Title: Kiriakou & Sean O'Brien Explain Panquake
Show: Graham Elwood
Date: 2022-04-22
URL: https://youtu.be/chQTXijz4rc
Duration: 33:00

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[00:00] let us bring them on the show everybody they we we're going to talk mainly about pan quake and the importance of pan quake and uh we wanted to bring both of these gentlemen back on the show they've both been on the show before um first of all uh xcia and whistleblower john kariaka was here who uh let's bring him on the show john how are you hey doing well thanks graham sorry to hear about youtube man not good well dude that's

[00:30] this is happening to everybody i know it's awful sorry i know it's great i mean it's it's it's it's insane i mean it's happened on youtube i mean i i have several friends and i'm sure you'd know people too worked at rt america so they just basically wiped rt america off the face of the earth i mean like just like that it's and all these really good shows redacted tonight on contact boom bust max kaiser all these shows that i watched um that brought news and information to people

[01:01] in a way that the amer american media isn't it's just it's awful terrible we live we live in we live in a crazy we live in crazy times um yeah but uh we'll bring also on uh the cso of pan quake who's been on the show before mr sean o'brien sean how you doing uh great happy to be here excellent well um let's get right into it uh about first of all where pan quake is it's

[01:33] just i mean it's close to being done i've talked to susie about it uh and then i want to really get into the importance of it especially to what we were just talking about john and i were just talking about and all the censorship all of us have seen so why don't sean why don't you just give us sort of an update of where it's at and the status of it and then we'll get into the the reasons why sure so um as a lot of your audience knows pancreatic.com is a short messaging service um we've been um

[02:05] working on it uh from a development standpoint since approximately last summer and stuff is moving very very quickly the development process is going really fast we just revealed to the world um the look and feel so the beautiful screens um showing what a pancake dashboard will look like um this environment that we want folks to um be happy living in um expressing themselves sharing information you know um and having a network where they really can feel and

[02:36] know actually transparently that they're reaching the folks that they intend to reach they have the amplification they should have that they have the voice that they should have on social media um so we have uh you know a functioning uh interface uh john has seen it and we have demoed it to some other folks as well um we're constantly uh building and adding to that um and we're push push pushing so we're in the last phase of our crowd fundraiser so we're a crowdfunding model

[03:06] here um we've had you know approximately 3 500 folks donate to that crowdfunder which is just incredible um and we need to get through this last phase get across the goal line um so we can bring the folks we need to bring in for things like support um making sure we have real humans and not algorithms right um who are going to help our folks um you know if they if they need that that support uh in the network um and just upping the business really yeah

[03:38] and just for people look here i've just put this is what the interface looks like i've seen it as well it's pretty amazing uh to see how functional it is and then to just go back to uh this is how many people have donated thus far this is the campaign uh and this is to me already showing how hungry everybody is for this and and what it's going to do and it was really sort of exciting um [Music] for me and for myself for all of us to

[04:08] to see this one of the things that i find exciting about it is that um you know as a stand-up comedian just to somebody that that promotes shows i've been so um you know throttled that that i you know i've amassed followers on all these social media platforms and then i tell them hey i'm coming to your town to perform or watch my live stream or whatever and they're like never heard of it they're not even allowed to hear of it so it's really just just as a performer not to mention

[04:39] uh all the other reasons for to use it for censorship but um i want to like so john what what drew you to this project and how do you see it yeah um how do you see it interacting with the intelligence community which which really has hijacked so many of these social media platforms really great questions this is the best way to open this conversation what what drew me was several different things

[05:10] actually um number one i've gotten to the point where i have to go to my twitter every day to see if they've put a little red tag saying that i'm a an official mouthpiece of the russian government which i'm not but i mean poor ed schultz has been dead for how many years and they made him a they put a tag on him saying that he's a mouthpiece of the russian government so that was one thing that bothers me very much more importantly though you know i i used to go to twitter

[05:41] constantly to read the news what what i would do is because i can't read everything as much as i would like to i would follow people that i respect from a wide variety of backgrounds and look all day long to see what they're posting what's ralph nader saying right what's uh uh the the marshall uh center saying or the brennan center or propublica

[06:11] and now it's you know so much of what i used to be interested in is banned or it's you can't see you can't find telesur you can't find rt or sputnik uh any anything that i'm interested in that has to do with prison reform for example uh is deemed to be anti-american and so all of a sudden i just can't read the news anymore facebook's even worse facebook beat twitter to the punch they're even worse

[06:42] and then about a year ago susie dawson approached me and told me about pan quake and the idea behind pan quake was no corporate money no government money no advertising completely open source code so that everything is transparent and i mean like in the literal sense of the word it's transparent there is there is no big brother to go through our our uh

[07:14] posts and then impose an algorithm on us that's going to decide what our friends and followers can see and what they can't see so you know we we give a lot of we give a lot of lip service grabbed to to freedom of speech and to transparency and nine times out of ten at least here in the united states with these corporate run sites we're just not serious about it well what told me that that pan quake was serious

[07:45] about it was the fact that it's hosted in iceland which i absolutely love so it's not subject to a national security letter from the fbi demanding all of your user data and all this other nonsense that we see all the time in the news and because there are no um outside investors no corporations or governments or think tanks or anything else there's no pressure to squelch free

[08:16] speech so this in my view is what these big tech platforms originally thought they wanted to be and then realized that they could never be never yeah and they've i mean you you especially you read a book like uh you know when when google met wikileaks you know you realize that like google has been basically doing data collection for the intelligence community for quite a while so it's absolutely absolutely you

[08:47] know i remember oh it's been 10 or 12 years now when uh somebody i don't know who somebody leaked to wikileaks that it wasn't just google it was literally every one of the big tech firms from from microsoft to google to apple to all the big communications companies every last one of them was providing information to the cia into nsa and to the fbi with these national security letters well you have to ask yourself when the director of security

[09:17] for microsoft is the former station chief well i shouldn't say where he was the station chief but you know there's a problem there's a problem with this how do we trust this company well i can trust yeah and that's the thing that's so fascinating to me is like in in you know in and how susie's explained it to me and to all of us like i'm you know i'm not a coder i'm not a tech guy at all and so the questions that have come up like

[09:48] um and because susie's been targeted herself and because she knew julian and and understands how this works they put in you guys have put in so much stuff to prevent all of this like the iceland thing i never even would have thought of that you know like and the the the servers are not amazon servers because that's boom they can they can just call up amazon say shut it down and it's done and jeff bezos has got 600 million dollars from the cia so we

[10:18] know we know where where was that so um i want to like uh some of the questions and sean i know you can you can answer these um the questions of like can it be hacked can it be can can somebody just come in and buy pan quake and and snatch up all your data it is always all the data going to be stored somewhere so everyone can steal it or hack it or whatever can you answer those questions for anybody sure um and first i just want to say you

[10:49] know the points you're making and the the way we're talking about this is absolutely correct right um we want to be a lifeboat away from big tech and that's you know an analogy of course but it's a one we really really mean um protecting data is actually protecting lives um you know especially when we're talking about you know high value targets for the cia etc etc um activists um who are making an impact right there they know that they're being targeted it has a real effect on their

[11:21] lives and these other social media sites that are advertising surveilling you know creating these frameworks which were in turn work with these state agencies um they are exposing people to real harm and real danger so um that's exactly the thing that we care about um you know protecting people from and that's why we're building things the way we're building them so on the building piece um so yeah we have our core infrastructure in iceland um it's a good jurisdiction for you know

[11:51] freedom of speech and a number of other protections from specifically the us government but other governments as well um but also we have a decentralized model right we have a blockchain based model and our nodes the machines the people right with smartphones and desktop computers and so on that will be in pancake.com those folks will be communicating to each other using peer-to-peer connections right so we're making sure we're using the edge of the network we're having folks

[12:22] uh communicate in a decentralized not cloud computing way um and that in turn makes a network very resilient against things like you know ddosing and other kinds of attacks that could bring it down right um we spread out the computing as far as we possibly can um we make sure we have strong encryption strong um you know authentication and verification of users between other users and we have some clever encryption where we're uh implementing to do all of

[12:52] that um we make sure that uh we have open source code right so we're gonna release uh with the pan quake launch we're gonna release the code for the entire stack um that means anybody can review and audit that and we will have the best and brightest security experts and already do have quite a few um looking at that work looking at that code um so that's our sort of the fundamental things but if you care about protecting data right don't take that data in in the first

[13:23] place okay one of the analogies that a lot of security experts talk about is data as what they call a toxic asset and that means basically you know the more data you collect the more you sort of put it on a shelf somewhere it's like a corroding battery that just gets worse and worse and worse these other services right that we're so used to using on the internet have these huge databases these huge server farms that have all this information on their users all these profiles and so on um at pan quake right we don't want that data

[13:54] in the first place okay anything that's even remotely sensitive will be on your machine so we're architecting it so that you have a user data store on your devices um and that's your data you own it we don't want it um you're not even collecting the data right that's right that's exactly right so you don't even it's incredible right yeah it's incredible i love it you know but it's so simple really and and you know we're

[14:24] not going to collect email addresses or phone numbers or those kinds of things that folks are now having to use all the time to verify themselves on these other networks we don't want it right that's good for us right and it's good for you um and that's that's the basic principle there um the nuts and bolts of how it works i mean we're taking some very clever pieces of software some very clever encryption um we're decentralizing and spreading things out like true peer-to-peer networks um we're doing a lot of the things which you know other transformative you know um apps

[14:57] are doing um to change the the world and this thing that some folks are starting to call web three right although we'll see if that catches on um but the point is you know it's about breaking down these control structures breaking down the centralization of the network environment that we have which is what allows the googles etc etc to have the censorship that they have but it also allows them right to basically ruin people's lives by amassing these huge

[15:28] profiles on people and then following them throughout their entire childhood now i mean the people who've grown up in this environment all the way through you know they hope that you know the end of their lives that's that's the google plan right um and that's something we not only would never do we don't want to do it um and because we're not focusing on spying on people right like these other companies are and they put all this engineering effort into trying to figure out who people are and who they're talking to and how to stop them from talking to specific people or stop them from sharing different information

[16:00] that takes a lot of engineering work right um because we're not doing all that we can use our engineering muscle right to deliver something different that allows information to be amplified freely allows you to reach your audience and know verifiably and transparently with the blockchain record that you're reaching your audience and so on and so forth um it's it's simple right it's it's in some ways going back to you know the better part of the internet before it was destroyed

[16:30] in the last you know 10 15 20 years by these big tech companies and we're using the lessons and the cool technology that's out now to reinvent that internet into something that's better and more powerful so well that's yeah that's got to have them all befuddled because you're not creating something to try to take over the world and become billionaires and build rocket ships to fly away from a planet that you let set on fire um so i wanted to and since we've all said we've all seen

[17:01] you know how they've used infiltrated social media like the intelligence and stuff to to blow up activist movements there's you see these infiltrators you know they'll have a pro a profile that you know you look to read the boy they seem like they're a real true lefty activist it says free assange and medicare for all or whatever else and then they're always like stirring up or whatever um so i wanted to sean quickly tell us like

[17:31] how that works in terms of the the giving someone a pan quake and giving them the authority to do that so that even because because the question is like okay so you guys are doing five dollars a month subscription what's to prevent google or the cia or whomever to buy a bunch of bot accounts and then they can just take this thing over and in six months to a year it'll be ruined again just like the last cool thing we thought was going to be great that's not ruined sure sure um so there's a few mechanisms that we're sort of building in at a fundamental level we'll obviously also

[18:02] have checks and balances uh you know um intrusion detection systems and so on so that we can start spotting you know real attacks on the network but putting aside that technical stuff um first off the subscriber model is a good way to limit um things like botnets like all these bots um you know swarming and creating these you know what used to be called egg accounts on twitter right these these bs accounts with 30 followers that just harass people and and make people's lives miserable um that subscription

[18:33] actually does help to limit that somewhat um you know the types of tools that you know the cia the nsa uses to spin up these fake personas as they call them in their own documents um that is not going to be easy to do um when you have a subscription model so that's that's sort of the first thing right yes i guess really if they want to buy a bunch of bots well that's thanks for the five bucks from all these robots right that's one way to think about it do they really want to be funding us right so at any rate um

[19:04] the second part is that um it's an opt-in social network in the sense that you're going to see content from the people you follow or content for example that you might search for so if you search for cats you're going to see cats right um that's not a very effective network for spies to use to amplify content and manipulate people right because what they rely upon is spinning up these you know groups of fake accounts so that they can basically push

[19:34] their narrative so that they can have you know these fake trolling conversations shove things into people's timelines manipulate um on the back end when they can the algorithm to silence some voices and to allow some other voices to be bigger so that their voices the bots that they control the paid staff that they pay to manipulate social feeds those folks suddenly have a huge voice in these big tech networks right none of that's going to be possible in pan quake folks have a level playing field which

[20:05] is very big to us and it's not just about you know the spies and all of that which certainly is a problem that we're well well aware of um but we want to be somebody who's you know just um starting out uh trying to promote content such as yourself graham i mean you're not just starting out but you would be when you get into pancake new there um we want you to have equal footing to you know if i don't know somebody who was uh some huge star came into the network right we want to know that those accounts

[20:35] start out on equal footing have the ability to amplify have the ability to reach their followers and folks will find that they have a voice that where they don't feel like they're you know in some sort of popularity contest right um a lot of that again is just about not manipulating timelines right not manipulating content not forcing fake trends into people's faces that are advertising the next disney thing um we're not doing any of that but that that also makes it so that a lot of the abuse a lot of the things that facebook

[21:06] especially has been called out for um can't happen in the network um if you're not manipulating algorithms you know to do this terrible stuff to do you know manipulation of uh political beliefs for you know some sort of political campaign and so on and so forth um then you know uh there's there's a lot less to worry about as far as folks who are worried about you know these kinds of uh um i don't know these social uh uh engineers let's say

[21:37] uh if we get us you know uh someone in there who is trying to manipulate people they're going to find it's going to be very very difficult with the way that we're just having opt-in content no trend manipulation no timeline manipulation and honest transparency about statistics um that alone is going to make it really hard for these folks to operate the way that they're used to operating in the big tech environment yeah and so let me ask you this john so like you've obviously experienced first hand the targeting for being a

[22:08] whistleblower you've seen it you know the assange movement the wikileaks has been targeted i mean susie dawson just put in the chat how they shut down the paypal donations during the fundraising of this and so how do you what what i mean like we have to think in these terms and this is the thing i liked and the conversations i had with susie is she's assuming these attacks are going to come she's not like let's hope they play nice we know they're not going to play nice we know what they're going to do so what attack what things do you see them trying to do to shut down pan quake

[22:38] john and how do you see pan quake being able to with withstand these attacks um yeah you know i'm confident that susie and sean and the team have foreseen uh a lot of what uh we ought to be expecting basing basing the the servers in iceland i think was a stroke of genius even the corporate headquarters is um is offshore in a in a place that's very secure for this kind of thing

[23:09] very very forward thinking um if i were still at the cia or nsa i would be looking for a technical way in i think that the fact that there's this subscription service which makes it almost impossible to create bots to attack the system unless the bots pay you know the five dollars a month was also uh brilliant uh what the cia well i would expect different things from the cia from nsa nsa i would expect

[23:39] technical attacks and bill benny bill benny's on the team bill can go into some deep detail on that kind of thing he's he's a genius on the cia side i would expect um a different kind of underhandedness i would expect uh personal attacks on pan quake's leadership i would i would expect um uh articles uh condemning all of us who are involved for whatever reason oh john kiriakou he's a convicted

[24:12] felon you want to be in business with a convicted felon you know i get that all the time from people who can't debate on the issues so uh you know what they did to to wikileaks uh allowed us to learn lessons and we've been able to safeguard ourselves to protect ourselves from those kinds of attacks it's going to be much much harder to attack pan quake than it is to attack wikileaks and because pan quake is still so small it's

[24:45] still you know in its nascent stages i think we largely haven't come to their attention yet and i'm i'm optimistic that once we do come to their attention once we're big enough or important enough to be worth attacking will be so ready for them that there won't be anything that they can do well yeah i mean it will get i can't wait for the article that pat quake is helping putin or whatever whatever that happened and you know it's coming you know they're gonna hashtag putin quake or

[25:16] whatever right quake great yeah just like just like ed snowden defected to russia like nobody in america remembers that he was in the transit lounge when john kerry revoked his passport so yeah histories change as time passes it's going to be up to us to make sure that the truth is out there which again pancake will afford us that safe place to do it and i want people to understand that this wasn't just like something slapped together you've got bill benny involved

[25:46] nsa whistleblower john you're a cia whistleblower involved you've got susie who's been targeted you've got people who played this game and see the tactics and so you know let's all just be ready for the whatever pan quake kills puppies headline from cnn or whatever whatever whatever exactly that's how you know you're making an impact right yeah how else are you gonna attack the former number four at nsa nsa's technical director who's arguably

[26:18] one of the the greatest minds in america on the issue of internet security and privacy how else are you going to attack him right yeah you've got to say he he he killed christmas or whatever bill benny hates rainbows or whatever they're gonna whatever they're gonna say um so um and i the thing too i want i want to talk about this as well uh because susie one of the things our conversation her and i had was about

[26:48] she wants to be ready to have staff in place so that if it takes off it's not overwhelmed because that's another thing too we get all of a sudden you know two million people sign up for this thing in in 20 days oh we don't we don't know we don't have the staff in place to do that so what what steps are you guys taking in case that which is which would be a good problem to have um for that to be handled so we have a staggered release model right um so first i just want to say you know if you folks are interested in our

[27:19] progress and how we're building in in the direction we're moving in and why we're making certain choices and so on we do monthly delivery meetings um where we recap basically everything that happened in the month both the technical stuff and the non-technical um and we just make sure we have that transparency for all of our donors and the public in general um but yeah uh we do staggered releases basically so uh first off uh we are having a beta right and that beta will have 5 000 users in it if folks would like to apply to potentially be

[27:50] someone who can join the beta you can go out to pancreatic.com there's a link to apply to join the beta we just want to make sure we do a little bit of vetting and and we don't have bots warming us at the beginning all right so that's the kind of thing we're being smart about and and that that model is very smart um that way um and not just bots but you know disruptive folks and so we want to have we like disruptive folks of a certain kind but we we want to have trustworthy folks in the network who really care about what we're doing and and uh and so on and so forth

[28:22] that's a smart thing to do and then we go to the 1.1 and we're going to get to uh 25 000 users for that release um so we're just having just a little bit larger for that and then we will open it to the public and have sort of this staggered release model that allows us to make sure especially with a blockchain right we have to have that core of trust in the beginning um the folks who are part of what's called a consensus model and and uh your audience who are cryptocurrency folks i'm sure are familiar with this kind of thing um you need to make sure

[28:52] that that core is uh non-malicious actors basically um so we have to have that really trusted core of folks in the beginning um and then we just sort of move out and branch out the um support plan which is something that the staff is working on in which i'm sure we will talk about this month in the delivery meeting and probably continue to talk about um is very smart um we're making sure that we're scaling and planning to scale you know having real humans who

[29:23] can help real people and um doing that and making sure that's in place giving people that different experience from you know all this algorithmic you know bs that they're used to um is also really important to us right we want people to be respected we're building respect in not just into the technology right but also into the way that we're building the infrastructure around that the human infrastructure around that um so that's that's really a big part of it but also i will say like this decentralization

[29:54] stuff right um which has already changed the world with you know cryptocurrency and and some other decentralized apps that are out there d apps or whatever folks want to call it um it's really powerful it's really scalable so we can plan sort of a staging of bringing more and more nodes online expanding the network out across continents and so on and so forth we're using the pipe in very efficient ways so to speak right we're not just funneling a bunch of data into a google

[30:24] data center somewhere or relying upon some amazon aws server that we're renting you know that's not even ours and that kind of thing allows us to really plan in a smart way um we don't want to be like some of these networks that folks may be familiar with the the getters which had you know getter had all kinds of problems to put it mildly on true social the the trump network that seems to have fallen apart before it started barely um that kind of thing are the mistakes that we know well are well aware of and we

[30:56] can make sure that we don't do um but also i mean look we want to have uh uh something sustainable here um we're not trying to as as we said you know have uh vc money or corporate pr teams we don't have corporate marketing teams everything we've raised to this point is graph grassroots money um from folks who are donating their hard-earned cash to us to do something amazing um and that's been done you know with word of mouth

[31:27] our word of mouth and speaking to each other human to human is really really powerful um so we have regular people being our voice we're going to get that critical mass and when we get there right we get those folks on board and we can't be ignored by the corporations and these other folks you know that's when you'll see the smear pieces certainly but that's also when you're going to see a situation where we can't be ignored and we're on the front pages right um you have to build it that way and that that's a lesson really that you know we

[31:59] learned in in some respect from from wikileaks right um they built something that couldn't be ignored there um they were releasing information that was vitally you know important um and did it in such a clever way especially with i mean with the numerous releases that they did um that you know even though the mainstream media didn't want to report this stuff they had to right and um that's sort of the thing that we're learning and trying to do with fan quick as well we want to be something big

[32:30] that people care about that people are part of real ordinary folks and then you know um conquer the world let's hope we'll see everybody thanks for watching we are still in our like ninth month of demonetization from youtube so support what we're doing at patreon.com gramelwood or rockfin.com graham ellwood which is a blockchain cryptocurrency platform it's free to sign up and there's a premium level at ten dollars a month and for that you get everybody on the platform's premium content myself lee

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