Reply All - #96 The Secret Life of Alex Goldman

Episode Date: May 4, 2017

Alex agreed to let PJ hack his phone, giving him 24/7 uninterrupted surveillance over his life. This week, everything you can learn about someone who completely surrenders their privacy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Gimlet, this is Reply Off. I'm PJ Vote. Alex Goldman. Oh, man. Oh, man. Hi. Hey. How's it going?

Good. So, a while back, we decided to do an experiment. Right. And the experiment was this. We had read that Donald Trump uses an old, easy-to-hack Android phone, a Samsung Galaxy S3. And so we wanted to find out if somebody were able to hack his phone, what could they find out about Donald Trump?

You like very, with that very little persuasion, I was like, hey, can I hack your cell phone for a while? And you were like, yeah, that's fine. And so what we did is I bought a Samsung Galaxy S3 off of eBay. I bought some just like consumer spyware software. I loaded it onto the phone, which was really easy. I basically like had to jail break it and then visit one website, which took about five minutes.

You agreed to not use your iPhone to only use this phone. which meant that I had unfettered access to your life. And I just want to, I have a lot to say about my experience. That's why we're here. First of all, using this phone was like a painful odyssey. Like I just felt like I was using a phone that felt totally alien to me, not only because it's not an iPhone, but because it's older, it's like six or seven years old. And in technology years, that's like...

Three decades. Yeah. So what? So what was hard? Well, let's see. What was hard? You have it right now. I have the phone in my hand.

It's like a, it looks like an old, like, it's like, it's kind of like from the era where things were rounded in a way that was supposed to look high tech, but it just looks like somebody's birth control container. It looked, there's a ton of shovelware on here. What's shovelware? Just like a bunch of garbage that was preloaded on. Like what? Beats music, chat on. AT&T locker, AT&T family map. Group play.

Most of these things sound like sex stuff. Like chat on, group play. I don't know about AT&T locker. Samsung Hub, S memo. Okay, but whatever. It has a bunch of crap on it that you're not going to use. That doesn't seem like such a problem. It has an app called Let Go.

Is that like a pro-suicide hotline? That to me just sounds like, give up Alex. There was like an extra lock screen on top of the lock screen that I had. How would it is? It seemed to unlock your phone twice? Yes. I had to swipe through twice.

To say nothing of the fact that the battery is seven years old, so the phone died every... You couldn't use the phone for more than an hour and a half. I've had it charging all day. It's at 61%. It was at 74% when you walked into the room

10 minutes ago. Got it. That is frustrating. Also, I think the other reason the battery may have been dying a lot was because the phone was doing a lot. Not just the things you asked it to do. Oh.

Oh, God. The other thing that I should mention is that on the first episode, we agreed that I would do this for a week. Yes. And then it just sort of kept going. And no one said anything, so I just kept using the phone. I think I ended up using it for three weeks. Yeah, that's true. That's true.

My wife was furious. I wondered if she had any feelings about this thing you agreed to do that violated all of her privacy as well. Not because of the privacy stuff, just because the phone was so unusable that she had a very hard time getting in contact with me. I noticed that. Oh. Okay. Here's what it looked like from my end of things. I have this.

Basically, I go to my web browser. I could go to the, like, interface for my spyware, and I get this dashboard. Basically, it's like the same graphic design

as like when you do router set up at your house. Yeah. But it shows me like, exactly where you are right now on a map. It shows me your battery level, which is always very low.

But then I can open it up and I have, have a recording of every phone call to or from your phone. Really? Yes. Oh, wow. I'm watching. You learn things. Oh, boy.

All your texts. Okay. All your MMS, like, so photos you sent. All the photos you yourself took on the phone. All the videos you took on the phone. Any audio files you made on the phone. The wallpaper for your phone, which you never changed. And then what I could do is I could.

ask the phone to record for a period of anywhere from one minute to, I think, an hour. And it would just record from its microphone starting that, and it would send me the audio file. And then I could also ask you to take a picture, and so I have a bunch of pictures from your phone's camera that I took. And would they store on my phone, or would they go straight to you? No, they just send them me. They were for me, not for you. Did you get anything good? Well, let me tell you about that.

So this has been a very frustrating experience for me. It's been a very frustrating experience because you are perhaps like, there's no one worse I could have picked to surveil. Can I, yeah, can I play you some of what I picked up on my wiretaps? Yeah, please. Now I'm very excited. Here's a conversation with you and Sarah. Hello? Hey, babe.

Can you hear me? Yeah, can you hear me? Yeah. I'm on my way home. Are you, what's going on? I'm in the train. Okay, when do you think you'll be home? Probably around 930.

Maybe like 945. Okay. I think I have to stop and get cash for Deslin, so I wanted to make sure. Okay, so you're going to be home first? Yeah. Okay. I also got cash for Deslin. But now I have cash for me.

It's a big twist. You don't find that the least bit exciting? You also send her so many pictures of just like, if the train's crowded, you'll send her a picture of the train being crowded. like a lot? Like I was like, why is he taking pictures of all these people? There were some pretty serious train problems in New York City. Oh, I know. You also talked about them in the morning in the office. Here's like a, here's like a pretty crazy conversation you and Tim have. Hey, what's up?

Good morning, dude. How are you? I feel like shit. I didn't get any sleep last night. I feel very bad. Why didn't you get any sleep? Because I have a two-year-old. Can you hear Tim, not caring? Yeah, I sure can. All right. I'm going to, let's see,

do you have a list of, like, retracting? You spend 20 minutes talking about, like, minor edits for that week's episode. I now own hours and hours and hours of recordings that are just like this. Like, there's nothing. There's, like, no behind the scenes. Like, it's like a movie, and then they do the director's commentary, and it's just the dialogue of the movie again. And then, like, another way I thought,

I could get you to reveal something about yourself. It's just like, if it's not your thoughts, it's like, where do you go? Like, there's this feature where it shows me a map. And every single time you move, there's a dot on the map. So I can see like all your patterns over the course of these three weeks. Here's what I see. Like when I hit the video and watch you travel, you start at work, and then at the end of that first workday, you get on a train and I see your dot travel on the train to Manhattan. And then I see you transfer trains and travel to New Jersey. And then you go from the train station in New Jersey to your house. And the next morning, you do the exact same thing, but just backwards.

This makes me feel really bad about my life. Really? What did you? Just give me a scenario. What did you expect? I don't know. Maybe you had a friend I hadn't heard about. Or a hobby you'd never mentioned.

Or like, just a secret. One secret. Maybe you would have one secret. Maybe it wouldn't be a dirty secret or a good secret. Just a secret. There was one point for like one moment when I was reading all your text messages where at least like an outside observer, it did look like you were absolutely having an affair. Come on.

You send a message to a person. You have an exchange where somebody tells you, I really want to have our slumber party one day. And they were like literally inviting you over that night. And they're like, here's my address. Call when you're here. If you want home-cooked food, there's home-cooked food. Huh. Is this stressing you out?

It, like, stressed me out to read this. I have no idea what this is about. This is stressing me out. It was truthy. Like, it was like some late night when it was a winter storm. You didn't know if you could get back to Jersey. Yes. And she was sort of saying like, oh, you can crash at our place, but if you want to go home.

But like, it was the thing where I was like, oh, if a random person were looking into you, like, if like the FBI were looking into you, they'd be like, this is definitely bad. Right, right. But yes. Oh, my God. The shorthand we use with each other. Oh, that could have been very terribly misconstrued. Yes. But for me, so I got so bored.

And I was like, it really felt like I was like, well, we said we were going to do this. And I need to find something. And like, if this really is like somebody spying on Trump, you know, it's not just like one person spies on Trump. Like if it's the NSA, they have like junior analysts. They're like people who. Oh, come on. Yeah. Yeah.

So I, do you know Emily Kennedy? Yes. So Emily Kennedy, for people who don't know Emily Kennedy, she's a freelance radio producer. We've worked with her. remotely. And so I was like, Emily, do you want to be like a junior spy analyst of Alex Goldman's life? I didn't explicitly give you permission to do this. That's true. So I handed it over to Emily and like, Emily came into it differently because like she, you guys haven't met in person. No. So like I gave, I handed the controls over to her for a weekend. And basically like she caught the

same stuff I did. Like she got a lot of you with your family talking to Sarah, singing to Harvey. Her main takeaway is just she really, really loves your life. He just seems like such a good dad. You can like see the like hard eyes emoji like up here on your street, you know. It's so cute. But it also like, I don't know, something about listening to children on like on a like a super shoddy recording laughing makes me feel like something is imminently going to happen to this, like, very nice family with this, like, very nice mom and this very nice dad who are, like, reading Thomas the Tank Engine all together with their kid. And you're like, oh, fuck. Like, you guys are going down. There's a serious that they're standing outside. What else jumped out of you? What else was interesting?

Oh, my God. Okay. There was an amazing moment, which I feel like you'll appreciate. Yeah. Okay. So he, So this was, let me see, I have, like, notes on this that I can pull up to because it was just so good. So he's in his house. I think he walks up the stairs, and then he says to his wife, like, where's the shopping list? It was on the table. And then it gets really staticy. And then she goes, where do you want to, where are you going to the grocery store?

And he says, I don't know, do you want me to go to Trade for Joe's? I don't give a shit. Unless you want me to go to Trade for Joe's. And she goes, I don't care where you go. And then he goes, hey, I love you, which is like this very sweet moment. It's just so weird to talk about it. Okay, I'm going to keep dying. And then, okay, and then he leaves the house, which is really exciting because it felt like that was the first, like, real theme tape that I got of, like, like, you could hear him jangling his keys and you could hear the door shutting.

And, like, you felt like he was going somewhere. Because it has so little story. It's, like, anything that happens feels like a story. is happening. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So the thing that Emily found, like the big moment,

it happens next. Okay. You get into your car, you turn on, like, whatever the pop rap radio station is in Jersey, Hot 97,

and then you start driving, and after a couple minutes, you just start laughing to yourself. It's like that kind of laughter. and it like goes on. It's like a full minute where you're just like, just like laughing and you'll stop

and then you'll start laughing and it's like a song on the radio. It's like not from the radio. I'm going to tell you something about myself. Yeah. This might be my one secret. Okay. If I watch a comedy show or listen to a comedy podcast

and there's a moment that I think is particularly funny, if I think about it, well, I'm by myself. I often start laughing very hard. Do you have the recording? Yeah, it's kind of a low quality recording. I really want to hear it. Okay, here, let me play for you.

I don't know, you're doing anything where you laugh so hard, you start coughing. Do you see that mean about it being like? That's so weird. That's so weird. Why, I'm still laughing! That's so weird. Oh, this is the most embarrassing thing that's ever happened to me. Really?

It's so weird. Yeah, it is so weird. It's so weird. Yeah. It's that. That is like my worst nightmare about what you could find out about me. Really? That I'm like a creepy self-laffer.

in a car by myself. It's so weird. Do you want to hear something that maybe will make you feel better? Sure. Do you want to hear yourself singing to your son? Yeah, that would be great. Oh, here's your song with Harvey.

Tau song? This makes me feel happy. Because you're hearing you with your kid? Yeah. I love that guy. So that's your life. You go home, you sing to your kid. Sounds great.

Then you get in the car. I laugh to myself. All the murders you're going to do. That is truly so weird. Coming up after the break, a world of creeps. How are you feeling, Alex? Uh, you know, a little worse for where, but pretty good. Okay, so I have to tell you something.

All right. So our last conversation was a week ago. In that time, I have learned a lot of things about the tool that I use to spy on you. It's called flexa spy. all of those things are pretty bad. Great. Great. Yeah.

So I'm going to tell you the things that I've learned, which make me feel bad. You can feel bad. Also, some of them you personally, I think, just, like, need to know. Okay. So Joseph Cox, the motherboard reporter who told me about Flexa Spy in the first place, while we were doing our experiment, he was just learning as much as he could about this tool. Okay. But Joseph has been focusing on domestic violence because it turns out the kind of person,

who wants to control you by invading your privacy can also be the kind of person who will be violent towards you. Yeah, it's bad. He told me about this survey. 75% of domestic violence shelters have come across somebody who's come in and said, I found software like this on my phone. Oh, Jesus Christ. Does Joseph know anything about this company that's doing this?

So he was able to get data on FlexisPi and this other similar company. They have way more users than I would have thought. They've like a hundred, he thinks like 130,000. I would have guessed 10. I know, especially because the software is really expensive. Like the package I got was $200. I think there's a cheap one for $50. But like this is profitable.

It's international, although the United States is like a lot of their business. Also, he found out that they explicitly are targeting a spouse situation. Like basically they bought up a bunch of ads on Google. And if you search like, how do I catch my cheating husband? How do I catch my cheating wife? you're likely to see ads for their software. This is like a classic blind spot for Google. If I were Google, those are the kind of ads I would delist.

You're not explicitly breaking any rules, but it's just, it creates a scenario that facilitates like violence and terribleness and like just, it facilitates like human misery. The other thing is it is illegal. So like, this is a point that somehow just flew over my students. stupid head, you're not allowed to wiretap people. So how can they sell this stuff? Because they're not located in the U.S., like the companies that do this for the most part. They can say, if they're smart, like, well, we don't know that people are going to use it for

that. But what makes Flexis Buy, the company that I use, like, particularly bad is they're telling people to use it for this. Like, they're not even winking. So the big thing that happened between when we started this and when I spoke to Joe yesterday. Can I take a guess? Yeah. Were they hacked?

Yes. Oh, you've got to be kidding me. Flexis Spy was hacked? Yes. And what does that mean? What if they gotten? Okay. So they were hacked.

He has access to the database of hacked stuff. Uh-huh. He searched and you are not in it. That's a relief. Did that feel genuinely worrisome? Yeah. So actually, the hacker who hacked Flexis Spy is this hacker named Leopard Boy. And he did it, like, as a hacker.

an act of protest. Like, he was like, what they're doing is wrong and gross, and I don't like it. He'd actually, he'd read Joseph's article and got mad that way. And then he sent the material to Joseph. Did the contents that were sent to Joseph also include the names of the customers? Yeah, they got this huge list of flights of spies customers. So all these people who were spying on people, they now are kind of exposed. Okay, you said my name wasn't in the list. Was your name in the list? My name was not in the list. Okay. But Joe wanted to talk to some of the people who were on the list. Like he wanted to just know who they were. And so he started emailing them.

And they were just totally normal people, like a teacher in Washington, D.C., a dog trainer in Georgia, someone who runs a sunglasses distributor in New York. And they're just, they're not embarrassed about what they've done. Like there was this guy who had used it to spy on his wife. He said it was the best money he ever spent. Sure. Yeah. Well, maybe spend your money on more things. but um and then there was another one that i think was the most shocking it was a very simple short

email that simply said it's normal and i never heard from them again it's normal meaning it's normal to spy on people it's normal to use this software this malware yeah joseph also heard from a second hacker a person who'd hacked another company that's basically the same as flexa spy and they got like actual material. Like all the things that like if I spied on you and I collected like photos, video, audio, they had that stuff and they sent that stuff to Joseph. Wow. The fact that that was not better secured.

I know. Not great. Yeah. The hacker agreed with you. He was like, I don't think people should be able to gain access to this material. So after he broke into the company, he wiped all of their servers. he deleted it from the company itself

yeah that is like the end of fight club or something yeah you kind of sell it on fire and the flexi spy hacker did largely the same thing isn't that awesome it is awesome i strongly suspect that they probably had backups yes i'm sure that they did but it was a nice move yeah anyway i just feel like my whole takeaway from this is

I feel like we were using like a toy and I'm like, oh, this is not a toy. This is terror. And it's not like it didn't occur to me that this might not be the best thing, but like it's like you brought an AK-47 to hunt squirrels. Yes, yes, yes.

And like, I do, like, I do genuinely feel, I have this feeling like I expose you to more risk than I intended to and it feels bad and I'm like genuinely sorry for that. Well, thank you. Thank you. I thought the first first half of this show was like so much about just my glaring personality flaws and like

the incredible milk toastiness of my life. It turns out it was about like your incredible lack of thoughtfulness and my blind willingness to trust you in any circumstance. You lead me down so many primrose paths. You don't give a shit. I guess you give a shit. You apologized. Yeah, I guess I give that much of a shit. One last thing. If you're worried that you may have been targeted with Flexi. There's a tool you can use. It's called FlexiKiller. It's made by a group called Security Without Borders.

It can't scan your phone, but it can scan your computer to see if the software is on it. It can identify it. It can delete it. Also, if you're experiencing domestic violence, a good phone number is the National and Domestic Violence Hotline. It's 1-800-7-9-7-233. They're there 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Reply All is hosted by PJ Vote and me, Alex Goldman.

Our show is produced by Shruthy Pinnaminani, Fia Benin, Chloe Prasinos, and Damiano Marquetti. Production assistance from Sharina Ong. We're edited by Tim Howard and Jorge Just. We're mixed by Rick Kwan. Our theme songs by The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder and our ad music is by Build Build Buildings. Matt Lieber is a balmy summer night. Just hanging out on the back porch. Doing whatever.

We're looking for a fall intern. If you're interested in applying, you can't. and do so on our website, the deadline for applications is 9 a.m. on May 29th. You can visit our website at replyall.com, and you can find more episodes of the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll see you in two weeks. Space, the winters are harsh, and the beats won't drop. 112 trillion miles back to Earth. Listening to that the whole way.

What, seriously? Did you check the routers? If we don't have internet, then we don't have navigation. You mean we're just stuck here?