Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (00:00)
My guest today is Johnny Ryan.
Dr. Johnnie Ryan is the Director of Enforce at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. He's also a senior fellow at the Open Markets Institute. He's a globally recognized expert on surveillance, data rights, competition and privacy. He works with lawmakers on digital legislation in the US and EU, and his expert commentary is published globally.
Dr. Ryan held senior roles in in online advertising and media as well as innovation and technology companies. He also has a PhD from the University of Cambridge, is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and has authored two books. It's a real pleasure to have you join me on the technology and security podcast, Jonny.
Dr Johnny Ryan (00:38)
Miah, it's a pleasure to be with you from across the world.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (00:41)
I'm recording today on the lands of the Gadigal people. I pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging and acknowledge their continuing connection to land, sea and community. So I want to start with data and surveillance. On average, Australians are tracked nearly 500 times a day as one form of advertising known as real time bidding broadcasts what a person in Australia is reading or watching and where they are.
You co authored the report the statistics comes from. It's called Australia's hidden security crisis. I'm going to link it in the show notes. Can you take us through your key findings and why they're so important?
Dr Johnny Ryan (01:17)
That report is about a system that operates all over the internet on apps, on websites, everywhere. And I used to work in the technology that is responsible for that system. It's called real-time bidding. And when I explain how it works, you'll then understand why it's pumping data about Australians and everyone else all over the world.
and how those data can easily end up in the hands of adversaries or potential ne'er-do-wells. So let's imagine that you are reading an Australian newspaper and you've been browsing the different pages of that paper on your web browser and you call up a page about some sort of cancer symptom, something that could be quite revealing about you. Now,
As that page loads in your web browser, there will be rectangles that appear on the page. And those rectangles, we all know, will contain an ad. But the ad isn't always there from the very first moment that the page is loading on your screen. So often what happens is the editorial content of the web page starts to appear on your screen, and then an ad jumps in and pushes the text down. It's almost like a stutter.
So that's when you notice this process happening. But what you're not seeing is what led that ad to be pushed in. The website will send information about you and about where you are often and about what you're reading to a type of company called an advertising technology company, an ad tech company. This particular ad tech company will be a SSP, a supply side platform. Now the SSP
offers information about you into at least one auction. There could be many auctions just for one ad. And what's happening is they are soliciting bids from other companies who represent advertisers. And the bids are for the opportunity to have a particular advertiser's ad shown to you specifically in a particular place in a particular time. Let me say that again in plainer English.
You turn up on a website and they throw you to the wolves. And there's an auction for your attention and tens, hundreds, conceivably thousands of different entities receive information about where you are, what you're looking at, reading, watching, listening to right now. And they receive identification codes that link you and what you're doing now and where you are now to where you just were. And that could go back months or longer.
you can stitch these things together.
So why? The logic is that if I am a car company, if I'm Renault or Toyota, I will want to show you ads at a particular price. And I'll want to show only some people these ads. So for the advertiser, in theory, this makes sense. It actually doesn't because of certain problems with this system. But the net effect is
That data about what everyone is doing on the internet and where they are is being broadcast out hundreds of billions of times a year. And we found these data turning up in the most strange places. Let me give you an example. There's a company called ISA based in Israel, private company. It's not connected to the state.
And ISA offers a commercial surveillance system called Patterns with a Z. And Patterns says, we've been using real-time bidding for years. We actually Hoover updated from that system. And we can give you your target person's most frequent driving route. We can show you who their kids are. We can alert you when they meet other people of interest. this is getting into drone strike territory.
is what that sounds like. I'll give you a second example. We posed in my organisation, we posed as data buyers. So we set up a fake boutique data consultancy firm. And on the webpage of that firm, there's a picture of a Russian trooper and then a map of Ukraine. And it says, precision targeting data, where will your target be tomorrow? So it's very clear what kind of company we were purporting to be.
And when we went to a data broker, that's a type of company that sells data about people. And we asked it, what categories of people can we get real-time bidding data on to show ads to them, for example? And which companies can we do that through? We got categories that would work for category codes for Microsoft, Google, all of the other big ad tech companies. And
The kind of categories you can find are government, decision maker, Australia, counter terror and intelligence, but also health conditions, bankruptcy, finances, all those kinds of issues, weight loss, depression, STDs. And once you've got those category codes and you can show an ad to a person, you can then start tracking that person.
It's a long answer to a short question, but real-time bidding is a big topic. It is the system that pays for nearly, well, certainly the majority of advertising on the internet today. And every day, if just you count that day alone, is the biggest data breach ever recorded, but it repeats continually.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (06:11)
Who gets the data in the auction? If you're a player in the auction, do you get the data? Do you get access to the data?
Dr Johnny Ryan (06:17)
Yeah. So the supply side platform sends data. Let's imagine it's Miah. Innocent Miah visits an Australian newspaper. And for a single ad, maybe there are two or three different auction houses involved for that single ad. Now, I sold a house in the last few years.
If you've done that too, you'll know that you want as many people as possible to see the house, to walk around and dirty your carpet because you want to solicit the most number of bids to make these people compete to get the highest bid for your house or your particular ad slot. So you're incentivised to share it as widely as possible. Now that means for a single ad,
The data can go to one ad exchange, that's what auctions are called, or it could go to four, five, six. But let's imagine in our example about you, it goes to two or three. Each of those auctions then sends that information out to tens or hundreds of different demand side platforms, DSPs. So we started off with the supply side platform. They have thrown Miah to the wolves through their supply side platform.
That comes from the publisher of the app or the website.
The DSP represents advertisers. So one DSP may represent several. And once they get the data, they can do whatever they want with it. There's another type of company that's also involved, I better describe it briefly, called a data management platform, a DMP. These acronyms, I realize, are tiresome, but this will make sense in a moment. A DMP, if I'm advertising to you,
I might have some information about you or people like you, and I'll give it to my DMP, my data management platform. My DMP will almost certainly offer me more data about you that it has taken from data brokers. What's your disposable income? Do you need to buy a car? know, what's the situation with your mortgage level of education, everything. How do you vote? Now, the most famous DMP we're familiar with is Cambridge Analytica.
Just think of Cambridge Analytica, but imagine it as one cog in a system that is just throwing data around the place. Now back to the DSPs. These DSPs could be sending the data anywhere. And in Google's list of, of all, there's a public list of all of the companies that it allows RTV data to flow to. So the list that covers Australians, there are 12 companies with the name.
with the word Beijing in the company name. So these certainly are going outside of Australia. That's unquestionable. Many DSPs appear to be operated by people whose interest is less about advertising and more about hoovering up data.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (08:55)
So just to reiterate that data about Australian defence personnel and political leaders is flowing to foreign states and in that report it shows that includes China and prior to sanctions Russia.
Dr Johnny Ryan (09:07)
Exactly. Yeah.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (09:08)
And what you've also said earlier, I'm not sure you specifically said, but in the report, I think you mentioned that not only are there category codes for defense personnel or intelligence officer, but also families and spouses as well as all of the other kind of data sets.
Dr Johnny Ryan (09:22)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Yeah. So we're seeing, we're seeing not just military personnel from each arm of the military. And we're seeing not just people who work in aerospace and defense manufacturing. And we're seeing not just political organisation and party decision makers and government officials and judges, but we're also seeing all of the people in their lives. So
if you're sensitive personnel and you harden yourself, so you block all ads and you have a phone that has lots of stuff locked off in it. Well, What about all the people around you in your life? All of these people are still broadcasting information.
about themselves, which is going to reveal you. And in the segments, in the RTB data that we were offered when we went looking for it, you're getting information about whether a person is financially unsavvy, whether they are anxious about their finances, whether they've gambled in the past week, all of this incredibly useful material that is
It's a gold mine for blackmail. So it's not just location where you're seeing, that person was at their divorce lawyer. And then they went back to, you know, enter name of national security building and went to this place. You're, you're getting profile tags about them built up over time. And you know, you're
you're getting mental state. It's not just facts about them, it's how they feel.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (10:44)
And I mean, some of these inferences about how we feel may or may not be correct, but they can be incredibly damaging. What do you see? Can you take us then through the next steps? What are the national security risks of this kind of pervasive data collection?
Dr Johnny Ryan (10:58)
So a few years back from another data broker, one based in Europe, I obtained a list of the kind of data that were available from them. And one of the categories was incest and abuse support. So what that means is if you are a victim and you are seeking support, this is the tag that might be associated with you.
And I didn't get the data about the people, just to be clear. I don't know who the people are, but what was on offer was data about 200 Irish people. was curious about this country that I'm in now. 200 Irish people who had been by the tracking industry tagged with that tag. And that particular tag, by the way, that's an official industry tag. They've now removed it after we blew it up in the press.
But that was an IAB tag. IAB is the Tracking Industries Trade Body. They are responsible for this entire mess. Now, if you can tell that someone needs support for incest and abuse victimisation.
you can tell many, many other things about them too, because that is about the most sensitive possible thing. So I think what we're looking at here is not just the normal scandal that we have with the tracking industry, which is always location. Look, we found this soldier was in this particular building and then they ended up in a brothel. That's the normal story. This story is
We found this particular senior official's buttons and we know how to push them. And we are in China. And we, by no means, by have access to any commercial data that enters our jurisdiction. So what we're talking about is a gusher of Australian secrets, and this applies elsewhere in the world too.
going out to all and sundry without any restriction. Now, a listener might think, well, hang on. When I visit theaustralian.com or .au and I get a consent message that pops up in front of me, I click no on most of the things and yes on some of them. That whole theater, that spam.
of consent pop-ups is something we're in the middle of killing at Europe's highest court. It's just a kind of a veneer, a kind of a legal theater that covers up this data breach. Actually, if the publisher is so minded, there's nothing to restrict them from sending data anywhere they want. And even if the publisher is careful and they send data to only one or two other companies, those companies often are in the business.
of maximizing the number of parties they share data with, whatever about what you've permitted, that's irrelevant. There's no technical restriction connected to that process. So they're in the business of sending your data to far more parties because that is how they are financially incentivised. So we're talking about a broadcast of everyone's secrets all over the world. And your question really was, what's the risk?
the risk is so wide that it's impossible to limit what it is. So the risk is the prime minister and the people around the prime minister are completely compromised by enter name of country. That's the risk. that, let me give you another example. Microsoft bought one of these ad tech companies.
few years ago, it was called Xander. Microsoft bought it from AT &T. And right about the same time, we got our hands on a list of hundreds of thousands of categories of people who one could reach using RTB with the ID codes to then find them again. And I was going through that list and I was just going through the aerospace section of employees.
And there was a company I'd never heard of, GFK. Who's GFK, I thought? Well, GFK is a Dutch aerospace maintenance industry. They had just won the contract to serve the landing gear of the new Dutch F-35 fleet. That's the risk. The risk is pervasive.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (14:42)
How do you think it is being and will be used in conflict zones?
Dr Johnny Ryan (14:46)
You know, I'm thinking of that Ukrainian operation, which they've been telling everyone about as loudly as possible. And it is impressive. So this is the operation where there were drones hidden away in containers.
and the containers were then put on trucks, which Russian drivers were paid to drive around the place. And unbeknownst to them, those containers with the secret drones in them then opened remotely and that swarm then went and attacked strategic bombers collection. Any planes they could find is what it sounded more like. All over Russia. Now, there's an academic called Stuart Russell.
who would be one of the top thinkers on artificial intelligence in the world. And he recently gave the annual, you know, the BBC does an annual lecture. Russell was describing a near future in which very, very small munitions automated
potentially without a kill switch to destroy them, could use facial recognition and their own navigation and loiter and just wait for someone and then assassinate them. And that there could be a very large number of these machines. So whether it's real-time bidding data, which may not be the most accurate, there are more accurate ways to track people. It's just that it's the most pervasive. Whether it's real-time bidding data or some other data,
Having humans moving in a sea of data when you can have a kill swarm is quite worrying.
So that's the risk. The risk is mass murder. But lesser than that, of course, the risk is a
enormous curtailment of human liberty. But I'd say death is really the ultimate risk.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (16:18)
Thank you for indulging me.
is it feasible to change the business model of data collection, real time bidding, advertising technology, given that so much of our current digital economy relies on it? And what can be done?
Dr Johnny Ryan (16:34)
Yes,
it is. It's more than feasible. It is commercially desirable. I used to work in that industry. I worked for a publishing group and I worked for an ad tech company and I worked for a web browser. So I've seen this from all of the angles that really count except for the advertisers, but I've worked a lot with advertisers too.
If we simply did what we're trying to do with cars and moved from dirty diesel and petrol, like petrochemical engines, if we switch them off and move to something safer, we have a sunny future. So today, online advertising works by broadcasting everyone's secrets to everyone. That clearly is disastrous. Commercially, it is also
entirely ridden with fraud. Advertisers were promised a scientific certainty about what their every dollar that they spend would end up with this benefit. That has been proven a nonsense. Advertising is no more scientific than it ever was. It's an art. And today what happens is because you can track a person across the Internet,
It means that software that masquerades as a person, in other words, a bot running on a smartphone on a rack in a warehouse, full of other smartphones, bots are sent to expensive publications where they build up a pattern of behavior that makes them look like people with lots of money to spend. And then they go and they start reading reviews of cars. The more expensive, the better. And then the bot is brought back to a criminal website.
which is the client for the bot. They're the ones paying. And on the criminal website, this tracking system brings back all of that attention from the car seller. And they spend money on these fraudulent websites that'll never be seen by a human, where the odds are stacked 20, 30, 40 deep. So that is taking real money out of the pocket of the advertiser, away from the newsroom or the entertainment producer.
away from the creator and the journalist and into the hands of criminals. And the estimates of the financial cost of that bot fraud, of that tracking based data bot fraud, range from single to triple digit billions. Now that spread tells me we only know it's billions. We don't know how many and in billions, mean US dollars here. So no one has a clue what the damage is. We don't know when we're showing ads to humans.
We know we're tracking humans. We're certainly doing that. We're tracking all the humans, but we're also tracking a huge number of bots and we don't know what is being spent on. The other problem is when you can provide this supposedly magical discount by showing an ad to a high net worth individual who reads The Economist, for example, but you're showing that ad on a really cheap website, which actually isn't seen by humans.
that looks to you like a big discount. And in return for that discount, companies like Google and others take a massive cut with not very clear, actually quite hidden percentages. And we know roughly what those percentages are. I'll give you an example. We're getting way away from security, I'll finish this briefly. But it may be of interest. In 2016,
Sorry, 2017, The Guardian newspaper took a court case against the ad tech industry. Its own supply side platform was its target. So The Guardian pretended to be an advertiser, invented a brand, and spent money to buy ads on The Guardian. And for every pound sterling that The Guardian spent as a fake advertiser on The Guardian, The Guardian as a publisher received back 30p.
So 70 % disappeared into this mess. So we've got a national security problem where everyone's profiled, where every voter is profiled, where every security person is profiled probably. We've got a huge fraud problem and we've got a massive hidden fees problem. It's a dirty corrupt industry. And what needs to happen is that the data that are broadcast need to be stripped right back.
so that the ad is still relevant when shown. You still have an auction for a relevant ad, but you cannot track people based on the data you get. That's the obvious and quite simple solution.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (20:40)
And so the solution to do that would be the advertising auction occurring at the edge or
Dr Johnny Ryan (20:43)
We just started.
No, you can have the add option at the same place if you want. Now, yes, you can run it on the device, which is Brave where I used to work, a browser was doing something similar. That's option one. Option two, and they're not incompatible, is that you have the same system with safe data. No personal data, no IDs. Even the timestamp would have to be slightly.
slightly played around with, salted, so that it's not precise. But you're still knowing you're getting the person who's reading about golf and they're right in Sydney and you you show golfers, I don't know, ads for pensions. Something along those lines.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (21:22)
one was on the device, one was with safe data, was there anything else?
Dr Johnny Ryan (21:26)
I mean, those two would be a very, very good start.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (21:29)
So have you seen any countries implement successful protections?
Dr Johnny Ryan (21:34)
No. No, I've seen one or two entities do so with very good commercial results. But no. Now, there's a reason for that. We have many privacy laws and data protection laws, but nowhere have they really been applied. You asked me about the law earlier.
or you said you might ask me. So I'll just get into that for a moment. Last week, we launched the first ever class action in this country, in Ireland. We've never had one before. And the class action targets Microsoft. Now, Microsoft is just one among many of the ad auction companies, but it's a pretty big one. And Ireland happens to be the place where Microsoft has its European headquarters. So,
We represent all Irish people. A ruling against Microsoft would affect their processing across the European area. And I think once that happened, you'd see a cascade of that consequence globally, and it would extend beyond Microsoft. But the reason none of this has happened before is that our enforcers in some jurisdictions don't have the necessary law. In jurisdictions where they have the necessary law,
They have for cultural or competence reasons just entirely failed to protect people. I have yet to meet a regulator in this space worthy of their salt.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (22:49)
That brings us to another question, which is, what do you see as the biggest issues that lawmakers are currently grappling with when it comes to digital legislation?
Dr Johnny Ryan (22:51)
you
Australian lawmakers have been grappling with the question of whether to develop privacy law. And it is a great pity that the prime minister at the time did not go a little bit further when this report was released. That is a huge disappointment and it exposes Australians to risk. The legislator where I live in the European Union has already done their job. We have the law.
We just do not apply it. We have
a expensive data protection regime that is completely unenforced. Now, when I say completely, you may see in the news that there are large fines imposed on companies. This is immaterial. An ice cream van that parks outside a school and gets a parking ticket because it shouldn't be there. Maybe it has to pay, you know, a hundred dollars that day, but it makes a thousand dollars.
by virtue of parking there. So handing out parking tickets is clearly not working. But we do not have well-motivated or highly incentivised enforcers.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (23:54)
I'm going to go to a segment. what are some of the interdependencies and vulnerabilities of data and technology that you wish were better understood.
Dr Johnny Ryan (24:03)
A topic that there's some understanding of is the algorithmic recommender system.
On TikTok, YouTube, X, any of these platforms, there is a system operating behind the scenes that decides what you in particular will be shown. Now we've known over the last decade, we've known that almost as a byproduct, these systems have been tearing people apart. They've been pushing us to polar opinions.
because outrage is what keeps people stuck on the platform. And we've known that they're also pushing self-harm, self-hate, self-loathing, suicide, hatred of women into kids' feeds. the most revealing evidence, I think, was the filing by the attorney general of Kentucky in the US against TikTok after a two-year investigation.
14 states attorneys general filed a submission to the court and Kentucky messed up on the redactions. So we can see what they got out of that company. And inside TikTok, you could see senior executives saying this system is preventing children from eating, sleeping, making eye contact, being able to operate, do homework. you know, body dysmorphia is a real problem. But the younger the user,
the more effective the system. And when it came to solutions, what are we going to do? The answer was, we're not going to do anything that could affect the metrics how long people spend. So we saw the cynicism of big tobacco inside that company. And I think it reflects the other companies too. And that's the algorithmic recommender system.
The real-time bidding industry is highly concentrated. There's a major court case taken by the Department of Justice in the United States in Eastern Virginia at the moment that will probably break Google up, or at least parts of it. And at the same time, there's a slower case being taken by the European Commission and investigation. And similarly, it looks at Google's central role in real-time bidding.
Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta is in there too.
These are the main players. And then there's one or two other quite large players like the trade desk, which is a name people won't be familiar with. But we have a handful of companies that dominate online advertising and also the lion's share of the data pass through them. Now, the point I was going to make is in Trump's second term, because we have allowed
By failure of competition and data protection enforcement, we have allowed a small handful of oligarchs to take control over our digital media.
And we in Australia, in Europe, in Canada, in Africa, in Asia, less so in Asia, because they were smart, we are relying on their platforms as our spaces for public discussion. Now your audience.
is interested in security. So that means, do we have public support for what we're doing? Do we have public support for the budget that is necessary, we argue, for what we're doing? Do we have public support for democracy? In Europe, the margins in the elections that have kept authoritarians out of power are knife-edged.
In that situation where our politics were on a knife edge, we have Trump holding the hidden levers of our political debate because he controlled the oligarchs.
who control the algorithms that decide what gets boosted into our feeds. And they are deciding what lens we see the world through. the Eurobarometer poll showed something like, yeah, the majority of people under 30 in Europe rely on those feeds for their political information.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (27:27)
It's the same in Australia. We have an increasing focus on digital and much of our news is increasingly from socials,
I'm going to go to a new segment for 2025. It's called the contest spectrum. What's a new cooperation, competition or conflict you see coming this year?
Dr Johnny Ryan (27:46)
It's very, very clear what the big conflict is in my part of the world. And it's very neat. You said you've started this segment in 2025. This conflict became manifest in January when Trump assumed office again.
In March, JD Vance turned up at a very important conference for the security community, the Munich Security Conference. And he showed in his remarks that Elon Musk's interference in European politics to boost authoritarians into power if possible, and to boost those topics into debate, that that enjoys official support. Now we're recording this right at the beginning of June.
Last month in May, Marco Rubio made a public statement, lambasting the German authorities for having designated the AFD as an extremist organisation. The AFD is a neo-Nazi political party in Germany. So that shows which side they are on. He was backed up by Vance and Musk and various other officials. Then there were letters
going to senior European commission leaders, including Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the commission, saying, you must intervene in Poland to support the PIS. the PIS, again, are authoritarian leaning, ultra-nationalists. So wherever the hand of US officialdom shows in Europe, it is in the service of the people who want to end our liberal democracy.
And most recently and most notoriously, on the 27th of May, the US State Department published as an official act, published a document called The Need for Civilizational Allies in Europe. The Need for Civilizational Allies in Europe. And that memo
which is public says,
The European project is now in tatters because it has turned on its own citizens. It has turned against the Christian civilization. It's something to that effect. They use these words. The words they're using are straight out of the mind and mouth of Viktor Orban, the authoritarian leader of Hungary. So the great
You said conflict, but also collaboration of 2025 is Hungary from within Europe is collaborating with the Trump administration and they are trying to boost Europe's authoritarians, traitors to the European project and to liberal democracy into power across Europe. That's what's happening this year.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (30:13)
That's a huge conflict.
How do you then see that with the critical reliance government has on the very same players for its own digital services?
Dr Johnny Ryan (30:25)
It is utterly disastrous.
It is utterly disastrous. Europe has done two things. It is not just that it has allowed itself to become reliant on foreign technologies, which are now in the hands of unfriendly powers. And that includes, of course, Chinese technology in the energy infrastructure and other vulnerabilities. It is not just that we allowed that to happen.
And it couldn't have been foreseen perhaps that there would be this change in the relationship with the Americans. But it's also that Europe allowed itself to deindustrialize. So we are now talking about investing half a trillion euro to militarize this continent. Now that's not
There's not something there's consensus about, but some member states are going ahead. Poland is talking about recruiting an enormous army. Latvia has reintroduced conscription. Even Ireland, which never spends a bean on defense, is now starting to buy fast jets.
So a huge, huge change. But Europe did allow itself to deindustrialize. It switched to a services economy and it said, okay, you Americans
you're going to provide the digital stuff. And that has been a strategic misstep of enormous proportions, similar to when we tied our energy fate to Russia, which is, you know, there was a huge infrastructural project to build interconnecting pipes, bringing gas from Russia that made Europe.
unnecessarily vulnerable. And we've had the same thing now with tech. There is discussion about what they call a Euro stack, building alternatives. But as with reindustrializing, it will take Europe somewhere between five, 10 years to do this. Once that has happened,
Europe is a small place, but it is a very, very heavy cannonball to have loosed onto the deck. So who knows what will then happen.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (32:16)
This might be a leading segment, but I'm going to go to a segment on alliances and ask you about what alliances will be most important in the digital sovereignty and tech space in the next few years.
Dr Johnny Ryan (32:29)
You need small business. You need unions. You need makers, creators, journalists.
Trade people, political organizations, reporters, parents who are concerned for their children's well-being. Every person who has been diminished by this swollen, overly concentrated power that the big tech firms have. In other words, everybody who isn't big tech, everyone has something to gain.
There are more of us than there are of them. And let me give you an example.
The politicians did not realize that they were being drawn into a net, that they would become reliant on these platforms for reach.
We've all been drawn into a net. It's not just of convenience. It gives us other things as well. And we have to cut our way out. That's what has to happen. And it involves everybody. Everyone right across society and industry. let me say there's another set of actors. If the whims of an oligarch can change your life.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (33:16)
Do you think?
Dr Johnny Ryan (33:26)
then you're in the fight. And the whims of the oligarch can change everyone's life. Every parent is affected. Every politician's affected. Certainly every small business. Because the oligarchs control the platforms on which so much of business now operates and relies. Now, the question then is, how do all these people get together? Well, this is where the regulator comes in.
What we need is regulators to step up and do their job.
But actually, what we're talking about is power. Too many of us are vulnerable now to too few,
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (33:57)
time and again that when someone creates a machine that amplifies and concentrates power, whatever that is, that people will also flock to that to abuse that power. I wanted to ask you in the Alliance section, do think there are any countries that can join together that can form some kind of alliance to help
to help create digital platforms or ways to coordinate and communicate that are in support of democratic values and principles.
Dr Johnny Ryan (34:26)
Yeah. And here's a lesson from history. The impulse to raise up a tyrant, that has a countervailing reaction in history. And that is to pull down the tyrant and to spread the power to not concentrate it. In grand strategy theory, you would call that bandwagoning. You get one power and then you get a block against the power.
The strangest thing is that in Europe, which had been talking about de-risking the relationship with China, Europe is now you see softer language about China coming out of the lips of von der Leyen. I find that challenging, but that is the inevitable balancing that always happens in international relations. And it puts Canberra.
in a strange position as well. Having been so close and so hip to hip with the US in every military venture at every point, now even Canberra must be looking to Beijing and thinking, wonder, there a slight, should we be slightly leaning towards them? This is an absolutely bizarre situation. Now, is there an alliance of the true Democrats?
to be made. Well, actually, I think that already exists. You can see in Canada as a new spirit because the jeopardy for them is so acute. You're at the other extreme. know, for Australians, it's probably a little bit less severe than it is for Europeans. So there's a lag and we're not all in the same place yet.
One thing that might wake us
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (35:49)
Do you think it's possible to get
on the same page when we have these isolated information bubbles and we are all subject to algorithmic influence?
Dr Johnny Ryan (35:59)
I don't know. The fact that you can ask the question, and it's a real and sensible question, should show that we should immediately switch those algorithms off.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (36:08)
we've covered algorithmic influence and interference in democracy, in polarization in young people in mental health. I know you've written some commentaries about some of the options. And one of those options is to switch off the recommendation systems until we have proof. Can you just expand on that quickly?
Dr Johnny Ryan (36:13)
Okay.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. This is a dangerous technology. is pounding control over our political debate to unfriendly foreign powers. That's where we are now. Now, in the Australian market, if I want to sell bananas to your market, some Ireland, I would warn you, by the way, they would not be very nice.
But let's imagine, okay, I'm gonna sell you some hybrid banana potato. So let's imagine I've done that and genetically modified them. For me to get that into your market is going to be tough. And if you deign to permit my genetically modified product into your market, and if it then turns out there are any concerns about its safety, you're gonna kick me out of the market.
It's gone. And any other products I offer to your market, you will look upon them with a skeptical eye too. And I will have to work very hard to get into your market again. It's the same in Europe. Europe has many things, but fundamentally, it's a market. So if you are selling your digital product to us, okay, that's fine. But this feature is off until we have proof that it's safe. Proof you probably won't be able to provide,
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (37:26)
I've got a segment called emerging tech for emerging leaders.
Dr Johnny Ryan (37:28)
I'm gonna slowly answer them.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (37:30)
What do you see as the biggest challenges for leaders in our current technology environment?
Dr Johnny Ryan (37:35)
Okay, if you're a national security leader, your problem is that your counterpart who is supposed to police how data are used in the system either doesn't have the right legal tools available because the legislator hasn't acted, or they have the tools available, but they just don't use them. And that leaves an enormous weight and it gets heavier by the time it passes to you, an enormous weight in your lap.
The failure to police data and to protect data is having spillover effects for everyone else.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (38:04)
I'm going to a segment now called Eyes and Ears. What have you been reading, listening to or watching lately that might be of interest to my audience?
Dr Johnny Ryan (38:12)
think that US State Department memorandum that I mentioned is, it's a must read. So the title again was The Need for Civilisational Allies in Europe. But I think it should be read with another document as well. There's a writer called Barry Lin, And Barry wrote a piece in the Washington Monthly recently.
in the latest edition, I can't recall the title, but you'll be able to find it by searching for Washington Monthly and Barry Lynn, in which he sets out how this happened and what we need to do. And I think those two pieces together are profound. And I would add a third just for background context. Foreign Affairs, the journal, had a...
I the article was called America's Path to Autocracy. It was an article in January written by two academics who look at autocracies where elections happen, but where the losing side in the election is always made inevitable because the autocrat has rigged the system against them. And so these two academics study those systems which exist in
various places around the world and wrote a kind of a game plan for how Trump might walk that path. And I found it very useful because it does anticipate the path that he has been walking.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (39:25)
How do you wind down and disconnect?
Dr Johnny Ryan (39:27)
Like you Miah, I have young children. I do not wind down and I do not disconnect. I'm plagued by work. There is no life work balance. I am a drone as you are. And these two realities which ought not mix, mix. So that's how I don't disconnect.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (39:41)
and often rained on drone, apparently.
Dr Johnny Ryan (39:44)
work is recreation, recreation is work and...
Maybe that's a terrible, terrible tragedy, but it's the case for me.
About a decade and a half ago, I wrote a history of the internet and I went back each decade. I went back and back and back to the 40s. Maybe the earliest reference might be to the 30s. Just some of the ideas that germinated up to create the technologies that ended up being the internet and to study how all of these things changed social life.
commerce and politics and culture. And at that time, I was incredibly optimistic.
Now I look at these technologies and I worry myself that my view has changed so much, but I think liberal democracy will collapse if we don't take quite an extreme response. I think we have a recipe here in the technologies we have and how we don't shape them, how we don't
regulate them even according to the laws we've written. We have a recipe here to end our brief experiment in liberal democracy and it doesn't get much more negative than that.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (41:01)
In one of your commentaries, you wrote, this is a fight no one wants to have, and yet it is a fight we must have. You were talking about responding to big tech, you were talking about responding to algorithms, to influence, to data collection. I think that's a really profound statement.
because I'm not sure that everyone is aware that it's a fight that we will have. It will happen whether we are ready for it.
My final segment is called Need to Know. Is there anything I didn't ask you that would have been great to cover?
Dr Johnny Ryan (41:35)
No, I don't think so. I think we covered quite a range.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey (41:39)
Johnny, thank you so much for joining me today. It's been a real pleasure to have you on the show.
Dr Johnny Ryan (41:42)
Thank you, Miah. Nice to join you.
