Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Nothing to Hide

Episode Date: March 10, 2017

Potemkin apps, Fake ads, and the return of little pepe the frog. Your host busts out all his best deep state moves for the grand conclusion of our Surveillance miniseries. Plus Finn Brunton pitches AdNauseum and Siva Vaidhyanathan gives us a tour of the Cryptopticon.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Nothing to Hide. One of my favorite stories about surveillance and technology is that one of the ways that the U.S. government found out which house in Abbottabad had Osama bin Laden in it was that it was the only house in Abbottabad without a satellite dish on the top, without internet connectivity, you know, that it was the only house off the grid. So it kind of made it easy to narrow it down. That's Siva Vadianathan. He's a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia. And he's got something I've been looking for ever since I started this mini-series on surveillance. An alternative to the panopticon. I think we're living in a cryptopticon. We're living in an elaborate system of surveillance that we're not allowed to see, that is cryptic. It's hidden from

us. Siva conceptualized the cryptopticon around 2006 when he was working on his book The Googlization of Everything. This was way before Snowden. Today, Siva believes his cryptopticon still trumps Foucault's panopticon because there is still so much we don't know. There is still so much that is hidden from us. We don't see most of the cameras that watch us, nor do we understand most of the algorithms that track us. If we were supposed to understand and be aware of it, then it could be set up to get us to conform in certain ways, to behave in certain ways.

It could be to curb our weirdness. You know, all the stuff that Michel Foucault promised would happen in an administrative state. That's why I think that the term cryptopticon is much better than panopticon for our current moment. When Siva emailed me a link to his piece on the Cryptopticon, I was a little hesitant at first. I personally know where a lot of the cameras are. I even know where some of the algorithms are buried. But then, one day, I was doing some research on Axiom,

one of the larger data brokers out there, and I came across one of their subsidiaries, a company called LiveRamp. LiveRamp facilitates the buying and selling of data. And on one of their recent press releases, they mentioned some of the companies they work with. Companies like Vertical Mass, which manages audience data for celebrities and in turn sells that data to brands. And InfoScout. This one is really fascinating. On their website, they brag about a super popular shopping list app they built called Out of Milk, which they use to collect data and sell on LiveRamp. But when you go to the Out of Milk page,

there's no mention of data collection or InfoScout. Of course, you can try reading their privacy policy. But I assure you, you'll end up in the weeds before you even get to the part where they tell you that there's no way to opt out. Out of Milk sends raw sensor data generated by your device to Sensor360. Out of Milk is basically a Potemkin app

designed to take your data and then sell it back upstream. It's surveillance, and it's hidden. Amazon wants us not to think about the fact that Amazon's tracking us. Google wants us to think about where we want to go, what we want to read, but not about the fact that it's tracking us. Target, when you shop at Target and you use a credit card, Target doesn't tell you straight up in your face, by the way, we're tracking everything you buy

and we're going to market to you based on the stuff you buy. And of course, the Visa card you use at Target is not going to tell you that either. But you're being tracked at all those points. That's an elaborate surveillance system that, again, we are not supposed to understand. Whether you're looking at these commercial entities or these web platform entities or the government, they want us to be ourselves. They want us to dance to what we want to dance to and shop for what we want to shop for and read what we want to read and hang out with the people we want to hang out with and imagine or pretend we're not

being watched because that's the only way that we're going to be true to ourselves. And if we're true to ourselves, we might reveal something useful. Useful to Amazon is something to sell you. Useful to the government is you're hanging out with some bad dudes. And that might trap us, even if we're innocent, in a world of much more dangerous surveillance and maybe even restrictions on our freedom. The cryptopticon is an extremely useful term, for it enables us to not just talk about surveillance, but push back. For Siva,

we shouldn't be trying to burn the Panopticon down. It's time, he says, to make the Panopticon great again. It's our job, those of us who care about these issues and write about these issues, to expose as many of these technologies and systems as possible, to actually embrace the panopticon, make the cryptopticon a panopticon, so that we at least have a chance to stare back at the camera, to give it the finger if we need to, and assert ourselves as informed and free citizens. It's getting kind of crowded up there in our watchtower. At this point, we now have the NSA, the FBI, the police,

Palantir, Axiom, DataLogix, Cambridge Analytica, Russia, Facebook, Google, WikiLeaks, Barack Obama himself. I think it's time for us to wrap this mini-series on surveillance up. This is going to be the last episode. Wait, aren't we going to talk about, like, all the people that we actually know who spy on us? Like, our bosses, our neighbors, friends, exes, distant relatives? That's Andrew Calloway. He's been helping produce this series. All the protests that I've been going to have Facebook event pages. Whenever I RSVP, even if I don't share it or make a post about it, it apparently shows up

in my Trump supporting cousins timeline. And I know this because he'll either like it or make some kind of snarky comment calling me a socialist or something. So he wants you to know that he's got his eye on you? Or is he letting you know that when his people take over, you'll be going straight to the camps? I mean, I don't think he wants to send me to the camps. But if Trump asked him to do his patriotic duty, he would definitely send in screenshots of my Facebook. And that doesn't scare you? I mean, I am scared, but not for myself. Look, I'm a white guy. And I spend most of my time making Bernie would have won memes, helping you with your podcast, and going to democratic socialist meetings in Brooklyn. I'm pretty close to the bottom of the list of people who are going to get fucked with.

So there's nothing that will ever make you quit Facebook then? I mean, why bother? It would be really inconvenient. Those Facebook events for the protest sync up with my Google calendar. And look, I know you're proud of having quit Facebook, but what makes you think that you're any safer on Twitter? Because Twitter is a failing platform that really only journalists and bots and podcast network bosses care about at this point.

You did forget about one person. I'm sure he'll be moving over to Snapchat any day now. But seriously, after everything we've talked about in this series, Andrew, are you telling me you're not worried about putting so much stuff out there publicly? Look, protesting is the least I can do, because thanks to my privilege, I'm uniquely positioned to do so without facing serious consequences. And not everyone can say that right now. So while yes, potentially, at some later date, my associations with feminist anarcho-communist radicals could get me in trouble,

for now, while I still can, I am going to speak out against the injustices of the capitalist system, both on the streets and with my tweets. I mean, I don't want to be like the guy in the poem who didn't speak out when they came for the trade unionists because he was not a trade unionist, who didn't speak out when they came for the— Podcasters, yeah, okay, I get it. But listening to you talk here, I just feel like I've totally failed. I mean, I just spent nine episodes talking about how we need to think of surveillance as something much bigger than just the man. I mean, what do I have to do to get it into your

Bernie bro skull, Andrew, to get you to understand that you are being surveilled, tracked, and targeted by advertisers. Well, I get all that, but it's just that with Trump and ICE and Muslim bans, it's a little hard to take seriously the idea that, oh, the real problem is t-shirt ads following you around. I mean, are there any practical reasons for me to be afraid of ads? Am I fired? I was on the road, I was driving, I was listening to the podcast in my car, and I heard an ad for Oculus. And I thought that it was just clever copy on your part.

I was like, wow, that sponsor is really giving Benjamin some creative freedom in terms of how he shills the product. I'm a filmmaker, I happen to be in the market for a headset, and I just wanted to believe. I went online, I went to the Oculus site, I looked for a discount code, and it didn't work. So I wrote the company, and they wrote me back and said, we have no discount code for this podcast. We have no record, maybe you could try Amazon. And I tried Amazon, and it didn't work for Amazon either. And at that point, I thought, if there's a 25% discount, I think I'm going to try everything I can to get this discount.

So I went to your show's website. I think I went to Twitter. You liked my tweet where I thought maybe jokingly I was calling it satire. And then I wrote Radiotopia, who then forwarded the message to you. And did you buy it? I haven't yet. Ah, so you would have bought it if the discount was there. Oh, I will buy it.

I just haven't gone through the motions. You're still going to buy an Oculus, but you definitely would have done it right then and there. Oh, yeah. Had that code worked. Yes. Wow. So basically my satirical ad almost worked better than a real ad. Yes.

You know, what I really want to know is, do you think I should get in touch with them and just tell them about this story as a reason for why they should support the podcast? I really do. I really think you can use it as an example. Saying, look, I've got the reach. Obviously, people are responding. Maybe you should sponsor my show. Maybe what I'll do is I'll wait. I won't buy the Oculus until they sponsor your podcast.

You can purchase AdSpace on Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything by visiting radiotopia.fm slash sponsorship or send an email to sponsor at radiotopia.fm In 2016, Google pulled in $89.5 billion. 88.7 of that, $79.4 billion, came from advertising. Over the course of the same year, Facebook pulled in $27.6 billion. And of that, 97%, $26.8 billion, came from advertising.

Google and Facebook are advertising companies. It's important that we never forget this. It's also important not to forget that a large portion of that $100-plus billion used to go to other players in the advertising ecosystem. This is what disruption actually looks like. And it's why all the other players in the advertising ecosystem hate the walled gardens that Facebook and Google have put up. In fact, they hate them even more than some of the privacy researchers we've met over the course of this series. Facebook and Google have effectively

walled off over a hundred billion dollars worth of data. This is the context, the setting, in which I would like to talk about the latest revelations about the CIA and surveillance. Of course, on the day I am recording the final episode of my mini-series on surveillance, WikiLeaks dumps a bunch of documents containing explosive revelations about government spying. And while it's always been rumored that the CIA has built up an arsenal of zero-day exploits, weapons that bypass security measures and compromise smartphones and computers, the WikiLeaks Vault 7 documents suggest this arsenal is vast and powerful. And they all have incredible names, like Eggs Mayhem. This piece of malware, co-created with the NSA,

lets the CIA remotely access the Chrome browser on your Android phone. Harpy Eagle. This one gains root access to your Apple router and installs a persistent root kit into the flash storage of all the devices that connect to it. And my favorite, Weeping Angel. Named after creatures in a Doctor Who episode that pretend to be statues when you're not looking at them,

this exploit creates a fake off mode for your Samsung television so that when you try to turn off your TV, it just pretends to be sleeping while listening to every word you say, possibly even recording audio and video. It just doesn't matter how secure or encrypted your communication tools are. Signal, WhatsApp, Confide, none of these programs can provide security if the device you are using is itself compromised. This is why it's such a bad idea to give the American government golden keys, custom backdoors to the hardware and software products that American companies make. Because, as this Vault 7 leak proves, these vulnerabilities have a tendency to end up in the hands of the wrong people.

Even rumors that these backdoors might exist is motivation enough for hackers to invest time and money into uncovering or duplicating them. Because these vulnerabilities are super valuable. It's not just that they can be sold to repressive governments and police forces. They can also be sold to criminal networks who are after credit card information and passwords.

But the real professionals, of course, know that the big money is in big data. And that's really how we should understand these exploits. They open the door to the vault that contains over $100 billion worth of data. If you were in a situation where you couldn't simply hide and that you could not escape observation, what if you could generate a crowd around yourself within which you could simply blend in, within which you could simply become one among many?

Finn Brunton is an assistant professor of media culture and communication at NYU, and one of the co-authors of Obfuscation, a user's guide for privacy and protest, a book that conceptualizes the greatest ad product ever, Ad Nauseam. So Ad Nauseam is a very, very simple idea, which is wonderfully maddening in its implications, which is that it is a plugin for a browser. And whenever you load a web page, you're also, in almost every case, loading a huge slew of ads. Most of us have learned to tune out these ads in various ways. Ad nauseum, it doesn't block the ads, doesn't hide them, doesn't try to disguise them. Instead, it clicks all of them in the background on your behalf.

And this, and we know this from firsthand conversations with people in the ad tracking industry, this is way, way worse than just blocking the ads. Ad nauseum takes the obfuscation move, which is rather than trying to ignore the ads, rather than trying to pretend that tracking doesn't exist or taking this sort of passive position. Instead, Ad Nauseam clicks on every ad. It floods the channel with precisely the signal that the channel is optimized to find. And in doing so, it doesn't just offer the promise of hiding the individual's movements, but it also undercuts the value of the data in general. It actually threatens the whole value system.

So if I am suddenly clicking every single ad I see, that isn't just something that is messing with the profile building process for me personally. It's also something that is skewing data for everyone else who's in my demographic cohort. It's suddenly starting to mess with the data on a much broader scale because you're both messing up that system for you and you're messing up that system for many, many other people. My favorite dystopian movie will always be Brazil. Because in Terry Gilliam's 1985 film, he shows us something that is a million times more terrifying than totalitarianism.

The bureaucratic state. In Brazil, the party controls the future by controlling the paperwork and by papering over mistakes. That's how this film begins, with a mistake. A man swats a beetle, and the beetle falls into a keyboard.

And this computer bug changes the name Tuttle to Buttle on an information retrieval form. This leads to the arrest of the wrong man, Buttle, who then dies during interrogation, because the information retrieval specialist, the torturer, was unaware of Buttle's heart condition. He was working off of Tuttle's charts. But here's the thing. In the bureaucratic state, mistakes aren't possible. So our hero, Sam, is tasked by his boss to paper over it. But in a system where mistakes aren't possible, even the knowledge of a mistake is dangerous. Trying to hold someone accountable in a state where mistakes aren't possible,

well, that's even more dangerous. But this is precisely what Jill, Mrs. Buttle's neighbor, is trying to do. She's looking for answers. Which is why, at the end of the movie, the state guns are down. When the film came out 30 years ago, people famously walked out of theaters. Brazil was just too odd, too alien, too implausible of a science fiction. But today, well, I think it's clear that we are now living in Brazil. For example, the facial recognition systems we learned about earlier in this miniseries.

These systems are not good at recognizing African-American faces. But these systems are also incapable of making mistakes. Which means, if the system can't find a match for Tuttle, it will serve up buttles. And then, it's up to the information retrieval specialists, the police, to deal with the false positives. Another example. On February 23rd, in a bar in Kansas, a man named Adam Purinton took out a gun and shot two men from India. People in the bar heard him scream out, go back to your country, just before he opened fire.

Later, he told police that he thought the men were Iranians. A week later, another Indian man in South Carolina was killed. And then, the following day, another Indian man was shot in his driveway in a Seattle suburb by a man who also yelled out, Go back to your country. How are we to make sense of this violence? An unintended consequence, perhaps, of the new party slogan, we are now and always have been at war with Irania? Well, I would argue that the Trump administration's silence regarding these killings gives the game away. The administration is silent because there isn't anything to say. Remember, in Brazil, mistakes aren't possible.

So the question of how effective something like ad nauseum really is for the individual, there's kind of two prongs to thinking about that effectiveness. And I think both of them matter, but they matter in very different ways. So the first one is, can you so screw up the flow of data that you can actually protect yourself in a very concrete way by, for example, screwing up your ad profile so that it becomes harder to market to you as an individual. But there's one other aspect to the value that something like Ad Nauseam could provide to people who are really under the sum of some other organization, institution, group. You have like your public face, right? The face that you have to maintain if you're,

you know, being employed in a situation where there's not an equitable relationship between you and your employer, you have to kind of like, you know, tout how and say the right things and so on. But in the back of your mind, you have like the hidden transcript. You have what you're actually thinking. And that's a really important thing because it helps to carve out that space where it becomes possible to think about how things could be otherwise. Like I've had to be like, well, yes, or I understand, see your side of things too. But you know in your heart that that's not really adequate to the situation. And the hidden transcript, that space of being able to think like, I don't have to be passive in the face of this, that's a starting point for something very, very important. In the same way,

the beauty of ad nauseum, the beauty of a lot of obfuscation techniques is not just that it can work as a method for hiding, as a method for interfering with data collection and so on, but also that there's something really prankish and funny and playful about it. And I want to highlight that because I think in a lot of the technology around privacy, one element of its effectiveness isn't just that it works in specific terms, like people not being able to crack the crypto or you know like you know do particular kinds of analysis on the messages or figure out that there's a sting in the graphically encrypted message inside of a picture or what have you

but also that it creates a space in which you suddenly have a sense of inside and outside of hidden and public and then in the hidden side you start to say, I don't want to participate in this anymore. I don't have a choice about whether or not to do that. But instead, I can kind of begin to fight back ad nauseum by not trying to, you know, hide the ads. Instead, by clicking on all of them, it can both actually conceal your activities, and it can conceal what you're, quote unquote, really interested in. But it can also, in that process, by the extent of you downloading it and choosing it, it can actually give you this opportunity

to not simply refuse, but to actually mess with the people who are engaged in this activity. To say, hey, you know what? Like, you guys never, we never came to any kind of meaningful agreement about how this was supposed to work. So like, fuck you. It's something where I'm actually going to not simply try to hide my own tracks, but do so in a way that makes the results that you're getting worse and throwing your system into disarray. There's a guy who lives on my block in one of the new condo buildings.

He has a beard and tons of tattoos. So I was surprised when a few months ago, Mathilde pointed him out to me and said, you know, he wears a Make America Great Again hat. I've been giving him the evil eye ever since. Every time I see him walking his little dog or locking up his bike. But it's been cold out. He's always wearing a hoodie. And since he wears his black hat backwards, I've never been able to see the Trump slogan with my own eyes. But yesterday, as I was walking home with Arcto on Avenue C, I saw him coming towards me.

And he wasn't wearing a hood. I realized I would finally be able to deliver to his face the line that I've been rehearsing in my head ever since the night of November 8th. Are you such a fucking coward that you can't even wear the red hat? I take a deep breath and narrow my eyes as he approaches. And when I catch his gaze, I belt out my line. What? Are you too much of a coward to wear the red hand? I'm totally screwed. His hat says, make America goth again, not make America great again. Are you talking to me? He sounds like Robert De Niro.

Before I can reply, I realize that Arcto's no longer holding my hand. A bus is roaring down the avenue. I gasp, but then I see him. Somehow, Arcto's gotten inside the payday loan slash check cashing for a small percentage fee store that we're standing in front of. Excuse me, I mutter as I run over to the door. I tug and pull at it, but for some reason, it won't open. Arcto is darting around, showing everyone his Pepe the Frog doll. Try pushing, my new favorite neighbor says.

I shove the door open with such force I tumble onto the floor. Arcto runs over to the lottery ticket machine and starts banging on it with both hands. An elderly lady bends down and picks up his Pepe doll from the floor. I've never been inside the payday loan slash check cashing for a small percentage fee store before. In fact, I don't think I've ever even looked in the window. It's packed. There must be at least 30 people waiting in line. I scoop Artaud into my arms, take Pepe from the elderly lady, and head for the door.

But a burly man in paint-splattered overalls steps in front of me. What's up with your sweatshirt, he snaps. Are you part of the deep state? Okay, now this is going to take a little bit of explaining. You know how right-wing conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones have popularized this term, deep state? In fact, the alt-right now uses it almost as shorthand for what they call the internationalist, Obama-loving, freedom-hating, Trump-undermining faction of the United States government. A faction that works covertly from the shadows, of course. Thus the name, deep state.

Well, a few weeks ago, I was procrastinating on the Internet, and I went to one of those cafe press sites where you can put a logo on a mug or a piece of clothing, and I made myself a Deep State sweatshirt. It looks like athletic wear, but instead of Ohio State, it says Deep State. I know, it's stupid. People usually laugh when they see it. But not this guy, standing in front of me here in the payday loan slash check cashing for a small percentage fee store. He definitely doesn't think the Deep State is funny.

In fact, he's pissed. Did you come in here to spy on me, he snarls. Uh-oh, I think, clutching our toe close. He turns and addresses everyone in the store. Did you know that the Deep State itemizes every EBT purchase we make, and then they put us in databases? Poor people like us, we are always the guinea pigs for the deep state and their bullshit surveillance experiments. They're always trying to come up with new ways to

take away the services and benefits we need and charge us more for the ones we can't live without. Fuck the deep state, someone yells. Yeah, get the fuck out of here, someone else adds. And take your racist motherfucking baby. That sounds like the old lady who handed me Pepe. But I don't want to turn around and check. I just want to get out. So I take a deep breath and I walk around the simmering man in the overalls. And I pull open the door to the payday loan slash check cashing for a small percentage fee store, and I walk out onto the street. It's bright. The sun is in my

eyes. But I can see my neighbor across the street, unlocking his bicycle. Arcto and I stare at him as he maneuvers it out onto the street. His hat definitely doesn't say, Make America Great Again. As he turns onto 7th Street, he looks back over his shoulder and gives me the finger. Thank you. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Nothing to Hide. This episode was produced by me, with help from Andrew Calloway. And it featured Siva Vadianathan and Finn Brunton.

Special thanks to Ian Chambers, and every single one of you out there in listener land, who wrote in and contributed. I'm sorry I couldn't fit everything in, but perhaps we can make something together in the future. Special, special thanks to Jesse Shapins, Kara Oler, Mathilde Biot, Pike Malinowski, Helen Zaltzman, Julie Shapiro, and all of my super smart friends and colleagues

who helped me with this miniseries. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia from PRX, the world's best podcast network. You should be listening to all of the Radiotopia shows by now, but if you're not, go pick one at random at radiotopia.fm. Shout out to Robert D. Benedictus and all the folks at PRX HQ for all the work they do. And as always, thanks to Roman Mars for making this whole thing real.

Radiotopia's launch sponsors are MailChimp and the Knight Foundation and listeners like you. Radiotopia from PRX.