The Conversation

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0:00:03.1 Natalie Dowzicky: Welcome to Pop & Locke I’m Natalie Dowzicky.

0:00:05.3 Landry Ayres: And I’m Landry Ayres.

0:00:07.3 Natalie Dowzicky: You may know, Francis Ford Coppola for the critically acclaimed Godfather franchise. But Coppola directed, many other movies, including our topic today, released two years after the Watergate break-​in and amid the ruins of the Vietnam War, the conversation tells a story of a man caught between his own technological power and the nightmares of his personal responsibility. Joining us today to discuss the intricacies of surveillance is senior fellow at the Cato Institute, Julian Sanchez.

0:00:34.3 Julian Sanchez: Thanks.

0:00:35.4 Natalie Dowzicky: Speaker and author for over 28 years, Richard Thieme.

0:00:39.0 Richard Thieme: Thank you.

0:00:40.0 Natalie Dowzicky: And senior counsel of the constitution project at the Project On Government Oversight, Jake Laperruque.

0:00:46.3 Jake Laperruque: Hi everyone.

0:00:48.2 Landry Ayres: Director Francis Ford Coppola has said before that the practice of confession is one of the earliest forms of the invasion of privacy, the earliest forms of surveillance, which is obviously central to both the plot and overarching themes of this movie, does surveillance make us feel God-​like, and how does Gene Hackman’s character Caul, square his sort of Catholic guilt with this business practice that he’s involved in.

0:01:23.4 Julian Sanchez: I think first just, by way of background, I’ve suggested in some talks I’ve given that in a way, one function of religion is to substitute for inadequate surveillance, technology. That is to say if you’ve got an emerging civilization, you want people to be generally pretty well-​behaved and not cheat each other or kill each other, so that you can get some kind of social cooperation going. In the modern era, to some extent, we have police and we have ways of monitoring people and you can threaten people with legal penalties if they violate social norms, but in a pre-​surveillance era, one way to save money on a surveillance state is, Well, can you at least convince people that they’re under observation and that they better damn well behave.

0:02:16.0 Julian Sanchez: So, in a sense, granted this is you I say this not to disparage religion or say, well, it’s not true, but one of the social functions that it serves is analogous to that of actual surveillance. That’s the thing about surveillance that Jeremy Bentham understood when he developed his idea of the Panopticon as a prison where inmates would have to always behave as though they were potentially under surveillance because they couldn’t see who the observers in the central tower were looking at.

0:02:51.7 Julian Sanchez: Would always have to behave as though they were under surveillance and so… So it serves that kind of function of trying to regulate people and get them to behave in conformity with norms, and Coppola sets this up in the absolute first shot of the movie, which is we are looking at a public square, with some jazz music playing, a big crowd at lunch time milling around. And it is very much a God’s eye view, zooming down from above, but as we zoom down and pan across the crowd and try to wonder what and who we’re supposed to be looking at, we start getting this kind of digital audio artifacts in the music, and so it becomes clear that what we thought was the gods eye view is the surveillers eye view. It’s not literally…

0:03:40.7 Julian Sanchez: We’re not seeing things from the vantage of any of Harry Caul’s team who are actually doing surveillance on the square, but we sort of injected the technological artifact and which course is already there, we’re seeing things through a camera, but we sort of suspend that as film viewers. But then the audio artifacting we hear the distortion of the music re-​introduces that and says, No, no, you are witnessing and hearing this scene through technologies of observation. So what had seemed like this kind of deity view, the omniscient viewer view, is a mediated view, is a kind of technological voyeurism.

0:04:25.6 Richard Thieme: I’ll jump into that because I wasn’t going to mention it, but I have to because you lead with confession and priest and religion that I was an episcopal clergyman for 16 years before speaking and writing full-​time for the last 28, and there is a collect or a prayer, which is often said at the beginning of the service, which says, “Oh, almighty God and to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.” So what it does is inculcate in the herd and it is sheep like when you are in a mass, in a trance, in a religious trance, which is what rite and rituals designed and music to do.

0:05:05.2 Richard Thieme: Whether rightly or wrongly you come to believe that there is nothing inside you that is not exposed, and if you believe that, then you act as Harry Caul ultimately did in the confession, he had to re-​align himself with somehow that belief which he must have had inculcated into him in Catholic churches, that he was known.

0:05:30.2 Richard Thieme: And that what he had done, which plagued his guilt, kind of the way it reminds me of Jake Gittes in Chinatown, there a number of parallels, and Jake Gittes didn’t want to cause harm to someone again, as he had done once and felt guilty about having done and screwed up so much that he caused ultimate harm to the woman he wanted to protect. And Harry Caul just like Jake Gittes, doesn’t understand what he’s hearing, Jake Gittes didn’t understand what he was seeing. It was right in front of their faces. But I guess their paradigm or belief system prevented them from knowing what was up, and you refer to the Panopticon, which has almost been superseded by the panspectron, which is that a single click links everything that is already databased about you, and then if you become a target or someone wants to know who you are or what you have done and just about everything about you, it’s just a click. And this has been true for a long time. So now one of the status symbols I hear from security people is, Do you think you’re a target? Because to be worthy of someone caring about what you do is considered a good thing.

0:06:54.5 Richard Thieme: Let me just say one more thing, and then I’ll hand it off. I have worked with security and intelligence people for many years, and I was once talking with a senior security person at the NSA with which I was most closely aligned, and describing what you did in ministry, and I said, What you do is learn to use a persona to present a facade, which invites relationship, so that there’s a transfer of energy and information, a relationship between the two of you and in the ministry, what you ultimately are trying to do is use that relationship to enhance the freedom or autonomy and clarity as a person you’re serving. And my friend said in the intelligence community, we do exactly the same thing, but we do it to control you, and that’s it. The technique is identical because it’s based on relationship and creating a bridge to other people, so that they will give you access to their secrets, and you learn to manipulate that relationship in order to derive those secrets, and absolutely in the clergy, it is a position of power. There’s no question of that. It’s definitely a position of power.

0:08:15.6 Richard Thieme: And so you go all the way back to, I guess, 17th century France, when people were required by law to carry a lantern because crime happened in the dark, and you didn’t carry a lantern in order to see where you were going, although it helped, it was so that you could not be anonymous, you had to be identifiable in the dark spaces of the public square, and that’s exactly at a Nth degree level what the internet and other digital technologies, network technologies have created. We have all kinds of markers identifying who we are, and many years ago, someone at the FBI said to me, you can have one big brother or a lot of little brothers, so choose wisely.

0:09:00.2 Richard Thieme: And then when I saw him many years later, he said, Well, I was wrong, we have both. Yeah. We have big brother, and we have Google, and we have Apple, and we have Tencent, and we have, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And if you’ve looked at the book recently, we have been harmonized about how the Chinese are taking this level of surveillance and control to its ultimate extreme. What you see are things that are already being implemented here. So Harry Caul, there’s none of us in that business and I’ve spoken to DEFCON, and I’ll be going back in August for the 25th straight year. That’s some kind of record.

0:09:41.2 Landry Ayres: For the listeners who aren’t familiar, DEFCON is probably the major annual hacker conference.

0:09:46.5 Richard Thieme: That’s right, and there were 300 the first time they spoke, and there were 30,000 last year, and there’s nobody in that space who does not understand the rush, the power rush as intelligence people do, there is no high higher than having secrets. That secrecy and being big part of the elite that has those secrets, so you can get at them officially as we have since 1947 with the building of the National Security State, or you can get them the way Harry Caul did as a cautionary tale.

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0:10:23.6 Natalie Dowzicky: So you mentioned this notion of control, and I had written this down before our recording, but the role that control plays throughout this film is really interesting because there’s like the notion of having control and wanting control and also falling under the illusion that you are in control are all big factors throughout this movie, so I was kind of hoping we could break down for the audience, like how Harry Caul experiences all of these phases, let’s call it phases of control throughout the movie.

0:10:56.7 Jake Laperruque,: To me, this was kind of the most interesting facet of the movie, I think, which is just kind of the, I would call the hypocrisy of his character. When you look at this guy, he is a wire-​tapper, that is his job, he illegally goes and records people’s intimate lives in a way that I think at this point is breaking the law and is certainly breaking pretty basic moral ethics, so you kind of have to ask, is… Well is this like an amoral guy who just wants his paycheck, doesn’t care if what he’s doing is ethical or not? Like, No, he has these seemingly deep religious convictions, he spends most of the movie kind of grappling with the harms of what he’s doing, not necessarily the privacy harms, but kind of, Oh, well, I would be responsible if handing over these tapes leads to someone being physically harmed, so he clearly thinks that it is on him if there’s… If something bad happens from this, so okay, he has morals.

0:11:49.9 Jake Laperruque,: Is he a guy who just doesn’t believe in privacy, believes that, Well, I care about ethics and harming people, but I think that privacy is overrated, but that doesn’t seem to be true either, because the points in the movie is when he… In the movie, when he displays the most emotion is these kind of rare funny shoe is on the other foot moments when he finds someone surveilling and recording him. There’s kind of a light moment at the beginning of the movie when it’s his birthday and he finds out that his building manager looked at one of his birthday cards and he gets very worried about the prospect of someone seeing that he’s what, what was it? Like 47 years old.

0:12:21.9 S?: 44, right.

0:12:22.6 Richard Thieme: 44.

0:12:23.5 Julian Sanchez: Although then, he lies to his girlfriend later.

0:12:25.3 Jake Laperruque: Yeah, that’s right. He tells her he’s 40.

0:12:26.6 S?: She says, Oh, well, how old are you? He says, I’m 42.

0:12:28.3 S?: Yeah.

0:12:29.4 S?: Yeah, he won’t even tell her his age.

0:12:30.9 Jake Laperruque: Or maybe that’s why he needs to keep it secret. He’s got a whole scam going on. Yeah, so there’s that, and then there’s this really great scene halfway through when he’s with his little wiretap buddies having their cool wiretap hanging out in his cage, his very fun party pad, and he and it’s… One of his sort of friends, colleagues reveals that when he gave him a pen earlier, it was actually a bug and that he’s been recording him, and he kind of freaks out and promptly ends the fun party in his mesh cage. So, this is a guy who clearly understands that privacy is important and understands that harming people is important, but for some reason, doesn’t seem to really have qualms about doing it all the time, which I just… It’s really interesting. I don’t think it makes him an unbelievable character, but I do think it makes him a bit of a contradictory and a hypocritical character.

0:13:26.3 Julian Sanchez: Yeah, I think the scene Jake mentions is pivotal here, but we’ve seen… Harry is a guy so paranoid of surveillance that he has a woman that he’s been seeing that he later admits to being in love with to someone else, but he hadn’t told her it was his birthday until the day, he won’t tell her what he does for his work, he won’t really tell her anything about him, and you do wonder what they talk about or how their relationship even got started.

0:13:56.7 Jake Laperruque: He won’t take his rain coat around her, even though he’s in her apartment for an hour lying in bed with her.

0:14:03.7 Richard Thieme: Yeah, so this person is incredibly stunted emotionally where he is so paranoid about surveillance that he’s kind of completely incapable of any form of intimacy, and then the one moment where we actually see him in this party conversation, maybe after a drink or two to start opening up a little to someone and talking to another woman about his real feelings for this, this person, he’s supposedly in a relationship with, he’s sort of immediately punished. He is immediately punished by having that disclosure that intimacy exposed by being recorded and mocked.

0:14:42.3 Richard Thieme: But his lack of due diligence goes even further than that, because you’re right, he explodes, he tells everybody to get out and the woman who is there to seduce him stays. And so the one agent who has been sent to penetrate him in order to steal the tape so that she can give it to the Director from whom he has kept it back after realizing his own internal conflicts, he doesn’t even suspect that she is an enemy agent who is seducing him a time honored mata Harry kind of trope.

0:15:15.5 Natalie Dowzicky: Classic.

0:15:16.7 Richard Thieme: In intelligence. And he wakes up to find he’s been had and then, are we giving away the end of the movie? We know he never…

0:15:25.5 Landry Ayres: Give it, give it away.

0:15:26.4 Richard Thieme: He never…

0:15:27.4 Natalie Dowzicky: It’s been out for long enough.

0:15:29.6 Richard Thieme: Its been out for decades, he never is able to defend himself, protect himself through appropriate means and suspicions, and I think that’s in part because I don’t know if he’s hypocritical. I think he is so convinced through how good he has been at his craft, that he is impenetrable, and he has mistakes, offense, he mistakes offense for an assumption of defense, and that’s why he just goes crazy when… I mean literally he explodes. But also, don’t minimize the degree to which he has spent his life, and I have to say, I just wrote my best book called Mobius a memoir about the life of an intelligence professional, and it is getting great reviews because as I quoted Clapper, I told the least untruthful things in that book that I could. And rationalization is a necessary part of being in a profession that compels you to qualify your conscience again and again by compartment-​ing it and separating it from your work, and in that way, which Mobius I think shows clearly, it’s every man. Mobius has been called Every Man because it’s the degree to which we all do this, we all…

0:17:05.5 Richard Thieme: Nietzsche said autobiography is untrustworthy, because pride. And truth telling, war and pride always wins. We are literally incapable of being 100% disclosed, all hearts are open, all desires known. No, we don’t want that. Nobody wants that completely, we want almost everything out there, and to go back to the clergy, I learned to share selectively the details from my life and a clergy woman said to me the other day, the difference is, other people, I’m authentic to the degree that I choose what to share. The people who come to see me for counseling have to share everything, or I can’t be of value to them. So he’s hypocritical, but in a way that the human race, which it is arguably is hypocritical.

0:18:00.8 S?: Yeah.

0:18:02.7 Julian Sanchez: There’s a sort of fantastically telling moment in that confession scene where he’s obviously feeling very guilty about the possibility of this recording he’s made of this young couple seemingly talking about… Actually talking about an affair, will get one of them or both of them harmed, and is acknowledging in confession that this has happened before, we learn more details later, but the previous surveillance job he did resulted in people getting killed and the way he phrases it is, this has happened to me before.

0:18:36.3 Julian Sanchez: So the consequences of his actions, the fact that people died as a result of his work, and in that case, pretty indirectly, maybe he shouldn’t have been able to foresee that, but this consequence of his work as other people were harmed is something that happened to him, because now he feels bad about it, so he’s sort of the victim because look at how I have to suffer now, not look at the poor people, which I think is a pretty… Is not limited to surveillance, I’m pretty sure it’s a universal human trait. It’s not a very pretty one, but this, Why do you make me hurt you? Sort of impulse.

0:19:15.8 Julian Sanchez: This is a source of a lot of human evil. Natalie’s initial framing of this was about surveillance and power. I think in a way, the best, very short encapsulation of this is on the way to the party scene, we mentioned earlier, there’s a group coming from a surveillance convention to Harry’s wonderful Faraday caged office, and there’s this older man driving and a kinda young teenager in a speedster comes up and is zooming by. And so this older driver is kind of humiliated and emasculated by the younger and more virile teenager with the stronger muscle car. And so he calls up immediately a cop friend on a radio and runs the license plate and then zooms up next to the younger guy in the muscle car and starts rattling off his name and his address, and his height and weight, and the guy’s…

0:20:16.4 Natalie Dowzicky: Not creepy at all. [chuckle]

0:20:17.6 Julian Sanchez: Shocked by this, but so right, yeah. He’s been emasculated and now he reasserts his dominance by saying, well, but I know you, and so I’m the one in power because you might be faster and younger and still able to perform in bed, but I have the information and so you’re subordinate.

0:20:37.9 Landry Ayres: Cause knowledge is power. [chuckle]

0:20:41.0 Richard Thieme: But what you’re describing also is business intelligence as it has universally come to have a place. I don’t think anyone operates a business without psyching out as best they can through legitimate open source and some illegitimate. And I’m gonna make a slight confession here, someone many years ago came to me with a proposal for a joint business, and there was just some red flag, I didn’t trust this person, and I went to a friend of mine who was a police officer, and I said, I don’t know about that. He says, “Well, let me see what I can find out.” And he went and ran that person’s name through the computer and came back with a long, long list of fraudulent acts and checks past, et cetera, et cetera, and that person never knew why I called up and I said, “I really appreciate your proposal. Thank you very much, but I just don’t have time to get into another business now. So I’m gonna have to pass.” But it’s using the secret knowledge you get on behalf of your own ulterior agenda that makes it powerful and… Go ahead.

0:21:52.1 Julian Sanchez: I appreciate how sort of common that is, maybe not… Actually and intelligence, I think it’s actually probably much more strictly regulated in a sense, so you’re actually more likely to be ultimately punished for strictly personal misuse of an NSA system, but I don’t know if…

0:22:12.4 Richard Thieme: Not if you’re careful. [chuckle]

0:22:14.0 Julian Sanchez: Well, it’s true. But it’s a little bit stricter there, we hope, I don’t how common it is for certain employees and cops do to make personal use of those kinds of systems, and it’s sort of linked that… The way to discover this is go through a bad divorce with a cop, and you’ll find out, quickly, at least from…

[overlapping conversation]

0:22:39.3 Richard Thieme: Don’t forget there was a moment in the Director’s Office of the NSA when the person responsible for liaising with the Brits with whom we have a ‘special relationship’ was saying we needed to treat them differently because they were our friends and allies, and the Assistant Deputy Director Sagent spoke up and he said, “Excuse me. We have no friends, we have no allies. We only have targets.” And everyone agreed, that’s the nature of the game, the expression of outrage by the Germans and the French, “Oh, you’re surveilling our leaders.”

0:23:14.1 Richard Thieme: Everybody surveils everybody, that’s the kind of world we’ve created, and that creates layers of subterfuge and deception layered on top of what people think they’re getting just like Harry Caul. Thought he knew what he was hearing, and he didn’t. And part of the great game is layer upon layer upon layer of deceptive practice, of which the poster child for where it can take you is James Jesus Angleton who was so wounded by the Kim Philby episode with whom he had shared so much. That number one, he burned all their conversations, which was illegal, but that wasn’t uncommon, and he was never the same. He became so paranoid that he became convinced every mole he uncovered in the CIA was for him to find to protect the mole at a higher level.

0:24:02.8 Richard Thieme: And I wrote an essay called “Why We Were All Going A Little Crazy.” And said we were all becoming necessary counter intelligence agents just in order to find out what’s true in the world of which we now all understand through social media. Layers, deception upon deception upon deception, and embeds triggers to collect the herd in a stampede that makes it oblivious to truth, critical thinking, and the ultimate goal of these values we seem to share in this podcast as fundamental to our humanity and to our body politic.

0:24:40.7 Richard Thieme: So this is not trivial stuff, and I was struck watching The Conversation again, at what just a wonderful movie. Wonderful movie, it was. But don’t forget that in this time, 60s and 70s, we had the parallax view about the Robert Kennedy assassination, we had China Town, we had All The President’s Men, we had a whole range of paranoid movies, and they weren’t paranoid. We speak in the security world of appropriate paranoia, you better be aware that there are people who wanna know what you’re doing for a variety of reasons, economical, psychological, political, and other. And so knowing that’s the world we live in, how do we live a ‘normal life’. And we’re all ambivalent toward Harry Caul. I don’t condemn him, but I understand what he did. Of course, I understand what he did.

0:25:40.8 Richard Thieme: Because he wanted to be one leg up on the rest of humanity by having this control and this power, and a lot of people I know went into the intelligence community, it’s a tremendous rush to become part of an elite, which is empowered to break the laws of every country except our own, at least that was until 9/11, at which point the law was changed to allow us to break our own laws as well, because we rewrote the laws to make warrant-​less surveillance okay, and then we rewrote the courts to approve those laws. And it’s not a Republican or… I used to say Obama is more Bush than Bush, he just took it even further, of necessity in the world in which they live, where defending at all costs, is the name of the game.

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0:26:36.1 Natalie Dowzicky: So we’ve hinted at this, but I’m curious if we could talk about what types of surveillance were going on when this film came out. So I doubt the general public was acutely aware of how they were… Or any types of surveillance that were going on by the government, and then also the type of paranoia that was going on about surveillance, because I think watching this film today, versus watching it back in the ’70s, was looked at very, very differently by the audience, because maybe it’s just by the nature of where I work, and that kind of stuff. I’m acutely aware of everything [chuckle] that is getting watched, but I’m curious on the dichotomy of the two viewing experiences from what was actually happening during those time periods?

0:27:24.8 Julian Sanchez: I would question that, this movie is coming out effectively on the, on the heels of the of the Church Committee report. 1978 is the year FISA was finally passed in response to that, so probably as this movie is coming out, the general public is as conscious of surveillance as an issue as they had been at any time between then and the Snowden revelations, probably. So this is a topic that was on people’s minds, so when you have that conversation at the party between what is his name, Bernie and Harry, and Harry boastfully says, “Well, I’ll have you know I wire-​tapped a major party’s presidential candidate, and I don’t want to say which party, but he lost, I guess you can say I chose the president.”

0:28:22.0 Julian Sanchez: And this is played off as this kind of buffoon boasting. But this is also at a time when the public was discovering that, in fact, the President of the United States had wire-​taps, his political adversaries had gained intelligence about opposing campaigns through illegal use of surveillance and infiltration. So I think then as now are people necessarily aware of the nitty gritty details of every… In a way that someone who does this stuff for a living is? No, but I think it was…

0:29:00.2 Julian Sanchez: This is a timely film, and this is a period when maybe for the first time in American history, the wider public was becoming aware of the extent of surveillance and of its potential for abuse, after a long time when not just the public, but members of Congress for many, many years, it had the attitude that there are things that we need to do for national security, and I’d just as soon not know about them, and then realizing the cost of not wanting to know.

0:29:31.3 Richard Thieme: But Natalie, I think this is also where our generational differences may be showing up because you didn’t live through Vietnam, you didn’t live through the riots. I tried to tell somebody younger what it was really like to have 40 cities, 40, not just Minneapolis where I live, 40 cities burning, the assassinations, Martin Luther King, John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Medgar Evers, on and on. And we learned and we knew deeply that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI was being used illegally to surveil for example, Martin Luther King Jr. By bugging him everywhere he went and Vietnam, all Vietnam protesters were targets of both legal and illegal surveillance because anyone who opposed the war in Vietnam was considered by those people not to be patriotic in support of our troops, etcetera.

0:30:27.6 Richard Thieme: So, the other thing I walked around, I picketed HUAC. Listeners may not know that refers to the House Un-​American Activities Committee. I remember walking around the building in Chicago when I was a teenager with other picketers, opposing what HUAC was doing, and the FBI was standing there taking films of all of us who were in that circle so we could be identified, but now we know that you can identify people by their gait, by their vocal tonality, by the pace of their keyboarding, by their faces, by every signal we give in normal life, to who we are, it’s out there, and it can be databased and linked and mined. So anonymity is a very, very tough nut to crack these days, but I think depending on whether you were a minority then and had suffered as a result of government oppression, that would determine the degree to which you’re conscious of what what could be done.

0:31:41.8 Richard Thieme: And the other thing is I had a friend in CIA said, “Anything you can learn Richard, is about 20 years after we’ve done it.” And I noticed when I read the Chinese book, We’ve Been Harmonized that he referred to things as breakthrough journalism, that I was told by the Secret Service when they had us down for a dog and pony show in Chicago when Obama was going to give his speech in Grant Park. They showed us what kind of surveillance they had, how many cameras linked, public and private in the city, how infrared could detect the frogmen coming in at Navy Pier. How any anomalous traffic movement was immediately flagged, the license plate photographed and the car handed off from camera to camera, as it went across the city, because IBM and Northrop Grumman had done a beautiful AI front end. This is when Obama was about to give a speech, and on and on I could give more examples. So what they were doing then compared to what can be done now, it’s just who is they.

[laughter]

0:32:47.0 Julian Sanchez: You do remind me about just a wonderful little story. Another Pop N’ Locke guest, Jesse Walker from Reason magazine with whom we did an episode little while ago about John Carpenter’s They Live, wrote a wonderful book called “The United States of Paranoia” about the Paranoid style and conspiracy theories. One anecdote, he tells is, and I think I remember… In the days of co-​intel pro. The FBIs highly illegal anti-​domestic defense infiltration program.

0:33:23.0 Julian Sanchez: There was a particular activist, they wanted to try and discredit, and they realized that the method, they decided the method they wanted to use was they were gonna plant, this non-​functional, obviously fake to anyone with any kind of technical savvy, surveillance device at the guy’s house, so that he would discover it, become paranoid, show it to his activist friends, they would say, this is obviously fake, and think he had planted it himself, and so he would be discredited and become paranoid. Which is very apt for a film like The Conversation where we watch this happen to Harry Caul. But there was some internal debate over whether this target was important enough to take this rather extreme step of essentially running a psychological operation against him. So they placed him under real surveillance in order to determine whether he was worth putting under fake surveillance…

[laughter]

0:34:19.6 Julian Sanchez: So the real surveillance was a prelude to this sort of phony surveillance that was meant to make him paranoid and make him seem crazy, which seems like a perfect encapsulation of some of the themes we see in the film, both the power of surveillance, but also the power of making people paranoid about surveillance.

0:34:41.1 Richard Thieme: And that’s also a standard operating procedure… Right?

0:34:44.2 Julian Sanchez: Sure.

0:34:44.9 Richard Thieme: That’s what you do. You can’t expend your energy everywhere to surveil everyone at that level of granularity and to run operations against them unless they merit it. It’s just not worth it. You don’t do it for fun. You have too many real targets you need to take down is the point of view of the people who do that sort of work.

0:35:04.9 Jake Laperruque: It is really interesting to think about watching this as like an almost 50-​year-​old film sort of what it reflects than versus today. I used to have in my office back when we worked out of offices.

[laughter]

0:35:18.5 Jake Laperruque: A Magazine cover I hung that said… Like the headline on the cover was, Is privacy dead? And it was like little cartoon of all these different recording devices and microphones and things, and it’s a Newsweek cover from the mid-​70s. Which for me is always kind of a pleasant reminder whenever people talk about like, Oh my god, Google and Facebook and no one has privacy anymore, that this is not actually a new phenomenon. It’s sort of a recurring word we have again and again and again.

0:35:44.9 Jake Laperruque: And I do think like if Harry Caul was around today, yeah, he wouldn’t be working with microphones, he’d probably be working at ClearView AI, Hawking facial recognition or… Pimeyes Hawking, sketchy like, hey, you can take a picture of someone on your phone at a bar and then you’ll know every detail about their life, the way you would speeding by the guy in the car. I think it’s kind of interesting thinking about that sense of something like… We’ll call it Google stalking before a date is I think very seen as… Commonly seen as socially acceptable.

[laughter]

0:36:18.9 Jake Laperruque: Yeah, I might wanna get a little information about a person, where they work, are they actually who they say… That their name is who they say he is. But the notion of I’m going to scrape every photo of this person ever that’s existed through their life is, I think, rightfully seen as very dangerous and creepy. There is kind of that, when you see it all just like in the face of shifting technology, we have shifting, but I think pretty stable norms of personal privacy. And there are always going to be efforts like a Harry Caul or a ClearView AI where people just say, Oh, well I can make a profit on cutting along the edges of that.

0:36:58.1 Landry Ayres: Jake, you sort of leaned into the next question that I was curious about, which is, we spent a lot of time discussing the context of this film and what it meant to view it then is supposed to now. Sort of looking at it from a different angle, what would it mean to make this film now, as opposed to then? If you were to take this story, this plot, this situation that Caul gets put into now, what would that mean? What would the technology look like? What, would his moral dilemma be different? What kind of operator would he be, and what would the people that he’s observing be existing, and how would they function? It seems like it could be a very different film made today, and how would it be different? And how would it be the same? .

0:37:56.0 Julian Sanchez: There is sort of a sequel from the 90s. There was a Will Smith and Gene Hackman movie called Enemy of the State, in which Gene Hackman plays a kind of retired or former Surveillance operative. He’s not called Harry Caul in that movie, but…

[laughter]

0:38:12.5 Julian Sachez: You see his office at one point and it is the same Faraday cage office, and so it’s very obviously kind of an homage. And if you wanna make it your head can and you can say, Oh, this is what happened to Harry Caul years later, having changed his name. But sorry Jake go ahead.

0:38:28.3 Jake Laperrque,: I also I totally do think of that as cannon for that movie. I think he was Harry Caul in Enemy of the State. Kind of scary. There’s so many ways you could go about it now, ’cause there’s… Again, I don’t think privacy is dead now in a way it was in the 70s, but I do think there are a lot of more vectors for surveillance. He could still be kind of like a wire-​tapper, but do it digitally, he could be… Probably the easiest way would just have it, the character be a hacker and have someone be grabbing people’s computers and snooping on their emails and things, and be reading people’s text messages or going in the vein of he’s…

0:39:08.3 Jake Laperrque,: That this is sort of like a slightly off-​book sort of business model, but that still has a business community, I could see someone like this being someone who works for one of those apps that basically is like a stalker aap for like, Hey, get this installed on your partner’s phone and now you can track them everywhere and read their texts and things like that. I mean, that to me feels most reminiscent of what he is doing of like… It’s very shady. It’s very unethical. But he kind of… All these people at this convention that they do, I think they kind of think of themselves as basically door-​to-​door salesmen who are doing the same thing as someone in a Best Buy. And like, Here buy this TV. Buy this mic so you can snoop on your wife or your girlfriend.

0:39:54.3 Richard Thieme: Well, it’s a huge business. And the major Western countries, which might claim moral superiority, export all of the technologies that do this, and I know people who do that to the most nefarious actors in the world who use the technology to surveil, arrest, torture, and kill people who oppose their state power. That’s just a fact. So it’s a ubiquitous context and you can’t just isolate one or two things, you get their email… You’re thinking too small. Because the pan-​spectron is real. I did a talk called “When privacy goes poof, why it’s gone and never coming back”. And a key element of that talk was the notion of individual no longer holds, it’s a 20th century, 19th century, 18th century construction, an emergent property of the technologies that existed then.

0:40:52.2 Richard Thieme: And that other people who do this right and do it on the scale necessary, they know us all better than we know ourselves, and we live inside and behind a self-​conception, which is not what others who have done this work can see when they look at us, because they can mine those patterns for understanding who we are and what we are likely to do. As somebody in MIT said, actually, I think it was about 20 years ago, “We don’t see real people. We see millions of dots moving around on a screen that occasionally touch one another.”

0:41:30.9 Richard Thieme: We are data points, and we are data points in which other data points have been aggregated and the relationship, I’ll never forget Jeff Jonas, who did it for casinos first, and then the CIA came to him, and it was relationship awareness. At that time he was just starting, and they were out to 13 degrees of separation in relationships. And now that we can do that with genetics, because they’re wonderful stories about, we caught this one, the serial killer, because he was related to his third cousin who was… People don’t live as if the power of these technologies are in fact ubiquitous, and I think that’s a major problem. And when they learn bits and pieces, that’s where conspiracy theories come from. It’s seeing six or eight stars and saying, “Oh, it’s a bear or a lion”, when in fact, it’s a goat, and that turns us into the goat, because in their fear and cognitive dissonance, people project prematurely a gestalt upon inadequate points of data for the pattern they wanna see, and then when they’re collected into a herd, which gives them a feeling of self-​confidence and at least some security, then we see it all over the internet now. So we’re up against some really tough problems of which the key one is that we do not have systems of governance for a digital society.

0:42:56.2 Landry Ayres: And that’s an interesting sort of reading of this because I think you could read that in the conversation too, that the real flaw is not the sort of the error that Caul goes into, his sort of hamartia, is not the collection of the data. That has its own sort of things that it’s tied into, but it’s the misinterpretation of what he then gathers and that becomes his sort of fall from grace in this sort of Greek tragic way is the way he misinterprets it, and the consequences of that.

0:43:27.9 Julian Sanchez: He’s meticulously gathered so much information, he has the whole conversation, he’s got photographs of people, he thinks he understands what they were talking about. But the slight difference in emphasis in one word in a sentence completely changes the meaning. So he’s totally misunderstood the sentence. Again, I hope you’ve seen the movie before I say this. But the couple says, as he hears it originally, “Well, he’d kill us if he got the chance.”

0:43:58.0 Julian Sanchez: But then as they tweak the audio, he realizes it’s, “He’d kill us if he had the chance” as in “So we should feel okay about killing him”, the apparent victims are actually the perpetrators. But it’s a way of showing, “Oh, you think you know everything, but this tiny bit of nuance reverses everything.” You can think you know everything, but in fact, you’ve misunderstood. It reminds me, there was a group of people who were living in the US, who had trained with the Taliban in Afghanistan who were under surveillance quite appropriately given that they’d done this, but they eventually swooped in and arrested them because they overheard a phone conversation, and I think this was the Lackawanna Six where they were talking about or looking forward to a big meal at the wedding that was coming up. And a wedding is of course a very popular Al-​Qaeda code for a terror attack. And so they, “Okay, it’s time to wrap up the operation. We’re gonna bring these guys in.”

0:44:53.2 Julian Sanchez: And it turned out they were actually talking about a real wedding. So it’s a reminder of the illusion of omniscience that you may think you have everything external, but, well at least in that era, you don’t yet have access to the interiority of the targets’ mind and what those external communications may signify to the parties. Maybe that’s changing gradually. I will say I think it would be very hard to do a great movie about surveillance now. I’m still hoping one will come out.

0:45:28.6 Julian Sanchez: But even more recent, you think of the 2006 film, “The Lives of Others,” which I think is one of the best surveillance movies ever made up with The Conversation, but it’s about East Germany in the ’80s. And I think that’s partly down to the limitations of film. You can do a guy in a garret with headphones on, listening to a conversation, you can do a telephoto lens… Very naturally lends itself to film. So the voyeuristic medium of film and the surveillance lens mesh together very nicely. But alright, if you wanted to depict cinematically the idea that, well, by aggregating information from your web browsing history and metadata from your cell phone and your GPS logs and correlating that with a pattern analysis of other people with similar GPS fingerprints and who…

0:46:23.9 Julian Sanchez: That’s hard to even explain, let alone film compellingly, right? It is hard to make the… Right, the much more comprehensive reality of contemporary surveillance capabilities comprehensible, let alone filmable, legible in a visual medium.

0:46:45.7 Richard Thieme: Right. And you’re pointing toward an important point, I think, which is that The Conversation is about the technology, in part, but what you’re pointing toward today is it’s not about the technology, it’s about the layers of self-​understanding, in relationship to the geopolitical structures that we’ve built. And I will slide to the movie Blow-​Up, which Coppola said yes, he was influenced by it, it wasn’t identical, but someone thought they photographed something and spent their life blowing up the picture, and the last scene in Blow-​Up, by Antonioni, is the life we all live today, of these clowns kept coming by in a car through the movie, and at the end he comes upon the clowns pretending to play tennis.

0:47:30.9 Richard Thieme: They’re inside a court, and they have no rackets and no balls, but they’re running back and forth as if they are miming a tennis game, and one hits the ball over the fence and comes to the fence and puts out their hand for the ball. And what confronts the protagonist is, “Am I gonna play the game or not?” And he walks over, picks up the imaginary ball, throws it back, they say thank you, and the game resumes. And that is the degree of ambiguity about our own context, to which I think you’re pointing. So the story today is about what it does to us. Well, I say, I speak about the human and the machine, the impacts of these technologies, and surveillance, and intelligence, and security on us as human beings. And I can tell you that a common thing I hear from audiences is, “I don’t wanna know that. I don’t wanna live in that world. That’s your world. You stay there. I prefer to believe you’re lying to me,” say. “I can’t handle it.” And the truth is we can’t handle the truth, as Jack Nicholson famously says. It’s a tough one.

0:48:44.2 Julian Sanchez: I think one of the best… We’ve got three best scenes in The Conversation, there’s the opening sequence of the spying on the crowd, the famous final scene, where kinda gripped by paranoia, Harry is sitting with his saxophone in the remains of his demolished apartment, having torn it to shreds…

0:49:03.0 Jake Laperruque: Not knowing that the bug is in the saxophone.

0:49:05.2 Julian Sanchez: Right. [laughter]

0:49:06.3 Julian Sanchez: Right, looking for the bug, but metaphorically he’s destroyed his most intimate space, metaphorically, out of paranoia, as a microcosm for his whole character, but also the scene at the hotel where he, again, is spying and misapprehends. He thinks he’s observed the murder of the young woman that he was spying on earlier, actually, he’s dimly observed the murder of her husband, but he goes into the hotel room afterwards looking for evidence of what he’s seen.

0:49:46.2 Julian Sanchez: And there’s this wonderfully surreal moment, because we wonder how much of what we’re seeing is real, or whether we’re like maybe witnessing some kind of psychotic break on Harry’s part, because he walks in the bathroom and the place is spotless, and he goes into the bathroom, and Slavoj Zizek points out in his wonderful video essay, Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, that this is kind of in a certain dialogue with Psycho, because he looks at the shower and slides back the shower curtain and we think then we’re finally gonna see the horror, and no, there’s nothing, and he runs his finger around the drain looking for blood, which in Psycho, as we see the blood run into the drain and it pans into the eye of the corpse, it’s not there, and then he looks to the toilet, and he flushes the toilet…

0:50:34.0 Julian Sanchez: And this is this the surreal part, we’re like, “Is this really happening?” For a second. And the toilet starts just overflowing with blood. They’ve stuffed all the bloody rags, all the evidence of the murder into the toilet, and now it’s just gushing back up, bleeding. And he reacts with recoils in horror and backs away from this. And again, it’s maybe a little heavy-​handed metaphor here, but Harry throughout the film has been saying, “Look, I just want the tapes. I don’t care what they’re talking about. I don’t care what the use is made of it. That’s not my department. I take the tapes and this is… ”

0:51:08.9 Julian Sanchez: Basically, this is shit I flush away. This is waste material that I now wash my hands of. And then in that bathroom scene, this lovely, sterile, clean bathroom, suddenly everything that’s been flushed away comes bubbling back up. The blood comes pouring out onto the floor, and onto his shoes, and the thing you thought you’d flushed away is still with you, it’s coming back. Your bathroom isn’t so sterile anymore. It turns out you can’t wash your hands that easily.

[music]

0:51:40.6 Landry Ayres: And now for the time in the show where we get to share all of the other things that we’ve been enjoying with our time at home, this is Locked In. Julian, we’ll go ahead and start with you.

0:51:51.7 Julian Sanchez: Let’s see, the last television thing I binged was Umbrella Academy, which is a lovely post-​superhero show, I suppose. It’s about a dysfunctional family of powered individuals who were super heroes as kids and teenagers and now have moved on, and are reunited by the death of their mentor figure, and all broken child star-​types. I novel I read, I just read CJ… Or I’m reading CJ Cherryh’s novel Downbelow Station, which is at least so far about a conflict between earth-​based humanity and its far-​flung descendants who have moved out to the stars. And then also reading-​wise, I guess, I’ve been rereading the manuals for the Call of Cthulhu campaign: Masks of Nyarlathotep.

0:52:51.2 Julian Sanchez: Before the pandemic started I had been running for mostly some journalist friends of mine Call of Cthulhu role-​playing adventures, we had done a whole bunch of sessions, we had done a prologue, and were ready to start the probably the most famous campaign in this role-​playing universe, Masks of Nyarlathotep, which is this huge epic adventure, and then the pandemic started, so, of course, we didn’t do it. And I didn’t really wanna do it over Zoom.

0:53:20.7 Julian Sanchez: I prefer to be in person where you can act things out and you can actually give people fake newspapers and physical things that they can look at and study. But now where everyone’s vaccinated and things are opening up again, so I’m looking forward to being able to restart it and run Masks of Nyarlathotep.

0:53:38.6 Jake Laperrque,: [0:53:40.9] ____. Books, I just finished the The Lies of Locke Lamora, it’s like a fantasy book from about 15 years now. That’s a short series. Really, really good, I love that a lot, recommend. Movies, I have been watching all the Batman movies on HBO, very fun. Some of them are very fun, some are not. But looking at just the range of Batman movies is pretty good and the Nolan ones still hold up incredibly well. And then I’ll give a game I’ve been playing.

0:54:16.2 Jake Laperrque,: They just released a remastered version of Mass Effect this like classic video game series. So I’ve been playing through that steadily and going through all the adventures of Commander Shepherd. It’s actually been kind of weirdly resonant of… I never took much from this sort of idea of The Reapers is galaxy pealing, impending doom at race of robots, and this incompetent galactic government that keeps throughout the series ignoring them.

0:54:44.8 Jake Laperrque,: Now in playing this game in a post-​pandemic COVID world, I keep seeing The Reapers as covid COVID just like this Council of all these aliens being like, “It’s gonna be fine, don’t worry about it.” This feels very real in a way that it did not before and it makes me wonder, how much we’re going to sort of see COVID and the government’s responses and society’s responses to it in lots of fiction in ways we didn’t necessarily intend before.

0:55:13.0 Richard Thieme: I read a lot of non-​fiction, I’ve been reading a lot of Macintyre. I just finished Spy Among Friends. It’s an extraordinarily good book on Kim Kilbhy. I do read Charles McCarry, I think he is one of the best spying novelists we’ve got. He’s pretty good. I read James Lee Burke. I’ve read dozens of James Lee Burke books because when he’s good… He’s getting old, I shouldn’t say that, but he is. And his prose-​style is degrading into an imitation of his former excellence, but he’s tremendous at his best. Beautiful, beautiful descriptions of the West and of Louisiana. I like reading him for my guilty pleasure, and I have to admit, I’m working on my second. Just starting another book about Mobius, and I’m thrilled. The reviews from Mobius have been mostly from CIA, NSA people, basically, they’re over the top enthusiastic, because they tell me that I nailed it.

0:56:15.2 Richard Thieme: And one said that I’d created a character who was a George Smiley for our time. Which is a great compliment from a former NSA professional, because George Smiley is the great character created by John le Carre. My interests are diverse and I read a lot and I go to a lot of stuff online, essays and so on. And read James Lee Burke for pleasure.

0:56:44.7 Natalie Dowzicky: For me, so we’ve been really in the Pop N’ Locke gear lately, so the most recent book I read was 1984. And then for movies, me and my housemates have been on a horror kick and someone hadn’t seen Silence of the Lambs, so we had to do Silence of the Lambs, ’cause that’s a classic, so we started with that. One of my other housemates had never seen any of The Conjuring movies, so we started… We watched the first one and the second one thus far. I don’t know if we’re gonna do the whole Conjuring Universe, which is like a thing now, but that’s kind of… That’s what we’ve been doing for fun on the side. The book I’m reading now is Fahrenheit 451 for the next Pop & Locke recording, so kind of in between. I know it’s spoilers, but it’s fine. Normally, I read historical fiction from World War Two era, so it’s been a nice break from that for now.

0:57:44.0 Landry Ayres: I have been watching my wife played Mass Effect the Legendary Edition actually Jake. She’s been playing that and we’ve also been trading off, been playing Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, not Valhalla, not the Viking one, that’s the new one, but Odyssey. Reading-​wise, I finally I have been curious and picked up Stephen King’s, The Dark Tower series. Before I had never read any of it, so I just finished the Gunslinger, the first instance in that. Which is a… If you don’t know anything about it, is a really fun Wild West meets epic fantasy arthurian legend, but make it cowboys in the future of another dimension. It’s wild, it’s Stephen King taking everything and throwing it at the wall.

0:58:31.2 Julian Sanchez: It’s one of my all-​time favorite series. It’s so good.

0:58:34.2 Landry Ayres: It’s really good, I really like it. And it’s very well written for as wacky as it sound.

0:58:39.6 Julian Sanchez: Do you know that he actually significantly changed the ending of the first book though. So if you’re reading it, you might be reading the updated version, which I think is actually better.

0:58:48.3 Landry Ayres: I think I might be, I’ll have to double check, ’cause if not, I’ll just go back and re-​read it.

0:58:52.9 Natalie Dowzicky: Alternate ending.

0:58:54.8 Julian Sanchez: A series I looked at the scale of and thought, “I’m gonna read the Wikipedia entry.”

0:59:00.5 Landry Ayres: I got the bundled version, so I think it has seven books in it or something. I’ve only read the first one.

0:59:07.2 Julian Sanchez: He actually finished the seven book series. Shots fired, George R.R Martin.

0:59:12.6 Landry Ayres: We’ll see how far I get into it before I have to put it down, but I did like the first book a lot. I also just finished a great book of short stories called Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-​Brenyah, specifically the last story in that collection called Through the Flash. Which is about this weird and twisted sort of hyper-​violent Groundhog Day scenario, where everyone in society re-​lives the same day over and over again, following a nuclear explosion. It is wild and weird, but really beautiful too, and super cool and action-​y.

0:59:51.6 Landry Ayres: And a great full book that everyone could read, if you don’t want fiction, you want something non-​fiction is Underland a Deep Time Journey by Robert McFarland, who has written books mostly. He is sort of a nature writer and has written about mountaineering and climbing and things like that, but this is about the world beneath our feet. Cave diving, spelunking, diving into glaciers and the Catacombs of Paris, and where we bury nuclear waste and all the insane cool places that we walk above every day and what they mean. So it’s really eye-​opening and makes you look at everything in a new way when you’re outside imagining all the stuff that’s not just above you but below you.

1:00:42.0 Landry Ayres: Thanks for listening. As always, the best way to get more Pop N’ Locke content is to follow us on Twitter. You can find us at the handle @Pop N’ Locke pod. That’s Pop the letter N Locke with an E like the philosopher Pod. Make sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen as well. We look forward to unravelling your favorite show or movie. Next time.

1:01:08.3 Landry Ayres: Pop N’ Locke is produced by me, Landry Ayres and is co-​hosted by Natalie Dowzicky. We are a project of lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org. To learn more, visit us on the web at www​.lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.