Original subtitles

we live under a billion unblinking eyes...

a global surveillance system that solves crime...

uncovers terrorist plots...

and helps stop abuse of power.

but are we ready for a world without secrets...

...where not even our homes are off-limits

and corporations know our every desire?

should we say goodbye to our privacy?

or is it time for the watched to become the watchers?

space, time, life itself.

the secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.

ever have the feeling you're being watched?

well, you probably are.

if you live in a large city,

surveillance cameras take your picture

hundreds of times per day.

every transaction you make is electronically logged.

scanners at airports can peer through your clothes.

the latest models can even detect your emotional state.

and in those moments when you're not being tracked,

we're busy giving away our personal information

on social media.

we think of our privacy as a fundamental right.

now it appears to be on the brink of extinction,

which sounds like a nightmare.

but is it?

this footage was shot by the hawkeye ii surveillance camera

flying two miles above ciudad ju?rez in mexico.

once every second for hours on end,

it takes a picture of the entire city.

here it documents the murder of a police officer

by members of a drug cartel.

but it also captures the movements of the assassins.

it tracks their cars as they leave the scene

and leads the police to their hideout.

cities around the world

are beginning to use these total surveillance systems.

one could be watching you right now.

nick bostrom runs the future of humanity institute

at oxford university.

he believes constant surveillance

will radically reshape our lives,

but we won't end up fearing it like big brother.

nick believes we'll embrace it.

surveillance technology might be one of those things

that could change social dynamics

in some fairly fundamental way.

yes, already in urban environments,

there are a lot of cameras looking at us all the time.

so, it's a lot of eyeballs,

but they are kind of semi-isolated.

an obvious next step,

where all these video feeds are stored in perpetuity

and coupled with facial-recognition systems

so you could automatically tag and keep track

of where any individual has been,

whom they have been talking with,

what they have been doing.

that sounds like a bad thing,

but it doesn't have to be.

think about contagious diseases.

the virus this man is carrying

could spread across the city in just a few days.

it could start a pandemic

that kills tens of thousands.

if you have a new outbreak,

you have sars or h1n1 or some new disease that pops up,

it gets really important to try to trace

who might have been exposed to the germ.

and it's painstaking work.

you have to interview the people

and try to get who they have interacted with,

and then you have to go and interview those people.

but constant surveillance

could spot the origins of the outbreaks in real time,

locating the infected,

dispatching medical teams to them,

and establishing quarantines.

please return to your homes.

this area is under temporary quarantine.

those things obviously can become more efficient,

the more detailed information you have.

so, if you nip it in the bud,

you potentially save millions of lives.

imagine if every single person you interacted with

were tracked 24/7.

actually to be able to see

what somebody has been up to in the past.

have they kept their promises?

there are a lot of jerks and cheaters in the world

who get away with it.

and by the time people wise up,

they have moved on to their next victims.

kind of nice

to be able to disempower the jerks and cheaters,

and it would encourage more people

to behave in ways that -- that are good.

and if cameras tracked you every moment of the day,

some aspects of your life

would become a lot more convenient.

you could go into a shop and just take what you need.

and the camera recognizes who you are

and automatically rings it up to your bank account,

and it's all taken care of.

if you hadn't yet kicked the old habit

of carrying a wallet,

you'd never have to worry about remembering where you left it.

in some ways, it's actually a return

to a more normal human condition.

we used to live in small tribes, small bands.

you kind of know what everybody's doing,

who they are, what they are up to,

what they have been doing in the past.

in some respects, it's not a complete novelty.

it might be more a return to normalcy.

life under global surveillance

might resemble life in a small village,

but could we adapt to being constantly surveilled,

even inside our own homes?

most people say they don't like being watched

when they're eating, washing, or doing anything in the nude.

but our homes are already full of cameras,

from security cameras and cellphones

to laptops and tvs.

they're even hidden inside clocks

that keep an eye on the nanny.

you might think these cameras are harmless,

but they all connect to the internet,

which means they can be hacked.

cognitive scientist antti oulasvirta

lives in finland,

a country known for notoriously shy people.

they say you can spot an extroverted finn

because they're looking at your shoes, not their own.

antti realized his countrymen would be perfect guinea pigs

for an experiment

to see how people react to having no privacy.

i have a motivation to keep the kitchen clean,

but i have an extra motivation today -- this camera.

antti wanted to see how people's behavior changed

when their homes were wired for constant surveillance,

so he persuaded several households

to do what for finns is unthinkable --

submit to being watched for an entire year.

we wired 10 households in finland for 12 months,

including cameras and microfilms and even screen capture.

so, this is bob,

and bob looks like a regular piece of home electronics,

but he's not.

b-o-b,

which stands for "behavioral observation system,"

records all the video and audio around the house.

bob also keeps track of all e-mail, web traffic,

online purchases, and television-viewing habits.

so, we had them covered pretty well in all areas

of ubiquitous surveillance.

we didn't want to bust people for doing anything wrong.

we simply wanted to see how they would react

to not being able to be alone in their own homes.

in the first weeks of the study,

antti noticed his subjects appeared unsettled

by the presence of the cameras.

they had to keep their impulses in check,

control their shouting.

and if there was a stressful situation

playing out in their lives,

that could amplify the stress.

and -- no surprise --

they were sensitive about being naked.

being naked was, of course, an issue,

and we left them a few spots -- for example, bathrooms --

where they could be alone without the cameras.

they were like fish in a fishbowl.

but as time went on,

antti noticed something surprising.

so after surveilling people for six months,

we asked them to draw us a graph of their stress levels.

they were stressed out in the beginning,

but after a while, it leveled off.

eventually, the subjects started to relax.

they stopped worrying about being seen naked.

so, the mentality was that,

"now you've seen me once walking around the kitchen naked,

so what's the point continuing to hide?"

and when they really needed privacy

for a delicate conversation,

they figured out how to get it.

they went to caf?s to have private conversations,

and they avoided the cameras in creative ways.

antti's study shows

we can adapt to almost constant surveillance.

he admits that this was a special case.

the subject knew him and trusted him not to share the data.

but to antti's surprise,

some people didn't care who was watching.

we asked the subjects

who would they least want to share the data with,

and the most striking feature was,

some went as far as saying that,

"it doesn't matter to whom you share the data."

we have an amazing ability

to adapt to changing environments.

but if we learn to ignore cameras,

it won't be long before we stop thinking about who's watching

and why they are watching.

they say ignorance is bliss.

but in this case,

what you don't know could hurt you.

in george orwewell's novel "198"

everyone lived under the watchful eye

of an authoritarian government --

big brother.

today, in real life,

there's a different watchful eye we should worry about --

big business.

ask yourself this --

do you know when corporations are watching you

or how much they already know about you?

the answer will shock you.

alessandro acquisti always puts safety first.

he knows a helmet will keep him safe on the road,

and the same goes for his social-media profile picture.

i do have a facebook profile.

for my profile picture, i wear a motorcycle helmet.

your name and your profile picture

are public by default.

therefore, they're searchable.

so, my question is, how much can i learn about you

starting just from a photo of your face?

alessandro is a behavioral economist

at carnegie mellon university in pittsburgh.

he's trying to find out what private corporations

might be able to find out about you

just by taking a picture of your face.

would you like to help us with a study?

sure.

so, alessandro and his team

developed their own data-mining app.

we took a shot of their faces.

and then you wait a few seconds.

in the meanwhile,

the shot is being uploaded to a cloud,

where we have previously downloaded

a few hundred thousand images from facebook profiles.

the app uses

commercially available facial-recognition software

to find a matching face online.

this information is sent back to the phone

and overlaid on the face of the subject in front of you.

to see if we can identify you and see what information we...

once it matches the photo

to a social-media profile,

the software can find out someone's name,

their birth city, their interests, and much more.

starting from just one snapshot of a person --

no name and no personal information --

we were able to lock on

to the facebook profiles of these subjects.

wow. No way.

and once you get to the facebook profile,

a world of information opens up.

that's really eerie.

most of us post photos of ourselves online,

but not everyone realizes that photos are also data.

and no one stole the data from us.

we are willingly and publicly disclosing it.

with a name and birthplace in hand,

deeper corporate data mining can reveal data of birth,

criminal record,

and can even make a close guess

at someone's social security number.

that's one digit away from my actual social security number.

how'd you predict that?

once they have this information,

there is virtually no limit

to what else they may be able to find out about you.

alessandro says

he designed this software demonstration as a warning.

it took very little effort to develop it.

imagine what the corporations that rule the internet

might already be doing.

on any given day,

2.1 billion people are active on social media.

they tweet 500 million times.

they share on facebook one billion times.

they upload 1.8 billion photos.

and every time you click on "like,"

a record is made of what you like.

today the internet

is essentially a surveillance economy.

companies like amazon can sell millions of dollars

of merchandising an hour.

and much of these revenues come through ads,

which are tailored to your preferences.

the more a company can know you,

the more they can manipulate you

into clicking this link or buying this product.

alessandro is convinced

we'll keep giving up our personal data and our privacy

because corporations make it so easy for us.

marketers entice us

into revealing more and more personal information.

they work hard to make it a good experience for us.

to us, it looks like the garden of eden,

where everything is free.

you get free apps, free content,

you get to play angry birds,

all of this in exchange

for, say, having your location tracked

1,000 times per day.

once corporations

have collected enough of your location history,

they know you better than you know yourself.

they can predict where you will be at a particular time of day

with 80% accuracy up to one year into the future.

with that kind of information,

your phone --

and the companies that control the data in your phone --

will be able quite literally to steer your day.

they may buy new shoes for you

before you even know you need them.

they may influence your decisions,

which job you're going to take.

alessandro believes

we're losing the battle for our privacy,

and it's a battle we don't even know we're fighting.

the problem is, then,

the system is basically built around trying to nudge us

into revealing more and more personal information

so that we no longer know

whether what's being collected about us

will be used in our best interest

or will be used to the best interests of another entity.

but even if we wise up,

we may have a hard time stopping ourselves

from sharing our most intimate likes and needs online

because this scientist believes

we may already be hooked on sharing, like a drug.

people like to share.

after all, we are social animals.

but somehow the age of social media

has got us sharing more and more...

no matter how uninteresting it might be...

even though we know every post gives marketers

more and more information about us.

so, why do we do it?

and could we stop ourselves even if we tried?

psychologist diana tamir knows

she's sometimes guilty of over-sharing...

-you gonna try this one? -i'm gonna try this one.

...especially when she tries out

her favorite new hobby.

it's super satisfying to be able to do a route

that you weren't able to do before.

that's part of the joy of rock climbing.

getting to the top of a wall can feel rewarding.

you don't have to conquer k2

to feel that basic human impulse --

the impulse to talk about yourself.

check it out.

people talk about themselves all the time.

they talk about themselves

when they're having a conversation with other people.

they talk about themselves

when they're sharing information about themselves on social media

or taking pictures of the thing that they ate for breakfast

and posting it for the world to see.

that's a really good one.

there was a study

that looked at what people tweet about on twitter,

and they found that about 80% of what people are tweeting about

is just their own personal experiences.

why do we enjoy this so much?

as a neuroscientist,

diana thinks the answer may be hiding in our brains.

so she designed an experiment using an mri scanner

to see how talking about ourselves -- versus others --

changes brain activity.

picture it like a public-access talk show,

with diana taking the role of the interviewer...

is it rewarding to talk about yourself?

let's find out!

...and a ficus standing in for the scanner.

-hey, adam. -hey.

do you get excited to dress up for halloween?

diana asks her subjects

to respond to questions about themselves or other people

while showing them corresponding photographs.

does your dad like being photographed?

do you enjoy spending time in nature?

do you like being photographed?

do you enjoy having a dog as a pet?

for diana, the answers weren't important.

what mattered was

how her subjects' brains responded to the questions.

all of them activated the prefrontal cortex,

a region associated with higher thought.

but something else happened

when a subject answered questions about themselves.

diana saw activation in two brain regions --

the ventral tegmental area and the nucleus accumbens.

they belong to what neuroscientists call

the reward pathway.

so, we have these reward pathways in our brain

that motivates our behavior

by helping us to learn what things in the world

feel rewarding

that we need or want or desire, like food or sex.

the brain's reward system

is powered by a key chemical called dopamine.

a surge of dopamine can trigger pleasant feelings,

which motivate us to seek further rewards.

it's the same system that fires up

when people do drugs like cocaine

or eat chocolate.

so, like drugs, sharing can become addictive.

but why does the dopamine system activate

when we talk about ourselves?

humans have a fundamental need to belong

or connect with other people.

so, social connection and making friends

and interacting with people

are something that we're highly motivated to get.

so, being part of a group gets you more resources, food,

reproductive options than if you were by yourself.

self-promotion helps establish us

as members of a group.

and for hundreds of thousands of years,

being part of a group has been essential to our survival.

even when we can't see the other people in our group,

we still have the instinctual urge to promote ourselves.

part of the reason people share so much on social media

is because it activates the same sort of neural systems

as self-disclosing in person.

sharing stems from a deep evolutionary drive.

that's why it's so easy to get hooked on it.

diana wanted to know how easy it would be

for her subjects to kick the habit of over-sharing...

...so she tried bribing them.

what we were looking at is whether or not

people would kind of forego some extra monetary rewards

in order to answer a question about themselves.

this time, diana let her subjects decide --

talk about yourself and earn nothing

or get paid to talk about somebody else.

can you tell me about whether you or your friend

like spending time in nature?

money activates the dopamine system.

in fact, our neural wiring has taught us to chase it.

but they say money can't buy happiness --

at least, not as much happiness as you get

when you talk about you.

while some participants chose the money,

most turned it down.

we see that people place significant amounts of value

on answering questions about themselves

and significantly less value

on answering questions about other people.

it kind of really brought the point home

that sharing information is rewarding.

our compulsion to share

is part of our biological makeup.

but our biology could be the next target

in the assault on our privacy.

our most sensitive personal information

may already have been sold to the highest bidder.

which would you hate to lose the most --

your phone or your wallet?

if either one of these is stolen,

it's a total hassle.

your private information is exposed.

however, you can cancel bank cards,

wipe the data from your phone,

and change all of your passwords.

but there is something else you leave behind every day

that could be far more devastating to your privacy.

a single strand of hair

contains the most private information you have...

...your dna.

yaniv erlich is a former hacker

who used to break into banks to test their security.

now he's a computational biologist,

and he's concerned about the security

of a different kind of bank --

a dna bank,

which can store the individual genetic code

of hundreds of thousands of people.

he believes that hackers

will soon be able to break in to those biobanks

and steal our most valuable and most private asset.

a number of large-scale biobanks

offer you the opportunity to contribute your dna to science.

it just takes a simple cheek swab

to get the dna out of your mouth.

and then, in a matter of days with the current technology,

we can analyze your entire genome.

companies like 23andme and ancestry.com

will sequence your dna

and send you back information about your family tree

or whether you are at risk for certain inherited diseases.

and scientists are using

this huge database of genetic information

to develop new cures for a wide range of diseases.

so, with all these types of information,

scientists can really understand

how the vulnerability within the population

is affected by the dna material we have.

if the contents of your dna

were stolen and disclosed,

the consequences could be disastrous.

imagine being denied health insurance or losing your job

because your genes show

you're at high risk for a heart attack.

so biobanks say they make sure your dna remains anonymous.

to increase the security,

biobanks usually don't store your identifiers

together with your genetic material.

they will keep your name, telephone number, and address

totally separated from this information.

this way, no one knows what is the origin

of the genetic material that you gave.

but yaniv has found a serious flaw

in biobank security.

in fact, he's discovered that even those of us

who have never had our dna sequenced are at risk, too.

our dna is vulnerable to theft every single day.

just think about what happens when you get a haircut.

although dna is something very personal,

you shed it everywhere.

you go to the barbershop.

you get a shave,

you leave some of your dna on the blade.

you take a sip from a glass.

you have some of your saliva on the glass,

you leave behind some of your dna.

maybe if you're chewing gum or you smoke a cigarette,

you leave the cigarette butt behind.

you left some of your dna.

if a gene thief got ahold of your dna,

they could discover which inherited diseases you have,

whether you have a tendency

towards alcoholism or mental illness,

and threaten to reveal that information

to employers or insurers unless you pay up.

aah!

the key to being able to tie

a piece of anonymous dna to a name,

whether in a biobank or a barbershop,

is in the "y" chromosome.

if you're a male,

we can know more about your paternal ancestry

because you inherited a short piece of dna

called the "y" chromosome

that you just get from your father's side.

now, here is the funny thing about your "y" chromosome.

you get your surname from your father.

he got it from his own father.

and you got your "y" chromosome from the same path.

this creates a correlation

between "y" chromosome and surnames.

in men, the "y" chromosome

contains patterns of repeating letters of dna,

a genetic fingerprint

that passes from grandfather to father to son unchanged,

just like the surname does.

to prove that our genetic privacy is under threat,

yaniv pretends to be a gene thief.

he downloads an anonymous dna sequence from a biobank

and zeroes in on its unique "y" chromosome patterns.

then he log on to a genealogy database,

where people voluntarily upload their "y" chromosome sequences,

along with their names, to locate long-lost family.

that allows him to match the anonymous biobank dna

to a specific surname.

and since the anonymous biobank sequences

are tagged with the age and state of residence

of the person who supplied the dna,

a simple internet search reveals their identity.

he has done this successfully 50 times.

i was so shocked by the results

that i have to take a walk

to think about the implications of our method

to genetic privacy.

it means that if hackers can get

the identified genetic information

that is allegedly anonymous,

it means that we cannot promise,

we cannot guarantee full privacy,

and we need to seek a different way

to engage participants in these large-scale biobanks.

in the wrong hands, a single strand of hair

can ruin the life of the person who left it behind.

how can we shield ourselves from this privacy onslaught?

lock ourselves in our homes and never go outside?

sterilize every room we've been in?

one scientist thinks

there's only one way to save our privacy.

for him, the best defense is offense.

feels like pretty soon,

there won't be a minute of the day

when we aren't being watched.

any device you own could be hacked into

and used to spy on you.

so, what's the answer?

go completely off-grid?

maybe there's another way.

we could develop technology to know when we're being watched

and when we truly have privacy.

steve mann has worn a computer every day for the last 38 years.

in fact, he's been called

the father of wearable computing.

his ideas inspired better-known devices like google glass.

but back when he began,

his digital eyeglass was so bulky,

he was often the subject of ridicule.

so, 35 years of digital eyeglass,

and finally we see how the industry is catching on

to some of these concepts.

so i feel kind of vindicated after people laugh at me

for all the sort of stupid eyeglasses and crazy things.

steve, a professor at the university of toronto,

has a cult following among his students

as the original cyborg.

his digital eyewear is bolted to his skull.

his interest in using technology to augment what he could see

began when he was a kid.

then in the 1970s,

i started to notice these things watching us

and sensing us --

microwave motion detectors and burglar alarms

and stuff like that.

and i was wondering,

"well, why are all these machines spying on us?"

and today he runs an entire research team

dedicated to developing technology

that can sniff out when we're being surveilled.

so, this device will help you identify

what devices are recording your sound.

so, the lights over here move faster and bigger

near a microphone.

and then it locates the mike,

and that's how you can sweep bugs.

they have devices that can pick up radio waves,

including those from your cellphone.

so, the radio waves coming from my smartphone here,

for example --

if i block that with my hand, the wave is very weak.

see how weak that wave is when it's going through my hand,

and then, whereas if i hold it like this,

the wave is much stronger.

perhaps his most important invention

in this age of near total surveillance

is technology that can detect precisely

when you're being watched by a camera.

so, there's a camera inside this dome,

and we don't know which way it's pointing

because it's shrouded in this dark dome.

but the light here,

when it comes into the field of view of the camera, glows,

and when it goes out of the field of the camera,

it goes dim again.

and so you can see here it sort of paints out, if you will,

the sight field of the camera.

if i put my coat in front of it, my jacket, the bulb --

i haven't moved the bulb at all.

i've just blocked it with my jacket,

and when i unblock it, it glows.

most of us are used to seeing cameras everywhere.

but steve believes that if we knew when we were being watched,

we'd start asking more questions about who's watching and why.

it could be the police.

it could be a computer.

it could be artificial intelligence.

it could be machine learning. We often don't know.

many times, surveillance embraces hypocrisy,

wanting to watch and not be watched,

wanting to see and not be seen,

wanting to know everything about us,

but reveal nothing about itself.

to redress that balance,

steve is working to commercialize technology

to detect the zones where a camera sees us...

what he calls its veilance field.

ryan jansen is working with steve

on getting a veilance-field detector into a wearable device.

these are some glasses where i can see the veilance fields

from this surveillance camera.

so, what it does is pokes and prods at the optical field

until it figures out how much the camera is seeing.

so, you can really take this around

and measure a whole veilance field

from a surveillance camera.

what i'm excited about is to be able to finally see and know

how much we're watched,

know how much the watchers are watching us.

veilance fields

aren't always places you want to avoid.

sometimes you may want to be watched.

a lot of people who say, " you're into the sensing cameras,

so must be against cameras."

sometimes i'm walking home late at night in a dark alley

and there's somebody sharpening a knife

and somebody loading a gun down there,

i might say, "you know what?

i think i'd like to be watched,"

sort of say, "there's a veilance flux over there.

i think i'm gonna move towards the camera."

what i'm really against is the one-sided valence.

government or big business

use cameras to watch regular people.

but regular people rarely turn their cameras

on big business and government.

steve believes wearable devices like his digital eyeglass

can help us watch the watchers.

"surveillance" is a french word

that means "to watch from above."

when we're doing the watching,

we call that undersight, or sousveillance.

but steve has already discovered

that sousveillance can invite trouble.

recently, he walked into a fast-food restaurant

wearing his digital eyeglass

and was confronted by employees enforcing policies

that don't allow filming in their buildings.

hey!

despite the eyeglass being bolted to his skull,

the employees tried to remove it,

damaging it in the process.

the cameras want to watch but not be seen.

and, in fact, even if you photograph cameras,

you find very quickly people come running out to tell you,

"no cameras are allowed here."

and you say, "well, aren't those all cameras around here?"

"no, but those aren't cameras. They're surveillance."

steve believes that if we know when we're being watched

and if sousveillance becomes widespread,

we'll finally have the weapons we need

to fight back against the governments and corporations

that constantly peer into our private lives.

the goal is to create systems

that improve the quality of people's lives,

systems in which people are innately aware

of what's happening,

to create a society in which

sousveillance is balanced with surveillance.

one day, widespread digital eyesight

will merge sousveillance and surveillance

and transform society.

although someone may be watching you,

you can now do your own watching.

but what will a world where everyone is watched

and everyone is a watcher look like?

what will life be like in a world with no more secrets?

we stand on the brink of a new era.

governments and corporations

are peering into every corner of our lives.

and we are developing tools to watch the watchers.

so, will life in a world with almost no secrets

be a living nightmare?

or will the naked truth set us free?

futurist and science-fiction author david brin

thinks there is no point in trying to hide,

so he's putting it all on display.

in this modern era,

when eyes are proliferating everywhere,

with the cameras getting smaller, faster, cheaper,

more numerous every day,

the human reflex is to say,

"get those things away from me.

ban them."

but over the long run,

that approach is not only futile.

it also is kind of cowardly.

david has got used to the idea

that even private spaces aren't so private anymore.

he thinks the key to getting comfortable

is to look to the past.

after all, for most of human history,

we lived without privacy.

-thank you. -sure.

cheers.

our ancestors didn't have much of a concept of privacy.

families would crowd into single cottages,

knowing each other's business,

seeing everything that was going on.

the advantage was everybody knew your name.

there was some sense of solidarity.

but the olden times were no utopia.

the disadvantages were huge.

you were dominated

by the lord on the hill and his thugs

and by the local busybodies who knew everybody's business.

today, we have our own versions of these watchers.

you can think of the lord of the village

as the nsa or the fbi.

the busybodies are the media and your neighbors,

who can see almost anything you do.

david thinks it's with our fellow citizens,

not the government,

that the battle to reclaim our privacy must begin.

the first step is to make sure

people who are watching us and talking about us can't hide.

we're all so used to personal gossip,

where exchanging stories about other people is so natural

that we put up with

the filthier, more destructive aspects

as just being part of life.

what's going to bring this to a head

is what's happening online.

we all know about horrible crimes of bullying

that have taken place online, empowered by anonymity.

but we can use the tools of surveillance

to expose prying eyes.

the way to deal with the eyes is to spot them.

hey!

to find out who's looking and hold them accountable.

if we all look back at the watchers,

we have the power to change the way they behave.

it's a step towards what david calls the transparent society.

transparency can stamp out bad behavior

from nosy neighbors.

they won't be so quick to talk about you

if they know you could talk about them.

but it doesn't stop there.

it ripples all the way up our society.

2013 was the best year for civil liberties

in the united states of america in a generation.

that was the year

that the administration joined the courts

in declaring a universal right of citizens

to record their encounters with police.

it is empowering the good cops,

but it's empowering groups like black lives matter to say,

"what you do to us is what matters,

and now we can prove it."

a loss of privacy for those in power

can make society better.

in fact, to make the transparent society work,

david believes the government's right to secrecy

must be massively curtailed.

it should be able to keep secrets for a while,

like plans to arrest criminals or military invasions,

but nothing should stay secret forever.

any practical, tactical value to a secret

is going to decay over time.

let's say government agencies, corporations

can get five years of secrecy for free.

after five years,

you have to cache the secrets in a secure place

and pay money to extend it another five years.

it's for this reason that david supports

whistle-blowers like edward snowden.

they shine a light in the dark corners of government.

and in a free society,

their leaks ultimately make us stronger.

everything leaks.

not a month goes by

when something has not hemorrhaged

all over the internet,

getting headlines.

but somehow western governments

and western civilization keep surviving.

in fact, it makes us better.

now think about our enemies --

terrorists, tyrannical governments,

and criminal gangs.

to them, it's lethal.

the world is never going back

to the way it was just two decades ago.

eyes will be everywhere.

there will be no escaping them.

but if we change our behavior, we can keep the privacy we need.

privacy is essential to be human.

we're just going to have to defend it differently

and redefine it.

we will probably look back on the last couple of centuries

as a golden age of privacy,

a time before the age of almost total surveillance.

but there is an upside.

if we accept that we are going to be watched,

then governments and corporations

must accept the same.

we need the privacy of our bedrooms.

government needs the privacy of its war rooms.

beyond that, our society will be transparent.

and this loss of secrecy could herald a new age,

the age of honesty.

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