401 - Surveillance and Revolution

Program Notes §

Guest speakers: Glenn Greenwald and Stefan Molyneux

“What the NSA has done is essentially converted the Internet from this unprecedented zone of freedom into the most powerful means of surveillance ever known in human history.” -Glenn Greenwald

[NOTE: The following quotations are by Stefan Molyneux.]

“If we have a bitcoin universe, you don’t get to print money for war. You don’t get to have money for a prison/industrial complex. You don’t get money for a war on drugs. You have to ask the people.”

“So bitcoin gives us an opportunity to reclaim the power of the people to say yes or no to what the government claims that it wants to do.”

“Freedom for the government is enslavement for the people. When the government is free the people are enslaved. When the government is contained then the people are free.”

“To limit money is to limit political power.”

“If we have a bitcoin universe, you don’t get to print money for war. You don’t get to print money for a prison/industrial complex. You don’t get to print money for a war on drugs. You have to ask the people.”

“When you give government the power to control the money supply, it grows like a tumor until it extinguishes society itself.”

“There is going to be enormous amounts of resistance to the adoption of bitcoin, but I really believe that it’s about the most peaceful revolution that we can have in this world.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6IZ2TroruU&width=800&height=600
/*

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Transcript §

00:00:00 ► §

Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic

00:00:22 ► §

salon.

00:00:23 ► §

And welcome to another Wave of Action report.

00:00:26 ► §

As you know, a worldwide Wave of Action began on April 4th of this year and will continue through July 4th.

00:00:34 ► §

And while this is the next phase of the Occupy movement,

00:00:38 ► §

I’m sure that you’ve also noticed the lack of mainstream media coverage about what’s taking place.

00:00:43 ► §

And that’s not necessarily a bad

00:00:45 ► §

thing. As was discovered during Phase One, which was Occupy Wall Street, our local police forces

00:00:52 ► §

have now been transformed into heavily equipped military units. In essence, the police-slash-surveillance

00:00:59 ► §

state has begun a somewhat light-handed form of martial law. I say light-handed because it’s the plan

00:01:06 ► §

to keep us all thinking that the threats to our freedom come from a ragtag bunch of faceless

00:01:11 ► §

terrorists. The fact is, however, that here in the U.S., the likelihood of being struck by lightning

00:01:17 ► §

is significantly higher than that of being involved in a terrorist incident. How many

00:01:23 ► §

people do you know who have been struck by lightning?

00:01:26 ► §

If the answer is zero, then perhaps you should be worrying about something other than the

00:01:30 ► §

fear of terrorists that the Obama administration is pushing down our throats.

00:01:35 ► §

But I digress.

00:01:37 ► §

As I pointed out in an earlier Wave of Action podcast, this phase of the movement involves

00:01:42 ► §

doing mainly positive things things like helping people fight

00:01:45 ► §

off greedy banksters who continue to foreclose on homes and put people out on the street at

00:01:51 ► §

alarming rates. There are other wave of action programs that are housing the homeless and

00:01:56 ► §

helping other less fortunate citizens. And then there’s the monkey wrenching activities such as

00:02:02 ► §

producing fake commercials that expose the dirty underbelly of some products and some companies that manufacture them.

00:02:09 ► §

The best of these that I’ve seen so far is the fake General Motors commercial that John Oliver did on his show last week.

00:02:17 ► §

And I’ll put a link to that in the program notes and encourage you to check it out if you get a chance.

00:02:24 ► §

you to check it out if you get a chance. The fake commercial comes in the last two minutes of the clip, and after you first watch it with the sound on, turn off your audio and just watch the fake

00:02:30 ► §

ad with the captions that Oliver’s staff added. It’s simply priceless and most definitely reflects

00:02:37 ► §

the tone of the wave of action. Now today, rather than a simple report of what others are doing this

00:02:43 ► §

time, I thought that I should add a few of my own ideas and comments.

00:02:48 ► §

So, there are three parts to this podcast.

00:02:50 ► §

First, I’m going to play part of an interview with Glenn Grenwald about the Edward Snowden revelations.

00:02:56 ► §

Then I’m going to play part of a talk about the revolutionary aspects of Bitcoin, the digital currency.

00:03:03 ► §

Finally, I’m going to combine those two topics and give

00:03:07 ► §

you some of my own ideas about how the Bitcoin protocol, not the money, but the Bitcoin protocol

00:03:13 ► §

may hold an answer to several pressing problems in our society. So let’s begin. As you already know,

00:03:21 ► §

Glenn Grenwald is one of two journalists that Edward Snowden trusted with the huge cache of secret documents that he’s bringing to light.

00:03:29 ► §

And let me just say that in my opinion, they are bringing these documents to light in the spirit of transparency that the Obama administration promised but has refused to deliver on.

00:03:39 ► §

So, in my opinion, they’re just helping him keep his promises.

00:03:43 ► §

I’ve now finished reading Nowhere to Hide, which is Grinwald’s book about the story,

00:03:48 ► §

and if you’ve ever listened to anything that I’ve said here in the salon,

00:03:52 ► §

well, I hope that you listen to my advice that you should most definitely read this book.

00:03:57 ► §

If you’re a dusty old fart like me, it’s going to put the final nail in the coffin

00:04:02 ► §

of what us old guys were led to believe was American freedom. We’ll be right back. revelations continue to unfold. And I’ll have more to say about this after we listen to this

00:04:25 ► §

conversation between Charlie Rose and Glenn Grenwald. I am pleased to have Glenn Grenwald

00:04:31 ► §

at this table for the first time. Welcome. Great to be here. Let’s start with the title,

00:04:36 ► §

No Place to Hide. It comes from Frank Church and the CIA Investigating Committee. It does,

00:04:40 ► §

from the famous Church Committee of the mid-1970s that discovered that when surveillance apparatuses are vested in the U.S. government without very much oversight or transparency, it will inevitably be abused.

00:04:51 ► §

And what he said at the time was nobody knew that this capability had been amassed.

00:04:55 ► §

The mandate of the NSA was never spied domestically.

00:04:58 ► §

And what he said was just the existence is so dangerous because if it ever got turned against the American people, there would be no place to hide.

00:05:04 ► §

is so dangerous, because if it ever got turned against the American people, there would be no place to hide. And of course, it has come to be that the NSA now does direct itself,

00:05:08 ► §

both at foreign nationals and at the American population.

00:05:11 ► §

Do you believe that these disclosures have changed the NSA?

00:05:17 ► §

They’ve certainly changed the debate surrounding the NSA. I believe they’re going to change the

00:05:23 ► §

authorities that the NSA has as a result of

00:05:25 ► §

Congress. And I think that it has made the NSA, for the first time since at least the September

00:05:30 ► §

11th attacks, question whether or not just because it has the capability to do something,

00:05:35 ► §

it means it ought to do it. Do you believe it’s changed the attitude of the president?

00:05:40 ► §

I do. I think there’s a serious question about the extent to which President Obama even knew about the NSA’s reach.

00:05:46 ► §

When Angela Merkel was revealed to be a primary target of the agency, the White House was adamant that he had no idea that there was this level of personalized surveillance against allied leaders.

00:05:57 ► §

Would you find it surprising that he did not know?

00:06:00 ► §

I wouldn’t find it surprising that he didn’t know at the granular level every target that the NSA chooses.

00:06:05 ► §

It certainly must be the case that after five years in office, he had a pretty good sense of the reach of the NSA.

00:06:11 ► §

At some point, when your briefer says to you this, this, and this, you have to say, how did you get that?

00:06:17 ► §

Yeah, there has to be all sorts of indications in every presidential daily briefing that he gets

00:06:23 ► §

that there’s a very wide reach of the NSA, certainly far wider than he would have known as a senator not

00:06:28 ► §

on the Intelligence Committee.

00:06:29 ► §

Do you think it’s changed the opinion of the American public?

00:06:32 ► §

I know it has.

00:06:33 ► §

I mean, one of the most extraordinary polling results to me since we started doing the reporting

00:06:37 ► §

and frankly, one of the most gratifying is that Pew every year since 9-11 has asked Americans,

00:06:42 ► §

do you fear more the threat of foreign terrorists or the threat of government to your rights?

00:06:47 ► §

And every year since 9-11, overwhelmingly Americans have said, I fear more the threat of terrorism.

00:06:51 ► §

For the first time ever since 9-11 in 2013, it was a radical reversal.

00:06:56 ► §

Something like 65 to 35 said, I fear more the threat to my rights from the government than I do the threat of foreign terrorism.

00:07:02 ► §

And you believe that’s because of the disclosures?

00:07:04 ► §

It has to be. It’s a radical, sudden, immediate And you believe that’s because of these disclosures? It has to be.

00:07:05 ► §

It’s a radical, sudden, immediate shift in the wake of the Snowden disclosures.

00:07:09 ► §

Are you certain that no one has been either arrested or killed because of these disclosures?

00:07:18 ► §

I am, and I’ll tell you why.

00:07:19 ► §

We have, as everybody knows, many, many tens of thousands of documents

00:07:24 ► §

that were given to us by Edward Snowden.

00:07:25 ► §

And even though we’ve had them now for almost a year, a very small percentage of those documents have actually been published.

00:07:32 ► §

And the reason is because before we publish something, we vet them with huge numbers of editors and experienced national security reporters.

00:07:39 ► §

We talk to the government.

00:07:39 ► §

We talk to lawyers to make certain that nothing in them can jeopardize any.

00:07:43 ► §

Do you talk to the government, meaning?

00:07:43 ► §

We talk to lawyers to make certain that nothing in them can jeopardize any. You talk to the government meeting?

00:07:44 ► §

We, I don’t personally because I’m not a big fan of that process, but the editors with whom I work go to the government and say, here’s what we intend to publish.

00:07:52 ► §

Make your case about why anything in here should be withheld.

00:07:55 ► §

So people like the Guardian and the Washington Post would do that?

00:07:57 ► §

Or all the foreign media outlets with which I’ve reported I’ve required them to do that as well.

00:08:00 ► §

Is this required by you or required by their own principals?

00:08:05 ► §

Both. Nobody has resisted, but it’s something that i insist upon before i share make sure you check this out with

00:08:09 ► §

the government make sure you go to the government tell them what it is you intend to publish and let

00:08:13 ► §

them make their case to you and therefore to me about why they think these things should be

00:08:17 ► §

published and then you decide based on their answer as to whether you go ahead and publish

00:08:20 ► §

right and overwhelmingly say please don’t publish it because it’ll do this or do that precisely you

00:08:24 ► §

make your own decision based on what they tell you.

00:08:26 ► §

And overwhelmingly, we have gone forward and published.

00:08:28 ► §

And there’s a big criticism out there.

00:08:30 ► §

It doesn’t get heard much that we actually haven’t published enough.

00:08:33 ► §

And I actually find that criticism more valid than the criticism that we’ve published too much.

00:08:37 ► §

I’ll come back to that in terms of what you haven’t published.

00:08:39 ► §

But when you look at the stuff that you have published, do you believe that it has damaged U.S. security interest?

00:08:48 ► §

No.

00:08:49 ► §

Under no circumstances in terms of means and methods have been disclosed that would harm the intelligence gathering that might be legitimate in terms of America’s national security.

00:08:58 ► §

I absolutely believe it has not, and there’s been zero evidence presented by anyone that it has.

00:09:03 ► §

But there have been lots of people from the national security apparatus who step forward and say it has.

00:09:07 ► §

Right.

00:09:08 ► §

But the thing about that is the reason why –

00:09:09 ► §

And they’ve been more than you on this case.

00:09:11 ► §

Well, the reason why that doesn’t move me much is because if you look at every case of unwanted transparency,

00:09:16 ► §

where light has been shined on the U.S. government going all the way back to Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers,

00:09:20 ► §

which is widely regarded as heroic and noble, the government says the same thing in every single case.

00:09:26 ► §

This transparency will cause blood on people’s hands.

00:09:28 ► §

It will cause people to die.

00:09:29 ► §

It will jeopardize our security.

00:09:31 ► §

It’s almost never presented with specificity, and there’s almost never any evidence to demonstrate it.

00:09:35 ► §

It’s a script from which they read.

00:09:37 ► §

So you think then that the people who say that are lying or intentionally want to deceive in order to shut it down, surveillance?

00:09:44 ► §

I think it’s both.

00:09:45 ► §

Or limits on surveillance? I think it’s both. Or limits on surveillance.

00:09:45 ► §

I think it’s both.

00:09:46 ► §

I think, you know, and it’s not a conspiracy theory.

00:09:48 ► §

I mean, I think one of the ideas, the principles of the founding,

00:09:52 ► §

is that power that’s exercised without transparency will be abused.

00:09:55 ► §

But I also think it’s that the national security state believes

00:09:58 ► §

that unless everything it’s doing is kept secret,

00:10:00 ► §

it will be less effective what they do,

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and that will in turn result in security.

00:10:04 ► §

I believe they genuinely believe that.

00:10:06 ► §

Okay, but you’ve got to have some kind of, I mean, everything cannot be transparent in

00:10:10 ► §

a national security operation.

00:10:12 ► §

Right, which is why a small percentage of the documents that Mr. Cohen gave us have

00:10:15 ► §

been published, right?

00:10:16 ► §

So we certainly recognize that there’s legitimate secrecy.

00:10:19 ► §

You know, the broad contours of what the government is doing certainly have to be known to a population

00:10:24 ► §

to have a healthy, thriving democracy, even though specific programs or tactics or targets may legitimately be kept secret.

00:10:30 ► §

How do you choose what you release?

00:10:32 ► §

We go through the documents.

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We vet them all.

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We look for the significant stories.

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We consult with experts.

00:10:38 ► §

We begin the reporting process.

00:10:39 ► §

And then when they’re ready to be published, we publish them instantly.

00:10:42 ► §

When they’re ready to be published means what?

00:10:43 ► §

Meaning that we have a very good understanding of what the material is, of what the revelations are.

00:10:48 ► §

We filled in whatever gaps there are with extra reporting. We’ve consulted with experts and we’re

00:10:53 ► §

convinced by talking to our lawyers and after talking to the government that we can safely

00:10:56 ► §

and responsibly publish it. I’m quoted in your book in an interview with the president asking

00:11:00 ► §

where the balance was. What’s your definition of where the balance is? You know, to me, there’s a great and exciting aspect of that question, which is we can look

00:11:09 ► §

to what we did in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, when the height of the Cold War had all these

00:11:14 ► §

intercontinental ballistic missiles pointed at American cities. There were terrorist groups and

00:11:18 ► §

the IRA, the PLO, Hamas. And what we did, the framework we created was we said it is important

00:11:23 ► §

that the government be able to eavesdrop at times.

00:11:26 ► §

But before they do that, they need to go to a court and present evidence that the person on whom they want to eavesdrop has actually done something that merits the surveillance.

00:11:35 ► §

Not this indiscriminate, suspicionless mass surveillance, but very targeted and specific.

00:11:40 ► §

Is that primarily metadata?

00:11:41 ► §

Well, I mean, it’s not just metadata.

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I mean, the government collects billions of calls and emails every single day.

00:11:48 ► §

They collect so much of the content of communications around the world that they can’t even store it all physically,

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even though huge amounts of data can be stored on a small thumb drive.

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Look at even what you’ve talked about today. when you hear it is that the disclosure from you, I think, about how routers and things being shipped overseas

00:12:08 ► §

were opened, repackaged with a security device inside.

00:12:13 ► §

Yeah, backdoor.

00:12:14 ► §

And, you know, the amazing thing about this, Charlie,

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and this is why I feel like the journalism we’ve done

00:12:19 ► §

has been in the public interest,

00:12:20 ► §

is because for many years the U.S. government

00:12:22 ► §

has been warning the world that the Chinese do that to the products of Chinese companies. Don’t buy routers and servers

00:12:28 ► §

and switches from the Chinese because the Chinese government goes into the products and puts back

00:12:32 ► §

doors. And the whole time the NSA is doing exactly that. And when you have a government that’s

00:12:37 ► §

misleading its people to that extent, I do think democracy becomes imperiled. And it’s the role of

00:12:43 ► §

journalists to make people aware of that.

00:12:45 ► §

I suspect the Chinese have said, you don’t necessarily occupy the high ground here.

00:12:49 ► §

Right. And, you know, I mean, it’s certainly something that I think the American people have the right to know if they’re being told by their government that the Chinese are evil for doing these things that the U.S. government itself is doing in secret.

00:12:59 ► §

Which raises the other question. Does everybody do it?

00:13:02 ► §

Not everybody. In fact, nobody—

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But everybody capable of doing it does it.

00:13:06 ► §

Nobody surveils the Internet and world communications to the extent the United States does.

00:13:11 ► §

Okay, but to the extent is a definition maybe about competence.

00:13:16 ► §

In other words, you do it because you know how to do it.

00:13:18 ► §

Others might do it, and they do it in part, and might do more if they had the competence to do it. Nobody thinks that spying in and of itself and all its manifestations and permutations is illegitimate.

00:13:29 ► §

Spying has always existed between states and it always will.

00:13:32 ► §

Are the sole problems in any one particular country?

00:13:34 ► §

Yeah. I mean, if the United States were targeting at spying at traditionally recognized legitimate targets, military officials, heads of foreign state, There would never have been an Edward Snowden.

00:13:46 ► §

There would be no reporting.

00:13:47 ► §

There would be no controversy.

00:13:48 ► §

It’s the indiscriminate nature, the goal of the NSA, as they themselves describe it, is collect it all.

00:13:54 ► §

Exactly.

00:13:55 ► §

And so in terms of your own reporting, is that exactly the issue for you?

00:14:01 ► §

It is the catch-all.

00:14:02 ► §

It is the indiscriminate all.

00:14:04 ► §

That is the most offensive thing that here

00:14:06 ► §

you disclose in this book as you tell us the story. I think that is absolutely the most

00:14:11 ► §

significant part of the story is the ubiquitousness of it, the limitlessness of the NSA’s institutional

00:14:17 ► §

aspiration to turn the internet and all forms of digital communication into a field where there is

00:14:24 ► §

no privacy. Literally,

00:14:25 ► §

it’s not an exaggeration. It’s just definitionally the case that if you subject all communication to

00:14:30 ► §

their surveillance, that privacy ceases to exist. How did you first meet Edward Snowden?

00:14:35 ► §

He had contacted me in December. And who were you at that time?

00:14:38 ► §

He had contacted me in December. Before you tell me who you were, you were a reporter,

00:14:42 ► §

investigative reporter, reporting for various organizations.

00:14:47 ► §

Yeah, I mean I principally was at the time writing for The Guardian.

00:14:58 ► §

I had written about civil liberties and surveillance for a long time because I got into political journalism as a constitutional lawyer interested in these Bush executive power theories that were adopted in the wake of 9-11.

00:15:07 ► §

And at the time I was writing for The Guardian, I had actually written a book back in 2006 on the NSA scandal of that time, which was much more limited.

00:15:09 ► §

It was about telephone calls.

00:15:18 ► §

And so Edward Stern was actually a reader of mine for several years and decided that I would be a person with whom he would want to work on this story. What was it about you that made him decide that?

00:15:21 ► §

You know, a lot of people have assumed that it was because I was warning about the dangers of

00:15:26 ► §

surveillance and he thought that I would therefore be sympathetic to his viewpoint. Yeah. But it was

00:15:30 ► §

actually much more my views on journalism. I had been very critical, for example, of the New York

00:15:35 ► §

Times, because in 2004, Jim Risen had discovered that the NSA was eavesdropping without warrants

00:15:41 ► §

and the New York Times at the behest of the Bush administration blocked him from publishing that story for a year and a half

00:15:46 ► §

when George Bush summoned Bill Keller

00:15:48 ► §

to the Oval Office and said, if you publish this story

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it’s going to damage national security.

00:15:52 ► §

And they only ultimately published that story because

00:15:54 ► §

Risen got frustrated, wrote a book, was about

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to break the story, and then did it. And

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they won the Pulitzer Prize for it.

00:15:59 ► §

And I think Snowden was very worried that he was

00:16:02 ► §

going to unravel his life to bring this information

00:16:04 ► §

to a newspaper that was too close to the government.

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And he believed that I would report on the story adversarially and aggressively and that my being at The Guardian would let me do that, that that was an environment conducive to that kind of reporting.

00:16:16 ► §

So it was much more of my views about journalism than it was my views on surveillance that led him to want to contact me.

00:16:21 ► §

And so how did he reach out to you?

00:16:22 ► §

So he emailed me at first, and of course he was petrified in retrospect for very good reason

00:16:27 ► §

of saying anything specific about who he was.

00:16:29 ► §

He wanted me to install encryption.

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He was obsessed with the idea that I install these very sophisticated encryption programs

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that I didn’t know anything about and didn’t know how to install.

00:16:38 ► §

And because he wouldn’t tell me who he was or what he had, I really didn’t prioritize him.

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And he kept kind of urging me to do it.

00:16:50 ► §

And over seven weeks, he kept asking me to do it and i didn’t and he finally went to war of poetress who’s a documentarian and academy award winning business partner with

00:16:56 ► §

with the new project yeah and and she’s one of the founding editors with me yeah and um she did

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have encryption because of the film she’s been working on and and he communicated with her and asked her to involve me and then we spoke online laura and

00:17:10 ► §

snowden and i did for maybe six weeks um in encrypted environments and uh he insisted that

00:17:16 ► §

i come to hong kong and and i told him i would as long as i got a sense of what he had he sent

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me a few documents that were shocking in their content what were they one was the prism program, which ultimately made such a big impact on the world about NSA access to Facebook and Google and Yahoo and the like.

00:17:31 ► §

Others were training materials that NSA analysts get to show the range of the information that they could get.

00:17:36 ► §

And at that point, I knew this was the most serious leak in certainly NSA history.

00:17:40 ► §

And I got on the next plane to New York, met with my editors in New York at The Guardian.

00:17:44 ► §

And then the following day, went with Laura and another guardian reporter ewan mccaskill

00:17:48 ► §

uh to hong kong and and we worked with snowden for the next 10 days and tell me your first

00:17:53 ► §

impression i was you know um shocked because i had been assuming that he was this very senior

00:18:00 ► §

official because he had access to all kinds of information that were top secret, but more so he had a very sophisticated insight, sort of this world-weary view about what the

00:18:11 ► §

national security state had become.

00:18:13 ► §

And when I saw this kid, he’s 29 but looks six years younger, wearing jeans and a T-shirt,

00:18:18 ► §

it was very disorienting.

00:18:20 ► §

I thought it might be a scam or I thought it was the son of the actual source and he

00:18:24 ► §

was going to take us, sort of like the Wizard of Oz hiding behind the curtain

00:18:27 ► §

but then I sat down with him immediately

00:18:30 ► §

questioned him for six straight hours

00:18:32 ► §

and saw that he was extremely serious and credible

00:18:36 ► §

and that I could rely on him as a source

00:18:39 ► §

where I’d put the credibility of not just the Guardian

00:18:41 ► §

but myself and my career on the line to report on these documents.

00:18:45 ► §

Do you believe that he has disclosed anything that he has, and perhaps not made it public,

00:18:51 ► §

but has disclosed it to the Chinese government or the Russian government?

00:18:55 ► §

I absolutely do not believe that.

00:18:58 ► §

Do you have means to know that?

00:19:00 ► §

You can never prove a negative, right?

00:19:02 ► §

So I can’t sit at a table or in any other way prove to you that something did not happen, including that.

00:19:07 ► §

But I can tell you the evidence, and Bart Gellman of The Washington Post, who worked with Mr. Snowden, is adamant in the same way that I am that it’s very unlikely that it happened.

00:19:16 ► §

In part, he is a highly trained operative by the NSA in how to protect digital information from the invasion by the most sophisticated foreign governments.

00:19:24 ► §

And most of all, he didn’t do what he did, unravel his life, risk prison and life,

00:19:29 ► §

to turn over information to a foreign government that would help them better surveil their own citizens.

00:19:35 ► §

And destroy his credibility.

00:19:36 ► §

And destroy his credibility, turn him into a traitor in his own eyes and the eyes of the world.

00:19:40 ► §

It’s extremely unlikely that it happened.

00:19:42 ► §

Is anything about what he has done traitorous?

00:19:46 ► §

Absolutely not. I mean, you think about it, he

00:19:47 ► §

could have sold this material and been

00:19:50 ► §

extremely rich for the rest

00:19:52 ► §

of his life. He could have secretly handed it

00:19:54 ► §

to adversary governments. He did what you

00:19:56 ► §

want whistleblowers to do, which is come to journalists

00:19:58 ► §

and ask the journalists to make the decisions

00:19:59 ► §

about what should be published and what shouldn’t.

00:20:01 ► §

But he does not come in an act of civil

00:20:03 ► §

disobedience.

00:20:06 ► §

Well, I mean, you know, there’s a lot of debate about what civil disobedience entails.

00:20:09 ► §

I mean, Daniel Alsberg wrote a brilliant op-ed in the Washington Post in July

00:20:13 ► §

essentially saying that he was right to flee because…

00:20:16 ► §

I know that, but on the other hand, the other people who argue that

00:20:18 ► §

if you’re prepared to engage in civil disobedience to violate the law,

00:20:21 ► §

then you should be willing to stand up to the punishment, as you well know.

00:20:24 ► §

Yeah, I mean, you know, I see civil disobedience to violate the law, then you should be willing to stand up to the punishment, as you well know. Yeah, I mean, you know, I see civil disobedience.

00:20:27 ► §

There was a very good chance that he was going to end up in prison for the rest of his life.

00:20:30 ► §

We assumed, in fact, in Hong Kong that that was by far the most likely outcome.

00:20:34 ► §

He managed to escape that.

00:20:36 ► §

I don’t think it requires that you turn yourself over to decades in a cage

00:20:41 ► §

in order to prove that your act is noble.

00:20:43 ► §

So what is he asking for now?

00:20:45 ► §

I think he was very clear, and to me this is the most impressive part,

00:20:49 ► §

that he did not want to unilaterally, single-handedly destroy these programs

00:20:54 ► §

that he found so disturbing, which he could have done,

00:20:56 ► §

by uploading all these documents to the Internet.

00:20:58 ► §

He wanted to trigger an informed worldwide debate

00:21:01 ► §

so let human beings decide whether or not this is something

00:21:04 ► §

that we want to allow to happen to the Internet. And I think he’s been extremely gratified

00:21:08 ► §

that a debate far more serious and widespread and sustained than anything we thought in

00:21:13 ► §

the best case scenario would happen has actually happened. And I think what he wants is exactly

00:21:16 ► §

what is happening, which is democratic debate over whether this should continue.

00:21:20 ► §

Do you think he expects to live in Russia the rest of his life?

00:21:22 ► §

He thinks it’s a possibility. There’s a real debate in Germany and Brazil about whether to extend asylum to him in recognition of what he did.

00:21:29 ► §

In Germany and in Brazil.

00:21:30 ► §

The two countries that probably reacted most strongly to the revelations.

00:21:36 ► §

And I think that that’s a possibility, but it’s very possible that he will end up in Russia for the rest of his life. A lot of very tough and pragmatic and hard-minded people have said to me,

00:21:47 ► §

it’s impossible that something has not happened in Russia for Putin to allow him to stay there,

00:21:54 ► §

that he must have given the Russians something for Putin to allow this.

00:22:00 ► §

Yeah, I mean, it’s very easy to make accusations or claims without evidence,

00:22:04 ► §

as people have done about that.

00:22:07 ► §

I’ve never seen Edward Snowden lie.

00:22:09 ► §

I believe him when he says he went to Russia without any of the digital material.

00:22:12 ► §

Oh, he has none of it there.

00:22:13 ► §

Right, that he has none of it.

00:22:14 ► §

Then where is it?

00:22:16 ► §

He got rid of what he had physically.

00:22:19 ► §

Before he got on the plane.

00:22:20 ► §

He gave it to journalists, right, and purposely didn’t take it with him.

00:22:23 ► §

But let me just say something about Putin, which is, I think it’s easy to see why Putin wants him there.

00:22:28 ► §

For one thing, Putin has demanded the extradition of all sorts of people who are Russian who are in the United States that he believes are criminal.

00:22:34 ► §

And the view of the position of the United States has been we’re not giving them to you because there’s no extradition treaty.

00:22:38 ► §

And it’s a huge propaganda coup for Putin to say we’re protecting the human rights of this whistleblower from persecution inside the United States.

00:22:46 ► §

I think Putin loves the fact that

00:22:47 ► §

Snowden is in Russia and gets all

00:22:49 ► §

kinds of perception benefits from it.

00:22:52 ► §

Does he look more favorably on what Russia does

00:22:53 ► §

than what the United States does?

00:22:55 ► §

One of the questions that we get asked

00:22:57 ► §

sometimes is why haven’t you talked a lot about Russian

00:22:59 ► §

surveillance? And the answer is because

00:23:01 ► §

Edward Snowden worked inside the American

00:23:03 ► §

surveillance system and he knows about that. And knows very little about russian surveillance other than what

00:23:08 ► §

publicly is known there’s sort of a theory that that i think known chomsky and other people have

00:23:12 ► §

talked about that if you’re a citizen of a country your first duty is to stand up and object to the

00:23:17 ► §

wrongful acts of your own government as opposed to governments halfway across the world over which

00:23:21 ► §

you have no influence um but i think that you you know… I understand that argument. Yeah, and I think that’s part of what motivates them.

00:23:26 ► §

But I also think it is the fact that the U.S. government is so far ahead of every other country

00:23:31 ► §

in terms of all capabilities and resource devotion.

00:23:35 ► §

There’s a reason why we’re so far ahead of every other country.

00:23:38 ► §

It’s because we spend $75 billion a year on this surveillance state.

00:23:41 ► §

Well, and because we’ve led the technology revolution in the world in a huge

00:23:45 ► §

way and the internet largely physically is on u.s oil you’re right there’s lots of different reasons

00:23:49 ► §

i read that for you the nsa was contrary to the spirit of the digital culture what did you mean

00:23:56 ► §

there’s you know there’s there’s the idea of the internet from the beginning was that it was going

00:24:01 ► §

to be this kind of vast free place that would equalize

00:24:05 ► §

the playing field empower the powerless liberate people in tyranny and that the only way that that

00:24:10 ► §

would really work is if we were able to express ourselves with privacy we were able to coordinate

00:24:15 ► §

and organize with our fellow citizens freely and what the NSA has done is essentially converted

00:24:19 ► §

the internet from this unprecedented zone of freedom into the most powerful means of surveillance

00:24:27 ► §

ever known in human history and it really has subverted what the internet and its greatest

00:24:31 ► §

promise could have been and i think that’s why younger people in particular are so supportive

00:24:35 ► §

of the snowden revelations because they understand what that internet could have been for themselves

00:24:40 ► §

because they grew up yeah but and you and others like privacy as a central component of what it means to be an American.

00:24:46 ► §

Sure. I mean, privacy from the beginning.

00:24:48 ► §

I think the American ethos has always been, this is my land.

00:24:52 ► §

The government cannot enter it, even if it’s to catch criminals,

00:24:55 ► §

unless there’s a probable cause search warrant.

00:24:57 ► §

And the idea of being left alone, as the Supreme Court has said in several cases,

00:25:02 ► §

is the anchor right to everything else.

00:25:04 ► §

As you release this information through these newspapers and other sources, other distributors, do they pay you for the information so that they can print it?

00:25:13 ► §

They don’t pay me for the information.

00:25:14 ► §

They pay me for the work that I do as a freelance journalist.

00:25:17 ► §

So they pay you what you write, not what you release.

00:25:19 ► §

Right.

00:25:33 ► §

If I were to cooperate with four media outlets without having a freelance journalism contract, the government could easily say that I’ve now converted myself from a journalist to a source and have lost the protections legally that I need to publish top-secret information.

00:25:36 ► §

And so it’s been important to do it within a journalistic framework just for legal reasons. It is said that you were offended when they described you early on not as a journalist but as a blogger or an activist.

00:25:43 ► §

early on, not as a journalist, but as a blogger or an activist?

00:25:48 ► §

You know, I mean, I don’t really mind what labels people apply because I think ultimately these labels don’t have much meaning. They’re sort of just shorthand signifiers. But the reason I was

00:25:53 ► §

disconcerting, and it was the New York Times that led the way in doing it, they called me an

00:25:56 ► §

anti-surveillance activist and a blogger repeatedly, is because there are very serious legal questions

00:26:03 ► §

that come from publishing top-secret information.

00:26:05 ► §

It’s by no means clear that it’s a legal thing to do.

00:26:07 ► §

And the one thing that enables you to do it is that you act as a journalist

00:26:11 ► §

and therefore can invoke the First Amendment’s free press provisions.

00:26:15 ► §

And so to have other journalists essentially, while I’m doing it,

00:26:18 ► §

go out of their way to depict me as something outside of journalism, I do think was disturbing.

00:26:24 ► §

Here’s what I don’t understand.

00:26:26 ► §

How deep does this go?

00:26:28 ► §

Not the surveillance, but the information that somebody, you or whoever has it,

00:26:33 ► §

who’s in charge of it?

00:26:36 ► §

Laura Poitras and I are the only ones who have the full archive.

00:26:39 ► §

The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New York Times, ProPublica

00:26:41 ► §

all have very substantial subsets.

00:26:43 ► §

And how much is it?

00:26:45 ► §

There are many tens of thousands of top secret documents.

00:26:49 ► §

And so the question now becomes, you know, we’re thinking about ways to expand the access

00:26:53 ► §

for other media organizations around the world to make sure it all gets reported.

00:26:56 ► §

And have you seen all of them?

00:26:56 ► §

By now, I have looked at all of the documents at least once.

00:27:00 ► §

And so just give me your sense of them.

00:27:03 ► §

It is, you know, it is just stunning to watch.

00:27:07 ► §

You know, I’m somebody who has written about this for a long time,

00:27:10 ► §

and I’ve been warning for a long time that I thought the NSA was an out-of-control agency engaged in indiscriminate surveillance.

00:27:16 ► §

And yet I was genuinely shocked.

00:27:18 ► §

And even to this day, 11 months later, remain shocked when I read these documents,

00:27:22 ► §

just to see in practice the idea that

00:27:25 ► §

all of our communications electronically on telephone and internet, all of our activities

00:27:30 ► §

in the eyes of this government should be collected and monitored and stored. It is remarkable to

00:27:35 ► §

watch them believe that and then to put that in practice. But are there deep American secrets that

00:27:40 ► §

go beyond surveillance in these documents, deep American secrets about how we

00:27:47 ► §

go about our national security, not how we obtain information, but information we have.

00:27:53 ► §

The NSA is part of the Defense Department. It’s run by generals. It cooperates on things like

00:27:58 ► §

the drone program, on things like the deployment of troops around the world. You know, one of the

00:28:03 ► §

first reports I did in our new journalistic venture

00:28:07 ► §

was with Jeremy Scahill, who’s written about drones a lot,

00:28:10 ► §

about how the NSA uses metadata analysis to determine who should live

00:28:13 ► §

and who should die through the drone program.

00:28:16 ► §

But, yeah, there are a lot of very sensitive documents in the archive that he gave us

00:28:20 ► §

that go beyond surveillance.

00:28:22 ► §

You have described the last piece of material that you release will be like a firecracker

00:28:27 ► §

and will be the great finale.

00:28:29 ► §

Right.

00:28:30 ► §

What consequences will there come from the great finale?

00:28:35 ► §

I think that if you look at the surveillance abuses of the past, the principal question

00:28:41 ► §

has always been on whom is the government spying domestically and for what reasons?

00:28:48 ► §

Who are their targets?

00:28:50 ► §

And that’s the missing part of the puzzle in terms of the public reporting that has taken place.

00:28:53 ► §

Who the targets are.

00:28:54 ► §

Who specifically are the targets domestically?

00:28:57 ► §

American citizens, U.S. persons, people legally inside the United States. And so the investigation that we’re currently working on and the reporting that we’re currently doing that I do think will complete the picture is to answer that question

00:29:09 ► §

in a very comprehensive way. When will that happen? As soon as it’s ready. If I give you a

00:29:16 ► §

time frame, my editor will call me and probably murder me. So I don’t want to put that pressure

00:29:20 ► §

on myself, but it’s coming sooner rather than later. I don’t want to be responsible. Thank you. I appreciate that.

00:29:26 ► §

Finally there, this.

00:29:27 ► §

Suppose you do find out that, in fact, you have done grievous damage.

00:29:33 ► §

Somebody, you seem like a rational man to me.

00:29:35 ► §

You know, grievous damage to American national security.

00:29:38 ► §

Or B, that it has caused harm to people.

00:29:40 ► §

What will you do?

00:29:42 ► §

Will you say, I was wrong?

00:29:44 ► §

I’m sorry?

00:29:44 ► §

You know, I think that all

00:29:46 ► §

reporting entails risks. You know, I mean, I think that we’re making the best judgments that we can.

00:29:51 ► §

I don’t expect that to happen. If it did happen, I’d be the first to acknowledge that it did.

00:29:56 ► §

But I also think there’s grievous harm from allowing a very powerful government, the world’s

00:30:01 ► §

most powerful government, to do extremely consequential things without any transparency or accountability.

00:30:06 ► §

That’s been pointed out and discussed.

00:30:07 ► §

No, but so I just mean, I mean, you know, you have to…

00:30:09 ► §

That point is made, isn’t it?

00:30:10 ► §

Yeah, but, you know, as a journalist, I mean, you realize that when you disclose secret

00:30:14 ► §

documents, there is a risk that you could make a bad judgment.

00:30:18 ► §

You can make a mistake that can result in harm to somebody.

00:30:22 ► §

And I say that I take that risk because the risk

00:30:26 ► §

of allowing this information to remain suppressed is extreme. It’s, it’s quite great. And, and so,

00:30:33 ► §

like I said, I don’t expect it to happen. And if it did, we would hold ourselves accountable the

00:30:36 ► §

same way we do other people. What fears do you have? Um, you know, I have a fear that we’re,

00:30:43 ► §

we’re not going to find the right way to get all of the information that should be public out into the public in a responsible way.

00:30:50 ► §

I feel a burden, an obligation to make sure that what should be reported gets reported in a timely fashion.

00:30:56 ► §

And it’s a difficult challenge.

00:30:57 ► §

I worry about that.

00:30:59 ► §

For a long time, I worried about what the legal consequences would be of my doing this journalism.

00:31:03 ► §

There were senior Obama officials arguing that it was criminal

00:31:06 ► §

and that we could be arrested if we came back to the U.S.

00:31:09 ► §

My partner was famously…

00:31:10 ► §

So you had a conversation with senior Obama officials about this?

00:31:12 ► §

Well, they publicly said it.

00:31:13 ► §

I had lawyers who have good contacts in the Justice Department

00:31:16 ► §

trying to get some assurances that if I came back to the U.S.

00:31:20 ► §

that I wouldn’t be arrested, that there wasn’t a grand jury pending.

00:31:22 ► §

And you were given assurances?

00:31:23 ► §

We were given no assurances.

00:31:24 ► §

They purposely kept us in the dark in a state of uncertainty

00:31:26 ► §

about whether they intended to do that.

00:31:29 ► §

They wouldn’t give us any information.

00:31:31 ► §

You know, my partner was detained.

00:31:33 ► §

There was an active terrorism investigation in the U.K.

00:31:36 ► §

So there’s definitely been risks.

00:31:37 ► §

And when you have many tens of thousands of secret documents,

00:31:40 ► §

there are lots of intelligence agencies around the world

00:31:42 ► §

that would like to get their hands on that.

00:31:43 ► §

And so there’s security risk, there’s physical risk um and then there’s

00:31:47 ► §

just the burden of trying to make officials would like to get their hands on it doesn’t that say

00:31:51 ► §

something yeah i mean it said well it could just say that they want to know how to defend

00:31:56 ► §

themselves against the invasions of their communications but you know no i mean if the

00:32:01 ► §

united states government were is invading the communications of government officials, of consulates, of embassies, you would just rationally want to know what they’re doing and how they’re doing it so you can protect yourself.

00:32:11 ► §

Maybe you want to know what they’re doing to replicate it and do it yourself as well.

00:32:14 ► §

Are the negotiations going on at all with Edward Snowden to somehow allow him to believe he could come back and get whatever it is that he’s looking for?

00:32:23 ► §

There’s some negotiations, but they’re not very fruitful.

00:32:26 ► §

I don’t see a day when the U.S. government will allow him to return without a lot of jail time.

00:32:30 ► §

Who’s negotiating with whom?

00:32:31 ► §

Well, he has lawyers, including the ACLU and others.

00:32:35 ► §

And who negotiates with them?

00:32:36 ► §

The Justice Department.

00:32:37 ► §

So there are conversations between the Justice Department and his lawyers about which circumstances he might come back.

00:32:41 ► §

There have been.

00:32:42 ► §

I just don’t – they haven’t progressed very far at all.

00:32:45 ► §

When will you see him?

00:32:47 ► §

I actually expect to go to Russia

00:32:50 ► §

at some point in the very, very near future

00:32:52 ► §

for an interview and for…

00:32:55 ► §

An interview with him

00:32:57 ► §

or to be interviewed about this book?

00:32:59 ► §

To be interviewed jointly with him.

00:33:01 ► §

And I can’t disclose the details yet

00:33:03 ► §

just because it hasn’t been announced,

00:33:05 ► §

but that will happen in the very short-term future. So it’ll be sort of the reunion of our one-year

00:33:09 ► §

anniversary from Hong Kong. Well, that should give you a little more background about the

00:33:15 ► §

significance of the revelations about the NSA spying on you, your friends, and your family

00:33:21 ► §

members. Just think, every link you’ve ever clicked on is recorded in your personal profile

00:33:26 ► §

and then cross-referenced to the files of those you have in some way or another become connected to,

00:33:31 ► §

no matter how remotely.

00:33:33 ► §

Now, I know that a lot of people say that they have nothing to hide,

00:33:37 ► §

but I’ll bet that there are a lot of men, both old and young,

00:33:40 ► §

who most certainly would not want their mothers to see the list of all the websites that they’ve been visiting late at night.

00:33:47 ► §

Actually, I have to admit that it really bothers me when people say that they intend to keep on using Gmail, Hotmail, and the other NSA fronts

00:33:55 ► §

just simply because it’s convenient, doesn’t cost anything, and besides, they don’t have anything to hide.

00:34:02 ► §

Well, how about if we start a list of people who say that

00:34:05 ► §

and then post those names on a public website

00:34:08 ► §

so that, well, we can all keep our eyes on them

00:34:10 ► §

and determine if they’re telling the truth about having nothing to hide.

00:34:14 ► §

After all, if they don’t mind the Google and Facebook kids,

00:34:17 ► §

along with thousands of government employees and contractors

00:34:20 ► §

having access to all that they do,

00:34:22 ► §

well, then they shouldn’t mind a few more of us looking over their shoulders as well.

00:34:28 ► §

But in all seriousness, just think about what’s happening to our collective psyche, knowing

00:34:34 ► §

that every keystroke we make, every link we click, and every email message we send or

00:34:38 ► §

receive is being recorded in a file with your name on it.

00:34:42 ► §

Can you honestly tell me that this in no way causes you to

00:34:45 ► §

self-censor what you are doing and saying? Well, you can tell me that, but I’m not going to believe

00:34:50 ► §

you. As I said in the introduction to this conversation, Glenn Grenwald’s new book, No Place

00:34:56 ► §

to Hide, becomes ever more important the younger you are. I don’t have all that many years left for

00:35:02 ► §

the government to continue assembling a dossier on me,

00:35:08 ► §

but if you’re still young enough to be in school, at any level,

00:35:11 ► §

you should really be thinking very carefully about these things.

00:35:15 ► §

Now before I go to the next segment of this podcast,

00:35:22 ► §

I’m first going to read one of the more than 100 sentences that I’ve underlined in Grenwald’s important book,

00:35:29 ► §

and hopefully it’ll give you something to think about the next time you log on to Facebook or use Gmail. Here’s what Grinwald has to say.

00:35:37 ► §

When the government knows everyone you call and everyone who calls you, plus the exact length of all those phone conversations, when it can list every single one of your email correspondence

00:35:42 ► §

and every location from where your emails were sent,

00:35:45 ► §

it can create a remarkably comprehensive picture of your life, your associations,

00:35:50 ► §

and your activities, including some of your most intimate and private information.

00:35:56 ► §

That’s the end of the quote. In other words, the power elite now have ways in which to predict

00:36:02 ► §

whether one day you may become a threat. And then, just like in that old movie, they can maybe preemptively marginalize you.

00:36:09 ► §

In fact, it’s happening every day, so think about it.

00:36:13 ► §

Now I’m going to play part of a talk that was given at the Next Web conference in Amsterdam

00:36:18 ► §

by Stefan Molinier, who is the host of Freedom Maine Radio, a popular Canadian program.

00:36:25 ► §

And Stephan gives a really succinct presentation about how our governments are able to keep us all in perpetual servitude.

00:36:33 ► §

For example, if you’re getting out of university with a large debt, say $44,000,

00:36:38 ► §

you will never, as in never, be out of debt again in your entire life.

00:36:43 ► §

Ask around and see if that isn’t so.

00:36:46 ► §

And Stephan not only explains why this is so and how it works,

00:36:50 ► §

but he goes on to explain how a global digital currency, like Bitcoin, can change things.

00:36:56 ► §

In fact, he shows how cryptocurrencies could be the greatest revolution in human history

00:37:01 ► §

and the foundation of a truly free and prosperous planet.

00:37:06 ► §

So let’s join the audience now at the next web conference and hear what he has to say.

00:37:11 ► §

Good afternoon, everybody. Hope you’re doing well. Thank you so much for coming out to Bitcoin versus

00:37:16 ► §

political power. I have a technology background, which is probably why I managed to slip into the

00:37:22 ► §

conference. I was an entrepreneur for about 15 or so years in the high-tech field,

00:37:27 ► §

and then I got bitten by the philosophy bug.

00:37:30 ► §

I studied philosophy at a graduate level in Canada,

00:37:33 ► §

and I ended up running the show.

00:37:36 ► §

We have about 65 million downloads.

00:37:38 ► §

I’ve been on TV. I speak all over the world.

00:37:40 ► §

And since about 2011, I’ve been really talking up Bitcoin.

00:37:47 ► §

Now, just curious, how many people have Bitcoins? I don’t mean on them. I’m just curious how many people have Bitcoins. Okay,

00:37:53 ► §

good. Good for you. How many people are interested in getting Bitcoins? Not that I have any on me to

00:37:58 ► §

provide, but okay, good. And I’m going to make a case here. I mean, Bitcoin is great technology. It’s genius code.

00:38:06 ► §

This public ledger of value transfer and information, copyright, deeds, wills,

00:38:14 ► §

almost anything you can think of can be implemented in the Bitcoin architecture.

00:38:20 ► §

It is one of the greatest innovations, I think, in human history.

00:38:24 ► §

It’s a lot to say, but I’ll hopefully make the case here.

00:38:26 ► §

And one of the things it has the power to do is to limit the seemingly endless growth

00:38:32 ► §

of political power that literally appears to be eating up the world,

00:38:38 ► §

eating up the next generation.

00:38:40 ► §

The unfunded liabilities of the U.S. government are estimated at over $100 trillion.

00:38:48 ► §

That’s on a GDP of $15 trillion.

00:38:52 ► §

Can’t possibly pay it.

00:38:53 ► §

Even here in the Netherlands, unfunded liabilities, the social security pensions,

00:38:57 ► §

all the stuff the government has promised to pay for but has no cash to pay for, is 522% of GDP.

00:39:08 ► §

That’s not good.

00:39:10 ► §

That’s not good at all.

00:39:12 ► §

And there’s a reason why that has occurred.

00:39:16 ► §

And the reason is because governments can print

00:39:20 ► §

any money that they want.

00:39:23 ► §

That’s their business plan.

00:39:24 ► §

I’ve got a bank account.

00:39:26 ► §

I’ve got a keyboard.

00:39:27 ► §

I’m going to type some numbers in.

00:39:29 ► §

Look, I’m a business genius.

00:39:32 ► §

That’s what they’re doing.

00:39:35 ► §

And that takes away power from the people.

00:39:39 ► §

A study just came out yesterday

00:39:40 ► §

from Princeton and Northwestern University

00:39:42 ► §

that proves, I think, what we all

00:39:46 ► §

feel instinctively to be true. They did a study in America and they said, what are the political

00:39:52 ► §

beliefs or preferences of the American population? And what has the government done? Was it this

00:40:00 ► §

close? It was not. This, this. They couldn’t, you know, it was like watching a guy tell you how big the fish was he caught in Narnia.

00:40:09 ► §

They couldn’t find a further gap.

00:40:11 ► §

Now, business interests, financial interests, they had the ear of the government.

00:40:19 ► §

The people did not.

00:40:20 ► §

It’s an oligopoly.

00:40:22 ► §

It’s a plutocracy.

00:40:22 ► §

We all know this to be true.

00:40:22 ► §

It did not. It’s an oligopoly. It’s a plutocracy. We all know this to be true.

00:40:24 ► §

And I’m going to argue that it is fiat currency that enables that in the government

00:40:30 ► §

and it is Bitcoin that can stop it and stop a lot more besides.

00:40:38 ► §

2500 years ago, Aristotle, known as a very smart cookie,

00:40:43 ► §

defined money as having four characteristics.

00:40:49 ► §

It had to be portable, right?

00:40:51 ► §

You know, lead coin.

00:40:53 ► §

Can’t do that.

00:40:55 ► §

It had to be long-lasting and not fade away, not lose its value.

00:41:01 ► §

It had to be divisible, right?

00:41:02 ► §

You can cut it up, reassemble it.

00:41:04 ► §

And it had to have intrinsic value. It had to be divisible, right? You can cut it up, reassemble it. And it had

00:41:05 ► §

to have intrinsic value. And its most important intrinsic value was that it was limited. Limited.

00:41:12 ► §

Now, I’m sure you guys know, what was the original money back in the day? Solid gold.

00:41:19 ► §

That’s right. Not just a great TV show, but a very, very fine basis for currency. Of course, nobody under 40 knows

00:41:25 ► §

that reference. Okay, never mind. So gold has those properties. It lasts long. You can

00:41:31 ► §

slice it up. It retains its value. You can reassemble it. And it has intrinsic value

00:41:35 ► §

because people like it. It’s shiny. It’s pretty and all that. So Bitcoin, of course, lasts.

00:41:40 ► §

It’s digital. Bitcoin is divisible, right? There will be 21 million Bitcoins that can be divided by 100 million each into these Satoshis.

00:41:50 ► §

And I think that’s about as many pennies as there are in the world economy.

00:41:54 ► §

So we’re not going to run out of money anytime soon.

00:41:57 ► §

And it is limited.

00:42:01 ► §

And I know this sounds like very abstract, maybe even annoying intellectual economic abstractions,

00:42:06 ► §

but the limits of money, the limiting of money, is the limiting of political power.

00:42:14 ► §

We have these governments, and we believe that they’re necessary,

00:42:17 ► §

but they are considered to be great servants and terrible masters.

00:42:20 ► §

We create them for security, we create them for defense,

00:42:26 ► §

for dispute resolution through the court system, and then they seem to do everything else under the known universe,

00:42:30 ► §

and they run up enormous debts, and they start wars, and they sell off the unborn to foreign

00:42:34 ► §

banksters, and we can’t control the government when we need to. We try to vote, we try to rally,

00:42:40 ► §

we try to have activism, and we cannot control this beast of the state. Anybody know how

00:42:47 ► §

many Occupy Wall Street protesters ended up in jail? Anyone know that number? About 2,500.

00:42:54 ► §

2,500. The bankers in the United States are estimated, if you take out some of the government

00:43:00 ► §

spending that’s tried to remediate the damage damage estimated to have destroyed about 40% of America’s wealth.

00:43:05 ► §

40% of the wealth of the wealthiest country destroyed by a financial oligopoly

00:43:11 ► §

who were clearly breaking laws repeatedly.

00:43:14 ► §

Does anybody know how many bankers went to jail?

00:43:20 ► §

Yeah, big fat goose egg, a bagel, zero.

00:43:24 ► §

Remember Mitt Romney? Corporations are people, my friends. No, a bagel, zero. Remember Mitt Romney, corporations are people, my friend.

00:43:27 ► §

No, people go to jail.

00:43:30 ► §

Corporations never go to jail because they give money to the government.

00:43:34 ► §

Barack Obama was elected because it took the most money of any political candidate ever in history from the financial sector.

00:43:40 ► §

And in return, he extends the tarp bailout.

00:43:47 ► §

sector. And in return, he extends the tarp bailout. And banks that made hundreds of millions of dollars lying to their customers, selling them financial instruments that they were actually

00:43:53 ► §

betting against, well, they get slap on the wrist fines that basically get passed off as costs

00:43:59 ► §

to their customers. They pay nothing. We cannot control this monster. In the 19th century,

00:44:07 ► §

we’re also used to inflation. Here, it’s crazy. Like, I came to Amsterdam, and my wife told me

00:44:12 ► §

it was going to rain all week. Turns out it’s quite sunny. I don’t want to get full-on tomato

00:44:16 ► §

head, so I went to get some sunscreen. Like, $30 is like 20 euros for sunscreen and all that. I

00:44:23 ► §

thought it was going to be like gold and turn me into C-3PO or something,

00:44:26 ► §

but it’s just crazy expensive.

00:44:28 ► §

When I first came to Canada in 1977, a candy bar cost 10 cents.

00:44:33 ► §

Within 10 to 12 years, it was up to a buck.

00:44:35 ► §

Inflation is just something we’re so used to.

00:44:37 ► §

In the 19th century, when gold was the basis of currency,

00:44:42 ► §

prices went down.

00:44:45 ► §

Can you imagine that?

00:44:46 ► §

Don’t we all feel like our money is just kind of evaporating?

00:44:50 ► §

You know, like it’s like grapes left out for ants to eat,

00:44:53 ► §

like you put it under your bed and it just smolders and vanishes.

00:44:56 ► §

It’s one of the reasons why we put money in banks,

00:44:57 ► §

why we invest in the stock market.

00:44:59 ► §

It’s just a hedge against inflation.

00:45:01 ► §

In the 19th century, when money was limited by gold,

00:45:07 ► §

prices went down for a hundred years in general. Everything was a computer. Everything got better and cheaper over time.

00:45:13 ► §

We can’t fathom this anymore, but that’s how it used to be when money was limited.

00:45:20 ► §

Now, what happened in the 19th century was rich people, not all rich people,

00:45:26 ► §

but rich people in general want to privatize profits and socialize losses, right?

00:45:33 ► §

Ooh, I made some good money.

00:45:35 ► §

Yay, all mine.

00:45:36 ► §

Fine, I’m fine.

00:45:37 ► §

Down with property rights.

00:45:38 ► §

Good thing, right?

00:45:39 ► §

Ooh, did I lose some money?

00:45:41 ► §

Can we find a couple of taxpayers?

00:45:43 ► §

Maybe they’re kids.

00:45:44 ► §

Maybe they’re unborn.

00:45:44 ► §

They’re not voting yet. Let’s do that. And in the 19th century, people put money into

00:45:50 ► §

banks. Now, they’re already making money just by sitting on it because prices were going down,

00:45:55 ► §

but they put their money in banks. Now, how do banks give you interest? They don’t have any

00:46:00 ► §

money other than what they’re given. They’re not entrepreneurs in the way most of the audience members here are.

00:46:06 ► §

So banks lend money out to other people.

00:46:09 ► §

And then those people make money and pay back the bank.

00:46:13 ► §

And then the bank gives you a couple of points on your deposits.

00:46:17 ► §

Fine business model.

00:46:18 ► §

No problem with it at all.

00:46:19 ► §

But in the 19th century, banks had the capacity for failure, of course, right?

00:46:25 ► §

Because sometimes you invest, you give a whole bunch of people making carriages a lot of money,

00:46:31 ► §

and then, oh, some jerk invented the car.

00:46:34 ► §

Damn.

00:46:35 ► §

Buy to that money.

00:46:36 ► §

And you lose a lot of money.

00:46:37 ► §

And, of course, banks maybe make one or two percentage points on a loan,

00:46:40 ► §

which means for every loan that fails, between 50 and 100 have to succeed perfectly.

00:46:44 ► §

So it’s a very risky business.

00:46:48 ► §

So banks were competing for customers, and they always wanted to be able to offer more interest.

00:46:53 ► §

Now, how could they do that?

00:46:54 ► §

Well, fractional reserve banking.

00:46:57 ► §

Boy, there’s a phrase that will get people to flock to you at dinner parties.

00:47:00 ► §

I know about fractional reserve banking.

00:47:02 ► §

Would you like to sit next to me?

00:47:05 ► §

So the banks wanted to offer more interest, so they had to lend out multiples. They got a ton

00:47:09 ► §

of gold. They lend out five tons worth of money to people. And they hope that the law of averages

00:47:14 ► §

is going to even it out and they’re going to be okay. And a lot of times it did. And sometimes

00:47:19 ► §

it didn’t. Then people lost money. They lost money because they were greedy, because they

00:47:23 ► §

wanted the bank to lend out more than it was holding. When the bank went bankrupt, a lot

00:47:29 ► §

of rich people lost a lot of money. Where do they go? Oh, congressmen. They go to the

00:47:35 ► §

state. Now, the problem is the state is a negative sum game. The state is the deal where

00:47:42 ► §

they say, hey, I can give you five euros. And people are like, hey, I like euros, I’ll take that.

00:47:48 ► §

And they say, well, to give you the five euros, I need to tax you ten euros first, if that’s all right.

00:47:56 ► §

And then people say, I think that deal just got away from me.

00:47:59 ► §

I don’t feel like that’s going to work that well.

00:48:03 ► §

Because, you know, you’re going to give someone $100,

00:48:05 ► §

you go tax people a dollar each, 100 people,

00:48:08 ► §

you’ve got to go pick up that money and people aren’t going to comply,

00:48:10 ► §

you’ve got to have a court system, collection, IRS, all that.

00:48:13 ► §

So it’s a negative sum game.

00:48:14 ► §

Some people think it’s worth it.

00:48:16 ► §

That’s perhaps a conversation with other time.

00:48:17 ► §

I’ll be at the Q&A session afterwards.

00:48:20 ► §

But it is a negative sum game.

00:48:22 ► §

So if a bunch of rich people come to you and say,

00:48:25 ► §

my bank went bust, give me some money.

00:48:28 ► §

Well, you’ve got to go and raise taxes on a bunch of people.

00:48:31 ► §

And they don’t like that.

00:48:32 ► §

See, when money is limited, when it’s limited on gold,

00:48:35 ► §

the government can’t just make it up.

00:48:36 ► §

It means if you want to transfer money,

00:48:38 ► §

you have to go take it from someone first,

00:48:40 ► §

and those people don’t like it.

00:48:43 ► §

And so governments are always trying to

00:48:45 ► §

enrich people, always trying to break out of limited money, to get out of this little

00:48:49 ► §

cage of limited money. And freedom for the government is enslavement for the people.

00:48:54 ► §

We’re talking about power. To the people at this conference, when the government is free,

00:49:01 ► §

the people are enslaved. When the government is contained, then the people are enslaved. When the government is contained then the people are free.

00:49:07 ► §

And when the government can print

00:49:09 ► §

all the money that it wants

00:49:10 ► §

and when the government can create

00:49:13 ► §

in Canada there’s a province

00:49:14 ► §

it has 75 year bonds.

00:49:18 ► §

Right?

00:49:19 ► §

Which means

00:49:19 ► §

give me money now

00:49:22 ► §

and in 75 years

00:49:24 ► §

someone will pay it back.

00:49:27 ► §

I mean there’s no

00:49:28 ► §

conceivable way that that could be

00:49:30 ► §

considered just or fair or democratic.

00:49:32 ► §

These people aren’t even born yet

00:49:34 ► §

and you’re taxing them.

00:49:37 ► §

Picking the pocket of a fetus

00:49:38 ► §

takes some pretty nimble fingers

00:49:39 ► §

but they can do it with fiat currency.

00:49:43 ► §

To limit money is to limit political power.

00:49:49 ► §

So prior to the First World War,

00:49:52 ► §

Federal Reserve was created in America

00:49:54 ► §

with the capacity to create money,

00:49:58 ► §

which is, well, technically called counterfeiting,

00:50:02 ► §

but in the annals of government, it’s sound fiscal policy.

00:50:10 ► §

And during the First World War, which started late in the summer and everyone expected it to be over by Christmas.

00:50:17 ► §

Why? Because that’s all the money they had.

00:50:19 ► §

War is ferociously expensive.

00:50:23 ► §

And all wars prior had been relatively short,

00:50:25 ► §

relatively contained.

00:50:27 ► §

And one by one

00:50:29 ► §

over the First World War,

00:50:31 ► §

the European governments

00:50:32 ► §

went off the gold standard

00:50:33 ► §

because they had no gold.

00:50:35 ► §

War and gold

00:50:37 ► §

don’t mix very well.

00:50:38 ► §

War and limited currency

00:50:40 ► §

don’t mix very well.

00:50:42 ► §

When you have fiat currency,

00:50:44 ► §

you have like this infinite blender for human parts.

00:50:47 ► §

You can just keep shoving more and more people in.

00:50:49 ► §

If they’d had to wage the First World War on gold,

00:50:52 ► §

it likely would have ended by Christmas 1914

00:50:55 ► §

and a further 9 or 10 million people would not have died.

00:50:58 ► §

This is how serious money is.

00:51:01 ► §

Money is life and death for millions of people.

00:51:03 ► §

money is. Money is life and death for millions of people.

00:51:12 ► §

So the social programs that were instituted by most European governments in the 19th century,

00:51:16 ► §

Germany first and foremost among them, kept running through the First World War.

00:51:21 ► §

I don’t know if you know this, guns or butter, do you want to have a war economy or do you want consumer goods? When you have fiat currency, you don’t have to give people that choice.

00:51:27 ► §

You can have your social programs,

00:51:29 ► §

you can have a war economy

00:51:30 ► §

and you pay for it

00:51:31 ► §

by printing money.

00:51:34 ► §

Anybody, what’s the effect

00:51:35 ► §

of printing money?

00:51:37 ► §

What does it do to prices?

00:51:40 ► §

Who’s awake?

00:51:40 ► §

Yeah, it goes up.

00:51:42 ► §

Yeah, they go up.

00:51:43 ► §

Inflation technically,

00:51:44 ► §

according to the Austrian economists,

00:51:46 ► §

who I’d really recommend you look into,

00:51:47 ► §

inflation is an inflation of the money supply.

00:51:51 ► §

The price that goes up is just an effect of the inflation.

00:51:57 ► §

First World War, they kept the social programs going

00:52:00 ► §

while running unsustainable wars,

00:52:01 ► §

and they had to go off the gold standard.

00:52:03 ► §

The First World War did not need to be fought.

00:52:05 ► §

The economic disasters that followed, the uncoupling of money from gold are still being felt.

00:52:12 ► §

1971, in America, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society social programs were underway,

00:52:20 ► §

costing billions and billions of dollars, fighting a war in Vietnam,

00:52:24 ► §

which, like the First World War, did not need to be fought.

00:52:27 ► §

Did they go to the people and say,

00:52:29 ► §

we need money for the war,

00:52:30 ► §

we’re going to have to shut down all this other stuff?

00:52:33 ► §

No.

00:52:35 ► §

They went off the gold standard,

00:52:37 ► §

just like the European nations had done

00:52:39 ► §

through the First World War.

00:52:41 ► §

They go off the gold standard

00:52:42 ► §

so they don’t have to ask you to choose

00:52:44 ► §

between food and death,

00:52:47 ► §

between life and murder,

00:52:48 ► §

between guns and butter.

00:52:51 ► §

Taxes in America have not been raised.

00:52:55 ► §

They’re waging a war on terror.

00:52:58 ► §

Throughout all of human history,

00:53:00 ► §

174,000 tons of gold

00:53:03 ► §

has been mined and refined. 174. Just think, 174,000 tons of gold has been mined and refined.

00:53:05 ► §

00:53:06 ► §

Just think, 174.

00:53:09 ► §

The war on terror

00:53:10 ► §

cost 291,000 tons of gold.

00:53:15 ► §

The cost of World War II

00:53:17 ► §

for America,

00:53:18 ► §

which was never invaded or bombed,

00:53:21 ► §

save Pearl Harbor,

00:53:23 ► §

was 15 times the amount of gold that they had

00:53:26 ► §

in Fort Knox and the Fed.

00:53:30 ► §

In terms of bitcoins,

00:53:33 ► §

the war on terror costs 500 times more bitcoins

00:53:38 ► §

than will ever be mined,

00:53:39 ► §

and about 1,100 times more than is currently available.

00:53:47 ► §

How is this possible? How is it possible to wage these astoundingly destructive wars with the deaths of over a million Iraqis and the displacements

00:53:54 ► §

of a million and a half Iraqis? And in Fallujah, the genetic damage to the population as the result

00:53:59 ► §

of these hellacious weapons is so bad that anthropologists and geneticists estimate that

00:54:04 ► §

the population of

00:54:05 ► §

Fallujah has been genetically destroyed for at least a generation. How is it possible?

00:54:11 ► §

It’s possible because money is unlimited. It’s possible because not more than one in

00:54:16 ► §

a thousand or ten thousand people know that they lost their house because they cheered

00:54:21 ► §

the war. They don’t know that. They can’t trace that. They’re certainly not educated about that.

00:54:26 ► §

Why would you educate people about that

00:54:28 ► §

if you want all the evils of warmongering political power?

00:54:34 ► §

So when governments can print money,

00:54:35 ► §

they don’t have to ask the people to make rational decisions

00:54:38 ► §

or to balance things, right?

00:54:40 ► §

The basis of economics.

00:54:41 ► §

All human desires are infinite.

00:54:43 ► §

All resources are finite. But with the

00:54:46 ► §

magic of the printing press, with the magic of typing whatever you want into your own bank

00:54:50 ► §

account, you go into this crazy psychotic world of limitless capacity for destruction and debt.

00:54:59 ► §

So if in 2003, the American government had gone to its population and said,

00:55:06 ► §

hey, that’s a damn bad guy, right?

00:55:08 ► §

Bad guy.

00:55:08 ► §

I think we’re all in agreement on that.

00:55:09 ► §

Very bad guy.

00:55:10 ► §

Would be nice if they hadn’t armed him before, but bad guy.

00:55:15 ► §

Why don’t we go to war?

00:55:16 ► §

People say, I’m not sure about that.

00:55:18 ► §

They say, well, that’ll be $75,000 per household.

00:55:21 ► §

Please and thank you very much.

00:55:23 ► §

How many warmongers would be left?

00:55:26 ► §

Oh, really?

00:55:32 ► §

75,000? No, that’s okay. Blessed are the peacemakers. Let’s find another route.

00:55:39 ► §

The tarp bailout for the banks. Hey, do you feel like bailing out Daddy Warbucks and his gold monocle? Would that be fun for you? Great. $2,200 per person.

00:55:47 ► §

$4,400 for every working person.

00:55:50 ► §

Want to send that money to us?

00:55:51 ► §

Really?

00:55:52 ► §

No, I don’t think so.

00:55:56 ► §

But they can just keep doing things without referring to the will of the people

00:55:58 ► §

because they didn’t invent the photocopier

00:56:01 ► §

but they sure know how to use it.

00:56:02 ► §

The government has no money of its own.

00:56:05 ► §

Bitcoin is intrinsically limited.

00:56:10 ► §

You can’t make a Bitcoin.

00:56:13 ► §

You can mine it and buy it.

00:56:14 ► §

The government can’t print a Bitcoin.

00:56:18 ► §

The government in a Bitcoin currency universe has to actually go to the people and ask them

00:56:24 ► §

what they want.

00:56:25 ► §

The government will actually have to do what it claims it does.

00:56:29 ► §

Serve the people.

00:56:32 ► §

Ask the people.

00:56:33 ► §

Not with votes.

00:56:36 ► §

Votes.

00:56:38 ► §

You only ever get to vote for people who’ve already been bought and paid for.

00:56:43 ► §

Who’s up there on the podium in the presidential debates,

00:56:46 ► §

whether you go to Europe or to America or South America or China, anywhere?

00:56:50 ► §

The only people who are up there are people who’ve got enough money to run,

00:56:53 ► §

and where are they getting the money from?

00:56:54 ► §

They’re getting the money from special interests at your expense.

00:56:59 ► §

That’s not a theory.

00:57:01 ► §

I mean, this is fairly well documented.

00:57:04 ► §

If we have a Bitcoin universe,

00:57:08 ► §

you don’t get to print money for war. You don’t get to print money for a prison industrial

00:57:13 ► §

complex. You don’t get to print money for a war on drugs. You have to ask the people.

00:57:18 ► §

War on drugs in America costs hundreds of billions of dollars a year, at the most conservative estimate, hundreds of billions of dollars a year. How many people, if their moral outrage against

00:57:31 ► §

drug use, ooh, that’s bad vegetation. If their moral outrage was not subsidized by money

00:57:38 ► §

printing and they had to pay the bill themselves, how many of them would find tolerance for

00:57:42 ► §

people who like Pink Floyd? I think they would be all right with that. All the people who hate drugs and love Sgt. Pepper’s.

00:57:51 ► §

So Bitcoin gives us an opportunity to reclaim the power of the people to say yes or no to what the

00:57:57 ► §

government claims that it wants to do. Because there’s this weird thing that happens in society.

00:58:02 ► §

There’s something that’s happening that’s cool, and then people say, well, the government can make it better.

00:58:06 ► §

And they say, okay, well, the government can make it better,

00:58:07 ► §

let’s have the government add to it.

00:58:08 ► §

And then what happens is, point, you get over to this place

00:58:10 ► §

where suddenly the government has to do it.

00:58:15 ► §

And then suddenly it’s like only the government can do it.

00:58:17 ► §

And this is how we think about currency now.

00:58:19 ► §

It has to be government. Why?

00:58:22 ► §

It’s a complete anomaly.

00:58:23 ► §

The last time the government had this much power over currency

00:58:26 ► §

was in the waning days of the Roman Empire

00:58:29 ► §

when they inflated the currency so much

00:58:35 ► §

that the gold coins only had 2 or 3% of gold left in at the end.

00:58:39 ► §

And they were trying to pay all their mercenaries with this crap gold

00:58:42 ► §

and the mercenaries said,

00:58:44 ► §

this stuff is crap.

00:58:48 ► §

We’re coming to Rome to get the gold. They killed the Roman economy,

00:58:53 ► §

depopulated Rome from like a million and a half people to 17,000 people in a year or two. And that was it for civilization for quite some time. When you give governments the power to control

00:58:59 ► §

the money supply, it grows like a tumor until it extinguishes society itself.

00:59:06 ► §

I really urge you to consider it to be that important.

00:59:10 ► §

With Bitcoin, you can’t steal it.

00:59:16 ► §

Well, if you leave your wallet on a park bench, it can be stolen.

00:59:22 ► §

But with any rudimentary security, you can’t have your Bitcoin stolen.

00:59:26 ► §

I was just speaking at a conference in Texas. I met some vendors who are integrating something

00:59:31 ► §

so that if anybody tries to get a Bitcoin out of your wallet, it sends you a text message

00:59:36 ► §

to your cell phone, you enter a PIN, and you approve the transfer. Solved. Can’t steal

00:59:41 ► §

the Bitcoins now. That happens anywhere and everywhere.

00:59:48 ► §

There is going to be enormous amounts of resistance to the adoption of Bitcoin,

00:59:50 ► §

but I really believe that it is about the most peaceful revolution

00:59:54 ► §

that we can have in this world.

00:59:58 ► §

It’s been called the Internet of Money

01:00:00 ► §

in that it’s a protocol and you can program around it,

01:00:04 ► §

you can build anything

01:00:05 ► §

on top of it, which the community thousands of developers are currently doing. But it’s

01:00:09 ► §

better than the Internet. That’s a non-controversial statement. It’s better than the Internet

01:00:14 ► §

because the Internet has not slowed the growth of governments around the world. The Internet

01:00:22 ► §

has not saved the next generation from the endless gutter hole of

01:00:25 ► §

debt. Information empowers the people, but not with regards to political power. Political power

01:00:34 ► §

is a monopoly of the initiation of force in a geographical area. Information don’t stop bullets.

01:00:41 ► §

But when you don’t have money to fund bullets, the bullets stop. War, surveillance,

01:00:49 ► §

as the lady was talking about before, debt, the growing fascism that is occurring throughout

01:00:57 ► §

the Western world is all predicated on money. Imagine a football game where every time you cheered, you were charged five euros.

01:01:06 ► §

How loud is that game going to be? Very quiet. Imagine if our primitive reptile bloodlust brain,

01:01:16 ► §

which we all have, nothing wrong with it. Imagine if our primitive bloodlust, us versus them,

01:01:29 ► §

Imagine if our primitive bloodlust, us versus them, tribal, base of the skull meat brain, was provoked with an enemy.

01:01:31 ► §

Those guys are bad. They’re coming to get us.

01:01:33 ► §

We don’t want the smoking gun to be in the form of a mushroom cloud.

01:01:37 ► §

What stops that brain from cheering war?

01:01:40 ► §

Cost.

01:01:42 ► §

Cost stops us.

01:01:46 ► §

Think of the environmental predation and environmental destruction that is wrought

01:01:49 ► §

by the continual increase in the money supply.

01:01:55 ► §

How much consumerism is driven by the fact

01:01:58 ► §

that your money is burning a hole in your pocket?

01:02:00 ► §

Literally, it’s melting, it’s evaporating,

01:02:02 ► §

it’s dying in your pocket.

01:02:04 ► §

Convert it to something. Convert it to something. Buy something. How much consumer demand is stimulated

01:02:09 ► §

by excess money being flushed into the system? How much wealth, genuine wealth, not bubble wealth,

01:02:16 ► §

genuine wealth, how much genuine wealth is not being created? I’ll give you one tiny example,

01:02:21 ► §

then I think I have to end. There was a study that came out recently that said if, just one tiny aspect, if American regulations and controls over the economy,

01:02:30 ► §

interferences in the economy, had stayed at 1946 levels. It was not a Mad Max, Thunderdome,

01:02:36 ► §

flaming-headed, bayonetting kind of wasteland in America in 1946. Civilized society. If

01:02:43 ► §

regulations had stayed that small in America, if regulations had stayed

01:02:45 ► §

that small in America

01:02:46 ► §

if they just stayed that size

01:02:48 ► §

the GDP of America

01:02:51 ► §

would not be 15 trillion dollars

01:02:53 ► §

it would be 53 trillion dollars

01:02:57 ► §

this is the opportunity cost

01:02:59 ► §

of one tiny slice

01:03:00 ► §

of an expansion of government power

01:03:02 ► §

there would be no poverty

01:03:04 ► §

nobody would have to worry about health care costs charity would take care of government power. There would be no poverty. Nobody would have to worry

01:03:05 ► §

about health care costs. Charity would take care of everyone. And there would not be, as there is

01:03:10 ► §

in America at the moment, children born into $1.4 trillion worth of debt that they never voted for,

01:03:18 ► §

never chose, and will spend the rest of their lives groaning under the yoke of foreign banksters

01:03:22 ► §

to pay off. This is the alternative

01:03:25 ► §

universe that Bitcoin can generate. So I strongly urge you to start looking into Bitcoin. Start

01:03:32 ► §

promoting it. Yes, it’s great. You can make some money. You can do some cool stuff technically,

01:03:36 ► §

but I really believe this is our best chance to save the world from a direction that it’s heading,

01:03:40 ► §

which is sadly a photocopy of the end of the Roman Empire. When you study history,

01:03:44 ► §

you’re basically watching the same movie

01:03:45 ► §

over and over and over again with different costumes.

01:03:49 ► §

Not a toga, it’s a suit, but it’s the same damn thing.

01:03:54 ► §

Bitcoin, we can stop the tape.

01:03:56 ► §

We can break out of the loop.

01:03:58 ► §

We can regain power to the people.

01:04:02 ► §

Thank you, everyone, so much.

01:04:03 ► §

Thank you everyone so much.

01:04:08 ► §

Thank you.

01:04:14 ► §

You’re listening to the Psychedelic Salon where people are changing their lives

01:04:16 ► §

one thought at a time.

01:04:19 ► §

In just a couple

01:04:20 ► §

of minutes I’m going to give you some of

01:04:22 ► §

my ideas about how the Bitcoin

01:04:24 ► §

protocol, not the digital currency, but the protocol can be used to transfer some of the power back to the people.

01:04:31 ► §

But first, I want to add a brief comment about Stefan’s comment about the unseen political power that is eating up the world.

01:04:44 ► §

time now many of us have been speaking and writing about the fact that the only way to change the constant use of warfare instead of diplomacy to settle differences between

01:04:49 ► §

various human populations is to quit using fiat currency. But until Bitcoin came along,

01:04:56 ► §

I hadn’t come across a single good answer as to how to starve the beast of the money

01:05:01 ► §

that is fueling these constant wars. On the day I was born, the entire world was at war.

01:05:08 ► §

And the situation is even worse today, I think,

01:05:11 ► §

mainly because so few people are willing to step back

01:05:14 ► §

and observe the pattern of the constant wars that rage all around us.

01:05:18 ► §

Today in the U.S., it is our nation’s Memorial Day holiday.

01:05:21 ► §

But I doubt if many people celebrating it have even the slightest

01:05:25 ► §

idea of what it’s about. As a child, my godfather was a World War I veteran and my dad was a World

01:05:32 ► §

War II veteran, so our home on Memorial Day was second only to Christmas for us. I’ll spare you

01:05:38 ► §

the details, but it meant a lot to our family to remember those who had been our friends,

01:05:43 ► §

relatives, and neighbors that didn’t return alive after the war.

01:05:47 ► §

And contrary to popular belief, while I was indoctrinated into being a patriot, not for a moment did my elders glorify war.

01:05:56 ► §

In fact, many times I heard them quoting President Eisenhower and saying, I hate war.

01:06:01 ► §

I hate war.

01:06:06 ► §

That said, it was a combination of blind patriotism and cowardice that ultimately saw me serving in the U.S. Navy off the coast of Vietnam

01:06:10 ► §

instead of growing dope in Canada.

01:06:13 ► §

I still regret the fact that I avoided reading about the true history of my country

01:06:17 ► §

and of how both the Korean War and the American War in Vietnam

01:06:21 ► §

had already been planned before the end of World War II.

01:06:24 ► §

Had I known that on the very same day that the Japanese surrender was signed, transport

01:06:30 ► §

ships left Okinawa loaded with tons of arms and equipment that had been stockpiled there

01:06:35 ► §

for a possible American land invasion of Japan.

01:06:38 ► §

It was enough equipment to supply over 250,000 men, and that mountain of war-making material was split between the South

01:06:46 ► §

Koreans and North Vietnamese in order to continue the need for ever more weapons to be manufactured

01:06:52 ► §

as these new wars were begun and waged. So read your history, and then you won’t be very surprised

01:06:58 ► §

at what is now taking place in Ukraine and Crimea. Iraq and Afghanistan are winding down for the U.S.

01:07:05 ► §

And so now it’s time to start the next round of wars that the owners of this world find so lucrative.

01:07:11 ► §

The only way that I can see to stop them is to simply quit giving any value to their fiat currency.

01:07:17 ► §

And so that’s why I see digital currency, in particular the digital currency aspects of the Bitcoin protocol, so important.

01:07:29 ► §

But I think that the digital currency, as important as it is,

01:07:33 ► §

may wind up being only the tip of the iceberg that the protocol can supply us.

01:07:38 ► §

You know, in the beginning of his talk, Stefan spoke about the potential of the protocol,

01:07:42 ► §

not just in the area of a public ledger of the transfer of value, but for copyright, wills, deeds, and as he said,

01:07:45 ► §

almost anything you can think of

01:07:47 ► §

can be implemented in the Bitcoin architecture.

01:07:51 ► §

So here are my contributions

01:07:53 ► §

to the pool of ideas that is now forming.

01:07:56 ► §

And just to be sure that you know

01:07:57 ► §

that I am in no way proposing

01:07:59 ► §

that anyone break any law of any nation,

01:08:02 ► §

what I’m passing along here is an idea for a plot for a novel,

01:08:06 ► §

short story, play, or movie that perhaps some of our fellow salonners besides myself may be working

01:08:11 ► §

on. Well, here’s a way to work the Bitcoin protocol into your stories. Think of the protocol as a

01:08:18 ► §

wrapper, an envelope, but it’s an envelope that needs a private key to open it. Now what if that envelope had a way, upon the happening of a certain event, to use its

01:08:27 ► §

key and open itself?

01:08:29 ► §

That certain event, well, it could be the arrival of a particular date, or an obituary

01:08:34 ► §

notice or simply the absence of a regularly scheduled event of some kind.

01:08:39 ► §

Now suppose you have a character in a position to blow the lid off things, but instead of being a superhero,

01:08:45 ► §

as I see Edward Snowden, your character is cowardly like I once was. Well, instead of

01:08:51 ► §

making documents immediately public, this reluctant whistleblower can wrap the incriminating documents

01:08:57 ► §

in a bitcoin wrapper and schedule them to release themselves in 25 years or whatever. I can even see a teenage character,

01:09:06 ► §

say a young girl who is horrified to learn that her father is a CIA assassin and she finds

01:09:12 ► §

incriminating evidence in his study, bitcoins it and sets it to be revealed on the day that the

01:09:17 ► §

local paper carries her father’s funeral notice. You get the point, I’m sure. I’m even seeing something like a reverse of the 1984 memory

01:09:28 ► §

hole, where maybe beginning a decade or so from now, that each day sees more old secrets bubbling

01:09:34 ► §

up. Now you see why writing fiction is so much more fun than non-fiction? And here’s another

01:09:42 ► §

idea for the Bitcoin protocol. If you aren’t familiar with the FBI’s COINTELPRO activities during the 60s, well, you should look it up.

01:09:51 ► §

The reason that you’ll want to know about that strike force is that, well, it’s never been shut down completely.

01:09:57 ► §

They just keep changing the name and their office location, but in one form or another, there’s still a program like that going on in the government.

01:10:04 ► §

but in one form or another, there’s still a program like that going on in the government.

01:10:10 ► §

And if you don’t know what it was, in brief, the FBI infiltrated the peace movement,

01:10:13 ► §

and their agents even had love affairs with their targets,

01:10:16 ► §

and then they destroyed as many peace activists as they could.

01:10:20 ► §

You know, that’s what the government sees as its job, by the way,

01:10:23 ► §

to stifle all opposition to the status quo.

01:10:28 ► §

Anyway, the government isn’t content in just knowing everything you do online,

01:10:33 ► §

to the point of even being able to predict your activities in a broad sense.

01:10:37 ► §

They also want their agents involved in watching you at gatherings you may attend.

01:10:41 ► §

So then how can we build a worldwide community of like-minded people who can absolutely trust that a person is who she or he says they are.

01:10:46 ► §

Well, right now I’m actually thinking of the scantily clad young women at Burning Man who

01:10:51 ► §

were actually undercover agents for the Bureau of Land Management. So when a young honey asks you

01:10:57 ► §

for an illegal drug, how can you tell if she’s real or just trying to entrap you? Well, here’s

01:11:02 ► §

something that the Bitcoin geeks among us can figure out.

01:11:06 ► §

What if there was a coin that represented social capital, not money?

01:11:10 ► §

Wouldn’t it be great the next time you’re at a meetup or a festival

01:11:14 ► §

to be able to scan a QC code on people’s name tags

01:11:18 ► §

and discover what, for lack of a better word, their lineage is in the tribe?

01:11:23 ► §

So if I’m meeting somebody for the first time at a festival

01:11:26 ► §

and I see that they’re a close friend of Alex Gray,

01:11:29 ► §

I’m going to be a lot more open with them than if that person only had one friend

01:11:33 ► §

and that friend lived in another country.

01:11:36 ► §

Now you may want to jump on this and say that,

01:11:39 ► §

well, this would just create more division and paranoia among us.

01:11:43 ► §

But having seen what happens at a conference when

01:11:45 ► §

somebody is wrongly and innocently suspected of being a narc, well, I’d say that the unfounded

01:11:52 ► §

suspicion is equally bad. Okay, let’s get out of these loops. I guess that in some ways this has

01:11:59 ► §

been kind of a downer of a podcast, but I also believe that the information passed along here is critically important in getting you to begin giving more of your focus to issues that affect

01:12:10 ► §

your personal privacy, and that you pay attention to what your government is doing with the money

01:12:15 ► §

that it’s printing. In my opinion, the only way to defeat the beast is to starve it into submission.

01:12:23 ► §

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from

01:12:25 ► §

Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends. Thank you.