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

Episode Date: September 17, 2026

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

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free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Byron Tau. welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. My pleasure. My pleasure. So like I said, I heard about you in an earlier episode.

Your book got shouted out. And so it took us a couple of years, but here you are. Well, glad to be here. By, yeah. It's good to have you here. So, you know, so we're going to be talking about basically digital surveillance, what they do with all that information and all this stuff. And this can be kind of a dry subject. So I just kind of want to preface it before we get going.

Have you heard about this pricing surveillance? Yeah. This is a new thing where essentially companies are trying to figure out what the maximum is that you're willing to pay. And try to extract as much money from you as possible through all the data they collect about you. So I just want to paint a picture real quick, you know, because you get a lot of, of people and they're like, ah, what does it matter about what, what are they, what, I'm not trying to hide anything, you know, and so I know Walmart is, I think Walmart, I think there's another big company to, is it, is it Amazon? I'd be surprised if most big companies weren't at least

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

specifically are willing to pay for each individual product within the store. And so it's, it just falls into this mass surveillance hysteria that everybody is getting extremely concerned about. And, and so this is, this is some of the stuff that we're going to, that we're going to talk about today. Yeah, I think companies generally speaking, for many, many years now have started to see consumers as data, right? They want to know about you. They want to know about your purchase journey. They want to know about your background.

They want to know about your interests. And they use all of that to, historically, they've used it to target you with advertising. But increasingly, we're at an, we're in an environment where there's enough data out there about you. And there's enough of a consumer profile out there about you, whether that's stuff you put out yourself or your purchase history or things they're inferring about you.

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

I knew it was horrible. I thought the government kind of had their own arm in this, but it sounds like they don't really need their own arm because the marketing agencies that collect all the data from your phone through the apps, through your tires, through the vacuums, through TVs, through everything. They're just, they're so good at collecting that they just take the block of it and sell it to the U.S. government. Yeah, that's right. And this has been going on for a while, but it's accelerated as we've all started putting more and more information about ourselves online. So this originally started with stuff like, well, you know, these data brokers will collect your property history, like who bought a certain house. They might get a little information about your mortgage. They might, at some point, it started, you know, getting consumer lists, right?

Were you the kind of person that subscribed to a magazine about pets or cooking or guns? And so they gradually started amassing more and more information about people right up to the current moment where they essentially can, you know, track a lot about your browsing history, they can track a lot about your movements through the world, they know how to link your social profiles to your real identity. And yes, governments have realized that there's a ton of corporate data out there that consumers are voluntarily handing it over in many cases. and that if they just open their wallet, they can often get information that they would otherwise either be forbidden from getting, because you've worked in the government, there are all sorts of rules and regulations

about when you can target people and how you can target people. But if you buy the data on the open market, some of those rules go out the door. And so, yes, this is a phenomenon that's been increasing in recent years and is only going to keep increasing as long as we keep pouring data about ourselves

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

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

This is from Jesse Martin. Your reporting has shown that commercially available location data can map the movements of phones around military installations, intelligence facilities, and the homes of the people who work there. If a foreign service can simply buy that from an ad broker, has the concept of OPSEC for operators and their families already collapsed? And does anyone in government have a serious answer for it? That's a great question. And I think even in this current conflict in Iran, we've seen reports out of CENTCOM that the Iranians may have indeed targeted American soldiers using commercially available data. This is a really, really hard problem to solve. There are some solutions.

There are sort of hardened phones. There are rules you can put in place, but they're very, very difficult. And it takes discipline. It takes discipline from the leadership of the military. It takes a certain amount of technical expertise, right? It's not just putting your phone in airplane mode. there's a lot of different things you need to do to harden a device and to make sure that, you know, operational security is maintained.

And, you know, it requires understanding a bewildering array of data that's collected. And so there are people that are working on this problem. There's probably not enough people that are working on this problem. But it is a serious and ongoing threat to the people that go overseas and serve our country. Is there – I mean, I know the FTC's getting involved in the – in the surveillance pricing stuff, but is this even a discussion in the U.S. government right now as far as just, you know, for a civilian standpoint? I mean, it's so invasive. So, I mean, I think, you know, historically, I think the government, and I think this is, you know, leading members of both parties have not wanted to really interfere in the Internet at the very beginning, right?

because they thought it was going to be this tremendous tool for the advancement of human flourishing and freedom and commerce, and they thought that onerous regulations might interfere with that. And that was a reasonable position to take, you know, 20, 30 years ago. I think as we've seen the internet mature, we've really seen a lack of serious policy discussion about what the rules should be around consumer data protection,

and we've seen a real leadership vacuum in Congress. I mean, you know, the internet's 30, some, years old at this point and you know we're the last remaining major industrial democracy that does not have a comprehensive privacy law we have a patchwork of different laws that are state by state we have some executive orders that have been meant to deal with some of this from a purely national security basis right like trying to stop tick-tock and other data flows out of the country but writ large i mean our lawmakers are our political leaders have never really written rules of the road

for digital services Wow. You said we're the last, we're the last one. That's something you hear scholars say, but essentially, I think that's correct, that at a national level, we're the last real remaining, you know, major democracy and major economy that doesn't have a privacy law that applies across the board to digital services. Yeah, I think that's true. Well, I mean, just, you know, from our previous discussion before we even started this, I mean, I'll bet they're thinking about it now. I mean, I wasn't even planning on good. going into this, but I mean, you're, so right now you're working on how foreign governments, specifically Iran, but there's a lot of other ones, I'm sure, are buying the data from U.S. marketing firms about us and targeting U.S. soldiers, operatives, state department personnel overseas. Can you, could you? Yeah, I mean, it's something I'm, I'm interested in because

It grows out in my book, but there was a letter, I think, a few weeks ago or a few months ago from Senator Ron Wyden's office, and he asked the Pentagon straight up, are there any reports that Iranians had targeted American soldiers? And the Pentagon answered that, yes, they had received credible intelligence report saying that Iranians had used commercially available information, information collected from data brokers to potentially target U.S. soldiers. They didn't give a tremendous amount of detail, but they said they had received that reporting. And so, yeah, this, you know, I've focused in this book primarily on what our government does with this data, but this data is out there and it's available for sale, and our adversaries can and do buy it. You know, there have been reports of other foreign governments getting this information, particularly Israeli companies.

And, you know, Israel is an ally of the United States, but it would not be at all difficult for China. Russia, Iran to obtain the exact same data that we're talking about here. And CENTCOM seems to believe that it's at least credible that it was used to target Americans. Wow. Do you have a hardened phone? I do not. I do use a privacy for a cell carrier, and I do put my Apple phone in lockdown mode. But, you know, being a reporter, you have to balance the need for contacting people with

putting your phone number out there in many instances. and trying to encourage the public to deliver you tips. And so I try to get a balance with my own personal security. Well, I got you a present. Oh, yeah? I sure did. So, here you go. Oh, thank you.

You're welcome. This is a hardened phone. Should I open it now? Go ahead, open it up. All right. How do I do this? Oh, boy. You're going to have to help me.

Oh, boy. All right. There we go. Oh, there's a snap. Tell me about this. All right. So I'll tell you about that. So you wrote about a company called Glacier.

I did. In your book. And I wound up going into business because this is with Glacier, because this is something I've been extremely concerned with. My podcast got a little political. I've been now I'm affiliated with heads of state and all these other people. I used to work for the agency. I get paranoid about this stuff.

So anyways, I reached out to them because I didn't want all these people who have my numbers. I don't know what they're sucking out of my phone, talking to people like you, talking to former colleagues and what's being sucked out of the phone. I wanted to harden phone for everybody on my team. So I reached out to some former colleagues, you know, about what's the latest and greatest hardened phone. And they pointed me towards a company called Glacier. I wanted to go into business with Glacier. But first and foremost, I wanted their product. Well, their product is awesome, but it's $10,000 a phone roughly, plus another double that for the service.

And so I lost interest and I said, look, I want something that we can do for everybody that everyday consumers can afford. It's not, nobody can afford this. And so we developed an application that takes a lot of the best features out of the phone and put it into an app. And the app's called Glacier. And so basically, in a nutshell, what Glacier does, I think you're going to love this. One, burner numbers. So my number gets leaked all over the Internet. I'm sure your number, you know, if you're an investigative reporter, you know what that's like.

And so we created, you can get up to five burner numbers. And so what that is, you know, you pass your number out, it starts getting leaked, you're getting spam, you don't want your hotel, the pizza place, the political campaign, you donate to any of that stuff, the nonprofit that you do. Everybody's selling your shit constantly. So you hand out the burner number. When you come to the realization it's been compromised, you burn the number, you get a new one. You can pick any area code in the U.S. Then the other thing we did is we did secure DNS, you know, which keeps the applications that you're not using that are selling all your information, where you are, what you buy, who you're with, all that stuff. It keeps that stuff localized on your phone and blocks it from being uploaded and sold to the marketing firms or the U.S. government or foreign governments. And then the last thing that we did was we put a VPN in there that we don't hold any data. other than the email that you sign up with. And they're all-American VPNs.

So that's what we developed. And we made the app as simple as you could possibly imagine. The real winner in there is the burner numbers and the DNS. And so that's built into a commercially available app that most consumers can get out without dropping $10,000 on a secure phone. Yep. And it's super simple. You, I mean, you connect to the DNS, you shut the app off, and it is done. You don't ever have to open it again. So can I ask you a question? What's your experience been like with the hardened phone?

Because like you mentioned, I did talk to Glacier in writing this book and a few other people who made hardened phones. And one of the things they said that the challenge was, you have to make a hardened phone that people want to use, right? Because if you have a hardened phone and it doesn't work in all the normal ways that people want to use a cell phone, then they end up just getting a non-hardened phone

and carrying both of them around together. And then you've defeated the point of the hardened phone. So what's been your experience? experience like using the hardened phone. Does it, does it do everything a normal cell phone does? It does. It's an iPhone. You know, and so when talking to them, because I've had other hardened phones, but they were, they weren't the iPhone. And I think most Americans, they, life revolves around Apple. You know what I mean? Unfortunately, it just is what it is. It's hard to escape that ecosystem. And so they've found a way to harden that, harden the damn iPhone. And,

It's it's got some, you know, more advanced features on the app, but it's, it's just, it's having an iPhone. They, you know what I mean? And if, if they detect suspicious activity, you get an email, they follow up with it. They track where it went, what's happening, you know, and if it's, if it is something malicious, then then you get notified. You get a phone call from them. Some other stuff that they can do that, you know, that the app can't do is, you know, for, for me, we're all over the world.

you know, and we're kicking over some rocks that a lot of people don't want kicked over. And so what they can do is they can actually upload a footprint, like a false footprint, into your phone to make it look like you've been there for a long time and delete it when you're gone. You know what I mean? So you come back to the U.S. doesn't look like I was doing an interview in Taiwan. I go to Taiwan. It doesn't look like I came from the U.S. us. I go to Dubai to interview there. I have a whole new footprint uploaded that's a, you know what I mean? So it makes you, it makes you blend in, you know, digitally. And it doesn't

raise any red flags when you're out to all these countries. And there's some kidnapping type features, some of that kind of stuff. I'm looking forward to checking it out. I love to hear what you got to say. Here's the pitch. It takes two minutes and you'll never think about it again. Hit one button, close the app. That's the entire job. No manual, no settings, no tech background. Nothing for you to get wrong. And then it just runs.

Blocking the trackers, the fishing sites, and the surveillance ads across every app on the device all day, quietly, without anybody having to do anything. It's first week out. It hit number six on Apple's top-down. downloaded productivity chart. Built by former U.S. intelligence professionals, I'm a co-founder, Glacier,

downloaded on the app store. And remember, privacy isn't paranoia, is protection. Look, if you're going to have a firearm in your home, it needs to be secure, especially if you have kids. But you also need access when it matters the most. And that's why I started using Stopbox.

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Please support our show and tell them our show sent you. So how did you, I mean, how did you kind of get your start into this? What caught your attention? Because like I said, this can be a pretty dry subject, especially two years ago when, you know what I mean, when you were getting into it. Yeah, actually, I mean, the story starts almost six years ago at this point, maybe even more. But, you know, I was at a dinner party and somebody was telling me about a program that they were working on that involved the Department of Defense or the Department of War, as it's now being called, buying up large amounts of commercially available information on the open market and using it to do some kind of counterterrorism work. And this was something I had never heard of, right?

I didn't know that you could just go out and broker information that showed pretty precise and granular movement of phones. And, you know, this was a vector of surveillance that I had simply not considered. You know, like, I thought I understood, you know, I was a Washington reporter. I had covered courts on and off. I knew about how law enforcement was supposed to work. And the idea that there was this data set out there of the movement of hundreds of millions of devices was kind of shocking to me.

So I'm sitting there, you know, tell me more. That's an interesting program. And, you know, I got some of the tale. I got some of the technical explanation that, oh, you know, it comes off these apps, like weather apps and games. It comes when you opt in. Your phone number's not in there. Your name isn't in there.

You're known by an anonymized identifier, a string of letters and numbers. But, you know, we can generally figure out who you are, right? because where a phone is at night and where it goes during the day and where it goes back to at night, it's a pretty good correlation to a person's real-world movement and identity, right? I'm the only person that gets up at my home in Washington, D.C., and goes to my office in downtown Washington, D.C.,

and comes home every night, right? Like, my fiance wakes up there, but she goes to a different office. And so it's not all that difficult to get down to people's identity in this data sets. in these data sets. And so hearing this story, I thought this was rather extraordinary and a kind of surveillance I just hadn't considered. And so, you know, I kept it in the back of my mind,

and I started reporting on it. And, you know, the opportunity really came to delve deep into it when I was kind of a new reporter on the Justice Department and Law Enforcement Beat. Back in 2020, I remembered this tip from a few years before, and I started digging into it. And at this time, the program had matured a bit. DHS had started to use this data to do kind of internal security

and tracking of unlawful border crossings and trying to find unlawful immigrants in the interior of the country and had started to start using it for ordinary law enforcement, right? Kidnappings and all sorts of other things. And all doing it without a judge's supervision, without a warrant, and without most people in America, knowing that this program was happening.

And so that's when I really see. started to delve into it. I published my first story on the topic of commercial data tracking in February of 2020, and I've been reporting on it ever since. Six years ago. Yeah. And now that I think of it, I think the tip came in 2017 or 2018. Wow. Wow. How much is this advanced? You know, a couple things have happened since I started working on it. I mean, you know, on the one hand, people are much more privacy aware, and Apple and Google have made some changes into how much data phones can collect without people realizing.

So, I mean, in the early days of the iPhone, people were putting all sorts of crazy stuff on their device and clicking, sure, you can track my GPS location, and it would ping the phone every two seconds. And today, Apple doesn't really like to let you do, you as a developer, if you're trying to make a game or an app that does that.

Apple doesn't really want you to do that, right? It wants people to know how many times an app has tracked your location. So now there's a big pop-up that comes up every few days if an app tries to do that and says, yeah, this game collected your location 5,000 times in the last few days. Are you sure you want to continue to allow this? And so a lot more people have opted out.

On the other hand, there's all sorts of new ways to infer people's identity and data, right? Like, there's just, none of this is stopping, right? So there's other technologies that have matured, so there's just a lot more license plate readers out there than there were five or six years ago. There's a lot more connected cars that are broadcasting data to car manufacturers.

You're often pairing your phone with your car, right? And who knows what data is passing between the car and the phone and the manufacturers of different things? And then just, you know, even if you turn off all these location permissions and don't download shady apps, you're still getting served ads. every day, and those ads can collect information about you.

All the people that are sitting there trying to serve you ads get a ton of information about you, even if it's not your precise GPS location. For example, if I connected to the Wi-Fi network here in your studio, someone might well know that I'm here in an IP address that is here in Tennessee. And so there's all sorts of ways to continue to track people, and marketers aren't just giving up

because these technical changes have been made. What information that's being sucked out of, whether it's your phone, your TV, your vacuum, your vehicle, your tires, what concerns you the most? Actually, what I would say is the aggregation of all this data is what concerns me the most. Because in isolation, you know, a snapshot of your license plate driving down a road is just one data point. But when you correlate it with all the other things that you're generating in terms of data trails, it makes it very easy to put together a pretty holistic picture of your life. And it's not one single data set. It's not one particular technology.

It's the aggregation of all these different bits and bytes of information about us, all these different data points. Some of them in government hands, some of them in commercial hands, Some of them only available if you go get a judge to give you a search warrant. Some of them available on the open market. But the data's out there. And increasingly, there's a lot of pressure to weave it together, to put it together, to sell it, to trade it, to share it with the government for public safety. All of that leads down a path in which it's very hard to exist in a modern society, even a democracy,

without giving up a ton of information to parties that you don't know who you're giving it to. So how are they able to, are they able to piece all this together? You know, when they take all these different ways to collect on you, how do they, how does it all come together into, you know, a personal profile snapshot? Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on the government agency and it depends on the mission that they've been charged with doing, right? So I think our military and our intelligence agencies are largely focused over. overseas. And there, they're obtaining the exact same kind of data that's available on Americans, and they're doing intelligence gathering, right? They're spotting and assessing and trying to recruit foreign spies. They're trying to understand the behavior of important people in foreign

countries. And sometimes they're doing counterterrorism work, right? They're trying to target people, and often kinetically. But then you think about an agency like the Department of Homeland Security. Well, they're actually much more inward focused, right? They're trying to look at who's coming into the United States, what goods are coming into the United States, who's applying for a visa? When you're here, what you do? What's happening around this border region? Which, by the way, encompasses many, many parts of the United States, including a lot of our major cities. DHS has authorities within 100 miles of a border, and that includes airports, that includes coastal borders, and that includes the land borders. And so this is an agency that's very powerful and has a lot of

authorities to do things in that zone and is interested in understanding what happens in that zone. So that's an agency that's interested in collecting a lot more information about the American public, right? That's the agency that wants your face so that you can go quickly through the touchless TSA pre-check. It's the agency that wants to know who you're traveling with and whether you pose a threat to civil aviation. It's the agency that wants to know where visitors are going and what they're doing. And that's a perfectly legitimate mission, but they're collecting a ton of information as part of that. And then you think about local police departments, right? They're they're charge. with solving crimes and issuing speeding tickets and just general public safety, then they also get a piece of this information, right? They're thinking about, well, who's saying what on social media, about local politicians,

about the local school system, you know, where are cars going in the mornings and the evenings? Are they traveling to downtown? Are they going to known drug trafficking spots? And so there's, depends on who the they is. But in all of these cases, in all these government agencies, they're getting increasing amounts of data, much of it from commercial sources.

And a lot of this is being done without a tremendous amount of thought, public conversation, or guardrails around what the limits are, what the rules are about accessing this data, when you can access this data, who gets to access this data. Some of those conversations just aren't really happening. Let's, what about, I mean, I wasn't even ready to go into the government yet, but what about just the civilian, like, just your basic corporation that's collecting data? Yeah. I mean, do these all, what are they collecting?

Yeah. What do they do with it? And when we're talking about all these different devices, how does it come together into one specific profile piece about fire and town? Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, corporations are very interested in where I live and what I do for a living and how much money I made. right? That helps them target products and ads to me. It helps them know, am I a consumer that's interested in a Lexus or am I interested in a used Nissan Versa? That's a helpful data point. So they'll pull property records based on where I live.

They'll get email addresses, right? That's how we get most of our communication from companies these days, is these things that fill up our inbox with offers. And often that's, that comes from you giving your email address to a company, when you want to buy something. Often those companies will sell or rent your email address to data brokers. Beyond that, they're interested in your purchasing habits, right? So like, what did you buy? What are you interested in?

They're interested in your browsing habits, so that's what cookies are. As you move around the web, they're kind of trying create a profile of you. Is this someone who's interested in sports or cars or guns or ballet or liquor? So it's a tremendous amount of that. out of consumer information.

And then, you know, if you're talking about digital devices, companies are trying to extract information off of those too, right? So when I go to a store, they want to know if I'm in that store. So they'll buy geolocation data. Did I inadvertently let the Starbucks app collect my information? Well, now a bunch of data brokers know I was at Starbucks because I've enabled GPS on that particular app, because I want the rewards when I walk in there.

So companies are building. these pretty detailed dossiers. You know, some of them are kind of aggregated in the hands of data brokers. Some of them are their own internal data on you and you as their customer. And sometimes they trade this information amongst themselves or sell it when they go bankrupt.

So companies know a lot about you too. So do the, how do I say this? So we have different sets of data being collected from different devices, I guess, is... what I'm trying to say. And so do those data sets come together in a centralized location to give a better snapshot of who you are? So there's not, this is kind of where the primary difference

between us today in the United States and in other Western countries and China is, is that no. Today, there is not one gigantic master repository of all the information about me. as a citizen, as a consumer, sitting in a single database. It's spread out. It's dispersed.

The Chinese model, the authoritarian model is, no, you have to give it all to the public safety entities. And they're going to look at your power data to figure out if you're doing Bitcoin mining. They're going to look at your public transit data to make sure you're not meeting with subversive people. They're going to read your text messages. That's what an authoritarian government looks like. Today, we don't quite have that. We have a lot of different databases spread out in a lot of different places. Some of them in government hands, some of them in corporate hands, some of them available for

sale, some of them not available for sale. But the data that's collected on Westerners is not all that dissimilar from the data that's collected on Chinese citizens. It's just not all quite 100% weave together in some sort of public safety portal. Are there any, I mean, that's actually surprising. Are there any companies that are, I mean, why wouldn't in a capitalistic society would think that would be, I mean, I think, was it Elon Musk that was saying, you know, data is the next oil?

Yeah. I mean, lots of these guys are saying that. So there's a lot of pressure to do exactly that, right? For a lot of different reasons. Some of it, some of it like public health and transportation planning, right? Can we pull in all this corporate data and all these kind of this movement data and the, you public people's public transit trips and their toll transponders, can we pull all that into a portal to do transportation planning?

And then once it's in a government database for transportation planning, well, now there's a public safety imperative. Well, you know, can we detect when someone's fleeing from the authorities? Or there's an amber alert on a missing child. Maybe we should pull all that transportation data into a public safety database. So there's pressure to do a lot of that. In fact, that's a lot of what Doge was talking about,

when Elon Musk came into government, is taking all these different databases that exist for different reasons and trying to merge them to give the central government, the federal government, a better picture of everything that's happening. Well, sometimes those databases

are in different places for a reason because we don't necessarily want our medical data being used for immigration enforcement, or we don't want our tax data to be used by immigration authorities, or we don't want our toll transponderance, to be used to track us around without a search warrant. And so that's why a nuanced conversation

about the dangers of this kind of data fusion is really important. And I think, you know, the Doge moment was an interesting one where there was a lot of pushback about this. But this is, in many ways, the difficulty of obtaining data is a privacy protection. It exists, but the privacy protection is that it's hard to get and it's hard to merge.

And there's a lot of pressure now to say, pressure now to say, well, we have this data and we have these important problems, let's just dump it all in one place. Are there any companies that are close? What about something like a Palantir? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, Palantir is one of many companies that's out there to solve exactly this problem, right? It's to take different disparate data sets and try to extract unique insights from them.

So, yes, I mean, Palantir doesn't themselves buy up all the data or get it, but they exist to help government agencies go and take different databases and merge them together and say, well, now we can take your toll transponder data and combine it with the crime data. And I'm not saying this is happening, but this is a hypothetical project you could do and look for criminals who pass through tolls. And maybe we can start to look for not just known criminals, but people whose driving patterns look suspicious, right? They take a one-day trip from Houston to the border region.

Does that mean they're, and then they turn around? Does that mean they're drug smugglers? Does that mean they're human smugglers? Maybe we should find out based just on that pattern of behavior. So Palantir, and in fairness to Palantir, they're not the only ones out there, right? You could do this with Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets if you had enough computing power. But yes, there's all sorts of companies that are out there,

and they're trying to help guys. to help governments and private entities. Palantir sells to private companies, including some journalistic outlets, to take all the data they have and merge it and make sense of it. How many of these companies are there that are out there collecting? Do you have any idea? That are collecting data on the global population? Probably tens of thousands. If you just look at, take one example. You know, all the ads that you see that Google serves you, that's a product called AdX. Google probably has several thousand partners

that are able to serve ads and also get information off of Google's ad servers about the people they're trying to serve ads to. And that's just Google. That's just one company. You know, there's a meta ad service. There's plenty of smaller ones that don't have a consumer-facing business that no one's ever heard of.

Each of those has hundreds, if not thousands, of other business partners. And so that's just in advertising, never mind, you know, the other parts of the economy that also collect data. So there's thousands, tens of thousands, maybe even more. How are they, I mean, could anybody start one of these companies? That's a good question. So you need a little capital, right? But to access some of this data, some of it's cheap. So you can go on websites right now.

There's one called Data Rade, and you can go on there with your credit card. You can get a sampling of data, and there's a few others. There's some, it's called alt data. There's conferences. There's just these places where you can go and get mobility data. You can get internet data. You can get some point of sale data. Some of that's only a few hundred or a few thousand dollars.

You know, I've, in the course of writing my book, I had a very good researcher who's essentially a private investigator, and he said, yeah, I have a contractor that can go look up the movement of a phone for you that can see if there's anyone in there. He'll do that for $2,500 for you. You know, give him a name of a person who you want to track, and he'll run the data for you. He'll see if we can find where this person goes, and he'll give you a full report about it. You can get a full life pattern just like that.

I mean, again, it doesn't always work, right? Because like some of this data is spotty, some people, some people are more careful with their phones than others. But yeah, $2,500, this was a few years ago. Maybe the prices have gone up. Maybe they've gone down, I don't know. But yeah, private investigators are out there and can do this for you for what I think is relatively cheap.

And then, you know, if you and I wanted to set up a company and start, you know, getting data on, let's say, mobility data on, you know, a state in the United States, States or a small country, we could probably do that for a few thousand dollars. And then, you know, if you and I wanted to start up a defense contractor and, you know, broker commercially available mobility data, so the data that comes off of your phone when you opt into, you know, the weather app, to the government, and we wanted the whole fee to the whole world.

And the contracts I've seen on this are six figures, you know. So, yeah, we could buy the data for six figures and sell it at a 20% markup to the government. And that could be our business model. So you just, it's literally just a middle band. We'll buy it from this company, sell it to the government. How long do they hold this data? How long before the data becomes irrelevant? It depends, right?

Like you could be one of these companies that wanted to hold onto it forever and, you know, keep years and years and years worth of mobility data on the whole world. Like if you wanted to pay for that storage and it was important, to whatever mission you were doing, you could do it. It's a matter of do you want to pay the Amazon Cloud Storage Bill? And do you have a customer for it? And is it still relevant? Most of the time, data is kind of stale after a few years.

Because, you know, like, are we really going to want to rewind 10 years back on someone's life? I mean, how relevant is that going to be? But I could see companies or government agencies being saying, you know, actually, maybe we should keep a lot of this, so we can look back historically if there's a reason to. I'm picky with eyewear because I wear it every day. If it's heavy, slides around, feels cheap, or gets annoying after an hour, I'm dumb with it.

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performance, Roka is it. Ready to upgrade your eyewear? Check them out for yourself at Roka.com and use code SRS for 20% off sitewide at checkout. That's Roka.com code SRS. Let's get into, I want to get into the laws again about, you know, who's protecting us, if anybody. Is there anybody in the government that is, I mean, is this even a concern to them? Or are the, I mean, lobbying firms? Are they all lobbied? all, I mean, it seems, as time goes on, and more and more, it just seems like all of our elected officials are owned by lobbying firms, at least from my vantage point. Well, I mean, certainly almost all these companies have a significant presence in Washington,

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

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

Why would they allow any of our data to go to any country at all? Well, that's a good question. Even allies, Israel, any of them. Yeah. I mean, the honest- Like it's spying on our own citizens. The honest answer is because there's so much cross-border data flows. that it would maybe break the global economy.

You know, that the way the internet works is that sometimes you'll ping a server in Europe and download your own Google Drive file from Europe because that's just where Google's cloud decided was the most efficient place to store your file at that given moment. And, you know, companies in these countries need to swap data, or they say they need to swap data with one another. At the same time, there are countries

that have very strict data export rules. So Europeans have increasingly started to pass laws that say, you know, if any company is going to hold data on our citizens, it sits in a server that sits physically in our country under our control. That's called data sovereignty. China is very, very strict. It does not allow American companies to go into China and just start collecting huge amounts of data on the Chinese population,

because they've decided that, you know, their national security imperatives are more important than whatever commerce benefits would flow from letting that kind of data market exists. So the honest answer is these multinational corporations have made the case successfully so far to Congress that it would disrupt commerce too much to do something like that in the United States. What do you think about that? Well, you know, I'm a reporter, so it's my job to kind of just tell people how this is. I think there are ways that Congress could solve this problem. It could mandate that Americans' data stay within the United States

and stay on servers that are physically controlled by American companies. It could insist on that. It could make it much harder to transfer bulk U.S. data to even allied countries, right? You could stop data brokers from selling to any foreigner. And that would at least kind of clamp down on some of this export of data that we're seeing. But that's just a choice.

Congress hasn't made and you know I can't make it for them I can just tell them what the consequences are I mean couldn't a foreign adverser just I mean by US data from a foreign from a different foreign country yeah and that happens all the time so that so this so the protection to North Korea and China and all this other bullshit is yeah it's completely obsolete they have to set up a shell company in Germany that's what they will have to do to get the data yes and there's very little way to police that so it does nothing Nothing at all.

It adds a layer that potentially pays for some compliance law firms that checks and boxes. But if you're asking, does it shut down the global trade and U.S. data and the flow of it to our adversaries? I would say the answer is no. Would you say that technology outrun the law? Oh, 100%. In this instance, yes, that, you know, we... We stood up and created a digital society so quickly, and we simply didn't have time or didn't thoughtfully do it when it came to writing rules.

And I mean, historically, Congress has actually done a pretty good job. I mean, if you look before the digital era in the 20th century, Congress, you know, made some reasonable compromises around privacy versus security. So, you know, when telephone wiretaps first came to, you know, when telephone wiretaps first came up and originally the Supreme Court said, yeah, well, you know, you don't need a warrant to wiretap people. You don't have an expectation of privacy because, you know, sound is traveling on a physical wire and if someone grabs the wire and listens in on it, well, you don't need privacy. Well, Congress said, you know, that's kind of crazy.

That's not some, that's not a world we want to live in. So they passed a law in the 20th century that said, you know, you want to listen in on two people's private phone calls. You need to go to a judge. You need to have a reason to do so. You know, Congress did that with all other, all sorts of other data. It did it in the 90s with health data. It said, yeah, doctors can't just willy-nilly give away your private health information.

No, we're going to control that. It did that in the 70s with credit information. Credit information is very well controlled. There's a lot of laws around it. What it didn't do when the internet came about is do any of those things for digital information. Jeez. But it kind of seems like, it just feels like they have an ad. access to just about everything.

It feels like we don't even have a Fourth Amendment anymore. In a lot of ways, you know, that's true, right? Like, if there's data that's collected from a company, a private company, the Fourth Amendment no longer applies. Because it's a commercial transaction. The government is just getting it in an ordinary, It's just buying the information, right? So you do need a warrant to go look at somebody's

cell phone movement patterns if you go to their cell carrier, right? The government can't go to AT&T and say, you know, give me all of Sean's movements over the last 30 days. But if you've opted into a weather app that collects your information, well, all of a sudden, they don't need that warrant, right? they, the weather app can sell it to them. And so that is this loophole at the heart of our current Fourth Amendment doctrine that several in Congress,

a very vocal bipartisan majority in Congress, or a group of people in Congress want to fix. But so far, the body hasn't acted. I mean, do you think it's even, I mean, maybe you don't want to talk about it. I look at our political system. and we have people 50% of these people probably can't even figure out how to open their fucking email.

You got people dying in office. We've got people we don't even know if they're alive. They're sending out a little subliminal proofs alive with dates on newspapers. I mean, this is like a foreign language to them. How would they even be?

Do you see what I'm getting? I do. Are governmental structure, maybe not the structure, but the people in there are obsolete. Yeah. And there's a lot of problems with Congress. And one of those problems is expertise. You know, if you are a member of Congress, you have a small staff of a few dozen. You know, these young people, these are often quite young people.

And sure, they're tech savvy often, but they're not very well paid and they don't last very long in these jobs. last very long in these jobs and they find that, you know, working for a Congress member is great and making, you know, $60,000 in an expensive metro area just doesn't cut it. And so they'll go to a lobbying firm and make triple that. And so, you know, Congress in many ways is responsible not just for not passing laws about this, but for not even paying good staff and developing the expertise and having the in-house to even address these tech questions. And a lot of that goes back to salaries.

It goes back to staffing. It goes back to resources. Congress just doesn't have the capacity to think about and analyze a lot of these technical problems because they don't pay good people. The people that are good who want to make a career there are often sacrificing a lot more money that they could be making in the private sector.

So this is an entrenched problem in our political system, that our political system is both unresponsive to many of these issues and not really well equipped to deal with them. Let's talk about, we kind of talked about it around a way, but let's talk about the flow of data and how it goes, how it gets to the government, where it goes from there, do all the agencies collaborate on it? I mean, same with foreign adversaries, foreign governments. Where does it, you know, let's talk about the flow from start to finish. Yeah, I mean, I can talk about a couple of different data flows, right? So, I mean, first of all,

there's your just general consumer information. So your address, your voting history, you know, all that is held by data brokers, your phone number, your email address. And those data brokers work with the government, right? They sell identifiers to government agencies. These are traditional data brokers. They've been around for a long, long time.

You know, many of them come out of the 20th century. They've been collecting people's address histories, their phone numbers, their email addresses for a long, time. That's one set of data, and that they just have a straight-up government sales arm, they sell it. Then there's social media data, right? Because the government has been very interested in understanding what people say in social spaces. And, you know, to get that kind of bulk data is kind of hard because some of these social networks are closed spaces. So, you know, Twitter, back when it was called that was very open. You could kind of just read everything that

was public. Facebook is semi-closed, right? You need to log in. You need to be friends with someone often to see what they're saying. And then there's kind of more purely closed, like big group chats and telegram channels and other things that are more closed. Well, there's all sorts of specialized data brokers that have sprung up to collect public social media data from places like Twitter, to collect semi-private social media data from places like Facebook, and to collect private social media data from group chats, including some, you know, there's some very large, there were some very large ISIS-related group chats, or there were some very large, you know, protest-related group chats in the United States. And these companies would infiltrate them

under false pretenses, collect all the messages, collect the whole list of everyone that was in them, and sell all that to the government. So that's another kind of data. Then there's the mobility data, the cell phone movement data I was talking about. in the thing that I heard about at a dinner party that I spent a couple of years unwinding, you know, that comes originally as collected by commercial entities for advertising or for analytics reasons. And then, you know, there's a couple ways the government gets it. Sometimes they set up a shell company.

So there's a defense contractor in the United States called Sierra Nevada Corporation. And if you look, they own a very tiny little marketing company that's based, you know, in the Virginia area, and if you go to its website, it's called N Context, and it's got, you know, it's got a picture of, you know, the Y in Philadelphia and a cultural center in, you know, New York City, and it says, these are our clients, and, you know, we help people obtain data and understand them

and do marketing campaigns. But if you look on the government's procurement website, you'll see that this little marketing company actually has a contract with the intelligence community. And that sure looks like a shell company to me, right? That looks like something a defense contractor set up in order to collect large amounts of this kind of commercially available advertising data and give it to parts of the government

that want to do things with it. And so there's just a lot of different ways governments get these data sets. In other cases, some vendors have just set themselves up as contractors. They say very openly we're a government contractor, and we're going to buy data on the open market from other vendors just like us, and we'll sell it, we'll sell it to the government that way. We're not going to be even sneaky about it. We're not going to pretend to have a shell company.

So there's lots of ways it gets to government agencies. Are there foreign companies within the U.S.? Israel has some, correct? Yeah. There was some journalism about several Israeli companies that were doing exactly the same thing. They'd set up a fake marketing company. They were really associated with the defense contractor,

and they were brokering that data. to foreign governments, probably not just the Israeli government, but probably many foreign governments. We don't know their exact list of clients, but Israeli companies often perform that service. And, you know, while that's the only kind of foreign one that's been identified, I am certain that other countries are doing the same thing. But we just allow them to do it. Well, it's not actually illegal. Why would they be so interested in what we're doing here in this country? Why would foreign countries be interested in our population?

They want to understand the world. They want to understand how Americans move around, how they live their lives. If there's high-profile Americans in those data sets, they might want to understand their patterns of movement. If there's American soldiers who have been a little bit careless and not locked down their phones, there might be some operational security risks to those soldiers because adversaries might want to figure out,

where this unit is going, and they may want to straight up do espionage, right? They may want to recruit people. They may want to know where the person who works at the GM factory goes after work and whether they can send an intelligence officer there to convince them to give, you know, critical infrastructure, critical information. So there's all sorts of reasons why a foreign government might be interested in our data. Have you ever purchased any of these datasets? I have used tools that let me look at social media data. I've sometimes built little scrapers to scrape open web data.

I've had people show me demos of some of the tools that the governments used. And I, when trying to write this book, did ask one of the private investigator who was willing to run people for $2,500. I asked him to look up whether I was in the data and whether some of the CEOs of these data brokers were in the data. But I didn't actually pay him for it. He was willing to do it for free.

So I've never outright purchased data, but I know that some journalists have or they've obtained it. The New York Times did a whole series on what you could tell from location data. In that case, I don't think they bought it, but they got a huge leak of data, and they were able to show what commercially available data was out there.

And other journalists do buy you. data and they're usually transparent about it when they do. So it's fairly, it's pretty simple. Yeah. I mean, there's all sorts of data sets out there. And then, you know, some of these data brokers will actually, you know, give reporters accounts because it's meant for investigators. It's meant to help, you know, understand the world better.

And from their point of view, they're collecting data that they're legally allowed to collect and that they're legally allowed to sell as a service. And investigative journalists are just like anyone else, they're trying to understand the world. They're trying to do stories. And some of this data might be valuable. So there's data brokers that have trade data and some internet data. And we'll often provide very useful accounts to journalists and to do very important information and stories in the public interest. And, you know, often, we usually disclose when we do that in our stories. In fact, we almost always disclose when we do that. But it's a world that also encompasses us as investigators,

for sure. I mean, what does it look like? Is it nice and organized? I mean, what does the data set look like? Is it easy to navigate? Yeah, I mean, it depends on the tool, and it depends on the data set, right? So sometimes you get what's called unstructured data, which is just a giant spreadsheet, and you are responsible for figuring out how to make sense of it.

And, you know, in the old days, this was something I struggled with, but now that AI can really help process data better, it's a lot easier for the ordinary person. to work with unstructured data. And then sometimes these vendors just build a tool, right? Like it's just, it's like any old subscription service that you can just log in, you do a search, or it's just like Google Maps, you can draw a circle, or you can draw a geo fence, and you can watch phones move around,

or you can do a search term for what people are saying on social media. So it's a very slick interface, just like any other web app that you might go get. When it's bought, is it duplicated? or can you own, let me, let me. Yeah, can you? Basically, and I should probably wait until we get into all the devices that are tracking you and sucking on the information. I'll probably ask it again, but can you purchase your own data back?

Yeah. Or is it just a duplicate of it? So some of these vendors will sell you the raw data, right? They'll just be like, here's a spreadsheet of, or, you know, a giant file of all the phones in the world. and you can do whatever you want with it, that's our commercial agreement. So that's one business model. And others will say, no, you can't just take out all the data.

That's our secret sauce, right? But you can do the searches on our platform. And you can export the results of your search, but you're not just going to get all the data that we have. So there's different models of data brokering. And some build the slick interface and the tool, and they'll sell access to it for $1,500. a year or whatever, and some of them will just say, no, here's the raw data, you do what you want

with it, we're just a pass-through, you pay us, you visualize it the way you want. So there can be different arrangements. Gotcha. Well, Byron, let's take a quick break. Okay. When you're building a business, nobody tells you how much time gets eaten up by the back end, payroll, onboarding, benefits, tax filings, and HR questions. It's not optional, and if it's messy, it creates problems fast. That's why I like Gusto. Gusto is online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses. It's all in one remote-friendly and incredibly easy to use so you can pay, hire, onboard, and support your team from anywhere. What I like is that Gusto keeps the important stuff in one place. Payroll, onboarding, benefits, taxes, HR, it's all organized

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So, Byron, we had Chris Beck on the show, former SEAL Team 6 guy who spent years around advanced military R&D. He told us something that went insanely viral. If you take the battery out of your phone, I can still listen to you. He was talking about technology developed for national security applications. You've spent years investigating where surveillance technology has gone since then. So if I shut my phone off today or leave it home entirely, can I still be tracked?

And what is it giving away? That's a good question. So unfortunately, phones these days, you can't even take the battery out of them. The honest answer is I don't know. I don't know what you can, what can happen. if the phone is off. Certainly the phone being off is a better privacy protection than the phone being on. But is there something very tricky governments can do to make phones seem to be off when they're not? That's entirely possible. I don't know the answer. Leaving your phone behind, again, that reduces the vector of tracking you through your phone.

But of course, as we've been talking about, there's all sorts of other vectors to track you, right? There's ring cameras mounted on all these houses now. There's license. plate readers that will track your car. There's the toll transponder that you use when you go through a toll now. So leaving your phone behind is not a way to evade surveillance. It's just a way to reduce some kinds of surveillance. Here's some true or false questions. Okay. My phone can track me while, excuse me, my phone tracks me with location services off. Sure or false? If the developers are following the rules, that's false. Of course, there's very little way for the average person to know if the developers are following the rules. Airplane mode protects me. I'm not sure airplane mode even protects airplanes.

I'm not sure what it does. Powering off the phone protects me. Actually, that's true. and for kind of a strange reason that a lot of even, like, very advanced malware, so if a country was to try to put a virus on your phone, actually one of the best defenses against that is to turn your phone on and off every once in a while. And yes, in theory, turning the phone off

should drastically reduce the amount of data that comes off of it. Now, again, I can't say for sure that there aren't very clever pieces of malware that can do things when the phone is off, but in general, turning the phone off should offer some privacy protection. That's true. A Farity bag actually works. I don't know.

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

Mm-hmm. All right. So kind of a random thing here, but I heard you, talking about something about you have something going on with UPS or UPS, excuse me, USPS. Yeah, a few years ago I got interested in how all sorts of government agencies handle your data, including the Postal Service. And, you know, it kind of came to my attention that the Postal Service was in the process

of making a pretty aggressive push to collect all sorts of your electronic information. your phone number, right? So when you sign up for informed delivery or you fill out a change of address form, now you're giving the postal service your digital identifiers, including your email and often your phone number. And now they're very aggressive in wanting a receipt from you. You want it by email, you want it by text. So they seem to be collecting digital identifiers. Well, at the same time, the post office is the government agency that knows where you live. And so it seemed to me this was a government agency that, you know, knew a lot about your physical real world life and then was also kind of branching into trying to learn about your digital life or at the very least linking them.

And so I asked some very basic questions of them like, hey, can you give me all the privacy documents that are required by a law from the 1970s known as the Privacy Act that are supposed to be public anyway? And they stonewold me for three years. And so I had to hire lawyers. I'm being represented by the Harvard Cyber Law. clinic, but we brought suit in federal court in Washington, D.C., to try to force the Postal Service to turn over the most basic information about how it handles our data.

Why do you think they're guarding it? I have no idea. I couldn't tell you if it's just that they didn't do a very good job in writing these documents, that they don't have them, or if there's something they don't want people to know, I don't know the answer. I'm looking forward to getting the documents back. How are they... You mentioned there's a digital component to the,

how are they doing that through the mail? Well, just when you sign up to change your address or to get kind of the scan of your mail, they often ask, well, how do we contact you electronically? Do you want it by email? Do you want it by phone? And that capability of linking someone's online identity with their physical real-world location is a very difficult problem in marketing.

a lot of the time. You know, people change addresses. They give fake addresses. They, you know, they're not always honest with corporate companies, but, you know, you do want your tax returns. You do want your property tax bills. So you're usually going to, the post office is going to know where you are. And so I just got curious, well, what are they doing with all this digital information now that

they also know a lot about your physical world location? It was at the very least a question worth asking of a government agency with a lot of data. and I didn't get an answer without filing a lawsuit. Jeez. And that's coming up, right? We'll see what they give back. Sure, they'll get right on it. You know, I want to go down device to device, you know, that people have on their homes and see what you can tell us about it.

But, you know, a big question that are everybody's mind. And some people say yes, some people say no. are our phones listening to our conversations, whether you're actually on the phone or off the phone? Everybody's brought up, I want to buy means of control. And then the ad pops up or whatever it is. You know, it just passing conversation.

It's like, holy shit, there it is. Five minutes later. And then, no, we're not listening. Oh, sure, it's just a coincidence. this has happened 20 times this week. Yeah, it's a great question. I've never seen any evidence that I am comfortable reporting here on, you know, on your show that says that they're doing it.

But as you say, like an awful lot of people experience those coincidences, including me. I mean, one the other day, I got a weird, you know, text message saying, hey, like, we know, we know you, you, you just put, I put solar panels on my roof, and a friend was asking if I liked it, I got a text message saying like, hey, recommend a friend and get, you know, $750 back on your solar panel install. And I'm like, well, that's weird. That's really weird timing, you know?

So, I mean, I think if phones were listening 24-7, there'd be a lot of data coming off of them, and researchers would be able to figure it out. But, you know, is there some interesting technical way where phones could listen for a keyword. And then that sends a piece of information back. I don't know. I've never seen evidence of it. But as you say, a lot of people have really weird experiences. So let's go, let's just go through a lot of devices that average Americans have in their home every day and outside of their home that is collecting a

data set on them. Sure. TVs. Well, modern smart. TVs really want to know what you watch. And so a lot of them have built-in sort of screen capture technology that are trying to figure out what you're watching, when you're watching it, because they want to understand your preferences. And some of that helps subsidize the TV. That's why TVs are kind of cheap now,

and they used to be much more expensive. So, yes, TVs are data collection machines. You know, I think some people are even starting to connect cameras to them. I'm sure there's some stuff you could do about detecting whether people are in the living room or watching ads at the time when they're served. I don't know that that's being done, but it's certainly a possibility and not something that marketers would be particularly ashamed from dissuaded from trying. And so you think that you're saying that TVs are so cheap now because it's become the major sale is you, the person, the human being. Yeah.

Your data is being sold from the TV companies. I think, yes. I think any time a company can kind of extract a data stream, that can help subsidize a product. Maybe it just ends up subsidizing their executives' bottom line. But if you're in a competitive market where there's a lot of vendors and you're able to monetize the customer in some additional way, including collecting data about them, then, yeah, like, yes, that can help subsidize the cost of the product. How about robot vacuums?

It's a great question. I don't know. I mean, I'm sure. So there have been some scandals about them taking pictures, including, you know, some really horrific stuff, like catching people on the toilet. And humans were, like, reviewing these data sets for machine learning. Now, they're not exactly selling that.

But that's an invasive privacy violation if there's, you know, contractors to a robot company that are watching people move. around their house, and I'm sure that's disclosed somewhere on page, you know, 25 of the 100-page privacy policy. But so, yes, there's cameras on some of them. They certainly, some of them map your house. I had a pretty dumb one for a while, like it would just go until it hit a wall, and it didn't

really do anything beyond that, but I think it depends on the vacuum. And I don't know what's happening with that data, to be honest. I mean, didn't know, didn't one company, didn't one just get busted or selling it to China? I mean, I think some of these are Chinese-owned, so the data close to China, yeah. For sure. I mean, why would China want to know the layout of my house? Well, I mean, it's hard to, they probably don't want to know the layout of everyone's houses,

but if, you know, if in a world in which you were a valuable person and they needed to do an intelligence operation or they wanted to know how many people were in your house or, you know, again, some of these vacuums have cameras and can see, have robot vision. I can't see a good reason why you would put a microphone on a robot vacuum, but I can't tell you that there aren't any with microphones. So, yeah, I mean, you know, a foreign government might potentially find some use for a house layout or information about who's in the house at a given time if a unique person were valuable to that government. How about smart speakers, Alexa, all these kind of things? I mean, smart speakers are, obviously, they have the potential to listen in. You know, these companies swear that they're not doing so, and most of them are American companies.

We're swearing that, you know. I mean, there's some sort of enforceable consumer right there. But, you know, sometimes they get triggered accidentally, right? Certainly everything you say to it is collectible and used for training a new AI system. And of course, these devices, you know, forget corporate malfeasance. Like, you are loading your house up with microphones, and if somebody wants to hack that device, like, how good is the cybersecurity on it? So could somebody, whether it's just a criminal, listening in for information about your finances

or your banking account numbers or something like that? Or it's a nation state? And they want to do something, whatever it is, recruit you as a spy, blackmail you, I don't But certainly smart speakers and anything with a microphone is a vector for that kind of, you know, that kind of hacking. Do you have smart speakers in your house? I don't. Although I do have a couple of devices that, like, have the capability, I turn them off. But again, like it's the same risk, right?

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

Retail and grocery stores tracking everything you buy through membership and loyalty cards. Oh, yeah. That's happening. And not just that. They're often trading it or selling it with data brokers, right? Because they, you know, they get your information. They get your phone number. They get your email address.

They may get your address. So, yeah, that information gets packaged up and sold. And the grocery store says, hey, Coke, here's a consumer who bought Coke. Hey, you know, hey, Tyson's, here's someone that likes Turkey. Absolutely, that's a robust data market. And when you sign up for those loyalty programs, you are getting a discount in exchange for data collection. That's why you need burner numbers. Home Depot.

So scan driver's license, scans your driver's license every time you return something. What are they doing with that? I have no idea. I assume there's some problem with returns and theft, and it's probably an anti-fraud measure. But again, collecting your license is probably the best form of identity out there, right? Like, I suppose you could have a fake ID, and generations of college students have. But most people, when asked for their ID, you know, most adults who have nothing to hide. hand that right over.

And, yeah, I mean, bars and retail outlets that scan it are almost certainly collecting it and saving it for some reason. Tires on your car. I did now know this. Yeah. So they're not collecting data per se, but they are a vector for surveillance. And of all the people, you know, all my friends that read the book and even some strangers, the one thing they came away from it was,

oh, my car tires, I can be surveilled through those. And the answer is yes, because when you start up your car in the morning and you see that pressure sensor reading, right, like, oh, you have low pressure, it's a cold day, you need to go to the gas station and fill it up. That is a little radio transmitter. It's a little radio transmitter that sits inside the tire and measures the tire pressure, and it sends a radio transmission to your car's central computer. The problem is that that tire has a unique number.

And that's how your computer knows to pair with that tire. And that tire is just screaming that number all the time as you drive down the road. It's just constantly broadcasting a signal that says, I'm accurate tire number one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. And if you put up little sensors along the highway or along roadways, and there are companies that have done this, or you're the military, and you want a little trigger sensor sensor when somebody drives down a certain road and you already know their tire pressure,

you can put a little sensor at the end of that road that will cue you when someone drives by. And so, and, and this, this is a good way to identify cars even after they've swapped license plates, right? Because you swap plates, but the tire, you're probably not going to remember to swap your tire pressure sensor. So, yes, tire pressures are a vector for surveillance. Are they a serious one that you should worry about? No.

But it's an example of a carelessly engineered technology that, in inadvertently turned into a surveillance device. Smart lighting. By the way, I love my smart lighting. I don't know what that's collecting, but it's, I mean, it's certainly creating a log, at least locally, and probably on some company's server somewhere, of when you're home, when you turn on the lights,

if it can detect motion, I think now some of these new smart lighting systems have realized that they can act as motion sensors, and motion detectors, and so that can trigger. So that's another clue to your patterns and your routines as a person that lives in a house, right? So when do you turn on the light, when you turn off the light? In the old days, the light bulb didn't log that, but today a smart light bulb does log that,

and now it knows your home. You know, here's another one that I thought was interesting is your vehicle. Yeah, cars. Connected cars. Like beyond the license plate readers, These car companies are becoming aggressive collectors of data. And I even detail in my book my attempts a few years ago to try to go buy a car without a data connection.

Back then it was possible. You could get one without a cellular chip, and it wouldn't, my 2021 car doesn't broadcast my location to anyone. There's not even a possibility. It doesn't have the chip. I don't know. I haven't bought a car in a few years, but I think a lot of them just have the cell chip. built in, whether you turn it in or not. And of course, they all push this service.

Oh, you know, roadside assistance and emergency assistance will give you the first year free. Well, when you sign up for that first year free, they're usually getting your location data for that whole year, right? You're agreeing somewhere in those terms of service to let them collect information about where you go, how hard you break sometimes. They're giving it to insurance companies.

In some instances, they're cooperating with law enforcement. In some instances, they're just straight up selling it to data brokers, just like data brokers are existing to buy phone data. They're existing to buy car data. So yeah, connected cars, it's hard to escape them these days. And they're selling it to insurance brokers. Insurance, right? You break hard too many times. You might not even know, but your insurance company knows, and they're collecting data off the car, and all of a sudden your rate goes up. How about health wearables? Oh, health wearables collect tons of data and I'm sitting here wearing an aura ring and, you know, I've made the cost-benefit

analysis that, you know, knowing how my body responds to stress and kind of cataloging whether I'm getting adequate sleep and nutrition is worth the privacy risk. But I can imagine this would be a tremendous benefit to an intelligence agency, right? If you were trying to recruit somebody and you were looking for a maximum moment of either you've assessed that you should approach them when they're at their most relaxed, well, you can tell that from this. Or when they're at their most stressed, you can tell that from this, too. So this kind of psychological and psychographic data that comes off of these things is really, really valuable. And, you know, these companies swear that they're not selling it, and I have read the privacy policy for them. But they can't swear

that a law enforcement demand or a national security letter won't come in from a government agency in whatever country they're based. And they can't swear that a hacker can't get access to their systems and use it for some kind of nefarious purpose. So, yes, these are privacy risks. And like everything, people have to decide whether they're worth it or not. You know, I think, you know, when it comes to the privacy disclosures and all the paperwork, one thing I started doing is just running it through AI to summarize it.

And AI is good for that, actually. But it kind of, it tells you all the loopholes. It does. It does. And I will say that, you know, a lot of people think that, you know, there's sneaky stuff happening, and there is sneaky stuff happening on the internet. But most Western companies organized in a rule of law country, they will tell you somewhere vaguely in the privacy policy what they're doing.

They may not be super explicit about it, but it's probably in there somewhere and they're just counting on you not reading it. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And then, you know, the big topic of the day, flock cameras. What do you know about these? Well, it's interesting because the public is really fixated on flock, but these have been around for ages,

and private companies have been doing this for ages. And, you know, I don't know if flocks the biggest, but until recently they were not the biggest. There's several other companies that do the exact same thing. There's one called Vigilant. There's a company called Recore. There's a company called Genoptic. There's a company called Axon.

There's a dozen of these license plate reader companies, and they've put up cameras all over the United States and indeed all over the world, and they're collecting your location as you move around the world in your car. And it's kind of interesting to see the privacy backlash from people that are kind of waking up to this, and it's been a very interesting grassroots movement to see.

But flock is really just one kind of, one kind of, one company among many. And I think we're even seeing companies who have, or sorry, police departments or towns or cities that have put in flock and then people get mad about it. They drop flock and they just put in a different vendor because they think, oh, it's just a PR problem with flock. Well, the real problem is the license plate reader, right?

Because the license plate reader is a system that's designed to collect the location of cars. And, you know, one or two pings of a car might not tell you, an awful lot about them. Like, maybe if you put them on an overpass and a stolen car drives by, maybe that's a good use of it. But increasingly, they're everywhere, and they're networked together, right? So these companies offer the service of saying, hey, little town in Tennessee or little town in Arkansas, put these cameras in, and they're going to become part of a nationwide sharing network where all of the law enforcement agencies all around

the country are going to be able to see all the cars that pass through your little And, you know, there's a ton of pressure from law enforcement for these towns to opt into this. So what they're essentially creating is several privately owned networks of surveillance systems that all government agencies all across the country have access to and can do whatever they want with in many instances. You know, there's been a saying that it's been going around for a long time and it makes sense to me, you know, if, especially when it comes to applications. if the application is free, then you are the product. Indeed.

I don't know if that's necessarily even true anymore. It seems like a lot of the stuff that we're paying for. Yeah. They're double-dip in there. They are, and then there are certainly some things that are genuinely free that you aren't the product, right? Often created by nonprofit organizations. So Signal, the popular messaging app, is free

and is, you know, a tremendously valuable privacy tool. It's an encrypted way to, communicate. It's not the only encrypted way to communicate. But so while that's not a hard and fast rule, I do think there is a wisdom to it because a lot of this data collection, at least originally, was driven by the fact that people were either reluctant to pay for things online because they were afraid of, you know, giving their credit card information on the internet in the 90s or just general consumer reluctance to pay for things, right? Why pay for something when I can get it for free? So there is wisdom to the fact that

that this entire norm and market that we hand over our data constantly to entities that we barely even think about, all the time, that probably did come about because there was some consumer reluctance to pay. And that was the only way to make money. But I think you're right, that increasingly, even very expensive things that you pay for are trying to monetize you, right?

You see car companies, you know, they'll sell you a car that's very, very expensive, and then they'll say, yeah, pay us $15, $15,000. if you want to turn the heated seats on. You know, so I think you're right, right? They're double-dipping and they see add-ons and features and recurring subscription revenue as a way to pad the bottom line and squeeze a little bit more money out of the consumer. I mean, do you think there's a world where they have to pay us for our privacy data?

Well, you know, that's something that a lot of people have talked about. And I just don't think at the end of the day, it's... the economics work out for the individual, right? Because your data might be worth a few bucks to a company, but in the aggregate, it's worth lots. And the problem is, you know, you probably don't even want the few bucks for the hassle that it will cost.

But in the aggregate, the data market is worth billions, if not trillions. And so it's a hard problem to solve. You know, there have been some experiments in trying to do that. There are increasingly, you know, companies that are saying, you know, we're just not going to do this. We're going to be a subscription service and we're not going to collect your data.

That's one possible business model. But in general, I think it's a really hard problem to kind of return the money to the consumer. Probably the better model, probably a better way forward is for there just to be a more straightforward bargain between the consumer and the maker of the product that I pay you money and you give me a service and you don't collect data from me. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I mean, no, no, no.

It just seemed, you know, you pay Costco $200 a year or whatever it is to get a membership and they collect everything that you ever buy and, and no discounts. You know, and it just all that, it's just, it does seem to be coming to a head. People are waking up to this. They're getting pissed. Yeah, I think so. And I think you're seeing, you know, a lot of current outrage. right now over this idea of individualized or surveillance pricing, right?

You are seeing regulators being interested in it. You're seeing at least some states saying, well, you're going to do that. At the very least, you need to disclose. You're charging people different prices. But yeah, this is the world we're living in because there's so much data out there, and there's an increasing amount of ability to process it. And so when you have big, powerful computers and artificial intelligence and 100 data points on a consumer, you can make a judgment about, hey, this is what they're willing to pay,

and I'm going to try to charge them in the max. I mean, can you just go a little bit more into the surveillance pricing? Because this is new to pretty much everybody. Yeah, I mean, well, I mean, in a way. How exactly is it going to work? I mean, I don't think we know all the answers, but in a way, I mean, some of it's already here. For example, I'm a big fan of the New York Times home delivery. You know, I, your listeners may think what they will about the New York Times,

but I like getting up in the morning on a Sunday morning and reading the physical newspaper over coffee and eating some eggs. But I don't like it as much as they want to charge. I don't like it as much as the sticker price. So, you know, I'm willing to pay a certain amount, and then every few months the Times emails me and says, oh, your introductory discount on home delivery is about to end. And I go right into the website, and I press cancel.

And after I press cancel, a screen pops up and says, oh, would you consider sticking around at the same rate for another 36 weeks? And I click, yes. So in a way, it's just taking what's already there. And I think we've all experienced that, right? We've all tried to cancel something, and then cable or some subscription service,

and then they throw an offer at you. Oh, would you stay for half off? Would you stay for a quarter off? So it's an extension of that, right? It's an extension of the idea that, like, they're already kind of doing this. 30 offering some discounts to keep you paying for certain services, what if we could just model it on the front end, right?

What if we could just, before you're even our customer, we could take all the data we know about you, we could take your socioeconomic class, we could take how much you typically spend it a month off your credit card statement, we could take, you know, we could make some inferences about where you work, based on all sorts of data points that we have on you. Maybe we just scrape LinkedIn and we know where you work. I don't know.

And we can estimate how much you, as a consumer might be willing to pay for that, you know, that service or even something as petty as, you know, that produce at the grocery store. I mean, that is one possible future that we're looking at because of the amount of data that companies have and that we all generate every day. I mean, how, do you think it's inevitable? This is going to happen? Well, I don't think anything's inevitable, right? Like, we, we as voters and consumers get to make choices about this stuff, including about our technology and about what stores were willing to patronize.

So if enough consumers don't like this stuff and they don't want to participate in an economy where they're charged different amounts of money based on what kind of data companies collect on us, then I don't think we're going to live in that future. If, however, people are willing to tolerate it and some people may even willingly opt in, right? Some companies may, to avoid the thorny problem, say, like, turn over all the information to us and you'll get tons of discounts. We may well live in that world. It all depends on what people are willing to tolerate. Legendary has arrived in Alberta with BetMGM Sportsbook.

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See betmgm.com for terms. 18 plus Alberta only, please play responsibly, subject to eligibility requirements. If gambling is affecting your mental health or well-being, 211 Alberta is here to help. Call or text 211 or visit ab.211.C. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with the Alberta Eye Gaming Corporation. Standard message and data rates may apply. Let's talk about how we can take control back a little bit. I mean, we've talked about all, not all, a lot of the ways that these companies are collecting on us.

We talked about the flow of data, how it gets into the government's hands, what the marketers do with it, what the devices are, surveillance pricing, all this stuff. What are things that people can do to kind of shield themselves from the invasiveness? Yeah, it's a hard question. You know, if you want to live a normal life and you want to have a phone and you want to go about your day and you know, you don't want to live in the woods and a self-sufficient plot of land where you're, you know, collecting rainwater and using your own solar panels, then it's hard to completely opt out of data collection. I think about it as, I think about it a couple ways. One, I do think the content of our communications

and the content of our important documents and the content of our emails, the stuff we, the communications and the documents we write and keep, I think a lot that's very important to keep private. And there are plenty of ways to do that. There are, I basically think you should encrypt your communications, your emails, your documents, your file, as much as possible.

And you can do that through a feature built into the Apple phone called Advanced Data Protection. There are some third-party encryption platforms out there, including Proton Mail, which has basically an encrypted email. Tutanota is one. There's a lot of these encrypted drive providers, or encrypted email providers. There's encrypted communications platforms,

like signal, like the Glacier Platform that you're developing and where you're developing, and working on, like, even WhatsApp. WhatsApp is owned by Meta. It collects a lot of information about who you are and who you talk to, but actually, the communication is private. Meta can't see it. Apple's iMessage is pretty well encrypted.

So keeping the content of your communications and the content of your files private is probably the most basic thing you can do. And isn't so hard, but might take a little bit of work. Second, you can be careful about your permissions, right? Like, you don't have to let every single app have your location. You don't have to let Uber and DoorDash have your location. You can type every time you want an Uber where you are,

or you can drop the little pin on the map, or you can just say, you know, today I'm at this address and I want delivery. And sure, they'll store it. But it's better than giving this technical backend access to your GPS location. So turn some of that stuff off. And don't let every app that asks have access

your contacts and your calendar and your photo roll. Like, they don't need all that. A lot of them work just fine without turning that stuff on. So, you know, our device manufacturers have actually, you know, done a good job of trying to give you some control over what things you do and don't want to share. And I would advise you whenever possible to not check those things. And often the apps that want them work just fine without them. There's other things you can do, right?

Like, there are, as you say, there are now services that offer burner phone numbers. There are services that offer privacy-preserving email accounts, fake email accounts that will funnel to your real email accounts. You don't have to give all these retailers your real email. You can give them a proxy email. You can give them a proxy phone number. That when they start to spam you, you can disconnect and make go away. So that's a privacy protection that you can build in.

You know, VPNs are controversial. I think they can be useful in some instances, but you also have to trust your VPN provider, right? Because you're just moving the layer of trust from your telecom or your internet service provider, which is usually a large company with a lot of good lawyers, to some kind of shady overseas business that you don't know much about.

So do be careful. Like there are reputable VPNs, and there are not reputable ones, and they change all the time, and they merge, and they go out of business. They can be helpful. for privacy, set upright and used correctly in the right circumstance, or they can be a privacy disaster. That is one thing I learned when we were building Glacier with the VPN stuff, is that you have

all these foreign entities, Chinese companies, Russian companies, Israeli companies, and it's a conglomerate that owns a multitude of VPN companies that are just constantly collecting. Right. And again, you know, using a shady VPN might be better than connecting to the Chinese telecom network while you're traveling through China. But is it really good? Are they really more trustworthy than whoever your cell phone provider is? I would do some soul-searching because all you're doing when you're putting a VPN on your

phone is moving which company can see your internet traffic. Is it your cell provider that you want to see your phone? traffic or is it this company you've never heard of that's in India or Malaysia or wherever? So I would think carefully about it, but they can be useful in certain circumstances and there's actually VPNs that will take cash from you and don't create linkages back to your real-world identity. That can be valuable depending on what you're trying to do. But yeah, I mean, it's hard, but there are some ways to get some balance.

What do you think about the secure DNS? I have not looked deeply into secure DNS. You know, I know there are some, so basically DNS is the phone book of the internet for your listeners. So when you type in Google.com, that's actually meaningless to the machine. What it needs to know is what IP address do I need to send you to? So do I need to send your IP address, whatever that is, that looks something like 1.92. 4.194 or something like that.

We're going to send you to some web address. DNS is how the computer looks up. Where is Google.com in the numbers that I know how to root you? And yes, there have been data brokers that have gone in there, and they've said, oh, we can learn about where people are going on the internet based on their DNS queries. We can set up a DNS server and they'll send all their traffic and we know that they're going to Google or we know they're going to this.

I don't know a ton about secure DNS providers. I know there are some, you can go in deep in your phone and set your settings to go to like 9.9.9.9, which is one based in Switzerland that says they don't log. There's a few others like that. There's some security DNS services that you kind of install on your phone. I think that's probably a good thing.

I just haven't kind of delve deep into which specific ones are good. How did you find out about Glacier? You knew about it way before I did. How did I find out about Glacier? I think I was reporting on secure phones, actually, and trying to understand how the government dealt with the problem of all this commercial data sloshing around. And one thing led me into another, one vendor led me to another.

And I think I found Glacier and I found the people at it as someone that was trying to solve this problem, both for the private sector, as well as having government clients. And at the time, I was, I was kind of thinking about the fact that privacy was becoming something of a luxury good. And, you know, if you were willing to pay the money, you could get a higher level of privacy than the average person. But it's interesting to see that they've pivoted more towards the consumer market. And I think in the years since I first talked to them for this book, a lot of companies have started to see that.

You know, there is a market for privacy in the United States. It's not a big market. There's a market for privacy in Europe. But it is a market and there are paying customers out there that are willing to pay a little bit more for a more secure or more private product. And that has reshaped some of the market dynamics and companies like Glacier and others out there have made that pivot. I mean, I think, you know, as time goes on, it's just getting more and more important because now privacy is affecting your negotiating power with surveillance pricing. Totally. It's going to be a bigger and bigger deal.

Well, Byron, I really appreciate you coming out here. Thanks so much for having me. Great talk. Great talk. And I hope to see you again. Yeah, same. I hope to be back. No matter where you're watching the Sean Ryan show from,

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