Katherine Albrecht: The Totalitarian Nature of Surveillance (NSA, Google, Facebook)
Geopolitics & Empire
Geopolitics & Empire
4.2 • 568 Ratings
🗓️ 9 November 2015
⏱️ 65 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dr. Katherine Albrecht discusses her book Spychips, published almost a decade ago, and reflects on RFID threats today as well as from other technologies. The US Goverment has decided to use the same RFID system being developed by commercial industry which will become ubiquitous by placing both RFID chips and scanners everywhere. She also discusses R.J. Rummel’s work on democide and how the very nature of government and corporate surveillance is totalitarian. Dr. Albrecht also gives the history of the private search engine StartPage and the private encrypted Netherlands-based email service StartMail, who she also works with and helped co-found.
Websites
Books
Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID
I Won’t Take the Mark: A Bible Book and Contract for Children
About Katherine Albrecht
Dr. Katherine Albrecht is an internationally known privacy researcher, consumer advocate, bestselling author, and nationally syndicated radio host. She is also is a senior executive with the private search engines StartPage and Ixquick, and is on the team behind the new privacy-protecting email program StartMail, to make powerful encryption available to regular people. Katherine holds a Doctorate in Human Development and Consumer Education from Harvard University, has studied at the MIT Media lab, and received a Masters from Harvard in Technology, Innovation, and Education.
Katherine has authored pro-privacy legislation, testified before the Federal Trade Commission and numerous state legislatures, and was appointed as a consumer technology expert by NH Governor John Lynch. She co-authored the bestseller Spychips, has granted over 2,000 media interviews with news outlets around the globe, including CBS, NBC, CNN, NPR, Fox News, Good Morning America, the BBC, Wired Magazine, The New York Times, and hundreds more. Katherine is currently serving as the Associate Editor of the IEEE Technology & Society Magazine, co-authors an online security blog for eHow, and she heads the 18,000 member consumer privacy organization, CASPIAN.
She is the author of a children’s Bible book about Revelation titled “I Won’t Take the Mark: A Bible Book and Contract for Children.”
*Podcast intro music is from the song “The Queens Jig” by “Musicke & Mirth” from their album “Music for Two Lyra Viols”: http://musicke-mirth.de/en/recordings.html (available on iTunes or Amazon)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Dr. Catherine Elbrecht is our guest today, and the topic is surveillance technology and the threats posed by it. |
| 0:12.9 | Dr. Albrecht is the best-selling author of Spy Chips. |
| 0:15.8 | She works on the team of the private search engine and email service starts page and start mail |
| 0:20.6 | and has her own |
| 0:21.5 | syndicated radio show on GCN, which you can listen to on catherine elbrick.com. Thank you for joining us, |
| 0:27.4 | Dr. Elbrick. Hi. Well, it's really great to be with you. Good to have you here with us. Let's start |
| 0:33.7 | out with the first question. Your book on RFID chips came out almost a decade ago. |
| 0:40.1 | And in terms of surveillance technology, so much has been changing. |
| 0:43.8 | Your warnings still ring true, but it seems we can add dozens of surveillance threats |
| 0:48.5 | on top of the RFID chips, which you warned about. |
| 0:52.6 | What are some of the strongest threats in your mind since |
| 0:54.9 | spy chips came out at the moment? For example, you know, is it still RFID? Now we've got issues with |
| 1:01.5 | drones, Windows 10, which you've been talking about, these ubiquitous cell phone networks. |
| 1:07.9 | What's on your mind at the moment? I think really all of that, you really did a great job of summing it up. |
| 1:13.7 | So 10 years ago, and actually it was more like 12 or 13 years ago, I was actually sitting |
| 1:19.3 | in a meeting that I had crashed of some of the biggest corporations on the globe. |
| 1:25.1 | And they were talking about plans to secretly put tracking devices into every object manufactured on Earth using RFID, which we call |
| 1:34.1 | spy chips. |
| 1:35.2 | And they had done some research and found that the majority, like 89% of people were |
| 1:40.0 | opposed to this because they didn't trust the corporations and the government not to abuse |
| 1:43.9 | the ability to track people and identify their belongings inside their backpacks or figure |
| 1:49.0 | out what color underwear they're wearing as they walk through a doorway. It was just creepy. |
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