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His website is schneier.com.
That's S-C-H-N-E-I-E-R, schneier.com.
And here he is at theatlantic.com with what we don't know about spying on citizens.
Scarier than what we do know.
Welcome back to the show, Bruce.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
I appreciate you joining us today.
It's been way too long since we've spoken.
And you know what?
This series of stories coming out of The Guardian and or The Post, it's, well, a lot's covered.
And of course, the TV is mostly concerned with the soap opera of the leaker himself.
But you've got a great rundown here, a sort of what we know, what we found out over the last decade even, about the different programs the government has for hacking us, the plain old regular American citizens.
And it's the kind of thing where I think, you probably need your level of expertise to be able to categorize and remember all of the different things that they're doing to us at this point, the way you've recounted it in this article.
It's really incredible.
Can you sort of paint the picture for the people here?
Well, I mean, really, the story is less the individual details and more the totality.
It's kind of ironic.
I was writing that piece you talk about over the past few months.
Yeah, the metadata, so to speak, huh?
The last week's events.
We could talk about metadata, and I think it's a terrible word for that.
But over the decades, we've been seeing a huge growth in surveillance, both government and corporate.
I mean, the interesting thing about this story of last week is the NSA is spying on everybody, but they're not doing a lot of work to do it, right?
They're getting a lot of the data from Verizon and from Google and from Apple and from all these companies.
And that's sort of the real story, that there is an enormous amount of data about individuals being collected and saved for use later.
And it's pretty much impossible to live a life where that doesn't happen.
So we're entering a surveillance state.
And we should have a huge debate now about whether the government is allowed to get this data and under what rules, under what laws, and how much secrecy.
But there's a much broader debate about whether we want to live our life in public in this way, whether we want large companies buying and selling this data in an effort to advertise us better or behaviorally profile us better.
And so these are all the meta issues that are coming to light because of what happened in the past five days.
But the issues are a decade or more in the making.
Yeah.
Well, so I'm afraid about that public debate as much as I am all the secrecy because it seems like everybody always decides wrong.
Go ahead and have your way with us.
What do we care?
And of course, it's always the 56% versus the 41 of us and they get to cede our rights for us and we don't have a say in it, those of us in the minority.
Well, you know, hopefully, there are strong constitutional issues here, especially when it comes to government surveillance.
Rules about probable cause and getting court orders.
Rules about what the NSA is allowed to do, domestically versus foreigners.
Rules about what the FBI can do.
So we do have these rules.
You're right.
When you're dealing with public opinion, especially when the public is scared for reasons right or wrong, it's very easy to cede our rights to say, just do anything and keep me safe.
And unfortunately, a lot of the debate in the last decade has been from a position of fear.
I think that's wrong and you're right.
We can come up with very bad answers.
But we as a nation can come up with good answers too.
After the abuse of the 70s, we established a lot of controls against government surveillance.
And we can easily put in controls against corporate surveillance about how this data can be used and collected.
Europe has done that.
And their economy is no less robust because of it.
So we can have these debates.
You're right that it's hard.
And fear is not a good place to have them from.
But I think we do need to learn to discuss scary things.
We as a civilization, as a country, we're dealing with a lot of risks these days that are complicated and technological.
And we do need to figure out how to have intelligent conversations of them.
Whether it's climate change or surveillance or any other large issues.
I don't think we can say that we can't talk about this because we don't know how.
I think that's a mistake.
Right.
What do we do know about what they're doing?
It seems like for somebody who just more or less tries to keep up with this on the layman level reading Bamford and following the news.
I guess I would have guessed exactly what we're finding out this week.
That yeah, ever since the FISA amendments they've legalized the creation of warrants for categories of information.
And so go ahead NSA, read emails or whatever it is that you're interested in.
Google searches.
Why not?
There's basically nothing stopping them.
That's what I've assumed was behind all this secrecy.
It was exactly what we're finding out.
But then, so what do you imagine is so much more that we don't even know yet?
How much worse could it get?
And I think you're right.
I think for those of us who study intelligence and the NSA and policing, there are not a lot of surprises here.
It's important to get the real documents and the real information because suspicions can't drive policy change.
You actually need the real facts.
But no, we all thought that all our email was being hoovered up by the NSA.
We all expected all of our phone calls were.
There's not a lot of surprises.
The only surprise was the presidential directive on cyber war.
Because that discussed not eavesdropping but offensive cyber capabilities.
That the United States is building cyber weapons, is targeting cyber weapons, and is engaging in operations to gauge how well they work.
And I think that also ties into this.
Just because the U.S. Cyber Command is at Fort Meade, Maryland with the NSA and the general in charge of the U.S. Cyber Command is General Keith Alexander in charge of the NSA.
So all of this is tied together.
And it seems unreasonable to believe that the NSA would be engaging in all of these eavesdropping operations abroad and not also figuring out how to target weapons, how to perform damage.
And that to me is very destabilizing.
That's the only news here.
Everything else, if you asked me about it two weeks ago, I would say probably this is true, probably that's true.
A lot of what I wrote in that Atlantic essay was written before these revelations and I didn't have to do any rewriting.
This is what we suspect, but there's a difference between suspecting and knowing.
And I think there are going to be more.
Glenn Greenwald has said he's not done.
That there are more documents and he's a smart enough journalist not to lead with his best stuff.
And what it's going to be, I don't know.
It'll be another program.
It'll be another collection ability, another analysis ability.
What we really don't know is how extensive the analysis is.
What can be figured out?
Because a lot of people are saying that there's just so much data I'm hiding in plain sight.
They can't find anything about me.
And we don't actually know that.
We don't know how much analysis can be done with the raw data they have.
We also don't know how much of what the NSA does is offensive.
And by this I mean going out and deliberately introducing vulnerabilities and taps.
Kind of things they would do during the Cold War.
And how much of it is an agreement with a company like Verizon just to get all the data.
And I think that's important.
Well you know, part of this story has been how there's so much secrecy regarding all of this and because the government keeps arguing that because it's all secret that they're the victim of it.
So nobody has standing to sue to challenge the constitutionality of any of these laws that pretend at least to legalize this stuff.
But now Glenn Greenwald is saying one of the things that he has he's already revealed this on I think Good Morning America or Today or one of those that he's got target lists so that now people will be Americans will be able to prove that they were targeted for this unconstitutional surveillance by the National Security Agency inside the United States and they will finally be able to sue.
And then again of course the same guys who just legalized raping you for your DNA will be the same people to legalize this when it finally does get to the Supreme Court probably but at least we'll have a shot.
And that's of course the worry.
And this really shows that I think Obama was at best disingenuous that these programs were approved by lawmakers and the courts that there have been several attempts to go to the courts with charges that these programs are illegally targeting people and their unlawful surveillance of no probable cause and they've all been shot down by the secrecy argument that we cannot say anything about this because it's secret.
And that's happened several times and now finally, if you're right we'll be able to bring these cases to court so courts can decide.
We know that a few lawmakers have been briefed on some of these programs we don't know how extensively but they've been unable to talk about them even with their aides and with their confidants which is very different than Congress has approved these programs.
This really is a secret government and secret government is not something that's good.
Secret government is dangerous.
Power is by nature abusive and people with power by nature abuse it and there's a reason that we limit government power because we know we are more secure because of it and this is an example of what can go wrong.
Well now you talked about the volume of data and we don't know really how good they are automating the analysis of all that they're scooping up.
I think the phrase in Bamford's book is that they're always trying to surf on the ocean of data rather than drown in it and it's always a struggle to do that and of course Bamford on the show last week started listing all their failures to stop attacks you know off the top of his head I had to stop them before we wasted the rest of the show you know he said to keep adding hay to the haystack instead of getting better at looking for needles but I guess what's your best guess about the software we've heard all about ThinThread and Varent and you know Israeli software here and Scandalous, very expensive but not very functional software there is it really plausible that the NSA could write a script smart enough to surf every freaking one and zero in the world every day and figure out what matters and what doesn't?
I think yes, we don't know to what degree because we can look at what companies like Google and Facebook are doing with our data and it gives us some idea I mean these companies are trying to use it to gauge interests Facebook is using it to figure out who our friends might be in an effort to get them to join so we do see some of these things in public we assume that the government will have access to any public research plus any research it's doing so it'll be some super set of what we're seeing in corporate America exactly what the details are we don't know, I think it's certainly plausible to believe that they can certainly search the data for keywords for relationships use it to figure out you know things about people what their interests are, what they're doing where they are what's been called metadata and we in the industry have thought this as long as it's traffic analysis what people are saying but where they are and how they're saying it and then that's extremely important it's more important than what's being said what's being said is hard to parse who's talking to who is very easy to parse so if you can collect all of the cell phone metadata for the country you know where everyone is at all times because your cell phone tracks location and you know who's talking to and for how long and this is extraordinarily valuable in figuring out what people are doing and this is stuff that marketing companies use and the difference it's important to think about this between marketing companies and governments is that for a marketing company if you get it wrong the cost is very low someone gets an ad they don't care about that's the cost of getting it wrong you're getting a little less revenue for your advertising dollar because they're a little less effective and when governments do this mistakes are very expensive they result in investigations they result in arrests they result in people's lives being disrupted and potentially ruined which is why there are higher standards for evidence in a court than there are for data being used to gauge interest for marketing purposes and when you take the algorithms the techniques and apply them to the government to law enforcement terrorism detection this is why the programs are all such failures because the false alarm rate just swamps what you're doing and you don't get successes and really one of the big scandals here is how much money is being spent on these programs that could be spent instead to make us safer these broad surveillance programs instead of targeted investigations Bradley Balco from the Huffington Post Civil Libertarian tweeted this morning that remember when the Boston bombing attack was being planned and carried out the Boston Fusion Center was focusing on anti-war protesters because that's who the state considers its enemy people, the enemies of the state I think that's a really good point and we know that these programs have been turned on Americans doing lawful activity and that's another danger but this is what you get from a secret government and unfortunately and it's sort of interesting to watch the politics of this we're seeing both Democrats and Republicans fall on both sides of this issue I mean none of this is new all this was started under Bush there's a great Republican-Democrat divide here that both parties are fracturing on this issue and I think that'll be very interesting going forward and that's some ray of hope I mean you talked about the futility of expecting change in this environment you know, not so sure because there isn't the Republican-Democrat gridlock this issue is breaking party lines so maybe we'll see how this goes but we've had a lot of political realignment going on for the last 10 years now where you really have the people that side with principle versus the people who side with their political heroes and the more scandals there are the more people it's bipartisanship only it's bipartisanship in opposition to all this madness it's not Lindsey Graham-John McCain bipartisanship it's the other end of the spectrum bipartisanship from there that's true unfortunately it's very hard to talk about what's going to happen in the midst of the debate and the New York Times this morning asked me to comment on whether Snowden should be prosecuted and I wrote a piece for them but it really is very early to discuss that things are just happening and one of the problems with the news cycle is we can't wait a week and really figure this out that people want to know now but the news story today and yesterday was the human story who Snowden is and where he is and what were his motives which obscured the real story of the documents and the government programs and whether they're lawful and secrecy and who we are as a nation and how we're spying on our allies I know in the UK I know that Brits are not Americans and they're asking their government about how much cooperation they've been giving and it seems like there was a loophole it's illegal for the British government to ask the Americans about British citizens but it's not illegal for the Americans to offer so that little loophole seems to have been exploited where as long as the British didn't ask explicitly things were okay so a bunch of stuff is coming out we're going to see as this unfolds you say Greenwald has more things to tell us I think there's a good chance we're going to see some more whistleblowers come forward with other documents and other programs now that the dam has been broken I hope so we know that Obama has over the past, actually much more than Bush has gone after whistleblowers has really declared war on them and intimidated them and prosecuted them to an extent no other president has in our history so there's that to consider what Snowden did was very very brave and there have been some articles that said it was foolish and I don't know if I could disagree with that because what he did was very very dangerous yeah it's both one of the textbook Socrates syllogisms was about how bravery and foolishness are the same thing yeah and we'll see in our culture we tend to be very hard on whistleblowers even if we believe in what they did at some gut level we just don't like that someone that someone does that that someone is a traitor whether it's a traitor to their company or their country that even if what they're doing is morally correct we tend to object to the actions and it's more often history that holds these people as heroes although I think more and more just like more and more people are falling away from their former partisanship I think people more and more understand that the government is not the country and actually in a case like this stealing your government's secrets about their horrible crimes and abuses and giving them to the people is the highest form of patriotism and love of country and all he's doing is betraying a bunch of people who are betraying us and giving their own stuff back so we'll see what happens there are so many issues we have to talk about whether these programs are legal or illegal whether the classification was legal or illegal there's been a lot of over-classification and we actually do have whistleblower protection laws in our country we have laws that protect whistleblowers from prosecution and from abuse when they disclose things how well do those laws apply in this case these are all kind of complex questions and questions we have to answer before we talk about what to do with a person alright and now I want to try to understand this a little bit better about kind of the way this works I guess I grew up hearing stories about well I knew a guy who sued for his FBI file and he got this big thick thing back where apparently they've been following him around for weeks but why?all he did was know a guy who knew a guy who sold pot something silly like that I heard that kind of stuff from time to time when I was a kid and what I'm coming to understand I think about the way all of this vacuuming up of everything and I know not everything the NSA has is available to every domestic cop but they all have their different versions of this data mining and it seems like what they have is sort of the instant FBI file where even if they've never investigated you before at all and hit enter and it immediately assembles a file on you out of every database in the world in and out of government everything that they've tapped everything they've ever collected on you all of a sudden it comes up so they don't need an FBI file on you they can, as I think Snowden put it in the interview they can go back in time and scrutinize every decision you've ever made everywhere you ever spent a Wednesday night or whatever that they want and I think that's important to realize and the government is much less monolithic and much less efficient than we give it credit for I mean these are NSA programs how much of this data goes to the FBI Department of Justice is really unclear how much of it goes to Homeland Security is unclear how much it goes to the fusion centers is unclear we don't really know and understand how this data flows when the FBI has been agitating for changes in the law for them to get more data from corporate databases national security letters have been used by the FBI to get some of this data that's different from these NSA programs and we don't know and I think it's important for us to know how much this data moves around different areas of government once it's collected who has access to it under what legal regimes and for what purposes another leak is about the NSA which I believe isn't sharing data very much with the FBI I might be wrong there might be an NSA terminal in the FBI headquarters we don't know this we like to think of the government as a big monolithic behemoth with a single mind but it's not it's very complicated there are a lot of turf battles well and it sounds like also what you're saying is none of how this works is in the law this is all just executive orders and decision directives and rules and regulations written within the executive branch and so we can't look up the law that congress passed that says how it works because there isn't one right and a lot of those regulations are secret and the president's directive on cyber war was an example of a top secret and you read it and you wonder why it's top secret, it's pretty general but a top secret directive discussing how the government, it's addressed to pretty much everybody at a high level how they should formulate cyber war strategy ok now I don't know if you can answer this I'm just asking for a best guess but you may have heard of that FBI agent a few weeks back saying that they could go back in time and listen to the elders brother's phone calls and it sounded a little bit outlandish at the time but he came back on CNN the next day and insisted it was true and I had a conversation with James Bamford about it last week about is it possible that phone quality is pretty low anyway and maybe they could zip it down to a real small file and is it possible is it within the realm of possibility that they're actually saving domestic and let's say even just the ones they're saving all those audio files on disk somewhere for going back and listening to?it's possible, if I were designing the program I wouldn't save the audio I would do voice to text and save that it's going to be a lot smaller and a lot easier to search but this is something we don't know we're learning this about metadata but you're not saying how much of the actual voice is being listened to by computers transcribed to text and saved later we don't know it's probably technically plausible operationally I have my doubts but this is something I can easily be wrong about and you can do the math you can look at the number of calls and estimate the data and how much would be required saving the voice seems a little beyond current technology but also very inefficient saving the text and you can do the voice to text at the point of collection that suddenly makes it a much more tractable problem to move around and save the text then save the voice and you're not going to do this dumb you do this smart if you don't understand a word you save that 2 seconds of audio attached to the question mark you're not going to do this dumb you'll do this smart we'll have to leave it there because we are fresh out of time Thank you for having me Alright everybody that is Bruce Schneier S-C-H-N-E-I-E-R dot com S-C-H-N-E-I-E-R dot com and he's got this great piece at the Atlantic about what we don't know about national security agency spying about how we need leakers brave enough to lay down and die for Nouriel Maliki or Hamid Karzai you ought to be brave enough to go to jail for a little while from the government and give it to the people whose loyalty you're sworn to how about that leak free Brad Hey y'all Scott Horton here for wallstreetwindow.com Mike Swanson is a successful former hedge fund manager whose site is unique on the web subscribers are allowed a window into Mike's very real main account and receive announcements and explanations for all his market moves the Federal Reserve has been inflating the money supply to finance the bank bailouts and terror war overseas so Mike's betting on commodities investing stocks, European markets and other hedges against a depreciating dollar play along on paper or with real money and be your own judge of Mike's investment strategies see what happens at wallstreetwindow.com Hey y'all Scott Horton here for the Future of Freedom the journal of the Future of Freedom Foundation every month plumb line individualist editor Sheldon Richman brings you important news and opinions on policy by heroic FFF president Jacob Hornberger hard-hitting journalist columnist James Bovard and others from the best of the libertarian movement the Future of Freedom tackles the most important issues facing our country from the 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