Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Visit SoFi.com slash VoxPod to see how much you could save. That's SoFi.com slash VoxPod. SoFi student loans are originated by SoFi Bank and a member FDIC. Additional terms and conditions apply. NMLS 696891. Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems.
Today, we're going to talk about the messy, fast-moving situation at Anthropic, the maker of Claude, that now finds itself in a very ugly legal battle with the Pentagon. The back-and-forth is complicated, but as of a few days ago, the Pentagon had deemed Anthropic a supply chain risk, and Anthropic was
that filed a lawsuit challenging that designation, saying that the government was violating its First and Fifth Amendment rights and, quote, seeking to destroy the economic value created by one of the world's fastest growing private companies.
I can tell you right now, we're gonna be talking about the twists and turns of that case here on Decoder and on The Verge many, many times in the months to come. But today, I wanna take a step back and really dig in on one very important part of this situation that hasn't gotten nearly enough attention as things have spiraled out of control.
How the United States government does surveillance, the legal authority that allows that surveillance to occur, and why Anthropic was so distrustful of the government, saying it would follow the law when it comes to using AI to do even more surveillance. My guest today is Mike Masnick, the founder and CEO of Techter, the excellent and long-running tech policy website.
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Chapter 2: How does Anthropic's lawsuit against the Pentagon reflect on digital privacy?
So if you and I were to text each other and mention... a foreign person, that is now fair game for the NSA to collect and to keep and to store. There's a second part of this. I mentioned first the executive order 12333 from Ronald Reagan, which effectively allowed the NSA
As the technology changed over time and the internet grew, it allowed the NSA to tap into foreign communications, but that included any communications that maybe left the U.S. en route somewhere. So if...
If I'm texting you and a message went from me in California through a fiber optic cable that happened to leave the U.S., the NSA could put a tap in the part once it's outside the U.S., collect that information, even if it was just going to you within the U.S., And then what they could do is keep that information, even if it was on U.S.
persons, and they could do specific searches on that later, sometimes referred to as backdoor searches. So they collected this information that we believe they weren't supposed to collect in the first place, but they could keep it. And they promised, they sort of pinky swore that they would keep it private.
But if they did a search and found that you or I mentioned a foreign person, then suddenly it was fair game for them to do whatever they want with it. In total, that has turned into a world in which they can basically collect any information that happens to touch outside the U.S. And even if it is entirely between two U.S. persons, if they mention or even hint at someone who is not a U.S.
person, suddenly it is fair game to be collected. And from that, we've gotten what appears to be a form of mass surveillance of U.S. persons by an NSA that claims and publicly states that they do not spy on U.S. persons. How did we get to this point? This is a lot of incremental baby steps. You mentioned James Clapper in 2012. That's the Obama administration. You mentioned Ronald Reagan.
That's the 80s. We're going through Democrats and Republicans here, right? The war on terror happens in the George W. Bush administration. 9-11 and the Patriot Act happens in the George W. Bush administration. This is a lot of incremental bad things. Yes. Under presidents of both parties, under congresses of both parties, how did this happen?
I mean, the simplest form of it is just that nobody and certainly no president wants to be president during the time when there's a big terrorist attack because that makes them look bad, right? I mean— Obviously, they also want to protect Americans, right? That's part of their job, I guess.
And so, you know, if you have an intelligence community that is basically operating in darkness because that's what intelligence communities do, and they keep coming to you and saying, you know, hey, you know, if we could just get access to this information, it would be really helpful in preventing a terrorist attack.
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Chapter 3: What historical context is important for understanding government surveillance?
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Chapter 4: How has the interpretation of surveillance laws evolved in the U.S.?
you know, exactly this issue in terms of third-party data. But I do want to clarify the main difference where what we were just talking about before this with, you know, Amazon or other third parties hosting your data, that was cases where they were, you know, because of where they sit in the ecosystem, they were hosting your data directly.
With Claude, it's not that anyone is worried about the NSA looking through like your Claude usage, right? It's about them going out and getting third-party data from an Amazon or, more likely, the sort of sneaky hidden data brokers that serve ads on your phones and know all your location and your interests and things like that. And then feeding that into a system that Claude would then work on.
That's what Anthropic really didn't want to be a part of. Right. Wherever or however the government would collect that data from a third party, Claude said, we don't want our tool to be used on that data. There's a piece of that that just feels like – Apple famously stands up to the FBI. Put a backdoor on the iPhone. Apple says no, and they stand up to Trump. And there's just a part of –
however our system works, in which big private companies get to say no to the government on behalf of their customers. And this felt the same, in the same way that, you know, Apple, again, won't put it back toward the iPhone, or the big cloud providers say there's a little bit of a process you have to jump through before you get the individual data.
Here, it seems like Anthropic is saying, we're not just going to do bulk analysis of data that you have acquired from other parties, because that leads to 24-7 mass surveillance of Americans, and we don't want to do that. And that seems like a bridge too far for this administration. Is there any coming back from that? I mean, we'll see.
In the past when that's happened, and it's happened plenty of times with most of the large tech companies, at some point they've said something is a bridge too far. And where that normally goes is to court. And that, you know... The companies will go to court or the administration will go to court and there'll be some sort of court battle.
I mean, you know, backdooring the iPhone is a perfect example of that. Sort of went to court and they sort of fought it out, though they never quite got to a conclusion because the FBI eventually did just, you know, manually break into the iPhone and then didn't want the court ruling to ruin the future. Yeah.
But in this case, you know, where the escalation is and where this is different than those past situations is that rather than just going to court, they did this supply chain risk designation, which is just insane. You know, this idea that this tool, which was designed to stop, you know, potential foreign malicious actors from supplying technology that could then, you know,
put in hidden surveillance tools into the larger technology stack, that those could be banned. To apply that to a US-based company, basically for having an ethics policy, feels... like a real misuse of that tool.
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