Pushkin. Imagine there's a place in our world where the known things go, like old modems, or at the end of this brightly lit hallway, towers of computer servers, a little city of miniature skyscrapers. This vault, this data center, stores the facts that matter, and matters a fact. It's all that stands between a reasonable doubt and the chaos of uncertainty. The sign on the door reads the last Archive. Step through the door to Washington, d C. Capitol Hill.
July twenty six, nineteen sixty six, a Tuesday, the United States was admired in a terrible war in Vietnam. Americans were engaged in a struggle for civil rights. At home. There'd been riots on the streets of American cities, protests of all kinds, anti War March's student demonstrations. To a lot of people felt as if the country was coming apart. Inside the office building of the House of Representatives, Room
twenty two forty seven, hearings were about to begin. Hearings that weren't about any of those protests, Hearings that were about computer data. The subcommittee will come to order just after ten am. Cornelius E. Gallagher, a Democratic Congressman from
New Jersey took his seat. The Special Subcommittee on Invasion of Privacy today begins its investigation into proposals to establish a National Data Center, a centralized facility within the structure of the national government into which would be poured information collected from various government agencies and from which computers could draw selected facts. At the time, more than three billion government records were stored on punch cards in magnetic tape,
housed in over twenty different federal agencies. So many facts scattered all over the place. It was a mess. So the Johnson administration said, how about building a national data Center. It did, gather all the computer records of every federal agency all in one place, the same way the Library of Congress holds books, where the National Archives holds manuscripts. Seems straightforward enough. Congressman Gallagher, though, he thought this was
a terrifying idea. If safeguards are not built into such a facility, it could lead to the creation of what I call the computerized man. The computerized man, as I see him, would be stripped of his individuality and his privacy. Congress is one of those lagging indicators of American fears By the time I fear gets articulated on Capital Hill,
it's already been infecting the population for a while. Think about the times Congress has brought in baby faced Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to ask him about computers and the invasion of privacy. Mister Zuckerberg, would you be comfortable sharing with us the name of the hotel you stayed in last night? No? I think that maybe what this is all about. You're right to privacy. It was too late. Congress is very often too late. Remember last episode about
the defeat of National Health Insurance? Congress too little, too late? The National Data Center. It's a forgotten sequel to that story about National Health Insurance. Welcome to the Last Archive, the show about how we know what we know, and about how it seems lately as if we don't know anything anymore. I'm Jill Lapoor. But of course you can
know things. For instance, you can know a lot of things by listening old congressional hearings and asking questions like, what the hell ever happened to the National Data Center? And did anyone listen to Congress in the nineteen sixties when it issued ominous warnings about a future in which we'd all be stalked and haunted and tortured by that freak,
that monster computerized man. Everyone in the whole world seems to have forgotten about those hearings in nineteen sixty six, But forgetting about the means we keep having them all over again. It's like the horror movie where you think you've killed the monster, and then he digs himself out of his own grave and comes after you with the same rusty, bloody axe. Cornelius Gallagher, the Democrat who chaired the committee, wasn't the only member of Congress who was
really worried about data and privacy. After Gallagher called the meaning to order, he was followed by Frank Horton, a Republican who felt more or less the same way about the whole thing as Gallagher did. I have become conver that the magnitude of the problem we now from front is akin to the changes wrought in our national life with the dawning of the nuclear age. Assuming the best for a moment, let us regard our computer systems as good and fair, and the computer men behind the console
as honest and capable. That was the best case scenario. God forbid the machines were bad and unfair, and the computer men dishonest and incompetent. By the way, the term computer scientists didn't really exist then. They were called computermen, which I like better anyway, because it makes it sound as if they're half computer, half man. Anyway, there were all kinds of reasons the federal government wanted a national
data center. For one, the government had taken on problems of bigger and bigger scale, a social security program, the building of atomic weapons. The government needed to collect and to conduct statistical analysis of data had to do with things like healthcare and economic development and racial justice. Lyndon Johnson's administration needed that information to fight the War on poverty.
It also needed that information to implement the oversight requirements of the nineteen sixty four Civil Rights Act and the nineteen sixty five Voting Rights Act. To do those things, it needed what we would call big data. Modern life required taller and taller piles of facts, numbers, and data. Piles of data so tall that they had to be
handled by computers. And remember this was decades before the personal computer, before people had their own computers and knew how to use them, which meant that people had to be willing to put a whole lot of trust in the very small number of people, mainly men who knew how to run those machines, those computer men. Because of that, it seemed as if computer men had all kinds of information about you, and they seemed to have limitless powers.
Assuming a computer man who was dishonest, unscrupulous, or bent on injury, there would be nothing sacred. We could be destroyed. Whoa so crazy start to those hearings? We could all be destroyed. Then Gallagher called his first witness, the subcommittee is very fortunate this morning and having as its first witness in this series of hearings, mister Vance Packard. Mister Packard is more responsible than any man in our country for alerting us to the dangers that lurk in the
twilight of our sophisticated society. The then famous, if now sadly much forgotten, mister Vance Packard. I guess we'd now call this guy an influencer. He wasn't an academic, but he was often mistaken for one. And I'm sorry, but I love this guy. In nineteen sixty six, he was a fifty two year old social critic, and he was most famous for a book called The Naked Society, in which he'd issued a warning about the loss of privacy. The book spent twenty three weeks on the New York
Times bestseller list. Packard had written a whole series of bestsellers, a lot of them about things I've been talking about here, and the last archive lie detectors targeted advertising data surveillance. The Times, in a profile, described him as a man who acts on the whole like a professor at a small college, a little unsure of tenure. This was actually a gentle way of saying that Packard was incredibly boring to listen to. But the Times reporter added, at the typewriter,
he is something else again. In other words, in person, Vance Packard was a dud. But on the page, Vance Packard was a stud. Sometimes newspapers referred to Packard as a sociologist. This really tugged at the well trimmed beards of the nation's actual sociologists. One social science journal published an entire issue trying to answer the question, is Vance Packard necessary? You'd feel bad for the guy, except that he was a famously happy man and troubled by his critics.
Packard liked to work in bed. He'd spend hours a day lying there. He clipped stories from newspapers and magazines and read through them. He played the banjo, He swam in the ocean, fare asked every morning. He was famously thrifty. In the winter, he wore two pairs of pants, one on top of the other to stay warm. Famously thrifty, famously kukie, but either way, very very famous. We are indeed honored and privilege to have you opened these hearings today.
Mister Packard, please proceed. Cornelius Gallagher welcomed him to the hearings with enthusiasm. Mister Chairman and members of the committee, thank you for inviting me. Records on individual Americans now number in the billions. We leave a trail of records behind us from the moment of birth. The individual rule citizen who is concerned about the erosion of his privacy has up until now had some consolation in the knowledge that all these files about his life have been widely
dispersed and often difficult to get at. Are we getting prematurely overheated and are concerned? I do not think you are getting prematurely overheated at all. I think we should all be scared stiff about the possibility that these giant machines would be fed data about individual Americans, and that this information would be retrievable by a number of different organizations or groups. I think this would clearly create the preconditions for a totalitarian system. He went on like that.
On the first day of the hearings, nearly everyone agreed with Packard, down to the last witness agenda. I got to wondering whether people outside of Congress were worried about the National Data Center, and once I started looking, men they were everywhere. The New York Times, so the Data Center would bring the United States closer to an Orwellian nightmare. Big Brother Never Rests, ran the headline in the Indianapolis Star from Pulpits priests and ministers and rabbis denounced the idea.
Another newspaper called it a giant peeping tom and I'm not kidding. Even the Daughters of the American Revolution the dr passed a resolution against the Data Center. But what about just regular people? Almost everyone who wrote to Gallagher about the National Data Center was opposed to it. Dear sir, it is good to know that your committee is alert to the dangers of this gestapo scheme of the president.
I'magene Armstrong, El Paso, Texas. A lot of the letter writers feared a vast government conspiracy, a socialist conspiracy, or a communist conspiracy. Let me just add here that in the nineteen sixties this sort of cockamami thing got sent by the postal surface and read by one person or maybe two, and then they got filed in a drawer. Today this stuff is on Fortune or Twitter, read possibly
by thousands, clicked on and linked to. I always think about that when I read these old letters, that no one has heard these voices since nineteen sixty six, and that really hardly anyone heard them. Then, dear sir, what better way to inaugurate a police state? Already we have creeping socialism in our government. God help us yours truly. Donald F. Hammond, Flagstaff, Arizona. Gallagher was a Democrat, a liberal, a supporter of Johnson's Great Society, but the citizens who
wrote to him on this topic were chiefly conservatives. Also, there was a lot of talk about Dossier's Dear mister Gallagher, a word of thanks for bringing to a lot of day the nations of the White House task force employed in the Soviet life procedure of turning every US citizen into a little white rabbit for governmental dissection, brainwashing, and intimidation via the dossier process. Sincerely, Elizabeth Nash, Front Royal Virginia.
A lot of these letter writers were from what was then the very far fringe of the American right, anti government coups, white supremacists, John Bircher's conspiracy theorists. Dear mister Gallagher, please kill the idea of a central data bank. This looks like communist infiltration. Also kill the Civil Rights Bill, especially fair housing jail Martin Luther King for inciting rebellion. Most sincerely, Frank P. Sterling, Open California, veteran World War One.
Dear Congressman, the federal government is already operating too much of our business, controlling our manufacturing, interfering in our medical establishments, taking over our educational facilities and procedures. The Great Society now demands to have prior control and jurisdiction over even our personal thoughts. Guess we might just as well move to Moscow. Please do everything in your power to defeat and rout these enemies of freedom and liberty. James s. Christie,
Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. The congressman started to get a little worried. He'd right back trying to calm these people down. Dear mister Christie, what I appreciate you supported my inquiry. I can either agree with your views that the federal government is taking over our rights, nor that the great society is the instrument for such action. Sincerely, Cornelius Gallagher. Remember though, that at the time there was also just a lot of anxiety about computers, and especially men who were obsessed
with them. In the nineteen sixties, Americans were terrified too of another machine, the war machine, that was calling up young men, number by number, for the draft to go to Vietnam. Before nineteen sixty six, the kids of the middle class, the college students, they got educational deferments or some other dispensation. But by nineteen sixty six, the number of young men called up to the draft every month was being raised from seventeen thousand to thirty five thousand.
That meant that for the first time, middle class white men boys really were being sent to Vietnam. Meantime, the war began to seem as in fact, it was hopeless and immoral. The Vietnam War was the first war whose every move was plotted by computer. Johnson's Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, was a systems analyst, a computer man who appeared to be running this war with a giant computer that could calculate a victory index. Johnson said, there is no computer that can tell the hour and the day
of peace. But apparently there was a story, has it. People at the Pentagon fed all kinds of data into that computer, population, gross national product, manufacturing capability, the number of tanks, ships and aircraft, the size of the armed forces. And then about nineteen sixty seven or so, men at the Pentagon went down to the basement and asked that giant computer, which had run all those numbers, when will we win the war? And the computer spat out these words,
you won. In nineteen sixty four, conservatives hated Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and big government, and liberals were getting angrier and angrier about Vietnam, seeing it as a war being waged by the ruthless, relentless mindlessness of a giant electronic brain. That meant that things looked bad for the establishment of
a national Data center. On the last day of Gallagher's hearings July twenty eighth, nineteen sixty six, a witness appeared, Paul Baron of Rand Corporation, a forty year old Polish born computerman. Baron had grown up in Philadelphia. He'd worked for the Remington Rand Company, the company that made the Univac, the machine that CBS had hired for election night in
nineteen fifty two. Baron was brilliant. Suppose we build our future systems without any safeguards at all, and all information, this whole list of records did we accumulate during our life, is available in various systems. Barren told the committee something it hadn't expected to hear and couldn't really understand. He admitted that a national data center could destroy privacy as we knew it. But then he told the committee they actually didn't matter whether or not the national data center
was built. It didn't require a building. Data was about to get all linked up anyway. Whether the information is centralized in one central data bank or whether it is spread around the country doesn't make a darn pitted difference. The result is the same. Basically, we could sum up, mister Baron, that we certainly should not attempt to impede
the growth of technology. But at the same time, we should start devoting more time to building in the safeguards so that this technology can serve man rather than subordinate him to its decision. That's right. I don't think we're going to be able to stop technology. I think that decision is not ours. But what we can do is
provide all the safeguards we possibly can. Barren's position came down to this, you can't stop technology, and you can't stop people from collecting data, but you can make data safer if you act right now. He told the committee, please do something. Set up a national data center, or
don't set up a national data center. Just do something, set up some rules, establish principles before it's too late, because unless the government comes up with a way to understand what data is and what can be done with it, will be left wandering around in a world where anyone can collect data about anything and do whatever they want with it. The Special Subcommittee of Invasion of Privacy is a journ God damn it. The House investigation ended and
they didn't come up with any rules. But then the Senate decided to hold its own hearings I've got the tapes stored here in this data center, in the halls of the last archive. The Senate held its own hearings about the National Data Center a few months after the House in March of nineteen sixty seven. Its chief witness was a then unknown law school professor from the University of Michigan. He was thirty two at the time. He's in his eighties now. I called him up. I'm Arthur Miller.
I'm a university professor at NYU with a long tour at Harvard Law School, and I wrote in nineteen seventy one a book called The Assault on Privacy, which some say saw the future. Miller's retired now for a long time. In the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties, he had a TV show called Miller's Court. On an upcoming Miller's Court, we'll be talking about the draft, the subject. Everyone has an opinion. I watched it when I was a kid. I thought it was like free law school. Miller really
is a maid for TV law professor. He's a nimble, witty, combative. He's a very distinctive style. He wears three piece suits with flashy ties. Isn't it time for your day in court. I wanted to know how Miller got roped into testifying before the Senate hearing. He said it all started when he got a phone call from the office of Senator Sam Irvin, a Democrat from North Carolina who's best known as the guy who chaired the Watergate hearings. My phone rings.
It's the staffer from the Senate Committee, Irvin's committee, and he says, we'd like you to be the lead witness on this hearing that we're going to hold on the National Data Center. And I say to the staffer, I don't know a thing about privacy, and he says, well, we're told that you've written about it. And I said no, I've written about computers and privacy. And he says, hang on. And the senator gets on the phone. What do you mean you don't know anything about privacy? And he says,
I still want you as the lead witness in these hearings. Senator, I know nothing about privacy, and he screams into the phone, Well learn damn it. Miller says, okay, okay, I'll do it. You don't say no to Sam Irvin, so he reads up. I asked him why so many people had gotten worked
up about the National Data Center. It just seemed like a damn good political issue that crossed Republican and Democratic lines, because when you're dealing with privacy, you're into the world of humanism, and the Democrats can rally around that, and the Republicans can rally around not creating big government that knows everything about you. The problem was that some people saw the government as the devil. Personally. I was concerned that there were no constraints on the broad outlines of
the system that was being proposed. So March nineteen sixty seven, Arthur Miller gets dressed up, three piece suit, flashy tie, pocket handkerchief. He goes to the hearing in the Senate. Sadly it wasn't recorded, but Miller tells the senators with his usual flair, that it's stupid to oppose a technological development that will widen the sphere of knowledge just because it might be misused. I was not Carrie Nation with an axe out to smash the machine. Never have been
looking for rational controls. And the problem back then was not only was no one looking at that, but the high technology people didn't know how to do it. Miller agreed with that rand guy Paul Baron, who testified before the House a few months earlier. Baron said data collection was going to happen, and it wouldn't require an actual building like the Library of Congress or the National Archives. It would just be there floating around like a cloud.
The thousand A Senate we're supposed to keep on thinking about the National Data Center, but instead they tabled it everything, including the questions it had raised about data and privacy. Basically, they hoped everyone would forget about it. They'd killed the monster and buried him. One month after the Senate hearings were Miller testified. The first big, really big protest against the Vietnam War took place in New York. Martin Luther
King spoke out against the war. We have the participants in today's unprecedented national peace demonstration are united in our conviction of the imperative need pond immediate peaceful solution to an illegal and unjustifiable law that fault. Robert McNamara, Lyndon, Johnson's Secretary of Defense, resigned a few months later. Johnson shocked the country when he announced that he would not
run for reelection in nineteen sixty eight. The Great society was over and the proposal for a National Data Center was dead. What do you think was lost in the way that defeat happened? When one looks at the National Data Center, it's child's play. It's fun for the feeble mind. It was basically a statistical system. Its ability to harm
was limited. Yeah, so, I mean that's exactly squarely. What fascinates me about this story is looking back, was there ever a moment, and if there was, was at that moment in sixty six or sixty seven when maybe we could have usher in a set of principles that might have spared us the course we're now seeming to be doomed too. If somebody had said, hey, this National Data cent a great idea, sleek, efficient, economical, but we better take two years out and figure out the delatarious side
effects of it. If that occurred, the possibility that we shot ourselves in the foot because we defeated it may have been a reality, but I assure you back in sixty six, seven, eight, nine, seventy, there was no no ability to do that. In other words, a better version of the National Data Center never had a chance in the nineteen sixties because people just couldn't wrap their heads
around it, or some people could. They could see what was coming, but not enough people to really do something about it, like make those rules and build those safeguards. You probably know what happened next. Killing the National Data Center didn't mean the end of data. It was then followed by years of expanded governmental and private systems, which in effect gives you a national data center maturing into today's world, which is in fact the womb to tomb
dot cer. Womb to tomb, cradle to grave data chronicles every moment of your life, and that data is entirely unregulated. Even as the National Data Center was being buried, a new monster was rising. The Internet, or at least what would become the Internet, was first demonstrated in nineteen seventy two in the ballroom of a hotel in Washington, d c. The ball and floor looked like the bottom of the ocean.
A huge octopus splayed across it its tentacles, so many cables tangled in a seaweed of telephone lines and electrical cords. Technicians had set up twenty nine different terminals, each at its own station. Bob Kahn, a computer man, had organized the demo of what was called arpanet, the Computerized Network of the Department of Defenses Advanced Research Projects Agency or ARPA. People have been trying to build it for a long time,
but it had never gotten finished and configured. They needed a deadline to give them a kick in the pants. So can you tell me a little bit what the mood was like in the ballroom during that week? Well, it was I would say exuberant. I mean it was like you know what you'd find in Time Square at eleven thirty waiting for New Year's to happen. It was everybody was excited. They knew they were part of, you know,
something important. Were you hoping to get reporters to come right about this or it was really just for internally for the community of people who were working on the system. We weren't looking to try and advertise. I mean, like, did the Right brothers have the press there when they have their first airflight? I don't know. Maybe they didn't know if they'd get off to them. The news that day, October nineteen seventy two all had to do with the
upcoming presidential election, which was just two weeks away. Henry Kissinger had just gotten back to Washington after a trip to Vietnam, a young Joe Biden was turning heads in his upstart Senate campaign in Delaware. The Washington Post had just broken a story reported by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, an update about a break in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel. Meanwhile, over at the Arpanet demo at the Washington Hilton, a lot
of wonderful and thrilling goofiness. The idea was to demonstrate that computers could talk to other computers. What they'd actually talk about didn't seem to matter much. The big idea was computers were changing from being storage devices to being also communication devices. It was amazing. My name is Timmy the Terminal, whilecast yours Jill. Lookfore, so you could sit in DC, follow the instructions in a brochure and chat with a program running out of UCLA. Pleased to meet you,
Jill Lapware. Have William met before? No? Sorry, but I have a terrible memory for names. Anyway, My job is to answer your questions, so I'll ask away when will this computer crash next? About five o'clock, Timmy the Terminal clip be the paper Clip's grandfather. Some of these programs were really interesting, promising. Some of them are just unbelievably exciting. The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab had established a connection to
the Associated Press's news hot line. Any terminal on that network could be turned into an AP news line using a program called h O T hot With this program linked to the AP wire service, you could read through all the latest news updates. You could even search by keyword. It was the first, the very first version of what we would call a news feed. Associated Press News Nixon twelve news items found Read Which funds? Which Richard Nixon
story you might want to follow? In October nineteen seventy two, hard to say there were too many to choose from. Two weeks after the urpan At demo, Nixon was re elected with an incredible sixty percent of the popular vote. When it became clear just how huge Nixon's victory was going to be, an anchor at ABC News called a correspondent over where the Nixon campaign was celebrating well in Washington.
President Nixon's number one domestic affairs advisor is John Erlickman, and David Schumacher is with him now in the Shoreham hotel in Washington. David Howard, he feels too good. I'm going to ask him whatever happened to Watergate. I don't know. I don't know. Apparently nothing. In spite of all those investigations by Woodward and bernstein Erlickman was confident that there was nothing going on, But of course there was a lot going on. It led to an investigation and in
a House impeachment inquiry. After two long years of scandal and strife, on August ninth, nineteen seventy four, President Nixon went on live television and resigned. I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed as abhorrent to every instinct in my body. The story of Watergate is a story of illicit knowledge, the real monster, ill gotten evidence, bad governance. Nixon's administration had bugged DNC
headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. It had also directed the FBI and even the Army to conduct unlawful surveillance on American citizens. The list of citizens the Nixon administration had spied on it was staggering, and of course, in a story of Shakespearean proportions, Nixon was brought down by the evidence he had gathered because the president had even bugged his own office. Secrecy and spying. That's not a climate conducive to a national data center, let alone to a
network of government computers. But that's the climate the Internet was born into, paranoia about what the government knew and how it knew it. NBC News has learned that the government has built a secret electronic intelligence network that gives the White House, the CIA, and the Defense Department instant access to computer files on millions of Americans. Just months after Nixon resigned, a young NBC reporter named Ford Ruin began an investigation of his own into the last days
of the Nixon White House. In a series of explosive reports on NBC Nightly News in June nineteen seventy five, Rowan claimed to have uncovered yet another conspiracy, yet another cover up. The secret computer network was made possible by dramatic breakthroughs and the technique of hooking different makes and models of computers together so they can talk to one another and share information. It's a whole new technology that
not many people know about. He sounds a little advanced packard in the Naked society, going on about how the government strips you down down to your bare ass. If you pay taxes or use a credit card, if you drive a car or have served in the military, if you've had major medical expenses, or contributed to a national political party, then there is information on you somewhere in some computer. Then ruin without really explaining it invokes the
failed National Data Center proposal. The NBC News has learned that while Congress was voting down plans for big computer link ups, the Defense Department was developing exactly that capability. The technology to connect virtually every computer. The network, and it is referred to as the network, is now in operation. NBC News has learned that the network computers are talking to one another. We don't know how or when it began. We do know this. One of the perpetrators is named
Timmy the Terminal. The Department of Defense scratched its head at NBC's report. Everyone involved in building ARPANET must have scratched their heads. This supposedly secret network had debuted in a public demo in a hotel ballroom. Gerald Ford's White House issued an official denial. The White House was not connected to ARPANETT, which was also not a secret network, but the Senate still in a watergate mood opened hearings
on surveillance technology. So once again we're back in a hearing room to talk about monsters and computer men on Capitol Hill. The Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense appeared before the committee and admitted that the Army had illegally conducted surveillance and kept files on American citizens involved in political protests.
That story had already come out. But as for keeping those records on a secret computer network, let me emphasize that it is not a secret network, but it is used for scientific research purposes, that it contains no sociological or intelligence data on personalities, and that it is a marvel in many ways, but it does not fit the Orwellian mold attributed to it. Arpanet was and always had been unclassified. The public was invited to its unveiling in
nineteen seventy two at the Washington Hilton. The public just hadn't been interested. And not only had the public not been paying much attention to arpanet, but the public had really not been paying much attention to private corporate ownership of data. In nineteen sixty four, Vance Packard, wearing two pairs of pants, published the naked society, warning that computers
were collecting data about you and stripping you naked. In nineteen seventy five, the United States finally withdrew from Vietnam. In the decade between, the American public got alarmed about what the American government was doing with its data. Between Vietnam and Watergate, Americans lost faith in the federal government, fearing and having found out that the government knew things it shouldn't know and was hiding things it shouldn't hide.
All this happened just when data was becoming easier to store and faster to process, and computers were beginning to be able to communicate with one another across fast distances. That part's just a coincidence. But there are patterns here too, patterns that you can only see from the vantage of history. Because meanwhile, the people who were really stealing and hoarding data corporations, and hardly anyone noticed. Maybe Congress is always too late when it comes to technology. I think Arthur
Miller feels about this the same way I do. The National Data Center died, but then that monster came back, wielding that same rusty, bloody axe. It came back as the Internet, and for my entire life. We've been having the same argument over it. My God, I close my eyes and I say, I've seen this movie before, and it's just as bad as it was the first time.
That bad movie. It's still playing on c SPAN. In twenty eighteen, when a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings about Facebook data and privacy, Senator or In Hatch was eighty four years old, Mark Zuckerberg Facebook was thirty three, and from their exchange it was pretty clear that Hatch had no idea how Facebook works. So how do you sustain a business model in which users don't pay for your service? Here, Zuckerberg blinked, Senator, we run ads. Senator,
we run ads. People give us their data for free, and we sell it to advertising agencies and to other companies. This problem was never a technical problem. This problem a half century old, was always a political problem. Where is your data? Yeah, in the cloud? Where's the cloud everywhere? In data centers all over the world. What are the rules? There are no rules. The last archive is produced by Sophie Crane, mccabbon and Bennette of Faffrey. Our editor is
Julia Barton and our executive producer is. Mia Lobell, Jason Gambrell and Martine Gonzalez are our engineers. Fact checking by Amy Gaines, original music by Matthias Bosse and John Evans of Stellwagen Symfinette. Many of our sound effects are from Harry Janette Jr. And the Star Jenette Foundation. Our full proof players are Barlow, Adamson, Daniel Burger Jones, Jesse Hinson, John Kuntz, Becca A. Lewis, and Maurice Emmanuel Parrott. The Last Dark I was brought to you by Pushkin Industries.
Special thanks to Ryan McKittrick in the American Repertory Theater, to Alex Allenson and the Bridge Sounding Stage, and to Simon Leak at Pushkin. Thanks to Heather Fane, Maya Canink, Carly Migliori, Emily Rostack, Maggie Taylor, and Jacob Weisberg. Our research assistants are Michelle Gau, Olivia Oldham, Henrietta Riley, Oliver
Riskin Kutz and Emily Spector. Thanks also to Rachel Henson at the Carl Albert Center at the University of Oklahoma and to Stephen Kohler at the Lamont Library at Harvard. I'm Jill lapoor