Transcriber: Chryssa R. Takahashi Reviewer: Miloš Milosavljević
I'd like to start by asking you a few questions.
Please raise your hand if you have a smartphone.
OK. Is there anyone here without a smartphone?
Oh, I'm sorry. (Laughter)
Raise your hand if you have a Facebook account.
OK. Is there anyone here without a Facebook account?
Wow, I'll speak more slowly. (Laughter)
Is there anyone here that has more than one Facebook account?
OK, interesting.
How about Twitter? Instagram?
Have you ever bought something from Ebay?
Amazon? Deal Extreme? With that, you are very good.
Is there anyone here that has bitcoins?
OK, interesting.
OK, last one. Listen carefully.
If you had to choose between spending three days
without your smartphone or without your toothbrush,
what would you choose? (Laughter)
Don't answer. There are cameras here.
Ever since I was a kid, I was fascinated with computers.
I loved taking them apart and putting them back together.
Putting them back together didn't always work.
Nevertheless, I learned a lot.
But there was a downside to this, as you would expect.
Friends, and friends of friends, and even their parents,
used to call me and ask,
"Do you have a spare minute? I need you to fix my computer."
It never took a minute.
And I hated the fact that computers had so many problems.
One day, I decided, "Enough.
From now on, I'm going to charge anyone who wants me to fix his computer."
Amazingly enough, that actually worked.
People started paying me to fix their computers.
From that moment on, I loved the fact that computers had so many problems.
(Laughter)
So at the age of 15, I actually opened my first business
together with a friend of mine from school.
And it was a huge success for us.
We didn't have to take anymore money from our parents.
And we started with fixing computers
and at some point we started selling computers.
But the most amazing thing about this story
is that so few people know it.
This is actually the first time I'm sharing this business card.
I only took this picture four days ago for the sake of this presentation.
I'm from the last generation that knows
how the world looked like before the Internet.
Now, keep that in mind, and think about the children of our grandchildren.
They will know us so well.
I have no clue who was my great grandfather.
It could have been anyone.
There is so little information about past generations.
And only selected few had received this highest honor
of having their life documented.
Right, kings and philosophers.
But for us, we document our lives as we go.
Every 60 seconds, 100 hours of movies are being uploaded to YouTube.
In those 60 seconds, approximately 40,000 pictures are being posted on Instagram.
And 350,000 tweets are being shared.
So, future generations will have so much information about us,
they wouldn't know what to do with it.
They could know us so well, but so could anyone else.
Including our future potential boss
that might approach a new type of psychologist,
that will be asked to determine whether we fit for the job that we applied to.
And he would do that without even meeting us.
Just by browsing through the information we shared,
and, yes, sometimes the information we forgot we've shared.
(Laughter)
I have no excuse, I'm sorry.
No one needs to meet us in order to know us.
So sometimes we will find out if we got the job
even before we had the interview.
Strange as it may sound, today, 75% of employers
are already browsing through candidates' personal profiles
before hiring them.
One in every three admitted having disqualified a candidate
because of information found online.
And we're becoming even better at sharing information, right?
So, amazing companies are creating great tools
that will help us share more and more information.
They do that because they understand the great value
in holding huge amounts of personal information, of our infomation.
We should think of them as a great machine
that knows how to transform personal data into profit.
And they make billions of money.
But I want to speak about a different type of machines.
Those machines also take personal data, the same data,
but they transform it into National Security.
Those are governments and intelligence agencies.
So, with Facebook, we know how they get the information.
We give it to them, free of charge.
But how would intelligence agencies get this information?
It's not very easy to collect, right?
But wait a minute.
If someone already collected it, maybe we can use it.
So, many states understand now that they have a great incentive
to put a spy inside Facebook.
But not just Facebook.
Many companies in the private sector are unwillingly becoming pawned
in the national security games, in the homeland security campaigns.
You probably recognize this guy, right?
This is Edward Snowden, who worked for the NSA.
The NSA is the National Security Agency.
What do they do there, inside the NSA?
In the world of intelligence, they are called SIGINT Intelligence gathering Unit.
SIGINT stands for Signals Intelligence.
That means that the NSA,
much like Facebook and Google and others,
is in the business of collecting digital data and processing it.
So, every country in the world has an agency
that is responsible for SIGINT gathering.
In the United States, it's the NSA.
Edward Snowden worked there,
and one day he decided to do something
that completely changed the way we speak about privacy.
He took many documents and published them;
many classified documents from within the NSA, and published them.
You should understand, that until that point,
people in my field of work addressed NSA as No Such Agency.
This is how we called them.
But right now, we have so much information about what is going on in there.
So, one of the first things that Edward Snowden
actually published, revealed to the world
this secret secret secret project, named PRISM.
This is what Edward Snowden published.
This is what used to be a top secret presentation.
It was so secret that only selected few inside the NSA
were cleared to see it.
While viewing this presentation, we come to understand two amazing things.
The first one, they design terrible presentations inside the NSA.
(Laughter)
This design is unforgivable. Seriously, guys.
The second thing that we learned is what PRISM is.
PRISM is an intelligence gathering program,
through which the NSA actually had access to private companies,
to information that was stored inside private companies,
like Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and Facebook, Skype, YouTube and Apple.
The NSA could access those companies
in order to gain access to our information.
Obviously these things that Edward Snowden published
created a lot of public criticism surrounding the NSA, right?
The public wasn't happy with that.
So, someone had to tell the other side of the story.
The job fell on the shoulders of this guy, General Keith Alexander,
who until recently was the head of the NSA.
So, his job was to demonstrate the trade-off.
So if you have privacy in one hand,
and national security in the other,
and you want more national security,
you should compromise privacy. That's that.
So, he tries to convince us that the NSA is actually an efficient machine
for transforming personal data into national security.
How did he do that?
One of the things that he did,
he went onstage at a big cyber conference in Las Vegas.
This conference is for hackers and security professionals.
I was sitting there in the audience listening to him,
and he said about PRISM and other intelligence gathering programs
that they were a vital tool in stopping actual terrorist attacks.
Oh my God! What should we take from it?
What should we take from the fact that the NSA is using this information
to stop terrorist attacks?
It is now the undeniable truth that the information that sits
within private companies such as Facebook,
is valuable intelligence related information.
It is the type of information that the United States can use
in order to promote its old national security agenda.
Now, the NSA had a pretty easy life
because all of those companies are actually American companies,
which sit within the United States.
So they could approach a federal judge that will issue a warrant.
This is a magic key.
It forces everyone to hand over this information.
But what can Russia do?
What can China do?
What can any other country in the world do?
Every intelligence agency in the world
wants the information that sits inside Facebook and other companies.
If the United States can stop terrorist attacks
using this information,
everyone can use this information.
Make no mistake.
It is not a question of if they will get it.
It is a question of how and when.
They can try to actually approach the federal judge,
right, the American federal judge.
It won't help, though it might amuse him a lot.
So there are basically two ways to go about it.
One, they can try hacking into Facebook,
which is not an easy thing to accomplish.
Trust me. (Laughter)
The second thing that they can do,
they can try to put a spy inside Facebook,
so that he will provide the information they need.
Well, when we think about a spy inside Facebook,
this is probably not a spy we have in mind.
This is more like it. (Laughter)
It's strange to think about state sponsored spies
inside private companies, inside commercial companies.
But there are several reasons that make this thing easier.
One, it's much easier to get a job inside Facebook than inside the NSA,
security clearance-wise.
The second thing is that the risk is lower.
Being a spy inside Facebook is not as risky
as being a spy inside the NSA.
And the third, in the past, if you wanted to be a good spy,
if you wanted to hire a good spy, you wanted this guy.
This is the guy that knew everything, right?
You wanted someone that would be as senior as possible inside the organization.
But today, in the age of information,
the people that actually have the power are those people,
the hands-on guys, the engineers, the support team.
Those people have unrestricted access to information.
This is what you want.
This makes your life much easier,
if you want to put a spy inside a commercial company.
And then the plot thickens,
because there are many other companies that hold information that is valuable.
For example, you might put a spy inside a mobile operator.
And he could listen to your phone calls,
and might be able to tell where you're at at every given moment.
You might want to put a spy inside a credit card company.
He will know everything about everyone
while being inside a credit card company,
and sometimes, your deepest secrets.
And there are many other companies
that hold valuable information for intelligence.
So, where do we go from here?
Someone hacked my presentation.
(Laughter)
Good job guys.
Where do we go from here?
We have to understand that today,
commercial companies are actually better at collecting data
than actual intelligence agencies.
Companies like Facebook and Google are better at collecting our data
than actual intelligence agencies.
That's amazing.
Think about Facebook facial recognition mechanism.
This is an amazing tool for spies.
Are you familiar with this mechanism?
It means that you can take pictures of your friend
and Facebook will automatically tag them.
He will recognize your friends and will automatically tag them.
So if you are a spy, you could create this amazing camera,
and stand outside a secret agency,
and take pictures of people coming out
and immediately receive their names, the names of their friends,
what are their deepest secrets, where are they going to be.
Facebook is a dream place for spies.
You can see how much the spy is happy.
So where do we go from here?
Should we educate our children only to use applications
that were made by countries that we consider friendly?
Or should we just accept that we are living in a world
that has no secrets?
What we can be sure of is that nothing is free.
On the Internet nothing is free.
We either pay with money or with our privacy.
Thank you.
(Applause)