The Daily Beast Podcast - Don’t Feel Bad for Kevin McCarthy—He Dug His Own Grave

Episode Date: October 3, 2023

Don’t cry for Kevin—he knew what he was getting into when he took the job as House Speaker, The New Abnormal hosts argue. Then, an interview about dystopian police technology with WIRED staff writer Dhruv Mehrotra. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Kenned, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. What an excellent show we have today.

Alexandra Reeve Givens, the president and CEO of Center for Democracy and Technology, talks about the rise of AI and how her organization fights to protect civil rights in this new digital age. Then we'll talk to staff writer at Wired, Drew Merootra, about his most recent article, The Maker of Shotspotter, is buying the world's most infamous predictive pull. policing tech and what that means for our bleak future. But first, let's have some fun. So, Daniel, as we start this glorious week, the government is still open. So two cheers for that. Yeah. Shutdown was averted at the last minute over the weekend. While Democrats are fairly happy about this continuing resolution that will keep us funded through mid-November, Republicans are not in the best possible state right now. Kevin, McArthur managed to get this so-called clean resolution through, but at what cost, Danielle,

at what cost? Do you remember when former speaker Nancy Pelosi said that the Republicans just seemed like a miserable lot? Like, look at them. That's all I thought about this weekend as I was watching the fiasco play out was just like, these people are just fucking miserable. Like nothing is ever enough for them. And that's the problem with Kevin McCarthy trying to like satiate this maga monster that he's been feeding for close to eight years at this point now.

And here it is. And they're never going to be content unless like you present Hunter Biden's head on top of Hunter Biden's laptop and Joe Biden in shackles. And even then they'll be like, this isn't harsh enough. They should be in Guantan. Like, there's nothing that you're ever going to be able to do to make them happy. And so, yes, we've reverted a shutdown that would have affected millions of Americans. The fact that I just want to lift this up, that whenever there is a government shutdown, one, Republicans are in charge of the House because the last several have been under their watch.

Two, they fucking still get paid. Yeah. Which is just like the fact, again, that the people that are writing the, policies will always be okay. And everyone else, including what pissed me off to learn, is that the people that work in the cafeterias and the janitorial staff at the house who, by the way, are largely black and brown people. I just want folks to know if you've never visited the cafeterias on Capitol Hill, they're largely run by black and brown people, would not get paid and also would not receive their back pay. But the members who want to fuck around with their money and play

politics, oh, their paychecks never get disrupted. Yeah. And also point out that while they would not get paid, they would still have to work. Correct. Otherwise, they would lose their jobs. Right. And they would, you know, they'll get back pay or whatever when, but that's not the point. The point is they will be working at the time without a paycheck because, as you said, otherwise, they would lose their jobs. Now, the whole thing is disgusting, and there's been a ton of rhetoric from Republicans over the past couple weeks, ranging from a government shutdown is no big deal to, oh, a government shutdown is a good thing. And this is what McCarthy has to deal with.

And I will never, ever in my life, feel bad for Kevin McCarthy. This is the Andy Levy guarantee. Yes, I love that. But he is sort of stuck in this place now. But it's a place largely, or at least, you know, in part of his own making. And I always think about, you know, Nancy Pelosi, for better and for worse, had an incredible grip on the Democratic House members when she was speaker or when she was the party leader. She did keep things running. And again, there are times when maybe that wasn't great because you end up with legislation that's not ideal.

But in general, it's a good thing and it's something that you need. And McCarthy has absolutely none of that. And basically, look, even the clean CR that he got through, he got it through because Democrats voted for it. But then, of course, he goes out there and talks about Republican leadership and how Republicans pass this bill because he can't help himself from being absolutely full of shit. But everyone knows it's the Democrats that voted for this and enough, barely enough Republicans to get it through. Kevin McCarthy is just so full of shit. I know that we often talk about the gaslighting that happened. but it's just like suspending reality the way that they do

in order to say that somehow getting this through just in the nick of time while Americans who were going to be affected by this were holding their breath, trying to plan out wondering like how they were going to make it and how long they could go without a paycheck is just absurd. And the fact that this only happens

when Republicans are in control of the house and yet you have people who are being pulled in saying, well, I think that Republicans are better for our bottom line. Who's bottom line? You know? And just like the way that he looks into the camera, Kevin McCarthy, with that stupid fucking smirk that he has, like he knows what he's doing and he's doing a great job is just so absurd to me. Like every single one of them is just so absurd.

They don't care about the American people and I just don't know how you sell that. Like how you wake people up to that fact who continue to vote in their worst interests, I don't know. Yeah. And that brings us to people like Matt Gates. And Matt Gates is so upset about all of this that he is now starting a plan to oust Kevin McCarthy from the speakership. And he has been very outspoken about this. He went on State of the Union with Jake Tapper over the weekend. He said, quote,

Speaker McCarthy made an agreement with House Conservatives in January, and since then he's been in brazen, repeated material breach of that agreement. The agreement that he made with Democrats to really blow past a lot of the spending guard rails we set up is the last straw. So he says he's intending to file what's called a motion to vacate against the Speaker this week. In response, a bunch of his GOP colleagues are now saying that they want to boot him out. And they're simply, they're awaiting a report from a House Ethics Committee that's investigating him right now. One lawmaker told Fox News, quote, no one can stand him at this point, a smart guy without morals. So I guess this, you know, maybe the answer to, you know, what is too much even for the crazies, the answer might be Matt Gates. But did they say a smart guy with no morals?

Yes. That can't be right. It's half right. Right. No morals. and he is in fact a guy. Yes. The fact is we always talk about where the bottom lies, right?

Like if there is a bottom for Republicans, and maybe Matt Gates is that bottom. Maybe he is the place that they draw the line, you know, somebody who didn't draw a line when trafficking. But anyway, he wasn't indicted. I can't stand Matt Gates, but I think that there are so many people to expel from the House Republicans that like I you know the list is long but if he's the first one go with God yeah absolutely and look an attempt to oust McCarthy a lot of that's going to depend on how Democrats vote because remember the entire house votes on this and you've already got some Democrats out there aOC for example she has said that she would absolutely vote to oust him or vote against him and you know once again I find it interesting

that she's ducking me and won't come on the show but she will stand up and and oust Kevin McCarthy. But if she is indicative of the way Democrats are thinking, McCarthy is in for trouble because, you know, you could, you can envision a world, I guess, in which Democrats don't vote to oust him because they actually think whatever comes after would be worse. But if she and others are already signaling that, yeah, we'll vote to oust. I mean, if you guys want to self-destruct, we're here to help. That's got to give him a little pause, I think. How do you think McCarthy sleeps at night? It can't possibly be well. It took you 15 fucking votes to get. get this gig to get your limp Fisher Price gavel. You have shown no authority, no command over these

people. Your own party cannot stand you and mocks you at every place. The only reason you have that job is because you make a good puppet. And it's just like, how do you sleep at night? How do you look in the mirror? Like he was so amped to get his name like on the speaker's door. And I'm just like, it is the most hollow victory. So of course, but a handful of months later, would they be looking to vacate, you know, because he agreed that it would only take one person to be like, we don't want you here. And so for Democrats, it's like, what would be the reason that McCarthy could give them to say vote with me? And what is it that McCarthy could offer that you would actually trust coming out of his mouth when literally he robbed Peter to pay Paul

all up and down that house? Right. You have no idea what deals he made. So I wouldn't trust him as far as you could throw him. So for Democrats, I don't see somebody could be worse. How? How? Unless they just give the gavel to Marjorie Taylor Green in reality. But I mean, she's already wielding it. Yeah, look, you could have Speaker Marjorie Taylor Green.

You could have Speaker Jim Jordan. I can think of people who would be worse. I have to assume that even they wouldn't get enough Republican votes, hopefully, to win. Because there's got to be at least out of the what, out of the couple hundred Republicans, it's got to be at least nine or ten who would realize that's a bad idea. And that would probably be enough in conjunction with all the Democrats. But yeah, no, look, the only possible reason Democrats would have for making some kind of deal with McCarthy would be if they thought it would be a Marjorie Telegrine or Jim Jordan or

whatever, Andy Biggs, any of these guys. But no, I think you're absolutely right. And there is really nothing that he can offer. them or that he can do to make them vote for him. I mean, he has not, you know, it's not like he's been a reach across the aisle kind of speaker. So, you know, they owe him absolutely nothing. Matt Gates, apparently, as they're saying on the socials, only needs 20 no votes to depose Kevin McCarthy. Do it. So you get the 20 votes, right, which I think is very easy for them to get. And then what happens? Then we just keep voting until you,

They get a new speaker. I just, oh, my God. Remember that long night of them voting for McCarthy, 74 times before he passed or whatever it was? We get to do that all over again. I picked the right or wrong time to stop drinking. Definitely the wrong time. I don't know. So meanwhile, on the Democratic side, since we last recorded, Senator Dianne Feinstein passed away.

And on Sunday night, Gavin Newsom announced that he was going to. replace her with a woman named LaFanza Butler. She is the president of Emily's List, which is a group that works to elect pro-choice women to political office. And she is also a lesbian. She will be the first lesbian, a senator from California and the second overall in the Senate. Newsom had promised that if Feinstein ever had to step down, or in this case passed away, that he would appoint a black woman to fill her seat. It is a wonderful day. I will just say this.

When I turn on that cesspool formerly known as Twitter, where black lesbian is trending. And I both want to, I both want to click the link and then also probably not. You know, it's like, yay. Oh, wait. Why are we trending? But look, Gavin Newsom held true to what he said that he would. do. I know that this is a complicated choice for those that find themselves to be purist in terms of people's professional and progressive background. But I think that for history's sake and for

somebody who has shown themselves to be pro-choice, pro-labor-ish, and, you know, outspoken and out front, I think great job and great choice. We can unpack the reasons why. it's a complicated one and there will be folks coming out of the woodwork that aren't just Republicans because it will remain to be seen whether or not she'll be seated on the Judiciary Committee where Feinstein was in order to continue to approve the pace of judges that are coming out of the Biden administration, which Republicans will surely try and block her being seated. So this is something that is in fact unfolding. Yeah, there were a couple of things here.

Newsom was kind of in an awkward spot because there are three major Democratic figures who had said they were going to run for a Feinstein seat had she lived to retire next year. It's Adam Schiff, Katie Porter, and Barbara Lee, Barbara Lee, of course, being a black woman. There are a lot of people on the left who thought that Newsom should appoint her. And he basically was like, look, I can't give anyone a leg up in the election for next year. And that's why he didn't appoint her. But there are definitely, you know, I was reading some articles. The San Francisco Chronicle had an article.

There are black leaders in California who are not happy about this and who think it should have been Barbara Lee that she has earned the spot. And so I don't know. I guess, Danielle, I'm curious to hear what you think of this. Honestly, I am a person that believes still in this rare thing called fairness. And I think that because there are three viable candidates for. for Feinstein's seat, I don't think that it would have been fair to give Barbara Lee the appointment. Yes, I think that her record is stellar.

Yes, she has been representing the people of her district and doing a great job doing so for many, many years. But I think that if he is trying to say, look, let them continue their campaigns and dueling it out in the democratic process, I'm going to appoint somebody that if they decided that they wanted to run, they could. but in the meantime, they're holding the seat down. I think that he did the fairest thing that he could possibly do. Yeah, I kind of feel the same way. And I'm not the world's biggest Gavin Newsom fan,

but I really do feel like he was in a bit of an awkward position here. Yeah. And I understand why he didn't think that he could appoint Barbara Lee, regardless of whether she deserved it or not. And look, the voters will decide next year. We have absolutely no idea at this point if Lafonza Butler will, want to throw her own hat in the ring for that election to be determined. I think we would be remiss, and you sort of alluded to this, there's definitely a bit of a,

I don't know if backlash might be too strong a word, but there are eyebrows being raised among some people on the left about Butler because she was a top official with the service employees international union, SEIU, but somehow after that, she went on to advise Uber. Uh-huh. in a way that was, I think, anti-labor is almost not a bad way to put it. And she's also done work with Airbnb. And these are both companies that, you know, have done a lot to sort of foster this gig economy where workers don't have rights and workers don't get benefits and stuff like that.

So there's definitely been some eyebrows raised on the left and we'll have to see how that plays out. He's appointed her. That's a done deal. So people can raise their eyebrows and be upset about it all they want. and they have every right. I'm not trying to diminish that. It sounds like they might have an actual good point here.

But regardless, she is and will be the senator from California for the next year. Basically, California is about to pull a Georgia in the amount of elections that it's going to take in order to have a six-year, just one-term person come into that seat. So buckle up, California. Folks, I am very happy to welcome to the new abnormal for the first time, Alexandra Reeve Givens, who is the president and CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization fighting to protect civil rights and civil liberties in the digital age.

Alexandra, I want to start where I normally start, which is with my own existential crisis. around the rise of artificial intelligence that is being at once hailed as the great savior to labor and, you know, our day-to-day tasks, as well as by the very people that are responsible for the creation of AI, telling us that the doomsday clock has started and they actually started it. 50,000 foot view, you're working at the intersection of both democracy and technology. And recently, over the summer, the Biden administration hosted some folks to come in and talk about both the dangers as well as the opportunities that AI presents. I don't know if you've ever found yourself either speaking at or watching any of these committee hearings that happen on tech, but it is painful at best to watch people who, barely know how to use their phones, try and create legislation and policy that is going to

protect the rest of us. What do you make of all of the headlines, either doomsday or savior, around AI? Sure. So I'd love to start a conversation with a little existential angst. And there's question, right? The AI has dominated headlines around the world this year in particular because of the level of surprise that the broader public had at its power, really? and its capabilities. Those concerns are real. I believe it when technologists say we have to think about the long-term power of this technology. We have to make sure that it is being designed responsibly with guardrails from the beginning. But my work, and actually the focus of the White House in that roundtable meeting that you mentioned, has really been on the nearer term as well,

which is how AI today is already shaping social inequality, how fake images and fake video and fake audio can already undermine our trust in public dialogue and public conversation. And there is a hugely important thread that we have to make sure we focus on now, even as academics and technologists also think about those long-term risks too. One of the things that really does trouble me as a black queer woman in America is the fact that we are literally, as the Netflix documentary so wonderfully titled itself, coding bias, that the people, the very people who are creating these systems that are scanning, you know, millions of faces that are listening to millions of people's voices and their tones and

their inflections to literally learn human behavior are actually doing exactly what that Netflix documentary talked about, which is coding bias, which is either not seeing black faces or overly representing them in criminal databases. For instance, in New York where I sit, we just had our mayor roll out a 200-pound robot. Nothing to say about the infrastructure that's needed in New York City, but now we have a robot that can also stop and frisk. So I'm curious as to what you think about the dangers, the actual existing dangers, which is the digitizing of discrimination and racism that we already are dealing with,

as well as the existential, are we. creating intelligence that is going to surpass our own and by way of turning our actual lives into a sci-fi thriller. Yeah, and we're seeing this come up again and again. And maybe it's helpful for some of your listeners to kind of get specific on examples on how this type of built-in bias is manifesting on the day-to-day and why advocates like myself and so many others are worried about it. So you already mentioned coded bias. This is a big study into the use of face recognition technology, which was demonstrated for years to not work as well on darker skin tones and on female face shapes. Law enforcement continues to use face recognition today. We have had

Americans falsely accused spending time in jail for multiple days based on a wrong face recognition match. And even though they argue that the tech is getting better and it is not as discriminatory as it was before, every single one of those known cases so far was a black American. And so that tells you, we have to keep focusing on this. To this day, we do not have legislation that puts responsible guardrails on the use of face recognition technology by law enforcement. And that's just one concrete example. But then you move over. And let's talk about economic justice for a moment, right? So in the landscape of job applications, increasingly now when people are applying for a job, they're actually getting sorted by AI systems rather than real people.

And this could be something like an automated resume scanner that goes through a big stack of resumes and pulls out people that they then want to interview or even automated video interviews where you do your interview just talking to a bot. And then the bot purports to analyze you based on your face characteristics, on the things that you say on your vocal intonation. And time and again, we're seeing the risk of discrimination baked into these as well. If you think about a resume scanner, the way that they work right now is that they are trained on the existing population of employees on a company, usually, or desirable traits for that

company. We don't have a good history of representation in our country. And so often those are biased sample sets. And so if you went to an HBCU instead of to an Ivy League, you may not show up because you don't represent the current people on staff. We've seen this happen with women who were systematically discriminated against because the current population of people in the company was overwhelmingly male. And the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission actually just brought their first lawsuit against an AI hiring system

that literally just had it coded in to not consider older Americans. That's indirect violation of the law. We have civil rights statutes for a reason. But again, these developers are kind of training things without remembering and thinking about those legal obligations that they have to satisfy. And so that's why, you know, really pushing hard now on how these AI systems are designed, they're tested, how they're monitored, and then how people who face discrimination can vindicate their rights is a critical issue that so many of us are working on. I think it's extraordinary that, one, we're having to be already super vigilant in a way that I don't know how many studies have been done that tells you when people are doing the actual sorting, for instance, on resumes, that discrimination

happens, right? If you have a certain, you know, name that seems ethnic or black or what have then your resume goes in the trash. And so I want people to understand that it is human beings that are informing AI. And because human beings, the ones that are doing it are largely coming from very homogenous backgrounds. There is implicit bias. And so how do we even account for that when, to be honest, Alexandra, we haven't done a really great job to manage humans making these mistakes? Yeah, it's such a good question. And that, you know, well, people are biased too is a really common

refrain. And it comes up in the hiring context and it's worth just spending a minute on it because, yeah, that is definitely true. Right. We know people every day face discrimination when they're applying for jobs. But I think what's so important about AI and what people have to focus on is if there's a bad apple in HR, it's not always easy to tell, but you can kind of tell that that conversation didn't go as it should have, right? You might see that they have a pattern of like, Who is coming through this filter? This person is only ever passing on, you know, white men for this job. You can tell that there are sometimes indicators. What happens when you switch over to an AI system is that it is really hard to tell how they are making the decision. At what stage you're getting

filtered out. It's not one bad interview that went wrong, right? It's actually you don't, you're just tossing your resume into the void and have no idea what's happening. And here's the kicker. So not only does it seem to be fair because people tend to think that computer programs are going to be more fair than people when we know for the reasons we talked about that it can bake in discrimination, it also can discriminate at scale because suddenly it's not one bad apple in HR. It's a system that's being used across an entire company or even across an entire industry when there's a vendor who, you know, does all of the hiring for all of the major grocery stores in the country that are hiring people to be checkout clerks, right? just to give an example. And so when we move to this completely digitized system, there is a risk not only of discrimination being invisible and hard to prosecute against, like hard to push back against, but also the scale. So yeah, humans are biased. We're not going to fix that today. But we have to make sure that as we move to these more computerized systems, we're not replicating that and entrenching

that inequality in an even more nefarious way that's impossible to detect and guard against. Let's talk about switch gears for a moment and talk specifically about the danger to our democracy right now. And how technology, whether it is Elon Musk deciding that he is going to dismantle the election integrity department inside of his whatever he calls it, ex-Twitter, I don't care. And allowing bots to run Supreme. how we have seen since 2016 the rise in troll farms that are used in Russia and now used in the United States in order to alter what potential voters are seeing in their feeds or not seeing. Talk to us about how this is specifically affecting the future of our democracy. Yeah, it's a great question.

So we already know that the fabric of our democracy is fraying, right? in terms of there being a set understanding of truth and norms, we're having more attacks than ever on the legitimate conduct of elections and people bringing politicized attacks against them. And we've also seen efforts of voter suppression. Now we have to layer in how AI works in that landscape. And again, to give listeners kind of some concrete examples of what organizations like mine are worried about

and hoping that we can guard against. The first is just how much easier it is than ever, ever before to create fake images, fake video, fake audio. We've already seen this come up. One of the presidential campaigns, the DeSantis campaign, has used fake video of Donald Trump. I think many people anticipate that there is going to be more and more of this in the months and year ahead. How we get voters to actually understand the ground truth and what candidates stand for

is hugely important, particularly when you then couple on top of that, the liar's dividend, right, which is if you start to know that images aren't reliable or the, or there's a chance that something is a deep fake, even the trusted stuff becomes hard to trust. Even the authentic stuff kind of gets this veneer where it's easier for people to challenge it. So there's a big question right now about how we respond to that concern. And elections is a big one, right, because it matters what candidates say and then they're actually judged for what they are genuinely saying. But it also comes up in the national security context in public health.

Some of your listeners will remember Balenciaga Pope. That's fine. but what if it wasn't wearing an image of the Pope wearing a balanced-yager jacket, but instead it was him wearing something that supported Nazism or some other image, right? You can think about the fake image of an attack on the Pentagon that went around last year. Right now, those have been isolated events. And so public discourse has been able to quickly correct and say, you know, that's a manufactured image. But we really need our public officials to be ready to push back on that and be able to counter

mis and disinformation like that to say, you know, here's the ground truth. And right now our infrastructure just isn't well set up for this. One of the things that my organization works on is with election officials to say, okay, in a world of so much disinformation and voter suppression, you know, people misrepresenting whether someone's polling places open or not. You have to be trusted places blasting out information that voters can rely on. And right now, you know, only one in four election official even uses a dot-gov website, right? A lot of them are on, you know, so-and-so vote So there's some basic things of how you serve as a trusted voice in this ecosystem. And we need our election officials to really ramp that up.

And then the second piece is this comes up for voter suppression. It also comes up for consumer fraud. Advances in AI are going to make it easier than ever to create really personally tailored misleading communications. So right now we all get scam emails, right? And it's pretty easy, usually, to know that it's a scam. It either uses generic language or, you know, sometimes the English isn't exactly right or it just feels like a spammy email that's going to a lot of people. When AI makes it faster than ever to generate these, and it's coupled with a huge amount of personal information about all of us that now exists on the internet because we don't have a privacy law, it's going to be easier than ever for those scams to get super targeted.

And so we worry a lot about the voter suppression and the fraud aspects of that. And again, we have to get information into the hands of voters to be able to counter those factors. How do you foresee getting that information, the correct information, into the hands of potential voters, when we know that so many people are online, so many people are already receiving siloed news? Like I can get the news that I want to hear as opposed to what exactly is happening. how do we spread the facts and the right information and deter the negative and the wrong? I hate it when people say, we have to improve digital literacy because it sounds like the biggest cop out of all time. So I'm not going to let myself out the hook and just say that. But it is a key piece of this, right?

Like this is we have a chaotic information environment. The First Amendment allows us to have a chaotic information environment. It is getting more chaotic. part of that is that we have to give people the tools to navigate the chaos and make sure that they can find the information they need, like boosting those trusted sources of information like election officials. But there are steps that the companies can be taking two. One that's getting a lot of attention right now is watermarking, for example. It's not going to be a silver bullet, but when Dali or one of those image generators is churning something out,

if automatically they are just embedding a naked to the personal eye, but something that actually just gets it taxed. so that you know that this is a manipulated image. That still allows people to use those tools for creativity and to have fun and, you know, kind of do a fancy version of Photoshopping, but it would help let people know that an image is being manipulated. So those are kind of like one easy intervention they can do. The other is that I worry a lot about how some of these generative AI tools are being held out to the public as being a source of trusted, reliable information.

You know, when a generative AI tool is integrated into your search, engine. Most of us tend to go to a search engine and rely on the results, right? You're used to kind of having the things surface that you need to have surfaced. Generative AI, often those results are going to be speculative and they could be wrong. And so we really need the companies to do a much better job of signposting the risks that some of this information may be wrong or misleading so that again, even they are contributing to better education of the public as the public learns to navigate this new world. Alexandra, for those that are really concerned and want to stay, you know, up to date about what is happening and try their best to protect themselves.

What recommendations and advice do you have? So a couple different things. One, a lot of this is going to be with the consumer. So being a smart consumer, teaching your kids, talking in your family about how to weed truth from fiction on the internet and how to get savvy on that because we're going to need to be savvier than ever before. And then we need to keep pushing the companies for leadership and policy makers for action. The white, has put out an AI Bill of Rights last year that says that AI systems have to be safe and effective. They have to actually be, and it makes sense for the purpose they're being used for. They can't be biased and discriminate.

They have to protect people's privacy. Those are really bare bones fundamental concepts. And as consumers, we have to insist on them, that companies abide by them, that the government and law enforcement abide by them when they're using these tools. And we're not going to get those rights if we don't insist on it. So that's where we need to use our collective action and our voices to do. demand to continue focus on this and push for change. We will have to leave it there today, but I appreciate you and the work that you were doing

at the Center for Democracy and Technology and keeping us all abreast on what is happening because it seems that the pace at which technology and AI is moving is so fast. And to get a hold on it and wrap our arms around it is going to take trusted individuals like yourself. So we appreciate you. Thank you so much. The maker of ShotSpotter is buying the world's most infamous predictive policing tech. So read a headline at Wired.com that caught my eye, and I'm sure the eye of privacy, civil liberties,

and criminal justice advocates. Here to explain what this purchase means and why it's a big deal is staff writer for Wired and co-author of the piece that broke this news, Drew Murotra. Drew, thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having me. So start by explaining what Shotspotter is for people who may not know. Sure. Shot spotter, well, the company is now called sound thinking. They were formerly called ShotSpotter. And the first technology that they offered the public was a gunshot detection

solution. The idea is that ShotSpotter would place little microphones on top of traffic lights and stop signs and things like that. And the microphones could detect gunshots and then deploy police resources to where the gunshots were located. The technology is controversial in that activists and advocates have been concerned that the tech is disproportionately deployed in low-income communities of color and is inaccurate. How widely is it used? Do we know? You know, marketing material from the company suggests that it's 150 jurisdictions that have

Shotspotter mics placed in them. Okay. So now tell us what the titular world's most infamous predictive policing tech is. Yeah. So they were formerly called PredPol. They changed their name to Geolitica last year. But they were among the first companies to offer a predictive policing solution. And the idea of their software is that it would take in historical crime data

and predict where crimes were going to occur so that police could then deploy officers to areas that had a high kind of risk of having crime at a certain time and date. And similarly, that software was controversial. and academics and advocates and activists have pointed to the fact that crime data is historically biased and inaccurate. So if the data is inaccurate, then of course the crime predictions are inaccurate and will lead to sort of relentless targeting of low-income blocks. Among other things, it sort of puts us in like a feedback loop, right?

Cops are more likely to make arrests in black and minority areas. And then the pred poll algorithm predicts more crime in those areas, which leads to more patrols in those areas, which leads to more arrests, et cetera, ad infinitum, I suppose. Yeah, that's exactly right. I think the main concern about these technologies is the possibility of that kind of feedback loop that results in, yeah, relentless patrols of low-income communities of color. So basically, sound thinking now owns, well, they own ShotSpotter, and they now own the PredPol technology and engineers. And this is all, as you and Del Cameron say in the piece, This is with an aim toward making them sort of the Google of crime fighting, or I guess the Amazon of crime fighting, like a one-stop shop.

Yeah, that's right. I mean, for the last four years or so, sound thinking has been acquiring a variety of different police tech companies. And they've been sort of expanding from their first standalone gunshot detection solution to records management to what they're calling resource management, which is essentially, you know, predictive policing. Right. It feels more than a little disingenuous on their part to rebrand this from, as you said, from like predictive policing to resource management. Is this maybe a realization not that the idea of predictive policing is bad, but that it needs to be marketed differently because, you know, a lot of people oddly don't want to live in a minority report-ass world? Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, the company, both companies have changed their names to sort of market themselves a little bit differently.

And, yeah, predictive policing, what Shotsbotter is doing with resource management is functionally no different than what we would call predictive policing in the sense that they are using data to forecast where crimes should occur and then deploy police resources to those areas. And you mentioned that, you know, activists and, you know, people who believe in civil liberties and stuff like that are not fans of either of these two programs or predictive policing in general. Who are we talking about here?

We're talking about groups like the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, anti-surveillance groups, etc. Largely that, and also racial justice advocates. MacArthur Center had done a really, really detailed report about shot spotter's accuracy. And they had found that something like, you know, 93% of shot spotter alerts led to sort of dead ends where there was no shell casing or evidence of gunfire found on the scene. So I think, you know, the concerns range from, yeah, like, you know, civil liberties advocates, to anti-surveillance advocates, to, you know, academics who have been studying this stuff. Well, that's the thing. That's what I was going to bring up. There's the group of, you know, there are the detractors who were philosophically opposed to these sorts of things. And then there are the folks that simply say that neither one of these programs works all that well. And this includes some police departments who have tried them, right? Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, PredPoll had been sort of hemorrhaging clients for quite a while. Most sort of famously,

The LAPD dropped the software after they found that it was essentially, they couldn't figure out whether or not it was useful or not. The data was unclear, whether it had a real reduction in crime rates in the areas where predictions occurred. They, in 2020, I believe, dropped the software. But yeah, I think that's right. There's serious concerns about the accuracy of these tools. Wasn't there a whole thing with the Houston Police Department, I seem to recall reading, and they ended up dropping Shot Spotter, I think it was? I don't recall if they've dropped Shotpotter. but there have been many, many local reports. Houston is one of them that found similar results as MacArthur

that most of the gunshot alerts led to dead ends. By sound thinking, which is the owner of shots, but are buying this, are we looking at, is this like a bundling situation, like Disney Plus and Hulu or Paramount Plus in Showtime, like you subscribe to both, you know, for one price? Is that what they're trying to do here? That is what they're trying to do. I think they're trying to, I mean, so in the August earnings call that we reviewed that kind of laid out a sound thinkings plan to acquire the patents and employees of PredPol, you know, something that the CEO of Sound Thinking had said is like, this is an opportunity to sort of cross bundle and sell our existing clients on these new solutions that we're offering.

Notably, part of the acquisition included transitioning PredPol's customers to Sound Thinking's own resource management tool. So you have one program that there are a police department saying doesn't work very well, and you have another program that is just sort of widely known to not work very well, but somehow selling them both together is good for police departments? Yeah, I mean, the cell that sound thinking is trying to make is that police budgets are being cut and there aren't enough officers. So the promise of this technology is that it more efficiently will deploy the limited resources that they say that they have. So I think, you know, that's the pitch, and it seems compelling enough for seems like more than 100 clients to have purchased. So what's the future for tech like this? You know, you mentioned that PredPol had been hemorrhaging users. What's the data on shot spotter? Is it the kind of thing, you know, we talked about L.A. dumping it and Houston raising, you know, concerns and stuff like that. But on the other hand, there are cities like Chicago that use it extensively. Is this, unfortunately, is this the future of policing?

or is there a chance that stainer heads prevail and say, well, hold on, this is not what, first of all, these things don't work. And second of all, even if they do work, we're giving up too much in terms of freedom. And also, you know, there's racial bias going on here. And it's just a bad idea in general. Is it too late for that or is this fight ongoing? I'm not particularly optimistic that more cities won't purchase these solutions. I think that is more than likely going to happen And as academics and journalists study this technology, and, you know, we find that there are, in fact, errors with accuracy. I think that helps to sort of show that, like, you know, these tools, if they're deployed, they need to be auditable and publicly auditable to see just, in fact, how inaccurate they are if they're leading to over-policing in certain areas and, you know, what the actual consequence for the criminal justice system is. And one of the big problems here is that, you know, a company like PredPol or Geolitica says that they change the way their algorithm works and that it's more accurate now because they are basing it on victim reports and not on police reports.

You know, MIT Technology Review points out that researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and University of Texas at Austin show that this is also skewed because, for example, rich white people are more likely to report crimes committed by poor black people than the other way or wrong. and that everything in the statistics has a built-in societal bias, and these programs don't care about that. Yeah, that's right. Crime data is notoriously skewed and biased. There's sort of selection bias in who makes calls for service, selection bias, and like what types of stops lead to an actual crime report and bias in terms of who gets stopped. So I think, you know, crime data is notoriously messy, and I think police departments understand that. What's interesting here is that resource router, the sound thinking's predictive policing tool, says that they have built in a bunch of anti-biased measures. They didn't really clarify to me what exactly those measures are, but they say

they use, quote-unquote, data-driven impartiality. And, you know, when we looked at resource router, we saw that the tool can collect dosage data, which is essentially how long an officer spends patrolling a certain hotspot. What resource router is trying to claim by doing this type of thing is that they're taking in additional inputs, not just crime data, but I think they told me weather data and maybe even where streetlights are and things like that to make what they say are more objective forecast, crime forecasts. You're not convinced by that. Well, look, until we can audit the software, we don't know.

It's all marketing material that we're getting from sound thinking until they sort of show us some data that we can independently verify. I don't think we can take them at their word. I think, you know, importantly with PredPol, the reason that academics and reporters have been able to even analyze the efficacy of the software is because there was a massive, essentially, leak of PredPol data. I worked on a story with the Markup and Gizmodo a few years ago where we analyzed millions and millions of crime predictions by PredPoll and found that they, you know, relentlessly targeted low-income communities of color. And today in Wired, actually, we just published another story with those same predictions. that found that not only was it targeting communities of color, but the predictions weren't accurate. You know, I think 99% of them were essentially dead ends. There never was crime on that block.

So it's worth reading. Yeah, absolutely. And I assume, like for ShotSpotter, the problem here is that, obviously, I understand they have proprietary algorithms that they don't want to make public because they'll lose business. But on the other hand, if police departments, the public law enforcement is using them, it does sort of seem like people should have a right. to know what's going on in these programs. Yeah, I think that's right. I think before a city adopts a new technology like ShotSpotter or, you know, resource router, whatever it is, it's incumbent on the company to be transparent about exactly how the tool works and make sure that it's independently auditable. I think the last thing I'll say, too, about ShotSpotter is, you know, in response to

sort of claims about their inaccuracy, they commissioned their own study by a group called Edgeworth Analytics that essentially found that the technology. is, you know, 97% accurate or something like that. And I think they're savvy about how they market their statistics and how they count things. So I think an independent audit is what a lot of this software needs before it can be publicly deployed in these high-stakes situations like criminal justice. Drew, thank you so much for being here. This is all intensely scary. And like I said, hopefully saner heads can come through on this. And just, it's so important what you're doing, pointing out how bad these programs are. I really appreciate it. Drew, thanks so much.

Thanks for having me. Danielle Lutie. Andy Levy. Who is your fuck that guy to start off this week? An entire state, you know, because I like to go big as we start off the week. But it's going to be the state of Idaho. Because in effect, since they have outright banned abortion in the state of Idaho, it is forcing women and people with uteruses in Bonner County where they have closed down their obstetrics unit, their maternity unit, because their solo doctor has left the state and has gone to a state where they can actually perform OBGYN services and not do so under duress. And again, these fucking people who say that they care about life clearly don't do their research, don't believe in science, and are putting people who want their children, who want to be parents, at greater risk.

And according to an NBCNews.com article on what is happening in Idaho, I just want to share this, that research has shown that women who lack access to hospitals with obsteture. care are more likely to face health consequences, including a higher risk of preterm birth, which is associated with asthma, hearing loss, intellectual disabilities, and other lifelong impacts for children. An analysis published in 2019 found that rural residents had a 9% greater chance of maternal morbidity and mortality compared to urban residents in part because of limited access and longer travel times to obstetrics care. In this area, the next hospital over in Bonner that people with uterces can go to in Idaho

is 90 minutes away. That is an hour and a fucking half, that you are in labor driving past what used to be your hospital of choice to go to the next hospital over that has obstetrics. This is what the overturning of Roe v. Wade has done. This is why I say that these people that live in these areas and say that they are proud Republicans have voted against their own lives over and over and over again. So we are going to continue to hear stories that are preventable that are going to include the death of babies and their mothers because of this law. It's so heartbreaking because for the last 50 years, it was preventable. And now we're just back to ground zero.

So for that reason, the state of Idaho, the fucking Supreme Court, these right-wing fascists that say that they're pro-children but don't actually give a fuck about them. Fuck that guy. Fuck that state. Fuck them people. Yeah. The thing that really got me was there's a quote in an NBC News article about this from Dr. Morgan Morton, who used to work at Bonner General and now practices in Washington State,

for the reasons you laid out earlier. And she said, I definitely have patients that I know would have been in support of these laws, meaning the anti-abortion laws, and are now very surprised at the downstream effects. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Because these were not unforeseen consequences. Yep. Like, it was very obvious that shit like this was going to happen. And we are just being ruled by stupid people. And to sit there, You know, my heart goes out to the women who don't like those laws and didn't vote for those laws and are now forced to deal with this. But I look at these women who are like, how can you be this dumb and how can you not realize that regardless of what you believe this is going to come back to bite you? I have no idea.

I literally have no idea. Andy, how are you starting off this good, good week? I'm going to go with an oldie, but a goodie, and that is Elon Musk. Fuck that guy. But please, tell us why we're doing it this time. Just fuck that. It's true. Just fuck that guy.

Yeah, yeah. We can just end now. Elon Musk is now being sued, being sued by a 22-year-old named Ben Brody. Brody is Jewish, lives in California. And earlier this year, he was connected to a fight. There was a fight between some proud boys and another sort of neo-Nazi group called the Rose City Nationalists. and the fight was caught on video and one of the members of the Rose City Nationalists, there was a picture of him without his mask off, and idiot right-wingers on Twitter identified

this man as Ben Brody. This got further circulated on Twitter and Musk himself retweeted this, and then later tweeted it on his own, that it was this guy, Ben Brody. Needless to say, it was not Ben Brody, who, as I said earlier, is Jewish and not a member of a neo-Nazi group. And so Ben Brody is now suing Musk. One of the reasons this is a big deal is because Brody smartly got himself a lawyer named Mark Bankston. Mark Bankston is known for representing a couple of Sandy Hook parents who sued Alex Jones and won that suit. And not only won that suit, but my God, did he make Alex Jones look god-awful? Usually these lawsuits, you know, you kind of, ah, people are filing on lawsuits all the time.

you kind of shrug at him sometimes. But this, I don't think I would be so quick to shrug if I were Elon Musk in this case. Because Mark Bankston don't play. If they can prove that Musk through his retweets and his own tweets did damage to Ben Brody, then good for them. Because honestly, I can't think of a more deserving person to be screwed in court than Elon Musk. So fuck that guy. Do you realize that he could be sued for $228 billion?

pay it out and still be a billionaire. I know. Yeah. I just threw up in my mouth. Thanks. Fuck that guy. You know, I was maybe feeling a little good about my fuck that guy. And then you brought me right back down.

Sorry. I didn't mean to. Happy Monday. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of the new abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production. by Jesse Cannon and Seamus Calder.

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