A Conversation with Edward Snowden (Part 2)

About This Episode

Neil deGrasse Tyson’s exclusive, one-on-one conversation with whistleblower Edward Snowden – via robotic telepresence from Moscow – concludes with a deeper dive into metadata, personal privacy and covert communications. Join us as Edward takes us further down the rabbit hole, where countries spy on their own citizens to protect them and “mere” metadata can be more intrusive and invasive than the actual content of a phone call. Decipher the differences between symmetric encryption, asymmetric encryption and secret sharing schemes. But this episode isn’t just advanced math and n-dimensional matrices – Neil and Edward leave Earth behind and dive into the wavelengths of pulsars and cosmic background radiation in search of the perfect random number generator for an ideal seed value. Plus, Neil and Edward discuss the difficulty of separating the signal from the noise, both in astrophysics and in government mass surveillance.

NOTE: All-Access subscribers can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: A Conversation with Edward Snowden (Part 2).