John Scott-Railton
Appearances
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
You know, the thing I did first was neuroscience. That was my old thing. No way. Yeah.
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
And one of the big things, so I was working on neuroplasticity and one of the big things that is known about the brain is that anxiety suppresses plasticity and the suppression of plasticity is a good candidate for one of the major causes of depression.
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
I like to call it mercenary spyware, although I've noticed that a lot of other groups call it commercial spyware. But I like the mercenary term in part because it denotes the idea that these people are probably working for states, whereas commercial, to my ear, could refer to a much broader category of things.
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
That's right, and I like to frame it sort of like this. After Snowden, a lot of governments... who didn't really know all the cool toys that the US government had, suddenly not only learned, but were like, hey, I got to get some of that. And you have this other dynamic, which is kind of like the first generations of people working within tier one government programs, developing exploitation tools.
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
are starting to look for a bigger paycheck and a cushy approach to retirement. Thus begins this massive technology and knowledge transfer from some of the most developed cyber powers in the world towards the rest of the world. That's the proliferation as people, whether it's from American or German or Italian or British countries are like, hey, we could really make a business out of this stuff.
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
And then you add to that kind of this dramatic rise in Israel's high-tech sector combined with a really permissive environment towards export law, and you get yourself a global industry in this technology.
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
It's a stinky wind, yeah. Yeah. I think that in a democracy, the people who elect the government should have some degree of understanding of how much power the government has to completely pry into their personal lives and when the government can exercise that power. And what is so scary about mercenary spyware like Predator or Pegasus is that it offers a security service a total view
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
into a person's private world in ways that were never designed to respect existing law about search warrants or search seizures or anything like that, and can just provide that as a turnkey. So the intent really is to provide this total view on an individual.
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
I think it's also the case that there are a lot of autocrats around the world who want this technology because they really want to hold on to power. And they recognize that making their citizens afraid of having their lives basically dumped out on the digital table silently and remotely without any warning is a core part of how they stay in power.
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
That fear, that technology of fear is a big part of it. And the fact that Pegasus doesn't respect national borders is a great way for autocrats to basically claw back power into states that they would otherwise have no ability to act in, right? It shouldn't be the case that an autocrat in Togo has dissidents in the UK afraid.
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
But that can be the case when you acquire this kind of technology because you can experience completely devastating consequences of speaking up against an autocrat or a dictator from around the world. That kind of stuff is just net dangerous to democracy and to freedom.
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
Well, on your perceived enemies, right? So we know from extradition documents, for example, like Panama's then president, Ricardo Martinelli, apparently got himself a bunch of Pegasus. Well, who did he put under monitoring? People like his business rivals, but also his mistress.
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
And every morning he would, according to these documents, sit and put his headphones on in his office and listen to the conversations and read the messages of people who he didn't like. That image of a president angry and jealous, prying into the lives of anybody who he felt like it, is a scary image to all of us. And it's scary because that's not part of the social contract, right? That's not...
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
a power that government should have and any of the existing powers that government has in a you know society like the united states are circumscribed by law right i know my rights you can say at a traffic stop but with something like pegasus if you know your local police department has acquired um Pegasus and has used it against you, do you know your rights?
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
Do you know whether they were within their rights or authorities to use it? Do you know whether their use of it was properly overseen? What's happening is that this technology is landing in jurisdictions that don't yet have any legal protections around how this stuff gets used. Citizens have nothing to protect them.
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
And that's really, really scary because you want there to be limits on the power of the state. Without those limits, you're existing in a tyrannical or autocratic regime.
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
I see what you're saying. And companies should fight as hard as they can to prevent badly formed or wrong requests for this data. We'd be in a better universe if that stuff was not collected, but it is. That said, I think that something like Pegasus or Predator
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
is actually even more invasive in some ways than what those apps have, in part because your phone really is, for most people at this point, it's just like nexus of your public and private brain.
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
And what's really scary is the idea that governments could access this secretly without you ever having to know about it and without a warrant, without any kind of oversight, and without any kind of potential consequence or accountability if they abuse that power, if they get in there and they use it to hurt you.
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
And we've already seen cases where the fruits of hacking are used to hurt and harm people. So as I see this... There is a constant battle to try to protect a degree of individual privacy from big, powerful interests, whether it is governments or corporations. And we should be fighting this battle on multiple fronts at once. But what we shouldn't do is say, well, okay, you know,
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
One bad apple is already violating our privacy, so we shouldn't be angry when another bad apple does it. It's different also, if you think about it like this, it's different when an entity that is seeking to monitor your behavior in order to sell you something
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
learn something about you than an entity that can put you in jail and deny you your freedom based on that information has access to it and that's why in many cases i think it's appropriate for the police to have a harder time getting access to people's private information than you or i might if we wanted to buy a bunch of user data because the consequences are so great good point
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
Jack, as you're talking about these things, here's how I think about this. There are certain questions about citizens that are probably illegitimate for governments to ask. Certain questions like, do they really believe in politics? you know, so-and-so, president so-and-so, right?
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
Because once governments start having the ability to get those questions asked and to do so in secret, there may be a temptation to use that information to retaliate and to harm people. And part of why it's critically important to stem the proliferation of spyware like Pegasus and Predator
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
is not just because it's bad when dictators are able to hack dissidents and chill dissidents, but because in democracies, we really also do not want this kind of capability lurking around out there, tempting governments, local, state, and national to abuse it in ways that will ultimately erode the freedoms that we cherish. Think about it this way. When you make a choice to speak out publicly,
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
against a government policy that you disagree with. In a democracy, you should have some perception, not just that you are free to speak your mind, you can't be jailed for saying, I disagree with this, but also that it would be inappropriate for the government to retaliate against you for doing this, right?
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
And what form of retaliation is scarier than the idea that the government could suddenly choose to basically penetrate as deep as it can into your private world and look at all your stuff? What a terrifying thought. That is the thought that people in East Germany live with every day. That is the thought that people living in dictatorships live with every day.
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
The potential that an angry official could just be like, well, let's see what Jack's worried about at 2 a.m., right? Let's see what health concerns bother him. Let's see what things he's like talking about in the evening with his partner.
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
Yeah. And this is the question. And there are two parts to it. The first is, would they be doing it with proper authority under law? Or are they just doing it like in a 24 episode because there's a ticking time bomb, right?
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
And spyware merchants love the idea that there are just like all these terror plots and bad actors and the only thing you can do is Kiefer Sutherland it and just like hack them immediately, right? Forget the law, we need to get the bad guys. But the thing is, we know from recent and older history that if governments start being enabled to do that, Bad things inevitably follow.
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
Temptation to abuse it always follows. Some of the biggest problems that we have today in the United States around privacy come from the post-September 11th period, things like the Patriot Act, right? Hugely invasive stuff. But then the other question, and this is just like equally important, is does the society, does the governmental office that's receiving this data,
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
have the mechanisms in place to prevent abuse if the people who happen to be holding this stuff in their hands are not good people. or it could be giving into the wrong temptations.
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
Part of why it's important that we have laws and rule of law is that you want a person who's got some of the power of the state in their hands, whether it's a cop or an investigator or a prosecutor or a politician or whatever, they have to feel that there will be consequences if they misuse that power, and they have to know what the guardrails are around how they can use that power.
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
One of the big problems with mercenary spyware is that it's arriving in jurisdictions that don't yet have any laws that say how police should or shouldn't or prosecutors should or shouldn't
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
use this technology in a situation like that the potential for abuse is huge in part because like what's going to be the consequence right people in authority might not even believe there would be any consequence if they abuse the technology that's part of why people like me feel that it's so important to slow the proliferation down because the faster this stuff arrives at jurisdictions that don't have any laws around this the more likely you are to see abuse
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
I think, unfortunately, we're stuck with the existence of this technology. But slowing down the rate of proliferation is, I think, the best approach we have to limiting the global harm that it's going to cause.
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
And it is my firm belief that as more and more governments pay attention, they will recognize that a totally uncontrolled, a digital Mogadishu of spyware, where everybody is using this stuff all the time, is a really bad outcome for most governments. And that you will need a degree of protection.
Darknet Diaries
137: Predator
The problem is that willingness to act is, I think, unfortunately contingent on a lot of governments feeling the sting first. I don't think it's an accident that a large number of U.S. government personnel had to get hacked with Pegasus spyware before the U.S. took really decisive action.