmerman? All right. What's he famous for? By peas. Pretty good. All right. Um, so Phil Zimmerman was in a battle with the government for three years. He created what would become uh the most popular email encryption software in the world and he decided to release it open source. Now unfortunately the government had other plans and they were like no no no no you cannot let other countries get access to encryption because we need access to all of that. We regulate this as amunition. So you putting open- source code that protects your emails is equivalent to selling bombs to all the countries of the world is like it's wild. Um but they really considered this a very very powerful weapon. And what happens when you release a thing and you're just like a single person who wrote some code and was like I you know I'm anti- um war and I am pro protest and like Phil Zimmerman was really into that kind of activist culture at the time. He's like I just want people to protect themselves and like be able to protest privately and safely and then the the full force of the American government is like no you cannot do that. Um that's like a giant you know David and Goliath story. There's no way Phil is going to win in this scenario, right? Which is why Phil is now in jail. No, he's not. He won, guys. Here's how he won. All right, first of all, he moved fast. Okay, so what spooked him was there was a US Senate measure at the time. So we had in 1991 this anti-rime bill and it contained language for pushing for government access to plain text. Essentially, it was an early backdoor demand. So he rushed PGP out to get strong encryption into people's hand before any law could take hold. He was like, "Okay, we got to build this underground railroad before you know this thing kicks back. Let's proliferate these tools. Let's get them into people's hands. If we can like get it out there fast enough, you can't actually shut it down." So, moving fast. That's a great lesson we can learn from um from Phil. Decentralize. All right. It was not a single person fighting this battle. Phil started it and uh and he was kind of like this this front person, but everyone at the time you had this entire hacker culture who was like, "No, we understand the importance of strong encryption. Like this is so important." And they were so forwardlooking. They were looking at the future where, you know, everyone is going to be doing things digitally. We're going to do commerce digitally. We're going to send messages digitally. We're going to, you know, FaceTime our parents. They probably predicted FaceTime, I'm sure. Um they were very forwardlooking. Um, so they like everyone kind of joined forces and they were like, "No, this is a giant battle. We all need to like all hands on deck. What could we do?" So, for example, they figured out how to like compress the RSA algorithm down like small enough that it could fit on a t-shirt. So, you had a guy called Adam Back who just started printing t-shirts with this code. It's like, can I export this t-shirt then? Um, so you had people doing that. You had people like Samir Perk who went to Australia and um and then he just hired cryptographers there to rebuild you know strong encryption from the ground up. So they ended up writing open SSL. Um you had Zimmerman actually print everything into a book because it's perfectly fine for you to ex export books. And what's more he partnered with MIT on this. So now this was an academic textbook. So this is totally fine. So now they like exported all of that. So that's that kind of out of the box thinking. That's why this crowd here is like perfect if we can see a problem and we think it's important enough. You guys have every creative tool in the world where you can think of ways that we can be pushing against this. So they came up with all kinds of wild ways and they got everyone working on it. This was not a single person's effort. It was everyone doing whatever their skill set was, whatever their edge and they contributed what they could and it was fantastic. Um, next one. So go loud. Phil's lawyers told him not to do any interviews. They were like, "No, no, no, no, no. You're under a federal investigation. Anything you say or do can and will be used against you." Um, and uh, he was like, "Oh, that is very interesting advice. I will take it under consideration as I do this interview with Wyatt and I do this interview with, you know, all these people. I'll testify in front of Congress." Like, he went like wild. And um, and was this a bad move? Absolutely not. Because this battle would have taken place in secret. This place would have taken play. The battle would have taken place behind closed doors with some obscure computer guy with this technical thing that I don't understand. It got banned. It doesn't affect my life. I don't care about it. He got in front of people. He explained to them why this is important for protest movements, why this is important for those self-correcting mechanisms in society. Um, and he changed the narrative. He like suddenly was no longer some obscure tech builder. He was a human who just really believed in the underpinnings of freedom in society. And it kind of like it turned the narrative from being this armed trafficker to, you know, this person, this kind of like hero who was protecting privacy for the like all future generations, you know. Um, and so being loud can be really good for this. Just educating people. Don't presume the world is as smart as you guys cuz they're not, right? We kind of you guys are um self- selecting here. Um, I'm seeing what you guys are building out there. I don't understand it. It's really cool though. Um, so like people don't understand tech and you guys have the ability to show them the way. You can teach them how to use things. You can help them understand how this stuff uh works. You guys can be that bridge to help normal people who don't understand what's at stake like get with the narrative. You know, we're not going to win if it's just a handful of people fighting against the most powerful entities globally. We need everyone to get this. So, we need a culture shift. So, uh you guys could be, you know, you're so inspiring. Honestly, this camp is like the greatest thing in the world. If everyone just came here, they'd all be like, "Yeah, I just want to live at tour camp forever and make things." Um, so like like provide like extend that as far as you can, you know? Don't just make it this kind of like once every two years insula thing where you guys get together or every time you get to a hacker conference you kind of uh do this stuff. find a way where you can h like help build that community outwards to people who may not have the same technical skills as you because I think we need more people on board. Let's look at the next case example. I saw a t-shirt earlier. Um, who's heard of uh who's heard of this? Turn around, sir. Show them your t-shirt. Beautiful. All right. So, has anyone heard of Cold of the Dead Cow? >> Great. We can learn a lot from their battles as well, right? So, they and tell me if I'm wrong. All right, you guys uh know more about this than I do. Um but basically, Microsoft was terrible. We all on the same page. Great. You're right. You're right. I'm sorry. Microsoft is terrible. Um so, uh there was this period in time, which definitely isn't anymore. Luckily, they have patched everything since this time. But um there like there's group of hackers who were just so infuriated by the state of security and the lack thereof and how Microsoft just kept like releasing all of these completely insecure tools and they're like shouting at them and saying you got to like fix this stuff and Microsoft is like a bit quiet over there. And uh and so then they were like, "All right, we're going to create an actual tool that will allow people to hack these systems." And so basically they first of all it started they did it twice. So the first time they did it was in 1998 at Defcon. And uh they presented back orifice. It's a great name. Um and uh basically if you run this on a Windows 95 or 98 machine, you could control the computer from anywhere. You could read it files. You could log it keystrokes. you could watch a screen and the user would have no idea that this was going on. It would be completely hidden from whoever was was doing this. Um, so did they win after this? No. Windows turned around and they were like, "Well, this isn't a problem with our software. It's a problem because you installed malware." Um, and uh, it was interesting because what cult of the dead cow was trying to explain to people and again it was technical, so they like couldn't quite get the wording out and normal people who were using Windows 95 and 98 couldn't understand this. They're trying to explain like no, the entire like infrastructure of this system is insecure. Like there's no separation between programs. There's no permissions. There's no like privilege boundaries. there there's like this single system with like a home user design. It's all accessible which means if someone gets access and you are trying to sell this product as access to the internet every all the branding was around like this is your gateway to the internet like they're going to download malware in two seconds and people will get access to everything on their devices. Let's just build the malware. We'll hand it out on a bunch of CDs, give it out at Defcon and we'll show you how dangerous this is. Um and then uh so Microsoft tried to spin that. They came back the next year with back Oraifice 2000 kind of like a a nod to like the fact that Microsoft like put 2000 at the end of everything. Um and so this time they also target it towards corporate machines as well. So like what are the lessons that we can learn from all of this? Well, they use their technical skills to build a demo. Sometimes people just don't understand if you're shouting about things, but if you build a demo, you can actually show no this is a huge issue. You need to like protect this. Um, you know, you can't deny a tool that hundreds of thousands of people are already running, right? Um, so technical skills are to a superpower that all of you guys possess. You can really um, you know, show people the inner workings of this stuff. Um, so they anticipated the spin um that the go that Microsoft would have around this and they kind of preempted it and uh, and they got kind of in front of that narrative. I would say there's an interesting lesson here because you think about this, this is a damaging tool, right? So, like my advice isn't necessarily like go and build up hacking tools and break open everyone's computers. Like that's that's probably not the lesson here. I think we can learn a different lesson from this because actually the fact that people ended up installing pretty dangerous malware on their computers and getting stuff hacked and there was some damage um is an interesting lesson because I feel like Cold of the Dead Cow kind of gave Microsoft an easy pass there. You know, it actually allowed them to be vilified. So, I think we can be smarter than that. You know, when we um we we go and do whatever we're doing. You want to make sure you're walking a line and you understand you're going cleareyed into whatever you guys do to understand like, well, I don't want to hurt people. I don't want to like damage things, but how do I make a strong enough message that this is very clear? That's a really hard line to walk, you know, and I think God of the Dead Car honestly did a great job um like being funny, getting a lot of press. I think the press again go loud the same um uh lesson we learned before that's a big thing uh a lot of people talking about this the fact that they did giant devcom presentations they released a second version like open source um that's great but yeah I do think you want to be mindful about this stuff and how you present it and go into a cleareyed and understand you know if you are doing damage have you actually assessed is this damage worth it to get this message you know that's a really important calculus to do I I would say like, you know, I'm not going to say it's never going to like justify it. Um, but you want to do that calculus and if there is a better way for you to get this message across, be inventive. Um, be creative and try to like mitigate that damage. The point is to protect people if ultimately the point is a better society. Let's get make people safer. Let's protect. You really don't want to walk a path where you are doing more damage in the process. And the final one, and I'm running out of time here, so I got to speed through here. Um, so the Clipper chip. So this was a backdoor in hardware that the government wanted to um, uh, push and then it ended up failing. Again, the government wanted to do this thing and they like they didn't win. Um, and so let's look at how they didn't win. So 1994, cryptographer Matt Blae uh, he studied the actual design. He published a paper. He proved that the chip was flawed on its own terms. Um, and it showed like that this was easily breakable, right? Um and then there was like public pressure. So, uh EFF, Epic, privacy groups. There was a giant coalition, right? These are not organizations that agree with each other on everything, right? There's a lesson in this. This is not a partisan battle right now. And we need allies. And you may have incredible dislike for some organizations out there who believe about other things. We need to find the areas where we overlap with people and be okay with just collaborating on those areas where we overlap. We are absolutely being divided and conquered right now, right? The polarization in society is absolutely insane. You know, it it's kind of getting just like gross to be online a lot of the time now. Um I don't feel like I'm in civil conversations with people. I feel like I'm in a war zone. We are I I I mean this is intentional. I think there's so many reasons why people would deliberately try to separate society, we need to find ways to build back social fabric with people that we absolutely disagree with on things. And even if the overlap is only on this one tiny issue, we need to find that and build coalitions. So when there are groups out there who are like, you know, we're privacy focused or whatever, find ways to all get on board and figure out like how we can help amplify these messages. I think it's so important. Like I honestly just don't think we'll win without it. So it may feel distasteful, especially because we're all being subject to the polarization. Like we're all like immediately feeling like I do not want to collaborate with them. Um but I I just don't think we'll win. Um if we don't and if we like there's so much more at stake than like my pride collaborating with someone that I dislike. Um then you know that what's at stake is like the very fabric of freedom in society. So we have to just put aside that distaste that we have and find a way to win this battle on common ground because I I don't know if we will win without creating big coalitions right now. Um so that is uh I think the big one from the Matt Blaze was that demo proved everything like you like if you literally just show the government no I just hacked this and got access like two seconds. You know the government has no nothing to stand on anymore. They can't say, "Well, this is a secure system and we just have a back door and we'll be the only ones who ever access the back door." No, that's blown out of the water now. The tech speaks for itself. The demo spoke for itself. So, just recap these lessons. So, make a tech demo. This stuff is so powerful. You guys are the only people who have the capacity to do this, right? You're very technical. So, lean into that. Go public and loud. Try to get the narrative on your side. If you can explain your situation, explain your point of view. Change the narrative. show people that you're a human being and these are the reasons why you, you know, believe these things and think they're important. We can actually, you know, ferment a movement here. Um, decentralize. Let's like figure out like get everyone working on their own things. We don't all have to be in lock step um doing the exact same thing. So, let's all figure out where our edge is and get as many different kinds of movements and fights on different fronts happening as we can. Move fast. I reckon we've got like a couple of years, maybe three years before we have the death of the free internet. And that's not even hyperbole. So now, like my whole trajectory for my channel is now shifting to decentralized tech. Um because I can continue to make videos about like, oh well, here in a completely ided internet environment is how you make a social media account where they only know 85% of the things about you, you know? It's just not good enough for me. Um, I I just have such a like distaste for that encroachment in my life. So, I'm I'm moving full into like decentralized tech stack. If you guys have abilities in that area, please reach out to me so I can interview you, learn from you, spread the work that you guys are doing far and wide because I think we've got to get these tools into people's hands fast. Um, control the narrative. Again, remind people that this is just about like basic human dignity. It's about autonomy. It's about being able to live our lives on our terms without self-censoring, without being like constantly afraid to think things that are outside of the norm. This is what a good society looks like. You know, when we have that freedom and if we lose it, it'll get pretty dark. Um, and then know it's a double-edged sword. Just understand the things that you're doing. Make sure you understand the consequences and make good choices. Make sure you're not becoming the enemy, you know, by um um uh doing things that maybe get out of control that you you didn't think of. I think that we could be smarter than that and more creative. So, this is my call to action to all of you. I really, really want your help in this. Uh, you know, I would love to see if you guys have any ideas and you think I can help you. Let me know so I can amplify what you guys are doing. But honestly, you guys have just so much capacity to make a huge impact here. And if the people in this tent are not the ones doing this, no one is. There is no normie outside there who is thinking about this and understanding the consequences. So, like if we're not doing it, the future's already written. I just think we can write a better one, and I think you guys can be the ones to do it. So, thank you so much.