The Glenn Beck Program - Best of The Program ｜ Guests： Ken Paxton & Ross Anderson ｜ 8⧸10⧸21

00:00:00.000 It was a great show today, and you don't want to miss the podcast.

00:00:03.940 We have Ross Anderson on from Cambridge University.

00:00:07.340 He's an expert in security.

00:00:08.720 We talked a little bit about technology and what is coming our way and the plan for iPhones here in the U.S.

00:00:16.060 that Apple is going to scan everything for child abuse imagery.

00:00:22.760 Ross, who, again, his whole thing is technical security.

00:00:26.640 He says this is a nightmare that is about to happen.

00:00:32.180 Also, on today's podcast, we had Ken Paxton, our attorney general here from the great state of Texas.

00:00:40.740 We were talking about the border, what the governor is doing, also COVID, and to rein in these little teeny dictators all around the state.

00:00:50.520 Also, we did an hour today of, I think, empowerment.

00:00:57.200 It was opening up the phones and asking people if you came from a really bad situation as a child, and you had no reason to believe you could make it, but you did.

00:01:11.060 Tell me your story.

00:01:12.680 It's great.

00:01:13.500 It's on today's podcast.

00:01:14.400 Welcome to the program, attorney general from the great state of Texas, Ken Paxton.

00:01:35.700 Ken, how are you, sir?

00:01:37.600 Well, you know, days are pretty interesting these days, Glenn.

00:01:41.840 Today is going to be interesting?

00:01:44.620 Oh, absolutely.

00:01:45.660 They're all interesting.

00:01:46.780 As you can see just what's going on in Texas, every day is a new challenge.

00:01:51.760 Yeah, it is.

00:01:52.820 Texas is under fire today because of the hospital situation here.

00:01:58.760 It is not an emergency, but we have hospitals that are firing people if they don't want to take the vaccine, and we could use a few extra nurses, I understand.

00:02:08.860 And so the run-of-the-mill request from the governor is now being distorted as that there's a massive problem with the hospital system here in Texas, which is not true.

00:02:23.060 Well, you're right about that, and the problems that we are having as it relates to COVID, oddly enough, as you watch the border being pushed by thousands and thousands of people, potentially with COVID.

00:02:38.620 I think we lost him.

00:02:40.880 ...in the country, given the fact that the Biden administration is allowing so many people in our country with COVID.

00:02:45.620 Yeah, it is.

00:02:47.280 Texas is overrun at the border, and, I mean, small little teeny towns are having to put COVID tents up.

00:02:56.280 These people are just dumped into their city by the federal government, and they're just putting up little tents because they don't know what else to do.

00:03:03.680 It's absolutely out of control.

00:03:06.440 It's not.

00:03:07.080 You know, what's amazing is that they are bussing people around the country and just dropping them off.

00:03:11.940 I know for a fact, I was talking to some police officers in Dallas, and they said that these buses showed up in Dallas and just dumped a couple hundred people out of buses, and they just wandered around the streets, and that was it.

00:03:23.800 They were let go.

00:03:25.020 That's how it's being done.

00:03:26.620 Okay.

00:03:27.320 There's a couple of things.

00:03:28.580 First of all, I had a county commissioner on last week, and he was talking about a commissioner's court and a judge in a commissioner's court.

00:03:41.480 It's weird.

00:03:42.760 When you hear court everywhere else but Texas, you think of an actual court, but that's not what this is, right?

00:03:48.900 That's correct.

00:03:49.540 This is like a city council for a county.

00:03:53.740 There are a few counties in Texas that don't have enough court, so they act as a judge, but for the most part in these large counties, a county commissioner's court or a county judge is not really a judicial position.

00:04:06.640 It's more of a management or a city council type position.

00:04:09.640 Okay, and this quote-unquote judge made a ruling against a commissioner and forced him to leave even though he was vaccinated because he wasn't wearing a mask.

00:04:21.200 That is exactly what happened, and, of course, we have an executive order from the governor who's acting under his power called the Disaster Relief Act where he said, hey, you can't require a mask, and that is completely in violation of state law what that commissioner did.

00:04:40.740 So what are you doing about it today?

00:04:44.220 So in the next, I think, hour or so, we're going to file to intervene in his case because he's already got litigation going, and we're going to try to stop what we would consider illegal by this county judge.

00:04:56.080 And I doubt he's going to take it well.

00:04:59.920 He has been on Twitter just saying, you know, you've got to mask up.

00:05:03.320 We've got to get ahead of this.

00:05:04.260 We've got to stop all this madness, yada, yada.

00:05:06.920 But the county commissioner he kicked out, he was already vaccinated.

00:05:13.720 So, go ahead.

00:05:15.500 Here's the deal, Glenn.

00:05:16.600 And, you know, these guys are supposed to act under law, and he doesn't like the current law.

00:05:23.180 He needs to, like, lobby the legislature to change it, not decide for himself, hey, I run this county.

00:05:29.200 I do what I want.

00:05:30.160 I don't follow anybody's other laws because I'm the county judge.

00:05:33.220 That's effectively what this guy is doing.

00:05:36.080 And, look, if he's right, he's right.

00:05:37.840 He can go and lobby and try to get the changes.

00:05:40.460 But he can't unilaterally just make up his own law, and that's sort of the attitude of a lot of these elected officials.

00:05:47.260 They can do whatever they want.

00:05:50.160 Do you expect this to go through here, or is he going to fold?

00:05:57.260 No, I think he likes the media coverage.

00:05:59.480 He's not going to win.

00:06:00.520 I'm pretty sure he knows he's not going to win.

00:06:02.460 If the law matters, he has no chance.

00:06:04.560 We've won these battles before.

00:06:06.360 This is deja vu all over again for us.

00:06:08.360 So we're very confident we're going to win.

00:06:11.080 I think he's doing it for media coverage.

00:06:12.560 But you just said, you know, if the law matters.

00:06:15.500 I have to tell you, and I can't speak for Texas because Texas is, you know, there's a few states that are bucking this system.

00:06:23.900 But it doesn't seem like the law matters anymore.

00:06:26.900 To many Americans, the law doesn't matter anymore.

00:06:31.340 Well, I think Obama set this up, you know, when he was president.

00:06:35.620 He ignored federal law, didn't work through Congress, made up his own executive orders, had agencies make up the law, and just thumbed his nose at laws.

00:06:45.140 And we had to assume we were very successful doing that.

00:06:47.400 But I think he set sort of the mindset for a lot of Democrat, particularly Democratic elected officials.

00:06:52.800 I don't have to follow the law either.

00:06:54.180 If President Obama doesn't do it, I might adopt the same approach.

00:06:57.340 So that's kind of the approach that you're seeing by mayors, by county judges, by elected officials all over the country who just say, why should I have to follow the law?

00:07:04.960 Consume me.

00:07:05.540 What does it cost me?

00:07:06.260 They have no personal risk.

00:07:08.740 Well, but you have more than that now.

00:07:11.180 Firing somebody for their health conditions against the law, it's not being enforced.

00:07:17.100 Questioning somebody about their medical information is against the law, not being enforced.

00:07:21.820 The CDC eviction moratorium, unconstitutional, everybody admits that, but nobody's going to stop it.

00:07:31.300 Using any method to coerce someone into taking an experimental drug against the Nuremberg Code.

00:07:38.980 But it doesn't matter.

00:07:40.840 I mean, when is this end?

00:07:44.460 Well, I mean, this is why we're in the fight.

00:07:46.180 I mean, we can't take on every battle around the country, but we can certainly fight the fights that we have in Texas.

00:07:51.900 And today, this is a fight we have.

00:07:54.640 But we've got thousands of fights going on, and these occur almost every day in my office where we have to pick among a number of choices of which battle can we go fight.

00:08:05.240 And how are we fighting at the border, Ken?

00:08:07.500 What is the latest on that?

00:08:09.660 So that's another long battle for us because we've got six lawsuits as it relates to the border.

00:08:15.220 You know, the governor issued his executive order where he said, hey, if there are people being trans-border that are illegal, they need to be sent back to the border, which is, in my mind, you know, perfectly normal. 0.98

00:08:25.720 And you'd expect a governor to try to protect his state from the spread of COVID from the border and the crime that's associated with that.

00:08:32.500 And yet we were sued by the federal government for trying to protect our state in a way that the federal government refused to.

00:08:42.640 Wait, you're breaking up.

00:08:43.840 You said you've been accused of breaking the law, I guess, the federal law?

00:08:51.600 Yeah.

00:08:52.020 Yeah.

00:08:52.560 So there's this idea under this U.S. Supreme Court case, U.S. v. Arizona, that because the federal government has statutes providing them authority over immigration,

00:09:03.280 that the states still can't protect themselves, that the federal government doesn't.

00:09:06.740 I just don't think that's correct understanding of what the law is.

00:09:10.280 How can it possibly be that the state has to sit by while the federal government ignores the law and allows great harm to the citizens of that state?

00:09:18.160 I can't believe that the governor has to sit by and let that happen.

00:09:21.780 This is the old Constitution is not a suicide pact.

00:09:25.680 Right.

00:09:25.980 It's just not that cannot be the right interpretation of the law or the Constitution.

00:09:31.240 And we're fighting that?

00:09:33.740 Oh, absolutely.

00:09:35.000 We'll fight that to probably the U.S. Supreme Court.

00:09:37.880 Good.

00:09:38.440 Good.

00:09:39.100 Ken, thank you very much.

00:09:40.420 Appreciate it.

00:09:41.160 God bless.

00:09:41.980 The best of the Glenn Beck Program.

00:09:44.360 Let me go to David in Missouri.

00:09:52.180 We're talking to people today that had no reason to expect that they are going to they were they were going to be able to make it.

00:10:00.400 We just talked to a guy a minute ago who is, you know, who is told every step of the way you're going to go to prison.

00:10:07.280 You're never going to make it even in my house.

00:10:10.060 I mean, it was they helped me on my career.

00:10:13.400 My folks would take me to the radio station and everything else, but they didn't really believe.

00:10:18.720 I mean, I was told, you know, you really should have a backup career.

00:10:24.360 And it was a good idea.

00:10:26.020 But because maybe because I didn't have one, this had to work.

00:10:31.780 But anyway, David is with us now in Missouri.

00:10:35.140 David, why?

00:10:36.760 Why did you have no expectation of making it in other people's eyes growing up?

00:10:42.400 Well, thank you for having my call, Glenn.

00:10:45.720 It's an honor speaking with you.

00:10:47.180 Long time listener.

00:10:48.100 First time caller.

00:10:49.280 Thank you.

00:10:50.200 You know, I grew up in a single parent home.

00:10:52.740 My biological father left my mother when she was pregnant.

00:10:55.400 I have no idea who he is or where he is.

00:10:57.560 And and that chapter is long gone.

00:10:59.640 But, you know, my mom's first husband was former military and a prison guard.

00:11:04.540 He was a very harsh man and mentally and physically abused me for years and years and years.

00:11:09.680 And it caused damage that still to this day, I still find traces of in my life that I have to overcome.

00:11:15.260 But along the way, I found alcohol, which consumed my life.

00:11:18.500 I could tell you, you know, six to eight months of time that I don't recall at all of my life because I had so much alcohol consumption.

00:11:28.640 I ended up getting married.

00:11:30.240 My wife had two kids and I took them as my own and raised them.

00:11:33.980 But it was very difficult because I had obviously the tendencies from my mom's first husband that still left traces of my parenting.

00:11:41.540 So I was a harsh person for a long time.

00:11:44.200 And then you had the fuel of the alcohol to it.

00:11:46.120 It was a hard time.

00:11:47.080 Holy cow. 0.89

00:11:47.860 Yeah.

00:11:48.180 Over time, over time, my wife and I actually got divorced after we had jointly had our child together.

00:11:55.080 And alcohol still considered, you know, could still can assume to me.

00:11:58.360 And I remember there was a day this was actually August 1st of 2010.

00:12:02.940 I was away from my wife and my family and I had my youngest daughter with me and we were just sitting there together.

00:12:08.140 And I was hung over more than I could imagine.

00:12:10.720 And I looked at her and I thought, this is God's gift to me and I'm treating it like this.

00:12:17.280 And that day I set the bottle down, never touched it again.

00:12:20.920 August 1st this year was actually my 11th year of sobriety.

00:12:24.040 So let's get past the alcohol part.

00:12:26.420 After that, what I mean, I had nothing.

00:12:28.620 I had no skill.

00:12:29.580 I had no future.

00:12:30.820 I had no hope.

00:12:32.500 And so I just worked dead end job after dead end job until finally, you know,

00:12:36.680 I landed in a service industry that I was very successful in and my skills were great.

00:12:42.380 And after working for many people with a lot of prayer and counsel from from church leaders,

00:12:49.400 I started my own business and I actually started my own business, probably similar to the way that you did a lot of things in your life.

00:12:56.420 I didn't have a lot of money or support.

00:12:58.060 It was whatever I had at the time, I think I might have had eleven hundred dollars to start a company with.

00:13:04.260 And fast forward five years later, the Lord has blessed me to the point where I know the Bible says,

00:13:09.980 if you bring the tithe of the storehouse of the Lord, he will pour out blessings upon you more than you can ever contain.

00:13:14.220 And sometimes I'm praying, Lord, I appreciate the blessings.

00:13:17.340 But can I just have just a little bit less right now?

00:13:19.520 Because this is a lot and and God is just so good.

00:13:23.940 And, you know, I have more hope and joy than I have ever had in my life.

00:13:30.040 And success to me is not the business.

00:13:32.440 Success to me is not the possessions that I have.

00:13:35.600 The success that I feel in my heart is my relationship with Jesus Christ and my love for people.

00:13:43.500 Just the stories that I can tell them, the testimony that I have.

00:13:47.880 And if you were to even look at the business profile that I have on Google or talk to the customers that I have, they'll tell me day after day.

00:13:54.720 They say, we love doing business with you because you care about me, not the money.

00:13:59.360 You come into my place of business or my home to help me with my service issue.

00:14:05.040 And you genuinely care about me.

00:14:07.200 And my customers are my friends.

00:14:09.140 The people around me are my friends.

00:14:11.080 And I just have a joy of life that's contagious.

00:14:14.240 And that was never who would have ever thought that was in the cards of my life.

00:14:17.540 I was a raging alcoholic from an abusive, you know, at the hands of an abusive prison guard.

00:14:23.880 How's your relationship with your kids?

00:14:28.960 So I will tell you that my two oldest kids, we have a fantastic relationship.

00:14:34.500 But they're still, I mean, I repent to them often.

00:14:38.360 And I tell them regularly how sorry I am for the things that I did or said.

00:14:45.600 But I will say this.

00:14:49.940 I love them more than I ever have in my life.

00:14:52.320 They're very successful children.

00:14:54.100 Actually, they're not, I say they're always going to be my children, but they're 18 and 19 now.

00:14:58.200 So they're older and very successful themselves.

00:15:01.340 One of my crowning achievements is that day on August 10th when I shut the bottle down for the last time.

00:15:07.380 And my youngest daughter was actually not old enough to ever have recollection of me ever drinking.

00:15:12.380 And still to this day, someone 14 years old, 13 years old, still has no clue that I ever drank alcohol and never will.

00:15:20.280 Ever, ever, ever will know that I ever did.

00:15:22.680 Only through stories that I tell her is cautionary tales of things to look out for from the evils of the world and the vices that can grab ahold of you so tightly and easily.

00:15:30.580 Wow, David, I am so glad that you called in.

00:15:35.420 Thank you.

00:15:36.580 Congratulations.

00:15:37.580 I'm so happy for you.

00:15:39.880 So happy for you.

00:15:41.160 Well, thank you.

00:15:41.860 You bet.

00:15:42.320 God bless.

00:15:43.000 It's by the grace of God.

00:15:44.280 God bless.

00:15:44.760 Thank you, Glenn.

00:15:45.520 I will tell you, you notice the theme here.

00:15:48.300 I think everyone has mentioned God in some way or another.

00:15:52.800 Every single person.

00:15:54.920 I think even the first guy who lives in Wisconsin, which I don't understand.

00:15:58.280 Again, the horse racing is fine or the horse raising horses is fine.

00:16:01.560 Just Wisconsin.

00:16:03.260 Really?

00:16:04.660 Wisconsin.

00:16:05.600 There are places that aren't that cold or progressive.

00:16:09.100 I just want to point that out to you.

00:16:10.980 And that's the birthplace of progressivism.

00:16:13.100 Yeah, it is.

00:16:14.080 Anyway, but you notice the you notice the mark here.

00:16:18.260 There's no reason for hope.

00:16:21.800 You know, I've I know that God lives.

00:16:25.240 I know that God lives.

00:16:26.960 I know the healing power of the atonement, because I just like our last caller had lots

00:16:37.120 to atone for, and I know it.

00:16:40.040 I know those things.

00:16:41.500 But let me just say this.

00:16:43.720 If I wake up in the dirt, you know, trapped in a box for all eternity and there's nothing

00:16:50.780 besides endless dirt nap.

00:16:54.880 I don't care.

00:16:56.640 I mean, I'll be disappointed.

00:16:58.600 But the secret is I won't wake up from it.

00:17:00.980 So I won't know.

00:17:01.800 But it's made me better.

00:17:04.760 It gives you hope.

00:17:07.880 If you really, truly believe, that's the difference.

00:17:12.180 That's why we believed we could do it.

00:17:14.680 That's why that's why we were founded, because we didn't need a king.

00:17:22.100 We already had one.

00:17:23.480 And all of our laws are based on biblical truths.

00:17:29.000 And the more we deny the biblical truth, the more we deny our own laws.

00:17:36.900 That's why everything is breaking down.

00:17:40.600 Because we no longer believe in the law.

00:17:44.500 We're not a nation of laws.

00:17:46.000 We're a nation of men.

00:17:46.940 We were a nation of laws only because we agreed on those laws that they were pretty much eternal.

00:17:55.560 That the things that the things that we had in place in our Constitution and the directives of the Declaration of Independence didn't come from man.

00:18:07.340 They came from God.

00:18:09.860 And the Constitution was just a way to protect those things.

00:18:13.200 If we lose our faith in God, you lose almost everything.

00:18:18.720 Because nothing, the center won't hold.

00:18:22.240 You know, people always say atheists find their, sure, find religion in the foxhole.

00:18:26.880 I don't know if that's true.

00:18:31.100 But I know that people who are kind of indifferent, when they're in the foxhole, whenever they're in trouble, their kids get sick, they suddenly find God.

00:18:41.000 They do find God.

00:18:43.200 But we are in a place right now where the only thing that will heal us is forgiveness.

00:18:58.560 That's it.

00:19:00.360 We are in a place now where we can't forgive one another because we voted differently.

00:19:05.140 Because we think differently.

00:19:09.360 We are in a place now where we can't forgive members of our own family for things they've said.

00:19:17.660 When you're, when you're in the situation these callers have been in, you have to forgive.

00:19:30.060 Otherwise, it just turns into hate.

00:19:32.660 And it turns into rage.

00:19:34.440 And it turns into vindictiveness.

00:19:36.520 Do you notice that pattern in our everyday life as a nation?

00:19:45.180 It's because we can't forgive each other.

00:19:49.080 We need to forgive each other.

00:19:51.620 And forgive ourselves.

00:19:55.600 And start fresh.

00:19:57.760 So, I am trying to eat healthier, and I am.

00:20:00.780 But the thing is, I don't like healthy food.

00:20:04.060 I don't like any of it.

00:20:05.540 You've heard of a fat suit, right?

00:20:07.080 I mean, there's got to be.

00:20:08.200 When are we getting a skinny suit?

00:20:09.660 Something that will make me look skinny.

00:20:11.520 Because I just want treats all the time.

00:20:14.140 I grew up in a bakery for the love of Pete.

00:20:16.280 The bad news is, no skinny suit is coming.

00:20:18.700 You actually have to do the work.

00:20:20.140 Blah, blah, blah.

00:20:20.780 That's why I am eating Bilt Bars.

00:20:22.980 It satisfies my sweet tooth.

00:20:25.240 But it's a protein bar, but not like, you know.

00:20:27.400 That's like eating stuff at the bottom of my chalkboard, usually.

00:20:31.020 This is 100% real chocolate.

00:20:33.220 It's low carb, low sugar.

00:20:35.160 If I'm eating a protein bar as a treat, come on.

00:20:38.000 You've got to know it's good.

00:20:39.320 And I am.

00:20:39.860 Mint, brownie, cookies, and cream.

00:20:41.520 The new flavors that are coming out all the time, they're fantastic.

00:20:44.520 Go to BiltBar.com and use the promo code BECK15 for 15% off your order.

00:20:51.400 Your mouth is going to water just looking at them.

00:20:54.300 Trust me.

00:20:55.100 BiltBar.com.

00:20:56.340 Promo code BECK15.

00:21:02.240 This is the best of the Glenn Beck Program, and we really want to thank you for listening.

00:21:06.000 So last week, the story came out.

00:21:15.240 Apple plans to scan U.S. iPhones for child abuse imagery.

00:21:19.320 And on the surface, if you're not paying attention to what's going on in the world, you think, oh, well, that's good.

00:21:24.700 I got an email from a guy who used to be very, very high up at Yahoo about 20 years ago.

00:21:33.560 And he said, we basically set up a direct line with the FBI because we frequently had websites submitted to us to be crawled or indexed that we believed may contain child pornography or other illegal things.

00:21:46.720 At first, we were just emailing links over to the FBI task force.

00:21:49.680 But the process for them to check on it and get back to us was just so arduous that we just eventually set the FBI up with an E3 terminal in their L.A. area offices.

00:22:02.040 That was basically the same terminal that our editorial team members, those who were the keepers of the Internet at the time, they determined which websites and search results showed up for people and which ones we would block, trying to keep harmful or illegal content out of Yahoo's search results.

00:22:17.920 So by giving the FBI an E3 terminal, anyone from the editorial team or the sales group could submit a website directly to them for review.

00:22:25.700 It would pop up in their queue, just like a help desk ticket and someone at the FBI could review it and let us know if the content was legal.

00:22:33.180 But they could also just flag something to be blocked and it would be blocked.

00:22:37.520 Generally, no questions asked.

00:22:39.860 And because of what we felt at the time, we felt like we were doing good, taking down child and sex trafficking criminals.

00:22:47.920 We felt great about it.

00:22:50.220 This is a long winded way of saying, yeah, I'm sure that Apple is and others are getting into a cozy relationship between social search tech giants and the government.

00:23:03.120 We now know that this was a mistake to open up the door in the first place.

00:23:08.400 Ross Anderson is with us.

00:23:10.640 He is a professor of security at Cambridge University and one of the louder voices speaking out and warning us about what Apple is doing.

00:23:19.680 Hi, Ross.

00:23:21.260 Hi, Glenn.

00:23:22.700 Thank you so much for being on the program with me.

00:23:25.520 I want to understand why this is so dangerous.

00:23:30.520 Apple says it has all kinds of safety features and they're only scanning faces for those that are, you know, in in in sex rings or have been sex trafficked and maybe those children that are missing.

00:23:48.300 Well, you can see how this is going to develop, but first of all, Apple will be scanning all the photos in everybody's camera roll everywhere in the USA and later everywhere in the world against a database of 200,000 abuse images that have been supplied by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

00:24:11.540 Now, given the way that their neural network is organized, it looks like it's going to scan for faces, as you say.

00:24:19.520 And so you can imagine the kind of things that will happen, that there'll be some abuse image that's 10 or 20 years old.

00:24:27.400 And so the reviewers at Apple will see a photograph which isn't of child sex abuse, but of a grown up with their clothes on.

00:24:35.780 And the system will recognize this person.

00:24:38.400 And the person at Apple then has to decide whether this is a survivor or a perpetrator and what to do with it.

00:24:46.240 There's a small problem there that U.S. law says that if you do get suspected child abuse material, you should report it at once to NCMEC rather than reporting it to Apple.

00:24:56.300 Right. So there's first the illegal problem there.

00:24:59.040 And then secondly, there's the problem of what happens when NCMEC extends that to missing children.

00:25:06.040 Right. Because some of the children who are known, you know, who go missing, go missing for perfectly good reasons.

00:25:12.080 For example, they might be getting abused at home.

00:25:14.280 They might get beaten or even sexually abused.

00:25:16.320 And so if you recognize runaways, there's all sorts of processes around that you have to think about.

00:25:24.100 Apple doesn't seem to have thought about this.

00:25:26.200 You know, they don't seem very keen to provide help desks and help lines and places where people can report stuff.

00:25:33.600 And then the next problem is that once you've got a mechanism sitting in your iPhone that can scan your camera raw for for faces, it's open to any government in the world to come along with a warrant and say, hey, Mr. Apple, we've got a file of 20,000 faces that we'd like you to scan for in our country.

00:25:52.600 And you can guess what those faces might be in China.

00:25:55.980 It might be the faces of the Dalai Lama and the Pope in Europe.

00:26:01.220 If there's been some rowdy demonstration in Paris, for example, the police might feed in the faces of demonstrators.

00:26:08.120 You know, your guess is as good as mine.

00:26:10.060 But Apple is building a very, very dangerous mechanism into its iPhones.

00:26:14.400 And there needs to be proper scrutiny and accountability of this.

00:26:18.120 So this is actually is it based on or is it just very similar to something that happened in 2008 in China that kind of opened Pandora's box?

00:26:28.160 Well, yes.

00:26:28.980 And this is a worrying thing, you know, because if our civilization is going to be in Cold War 2.0 with China for the next 20 years or 30 years, we should watch what the Chinese do and understand it rather than copying them. 0.97

00:26:42.680 And in China, what happened in 2008 is that they mandated everybody in the country to put software called Green Dam on their PCs.

00:26:52.080 And Green Dam was sold to the population as being a porn filter.

00:26:57.200 And it did that to some extent, but very badly.

00:27:00.060 However, the real purpose of Green Dam was to look for words like Falun Gong and Dalai Lama and so on that were of interest to the Ministry of State Security.

00:27:08.980 What Green Dam also did is it made your computer vulnerable because the government weren't very good at writing software and the software that they produced meant that everybody who used the Green Dam software was vulnerable to having their PC taken over by websites that they visited.

00:27:25.100 Now, that's been fixed by now, but still, it's the case that in China and in Russia, we have this ecosystem of government scanning what's on people's PCs.

00:27:35.080 And no doubt the Chinese will be seen to it that they get to scan stuff in people's phones as well.

00:27:41.220 So, you know, it was we were talking about this the other day and I said to my staff, can anybody name anything that, you know, is a bigger threat to your freedom and security than social media and technology?

00:27:59.440 I mean, it's not necessarily the threat today, but we know what it can do.

00:28:06.800 And and yet, again, do you know anybody who has given it up and said, I'm just not going to be a part of this?

00:28:14.280 Very, very rarely does that happen.

00:28:17.320 We are just going down the road and they keep passing these red lines of, oh, that's a really bad sign.

00:28:25.900 That's a really bad thing to do.

00:28:27.760 And just hoping that it's not going to be turned against us when we already see social media is doing all of these things.

00:28:35.940 Well, absolutely.

00:28:39.400 You know, I used Android for many years and switched to Apple a couple of years ago when I was updating my security engineering book and I noted how much more secure Apple was.

00:28:49.580 But the problem with Apple iPhones being tamper resistant is that I can't easily drill into them and find out what they're doing.

00:28:56.920 I can't see the database of hashes of abuse in my phone and check that it doesn't contain hashes of dissidents instead.

00:29:06.540 With a less secure phone like an Android, you could perhaps do that and you could hold people to account.

00:29:12.020 So here is a case where security is being used against us to undermine our privacy.

00:29:17.240 And the tamper resistance of the iPhone means that the government can have an eye spy in your iPhone over which you've got no control whatsoever.

00:29:28.380 Ross, how how far away are we from a an easy police state with the wrong person taking charge?

00:29:40.320 Well, that's exactly the problem here.

00:29:43.420 You mustn't give the police too much power.

00:29:45.760 You may think that it's nice to give the police power when your lot are in charge, but it never works because you end up with the other lot in charge and, you know, then you've had it.

00:29:55.220 So to stay free, we have to see to it that the government can only do so much that it can't undermine our basic freedoms.

00:30:03.200 And you're lucky in the United States having your constitution here in Europe.

00:30:08.180 We have the European Convention on Human Rights.

00:30:10.660 And once you get to those parts of the world where we don't have guarantees for basic freedoms, well, good luck.

00:30:16.300 Well, I don't know if you've been paying attention much to America lately, Ross, but we're not following the Constitution.

00:30:22.180 I mean, we are our Constitution says, you know, you you can't you can't quarter soldiers into a house and go through somebody's papers.

00:30:30.700 Well, I think you already have that if you're if you're if you're if you're on online and the government wants some information, they're just going to go to one of these tech companies and they'll go through all of your papers.

00:30:43.020 I mean, and they're they'll watch you or they'll scan your photos and you there's no such thing as privacy anymore.

00:30:49.720 Well, indeed, and I'm not an expert in U.S. law, of course, being a Brit, but I hear from American friends that the argument which Apple and the FBI are going to use goes to a case around drug sniffer dogs where somebody's in a traffic stop.

00:31:08.560 A drug sniffer dog brought around and they found some weed in his boot and he got convicted and he said that was unfair.

00:31:16.520 And the court said that if you've got a search that finds only contraband, that's OK.

00:31:22.980 Now, it depends on what the government defines as contraband.

00:31:26.460 But if you've got a government search engine that can look at all your most intimate stuff, you know, your photos, your emails, your texts, and it can use artificial intelligence to find out something that the government of the day considers to be contraband.

00:31:39.220 And then that means it makes a mockery of the idea that you've got to get warrants because suddenly you're turning the universe around so that the government to do surveillance doesn't have to get a warrant against a suspected person, but against a suspected idea or an expect a suspected image or a suspected form of speech.

00:32:00.600 Is that what's that's what's that's what's changing here.

00:32:03.000 And it's really scary.

00:32:03.940 Is there is there anything the average person can do to secure themselves?

00:32:12.700 Well, what's happening in the long term, this is down to political action.

00:32:19.860 This is down to legal action.

00:32:21.580 This is down to, well, you know, my next phone isn't going to be an iPhone.

00:32:24.840 In the meantime, Apple saying that they will only scan your photos if you back them up in iCloud or then find buy yourself a disk drive and attach it to your laptop and back your phone up on your laptop and back the laptop up on a disk drive.

00:32:40.660 Right.

00:32:40.820 I mean, by doing that, that only just tells that anybody who does market in child pornography, don't put it on the iCloud.

00:32:48.440 That doesn't make any sense at all.

00:32:51.120 Well, and it's also too much bother for most people.

00:32:53.880 You see, what Apple and the FBI will be relying on here is the fact that Apple nagged you really, really hard to get an iCloud account and to put more money in it and to back your phone up to iCloud and your MacBook, too, rather than using a disk drive.

00:33:08.480 You know, for some years, my wife refused to get an iCloud account.

00:33:11.340 And every time she connected her iPhone to the MacBook, it just complained and said, put in your iCloud password.

00:33:16.920 And it's this kind of commercial nagging that is now going to be exploited by law enforcement to drive a coach and horses through security.

00:33:25.300 But there is another thing here, which is that your photos in iCloud aren't properly encrypted when they're backed up anyway.

00:33:33.900 So Apple could, if it wished, run child porn detection software over the photos, just like, for example, Facebook does over photos in Facebook Messenger and Google does over photos in Gmail.

00:33:47.040 And it could then report people who already have illegal images in iCloud to NC Mac.

00:33:55.680 But it doesn't do that.

00:33:57.100 Last year, Facebook reported made over 20 million reports to NC Mac and Apple made under a thousand.

00:34:04.200 So wait, so it's something really weird going on here.

00:34:07.140 Yeah, why?

00:34:07.720 Apple really cared about stopping child sex abuse.

00:34:11.060 They could have done a lot of stuff a long time ago.

00:34:13.320 Any thought on why they're now taking this step?

00:34:16.340 Because it's unneeded, apparently?

00:34:19.680 Well, well, one of the things that's been suggested is that Apple is contemplating encrypting iCloud data properly.

00:34:29.260 And the FBI is going to object to that unless there's some means of scanning for stuff of interest to them.

00:34:35.940 But, of course, child sex abuse material isn't the only thing of interest to the FBI.

00:34:42.440 The FBI has got much wider interest than that.

00:34:45.400 Ross, thank you very much.

00:34:46.280 Thank you for everything that you're doing and speaking the truth and letting people know what is possible with technology and what is coming our way.

00:34:56.040 Professor of security at Cambridge University on the Apple plan to now use iPhones to scan for child abuse imagery and possibly much more than that.

The Glenn Beck Program - August 10, 2021

Best of The Program ｜ Guests： Ken Paxton & Ross Anderson ｜ 8⧸10⧸21

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