DeProgram with John Kiriakou and Ted Rall - DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou: “The Lightning Shared Scooter Scam”

Episode Date: August 27, 2025

On today’s “DeProgram show” with political cartoonist Ted Rall and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, we guide you through a barrage of developments, from yet another mass school shooting to political maneuvers and corporate deception. Joining us is Yale Privacy Lab's Sean O’Brien, exposing the hidden dangers in a collapsed scam. Minnesota Shooting: A gunman unleashes horror at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, firing a rifle, shotgun, and pistol through church windows during an all-school Mass marking the first week of classes. Two children, aged eight and ten, die in the pews, while 17 others—including 14 children—suffer injuries, with two in critical condition. The suspect, 23-year-old Robin Westman, who legally changed their name from Robert in 2020 indicating transgender identity, dies from suicide; authorities investigating motives amid reports of racist, antisemitic writings on weapons and a possible hate crime targeting Catholics, fueling debates on access to assault weapons and gun control.DNC Calendar: The Democratic National Committee sits down to decide its 2028 presidential nominating calendar. Emphasizing diversity, regional balance, and battleground status, DNC Chair Ken Martin says he wants a rigorous, fair process extending through spring, potentially restoring Iowa's caucuses or elevating states like New Hampshire. Is the party moving past Joe Biden? States lobby aggressively at the Minneapolis meeting, aiming to shape a lineup that battle-tests candidates while avoiding the 2024 chaos of unsanctioned primaries.Border Patrol Arrests: U.S. Border Patrol agents conduct targeted enforcement at a Playa Vista Home Depot, detaining two individuals amid bystander outrage and leading to the arrest of a 27-year-old U.S. citizen for assaulting officers. Operations highlight collaboration with local law enforcement, focusing on smuggling networks while navigating a court injunction against warrantless stops in southern California. Arrests surge in interior zones, with ICE reporting over 1.6 million removals this year.Lightning Shared Scooter Company Scam: For over a year, Lightning Shared Scooter Company lured thousands of Americans via storefronts, apps, and endorsements from mayors, police, and ex-White House press secretary Sean Spicer, masquerading as a legitimate scooter-sharing startup. Unmasking as a vast multi-level marketing scheme, it recruited communities with crypto payments, apps harboring privacy breaches, and overseas ties—spanning eight U.S. cities and amassing millions before crumbling this summer, stranding families in recovery battles. Sean O’Brien of Yale Privacy Lab joins as a guest, detailing app examinations uncovering severe security flaws and data streams to Chinese servers, urging scrutiny of deceptive tech ventures.

Hi, John. Good afternoon. I'm Ted Rall, John Kiroaku, knows he's John Kirooku. You're watching D-Program. We are here Monday through Friday, Monday, sorry, 5 p.m. Eastern time. It's Wednesday, August 27th, 2025. Thanks so much for joining us. Please like, follow, and share the show. You're going to hear me say that over and over again.

But sorry. Lots to talk about today. We're going to be joined as bringing down at the bottom of the the hour. We're going to have a friend of the show and friends of ours. Sean O'Brien's going to join us to talk about this crazy scam out of China, the Lightning Shared Scooter Company scam. I admit I had not heard of it myself. I had neither. Until Sean brought it up, but it's a big deal in the world of tech. And we think it's important for you to know sort of how this scam in particular sort of is endemic. Sort of this kind of thing is going to happen more

and more. So it's good to keep an eye out for it. Obviously, the big news of the day is that horrific mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We'll talk about that and what it all means. The DNC is getting together to figure out what order their primaries are going to be in in 2028. Does it matter? And are they going to restore the old calendar? I know people in Iowa and New Hampshire, we'll be watching with great interest. And there are so many crazy border patrol stories that when John said you wanted to talk about the border patrol arrests, it was kind of like which arrests of the border by or of border patrol agents, couldn't figure out those prepositions are tough.

So, yeah, and indeed, Steve, Stevie 301 is like just another Wednesday in America. Indeed, very, very sad. Yeah, it is a sad day in Minneapolis and really across the country as well. Okay, what should we talk about here? Should we go to Minneapolis first? Yeah, we should probably talk about Minneapolis first. It's a terrible, terrible situation there. And it's inexplicable, which makes it even worse.

Yeah. So this 23-year-old guy went up to Annunciation Catholic School and Annunciation Church during Mass, where all the students were in church. church, and we're talking about students between the ages of five and 13, he had with him a rifle, a shotgun, and a pistol, and he just started opening fire through the windows. He killed two children ages eight and ten. He critically wounded at least five, and then there are seven others who also have wounds. He apparently had written some kind of manifesto that the police, I should say he killed himself

after he was done shooting. The police confiscated a manifesto in his apartment. And the New York Post has screenshots of pages of it. He had sketched this all out. He did say that he wanted to go down in history as one of the great mass murderers. Like, I don't even want to say his name, like the kid at Sandy Hook with the bugged out eyes. And... Carrot top guy.

Yeah. That's right. And that's kind of where it stands. He's apparently ethnically Russian. A lot of this was written in Russian. He also took video of himself writing it and reviewing it. And you can hear him cackling on the YouTube video that has since been taken down. So he apparently had been planning this for quite some time. It's good that it was taken down. So I was watching the Fox coverage of this. And I think this is well-south. sourced that this was a trans person. Obviously, you can see the political divide in the coverage. That's being really emphasized on the right, de-emphasized on the left. But Fox kind of has the trans-smoking gun in that they have the change of name court order that I guess they filed for back in 2020 and saying that they chose to now identify as

female. So I don't know if their nickname was a she. I mean, sorry, their pronoun was a she. I don't know if it really matters. I don't know. I mean, the thing is, look, there's sort of a sense on the part of some people that trans people are crazy or that there's something crazy about changing your gender. And I will admit, I'm very, as left as it comes, and I'm very uncomfortable with the idea of like, especially the operations. It's like, yes. I totally get being gay. I could totally imagine being gay. I just can't imagine wanting to change my gender. And I think when you evaluate what other people do, you always think if I were in that position, could I see myself doing that? It's part of the reason that like so many people hate pedophiles because they

can't imagine themselves doing that. You know, I can imagine myself embezzling money from a corporation, so therefore I'm not as hard on them. So it's like I didn't do it, but I could see it. And so, you know, I mean, I guess the thing is there's going to be the usual, you know, well, this is about gun violence and the fact that assault weapons are too easy to get, although a pistol was involved, a shotgun was involved. Those are not assault weapons. And, you know, the point is, you know, if you want to kill people, you can, with or without an assault rifle. And then there's the question of, you know, whether someone like this who clearly, was deranged, maybe there should have been a red flag law that applied here or not. Does the

trans aspect have anything to do with it? And then the only good news, such as it is today, I think, is the fact that Minneapolis has great hospitals. I mean, they have a very strong, you know, medical community. So, I mean, I guess that's, they have a, for the kids who are currently being treated, they have a better shot there than they might somewhere else. I think that's exactly true. There are so many important questions that the authorities just don't have answers to yet. But yeah, this is, this is anything that involves killing children, I just, I can't wrap my brain around it. Yeah, Jay Edgar Hoover was a cross-dresser by all accounts. You know, In one of the recent biographies of him, I put this in my cemetery book, he's buried here in

Washington. Clyde Tolson, the deputy director of the CIA, was, by all accounts, Hoover's boyfriend. They even lived in houses next door to each other. They had lunch every single day together, seven days a week for 48 years at the Mayflower Hotel. They would go to vacation together. And the honor of one- What's with the Mayflower Hotel? That's where Elliot Spitzer used to go. Yeah. In fact, they've named the bar, Edgar's place. Yeah? I love that hotel, by the way. It's a great hotel, historic hotel. That's where John Kennedy's inaugural ball was held.

It's the first place I ever stayed in Washington when I visited with my mom. It was pre-it-it was the old school pre-renovation days in the 70s. Oh, yeah, yeah, famous place. So one of the biographers, wrote that he went out to Santa Monica. They used to like to stay this one hotel in Santa Monica when they went to vacation, went on vacation. And so he went out there

to interview Hoover, and when he approached them on the beach, Tolson was on his knees clipping Hoover's toenails. Like, sure, that's what the deputy director of the FBI would normally do for the director, right? And then when Hoover died,

Tolson just moved into his house, even though he owned the house next door. Yeah, they were roommates. That's how it was back then. Yeah. Yeah. And you know what? Nobody would care if he didn't actively try to ruin the lives of so many gay men in America just because he didn't like their politics. Such a hypocrite. What a monster Hoover was. Yeah, that's true. He really was. He, you know, it's a certain archetype, very, sort of a mid-20th century archetype, kind of like Roy Cohn. It's a certain. Yeah, look, someone else just said it.

Michael Viloff and I are both have the same exact thought at the same exact time. So, yeah, no, I mean, it's funny about the cross-dressing thing. You know, I had a relative, I should say an in-law, who she was married to a big buff dude. she comes home from work one day early and she finds him prancing around the house in her dainty under things she was furious and divorced him but the thing is I was and I was saying like look you know studies show like was I was like is he like failing to deliver in the bedroom she's like no you know I was like just because you're you know most transvestites are straight they're not gay and like you know Like, was he a good father?

She's like, yeah. I'm like, you know, you might be able to work through this. She's like, no. She's like, and it was, and finally in the end, I kept going back and forth. She's like, I don't want him stretching out my panties with his badass. I was like, you could buy him his own. Seriously. She's like, no.

Wow. Well, anyway, not to, so, all right, look, John, we know how this goes. Hearts and prayers, flags at half-mast, nothing ever changes. Another day, another mass shooting. Nothing ever changes. Nothing ever changes. Is there any way that this could change credibly? Not without addressing the root causes, which are we have too many guns,

and we have too many mentally ill people with access to guns. and too many mental and not enough mental, you know, mental health parity. I mean, it's in the law, it's in the Affordable Care Act that insurance companies are supposed to cover, you know, therapy and meds, I guess, SRIs, whatever you need with the same exact, you know, the same way that they, that they treat you for, you know, any other medical condition, but they just don't. And, you know, it's not just United Health. Let's see.

Thank you very much for the donation, USC era 21. Thoughts about how deep shit the administration is with espionage accusations from Denmark, which we talked a little bit about yesterday, or did we? No. That hadn't broken yet. I don't think so. Yeah, we hadn't broken yet. Yeah, by all accounts, that's exactly what's happening in Greenland,

where we have begun what appears to me to be a covert action campaign. campaign to move Greenlander public opinion away from Denmark and to the United States. This is scandalous. Denmark is a NATO ally, a close ally, and to initiate some sort of covert action program against them in order to steal their land is just beyond the pale. Yeah, thank you, Middy, Smitty. Very true. Thoughts and prayers aren't enough when you get killed in the pews of your church. That's for sure. Yeah, so basically, I mean, John, these details coming out of Greenland are very

sketchy, right, at this stage. But basically, the Danish are arguing that the U.S. is recruiting or has agents at work trying to destabilize the relationship between Greenland and Denmark. John, in your experience at the CIA, is that the kind of thing that the U.S. does frequently, and if so, how do they go about it? Yeah. Well, they go about it in different ways. This would be a little bit tougher because the population of Greenland is so small. It's something like 35,000, 38,000 people. And there's already a U.S. Air Force base there.

So what the CIA would have to do is to assign people to the base so that they can use. military cover or say their civilian DOD employees and go out there and start yeah because there's no consulate right there's no consulate no so they would be in nuke right start by bribing um journalists and saying listen uh you know i've got this really strongly pro american article that needs to be published and so uh you know here's five thousand bucks why don't you go ahead and publish it that's the simplest way to do a covert action program. I can't imagine the CIA is trying to recruit Greenland officials. That wouldn't make any kind of sense. But they also may be working against the Danes in Denmark, you know, trying to recruit Danes who have some sort of oversight authority

over Denmark. Either way, this would be an ugly thing to do to such a close friend and ally. So would this be about propaganda? Would this about be publishing an op-ed that says, you know, the Danes have never been there for us. Yes, that's exactly what it is. And there was an allegation about their offer. There was an allegation of that in the spring that already people had begun saying, you know, maybe we should have a referendum. Maybe we should join the United States as a territory or a Commonwealth.

And there was even an article in the Washington Post saying, you don't want to do that because your medical care is so much better than ours as it is. I remember reading it and thinking, what would these people possibly have to gain by joining the United States? They've got a great situation with Denmark. It would only work if there was a mass payment that was distributed in whole or in part to the piece. That's right. That's right. That's right.

So I don't know. This just seems pretty ugly. Five-pound contribution from Matthew Blayrand, Blayrins. My apologies for the pronunciation. Why do you think the agency has? such an emphasis on paramilitary actions compared to other agencies like MI6. Yeah, that's a great question. And it's actually, the answer is actually very practical.

It's because the CIA has so much more money and so many more people than MI6 that they can essentially do anything they want. We also have this cowboy attitude at the CIA, where we want to go out and just wreak havoc on our enemies. MI6 is far more cerebral, far less bureaucratic, and frankly, less murderous than the CIA. It was not my experience that the Brits made a habit of going out and killing people. The French do. The Russians do.

The Iranians do. The Americans absolutely do. We set the standards. But not the Brits. we have uh we wanted we should probably uh move on to the dnc calendar so um in in in in one of his many lame attempts to remain in office uh the late un lamented un lamented joe biden changed the primary calendar to put south carolina which traditionally has been third after iowa and new Hampshire and make it first, he basically conspired with James Clyburn, the party boss of South

Carolina, to put South Carolina first. The argument was sort of based on, it's about there, we have to do it for the black voters. And there's more, you know, they're all white up there in Iowa and New Hampshire, but South Carolina's black and blah, blah, blah. But we could all see through this. I mean, South Carolina is where Bernie Sanders died of dog's death. That's right. You know, that was the wall. And it was the state that rescued Joe Biden. Correct. So Joe Biden wanted that. So for the first time in at least my lifetime, Iowa was ditched. Iowa has a, in New Hampshire, well, New Hampshire has a law, right? I was a caucus. New Hampshire is the primary. New Hampshire state law says that New Hampshire has to be the first primary in the nation,

which is hilarious. It's like, I'm going to pass a law that says Ted Raal is the best looking man in America. And, you know, you all have to, you all have to go along with that and uglify yourselves just to make that true. So the DNC is meeting next month. They're going to sit down in a couple of weeks. DNC chair, Ken Martin, says that he wants a fair process. But it looks to me like Iowa and New Hampshire are going to be restored. And I'm wondering if you agree with that And if you, if so, do you think that this is basically the party trying to exercise the ghost of Joe Biden? Yes and yes. I think Iowa and New Hampshire will be restored.

I think South Carolina is out. And I think South Carolina is going to be replaced probably by Georgia. There's talk it could be North Carolina. But the black vote is so much larger in Georgia. I think that they're going to throw a bone to that state. but yeah i i think the democrats made a serious mistake by by punishing iowa because they screwed up the vote in uh 2020 uh and it took remember nine days before we know we knew definitively who had won iowa that was the dnc's fault by the that was not iowa's fault right

but they but they had a fall guy it was the head of the iowa democratic party and they threw him out and took that first in the nation position away from from iowa i want to add one thing about iowa there was a special election there yesterday for a state senate seat and a democrat won in a solidly republican district that went big for donald trump not because donald trump is unpopular in iowa he's not he's very popular in iowa it was because they had an 18 percent turnout but the reason why this is important, is that this one seat takes away the Republican Party's supermajority. And there is a proviso in the Iowa Constitution saying that all judicial appointments have to get two-thirds of the vote.

And now the Republicans are short by one vote, which means they have to cooperate with Democrats. Oh, so sad. So sad. So sad. them. I will stay up late crying in my pillow. Marble. Thank you, Marble. Thank you very much for the very generous 1999 contribution.

Thoughts on Gavin Newsom's tweets. I love this question. John, I don't know how you feel. I have no idea. I fucking hate them. So Gavin Newsom's been doing these all caps, Trump-style tweets. And the thing is, he does a pretty good job at channeling Donald Trump. But let me just say, when you're framing yourself using someone else. When you're presenting yourself using someone else's framing,

you are losing. You're not making fun or ridiculing Donald Trump. You're pumping him up. So to me, this is just like, I think it's pathetic. I hate to say it. Sad. Gavin needs to develop his own message. You know, I mean, I still don't know three major issues that Gavin Newsom would promote if he were to run for president. which I'm sure he will. You know, so that's his problem. I hate the tweets. John, what do you think?

I hate the tweets too. I hate to say. I'm already predisposed to dislike Gavin Newsom. But we both. I was in L.A. for four hours on Sunday. Four hours. Flew out, did a podcast, flew right back. And just in my four hours there, I noticed that gas was between $4.99 and $5.99 at every single

gas station I passed. The taxes. The taxes are astronomical there. Just got gas in Ohio at a Costco for $2.49. I paid $278 yesterday. The way God intended. That's right. I paid $278 yesterday and I was happy to give them my money.

But $5.99? Sorry. Homeless people everywhere, trash and graffiti everywhere. This is not the LA of 10 years ago. And so, I don't know, I just, I don't like the guy. I have to agree with you, Ted. I've yet to see any ideas coming from Newsom. I mean, if he's got some ideas, lay him out.

Let's hear what they are. Quit clowning and fucking get to work. Take this seriously. Yeah, I mean, you're trying to run. You want to be the leader of the free world. You want to run the Democratic Party and you want to rest, and you want to dig us out from the hole that Donald Trump is only one seventh of the way of digging us into you know dude you're going to have to do better than that um so all right plus not to

mention he's going to have probably uh there's probably going to be a lot of of rivals that he's going to have to run against but uh all right sean we see you there waiting uh we'll get to you in a few minutes let's talk about the border patrol um so yet there was uh the the border patrol um arrested they had a riot basically in playa vista at the home depot in californ California. They detained a couple of people, but basically the witnesses got so furious that they were throwing shit at the Border Patrol officers. A 27-year-old dude was arrested. And John, I just want to point out, we should talk about the sandwich guy in D.C. has been liberated. He is no longer a, oh, there's, John, we've got to get you back here. How about that? It's all right. Well, there you are frozen in time.

That was weird, like Star Trek. So I was just, I was mentioning the kind of mini riot that happened at the Playa Vista Home Depot in California. But also, the sandwich guy there in D.C. has been freed. The, you know, apparently, the joke, old joke was that you could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. But you can't in D.C. get a grand jury to indict the guy who throws the ham sandwich. No, sir. You are exactly right. And you know, it's funny, too. This came the same day that Donald Trump called for the wide use of the death penalty in D.C. cases. Not going to happen. I said yesterday, Donald Trump got 7% in Washington, D.C. Nobody likes him. Nobody likes Janine Piro. What nonsense is correct. She can't even get the hand sandwich indicted, as you say. say. They tried three times and failed. Look, I watch a lot. Yeah, they're having problems with the grand jury. Grand juries are getting pissed about all these overchargings. Yes. Yes, exactly.

It's kind of unringed, but they're usually rubber stamp for the prosecution. Yeah. And in terms of the death penalty, not going to happen. Not with a D.C. jury. Not going to happen. John, let's talk about our favorite most patriotic border patrol agent. The not the one who's just who's in trouble for punching a police officer, but the one who's just got sentenced to a year in prison because he's a lech because he was forcing immigrants to expose their breasts, female immigrants. He learned how to say in Spanish, please remove your bra.

And he made women hold their shirts up if they wanted to enter the United States. So basically, that's the new way to get into the U.S. Show us your tits? Yeah. Yeah, show us your tits. And the excuse that he used, this is like the weakest defense anybody's ever posed in court, was he was looking for gang tattoos. Yeah. Right.

He was looking for gang tattoos on women's west. Well, the tattoos are on the tattas is how that works. Yeah, right, right. And these poor women. My measurements are 3624 MS-13. Right, exactly. Just, just, I could do this all day, all day. I mean, it's really insane.

And the guy's like, you know, doesn't seem long enough years old, right? Yeah. It doesn't really doesn't. I mean, all kidding aside, he violated a lot of women, you know. A lot of women. The fact that he got a year in prison was a sweetheart deal. Yeah. It was a sweetheart deal.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, and he's like 50-something years old, 58 or 57, something like that. And like, my God, man, porn is free. Just go online. Porn is free. Well, I mean, I hate to, I'm going to sound like Andrea Dork in here, but this is about power. It really is. It's about, it's about, it's about, that's right, you know, swinging my big dick around, bullying people, just because I can't. It's, I mean, not me personally, but because you can. Not you personally. This is a, I hate talking about things like this because you're just, you're going to step all over your own feet. So yes, the answer to your question, Wells Campbell, is yes, the Border Patrol and ICE are different agencies, both under Homeland Security. But, yeah, what's the, I mean, what's the difference, John? I mean, between the, I mean, why don't we just have border patrol, like, what's the purpose of ICE?

I don't really understand why we have a separate agency there. Yeah, you know, ICE used to, ICE stands for immigration and customs informant. I'm sorry, enforcement. Sorry, sorry, enforcement. And it used to just be the U.S. Customs Bureau. And then Border Patrol is now border protection. So the names overlap. I think that the difference is Border Patrol does, you know, the border.

They patrol, drive up and down. guns, make sure nobody's, you know, digging tunnels or whatever. And ICE is manning the border crossings. They're in airports, in ports and that kind of thing. There's a lot of overlap. I don't know. I think it was like poorly signed when they were in a home and security. I mean, it seems to me like these are two agencies that could be merged. I don't know what the heck happened. It looks like we both went off just now. You just froze.

It was you. Yeah, you have a weak connection. Yeah, you have to talk to the cable company. I must have a week. Yeah, this is. Or just get us, whatever, we can talk about the tech side later. Okay, let's go ahead. And speaking of tech, let's go in and bring in our friend, Sean O'Brien.

Sean O'Brien is from the Yale Privacy Lab. And he is, we're working with him at Ivy Cyber on a big tech private. have a C play, I think is the fair way to put it. So let's talk about the Lightning Shared Scooter Company. I never heard, Sean, of the Lightning Shared Scooter Company until you brought this up. But once I did a dive, it was fascinating. So why don't you tell us what it is and like why we should care?

Amazing. So of course, I didn't hear of it anyway or either. You know, it was sort of a odd small company when we looked into it, but it turns out that this company was a huge scam, right? Basically, the folks at NBC News, they did a great investigative report into this company, and they found that it had a lot of connections throughout the United States. So lightning-shared scooter company, it's in at least eight U.S. cities. It's basically a multi-level marketing scheme, right? Just to sort of set the stage, right? We all know the job market's tough. The economy's really bad. A lot of folks are doing gig economy jobs anyway. And there's a lot of chatter on social

media about manifesting wealth and, you know, becoming an entrepreneur and becoming an investor and this sort of thing. This LSS company jumped into this world and said, hey, if you invest, you know, $10,000, $11,000, sometimes even more of these folks were putting in. if you send that money to our bank account, then you too can become an investor in this company. So it's a pyramid scheme. It's a Ponzi scheme. Yeah, that's exactly right.

They gave them a fake dashboard. So basically they showed them that they were actually, people were renting scooters in Hong Kong. So they said, hey, you know, we have these scooters in Hong Kong. Hong Kong's a busy, bustling place. There's all these folks on these electric scooters. And they gave them metrics based upon, you know, how many scooters, they ostensibly were renting, right? And then like a pyramid scheme,

as you allude to, it was all about getting other folks in, making sure you have people under you that you're recruiting, doing fake giveaways, you know, contests for Teslas, all this kind of stuff. And it really wrapped in a lot of folks. And then at the end of the day, of course, this company basically folded, fell apart and nobody got any money back. So where were they, where were they doing this marketing, like online? I mean, like, where? So primarily Facebook, yeah, and so the earliest traces that I've been able to find were in April of last year on Facebook, but also, for example, Sean Spicer, the former White House Press Secretary did, like, a cameo ad for them. Now, you sure it's not, that wasn't Melissa McCarthy, playing Sean Spicer.

Yes, the actual Sean Spicer, right. And so they got sponsorships all over the place. They went through municipal governments, right? So Cleveland Police Department did a giveaway contest for them. The mayor of a city in Mississippi, a number of other corrections officers, groups, unions, churches, these kinds of places were doing the marketing. And again, Facebook was the primary place. There were some TikToks as well, obviously. And where I sort of come in is by looking at the apps, right?

These folks at NBC tapped me to look at the privacy of the apps. And as you might expect, they're not very private and they're pretty atrocious. Oh, John seems to have vanished. We will bring him back. One of the commenters, Michael, says Herbalife is still listed on the stock market. I remember being pitched. I was pitched Herbalife by a taxi driver in Kyrgyzstan one time. So it was very, very widespread.

Brad. Yeah. Yeah. And so this stuff is growing through small group chats too. One of the reasons it's kind of hard to track is because there's a lot of chatter in places like WhatsApp. I'm sure we all know we're all in tons and tons of group chats now, right? And so this activity is just happening in these other apps.

The other apps. Even with regular I message on the iPhone, I've had that happen where there's like 600 people, you know, you're in some crypto crap. question here, and this is important. Marcel wants to know what happens with the legal consequences. If the money goes, if the company's in China, the money goes to China, does the U.S. have any extradition rights? I mean, you can't extradite money, you know,

but can the U.S. ask the Chinese authorities to do something about it? How does that work? Well, John would know more about this than I do, but I would say that there are open investigations. To me, that's not going to amount to very. much, right? The money's gone, basically, yeah. But I would not be surprised if, in a technical sense, these folks signed a terms of service that basically promised them nothing, right? So that's the other tricky part here. Who reads the terms of service of anything, right? And we don't know

exactly what these folks we're signing up for. Another piece that's really tricky. How big is this, Sean? I mean, I mean, we're talking about millions, tens of millions, hundreds, of millions? What are we talking about? We're talking about millions of dollars. We're talking about thousands of people. Yeah. So it's kind of by scam standards. I mean, it sucks for them, but it's not massive, right? I wouldn't say it's massive. I think one of the things that's surprising about it for me is the brazeness of it and the fact that it's sort of clever.

What's so clever about it? What distinguishes it? So basically, we have software that we use all the time, right? And we have all these analytics dashboards that show us metrics on things. You know, if you have Google Analytics, you see that there were a number of clicks on your website. You might have maps showing your location data of your users and things like that. In this case, these folks were being fed false information in a fake dashboard. So the interface was basically showing them that all these scooters were being rented and moving around. but it was all just fake.

The other piece of it is that the app itself, they had storefronts and malls. They were basically taking phones from people installing these apps on the phones, and the apps were given elevated permission. So I've actually never seen apps with this amount of permission over a phone. We're talking, staying awake when the phone's locked, in some cases trying to stop.

the phone lock from happening, accessing media, microphone, camera, you know, you name it, basically the entire gamut. So it's new in that sense. And I guess I would say also these international sort of geopolitical plays that are going on, we're talking a lot about TikTok and how dangerous TikToks is or isn't, right? But the software supply chain, these apps are just flooded with this stuff. And the data just goes, who knows where, unless you're actually looking. These apps were often talking to 10, 20, 30 servers. In some cases, these servers had open FTP ports,

if you remember what FTP was, like file transfer protocol, unencrypted. So there's that kind of thing going on here, too, which is a little different, yeah. We had a question from Star Lion. She says, is Jennifer Granich still working in the space of digital civil liberties do you know i don't know um that's a very good question i could just look it up but um yeah i'll check it out later and and i've got a question for you sean if you don't mind

um i have heard from three people independently of one another in the last two days that crypto's on the brink of something great right and oh you should buy Bitcoin and you should buy this other one I never heard of and you should buy Ethereum and Is there something going on? Is there something out there or is this just wishful thinking because crypto's been in the news a lot lately? So it's no secret that this administration, the executive branch is extremely bullish on crypto, whatever crypto is or isn't, right? Traditionally, we were considered Bitcoin, Ethereum, these kinds of coins as crypto, right? But the administration has been pushing these so-called meme coins very hard.

Spitting them up, you know, making their own meme coins. Can you explain what those are? So basically, there are a number of different layers in cryptocurrency where you might have with Bitcoin something called proof of work, where you basically crunch numbers, right, to create, the next bitcoin and then that mining the mining that's exactly right i'm trying not to use too much the terminology i think most people are familiar with that okay good so you so you mine bitcoin right okay um in ethereum and salana which are two examples of other coins um there is also the

possibility of having a layer two network with what they're called smart contracts right and that means when the coin is created, you can execute some code, right? And because you can execute that code, you can then sort of riff on top of this and create NFTs, right? You can have, you know, an ape image that's tied to it with a URL that's part of that smart contract minting the NFT. Or you can have peppy coin or fart coin or whatever. So this would be like doge coin or something like that yes doge is a little different because doge does have a proof of work mining built into it but when i talk about mean coins i'm talking about for example if you got to uniswap you'll see there's all these coins that are erc coins basically built on ethereum that you can just

swap between very easily and if you wanted to you could create a pump and dump scheme where you come up with your own tokenomics and you say hey 80% of the supply is going to be me ted and john we're going to spin up, you know, I don't know, CIA coin or, you know, screw the CIA coin, whatever. And then we basically put it on the market, a bunch of people throw their money in. As soon as it's released, we sell our supply, you know, as since it has some value to it, we make 10x, 100x maybe return, and then the other folks have something that's worth nothing, right? So these sort of pump and dump schemes are sort of tied to what people generally speaking call meme coins. Doge or Doge is also a meme coin, but it's a lot more stable and it's been around for a much longer time.

John, I think the reason folks are talking about this now is the markets are completely separated from reality generally anyway. Right. We see a situation with Nvidia and Tesla and all these companies. The valuations are wild. They've sort of just not even reacted anymore to the whole tariff thing, which was this up and down thing. And people have decided to invest, let's say, put their money in these more risky propositions, which are what a lot of these coins are. So people have been able to move their money around pretty quickly. You know, maybe they make a 510x return, shuffle their stuff around.

If they're being day traders, you know, this is like the kind of like Robin Hood thing too with stocks, right? And meme stocks, right? which we've seen a number of different times. We have folks trying to figure out clever ways to sort of try to make wealth quickly. But of course, most folks are going to get hurt. I tend to like coins that have some strong fundamentals. I like privacy coins, of course. Monaro is the one I usually talk about in that context.

Explain what that means? Sure. So Monaro is a coin which basically you can actually transact. You can actually send money or receive. money in a really, truly anonymous fashion. It has a number of features that basically mix transactions in such a way that it's very hard, if not impossible, probably impossible, to do chain aliasis and reconstruct the transactions. It also, you know, you can use these anonymity networks, these so-called mixed networks on the back end to mask your network traffic while you're

doing transactions, et cetera, et cetera. So it sort of lives up to the promise of Bitcoin. I write a lot more, or at least, you know, sort of the vision, the original vision of Bitcoin, where you could send wealth or send some sort of value to someone on the other side of the world, and it wouldn't be able to be tracked. We have a question from Jacob Decker. What about crypto-backed by gold, like P-A-X-G or Pax, I don't know if there's a pronunciation there? Yep, that's okay.

So anything that's backed by a store of value in the traditional sense, gold, silver, even stable coins, right, USD coin, Eurocoin, etc. Those things are going to be pinned to the value of that asset, right? So all you're doing there is basically adding, you know, an electronic, a digital transfer layer basically to gold. So if gold is doing well, then your Pax coin is going to be doing well. So it's like an index fund kind of. Yeah, exactly. And of course, We now have ETFs with all these crypto coins in that. Why not just buy gold? I don't know.

Yeah. Okay, so you're being, now we're being, you're being asked like an treated like an investment advisor by our viewers here, which are not. But rebellious rainbow unicorn wants to know is Monera safe. I mean, to me, all this stuff feels like, you know, tulips, you know, 400 years ago. But what do you think? As far as speculative bubbles go, I would say that the main issues are with what I would call the meme coins. And it's not to say that you shouldn't necessarily, you know, if you want to put a few bucks in these things and play around with it and figure out, you know, how these things work, it might be a good learning exercise for you, right?

But of course, there's a lot of speculation around that. That has sort of made crypto a dirty word to a big part of the industry, which is really a shame. Because there are some really good applications for the technology, blockchain technology, that we can talk about. We can, but Monero is a coin that is very good with those fundamentals, right? But for that reason, it's been delisted from a lot of the major exchanges because it actually is private, right? Because then the claim becomes, well, criminals are going to use all this stuff. And, you know, they can't be using Monero, so therefore we don't want to have Monero in our exchange. Additionally, there was basically a targeted attack on Minero in the past month by a company who was trying to undermine, let's say, the mining process of Minero and sort of, they claimed they had taken over the network, but they didn't.

And then spreading that kind of fud, you know, created all the problems downstream where the value of Minero sort of, it didn't tank, but it went down for a little while. So these things are risky, but, you know, putting it all in context, the way I view it is we have an entire generation of folks who were unable to get in on the ground floor of the stock market in the way that you might have been able to buy Apple stock, you know, 20, 25 years ago, right? And because they can't get in on that stuff, they've invented their own new ways of sort of these new markets that they can get in on. This is why people are trading stocks on Robin Hood and pumping them up through Reddit, right? It's just the- I mean, is that really something that people think? I mean, I used to work on Wall Street. And I remember one of the first things that my, the guy who trained me, who was kind of a genius, told me was like, you know, at the time, this tells you how old this story was.

He said, every day, Ted, this was a quiz, 100 million shares trade hands on the New York Stock Exchange, right? Now it's billions. And he said, so which of those are making a mistake and which of those are doing the right thing? And I said, half of them, right? Every single transaction, someone's fucking up and someone's winning. Yeah, that's exactly right. That's still true every single transaction, isn't it? Of course.

There's always new opportunities. But to bring it full circle here, think about, for example, the scooter scam, right? folks are not seeing any opportunities in front of them. The financial instruments are extremely complex. They're locked out of them. When we do see an IPO, which is not very frequent, like we just saw the Figma IPO, you can't even get in on it anyway, right? It's basically pre-sold to a bunch of investors.

And by the time it actually gets to an actionable state where you can put money into it, you know, the price has gone up. Who knows how much, right? 10, 100X, whatever it was. So I think people are frustrated. they're desperate. And just like we see a rise in gambling apps, right? We see sports gambling apps being very popular, punted by a lot of celebrities. This sort of stuff is starting to have that kind of cachet. And scammers are going to jump in, of course, and they're going

to build these scam schemes around it. And they're going to do it on an international level, which is pretty crazy. So, okay, so, I mean, I always like to tell people, you know, okay, so you know about all this, but is there something you can do? Like, okay, so like when you're, you're on Facebook and you hear about something that sounds really great. I'm not going to say too good to be true because if you thought it was too good to be true, you would know it was too good to be true. But like how do you identify something as being too good to be true versus just like a great opportunity, which do exist too?

Yeah, I mean, that is a hard problem, right? I know with Bitcoin with me, I heard about it very early. Okay, I played a rhyme with mining a little bit, but I didn't jump in, you know, fully into it because my tacit assumption was that as soon as it got valuable enough, nation states and powerful actors would basically co-opted and take over. What I didn't, that's all true. It's happening now. Wall Street's taken over Bitcoin, right, to a large extent. But I didn't think the timeline would have allowed this sort of Wild West in the middle there where there was a lot of opportunity for people, right? And I would say,

you know, if you're going to get into this world, try to focus on things that have strong utility, right? If a crypto coin is tied to a really good use case, then maybe it's something you want to try, right? Maybe you do want to put some money in stable coins just so you can move it around. Maybe you do want to play around with smart contracts and build an application on top of it

or a business model, an actual business on top of it, you know, all those sorts of things you can do, but they're hard work, right? I mean, I guess, okay, this is like one of the comments, commenter said that he knew he's smart enough to know or that he's not smart enough to understand this. And this part here is where I'm on the same page as him or her. You know, I mean, why not just build your business on top of the U.S. dollar or for that matter, you know, the Chinese yuan or whatever?

Ah, the stable U.S. dollar. This year with the bond market, I mean, look how wild it went. And I actually think the ulterior motive for that, to a certain extent, is Trump's allegiance to these stable coins. I think there's been a shift where people are putting their money into USC and these other coins away from the traditional bond market in currencies for that reason, which goes back to the thing with gold, right? If you're worried about the price of gold and you invest in gold, you might have to go through some intermediary where you can't then cash that out or move it out very quickly. But if you move it into crypto, you can cash it out quickly, right? Nobody's going to take your crypto away if you have the keys. And that's the part I try to sort of push back on.

I think Bitcoin's pretty stable and here to stay. I think it's a, I mean, the amount of value you would have in Bitcoin just even in the last year, even with all the fluctuation, is much more than 401K plans and so on, which are mostly scams as far as I'm concerned. And of course, yeah. big question though i mean why is bitcoin money right so i was i was you know like the history of paper money uh really prime in the modern era really dates to jenghis khan and the mongol empire because uh basically he had the biggest empire ever created and he needed and and coins

giant bags of coins were too heavy to lug around on the on the backs of those horses so basically he introduced paper money and people and when shopkeepers said why i'm not taking this i don't know this then they were told then you will be killed and then people decided to take it um so that's that works right you can enforce um you know that that that's that's happened many times like uh u.s occupation money uh carried by uh d-day invasion force in in normandy in 1944 same thing we have guns you're gonna take this um but why the u.s dollar is like based on a promise um you know this is based on the full the full faith and credit of the United States government. As long as we're around, the money will be around and we'll do everything we can to prop it up.

What gold is like, well, it's a limited, somewhat useful metal, and there's only so much of it, although we try to control how much of it there is, and we kind of fake that. But why is Bitcoin? You're asking where the value is derived. Why is Bitcoin money? I mean, I don't understand why, you know, just running. running computers like all the time to the point where everything we get brownouts i don't see how that makes money okay so um a blockchain is a big distributed ledger right it's a big spreadsheet

where the entries have a cryptographic relationship between each other right and you can verify the blockchain without having to verify the entire record like the entire chain just by looking at a few of the entries that's what makes it really powerful you can just basically have a few of the transactions you can verify those and then you can spread the spreadsheet around the world right each of those entries in the spreadsheet required some sort of investment right the investment in this case would be energy processing power essentially with a proof of work algorithm P-O-W algorithm that is the way that that derives some sort of value every single transaction that can be quantified cryptographically can be a source of value in a digital sense right this is why

why people pay people for likes on Facebook, right? It's sort of like asking what the value of likes on Facebook is. Well, it exists and there's an economy for people to basically have bots and poor users go out there and be paid in these big, you know, farms and people clicking like, like, like, because somebody's willing to pay for it. So the question you ask is sort of the same. And I would actually say in many ways Bitcoin has more tied to economic reality these days than the U.S. dollar for that reason. That's a big statement, Sean. Yeah. That really is.

We can quantify Bitcoin transactions and we can get a better sense. One of the reasons people talk about the energy problem of Bitcoin and these perfect work algorithms is because you can quantify those transactions pretty well. But try quantifying what happens when I use a debit card. You know, how much electricity does that use? How many intermediaries are there? How many office buildings are running air conditioning and lights in the middle of Manhattan right now? You know, so yeah, it is a big statement. It's also very, it is bad for the environment, but that's a different question.

Rebellious Rainbow Unicorn wants to know, how safe will the bricks currency be when it comes out? I suppose the answer to that is a lot of depends, right? Of course it depends. Yeah. If you guys are interested in this sort of thing, I think we could do a full session on it. One of the things I've been trying to do is bring in folks to talk about crypto. And I just want to relate back because I don't want people to come from this and say there's nothing actual. they can do in their lives. First, on the privacy front, right? You can actually get a good sense for

whether an app is private or not. There are good ways where experts can figure this out. And then I'm working on some curriculum to basically try to show folks how to analyze their apps. It's one of the things we're going to be doing at Ivy Cyber. Would that be a rating system or is that something people would be able to do themselves? Well, I'm going to walk people through the techniques that the experts actually use. So, you know, when I figured out there were 50 plus permissions on this bone chat app and then there are 20-something permissions on this LSSC app. Those tools are pretty easy to run and you can actually do them in the browser, believe it or not. So I could show you, you know, a few seconds, basically.

Not in all cases, but in many cases. For, you know, some of the more complex stuff with rating systems and son, there are some good people working on that. And we could talk about it. But the point is there are actionable things that people can do. And I don't want people to think that they don't have any control over this. The situation has gotten a lot better than it used to. And one of the big things I always want to hammer home is make sure you get rid of apps. You actually audit your own phone.

You go through and you say, do I use this anymore? Did I use this for a specific purpose? Because we have such a transactional thing going with technology where we just install stuff because we have an immediate need. And then we expose yourself to a huge amount of risk, right? So one of the things you can do is just go down your list, go through your manual. you get rid of stuff you don't need, right? And similarly with the crypto stuff, you know, I would say don't spread out your wealth to all of these different coins. Don't just try all

these things out. And then, I mean, people are so diversify, diversify, diversify. Always good advice. Sean, stay right there. We have a quick ad to read through. The countdown is over. The rivalries are real. And the road to the championship begins August 23rd. Westwood One sports brings you every electrifying moment of NCAA football. From the first snap to the final whistletop teams, big plays, unforgettable Saturdays. Don't miss a second of the action. Listen to NCAA football on rumble.com, the Westwood One sports app on westwoodsports.com via Westwood station streams or try asking Alexa to open Westwood One sports. If it's sports, it's on Westwood One.

All right. So we have, I'll invest all that in stable coin, whatever the hell that is. You're half of the $2 we're making today. My half is $2.2, I'm going to do something else. Yeah, indeed, indeed. Yeah, so, I mean, is this going to be some, I mean, it just seems like the, I mean, this is a golden era, I guess it always has been, it's a golden era of scamming these days, just because there's so much about the new world that people don't understand.

And I really, really worry about older people. I mean, it's hard for them. So when I do workshops and I talk to people, I've actually seen sort of the older folks and the younger folks are sort of coming together at their level of non-understanding. The people who were in the sort of the nicest way possible. Yeah. Well, but it's partially because apps are magic, right? technology is magic.

If you've grown up with something and you're just used to hitting an icon and your interaction is swiping, right? You don't really understand things like what a network is, right? So when I talk about data crossing to Hong Kong over a network, what does that mean, right? Yeah, my kid and his classmates in high school, they didn't understand that if they posted to a chat group, that it was on the internet and that people in Malaysia could read it. That's exactly right. So when we're talking about these apps, right, these software development kit, SDK trackers,

these apps open to all these servers all the time. So it's not even just that you're posting something and it goes on the internet and publishes on the internet, right? It goes to a server somewhere. But in the background, your apps are constantly just cranking, sending data all over the world. And in this case, like with these apps, it was very clear where it was going. I was going through Alibaba and Tencent and all these Chinese-owned intermediaries. but I've seen apps sending to every corner of the globe at once. Sean, before I let you go, I'm going to ask you a legal question or a political question.

In my opinion, you know, I've been trying to wrestle with how to write this piece. But a very high percentage of crime in the United States is victims of crime. You're far more likely to be robbed in a confidence scheme on the Internet than you are to be mugged in the streets, even of a city like, Southeast D.C. or Baltimore. So, like, the thing is, but if you go into, if I go into my local police precinct here in Manhattan, the odds are they've got no one there who knows how, who has, they don't have a cyber division at my precinct. Shouldn't every police precinct in the country have a cyberdivision? Sure. So the two things to talk about there. I mean, to deal with Metafiles, for example, everything.

Yep, the two things to talk about there are, and I'm glad, again, this brings it full circle in a good way. We were talking about Monero and cryptocurrency, right? And the so-called, you know, criminals using Minero and stuff. Cybercrime is just crime now, right? Everything is intermediated by digital technology. Criminals who are running cybercrime rings resemble organized crime. They have a hierarchy, the people who are expendable or the ones who are doing the stealing, right? They can cut ties with them and they can run off and nobody knows who the people running

the show are. And they're going to use simple schemes. They're often going to transact with just Bitcoin because Minera's too hard to use, right? Or they're going to just steal from your ATM machines. Right. Scammers always go with the path of least resistance, which is why most viruses are on PC and not on Mac. Right. Now on the, yes, that's a big part of it, although there's some things about Unix that are pretty good about Macs as well and Linux as well, which is my thing. But what I'll say about the cops and the police, right, they focus an awful lot on digital forensics, which is something I teach, and I teach people who, you know,

basically are using the same tools that the law enforcement is using. And they're focusing on basically taking some drug dealers' phone, sifting through it and coming up with a reason to give them a big sentence, right? I think that if law enforcement did care about cyber crime and cared about their communities, they would be focused more on understanding these kinds of crime scams, you know, being able to, as you say, you know, have a real cybercrime division because otherwise the answer is, you know, the one I gave you in the beginning. Like basically nothing's going to happen to these people. You know,

you've got one of the largest news outlets in the world, certainly in the U.S., talking about it, and it'll just be lost in the memory hole and nobody will care. So. All right, Sean, thank you so much for joining us. This fascinating conversation, and you're Right. We could have just kept talking. Sean O'Brien is from the head of the Yale Privacy Lab, and he's the head of Ivy Cyber. We'll be talking to Sean and about Ivy Cyber more in the future. Thanks very much. We'll talk to you soon. Okay. And I've got a question for you, John, from the Rumble Feed. Okay. Do you have a burn notice? Sherlock Holmes 100 wants to know.

I was told in 2004 that, yes, I had a burn notice. I don't know if that's true or not, but yeah, that's what I was told, but there was indeed a burn notice on me. Well, I will say that in 2007, I went to Afghanistan at the request of Paramount Pictures to rescue these little kids that had acted in the movie, the kite runner. Oh, wow. And so word that I had gotten the families out of Afghanistan somehow leaked to the New York Times. Well, the studio leaked it to the New York Times. And somebody at the agency read it and asked if I would come in and brief them on the leaders that I

had encountered in Afghanistan. So I did. And that was in 2007. So I don't know. I was told that Mary Margaret Graham issued a burn notice. A burn notice is an order. Thanks, Reed. A burn notice is an order not to have anything to do with a person. And I was a troublemaker. It's like being a Mormon and being snubbed. That's right.

Shunned. And did I ever work with John O'Neill? Yes, indeed. I did work with John O'Neill. John O'Neill was one of the most difficult people to get along with that I've ever encountered. He was the head of the FBI's New York Field Office and deputy director of the FBI. He was one of the angriest, meanest, most difficult people ever. He left the FBI on September the 10th, 2001 and started his new job as the head of security for the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11th and was killed two hours later.

yeah well that's the guy why was he so difficult he was just a dick i mean i hate to speak ill of the dead i really do but the guy was just a dick and some people are like that they're just they're just awful oh someone's asking if you saw an interview clip of yourself on the young turks no oh i'm glad though if that's how you know i'll say too when i i debated andrew gustamante a year ago on the Danny Jones podcast, and I didn't prepare at all because I thought, you know what, if I don't know these issues by now, I'm never going to know them. So I just went at him. He went at me first.

And when I got home, Alan Dershowitz called me and said that he said he had watched the podcast and he said, you gave that kid a master class in the Constitution. I said, hey, thanks. I'm not a, I'm not an Alan Dershowitz fan, but that was kind of nice. Being Professor Emeritus of Constitutional Law at Harvard University, I think. Yes, I would say that's definitely a great compliment. Yeah. Well, everyone, thanks so much for listening and watching.

We're here Monday through Friday, 5 p.m. Eastern Time. Please like, follow, and share the show. This is you've been watching Deep Program. So hopefully you're deep programmed. I'm Ted Raul, John Kariaku, and I both thank you. and we'll see you tomorrow at 5 p.m. Eastern time. Let me make sure I've got this all. Oh, yeah, here we go.