From UFOs two ghosts and government cover ups. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to now. All right, Hello, welcome to the show. If that intro by our super producer Noel was familiar, then that means you are in the right place. Ladies and gentlemen. This is stuff they don't want you to know. I'm Ben. You're probably wondering where Matt is. He is off on an adventure that maybe we'll get to in the course of this show. But in place of Matt, today we have not one, but two very special guests from tech Stuff, from brain Stuff, from Forward Thinking. I don't even know how you guys found time to come on this show, Jonathan Strickland and Lauren vogelbaumb We found time because we literally just recorded another Tech Stuff episode with you, like like ten minutes ago. Thanks for not giving away our time travel scheme. That was good. I'm glad that we have got that out of the bag out of the bag Man, which is only gonna be funny if you listen to the other episode, right, because this is a sequel that's a compacit a sister episode. It is. It is now. You guys were kind enough or add poor enough taste to have me on your show just a few minutes ago when we recorded a great episode on how to serve the Web anonymously or whether it's even possible. And this was us to something that we thought was right up the stuff they don't want you to know, Ali, because listeners out there, now, you guys know as well as everybody else does now that it turns out the United States government in particular was putting a lot more energy into tracking people than we had all thought. Yeah, I mean, even if you take it at face value, where you know you have this this system specifically the n s A we're talking about here, with the prison specifically with yes, that if even if you take it at face value, that what they were looking for were foreign agents. So if you are a United States citizen, then in theory you would not a United States citizen who is not involved in one of these schemes, You would not be considered a foreign agent and therefore not part of the surveillance. Even if you take that at face value, they would look for people who they did identify as foreign agents, and the people that that those folks talked to, right, Yeah, they played the Kevin Bacon game. Yeah. And if you've ever played the Kevin Bacon game, you know that it gets pretty easy to start linking two people you never thought would have had a connection to each other together. It doesn't really take that many levels of separation, right, Right. And furthermore, they're really collecting information on everyone and sort through it in order to find these specific people. But the fact that they're collecting and storing this information about all of us, it's creepy. It's problematic. So again, even taken on face value, it's it's it's troublesome. And then when you realize the actual methodology, it becomes downright concerning. I mean it's not just that, oh, there's some issues here from a technological perspective, the very methodology is problematic. I think that's well said. So one of my first questions for you guys before you really get into this is, uh, if let's say twenty years ago, if someone had come up to you in and said the government is watching everything and it's just going to watch more, would you have would you have thought it was sort of conspiracy bunk or would you have thought there was a possibility of it happening, I would have thought bunk for sure. Yeah, and it's and it's largely because uh well, I mean ninety four wasn't there at Yeah. When you're talking about how much data gets created or transferred or copied or transmitted however you want to look at it, it's an astronomical number. It is an enormous number. Just let's just take YouTube as the example of data creation. Okay, so on YouTube, every single minute that passes, more than a hundred hours of video footage is being uploaded to YouTube. Some of that's duplicate footage, but it doesn't really matter. That's a huge amount of information. Now, just kind of extrapolate. Imagine that the entire Internet, this network of computer networks, is filled with people who are either creating information or accessing it in some way. And the accessing of information does in itself create a certain amount of meta data. There's information about who, who accessed what and when. This is such an enormous amount that most of us would think that being able to to capture it and filter it and make any meaning of it would be a gargentean task beyond our capabilities. But it is a gargentean task. But it's not, as it turns out, beyond our capability exactly. It turns out that our our technology is sufficiently sophisticated enough to be able to weed through that kind of stuff, or at least we're working very hard on it. I mean, not the three of us at this table, but I'm personally aware of well. And and Google is a perfect example of how we should have really kind of re evaluated this idea that it's just too big, right, because Google has created a business that, or at least the forward facing part of their business that that's the search engine. You know, arguably you would say that the real business is advertising, but but the search engine is the thing, the product that we're all familiar with, and it's really really good. It's a really good search engine if you're trying to find something specific. And once we realize how much information is out there and how Google has developed an algorithm that can effectively find the stuff you actually want to see, then you start to realize, oh, I guess it really is possible to build in that a similar kind of tool that could be useful if you're looking for signs of activity. Uh, if you happen to be an enormous government organization that is in charge of discovering cryptic messages set between foreign agents that could potentially affect your country, or friends of foreign agents, yes, or people who know friends of foreign agents. Yes. That's the problem is that this this ripples outward. Right, if if it were just the foreign agents, that becomes an issue because then you have to be able to to reliably identify a foreign agent versus someone who is not a foreign agent. But then if you go one ripple outward, who are these people talking to and why? Well, I can understand why you would be interested in that, but they're going to be people in that that one ripple outward who are not in any way connected with anything nefarious, but they're going to get swept up in that surveillance. Anyway, if you go a further ring out, go for it. That's an enormous number of people. This is what Facebook is completely built upon, the whole idea of that social network. If you ever see any of their presentations, you just see how this this this one small group of people who have these interconnections between each other become this enormous mass of people. When you just go out a couple of steps. Yet now this I'm glad that we're talking about this because this is something that escapes a lot of people that the uh, the government agency, the n s A has automated the collection and analysis of this of this stuff for people who are concerned. You know, the n s A is listening in on my phone calls and reading my emails. They're taking your phone calls and emails and they're keeping them like like you said, Lauren, And what they'll do is if you pop up on a different algorhythm, than they'll actually have a human. Like any other big organization from a call center to the FBI, it's kind of difficult to actually get to a human. You have to go through a few steps. Yeah, dial one, wait for stuff. You listen to a robot voice and I hate it, just a side note, I hate it when the the automated line won't let you just push a button and you have to stand there wherever you are and look really stupid and go operator operate. Yes, yes, yes, yea, And everybody's so solemn. We all just said the same yes. But um. But but moving from this, we before we go too deep on the government, we should make a point that they're not the only people looking at web activity when we talk about yeah, I mean, companies obviously are looking at a lot of web activity as well, for multiple reasons. Uh. Mostly companies are looking at activity in order to make more money, all right. They want to be able to sell you stuff better, or to sell you as a consumer to an advertising company so that that advertising company can tell you stuff better. Yeah. Yeah, it all comes down to, you know, where are the dollars, where are they coming from, and where are they going to? And so we the users end up playing a big role in that. I mean we we are the ones who generate revenue for companies. And you know, if it weren't that way, the Internet would be a very different place. For one thing, it would not be nearly as robust as it is, right, it would it would be mainly limited to communication lines between things like research institutes and the government, which, big surprise, that's what originally the Internet was all about. Our yeah, our ponnett was essentially connections between scientific research institutes, universities, and government installations. And that was it, and and that was because you know, that was what it was built for, was built to be this really fast communications and networking ability so that people could share things very effectively. What it's grown into is this crazy world that melds things like entertainment and commerce and communications all into one big package, which in many ways is legitimately awesome. Obviously, we wouldn't have jobs if there were an internet, or at least we wouldn't have these jobs we are on the internet right now. Yeah, well, you guys get paid. I'm here for community service. Your internship has lasted longer than any other I've ever seen. That's true. Hey, will you sign off for my hours before this is? Thanks guys. UM. One question, though, that a lot of people will have is the following. Just a little bit of background here. UM, The question is is surfing anonymously legal? Uh? The background here is that often the desire to surf anonymously is depicted as one that is inherently sinister. That is the same sort of uh perception that is given two things is like torrents now or peer to peer networks. Peer to peer networks as they are by themselves, are not sinister or shady or illegal, right ap. Peer to peer network is just a means of distribution of files right, But when you start distributing files that you don't have the right to distribute network, that's where the illegal activity comes, and then you end up sort of casting this shadow across the entire technology. So there are companies like music and movie companies that just say peer to peer networks alone are bad because those are a lot of the ways that that illegal file sharing got spread around, you know, just a few years ago. Now it's not even that big of a deal because you can get pretty much everything in a billion different places. But uh, you know, if you're talking about just trying to serve anonymously, it all depends upon where you are in the world. In the United States, it's not a big deal. There's no law that you'd be very king by trying to hide your IP address. The laws that you would be breaking would be if you tried to do anything illegal while you were doing that, or even if you weren't, whether or not you're trying to hide what you're doing. If you're doing something illegal, that's against the law, right, Yeah, Like like you like you don't have to use tour to buy drugs. There are many other reasons that you can use tor Yeah, but if you do buy drugs. That's against the law, and then if you're caught, you could be punished for it, or you will be if you're caught. I see. Yeah. So so here in the West and the United States, Canada and so on, there is not a law against uh surfing the web anonymously. I don't I don't think it's even against the law to uh go into some of the deep web stuff to which we alluded um, which you guys have covered in a previous episode and Matt and I have covered as well. We're talking about this Silk Road and and not the historic one through Central Asia. But as you said, other countries have different perspectives, like you've got a great example about China. Sure, yeah, China. They have a program in China that is called the Golden Shield Project, also more commonly known as the Great Firewall of China. UH. And the reason for this is that it said effort i'll um on part of the Chinese government to censor and and have surveillance over Internet activities within China, so that the main purpose of it is to prevent objectionable material as defined by the Chinese government from getting to Chinese citizens using the internet. So flat out block some websites and some search terms and like some yeah things like Facebook. You can't access Facebook in China using if you were just trying to connect to a Chinese I s P and go through methods domain name server. So if you were to if you were to just use like plug and play, you're you're just trying to use your browser to get to certain places. You would find out that there's some websites you just cannot access that way in China. In order to access those websites, you have to circumvent the protections that have been put in place. UH. In general, this is not seen as a huge deal, right, It's it's it's it's frowned upon. You're not supposed to do it. But as far as I am aware, no one has been UH persecuted and or prosecuted for trying to circumnavigate the firewall of China. However, if you were to do something such as post messages that are anti Chinese government to websites, then that is very much considered against the law, and you will they will look for you, and if they find you and catch you, they will punish you. Right, and it might also be used as perhaps a pretext for arresting someone, at least in that country, kind of the same way the tax evasion was the crime for which Capone was ultimately arrested. Yeah. That in some cases, depending again upon what country you are in, uh, this might be the the door that opens up so that they can get you for what they really want you for. Right And and when we say we're not especially picking on China, oh, although I do have to say, there's one really cool thing that that freaks me out a bit. And if you are on just the regular you know, the version of the inner State uh Internet in China. Every so often these two cartoon police characters will pop up on the screen just to let you know that they're they're looking out for you, they're protecting you. They're protecting and serving by making sure you're not doing anything wrong. Actually, what they're doing is they're protecting you by making sure all that terrible information that would flood flood your browser if if it only had the chance, because they know you are an upstanding Chinese citizen and would never try to access that kind of stuff. But that stuff is trying to get it you no matter what. And those cops they are making sure that you are going to be safe from it. They also have blue eyes, which is very weird. Their names of Chinging and Cha Cha. It's based on a pun that means police in Chinese. So check check it out and google it if you have a chance. Just remember that China will know you looked at it. And uh so earlier, Um, we we mentioned toward the onion router, right, and uh what I wanted to ask about is if you could, because you guys are the experts here on technical matters, if you could outline briefly for our listeners, what's the difference between like a privacy mode on a browser and something like tour. That's a great question. Yeah, in brief, a privacy browser on your home computer does absolutely nothing to to protect what you are doing from anyone aside from someone who is looking purely at your home computer. Yeah, exactly, the text mat real quick. While you're doing that, I'll continue to explain. So, yeah, the privacy mode, what it's doing is it's preventing stuff that would normally show up and say, your search history, your browsing history cookies, is preventing all that kind of stuff from happening so that someone who gets access to your machine. Can't just look and see what it is you've been up to. However, anyone who can see the traffic that's going across your local network that includes perhaps other machines that are also on the local network, your router, the modem, your I s P, all of these entities know exactly what you're doing because in order for you to get the stuff you're trying to get, they these entities have to know where to send it, right right, This is so you know, up to and including the website that you're accessing, they know who you are as well, right, Yeah, at least they know the I P edge, yes, and they know they know what network it's going to. So really it's it's you know, you can't hide your IP address perfectly because if you did, no information would ever come back to your computer. Now we, uh, we do have an interesting fact here, and by interesting I mean disturbing. So I'll just go ahead and ask how much information does someone a company or a government or whomever need about you before they can figure out who you are? All right? This is a kind of fascinating. Did you ever hear the story about how Target had identified a customer as being pregnant. It was It turned out to be a young lady, teenager, and so Target pregnant people are ladies, that that would be true. That is true, Lauren, thank you is a good point. A young lady pregnant, Uh, Harris don't know. Parents don't know, parents don't know. She has not told them. Uh. And Target starts proactively sending her offers for things that a pregnant lady wouldn't possibly need. And her father found the offers and got very upset, saying like, why is Target sending this unsolit solicited stuff? What do you what are you saying about? My daughter? Raised a big fuss about it. You have offended mod dignity. That's how I pickture him speaking. Yes, it was a Southern gentleman from the fun city of Savannah there with a white glove and just slapped the front door. Yeah. Challenge you, I challenge your entire organization to Yeah. No, that's not exactly what happened. But he did raise a fuss and then later wrote a second a follow up message saying I had a talk with my daughter. It turns out that I did not. I was not aware that she was pregnant. But this raised the point of how did target know? What was it that gave target the information? How did they predict this? And as it turned out, it had the company had been watching her purchase patterns and determined that statistically speaking, she was very likely pregnant. And so this is an illustration that you don't have to have actively shared some information about yourself for an entity or a per son to draw conclusions about at least your what your physical state is, or what your your state of mind might be. Even if it's not your specific name and identity, it could be enough to be able to single out who you are from a level that's separate from my name is Jonathan Strickland and I live in Atlanta, Right, That actually would be very easy. They're probably very few Joan Strickland's living in Atlanta. There might be a few, because you know, there are a lot of other Jonathan Strickland's. Lauren vocal Bam might be the easiest to paying directly to zoom in pretty quickly. So the real answer to this question, according to research specialists, is that thirty three bits of information called bits of entropy, and this in this identification business are required in order to narrow it down to a specific person out of all the people on Earth. And and these these bits of information can be anything from from your gender to the type of car you drive, to your zip code to like, like, it doesn't have to be the same thirty three bits in order, it could be any thirty three bits, and bit in this case means something specific. Like like in the computer world we talk about digital Uh, you know these binary digits. That that's what a bit is. It's either a zero or a one, which you could think of as either a no or yes. Well, uh, some bits, some pieces of information represent a single bit, like gender is considered to be a single bit, putting gender discussions aside. For for many people, this would be male or female. All right, that that obviously oversimplifies things, but for the purposes for identification, male female tends to be uh. The way that they look at it, very black and white kind of approach. That represents one bit. Something like your zip code might be several bits of information that would make up just one zip code, but all it takes is thirty three bits. Some of those bits might be connected to a larger concept, like your model of car, uh, the specific region you live in, whatever it is your age. That's another good one. But all you need are thirty three bits worth of this information to be able to identify. And the reason for that is you take this yes or no. That's a base of two, right, You've you've got two options. You take that too, then you have the thirty three different bits. That's two to the power of thirty three. If you work that out, that ends up being more than eight billion. Two to the thirty third powers more than eight billion. There are seven billion people on Earth. Wait, we've got made up people in this. It means that we have more than enough information to to account for the seven billion people who are actually alive. So, uh, if you the idea is that with those thirty three bits, you can then have enough personal identifiable information to narrow it down to a specific individual. And also, it's devilishly easy to forget that what you're putting out on the internet personally identifies you, right say, all sorts of things that they imagine are innocuous. I mean, Twitter is in the Congressional Library. Now, yeah, you can get an entire you can download an entire Twitter history, which is for some of us quite a large file. As it turns out. I think I have more than seventeen dozen tweets. So, um, I clearly am not as as worried about anonymity as some people are. Perhaps that is a foolish thing on my part, but uh, there's an interesting example of this as well. Researchers at Stanford and the University of Texas. We're able to identify Netflix viewers based upon their activity, and part of that was because these are the same. These viewers would do things like leave reviews for movies on other sites and just by looking at the stuff that you wouldn't think would personally identify you, right, because it's just it's just you your opinion about a movie. It's not hey, I happened to be five foot whatever. I'm not telling you. Yeah, but they But the point being then is that there's uh, there, there's some puzzle solving that can happen very easily, right because they say, oh, um, anonymous user A watch this thing on Netflix at this time, and then oh surprise, shortly thereafter, anonymous user oh wait, it's anonymous user A. And they said that this was they gave it three stars, and what they did on Netflix like like this, this anonymous user A watched a uh particular movie at a particular time. This other person whose identity we know, left a review on IMDb, and based upon the time between these two events, were reasonably certain that anonymous user A is this person we know. An anonymous user A is completely wrong about Big Trouble a Little Chine, which is an amazing movie. It is not. It is not a good bad movie. It is a good good movie because he's the sidekick the whole time. You got pork Shop Express. Come on, So what is the Tour project about? You guys have done a you guys done a podcast on this. Um, Matt and I have done some videos, but we've never done a full podcast on it. So it's tour you know, kind of stands for the Onion Router. It's really its own name now, it's just tour sure. Originally the Onion Router was based on the idea that, um, it's encrypting things in layers, yes, so that you would go, uh, an information from point A to point Z, let's say, would go through all these different layers, and between each layer things would get encrypted in a different way. So from layer one to layer two it would get encrypted layer two to layer three, it would get encrypted layer three to layer forward get a different level of encryption, and and furthermore, each each layer, each node in this connection only knows the node before it and after it, which is key. It doesn't know the entire chain exactly. So the idea of being that this node, this series of nodes makes a circuit. That circuit is connecting your computer running a tour browser to whatever site or whatever information you were trying to retrieve. But that circuit of nodes has very limited information in any individual piece of the overall circuit. Right, So if you identified that there's one node in this network, and you see that information is coming from uh, the node immediately preceding it, and it's going to the node following it, you wouldn't be able to reconstruct the rest of the circuit. That's all the information you would be able to get. So if there are like six nodes in this circuit and you've identified node number three, you can only see that information is coming from node two and it's going to node four. You wouldn't be able to see where node one, five, or six, where those are in that circuit. Yeah, you wouldn't be able to see the original sender or the intended receiver, and hopefully if it's encrypted well enough, you wouldn't be able to read the message either exactly, because again it gets encrypted between each node in that circuit. Uh, it sounds pretty secure, right, Yeah, it sounds it sounds pretty cool. What could possibly go wrong? Well, as it turns out, there are ways to try and figure out who is trying to access what so So in this world where you're looking at all these connections that get hidden because it's traveling through all these nodes, you might be able to see all the potential start points and all the potential end points, but you don't really know which people are trying to access which sites or which servers. However, if you were to be able to analyze all the traffic across the network and build enough of a statistical model, you could start weeding people out and start looking at the potential people going to the potential end points, play the something like the target game. You could use big data to uh analyze and then maybe even predict. Yeah. So essentially what you're this is really oversimplifying it. But essentially you might see that, uh that let's say person A, the anonymous A is trying to access Silk Road, all right, and so you see an anonymous person's a's connection light up. It then goes across these nodes which mix everything else up, and you are already looking at Silk Road, so you are specifically you've already identified the potential target and the potential destination. And then you see that the silk Road one lights up in the amount of time you would expect for this message to have to transfer across these modes. Then you'd say, uh, this is a potential hit. And then you continue to analyze traffic. This can actually help d H and animonize I can't even say it. How do we thank you anemone D anemone the network? So but you know, it really is this is a potential way where you can figure out at least which connection was trying to connect to which server. Uh, And it just it steps back from the actual circuit entirely. And it may not be enough to move on a person you know with full legal backing, but it might be enough to convince you to really look into that person more closely. So there's really no safe harbor for complete anonymity on tour because if somebody wants to find you or if they want to find find the needle in the haystack, with enough diligence, they can well, I mean it would it's at least possible for them to for for someone really determined and with the right resources to be able to start narrowing things down right, Uh, certainly, And there there are few other problems with with tour. I mean, it's an open source thing. That's part of the way that the system actually protects itself and a kind of anti logical. It might encounterintuitive, but it really is because it means that anyone can can go in and look at this. So if someone changes something or someone puts in a change, this is a community that's looking after the whole the whole product. So it's not something that would be easy to slip in without anyone taking notice of it. Also, its origins kind of raise some eyebrows to Yes, the origin from naval research, right, Yeah, well, I mean, as it turns out, Uh, there are reasons why, say a military organization would want to be able to send information uh secretly or perhaps access information in secret and even within itself, yeah, even without itself, even even apart from other organizations within that same government. Uh. When we talk about the n s A, there are their government organizations that are equally upset as they quite a few that, like you know, you know, there are citizens who are up and up up all about this. I mean, they're very upset about it, as I think they should be. Um, that's my own personal opinion. But there are government organizations they're they're working for the same people who are equally upset. Their wheels within wheels would be the X files line. I mean, you've got those, You've got those great rivalries between the CIA and n s A that date back to the the beginning of both organizations. And recently, as we're recording this, more and more information about what we would call friendly fire surveillance has leaked people who had not only the wherewithal, but the motivation to keep their communications private or anonymous. Like congres members of Congress found that, um, not only was the n s A, but the FBI as well, uh mono touring their monitoring their day to day emails and phone calls, whatnot. The thing that was was really important to underline here is that it's not inherently sinister to serve the web anonymously. And it's possible to do it, as we said an earlier thing, but it's not really plausible and uh not for a long term solution. No, No, it's once off and we uh we do tell you, guys, listeners in UH and Jonathan Lawns show, we show you how theoretically you could make yourself if not impossible to trace, very very inconvenient to do so. Right, But it's basically like like burner phone, burner, internet connection, burner face like to go, yeah, you gotta pretty much be uh. You have to really limit what it is you want to do, and you have to very much limit the way you do it. So in other words, it's not like you can just use that methodology to do everything you would want to do on the web, because there's some cool stuff that's on the web that I love to do that there's just no way to do anonymously, not not truly right, Like can you really have a full Corgy watching experience if you can't log in and comment? That also is a reference to the Text Stuff episode. You'll learn way more about Corgy obsessions in that show. I think it's enthusiasm. I don't think we've crossed the line into obsession. Yet we're just let me close out a couple of tabs. So while Jonathan's closing out a couple of tabs, I do just want to set you guys up for one more big question. UM. If you if you like our show stuff they want you to know listeners, then then you'll love tech stuff because they have also been talking about several different revelations, um, both both with security and the nuts and bolts about how these kind of things work. So we highly recommend their show. And I have to ask you guys, since you're the ones with to know how, UM, if you had to guess or speculate, do you think that there would be more news forthcoming like the whole Snowden disclosure thing where he said, you know, he kicked down the door of the news organizations and said this buying on everybody. Is there anything else that would happen, because it seems like that's the big well, I mean, we only know what we know, right there's there's you can bet a couple of things. You can bet that anything that has happened since Snowdon has left is largely unknown to us because he was the source of the leak. So anything that has been done to address that or change things, evolve the technologies that's being used, or or to find tune them in different ways, or even apply them and even more broad applications, or to fine tune the process by which they make sure that other people don't link their information. Yeah, all of that is unknown to us, so we can't really be sure what's going on. What we do know is just based upon the information that's been revealed so far. There already have been abuses of the system. So that's the other thing to keep in mind. Even if somehow you could agree that the n s A system is on its own, maybe you could call it flawed, but it mostly works. Let's say that you even make that assumption. The problem is it's run by people, and people, as it turns out, our flawed very much so, and some people will take advantage of having the opportunity to use such a powerful tool to do things like snoop on X girlfriends. Yeah, and even if someone isn't doing it nefariously, there there could certainly be mistakes made. Yeah. So, so there are a lot of issues that will probably come to light as we get more people investigating this um. The interesting thing to me is really seeing how much movement we see in political circles to actually address this in a meaningful way, because you do have lots of people, You have lots of representatives who are at least saying that they want more, more, more transparency because their constituents are demanding it. Right. Yeah, well they're they're kind of demanding it too. I mean it sounds like, yeah, once they found out that the ad but uh there. That's one of the big debates always is uh is it a matter of sincere offense or fashionable offense fashionable indignation? And and that's something that I think we will see in the future with our listeners. We'd like to we'd like to hear from you guys as well. What do you think the next big revelations about the internet would be? Um? Oh, and here's one. Uh, can you or have you served the web anonymously? Let's see if you could write in and let us know and still stay anonymous. I don't know, let's just see if it works. Uh. In the meantime, I'd like to thank Jonathan and Lauren you guys, thank you so much for coming on our show. Um, I wish I knew what had happened to Matt. We haven't really said it on air, but you want to go ahead, and I actually I can reveal at this point that Matt in fact was buried under a pile of corky puppies and he's he's all right, but he's penned and cannot move. He's the happiest that he has ever been. He is stuck. He has been saying that I cannot breathe and that's okay, uh, in various languages. It's weird. He actually is really fluent, but only in that one phrase. Yeah, he's really smart, but it's strange that he only knows that phrase. So, um, I guess maybe I'll go try to find him and get him out because we still need him for the show. Yeah, he's got some stuff he needs to edit to and uh. And honestly, those puppies are starting to get tired and he just keeps on picking up the ones that are wearing a nap and putting him back on his stomach. So so there's okay, I know the pile of puppies you were talking about. Okay, No, he's under there, the third pile. Yes, yeah, okay, great, um as I said, guys, want to thank you so much for coming on the show and being our very first guest. I'd also like to let listeners know that if you like this show, as you said, you'll enjoy tech stuff. But these folks aren't just on tech stuff. They are on another excellent podcast called Forward Thinking that which is also a video series, and you can see all three of us they think at various points, participating in everyday science shananigans on a show called brain Stuff. You can actually see all three of us in in the episode about about product placement. Oh boy, that one I forgot about that. Yeah, well, if you want to see why they're laughing at me, you can check that one out to Uh. You can find stuff they don't want you to know. Dot com for video and every podcast we've ever made, and of course we're all over the internet. You can drop us a line with a suggestion or feedback on Twitter or Facebook. That's where we put a lot of the stories that don't make it into videos or podcasts. So do check it out. And if you'd like to cut has the social media rigormar rule entirely, just send us. Uh, just send us an email at our address. We are conspiracy at how stuff works dot com. For more on this topic another unexplained phenomenon, visit test two dot com slash conspiracy stuff. You can also get in touch on Twitter at the handle at conspiracy stuff.

From UFOs two ghosts and government cover ups. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to now. All right, Hello, welcome to the show. If that intro by our super producer Noel was familiar, then that means you are in the right place. Ladies and gentlemen. This is stuff they don't want you to know. I'm Ben. You're probably wondering where Matt is. He is off on an adventure that maybe we'll get to in the course of this show. But in place of Matt, today we have not one, but two very special guests from tech Stuff, from brain Stuff, from Forward Thinking. I don't even know how you guys found time to come on this show, Jonathan Strickland and Lauren vogelbaumb We found time because we literally just recorded another Tech Stuff episode with you, like like ten minutes ago. Thanks for not giving away our time travel scheme. That was good. I'm glad that we have got that out of the bag out of the bag Man, which is only gonna be funny if you listen to the other episode, right, because this is a sequel that's a compacit a sister episode. It is. It is now. You guys were kind enough or add poor enough taste to have me on your show just a few minutes ago when we recorded a great episode on how to serve the Web anonymously or whether it's even possible. And this was us to something that we thought was right up the stuff they don't want you to know, Ali, because listeners out there, now, you guys know as well as everybody else does now that it turns out the United States government in particular was putting a lot more energy into tracking people than we had all thought. Yeah, I mean, even if you take it at face value, where you know you have this this system specifically the n s A we're talking about here, with the prison specifically with yes, that if even if you take it at face value, that what they were looking for were foreign agents. So if you are a United States citizen, then in theory you would not a United States citizen who is not involved in one of these schemes, You would not be considered a foreign agent and therefore not part of the surveillance. Even if you take that at face value, they would look for people who they did identify as foreign agents, and the people that that those folks talked to, right, Yeah, they played the Kevin Bacon game. Yeah. And if you've ever played the Kevin Bacon game, you know that it gets pretty easy to start linking two people you never thought would have had a connection to each other together. It doesn't really take that many levels of separation, right, Right. And furthermore, they're really collecting information on everyone and sort through it in order to find these specific people. But the fact that they're collecting and storing this information about all of us, it's creepy. It's problematic. So again, even taken on face value, it's it's it's troublesome. And then when you realize the actual methodology, it becomes downright concerning. I mean it's not just that, oh, there's some issues here from a technological perspective, the very methodology is problematic. I think that's well said. So one of my first questions for you guys before you really get into this is, uh, if let's say twenty years ago, if someone had come up to you in and said the government is watching everything and it's just going to watch more, would you have would you have thought it was sort of conspiracy bunk or would you have thought there was a possibility of it happening, I would have thought bunk for sure. Yeah, and it's and it's largely because uh well, I mean ninety four wasn't there at Yeah. When you're talking about how much data gets created or transferred or copied or transmitted however you want to look at it, it's an astronomical number. It is an enormous number. Just let's just take YouTube as the example of data creation. Okay, so on YouTube, every single minute that passes, more than a hundred hours of video footage is being uploaded to YouTube. Some of that's duplicate footage, but it doesn't really matter. That's a huge amount of information. Now, just kind of extrapolate. Imagine that the entire Internet, this network of computer networks, is filled with people who are either creating information or accessing it in some way. And the accessing of information does in itself create a certain amount of meta data. There's information about who, who accessed what and when. This is such an enormous amount that most of us would think that being able to to capture it and filter it and make any meaning of it would be a gargentean task beyond our capabilities. But it is a gargentean task. But it's not, as it turns out, beyond our capability exactly. It turns out that our our technology is sufficiently sophisticated enough to be able to weed through that kind of stuff, or at least we're working very hard on it. I mean, not the three of us at this table, but I'm personally aware of well. And and Google is a perfect example of how we should have really kind of re evaluated this idea that it's just too big, right, because Google has created a business that, or at least the forward facing part of their business that that's the search engine. You know, arguably you would say that the real business is advertising, but but the search engine is the thing, the product that we're all familiar with, and it's really really good. It's a really good search engine if you're trying to find something specific. And once we realize how much information is out there and how Google has developed an algorithm that can effectively find the stuff you actually want to see, then you start to realize, oh, I guess it really is possible to build in that a similar kind of tool that could be useful if you're looking for signs of activity. Uh, if you happen to be an enormous government organization that is in charge of discovering cryptic messages set between foreign agents that could potentially affect your country, or friends of foreign agents, yes, or people who know friends of foreign agents. Yes. That's the problem is that this this ripples outward. Right, if if it were just the foreign agents, that becomes an issue because then you have to be able to to reliably identify a foreign agent versus someone who is not a foreign agent. But then if you go one ripple outward, who are these people talking to and why? Well, I can understand why you would be interested in that, but they're going to be people in that that one ripple outward who are not in any way connected with anything nefarious, but they're going to get swept up in that surveillance. Anyway, if you go a further ring out, go for it. That's an enormous number of people. This is what Facebook is completely built upon, the whole idea of that social network. If you ever see any of their presentations, you just see how this this this one small group of people who have these interconnections between each other become this enormous mass of people. When you just go out a couple of steps. Yet now this I'm glad that we're talking about this because this is something that escapes a lot of people that the uh, the government agency, the n s A has automated the collection and analysis of this of this stuff for people who are concerned. You know, the n s A is listening in on my phone calls and reading my emails. They're taking your phone calls and emails and they're keeping them like like you said, Lauren, And what they'll do is if you pop up on a different algorhythm, than they'll actually have a human. Like any other big organization from a call center to the FBI, it's kind of difficult to actually get to a human. You have to go through a few steps. Yeah, dial one, wait for stuff. You listen to a robot voice and I hate it, just a side note, I hate it when the the automated line won't let you just push a button and you have to stand there wherever you are and look really stupid and go operator operate. Yes, yes, yes, yea, And everybody's so solemn. We all just said the same yes. But um. But but moving from this, we before we go too deep on the government, we should make a point that they're not the only people looking at web activity when we talk about yeah, I mean, companies obviously are looking at a lot of web activity as well, for multiple reasons. Uh. Mostly companies are looking at activity in order to make more money, all right. They want to be able to sell you stuff better, or to sell you as a consumer to an advertising company so that that advertising company can tell you stuff better. Yeah. Yeah, it all comes down to, you know, where are the dollars, where are they coming from, and where are they going to? And so we the users end up playing a big role in that. I mean we we are the ones who generate revenue for companies. And you know, if it weren't that way, the Internet would be a very different place. For one thing, it would not be nearly as robust as it is, right, it would it would be mainly limited to communication lines between things like research institutes and the government, which, big surprise, that's what originally the Internet was all about. Our yeah, our ponnett was essentially connections between scientific research institutes, universities, and government installations. And that was it, and and that was because you know, that was what it was built for, was built to be this really fast communications and networking ability so that people could share things very effectively. What it's grown into is this crazy world that melds things like entertainment and commerce and communications all into one big package, which in many ways is legitimately awesome. Obviously, we wouldn't have jobs if there were an internet, or at least we wouldn't have these jobs we are on the internet right now. Yeah, well, you guys get paid. I'm here for community service. Your internship has lasted longer than any other I've ever seen. That's true. Hey, will you sign off for my hours before this is? Thanks guys. UM. One question, though, that a lot of people will have is the following. Just a little bit of background here. UM, The question is is surfing anonymously legal? Uh? The background here is that often the desire to surf anonymously is depicted as one that is inherently sinister. That is the same sort of uh perception that is given two things is like torrents now or peer to peer networks. Peer to peer networks as they are by themselves, are not sinister or shady or illegal, right ap. Peer to peer network is just a means of distribution of files right, But when you start distributing files that you don't have the right to distribute network, that's where the illegal activity comes, and then you end up sort of casting this shadow across the entire technology. So there are companies like music and movie companies that just say peer to peer networks alone are bad because those are a lot of the ways that that illegal file sharing got spread around, you know, just a few years ago. Now it's not even that big of a deal because you can get pretty much everything in a billion different places. But uh, you know, if you're talking about just trying to serve anonymously, it all depends upon where you are in the world. In the United States, it's not a big deal. There's no law that you'd be very king by trying to hide your IP address. The laws that you would be breaking would be if you tried to do anything illegal while you were doing that, or even if you weren't, whether or not you're trying to hide what you're doing. If you're doing something illegal, that's against the law, right, Yeah, Like like you like you don't have to use tour to buy drugs. There are many other reasons that you can use tor Yeah, but if you do buy drugs. That's against the law, and then if you're caught, you could be punished for it, or you will be if you're caught. I see. Yeah. So so here in the West and the United States, Canada and so on, there is not a law against uh surfing the web anonymously. I don't I don't think it's even against the law to uh go into some of the deep web stuff to which we alluded um, which you guys have covered in a previous episode and Matt and I have covered as well. We're talking about this Silk Road and and not the historic one through Central Asia. But as you said, other countries have different perspectives, like you've got a great example about China. Sure, yeah, China. They have a program in China that is called the Golden Shield Project, also more commonly known as the Great Firewall of China. UH. And the reason for this is that it said effort i'll um on part of the Chinese government to censor and and have surveillance over Internet activities within China, so that the main purpose of it is to prevent objectionable material as defined by the Chinese government from getting to Chinese citizens using the internet. So flat out block some websites and some search terms and like some yeah things like Facebook. You can't access Facebook in China using if you were just trying to connect to a Chinese I s P and go through methods domain name server. So if you were to if you were to just use like plug and play, you're you're just trying to use your browser to get to certain places. You would find out that there's some websites you just cannot access that way in China. In order to access those websites, you have to circumvent the protections that have been put in place. UH. In general, this is not seen as a huge deal, right, It's it's it's it's frowned upon. You're not supposed to do it. But as far as I am aware, no one has been UH persecuted and or prosecuted for trying to circumnavigate the firewall of China. However, if you were to do something such as post messages that are anti Chinese government to websites, then that is very much considered against the law, and you will they will look for you, and if they find you and catch you, they will punish you. Right, and it might also be used as perhaps a pretext for arresting someone, at least in that country, kind of the same way the tax evasion was the crime for which Capone was ultimately arrested. Yeah. That in some cases, depending again upon what country you are in, uh, this might be the the door that opens up so that they can get you for what they really want you for. Right And and when we say we're not especially picking on China, oh, although I do have to say, there's one really cool thing that that freaks me out a bit. And if you are on just the regular you know, the version of the inner State uh Internet in China. Every so often these two cartoon police characters will pop up on the screen just to let you know that they're they're looking out for you, they're protecting you. They're protecting and serving by making sure you're not doing anything wrong. Actually, what they're doing is they're protecting you by making sure all that terrible information that would flood flood your browser if if it only had the chance, because they know you are an upstanding Chinese citizen and would never try to access that kind of stuff. But that stuff is trying to get it you no matter what. And those cops they are making sure that you are going to be safe from it. They also have blue eyes, which is very weird. Their names of Chinging and Cha Cha. It's based on a pun that means police in Chinese. So check check it out and google it if you have a chance. Just remember that China will know you looked at it. And uh so earlier, Um, we we mentioned toward the onion router, right, and uh what I wanted to ask about is if you could, because you guys are the experts here on technical matters, if you could outline briefly for our listeners, what's the difference between like a privacy mode on a browser and something like tour. That's a great question. Yeah, in brief, a privacy browser on your home computer does absolutely nothing to to protect what you are doing from anyone aside from someone who is looking purely at your home computer. Yeah, exactly, the text mat real quick. While you're doing that, I'll continue to explain. So, yeah, the privacy mode, what it's doing is it's preventing stuff that would normally show up and say, your search history, your browsing history cookies, is preventing all that kind of stuff from happening so that someone who gets access to your machine. Can't just look and see what it is you've been up to. However, anyone who can see the traffic that's going across your local network that includes perhaps other machines that are also on the local network, your router, the modem, your I s P, all of these entities know exactly what you're doing because in order for you to get the stuff you're trying to get, they these entities have to know where to send it, right right, This is so you know, up to and including the website that you're accessing, they know who you are as well, right, Yeah, at least they know the I P edge, yes, and they know they know what network it's going to. So really it's it's you know, you can't hide your IP address perfectly because if you did, no information would ever come back to your computer. Now we, uh, we do have an interesting fact here, and by interesting I mean disturbing. So I'll just go ahead and ask how much information does someone a company or a government or whomever need about you before they can figure out who you are? All right? This is a kind of fascinating. Did you ever hear the story about how Target had identified a customer as being pregnant. It was It turned out to be a young lady, teenager, and so Target pregnant people are ladies, that that would be true. That is true, Lauren, thank you is a good point. A young lady pregnant, Uh, Harris don't know. Parents don't know, parents don't know. She has not told them. Uh. And Target starts proactively sending her offers for things that a pregnant lady wouldn't possibly need. And her father found the offers and got very upset, saying like, why is Target sending this unsolit solicited stuff? What do you what are you saying about? My daughter? Raised a big fuss about it. You have offended mod dignity. That's how I pickture him speaking. Yes, it was a Southern gentleman from the fun city of Savannah there with a white glove and just slapped the front door. Yeah. Challenge you, I challenge your entire organization to Yeah. No, that's not exactly what happened. But he did raise a fuss and then later wrote a second a follow up message saying I had a talk with my daughter. It turns out that I did not. I was not aware that she was pregnant. But this raised the point of how did target know? What was it that gave target the information? How did they predict this? And as it turned out, it had the company had been watching her purchase patterns and determined that statistically speaking, she was very likely pregnant. And so this is an illustration that you don't have to have actively shared some information about yourself for an entity or a per son to draw conclusions about at least your what your physical state is, or what your your state of mind might be. Even if it's not your specific name and identity, it could be enough to be able to single out who you are from a level that's separate from my name is Jonathan Strickland and I live in Atlanta, Right, That actually would be very easy. They're probably very few Joan Strickland's living in Atlanta. There might be a few, because you know, there are a lot of other Jonathan Strickland's. Lauren vocal Bam might be the easiest to paying directly to zoom in pretty quickly. So the real answer to this question, according to research specialists, is that thirty three bits of information called bits of entropy, and this in this identification business are required in order to narrow it down to a specific person out of all the people on Earth. And and these these bits of information can be anything from from your gender to the type of car you drive, to your zip code to like, like, it doesn't have to be the same thirty three bits in order, it could be any thirty three bits, and bit in this case means something specific. Like like in the computer world we talk about digital Uh, you know these binary digits. That that's what a bit is. It's either a zero or a one, which you could think of as either a no or yes. Well, uh, some bits, some pieces of information represent a single bit, like gender is considered to be a single bit, putting gender discussions aside. For for many people, this would be male or female. All right, that that obviously oversimplifies things, but for the purposes for identification, male female tends to be uh. The way that they look at it, very black and white kind of approach. That represents one bit. Something like your zip code might be several bits of information that would make up just one zip code, but all it takes is thirty three bits. Some of those bits might be connected to a larger concept, like your model of car, uh, the specific region you live in, whatever it is your age. That's another good one. But all you need are thirty three bits worth of this information to be able to identify. And the reason for that is you take this yes or no. That's a base of two, right, You've you've got two options. You take that too, then you have the thirty three different bits. That's two to the power of thirty three. If you work that out, that ends up being more than eight billion. Two to the thirty third powers more than eight billion. There are seven billion people on Earth. Wait, we've got made up people in this. It means that we have more than enough information to to account for the seven billion people who are actually alive. So, uh, if you the idea is that with those thirty three bits, you can then have enough personal identifiable information to narrow it down to a specific individual. And also, it's devilishly easy to forget that what you're putting out on the internet personally identifies you, right say, all sorts of things that they imagine are innocuous. I mean, Twitter is in the Congressional Library. Now, yeah, you can get an entire you can download an entire Twitter history, which is for some of us quite a large file. As it turns out. I think I have more than seventeen dozen tweets. So, um, I clearly am not as as worried about anonymity as some people are. Perhaps that is a foolish thing on my part, but uh, there's an interesting example of this as well. Researchers at Stanford and the University of Texas. We're able to identify Netflix viewers based upon their activity, and part of that was because these are the same. These viewers would do things like leave reviews for movies on other sites and just by looking at the stuff that you wouldn't think would personally identify you, right, because it's just it's just you your opinion about a movie. It's not hey, I happened to be five foot whatever. I'm not telling you. Yeah, but they But the point being then is that there's uh, there, there's some puzzle solving that can happen very easily, right because they say, oh, um, anonymous user A watch this thing on Netflix at this time, and then oh surprise, shortly thereafter, anonymous user oh wait, it's anonymous user A. And they said that this was they gave it three stars, and what they did on Netflix like like this, this anonymous user A watched a uh particular movie at a particular time. This other person whose identity we know, left a review on IMDb, and based upon the time between these two events, were reasonably certain that anonymous user A is this person we know. An anonymous user A is completely wrong about Big Trouble a Little Chine, which is an amazing movie. It is not. It is not a good bad movie. It is a good good movie because he's the sidekick the whole time. You got pork Shop Express. Come on, So what is the Tour project about? You guys have done a you guys done a podcast on this. Um, Matt and I have done some videos, but we've never done a full podcast on it. So it's tour you know, kind of stands for the Onion Router. It's really its own name now, it's just tour sure. Originally the Onion Router was based on the idea that, um, it's encrypting things in layers, yes, so that you would go, uh, an information from point A to point Z, let's say, would go through all these different layers, and between each layer things would get encrypted in a different way. So from layer one to layer two it would get encrypted layer two to layer three, it would get encrypted layer three to layer forward get a different level of encryption, and and furthermore, each each layer, each node in this connection only knows the node before it and after it, which is key. It doesn't know the entire chain exactly. So the idea of being that this node, this series of nodes makes a circuit. That circuit is connecting your computer running a tour browser to whatever site or whatever information you were trying to retrieve. But that circuit of nodes has very limited information in any individual piece of the overall circuit. Right, So if you identified that there's one node in this network, and you see that information is coming from uh, the node immediately preceding it, and it's going to the node following it, you wouldn't be able to reconstruct the rest of the circuit. That's all the information you would be able to get. So if there are like six nodes in this circuit and you've identified node number three, you can only see that information is coming from node two and it's going to node four. You wouldn't be able to see where node one, five, or six, where those are in that circuit. Yeah, you wouldn't be able to see the original sender or the intended receiver, and hopefully if it's encrypted well enough, you wouldn't be able to read the message either exactly, because again it gets encrypted between each node in that circuit. Uh, it sounds pretty secure, right, Yeah, it sounds it sounds pretty cool. What could possibly go wrong? Well, as it turns out, there are ways to try and figure out who is trying to access what so So in this world where you're looking at all these connections that get hidden because it's traveling through all these nodes, you might be able to see all the potential start points and all the potential end points, but you don't really know which people are trying to access which sites or which servers. However, if you were to be able to analyze all the traffic across the network and build enough of a statistical model, you could start weeding people out and start looking at the potential people going to the potential end points, play the something like the target game. You could use big data to uh analyze and then maybe even predict. Yeah. So essentially what you're this is really oversimplifying it. But essentially you might see that, uh that let's say person A, the anonymous A is trying to access Silk Road, all right, and so you see an anonymous person's a's connection light up. It then goes across these nodes which mix everything else up, and you are already looking at Silk Road, so you are specifically you've already identified the potential target and the potential destination. And then you see that the silk Road one lights up in the amount of time you would expect for this message to have to transfer across these modes. Then you'd say, uh, this is a potential hit. And then you continue to analyze traffic. This can actually help d H and animonize I can't even say it. How do we thank you anemone D anemone the network? So but you know, it really is this is a potential way where you can figure out at least which connection was trying to connect to which server. Uh, And it just it steps back from the actual circuit entirely. And it may not be enough to move on a person you know with full legal backing, but it might be enough to convince you to really look into that person more closely. So there's really no safe harbor for complete anonymity on tour because if somebody wants to find you or if they want to find find the needle in the haystack, with enough diligence, they can well, I mean it would it's at least possible for them to for for someone really determined and with the right resources to be able to start narrowing things down right, Uh, certainly, And there there are few other problems with with tour. I mean, it's an open source thing. That's part of the way that the system actually protects itself and a kind of anti logical. It might encounterintuitive, but it really is because it means that anyone can can go in and look at this. So if someone changes something or someone puts in a change, this is a community that's looking after the whole the whole product. So it's not something that would be easy to slip in without anyone taking notice of it. Also, its origins kind of raise some eyebrows to Yes, the origin from naval research, right, Yeah, well, I mean, as it turns out, Uh, there are reasons why, say a military organization would want to be able to send information uh secretly or perhaps access information in secret and even within itself, yeah, even without itself, even even apart from other organizations within that same government. Uh. When we talk about the n s A, there are their government organizations that are equally upset as they quite a few that, like you know, you know, there are citizens who are up and up up all about this. I mean, they're very upset about it, as I think they should be. Um, that's my own personal opinion. But there are government organizations they're they're working for the same people who are equally upset. Their wheels within wheels would be the X files line. I mean, you've got those, You've got those great rivalries between the CIA and n s A that date back to the the beginning of both organizations. And recently, as we're recording this, more and more information about what we would call friendly fire surveillance has leaked people who had not only the wherewithal, but the motivation to keep their communications private or anonymous. Like congres members of Congress found that, um, not only was the n s A, but the FBI as well, uh mono touring their monitoring their day to day emails and phone calls, whatnot. The thing that was was really important to underline here is that it's not inherently sinister to serve the web anonymously. And it's possible to do it, as we said an earlier thing, but it's not really plausible and uh not for a long term solution. No, No, it's once off and we uh we do tell you, guys, listeners in UH and Jonathan Lawns show, we show you how theoretically you could make yourself if not impossible to trace, very very inconvenient to do so. Right, But it's basically like like burner phone, burner, internet connection, burner face like to go, yeah, you gotta pretty much be uh. You have to really limit what it is you want to do, and you have to very much limit the way you do it. So in other words, it's not like you can just use that methodology to do everything you would want to do on the web, because there's some cool stuff that's on the web that I love to do that there's just no way to do anonymously, not not truly right, Like can you really have a full Corgy watching experience if you can't log in and comment? That also is a reference to the Text Stuff episode. You'll learn way more about Corgy obsessions in that show. I think it's enthusiasm. I don't think we've crossed the line into obsession. Yet we're just let me close out a couple of tabs. So while Jonathan's closing out a couple of tabs, I do just want to set you guys up for one more big question. UM. If you if you like our show stuff they want you to know listeners, then then you'll love tech stuff because they have also been talking about several different revelations, um, both both with security and the nuts and bolts about how these kind of things work. So we highly recommend their show. And I have to ask you guys, since you're the ones with to know how, UM, if you had to guess or speculate, do you think that there would be more news forthcoming like the whole Snowden disclosure thing where he said, you know, he kicked down the door of the news organizations and said this buying on everybody. Is there anything else that would happen, because it seems like that's the big well, I mean, we only know what we know, right there's there's you can bet a couple of things. You can bet that anything that has happened since Snowdon has left is largely unknown to us because he was the source of the leak. So anything that has been done to address that or change things, evolve the technologies that's being used, or or to find tune them in different ways, or even apply them and even more broad applications, or to fine tune the process by which they make sure that other people don't link their information. Yeah, all of that is unknown to us, so we can't really be sure what's going on. What we do know is just based upon the information that's been revealed so far. There already have been abuses of the system. So that's the other thing to keep in mind. Even if somehow you could agree that the n s A system is on its own, maybe you could call it flawed, but it mostly works. Let's say that you even make that assumption. The problem is it's run by people, and people, as it turns out, our flawed very much so, and some people will take advantage of having the opportunity to use such a powerful tool to do things like snoop on X girlfriends. Yeah, and even if someone isn't doing it nefariously, there there could certainly be mistakes made. Yeah. So, so there are a lot of issues that will probably come to light as we get more people investigating this um. The interesting thing to me is really seeing how much movement we see in political circles to actually address this in a meaningful way, because you do have lots of people, You have lots of representatives who are at least saying that they want more, more, more transparency because their constituents are demanding it. Right. Yeah, well they're they're kind of demanding it too. I mean it sounds like, yeah, once they found out that the ad but uh there. That's one of the big debates always is uh is it a matter of sincere offense or fashionable offense fashionable indignation? And and that's something that I think we will see in the future with our listeners. We'd like to we'd like to hear from you guys as well. What do you think the next big revelations about the internet would be? Um? Oh, and here's one. Uh, can you or have you served the web anonymously? Let's see if you could write in and let us know and still stay anonymous. I don't know, let's just see if it works. Uh. In the meantime, I'd like to thank Jonathan and Lauren you guys, thank you so much for coming on our show. Um, I wish I knew what had happened to Matt. We haven't really said it on air, but you want to go ahead, and I actually I can reveal at this point that Matt in fact was buried under a pile of corky puppies and he's he's all right, but he's penned and cannot move. He's the happiest that he has ever been. He is stuck. He has been saying that I cannot breathe and that's okay, uh, in various languages. It's weird. He actually is really fluent, but only in that one phrase. Yeah, he's really smart, but it's strange that he only knows that phrase. So, um, I guess maybe I'll go try to find him and get him out because we still need him for the show. Yeah, he's got some stuff he needs to edit to and uh. And honestly, those puppies are starting to get tired and he just keeps on picking up the ones that are wearing a nap and putting him back on his stomach. So so there's okay, I know the pile of puppies you were talking about. Okay, No, he's under there, the third pile. Yes, yeah, okay, great, um as I said, guys, want to thank you so much for coming on the show and being our very first guest. I'd also like to let listeners know that if you like this show, as you said, you'll enjoy tech stuff. But these folks aren't just on tech stuff. They are on another excellent podcast called Forward Thinking that which is also a video series, and you can see all three of us they think at various points, participating in everyday science shananigans on a show called brain Stuff. You can actually see all three of us in in the episode about about product placement. Oh boy, that one I forgot about that. Yeah, well, if you want to see why they're laughing at me, you can check that one out to Uh. You can find stuff they don't want you to know. Dot com for video and every podcast we've ever made, and of course we're all over the internet. You can drop us a line with a suggestion or feedback on Twitter or Facebook. That's where we put a lot of the stories that don't make it into videos or podcasts. So do check it out. And if you'd like to cut has the social media rigormar rule entirely, just send us. Uh, just send us an email at our address. We are conspiracy at how stuff works dot com. For more on this topic another unexplained phenomenon, visit test two dot com slash conspiracy stuff. You can also get in touch on Twitter at the handle at conspiracy stuff.