i would care about because they were important to us when we grow. issues that we care about because they matched our broader is believed but because of the players we saw in our community doing good work every day. martha's table delivered hot to theo the table -- little park outside and i would see that van every night, and i would see the lines of people there every night, and i knew that it was volunteer driven, 10,000 volunteers with just 80 hard-working staff and that they had enormous influence in the community they were serving, and it was a great brand. i thought, why wouldn't i join that organization and see if i can put my skills to work but also understand better why do we have this issue of persistent childhood poverty? why do we have so many children

who aren't graduating high school, going on to college or getting attached to careers the way i was able to? >> the president and ceo of martha's table on leading the nonprofit, sunday night at 8 p.m. on q&a. >> now, conversation about the u.s. supreme court's role in badery with justice ruth ginsburg. mr. olson most recently argued before the supreme court on same-sex marriage. northern virginia technology council, this is 45 minutes. [applause]

>>. >> good morning. >> good morning. >> [inaudible] >> audio. someone will also have to control the microphone. [laughter] >> it is a great privilege for me to have the opportunity to ask questions of justice ginsberg instead of the other way around. [laughter] i want to thank all of you out there who planted questions with me in the hopes that i would ask those questions, but i probably will not ask any of those questions. [laughter] let's start with the supreme court of the u.s.

you and your court handled the most difficult and most controversial questions of our day and of our society involving life, death, voting, property, race, freedom, and campaign contributions -- all of those things. what is so special about this court despite the fact that you decided controversial questions? the supreme court of the u.s. is the most respected institution in our government and has been for a long time. tell us about why that is? >> i would add that it is probably the most suspected high court in the world. one reason is that we have been involved in passing on laws and executive options of constitutionality. in other countries in the world, parliamentary supremacy -- it wasn't until world war ii that courts abroad began to engage in judicial review for constitutionality.

just to take a few notable cases, when president truman decided that the country was at war in korea i could not risk a strike at a steel plant, he took over the steel mills. that was challenged. the courthouse, mr. president, you do not have that authority alone. what did truman do? that is remarkable to many courts in the world. we have an excellent police

staff that the court. we have no guns. we do not have our own purse. when the supreme court makes a decision like that, probably the most are medical and was nixon. the court said, turn over the tapes. and he did and he resigned from office. part of it is the court has been at this for a very long time. it is excepted -- accepted. the court made its decision. i dissented, as you know. >> i do know that.

[laughter] >> the country accepted it. no one was rioting in the street. the election was settled. all of the members had one thing in common we wanted to keep it that way. we wanted to make sure when we left the court, it would be in a secure position as it was in when we became a member. >> that leads me to a question you do decide very controversial cases. sometimes the dissenting opinions clash with the majority opinions with quite a high level of intensity. yet the court comes back together every year in october after the final decisions are rendered in june. you all seem to get along personally with one another, notwithstanding the difficult and intense decisions that are made.

is that true? what are your relationships? >> it is the most collegiate place i have ever worked. part of it is that we know we have to work together to keep the court in the position that it holds. to take an example, that was a marathon. we have the argument on monday. decision on tuesday. very soon after, we had our regular january sitting. we all came together. it was almost as though nothing had happened. it was the same. we were going on to the new sitting. >> there was a book written

about the court called "nine scorpions in a bottle." [laughter] i know that does not reflect the relationships that exist today. some people felt that in past years, the justices on the court developed animosity towards one another. if that is true, what do you attribute the relationships that you have now? >> different periods of the court were collegial. perhaps most striking example of an on collegial court -- uncollegial court was when president -- a president appointed -- to the court. wilson had appointed one before. that person did not like jews. so much so that he would leave the room. every time there is any justice, we would take a photograph.

the year brandeis was appointed, there is no photograph because that justice refused to stand next to another justice. there were animosities in the court. from time to time. in the current court, it is most collegial. >> it is well-known that you and justice scalia are very good friends and have a wonderful relationship with one another, notwithstanding the fact that his judicial philosophy inured judicial philosophy cannot be -- can be quite distant and you have dissented from his opinions and vice versa.

is that true about your relationship with justice scalia? what causes that to be true? >> i met justice scalia for the first time when he was on the faculty of the university of chicago. i was teaching at columbia. he gave a talk that was about a famous case at the d.c. cursus circuits. he was severely critical about that. i disagree with the most everything he said, but he said it in such a captivating way. [laughter] even now, you have been a consumer of our products -- [laughter] you know that our styles are quite different. his style it is attention grabbing. mine is moderate and restrained in comparison. [laughter] >> i find it attention grabbing when you ask me a question in the court.

it gets my attention. [laughter] both you and justice scalia are opera buffs. you go to the opera together. now i read in the paper that someone has written an opera about justice ginsburg and justice scalia. did you know that? is this true? [laughter] >> everything in the court is done by seniority. even though i'm older by justice scalia, he was appointed before i was. the opera is called scalia- ginsburg. [laughter] >> how can you write an opera about the two of you? i think there are a lot of people out there who would like to take a hand at that. will it happen?

>> this is a random page from the score. it does exist. an opera composed by a young man who advertises himself as a, lyricist, and pianist, but he also has a law degree. in his constitutional law class, he was reading these opinions -- justice scalia's opinions, my opinions, he decided this would make a great opera. [laughter] i will give you a sample. this is justice scalia's opening aria. it is labeled "rage aria." [laughter]

the main frame goes this way -- the justices are blind. how could they possibly office -- spout this. the constitution says, absolutely nothing about this. that is his opening. [laughter] my response aria is in the style of verdi. it goes -- you are fighting in vain for a solution to a problem that isn't so easy to solve. but the beautiful thing about our constitution is that like our society it can evolve. [laughter] [applause]

>> i'm sure that everyone of us here are going to be wanting to stand in line to see the opera. [laughter] is it within a year? what is the plan? >> is it a reading or a singing in february somewhere around baltimore. that will be the first time that the entire score will be played. >> justice ginsberg, in 1981, ronald reagan appointed justice sandra day o'connor to the court. she was the first woman to serve on the united states supreme court. there have been 112 appointments to the supreme court. you were 108.

is that correct? when you replace justice white? >> 107 or 108. >> you are the second woman up proved -- appointed to the supreme court. what did it mean to the court when it finally had a woman justice and when you came onto the court, two women justices? you can say what it is like now with three justices being female. >> when santa was asked that question to have a second woman, she said, you think i am glad that justice ginsberg is on board, you can imagine the joy of john o'connor to be no longer the lone male spouse. [laughter] she was there all alone for 12 years. a sign that women were there to stay came when i was appointed.

they did a renovation in our robing rooms. up until then, there was a bathroom and it was labeled "men." when sandra was at a conference and she needed a rope, she had to go back to her chambers. they installed a women's bathroom equal in size to the men's. so. things were changing. for every year that we sat together, and there only one , one lawyer or another would calmly justice -- call me justice o'connor. they would hear a woman's voice and they knew that there was a woman and although we do not speak alike and we do not look alike, but now with three of us, no one calls me justice sotomayor or justice kagan.

it is an exhilarating change. after sandra left and i was all alone in my corner of the bench, and i did feel lonely, now we are all over. i sit toward the middle. elena is on my left and sony on my right. -- sonya on my right. those two women are not shrinking violets. as you well know. [laughter] they are very active in questioning. it is wonderful for the schoolchildren who parade in and out to see that women are there. they're are part of the court's operation. >> you mentioned the oral argument process. i think most people do not know that the court hears about 75

cases a year in each case, except in unusual situations, is a lot of one hour oral -- allotted one hour for arguments. each side gets half an hour. some people think that lawyers get up and lecture or give a speech as a part of their oral argument. it is not like that at all. can you describe what oral arguments are like? >> yeah. let me say something about the 75 cases that we hear and decide on. that 75 comes from a pile of over 8000 petitions for review. from those, we select a very small number. the reason we do that is we see our job is keeping the law of the united states more or less uniform, whether it is statutory it everybody agrees, there is no need for us to step in.

but when three judges are of different minds, that is when we step in. the 75 we get down to that way. the oral argument time as you said is very precious. the justices have come to the bench after having done reading. i think most of my colleagues start as i do by reading the opinions. i do that before i turn to the lawyers speech. i will know if they are giving an honest account of what the decision is. >> and if they are not, justice ginsberg catches them. >> nowadays, we have many friends. so many that it is not possible for the justices to read all of

them. my law firm has instructions. everything is color coded. there are three piles. one is skipped. that is the largest pile. [laughter] another is to skim or read pages. that is not in the party's briefs. then there's a small pile that says read. those are the really good ones. people are not just saying, me, too. when we come to the bench, where rare well armed and prepared for the hearing of it -- we are very well armed and prepared for hearing the case.

most difficult ones on which the decision may turn, that the kids should have a chance -- advocate should have a chance to address what is on the decision-maker's mind. some lawyers resent our interruptions. they would like us to keep quiet and they would like to present their prepared appeals. for me, in the days that our --

i was arguing cases, a cold bench was the worst possible because i had no idea what was in the minds of the judges. sometimes a question is asked not so much to elicit a response from the lawyer, but to persuade a colleague. sometimes a justice tries to a sustained lawyer who is on the ropes -- assist a lawyer who is on the ropes by asking a helpful question. many lawyers miss that you because they are so -- miss that cue because they are so suspicious. [laughter] but when i come off of the bench, i have a pretty good idea where my colleagues are on that case. we are sometimes talking to each other and talking through the council not to the council. >> have you found that certain styles of advocacy by the lawyers working better in the

courts? justice scalia was here before this group a few months ago and talked about advocacy is written about that. you must have your own views about what works and what doesn't work. could you say a word or two about that? >> i think they will prepared opening sentence is a good idea. you can get that out. >> sometimes. [laughter] >> and then to ride with the

wave and go where the court is taking you. don't try desperately to get back to what you planned. i/o is at about 45 points. -- i always have about 4-5 points. if i'm responding to a question, i would immediately pick up on the plan wanted to get across without leaving a pause that would invite another another question. >> this raises a question that many do not know. you are an advocate yourself before the supreme court. you represented cases and handled pieces involving the rights of women. >> and then. >> and -- and men. >> and men.

>> john roberts are geared -- argued cases before he was appointed to the supreme court. does it make a difference that you were yourself an advocate and you know what it is like out there? or most of your colleagues have not argued? justice kagan was the solicitor general. she argued a number of cases that one year. doesn't it make a difference to have been an advocate? >> to me, it does. in this respect. i try to keep my questions tight. and not to ask a question as a professor with a question that goes on and on. >> you appreciate what it is like to be in a room and to listen to speeches in the form of questions -- you avoid that yourself? some of your colleagues have a little bit more of a broader latitude forward that.

>> yes. i have occasionally commented on that. we appreciate how precious that half-hour is. we try to be more disciplined. observe a preceding in the u.s. supreme court and then do what i am going to do in february and decide. they're the justices sit in magnificent maroon, velvet ropes. they asked no questions at all. they sit through the entire argument. i think it would be hard for me to stay awake if i operated on that type of court. [laughter] >> could you comment on the confirmation process and then we

will have some questions from the audience? when you were confirmed 20 years ago, the vote was 97-3. i did not look up who were the three senators who voted against you. but i bet you could name them. but the process has become very contentious. john roberts had 23 plus votes against -- more than 40 votes against justice alito. and you talk about what the process has become compared to what it was like when you were confirmed? >> another justice and i were confirmed. there was a failed nomination. justice thomas had a turbulent nomination. there is public reputation that had declined.

there was a deliberate effort. there had been no women on the committee. enlarge the committee by two. two were added into the committee. i was nominated in june. any senator could have put a hold on me so that my hearing wouldn't, until the new term is underway. there were three negative votes, but none of the three try to stop the confirmation process from acquiring speedily. my biggest supporter on the judiciary committee was not vice president joe biden.

it was was a committee. it was hatch. not one senator asked me any questions. a long-term affiliation with the american civil liberties union. not one senator asked me any questions about that affiliation. my hope is that we would get back to the way it was. we spoke about justice alito. justice kagan and justice sotomayor had many negative votes. a great man that i knew and loved said the symbol of the u.s. is not the bald eagle.

it is the pendulum. i think the pendulum has gone too far in one direction in the handling of judicial nominations and it should go back to the middle. >> i think we would all hope that. let's get a hand to justice ginsberg. [applause] we have time for questions. there are two microphones. go to one of the microphones and identify who you are. no questions from the media. >> and no questions on cases that are pending decisions or about to be heard. >> thank you.

my name is gary. thank you to both of you for your historic leadership in protecting the rights of gay americans to marry. it was a terrific change that is necessary. [applause] thank you, justice ginsberg, for sharing your thoughts with us today. as an american that is part of the business community that is in trouble, there are lots of laws and ambiguous loss. we have example of how at&t tried to buy a company they thought they could buy, but with great lawyers and yet they were stop by the government because

at&t -- business communities think they are following the laws, but they are either ambiguous or unclear. if you had a message to legislators in which you wish they could do something and you had a magic button you could press, what would you like congress to do differently than what they are doing today? >> to the first part of your question, there are many laws that are ambiguous, dense, can be read in more than one way, sometimes in more than three or four ways. in that respect, our congress does not stand up so well. there seems to be a lack of discipline. we need an expert committee go over the provisions and try to detect ambiguities.

sometimes ambiguities are deliberate because the question was a political hot potato. the members of congress are for to punt it to the court. to say what the law meant. i think people in the business world who care, they let their representatives know if you're having a hard time because the laws are unclear. >> justice ginsberg, my name is josh. my question for you, after same-

sex marriage, where do you see the future of equal protection down the road? >> thank you for asking that question. the equal protection clause is my favorite cause in the constitution. [laughter] i think it shows the genius of the system. go back to where it started. the constitution opens with some physical words, "we, the people, of the united states, in order to form a more perfect union." if you asked the question who are "we, the people" that would include me because we were not part of the political community in till 1920. people were held in human bondage.

even white males in many places could not vote unless they were property owners. we went from an idea of we, the people that was rather confined and over the course of more than two centuries, that notion has become ever more expansive. people who were once held in slavery, native americans did not count in the beginning. women. the equal protection clause has worked to perfect a more perfect

union, to perfect we, the people. the founding fathers had an idea from the start. you heard the lyric from my aria that a constitution like our society can evolve. >> comcast, business for business. i'm very struck are your integrity as my perception of you has evolved over the years. justice ginsberg, you have always been one of my favorites. please do not take this as an endorsement of the policy i will ask about, but term limits that we give each presidential term, two nominations -- thank you. >> it is a good question, but highly hypothetical. article three of the constitution says that the judges shall hold their offices

during -- behavior. behavior.good on the whole, federal judges have been a well behaved lot. [laughter] >> is that because everyone is watching? >> the notion is that the judges would become independent. the framers did two things. one gave us life tenure. two provided that our salaries cannot be diminished while we hold office. most places in the world i would have been gone years ago. [laughter] the retirement age starts at 65, 70. 75 top.

so, it would take a constitutional amendment to change that. our constitution is powerfully hard to amend. proponents of equal rights amendment know as proponents of statehood for the district of columbia. so, the likelihood that you could galvanize the public to amend article three and put in a fixed term -- some systems say that the constitutional council in france has a nine year nonrenewable term. in systems that have a relatively long term, the notion is make it nonrenewable so that the judges won't court favor from particular constituents.

it is a real problem in the u.s. come in state to dictionaries that are elected. federal judges are all appointed and fit during this behavior. >> should a justice plan his are her retirement for -- to coincide with the office of presidents of the same party so that if it is a republican appointee that justice should wait until there is a republican president and plan his or her retirement at that point? is that the sort of thing entering anyone's mind? >> i think one should stay as long as they can do the job. he. i suppose there were many people who wanted justice brennan and

justice marshall to leave when a democrat was president. they didn't. the number one question is, can you do the job? can you think as well? can you write with the same fluency? at my age, you take it year by year. i'm ok this year. [laughter] >> that is for sure. [applause] >> good morning, justice ginsberg, and mr. moderator. i'm with the united postel service. we appreciate you being here. my question to you is how do you find peace within yourself if there is a case that has been argued and you don't agree with what the resolution is? how do you find peace when you

go home to your family? i know a lot of times in the professional arena, we do not know how to find a personal and work balance. how do you find that? >> you asked two questions. one concerns when i end up on the losing side. there is a famous man who said it ain't over till it's over. [laughter] think of one case that was 5-4. i was with the four. my bottom line was -- we had the lily ledbetter pay act. the constitutional question takes longer. if you think of all of the great free speech dissents written

around the time of world war i, that was a lot of the land today, although when they were written, they only spoke for two justices. i'm always hopeful that is my opinion does not command a court today, it will in time. did you ask a question about work and life balance? >> yes, ma'am. >> i have two children. they are 10 years apart. when my daughter was in school, it was unusual to have a mother who was a working mom. 10 years later when my son was in school, there was a tremendous transformation in those years because there were many mothers who had paying jobs as well. that was in the late 60's and 70's.

>> the greatest asset is to have a supportive spouse. someone who thinks your work is as important as his. sometimes one accommodates to the other, so my husband graduated from law school before i did. he had a good job in new york. marty has been teaching at columbia and transferred to --

you accomdate to each other at different times in your life. >> thank you. >> last question. >> thank you. my name is scott. i'm with microsoft. i am honored, justice ginsberg, to be in your presence. you are a vibrant spirit and mind. i appreciate the opportunity to hear you today. my question is a recent presidential aspirant said that corporations are people, my friend. referring to know particular case, i am curious to hear your thoughts on the personhood. we start out with "we, the people" in your earlier statement that corporations are

becoming "the people." thank you. >> a corporation counts as a person for some purposes, but not for others. corporations don't march to the polls. my answer to your question is sometimes they are considered a person. for example, an entity is entitled to due process just as an individual is. the same would be true for equal protection. you can single out one kind of business and say we will tax that this is more heavily than another.

we are continuing to have questions about the extent to which a corporation should be treated in the same manner as an individual in cases where it is appropriate to recognize that a corporation is an artificial entity. it is not a flesh and blood person. >> this is a very busy time of the year for the court. each of the justices spent an enormous time preparing for oral arguments and reading the briefs and writing opinions or dissenting opinions. i know how hard justice ginsberg works. i have every respect that she would take her time to be here with us.

it is not her favorite hour of the day. [laughter] we owe her a great deal of thanks for her time and her thoughtful and revealing remarks about the court. thank you, justice ginsberg. [applause] >> thank you. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2013] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] >> tonight on c-span, a forum with experts and analysts about data privacy on the internet followed by oklahoma senator tom coburn discussing government spending. justice -- supreme

for justice ruth bader ginsburg talks about the court's role in the country. president obama held an end of on friday.ence he has chosen elegance to the limpets. here is a quick preview. -- delegates to the olympics. here is a quick preview. >> what is the message you are trying to send with not only your decision not to attend the games but with also the people you chose to represent the united states at the game? i have not attended olympics in the past. a attending anme olympics, particularly at a time we have all the stuff you below are talking about is going to be tough. although i would love to do it. i will be going to a lot of olympic games post presidency. as for the delegation, we have

outstanding americans, outstanding athletes, people who represent us extraordinaire lee well,- extraordinarily and the fact that we have folks like billie jean king or brian themselves have been world-class athletes that everybody egg knowledge is for their excellence but also for their character, -- everybody acknowledges for their excellence but also for their character who also happen to be members of the lgbt community, you should take that for what it is worth. olympicsomes to the and athletic performance, we don't make distinctions on the basis of sexual orientation. we judge people on how they perform both on the court and off the court. on the field and off the field. that is a value that i think is not just at the heart of america americane heart of

sports. >> watch all of the press conference sunday at 10:35 a.m. eastern here on c-span. >> if you are a middle or high c-span wants to know what is the most important issue congress should address next year? make a 5-7 minute video for your chance to win $5,000, with $100,000 in total prizes. get more info at student cam.org. now, a look at digital and .nternet privacy this is moderated by rebecca , cofounder of global voices online and runs an hour and 35 minutes. >> ladies and gentlemen, please welcome this afternoon's host, rebecca mackinnon.

>> good afternoon. thank you for coming. [applause] many people may not realize this, but 95% of people who are out there on the internet using their smartphones and so on can be identified and profiled by just for interactions through their mobile devices. if you post a tweet, check your bank account, send an e-mail, or check your facebook newsfeed, boom. some ad network is profiled you. the problem is that a lot of the companies collecting this data can not live up to their security claims. this data is vulnerable to hacking. security experts will tell you that any device connected to the internet can be hacked. that is not just your computers, or your smartphones, or your tablets. increasingly it becomes our cars that are connected to the

internet, your home security system, your medical devices, power plants, all of this is vulnerable to hacking. hacking is not just for criminals. governments all employee hackers. they dig up information on people outside of their country and people inside their country. as we have found from edward snowden who released a large trove of documents, our government, the nsa, exploits quite a lot of hacking techniques to acquire information. in a lot of cases, they do not even have to hack you. if the company is in the jurisdiction of the government and they have the legal authority to act, they just demand it from the company. there we are.

i am rebecca mackinnon. i am also the author of "consent of the networked." i am joined here today by five brilliant individuals. all of us will be telling you some things that are a little bit scary. the point is that knowledge is power. if we want to change the way things are today, if we want to build a world that we want to live in, you have to start by understanding how this digital environment works, what the threats are. with that, i will begin my little story. january 1990. was anybody using the internet in 1990? very good. in 1990, the berlin wall came

down. these photographs are the ransacked offices of the stasi, the secret police. as east germany began to fall apart, protesters went into these offices and ransacked the files. two years later, the unified democratic germany declassified all of the files. people could for the first time find out who had been spying on them for all of those years. people found out that neighbors, colleagues, sometimes lovers, symptoms spouses, sometimes parents or children were informing on them to the secret police. it was very traumatic. fast forward to 2009. the unified democratic berlin. a german politician exercises his right under german law to

request data from his phone provider deutsche telekom on all of his movements over a six- month period. he takes is doing newspaper in a create an interactive graphic. you can still visit it online. it has an entire log of all of his movements throughout that entire six-month period. this is the stasi's wet dream. it did not require neighbors and lovers to betray anybody. this kind of digital dossier -- people can spy on all of us through our devices and platforms and networks that we are relying on for pretty much everything in our lives. the only difference between a dictatorship and a democracy in this digital age is going to be, do we have control over how information is collected over us?

are we able to hold information collectors accountable? do we understand who is collecting information and how it is being shared and with whom it is being shared? if there's accountability around that, and this is happening with some consent of the citizenry, then you have a chance of being a democracy. if not, you are going towards a dictatorship pretty fast. moving on to san francisco in 2006, a whistleblower named mark klein, who was a former employee of at&t, disclosed that the national security agency had built a secret room in that room building. a communications of millions of ordinary americans were routed through that building and were being siphoned off into the secret room as they pass through that building. a number of organizations try to

see the government. those lawsuits have yet to go anywhere. the point being that we started to begin to get a picture of the surveillance that was going on. how large that picture was and the extent of the surveillance, we are now coming to understand more fully, thanks to the leaked information by edward snowden. these nsa facilities are everywhere around the country. they're collecting data on a large percentage of americans. now of course, the internet is revolutionary. let's not deny that. the internet and mobile technology can be used by citizens to overthrow governments, to get opposition

leader selected who would have no chance otherwise. this technology is very empowering. but at the same time, governments are doing everything they can to use their power over the commercial networks that are within their jurisdiction to fight back. these photos are from state security headquarters outside of cairo in 2011. after the mubarak government fell, an activist got into the headquarters. some agents tried to shred documents, and people were posting them on twitter of course false however, there were rows and rows of files. people got in there and found their own files.

there were reams and reams of e- mail transcripts. there were cell phone transcripts. there were conversation logs that people have thought had been secure. there was information about data that they have been uploading and downloading from the internet. it was all captured over their internet service providers. using technology, the egyptian government -- they purchased the technology from a company affiliated with boeing. what is the point here? he point is that increasingly the relationship between citizens and their government is mediated through the internet. technologies are largely developed and operated by the private sector. you cannot assume that the internet is going to evolve in a way that actually empowers its citizens. if we want the internet to evolve in a way that is compatible with democracy, and compatible with human rights, compatible with the sort 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 because you do not engage in the way in which your

physical society is being governed. weber makes the most effort to shape that society will shape it to their greatest advantage. this is what we need to be working on. this is what we need to be working on. as i mentioned, the internet is challenging. in a a lot of very important ways, governments are trying to fight back. interestingly, this is a map that was developed recently published recently by the oxford internet institute. they resized all of the countries on the planet based on their internet population. then they colored each country according to which website is the most visited website in that country. all of the red, those are countries where google is the

most popular. all of the blue, countries where facebook is the most popular. china is a big green because that is baidu, a big internet company. except for china, cause extent, iran, and russia, all of the other countries, the most dominant web services are american. now, you combine that information with what we are now learning about the nsa and the effect it has had and it's relatively unfettered access to information on communications happening on these websites -- arguably there are some controls over how they can access and what they can do with the information of american citizens and u.s. persons -- there is virtually no meaningful control over what

they do and how they collect information of non-us persons. if you are not a u.s. person, and you are looking at this map, and you are thinking about this map in the context of what we have learned from edward snowden, you might be mad. you might feel that there is a power imbalance going on here. a lot of governments are pretty mad. this is the president of brazil. she recently spoke at the united nations. she accused the united states of breaching international law. they have completely failed to respect the privacy of anybody who is not an american on the internet. why does this matter? if you are an american, why do you care about non-americans and if their privacy rights are being disregarded? it relates to how we use the internet.

this is something called the international telecommunications unit. they govern the international telephone and satellite system. last year, they tried to assert control over how the internet is coordinated and how standards are developed. the u.n. body chose a block of governments. they came close to go, but another block of government, democracy is working with companies, working with citizens fought back. right now the way the internet is governed and coordinated is very decentralized. it involves engineers and companies and a lot of nongovernmental insitutions. there was an effort to say, governments need to reassert sovereignty over the internet. it was blocked last year, and unfortunately because of the nsa revelations, a lot of the governments that were voting for

a more democratic decentralized internet are starting to rethink. they are starting to talk about something called data sovereignty. that means that governments are now discussing new laws that would require web services and internet services and telecommunications services who want to serve the citizens of a particular country -- the data needs to be stored and managed in that country. so what does that mean in practice? they're doing this because they do not want the nsa to have the -- they have. there is a troubling side of that. there's one country that is already asserting sovereignty over data. it is called china. this is one of the results. facebook is blocked in china. this is what you get when you try to visit facebook on a chrome browser from within china.

facebook will not house services that are meant to serve chinese customers inside china. so you cannot access facebook in china. this is the kind of world that would become more of a facsimile of the international telephone system, rather than a free and open internet. that is because you have a lot of people who feel that their rights are being violated. in my book, "consent of the networks," i argue that we need to start taking charge. we need to think of ourselves as citizens of the internet. citizens of this networked world and not just passive users. we need to start telling government and telling 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, ultimately no one's rights will be respected. it is akin to the environmental

movement. it is starting to emerge. very soon, there will be a march on washington to demand an end to unaccountable surveillance by the nsa. people can also begin to join a lot of international movements. there is global voices online, which i am part of. one way that an american can start to get involved with these issues is the electronic frontier foundation. you can go to esf.org and get a lot of information about what is going on and how to protect yourself in the future. there are a lot of drives and information about rallies that you can attend. there are a number of other organizations. it is up to all of us to determine how our internet evolves. just as if you want chicago to

be covered in a way that actually respects the rights of its citizens, is the citizens do not get actively involved in a governance, if the citizens have no idea how chicago is governed, who is exercising power and how, then you are not going to really be able to affect changes in that governance. you have to participate and be involved. you have to make your views known. as a consumer, we can exercise a lot more power than we are doing right now not only in terms of what you choose to use and not use, but as a vocal critic. a lot of these companies do respond to public criticism. lets exercise our power and not be passive users. let's become active citizens of this networked world we are in. moving on, there are some people

who are so upset about the abuse of power in our digital lives and to also have technical skills that they've joined a group called anonymous. i'm sure many of you have heard of it. their slogan is, we are anonymous. we are legion. we do not forget. expect us. that is their battle cry since they emerged in 2008 from a number of message boards where people began to post their conversations and opinions with anonymous not giving their real names. there's definitely a real ethic in that community about the importance of anonymity. they have also gone after a lot of organizations and governments that they do not like. places that they feel are abusive. the church of scientology,

government agencies in the united states, israel, tunisia, uganda, the westboro baptist church, sony, etc. one of our guests today is the author of "we are anonymous." new york magazine called this book the insider account of the hacker movement. she will share with us both some of her stories from her book, but also she will talk about some of her new work on mobile tracking. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you. thank you. thank you so much for that introduction. it is a real privilege to be here at chicago ideas week. i am a journalist with forbes.

i started off in radio journalism and i joined forbes in their london bureau writing about business and marketing currencies. two years ago, i started focusing on technology. a couple years ago, i started writing about anonymous. i read a book about it. 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. they do not make much money at all. just to explain why and writing about anonymous, in 2010, forbes opened up a blogging platform. that allowed journalists like me to focus on a topic that we were interested in and write about it with as much frequency as he wanted. i got lucky because in that same

year, december, anonymous carried out one of its most notorious attacks against a series of financial companies. they wanted to avenge wiki leaks and the arrest of julian assange. i have always been interested in disruptive figures and underground societies. i got tired of reading about rehashed articles online and i started interviewing some of the reporters. eventually, i made contact with some of the senior organizers and realized that this was not just a group. it was a whole culture with a history. they had etiquette and their own language. that fascinated me. i became obsessed of tracking these guys. i got in contact with some senior figures who created a splinter group, lulzsec. i would track what they were doing in the public eye.

i would track what they were doing with sony pictures and fox news and even the cia. it was a very hair-raising moment i had hackers threatening to destroy the company i work for. i saw my sources get paranoid. i was able to meet some of them face to face. some of them got arrested. it was quite emotional at times. i learned that a lot of these guys were young men, unemployed, quite isolated in society. they were extraordinarily intelligent, but they often lacked common sense. they were full of contradictions. for example, it is jake david who i met face to face while he was still part of lulzsec. online he was topiary. he was one of the leaders of lulzsec. face to face, he was this scrawny young man who was not good at socializing and quite shy. he is not like that anymore. this was a while ago.

i also learned about a website called 4chan. you will hear about this for my colleagues. this is a website that anonymous started on and it has been called, i will not say the word, but it is the armpit of the internet. it hosts a lot of graphic violence. it is a place where people come to discuss their fears and their proclivities and their inhibitions. one of my interviewees, who i call william in the book, he allowed me to take a picture of him by covering his face. he went on 4chan for many years every day. this was his life. it was a place where he could honestly talk about things in a way that he could not the off- line world. it was a real community for him even though he knew no names. let me give you a brief rundown of some of the key things i learned about anonymous and what it was. first of all, when we were first

reading reports of anonymous, they were referred to as a group of hackers. that is not true. it is not a group. it is a network of ever shifting nodes. most of them are not hackers. they were just good at trolling or knew the community very well. also the attacks that 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. they would subvert those tools and use them to launch cyber attacks. super easy to use. another key thing i learned was about the huge amount of year that exists in anonymous. red-hot paranoia, constant. part of that fear was about getting arrested. part of that fear was about getting doxed. to be doxed, is you have your online identity unveiled.

anons would sometimes spend more than a year cultivating a nickname online with a personality and everything else. as soon as you are real 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 topiary. nobody wanted to be doxed, but that threat was constantly being tossed around. that raises a lot of questions about privacy. for a lot of these guys, anonymity was the one way to experience 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, startups, 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 in crossreferencing 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 infringed 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. the than maybe my dna, it finds me. all my relationships. it is forming a structure that is quite a rich definition of who i am. 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 anonymous 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 here 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 promise 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 analytic 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 triangulates all that

data between the apps and creates personas and categories for people and aligns each smartphone with a 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 know names, but 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 wider, 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 anonymous but our ability to compete an identity private boils down to the same thing that the anons 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, anonymous 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. 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 protest, 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 algorithms 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 watch or what we watch on tv. maybe by then if another network like anonymous 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 knew i loved fill in the blank, whatever it is. and of course if you can go online and be anonymous, 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 -- anonymously 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 cole stryker is going to be exploring. 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 stryker. 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 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. [laughter] so i won't be talking -- i don't want to look too foolish. so i'll focus on the history. 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 dew and the winner was "hitler did nothing wrong," which was basically a way of saying, if you come 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 anonymous. and they gave me the same kind of treatment that parmy got where they tried to find out where i 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 randi 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 ado, i would like to get into the history of

anonymous. a quote from emily dickinson. so there are a couple of reasons why someone might have wanted to be anonymous 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 praise through this work. another example, we have alice in wonderland. the author, lewis carol, 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 anonymous might be to stymie sexist.

there's countless examples of this throughout history. two of my favorites are charlotte 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 mary ann 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 a political blog for some time under a pseudonym 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 land full 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 anonymous group. "gulliver's travels" was throwing molotov cocktails at the establishment. he also wrote an essay about how the starving irish would 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 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 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 anonymous. 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 anonymous 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. you have john 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.

in 1960, this was an 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 anti- scientology movement that we've seen blown up with anonymous 15 years later. and then a finnish anonymous 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. and then in 1997, excuse me,

aclu vs. zel miller. you have the state of georgia saying no one can use the internet under a pseudonym. 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 cryptography. but it's a fascinating history of how basically cryptographic technology was liberated 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'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 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 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 anonymity and privacy issues are of most concern to people that are on the fringes. most 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 someone who 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 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 like to call the identity wars which is 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 have silent circle which are technological platforms that protect people's identities and you have wild cards like anonymous who are trying to create ways where people can perform commercial transactions anonymously. 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. thanks so much, cole. that story about zuckerberg and his property, that really does say it all, doesn't it? so, going deeper, particularly

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 digital security expert. he's written a book titled "when gadgets betray us: the dark side with our infatuation 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 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 cissp 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 playground for digital feeds. 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? what sort of behavioral privacy 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? there are some gadgets that are designed to collect data and it is important. i am talking about medical devices. if you live in north dakota and 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 secure are those devices? there was a researcher and he looked into the security of an insulin pump.

he looked at what was going on defibrulators. he did have an opportunity before he died to work with the medical device manufacturers and hopefully his legacy will be those manufacturers are including more security to make those devices resilient to pranksters who may want to throw a pacemaker into an arrythmatic state. my company in 2010 did a test on 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 like netflix now your username and password is available to someone who could go on the internet and go in and now take your service and start watching shows that you are watching. that is 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 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. we think of the convenience of 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 valleys when it is evening or when you are away from home. they are subjected peaks in

-- there are some jagged peaks there. 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 in 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.

we 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 in the world, 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 use it and you can regulate the hue of individual light bulb in your home. it is an opportunity for someone to eavesdrop. 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 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 photographs off of the sd card. it is a big deal because the 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

to just based 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 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 identifier. this is going to tell you who is walking by the garbage can, but 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. you can collect a path. 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. there are conveniences 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 2001 and forward, cars in the united states have had black boxes in them. 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. in 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 type of data is now being recorded so that is something to think about the next time you're 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. if you are really paranoid, don't take the same path every day to work. shake it up a little bit. go a different route. 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, push 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. one point of information -- if 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, leave it at home. or get a cell phone that you can take the battery out. moving along swiftly and easily, we are now turning to -- sorry. 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. as he said in his research, the level of anonymity that

customers can expect is fundamentally unreliable. .- unrealizable i turn it over to him who is going to explain this for us. thank you. [applause] >> thank you. rebecca didn't mention it took because i do not have i could one. talk about any privacy topic. what i found most useful to share with you today is online tracking and how companies are tracking us online when we browse. let me show you this cartoon. do you remember the famous tagline and went with this axle on the internet, no one knows that you are a dog? 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 food. this is the reality that we live in today. this is what i wanted to talk 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. i have a team of students at 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 our personal data. i want to give you good news. you have a lot of power in the 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 invisie