>> without also dealing with the disease in the wildlife population. >> and just as badgers were proving to be rather thin on the ground in the weeks of autumn, new peers were, by contrast, plentiful. thirty new ones taking membership of the house of lords, upwards towards 800. several notable new peers appointed such as lady lawrence,

mother of the murdered black teenager, steven lawrence. lord -- [inaudible] a former assistant deputy police commissioner. lady jones, a green party politician in london. and lord finkelstein, columnist and a former associate editor of the times. to put all the new peers, in october a former first sea lord had a novel suggestion to make. >> and i wonder if the royal navy could come to the nation's assistance again, i've been asking people to buy the third invincible class carrier, two having been scrapped, and i wonder if the house authorities would like to buy it to accommodate the huge number of new piers being created. [laughter] in fact, it can accommodate up to 700 people and has a bank, laundry and shop. the death of nelson mandela was a moment that parliament couldn't ignore. the first black president of south africa and father figure

for his nation came to parliament back in 1996 and spoke in westminster hall. he was fully aware of the anti-apartheid campaigns that ran in britain throughout his long time in captivity. when his death was announced, the tributes were many and moving. >> when themson mandela took his first steps to freedom k he made no call for vengeance, only forgiveness. he understood that dismantling aparricide's legacy was about more than just removing the most explicit signs of discrimination and segregation. >> the man most responsible for the destruction of what people thought was indestructible, the apartheid system, the man who taught us that no injustice can last forever. >> my mother, ad lain, was often alone in the whites-only section of the public gallery of nelson mandela's 1962 trial in pretoria, and when he entered the dock, he would always of

acknowledge her with a cell -- clenched fist which she would return. >> it was not just nelson mandela who undoubtedly deserved the bulk of the president, but there was also the president, f.w. de klerk, and without both of them, it would not have been a peaceful resolution. and in some ways, it was more difficult for de klerk than mandela because -- no, let me explain what i mean. mandela was receiving power which at that stage most of the struggle had already been won. he was receiving power, de klerk was having to persuade his own people to give it up. >> i am truly grateful for the role model that was nelson mandela. because to me and so many like me, he provided a tremendous

dignity and courage. that perhaps is the reason why during the very difficult 1980s we did not pick up molotov cocktails and cause chaos on our own streets. we chose another path. [applause] ♪ ♪ >> and three days later, a less somber day. the a celebration of melson mandela's -- nelson mandela's life and work in a setting of historic westminster hall which ended the term in parliament on a colorful and poignant note. ♪ ♪ mandela. ♪ nelson, people love you because your message is strong. ♪ raise our voices, raise our

voices. ♪ let's sing to the messenger. ♪ yeah >> coming up here on c-span be 2, a conversation with the cofounder of global voices online and author of "consent of the networked." at 9:30 eastern we'll be live with charlie cook, editor of the cook political report. he's going to give his thoughts on the 2014 congressional races. >> we are in the gallery of the light catcher building at the museum. we're looking at vanishing ice, alpine and polar landscapes in art, 1775-2012. the purpose of the exhibition is to highlight the rich cultural heritage of the planet's frozen

frontiers, the alpine region, the arctic and antarctica. this is a photograph of the greenland ice sheet by a german artist, olaf becker, dating from 2008, and it's exhibited side by side with a photograph by camille seeman also of east greenland. it's from her last iceberg series of 2006. many people understand the importance of ice for the planet, its reflective qualities that help regulate the climate, but many people are unaware that there is a collective consciousness in western culture about these regions. and so it was important within the context of climate change to let people know that these regions are fundamental to our identity. >> there's more from the what

the-- whatcom museum this weekend saturday at noon on c-span2 and sunday at 5 on c-span3. >> now a look at digital privacy and open source intelligence. a group of security analyst ares, authors and privacy advocates spoke at the annual chicago ideas week in mid october. in this hour-and-a-half portion, a conversation with the cofounder of global voices online and author of "consent of the networked." >> ladies and gentlemen, please welcome this afternoon's host, blogger, author and founder of global voice online, ms. rebecca mackinnon. [applause] >> good afternoon. thanks for coming. many people might realize this -- may not realize this, but 95% of the people who are out there on the internet, using

their smartphones and so on can be identified and profiled by just four interactions through their mobile device. so if you post a tweet, check your bank account, check or send an e-mail, check your facebook news feed, boom, some ad network somewhere has profiled you. the problem is that a lot of the companies collecting this data can't live up to their security claims, and this data is vulnerable to hacking. and as security experts will tell you, any device connected to the internet can be hacked. and that's not just your computers or your smartphones or your tablets, but also increasingly our cars that are connected to the internet, your home security systems, your medical devices, power plants, etc. are all vulnerable to hacking. what's more, hacking is not just for criminals. governments all employ hackers to dig up information on people

outside their country and people inside their country. and as we have found from edward snowed been, the security -- snowden, the security analyst who has leaked a large trove of documents, our government, the national security agency, employs quite a lot of hacking techniques to acquire information. but in a lot of cases, they don't even actually have to employ hacking, because if a company is in the jurisdiction of a government and the government has the legal authority to ask for this information, they can just demand it from the company. and so there we are. so i'm rebecca mackinnon, as they just said, i'm the cofounder of global voices online, an international citizens media network and also author of "con isn't of the networked," and i'll be signing

a book after this session is over, and i'm joined here today by five brilliant individuals. and all of us are going to be telling you some things that are a little bit scary. but the point is that knowledge is power. and if we want to change the way things are today, if we want to build the world that we want to live in, you have to start by understanding how this digital environment works, what the threats are, who's exercising power. and so with that, i'm going to begin my little story in january 1990 when very few people were using the internet. was anybody here using the internet in 1990? i wasn't. okay, so very good. so in 1990 the berlin wall came down. and these photographs here on the left and right are the ransacked offices of the secret police in east germany.

and as east germany began to fall apart, protesters went into these offices and ransacked the files. but two years later the unified democratic germany declassified all the files, and people could for the first time find out who had been spying op them for all of -- on them for all of those years. people found out that neighbors, colleagues, sometimes lovers, sometimes spouses, sometimes a parent or a child had been informing on them to the secret police. very traumatic. fast forward to 2009, the unified democratic berlin. a german politician named spitz exercises his right under german law to request data from his mobile phone provider, deutsche telekom, on all of his movements over a six month period. he takes this, gives it to a

newspaper, and they create an interactive graphic which you can actually visit still online, and it's got an entire log of all his movements throughout that entire six month period. now, this is, of course, the as the si's wet dream, right? and it didn't require neighbors and lovers to betray anybody. and this kind of digital dossier is being collected by all of us, by all of our devices and platforms and networks that we're relying on for pretty much everything in our lives these days. and the only difference between a dictatorship and a democracy ultimately in this digital age is going to be do we have control over how information is collected over us, are we able to hold the information collectors accountable, do we understand who's collecting the information, how it's being shared, with whom it's being

shared and how it's being use 3? and if there's -- used? and if there's accountability around that and if this is happening with some consent of the citizenry, then you have a chance of being a democracy. if not, you're going towards dictatorship pretty fast. now, moving on to san francisco in 2006, a whistleblower named mark klein who had been a former employee of at&t who had been working in that building right there disclosed that the national security agency had built a secret room in that building and that the communications of millions of ordinary americans that were routed through that building were being sigh upon ifed -- siphoned off into this secret room as they passed through that building. and a number of organizations tried to sue the government. those lawsuits still have yet to go anywhere. but the point being, we started to begin to get a picture of the

surveillance that was going on which, of course, how large that picture was and the extent of the surveillance we're now coming to understand more fully thanks to the leaked information by edward snowden. these nsa facilities are everywhere armed the country. -- around the country. they're collecting data on a large percentage of americans. now, of course, the internet, mobile phones are revolutionary. let's not deny that. the internet and mobile technology have been used by citizens to overthrow governments, to get opposition leaders elected who would have had no chance otherwise. this technology is very empowering, and it remains so. but at the same time, governments are doing everything they can to use their power over the commercial networks that are

within their jurisdictions to fight back. these photos are from state security headquarters outside of cairo. in 2011, soon after the mubarak government fell, some activists got into the headquarters. some of the agents had threed to. >> -- tried to shred some documents, left them behind. people were posting this on twitter. there were rooms and rooms of files that were left intact. some people got in there, found their own files. what did they find? cell phone text message transcripts, skype conversation logs that they thought had been secure, informs about data they had been uploading and downloading from the internet all covered by their internet service providers and cell phone networks. use of the technology the egyptian government had bought from a company whose technology was also used by the nsa in that at&t facility.

we later found out from another leaker. so what's the point here? the point is that increasingly the relationship between citizens and their government is mediated through the internet and related network technologies which are largely developed, owned and operated by the private sector. and you cannot assume that the internet is going to evolve in a way that actually empowers the citizen. if we want the internet to evolve in a way that's compatible with democracy, compatible with human rights, compatible with the kind of society we want to live in in which individual freedom is protected, we have to fight for it. just like you have to fight for freedom if you don't engage in the way in which your physical society is being governed w whoever makes the most effort to shape that society will shape anytime a way to their greatest advantage, and this is what we

need to be working on. now, as i mentioned, the internet is challenging, -- is challenging the sovereignty of nation states in a lot of very important ways. and governments are trying to fight back. but interestingly, this is a map that was developed recently, published recently by the oxford internet institute. and what this is, is they took -- they kind of resized all the countries on the planet based on their internet populations and then colored each country according to which web site is the most visited web site in that country. so all of the red, those are all countries where google is the most popular. all of the blue countries where facebook is the most popular. china's a big green because that's baidu, a chinese internet company. but what you see here is really

interesting, that except for china, kazahkstan, russia, iran and korea, all of the other countries the most dominant web services are american. now, you combine that information with what we're now learning about the fact that the nsa has relatively unfettered access to information of communications happening on these web sites, and while there are arguably some controls over how they can access and what they can do with the information of american citizens and so-called u.s. persons or those who reside in the united states, there's virtually no meaningful control over what they do and how they collect information of non-u.s. persons. so if you're not a u.s. person and you're looking at this map and you're thinking about this map in the context of what we've

learned from edward snowden, you might be starting to get pretty mad. and you might be starting to feel that there's a real power and balance going -- imbalance going on here. and, in fact, a lot of governments are pretty mad. this is the president of brazil. she recently spoke to the united nations and accused the united states of breaching international law. for completely failing to respect the privacy of anybody who's not an american on the internet. so why does this matter? if you're an american, why do you care if the privacy rights of non-americans are being disregarded? well, it actually relates to the future of the internet. this is something called the international telecommunications union. they govern the international telephone and satellite system. last year they tried to assert control over how the internet is coordinated and how its

standards are developed. it's a u.n. body, so it is a block of governments. one government, one vote. they came close to doing this, but another bloc of governments, democratses, working with companies, working with suicides, fought back -- citizens fought back. because now the way the internet is coordinated is pretty decentralized. it involves engineers, companies, a lot of nongovernmental institutions. and there was an effort to say governments need to reassert sovereignty over the internet. it was blocked last year, but unfortunately, because of the nsa revelations, a lot of the governments that were actually voting for a more democratic, decentralized internet are starting to rethink. and they're starting to talk about something called data sovereignty which means that governments are now discussing new laws that would require if a

web service, an internet service, telecommunications service wants to service citizens of a particular country, the data needs to be stored and managed in that country. so what does that mean in practice? you know, they're doing this because they don't want the nsa to have such easy access to it. but there's a troubling side of that which is that there is one country that's already asserting southernty over data -- sovereignty over data. it's called china, and this is one of the results. facebook is blocked in china. this is what you get when you try and visit facebook on a chrome browser from inside china. because facebook will not house its services that are meant to serve chinese customers inside china, you can't access it. so this is the kind of world that would become really much more of a facsimile of the international telephone system rather than a free and open,

borderless internet. and that is because you have a lot of people who feel that their rights are being violated. now, in my book, "consent of the networked," i argue that we need to start taking charge. we need to start thinking of ourself toes as citizens -- ourselves as citizens of the internet, citizens of this network world and not just passive users. that we need to start telling governments, telling the companies that run our services that we want our rights to be respected and also recognize that if only some people's rights are respected and not others, then ultimately, nobody's rights are going to be respected, and the whole environment is going to be degraded and that we really need a movement akin to the environmental movement. which, forchew nately, is starting to emerge. and, actually, october 26th, very soon, there's going to be a march on washington to demand an end to unaccountable surveillance by the nsa, and

people can also begin to join a lot of the international movements. there's also global voices online which i'm part of, but one way that an american can really start to get involved with these issues is the electronic frontier foundation. you can go to eff.org, get a lot of information about what's going on but also some tips on how to protect yourself for the future be, a lot of petition drives, information about rallies you can attend and a number of other organizations such as access and stop watching us. so it's up to all of us to determine how our internet evolves. and just as if you want chicago to be governed in a way that actually respects the rights of its citizens, if the citizens do not get actively involved with that governance, if the citizens have no idea how chicago is governed, who is exercising

power and how, over whom, then you're not going to really be able to affect changes in that governance. you have to participate, you have to be involved, you have to make your views known. as a consumer, we can exercise a lot more power than we're doing right now not only in terms of what you choose to use and not use, but as a shareholder and also as a vocal critic. these, a lot of these companies do respond to public criticism. so let's exercise our power. let's not be passive users, and let's become active citizens of this networked world we're in. so moving on, there are some people who are so upset about the abuse of government and corporate power in our digital lives and who also have technical skills, they've joined

a group called anonymous. i'm sure many of you have heard of it. and their slogan is we are anonymous, we are legion, we do not forget. expect us. that's their battle cry since they emerged around 2008 from a number of message boards where people began to post their conversations and opinions with anonymous, not giving their real name. and it's definitely a real ethic in that community about the importance of anonymity, but they've also gone with after a lot of organizations and governments that they don't like, that they feel are abusive. it includes the church of scientology, governments, government agencies of the united states, israel, tunisia, uganda, westboro baptist church, sony, you know, etc.

and pammy olson, who's here with us today s the author of "we are anonymous." new york magazine called this book the insider account of the hacker movement. and she's here today to share with us both some of her stories from her book, but also to talk about some of her new work on mobile tracking. so thank you very much. come on out, parmy. [applause] >> oh, thank you. [laughter] all right. thank you so much for that introduction, and it's a real privilege to be here at chicago ideas week. how exciting. my name is parmy olson, i'm a journalist with "forbes." i started off in radio journalism, and eight years ago i joined "forbes" in their london bureau writing about business and markets and currencies. and then a few years ago started focusing on technology, and then

a couple years ago started writing about, um, anonymous. and i wrote a book about it. oh. yeah. and, now, "forbes" magazine probably isn't the kind of publication that you would expect one of their journalists to write about a bunch of young, anarchic people who go around subverting things on the internet and actually don't make much money at all. so just to explain why i ended up writing about anonymous. in 2010 "forbes" opened up a blogging platform, and that allowed journalists like me to focus on a topic that we were interested in and write about it with as much frequently as we wanted. frequency as we wanted. now, i got lucky because this that same year, december, anonymous carried out one of its most notorious attacks against a series of financial companies to avenge wikileaks and to avenge the arrest of julian assange. i was reading about this, i've

always been interested in disruptive figures and underground societies. and i got tired of reading about rehashed articles online. so i started interviewing some of the supporters. and eventually, i made contact with some senior organizers and realized that this wasn't just a group, this was a whole culture with a history, with etiquette and its own language, almost, with a jargon. and so that really fascinated me. and so i became obsessed with tracking these guys and ended up getting in contact with some senior figures who created a splinter group of hackers. and i was tracking them every day behind the scenes and also what they were doing in the public eye which was attacking, cyber attacks against big names like sony pictures and fox news, even the fbi and the cia. so the next few months of reporting very hair-raising, i had hackers threatennenning to destroy the -- threatening to destroy the company i was working for. i watched my sources get paranoid. i was able to meet some of them

face to face through convoluted names of encrypted communication, and i learned a lot of these guys were young men, unemployed and quite isolated in society. extraordinarily intelligence but also -- intelligent but also often lacking an extraordinary amount of common sense. it was full of contradictions. so, for example, this is jake davis who i met face to face before -- while he was still part of the group and before he was arrested. online he was the leader of one of the cofounders and this witty, charismatic kingpin in the community. but face to face he was a scrawny young man. he was actually not particularly good at socializing and quite shy. of course, he's not like that anymore. this was a while ago. i also learned about a web site called forten, and you'll hear more about this from cole stryker, my colleague, who's really investigated this. and this is a web site which

anonymous started on. it's been called -- well, i won't say the word, the armpit of the internet, because it hosts a lot of porn and graphic violence. but at the same time, it is also a place where people come to honestly cuts discuss their fears and their proclivities and inhibitions. one of my interviewees who i called william in the book, and he allowed me to take a picture of him by covering his face, went on for many years every day. this was like his life. and this was a place where he could honestly talk about things with people in such a way that he couldn't in the offline world. it was a real community for him even though he knew no names, no nicknames or anything. so i'll just give you a brief rundown on some of the key things i learned about anonymous and what it was. well, first of all, when we were first reading reports about anonymous, it was referred to as a group of hackers, which is not true. it was knotts a group, it was -- it was not a group, it was more of a network of ever-shifting nodes, and most of them were not hackers. most of them didn't know

programming languages. most of them were actually just very good at trolling or knew the community very well. and also the attacks they carried out were very easy to do. they would download simple web tools from the internet which had been previously created for penetration testing by i.t. security guys and use them to launch cyber attacks. super easy to use. .. measure

so it was a huge threat. nobody wanted to be stopped, but that threat was constantly being tossed around. so for me in hindsight that raises a lot of questions about privacy. because i think for a lot of these guys, anonymity was the one true way to experience privacy in an age where corporations and governments know more about us than ever before. last december, about two years after i wrote my book, i moved him forbes in london, transferred to san francisco where i started studying and researching technology in silicon valley. and i can't begin to tell you what a jump into the deep and that was. and also how surprised i was by the blasé attitude i was encountering among executives, startups, entrepreneurs about

the privacy of consumers that they were building technology for. i think a fundamental reason for that is because of the way our personal data translates into dollar signs. so it took an executive at a company called new ones, which is a voice-recognition company, to put it this simply for me, ts particular attitude. he said that privacy was an economic consideration. now, this executive with something nuance which does the voice-recognition technology for the iphone to create a personal assistant technology separate to that i could go beyond siri and cross-referencing all the data between our different apps on their phones kind of like a butler that has the keys to all the doors in your house and all the cupboards and every safe, just to make them that little bit better at what they do. i asked him about, wouldn't consumers find that a little bit odd to have the privacy infringed like that? and he answered, again, i feel like this illustrates the attitudes in silicon valley,

when information has been taken from them without value and exchange. all that information that resides in the cloud can be parsed and anticipate and thought through and synergies made that i ever thought about before. there's an astonishing amount of value in the information. people talk about value a lot the other than maybe my dna, it defines the. it's where i am, what i do, who i talk with, all my relationships. it's basically forming a structure that's quite a rich definition for who i am. now, i think it's true data goes along way to define us as individuals as well as the things we own and say and think. what does it mean for individuals and our identities? if someone else knows about those things without expressed permission. supporters of anonymous often were not much better when it came to privacy infringement. they often said that information should be free but then the

organizers of a anonymous would keep their names secret and also at the same time attack the company like sony pictures and release millions of passwords of consumers, along with e-mail addresses and names inside that as collateral damage. there's some complexity there about what kind of information should be free. information that's in the public interest? information about institutions, individuals? so that debate is raging on the one thing i know for certain is that, information about us is being traded all the time more and more behind the scenes. increasingly, even the price is being put on your head every time you open up a mobile app like candy crush. i don't know if anybody here place this. i've avoided actually downloading this game. but in the past the developer of a game like candy crush, how would they make money? they would sell ads through an ad network and this ad network would sell a few thousand

impressions which is the promise of being seen by a few thousand people to an advertiser like nike. so that model is changing now. developers can insert an analytical tool into their app that tracks the people are using the app so they can make it better but also so that an advertiser can better target that person with ads so the developer can make money. one of the biggest players in this game is a company called flory. you might not have heard of them. they develop a tool, fleury is now on 1.2 billion smart phones in the world today. that's an average of 10 athletes of those old. it has more mobile data and facebook and google. if flurry triangulates all the data between apps and puts them, creates personas and categories of people and its allies each smartphone with the category. here's where it gets interesting.

flurry used to be an app network but it's now becoming an ad exchange as are a lot of other similar companies, like a stock market for selling mobile apps. instead of showing an ad to thousands of iphone users at once, fleury holds an automatic auction to decide in one-tenth of a sector which add should be shown to a single person the moment they open candy crush while they're sitting at an airport. the ad isn't for 1000 people. is for one person. crucially for knows a little bit about this person but it knows that she's a woman, that she's a new mother, a traveler and that she likes fashion. in a split-second an ad for sunglasses shows up. flurry says this is how you show the perfect ad. it has nothing to do with the ad itself. and everything to do with the person who is seeing it. flurry says it doesn't know names so it cannot am isis everything, but it is possible as we heard earlier cross-reference one of these of identifying information with

another in a security breach and you can get names. flurry ceo told me last month that the persona integrating about people are getting better for advertisers. it has 50 personas never by the end of the it will have 100. and who knows, at some point it might start taking a third party data like location data from other brokers to augment those personas. so i think it's often said in the debate about privacy in the western world that there is this tension between privacy and security. but what if there's a wider, potentially more sinister conflict between privacy and convenience? consumers love free. they love things to be convenient. more and more apps are on the app store are becoming free, and developers are increasingly making money through ads and ad exchanges like fleury. i don't know how far certain technologies in silicon valley will take a deep dive into our data and our individual identities, i don't know how far

they're going to get to knowing who we really are and docking us all. we might not be supporters of anonymous but our ability to keep an identity private oil stances same things, a sense of control. how much control do i really have over my personal data any more? what decisions are being made about me that i don't know about? how will these decisions affect my life in the future? anonymous in many ways was an unconscious backlash to all that tracking is was a huge diffusion of celebrity people taking their private lives public their platforms like facebook and youtube. backlashes like this often come from young people because i think and people see things that they are. they are not bogged down by the systems and experience. a bunch of young people start anonymous in the mid-2000 as a way to bully and protest all of the wonderful and terrible

things that make us uniquely human. they did so at a time when it was becoming increasingly difficult to become anonymous online and in some pockets, to be human as well perhaps. with so many algorithms and trading desks that are deciding in helping to determine what we clicked on, what news articles we click on are what music we listen to or what movies we're going to watch or what we watch on tv. there's a famous very positive by the computer human single dirty happening by 2045. maybe by then if another network i can anonymous is greater by a new generation of people, my guess is they won't gather online anymore. because the very definition of going online will be to forgo any privacy or anonymity at all. maybe they'll just shut down their devices, take off their augmented reality glasses, open the door and go outside and meet one another face-to-face. thank you very much.

[applause] >> thank you. that was great, parmy. we go deeper and deeper into the subject. i was reminded as she was talking of a conversation i had with a person who works at a company i won't name, and i asked this person, why doesn't your company to this, that, and the other thing that would help to protect privacy of your users? and the response was really interesting. the response was, management doesn't want to devote resources doing anything that our customers are not demanding. because customers and users were not depending these privacy protections, it was not prioritized. so that's just a little crumb of food for thought about, we are sort of silently allowing these things to take place. but to come back to the issue of anonymity because we're going to delve even deeper into deb thata

minute, but think of the sentence, have you ever thought, what would people out there think of me if they know i -- if they knew i loved, fill in the blank, whatever it is. and, of course, you can go online and be anonymous. you can meet other people who love that thing that made is sort of an odd hobby that your friends might make fun of you about, maybe it's something, maybe it's a political preference you don't want your employers to know about. whatever it is, the ability to communicate and connec connect h people i not mos must online als groups to form around interests that people may have a very good reason not to want attached to their real-life identity and made public. so this is fishy. there are some people who argued anonymity means lack of accountability. we need identity to have accountability. not there's this other issue of

can you escape pervasive surveillance and oversight, and can you do that if anonymity is lost? this is the angle that cole stryker is going to be exploring. is off of the recent book hacking the future, privacy, identity and anonymity on the web. and he talks about the importance of being able to achieve anonymity for two primary reasons, which i believe call will very shortly explain. cole stryker. [applause] >> thanks for having me. my name is cole stryker, i'm an author based in york and i spent last couple of years of my life studying anonymity, first through similar stuff that parmy has been working on, studying anonymous and 4chan and the communities that have chosen to operate under the bill of anonymity for berries reasons for good and bad.

yes. so i basically decide to talk about the history of anonymity and there's a couple of reasons. one, is because i think there are probably a lot of people in this audience who are of the opinion that if i do nothing but i have nothing to hide. this is a widespread opinion in american society, should buy a lot of my close friends and family before my book came out. so that book was kind of of dedicated to them but in any other reason is i've a personal role not to talk to much about technology when there's a guy with a ponytail talking after me. [laughter] so i won't be talking -- i don't want to look too foolish so i'll focus on the history. so yes, anonymous was this group of trolls and pranksters that basically were lighting up the internet right before i got my book deal. and around that time to start take this kind of pseudo-political event where they were going after people they thought were censoring the web, promoting surveillance. in this picture is just an example of what anonymous was

doing the mountain dew when they invited the internet to -- the win was hitler did nothing wrong which is basically the way of saying if you come on our internet and try to capitalize from our creativity, this is what you're going to get in return. they weren't particularly big fans of my book. these quotes are from reviews on amazon. they basically don't like when people write about them, or at least the time before they became a huge media sensation this is basically the reaction you would get if you wrote about anonymous. and they gave me the same kind of treatment that parmy got where they tried to find where i live. they harassed my family. they solicited pizza delivery. they send me junk no. they sent my and a letter under my name goes basically like a deep convection of my sexual urges towards her. then we had to meet at some point. this woman is in her '60s, so

basically my family and friends couldn't understand. there ought to be a law, people should be allowed to say these kinds of nasty things about you online. you know, and just hide behind anonymity, doesn't seem fair. i found it to be such a widespread view that that became the subject of my next book. even very powerful people, i got a dedicated the book to randy zuckerberg who is a sister of mark, who founded facebook. she said i think anonymity on the internet has to go away. obviously, a person in a pretty powerful position holds this belief. here's a couple other examples. eric schmidt of google and mark, if you do nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide. so without further ado, i would like to get into the history of anonymous and opening up a frame -- my favorite quote from emily dickinson. we'll get into that a little bit later. so the a couple reasons why someone might want to be anonymous and one might need to uphold modesty.

an example i like is a guy who wrote amazing grace. he was someone who didn't want to associate his work with himself because he didn't want to take attention away from his creator who was trying to basically pray through this work. another example, here we have alice in wonderland. the author, lewis carroll, that wasn't his real name, basically didn't want to associate is childish stories with his series academic work. he was a painfully shy mathematician, didn't want those two worlds colliding so we had kind of a pragmatic viewpoint of his own identity wherein in this place on this person and in this place i am this person. another reason might be to stymie sexes. there are countless examples of this throughout history. two of my favorites are charlotte brontë who has a great quote here, basically saying i want to be judged as an author, not as event or a woman. in those days being a woman

author invited an unimaginable amounts of prejudice against one's work. another great example is marianne evidently all know as torricelli it. very similar, she used her second identity as a tool that could be dropped at any moment were it to cease to be useful for her. i have a friend who wrote for the political blog for some time under the pseudonym asked a lobbyist, and basically spent over a year talking about the seedy underbelly of the lobbying industry in washington, d.c., cultivated a rabid following and basically as soon as they found that she was a woman, immediately turn on or. her comments section became a landfill of people calling her fat and ugly and a big. basically something that would never happen to men because men in our society are valued more with their ideas they bring to the table. and women are valued based on their looks. i think that you say this is something we no longer have to deal with is a position that can only be driven a privileged and

ignorance. to make mischief is another example, kind of the godfather's of the anonymous groups. here we have gulliver's travels written by jonathan swift who is showing basically -- throwing molotov cocktails at the establishment. you also wrote a book about, or an essay about how the starving irish should eat their children as a way of using satire to attack the governing ways of the english people. that obviously would have gotten him killed or put in jail for life, had those sentiments been associated with his real name. and the most importantly in my opinion one might want to be anonymous. this is thomas paine pic will get to them in a second. but i don't have a ton of time so i will buzz through these bullet points. 1530, first licensing law in

place. everything that is printed has to be run by a royal analyst, i guess you would say, to make sure it doesn't say anything nasty about the crown or the church. sometime later, printers also included -- it wasn't good enough just to go after the author but if you can't printing something that was written by someone with something nasty to say, you are also, your neck was on the line. 1879, one of my favorite stories, john stubbs wrote the discovery of a gaping gulf, which was a work of political satire, and i think he's particularly interesting because they cut off his hand and his name was stubbs so it was almost a perfect outcome for him. 1589, one of the first works not just of the defense but an offense so this guy's naming names of real people in power, basically criticizing them

publicly in what they couldn't fight back. in 1543, another printing regulation where instead of the crowd it becomes the state becomes the primary body for deciding what stuff can be published and what stuff gets someone killed or thrown in jail. treason act, john twin was a printer who printed something by an anonymous author and had his head put on a spike and his body quartered in each of his body parts were put on the gates of london just as assigned anyone who might try to pull something like that. and then things start to get better. you've got john locke publishing two treatises, cato's letters, to works that are very influential on america's founding fathers. and 34, john peter singer is acquitted of basically criticizing the new york governor in a letter so that's like one of the first turning point for people and governments to decide we might want to pull

out -- cool it a little bit putting all the people in jail. thomas paine writes commonsense under a pseudonym called an englishman, not thomas paine. then over the course of the next century that abolitionist, tacitus, anti-monopolist also using anonymity or pseudonymity in order to speak out against the powers that be. and fast-forward all the way up to the 1958, we've got a couple of course cases that were important. naacp versus alabama. alabama decides it wants the membership list of the naacp. the naacp says hell no, if you get this was all over members will have burning crosses on lawns tomorrow morning. the court favored the naacp. in 1960, this was an anti-role that basically said you get this should get pamphlets and less

are is a name on them, and that was overturned here. skippy we had to 94 you start to see this in the digital realm. scientology, the first and last scientology movement that we see really growing up with anonymous 15 years later. and then finnish anonymous remain a. these guys are their doors kicked in by the fbi, hard drives seized, things like that which really was kind of the trigger for the hackers being, really this was kind of or near where they were fighting for freedom against censorship and for freedom of speech -- activists. in 97, excuse me, aclu versus miller. you've got the state of georgia saying no one can use the internet under a pseudonym and then thankfully the court decided georgia, you don't own

the internet but you don't run the show here. just chill out. and dangling alongside essential we've got the history of cryptology which i'm not going to get into because i've only got four minutes left, but it's a fascinating history of basically cryptographic technology was liberated from a few organizations that had access to it. mainly because it was use as a military tool. so you have the public now able to conceal their messages, digital messages, and mainly this happened because there was an economic reason to banks needed to be able to secure financial data, and then over time it got to the point where the every man provided that he has the tech-savvy, can now use this information, the technology to conceal their information. so today, a lot of people in very powerful positions, like i said, are basically saying, why do we need privacy? i think this is really concerning.

here's a guy, this is a very super prestigious journalist who basically says if you're not a pedophile you don't need privacy. he's never seen anyone using privacy for a good cause. i would hope that if this journalist had at least just in the last 10 minutes of my talk, would feel differently about it. here's somebody else. this is a microsoft researcher who basically wants driver's licenses for the internet. any hacker will laugh at you if you tell them this is a possibility, but basically this would be an authentication law that would work like a log into facebook where you would log in to the entire internet instead of just individual websites. and everything you say and do online can be traced to you. very unlikely that would happen but there are people who would like to see it happen. again we come back to these questions, if i've done nothing wrong i have nothing to hide. another one i think is privilege related, and this is just a big problem that doesn't matter to people who've never had to worry about putting food on the table.

my argument is anonymity and privacy issues are of most concern to people that on the fringes. most marginalized, least privileged people. for instance, if you're a homosexual teenager living in iran, you could very likely be rounded up and shot. that happened. so i wouldn't call that person someone who is in a privileged position. and then there's the quote unquote four horsemen of the apocalypse, these pedophiles, cyberthieves, cyber terrorists, things like that. what's going to happen if we allow for a world of anonymity, won't these people just run rampant? i've got news for you. we live in that world, and any kind of measures taken to track people are easily circumvented by people who have enough technical know-how to get around them. so my opinion is that hackers are always going to be one step ahead of the feds, and even though fed simply very smart

hackers, we should never underestimate the ability of people to break systems. and then finally, but i live in america. we don't have censorship here. you're not going to get your hands cut off if you speak out against obama. that might be true but this presentation was written before the nsa leaks. and i think that's kind of a case in point here, were as we are far less secure than we thought our information was and the fact that the nsa has unfettered access into all of these technological platforms that we're using on a daily basis should be cause for concern. even if we don't, even if we trust obama and if we trust basically our benevolent overlords today, who's to say whether -- what the landscape is going to look like down the line? the decisions we make now are far-reaching. so basically this is all setting up to what i like to call the identity wars because the original title of my last book. where you have a bunch of lightly or loosely related

collectives like the electronic frontier foundation, wikileaks and other activist groups. you've got silent circle, platform to protect people's identity and then you got wildcards like anonymous and the bitcoin crowd that are trying to create ways where people can perform commercial transactions anonymously. and then on the other side, you've got facebook, google, the nsa, the fbi, governments like chinese and then corporations like chevron and at&t. i threw chevron on ther their be they are trying to basically force corporations like yahoo! and google to divulge nine years worth of e-mail and web browsing history from some people that they're trying to fight in court. that kind of a threat could come from any powerful company. so i guess the whole thesis here is that, that i've done nothing wrong, i have nothing to hide is a position that is informed by

privilege, and that if that's how you think, you're not thinking of the homosexual teenager who's living in iran, or even the homosexual teenager who's living in alabama and who doesn't want his parents to find it. there are plenty of good reasons to want to different kinds of identities that are contextual and look differently on different platforms. and i'll leave you with this story. i just read a couple days ago that mark zuckerberg bought a piece of property adjacent to his home because he wanted more privacy. i think that says it all. thank you. [applause] thank you. thanks so much, cole. that story about the zuckerberg and his property, that really does say it all, doesn't it? so going deeper, we particularly in this country i think we are really fascinated i want people what is called smart technology. ..

all the time. that we've come to depend on and he believes it is absolutely important to educate people about the capabilities of the technologies we're using as well as the real risks to privacy and security that we must be aware of if we want to be empowered

users of technology and not just passive subjects for the technology to use us. so he's here to give as you glimpse of how this all works. robert, thank you very much. >> thank you. [applause] so i'm robert famosi, i'm cissp, which gives me credit of being expert. i'm a security analyst for a corporation which is a device security company out of san francisco. as we found out, i'm author of when gadgets betray us and in a movie documentary about hacking called code 2600, available from amazon. i'm a graduate of northwestern university. great to be back home in chicago and be at chicago id all week with you. i will talk a subject a little

different than cole and parmy set up. i will talk about the privacy and approach it from internet things. this idea that all the gadgets we have being connected to each other and to the internet and what those quon sequences might be. i see it as a new playground for digital feed. so with every new technology you're always going to have this tradeoff between security and convenience. you want the cool factor but what are you giving up in the meantime? what sort of behavioral privacy might be collected by these new gadgets coming into our lives? we're in a time of great experimentation. if you think back 10 years ago when, say, facebook was first around, people put their addresses and all sorts of personal information up there because they wanted to share with the world what was going on. then we realized, oh, bad idea. let's backtrack on that. don't want do that anymore. what is going on passively with

a lot of gadgets we own? what is being collected that we're not thinking about yet? so there are some gadgets that are designed to collect data and important, life critical. i'm talking about medical devices. certain think there is convenience factor. if you live in rural north dakota and don't want to drive four hours to have the medical practitioner adjust something in the medical device, you can do it over internet. that's great. that is more time you can live and not be in transit to do something. but how secure are those devices? there was a researcher and he looked into insulin pumps. one of the first researchers to look at the security of an insulin pump. also he contributed to the knowledge what is going on with heart defibrillators. what he found was, basically they were not protected. they were not designed to be protected from the internet yet being connected to the internet. unfortunately he died in july a

week before he was to present at black hat and defcon, two premier security events. he did have opportunity before he died to work with medical device manufacturers. hopefully his legacy will be the manufacturers to install more security to deep keep see vice from pranksters that throw a pacemaker into a arythmic state an damage somebody's heart. my company did a test on commercially available tv s in 2010 and what they found was the data being collected on tvs were stored in the clear. data at rest was in the clear. data in transit was being transmitted in the clear. there was no encryption going on. you might say, what is the big deal with that? if you subscribe to service like netflix, now your user name and password is available to someone

who can go along with internet and look for signal of your digital tv and take your service and start watching shows that you're watching and that is theft of service. maybe not a big deal to you but we'll see other examples of gadgets that connect to the internet that also leak information and consequences get more and more severe. so back in 2009 the government put an incentive in front of a lot of the utility companies and said, roll these out. make sure every home and business has a smart meter. my concern with that was, hey, do we bother to test the devices before we rolled them out? no. we rolled them out. they're out there. every home and business has the smart meters in them. well, did we look at basic security of them? did we find out what is being collected? i guess further extension of that, now that they're out there, what can we do with that data that's being collected? i think that is really interesting about these gadgets

when they connect to the internet. we think of convenience of immediately having access to them but five years from now, what can be done with the data. 10 years from now what can be done with data? kind of interesting. so the bottom part of the slide is what you see from a smart meter. every 20 seconds, sometimes, often as two seconds it pulses out data about your energy usage in your home. the idea as a homeowner, business, wow, that refrigerator is not efficient. i should replace it with something more energy efficient. you see steady blocks which is something like air conditioner going on and off. see valleys with the person away from home and wisely turning off ac while they're gone. there are jagged peaks in there. what is interesting about those peaks and researchers delved in, digital tv emit particular signatures. not only that when watching particular tv shows.

researchers can say with maybe 80% accuracy what you were watching just based on your power usage. wow. who knew? now as i said before a lot of these devices don't protect data at rest. they don't protect data at motion. so some german hackers had fun with it. the top chart is example of that where they manipulated readings from a smart meter that would display on the graph. if you can't see it, what they're saying there is, you have been hacked. now you can have some fun and games. you can lower your energy usage at home and neighbor causing you a lot of problems, raise their energy usage so they get billed more in the future. we're currently exhausting ip addresses, internet addresses for ipv-4. we're transitioning to something called ipv-6. to give you how many more addresses someone once explained to me consider all the grains of

sands on all beaches of the world, will be available under ipv-6. of course gadgets will start to use it. one company rolled out light bulbs uses ipv-6 addresses. they have their internet protocol. this is great. you can regulate the loom no, sirty or hugh of individual hue of light bulbs in your home. i can know when your home and when you're not and maybe i want to know your preferences of lighting in your home. we go further with that. if we've got so many ip addresses out there, we're going to connect everything, including toasters. what could possibly go wrong? so, i'm talking about, in my book, a lot of different gadgets we have around the home we may not think about as connecting to the internet. new digital cameras have that capability. they have their own web server. they have their own internet

address. what can be done with that? well, a couple of things. researchers have already scanned internet and identified these particular cameras. in some cases they were able to go into the cameras, the sd card and take photographs off the card. you're thinking great, someone has pictures of my puppy running around my living room, no big deal. actually it is a big deal because the digital file format that is being used collects longitude and latitude, geolocation data and puts it in the photograph. if i get a bunch of photographs from you i can trace your behavior. i can plot on a map where you live. most likely where you work. what parks you like to go to. what activities you engage in just based on photographs i have taken off of your camera. i don't even have to go to your camera. i can go to some websites and pull down photographs because a lot of mobile phones by default still track location data but

you can turn that off. so good news on that. but you may not have thought of that before. so, let's leave the home and take a walk. in london recently the company that makes digital displays on the side of the garbage cans decided they wanted to go a step further and wanted to start collecting data about the people that passed by these particular garbage cans. so they started collecting what is called the map address. every device that we have has a mac address. the first couple digits of the mac address identify the manufacturer and last couple are unique identifier. this will not tell you who is walking by the garbage can but it will start to build a profile. you know every day at 12:00, samsung, whatever number, walks by this particular garbage can, hey another garbage can down the block picked up the same signature two minutes later. we can figure out a path. we figure out how fast the person is walking.

we collect a lot of random data without really knowing who that person is. what will we do with this data? i don't know. it is good to be aware this type of data is being collected and good to know people like mayor of london quickly shut this down once he found out it was going on in the city. there are conveniences in having the dashboard navigation certainly, not knowing where you're going. i opened my book with a the case of a woman who got lost in england. consequences basically didn't know she was on a railroad track and train ended up destroying her car. she is okay. the car is totally destroyed. more of that in the book. but there is company, tomtom, in 2011, actually used the data that it was collecting from its navigation devices and handed it over to the dutch police. they could tell by how fast you got to a destination how fast you were going. and so we had virtual speed

traps. they publicly apologized and said they would never ever do that again. think about the next time you use siri or google now or some other navigation service. they have an idea how far it is from point a to point b. if you suddenly get to point b faster than expected you can infer you were probably speeding to get there. the things that go on in your car are being recorded. from 2001 forward, cars in the united states have had black boxes in them. black boxes actually exist further back in time, back in the 1970s when airbags first came out. engineers used black boxes to reconstruct when was happening. in the 1970s, people died because of early airbags. they didn't quite understand how to do that. black boxes are in every single car. as of 2012 the owners manual have to declare this is the case. in 2014 the nstb now said you need to have 40 pieces of data collected by the typical

black box. includes things like, were you wearing a seatbelt the a the time of the accident? did you have your turn indicator on? did you have lights on? did you have stereo on? how loud was the music playing at time of the crash. that type of data is being recorded. something to think about the next time you're driving you're watched whether you want to or not. so what can you do? you can't really stop data collection but you can minimize it. you can turn off unnecessary settings in the device configuration. examples would be, my data plan is pretty liberal, so i turn off wi-fi. why let my mobile phone connect to a random public network when i go through the carrier. i feel more secure. turn off geolocation and photographs as i said before. if you're paranoid, don't take same path to work. go different route. device is being tracked.

maybe they will think different people are doing that. turn off the devices occasionally. the maybe not use technology so much. i don't know about you, but i love technology and i'm really not going to start doing that but what i do recommend, my takeaway is, think about what the device might be collecting and learn to live with it. be comfortable with what you're using and if you don't like it, push back. don't buy that device. don't use that technology, just push back a little bit and maybe we'll start to see some changes,. remember gadgets don't control us, we control them. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you so much. one point of information, actually if your cell phone battery is still in your cell phone it can be turned on remotely and used as tracking device, even if you turn it off. if you don't want to be tracked, leave it at home, take a cell phone you take the battery out of.

moving along swiftly and more deeply, we're now turning to arvind, sorry, i should have asked you, naranon. who is concerned about the problem that companies make false claims about their security. they claim they have got your data secure. they claim they're taking all these measures but is it really all that secure? and he is dedicated to holding companies accountable for the claims that they're making about your security and your privacy. and as he said in some of his research, the level of anonymity that customers can expect is fundamentally unreal liesable compared to the claims being made. so i turn it over to arvind who is going to explain this

further. thank you. >> thank you. [applause] rebecca didn't mention a book, that is because i don't have one. this left me with a conundrum. i could talk about any privacy topic. what i felt was most useful to share with you, online tracking and how companies are tracking us online when we browse and what concrete steps you can take about it. let me show you this cartoon. do you remember this and the famous tag line that went with this? on internet nobody knows you're a dog? that was the early innocent days of internet. makes you feel nostalgic, doesn't it? do you imagine what you sound like if this was published. it was internet. of course they know you're a dog. they also know your favorite brand of pet food and the name of the cute poodle at the park you have a crush on. so this is the reality that we live in today and this is, what i want to talk to you about. i want to give you bad news and

good news. the bad news we live in a world with exploding complexity of online tracking. i have a team of graduate and undergraduate students at princeton where i work with where i'm a professor. we're reverse engineering companies do online tracking our personal data. and i can only describe our feelings as morbid fascination. i want to give you a good message. it is not doom and gloom. you have a lot of power and things you can do and i want to share that with you as well. so, what i want to talk about specifically when i talk about online tracking is what i call third party online tracking which i consider the most insidious form of online tracking where sites, other than the one you're visit, that are typically invisible, you don't even see them, are collecting profiles of your browsing history. you wonder how could this even happen. how could the site other than i'm visiting see me? let me show you screen shot this

is definitive study of stanford tracking. this is new york times. see in this picture how many areas are highlighted in red and these are all content that's being served by sites other than "the new york times." and when this happens your browser connects to a bunch of other sites, seven you can see in the picture and lots more concealed that are invisible. all of these other sites know that you visited "new york times" and what other sites you visited and that is how they compile dossiers on you. one study revealed on average top 50 websites there are 64 independent tracking mechanism. and so just to drive home this point of how subtle these trackers can be let me show you screen shot. let me show you what some of these different third parties can be tracking you. it could be facebook and google. could be well-known companies. could be companies you never heard of. loki, revsite.net.

1207207.net. you probably did they remember you. they're in the business of remembering you. here is the screen shot of u.k. national health service and looking at they are syphilis page. a lot of good information but what i want to point you to there is facebook like button on there and five people clicked it. i don't know, i guess i'm missing out. but joking aside, this scary part here not that five people clicked it but hundred of thousands of people who visited this page and other very sensitive pages like it were not at all aware there was a facebook tracker on this page and that facebook is watching what they browse online. facebook typically has your identity, knows who you are, because you have left your browser logged into facebook, like most of us do. so, if that doesn't convince

you. the fact there are so many invisible trackers, let me quickly summarize one might want to worry about this kind of online tracking. well there is just basically our intellectual privacy. studies show people behave differently when you know there are hundreds of people watching what you do, right? that is important freedom to protect. there is also behavioral profiling and targeting. you may have seen a headline last year, how target knows a teenage was pregnant before her dad did. right? that is level of targeting and profiling this data can reveal about you. there is preliminary evidence that they're being used for priest discrimination. you said person i don't care about my of this only thing i care about being safe from the government. tell me about the nsa. that is the only privacy leak that worries me. i got news for you. in recent nsa leaks, reveals one they're using to track you is doubleclick tracking cookies. third party online tracking companies are doing nsa's work

for them. so, scary stuff but let's pause for a moment. i've been working in researching the online tracking space for about four years now. and, let me share with you some of the things work and what doesn't work in terms of how you can protect yourself. one piece of good news, something that does work is public opinion. this might seem not logical, but a lot of companies really care that there is privacy backlash. news of products shut down, entire companies shut down because there was backlash and people didn't like it. you might remember google bus. let me give you a example more closely related to third party online tracking that we've been talking about. there was a feature, facebook instant personalization. i consider this probably the most privacy intrusive feature that facebook has ever released. the point of facebook instant personalization whenever you go to some other site, that site and facebook talk silently in the background and facebook

tells them who you are and various things about you, your location and what movies you like, whatever. many privacy experts complained about this. i ham happy to say i had had a role on this, and organizations like electronic frontier organization we heard depicted up the cause. because of that facebook limited to preliminary beta rollout. this is fortunate not happening today. the internet could be a much worse place for privacy if some of these things had been allowed to happen. public opinion didn't work. we're not living in reality of facebook instant personalization. that is one piece of good news. on the other hand, here's something that doesn't work. efforts for privacy advocates and tracking companies to sit down and the table together in my experience don't seem to have worked. let me tell you the story of do not track. if you read the little blurb about me say i'm one of the researchers behind the do not track proposal. what this was advertising companies and tracking companies saying hey, if you're worried about tracking we let you opt

out and we're okay with that because we believe most people will be convinced of advantages of tracking an will not opt out. but we said, look, there are hundreds of tracking companies that is completely unfeasible to expect anyone to opt out individually. make a browser setting so the browser can help you opt out of all the sites at once. browser vendors got on board. this set something in every browser. firefox and privacy tab that is the very first privacy setting. do not track. every single browser has it what happened. two years of constant negotiations what do not track means and what tracking companies are obligated to do and not obligated to do. as a week of or two ago, everybody agrees the negotiations are going nowhere. this idea of, oh, let's all be on the same page and let's talk about together, that hasn't really worked out. i would say even though i invest ad lot time and so many others for do not track it is time to move on. we're in a world where the

interests of these tracking companies and interests of consumers are fundamentally a little bit misaligned. i'm okay with that we tried but it didn't work, to bring everybody to the table on the same page. so i want to tell you there are a bunch of these blocking tools for online tracking and these blocking tools work really, really well. ad block plus and ghost are a couple i use. there are more. i'll tell you about a little bit more about these. these are typically browser add ons you can employ. when i tell people about blocking tools, one. things that they say is, oh, this is not a good solution for me because there are new privacy intrusions all the tie. i have to change those settings again or i have to install yet another blocking tool and so on. well, here is my answer to that here is how i solved that problem. i'm not necessarily on top of all the privacy intrusions going on. here is what i do. there are a lot of organization

that is are in the business of staying on top of this. and telling you about them. the electronic frontier foundation is one of them. there is privacy company that i like. there are few examples. there are others. so one the things you can do that is very powerful get on twitter feed or rss feed of these organizations in the business of always knowing whenever there's a new privacy intrusion and telling you in very simple steps why you have to install or what setting tough change. and is a method i think can work for most people. in other words to put it differently, online privacy, the price of online privacy is eternal vigilance but what jefferson didn't know and what we have today is that this eternal vigilance is a problem that has been solved by technology. people give up when they hear, oh, you have to keep changing your privacy settings all the time but i have been doing that and i have been teaching people do that. that is not hard at all. all you have to do set aside hour or two of budget per month

to stay on top of this or get on news feed of organizations like electronic frontier foundation. that is very simple, easley applicable tool everybody can use. in my years of research and one other, sort of point that has come out people say, oh, this is going to get into an arms race. say if it is an arms race, bring it on. that is not a problem. the balance of power is with consumers. let me give you a very quick example of why. this is kind of because of a legal nuance, example that i'm going to give you. safari, had a feature to block third party cookies which is one of the tools that you can make use of turned on by default. google, in their tracking features was to circumvent the tracking proex-by safari. here's what happened. an independent researcher found this out. who i'm going to show you in a second. and because of that. the federal trade commission was able to swoop in and say, this

is a circumvention of existing privacy tool. so google was slapped with a huge fine and they backed off of that now. if it gets into an arms race there are legal mechanisms to protect against that such as the federal trade commission. an arms race is nothing to worry about. go ahead. be income for thible installing privacy tools and protect yourself. very quickly, a success story that reverse engineering by independent researchers has help ad lot in revealing the fate of online tracking. these are couple of guys who have been heroes of this new wave of research. and my own research at princeton is inspired by success they have. let me summarize with three takeaways that i have for you in increasing order of importance. first one support privacy groups. through these groups like eff, act and aclu a loot lotted good tools and news about privacy comes to us.

voice your concerns to companies an regulators because we've seen time and again that public opinion has been a powerful force for companies to change their privacy policies. in turn, the first, and most important one these blocking tools like browser add-ons and blocking cookies really work. so make use of them. the only caveat you have to pick the right tools and stay updated involves a little bit of effort but as i told you price of privacy is eternal vigilance that is not hard. get on twitter. get on rss feed. follow some privacy news feed. that will take care of the problem for you. you woken feel like you're drowning anymore. you will feel like you're in control. you will find out about things as soon as they happen. you will know how to protect yourself. i leave you with that thought. thank you for your time. [applause] >> thanks so much. thanks so much, arvind i use a few of those blocking tools on my different browsers and i have to say, yeah, they're pretty impressive in how they work.

last but not least, while google may be a house hole name there is another search engine that probably most of you have not heard of. this is search engine not for websites but for devices that are connected to the internet. and this search engine is basically scanning the internet for the ip addresses -- >> we'll leave this discussion at this point. you can ein its entirety if you go to our website, c-span.org. live now for remarks from charlie cook with "the cook political report." he will highlight the nation's major congressional races during the election year. he is head of american campaign management institute. all 435 house members are up for re-election this year and in the senate there are 35 races to be decided. >> good morning. welcome to the campaign management ininstitute at

american university. i'm candy nelson. director at cmi this is the 30 fifth year cmi has existed. we started as a bipartisan training institute and we've been going strong ever since. our first speaker today is charlie cook. charlie is the editor and publisher of "the cook political report" which he founded 30 years ago. >> 30 years ago in april. >> oh. charlie is also political analyst for "national journal." a regular election night contributor to cnn, cbs and nbc. always very generous with his time for cmi. he will start off this morning talking about general political environment going into 2014. so, charlie cook. >> thank you. [applause] thank you, candy. first of all i want to compliment all of you for your decision to participate in cmi because hardly a month goes by

that i don't run into somebody somewhere that didn't say, i met you, or i first heard you at the american university campaign management institute and i've been doing this for really long time. i remember my favorite story about the cmi was back in the, either very late '80s or probably early '90s. a friend of mine. leland: bill sweeney was helping to run the program. and this was march, april, may, few months after the cmi and he was walking through the capitol building and he ran into the speaker of the house, tom foley, who he knew. and speaker foley put him aside and said, bill, a few months ago, back over the holidays, my father was very ill, so i was spending a lot of time with him. there was one night i couldn't sleep so i turned on television and started watching c-span and campaign management institute was on. then speaker of the house goes

through to critique each of the speakers. just goes to show you never know who is going to be watching this kind of thing on c-span and also just what kind of terrific program that amu puts together. what i am going to do is sort of talk about the lay of the land, the political environment. thank you very much. and i used to, a million years ago, back in the '70s when i first got out of college and working in politics there was a terrific political newsletter called the american political report that a guy named kevin phillips did who had been a political strategist for president nixon in '68. this newsletter was eight or 10 pages long, 12 pages long, every other week. the front part of it was sort of macro big picture themes of american politics and the last couple of pages was the alabama to wyoming, what is going on in each state. i was just out of college and so, to me i would go straight to

the back pages, you know, alabama, arkansas, go through all the states to see what was going on and then i would read the frond part because i thought to me that was like cocktail party conversation. it was sort of vaguely interesting but not that important. but as i sort of my career progressed i started realizing, wait a minute, it is the stuff in front that drives what's happening in the back and i think as sort of as i moved along the thematics are awfully, awfully important. so i think a lot of people, particularly younger people think we put too much emphasis on some of the big picture stuff but over time it seems to matter in a enormous amount. at the beginning of each election cycle i start off and think about, ask myself two questions and the first question is, what kind of election is this going to be? and whether it is sort of what i call micro or macro.

around the second is, what's the election going to be about? let's talk about these two questions. what kind of election it's going to be. the late democratic speaker of the house tip o'neill coined probably the most popular phrase in american politics. all politics is local. now to me what speaker o'neill meant, whether you're looking at a state representative or state senate race or a state, coon aggressional race, senator's race. governor's race, every jurisdiction, every race is largely independent. what's the population like in that area? what are the voting patterns and voting history? who are the candidates? what kind of campaigns do they have. what resources money and otherwise do they have. what are local issues and circumstance that could influence that race? but the idea that each one of these contests are sort of stovepiped is the current phrase

we use, french freestanding independent of all the others. a lot of elections really are like that but there are a lot that aren't and from time to time we have these sort of, a lot of people call wave elections, where all politics isn't local and it's where there, almost like there is an invisible hand that sort of pushing up or forward the candidates of one party and pulling down the candidates of the other and you can go back through history, you know, 1958, 1966, '64, six at this six, '80, '74. now it used to be a little over one a decade. they're happening more freakily because our political process is not parliamentary but seems to get more parliamentary than it used to be. people are not splitting their tickets as much as they did back

when i was in school. it used to be fairly routine for someone to vote, democratic for the house, republican for senate, democrat for president or mix those any way you want but move back and forth, sort of choosing back and forth between the two. that was quite common but now we don't have those anymore. we had bonn a long time without a really big one. then in 1994 we had the newt gingrich-led republican tidal wave election during president clinton's first term election. that swept speaker foley out of office. and, then you had '94, as i said, '94, getting over a chest cold. '94. then had '86 was a big democratic one. 2006, rather, 2010 was a big republican one. where we had these wave elections from time to time and so, whether is it going to be a

micro, all politics local kind of election, or is it going to be macro, one of these sort of wave elections that strongly advantages one side or the other. the other question is, what's the theme of the election? there's a famous thing of winston how much hill where he apparently reportedly sent back dessert to the kitchen and said to the waitress, you know, madam, take this pudding away, it has no theme. so the question is sort of what's the theme of the election? what's it about? what are the key dynamic that's out there? sort of what's the current term people use is narrative. what is the narrative of this election? and, so at the beginning of this election cycle, a year ago, i started thinking, okay, there are sort of two possible narratives in this election. and the first narrative, this is

in no particular order. but the first one is, that republican brand image problems and internal problems just continue. and the problems that the republican party's currently facing with younger voters, with minority voters, with moderate voters, with women voters just sort of persist and flow as they did in 2012, on into 2014. the other theory is that this is a classic second term midterm election in which the party in the white house traditionally gets absolutely hammered in the midterm election halfway through a second term. and it's not, doesn't always happen but it's almost always happens. and so which of these two is it going to be? let's talk about each one for a second. talk about the republican brand image problems. i don't know, if i need to dwell too much about this, got talked about a lot coming out of 2012

the republican party has profound -- you can blame mitt romney for the, his loss in his campaign and to be honest i think that was actually a very, very winnable race had it been run somewhat differently, that the obama campaign was very, very smart campaign and made a lot of very smart decisions and the romney campaign not so much. but notwithstanding that, when you sort of look at other races and look broader, you can see there is just some huge problems facing the republican party. first minority voters when african-americans make up 13% of the electorate and your presidential candidate loses 87 points, 93-6, that is pretty bad. when hispanics make up 10% of the vote and romney lost by 44 points, 71-27. but the group that i kind of like to point to is sort of making a statement is a smaller

group, asian voters which make up 3% of the electorate. now, let's do some, don't worry i'm not boeing to say anything bad. let's do some profiling here. what are the stereotypes of asians, asian-americans? hard-working, entrepreneurial, capitalistic. they have a lower unemployment rate than whites. they have a higher household income than whites. tend to be cult rattily conservative. wouldn't that kind of describe republicans. attributes one attribute to the republican party. yet romney lost the asian vote by 47 percentage points, three points more than he lost the the hispanic vote. that is really interesting to me. the vote for confess is almost identical. you say, wait a minute, nobody was talking about asian vote. how did that, the thing about it

is, when you look at the polling, when you sit through focus groups with voters, the message that minority voters across the board are getting is the republican party doesn't like anybody that doesn't look like themselves. is that a fair characterization of all republicans? no, i don't think it is but that is the message that so many minority voters are getting and, and i think to me, what is happening with the asian vote is particularly symptommic of it. that has a lot less to do with immigration or anything else, is that republicans have an enormous problem with minority voters. and country is getting more and more, and more diverse. that romney won the 59% of the white vote in this last election. historically, if you got 59% of the site vote, you're republican and you got 59% of the site

vote, you have just won the election. but that but it is no longer sufficient. and what we're seeing is the share of the white vote has been dropping, basically 15 points over six elections. so that simply winning the white, for republican winning white vote big is not enough to win anymore. and when republicans have to kind of go back and go back and look at their recipe a little bit because that is not working so well. then you look at young voters. and take voters under 30. romney lost the 18 to 29-year-olds by 23 percentage points. if you look at four age brackets of exit poll. you draw a line at 45 years of age. voters for the most part over 45 vote pretty strongly for, for republicans, for congress an for romney and under 45 voted more for obama and for democrats.

at the extremes of those age groups it's, it is even higher. now but the thing about it is, you can look at that say, well, okay, they kind of balance each other off or something. and maybe a little bit. but the thing is, when you think about the long haul, and, i just turned 60. so i can actually say this without getting into trouble. but, when i look at voters under 45, particularly under 30, i see the future. i mean that's where, that is where american politics is going to be down the road a little bit. for those of us who are over 60, we're kind of the prelaugh dead. and, republicans are doing really, really well with the pre-dead and not so well with the future. if i were an old republican i wouldn't care. but if i were a young republican i would be really, really worried. something will change or they

will not be winning many statewide or national elections. of. we get to women voters. we started hearing about a gender gap back in the reagan administration, the '80s. and i remember initially i thought, well, you know, this is kind of a glass half empty, half full kind of thing. do republicans have a problem with women vetvoters? yes. but do democrats have a problem with male voters? yes. so it kind canceled each other out. there are two problems with that notion. number one, unfortunately from my personal perspective, women live longer than men do. as a result they're 53% of the electorate and guys are only 47% of the electorate. when you have such strong, you know, strong partisan voting patterns among the two genders that is kind after problem. but the other thing is, that democrats are doing a lot better among women than republicans are

among men. this is true for congress and it was true for, in the presidential race that obama won the woman's vote by 11 percentage points and romney only one the male vote by seven percentage points. from a republican perspective, republicans are winning a smaller slice of the smaller pie. and again over the long haul that doesn't really work so well. then finally, self-described moderate voters. now, i used to completely assess independent voters, self-described independents, people that didn't call themselves democrats or republicans. the reason i used to obsess over that, you look over time, and basically 90% plus percent of all the people who call themselves democrats, vote for democratic candidates for congress and president and 90 plus percent of self-described republicans vote for the republican candidate.

and so pretty predictable. so, you look at independents. well, the problem with independents, the problem with that is that independents are not splitting, the independents are becoming a bigger and bigger role and so but, for republicans they, if you told me two years ago, three years ago, that mitt romney was going to be the republican nominee and he would win the independent vote by five percentage points, i would have assumed he won the election, you know. all other things being equal. but, what's happened is that the makeup of independents has changed a little bit and another group has become more important and when i say the makeup of independents, has changed somewhat, i think that within the realm of self-described independents you've got one group of people in there that

used to be republicans. they are very conservative but they now call themselves independents and are more sympathetic with the tea party movement and so they no longer identify as republicans but in a two-way democrat republican race you can pretty much bet on them going republican. the second thing is, i think there are some moderate republicans, people that were moderate republicans who have no longer call themselves republicans and call themselves independents but they are still more conservative than they are liberal but they have more leanings that way. but anyway romney won among independent vote by five percentage votes but lost the election by what, 2.8 percentage points. so what is the key group? i would argue the key group that i'm play paying more attention to is self-described moderates. republicans or conservatives i should say taken solace more

americans consider themselves conservative than liberals. 35% conservative, 25% liberal a 10 point gap but 40% call themselves independents. in this last election it, was actually 41% in the last election. independents voted for obama by 15 percentage points, 56-41. so if that's a group, you know, if democrats are winning among liberals and republicans winning among conservatives even though there are a lot more conservatives than liberals, if democrats are winning moderates, 41% of the electorate, by 15 percentage points that makes a huge, huge, huge, difference and it didn't used to be that wide. and so we sort of look at these things and say, can republicans in 2014, repair their damage? wait until the end. repair their damage with, minority voters, young voters, women voters, moderate voters. and that is to me, that's a

critical, critical, critical question. then we get to the second question. and that is, is this going to be a traditional second term midterm election? now, one of the things we've seen, and since end of world war --, first of all midterm elections tend to be much more often than not are bad for the party in the white house. and it is sort of, if people are unhappy for any reason, they tend to take it out on the president's party. if they're happy, they vote on some other issue but if they're unhappy, they tend to take it out on a president's party. just sort of, it is what it is but it's been like that for, you know, since the beginning of time pretty much. but in the post-world war ii era, in terms of looking at second midterm elections. we've had six of them. five out of six the party in the white house got absolutely hammered in the second term midterm election with enormous

losses in either the house or senate or usually both. and one exception, the one out of six that didn't happen was back in 1998. bill clinton's second term midterm election when there was a backlash against the republican impeachment of clinton in the house and trying him? the senate where the american people, they wean really happy with president clinton but they thought the country was doing okay. they didn't want to throw him out even though they did think that, did not necessarily approve of his behavior. so the there was a backlash against republicans. so the normal pattern was, would seem to have been broken during that time. now why, why does this tend to happen in second terms? part of it is, think about when a brand new president is elected. all of you are young enough to remember back in 2009, whether you were a democrat, republican, liberal, moderate, maybe less so

conservative, there was a real curiosity. how was this new president was going to do? and sort after curiosity, an energy, excitement, passion, whatever, how is this guy going to do? and people are hopeful, whether they voted for him or not, they generally speaking want the country to do well and so hopefully this will be a turn for the better after going through some tough times. but, and that is fairly typical when a new president is ileced. but overtime the novelty wears off and over time decisions are made, tough governing decisions are made, that tend to tick people off. and that the fresh, new ideas, tend to dissipate some. "the a-team", the team that elected that president initially, by the time after the re-election, they generally go off to make money. so you have the b or the c team on the field. there are no new idea.

they're just sort of, final thing sometimes sort of chickens come home to roost. things you said or did in the first term come back and i will use a technical political science term here, bite you on the ass in second term, things if you like your insurance you can keep it, things like that compact to haunt you in the second term. there are tendency for bad things to happen to presidents in their second terms. sometimes it is economic downturns, for example, president eisenhower had two recessions in the last two years he was in office. i didn't know you could have two recessions that close together. you could have unpopular wars like vietnam during the kennedy-johnson administration, iraq for george w. bush. you can have scanneds like watergate, during the nixon, ford, controversy over the pardon and monica lewinsky for clinton and thing is, or iran-contra for president

reagan. bad things typically happen to presidents during the second term. people just start betting tired and start to become more receptive to change. we've done this and let's do something different. but it's a pattern that holds up pretty, pretty darn well. so those are the two questions. so what's it going to be? well i, when i look, when i look at what's going on and look at the polling data and one thing, i didn't get a chance to go by the office and print this out but right, write down, our website is cook political.com. www.cookpolitical.com. you go to the homepage, this won't make me any money, right-hand side of the page there is a box that talks about political environment and says, read more and click that. and there's, it is about 10-page document that we update several times a week with the polling

date that we think is most relevant in terms of sort of ascertaining what's the political environment going to be like. and we start off with right direction, wrong track numbers. then we go to presidential approval. we have the gallup numbers and as well as abc, "washington post," nbc, "new york times,", fox, cnn, gallup and pugh. we go through consumer confidence. first of all, to the extent we are taught that midterm elections are usually a referendum on the incumbent president, then looking at the president's job approval rating is very, very important. but it's also said that americans tend to vote their pocketbooks and they tend to vote if they are worried, scared, fearful about the economy, they tend to pessimistic, generally not so good for incumbent party. if they feel good about things, they typically vote on other

things. but we have the conn conn ratings. then -- consumer confidence ratings. we have favorable, unfavorable ratings for parties from various polls. we have before that numbers from the kaiser family foundation which is largest, sort of objective body of polling on the affordable care act. sort of watching several questions there in terms of the popularity of the affordable care act. and we have the generic ballot test. maybe another question or two on there. that is sort of a good way to check in for free and look to see how things are going. so when i look at what's happening right now, the democratic party has lousy fav-unfav numbers. the republican party has even worse favorable unfavorable numbers. the president's approval numbers are 43% where exactly president george w. bush was at this point in his second term which is

after iraq already turning sour and after katrina. and so that's exactly, almost, actually some days digit for digit the same where president bush was at this point which is obviously not a good place and republicans took some pretty significant losses back in 2006. so the republican, there is no reason to believe that republicans have improved their standing one iota among minority voters, younger voters, women voters, moderate voters. none whatsoever. but at the same time, you look over and you look at the president's approval numbers and they're on the track towards where you have bad second term midterm elections. and it is what it is. maybe things better. maybe they do. we'll have to see. you don't just take a poll and skip the election. you carry up through the election. that's why you have campaigns but the thing is right now looks

like both of those things are going to happen, or both of those things look to be, if you're going to have the election today, operative. which would tend to suggest canceling each other out. when i talked about what kind of election it is going to be. at this point, there is not any evidence that this is going to be a wave election because for people to vote against somebody they kind of have to vote for somebody. and the thing is, they don't like either side here. and so i don't see them handing out compliments or willy-nilly handing out victories to either side because they're not really happy with either one. i guess meteorologist would look at this and say it is kind of like an unstable air mass. it is very, very volatile situation but neither side looks to be sort of naturally advantaged by sort of the macro political environment. now, then you say, well, okay.

that is the environment. let's get down to sort of cases. i know your next speaker will get more into races but i'm going to do it from sort of a larger sense. we got the house and senate. in house, democrats woo need a 17 net gain to get majority in the house. 17 seats. in big scheme of thing, 17 is not particularly big number. you can look, there is a great, great book, norm ornstein, tom mann and michael maalvin, vital statistic on congress. terrific book. they have it up on the web. they don't publish it in hard copy anymore and up on the web and available for free. it is terrific. go through brookings or aei website but when you go back and look over time, trying to

remember what, what my point was. as i say getting over a chest cold. i remember. 17 is not much. it really isn't but the thing about it is, but in the new world order it is kind of a lot. because there are very, very few competitive districts out there. you know i started as i mentioned earlier, my newsletter back in april of 1984. and it was not uncommon in those days to have, you know, 100, 125, 150 or more competitive districts. and now, it is sort of, you know, depending upon you determine, how you define it, actually i was reading someplace, somebody was using our numbers, defining it as where it voted for president for one party and congress for the other, it went from 99, like 10 years ago, to only 25 now. but the better statistic is that

96% of all the democrats in the house are sitting in district that is obama carried and 93% of the republicans in the house are sitting in district that is mitt romney carried. so there is just not a lot of elasticity in the house left anymore. . . . >> soyou want to do, if you're the dominant party in a state and you want to absolutely