welcome. we were warned more than 60 years ago george orwell in his novel, described a society whose inhabitants were called perpetually in the eye of big brother, from the government gaze from which there was no escape. earlier, "brave new world" had individuals bred for come plaes ensy. fuss our own government has been extensively engaged in our e nails and phone records with the ability to singling us out for scrutiny. big brother and big business have morphed into the biggest brother ever. not only watching and listening, but taking down names and numbers. >> the authority that the analyst is empowered with, not all theage lists have the ability to target everything. i sitting at my desk had the authority to tap anyone, even the president if i had to. >> as of now, only snowden fully understands his motives and full extent of what he intends to reveal remains unknown. the white house insists looping as a weapon against terrorism. general keith alexander, head of the nsa, told congress this week that the agency surveillance had helped prevent dozens of attacks. a large majority of the public agrees that the spying is necessary. but others see it as an unprecedented infringement on our civil liberties, a massive threat to a free society. lloyd lessick was one of the first to see the promise of the new technology and its peril. in 1999 he wrote this book "code and other laws of cyberspace." at stanford university in the heart of silicon valley, he founded the center for internet and society. and he's been involved with such advocacy groups as the electronic frontier foundation and creative comments. now he teaches laup at harvard university and directs the center for ethics. there, he began to turn from internet policy to focusing on the corrupting influence of money in politics, which he sees as the true roadblock to american greatness. he's written several books on the problem, including republic lost and master land. and started the organizati root strikers to rally citizens from both the left and right to fight fire with fire. welcome. >> thank you. >> so, what do you make of these revelations about the government surveillance of our phones and e-mails? >> so i think it's but the particular thing for me that is most terrifying was when snowden revealed that basically analysts have discretion to decide where and how they're going to be spying. and recognized that we haven't built a system yet that anybody should have confidence about. assuming what he's saying is true. >> is the surveillance, as we've learned about it in the last few days, more extensive than you thought? >> it's cruder and more extensive. >> cruder? >> cruder in the sense that, you know, in my dream of how it might be if we actually had a sensible system developing, i kind of imagined machines that had well-programmed algorithms as to when and what they should be looking for, and when humans got connected to make sure the humans were doing the right sort of thing. but when snowden describes agents how they pick and choose on their hunch of what makes sense and what doesn't make sense, this is the worst of both worlds. we have technology now that gives them access to everything, but a culture if, again, it's true, encourages them to be as wide ranging as they can. >> it seems to me we're running a dragnet throughout the internet and bringing in almost everything online. is that a false perception? >> well, if what he says is true, then they're bringing in everything they can. and of course, they're applying very sophisticated algorithms to try to pull a needle from the haystack, the algorithms that google employs to see the good ads that serve you as opposed to bad ads. they're using technology in the most sophisticated way they can, but the question is, are there protections or controls, or countertechnologies to make sure that when the government gets access to this information, they can't misuse it in all the ways that, you know, anybody who remembers nixon believes and fears governments might use. >> nixon and watergate, where there was a considerable amount of surveillance and invasion of privacy. criminal behavior on the part of the government. >> right. and it's not clear there's criminal behavior now. which is an important distincti distinction. we have now authorized through law the kind of thing that before you had to violate the law to be able to do. >> but president obama has assured us that nobody is listening to our phone conversations or reading our e-mails. >> he's very careful. i have enormous faith in him. >> why do you have faith in him? i ask that not personally, but in terms of the office of the presidency. it's been my experience over the years that if you put a tool in the toolbox at the white house, it will be used. >> now, i don't mean that i have faith in him in the sense that i believe he has created a system that protects privacy in the way that privacy needs to be protected, i mean more faith in his good faith, that what he's trying to do is deal with the threat of terrorism. but the issue isn't good faith in the sense that he's not somebody who's trying to defeat george mcgovern in a presidential campaign, he's somebody who is trying to defeat al qaeda or their equivalents. good faith is not enough. what do you put in place to make sure that the system doesn't run off the rails. that's the analysis since the magna carta about how we protect liberty. what do we put in place to check government officials to make sure that when they behave, this ebehave in a way that respects our most fundamental values. >> didn't you assume that once the patriot act was signed in 2001, we're being watched? >> in a sense, yes, we're being watched. i certainly assumed that there were computers that were making flags whenever certain kinds of words or relationships were established. i was sure that was happening. especially internationally. but the question, again, is the difference between computers doing it in a well-regulated sense and computers giving humans the ability to pick up and to listen. now, again, the president has said that nobody's listening to telephone calls, or reading e-mails of american citizens. those two statements could be perfectly true and there could still be something fundamentally to worry about. put that aside for a second. in the old days, the thing you worried about is a government agent listening to the telephone call. that was the invasion. but today, when every bit of your life is out there in the ether somewhere, somewhere in the cloud, and what intelligence is is using computers to sift through this and put together patterns to figure out what you care about on the basis of all this information that's out there. privacy must progress to recognize why it's important that we regulate the government's use of all this public data as much as it's important that we regulate the government's ability to listen to my telephone calls. >> google and yahoo! and other companies say they're not complicit in any mass eavesdropping exercise, and that they have not given the government information beyond what was covered by federal court warrants. does that comfort you? >> they're very adamant that they're not exceeding legal requirements. but that doesn't give me much comfort, because the legal requirements here are quite expansive. i think anybody who believes that a company -- a publicly traded company is going to violate the law to protect privacy is naive about the proper loyalties of these companies. so the question isn't whether they're living within the law or not, the question is, what is the invasion the law is insisting upon. and that's the thing that we don't yet have a clear sense about. and we certainly don't have any reason to believe that infrastructure is for protecting legitimate privacy that's been built here. even if the government's engaged in a very difficult task of rooting out terrorists. >> talk a little more about what you referred to as the proper loyalties of these companies. >> well, these companies have a job to earn money for their shareholders. consistent with the law. meaning they're not allowed to exceed the legal authorization, and when the courts and federal prosecutors, or federal agents come in, they've got to do what those people say. now, they can fight it. you know, so twitter, for example, has been quite aggressive in insisting -- forcing the government to meet the burden the government must mead before they get access to the certain information twitter has had. google has done the same thing. but the question is whether this is a good way to convince the public, in a public relations exercise, that they're being as protective as they can be, versus really protecting data from government surveillance. the reality is, there's very little a company can do consistent with the law to resist the government when the government comes in and makes a demand. >> as i understand it, the u.s. law allows the government to demand that companies hand over phone line information about people outside the country who are not u.s. citizens, if they are proven to be a potential national security threat. government officials say, or have been careful to say that any information on u.s. citizens when they cast that metaphorical drag net can be scrubbed out. if they can't be scrubbed out, the reverse is they can also be allowed to stay in. is that a concern to you? >> the scary fact is an obvious fact that it's cheaper and simpler, and this is what snowden said, is simpler to gather it all and to have it all there. and for a period of time, and who knows how long a period of time that is, and to go back to it and use it as you need it. and the reality then is that if we don't have technical measures in place to protect against misuse, this is just a trove of potential misuse. now, that's the part that really frustrates me, because i wrote a book in '99 called "code and other laws of cyberspace." my point from the very beginning has been, we've got to think about the technology as a protector of liberty, too. so code is a kind of law. and the government should be implementing technologies to protect our liberties, because if they don't, if we don't figure out how to build that protection into the technology, it won't be there. what's frustrating to me is to hear a description of a system where we don't have any infrastructure in place, really, to protect the privacy. we have infrastructure in place to facilitate the surveillance. when there are plenty of entities out there, companies like the company called talenter, who has built a technology to make it absolutely -- make you absolutely confident that a particular bit of data has been used precisely as the government says it's supposed to be used, you can find out exactly who's looked at it and what purpose it's been used, there's a way to build the technology to give us this liberty back, this privacy back, but it's not a priority to think about code to protect it. >> is that sort of a burglar alarm? >> it's more of an audit trail. like the thing that you should worry about is that the government gathers all this data, and they're gathering it for the purpose of finding out whether you're a terrorist. let's say they figure out you're not a terrorist. but what else might they be looking at this data for? let's say you say something troubling to the administration. now, we ought to be able to know what reasons and when they've actually looked and used this data. the point is, these technologies of audit protection, at least make it harder for the plumbers, the digital plumbers of the future to get around the protections and to viole the underlying core privacy. and that's where we should be pushing. we should recognize in a world of terrorism the government's going to be out there trying to protect us. but let's make sure that they're using tools or technology that also protects the privacy side of what they should be protecting. >> for the sake of our viewers who are younger than even you, the plumbers were richard nixon's burglars, secretive operatives, spies, that went into the privacy data about the people they considered their enemies. >> yeah, we call them private contractors today. >> and there are a lot of them actually. but the people who have to build that system that you're talking about, and calling for, are the very people who built the present system. >> so far. but there are lots of other people who could be brought into this process who don't have a connection to the defense contractor, don't have a connection to the military, who have technical knowledge necessary to make the kind of evaluations that ought to be made here. and you could begin to insist on the standards. we have a conception of bringing judges in to oversee warrant processes. i think we ought to think about making geeks into judges. people who have legal knowledge that could sit there with the lawyer judges and say, no, no, no, when the government says there's no way for them to surveil without doing blah, blah, blah, that's wrong. they could be doing this instead. we have two kinds of specialized knowledge here. lawyers and coders. and those people have to be in the same room as they listen to the government, when the government says, this is what we need to do to keep america safe. let's force the government to do that, to the lawyers and the coders. >> this technology makes it so much easier, as you said, to invade our privacy, that -- we're profiled all the time by advertisers. what's the difference between that practice and the profiling being done by the government? >> so, i personally love the profiling that makes it so some ad company doesn't serve me an ad for tennis shoes, and does serve me an ad for a great new book that i might have some interest in. the purpose of that profiling is to narrow the information that would be pushed into my sphere, to that information which i want. and i'm happy for that, right? but the same profiling information has other uses, some of which are good and some of which are bad. i think we have to think a little more about what we think is privacy. if there is data out there that the government can use to build profiles or build or steer the government based on, you know, profile-like data, the way that advertisers try to figure out that if you're somebody who's crazy enough to have bought one of lessick's books, you might want to read one of jeff rose's books. i don't really feel the privacy issue. what i feel the privacy issue triggered is when it ties it back to me. when you start linking it back to me. that i start to suffer consequences, where i can't get onto an airplane, or i see people watching me. that is, i think, what the privacy here has got to be. in my view, in the future the world will be a great thing when big data can sort out all sorts of things that we can't figure out now. when it's able to physician ur out, this is the fear of influenza we have to worry about because we see 17 indications in this part of the world and we see the airplane links that bring them over to new york. that's the big data we should be able to celebrate. but the question is, are we building at the same time infrastructures for protects the misuse of that big data. the violation of privacy. in my view the violation of privacy is drawing it back to an individual and interfering with that person's liberty without any good showing to a court or a judge that there's a good reason to do that. >> would the surveillance at the boston marathon have caught them, responding to them as if they had just done something questionable. would you consider that an invasion of their privacy because they could no longer, as we used to say, get lost in the crowd? >> i'm not troubled, once we have these data, that we narrow it down and properly track and follow people we believe have committed a crime. we have to do that well. one of the tragedies that happened in boston is this flurry of images that was sent out there tagging lots of people, tagging innocent people who suffered great loss. in a completely irresponsible way. that's a misuse of that data. the proper use of that data is, okay, we have these cameras out there. we all recognize we're on a camera all the time. we ought to be able to go along in our life without having to justify what happens to have been caught on camera unless in's a good reason you can show to a court and say, this is the person we need to be able to track down. the things that link these people together with a tragedy that happens. >> but who do you trust to make those distinctions and act honorably on the data collected? >> not the government, or the prosecutors or investigators alone. and that's the insight that american law for hundreds of years has traded on, that we have prosecutors, but we also have a neutral arbiter, a court who's supposed to listen to the government's claim. we need to go after this person. ed to breakn's privacy. we need to unlock this person's car. and decide whether it justifies the government's invasion. it's the need to build this check into the system. law is an important check. the constitution is an important check. we also have to think about the infrastructure, the technology, the code, and whether the code that we're building here just creates this endless candy jar for miscreants to go in and invade privacy, or whether we're building a code that has the capacity to protect us, even as it's facilitating the government to identify criminals engaging in criminal behavior. >> let's talk about edward snowden, the 29-year-old who was a contracting employee at the national security agency. any thoughts about his motives? >> you know, he came out publicly. he explains his reasons. doesn't seem to be benefiting financially from this. he's going to suffer enormous perm cost for what he did. those are the things that have traditionally marked somebody as a civil disobedient. let's be clear, the penalties which he faces for what he has done are extraordinary. today, these guys face life imprisonment, maybe the death penalty. when somebody comes forward and explains him or herself in a way about what's motivating, it's hard not to be moved by that. >> let me play some video of what edward snowden told "the guardian." >> the greatest fear that i have regarding the outcome for america of these disclosures is that nothing will change. people will see in the media all of these disclosures. they'll know the lengths the government is going to grant themselves powers unilateral ly to create greater control over american society and global society. but they won't be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things, to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests. >> i think the thing he most fears is the most likely outcome. i think we've seen lots of scandals that we've not been able to rise up and do anything about. look at the wall street scandal. there was the occupy wall street movement, but it didn't cause an uprising in ordinary people. but i think ordinary people have lost the sense that there's a reason to try to engage politically, because in the end they know how the cards will be dealt. and the cards will be dealt not according to what makes sense, or what people actually believe, but where the power is. and here the power is both the literal power of the most powerful security state in the history of the world, and also the power of enormous interests to support and continue that state. >> i guess one thing he said, i understand that i will be made to suffer for my actions, but i will be satisfied if the federation -- interesting word -- the federation of secret law on equal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that i love are revealed even for an instant. >> well, i read that to be somebody who cares