Privacy expert Dr. Katherine Albrecht details how Dutch services like StartPage and StartMail bypass U.S. surveillance laws by stripping tracking data and utilizing client-side encryption, contrasting these with Gmail's alleged content scanning for ads. She recounts leading RFID boycotts that cost the industry hundreds of millions and warns that digital wallets and smart meters enable total behavioral monitoring, potentially leading to rationing akin to Venezuela's system. Ultimately, Albrecht argues that registering services like food or travel is a precursor to government confiscation, urging individuals to use cash and private tools to resist an expanding surveillance state. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
Time
Text
Deleting Email Files00:14:50
Hi, this is Dark Journalist.
Today, my special guest is Katherine Albrecht, the privacy expert and author of the best selling book, Spy Chips.
Katherine has been way ahead of her time in her forecasting on privacy and surveillance trends.
Today, she will discuss the rising danger of the internet surveillance state.
Here we go my exclusive interview with Katherine Albrecht.
So, you know, you put it all together and it just becomes mind boggling the amount of control, globalized potentially, control that is being built all around us into the infrastructure without us even being aware of it.
Now, Catherine, I know you've done some amazing work in advocating for privacy and transparency in the consumer technology world.
Tell me about your latest ventures StartPage.com, the world's first search engine that respects your privacy, and StartMail.
The way it works, you go to StartPage.com.
You can add it to your browser.
You can also put it in the right hand corner of your pull down menu, where Google has paid to be the default, and I think Bing has also paid to be up there as well.
You can add StartPage there.
When you put your search into the box, just like at any other search engine, we then get their results, we bring them back, and we strip out anything that they might have attached there.
We serve that to you, and then we delete all records of your visit.
So we don't store your IP address, we don't use any tracking cookies, we don't store the terms that you searched on.
Now, many tech giants are required to turn over their users' data if they're subpoenaed.
How do you avoid having to submit user info upon request?
We wouldn't be able to turn over information through a subpoena or a warrant.
There's actually a A couple of reasons for that.
Number one, we are not even under U.S. jurisdiction.
It's a Dutch company, StartPage, StartMail, and our sister search engine, Ixquick, which we should probably also talk about, but they're all based in the Netherlands.
So we are not subject to PRISM requirements.
We're not subject to Patriot Act requests.
We're not directly subject to any kind of subpoena, warrant, or FBI demand that would come from the U.S. government.
And we actually think that that makes us unique.
I've got to tell you, I'm kind of a true blue American girl.
I believe in buying American, but there are times when you say, thank goodness it's not on.
US soil, because that gives you additional protection, especially with all the revelations that Edward Snowden has been sharing with us.
So, with StartPage and Ixquick, both of our search engines, remember StartPage gives you those Google results.
Ixquick gives you also private results from other search engines, but not including Google.
And with StartMail, we store your mail, but we store it in an encrypted user vault, and only you have the encryption key that resides in your own brain and on your own local computer.
So, without that key, no one is able to get into your email.
That means that not only do we not read your email, unlike those other supposed free email services, which really exist specifically so they can read your email, we don't read it, and we also back that up with a guarantee that we are not able to read it.
So, when you log on, every time you log on to your email, you have to decrypt the entire storage on the drive.
Then you're able to access it, read, send, and do whatever you need to do.
And when you log out, it locks back up into a vault.
Turning the, you know, spinning the wheel in a safe, and at that point, no one can get back in unless you provide that key.
Okay, so what we have we have three services we have startpage.com, which keeps your searches private but searches Google for you anonymously as well, right?
And then Ixquick, which pretty much does the same thing except no Google searches, exactly, and then startmail.com, which keeps the contents of your emails private.
Yes, and startmail, I should clarify, it's not free.
And what I always, every time I talk about this at conferences and elsewhere, people say, well, wait a minute, why would I want to pay for email if I can get Hotmail or Yahoo Mail or Outlook Mail or Gmail?
If I can get all those services for free, why would I want to pay?
We're estimating it's going to be around $5 a month.
Why would I want to pay for email?
And the answer to that question is kind of like if a hotel told you, hey, listen, we've got free rooms, the whole third floor, totally free.
There's just one catch we've put cameras in all the rooms, and we've bugged the phones, and there's a camera aiming at the shower and at the bed.
And at that point, I think most people would say, well, that's not really free.
You're giving me a space.
But when I'm in that space, you're going to be watching what I do there.
That's not real freedom.
And we actually say the same is also true for those email accounts, especially just this summer.
Yahoo came out and specifically said that they're subjecting all emails, both received and written through Yahoo accounts, to content scanning and analysis, meaning that they are literally reading every single email that you write.
They're not only reading them for their own advertising and marketing purposes, pulling out all the keywords and using them in your profile so they can market to you, but apparently they're also using them for what they call abuse.
Protection.
And I've spoken, I do a daily radio show, and some of my listeners have been telling me that their accounts have been frozen for up to 24 hours or even longer because someone at Yahoo or even the automatic algorithm didn't like a word in their message.
In one case, a man had actually put the word silicone, and it was related to some kind of thing he was working on, but the word silicone or silicon somehow triggered Yahoo to say, This email will not be delivered.
He got a message saying, We refuse to deliver it.
And not only that, but for security purposes, we're shutting down your account.
For 24 hours, so he was not able to send or receive any email.
Now, with email services like Yahoo openly scanning their users' emails, do you expect to see large scale defections from these services?
It's actually quite shocking.
What people don't realize is that actually Gmail blazed this trail back in, I want to say 2006, it might have been even earlier.
And I was one of several dozen privacy advocates and experts who signed on even back then to say, wait a minute, your new plan, your new Gmail plan to offer email.
Is, you know, it's great.
You got all this storage and it's free.
There's just one catch you're reading everybody's email.
Now, at that time, that was not the case with Hotmail or Yahoo Mail or other mail services.
They were private.
But when Google came out with Gmail, and I don't know if you remember that time, but they offered huge amounts of storage.
It was like a gigabyte of mail storage, which at that time was almost unheard of.
And, you know, we all said, if you do this, you'll be setting a precedent.
And unfortunately, that precedent was actually set by Gmail, and now all of the other supposed Free email services have really followed suit.
So now instead of putting the advertisement right into your email, you may recall in the old days that when you would send a mail to a friend, there'd be an ad at the bottom of the mail.
Now they don't do that.
Your email seems as though it's completely free from ads and any kind of commercialization, but what they're really doing is they're reading all of the contents of your email.
So if you, for example, write to a friend and say, you know, I'm really nervous, and I'm a breast cancer survivor, so I'll use that as an example.
If you write to a friend and say, I'm really worried, I found a lump in my breast, and I'm not sure if I want to go get a mammogram.
What should I do?
Then at that point, creepily enough, you may find yourself on random other websites and seeing ads for mammogram services or breast cancer treatment centers or products related to that when truly that's something that you never intended to share.
Now, not only with healthcare information, but when Google came out with its new terms of service and they said, listen, we're going to be scanning all of your email for advertising and for this abuse protection, I actually had a girlfriend of mine say, you're kidding me, right?
I just sent my tax returns to my accountant as an attachment to my accountant's Yahoo email address.
Does that mean now that Yahoo has all of my tax information?
And I said, unfortunately, it does mean that because not only do they get the contents of your email, but they also get to scan through the contents of the attachments.
So if you send a PDF to any one of those services, whether it's Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, if you send a PDF, then if it's to your accountant, then they know your social security.
Number, they know your income, they know your deductions, they know the number of children you have, they know the social security numbers and names of your kids.
It's truly shocking how much information they actually get.
And when many people hear about this, they say, oh my gosh, I just want to go in and delete all of that information from my account.
Unfortunately, even if you delete it, all you're really doing is you're deleting your ability to access it.
You're deleting its name from your account, but you're not deleting the underlying file because they have the ability to retain that information for as long as they'd like to.
And unfortunately, here in the U.S., we do not have the legal rights or the legal protections.
To request companies to delete information they have on us, they do have those rights over in Europe.
And in fact, I just got back from a big privacy conference in DC where that's what we were talking about.
How can we maybe get some of those protections in the US to at least be able to see what data these companies have on us?
And then if we do want to delete it, to actually have that right to say, you know what, I know we gave you those PDFs, but we'd really like them not to be on your system.
Wow, yeah, absolutely.
Now, in a situation like that, What do you think that they do with the information when they have it?
Do you think that they create a kind of Catherine Albrecht file that they're adding things to?
And what do you think is the, you know, I mean, they're using it for marketing purposes, as you've already pointed out, but what else can they do with it?
Well, the first question you asked is about do they have a Catherine Albrecht file?
And let me tell you, there are actually a couple of lawsuits right now, one in California and one in Pennsylvania against Gmail specifically, but they could be against Yahoo or Hotmail as well.
And the reason for that is I, Katherine Albrecht, do not have a Yahoo account.
I don't trust Yahoo with my personal information.
And so as a result, you would think that because I never agreed to their terms of service by signing up for an account and clicking I agree, that I would not be in their database.
What the lawsuit is about is that even if I send an email, let's say that someone writes to me who has a Yahoo account, and many of my radio listeners do, and then I hit reply to that email, anything that I say in my reply that goes into that Yahoo account, Goes under the Catherine Albrecht file that they keep.
So not only does it go into the person I'm writing to who's agreed to those terms of service, but they make a whole new account with my name at the top, and then anything I send to anyone within their system goes into basically it's intercepted, read, and stored into that account.
So the reason there's a lawsuit is that's actually a violation of federal wiretapping regulations that say you cannot intercept personal communications between two people unless both parties have agreed to allow you to do so.
So, in the case of me writing to you at Yahoo, you may have agreed, but I didn't agree.
Right.
So that's where that lawsuit is.
Okay, now let's talk about Start Mail.
It's a very interesting product you've developed, which keeps your emails private and doesn't even allow the company to scan them for marketing or any other purpose.
Tell me a little bit more about it.
I think this is very interesting because one of the reasons we're developing Start Mail, and we want to make it very easy for people to get Start Mail accounts, so that if I write an email to someone, Who has a Start Mail account?
Not only are they both on those encrypted user vaults not being read, but even in transmission, they're through an HTTPS or SSL encrypted pipeline so that no one can intercept that mail as it travels.
And let's say I wanted to write from my Start Mail account to someone who had a Yahoo account, then I've got the option of putting in a user question.
Like it might say, you know, Daniel, who did we do the interview for last week?
And then voila, it would open up.
And you'd be able to access my encrypted email because you knew the answer to the question.
So, we've come up with a lot of creative solutions to make sure that people can still communicate even outside the system of Start Mail with the same degree of protection.
Well, yeah, that sounds very interesting.
I bet Start Mail will be a big hit because I think a lot of people are looking for a service like that.
Indeed.
And we've already got over 40,000.
I think we're up to 45,000 people now who have signed up to be beta testers to get a free sample account when it comes out.
I'd love to get you a full year account.
We'll go ahead and get you signed up.
You can kick the tires.
We can write to each other.
You can see what you think about it.
But we've also made it really easy to use because I remember, you know, I've been doing this privacy work since 1999.
And I actually got my doctorate from Harvard University in 2006, researching these topics and privacy education and why it is that people don't protect their privacy.
And what I found was they don't know how, or it's too inconvenient to try to do that.
And so I think back to 2000, 2001, when I first got PGP encryption, and it was virtually impossible to use.
It was so hard and so complicated and took so many steps that I finally, even I, a privacy advocate, I finally said, forget it, it's not worth it.
So, one of the things we told the engineers in developing Start Mail, make it easy, put the PGP encryption into the background where I don't even have to notice it.
I just check a box and it automatically does that for me.
And that's the part I'm most excited about because it'll let me, for the first time in 15 years of being a privacy advocate, to actually have encrypted email.
Thank goodness.
So, I'm super excited.
It's going to be great.
Your early work was primarily focused around RFID technology, loyalty card tracking, retail tracking, and that kind of thing.
And then you put out a best selling book called Spy Chips, which really raised awareness on these issues.
Do you feel that your efforts really curtailed the rise of the RFID technology?
Yeah, I think we definitely slowed it down with spy chips.
We also did a number of high profile protests.
We did BoycottGillette.com.
We boycotted the biggest retail chain in England called Tesco at BoycottTesco.com.
We did protests outside of Walmart stores.
We really did quite a bit.
Digital Gadgets Pounce00:05:08
To expose what the industry was planning with RFID tags.
And for people who haven't read Spy Chips, some of those plans were truly appalling.
The idea of hiding RFID tracking microchips in people's shoes or putting them into the seams of their clothing and then hiding reader devices in doorways and in bathrooms and bus stations and museums to track people, truly just a very disturbing plan.
So I think we did slow that down.
I've spoken to many people within the industry who say that we cost them several hundred million dollars.
Of canceled programs that were going forward.
And, you know, I'm a big fan of industry.
I'm a free market libertarian.
I believe in making money, but I don't believe in making money in a way that you have to hide what you're doing from the public or do something underhanded.
And in fact, I was at a conference when we came out with our RFID right to know legislation that would have required labeling at the very least on products with RFID tags in them.
And I remember getting up at this conference to announce this, and I had virtually everybody in the audience stand up.
It was a bunch of RFID people.
And they all got up and they said, You're trying to kill this industry.
And I said, well, you know, to be honest, I wouldn't mind if your industry went poof, but how can you say that just requiring labeling is trying to kill your industry?
I'm not trying to make it illegal, not trying to ban it.
I'm simply trying to have you let the consumer know it's there so that the market can make its own decisions, so people can decide themselves.
And it was so telling the response I got.
One of the key gentlemen in the RFID industry got up and he said, well, you know as well as we do, Catherine, if you tell people it's there, they won't let us use it, and that's going to kill the industry.
Wow.
And my response to that was if you can't tell people what you're doing, you probably shouldn't be doing it.
And I think that ties, you know, that was what, 2004, 2005?
Fast forward to today, and we're seeing the same thing with the NSA.
We're seeing the same exact thing happening with these nine prism companies.
With, you know, I mean, you've got Skype, you've got AOL, you've got Apple, you've got Facebook, you've got Google, you've got Microsoft, Yahoo, all these companies doing something which is providing backdoor access to all of their files and transactions and all of their customer information to the federal government, but it has to be top secret.
And again, I come back to the same thing.
If you can't tell people you're doing it, you've Probably should not be doing it.
And in that case, we're even talking about a violation of law because, of course, that's a violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution.
So, you know, there's been a lot of things going on.
RFID, I think, in the physical realm may have been supplanted a bit with our cell phones and our smartphones and all of these, you know, digital gadgets that we carry with us.
A lot of the infrastructure that was being proposed for tracking RFID tags that would be sort of passively in our belongings has really been redirected to the tracking of these.
Essentially, similar devices, radio frequency emitting devices called smartphones.
So, I think seeing that on the physical level, they want us to be carrying something or we will be carrying something, and then they just make the environment into the tracking device that kind of watches us as we go around.
And then I think on the digital side, we're seeing that all of these systems are being built that people are not aware are there.
And of that, for example, people don't know that when you go onto Google and you search for breast cancer, Or sexually transmitted diseases, or miscarriage, or alcohol addiction, or whatever it is that you're looking up.
And, you know, people should have a right to look things up privately.
But when you do that, they're waiting to sort of pounce on your information.
All of the major search engines do that.
People don't know.
They really don't.
So, all, you know, and I think it's even harder, Daniel, because when you sit down on a computer, you look around, you've got the shades drawn, the door is shut, there's no one around, and you feel as though you have this.
Personal and somewhat private relationship with this window into which you're communicating.
And I think that's really where people need to realize if you're typing it into a screen, unless you've explicitly and specifically sought out a private service like a Start Page or a Start Mail or an Ixquick, unless you've made an effort to be private.
And there are other services too, like Tor and Ghostory.
I mean, there's a bunch of them.
But unless you're using them, you can pretty much assume everything you type is going into a database.
It is going to be used for marketing purposes, and there's a very good chance that it will be intercepted and wind up in the hands of the federal government, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, who knows, but it will be in there, and it may well be in there forever, and you can't undo it.
So we're really calling on people and requesting people to just be more thoughtful for all of our sakes.
Now, you've pointed out the privacy danger of smartphones on multiple occasions in the past, how with a wave of the phone we'll be paying for our bills and taking another step towards a cashless society.
Food Purchase Surveillance00:11:04
Now, in your opinion, what is the top drawback to moving towards this digital currency, digital wallet, and a cashless society?
Well, let me give you an example that ties back to 1999 when I first founded Caspian.
I actually started Caspian because I was concerned about the supermarket frequent shopper cards, the ones that are used at grocery stores around the country Kroger, Stop and Shop, Shaw's, Albertson, Safeway, all of these stores.
And by the way, I can't mention that without giving you the good news that Albertson's has Discontinued its shopper cart, and so his Shaws.
Oh, wow.
I was excited about that 14 years after I started the battle.
Forgot, hooray.
So, this is where you cue Ding Don, the witch's dad.
That's how I got started, was really looking at those frequent shopper cards and saying, you know, people get so concerned about Second Amendment rights.
I know a lot of people in the liberty movement are very concerned about, you know, making sure that there's not gun registration, for example, because one of the things we know, whenever guns are registered, and historically when they were registered, even under the Nazis, when a bad government comes in, they use the registration records.
To confiscate people's guns and leave them disarmed as bad governments take over.
So I know there's a lot of political movement around that, but I didn't see the awareness around the frequent shopper card, which, if you think about it, is a registration of your food.
So when you scan a frequent shopper card, what you're really doing is you're telling the grocery store who you are, you're telling them where you live, and you're telling them how often you shop, you're telling them whether or not you have a cat, a dog, a child, a husband, whether you have hemorrhoids, whether you have dandruff, diabetes.
You name it, it's all conveyed through these frequent shopper card records.
And what's more, the stores now have converted those records into nutritional and health profiles on individuals.
So, what that means is that when you buy a cart full of Hagen Dias, they're counting up how many grams of fat, how many calories, how much sugar, and they're putting that in your record.
Now, I've said for years, 14 years to be exact, when I founded nocards.org, kind of a, I haven't updated it in years, but it's still there.
You can look at it.
Nocards.org, fighting the supermarket cards.
I said, if we're not careful, And we move to a society in which we are registering all of our food purchases, there will come a time when the government will use those records to restrict your ability to buy food.
And like so many other things I've said, people say, oh, come on, that's crazy, it'll never happen.
What do you mean?
Well, let me point you right now to Venezuela.
And you may recall Hugo Chavez recently passed away.
He had instituted price controls as part of his socialist utopia down in Venezuela.
And as always happens, price controls always lead to shortages.
So, Venezuela has been hit with terrible shortages in food, even toilet paper, of all things.
They actually had not a stitch of toilet paper in the whole country for several weeks.
So, Venezuela is really struggling with this issue of artificially reduced prices leading to shortages.
Well, guess how they're resolving that?
And I'm going to bring this whole thing full circle.
The infrastructure that was built up in the cash registers through the frequent shopper card programs is now being used to ration food exactly the way I predicted.
So, there is a state in Venezuela where about 60, 65 grocery stores, all the stores in the state, are all part of, they've all linked up their frequent shopper card networks.
So, when you go in to buy groceries on Monday at store A, you have to scan your government issued frequent shopper card.
They then make a record of exactly what you bought.
And if you bought, for example, a gallon of milk, well, that's your quota.
Now, on Wednesday, you try to go to store B 10 miles away and you have your, Your grocery card, and you put your milk up there, and they go to scan it.
There's a little alarm that sounds beep, beep, beep.
No, this person has already used up their allotment of milk.
They've got to put that back on the shelf.
So they're restricting people through the use of these registration programs to make sure that they don't buy more food than is allowed.
In the U.S., let me tell you where this has me very concerned.
The U.S. and the U.K. are, you know, it's not a good thing they're leading the charge with these shopper cards.
In the U.K., The big grocery chain Tesco, which I mentioned earlier that we boycotted for RFID use, they have actually agreed to share their frequent shopper card records with the government.
And the government, under the National Health Care Plan, wants to use all of those records, which, as I said, are now nutritional records and health profiles, and use them to try to maneuver the British public into eating differently or better or improving their diets.
Here in the US, under Obamacare, right now I could care less.
If you want to stock up on potato chips and soda and popcorn and beer, I don't care.
Do whatever you want.
But in the future, when everyone is paying for everyone else's health care through a single payer national health care program, At that point, I think it is just a matter of time and almost inevitable that these kinds of programs will be put in place.
In fact, right now at Safeway stores in California, if you are a Safeway employee, you get charged a surcharge on your health insurance if you don't allow them to track all of your food purchases.
So they're already linking the food purchases with the frequent shopper card, with the health profiles, with your insurance.
And when that comes together under an Obamacare plan, look out.
And I think we really could be seeing the rationing of food through these programs.
We got onto this because you were asking, what's the deal with cashless society?
What are the problems?
Well, the danger anytime you register something, the people who want you to register it want to monitor people's use of whatever it is, whether you're registering guns, whether you're registering food, whether you're registering travel.
It's because someone wants to monitor how people are utilizing that service.
And ultimately, it is because they want to restrict who and how that service gets used.
So you take a look, for example, at the no fly list.
Everyone now has to show ID.
That's actually a relatively new phenomenon that's only been around for about 15 years.
It used to be anyone could fly.
Now the government has to give you permission to fly.
So anytime there is a registration underway, I always caution people think this through because your first step will be registration, your second step will be restriction, and your third step will be confiscation or control.
And in a world of cash, it doesn't matter.
I just take my $20 bill, which is as good as your $20 bill, I go down to the local farmer at the farmer's market and I buy food.
But once the cash is gone, then at that point, it could actually be the case that the farmer is not able to sell me something without my number going into a global database, which then performs the same kind of no fly list.
Maybe it would be a no grocery list or a no eating list or a no purchasing list and says, hey, that Catherine Albrecht, she's a little too outspoken when she does these Skype interviews.
We don't want her eating this week.
And let's see if maybe she changes her tune next week.
So those are the concerns that I have that when you have the government looking at our innermost thoughts and communications, Through these NSA PRISM type programs.
And then when you have the corporations laying the foundation and the groundwork for the registration of fundamental necessities like food, then I think you actually run a very real risk of, at some future point, the leverage, the screws being turned up, and that being used as leverage to force people to comply to become very docile citizens, we'll put it that way.
So, what you're saying is the surveillance tracking starts out on a corporate level and then it grows into a kind of government centralization.
It becomes a way of identifying you and could eventually become a way of restricting your activities, like we've seen an extreme case of this in Venezuela.
Yeah, you know, and the Venezuela thing, it just happened within the last couple of weeks, and I had just a gulp moment because I truly had hoped that that was just the product of a feverish imagination, and to actually see it happening and to see it happening so exactly the way that I saw that, you know, of course they'll use it in that way.
Really was chilling.
So, I think as people say, you know, a cashless society would be so much more convenient, it'd be so much more this and that and the other, it also creates immense risks.
You know, you look back during World War II in the 1930s, in the years leading up to World War II in the concentration camps, Hitler actually began by restricting the ability of the Jews in Germany to purchase certain foods or to travel on certain streets or even to use elevators.
They had to use the stairs instead of the elevator.
Back then, that had to be enforced by people.
But today, you could actually identify any class of people and say anyone who, I don't know, voted for Ron Paul is not allowed to go into the museum or walk into a mall or get on an elevator.
Anybody who voted for Obama, if we switch administrations, won't be able to buy milk or cigarettes or whatever it might be.
There are ways that you can use these things to block people off, and it's been done historically.
It just wasn't done very well or very all inclusively because the technology wouldn't enable it.
When we move to cashlessness, and I say when, not if, because I think it is going to happen, then at that point it's going to be virtually impossible, especially with RFID tags embedded in our belongings, to exist so called off the grid or out of the system.
And when I say RFID tags embedded in our belongings, one of the things that's possible in the future, when every object in your home has an RFID tag, is you can actually have, you know, you think IRS audits are bad today.
You could have an auditor come in your home with a backpack, and in the backpack would be an RFID reader.
And he could just walk the hallways and walk through the middle of every room in your home and pick up the purchase history of every object in your house.
Actually, read every RFID tag, the one in your book and in your tape and your whiteout and your shoes and your dishes, and be able to tell if those items were purchased by someone else.
Because if you're trying to live off the grid and you don't have cash and you've been cut out of the system, then they would immediately know who has been supplying you with dishes or shoes or whatever it might be.
So, you know, you put it all together.
And it just becomes mind boggling the amount of control, globalized potentially control, that is being built all around us into the infrastructure without us even being aware of it.
Catherine, do you ever get frustrated that after having spent all this time researching these topics and understanding how the companies work, that the vast majority of computer users seem to be lacking the basic awareness of protecting their privacy online?
Fight For Cash00:02:42
It's changing though, Daniel.
It really is.
And I have to say, we owe Edward Snowden a huge debt of gratitude.
It should never be a Crime to reveal a crime.
So the fact that he came forward and told people what we've all been suspecting but we didn't have the evidence of has enabled, for example, this big groundbreaking lawsuit to challenge the provisions of the Patriot Act, which could never be done before because no one could prove they had standing.
No one could prove that their rights had been violated under the Patriot Act.
Now we've got lawsuits.
We've got a lawsuit moving forward in federal court saying, hang on a second, you can't access people's Verizon records when they haven't committed a crime.
That's a violation of the Fourth Amendment.
Thank goodness we know about that.
So, I found that in the 14 years I've been doing this, yes, I get frustrated.
I remember what the Bible says let he who has an ear hear.
And Jesus says this over and over in the Bible, and I used to think, what is he talking about?
Everybody has ears.
But now I've come to realize that when you speak truth, a certain percent of the population will lean forward and go, what was that?
Tell me more.
I want to know.
Where can I find that?
Other people will say, whatever.
I don't care.
And you have to really focus on the people who want to hear, who want to know, and who are interested.
And beyond that, you have to just kind of step back.
You know, the Bible also talks about casting pearls before swine.
I think there comes a point when some people love this.
You know, they want to live in a world that's totally under control and totally under the thumb of whatever global leadership arises.
And, you know, I have to say, as far as those people are concerned, I'll let you know what I know.
I'll share what I've seen.
I'll give you the alternatives.
There's a start page, there's a start mail, there's solutions here.
And if you choose not to avail yourselves of them, then, you know, I mean, that's unfortunate.
But please don't stand in the way of the rest of us from doing it.
And that's why I say, like cash, for example, we really do need to fight for cash.
I make a point of making all my purchases in cash.
And the reason I do that, you want to be the change you want to see, or what's the other phrase that they always use?
Act as though your actions were going to sort of determine how the world was going to turn out.
So I think if I don't pay cash, then cash is going to go away.
I mean, granted, I'm one person, but I do a radio program.
I've got tens, hundreds of thousands of listeners, and I try to remind everybody cash, use it or lose it.
Start page, use it or lose it.
Start mail, when it comes out, use it or lose it.
Because if we don't vote with our dollars, our Time, our money, our effort, and our energy for the right solutions, they're going to go away.
So, yeah, there are things we can do, and I think we have to take more personal responsibility and not sit around waiting for the government to fix it because the government is never going to fix it.
Smart Meter Gatekeepers00:04:28
The government is relying on our apathy to make it worse.
So, we've got to be the people making these changes and creating the solutions.
Now, it seems the smart meter technology is being forced upon homeowners to the point where if they don't accept the meter, then they quite literally won't be able to.
Power their own homes.
Where do you think this is heading?
You know, smart meters are kind of bizarre because whenever you talk about all of this tracking, surveillance, surveillance cameras, and license plate recognition, people always say, well, at least I can retreat to the privacy of my own home.
And up until now, you've always been able to do that.
You can say, fine, when I'm out in public, I guess I'm just going to be watched.
But when I get home, I want to be able to lock the door and just go, phew, I'm home, I'm safe.
And what the smart meter does is it provides a way to make your very home, your refuge, your castle, into a node in the network that is reporting on you and your activities within your very home.
So, a smart meter, people raise a lot of questions about hang on one second, let me just repair that.
People raise a lot of questions about the health ramifications of that.
I'll leave that to other experts.
I really raise the privacy questions.
When you have, excuse me.
When you have a smart meter attached to your home, it has the ability to pick up information from smart appliances.
And I know a lot about this because of reading the RFID plans and strategies by major corporations, where what they would like to be able to do is have every individual object in your home contain a passive RFID tag, and then have your countertop, your bathroom, your medicine cabinet, even your toilet.
Conveying information about what you're doing in your home.
So, I'll give you an example.
Philips Electronics has a prototype of a smart medicine cabinet.
And what it can do is every time you take the aspirin off the shelf or you take the lid off the toothpaste, for heaven's sakes, it sends a message through the medicine cabinet onto the internet.
So, then the real question well, how do you get your medicine cabinet onto the internet?
Nobody's really going to wire it that way.
But if you can wire it into a smart meter or into a smart grid, then you can actually have all of the wiring that's already been installed in our homes picking up and conveying all of this information.
So they would know, for example, if someone were staying in your guest room.
This is kind of freaky.
Do you know?
I had a guy from the market research industry tell me that he would be able to tell today that Anne Frank was hiding in that home.
Do you know how he was boasting they would be able to know?
Because they would buy more toilet paper.
Actually, be monitoring the rate at which they used up and had to replace their toilet paper.
And he said that it's actually a really efficient way of telling precisely how many people are in a house based on, you know, and yeah, you could ration it, you could use fewer squares, but if you're not thinking about it, you're conveying all this information.
So the idea that the data collection would be occurring through a box physically attached to the side of our homes, that's really, I think, where the privacy issues come up.
Now, I was at a conference in the EU.
And I had one of their future technology EU people.
He took me over and showed me a screen where they were actually running a full feature, a full length feature film, a Hollywood feature film.
And I looked at the screen and I said, Yeah.
He said, Well, look, it's streaming.
I was like, Well, so what?
He said, Well, take a look at the back.
This is not wireless.
This has no connection to the Internet.
And I went, Wait a minute, how are you doing this?
He says, It's streaming through the Internet, but it's streaming through the power cord.
And I backed up and I looked, and sure enough, They have worked out a way to stream that much.
I mean, you think of the pipeline, the bandwidth it takes to stream a full length feature film, and they're streaming it through nothing more than just the three pronged plug that you plug into the side of your room.
So, once we have the ability to transmit that kind of data through power lines, then the smart meter becomes kind of the gatekeeper for watching all of that information.
Streaming Through Power Cords00:00:36
Now, you've been a privacy advocate for many years, and you have predicted many of these trends before anyone else.
How does it feel to have been so far ahead of the curve seeing everything that's going on now?
You know, I don't enjoy saying I told you so.
I would have much preferred to have been wrong.
Yeah, yeah.
Gotta say, yeah.
Catherine, thank you for spending this time with me today on this very important topic.
The book is Spy Chips, and the website is katherinealbrecht.com.
This has been just a delight, and I'd love to do it again sometime.