Joe Rogan Interviews Edward Snowden

By now, it should be crystal clear to anyone paying attention that individual autonomy and freedom is under attack by powerful forces with the capability to shape and mold society according to their own whims.

Tech monopolies like Google and Facebook have accumulated the power to erase your civil liberties, often without you even noticing it happening, even though it’s occurring right in front of your face, or in this case, right on your computer or cellphone screen.

Over the years, Google became the biggest “library” in the history of the world. While it began as an inconceivable blessing, giving people access to information they might never have had access to before, it has since morphed into a massive, and just as inconceivable, control device.

As of June 2019, Google has changed the game, and you are no longer able to access this vast treasure-trove of information in the same way you were able to in the past.

The results can be nothing short of devastating, as you’re not only prevented from finding truthful information about health (among other things), but you’re actively being led toward information that will mislead you. So, it’s a double whammy.

In the video above, Joe Rogan interviews Edward Snowden. It’s a nearly three-hour-long interview and, if you can, I highly recommend taking the time to watch it in its entirety. It may well be one of the best interviews Snowden has ever given.

However, I started the video for you toward the end, where he was finally warmed up and getting into some amazing stories before Rogan cut him off at two hours and 45 minutes.

If the three-hour interview is too much to handle, at least watch this 20-minute outtake from Rogan’s interview with Snowden. In it, he specifically discusses how your cellphone has become an undercover surveillance device.

At all times, your phone is connected to the nearest cellphone tower, and it’s continuously broadcasting a globally unique identifier code that identifies your physical handset. This is why when someone calls your number, your phone rings and no one else’s.

Each cell tower your phone connects to makes a permanent record of your handset and phone number, and the time that it was connected to that particular tower.

Since you have to have a service subscription for your phone number, once someone has your handset ID and corresponding phone number, they can obtain your identity. So, as you move about your day, your phone is tracking your every move, provided it’s on your person.

As noted by Snowden, there is no need for this information to be kept forever, and yet it is. Companies see this data as valuable information, providing them with data points about you, your interests, personal connections and so on, which is then turned into a gigantic profile of you as a person that can be exploited in various ways, including for marketing purposes.

Snowden also explains how, even if you have GPS turned off in your phone, as long as you’re connected to Wi-Fi, your exact location is still being identified and recorded, thanks to globally unique identifiers in Wi-Fi modems. In other words, Wi-Fi access points act as proxies for your location even in the absence of GPS data.

How Can You Protect Your Privacy?

So, what can you do to protect your privacy? As strange as it sounds, even shutting your cellphone off isn’t a guaranteed shield from this kind of surveillance, as shutting it off might not entirely shut it off.

The reason for this is because most smartphones now have permanent batteries, and if you cannot remove the battery, you cannot be certain that no data are being received or transmitted from the device.

According to Snowden, “There are ways to hack a phone to where it appears to be off but it’s not actually off, it’s just ‘pretending’ to be off.” If you want to learn more about this, see Snowden’s paper⁷ “Against the Law: Countering Lawful Abuses of Digital Surveillance,” published in The Journal of Open Engineering.

For the average person, though, such hacking will not take place and shouldn’t be of great concern. (Snowden’s paper addresses the problem of cellphone surveillance from the point of view of how it can sabotage and threaten the safety of journalists, who may be actively targeted.)

Snowden recommends that when considering mitigation efforts, first consider just how damaging the information might be to you were it to be exploited. So, in other words, don’t send “top-secret” documents from your cellphone, for example.

The primary threat to the average citizen is the bulk collection of data, Snowden says, which is made possible by the fact that most people leave their phones on all the time.

“The central problem with smartphone use today is you have no idea what the hell it’s doing,” he says. “You don’t know what it’s connected to or how frequently it’s [sending/receiving information]. Apple and IOS make it impossible to see what kind of network connections are constantly made on the device.”

Privacy Requires the Ability to Control Your Data

What we need is the ability to make decisions about which apps and programs are able to communicate and when, Snowden says. Part of the problem is the fact that there’s an entire industry built on keeping all of this invisible, to keep you in the dark about what data are being collected on you and when.

“We need to make the activity of our devices … more visible and understandable to the average person,” he says. “And then give control over it.” Google and Apple are not providing this capability, claiming it’s simply too complex a task, and that, Snowden says, “is actually a confession of the problem.”

“If you think people can’t understand it, if you think there are too many communications happening, you think there’s too much complexity in there, [then] it needs to be simplified,” Snowden says. “It should be a much more simple process.

It should be obvious, and the fact that it’s not; the fact that we read story after story … saying your data has been breached here, this company is spying on you

… this company is manipulating your purchases or your search results, or they’re hiding these things from your timeline, or they’re influencing or manipulating you in all these different ways — that happens as a result of a single problem, and that problem is an inequality of available information.

They can see everything about you, they can see everything about what your device is doing and they can do whatever they want with your device. You on the other hand … you paid for the device, but increasingly these corporations own it; increasingly government owns it …

We are living in a world where we do all the work, we pay all the taxes, we pay all the costs, but we own less and less … This is something people don’t get — they go ‘oh it’s data collection; they’re exploiting data.’ This is data about human lives. It is data about people.

These records are about you. It’s not data being exploited, it’s people that are being exploited. It’s not data that’s being manipulated, it’s YOU that’s being manipulated!”

Google Is Too Big for Our Own Good

In recent years, I’ve written many articles about the danger Google’s monopoly on information poses, and today, we’re seeing the effects of it. Everything I feared would happen has now occurred. Google recently implemented a massive update, removing almost all of my content from its search results.

Google worked for many years to earn your trust, but it was really just setting a trap to twist that trust into powerful control. It started out giving you everything you wanted, so it can now take everything you have.

Google now has a stranglehold on information, picking and choosing what it wants you to be able to see and what you cannot. It also plays an integral role in the mass surveillance machine, as it’s a primary collector of personal data.

For an in-depth look at how Google is censoring health and political information, see “Google Whistleblower Zach Vorhies Speaks Out.” In many ways, Vorhies is the Snowden of Google, ripping the veil to reveal the many ways in which Google is manipulating users and influencing politics from behind the scenes.

Again, if you can, watch Rogan’s interview with Snowden in its entirety. You’re not likely to regret it, as it’s really, really informative. Even though there are few answers to the surveillance problem at present, we’ll never find any answers if we remain unaware of how the surveillance works, or that it’s even taking place.

Aside from turning your phone off when not in use, to minimize the tracking of your every move, eliminating Google and Facebook from your life is another way you can protect your privacy.

In “What Kind of Information Does Google and Facebook Have on You?” I review the kind of data being collected by these entities, and how it’s being exploited. Part of the answer is quite simply to boycott Google and avoid using any and all Google products. Here are a few suggestions:

• Stop using Google search engines. Alternatives include DuckDuckGo⁸ and Startpage⁹
• If you have an Android phone consider ditching it (as it is a Google operating system) and switch to an iPhone, which is more diligent about preserving your privacy
• Uninstall Google Chrome and use Brave or Opera browser instead, available for all computers and mobile devices.¹⁰ From a security perspective, Opera is far superior to Chrome and offers a free VPN service (virtual private network) to further preserve your privacy
• If you have a Gmail account, try a non-Google email service such as ProtonMail,¹¹ an encrypted email service based in Switzerland
• Stop using Google docs. Digital Trends has published an article suggesting a number of alternatives¹²
• If you’re a high school student, do not convert the Google accounts you created as a student into personal accounts
• Sign the “Don’t be evil” petition created by Citizens Against Monopoly

 Sources and References

• ^1, 2, 4 The Washington Post June 9, 2013
• ^3, 5 The Guardian June 11, 2013
• ⁶ The Guardian August 1, 2013
• ⁷ The Journal of Open Engineering July 21, 2016 DOI: 10.21428/12268
• ⁸ Fast Company, Inside DuckDuckGo
• ⁹ Startpage.com
• ¹⁰ Opera Browser
• ¹¹ ProtonMail
• ¹² Digital Trends April 28, 2017

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