Alex and Evelyn talk about Trump's return to X and other platforms, Thierry Breton's attempt to make it all about him, the hack and leak of Trump's campaign, the FBI's new rules around communicating with platforms about foreign interference, Apple imposing its 30% commission on Patreon, and a small little sporting event that happened recently.
Alex Stamos: Evelyn.
Evelyn Douek: Hello?
Alex Stamos: I don't think we could... The podcast can... Hello? Evelyn, are you there?
Evelyn Douek: Yeah. Hi. Hi. Alex, hi.
Alex Stamos: I think the podcast is under a DDoS attack. I think we're being attacked.
Evelyn Douek: That's-
Alex Stamos: It's not our fault. This is not a technical failure.
Evelyn Douek: ... Yeah. It's incredible. 60 million listeners.
Alex Stamos: 100 million people are trying to listen. It's a DDoS attack. This is a DDoS. We're being DDoS'd right now. It is not our fault. It's not because we fired all the moderated content engineers.
Evelyn Douek: That's it.
Alex Stamos: That is not our fault.
Evelyn Douek: Too popular. We broke the internet.
Alex Stamos: We broke the internet.
Evelyn Douek: Yeah. Again. It's tough. It's tough being this popular.
Alex Stamos: 1 billion people are trying to listen. I am watching the number right now.
Evelyn Douek: Incredible.
Alex Stamos: It's a real number on my screen. I'm not making this up. I've never made anything up.
Evelyn Douek: Never before. No.
Alex Stamos: 1 trillion people are watching this stream right now and we're getting DDoS. It's [inaudible 00:01:02] of traffic are flooding our pipes. Our pipes are flooded right now of DDoS.
Evelyn Douek: Yeah, got to clean the pipes. It's tough being this popular, but we persevere somehow to bring you the content that you desperately want. Welcome to Moderated Content, stochastically released, slightly random, and not at all comprehensive news update from the world of trust and safety with myself, Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos. Obviously, it's DDoS attacks nonstop that has kept us from your ears for the last couple of months, like we were saying, just tough being this popular and breaking the internet on the daily.
Obviously, we are referencing the big events of the year that happened last night, which was Trump's failure to launch interview on X last night with Elon Musk, which came in a nice 42 minutes late because of technical issues, issues that Elon Musk blamed on a DDoS attack on X. Now, Alex, I'm not much of a technical person, so if you could just help me out here. The rest of the platform was fine and nothing in particular seemed to be having a problem. DDoS attacks, are they good at just taking down one particular space that is experiencing a high level of content? Is that how that works?
Alex Stamos: So, generally not. I mean, it is very likely that Musk is lying about that. In theory, yes, you could take down just the audio part, because spaces runs on specific servers that when you go to twitter.com, X, and you go to HTTPS and you pull down the HTML and the image content from the CDN, that is different than the audio content. So if you know what you're doing, you can specifically hit the audio servers. That being said, a DDoS attack of that size has to transit a huge amount of internet infrastructure and nobody else detected that attack. I have talked to a number of people who work in this space, nobody else saw it. So, it was not a DDoS attack. And in fact, the Verge has several sources from inside Twitter who said that he was lying.
Evelyn Douek: That's just incredible. I can't believe Musk was lying about this. It's tough to believe, but we'll recover from this disappointment that I feel.
Alex Stamos: But, it's unfortunate, because it's not like everybody else has figured out how you can stream audio to thousands or millions of people at the same time. This is what happens when you fire all your engineers, and then you think that you're a distributed systems genius who can do it all by yourself. It just turns out that it's very hard to do this thing. I mean, he announced this interview a week ago, so this is the unfortunate part too for the remaining core of people at Twitter is you find out a week in advance that you're going to host the largest space ever, right? He got rid of an entire data center. He's got rid of their Google Cloud ability, so they don't have the ability to burst to their capability to Google Cloud anymore, because they stopped paying their Google Cloud bills. I don't know if they're paying their AWS bills anymore. So, I feel really bad for the Google infrastructure folks... I'm sorry, the Twitter infrastructure folks who are getting blamed for this, I'm sure today, because he has vastly reduced their ability to burst their infrastructure to handle loads like yesterday.
Evelyn Douek: Okay, so apart from the obvious Schaden Freud that we feel about this interview, there's not a lot of breaking news or content moderation content to cover from it, except it wasn't really a content moderation story, until the EU commissioner, Thierry Breton, weighed in on this particular issue. Now, we've talked about Thierry before as the chief enforcer of the Digital Services Act that the EU passed earlier this year. He, in a moment of absolute insanity, sent Musk a letter a couple of hours prior to the interview, basically, I think warning him. I mean, it's hard to make sense of this letter. The sensible letter was to remind X of its obligations under the DSA to ensure effective mitigation measures were in place regarding the amplification of harmful content, content that promotes hatred, disorder, insightment to violence, or certain instances of disinformation, specifically citing recent events in the UK and live conversation over the U.S. presidential candidate. Now, I'm not quite up to date on my geography. It was never my strong suit. But, the U.S. and the UK, are they in the EU? It's a little tricky to work this one out.
Alex Stamos: Yeah, so let me look. I'm looking at my globe and there's this large blue space-
Evelyn Douek: Is it a round one or a flat one, by the way, is your globe?
Alex Stamos: ... Mine's round. But, I totally respect those who believe the earth is flat. I mean, those who are just asking questions about whether the world is flat and balance on the back of turtles.
Evelyn Douek: I mean, careful or Thierry Breton might want this podcast removed from the internet for disinformation if you say things like that.
Alex Stamos: So I'm looking at the globe, and there's a pretty large Atlantic Ocean between us and the UK and the EU. And I'm pretty sure the UK is no longer part of the EU. There's something in the news about that.
Evelyn Douek: I read some stories about that. I think, I vaguely remember that being a big deal.
Alex Stamos: I don't think that's a good idea, but they did do it, right? It has not worked out for them very well economically. But they did make that call. And I'm pretty sure the DSA does not apply to the United Kingdom. But it certainly does not apply to the United States. Here, I'm going to do, I'm going to humongi-sigh.
This is my theory, Breton, he's driving me nuts. We've talked about him over and over again that he goes so far beyond what the DSA actually says. He writes these crazy letters that totally embarrass the EU. They misstate what the DSA say. And, he goes way beyond what the European Parliament wanted and what is at all reasonable, by any reasonable standard of extraterritorial application of EU law around the world. And certainly to say that he has any power to control the speech of a candidate in an American election is ridiculous, and something that they would never, ever accept in the EU for any of their candidates. Even their most ridiculous right wing candidates of which they have many in his Native France. He would never accept Facebook, or X, or anybody censoring even their craziest candidates in their elections. Or maybe he would.
Evelyn Douek: Well, I remember when platform's de-platformed Donald Trump a number of years ago. There were European politicians that came out, including Angela Merkel, saying, "Wow, we are concerned about this excessive exercise of private power over political candidates and the public sphere, and the platforms need to be transparent and open about how they're doing this." And then, a couple of years later like, "Oh, don't let them back on for any kind of conversation." It's crazy.
Alex Stamos: And that was a private action on the day that the Capitol was invaded by his followers, right? So, that was a decision that was not a government decision, which I would've been against. I would've been against the government deciding that the platform should do that. I think you would too as a First Amendment scholar.
Evelyn Douek: For sure.
Alex Stamos: As a private decision, I think it was totally appropriate for the private platforms to say, "We're not going to be part of this riot and this invasion of the United States Capitol." And even then, like you said, a number of EU leaders are saying, "Ooh, we didn't mean that rule should be applied to national leaders. That seems crazy." Right? Yeah. Breton, he is out of control. And, the rest of the EU needs to reel him in, because you and I both have our problems with the DSA. I have a bunch of problems with the DSA. I think there are some positive things in the DSA around making companies think about the impact of their products. I think those positive uses of it are not in the area of misinformation. They're not in the area of any political speech. They're in the area of child safety. They're in the area of-
Evelyn Douek: Transparency.
Alex Stamos: ... Transparency. They're in the areas of the hard trust and safety issues that everybody agrees are bad that cause direct impact, right? That's what they should be talking about. That's what they should be focused on is there is a ton of sexual abuse that happens on X. There is a ton of direct calls for violence on X in places like India, and Sri Lanka, and stuff that are not being taken care of. If he wants to complain about X, that's what he should complain about, right? He should be complaining about deep fakes of teenage girls. That's what he should be complaining about. The fact that every letter he writes is about some complex political topic for which in this case is extraterritorial is clearly all he cares about is he wants to troll and he wants the attention. And he's going to get it, because he's picking a fight with Donald Trump and Elon Musk. And if you want attention, picking a fight with Donald Trump and Elon Musk is a pretty good way to get it.
Evelyn Douek: Yeah, I mean, it's hard to understand this as anything other than a political stunt to try and capitalize or share in the spectacle that was the Musk interview with Trump and get into the news cycle, which he managed very successfully, unfortunately. And here we are talking about it as well, because it's hard to think-
Alex Stamos: We need to come up with a code name with him, so we don't use his word his name.
Evelyn Douek: ... Exactly.
Alex Stamos: We need come up with little theory. What's a Trump like-
Evelyn Douek: Oh, gosh. I wish I had that talent. I don't have the nicknaming talent quite the same way.
Alex Stamos: ... We should call him Brie, right? Breton. Let's come up with a French, Brie.
Evelyn Douek: Yeah, right.
Alex Stamos: We're going to tell him, from here on out the cheese, we're calling him Brie, little Brie.
Evelyn Douek: A little stinky Brie. There you go.
Alex Stamos: Little stinky Brie wrote a letter. Yeah.
Evelyn Douek: Because he thought that it would actually have any impact on... I mean, the idea, we might be concerned about it as being jawboning that he was trying to jawbone Musk into changing the way he talked during the interview, or taking the interview down, or something like that. But it seems highly unlikely to have that impact, and instead just got a lot of attention. And indeed, the European Commission was distancing itself from little Brie this morning by saying that it had received no advance notice that this letter was planning to come out, that it wasn't approved by the president, and that, "This guy? This guy? Never heard of him." Distance between this and the DSA, which totally makes sense, because as you were saying, this is extremely harmful to the legitimacy and the perception of the DSA, which was and could have been this really serious attempt to deal with this very difficult problem that we have about this unaccountable power over the private sphere, but also the concern about government intervention in speech policies.
And here, instead what we have is giving fuel to the people who say, "Any regulation will lead to problems and will lead to government abuse. And so, therefore we cannot regulate these platforms in any way, shape, or form. And so, hands off forever." And then, it means we leave all of these actual problems on the table potentially unregulated. We have the opacity, we don't get the transparency mandates, all of those problems are going to continue, because this is confirming for people that government regulation is always going to be a bad idea and prone to abuse. So, it's stupid, but it's also really dangerous.
Alex Stamos: If little Brie didn't exist, he'd have to be invented, right?
Evelyn Douek: Right.
Alex Stamos: You'd have to invent him as the example of the overreaching European bureaucrat. It's like he sprung forth from some right-wing novel. It's almost bizarre. Okay, thank you little Brie for creating yourself. So we have something to talk about on this podcast, and so that Mr. Musk and the substackers have somebody to write about. We appreciate your service, sir.
Evelyn Douek: Exactly. Yeah. He seems to be enjoying the role. So, in other news surrounding this event, Trump started tweeting again. Now, he hasn't tweeted or Xed, I don't even know what we're calling it these days, since the interview, but he was back on the platform yesterday hyping the Musk interview in advance. He just stayed political content, his campaign videos, it's the thing that he also is posting to Facebook, which I went and checked to see if he was there, because it's also worth noting that last month Meta rolled back all of its restrictions that it had placed on the Trump account. So, Trump is no longer subject to the heightened restrictions that Meta had placed on him when it reinstated its account. And as we've seen a reverse of domino effect post that when the platforms de-platformed him, they all followed one by one and kicked him off. Well, now we're seeing them all letting him back on slowly.
So we saw a week after Meta rolled back its restrictions, Twitch also lifted its ban on Donald Trump, and so we're seeing him have access to all of these platforms again in the lead up to the 2024 election. And it's going to just be really interesting to see, A, what he does with that access, and B, how the platforms handle it. I don't know whether this is a sign of a completely different approach to content moderation going into 2024, or whether there's a naive optimism that Trump's just going to behave differently and we're not going to have all of the same problems all over again. But, we seem to be setting the stage for a replay of all of those issues that we had four years ago.
Alex Stamos: Yeah, interestingly enough, it looks like right now this account might be in the control of his campaign people. It's not really him. If you look as of right now, we're recording about 11:00 a.m. on Tuesday, August 13th. He has truthed or retruthed 10 times already this morning, as of 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time. He has done nothing on X. So, it seems like Truth is the platform that he is still using himself personally, right? When he picks up his phone and he wants to write something in all caps, "Kamala Harris goes the exact opposite way on her law and policies regarding the energy, healthcare, crime in the border. What a joke she is!!!" It goes straight from his brain to his phone, it is going to be on Truth. Whereas, on X, it is post of professionally made campaign videos. It is ads. And so, I expect what we're going to be seeing is that Truth will be him. And, this has worked to his benefit so far, right?
One of his real weaknesses in 2020 was he said completely crazy things on X that got a lot of media coverage for whatever reason, even though every media outlet has access to Truth Social, he can say totally insane things and it doesn't get covered anymore. And, I don't know if it's Trump fatigue, if the level that he's being held to has gone down, but it will be interesting to see if they do this not just at X, but other platforms, like you said, if all of a sudden you see Facebook... He's been big on TikTok. TikTok is clearly his campaign, because it's all professionally made video content. If you see professional stuff, the, "I am a normal Republican candidate." Professional stuff on all the platforms except Truth. And then, Truth is where he speaks to the true believers. And then, that's the outlet that his campaign gives him, because they clearly can't control them.
The other place they can't control them is when he speaks contemporaneously, right? And that's what's killing them. The Republican National Convention is the great example of that, where they kept him on the teleprompter for 25 minutes and they were doing great. He's telling the story of the assassination attempt, and I'm sure that those dials that they had, all the focus groups were at 9 and 10. He was talking about the man who tragically died. He was doing fine. And then, he's like, "Ah, you know what? I'm doing great. I don't need to read the teleprompters anymore." And then, starts talking about Hannibal Lector and everything else. And then, literally starts talking into the next day. And then, going Castro style, right? And so, I wonder if the campaign's like, "Okay, great, his outlet is Truth. For whatever reason, people aren't paying attention to it, so we can let him have that, and then we'll have all these other channels. And so, if we can keep him to the minimum stuff..."
Because the other thing that's going on in the campaign is JD Vance is out there way more than him and he stays to the script. And so, they're going to make JD Vance the front man. They're going to keep Trump to the minimum number of campaign appearances, minimum number of things. And, he wanted to do this thing with Musk and it turned out to probably be a bit of a disaster, like he said, a this is a political podcast, but he said a bunch of crazy stuff that's going to get that the Kamala campaign was clipping it in real-time, right? And so, every time he does an interview or he does a campaign speech, it becomes real-time fodder. So I don't think it will be a big... X is not going to care. Truth clearly doesn't care. But I don't think the other platforms are actually going to get tested, because it's just going to be campaign videos and stuff that Chris LaCivita intentionally wants to go out to large audiences.
Evelyn Douek: Yeah. Which is the perfect outcome for the platforms, because then they get to say, "We're not being biased. We're not censoring anyone. Everyone has access to our platform." And their rules don't get tested and they don't face these difficult decisions that they faced four years ago. The question will be whether Trump can maintain that self-restraint as we keep going, especially if Harris continues to dominate the online discourse, the meme wars, drive the news cycles and the attention. I mean, the question will be whether Trump can resist the dopamine hits, but we will see.
Alex Stamos: Well, but, I mean, he gets a lot of that from Truth. Also, the fascinating issue here too is that Truth Social is his own platform that then did a merger with a SPAC to create the DJT stock. Part of that deal was the idea that he would only be on Truth Social. Now, he had a legal obligation to do that, and my understanding is that obligation ran out in June. So, he's not in violation of his promise of exclusivity. But man, that is a real violation of the trust of those SPAC investors of the exclusivity. Now, it looks like Truth still has exclusivity on him as a person, but if he starts posting his real rants to X, which is clearly what Elon wants, right? Elon wants the real unfiltered Trump on his platform, because he wants people like [inaudible 00:18:37] says, "X is where things happen."
If they're just getting the campaign videos, then that's not really where things happen, right? But, they want the real, real feed of Trump content and they want newsworthy things for him to be saying on X. So if he starts doing that, then that's going to be a real blow to the people who invested in his company, which is where now the majority of his net worth is tied up in that stock, which my understanding is he can't sell still for a while. So, he can't pump and dump out of it.
Evelyn Douek: Right.
Alex Stamos: So it's a real complicated balancing act for him. Yeah, it's interesting.
Evelyn Douek: Yeah, it's like two wolves inside Donald Trump, the wolf that's interested in his investment and his money, and the wolf that chases the attention and being the center of the news cycle, and which will prevail? We will find out. It's honestly going to be a tough call.
Alex Stamos: And if there's any adult human that would pass the marshmallow test, it would be Donald J. Trump, clearly.
Evelyn Douek: I mean, obviously. Correct. So, it's been a busy couple of months for Musk, while we've been away as well. One of the ironies that we're seeing in the last few months or last few weeks in particular is a complete reversal of the stories and concerns about bias that we had in the lead up to the last election, in terms of Musk's ownership of X. So there have been stories about how on the day that Biden withdrew from the race and endorsed Harris, some users reported that they were unable to follow the official campaign account KamalaHQ, and there are also a number of other accounts like White Dudes For Harris that had been suspended as they were leading fundraising efforts, all of these things. Now, as we've already been talking about, this is hardly the most technically competent platform with the most robust infrastructure that's going to be enforcing its rules and its spam policies in an even-handed and simple way.
And so, all of these probably have an innocent explanation and to jump to conspiracy theories is probably not the right way to go. But, this is exactly what happened four years ago as well, and without transparency, obviously, the place where people go is that this is a political effort by Musk to sabotage the Democrats and sabotage Harris's campaign. And so, now we see exactly the same allegations of bias that we saw coming from the right four years ago, coming from the left and saying, "Wow, this is really problematic. We need much more transparency. We need evenhandedness. We can't have these platforms exercising this arbitrary power. And they need to be fair to both sides." And so, it's a little bit like, "I can't believe the leopards are eating my face," situation. But, it is the same fundamental problem and it'll be interesting to see how that story pans out in the coming months as well.
Alex Stamos: Yeah, I think this is part two of everything that has inverted between 2016, 2020, and 2024. These are common things. You create a new account and all of a sudden it has a gazillion followers. It trips over a bunch of trip wires, anti-spam trip wires, antivirality. A bunch of things happen. Sometimes just technical issues around... Sometimes when you have accounts that are small and they become big, you end up having technical issues around that thing has to get replicated to a bunch of cash servers or a bunch of different locations and things break for a short period of time. Those things happen. And then, yes, everybody sees a conspiracy everywhere, but those conspiracies used to be always on the right, and now they're often on the left. And, yeah, congratulations, because Musk used to, and still does, amplifies those conspiracies whenever they happen on the other side, and now he has seen them on this side.
Evelyn Douek: In other shenanigans, our free speech warrior has also been fighting the good fight and suing advertisers for boycotting X. So, in the last couple of weeks, X brought a lawsuit against the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, known as GARM, alleging that they violated antitrust laws by coordinating with brands to dissuade them from spending money on the social media platform. Now, GARM itself shut down two days later, but the lawsuit continues. This is the same group of advertisers that Musk last year at the New York Times's DealBook Summit told to, "Go (beep) themselves." It's a direct quote there. So, earning the explicit warning on this episode, because I can't quote him without doing so. And it's ironic.
Alex Stamos: So it's an interesting question. We should go look at the rules for the explicit warning of whether or not there's an exception for newsworthy, right? Because you just directly quoted what is actually a newsworthy, and I believe his direct quote ended up in a number of outlets including the New York Times, which did not end up. So if we get the explicit tag, I think we should go appeal. In fact, I think we should file a First Amendment lawsuit against Apple Incorporated.
Evelyn Douek: I mean, obviously, free speech dies with explicit warning labels. Everything is a content moderation problem. So, this is being covered to death, and I'm sure all of our listeners have followed this, but this lawsuit has it exactly backwards, the advertisers in saying, "We don't want to advertise on X, because we don't like their content, and their content policies, and we don't want our brands to appear next to..." I don't know, "Terrorist content, or sexually explicit content, or child sexual abuse material." Or whatever it is, or hate speech, or literal Nazi content. That is them exercising their First Amendment to free speech, their First Amendment right to freedom of association, which also includes the right not to speak and not to associate. And ironically enough, not to spend money advertising on a platform that you don't particularly like. So, it's completely upside down world with this lawsuit.
But, as with all of this, Musk is so close to having a legitimate point. It's not a legal point, but there is a point to say, "It sucks how much power these advertisers have over our public sphere. And the content rules that advertisers want on social media platforms are not the content rules that I want on social media platforms. The brand safety notions are not, I think, the best rules for public debate and public discourse." And so, I don't think we should skip over that and forget that part of this whole debate when we're talking about this. But, I can't see how this is going to be an antitrust violation.
Alex Stamos: Yeah, we keep on ending up in this place, where you and I have a normative argument here, where it's like, we disagree with some organization, right? You and I might disagree with the GARM of what they did or the power they have. We've disagreed with research, but we don't think Musk should punish... The response here is, in the public square, it is not using the courts to try to punish somebody else's First Amendment right. It is not using the fact that you're a billionaire to try to bury these people. We might not like what Media Matters said. We might not like Media Matters research, but Media Matters is a right to say it. We might not like that GARM is utilizing their power this way, but they have a right to do it. I mean, I don't remember, is there a federalist paper that says that large European brands have to advertise with profascist platforms. Or, I guess what would've been more appropriate, if Alexander Hamilton wrote that you have to put advertise in the New York Post, which he then ended up founding after the Federalist Papers. Was that in there?
Evelyn Douek: Yeah, famously.
Alex Stamos: Was that Federalist 37 or something?
Evelyn Douek: Yeah, very prophetic actually. Incredible how they mentioned specifically Unilever, and said, "Unilever must advertise on all internet platforms, otherwise free speech dies."
Alex Stamos: When the internet pipes it.
Evelyn Douek: In advertising. Yeah.
Alex Stamos: Yes. Right.
Evelyn Douek: Yeah.
Alex Stamos: It's just a complete ridiculous inversion of the First Amendment, which we just see over and over again in this law fair is the inversion of these First Amendment principles.
Evelyn Douek: Yeah, I mean, it's an inversion of the First Amendment, and perhaps even more shockingly, an inversion of capitalism. These are brands making brand choices about their products. I don't think they're making some big political statement. I don't know if we should brand these brands as free speech warriors or public interest minded activists for doing what they did. They were doing it because they were concerned about their brand safety and their bottom line. And so, the capitalist motivation here is really at the core and it's just something that they have every right to do.
Alex Stamos: Wait a second. I just realized Tesla and SpaceX have been boycotting advertising on moderated content, Evelyn.
Evelyn Douek: Outrageous.
Alex Stamos: Can we file a lawsuit-
Evelyn Douek: I cannot believe this.
Alex Stamos: ... In a tiny town in Texas?
Evelyn Douek: Yeah, Texas is the wrong state. We need to find a slightly bluer state for that one. But, yes.
Alex Stamos: That's the other part here, did you mention the clear form shopping here? That is an amazing part here too.
Evelyn Douek: Right. Yeah, I mean, it's again, another one of these lawsuits that's filed in a specific district with a specific sympathetic judge. And again, it's these performative lawsuits that tie up these organizations spending resources, spending money to defend these species claims, and get all of these public pressure about it, get all of this political pressure about it, and have to cope with all of these news stories and things like that, where it maybe doesn't matter so much. I don't even know if Musk thinks that this is a viable legal claim, but it's all of this performance around it that makes it effective regardless. Okay. In the part three of everything is reversed from 2020, the big-ish story of the past week has been news that Trump's campaign has been hacked and there are a bunch of materials and files floating around that have not been reported on, but a number of outlets, Politico, the New York Times, Washington Post have internal emails, documents from the Trump campaign. This one's much more in your wheelhouse than mine, Alex. So, what's your take on this story?
Alex Stamos: Yeah. So, there's really two parts here. So the first is that there looks to be a concerted effort by Iranian hackers, probably related to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is the paramilitary organization that reports directly to the Ayatollah, and where the best Iranian hackers work for the IRG, that they have been going after both, what at the time was, the Biden campaign and the Trump campaign. This was reported at the time, and there actually was a warning from both the DNI and from Microsoft and a variety of other organizations that they saw this activity. My understanding is the attribution on this is actually quite strong. I can't talk too much about the details here, but the attribution to this IRGC activity is quite strong. And, my understanding is and was effective in both compromising the personal Gmail account of at least one Trump advisor, and then the professional Microsoft accounts of a number of Trump campaign officials.
Then separately, somebody who called themselves Robert, created an AOL account, and then used that AOL account to send internal emails and documents from the Trump campaign to at least three news outlets, including Politico and the Washington Post. I'm not sure what the third one was. Now, there's no evidence saying that Robert is actually the Iranians. But, the coincidence here is quite strong. So we don't have attribution data on Robert yet. My expectation is the moment that this happened, that subpoenas or probably FAA 702 requests when out to AOL, Microsoft, Google, and the other companies, because this is a foreign intelligence investigation, so this would be under FAA 702 and the FISA court. And, that the FBI is gathering up as much information as possible, and so they will have a pretty good strong understanding of what is going on at this point, but they have not yet said. So, we don't have good attribution that Robert happens to be the Iranians, but the coincidence is quite strong, and it does seem quite possible that Robert is a persona for Iran.
This is the exact version of what happened in 2016 with the GRU and Hillary Clinton. That the GRU hacking team, a.k.a., APT 28 broke into the personal Gmail account of John Podesta as part of a much larger hacking campaign. Over 1200 people were hacked as part of that campaign, including a bunch of native officials and such, but Podesta was part of that campaign. And then, there was a direct intrusion into the email server of the DNC and as well as accounts of the DCCC and such, and a bunch of data downloaded. And then, personas were created of [inaudible 00:30:33] 2 and sent out via Facebook at the time, which is where I was. And so, what we saw at Facebook was not the hacking. The hacking happened against Gmail and against direct servers that were being run... Literally a server in the basement of the DNC, which now, I have seen it. That server is in the DNC, next to the Watergate filing cabinet, which is still bent open, where it's pried open by G. Gordon Libby. The DNC has a whole museum of stuff that has been broken into.
Evelyn Douek: Wow.
Alex Stamos: But, for Facebook, what we saw is the communication where then the Russians reached out to push it to journalists. In this case, it was AOL used as that, not Facebook. The difference is, one, obviously the target, that Republicans are being targeted. The actors is the Iranians, not the Russians. And then, the big difference is how the media is acting. So in 2016, Politico ran a live blog. They started up a live blog where they were live blogging as they went through all the stuff that was dumped out to them of going through John Podesta's emails, including his lasagna recipe, and all that stuff. And there was a huge feedy-
Evelyn Douek: Rissoto.
Alex Stamos: ... Rissoto, I'm sorry. Risotto.
Evelyn Douek: But, yes. Fact check.
Alex Stamos: There's a huge feeding frenzy of all of this, of like, "Look at this. All of this stuff that's been given to us." Even though a number of people said, "Hey, it looks like you're being manipulated by foreign actors." There's this huge feeding frenzy of the journalists being super excited. This time\, none of those three media outlets, they've been much more responsible. I think that is the appropriate thing. I think it's appropriate for them to be responsible that they should not be manipulated by foreign actors who are trying to change U.S. politics. That being said, oh my God, is this a complete inversion of everything Republicans have been saying since 2016? Because, those of us who investigated that foreign interference were first we'd been told that we were lying, that it wasn't foreign interference, and it wasn't Russia. That it was really a Democratic insider. There were horrible insinuations that it was Seth Rich who died tragically, and then people said that he was an inside leaker, and then he was murdered by Hillary Clinton. That is something that has been pushed by Republican office holders, and people inside the Trump campaign.
So people have pushed that idea. A number of people, including people who have attacked me personally have said that any withholding of this evidence is censorship itself. That any carefulness that people showed or publication of saying that you have to be careful here is censorship itself. Two of our colleagues, Janine Zakaria, and Andy Grotto wrote a paper talking about how you need to be careful if you're given information by a foreign hacker. They didn't say, "Don't publish." They just said, "You have to be careful." And, a number of the substackers who have lied about us in front of Congress ended up saying that that's a violation of the Pentagon Paper's principle and said it was censorship. They also misattributed that paper to Renee and I, which is funny. I mean, I guess-
Evelyn Douek: Amazing.
Alex Stamos: ... Andy and Janine are also brown, right? Renee's Italian, I'm Greek. Janine's of Greek descent, Andy's Italian, so there you go. And we all work at Stanford. So, we all have significant eyebrows, all four of us. So there you go. But yeah, it is a complete and total inversion, but only one side here is being consistent, right? FSA. And, I'm trying to be consistent here, which I do not think we should allow foreign adversaries to manipulate our democracy. Whether or not I personally agree with the victim of that foreign manipulation. It is totally inappropriate. Just like with assassination. We should not allow assassins to change American history. We should not allow foreign adversaries to change American history. And that's what the Iranians are trying to do here. And, this is what those of us who worked on 2016, and then tried to protect 2020, and who have been attacked for trying to protect 2020 have been saying the entire time, which is, foreign interference is not a partisan issue. It should not be a partisan issue.
That Russians, they really didn't invent this, but they really demonstrated something the first time. But in the history of cyber campaigns, what we have seen over and over again is one big country does something the first time and then everybody else copies it, right? The Chinese Aurora attacks of 2009, I helped investigate those, and then every state sponsored and even economic attack I saw for the next five years were a carbon copy of those attacks, right? Stuxnet, which the U.S. did with Israel. Everybody copied Stuxnet. Everybody's like, "Oh, man, that's a great idea. I'm going to do that." The Snowden documents, a bunch of the stuff that were in the Snowden documents, other countries publicly were like, "Oh God, that's terrible. I can't believe America did that." Privately, they're like, "I want to do that." Right? And they started copying the techniques that were revealed from the U.S. and the Five Eyes.
So, clearly that was going to happen here, that the Russian influence operation of which there was the internet research agency of all the trolling campaign, and that has been copied, but clearly, anybody who's really paying attention, any intelligence professional looking at 2016 would've said the GRU hack and leak campaign was by far the more influential component of that and had the most return on investment for the Russians. And so, clearly, that was the part that was going to be copied, and that has been immediately picked up by the Chinese and the Iranians. And, China and Iran have very different geopolitical interests than Russia. And therefore, are not necessarily going to go after the same political party or the same candidates. And so, this should be a bipartisan issue. But unfortunately, one political party has attacked the people inside of academia, inside of the tech companies, inside of the government, and have weakened the tools and the linkages between those groups that were built for 2020. And we are weaker in 2024 because of that.
Evelyn Douek: To your point that it should be a bipartisan issue, I've seen reporting that both campaigns were targeted by this operation. And it's just that one fell for it. Is that right?
Alex Stamos: That is what I've heard. I've heard that both campaigns were going after it. And, that makes sense. And that was true in 2016 too, as the Russians went after both campaigns, and I think the Russians actually got some stuff out of the Trump campaign too. What you have to remember is the hacking component and the influence operation component of these groups are different, right? The hackers are just told, "I want you to gather up as much information as possible." So, their job is to break into a bunch of accounts to steal everything. And then, they hand it over to the actual intelligence professionals. The hackers don't know what they're gathering, they're just grabbing files, they're grabbing emails, they're dumping it into an internal file server. And then, the guys who actually speak English, who perhaps studied in the United States, perhaps spent time in the U.S. embassy, right, as a cultural attache or whatever, they've rotated into the SVR, or they've spent time studying American politics, they're the ones who then decide based upon their tasking by Putin and other leadership, what are we going to do with it?
And so, even if say you're the Iranians, information from the then Biden and now Harris campaign is going to be useful. Maybe you're using for blackmail, maybe you're just using for intelligence purposes, what's their position on Iran? What's going on? So, if you're going to task your people, you're going to say, "Go after everybody." You're going to gather it all up. But, my understanding is, yes, it was not effective, it's the Biden campaign, because the buying campaign is incredibly paranoid. They actually have a quite good security team. They use phyto tokens, they use multifactor authentication. Spear phishing is not going to work against them. And this is not the most technically sophisticated attack. This is a spear phishing attack. I think this is the other problem of the politicization here is if you think that 2016 was a hoax, then you're not going to take it seriously, right? You're not going to train your people, "Everybody has to have a hardware fighter token. Everybody has to be trained for spearfishing." Because John Podesta wasn't spear fished. It was Seth Rich, right? It was a hoax.
Evelyn Douek: Right.
Alex Stamos: This was all made up by the Democrats. This was all made up by the media. And so, that's what happens when you start to believe your own propaganda is you open yourself up to this vulnerability.
Evelyn Douek: Okay. So, moving to the other side of foreign interference in elections, talking about the hacker leaking to the information operations, there was a story last month about reforms within the FBI and the DOJ about how they're going to be communicating with social media platforms in the lead up to the 2024 election. So, the inspector general released a report on the efforts that the FBI had been making to share intelligence with social media platforms and found that there was no policy about how these interactions and these information sharing relationships should take place until February, 2024. And then, one was put in place as a result of the lawsuit that we've talked about many times on this podcast, Murphy V. Missouri, that the Supreme Court ultimately dismissed for lack of standing a couple of months ago now. But, it's a strange story, because this seems to be a somewhat positive outcome from what we've talked about was a bananas, and very specious, and harassing lawsuit that concocted conspiracy theories out of nothing.
But it did prompt this review by the FBI, by the DOJ into their relationships with social media platforms, found that there was no policy about how these relationships should take place and still respect the First Amendment, and make sure that the government wasn't overreaching and asking the platforms to take down or commanding the platforms to take down protected content. And so, now they've put a policy in place and the DOJ has said that it will share it. It hasn't done it yet. But it said that it will share this protocol and the FBI will resume regular meetings with the social media companies in the lead up to the 2024 election in accordance with this protocol. It'll be interesting to see what reception they get at the social media companies this time round. I think it's different landscape over there. But overall, this seems like a positive set of reforms.
Alex Stamos: Yeah, I mean, you and I have always talked about job voting is a real issue. Certainly, you don't want the government saying, "Take down this American speech, because we don't like it." No reasonable American thinks that should happen. You also don't want the government implying that something is foreign action that's not. You don't want platforms taking stuff down without double checking and making their own determinations. But you also do want the ability for the government to say, "Hey, we think these actors are foreign actors. You might want to double and triple check." Right? And, that is the information that if you actually look through the "printer files," if you look through the FOIA, if you look from the email from FBI agents, you see, here's an Excel spreadsheet of 100 accounts, and you go and actually pull the tweets from those accounts and it's like, "Oh, look, there are accounts over and over again talking about how Taiwan really is part of the PRC historically, and it's not a real country, and then this, and that." And they're all linking to the same obvious PRC propaganda.
And so, the fact that the FBI is agent saying, "Hey, you might want to double check here." Is probably not a massive violation of Americans rights. But I do think it's good to have guidelines. I mean, I think the fantasy here is that there's an FBI agent with a gun to the head of some Facebook employee saying, "Take down these tweets." Right? It's 24 or something. There's a 24 counter going in the corner. And that was never true. But it's good to, I think, have a good written policy of, one, you can only ask nicely, because of the First Amendment. You can't ask. You can just inform. I think what would be really good coming from somebody who's on the platform side is the policy should be is you should provide as much information as possible of why you think these are foreign. And, as much attribution as possible, because that's very helpful.
If you just provide a list of, "We think these accounts are foreign." And you're like, "Ah, okay, well, what kind of foreign?" That helps a lot. In some cases, it's obvious. If it's a list, they're like, "Oh, they're all talking about Taiwan." Then you're immediately going to zoom in and look for links to the PRC. If it's just totally random stuff about American politics, then that could be there's a whole host of actors who might be trying to stir the pot in U.S. politics, right? Or if they're just very spammy, because also what you find is lots of actors, they create accounts and they try to age them for a couple of years. And if the government's doing their job, then they'll try to infiltrate those groups early before the actors have the ability to deliver the actual payload, right?
So, hopefully, we see more details, but it would be great if the policy said, "Hey, we're going to provide as much detail as possible." I think the other thing that would be nice is, yes, you have the declassified email that says, "Here's an Excel spreadsheet of the accounts." And then, the policy is, we will give the classified briefing to the person with the clearance of like, "Yes, that email we sent you, that is Ministry State Security. They have this group in Shanghai that is doing all this stuff. We can't tell you this unclassified, because we're doing this because we have owned up. We have access to their security camera in their lobby. Here's the video of people coming in in the morning and we've owned up their VPN server, and that's how we can tell that it's really them. But we can't send that to you in an unclassified email. But we are giving you this briefing so that you have confidence that we have confidence that this is foreign activity." And that's the stuff I think that would be helpful.
Obviously, if you're a platform like X, and you're just never going to ever take any input from the FBI ever again, that's not going to be helpful. And then, Americans are just going to have to understand that there are some platforms that are completely open to foreign interference.
Evelyn Douek: Yeah. So the current policy has been deemed too sensitive to share. But the inspector general said, and I think this is right, that the public confidence would be strengthened. Public trust would be strengthened by sharing the policy. So, the DOJ has said that it will. We haven't seen it yet. And, I would love it to include all of these things that you're saying about share as much information as possible and a whole bunch of protocols around transparency, maximum transparency. I think all of that would strengthen public trust. Who knows if it'll be that detail? Who knows if we'll have all of that. I suspect unlikely. It's probably going to be like, "Number one, use your inside voice when requesting platforms to look at content that you have identified." Or, "Ask nicely and use please and thank you, rather than coercing or yelling at platforms." As we saw in some of the emails in the Murphy case.
I would even go so far... I mean, one of the things I didn't like about this report is I think it's much too flippant about the idea that foreign speech is automatically unprotected by the First Amendment and has no First Amendment value and is the thing that the government can be telling platforms to take down. I think, as a foreigner that sometimes says things about American politics, I think that I somewhat take offense by this presumption.
Alex Stamos: I mean, I feel your speech has no value at all.
Evelyn Douek: Thank you, Alex.
Alex Stamos: I personally should be able to censor it whenever I want.
Evelyn Douek: Not only it has no value, but no constitutional value. It's just uninteresting. It's just constitutionally valueless is the important... It's just a real low blow. So thank you for clarifying. But, identifying that it's manipulation as a result of government interference or misrepresenting who these accounts are and their point of view, I think that that's a valid thing to be drawing platforms attention to. So, it'll be interesting to see the protocol once it comes out. Okay. Last small story is very on brand for you, Alex, about the Apple App Store, and its policies, and its power, gatekeeping power. So, it's a story about Patreon and the announcement that any Patreon membership sold through Apple app will be subject to the Apple's 30% commission in our purchases. Go off.
Alex Stamos: Okay. Apple is on a mission to extract 30% of every bit of revenue for any company that makes any app that runs on their devices. It is absolutely insane. And now, the company they're targeting is Patreon, which those of you who don't know, Patreon is basically an intermediary platform where they pass money through to creators that you could subscribe to their stuff, blogs and all that. I think, non-porn. The porn stuff is OnlyFans. But it's blogs, or videos, or a bunch of other things you could subscribe through Patreon.
And so, Apple, not willing to only be the number one or number two most valuable company in the world depending on what's going on with Microsoft at any moment, they have to be the number one. They have to grab as much commerce as possible and own it up, has decided that they are no longer going to allow people to go sign up by going to patreon.com, and then sign up, and then go view stuff through the Apple App Store, that if you want to see stuff through the Patreon app on iOS, you have to sign up on iOS, and you have to pay through the Apple signup process, and you have to pay the 30%.
And so, Patreon has notified all their creators that if you want to see the stuff and you want your stuff to be visible through to Apple users, that you have to pay the 30% Apple tax. I don't know what to say, other than Apple is unbelievably greedy. And, it is shocking to me that they're doing this in the middle of all of their antitrust fights, especially in Europe. They're basically looking Europeans in the eye, they're pointing to their eyes, you guys can't see this, but I'm doing this to Evelyn. I'm pointing to my eyes. I'm looking her straight in the face.
Evelyn Douek: It's scary. It's intimidating.
Alex Stamos: They're just staring down the EU, and they're saying, "What are you going to do about it?" Right? "What are you going to do about it?" It's unbelievable. It is the most unbelievably aggressive corporate behavior I have ever seen towards a democratic governmental body, considering how much they give up to authoritarian governments. The fact that on things like App Store fees against a democratic body like the EU, they're willing to just completely go to the mat. It's just amazing.
Maybe this is because Google lost their antitrust, and a big part of that is that Google can no longer pay Apple $25 billion a year to make the default search google.com in safari. So, Apple now has to go extract that $25 billion if they just want to keep their revenue the same and their stock price the same. They have to go squeeze $25 billion out of a bunch of much smaller companies than Google. And so, I guess this is how they're doing it. And, somebody wrote a memo inside of Apple and said, "Hey, go find 10 companies that we can get 2.5 billion come out of each." It's just unbelievable. It's amazing. In the middle of all this that they're going to do this.
Now, what's happening though is all of these companies understand that Apple's in real antitrust trouble. And so, they're making it super obvious to all their customers, and the billing of this is the Apple fee that you're paying. And so, I think, this is starting to really rebound on Apple from a PR perspective, because all of these creators are now going to see on every single bill, "This is what the Apple tax is. This is what the Apple tax is. This is what the Apple tax is." And that's going to start to get forwarded to EU parliamentarians, to local... And so, I do think it is a bold move by Apple, but also, all of the folks in their ecosystem are starting to catch on to how you fight this. And the way you fight this is through transparency of how much money they're grabbing from the entire economic mobile ecosystem.
Evelyn Douek: You just said that you think it's one of the most aggressive moves that you've seen a company make towards a democratic regulator. And, that's in a week where Musk responded to the letter that Breton sent with the Tropic Thunder meme that said, "Take a big step back and literally (beep) your own face." So, it really is saying something.
Alex Stamos: You're really pushing it on the explicit.
Evelyn Douek: I am. Well, I mean, newsworthy, what can I do?
Alex Stamos: Newsworthy. Newsworthy exception.
Evelyn Douek: That's it. For me, Apple, let's see what you got. All right. And, no big sports news in the last few weeks that I can think of. None whatsoever. Certainly, nothing to do with Australia that I can think of in the past few weeks that has been-
Alex Stamos: What are you talking about? I was mainstreaming the Olympics. It was fantastic. Mainlining the Olympics. It was incredible. The Olympics were great. The French did a great job. I think they put on a great Olympics. I'm glad it was violence-free. I mean, I was really worried with war in the Middle East, war in Ukraine and Russia. France is involved in both the Middle East and in Russia, Ukraine. So, the French were terrified. And there was neither a massive cyber attack, nor a major physical attack. There was disruption of the train network, which looks like it was a domestic thing. But, other than that...
So, thank God there's nothing really bad that happened to the Olympics. So, I know that's not what other people are thinking, but as a risk management professional. I'm like, "Great." I mean, I know that's what [inaudible 00:50:54] and a bunch of people in said France were like, "Thank God we got through this." Right? But, I thought that the French did a great job. They put on a great Olympics. I got to say, USA, USA, USA once again demonstrating our dominance of totally weird sports. But Australia did fantastic.
Evelyn Douek: ... Yeah, I'll just say, I mean, I saw a tweet that I really agree with, which is that, you know that coming towards the end of the Olympics when the Australians start busting out the words per capita. So, well done USA, but if we worked out that ratio, I think we would have some competition for you.
Alex Stamos: Absolutely. No, Australia was fourth overall in the medal count. You have 26 million people. That's a little more than half as many people living California. And in fact, amazingly, you had more medals than Stanford, which is fantastic.
Evelyn Douek: I mean, just.
Alex Stamos: Not that many more, but more than Stanford University. Stanford came in eighth from ninth in the entire country ranking.
Evelyn Douek: Quite incredible. 39 medals to Stanford University. So, both of my allegiances doing very well. Doing very well there.
Alex Stamos: Yeah. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see if we have any Olympians in our class on Monday if they feel like they wear their medals to. Probably not in the law school, but I might have some undergrads. We'll see.
Evelyn Douek: Oh, yeah. The comp sci department is-
Alex Stamos: Not the comp sci. I'm not teaching CS. I'm not teaching CS in the fall. But, yes. Yeah, no, I thought the Olympics were great. I heard you guys have incredible break-dancers in Australia.
Evelyn Douek: ... I mean, we were so close to getting through without this particular reference. Look, all I'll say is, I know there's been a lot of cultural commentary on B-girl Raygun. But, she gave me a lot of joy and I appreciate that. So, if you haven't seen her stylings, I would definitely look them up.
Alex Stamos: She has a PhD. So I think, actually, we should-
Evelyn Douek: So it's Dr. Raygun. We should be respectful. It's Dr. Raygun to you listeners.
Alex Stamos: ... She works for Macquarie University in Sydney.
Evelyn Douek: Macquarie. Not bad.
Alex Stamos: Macquarie. Yeah, yeah. That's a real university?
Evelyn Douek: It is definitely a real university. Not known for its break dancing specialty.
Alex Stamos: It is now.
Evelyn Douek: It is now. That's right.
Alex Stamos: That's what it's known for.
Evelyn Douek: World-famous break dancing university, Macquarie.
Alex Stamos: Sorry Macquarie, but that is what you Google News Alert ranking will be for quite a while outside of Australia.
Evelyn Douek: You know what? The thing I love about Australia is we will own it. Raygun has been welcomed as a hero. Macquarie will probably have her image up on banners around the university. We love that stuff. We could take a good joke and laugh at ourselves. And so, I appreciate that about us.
Alex Stamos: Yeah. And then, I just have to point out, the Olympics come back to California, which you could tell, because in the closing ceremony, as part of the handover, Tom Cruise comes in. Who else were we going to send to California? Were we going to send our governor? Were we going to send the vice president of United States, a California native born in Kaiser, Oakland to two PhD parents, her father, a Stanford economist, her mother, a Berkeley bioscience researcher, the Vice President of the United States, her herself, a JD from Hastings from the University of California. Perhaps she could have represented the academic Majesty of California and the fact that we have some of the world's greatest universities. No, no, no. We'll send Tom Cruise.
Evelyn Douek: Yep.
Alex Stamos: That is LA 2028 right there. Oh, boy. Get excited. Get ready for the California Olympics.
Evelyn Douek: Exactly. Something to be proud of. I never quite understand how he has survived being canceled, but he has. He is cancelable. And, it was quite the spectacle.
Alex Stamos: [inaudible 00:54:40] being canceled. How has he survived? Right? The guy has been hurt. He does all these stunts. He's broken every bone in his body.
Evelyn Douek: It's true.
Alex Stamos: Yeah. It is amazing. Somehow the thetans have not been able to kill him so far. But yeah, LA Olympics coming up, which I think, actually there will be probably some events at Stanford. So that'll be cool. There'll be events in Northern California. So, by then, you should have tenure. So, it'll be great. You'll be able to skip class to go watch some-
Evelyn Douek: Exactly.
Alex Stamos: ... I mean, it will be summer, so it'll be perfect.
Evelyn Douek: Hey, no, I am warming up for the... Unfortunately, there's no break dancing in the 2028 Olympics. Otherwise, that would be my way in to be Australia's best break dancer.
Alex Stamos: Because you only have to compete against 26 million people for your spot in the Olympics.
Evelyn Douek: And we've seen the best that we have to offer. So, I could be in for a real chance.
Alex Stamos: But yeah, so what will be is there'll be surfing, skateboarding, and sport climbing will be in the 2028 games. So, those are three sports that you can-
Evelyn Douek: Those sound hard though.
Alex Stamos: ... Yeah, those do. I think, sport climbing is probably the thing you probably need to be a little bit taller for. No offense. I've seen your arms. I'm not sure that's going to be it. But surfing and skateboard, I think, you would actually be a great skateboarder. You're lightweight, you've got low center of gravity. You've got the hair. You actually look like a skateboarder. You'd be perfect.
Evelyn Douek: Excellent. All right. Well, four years, the count is on. Let's see if I can get into the event.
Alex Stamos: Plus, I mean, Australia's really not a famous skateboarding country, so I feel like it's the country where if you just did skateboarding every day, you could compete.
Evelyn Douek: Atlas, I have this podcast that I have to attend to.
Alex Stamos: It's the podcast. It's the podcast that we record every three months.
Evelyn Douek: Exactly. It's such a shame. Otherwise, I'd be right on that, and at the next Olympics. So, ah, what a pity. And with that, this has been your Moderated Content not so weekly update. This show is available in all the usual places and show notes and transcripts are available at law.stanford.edu/moderatedcontent. Please give us a rating, preferably a good one. We do like it when you do that. Gold, gold, gold for us. And, this week we bid a due to John Perino, policy analyst extraordinaire at the Stanford Internet Observatory. We'll miss you, John, and thank you for all the hard work that you've done on this pod over the years.
Alex Stamos: Yeah, I just want to say, John has done incredible work at Stanford Observatory. He took the research we did, he took it to Congress, and had huge impact. He did briefings for members of Congress, briefings for staffers, and there have been actually legislative impact laws that have been changed, laws that I think have been sped through, especially around the child safety world. A bunch of that work, he took them and said, "Look at the actual things that are happening in the world." And helped propel some things. So, congratulations, John. I'm not sure if it's public, but he has another fantastic job. He's going to continue to have impact on tech policy. And, I'm glad we're going to continue to see him around DC and continue to have impact. But thank you so much for your work, John.
Evelyn Douek: Yeah, congratulations, John. And, look forward to seeing what you do next. The podcast is produced by the wonderful Brian Pelletier. And, special thanks to Lily Chang and Rob Huffman. Talk to you soon.