♫ cold feet and a tie
♫ rise to the occasion
♫ a million tiny flashlights
♫ I gotta turn it off
♫ cold feet and a tie
♫ rise to the occasion
♫ a million tiny flashlights
♫ I gotta turn it off
♫ for a while
♫ I'll keep my place ¶
♫ but tonight
♫ I'll stay so late ¶
♫ oh sleep for a while
♫ too much conversation
♫ too much information
♫ I gotta turn it off
♫ oh sleep for a while
♫ too much conversation
♫ too much information
♫ I gotta turn it off
♫ for a while
♫ I'll keep my place ¶
♫ and tonight
♫ I'll stay so late ¶
♫ and here we are
♫ gotta turn it off
♫ gotta turn it--
[narrator] just about every time we use the internet,
A communication link, or an app,
We agree to some very long terms and conditions.
But what exactly are we agreeing to?
You guys! You gotta help me.
These business-casual g-men are trying to kidnap me!
What? It's crazy, dude!
They're saying it's because I agreed to the latest terms and conditions on itunes!
Why? What did the terms and conditions for the last update say?
I don't know! I didn't read them!
You didn't read them?
Who the hell reads that entire thing every time it pops up?
I do.
Can you tell--
Can apple tell how many people actually read it?
Well, they have to say that they agree.
We can't know for sure if they've read--
We try to make it in plain english and very short.
If I were trying to make a user agreement uninviting,
I would choose a small font,
A sans serif font, and I would set it in all caps.
Because what happens then is that you have type
That becomes a texture rather than words and spaces.
No one has read the terms and conditions,
No one in the world.
No one. Even the lawyers who wrote it wrote it like this.
[laughter]
You come to a website and they have a set of rules
Usually described in a terms of services,
And then they have a privacy policy.
And as soon as you start using the service,
In essence, you have agreed to the terms of service and the privacy policy.
Do these terms and conditions that we sign up for even apply?
They do. I think if they didn't apply,
I think the web would topple over.
And so, to the extent there have been contract decisions,
They've held that these terms and conditions are valid.
[narrator] and this concept is pretty new.
For instance, you never had to sign a user agreement
For an old-fashioned land line,
Or to watch tv, or to read a book.
But if you use a smart phone, a kindle,
Or you watch hulu, then you do.
Violet baby, don't you sign anything there!
What's this all about?
Standard form of contract.
Don't talk to me about contracts, wonka.
I use them myself. They're strictly for suckers.
Yes, but you wouldn't begrudge me a little protection.
[narrator] in fact, if you were to read everything you agreed to,
It would take one full month of work out of every year.
That's 180 hours you'd need to spend every year.
And according to "the wall street journal,"
Consumers lose $250 billion
Each year due to what's hidden in fine print.
Here's an example from linkedin's terms.
You grant linkedin a nonexclusive,
Irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual, unlimited,
Assignable, sublicenseable, fully paid-up
And royalty-free right to us to copy,
Prepare derivative works of, improve, distribute, publish,
Remove, retain, add, process, analyze, use and commercialize,
In any way now known or in the future discovered,
Any information you provide, directly or indirectly
To linkedin, including, but not limited to, any user-generated content,
Ideas, concepts, techniques or data to the services,
You submit to linked in, without any further consent,
Notice and/or compensation to you or to any third parties.
[narrator] so linkedin takes pretty much everything forever.
You'll find this kind of language in google, pinterest, facebook--
Pretty much anything that people consider free.
Instagram is finding that pictures are worth
Much more than a thousand angry words,
After the company updated its user agreement to say
It would have the right to sell posted photos
Without compensation for use in advertising.
[narrator] and even if you are paying,
Companies have the ability
To make you accept just about whatever they please.
In 2009, gestation,
Company in the u.K.,
Put some pretty sneaky stuff their terms.
They didn't take mon, or your firstborn child.
But for one day, their terms stated:
By pcing an order via th website,
You agree to grant us a non-transferable option to claim,
Now and forer more, your immortal soul.
The contract was only live for a day,
But gamestation happened to rake in the lives of 7,000 immortal souls.
This was of course a joke. However, it makes you wonder.
What if there were more serious consequences
That might result from not reading terms and conditions?
What if your phone came with these long terms and conditions
That said, well, if you use the phone the government can wiretap you.
That would be insane.
But that's the kind of world we're living in.
[narrator] a world where the government can wiretap you
Because of terms and conditions?
So if you look at the iphone user agreement,
Wiretapping isn't mentioned.
But in at&t's privacy policy,
They say that they can use data to investigate, prevent,
Or take action regarding illegal activities.
Prevent?
♫ you'll love the stuff we're made of, pizza hut! ¶
[narrator] in 1994,
Pizza hut became the first major chain
To accept a delivery online.
Suddenly the internet needed a way to remember who you were,
Where you lived, and how you were going to pay.
My question is, what the hell?
Like, how do they know who you are?
Yeah.
Okay, there are these things called cookies,
Where, like, if you go to a site and buy something,
It will remember you and then create ads for other stuff
You might want to buy.
So it learns information about me.
Seems like an invasion of privacy.
[narrator] it wasn't until the late '90s
That companies began voluntarily adding privacy policies
To explain what was happening with this data.
Then, in 2000, an online company called toysmart went bankrupt.
But they had an idea.
They tried to sell their database
Of 195,000 users to another company.
This included names, billing information,
Shopping preferences, and family profiles,
Even though their privacy policy said they would never share information.
People felt like they were being duped.
[man] lawmakers tell you time and time again
That every time they go back to their district,
People are telling them that they want
Some internet privacy laws. They want some protection.
[narrator] in early 2001,
Over a dozen bills were introduced in congress
To protect privacy online.
[george w. Bush] these acts of mass murder
Were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat.
But they have failed.
[narrator] all of the privacy legislation was killed or abandoned,
And the patriot act was of course initiated.
[bush] the bill before me takes account of the new realities and dangers
Posed by modern terrorists.
This new law that I signed today
Will allow surveillance of all communications used by terrorists,
Including e-mails, the internet, and cell phones.
The patriot act expanded the ability of the federal government
To do surveillance in a lot of little ways.
You don't need a judge's approval, for instance,
To find out what website someone visited,
What search terms they typed into google.
The question of your, if you will, information, being retained by google
Is not really at this point a google decision.
It's really a political or public-policy decision
Enforced by different governments in different ways.
[narrator] what if privacy policies weren't about protecting privacy at all,
But rather, taking it away?
Let'e's privacy policy around this time
To see if any changes were made.
So here's google's privacy policy from December of 2000.
"google may also choose to use cookies
To store user preferences.
A cookie can tell us, 'this is the same computer
That visited google two days ago',
But it cannot tell us, 'this person is joe smith',
Or even, 'this person lives in the United States'.
And here's the privacy policy from one year later,
In December of 2001.
"google does this by storing user preferences in cookies
And by tracking user trends and patterns of how people search.
Google will not disclose cookies to third parties,
Except as required by a valid legal process,
Such as a search warrant, subpoena, statute, or court order."
Now it's important to note the fundamental difference
Between these two policies.
One says that you're totally anonymous.
The other says, when necessary, you're not.
But here's what's strange.
So the first screenshot you saw of google's oldest policy
Was taken by a non-profit internet archival service.
It records what websites used to look like
By taking snapshots, and it's been doing it since the '90s.
Now, google also lists the history of its privacy policies
On its own official archive page.
In their archives, they state that they've got every privacy policy
That goes back to the beginning.
But what google shows as their original privacy policy
Doesn't match that of the archive service.
Instead, they show the policy from December of 2001,
The one that says users are not anonymous.
Google claims this is their first privacy policy, which it isn't.
So why would google not include its original privacy policy
On its own archives page--
The one that said you would remain anonymous?
What if the data collection that the patriot act required
Became the foundation of a whole new business model,
And the foundation of the modern internet as we know it?
Would that be something worth covering up?
And even though we don't write checks to google,
And that's one of the reasons we kind of like the company,
It doesn't mean that google's really free,
Or that we are free in the liberty sense when we use it.
It might feel very different if google was effectively
A $500-a-year service,
Because that's the value of the data that you're providing.
I mean, that was a really critical finding,
That advertising could be targeted based on information
That people were somehow supplying about themselves.
Suddenly, you didn't have to wonder,
Was somebody watching my commercial?
You knew. Someone clicked on my ad.
That meant that they paid attention to it.
[narrator] in 2012, google was one of the most valuable stocks in the world.
And mark zuckerberg, the founder of facebook,
Had become one of the richest men in america.
My job is to help investors figure out for themselves
What this thing's worth.
So I look at what facebook has as an asset,
Which is 900 million people and a ton of data on those people,
And I say if they use 10% of that data,
They're going to be the most valuable company ever.
[narrator] when personal data is worth this much,
Why would google, or any free internet service,
Be opposed to the data retention that the patriot act required?
Anonymity wasn't profitable.
People who are willing to give up information
In exchange for having access to something that's free,
Or something that's fun, or a free taco.
I don't think that ever changes.
You always want something free.
And plenty of people are willing to provide information to get that.
[narrator] and plenty of companies picked up on this fact.
Let me give you some very practical tips.
First of all, I want everybody here to be careful
About what you post on facebook.
What the default settings are on facebook,
This is how most people use this technology.
When these companies are building these systems, they know that.
[audience member] so why is it the default for everything sharing,
Every photo, when I start facebook?
Why isn't it just for my friends?
Why is the default for everybody?
Because it's really confusing for my mom to figure out
How to just share to her friends.
The way we've designed the site is that,
It's a community thing, right?
So people want to share with just their friends,
But a lot of people also want to share with
The community around them. Right. Right.
I want to share with everyone who works with me at facebook.
I want to share with everyone who went to my college,
Everyone in the village around me.
And those people aren't just my friends.
[narrator] even mark's explanation doesn't make any sense.
He says he wants to share with the school,
With the quaint village next to him.
He doesn't say he wants to share with the entire world.
And yet, that's the default.
The challenge with defaults
Is that you get comfortable with whatever the default is.
When the default is public,
You actually can adapt really beautifully and deal with it.
When the default is private,
You can adapt comfortably and deal with it.
When the defaults change, that's when problems emerge.
[narrator] and in fact, that's what facebook did.
In 2009, facebook made changes to their privacy policy
Without telling anyone.
Doing a privacy change for 350 million users is--
Is not the type of thing that a lot of companies would do.
We decided that these would be the social norms now,
And we just went for it.
[narrator] you might remember the fan page with over a million people
Who tried to get the policy reversed.
What was the big deal, you might ask?
Well, over the course of a night,
Facebook turned what was once private information
Into totally public information.
These platforms have an incentive
To keep as much information
About you and make it as visible as possible.
It's almost the question then becomes,
What's the less forgivable sin,
Having this crazy one night stand
Or not knowing how to use facebook properly.
Most relationships in your life,
It's very good that the other person doesn't know everything
You've ever said, or scribbled, or thought.
When you choose to share a photo album,
You go to facebook and you choose to put those photos there.
Just have an opt in on every single thing.
Opt in--
Opt in.
I'm okay with facebook behaving like a company.
But I think we need to treat it like a company,
And not treat it like some benign public utility.
[narrator] these are the default settings on facebook in 2005,
Divided into 12 categories.
As time passes, more and more information is shared by default.
In 2009, facebook began automatically sharing personal information
With the entire internet.
By 2010, everything was shared by default,
Except for your contact info and your birthday.
We could, if you did a search, and a gmail,
And a youtube and so forth yesterday,
And you did it from your home-- I'll give you the worst case.
You did it from your home, and you only have one computer in your home.
In theory we could cross-correlate those
And get all three together.
We don't do that and we're not likely to do that.
[narrator] but in January of 2012
Google made changes to tir privacy policy,
And they did just that.
Google combined l of the information
Any of the services had collected about a person
And put them into one ngle profile.
What eric schmidt had said was the worst-case scenao,
Gole had actually done.
How can you honestly sit here
And tell this committee this is not a growing problem?
A good deal of what I was trying to say
Is that I don't think there's evidence of market failure
Or consumer harm from the legal and legitimate use
Of personal information in commerce.
I don't think there's evidence of it.
There are companies that you've never heard of, like acxiom,
That claim to have about 1500 points of data on the average american citizen,
Everything from, you know, whether you're right-handed or left-handed,
What kind of dog you have,
What your sort of psychological outlook is,
And all of that can be used to inform decisions
That businesses make about us as well.
These are the types of companies that a potential employer
Would go to to try and run a background check on somebody
Before they hired them.
They're able to connect the fact
That you went to site a,
And then later to site b,
And then eventually to site c,
And create this detailed history
Of what sites you visit online.
[man] they don't put your name in the cookie.
They put a unique serial number in the cookie
That can then be linked to your name in their database.
I don't know if you've ever seen the picture
Of the ad network ecosystem
That shows all the parties in the ad network ecosystem.
It's a bit overwhelming.
The information is valuable to different people for different reasons.
What if you buy a lot of alcohol?
You know, they might want to raise your premiums
Because they think you're at risk for alcoholism or something like that.
The company might use it in a way that actually harms you.
[narrator] for example, in 2008,
Thousands of people suddenly had their credit limits reduced,
Seemingly for no reason.
While on vacation, one wealthy business owner from atlanta
Saw his limit plummet from $10,800
To just $3,800, ruining his vacation.
The letter he received said this:
"other customers who have used their card
At establishments where you recently shopped
Have a poor repayment history with american express."
This means companies like wal-mart.
And in minneapolis, a father came into a target
Outraged that they were sending his teenaged daughter pregnancy coupons,
Coupons that were addressed to her.
The man thought that target was trying to encourage his daughter to get pregnant.
As it turned out, thanks to her shopping habits,
Target knew that this high-schooler was pregnant before her own father did.
The father later apologized.
And in the netherlands, data was being used to harm customers in a whole new way.
Now, while you're driving and using a gps,
That gps is sending back signals to tell how fast you're moving.
It's really useful for helping us avoid traffic.
But that got a little company called tomtom wondering
Who else might be interested in knowing the speed of traffic.
And so in the netherlands, the data that people were willingly trading
To find a faster way home was being sold to the authorities
To give those same drivers tickets.
Is the reason we don't have any baseline consumer privacy law
Because of the fbi? No.
That is largely due to lobbying by companies
That have built extremely lucrative businesses
Around these business activities
And don't want to do anything to disrupt that.
Under facebook's terms and conditions,
A user must be 13 or older.
Despite this, according to a recent consumers' report study,
An estimated 7 1/2 million users were younger than 13.
First of all, we don't allow people to have accounts under the age of 13.
And my reaction to that is that's just absolutely indefensible.
I mean, it's unbelievable that you would say that.
Well, senator, I just want to say we-- we really emphatically agree with your points.
They say that facebook sent an army of lawyers
So that the final privacy legislation that emerged
In 2011 was watered down significantly
In a way that wouldn't affect facebook's business model.
My name is alan davidson, and I am the director of public policy
For google in north and south america.
My message today is simple.
As we've heard, mobile services create enormous social and economic benefits.
I reject the notion that privacy protection
Is the enemy of innovation.
It absolutely doesn't have to be, and isn't.
[narrator] it was an expensive year of lobbying for these big companies.
Google spent five times as much as the year before,
And facebook spent four times as much.
Senate bill 242 will protect users of social networking internet sites.
It will protect these users from identity theft
And from unwanted contact by keeping their private information private,
Of course unless they agree to share it.
I know that many members including myself
Do not want to negatively impact
A very important industry for the state of california.
Individuals involved in this industry
Don't want to see any regulation whatsoever,
So I think that's really the key.
And one of the most interesting things I've found in these conversations
Is that many members of the legislature
Don't even have social network sites
Because they're concerned about their privacy.
And at the time the bill was being heard,
Although lobbyists were in the committee room
For the entire hearing, they did not come forward to speak.
So it was sort of an interesting process,
Sort of a stealth killing of the bill,
Without the opportunity for the public to really see
Who was in opposition,
So people like google and facebook
Were in strong opposition. Facebook in particular.
What did facebook have to lose?
You know, I really do not understand their logic,
And you'd have to ask them about that,
But when I analyze an issue like this--
I'd love to ask them about that. They won't talk to me.
[laughs] I'm not surprised.
I don't think-- I don't think the rules of law and regulation
Necessarily apply when it comes to interacting with a company
That wants to sell you something.
Yeah. We should be worried.
[narrator] but worried about what?
Sure, the data collection allowed by privacy policies
Had fueled commerce. But was there something more serious we were agreeing to?
[narrator] total information awareness.
A program initiated by the government in January of 2002.
Its mission? To collect every digital transmission imaginable.
And yes, this was their real symbol,
They eye of the pyramid, scanning the earth with a laser beam.
It actually looks oddly similar to what's inside mark zuckerberg's hoodie.
Making the world more open and connected.
Oh my god! It's like a secret cult!
Total information awareness was a program designed to connect the dots,
To link banking activities to flight searches to online activities.
[reporter] but the pentagon is clearly moving to create
The largest electronic eye ever,
To look at any and all americans.
You're looking for trends and transactions
That are associated with some potential terrorist act.
They believe that with enough data,
That they can predict who would be engaging in nefarious crimes.
[narrator] the public was outraged.
Congress was outraged. The program was shut down.
The lesson that the government learned
After the failure of total information awareness
Was that if you're going to create a gigantic spying program,
Don't give it a creepy name.
There's nothing to prevent them from developing the same capabilities,
Just in smarter ways, from their standpoint.
[bush] a wiretap requires a court order.
Nothing has changed, by the way.
[narrator] but in reality, lots had changed.
How we were told one day in late 2002
That an nsa representative was coming to the office.
Mark klein came to us at the electronic frontier foundation
With data and documents that showed that
At&t was engaged in a wiretapping program.
The nsa is much different from the cia.
First of all, it's about three times the size,
It costs far more,
It's tremendously more secret than the cia,
And what it does is very different.
It's focused on eavesdropping,
On tapping into major communications links.
They actually had a secret room in their facilities,
And they were creating a copy of internet traffic and sending it to the nsa.
So in a sense, they are vacuuming up, scooping up every--
They are blindly vacuuming up everything going across those links.
And you're certain of that.
I'm certain of that.
[narrator] so president bush owned up to it.
I authorized the national security agency
To intercept the international communications
Of people with known leaks-- links to al-qaeda
And related terrorist organizations.
It's taken less than 24 hours after the bush presidency ended
For a former analyst at the national security agency
To come forward to reveal new allegations
About how this nation was spied on by its own government.
The national security agency had access
To all americans' communications,
Faxes, phone calls, and their computer communications.
Is there a recording somewhere of every conversation I had
With my little nephew in upstate new york?
Is it like that?
It would be everything, yes.
Um-- it would be everything.
[narrator] but then a beacon of hope arrived in the white house.
Hi, senator obama, I appreciate your giving us
The opportunity to ask you questions.
I'm an attorney who represents federal whistleblowers,
And I was very disappointed when I learned
That you supported the bill
That lets phone companies off the hook
When they've helped the federal government,
Without warrant, wiretap phones.
I recognize that some people feel like,
Yeah, well, the phone companies still were complicit in this;
They should be held accountable still.
I understand that argument.
But the problem was that the surveillance program
Is actually one that I believe is necessary for our national security.
So they were immune, but that means that the programs were still shut down, right?
The-- the programs were shut down?
Yeah, e wiretapping programs.
I have no reason to believe
That the wiretapping programs have been shut down.
No, if the wiretapping programs had been shut down
Then I don't believe that the government
Anat&t would still be fighting in court
For the lelity of it.
So barack obama has't changed anything?
No, barack obama did not shut those progrs down
After he took office,
Even though he had threatened to before he became president.
[zuckerberg] when we got started just in my dorm room at harvard,
Um, the question that a lot of people asked was,
Why would I want to put any information on the internet at all?
Like, why would I want to have a website?
And people have really gotten comfortable
Not only sharing more information and different kinds,
But more openly and with more people.
And that social norm is just something that's evolved over time.
You may have seen the "onion" take on facebook, which was,
The cia has just announced its most recent handy invention-- facebook!
According to department of homeland security reports,
Facebook has replaced almost every other
Cia information-gathering program since it was launched in 2004.
After years of secretly monitoring the public,
We were astounded so many people would willingly publicize
Where they lived, their religious and political views,
And alphabetized lists of all their friends,
Personal email addresses, phone numbers, hundreds of photos of themselves,
And even status updates about what they were doing moment to moment.
It is truly a dream come true for the cia.
You know, the fbis and the nsas of the world
Are appreciative of the fact that google and facebook,
You know, have built business models around collecting user data,
Because it makes their jobs much easier.
That article in time started with this anecdote:
They're sitting in their transparent cubicle
In their open space, in facebook.
Robert mueller was the one man in the room with a tie on,
And he was older, in a suit.
And he comes in and he says, I was just in the building
And I wanted to say hello to mark zuckerberg.
So he says hello to mark zuckerberg,
A little chitchat and then he leaves.
And everybody's saying, what the hell was that?
Now, nobody asks the question,
Why was mueller in the building?
He's the head of the fbi.
So on the one hand, mark zuckerberg has said
He wants to create a more open society,
And facebook is a way to do that.
On the other hand, you know,
There's a lot about the way facebook uses information that people don't know.
[narrator] if only there was a way of knowing
How much information these companies were storing about us.
Well, in the case of facebook,
We learned some pretty interesting things
Thanks to one student in austria.
And, unlike the us, europe has a law that requires a company
To tell a customer what data they have stored on them
If that customer wants to know.
And facebook, unlike most major internet companies,
Had actually built a headquarters in europe.
Apparently we're like, the only three people that were like,
Pushing hard enough and asking again and again and again
And going through also the irish authority
To finally get at least like a bigger part of our data set.
We still didn't get everything right now.
Got it right here, just to have an idea of how much it actually is.
That's like, just to picture it to see how much it is.
Can I hold it? Wow, this is more than a baby.
Yeah. That's 1,222 pages.
I'm a member of facebook for three years,
But I was using it more intense
For like the last one and a half years or so.
What's interesting as well is that I didn't post too much, actually.
I'm a person who posts something like once a week or so.
With this giant ream of information in front of me,
Is it hard to go through it and actually find specific details about a person?
No, that's super-easy, 'cause it's--
I mean, we just used the search function in the pdf file.
So you just type in one word,
Let's say "demonstration" or "sex"
Or political party or something,
And within a second you find the right information.
So within a couple of minutes you can figure out what people voted for,
What, I don't know, psychological problems they have,
What parties they've been to,
All these informations are like really easy to find, actually.
While using that service for such a short time,
You still had a data file that's bigger than anything that
Any cia, fbi, or, I don't know,
Stasi ever had about an average person.
If you hit the remove button, it just means it's flagged as deleted.
So, um, you hide it actually from yourself.
But anyone like facebook or any government agency
That wants to look at it later can still retrieve it and get it back.
And that means that it's there for an indefinite time,
Um, even though you hit the delete button
And they ask you three times if you really really want to delete it.
It's not actually gone?
It's not actually gone. It's still there.
So we've ultimately adopted roughly the following rule.
We-- think of it as we anonymize the information within 18 months.
It might be anonymized within 18 months,
But all of the searches we've ever done are still there.
The underlying data is still there to be de-anonymized at some point.
[narrator] and de-anonymizing search records turns out to be shockingly easy.
That is, taking private searches and finding out whose records they are.
In 2006, aol turned over a bunch of these anonymized search records
Of their users to the public.
And it only took a few short hours
For a reporter to decode who user number 4417749 was.
Between searches for things like "numb fingers", "'60s single men",
And "dog that urinates on everything,"
The reporter uncovered a woman named thelma arnold.
She was age 62.
But then there's user 17556639,
Who looked up "how to kill your wife", multiple times,
Along with "decapitated photos",
And then in the middle, the user actually looks up "steak and cheese."
Steak and cheese!
And there were plenty of users online
Who were quick to judge what was going on here.
It was murder.
Rainey, easy. Hey, old friend!
So let's take a seat and I'm gonna show you something.
Okay.
What I'm showing you here is a list of anonymized search records.
Um, these records were released by aol.
Have you-- are there actually things on this list
That you know you've searched for before?
Um, sure. Yeah, I've definitely looked up "car crash photos",
I've definitely typed in "decapitated",
I've definitely looked up "dead people photos",
"wife killer" I've definitely looked up "wife killer".
In fact, I've looked up every single search term I'm looking at here.
[narrator] you see, jerome had been a writer on "cold case",
A tv show where each week cops have to solve a murder mystery.
Well, that's always what scared me
When I was entering those search terms,
Was if there's some sort of automated system
That just red-flags you based on the search term.
They're not gonna look and say,
Oh, yeah, he was probably working on a tv show,
And that's why he was just googling
"how to murder my cheating wife."
What?
I just wanted to confirm that I had not murdered you and that you are alive.
No, I am allowed to come out of this room.
And our baby's safe.
Okay, good.
And he has a clean diaper.
Oh, thank god.
So we can rest assured you are not a murderer.
I am not a murderer.
You're a writer.
I am a writer.
Okay.
Glad we could clear that up.
[narrator] so what would happen if that red-flag system did exist?
If a dad like jerome might someday have his door knocked on
Because his search records became public?
The consensus seems to be
That the retention of this kind of information
Should be greater than zero days.
And the reason has to do with police actions, terrorists,
Patriot act, all those sorts of things.
Turns out that in this environment,
The digital environment,
There's a loophole to the 4th amendment,
Which is, if a third party collects a lot of this information,
The government doesn't have to go through those same hoops.
It's called the third party doctrine.
The third party doctrine means that when you the consumer
Share data with a bank,
With an email provider,
With a search engine,
With any kind of technology company,
You have basically given up
What would have been your 4th amendment protections over that data.
For the government to get information from a google or a facebook,
Is a lot easier than the government doing it itself
And putting a wiretap on our phones.
Large companies like google and facebook
Receive thousands of requests a year from government agencies.
Facebook has 25 employees doing nothing but surveillance,
And these companies routinely receive requests,
They process the requests.
You may be surprised to hear that secret searches of email
By the government seem to be commonplace.
The law that governs when the government
Can get electronic communications,
Like emails and things that are stored remotely,
Was written in 1986, and could have effects
That allow the government to at least claim
That they should be able to get location data without a warrant.
Or at one point the government was claiming
That it doesn't need a warrant to get emails that you've opened.
Well, in the spring of 2011, the department of justice,
And in particular the fbi,
Made several requests to internet companies as part
Of an investigation relating to individuals associated with wikileaks.
We released 400,000 classified documents.
[narrator] for those of you who don't know who julian assange is,
He started wikileaks.
Now, in the past, wikileaks has released secret documents
Related to the iraq war,
Guantanamo bay, and afghanistan.
And that's, you know, obviously a positive development
For those of us who think that information
Should be more accessible almost no matter what,
And obviously is a threatening development
To those institutions, like corporations in many cases,
That depend on secrecy.
I condemn the action that wikileaks has taken.
It puts at risk our national security.
Twitter received an order that requested data
Regarding certain twitter users.
These were all users that were related to
The whistleblower website wikileaks.
However, it wasn't just an order.
It was actually a d-order and it came with a gag order.
It required that twitter never speak publicly
About the fact that they had received this request.
[reporter] denouncing the move,
Assange said he believes other american internet companies
Such as facebook and google
May also have been ordered to disclose information.
Companies like amazon, yahoo, dropbox,
Even facebook, will be capable
Of handing data to the government without first informing users.
Even if you think what the people are doing is wrong,
That's why the first amendment exists.
To protect unpopular people
Engaging in unpopular speech.
[narrator] but twitter fought back.
They released the information to the users,
And let them know ahead of time.
And they were successful in getting the gag order overturned.
Meanwhile, amazon, paypal, mastercard, and visa-
They all gave in to the pressure regarding their users.
You know, a culture of loyalty to not you,
But a greater cause,
Is important to be successful, it seems like to me,
And it's disloyal, in this case, to the country.
[narrator] while president bush might think it's disloyal,
Thanks to twitter standing up for the rights of activists
Like julian assange,
You can now be shown this.
Today, we released over 287 files
Documenting the reality of the international mass surveillance industry,
An industry which now sells equipment
To dictators and democracies alike
In order to intercept entire populations.
9/11 has provided a license for european countries,
For the United States,
Australia, canada, south africa, and others
To develop spying systems that affect all of us.
[narrator] the spy files show the massive industry
That surrounds selling to the us government
And governments around the world.
Instead of having something called the total information awareness act,
With this big symbol with the eye of the pyramid,
Looking at everybody,
Scanning the world with its sinister laser beams,
Instead they just have a bunch of companies that exist
That are providing bits of those capabilities,
And they're provided under different contracts
But you go up to the same agency, the same people.
One of the most popular is called massive intercept,
And basically what governments are trying to do with this
Is get as much information as possible
From our communications
So they can analyze that and detect patterns in that.
It's interesting, in your article,
That you really talk about the secretive nature of the business.
Right.
They sell through trade shows
Which are not open to the media.
[narrator] but we actually went to one of these conventions.
It was pretty easy.
We just called and asked for a pass.
So we talked to the representative from one of these companies,
A firm called cellebrite.
They were included in the spy files.
They're a company that sells cell-phone extraction tools
To every major government sector in the us.
So my name's christopher shin.
I'm the vice president of engineering for cellebrite usa.
Today I'm presenting to you the cellebrite u-fed system,
To my right here.
It is a device used to extract countless information
From mobile devices, so text messages,
Pictures, video, audio, call logs, that kind of thing.
It's used by agencies across the United States and the world.
Yeah, the iphone specifically stores a lot of information;
More than your normal handset.
It really is a digital store of your personal life,
Your business life,
And this is why the field is actually,
It's been growing exponentially
Over the last couple years.
So as the devices get more complex,
They can hold more information.
This is one of the most personal devices to you today,
Even more than your laptop, so...
We think of ourselves as basically a tool manufacturer.
Just like, you know, glock or beretta is producing a firearm,
We're producing a tool that does a certain task,
And we're marketing that tool only towards--
Just like you can't go out and just buy a handgun without credentials,
We're not just selling it to everybody.
But could you conceivably sell it, or are there laws against it?
There are no laws against selling this to someone
That's not in law enforcement or government,
Something like that.
If someone was to dump my phone tomorrow,
They might get a good laugh out of the content in it,
But I don't think I'd be put in jail.
So I think that it really depends on how you look at it.
I mean, there are privacy concerns,
But I'm a little bit more on, I guess,
The liberal side of my privacy being exposed.
I mean, other people, of course,
That's a completely different--
That's a completely personal view.
My phone itself, I mean--
I actually take that back;
I have a lot of work-related information on my blackberry,
So if this information did get out,
I probably would be pretty concerned.
The surveillance vendors target two types of customers.
They target governments directly,
And then they so target internet service provirs
And tecommunications carriers
Who are tasked with the responsibili
Of spying on their own customers.
[narrator] for ample,
There was a little piece of software
That h been installed on every phone in america.
This software was called carrier iq.
And thankso a little video
That a systems administrator from connecticut posted on youtube,
The world now knows that this software
Had been monitoring our every keystroke.
[electronic voice] five fifty-three, and so on and so forth.
[narrator] according to carrier iq's chief marketer,
They're aware that his information is sensitive,
And call it a treasure trove.
It became big enough of a deal
That al franken decided to take this issue to congress.
Mr. Director, millions of americans have smart phones
With preinstalled software designed by a company called carrier iq.
Recent research has shown
That it captures a broad range of sensitive information.
Let me start off by saying
We have neither sought nor obtained any information from carrier iq
In any one of our investigations.
Not directly from carrier,
But what about from the wireless carriers?
No, I don't believe so.
If you're-- if you're specifying the use
Of the carrier iq software in--
By a wireless carrier, have we sought that?
I do not know,
And the information we seek from wireless carriers or what have you,
And I'm not talking about carrier iq,
I'm talking about wireless carriers.
Right.
We may obtain information
That in some way carrier iq may have been involved with.
[narrator] why would the fbi
Need carrier iq to send them all of this information?
After all, they could be using any of these services
That were included in the spy files.
Take this product, for instance.
Scan and target, which claims that it can search through the sms,
The ims, twitter, emails, facebook, blogs and forums,
All while analyzing huge volumes of information in real time.
Or finfisher, which demonstrates how police
Can infiltrate anyone's system
Through a variety of videos
That used to be available on their website.
They even show the agent
Hacking into google and facebook in their demo.
Who has this kind of equipment?
Massive interception equipment
Is sold by surveillance vendors around the world.
It's really up for grabs for anyone who wants it and can pay the price.
[narrator] the finfisher system
Was sold to egypt to monitor people who opposed their leader.
These are the actual documents.
It even includes training for two to four people
For the low, low price of about eleven grand.
Or the hacking teams project,
Which advertises that it can track hundreds of thousands of cell phones,
All on one system.
Or software like kapow,
That analyzes all social networks,
With features like the ability
To search out key words and phrases.
Everything that happens on facebook,
And it shows the frequency of conversations
Between one person and another and all that kind of thing.
That allows for a lot of profiling,
It creates massive databases
For law enforcement to exploit, and often misread.
[narrator] with hundreds of companies offering these services,
Why would the fbi need to use carrier iq?
Everything coming from a cell phone,
Everything coming from a computer,
Anything that's going over the internet,
Out of the country, or even internal within the country,
Can be monitored using this kind of equipment.
If you look at news stories now about what they call "big data"--
Big data is really looking up the question
Of how can government and corporations
Work with that data in order to look for anomalies
And predict when you're gonna do something
So they can stop you from doing it?
[narrator] and the government isn't even that secretive about it.
If you visit their business website,
There's an application there looking for developers
To create better tools for mass surveillance for online activity.
Examples for surveillance include but are not limited to
Fox news, cnn, msnbc, twitter, facebook, etc.
Which brings us back to that word you'll find in many user agreements.
It's the word that sent us down this whole path in the first place.
"prevent."
So this might make you wonder:
What potential threats would all this surveillance we agreed to
Actually prevent?
Basically, January the third,
20 days before I go on holiday,
I tweet, "are you free this week for a gossip / prep
Before I go destroy america?"
Ended the tweet with a kiss,
As threatening as that is.
Um, 20 days later, I get on a flight,
Go to lax, we had a hotel on hollywood boulevard,
We were just going to party around for a week,
Just looking around, just be tourists.
Get off the plane, went through the passport control,
Swiped my passport through and they were like,
Can you come this way? And I was like,
It's 'cause I've got an irish passport, I thought maybe,
Irish people, it's like stereotype, ira bombers.
So they went through my suitcase, and I was like, ugh,
What are you doing, and then when they pulled me into the holding room,
I was questioned for five hours about whether I had a twitter account.
And it was like, are you being serious?
Are you actually holding me because of a tweet?
And they were like, 'what do you mean by "destroy america?"'
And I was like, to party? It means to go wild, get drunk?
Any moron that could read that tweet
Could see what it's meant as, like it ends with a kiss.
I'm sure, like, hitler doesn't end his memoirs with a kiss or whatever he did.
So then they moved us to a holding room,
But then at midnight, the staff changed over,
And they weren't aware of what we were there for,
So they handcuffed us, stuck us in the back of a police van,
And then took us to a downtown prison detention center.
Innocent people shouldn't be treated like absolute dirt,
And they were dragging us round, pushing us into walls.
Sounds like a horrible vacation.
Is the government refunding you, at least?
No!
They won't comment on what happened.
Well, if I'd put I was going to paint the town red,
They'd have me down for graffiti as well, wouldn't they?
When I go to other countries, this is gonna show up that I got refused from america,
So more than likely I'm now gonna get dragged off at every airport
And questioned about what happened,
And then I'll have to explain to them that it was a tweet.
I'm italian, irish, french, portuguese, native american--
Plant-- I'm even like one-eighteenth avatar.
[narrator] this is joe lipari.
Joe lipari had had a rough day at the apple store.
He had been forced to wait in line for four hours before finally leaving.
So I get home from the apple store, still a little irritated,
Smoke a little dope, put on fight club,
Just trying to relax, go on facebook.
[ed norton in fight club] and this buttoned-down, oxford-cloth psycho
Might just snap and then stalk from office to office with an armalite ar-10--
"semi-automatic weapon," and I said the same thing, but except the apple store.
[norton] pumping round after round...
And, you know, basically word for word except for where.
Hangin' out on facebook, getting' ready to go to yoga class,
And there's a "shave and a haircut, two bits" knock on my door.
So I was like, hey, maybe somebody's here to watch fight club with me.
[chuckles]
Open it up, boom, nypd s.W.A.T., bulletproof vests on,
Their guns drawn, and they tear the place apart,
You know, they really go through everything.
The one cop finds the box that has all my, like, military awards.
He comes bringing it down, he says oh, you were in the military?
And we start talking army talk, he sees that I speak the language.
And that's when he asks me, do you know what an armalite ar-10 is?
And I was like, that's why you're here, guys?
You're here because I made a bad joke on facebook?
Like I, you know-- it blew my mind.
It's the ultimate buzzkill, really, your facebook page brought s.W.A.T. To your house.
They told me not to like, you know, go far from new york
'cause I'll be needed for all these court cases for a year.
They claim one of my facebook friends called 911.
Which is another thing I think is bogus.
So I asked for the 911 tape, which they keep on file.
They have to. And it's my right,
It's my stuff. They have to give me my mug shots if I want.
So they come back and say, oh, turns out it wasn't someone who called 911,
It was someone that just walked into the police station,
And that's something "we don't keep a record of."
And how'd you get my address? I'd lived there for like 10 days.
You know, like, I didn't update my mailing address yet,
Like, all my banking stuff is still going to my old apartment--
There was nothing saying I lived there except for a verbal agreement.
[boy] 'three minutes after being done with my lunch,
I was told to go up to the office,
And then I was sat down inside the vice principal's office,
And I wasn't told what was going on until maybe ten minutes later.
[woman] my phone rings, and I look at it and it was the number to his school,
And I answer it, and it's the school security guard--
Just giving me a fyi, you know, for your information,
Just to give you a heads-up, the secret service is here
With the tacoma police department, and they have vito
And they're talking to him.
[vito] a man walked in, in a suit and glasses,
And he said that he was part of the secret service,
And he told me it was because of a post that I made,
And it indicated as a threat toward the president.
[narrator] yes, a seventh-grade boy was visited by our fbi
Because of a red flag that came up in their spy system.
I was saying how osama's dead,
And for obama to be careful,
Because there might be suicide bombers.
[narrator] it didn't consider his age, or that his comment
About obama needing to watch out was one of concern.
The machine simply determined that based on a series of words,
Vito was a potential threat.
Pre-crime, the belief in this potential breach of the peace,
Their belief that you might cause a crime.
There's those pre-crime arrests in minority report.
[tom cruise in minority report] mr. Marks, by mandate of
The district of columbia pre-crime division,
I'm placing you under arrest for the future murder of sarah marks,
Due to take place today, April 22nd,
At zero eight hundred hours and four minutes.
No! I didn't do anything.
This arrest happened on the royal wedding day
When I attended a zombie flash mob wedding picnic--
- Great. - And myself and four other zombies
Were arrested preemptively for a potential breach of the peace.
Even if you dress up as a zombie, it seems to me
That the crime isn't really committed until you've eaten some brains.
Yeah. To be fair, we did have some brain cake. So there's that.
How did they know that you were going to be dressing up as a zombie this day?
Could it have been emails, or anything really?
It could have been. It's hard to know, yeah.
- I think that's the toughest thing, right? - That's the scary thing, yeah.
The indication that they were monitoring private social networks
Came in the way they were reacting to certain things and asking about certain things.
So they were asking about maggots, and they were asking about climbing gear,
Which they must have heard about through some exchanges on the internet.
Neither of which was true. Nobody had maggots or climbing gear.
And not something that was itself posting a hazard to the royal wedding celebrations;
We were nowhere near the royal wedding celebrations,
And we had no plan of going near the royal wedding celebrations.
Anything that wasn't part of the official, ostentatious,
Joyous, expensive, celebrations
Of this wedding of two strangers
Was prevented from happening,
And that seems deeply disturbing.
You can see that surveillance measures are being used
To silence protests before they even happen.
And this was of course the royal wedding.
We'd all helped pay for the royal wedding, it wasn't just a private wedding.
[from tv] you're arresting a professor of anthropology
That runs a street theater group.
One o' kings, one o' kings, one o' kings--
We couldn't believe this was happening.
It was just-- we werso obviously a street-theater troupe.
Some of us hadctually gotten costume on, you know?
So we were locked away in lewishamolice station for 25 hours.
Once the whole wedding was safely over, we were let out.
For the first time, as far as I'm aware in this untry,
A number of us-- something like fifty of us---
Were arrested, and in most cases incarcerated
For thinking about protest,
For thinking about, in this case, some street theater.
A lot of-- a lot of life is based upon trust.
I mean, if you have a conversation with your inner circle
On a key strategic decision that is vital to your company
And you read about it in the newspaper before the decision is implemented,
In other words, you get preempted from acting
Because somebody inside your company has talked,
You're not gonna like it, and it'll hurt.
[narrator] the activists didn't need to commit any crime.
They just needed to text and to email, and to call each other
About potentially protesting.
But I think that the answer is not to take away the capacity of
Looking at the public actions of citizens and keeping a record of them.
The solution is to make sure that we elect better governments.
Well, I know this argument,
And it is not very new.
It's old-fashioned, saying,
"we are complying with rules and so what happens?"
Between leading my-- leading the sinful life I would like to lead,
And hoping that governments will protect my privacy,
Or, assuming that no one's going to protect my privacy
And leading a less sinful life, I'll go with the latter.
It's simply just the odds of success seem higher to me.
I congratulate the people who say they have nothing to hide.
I don't believe them,
And I also say they're probably hiding something from someone. We all do.
You have nothing to hide till you do.
And you are not necessarily going to know
What you have to hide or not.
[narrator] you might remember the case of milly,
A teenaged girl in britain who disappeared in 2002.
[announcer] police in surrey say they're growing increasingly concerned
About the safety of a thirteen-year-old girl
Who hasn't been seen since Thursday afternoon.
[narrator] before the police found her body, her parents were holding on to hopes
That she might still be alive.
I'd say if someone has taken milly and is holding her,
Then please, please, give her back to us.
[narrator] why is that, you might ask?
Well, because according to phone records,
Milly had checked and deleted her voicemail.
We were sitting downstairs in reception and I rang her phone.
- Yes. - And it clicked through onto her voicemail,
- So I heard her voice. - Yes.
And I was-- it was just like,
I jumped-- she's picked up her voicemails, bob! She's alive!
And I was just-- it was then, really.
[narrator] as it turned out, members of rupert murdoch's corporation
Had been hacking into milly's phone,
Trying to be the first to reveal details of this national news story.
I think this is the watershed moment, when finally the public start to see,
And feel above all, just how low and how disgusting
This particular newspaper's methods were.
This was a murdered schoolgirl,
And the thought that a very tight-knit circle
Of very senior politicians
Linked up very closely, intimately, with the police
And with the media mogul rupert murdoch.
[newscaster] for 30 years, as british prime ministers came and most certainly went,
A constant character in their worlds was rupert murdoch. The billionaire media mogul--
[narrator] for years, celebrities, and individuals like milly,
Had the voicemails they thought were hidden and private
Accessed by rupert murdoch's corporation, at the expense of people like milly's parents.
And it took nearly a decade to expose the misuse of this highly personal data.
Transparency, which, you know, bonds us together and gives us all so many friends
That we didn't know before, but all these friends that are connected,
Gives the state an absolutely unparalleled in the history of humanity
Ability to know what's going on in its citizens, to find out who the dissenters are.
The government is making whistle-blowing a crime.
They are making dissent a crime.
Especially when it embarrasses the government and calls the government to account.
If sources are gonna get discovered,
And if whistleblowers cannot securely and anonymously provide
That information to journalists,
We as a society won't know when our rights are being silently violated.
Of course, the president has defended his administration
The only way he knows how.
If we can root out folks who have leaked, they will suffer consequences.
[audience laughing]
You look at a technical perspective, the technologies of maintaining privacy
Are actually running ahead of the technologies that break it.
For example, encryption,
Which can maintain your privacy, is running ahead of decryption.
[narrator] but what if there was a way to store information until it could be decrypted?
U.S. Intelligence officials will soon be allowed to keep information on u.S. Citizens
Much longer than they used to, even if those citizens have no known ties to terrorism.
Under new rules, the government can store data it gathers for five years.
That's up from the current limit of six months.
General alexander, if dick cheney were elected president
And wanted to detain and incessantly waterboard
Every american who sent an email
Making fun of his well-known hunting mishaps,
What I'd like to know is, does the nsa have the technological capacity
To identify those cheney-bashers
Based upon the content of their emails?
The-- in the United States, we would have to go through
An fbi process, a warrant,
To get that and serve it to somebody to actually get it.
But you do have the capability of doing that.
Not in the United States.
There are new questions about the national security agency's massive spy center
Under construction in the desert of utah.
Once finished, it'll be five times the size of the u.S. Capitol building.
The nsa is not allowed to spy on americans,
But now a whistleblower has come forward, saying that the agency is doing it anyway.
This massive agency that's collecting a tremendous amount of information every day
By satellites and tapping of cell phones and data links
On your computer or email links and so forth.
And then it has to store it someplace,
And that's why they built bluffdale.
It's gonna cost two billion dollars.
It's being built in this area on a military base
Outside of salt lake city in bluffdale.
As I said, they had to actually extend the boundary of the town
So it would fit into it.
And the whole purpose of this is the centerpiece
Of this massive eavesdropping complex,
This network that was created after 9/11.
The reality of information technology is it progresses exponentially.
Only information technology.
Exponential growth starts out very slow,
Looks like nothing's happening, you're doubling tiny little numbers,
And suddenly, it takes off, and we've seen that with paradigm after paradigm,
Like social networks in recent times.
[narrator] in 1984, to store one gigabyte of data cost $85,000.
By 2012, it cost about five cents.
In the city of chungking, there are about 500,000 cameras.
In 2012, the cost of permanently recording a high-resolution feed was $300 million.
By the year 2020, the projected cost is less than $3 million.
[man] the u.K. Being one of the cultures that's introduced cameras
Most ubiquitously and most quickly,
So far the population seems fine with it.
If they weren't, they know who to call.
All of which feed into this control center housed in a secret location.
And I can call up, in real time,
All instances where a camera caught someone wearing a red shirt.
This is the shape and the size of a potentially suspicious unattended package.
Many police departments set to use controversial new devices
Capable of scanning people's faces,
Then checking that information against a criminal database.
When we're at war, when you're protecting your society
Against people who want to come in and kill civilians,
You have to be able to defend what we're doing.
You have to be able to defend our way of life,
And you have to put these powers into somebody's hands.
[narrator] according to the brookings institution,
This kind of pervasive monitoring will provide what amounts to a time machine,
Allowing authoritarian governments to perform retrospective surveillance.
For example, if an anti-regime demonstrator
Previously unknown to security services is arrested,
It will be possible to go back in time
To scrutinize the demonstrator's phone conversations,
Automobile travels, and the people he or she met
In the months and even years leading up to the arrest.
[chris soghoian] the government is using the existence of terms of service
To justify the surveillance state that we now live in.
The messages are free to use, and most importantly, they're encrypted,
So the police can't actually get in there to decrypt what happened.
So that's prompted calls to shut down the entire network.
[narrator] it's easy to justify using these technologies to stop a riot.
But shouldn't we be concerned when the government is able to read our emails,
Text messages, phone calls, search history...
To track our movements and limit our free speech?
What crime did that seventh-grade boy really commit?
Is having zombies at a royal wedding really so bad?
What about milly's parents?
And what happens when these technologies are used to watch peaceful protesters,
Like all of the people that occupy wall street, or the tea party folks?
What happens if the government doesn't like tents being set up?
[yelling, screaming]
Despite all of this, it was starting to seem like, so what?
So what if the government can acquire all of this information?
Maybe it's good they can keep the peace when riots are happening.
And besides, maybe it was already too late.
I mean, it's certainly dying.
Whether or not it--
For privacy to--
I mean, privacy's going to remain dead
Unless there's a really fundamental shift in...
The dynamics by which that's decided, by which I mean,
The only really effective response is to monitor and to change the behavior,
The tendencies of the intelligence industry
And law enforcement and all that, and even companies.
And that's very, very unlikely.
I don't know exactly who the 'us' is, but I'm very critical of us.
I think that this is an area
In which we have allowed ourselves to be smitten,
We want this technology to grow and grow,
And we don't want anything to rain on our parade.
And we have woken up to the privacy concerns...
In my view, at least four years too late.
I mean, is privacy dead?
Yeah, without question.
Without question, yeah, it's dead.
It's safe to work under the assumption that nothing's private.
You know, anything that's been digitized is not private.
And that is terrifying.
When this becomes the size of a blood cell,
And I can just send them into my brain
And my body through the bloodstream,
This'll become quite ubiquitous,
And it really will be part of who we are.
People say, well, okay,
That's gonna be a real threshold to move beyond,
But I don't think so.
It's a very smooth continuum
From, you know, when I was a student
And I had to take my bicycle to get to the computer
To having it in my pocket to having it in my body.
It's a convenient place to put it;
I won't lose it that way.
But they say if you put a frog in a pot of water
And slowly turn up the heat,
The frog'll just die, because it doesn't realize it's boiling.
And I think that, like anything else,
I think we're opting in a centimeter at a time,
And, you know, pretty soon you' prerey far down the road,
You look behind you and you sort of wonder how you got where you were.
I think that's true.
It's just completely out of control.
I mean, it's just-- sky's the limit, you know.
They know everything about us now.
It takes someone-- it takes someone who is in charge of laws
Having what is being done to american citizens
Done to their email account or to their facebook profile.
Right, if it's personal, they're gonna pay attention to it.
All of these powerful institutions,
They're not subject to the same invasions of privacy as the rest of us are.
Eric schmidt, the ceo of google, once said,
"if you have something that you don't want anyone to know,
Maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
Then he got very angry when cnet,
Which is owned by cbs, published a picture of his house.
[mouse clicking]
When you ask google about "do not track,"
They claim, "we have to understand how to define that
Before we can implement any technology."
"do not track's" pretty simple.
It means we don't want to be tracked.
The only reason google doesn't understand it
Is because google doesn't want to implement it.
Unless someone comes and makes it
No longer practical for them to engage in that kind of activity,
Pressure is put upon ceos of the companies,
They're going to engage in it.
[mouse clicks]
We're going by the facebook campus right now.
Really have no idea what to expect.
Have not had breakfast. Um...
Zuckerberg.
He'll know that I checked in here, too, so that's good.
He knows that I'm right next to his house.
Let's see, we have a--here's the exact quote from mark.
So: "having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity."
Lack of integrity.
They just did a knock-up on his door,
So it seems very likely that we might get
A mark zuckerberg sighting today.
I mean, you might not be wrong, vince, ben.
He might actually have a tunnel.
There's some definite motion in the yard.
Is it the dog?
- Here we go. - That's him.
Mr. Zuckerberg?
Hey, I'm working on a documentary.
Got a little blog here,
But wondering if I could just ask you a couple questions?
No, I-- sorry.
Really?
I have to be at work.
Can I ask, do you still think privacy is dead?
What are your real thoughts on privacy?
Are you guys recording?
Um-- we are.
Could you please not?
Um-- I can stop, yeah.
All right.
[narrator] mark zuckerberg had asked me to please not record him.
So we shut off the main camera.
But since mark doesn't seem to mind
Storing our data after we think it's been deleted, this only seemed fair.
Can you please not?
Um-- I can stop, yeah.
All right.
Can I come by your front desk, though,
And ask about setting up an interview?
Yeah, I mean-- we have a department
Where you can talk to people about that.
Yeah, I know, I've tried going through it a few times,
And I never hear back.
[narrator] there's a major difference here.
Mark loosens up after he thinks we've stopped recording.
And you see that? That right there.
That's a smile.
Mark zuckerberg smiled at me.
And you know why?
Because he thought I had stopped recording,
And he was relieved.
Imagine what a relief it would be
If all of these companies and the government
Stopped recording everything we do.
If we could just make a simple request to them--
Something that mark zuckerberg knows how to ask for.
"can you please not?"
Can yopleau not record us,
Monitor us, and share our information, unless we ask first?
We need terms and conditions that are reasonable,
And we need privacy policies
That promote the most basic principles of our democracy,
Rather than taking them away.
Or, as a young senator once said,
Back before he became president:
We need to find a way forward
To make sure that we can stop terrorists
While protecting privacy and liberty of innocent americans.
We have to find a way to give the president
The power he needs to protect us,
While making sure that he doesn't abuse that power.
And that simple principle,
That there's somebody watching the watcher,
Whether that's on an issue of freedom of the press,
Or it's an issue of warrantless wiretaps,
That simple principle is one that we can't give up
And we don't have to give up.
[narrator] well, mr. President, we are watching.
And I guess we have to ask ourselves one simple question:
Do we agree?
♫ cold feet and a tie
♫ rise to the occasion
♫ a million tiny flashlights
♫ I gotta turn it off
♫ cold feet and a tie
♫ rise to the occasion
♫ a million tiny flashlights
♫ I gotta turn it off
♫ for awhile, I'll keep my place ¶
♫ but tonight, I'll stay so late ¶
Washington is caught in its very own episode of spy versus spy.
The tactics once employed
By top intelligence-gathering teams at the cia,
Sifting through ip addresses, emails, and fake dropboxes,
Have now been turned against the intelligence community's top official.
♫ oh sleep for a while
♫ too much conversation
The fbi uncovered evidence of an affair
Between petraeus and his biographer paula broadwell.
That's right.
Petraeus had an affair with the author of his fawning biography all in.
These did not implicate criminal activity;
These did not implicate national security;
These were not a threat to david petraeus the person,
Or to general petraeus,
The director of the central intelligence agency.
Those are not my words; those are the fbi's words.
But instead of actually sending those emails,
In many cases they wrote them as drafts
In a gmail account they both had access to,
And that way they could both log on and check the draft folder,
Never having to actually hit "send."
It's very embarrassing for the obama administration
And for its national security command.
It's troubling because
There are laws that the fbi has to follow,
And he has the right
To be protected from an unwarranted,
Unjustified investigation by the fbi or anyone.
People don't really know how they're being monitored,
And they think, hey, if it's working,
If we keep stopping another 9/11,
Then it's--then it's quote "worth it."
The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome
For america of these disclosures is that nothing will change.