that was the police i'll be watching you my name is jim brett i was i'm your host on the radical magination i'm a sociologist who's taught it on j college and she viewed versity here in new york and our guest today on the radical imagination is someone i met at the recent fifty is anniversary conference at columbia university on the columbia student rebellion in one nine hundred sixty eight she's a remarkably gifted and articulate spokesperson for field has become increasingly important for progressive and activists around the world to understand and appreciate the key to a civic technologist and data privacy activist in new york city graduated from columbia with a degree in history and statistics and spent her free time organizing and crafting progressive policy with the roosevelt institute she is in turn for the tour project the leading privacy browser used by activists and dissidents throughout the world and she currently works at the end why use gov lab examining digital platforms that increase participation in the law making process at the conference nikita blew me and others away with her knowledge of a field probably most of us in our audience have a lot to learn about killing myself our rights of privacy as carpenter versus united states a pending case before the supreme court the trumping ministrations position would mark the end of privacy in the digital age the specific dispute concerns whether the government needs a warrant to obtain records of the cell towers that an individual's phone is connected to over the course of several months the data allows the government to construct a map of everywhere an individual traveled twenty four seven as long as he or she was carrying the phone the administration argues that because we voluntarily gives information to our cell phone service providers when we use a phone there is no fourth amendment protection for it by that reasoning all information shared digitally including e mails web searches and the internet sites one reads are views would become an open book for the government it would end privacy as we've known it for the past two hundred years i'm so glad the heat is here on the show the in lightness and us fight back at those who would crush our privacy and defend rights and before we meet her here's a brief clip by glenn greenwald on why privacy matters videos devoted to an experience which i am certain that everyone in this room has had it entails an individual thinking marijuana own engages in some expressive behavior while singing gyrating dancing some mild sexual activity only to discover that in fact they are not alone that there is a person watching and working the discovery of which causes them to immediately cease what they're doing in horror the sense of shame and humiliation in their face is palpable it's the sense of this is something i'm willing to do only if no one else is watching this is the crux of the work on which i have been securely focused for the last sixteen months the question of why privacy matters a question that has arisen in the context of a global debate and a bold by the revelations of edward snowden that the united states its partners unbeknown to the entire world has converted the internet once heralded as an unprecedented tool of liberation and democratization into an unprecedented zone of ma indiscriminate surveillance there is a very common sentiment that arises in this debate even among people who are uncomfortable with mass surveillance which says that there's no real harm that comes from this large scale invasion because only people who are engaged in bad acts have a reason to want to hide and to care about their privacy this worldview is implicitly grounded in the proposition that there are two kinds of people in the world good people and bad people bad people are those who plot terrorist attacks or who engage in violent criminality and therefore have reasons to want to hide what they're doing have reasons to care about their privacy but by contrast good people are people who go to work come home raise their children watch television they use the internet not to pot bombing attacks but to read the news or exchange recipes or to plan their kids little league games and those people are doing nothing wrong and therefore have nothing to hide and no reason to fear the government monitoring them there are people who are actually saying that are engaged in a very extreme act of self deprecation what they're really saying is i have agreed to make myself such a harmless and on threatening and uninteresting person that i actually don't fear having the government know what it is that i'm doing this mindset has found what i think is its purest expression in a two thousand and nine interview with the longtime c e o of google eric schmidt who when asked about all the different ways his company is causing invasions of privacy for hundreds of millions of people around the world said this he said if you're doing something that you don't want other people to know maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place maybe we should be to welcome i welcome her family to the american to the end to the radical imagination and we want to talk about the way in which america is hindering our privacy rights and i know you are an activist you've been involved in various programs and research on all of this  and you were just fantastic at the columbia conference and blew it all away so tell us a little about you work your interests how it hooks into some of the things we're sure another standard well i think just being a young person and always having a cellphone or a computer around me the idea of digital privacy is always so to me just been part of the my fingerprint of part of growing up we assume that we have privacy in our own homes and that's something reaffirmed by cream court albeit some day when speaking of the case carpenter right are you actually do you actually have all those privacy rights afforded to you but it just it should be exactly just it seems like something that would make sense but it's interesting you brought up privacy in america because a lot of other countries have the idea of privacy even is preposterous in england for example c c t v fees are everywhere and i grew up in australia and the idea of privacy there is and in most countries a somewhat modern brandeis talked about privacy back in the early one nine hundred and there have been people who hypothesize that maybe privacy came out of and this is more of a marxist like leftist thinking of privacy this idea of with of wealthy people had servants being able to withdraw into their private quarters away from everyone else like their servants or whoever is out on the street but when you really think about privacy today it's not just i don't want people to know what i'm doing but it's how can i be a creative decision making being in charge of my own life without having to worry that someone's going to be exactly so you assume that you can have this life but now there's big questions as to whether or not you can as a result of the trump ministrations decision to and a lot of harvard law scholar zur writing about the internet in their internet one point zero people were devised had imbedded in that notion and idea of a decentralized world where it's not just controlled by one government one government sovereignties and their laws but rather this is this new this new phenomenon this new space really breaks ackley we can create whatever we want and we can be whoever we want to be and internet one point zero very much was that but then it was and i think a lot of as the bedded in who created the internet a lot of it was researchers they were hobbyist technologists and then when you came internet two point zero came about that was when you got your googles involved the larger corporations who started saying how can corporate ties to internet so there is nowhere that you can really go on the internet unless they are would say our technology even the privacy technology we have out there isn't perfect yet but basically we're ever you go there is a footprint being crafted of who you are online and whether that's supertaster to realities that remains to be seen because it's not as if you have a cell sovereign identity saying this is who i am online they are creating it basically economic reasons yes which can also turn into political yet how so political will of course especially if you're an organizer especially in an ad exactly in any country that surveys what the united states of course but most countries and the important thing is even going back to the case carpenter they don't need to know exactly what web sites you're visiting or they don't even need to know exactly who you're meeting but rather the metadata involved so even how long you spent on a website or how long you were in a given space because they can pinpoint it on the g p s that's enough information to create case a case against you and then a lot of these cases around surveillance are heard by the  and in the last even couple of years you see him blocking technology is where the idea of encryption being used and how we communicate with one another and basically encryption and layman's term is just the idea of instead of what i'm saying to you and where i said it being passed through a node and that node being accessible to anyone your nodes are layered in levels of protection and only you and the device you're communicating with know how to unlock that message so that's kind of what we have right now is a form of press as a form of privacy so when you hear about telegram that's what telegram uses tor has a more complex version of that as well and it encrypt enough information and multiple nodes to be able to pass your message or you know that subject line then have that you have to be sophisticated enough to carry the song otherwise you're open to the lot of their engineers are based around the world who work on this and it's fallen a lot of them are volunteers who have created this browser that you can use and the reason it's called tor there at the onion router is because of those layers of encryption it's not as fast as a normal internet if you are just using chrome or internet floor because it does take time to send your traffic or your activity from one node to another node to another node and exit nodes are basically where you or your ip address gets located so instead of being here in new york for example your ip address shows up as i'm in the country of georgia or i'm in ethiopia somewhere and exit nodes where your information is still a little bit in what are you actually pursuing or doing that's so part of it is obviously to create a community of people who care a lot about surveillance and privacy and want to further  out these tools so that we get from where we are now which is probably seventy five percent where we want to be to here is a fully private device that you can use to communicate with your friends and family or any other states  your state and with your political viewpoints you times organize and exactly exactly and so that's really from my privacy background what what i'm pursuing then act of lab that's really about civic engagement so i guess i got two sides of the activists in me want to i want to make sure everyone is safe and secure and the other how can we enable you to take that expression expression on the streets expression online and action it and go institutions and how we can use various technologies to further that but i specifically work on a project called crowd law and we're trying to come up with best practices and identify the really great projects and initiatives out there being run by governments and getting the word out yeah yeah but usually right that happens at the beginning so like i want your you're a lobbyist organization or you're an activist how do you convince your blog maker to put out a bill it's usually right at the beginning of the process and you don't really see anything that happens in between until here's the bill we're going to vote on the bill of rights so how can we get involved made in between countries and cities have done an incredible job at creating platform so better reykjavik for example and iceland it allows people to up vote proposals on certain ideas that they want to be covered by the immigration or even school schooling exciter and then once a proposal gets enough votes then it's institutionally required to be seen by the city of work you make which is really incredible that's of just one example then in the drafting process instead of just your representatives drafting is it possible for citizens to using you're speaking a language that they understand which is technology now let's make a song of this early easier not always looking for the easiest solution but rather what's a meaningful solution and i think a lot of these paparazzi can look at their effica y abroad to see what might we be able to bring back here and participatory budgeting for example which happens in several districts in new york i think a lot more than twenty in new york and new york ok portioned and then there is voting so you know you decide instead of representatives exactly where that money is allotted and it's been very popular in new york boston lots of other places and the representative actually pays attention to us because it could be winning or losing yeah it's yeah and people feel like they get to say for example there are specific events to get people to come and participate in part of story budgeting that are for specific under served so there is one for people who this district for example people who were formerly incarcerated they said come out right create proposals are around usually brick and mortar things that you want to be seen that you want done and have a say and build out this proposal with us will help you stuff gets complicated right yeah don't tell me at times very very heavy ideological resistance not only in this city but around the country over such things take us through that because it sounds wonderful yeah well i think that there are very interest and this is very i'm at the you really have to have an imagination to believe that we can do some of it has to share a badge and right so we're having it in that way right now and your virtual vote to indicate to your representatives this is what i'd like you to do when you vote on this topic and out of this app i believe it's called citizen zero s but if i'm wrong i will let you know they created a party a lit political party called the net party and they said their pledge was if you elect us to the government bodies you will we will vote based on what you tell us on the app if you and the bill comes forward and you virtually said tell us we approve of this bill and i see there is more yes the name is i'll vote with the people so it's very responsive government versus i like to you every four years and i think you're doing what i want you to do ok let's say we have the people don't wanna loosen voter suppression laws or they want writers to continue in their palm or people in the now what oh where does it activism go at the technology is there but but it's still sort of a give and take yeah definitely technology will never say never supplant activism right so it's a matter of getting out there and organizing mobilizing people changing people's mind yeah and the technology and the bus and power you got that to happen ok all right but again there is resistance and there's would you argue that there are some very powerful vested interest who will fiddle faddle around with this technology that well you know let them play around with this but i'm going to vote this way anyway because the big money is really tongue well so now what that's why world if all representatives were always responsive to what we wanted and we were able and good clients exactly right people yes and we were able to intervene at any point as a law making process beforehand to make sure that the opinions of people are heard and that action but it's important it's important it's very important so one of the great things i've seen from the project i've looked at a lot of them are institutionalized so again there's another example brazil for some reason  is at the forefront of a lot of this but they have a applique i guess it's more of a program it's called promise tracker and in a lot of brazilian schools the they are supposed to abide by a certain standard for what they're feeding children but a lot of places don't so in conjunction with the chamber of deputies in brazil and some civic or eggs they decided let's create a way for kids to take photos of their food so that we know whether those schools are maintaining those standards way even to get kids involved in evaluating how effective public policy and it's been done a really good job because if they get a couple photos that kids of sun and run they can say that's definitely not where you're supposed to be feeding children and the brazilian n their example if in finland or actually denmark the denmark the better example that they have a place called mind lab which was run by the department of education and other another department to get people and businesses and government leaders to come together and run pilot programs so if you think i want to create a different kind of policy for health care or maybe something smaller than that because of my feel of a radical to just pilot something small they want to see let the pilot an area and see how it works and if it's successful let's scale it out to the rest of the population because we know that we can build a true policy around this there's examples of that going on oh it's looking at but don't you need a fairly you need a government that cares and right side funding for it you need a lot of researchers and academics of course are always involved in things like this even businesses that are around urban design or things like that they get involved in a lot of these prophecies but it does require an active and engaged citizenry none of this matters if that is fundamentally missing and of course of forces the country would not like to see that and them or make sure that they don't have the sort of power that you want them to have i think if people don't buy into the idea that they can enable change then the government barely looks at these projects they go around really care and no one's really invested in the right but sometimes the government themselves drive itself drives the project sometimes it's civic organizers but if there's enough noise there enough people that say this is a really great project and we care about making sure that we have better schools or better immigration we have better health care we have better roads whatever it is and they can point to this at like three one one data for example if they can say it through this three one one data is telling you we have so many potholes in to talk about before the show here poor people's campaign which i've been involved in and we every week have a segment on that and i've been down to d c the last couple of weeks and speak direct action there and so and now this is an attempt to resurrect what king was a time you do back in sixty eight so the attempt to rekindle that energy by organizing and getting hundreds thousands of people to participate i legislative levels and the d c in the capitol so on the way again people there and getting people to demonstrate and to take action and in the hopes of spreading that word so every monday there is a direct action three o'clock ha simultaneous civil disobedience mass demonstrations except the first time in our history that's really happened now that if you will i guess the strategy the gamble is to make this a nuff of an issue get it out there is a narrative that we begin to pay attention to poverty and the linkages to racism and militarism and excessive materialism and so on now as a movement you want this to spread now how can the technology be used in ways that can get that there about that this could become something that mitt literally millions and millions of people participate in and turn the tide against the military prison industrial complex and so on the power well of course one of the great things about having social media is that you can take really potent imagery and help it go viral we saw that with black lives matter and that photo  capture what was going on there so the good thing is there is great leftist media but if we want everyone especially mainstream media to pay attention it doesn't mean you have to go viral you have to have enough people that ok well ok so now you've got to figure out how it's trying to take technology that already speaks to so many people and then imputing within that a message about poverty and i think a lot of it is how we i think it makes people uncomfortable yeah idea of let's talk about class and share and tweet or let's post on facebook about class issues it definitely makes people uncomfortable because who you are online is a very cultivated person so you have to say absolutely this is an issue that matters to me and i'm going to be tweeting about it and sharing and writing about it because this issue is so important and be willing to do that and continuously do it because activism parts of the country talking about the the suffering and the pain and what they've gone through and there was one woman in particular as it was in mel bama who lost a child because lack of medical care  that the state who wasn't providing him so wanted to give him access to it and she just started crying while she was on the stand there and and just said forgive me i just have to let this out and she let out this unbelievable wail from the bottom of her being and it was there barbara just said if you all feel like wailing also in feeling that what she's  ahead it was one of most electric moments i mean i've been around the block a few times but man this was something else yeah i mean that moment to capture that i mean this is a viral moment and there's there's we're go see actually have a couple clips would be end here on barbers and that the face to face interaction he had with a particular police officer one of the capitol police officers was just again riveting you could see the searing anger and venom in this guy's face and i mean that's the sort of thing you're talking about that needs to go viral and people can begin to get out of the little the service workers international union yes yes they for the favor of the movement new york right they always had someone out with a camera someone out with a video so then they could capture those moments when that happened and because they had such a media get to your events because at first when the five or fifteen were doing their demonstrations and not folly and any mainstream media at all came about but because and i are people already know or at least caring more about the poor people's movement and once again you have and energy that's another question where does it go does it go into a political party i mean into laws and how does that go but but we're still at this level of getting the technology in the media to pay attention and getting people to to understand what's going on too yeah that's a very important component of where so tell me a little about your columbia experience i mean this is did you pick up a lot of this during your studies or how did this all happen because you were but some of the stuff that you've been writing and wrote for the spectator and writing and i mean you require active obviously still are but how did this happen on campus tell me a little about your own variant and what's going on there now still yet still the struggle right unionization yeah i would say  my coming of age and there are politics and then i didn't strike or restrict myself or see myself as a leftist until senior year and i think a lot of that was around the election so obviously awful event but i think it really galvanized a lot of people that were coasting by that were satisfied in their politics this was a moment that shock a lot of us for divestment be in solidarity with the union unionization efforts on campus those are always things that right there for you exactly exactly and then when eric garner and and all all of the black lace matter shooting happened that really and her mattress of course this really why i think it's very interesting to hear her talk about it because she said i didn't didn't set out to become an activist but it's a mantle it's a it's a thing that she has to shoulder because her story brought out so many other stories from for other women on campuses not just like on the but across the country and i'm really glad it happened because we wouldn't have had you know this big title nine campus actual so movement that now we've seen in the me too movement to happen hollywood and it's continued to have a reckoning in so many other industries that's kind of what you want out of a movement for it to not just be isolated and circumscribed to one area but say this is a systemic issue you get caught up in that your junior year and your yeah i would say not i personally didn't participate that much in any of the title nine activism and i think that's because i actually spent a lot of my time for a fight for fifteen so that's the thing about being an actor he kind of especially when you care a lot about one issue but you also obviously as a woman i care about being safe and being a fan and having the space to be a feminist but for me i gravitated towards the activism of fight for fifteen so i this resurgence of labor activism and of course it's new york so there's always going to be those kinds of movements but on campus i've never seen anything like it right and i'm just little person i mean as a sibling it was in your family background that would bring this out too because we were at the conference we remember from talking about the activists of of sixty eight the most number of the members were from families of holocaust survivors for example and that was there's something in your own background personal history some family history that maybe and all that maybe even my parents are immigrants so immigration policy as my would say mattered to me and they have been a part of the managerial class so not necessarily laborers but i've been to india i've seen it's actually it's funny because after the i m f and a lot of i guess india move towards neoliberal as we saw in that moment as well as stripping back o workers rights for these new corporations that were coming in and the i m f and the world bank basically gave the checkmark to those policies in order to get funding from them for growth for grants and for building more infrastructure  i've seen some of the negative effect even though in fact your family did their condition improved under these sorts of policies and you know what i'm saying yes i think it but then you could see it for what it was to yeah because it's a conflicting sort of thing it is it is you are part of a privileged right and now what do you do with that exactly my i feel lucky that my  grandparents actually were teachers so they always came from been at the just a pure educational background it was and they had like they were working at a corporation or any kind of business so for them all that they matter of what was most important for them was the way that my parents were being raise and being educated by my parents and never really been active they don't pay attention that much other than what is donald trump doing with your grandparents that was my grandparents  country yes rationalize me to yeah it's actually really interesting in india they have in one state i can remember it's raja saw nervous another one the two parties that it goes it goes back and forth between the communist party and socialist party that's as far as the hill only two parties that really do have a strong stronghold in india so very eclectic political system in india right now because you go back and forth you go back and forth i go maybe every three four years so i don't go as often or not as plugged in as i would like to be so i gathered it's kind of hard to track down where it was sparked in me why i decided to become more of an activist and channel more of my energy on doing that but i think it does happen for reading a lot and observing when you see the pain and suffering and the material conditions of people face in this there so what are some of the other issues on campus so you have the debates about these controversial speakers coming to campus and are you written about that too as well to write i what i mean listening and then and vigorously debating and or not allowing them to speak this is walking it's still something that i have to personally figure out but i think some ideas are so dangerous they don't deserve to be articulated because just prior to cleaning them you validate them and you're saying this is an idea that is worth debating it's worth hearing out like when charles  girls mary says african americans have inferior i chuse right are just not as smart as white people that's based on some very questionable racial side race science  exactly so there were activists out there activists and audience actors before he got in and it's really important to have always have those people there to say you might listen to what he has to say and that's fine but it's really important to recognize the fa suggest that the policy be on that sort of stuff i wonder what columbia's specific save face this falls the is if they if they do have one but i think it's about having spaces where you're free to express yourself and there are some places that just have innate chilling effect to them that you don't feel like you can fully be yourself and you can even take the workplace for example as a space that you can't believe you who you are and who you want to be because there are policies in place and there are norms in place about expressing that you are and that manifests itself in so many other context when you're in a classroom you can't just say or do whatever you want because it's a classroom and it's the  same it's that idea so when i think of safe space i don't just think of it as i want to hide from this idea that i don't like i don't see it that way i see the concept of a safe space as an empowering environment especially for communities that have been under served and systemically oppressed and developing sensitivity to what the i can but we have about a minute left oh no no i really i mean we have this viewing the radical imagination this jim verraros wish you a great week and we're going to go off with a couple of clips from reverend barber and the poor people's campaign on washington d c ending with a short little clip of  people demonstrating getting arrested and if you look closely yours truly will be part of that entourage there so anyway all the best vigilant activism thank you again so much to get thank you also very much see you next week on the radical imagination today in more than thirty states and here in the district of columbia activists clergy and most of all impacted people poor will be organizing mark nonviolent moral fusion direct action monday's direct confrontation with what we call policy of violence and the immoral policies that we see continuing to hurt the poor and particularly the focus today will be on women in poverty children in poverty and the disabled we cannot continue to have a democracy that engages in the kind of policy violence that we see happening every day i think about the low wage worker i met in north carolina who could not get insurance because narconon did not expand medicaid but then was also sick with barry and cancer ovarian cancer and has children or amy in west virginia who is a woman who is working poor woman who watched her state her governor republican governor cynically give a little raise to teachers but chose to do it by cutting medicaid and cutting food stamps or i think about the lady pamela in laos county alabama who has raw sewage in the back of her yard who was taken advantage of by predatory lenders d all over this country and we continue to see what is not often seen or talked about in our politics in our political debates or even in the media except for places like here and me two hundred fifty thousand people are dying every year from poverty and low well sixty four million people work with less and a living wage fifty four percent of african americans and these realities her children and and and women and the disabled the most  people who are who are homeless are of every different race creed color sexual orientation and what we are saying it is time for a moral confrontation a nonviolent mar a confrontation because whether you look at the constitution the establishment of justice or you look at the morality of the scriptures this says for instance in isaiah t n warning to those who legislate evil and rob the poor of their right to make women and children their prey it is immoral to have thirty seven million people without health care it is immoral not to pay living wages when we know we can do it it is immoral that people don't have single payer health care for everybody as a matter of human rights and children have access to public education  and college and that we stop the tree and the resegregation it is the mara the way we've suppress the vote in a way that allows people to get elected who wants to get elected using racialize methods to do so they didn't vote policies that hurt women and children and disabled they are against living wages they are against health care they are against unemployment and those things that hurt families her children her women her to disable and we're coming together of every race creed color and people from every part of this country that will be simultaneous nonviolent action beginning today with a two o'clock rally and in three o'clock direct action and this will go on for forty days every monday along with theme somebody is hurting people and it's gone on far too long and we can't be silent anymore we will take a particular street near the east side of the capitol and we will to engage in the street many people sit down to pray and they because we are saying that the country is headed in the wrong direction that's why today is to st later on of the b other places in d c but today as to st because we're saying the country is headed in the wrong director we have to break through the modern narrative our first goal is to break through the modern narrative to where we're talking about we're not in talking about these issues in the country and we're also going to be calling people to engage in massive voter mobilization and we're also going to be doing power will be owning among poor communities and this amy is a launch the forty days is not the end of the campaign it is the launching of a multi year campaign we're trying to go to independent