[00:00.000 --> 00:00.740]  Thank you.
[00:00.880 --> 00:03.320]  It's not every day that somebody claps for me.
[00:04.780 --> 00:05.900]  So today... Oh, I know.
[00:06.020 --> 00:06.220]  It's hers.
[00:07.760 --> 00:10.100]  So today we're going to talk to you about the history of leaks.
[00:11.340 --> 00:16.660]  As Emma and I were designing the slides, we tried to keep it fun and light.
[00:16.760 --> 00:18.460]  So we're going to try and do that here.
[00:18.780 --> 00:21.960]  A lot of this history, some of it you will probably know.
[00:22.160 --> 00:23.760]  We will talk a little bit about the details.
[00:24.460 --> 00:27.960]  But before we get into it, we introduce ourselves a little bit here.
[00:28.680 --> 00:29.360]  Sure.
[00:29.360 --> 00:32.100]  So, Emma, do you want to introduce yourself?
[00:32.980 --> 00:33.200]  Sure.
[00:34.360 --> 00:37.500]  I'm a former hacker and reformed analyst.
[00:37.980 --> 00:51.980]  I've spent years doing FOIA research and as part of that helped push CIA to publish the Crest database, which was 13 million pages of declassified documents online so that anyone could access it.
[00:51.980 --> 01:00.580]  And in 2018, I co-founded Distributed Denial of Secrets, or DDoS Secrets.
[01:05.610 --> 01:07.230]  And my name is Emily Crose.
[01:07.410 --> 01:09.270]  I used to work for the intelligence community.
[01:09.410 --> 01:11.370]  I'm reading my slides like I don't know my bio.
[01:12.250 --> 01:18.090]  Right now, I'm a runtime front researcher at Sophos, an AV company you're probably aware of.
[01:18.090 --> 01:20.770]  I also am a FOIA researcher.
[01:21.070 --> 01:28.830]  The way that Emma and I got linked up was in our research into hacking history using FOIA as a source of information.
[01:28.830 --> 01:33.630]  And a lot of that information has found its way into a book that's coming out later this year.
[01:33.870 --> 01:38.650]  It's titled, Hack to the Future, How World Governments Relentlessly Pursue and Domesticate Hackers.
[01:40.130 --> 01:41.790]  Should be an interesting book, hopefully.
[01:42.050 --> 01:45.570]  So, if you are interested in reading that, it should be out later this year.
[01:46.830 --> 01:54.450]  Had kind of an interesting moment this week, because as I was writing this book, I had to submit it to a pre-publication review.
[01:54.690 --> 02:01.790]  It's like taking something you've written, take it to the government, have them, you know, the kindly government censors check you off until you're good to go.
[02:02.010 --> 02:03.890]  I got that letter back this week.
[02:03.890 --> 02:08.730]  So, if you're in this talk, you're probably interested in bureaucracy to some extent.
[02:08.730 --> 02:12.110]  So, I just thought this would be fun, because this just came back on Wednesday.
[02:12.930 --> 02:15.170]  The book has been cleared and ready to go.
[02:15.390 --> 02:21.010]  So, I don't think there's any edits that need to be made, which is good for anyone who reads the book.
[02:21.390 --> 02:23.750]  Anyway, let's get into leaks.
[02:23.930 --> 02:27.950]  So, I think it's a good spot to begin asking, like, what is a leak?
[02:28.030 --> 02:29.230]  Just so that we all understand.
[02:29.230 --> 02:33.650]  So, I'm going to kick that over to Emma to explain some of the background in this.
[02:33.650 --> 02:34.350]  Thanks.
[02:34.810 --> 02:41.310]  Leak is, unfortunately, one of those overbroad terms that gets applied to almost anything these days.
[02:42.170 --> 02:47.910]  But, essentially, we can define a leak as an unauthorized disclosure of some sort.
[02:47.910 --> 03:00.070]  That can be an insider talking to the press, publishing a document, or it can be hacktivists or malicious hackers going in and grabbing things and leaking the information.
[03:00.650 --> 03:04.530]  We've seen that more with ransomware groups in the last couple of years.
[03:09.470 --> 03:14.270]  So, there's largely four categories of leak sources.
[03:14.710 --> 03:17.310]  You can break it down into a lot of different ways.
[03:17.310 --> 03:29.150]  But, for our purposes, and for my experience with BDOS Secrets, we've got federal government, private companies, financial institutions, and local government.
[03:30.790 --> 03:35.310]  Some of the most interesting and useful data is financial institutions.
[03:35.310 --> 03:50.870]  It gives us, well, in the last couple of years, if you've heard of Cyprus Confidential, that was all financial institution data that exposed how people were evading sanctions, laundering money, and not for the fun stuff.
[03:54.400 --> 04:01.040]  So, we've also got two categories that we decided to look at for this talk briefly, serendipitous vs.
[04:01.260 --> 04:02.140]  strategic leaks.
[04:02.640 --> 04:06.200]  A serendipitous leak is going to be more spontaneous.
[04:06.840 --> 04:18.220]  It's going to be a response to the environment, whereas a strategic leak is something that you're more likely to see from a nation-state doing hack-and-leak operations.
[04:20.920 --> 04:27.840]  So, for strategic leaks, we decided to look at it in four basic categories, just to help understand it.
[04:28.280 --> 04:29.400]  You've got timing.
[04:30.240 --> 04:34.920]  For the DNC leaks in 2016, the timing there was very obvious.
[04:35.560 --> 04:45.080]  It was strategically released just before the primary, and continued to go out during the election, and we've seen that with a lot of other leaks, too.
[04:45.080 --> 04:57.220]  We've got Macron leaks, we've got just dozens of examples where it's not released at a certain time because, oh, that's when people are interested in it, or at least not purely.
[04:57.220 --> 05:15.220]  It's released at a certain time to dovetail with other events for a more strategic purpose, which gets us into the next category for the for-purpose if they have a larger goal in mind, interfering with politics or with people's money as one of them.
[05:18.000 --> 05:21.340]  Collaboration and highly relevant kind of speak for themselves.
[05:21.860 --> 05:24.200]  Again, highly relevant goes with timing and the purpose.
[05:25.440 --> 05:41.160]  Yeah, I would add, I think as time has gone on and we've become a little bit more comfortable with the idea of leaks over the last few decades, timing is, correct me if I'm saying something that doesn't make any sense to you, but timing seems to be one of those things that the general public has
[05:41.160 --> 05:42.460]  maybe caught on to a little bit.
[05:42.460 --> 05:47.080]  Like, they're a little bit more skeptical, I think, about the timing of information when it comes out.
[05:47.260 --> 05:55.580]  And I think you tend to see more, like, questioning when a piece of information is released, you tend to see the public kind of question, like, well, why is it now?
[05:56.220 --> 06:02.520]  So, strategic leaks definitely still have a relevance and importance to, like, something that's happening in the news.
[06:03.000 --> 06:08.820]  But I almost want to say that I think it's getting easier to spot.
[06:09.000 --> 06:09.880]  Would you agree with that?
[06:11.520 --> 06:13.320]  It's getting easier and harder.
[06:13.740 --> 06:14.280]  Getting easier.
[06:15.460 --> 06:24.920]  It's, unfortunately, because people are more aware of it and they are questioning it, there's also a lot of times where people attach meaning to timing that isn't there.
[06:25.620 --> 06:29.220]  Because, unfortunately, coincidences will always exist.
[06:29.220 --> 06:33.320]  Whenever something happens, something else is going to be happening.
[06:34.180 --> 06:42.600]  And so, with all that increased awareness, there's, unfortunately, some people that get caught more on noise than on signal.
[06:44.320 --> 06:46.120]  It's an interesting dynamic, certainly.
[06:47.980 --> 06:49.460]  So, the question then.
[06:50.060 --> 06:52.920]  Leaking is a, it's a pretty risky behavior.
[06:53.120 --> 06:54.960]  Why would you, why would you leak?
[06:55.160 --> 06:58.520]  Like, what are the reasons that anybody releases sensitive information?
[06:58.760 --> 07:06.080]  Like, what, is there, is there a template or anything that we could use to sort of map out, like, why somebody would take that sort of risk?
[07:06.820 --> 07:12.980]  If you ask, if you ask a counterintelligence person, they are going to give you an answer probably somewhere along these lines.
[07:13.180 --> 07:15.540]  So, if you've heard of this, has anybody in the audience heard of mice?
[07:15.880 --> 07:17.280]  Is this familiar, familiar concept?
[07:17.880 --> 07:19.600]  Okay, so this is going to be new to some of you.
[07:20.160 --> 07:30.120]  So, counterintelligence investigators tend to map out leaking motivations to one of these four categories.
[07:30.260 --> 07:33.140]  So, money, ideology, coercion, and ego.
[07:34.360 --> 07:43.340]  You can map almost any case of, specifically with spies, is where this is used, but you can map almost any spy case along these lines.
[07:43.340 --> 07:45.840]  So, money obviously speaks for itself.
[07:46.100 --> 07:46.840]  Were they paid?
[07:47.340 --> 08:01.120]  Ideology, do they believe in something so much that they are willing to take a risk upon themselves to make a point or to make a certain bit of information available to everyone?
[08:02.700 --> 08:03.180]  Coercion.
[08:03.500 --> 08:03.600]  Coercion.
[08:03.600 --> 08:05.180]  Were they blackmailed?
[08:05.320 --> 08:09.860]  Did somebody reach them and kind of threaten them with something?
[08:10.540 --> 08:11.220]  And ego.
[08:11.400 --> 08:13.200]  And ego is actually a pretty strong driver.
[08:13.420 --> 08:17.800]  Maybe out of all of these, maybe compared to ideology is pretty strong as well.
[08:17.800 --> 08:32.640]  But with ego, I would say that's maybe one of the strongest because there are a lot of people who, especially in these sensitive, controlled information environments, it's a lot more bureaucratic than you probably think.
[08:32.780 --> 08:37.340]  Like, think about how bureaucratic any boring IRS job would be.
[08:38.060 --> 08:44.460]  About the same level of boringness from like 90% of the jobs that you'll see in like spy work.
[08:44.460 --> 08:54.760]  So, a lot of people who have access to that sort of information, living kind of boring lives eventually, they get kind of bored, they want to live out a James Bond fantasy or something like that.
[08:55.260 --> 08:58.420]  So, ego is a lot stronger than you may think.
[09:00.260 --> 09:03.880]  With the folks who actually end up doing some sort of spy action.
[09:05.420 --> 09:06.160]  Yeah, go for it.
[09:06.160 --> 09:22.700]  One interesting difference that we see with leak cases versus espionage cases is that ideology is less likely to be about problems with the alleged ideals of an institution.
[09:22.700 --> 09:28.000]  And you're much more likely to have it because people share that ideology.
[09:28.520 --> 09:32.360]  But they see that, oh, the system isn't matching up to the ideals.
[09:32.600 --> 09:34.320]  This isn't what we're supposed to be doing.
[09:34.600 --> 09:46.840]  We're, you know, a lot of government whistleblowers over the last 15 years, you can match some kind of response to them where they're going, we're supposed to be the good guys.
[09:47.240 --> 09:49.340]  Why are we doing this horrible stuff?
[09:50.360 --> 09:55.960]  Whereas in espionage cases, people are more likely to have an ideology that disagrees with that institution.
[09:56.600 --> 09:58.940]  And it's just an interesting...
[09:58.940 --> 09:59.420]  Yeah, certainly.
[10:01.900 --> 10:07.220]  So, you all came to hear a talk about the history of leak, but let's actually, let's talk about the history.
[10:08.340 --> 10:11.360]  So, we promised that we were going to start with the Pentagon Papers.
[10:11.840 --> 10:16.960]  What we're going to do is we're going to step through a history of leaked information, starting with what...
[10:16.960 --> 10:18.820]  We're going to break this down into four different categories.
[10:18.820 --> 10:20.000]  We've been doing that a lot lately.
[10:20.740 --> 10:24.000]  Early digital, a period of time that I call the quiet time.
[10:24.000 --> 10:29.760]  So, that's between 1980 and 2000, the millennial era, and then the modern era.
[10:30.060 --> 10:32.580]  So, we're going to cover a lot of ground here.
[10:32.860 --> 10:38.620]  We'll probably only say a couple of things about each case, but they'll probably map somewhere here on this timeline.
[10:38.840 --> 10:42.780]  And then we'll have an interesting question and maybe banter a little bit at the end.
[10:43.340 --> 10:46.520]  So, starting with the early digital era in the 1970s...
[10:47.460 --> 10:50.960]  Well, the Pentagon Papers occur, of course, in the early 1970s.
[10:50.960 --> 10:51.840]  I think it was 1971.
[10:52.600 --> 10:54.960]  Resident Expert, you want to kick us off?
[10:56.220 --> 10:56.780]  Yeah.
[10:56.780 --> 11:01.440]  So, I think most people here are familiar, at least in passing, with the Pentagon Papers.
[11:01.600 --> 11:03.900]  Daniel Ellsberg leaked them in 71.
[11:03.900 --> 11:06.680]  They were declassified, finally, in 2011.
[11:07.440 --> 11:16.760]  And the reactions to the leak, and especially the overreactions, dovetailed with a lot of the Watergate scandals and revelations.
[11:18.360 --> 11:27.300]  The reason that Ellsberg was never prosecuted was because the U.S. government overstepped so grossly in their investigation and pursuit of him.
[11:27.900 --> 11:36.020]  But one of the things that's interesting about that is that the reason they were so eager to do that was...
[11:36.020 --> 11:44.020]  The U.S. government, specifically Hoover and Kissinger in the White House, were convinced that Ellsberg was a Soviet agent.
[11:44.760 --> 11:54.040]  This was because of a KGB disinformation operative, codenamed Fedora, who told them that Ellsberg had leaked to them.
[11:54.040 --> 12:00.900]  He gave them a list of some of the documents, said that he had thrown them over the fence at the embassy or something to that effect.
[12:04.180 --> 12:25.060]  And because Cold War paranoia was so severe at that point, and because, let's be frank, it was the Nixon era, so that paranoia was compounded by 10, they gobbled up this disinformation and went after Ellsberg way harder than even the American justice system would allow.
[12:27.640 --> 12:36.540]  None of that, to be clear, none of that is giving the U.S. government a pass for being so overzealous with that, but it was a provoked thing.
[12:37.400 --> 12:49.960]  And that's one of the interesting things that we get with these leak cases, is sometimes we have what looks like a pure leak, like the Pentagon Papers, and then people intervene and turn it into an espionage case.
[12:49.960 --> 12:56.940]  So it can get very complicated very quickly when you have dozens of people mucking about.
[12:57.260 --> 13:11.700]  If y'all remember any of the chaos from the Anonymous era, where everyone was talking to everyone about everything, you might remember some idea of what that chaos and confusion can be like.
[13:12.380 --> 13:12.860]  Yeah.
[13:13.340 --> 13:15.460]  We meant to set the stage a little bit here, too.
[13:15.940 --> 13:26.740]  Pentagon Papers, of course, happened in the Vietnam era, so we had the backdrop of a failing American war, maybe the first major failing American war that the American public got really upset about.
[13:26.740 --> 13:32.100]  So there was a great deal of disintentment happening in the United States at that time.
[13:32.440 --> 13:46.260]  And this ended up kind of kicking off like an entire era of anger toward the government that led into not a direct follow-on, but just kind of like another one of these things that was happening in the background, which was, of course, the Watergate break-in.
[13:46.780 --> 13:51.060]  So I think we all kind of know the basic facts about the Watergate break-in.
[13:51.620 --> 14:01.980]  And I know Emma's got something very specific to say about whether this is a leak or not, so I'm gonna prompt by mentioning Mark Felt.
[14:04.000 --> 14:07.580]  Hard to know whether Mark Felt was the inspiration for Detective Cole Phelps.
[14:07.760 --> 14:12.440]  I don't know for sure, but Emma's got a lot of opinions, so I'll pass back to Emma on this one.
[14:12.440 --> 14:21.740]  The Watergate investigation was interesting because the revelations were largely fueled by leaks that happened through investigative journalism.
[14:22.220 --> 14:25.060]  And I think most people are familiar with that narrative.
[14:25.340 --> 14:27.080]  You've got all the president's men.
[14:27.400 --> 14:32.420]  You've got Woodward and Bernstein going and meeting with sources, most famously Deep Throat.
[14:33.860 --> 14:38.040]  One of my pet peeves is that Deep Throat never existed.
[14:38.040 --> 14:41.640]  That was a fabrication that they came up with after the fact.
[14:41.640 --> 14:55.960]  It helped with the narrative, but while Mark Felt was a major source for them, some things that are attributed to Deep Throat came from people, quite definitively, who was not Mark Felt.
[14:56.800 --> 15:14.180]  And that's one of the more interesting examples of, let's call it leak-wandering, that we're gonna see here, where it was done for purely narrative effect, and for some OPSEC reasons, they wanted to protect the source.
[15:16.440 --> 15:27.020]  But Watergate, and we're gonna talk about another example of this in a minute, the leaks paired almost in real time with official investigations.
[15:27.020 --> 15:41.600]  And that has a very different way of playing out in politics and the news cycle than just pure leaks or something where, oh, we've got these leaks, and then four years later Congress gets around to investigating it.
[15:42.520 --> 15:49.600]  It's probably also worth mentioning about Mark Felt, any information that would have been sourced from Mark himself.
[15:49.860 --> 15:54.040]  Mark was the associate director of the FBI, so he was a pretty high-placed individual.
[15:54.040 --> 15:54.600]  Mm-hmm.
[15:55.520 --> 16:08.120]  So, whether all of this information about the break in itself had come from him or if there were several sources, the fact that there was a source that was as highly placed as Mark Felt was is sort of a unique thing.
[16:08.240 --> 16:17.500]  I don't know how likely we would be to see somebody of that stature today coming out to talk about an active investigation in the way that Mark Felt did.
[16:18.140 --> 16:23.580]  And I believe he was exposed much later, like, not up until maybe 20 or 30 years later, right?
[16:24.300 --> 16:26.520]  Not during the actual investigation period.
[16:26.960 --> 16:27.060]  Right.
[16:27.580 --> 16:28.540]  Absolutely, yeah.
[16:28.680 --> 16:37.160]  That was a revelation that they made, I think, shortly before Mark Felt died, that that's who the character Deep Throat was based on from the novelization.
[16:37.460 --> 16:41.080]  But, again, Deep Throat didn't exist in any of their notes.
[16:41.320 --> 16:44.960]  He wasn't there in the original draft of the book or any of the articles.
[16:45.420 --> 17:02.580]  It was a fabrication that they came up with later to make things more accessible to readers and whatnot, because one source that talks as a mouthpiece for all of them is much easier to understand in Brock than, oh, we called this person, and they were a secretary,
[17:02.680 --> 17:07.080]  and we called that person, and they looked at this file, and they confirmed.
[17:07.300 --> 17:09.160]  Like, that's confusing.
[17:09.480 --> 17:10.660]  It's not a good narrative.
[17:10.660 --> 17:16.500]  So we get things like Deep Throat even when that doesn't actually exist.
[17:17.460 --> 17:24.780]  I would think there's actually two for the fact that it took so long for the Mark Felt information to come out.
[17:24.780 --> 17:36.020]  It also speaks volumes to the strategy that the journalist handlers of Felt himself were able to keep this under wraps for as long as they were.
[17:36.600 --> 17:40.400]  That's kind of another marker, I think, of more modern leaks that they...
[17:40.400 --> 17:46.940]  There's somebody responsible for it usually found out within maybe 10 years at least, at the latest.
[17:48.260 --> 18:05.060]  So, moving on from the sad times of Watergate, we enter this sort of government accountability period of time after Watergate, where the... in part because of Watergate, the actions of the U.S.
[18:05.180 --> 18:14.100]  government, and specifically the CIA and NSA in particular, start to be questioned by some of the most powerful people in the country, i.e.
[18:14.180 --> 18:14.840]  Congress members.
[18:14.840 --> 18:17.860]  So, we open this investigation, the Church and Pipe Committee.
[18:18.200 --> 18:22.400]  This dramatically changed the way that intelligence agencies do their work.
[18:23.020 --> 18:30.420]  Dramatically changed the way that they... who they're reporting to before they were very, very able to go rogue.
[18:30.820 --> 18:37.380]  You can see here Congressman Church holding a pistol.
[18:38.400 --> 18:41.340]  That's another chairman on the board.
[18:41.340 --> 18:42.840]  I believe that's Tower.
[18:45.340 --> 18:49.940]  John Tower is one of his co-counsel on the committee hearings.
[18:50.560 --> 18:54.700]  This is like a modified pistol made to be a dart gun.
[18:54.860 --> 19:02.540]  I mean, this is all kinds of... we could probably make a whole talk about the family jewels and all the information that came out from the CIA accountability era.
[19:02.540 --> 19:04.080]  A lot of weird stuff.
[19:04.280 --> 19:05.520]  A lot of interesting stuff.
[19:05.760 --> 19:08.600]  A lot of really weird stuff is kind of an example of one of those.
[19:09.200 --> 19:12.340]  So, just a broad, like, question.
[19:12.340 --> 19:20.920]  I don't know that we would necessarily include the Church and Pipe Committee in a collection of... these are leaks.
[19:23.280 --> 19:38.040]  This is a much more... if you are into the whole, like, institutionalism and establishment way of doing things, this is the more legitimate way of getting information out of the deep, dark agencies in the U.S.
[19:38.140 --> 19:38.360]  government.
[19:38.360 --> 19:46.840]  asking for it officially and getting answers and maybe sometimes doing it a little... playing hardball with them, which is what they did with Church and Pipe.
[19:47.900 --> 19:52.780]  So, I don't know that we would necessarily group this in with other leaks of the same caliber.
[19:52.780 --> 19:58.800]  There is actually quite a bit of information that came out from this and, like I said, it kind of, like, directly led to changes.
[20:00.720 --> 20:01.160]  Um...
[20:01.160 --> 20:04.780]  I agree with most of that, but I do want to add, um...
[20:05.300 --> 20:12.920]  that some of those reports, I think especially Pipe, were themselves censored and only came out because they were leaked to and by journalists.
[20:12.920 --> 20:17.340]  With the Church Committee also, they're...
[20:18.060 --> 20:22.800]  Most of what we know now is because of the official investigations and disclosures.
[20:22.800 --> 20:29.060]  And it is amazingly wonderful when that actually happens and, gosh, wouldn't it be great if there was oversight still.
[20:29.520 --> 20:34.700]  But behind the scenes, a lot of it was motivated by... by leaks.
[20:35.480 --> 20:36.160]  Um...
[20:36.160 --> 20:36.860]  And...
[20:36.860 --> 20:44.200]  there we have an interesting combination of serendipitous and strategic leaks, because this was being done largely by...
[20:45.320 --> 20:51.600]  career officers, career politicians, people that had grudges, people that wanted to take control of things.
[20:52.660 --> 20:53.180]  Um...
[20:53.180 --> 20:58.980]  Some of Sy Hersh famous scoops from that era were given to him by, you know, the CIA director.
[20:59.660 --> 21:03.580]  And they also used that as a way of hanging out to dry certain...
[21:03.580 --> 21:06.260]  certain other people, like Angleton, who...
[21:06.260 --> 21:09.680]  is guilty of pretty much everything people here think.
[21:10.860 --> 21:16.600]  But, you know, they put it all on his doorstep and said, well, the rest of us had nothing to do with this.
[21:16.760 --> 21:17.620]  Ignore my signature.
[21:19.420 --> 21:19.940]  Um...
[21:19.940 --> 21:24.900]  So, those investigations were prompted by leaks in...
[21:25.860 --> 21:26.880]  in... in reality.
[21:27.860 --> 21:28.140]  Uh...
[21:28.900 --> 21:29.460]  but...
[21:29.460 --> 21:40.140]  that was really a combination of people who wanted to achieve a specific end for strategic reasons, and people who also said, like, oh, this is messed up.
[21:40.480 --> 21:43.180]  And that's how you get, like, the family jewels specifically.
[21:46.560 --> 21:50.760]  So, just to wrap up this era, just a couple of notes here about...
[21:50.760 --> 21:51.860]  what are the hallmarks?
[21:51.860 --> 21:53.980]  So, we had a lot of anti-war leaks.
[21:54.140 --> 21:55.500]  There are a lot of people who...
[21:55.500 --> 21:56.840]  who read these...
[21:56.840 --> 21:57.840]  who were...
[21:57.840 --> 22:00.940]  who were reading these reports, sensitive information from this era.
[22:01.620 --> 22:01.880]  Uh...
[22:01.880 --> 22:03.260]  very ideological...
[22:03.260 --> 22:03.720]  uh...
[22:03.720 --> 22:05.080]  ideologically driven...
[22:05.080 --> 22:05.740]  um...
[22:05.740 --> 22:11.300]  stuff coming out about what they were seeing behind closed doors, with American agencies, the Department of Defense itself.
[22:12.820 --> 22:13.300]  Um...
[22:13.300 --> 22:13.480]  uh...
[22:13.480 --> 22:14.840]  a lot of insiders...
[22:14.840 --> 22:15.560]  active...
[22:15.560 --> 22:16.020]  who...
[22:16.020 --> 22:16.980]  retrieved the information.
[22:17.220 --> 22:17.800]  I mean, this...
[22:17.800 --> 22:18.860]  early digital...
[22:18.860 --> 22:20.500]  there were computers, but, uh...
[22:20.500 --> 22:22.080]  much easier to...
[22:22.080 --> 22:24.520]  take a big stack of papers...
[22:24.520 --> 22:24.940]  uh...
[22:24.940 --> 22:25.420]  out of...
[22:25.420 --> 22:27.920]  out of a building, rather than dragging an entire computer out.
[22:28.320 --> 22:28.800]  Um...
[22:28.800 --> 22:31.100]  a lot of these were done for the purpose of government accountability.
[22:31.660 --> 22:32.520]  So, uh...
[22:32.520 --> 22:32.960]  in...
[22:32.960 --> 22:34.600]  sometimes in a response to...
[22:35.460 --> 22:36.060]  like, the...
[22:36.060 --> 22:39.320]  the next point, the anti-war point, sometimes in a response to...
[22:39.320 --> 22:39.740]  uh...
[22:39.740 --> 22:41.580]  something they'd seen, um...
[22:41.580 --> 22:43.340]  something that they thought was, uh...
[22:43.340 --> 22:45.820]  publicly relevant, but always...
[22:45.820 --> 22:50.960]  as a reaction, almost always as a reaction, to something that was happening, that was active in the news cycle.
[22:51.540 --> 22:52.000]  Um...
[22:52.000 --> 22:54.460]  or, on the minds of the American public.
[22:54.680 --> 22:55.800]  So, uh...
[22:55.800 --> 22:57.720]  we will see some of these...
[22:57.720 --> 22:58.240]  uh...
[22:58.240 --> 22:58.480]  uh...
[22:58.480 --> 23:00.800]  points come up again later, and we'll look at some other eras.
[23:01.160 --> 23:01.900]  But, um...
[23:01.900 --> 23:03.520]  if we had to boil it down to a couple...
[23:03.520 --> 23:08.880]  There's a pretty broad spectrum of things that we can use as markers for this era.
[23:12.600 --> 23:18.740]  So, when we were researching this, actually, Emma and I tend to do research on specific events.
[23:18.780 --> 23:23.120]  I think this is probably the first time that we'd ever endeavored to, like, break down eras.
[23:23.840 --> 23:25.960]  It's definitely the first time I've ever thought about it.
[23:26.580 --> 23:27.940]  So, I'm going through this history.
[23:28.060 --> 23:36.960]  I think it was, like, earlier this week, I messaged Emma and I said, what's with this, like, 20-year period of time where there was no major leaks?
[23:37.160 --> 23:38.000]  Is that true?
[23:38.400 --> 23:39.560]  I can't think of any.
[23:40.420 --> 23:44.380]  And so, we kind of call this the second period of time.
[23:44.540 --> 23:49.800]  It's a 20-year period where there's really no major activity happening in terms of leaks.
[23:49.900 --> 23:54.300]  So, you have all of this stuff happening in the 1970s, very tumultuous decade.
[23:54.300 --> 24:02.080]  And then you have between 1980, 1990, and 2000, and there's relatively little happening.
[24:02.420 --> 24:05.700]  So, we had to ask, like, what's going on in this period?
[24:06.220 --> 24:09.440]  So, what can you think of here?
[24:10.380 --> 24:22.220]  So, the period that we've dubbed the quiet time, there were plenty of leaks in that time period, but they tended to focus on talking to journalists.
[24:22.220 --> 24:24.640]  They were small-scale leaks.
[24:26.100 --> 24:29.680]  So, they don't stand out quite as much in our memory.
[24:29.680 --> 24:44.140]  But, one of the more interesting things is that this time period did include some of the biggest espionage cases against, or not against, targeting the United States.
[24:45.500 --> 24:49.040]  The mid-80s, you know, we've got the year of the spy.
[24:49.800 --> 25:02.760]  But, as we start to get into more widespread digital access in the mid-90s, we do have transparency movements and leak forums of different sorts beginning to come out.
[25:03.620 --> 25:06.640]  Like, in 1996, we've got Cryptome.
[25:07.020 --> 25:09.820]  They launched, we'll talk about them a little bit more later.
[25:11.060 --> 25:12.180]  But, the...
[25:13.780 --> 25:20.200]  The quiet time was marked mostly by small, individual leaks, that they may have had a very big impact.
[25:20.240 --> 25:33.020]  But, because they were charts that were specifically given to a newspaper, or facts and quotes in interviews, the government still considered those significant disclosures, you know.
[25:33.180 --> 25:35.300]  They would put them in their little database of leaks.
[25:37.260 --> 25:37.780]  Um...
[25:37.780 --> 25:38.540]  But...
[25:39.660 --> 25:40.700]  Yeah, it's...
[25:41.380 --> 25:42.680]  It's an interesting time.
[25:42.900 --> 25:48.420]  So, do you think that it's possible that there was very few leaks during this period because...
[25:48.420 --> 25:51.420]  Uh, people were just so happy under Reagan?
[25:51.480 --> 25:53.680]  Do we have any Reagan fans here right now?
[25:54.620 --> 25:56.060]  I'm hearing a lot of laughter.
[25:56.500 --> 25:57.300]  Uh, no Reagan?
[25:57.300 --> 25:58.700]  Reagan fans in this group?
[26:00.220 --> 26:00.940]  Whoa.
[26:03.100 --> 26:05.460]  That actually brings up an interesting point.
[26:05.680 --> 26:09.560]  Is, under Reagan, we do have leaks beginning to come out.
[26:10.740 --> 26:11.460]  Um...
[26:11.460 --> 26:14.920]  Leaks are how we got things like the Iran-Contra investigation.
[26:15.500 --> 26:19.140]  That's how Word of Oliver North began to get around.
[26:19.520 --> 26:22.240]  So, leaks did happen, but...
[26:22.240 --> 26:25.180]  They're not events that we associate with leaks.
[26:27.520 --> 26:28.000]  Um...
[26:28.540 --> 26:29.020]  And...
[26:29.020 --> 26:32.400]  Now we're back to the spy cases that I started to bring up, and...
[26:32.400 --> 26:32.540]  Yeah.
[26:32.680 --> 26:35.280]  Emily's gonna cover that a bit more thoroughly.
[26:35.540 --> 26:36.540]  Yeah, so something...
[26:36.540 --> 26:37.920]  Something kind of interesting here.
[26:38.100 --> 26:40.020]  And I'm not saying there's causation.
[26:40.260 --> 26:41.580]  But there's certainly a correlation.
[26:42.040 --> 26:43.980]  In this time where there were...
[26:43.980 --> 26:47.180]  There was a notable uptick in the amount of counterintelligence.
[26:47.180 --> 26:52.560]  These spies within the United States being rolled up, is what we'd say in the spy industry.
[26:53.000 --> 26:53.520]  Uh...
[26:53.520 --> 26:56.700]  Being arrested for espionage, and then tried for espionage.
[26:56.820 --> 26:57.120]  So...
[26:57.120 --> 26:59.820]  1985 is known as the year of the spy.
[27:00.100 --> 27:03.040]  There were several very high-profile cases, uh...
[27:03.040 --> 27:03.840]  Of spies.
[27:04.020 --> 27:05.400]  And I actually have a slide here.
[27:05.560 --> 27:07.460]  It's hidden for whatever reason.
[27:08.400 --> 27:08.880]  Uh...
[27:08.880 --> 27:09.000]  Um...
[27:09.000 --> 27:09.500]  But there's...
[27:09.500 --> 27:11.460]  There are a few notable spies that were in this area.
[27:11.760 --> 27:12.060]  Uh...
[27:12.060 --> 27:14.020]  I know that John Walker is on that list.
[27:14.320 --> 27:14.540]  Uh...
[27:14.540 --> 27:17.020]  Aldrich Ames and, um...
[27:17.020 --> 27:17.460]  Uh...
[27:17.460 --> 27:17.640]  Hanson.
[27:17.640 --> 27:18.660]  We're all on that list.
[27:19.760 --> 27:20.240]  Um...
[27:52.020 --> 27:54.440]  If you're not familiar with it, definitely worth looking into.
[27:54.600 --> 28:02.540]  We let him go recently, I think, sent him back to Israel within the last, I think, over five years.
[28:02.800 --> 28:04.960]  My God, I think it's been maybe five or six years.
[28:06.140 --> 28:06.960]  It's been a while.
[28:07.360 --> 28:09.560]  Time stopped after COVID.
[28:09.840 --> 28:12.160]  Yeah, I think it was before COVID, yeah.
[28:12.400 --> 28:13.640]  We're still in the null times.
[28:13.900 --> 28:15.840]  Yeah, time doesn't exist anymore.
[28:15.940 --> 28:16.280]  Never did.
[28:17.920 --> 28:26.820]  So, we leave the choppy waters difficult to understand waters of the quiet time and into the millennial era starting in 2001.
[28:26.940 --> 28:28.800]  We kind of end here in 2016.
[28:28.800 --> 28:34.740]  Although this is, when we get into more modern history, the timelines become fuzzier.
[28:34.980 --> 28:39.960]  So we'll talk a little bit here about what happened in this period of time.
[28:40.160 --> 28:53.780]  So we start to see the emergence of these outlets where clearing houses of sensitive information being collected into one space definitely have computers, we've got high-speed computer networks.
[28:53.980 --> 29:02.880]  So trading information, exchanging sensitive information is much easier to do than it was even 10, 15, 20 years ago, before 2001.
[29:03.200 --> 29:11.740]  So we start to see there being a practical application for having places to take information and lead to these specific sources.
[29:12.120 --> 29:15.260]  And they sort of fashion themselves in a very specific way.
[29:15.580 --> 29:19.520]  So we start with one of the early ones, Cryptome.
[29:20.020 --> 29:21.520]  Pass it back to Emma over here.
[29:22.100 --> 29:22.180]  Yeah.
[29:22.460 --> 29:26.280]  So Cryptome, like we said before, was launched in 1996.
[29:26.500 --> 29:29.480]  But its history goes back further than that.
[29:29.780 --> 29:34.040]  Their roles in activism had gone back to their time in college.
[29:34.940 --> 29:41.260]  They, in this case, being John Young and Debra, I hope I'm saying her last name correctly, Natsios.
[29:42.720 --> 29:48.380]  John Young's wife and the daughter of former CIA station chief Nicholas Natsios.
[29:50.240 --> 29:55.840]  Cryptome, it's run by a pair of architects, which is one of the most interesting things about it.
[29:56.320 --> 30:04.920]  We're not talking about people who are professional technology experts or information domain experts.
[30:04.920 --> 30:13.020]  We're talking about people that are very scientifically and artistically literate and are very interested in this stuff.
[30:13.640 --> 30:20.900]  And just decided to start doing it one day and now... Oh, God.
[30:21.460 --> 30:24.420]  Over 25 years later, I think, they're still doing it.
[30:25.000 --> 30:25.620]  Time doesn't matter.
[30:25.800 --> 30:26.080]  We're already coming.
[30:26.080 --> 30:26.380]  Yes.
[30:27.240 --> 30:34.960]  But one of the interesting things about Cryptome is that it's not an effort just by them.
[30:35.300 --> 30:38.580]  They built off of the Cypherpunk's mailing list.
[30:38.660 --> 30:41.820]  I think at that time, it had already become the Seapunk's list.
[30:42.500 --> 30:44.680]  But they drew on those networks.
[30:44.680 --> 30:46.880]  They began gathering documents.
[30:47.060 --> 30:49.700]  Many of them were open-source, but difficult to find.
[30:50.780 --> 30:57.660]  But again, we do get into areas where they started putting up things that were legitimate leaks.
[30:57.780 --> 31:02.460]  And so you had companies like Microsoft, trying to get them taken offline for a while.
[31:03.140 --> 31:09.460]  And just lots of lots of people at different times getting upset, saying, oh, you've posted too much.
[31:09.460 --> 31:10.440]  You've gone too far.
[31:10.620 --> 31:12.800]  How could you post this decryption information?
[31:13.960 --> 31:19.440]  But they're just very staunch believers in information.
[31:22.100 --> 31:22.700]  Yeah.
[31:22.920 --> 31:31.860]  So I mentioned before the ubiquity of high-speed computer networks, better computers, easier ways of transferring information.
[31:32.220 --> 31:42.160]  Though we tend to get into this period of time that's helped, certainly, by what we might consider the rise of hacktivism as a pastime.
[31:42.380 --> 31:46.020]  So I think everybody in this room is probably familiar with this concept.
[31:46.640 --> 31:54.100]  People with a specific knowledge of how to get into computers, steal information, and provide it to these... and providing it to these outlets.
[31:54.760 --> 32:00.260]  Like, we've got an image of the LulzSec group here.
[32:01.640 --> 32:05.960]  Kind of a loose affiliation of degenerate hackers.
[32:06.080 --> 32:09.220]  Any degenerate hackers in the group?
[32:10.100 --> 32:11.860]  Members of degenerate hacker groups?
[32:11.860 --> 32:12.560]  I see one hand.
[32:12.660 --> 32:13.820]  Oh, there's more than one.
[32:13.980 --> 32:14.580]  You liar.
[32:14.740 --> 32:17.980]  We're just... we're just living undercover now.
[32:19.040 --> 32:27.080]  So this becomes kind of like a hinge point in the way that information is both sourced and also shared.
[32:27.780 --> 32:30.720]  And that's where we get to organizations like WikiLeaks.
[32:31.280 --> 32:35.280]  So Cryptome, kind of following the example of Cryptome, I think, before it.
[32:35.580 --> 32:36.060]  Yeah.
[32:36.500 --> 32:39.720]  Cryptome actually played a role in the initial formation of WikiLeaks.
[32:39.900 --> 32:41.760]  They were there to help register the domain.
[32:42.100 --> 32:47.960]  They were on the development list and then began having falling outs with Assange.
[32:48.480 --> 32:58.040]  They've since then just gone through a cycle of appropriately criticizing him, but still supporting the overall movement of transparency and free speech.
[32:59.060 --> 33:04.960]  WikiLeaks started, I think... probably everyone here knows about WikiLeaks, so we won't spend too much time on it.
[33:05.800 --> 33:19.200]  2006, they stopped publishing in 2019, and Assange was recently released and now has immunity for everything that's happened so far, and I think they're trying to get the pardon deal.
[33:19.400 --> 33:29.940]  But one of the things that's interesting about WikiLeaks is there's several different phases of editorial decisions that they've had for terms of what gets published.
[33:30.120 --> 33:38.320]  In the earliest days, WikiLeaks ran on an actual Wiki, and almost anyone could upload almost anything.
[33:38.320 --> 33:43.340]  If it wasn't appropriate, as deemed by the site admins, it would get taken down.
[33:44.460 --> 33:55.300]  But those Wild West days, so to speak, ended around 2010, when WikiLeaks started getting much more attention following the release of Collateral Murder.
[33:56.060 --> 34:04.020]  Since then, WikiLeaks has released so many things that that I'm not going to waste y'all's time just listing them.
[34:04.900 --> 34:10.320]  We are going to revisit a little bit later the DNC leaks briefly with Kutifer2.
[34:11.020 --> 34:24.720]  But yeah, they have published everything from CIA documents to state cables to code and hacked emails, just all sorts of things.
[34:24.960 --> 34:28.420]  And to be clear, the emails were not hacked by WikiLeaks.
[34:28.540 --> 34:34.920]  They've only ever broken encryption on one set of things, and that was some classified Pentagon documents.
[34:34.920 --> 34:36.840]  They wrote about this on the website.
[34:37.180 --> 34:39.140]  The password was very secure.
[34:39.300 --> 34:40.420]  It was the word PROGRESS.
[34:43.440 --> 34:56.080]  There are a lot of really interesting stories in the history of WikiLeaks that are probably things that you would be surprised if were very widely known stories.
[34:56.660 --> 35:00.400]  A lot of internal politics WikiLeaks with WikiLeaks.
[35:00.580 --> 35:10.920]  But also, one of the things that made them unique, especially in this time, previous slide being hacktivists, is that they were not just working with people that were looking to release information.
[35:11.220 --> 35:22.400]  They were also, at a certain point in time, they started directing activities, which is very much against what I think a lot of people tend to think about when they think about a journalistic organization.
[35:22.520 --> 35:33.040]  Rather than just accepting information, they were actually beginning to work with hacktivist groups, LULSEC in particular, to sort of pick targets and send them after those targets.
[35:33.220 --> 35:41.340]  So, a sort of interesting dynamic with WikiLeaks that you don't often see with groups that do the same type of activity.
[35:43.540 --> 35:51.240]  Another thing to mention here in this era is that you start to see a sort of revival of this insider sourcing.
[35:52.060 --> 35:56.840]  So, for a long period of time, we got some information that's coming from hacktivists, of course.
[35:57.860 --> 36:06.040]  But we sort of returned to form with some of these newer ones that I'm sure that you'll notice when we are... or that you'll remember when we switch to these slides.
[36:06.320 --> 36:10.540]  People who have direct access to sensitive information and provide it.
[36:10.840 --> 36:13.980]  So, start with Snowden, of course, 2013.
[36:15.780 --> 36:16.380]  Yeah.
[36:16.680 --> 36:21.660]  So, again, I think Snowden is one of those people that everyone here has probably heard of.
[36:23.680 --> 36:36.080]  But one of the interesting things about Snowden and the next example we're going to look at is that they both worked with WikiLeaks to varying degrees for these mass reveals of information.
[36:37.400 --> 36:44.720]  In both cases, the information was curated, but the damage done was not.
[36:44.900 --> 36:56.220]  As soon as it's shared and exposed, whether or not it's exposed to the public, the agency goes, oh shit, everything is ruined, and they just start taking things apart and rebuilding them.
[36:56.220 --> 37:13.320]  So, the scope of the revelations and what wasn't revealed had a huge impact on both agency operations because of reforms and agency operations because they decided that things were potentially burned and no longer safe to use or rely on.
[37:15.580 --> 37:25.000]  Snowden's main interaction with WikiLeaks that people know about is, you know, help flying around and eventually landing in Russia.
[37:25.340 --> 37:36.900]  Uh, but WikiLeaks also published the insurance files for the Snowden disclosures, which is, um, just one more interesting link between them.
[37:37.500 --> 37:45.320]  But then we've got Joshua Schulte, who was CIA as opposed to Snowden having been NSA.
[37:45.320 --> 37:56.920]  He disclosed huge amounts of code and, um, basically a complete copy of the CIA's system and database that managed that stuff.
[37:57.860 --> 38:01.300]  Release was done under Vault 7 and Vault 8.
[38:01.460 --> 38:13.180]  He has since been convicted on multiple counts and, um, still has some trials pending due to the CSAM charges and, uh, an assault case.
[38:13.960 --> 38:27.440]  But, again, like with Snowden, the damage was done simply by copying the information and getting it out there because the agency is never going to assume, oh, WikiLeaks only published this much publicly.
[38:27.480 --> 38:29.560]  That's all it's gotten around.
[38:29.600 --> 38:31.740]  There's, there's nothing to worry about.
[38:33.180 --> 38:34.640]  They're paranoid assholes.
[38:34.640 --> 38:35.760]  That's not the way they run.
[38:38.860 --> 38:43.700]  Yeah, so we'll, we'll tie up the millennial era by, uh, mentioning some of the hallmarks.
[38:44.040 --> 38:47.740]  Um, a lot of these are the same that you've seen in, uh, previous eras.
[38:48.620 --> 38:51.500]  So, activism, uh, was a facet of it.
[38:52.000 --> 38:54.940]  Tend to see a lot of the insider leaks in this period of time as well.
[38:54.940 --> 38:57.880]  Um, there was a purpose to doing this.
[38:57.980 --> 39:00.380]  It wasn't just kind of willy-nilly for a lot of these cases.
[39:00.740 --> 39:04.480]  Uh, and also pretty relevant to things that were, that were happening in the world.
[39:05.100 --> 39:12.600]  So, um, we enter this period of time after, starting in 2016 and then, uh, kind of maybe up to where we are now.
[39:13.200 --> 39:20.540]  Um, where, what are some of the, what are some of the notable examples here of this period of time that we can think of since 2016?
[39:20.540 --> 39:26.340]  Uh, well, I mean, right up front we've got the hacktivist boom, which is anonymous.
[39:26.900 --> 39:29.580]  Uh, I think everyone here has heard of anonymous.
[39:29.840 --> 39:39.500]  Then we've got the great Phineas Fisher, who did several hack and leaks on Gamma Group, uh, hacking team, and several, several other systems.
[39:39.500 --> 39:48.640]  Uh, and more recently, we've got Guacamaya, uh, which hacked most of Latin America's military.
[39:49.020 --> 39:55.500]  Uh, and provided those emails to, uh, to different organizations, distributed denial of secrets.
[39:55.500 --> 40:01.680]  And in Lace Ave de Vista, we've made them available to journalists, uh, and published some of it publicly.
[40:02.800 --> 40:09.820]  However, there's a limit to what we can do in terms of dumping 10 million internal military records safely.
[40:10.020 --> 40:19.380]  Especially since there's problems like cartels, people will get killed, um, and it's just frankly too much to, to redact.
[40:21.840 --> 40:31.980]  Yeah, so this is a really interesting period of time as well, because we start to see some cases that, uh, drain the, the typical narrative of League cases.
[40:32.500 --> 40:36.980]  Um, we're running a little low on time, so probably only touch on a couple here.
[40:37.080 --> 40:42.720]  Do you want to say something about, uh, about Maxim Popov or do we want to kind of breeze on Bob?
[40:42.720 --> 40:45.700]  Maxim Popov is, uh, a...
[40:47.540 --> 40:53.620]  a Ukrainian-Russian hacker who has worked for the Ukraine government, the Russian government, and the U.S.
[40:53.780 --> 40:58.840]  government, being an offensive hacker for them or an informant for them at different times.
[40:59.280 --> 41:12.240]  Um, one of the most notable things about him is that in the early 2010s, he infiltrated Anonymous, uh, if such a term can be applied to a group like Anonymous.
[41:12.240 --> 41:15.560]  He got close to, to core people, including Sabu.
[41:16.300 --> 41:31.500]  And, um, one of the interesting things about him is that his messages, code, and passwords were, were sent to Sabu and then passed on to Jeremy Hammond, and that's part of what the government actually charged him for.
[41:32.040 --> 41:41.940]  Uh, you can see that in the court records, although a lot of it is redacted, but it came from this Russian hacker that had worked with the FBI, and then they sent him home.
[41:43.100 --> 41:47.380]  Uh, Gujuffer II, several years later, was the source for the DNC emails.
[41:48.520 --> 41:55.520]  And, um, both of these, both of these entities used numerous false personas.
[41:55.940 --> 41:58.360]  Gujuffer II was also connected to DC leaks.
[41:58.360 --> 42:00.700]  And Popov had...
[42:02.200 --> 42:20.000]  at least half a dozen personas active at the time that pretended to have different nationalities, different bulls, and in Popov's case would largely recycle old hacks and leaks as a way of getting revenge on people that hadn't given him the respect or money that he felt he deserved.
[42:22.940 --> 42:26.260]  Um, so, I think we want to just mention this really quick.
[42:26.380 --> 42:28.160]  This is, uh, a consortium leaks.
[42:28.220 --> 42:31.440]  A lot of, like, financial information was also leaked in this period of time.
[42:32.060 --> 42:35.600]  Um, information about powerful people rather than necessarily...
[42:35.600 --> 42:38.900]  Powerful people and powerful organizations weren't necessarily government-related.
[42:39.480 --> 42:43.980]  Um, definitely, importantly, not something I think we have a lot of time for, unfortunately.
[42:44.800 --> 42:51.200]  But, uh, since we have, since we have Emma on stage, probably worth bringing up an organization to make something though.
[42:52.100 --> 42:59.760]  Uh, so, Distributed Denial of Secrets founded in 2018, and it's now the largest library of secrets in the world.
[42:59.940 --> 43:02.760]  Uh, its size is comparable to the Library of Congress.
[43:03.120 --> 43:06.460]  Just to give you something to hang that... that on.
[43:07.220 --> 43:12.400]  Um, Distrib... DDoS Secrets we use what we call a mixed distribution model.
[43:12.520 --> 43:23.440]  We try to make as much possible available directly to the public because, not only does that better help inform the public, but it makes it more available to journalists and everyone else.
[43:23.940 --> 43:31.380]  But, as I mentioned before, with some of the massive military hacks, it's not always possible to... to safely do that.
[43:31.600 --> 43:34.160]  Or it's not always responsible to do so.
[43:34.160 --> 43:52.080]  Um, in some instances, we've withheld certain information because it just had huge lists of people that had done nothing wrong, and just, here's... here's their social security number, here's their credit card number, and, you know, this doesn't...
[43:52.080 --> 43:57.200]  this doesn't actually inform anything meaningful without additional context.
[43:57.880 --> 44:02.320]  But, I don't want to spend too much time talking about DDoS Secrets.
[44:02.520 --> 44:06.560]  Yeah, so, I think we've... I think we've covered a lot of, uh...
[44:06.560 --> 44:11.460]  a lot of the information on the slides already, and I just want to kind of, like, end with one question.
[44:11.680 --> 44:13.800]  This is a very interesting question to me, though.
[44:14.580 --> 44:16.180]  We've seen all these different eras.
[44:16.360 --> 44:17.360]  We kind of mapped them out.
[44:17.820 --> 44:22.300]  Do you think we're in a... are we in a new era of leaks, post-DNC leaks?
[44:22.300 --> 44:28.900]  Are we... is there anything distinct about a leak that may happen in the future that would make this different from anything we've seen before?
[44:29.240 --> 44:30.940]  Leaks are pervasive now.
[44:31.820 --> 44:32.380]  There's...
[44:32.380 --> 44:45.240]  especially in the last year, it's become increasingly obvious to me that... probably every single person who has been online for more than two years has had their information leaked.
[44:45.940 --> 44:50.000]  Most... many people who have never been online have also had their information leaked.
[44:50.000 --> 44:54.540]  That's not even getting into targeted leaks, or...
[44:54.540 --> 44:57.800]  things that are... are done for very specific purposes.
[44:58.140 --> 45:00.440]  That's just how wide-ranging it is.
[45:00.640 --> 45:05.940]  So much of the information is also being recirculated, sometimes stripped of context, but...
[45:06.760 --> 45:12.180]  that information is also being leveraged in some cases for further leaks and further hacks.
[45:15.720 --> 45:24.520]  If we are in a new era, it's simply one where there's so much information that, collectively, we haven't figured out what to do with it yet.
[45:24.520 --> 45:25.860]  How do we process it?
[45:26.260 --> 45:41.740]  You know, if you... if you go to even a major news organization and say, here's 150 million leaked records, dive into it, they're gonna have a brain aneurysm and say, oh, we can't.
[45:42.780 --> 45:46.000]  Even... even organizations that tend to be specialized in that.
[45:46.180 --> 45:48.720]  It's just not something that we've geared up to do yet.
[45:48.980 --> 45:51.180]  And no, AI is not the answer.
[45:51.380 --> 45:51.960]  Shut up.
[45:55.120 --> 45:58.100]  I couldn't think of a more apt way to end it.
[45:58.360 --> 46:00.360]  So, thanks for... thanks for coming to our talk.
[46:00.980 --> 46:03.340]  If you have any questions, we'll be floating for a little while.
[46:03.480 --> 46:04.620]  Otherwise, appreciate it.