were here in february that's right yes i was horizontally having my hate replaced at the time so i missed that opportunity but i'm very happy to have you here today to continue to talk to us about the issue all the fourth amendment and where we stand today with discussions in every medium possible including congress and people's bedrooms and dining rooms and where are we today with this issue oh well the great thing is that there is an entity that has a very comprehensive picture of those conversations that are going on and that is the n a the the status is this true six months ago really people were not sure how much could be conducted by the us government and the amount of information that was being gathered on all of us but the situation looks a little better today develop is that the patriot act would is really not that great an idea to begin with and we have reached a point as a society where we should feel comfortable with and that collects all of our communications and then flags things that look suspicious according to the algorithms that it runs that's not how we're meant to run things we're meant to be able to for our lives as free people and pursuing the interests that we have and if we don't get involved provably in criminal behavior then the government should leave us alone so what is it was supported by some people who wanted to see reforms it was also supported by a lot of people who wanted to see the government's massive aiden's programs continue because it didn't really do that much to form and it was opposed in genuine bipartisanship you don't see a whole lot of that from congress but on this issue you do because half of the people voting for send half the people voting against it were democrats and republicans it was pretty much  so it's a mix in either party and that makes it really interesting to work on and it means that we work in error to see with groups of right over on the right hand side of the spectrum and right over on the left hand side suspects but or call a member of your family when two grandmothers in peoria wondering whether they're going to go out for coffee that morning the information on that call can be gathered by the surveillance state that's how they reinterpret it and they said that gathering everything that data on every call in the united states was relevant and what has been found no that it has become public in the last couple of years that this is what they are doing the defenders of the n s a went to congress and said you don't understand this it's been  useful it has helped to thwart fifty four terrorist attacks and some some members of congress were appropriately skeptical and they said ok what fifty four tell us about that and they came back and said well we didn't so much mean fifty four attack what we actually meant who is that there was this one case of this one guy in san diego who wired some money to somalia and the money ended up in the hands of  who are an unpleasant fundamentalist group and we probably would never have known that had it not been for this program and so on the one side eight thousand five hundred dollars less to al shabaab and on the other side  time sounds like a fair trade off to me and they would like really fifty four down to like one or maybe a half an attack it isn't really an attack even that one is just like money  over way that we should get rid of this program is incredible to me under those circumstances it is that when you put it that way i must say that's a compelling argument  what is being gathered is equivalent to maybe one hundred twenty million years wow so that was fully utterly overwhelmed and the mismatch between staff time and the amount of data that is out there is getting bigger with every passing day so for this reason the n s a is investing very heavily in any first party contractor that promises to enable them to mix it could be through sophisticated algorithms that and converting them into texas thing can then be reliably and i don't sound very sophisticated it's a very very difficult challenge obviously you're dealing with communications in every language and also in every accent within it's a much more manageable system and human beings can actually make sense of it and act on it so one can you can you share with us a little bit about your background and how you got interested in this i think it's and i came to the u s as a young man for grad school at u c berkeley and so i landed in the san francisco bay area in the middle of the dotcom boom and people at this grad school were very interested in a lot of different matters like health policy and welfare policy but no one was really doing work on technology policy and what would be happening in the context of the white sprayed it might widespread adoption of the internet which had happened only four years before it was changing a lot of things and no one really understood it yet but i i interned us an organization that had a better handle on that than almost anyone else which was called the electronic frontier foundation in san francisco and what i learned through my mind because they could see what was the and then in twenty twelve i became a u s citizen and i felt it was more appropriate for me to engage in this issue because it was something that was highly relevant to domestic politics and i was now will be cool and i would care about it not many other people would care about it but it would be meaningful to me and then a year later edward snowden came along and everything to do and he'd talk is that what happened and  never spoken what is the name of your organization the name of the organization that i run nationally is restore the fourth for the fourth amendment and we have twenty six chapters across the country  and the people who are trying to to this cause tend to be very interesting they tend to have some knowledge about technology probably more than i do myself i was an english major and undergraduate  they they tend to be progressive in their views who are libertarian in their views and they also tend towards being younger than i am wish kind of refreshing to be working in this space because it means that it's the first space i've ever worked in where i'm the oldest statesman which is frank and i are not used to being the oldest statesman of benefit so we work we advocate and our biggest two fifteen because it's a patriot act and everyone knows the patriot act is yesterday here to stay and look where we are where two days before the actual lapse of section two fifteen and even if the senate comes in now agrees with what the house is doing which they probably will and then there is absolutely nothing that can be done to stop sunset at this point as of the morning of june first we're going to not that day we are going to be in a world where there is going to be meaningfully less surveillance and on that basis we can work with congress to not in my personal opinion this would be what i would be also is causing people to who are involved in it it from what i'm understanding you to say to focus on gathering the stuff that is really i mean so much information that it's irrelevant for focusing on what are the true threats yes and so does that make that is right it's really a mathematical problem let's say that you devise a system that nobody is even close to yet which takes people's data and is ninety nine percent effective at detecting who is a terrorist but then you have billions upon billions of communications and if it's ninety nine percent effective then the vast majority of the flags for being a terrorist that you receive and that's even if you have systems that a vastly more accurate today that's interesting wow a lot of work to be done well you say well you could either say well if we just feed in burbank elementary and they seem to be having a good time there is good of the school and i have a one year old daughter who is in daycare for around thirty hours a week it and the rest of the time we manage you know this is the life of being a parent with young kids and sometimes you find that you're doing work on this a lot after the kids go to bed something that was politically unimaginable six months ago and if you look at the resources of the people who have been trying to make sunset happen versus the resources of the n s a and the government and all of the people who are stacked against  it's laughable we've got essentially no money to be doing this but individual people and trente not that many people organizing and being strategic and effectively you don't need the whole mass of people to do the same amount of work that you do on it you really don't need that many people you really don't necessarily even mean you need that much  you just need to be have enough people who are in a situation to be able to work so how do people who wish to learn more and perhaps get involved get in and there is a little tab that to volunteer and they can sign up through that and we will find plenty for them to do even at the state level here in massachusetts we have an active chapter that meets every week  who are very motivated and you can let you know a lot about what is really going on because a lot of this knowledge before edward snowden came in was a little bit long toppin in the tech community and in the intelligence community and not many people really had much of an idea of what was going on but now that information is being out and people don't like they don't want to have their every move screws right by one wouldn't normally know where to begin to figure out how to be involved i mean what you do but you guys are doing something and it's for us to figure out and how we can participate because it's certainly worth it we can all only benefit right thanks again thank you and until next time what's going on