Defending Free Speech on the Web with Preston Byrne

21:28Alex Thorn:Isn't that a strange argument? I mean that's like saying they have their own Magna Carta constitutional rights as a government to avoid being sued by us. but that's what you guys are arguing here. It's very similar, right? When you're doing sovereign on sovereign stuff, because law flows from sovereignty, it's, there's not, because law flows from sovereignty, it's kind of like, you know, it's that video of like two dogs barking at each other through a fence, right? Where they can't, and then they move the fence, and they're like, oh, gee, I don't know what. So it's very much like that, where they're saying, well, our sovereign rules say this, and so your rules don't apply, because American rules don't exist in the UK.

22:08And we're saying, well, our sovereign rules say this and your rules don't apply because UK rules don't exist in America. And they can't back off from the fiction, right, that their rules don't apply here because that's what English legal doctrine says. So they're continuing to press the attack. And that included making, the other thing is that because they are arguing that there is sovereign instrumentality, essentially what they're saying is US law doesn't exist when you need it, but US law absolutely exists when we do.

22:33Alex Thorn:Right, we're asserting sovereign immunity under US law. Correct. in responding to your D.C. claim. And we sort of expected them to argue that. And the fact that they argued it created the political momentum necessary to get a bill filed in the state of Wyoming. And so I'm hoping it has also created the momentum necessary to get a bill filed in Washington, D.C. Because the strangest thing here, trying to enforce a British law on an American-based company and then arguing in American court that British law is supreme and America is so nonsensical, Certainly the way for them to actually exercise their sovereign immunity and their sovereignty would be to put a censorship box on the pipes coming into the UK, right?

23:14Alex Thorn:Block. They can block 4chan in the US. But they don't want to do that. Well, why is that? Because it looks bad. Yeah. Then it's not the Online Safety Act. Then it is the Online Censorship Act. And we are anticipating that and we invite them to do it. Yeah, you say, guys, look, you don't want people in your country, no matter what country, to look at a website. That's great. Block your internet. Like that's, you know, now could that cause a revolution in your country? It could. But, you know, you've got plenty of like great firewalls, you know, around the world. Like that's, we can't force it. I mean, 4chan is not sitting on a boat out in international waters broadcasting their website with a satellite into the UK.

23:52Alex Thorn:It's on the open internet. It's a bunch of servers in the, it's not on the open internet. It's in the United States. It's not projecting out of the United States. If someone is connecting to its servers, they're looking at a machine that's in the United States. If I design something in the UK's internet that allows UK citizens to access it, it has nothing to do with 4chan. Correct. And so our position is that the Online Safety Act was, one, it's an intimidation racket, because fundamentally it's unenforceable against most American companies. And so American companies have to make a decision whether UK market access or the First Amendment rights are more important.

24:23But from the perspective of the smaller Americans, the smaller American companies that they targeted, they're like, well, listen, we have hardly any users in the UK. Why are you talking to us, man? Like Facebook has an office right there. Google has an office in downtown London on Oxford Street. Why aren't you talking to them?

24:41Alex Thorn:So those guys aren't, by the way, taking a stand against these laws. They're complying. So you need an idea. Can we talk about the age verification real quick? If I'm a UK citizen and I want to open an Instagram account, I have to do KYC? Essentially, you have to do KYC. I have to show my ID that proves I'm of a certain age? It depends on which software you use. There are some systems which use AI to verify your age. Okay, but like a picture maybe. So you're providing biometrics, some type of a credit card, a driver's license, a passport. But it's like going through the TSA now to access a website.

25:13Alex Thorn:They're going to take photos of me and stuff. It's like opening a bank account. It's unbelievable. Yeah, it's like opening a bank account. And so they want that to be. And then what happens is you have a token in some systems. You have a token which follows you around as you go around the internet. And so every website you're going to knows that you've been through the age verification process, which means if you're a law enforcement agency, you can find out who that person is. If they've uploaded their KYC somewhere and you've got a record. So total surveillance. I mean, exactly. And this is, I guess, nothing new in the UK.

25:45Alex Thorn:They were famous for having the CCTV cameras everywhere. They were famous for that 20 years ago. What is it about the UK and surveillance? What is it? I don't know. It's very strange because they're, I mean, at the forefront globally, I would say. I mean, certainly probably places say like China have more robust surveillance. But, I mean, that's in the West, in those sort of Western civilization. The U.K. has been a surveillance. I mean, George Orwell is British. He was writing. This was very much based on his experience in Britain. They've been paternalistic for about 30 years. It started in 1997 when Tony Blair got in.

26:22and there was a belief that the UK was going to be a model for harmonization around the world. There was a sense of moral superiority that's derived from their historical position as a great power, which we said they were proceeding with, you know, with all the certitude of people who thought they were doing the right thing. And they, you know, they thought that this was the right thing to do. And that was a sort of, there was a chic political attitude to have. When you then had the great leftward shift in 2014 to 2024, the great awokening, so to speak, there were no guardrails whatsoever to prevent their existing rules on free speech.

26:59And the free speech rules have been the same for 100 years in the UK, broadly speaking. The Public Order Act has been largely the same since the 30s. But the speech infringements we're seeing today, where you have 12 ,000, 13 ,000 people arrested a year for social media posts that are offensive, that kind of stuff was used. even when I was living there 25 years ago, very, very sparingly, right? Now it's used all the time. Yeah. And so as a result, they had no guardrails. The whole system went wild because if you outlaw offensive speech, as they do, right? So grossly offensive speech is illegal over there.

27:34Alex Thorn:Which, you know, really mean things said about people. Right. Which is like part of the ordinary Sturm and Drang of American political discourse, right? You think it's bad now. Go back and read all the pamphlets and flyers from the early years. It's been bad for 250 years. Yeah, yeah. But the UK decided that they were going to try to eliminate that. And when attitudes change, right, then the universe of acceptable speech also changes. So they've had this—if you want to know what the slippery— An Overton window shifts. Overton window shifts, slippery slope, whatever—like, if there's a slippery slope, they are at the bottom, right?

28:09They're at the bottom. They're in the mud at the bottom of the slippery slope, flailing around aimlessly. aimlessly and to the point where now you actually have a robust and large and growing free speech movement in the UK because they've gone too far. They've actually triggered a backlash domestically, right? Forget what's going on in the United States. You have the free speech union with tens of thousands of members. The Reform Party has expressed, which is currently leading in the polls, has said that they'll repeal the Online Safety Act the day they get in. They're pro-free speech. The Tories and Reform, I can't say how I know this or what specifically I know, But they're both looking at significant reforms to British law in order to not replicate the American First Amendment position, but get a lot closer to it.

28:51Climb back up that slippery slope a bit. Climb back up. You know, a guy named Toby Young, he's the Lord Young. They ennobled him and was richly deserved. A journalist being a Lord, imagine. But he started the Free Speech Union in 2019, which is sort of their equivalent of the ACLU, except they actually focus on free speech and not other things now. So Toby, he or Lord Young, started this organization. He's got tens of thousands of members. And it's really amazing to see how much progress they've made in a very, very short time, both fighting back. They fund litigation defense. They make the courts and the prosecution really work to win free speech cases.

29:29They have inflicted some defeats where, you know, and there's one, a fellow burned a Quran outside the Turkish embassy. They won his acquittal in the crown court. And the crown prosecution service is now appealing because they think that was wrong. So you have a really robust free speech movement growing over there. And they're going to, you know, ultimately they are, you know, the Brits themselves are the ones who have to fix it for the Brits. So I think there's a strand in America that we're going to, you know, there's a strand of thought that we're going to save England from itself. That's not going to happen, right?

30:00They have to save themselves. And I think they will, to be honest. And I think they will, and I think they'll do it a lot sooner than most people think. But for the time being, right, we are where we are. The party that's in power is in power. Their priorities are their priorities. Those priorities are attempting to project British sovereignty and essentially eradicate the First Amendment. They were not expecting resistance. They got a hell of a lot more resistance than they bargained for. and now we've got bills filed and we are looking to get bills filed elsewhere and to be blunt

30:30Alex Thorn:you know i think we're going to win um seems pretty i i can't imagine that if this bill were to come up in the congress even in this divided congress uh that you would see significant push back i can't imagine any american uh voting against reiterating that the first amendment exists and it's it's a really simple it's a really simple bill it says it's a really simple bill, right? And so I had a lot of my English barrister friends looked at it and they're like, well, why don't you do like social media bans or, you know, this ban or that ban? It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. The American first amendment is all you need.

31:03If one guy, right, or two guys can hold off this offensive working nights and weekends for free, right? Then that tells you something about what is required. And that is simply to reassert the first amendment and give it a little teeth. So what we've done is we've said, listen, the bill that we proposed in Wyoming is called the Granite Act, right? Like the rock. Granite stands for guaranteeing rights against novel international tyranny and extortion, which is what this is. It's an extortion racket. And basically it says, listen, three really simple pillars on which this stands. Pillar number one is that we have a censorship shield.

31:35We acknowledge that those foreign orders are not enforceable in our courts, which is already the position, right? But we just want to make it clear in writing so that when you hear from one of these foreign censors, you just say, listen, here's the statute, go away. Not here's a memo with 10 different cases and precedents and all that jazz. Here's the statute, bye. See ya. So that's thing one. Thing two is it prohibits state agency cooperation with these notices. And the reason we need that is because the Biden administration was cooperating with censorship notices. I know because I saw them. I know because I wrote to the Biden administration and threatened to sue them over this because they were serving notices under the German censorship law, the NETS-DG, on American companies.

32:11So the Germans were sending

32:12Alex Thorn:it to the white house basically to the admitted to the state department that was sending it to the department of justice and then the department of justice was serving them uh for constitutionally protected speech and conduct for not opening a representative office in germany and giving them their hostage so that they could arrest someone so now you as a company if you had received that from the germans via the state department and department of justice you're now implicitly under threat that the u.s federal government would enforce it or go after you correct even though it's a foreign order. Correct.

32:43Alex Thorn:I mean, they could just mail it to you, Germany, you know, we have a postal system. Well, they could mail it to you, but then it wouldn't be effective because we have a treaty that governs these things. Yeah. So we told, so we told the Trump administration about this and magically the notices stopped being served. I don't know how that happened, but, but I'm imagining that someone did something about it. But the third, and the third pillar is the big one, which is that I call it the censorship, the pro-free speech or anti-censorship death star, because what happens is you have your shield, right?

33:08You've got your big energy shield. We all remember that, right, over the forest moon of Endor. But you also now need a turbolaser, right, to keep people away from you. And the damages turbolaser is that there's a minimum statutory damages. So you can claim if someone sends you. It doesn't matter what it is. If they send you the notice, if they attempt to interfere with your First Amendment rights, you get the maximum, right? You can sue them. You can sue the government. You can sue the agency. You can sue the individuals. And it's joint and several, right, among the three of them. So any one of them is liable for the whole quantity.

33:38And what you can do is you can get a damages award, which is the greater of either three times your actual damages, defending it, which is not going to be, you read a letter, you respond, you say, go to hell. It's not actual damages. Or$10 million minimum adjusted index to inflation by reference to M2, because fuck you, that's why. That was an innovation by Colin Crossman, who's the secretary, he's the deputy secretary of state in Wyoming, and he was the primary drafter of the actual bill text. And he was like, why M2? He's like, fuck them. Why not CPI? Why not M2? M2. So$10 million per threat per instance.

34:18So 4chan, six letters, six threats, $60 million. Or you do three times the, so this is the greater of, three times the amount of the threatened fine. So in the case of Facebook, right? So the fine is either 10 % or$25 million. That's the standard fine that they threaten you with. So either$75 million, because that's the dollar amount, or if the greater is 10%, Facebook's revenue is$164 billion. $16.4 billion times three is$49 billion, which is roughly equal to the quantity of British assets, sovereign assets, custodied at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

34:52Alex Thorn:So you've got the Endor Energy Shield of clearance statute. Yep. Then you've got the turbo laser deterrent, which is if you even try to breach that energy shield. Yep. you're going to have to pay so much money just for sending me that mean letter. Right. And the idea is that you don't want— So I think where this winds up is that the majors who live and work in Europe will wind up complying voluntarily because it's good for other regulatory purposes. But what we want that to be is voluntary. We don't want it to be compelled by duress because these are American companies. They're exercising their First Amendment rights.

35:27The Europeans are threatening us with fines and jail terms for this. And so our position is, okay, that's fine. Now it's our turn, right? You want to do that? Well, now it's our turn to assert our sovereignty.

35:38Alex Thorn:It's quite a story and quite a battle you guys are fighting. And I want to ask, Preston, maybe a little bit of a transition. So this is a free speech battle that you're fighting, a First Amendment American sovereignty type. First, fourth, and fifth. Yeah, well, because I was going to say, too, the risk assessment seems a bit like a Fifth Amendment violation. You're basically just confessing to them that you've broken their laws. Obviously, you can't be compelled to do that in the United States. Correct. How does this overlap? You are a constitutional lawyer. You're barred in both the UK and the US, right?

36:12Alex Thorn:In fact, I think you were trained in the UK as a lawyer. How does this, you get an international thing, but you've also been in Bitcoin for, I think, more than 10 years at this point. How does this... 13. Yeah, I was going to say, how does this fight about freedom on the Internet sort of overlap with your interest in Bitcoin and crypto? Yeah, so I mean, Bitcoin is liberation technology, right? It's designed to do things outside of traditional institutional boundaries, and it's designed to be resistant to state control. So a common strand that runs through everything that we do is that it's about putting power in the hands of people who, you know, in the hands of individuals, right?

36:50And then trusting that the individual is going to be responsible with how they use it. So with Bitcoin, the choice of what software you run, right? The choice of whether you can put a smart contract. We've seen this with Samurai, right? Or the Tornado Cash case. There were free speech pieces of those prosecutions, right? And there were free speech elements in their defenses. And that's something which you encounter if you're doing anything in DeFi, right? There's a line, right? Here's what publication is, right? And at some point, you're going to cross that line and you're going to be into commercial activity.

37:22So it's both from the idea of principle, you want to live in a world where people can publish the software they want to publish and run the code they want to run. But from a practical standpoint, it's also, okay, there is a point when you stray outside of that protected activity. And you have to be aware of where that line is because if you're on the wrong side of it, you can get into a lot of trouble really, really quickly. So it is something which comes up. I'm not at liberty to say how and where it comes up, but it does come up. it certainly came up a lot in private practice before I went in-house with Arkham which is where I currently work and so yeah it's a pervasive issue from a commercial point of view that I think a lot of people don't fully appreciate because it's just First Amendment stuff is so niche and they teach it in law school so it's everyone you encounter it once in law school you know it exists and then you never see it again

38:08Alex Thorn:very few people are First Amendment lawyers yeah there are hardly any of us but that's because there's no money to be made to be correct Well, because to your point, I mean, it's always about packaging the anti-First Amendment stuff in protects children or anti-terrorism, right? So, like, who wants to take up the defense of something that's bad for children or good for terrorism? They target scoundrels. Right. And scoundrels don't have money. No, but if you're not defending the scoundrels, as you said, or the sort of most offensive but legal speech, then, you know, it's just a matter of like what you said in the UK where the, you know, culturally, the bar about what is offensive will move.

38:48Alex Thorn:So if you don't have that backstop, then it could slide all the way. I mean, the other thing to keep in mind is that the UK runs around and they say that these people are, these clients are scoundrels, right? They say these companies are bad companies, that they're dangerous and that they're harmful. You know, I have advised some of these companies for a really long time. They're not, right? The FBI calls up and they say there's an emergency. And I know for a fact, right, that several of these companies are far more responsive to law enforcement than a meta or a Twitter or a Google. But because all of that happens in the shadows, and it's not something which happens in public, right?

39:22The UK runs around and they can say, well, they're dangerous and they're this and they're that. And it's all lies.

39:27Alex Thorn:They're posting the Pepe the Frog meme again. They're posting Pepe the Frog meme again. Oh no, they must be bad people. It's like, okay, but when the rubber meets the road, right? And your phone rings at two in the morning on a Saturday and they say, we think there's a mass casualty event coming. Can you send us this data? And you respond in 30 minutes, right? That's where it matters, right? And I I think any company that's based in the United States, because you have the possibility of the FBI coming and knocking on your door, right? If you're based in the U.S., generally speaking, and you're not some dark net whatever, generally speaking, you're going to be a pretty law-abiding company.

39:59And generally speaking, these companies, because of the position they occupy in the marketplace, it's actually in their interest to be highly cooperative, right, and to be very collaborative with law enforcement. And this is not in the sense, you know, we have the Stored Communications Act. They're not acting as, you know, data warehouses or something like that. But when you get a lawful demand, you promptly respond. You don't argue about it too hard. You don't turn around and fight it if it's unreasonable or something like that. You adopt a proactive approach where you say, listen, we get the demand.

40:25We're going to respond quickly, right? Because the subpoena comes in. It says you've got 30 days to respond. If you respond in 15 minutes, right, instead of responding in a month, you're doing a public service. You're doing a mitzvah. And nobody knows about it when that happens. And the same is true with the UK. Okay. One of, you know, one of their targets, and I'm not going to say which one, you know, had a, listen, we've got to reach out to UK law enforcement about this. Does this affect, you know, do we have a problem because of the Online Safety Act? Is this going to prejudice us in the eyes of their regulator if we reach out proactively to law enforcement about this particular issue?

41:00Like when we see something bad that we want to help with. And we want to help, like, like they're trying to, they're trying to kill us. Like, are we actually doing something that's against our interests when we turn around and we engage and responsible reporting? The answer to that question is, of course, no. Go do the report. That's the proper thing. Checking the block clock. See what's going on. I saw you looking at it. I want to make sure. I saw it flash. And I was just like, oh. Yeah, no, Bitcoin's, I think it's at 52 ,000. No, more. Correct. But so these are responsible businesses, despite the fact that the media narrative is entirely one way.

41:32And, you know, no one's willing to defend them. So I decided to do it.

41:38Alex Thorn:Let's talk about Arkham. It's widely used by market strategists and analysts like me and the internet. It's partly because of its quality, partly because of its UX. It's very, very useful for tracking on-chain flows. You were the head of legal there. What kinds of legal issues does – why have a Burnstorm head of legal at a – because are they a publisher? Sure. So Arkham, so I actually joined Arkham in, they were a client of mine, and I joined Arkham in March or actually early April of 2024. We'd been working on, it's now publicly known, we've been working on an exchange. And so that's a global spot and derivatives exchange, you know, and the idea was that we wanted to, you know, we've got the analytics tools, everybody loves them, they're used by millions of people.

42:27And the question is, like, how do we merge those things so that you have a coherent offering where a trader using this stuff can then have signals, So we rolled out an AI offering this summer, which explains what's going on in particular wallets when you go and navigate to the page. And so the idea is that you kind of create a Bloomberg, right, for crypto, which is where you've got both the execution environment and the information being presented as a single interface. And so we're working on, you know, developing that iterating over time. So the crypto exchange piece of the puzzle is obviously, you know, everybody knows what issues are involved there.

42:59You've got BSA, OFAC, KYC, money transmission, all your compliance stuff. you know it's very standard crypto financial regulatory issues and i think we've got a good program we've got a good defensible program for where we are and you know i'm very proud of it then you have the publishing piece of the puzzle right and that's that is it's fairly i mean it's a fairly light lift right because again because of the first amendment but there you've got data protection issues frequently you have you know sometimes people will turn around they'll try to get content removed and they'll say hey i want this taken down and we'll say well it's on chain so we're not, no, we're not taking it down from the chain.

43:36You can't take it down from the chain. You know, if you've got a problem, go talk to the validators.

43:40Alex Thorn:Dear Mr. Nakamoto. But it's, I mean, it's an interesting fusion of, you know, I've been doing crypto and free speech and this company is a really interesting fusion of those two issues. Right. Because you have essentially a news publishing platform, right, which is turning around and trying to tell the world, hey, this is how the world works. And then you've got a, you know, transaction execution platform where you get to do all kinds of fun stuff, token listings, you know, token reviews. All the crypto law. All the crypto law. But you're right. That is sort of, that's a big box of understood crypto legal regulatory stuff that every, I mean, most big companies in crypto are brokerages and exchanges.

44:14Alex Thorn:Yeah. They all deal with that stuff. Yep. But it's very interesting that you, it is, it certainly was first known and is, I would say, still primarily known as a publishing and information website. I mean, what kinds of things do people complain about taking down? I mean, I can tell you this from my representation of social media companies. Any piece of content that exists, no matter what it is, I don't care if it's a picture of like a duckling, a baby duckling. Any piece of content on the Internet, you can find at least one person who wants it removed. And so it doesn't matter. It might be a logo.

44:48It might be a competitor's logo. It might be a picture of a baby duck. It might be someone, you know, reciting a poem from Robert Frost that someone doesn't like. Like, whatever content exists, someone in the world finds it utterly offensive and wants it destroyed, right? And wants it removed from the web. And so, you know, that's true with any website, right? I think if you have any website which lists information about the world and allows people to understand it, there's someone out there who doesn't want the world to be understood in a particular way, whether it's criticism or whether it's some kind of public disclosure or something like that.

45:22You know, some people say that, you know, Arkham's a de-anonymization engine. You see that a lot. It's not. Arkham is an explorer, right, where you can go see how the world works and understand. You know, you can understand how crypto is shaped, right, in ways that otherwise would be inaccessible to you. And all of which is public, right? So we're just, we're taking that information, we're assembling it in a way that's understandable, and then allowing people to access it. So in an easy way. So I really love it. But it's very much my two interests of crypto and free speech find a very nice, you know, they meet nicely in the middle with the kinds of issues that we have to deal with on the daily.

46:02Alex Thorn:Yeah. Long term, Preston, for the future of the Internet, are you optimistic or pessimistic about free speech, liberty, global connectedness? Is the dream of the Internet connecting the world, is it over? No, we're going to win. I mean, we're going to win. This thing with the Online Safety Act, we're going to beat it. I'm very, very confident that the United States is going to respond to this and that we're going to respond to it in a way that stops this particular—I think we're at the high watermark of internet censorship for the next 20 years at least. There was a model. They rolled that model out.

46:41They replicated that model in places like Australia and New Zealand and the European Union and the UK. And the UK said, you know what? We're the first ones to get our new law in the books. And they had their Death Star, right? And they said, our Death Star is fully operational. And they let her rip, right? But it didn't work. So they came out the gate storming. They tried to come after American companies. What they were expecting, I can tell you what they were expecting. They were expecting all of the targets to ignore the notices. They were expecting all of the targets to quietly just let this thing happen.

47:12They were expecting to win their fines and win, because they're judge, jury, and executioner, right? There's no due process involved here. It's just an agency making its own determination according to a rule book that it wrote for itself, right, with overbroad laws that were intended to do exactly that. And they were expecting to have no resistance, and then they were going to take their little bits of paper and wave them to all the other big American companies and say, hey, you know what? Your lawyers were right, right? You shouldn't have resisted because these companies didn't stand up and fight.

47:41And what the four targets decided to do, every single one said no, right? And these are tiny companies. I'm doing this pro bono for a reason, right? Well, two reasons. One reason is because they need a defense and charging them for defense would be unfair. The second one, as I progressed through this process, is that I know how much the big majors have spent on legal fees. and I want to prove to everybody, the whole marketplace, every tech company, every law firm, all of them, that we can beat this for free. And so I'm not accepting a penny in compensation to do it. And so, and this is true if new clients come in the door, anything else, no comp, because when it's over, right, I want to turn around and say to the tech majors, you spent how much, right?

48:23And we beat it for nothing, right? So that's, it's a bit of a point of personal pride. But I think we're going to win. I think that the win that if we're going to, if we get something like a federal granite, then it's really over. If we get state granites in several states, then it's only somewhat over, right? And we'll have to wait for federal action to get our turbolaser fully operational. But it'll be enough to slow it down, right? And really prevent it from penetrating into the United States too deeply. And I also think that this will set up a template, right? If this works, right? If the Europeans won't dare get through this, guess what's next?

48:56GDPR, right? Guess what's next? Any competition regulation, things like that. If they're afraid of our template that we roll out, then we can replicate that. And we'll be back to the position that we were in 50 years ago, right? Which is that every country has its own laws, companies that are domiciled in that country, follow that country's laws. And there's a, you know, understanding in the brotherhood of nations that different countries do things in different ways. And that is the only thing that makes sense. There are two answers to the censorship issue, which makes sense, right? One of them is what I just said.

49:26The other one is that every country in the world harmonizes and they agree that internet censorship is a good thing and there's no escape. And we're trying to prevent that reality from becoming America's reality with what we're doing with this litigation. And the effort with 4chan is more than just a case in DC. It's a case in DC. It's a public relations and media thing where we explain what's going on. We contextualize it properly. We educate people about what's happening. And it's a legislative effort where we are getting laws proposed, filed, right, in state houses across the country. We're encouraging other state houses to do the same in order that we can create this impervious shield, right, from foreign censorship that will allow the American internet space, including all of crypto, right, encryption, right, and the right to use cryptography, that is protected by the First Amendment.

50:15They want to get after that. So we're trying to build that shield that's going to allow Americans to run whatever software they want, as long as it's lawful to do it here. And hopefully once we're done building it, no one will get through it again.

50:28Alex Thorn:Preston Byrne from Byrne and Storm and Arkham Intelligence. Thank you so much, my friend. Thank you. That's it for this week's episode of Galaxy Brains. Thank you to our guest, Preston Byrne, head of legal at Arkham Intelligence, lawyer at Byrne Storm. Everyone have a safe and happy holiday weekend, and we will see you next week.

50:51Alex Thorn:Thanks for listening to Galaxy Brains, the weekly podcast from Galaxy Research. If you enjoy the show, please like, rate, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. To follow Galaxy Research, sign up for our weekly newsletter at gdr.email, read our content at galaxy.com slash research, and follow us on Twitter at glxyresearch. See you next week.