Welcome to the Last American Vagabond. Joining me
today is James Corbett to discuss the GiveWP
security vulnerability that we've been mentioning on the
show and something that is quite confounding. We
were briefly talking about it before we started
and just kind of the the issues, not
just about, you know, the email addresses that
were exposed, but, you know, what else could
be going on there, the issues of transferring
people from one thing to the other and
what that does to the platform itself. And
I wanna get into a couple different things
with him about what this could mean, what
he thinks, you know, might have driven this.
But just in general, really, just kind of
an informative discussion so you guys know what's
going on. You can, you know, see the
options on the table and, you know, plan
accordingly. So, James, how are you today? I'm
doing alright. How are you doing?
You know, ups and downs. We're talking about
before. You know, every day, it's another thing.
But, you know, you almost kinda get used
to the chaotic nature of of how this
all works. But Yeah. It's it's just hard.
But, you know, again, I I think to
start on a positive note, that the reason
anything like this, assuming this is something deliberate
or not, but stuff like this is going
on that is, I think we'd set a
tie and and we're at a time where
people are starting, at least in my experience,
tell me what you think, more than I've
ever seen doing this, and you've been doing
this a lot longer than me. People are
asking questions. People are skeptical of things, like,
even in the partisanship. And I just think
that's an important thing to recognize. There's a
lot of you know, it feels bad because
I think we're at a point where the
system doesn't like what's happening, and so it's
making it feel crazy. But I'm I'm in
a weird way hopeful in how things have
been going. You know?
I hear you. And I I share that
quiet optimism because I do certainly see that
there are more people that are more aware
of more issues than I have ever seen
in the couple decades I've been doing this
at any rate. And that is something. And
we shouldn't I know it's easy to dismiss
or poo poo that or go black pill
and who cares, it doesn't matter. But I
think it does matter. And it's actually a
point I made on New World next week
last week. You know, the fact that the
UK government is so freaking out over people
talking freely online, it means that people talking
freely online does make a difference. It really
does. They
are actively
scared of this and putting up, you know,
entire
information teams, national security and online information teams
to try to coordinate against this threat of
people talking to each other online. It's because
what you say and what you think actually
does make a difference. And I think it's
easy for people to get,
you know, black pilled on this sort of
thing. Oh, it doesn't matter. Who cares? Whatever.
We can't do anything. They control everything. No.
They don't. That's enemy propaganda. And I wish
I wish more people would stop
basically taking that, that bait and start realizing
that, you know, no. What we're saying, what
we're doing, what we're thinking really does matter,
and they are scared of it. They show
it by their actions.
Well and I've been I totally agree. And
what I've been seeing lately, you know, how
do you like, how does it not feel
like, look at it this way.
Despite the power, the money, the resources, the
influence, the censorship of every platform, the, you
know, the financial censorship, everything,
we're still getting through. You know what I
mean? Like, that's powerful to think about. Like,
where the information is still forcing its way
through and they're still trying to censor it.
It's just you know? So that's a win,
however you slice that, even if we're struggling
and suffering to get it out, you know.
But but James, didn't you know that we
are the ones that are black filled. Right?
So
Oh, right. Oh, I forgot. Yeah. Yeah. We're
the ones. Just because we don't believe in
Lord savior Trump or something. Right? Yeah. Yeah.
Which, by the way, many of them are
now on that same page. You know, it's
just funny how that works, but different conversation.
But, yeah, I do I do definitely think
that that's where we are, you know. And
so that's what I wanna get into, not
to start, but that, you know, wondering about
where why you think this might happen before
we get to that.
So let let's just start with you breaking
this down for people on how, you know,
how you came about this, what you found,
what the implications are, and then we can
jump into some of the parts as we
go through.
Okay. Alright. So,
I don't know, you know, the relative level
of web development of any people out there,
but corporatereport.com
is my website. It runs off of the
servers that have been graciously provided to me
by Euro VPS.
And so
this website is built on,
WordPress
CMS, a content management system, which for people
who don't know, again, there are different types
of content management systems. A very common one
is WordPress. There are again, this can confuse
people. There's wordpress.com
versus wordpress.org.
Wordpress.com
is so very recently.
Yeah. Yeah. It's a it's a separate thing.
Wordpress.org is the open source
version of it. Wordpress.com
is hosted by WordPress,
an organization,
etcetera etcetera. Anyway, long story short, I use
the open source version of this. It's extremely
common. Think of your favorite websites.
Most of them probably
operate on WordPress. But the thing about WordPress
is, so on the back end, there are
all these plugins that are developed by different
developers
and presumably
go through
security checks and what have you. Also, generally,
the source code is posted to GitHub and
other places so people can go through it
and check for security vulnerabilities themselves,
if you are coding inclined.
But so there's a bunch of WordPress plugins
that you can get that will help your
website operate in different ways. One of them
that I was using,
for for about a year and a half
from about 2024 until a couple of weeks
ago was GiveWP.
And this is a a donation
management plug in. So the reason
I was using that, it was recommended by
my developer, Harley at Expand Designs. He liked
using this particular one, for a number of
reasons. One, it did make it,
the the sign up process essentially a lot
easier. I was using just direct,
like PayPal or Stripe buttons that people would
click and then they'd get shunted off. But
this one tied in directly with the membership
system that's on the back end of the
WordPress database, etcetera. So it made it all
connect very easily and also allowed for people
to enter,
which a lot of people ask for me
for some reason, they want a specific link.
No. I want to give you this much
money. And all I had was for, like,
you can donate this much or you can
donate this much. And I kept getting people,
no. I want to donate this specific amount.
So anyway, this plug in helped to do
all of that. And it worked
fine until it didn't. Specifically,
Thursday,
I wanna say Thursday, July 24,
there was,
I'm not sure if that's exactly when the
update happened, but there was an update that
I updated the plugins because you have to
update the plugins as you go because there's
always security patches and things that are happening.
So I updated the plugins as usual.
And lo and behold, unbeknownst to me or
literally anyone else in the world at that
time, there was a vulnerability, a strange vulnerability
in this update
that took all of the information that had
been entered into the back end of that
had been entered into this membership sign up
form at some point.
Names, specifically names and email addresses and for
some reason started printing that information. All all
of the people who had ever put their
name and email address into this form, printing
that information
into the source code of the website.
And again, for people who aren't developers or
whatever, you couldn't see the email addresses on
the screen. It wasn't there for you to
see. But it was in the source code
that was being put out by the the
website that
what you see is constructed from. And for
no
discernible reason in the universe,
suddenly it started putting all these donor names
and email addresses in the source code of
the website. And again And you said it
was just through that just through the membership
sign up, but not all of them, but
just through that sign up. Right? The ones
with the Right. So for I again, I
don't know how other people did it. But
for me,
I had had members signing up, you know,
years before. I have people signing up through
Substack and other places that never touched that
membership form. So they their email addresses were
not exposed. But anyone who had used that
particular form had entered their information in there.
For whatever reason, it started coughing it up.
And again, I didn't know. No one saw
it at that time until,
it was I think maybe Sunday the twenty
seventh or Monday the twenty eighth, somewhere in
that time frame, I got an email from
someone who said, hey, I have an email
alias.
You know, whatever. CorbettReports123blahblah
dot com. So for people who don't know,
an email alias is a sort of not
a fake email address, but in a sense,
it's a it's an email name that you
create. Like a burner phone. Like a burner
phone. Yeah. It's a burner email address that
you create when you sign up to something.
You can sign up with a specific email
alias for that one, and that points back
to your real email. But the point is
when you start getting, for example, spam,
you'll know, oh, it's coming to that particular
address that I used to sign up for
that particular website. So you know, oh, they've
sold my info or somebody's, you know, hacked
it or whatever. So I started getting emails,
multiple emails from multiple users of mine who
did this, who said, hey, I'm getting spammed
my corporate report email alias.
I think you
know what's going on, but it happened to
several people. So, like, okay. There's clearly a
leak here somewhere, which began this frantic search
for, like, what is be how is this
happening? And eventually
found in the source code, eventually. And I
will credit where credit is due. I have
a user called, Frood
Chresteville, who I've interviewed actually on SolutionsWatch, for
example.
So my listeners might be familiar with him.
He was the one who managed to find
that in the source code and figure out,
oh, it's from the Scout get WP plug
in. So big props to Crude. And he
was, as far as I can tell, literally
the first person on the planet to figure
this out. And this was,
at this point, I think it was Tuesday
the twenty ninth. So it was, like, five
days into this update.
Finally, someone had discovered it, and it happened
to be a corporate report user.
And so
then begins the Odyssey. So, of course, immediately
upon discovering that, literally, the second that was
discovered, okay, I disabled the GiveWP plugin. Because
at that point, there was no update. You
know, they hadn't seen it. They hadn't patched
it. GiveWP
didn't know that their own plug in was
doing this. And it wasn't just Corbett Report.
It was literally every
website that used GiveWP
that updated to 4.6
o. And I don't know exactly how many
that is, but I did find a website
that, said there was something like 46,178
whatever websites that use the plugin generally.
How many of them updated to 4.6? Who
knows? But some significant number. And I did
personally confirm a number of websites. I saw
several that I confirmed. Oh, yeah. There's there's
email addresses in the source code. There's email
addresses in the source code. So it was
a it's a big deal. And the one
of the interesting things about this to me
is that,
okay, I get the average person just out
there, like, maybe doesn't know or care or
understand the implications of this. But, like, surely
these, you know, the hacker news websites and
TechDirt and places like that would be interested
in a story like this. This is a
pretty big thing. It's not
it's not as big as it could have
been. There was no financial information or passwords
or anything like that. But it is names
and email addresses, specifically of donors.
And I just I can't imagine there are
many organizations that are would be totally blase
about, oh, okay. You know, here's the names
and email addresses of all all the donors
who've ever donated
to me. Especially in independent media where people
are already
very, you know, concerned about their privacy, rightfully
so, and, like, who you know, what three
letter agencies might be interested in knowing who's
watching the last American Vagabond or corporate or
what have you. So it's it's a big
deal. But I only saw and I only
found one news article on one website that
covered this. And they were only covering it
because there was,
what I believe is an ad blocker of
some sort called Pie Hole. I don't use
it myself. But anyway, they discovered that it
had happened to them. And they had
inadvertently leaked something like 30,000
email addresses. So they were freaking out about
this because they take their privacy very seriously.
And so they did a press release about
this. And as a result, it got covered
by, as I say, exactly one
one news article that I've found out about
this whole situation. So I don't know where
you wanna take it from there, but it's
it's to me, it's a crazy story in
a number of different ways. Well, even just
today, as I'm getting ready, I'm looking at
the story and and, you know, researching just
the general idea of it. And there's I
I don't I honestly don't see any mainstream
platforms or like you're talking about. Like, it
it like, to your point, I mean, it's
yes. It's just emails and names. And I
shouldn't even say just. It's it's not just
about that. It's the vulnerability.
Right? So who knows if there's even more
than that that we don't know about. Right?
And so the point that nobody's talking about
that is really telling to me. I mean,
what do you what is your what is
your kinda gut about that? Because I wanted
to think see, get your thoughts about, you
know, whether this because so you said, what,
40 the number you said was 45,000, something
like that. 46,000 websites. So so again, put
that in perspective for people who don't know.
Yeah. There might be like again, WordPress is
an open source thing. Any developer can develop
any plugin they want. And so there's I'm
sure there's a million plugins out there and
some of them have like, you know, 10
installations or a 100 installations, like Mickey Mouse
kind of things. But this is not a
Mickey Mouse thing. 46,000
websites.
And even one of those websites alone, the
pie hole one, had 30,000
users' emails exposed. So
we're talking hundreds of thousands, millions of emails.
Who knows? I've been here. Yeah. Email addresses.
Yeah. And what what I what I mean
though is that is that in it, like,
comparing that to, I don't know, something that
Fox News uses. Right? Like, it's not or
whatever. You know, something large. That's that's I
think, in the eyes of somebody who might
do this for a re like, it seems
like small potatoes or something like that. Not
in the sense of how many were leaked.
That's a big deal. But, I mean, like,
I get what I'm getting at is why
focus on GiveWP
if you if this was an effort? And
and then I'm what I'm kind of wondering
if your thoughts on whether or not, like
so to me, this seemed like something that
was created
for the kind of person that can't you
know, it's it's like a a little bit
of a circumvention of the normal processes. Right?
And so I would just I wonder if
this was like a trap. You know what
I mean? Like just to Yeah. What do
you think about that or just the possibility
of that today in general? So okay. So
GiveWP's
official explanation is that they were updating a
legacy database system that they'd been using since,
I would guess,
for years. And they were updating that to
a completely different
format. Mhmm. And in that process, they had
to basically reconfigure all sorts of things in
the back end. And wouldn't you know it,
lo and behold, oops, we kinda did the
wrong thing and that happened. But we they
fixed it right away as soon as they
found out within twenty four hours of finding
out about it. But to me, first of
all, their response is crazy because their their
official response, which I've linked to from their
web website,
actually talks more about, oh, don't worry. We
fixed this so that now people can report
vulnerabilities to us secretly rather than out in
the open so people won't see them. That
seems to be their main point.
It's crazy to me. But also, I mean,
just the fact that it had to be
some third party person, in this case, a
corporate report member who managed to find this
and then report it to them, that should
be kind of a big deal in and
of itself because that means they are not
checking their own updates for these kinds of
critical security flaws. And a true shout out
to the and this is just this goes
beyond even just your, you know, fantastic audience.
But, like, this is something that I try
to I've emulated in in my platform is
just the idea of, you know, open source
investigation. Like, I love that. That's what I
was saying earlier. I just really think that's
worth noting on that that's what you've cultivated.
Like, this group of people that are aren't
just passive, you know, that are out there
looking and checking. I think that's fantastic, and
I think that's, you know, one of the
reasons why where this direction is right now
is making power structures uncomfortable. But, what's funny
is it says what's worse is that we
didn't communicate it well and we're owning that.
I thought that was funny. You know, like,
wait until we that sort of retro
after the fact doesn't really make as much
impact. But And specifically what they're talking about
there is the GitHub,
thread that was opened
about this issue that was what brought it
to their attention. Right? That one. And in
that one, they're like, oh, okay. Well, we
took care of it. And so
what? It's it's only been like four hours
since you let us know about it. So
what's the big deal, guys? Why are you
getting all busy? So I think they're trying
to cover their tracks on that particular and
that's why they say, oh, now we've opened
this new channel that people can report bugs
to us directly. You don't have to go
to, like, places like GitHub, you know, where
Yeah. See
that we've made a major major security violation
here. Because if it weren't for the Gorbachev
report and that computer website and and the
last American Vagabond
and Pie Hole, I guess, would anyone even
know that this happened? I mean, I yeah.
Because I've I have heard from all a
lot of the people that were unfortunately, their
emails addresses were exposed who said, yeah. I
have definitely seen an uptake in spam since
this happened.
But for everyone see, this is another great
thing about the audiences that we've cultivated is
that people not only know about email aliases,
but use them. Right. Precisely for things like
this so that they can come and tell
me, hey. Your website is leaking data. Wow.
Thank you. Awesome. And if it weren't for
that,
who knows? We Right. How would you ever
know? Oh, I'm getting more spam than usual.
It must be because there's some plug in
on the back end of corporate report or
or whatever. Right?
You know? Well, so so in in regard
to so we're at at the moment, it
has been updated. Right? So they what at
least what we're being told is it was
only emails, names, and I think the ID
number associated with the the donor. You know?
But other than that, no passwords, no and
they have updated. So at the moment, they're
claiming there's no more risk. But, you know,
where do you feel like that's gonna be
going? Like, do you have a may I
ask you, like, point blank or just specific?
Do you think GiveWP
should be not just responsible because they clearly
weren't looking, but, like, you feel there's any
more potential?
Yeah. Again, do you think this is something
that's patched up in that regard that only
is you know, was it laziness in your
mind? Do you feel like there's more to
the story? Just, I guess, to make it
broad. Okay.
100
speculation here. Right. It's like I do not
have any inside skinny. But,
my web developer was at least contemplating the
idea that this was some sort of deliberate
sabotage from within. It's at least a possibility
because,
certainly, when we discovered it, I mean, my
jaw dropped when I figured out, oh, it's
this plug in is literally printing it to
the source code. Like, again, that is not
a minor thing. Yeah. That's that's the most
essentially, that is the most sensitive information that
GiveWP specifically is collecting because all the financial
information is going through Stripe or PayPal or
the payment gateway. So I don't think GiveWP
even has that information.
Essentially, the most sensitive information it's getting is
names and email addresses, and it just barfed
it all up. That's But how did that
even happen too? Like, how does that end
up I mean, I'm not an expert in
this field in in regard to, you know,
coding in general, but Yeah. Printing the email
addresses on the source code, like, is that
do you know enough about it to whether
know whether that's something that's even like, how
does that happen accidentally? That seems very I
am not enough of a coder to understand
if that is likely to just sort of
randomly happen.
Again, according to them, it's something that was
supposed to be happening on the back end,
but oops, it got printed and basically published
to the websites.
But I don't know. Could it have happened,
you know, just stupidity and incompetence and whatever?
I think it's possible. But could it have
been some sort of deliberate thing on the
inside? Maybe that's possible too. Yeah.
And I, again, I had heard, but I
don't I haven't been able to confirm this,
that there was some sort of
some sort of management
swap or takeover or something that was happening
with GiveWP and there might have been some
disgruntled employees. I haven't been able to verify
any of that. So
if that's true, that might add another layer
to this story. I don't know. But anyway,
is it possible that this was some sort
of deliberate thing? Yeah. It's certainly possible.
The other part that I wanted to talk
about is the spam aspect of it. You
know? Is it you know? Like, thinking in
a broader sense, like, I wonder like, is
like, here's what's interesting. The fact that this
took your audience to show that, like, this
the the the I guess, the reason it's
even being discussed by us and literally nobody
else,
it's possible there's plenty more of these happening
that aren't being highlighted, aren't being discussed. So
my my worry in that is that so
one here's what I'm dealing with every day.
And I I I we were laughing before
we went on that In Corbett's video about
this, he makes a joke about, you know,
the emails he sent out about this, but
it probably went to spam. Literally, the one
he sent me went to spam. I showed
him today a little spam marker on it.
It's like this is just funny. The point
is that in my world right now, I
barely I almost I'm almost gravitating away from
email in general because it's so impossible for
me unless I know what I'm looking for.
And even then, half the time, I don't
even see it in spam when I look
for it. Blah blah blah. It's just so
muddled together, and I don't think that's by
accident, accident, personally. I think TLAB has been
blacklisted in all these places. My point is
that it gets to a point to where
one of the most used
communication tools starts to become Yep. Hard to
use. And I wonder if there might some
level of that direction because, you know, like,
some people might even care. They're like, well,
I already get a bunch of spam. So
we'll go in the No. I've I've heard
that from a lot of people too. Yeah.
My email has been leaked many times. Whatever.
You know? So, yeah, unfortunately, that is true.
And, yeah, again, for people who've never tried
to maintain a mail server
Mhmm. Man, just trying to get it,
you know, a compliance with all the million
rules so that you don't get marked as
spam is Right. An ongoing
struggle. And that's just me doing just regular
sort of email. I mean, I'm not out
there trying to email, you know, thousands of
people at a time. I use Substack as
my email list essentially. And so they have
to handle the problem of sending out emails
to thousands of people at a time, you
know. However,
again, it's a pay for play system like
everything else. If you're a big if you're
a big organization, a big company, a big
corporation, you can probably afford all the the
dedicated IT team to keep your mail server
functioning in a way that you can
send emails out on that scale, but I'm
not. So, yeah, the big irony here. Yeah.
The spammers, of course, scraping websites at all
times immediately found us and immediately started spamming
the email addresses. But me sitting here having
I'm going through and informing every I'm emailing
every single person whose email was exposed,
and I have to do it one by
one because I'm not gonna send out a
mass email that's going to end up in
people's spam if it gets delivered at all.
And And I'm not going to take all
those email addresses and put them into some
other, you know, newsletter service or something in
order to send out a mass email because,
again, I'm not gonna give people's information out
a second way. Right. But this is the
second potential exposure.
So
so I'm doing it the manual way. And,
you know, that's that's the difference. That's that
is exactly the whole dynamic here. Again, if
you're a big corporation that has dedicated IT
teams, you can you can handle things like
this a lot easier than us fly by
an independent independent people who are doing it
literally by ourselves or in my case, I
have a web developer, but it's still it's
a huge battle. Right. And that's that's kind
of the one the the kind of extended
extension of the point is that, you know,
it's it's just it's it's it's not designed.
Like, it's almost meant to be I mean,
it is. It's two steps back, one step
forward, or rather, I guess, two steps forward,
one step back if we're making progress, but
it's clear that it's, you know, just overly
complicated. And so where I come into it,
I didn't even hear about this until,
Brock had to reach out to me because
I didn't see James' email. Same thing, by
the way, different email. And ended up seeing
this after it had already updated to force
the the new one where they claim there's
no issue. And so I at the moment,
at least as it seems, I'll I'll be
talking to James more about this after. Doesn't
seem that I I can't even access the
emails that were manipulated. You know? So it's
just this I you know, where do you
go forward from here, James? Like, with especially
with where you know? So right now, especially
with TLAP having a huge portion of donations
coming through here, you know, like, what do
you recommend people go to? You know, other
than the things they already have, like the
options. Like, is there another avenue that you'd
recommend for somebody? You know? Or what what
do you think? I mean, there's no you
know, this is the big
problem
of online communication at all. If you want
to do this,
how are you going to do it in
a way that isn't going to expose one
of your email addresses to the potential vulnerabilities?
And I've had a lot of responses from
people, very kind responses from my listeners who
say, hey, I appreciate the integrity of you
admitting this and and getting in touch with
me. It shows that my trust in you
is not misplaced or whatever. And that's great.
I I truly hope I can continue to
earn that kind of trust because I truly
do not want things like this to happen.
But actually, it goes to show kind of
the opposite point that even if you do
trust and even if you validly trust the
person Right. With your information because you know
they're not gonna sell it or they're not
trying to leak it out, there's still a
thousand points of potential vulnerability that work, you
know, 99.999%
of the time, but that one time suddenly
done. Right? So yes, there's so many vulnerabilities
out there that you can't possibly
really contain them all. I guess the only
things you can do is,
basically disconnect from the Internet
altogether, which, hey, maybe that is a solution
for some people. And if you can do
it, I wouldn't I wouldn't try to dissuade
people from doing that. Right. But for most
people who are already online in some way
and who get information online, what do you
do?
I have, for example, a couple of years
ago, I had a solutions watch that seems
incredibly pertinent now, which is just called salting
your data. And for people who don't know
about that concept,
the idea is, yeah, websites and various places,
they're always asking for your name and email
and birthday and next of kin and whatever
else. And 99% of the time, it's not
like you're signing some kind of legal contract
that you're gonna be hauled
into court for, you know, you told me
your birth date was January
'8.
You're you're you're you're lying.
Not yet, anyway. Yeah. Well, that's the point.
Right? So so yeah. Exactly. Right. Actually, that's
a good point. Because when I made that
episode, the idea of online age verification was
still a, you know, pipe dream kind of
thing. But now it's a very, very real
conversation, especially for people in The UK and
elsewhere. Yeah. But but the point at that
time was if you don't have to give
your real, true, accurate, valid information, don't do
it. And I would say, yeah. Well, when
I was using that GiveWP form,
again, don't give me your name. Like Yes.
Whatever. I'm I'm Arthur b
Blobovir. Whatever. Who cares? Make something up. I
don't need your name.
I do need a valid email address that
will work and so that I can contact
you and that you can sign in and
all that kind of stuff. But
even then, again, so that's why the very
first Solutions Watch after this whole kerfuffle was
on email aliases. How to set up an
email alias. So I talked to, Hakeem Anwar
of of of our phone. Right? Because again,
this is a simple
thing that actually only takes a few minutes,
really. And he showed demonstrated exactly how to
do it on on the screen there. So
it can be done and it should be
done. And again, that's one of the things
I'm so glad about is I have the
audience that, you know, actually, I have a
fair few number of people who actually did
this, but hopefully more now. People who know
to set up an email address. Why? An
email alias. Why? Precisely four things like this.
At the very least, number one, you know
that when you're you start getting the spam
to that email alias, you start knowing, okay,
so something happened with that website or they're
selling my data or something. And two, it's
like a burner email. You can just delete
that email alias and boom,
spam problem gone. Just never give out your
core actual real email address and then you'll
be okay. Right? Yeah. I mean, it's just
about privacy. You know, it's it's one of
the most obvious things in the world right
now that it's we're going in a rapidly
in a direction where privacy will be a
thing of the past or at least that's
the effort. You know? And I think that
one step in the right direction, there's probably
a thousand other ways that this very thing
could be done in all aspects of our
life, you know, but this is something that
is still one of the largest tools people
use to communicate. So, why not keep yourself
private in that regard? Where so, in in
the overlap to this, to to, you know,
kind of, I guess, we can finish on
this point,
you know, where the the vulnerability
aspect of it. You know? It's clear that
there's
a lot around this. Like, to the where
this world's going. You know? Technocracy,
whatever whatever word you see, we all see
in some ways what's being built to the
Palantir
and all the surveillance. You know? So where
do you see this, you know, in a
broader sense, like, what this is about? Like,
right now go ahead. No. No. It's just
such an excellent, important, pertinent question about this
because yes, this is a big deal, certainly
for me, for you, for other sites that
were affected by it.
But in the bigger picture, what does this
mean? And again, one of the interesting and
perhaps disturbing aspects of this is how many
responses I've gotten from people. You know, whatever.
My email's been out there so much, and
I get spam all the time anyway. So
whatever. Maybe just the solidarity with you, really,
is probably what you're saying. I I get
it. And I I understand why people are
like that, and they're, they're just basically saying,
oh, don't worry about it too much, James.
Okay. Thank you. I appreciate that. But the
bigger point is exactly as you're saying, like
email is becoming
a more and more troublesome, bothersome thing that
is not nearly as useful as it used
to be. And I get why everyone's on
group chats and things these days. I don't
use any of that stuff, which makes me
incredibly
a, an old fuddy duddy and b, hard
to contact. So sorry Ryan, I know. I
should get with the times. But,
it it is it does seem
again, maybe not this particular thing, maybe, but
in the bigger picture of the all of
these leaks and vulnerabilities and problems that happen,
they all add up to the
essentially the the the growing,
I'm trying not to use that word that
you wouldn't use on air.
The and badification
of
of services like email and other things that
can be genuinely useful,
genuinely helpful tools that are becoming more and
more basically not worth your people's time.
And it's not, of course, just email, but
that's one aspect of this. And what so
what ultimately
becomes the solution to this? You know, as
as Hakim was making the point on the
solutions watch I just did about email aliases.
You know, Yahoo,
oops leaked whatever, however many hundreds of millions
of people's data and there was, I I
can't remember which other one he cited with
credit card data and passports and things like
this. And now,
now what what are we doing?
The online age verification
laws that obviously just got passed in Britain,
they're working on it in Europe. I covered
this on New World Next Week a couple
of years ago. We are entering the age
of online age verification.
How do you do that? Well increasingly,
you know, take a selfie of you holding
your government issued ID and whatever.
And you better believe
there's gonna be, you know, the big scandal,
the next big scandal. Oops. One of those
kind of companies got hacked. And they said
they were deleting your selfies, but actually they're
all there and so now all of your
data is gone.
You you know where this ultimately leads with
enough security
breaches and data breaches and privacy breaches. You
know, sorry guys, the only way to do
this now is some sort of biometric digital
item. Right? The only way you can do
it is you gotta scan your fingerprint and
eyeball to get on the internet. That is
where this is ultimately heading and that's why
I think
we need to,
we need to present the alternative to all
of this which
again is to the extent possible
using privacy protecting tools and salting your data
and email aliases and everything else we can
think of to make it so that people
are not putting their
personal lives online. Right. You know? And then
again, that's harder and harder for people to
do. Oh, I'm already online over my work
and whatever and blah blah blah. But to
the extent that it is possible to
stop
feeding this beast, we have to stop feeding
this beast. Absolutely. I mean, as you're saying,
this this one thing could be part of,
you know, even or just used, but very
well could be an, you know, multifaceted effort
to drive the idea that these things are
no longer secure. You know, and which they're
not in many cases. You know, it's one
of the one of the main things here
that that and this and more and more,
I'm seeing autentics pop up in these things.
It Twitter is still using it despite the
fact that he he publicly said he would
stop using it and it's still there, which
if they don't know out there listening, it's
an Israeli I mean, it's literally tied into
Israeli intelligence, not through some side thing. It's
a major part of Israeli intelligence, and it
is being used right now on Twitter to
at least for some people. Like, I actually
saw an interesting point where somebody showed me
what the one that came up for them
was different. To me, I do whatever. I
check it all the time. It still says,
check here to approve that Authentics can take
your biometrics
and hold on to them for a period
of time. And they at this moment, they
still don't even need that for signing for
Twitter, yet yet it's happening. And I saw
it for other platforms popping up. And it's
not just about Israel, but it's about where
it's going and the scooping up of this
and the scooping of all the data they
can get their hands on from everything, US.
You know, it's like the the Palantir element
of it all. Like, it's very rapidly going
in this direction. Yep. You know, when do
you think that shoe is gonna drop? You
know, the idea where it's, like, not just
digital ID, but, like, the you know, this
is the new norm kind of a thing
in regard to going into a store, you
know, this kind of stuff, like China. Do
you think that that's close in this country?
Yeah.
Well, I have so I've been talking about
this, on New World Next Week with Pilato
for Mhmm. I don't know, fifteen years now.
So people are probably sick of hearing about
it, but I truly I really do think
that the stage has been set for the
digital Pearl Harbor.
I think at this point, there still needs
to be that punch in the Facebook as
Pilato says. Something that's actually, that we we
need to update that because no one uses
Facebook anymore. Right? But Yeah. But the point
is, like,
I still feel they need that shocking
shock and awe moment of, oh my god,
you know, look what just happened to get
everybody on board. I think they're at for
the last couple of decades, they've been trying
the inching towards just more and more and
more and more putting, you know, more of
this normalizing this sort of stuff. But I
still at this point, if they wanted to
do it tomorrow to get everybody to have
to, like, face scan or whatever to get
online, I think there'd still need to be
that big event.
Maybe not. Maybe not because as we are
seeing again right now with The UK. I
mean, to get onto
Reddit,
I guess, on The UK or at least
certain subreddits. People are, like, having to
show their government ID or take selfies or
whatever.
For Reddit? Like, what is going on? And,
of course, this is about the normalization of
essentially giving up all your personal data in
order to access websites.
And,
again, I just see so clearly where this
is going. There there's gonna be some kind
of big breach, some kind of amazing like,
oh my god, you know, all these people's
records just got leaked and is all their
data and everything.
So we need now the digital ID. That's
that's
it's so obvious where this is setting and
that's where all the infrastructure is. Again, like,
it's like back in whatever 2009 when I
did the medical martial law podcast. It's not
because I'm some sort of Nostradamus. It's because
they've been by that point, already setting up
the infrastructure for medical marshal law for at
least a a decade in terms of the
institutional
legal infrastructure for it. Well, now they've been
working on the digital ID infrastructure for a
couple of decades. I remember part reporting back
in, I think, like, 2008
or something like that about digital,
driver's license for the Internet.
Right. Right. Was a phrase that was being
slung around by Microsoft,
VPs and people like that talking about, you
know, we're gonna need some sort of driver's
license for the Internet. I remember the Obama
White House was doing trial runs of government
issued digital ID back in 2012
or whenever it was. So this has been
in the works for a long time. The
only question I mean, it's not a technical
question at this point. The only question is
how do they get people to adopt it
on mass? And they're trying it already in
The UK and The EU and places like
that. Maybe, I'd like to think people in
America are still stubborn enough and still have
at least the idea of sort of freedom
and privacy and stuff.
Maybe there's enough of that that it would
require a spectacular false flag. But if that's
what it'll require,
do we really think they wouldn't do it?
Yeah. Right. And I think both our audiences
are already well aware. That's the most likely
thing in this conversation. But the last thing
on last thing. You know, when you say
for those that may not know, which is
probably few and far between for both of
our audiences,
but digital Pearl Harbor,
you know, what we end with that. What
do you mean by that, and what would
that look like? However you wanna go with
that. Cause I think that's important. Yeah. Let
me just on this. It was the Half
Moon Bay,
Technology Conference. I think it was 2007
or something along those lines. I've cited it
so many times that now I forget these
specifics. And it was Lawrence Lessig,
who's the Harvard,
IP
lawyer,
whatever law professor guy, who was talking about
a conversation that he had. And it was,
I believe, shortly
after nine eleven
and, the Patriot Act and all of that.
And he was talking to Richard Clark,
the ex,
security intelligence czar of,
Clinton and then Bush,
who was the intelligence czar
at the time of nineeleven,
who, by the way, later years later told,
Duffy and Novoshelski
about that story about how he was being
deliberately
deceived by Tenet at the CIA about what
they knew about,
Al Al Hazmi and Al Midar Hazmi and
Al Midar. Whatever.
You know, the nine eleven hijacker Patsy's. Anyway
Right.
Whole other sort of digression there. But Lawrence
Lessig was talking about this conversation he had
with Richard Clark where he said, like, so,
you know, do you have some sort of
Patriot Act equivalent for
the, you know, some sort of Internet event?
And Richard Clark said, yeah. Of course. It's
on the shelf. It's ready to go. In
the event of the, you know, I Pearl
Harbor, there will be the I Patriot Act.
Mhmm. And they have it all, you know,
that in the same way that they didn't
just come up with the Patriot Act, all
several 100 pages of densely worded, you know,
legalese referring to all these different sections of
US code and everything. They didn't just whip
that up in a few weeks. That was
ready to go. And in fact, Biden actually
bragged at one point about having essentially, you
know,
not written it. Of course, he didn't write
anything, but having essentially tried to forward it
back in the Clinton days. Anyway, so that
was already on the shelf and ready to
go, of course. And then when nine eleven
happened, boop. Here's the Patriot Act. And, oh,
by the way, there's this anthrax thing, so
you're gonna close down Congress. So you better
vote now, and you no time to read
the bill. Just pass it.
Well,
that's exactly the blueprint.
And Richard Clark even said it and admitted
it. Yes. There is an IPatriate Act that's
ready to go in the event of the
next I Pearl Harbor.
So we know this already exists and who
knows what's in it? I mean, Lawrence Lessig
never if he asked Richard if if Clark
said anything about it, we don't know. But,
so who knows exactly what's in it? But
you you gotta believe there's gonna be essentially
the crackdown on the Internet, which of course
powers
that shouldn't be have been lusting after essentially
since the Internet
or the World Wide Web came along and
started offering us this Gutenberg two point o.
Now
because I have studied the bigger picture of
the history of mass media and the media
matrix and my online,
mass media course,
I know
that ultimately,
censorship is not gonna win out over the
technology.
That's not how it worked with Gutenberg one
point o. Yes. Absolutely. Kings
and popes and tyrants of various sorts
tried their best
to essentially put the cork on the bottle
of the Gutenberg revolution,
but they were not successful at that ultimately.
It worked for a time in various places,
but it didn't work forever. And, you know,
licenses to print
to run a printing press and things like
this, it worked for times, but not forever
because you can't really put the cork on
that technology once it's out there.
So I'd like to think that this Gutenberg
two point o, yeah, they'll try to censor
and keep people,
off of these platforms and things, but there
will always be cracks in the system.
Ways around it. And, you know,
Quartle and whatever, a million other ways of
essentially using the Internet for what it's actually
supposed to be for peer to peer connection
will exist, will continue to be developed, will
not easily be suppressible,
and to some extent maybe even the powers
that shouldn't be will recognize the utility of
such platforms and will leave cracks in the
system so that you'll be a a pirate,
you know, illegal person if you try to
communicate in ways that aren't approved. But they'll
always leave back doors like that open for
their intelligence cutouts and what have you as
well. So
so, you know, like drug running and things,
like, if they actually wanted to stop drug
running into The US, they could, but they
don't because, of course, the CIA, you know,
funds their black budget with it and things
like that. Right? So Yep. The same thing.
Bad. You know? Yeah. Like crypto and other
things. Like, yeah, if they really wanted to
absolutely crack down on it, they could, but
they don't because they wanna use it for
their own purposes.
So I think those those cracks always exist.
You'll always be a pirate, you know, and
on the run from the law if you're,
you know, in those spaces.
But those will always exist. So I don't
think they'll actually be able to cork the
bottle. Yeah. But then again, also as people
know from the Gutenberg one point o revolution
and what ultimately happened, the thing that ultimately
happened is that the technology became so capital
intensive and so, you know, so out of
the reach of just an average mod pod
to run their own personal printing press. Suddenly
you've got these corporations running these massive newspaper
syndicates
and it gets corporatized
and then you get the oligopoly
and then you have the gatekeepers and all
of that. That's I think probably the model
that may work for Gutenberg two point o.
And we've already seen it to some extent
as everybody starts to pile on to the
same handful of websites.
The Internet now is YouTube and Instagram and
Meta and X and whatever.
That is the Internet to a lot of
people. And to the extent that that's that
SIOP has worked, it's, well, that's that's the
end of the Internet revolution to whatever extent
it it existed.
Luckily, our audiences,
obviously,
are not, you know, totally in the grip
of that, psyop, but a lot of people
are. Yeah. And, well, hopefully, they're out there
doing which I know they are, doing the
same thing, talking to people, sharing information, which
is the whole point. Right? I'll include this
since you mentioned, you know, the of the
word. I I what the other term for
another time, is
where we're going in the future. You know,
it's clear this is kind of the direction.
And I'll I'll leave you with,
you know, I mean, you you've mentioned this
to yourself, but, what we just discussed there
at the end, let's not forget that, you
know, you got PNAC and, you know, the
new nine eleven, we've also had Trump.
Who in his first term made it clear.
We need another nine eleven like event. He
said that on record, You know? And so
it's not new. Or what I forget her
name off the top of my head, that
blonde lady in front of congress that kinda
said the same thing. You know, it's clear
that, you know, I think that's what it's
pointing to. And whether that's a written out
plan that the current administration is planning out
or it's something that's on the shelf somewhere,
it's very clear that there is a building
momentum that way. And so, you know, things
like this is you know, if you're out
there thinking this is a small thing, like,
recognize that this is, I think, one part
of a much larger thing happening, even if
it's just, you know, random things popping up
that are being used. So, thank you, James,
for, you know, forcing this into the conversation
that people don't seem to wanna talk about
because I do think it's important that we
do our best to make sure these things
are tied up and that we're you know,
privacy, it has to matter. Don't don't get
that mindset out there where it's like, well,
like James was saying, they already got this.
They already have my phone. You don't know
that for sure. Right? You do everything you
can where you can. That's how it is.
Also, yeah. Also, let me address that because,
yeah. Sometimes, again, people kinda get black pilled
or doom pilled on this sort of thing
and just go, well, you know, they're gonna
find it one way or another.
But even if that's true, even if the
NSA or, you know, whoever is looking at
the trunk line of the Internet truly can
see everything and monitoring you and trying to
expose you. Okay. Even if that's the case,
there are still just garden variety criminals and,
you know, people that you should still be
protecting your data from. Right? Good point. Yeah.
Right. So Hackers and you know Exactly. So
just be careful as much as you can
be. And let me also clarify,
yes, I stopped using the UWP
MWP, plugin. I have a new plugin that's
managing the membership
form on the back end right now. So
I have a new membership sign up thing
at mycorporatereport.com.
If people are, you know,
reticent about the all of this now, I
understand. But if you want to continue to
support corporatereport.com,
again, I am doing my level best to
make sure that it this absolutely never happens
again and I'm implementing new checks for every
time I run an update to plugins and
other such things that Right. I think might
be a good way of, at least determining
if something is leaking. But anyway, I have
a new membership form, a new sign up
thing. So if people want, they can go
to corporatereport.com/members
and support the work. And hopefully,
again, support the independent media that's fighting the
uphill battle against the the Goliaths of the
world. Yep. You know, and, honestly, I would
just recommend, at least for me, I don't
know if you I I believe you probably
have something of the same. Go go snail
mail. Go through the direction. That's that's where
at least I'm at. A lot of people
are going that direction. You know, that's how
you know, ultimately, I think it's important that
if this you know, don't be scared away.
Keep supporting James, right? To get it. That's
that's the important thing is that we the
support I honestly think some of these things
can be just like that to sort of
you know, like I said earlier, I think
off the air with James when Patreon happened
with with Whitney and I. It's, you know,
you you follow over and you you probably
retain, like, 20% of the people that were
donating there. And I think that's kind of
by design because I get it. People get
frustrated. They don't wanna go through it again
and, you know, so just don't let them
win is the point. Keep fighting out there.
But thank you, James, for coming on. I
appreciate all that you do, man. And I
look forward to talking to you in the
future. Well, thank you, Ryan, for being one
of the, what, free outlets in the world
that are talking about this now? Anyway, we'll
we'll keep letting people know this happened.
Anything you wanna shout out before we leave
up to up upcoming events or anything? I
think that's it. I,
it's August here in Japan and it's getting
to the sweaty,
uncomfortable weather. So I am going to be
probably taking a couple of weeks,
not off. I'm not going anywhere. I'm not
doing any vacation stuff. I'm gonna be working
behind the scenes, but I will be probably
posting less in the next few weeks. But
anyway, people can stay tuned to corporate report
because I have some pretty interesting and important
stuff coming out next month. So I hope
people will stick around for that. Alright. I'm
sure we'll be talking about it. So as
always, everybody out there, question everything. Come to
your own conclusions.
Stay vigilant.