name is revealed, the value of that identity was lost. this was a problem for people like jake davis when he was found out to be the real tell. . butdy wanted to be doxed, that threat was constantly being tossed around. that raises a lot of questions about privacy. anonymity was the one true way to experience privacy in an age when corporations and governments know more about us than ever before. last december, about two years after i wrote my book and researched unanimous, i moved from "forbes" in london to -- 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 end that was. and also how surprised i was by the blase attitudes i was encountering among executives, startup, entrepreneurs about the privacy of consumers that they were building technology

for. and 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 nuance, which is a voice recognition company, to put it succinctly for me, this particular attitude. he said that privacy was an economic consideration. now, this executive was helping nuance which does the voice recognition technology for the iphone siri to create a personal assistant technology separate to that, that could go beyond siri ins could referencing all the data between the different apps on our phones. kind of like a butler that has the keys to all the doors in your house and all the cup boards 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 their privacy unfringed like that? and he said, just again, i feel like this illustrates the attitudes in silicon valley, when do people feel their

privacy has been breached? and then he said when information has been taken from them without value and exchange. all that have information that resides in the cloud can be anticipated and thought through and synergies made that i'd never thought about before. there's an astonishing amount of value in that information. people talk about value a lot. >> now, i think it's true that data goes a long way to defining us as individuals, as well as the things we own and say and think. but what does it mean for our individuality and our identities? if someone else knows about those things without our expressed permission? now, supporters of unanimous often weren't much better when it came to privacy infringement. they often said that information should be free but then the organizers of

unanimous would keep their names secret and also at the same time attack a company like sony pictures and release millions of passwords of consumers along with e mail addresses and names and cite that as collateral damage. so 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's 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 a price is being put on your head every time you open up a mobile app. like candy crush. i don't know anybody hear plays this. i have avoided actually downloading this game. but in the past, a 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 proposition of being seen by a few thousand people to an

advertiser like nike. so that model's changing now. app developers can insert a tool into their app that tracks how people are using the app, so they can make the app better. but also so that an advertiser can better target that person with ads and so the developer can make money. one of the biggest players in this game is a company called flurry. you might not have heard of them. they've got anly thics tool which they give away to developers. because of that tool, flurry is now on 1.2 billion smart phones in the world today. that's an average of 10 apps on each of those phones, that means it has more mobile data than facebook and google. flurry triangle lates all that data between the apps and creates personas and categories for people and aligns each smartphone with a cat comboir. -- category. here's where it gets interested. flurry used to be an app

network but it's now becoming an ad exchange, as are other similar companies, like a stock market for selling mobile ads. instead of showing an ad to thousands of iphone users at once, flurry holds an automatic auction to decide in a tent of a second which ad should be town to a single person the moment they open candy crush while they're sitting at the airport. the ad is isn't for 1,000 people, it's for one person. now, crucially, flurry knows a little bit about this person. it knows that she's a woman, that she's a new mother, she's a traveler, and that she likes fashion. and in a split second an ad for sunglasses shows up on her screen. 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. now, flurry says it doesn't it is possible as we heard earlier, cross reference one other piece of identifying information with another and a security breach and you can get names.

flurry's c.e.o. told me last month that the persona it's creating about people are getting better for advertisers. it has 50 personas now. by the end of the year it will have 100. and who knows, at some point it might start taking in 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 witer, potentially more sinister conflict between privacy and convenience? consumers love free. they love things to be convenient. more and more apps that are on the app store are becoming free and developers are increasingly making money through ads and ad exchanges like flurry. now i don't know how far certain technology companies in silicon valley will take their 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 unanimous but our ability to compete an identity private boils down to the same thing that the unanimouses were trying to achieve which is a sense of control. how much control do i really have over my personal data anymore? what decisions are being made about me that i don't know about? how will these decisions affect my life in the future? now, unanimous in many ways was an unconscious backlash to all of that tracking as well as a huge diffusion of celebrity, of people taking their private lives public through platforms like facebook and youtube and vine. backlash is like this often -- backlashes like this often come from young people because young people see things as they are. they're not bogged down by baggage and systems and experience. a bunch of young people started unanimous in the mid 2000's as way to vent and bully and hack and protect, all of the wonderful and terrible things that make us uniquely human.

and they did so at a time when it was becoming increasingly difficult to become unanimous online and in some pockets of modern society, to be human as well perhaps. with so many alge rhythms and trading desks that are helping to determine what we click on, what news articles we click on or what music we listen to or what movies we are going to atch or what we watch on tv. maybe by then if another network like unanimous is created 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 forego 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. thanks. 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 the person who worked as a company i won't name and i asked this person, why doesn't your company do this, that and the other thing that would help to protect the privacy of your users? and the response was really interesting. the response was, management doesn't want to devote resources to doing anything that our customers are not demanding. and because customers and users are not demanding these privacy protections, it was not prioritized. so, that's just a little crumb of food for thought. we're sort of silently allowing these things to take place. but, to come back to the whole issue of anonymity, because that's -- we're going to delve even deeper into that in a minute, but think of the

sentence, you know, you have ever thought, what would people out there think of me if they know -- if they knew i loved fill in the blank, whatever it is. and of course if you can go online and be unanimous, you can meet other people who love that thing, that maybe it's just sort of an odd hobby that your friends might make fun of you about, maybe it's something that -- maybe it's a political preference you don't want your employers to know about, whatever it is, the ability to communicate and connect with people unanimously online allows 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 argue anonymity means lack of accountability. we need identity to have accountability. but there's this other issue of can you escape pervasive surveillance and oversight and can you do that if anonymity is

lost? and this is the angle that kolle striker is going to be explore -- kohl striker is going to be splorg. he's author 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 cole will very shortly explain. cole striker. [applause] >> thanks for having me. my name is cole striker. i'm an author based in new york and i've spent the last couple of years of my life studying anonymity, first through the similar stuff that parmy's been work on, studying unanimous and these communities that have chosen to operate under the veil of anonymity for various rrnings for good and bad -- reasons, for good and bad. yes, so, i basically decided to talk about a history of

anonymity. and there's a couple reasons. one, is because i think that there are probably a lot of people in this audience who are of the opinion that if i've done nothing wrong, i have nothing to hide. thanks widespread opinion in american society. shared by a lot of my close friends and family before my book came out. so that book was kind of dedicated to them. and then the other reason is i have a personal rule not to talk too much about technology when there's a guy with a ponytail talking after me. so i won't be talking -- i don't want to look too foolish. so i'll focus on the history. [laughter] so, yes, unanimous 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 they started to take this kind of pseudo political bent where they were going after people they thought were censoring the web, promoting surveillance, and this picture is just an example of what unanimous was doing. where they invited the internet

to name their new flavor of mountain due and the winner was hitler did nothing wrong which was basically a way of saying, if you come onto our in her internet and try to capitalize -- onto our internet and try to capitalize on our creativity, this is what you're going to get in return. they weren't big fans of my book. these quotes are from reviews on amazon. they basically don't like it when people write about them. or at least at the time before they became a huge media sensation this was basically the reaction that you would get. if you wrote about unanimous. and they gave me the same kind of treatment that parmy got where they tried to find out where i lved, they harassed may -- lived, they harassed my family, they sent me junk mail. they sent my aunt a letter under my name that was basically a deep confession of my sexual urges toward her. this woman's in her 60's. [laughter] basically my family and friends

couldn't understand. they're like, there ought to be a law that people shouldn't be allowed to say these kind of nasty things about you online. and just hide behind anonymity, it doesn't seem fair. i found that to be such a widespread view that that became the subject of my next book. even very powerful people, i kind of dedicated the book to randy zuckerberg, the 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. they were saying the same things along the lines of, if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide. so, without further a, do, i would like to get into -- ado, i would like to get into the history of unanimous. a quote from emily dickinson. so there are a couple of reasons why someone might have wanted to be unanimous and one might be to uphold modesty. an example of like is the 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 he was trying to basically pray through this work. another example, we have alice in wonderland. the author, lewis carrol, that wasn't his real name, basically didn't want to associate his stories with his serious academic work. and he was a painfully shy mathematician, didn't want those two worlds colliding. so they had a pragmatic point of his own identity, where in this person i'm this person and in this person i'm this person. another reason to be unanimous might be to stymie sexist. there's countless examples of this throughout history. two of my favorites are charlotte bro in, te who has a great -- bronte who has a great quote here saying, i want to be judged as an author, not as a man or woman. in those days, being a woman author invited an unimaginable

amount of prejudice against one's works. another great example is mar janne evans who you all know as george eliott. she used her second identity as a tool that could be dropped at any moment were it cease to be useful for her. i have a friend who wrote for the political blog for some me under the pseudo -- pseudoname and spent over a year talking about the seedy underbelly of the lobbying industry in washington, d.c., cultivated a rabid following. and basically aye as soon as they found out she was a woman, immediately turned on her. her comment section became a landful of people calling her fat and ugly and a pig. basically something that would never happen to a man because men are valued more in our society on their ideas that they bring to the table and women are valued based on their looks. i think that to say that this is something that we no longer have to deal with is a position that can only be driven by privilege and ignorance.

the examples here are kind of like the godfathers of the unanimous group. "gulliver's travels" was throwing molotv cocktails at the establishment. he also wrote an essay about how the starving irish would eat their children as a way of using is a tire to attack the -- 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 then most importantly in my opinion, this here is thomas payne. we'll get to him in a second. but i just -- i don't have a ton of time so i'm going to buzz through these bullet points. 1538, first licensing law in place. everything that's printed has to be run by a royal analyst i

guess you would say to make sure that it doesn't say anything nasty about the crown or the church. sometime later, printers also included -- it wasn't good enough to go just after the author. if you were caught printing something that was written by someone who had something nasty to say, you were also -- your neck was on the line. 1579, john stubbs wrote "the discovery of a gaping gulf". it was a work of political satire and i think he's particularly interesting because they cut off his hands and his name was stu about, ps is -- stubbs so it almost is a perfect outcome for him. there 1589, martin was published. he used anonymity as offense. he named real people in power, basically criticizing them publicly in a way that they couldn't fight back because he

was unanimous. in 1643, another printing regulation where instead of the crown it becomes the state, it becomes the primary body for deciding what stuff can be published and what stuff gets someone killed or thrown in jail. john twyn was a printer who printed something by an unanimous author and had his head put on a spike and his body quartered and each of his body parts were put on the gates of london just as a sign to anyone who might try to pull something like that. and then things start to get better. ou have john lock publishing locke publishing "two treatises." in 1734 john peter zenger is acquitted. that's a turning point for people in governance saying they want to cool a little bit of putting all these people in

jail. and then of course 1776, a monumental year. thomas payne writes "common sense". and then over the course of the next century you have abolitionists, pacifists, also using anonymity or pseudo anonymity in order to speak out against the power that be. and then fast forwarding all the way up to the 1958, we've got a couple of court cases that were important. ncaap vs. alabama. alabama decides that it wants the membership list of the ncaap. the ncaap says, hell no. if you get this list, all of our members are going to have burning crosses on their lawns tomorrow morning. and the court favored the ncaap. was an this antifamiliar fret hearing that said -- antipamphlet hearing that said you can't distribute them unless there's a name on them and that was overturned

here. then skipping away ahead to 1994, you start to see this in the digital realm. really the first antiscientology movement that we've seen blown up with unanimous 15 years later. d then a finnish unanimous remailer. these were guys that had their doors kicked in by the f.b.i., hard drives seized, things like that, which really was kind of the trigger for the hackers being really activists, was kind of born here, where they were fighting for freedom against censorship and for freedom of speech. d then in 1997, excuse me, aclu vs. zel miller. you have the state of georgia saying no one can use the internet under a sued anymore. thankfully the state decided, georgia, you don't own the internet or run the show here,

so just chill out. and then going alongside this history, we've got the history of cripping to are aify. but it's a fascinating history of how basically crypt graphic technology was lip rated from the few organizations that had access to it. mainly because it was used as a military tool. you have the public now able to conceal their messages, digital messages, and mainly this happened because there was an economic reason, banks needed to be able to secure financial data and then over time it got to the point where the everyman, provided that he has the tech savvy, can now use this information, this technology to conceal their information. so, today a lot of people in very powerful positions are basically saying, why do we need privacy? i think this is really concerning. here's a guy, this is a very

super journalist who says, if you don't -- 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 if this journalist had at least just seen the last 10 minutes of my talk, would feel differently about it. here's somebody else. this is a microsoft research who are wants driver's licenses for the internet. and any hacker will laugh at you if you tell them that this is a possibility. but basically this would be an authentication law that would work like a log-in to facebook where you would log-in to the entire internet instead of just individual websites and everything you do online would be traced to you. 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 dog done nothing wrong, i have nothing to hide. another one i think is privileged related. isn't this just a fake problem that doesn't matter to people who have never had to worry about putting food on the table? my argument is that unanimity

and privacy issues are of most concern to people that are on the fringes. most mar january -- marginalized, least privileged people. 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 doesn't need it. then there's pedophiles, cyberthieves, cyberterrorists, things like that. what's going to happen if we allow for a world of unanimity, won't these people run rampant? i've got news for you. we live in that world. any kind of measures taken to track people are easily circumvented by people who have enough technical know-how to get around them. my opinion is that hackers are always going to be one step ahead of the feds and even the feds employ very smart hackers, we should never underestimate

the ability of people to break systems. then finally, the 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 those n.s.a. leaks. and i think that that's kind of the case in point here. we are far less secure than we thought our information was. and the fact that the n.s.a. has unfettered access into all of these technological platforms that we're using on a daily basis should be cause for concern. and even if we don't -- even if we trust obama and trust basically our benevolent overlords today, who is to say what the landscape is going to look like 10, 20, 30, 40 years down the line? the decisions that we make now are far-reaching. so basically this is all setting up to what i was -- what i like to call the identity wars which is the original title of my last beak -- 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 have family circle which -- silent circle which are hecklogical platforms that protect people's identities and you have wild carts like -- wild cards like unanimous who are trying to create ways where people can perform commercial transactions unanimously. and then on the other side, you've got facebook, google, the n.s.a., the f.b.i., governments like chinese and then corporations like chevron and at&t. i threw chevron on there because they're trying to basically force corporations like yahoo! and google to divulge nine years' worth of email and web browsing history from people they are trying to fight in court. and so that's -- that kind of a threat could come from any powerful company. so, i guess the whole thesis here is that the 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 is living in iran or even the homosexual teenager who is living in alabama and doesn't want his parents to find out. there are plenty of good reasons to want to have different kinds of identities. thank are different 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. hanks so much, cole. that story about zuckerberg and his property, that really does say it all, doesn't it? particularly r, in this country we are really fascinated by what people like to call smart technology. technology that can think on its own, artificial intelligence. but what happens when that technology starts to do things

that you didn't know it could do. and that you didn't consent for it to do? what happens if the technology turns on you? turns against you? there's plenty of science fiction movies about that kind of thing happening. but it's actually not just the stuff of science fiction. robert vamosi is a digit cal security expert. he's written a book titled "when gadgets betray us: the dark side with our infat situation with new technologies." he has realized just how disconnected we are with the capabilities of the gadgets and services used all the time and that we've come to depend on and he believes it's absolutely important to educate people about the capabilities as a technology -- 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 us a glimpse of how this all works. robert, thank you very much. >> thank you. [applause] >> so i'm robert vamosi. i'm ccisp which gives me the credit of being an expert. i'm also a security analyst for a corporation which is a device security company out of san francisco. as we just found out, i'm the author of when gadgets betray us and i'm also in a movie documentary about hacking called code 2600 which is now available from amazon. i'm also a graduate of the university so it's great to be back here in chicago. thank you. , so i'm going to talk on the subject that's a little bit different than what cole and parmy set up and still talk

about privacy but i'm going to talk to you about the internet of things, this idea that all these gadgets that we have are being connected to each other and to the internet. and what those consequences might be. i see it as a new with every new technology you are always going to have this trade-off between security and convenience. you want the cool factor but what are you giving up in the meantime? privacyt of behavioral might be collected by these new gadgets that are coming into our lives? we are in a time of great experimentation. if you think back 10 years ago when facebook was first around, people put their addresses and all sorts of personal information because they wanted to share it with the world. we realized it was a bad idea. what is going on passively with

a lot of the gadgets that we own? what is being collected that we are not thinking about yet? gadgets that are designed to collect data and it is important. i am talking about medical devices. dakota and in north you don't want to drive a four hours to get that medical practitioner to adjust something in your medical device, you could do it over the internet. that is great. that is more time you could live and not be in transit. how can -- how secure are those devices? there was a researcher and he the security of an insulin pump. he looked at what was going on with particular bladers -- heart different realtors -- defr

he did have an opportunity before he died to work with the medical device manufacturers and hopefully his legacy will be those manufacturers are security -- including more security to make those devices resilient to pranksters who may want to throw a pacemaker into this estate -- into this state. test onny in 2010 did a commercially available pd's and what they found was the data that was found on these tvs were stored in the clear and data in transit was also being transmitted in the clear. there was no encryption going on. you might say what is the big deal. if you subscribe to a service now your username

and password is available to someone who could go on -- on go in and nownd take your service and start watching shows that you are watching. theft of service. maybe not a big deal to you but we are going to see other examples of gadgets that collect information and the consequences get more severe. back in 2009, the government put an incentive in front of a lot of the utility companies and said roll this out. make sure every home and business has a smart been or -- meter. do we bother to test these devices before we roll about? no, we just rolled out and now it is out there. did we look at the basic security of them? did we find out what is being collected? now that they are out there, what can we do with that data that is being collected? that is what is really

interesting about these gadgets when they connect to the internet. ofthink of the convenience immediately having access but five years or 10 years from now what can be done with the data? the bottom part of this slide is what you see from a smart meter. every 20 seconds, sometimes it is often as two seconds, it pulls the data of energy usage in your home. you see some steady blocks bear which is something like an air conditioner going on and off and you see these values when -- valleys when it is evening or when you are away from home. they are subjected peaks in their. re. researchers have now dealt then and found that digital tvs admit particular signatures. the researchers can actually say

with maybe 80% accuracy what you are watching just based on your power usage. wow. who knew? a lot of these devices do not protect data at rest or motion. some german hackers had some fun with it. the top chart is an example of that where they manipulated the readings from a smart meter that would display on the graph. if you can't see it, what they are saying there is -- you have been hacked. you can lower your energy usage at home. the neighbor that is causing you problems, you can raise their energy usage so they get billed more. are currently exhausting all of the ip addresses and we are not transitioning to something called ip6. consider all of the grains of sand in all of the beaches and

sand, that is all the addresses that will be available under it. gadgets will start to use it. one company has started to roll out encoded using those addresses. this is great because you can theit and you can regulate hue of individual light bulb in your home. in -- an opportunity for someone to use drop. i can know when you are home or when you are not or maybe i want to know your preferences. we go further with that. if we have so many ip addresses albert got -- out there, we will connect everything. i am talking about in my book a lot of different gadgets that we have around the home that we may not even think about as connecting to the internet. new digital cameras now had that capability.

they have their own internet address. what can be done with that? a couple of things. researchers have scanned the internet and recognize that these particular cameras and they were able to go into the cameras and take those autographs off of the st card -- sd card. thes a big deal because digital file format that is being used collects longitude and latitude to your location data and puts it into that photograph appeared if i get a bunch of photographs from you, i can start to trace your behavior. i can plot on a map where you live, most likely where you work, what parks you like to go on the photographs i've taken off of your camera. i don't even have to go to your camera. i can go to some website and pull down photographs because a lot of the mobile phones still

track location data. you can turn that off so good note -- good news on that. let's leave the home and take a walk. in london recently, the company that makes digital displays on the side of garbage cans decided they wanted to go a step further and start collecting data about the people that passed by these particular garbage cans. they started collecting the mac address. every address that we have has a mac address. it identifies the manufacturer and the last digits are the edit fire -- the identifier. it will start to build a profile. you know that every day at 12:00 , this device walks by this particular garbage can and then there was another can that picks up that same signature to it later. a path.collect

you collect a lot of random data without knowing with that person is. what are we going to do with this data? i don't know. it is good to be aware that this type of data is being collected and that people like the mayor of london quickly shut this down once he found out it was going on in his city. they are conveniences and having -- and having -- for navigation -- and having dashboard navigation. there is a company in 2011 that actually used the data 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.

so we had virtual speed traps. they publicly apologized and said they would never do that again but think about that the next time you use google or some other navigation service. they have an idea of how far it is from point a to point b and if you suddenly get to point b faster than expected, you can infer that you are probably speeding to get there. the things that go one into your car are being recorded. from 21 -- front with -- from 2011, the president of the united states have black boxes and it. the engineers use the black boxes. in the 1970's, people died because of the early airbags. black boxes are now in every single car and as of 2012 the owner's manuals have to declare it is the case. -- 2014, they said that that 40 pieces of data

in that black box. that includes if you are wearing a seatbelt, did you have your lights on, did you have your stereo on, how loud was the music in the car at the time of the crash. that candidate is being recorded so that assumption to think about the next time you are driving. you are being watched whether you want to or not. 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. my data plan is pretty liberal so i turn off wi-fi. -- i feel a little more secure about that. i turn off photographs. really paranoid, don't take the same path every day to work. shake it up a little bit. go a different route.

the dip -- the devices being tracked so maybe they think different people are doing that. turn off your devices occasionally. maybe not use technology so much. i love technology and i am not going to start doing that. my take away is think about what the device might be collecting and learn to live with it. be comfortable with what you are using and if you do not like it, pushed back. do not buy that device argues that technology. just push back a little bit. the gadgets don't control us, we control them. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you so much. -- ifint of information your cell phone battery is still in your cell phone, it can be turned on remotely and use as a tracking device even if you have it turned off. if you don't want to be tracked, and leave it at home. that you can phone take the battery out. easily,long swiftly and

-- sorry. turning to who is concerned about the problem that companies make false claims about their security. they claimed they had their data secure, they claim they are taking these measures, but is it really all that secure? he is dedicated to holding companies accountable for the claims they are making about your security and your privacy. research, thehis level of anonymity that customers can expect is fundamentally unreliable. him who isver to going to explain this for us. thank you.

[applause] >> thank you. rebecca doesn't mention i bought because i do not have one. i could talk about any privacy topic. what i found most useful to share with you today is online tracking and how companies are tracking is online when we browse. let me show you this cartoon. do you remember the famous tagline that but with this? that was the early innocent days of internet. it makes you feel nostalgic doesn't it? imagine what that would've sounded like if that cartoon was published today. it would be something like -- it is the internet. they know your favorite brand of pet fruit -- food. this is the reality that we live in today. talk towhat i wanted to

about. i want to give you batting good news. the bad news is that we live in a world with exploding complexity of online tracking. students atm of princeton that i'm working with where i am a professor and we are reverse engineering the companies are doing online in terms of tracking us and are personally data -- personal data. i want to give you good news. power in thet of situation. there are a lot of things you can do and i want to share that with you as well. what i want to talk about pacific league when i talk about online tracking is what i call online tracking which i considered the most insidious form of online tracking. it is where sites other than the ones you are visiting that are typically invisible are collecting profiles as you are browsing. you might wonder how does this happen? screenshot --u a

this is from a study at stanford of online tracking. this is from the new york times and you can see in the picture how many areas are highlighted in red and these are all content that are being served by sites other than the new york times. when this happens your browser connects to other sites that are concealed in all of these other sites now know you have visited the new york times and whatever other site you visited and that is how they compile information on you. one study revealed there are 64 independent tracking mechanisms on one website. just to drive home this point of how subtle these trackers can be, let me show you a screenshot -- let me show you what these third-party trackers could be. it could be well-known companies. it could be companies that you probably have never heard of. there was one track at that we

found in our database which is very prominent. you probably visited this site and they remember you because they are in the business of remembering you. screenshot of the national health service and you are looking at their syphilis page. a lot of information -- good information. there was a facebook like button on their and five people afflicted -- have clicked it. [laughter] not iary part is that the people- like it, who visited was not aware there was a facebook tracker on this page and that facebook is watching what they browse online. facebook has your identity and knows who you are because you have left your browser locked into facebook like most of us do. you -- does not convince

there are some invisible trackers, let me summarize why one may want to worry about this online tracking. there is basically our intellectual privacy because people behave differently when they know there are hundreds of people watching what you do. that is a freedom to protect. there is behavioral profiling and targeting. that is the level of targeting and profiling that this data can reveal about you. there is also polluting area evidence that browsing can be used for price dissemination. you might be the type of person that does not care about this and you only being safe from the government. tell me about the nsa. i have news for you. in the recent nsa leaks, it was revealed that one of the things they're using to track you is double-click tracking cookies. these third-party companies are doing nsa's work for them.

scary stuff. i have been working -- researching the online space for four years now. let me share with you some of the things i have found that with what works and what does not work in how you can protect yourself. one piece of good news is that something that does work is public opinion. this might seem logical that a lot of these companies really care if there is a privacy backlash. there have been many incidents because there was a backlash. you might remember google buzz. let me give you an example that is closely related to third-party online tracking. there was this feature called facebook instant personalization. i consider this the most riotously interest -- privacy intrusive. talk silently in the

background and they tell you who you are and various things about you like your location and various movies that you like. many experts complained about this. organizations who we have heard about several times already picked up this. because of that, facebook limited to a very literary rollout and not happening today. the internet could be a worse place for privacy if this was allowed to happen. we are living in the reality of facebook. that is one piece of good news. on the other hand, here is something that does not work. advocates torivacy sit down at the table do not seem to have worked. when they tell me the story of do not track. i am one of the research behind the do not track proposal. they are saying, if you're

worried about tracking, we are ok with that because we believe most people will be convinced of the event is of it. -- the advantages of it. let's make a browser setting so that the browser can help you. browser vendors got on board with this. it is on every browser today. that is called the do not track. what happened? there was two years of constant negotiations and what tracking companies are obligated to do and not obligated to do. everybody has finally agreed that these negotiations are going nowhere. this idea of being on the same page and talking about it together, that has not worked out. that for do not track, it is time to move on. we are in a world where the

interests of the tracking companies in the interests of consumers are misaligned. i am ok with that. we tried but it did not work. you there was a bunch of these blocking tools from eye tracking and these blocking tools work really well. s is an example of what i use. there are more. these are typically browser out on's -- add-ons. when i tell people about blocking tools, one of the things they say is, this is not a good solution for me because there are new privacy intrusions all the time so i have to go and change the settings again or have to install another blocking tool. here is my answer to that. on top ofecessarily all the privacy intrusions that are going on.

there are a lot of organizations that are in the business of staying on top of this and telling you about them. there is a privacy company that i like. there are others. one of the things you could do that is very powerful is just get on the twitter feed of these organizations that are in the business of always knowing whenever there is a new privacy intrusion and telling you in very simple steps what you have to install. that is a method that can work for most people. to put it differently, online privacy -- the price of online privacy is vigilance. but we have today is that this eternal vigilance is a problem that can be solved by technology. people give up when they hear you have to keep changing your privacy settings all the time. i have been doing that and teaching people to do that and that is not hard. all you have to do is set aside an hour or two of budget or time

-- per month to stay on top of this. that is an easy tool everybody can use. in my years of researching, there is one other point that is come out which has been people get into an arms race. if it is an arms race, bring it on. the balance of power is with consumers. this is because of the legal nuance. safari had a feature to block third-party cookies. in one of the tracking features, try to circumvent this tracking protection. an independent researcher found this out, who i am going to show you in a second, because of that

the federal trade commission was and said thisn was a circumvention of the existing privacy tool. google was given a large fine. if he gets into an arms race, there are legal mechanisms to protect us such as the federal trade commission. go ahead, be comfortable in calling those privacy tools. a success story is that reverse engineering i independent researchers has helped a lot in revealing the state of online tracking. these are a couple of guys who have been heroes in this new wave of research. let me summarize the three takeaways that i have for you. one is to support privacy groups because it is true these groups -- a lot of these tools are given news. the second one is going to be to

voice her concerns to companies and regulators because we have seen that public opinion has been a powerful force for companies to change their privacy policies. one is thatortant these blocking tools really work. is you haveeat here to pick the right tools and stay updated. it involves effort. privacyugh the price of is eternal vigilance, that is not hard. get on twitter, follow some of these privacy newsfeeds. that will almost take care of the problem for you. you will feel like you're in control because you will find out about things as soon as they happen anyone know how to protect yourself. i will leave you with that thought. thank you for your time. [applause] >> thank you so much. i use a few of those blocking tools on my different browsers and i have to say, yeah, they

are impressive and how they work. least, while google may be a household name, there is another search engine that most of you have not heard of. this is a search engine upper websites for devices that are connected to the internet. engine is basically scanning the internet for the ip addresses of various devices and enabling people to search and locate these devices. is going to ber talking about the research he determine network security logistics and to perform testing for his clients using this search engine, among other things. he is here to share with us how we can use this information in

empowering ways to carry out repetitive practices of our own. here he is the tell us about all of the rather amazing things that one can find just by searching the internet. thanks, dan. [applause] >> hello. i will be your ponytail for this evening. i havee last two years, had this habit of finding things underneath -- on the internet and displaying them in presenting them. short compilation of some of the things i have found on the internet. to find interesting stuff online if you know where to look. you don't need special tools. you don't need special skills. you need a browser. a lot of stuff can be found by searching google, but even more so there is a search engine

exposingowdown that is to the internet versus a webpage. it. is the front end of this is where you type your query. it is just like google essentially. it is to show you what is connected beyond web servers. you have to imagine the internet like america's freeway system. if you were to get out and look around, if you are a step out over an overpass, you could look andde every truck bed convertible car. the internet is the same way. people are exposing things either willingly or unknowingly and anybody can look at the know where to look. there are tons of internet cameras. 972,000 publicly

accessible webcams. this happens to be in somebody's office. somebody put it on the internet. why? i have no idea. this is another system. this is a camera system i found on the internet. >> ok. too much. this is a hydrogen fuel cell. why someone would want to put that on the internet is beyond my comprehension but it is there and you can get to it if you want to. these things tend to be found at 4g cell phone towers. wind farms are connected to the internet.

here is an interface or one, publicly accessible. it could be italian. some very large industrial system controlling something that looks like it could be under a lot of pressure publicly acceptable -- accessible to the internet. i can control the pumps. do not let me control the pumps. it was -- it is a bad idea. is a private residence. this is a house. it is someone's home. this thermostat might look familiar. this is a thermostat system that i think is made by honeywell. is a popular controller to do this kind of thing. these are connected to the internet as well and they have touch panels you can control using a bnc program -- protocol -- vnc protocol over the internet. larger systems that could be in

large buildings like this one, this is a system that controls the boiler room. this is contents under pressure situation where the system is publicly accessible online. you probably don't want nefarious people getting their hands on it. you have to ask yourself -- this system has been online for years and years. if a bad guy wanted to do bad stuff with it, why haven't they already? further,hat a step some of today's other speakers have elaborated. you can start to confer things based on this information that you find and you can cross-link information to find more interesting things. this is a short little example of that. this is a camera system that i found somewhere in the united states that is using another internet ash network phase -- network interface. i can control this over the internet using a browser.

i can pan around and spy on the girl at the front desk and i can look around the room and a lobby. so i did. there is a cool tool you can put into chrome. it will tell you some small details about the website you are visiting, the the city is in, whether it is scary or not, it things like that. you can validate where this thing lives. in this case it is an newberry port, massachusetts. panning the camera over to the the front doorn which laughably says security integrators. and their information city, i was able to find out on google where they are and this is as close as google maps would let me get to them. this was done with a browser. i use nothing but google chrome to do this. no special tools, just playing on the internet.

you can take it up a notch and do some simple social engineering. it is amazing when you can do and this was not me, but these were sent to me. it is amazing what you can do call a person working at a pizza place and say, we are watching you, you should do this -- some stuff. i've been doing this talk for a while and based on what i've done, people on the internet i releasedme tools in one of them was inside of a pizza place. they call the place and you see the monitor on the far left is covered in brown paper. they told the girl that was something wrong with the computer and that in order to fix it they had to put brown paper around it and she had to write "omg hax."

equipment could not be found on the internet. i never really worked on an industrial setting before but this is a building that has 15 youth average of coolers. this is the interface. it is publicly accessible. us talk about information linkage -- begins. this is a ui. the name ofell what the guy is that at men's this when i am not doing it, i will give you one dollar. he even mailed me because my computer's name appeared in the list when i landed on this controller. things in the world around you are keeping track of and loosely logging places in not a lot of people look. the protocol that was designed systems together hvac

and industrial systems that were running in businesses like this one. if you wanted the air- conditioning to talk to the garage or the alarm, you could use this to do that. ash along makes the system and they are stackable. on makes the system and they are stackable. there is a place in denmark that has one place controlling all the controllers in the city. the lower controllers were password-protected but the upper one that controls everything was not. i found a place that was like a convention center under that basketball floor, i guess, is an ice rink that you can defrost if you are up to it. why these controllers are online, i am not sure. i am guessing it is for the convenience of the organization. they should have taken five

minutes to think about what they were doing before they put it on the internet and i found it. they have conveniently placed their floor plans on their website so you want to mess with certain parts of the building, you can. other organizations that are --trolled by this system another version of this talk has another dozen of these things that is controlled by the same unit. you get into one and can control the rest. it'd think your phones are safe, maybe, depends. this is a screenshot of an application you can install on and ride it -- on and android phone. this is a phone that someone has set up in the living room is publicly accessible that is monitoring their living room. you can sit there and watch what they are doing in their living room. not only can you watch the video, you can use drop on the room. if you really want to scare them, you wait until it gets dark and you can turn the flash

on and off. you can more skoda at them with the phone. them with theat phone. to theseell that things and put them into test mode. you can mess with stoplights. theess people went back to 1990's, security, security, i will put it on the internet and no one will find it. you can scan the internet over and over again and keep finding this stuff. i will keep doing it and keep laughing at the guys that do this. the i guided -- the idea that you can put something online it will be safe if you don't tell anyone about it is not a good idea. this is another fun find. it has a website, or i should

say the units that are deployed that have web interfaces that look like this. they keep track of every single car that drives to the intersection. i thought the red light cameras but they actually take pictures of everyone. why that is, i am not sure. a c, you can change the destination place where they go. this is a french hydroelectric plant that i found it is directly connected to the internet. let the job or run because i thought it was a malicious website. kilowatt.does read this is a french hydroelectric plant on the internet that is still online today. i've a story that involved our government and the french government talking and he eh," and leftd, " it. the french really like their hydroelectric plants on the internet. this people have found

hydroelectric plant and broken it and cause it to flood people. apparently it is still open and people can still get to it. i put that on twitter. the dhs called me, so police they are listening. the french really do like to leave their power plants online. here's another one, and a third, and a fourth. after four, i give up. satellite systems are online as well. , emergencyays telecommunications equipment, home automation systems, you can control a guy's garage door if you want. swimming pool -- why would you put a swimming pool and the internet? i don't know. why would you give me control of the acid pump controlled by the system? you can put it into manual mode" the acid into the pool. openly, publicly. anyone who knows the ip address of the system would be able to dump the acid into these -- hte

pool.- the is meant to link together m.r.i. systems. wikipedia has an article that says it is like 27 of them that talk to each other. some genius thought it would be a good idea to put that on the internet. medical stuff, imaging. so, i went looking for it and i found a lot of them. direct the connected to the internet. this is what it looks like when centricity.or ge this, it you at can see some stuff. i looked it up and it turns out it is a breast, liver, and prostate imaging tools that is used is hospital. this is publicly accessible on the internet. why are people putting this.

? i'm sorry, i'm like two minutes over. >> abel are telling me i'm going to have to thank you very much. >> louisiana senator david bitter, the top public and on the environment and public works committee, is the guest on "newsmakers." he talks about politics in his state. here is a preview. >> how big of an issue will this be in 2014? that race as an example, that is at least 80% of that whole campaign in terms of what it is about, what the important issues are to louisiana folk and i don't think that is going to be unusual. it is a huge issue. >> would you like to see her defeated? >> absolutely. she is helping draw the country in the wrong direction in my opinion, including by helping harry reid leave the senate,

including by supporting ultra- liberals who disagree with the mainstream of louisiana thought, lead in different policy areas. >> watch the entire interview "newsmakers" on c- span. >> as 2013 wraps up, we are here on the west front of the u.s. capitol to tell us about our c- span at your interview series. coming up on monday, a look at immigration laws. tuesday, senate filibuster rule changes. nsa surveillance on wednesday. thursday, it is gun laws. on friday, we wrap up the week with the look at the u.s. budget and government shutdown. that all stress monday at 8:00 eastern on c-span. -- e're joined host: we are joined at the table

by senator tom coburn, republican from oklahoma, here to talk about his newest addition of the waste book which he has put out for the last several years. you are also a member of the select intelligence committee on capitol hill. we want to get your take on the recommendations from the panel on reining in the nsa that came out yesterday. what do you make of those recommendations and what do you think congress and the president can do with them? guest: we have been busy. i haven't thoroughly studied that. i will look at the recommendations. i don't agree there should be a civilian director. there is too much coordination. i have sat on this committee for 3.5 years. what is in the press is oftentimes erroneous, but you can't state that it is erroneous without compromising other things. senator feinstein and senator

chambliss are often perilous to correct things that are in the media. the second thing i would say is that a lot of what is put out, what mr. snowden has put out is erroneous, but you can't say how it is erroneous without compromising our own national security. i think some mistakes have been made. there is no question about that. this is one of the most thoroughly oversighted agencies. two hours a week i spent time in a closed review oversighting this agency. i will read the recommendations and look at them. also, having the inside knowledge about what they have done and what they have prevented and how they have helped us secure this country without violating privacy rights of americans i think is

phenomenal. host: you think the advisory people -- panel was the right group of people to put together for this? guest: i don't want to cast judgment on that. i am pretty much known as an independent thinker. i lean more towards the libertarian side. i am not real worried about what nsa has been doing based on what i have seen in the protections that have been put in place to protect civil liberties through what they have done. we live in a very different world today than we did 10-15 years ago. i am not for giving away our freedoms to give ourselves protection. but they have been reined in significantly, but have also done a very effective job. host: one of your other efforts for the past several years has been to put together the waste book, as you call it.

calling out wasteful government spending. the waste book tallied some $30 billion in wasteful, unnecessary government spending. that is the highest total of any of your previous waste books. was this a particularly bad year or was the waste just easier to find? guest: oh --i would be careful with the numbers. the last one was $25 billion. we are spending money on things we don't have on things we don't absolutely need. that was interesting hearing your last conversation on bernanke. bernanke did not have any help from the u.s. congress. we have the monetary policy, that is what the fed can do. but there was no positive fiscal policy from the u.s. congress. same thing goes for the spending. administrations can do so much.

but if the congress is not going to oversight but the administration is doing, isn't going to be specific when the write legislation, isn't going to expose waste through an oversight hearing and holding people accountable, then you are going to continue to have it. you have a $3.5 trillion budget. host: if people want to see the waste book it self, you can find that at coburn.senate.gov. is this book meant for members of congress? is it meant for the agencies that are -- guest: it is for both. these are some real problems. a lot of people will disagree with me on whether that is appropriate spending. you cannot disagree that in a time when we are borrowing $750

billion, those things can't be a priority. host: what are the things you highlight? guest: a study to a yale professor for $400,000 to assess the intellectual capabilities of tea partiers. the focus of that study was to show the people or constitutional conservatives don't have the intellectual capacity that other people have. the study surprised because they're smarter on average than the average voter. and that is funding through nsf. there was a political purpose to it. if you're going to do that, then do it with private money. that is all borrowed money. the $30 billion in this thing is borrowed money. we are borrowing it against our future. maybe it is a good thing to study that, but if it is, if we

have to borrow money to study it right now, when we are in trouble as a nation, should we be doing that now? let's say you of a completely different political philosophy than i do and you think we are -- we ought to look at that. should we look at it now? when we are borrowing the money to do it? or should maybe we wait and have some judgment and maybe not spend money on somewhat questionable things? especially in light of that they could be challenge from a political perspective. maybe we ought not to spend the money until we get our house in order. host: you bring up the government shutdown as one of the big wastes. talk about the waste you see in the government shutdown. guest: you didn't have to shut it down, one. you paid $300 million to federal employees for not working. you pay them anyway. the amounts of money we are showing here would have kept it from shutting down.

$30 billion is half of what the sequester was per year -- on a discretionary budget. if congress would do their job and create an expectation that you will not get away with spending money stupidly or frivolously or not following up, you would change spending habits. the $30 billion outlined in here you would not have to have a government shutdown. host: who puts together the waste book? guest: my staff. we will go through the year and see things. we are constantly -- this is not hard to do. compiling it at the end is what is hard to do, to make sure you have no errors. the last third of it is nothing with footnotes and references where we got the information and what the basis of it is. the hard part is not collecting

the information, but put it out there were people don't think you are totally being -- have a biased source. everything is sourced and legitimately so. this is a third of what we could have put out. host: we will be going through specific examples from the waste book for about the next 40 minutes or so on "the washington journal." if you want to call and ask him about the waste book and have some thoughts on it, he is here to answer your questions and talk about it. senator, i appreciate you coming on to talk about this. jesse in virginia beach, virginia. republican line. caller: hello, senator. guest: good morning.

caller: on 9/11, building seven was not hit by a plane. random fires could not have done that. would you be willing to meet with and review the evidence about the controlled the motion representatives -- host: we will try to stick to the waste book question. guest: we will look at that. i will not spend a lot of time meeting with people. if someone has something that is definitive, we will certainly look at it. host: julie from los angeles, california on the line for democrats. good morning. caller: good morning. hi, senator coburn. when you are doing senate hearings, i found your interactions were particularly memorable and i'm loving the goatee. guest: [laughter] they are brilliant people.

like most supreme court justices, sometimes i agree with what they are doing and sometimes i don't. i don't think it really matters. the questions you hear are really interesting as they hear cases. that comes from the fact that smartre both very individuals and know the law well. i think they're doing fine. judgment which coincides with justice -- if you have open and clear judgment and it is willing to look at the constitution and look at the facts of the case and it is done out in the open, essentially with a hearing before the justices -- one of the things i would like to say see with the supreme court is

documentation of their meetings as they decide these cases behind closed doors so that we can have more insight into what the discussions were before we see both that opinion and dissenting opinions that come out. host: how did you feel about having cameras? guest: i think cameras in courts are terrible. just like cameras in the house of called all sorts of acting out, just the same as the senate. people look at the camera, the don't look at each other. they are used-car salesman selling their point. i believe courts ought to be open, we are to hear it. i am not a big fan, because of what i have seen happen in courts, i don't even like court tv because of all the theatrics that go on. host: we are talking about your waste book this morning. put out earlier this week. is there one specific example

in here that particularly hooked -- irked you or surprised you? guest: there's always one or two. i don't like when you see stuff done for political purposes the the agencies -- i don't like that. host: is that like the funding -- guest: what we ought to be is very careful to make sure we are not trying to make a judgment about political for loss of the. is this a study we need to know? and what value is it? and is there a bias -- in that are you trying to get a certain outcome? sometimes at nih, you see that. the things that bother me are poor decision-making that never

gets held accountable. that is a real problem and u.s. government. we have $677 million spent on airplanes that we will not use. as soon as they came off the they went to arizona to the boneyard. the person who made that decision did not get fired. not held accountable. the people that make the decisions -- they are not held accountable. the companies that provide things to the federal government who don't perform, we do not take them to court. we spent $300 million on a blimp. supposedly for warfare observation. an army blimp that flew one time in new jersey, not afghanistan. it did not meet the requirements so we sold it back to the

manufacturer for $300,000. who made the decision to do that? who is held accountable? what general in the pentagon is forced to retire? did the people produce what was actually asked to be reduce? did we hold them accountable if they didn't? we never hold people accountable in the federal government. they coast. we do not hold individuals accountable or the contractors who did not deliver. let me give you some numbers -- the federal government spends over $80 billion a year on i.t. $80 billion. when you take all the gao and ig reports and the contracts that are over -- that are high risk by gao. it is estimated that over half of everything we spent every year on i.t. gets thrown away.

$40 billion. that is more than everything in this book just on i.t. in the federal government. we are not holding people accountable. the administration did not do it, congress does not do it. the number one problem is congress. they will not do their job. host: many members of congress is really awaiting publication of the wastebook each year. this is the fourth year you have done it. here is a tweet from senator rand paul. calling out the $65 million in hurricane sandy relief money spent on television ads promoting tourism and in new york and new jersey. #wastebook. talking with senator coburn about his wastebook. $30 billion in spending listed in the wastebook. jonathan from georgia on our line for independents. good morning. caller: good morning. my comment is actually -- it is on the oversight of the nsa. i think it applies to waste as

well. i look at it -- it is always a case of the fox guarding the henhouse. it is an issue of public trust. when you look at spy abuse, i look at this close to previously dealing with -- it was not until the break-in and the fbi that we discovered the abuse. then you had the church commission to actually look further. i think similarly to the nsa scandal, you had the snowden affair that expose wrongdoing. you had clapper come on and lie to the american people. i think those recommendations coming out should be looked at closely. i think it requires some type of church commission. on the waste part, i think it is the public trust level of our government.

congress and senate and the president, of course. it is at an all-time low. they are saying trust us to oversight ourselves. host: james on twitter writes in that we are spending $50 billion a year on snooping on americans. are we getting our money's worth? guest: that number is not accurate. i think the independent caller made a great point. we do have a crisis of confidence in our country. that is based on lack of effective leadership. both by the president, the house, and the senate. why would you think we are doing why would we be at 6% approval looking at what we have done? the senate majority leader --it is way too high.

you have to have been living in a hole or known nothing about should be required of the u.s. senate to think we should have a 6% approval rating. the senate was designed by our founders to force compromise. to build consensus. to not react to the public pull. to think long-term. we have had leadership in the last 8 years that has gone counter to that. it has made a partisan, non- compromise, non-consensus, and nonreactive to the needs of the country. it has been almost 5 years since the president signed an appropriation bill. why is that? we do not have to want to take a vote. as a u.s. senator, i don't want to have to defend my vote? it is the most cowardice thing to not put bills on the floor.

we are now running the senate. you cannot get an amendment or offer a solution. there will be a defense authorization bill today, $700 billion worth of authorization. over half of our discretionary spending. there will not be one amendment offered. the pentagon cannot even report back as the constitution requires how they spent their money? we are not going to do anything about it? we have all this waste in the pentagon -- duplication and incompetence. host: on the subject of doing something, let's talk about what you do when you call out the $30 billion in waste in the wastebook. robert on twitter. senator coburn does this to stir up the tea party. why don't you fix it? guest: i cannot convince my colleagues to do the hard work of oversight.

if that gentleman will recall, we used to do earmarks. somebody offered an amendment to eliminate the bridge to nowhere. that was me. it was a strategy to involve the public and what is going on so they will force change. two years ago, we did away with earmarks. not because career politicians wanted to get rid of them. but because the american people were demanding it. the whole idea is to create such disgust with the stupidity of members of congress that the american people will demand change. i cannot convince them after nine years. i cannot get the leadership to do what they need to do. to actually fulfill their constitutional duty of oversight and transparency. host: have there been smaller victories?

excessive printing costs. guest: it is not going to change until americans demand that their member of congress start doing what they were sent to do. there are a few of them that do. the number one goal is to get reelected, not to preserve the republic. not to make sure we do not waste money. we give stuff to committee chairmen and ranking members to do stuff, nothing happens. 3.5 years ago, i attached an amendment that forced the gao to study every aspect of government. we have now had three reports and will have a fourth one this year. it is over $250 billion worth of duplication and waste per year in the federal government. what they have given us already. only one time in 3.5 years has one committee done anything

about this gao recommendations. it was the labor workforce committee in the house that consolidated 47 training programs into 19. they only had authority over 36. senate has not done anything. no other committee has acted on recommendations that would be saving us hundreds of billions of dollars a year. we are more interested in perception and politics than we are the policy and the future of our country. americans should be disgusted with us. i cannot believe the 6%. nobody is doing their job and there is no leadership to get this country out of trouble. host: talking with senator tom coburn, republican of oklahoma. member of the government affairs and senate intelligence committee. author of the wastebook, the

subject of our conversation this morning. that was published this week. joe in georgia on our line for republicans. caller: good morning. i have been calling in to c-span for 30 years, tom coburn is a hero. i think the only answer is to elect more people like you and ted cruz. i am a member of the tea party. we have amy cramer coming down to be on my television show. we have a guy running for governor just like you. he is running against the incumbent governor. he is a champion just like you. the only answer is to elect super taxpayer champions like you and ted cruz. what do you think? guest: i do not vote for people who are career politicians anymore, i do not care what party.

i do not think you fix washington by sending people up here to fix it. i think the states have to restrict the power of the federal government. it is out of control. we need a convention of the states and to rein in the power of the government. we need term limits in congress. we need to limit the authority of the executive branch. regulations that have major impact on the economy that do not have any basis in science but have a basis in political philosophy. there is a lot of things the states could do if they had a convention to limit the federal government. going back historically, if you read madison, jefferson, if you read our founding fathers, we are so far away from their principals of a limited federal government and the authority of the states in relationship to

the federal government, we need a big change. you are not going to fix it with career politicians. host: how many term limits do you think a member of the house and the senate should serve? guest: a max of two terms in the senate and three times in the house. i am in my 10th year in the senate. that is plenty. host: you served in the house before that. guest: i never intended to come back up here. this place is sick. or is nothing but circular information in washington and very few fresh ideas. it is all handed off to someone else. limiting terms give you freedom to do and be who you think we ought to be. rather than continuing to look to get reelected.

there are two countries in the eyes of washington. the washington country and that the country outside of washington. we are not served well by what we have going on in washington today as a nation. host: mitchell from tennessee on our line for democrats. you are on with senator coburn. caller: good morning. guest: i am doing well, how is chattanooga? it is a pretty part of the country. caller: it is beautiful down here. a couple questions -- you are talking about spending. i don't see why you don't look at loopholes as spending -- guest: tax expenditures are nothing but earmarks in the tax code. $1.2 trillion, i was on the bowles-simpson commission and recommended eliminating many of those.

caller: you guys have to do that. the second thing, do you know the difference between enlisted pay and officers pay. why would you take money from an enlisted man? i was down there for years, i never saw officers relieved me. i was shoveling coal. we had a hard time down there. i spent 15 years and you want to tell me what i did is not worth it? guest: i do not understand what you are saying. i'll have i done that? -- how have i done that? i voted against the bill yesterday, i will vote against this one that will impact retiree pay. i am on the other side of that. you may have me confused with somebody else. caller: i thought i had seen your name as voting for it. guest: no, sir.

host: we will go to spartanburg, south carolina on our line for independents. good morning. caller: good morning. senator coburn, i want to let you know that i appreciate what you are informing us about. i have always thought that it needed to be brought to the front and dealt with. all this abuse. all this spending. it is like the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. i am 66 years old, retired. i do not even make $1000 a month in social security and that is what i live on. you always have to have a policy along with your regular medicare, on and on. i tried to keep myself above water.

i just applaud you, senator, to come on and let us know about wasteful spending. i have been watching c-span for many years. i respect the stuff that they let people -- senators come on and speak about. i am so discouraged. i love our country, but i am really discouraged that we are going down a path. it is like the whole is getting deeper -- the hole is getting deeper and i am afraid we are getting buried under it. guest: we do not have one problem in front of us that is not fixable. but until you take it out of the hands of the politicians here today -- republican and democrat

that play a game with the american people. until you put leadership and that says i do not care what happens to the party, i care what happens to this country. i will make the choices best for the country, not my party. i will speak the words that people do not want to hear because they need to be said. until you have that kind of leadership, we will not fix our country. what i would tell you is 80% of what you hear from washington is a lie. spoken by both parties. it is half truths. a half-truth is a whole lie. we continue to see people not wanting to embrace the truth, the facts of the situation. they rationalize everything so they can look better as a politician. politicians in america have failed this country right now. they are celebrating bipartisanship. that was a deal about politicians, not about the country.

it was good for the politicians. you're not going to have that conflict. we are going back on our word on spending, we put some things in the bill that do not make any sense in terms of asking some people to sacrifice -- like wounded and injured veterans. we are wasting $80 billion a year out of medicare just on fraud. because we will not hold agencies accountable. put in the system that the rest of the industry has and we cannot force it. we do not have an executive at hhs that knows what they are doing in terms of improving things. we have failed. the american people need to reject the status quo of the politicians here today. host: talking about votes this week. you voted no on the budget bill

that was passed last night. you said i will vote no again today. the national defense authorization act. why are you voting no on that? guest: we will never fix the problems at the pentagon without structural change. put some teeth into something that will force them to report numbers. in the constitution it says every year you should get an account for the treasury of how you spent your money. the pentagon has not ever done that. they have no idea where they are spending their money. what i can tell you from my business background. every other successful business if if you cannot measure what you are doing, you cannot manage it. you have never seen such incompetent management. why would you buy $700 million worth of planes and put them in the desert? why would you buy a blimp that

does not work? the way you get rid of a trillion dollar deficit is $1 billion at a time. they waste $100 billion a year at the pentagon. they do not know where they are spending their money and how effectively they are spending their money. you look at the major weapons systems, they do not know how to buy weapons systems. our high-risk list is unbelievable. we have a carrier -- nobody would believe what is going to cost, the gerald r ford. f-35's that are way over budget. they are still going to cost two times or three times what they were projected to cost. incompetency because there is no adult in the room and no control of buying something before you know what you want. we need to make real changes at the pentagon. you have people who are authorizing this who do not want real changes. they like the status quo. host: stella on twitter.

she says, i do not always agree with him, but i know he would be a great president. any interest? guest: no. my frustration is high enough. it is time for me to go home before i get in real trouble. i have done and been where i am going to be. host: senator coburn's fourth wastebook. you can see that on his website, coburn.senate.gov. you can look through that report of about 100 different examples of waste and unnecessary spending by the government. ken from georgia on our line for republicans. caller: senator coburn, glad to see you on the program. i have seen you on the other programs, on fox, discussing your latest edition of government waste. as you mentioned, i was just

watching a program where there is a move afoot to have an amending constitutional convention of where the states' legislatures have to put forth the idea of amending the constitution. this would be to get term limits. i agree, at one time i did not believe that was the solution. but i am convinced, as you have expressed numerous times, that that should be the case. term limits would help get people to be more responsible and to get the career politicians out. one point. hopefully you would not leave until that is passed. you are a reasonable voice, one of the few in the government. your quote, i have used it talking to some people.

"we are spending money we do not have for things we do not need." that is a good quote for a book on money makeover for individual families. host: ken brings up the idea of term limits. on twitter, what will term limits do if new members still have to take high dollar money to get elected? guest: if money is the corrupting influence -- money is not the corrupting influence in washington. if you can buy my vote for a dinner, you have already sent the wrong person. it is going to take less and less money, not more and more money. as we switch campaigns to social

the year which are less expensive, you're going to see that. you get people here who do not know what you cannot do. if you look at what is happening -- most people who come to washington their first time have a history of being in elected office. 70% of the senate is career politicians. their whole career has been in the political arena. what our country needs -- we do not need another career politician. we need people with real-world experience who have been through the school of hard knocks. who have made mistakes and made things right and who can make a judgment of their experience and apply it to problems in front of the country. instead of the conflict, which is natural, it does not mean they are bad people. the natural conflict of how do i stay here and advance my career. that is in contrast and conflict with what is in the best

interest of the country. i am term limit, i have term limited myself. i am going home. there is no positive benefit. you need more people who do not know the system who do not buy into the biases of the political elite. they come here and say that will not be the case. use their wisdom and their experiences to apply to our problems. host: a few minutes left with tom coburn of oklahoma and author of the wastebook. mark from california on our line for democrats. good morning. caller: good morning. i am a disabled vietnam veteran. i have seen a lot of fraud and abuse in the va system. they say it is the best health care system we have. that is a lie. most of the stuff that comes out of washington is a big lie.

we have been fed a lie. we need to get money out of politics. until we do that, our government is broken. everybody is on the take. except for a very few, i do not know. i just wanted -- guest: a couple of points, they are not on the take. what they are on is how do i make sure i get to stay here. and my career is more important than the country. that causes more poor decision- making. the second point is why should a veteran, disabled or not, be forced to go to a va system rather than wherever they want? va health care -- in some places it is great, in some places it stinks. i would give veterans the right

to go wherever they want. you served our country, you are service connected, you go where you want and we pick up the tab. if you want to go to the va, great. if you want to get care somewhere else, you should. we create competition and make the va better than what we see today in many places. that will give veterans a choice. they fought for freedom, why shouldn't they get freedom to choose their health care? i proposed that for a long time, i cannot seem to make it work. host: we want you to talk about specific examples from this year's wastebook. one that stood out was paying for a study that had people lying in beds for 70 days. guest: that is a nasa study. they are paying people to see where the physiological effect

of being in a headdown position. that is what they should have their astronauts doing. they should put the very people they are going to be putting through this. that's why they hire people. we take 10 people or 12 people and pay them $18,000 for six months to lie flat. let's do that to the guys in the program rather than contract out. i am questioning why you would not have the very guys who are going to be your flyers doing that. host: over your four editions of the wastebook, how many examples have you been able to retire from the book? guest: 20 -- host: out of 400? guest: what we have done is prevent more of the same. nsf pays a lot more attention to what we are saying, nih pays attention. the military does not pay any

attention. they probably have not even seen the wastebook, they do not even care. it is such a convoluted mess of priorities. the state department spent $5 million to buy crystalware. whether we need it or not, we spent $5 million. what could that do for education of inner-city schools? we are out of control. host: richard from philadelphia, pennsylvania on our line for independents. you're on with tom coburn of oklahoma. caller: thank you, senator coburn for your wastebook. i appreciate the information. the comment on nsa. i agree with the other caller about the conflict of confidence that exists and has always existed. i wonder about the technology,

the development that gives this type of intrusion. not through the government for security purposes, being inundated in our society. i am concerned about that. host: senator coburn? guest: he is right to be concerned. one of the things i have told my staff and i am going to do -- i am not going to carry a cell phone. i will not have a blackberry. too much technological capabilities to invade my privacy. there is no guarantee someone has not -- it does not have to be the government -- the fact is that if you want your privacy that, you have got to get rid of the electronics, the mobile devices. somebody, somewhere -- not the government -- google or facebook, we just saw a deal

yesterday where facebook can see what you're typing. and not necessarily on facebook. i think he is right to be concerned with this modern method of communication.there comes a lot of vulnerabilities. we have demonstrated irresponsibility. one of the things that is dangerous for a republic is for people to lose confidence. lose confidence in the government's auspices, lose confidence and the rule of law. that is how you get the unwinding in a republic. people want us to address the real problems rather than play games. too often, we play games. our motivations tend to be about us. host: senator coburn, author of the fourth edition of the wastebook. you can see it at

coburn.senate.gov. we appreciate you coming. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2013] that kim jong-un has executed his uncle, we will discuss the situation inside the country. it will be followed by a look at president obama's national security legacy. fund raising and spending for the 2014 and 2016 elections in the role of outside spending groups like super packs -- super pac's. "washington journal" is live every morning at 7:00 a.m. eastern here on c-span. >> like so many of your viewers, i would to -- michael and i would do the annual consideration of the things that

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