Naomi Brockwell on the Surveillance Accountability Act, Developer Arrests, and Why You Can't Opt Out

The federal government doesn't need a warrant to buy your location data, your financial records, or your private information from data brokers. The Surveillance Accountability Act wants to change that. In this Techlore Talks interview, Henry sits down with Naomi Brockwell, host of NBTV and president/founder of The Ludlow Institute. They discuss the bill, Naomi's three-pillar approach to fighting the surveillance state, why decentralization doesn't automatically provide privacy, and what you can actually do right now.

🔗 SOURCES & LINKS
• Surveillance Accountability Act: https://surveillanceaccountability.com
• Contact your rep (script included): https://surveillanceaccountability.com/support
• Naomi Brockwell TV: https://nbtv.media
• Naomi's 501(c)(3): https://www.ludlowinstitute.org

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Creators and Guests

Host

Henry Fisher

Runner, artist, musician and digital rights activist. Owner of Techlore

Guest

Naomi Brockwell

President & Founder, The Ludlow Institute

Editor

Tori

Techlore

What is Techlore Talks?

Techlore Talks brings you in-depth conversations with the experts at the forefront of privacy, security, and digital rights. Hosted by Henry Fisher, founder of Techlore and long-time digital rights educator, each episode features meaningful discussions with the people building, researching, and advocating for digital freedom.

From cybersecurity researchers and privacy tool developers to open-source advocates and digital rights activists—if they're shaping how we protect ourselves online, they're on this show.

Topics include: privacy tools and technologies, cybersecurity threats and defenses, open-source software, surveillance and digital rights, encryption, tech policy, and digital sovereignty.

New episodes released regularly. Subscribe and join the community at techlore.tech.

No one is doing the work.

This idea that, you know, I'll just explore privacy when I need it isn't going to cut it.

Privacy could be outlawed by the time.

Today, I'm super excited to have Naomi Brockwell on the channel.

We've been following each other's stuff for a long time.

We've been on Signal, but now she is putting out this Surveillance Accountability Act that

I really wanted to talk about, ask her some questions about it, and also put it in front

of your court.

If this bill passes, it would pretty much require the federal government to just get a warrant

before buying your location data, your financial records,

or your private information from data brokers.

So they actually have to go through the proper channels that are typically required.

Now, we also expand beyond that.

We talk about the bill itself, of course, what it does, what it doesn't do, and why it matters.

But we also go through her three-pillar approach to privacy advocacy,

why decentralization and privacy aren't the same thing and don't guarantee one another,

even though people treat them like they do,

the legal pressure that privacy advocates are facing in 2026

and why it can't just be about technology

and why she's still optimistic about the fight

and of course how you can get involved.

It was a very dense packed interview

and I think you guys are going to like this one.

Let's get into it.

All right, Naomi, I've had you on Signal now for a few years.

We've kind of teased doing something together for a long time

and I think now with this bill that you're trying to put forward

we finally had a really good reason.

We always had a good reason to bring you on

but we had a reason to no longer put off bringing you on.

So welcome.

We couldn't justify putting it off.

for sure. But this has been a long time coming and I'm absolutely delighted to be here. I love your

stuff. You guys are just such a force for good when it comes to biding the surveillance state

and teaching people about privacy. So thank you for everything that you do.

Yeah, you as well. And I remember like you've just blown up so much over the years because I

remember when I found you and you were smaller and I'm like, oh, this is pretty cool and pretty good.

And then boom, you just blew right by us. So it's cool to see. I'm glad that like we see so many

people getting traction. We're like one of the smaller people in the space is now on our end,

which is crazy because there's other large creators too. So it is cool to see this space evolve.

I think that watching this space has been really interesting because like people like you were

really trailblazers. You know, before anyone was sounding the alarm about the surveillance state,

you're out there creating content and teaching people how to protect themselves. And it is

exciting actually to see more people start to put out content because there's way too much ground

for any one person to cover.

And the surveillance state gets so much larger every single day.

Their tools get more advanced with the introduction of AI

into all of their surveillance machinery.

It's just getting harder and harder to cover all of the threats

that might be out there.

And I think that we need more people.

And we need not just creators, but we need individuals

to really start stepping up and participating in this privacy economy.

I don't think we'll win if we don't do that.

We have to kind of make this normal and make this like a mainstream ideal.

Yeah, and I definitely want to touch on this towards the end because I want to hear, I hear optimism when you're talking.

So I want to hear from you why you still have optimism and what people can do and the tangible things that maybe you can share with them by the end of the interview.

I just wanted to start and just touch on you for a second.

Why do you talk about privacy, surveillance, digital freedom?

Where did this start for you personally?

Yeah, I mean, it started, my channel really started as a cryptocurrency channel. I was very interested in Austrian economics. When Bitcoin came along, it seemed like alternative money could be a tool for freedom. I really like the separation of money and state and the idea that you might be able to have an alternative money that couldn't be shut down.

We've seen alternative monies exist throughout history.

And governments, if there's a choke point, don't like competition.

You know, they're thoroughly debasing the currency all the time.

And so, you know, if something alternative comes along, it tends to be shut down pretty quickly.

This was a decentralized infrastructure that I found super interesting.

So I started out focused on decentralized tech, this idea that what if we could have tech that didn't have choke points that could be targeted?

because we're seeing more and more censorship.

You know, it's not just like financial control.

It's actual like censorship and, you know, shutting down like gatekeeping sites, all that

kind of stuff.

So I got really interested in decentralized tech.

But then I realized and for me, it was kind of like the holy grail.

I was thinking, well, decentralized tech will save us.

That's all we need.

And I soon realized that like if we don't know how to use the decentralized tech privately,

if the government bans the tech, sure, the protocol itself might be like uncensorable.

or, you know, censorship resistant.

But if they know you're using it, they'll just target you.

They'll just go after individuals.

And so I realized, like, if we don't know how to use the internet privately, all this

amazing decentralized technology that was being built with Web 3.0 wouldn't be accessible

to anyone.

Like, we wouldn't be able to take advantage of it.

And so I wanted to see kind of this underground railroad of all this uncensorable technology

be built out and on order for us to actually make sure we could access it into the

future, privacy became a super big focus of mine. When I realized when I made that pivot and I was

like, oh my God, like they just target the individuals. It kind of started out as a thought

experiment. And this was years and years and years and years ago at this stage. But it kind of

started out like, oh, like if I needed to use the internet privately, could I? You know, I don't need

to. I have nothing to hide. I'm a normal person. And so then I just started kind of diving into it.

I was like, OK, if I needed to access this privately, could I?

And the more I dove in, I was like, wow, the surveillance state is incredibly like it's

pervasive in everything we do.

And opting out isn't as simple as like toggling a, you know, a user function.

And so I've been in that rabbit hole for years and years of this state.

You know, now I have a 501c3 dedicated to this because it became clear that this is an incredibly

like hard issue.

No one is doing the work.

The people who are building the tools are getting no support.

And this idea that, you know, I'll just explore privacy when I need it isn't going to cut it

because privacy could be outlawed by the time that comes around.

In fact, it almost surely will be.

They're already arresting privacy developers.

You know, I think today they just changed the Clarity Act to remove any protections for

people building decentralized tech, you know, before it was built in to say, you know, we

won't go after people building decentralized software as like a money transmitter.

They removed that. Politics isn't going to save us as far as I can see if we just leave it to the people who are currently doing the politics stuff. So we kind of need to fight the battle on all fronts at this stage and double down.

Yeah, one quick thing. There's a lot to unpack there, and I know you have limited time.

So normally I think I took notes and I would normally double down on a lot of things you covered.

But the one thing I do want to touch on is, I think, and you kind of allude to this, that people in a decentralized world just assume because something is decentralized, it means it comes along with privacy.

So do you mind just quickly touching on that misconception and how you see it and why that is maybe not always the case?

Oh, yeah, I would say it's rarely the case, actually.

and you take Bitcoin as an example. In Bitcoin's early years, and I was, you know, a victim to this

mentality as well at the time, there was this idea that because it's pseudonymous, all you had to do

was just not link your real world identity and you could remain private. And people don't understand

how many touch points link your real world identity. It's almost impossible to not link

your real world identity. The only question is, is someone going to come looking? And that's not a

robust safety strategy. You're just hoping someone doesn't want to, you know, de-anonymize you.

And so, yeah, decentralized tech, it's only in really the recent years that I've seen

a bit of a pivot and people start to really focus on this as the priority that it should be.

Again, we're so focused on the decentralized infrastructure of something. If there's no

choke point, we can't stop the system. And that's true. You can't stop the system. You can target

individuals everywhere and a system can keep running. I mean, you can throw the developers

in jail, the system will keep running. But individuals will not have the freedom to use

that system safely if they don't know how to use the internet privately. And that is the big

difference that people are just not thinking about. They're just thinking about availability

as enough. You know, like as long as it's available, that's all I need. No, you need to protect

yourself from those who don't want you using these things. So yeah, I see a lot of really bad privacy

leakage in the Web3 world. I'm seeing definitely a change in mindset now as more and more people

are focused on fixing that. Like there was a great thread today based on a video that came out

recently about the Kohaku wallet. So like the entire kind of Ethereum community is jumping on

board and explaining all the touch points where you're just leaking privacy all the time. So

an interesting change of pace now. It's just a question of, okay, now that people are interested,

can we ramp up fast enough to actually make up for lost time? Because the surveillance state has

been expanding so quickly. Privacy tech has not kept up. So now that people are starting to wake

up, can we hit the ground running and actually trying to make a dent? Yeah, it's been cool. You

know, I was doing marketing for CakeWallet. And so I started to see some of these emerging

technologies like silent payments for Bitcoin is now a larger discussed thing in this decentralized

world. We have MWeb for Litecoin. Monero's been there. I know Zcash is also something that you're

a big fan of. And so we have these tools that are starting to come up and are getting stronger and

stronger. So I'm hoping that continues to happen in a decentralized space. But I feel like in some

ways, like you said, this decentralization fights privacy sometimes. We see it's hard because to

make things more open and sometimes interoperable with different people, sometimes you have to

expose a little bit more data to make that happen.

So it's hard to do both.

But without getting too far down that rabbit hole, you started, or I don't know if you

started, so maybe you can explain this to me, but my understanding is you started with creating

content and building awareness for individuals.

But now you're talking more about politics, you're talking more about your 501c3 and these

other things that you're trying to do.

So do you mind kind of explaining the ways to target this?

So, you know, the way I'm hearing this is maybe education, policy, technology is kind

of like the three main things.

I think the Kallax Institute uses kind of a triangle.

Those are the three parts of the triangle.

Do you mind explaining kind of the areas that you see yourself and the things that you're

doing in those areas right now?

And maybe that leads into kind of the policy work that you're trying to get into.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think that's the great three pillars that you laid out.

I have like a kind of different categorization that I like to use as well, which is you've got legislation, you've got litigation and you've got technology.

And I've always been the biggest fan of technology just because I don't like the idea of having to kowtow to politicians to beg for rights that should be mine.

So if I can just like give people the tools for freedom today and they can just reclaim the freedom of speech and, you know, freedom to associate and financial freedom, that to me is like better than doing a 10 year policy battle where your, you know, fight is going to get watered down by people who don't understand the downstream consequences as it relates to freedom of what they're doing.

I just see technology as being really impactful.

And that shifted a little bit because now that the developers of privacy tools have started to be arrested, I kind of realized like, wow, like we need to be in the trenches fighting on all fronts.

So each of those three areas.

For people who don't know, do you mind expanding on those stories?

Because I know some people don't know what you're referring to.

Yeah.

So stories, for example, you've got Keanu Rodriguez is a great example.

his partner, Bill, who created the Samurai Wallet. And they essentially were like, it's insane. I

laugh because it hurts so much to hear this. They did nothing wrong. They were put in jail for being

an unlicensed money transmitter, for not registering as a money transmitter. Now,

Vinson, the regulatory agency in charge of regulating money transmitters, literally said

samurai is not a money transmitter. And yet the Southern District of New York arrested them and

threw them in jail for being an unlicensed money transmitter. I mean, it's egregious corruption.

And really throughout the whole trial, if you just look at all the talking points that were

brought forth, first of all, they were not allowed to justify why they built samurai and explain,

like, first of all, they weren't even allowed a motion to dismiss, right? They ended up taking

like a plea deal before this could even get in front of a jury because it was so clear that the

judge just would not let information be presented. And so they had this amazing motion to dismiss

where they had case law, they had Supreme Court precedent, they had all of these things saying,

if you just build a tool that doesn't make you a part of a conspiracy to do these illegal things,

this stuff has happened for forever. And just building this neutral technology,

it doesn't matter if you know theoretically whether it could be used by bad people for bad

things. It actually is irrelevant when it comes to case law and Supreme Court precedents. Anyway,

these people have been persecuted because they really were like staunch privacy advocates. And

that is like Roman Storm is another one who's currently, you know, fighting ongoing battles

about this, another developer with Tornado Cash. So there are all these people in primarily the

financial privacy space who are being targeted right now. But that's just because financial

space is so heavily regulated, right? You're going to see this just skyrocket and balloon

to cover all kinds of privacy areas in the next three years. So mark my words on that one. This

is absolutely going to expand. And it's expanded before. I mean, they've already gone after people

who've created like private telephones and things like that. Slightly different examples, but we're

going to see more and more entrance into that space. So from my perspective, as soon as you start

seeing these people involved in these litigation battles, that's a sign to me that we need to be

part of this kind of litigation battle, you know, either supporting their cases, helping them set

up better precedents. Because once you get a bad precedent, like you create neutral technology,

and you're liable for all the users who use that open source neutral technology,

like that's a terrible precedent. So we kind of need to be in the trenches fighting that.

And then on the legislative side, I also saw how easy it was in the last,

you know, especially the last few years, we've just seen politicians signing away our rights

every single day with these atrocious bills where they're like, yeah, we're just going to gatekeep

the internet. Now you have to have an ID to use a browser, you know, and the fact that they do it

with such ease and so quickly, they sign a thing and they're done. Like you can no longer have like

a free internet. Oh, now your operating system requires you to like verify your age before you

use it. Oh, your 3D printer will no longer actually be able to be used for decentralized means.

It's all going to be centrally controlled and they're going to block you building certain

things.

I mean, that for me was a giant warning sign where I'm like, OK, so we we need to be in

the legislative fight, too.

Like we need to be fighting in every single one of these battles.

And, yeah, it's going to be exhausting.

And, yeah, we're all going to be like just so sick of it by the end of it.

And it's going to be relentless.

And they have way more resources.

But we have no other option.

We have to do this because otherwise you're literally just saying, OK, too many of my

have been taken away. I guess I'll let them take the rest. It's like, no, that's not how it works.

You just keep fighting and you try to preserve every last freedom that you can. So I hope that

people are kind of getting like the bat signal and seeing it being like, okay, it's my call to

action. How can I participate in these three fights? Yeah, I want to ask you about now the bill.

But right before then, a question that came up, I just put out a video like an hour ago about

privacy doomerism.

Because I watched an MKBHD video yesterday

about Android's new launch from Google

and how they're calling it the biggest launch of all time.

And believe it or not, this is MKBHD.

This is a very popular tech channel

that has nothing to do with privacy.

Lots of comments are in there that are like,

oh my God, this seems like a privacy nightmare.

But on all of them, they're just littered with responses

saying, well, why are you on the internet, LOL?

Privacy was dead long ago.

I'm sure you see these on your YouTube channel.

We've been getting a lot more of them in the last few years.

And so for me, there's this doomerism in these last few years that people feel quite helpless.

So before you touch on the bill, why are you optimistic?

Why should anyone bother even caring or trying?

You're speaking as if, well, we still need to fight.

But if someone's listening to this and they're going, I don't know what to fight for,

what would you tell that person before we talk about what you want to do?

Fight for your freedom. Fight for your rights.

Fight for a world where your choices aren't controlled by a select few

who happen to control the most powerful technology and surveillance apparatus that we've ever seen

in history. First of all, we have reason to be optimistic. Privacy tech has never been better.

We have never seen such cutting edge privacy tooling out there. All of this R&D into homomorphic

encryption and zero knowledge proofs and like all this stuff is incredible. Just even the idea of

Web 3.0 is incredible. This idea that we could have all of these things and communicate with

zero gatekeepers and like you create rails that can't be shut down like this stuff is so incredible

for me the issue is that not enough people are using it not enough people know it exists not

enough people understand it and simultaneously like governments are trying to shut down a lot of

it because they see this as a tool for freedom um and so it means that it's going to be a hard

battle but it's definitely not over for me i see technology as it's neutral you know and that

includes AI. A lot of people feel the doomerism because they see AI as being largely hijacked for

surveillance, which I agree, it has been like overwhelmingly hijacked for surveillance technology.

AI itself is neutral when it comes to whether it could be used for good or bad. You can absolutely

build incredible privacy tooling that makes it so much easier for you to protect yourself with AI.

So for example, you know, you might have something on your machine and you use AI to analyze all the

telemetry leaving your device and figuring out, okay, who was spying on me and then getting the

AI to help you plug it. You've never had that capability before in history. Unless you're a

developer, you couldn't do that. But now you can. Even Mulvatt, I think, released a feature,

DAI TA Data. I believe it uses AI to add noise so that it's hard for people to do

inspection in the traffic. That's a small example. Yeah. White noise is another great example.

An individual can't create enough white noise to really fuel these systems. But

convincing AI can, especially in a world of deep fakes. So of course, they can figure out how to

create traffic and things that can be indistinguishable. So using AI to like, at the end of

the day, AI is essentially powerful compute. And whether you love it or hate it, it's not going

anywhere. Like this is invading every single thing we do. So you can either leave that powerful

compute in the hands of your enemies who are trying to surveil and track everything you're doing.

Or you can say, OK, I may not like this, so maybe you do like it.

But regardless, I'm going to pick up the gauntlet and I'm going to figure out how to use this to protect myself.

You can even use this like for offense instead of defense.

They're like there are a million ways that you can use this powerful tool to your advantage.

So that goes for all of this tech.

The way I see it, people are super dumeristic.

That's a new word.

Because AI really put this front and center for a lot of people.

You know, you've had governments and large corporations with incredible computing power

for a really long time.

And you've had data brokers that have been collecting everything we've been doing for

a really long time.

And they're analyzing this and using inference to figure out and like predictive actions and

capabilities and target us better.

Like these tools have been in the hands of like elite few for a long, long time.

And we've never like paid attention to it.

You know, most people have no idea it's going on or how advanced this stuff was.

And then suddenly we have tools where you can literally run a 7 billion parameter model

on your local hardware, your local computer.

And suddenly you have comparable tech to what only giant governments and corporations used

to have.

That's empowering.

That's a reason to like rejoice because what we're seeing is not like AI just came onto

the scene and it's destroyed everything.

It's like, no, suddenly individuals have the same power in their hands as other people have

previously been using, you know, to target them and to oppress them.

This is great to democratize this technology so that it can't be used as a tool for abuse.

So often we see in history when like governments or corporations have a stranglehold over certain

technology, it does become a weapon for abuse.

And that has been trending in that direction with like privacy disappearing for a long

time.

Suddenly, we all have incredibly powerful compute in our back pocket, and we should use that power.

We should lean into that power.

It's not a time for doomerism.

It's a time to learn how to leverage this technology to save the world, essentially.

Yeah, I recently had one of Mozilla's higher-up individuals from Mozilla to just talk about their new AI stuff,

which was deeply controversial, as you could expect, because they're rolling out AI features in Firefox.

But his whole point is, do we really want Google and a few other AI companies to be the only people at the table talking about how we integrate AI in our browsers?

And they only roll out AI features that integrate with their AI models.

So he's like, we're building the alternative where you can hook in using any AI model.

It can be open source.

It can be, you can bring your own model.

So I went in knowing it would be a bit controversial, but I think it's a good testament to how this is, you know, that's someone who's kind of showing up and trying to see how this can be used for good.

Because otherwise it's just dominated by bad people.

And on that note, people can't throw their hands up in the air.

That whole doomerous culture of like,

well, then throw out your devices, get off the internet.

It's like, that won't save you.

Like flock cameras are everywhere.

Like throwing out your devices won't save you

as you walk down the street and get captured

by every CCTV in the region.

That's why you go in a forest.

Yeah, in a forest.

Well, now we've got satellites with high resolution imagery

and drones that will find you.

And like, you can't opt out, guys.

Like, gone is the era where you can be a Luddite and say, okay, I won't participate.

You're forced to participate.

So now you have to decide, like, which weapon are you going to put in your arsenal?

It's just opting out just isn't an option anymore.

That's a good way to put it.

Your bill.

What have you done?

All right.

What happened?

So Ladlow Institute helped create a bill called the Surveillance Accountability Act.

And this bill basically just says what the Fourth Amendment already says, which is if you need to do a search on someone, you need a warrant.

And it's like seems very uncontroversial.

Yet we reached out to like over 200 offices and only two people, you know, signed on to it.

We work closely with Massey's office actually to kind of format this.

And really what this comes down to is this fact that warrant requirements were set up.

And if you're like not from America, basically, you know, there's founding fathers, you have

like a revolution and you have people really angry because they're fighting against the

British crown and the king's men.

They basically had this era of tyranny where there's such abuse of power, where they're

using things called general warrants to literally just like go into people's homes, rifle through

their stuff, try to find any kind of seditious material.

So like if you criticize the crown, they would just go through everything in your life until

they could find whatever fragments to piece together whatever narrative they wanted.

And when you have enough access to someone's life, you can piece together whatever narrative

you want.

So this was being abused in Britain.

So when the founders were writing the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, they were like, okay,

well, how do we stop this super invasive intrusion into people's lives so that they can have

the freedom to live comfortably and safely and not feel like they have to look over their

shoulder?

And so that they could exercise freedom of speech so that they can criticize the crown and like not feel like they could be in danger for doing that.

The Fourth Amendment said, OK, no more general warrants.

If you want to do a search, it has to be specific.

You have to say the person and the place and what you expect to find.

You basically have to make a case for probable cause.

And then they bring in a second branch of government and they have to make that case to the judiciary in front of a judge.

And the judge has to agree with you that you have enough probable cause to invade this person's

life, to intrude and do this search. And so the Fourth Amendment says like no unreasonable searches

and seizures and then lays out this kind of warrant requirement. So fast forward to 2026,

the judiciary is nowhere in sight. There's zero accountability and no one's getting warrants

anymore. They're literally just buying giant data sets from data brokers and searching them at will.

They're literally just going to Google and saying, hey, search your database, intrude

into all of this person's private things.

No probable cause at all.

No reason.

They're going on fishing expeditions.

And this is like really, really scary.

This is exactly the thing that leads to abuse of power, where if you embarrass the government,

suddenly you could become a target and someone might go through your life with this unfettered

access and piece together a narrative that they want to put together in order to target

you.

So this bill basically says like enough is enough.

You know, we have to stop pretending that searching Google's database isn't a search.

We have to stop pretending that, you know, a query of your own database that you bought

from a data broker isn't a search.

So it's a fine search.

It says a search is a meaningful investigation of someone.

And, you know, if you want to do a search on someone, if a government agent wants to

do a search on someone, they need a warrant.

And we're very careful in this.

We don't want to stop law enforcement doing their job, right?

We want to catch bad people.

And I hear so much pushback from people who are like, you know, don't get in the way of

law enforcement.

Of course, we want to catch bad people.

It's like, right.

And this bill doesn't stop that.

It just says they need probable cause, which is exactly what the Bill of Rights says, you

know, is baked into this fundamental freedoms of the founding of America that you don't want

abuse of power and you want to enable the individual to protect themselves.

So it says that and then it also has this other part, the accountability part of this that says if they don't get a warrant, you could sue them, which is huge because so often you have all kinds of like qualified immunity and like no pushback when people with power abuse that power and break the law.

And so this says, no, you can be sued.

An individual has a private right of action and they can actually sue you if you do not do this.

So making people like individually liable was a big part of this.

And that's basically the bill in a nutshell.

Yeah, it's been a problem for years on Surveillance Report, my weekly news podcast.

I'd say almost weekly, if not every other week.

There's some story about some court case or some situation where law enforcement or the federal government

essentially captured user data without ever getting a warrant for it.

And they just tap on a third-party data broker.

They tap on a big tech company.

They tap on a private company that is allowed to collect it

and then they don't actually go through the proper channels

that they're supposed to go through.

So this is a widespread problem.

Our audience probably knows very well about this.

Now, you mentioned people had some pushback regarding the,

I guess I could see someone, right?

And I'm sure you're not disillusioned

by when you put these kind of things forward.

It could sound like, oh, they don't want to catch bad guys,

but you're being very direct about,

we still want to catch bad guys.

But now that person might ask, so what is the point of this?

So do you mind speaking a little bit to what are some of those concerns that you have, something tangible that you can speak to to say, hey, no, actually, we want to catch bad people.

We just want to stop X from happening.

So what is X for that person to understand?

Yeah, I mean, X is abuse of power, which we see routinely.

When you don't have a paper trail, when you don't have accountability or oversight, that

like always leads invariably to abuse of power.

So one of the things I think it was in the 40s, the Supreme Court had a great quote because

like sometimes we think of law enforcement or we think of government as like this monolithic

entity.

Government is a single thing.

It's not.

We have three distinct branches of government and sometimes they work at odds.

Sometimes they work in unison.

But the idea is to spread out that power instead of centralizing it to try to avoid abuse of power.

With warrant requirements kind of out the window, we've lost some of those like guardrails.

And that's just going to lead to terrible abuse of power.

Like you should never have law enforcement deciding on the limits of their own power.

And why is that?

Like, let's presume that there's never corruption.

Let's presume that no one ever like chooses to abuse power or do bad things.

and they're all saints. I mean, obviously, that's a terrible assumption. But even giving that benefit

of the doubt, law enforcement have their own agenda. Their purview is to solve the case,

to close the loop, to put the dots together and figure out where they lead. Like they have a

narrative in their head. And so what was so important about this guardrail was to make them

actually have to slow down and think carefully about this. So they just don't go after innocent

people. You know, there are so many cases where innocent people go to jail because it seems like

all of the evidence leads up to it. But it turns out to be wrong. The narrative that they put

together, it seems to make sense, but it didn't make sense. It was incorrect. So this idea that

law enforcement should have someone else judging the intrusion into people's life is super important.

They have this agenda, solve the case. The judiciary is meant to be the one that is not

like super involved in this. They are detached. They're somewhat neutral in theory, and they

should be able to look at this and say, is that a justified intrusion into someone's life? And that

is super important. They are weighing what law enforcement wants to do, which is get bad guys

with, okay, well, how do we do that while protecting individual rights and, you know,

civil liberties, all of that sort of thing. Now, in the forties, the Supreme Court said,

They actually referred to law enforcement, you know, this competitive enterprise of ferreting

out crime because they recognize that, yes, it is often competitive.

You know, if you catch the bad guys, you'll get a promotion.

Like there's a lot of inbuilt incentives into this, which is why you want this detached.

And they called it a detached and neutral magistrate to weigh in.

So that's the idea of the warrant requirement.

It's not because these are bad people necessarily.

It is just because they have their own agenda.

And it's super important to have someone who's not like day to day involved in this, you know, maniacal drive to like find the bad person.

You want them to have like an outsider perspective to say, OK, you really want to intrude on this person's life.

What's your probable cause? What do you expect to find? Why is this person in particular?

And this not only stops abuse of power, but in theory, it definitely curtails it because someone has to make their case.

They can't just say, this person said something bad about the king, and therefore, you know,

we've got to go through this stuff.

Like, no, the judiciary is meant to be there to be like, okay, we'll sound this out.

But it also creates a paper trail.

The number of searches that go on right now where there's zero accountability whatsoever

and zero paper trail of this, like with the FISA courts, for example, you know, hundreds

of thousands of queries into these databases where the FISA court like found that what

seven of them were legitimate in one of the most recent audits. That's insane, right? That sort of

lack of accountability needs to be stopped. So that's kind of what we want to put guardrails

back on to protect. So let me try to summarize this. You can throw it back at me if you want to

change it. So pretty much in law enforcement and just the way this government, not just a single

government, as you expressed, but the people who make up the government, they have a job to keep

people safe and catch bad people and make sure everything's moving accordingly. Pretty much what

you're saying is that the current ratio of the amount of searches they're doing isn't actually

corresponding to the people that are actually doing something wrong, and a lot of innocent

people are getting caught in there. And so would you say it's accurate that your bill is trying to

help correct that ratio so that there is more accountability and that the number of people that

they're going after is actually equivalent to the people actually doing something wrong by the law.

Yeah. And it's not just a ratio. It's qualitative as well. So quantity is a huge thing. We just have

unfettered access to our lives and infinite searches because they're querying their own

databases. They're just buying the data instead of ever getting a warrant. So it's like it is

quantitative, but it's also qualitative in that they have to prove themselves before intruding.

You know, it's not just the hassle of having a government intrude in your life that you

protect against.

It's the power that comes from information.

And you don't want to just have unfettered power in the hands of like the most powerful

entities of society.

You don't want to just keep giving them all the information in the world because that

entrenches their power.

You know, that gives them the ability, in theory, to go after opposition party, go after

independent media, go after investigative journalists and whistleblowers and dissidents,

protest movements, shut down protest movements in advance. If you just have unfettered access to all

the information about someone's life, you can preemptively decide who is going to be a problem

and silence them in advance, right? So it's just a huge amount of power. So what this requirement

does is it says, no, it has to be qualitative. You have to have probable cause. You can't just have

unfitted access at any time you want, you have to actually make a case that they committed a crime.

Why do you think, because I think people actually really, this has been a guarantee for hundreds of

years now, that law enforcement can't just walk into your house. I think a lot of people know and

understand, oh, I can say you need a warrant to just enter my house. Why do you think the digital

realm is different? Why do you think people hold a different standard? And nowadays, you can actually

get a lot more sensitive data digitally than you ever could from just walking into someone's house,

yet people seem to have a lower standard for that. Do you have any speculation on why that is?

Yeah, it's a few reasons. First of all, digital surveillance is not visible to the eye. You know,

it's not like someone's pounding on your door and you get that physical interaction with them.

You know, when that happens, it's very clear when a government is intruding into your protected

space. When they're querying Google's database and going through all of your emails from the last 15

years and, you know, checking all of your private messages and checking, you know, the

flock cameras to see everywhere you've traveled and like all of this stuff, they could do it

without you even knowing.

And that's huge power that they get from getting access to that information without you even

knowing, realizing that the scales have been tipped away from you.

And so just the fact that they're not aware of it is a big reason for a long time.

And second, you know, we set up these atrocious precedents in the court.

So we decided on this thing called the reasonable expectation of privacy test.

And this was set up in a case called CATS.

And this was in the 70s where, you know, it's pre-internet, right?

And in the CATS case, they basically, it was a case about a telephone booth and the government

like bugs the booth.

And it was a case that said, okay, was this person in the booth protected under the Fourth

Amendment?

And it turns out that, yes, he was, because there was a reasonable expectation of privacy when they went into this glass enclosure, even though it was a public space, this idea that they were still protected.

Now, how do you decide whether something is reasonable?

Like, what is someone's expectation of privacy?

How do you answer that question?

So then the courts came up with this way to answer it called the third party doctrine.

And they said, OK, well, if you give your data to a third party, you've given up your

Fourth Amendment protections over it.

You can no longer reasonably expect to have privacy.

Now, this, again, was in the 70s, where it was pertaining to very narrow types of records,

very limited information.

One of them was bank records.

One of them was telephone records.

And that precedent, unfortunately, has been held by the Supreme Court all the way to today.

and the internet runs entirely on third parties.

Every single thing we do runs on third parties.

So we went from this precedent that was set up where it's like,

okay, a person understands the telephone number,

the telephone company knows which number you dialed.

So they reasonably gave up their privacy.

We're presuming that an individual when they pick up their phone

understands that like, okay, so the CCP is in our critical infrastructure.

They're going to be collecting my data.

Verizon's going to collect it.

They're selling it to third parties.

They're going to take that data.

I've got all of these like femto cells that are intercepting the call to track my location.

They're like rogue cell towers that are being sold to like the mafia in some other country.

Like no one is picking that up and saying by dialing this number, I'm voluntarily giving

up my right to privacy because it's going through third party rails.

It's just insane.

So the Supreme Court absolutely needs to and the courts in general need to update their

idea of what a reasonable expectation of privacy. No, the average person is not making these

calculations before they use the digital world. Most of them don't even understand what is going

on. They have no idea how this technology works. And for the courts to argue that they have like

voluntarily given up their right to privacy in this space is really crazy to me. I mean,

I'll give you a different example, right? If I sign a contract with a company and that company says,

I'm going to protect your data and I'm never going to share it with anyone, even the government,

and you have a reasonable expectation of privacy in this. I would, as a logical person, presume

I have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Like we literally just signed a contract that says,

I'll protect my privacy. The courts say that that contract is completely irrelevant when it comes

to Fourth Amendment law. They say they disregard it. They say it doesn't matter what contract you

have. That was a third party and we set up a president in the 70s. And so we're just going

to stick with that. That's atrocious. We need to update this for the digital age. We need to

understand that digital data is property. You know, when I give my photos to Google,

I am not giving up the right to that photos. They're still my photos, you know. And so there's

this idea of bailment, which is another way to address this issue, right? Like when I give my

keys to the valet, that's a bailment. I don't give away the right to my car because I handed my keys

to a third party. I expect they'll give those keys back. When I take my dog to the kennel,

That's a bailment.

You know, they're going to give my dog back, right?

I didn't hand over the rights.

So if I give my data to a company and we sign a contract saying they will protect the privacy,

I have not given up my right to that data.

It should be specified in the contract and protectable under that contract.

But that's just not the way we do it right now.

So we have terrible court precedents and lack of awareness for my very long-winded answer

for like why we, you know, why this has become so normalized today and people throw their

hands up in the air and just think, well, of course the government can get access to everything in the

digital space. Like, no, that's not the way it should be. And we need to fix it before the balance

of power tips so far away from the individual that, you know, we can't reclaim our freedoms.

Right. And so how does, you know, the bill that you're proposing, what does realistic success look

like for you? I know we talked a little bit backstage and you were kind of sharing, well,

you have different expectations than maybe getting this passed right now, but it sounds like you have,

you know, you're planting seeds. So do you want to maybe speak to that?

Yeah, this is a multi-year effort. So right now, no politicians are getting like constituents

calling them to say, I'm a single issue voter. My issue is privacy, right? It just doesn't happen.

And so that's why it's so easy for these politicians to sign away our rights.

That's why when it comes to the next age verification bill, they won't hesitate because

they have lobbyists at their door every day saying how much children need to be protected and how,

you know, these handcuffs on the internet will help. They have no one from the privacy space

calling them and saying, I will not vote you back into power if you get rid of my privacy.

So through this multi-year effort, obviously, it's going to be really hard to get this bill passed

because no politician currently supports it. As I said, like we've reached out to over 200 offices

and even though everyone was like, oh, well, this is important, but not my top priority. We need to

make it their top priority, right? Politicians really care largely about being reelected. It

sounds very cynical, but I have a very cynical view of politics. So if we can tell them that

actually there is, you know, their future political career on the line, if they actually don't

reflect the will of their constituents, there's power in that. So I would say the biggest thing

that we could do right now, I would love to see more co-sponsors for this bill. So like call your

representative, ask them to co-sponsor the Surveillance Accountability Act. That would be

a huge thing. From there, we start to get the narrative rolling. You know, it's just about

making officers aware that privacy is a big issue for more people than they realized. They don't

come to that awareness unless we're really vocal about it. Yeah. And I guess this is a perfect

segue into kind of the last section of this interview for me, which is practical things for

everybody. It's going to touch on some things you covered earlier as well. I think my first question

is, I think at the very beginning you said politics won't save us. And right now you just

said you're cynical about politics and yet we're also kind of counting on politics a little bit

here to try to help us. So do you mind sharing this difficult relationship and how you kind of

grapple with that? Yeah. So I used to be a completely like don't even bother with politics

person, like more of an agorist who's like, just reclaim your freedom through tech.

You know, you can do it today instantly.

Which is common.

We see this in our community a lot as well.

Yeah, but I think we need to fight on all fronts now, honestly, because it is so easy

for politicians to just sign away privacy.

And so I want to see pushback.

I want to see these people who are just gabbling with our freedom be held accountable for this.

I want to see people push back against them.

I'm kind of disgusted by a lot of the stuff that goes on.

And I want to see these people, like they shouldn't go to bed at night thinking,

I did a really great thing, you know, making all these people vulnerable by

mandating the collection of their data in these databases that will end up being hacked by people

and end up all over the dark web.

And then they'll have someone do a wrench attack at their front door.

I don't want them to have this false sense that they did good in the world

by eliminating privacy in society.

I want them to understand that they have paved the way to one of the most dystopian futures

could possibly imagine if we don't course correct. So I want to see people reach back out to them.

I want to see people voice their support for privacy legislation so that they understand that

people care about this stuff and maybe they will think twice. The way I see it is that tech will

be the thing that saves us, but we need to slow down the rapid expansion of the surveillance state.

We need to at least be trying to slow that movement. It's going to keep continuing in

that direction, but we need to make it move slower. And we can do that to buy us time because

the tech, the proliferation of tech tools isn't there yet. We need to get it there. And so we need

all of this like steamrolling head with mandated ID verification to like really take a backseat.

So I have a complicated relationship with politics. And I would say that politics alone is not going

to save us. And ultimately, politics will not be the thing that saves us. You know, we're only

heading in one direction with that. But fighting the political battle can help save us by buying us

time for all of these other battles that I think will ultimately be the tools for freedom that we

can rely on. Yeah, I get the comment constantly. And I've been getting it for years now, which is

people are like, I don't know why I even bother talking about these bills or anything, because

people say it doesn't matter, it's all about the tools,

and then vice versa, you get people on both angles.

But I like that you take a very nuanced kind of middle ground.

There is a place for both of them, especially right now.

Now, there's two things, because I've been doing a lot of coverage

for age verification, chat control, etc.,

all these different problems.

They perform very well on YouTube.

It resonates with people, people get passionate about this,

people are getting involved.

But I still see two overwhelming comments I wanted to ask you about.

The first one is, we talked about doomerism already from the privacy angle, but I see equal doomerism for this whole phrase, which is contact your reps.

A lot of people hear this advice, they go, well, they're not going to listen to me.

So why am I going to bother?

How would you address that comment, which I'm sure you see a lot too as a response to this, to what you're trying to do?

So I'm going to give you a peek behind the curtain of how laws get passed.

It's total political game.

It is all about, you know, leveraging positions and agreeing to sign on to this thing so that you can get your thing.

But ultimately, the end game is one thing and it is re-election.

You may have like a handful, a smattering of people who are in politics just for, you know, fighting for what they truly believe in.

Those people are few and far between.

Some would argue that maybe they don't exist at all, but they're definitely rare.

Politicians want to get re-elected.

There are two ways that a politician can get reelected. One of the main ways, which I would say almost everyone does, is just campaign contributions. They'll literally really give you a price. If you go to an office and sign on to this bill, they'll basically say, okay, well, that'll be $30,000. And of course, they don't phrase it so bluntly, but that's the gist of it.

you need to give $30,000 as a lobbyist to their next campaign in order to actually get this passed.

And if you can offer that support, they might vote, agree to vote for your bill, which is just

horrendous. Now, the route that I went was not that route because we're a tiny 501c3 non-profit

in the privacy space and obviously don't like, you know, have money to just be giving to politicians.

And even if we did, like, it just seems so gross.

The other way that politicians can get reelected other than campaign contributions is their

constituents.

If constituents do not vote for them or tell them this is a single issue and I will not

vote for this, that gets them worried as well.

So actually, there is tremendous power because politicians are so preoccupied with re-election.

There's tremendous power in voicing your opinion and saying, you cannot vote for this.

I will not vote you in.

I'm a single issue voter.

You know, if you vote for this ID verification law or, you know, I will vote for you if you

are someone who respects my privacy.

Here is a bill that will really protect privacy in the digital age.

I want to see you vote for it.

I want to see you co-sponsor it.

So these things do make a difference.

I don't think that we should feel that our actions don't have any impact.

Basically, if you get like, you know, 10 people to call a specific rep, that's enough to at least

get that rep briefed, you know, that, okay, 10 people talked about this issue and it'll be part

of their briefing. You get like a hundred people call up, like that's a bigger briefing right there.

You get like a thousand people in a district call up and suddenly they're like, okay, this seems like

a really big issue for our constituents. Maybe this should be part of our stump speech during our

re-election campaign. Like in aggregate, we have huge power and we should not forget that. Sometimes

as an individual, it feels overwhelming in this fight because it's David against Goliath, but

ultimately in aggregates, like in solidarity with each other, we have huge power. So we actually need

people to activate and, you know, take a stand on this stuff and voice their opinion. If we all

lie down flat and just say like, okay, you know, I like, there's nothing I can do. Why even bother?

We do, all of us, and we do, like, each of our neighbors and our family and our friends, we do them all a disservice.

We understand that privacy is important, so we need to vocalize that with these people who, like, decide on these policies, for better or worse, on all of our lives.

Yeah, beautifully stated.

The second overwhelming thing I see, and then we'll kind of get into the last practical tips here, very common on these videos I make.

Oh, my gosh, I see so much finger-pointing, right?

It's like, oh, those dirty Democrats are behind this.

Those rascal Republicans, those crazy centrists are the ones behind this.

So can you maybe shed light on kind of the partisan slash bipartisan angle of,

because people hear politics and they instantly think, oh, there must be a side to this.

So can you speak to where this bill fits into that,

if this bill is supposed to be partisan or bipartisan and how you personally view these kind of debates?

Yeah, privacy is a universal right.

Privacy protects everyone in society. It doesn't matter which way you vote. You need privacy

because if one day someone comes to power who doesn't like someone like you, privacy is the

only thing that's going to protect you. So I think that like overwhelmingly this issue is bipartisan.

And we see that because every time, you know, if the Republicans are in power, you know,

all the Democrats are pro-privacy. And when the Democrats are in power, all the Republicans are

word privacy. It blows my mind. And what we see year after year is the surveillance state gets

bigger and bigger. It does not matter which side is in power. Surveillance powers are going through

the roof. It is not just a matter of policies, which are just expanded. We've got the Bank

Secrecy Act regime, which just gets expanded year after year. We have Pfizer 702 that just gets

reauthorized every single time. We have like the advances in technology where we're not even

deciding legislation or litigating this stuff. You know, we're just quietly implementing it.

So now we have like drones surveying properties and we have flock cameras tracking everywhere you

go. And we have governments putting SDKs in apps to monitor your movements and harvest your

social graph and access things that like the average person has no idea they're getting access

to. So surveillance capabilities are skyrocketing year after year. It does not matter who is in power.

And I think that all of this partisan politics is such a distraction, in my opinion. It's like,

look over here, guys, while we just slowly grow the surveillance infrastructure year after year.

And honestly, it's so tempting to every regime that comes to power because it seemed dangerous

when it's in their hands, but now it's in your hands. So you can use it as a tool for good.

And you have to kind of remind these people, it's not about whether or not you're going to use this as a tool for good.

It's whether you are implementing this systemic regime that has the possibility to eliminate freedom for all future generations.

Like, do we want our children to grow up in a world where they no longer have the option of privacy?

Because that is what we are doing right now.

Every administration that comes into power thinks it's OK now because we control the keys.

no they are setting up a landscape that will be inherited by someone else and one day this is a

ticking time bomb and one day someone will come into power and it's game over there will be so

much surveillance we will not have opposition parties that can push back we will not have

whistleblowers talking about corruption and accountability we will not have investigative

journalists speaking truth to power we won't have like any of these self-correcting mechanisms in

society anymore because they can't function safely because no one has a private space to retreat to

anymore to protect themselves. So yeah, it's a completely bipartisan issue. People should not

be distracted by whoever happens to be in power at any given time. This is systemic and we need to

make a change. Yeah. And so if people are hearing this and they go, all right, I'm inspired,

I'm going to get involved. Can you just give them the quick ways to do that? As easy as possible.

And of course, we'll try to leave things linked in the description and show notes, whether it's

your bill or just generally speaking. For sure. I would say go to

surveillanceaccountability.com. On the support page there, we have a link that shows you how to

find your rep if you don't know who your rep is. We have a script you can literally copy and paste

that says co-sponsor this bill. That would be a huge support. That is a big thing people could

do right now. And really, as I said, we don't expect this bill to pass. This is a multi-year

effort for us. And a lot of these bills, they will die in committee. They might sit there for a while,

But we need to get this information to politicians.

We need to tell them privacy is a value because this doesn't just affect this bill.

It affects every surveillance bill that comes across their desk, that they decide whether

or not they're going to vote for.

They need to know that we care about privacy.

So please reach out to your rep and tell them that you care about privacy.

You know, I think just constantly trying to proliferate privacy tools.

So all of the great channels out there like yours, you know, if you have a video that you

that you love, that teaches people how to integrate one of these privacy tools into your life,

share it with people, maybe handhold them, try to get them onboarded on this. We need to onboard

people to these tools. If we don't support the privacy ecosystem and give them our business,

we're basically giving our money to their competitors who are just like harvesting us

for data. So we either support the people trying to build a better future or we're supporting their

competition. So like with our choices, I really do think we need to just get more involved in the

privacy ecosystem.

Yeah, really well said. And there's also another hybrid option out there too. I know professionals

out there really don't like some of the open source tools, whether it's image editing. I've

seen a really good thing out there, which is if you're paying for Adobe, even if you're not going

to use the open source alternatives, pay the same amount to the open source alternatives.

Oh, I like that.

They can still eventually someday maybe compete, right? So that way you can still contribute to

both. You don't have to choose one or the other, but obviously in the perfect world, we're doing

only the better ones, right? I'm going to do that. That's not something I do. I pay for all the free

tools that are out there. I will donate to them because we need to keep this sustainable for them.

But now I'm going to start implementing what you just said. Even if I don't use them,

can I contribute to a world where one day they might be good enough that I can use them?

Yeah. Well, Naomi, it's been awesome to have you on. I'd love to have you back on at some point.

You're awesome. And I know a lot of our audience love your work. And I'm just really grateful to

have you not I mean you're still doing an incredible coverage on your channel with the

content but now you're even spreading a little bit wider and covering other places to be and I know

it's much appreciated and so yeah I just want to thank you for your work and thank you for everything

you've done over the years yeah and thank you too for all of the work that you do I I'm so grateful

that channels like yours exist you do such tremendous good teaching people about these tools so thank you

so much for having me yeah thanks Naomi I want to give a huge thanks to Naomi for the time and for

the work, both public facing and the legislative groundwork that doesn't make it onto a YouTube

video.

So I know she's covered videos about it as well.

I'll leave her channel down in the description if you want to check out more of her and what

she's doing.

There's a huge overlap in the stuff that we talk about.

And of course, I'm going to leave links to the bill that will also have instructions to

contact your representatives.

All of that's going to be down in the description that can take five minutes.

And it's part of the fight that we always talk about and can very much move the needle.

This is one of my favorite interviews, and I really hope that you all took as much from

it as I did.

And that's why I like running this podcast.

And so if you guys like this kind of stuff

and you want to see more of it,

you can join the Techlorians down in the description.

We have a private signal group.

I have a private RSS feed so you can keep up with news

and things that are happening.

And we have some other perks down there.

But most importantly, you get to keep this content going and growing

and we can get more really exciting guests.

See you all next time on Techlor.

Thank you all for watching and don't forget to get involved.

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