#340 Byron Tau - The Government Doesn't Just Spy on You. It Buys You.

Byron Tau is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter at ProPublica and the author of "Means of Control." He spent five years tracing how the surveillance apparatus built after 9/11 came home and found Border Patrol monitoring millions of American drivers through hidden cameras and a secret algorithm. Shawn and Byron get into who built these tools, how buying data legally sidesteps the Fourth Amendment, and what it means when the machinery aimed at foreign targets gets turned around. Privacy Isn't Paranoia. It's Protection. Download Glacier - https://srs.site/glacierapp Website - https://theglacierapp.com Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: Get firearm security redesigned and save 10% off @StopBoxUSA with code SRS at https://stopboxusa.com/SRS #stopboxpod Upgrade your eyewear at https://roka.com and use code SRS for 20% off sitewide at checkout. Try Gusto today at https://gusto.com/SRS and get three months free when you run your first payroll. For a limited time, save 20% on your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro at https://drinkag1.com/srs Byron Tau Links: LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/byrontau X - https://x.com/byrontau Bluesky - https://bsky.app/profile/byrontau.bsky.social Book - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/706321/means-of-control-by-byron-tau Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:05Shawn Ryan?

  Byron Tau, welcome to the show.

• 1:07Speaker 03

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 1:08Shawn Ryan?

  My pleasure, my pleasure. So, like I said, I heard about you in an earlier episode.

• 1:16Shawn Ryan?

  Your book got shouted out, and so it took us a couple of years, but here you are.

• 1:21Speaker 03

  Well, glad to be here.

• 1:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, it's good to have you here. So, you know, so we're going to be talking about, basically, digital surveillance, what they do with all that information and all this stuff. And this can be kind of a dry subject, so I just kind of want to preface it

• 1:40Shawn Ryan?

  before we get going. Have you heard about this pricing surveillance?

• 1:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is a new thing where, essentially, companies are trying to figure out what the maximum is that you're willing to pay and try to extract as much money from you as possible through all the data they collect about you.

• 2:01Shawn Ryan?

  So I just want to paint a picture real quick, you know, because you get a lot of people and they're like, ah, what does it matter about? What are they? What, I'm not trying to hide anything, you know? And so I know Walmart is, I think Walmart, I think there's another big company too. Is it, is it Amazon?

• 2:19Speaker 03

  I'd be surprised if most big companies weren't at least thinking about some of this stuff.

• 2:24Shawn Ryan?

  So imagine, so basically Walmart is, they want to do surveillance on us all and figure out the maximum amount you're willing to pay. And so just, here's a little scenario. You pull into Walmart, they got the flock cameras. Flock cameras talk to the internal cameras. They all talk to each other, and then they're going to have these digital price tags on all the products inside the stores that appear when you look at the product. Well, I mean, just through facial recognition, your phones, all these other things, that those, these cameras and these data systems are all going to be able to talk to each other and display the price that they think that you specifically are willing to pay

• 3:06Shawn Ryan?

  for each individual product within the store. And so it's, it just falls into this mass surveillance hysteria that everybody is getting extremely concerned about. And, and so this is, this is some of the stuff that we're going to, that we're going to talk about today.

• 3:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think companies, generally speaking, for many, many years now, have started to see consumers as data, right? They want to know about you. They want to know about your purchase journey. They want to know about your background. They want to know about your interests. And they use all of that to, historically, they've used it to target you with advertising. But increasingly, we're at an, we're in an environment where there's enough data out there about you, and there's enough of a consumer profile out there about you, whether that's stuff you put out yourself or your purchase history or things they're inferring about you. But yeah, companies are going to be able to start making pricing decisions based on all the stuff that they know about you. And that's a lot.

• 4:09Shawn Ryan?

  It's, I mean, it's just crazy to think about, you know? I mean, you go, you go to the store and it's, you think it'd be the same price for everybody, no matter how much money you make, no matter any of that. But I mean, it's basically, I think, it's all going to be individualized pricing based on what car you drive, what you bought on the internet. All of these, what you're wearing, everything, where you live, you know? And they'll talk to the stores so that they can charge you the maximum amount that they think you're going to pay. And, you know, just going through the outline and doing some research on you, I mean, you know, I did not realize that, I knew that the, the marketing agencies, you know, that, that collect all this data.

• 4:54Shawn Ryan?

  I knew it was horrible. I thought the government kind of had their own arm in this. But it sounds like they don't really need their own arm because the marketing agencies that collect all the data from your phone, through the apps, through your tires, through the vacuums, through TVs, through everything, they're just, they're so good at collecting that they just take the block of it and sell it to the US government.

• 5:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. And, and this has been going on for a while, but it's accelerated as we've all started putting more and more information about ourselves online. So this originally started with stuff like, well, you know, these data brokers will collect your property history, like who, you know, who bought, who bought a certain house? They might get a little information about your mortgage. They might, at some point, have started, you know, getting consumer lists, right? Were you the kind of person that subscribed to a magazine about pets or cooking or guns? And so they gradually started amassing more and more information about people, right up to the current moment where they essentially can, you know, track a lot about your browsing history. They can track a lot about your movements through the world. They know how to link your social profiles to your real identity.

• 6:03Speaker 03

  And, and yes, governments have realized that there's a ton of corporate data out there that, that consumers are voluntarily handing it over in many cases, and that if they just open their wallet, they can often get information that they would otherwise either be forbidden from getting because, you know, you've worked in the government. There are all sorts of rules and regulations about when you can target people and, and, you know, how you can target people. But if you buy the data on the open market, some of those rules go out the door. And so, yes, this is a phenomenon that's been increasing in recent years and is only going to keep increasing as, as long as we keep pouring data about ourselves onto the web.

• 6:46Shawn Ryan?

  Well, that's what we'll be talking about for the majority of the day. So let me start you off with an introduction, though. Byron Tau, you're an investigative reporter currently at ProPublica, following your tenure with Politico and the Wall Street Journal. You're the author of Means of Control, which focused on surfacing the intersection of corporate data gathering and government surveillance. And just this past May, you won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting regarding an investigation into mass surveillance tools built in Silicon Valley, advanced in China, and brought home for secret new uses by the Border Patrol. Congratulations on that, by the way.

• 7:26Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 7:27Shawn Ryan?

  And so before we get started, a couple of things to knock out here real quick. I have a Patreon account. They've been with me since the beginning. We've turned it into one hell of a community. I think it's almost 200,000 strong now. And so they get the opportunity to ask every single guest a question.

• 7:43Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 7:44Shawn Ryan?

  This is from Jesse Martin. Your reporting has shown that commercially available location data can map the movements of phones around military installations, intelligence facilities, and the homes of the people who work there. If a foreign service can simply buy that from an ad broker, has the concept of OPSEC for operators and their families already collapsed? And does anyone in government have a serious answer for it?

• 8:11Speaker 03

  That's a great question. And I think even in this current conflict in Iran, we've seen reports out of CENTCOM that the Iranians may have indeed targeted American soldiers using commercially available data. This is a really, really hard problem to solve. There are some solutions. There are sort of hardened phones. There are rules you can put in place, but they're very, very difficult. And it takes discipline. It takes discipline from the leadership of the military. It takes a certain amount of technical expertise, right? It's not just putting your phone in airplane mode. There's a lot of different things you need to do to, to harden a device and to make sure that, you know, operational security is maintained. And, you know, it requires understanding a bewildering array of, of data that's collected.

• 8:56Speaker 03

  And so there are people that are working on this problem. There's probably not enough people that are working on this problem, but it is a serious and ongoing threat to the people that go overseas and serve our country.

• 9:08Shawn Ryan?

  Is there, I mean, I know the FTC is getting involved in the, in the, in the surveillance pricing stuff, but is this, is this even a discussion in the US government right now as far as just for, you know, for a civilian standpoint? I mean, it's so invasive.

• 9:25Speaker 03

  So, I mean, I think, um, you know, historically, I think the government, and I, I think this is, you know, leading members of both parties have not wanted to really interfere in the, the internet at the very beginning, right? Because they thought it was going to be this tremendous tool for the advancement of human flourishing and freedom and commerce. And they thought that onerous regulations might interfere with that. And that, that was a reasonable position to take, you know, 20, 30 years ago. I think as we've seen the internet mature, we've really seen a lack of serious policy discussion about what the rules should be around consumer data protection. And we've seen a real leadership vacuum in Congress. I mean, um, you know, the internet's 30 some years old at this point.

• 10:09Speaker 03

  And, you know, we're the last remaining major industrial democracy that does not have a comprehensive privacy law. We have a patchwork of different laws that are state by state. Um, we have some executive orders that have been meant to deal with some of this from a purely national security basis, right? Like trying to stop TikTok and other data flows out of the country. But writ large, I mean, our, our lawmakers, our, our political leaders have never really written rules of the road for digital services.

• 10:37Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. You said we're the last, we're the last one?

• 10:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I, that's something you hear scholars say, but essentially that, I, I think that's correct, that at a national level, um, we're the last real remaining, you know, major democracy and major economy that doesn't have a privacy law that applies across the board to digital services. Yeah, I think that's, that's true.

• 11:00Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I mean, just, you know, from our previous discussion before we even started this, I mean, I'll bet they're thinking about it now. I mean, I wasn't even planning on going into this, but I mean, you're, so right now you're working on how foreign governments, specifically Iran, but there's a lot of other ones, I'm sure, are, are buying the data from US marketing firms about us and targeting US soldiers, operatives, State Department personnel overseas. Can you, could you?

• 11:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's something I'm, I'm interested in because it, it grows out of my book. Um, but there was a letter, I think, a few weeks ago or a few months ago from Senator Ron Wyden's office, and he asked the Pentagon straight up, are there any, um, reports that Iranians had targeted American soldiers? And the Pentagon answered that yes, they had received credible intelligence reports saying that, um, that, that Iranians had used commercially available information, information collected from data brokers, um, to potentially target US soldiers. They didn't give a tremendous amount of detail, but they said they had received that reporting. And so, yeah, this, you know, I, I've focused in this book primarily on what our government does with this data, but this data is out there and it's available for sale and our

• 12:16Speaker 03

  adversaries can and do buy it. Um, you know, there, there've been, um, uh, there've been reports of other foreign governments getting this information, particularly Israeli companies. And, you know, Israel is an ally of the United States, but it would not be at all difficult for China, Russia, Iran to obtain the exact same data that we're talking about here. And CENTCOM seems to believe that it's at least credible that it was used to target Americans.

• 12:43Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Do you have a hardened phone?

• 12:46Speaker 03

  I do not. Um, I do use a privacy first cell carrier and I do put my Apple phone in lockdown mode. Um, but, you know, being a reporter, you have to balance the need for contacting people with putting your phone number out there in many instances and, and, and trying to encourage the public to deliver you tips. And so I try to, I try to get a balance with my own personal security.

• 13:12Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm. Well, I got you a present.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah?

• 13:15Shawn Ryan?

  I sure did. So, here you go.

• 13:18Speaker 03

  Oh, thank you.

• 13:20Shawn Ryan?

  You're welcome.

• 13:21Speaker 03

  This is a hardened phone? Should I open it now?

• 13:24Shawn Ryan?

  Go ahead, open it up.

• 13:25Speaker 03

  All right. How do I do this?

• 13:36Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, boy.

• 13:37Speaker 03

  You're gonna have to help me.

• 13:38Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, boy. All right. Here we go.

• 13:41Speaker 03

  Oh, there's a snap. Uh-huh. Tell me about this.

• 13:51Shawn Ryan?

  All right. So I'll tell you about that. So you wrote about a company called Glacier.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  I did.

• 13:56Shawn Ryan?

  In your, uh, in your book. And I wound up going into business because this is with Glacier, because this is something I've been extremely concerned with. Uh, my podcast got a little political. I've been, now I'm affiliated with heads of state and all these other people. I'm, I used to work for the agency. I, I get paranoid about this stuff. So anyways, I reached out to them because I didn't want all these people to have my numbers. I don't know what they're sucking out of my phone, talking to people like you, talking to former colleagues and what's, what's being sucked out of the phone. I wanted a hardened phone for everybody on my team.

• 14:31Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:32Shawn Ryan?

  So I reached out to some former, um, colleagues, you know, about what's, what's the latest and greatest hardened phone, and they pointed me towards a company called Glacier.

• 14:40Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:41Shawn Ryan?

  I wanted to go into business with Glacier and, but, but first and foremost, I wanted their product. Well, their product is awesome, but it's $10,000 a phone roughly, plus another double that for the service. And, um, and so I lost interest and I said, look, I, I, I want something that we can do for everybody.

• 15:04Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:05Shawn Ryan?

  That, that everyday consumers can, can, can afford. It's not, nobody can afford this. And, um, so we developed an application that takes a lot of the best features out of the phone and put it into an app.

• 15:18Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:19Shawn Ryan?

  And the app's called Glacier. And so basically, in a nutshell, what Glacier does, I think you're gonna love this, one, burner numbers. So my number gets leaked all over the internet. I'm sure your number, you know, if you're an investigative reporter, you know what that's like. And so we created, uh, you can get up to five burner numbers.

• 15:38Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:39Shawn Ryan?

  And so what that is, you know, you pass your number out, it starts getting leaked, you're getting spam, you don't want your, the hotel, the pizza place, the political campaign, you donate, any of that stuff, the nonprofit that you do, everybody's selling your shit constantly. So you hand out the burner number, when you real, when you, when you come to the realization it's been compromised, you burn the number, you get a new one. You can pick any area code in the US. Then the other thing we did is we did secure DNS, you know, which keeps the applications that you're not using, that are selling all your information, where you are, what you buy, who you're with, all that stuff. It keeps that stuff localized on your phone and blocks it from being uploaded and sold

• 16:22Shawn Ryan?

  to the marketing firms or the US government or foreign governments. And then the last thing that we did was we put, uh, the secure, we put a VPN in there that's, um, we don't hold any data other than the email that you sign up with. And, um, and, uh, and they're all American VPNs. So that's what we developed and, uh, and we made the app as simple as you could possibly imagine. Basically, the, the real winner in there is the burner numbers and the DNS. So you.

• 16:55Speaker 03

  And so that's built into a commercially available app that most consumers can get without dropping a hundred thou, uh, $10,000 on a secure phone?

• 17:03Shawn Ryan?

  Yep. And it's super simple. You, I mean, you connect to the DNS, you shut the app off and it is done. You don't ever have to open it again.

• 17:15Speaker 03

  So can I ask you a question? What, what's your experience been like with the hardened phone? Because, um, like you mentioned, I, I did talk to Glacier in writing this book and, and a few other people who made hardened phones. And one of the things they said, um, that the challenge was you have to make a hardened phone that people want to use, right? Because if you have a hardened phone and it doesn't work in all the normal ways that people want to use a cell phone, then they end up just getting a non-hardened phone and carrying both of them around together. And then you've defeated the point of the hardened phone. So what, what's been your experience like using the hardened phone? Does it, does it do everything a normal cell phone does?

• 17:50Shawn Ryan?

  It does. It's an iPhone. You know, and so when, when talking to them, that, because I've had other hardened phones, but they were, they weren't the iPhone. And I think most Americans, they, life revolves around Apple. You know what I mean? Unfortunately, it just is what it is.

• 18:08Speaker 03

  It's hard to escape that ecosystem.

• 18:09Shawn Ryan?

  And so they've found a way to harden that, harden the damn iPhone. And, uh, it's, it's got some, you know, more advanced features in the app, but it's, it's, it's just, it's having an iPhone. They, you know what I mean? And if, if they detect suspicious activity, you get an email, they follow up with it, they track where it went, what's happening, you know? And if it's, if it is something malicious, then, then you get notified, you get a phone call from them. Uh, some other stuff that they can do that, you know, that the app can't do is, you know, for, for me, we're all over the world, you know, and we're kicking over some rocks that a lot of people don't want kicked over.

• 18:50Shawn Ryan?

  And, um, and so what, what they can do is they can actually upload a footprint, uh, like a false footprint into your phone to make it look like you've been there for a long time and delete it when you're gone. You know what I mean? So that it doesn't, so you come back to the US, doesn't look like I was doing an interview in Taiwan. I go to Taiwan, it doesn't look like I came from the US. I go to Dubai to, to interview there, I, I have a whole new footprint uploaded that's a, you know what I mean? So it makes you, it makes you blend in, you know, digitally, and it, it doesn't raise any red flags when you're running out of all these countries. And there's some kidnapping type features, um, some of that kind of stuff.

• 19:33Speaker 03

  I'm looking forward to checking it out.

• 19:35Shawn Ryan?

  I love to hear what you got to say. Here's the pitch. It takes two minutes and you'll never think about it again. Download it, hit one button, close the app. That's the entire job. No manual, no settings, no tech background, nothing for you to get wrong. And then it just runs, blocking the trackers, the phishing sites, and the surveillance ads across every app on the device all day quietly, without anybody having to do anything. Its first week out, it hit number six on Apple's top downloaded productivity chart,

• 20:18Shawn Ryan?

  built by former US intelligence professionals. I'm a co-founder. Glacier, download it on the App Store. And remember, privacy isn't paranoia, it's protection.

• 20:38Shawn Ryan?

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• 21:23Shawn Ryan?

  They've also got other products like the YouCan, which uses that same system, but gives you more storage for your firearm, ammo and gear. So you can keep everything secure without sacrificing access. For a limited time, our listeners get 10% off at StopBox when you use code SRS at checkout. Head to StopBoxUSA.com and use code SRS for 10% off your entire order. After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them our show sent you.

• 22:00Shawn Ryan?

  So how did you, I mean, how did you kind of get your start into this? What caught your attention? Cause like I said, this can be a pretty dry subject, especially two years ago, when you know what I mean? When you were getting into it?

• 22:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, actually, I mean, the story starts almost six years ago at this point, maybe even more. But you know, I was at a dinner party and somebody was telling me about a program that they were working on that involved the Department of Defense or the Department of War. It's now being called buying up large amounts of commercially available information on the open market and using it to do some kind of counterterrorism work. And you know, this was something I had never heard of, right? Like I didn't know that you could just go out and broker information that showed pretty precise and granular movement of phones.

• 22:57Speaker 03

  And you know, this was a vector of surveillance that I had simply not considered, you know, like I thought I understood. You know, I was a Washington reporter. I had covered courts on and off. I knew about how law enforcement was supposed to work. The idea that there was this data set out there of the movement of hundreds of millions of devices was was kind of shocking to me. So I'm sitting there, you know, and tell me more. That's, that's an interesting program. And you know, I got some of the tail. I got some of the technical explanation that, oh, you know, it comes off these apps like weather apps and games. It comes when you opt in, your, your phone number's not in there. Your name isn't in there.

• 23:39Speaker 03

  You're known by an anonymized identifier, a string of letters and numbers. But you know, we can generally figure out who you are, right? Because where a phone is at night and where it goes during the day and where it goes back to at night is pretty good. Pretty good correlation to, to a person's real world movement and identity. Right? I'm the only person that gets up at my home in Washington DC and goes to my office in downtown Washington DC and comes home every night. Right? Like my, my fiance wakes up there, but she goes to a different office. And so it's not all that difficult to get down to people's identity in this data sets, in these data sets. And so hearing this story, I thought this was rather extraordinary

• 24:22Speaker 03

  and a kind of surveillance I just hadn't considered. And so, you know, I kept it in the back of my mind as, and I started reporting on it. And you know, the opportunity really came to delve deep into it when I was kind of a new reporter on the Justice Department and law enforcement beat back in 2020. I remembered this tip from, from a few years before, and I started digging into it. And I, and at this time, the program had matured a bit. DHS had started to use this data to do kind of internal security and, and tracking of unlawful border crossings and trying to find unlawful immigrants in the interior of the country. And had started to start using it for ordinary law enforcement, right?

• 25:05Speaker 03

  Kidnappings and, and all sorts of other things. And all doing it without a judge's supervision, without a warrant, and without most people in America knowing that this program was, was happening. And so that's when I really started to delve into it. I published my first story on the, the topic of commercial data tracking in February of 2020, and I've been reporting on it ever since.

• 25:28Shawn Ryan?

  Six years ago.

• 25:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I think, yeah, now that I think of it, I think the tip came in 2017 or 2018.

• 25:34Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Wow. How much is this advanced?

• 25:38Speaker 03

  You know, a couple of things have happened since I started working on it. I mean, you know, on the one hand, people are much more privacy aware and Apple and Google have made some changes into how much data phones can collect without people realizing. So, I mean, in the early days of the iPhone, people were putting all sorts of crazy stuff on their device and clicking, sure, you can track my GPS location and it would ping the phone every two seconds. And you know, today, Apple doesn't really like to let you, you as a developer, if you're trying to make a game or an app that does that, Apple doesn't really want you to do that, right? It wants people to know how many times an app has tracked your location. So, so now there's a big pop up that comes up every few days.

• 26:21Speaker 03

  If an app tries to do that and says, yeah, this game collected your location 5,000 times in the last few days. Are you sure you want to continue to allow this? And so a lot more people have opted out. On the other hand, there's all sorts of new ways to infer people's identity and data, right? Like there's just, none of this is stopping, right? So there's other, there's other technologies that have matured. So there's just a lot more license plate readers out there than there were five or six years ago. There's a lot more connected cars that, that are broadcasting data to car manufacturers. You're often pairing your phone with your car, right? And, and who knows what data is passing between the car and the phone and the manufacturers of different things. And then just, you know, even, even if you turn off

• 27:06Speaker 03

  all these location permissions and don't download shady apps, you're still getting served ads every day. And those ads can collect information about you. All the people that, that are, that are, that are sitting there trying to serve you ads, get a ton of information about you, even if it's not your precise GPS location. For example, if I connected to the wifi network here in your studio, someone might well know that I'm, I'm here in an IP address that, that is here in, here in Tennessee. And so there's all sorts of ways to continue to track people. And marketers aren't just giving up because these technical changes, changes have been made.

• 27:41Shawn Ryan?

  What, you know, what, what information that's being sucked out of, whether it's your phone, your TV, your vacuum, your, your vehicle, your tires, what, what concerns you the most?

• 27:56Speaker 03

  Actually, what I would say is the aggregation of all this data is what concerns me the most. Because in, in isolation, you know, a snapshot of your license plate driving down a road is just one data point. But when you correlate it with all the other things that you're generating in terms of data trails, it makes it very easy to put together a pretty holistic picture of your life. And it's not one single data set. It's not one particular technology. It's the aggregation of all these different bits and bytes of information about us, all these different data points. Some of them in government hands, some of them in commercial hands. Some of them only available if you go get a judge to give you a search warrant.

• 28:41Speaker 03

  Some of them available on the open market. But the data is out there and increasingly there's a lot of pressure to weave it together, to put it together, to sell it, to trade it, to share it with the government for public safety. All of that leads down a path in which it's very hard to exist in a modern society, even a democracy, without giving up a ton of information to parties that you don't know who you're giving it to.

• 29:06Shawn Ryan?

  So how are, are they able to?

• 29:12Shawn Ryan?

  Are they able to piece all this together? You know, when, when, when they take all these different ways to collect on you, how do they, how does it all come together into, you know, a personal profile snapshot?

• 29:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on the government agency and it depends on the mission that they've been charged with doing, right? So I think our military and our intelligence agencies are largely focused overseas. And there they're obtaining the exact same kind of data that's available on Americans. And they're doing intelligence gathering, right? They're, they're spotting and assessing and trying to recruit foreign spies. They're trying to understand the behavior of important people in, in, in foreign countries. And sometimes they're doing counterterrorism work, right? They're, they're trying to target people and often genetically. But then you, you think about an agency like the Department of Homeland Security. Well, they're actually much more inward focused, right? They're, they're trying to look at who's coming into the United States, what goods are coming into the United States? Who's applying for a visa?

• 30:11Speaker 03

  When you're here, what do you do? What's happening around this border region? Which by the way encompasses many, many parts of the United States, including a lot of our major cities. DHS has authorities within 100 miles of a border and that includes airports. That includes coastal borders and that includes the land borders. And so this is an agency that's very powerful and has a lot of authorities to do things in that zone. And is interested in understanding what happens in that zone. So that's an agency that's interested in collecting a lot more information about the American public, right? That's the agency that wants your face so that you can go quickly through the touchless TSA pre-check. It's the agency that wants to know who you're traveling with and whether you pose a threat to civil aviation.

• 30:53Speaker 03

  It's the agency that wants to know who, where visitors are going and what they're doing. And that's a perfectly legitimate mission, but they're collecting a ton of information as part of that. And then you think about local police departments, right? They're, they're charged with solving crimes and, and issuing speeding tickets and, and, you know, and just general public safety. Then they also get a piece of this information, right? They're, they're, they're thinking about, well, who's saying what on social media about, about local politicians, about the, the local school system. You know, where are cars going in the mornings and the evenings? Are they, are they traveling to downtown? Are they going to known drug trafficking spots? And so there's, it depends on who the they is.

• 31:37Speaker 03

  But in all of these cases, in all these government agencies, they're getting increasing amounts of data, much of it from commercial sources. And a lot of this is being done without a tremendous amount of thought, public conversation, or guardrails around what the limits are, what the rules are about accessing this data, when you can access this data? Who gets to access this data? Some of those conversations just aren't really happening.

• 32:05Shawn Ryan?

  Let's, what about, I mean, I wasn't even ready to go into the government yet, but what about just the civilian, like just if your basic corporation that's collecting data? I mean, do these all, what are they collecting?

• 32:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:19Shawn Ryan?

  What do they do with it? And, and when we're talking about all these different devices, how does it come together into one specific profile piece about fire and tap?

• 32:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I mean, first of all, corporations are very interested in where I live and what I do for a living and how much money I make, right? That, that helps them target products and ads to me. It helps them know, am I a consumer that's interested in a Lexus? Or am I interested in a used Nissan Versa? That's a helpful data point. So they'll, they'll pull property records based on, on where I live. They'll get email addresses, right? That's how we get most of our communication from companies these days is these things that fill up our inbox with offers. And often that's, that comes from you giving your email address to a company when you, you want to buy something. Often those companies will sell or rent your email address to, to data brokers.

• 33:12Speaker 03

  Beyond that, they're interested in your purchasing habits, right? So like, what did you buy? What, what are you interested in? They're interested in your browsing habits. So that's what cookies are. As you move around the web, they're, they're kind of trying to create a profile of you. Is this someone who's interested in sports or cars or guns or ballet or liquor? So, so it's, it's a tremendous amount of consumer information. And then, you know, if you're talking about digital devices, companies are trying to extract information off of those too, right? So when I, when I go to a store, they want to know if I'm in that store. So they'll buy geolocation data. Did I inadvertently let the Starbucks app collect my information?

• 33:55Speaker 03

  Well, now a bunch of data brokers know I was at Starbucks because I've enabled GPS on that particular app because I want the rewards when I walk in there. So, so companies are building these pretty detailed dossiers. You know, some of them are, are kind of aggregated in the hands of data brokers. Some of them are their own internal data on, on you and they're you as their customer. And sometimes they trade this information amongst themselves or sell it when they go bankrupt. So companies know a lot about you too.

• 34:23Shawn Ryan?

  So do the, do the, how do I say this? So we have different sets of data being collected from different devices, I guess is what I'm trying to say. And so do, do, do those data sets come together in a centralized location to give a better snapshot of who you are?

• 34:47Speaker 03

  So there's not, this is kind of where the primary difference between us today in the United States and in other Western countries and China is, is that no. Today, there is not one gigantic master repository of all the information about me as, as a citizen, as a consumer, sitting in a single database. It's spread out, it's dispersed. The, the Chinese model, the authoritarian model is no, you, you have to give it all to the public safety entities. And they're gonna, you know, they're gonna look at your power data to figure out if you're doing Bitcoin mining. They're gonna look at your public transit data to make sure you're not meeting with subversive people. You know, they're gonna read your text messages. That's what an authoritarian government looks like.

• 35:31Speaker 03

  Today, we don't quite have that. We have a lot of different databases spread out a lot of diff, in a lot of different places. Some of them in government hands, some of them in corporate hands. Some of them available for sale, some of them not available for sale. But the data that's collected on Westerners is not all that dissimilar from the data that's collected on, on Chinese citizens. It's just not all quite 100% weaved together in some sort of public safety portal.

• 35:59Shawn Ryan?

  Are there any, I mean, that's actually surprising. Are there any companies that are, I mean, why wouldn't in a capitalistic society would think that would be? I mean, I think, was it Elon Musk that was saying, you know, data is the next oil?

• 36:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:14Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, lots of these guys are saying that.

• 36:16Speaker 03

  So there's a lot of pressure to do exactly that, right? For a lot of different reasons. Some of it, some of it like public health and transportation planning, right? Can we pull in all this corporate data and, and all these kind of this movement data? And the, the, you know, public, people's public transit trips and their toll transponders? Can we pull all that into, into a portal to do transportation planning? And then once it's in a government database for transportation planning, well, now there's a public safety imperative. Well, you know, can we, can we detect when someone's fleeing from the authorities? Or there's a, there's an amber alert on a missing child? Maybe we should pull all that transportation data into a, a, a public safety database. So there's pressure to do a lot of that. In fact, that's a lot of what Doge was talking about when Elon Musk came into government

• 36:59Speaker 03

  is taking all these different databases that exist for different reasons and trying to merge them to give the, the central government, the federal government, a better picture of everything that's happening. Well, sometimes those databases are in different places for a reason because we don't necessarily want, you know, our medical data being used for immigration enforcement. Or we don't want our tax data to be used by immigration authorities. Or we don't want our, our toll transponders to be used to track us around without a search warrant. And so that's why a nuanced conversation about the dangers of this kind of data fusion is really important. And, and I think, you know, the Doge moment was an interesting one where there was a lot of pushback about this.

• 37:43Speaker 03

  But this is, in many ways, the difficulty of obtaining data is a privacy protection. It exists, but the privacy protection is that it's hard to get and it's hard to merge. And there's a lot of pressure now to say, well, we have this data and we have these important problems. Let's just dump it all in one, one place.

• 38:05Shawn Ryan?

  Are there any companies that are close? What about something like a Palantir?

• 38:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, Palantir is one of many companies that's out there to solve exactly this problem, right? Is to take different disparate data sets and try to extract unique insights from them. So yes, I mean, Palantir doesn't themselves buy up all the data or get it, but they exist to help government agencies go and take different databases and merge them together and say, well, now we can take your toll transponder data and combine it with the crime data. And, and I'm not saying this is happening, but this is a hypothetical project you could do and, and look for criminals who pass through, through tolls. And, and maybe we can start to look for, for not just known criminals,

• 38:54Speaker 03

  but people whose, whose driving patterns look suspicious, right? They, they take a, a one day trip from Houston to the border region. Does that mean they're, and then they turn around? Does that mean they're drug smugglers? Does that mean they're human smugglers? Maybe we should find out based just on that pattern of behavior. So, so Palantir and, and in fairness to Palantir, they're not the only ones out there, right? You could do this with Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets if you had enough computing power. But yes, there's, there's all sorts of companies that are out there and they're trying to help governments and private entities. Palantir sells to, to private companies, including some journalistic outlets, to take all the data they have and, and merge it and, and make sense of it.

• 39:35Shawn Ryan?

  How, I mean, how many of these companies are there that are out there collecting? Do you have any idea?

• 39:41Speaker 03

  That are collecting data on the global population? Probably tens of thousands. If you just look at, take one example, you know, all the ads that you see that Google serves you, that's a product called AdX. Google probably has several thousand partners that are able to serve ads and also get information off of Google's ad servers about the people they're trying to serve ads to. And that's just Google. That's just one company. You know, there's, there's a, there's a meta ad service. There's plenty of smaller ones that are, that are, that don't have a consumer facing business that no one's ever heard of. Each of those has hundreds, if not thousands of other business partners.

• 40:25Speaker 03

  And so that's just in advertising, never mind, you know, the other parts of the economy that also collect data. So there's, there's thousands, tens of thousands, maybe even more.

• 40:39Shawn Ryan?

  How are they?

• 40:42Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it's, could anybody start one of these companies?

• 40:46Speaker 03

  That's a good question. So you need a little capital, right? But to access some of this data, some of it's cheap. So you can go on, on websites. Right now, there's one called Data Raid and you can go on there with your credit card. You can get a, a sampling of data and, and there's a few others. There's some, it's called alt data. There's conferences, there's just these, these places where you can go and get mobility data. You can get internet data, you can get some point of sale data. Some of that's only a few hundred or a few thousand dollars. You know, I've, in, in the course of writing my book, I, I had a very good researcher who's essentially a private investigator. And he said, yeah, I have a contractor that can, can go look up the movement of a phone

• 41:30Speaker 03

  for you, that can, can see if there's a, anyone in there. He'll do that for $2,500 for you. You know, give them a name of a person who you want to track and he'll, he'll run the data for you. He'll see if we can find where this person goes and he'll give you a full report about it.

• 41:45Shawn Ryan?

  So you can get a full life pattern, just like that.

• 41:47Speaker 03

  I mean, again, it doesn't always work, right? Cause like some of this data is spotty. Some people, some people are more careful with their phones than others. But yeah, $2,500, this was a few years ago, maybe the prices have gone up, maybe they've gone down, I don't know. But yeah, private investigators are out there and can do this for you for, for what I think is relatively cheap. And then, you know, if you and I wanted to set up a company and start, you know, getting data on, I'll say mobility data on, you know, a state in the United States or a small country. We could probably do that for a few thousand dollars. And then, you know, if you and I wanted to start up a defense contractor and, you know, broker commercially available mobility data, so the data that comes off of your phone

• 42:29Speaker 03

  when you opt into, you know, the weather app to the government. And we wanted the whole feed of the whole world. And the contracts I've seen on this are six figures, you know? So yeah, we could buy the data for six figures and sell it at a 20% markup to the government. And that could be our business model.

• 42:47Shawn Ryan?

  So you just, it's literally just a middleman. We'll buy it from this company, sell it to the government. How, how long do they hold this data? How long before the data becomes irrelevant?

• 43:01Speaker 03

  It depends, right? Like you could be one of these companies that wanted to hold on to it forever. And, you know, keep years and years and years worth of mobility data on the whole world. Like if you wanted to pay for that storage and it was important to whatever mission you were doing, you could do it. It's, it's a matter of, do you want to pay the Amazon cloud storage bill? And do you have a customer for it? And is it still relevant? You know, most of the time data is kind of stale after a few years. Because, you know, like, are we really going to want to rewind 10 years back on someone's life? I mean, how relevant is that going to be? But I could see companies or government agencies being, saying, you know, actually, maybe we should keep a lot of this so we can look back historically if there's a reason

• 43:46Speaker 03

  to.

• 43:50Shawn Ryan?

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• 44:34Shawn Ryan?

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• 45:18Shawn Ryan?

  That's roka.com code SRS.

• 45:24Shawn Ryan?

  Let's get into, I want to get into the laws again about, you know, who, who's protecting us, if anybody? Is there anybody in the government that is, is this even a concern to them? Or, or, or the lobbying firms? Are, are they all lobbied? Are all, I mean, it seems, as time goes on, more and more and more, it just seems like all of our elected officials are owned by lobbying firms, at least from my vantage point.

• 45:53Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, certainly almost all these companies have a significant presence in Washington and, and, you know, advertising alone, never mind the data broker economy is, is probably a trillion dollar global industry. So there's a lot of financial incentives that keep the data market afloat. Not only that, but artificial intelligence companies increasingly need data to train these models that, that everyone seems very excited about and that they think will transform the economy in many ways. So data is becoming even more important than ever.

• 46:25Speaker 03

  So the answer is complicated, right? I, I think there are, there is interest in the national security space. We have seen administrations of both parties, including the Trump administration and the Biden administration, try to do things that limit the flow of data to adversarial countries. And we saw Congress on a bipartisan basis a few years ago, pass a law that said, you know, you, you know, you can't transfer certain kinds of data to Iran, North Korea, China and Russia, among others.

• 46:56Shawn Ryan?

  Why, why would they allow any of our data to go to any country at all?

• 47:01Speaker 03

  Well, that's a good question.

• 47:02Shawn Ryan?

  Even allies, Israel, any of them.

• 47:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, the honest-

• 47:06Shawn Ryan?

  Like it's spying on our own citizens.

• 47:09Speaker 03

  The honest answer is because there's so much cross-border data flows, that it would maybe break the global economy. You know, that, that the way the internet works is that sometimes you'll ping a server in Europe and download your own Google Drive file from Europe, because that's just where Google's cloud decided was the most efficient place to store your file at that given moment. And, you know, companies in these countries need to swap data, or they say they need to swap data with one another. At the same time, there are countries that have very strict data export rules. So, so Europeans have increasingly started to pass laws that say, you know, if any company's

• 47:52Speaker 03

  going to hold data on our, on our citizens, it sits in a server that sits physically in our country under our control. That's called data sovereignty. China is very, very strict. It does not allow American companies to go into China and just start collecting huge amounts of data on the Chinese population. Cause they've decided that, you know, their national security imperatives are more important than whatever commerce benefits would flow from letting that kind of data market exist. So the honest answer is these multinational corporations have made the case successfully so far to Congress, that it would disrupt commerce too much to, to do something like that in the United States.

• 48:30Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think about that?

• 48:32Speaker 03

  Well, you know, I'm a reporter, so it's, it's, it's my job to kind of just tell, tell people how this is. I think there are ways that, that Congress could solve this problem. It, it could mandate that Americans' data stay within the United States and stay on servers that are physically controlled by American companies. It could insist on that. It could make it much harder to, to transfer bulk US data to even allied countries, right? You could stop data brokers from selling to any foreigner. And, and that would at least, that would at least kind of clamp down on some of this export of data that we're seeing. But that's just a choice Congress hasn't made. And, you know, I can't make it for them. I can just tell them what the consequences are.

• 49:17Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, couldn't a foreign adversary just, I mean, buy US data from a foreign, from a different, from a foreign country?

• 49:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. And that happens all the time.

• 49:29Shawn Ryan?

  So that, so this, so the protection to North Korea and China and all this other bullshit is just, is completely obsolete.

• 49:35Speaker 03

  They have to set up a shell company in Germany. That's what they will have to do to, to get the data. Yes. And there's very little way to police that.

• 49:41Shawn Ryan?

  So it does nothing? Nothing at all?

• 49:44Speaker 03

  It adds a, it adds a layer that potentially pays for some compliance law firms that, that checks and boxes. But in, if you're asking, does it shut down the global trade in US data and the flow of it to our adversaries? I would say the answer is no.

• 50:02Shawn Ryan?

  Would you say that technology outran the law?

• 50:05Speaker 03

  Oh, 100%. In, in this instance, yes. That, you know, we stood up and created a digital society so quickly. And we simply didn't have time or didn't thoughtfully do it when it came to writing rules. And, I mean, historically, Congress has actually done a pretty good job. I mean, if you, if you look before the digital era in the 20th century, Congress, you know, made some reasonable compromises around privacy versus security. So, you know, when, when telephone wiretaps first came up and originally the Supreme Court said, yeah, well, you know, you, you don't need a warrant to wiretap people.

• 50:48Speaker 03

  You don't have an expectation of privacy because, you know, sound is traveling on a physical wire. And if someone grabs the wire and listens in on it, well, you don't need privacy. Well, Congress said, no, that's kind of crazy. That, that's not some, that's not a world we want to live in. So they, they passed a law in the 20th century that said, you know, you want to listen in on two people's private phone calls, you need to go to a judge, you need to have a reason to do so. You know, Congress did that with, with all, all other, all sorts of other data. It did it in the nineties with health data. It said, yeah, doctors can't just willy nilly give away your, your private health information. No, we're going to, we're going to control that. It did that in the seventies with credit information. Credit information is very well controlled. There's, there's a lot of laws around it.

• 51:30Speaker 03

  What it didn't do when the internet came about is do any of those things for digital information.

• 51:37Shawn Ryan?

  Geez, but it's, it kind of seems like-

• 51:43Shawn Ryan?

  It just feels like they have access to just about everything. It feels like we don't even have a Fourth Amendment anymore.

• 51:50Speaker 03

  In, in, in a lot of ways, um, you know, that's true, right? Like if, if there's data that's collected from, um, sorry. There's data that's collected from a company, a private company. Um, the Fourth Amendment no longer applies.

• 52:11Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 52:12Speaker 03

  It's because it's a commercial transaction. The government is just getting it in an, in an ordinary, it's just buying the information. Right? So you, you do need a, a warrant to go look at somebody's cellphone movement patterns. If you go to their cell carrier, right? You, you, you, the government can't go to AT&T and say, you know, give me all of Sean's movements over the last 30 days. But if you've opted into a weather app that collects your information, well, all of a sudden, uh, they don't need that warrant, right? They, the weather app can sell it to them. And so that is this loophole at the heart of our current Fourth Amendment doctrine.

• 52:54Speaker 03

  Um, that several in Congress, a, a, a very vocal bipartisan, uh, majority in Congress, or a, a, a group of people in Congress want to fix. Um, but so far the body hasn't acted.

• 53:07Shawn Ryan?

  Do you, I mean, do you think it's even, I mean, uh, maybe, maybe you don't want to talk about it. I look at our political system and we have people.

• 53:18Shawn Ryan?

  50% of these people could probably can't even figure out how to open their fucking email.

• 53:24Shawn Ryan?

  You got people dying in office. We've got, we've got people, we don't even know if they're alive. They're, they're sending out this little subliminal, subliminal proofs of life with dates on newspapers and, I mean,

• 53:38Shawn Ryan?

  this is like a foreign language to them. How would they even be, you see what I'm getting at?

• 53:44Speaker 03

  I do.

• 53:44Shawn Ryan?

  Our, our governmental structure, maybe not the structure, but the people in there are obsolete.

• 53:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and there's a lot of, there's a lot of problems with Congress. Um, and one of those problems is expertise. You know, if you are a member of Congress, you have a small staff of a few dozen. Um, you know, these young people, these are often quite young people. And sure, they're tech savvy, um, often, but they're not very well paid and they don't last very long in these jobs. And they find that, you know, working for a Congress member is great. Um, and making, you know, $60,000 in an expensive metro area just doesn't cut it. And so they'll go to a lobbying firm and, and make triple that. And so, you know, Congress in many ways is responsible, not just for not, um, passing

• 54:35Speaker 03

  laws about this, but for not even paying good staff and developing the expertise and having the in-house experience to even address these tech questions. And a lot of that goes back to, um, uh, salaries. It goes back to staffing. It goes back to resources. Um, Congress just doesn't have the capacity to think about and analyze a lot of these technical problems because they don't, they don't pay good people. Um, the people that are good, who, who want to make a career there are often sacrificing a, a lot more money than they could be making in the private sector. So, so this is an entrenched problem in our political system, that our political system is both unresponsive to many of these issues and, and not really well-equipped to deal with them.

• 55:18Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk about, um, we, we kind of talked about it in a round of way, but let's talk about the, the flow of data.

• 55:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:25Shawn Ryan?

  And how it goes, how it gets to the government, where it goes from there. Do all the agencies collaborate on it? How, how, I mean,

• 55:31Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 55:32Shawn Ryan?

  Same with foreign adversaries, foreign governments. Where does it's, you know, let's talk about the flow from start to finish.

• 55:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I can, I can talk about a couple of different data flows, right? So, so, I mean, first of all, there's your just general, um, consumer information. So your, your address, your, your voting history, you know, all that is held by data brokers. Um, your phone number, your email address. Um, and those data brokers work with the government, right? They, they sell, um, identifiers to government agencies. These, these are, these are traditional data brokers. They've been around for a long, long time. You know, many of them, um, come out of the 20th century. They've, they've been collecting people's address histories, their phone numbers, their email addresses for a long, long time. That's, that's one set of data. And that, they just have a straight up government sales arm. They sell it. Um, then there's social media data, right?

• 56:22Speaker 03

  Because the government has been very interested in understanding what people say in social spaces. Um, and, uh, you know, to get that kind of bulk data is, is kind of hard because some of these social networks are closed spaces. So, you know, Twitter, back when it was called that, was very open. You, you could kind of just read, read everything that was public. Facebook is semi-closed, right? You need to log in, you need to be friends with someone often to see what they're saying. Um, and then there's, there's kind of more purely closed, um, like group, big group chats and, and Telegram channels and, and other things that are, that are more closed. Well, there's all sorts of specialized data brokers that have sprung up to collect public social media data from places like Twitter, to collect semi-private social media data

• 57:06Speaker 03

  from places like Facebook, and to collect, um, private social media data from group chats, including some, some, you know, um, there's some very large, there were some very large ISIS-related group chats, or there were some very large, um, you know, uh, protest-related group chats in the United States. And these companies would infiltrate them under false pretenses, collect all the messages, collect the whole list of everyone that was in them and sell all that to the government. So that, that's, that's another kind of data. Then there's the mobility data, the, the cellphone movement data I was talking about. Um, in, in the thing that I heard about at a dinner party that I, that I spent a couple of years unwinding. You know, that comes originally as collected by commercial entities, um, for advertising or for analytics reasons.

• 57:49Speaker 03

  Um, and then, you know, there's a couple of ways the government gets it. Sometimes they set up, um, a shell company. So there's a defense contractor in, in the United States called Sierra Nevada Corporation. And, um, if you look, they own a very tiny little marketing company that's based, uh, you know, in the, in the Virginia area. And if you go to its website, it's called N Context. And it's got, you know, it's got a picture of, you know, the, the, the Y in Philadelphia and a cultural center in, in, you know, New York City. And it says, these are our clients and, you know, we help people obtain data and, and understand them and do marketing campaigns. But if you look on the government's procurement website, you'll see that this little marketing

• 58:32Speaker 03

  company actually has a, a contract with the intelligence community. And, um, that sure looks like a shell company to me, right? That looks like something a defense contractor set up in order to collect large amounts of this kind of commercially available advertising data and give it to parts of the government that want to do things with it. Um, and so there's just a lot of different ways, um, governments get these, these data sets. In other cases, some, some vendors have just set themselves up as contractors. They say very openly, we're a government contractor and we're going to buy data on the open market from other vendors just like us and we'll sell it, we'll sell it to the government that way. We're not going to be even sneaky about it. We're not going to pretend to have a shell company. Um, so there's, there's lots of ways it, it gets to government agencies.

• 59:17Shawn Ryan?

  Are there foreign companies within the US? Israel has some, correct?

• 59:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, there was some journalism about several Israeli companies that were doing exactly the same thing. They'd set up a fake marketing company. They were really associated with the defense contractor and they were brokering that, um, data to, to foreign governments, probably not just the Israeli government, but probably many foreign governments. We don't know their exact list of clients, but Israeli companies, um, often perform that service. And, you know, while that's the only kind of foreign one that's been identified, I am, I am certain that other countries are doing the same thing.

• 59:53Shawn Ryan?

  But we just allow them to do it.

• 59:55Speaker 03

  Well, it's not actually illegal. Um, uh, in, in our-

• 59:59Shawn Ryan?

  Why would they be so interested in what we're doing here in this country?

• 1:00:03Speaker 03

  Why would foreign countries be interested in our population? They want to, they want to understand the world. Um, they want to, um, understand how Americans move around, how they live their lives. If there's high-profile Americans in the, in those data sets, they might want to understand their patterns of movement. If there's American soldiers who've been a little bit careless and, and not locked down their phones, there, there might be some operational security, um, risks to those soldiers because adversaries might want to figure out where this unit is going. Um, and they may want to straight up do espionage, right? They may want to recruit people. They may want to know where the person who works at the GM factory goes after work and, and, uh, whether they can send, uh, you know, an intelligence officer there to convince

• 1:00:48Speaker 03

  them to give, give, you know, critical infrastructure, critical information. So there's, there's all sorts of reasons why a foreign government might be interested in our data.

• 1:00:57Shawn Ryan?

  Have you ever purchased any of these data sets?

• 1:01:00Speaker 03

  Um, I have used tools that, uh, let me look at social media data. I've, um, I've sometimes built little scrapers to scrape open web data. I've had people show me demos of some of the tools that the governments used. Um, and I, when trying to write this book, did ask, um, one of the private investigator who was willing to run people for $2,500. I asked him to look up whether I was in the data and whether some of the CEOs of these data brokers were in, uh, the data, but I didn't actually pay him for it. He, he was willing to do it for free. So I've never, I've never outright purchased data, but I know that some journalists have, or they've

• 1:01:45Speaker 03

  obtained it. Uh, the New York Times did a whole series on what you could tell from location data. And in that case, I don't think they bought it, but they, they got a huge leak of data and they were able to show what commercially available data was out there. And, and other journalists do buy data and they're usually transparent about it when they do.

• 1:02:02Shawn Ryan?

  It's, so it's fairly, it's pretty simple.

• 1:02:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, there's all sorts of data sets out there. And then, you know, some of these, um, some of these data brokers will actually, you know, give reporters accounts because it's meant for investigators. It's meant to help, um, you know, understand the world better. And from their point of view, um, they're collecting data that they're legally allowed to collect and that they're legally allowed to sell as a service. And investigative journalists are just like anyone else. They're trying to understand the world. They're trying to do stories. Um, and some of this data might be valuable. So there's data brokers that have trade data and some internet data, um, and all, and, and will often provide very useful, um, uh, accounts to journalists and to do very important information, um, and stories in the public interest. And, you know, often we usually disclose when

• 1:02:49Speaker 03

  we do that in our stories. Um, in fact, we almost always disclose when we do that, but it, it's a world that also encompasses us as investigators for sure.

• 1:02:58Shawn Ryan?

  What, I mean, what does it look like? Is it nice and organized? I mean, what does the data set look like? Is it easy to navigate?

• 1:03:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, it depends on the tool and it depends on the data set, right? So sometimes you get what's called unstructured data, which is just a giant spreadsheet and you are responsible for, for figuring out how to make sense of it. And, you know, in the old days, this was something I struggled with, but now that AI can, can really help process data better, um, it's a lot easier for the ordinary person to work with unstructured data. And then sometimes these vendors just build a tool, right? Like it's just, it's like any old, um, subscription service that you, you could just log in, you do a search or it's just like Google Maps. You'll, you can draw a circle or you can draw a geofence and you can watch phones move around or you can, um, do a search term for what people

• 1:03:47Speaker 03

  are saying on social media. So it's a very slick interface, just like any other web app that you might, you might, you might go get.

• 1:03:57Shawn Ryan?

  When it's bought, is it duplicated or can you own, let me, let me?

• 1:04:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. Can you?

• 1:04:03Shawn Ryan?

  I, I basically, and I, I should probably wait until we get into all the devices that are tracking you and sucking on the information out. But, um, you know, probably ask it again, but can you purchase your own data back?

• 1:04:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:16Shawn Ryan?

  Or is it just a duplicate of it?

• 1:04:19Speaker 03

  Um, so some of these vendors will sell you the raw data, right? They'll just be like, here's a spreadsheet of, or, or, you know, a giant file of, of all the phones in the world and you can do whatever you want with it. That, that's our commercial agreement. So that, that's one business model and others will say, no, you can't just take out all the data. That's our, that's our secret sauce, right? But you can do the searches on our platform, you know, you can, and you can export the results of your search, but you're not just going to get all the data that we have. So there's different models of, of data brokering and, and some, some build the slick interface and the tool and they'll sell access to it for $1,500, uh, a, a year or whatever. And some of them will just say, no, here's the raw data. You do what you want with it. We're just, we're just

• 1:05:04Speaker 03

  a pass through. You pay us, you visualize it the way you want. So there can be different arrangements.

• 1:05:09Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha. Well, Byron, let's take a quick break.

• 1:05:12Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:05:15Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:08:07Shawn Ryan?

  We're back from the break. I got a hot question for you before we move on.

• 1:08:11Speaker 03

  All right. Hot question.

• 1:08:12Shawn Ryan?

  Here we go. So Byron, we had Chris Beck on the show, former SEAL Team Six guy who spent years around advanced military R and D. He told us something that went insanely viral. If you take the battery out of your phone, I can still listen to you. He was talking about technology developed for national security applications. You've spent years investigating where surveillance technology has gone since then. So if I shut my phone off today or leave it home entirely, can I still be tracked? And what is it giving away?

• 1:08:46Speaker 03

  That's a good question. So unfortunately phones these days, you can't even take the battery out of them. Um, the honest answer is I don't know. I don't know what you can, what, what can happen if the phone is off. Certainly the phone being off is a better privacy protection than the phone being on. Um, but is there something very tricky governments can do to, uh, make phones seem to be off when they're not? That's entirely possible. I don't know the answer. Leaving your phone behind, again, that reduces the vector of tracking you through your phone. But of course, as we've been talking about, there's all sorts of other vectors to track you, right? There's Ring cameras mounted on all these houses now. There's license plate readers that will track your car. There's the toll

• 1:09:30Speaker 03

  transponder that you use when you go through a toll now. So, um, leaving your phone behind is not a, a way to evade surveillance. It's just a way to reduce some kinds of surveillance.

• 1:09:43Shawn Ryan?

  Here's some true or false questions.

• 1:09:44Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:09:46Shawn Ryan?

  My phone can crack, can track me while, excuse me, my phone tracks me with location services off. True or false?

• 1:09:54Speaker 03

  Um, if the developers are following the rules, that's false. Um, of course, there's very little way for the average person to know if the developers are following the rules.

• 1:10:06Shawn Ryan?

  Airplane mode protects me.

• 1:10:09Speaker 03

  Uh, I'm not sure airplane mode even protects airplanes. So, uh, I'm not, I'm not sure, not sure what it does.

• 1:10:17Shawn Ryan?

  Powering off the phone protects me.

• 1:10:19Speaker 03

  Actually, that's true. And, um, and, and for a kind of a, kind of a strange reason that a lot of even like very advanced malware. So if, if a country was to try to put a virus on your phone, actually one of the best defenses against that is to turn your phone on and off every once in a while. And yes, in theory, turning the phone off should drastically reduce the amount of data that comes off of it. Now again, I, I can't say for sure that there aren't very clever pieces of malware that, that can do things when the phone is off. But, um, in general, turning the phone off should offer some privacy protection. That's true.

• 1:10:55Shawn Ryan?

  A Faraday bag actually works.

• 1:10:58Speaker 03

  I don't know. I've, I've seen some tests that show yes, and I've seen some tests that show no. Um, in theory, a well-designed Faraday bag, uh, should prevent signals from coming off of an electronic device. I don't know how well-designed the ones you get on Amazon are.

• 1:11:14Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm. All right. So.

• 1:11:19Shawn Ryan?

  Kind of a random thing here, but I heard you talking about something about you have something going on with UPS or USPS, excuse me.

• 1:11:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, a few years ago, I got interested in how all sorts of government agencies handle your data, including the postal service. And, you know, it kind of came to my attention that the postal service was in the process of making a pretty aggressive push to collect all sorts of like your like electronic information, your phone number, right? So when you sign up for informed delivery or you fill out a change of address form, now you're giving the postal service your digital identifiers, including your email and often your phone number. And now they're very aggressive in wanting a receipt from you. You want it by email, you want it by text. So they seem to be collecting digital identifiers while at the same time, the post office is

• 1:12:13Speaker 03

  the government agency that knows where you live. And so it seemed to me this was a government agency that, you know, knew a lot about your physical real world life and then was also kind of branching into trying to learn about your digital life, or at the very least linking them. And so I asked some very basic questions of them like, hey, can you give me all the privacy documents that are required by a law from the 1970s known as the Privacy Act that are supposed to be public anyway? And they stonewalled me for three years.

• 1:12:46Shawn Ryan?

  Three years?

• 1:12:47Speaker 03

  And so I had to hire lawyers. I'm being represented by the Harvard Cyber Law Clinic, but we brought suit in federal court in Washington DC to try to force the postal service to turn over the most basic information about how it handles our data.

• 1:13:03Shawn Ryan?

  Why do you think they're guarding it?

• 1:13:04Speaker 03

  I have no idea. I couldn't tell you if it's just that they didn't do a very good job in writing these documents, that they don't have them, or if there's something they don't want people to know. I don't know the answer. I'm looking forward to getting the documents back.

• 1:13:19Shawn Ryan?

  How are they? You had mentioned there's a digital component to the, how are they doing that through the mail?

• 1:13:27Speaker 03

  Well, just, just when you sign up to, to change your address or to get kind of the scan of your, of your mail, they often ask, well, how do we contact you electronically? Do you want to buy email? Do you want to buy phone? And, you know, that, that capability of linking someone's online identity with their physical real world location is a very difficult problem in marketing a lot of the time. You know, people change addresses, they, they give fake, fake addresses, they, you know, they're not always honest with corporate companies, but you know, you do want your tax returns, you do want your property tax bill. So you're usually, you're usually gonna, the post office is gonna know where you are.

• 1:14:09Speaker 03

  And so I just got curious, well, what are they doing with all this digital information now that they also know a lot about your physical world location? It was at the very least a question worth asking of a government agency with a lot of data, and I didn't get an answer without filing a lawsuit.

• 1:14:24Shawn Ryan?

  Geez. Geez, and that's coming up, right?

• 1:14:28Speaker 03

  We'll see what they give back.

• 1:14:30Shawn Ryan?

  Sure, they'll get right on it. You know, I want to go down device to device, you know, that people have in their homes and see what you can tell us about it. But, you know, a big question that everybody's mind, and some people say yes, some people say no. Are our phones listening to our conversations, whether you're actually on the phone or off the phone? Everybody's, everybody's brought up, I want to buy means of control. And then the ad pops up or, you know, whatever it is, you know, it just a passing conversation.

• 1:15:12Shawn Ryan?

  It's like, holy shit, there it is, five minutes later. And then, no, we're not listening. Oh, and sure, it's just a coincidence, this has happened 20 times this week.

• 1:15:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a great question. I've never seen any evidence that I am comfortable reporting here on, you know, on your show that says that they're doing it. But as you say, like, an awful lot of people experience those coincidences, including me. I mean, one, the other day, I got a weird, you know, text message saying, hey, like, we know you, you, you just put, I put solar panels on my roof and a friend was asking if I liked it. I got a text message saying like, hey, recommend a friend and get, you know, 50%, you know, $750 back on, on your solar panel install. And I'm like, well, that's weird.

• 1:16:07Speaker 03

  That's really weird timing, you know? So, I mean, I think if phones were listening 24/7, there'd be a lot of data coming off of them and, and researchers would be able to figure it out. But, you know, is there some interesting technical way where they, where phones could listen for a keyword? And then that, that sends a piece of information back? I don't know, I've never seen evidence of it, but as you say, a lot of people have really weird experiences.

• 1:16:32Shawn Ryan?

  So let's go, let's just go through a lot of devices that average Americans have in their home every day and outside of their home that is, that is collecting a data set on them.

• 1:16:47Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:16:48Shawn Ryan?

  TVs.

• 1:16:49Speaker 03

  Well, modern smart TVs really want to know what you watch. And so a lot of them have built in sort of screen capture technology that are trying to figure out what you're watching, when you're watching it, because they want to understand your preferences. And some of that helps subsidize the TV. That's why TVs are kind of cheap now and they used to be much more expensive. So, yes, TVs are data collection machines. You know, I think some people are even starting to connect cameras to them. I'm sure there's some, some stuff you could do about detecting whether people are in the living room or watching ads at the time when they're served. I don't know that that's being done, but it's, it's certainly a possibility and not

• 1:17:32Speaker 03

  something that marketers would be particularly ashamed from, dissuaded from trying.

• 1:17:37Shawn Ryan?

  And so you think that, you're saying that TVs are so cheap now because it's become the, the, the major sale is you, the person, the human being.

• 1:17:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:49Shawn Ryan?

  Your data is being sold from the TV companies.

• 1:17:51Speaker 03

  I think, yes, I think anytime a company can kind of extract a data stream, that can help subsidize a product, you know? Maybe it just ends up subsidizing their executives' bottom line, but if you're in a competitive market where there's a lot of vendors and you're able to monetize the customer in some additional way, including collecting data about them, then yeah, like, yes, that can help subsidize the, the cost of the product.

• 1:18:17Shawn Ryan?

  How about robot vacuums?

• 1:18:19Speaker 03

  It's a great question. I don't know. I mean, I'm sure, so there, there have been some scandals about them taking pictures, including, you know, some really horrific stuff like catching people on the toilet. And, and humans were like reviewing these data sets for machine learning. Now, they're not exactly selling that, but that's a, that's an invasive privacy violation if there's, you know, contractors to a robot company that are watching people move around their house. And I'm sure that's disclosed somewhere on page, you know, 25 of the 100-page privacy policy. But, so yes, there's cameras on some of them. They certainly, some of them map your house. I had a pretty dumb one for a while, like, it would just go until it hit a wall and

• 1:19:04Speaker 03

  it, it didn't really do anything beyond that. But I think it depends on the vacuum and I don't know what's happening with that data, to be honest.

• 1:19:12Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, didn't, didn't one company, didn't one just get busted or sell it to China?

• 1:19:17Speaker 03

  I mean, I think some of these are Chinese owned, so the data flows to China, for sure.

• 1:19:23Shawn Ryan?

  Why, I mean, why would China want to know the layout of my house?

• 1:19:26Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, it's hard to, they probably don't want to know the layout of everyone's houses, but if, you know, if, if in a, in a world in which you were a valuable person and they needed to do an intelligence operation, or they wanted to know how many people were in your house, or, you know, some, again, some of these vacuums have cameras and can see, like, have robot vision. I can't see a good reason why you would put a microphone on a robot vacuum, but I can't tell you that there aren't any with microphones. So, yeah, I mean, you know, a foreign government might potentially find some use for a house layout or information about who's in the house at a given time if, if a unique person were valuable to that government.

• 1:20:10Shawn Ryan?

  How about smart speakers? Alexa, all these kind of things.

• 1:20:15Speaker 03

  I mean, smart speakers are, obviously, they have the potential to listen in. You know, these companies swear that they're not doing so, and most of them are American companies.

• 1:20:27Shawn Ryan?

  We swear.

• 1:20:29Speaker 03

  If they're promising that, you know, I mean, there's some sort of enforceable consumer right there, but, you know, sometimes they get triggered accidentally, right? Certainly, everything you say to it is collectible and used for training a new AI system. And of course, these devices, you know, forget corporate malfeasance, like, you are loading your house up with microphones and if somebody wants to hack that device, like, how good is the cybersecurity on it? So could, could somebody, whether it's just a criminal, listening in for, for information about your finances or your banking account numbers or, or something like that, or it's a nation state and they want to, to do something, whatever it is, recruit you as a spy, blackmail

• 1:21:13Speaker 03

  you, I don't know. But certainly, smart speakers and anything with a microphone is a, is a vector for that kind of, you know, that kind of hacking.

• 1:21:21Shawn Ryan?

  Do you have smart speakers in your house?

• 1:21:23Speaker 03

  I don't. Although I do have a couple of devices that like have the capability, I turn them off. But again, like, it's the same risk, right? Like, it's, it's, you know, like my, my smart thermostat, which I love, by the way, because when I forget to turn off my thermostat, I can, I can, you know, save on my energy bill when I'm on vacation. But, you know, that has a microphone in it. I don't use it, I've turned off the microphone, but like, could a, could a hacker break into it and turn it on? Could a nation state? Maybe. And, and is that a good thing? I don't know.

• 1:22:00Shawn Ryan?

  Retail and grocery stores tracking everything you buy through membership and loyalty cards.

• 1:22:05Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, that's happening. And and not just that, they're often trading it or selling it with data brokers, right? Because they, you know, they get your information, they get your phone number, they get your, you know, they get your email address, they may get your address. So, yeah, that information gets packaged up and sold and and and the grocery store says, hey, Coke, here's a here's a consumer who bought Coke. Hey, you know, hey, Tysons, here's someone who likes turkey. That absolutely, that's a robust data market. And and when you sign up for those loyalty programs, you are you're getting a discount in exchange for for for data collection.

• 1:22:39Shawn Ryan?

  That's why you need burner numbers.

• 1:22:43Shawn Ryan?

  Home Depot. Scan driver's license, scans your driver's license every time you return something. What are they doing with that?

• 1:22:51Speaker 03

  I have no idea. I assume there's some problem with returns and theft, and it's probably an anti-fraud measure. But again, collecting your license is probably the best form of identity out there, right? Like, I suppose you could have a fake ID and generations of college students have, but most people, when asked for their ID, you know, most adults who have nothing to hide, hand that right over. And, yeah, I mean, bars and and and retail outlets that scan it are are almost certainly collecting it and saving it for some reason.

• 1:23:25Shawn Ryan?

  Tires on your car. I did not know this.

• 1:23:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. So they're not collecting data per se, but they are a vector for surveillance. And and of all the people, you know, all my friends that read the book and and even some some strangers, the one thing they came away from it was, oh, my car tires? I can be surveilled through those? And the answer is yes, because when you start up your car in the morning and you see that pressure sensor reading, right? Like, oh, you have low pressure, it's a cold day, you need to go to the gas station and fill it up. That is a little radio transmitter. It's a little radio transmitter that sits inside the tire and measures the tire pressure, and it sends a radio transmission to your car's central computer.

• 1:24:08Speaker 03

  The problem is that that tire has a unique number, and that's how your computer knows to to pair with that tire. And that tire is just screaming that number all the time as you drive down the road. It's just constantly broadcasting a signal that says, I'm at your tire number 1234567. And if you put up little sensors along the highway or along roadways, and there are companies that have done this, or you're the military and you want a little trigger sensor when somebody drives down a certain road and you already know their tire pressure, you can put a little sensor at the end of that road that will cue you when someone drives by. And so and and this, this is a good way to identify cars even after they've swapped license plates, right?

• 1:24:53Speaker 03

  Because you swap plates, but the tire, you're probably not going to remember to swap your tire pressure sensor. So, yes, tire pressures are a vector for surveillance. Are they a serious one that you should worry about? No. But it's an example of a carelessly engineered technology that inadvertently turned into a surveillance device.

• 1:25:11Shawn Ryan?

  Smart lighting.

• 1:25:13Speaker 03

  By the way, I love my smart lighting.

• 1:25:17Speaker 03

  I I don't know what that's collecting, but it's it's, I mean, it's certainly creating a log, at least locally and probably on some company's server somewhere, of when you're home, when you turn on the lights, if it can detect motion. I think now some of these new smart lighting systems have realized that they can, they can act as motion sensors and motion detectors, and so that that can trigger. So that's, that's, that's another clue to your patterns and your routines as a, as a person that lives in a house, right? So when you turn on the light, when you turn off the light. In the old days, the light bulb didn't log that, but today, a smart light bulb does log that, and now it knows you're home.

• 1:25:59Shawn Ryan?

  You know, here's another one that I thought was interesting is, you know, your vehicle.

• 1:26:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. Cars, connected cars, like beyond the license plate readers, these car companies are becoming aggressive collectors of data. And I even detail in my book, my attempts a few years ago to try to go buy a car without without a data connection. Back then, it was possible.

• 1:26:23Speaker 03

  You could get one without a cellular chip, and it wouldn't, my my 2021 car doesn't broadcast my location to anyone. There's not even a possibility, it doesn't have the chip. I don't know, I haven't bought a car in a few years, but I think a lot of them just have the cell chip built in, whether you turn it in or not. And of course, they all push this service. Oh, you know, roadside assistance and emergency, emergency assistance will give you the first year free. Well, when you sign up for that first year free, they're usually getting your location data for that whole year, right? Like, you're agreeing somewhere in those terms of service to let them collect information about where you go, how hard you brake sometimes, they're giving it to insurance companies. In some instances, they're cooperating with law enforcement.

• 1:27:05Speaker 03

  In some instances, they're just straight up selling it to data brokers, just like data brokers are existing to buy phone data, they're existing to buy car data.

• 1:27:15Speaker 03

  So, yeah, connected cars, it's hard to escape them these days.

• 1:27:18Shawn Ryan?

  And they're selling it to insurance brokers.

• 1:27:20Speaker 03

  Insurance, right? You you break, you break hard too many times, you might not even know, but your insurance company knows, and and and they're collecting data off the car, and all of a sudden, your rate goes up.

• 1:27:31Shawn Ryan?

  How about health wearables?

• 1:27:33Speaker 03

  Oh, health wearables collect tons of data, and I'm sitting here wearing an Oura ring, and, you know, I've, I've made the cost benefit analysis that, you know, knowing how my body responds to stress and and and and kind of cataloging whether I'm getting adequate sleep and nutrition is worth the privacy risk. But I can imagine this would be a tremendous benefit to an intelligence agency, right? If you were trying to recruit somebody and you were looking for a maximum moment of either you've assessed that you should approach them when they're at their most relaxed, well, you can tell that from this, or or when they're at their most stressed, you can tell that from this, too. So this kind of psychological and and and psychographic data that comes off of these things is really, really valuable.

• 1:28:18Speaker 03

  And, you know, these companies swear that they're not selling it, and I have read the privacy policy for them, but they can't swear that a law enforcement demand or a national security letter won't come in from a government agency in whatever country they're based. And they can't swear that a hacker can't get access to their systems and use it for some kind of nefarious purpose. So, yes, these are privacy risks, and like everything, people have to decide whether they're worth it or not.

• 1:28:44Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I think, you know, when it comes to the privacy disclosures and all the paperwork, well, I just, one thing I started doing is just running it through AI to summarize it.

• 1:28:54Speaker 03

  And AI is good for that, actually.

• 1:28:56Shawn Ryan?

  But it kind of, it tells you all the loopholes.

• 1:29:00Speaker 03

  It does. And I will say that, you know, a lot of people think that, you know, there's sneaky stuff happening, and there is sneaky stuff happening on the internet. But but most Western companies organized in a, in a rule of law country, they will tell you somewhere vaguely in the privacy policy what they're doing. They may not be super explicit about it, but it's probably in there somewhere, and they're just counting on you not reading it.

• 1:29:24Shawn Ryan?

  And then, you know, the big topic of the day, flock cameras. What do you know about these?

• 1:29:33Speaker 03

  Well, it's interesting, because the public is really fixated on flock, but these have been around for ages, and private companies have been doing this for ages. And, you know, I don't know if flock's the biggest, but they, until recently, they were not the biggest. There was, there's several other companies that do the exact same thing. There's one called Vigilant, there's a company called Recor, there's a company called Genoptic, there's a company called Axon, there's a dozen of these license plate reader companies, and they have put up cameras all over the United States and indeed all over the world, and they're collecting your location as you move around the world in your car.

• 1:30:13Speaker 03

  And, you know, it's, it's kind of interesting to see the privacy backlash from people that are kind of waking up to to this. And it's, you know, it's, it's been a very interesting grassroots movement to see, but flock is really just one company among many. And I think we're even seeing companies who have, or, sorry, police departments or towns or cities that have put in flock, and then people get mad about it, they drop flock and they just put in a different vendor because they think, oh, it's just a PR problem with flock. Well, the real problem is the license plate reader, right? Because the license plate reader is a system that's designed to collect the location of cars.

• 1:30:53Speaker 03

  And, you know, one or two pings of a car might not tell you an awful lot about them. Like, maybe if you put them on a, on an overpass and a, and a stolen car drives by, maybe that's a good use of it. But increasingly, they're everywhere, and they're networked together, right? So these, these companies offer the service of saying, hey, little town in Tennessee or little town in Arkansas, put these cameras in, and they're going to become part of a nationwide sharing network where all of the law enforcement agencies all around the country are going to be able to see all the cars that pass through your little town. And, you know, there's a ton of pressure from law enforcement for these, these towns to opt into this.

• 1:31:35Speaker 03

  So what they're essentially creating is several privately owned networks of surveillance systems that all government agencies all across the country have access to and can do whatever they want with in many instances.

• 1:31:52Shawn Ryan?

  You know,

• 1:31:56Shawn Ryan?

  There's been a saying that go, it's been going around for a long time and it makes sense to me. You know, if, especially when it comes to applications, if the application is free, then you are the product.

• 1:32:08Speaker 03

  Indeed.

• 1:32:08Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know if that's necessarily even true anymore. It seems like a lot of the stuff that we're paying for.

• 1:32:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:16Shawn Ryan?

  They're double dipping here.

• 1:32:18Speaker 03

  They are, and then there are certainly some things that are genuinely free that you aren't the product, right? Often created by nonprofit organizations. So Signal, the popular messaging app, is free and is, you know, a tremendously valuable privacy tool. It's an encrypted way to communicate. It's not the only encrypted way to communicate, but, um, so, well, that's not a hard and fast rule. I do think there is a wisdom to it because a lot of this data collection, at least originally, was driven by the fact that people were either reluctant to pay for things online because they were afraid of, you know, giving their credit card information on the internet in the nineties, or just general consumer reluctance to pay for things, right? Why pay for something when I can get it for free?

• 1:33:01Speaker 03

  Um, so there is wisdom to the fact that this entire norm and market that we hand over our data constantly to entities that we barely even think about all the time, that probably did come about, um, because there was some consumer reluctance to pay, um, and that was the only way to make money. Um, but I think you're right, that increasingly even very expensive things that you pay for are trying to monetize you, right? You see car companies, you know, they'll sell you a, a car that's very, very expensive and then they'll say, yeah, pay us, uh, 15 bucks a month if you want to turn the heated seats on. You know, so I, I think you're right, right? They're, they're, they're double dipping and they see, um, add-ons and features and recurring

• 1:33:43Speaker 03

  subscription revenue as, as a way, uh, to, to pad the bottom line and squeeze a little bit more money out of the consumer.

• 1:33:49Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, do you think there's a world where they have to pay us for our privacy data?

• 1:33:57Speaker 03

  Well, you know, that's something that a lot of people have talked about and, um, I just don't think at the end of the day, it's the economics workout for the individual, right? Cause your data might be worth a few bucks to a company, um, but in the aggregate it's worth lots. And, and the problem is, you know, you probably don't even want the few bucks for the hassle that it will, will cost. Um, but in the aggregate, the data market is worth billions, if not trillions. And so it's a hard problem to solve. Um, you know, I have, there have been some experiments in trying to, trying to do that. Um, there are increasingly, you know, companies that are saying, you know, we're not, we're just not going to do this, we're, we're going to be a subscription service and we're not going to collect your data.

• 1:34:41Speaker 03

  That's one possible business model, but in general, I think it's, I think it's a really hard problem to kind of return the money to the consumer.

• 1:34:52Speaker 03

  The, probably the better model, probably the better way forward is for there just to be a, a more straightforward bargain between the consumer and the maker of the product, that I pay you money and you give me a service and you don't collect data from me.

• 1:35:05Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh, uh huh. I mean, no, no, no, it just seemed, you know, you pay Costco $200 a, a year or whatever it is to get a membership and they collect everything that you ever buy and, and no discounts. You know, and it, it just, all that, it's just,

• 1:35:24Shawn Ryan?

  it does seem to be coming to a head. People are waking up to this, they're getting pissed.

• 1:35:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think so. And I, I think you're seeing, you know, a lot of current outrage right now over this idea of individualized or surveillance pricing, right? You are seeing, um, you're seeing regulators being interested in it. You're seeing at least, um, some states saying, well, you're going to do that. At the very least, you need to disclose you're charging people different prices. Um, but yeah, this is, this is the world we're living in because there's so much data out there and there's an increasing amount of ability to process it. And so when you have, you know, big, powerful computers and artificial intelligence and a hundred data points on a consumer, you can make a judgment about, hey, this is what they're willing to pay and I'm going to try to charge them the max.

• 1:36:09Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, can you, can you, can you just go a little bit more into the surveillance pricing? Cause this is, this is new to pretty much everybody and.

• 1:36:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, well, I mean, in a way.

• 1:36:23Shawn Ryan?

  How exactly is it gonna work?

• 1:36:25Speaker 03

  I, I mean, I don't think we know all the answers, but in a way, I mean, some of it's already here. For example, I'm a big fan of the New York Times home delivery. You know, I, I, your, your listeners may, may think what they will about the New York Times, but I like getting up in the morning, on a Sunday morning and reading the physical newspaper over coffee and, and eating some eggs. Um, but I don't like it as much as they're, what they want to charge. I, I don't like it as much sticker price. So, you know, I'm willing to pay a certain amount and then every few months the Times emails me and says, oh, your introductory discount on home delivery is about to end. And I go right into the website and I press cancel. And after I press cancel, a screen pops up and says, oh, would you, would you consider sticking around at the same rate for another 36 weeks?

• 1:37:10Speaker 03

  And I click yes. So, so in a way, it's just taking what's already there. And, and I think we've all experienced that, right? We've all tried to cancel something and then cable or some subscription service and then they throw an offer at you, oh, would you stay for half off? Would you stay for a quarter off? Um, so it's an extension of that, right? It's an extension of the idea that like, they're already kind of doing this. They're already offering some discounts to keep you paying for certain services. What if we could just model it on the front end, right? What if we could just, before you're even our customer, we could, we could take all the data we know about you, we could take your socioeconomic class, we could take how much you typically spend in a month off your credit card statement, we could take, you know, could make some inferences about where you

• 1:37:52Speaker 03

  work based on the, all sorts of data points that we have on you. Maybe we just scrape LinkedIn and we know where you work. I don't know. And we can estimate how much you as a consumer might be willing to pay for that, you know, that service or even something as petty as, you know, that produce at the grocery store. I mean, that is one possible future that we're looking at because of the amount of data that, that companies have and that we all generate every day.

• 1:38:17Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, how, do you think it's inevitable? This is gonna happen?

• 1:38:21Speaker 03

  Well, I don't think anything's inevitable, right? Like we, um, we as voters and consumers get to make choices about this stuff, including about our technology and about what stores we're willing to patronize. So if, you know, if enough consumers don't like this stuff and they don't want to participate in an economy where they're charged different amounts of money based on, um, you know, what kind of data companies collect on us, um, then I, I don't think we're going to live in that future. If however, people are willing to tolerate it and, and some people may even willingly opt in, right? You know, some companies may, to avoid the thorny problem, say like, turn over all the information to us and you'll get tons of discounts. We may well have, live in that world. It, it all depends on what people are willing to tolerate.

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• 1:40:06Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk about how we can take control back a little bit. I mean, we, we've talked about all, not all, a lot of the ways that these companies are collecting on us. We've talked about the flow of data, how it gets into the government's hands, what the marketers do with it, what the devices are, surveillance pricing, all this stuff. What, what is it, what are things that people can do to kind of shield themselves from the invasiveness?

• 1:40:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a, it's a hard question. Um, you know, if you want to live a normal life and you want to have a phone and you want to go about your day and you, you know, you don't want to live in a, in the woods and a self-sufficient, um, plot of land where you're, you know, collecting rainwater and, and using your own solar panels, then it's, it's hard to completely opt out of data collection. I, I think about it as, um, I think about it a couple of ways. One, I do think the content of our communications and the content of our important documents and the content of our emails, um, the, the stuff we, the communications and the, the documents we write and keep, I think a lot of that's very important to keep private. And there are plenty of ways to do that.

• 1:41:12Speaker 03

  Um, there are, I, I basically think you should encrypt your communications, your emails, your documents, um, your files as much as possible. And you can do that through, um, a feature built into the Apple phone called advanced data protection. Um, there are some, you know, there are some third-party encryption platforms out there, including Proton Mail, which has, um, basically a, an encrypted email, uh, Tutanova, Tutanota is one. There's, there's a lot of these, um, encrypted drive providers, um, or encrypted email providers. There's encrypted communications platforms, um, like Signal, like the Glacier platform that you're developing and working on, um, like even WhatsApp. WhatsApp is owned by Meta.

• 1:41:55Speaker 03

  It collects a lot of information about who you are and who you talk to, but actually the, the communication is, is private. Meta can't see it. Um, Apple's iMessage is, is pretty well encrypted. Um, so keeping the, the content of your communications is, and, and the content of your files private is probably the most basic thing you can do and, and is, isn't so hard. Um, but might take a little bit of, of work. Um, second, you can be careful about your permissions, right? Like you don't have to let every single app have your location. You don't have to let Uber and DoorDash have your location. You can type every time you want an Uber where you are, or you can drop the little pin on the map, or you can just say, you know, today I'm at this address and I want delivery.

• 1:42:38Speaker 03

  And sure, they'll store it, um, but it's better than giving this technical backend access to your GPS location. So turn some of that stuff off and, and don't let every app that asks have access to your contacts and your calendar and your photo roll. Like they don't need all that. They, a lot of them work just fine without turning that stuff on. So, you know, our device manufacturers have, have actually, you know, done a good job of trying to give you some control over what things you do and don't want to share. And I would advise you whenever possible to not check those things. Um, and, and often the apps that want them work just fine without them.

• 1:43:19Speaker 03

  There's other things you can do, right? Like, there are, as you say, there are now services that offer burner phone numbers. There are services that offer privacy-preserving email accounts, fake email accounts that will funnel to your real email accounts. You don't have to give all these retailers your real email. You can give them a proxy email. You can give them a proxy phone number that when they start to spam you, you can disconnect and make go away. So that's a privacy protection that you can build in. You know, VPNs are controversial. I think they can be useful in some instances, but you also have to trust your VPN provider, right? Because you're just moving the layer of trust from your telecom or your internet service

• 1:44:02Speaker 03

  provider, which is usually a large company with a lot of good lawyers, to some kind of shady overseas business that you don't know much about. So do be careful. Like, there are reputable VPNs, and there are not reputable ones, and they change all the time, and they merge, and they go out of business. They can be helpful for privacy, set upright and used correctly in the right circumstance, or they can be a privacy disaster.

• 1:44:25Shawn Ryan?

  That is one thing I learned when we were building Glacier with the VPN stuff, is that you have all these foreign entities, Chinese companies, Russian companies, Israeli companies, and it's a conglomerate that owns a multitude of VPN companies that are just constantly collecting.

• 1:44:47Speaker 03

  Right. And again, you know, using a shady VPN might be better than connecting to the Chinese telecom network while you're traveling through China, but is it really good? Is it, are they really more trustworthy than whoever your cellphone provider is? I would do some soul-searching, because all you're doing when you're putting a VPN on your phone is moving which company can see your internet traffic. Is it your cell provider that you want to see your phone traffic? Or is it this company you've never heard of that's, you know, in India or Malaysia or wherever? So I would think carefully about it, but they can be useful in certain circumstances.

• 1:45:30Speaker 03

  And there's actually VPNs that will take cash from you and don't create linkages back to your real-world identity. That can be valuable, depending on what you're trying to do. But yeah, I mean, it's hard, but there are some ways to get some balance in your life.

• 1:45:48Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think about the secure DNS?

• 1:45:51Speaker 03

  I have not looked deeply into secure DNS. You know, I know there are some, so basically DNS is the phone book of the internet for your listeners. So when you type in google.com, that's actually meaningless to the machine. What it needs to know is what IP address do I need to send you to? So do I need to send your IP address, whatever that is? That looks something like 1.92.4.194, or something like that. We're going to send you to some web address. DNS is how the computer looks up. Where is google.com in the numbers that I know how to route you? And yes, there have been data brokers that have gone in there, and they've said, "Oh,

• 1:46:35Speaker 03

  well, we can learn about where people are going on the internet based on their DNS queries. We can set up a DNS server, and they'll send all their traffic, and we know that they're going to Google, or we know they're going to this." I don't know a ton about secure DNS providers. I know there are some, you can go in deep in your phone and set your settings to go to like 9.9.9.9, which is one based in Switzerland that says they don't log. There's a few others like that. There's some security DNS services that you kind of install on your phone. I think that's probably a good thing. I just haven't kind of delved deep into which specific ones are good.

• 1:47:11Shawn Ryan?

  How did you find out about Glacier? You knew about it way before I did.

• 1:47:16Speaker 03

  How did I find out about Glacier? I think I was reporting on secure phones, actually, and trying to understand how the government dealt with the problem of all this commercial data sloshing around. And one thing led me into another, one vendor led me into another, and I think I found Glacier, and I found the people at it as someone that was trying to solve this problem, both for the private sector as well as having government clients. And at the time, I was kind of thinking about the fact that privacy was becoming something of a luxury good, and, you know, if you were willing to pay the money, you could get a higher level of privacy than the average person. But it's interesting to see that they've pivoted more towards the consumer market.

• 1:48:00Speaker 03

  And I think in the years since I first talked to them for this book, a lot of companies have started to see that. You know, there is a market for privacy in the United States. It's not a big market. There's a market for privacy in Europe, but it is a market, and there are paying customers out there that are willing to pay a little bit more for a more secure or more private product. And that has reshaped some of the market dynamics, and companies like Glacier and others out there have made that pivot.

• 1:48:29Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I think, you know, as time goes on, it's getting more and more important, because now privacy is affecting your negotiating power with surveillance pricing, so...

• 1:48:40Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 1:48:41Shawn Ryan?

  It's getting to be a bigger and bigger deal. But, well, Byron, I really appreciate you coming out here.

• 1:48:47Speaker 03

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 1:48:49Shawn Ryan?

  Great talk. Great talk, and I hope to see you again.

• 1:48:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, same. Hope to be back.

• 1:49:07Shawn Ryan?

  No matter where you're watching The Sean Ryan Show from, if you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment, and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, head to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review.