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affected. Not everyone is just going to be a victim, so I don't know. And then whatever
they turned up was interesting enough to unravel something that was being wielded in a wider
way to users and in this trail of evidence, I guess.
You've got to tell me what you want me to do, Kyle. You're making hand signals while
you're speaking.
I'm going off a little bit because I can't hear. It's not something...
You sound fine to me. So what do you want me to do? You want me to turn you up or turn
you down?
Well, it's at that one threshold where you found that sweet spot. It's all...
Yeah, but you can't go up any higher. You see, you put a piece of tape there, so I can't
push it up anymore.
No, not me. I think it's the Skype one.
If I move the Skype thing, we're all going to sound terrible.
Okay, well, just...
You sound fine. Alex, how does Kyle sound to you?
He sounds okay. No better, no worse than usual.
As irritated and fuming as ever?
What we're used to.
All right.
All right. You can just tell me what you want me to do because I don't understand hand signals.
Or write it down on a piece of paper and hold it up. That would be nice, too.
I'm getting some exercise in the process. I just like to be active here.
Yeah. There's another big story, apart from the Grand Theft Auto debacle, and that involves
Edward Snowden. Have you heard about this? Edward Snowden has been granted citizenship
by Putin himself, apparently. Russian President Vladimir Putin granted citizenship on Monday
to Edward Snowden, the former security consultant who leaked information about top secret U.S.
surveillance programs and is still wanted by the United States on espionage charges.
He was one of 72 foreigners granted citizenship in a decree signed by Putin.
Now, you know, I've got pretty strong feelings about this because a lot of people are very
ignorant about the facts, about the facts involving Snowden in the first place, that
he chose to live in Russia and betray his country. No, he did not choose to live in
Russia. He was stranded in Russia because the United States canceled his passport so
he couldn't go anywhere else. And he was lucky enough to be able to find a place he could
stay. And this, you know, it's not ideal that he be a Russian citizen, I suppose.
And certainly Putin is using this for political advantage. But don't say that that Snowden
is is at the at the root of all this. He would like nothing better than to come home and
face charges that are fair. We know damn well that's not what's going to happen if he does
come back to the United States. And, you know, what's happening to Julian Assange, totally
different story, totally different person. But it gives you an idea of the way things
would go because the story has just been so overblown, sensationalized.
And when you think of all the good that we learned, you know, certainly the facts that
were brought to bear were not good. But the knowledge of those facts, that is something
that we deserve to know about, the fact that we are being spied upon, the fact that there
are these cover ups involving everything from the NSA to phone companies. This is something
we all need to know about. And if you if you listen to his explanation, you see that he's
not some some crazy person looking to just reveal everything. It's very thoughtful as
far as what is revealed and what is withheld. He talks to journalists and and gets them
to do the investigating, investigating of what it is he's talking about. And this is
somebody we should be celebrating, not punishing. So the fact that he is now a Russian citizen,
I mean, it's good for him because he he has a place now that he can stay in. It's bad
for us. It's bad for us because we could be benefiting from his presence.
Yeah. And I think that it's just as useful, I think, to adversaries and folks to jump to a
conclusion about his allegiances, especially given the complex context we're in now. And
as as I don't know if anybody can really say like what information we have now and and how good,
you know, our reporting is, is I don't know, it's it's it's not it seems like it's pretty
limited and there there are a lot of factors at play. And I don't know if this was ultimately
the goal or the plan. And I think that I don't know, it just it just seems like jumping to
conclusions and being certain about it is it's pretty bold.
Honestly, you know, after all this time that he has been forced and he has been forced to live
over there, not be in the United States with his, you know, the rest of his family and the places
that he grew up in and the things that I imagine he holds dear. You know, if you believe he should
be punished, did he not get punished already? I mean, at what point do we show a little compassion
here and and start thinking about how do we make things normal again? What Snowden said
upon being granted the citizenship after years of separation from our parents, my wife and I
have no desire to be separated from our sons. After two years of waiting and nearly 10 years
of exile, a little stability will make a difference for my family. I pray for privacy for them and for
us all. Which is a nice barbed remark there, which I really appreciate. Alex, I'm very curious what
your thoughts are on this. Yeah, I not surprisingly have somewhat differing thoughts from your own on
Snowden and this citizenship development. I mean, I don't I don't canonize Snowden in the same way
that I think you do and many others in the hacker community do. And I understand it's an unpopular
position to take on such a saintly figure in many ways. But, you know, I'm also somebody that worked
in this in the intelligence community and had the same clearance that Snowden had. I also had
TSSCI. And I think, you know, there is got to be some measure of respect and control for classified
information that belongs to the U.S. government. And and while I do believe that what Snowden
originally and initially disclosed about the massive surveillance network that was targeting
the Verizon Business Network subscribers was in and of itself prima facie unconstitutional
and therefore could have been the subject of legitimate whistleblowing. And I think that also
there were valid reasons for Snowden not to go through the ordinary whistleblowing channels that
existed at the time in the intelligence community because the historical precedent of whistleblowers
in that capacity has not been good. And, you know, the outcome probably would not have been
favorable to Snowden. However, you know, you mentioned that he had put all this information
into the hands of journalists and curated it and made sure that only certain stories got out,
etc. I don't necessarily think that that's the case. I think what Snowden did after his initial
disclosures with the Verizon Business Network Massive Surveillance Network was really a
smash and grab job. And I've said this many times before in the show that the information that he
grabbed and it was a massive amount of data that he had stolen from the U.S. intelligence community
and put into the hands of journalists had more to do with legitimate targets of U.S. surveillance
than anything else. You know, there was no need for the targets of U.S. surveillance in the
European Union and other places to know that we were surveilling them. Nothing about that was
illegal. Nothing about it was unconstitutional. He may have taken some kind of, he may have had
some form of ethical objection, perhaps, to this type of surveillance, but it wasn't illegal.
It's par for the course. And it's, in fact, what every single country that has an active
intelligence community would do. And so I don't think Snowden deserves to be canonized in the
same way as many others in our community do. I think he was brave. I think he was a whistleblower,
for sure. But I also think that by him continuing to stay in Russia, that he is, in a sense,
taking umbrage under the regime of Putin. And he may or may not have a choice because, you know,
his citizenship was pulled, his citizenship was not pulled. He did not denounce his U.S.
citizenship. He's still a U.S. citizen. He can come back. I think his passport may have been
suspended. And so, you know, I see this development with respect to Russian citizenship as, you know,
maybe giving him and his family some measure of comfort, maybe allowing him perhaps to travel,
although I doubt that he will step foot out of Russia. But look, I think it's a mixed bag for
me with Snowden. I think on the one hand, he has to be applauded because he was brave. It was some
of the stuff that he blew the whistle about, I think, was a legitimate concern. But I think for
the bulk of it and the rest of it, and we don't even know where a good amount of the information
that he stole from the U.S. government currently resides. You know, and don't forget, he chose
Glenn Greenwald as a repository. Okay, but in fairness, Glenn Greenwald was saner back then.
I don't want to get into personalities here, but the seeds of insanity were there. Yeah, but you
know, I don't think it's fair to say people are canonizing him. Certainly not us, because I don't
think we're doing that. I do believe that what he was able to reveal included a lot that affected
U.S. citizens. The fact that the NSA was spying on them. It confirmed what we have been publishing
and talking about for a very long time, many other people. Okay. And a lot of this stuff,
the reason that was put forth was the interest, the public interest in these programs. And I blame
the lack of transparency. I'm sorry, like no matter how important, how secret, how special
and boutique all these systems and programs are, if you're not communicating, you're communicating
to representatives who are lackeys and who are just doing the bare minimum in positions of
committees and stuff, and not communicating effectively to the public about the importance
of these things, you're going to have people question them. And at the time, the context,
the multiple wars at effect, the underspecious circumstances, I think, and mostly as like post
9-11 attitudes and conquests, I think, with unbridled access to resources to transform and
multiply the effects of the abilities of these FISA courts and all the things that we've been
talking about. It's not necessarily that it was new, what Snowden was saying. In other words,
it's that it confirmed so much in the public interest from a deep level. And you can tell
by how he was pursued and so forth. I don't know what more we can say though, because even in the
investigation and the reporting of it, where was the transparency? It's like, there were all, yeah,
movies and a lot of publicity around it, I think, from the community. And that, I think, was an
effect of a lot of the whistleblowers, but it has really no bearing, I think, on the impact of
whistleblowing the concept or surveillance writ large the concept. And a lot of the issues we've
talked about, like, think about how much we've been speaking about the future of how data is
used. And I mean, that for us, I think, is what may have come off as like a lotting, what was
confirmed in that stuff. And I mean, once it's happened, whether our adversary, I mean, if other
people know about it, and you double down on being even less transparent about it, it's still out
there, right? And how is the public to be secure or have any kind of confidence in these programs
that their tax dollars are going towards if they themselves are compromised by such leaks, you know?
And of course, we learned a lot about submission and how to do responsible whistleblowing. We're
seeing it even now with social media companies and that in place of oversight in general and a
good public communication by politicians who are actually doing a lot of the work, investigating
and looking at some of these areas of technology and its interface with the populace. But I think
that there's a lot of nuance here that can be really, really damaging to overall unity
in the community and the public overall.
Yeah, look, Kyle, I don't totally disagree with that in any respect. I think that the issue here
for me is that notwithstanding the fact that there were legitimate objects of whistleblowing
that he disclosed, and I think that we can certainly agree on that. We can certainly
agree that a lot of what he disclosed certainly confirmed what we were always talking about or
suspicious about in many ways, but it didn't end there. It wasn't a surgical approach. It wasn't
some kind of scalpel-like exfiltration of data that confirmed this massive surveillance network.
I think what had happened was more akin to a smash-and-grab job where he grabbed a massive
amount of information from the U.S. intelligence community, and some of it related to active and
legitimate targets of intelligence collection. Some of it put people in danger. Some of it could
have compromised sources and methods and then put others in danger. And so there's a lot of,
I think, collateral consequences of these Snowden disclosures and leaks that
we still are seeing to this day. And my problem is that he didn't curate all of this himself.
He didn't even, I think, understand what was in all of the data that he took. He took it,
and he put it into the hands of others who then eked it out story by story and got as much juice
as they possibly could have out of this data for the benefit of their media organization.
Okay. But it's called the free press, all right? And Alex, what you described as smash-and-grab,
how could he have possibly done it any differently? Would they have given him an
office where he could go through all this material and pick out the things that were,
in fact, directed at the American people and leave out the stuff that was legitimate intelligence?
Yes.
I mean, that is why he enlisted the help of Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, because
they were journalists that he trusted to actually do that part of it. And I think,
for the most part, that's what they did.
No, I think it's different in the sense that he could have ended his exfiltration and theft of
information as it related to the massive Verizon surveillance network that he had disclosed
initially. That, to me, absolutely legitimate object of whistleblowing and should be out there
in the public interest because it was prima facie unconstitutional. And then you had, I believe,
intelligence officials not being exactly forthright about that program as it turned out.
And so, sure, there's certainly a lot of issues there, but he could have stopped there.
Wait, why would you stop there? I mean, do you think that's the only thing they were doing?
When people are acting dishonestly, do you say, okay, we caught you,
we're not going to investigate anymore because that's the only crime you possibly could have
committed?
No, he should have. If he wanted to, he could have done it anonymously,
leaked it to the press in an anonymous way that didn't lead back to him without doing
an additional smash and grab.
I believe he was trying to be anonymous in Hong Kong, was he not?
I have no idea what his intention was in Hong Kong, but I know he was handing off data,
I believe.
He certainly wasn't looking for the limelight. That's one thing that I got from following all
the stories about him.
I'm not entirely sure about that. I don't know if I would entirely agree with that. I think he was
looking for a bit of the limelight here. He was playing some cloak and dagger and he took a huge
amount of data. He didn't have to take that amount of data. And the recording that came out
was embarrassing and damaging to the US intelligence community.
What he could have done, Alex, is simply dump the whole thing so that the public could see it,
like our Grand Theft Auto hacker did. But he didn't do that. He enlisted the help of two
trusted journalists who he believed would go through it and hold back on the stuff that
could endanger lives. All the things that Julian Assange is accused of not doing, this guy did.
Well, he essentially abdicated his responsibility to curate this data in a reasonable manner.
That to me is not laudable in any respect. Once again, he gave this to journalists and he left
it up to them to go through the data.
But who's going to curate it if not journalists? Who would you trust to do that?
Honestly, I would have trusted him to look at the information. He had a legitimate access
to this information and could make an assessment as to whether or not something was lawful
or unlawful, even being a non-lawyer. This is something that he did initially.
He did that with the massive surveillance dragnet that he disclosed.
And he was able to make a reasonable assumption that, hey, this is something in the public
interest. It could have ended there. And I would be right with you, singing his praises.
But because it went so much farther than that, for me, it's really a mixed bag.
And I think that he acted irresponsibly.
Well, what do you think should happen to him now?
Look, I think right to the chase.
Yeah. I mean, if I were in charge of what would happen to Snowden, I would probably
offer him some kind of clemency. I think it's wrong for him to be stuck over in Russia.
Despite my my misgivings about his intentions and the effects, I think nine years in exile,
almost 10 years, whereas it was 2013 when this happened.
I think that's way long enough for him to be suffering and missing his family and being
outside the country. And I think that this grant of citizenship is in some way a recognition of
that. But, you know, look, it's Russian citizenship. I think it's obvious to all of us
that Snowden is a great mind. He's a brilliant mind. I think he's one of the brightest and
most brilliant minds of our generation. I just don't agree with everything that he did.
But I'd love to have him back here in the United States. I'd love to hear what he has to say about
content moderation, about what's happening on our various platforms, misinformation,
election interference. I feel like we're really missing out on a lot by keeping him over there.
You know, I hear this so often, you know, it ended well with Chelsea Manning.
You know, she's thriving and able to share things with people not locked up in prison someplace.
You know, we've said this to so many of our friends in the past.
This person should be out there. We said it about Virgil, our friend,
who's currently in prison for five years for a ridiculous charge. And we can certainly say
that about Julian, too, I think. I think he has suffered more than enough. And this should just
end. Let him go. Let him live his life. Enough with torturing people is far worse than anything
that has been revealed. And, you know, if you're going to be applying this strict punishment
for people who reveal secrets, you know, there's a guy in Florida right now that I can think of
who's revealed a lot more that is pretty much not getting anything done to him. And it's shameful
to see how that plays out. Yeah, I think there's some irony there. And I agree with both of you.
I think that there's been, I mean, what more could we do? What more can be done to go into
the technologies at play, the who, the how, what was done over a period of time that
was a different circumstance completely than the current moment. And I think that
they need any kind of reintroduction here, if ever, would not go unobserved, right?
So it's not like, you know, they would have anything but a normal reintroduction. But of
course, people would see them and they would be, I don't know, subject to all kinds of
normal public life that here, I don't know, how would it be normal?
Well, that's a good point. That's a good question. Because, you know,
you're just going to go to the ice cream place and see Julian buying a banana split.
Whenever, well, let's talk about Snowden for now. But it certainly would apply to Julian as well.
But whenever I fall into his timeline, one way or another, I retweet something of his or he
retweets something or retweet the same thing. And you get people, you know, on Twitter where people
reply to both you and the other person, even if the other person isn't a part of that conversation.
The hatred and vitriol that I get whenever Snowden is part of that conversation is scary.
It really is. And that to me is the true threat, is that kind of, you know, threats of violence and
just ignorance and hatred. It's really horrible. And I fear for anybody exposed to that kind of
thing in real life. So that is certainly where I would be concerned. I remember, you know,
back in 2016, when Snowden gave our keynote at the Hope Conference, we were so honored to have
him do that remotely from Russia. And it was with Daniel Ellsberg. It was a truly incredible event.
But we were so honored to be able to hang out with Snowden's parents in the East Village and just
show them around. And, you know, I was able to get from them how Edward Snowden got his values,
because they were so honest and good, you know, just seeing the problems that exist in society,
but not judging, you know. And I just was very impressed with that. And I could see how somebody
would feel that what Edward Snowden eventually did was a hard choice, but the right choice,
because it was honest and it was something that needed to be done.
You know, there's very few people that I get that immediately from, but those people I did.
Now, look, I agree with you there. I think it was definitely a hard choice, a life-changing
choice, a choice that he made from which he could never go back. And there's, I think, a great amount
of fortitude and bravery that goes along with having to make those types of choices and making
them the way that he did. Patriotism, that's what we expect our soldiers to do, you know,
to fight for democracy. And I think he's doing something very, very similar.
Yeah, look, I disagree that all of his choices were right. I think the initial ones were right.
I disagree with some of the subsequent choices. But, you know, also in terms of
the ability to bring him back here in some way or another, I wonder if he would want to come back.
He may. I think he would in some ways. In some others, maybe not. But, you know, there are ways
to have some form of justice be served without giving him clemency or dropping the case entirely.
I mean, if I were the attorney general here, I think what I would try to do to get Snowden
back into this country would be to work out some kind of plea agreement whereby he would get
probation or, you know, some kind of fine or something like that, because he has suffered.
He has, I think, paid a great price for what he did. And being stuck in Russia all this time is
absolutely horrible. And this is a vocal person. And I think he's been also noticeably absent about
Russia's atrocities and what's happening in Ukraine. And he probably fears for his safety
if he speaks out there, just like anybody else in Russia who would fear for their safety if they
spoke out against. Well, it's it's it's it's actually, you know, even worse. It's worse for
him because while everybody in Russia has to be afraid of speaking out against the government,
he might face those penalties, but he could also be booted out of the country and sent
here. He'd go through even more hell. But all that said, you know, I could see him speaking
out anyway. A great personal sacrifice. That's the kind of person he is. Yeah, it is. And that's why
I think it's unfair to criticize. And there has been a great deal of criticism directed towards
Snowden for it concerning his failure to speak out about Russia's human rights abuses and aggression
in Ukraine. And I think for the reasons you just mentioned, Emmanuel, that's that's unfair
criticism. Yeah, it's not just him. It's his family, you know. So you have to think of of
multiple people there. But we'd love to hear what listeners have to have to say about this.
O.T.H. at twenty six hundred dot com is our email address. Or you can call us after eight o'clock on
off the hook overtime over on YouTube channel twenty six hundred. Hey, we have a letter that
somebody sent us. This comes from Odd Bjorn of Norway. Odd Bjorn. Kyle, do you remember we met
somebody named Odd who was from Norway on the QM two when we went overseas? Yeah, we know. He was
an old British guy that somehow had Norwegian roots and he just was talking to us about
all kinds of artificial intelligence. He must have been in his 80s, but he was so passionate
about this, could not get him to stop. We tried. He was always discussing the the eye in I.T. as
being more important. You know, there's the technology, but there's the information. You
know, what is the information? And he would not let go of that. Not let go of that. Even after
we got off the boat, he would not matter how much I thought I understood it. And you never you never
could. So just make sure you have more eye in than T. I mean, hopefully he's listening. But
odd from England. That's that's who he was. But he was originally from Norway. Anyway,
to your letter in the off the hook overtime, you complained about the difficulties
uninstalling malware like Facebook. Oh, I like this. I like where this is going now,
like Facebook from Android devices. In the past, I have had success uninstalling malware that is
uninstallable from the device itself using Android debug bridge from a PC with it's called
ADB with ADB installed. Installed packages could be listed with this command, ADB shell PM list
packages, which gave a long list of names that are very different from the names listed on the device
using an online translation list. I was able to find the name of the malware that I wanted to
remove and uninstall it with the command to uninstall com dot malware dot bloat. That's what
we're calling it, I guess. So the command would be ADB shell PM uninstall dash k double dash user
set a zero or an open and close parentheses there. That's a zero. That's a zero. Okay,
I couldn't tell. We need to replace the ink. com dot malware dot bloat. These days, we are almost
required to have a Google or Apple device in order to interact effectively with the world around us.
Here in Norway, they are used for two factor authentication for logging into our banks,
online card payments, charging our electric cars. You need a Google device or an Apple device to
charge your cars. Wow. Buying tickets for public transport, payment for parking and more. If one
does not use apps from Google Play or Apple App Server, or Apple App Store rather, for these
things, one is punished by having to use less convenient methods and in some cases with higher
prices. I like using apps for many of these things, but I do not like being required to be a customer
of either Google or Apple and accepting their terms of services in order to use these apps,
nor do I like using non-free software. Amen on all of this. I have for a long time run
I don't know how to pronounce this, SanGenMod, okay, and later LineageOS on several Android
devices, which I like because it is mostly free software and hopefully without malware.
Unfortunately, I left those devices incapable of banking, charging cars, and so on. I recently
discovered that I can install software from Google App Store without installing any Google
software and without a Google account through an app called Aurora Store, A-U-R-O-R-A. Unfortunately,
many of them did not work since they required a malware called Google Play,
or Google Play services rather, to be installed on the device. Luckily, there is a free software
alternative called Micro-G with a version of LineageOS passed with Micro-G. I installed the
apps I need to interact with society and several of them seem to work. I have noticed that the
problem seems to be accelerating. More and more services need these Google Play or Apple App Store
apps. I fear as we move forward, things will get even worse. More services will require apps to
interact with and those apps can only be found on two places, or in two places, Google Play and
Apple App Store. Companies, authorities, and politicians are not going to understand the
problem of requiring users of services to also be customers of Google and Apple. Most people will
not see it as a problem either. I hope it gets better, but I fail to see how. What do you think?
Well, Bjorn, thank you for that excellent letter. You raise a lot of really good points and your
passion and dedication to bypassing all of this is admirable. I wish I could say I saw a clear path
to something better. I think we still have to build that clear path. In much the way that Linux
came up out of the ashes, I think we can come up with an alternative way of doing all the things
that we need to do in this day and age using our smartphones, but without signing on to either
Google or Apple and just figuring out a way to do it ourselves. But we have to work together.
We can't be in our own little camps. We can't be condemning one particular version over a different
one. There's a lot to learn, but I think there are enough people that really feel the way that you
do, that we do. This is definitely something – it's a big project, but it's something that I think
is necessary and I think it's something we can accomplish. Yeah, making it fun and in different
ways, adaptable, something that is easily understood, those are crucial. Those are key
things that give people the ability to share with others and work around some of these issues,
but it is this overall trend of software as a service and now in operating systems,
which in many ways has been a tradition with the telephone. But in this case, I think that
it's just something fierce. You have to protect fiercely the ability to do general computing
anymore. It is territory that wants to always be connected and always working with a system
from afar or from some other area and as a part of a component in a larger systems.
People got to understand that this is how it's structured and it is what they are
relinquishing a lot of their control to. Yeah, standalone software, running on a standalone
operating system or something that you can modify or update, it's becoming too much work.
When it becomes too much work, we're relinquishing that control and you got to protect that. You got
to help people understand and help people feel like they are empowered in the process of resisting
some of the temptation. Yeah, we have to resist the temptation of just turning it all over to
some other entity because it's easier, whether it's putting things in the cloud or just having
your contacts organized by some massive corporation that you know nothing about,
who inevitably at some point lose it or expose it to the public and it gets compromised.
If you want to do something like run your own mail server, you're basically told you're crazy
and nobody wants to do that anymore. We see it all the time, but the benefits really pay off.
What do you think, Alex? Yeah, I tend to agree. I think we're all beginning to reconsider the
Faustian-type bargains we've made with big technology companies over the past few years
and wondered if it was worth having a permanent email address at Gmail to have it continually
mined year after year for its content so that some platform could get a better profile of your
purchasing and communication habits, which could then be sold through a data broker to another
platform and then repackaged with some other data and then sold to another platform. I think it's
high time we begin really rethinking these types of bargains that we're making.
Absolutely. All right. We have one more story to get to tonight before we go to overtime.
This is interesting. You know the organization Girls Who Code. It turns out the founder of that
organization, Reshma Sojani, recently found out that her company's book series had been placed
on a list of banned books in schools. Girls Who Code. Banned. Think about that. The series
chronicles a group of young girls and their adventures as part of a coding club at their
school. It was added to PEN America's index of school book bans. Now, PEN America, basically
they compile lists of books that have been banned. This story just hit a couple of days ago and it's
been blowing up all over the net. There's a problem though. The problem is that this happened a year
ago and we're only just finding out about it now. It's definitely something to be outraged at,
but what I'm seeing, I'm seeing a lot of people being outraged at school districts
that overturned the ban. They overturned the ban in September of 2021 and the books had been banned
for 10 months before that. We're only just finding out about all of this now. That's the problem,
that it takes that long to find out that books are being banned and which particular books are
being banned. It's important to know the facts of the story, to know that they're not banned.
They haven't been banned for a year, but the question is why were they banned? Also, how do
we find out a lot quicker when a book does get banned? Because certainly the people who are
banning the books, they know what books are being banned. They're spreading this information
somehow. Do we have to join their club to get the updated list? This story, had it been
jumped on a year and a half ago when it was actually happening, that would have been a very,
very strong story that everybody, I'm sure, would have taken an interest in.
Anyway, Sajani says she believed the move could have been part of a larger effort by
Moms for Liberty, which is a conservative organization that advocates for parental
rights in schools, including oversight of educational material. Makes sense.
After publication, Moms for Liberty said allegations that Moms for Liberty has worked
to ban Girls Who Code are completely false. Those books were joined by other recent additions to the
list, several of which tackle racial, women's, and LGBTQ plus rights issues, including The Handmaid's
Tale, Speak, and Fun Home, a family tragicomic. But again, those are recent. Those are a lot more
recent. In fact, they're still ongoing in many cases. Sajani says, we use these stories to teach
kids to code. It felt very much like a direct attack on the movement we've been building to
get girls coding, especially in districts that don't have the technology or have disparate Wi-Fi.
Books are a great way to learn to code and a way to equalize access to coding.
She added that removing the books not only hinders visibility for women in technology
fields, but also diversity in the industry, as many of the protagonists in the series
are young girls of color. You cannot be what you cannot see, she said. They don't want girls to
learn how to code because that's a way to be economically secure. The authors of the Girls
Who Code books joined Sajani in speaking out about the ban. Joe Whitmore said, yep, I've been
banned because some people choose not to focus on how awesome and empowering and inspiring these
books are, but instead choose fear. After learning of the ban, Sajani said she reached out to the
Central York School District president, I believe that's in Pennsylvania, and several teachers in
the area to understand why the books had been banned. It's an opportunity to realize how big
this movement is against our kids and how much we need to fight. This is an opportunity to start
more clubs, get more girls to code, and get more girls to become economically free. Couldn't agree
more. But the important thing is to also know the facts that they're not being banned now. In fact,
the people in that school district, the school board, the teachers, they could have played a
major part in preventing these books from being banned. Unfortunately, they're being targeted now
as the instigators of the ban because to many it seems, and I think the story even ran,
as if it was happening right now. We have to just be careful that we have the facts straight,
but this is something I want to know more about. I want to know how this happened, who was behind it,
and where is it happening now? Because undoubtedly, if one school district was banning these books,
there are others. We need a better pipeline to that information so that we're on it as soon
as it happens. Yeah, it's called journalism. We got to not deride it, have a little bit of faith,
a little trust, and maybe a little more awareness about the place it has in society.
Yeah, the bad information, I think, is a big theme there.
It happens a lot. It happens a lot, especially on the internet where dates aren't always apparent.
In this particular case, though, it's a major story. It's something that we all need to know
about. It's important to also have the current updates, but again, I want to know where this
is happening, and I want to know as soon as possible. When the library in Smithtown, Long
Island tried to ban gay and lesbian material during Pride Month in the children's area,
it got such an immediate response that they were forced to turn back within 24 hours.
That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. When people become aware of this,
they act, and there are consequences. Go ahead, Al.
I think just more fundamentally, the whole notion of banning books in a school district is just
ridiculous. The whole thing is absurd, and it's caused this bizarre timeline conundrum as well.
I think what happened here was that the books were supposed to not be used or put on this banned list
for resources, but they were already being used, and books that were being used were accepted from
that ban until sometime last year when people got angry that there was no movement on this banned
list, so then they reissued some kind of decree expecting movement with regard to those resources
and the Girls Who Code book was on it. It's just a crazy thing to ban books like this as well.
I can understand adult material, pornography. Maybe the anarchist cookbook shouldn't be in
every public library. We can talk about that. I'm sorry, Alex. We have to stop now
because we are out of time. Let's take it up on overtime. Join us on YouTube channel 2600
or write to us oth at 2600.com. Keep listening to WBAI. We'll be back next week. Good night.
See you
I'll change if you vote
Me
You just come to visit me
Do
I live in the ghetto
Someday I will move on my feet
Do
My name is secluded
We live in a house the size of a matchbox
We'll just live with this water wall
You've killed all our leaders
I don't even have to do nothing to you
You'll cause your own country to fall
You