Private Briefing: How to obtain digital privacy and physical security in modern America
Saturday, November 29th, 2025
Laramie, Wyoming
By Dan Denning
Greetings from Laramie and welcome to the weekend! I hope you had a great Thanksgiving with family and friends. It snowed overnight here in Laramie. A good day to stay inside and watch some great college football rivalry games.
Before that, I’m getting caught up with the events of the last twenty-four hours. We learned that Ukranian naval drones (the Magura 5 sea drone tuype) attacked ships in Russia’s ‘dark fleet’ of oil tankers in the Caspian Sea overnight. There are over 600 ships in the ‘dark fleet’ transporting Russian oil around the world.
And remember that ‘cooling issue’ I told you about in yesterday’s research note? The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) closed trading in futures—including precious metals—due to what it called a technical issue at a data center. But was there more to it?
The silver bugs on X have noted that$24.5 billion was borrowed at the Fed’s Standing Repo Facility (SRF) before the futures markets re-opened yesterday morning. The SRF exists to provide emergency liquidity to financial institutions, in exchange for good collateral. Those institutions might need to borrow from the Fed to say, cover a short in the silver market before the price gaps upward (silver opened 5% higher when the market DID open).
I’m looking into it this weekend. It raises the issue if markets are really markets and prices are really prices (a skyrocketing silver price is a sign of systemic weakness in the paper money system, a price signal the authorities would be keen to suppress). But it’s also a reminder that in a world where most things—drone attacks on Russian ‘dark fleets’ and possible price manipulation/suppression in silver—you can only control the things you can control.
In the first of several upcoming Private Briefings, I talked with author and privacy expert Gabriel Custodiet earlier this week. We’ll be following up between now and Christmas with a new version of the ‘Going Dark’ report I published a few years ago. It will show the ten practical steps you can easily take now to improve your financial and digital security in 21st century America.
But between now and then, please enjoy our wide ranging initial discussion below. Weirdly, privacy is a controversial subject with some readers. It may not be your cup of tea. But it has clear financial and liberty implications in this day and age. Please feel free to leave comments and questions below. We can address them in our upcoming re-release of ‘Going Dark.’
Regards,
Dan
P.S. For reasons that will become clear later, there is no video version of the Private Briefing. It has been transcribed in full (with minor edits for brevity and clarity) and I’ve included an audio link you can listen to or download.
TRANSCRIPT BEGINS HERE
Dan Denning: Welcome back to Bonner Private Research. This is Dan Denning, the Research Director here in Laramie, Wyoming. And by popular demand in today’s Private Briefing, I am joined by a privacy expert. We have a lot to talk about. We got some great reader questions. But let me first introduce my guest. He’s the author of a book that was published in September called Privacy and Utopia: A History. And everything you hear us talking about today, you can find more information at WatchmanPrivacy.com. And the man behind this whole project is Gabriel Custodiet. Gabriel, welcome to the show.
Gabriel Custodiet: Dan, it’s great to be here. I’m the privacy guy. We talk privacy, cybersecurity, cancel culture proofing, basically using technology for our benefit as freedom seekers, so happy to be here. Familiar with your audience. I help a lot of people who are investors and things of this sort, so excited to talk to you.
Dan Denning: Yeah, that’s great. Well, as the readers may know, and as you may know, last week I published a short note about what we mean when we use the word technocracy, and it’s a very broad term, so it has privacy concerns, it has financial concerns, liberty concerns, a little philosophy in there, cybersecurity. It’s a huge topic. And one thing I wanted to mention to readers before we get started and viewers, is that the format today is slightly different. This isn’t a video, it’s an audio and we’ll get into the reasons for that later. But before we take a deeper dive, I thought since you’re a new guest for our audience and privacy is not a topic we’ve dealt with specifically, let’s start at the very highest level with a question. How do you define privacy and why is that important to ordinary Americans and investors right now?
Gabriel Custodiet: Privacy, I see as a social term. This is something that I determined as I wrote the book you mentioned, Privacy in Utopia, as I was trying to figure out what we mean by privacy. And basically we already have terms like solitude, for example, where you’re alone and you’re inaccessible to others. That’s not what privacy is. When we talk about privacy, we’re talking about living in a society that allows us to participate, but also does not expect us to give up that much of our personal data. So you think of the early United States, they had this idea of being American, they had this idea of being part of something bigger, and yet they didn’t have all these things like ID cards and all the rest foisted upon them. That’s what I determined privacy is, is basically it’s a social environment in which you’re able to participate while not being expected to give up that much of your personal data.
And in my view, that is a rare blossoming thing in the world, as is human freedom. And I think it requires a certain group of people who are rational, who have a moral consciousness, and that is by no means every place on earth, so that is what I consider to be privacy. Why is privacy important? Well, this is another question that I get a lot, and fortunately I don’t really have to answer this question that much these days because I consult with individuals. And I’ll tell you what, Dan, when I’m consulting with a lady who is fleeing for her life because of an abusive, vindictive spouse, and it’s literally life and death, her finding any place to live, and this is more common than you would think, I don’t have to explain to her the value of privacy.
When I talk to the dozens and dozens of people that I talk to who are scammed in all sorts of ingenious ways, because there is a cyber crime industry across the world that is around $10 trillion and growing, it’s going to happen to you sooner or later, when I talk to these people, I don’t have to explain to them when they’ve had $10,000 scammed from them. I don’t have to explain to them the value of privacy and cybersecurity. When I talk to people who are trying to set up cryptocurrency payments because they have been kicked off of their payment processor again and again and again and literally kicked out of their bank, de-banked, I don’t have to explain to them the value of some of these things. I was just reading the other day, there were these two affluent Russians who were in Dubai, and they were known for flashing their private jets and things of this sort. They got wealthy through cryptocurrency.
They were found dismembered, their bodies were found dismembered in the desert of Dubai. If we could resurrect them, I don’t think we would have to explain to them the value of privacy. Or the gentleman who was the creator of a cryptocurrency hardware wallet in France who was kidnapped, his finger was cut off and he was held for ransom because he has his face on the internet and people know when they see him, that that is that guy. “That’s the co-founder, that’s the guy we want to kidnap.” Or the people, Dan, living in let’s say Oakland or San Francisco, who are Asian and who are purposefully and specifically targeted because Asian people are among the most wealthy people in that area. So people follow them home where they see signs that, “Oh, this is an Asian family, a Korean family,” because they see signs of that, the way that they decorate their house or whatever the case may be.
I don’t have to explain to those people the importance of being careful about what you publicly expose. Or the people who are using a service like Microsoft 365 where Microsoft literally says in their service agreement, “We will shut down your accounts for hate speech.” And that’s this nebulous term that I don’t even... It basically means what they don’t want you to say. So you can have your Microsoft Office account shut down. I think technically you could have your Windows operating system shut down because of what you say, and they’re always online, always surveying software that you’re using. We could talk about the 11% of people who are stalked. I don’t have to explain to them why privacy is important, or the family that had a baby monitor hacked because they were trying to be high tech and the guy was telling their baby that they love them.
I don’t have to tell these people about the value of privacy, or the 12,000 people in the UK who are arrested every year for what they say online because I guess these people have never heard of a VPN or they’re posting in their real name with their real accounts, which is the epitome of foolishness, especially in today’s climate, especially in places like the UK that are taking George Orwell’s 1984 as advice and not as a warning. And I’ll leave people with a final thought here. Mark Zuckerberg also said something like this about a decade ago.
He said, “Privacy is not a social value.” And then what did he proceed to do? He literally purchased every house that was adjoining his house in the Bay Area so that he could have his own compound. Later on, and this is what he’s doing right now, he purchased a several hundred million dollars compound in Hawaii so that he could have privacy. So privacy, we all want it, we all desire it. It’s really a silly question I think, when people say, “Do I want?” Of course you do, of course. The question is what are you willing to give up and how far do you want to go? And I think we’ll talk in this episode, I think I’ll convince people that you probably want to go pretty far.
Dan Denning: That’s an interesting point that I hadn’t thought about before too, that when I first came to the issue of privacy, or really in the sort of late ‘90s, I guess, it coincided with the introduction of the internet. Prior to that, privacy was what you did in your own time and it was nobody’s business and there was this sphere of life where you didn’t have to explain yourself or get permission from anyone to do what you wanted to do. But so much of our lives now are conducted in the digital realm and we put so much of our lives out there that it’s important for people to understand that there’s an upside to that, which we all know.
And then there’s this growing risk to our personal security and especially to our financial security. So I hope we can get into that more as we have our conversation. But let me ask you a little bit more personal question because those are all valid points.
You’re a professional in that industry, you obviously have learned how to help people with specific steps and things that they should do. How did this start for you? Why did this become an important issue to you? Did you do this kind of work in the corporate world, in the government, in the military, or was there a specific incident that prompted you to become the privacy advocate that you are today?