The War on Privacy—And How to Fight Back | Naomi Brockwell

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW]Many people have come to accept pervasive surveillance as the price of modern life: that our phones, browsers, messages, purchases, and movements will inevitably be collected, analyzed, and sold to those with enough money or power.

For many, there’s a growing sense that true privacy is irrevocably lost, and resistance is largely futile.

Naomi Brockwell disagrees.

She is the president of the Ludlow Institute, and with her YouTube channel, she educates people about the many choices they can make to reclaim their privacy—without totally disconnecting from modern life.

“I, as an individual, can actually make choices that reclaim basically all of my privacy in the digital age,” she says.

She connects the dots between digital privacy and the survival of whistleblowers, investigative journalists, protest movements, and opposition parties—none of which can function without it.

Her message is that some things are worth fighting for: “Because submission is its own kind of death.”

Her institute recently helped draft a new bill that aims to restore Fourth Amendment protections in the digital era by requiring warrants for the government to access your data online.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Naomi Brockwell, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Naomi Brockwell:

Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here.

Mr. Jekielek:

Naomi, I feel like I’m almost being programmed these days to believe in the idea that something like a surveillance state, the end of our privacy, is completely inevitable.

Ms. Brockwell:

I think you’re not alone. I think that this is a very common response, and I think it’s deliberate because when you have an entity that wants to surveil you, they don’t want you to fight back. They don’t want you to actually see all the tools at your disposal that you can easily switch to, which stops that data collection. They want you to feel like there’s nothing you can do, so you throw your hands up and then you just allow all of your information to be collected. So that’s how they’re most effective in this. 

I see this everywhere. I see people giving up before the fight is done. And people ask me, they’re like, you know, why should I bother? They already have all my information anyway. And for me, it’s akin to saying, well, why should I bother continuing to fight for freedom? I’ve already lost most of it anyway. It’s like, well, because when you’re losing your freedom, you die on that hill, right? Keep going. 

So, right now, we’re at a state where we are just skyrocketing towards a very dystopian future. People are not wrong when they are afraid of what is coming because they do see the power behind all of this surveillance infrastructure. And if we don’t change course, we’re in deep trouble. But the good news is, there are so many easy ways that people can make decisions for themselves in order to change that course. A lot of people are looking to governments to say, like, protect us or change your policy or hurt this company. Ultimately, it’s up to individuals to make better choices. All of the privacy tools are out there. We just have to choose to use them.

Mr. Jekielek:

Okay, that’s fascinating. We’re going to dig into all that in a moment. Let me ask you about a case at the Supreme Court that was recently settled: Cisco Systems, Inc. v. Doe. Okay, let me just give you a super brief background. Okay, the allegation and the evidence presented was quite compelling, was that Cisco basically sold itself to Communist China to help them build a system to surveil and persecute Falun Gong practitioners? And this is way back in 2000. 

And frankly, the materials I’ve seen were compelling that this is what they did. My point is, we were building something like this way back in 2000. And I’m trying to understand how you think that individual tools that we’re developing here can somehow stand in the face of what appears to be becoming a kind of leviathan?

Ms. Brockwell:

Yes. So there are multiple levels to this surveillance battle. And in the United States, most of the surveillance that happens is through our own volition. It’s through something called the third-party doctrine. The government actually doesn’t need to set up its own proprietary surveillance infrastructure to target people. That would be very cost-ineffective. A cost-benefit analysis just doesn’t scale to put Pegasus on every single person’s phone. 

So, what they do is they literally just go to Google and say, give us this information from your database. They go to private companies that are collecting all this and say, hand it over. They don’t need a warrant. They sometimes don’t even use a subpoena. For a subpoena, you basically need mild curiosity that you would like information. You don’t need a judge to sign off on it. You don’t need the judiciary involved at all. So governments are using all of these kinds of tools to just go directly to the companies where we’re handing over data. 

This is due to a terrible Supreme Court precedent called the third-party doctrine, which basically says that we have given up our reasonable expectation of privacy if we give data to a third party. It was thought of in the 70s; it was before the digital age. It applied to a very narrow scope of records, but this doctrine has been carried over into the digital age where the entire internet runs on third parties. So this is why we’ve lost Fourth Amendment protections in the United States in the digital age—a giant gaping loophole, and it’s just like steamrolling right through it. 

For people in America, that basically means that if you don’t give your emails to Google, if you choose an end-to-end encrypted platform like Proton Mail, you’re protecting that information. If you use something like Signal Messenger instead of SMS or Instagram DMs, you’re protecting that information. If you are using a more private browser that doesn’t log your activity instead of Google, instead of things like Chrome, you’ve had a more private search engine. 

These are all choices individuals can make. Now it gets up the stack; you start to look at ISPs and what happens when the entire internet is co-opted? What happens when we have all of these net flow data intakes and companies like Cisco participating in this? What do we do then? But fortunately, privacy technology has never been better. 

So right now, there are all kinds of decentralized tooling that don’t even rely on the centralized infrastructure of the internet. There are all kinds of decentralized social media platforms that can’t be censored. There are all kinds of decentralized monetary systems that can’t be shut down, protocols that are decentralized. So, all this technology exists. 

I think the biggest barrier is one, awareness, and two, understanding. This stuff is technically complicated, and the average person’s head is just going to explode trying to navigate this landscape. But the great news is that there are really smart people out there to bridge that gap and make it more and more frictionless. If you look at the early internet, that was a tech geek’s utopia back then. 

The average person was not running clients and the command line to send their emails. It wasn’t until you had companies come in and actually build on top of this and make it easy for the end user that they could access it. But that’s where we’re headed with privacy. People see the totalitarianism that we are just seeing rolling towards, and they want options other than exploring them.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, I mean, we have it functioning, right? We have this unbelievably invasive panopticon-style social credit system in communist China functioning now as we speak. This is what you’re talking about, basically on max steroids.

Ms. Brockwell:

Absolutely. And I think that the difference is that there are some countries where it is really difficult for them to reclaim that freedom. We can look to countries like China and see where we’re headed. The United States is headed there, Europe is headed there, Australia is headed there. All these countries are going and building the same infrastructure. It’s just a matter of whether they’re actually going to be able to prevent that from happening before we get to a place where there’s a social credit system. 

For the people in China, it’s a different story. They’re dealing with a different threat model now. I’ve spoken with people there who have come up with their own language because they know that their WeChat is being surveilled by the government. Everything is being looked at. So if they want to mention, you know, things that are not allowed to be talked about, if they want to mention Taiwan, if they want to mention, you know, Hong Kong, anything like that, they’re making up code words. 

And it’s all these very local communities that are saying, okay, in our friendship group, these are the words that we’ll use to refer to, you know, such and such. They actually have to use these kinds of cipher systems in their local friend group in order to evade this. And even then, they’re treading on eggshells. They’re self-censoring. That is a bad situation that you don’t want to allow to happen. 

We’ve got this global scenario where every country in lockstep is headed towards government ID mandates. They want everything on the internet surveilled. They want it tied to your personal identity. And they’re essentially going to end up ranking everyone the same way that the social credit system in China does. 

When you have some countries that are still somewhat free, that’s when we can help. That’s when we can get some of that technology into the less free places. They were part of this kind of free-market movement there, shot in both legs as they tried to escape the country. And they were talking to me about how we get the word out about the protests that are going on. The world doesn’t know what’s going on because the government shut down the internet due to its centralized infrastructure. 

I was talking to them about different mesh technologies that exist, you know, things like Meshtastic, MeshCore, Reticulum—things that would enable people to bypass those centrally controlled digital infrastructures. So I think in China, it’s the same situation. To help the people there, we really need to look at what kind of technology bypasses this centralized control.

Mr. Jekielek:

I don’t know if you know this, but our Chinese edition was actually founded in Chinese back in 2000 as a student website at Georgia Tech. Our Chinese edition broadcasts into China and allows millions of Chinese to access free internet through technologies like Ultrasurf and Freegate—incredibly powerful technologies that have now been running for decades. And actually, the only kind of limit on it, we had this situation where Iranians started using the technology quite intensely. And we actually had to close the Iranian IPs because we didn’t have the resources to support running them. It costs money. 

But basically, there are these possibilities that do exist, even in the face of a particularly aggressive and censorious regime, both massively heavy on the propaganda and massively heavy on the censorship. So this exists. It’s all really just a question of figuring out how to support these tools in the face of a particularly aggressive regime.

Ms. Brockwell:

And I think the biggest issue there is that the so-called Western world doesn’t realize how close we are to becoming like some of these countries. We should be proliferating this technology and infrastructure, we should be educating people about how it works, getting it into more hands. Instead, most people have their heads in the sand, and they don’t realize how important privacy is to the foundation of a free society. They don’t understand that it is privacy that protects every self-correcting mechanism we have. The whistleblowers, the investigative journalists, the protest movements, the opposition parties—these entities can’t exist without the protection of privacy. Are we taking it for granted that they still have a semblance of privacy? When that’s gone, it is going to be so difficult to get it back. 

Right now, the entire globe should be fighting to protect the countries that already have this infrastructure in place because every other country is watching them like a hawk and saying, what can we learn from them? We’ve had people, you know, in the UK, in the United States, in Australia, look at what’s going on in China, lauding it, saying, this is great, you can help mold people’s behavior. For control that can make society better. It is so dystopian. 

We need to be looking at things like that with a giant red flag and fighting it with everything we’ve got because it’s a precipice. And once you get over that, like panopticon surveillance precipice, it is so difficult to reclaim your freedoms after that point. So, I think the entire globe needs to be fighting to proliferate this technology, get it into the hands of more people, and educate people about what’s coming down the line.

Mr. Jekielek:

What do you make of these Meta eyeglasses that can record conversations? I know people have been turning off the little lights that allow you to see that you’re actually being recorded. I know they’re actually scrambling to try to fix that hack of that feature. But then again, it’s a free country, right?

Ms. Brockwell:

Maybe. Meta is an advertising company, and people need to understand that they are the product in that system. Everything that they do, every entity with Meta that they participate with, they are helping harvest information that Meta then packages and resells. And they’re not just selling it to consumer product companies to try to get us to buy a new pair of shoes. They’re selling it to political regimes to try to get us to think in a certain way. People are buying the eyeballs of people on Meta to try to get their attention and get them to think in a certain way. 

It’s being used to sow social division. It’s being used in all kinds of nefarious ways. And people are just thinking about it as this very innocuous, you know, oh, well, they want to sell me some food, or something. It’s really not that. 

Meta provides a lot of so-called free services. So, WhatsApp is an example of it, a so-called private messaging app. But again, why on Earth would Meta have any incentive to provide a tool like that when their main business model is advertising and harvesting data on people? 

So, every person that uses Meta, they download it, they immediately give Meta access to their contacts list on their phone, which means you’ve just given an advertising company the birthday, the home address, the phone number, the email address, any notes, private notes you have about every single person in your phone book, right? That is why they’re providing these free services to people. 

I think that these glasses are so gross. As a privacy researcher, I am testing out all kinds of tools. I test out the worst possible spying tools and the best possible privacy tools. I figure out that spectrum to help people see, okay, how much effort am I willing to go to use certain products? I’m wearing some wearables right now because we’re about to do a video on wearables. So, I’m comparing how much surveillance is in these, which of them have GPS embedded, which of them have 5G enabled.

Mr. Jekielek:

How are you checking this? Is this just by the specs, or do you actually analyze these independently?

Ms. Brockwell:

Yes, it really depends. So, for example, we’re also doing a research project on smart TVs. We’ve had someone, a lab that we’re working with, create CT scans of televisions. Apparently, some televisions embed microphones into the TV, and it’s not in the official specs. So, some of the work we do is to try to compare what’s the official narrative of some of this technology and what’s actually going on. We have a grants program that pays researchers to reverse engineer everyday technology to find hidden surveillance that people might not know about.  

So, yes, it depends on the product there. We’ve been analyzing baby monitors to see, like, okay, how secure are these homes, like, bedrooms of our children, and who is watching that, who’s getting access? This whole digital world, it is so opaque, and individuals have no idea what kind of things they’re putting inside their homes, and no idea who gets access to that data, what they’re going to be using it for. And I don’t think we can make informed decisions without more clarity on some of those things. 

It’s been found out that governments are running a lot of this technology in your phone in order to harvest data. I think Byron Tau is an example of a great journalist who did FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests and found that one of the most popular apps for Muslims in America had a relationship with the U.S. government where the government was basically being used as a data harvesting mechanism to track the whereabouts of a certain demographic.

Mr. Jekielek:

But even in situations where relationships like this don’t exist, there’s all sorts of publicly available data—I mean, available for purchase.The unplugged phone people, they have a guy that works with them, that consults for them, that was able to triangulate just using open source—well, not necessarily open source, but proprietary available data that they purchased—to zero in on the addresses of the Delta Force members, for example. I mean, that’s obviously an unbelievably invasive amount of information that’s available. And it’s not just our government that’s buying that data; the Chinese Communist Party [CCP] is deep into buying this data. And figuring out all sorts of things that many of us aren’t even fully aware are even possible.

Ms. Brockwell:

And that is absolutely happening. That is absolutely happening. There are governments that are targeting other countries. I mean, the U.S. government is also targeting other countries. They’re all playing this game.

Mr. Jekielek:

So I just want to caveat this. There are some things that I don’t like about the U.S. government, certainly. But I also like to make sure that people don’t feel like there’s some sort of moral equivalency here between the Chinese communist regime and the U.S. government reality.

Ms. Brockwell:

Yes. I would also caveat that by saying that some of the worst atrocities occur from a people’s own government. So I don’t think people should be complacent. I think that if the United States were to set up an equivalent surveillance ecosystem, and I think that they have already, but if they were to use it for the same means, then that would just be game over for people in that country. 

The Chinese government has less power over me if I’m in America than it does over Chinese people. I think the Chinese people should be most afraid of the Chinese government. But I think globally, obviously, China is a huge threat. They’re backdooring all of our technology. You know, they backdoored 5G technology. Volt Typhoon got into our infrastructure in America.

Mr. Jekielek:

To clarify, backdoored it means that they can access it in ways that they’re not supposed to be able to access.

Ms. Brockwell:

Exactly. So, for example, Volt Typhoon is a CCP-backed hacking group in China, and it was found that they are in all of our critical communication infrastructure in the United States. We have lawful access laws in basically every country. In America, it’s CALEA [Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act], so the government says, no, you cannot encrypt this communication channel. We need to be able to get that access in case we want to intercept messages for your security. 

Then, obviously, you can’t keep these backdoors safe, and China ended up getting into that, and you actually had the government announce to people, sorry guys, the CCP got back in, got into our infrastructure. They’ve been collecting the text messages, intercepting the calls of hundreds of millions of Americans for years probably. Even then, you had another government arm turn around and say, whoa, that doesn’t mean you should use end-to-end encrypted things. We still want that backdoor. Use responsible encryption, which has a backdoor. 

So every government just keeps pushing this idea that they want access and pretending they can keep it safe from the bad guys. And the reality is that when you have that access baked into technology, anyone can access it. The hackers can access it. The criminal gangs can access it. The tyrannical regimes can access it. And so when we are building our technology, we need to be thinking about the safety of the people. We need to be not thinking about government getting backdoor access to everything we do.

Mr. Jekielek:

When it comes to people that want that access, there are certainly these kinds of nefarious types, but there are also a whole bunch of well-meaning people who are saying to themselves, look, my job is to identify the terrorists, to figure out who they are, and to stop them. So I need access to this data.

Ms. Brockwell:

Yes, that is a very common response. And people think that enabling end-to-end encryption is going to stop law enforcement doing their job. It’s kind of like saying 100 years ago, unless we have microphones intercepting every person-to-person conversation, law enforcement can’t do their job. Because that’s essentially the same thing—a communication that the government couldn’t access because it was ephemeral, just between two people. 

So it’s just incorrect. The government has never had more access to data than they have right now. They are swimming in it, they are collecting all of it, and they are trying to break down the last barrier of communication that we still have in the digital age.

Mr. Jekielek:

Recently, I’ve been thinking about how organ procurement works, and let me explain how this is relevant to this question. When there is someone that has a catastrophic accident to be used as a potential organ donor, one side says that this person is ready to become an organ donor, right? And then on the other side, you have people that are advocating to be extra careful and make sure you don’t accidentally take organs from someone who has a chance of coming back. So this is just a reality. There’s this kind of tension that’s happening. 

And I think similarly, this sort of reality is happening here where you have people advocating for more access to provide more security, and you have people advocating for less access to provide. Yes, so it actually goes back to what you were just speaking about because I believe that that balance is the Fourth Amendment.

Ms. Brockwell:

When you’re deciding as a society how much intrusiveness should the government be allowed, the Constitution really kind of was that guideline, and the Fourth Amendment said this is how much intrusion the government should be allowed. They can get access, but they need a warrant. They need probable cause, and they need a second branch of government, the judiciary, to come in and say, and sign off. They need to agree with you that, yes, this warrants invasion into this person’s life; therefore, we’ll sign off on this warrant. 

So, the Surveillance Accountability Act—my organization, Ludlow Institute, participated in drafting that—was introduced to the House in April. It basically says if the government wants to do a search on you, they need a warrant. Right now, the government is creating these carve-outs and saying, oh, we’re searching Google’s database, so that’s not a search. We’re buying this data, and it’s in our own database. We’re just querying it. That’s not a search. And they’ve made all of these carve-outs for things that absolutely are intrusive into a citizen’s life. 

We have to ask, should the people with ultimate power in society have this much visibility into the ongoing activities of citizens? Because that sort of system sets up the ability for them to squash protest movements in advance, to squash opposition parties in advance, to stop whistleblowers from speaking out, to stop investigative journalists from shining light on atrocities. These are the things that we need to keep society balanced. And they’ve been eradicated in an age of total surveillance. 

So the Surveillance Accountability Act says, no, if you want to do a search—and let’s define a search, even though ‘search’ means the same thing now that it did back when the Constitution was written—let’s define it: a meaningful, purposeful investigation of a personal thing. If you are doing that, you need a warrant. That’s what the Constitution says. And these are the checks and balances that enable us to have a free society with security without allowing the government to devolve into tyranny and, you know, abusing that power. 

The accountability part comes into play because baked into this is a private right of action. If the government gets your information without a warrant and they need a warrant, then you have the right to sue them. And I think that accountability mechanism has really disappeared through things like qualified immunity and all of these things. We are absolving the most powerful people from abusing their power, you know, before it’s even happened, with this kind of immunity. It strips that back and says, no, if you abuse your power, there need to be repercussions. Individuals need to have that private right of action.

Mr. Jekielek:

And it just never really works out, does it, when you create impunity-like conditions for a power structure?

Ms. Brockwell:

Right. Who would have thought, you know?

Mr. Jekielek:

I just think we have a lot of—I think we have quite a number of examples recently, especially, of this playing out in just a variety of ways,kind of logical. Why do we keep forgetting the lesson?

Ms. Brockwell:

Because power tends to corrupt, when people get into power, they tend to really get high on it, and they want more of it.

Mr. Jekielek:

If I jump in, you know, we’re celebrating the 250th here, and I can’t help but think about the fact that this nation was founded on this idea that power corrupts, and our founders developed a very thoughtful system about how to actually deal with that.

Ms. Brockwell:

And I love that. I feel like with the Declaration of Independence, how brave, courageous, and ballsy do you have to be? Mind my language, I’m not sure if I ought to say that. Yes, but you’re going up against the most powerful empire in the world, the strongest navy that has ever existed. And you’re basically telling this tyrannical king who has been rifling through your things, and has been arresting anyone in a protest movement. 

If you say anything that embarrasses the crown, then suddenly you have people in red coats at your door, persecuting you and finding whatever they can to piece together whatever narrative they need to put you away. Then a group of people get together and say, actually, we just don’t recognize your authority anymore. You’re a tyrant. And when governments become tyrannical, we’re allowed to just abolish them. 

Here’s the thing; governments aren’t there to control people; governments are there to serve people. And that was the paradigm shift of the Declaration of Independence. For the first time in history, they set up this idea that governments work for the people. Be gone, this idea of divine right of kings. I was born into this. God put me in this position, and I have the authority to rule you. They said, no, all men are created equal. You weren’t born into a position of superiority over me. And actually, you’ve abused your power, and we don’t recognize your authority. 

This is a perfect David and Goliath story that kind of brings us back to this idea of this learned powerlessness because you’re dealing with a situation where you have a bunch of farmers with pitchforks and muskets who are like, no, no, we don’t recognize your authority anymore. If you were to have a betting market right then, who is going to win? The most powerful empire that has ever existed, and some farmers who decide they don’t want you to rule them. And yet, in David and Goliath, this famous story, David won. Goliath lost in that story. And with the Declaration of Independence, these people actually did fight for their freedom. 

So we’re in a situation right now where this totalitarian Orwellian surveillance state feels like it is pressing down on all of us. We are all treading on eggshells. We are self-censoring. We’re seeing what’s to come, and we’re terrified, and we think all is lost. What is the point of protecting our information right now? What is the point of protecting my freedom? 

Right now is when we should be fighting because history is full of examples of wars that could not be won that were won. And right now we need this war to be won. So we need everyone fighting. We can’t afford to have people with this learned victimhood and powerlessness throwing their hands up and saying, there’s nothing I can do. There is so much you can do, and we need every person on board to fight this battle.

Mr. Jekielek:

Because, you know, really, even if it was futile, I kind of think it’s probably still good.

Ms. Brockwell:

I completely agree. It’s the principle of the thing, right? Some things are worth fighting for because submission is its own kind of death, right? They had no idea whether they were going to win, and they decided to fight anyway because a life lived on someone else’s terms, with them writing the script for you, that’s not a life worth living. That’s not a life at all. It’s not a human life. I think that for human flourishing, we need people to have that sovereignty and that autonomy and that ability to make their own choices. And you can’t just have people in power assert that they have the right to decide how you use the internet, how you communicate, what you’re allowed to say, who you’re allowed to interact with, where you’re allowed to travel. That’s crazy. And people should not be willing to put up with that. They should stand up for their rights.

Mr. Jekielek:

I was at the ARC conference in the UK a few weeks back, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. And it was very interesting because as you’re talking about this, I keep thinking about The Lord of the Rings. Now, Baroness Philippa Stroud, who is kind of the benefactor of the ARC conference, she gave a speech towards the end where she quoted, not verbatim, but she had adapted a speech from the very end of the film, which is essentially Aragorn, one of the main characters, rousing the very small group of soldiers against, you know, kind of an insurmountable evil army marching on them. And there’s a ton of meaning that comes out of that, even when, you know, the odds of survival are slim.

Ms. Brockwell:

Absolutely. And I think that’s really empowering. That should be a heartening message that shows, like, it has been done, it can be done. There is nothing that tells you this is a foregone conclusion. There’s no reason for you to think that you can’t win right now. There are different battles that we’re fighting, and people need to understand the difference. 

One of the battles is, okay, we have a giant ship and it is heading in one direction. Is it possible to change the trajectory of this ship? Okay, well, that’s still a battle worth fighting for. But on the other side, there’s an entirely different battle. You know, you’ve got a bunch of lifeboats that are on there, and there’s enough for every passenger on board, we could all take this lifeboat and just opt out of this surveillance infrastructure. 

So yes, we can try to re-steer the ship, and we should definitely attack that battle, but we all need to be looking at individual responsibility and what we can be doing. I, as an individual, can actually make choices that reclaim basically all of my privacy in the digital age. You know, there is so much that I can do, like the different services that I can use, the different tools that I choose to opt into or out of, that makes a huge difference on my lived privacy and how much information is collected about me. It’s up to me to make that choice and opt in. 

So, yes, we can think that the whole ship battle, you know, and by that, the analogy is obviously how do we steer the entire government towards, you know, guardrails and how do we get it away from this trajectory of a surveillance state. We can fight that battle and we should, but at the same time, individuals need to understand their role in this. Their role is more meaningful than they realize. It’s not just about making choices for you. 

Every decision you make is a market choice; it is a market signal that says, I value this thing. More market opportunities for other people who want to build similar tools. This helps support these people who are trying to protect you instead of supporting their competition. So, every choice we make as an individual has these ripple effects. People need to understand how empowering that is. Like, we have so much more ability to change the course of history than we realize.

Mr. Jekielek:

Beyond the legislation that you helped author, what are some of these individual tools that you would recommend? For example, I use this unplugged phone as one of my phones. That helps reduce the amount of data that is basically broadcast into the system to vendors and so forth. But what else would you recommend?

Ms. Brockwell:

So, I use a GrapheneOS phone. I love it; it’s one of my favorite tools for privacy because, again, there’s so much information collected by Google and Apple when you’re using their devices. And Graphene is just a fantastic alternative to that. I think for the average person getting into this, don’t jump straight into the deep end. Just start with a different web browser. If you’re using Chrome, okay, get off that. Use something like Brave Browser. If you’re using Google Search, get off that. You could use something like Brave Search, or you could use something like Startpage, or there are countless other search engines.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right, I actually use the Gan Jing Browser. That’s from the Gan Jing World platform that we’ve actually been sponsoring. It’s a family-friendly platform that doesn’t collect any data, and I find that one to basically be working seamlessly.

Ms. Brockwell:

Well, if you’re SMSing people or using social media DMs or any of this, just use Signal, you know, or use something like SimpleX or any of these things.

Mr. Jekielek:

Is it really not broken? Like, I hear people tell me, oh, yes, no, Signal’s actually compromised; the U.S. government’s reading all that.

Ms. Brockwell:

Yes, so there’s nothing that suggests they are, and there’s nothing suggesting that they’re not. There is no way to say with 100 per cent certainty this is protected. It’s open source, there are a ton of eyeballs on it, and no backdoor has ever been found. So, if you’re comparing that to SMS, which the backdoor is baked in, literally mandated by the government, and we know that Salt Typhoon is in there, obviously it’s a no-brainer to switch to something where we at least have better privacy.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right, exactly. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Ms. Brockwell:

That’s the idea. Absolutely. So, it’s all about mitigating your attack, decreasing your attack surface, and mitigating this risk. So, even these tools where you think, oh, it’s compromised. Privacy is really a layered situation. You shouldn’t be depending 100 per cent  on any one tool. You should be trying to figure out, okay, how do I use all of these things? So, if one of them gets compromised, I have some backups. 

So, I would just start with the basic things, start with the lowest hanging fruit, which is browser, search engine, and messaging app. Email is another huge one. And Gmail, they’re an advertising company too. So, they’re literally just analyzing everything that comes into your message. They’re looking at all of your calendar history. They’re seeing your entire history of movements and appointments and everyone you interact with. There’s so much data that you give them through their ecosystem. 

There’s a single button you can click in the Proton ecosystem that ingests your entire Gmail history, your entire contact list, your entire calendar history, and now it’s encrypted. They can’t get access to that. So, simply by taking a step like that to remove things from these surveillance ecosystems, you can make a huge difference. I would start with things like that and then start to explore, okay, like hardware, let’s get beyond this. Let’s try to figure out what kind of trackers are in my car. Let’s go there. 

But start with just these four steps, which are the lowest hanging fruit, and you will see such a huge improvement in the amount of data collection. You’re plugging that because the browser is the gateway to the internet, and the internet is how you’re living your life. You’ve migrated your social interactions, your finances, your communications, everything to the digital realm. So, how you interact with that digital realm is so important. 

And using a privacy-preserving browser, you could even go to privacytests.org. They compare a whole bunch of different privacy-preserving browsers. You can choose what your favorite is. There are so many options out there. People just need to learn that they’re out there.

Mr. Jekielek:

So, I’ve spent the last, let’s say, three months with my location services on my phone mostly off. How significant is that?

Ms. Brockwell:

That’s great. With your phone, there are multiple ways that your location is tracked. So, for example, the baseband processor is connecting with cell towers everywhere you go, regardless of whether you have a SIM [subscriber identity module] in your phone or not. So, I don’t have a SIM in my phone for reasons we could go into. 

I use a separate hotspot so that I separate the OS [operating system] from the gateway. This enables me to have a more reliable VPN [virtual private network] that I know isn’t being bypassed. Essentially, through this baseband process of pinging cell towers, and the baseband process is just like another computer inside your phone. They can triangulate your location depending on whether you’re in an urban area, sometimes down to the foot. So it’s pretty granular.

Mr. Jekielek:

Even if your location services are off because of the cell phones.

Ms. Brockwell:

Yes, different tools. So there is the cell triangulation. If you keep Wi-Fi on, that’s another triangulation method. You’ll notice that if your Wi-Fi’s on and you’re moving around, the nearby Wi-Fi networks and different signal levels, that’s all being ingested by Google and Apple, and we don’t know who else, but that’s able to triangulate you because as you move away from one signal and towards another, you can absolutely track someone’s movement. 

BLE [Bluetooth low energy], if you have Bluetooth turned on, that’s another way that companies in particular love to granularly track you with your BLEs. So Walmart will know exactly which aisle you’re in and what you’re looking at because they can see through their BLE technology. Of a lot of different tech, but largely BLE that sees where you are in the store. So you have to turn that off. 

Mr. Jekielek:

That’s Bluetooth.

Ms. Brockwell:

Yes, Bluetooth low energy. And the other thing, location services. First of all, the attack surface on your phone is really just expanded by how many apps you have on there. So people, I will look at their phones and they have hundreds of apps. I’m like, oh my goodness, how much do you know about every single developer of the app? You know, is it patched? Is it maintained? Is it secure? Is it backdoored? Does the developer even know what SDKs [software development kit] are in the app?

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, but this is why people sort of threw up their arms.

Ms. Brockwell:

I know, I know.

Mr. Jekielek:

Helplessness, right?

Ms. Brockwell:

We don’t need to have our banking app with us at all times unless we’re using it at all times. I have a banking app on my phone, and it is not the phone that I carry around with me day to day. I just don’t need that many apps on my day-to-day device that has a microphone and a camera with me and is seeing everywhere I go. So I don’t have any social media on my phone. I don’t need to. 

If people send me something, I can just click on that link, and it opens in a browser. It doesn’t even log me in. So I can still keep up to date with what people are sending me. And if I want to participate in social media, I will go on my computer, I will log in, and I will make an intentional effort to do that. I just really limit the amount of apps that I have on my device because every one of those is an attack surface. And we don’t remember what permissions we granted. 

I don’t remember which apps have location permissions or microphone permissions or camera permissions. It was found out in 2019 that Facebook was turning on the front camera of everyone as they scrolled through their Facebook feed. When it was discovered, they said, oh, that’s a bug. Sure, right, that was a bug. I called them out on that. 

But the thing is, if we give these apps permission to access these things, it’s really an honest system if they’re going to do it. So if you’ve given people your contact list, you know, your access to your microphone, your camera, your location history, you should presume the worst. You should presume that they can do with that data whatever they will. And if someone offers them money for any of that information, they’re probably going to say yes.

Mr. Jekielek:

So, as a general rule of thumb, basically you’re saying reduce the number of apps you have on your phone substantially just to what you actually need. And that will actually help your privacy as a starting point.

Ms. Brockwell:

A huge amount. And turning off location services as well.

Mr. Jekielek:

I’m an offender.

Ms. Brockwell:

Everyone is, yes. I have a habit of taking people’s phones and just having almost a panic attack where I’m like, oh my gosh, let’s mitigate this right now. I go through and I delete apps for them. But this is something, again, empowering that the individual can do. Just take an evening, go through your phone. If you haven’t used an app in the last three months, delete it. 

Because what’s the worst-case scenario? You need it again, and you redownload it, and it takes five seconds. The other side of things is that an app might be silently harvesting everything that you’re doing. So you’re okay with five seconds to re-download an app you haven’t used in months, I think that’s a pretty good trade-off.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, Naomi, this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation. Final thought as we finish?

Ms. Brockwell:

Final thought is I think that people should claim their empowerment. You’re more empowered than you realize. You could absolutely make change in your own life, and your actions have ripple effects that affect everyone. So we can write a much better future. We all have to just get on the same page and understand how important privacy is to the fundamental freedoms of society.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, Naomi Brockwell, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on.

Ms. Brockwell:

This has been delightful.

 

This interview has been partially edited for clarity and brevity.