The Future of You

Surveillance and Data: Byron Tau on Government Monitoring and AI Risks

• Tracey Follows • Season 4 • Episode 36

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0:00 | 52:30

Byron Tau is an American investigative journalist and author of the new book "Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State” so in this episode I’m talking to Byron about the intricate world of government surveillance. 

We discuss how commercial data is leveraged by the US government and other entities for extensive monitoring. We also talk about the public’s seeming lack of awareness, the role of data brokers, the impact of surveillance on personal identity, and the implications of AI. During our conversation Byron shares insights from his own research, talks about how he self-financed his investigation and emphasises the importance of supporting independent journalism. 

Byron Tau photo credit: Elliott O’Donovan

The Future of You podcast investigates and analyses all the ways emerging technologies are going to affect our identity. Join futurist Tracey Follows as she explores our changing identity in a digital world.






SPEAKER_00

Byron Tao is an American investigative journalist, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Politico. He covered the Department of Justice and the White House. Now, after many years of meticulous research, he's just published his new book, Means of Control, investigating the role of commercial data in US government surveillance programs. In this episode, we discussed the American surveillance state, the contrasts and similarities to other parts of the world, the various generations of commercial third-party data that government accesses, why the public are unaware, the effects of surveillance on our sense of self, the implications of AI, and much more besides. Byron now works at the Allbritten Journalism Institute, training and mentoring early career reporters, and towards the end of our conversation, we discuss the importance of properly financing and resourcing impartial and investigative media. Because without it, who would know what our governments, technology companies, and not-for-profits are actually up to? Listen to what Byron says about how he self-financed his research into the hidden alliance between government and tech in the surveillance of its citizens. We live in strange and inverted times when we aren't prepared to pay for this kind of illumination that we so obviously desperately need, and neither are we prepared to pay to preserve our own privacy. In the 21st century, all our information is free. Except it's not. There is a price to pay, and surveillance is it. Byron, welcome to the Future View and congratulations on this fantastic book, Means of Control. It's a brilliant read and recommend it to everybody listening.

SPEAKER_02

Thanks so much for having me.

SPEAKER_00

Not at all. It says on the back on one of the reviews that this is meticulous. It is absolutely meticulous research, and you are a proper investigative journalist. But tell me, as we get into this podcast, just to start off, how did you come to identify data brokers as an area of so much interest? Because I'm not sure anybody has touched it or and certainly not investigated it in so much detail as you have here.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, so the story first came to me as a tip. All reporters love a good tip. I was in DC at one point, and somebody told me a story about how the Pentagon was acquiring large amounts of mobile phone data from essentially data brokers. Data was coming off of phones from things like weather apps and games. It was passing into this very shadowy ecosystem, and government contractors and ultimately government entities were buying access to that data. And that sort of floored me because I thought I understood the ways in which surveillance was conducted by governments, the ways in which spy agencies can spy on targets, and the way in which law enforcement can track people around. Usually you need some sort of a court order or finding to do that kind of tracking of an individual or individuals. But this was a different kind of surveillance program. And because the data was available commercially, it was being purchased from brokers, there were very few legal or policy restrictions on how it was used. And basically, everyone that had put a weather app or a game or was unknowingly broadcasting this data into this ecosystem was part of this massive surveillance program. And so I started digging into this. It was a lot of work because I had to both understand the technology. I also had to understand the advertising ecosystem because a lot of this is tied up in the advertising world. And then I had to understand how governments were using it. And that involved understanding both the law enforcement side as well as the defense department and the intelligence community. So it took a long time to unwind this world, but the deeper I went, the more I realized that this was a phenomenon. Governments purchasing large amounts of data from commercial sources. This was something that was happening not just with geolocation data, but had been happening for the past 20 years with different kinds of data sets and will continue to happen and will only grow as more and more data becomes available for sale and through commercial entities.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, now the subtitle of the book, of course, is How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government is creating a new American surveillance state. We'll get on to America in a minute, but I wanted to highlight this idea of the hidden alliance, and that's sort of what you you're nodding to there. Why don't people know about this? Or do they? I mean, my my perception is that the that the public, most of the public, are pretty much in the dark about any of this, which is why your book is so illuminating. But why are they in the dark? And has any of that changed over the past, I don't know, 15, 20 years? Do you think more and more people are becoming aware?

SPEAKER_02

It's a good question. I think there's a few reasons. First, that the entities at the center of this story, which are data brokers, actually have very little consumer relationship. Um when you sign up to a service like Google or Facebook or whatever, um, you expect that that service has some information about you, right? I know that Gmail has my emails as part of the bargain. But the data broker world is different because they end up purchasing, acquiring data from a variety of different sources. They often aggregate it, and they have almost no first-party relationship with consumers. And so their activities and their actions and even their names are often obscured by this fact that they don't have a consumer relationship. The second part of it is, you know, I think a lot of these technological systems are very, very complicated. When you're talking about the advertising world, where a lot of this data goes to target people and to collect information about what they're interested in, what they want to buy, and to target them and some might say bombard them with ads, the technology behind that is mind-numbingly difficult to understand. It's this real-time bidding, instantaneous service that delivers ads to billions of devices around the world. And so it's very, very difficult to understand both how the data is collected and how this can be sort of used and abused, and how people's privacy can be put at stake in these kinds of tech systems. And the final reason I think it's sort of hidden is because government agencies, government entities that are using it for surveillance or for law enforcement find it more convenient not to talk about it. It's not really classified per se. It's not, you know, a top secret program that's locked away behind many, many closed doors and requiring tons and tons of clearances, but it's a useful capability. And the more the public understands uh you know how they're tracked and how data is generated, the less useful it becomes. So it's not to any government's advantage to talk very, very loudly about how they're using data to do surveillance or to do law enforcement or to do public safety.

SPEAKER_00

Because I think a lot of people who are aware might even think that these are loopholes, but it feels to me like it's more a feature than a bug. And in America, we've seen lots of congressional hearings, we've seen social media giants up in front of governments, but but how how effective have those grillings, if you like, been? And a question to you, really, about politicians. Are they, and in any country, are they really up to speed with lots of the technologies and the advancements? Can they really ask the right kinds of questions, do you think?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, it's a great question. So let's start with the United States. So the situation in the United States for privacy is pretty bleak. We're one of the few industrial democracies that does not have any sort of comprehensive digital privacy law. And that has, in many ways, allowed this ecosystem to flourish. It's allowed these companies to spring up and argue that they're not really subject to any meaningful regulation. It's allowed essentially the Wild West of data collection, and that data collection has involved sale to government entities all around the world. Um, I think the situation is a little bit different in countries like the UK or in the European Union. Those countries have begun to have a very serious public debate about digital services and the data they collect. There are legal regimes in place in the EU, in Switzerland, and the UK that do give citizens some protections. But many of those protections are ineffective against a lot of what I write about. I'm not saying they're completely ineffective, but you know, they tend to apply to the largest technology companies, and those technology companies tend to comply because they want to be good corporate citizens. Um, but there's this whole ecosystem of hundreds, if not thousands, of companies that are not in the EU, that have no EU presence, that don't see themselves as responsible corporate citizens in the European Union or in the UK, and they are collecting vast amounts of data on the European population and often in contravention of laws like the GDPR. And so we're still at a phase in which the regulatory regime around data privacy has not caught up to the reality and the technological reality that a lot of this data can be collected, that this market is global, and that many companies simply don't care about uh European or California or Vermont regulations. They are outside of the reach of those enforcement agencies, and there's very little that the Europeans or the Californians can do about it. To your question about whether lawmakers are asking good questions, you know, I think that is a real problem, um, that expertise is hard to find. Good technological expertise is hard to find in the halls of government or in regulatory agencies. You know, that's not 100% true. There are very good technologists that often work on these policy areas, but they're few and far between. And it's true that the average legislator in either the United States or in Europe does struggle to ask good questions about these technological systems when they're writing these rules like GDPR.

SPEAKER_00

Did you see Mario Draghi's recent report um coming out of the EU and this suggestion starting to be talked about in even in a mainstream way that maybe GDPR is a little bit too restrictive for innovation?

SPEAKER_02

Aaron Powell I haven't seen that specific report, but I think this is part of a long debate, you know, and it's kind of a transatlantic debate because I think uh the Americans have taken a slightly different view and are much more in favor of allowing the market to sort it out. And the Europeans have taken a much more regulatory approach where they say that these technologies are both good and bad, and they can um they have upsides, but they also have downsides, and we need to protect our population against the downsides. And that truly may come at the expense of allowing innovative companies to flourish and new products to sprout. The question is where to draw these lines, as always. You know, I think in writing this book, I'm I'm certainly not saying there should be no level of government access to private data streams or that governments should never get access to data, but I do think where we have drawn the line in the past 20 years has left a lot of people around the world very exposed to large amounts of data collection from governments and not just friendly democratic governments, from hostile foreign governments, um, from private investigators, from corporations that want to do data collection. So these questions about line drawing are always interesting. And yes, I think there are meaningful trade-offs between consumer protection and innovation, and where to strike that balance is a difficult question that I think societies on both sides of the pond are grappling with.

SPEAKER_00

Now, you mentioned that about the last 20 years. I think this is certainly, and you start the book about uh about this, about the sort of in light of 9-11 and the Patriot Act and some of the permissions that the government gave itself in the US. And actually, when I interviewed Eric Prince, who was the one that put me onto your book, actually, he recommended your book to me. He said you get to the point where there are these indispensable counter-terrorism tools or and new gadgets everywhere that seem absolutely brilliant. They're great at data collection in the beginning, but you don't realize that they're going to be used or turned against you as a population. I wonder if you could just take us back to post-9-11 world and how some of this counter-terrorism surveillance and some of these technological tools did become used in the way that you do outline in the book.

SPEAKER_02

So I think that 9-11 represented a very important moment for a number of reasons, not just because it was this traumatic, shocking event in the United States and around the world, but also because it represented a very different kind of mission for government agencies. So historically, government intelligence agencies and public safety agencies had a very sort of different kind of mission. The intelligence agencies were tracking big foreign states, you know, they were trying to do order of battle and understanding where the Soviets were going to put divisions or fly spy planes. So they're monitoring another country, and the public safety entities were doing stuff like solving homicides. You know, there'd be a dead body and then they'd have to work backwards. Terrorism presented a very different kind of problem because you have to sort of sort out uh the so-called bad guys from the regular population, and they're relatively indistinguishable. So 9-11, in the aftermath, you suddenly had these agencies being charged with doing things like unwinding networks of people who are living in apartment buildings in Germany or um embedded in the populations of Afghanistan or Iraq or Pakistan. And that's a very, very different kind of mission than monitoring the Soviet armed forces and trying to recruit spies and the general staff of the KGB. So 9-11 represented um this moment where the intelligence agencies had to sort of monitor a population and sort out who's who in that population intends to do us harm and who is just a normal, ordinary person. And that involved collecting more data than these government entities had historically been either comfortable with or been able to collect. And that was helped by the fact that more data suddenly became available, right? Like in the exact same time frame, this is when the internet really started taking off for commerce, for communications. This is when social media sprung up. So over the past 25 or so years, we've seen governments become increasingly interested in the data that is held by corporations. So in the aftermath of 9-11, there were a number of research programs that asked questions like could you take stuff like hotel records and travel records and credit card records and look for an entire population and look for patterns within that data that might indicate that somebody intends to do something bad, right? Renting a car, renting a truck's not inherently suspicious. But if you also go get fertilizer, which is also not inherently suspicious, and you also book a hotel route along the way from Texas to Washington, D.C., well, maybe those three data points in combination, maybe that's a little bit suspicious, and we should check that person out. So there are all these research programs that started asking that question. When people started saying more and more things on social media, when we saw the rise of the Islamic State, which was using social media to recruit, that's when governments became interested in social media data. When we all started carrying around a cell phone in our pocket that has a GPS device, that has a microphone, that has a browser built in, where we're constantly asking questions 24-7. Well, that's when governments got interested in mobile phones. And increasingly, as everything we have today that's networked, um, Bluetooth headphones and even our cars are broadcasting data, the entire world of um internet-connected devices is of interest to governments. So as data became available in the post-9-11 era for counterterrorism, and now today, this sort of strategic competition with China, governments move to take advantage of it, whether to buy it or to hack it or to steal it or to get it under some sort of process.

SPEAKER_00

So you've got a great taxonomy in the book, I think, which helps people navigate and better understand all these kinds of data and actually kind of label them. You've got consumer data, social media data, there's obviously advertising media, which you've just you talked about, and then esoteric data. I wonder if you could take us through each of the four categories and help people understand what kind of companies, what kind of brokers, what kind of products and services you see in each of these categories.

SPEAKER_02

Sure. So as you say, I kind of break the generations of these data companies down into four separate eras. The first era is the traditional data broker, and these are companies who are kind of sort of household names if you pay attention to tech and to advertising, but yeah, they're companies like Thomson Reuters, Axiom, credit bureaus like TransUnion eventually got into this kind of market. And what they have historically done is gone out and taken either credit data from banks, commercial data from things like magazine subscriptions, public data from things like courthouses, marriage records, hunting licenses, driver's licenses, and created essentially lists of where people live in the world, what assets they own, and some basic demographic information, right? So they might guess at your gender, at your marital status, um, they might guess at your race based on uh zip code, they might guess at your income level, and all that was useful to corporations to do targeted advertising, traditionally mailing, but then you know, as digital technologies matured, then they also got into helping people micro-target online. Those are the sort of traditional data brokers. They are all a lot of them are still around. This is a line of business that's been around since the 1960s. And right after 9-11, the government became very interested in acquiring their data for address history and to try to understand when people live together and how they moved around. The second generation is social data brokers. So when social media became a big part of the way we communicate and the way we express ourselves in the early 2000s, there started to be these data brokers that began monitoring the social conversation. And there were legitimate commercial purposes for doing that. Brands wanted to know what people were saying about their product. Journalists like me wanted to understand breaking news events and to quickly get alerts if there was a school shooting or a terrorist attack, and social media is very good at that. Um, but governments also increasingly became interested in acquiring social media data and analyzing it and looking at people's connections with each other and who they talk to and what they say. Um, that can be useful for solving crimes. Often criminals say incredibly dumb things on the internet in advance of committing criminal behavior or criminal acts. Um, but it could also be useful for intelligence. People give away a lot more than they realize, and you can extract interesting information from their background, you can run their face through facial recognition systems, all sorts of things you can do. So those kind of data brokers sprung up to monitor the social conversation, and governments move to take advantage of that. Then there's location brokers. So these are brokers that started collecting information off of mobile phones. So what we were talking about at the beginning. Um, you put a game on your phone, you um enable some app to know your location. Well, all that information gets passed back into this complicated advertising or tech ecosystem, and brokers sprung up to collect that data and to sell it. And there are, again, legitimate commercial reasons to do uh that kind of collection, right? So companies want to know, do you go to KFC or do you go to Popeyes? Um, target you with an ad there. Companies also want to do things like investment analytics. So they might want to say, you know, is this a good place to put a Starbucks? Um, is there enough foot traffic? Do enough people drive by this location? Location data is good for that. And it's also good for making investment decisions. So if you know the number of uh cars that traditionally appear in a Walmart parking lot, and all of a sudden that either goes up or down, well, that might guide an investment decision whether to take a long or short position in a company in a chain. Um so there's plenty of reasons to get that kind of data for commercial purposes. But governments also tracking people's phones is a useful intelligence tool. And so they move to take advantage of that data. And then the weirdest kind of data I write about is um this what I call in the book gray data, um, you called it esoteric data, but you know, it is data that we do not normally associate with, we don't even really think about. It's this kind of weird digital exhaust. Um, so uh I'm talking to you through a pair of Bluetooth headphones. Well, Bluetooth headphones are constantly pinging out a signal, and if you know how to collect that signal, uh you can say Byron's Bluetooth headphones were at this particular address. The same thing with cars, um, the same thing with internet browsing data. There's just all manner of data sets that you really need to be a technologist to understand. And governments are moving to collect that kind of data as well.

SPEAKER_00

It's just it's fascinating, isn't it? I think what people would love to know is how governments come by this data then. Because is it via you know, being sold this data through third party brokers, whatever, or is it Creating these companies themselves and actually, you know, securing the data firsthand themselves. What are all the machinations of how government comes into contact with this and accrues this data?

SPEAKER_02

Machinations is a good word because that is often exactly what's going on. So sometimes you have data brokers that are completely willing to straight up enter into a commercial arrangement with a government agency. That that's a very above-board. You know, the biggest data brokers in the world do business with government entities, Thompson Reuters does, TransUnion does, uh LexisNexis does. All these data brokers will have and take public contracts and will sell to government entities often. So that's one way. Another way is governments uh sometimes just use a contractor. So a big defense contractor like Lockheed Martin or Boeing or Northrop Grumman, you know, they'll have often a small business partner and the data broker will contract with a government contractor so they don't have to have a direct relationship. But there are sneakier ways. So we have seen some instances where government contractors have set up what look like marketing companies and just said, hey, you know, we're a commercial marketing entity that uh does basic commercial stuff, and um we'd like some data. And really, what's happening is the data is passing through to a government agency through a couple different steps. And then finally, I've even run into some instances where money doesn't actually change hands, but essentially a government agency or entity will go to a commercial company and say, Hey, will you do us a favor? Will you hook us up with a data feed? Do the right thing for your country? You know, it's important for counterterrorism. We're trying to do good things and stop the bad guys here. Don't you want to help us out? So there's a couple different ways that governments get this stuff, but whatever way they they get it, it seems to feed into their general public safety, intelligence, and counterterrorism programs. And they don't seem to have trouble obtaining commercial data in one of those ways.

SPEAKER_00

Tell us about the story about Locate X. Because again, going back to this point about secrecy or a hidden alliance, you talk about um Babbel and Locate X and the fact that you can't even mention Locate X in the legal proceedings. Maybe you can tell the audience what the story is to do with that, but it's absolutely- I found that just incredible.

SPEAKER_02

Sure. So Babbel Street is one of many, many of these companies that has sprung up to cater to the government market. So they describe themselves as an open source intelligence tool. Um, they take uh government customers, they sell a product that lets you monitor social media, but also includes sometimes a feed of mobile phone locations. So this is the exact same kind of data that comes off games and whether that that's it's the mobile location data that brokers are selling. And so Battle Street created a product called LocateX about six, seven, eight years ago at this point. And it was intended to be sold to a kind of a closed circle of government customers, including law enforcement. And in the United States, when law enforcement assembles a case against you, when they charge you with something, generally speaking, with some exceptions, the rules are you're supposed to tell criminal defendants what kind of evidence you obtained against them, how you obtained that evidence, and um turn it over to the defense so that the defense can challenge it. Well, in this case, Babel Street was selling their mobile phone tracking tool, Locate X, to police agencies, but as part of the contract, they put that, hey, you're you're not supposed to introduce this into evidence in legal proceedings and you're not supposed to mention it in public documents. And so essentially what the company was selling was a tracking tool to be used against American citizens and used to solve crimes that could not be introduced in court and could not even, in many cases, be shared with the defense lawyer for the suspect. So you couldn't tell them how you initially got the tip that led the police to believe that you were the suspect. Now, this raises all sorts of problems in our criminal justice system. And it also stops defense lawyers from challenging this practice, right? This open legal question about whether in our society can government actually just go out there and buy their way around our traditional warrant requirement, right? To track someone around in the United States to get someone's location history through their cell phone, traditionally you need to go before a judge and you need to say, I have reason to believe that this person is engaged in criminal activity, the standard is probable cause of a crime, and a judge will either sign or not sign a warrant to get their cell data. Babel Street Locate X is just a license, it's a subscription. You can log into the product and run whatever queries you want about the entire population of the United States, and no judge ever needs to sign off on this. So by telling police agencies that they could not even mention the product, and they couldn't even say to the defense lawyer, hey, this is how we identified your client as our suspect, they were stopping lawyers from challenging this practice to begin with. And you know, I think that in and of itself also raises these civil liberties and constitutional questions that remain open to this day.

SPEAKER_00

Aaron Powell Don't you have laws to override that?

SPEAKER_02

Aaron Powell Yeah. So I mean ultimately a lot of the contracts with Babel Street Locate X were available if you do to ask for them. So again, it wasn't classified, it wasn't an actual national security secret. Um, but it was part of the contract with these police agencies that they shouldn't mention the product. And, you know, those contractual provisions don't override state transparency laws in some cases. And in other cases, um, lawyers, criminal defense lawyers have have gotten inklings that potentially a tool like that was used. And so um, yeah, so there's this open question about, you know, um, can a provision like that even exist in a in a public contract? Um, and does it override the obligations of the police? The way police have historically used it as kind of a like a tipping and cueing system. So they'll run a query if they have a crime site, they'll run a query, and if they get a person of interest, they might start to dig into them, but they'll create some parallel evidentiary reason why they believe that this person committed a crime. So they they use it as kind of a way to generate leads and to start an investigation into someone. They're not using it as the only piece of evidence to tie someone to a crime. But it still raises these questions about how much we're all being tracked, what are these tools that the government is buying, and is this practice even legal to begin with?

SPEAKER_00

And while you were writing this book, did the whole Twitter files thing emerge? Was it around at the same time? What are your thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, it's a good question. Because I did write at least a quarter of the book about social media surveillance and when governments get access to social data and what are the thorny civil liberties and privacy problems when that occurs. And um, towards the end of that process, while I was wrapping up the manuscript, that's when Elon Musk had taken over Twitter and had started making a lot of the files available to journalists and researchers to show the relationship between government entities and social media companies. You know, I do think it raises thorny questions when government agencies are communicating with companies, especially when they're doing so in secret, and especially when they're doing so sort of ad hoc without clear guidelines as to what is and is not content that should be taken down. Uh, it raises these transparency and these profound questions about free speech and government coercion. Those cases have gone up and down our legal system, and it seems like the Supreme Court has at this point said that, you know, maybe the government didn't quite cross the line in the case of the Twitter files, but you do you did see stuff in there like humorless FBI agents flagging obvious jokes to Twitter to be removed and doing so in secret. You know, I do think it would be healthier for both the social media platforms and for government agencies to do more of this communication in public. You know, if they do think that there is foreign malign activity from the Russians or the Iranians unfolding on public platforms, I think communicating just in secret with Facebook or with Twitter or with TikTok or with Instagram is less effective than putting it out in public and having a public discussion about the origins of these campaigns and what their evidence is. And I think it does raise these free speech questions when government agencies are flagging individual tweets to private social media companies for removal without public transparency and disclosure. A lot of the Twitter file stuff came out late in my reporting process, but I I did look at a lot of it and I did think it was a very interesting debate. And I think the Supreme Court case that was decided a few months ago was was equally interesting. And I think we as a society are going to keep debating this because this issue isn't going away.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, because to me there's a lot of complaints about what when they want to take something down, you know, it's obviously it's labelled as misinformation. But it seems to me that a bigger problem is missing information, the information that he's not allowed to even get on the platform or that the media don't report or whatever. And this brings me to a question around what you were just talking about and also missing information. The this idea that you can infiltrate these platforms with different personas and try to sort of investigate people, follow them around, surveil them. So these masks, these personas, we see it a lot with somewhere like BBC. So, you know, state broadcasters sort of doing this and putting under the banner of verify, but they don't always turn up the right kind of information. Sometimes they mislabel um information as misinformation. They seem to have their own agenda or certainly their own narrative or belief system, which might not echo somebody else's, and all of these personas and masks are kind of being used by them to surveil and analyse, if you like, the information on social networks. But if you are to sort of have a pseudonymous um identity or something like that, that is seen to be somehow dangerous, difficult. Maybe you are using it to push misinformation. What are your thoughts around this kind of asymmetry, if you like?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, it's a good question. There's all sorts of debates in civil society in the US, in the European Union, all around the world about the value of synonymous or anonymous speech. Um, you know, defenders of it say it allows people to be more authentic, it allows them to, you know, to debate edgy things, to engage in provocative speech without necessarily repercussions. You know, other people say that this environment on the internet is deeply toxic, and that part of that is because people can hide behind these synonymous accounts that aren't linked to their real identity. So they can say things in public without facing the same social consequences that if you said them in front of your friends or said them out loud to your colleagues that you might face for saying something edgy or provocative or even racist or whatever. So the value of anonymous speech is very much up in the air with warring camps about it. Adding to this sort of mess is the fact that state entities, governments, also use pseudonymous personas who are not who they say they are to push messaging, to surveil people, um, to do propaganda. We've focused a lot about what the Russians have done around the world, but Western countries do the same thing. They may not necessarily be engaged in trying to interfere in democratic elections, but you saw some really fantastic reporting on how the United States government, in order to sort of discredit China, went on a digital uh campaign to sell doubts about the Chinese vaccines in the Philippines and elsewhere. So states of all kinds engage in this behavior. And the platforms are kind of caught in the middle, right? Because they have a lot of users who enjoy the ability to not use the real names. They have a responsibility to the public to run a safe platform in many instances. In some cases, they have legal obligations to keep certain content off of their platforms, and they're under pressure from governments to crack down on other governments using their platform for manipulation. And so we're in a kind of a difficult spot, right? Because there are real problems of people saying all sorts of things on the internet that are even if they're not illegal, they're toxic. We've seen harassment campaigns, we've seen bullying, um, we've seen hack and leaks, um, we have seen governments use these platforms at the same time. You know, we're still in democracies, and and uh there is no law or rule against saying certain things, even if they're toxic. Um, there's no real rule that requires you to identify yourself on these platforms. And so I think it's kind of a mess. And I don't have a great solution for you, but uh you know, it's it's something we're all just sort of muddling through and and trying to draw lines um and trying to make the internet a little bit better without going overboard. And it's it's hard, I'm not gonna lie.

SPEAKER_00

It's a fascinating time to live through. When people look back and they see what we live through to get to whatever the solution or the situation ends up being, it'll be it'd be interesting to look back on it. I wanted to ask you about identity, because obviously this podcast is about the intersection of identity and technology, really. What kind of effect do you think it has on people to be surveilled and know that they are being surveilled? Do you think it either hampers or exaggerates or something else? Their own sense of self, their presentation of the self? I I don't know what your insights are around that. You must have loads of them from the research you've done.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I mean, these are interesting sociological questions, and I don't study sociology, but I do have some thoughts. I do think there are consequences to people feeling that they're surveilled. Um, there's this question could the American Revolution have ever happened in an environment in which um there is as persistent a surveillance as there is today? And the answer is probably not, right? Like the British would have probably uh cracked down on Samuel Adams and uh and Thomas Jefferson and lock them up for sedition, and that would have been that. So maybe civic society, healthy evolutions of society require a certain amount of civic space, and we are currently living through an environment in which we don't have that, or that civic space is narrowing. At the same time, you know, like the these technologies are truly useful sometimes in solving grisly homicides and in identifying spies. And you know, I do think there are real legitimate uses for this kind of data, and the line drawing is difficult. You know, the other thing about this is that the average internet user seems to be under the impression that they are surveilled already, and most of them don't seem to mind. They seem to believe that in a giant sea of 7 billion people on this planet, that nobody in particular is paying attention to them, even if they could. And I think in the great masses of people on the internet saying things, people do find some comfort in the large number of users on the internet and the fact that most people truly don't feel like they're doing anything truly wrong, and that no one's going to pay attention to them. And there are sort of these kind of interesting observational studies about this, that, for example, people feel much more awkward about going into a sex shop to buy something embarrassing than they do about buying it on the internet, even though the sex shop owner, you know, if you pay in cash, you're not actually revealing anything about your identity other than having an awkward face-to-face interaction. Whereas on the internet, you're actually generating a pretty substantial record, and you're giving that record to a bunch of entities you don't really know and trust, like an online vendor, like the Postal Service who has to deliver the package. So I don't think people are quite thinking through the implications of some of the decisions they make every day on the Internet. And we saw this just this month with a gubernatorial candidate in the United States who has a long posting history on the Internet of saying very, very provocative and inflammatory things, probably thinking that anonymity would protect him. When in fact, if someone cares enough about you and can acquire enough information and has the motivation to do some research into you, they're probably going to dig something up that's you know a little bit unflattering or embarrassing. I mean, we've all said stuff sometime or done things that aren't our best selves and don't put us in the best light. And the question for most people, most people don't really think about it because they don't run for governor, they're not in the public spotlight. But really, you know, it is hard to hide on the internet, and people's blasé attitudes towards digital privacy have caught up with many, many individuals, both ordinary people who find themselves in some viral internet mess, or people that grew up on the internet and then later decided to run for public office or go into the public glare in some way. And I think we all need to think a little bit more about this from the beginning, when as we behave on the internet, like not when we're running for governor, but you know, throughout our lives. And you know, that's in part why I wrote this book, to give people the tools and the education they need to make good choices about their privacy.

SPEAKER_00

Do you think in the future there will come a point where people are more in control of their own data? I mean, obviously there's this kind of utopian vision, this kind of clue train manifesto uh narrative of, you know, we'll be in charge of our own data and we'll be selling it to companies, you know, we'll we'll be the ones in control and allowing them access. So the the brand consumer or brand user kind of power relationship shifts. Or I don't know how we get to that point. Do you think it's it's possible at all?

SPEAKER_02

I don't think sort of true privacy and anonymity, I don't think we're gonna put the genie back in the bottle. Um, I think the 21st century probably will involve a lot more sharing and tracking of each other than the 20th and the 19th and the 18th, everything that came before. On the other hand, I do think the kind of Wild West is coming to an end. I think most democratic countries are getting serious about privacy and are increasingly looking to it as an area to do real, meaningful consumer protection and enforcement of existing privacy laws and privacy norms. And I do think privacy in some ways sells, right? Like you've seen Apple, which is one of the biggest vendors of hardware and a big consumer platform, making privacy a central part of its marketing. And, you know, Apple isn't a perfect company, but you know, there are good features built into its technology that actually do give its users a little bit more privacy than, say, the average Android user if you're using that mobile platform, um, Windows PC. So I do think companies will start to see some advantage in offering consumers uh more privacy choices. I think it will be a differentiator among technologies, at least among some consumers, especially at the high end who care about some of this stuff. And then I think we will slowly start to see some norms change. I think we might start to be a little more tolerant of provocative things on the internet or things in people's past. I think people will also evolve to share a lot more or less. Um, and I I think we've already seen that as I think people, you know, 10 years ago were saying a lot more things on social media. Today the spicy stuff stays in the group chat. So I, you know, I think we will get to an equilibrium where, um, at least in democratic countries where citizens can live with a certain balance of privacy but also public safety. But I don't think we're going backwards to the to what it was like in 1950 or anything like that.

SPEAKER_00

Just finally, Byron, I wanted to ask you about what you think the effect of AI is going to be on this. Because obviously AI is enabled to sort of analyze vast amounts of data and make some of the connections that humans can't make, even you know, in the moment. And we've seen, I think, the progress towards things like predictive policing, using AI at the center of that. Once this all of this data on you as a person or an individual can be put together and connected in those sorts of ways and can be used for prediction, whether it's for crime or anything else, where do you think we are as a society and what are your thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. So when I was writing this book, you know, one solution that just kept coming to me over and over again when I read about, you know, how these companies were collecting this data and the trouble that they would sometimes find themselves in when governments wanted it. I said, well, you know, why don't you just not collect it to begin with, or make sure that only the consumer can access it. And I think the rise of generative AI and the way that these technology companies need to train generative AI means that there's going to be this increasing hunger for data that's not going to go away. So the don't collect it attitude is probably not a realistic one, at least for these big tech companies who need access to huge pools of data to train these machine learning systems. So I think the hunger for data is not going to subside. And on the sort of government side, I think the Ability to process ever larger data sets is going to mean that governments are equally as hungry to obtain large amounts of data about the global population and use these machine systems to sort through them. And all of that raises an even deeper, more profound set of concerns about, yeah, like predictive policing and pre-crime and all these sort of science fiction phenomena. I think today these AI tools are not very good. They can do certain things, they can sort through large data sets. You still need human beings to do the real analysis and to draw the real conclusions. But, you know, computers are powerful and they're probably going to get much better. And we are probably going to live in a future in which governments can predict with good accuracy people who are trending towards criminality. And what do we as a society do about that? I have no great answers other than having journalists in civil society and people in their role as voters keeping a close eye on these systems and demanding answers from politicians when they implement them and from government agencies when they use them.

SPEAKER_00

Oh, you've hit on something very important, I think, actually, the role of journalism. A lot of our media has become activism and it comes from a certain point of view and it isn't investigative and it isn't impartial or independent. What can we do in Western societies anyway to sort of regain that importance, that independence of journalism, um, so that actually we can we can surface some of these, as you say, hidden stories, hidden alliances and partnerships?

SPEAKER_02

Well, the bad news is journalism is expensive and a lot of people don't want to pay for it. And, you know, this this book took almost four years of reporting. Um, you know, I was doing a lot of it at the Wall Street Journal where I was a reporter for many years. The journal is a healthy news organization that gets money from subscriptions and gives its reporters a long leash to do important investigations like this. But, you know, too many people don't want to pay for journalism. It's the same problem. Too many people don't want to pay for apps, right? This is why apps surveil you. Good journalism costs money. And if you do see news outlets out there that are doing investigations or are doing good things, I recommend that people support them. You know, reporters are human. We're not always going to get it right. Um, we do have our own opinions and our own biases, but I did fundamentally do this reporting um because I wanted people to know. I wanted them to know about how their technology works. I wanted them to be able to make meaningful choices when they vote for politicians, and I wanted the public to have a sense of what was going on. And um, you know, I was fortunate enough to work at a place that gave me a pretty long leash and fortunate enough to find a publisher that was supportive and gave me time to write this. But it's increasingly hard these days, and journalists are under a lot of traffic pressure, and um the whole business is unfortunately collapsing. And so, whatever you can do to support good, meaningful reporting, I recommend you do.

SPEAKER_00

And mentoring a new generation, I would have thought, because there's a generation coming up who only get their news through sites that, again, aren't investigative, aren't independent, very, very partial. And actually, you see that in a lot of the Gen Z sort of attitudinal stuff on politics. The younger males are moving towards more traditional conservative viewpoints, and the females are moving even more to sort of more liberal progressive. So there's there's quite a separation in terms of, and that's partly because of the news media and the media that they're accessing, isn't it? So, what do we do about a young generation?

SPEAKER_02

Wish I had an answer. I mean, I currently work at a nonprofit in Washington, D.C. Um, called Notice, where we are training uh the next generation of up-and-coming journalists. And I, you know, I teach, I write, and I serve as a mentor to younger reporters. And there is, you know, they have the same values as older reporters. Like they do just want to tell the stories and they do want to do real meaningful reporting. But yeah, it's true, like generational consumption of media is really, really changing. You are seeing a lot of people gravitating towards influencers and commentators, and there's nothing wrong with that vertical of content, but the problem is that influencers rarely do investigations, right? They comment on things, they share their opinion on the news, they analyze things. And again, that's fine. That's an important function in society. We we want discussion, we want debate, we want analysis, but the underlying reporting, the underlying news gathering, the verifying real information, finding new things out, that is expensive and it's hard. Um, and we've rarely seen kind of the influencer world do any of that. Um, so it is a challenge uh and one I don't have a great answer for.

SPEAKER_00

Didn't you bring sort of legal cases in order to sort of get discovery or access to some of the information? That's one of the fascinating things about this book, the way you have done this. Is why I say it's meticulous research.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I I interviewed, I did probably more than 300 interviews. I, you know, I looked through probably, if not tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of pages of records. And I did at one point bring a lawsuit against the U.S. government. I had to fund it out of my own pocket to get access to documents that were being withheld from me uh unfairly under the Freedom of Information Act. So and again, all that takes resources. I had to hire real lawyers to go do it. I had to get a law firm, I had to file suit. The suit is still going on, even though I filed it in December of 2021. Broken American public records laws. But I did get documents from it, and they were useful for the book. And yeah, like if people aren't willing to pay for books or they're not willing to pay for journalism, it makes it hard to do this, and it makes it hard to have the resources to do real reporting. And I think everyone is going to be the poorer for it because again, the media is not perfect, we make mistakes, there is there is a herd mentality that is an unfortunate part of our profession. But I I think most reporters do get up and they do want to tell true stories. And um, without the resources and the reader support to do that, it it is hard.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, that's very fair. Well, I'm very glad you did it. So I'm very grateful because it's uh it's a wonderful piece of work and thank you for doing it. And I hope more people will go out and buy it and read it. Are there any last things you'd like to say that we haven't covered about it? And also perhaps you can tell people where they can get means of control and discover more of your work.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, so means of control is available anywhere books are sold. I believe it should be available in the EU and um the UK and probably Australia and New Zealand as well. Other than that, I would encourage people to think more deeply about privacy. The book does include an annex with some practical steps that they can take to reclaim a little bit more of their digital privacy. But I, you know, I do think this sort of notion that none of us have anything to hide, it's a little outdated. You know, we all say things privately that we don't want public. We all are not at our best 100% of the time. And unfortunately, we live in a world in which everything is logged, tracked, recorded, and shared instantaneously on social media, often without context. And so I'd advise people to just be a little bit more conscious of the digital world they are building and to do so a bit mindfully.

SPEAKER_00

A great note to end on. I can't wait to see what you do next, what else you're investigating, what goes on from here. But for now, Byron, thanks so much for coming on and talking about means of control and best of luck with future success.

SPEAKER_02

Thank you so much for having me.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you for listening to The Future of You, hosted by me, Tracy Follows. Be sure to check out the show notes for more info about the topics we covered today. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you know someone who would love this episode, please share it with them. For more on the future of identity in a digital world, visit the futuremade.group slash the future of you. To explore the future of everything else, head over to futuremade.group. The Future of View podcast is produced by Big Tent Media.

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