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All right, we are live. Welcome to Layer 2 Pleb Chain Radio.
My guest this week, this is QW by the way, my guest this week is none other than Ghost.
Ghost is a privacy expert, has the site Untraceable Digital Descent, and has a lot to say about limiting your digital footprint.
So I'm very excited about the show. I'm very excited about the opportunity to speak with him, and I hope you enjoy.
So welcome, Ghost. How are you doing today?
Greetings and salutations. Doing well.
so who is ghost um tell me as much as you're comfortable with that is a deep question who is
ghost um obviously ghost is a nim uh just a made-up name a persona um following my rules
he only exists on no stir you'll up until extremely recently you would never find you know the same
name profile email etc on any other location forum twitter etc um made some exceptions to that
just recently i tried to keep keep the uh persona the straight with the uh the new website and blog
but if you're asking about the um the human breathing person behind the the uh the nim
Well, then that would be me.
Let's see.
Technical background.
Done this for a long, long time.
Have cybersecurity certs out there.
Been into privacy advocacy for a long, long time.
Everything I advise and tools I use are ones that I've actually used for real.
or know other people that have been in use for a long time.
Same with the methods.
So nothing's theory.
Everything's been battle tested and worn.
I do a lot of writing and advocacy all over the net.
Kind of a small Venn diagram where privacy and cypherpunks and Bitcoin
and everything kind of meets up.
So more than likely, you have read other things that I have written in magazines and on other sites.
Just didn't realize it was me.
Wow. Yeah, I was actually just looking yesterday and I didn't realize this.
The word cypherpunk apparently was invented or first coined by a girl that might have been working back then in 89.
I think she was the editor at Mondo 2000, something like that.
It was a magazine that first talked about cypherpunk.
And then she's the one that she went to – she might have been the editor there, but she definitely became the editor at Wired Magazine.
And that's where that Rebels with the Cause, 1993, I think February 1993.
The famous cover.
I have that copy.
uh that's that's one of my uh it i hold it dear um you know and i also i also have a dog tag uh
that uh a friend uh never met him but uh i i i cherish the guy uh snick toshi he created a laser
engraved dog tag that has the entire cypherpunk manifesto inscribed on it uh pretty sweet stuff
but um i feel like we're certainly reaching it's more and more important i mean we just saw the
I don't even know what happened with Samurai. They kind of bent the knee. I honestly want to give that more time to give my judgment on it. But we see these battles happening. It's across the globe now. Before, it was just the US.
We didn't have this world is flat, digital world where everything is connected.
And it's something where it's more and more important that we protect the freedoms today, protect the privacy, whatever it is.
Because my son, those are the same privacies he would never know existed if we don't.
So it's something that compels me to talk about these things, to put my foot down.
And a lot of the times I don know where to put my foot down I don know what can be trusted I don want blind security So these are just things that go through my head that I feel like
a show like this or a conversation like this can kind of unwind those doubts and give me more of a
path. So what compelled your passion within this field enough to place your scarce time and energy
into it. Was there a tip? Was there, was there a tipping point or is it something you've just
always been interested in? A little bit of both. Obviously I've something I've always been
interested in, always worked in and out of it. Obviously I'm a freedom maxi. I've said that from
the first. I, my, my political alignment is I think all gay couples that own a marijuana farm
should be able to defend it with a fully automatic machine gun.
Amen.
So, and while I've been on NOSTER,
obviously I have made a lot of those viewpoints out there.
I have given advice when I could,
answered questions when they were asked.
I have tried to do a NOSTER only blog with a different in-pub.
That didn't really work.
uh i tried to like a long form i did long form um it the great thing about nostr and the horrible
thing about it it disappears it it gets lost in the feed there's no way to like go back and look
so i thought maybe it'd be clever to to blog under a different in pub and that way you go to
that in pub and you only see those long forms that also got just lost in the in the thing so
So I unfortunately had to go the old route and actually, you know, WordPress and like a blogger site, you know, like it's, you know, 1995 again.
Isn't that wild though?
Because once you use Nostra, you got your InPub, you got your, you know, Wallet Connect, you got your browser extension to sign in.
Then you, you know, you use it for like three, four months.
And then all of a sudden you go back to another, you know, I'll call it the legacy site.
and you're putting in an email, you know, your two-factor authentication,
and you're just like, man, this is like, I feel dirty.
Kind of like signing into this platform we're on right now.
You just kind of bend the knee a little bit.
It's just, it's archaic.
To get the results you need.
You accept the limitations that it gives you.
So, I mean, yeah, WordPress is open source.
I'm using it.
It's fine.
I'm hosted in a, on a server that's in Iceland that I paid with,
with Monero and no name. So you, you, you work around the system.
You use the rules that they give you. Yeah.
Email is dirty.
And all the tools for privacy.
Yeah. Email is dirty. It's whatever else,
but it has its place in the world, unfortunately still.
so you use it as is and you accept the limitations and you don't try to make it do something it's not
made to do. You don't want to hack it. So what is an untraceable digital dissent? Dissident.
Dissident. Sorry, I'm reading off my poor notes. Yeah, so the website, talk a little bit about the
the scope of it and maybe your your mission uh well looking around i wanted to get something out
especially lately because i keep looking around and stuff's getting weird out there like really
weird and really bad we talked about the cypherpunks earlier we honestly thought we had
won that war back in the 90s with encryption and um you know code is speech and it seemed like we
did for a little while but now they're rolling it back um across the board across even western
democracies we're seeing it now it's it's horrible between you know australia and uk and now what's
going on in the us and the eu it's it's getting really weird um so i write for very diverse
folks everybody has different needs you have the dissident you have the activist you have the
journalist that have very strict privacy needs that if they're not met, they could end up,
you know, memory hold in a gulag or jail time. And then you have others that they're slowly but
surely giving away what little freedom they have and they're being manipulated by the system and
don't even realize it. And then you have, makes me roll my eyes, the privacy bloggers and influencers
and they're putting out stuff about that your laptop is getting spied on by satellites,
by the cooling fans, oscillations, and I just can't take it.
There needs to be some sane voice out there that what you should be doing should be for you,
not this craziness.
You shouldn't have to go out in the woods and live naked eating grubs to have some ounce of privacy.
Yeah I was thinking about that because you mentioned the code is speech battle that we thought we won But what that did was establish precedent right And if someone like let say let say Samurai was just a psyop and it was all just to make it to where it would establish precedent in court by not fighting it or pleading is that even possible
I saw one theory like that yesterday and I was like, you know, they could easily, if we're basing everything off of establishing precedent in a court of law, what's stopping, you know, them to manipulate that?
It seems like it's something that could absolutely happen.
Well, that seems a very long odds.
Birds are not real.
They're charging on the power lines.
They charged it on the podcast.
So they did plea deal, which does not set a precedent.
That's not a legal case.
If the judge, because so since they're pleading guilty, the judge didn't decide.
So the case wasn't actually tried.
They just pled guilty to what they were charged with.
So that doesn't set a legal precedent.
I'm not a lawyer, but yeah, that doesn't set a legal precedent.
Now, it does embolden the DOJ because they got what they wanted.
or at least some of what they wanted.
They're hushing and silencing
and freezing out open source developers
because they may not have charged them
with money laundering,
but they did get charged.
And they're looking at three to five,
which is nothing to laugh at.
So anyone else that's putting out
open source software
that has any kind of privacy implications
or mixing or hell,
even what I'm doing,
just giving advice.
could, they can always change the rules later because what they were doing at the time,
it wasn't illegal until they decided it wasn't legal.
Right. Yeah. I just, it's, it's, it's tough to trust anything right now. And when you talk about
the EU and Australia doing their online safety act, they're essentially using children as the,
the Trojan horse. It's always, it's always children. It's always your safety.
Which one are we going to use today? Yeah. Yeah. But you know,
when something like Epstein happens and you know, there's actually children,
all of a sudden that disappears. So there's certainly a little,
I don't want to go too far into that. Cause I don't, I don't know enough,
but it certainly seems like they, they choose when they want to protect children.
Let's put it that way.
They don't care about that. There's a hundred other ways they,
they could show that they do um an age verification that's mislabeled it's not an age
verification it's you cannot reach these services or these sites until you identify who you are
with id that that's let's be honest that's exactly what it boils down to because that's
the reality of it you go to that site you can't get there unless you prove you are who you are
and that that's not a that's do not pass go that's just not acceptable and the we have you know we're
all saying that about the eu the eu's doing that um rolling it right now they're talking about adding
it to uh youtube um which how is youtube dangerous that's an educational site uh i don't you know we
We're not the, in the U S States, we have what 19, 20 States now,
or if you try to go to an adult site, it does the same thing.
So, you know,
U S citizens shouldn't be shaking their heads and acting like it's so far
gone. Cause it's right here.
Australia is doing the same thing with YouTube. You got the UK.
That's who we were talking about. Do the EU is now put talking about maybe
putting in an Android verification app
so that when you download your apps,
they got to make sure what your age is.
So things like Zap Store, F-Droid, Atanium,
side loading will go away.
Your Android tablet, your Android phone
won't let you do it unless it came from the Google store.
Yeah, that's...
That...
I've read somewhere that legacy technology,
technology uh let's say legacy phones and things like that are gonna go up in value uh based off of
just just not having all the tentacles on them uh would you agree with that yeah i i would do
anything for an old school phone that i could put a sim card not a sim card but an actual um
micro usb and and remove the battery that used to be standard now now you cannot find a phone
that does either one yeah i have a uh i have one phone that's not in use uh that's got a sim slot
that one day you know i hope i don't need to use it but that's the closest thing i can get to not
being uh uh just you can't even take the battery out of things anymore yeah double sim double sim
uh is pretty standard now digital sim which is nice is pretty standard now but may not do extend extend storage or remove storage or remove the battery which I not saying this is conspiracy because I not really a conspiracy
There's too much real stuff I can point at.
But unless you remove the battery, the phone tracks you if you turn it off.
People think you can just turn it off or put it on airplane and it doesn't track you anymore.
How do you think Find My Phone works when the phone's turned off, but it still works?
No, as long as it's connected to the battery, it still does that.
You have to remove the power source.
And what thoughts on Faraday?
Faraday works.
You can throw them in a Faraday bag or one of those materials.
And yeah, obviously it kills the signal.
You're not going to get any calls.
You're not going to get any outsides and things.
But you need to test those. Some of the cheaper ones that you can get off Amazon or whatever else are questionable.
But there is an easy test. The wallets are easier if it's a looser material.
You know, you can hold your card up to one of the swipe machines, you know, tap to pay if it works, you know.
um or you can get the cheap you know less than ten dollar wallets that hold your cards that have
it's just two pieces of metal uh steel yeah nothing's getting through that it's going to
block the signal it doesn't matter how cheap it is it's not going to get through rfid is not going
to get through you know quarter a couple millimeters of steel so those are a cheap
alternative. That's what I actually carry. Nice. So Eric Hughes, he said privacy is essential for
an open society and that individuals must take responsibility for protecting their own privacy.
That's not, it's never honestly been more true than it is today. And it seems like that's
full front attacked with everything that's going on in the legislations. So I guess what is privacy,
may I ask? Privacy is control. You're able to control your own data and who gets to see what.
You can be out there with your full face and your social security number tattooed on your forehead
all over the internet. If that's what you chose, that's control. If you chose not to do that,
that is also control. It's controlling your data. If you want to give this away and have this and
allow people to know your name and your face and you know you see people on on nostr with their full
legal name and and pictures go for it but if you don't choose to you shouldn't be forced to
that that is what it basically what it boils down to if i don't want someone to know something about
me if i don't feel comfortable sharing certain things about me um or someone else i shouldn't
be forced to do so or it taken from you through through unsubtle means like google and other
corporate surveillance does yeah yeah and google was uh what you're alluding to is the google
youtube uh that just this week they're talking about ai integrating ai to kind of profile to
to you know scout out who might be enrage correct uh and yeah i'm sure that's all they're collecting
uh that's it's never all they're collecting i i have posted this before google is yeah they
they're not in the business of giving away free email and free video service and free docs and
tools and all the other free great note apps that they put out they're all free use them as much as
you want no one ever questions that that's their business model to give away free tools no it's not
It's to collect as much information about you as possible, narrow it down to the nth degree to where it's literally a science.
They measure what your mouse does, what it pauses on, what you click on when you click off, what you don't click on, what you don't click off, what you search.
They're able to build a pinpoint accuracy of a profile of you.
And once they have that, that is incredibly valuable to themselves and to other people, not only for, oh, it's just for advertisers.
That's true. But it's also for other people that not advertising.
We saw it and oh, Lord, what is the name of that company?
They pinpointed accuracy for information to be able to give certain groups different ads to this and that and influence how people react to certain situations or vote.
or anything else. It's just control. It boils down to the more they know about you, the easier
you are to control. You think, oh, all those decisions you made on your own, unfortunately,
study after study says, no, you didn't. You were influenced and pushed one direction or the other.
All right. That wraps up the 21 minutes of Plug Chain Radio Layer 2.
if you're interested in the full 90 minutes with ghost hit the subscribe we love support we
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