Welcome to Tech Talk by CT.

Thank you. Thank you for having us. And, thank you to CDT. And I I was actually thinking about this when I was on the train over. We write a lot in the book about, finding a political home, just having people you organize with. And it's generally true. We're we're in this maybe we can talk about it at some point, but we're we're advising this for activists and for people out in the world. But I I I do wanna say that I actually feel like in many ways while I was at the White House, CDT was sort of a political home for me. And I felt like I could always rely on everyone from Alex to Miranda, to to Quinn. I'm not I'm not saying Quinn, but, but on down. So I'm very grateful to be here and, and to be partners in this work. And Miranda is one of my favorite people. So

come from? So we we spent a year talking to dissidents, over a 100 people, dissidents on five continents. This was people who have, in some form or another, stood up to authoritarianism, to political repression. And as has now been introduced, Julia is a well known, well established tech journalist. I was doing a lot of tech policy at the White House, and we met actually through one of those, AI conferences that you guys all love going to so much, talking about other stuff. And after the election, I was I had a new fellowship at at the Kennedy School, at the Ash Center, where where people study democracy. And it was a place where they're just it's just a place where a lot of dissidents end up, a lot of opposition leaders who have been deposed or who have exiled from their countries end up at the center. I was sort of socially and intellectually hanging out with them. And Julia woke up the day after the election and said, as as Julia Anguen, and said, my threat model is off. Like, everything that I've ever thought, everything that I've ever known about the way that I'm supposed to avoid threats, feels different in a world of true acute increasing authoritarianism. And so we ended up having a conversation and came up with the idea, like, why don't why don't we just talk to some dissidents? And it began, actually, as a very technical project. It began just with asking for advice. Like, how do you stay safe when data is being abused in this way, when you're beginning to see the convergence of this is not the crowd to have to explain any of these things to, but to when you begin to see the convergence as we have seen between the far right and, tech leaders, and what does that mean in our day to day lives? What does that mean in immigration enforcement? What does that mean in surveillance? What does that mean under authoritarianism? So we began asking these questions, and what we found increasingly is we were asking technical questions. We were getting very personal answers, like deeply personal answers. And over and over again, the the the an the tools that people talked about using were really some tech tools. I mean, we got some technical advice about how to, you know, what to do if you get arrested or encryption, etcetera. But for the most part, people from Venezuela to Hungary to Russia were talking about community. And so we followed that. We just sort of followed that reporting as as far as it took us. And what we found over and over again was that these are personal stories, that almost everyone's path as a dissident and as an anti authoritarian activist begins with what we call a moral collision. A moment when the way that you feel inside is some is is out of step with what's going on the outside, and you have to make a choice. And so that's the direction we headed in. I'll say one other thing about this question that you asked about, which is a good one. We're we're we're kind of institutionalist. I mean, Julia would not really identify as an institutionalist. She would identify as, like, this is not fair to her right now, but she would identify as sort of like a rugged journalist. And she is. She is. But we both do come from sort of, from inside powerful institutions. And, this being a dissident is a different approach. It's about throwing sand in the gears. We've both felt like we did we did not the world did not need although, you know, if somebody wants to write this, they should. But the world has a lot of books that make the case that what we're seeing in places like The United States is authoritarianism. Ann Applebaum, and m Gessen, and Timothy Snyder. And there are also a lot of books that that profile, really, really, really preternaturally courageous people, like Navalny, or Mandela, or other people. But what we found as sort of institutionalists, as people who are trying to navigate this for ourselves and for our country, but really for ourselves, was that a book about those people and about those themes would be interesting, but not super helpful for us. What would be helpful for us is stories about people we haven't heard about before, and what they did when they heard that voice in their head that something something was wrong, and how do they take risks to do that.

in in this particular era? Well, first of all, institutions are just people. Julia likes to say that institutions are basically neutral, and they're just made up of human beings. They're made up of us. And what we found over and over again, and I'll give a couple of ex of examples of this, was people who decided to push their institutions to be more courageous. We tell a a couple of stories. So when we open the book, talking about a guy named Paul Osadabe, who, was a civil rights lawyer at HUD. And he was a civil servant, so he wasn't attached to any particular administration. And his job at HUD was to enforce the Fair Housing Act. He was in the civil rights division in the Fair Housing division. And he he realized very early during the Trump administration that the policy, whether it had been articulated or not, of Trump's Housing and Urban Development Office was to stop enforcing, was to just basically not enforce civil rights law. Stop if you've heard this one before. And, this this was a he he's also sort of the ultimate institutionalist. He had come up as a as an attorney. He had worked his way up in the civil, in the civil service. He was a union steward, so he was actually had responsibility for others within the organization. And he had this moment. He describes having this moment where he realizes the sort of capstone of Martin Luther King's legacy. This was the Fair Housing Act was passed about a week after King was assassinated, was just evaporating before his eyes. And and that, obviously, as we know in the room of people who work on civil rights issues, that that wasn't a clerical problem. That that was a that was a problem in people's real lives. That meant that people who are being discriminated against, which increasingly is happening, like, there are all these attempted, like, all white towns in the American South now, which is batshit bananas. That was happening. But but even sort of more creeping issues, like, you know, like, people be not being able to get alone because of because their immigration status or, you know, there are all kinds of things that were happening. Like, people were people's vulnerable people's housing was was acutely at risk. So he said to himself, like, he's a risk averse person. He's the child of immigrants. He was he, for good reason, was worried that if he spoke out, then maybe his parents who lived, across the country might be pursued, by MAGA folks, but said, as he told us, I'm a civil rights lawyer. I went to integrated institutions. He's he's he's black. He said, like, what am I doing here? What am I doing in in in this world if not this? So he so he began to speak out, and, and he and he just went on TV and explained what was going on. You know, the this administration has stopped enforcing housing, civil rights law in in housing policy. And eventually, he was fired, and he was frog marched out of the out of the building. But it took a little while. And in the process, he was able to tell the story, and and and give other people, a lot of courage in doing so. The other thing that he did is that he got other people together within the institution. He was one of the organizers of a letter that went to ultimately went to the to Elizabeth Warren, and then it became clear to the United States Congress, at the very least, someone was bearing witness to the fact that these that this injustice was happening. So that's one example. I'll give another, from the book, which is around the time when the, academic, quote, unquote, compacts were happening. Right? When Trump was sort of trying to coerce universities into all kinds of crazy stuff, but including, banning certain departments, academic departments, changing DEI policy, basically adopting conservative ideology, as a cudgel, or using accusations of anti Semitism as a cudgel. There were professors at Rutgers. There was a chemistry professor at Rutgers who sat on his university senate. Again, sort of like the most clerical institutional thing that you can do, sit on your university senate. They're basically deciding who gets what parking spot and what the academic calendar is, and it it important in the day to day life of the university, but pretty pretty boring stuff. And what he he was watching, like, Columbia University, one of the most powerful universities in the world, capitulating to a thug in the Oval Office. You know, we saw the same thing happen with with law firms, and just said, like, I don't understand what's going on here. And he and he had, in the back of his mind, he remembered NATO. He didn't know that much about NATO, so he, like, put into chat CPT, like, what is NATO? And then he was like, oh, that's makes sense. All for one and one for all. So he essentially described what was going on. All these universities are being picked off one by one by the Trump administration. What would a NATO style compact look like? By the way, I know that we keep we're all keep looking for the good use of Chat TVTS. I was just gonna say. Yeah. AI for, AI for good. Right? AI for good. Exactly. AI for democracy. And used the used the university senate as a place to begin that work. And then and basically, after that, got the university senates to codify this all across the country. And after that round of coercion, which is what it was for the universe, from, from the administration, I don't think any other universities capitulated. And so, these are examples of people who did not preside over the end of authoritarianism or the end of, you know, the authoritarian, breakthrough in The United States, but who used and we have more many more stories like like this in the book, but who used their perch from within their institutions, to make the change. And I will just say one other thing, because this is a book about taking risk. And I actually think we wrote it for Julia says oh, he says that we wrote it for wine moms, which is cool. Not against wine moms. Thank you to the wine moms of America. But I also think that we wrote it in part for the professional class, for folks like us, who are just not incentivized from from the time where I don't wanna overly categorize here, but certainly, I, you know, have not been incentivized from college on to take, moral risk and or risk for for for our values. And this is a set of tools that I think allows people to navigate that in a in a particular way.

Mostly, the answer from folks across the board was that they were they were able to take the long view. And I think Americans are bad at this. I think we're I think Americans are actually uniquely bad at this. I think that we live in a sort of instant gratification. So maybe it's not just Americans, but I live here and I'm not very good at it. And, I'll say just sort of two two stories of this. One is that, we talked to a guy named Nathan Law. Does anybody know Nathan Law? Nathan Law is a Hong Kong dissident. He was a student protester. He was a student, actually, who who got involved in student protesting. His first thing he ever did, because he was too scared of being arrested, was just passed out, water bottles at protests, and then witnessed so much brutality and witnessed so much injustice to his friends that it he felt like his community was at risk. And he became one of the major leaders of the Umbrella Revolution, so much so that he was jailed. He was he now lives in exile. He was nominated by a bipartisan group of United States senators for the Nobel Peace Prize, and this is a guy who's just, like, started passing out water bottles. So I think it's pretty amazing. But I asked Nathan this question from his apartment in he was in his apartment in London, and we were zooming. And I I asked this, like, how why are you working on this still, and how do you have any help? And he said, he said, I've studied a lot of history, and I've studied a lot of activist movements, and I've concluded that maybe we're just in the middle of history, which I think is nice. But I will also say that it's also he's right. Like, that's an interesting, fun, nice, poetic thing to say. The other thing that we talk a lot in this book about the Soviet dissidents, which was a successful dissident movement. As we know, Russia remains free, at this point. But, again, this is sort of the point. Right? History zigs and zags. But you have to count your victories in campaigns. You have to count your victories in historical epics and making sure that my, a mentor of mine from at at the Harvard Kennedy School, Danielle Allen talks she says she sort of rejects the idea that history the arc of the moral universe has long been a been stored justice. She thinks instead, she I she thinks history is basically like a globe and half like a sphere. And half of it is in the dark and half of it is in the light. And our job is just as long as we're alive and on this planet to continue to be pushing it, because otherwise, it'll always fall back. And we heard this from the Soviet dissidents. The Soviet dissidents, we did not talk to a lot of Soviet dissidents. Many of them were gone. But the there's an amazing book that came out, just in time for us to write this book, which is which is by a guy named Benjamin Nathan, who which is the the greatest, account of the Soviet dissident movement. And he goes deep, deep, deep it's like, you know, seven times as thick as this book. And he goes deep, deep, deep into the stories of and the lives of these people, most of whom had that moral collision. Most of them were intellectuals and academics and artists and people who just wanted to live a particular kind of life and all and that and and the fact that they were in a community allowed them to do that, a community of dissidents. But he describes the tote when I when when we asked him what kept them going, he says it was the ability to hold hope and helplessness at the same time, which is sort of the Nathan Law thing, sort of the thing that we need now. And he he names the book, he titles the book after a a toast that in the deepest, darkest depths of the Soviet descent movement in the fifties and sixties and into the seventies when people were being, you know, imprisoned and disappeared and sent to the gulag and sent to insane asylums, etcetera, that the the dissidents would gather and make. And that that toast was to the success of our hopeless cause. And then in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell.

that sudden shift that didn't seem like it was coming anytime soon? First of all, I was glad that we there was there was enough, like, chasms. There there were enough I should that that should be the four. There were there was enough sort of, like, shaking around the world in places like Venezuela and Hungary at the time that we did include, a line in the introduction that said, like, by the time you read this book, it's possible that events will have changed. And we talk a lot about Maduro also, which is a diff I would say a different situation. Yeah. I think that there are a few lessons from Hungary. Hungary is an example is a very good analogy to The United States. It's not a perfect one to one analogy, but a decent analogy to The United States because it's an example of what scholars now refer to as competitive authoritarianism, which is different. Do folks have a ever folks heard this term? So competitive authoritarianism, means that authoritarianism now looks different now. It's not your grandmother's authoritarianism. This authoritarianism doesn't come in on the back of a coup. This authoritarianism comes in through elections. And it's, it's the hollow slow hollowing out of democratic institutions. It means that the the free press gets a little bit less free and then a little bit less free until there is not a free press, or an independent press anymore. It means that elections keep happening, but they're skewed and they're tilted. It means that the courts continue to operate, but the but they're packed with, loyalists to the president. Does that sound familiar to folks? Mhmm. So that's called competitive authoritarianism because it remains at least the appearance of that remains look, you know, competitive. And Hungary is an example of this. Obviously, The United States is also an example of this. So it's good to to draw our lessons to draw some lessons from there. So I would say that there, there are several, but I'll focus on two. One is imperfect coalitions. The person who Hungary ultimately rallied around and the people who rallied around, around him were everyone from, real conservatives, ideological conservatives, to, sort of farmers out in the countryside, to, like, purple haired liberal students in the cities, which is not a coalition that I think we can really conceive of in in this country. And the person that they rallied around was basically Liz Cheney. And I think that when we watch things happen abroad, we're like, well, that's there, and that's that's hap this is part of the reason I think that Americans don't relate to the term dissident. It feels so far away. But when we look at, at a place like Hungary, we think, like, oh, they have this figure who that like, it was you gotta really think about it as Liz as Liz Cheney. And whether you could get behind Liz Cheney after fifteen years of increasing, creeping, and then, you know, speeding up authoritarianism. Julia Angwin, ladies and gentlemen. Come this way. We're talking about Liz Cheney. So lesson number one, lesson number one from Hungary is the value of a big tent coalition. And the big tent that they that they picked was was also it was, like, sort of a negative coalition. It was a coalition that wasn't necessarily around an affirmative agenda. If they had had to really describe an affirmative agenda, it would have been much harder. But it was a coalition of no. It was it was a it was a the thing they were able to get together on was, like, we're done with this guy. We're done with corruption, and we're done with Orban. That's the first thing. The second thing is, for The United States, is that because of what I just described in terms of competitive authoritarianism, because authoritize authoritarianism now comes in slowly and gradually and does that hollowing out thing that I just described, it means that the lights don't go out overnight for democracy. You still have off ramps. You could still use elections even the even if you have to have a bigger, win. You could still use the courts even if you need, to have a bigger win there too. You could still use the media even if it's sort of being, continually hollowed out. That's what we saw there. And so that's the other thing. I think the value of of of imperfect coalitions is one, but the other is that The United States, I think, really need to understand that so long as we have off ramps to drive down, we need to take them. And that means, getting things like the midterms right.

Yeah. Thank you. It's I'm sorry I'm late. And so I appreciate you all being patient with me. I, I think that the thing I was really happy to learn about, researching authoritarianism was that, my instinct as a journalist, that documenting it was important even if there were no immediate results from it was true. Right? That in fact like, a huge part of Hungary, actually, I was thinking about while you're talking about it, was journalism. And it was just by these few scrappy outlets that managed to hang on despite the state cracking down on any source of funding they could have, trying to investigate them, harass them out of existence. And what was really the compelling story there was this outlet called Direct thirty six that did, all these investigations and exposes on their YouTube channel about Orban's children and and how much his family had benefited personally, financially. Because authoritarianism is always theft. It's corruption. It's about money in the end, and they're stealing both your money and your rights. That's the that's the game. And so exposing it, the this was a journey that these outlets were just hanging on desperately, almost about to fold, but managed to keep putting out this stuff, and that is what got through to people. It actually wasn't a lot of the the thing the way that authoritarianism comes in sort of through all these legally, like, annoying annoying things where they're like, oh, they've hollowed out this thing. They've hollowed out that thing. And the average person doesn't totally grasp it. Right? But what they do grasp is these people took all my money, and they're, like, yachting around in the Mediterranean with it. And that was the compelling narrative that led to the no. Right? That was, galvanized enough people to make the coalition big enough. And so one thing I always think about with that is that, like, it takes time. Right? One of the things that's really frustrating about being a researcher or a journalist is that you write and you document, and it feels like nothing is changing. But the arc of history is long, and there will be moments of accountability. Right? That is what we learned from, Patrick Ball, the human rights data analysis, statistician who we talked to, who's testified at seven different tribunals after, genocides, basically, and documented every single perpetrator. Right? Thousands and thousands of people who participated in state violence, and he is helping to hold them to account. And his point that he made to us, which I thought was really compelling, was the victims will never forget. They are always going to seek accountability. So documenting it is a huge part of the fight. And so even if it feels hopeless, it is actually really, really important. And that's why I think we have to one of the reasons to write this book was to give people the hope to keep going. Right? Not just to bring new people in, but also keep doing it even when it feels like why are we doing this. We just did to the success of our hopeless cause right before that. So we're we're we're actually very on We're hopeful the world will not messes

But but I sent more I I sent markup stories to the vice president all the time. I mean, I and and and other and I think that and Nick Kristoff is, I think, a really good example of this also. Like, Nick Kristoff has had more success than almost anybody at going to the place, saying the thing, and then because of his stature, like, it will trigger a briefing on the Hill. Like, it's gonna happen. And so I yeah. I think that that's a really good point. Yeah. And and I I think we all consen consistently have to remind ourself that,

they took such joy in the small wins because that's really all you can focus on. Right? And so every the the the the volunteers in front of Delaney Hall that I spent so much time with, you know, every they were supporting the families who have to wait eight to ten hours in line to try to get in to see their loved ones. And every person who made it in over the objections of the guards and all the arbitrary rules that are constantly changing, they would celebrate. Like, we got them in. Right? They another person got to see their family. And I really felt it too. Like, I I was like, wow. You know, with journalism, I don't feel that. I feel like I write my story and then maybe nothing happens. And, or maybe sometimes it does. Right? But not as often as you like. And, this was, like, so ground level, and that's what made me realize true that the the work of of being a dissident is is that ground level work. Right? That none of this exists without that very small community level caring for others that sustains you across the larger movement. Right? And those are the building blocks for this larger movement.

Yeah. Well, I don't know how much of this you talked about, but when when I first the first initiating thought for this book was my feeling that my privacy threat model was wrong, that it was corporate surveillance I've been spending time on. I need to spend time on authoritarian surveillance. And I do I went into these interviews really feeling like, I I hope I I'm gonna figure it out. Right? Like, they're gonna really give me the the trip tips and tricks. And, and the sad thing is, right, that that it's never a silver bullet. And even if you used all the best encryption and you use the best you use code words and you, you know, delete everything, etcetera. Like, the the state will is always gonna be able to find a way to get at you. Right? And so your best defense is your community. But that said, there are some best practices that have evolved since when I last wrote my book on privacy and surveillance ten years ago, which, by the way, is hilarious. So Dragnet Nation, I wrote ten years ago. I also I also came and talked to her at CDT about it. And at the time, I went back and read the reviews. They were all like, this girl's hysterical. Like, what is she worried about? And, the funny thing is that I was under paranoid. Like, everything in that book that I was like, the worst case, it's actually worse. I didn't envision enough badness. Like and I'm not even talking about theoretical badness, like, actual on the ground this moment badness. And so I wanted to I want I actually was tempted to go back to all those reviewers. But then I remember I know. What Jay but I you know what? I actually looked up Jalen Brunson's quote when he like, what you know, the Knicks, captain who at this parade in after he won and he gets the keys to the city, he says, you don't owe your haters nothing. So I was like, okay. I'm channeling Dalen. But sorry. I've lost the thread here. We're talking about surveillance.

But so one of the some of the things that I felt like I actually hadn't quite clocked a little bit was and you you probably all know this better than I do, but, that there that we really need to I mean, we really absolutely, no one should be having facial recognition to unlock your phone, that we need, pins to open up each app. Right? Best practice is to have a pin to open your app. So even if they get into the phone, they can't get to the app. An extremely good practice, which I regrettably have to give to WhatsApp, is, the fact that you can hide a chat. So you can just make it invisible from searches even if they get into the app. And so levels like that, we call it the Swiss cheese theory where each level has holes, but putting enough Swiss cheese makes it impenetrable, is starting to arise in the tech industry, but is not as widespread as it should be. It's it's disappointing to me that, that hasn't become more widely held practices. And, also, something I always say, because people don't realize it, is film inside your signal app or inside of, an app called Tela that is designed for hostile environments instead of on your camera roll. So if they get your, thing, they don't have it, it's already being sent to your friends.

Can I just add one thing, which is, the one the sort of nontechnical piece, which is we profile in the book, a store the story of Claire Atkin? Do you all know Check My Ads? So Claire we we write about Claire, who's the one of the founders of Check My Ads, who was receiving real really vicious, threats online from after Dan Bongino, tweeted about her a number of times and really nasty stuff on Twitter and elsewhere. And what protected her when those threats migrated from online into real life and somebody showed up at her house was not an app or any of these sort of, technical hacks, which are all important. It was her neighbor who knew her and knew who was supposed to be around and who wasn't supposed to be around and noticed that there was a guy who looked strange, who was outside, and asked him who he was waiting for. And he said that he was waiting for for Claire, and then pinged Claire, who was not home and said, don't come home tonight. And she is very, insistent that, that it was the community and it was the relationship that she had that was ultimately the most important security hack that she could

have had. Yeah. And if you don't mind me jumping in on that, I, writing this book, galvanized me to meet my neighbors. And so I was like, god. I, you know, I've lived on this street fifteen years in Harlem, and I don't I knew some neighbors, but not all. So, I reluctant I convinced my very reluctant husband that we would put a flyer on every door and just see who showed up. And I had a little party, and I had wine and cheese. And I was like, hey, all. We're gonna fight authoritarianism through wine and cheese parties. They were like, amazing. Everybody was all in, which was great. Not everybody came, but actually more than I expected. Then another neighbor had a second party. And, actually, as a result of this, I don't think I ever told you this, a friend of mine had was coming to my house, and I had given her my key because I was running late or some we were it was confusing. And she tried to get in, and one of my neighbors came over and was like, who are you? You can go into that house. And she's like, but I have a key. And he's like, I'm sorry. No. And I was like, I have succeeded. And yeah. So it was really, it really changed my security game.

to to kind of bring that back into the conversation? Well, I think there's a theory out there that we weren't really able to prove and we didn't really address deeply, but there's definitely a hypothesis out there that social media activism actually detracted from real movement building, and that that is why there's been sort of a decline in the effectiveness of movements in the past twenty, thirty years. It's also very possible. There are other theories. Right? Authoritarians are getting smarter. Surveillance is getting better. Like, there's lots of reasons you could attribute to this change in dynamic. But it is definitely true that, I think now that we've, like, lived with social media for a long time, it's just clear what the limits are. And so I definitely see this with my teenage kids. They are in no. Not at all interested in social media, have logged off entirely, are less addicted than I am, which is super embarrassing, and, and really value in in person. They want vinyl record. You know, the analog thing is just the coolest stuff out there. Right? And also mullets. So confusing. So many things coming back that I did not expect.

historical data in any way. This is my daughter declared recently she's getting a mullet, and I was like, Oh, my God.

AI like, it's unclear how good it is at a lot of the tasks that they say it's good at. But one thing it is really good at is surveillance. Right? Somebody had to watch all that footage before, and now AI can do it. And that's one of the reasons my book underestimated, honestly, the power of, how quickly surveillance would get sophisticated because I didn't see how AI was gonna solve that problem. So there's a huge problem of AI just super powering the surveillance. But the simple fact, the reason that the movement scholars always point to people power as the way to fight authoritarianism is they literally just cannot put everyone in jail, or they can't kill everyone. They can try. They can kill tens of thousands of people, but there's still when there's there are more of us. Right? And so that is sort of the hope. It's an analog hope in a techno world. Right? But that's sort of the only hope. Because if you let them scare you and think, okay. Well, they're surveilling me, so I can't do anything bad, then they won. That's how they that's how they pull it off. Right? By making everybody refuse to, live their values and just comply with the regime's lawlessness and corruption.

Like, all of the above. Right? But I don't know I don't know how much of this you've already gone over, Ami. But, basically, I think the most I think the when I think about CDT, I think the thing I love is you guys hold institutions accountable. Right? And that is actually so important. Right? Because institutions themselves, especially these companies that control our information landscape and, really could they at any moment, right, any one of these tech gatekeepers could turn off the dial turn the dial so that we never see any dissent. Right? It's just over. And that is a terrifying prospect. Right? Because that is actually how that's how they win. Right? They the whole goal is to make it seem like no one's dissenting, and, oh, you heard about a thing. Those were just violent activists, criminals, etcetera. Right? So if they can control that narrative, that is absolutely a situation we've never seen before and, and terrifying. Right? And the the fact is that you guys play this incredible role of just being a bulwark of accountability and constantly forcing these institutions to be better, to answer to these questions. Right? And that is all we can do. Right? We institutions themselves are amoral. They don't they just it always wanna align with power. Right? That's that's what the shareholders demand. That's what capitalism wants as the end state. And so any pressuring institutions to be better is actually the fundamental work of authoritarianism. Everyone to pressure every institution they're in to be better. Part of that is is make a community with your neighbors and have that institution be one that's nurturing and safe. But also, institutions you're part of that are holding tech accountable. And also, if you're in a faith institution, ask them to stand up. Right? So we all are part of things already that we can just ask them to be better.

I would just add, it's I would actually offer a twin or complimentary or perhaps contradictory, but I think probably complimentary.

It is complimentary, which is that the other role, I think, beyond accountability that that an organization like CDT has to play is the vision, the the future vision. And we talked at the beginning a little bit about the negative coalition that was successful in Hungary. But what I say about Hungary is that, we actually don't know how Hungary goes. We know that Orban was ousted. That's what we know right now. But there are a lot of questions about what happens next. And if you ask people, for example, from many of the Arab spring countries, if you ask people from Egypt, we were speaking to a Egyptian dissident whose profiled in the book a few nights ago, they they they had the coalition of no. And the transition to something else is the is the harder work. It's the much more sustained work. And so, of course, we need your accountability expertise, and we need your recording of what's going on and making sure that the world knows and that congress knows and that the gatekeepers know and that history understands what happened. But I also think that it's going to become very important, I hope soon, but at some point, that we have a vision for technology, for technology policy that acknowledges what we now know, not just from other places, but also from The United States about the, intermingling of these of these issues, the intermingling of these illiberal coalitions, and that offers another path forward. And and to be able to articulate that to be able to articulate that in public language that people can mobilize around, I think, is actually gonna be unbelievably important, for our immediate future as a democratic society.

Thank you. Thank you. And thanks to CDT. Thank you, Miranda.