I'm Ron Deibert
and I received a significant chunk of the Snowden disclosures.
It really blew my mind.
Ron Deibert researches digital espionage and nation-state hacking.
In October 2013, he received a phone call
about newly released Edward Snowden documents
revealing mass surveillance in Canada.
I travel a lot, and I was going to Pearson Airport.
And because I fly a lot, I'm lucky to have lounge access.
So once I got through security and checked in
I customarily go into the lounge and I boot up my laptop.
We have certain protocols that we have to follow.
Obviously connecting — or maybe it's not obvious to a lot of people
but connecting through an airport Wi-Fi
is among the most insecure ways to connect to the internet.
So we take a series of precautions before connecting.
And once I got through that whole routine
and the protocols that I follow, I check my email
and there was one from a CBC journalist
asking if he could give me a call.
So I, you know
pulled up my iPhone and plugged in my headphones
and said, 'Sure, give me a call.'
Ron is one of the world's leading experts on digital espionage.
But what he was about to hear would shock even him.
I was quite surprised to hear that he said to me
quite openly that they had received
from Glenn Greenwald and company
some Snowden-related material that was unredacted.
Glenn Greenwald, of course, is the intercept journalist
to whom Edward Snowden entrusted a large
portion of the cache of materials that he took from the NSA.
And what Greenwald and company had done
was kind of farm these out in a federated manner
to journalists in other countries where they spotted
topics of national significance for that country.
And that's what they had done in this instance. They had
supplied some material to the CBC
and then the CBC was looking for experts.
I'm one of the few people
that has studied signals intelligence in this country.
So it wasn't surprising that they reached out to me.
What was very surprising was the manner by which they did this
which is to call me on an open line
while I'm sitting in the airport.
And to my shock
when he began to describe what the slides were about
this kind of cursory examination that he did
it's about hacking Wi-Fi networks in airports
including Pearson Airport
the very airport I was sitting in when I took the call.
Ron had to be extremely careful because his next step
could turn out to be a criminal act.
So I got off the phone very quickly.
When I returned from my trip, we arranged a meeting in person.
That didn't lessen the issue.
In fact, that magnified it more because he then
turned over to me by hand
a manila envelope containing photocopies of
classified intelligence programs.
So I had to think very carefully about what to do next.
I consulted some senior colleagues
and decided that I better, after examining them
deposit them with a lawyer, a third party
in a safe somewhere
and then loudly announce that
over the phone and in the air
as I was walking down the street, in case anyone was listening:
'I do not have these documents.
They are now in the possession of my lawyer in a safe.'
As Ron and his team deciphered Snowden's revelations
it became clear to him that state-sponsored digital surveillance
had become much deeper and easier to implement than ever.
A casual reader looking at this might assume
that our signals intelligence agency in Canada
had gone to Pearson Airport
and had actually put some special equipment
maybe under cover of darkness that they
would later retrieve
dressed as janitors or something like that.
But in fact, they didn't go anywhere near the airport.
So it's kind of
a neat synopsis of the
style of modern signals intelligence gathering.
So these very well-equipped, powerful agencies
in a lot of cases actually don't gather
data directly themselves using their own equipment.
In a lot of cases they do
but increasingly they don't have to
because we rely on
this digital ecosystem that
not only surrounds us, but deeply penetrates our lives
follows us around wherever we go
collects fine-grain details about our movements
our habits, our social relationships.
So it's much more efficient
for the signals intelligence agencies
to go to the companies
that own and operate this infrastructure and gather all this data
and get it from them, use them as proxies.
And that's what they did in this case.
They didn't, as far as I know, set foot in Pearson Airport.
In his 2020 CBC Massey Lectures entitled Reset
Ron raises alarm bells about how the digital world
is eroding our civil liberties.
When I started out in this area
there was a lot of enthusiasm about digital technologies.
People assumed that
it might even lead to the end of authoritarianism.
The rise of the internet coincided with the end of the Cold War
and the collapse of the Soviet Union, so everyone
coupled these two and thought
'There's something about our new digital world
that is leading to increased liberalization and democratization
when in fact the opposite has happened.
We've descended into authoritarianism.
We've seen kleptocracy spread worldwide.
So I've become really, really worried.
I think of it kind of analogous to the way
scientists who study climate change must feel.
Because I look around me and I think, 'This is a
disaster that's only getting worse.'
And one of the aims of writing this book
was to try to raise an alarm bell.
You know, hey, this is bad.
We need to change course.
We need a reset. We need a timeout
because if we don't, we're in for trouble.
Ron believes our communications ecosystem is essential
for our survival as a species
but that we urgently need a new set of rules
to govern our digital lives.
So we need some type of communications platform
through which we can share ideas, access data, all of that.
The problem is the way it's currently organized
around this business model
which has been dubbed 'surveillance capitalism'
is entirely dysfunctional to those larger aims
and it's creating, throwing up all sorts of
pathologies
creating bad habits, polluting discourse.
So we need to fine tune and adjust it, not throw it all out.
We can't retreat.
We can't unplug. We can't go back to another time.
You could move to rural Montana
but you'd still be watched by drones and satellites and so on.
You can't escape the digital environment within which we live.
So we have to take control of it.
And the bright spot here is we don't need to invent
some new fancy cyber theory to do it.
The main point of my book is that
there are principles and practices
that go all the way back to ancient Greece.
Humans have faced challenges like this in
eras prior to our own.
It may seem all novel, but it's not.
We're still just human beings living with each other
and we need to come up with a kind of
set of rules and principles
a constitution, if you will
as to how our communications ecosystem should be governed.