Technology Without Guardrails – Episode 19 of Unbuffered

Christopher Mitchell (00:16)
Well, I got good news for you today. This is another episode of Unbuffered, the podcast with Chris Mitchell from the Institute for Local Self Reliance, coming to you from St. Paul, Minnesota. And today I expect no buffers. We’re gonna be talking with Sascha Meinrath. Sascha is the Palmer Chair of Telecommunications at Penn State University. He’s been on the show a bunch of times, and he’s the director of X-Lab. Welcome back, Sascha.

Sascha Meinrath (00:42)
Hello, hello. Great to be here again.

Christopher Mitchell (00:45)
And the really interesting news is that not only do we have no buffers, now we have sound effects.

So I’m pretty excited about this. You know, we’ll we’ll see where it goes. but you know, I I don’t I don’t think I have a cricket yet, but I’m working on it.

Sascha Meinrath (01:06)
feel like we need the sad trombone

a lot.

Christopher Mitchell (01:10)
I do have I do have this. Hey, all right. So no, I will not overuse that. I will not drive my loyal viewers to insanity through what I enjoy as pretty dumb jokes. but today Sascha and I are gonna talk a bit about what’s happening in Washington, DC around privacy issues and FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Did I get that right? I just

I just wrote FISA, but then what’s the I? Is it intelligence?

Sascha Meinrath (01:42)
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It’s the foreign

part that c is most confusing, however, and we’ll get into that.

Christopher Mitchell (01:49)
Right, because by foreign they mean Earth anywhere on Earth.

Sascha Meinrath (01:53)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (01:54)
So and we’re gonna be talking about the Center for AI Research. and and frankly, this is one of those things where I don’t like to follow normal conventions. Normal conventions are you have a show, you want people to think that you’re resolute and you’re certain and that makes you powerful and people want to listen to you.

Sascha and I have a lot of questions and unresolved feelings about AI, where it’s going, and what we should be thinking about it. So we’ll put that’ll be reflected in our discussion about that. And then the the coup de gras will be ending with a discussion a little bit about what’s happening in Pennsylvania on Internet access. Sascha is one of the lesser authors on a report, The Cost of Inaction, the second to the last of a hundred authors. Take that, Sascha.

Sascha Meinrath (02:40)
Indeed, indeed. I I’m happy to be the lesser given how great my

co authors are, yes.

Christopher Mitchell (02:46)
And in two weeks, I’m talking with the lead author and person, and he’ll be like, dude, why did you have Sascha on to talk about my report? And I’ll be like, Cause I’m a terrible person. So so this is gonna be a fun show. All right, Sascha. I like I like poking you because I just feel like it’s more fun. but let’s talk about FISA and privacy issues in knowing that you and I are recording this on the day it’s going to be released, but the news may still overtake us. So what’s going on?

And what has just happened for the person that picks this show up on Thursday?

Sascha Meinrath (03:19)
Yes. So here on the twenty eighth of July we are awaiting with bated breath the confirmation vote for Clayton, who is the new head of all things FISA related, which is to say the head of surveillance and etc. for the United States. and FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, we have been fighting this act for

Decades. it has been a legal umbrella under which massive illegal surveillance has taken place. This is not hyperbolic. The federal courts in September of 2020 ruled in point of fact that the use of FISA to collect, for example, all of the phone records for Verizon, and anyone that contacted anyone on Verizon is in fact illegal. You may be asking yourself.

How does the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act enable domestic intelligence surveillance? That is a question that I and many other civil libertarians have been begging the courts to answer on a constitutional ground. Almost all of the data collected is done, is collected without a warrant.

ahead.

Christopher Mitchell (04:38)
I was gonna say, if we go back for a second, I think it’s maybe useful. Like the FISA process came about r a long time ago, right? After the federal government had significant overreach in in interfering, not just surveilling, but interfering in the lives of of many people, some of whom deserved it, but it was still inappropriate. So not only did they interfere in the lives of civil rights icons, they also interfered in

the leadership of the Ku Klux Klan, for instance. And so those are the folks that I feel like I don’t have as much sympathy for. But we’re supposed to be a nation of laws and the federal government isn’t supposed to be able to just track everything that people do and say and then use it against them if they disagree with where they’re going. So they set up a process, right?

Sascha Meinrath (05:22)
Well let let’s let’s take a a a quick trip down memory lane. So FISA comes out of a whole national soul searching moment epitomized by what was called the Church Committee after Senator Church in 1978. And this was a moment where we said, Never again will we allow the government to do what it had done, which begs the question, what

Done?

And the answer is the government had set up a domestic, a massive domestic surveillance and disruption program called the T Counterintelligence Program or COINTELPRO. And COINTELPRO from the end of World War II up through the mid-1970s was used to disrupt pretty much everything we now view of as progress.

In terms of human and civil rights. Go

Christopher Mitchell (06:22)
Right.

But I I do feel like I mean and like they also like they broke up the marriages of people that were in white supremacist organizations and things like that. And so like it’s not just like they were trying to disrupt they disrupted the leadership by destroying their personal lives. And I just and again, like I have mixed feelings about this. I shed no tears. These are terrible people trying to do terrible things. But that’s what they were doing as well.

Sascha Meinrath (06:44)
Yeah, but if you look at what COINTELPRO targeted, yes, I mean there was like a handful of right wing or n you know, white supremacists or what have you groups. The other ninety-eight percent of its activities were all against the left. And and so I I want to both acknowledge,

Christopher Mitchell (07:01)
Yeah, you’re right.

Sascha Meinrath (07:02)
yes, they did both, but let’s not make a false equivalency here. This thing targeted feminists, ecologists, this thing targeted the National Lawyers Guild for what?

For representing the people that they were going after. Which is to say, this was a wide-reaching, blatantly illegal and unconstitutional program in mass that culminated in things such as, and there’s a famous letter that the New York Times finally got released in only in 2015, where this program attempted to get Martin Luther King to kill himself because they had secretly and illegally.

Surveilled his adulterous bedroom activities and were threatening, extorting him to release this information. I mean, this is this is what was done under this program. There are still huge swaths of this program. They’ve never seen light of day. And the 1978 church committee report said all of these things need to be addressed. We will set up all of these checks and balances, and one of them will be the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

And the creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to oversee these kinds of activities. Fast forward to Snowden, it clearly is not being well overseen. And once these secret programs go public, the head of the foreign intelligence surveillance court publicly acknowledges we can no longer control the intelligence community. They are doing things that are illegal, p potentially unconstitutional. Something needs to be done.

And

right now, as of this podcast, FISA has now expired. Every five years it has to be renewed. The powers under FISA will be extinguished, will end in March 2027, unless it is renewed. And so there’s this massive battle royale on the hill taking place right now over w under what circumstances.

Should FISA be renewed. And now let me lay out the radical position in DC today, which I hold. The radical position in DC says, yes, we should renew FISA, but only if we guarantee that before you surveil Americans in America, you get a warrant. Which is to say, the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution is now considered the radical position when it comes to FISA renewal.

Christopher Mitchell (09:40)
So people who are less radical than you are considered dangerously radical by some of the podcasts I listen to. For instance, Rational Security, which is a somewhat of a centrist take on on national security issues. They would say these powers are essential for protecting us. And I just wanna I do want to go back for one second to note that this is always the justification, right? If it’s not for the children, it’s for public safety. That’s just

Sascha Meinrath (10:07)
Yeah. Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (10:07)
That is the nature

of like arguments in this vein. And I do want to say that, like, as you noted, the government engaged in sweeping unregulated, effectively, powers of intelligence. And it did not help all of the people who were engaged in the freedom rides, all of the people who were organizing against a massive orchestration of state terror from southern states and a variety of other

places that were seeking to to kill fellow federal fellow citizens in order to hold them in their place. And so this idea of like keeping you safe, it’s always like an idea of like we’re keeping a certain group of people safe. And what that means is really subject to interpretation. So I don’t want to spend a lot of time there. But FISA, I do there’s an important fact I think FISA did require a special judge to oversee before they did this.

And then we got a a sight into that, right? And we found that that special judge had like in only two cases out of like decades of doing this, had had turned down the request for surveillance. So so that process, like there was a little bit of oversight, but it was a joke. Is that is that fair to say from your point of view?

Sascha Meinrath (11:18)
I you’re being very generous calling it a joke. It was non-existent, it was non-functional to the point that the head of the secret foreign intelligence surveillance court declared publicly that they do not have control over the intelligence community. The intelligence community regularly lies to the judges, right? If you and I lie to a judge, it’s not gonna work out very well for us. Like, but the intelligence community systematically was lying to the secret court.

Right.

This isn’t in like a public purview. This like their court secretly overseeing w their secret activities. And they were like, you know what? We’re not even going to disclose to you what we’re actually doing, what the evidentiary trail is. And again, what I want to point out is that the the argument is we need FISA because it’s to keep us safe. And without it, you know, the sky’s going to fall, the terrorists are going to win, the Republic will not stand. And again, there’s those that say that, and there’s people like me who are like,

Well, okay, then let’s audit the program. Let’s find out what it’s actually accomplished. What are the trade-offs? What are the false positive, i.e., innocent people wrongfully accused? What are the false negatives where it misses the actual terrorists? And let and let’s find out how efficacious the program is. And the argument for those saying, like, this program is super useful and we have to have it or nothing will work, don’t want the audit. Which is to say.

They don’t want to have a conversation based on the merits of the program about the trade-offs of security and privacy and all of that stuff. What they want is us to blindly follow them to declare, yes, we gotta give up these fundamental constitutional rights in pursuit of safety that they claim to exist but don’t want us to actually measure. Otherwise, very, very, very bad things will happen.

And if you look back, this same argument was used over something called Section 215, another area of illegal surveillance that Snowden exposed in 2013, where they said, if this thing expires, like all hell’s gonna break loose. And we did fight, and we did get it to expire. And you know what? Nothing happened. So

My question

becomes like what is so special about these programs that without them we would somehow lose all the battles, right? And again, I think you’re alluding to something. Something very bad will eventually happen. It’s de facto guaranteed, right? No matter what we do, no matter how many things we put in place, like no matter how much surveillance and how much privacy we give up and like bad things will continue to happen.

In the interim, however, the question is like what kind of society do we want to live in? Do we want to live in one governed by constitutional rights, by inalienable rights, by human rights, by civil liberties, or do we want to live in like a lockdown state where everything you do may and often is surveilled, documented, and occasionally, far too often, weaponized against people that are doing nothing more

Than

engaging in First Amendment rights to protest, speak out, call people to account when they do something wrong.

Christopher Mitchell (14:49)
I I feel like this is the sort of thing that people are like, Chris, why is this show so political all of a sudden today? And the simple fact is that when it comes to telecommunications like this, this is about politics. This is about who we can trust to have these secrets and that sort of thing. And it’s about balancing when it comes to technology, how we’re going to handle the fact that these warehouses that are being built, some of the data centers that are being built, are the store.

All the conversations so they can go back and look back at them. And and frankly, we’ve seen now who’s in charge, right? you see Kash Patel, I don’t trust him to be involved in with the Department of Justice. I don’t trust a lot of these people. I didn’t trust a lot of the people under the under the Democrats, frankly. And like and like this is the worst of the worst right now that we have. And but the thing that I guess I just want to say to folks is is like

We wrestle with politics on this show, and it is fascinating to me how the people who are like, you know, we can’t trust the government to get anything right when it comes to like picking winners and losers between fiber optics and mobile wireless to as to like who’s to say what is better for connecting people in their homes. you know, the government can’t do that. but the government can be chosen with almost no oversight to just store all of our communications and decide how to how to use them.

It’s it’s a remarkable switcheroo that we sometimes see. And the true opposite is also true for people who I kinda feel like, you know, take it take the opposite view. So anyway, we’re gonna we’re gonna come out of the subject in a second, but any last thoughts on that?

Sascha Meinrath (16:25)
Yeah, I mean COINTELPRO was the bastard child of Democratic and Republican administrations. Section two fifteen, FISA, these are purveyed by Dems and Republicans alike. It never ends in terms of both parties being terrible on privacy and constitutional rights. And the reason not to give the

Government these powers is because the government inevitably abuses these kinds of systems to target the populace. And so a lot of this comes down to not providing these powers to the federal government because of the inevitable downside risks borne by us, right? The residents and citizenry of the United States, and because of the inevitability of them being used.

For nefarious, oppressive and illegal purposes.

Christopher Mitchell (17:28)
Yeah, and I think I mean, from my point of view, we’re living through a time right now of of just a remarkable change where we don’t know where it’s gonna go. It leads into our next topic, AI. But the federal government having all this information allows it to make very strong cases potentially against people that are false. But look bulletproof because when you have all of the information, it becomes a lot easier to frame people. And so I

I I’ve always been skeptical of government power. I’ve always thought it’s important and needs to be used wisely. and it puts me in an awkward situation sometimes, but it makes me very nervous to go through this and and like you said, to not have an honest discussion about trade-offs, in part because every elected official knows that if there is an attack, they will be they will probably be vulnerable to an opponent in the next election who will say you didn’t do enough to protect us.

Whereas if there is no attack, there will probably not be as much of an electoral punishment for having allowed government power to run and collect all this information and use it in in ways that we’re only starting to see can be abusive in the modern era.

Sascha Meinrath (18:42)
Mm-hmm.

We see a narrative from both parties that if there was an attack, it’s because we weren’t doing enough. And if there wasn’t an attack, it’s because of what we have and we need more. Which is to say the argument no matter what is transpiring, no matter what the reality is, always those in power demanding a diminution of our privacy in order to keep us safe. That’s the argument.

And as soon as you start saying, like, let’s in let’s interrogate that, let’s look and and and make an informed decision predicated upon the actual efficacy of these programs, people are like, no, we will not do that. And and that to me points to

the the fundamental problem, which is a lot of these safeguards, it’s like, you know, the the the the story about the tiger safety amulet, right? Like I sell you a tiger safety amulet

And you don’t get attacked by a tiger. And somebody eventually points out, like, well, there’s no tigers here, right? Now, obviously there are terrorists, but they’re very they’re a very rare thing. And do we need additional powers beyond those that we already have? And especially powers that target the citizenry and route around constitutional pr protections to keep us safe. One of the open questions about section seven two in particular, but many of these other powers.

Many of the other abuses that Snowden revealed over a dozen years ago now is they’ve never been tested on the constitutionality of these programs. It’s always been on the legality of a particular element. And the federal courts in September of 2020 said, Hey, we think that there’s a constitutional argument to be made.

That

has never been tested. I I keep waiting for that kind of thing. We had to do that with Jim Crow. No matter how many times we said the way that you’ve instantiated this particular illegal discriminatory activity, well, folks found an infinite ways to do that. And it took the Supreme Court saying, We don’t care how you did it, it’s all illegal. You cannot discriminate based on race. At some point we have to say, we don’t care how you do surveillance.

It is illegal to do so without a warrant because of that Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, which is crystal clear. There’s no asterisk or carve outs or if you want to surveil an anyone in America, you need to get a warrant. Period. And that has never been tested in court to date.

Christopher Mitchell (21:21)
Well, I’m sorry to say that I don’t have a lot of faith that the courts would do what we need in terms of upholding the constitution because the Constitution turns out to be pretty freaking unc inconvenient is what I was trying to say. and and that’s just true. I mean I feel like

People act like there was no hard decisions that were made back in the day by the founders. They were weighing hard decisions. And they frankly, they found it hard to live up to the constitution then. And we need to do a better job of trying to live up to it now. But we also have to move on. And so I want to ask you, Sascha, about something you’re involved with, the Center for AI Research. What is going on there? Because it sounds like it could be anything.

Sascha Meinrath (22:04)
and it’s a lot. so the Center for Agentic AI Research is a multimillion dollar research and development outfit that is staffed by kind of veteran open source and circumvention technology experts. fo the folks that brought you a lot of the tools that we use every day to secure our communications are in the orbit of the Center for AI Research. And why did we choose to build this thing?

Mainly because it is a hyper disruptive technology, number one, to all facets of society. And number two, it’s also the the accelerant poured upon exactly the issues we talked about in the first half of the show, which is to say privacy and surveillance within an AI-mediated realm simply disappear. That you will be unable to maintain any meaningful privacy.

Or protections against surveillance in an AI-mediated world, which is a very bleak and dystopian, very near-term event horizon, which is to say, as it becomes less and less possible to even purchase non-AI mediated goods and services and appliances and everything, you basically have the informant inside.

Your refrigerator that is directly tied into the intelligence community. And we see this in like what’s happening this month with people going out and cutting down flock cameras. But you also see it in terms of I think in the last 24 hours we had like this story come out about how like everyone that had not clicked properly in Claude had their their prompts and outputs put into Google for public purview. And there’s a lot.

Of hyper, hyper, like private information that has now been leaked via that mechanism. And all of that is before you get into so do we think that the intelligence community is like, nah, we’re not gonna use these data. You keep it, right? Like, no, obviously. The whole battle

Christopher Mitchell (24:17)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Sascha Meinrath (24:19)
for the White House and Anthropic that has been playing out this year is all about, right? The line in the sand that they drew is one, like.

You can’t use this to build terminators. And two, you can’t do domestic surveillance. And the White House is like, line is too far. And they fought this huge battle, right? Like at one point, Anthropic is labeled basically an enemy of the state for saying, no, you can’t use our tools to do domestic surveillance. And now, today, somehow, everything’s fine. And I’m like, Well, what was the quid pro quo? I have to believe that the quid pro quo is.

We’re now doing AI mediated domestic surveillance at a level that was unprecedented, impossible eighteen months ago.

Christopher Mitchell (25:06)
I would imagine so. I mean, and this is this gets to interesting questions that I think. You know, for instance, I would think that if you put a lot of compute into it, you could ensure that the wealthiest were actually paying their fair share. And you could design a tax code in which you did have them not able to escape you know, their obligation. and and again, like I’m not talking about like

Changing it. I’m just talking about these are rules that we’ve all agreed to and we should be living up to them. And that is not how the government is planning to use AI right now, right? Like and the people who make the decisions because our government is flawed, we need to work on improving it. they’re instead using it to make sure that they are tracking all of this information. And I just I feel like it is important for people to understand, like, when as the Internet was growing, you’re collecting all of this data in ways and it’s like, all right, well, fine, but like who’s gonna actually be able to sift through it? Well

Lots of people now. And the simple fact that the government can buy all the private sources means that even if we were successful in restricting what the government can do and special to being the government, it could still have, frankly, access to more information than anyone that believes in limited government should be comfortable with because of the amount of private sources. I mean, I I feel like I’ve I’ve thought about this for decades and because and I still I’ve never bothered tracking it down. But like my understanding is is that

Following the revelations of just how authoritarian East Germany was, that there were significant privacy regulations in either there or some of the other areas of Eastern Europe where they are very uncomfortable with anyone being able to have massive databases of information. And I feel like this is where we have to be thinking about for open society. Having massive databases of information, whether it’s about location, preferences, metadata around commute telecommunications calls.

This stuff is incompatible with an open society.

Sascha Meinrath (27:06)
Correct. And and you’ve laid your finger on the second radical position, not to not to fully take us back to our first topic here, but in terms of FISA renewal, it’s about getting a warrant before you surveil Americans and number two, closing what’s called the data brokerage loophole. In essence that law enforcement saying, like, look, we’re not surveilling you illegally because we’ve purchased the data on the open market and are using those data to surveil you.

And the point being, of course, that this is a completely non existent differentiator, that the function of surveilling you is taking place in both places. And just because you purchased the data doesn’t make it any more constitutional in terms of having to get a warrant before I do a search, then had you procured it directly yourself. And you have now this interplay between private industry.

and the intelligence community where they are just swapping intel by the petabyte on a daily basis, all without judicial oversight, warrants, or constitutional law on their side. And again, AI is the force multiplier for all of that. That with a Gentic AI systems, I can now make sense of these huge swaths of data. I can now

find the through a heterogeneity of different data for a variety of different data, I can now de facto track you in real time, all without a warrant, via all of the different systems that we interact with, all of the different flock cameras, the geolocational systems in your car, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Christopher Mitchell (28:55)
Do you think, I mean, if we take a if we take a step back from the government side of this and just look at the the mere fact of the the databases, I feel like we’re entering into a golden era, like and I say golden totally sarcastically, of blackmail. Of you know, you take a a person who is a church going person and you you dig through the location data to find something that looks suspicious, and you go up to this person and say, Hey, you want people to know that you did this thing? And

Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, right? I mean, like at a certain point, it’s just like, there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence. now I can have this person, you know, it’s a great time for the mob, potentially. I mean, I’m pretty worried about

where

Sascha Meinrath (29:35)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (29:35)
we’re going with this.

Sascha Meinrath (29:37)
Yeah, and and that era’s already upon us, which is to say, you get the spam email being like, I know what you did last summer, and you’re like, What is this? Right? Like it’s the first attempts. AI will keep curating and and honing these kinds of spam fishings. If you don’t give me like a bitcoin before the next Tuesday, I’ll tell them about your porn habit. And for some group of people, obviously they’re like, scrap, you’ve got my porn

They don’t, long story short, it’s all a lie. But correct.

Christopher Mitchell (30:05)
Right, but it doesn’t even have to be real.

Sascha Meinrath (30:08)
And and we have these really moribund attempts to address one tiny fraction of this, right? So like the revenge porn, the the ability to sort of take photos and create porn and the likeness of individuals. And we’re like, we should make that one that one tiny element of agentic system development and make that one thing illegal. That does de facto nothing. I mean it’s very sexy to the politicians right now. It does nothing to protect us.

From the larger problems of agentic systems. And to put a fine point on this, there’s a lot of things that we could do with technology. We can build chemical, biological, and radiological weaponry, for example. And we’ve decided as a global society, even though we could do this, we’re gonna make it illegal. Does it stop 100% of it? No. Does it stop the lion’s share, the supermajority of this? Yes. We need to move AI into the category.

Of chemical, biological, and radiological weaponry, which is to say, what we’re building today are weapons. These are multi-use tools. They could be used for good, they’re going to be used for evil. Right now they exist with no functional government oversight or accountability. So it keeps coming up that these companies keep doing this illegal stuff and they’re like, it wasn’t us. The AI did it. And I’m like, until AI is actually sentient.

You programmed it, you should be liable. And if you built a faulty product, well, we have rules and regulations around that. If you release a faulty product and it causes harm, you are still as a company liable. Somehow in the AI realm, we’ve been like, I don’t know, it’s black magic, like something did this, but it wasn’t our fault. And I thoroughly reject that. Humans programmed AI to do what it does. They

Short circuited the quality assurance, they sh short circuited the consumer protections, they released it on an unsuspecting public that has no idea that they’ve accidentally publicly released their innermost, most private fears to the Google search engine. And these are the problems that are going to metastasize and get far, far worse, not into some distant future.

We’re talking about over the next eighteen months. When

Christopher Mitchell (32:35)
So the the the Center for AI research is trying to think broadly about this, not to not to go after a single thing or a little symptom, but to really think broadly about how we can tackle this in a way that will for the point of this show, which is very much focused on how technology can be used for us rather than using us.

Sascha Meinrath (32:55)
Yes. So thinking yeah, think thinking is necessary but insufficient. So we yes, we we ponder these problems. We are aware and study them, but more importantly for the general populace, we’re building tools to fight back against them. In essence, we’re saying, Hey, look, these weapons are out there. We need to to arm ourselves against their utilization. And so we’re building tools to

enhance privacy, fight back against surveillance, encourage better operational security amongst organizations and individuals, allowing us to in essence get some of the upside benefits of AI and protect ourselves from the downside risks of AI. Keeping in mind, you know, like we’re a multimillion dollar endeavor. The folks that are weaponizing this against humanity in my mind are

Funded at orders of magnitude larger amounts. And one of the key problems here is the amount of technical acumen amongst civil society is near zero. Right? We got a lot of vibe coders. That’s great. Bless your souls. But that is not the same as having deep technical acumen around agency systems. And we desperately need to bolster that. Again, not into some

Distant future, but like right now, today. Things are being built today that are scary dangerous and are accelerating in the speed with which the scary dangers are being built. So the latest, if if we had this show six months ago, the latest bleeding edge models had about 300 billion parameters. Kimmy, which was just released this past month, 2.8 trillion parameters.

Right, you’re talking about an order of magnitude jump in the complexity of the AI models in six months. And these things are not being used to be like, hey, how do we improve your quality of life? That is not their that is not their not just soul master. This is not like their priority. The priority is like, how do I turn this into a new resource extraction moment? And the target is all of us.

Christopher Mitchell (35:11)
Sure. Okay. I wanna I wanna move on to the cost of inaction report about Pennsylvania and the broadband office. I think it’s it’s appropriate to apply this to most states. it’s not just narrowly about Pennsylvania, it’s I think broadly about whether states are taking action. the cost of inaction is something that I love as a concept. you know, I’ll just say that I I was just listening to a biography of Coolidge.

And it was interesting because it’s talking about how he just really hated government waste. He wanted to narrow government down, right? 1920s, there was a really it was a real focus. And one of the things that he he had done was implemented a program by which government workers had to use all of a pencil before they could get another one. And this is the classic sort of terrible management that I think some people think is brilliant.

But like if you look at it, I’m sure the management of that program costs like an order of magnitude more than the pencils did. Like,

Sascha Meinrath (36:13)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (36:14)
you know, trying to to force that and to regulate it and whatnot. And it’s a terrible. And for someone who wants to see government do less, it’s great because those people then aren’t doing their job anymore. They’re arguing about pencils. And so, but it’s just, I think it’s a reminder of of how if the government is doing something poorly, there’s a

Costs. And and there’s a lot of problems that are coming about. I mean, the the reason I would relate this back to Internet access is when we don’t spend money on making sure people can use the Internet well, we are saving that money, but we are losing 10 times as much money because those people are less productive. They cost the Department of Veterans Affairs more, they cost Medicare and Medicaid more because they’re not able to take advantage of less costly medicines. And that’s where the money is, or medical practices.

That’s where the money is and it’s not in whether or not people have a good device at home. So I just feel like that’s that’s what people need to understand, and that’s the in my mind the background of this sense of the opportunity that is being missed in Pennsylvania.

Sascha Meinrath (37:20)
Correct. And that opportunity has a name in econometrics, the opportunity cost, which is to say America is top of the class in terms of squandering money for short term game that cost us much more over the long term.

lack of a coherent national and state broadband plan has cost us

orders of magnitude more than it would have cost us just to deploy fiber to every home in the country. And you will see that opportunity

Christopher Mitchell (37:50)
Well I know that you’re

Sascha Meinrath (37:51)
cost

Christopher Mitchell (37:53)
I’m sorry, for people, I don’t know how Jordan’s gonna do editing this, but this is measuring the cost of latency right now as

Sascha Meinrath (38:01)
Ha ha

Christopher Mitchell (38:01)
as we try to have a conversation. And we’re we’re approaching like three quarters of a second of lag, I think, unfortunately.

Sascha Meinrath (38:08)
And I’m on a 5G network, which is to say I’m on a you know, North American 5G network, which is not very good at all. Right.

Christopher Mitchell (38:18)
No,

this drives me crazy. I’m on fiber, you’re on 5G. We should be able to do robotic surgery across this link. And no, it’s not

Sascha Meinrath (38:23)
That’s right.

Christopher Mitchell (38:25)
happening.

Sascha Meinrath (38:26)
That’s right. And so we we are the exemplar of opportunity cost of a failure to have a coherent broadband strategy, which is to say the cost is that things like this are harder in the United States. Obviously, if we’re doing robotic surgery, then it’s like we’re slicing through people’s aorta. Like it’s it’s not a good thing. And it’s an outlier amongst

Highly industrialized countries. And when I look at, for example, what America has done and what China, right, our boogeyman of the day, right, has managed to accomplish in terms of broadband implementation, it’s just night and day. Like there’s no comparing the successful trajectory of both countries. One has done incredible work over the same time frame that we have done marginal improvements.

And that may for many communities be still on the horizon.

Christopher Mitchell (39:26)
I think, I mean, I I always feel like these international comparisons come with some difficulties. I I certainly think there’s a lot that we can learn from others, but also I would I would be happily in the middle of the two without the genocide of the Uyghurs, you know, and from my government. So there’s always you know, the the complications of admiring some some government actions too much. Let me ask you something though. My hard hitting question for you is you

Detail the many ways, the myriad of ways in which the Pennsylvania Broadband Development Office has failed. And then the first recommendation is we need more of this. We need to renew it. So let me let me just throw that at you.

Sascha Meinrath (40:06)
Right.

So and it’s a hard thing, right? So like d has American health care failed Americans? Absolutely. Do we need more health care? Yes. Has Social Security failed many Americans? Yes. Do we need more of it? Yes. It isn’t the same vein. It’s like you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. You run the analysis to figure out what works and what doesn’t work, and you fix it. And when it comes to health care or social safety nets or broadband,

You know, you can basically look at like the US and every other highly industrialized country on the planet, and you’re like, why are we an outlier? Maybe we’re doing it wrong.

Right? And our failure, like I agree with you, there’s a lot of complexity in doing international comparisons, but like when every other pure nation is doing better than we are, at some point you have be like, I think we need some remediation here. Like we’re not doing it even partially well, we’re doing it about the worst that’s possible to do. And that is with data.

That we’re then cooking in terms of being like, No, no, no, it’s all fine here because we’ve all got 5G and you’re like, our 5G doesn’t operate like 5G in many other countries. Like and I’m like, so it could be physics, maybe physics in Europe or the Pacific Rim works differently than North America. Or maybe, just maybe the business model sucks and therefore they’re introducing lag in 5G in the infrastructure here in ways that we are not doing overseas.

That to me is part and parcel for like we should investigate and find out what is going on. Why do we pay the most of any country on the planet per capita for health care and get the worst outcome of highly industrialized nations? We could investigate that and find out, and many people have, and it’s it’s pretty obvious like, don’t privatize healthcare seems to be like the universal solution here. but long story short, in broadband, we choose both to do stupid.

And ineffectual tactics to bring about universal affordable connectivity, and then we refuse to even do the postmortem to say, like, what went wrong? Why didn’t we succeed?

Christopher Mitchell (42:22)
Yeah, that’s boring.

Sascha Meinrath (42:23)
when we look at the BEAD program, this is the third era, right? I lived through the top era of the 1990s, the BTOP era of the 2010s, now the BEAD era of the 2020s.

And it’s like we fail to learn over a multi-decade period what works and what doesn’t work, because we refuse to even look and empirically document what works and what doesn’t work. So when we say yes, we should do more of this, it’s under the caveat of we should find out what’s works and double down on that. And that takes independent assessment, it takes science, it takes, in essence, a willingness to to do the kind of like

investigation post-mortem to document best practices and eliminate things that are unsuccessful. And this will go without saying like you talk to pretty much in r anyone in rural America today and they will tell you what has not been successful has been the privatized business model uber alles, right? That you are not allowed to do co-ops or municipal networking. We throw up all of these barriers in the way of

Tactics that work, have worked, continue to work. But we’re like, no, we will not do any of that eventually, right? Like eventually Verizon Comcast AT&T, they’ll serve you. And you should just wait patiently, intergenerationally, for that service to be brought to your farmstead. And how dare you raise concerns, protest, or otherwise critique a model that has yet to serve adequately.

millions and tens of millions of Americans.

Christopher Mitchell (44:07)
Sascha, do you feel like I mean, if you look at Comcast, for instance, it does strike me like for decades they’ve been saying we’ve we face all this competition. They’re facing, I would say, a modicum of competition now, in that AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile have dedicated a small portion of their network where they have excess capacity to market against Comcast. And frankly,

I don’t I don’t get it. Cause like I would never move to like a a a a a mobile service the because of the cost, the latency, the the and the latency isn’t always this bad, but but your your various reliability concerns and Comcast is really struggling to deal with this small amount of competition. It’s it’s kind of remarkable to see, I feel like.

Sascha Meinrath (44:53)
Yeah,

I mean Comcast is up there with airlines in terms of like every customer being like, I hate this, right? Which is to say, like, you know, there is a complete disregard for the customer experience amongst a lot of these dominant non competitive business models, right? So you see it in airlines, you see it in banks, you see it in telecommunications. And again, it’s like, what is the commonality here? And you’re like, lack of meaningful competition is an obvious problem.

And you know, there’s no there’s no daylight between the last two decades of unprecedented mergers and acquisitions and consolidation across all of these industries, and then the plummeting of the consumer experience within those same sectors. And so we sit there and we’re like, what can we do to improve things? And of course the answer that we are told is we’re gonna have an AI chatbot help you out, right? And it’s like

my gosh, we’ve just made it so much worse for everyone. Because of course, the AI chat box is not there to fix your problem. It’s there to to to demand your time and energy for the minimal fix possible. It’s a war of attrition where your time is pitted against an undying machine with infinite patience.

In order to drive you away from anything that might cost the company any money whatsoever. And then we’re like, you’re welcome, right? And of course, if I had a choice, I would take my consumer dollars elsewhere. The mythology in DC is that you will just take your dollars elsewhere. But you talk to people on the ground, and in any given household, there’s like one, maybe two providers for wireline service if you’re lucky.

And that’s the supermajority of all households in the country. And that’s it. And so, as long as that oligopoly or duopoly all agree we’re all gonna have AI chatbots for our consumer service, you never get the one that’s like, Hey, honey, we’re gonna give you real meaningful consumer service. And then when somebody’s like, Hey, that’s what we’re gonna do, and they’re No, no, no, you can’t have municipal networks here, that would be un-American, right? Like, and so you eliminate the better choice for consumers.

via executive or legislative fiat. And that too is what we have seen. Pennsylvania has the ability to roll out a lot more than we are, but the legislator and Josh Shapiro, our governor, simply refuse to attend the problems vexing rural Pennsylvanians, rural Americans all across the country.

Christopher Mitchell (47:36)
You know, I never really thought about it. In in 19 years of doing this work, you just struck at the way you were putting it together. Calling municipal networks unAmerican is truly hilarious because the United States is what basically invented municipal infrastructure at this level. our refusal to deal intelligently with electricity systems led to four, four, forty, five hundred cities building electric light plants, of which 2,000 still operate the electric grid.

And similarly, our refusal to have a decent policy of ensuring the essential utility of telecommunications would work well for people in an era of competition that we that we brought after the 1980s led to municipal networks. Most of the world does not have municipal networks because cities are not viewed as the appropriate place. We have municipal broadband significantly here. And I think it’s a good thing. you know, but it’s it’s largely due practically not to.

the philosophy that I believe in terms of of local control is tends to be better. It’s because of the failure of the the federal government and the private markets. And so it’s pretty remarkable. Almost all municipal networks in the world are in the United States or Sweden. And Sweden got it from us, I’m pretty sure.

Sascha Meinrath (48:49)
Yeah, well, and it’s you don’t you don’t even have to look to electrical grids, although that is a very real reality. the telecommunications infrastructure of the United States, from the telegraph into telephony, when you look at the nineteen aughts, right, nineteen hundred, nineteen ten era, the home rule telephony movement at one point made up about forty percent of all phones. Which is to say it was normative to have

non-corporate, non-Mobell telephony in America. And then in nineteen thirteen, Mobell, AT&T, and the federal government crafted an agreement, the Kingsbury Commitment of nineteen thirteen, where the US government said, Hey, we will now allow you to have a monopoly and you will agree to interconnect all of these disparate systems. Well what were the systems they were agreeing to interconnect?

Not themselves, but rather all of these home rule systems. And what did AT&T immediately do? Completely screwed over the to the home rule telephony movement. Fast forward, we then have 70 odd years of ever-increasing despotism leading to the divestiture of 1984. It was so bad the government stepped in and broke up a private company. Long story short, the history of success.

For home rule telephony, for home rule telecommunications, is baked into the history of communications in America. And we not just forget that, we’ve outright expunged it from our understanding of what successful tactics look like. And now made it, which didn’t exist previously, and now even gone so far as to make it illegal to use a tactic that’s been proofed out for over a hundred years.

Christopher Mitchell (50:45)
So I want to go back to two things as we wrap up. One is you said that the consolidation of the recent years is unprecedented. And I just always feel I’m nervous when I hear that because I think it’s important to recognize there are precedents. And the fact that if if people think it’s unprecedented, there’s this idea of like, well, we don’t know what to do about it. Well, we we do know what to do about it. We’ve lived through this cycle many times in the past of when there’s too much private control over things that are collective in nature. And

And this is not to say that government should solve everything, but we do know that there needs to be some level of accountability and some level of public input into decisions that impact everyone. And so like this is very much precedented, it strikes me with the rise of civilization. and the other piece is as if you’re gonna keep bringing healthcare back into things, I’m changing the name of the show to unbandaged.

Sascha Meinrath (51:36)
Very

good. I mean, so you are correct. It is precedented in in form of kind. Like we’ve seen what happens during the robber baron era, for example, with the oligarchs of that era and the the contortion of American democratic ideals, not to over romanticize what was in the past, but rather to say, look, they basically took over our federal government. What is unprecedented is the scale.

That there’s never been a scale, both in terms of just mere massiveness of the oligarchs. I saw a statistic the other day that said John D. Rockefeller, one of the OG robber barons of the era, if you scaled up his wealth, taking into account inflation, he would today be worth about $30 billion. Right? Which is a lot, no doubt. But like we have centibillionaires today. Right?

The scale is just even accounting for inflation is just massive. The scale across various industries, right? The not just vertical and horizontal integration, but into entirely like this is like pure antitrust stuff. It is illegal, but we allow it kind of stuff, that’s unprecedented. The scale of the war chests of these companies is unprecedented. The sophistication of their surveillance is unprecedented.

Christopher Mitchell (52:57)
Let me put a point on that because I do think it’s worth noting. There’s a lot of people who really admire Elon Musk, and I really don’t. I really, really hate fascists and I hate bullies. and I think he’s one. Let’s just say that I’m totally wrong and I’ve misread him. He took SpaceX public. And if you look at what happened, it’s exactly what I predicted.

based on having looked into a number of folks that are pretty critical of him. Exactly. It’s a total grift and

and if you if you want Ed Elson, I think has done really good work predicting this. The point of the SpaceX IPO was to rip off the people who love Elon Musk. And that is just that gives you a sense this guy could do anything. This guy is doing remarkable things, whether it’s tunneling under the earth or putting satellites in above it. And what is he spending his time doing? Trying to figure out how to rip off retail investors with a sham IPO. It is

Unreal to me. And this is the danger of that kind of scale and letting those kinds of people run wild. That’s what we’re seeing.

Sascha Meinrath (53:56)
Yeah. And and to give to give a sense of this, you know, the IPO was June, right, last month. And, you know, it it IPOs it goes up to two hundred and fifteen dollars. I think it’s now down at like one fifteen, which is to say it’s lost almost fifty percent of its top values. And who lost that money? Not not the billionaires and the hedge funds that when bought in when it was going up, sold.

All the long hold investors, all the people that didn’t realize this was a big grift, they’re the ones left holding the bag when this massive, I mean, when you lose 50% of your value in one month, like that just is shocking. And the thing is, like, I and others were warning, hey, it doesn’t actually have all the things that people are claiming it has. There was this lead-in that was just a massive propaganda campaign of

Overpromising what space has does it a lot of amazing stuff. But you take the amazing stuff and then you turn it into a mythology, a functionality that cannot exist due to physics, an ability to launch like more rockets every day than exist on the planet. And and and that’s how you get to this massive overvaluation that is now being, as we call it, corrected. But that correction is bankrupting and horrible.

harming everyday Americans. I don’t know which hedge or which you know funds for people’s retirement are in there are now losing billions. I mean Elon Musk alone I think has lost six hundred billion dollars. Six hundred billion dollars. leaves him only with like more than half a trillion at this point in time. But like how many other people have been harmed simultaneously that don’t have an extra half a trillion dollars lying around to get

Buy when the value is gone. And we see this grift again and again. Look at Trump and crypto. Look at like all of these mechanisms by which people are enriching themselves at the literal expense of everyday Americans. And that to me is like again, one of the big critiques we have for Pennsylvania broadband is we are grifting.

Rural America. We are offering a substandard service. It’s going to cost them more over time, and telling them you should be thankful. And to me, this is all part and parcel for an era of grifters across the board extracting resources for America for their own personal benefit and harming, bankrupting Americans and, frankly, the American economy.

We

are no longer even close to competitive across a growing number of different sectors because of the grifts that have been done. Look at solar panels, electric vehicles, broadband, like you name it, we are no longer competitive.

Christopher Mitchell (56:58)
I I think this where we wanna we wanna draw to a close, but this is where it’s just worth reminding people. I think like our focus on accountability and being able to keep things local is not because we think it’ll be perfect. It’s because we think it’ll be better. It’ll allow us to iterate and allow us to improve and we’ll actually have a say in how things work out. And that is what is being denied to us as we live in this casino economy. So Sascha, I wanna thank you.

you’re you for people who have only been listening, Sasha’s been coming to us from his car where parts of the show he may have had a little bit of road rage.

Sascha Meinrath (57:36)
Indeed. And you know, just to put a fine point on it, locally implemented is locally accountable. And accountability is sorely lacking across these scaled-up quote unquote solutions that don’t meet our needs, cost more, and get, in essence, reiterated again and again and again to our detriment. And to finish that off, we are then told, why are you not thankful for these failures?

And then when we’re angry they say, Okay, we shouldn’t do it at all.

Christopher Mitchell (58:08)
Yes. All right, Sascha, thank you so much.

Sascha Meinrath (58:13)
Pleasure as always.

Jordan Pittman (58:15)
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Unbuffered Podcast. We have transcripts for this and other episodes available at ILSR.org/podcast. While you’re there, check out our other podcasts from ILSR, including Building Local Power, Local Energy Rules, and the Composting for Community Podcasts. Email us at [email protected] with your ideas for the show. Follow us on Bluesky. Our handle is @communitynets.

You can catch the latest research from all of our initiatives by subscribing to our monthly newsletter at ILSR.org While you’re there, please take a moment to donate. Your support in any amount helps keep us going. Unbuffered is produced

by Christopher Mitchell with editing provided by me, Jordan Pittman. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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