live. lives. hello there i'm marinated this is soon boston these are some of the stories that we're tracking for you today it's my favorite day of the week here on boom bust tech thursday and we're talking about twitter today now the micro-blogging site is having a remarkable week and we look at the little birds chirp and then renowned cryptologist bruce schneier is on the program first sat down with me to talk about data mining

terrorism and better computing systems and much much more and you definitely don't want to be a pretty great guy and in today's big deal edward harris and i are covering the latest sex stories from this past week you won't want to miss the moment that's right now. our lead story today twitter now twitter's share price soared on wednesday after the company's second quarter earnings beat expectations and its outlook on full year revenue proved better than expected it was the third time twitter's c.e.o. dick costolo reported earnings since twitter went public in a big splashy i.p.o. last year but it was the first earnings report that didn't send its stock lemonade

so that's a good thing now costello said revenue for the second quarter rose one hundred twenty four percent over last year to three hundred twelve million dollars which is well above wall street's expectations of a two hundred eighty three million in sales timeline views which is a measure of how much time users actually spend on the site and similar to the eyeball counts metric by fifteen percent over last year with a count of two hundred seventy one million monthly active use. now let's note here that twitter use the nonstandard accounting once again and very fashionable in the tech industry to report a two cent per share adjusted profit that's the number that wall street uses and that you hear in the news according to generally accepted accounting principles twitter lost one hundred forty four point six million dollars or twenty four cents a share more than triple the figure from two thousand and thirteen however don't worry about it twitter shares jump thirty five percent on earnings report i mean that's injuries bone lose money why not bubbles anyway trying to fast forward to

thursday when twitter's one twitter released its by annual transparency report detailing the number of requests for information the company receives from government agencies around the world twitter received two thousand and fifty requests for user information from fifty four different countries over the last six months that was forty six percent increase in requests from its previous year and this is where mr edward snowden comes in the world's best known whistle blower who expose the massive n.s.a. spying program is marking his one year anniversary of asylum in russia today however with his year long temporary asylum expiring without any confirmation that it will be extended it will means to be seen where he'll go next his lawyer said he could stay in the country while his application for an extension was being processed now not much is really known about where snowden is living in russia or what he's been up to over there but he did cause point this sensation in april when

he appeared in a recorded message on russian president vladimir putin's annually televised q. and a session asking if russia spied on its citizens and citizens so his temporary leave of remain in russia might not go made into a proper political asylum will have to wait and see but who knows maybe edward snowden will announce his next plans via twitter who we can count on that government information request account that's for sure. now it's extremely easy for the government and private companies to track our personal information but at the same time our outrage over this invasion of privacy is overshadowed by the convenience of using technology that is pretty convenient now this tension has led to our ongoing intense debate over the tradeoffs between

security and surveillance and to help us sort out all of these issues i sat down with cryptologist bruce schneier now schneier is a leading voice in computer security and privacy and he's a fellow at the berkman center for internet and society at harvard law school we started off our conversation with what's been happening over ever since edward snowden exposed n.s.a. surveillance practices here's what he had to say. so i think that snowden exposed a lot of what the n.s.a. was doing in secret and the fact that both houses of congress are debating serious reforms based on these revelations show that it was legitimate whistleblowing and that we needed to know a lot of the things he did i focus a lot more on the documents than the person and the documents are important to be made public the stories have been extraordinarily revealing and important.

first now when i think of the n.s.a. surveillance this year i think of the n.s.a. as more piggybacking off of private sector companies collection of data rather than actually collecting data itself now you call it a public private surveillance partnership there so how much of what the n.s.a. does is about using american companies database for the n.s.a.'s own purposes. the n.s.a. does both they certainly do a lot of collecting of data. through stu subterfuge by tapping undersea cables by going into hostile countries and collecting microwave links but they also get a lot through alliances both the n.s.a. in the us g c h q in the u.k. and partners all through europe are collecting data with the cooperation of telcos of service providers that are provided that are providing that data for people around the world as data moves across the internet there's a lot more use of alliances to get that data and yes there is a very strong partnership between the n.s.a.

and companies really around the world now that you've said that the internet is the surveillance state because we're being tracked all of the time when we're on the web but what exactly do you mean by that and what are the implications of this kind of tracking. of the implications i think are still unknown this is the first time we've had this in our society everything we do on the internet can be tracked it's being done on computers computers produced data and that data can be saved stored and analyzed and whether it's you reading a a document on a news site or communicating with a friend this is not just the u.s. of course this is many countries china russia middle eastern countries european countries there's a lot of tracking going on of users on the internet what they're doing who they're talking to what they're saying conversations of these to happen a femoral a face to face or readings that would happen with with paper and are now happening

our computers and that means these are all trackable so when i talk about the internet as a surveillance state what i mean is the things we do that used to be ephemeral now are producing data and that's data being tracked and countries around the world are using that data to monitor their citizens. first the digital information that we've freely given over to private companies it helps us do more but do you think this is a case of trading privacy for convenience and is the tradeoff worth it. well is the question we definitely are trading privacy convenience when i was working on my i phone before this interview and i was able to do a lot of things because that phone knew my physical location and that phone is a tracking device it's incredibly convenient yet it tracks me everywhere i go it knows where i live it knows where i work it knows when i go to sleep it knows who i sleep with simply because it knows my location now where are trading off an

enormous amount of privacy but we're getting some very powerful features in return so the trade off is in a sense worth it but we have to ensure that it's not being abused so when i look at corporate abuse when i look at government abuse they are around the edges these are still great services and that's why we all have cell phones we all have e-mail accounts we all have laptops now you've said in the past that the debate on privacy is wrongly characterized the security burst privacy when it should be security and privacy and that this is why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide you know you got nothing going on but you just need this little bit of privacy so can you expound upon these comments in light of the n.s.a.'s revelations . and privacy is something that's important to us individually it's about dignity it's about autonomy it's about liberty and it's about security you know we don't feel secure when we're under surveillance so

privacy becomes a part of security and security becomes a part of privacy you can't have privacy without security so when we look at both government surveillance and corporate surveillance the trick is going to be getting both privacy and security and there are lots of ways to do that and privacy is not necessarily in opposition to security we don't get more security when there's more surveillance and this is one of the important lessons of all the n.s.a. surveillance that it didn't actually get us more security it didn't make us safer it didn't catch terrorists so when i look at this security and privacy i look to get both how can we ensure our security and ensure our privacy now i understand that russia has offered a one hundred ten thousand dollar bounty to crack the torrent on a mis network so isn't this a perfect example of how state actors everywhere are looking to undermine privacy

and security. it's interesting yes we know the united states that the u.k. and the russia are all trying to break tor this anonymity service which is both used by dissidents around the world to stay alive and criminals around the world to evade detection or like all these technologies they have good and bad uses and yes we are now seeing countries around the world trying to break tour in the course the big question when we saw the russian announcement of of a bounty to break tour is whether they actually need to break torah whether that's a ruse and when you start dealing with this secret information you never know what's real and what isn't we do know that as late as two thousand and eight from the snowden documents that the u.s. and the u.k. were not able to break tour and tour is a valid anonymity tool which is very good news to all the dissidents around the world who use it to stay alive apparently the goal of the u.s.

government is to make the internet security strong enough to keep chinese hackers out but then we can have for the u.s. government to crack it so isn't there a big conflict there. well we can't do both i mean the problem is that the internet is one platform in the entire world and during the cold war there was a lot of attacking and defending united states versus the soviet union we would secure our as an attack yours you would secure yours and attack ours and that worked because the two countries had different stuff the u.s. computers were not the same as a soviet computers the soviet radios not the same as the u.s. radios that's different now everybody uses the same things we all use microsoft windows we all use the internet we all use the same cell phone standards and when every you weaken a standard you make it easier for the united states to attack the chinese networks you make it easier for the chinese to attack the us networks if we strengthen our

systems we strengthen it in both places well so we have to decide whether we're going to put security first or surveillance first it's just not possible to make a system that's so secure the chinese can't break it yet so weak the u.s. can break it it's either everybody gets to break it or nobody gets to break it. time now for a very quick break but stick around because when we return it will have more with our we're bringing your part two of my interview with him and it only gets better so stay tuned for that and in today's big deal edward harrison and i are discussing all the coolest tech stories from this past week and remember you can see all segments featured in today's show on you tube you tube dot com slash boom bust our team and on hulu hulu dot com slash boom bust now before we go here are a look at summer closing numbers of the bell come on back with us.

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in the finish line of the marathon. follow. the look. back now with part two of my interview with cryptologist bruce schneier now in this segment we discuss terrorism and embedded computing systems and i started by asking him if he believes that data mining will prevent terror take a look at what he had said. data mining is actually not a good tool to find terrorists and the problem is we're looking for extraordinarily rare events in a massive sea of communications and whenever you have those sorts of systems false

positives completely overwhelm anything you're finding we see that in the united states the data we know we know about different n.s.a. programs that send tens of thousands of tips to the f.b.i. all of those were false alarms there are programs that try to find suspicious of events all of those are false alarms the boston bombers we know the n.s.a. had data about them in their database they didn't know they were more important than the millions of other people in the n.s.a. database a data mining just surveilling everybody is not a cost of affective way of finding terrorists because it's too easy to hide in the noise what finds terrorists is following the leads the things that have been successful for the n.s.a. are when analysts go with a known thread and follow it who are their associates what are they're doing that's

how we stop terrorism it's not broad surveillance it's pinpoint targeted surveillance the kind of stuff you see in the movies and following the leads. first on this show we're much more concerned about finance and the economy than politics and sociology but in the debate on n.s.a. surveillance we see a surprising alignment of all of these issues so here's the wired magazine recently said the n.s.a. surveillance is a threat to the u.s. is tech company tech economy internet openness and america's foreign policy interests or do you think that's actually true. what we found in the past year is that u.s. businesses have lost a lot of money or the cloud security alliance talked about all the money i forget the numbers all the money they've lost from foreign customers not putting their data in the us cloud cisco i.b.m. eighty and t. have all talked about the losses they've experienced because foreign companies are not buying their products for eyes and lost

a big contract in germany so we are seeing a lot of direct financial losses due to the fact that u.s. companies u.s. networks u.s. hardware u.s. software is no longer trusted that the world believes that these are just avenues for n.s.a. spying and this is likely being a big deal and probably in the u.s. congress this is going to be more an impetus to reform the n.s.a. than anything else there's an extreme it is a train worry that we're going to lose competitiveness that foreign companies are going to come up with competing systems which are going to gain a lot of traction overseas because they're viewed as more trusted now whether that's true or not is another discussion but u.s. companies are now not trusted overseas because of n.s.a. surveillance. now we spoke to our leveson of lava bed regarding his brush with the n.s.a. and the shutdown of his business so what do you make of that case. you know it's really interesting to see the the lava bit case what happened was the f.b.i.

went to lava bit and wanted a particular person's data probably edward snowden so we don't know but the way lava bit was organized that way they were not able to provide that would love it provided a secure email service where they could not give the emails over to kill a person to the government government to courts and basically got an order for a lot of a bit to turn over their master keys the keys to all of their tens of thousands of subscribers a lot of it fought said you can't possibly be serious the government said yes we are and lavabit shutdown now this is a real important story because what it means is that the f.b.i. can go to any u.s. company and say break your security and then lie about it to your customers and lots of it was a small shop by read by one by one person and he was able to shut it down rather than comply if the f.b.i. went to google to microsoft to any of these large companies with that same water

those companies would not shut down they would have to comply and what that means is we don't know we don't know what other companies have gotten that type of order it's probably not zero and given that we don't know it's very hard for us to trust that any of them have it in this is the big risk this is the big problem of secret laws we don't know what's been subverted so we have to assume it all has. no privacy and encryption seem to make life more frustrating and more complicated for the consumer and you're a famous cryptologist so what can cripple creek encryption do to keep us more secure and how do we make encrypted easier for people like myself. you know making christian easy is one of the things i've been trying to for twenty years we actually have some very easy and corruption when you're on the internet when you're on the web and you see a u.r.l. as h.t.t.p. s.

that is an encrypted link so anything going over that link is encrypted and anybody listening in on the wire will not be able to to read the data so this is an example of encryption that is invisible to the user and works really well with their e-mail encryption programs that are a little bit harder to use if you chat i recommend a program called o.t.r. off the record which is extraordinarily easy to use and will encrypt your data and what encryption does it doesn't make you magically secure. what it does it secures you against bulk collection so if the n.s.a. g c h q the chinese government the russian government any other country is eavesdropping on the communications link encryption will protect the contents of your communication. that was cryptologist bruce schneier time now.

big deal time on this thursday with no one for edward harrison now today we're discussing a couple things first going to start off with apple t.v. then we're going to snap chat and then bit torrent now our first two stories have to do with security and privacy first open whisper systems and open source software group has announced the creation of the signal now that's a free app that allows people to encrypt their phone calls for free so how does this work out what's the start of this so basically you were talking to bruce schneier about encryption and the point is here that you want to be able to take phone calls and be able to encrypt without having to do a whole bunch of whiz bang stuff you know you have the black which allows people to basically be able to use their telephone in a normal way without any sort of surveillance this is a way for you to actually have telephone conversations using it without having to use any sort of sophisticated. hacking or routing what are jailbreaking and be able

to have a secure conversation this seems like there's no way this will work ok you know we know that a lot of it shut down that this is bound to shut down eventually i think you know i think that you know these kinds of are going are on the road they're already on the android platform and now we're seeing them on the platform as well which is a big deal i think that we're going to see more of these types of going forward from just trying out a healthy dose of cynicism to. move on to the next one bit torrent now bit torrent is developing and i say print shop product called bit torrent believe and it's currently available by invitation only but apparently keep your messages safe so this is a form of privacy that can prevent the government from snooping into your private conversations edward can you tell me what's going on with the. what's the story here so you know bit torrent and you think about actually a big coin has been distributed networks basically they're using and towards the same sort of thing a distributed network to be able to use that to make it so that you can get

people's ip addresses find out who they are specifically based upon their unique identification which is their ip address and this allows people therefore to have conversations without any sort of thought that anything that the government or you know in any other you know industrial espionage type of activity can go on and you can be private so it's another case in which privacy is increasing now that we know the n.s.a. thing is happening people want privacy and i think that there's a market out there for privacy types of apps this is a satirical yeah this is in the in the last when they were talking and i want to make of all these privacy initiatives you know are they really going to work and are they are they going to be jeopardized by consumers preference for convenience over actually you know just having having some of the first one i think is good in that way what you're going to see first generation early adopter type stuff coming

online. it's going to be something that's user friendly the key is being able to make privacy an integral part of the platform and also the as they are so that normal people can use them and it's not a big hassle to figure out how to have some measure of privacy in the us now let's move on to the one i want to start with apple t.v. now according to a tech business website the informant it seems that apple t.v. is running into trouble attracting cable companies to stream content ever teach only the reasons for these difficulties what do you think it's here you know it's a legacy business model and now we're seeing new business you think about the music companies they don't want any sort of new type of technology to reduce their revenue stream because if you think about i tunes as an example which is also another apple product. and that was the music industry this decision mediated the revenue stream but you got from physical c.d.'s these things are actually lower cost in all cases the revenue stream is lower cost for the for the company so for

the music companies it costs less for us to get these digital things it cost us less to get you know the new videos and so as a result what it means is they have this existing infrastructure they have to deal with and they're getting lower revenue against that that. existing cost structure so these companies don't want this to happen for that reason and that's why they're resisting this but it doesn't have anything to do with media consolidation like time warner comcast media consolidation is all about always and that's how ok so you know when you look at the emmys. in books there's a there's a whole thing there really what's come out is that amazon wants to lower prices for e-books and they don't want that because they have an existing infrastructure and they're going to have lower prices against that that's going to hurt their earnings now finally from the annals of market bubble snapshot is making headlines by seeking a new round of funding at

a ten billion dollars valuation now stop shop for those of you who don't know it's that little app where you take a picture of something you send someone and it goes away which is kind of me saying no these days are a couple seconds and i heard it's good for insider trading for. traders anyway. ten billion dollars company that sounds like a steal right now we only have thirty fellow hunter you're your thoughts on the publisher's nature of this i think that what we're seeing like when you talk about twitter earlier today with the fact that they have these are earnings that are based on. views and we're seeing the same thing with intil we see demonstrably earnings behind i think that we have to wait and see but it's looking to overvalued over just. thank you as always that's all for now but we love hearing from you so please check. our facebook page at facebook dot com slash combust r t and you can also tweet us at aaron ate at edward n.h. from all of us here at the bus thank you for watching see you next time check out.

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legal. but if you're going to watch the news all the face you know. a pleasure to have you with us here on t.v. today i'm real researchers.

a mosque in israel agreed to a seventy two hour unconditional ceasefire in gaza negotiated by the un and the us while the conflict has claimed more than fourteen hundred lives. latest e.u. sanctions on russia targeting banks oil and offense come into full force but the country's biggest bank also blacklisted by the bloc. lawlessness and mayhem c.e.u. governments and the us evacuating citizens from libya as radicals declare an islamic emirate in the country. and the us malls its largest ever shipment of hellfire missiles to the iraqi government that could that has lost control of economically crucial lands to jihad and.