In this episode, I'm chatting with Kushal Das — public interest technologist, core team member at the Tor Project, core developer of CPython, and director at the Python Software Foundation. He is also the founder of dgplug and a maintainer of SecureDrop — the platform journalists use to communicate securely with whistleblowers. We talk about why privacy is increasingly hard to protect, the hidden cameras in your robot vacuum cleaner, what happens to data once it leaves your hands, and what any developer can do right now to build more privacy-respecting software.
Outline
0:00 Episode highlights
0:17 Introduction
0:38 "Privacy is a human right" — is it?
1:22 What turned Kushal from technologist to privacy advocate
2:57 SecureDrop: what it is and who it protects
3:33 How SecureDrop works in practice
5:36 Biggest technical challenges building SecureDrop
6:35 Helping people living under authoritarian regimes
10:38 Vacuum cleaner cameras and the toilet photo incident
11:44 The year hackers took over vacuum cleaners and shouted at owners
13:44 Why Kushal removed Alexa from his home
16:08 Social media as a surveillance tool
18:24 Stalkerware: when someone close to you is tracking your every move
19:31 Cambridge Analytica, the Great Hack, and election manipulation
21:43 Are governments fast enough to regulate technology?
22:55 Once you upload something to the internet, it never comes back
25:20 AI tools and what happens to the data you share with them
35:15 "If you break encryption, it will be broken for everyone"
37:36 How to fight for privacy
40:04 EFF, Tor Project, and where to get involved
Episode links
– Tor Project: https://www.torproject.org
– SecureDrop: https://securedrop.org
– EFF: https://www.eff.org
– Stop Stalkerware: https://stopstalkerware.org
– dgplug: https://dgplug.org
– Kushal's blog: https://kushaldas.in
