Luke: [00:00:00] From privacy concerns to limitless potential, AI is rapidly impacting our evolving society. In this new season of the Brave Technologist Podcast, we’re demystifying artificial intelligence, challenging the status quo, and empowering everyday people to embrace the digital revolution. I’m your host, Luke Moltz, VP of business operations at Brave Software, makers of the privacy respecting brave browser and search engine.

Luke: Now powering AI with the Brave search. API. You’re listening to a new episode of The Brave Technologist, and this one features John Ku, who’s a former CIA officer, former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and former counter-terrorism consultant for a BC News. He was responsible for the capture in Pakistan in 2002 of Abbu, AB Beta believed to be the third ranking official in Al-Qaeda.

Luke: In 2007, Kara blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program saying the CIA torture prisoners. The torture was official government policy and that that policy had been approved by the then President George W. Bush. He became a sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration [00:01:00] under the Espionage Act, a law designed to punish spies.

Luke: He served 23 months in prison as a result of the revelation, and has since authored eight books on his experience. In this episode, we discussed why privacy doesn’t need to be sacrificed for national security, with specific examples, how targeted intelligence has succeeded without master surveillance, the use of drones in the military, and how the advancement of this technology has gone too far in crossing moral lines and his experience of blowing the whistle on the CIA’s torture program, how he was punished for it, and what he would do differently next time.

Luke: Now for this week’s episode of the Brave Technologist.

Luke: John, welcome to the Brave Technologist. How are you doing today? Doing well, thanks. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for joining us. Not every day. Uh uh, we have a guest on, it’s got your background. I’m really looking forward to kind of digging into the details of Pit. Can you give a little bit on your background, your experience in the CIA and, and then we can kind of use that as a jumping off point.

John: Sure. I spent 15 years at the CIA. The first half of my career was in analysis, [00:02:00] and the second half was in counter-terrorism operations. I became the chief of operations in Pakistan after the nine 11 attacks, and then finished off my career at headquarters as the executive assistant to the CIA’s deputy director.

John: Then I went to Deloitte, which was then Deloitte and Touche as the deputy director of the competitive Intelligence practice. Spying on Deloitte’s competitors. And then from there to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I was the chief investigator under the chairmanship of John Kerry. I.

Luke: Interesting.

Luke: That was the other thing I was really excited about having you on about, ‘cause you kind of were there pre-internet era. Yes. In the intelligence community. Yeah. And then you were also there at this like transformation was going on after nine 11 and as big tech started to scale and the web as we know it kind of like started to come into be having that kind of breadth of experience in that viewpoint, what do you kind of see around as the biggest myth around the idea that privacy has to be sacrificed in order for you to [00:03:00] have safer national security?

John: That’s really one of the most important questions that we have to face, and I can tell you definitively that privacy does not have to be sacrificed in the name of National Security. There’s a famous whistleblower from NSA by the name of Tom Drake. There’s several famous whistleblowers from NSA, bill Binny, Kirk Weeby, Tom Drake, a couple of others.

John: But Tom Drake tells this chilling story. His very first day at NSA was nine 11. He entered as a senior Intelligence service officer. He had been a colonel in the US Air Force and is one of the country’s leading thinkers on internet privacy. So NSA was getting ready to implement something called Thin Thread, which was a program that would’ve allowed NSA to intercept the communications of foreign nationals when nine 11 hit.

John: Still on nine 11, the head of NSA Michael Hayden, who later became the head of CIA, decided to [00:04:00] ditch Thin thread and to implement instead another program, a competing program called Stellar Wind. Stellar Wind just vacuumed up everybody’s communications. Now that’s illegal. At least it was mm-hmm. In September of 2001.

John: It’s also a violation of NSA’s Charter, which specifically says that NSA may not intercept the communications of American citizens or US persons that is any foreign national in the United States on a green card. It’s illegal, and they did it anyway. Hayden later said that nine 11 was the the greatest gift that the intelligence community had ever received because there was no pushback.

John: You know, it was only, what, four weeks later that we passed the Patriot Act. And here we are now 24 years later, and the Patriot Act is still the law of the land. So Tom Drake objected to this. He said it was, it was illegal, it shouldn’t be implemented. So he went to his boss. His boss said, buddy, you’re new.

John: [00:05:00] You need to keep your mouth shut. And then he went to the Inspector General, the NSA Inspector General. The Inspector General was not read into the compartment. So the Inspector General didn’t know what he was talking about, didn’t know what Tom was talking about. Tom then went to the general counsel’s office, and the general counsel said that this was way over his pay grade and he needed to back off.

John: Then he went to the inspector general at the Pentagon because NSA, of course is a DOD agency. They reported him back to NSA. And said, you have a rogue officer on your hands. When Tom didn’t get any, any results from the Pentagon, he went, as we’re all trained to do, he went to the Congressional Oversight Committee, to the House Permanent Select Committee on intelligence.

John: Everybody that he reported to everybody was cleared. And for his trouble, he got nine felony charges, including seven counts of espionage. Oh my gosh. Now, [00:06:00] he was facing a hundred years in prison. His wife left him. She was also an NSA employee. She decided to side with NSA on the issue, lost his pension, lost his job, lost his clearance, lost his wife, lost his kids, almost lost his freedom.

John: And then literally the night before the trial began, the case fell apart and the charges were dismissed, but the only job he could get. Was at the Genius Bar at the Apple Store in Bethesda, Maryland. This is one of the country’s leading experts on internet privacy. He ended his career at the Genius Bar and never recovered from it.

John: Of course, we can protect our privacy, of course. National security agencies don’t need to intercept the communications of Americans, but they do it because they know that they can do it and they can get away with it. Mm-hmm. And our elected officials aren’t willing to stand up for us.

Luke: That’s such a good example that you [00:07:00] brought up too with Tom Drake, because I feel like in the wake of Snowden.

Luke: Yeah. And when people are looking back on that, one of the examples, you, you’ve got all these people out here, former agency people, other folks that are, very, insistent that we do all of this data collection and, and they’ll say, you know, they’ll categorize ness kind of like breaking the rules.

Luke: But even when people follow the protocol right around reporting up the chains, they get penalized. So like Exactly. You’re not giving people a lot of options. Right. No.

John: You know, and it was the same situation for me. I had watched the Tom Drake case, I knew what they were doing to Tom Drake. Mm-hmm. They were gonna crucify Tom Drake.

John: And so in my own whistle blowing. I didn’t go through the chain of command because my chain of command created the CIA’s torture program. Mm-hmm. I didn’t go to the Congressional Oversight Committees because the oversight committees secretly approved of, and then appropriated money for the torture program and the secret prison program.

John: The only place I could go was was the media. Yeah, it’s

Luke: wild. Mm-hmm. And I think too, and we’ll, we’ll [00:08:00] get to the torture whistle blowing too. I think, this kind of frames it really interestingly too ‘cause because, so you kind of have the Tom Drake stuff come out and then Snowden exposes how the government’s plugging into all these big tech companies and looking into people’s stuff and, you know, all those programs that kind of got disclosed.

Luke: And, this is where it’s kind of interesting and, and my journey kind of hits in this too, because, you know, around 20. 11 through like 20 14, 15, right after the Snowden revelations. Mm-hmm. There was kind of this big pivot to business intelligence, right? I was working in the ad tech space at the time and all of a sudden everybody wanted to start having these business intelligence integrations, which was basically just hoovering up.

Luke: Everything you were doing kind of defacto, standardized what the government was doing except through corporate, commercial channels with users. Exactly. Right. In the public and, and now you’re in this space now where you’ve got 10, 20 years of all of this data, both commercial and government collected data.

Luke: Do you really need all this stuff in order to have good intelligence that protects the country?

John: Absolutely not. You [00:09:00] don’t need it. You know, I have to say at Deloitte, they really did it right. My boss was a former CIA analyst who had retired and came out of retirement to put this team together. There were six of us.

John: Four were former CIA, one was former FBI, one was former Secret Service. There was a separate team of analysts. Now the analysts had all of the subscriptions, the Wall Street Journal and Hoovers and, the Economist and all these data platforms they had access to. And then the rest of us were out there collecting human source intelligence.

John: For example, we had heard a rumor that Bearing point was calling this Global Partners meeting in Orlando, so. I flew down to Orlando and just hung out in the bar, hung out in the men’s room. You know, you just, you sit down on the, on the toilet and lock the door, and you just start writing notes. You’d be surprised when people talk about it in the men’s room or [00:10:00] in the bar.

John: I took a young colleague with me, very attractive young woman, and my God, the stuff that she got out of people, it was stunning to me that people would speak so freely about clearly private, protected, sensitive business information, and then to put a cherry on top of it all the CEO, the CFO and the COO were meeting in a breakout room.

John: They got up and left at eight o’clock and they just walked away. And they left papers all over the table and it was like, oh

Luke: man.

John: A complete list of bearing points. Clients, all of their revenue down to the last dollar costs, service lines, how discounts were determined. It was the crown jewels of the company.

John: I called the general counsel’s office. At Deloitte and I said, listen, they were in there for two hours. They just walked away and they left all this material. What should I do? And he said, don’t touch it for two hours. If they’re gone for more than [00:11:00] two hours, it’s considered to be abandoned. I. So I waited, I chased away a cleaning lady at one point, and then I waited until 10 o’clock at night and I scooped up all the, the paperwork.

John: I spent $700 faxing it back from a, from a Kinko’s in Orlando. Wow. And we used the information so that Deloitte could make an unsolicited offer to buy Bearing Point, which it did. And now Deloitte is the biggest consulting firm in the, in the world.

Luke: Yeah. And so just using, you know, what’s around and, and kind of being in the room.

Luke: Right? Yeah. Human source intelligence. There’s like another example too. I think you were talking about the Abu ze beta Sure. Tracking him down. Right. And how you were kind of in Pakistan it has like millions and millions of people and, and zeroing in, and I think you said something like you guys had a targeter that came in with like a piece of butcher paper Yes.

Luke: Or something like that. That was before like all of this, like mass internet surveillance and all this stuff that kind of Oh yeah. Being told is necessary. Right, right. Like how, how did

John: that process work? Yes. it was [00:12:00] before, so Abbu Abeta, we believed at the time that Abbu Abeta was the number three in Al-Qaeda, and we knew that he was somewhere in Pakistan.

John: I. And I had to catch him and I said, guys, come on. I said, this country’s the size of Texas. It has 120 million people in it. What do you mean? He’s somewhere in Pakistan. You have to go catch him. So for a couple of weeks I tried a couple of different things. I just could not narrow his location down. I just couldn’t do it.

John: So I had a friend who was a targeting analyst they deal with. Thousands, millions of pieces of data. I flew him out and he came out with this butcher block paper and wrote Abbu Beta in the center, put a circle around it, and then around Abbu beta he wrote. All of the phone numbers, the email addresses, and the physical addresses of everybody that had been in touch with AB beta, and then he did it again at a secondary level, and then again at a tertiary level, took about two weeks.

John: But he drew lines, [00:13:00] you know, between each one of them who was talking to whom? He finally came to me, he said, I can’t narrow it down to any fewer than 14. Possible locations. I said 14. We’ve never hit more than two sites before in a night. We can’t hit 14. So I, I asked headquarters for a, a giant team with weapons and ammunition and battering rams and secure communications and all kinds of stuff.

John: They flew it all out. One of the sites was a payphone at a shish kebab stand. So we, we dropped that off the list and then we hit all 13 simultaneously and, and we got him.

Luke: Wow. Wow. And without having to collect every single individual’s, every movement, and every, every browsing activity Exactly. Right. My mind, you know, may I

John: add something else?

John: Yeah, of course. Another thing that strikes me as particularly dangerous vis-a-vis privacy is that we’re starting to see this, this trend now where the FBI [00:14:00] rather than to go to a court and ask for a, a warrant. Instead just goes to an internet provider and just buys the data.

Luke: Right. Right. They just buy it.

John: Right. So where are our legal protections? There are no legal protections.

Luke: It’s

John: a

Luke: great

John: point. And it’s perfectly legal. Anybody could buy the data ‘cause they sell it.

Luke: Yeah. But the FBI.

John: Doesn’t need a warrant anymore.

Luke: I remember working in the space, I could go implement something that would track a certain ad or users on ads.

Luke: Right. You would never know where the data stopped and who got their hands on it. Yeah. And how often it was synced and copied and and stored. And even if there was a policy where. Said, we’re gonna retain something for a certain amount of time. You can’t really hold a lot of weight to it because the other partners are still gonna copy that data and do their own thing with it.

Luke: Exactly. And so you end up with this really massive amount of data. I, I think that’s the biggest thing is that, and this is one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on too, because I think [00:15:00] one, there’s like an entire generation of people now that don’t realize that we have a Fourth Amendment and they just think that privacy is something you kind of have to give up.

Luke: Right, in order to have an internet or, or a free web or whatever, but it does matter now. These things are definitely getting used against people and, and you know, when you, you combine the amount of data getting collected, the access, and then the example you just mentioned too, of them buying the data with this AI space.

Luke: Like what are your thoughts on how AI will be used and the intelligence space or how privacy is important around this and, and, and things Yeah. Maybe you’re concerned about or, or where your head’s at with all that.

John: I’m very concerned about AI and you know, I actually just a week ago in the UK debated an MI six officer, British Intelligence Service Officer, and we agreed on this point that AI in this early stage is very dangerous in the intelligence space because it can’t tell the difference between an American and a non-American or a Brit and a non Brit.

John: It can’t tell. Who it’s, it’s targeting or the nationality of [00:16:00] the person that’s targeting or whether the person ought to be targeted. Like I said earlier, NSA can’t do all your work for you. You need human beings to be able to tell if this is appropriate or, or if it’s not appropriate. So I worry about that.

John: I also worry about the leaps and bounds in technology that we seem to be making all the time. If I were in the ccia A today, I would be petrified about crossing a border in alias. Now this is something that CIA officers used to do literally every single day, right? You have passports at six different names from six different countries, and you know, sometimes you need to go to China or Russia or North Korea or Cuba or something to do an operation.

John: But now everybody’s scanning your face at the airport and then they’re like, wait a minute, this isn’t John Smith. This is Joe Blow. Why does this guy have two different names and two different nationalities? Next thing you know, you’re blown and you’re under arrest in a foreign [00:17:00] country. So I don’t know how they’re dealing with it today in the cia.

Luke: I remember hearing about Afghanistan too, where it almost seemed like kind of a, a staging ground for like, what, what can we do with biometrics or even Ukraine where so much of your everything app and it’s all kind of in this thing, which sounds convenient to people, but you know, right. In those kinds of environments, it, it also seems like very dangerous.

John: Yeah, I agree completely. Very dangerous. It’s cool to have new technology. It’s cool to be cutting edge, but we don’t really know the full effect that these technologies have.

Luke: Mm-hmm. It is kind of an interesting dilemma, like, because it does seem though that there are parts of these leaps in tech that, that have been great for the intelligence space and maybe not as harmful.

Luke: Like are there areas that have been like super helpful or, or things like, gosh, I wish I would’ve had this Then when we were doing these operations that are there now, like are there any positives that you see out of what’s developed over the past 10, 15 years?

John: Oh yeah. You know what I really wish we had had back then was D-N-A-D-N-A sequencing.

John: [00:18:00] I’ll give you an example. When I was serving in Greece, my job was to target one specific terrorist group called Revolutionary Organization. 17 November. They had killed 27 people, including the CIA Station Chief two US Defense Attachees. We couldn’t even identify a single one of them. We knew that it was a small group, it was compartmentalized, but we, we just couldn’t crack through that, that outer ring.

John: And so they launched a rocket at the German ambassador’s residence one night, and when the terrorist fired the rocket, it was a shoulder fired rocket. He cut his neck and he was bled profusely and oh wow. There was a puddle of blood on the sidewalk. I went out with, with the Greek intelligence service to investigate, and I was like, the blood has to come from the guy who fired the rocket.

John: Right. It has to. He’s the only person that’s on the, on the sidewalk. And the Greeks were like, we don’t do DNA testing here. We don’t have a database. And I was like, well, we have a database, [00:19:00] but it’s all Americans. Yeah. So he said, yeah, how are, how are you gonna collect the blood? ‘cause if you scrape up the blood, which was dry by then.

John: You’re gonna get all that concrete that’s gonna contaminate it. So I went to a, a home the Greek version of Home Depot, and I bought a sledgehammer and I smashed the sidewalk up and I took a big chunk. I put it in a bag, a plastic bag, and then I put it in a diplomatic pouch and I sent it back to the ccia A and they ran the DNA test, but they were like we don’t know who this is.

John: It’s a Greek. It has to be Greek. We, ours are all Americans and they’re all like convicted felons. I just wish that we had. Usable DNA back in 1999 would’ve made life so much easier. Yeah, we may have stopped that before they killed another half a dozen people.

Luke: Oh man. That’s wild. I. You made a pretty life changing decision to blow the whistle on the CA torture program.

Luke: Mm-hmm. I don’t know, maybe you want to give folks a little bit of context around what was going on there. ‘cause there might be people that might have been, I don’t know, in diapers back then or something that might not have been terribly aware of that. Sure. [00:20:00] And then also what motivated you to kind of speak out on that and blow the whistle.

Luke: Well,

John: about a month after the nine 11 attacks, the CIA made a strategic policy decision to pursue a torture program, which they euphemistically called Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. They hired two contract psychologists named James Mitchell and Bruce Jesson. They reverse engineered the Air Force’s SEER Program and created their own in-house torture program.

John: We were just waiting to catch somebody. Senior enough to warrant torture. And unfortunately that was Abbu Abeta. And so I was asked two months after we caught him if I wanted to be trained in these torture techniques. I said, no, I think they’re illegal and I have an ethical and a moral problem with them.

John: I don’t, I don’t think we should be in the business of torture and besides we executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American POWs, and now we’re gonna waterboard people and it’s perfectly fine. [00:21:00] I have a serious problem with this. I think it’s wrong, wrong, wrong, besides being ineffective, and so we began torturing up Aze Beta on August the second, 2002.

John: Torture did not result in a single bit of information that for stalled or disrupted an attack or saved an American life. Mm-hmm. It certainly stated our desire for revenge. But it didn’t help to keep Americans safe. And it was so patently illegal in my mind that I kept waiting for somebody to go public and nobody went public.

John: And I knew that there were other people inside the CIA a who were as opposed to it as I was, but nobody said anything. And then finally in December of 2007, I gave an interview to a BC News. And I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners that torture was official US government policy and that the policy had been personally approved by the president.

John: And so I. The CIA filed a [00:22:00] crimes report against me with the FBI under the Bush administration. The Justice Department declined to prosecute me. They said that I had not committed a crime interesting, but the Obama administration prosecuted me. They charged me with five felonies, including three counts of espionage, which can be a death penalty charge.

John: They offered me 45 years in prison. I fought and fought, and fought and fought. I finally took a plea to a lesser charge just to make the thing go away. They bankrupted me. And I had five kids at home, so I took a plea to a lesser charge. I did 23 months and got out. But I’ll tell you, that case gave me a soapbox.

John: They made me famous. I’m I’m a noted human rights activist now. It was worth it. The cost was high.

Luke: Yeah,

John: I would do it again. It was worth it.

Luke: Yeah. so interesting too that the, the Bush administration didn’t go after you, but the Obama administration did. Yeah. It’s, it’s like once you start opening these doors, you never know how they’re gonna get walked through by who and, and, and what they’re [00:23:00] gonna do.

John: Right. Oh my God. The, the Democratic Party is not the Democratic Party of George McGovern or of Franklin Roosevelt. The Democratic Party is a neo-conservative party that Ronald Reagan would’ve loved.

Luke: Yeah, it is interesting too. You’ve come out of the other side of that and you know, are kind of a. Example of just like actually, you know, doing what you felt you had to do.

Luke: Right. What was the outcome of all of that? Yeah. I mean, from what you know, are they a good question? Are they doing this

John: stuff or No? They stopped. They stopped and in December of 2014, Congress passed the McCain Feinstein amendment, which formally and permanently banned torture. John McCain was very kind to me.

John: John McCain was my strongest supporter on Capitol Hill. It was the December 14th. Of 2014, I, I was able to call my wife from prison every other day for 15 minutes. And I called her that day and I said, how was your day? And she said, oh, it was great. And I said, really great. Why was it so great? And she said, [00:24:00] because Congress passed McCain Feinstein today, and it proved that everything you said was true.

John: And she said, John McCain had gotten up on the floor of the Senate. And said that the American people owed me a debt of gratitude because had I not told them what the CIA was doing in their name, they would never have known. So it was, it was worth it.

Luke: Yeah. Yeah. That’s great. So often these stories don’t end with, with a positive outcome.

John: Yeah.

Luke: When people do these things.

John: Yeah, you can say that again.

Luke: There were so many things happening too that that seemed to be both like advances in tech allowed for certain things, but also really constitutional issues too. And I think, you know, there’s this, the stuff we’ve been talking about about privacy and then also at the same time we start seeing like drones first in the surveillance capacity, but then, or in a kinetic one, right.

John: Yeah, that’s the future. What’s your

Luke: take on how these things kind of interoperated and the drone campaigns that happen? Is [00:25:00] that something, as somebody who was in the intelligence space, you thought, because it does seem like the kinetic warfare, paramilitary type of capabilities were less of a thing list.

Luke: It is almost like the CIA had their own military at a certain point. Right. Ah, but they did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But they did. I mean, what, what’s your take on on that evolution?

John: Yeah. I don’t think anybody really saw it going to where it’s gotten surveillance. Drones are of incredible import in, in operations, both military and intelligence operations.

John: It was always great to have drone coverage so you could get the lay of the land, see if there’s ingress and egress. See if you’re in danger of being ambushed. Awesome stuff. As soon as things turned kinetic, it was just, it, it made it too easy to kill people. There’s another whistleblower named Daniel Hale, who I have very deep respect for, and Daniel tells a terrible story.

John: He was a drone operator with the Air Force. He was operating his drone from. I forget where [00:26:00] Florida or Nevada, something like that. His boss is a thousand miles away someplace and Daniel’s operating the drone. He is watching the screen and he says, I see the I see the target. And his boss tells him, fire.

John: And he said, wait a minute, there are two little kids standing next to him. And his boss said, I’m looking at the screen too. Those aren’t kids, they’re goats. He said, they’re not goats. Daniel says, they’re kids, I’m sure of it. And his boss says, fire. And he said, I can’t fire. They’re two little kids. His boss said, if you don’t fire, you’ll be court marshaled.

John: So he fired and he killed a 12-year-old girl and a 9-year-old girl. And he said he went home that night and he said to his roommates, I became a child killer today. Geez. There’s a, a cost that comes with something like that to the mental health of [00:27:00] our drone operators.

John: He’s gonna have unbearable PTSD for the rest of his life.

John: He’s a child killer. Mm-hmm. And he did it because we’re supposed to be the good guys. Well, that kind of thing happens every day in conflicts around the world. And we are in conflicts all around the world. We’re fighting in Somalia and in the Sahel right now, and nobody knows it. It’s not s reported in the papers.

John: Yeah, yeah.

Luke: But where does it end? Well, and there’s like these bits of data people get, right? Like I remember hearing about signature strikes. I think it was like some perception that this meant that the president was signing off on it or something. then someone, I don’t know if it was a whistleblower or, or just more info came to light where it was really this, that if you fit a certain signature of parameters than you were considered a fair game target.

John: And in fact, in Afghanistan and Iraq, the signature was. Any male over the age of 14 [00:28:00] period. That’s, yeah. If you were a male over the age of 14, they were gonna fire a rocket at you,

Luke: period. Yeah. It’s wild. Without the transparency and, and, and people kind of break crossing over these, these lines. It’s just the worst case scenarios can happen.

John: Yes.

Luke: You’ve done this, you’ve done the whistle blowing process before. I’m kind of looking at this. We see people like all of the AI landscape. We talk to folks that share a lot of their concerns and things like that. This next generation of, of potential whistleblowers, like as someone who’s gone through this ordeal that you’ve gone through with your experience, if somebody in this new generation of tech, people that see something.

Luke: That they feel compelled to blow the whistle on? Like is there any advice or pointers or, you know, I know everything’s a little bit different from case to case. Sure. What would you do recommend?

John: Oh yeah, yeah, that’s a great question and a very important one. There is one bit of advice that is consistent across all national security, whistle blowing, or not even national security, but [00:29:00] all whistle blowing.

John: I want to be crystal clear. Hire an attorney before you open your mouth. And when you do open your mouth, make sure that attorney is sitting next to you. Mm-hmm. That was a mistake I made where I blew the whistle and then I thought, oh crap, the government’s falling on my head. I better hire an attorney.

John: And then I had to be reactive to everything. This way you can be proactive and you can craft your whistle blowing in the best possible way and keep yourself safe legally. Yeah.

Luke: Are there like organizations people can reach out to if they wanna blow the whistle on things?

John: Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. Yes.

John: The two big ones are the Government Accountability Project, which is@whistleblowers.org, I think it is. And the other one is the National Whistleblower Center n wc. They’re both based in Washington. There are dozens of other smaller ones and. Most all of ’em do great work. There’s also one called The Project on Government [00:30:00] Oversight, pogo.

John: Those are kind of the three big ones here in Washington. The National Whistleblower Center is associated with a law firm, quite a famous law firm here in Washington that does only whistleblower cases, and then the Government Accountability Project is a nonprofit, but also has quite a large staff of attorneys that can guide you through the whole process and won’t charge you a dime.

John: Yeah.

Luke: Awesome. Yeah, that’s super helpful. Yeah, you can’t get your like local SA Goodman I would imagine to uh uh I know, see be your attorney. Right. And it seems like kind of preparation’s everything with this type of stuff and know it’s everything lasting. You wanna see people getting burned and I can see it with the way that AI is gonna roll out across and just the mandate.

Luke: That’s out there like a Fortune 1000 Cs to sweep down mandates on getting AI into everything that it’s almost like there’s gonna be people that are gonna have a conscience about this stuff and making sure that they, one, know that they can do this type of thing. And then two, that they don’t set [00:31:00] themselves up for pain is like, yeah, pretty important.

Luke: Amen. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John: Life will never be the same. Once you blow the whistle, you can’t go back. Once you cross that line, there’s no return. So you have to do, right. What does that mean? Can you expand on that a little bit? I will never work in government again. I will never work for a company again. I’m too controversial.

John: I am poisoned to the neocons and the neoliberals of the two political parties, so I, I had to build a life for myself. Tom Drake, like I said, spent the next decade at the, at the Apple store. I didn’t wanna end up at the Apple Store. Daniel Hale works washing dishes in the kitchen of a restaurant.

Luke: Oh my gosh.

John: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there’s no coming back. What are you doing in this life Post whistle blowing? I’ve got a column at Consortium News and a column at Covert Action Magazine. I host a television series on unified television [00:32:00] called CIA Declassified. We use declassified. Documents to tell historical stories.

John: Substack is a substantial part of my, of my income. I’m right now in the, the middle, between the third and fourth legs of a, of a worldwide speaking tour. I was signed by a speaker’s bureau in London. So I’ve done 10 events. I have 90 to go. I just published my eighth book. You know, a little bit of this, I teach a graduate school course in in the history of terrorism at the University of Salamanca in Spain.

John: So a little bit here and a little bit there. And I put together a living.

Luke: There is a life to be had after there is. It’s just you gotta be creative. I, this is the other interesting thing too. You’ve been able to, and there’s kind of a tech element to this too, right? Like when people think about kind of this creator economy and or whether it’s Elon saying We’re all the media now, or whatever, but I mean like it does seem like you’ve had, with the tools you’ve got in hand, you’re able to.

Luke: Make a life and, and put yourself out there and, and help to inform people on [00:33:00] whistle blowing. Good. But also just get history out there too, I would imagine. Yeah. Like how much of this absolutely has helped you with what you’re doing?

John: Oh my God, I’m 60 years old. I’m not a Luddite. The technology is changing so quickly, it’s kind of hard to keep up.

John: I just had a, a Zoom call today with six people who I respect and, and trust in their understanding of technology because I was late to, to the game with YouTube. Mm-hmm. I give a lot of interviews. Some of those interviews have millions of views and one of the shorts. From one of those interviews has 35 million views.

John: I haven’t made $1 from any of those. And I thought, you know what, why not? Why am I not making any money? So I started a YouTube channel and got my first check last week for $315. So you gotta start somewhere and Yeah. Yeah. The future is tech and, and, but you know, we are all the media. Mm-hmm. [00:34:00] Everybody’s gotta grab his piece.

Luke: That’s great. Do you ever think the Patriot Act goes away? Do you ever think we’d go back to where things were on that front before?

John: No. Yeah. Three, three or four years ago I would’ve said yes. When Ed Snowden went public with his revelations in 2013, I remember thinking, thank God somebody finally said something.

John: In fact, his dad came to prison to visit me. I had made a public statement. I made an open an open letter to Ed Snowden that I wrote, and it got huge press coverage. But then I wrote a private letter that a CI, a friend of mine delivered to him in Moscow, and we became friends. His dad came to the prison to thank me, and I said to his dad, ed is gonna change history.

John: The Patriot Act is gonna become obsolete because of him and his truth telling. And then here we are 12 years later. And the Patriot Act is still the law of the land.

Luke: Yeah. Yeah. [00:35:00]

John: I think we’ve hit a plateau in Congress with the number of people willing to challenge it. It’s just not enough.

Luke: Yeah, I know. I, I sometimes wish it was different, but it does seem like it’s gonna take something, it’s hard to not get too pessimistic about it.

Luke: It would require people to like really stand up and Stand

John: up.

Luke: Yeah. Get out. There’s, right,

John: and

Luke: they’re not,

John: people are complacent.

Luke: You said you got a YouTube channel. We covered a lot here today. I’d love to have you get back on sometime too, to kind of my dig into some more things. Where can people find you?

John: Yep, I’ve got a YouTube channel. The shows on YouTube are Deep Focus with John Carku and Deep Program. Substack is John Carku at substack or do substack.com. I’m on X and Instagram and Facebook and LinkedIn. So anywhere you wanna look, you’ll probably be able to find me. Yeah.

Luke: Awesome. Well John, I appreciate you making the time to come on today.

Luke: My pleasure, Luke. It’s been a great conversation [00:36:00] also. I really appreciate that you had the courage to kind of come forward. Thank you very much and change your life course, but put it out there. It’s not something a lot of people would have the courage to do. And, and thank you. Appreciate that. You’re just so open with doing these interviews and yeah, like I said, I’d love to have you back too, to kind of dig into some more topics, my and, and stuff like that.

John: I look forward to it.

Luke: Alright, thanks John. Thank you. Talk soon. All right. See ya. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to the Brave Technologist Podcast. To never miss an episode, make sure you hit follow in your podcast app. If you haven’t already made the switch to the Brave Browser, you can download it for free today@brave.com and start using Brave Search, which enables you to search the web privately.

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