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#0165_ The Government Doesn’t Just Spy on You — It Buys Your Data · INSPIRE STORY

• 0:05
  Speaker 1: Byron Tao, welcome to the show.
• 0:08
  Speaker 2: Thanks so much for having me.
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: My pleasure, my pleasure. So, like I said, I heard
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: about you in an earlier episode. Your book got shouted out,
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: and so it took us a couple of years, but
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: here you are.
• 0:22
  Speaker 2: Well, glad to be here.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's good to have you here. So, we're going
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: to be talking about.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: Basically digital surveillance what they do with all that information
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: and all this stuff and this can be kind of
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: a dry subject so i just kind of want to
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: preface it um before we get going have you heard
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: about this uh pricing surveillance.
• 0:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah this is a new thing where um essentially companies
• 0:50
  Speaker 2: are trying to figure out what the maximum is that
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: you're willing to pay and uh try to extract as
• 0:57
  Speaker 2: much money from you as possible through all the data
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: they collect about you.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: So I just want to paint a picture real quick,
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: you know, because you get a lot of people and
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: they're like, ah, what does it matter about what are they,
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: I'm not trying to hide anything, you know, and so
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: I know Walmart is, I think Walmart, I think there's
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: another big company too. Is it Amazon?
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: I'd be surprised if most big companies weren't at least
• 1:22
  Speaker 2: thinking about some of this stuff.
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: So... Imagine, so basically Walmart is, they want to do
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: surveillance on us all and figure out the maximum amount
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: you're willing to pay. And so just here's a little scenario.
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: You pull into Walmart, they got the flock cameras, flock
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: cameras talk to the internal cameras. They all talk to
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: each other. And then they're going to have these digital
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: price tags on all the products inside the stores that
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: appear when you look at the product. Well, I mean,
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: just through facial recognition, your phones, all these other things,
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: these cameras and these data systems are all going to
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: be able to talk to each other and display the
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: price that they think that you specifically are willing to
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: pay for each individual product within the store. And so
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: it just falls into this mass surveillance hysteria that everybody
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: is getting extremely concerned about. And so this is some
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: of the stuff that we're going to that we're going
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: to talk about today.
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think companies, generally speaking, for many, many years now,
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: have started to see consumers as data, right? They want
• 2:35
  Speaker 2: to know about you, they want to know about your
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: purchase journey, they want to know about your background, they
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: want to know about your interests, and they.
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: Use all of that to.
• 2:43
  Speaker 2: Historically, they've used it to target you with advertising, but increasingly,
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: we're in an environment where there's enough data out there
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: about you and there's enough of a consumer profile out
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: there about you whether that's stuff you put out yourself
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: or your purchase history or things they're inferring about you.
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: But yeah, companies are going to be able to start
• 3:03
  Speaker 2: making pricing decisions based on all the stuff that they
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: know about you. And that's a lot.
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: It's just crazy to think about, you know? I mean,
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: you go to the store and you think it'd be
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: the same price for everybody, no matter how much money
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: you make, no matter any of that. But I mean...
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: It's basically, I mean, it's all going to be individualized
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: pricing based on what car you drive, what you bought
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: on the internet, all of these, what you're wearing, everything,
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: where you live, you know, and they'll talk to the
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: store so that they can charge you the maximum amount
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: that they think you're going to pay. And, you know,
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: just going through the outline and doing some research on you,
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: I mean, you know, I did not realize that I
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: knew that the marketing industry agencies, you know, that did
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: collect all this data. I knew it was horrible. I
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: thought the government kind of had their own arm in this,
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: but it sounds like they don't really need their own
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: arm because the marketing agencies that collect all the data
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: from your phone, through the apps, through your tires, through
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: the vacuums, through TVs, through everything, they're just, they're so
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: good at collecting that they just take the block of
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: it and sell it to the US government.
• 4:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. And this has been going on for
• 4:22
  Speaker 2: a while, but it's accelerated as we've all started putting
• 4:25
  Speaker 2: more and more information about ourselves online. So, this originally
• 4:28
  Speaker 2: started with stuff like, well, you know, these data brokers
• 4:31
  Speaker 2: will collect your property history, like who, you know, who
• 4:34
  Speaker 2: bought a certain house. They might get a little information
• 4:37
  Speaker 2: about your mortgage. They might at some point have started,
• 4:40
  Speaker 2: you know, getting consumer lists, right? Were you the kind
• 4:43
  Speaker 2: of person that subscribed to a magazine about pets or
• 4:46
  Speaker 2: cooking or guns? And so, gradually started amassing more and
• 4:50
  Speaker 2: more information about people, um, right up to the current
• 4:53
  Speaker 2: moment where they essentially can, you know, track a lot
• 4:56
  Speaker 2: about your browsing history, they can track a lot about
• 4:58
  Speaker 2: your movements through the world, um, they know how to
• 5:00
  Speaker 2: link your social profiles to your real identity, um, and-and yes, um,
• 5:05
  Speaker 2: governments have realized that, um, there's a ton of corporate
• 5:09
  Speaker 2: data out there that-that consumers are voluntarily handing it over
• 5:13
  Speaker 2: in many cases, and that if they just open their
• 5:16
  Speaker 2: wallet they can often get information that they would otherwise
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: either be forbidden from getting because, you know, you've worked
• 5:22
  Speaker 2: in the government. There are all sorts of rules and
• 5:24
  Speaker 2: regulations about when you can target people and, you know,
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: how you can target people. But if you buy the
• 5:31
  Speaker 2: data on the open market, some of those rules go
• 5:33
  Speaker 2: out the door. And so, yes, this is a phenomenon
• 5:37
  Speaker 2: that's been increasing in recent years and is only going
• 5:40
  Speaker 2: to keep increasing as long as we keep pouring data
• 5:43
  Speaker 2: about ourselves onto the web.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: Well, that's what we'll be talking about for the majority
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: of the day. So let me start you off with
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: an introduction, though. Byron Tao, you're an investigative reporter currently
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: at ProPublica following your tenure with Politico and the Wall
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: Street Journal. You're the author of Means of Control, which
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: focused on surfacing the intersection of corporate data gathering and
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: government surveillance. And just this past May, you won the
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: 2026 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting regarding an investigation into
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: mass surveillance tools built in Silicon Valley, advanced in China,
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: and brought home for secret new uses by the Border Patrol.
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: Congratulations on that, by the way.
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: Thank you.
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: And so before we get started, a couple of things
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: to knock out here real quick. I have a Patreon account.
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: They've been with me since the beginning. We've turned it
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: into one hell of a community. I think it's almost 200,000
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: strong now. And so they get the opportunity to ask
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: every single guest a question. Okay. This is from Jesse Martin.
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: Your reporting has shown that commercially available location data can
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: map the movements of phones around military installations, intelligence facilities,
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: and the homes of the people who work there. If
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: a foreign service can simply buy that from an ad broker,
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: has the concept of OPSEC for operators and their families
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: already collapsed? And does anyone in government have a serious
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: answer for it? That's a great question.
• 7:13
  Speaker 2: And I think even in this current conflict in Iran,
• 7:16
  Speaker 2: we've seen reports out of CENTCOM that the Iranians may
• 7:20
  Speaker 2: have indeed targeted American soldiers using commercially available data. This
• 7:25
  Speaker 2: is a really, really hard problem to solve. There are
• 7:27
  Speaker 2: some solutions. There are sort of hardened phones. There are
• 7:31
  Speaker 2: rules you can put in place, but they're very, very difficult.
• 7:34
  Speaker 2: And it takes... It takes discipline from the leadership of
• 7:37
  Speaker 2: the military. It takes a certain amount of technical expertise, right?
• 7:41
  Speaker 2: It's not just putting your phone in airplane mode. There's
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: a lot of different things you need to do to
• 7:45
  Speaker 2: harden a device and to make sure that, you know,
• 7:49
  Speaker 2: operational security is maintained. And, you know, it requires understanding
• 7:54
  Speaker 2: a bewildering array of data that's collected. And so there
• 7:57
  Speaker 2: are people that are working on this problem. There's probably
• 7:59
  Speaker 2: not enough people that are working on this problem, but
• 8:02
  Speaker 2: it is a serious and ongoing threat to the people
• 8:05
  Speaker 2: that go overseas and serve our country.
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: Is there, I mean, I know the FTC is getting
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: involved in the surveillance pricing stuff, but is this even
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: a discussion in the U.S. government right now as far
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: as just, you know, from a civilian standpoint? I mean,
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: it's so invasive.
• 8:25
  Speaker 2: So, I mean, I think, you know, historically, I think
• 8:29
  Speaker 2: the government, and I think this is, you know, leading
• 8:32
  Speaker 2: members of both parties, have not wanted to really interfere
• 8:36
  Speaker 2: in the internet at the very beginning, right? Because they
• 8:39
  Speaker 2: thought it was going to be this tremendous tool for
• 8:41
  Speaker 2: the advancement of human flourishing and freedom and commerce. And
• 8:45
  Speaker 2: they thought that onerous regulations might And that was a
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: reasonable position to take, you know, 20, 30 years ago.
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: I think as we've seen the internet mature, we've really
• 8:55
  Speaker 2: seen a lack of serious policy discussion about what the
• 8:59
  Speaker 2: rules should be around consumer data protection, and we've seen
• 9:03
  Speaker 2: a real leadership vacuum in Congress. I mean, um, you know,
• 9:07
  Speaker 2: the internet's 30-some years old at this point, and, you know,
• 9:10
  Speaker 2: we're the last remaining major industrial democracy that does not
• 9:15
  Speaker 2: have a comprehensive privacy law. We have a patchwork of
• 9:18
  Speaker 2: different laws that are state by state. Um, we have
• 9:21
  Speaker 2: some executive orders that have been meant to deal with
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: some of this from a purely national security basis, right?
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: Like trying to stop TikTok and other data flows out
• 9:29
  Speaker 2: of the country. But writ large, I mean, our lawmakers,
• 9:33
  Speaker 2: our political leaders have never really written rules of the
• 9:36
  Speaker 2: road for digital services.
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: Wow. You said we're the last one?
• 9:43
  Speaker 2: That's something you hear scholars say, but essentially, I think
• 9:46
  Speaker 2: that's correct. That at a national level, um, we're the
• 9:48
  Speaker 2: last real remaining, you know, major democracy and major economy
• 9:54
  Speaker 2: that doesn't have a privacy law that applies across the
• 9:57
  Speaker 2: board to digital services. Yeah, I think that's... true.
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: Well, I mean, just, you know, from our previous discussion
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: before we even started this, I mean, I'll bet they're
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: thinking about it now. I mean, I wasn't even planning
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: on going into this, but I mean, so right now
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: you're working on how foreign governments, specifically Iran, but there's
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: a lot of other ones, I'm sure, are are buying
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: the data from U.S. marketing firms about us and targeting U.S. soldiers, operatives,
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: State Department personnel overseas. Can you.
• 10:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, it's something I'm interested in because it
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: grows out of my book. But there was a letter,
• 10:39
  Speaker 2: I think, a few weeks ago or a few months
• 10:41
  Speaker 2: ago from Senator Ron Wyden's office, and he asked the
• 10:45
  Speaker 2: Pentagon straight up, are there any... reports that Iranians had
• 10:49
  Speaker 2: targeted American soldiers. And the Pentagon answered that yes, they
• 10:52
  Speaker 2: had received credible intelligence reports saying that... that Iranians had
• 10:58
  Speaker 2: used commercially available information, information collected from data brokers, to
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: potentially target U.S. soldiers. They didn't give a tremendous amount
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: of detail, but they said they had received that reporting.
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: And so, yeah, this, you know, I've focused in this
• 11:11
  Speaker 2: book primarily on... what our government does with this data,
• 11:14
  Speaker 2: but this data is out there and it's available for sale,
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: and our adversaries can and do buy it. Um, you know,
• 11:20
  Speaker 2: there have been, um, uh, there have been reports of
• 11:24
  Speaker 2: other foreign governments getting this information, particularly Israeli companies. And,
• 11:29
  Speaker 2: you know, Israel is an ally of the United States,
• 11:31
  Speaker 2: but it would not be at all difficult for China, Russia,
• 11:34
  Speaker 2: Iran to obtain the exact same data that we're talking
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: about here. And CENTCOM seems to believe that it's at
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: least credible that it was used to target Americans.
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: Wow. Do you have a hardened phone?
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: I do not. Um, I do use a privacy-first cell carrier,
• 11:51
  Speaker 2: and I do put my Apple phone in lockdown mode. Um, but,
• 11:56
  Speaker 2: you know, being a reporter, you have to balance the
• 11:59
  Speaker 2: need for contacting people with putting your phone number out
• 12:03
  Speaker 2: there in many instances, and trying to encourage the public
• 12:07
  Speaker 2: to deliver you tips. And so I try to get
• 12:10
  Speaker 2: a balance with my own personal security.
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: Well, I got you a present.
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah?
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: I sure did. So here you go.
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: Oh, thank you.
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: You're welcome.
• 12:22
  Speaker 2: This is a hardened phone. Should I open it now?
• 12:24
  Speaker 2: Go ahead.
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: Open it up. All right.
• 12:29
  Speaker 2: How do I do this?
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: Oh, boy.
• 12:37
  Speaker 2: You're going to have to help me.
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: Oh, boy. All right, here we go.
• 12:43
  Speaker 2: Oh, there's a snap. Tell me about this.
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: All right, so I'll tell you about that. So you
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: wrote about a company called Glacier.
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: I did.
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: In your book. And I wound up going into business
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: with Glacier because this is something I've been extremely concerned with.
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: My podcast got a little political. I've been, now I'm
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: affiliated with Heads Estate and all these other people. I
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: used to work for the agency. I get paranoid about
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: this stuff. So anyways, I reached out to them because
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: I didn't want all these people who have my numbers,
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: I don't know what they're sucking out of my phone,
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: talking to people like you, talking to former colleagues and
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: what's being sucked out of the phone. I wanted a
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: hardened phone for everybody on my team. So I reached
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: out to some former people colleagues you know about what's
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: what's the latest and greatest hardened phone and they pointed
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: me towards a company called glacier i wanted to go
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: into business with glacier and but but first and foremost
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: i wanted their product well their product is awesome but
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: it's ten thousand dollars a phone roughly plus another double
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: that for the service And so I lost interest and
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: I said, look, I want something that we can do
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: for everybody, that everyday consumers can afford. Nobody can afford this.
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: And so we developed an application that takes a lot
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: of the best features out of the phone and put
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: it into an app. And the app's called Glacier. And
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: so basically, in a nutshell, what Glacier does, I think
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: you're going to love this. One, burner numbers. So my
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: number gets leaked all over the internet. I'm sure your number,
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: you know, if you're an investigative reporter, you know what
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: that's like. And so we created, you can get up
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: to five burner numbers. And so what that is, you know,
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: you pass your number out, it starts getting leaked, you're
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: getting spammed, you don't want the hotel, the pizza place,
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: the political campaign, you donate to any of that stuff,
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: the nonprofit that you do. Everybody's selling your shit constantly.
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: So you hand out the burner number. When you come
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: to the realization it's been compromised, you burn the number,
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: you get a new one. You can pick any area
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: code in the U.S. Then the other thing we did
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: is we did secure DNS, which keeps the applications that
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: you're not using, that are selling all your information, where
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: you are, what you buy, who you're with, all that stuff.
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: It keeps that stuff localized on your phone and blocks
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: it from being uploaded and sold to the marketing firms
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: or the U.S. government. or foreign governments. And then the
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: last thing that we did was we put a VPN
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: in there that we don't hold any data other than
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: the email that you sign up with. And they're all
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: American VPNs. So that's what we developed. And we made
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: the app as simple as you could possibly imagine. The
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: real winner in there is the burner numbers and the DNS.
• 15:54
  Speaker 2: And so that's built into a commercially available app that
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: most consumers can get without dropping $ 10, 000 on a secure phone?
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: Yep. And it's super simple. I mean, you connect to
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: the DNS, you shut the app off, and it is done.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: You don't ever have to open it again.
• 16:16
  Speaker 2: So can I ask you a question? What's your experience
• 16:18
  Speaker 2: been like with the hardened phone? Because like you mentioned,
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: I did talk to Glacier in writing this book and
• 16:23
  Speaker 2: a few other who made hardened phones. And one of
• 16:27
  Speaker 2: the things they said that the challenge was you have
• 16:31
  Speaker 2: to make a hardened phone that people want to use, right?
• 16:33
  Speaker 2: Because if you have a hardened phone and it doesn't
• 16:36
  Speaker 2: work in all the normal ways that people want to
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: use a cell phone, then they end up just getting
• 16:41
  Speaker 2: a non-hardened phone and carrying both of them around together,
• 16:43
  Speaker 2: and then you've defeated the point of the hardened phone. So,
• 16:45
  Speaker 2: what's been your experience like using the hardened phone? Does
• 16:48
  Speaker 2: it do everything a normal cell phone does? It does.
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: It's an iPhone. You know, and so when talking to them,
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: because I've had other hardened phones, but they weren't the iPhone.
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: And I think most Americans, life revolves around Apple. You
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: know what I mean? Unfortunately, it just is what it is.
• 17:08
  Speaker 2: It's hard to escape that ecosystem.
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: And so they've found a way to harden the damn iPhone. Yeah.
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: It's got some more advanced features on the app, but
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: it's just having an iPhone. You know what I mean?
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: And if they detect suspicious activity, you get an email.
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: They follow up with it. They track where it went,
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: what's happening. And if it is something malicious, then you
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: get notified. You get a phone call from them. Some
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: other stuff that they can do that the app can't
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: do is, for me, we're all over the world. And
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: we're kicking over some rocks that a lot of people
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: don't want kicked over. And so what they can do
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: is they can actually upload a footprint, like a false footprint,
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: into your phone to make it look like you've been
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: there for a long time and delete it when you're gone.
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: You know what I mean? So you come back to
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: the U.S. Doesn't look like I was doing an interview
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: in Taiwan. I go to Taiwan. It doesn't look like
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: I came from the U.S. I go to Dubai to
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: interview there. I have a whole new footprint uploaded that's a,
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: you know what I mean? So it makes you blend in,
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: you know, digitally, and it doesn't raise any red flags
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: when you're in and out of all these countries. And
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: there's some kidnapping-type features, some of that kind of stuff.
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: I'm looking forward to checking it out.
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: I'd love to hear what you got to say. Here's
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  Speaker 1: our show and tell them our show sent you. So,
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: how did you... How did you kind of get your
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: start into this? What caught your attention? Because like I said,
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: this can be a pretty dry subject, especially two years ago,
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: you know what I mean, when you were getting into it.
• 21:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah, actually, I mean, the story starts almost six years
• 21:17
  Speaker 2: ago at this point, maybe even more. But, you know,
• 21:21
  Speaker 2: I was at a dinner party and somebody was telling
• 21:26
  Speaker 2: me about a program that they were working on that
• 21:31
  Speaker 2: involved the Department of Defense, or the Department of War,
• 21:35
  Speaker 2: as it's now being called, buying up large amounts of
• 21:38
  Speaker 2: commercially available information on the open market and using it
• 21:42
  Speaker 2: to do some kind of counterterrorism work. And, you know,
• 21:47
  Speaker 2: this was something I had never heard of, right? Like,
• 21:49
  Speaker 2: I didn't know that you could just go out and
• 21:52
  Speaker 2: broker information that showed pretty precise and granular movement of phones.
• 21:59
  Speaker 2: this was a vector of surveillance that I had simply
• 22:02
  Speaker 2: not considered. You know, like, I thought I understood, you know,
• 22:05
  Speaker 2: I was a Washington reporter, I'd covered courts on and off,
• 22:08
  Speaker 2: I knew about how law enforcement was supposed to work.
• 22:11
  Speaker 2: And the idea that there was this data set out
• 22:13
  Speaker 2: there of the movement of hundreds of millions of devices, um,
• 22:17
  Speaker 2: was kind of shocking to me. So, I'm sitting there,
• 22:20
  Speaker 2: you know, tell me more, that's an interesting program. Um, and, uh,
• 22:25
  Speaker 2: you know, I got some of the tale. I got
• 22:28
  Speaker 2: some of the technical explanation that, oh, you know, it
• 22:31
  Speaker 2: comes off these apps, like weather apps and games. It
• 22:35
  Speaker 2: comes when you opt in. Your phone number's not in there.
• 22:38
  Speaker 2: Your name isn't in there. You're known by an anonymized identifier,
• 22:43
  Speaker 2: a string of letters and numbers. But, you know, we
• 22:46
  Speaker 2: can generally figure out who you are, right? Because where
• 22:50
  Speaker 2: a phone is at night, and where it goes during
• 22:52
  Speaker 2: the day, and where it goes back to at night,
• 22:54
  Speaker 2: it's pretty good pretty good correlation to a person's real-world
• 22:58
  Speaker 2: movement and identity, right? I'm the only person that gets
• 23:02
  Speaker 2: up at my home in Washington, D.C., and goes to
• 23:05
  Speaker 2: my office in downtown Washington, D.C., and comes home every night, right? Like,
• 23:09
  Speaker 2: my fiancé wakes up there, but she goes to a
• 23:12
  Speaker 2: different office. And so, it's not all that difficult to
• 23:15
  Speaker 2: get down to people's identity in these data sets. And so,
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: Hearing this story, I thought this was rather extraordinary and
• 23:23
  Speaker 2: a kind of surveillance I just hadn't considered. And so,
• 23:27
  Speaker 2: you know, I kept it in the back of my
• 23:29
  Speaker 2: mind and I started reporting on it. And, um... You know,
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: the opportunity really came to delve deep into it when
• 23:36
  Speaker 2: I was kind of a new reporter on the Justice
• 23:39
  Speaker 2: Department and law enforcement beat back in 2020. I remembered
• 23:43
  Speaker 2: this tip from a few years before. And I started
• 23:46
  Speaker 2: digging into it. And at this time, the program had
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: matured a bit. DHS had started to use this data
• 23:53
  Speaker 2: to do kind of internal security and tracking of unlawful
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: border crossings and trying to find unlawful immigrants in the
• 24:01
  Speaker 2: interior of the country. And had started to start using
• 24:04
  Speaker 2: it for ordinary law enforcement, right? Kidnappings and all sorts
• 24:07
  Speaker 2: of other things. And all doing it without a judge's supervision,
• 24:10
  Speaker 2: without a warrant, and without most people in America knowing
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: that this program was happening. And so, that's when I
• 24:17
  Speaker 2: really started to delve into it. I published my first
• 24:19
  Speaker 2: story on the topic of commercial data tracking in February
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: of 2020, and I've been reporting on it ever since.
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: Six years ago. Yeah.
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: And I think, yeah, now that I think of it,
• 24:31
  Speaker 2: I think the tip came in 2017 or 2018.
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 24:33
  Speaker 2: Wow. How much has this advanced? You know, a couple
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: things have happened since I started working on it. I mean,
• 24:43
  Speaker 2: you know, on the one hand, people are much more
• 24:46
  Speaker 2: privacy aware, and Apple and Google have made some changes
• 24:52
  Speaker 2: into how much data phones can collect without people realizing. So,
• 24:56
  Speaker 2: I mean, in the early days of the iPhone, people
• 24:57
  Speaker 2: were putting all sorts of crazy stuff on their device
• 25:00
  Speaker 2: and clicking, sure, you can track my GPS location, and
• 25:04
  Speaker 2: it would ping the phone every two seconds. And, you know, today,
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: Apple doesn't really like to let you do that. if
• 25:10
  Speaker 2: you're trying to make a game or an app that
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: does that, Apple doesn't really want you to do that, right?
• 25:14
  Speaker 2: It wants people to know how many times an app
• 25:16
  Speaker 2: has tracked your location. So now there's a big pop-up
• 25:20
  Speaker 2: that comes up every few days if an app tries
• 25:22
  Speaker 2: to do that and says, yeah, this game collected your
• 25:25
  Speaker 2: location 5,000 times in the last few days. Are you
• 25:28
  Speaker 2: sure you want to continue to allow this? And so
• 25:30
  Speaker 2: a lot more people have opted out. On the other hand,
• 25:34
  Speaker 2: there's all sorts of new ways to infer people's location.
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: identity and data, right? Like, there's just... None of this
• 25:41
  Speaker 2: is stopping, right? So, there's other technologies that have matured. So,
• 25:45
  Speaker 2: there's just a lot more license plate readers out there
• 25:47
  Speaker 2: than there were five or six years ago. There's a
• 25:50
  Speaker 2: lot more connected cars that are broadcasting data to car manufacturers.
• 25:56
  Speaker 2: You're often pairing your phone with your car, right? And
• 25:59
  Speaker 2: who knows what data is passing between the car and
• 26:01
  Speaker 2: the phone and the manufacturers of different things. And then just,
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: you know, even if you turn off all these location
• 26:07
  Speaker 2: permissions and don't download shady apps, you're still getting served
• 26:11
  Speaker 2: ads every day, and those ads can collect information about you.
• 26:15
  Speaker 2: All the people that are sitting there trying to serve
• 26:18
  Speaker 2: you ads get a ton of information about you, even
• 26:21
  Speaker 2: if it's not your precise GPS location. For example, if
• 26:24
  Speaker 2: I connected to the Wi-Fi network here in your studio,
• 26:27
  Speaker 2: someone might well know that I'm here in an IP
• 26:29
  Speaker 2: address that is here in Tennessee. And so, There's all
• 26:34
  Speaker 2: sorts of ways to continue to track people, and marketers
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: aren't just giving up because these technical changes have been made.
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: What information that's being sucked out of, whether it's your phone,
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: your TV, your vacuum, your vehicle, your tires, what concerns
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: you the most?
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: Actually, what I would say is the aggregation of all
• 26:59
  Speaker 2: this data is what concerns me the most. In isolation,
• 27:03
  Speaker 2: you know, a snapshot of your license plate driving down
• 27:06
  Speaker 2: a road is just one data point. But when you
• 27:09
  Speaker 2: correlate it with all the other things that you're generating
• 27:14
  Speaker 2: in terms of data trails, it makes it very easy
• 27:17
  Speaker 2: to put together a pretty holistic picture of your life.
• 27:20
  Speaker 2: And it's not one single data set. It's not one
• 27:24
  Speaker 2: particular technology. the aggregation of all these different bits and
• 27:30
  Speaker 2: bytes of information about us, all these different data points,
• 27:33
  Speaker 2: some of them in government hands, some of them in
• 27:35
  Speaker 2: commercial hands, some of them only available if you go
• 27:39
  Speaker 2: get a judge to give you a search warrant, some
• 27:41
  Speaker 2: of them available on the open market. But the data's
• 27:44
  Speaker 2: out there, and increasingly, there's a lot of pressure to
• 27:47
  Speaker 2: weave it together, to put it together, to sell it,
• 27:49
  Speaker 2: to trade it, to share it with the government for
• 27:52
  Speaker 2: public safety. All of that leads down a path in
• 27:55
  Speaker 2: which it's very hard to exist in a modern society,
• 27:59
  Speaker 2: even a democracy, without giving up a ton of information
• 28:03
  Speaker 2: to parties that you don't know who you're giving it to.
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: So, how are they able to... Are they able to
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: piece all this together? You know, when they take.
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: All these different ways to collect on you, how do they...
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: How does it all come together into, you know, a
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: personal profile snapshot?
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on the government agency,
• 28:30
  Speaker 2: and it depends on the mission that they've been charged
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: with doing, right? So, I think our military and our
• 28:36
  Speaker 2: intelligence agencies are largely focused overseas. And there, they're obtaining
• 28:40
  Speaker 2: the exact same kind of data that's available on Americans,
• 28:43
  Speaker 2: and they're doing intelligence gathering, right? They're spotting and assessing
• 28:46
  Speaker 2: and trying to recruit foreign spies. They're trying to understand
• 28:49
  Speaker 2: the behavior of important people in foreign countries. And sometimes
• 28:53
  Speaker 2: they're doing counterterrorism work, right? They're trying to target people,
• 28:56
  Speaker 2: and often kinetically. But then you think about an agency
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: like the Department of Homeland Security. Well, they're actually much
• 29:04
  Speaker 2: more inward focused, right? They're trying to look at who's
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: coming into the United States, what goods are coming into
• 29:09
  Speaker 2: the United States, who's applying for a visa. When you're here,
• 29:12
  Speaker 2: what do you do? what's happening around this border region, which,
• 29:16
  Speaker 2: by the way, encompasses many, many parts of the United States,
• 29:18
  Speaker 2: including a lot of our major cities. DHS has authorities
• 29:23
  Speaker 2: within 100 miles of a border, and that includes airports,
• 29:26
  Speaker 2: that includes coastal borders, and that includes the land borders.
• 29:30
  Speaker 2: And so this is an agency that's very powerful and
• 29:32
  Speaker 2: has a lot of authorities to do things in that
• 29:34
  Speaker 2: zone and is interested in understanding what happens in that zone.
• 29:37
  Speaker 2: So that's an agency that's interested in collecting a lot
• 29:40
  Speaker 2: more information about the American public, right? That's the agency
• 29:43
  Speaker 2: that wants your face so that you can go quickly
• 29:45
  Speaker 2: through the touchless TSA pre-check. It's the agency that wants
• 29:49
  Speaker 2: to know who you're traveling with and whether you pose
• 29:52
  Speaker 2: a threat to civil aviation. It's the agency that wants
• 29:55
  Speaker 2: to know, um, where visitors are going and what they're doing.
• 29:59
  Speaker 2: And that's a perfectly legitimate mission, but they're collecting a
• 30:02
  Speaker 2: ton of information as part of that. And then you
• 30:04
  Speaker 2: think about local police departments, right? They're charged with solving
• 30:08
  Speaker 2: crimes and issuing speeding tickets and, you know, and just
• 30:14
  Speaker 2: general public safety. Then they also get a piece of
• 30:16
  Speaker 2: this information, right? They're thinking about, well, who's saying what
• 30:19
  Speaker 2: on social media about, about local politicians, about the local
• 30:24
  Speaker 2: school system. You know, where are cars going in the
• 30:28
  Speaker 2: mornings and the evenings? Are they traveling to downtown? Are
• 30:32
  Speaker 2: they going to known drug trafficking spots? And so there's...
• 30:35
  Speaker 2: Depends on who the they is. But in all of
• 30:38
  Speaker 2: these cases, in all these government agencies, they're getting increasing
• 30:43
  Speaker 2: amounts of data, much of it from commercial sources. And
• 30:47
  Speaker 2: a lot of this is being done without a tremendous
• 30:49
  Speaker 2: amount of thought, public conversation or guardrails around what the
• 30:55
  Speaker 2: limits are, what the rules are about accessing this data,
• 30:58
  Speaker 2: when you can access this data, who gets to access
• 31:01
  Speaker 2: this data. Some of those conversations just aren't really happening.
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: Let's, what about, I mean, I wasn't even ready to
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: go into the government yet, but what about just the civilian,
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: like just your basic corporation that's collecting data? I mean,
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: do these all, what are they collecting? What do they
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: do with it? And when we're talking about all these
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: different devices, how does it come together into one specific
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: profile piece about Fire and Tao?
• 31:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so, I mean, first of all, corporations are very
• 31:31
  Speaker 2: interested in where I live and what I do for
• 31:34
  Speaker 2: a living and how much money I make, right? That
• 31:36
  Speaker 2: helps them target products and ads to me. It helps
• 31:39
  Speaker 2: them know, am I a consumer that's interested in a
• 31:41
  Speaker 2: Lexus or am I interested in a used Nissan Versa?
• 31:45
  Speaker 2: That's a helpful... So they'll pull property records based on
• 31:50
  Speaker 2: where I live. They'll get email addresses, right? That's how
• 31:54
  Speaker 2: we get most of our communication from companies these days,
• 31:57
  Speaker 2: is these things that fill up our inbox with offers.
• 32:00
  Speaker 2: And often that comes from you giving your email address
• 32:04
  Speaker 2: to a company when you want to buy something. Often
• 32:07
  Speaker 2: those companies will sell or rent your email address to
• 32:10
  Speaker 2: data brokers. Beyond that, they're interested in your purchasing habits, right?
• 32:15
  Speaker 2: So like, what did you buy? What are you interested in?
• 32:19
  Speaker 2: They're interested in your browsing habits, so that's what cookies are.
• 32:22
  Speaker 2: As you move around the web, they're kind of trying
• 32:25
  Speaker 2: to create a profile view. Is this someone who's interested
• 32:28
  Speaker 2: in sports or cars or guns or ballet or liquor?
• 32:33
  Speaker 2: So it's a tremendous amount of consumer information. And then,
• 32:38
  Speaker 2: you know, if you're talking about digital devices, companies are
• 32:42
  Speaker 2: trying to extract information off of those too, right? So
• 32:45
  Speaker 2: when I go to a store, they wanna know if
• 32:48
  Speaker 2: I'm in that store. So they'll buy geolocation data. Did
• 32:52
  Speaker 2: I inadvertently let the Starbucks app collect my information? Well,
• 32:55
  Speaker 2: now a bunch of data brokers know I was at
• 32:58
  Speaker 2: Starbucks because I've enabled GPS on that particular app because
• 33:01
  Speaker 2: I want the rewards when I walk in there. So
• 33:04
  Speaker 2: companies are building these pretty detailed dossiers You know, some
• 33:08
  Speaker 2: of them are kind of aggregated in the hands of
• 33:10
  Speaker 2: data brokers. Some of them are their own internal data
• 33:14
  Speaker 2: on you and you as their customer. And sometimes they
• 33:18
  Speaker 2: trade this information amongst themselves or sell it when they
• 33:21
  Speaker 2: go bankrupt. So companies know a lot about you too.
• 33:24
  Speaker 2: So do the.
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: How do I say this? So we have different sets
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: of data being collected from different devices, I guess is
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: what I'm trying to say. And so, do those data
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: sets come together in a centralized location to give a
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: better snapshot of who you are?
• 33:47
  Speaker 2: So, there's not... This is kind of where the primary
• 33:51
  Speaker 2: difference between us today in the United States and in
• 33:54
  Speaker 2: other Western countries and China is, is that no. Today,
• 33:57
  Speaker 2: there is not one gigantic master repository of all the
• 34:02
  Speaker 2: information about me as a citizen, as a consumer, sitting
• 34:07
  Speaker 2: in a single database. It's spread out, it's dispersed. The
• 34:13
  Speaker 2: Chinese model, the authoritarian model is, no, you have to
• 34:16
  Speaker 2: give it all to the public safety entities, and they're gonna,
• 34:19
  Speaker 2: you know, they're gonna look at your power data to
• 34:21
  Speaker 2: figure out if you're doing Bitcoin mining. They're gonna look
• 34:23
  Speaker 2: at your public transit data to make sure you're not
• 34:25
  Speaker 2: meeting with subversive people. You know, they're gonna read your
• 34:28
  Speaker 2: text messages. That's what an authoritarian government looks like. Today,
• 34:32
  Speaker 2: we don't quite have that. We have a lot of
• 34:35
  Speaker 2: different databases spread out in a lot of different places.
• 34:38
  Speaker 2: Some of them in government hands, some of them in
• 34:40
  Speaker 2: corporate hands, some of them available for sale, some of
• 34:44
  Speaker 2: them not available for sale. But the data that's collected
• 34:47
  Speaker 2: on Westerners is not all that dissimilar from the data
• 34:50
  Speaker 2: that's collected on Chinese citizens. It's just not all quite
• 34:55
  Speaker 2: 100% weaved together in some sort of public safety portal.
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: Are there any, I mean, That's actually surprising. Are there
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: any companies that are, I mean, why wouldn't in a
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: capitalistic society would think that would be, I mean, I think,
• 35:11
  Speaker 1: was it Elon Musk that was saying, you know, data
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: is the next oil?
• 35:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: I mean, lots of these guys are saying that.
• 35:16
  Speaker 2: So there's a lot of pressure to do exactly that, right?
• 35:18
  Speaker 2: For a lot of different reasons. Some of it, some
• 35:21
  Speaker 2: of it like public health and transportation planning, right? Can
• 35:24
  Speaker 2: we pull in all this corporate data and all these
• 35:26
  Speaker 2: kind of this movement data and the, you know, people's
• 35:30
  Speaker 2: public transit trips and their toll transponders, can we pull
• 35:32
  Speaker 2: all that into a portal to do transportation planning? And
• 35:37
  Speaker 2: then once it's in a government database for transportation planning, well,
• 35:40
  Speaker 2: now there's a public safety imperative. Well, you know, can
• 35:43
  Speaker 2: we detect when someone's fleeing from the authorities or there's
• 35:46
  Speaker 2: an Amber Alert on a missing child? Maybe we should
• 35:48
  Speaker 2: pull all that transportation data into a public safety database.
• 35:53
  Speaker 2: So there's pressure to do a lot of that. That's
• 35:56
  Speaker 2: a lot of what Doge was talking about when Elon
• 35:58
  Speaker 2: Musk came into government, is taking all these different databases
• 36:02
  Speaker 2: that exist for different reasons and trying to merge them
• 36:05
  Speaker 2: to give the central government, the federal government, a better
• 36:08
  Speaker 2: picture of everything that's happening. Well, sometimes those databases are
• 36:13
  Speaker 2: in different places for a reason, because we don't necessarily want,
• 36:17
  Speaker 2: you know, our medical data being used for immigration enforcement,
• 36:21
  Speaker 2: or we don't want our tax data to be used
• 36:24
  Speaker 2: by or we don't want our toll transponders to be
• 36:29
  Speaker 2: used to track us around without a search warrant. And so,
• 36:32
  Speaker 2: that's why a nuanced conversation about the dangers of this
• 36:35
  Speaker 2: kind of data fusion is really important. And I think,
• 36:39
  Speaker 2: you know, the Doge moment was an interesting one, where
• 36:41
  Speaker 2: there was a lot of pushback about this. But this is,
• 36:46
  Speaker 2: in many ways, the difficulty of obtaining data is a
• 36:49
  Speaker 2: privacy protection. It exists, but it's not The privacy protection
• 36:53
  Speaker 2: is that it's hard to get and it's hard to merge.
• 36:55
  Speaker 2: And there's a lot of pressure now to say, well,
• 36:58
  Speaker 2: we have this data and we have these important problems.
• 37:01
  Speaker 2: Let's just dump it all in one place.
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: Are there any companies that are close? What about something
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: like Palantir?
• 37:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, Palantir is one
• 37:13
  Speaker 2: of many companies that's out there to solve exactly this problem, right?
• 37:17
  Speaker 2: Is to take different disparate data sets and try to
• 37:21
  Speaker 2: extract unique insights from them. So, yes, I mean, Palantir
• 37:26
  Speaker 2: doesn't themselves buy up all the data or get it,
• 37:29
  Speaker 2: but they exist to help government agencies go and take
• 37:34
  Speaker 2: different databases and merge them together and say, well, now
• 37:38
  Speaker 2: we can take your toll transponder data and combine it
• 37:41
  Speaker 2: with the crime data And I'm not saying this is happening,
• 37:43
  Speaker 2: but this is a hypothetical project you could do and
• 37:47
  Speaker 2: look for criminals who pass through tolls. And maybe we
• 37:52
  Speaker 2: can start to look for not just known criminals, but
• 37:54
  Speaker 2: people whose driving patterns look suspicious, right? They take a
• 37:58
  Speaker 2: one-day trip from Houston to the border region. Does that
• 38:02
  Speaker 2: mean they're... And then they turn around. Does that mean
• 38:03
  Speaker 2: they're drug smugglers? Does that mean they're human smugglers? Maybe
• 38:06
  Speaker 2: we should find out based just on that pattern of behavior.
• 38:10
  Speaker 2: So Palantir, and in fairness to Palantir, they're not the
• 38:13
  Speaker 2: only ones out there, right? You could do this with
• 38:16
  Speaker 2: Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets if you had enough computing power.
• 38:20
  Speaker 2: But yes, there's all sorts of companies that are out
• 38:22
  Speaker 2: there and they're trying to help governments and private entities.
• 38:25
  Speaker 2: Palantir sells to private companies, including some journalistic outlets, to
• 38:30
  Speaker 2: take all the data they have and merge it and
• 38:33
  Speaker 2: make sense of it.
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: How many of these companies are there that are out
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: there collecting? Do you have any idea?
• 38:41
  Speaker 2: That are collecting data on the global population? Probably tens
• 38:46
  Speaker 2: of thousands. If you just look at, take one example,
• 38:50
  Speaker 2: you know, all the ads that you see that Google
• 38:54
  Speaker 2: serves you, that's a product called AdX. Google probably has
• 38:58
  Speaker 2: several thousand partners that are able to serve ads and
• 39:04
  Speaker 2: also get information off of Google's ad servers about the
• 39:08
  Speaker 2: people they're trying to serve ads to. And that's just Google.
• 39:11
  Speaker 2: That's just one company. You know, there's a meta ad service.
• 39:16
  Speaker 2: There's plenty of smaller ones that don't have a consumer-facing
• 39:20
  Speaker 2: business that no one's ever heard of. Each of those
• 39:22
  Speaker 2: has hundreds, if not thousands, of other business partners. And so,
• 39:27
  Speaker 2: that's just in advertising. Never mind, you know, the other
• 39:30
  Speaker 2: parts of the economy that also collect data. So, there's thousands,
• 39:34
  Speaker 2: tens of thousands, maybe even more.
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: How are they... I mean, could anybody start one of
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: these companies?
• 39:46
  Speaker 2: That's a good question. So you need a little capital, right?
• 39:51
  Speaker 2: But to access some of this data, some of it's cheap.
• 39:55
  Speaker 2: So you can go on websites. Right now, there's one
• 39:57
  Speaker 2: called Data Raid, and you can go on there with
• 39:59
  Speaker 2: your credit card. You can get a sampling of data,
• 40:03
  Speaker 2: and there's a few others. There's some that's called alt data.
• 40:06
  Speaker 2: There's conferences. There's just these places where you can go
• 40:09
  Speaker 2: and get mobility data. You can get internet data. You
• 40:13
  Speaker 2: can get some point of sale data. some of that's
• 40:15
  Speaker 2: only a few hundred or a few thousand dollars. Um,
• 40:18
  Speaker 2: you know, I've, in the course of writing my book, I, um,
• 40:22
  Speaker 2: I had a very good researcher who's essentially a private investigator,
• 40:26
  Speaker 2: and he said, yeah, I have a contractor that can, can, uh,
• 40:29
  Speaker 2: go look up the movement of a phone for you
• 40:31
  Speaker 2: that can, can see if there's, uh, anyone in there.
• 40:34
  Speaker 2: He'll do that for $ 2, 500 for you. Um, you know,
• 40:37
  Speaker 2: give him a name of a person who you want
• 40:39
  Speaker 2: to track, And he'll run the data for you, he'll
• 40:42
  Speaker 2: see if we can find where this person goes, and
• 40:44
  Speaker 2: he'll give you a full.
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: Report about it. You can get a full life pattern
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: just like that.
• 40:48
  Speaker 2: I mean, again, it doesn't always work, right? Because some
• 40:50
  Speaker 2: of this data is spotty, some people are more careful
• 40:53
  Speaker 2: with their phones than others. But yeah, $ 2, 500, this was
• 40:57
  Speaker 2: a few years ago, maybe their prices have gone up,
• 40:59
  Speaker 2: maybe they've gone down, I don't know. But yeah, private
• 41:02
  Speaker 2: investigators are out there and can do this for you
• 41:04
  Speaker 2: for what I think is relatively cheap. And then, you know,
• 41:08
  Speaker 2: if you and I wanted to set up a company
• 41:10
  Speaker 2: and start, you know, getting data on, let's say, mobility
• 41:13
  Speaker 2: data on, you know, a state in the United States
• 41:16
  Speaker 2: or a small country, we could probably do that for
• 41:18
  Speaker 2: a few thousand dollars. And then, you know, if you
• 41:21
  Speaker 2: and I wanted to start up a defense contractor and,
• 41:24
  Speaker 2: you know, broker commercially available mobility data, so the data
• 41:28
  Speaker 2: that comes off of your phone when you opt into,
• 41:30
  Speaker 2: you know, the weather app, to the government, and we
• 41:34
  Speaker 2: wanted the whole feed of the whole world. And the
• 41:36
  Speaker 2: contracts I've seen on this are six figures, you know? So, yeah,
• 41:40
  Speaker 2: we could buy the data for six figures and sell
• 41:42
  Speaker 2: it at a 20% markup to the government, and that
• 41:46
  Speaker 2: could be our business model.
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: So you just.
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: It's literally just a middleman. We'll buy it from this company,
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: sell it to the government. How long do they hold
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: this data? How long before the data becomes irrelevant?
• 42:01
  Speaker 2: It depends, right? Like you could be one of these
• 42:04
  Speaker 2: companies that wanted to hold onto it forever and keep
• 42:09
  Speaker 2: years and years and years worth of mobility data on
• 42:11
  Speaker 2: the whole world. Like if you wanted to pay for
• 42:13
  Speaker 2: that storage and it was important to whatever mission you
• 42:16
  Speaker 2: were doing, You could do it. It's a matter of,
• 42:18
  Speaker 2: do you want to pay the Amazon cloud storage bill?
• 42:23
  Speaker 2: And do you have a customer for it? And is
• 42:24
  Speaker 2: it still relevant? You know, most of the time, data
• 42:28
  Speaker 2: is kind of stale after a few years because, you know, like,
• 42:33
  Speaker 2: are we really going to want to rewind 10 years
• 42:35
  Speaker 2: back in someone's life? I mean, how relevant is that
• 42:37
  Speaker 2: going to be? But I could see companies or government
• 42:40
  Speaker 2: agencies being saying, you know, actually, maybe we should keep
• 42:43
  Speaker 2: a lot of this so we can look back historically
• 42:46
  Speaker 2: if there's a reason to.
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: I'm picky with eyewear because I wear it every day.
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: If it's heavy, slides around, feels cheap, or gets annoying
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: after an hour, I'm done with it. And that's why
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: I like Roka. I've been wearing these Lockhearts and prescription readers,
• 43:05
  Speaker 1: and the first thing I noticed is the fit. They're lightweight,
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: They stay in place, and they're comfortable enough to wear
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: all day. And it's not just their prescription eyewear. I'm
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: also a fan of their wind-down line, which they developed
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: with my friend, Dr. Andrew Huberman, to promote better sleep
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: and recovery. Roka was born in Austin, Texas. An American
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: design with zero shortcuts. Their eyewear is built for people
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: who are actually using what they buy. whether you're training, traveling, working,
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: or sitting down to record a podcast. The optics are
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: razor sharp. There's no glare, and I'm not constantly adjusting
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: them like I am with cheap glasses. And I like
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: that Roka does not look overbuilt. It performs like real gear,
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: but still looks clean enough to wear every day. And
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: if you're outfitting a law enforcement unit, military team, or
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: looking for corporate gifts for your team, they'll actually like
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: ROKA has wholesale partnerships too. If you're looking for eyewear
• 44:06
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• 44:10
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• 44:14
  Speaker 1: and use code SRS for 20% off site-wide at checkout.
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: That's roka.com, code SRS. Let's get into, I want to
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: get into the laws again about, you know, who's protecting us,
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: if anybody. Is there anybody in the government that is...
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: I mean, is this even a concern to them? Or
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: are the... I mean, lobbying firms. Are they all lobbied?
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: Are all... I mean, it seems, as time goes on,
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: more and more and more, it just seems like all
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: of our elected officials are owned by lobbying firms. At
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: least from my vantage point.
• 44:54
  Speaker 2: Well, I mean, certainly almost all these companies have a
• 44:56
  Speaker 2: significant presence in Washington. And, you know... Advertising alone, never
• 45:02
  Speaker 2: mind the data broker economy, is probably a trillion dollar
• 45:05
  Speaker 2: global industry. So there's a lot of financial incentives that
• 45:07
  Speaker 2: keep the data market afloat. Not only that, but artificial
• 45:11
  Speaker 2: intelligence companies increasingly need data to train these models that
• 45:16
  Speaker 2: everyone seems very excited about and that they think will
• 45:20
  Speaker 2: transform the economy in many ways. So data is becoming
• 45:23
  Speaker 2: even more important than ever.
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: So....
• 45:27
  Speaker 2: The answer is complicated, right? I think there are, um,
• 45:30
  Speaker 2: there is interest in the national security space. We have
• 45:34
  Speaker 2: seen administrations of both parties, including the Trump administration and
• 45:37
  Speaker 2: the Biden administration, try to do things that limit the
• 45:40
  Speaker 2: flow of data to adversarial countries. Um, and we saw
• 45:44
  Speaker 2: Congress on a bipartisan basis a few years ago pass
• 45:48
  Speaker 2: a law that said, you know, you can't transfer certain
• 45:51
  Speaker 2: kinds of data to Iran, North Korea, China, and Russia.
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: Among others. Why would they allow any of our data
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: to go to any country at all?
• 46:01
  Speaker 2: Well, that's a good question.
• 46:02
  Speaker 1: Even allies? Israel? Any of them?
• 46:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, the honest.
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: Like, it's spying on our own citizens.
• 46:10
  Speaker 2: The honest answer is because there's so much cross-border data
• 46:14
  Speaker 2: flows that it would maybe break the global economy. You know,
• 46:19
  Speaker 2: the way the internet works is that sometimes you'll ping
• 46:23
  Speaker 2: a server in Europe and download your own Google Drive
• 46:28
  Speaker 2: file from Europe, because that's just where Google's cloud decided
• 46:31
  Speaker 2: was the most efficient place to store your file at
• 46:33
  Speaker 2: that given moment. And, you know, companies in these countries
• 46:39
  Speaker 2: need to swap data, or they say they need to
• 46:41
  Speaker 2: swap data with one another. At the same time, there
• 46:44
  Speaker 2: are countries that have very strict data export rules. So
• 46:47
  Speaker 2: Europeans have increasingly started to pass laws that say, you know,
• 46:51
  Speaker 2: if any company's gonna hold data on our citizens, It
• 46:56
  Speaker 2: sits in a server that sits physically in our country
• 46:59
  Speaker 2: under our control. That's called data sovereignty. China is very,
• 47:02
  Speaker 2: very strict. It does not allow American companies to go
• 47:06
  Speaker 2: into China and just start collecting huge amounts of data
• 47:09
  Speaker 2: on the Chinese population, because they've decided that, you know,
• 47:12
  Speaker 2: their national security imperatives are more important than whatever commerce
• 47:16
  Speaker 2: benefits would flow from letting that kind of data market exist. So,
• 47:20
  Speaker 2: the honest answer is these multinational corporations have made the
• 47:23
  Speaker 2: case successfully so far to Congress, that it would disrupt
• 47:27
  Speaker 2: commerce too much to do something like that in the
• 47:29
  Speaker 2: United States.
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: What do you think about that?
• 47:32
  Speaker 2: Well, you know, I'm a reporter, so it's my job
• 47:36
  Speaker 2: to kind of just tell people how this is. I
• 47:40
  Speaker 2: think there are ways that Congress could solve this problem.
• 47:43
  Speaker 2: It could mandate that Americans' data stay within the United
• 47:48
  Speaker 2: States and stay on servers that are physically controlled by
• 47:52
  Speaker 2: American companies. it could insist on that. It could make
• 47:55
  Speaker 2: it much harder to transfer bulk U.S. data to even
• 48:00
  Speaker 2: allied countries, right? You could stop data brokers from selling
• 48:03
  Speaker 2: to any foreigner. And that would at least, um... That
• 48:07
  Speaker 2: would at least kind of clamp down on some of
• 48:10
  Speaker 2: this export of data that we're seeing. But that's just
• 48:12
  Speaker 2: a choice Congress hasn't made. And, you know, I can't
• 48:15
  Speaker 2: make it for them. I can just tell them what
• 48:17
  Speaker 2: the consequences are.
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: I mean, couldn't a foreign... adversary just, I mean... buy U.S.
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: data from a foreign, from a different, from a foreign country. Yeah.
• 48:28
  Speaker 2: And that happens all the time.
• 48:29
  Speaker 1: So that, so this, so the protection to North Korea
• 48:32
  Speaker 1: and China and all this other bullshit is just, it's
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: completely obsolete.
• 48:35
  Speaker 2: They have to set up a shell company in Germany.
• 48:38
  Speaker 2: That's what they will have to do to get the data. Yes.
• 48:40
  Speaker 2: And there's very little way to police that.
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: So it does nothing, nothing at all.
• 48:45
  Speaker 2: It adds a, it adds a layer that, um, potentially
• 48:48
  Speaker 2: pays for some compliance law firms that, uh, that checks
• 48:51
  Speaker 2: and boxes, but If you're asking, does it shut down
• 48:55
  Speaker 2: the global trade and U.S. data and the flow of
• 48:58
  Speaker 2: it to our adversaries, I would say the answer's no.
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: Would you say that technology outran the law?
• 49:05
  Speaker 2: Oh, 100%. In this instance, yes. That, you know, we
• 49:13
  Speaker 2: stood up and created a digital society so quickly, and
• 49:18
  Speaker 2: we simply didn't have time or didn't thoughtfully do it
• 49:22
  Speaker 2: when it came to writing rules. And, I mean, historically,
• 49:25
  Speaker 2: Congress has actually done a pretty good job. I mean,
• 49:28
  Speaker 2: if you look before the digital era in the 20th century, um, Congress,
• 49:34
  Speaker 2: you know, made some reasonable compromises around privacy versus security. So, um,
• 49:40
  Speaker 2: you know, when telephone wiretaps first came up and originally
• 49:44
  Speaker 2: the Supreme Court said, yeah, well, you know, you don't
• 49:47
  Speaker 2: need a warrant to wiretap people. You don't have an
• 49:49
  Speaker 2: expectation of privacy because, um, you know, sound is traveling
• 49:53
  Speaker 2: on a physical wire and if someone grabs the wire
• 49:55
  Speaker 2: and listens in on it, Well, you don't need privacy. Well,
• 49:58
  Speaker 2: Congress said, you know, that's kind of crazy. That's not
• 50:01
  Speaker 2: a world we want to live in. So they passed
• 50:03
  Speaker 2: a law in the 20th century that said, you know,
• 50:06
  Speaker 2: you want to listen in on two people's private phone calls.
• 50:08
  Speaker 2: You need to go to a judge. You need to
• 50:09
  Speaker 2: have a reason to do so. You know, Congress did
• 50:12
  Speaker 2: that with all sorts of other data. It did it
• 50:16
  Speaker 2: in the 90s with health data. It said, yeah, doctors
• 50:18
  Speaker 2: can't just willy-nilly give away your private health information. No,
• 50:22
  Speaker 2: we're going to control that. It did that in the
• 50:24
  Speaker 2: 70s with, credit information. Credit information is very well controlled.
• 50:28
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of laws around it. What it didn't
• 50:31
  Speaker 2: do when the internet came about is do any of
• 50:33
  Speaker 2: those things for digital information. Jeez.
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: But it kind of seems like... It just feels like
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: they have access to just about everything. It feels like
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: we don't even have a Fourth Amendment anymore.
• 50:52
  Speaker 2: In a lot of ways, um... You know, that's true, right? Like,
• 50:55
  Speaker 2: if there's data that's collected from... Sorry. If there's data
• 51:01
  Speaker 2: that's collected from a company, a private company, the Fourth
• 51:07
  Speaker 2: Amendment no longer applies. Wow. It's because it's a commercial transaction.
• 51:14
  Speaker 2: The government is just getting it in an ordinary... It's
• 51:18
  Speaker 2: just buying the information, right? So, you do need a
• 51:22
  Speaker 2: warrant to go... look at somebody's cell phone movement patterns
• 51:27
  Speaker 2: if you go to their cell carrier, right? The government
• 51:30
  Speaker 2: can't go to AT & T and say, you know,
• 51:33
  Speaker 2: give me all of Sean's movements over the last 30 days.
• 51:36
  Speaker 2: But if you've opted into a weather app that collects
• 51:40
  Speaker 2: your information, well, all of a sudden, they don't need
• 51:45
  Speaker 2: that warrant, right? The weather app can sell it to them.
• 51:48
  Speaker 2: And so, that is this loophole at the heart of
• 51:51
  Speaker 2: our Fourth Amendment doctrine that several in Congress, a very
• 51:57
  Speaker 2: vocal bipartisan majority in Congre... or a group of people
• 52:03
  Speaker 2: in Congress want to fix. But so far, the body
• 52:06
  Speaker 2: hasn't acted. I mean, do you think it's even.
• 52:08
  Speaker 1: I mean... Maybe you don't want to talk. I look
• 52:13
  Speaker 1: at our political system, and we have people... 50% of
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: these people probably can't even figure out how to open
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: their fucking email. You got people dying in office. We've
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: got people we don't even know if they're alive. They're
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: sending out little subliminal proofs of life with dates on newspapers.
• 52:36
  Speaker 1: I mean, this is like a foreign language to them.
• 52:41
  Speaker 1: How would they even be? You see what I'm getting at?
• 52:44
  Speaker 2: I do.
• 52:45
  Speaker 1: Our governmental structure, maybe not the structure, but the people
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: in there are obsolete.
• 52:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and there's a lot of... There's a lot of
• 52:54
  Speaker 2: problems with Congress. Um, and one of those problems is expertise.
• 52:59
  Speaker 2: You know, if you are a member of Congress, you
• 53:02
  Speaker 2: have a small staff of a few dozen. Um, you know,
• 53:05
  Speaker 2: these young people, these are often quite young people, and sure,
• 53:09
  Speaker 2: they're tech savvy, um, often, but they're not very well paid,
• 53:13
  Speaker 2: and they don't last very long in these jobs, and
• 53:15
  Speaker 2: they find that, you know, Working for a Congress member
• 53:18
  Speaker 2: is great, um, and making, you know, $ 60, 000 in an
• 53:22
  Speaker 2: expensive metro area just doesn't cut it, and so they'll
• 53:26
  Speaker 2: go to a lobbying firm and make triple that. And so,
• 53:29
  Speaker 2: you know, Congress in many ways is responsible not just
• 53:33
  Speaker 2: for not, um, passing laws about this, but for not
• 53:37
  Speaker 2: even paying good staff and developing the expertise and having
• 53:42
  Speaker 2: the in-house experience to even address these tech questions. And
• 53:46
  Speaker 2: a lot of that goes back to salaries, it goes
• 53:49
  Speaker 2: back to staffing, it goes back to resources. Congress just
• 53:53
  Speaker 2: doesn't have the capacity to think about and analyze a
• 53:57
  Speaker 2: lot of these technical problems because they don't pay good people.
• 54:01
  Speaker 2: The people that are good who want to make a
• 54:04
  Speaker 2: career there are often sacrificing a lot more money than
• 54:07
  Speaker 2: they could be making in the private sector. So this
• 54:09
  Speaker 2: is an entrenched problem in our political system, that our
• 54:12
  Speaker 2: political system is both unresponsive to many of these issues
• 54:15
  Speaker 2: and not really well equipped to deal with them.
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about, we kind of talked about it in
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: a roundabout way, but let's talk about the flow of
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: data and how it goes, how it gets to the government,
• 54:27
  Speaker 1: where it goes from there. Do all the agencies collaborate
• 54:30
  Speaker 1: on it? I mean, same with foreign adversaries, foreign governments.
• 54:35
  Speaker 1: What is its, you know, let's talk about the flow
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: from start to finish.
• 54:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I can talk about a couple of
• 54:40
  Speaker 2: different data flows, right? So, I mean, first of all,
• 54:42
  Speaker 2: there's your just general consumer information. So your address, your
• 54:48
  Speaker 2: voting history, you know, all that is held by data brokers.
• 54:51
  Speaker 2: Your phone number, your email address. And those data brokers
• 54:55
  Speaker 2: work with the government, right? They sell identifiers to government agencies.
• 55:00
  Speaker 2: These are traditional data brokers. They've been around for a long,
• 55:03
  Speaker 2: long time, you know, Many of them come out of
• 55:06
  Speaker 2: the 20th century. They've been collecting people's address histories, their
• 55:10
  Speaker 2: phone numbers, their email addresses for a long, long time.
• 55:13
  Speaker 2: That's one set of data. And that, they just have
• 55:17
  Speaker 2: a straight up government sales arm. They sell it. Then
• 55:21
  Speaker 2: there's social media data, right? Because the government has been
• 55:23
  Speaker 2: very interested in understanding what people say in social spaces. And,
• 55:29
  Speaker 2: you know, to get that kind of bulk data, is
• 55:32
  Speaker 2: kind of hard, because some of these social networks are
• 55:33
  Speaker 2: closed spaces. So, you know, Twitter, back when it was
• 55:37
  Speaker 2: called that, was very open. You could kind of just
• 55:39
  Speaker 2: read everything that was public. Facebook is semi-closed, right? You
• 55:43
  Speaker 2: need to log in, you need to be friends with
• 55:45
  Speaker 2: someone often to see what they're saying. And then there's
• 55:48
  Speaker 2: kind of more purely closed, like, big group chats and
• 55:52
  Speaker 2: Telegram channels and other things that are more closed. Well,
• 55:57
  Speaker 2: there's all sorts of specialized data brokers that have sprung up.
• 56:00
  Speaker 2: to collect public social media data from places like Twitter,
• 56:04
  Speaker 2: to collect semi-private social media data from places like Facebook,
• 56:08
  Speaker 2: and to collect private social media data from group chats,
• 56:12
  Speaker 2: including some, you know, there's some very large, there were
• 56:16
  Speaker 2: some very large ISIS-related group chats, or there were some
• 56:19
  Speaker 2: very large, you know, protest-related group chats in the United States.
• 56:23
  Speaker 2: And these companies would infiltrate them under false pretenses, collect
• 56:27
  Speaker 2: all the messages, collect the whole list of everyone that
• 56:29
  Speaker 2: was in them, and sell all that to the government.
• 56:31
  Speaker 2: So that's another kind of data. Then there's the mobility data,
• 56:35
  Speaker 2: the cell phone movement data I was talking about. The
• 56:39
  Speaker 2: thing that I heard about at a dinner party that
• 56:42
  Speaker 2: I spent a couple of years unwinding. You know, that
• 56:44
  Speaker 2: comes originally as collected by commercial entities for advertising or
• 56:48
  Speaker 2: for analytics reasons. And then, you know, there's a couple
• 56:52
  Speaker 2: ways the government gets it. Sometimes they set up a
• 56:55
  Speaker 2: shell company. So there's a defense contractor in the United
• 56:59
  Speaker 2: States called Sierra Nevada Corporation. And, um, if you look,
• 57:03
  Speaker 2: they own a very tiny little marketing company that's based, uh,
• 57:07
  Speaker 2: you know, in the Virginia area. And if you go
• 57:10
  Speaker 2: to its website, it's called NContext, and it's got, you know,
• 57:14
  Speaker 2: It's got a picture of, you know, the Y in
• 57:17
  Speaker 2: Philadelphia and a cultural center in, you know, New York City.
• 57:21
  Speaker 2: And it says, these are our clients and, you know,
• 57:24
  Speaker 2: we help people obtain data and understand them and do
• 57:27
  Speaker 2: marketing campaigns. But if you look on the government's procurement website,
• 57:31
  Speaker 2: you'll see that this little marketing company actually has a
• 57:34
  Speaker 2: contract with the intelligence community. And that sure looks like
• 57:39
  Speaker 2: a shell company to me, right? That looks like something
• 57:41
  Speaker 2: a defense contractor set up. in order to collect large
• 57:44
  Speaker 2: amounts of this kind of commercially available advertising data and
• 57:48
  Speaker 2: give it to parts of the government that want to
• 57:50
  Speaker 2: do things with it. And so, there's just a lot
• 57:53
  Speaker 2: of different ways governments get these data sets. In other cases,
• 58:00
  Speaker 2: some vendors have just set themselves up as contractors. They
• 58:02
  Speaker 2: say very openly, we're a government contractor, and we're going
• 58:05
  Speaker 2: to buy data on the open market from other vendors
• 58:08
  Speaker 2: just like us, and we'll sell it to the government
• 58:11
  Speaker 2: that way. We're not going to be even sneaky about it.
• 58:12
  Speaker 2: We're not going to pretend to have a shell company. So,
• 58:15
  Speaker 2: there's lots of ways it gets to government agencies.
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: Are there foreign companies within the U.S.? Israel has some, correct?
• 58:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah. There was some journalism about several Israeli companies that
• 58:27
  Speaker 2: were doing exactly the same thing. They'd set up a
• 58:29
  Speaker 2: fake marketing company. They were really associated with the defense contractor,
• 58:32
  Speaker 2: and they were brokering that data to foreign governments. Probably
• 58:37
  Speaker 2: not just the Israeli government, but probably many foreign governments.
• 58:40
  Speaker 2: We don't know their exact list of clients, but Israeli
• 58:43
  Speaker 2: companies often perform that service. And, you know, while that's
• 58:46
  Speaker 2: the only kind of foreign one that's been identified, I
• 58:50
  Speaker 2: am certain that other countries are doing the same thing.
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: But we just allow them to do it. Well, it's
• 58:56
  Speaker 1: not actually illegal. Why would they be so interested in
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: what we're doing here in this country?
• 59:04
  Speaker 2: Why would foreign countries be interested in our population? They
• 59:08
  Speaker 2: want to understand the world. They want to understand how
• 59:13
  Speaker 2: Americans move around, how they live their lives. If there's
• 59:16
  Speaker 2: high-profile Americans in those data sets, they might want to
• 59:19
  Speaker 2: understand their patterns of movement. American soldiers who've been a
• 59:24
  Speaker 2: little bit careless and not locked down their phones. There
• 59:28
  Speaker 2: might be some operational security risks to those soldiers because
• 59:32
  Speaker 2: adversaries might want to figure out where this unit is going.
• 59:35
  Speaker 2: And they may want to straight up do espionage, right?
• 59:37
  Speaker 2: They may want to recruit people. They may want to
• 59:39
  Speaker 2: know where the person who works at the GM factory
• 59:42
  Speaker 2: goes after work and whether they can send, you know,
• 59:46
  Speaker 2: an intelligence officer there to convince them to give you know,
• 59:50
  Speaker 2: critical infrastructure, critical information. So there's all sorts of reasons
• 59:53
  Speaker 2: why a foreign government might be interested in our data.
• 59:58
  Speaker 2: Have you ever.
• 59:58
  Speaker 1: Purchased any of these data sets?
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 2: Um, I have used tools that, uh... let me look
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 2: at social media data. I've, um, I've sometimes built little
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 2: scrapers to scrape open web data. I've had people show
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 2: me demos of some of the tools that the governments used.
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 2: And I, when trying to write this book, did ask
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 2: one of the private investigator who was willing to run
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 2: people for $ 2, 500. I asked him to look up whether
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 2: I was in the data and whether some of the
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 2: CEOs of these data brokers were in the data. But
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 2: I didn't actually pay him for it. He was willing
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 2: to do it for free. So, I've never outright purchased data,
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 2: but I know that some journalists have or they've obtained it.
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 2: The New York Times did a whole series on what
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 2: you could tell from location data. And in that case,
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 2: I don't think they bought it, but they got a
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 2: huge leak of data and they were able to show
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 2: what commercially available data was out there. And other journalists
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 2: do buy data and they're usually transparent about it when
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 2: they do.
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: So it's fairly, it's pretty simple.
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, there's all sorts of data sets out there.
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 2: And then, you know, some of these data brokers will actually,
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 2: you know, give reporters accounts because it's meant for investigators.
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 2: It's meant to help. um, you know, understand the world better.
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 2: And from their point of view, um, they're collecting data
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 2: that they're legally allowed to collect and that they're legally
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 2: allowed to sell as a service. And investigative journalists are
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 2: just like anyone else. They're trying to understand the world.
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 2: They're trying to do stories. Um, and some of this
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 2: data might be valuable. So there's data brokers that have
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 2: trade data and some internet data, um, and all, and
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 2: will often provide very useful, um, uh, accounts to journalists
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 2: and to do very, important information and stories in the
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 2: public interest. And we usually disclose when we do that
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 2: in our stories. In fact, we almost always disclose when
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 2: we do that. But it's a world that also encompasses
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 2: us as investigators, for sure.
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 1: I mean, what does it look like? Is it nice
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: and organized? I mean, what does the data set look like?
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: Is it easy to navigate?
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, it depends on the tool and it
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 2: depends on the data set, right? So sometimes you get
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 2: what's called unstructured data, which is just a giant spreadsheet
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 2: and you are responsible for figuring out how to make
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 2: sense of it. And, you know, in the old days,
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 2: this was something I struggled with, but now that AI
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 2: can really help process data better, it's a lot easier
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 2: for the ordinary person to work with unstructured data. And
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 2: then sometimes these vendors just build a tool, right? Like
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 2: it's just, it's like any old, subscription service that you
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 2: could just log in, you do a search, or it's
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 2: just like Google Maps, you can draw a circle, or
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 2: you can draw a geofence, and you can watch phones
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 2: move around, or you can do a search term for
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 2: what people are saying on social media. So, it's a
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 2: very slick interface, just like any other web app that
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 2: you might go get.
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 1: When it's bought, is it duplicated, or can you own...
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: Let me.
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah, can you.
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 1: I basically, and I should probably wait until we get
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: into all the devices that are tracking you and sucking
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 1: on the information. And I'll probably ask it again, but
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 1: can you purchase your own data back?
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: Or is it just a duplicate of it?
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 2: So some of these vendors will sell you the raw data, right?
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 2: They'll just be like, here's a spreadsheet of, or, you know,
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 2: a giant file of all the phones in the world,
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 2: and you can do whatever you want with it. That's
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 2: our commercial agreement. So that's one business model. And others
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 2: will say, no, you can't just take out all the data.
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 2: That's our secret sauce, right? But you can do the
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 2: searches on our platform. And you can export the results
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 2: of your search, but you're not just gonna get all
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 2: the data that we have. So there's different models of
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 2: data brokering. And some build the slick interface and the
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 2: tool and they'll sell access to it for $ 1, 500. a
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 2: year or whatever, and some of them will just say, nah,
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 2: here's the raw data, you do what you want with it,
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 2: we're just a pass-through, you pay us, you visualize it
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 2: the way you want. So there can be different arrangements.
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 1: Gotcha. Well, Byron, let's take a quick break.
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 2: Okay.
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  Speaker 1: I got a hot question for you before we move on.
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 2: Hot question.
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 1: Here we go. So, Byron, we had Chris Beck on
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: the show, former SEAL Team 6 guy who spent years
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 1: around advanced military R & D. He told us something
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 1: that went insanely viral. If you take the battery out
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 1: of your phone, I can still listen to you. He
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 1: was talking about technology developed for national security applications. You've
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 1: spent years investigating where surveillance technology has gone since then.
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 1: So if I shut my phone off today or leave
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 1: it home entirely, can I still be tracked? And what
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 1: is it giving away?
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 2: That's a good question. So unfortunately, phones these days, you
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 2: can't even take the battery out of them. The honest
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 2: answer is I don't know. I don't know what you can...
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 2: what can happen if the phone is off. Certainly, the
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 2: phone being off is a better privacy protection than the
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 2: phone being on. Um, but is there something very tricky
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 2: governments can do to make phones seem to be off
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 2: when they're not? That's entirely possible. I don't know the answer.
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 2: Leaving your phone behind? Again, that reduces the vector of
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 2: tracking you through your phone, but... of course, as we've
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 2: been talking about, there's all sorts of other vectors to
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 2: track you, right? There's ring cameras mounted on all these
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 2: houses now. There's license plate readers that will track your car.
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 2: There's the toll transponder that you use when you go
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 2: through a toll now. So, leaving your phone behind is
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 2: not a way to evade surveillance. It's just a way
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 2: to reduce some kinds of surveillance.
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 1: Here's some true or false questions.
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: My phone can track me while... Excuse me. My phone
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 1: tracks me with location services off. True or false?
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 2: If the developers are following the rules, that's false. Of course,
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 2: there's very little way for the average person to know
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 2: if the developers are.
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 1: Following the rules. Airplane mode protects me.
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 2: I'm not sure airplane mode even protects airplanes, so I'm
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 2: not sure what it does.
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 1: Powering off the phone protects me.
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 2: Actually, that's true, and for kind of a strange reason
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 2: that a lot of even very advanced malware, so if
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 2: a country was to try to put a virus on
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 2: your phone, actually one of the best defenses against that
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 2: is to turn your phone on and off every once
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 2: in a while. And yes, in theory, turning the phone
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 2: off should drastically reduce the amount of data that comes
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 2: off of it. Now again, I can't say for sure
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 2: that there aren't very clever pieces of malware that can
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 2: do things when the phone is off. But in general,
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 2: turning the phone off should offer some privacy protection.
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 1: That's true. A Faraday bag actually works. I don't know.
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 2: I've seen some tests that show yes, and I've seen
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 2: some tests that show no. In theory, a well-designed Faraday
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 2: bag should prevent signals from coming off of an electronic device.
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 2: I don't know how well-designed the ones you get on Amazon.
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 1: All right. So kind of a random thing here, but
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 1: I heard you talking about something about you have something
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 1: going on with UPS or USPS, excuse me. Yeah.
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 2: A few years ago, I got interested in, um, how
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 2: all sorts of government agencies handle your data, including the
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 2: postal service. And, um, You know, it kind of came
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 2: to my attention that the Postal Service was in the
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 2: process of making a pretty aggressive push to collect, um,
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 2: all sorts of, like, your, like, electronic information, your phone number, right?
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 2: So when you sign up for, uh, uh, informed delivery
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 2: or you fill out a change of address form, now
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 2: you're giving the Postal Service your digital identifiers, including your
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 2: email and often your phone number. And now they're very
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 2: aggressive in wanting a receipt from you. Uh, you want
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 2: it by email, you want it by text, so... they
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 2: seem to be collecting digital identifiers, while at the same time,
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 2: the post office is the government agency that knows where
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 2: you live. And so, it seemed to me this was
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 2: a government agency that, um, you know, knew a lot
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 2: about your physical real-world life, and then was also kind
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 2: of branching into trying to learn about your digital life,
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 2: or at the very least, linking them. And so, I
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 2: asked some very basic questions of them, like, hey, Can
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 2: you give me all the privacy documents that are required
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 2: by a law from the 1970s known as the Privacy
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 2: Act that are supposed to be public anyway?
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 1: And, um.
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 2: they stonewalled me for three years. And so... Three years?
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 2: I had to hire lawyers. I'm being represented by the
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 2: Harvard Cyber Law Clinic. But we brought suit in federal
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 2: court in Washington, D.C. to try to force the Postal
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 2: Service to turn over the most basic information about how
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 2: it handles Why do.
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 1: You think they're guarding it?
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 2: I have no idea. I couldn't tell you if it's
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 2: just that they didn't do a very good job in
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 2: writing these documents, that they don't have them, or if
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 2: there's something they don't want people to know. I don't
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 2: know the answer. I'm looking forward to getting the documents back.
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 1: How are they.
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 1: You had mentioned there's a digital component to the... How
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 1: are they doing that through the mail?
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 2: Well, just when you sign up to change your address or.
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 2: To get kind of the scan of your mail, they
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 2: often ask, well, how do we contact you electronically? Do
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 2: you want it by email? Do you want it by phone? And,
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 2: you know, that capability of linking someone's online identity with
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 2: their physical real-world location is a very difficult problem in
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 2: marketing a lot of the time. You know, people change addresses,
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 2: they give fake addresses, they, you know, they're not always...
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 2: with corporate companies, but, you know, you do want your
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 2: tax returns, you do want your property tax bill, so
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 2: you're usually gonna, the post office is gonna know where
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 2: you are. And so I just got curious, well, what
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 2: are they doing with all this digital information now that
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 2: they also know a lot about your physical world location?
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 2: It was at the very least a question worth asking
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 2: of a government agency with a lot of data, and
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 2: I didn't get an answer without filing a lawsuit.
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 1: Jeez. Jeez, and that's coming up, right?
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 2: We'll see what they give back.
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 1: I'm sure they'll get right on it. You know, I
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 1: want to go down device to device, you know, that
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 1: people have in their homes and see what you can
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 1: tell us about it. But, you know, a big question
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 1: in everybody's mind, and some people say yes, some people
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 1: say no. Are our phones listening to our conversations, whether
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 1: you're actually on the phone or off the phone? Everybody's
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 1: Everybody's brought up, I want to buy means of control.
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 1: And then the ad pops up or whatever it is,
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 1: just a passing conversation. It's like, holy shit, there it is,
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 1: five minutes later. And then, no, we're not listening. Oh, sure,
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 1: it's just a coincidence. This has happened 20 times this week.
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a great question. I've never seen any evidence
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 2: that I am comfortable reporting here on, you know, on
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 2: your show that says that they're doing it. But as
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 2: you say, like, an awful lot of people experience those coincidences,
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 2: including me. I mean, one the other day, um, I
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 2: got a weird, you know, text message saying, hey, like, um...
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 2: we know you just put, I put solar panels on
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 2: my roof and a friend was asking if I liked it.
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 2: I got a text message saying like, hey, recommend a
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 2: friend and get, you know, $ 750 back on your solar
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 2: panel install. And I'm like, well, that's weird. That's really
• 1:15:08
  Speaker 2: weird timing, you know? So, I mean, I think if
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 2: phones were listening 24-7, there'd be a lot of data
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 2: coming off of them and researchers would to figure it out, but,
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 2: you know, is there some interesting technical way where they,
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 2: where phones could listen for a keyword? Uh, and then that,
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 2: that sends a piece of information back? I don't know,
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 2: I've never seen evidence of it, but as you say,
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 2: a lot of people have really weird experiences.
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 1: Mm-hmm. So let's go, let's just go through a lot
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 1: of devices that average Americans have.
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 1: In their home every day and outside of their home
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 1: that is... that is collecting a dataset on them.
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 2: Sure. Well, modern smart TVs really want to know what
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 2: you watch. Um, and so a lot of them have
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 2: built-in sort of screen capture technology that are trying to
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 2: figure out what you're watching, when you're watching it... because
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 2: they want to understand your preferences. And some of that
• 1:16:08
  Speaker 2: helps subsidize the TV. That's why TVs are kind of
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 2: cheap now, and they used to be much more expensive. So, um, yes,
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 2: TVs are data collection machines.
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 1: Um.
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 2: You know, I think some people are even starting to
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 2: connect cameras to them. I'm sure there's some stuff you
• 1:16:23
  Speaker 2: could do about detecting whether people are in the living
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 2: room or watching ads at the time when they're served.
• 1:16:29
  Speaker 2: I don't know that that's being done, but it's certainly
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 2: a possibility and not something that marketers would be particularly
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 2: ashamed from, dissuaded from trying.
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 1: And so you think that, you're saying that TVs are
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 1: so cheap now because it's become the major sale is you,
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 1: the person, the human being. Your data is being sold
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 1: from the TV companies.
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 2: Yes, I think any time a company can kind of
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 2: extract a data stream, that can help subsidize a product.
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 2: Maybe it just ends up subsidizing their executive's bottom line,
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 2: but if you're in a competitive market where there's a
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 2: lot of vendors and you're able to monetize the customer
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 2: in some additional way, including collecting data about them, then yeah, like, yes,
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 2: that can help subsidize the cost of the product.
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 1: How about robot vacuums?
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 2: It's a great question. I don't know. I mean, I'm sure... So,
• 1:17:24
  Speaker 2: there have been some scandals about them taking pictures, including,
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 2: you know, some really horrific stuff, like catching people on
• 1:17:32
  Speaker 2: the toilet. And humans were, like, reviewing these data sets
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 2: for machine learning. Now, they're not exactly selling that, but
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 2: that's a... That's an invasive privacy violation if there's, you know,
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 2: contractors to a robot company that are watching people move
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 2: around their house, and I'm sure that's disclosed somewhere on page,
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 2: you know, 25 of the 100-page privacy policy, but.
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 2: So, yes, there's cameras on some of them. They certainly,
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 2: some of them map your house. I had a pretty
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 2: dumb one for a while. Like, it would just go
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 2: until it hit a wall, and it didn't really do
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 2: anything beyond that, but I think it depends on the vacuum, and...
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 2: I don't know what's happening with that data, to be honest.
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 1: I mean, didn't one company, didn't one just get busted
• 1:18:16
  Speaker 1: selling it to China?
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 2: I mean, I think some of these are Chinese-owned, so
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 2: the data flows to China. That was it, for sure.
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 1: I mean, why would China want to know the layout
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 1: of my house?
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 2: Well, I mean, it's hard to... They probably don't want
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 2: to know the layout of everyone's houses, but if, you know,
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 2: if in a world in which you were a valuable
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 2: person and they needed to do an intelligence operation or,
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 2: They wanted to know how many people were in your
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 2: house or, you know, again, some of these vacuums have
• 1:18:44
  Speaker 2: cameras and can see, have robot vision. I can't see
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 2: a good reason why you wouldn't put a microphone on
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 2: a robot vacuum, but I can't tell you that there
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 2: aren't any with microphones. So, um... Yeah, I mean, you know,
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 2: a foreign government might potentially find some use for a
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 2: house layout or information about who's in the house at
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 2: a given time. If, you know, a unique person were
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 2: valuable to that government.
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 1: How about smart speakers? Alexa, all these kind of things.
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 2: I mean, smart speakers are, obviously, they have the potential
• 1:19:19
  Speaker 2: to listen in. You know, these companies swear that they're
• 1:19:23
  Speaker 2: not doing so, and most of them are American companies.
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 1: We swear.
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 2: If they're promising that, you know, I mean, there's some
• 1:19:33
  Speaker 2: sort of enforceable consumer right there. But, you know, sometimes
• 1:19:36
  Speaker 2: they get triggered accidentally, right? Certainly, everything you say to
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 2: it is collectible and used for training a new AI system.
• 1:19:45
  Speaker 2: And of course, these devices, you know, forget corporate malfeasance. Like,
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 2: you are loading your house up with microphones, and if
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 2: somebody wants to hack that device, like, how good is
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 2: the cybersecurity on it? So, could somebody, whether it's just
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 2: a criminal, listening in for information about your finances or
• 1:20:04
  Speaker 2: your banking account numbers or... or it's a nation state
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 2: and they want to do something, whatever it is, recruit
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 2: you as a spy, blackmail you, I don't know. But
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 2: certainly smart speakers and anything with a microphone is a
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 2: vector for that kind of hacking.
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 1: Do you have smart speakers in your house?
• 1:20:24
  Speaker 2: I don't. Although I do have a couple of devices
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 2: that have the capability, I turn them off. But again,
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 2: it's the same risk, right? It's, you know, like my
• 1:20:36
  Speaker 2: smart thermostat, which I love, by the way, because when
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 2: I forget to turn off my thermostat, I can, you know,
• 1:20:42
  Speaker 2: save on my energy bill when I'm on vacation. But,
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 2: you know, that has a microphone in it. I don't
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 2: use it. I've turned off the microphone, but like, could
• 1:20:50
  Speaker 2: a hacker break into it and turn it on? Could
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 2: a nation state?
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 1: Maybe.
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 2: And is that a good thing? I don't know.
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 1: Retail and grocery stores tracking everything you buy through membership
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 1: and loyalty cards.
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that's happening. And not just that, they're often
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 2: trading it or selling it with data brokers, right? Because
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 2: they get your information, they get your phone number, they
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 2: get your email address, they may get your address. So yeah,
• 1:21:20
  Speaker 2: that information gets packaged up and sold and the grocery
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 2: store says, hey Coke, here's a consumer who bought Coke. Hey,
• 1:21:27
  Speaker 2: you know, Hey, Tysons, here's someone that likes turkey. Absolutely,
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 2: that's a robust data market. And when you sign up
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 2: for those loyalty programs, you are getting a discount in
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 2: exchange for data collection.
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 1: That's why you need burner numbers. Home Depot, scan driver's license,
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 1: scans your driver's license every time you return something. What
• 1:21:50
  Speaker 1: are they doing with that?
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 2: I have no idea. I assume there's some problem with
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 2: returns and theft, and it's probably an anti-fraud measure. But again,
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 2: collecting your license is probably the best form of identity
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 2: out there, right? Like, I suppose you could have a
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 2: fake ID, and generations of college students have, but most people,
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 2: when asked for their ID, you know, most adults who
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 2: have nothing to hide, hand that right over. And yeah,
• 1:22:16
  Speaker 2: I mean, bars and... retail outlets that scan it are
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 2: almost certainly collecting it and saving it for some reason.
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 1: Tires on your car. I did not know this.
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah. So, they're not collecting data per se, but they
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 2: are a vector for surveillance. And of all the people,
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 2: you know, all my friends that read the book and
• 1:22:39
  Speaker 2: even some strangers, the one thing they came away from
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 2: it was, oh, my car tires? I can be surveilled
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 2: through those? And the answer is yes, because when you
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 2: start up your car in the morning and you see
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 2: that pressure sensor reading, right? Like, oh, you have low pressure.
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 2: It's a cold day. You need to go to the
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 2: gas station and fill it up. That is a little
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 2: radio transmitter. It's a little radio transmitter that sits inside
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 2: the tire and measures the tire pressure, and it sends
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 2: a radio transmission to your car's central computer. The problem
• 1:23:09
  Speaker 2: is that that tire has a unique number. and that's
• 1:23:13
  Speaker 2: how your computer knows to pair with that tire. And
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 2: that tire is just screaming that number all the time
• 1:23:20
  Speaker 2: as you drive down the road. It's just constantly broadcasting
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 2: a signal that says, I'm Acura tire number one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 2: And if you put up little sensors along the highway
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 2: or along roadways, and there are companies that have done this,
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 2: or you're the military and you want a little trigger
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 2: sensor when somebody drives down a certain road and you
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 2: already know their tire pressure, you can put a little
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 2: sensor at the end of that road that will cue
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 2: you when someone drives by. And so, and this is
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 2: a good way to identify cars even after they've swapped
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 2: license plates, right? Because you swap plates, but the tire,
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 2: you're probably not going to remember to swap your tire
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 2: pressure sensor. So, yes, tire pressures are a vector for surveillance.
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 2: Are they a serious one that you should worry about? No.
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 2: But it's an example of a carelessly engineered technology that
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 2: inadvertently turned into a surveillance device.
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 1: Smart lighting.
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 2: By the way, I love my smart lighting. I don't
• 1:24:18
  Speaker 2: know what that's collecting, but it's... I mean, it's certainly
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 2: creating a log, at least locally and probably on some
• 1:24:26
  Speaker 2: company's server somewhere, of when you're home, when you turn
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 2: on the lights, if it can detect motion. I think
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 2: now some of these new smart lighting systems have realized
• 1:24:36
  Speaker 2: that they can They can act as motion sensors and
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 2: motion detectors, and so that can trigger. So that's another
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 2: clue to your patterns and your routines as a person
• 1:24:48
  Speaker 2: that lives in a house, right? So when do you
• 1:24:50
  Speaker 2: turn on the light? When do you turn off the light?
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 2: In the old days, the light bulb didn't log that,
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 2: but today a smart light bulb does log that, and
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 2: now it knows your home.
• 1:24:59
  Speaker 1: You know, here's another one that I thought was interesting is,
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 1: you know, your vehicle. Yeah, cars.
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 2: Connected cars, like beyond the license plate readers, these car
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 2: companies are becoming aggressive collectors of data. And I even
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 2: detail in my book my attempts a few years ago
• 1:25:16
  Speaker 2: to try to go buy a car without a data connection.
• 1:25:20
  Speaker 2: Back then it was possible. You could get one without
• 1:25:24
  Speaker 2: a cellular chip and it wouldn't... My 2021 car doesn't
• 1:25:29
  Speaker 2: broadcast my location to anyone. There's not even a possibility
• 1:25:32
  Speaker 2: it doesn't have the chip. I haven't bought a car
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 2: in a few years, but I think a lot of
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 2: them just have the cell chip built in, whether you
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 2: turn it in or not. And of course, they all
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 2: push this service. Oh, you know, roadside assistance and emergency
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 2: assistance will give you the first year free. Well, when
• 1:25:48
  Speaker 2: you sign up for that first year free, they're usually
• 1:25:50
  Speaker 2: getting your location data for that whole year, right? You're
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 2: agreeing somewhere in those terms of service to let them
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 2: collect information about where you go, how hard you brake sometimes.
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 2: They're giving it to insurance companies. In some instances, they're
• 1:26:04
  Speaker 2: cooperating with law enforcement. In some instances, they're just straight
• 1:26:07
  Speaker 2: up selling it to data brokers, just like data brokers
• 1:26:09
  Speaker 2: are existing to buy phone data. They're existing to buy
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 2: car data. So yeah, connected cars, it's hard to escape
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 2: them these days.
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 1: And they're selling it to insurance brokers. Insurance, right.
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 2: You break hard too many times. You might not even know,
• 1:26:26
  Speaker 2: but your insurance company knows. And they're collecting data off
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 2: the car. And all of a sudden, your rate goes up.
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 1: How about health wearables?
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 2: Oh, health wearables collect tons of data, and I'm sitting
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 2: here wearing an Oura ring, and, you know, I've made
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 2: the cost-benefit analysis that, you know, knowing how my body
• 1:26:43
  Speaker 2: responds to stress and kind of cataloging whether I'm getting
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 2: adequate sleep and nutrition is worth the privacy risk. But
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 2: I can imagine this would be a tremendous benefit to
• 1:26:55
  Speaker 2: an intelligence agency, right? If you were trying to recruit
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 2: somebody and you were looking for a maximum moment of
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 2: either you've assessed that you should approach them when they're
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 2: at their most relaxed, well, you can tell that from this.
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 2: Or when they're at their most stressed, you can tell
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 2: that from this too. So, this kind of psychological and
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 2: psychographic data that comes off of these things is really,
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 2: really valuable. And, you know, these companies swear that they're
• 1:27:21
  Speaker 2: not selling it, and I have read the privacy policy
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 2: for them. But they can't swear that a law enforcement
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 2: demand or a national security letter won't come in. from
• 1:27:30
  Speaker 2: a government agency in whatever country they're based, and they
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 2: can't swear that a hacker can't get access to their
• 1:27:35
  Speaker 2: systems and use it for some kind of nefarious purpose. So, yes,
• 1:27:39
  Speaker 2: these are privacy risks, and like everything, people have to
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 2: decide whether they're worth it or not.
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 1: Mm-hmm. You know, I think, uh, you know, when it
• 1:27:46
  Speaker 1: comes to the privacy disclosures and all the paperwork, well,
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 1: I just, one thing I started doing is just running
• 1:27:53
  Speaker 1: it through AI to summarize it. Yes.
• 1:27:54
  Speaker 2: And AI is good for that, actually.
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 1: But, um, it kind of, It tells you all the loopholes.
• 1:28:01
  Speaker 2: It does. And I will say that, you know, a
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 2: lot of people think that, you know, there's sneaky stuff
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 2: happening and there is sneaky stuff happening on the internet.
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 2: But most Western companies organized in a rule of law country,
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 2: they will tell you somewhere vaguely in the privacy policy
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 2: what they're doing. They may not be super explicit about it,
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 2: but it's probably in there somewhere and they're just counting
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 2: on you not reading it.
• 1:28:25
  Speaker 1: And then, you know, the big topic of the day
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 1: Flock cameras. What do you know about these?
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 2: Well, it's interesting because the public is really fixated on VLOC,
• 1:28:37
  Speaker 2: but these have been around for ages, and private companies
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 2: have been doing this for ages. And, you know, I
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 2: don't know if VLOC's the biggest, but until recently, they
• 1:28:47
  Speaker 2: were not the biggest. There's several other companies that do
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 2: the exact same thing. There's one called Vigilant. There's a
• 1:28:54
  Speaker 2: company called ReCore. There's a company called Genoptic. There's a
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 2: company called Axon. there's a dozen of these license plate
• 1:29:02
  Speaker 2: reader companies, and they have put up cameras all over
• 1:29:05
  Speaker 2: the United States, and indeed all over the world, and
• 1:29:08
  Speaker 2: they're collecting your location as you move around the world
• 1:29:13
  Speaker 2: in your car. And, you know, it's kind of interesting
• 1:29:16
  Speaker 2: to see the privacy backlash from people that are kind
• 1:29:20
  Speaker 2: of waking up to this, and it's... You know, it's
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 2: been a very interesting grassroots movement to see, but Flock
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 2: is really just one company among many. And I think
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 2: we're even seeing companies who have, or sorry, police departments
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 2: or towns or cities that have put in Flock and
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 2: then people get mad about it. They drop Flock and
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 2: they just put in a different vendor because they think, oh,
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 2: it's just a PR problem with Flock. Well, the real
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 2: problem is the license plate reader, right? Because the license
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 2: plate reader is a system that's designed to collect the
• 1:29:52
  Speaker 2: location of cars And, you know, one or two pings
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 2: of a car might not tell you an awful lot
• 1:29:59
  Speaker 2: about them. Like, maybe if you put them on an
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 2: overpass and a stolen car drives by, maybe that's a
• 1:30:06
  Speaker 2: good use of it. But increasingly, they're everywhere and they're
• 1:30:09
  Speaker 2: networked together, right? So, these companies offer the service of saying, hey,
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 2: little town in Tennessee or little town in Arkansas, put
• 1:30:18
  Speaker 2: these cameras in and they're gonna become part of a
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 2: nationwide sharing network where, all of the law enforcement agencies
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 2: all around the country are gonna be able to see
• 1:30:27
  Speaker 2: all the cars that pass through your little town. And,
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 2: you know, there's a ton of pressure from law enforcement
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 2: for these towns to opt into this. So what they're
• 1:30:36
  Speaker 2: essentially creating is several privately owned networks of surveillance systems
• 1:30:42
  Speaker 2: that all government agencies all across the country have access
• 1:30:46
  Speaker 2: to and can do whatever they want with in many instances.
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 1: You know, there's been a saying that's been going around
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 1: for a long time, and it makes sense to me,
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 1: especially when it comes to applications. If the application is free,
• 1:31:06
  Speaker 1: then you are the product.
• 1:31:08
  Speaker 2: Indeed.
• 1:31:09
  Speaker 1: I don't know if that's necessarily even true anymore. It
• 1:31:13
  Speaker 1: seems like a lot of the stuff that we're paying for,
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 1: they're double dipping here.
• 1:31:19
  Speaker 2: They are, and then there are certainly some things that
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 2: are genuinely free that you aren't the product, right? Often
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 2: created by nonprofit organizations. So Signal, the popular messaging app,
• 1:31:28
  Speaker 2: is free and is a tremendously valuable privacy tool. It's
• 1:31:33
  Speaker 2: an encrypted way to communicate. It's not the only encrypted
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 2: way to communicate. But so while that's not a hard
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 2: and fast rule, I do think there is a wisdom
• 1:31:41
  Speaker 2: to it because a lot of this data collection, at
• 1:31:44
  Speaker 2: least originally, was driven by the fact that people were
• 1:31:48
  Speaker 2: either reluctant to pay for things online because they were
• 1:31:51
  Speaker 2: afraid of, you know, giving their credit card information on
• 1:31:55
  Speaker 2: the internet in the 90s, or just general consumer reluctance
• 1:31:58
  Speaker 2: to pay for things, right? Why pay for something when
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 2: I can get it for free? Um, so there is
• 1:32:03
  Speaker 2: wisdom to the fact that this entire norm and market
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 2: that we hand over our data constantly to entities that
• 1:32:11
  Speaker 2: we barely even think about all the time, that probably
• 1:32:14
  Speaker 2: did come about, um, because there was some consumer reluctance
• 1:32:18
  Speaker 2: to pay. And that was the only way to make money.
• 1:32:22
  Speaker 2: But I think you're right, that increasingly, even very expensive
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 2: things that you pay for are trying to monetize you, right?
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 2: You see car companies, you know, they'll sell you a
• 1:32:30
  Speaker 2: car that's very, very expensive, and then they'll say, yeah,
• 1:32:33
  Speaker 2: pay us 15 bucks a month if you want to
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 2: turn the heated seats on. You know? So, I think
• 1:32:38
  Speaker 2: you're right, right? They're double-dipping, and they see add-ons and
• 1:32:43
  Speaker 2: features and recurring subscription revenue as a way to pad
• 1:32:47
  Speaker 2: the bottom line and squeeze a little bit more money
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 2: out of the consumer.
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 1: I mean, do you think there's a world where... they
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 1: have to pay us for our privacy data?
• 1:32:57
  Speaker 2: Well, you know, that's something that a lot of people
• 1:32:59
  Speaker 2: have talked about. And, um, I just don't think at
• 1:33:02
  Speaker 2: the end of the day, it's the economics work out
• 1:33:06
  Speaker 2: for the individual, right? Because your data might be worth
• 1:33:09
  Speaker 2: a few bucks to a company, but in the aggregate,
• 1:33:12
  Speaker 2: it's worth lots. And the problem is, you probably don't
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 2: even want the few bucks for the hassle that it
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 2: will cost. But in the aggregate, the data market is
• 1:33:22
  Speaker 2: worth billions, if not trillions. And so it's a hard
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 2: problem to solve. There have been some experiments in trying
• 1:33:30
  Speaker 2: to do that. There are increasingly companies that are saying,
• 1:33:36
  Speaker 2: we're just not going to do this, we're going to
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 2: be a subscription service, and we're not going to collect
• 1:33:40
  Speaker 2: your data. That's one possible business model, but In general,
• 1:33:45
  Speaker 2: I think it's a really hard problem to kind of
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 2: return the money to the consumer. Probably the better model,
• 1:33:54
  Speaker 2: probably the better way forward is for there just to
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 2: be a more straightforward bargain between the consumer and the
• 1:33:59
  Speaker 2: maker of the product that I pay you money and
• 1:34:02
  Speaker 2: you give me a service and you don't collect data
• 1:34:05
  Speaker 2: from me.
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 1: I mean, no, no, no. It just seems, you know,
• 1:34:09
  Speaker 1: you pay Costco $ 200 a year or whatever it is
• 1:34:11
  Speaker 1: to a membership and they collect everything that you ever
• 1:34:15
  Speaker 1: buy and and no discounts and you know and it
• 1:34:20
  Speaker 1: just all that it's just it does seem to be
• 1:34:25
  Speaker 1: coming to a head people are waking up to this
• 1:34:28
  Speaker 1: they're getting pissed.
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah i think so and i i think you're seeing
• 1:34:32
  Speaker 2: you know a lot of current outrage right now over
• 1:34:35
  Speaker 2: this idea of individualized or surveillance pricing right you are
• 1:34:38
  Speaker 2: seeing You're seeing regulators being interested in it. You're seeing
• 1:34:42
  Speaker 2: at least some states saying, well, you're gonna do that.
• 1:34:45
  Speaker 2: At the very least, you need to disclose you're charging
• 1:34:47
  Speaker 2: people different prices. But yeah, this is the world we're
• 1:34:51
  Speaker 2: living in because there's so much data out there and
• 1:34:54
  Speaker 2: there's an increasing amount of ability to process it. And
• 1:34:57
  Speaker 2: so when you have, you know, big, powerful computers and
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 2: artificial intelligence and 100 data points on a consumer, you
• 1:35:04
  Speaker 2: can make a judgment about, hey, this is what they're
• 1:35:07
  Speaker 2: willing to pay, and I'm gonna try to charge them
• 1:35:08
  Speaker 2: the max.
• 1:35:09
  Speaker 1: I mean, can you just go a little bit more
• 1:35:12
  Speaker 1: into the surveillance pricing? Because this is... this is new to...
• 1:35:18
  Speaker 1: pretty much everybody.
• 1:35:20
  Speaker 2: And... Yeah, I mean, well, I mean.
• 1:35:24
  Speaker 1: In a way... How exactly is it gonna work?
• 1:35:26
  Speaker 2: I mean, I don't think we know all the answers,
• 1:35:28
  Speaker 2: but in a way, I mean, some of it's already here.
• 1:35:29
  Speaker 2: For example, I'm a big fan of the New York
• 1:35:31
  Speaker 2: Times home delivery.
• 1:35:33
  Speaker 1: You know, I.
• 1:35:35
  Speaker 2: Your listeners may think what they will about the New
• 1:35:37
  Speaker 2: York Times, but I like getting up in the morning
• 1:35:39
  Speaker 2: on a Sunday morning and reading the physical newspaper over
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 2: coffee and eating some eggs. Um, but I don't like
• 1:35:46
  Speaker 2: it as much as they want to charge. I don't
• 1:35:48
  Speaker 2: like it as much as the sticker price. So, you know,
• 1:35:51
  Speaker 2: I'm willing to pay a certain amount, and then every
• 1:35:53
  Speaker 2: few months, the Times emails me and says, oh, your
• 1:35:56
  Speaker 2: introductory discount on home delivery is about to end. And
• 1:35:59
  Speaker 2: I go right into the website and I press cancel.
• 1:36:02
  Speaker 2: And after I press cancel, a screen pops up and says, oh,
• 1:36:06
  Speaker 2: would you consider sticking around at the same rate for
• 1:36:09
  Speaker 2: another 36 weeks? And I click yes. So in a way,
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 2: it's just taking what's already there. And I think we've
• 1:36:15
  Speaker 2: all experienced that, right? We've all tried to cancel something
• 1:36:18
  Speaker 2: and then cable or some subscription service, and then they
• 1:36:21
  Speaker 2: throw an offer at you. Oh, would you stay for
• 1:36:23
  Speaker 2: half off? Would you stay for a quarter off? So
• 1:36:26
  Speaker 2: it's an extension of that, right? It's an extension of
• 1:36:28
  Speaker 2: the idea that like, they're already kind of doing this.
• 1:36:31
  Speaker 2: They're already offering some discounts to keep you paying for
• 1:36:35
  Speaker 2: certain services. What if we could just model it on
• 1:36:37
  Speaker 2: the front end, right? What if we could just, before
• 1:36:40
  Speaker 2: you're even our customer, we could take all the data
• 1:36:42
  Speaker 2: we know about you. We could take your socioeconomic class.
• 1:36:46
  Speaker 2: We could take how much you typically spend in a
• 1:36:48
  Speaker 2: month off your credit card statement. We could take, you know,
• 1:36:51
  Speaker 2: You can make some inferences about where you work based
• 1:36:54
  Speaker 2: on all sorts of data points that we have on you.
• 1:36:56
  Speaker 2: Maybe we just scrape LinkedIn and we know where you work.
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 2: I don't know. And we can estimate how much you
• 1:37:02
  Speaker 2: as a consumer might be willing to pay for that,
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 2: you know, that service or even something as petty as,
• 1:37:07
  Speaker 2: you know, that produce at the grocery store. I mean,
• 1:37:10
  Speaker 2: that is one possible future that we're looking at because
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 2: of the amount of data that companies have and that
• 1:37:17
  Speaker 2: we all generate every day.
• 1:37:18
  Speaker 1: I mean, how do you think it's inevitable this is
• 1:37:20
  Speaker 1: gonna happen?
• 1:37:21
  Speaker 2: Well, I don't think anything's inevitable, right? Like, we as
• 1:37:25
  Speaker 2: voters and consumers get to make choices about this stuff,
• 1:37:29
  Speaker 2: including about our technology and about what stores we're willing
• 1:37:32
  Speaker 2: to patronize. So, you know, if enough consumers don't like
• 1:37:35
  Speaker 2: this stuff and they don't want to participate in an
• 1:37:38
  Speaker 2: economy where they're charged different amounts of money based on,
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 2: you know, what kind of data companies collect on us,
• 1:37:46
  Speaker 2: then I don't think we're gonna live in that future. If, however,
• 1:37:48
  Speaker 2: people are willing to tolerate it, And some people may
• 1:37:52
  Speaker 2: even willingly opt in, right? Some companies may, to avoid
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 2: the thorny problem, say like, turn over all the information
• 1:37:58
  Speaker 2: to us and you'll get tons of discounts. We may
• 1:38:02
  Speaker 2: well live in that world. It all depends on what
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 2: people are willing to tolerate.
• 1:38:06
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about how we can take control back a
• 1:38:09
  Speaker 1: little bit. I mean, we've talked about all, not all,
• 1:38:12
  Speaker 1: a lot of the ways that these companies are collecting
• 1:38:15
  Speaker 1: on us. We talked about the flow of data, how
• 1:38:18
  Speaker 1: it gets into the government's hands, what the marketers do
• 1:38:20
  Speaker 1: with it, what the devices are, surveillance pricing, all this stuff.
• 1:38:24
  Speaker 1: What are things that people can do to kind of
• 1:38:29
  Speaker 1: shield themselves from the invasiveness?
• 1:38:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a hard question. You know, if you want
• 1:38:36
  Speaker 2: to live a normal life and you want to have
• 1:38:37
  Speaker 2: a phone and you want to go about your day
• 1:38:39
  Speaker 2: and you don't want to live in the woods on
• 1:38:41
  Speaker 2: a self-sufficient plot of land where you're collecting rainwater and
• 1:38:47
  Speaker 2: using your own solar panels, then it's hard to completely
• 1:38:50
  Speaker 2: opt out of data collection. I think about it as...
• 1:38:54
  Speaker 2: I think about it a couple of ways. One, I
• 1:38:56
  Speaker 2: do think the content of our communications and the content
• 1:38:59
  Speaker 2: of our important documents and the content of our emails,
• 1:39:02
  Speaker 2: the stuff we... The communications and the documents we write
• 1:39:06
  Speaker 2: and keep, I think a lot of that's very important
• 1:39:09
  Speaker 2: to keep private. There are plenty of ways to do that.
• 1:39:13
  Speaker 2: I basically think you should encrypt your communications, your emails,
• 1:39:19
  Speaker 2: your documents, your files, as much as possible. And you
• 1:39:23
  Speaker 2: can do that through a feature built into the Apple
• 1:39:26
  Speaker 2: phone called Advanced Data Protection. There are some third-party encryption
• 1:39:31
  Speaker 2: platforms out there, including ProtonMail, which has basically an encrypted email.
• 1:39:37
  Speaker 2: Tutanota is one. There's a lot of these encrypted drive
• 1:39:42
  Speaker 2: providers or encrypted email providers. There's encrypted communications platforms like Signal,
• 1:39:49
  Speaker 2: like the Glacier platform that you're developing and working on,
• 1:39:53
  Speaker 2: like even WhatsApp. WhatsApp is owned by Meta. It collects
• 1:39:56
  Speaker 2: a lot of information about who you are and who
• 1:39:58
  Speaker 2: you talk to, but actually the communication is private. Meta
• 1:40:02
  Speaker 2: can't see it. Apple's iMessage is pretty well encrypted.
• 1:40:06
  Speaker 1: So.
• 1:40:07
  Speaker 2: keeping the content of your communications and the content of
• 1:40:11
  Speaker 2: your files private is probably the most basic thing you
• 1:40:14
  Speaker 2: can do and isn't so hard, but might take a
• 1:40:18
  Speaker 2: little bit of work. Second, you can be careful about
• 1:40:22
  Speaker 2: your permissions, right? Like, you don't have to let every
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 2: single app have your location. You don't have to let
• 1:40:28
  Speaker 2: Uber and DoorDash have your location. You can type every
• 1:40:32
  Speaker 2: time you want an Uber where you are, or you
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 2: can drop the little pin on the map, or you
• 1:40:36
  Speaker 2: can just say, you know, today I'm at this address
• 1:40:38
  Speaker 2: and I want delivery. And sure, they'll store it, but
• 1:40:40
  Speaker 2: it's better than giving this technical backend access to your
• 1:40:44
  Speaker 2: GPS location. So turn some of that stuff off. And
• 1:40:48
  Speaker 2: don't let every app that asks have access to your
• 1:40:50
  Speaker 2: contacts and your calendar and your photo roll. Like, they
• 1:40:54
  Speaker 2: don't need all that. A lot of them work just
• 1:40:56
  Speaker 2: fine without turning that stuff on. our device manufacturers have
• 1:41:01
  Speaker 2: actually done a good job of trying to give you
• 1:41:04
  Speaker 2: some control over what things you do and don't want
• 1:41:08
  Speaker 2: to share. And I would advise you whenever possible to
• 1:41:12
  Speaker 2: not check those things. And often the apps that want
• 1:41:16
  Speaker 2: them work just fine without them. There's other things you
• 1:41:20
  Speaker 2: can do, right? Like there are, as you say, there
• 1:41:22
  Speaker 2: are now services that offer burner phone numbers. There are
• 1:41:25
  Speaker 2: services that offer privacy-preserving email accounts, fake email accounts that
• 1:41:30
  Speaker 2: will funnel to your real email accounts. You don't have
• 1:41:34
  Speaker 2: to give all these retailers your real email. You can
• 1:41:36
  Speaker 2: give them a proxy email. You can give them a
• 1:41:39
  Speaker 2: proxy phone number that when they start to spam you,
• 1:41:42
  Speaker 2: you can disconnect and make go away. So that's a
• 1:41:46
  Speaker 2: privacy protection that you can build in. You know, VPNs
• 1:41:51
  Speaker 2: are controversial. I think they can be useful in some instances,
• 1:41:56
  Speaker 2: but you also have to trust your VPN provider, right?
• 1:41:58
  Speaker 2: Because you're just moving the layer of trust from your
• 1:42:01
  Speaker 2: telecom or your internet service provider, which is usually a
• 1:42:04
  Speaker 2: large company with a lot of good lawyers, to some
• 1:42:07
  Speaker 2: kind of shady overseas business that you don't know much about. Um,
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 2: so do be careful, like there are reputable VPNs and
• 1:42:14
  Speaker 2: there are not reputable ones and they change all the
• 1:42:16
  Speaker 2: time and they merge and they go out of business. Um,
• 1:42:19
  Speaker 2: they can be helpful, uh, for privacy set up right
• 1:42:22
  Speaker 2: and used correctly in the right circumstance, or they can
• 1:42:24
  Speaker 2: be a privacy disaster.
• 1:42:25
  Speaker 1: Um, that is one thing I, I learned when we
• 1:42:28
  Speaker 1: were building glacier with the VPN stuff is that you
• 1:42:31
  Speaker 1: have all these foreign entities. Chinese companies, Russian companies, Israeli companies,
• 1:42:40
  Speaker 1: and it's a conglomerate that owns a multitude of VPN
• 1:42:44
  Speaker 1: companies that are just constantly collecting. Right.
• 1:42:48
  Speaker 2: And again, you know, using a shady VPN might be
• 1:42:53
  Speaker 2: better than connecting to the Chinese telecom network while you're
• 1:42:57
  Speaker 2: traveling through China, but is it really good? Are they
• 1:43:01
  Speaker 2: really more trustworthy than whoever your cell phone provider is?
• 1:43:06
  Speaker 2: I would do some soul searching because all you're doing
• 1:43:09
  Speaker 2: when you're putting a VPN on your phone is moving
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 2: which company can see your internet traffic. Is it your
• 1:43:15
  Speaker 2: cell provider that you want to see your phone traffic?
• 1:43:18
  Speaker 2: Or is it this company you've never heard of that's
• 1:43:22
  Speaker 2: in India or Malaysia or wherever? So I would think
• 1:43:27
  Speaker 2: carefully about it, but they can be useful in certain circumstances.
• 1:43:30
  Speaker 2: And there's actually VPNs that will take cash from you.
• 1:43:33
  Speaker 2: don't create linkages back to your real world identity. That
• 1:43:37
  Speaker 2: can be valuable depending on what you're trying to do.
• 1:43:42
  Speaker 2: But yeah, I mean, it's hard, but there are some
• 1:43:45
  Speaker 2: ways to get some balance.
• 1:43:48
  Speaker 1: In your life. What do you think about the secure DNS?
• 1:43:52
  Speaker 2: I have not looked deeply into secure DNS. You know,
• 1:43:56
  Speaker 2: I know there are some, so basically DNS is the
• 1:43:59
  Speaker 2: phone book of the internet for your listeners. So when
• 1:44:03
  Speaker 2: you type in google.com, that's actually meaningless to the machine.
• 1:44:07
  Speaker 2: What it needs to know is what IP address do
• 1:44:10
  Speaker 2: I need to send you to? So do I need
• 1:44:12
  Speaker 2: to send your IP address? Whatever that is, that looks
• 1:44:15
  Speaker 2: something like 1.92.4.194 or something like that. We're going to
• 1:44:21
  Speaker 2: send you to some web address. DNS is how the
• 1:44:24
  Speaker 2: computer looks up. Where is google.com in the numbers that
• 1:44:28
  Speaker 2: I know how to route you? And yes, there have
• 1:44:31
  Speaker 2: been data brokers that have gone in there and they've said, oh, well,
• 1:44:35
  Speaker 2: we can learn about where people are going on the
• 1:44:37
  Speaker 2: internet based on their DNS queries. We can set up
• 1:44:39
  Speaker 2: a DNS server and they'll send all their traffic and
• 1:44:42
  Speaker 2: we know that they're going to Google or we know
• 1:44:44
  Speaker 2: they're going to this. I don't know a ton about
• 1:44:48
  Speaker 2: secure DNS providers. I know there's some you can go
• 1:44:52
  Speaker 2: in deep in your phone and set your settings to
• 1:44:54
  Speaker 2: go to like 9.9.9.9, which is one based in Switzerland
• 1:44:58
  Speaker 2: that says they don't log. There's a few others like that.
• 1:45:02
  Speaker 2: There's some secure DNS services that you kind of install
• 1:45:04
  Speaker 2: on your phone. I think that's probably a good thing.
• 1:45:07
  Speaker 2: I just haven't kind of delved deep into which specific
• 1:45:09
  Speaker 2: ones are good.
• 1:45:12
  Speaker 1: How did you find out about Glacier? You knew about
• 1:45:14
  Speaker 1: it way before I did.
• 1:45:16
  Speaker 2: Um, how did I find out about Glacier? I think
• 1:45:19
  Speaker 2: I was reporting on secure phones, actually, and trying to
• 1:45:22
  Speaker 2: understand how the government dealt with the problem of all
• 1:45:26
  Speaker 2: this commercial data sloshing around. And one thing led me
• 1:45:29
  Speaker 2: into another, one vendor led me into another, and I
• 1:45:31
  Speaker 2: think I found Glacier and I found the people at
• 1:45:34
  Speaker 2: it as someone that was trying to solve this problem,
• 1:45:37
  Speaker 2: both for the private sector, as well as having government clients.
• 1:45:41
  Speaker 2: And at the time, I was kind of thinking about
• 1:45:45
  Speaker 2: the fact that privacy was becoming something of a luxury good. And,
• 1:45:49
  Speaker 2: you know, if you were willing to pay the money,
• 1:45:52
  Speaker 2: you could get a higher level of privacy than the
• 1:45:54
  Speaker 2: average person. But it's interesting to see that they've pivoted
• 1:45:58
  Speaker 2: more towards the consumer market. And I think in the
• 1:46:01
  Speaker 2: years since I first talked to them for this book,
• 1:46:04
  Speaker 2: A lot of companies have started to see that. You know,
• 1:46:07
  Speaker 2: there is a market for privacy in the United States.
• 1:46:09
  Speaker 2: It's not a big market. There's a market for privacy
• 1:46:12
  Speaker 2: in Europe. But it is a market, and there are
• 1:46:14
  Speaker 2: paying customers out there that are willing to pay a
• 1:46:18
  Speaker 2: little bit more for a more secure or more private product.
• 1:46:22
  Speaker 2: And that has reshaped some of the market dynamics, and
• 1:46:25
  Speaker 2: companies like Glacier and others out there have made that pivot.
• 1:46:30
  Speaker 1: I mean, I think, you know, as time goes on,
• 1:46:32
  Speaker 1: it's just getting more and more important because now privacy
• 1:46:36
  Speaker 1: is affecting your negotiating power with surveillance pricing.
• 1:46:40
  Speaker 2: Totally.
• 1:46:41
  Speaker 1: It's going to be a bigger and bigger deal. But, well, Byron,
• 1:46:46
  Speaker 1: I really appreciate you coming out here.
• 1:46:48
  Speaker 2: Thanks so much for having me.
• 1:46:49
  Speaker 1: Great talk.
• 1:46:49
  Speaker 2: Great talk.
• 1:46:50
  Speaker 1: And I hope to see you again. Yeah, same.
• 1:46:53
  Speaker 2: Look to be back.
• 1:47:07
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• 1:47:10
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• 1:47:13
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• 1:47:26
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