France & Germany Officially BAN Pro-Palestinian Protests—As Rabid US Neocons Urge US War w/ Iran. PLUS: How Dystopian Face-Recognition Tech Will Destroy Your Privacy, w/ Kashmir Hill | SYSTEM UPDATE #161
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, on last night's show, we reported on a spate of disturbing censorship that is emerging throughout the West, ostensibly designed to outlaw, to criminalize, dissent from the West's policy toward the war in Israel and Gaza, exactly as they have spent the last 18 months dissent from the West's policy toward the war in Israel and Gaza, exactly as they have spent the last 18
Now, we know, of course, that the Israel-Gaza war fosters extreme emotion and passions on on both sides of the war, on both sides of the debate.
And that's true among the viewers of our show as well, which have been and continues to be one of the most ideologically diverse audiences of any political show, a real source of pride for us.
And we have members of our audience who are strongly in favor of what Israel is doing, who oppose Israeli blockades and occupation, who are disgusted by Hamas but want humanitarian constraints on how Israel responds.
But whatever your views are on the war or on Israel and Gaza, it should be alarming to everyone to watch European governments seize on and exploit These emotions to yet again increase their own censorship power.
We reported on several such repressive acts on last night's show, including the UK Home Secretary warning that the waving of a Palestinian flag or chanting pro-Arab slogans may be a crime.
Today, both France and Germany seriously escalated this censorship to all new and radical levels in the name of this new war.
may be illegal, exactly using the same rationale they used to try and make trucker protests in Canada against COVID mandates illegal as well.
Today, both France and Germany seriously escalated the censorship to all new and radical levels in the name of this new war.
As always, the reason why one should object to censorship, even if the target are views that you may hate in this particular case, is because if you acquiesce to these measures because it's your enemies who are being censored this time rather than your friends, then the precedent gets implemented or at least fortified and then you then the precedent gets implemented or at least fortified and then you lose the ability to object going forward once those censorship powers start being weaponized against your own views and your own allies as We'll tell you about the latest acts of repression.
The dystopian rise of privacy obliterating technologies is a topic that does not get nearly enough attention.
On some level, the notion that we have now ceded our personal privacy in the digital age has become so normalized that one barely notices any longer when there are major advances in the ability of states to digitally track and monitor everything we do.
And that normalization is really by design.
Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg had a notorious quote from 2010, namely that privacy is no longer a social norm, he decreed.
But in reality, it was really an observation by him that the internet is training people, training populations that there is no need to value personal privacy any longer.
There's no reason to be concerned about how corporations and governments spy on you.
A couple weeks ago I interviewed Coleman Hughes about how Ted tried to censor his TED Talk about race because he advocated colorblindness, a view that Ted employees somehow insisted was racist.
For a black man, Coleman Hughes to advocate colorblindness, the same thing Martin Luther King advocated and many other Anti-slavery activists throughout the history of the United States.
And I mentioned during that interview with him that I had done a TED Talk in 2014, and I described the process I went through.
And the topic of that TED Talk I did was essentially one that argued why privacy matters.
In fact, that was the title of the talk, why privacy matters.
Privacy does matter.
And it's still being aggressively eroded, primarily by new and stunning surveillance technologies that get far too little attention.
One of the genuinely good reporters at the New York Times, yes there are some of those, is Kashmir Hill.
There are not many, but there are some, and she's one of them.
She covers technology and privacy for that newspaper, and she just published a book that is truly good and important.
It's gripping at times, in which she recounts the sometimes creepy barriers she encountered as she tried to conduct a journalistic investigation of a new company, Clearwater AI.
That has developed remarkably invasive facial recognition technology.
Obviously, facial recognition technology is supremely invasive.
We take our faces wherever we go and if there's technology that can identify us and track us based on our face, that kind of surveillance technology is as ubiquitous as any.
We sat down with her for an interview about her new book and about specifically how this technology is already being weaponized by private corporations, billionaires, and by government intelligence agencies in ways that I think will amaze you.
This is really just part of a rapidly emerging dystopia that relies not just on privacy crippling technology, but also analytics to determine who are criminals and who are terrorists and who are other undesirable people.
analytics that are used to determine who gets punished, who gets excluded, even who gets droned.
And these analytics are at once remarkably efficient, yet remarkably prone to potentially disastrous error, and that includes facial recognition technology as well.
I think you'll really enjoy the interview we conducted with her, as well as her new book.
As a couple of programming notes, we are encouraging the viewers of our program to download the Rumble app, which works both on your phone and your smart TV, and if you do so, you will enable you to follow the programs that you most like on Rumble, which we hope includes system update, and it will also enable you to turn your notifications on, which we hope and it will also enable you to turn your notifications on, which we hope you will, so that you then get notifications the minute we or other programs start broadcasting live on Rumble, and that will help in the extremely rare case that we start a little bit late,
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Tonight, however, both because we're going to show you this interview we conducted and also because there's a big holiday here, we want to make sure our staff doesn't have to stay all night and can observe that holiday.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Governments around the world that want to censor have very time-tested and efficient tactics for getting the public not only to agree to that censorship, but even to cheer it and to crave it and to demand more of it. - Right.
And we're seeing that now.
As we talked about on last night's show, there are people primarily on the right, Who have built very prominent and lucrative media careers largely by denouncing state censorship and cancel culture.
People with whom I have been aligned in that cause for quite some time who have now turned around this week and completely reversed themselves by cheering for censorship
Of anybody who criticizes Israel or who expresses solidarity with the Palestinians, because now the issue is one they feel very passionate about, just like the left feels very passionate about the views they want censored on race or gender ideology or misogyny or xenophobia.
There are a lot of people who feel very, very, very strongly about this war, even though they don't live in Israel, they live in the United States or the West.
And the very same people have been crusading as free speech champions.
are now cheering as governments around the West, come here, Eurocrats, people raised in Brussels, France and Germany and the UK.
They're cheering them as they now start fortifying their censorship powers in the name of the war in Israel.
It's amazing to watch, but what's even more amazing and more alarming is how far this censorship is now going.
We reported on several cases last night that were already disturbing from the UK Home Secretary and from the Mayor of Toronto.
But what France and Germany did today has taken it to not just a new level, For this war, but a new level of censorship that I don't recall really seeing before in quite this blunt and extreme of an extent.
Here from the BBC today, the headline is accurate and stark.
France bans all pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
All pro-Palestinian demonstrations are banned in France.
The French interior minister has banned all pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the country.
Quote, "In a statement, Gerard Darmrine, I had a viewer generously offering to help me with my French pronunciations.
Noam Chomsky once explained to me why once you reach a certain age, your bones and your face ossify, the parts of your brains that helps with accents stops growing.
And the famous linguist explained to me that it is almost impossible to learn new accents As you get older.
I'm not near the age where that's yet happened, but I'm approaching it.
So I don't know how successful I'm going to be, but I appreciate the offer.
In any event, the French interior minister, quote, ordered foreign nationals who break the rules.
Let's say that again.
Just like in the U.S., most parties in France condemned what Hamas did on Saturday in Israel as a terrorist attack and expressed support for Israel's right to respond.
say that again.
Just like in the U.S., most parties in France condemned what Hamas did on Saturday in Israel as a terrorist attack and expressed support for Israel's right to respond.
That is basically the overwhelming consensus of mainstream political parties in the U.S., in Canada, in Europe.
Despite that, and even the initial response from Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who was the far-left candidate in the leader of the France Unbowed Party, he was also pretty supportive of Israel and viciously denouncing Hamas, he was also pretty supportive of Israel and viciously denouncing Hamas, like all decent people did, even though it was a little more But his statement caused a lot of controversy.
A statement by the party referred to the Hamas attack as, As, quote, an armed offensive of Palestinian forces, prompting fierce criticism from other parties, including left-wing allies such as the Socialist and Communist parties.
But the point here is that the French government has now officially banned protests.
So, for example, you're a member, you're a citizen of France, either a naturally born citizen or a naturalized one.
And your government has announced that they intend to fully support Israel's attack on Gaza.
And again, put aside what your actual views are.
Let's just focus for a minute on the issue of free speech.
Because I always argue, when it comes to free speech and censorship, that one's opinion of the views being censored don't matter.
Obviously, the whole point is that you're defending the right of citizens, your fellow citizens, to express views, not only that you dislike, but sometimes that you find genuinely offensive or dangerous.
I mean, the people on the left, who we often criticize, who support censorship, genuinely believe that the views they want censored are dangerous and hateful and bigoted and likely to incite violence against black people or against women or against trans people.
They do genuinely believe that.
They believe that as much as A lot of newfound American neocons and people on the right who now support censorship feel about the war in Israel.
They feel just as strongly.
But the point is that you're supposed to defend the right of your fellow citizens to express views you dislike.
So imagine you're a citizen of France and you want to have a protest against your government's support for Israel by denouncing the Israeli occupation of the West Bank or the blockade of Gaza.
Or you want to criticize Israel for using excessive force in Gaza?
You now are barred by law from having that kind of protest.
If, though, you want to have a protest supporting France's policy of giving aid to Israel in the war, and you want to have a pro-Israel rally, you're totally free to do that.
Because that's the line with the French government's war policy.
You're just not allowed to dissent from the French government's policy.
This is the same thing France and the EU did at the start of the war with Ukraine and Russia.
Obviously, their view, the French view, the EU view, was the same as the US government's, same as the Biden administration.
We are going to intervene in that war.
We're going to support the war by supporting Ukraine, fueling the proxy war.
And they immediately started enacting laws that, for example, made it illegal For platforms to allow to be heard Russian state media like RT or Sputnik.
Remember, Rumble is unavailable in France because the French government threatened to ban Rumble nationwide if it didn't remove RT.
Rumble said, we don't support RT.
We don't support or oppose any media outlet.
That's not our role.
We just allow anyone to upload their videos to our platform.
And we're not going to start arbitrating who can be heard and who can't.
That's the whole point of a free speech platform.
And the French said, under European law, even though Rumble's not based in Europe and not a European company, so now it means that social media platforms have to censor on every government's orders, It's exactly what the EU did with the war in Ukraine.
They're justifying censorship.
They're threatening Twitter, as we have reported the EU is, based on the ground that because Twitter won't censor enough, there's pro-Russian propaganda.
Every war, every crisis, like the COVID crisis, is seized upon by authorities and officials throughout the West.
now to justify censorship and that's all they're doing here.
They know that people feel very strongly about the war in Israel and they're exploiting those emotions to say we need the power to ban protests that deviate from government policy.
I hope that you are not supportive of that no matter how strongly you feel about what Hamas did or about Israel.
But as we're going to show you, a lot of people, including ones who have built their media career on opposing censorship and cancel culture, are in fact cheering France, cheering French officials.
It's not just France, it's Germany.
Here from Reuters, there you see the headline, Germany bans pro-Palestinian group Samadun.
Germany will ban the pro-Palestinian group Samadun, Chancellor Olaf Schloss said on Thursday, adding that its members were celebrating Islamist Hamas terror in Israel on German streets.
Quote, our law governing associations is a sharp sword, and we as a strong constitutional state will draw this sword.
Schultz said in an address to Parliament in Berlin, the group has been organizing pro-Palestinian protests and is now monitored by Berlin's domestic intelligence agency, according to German magazine Der Spiegel.
Again, we cover censorship.
It's one of the primary topics that we report on.
It's something of great concern to us for reasons we've gone over many times before.
And one of the things that has been happening over the last six years, especially since the UK approved Brexit and that Trump won the election, was that Western establishments and their authorities have decided that free speech can no longer be tolerated, that it's too dangerous.
And yet, watching a country like France ban not all protests about the war, just protests that support one side of the war but not the other, And watching Germany say they're banning an entire group, a party, because they're pro-Palestinian and putting them under the monitoring of their domestic intelligence services should be extremely disturbing to everybody and yet it's not.
Last night we went over six or seven examples of people who have spent years rallying against the left for cancel culture Now celebrating and in fact demanding that any student signing pro-Palestinian petitions in the United States be put on an actual list, that that list be made public, and that they be fired from their jobs or not hired.
But still, that is not as extreme as what I'm about to show you.
Here is Dave Rubin.
Whose show I was on when I went to Milwaukee to cover the Republican National Committee.
He's also one of the founders of Locals, which is the platform that we use here at Rumble.
And I'm citing him in part because he became a very prominent opponent of censorship and free speech.
That was one of the main reasons he gave for why he left the left, because he opposed censorship and cancel culture.
And here he is citing the report, the report I just went over with you, that France has banned nationwide all pro-Palestine protests.
And Dave Rubin above that wrote, quote, maybe the West has a chance.
Obviously cheering that law, the ban on those protests.
By the government.
And saying, evidently, I guess, the only way the West can be saved Is if France and other governments ban criticism of Israel or support for Palestinians.
I just, I find this mind-blowing, mind-blowing.
I don't understand.
I really, I'm not trying to make a rhetorical point.
I don't actually understand how the human brain can accommodate self-contradiction to this extent and not recognize that's what it's doing.
I spent yesterday and today denouncing this kind of censorship throughout the West, and usually it's left liberals who appear in my replies or write me emails defending censorship.
But over the last two or three days, it's been people on the right who are doing that.
And the arguments they make to defend this kind of censorship are identical Not similar to, identical to the arguments people on the left make to defend the censorship that they want.
Oh no, you don't understand.
This is hateful, this is bigoted, this is cheering violence and I'm likely to incite violence.
It's not true.
If you go and say, oh, I think the Israeli blockade of Gaza is wrong, or I think the Israeli occupation of the West Bank is illegal, or I think that Israel is using excessive force in how it's responding to the attacks it suffered, which, as we've gone over many times, we find reprehensible and indefensible what Hamas did, but if you go and make any of those arguments, you're not justifying violence, but
Even if that is true of that speech, it also of course is true that if you go on the street and say, I think trans people are a threat to children, you may incite violence.
And there are flags like the Confederate flag or other kinds of flags that have racist overtones, to put it mildly.
But usually we've been mocking the idea, mocking the idea, that that speech should be censored on the grounds that, oh, it's hateful or bigoted.
That's just not the role of the government.
It's not the role of the state.
And that people who have been saying that over and over for years when it came to left-wing censorship are now instead celebrating it.
In fact, saying that the only way the West can be saved is by allowing French officials To criminalize certain views that the French dislike.
I mean, it's like waking up in a different universe or watching conservatives be jettisoned back to 2002 on a time machine and then just start speaking.
This is what it was like after 9-11.
Anybody who dissented at all was deemed pro-terrorist.
People wanted these people silenced and fired.
I thought we were over that.
I really did.
Maybe I was naive.
Now, as soon as I said something about this, I emailed Dave and I said, look, you know, I am saying this respectfully, but I don't agree with you.
I did the same thing with Aaron Siberian and others.
And I said, I'd love for you to come on my show or I'll come on yours.
I would just, I would love to talk about this and understand how it is that you can be cheering French censorship of all things.
Here is a tweet from the same Dave Rubin.
In April of last year, quote, do the people screeching about the perils of free speech not realize they're fully admitting they only like the game when it's fixed?
This is what I mean.
And I could find a hundred Dave Rubin tweets like this or hundreds of YouTube videos or shows that where Dave Rubin has said similar things.
Accusing the left of only wanting the views they approve of and like to be permitted and every other view to be suppressed by the state.
And now they're turning around and doing the same.
Now, there was a video, I want to show you this video.
It was, can we check if this is the University of Washington or the University of Wisconsin?
It says the University... Okay, so it's the University of Washington and At this university, there was a pro-Palestinian protest organized by students at the school.
They were waving Palestinian flags.
They were chanting that Palestine should be free.
I don't think there were reports of people cheering what Hamas did.
It was a generalized pro-Palestinian protest.
But even if People wanted to cheer what Hamas did.
That's actually illegal in the United States.
That's free speech.
Just like you could cheer Al Qaeda.
You can cheer the KKK.
You can cheer the Nazi Party.
You can march through streets with Nazi insignia.
This is free speech.
But from what I can see, at least, and from the reports I've seen, I don't want to state it too definitively, but I'm not saying maybe there was one or two people there who praised Hamas, but it wasn't a protest in defense of Hamas.
It was a protest in defense of the Palestinian cause, which is not the same thing.
One of the students who identified as a Jewish student began weeping and begging a school administrator to get rid of this protest, to ban this protest, on the grounds that it was making her feel intimidated and unsafe.
And ordinarily, everybody On the right would be mocking a college student who was weeping about the existence of a peaceful protest by saying that makes them feel unsafe and they want the administrator to come and make them feel safe by banning the protest.
She would be ridiculed and derided without end.
And yet, I don't want to generalize, obviously there's a lot of people on the right uncomfortable by the censorship, but there were a lot of people, including people who work for Barry Weiss's site, Free Press, which is a site that was created in opposition to cancel culture and campus oppression, who were glorifying her, who were siding with her and saying, yes, this protest should not be allowed.
Let's watch her.
They want our people dead!
They want us killed.
How is it allowed?
How are you allowing this?
Why are you putting us down here?
They want us dead.
Please, I didn't believe.
I'm sorry, this is a question.
This isn't about what happened.
So you can see, I don't -- I don't -- I don't know.
I think these women are being attacked violently or physically.
Their complaint is that the mere existence of a protest where people are waving Palestinian flags make them feel unsafe.
And their claim seems to be that anybody who supports the Palestinian cause who is opposed to Israeli occupation of the West Bank or the blockade of Gaza wants to murder Jewish people.
And it's kind of a grotesque slander.
There are a lot of Jewish people who are supporters of the Palestinian cause and who believe the Israeli government has been excessive and abusive in their treatment of the Palestinians.
But that is the framework being presented.
The IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces, actually has adopted the slogan, copying George Bush after 9-11.
They're posting it on Instagram and everywhere else.
And the slogan is, either you stand with Israel, or you stand with the terrorists.
That was, of course, George Bush's famous, or notorious, post-911 formulation written by David Frum.
Either you're with us, or you're with the terrorists.
And it's intended to create a framework where you either agree with everything the Israeli government and the American government do, or you're on the side of Hamas.
And that's the premise that these students have internalized.
That if you're waving a Palestinian flag, it means you want to murder Jews.
But I don't even want to dissect How they are interpreting this protest.
It's a peaceful protest about a political debate, an important one, one in which the United States government is involved in a new war and people have the right to dissent.
That is the fundamental right that we spend so much time in this show defending.
And the idea that college students, these are adults, Can't withstand the existence of protests or being exposed to views that they dislike or find offensive and are going to weep to administrators about the need to stop the protest to make them feel safe, as I said, is something that ordinarily is viciously mocked.
As it should be.
And yet here, the same people who mock it are cheering it, are saying that she's right, this protest should not be allowed to be heard.
This peaceful protest.
Now, a couple of days ago, Tucker Carlson, at least from my memory, talked about Israel and Palestine for the very first time.
I'd never heard him talk about that topic before.
And he did it in the context of interviewing the presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy.
And before he interviewed Vivek, Tucker gave a monologue of the kind that he had that he used to open a show with every night on Fox that he hasn't really been doing much of.
And I'm glad to see that he's now doing them.
And his topic was Israel and Palestine.
His argument basically was that every decent person thinks what Hamas did is reprehensible and that Israel has a right to respond, which is the view of myself as well.
But he then went on to question, why should this be an American war?
Why should the United States immediately view every attack on Israel as an attack on the United States?
And this is what he said.
So there's a lot at stake in how we encourage Israel to respond to the horrifying Hamas attacks.
Wisdom and long-term thinking are essential, but you will not be surprised to learn that is not what we are getting.
Watch this person, for example, who happens to be the media's pick for President of the United States.
This is not just an attack on Israel.
This is an attack on America.
Because they hate us just as much.
And what we have to understand is, this is the reason that we have to unite around making sure our enemies do not hurt our friends.
America can never be so arrogant to think we don't need friends, just like we needed them on 9-11.
That's why Ukraine needs us when Russia's doing this.
That's why Israel needs us when Hamas and Iran are doing this.
I'll say this to Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Finish them.
Finish them.
Hamas did this.
You know Iran's behind it.
Finish them.
They should have hell to pay for what they've just done.
This was an attack on America, she says, when in fact it was not.
And for that reason, we must, quote, finish Iran, a nation of nearly 90 million people.
What are we watching here?
This is not sober leadership.
She's a child, and this is the tantrum of a child.
Ignorant, cocksure, bloodthirsty.
Yet no one in Washington scolded her for it.
In fact, they aped her hysteria.
Here's fellow neocon Lindsey Graham just spelling it out and calling for the bombing of Iran.
So I've been on the phone all day to the Mideast, and I've told our allies and people with connections to Iran what I would do.
I would tell Iran that if Hezbollah attacks Israel, we're going to come after you, the Iranians, and have a coordinated effort between the United States and Israel to put Iran out of the oil business by destroying their refineries.
There are four major refineries in Iran.
They're fixed targets.
If Hezbollah attacks Israel, I would make Iran pay a heavy price.
Now let me just stop you there because in that interview, Lindsey Graham said, if Hezbollah attacks Israel, then I would attack Iranian refineries.
In other words, I would go to war with Iran.
Not Israel go to war with Iran, but the United States.
But in an interview with CNN, the day after, He eliminated that caveat.
He now wants the U.S.
to go to war with Iran.
He wants the U.S.
to go bomb Iran along with Israel.
Here's what he said.
What I would do is I would bomb Iran's oil infrastructure.
The money financing terrorism comes from Iran.
It's time for this terrorist state to pay a price for financing and supporting all this chaos.
Yes, if you're the Iranians, if we're up to me, this war escalates.
I'm coming after you.
I think this is what I'm trying to clarify here, because I'm wondering... Us and Israel.
Us and Israel.
The United States and Israel... No, I will be crystal clear.
Let me just understand you, just to be clear.
You're saying that you would want the United States and Israel to bomb Iran, even in the absence of direct evidence of their involvement in this attack.
Yeah.
All right.
So he then went on to kind of say why he thinks it's clear Iran.
But that's that's Lindsey Graham.
So he wants to not only have the war in Israel be viewed as an American war, but he also wants to go bomb Iran right now.
He wants to start a war with Iran.
We have a war with Russia, a proxy war in Ukraine.
We have this war in Israel now with Gaza.
He wants to go start a war as well with Iran.
So we're going to be at war with Iran and Russia and then the one in the Middle East who could entail who knows who and at the same time he constantly criticized the Biden administration for not doing enough to confront militarily confront China even though we have China militarily encircled.
So he seems to be wanting a war with China as well.
That's a lot of wars against a lot of big powerful countries that Lindsey Graham wants to send other people to go fight.
So let's just watch now The views of Tucker Carlson because what he said, Tucker Carlson, enraged Ben Shapiro.
I think it's worth showing this division on the right right now about how to think about this war in Israel.
BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND ISRAEL TO PUT IRAN OUT OF THE OIL BUSINESS BY DESTROYING THEIR REFINERIES.
THERE ARE FOUR MAJOR REFINERIES IN IRAN, FIXED TARGETS.
IF HEZBALAH ATTACKS ISRAEL, I WOULD MAKE IRAN PAY A HEAVY PRICE.
WHAT EXACTLY WOULD HAPPEN TO THE UNITED STATES IF WE DECLARED WAR ON IRAN AND STARTED BLOWING UP THEIR INFRASTRUCTURE?
LINDSEY GRAHAM HAS NO CLUE WHAT He hasn't thought it through.
He's almost 70 years old and he has no children.
He doesn't care.
But neither, amazingly, do most of his colleagues in Washington.
They're as reckless as he is.
Texas Congressman Dan Crenshaw took to social media to call for what he described as a war to end all wars.
As if there is such a thing.
But of course, there isn't such a thing.
Wars beget more war.
The bigger the conflict, the uglier and longer lasting the consequences.
See World War I for details.
So, World War I, of course, was described at the time as the war to end all wars.
We were told that the United States should go fight in that war and win in it, and that would put an end to all wars.
And of course, it spawned World War II, and needless to say, it did not end all wars.
So, that was Tucker's monologue.
He said what Hamas did is reprehensible.
Israel can respond how they want, but there's no reason to make this a United States war and especially not to start a war with Iran.
Here was Ben Shapiro responding to Tucker's comments with a lot of rage.
As I said, this war is producing enormous amounts of extreme emotion among a lot of people who have a strong affinity for Israel.
And that's what's driving a lot of this censorship craze and a lot of this extremism and desire to get people fired and silence them is how much passion Israel provokes for a lot of people.
So here's what Ben Shapiro said in response.
I don't have a voice to that because I'm a human being.
Oh, sure you do.
You sound very outraged.
The outrage among Republican presidential candidates was so much more intense.
One of them took to a bullhorn and started yelling about it.
I get it.
But no one would think to do that about the 100,000 American young people murdered every year.
Because who are you yelling at?
Who are you yelling at?
First of all, people are on bullhorns yelling about drug overdoses and the open border all the time.
All the time.
What is he even talking about?
What he's attempting to do is minimize what happened in Israel.
He's not attempting to maximize what happened in the United States.
He's attempting to minimize as though America can't walk and chew gum morally speaking at the same time.
Which is absurd.
And those two things are nothing alike.
I'm sorry, that is not alike.
It is not alike for drug smugglers to smuggle drugs over the border, which someone then takes and shoves into their arm and then they die of an overdose.
That is not the same thing.
I promise you, it is not the same thing as a terrorist breaking into your home and murdering your children in their beds in front of you and dragging your wife off to be raped in Gaza.
That is not the same thing.
Now just...
To note the important point here, because I think it's not obvious from Ben Shapiro's reaction, he's saying what happened is so much worse in Israel because they came in and killed children in front of their parents and they raped women, etc.
And that's much worse than Americans dying of overdoses from fentanyl by huge numbers each year, 100,000 each year, because that's not the deliberate killing.
And I don't even necessarily have a problem with that moral distinction.
The problem for the argument, though, is that Israel is a foreign country.
Israel is not the United States.
When Marjorie Taylor Greene was on my show and many other times when she argues against having the United States fuel the war in Ukraine, give the money and weapons to Ukraine that it needs for that war, she says Ukraine is not the 51st American state.
So while the moral distinction Ben Shapiro is drawing might be true, that, I don't know, It's worse to have a terrorist come into your home and shoot you than it is to have your son die of a fentanyl overdose because one is deliberate and one is accidental.
The point Tucker Carlson's making is that if you're the American government, an American official, you should care more about the latter.
Not because it's worse or better, but because it's actually happening to Americans in the United States and not to this foreign country on the other side of the world, whether Ukraine or Israel.
And that's the Division on the right that I think is crucial, which is, is it the role of the U.S.
government to go around the world constantly fighting wars in other countries for the benefit of other countries?
This is what Donald Trump ran on in 2016 that we shouldn't.
Do we look at the war in Ukraine?
Do we look at the tension that Iran has with Israel?
Do we look at the attack on Israel by Hamas and say, no, these are all our wars, too?
We have to go have all these multiple wars, not because we were attacked, because foreign countries were.
Let me finish Ben Shapiro's response here to Tucker.
He pretty much gets angrier and angrier and talks faster and faster as he does, but I think it's worth hearing.
pretending that it is is a moral it's a moral blight it's idiocy it's just moral stupidity at the highest level of course we should care about what happens with fentanyl of course we should care about we should close our border have i been unclear about this of course america should have closed borders when it comes to this sort of stuff i'm on the same side as tucker on that i just don't understand why he's not on my side when it comes to hamas has to be wiped off the face of the earth what is no again just to be clear tiger carlson
lots of other people of that same view didn't say that it's wrong to try and destroy In fact, Tucker said if any country like Israel is attacked that way, of course they need to respond.
His argument was that's the responsibility of the Israeli government, not the American government.
Those are two separate countries.
It's the responsibility of Israel to protect its citizens called Israelis.
It's the responsibility of the United States government to protect its citizens called Americans.
But this is why there's so many high emotions that governments are able to exploit and to get people to cheer for censorship because of how emotional some people get when it comes to Israel.
Here is John Bolton on CNN.
It's always good to hear from him.
And here's what he says.
Joining us now, former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton.
Ambassador Bolton, appreciate you being here in that capacity and your experience as ambassador to the United Nations as well.
But let's begin with Iran because I think everyone knows where you stand on Iran.
We'll never forget the op-ed you wrote in 2015 to stop Iran, bomb Iran, but I'm struck by how differently even members of Congress see the intelligence out of Iran that they were briefed on yesterday.
Should the U.S. be exceedingly cautious at this moment?
Well, I think you have to look at particular elements of intelligence within the broader strategic framework.
And I think what happened over the weekend was in our...
Isn't it amazing that one of the most deranged figures in American political life, somebody who has been laughed at at Washington, who has been mocked as a caricature of a warmonger, is the person CNN turns to for foreign policy advice?
They have him on constantly.
And the reason, of course, is because when he got fired by Donald Trump, he turned into a Trump hater, and that's the only thing you need to be to be Welcomed and respected by CNN.
But also, John Bolton doesn't have access to intelligence.
He's sitting here pretending like he knows better.
When the Wall Street Journal claimed Iran participated in the planning of this attack, both the US government and the Israeli government came out and said, we don't have any intelligence that suggests that's true.
And here's John Bolton trying to pretend like he knows better, like he has access to the intelligence.
And of course, as the CNN anchor or host or whatever she is pointed out in the question to him, he's wanted a war for a long time with Iran.
All neocons have.
And they're now exploiting the emotions around what Hamas did to Israel, just like European officials are due for censorship power to try and prod the United States into the war they've long craved with Iran, just like neocons craved a war with Iraq way before 9-11.
We did a show once on Bill Kristol and documented how he was craving War with the Rocks, so was Victoria Nuland's entire family the Kagan's, and then when 9-11 happened they immediately saw, ah, this is the opportunity to exploit the emotions Americans feel over 9-11 by trying to mislead them into believing Saddam Hussein personally planned the 9-11 attack.
Do you know that when The United States invaded Iraq.
70% of Americans believe the complete and utter lie that Saddam Hussein personally participated in the planning of that attack.
That was done by all the people who now claim to hate disinformation so much.
So here's John Bolton now trying to exploit all of our emotions, having watched these Hamas videos, to try and steer us into a war with Iran, just like Lindsey Graham wants to do.
All the people who cheer every American war, who always want new American wars, who never get near the front lines and fight them, like John Bolton, but always cheer them, are trying now to steer America into a war with Iran at the same time They're trying to ensure that there's censorship of anybody who dissents.
Iranian attack on Israel, using Hamas as a surrogate.
No question.
None, whatever.
The only real question now is whether Hezbollah will join in at an appropriate time.
Iran has supplied enormous quantities of weapons, material, financing, training to both Hamas and Hezbollah for decades.
Really, they formed Hezbollah in the early 1980s.
Hamas had a different origin.
It's Sunni, not Shia.
But in the last 10 years, they have been largely a surrogate for Iran.
And many leading Hamas officials are embedded with Hezbollah in Lebanon and Turkey.
Iran did not provide all that material, billions of dollars worth over the years, so that Hamas or Hezbollah could deploy it when they saw fit.
They gave them those weapons so that they would be deployed when Iran saw fit.
And let's not forget, this attack occurred on the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War.
This is not accidental.
I just want to be clear, that is in opposition to what multiple sources tell CNN, the U.S.
intelligence.
Do you see how deferential they are to him?
She's like, no, no, please don't get mad at me.
I'm just telling you what intelligence officials have told us.
Do you see her hand out?
Please, please don't get angry at me, John Bolton.
Liberals love these warmongers.
They love these neocons.
They're also all over The Atlantic.
The Atlantic is a magazine funded by Steve Jobs' widow and is run by Jeffrey Goldberg, the journalist who, when he was with The New Yorker, did more than anybody else to deceive Americans into believing that Saddam Hussein personally planned the 9-11 attacks and was in a partnership with Al Qaeda to trick Americans into supporting this war that they've long craved in the Middle East.
Here is another one of these neocons, Eliot Cohen.
He doesn't get a lot of attention.
He's not very charismatic, but he's constantly writing in places like the Atlantic.
And here he has an article against barbarism.
We are in the fight of our lives.
and look at the neocon worldview and see if you're comfortable with this quote americans have fought barbarians in syria iraq and afghanistan all wars that he supports ukrainians have been fighting them for years and particularly since february 24 2022 another war he supports occasionally as in russia today or germany in the 1930s or the gaza strip under the hamas dictatorship They seize hold of a whole society and instill their doctrines in a crowded population, converting some and terrifying others into passivity.
Then they are truly dangerous.
Note he just takes Russia and Gaza and groups them in with Nazi Germany, a country that tried to conquer all of Europe and did the Holocaust.
And the whole article is basically designed to insist that Americans take more seriously this threat by trying to ensure that Americans want to go to all these wars and fight all these wars that all these neocons want to fight.
People like Lindsey Graham and Nikki Haley, there's no wars too many for them.
There's never a point where they say, we can't fight more wars.
They're craving more wars all the time.
And these are the same people who, not the same kinds of people, the same people, who led America onto such a disastrous path after 9-11 by doing the same exact thing they're trying to do here, exploiting the high emotions surrounding this war.
And one of the things we always try and argue when opposing censorship or the attempt to crush dissent is that the reason dissent is so important, the reason it's so important to allow these kinds of debates to be had, not to have the state come in and crush them, is because if you don't allow it, you're going to allow people like this to propagandize without challenge.
And yet that is what people want.
That is the core desire at the heart of censorship, is to ensure that the people who you disagree with most on the topics you care about most can't be heard.
So that only your side is heard.
And people can't resist it.
They have no way to critically evaluate it because you've made it illegal to challenge what you say.
And that's why you have people like all these right-wing figures that we've cited.
And again, there are a lot of people on the right who are not on board with this at all.
There are people on the right who despise Hamas, who want to do everything to support Israel, who nonetheless have been bothered by censorship.
But a lot of them, including amazingly the ones most identified with the cause of opposing censorship in Cancel culture are the ones cheering most loudly for all of these repressive measures.
And the reason for that is because the issue they care about most is this war in Israel, or one of the issues they care about most.
And so just like when the left finds the issues they care about most, culture war issues on race and gender ideology and gender and sexual orientation and immigration.
And they want to suppress and criminalize dissent from their views on the grounds that it's hateful and bigoted.
And designed to glorify violence.
That's exactly what a lot of these people who crave more war and more and more war in the Middle East also are trying to do.
And you may fall on the side of the debate with Ben Shapiro.
You may fall on the side of the debate with Tucker Carlson.
You may fall on the side of the debate of people on the left who are more supportive of the Palestinians and view Israel as repressive.
But wherever you fall on that spectrum, You cannot go around supporting states making it criminal to adopt a certain view of a policy, a very consequential policy they've adopted, and to watch the same people
Who made so much of a name for themselves and built such a platform, made a lot of money convincing people that they're free speech warriors and hating and opposed to censorship and counterculture now turn around and invoke those same policies and the same rationale in defense of Israel is something that is not only incredibly disturbing but also very dangerous.
So we're going to have the second segment of our show, which is about these privacy crippling technologies.
And this interview with Kazimir Hill, who wrote a very important book on how facial technology is way more advanced than you know, and is already being weaponized in all sorts of ways.
And we have a sponsor who, of course, is very important to our show, who we hope you will give a good listen to and consider patronizing.
and we're going to hear from them right now, and we'll be right back after we do.
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There are a lot of issues of great consequence that, for whatever reason, don't get nearly enough attention in the media, and sometimes I am guilty of not paying sufficient attention to topics that probably deserve more, and one of them is the always inexorable, ongoing, constant and one of them is the always inexorable, ongoing, constant assault on our people.
Our privacy through a combination of private corporations and even billionaires and especially state intelligence services that, as we just showed you in that last segment, use monitor and tracking not just against criminals or terrorists but also against domestic dissent.
We've covered that a lot.
And a lot of these privacy-invading technologies are getting more and more sophisticated and more and more potent.
Without very much attention at all.
One of the few times privacy actually got a lot of attention was when we did this note June of 2013.
So more than a decade ago.
We had a 10-year retrospective with Laura Poitras and our source for the story, Edward Snowden, on the show.
Maybe it was about now four months ago or five months ago.
Came out more than a decade.
And in that decade things have gotten way more menacing.
And we're about to show you an interview we conducted with the New York Times reporter Kashmir Hill as a new book about the very gripping investigation she conducted into a company that has become the primary company selling facial recognition technology.
And the uses of this and the abuses of it are far greater than even as somebody who covered privacy great deal I had realized before reading her book.
And the context, the key context is that there's so many different kinds of technology and not just technology that invades privacy, but a lot of what is happening is that governments are increasingly using dehumanized technology, artificial intelligence, analysis of but a lot of what is happening is that governments are increasingly using dehumanized technology, artificial intelligence, analysis of metadata to
The Chinese are doing that too in terms of analyzing a person's sort of social score, who you are as a person, using all kinds of complex data that you can't appeal from, you can't reason with.
And sometimes it's used not just to exclude people from credit or from the financial system, but also to dole out punishment, including death.
One of the stories that I did as part of this note in reporting that I thought got insufficient attention was one that I did with my colleague at the time, Jeremy Scahill.
It was actually the very first article that was ever published by The Intercept.
It was February 10, 2014, and the title of this article was, The NSA's Secret Role in the U.S.
Assassination Program.
At the time, a major controversy was the fact that the Obama administration was going around using drones to kill people, to assassinate them.
John Brennan, the CIA chief and then the National Security Advisor for Barack Obama was overseeing this policy.
They would have these methods, these mathematical, analytical, algorithmic methods for determining who should be their target.
For drone killing based on technology that monitored and tracked people and assigned scores to them.
Here's what we reported, quote, the NSA is using complex analysis of electronic surveillance rather than human intelligence as the primary method to locate targets for lethal drone strikes, an unreliable tactic that results in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people.
According to a former drone operator for the JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, who also worked with the NSA, the agency often identifies targets based on controversial metadata analysis and cell phone tracking technologies.
Rather than confirming a target's identity with operatives or informants on the ground, the CIA or the U.S.
military then orders a strike based on the activity and location of the mobile phone a person is believed to be using.
In one tactic, the NSA, quote, geolocates the SIM card or handset of a suspected terrorist's mobile phone, enabling the CIA and U.S.
military to conduct night raids and drone strikes to kill or capture the individual in possession of the device.
And one of the things we found is that sometimes this algorithmic analysis was very sophisticated, but other times it was scarily and alarmingly flawed.
So the effort, the essence of it was that they were trying to determine the likelihood that you are a terrorist by seeing how often you interact with or communicate with known terrorists, how many times you're in their proximity, all done through computer analysis, not, as we said, confirmed with human intelligence on the ground saying, yes, that person is a terrorist.
And one of the things that we found was that some of the people with the highest scores, they would give out point scores based on the likelihood that someone's a terrorist, would be people who were talking to known terrorists, not because they were terrorists, but because they were journalists reporting on what Al Qaeda was doing, or if the Taliban were doing, or diplomats, or people working with the government of Pakistan or Afghanistan to try and defuse terrorism, or to try and contain it.
And when you use metadata analysis to determine who is a terrorist, who deserves to die, sometimes these systems are frighteningly efficient and sometimes they are embedded with flaws that can lead to fatal errors.
Now, it's not just the United States, of course.
China is using these kinds of dehumanized analytical methods to determine people's worth or value based on judgments that not human beings make, but that computer systems make.
Here from Wired in July of 2019, the complicated truth about China's social credit system.
Quote, China's social credit system isn't a world first, but when it's complete, it will be unique.
The system isn't just as simple as everyone being given a score, though.
Brits are well accustomed to credit checks.
Data brokers such as Experian trace the timely manner in which we pay our debts, giving us a score that's used by lenders and mortgage providers.
We also have social style scores, and anyone who has shopped online with eBay has a rating on shipping times and communication, or Uber, where drivers and passengers rate each other.
If your score falls too far out of luck, China's social credit system expands that idea to all aspects of life.
Judging citizens' behavior and trustworthiness.
Caught jaywalking?
Don't pay a court bill.
Play your music too loud on the train?
You could lose certain rights, such as booking a flight or train ticket.
As yet, there's no one social credit system.
Instead, local governments have their own social record systems that work differently, while unofficial private versions are operated at companies such as Ant Financial's Zimacredit, better known as Sesame Credit.
What's troubling is when those private systems link up to the government rankings.
Which is already happening with some pilots, she said.
Quote, you'll have a sort of memorandum of understanding like arrangements between the city and, say, Alibaba and Tessin about data exchange and including that in assessments of citizens.
That's a lot of data being collected with little protection and no algorithmic transparency about how it's analyzed to spit out a score or ranking.
Though Sesame does some details about what types of data is used.
So this is really the point is that you have these incredibly potent technologies constantly collecting data on us, which not only invades our privacy, but then is used to make judgments about us that are stripped of humanity.
There was a huge scandal in the UK.
Here we see that from the Financial Times in 2022 that reported on the fact that the Postal Service had implemented software designed to detect who was stealing money, who was embezzling money, who was committing fraud and abuse.
And what they found was that there were so many bugs and errors in the system that it ended up falsely accusing hundreds of people and punishing them based on algorithmic errors.
The headline is hundreds of quote lives ruined by post office scandal inquiry hears.
Executives said to have known the IT system was faulty but still used evidence from it as the basis for prosecutions.
These systems are all around us.
They get very little attention.
But we're increasingly living in a world where we're constantly being monitored by increasingly sophisticated invasive privacy destroying technologies.
And then being put to use in private corporations, but also by governments and intelligence agencies in a way that is getting more and more entrenched every day, and yet has no opportunity for human interaction.
It's just all mathematics.
It's reducing you to data and numbers that are determined by systems that are monitoring you and your activity constantly.
One of the most important, one of these, and I think one of the most disturbing, is how much facial recognition technology has advanced.
Where everywhere you go, you obviously bring your face, And the level of capability that this technology now has is way beyond anything I understood until I read this book by Cashmere Hill, Your Face Belongs to Us, A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It.
And the book tells the story of her role at work as an investigative journalist to try and Find out about this company, how she discovered it, but then also what she learned about just how potent private face facial recognition technology has become and the ways it's already being weaponized with very little attention.
Private corporations can buy this software, billionaires buy this software, governments buy this software, and they're using it to track everybody all the time in ways that This interview and this book do a great job of revealing.
I think you'll really enjoy and find, I don't know if enjoy is the right word, but find very thought provoking and informative this interview that we are delighted to show you with Cashmere Health. - Cashmere, first of all, congratulations first of all, congratulations on the release of your book.
I know from personal experience what an arduous path that is.
It's a book I'm really excited to talk to you about.
You see it on the screen.
It's Your Face Belongs to Us.
What a secretive startup's quest to end privacy as we know it.
Thanks for taking the time to talk to me.
I'm happy to be here.
Thanks for having me on, Glenn.
Yeah, it's a great book.
I think the kinds of books I like best about investigative journalism are ones that involve a lot of high drama.
I think that's the best kind of investigative journalism because usually you're digging to expose secrets of a lot of powerful companies or a lot of powerful people, and that's exactly what this book is about.
So before we get into the details of how you got into this story, how you came to become aware of this company that you have done a lot of reporting on First of the Times now in this book, let's just talk about the technology of facial recognition generally.
Independent of this specific company and what you've found, what has been the kind of trajectory of facial recognition technology over the past couple decades?
Is it in use?
How has it been used?
And what have been some of the controversies surrounding it?
Yeah, so police departments have been using facial recognition technology really since the early 2000s, and they were using it traditionally on criminal databases at first, at least, you know, going through mugshots, trying to identify an unknown criminal suspect.
And honestly, in the early days, it really didn't work that well, especially in the real world.
There were many problems with it.
One is that when it did work, it tended to work on white men and not as well on other people.
But yeah, it's been around for a long time.
Tech companies started using it.
to, for security reasons, you know, open your cell phone, tag your friends on social media.
And all along, it was kind of, I mean, it was a little bit janky.
It didn't work that well.
But then in the last five years or so, it grew very, very powerful.
So this book comes out of an article, an investigative report, a quite long one, a quite dramatic one that you wrote for The Times in January of 2020, the title of which was The Secret of Company That Might End Privacy As We Know It.
And the sub-headline was, a little-known startup helps law enforcement match photos of unknown people to their online images and might lead to a dystopian future or something a backer says.
So talk.
Talk a little bit about how you came to learn of this company.
This company seems to have had a lot of advances, seems to have disseminated this technology in ways much further than people understood.
How is it that you learned about this company and what it is they were doing?
Yeah, a few years ago I got a tip from a public records researcher who had been doing FOIAs to police departments around the United States trying to understand what facial recognition technology they were using, how much they were paying for it, and he got a response from the Atlanta Police Department that included mention of this company, Clearview AI, that that claimed to have scraped billions of photos from the public internet, from social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Venmo, LinkedIn,
and that hadn't gotten anyone's consent to get those photos and was secretly selling this kind of superpower to police officers and nobody and that hadn't gotten anyone's consent to get those photos and was secretly And I'd been covering privacy for 10 years and I found it really shocking.
And when I talked to experts in the field, they were very shocked by it.
And meanwhile, this company that was kind of exposing so much about all of us who had our photos in the database was kind of trying to stay in the shadows and not have people know about them or even who worked for the company.
So one of the things I think happens with a lot of these new technologies, and I know this from my own experience in doing privacy reporting, I know you do as well, is that sometimes these technologies that have a kind of dark side, a very high potential for danger, for abuse, Get presented to us in the first instance is kind of this banal or even fun and very kind of useful technology.
Look at artificial intelligence in general now.
It first got widespread public consciousness through this chat GPS software where you can go and ask questions.
It does actually help a lot and sometimes that obscures the More nefarious ways this technology can be used so I think a lot of people's experience with facial recognition besides knowing police departments use it to catch criminals which I think a lot of people support are pretty trivial things like it's a way to get into your phone that sometimes is more secure.
I know a lot of times if in the past when I've been locked out of social media accounts you can submit a photo of your face which they then match to say your Instagram photos to confirm your identity and so people think wow this seems like a technology that offers a lot of convenience.
What has been the ways they've tried to lead people to think this technology can actually be useful or trying to trivial, and what are the dark sides to it that people aren't seeing? - Yeah, so clearly there are benefits and conveniences to facial recognition technology And yes, I think most of us would agree that it can be very useful to solve a crime, right, if you can identify an unknown person.
But when you think about the deployment of this more widely, I mean, Clearview sells this to the police, but originally they wanted to offer it to everyone, to anyone, individuals, companies.
And there are lots of other facial recognition technologies that offer that.
And so think about if You know, you walked into a bar and you're talking to somebody and decide, I don't want to know this person anymore.
You walk away, you haven't told that person anything about you, but they snap a photo of your face.
And now they're able to search the internet for other photos of you.
They can find out your name, you know, your friends, where you live.
This can be used on people seeking medical services.
You know, a woman who goes into an abortion clinic and walks out and there's protesters outside.
They take her photo.
They know who she is.
They can make assumptions about what happened there.
Governments using this to identify protesters.
Kind of one of my favorite examples here in the United States is Madison Square Garden, which installed facial recognition technology for security purposes to make sure that threats didn't come into their basketball games and their hockey games and concerts and shows.
And in the last year, the owner of Madison Square Garden said, well, another great way to use this would be to keep out the lawyers that work at firms that have sued my company because it's really annoying.
They cost me money.
And so now, and I actually have seen this happen.
I went there with a woman who worked at a personal injury law firm that had sued Madison Square Garden.
And the minute we walked through the door, security guards approached us, asked for her ID, and she got kicked out.
So you could really see how this technology could usher in this new era of discrimination because it's so easy to associate your face with all of this other information about you gleaned from the internet.
You know, I was thinking about the Stoner reporting that we did and obviously this gigantic impact it had.
And at the time, the program, especially the first one we exposed that caused so much controversy was the fact that the government was collecting people's communications data.
Who they called, who called them, how long they were speaking, where they were.
And I always used to think, This is really kind of ubiquitous spying.
It's very scary spying.
At the same time you can kind of avoid it by not calling people.
You can meet in a park.
You can have conversations that way.
It's increasingly difficult with the internet being the way that we use everything, but at least you could kind of escape it.
Your face, though, is something you have to take everywhere.
You're constantly feeding into this database where you go, with whom you are, what it is that you're doing, what kind of places that you're frequenting.
So talk about, you know, there's obviously other distinguishing features that we have, like our fingerprints that have been in databases, or our DNA that have been in databases that let people Police departments and companies identify us, find out information about us.
Why is facial recognition technology particularly subject to abuse?
I mean, so eventually I got the people behind Clearview AI to talk to me.
One of the founders is a guy named Juan Tontat, and I've met with him several times while I was working on the book, and each time he would do a search for my own face in Clearview's database.
And there would be hundreds of photos, you know, some that I'd put on the internet, but also things I didn't know were there.
You know, me in a crowd at a concert.
Sorry, can I just interrupt you there about that story?
So, you were, and I know you wrote about this in the book, and what you just said caught my attention as well, which is, so during the time that you were investigating them for the New York Times and then for your book, they were actually using their technology to kind of track you.
Was that with your consent or was it kind of a mixture that they were doing it on their own and then also you wanted to see its potential?
Yeah, no.
At first, when the company wouldn't talk to me, I actually found police officers who had used the app and I wanted to interview them about it, and they would offer to run my face so I could see what the results were like.
And each time this happened, basically, the officer would stop talking to me.
In one case, my face didn't have results, and what I eventually discovered was that the company was tracking me.
They had put an alert on my face and they had blocked the results for me.
And every time an officer ran my face, they would call the officer and tell them to stop talking to me.
So it was it was very chilling for me to see that this company could see everyone who law enforcement was looking for and control whether they could be found.
When, you know, the the CEO ran a search for me on the first time and there were results, he said it must have been a bug earlier.
But there were just so many results there.
And one of them was striking me about your question is there was a photo of me with a source.
And we've been at an event together.
And it just it was my immediate thought was, wow, I'm going to be I'm going to need to be more careful when I'm out in public with a sensitive source, because it could be tied back to me like this.
And actually, while I was working on the book, the CIA sent out a warning to its kind of bureaus around the world and said, you need to be more careful with your informants.
They're being compromised and they're being killed because of new ways of AI tracking, including facial recognition technology.
So yeah, you can't just meet at a, you know, a dive bar anymore and leave your phone at home and trust that you won't be able to be tied to this person.
Yeah, that's what I mean.
It just seems like you're so vulnerable.
I mean, I guess you could wear a mask or something, but even then, I'm not even sure it is a way to block that.
A ski mask would probably work.
What's that?
A ski mask might work.
Yeah, a ski mask.
But then on the other hand, if you're walking around with a ski mask, you're going to be drawing attention to yourself in other ways.
Anyway, that's a pretty extreme way to have to go through life to avoid being constantly tracked.
And that's, I guess, what I mean.
One of the things that caught my attention as well, I'm really interested in this, is You said as part of your investigation you had determined, discovered that big tech companies like Facebook and Google had actually developed very effective and invasive facial recognition technology as early as a decade or more ago and yet they decided it was too dangerous to deploy.
Now these companies are not exactly renowned for their reticence when it comes to using technology because it might be too dangerous.
What is it that you found out about what they had developed and why they decided it was too dangerous at the moment to utilize?
Yeah, this was so surprising to me because as you say, these aren't companies known for holding back when it comes to kind of new ways of collecting data.
So, I mean, Google was saying as early as 2011 that this was the only technology at that time that they had developed and held back.
I got to watch this video of engineers at Facebook in a tiny conference room at Menlo Park One of them had a smartphone strapped to the brim of their baseball cap and was looking around at the people in the room and the phone would call out their names.
I mean, I thought when I first found out about Clearview that they were kind of technical masterminds who had been able to do something that big tech companies and the government hadn't been able to do.
But it turned out it was really just an ethical breakthrough rather than a technological one.
They were willing to cross that line.
And I think with the big tech companies, they're just under such scrutiny.
They've had such blowback for privacy invasions that when it came to this, they were just more careful.
And I think it's such an important, it's really an important thing for us to be thinking about in this time of AI that, you know, the big companies may be responsible actors.
You know, they're worried about what society thinks, but then you're going to have these radical kind of smaller actors, these startups, they're just trying to, make a name for themselves, you know, pioneer a new business model.
And I think that we're going to see more Clearview AI type businesses that do things with these powerful tools that are more accessible than ever that really shock us.
Yeah, that's what I found so disturbing, even kind of creepy about this investigation that you did, which is that there is, I don't want to call it a comfort because that's too much, but at least like an assurance that Facebook and Google are subject to a lot of media attention, a lot of government attention, regulatory attention, If nothing else, maybe they regulatory attention, If nothing else, maybe they do have a little bit more caution because they've already become extremely rich.
Maybe it's just that they're worried about their position.
They don't want to take as many risks.
Clearview, though, just kind of came out of nowhere and they're behind this extremely invasive technology.
What is it that you were able to find out about them?
You mentioned earlier this kind of founder who is a kind of sketchy Australian business person who used to be a model.
What have you been able to find out about this company and the people behind it?
So one thing that's surprising about them is they're just so small.
Juan Tontat, yeah, young guy, grew up in Australia, obsessed with technology.
At 19 years old, he drops out of college, moves to San Francisco, you know, is trying to ride the tech boom in 2007, doing Facebook quizzes, making iPhone games.
And kind of part of like a liberal crowd there, grew his hair long, hung out with musicians and artists.
And then he moves to New York and fell in with a kind of more conservative crew, reading a lot of Breitbart, met a guy named Charles Johnson.
They go to the Republican National Convention together when Trump was a candidate.
And Charles Johnson told me that in the early days, that this is how they started thinking about Clearview AI.
or the company that became Clearview AI.
It would be nice to have kind of an app on your phone where you could just point it at somebody and get a bunch of information about them and kind of understand, should I know this person?
Should I avoid this person?
And they linked up with a guy named Richard Schwartz, who was older than them, who had worked with Rudy Giuliani when he was mayor of New York.
And yeah, they just, this small ragtag crew was able to come up with this really powerful technology.
And in the beginning, they just wanted to sell it to whoever could afford it.
And so some of the earliest users were...
Billionaires, you know, investors that they were trying to get invested in the company.
Peter Thiel was actually their very first investor with $200,000, and they would actually give the app to these people.
So that was, as William Gibson says, the future is unevenly distributed, and the rich often get it first.
So one billionaire investor from New York told me about how he had it on his phone, and his daughter walked into an Italian restaurant with a date that he didn't recognize.
So he had the waiter take a photo of them, ran their picture for Through Clearview AI and then was able to figure out who her date was.
Yeah, I mean, and we're obviously, you know, as you suggest, like at the incipient stage of this technology.
It's, I think, a lot more advanced than a lot of people recognize, but it, you know, every kind of month that goes by, every year that goes by, it gets more and more invasive.
One of the things you report is that this technology is in use in China already with a lot fewer limits than our legal framework, at least for the moment, would permit.
What kind of ways is this facial recognition technology being used in China?
So in China, you know, it is far more widely deployed kind of actively on surveillance cameras so you can track people in real time.
Protesters in Hong Kong said that they were being identified with facial recognition, that the police would show up at their door after a protest.
So they started actually scaling some of the camera poles and like painting over the cameras and trying to prevent being recognized this way.
You know, used to control the Uyghur population there.
And it's also used in these, you know, oftentimes when you set up these AI surveillance systems, the original idea is this is going to prevent security threats.
But then you'll see this slippage.
And so in China, we've seen it getting used to identify people who wear pajamas in public, which is frowned upon.
And then they'll name and publicly shame these people, you know, put their photos up on social media, include their names.
It's been used in a public restroom in Beijing at the Temple of Heaven because they were having problems with toilet paper thieves.
And so they set up facial recognition cameras in the bathroom that you had to look at to have, you know, toilet paper provided to you.
And if you needed more than you got, you had to wait seven minutes before you could, like, look into the camera and unlock more.
you know, giving out jaywalking tickets.
I mean, once you have this technology in place, there are so many ways that it can be used and some of them are really quite chilling. - So speaking of chilling, one of the things I do a lot of reporting on, we do a lot of reporting on this show, is how oftentimes technologies or surveillance methods are first deployed is how oftentimes technologies or surveillance methods are first deployed in war zones where there tend to be no limits of any kind and then they kind of start slowly migrating to law enforcement and then to domestic uses
There was a lot of that in the War on Terror where there were weapons and technologies developed for use on the battlefield in Iraq or Afghanistan that have now made their way to the United States for use in sort of more ordinary One of the things you did in uncovering the people behind this small company is you trace the political leanings.
You talked about some with Peter Thiel and the Trump Convention in 2016, but also the person behind this company seems to have kind of developed a fanatical interest in and support for the Ukrainian military and its war against Russia.
And has given a lot of this technology to the Ukrainian military.
How is it being used in that war zone in Ukraine in ways that might end up being translated to civilian life?
So the idea originally, I think, when Clearview AI gave it to Ukraine for free to use on the battlefield was that it might help them identify kind of Russian infiltrators who were kind of pretending to be, you know, in Ukrainian populaces.
And they said, oh, maybe you can use it to, you know, reunite people with their families if they get separated somehow.
But one of the very creepy ways that it has been used is when Russian soldiers were killed in battle, the Ukrainians were taking photos of the corpses, identifying them, finding their social media profiles, and then contacting their loved ones, you know, wives and mothers and partners, and saying basically, like,
Your loved one has been killed and it was an attempt to kind of sway public opinion in Russia and let them directly see the toll of the war.
But a lot of people, you know, felt that that was a very creepy use case.
I remember, Kashmir, when we were doing this stony reporting, there were so many reports that sometimes some of the ones that I thought were most important kind of got lost in the news cycle or just like in the fatigue of how many stories we were doing.
And one in particular was we had discovered that one of the things they were doing in Afghanistan and in Pakistan as part of the drone program under Obama, who loved this kind of effort to make the military more sophisticated, more technologically advanced, was they were using metadata analysis to determine assigning points based on how often someone spoke to a known terror suspect,
how often they were in proximity to that person, and kind of assigning how often they were in proximity to that person, and kind of assigning points based on how likely they were a terrorist and often putting them on the drone target kill list or not based on this kind of dehumanized And as it turned out, oftentimes they were wrong.
There were people who were talking to terrorist suspects because maybe they were journalists or activist groups trying to do things completely independent of terrorist activity.
So a lot of times we think about this technology and get scared about it when it works.
But sometimes it's even scarier when it kind of doesn't work, when it's inaccurate, when it inaccurately targets somebody.
How susceptible is this technology as it's currently deployed by this company and by law enforcement agencies that are consuming its product?
How susceptible is it to those kind of errors?
As one privacy professor put it to me, you know, we are not all unique snowflakes, and there are people in the world that look like us.
And especially when you get a database that has 30 billion faces in it, I think you're going to create more of a risk of possibly saying somebody is not a person that they are.
We know of at least six people who have been wrongfully arrested based on a bad facial recognition match.
The most recent one that I reported on is a woman named Portia Woodruff.
She was eight months pregnant and got arrested one Thursday morning trying to get her kids ready for school for robbery and carjacking committed a month before by somebody who was not visibly pregnant.
I mean, clearly was not her, but she had been identified in a facial recognition match and the police had not done enough investigating after that to see if she was actually the person responsible for this crime.
And she went to jail for the day, had to hire a lawyer to defend herself.
I mean, there's a real cost to being arrested.
And so I think that is one thing.
If we do decide, okay, yes, we should use facial recognition technology to solve crimes, we need a strong, you know, kind of regulatory framework for how it gets used and make sure that people don't just kind of get a hit in a face recognition database and then just go out and arrest that person because then we will have people certainly who are wrongfully arrested.
Yeah, for sure.
Just a couple more questions just to not make this so dreary about this kind of dystopian technology that's already here when we didn't know and probably coming even more aggressively.
So one of the things that happened with the awareness of the mass surveillance system is people started developing things like encryption to make it more difficult for governments to surveil on them and other privacy tools that ended up being developed.
We talked kind of, I guess, frivolously or jokingly about wearing a ski mask, but what are some of the precautions people can take or some of the ways that they might be able to thwart what seems like a pretty ubiquitous and inevitably strengthening technology that can really surveil everything we do and where we go?
There are many privacy technologists who are kind of playing a cat and mouse game with these algorithms, and they will develop something that disrupts the computer vision system.
So every once in a while there'll be a new sweater, you know, that you can wear that it has a whole bunch of little people on it and it confuses the camera.
A ski mask certainly would make it easier.
There have been people talking about kind of dirtying the data and having some kind of software Where every time you upload photos of yourself, it kind of makes little tiny pixel level changes so that that image couldn't be associated with you.
But that would really require, you know, a big company like a Facebook or an Instagram to kind of deploy that widely.
As for individuals, I mean, as always, being careful about what you post online.
Taking advantage, if you have them, of privacy laws that let you access the information that a company like Clearview AI holds and delete it.
There's another, we didn't get into it, but another public search engine that's available, not just to police, but to anybody with a subscription called PIMEyes, and you can search your own face on that and kind of see what your exposure is.
And PIMEyes does allow people at this point to remove results that they don't like.
Yeah, last question.
I guess, in a way, one of the reasons to write a book like this is to raise public awareness and hopefully highlight the need for more safeguards and more protections.
But in the reporting that you've done, the part of your reporting that you've done on kind of the legislative response and the regulatory framework, does it seem like there's any kind of political constituency concerned about this and pushing for meaningful reform or meaningful regulatory protections?
There's definitely a push.
You know, one of the things I did in the book is to trace the many times that politicians have gotten upset about facial recognition technology dating back to the 2001 Super Bowl in Tampa Bay, Florida, which got dubbed the Snooper Bowl because they secretly had facial recognition running there.
And after that, you know, you had Dick Armey, a very conservative congressperson, pair up with the ACLU, who they're not usually on the same side of an issue, and put out a press release that said, we need to do something about this, we need to protect our civil liberties, otherwise we're going to be tracked everywhere we go by face.
I've seen that happen again and again, these strange political bedfellows, you know, uniting around privacy as a bipartisan issue.
Most recently it was John Lewis, the civil rights leader, who was leading the impeachment into Trump, held a hearing with Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows, Trump supporters.
Mark Meadows became the chief of staff for Trump.
And they said, we don't agree on a lot, but we do agree on this, on privacy, on controlling facial recognition technology.
So it seems like there is, this is like one of the few things that all the politicians agree on, What's disturbing is we still are not getting any kind of laws to ensure that we can harness the benefits and convenience of facial recognition technology, but not have to also embrace the very chilling deployment of it that would kind of limit our ability to be anonymous in public.
Yeah, it's so frustrating.
I remember, in the wake of the Snowden reporting, the big reform bill was co-sponsored by Justin Amash, who at the time was kind of known as this Tea Party conservative, very young Republican from Michigan, and John Conyers, the longtime African-American liberal and civil libertarian from Michigan.
And they created this big bipartisan coalition in defense of privacy, which has been a longtime cause on both the kind of libertarian right and the left.
And at the last minute the NSA managed to derail it and that so often happens where you get these bipartisan coalitions and somehow these power centers end up defeating it.
Well, I really enjoyed reading the book.
For me, it's a book at least as much about investigative journalism as it is about facial recognition because you really take the reader on this kind of exciting and You know, very dramatic effort to dig into a company that is sketchy, which always makes it a little bit more insecure and a little bit more chilling.
And I think it's the best kind of investigative journalism where, you know, you just kind of intrepidly dug and really gave us a lot of information about the technology that is coming.
And the question is, what are we going to do about it?
So the book is Your Face Belongs to Us, A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It.
I really can't recommend it highly enough.
I enjoyed reading it.
I appreciate your taking the time to come and talk to me about it.
Thanks, Glenn.
I can only hope it has the kind of impact that your incredible reporting on privacy has had.
So, thank you.
Thanks, Kashmir.
Have a great evening.
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