Speaker 1: You're listening to Comedy Central.
Speaker 2: I guess tonight is the CNN anchor, chief national security analyst,
Speaker 2: and best selling author whose latest book is called The
Speaker 2: Return of Great Powers, Russia, China and the Next World War.
Speaker 3: Please welcome, Jim Shootout.
Speaker 4: We have a here.
Speaker 2: We turned of the Great Powers, Russia, China and the
Speaker 2: Next the Next World War. What are we talking is
Speaker 2: it's going to be a cold war, a hot war.
Speaker 1: It's an uplifting story, you know something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a lovely read that I read to my
Speaker 2: kid just to scare him to do better in school.
Speaker 3: To be honest, it's a.
Speaker 5: Warning, right, And I've spent a lot of years in
Speaker 5: these places, tracking these things which which I think we
Speaker 5: have to be concerned about. So it's meant to be
Speaker 5: a warning, and I think it's a serious one. But
Speaker 5: I also think going into it, we that is, the
Speaker 5: people who want a world not run by autocrats, right
Speaker 5: and not into about half of us, well yeah, more,
Speaker 5: maybe maybe even more, we have some advantages going into it, right,
Speaker 5: So so I direct over time to ways that we
Speaker 5: could find a way forward, right, avoid the next World war,
Speaker 5: but also come out on top with the things that
Speaker 5: we hold valuable.
Speaker 2: It provides in some ways a blueprint to get past that,
Speaker 2: but also looks back as to how we've gotten where
Speaker 2: we are right now. You're focusing a lot about where
Speaker 2: we're on this moment with Ukraine, talk about where we
Speaker 2: are with China. You call this a post post Cold
Speaker 2: War moment? How do you draw that line from the
Speaker 2: Cold War to the post post Cold War?
Speaker 1: So you know, for my generation and you're younger than me, but.
Speaker 3: Twenties, Max, we remember that moment.
Speaker 5: We remember that night followed the Wall nineteen eighty nine,
Speaker 5: followed the Berlin Wall, collapse of the Soviet Union. This
Speaker 5: was we thought bringing about a period of peace, and
Speaker 5: it did for a time. I mean, the Cold War
Speaker 5: was over and for a very brief moment in time,
Speaker 5: the US and Russia, if not friends, found a way
Speaker 5: to go forward. And with China, even if it was
Speaker 5: growing more powerful. We thought that Russia and China that
Speaker 5: we could work with them all the time, and there's
Speaker 5: still ways we could work with them. But we thought
Speaker 5: that they wanted what we wanted, right, We were mirroring
Speaker 5: to some extent, And the truth is they don't really
Speaker 5: want what we want to a large degree, because they
Speaker 5: see it, and to be fair, they're seeing this from
Speaker 5: a different perspective. They see our world order as being
Speaker 5: to our advantage and not theirs. So they see it
Speaker 5: as in their interests to make America weaker and to
Speaker 5: undermine that system. Now, that'd be clear when I talked
Speaker 5: to folks you know, in Europe, in Asia, here in
Speaker 5: the US. They don't believe that China and Russia want
Speaker 5: to go to war with us, right, you know, there
Speaker 5: are smart enough people to know that that would be
Speaker 5: a horrible war to be.
Speaker 1: A hot one.
Speaker 5: That said, they're willing to push the limits pretty far,
Speaker 5: I mean, and one that we saw just in the
Speaker 5: last few years, right, is the largest invasion, the largest
Speaker 5: land war in Europe in eighty years. Right, I mean,
Speaker 5: that's a pretty big deal. Yeah, that shows how far
Speaker 5: they're willing to push the liber.
Speaker 2: Well, you wrote this book obviously before the terrorist attacks
Speaker 2: in Russia just a week ago. I'm wondering how you
Speaker 2: see an attack like that affecting some of these some
Speaker 2: of these pathways.
Speaker 5: Well, listen, post nine to eleven. That was a period
Speaker 5: when the US and Russia actually worked together on terror.
Speaker 5: They were sharing information and so on. It and it
Speaker 5: showed that there are times that you have shared interests
Speaker 5: and that's a good thing. And there are other things too.
Speaker 5: The US and China actually at times work together on
Speaker 5: climate change.
Speaker 1: That's not a bad.
Speaker 5: Thing, but the whole host of things that we don't
Speaker 5: work together on or like at log our heads on
Speaker 5: that period with Russia, certainly, and to the point where
Speaker 5: the reporting is that the US actually warned Russia that
Speaker 5: an attack like this was in the offing, and Putin
Speaker 5: basically ignored that warning. You know, that's partly a lack
Speaker 5: of trust, which is important. It's partly a lack of communication.
Speaker 5: That those channels just aren't open anymore. So that's a
Speaker 5: sign of one of the dangerous trends here is that
Speaker 5: we don't talk in ways that we used to. And
Speaker 5: I'm not necessarily talking about happy talk, right, but we
Speaker 5: don't have hotlines and right that we used to, which
Speaker 5: are important to keep small things from becoming bigger things. Yeah,
Speaker 5: and those hotlines developed because in the last Cold War
Speaker 5: we got really damn close, right. I mean, if you
Speaker 5: think the Cuban missile crisis, right, I mean that was fair.
Speaker 5: And I talk about this in the book because it's
Speaker 5: about learning lessons from history as well, but that came
Speaker 5: close to it.
Speaker 1: To a global nuclear war.
Speaker 5: And after that, folks like Kennedy iven Khrushchev said, we
Speaker 5: got to find ways that doesn't happen. We don't get
Speaker 5: that closer. Let's have hotlines, let's negotiate some nuclear treaties,
Speaker 5: et cetera. And the thing is, we have to get
Speaker 5: back to that point because right now we're going this way,
Speaker 5: We're not going this way.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's interesting.
Speaker 2: You do talk a lot about that you have to
Speaker 2: keep these lines of communication open, and you also have
Speaker 2: a chapter or you look at this madman theory.
Speaker 3: Donald Trump brags about.
Speaker 2: The relationship that he has with Vladimir Potney, brags about
Speaker 2: what he did with Kim Jong un, and I think
Speaker 2: on one hand, you can see through what that means
Speaker 2: and what he wants from that. On the other hand,
Speaker 2: he's talking about legitimate connections. You actually even talk about
Speaker 2: some of the success as Trump had with his relationship
Speaker 2: with Kim John Un, and this madman theory in some
Speaker 2: sense of being so big, so bragg and do show
Speaker 2: that tactically that sometimes can be beneficial in ways that
Speaker 2: other tactics can't true.
Speaker 5: Listen, opening channels is not a bad thing, right, you know,
Speaker 5: sitting down with Kim Joe nun is not a bad thing,
Speaker 5: or with Putin or she.
Speaker 1: We have to be talking.
Speaker 5: That's better than not talking, because when you don't talk,
Speaker 5: I mean that's true relationships as well, right, where you don't.
Speaker 3: Jim, safe things, Jim, we got to say. But you're
Speaker 3: here to talk about the book.
Speaker 2: Jim, you talk about the Cold War, the next war?
Speaker 1: All right, you gotta talk.
Speaker 5: Talking is not bad, but you also have to have
Speaker 5: realistic expectations. So so Trump had three face to face
Speaker 5: meeting with Kim Joe ND went nowhere, right, there were
Speaker 5: no agreements, but sheer force of personality is not going
Speaker 5: to change their long term interest. The worrisome thing, right
Speaker 5: is that for Russia and China, these are strategic decisions
Speaker 5: to undermine the US and the system as it stands
Speaker 5: today again because they look at it as aligned against them,
Speaker 5: kind of skewed against them. So the strongest personality in
Speaker 5: the world is not going to change long term strategic interest.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 5: And if Trump imagines as he does, and by the way,
Speaker 5: don't trust me, I talk to folks who advised him
Speaker 5: at the most senior levels in his last administration. If
Speaker 5: Trump believes, by his personality alone, he's going to fundamentally
Speaker 5: change that dynamic.
Speaker 1: It just doesn't line up with reality. Right. Doesn't mean talking.
Speaker 5: Is a bad idea, but you have to know who
Speaker 5: you're dealing with here, and you have to know what
Speaker 5: they're what they're seeking to do, and you have to
Speaker 5: be clear to say I'm not gonna let that happen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you talk to a lot of Trump insiders here.
Speaker 2: I think something that stood out in reading this was
Speaker 2: we'd heard stories about Trump's desire to pull out of NATO,
Speaker 2: and I think you kind of walk through how close
Speaker 2: that was to becoming a reality. And when I find compelling,
Speaker 2: like that's a big issue right now, and I will
Speaker 2: I will say when I go out and I talk
Speaker 2: to people at MAGA events, you know there's an isolation
Speaker 2: as attitude, to say the least.
Speaker 3: But I do.
Speaker 2: Think a lot of people don't when you bring up
Speaker 2: something like NATO, the idea of pulling out of NATO
Speaker 2: is a no brainer. We want to be to ourselves
Speaker 2: that's it doesn't serve us any and it doesn't do
Speaker 2: us any good. And I will also say as a
Speaker 2: younger generation, as somebody who's twenty four. As you pointed out,
Speaker 2: like the conversation at Hi school about the Cold War
Speaker 2: was short.
Speaker 3: Our understanding of NATO we don't have.
Speaker 2: We are so disconnected from the realities of what that
Speaker 2: was created for that I think like the discussions we're
Speaker 2: having right now about the importance of NATO are falling
Speaker 2: on deaf ears on one party and one candidate, but
Speaker 2: also on deaf ears on I think an electorate that
Speaker 2: isn't educated in history in a way to understand what
Speaker 2: NATO is supposed to do. Is this also a crisis
Speaker 2: of education one hundred percent.
Speaker 5: I mean, you know as well as me that the
Speaker 5: baseball bat doesn't work right. When you're trying to convince
Speaker 5: people of the importance of these things or how it
Speaker 5: served our interests over time, you have just remind people
Speaker 5: and make an argument as to what we gain from it.
Speaker 5: I mean, I think when you look at a place
Speaker 5: like Ukraine. So Ukraine is a country of forty minutes,
Speaker 5: it's the largest country in Europe. I've spent a lot
Speaker 5: of time there. They're lovely people, right, they don't want
Speaker 5: much more than what we have, which is to be
Speaker 5: able to choose your own leaders, travel where you want
Speaker 5: to go, and not get dumb off of building balconies. Right,
Speaker 5: if you write a critical piece about the person in
Speaker 5: charge of the country, I might be speaking about how Russia.
Speaker 5: You know what life is like in Russia today, that's
Speaker 5: the way it is. They don't want that, they don't
Speaker 5: want to live under that. So you have you know,
Speaker 5: you have a sympathetic case as to why to help
Speaker 5: these people, or why to help the Taiwanese people defend
Speaker 5: themselves from China. But then you have a self interested case,
Speaker 5: which is that you know, NATO has stood by the US.
Speaker 5: The only time NATO has invoked its mutual defense agreement
Speaker 5: was Post nine to eleven and they went to war
Speaker 5: with US in Afghanistan Post nine to eleven.
Speaker 1: So you have that.
Speaker 5: But also, a peaceful Europe that is free from Russian
Speaker 5: domination is in our interests. It's a vibrant Europe, it's
Speaker 5: an economically healthy Europe. We sell a lot of stuff there.
Speaker 5: We could go do business there, we could send our
Speaker 5: kids to semesters abroad there. That kind of thing. Things
Speaker 5: we buy are cheaper here because it's peaceful there, and
Speaker 5: you can say the same thing about Asia. You know,
Speaker 5: half the stuff in our homes comes through shipping lanes
Speaker 5: in Asia, which the US helps keep open. So you
Speaker 5: have both a sympathetic case to make for this kind
Speaker 5: of thing and a values case, but you also have
Speaker 5: a helf interested case because we benefited that from that
Speaker 5: for years, and not not just since the last Cold War,
Speaker 5: but even going back to like eighty years ago post
Speaker 5: World War Two, that NATO and other treaties helped keep
Speaker 5: the peace pretty much. It's not perfect, but they did
Speaker 5: prevent so far, right, you know, the next World war.
Speaker 1: That's important. We benefit from that.
Speaker 2: You talked about this not just being a downer. There
Speaker 2: is a blueprint for some optimism there where do you
Speaker 2: see that?
Speaker 5: So a couple of things, One like, we don't want
Speaker 5: to look at them as ten feet tall Russia or China.
Speaker 5: They make mistakes. So I mean, prior to the Ukraine invasion.
Speaker 5: You've probably heard this too, a lot of folks were like,
Speaker 5: Putin's way too smart. He's playing three dimensional chess with
Speaker 5: the West, all that kind stuff.
Speaker 1: He will never do it. Behold, he invades.
Speaker 3: I think nobody knows how chess works exactly.
Speaker 2: People use that metaphor, it's like, we don't we don't
Speaker 2: really have a good understanding of that.
Speaker 1: My year old daughter beats me a chess back, so
Speaker 1: they focus.
Speaker 5: So you know, they make mistakes too, and he got
Speaker 5: himself in a horrible war, which you know he's effectively
Speaker 5: using right. And China makes mistakes as well, and its
Speaker 5: economy is you know, it's definitely flattening out this idea
Speaker 5: that China's is.
Speaker 1: Going to be growing forever.
Speaker 5: They've got weaknesses as well, So you want to start
Speaker 5: with we have advantages. The US economy is growing. You know,
Speaker 5: we have an open society. People buy and want to
Speaker 5: buy American stuff, right, they don't want to buy Russian
Speaker 5: cell phones. Right, you know we we we there's a
Speaker 5: reason for that, right, I haven't tried.
Speaker 3: I tried.
Speaker 5: So we have advantages in that sense. We have a
Speaker 5: lot of friends and allies. One thing, when you look
Speaker 5: at Russian China, they don't have allies. I mean, Russia's
Speaker 5: biggest allies right now are China, North Korean Iran. I mean,
Speaker 5: we have all of Europe in effect on our side.
Speaker 5: We shared values, so we have advantages going in and
Speaker 5: then in terms of how to find a path so
Speaker 5: that we don't go to war. I mean, people ask
Speaker 5: me this, They're like, well, it sounds like you're making
Speaker 5: the case to go to war against Russia and China.
Speaker 5: And I always say them, I said this before we
Speaker 5: came on. I've got a thirteen year old and fifty
Speaker 5: year old boy. They're like a minute away from draft age.
Speaker 5: And I'm sure folks in the audience who have kids
Speaker 5: think the same thing.
Speaker 1: You don't want them on.
Speaker 5: A US aircraft carrier on the Taiwan Straight if the
Speaker 5: US and China were to go to war. I don't
Speaker 5: want that. I don't want that either. But we can
Speaker 5: learn from history here, right. One thing is communication lines matter.
Speaker 5: There's a reason why Kennedy and kruse Cheff were like,
Speaker 5: we got really close. I gotta have a phone on
Speaker 5: my desk. You gotta have a phone on your desk
Speaker 5: so this doesn't happen again. Those things have faded over time,
Speaker 5: and with China and a lot of respects, we haven't
Speaker 5: had them. They've come and gone when relationships have gone
Speaker 5: up and down. So communication matters. Treaties matter. You know,
Speaker 5: we negotiated those nuclear arms treaties again to keep the
Speaker 5: US and Russia from going to war and kind of
Speaker 5: like just beating each other to death in a nuclear
Speaker 5: arms race. A lot of those treaties have gone away
Speaker 5: in the last several years, and there are Americans that
Speaker 5: are like, ah, we don't need those treaties. Well, actually
Speaker 5: they kind of help, right, And we have no treaties
Speaker 5: with China when it comes to nuclear weapons.
Speaker 1: There are no.
Speaker 5: Treaties regarding cyber weapons, there are no treaties reding regarding
Speaker 5: weapons in space. I mean Russia just you know, probably
Speaker 5: saw our story a few weeks ago, talked about putting
Speaker 5: a nuke in space to knockout satellites, which, by the way,
Speaker 5: if you think about this war being a million miles
Speaker 5: away from us, you know, with cyber attacks or with
Speaker 5: attack in space, we lose all the technology we depend
Speaker 5: on every day, GPS and communications and internet and the
Speaker 5: financial market stop. So you know, this stuff affects us
Speaker 5: at home. We need treaties for that stuff.
Speaker 2: We are heading to the good news and you you
Speaker 2: mentioned a nuclear weapon in space.
Speaker 1: This is why my kids love talking to their dads.
Speaker 1: This is what I bring home.
Speaker 5: But the final thing is that you can with those treaties,
Speaker 5: they can help they can help this going down a
Speaker 5: bad path. And the final thing is that communicating what
Speaker 5: you want won't stand for matters, right, I mean, if
Speaker 5: you look, I speak a lot to the Estonian Prime
Speaker 5: Minister here Astonia, who's like right on the front lines
Speaker 5: of this, right next to Russia, and she constantly quoted
Speaker 5: Churchill about Hitler, which is an appeaser, is the one
Speaker 5: who feeds the crocodile expecting that he'll be its last meal.
Speaker 5: The thing is that the parallels between a Hitler and
Speaker 5: a Putin is that if you give a little ground,
Speaker 5: he tends to take more. You know, he took a
Speaker 5: piece of Georgia in two thousand and eight, and he
Speaker 5: took Ukraine in twenty fourteen, then invaded again. Did clear communication,
Speaker 5: and we learned this from Hitler. You know, if you
Speaker 5: are soft and don't tell them what's too far for you,
Speaker 5: they might then take advantage and move forward. So the US,
Speaker 5: I think and its allies can be confident say we're
Speaker 5: not going to allow you to invade countries because borders
Speaker 5: matter to us, and there are friends, and we're going
Speaker 5: to stand in the way, and the costs are going
Speaker 5: to be high for you.
Speaker 1: That doesn't.
Speaker 5: That doesn't necessarily mean we're going to go We're going
Speaker 5: to take you to war by any means, but that
Speaker 5: we defend our friends and we're going to be strong,
Speaker 5: and those those messages matter over time, and if you
Speaker 5: look back, sometimes clear messaging can can prevent miscalculation and
Speaker 5: can prevent the guy on the other side thinking he
Speaker 5: could take advantage of you.
Speaker 2: Well, it's a great rate. The Return of Great Powers
Speaker 2: available now. Be sure to check out CNN Newsroom on Max.
Speaker 3: Jim shoot Out. Thanks so much, take great Greg go
Speaker 3: back right after that.
Speaker 2: My guest tonight is an investigative reporter at Notice whose
Speaker 2: new book is called Means of Control, How the hidden
Speaker 2: alliance of tech and government is creating a new American
Speaker 2: surveillance State.
Speaker 3: Please welcome Byron tau By Run. I got this book.
Speaker 2: Scared me, Okay, I gotta be real, honest, it scared me.
Speaker 3: It's fascinating.
Speaker 2: I don't want to scare people away, but there was
Speaker 2: a lot of revelatory things in here.
Speaker 1: Now I.
Speaker 2: Have some skepticism, and I understand that technology. A lot
Speaker 2: of times, these tech world, these tech apps, they're tracking me.
Speaker 2: They have a lot of data. I understand the government
Speaker 2: maybe not always above board, but you found a way
Speaker 2: to put these two together like a ham and cheese
Speaker 2: sandwich of paranoia. And tell me, I feel like a
Speaker 2: lot of this starts. What started to surprise me starts
Speaker 2: here at these digital advertising exchanges. Right start with me there?
Speaker 2: What do I need to understand about a digital advertising exchange?
Speaker 4: Sure, so that banner ad that you see every time
Speaker 4: you load an app or a website that's tracking you
Speaker 4: in more ways than one. Every time you load something
Speaker 4: like that and you see a little display ad, you're
Speaker 4: actually passing a ton of information back to these technology
Speaker 4: companies that are vacuuming it up. They're collecting it, they're
Speaker 4: trying to build profiles of you. And there are thousands
Speaker 4: of them that are all getting this data every time
Speaker 4: you load an app. And some of those entities are
Speaker 4: actually saving that data. They're brokering it. It's become a
Speaker 4: big business model, so they're selling it to other entities.
Speaker 4: So whenever you give a weather app permission to know
Speaker 4: your location, your location is actually being passed back to
Speaker 4: this mind numbingly complex system of digital advertising. And there
Speaker 4: are thousands of parties there that can collect it. Even
Speaker 4: if they're not the one that serves you the ad
Speaker 4: and so a lot of is saved and resold.
Speaker 2: And so what you're telling me here is well some
Speaker 2: of that I assume, Right. I open up that weather app. Oh,
Speaker 2: it knows it's cold hair. It's going to sell me
Speaker 2: a parka. Right.
Speaker 3: It also knows that I'm cheap, so it's going to
Speaker 3: have to be a cheap parka.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: These are what these phones do.
Speaker 2: If you talk about the government has decided, well, for get,
Speaker 2: we can use this too, Right, I'm I'm okay with
Speaker 2: Nike pouncing on me and selling me these shoes for
Speaker 2: my gout riddled feet. Perhaps I share too much they
Speaker 2: already know, Well, how is the government getting in on
Speaker 2: this action?
Speaker 4: Sure, So there's a lot of ways government gets data
Speaker 4: from things like digital advertisers. So sometimes they just buy
Speaker 4: it from these data brokers that sit there and they
Speaker 4: slurp it all up and they sell it. Sometimes government
Speaker 4: contractors set up things like things that look like marketing
Speaker 4: companies and they get access to these ad networks and
Speaker 4: they provide the data to the government. Sometimes governments, you know,
Speaker 4: hack into these systems. So there's lots and lots of
Speaker 4: ways for governments to get data off of these networks,
Speaker 4: and often they just simply need to open their wallets
Speaker 4: and buy it.
Speaker 3: This is this legal.
Speaker 4: This is by and large considered legal because when the
Speaker 4: government acts as a buyer in a consumer market, lawyers
Speaker 4: have tended to take the position that you've lost the
Speaker 4: reasonable expectation of privacy that's core to your Fourth Amendment rights. Right, Like,
Speaker 4: you've already told something like a digital advertiser or a
Speaker 4: bank or some other company something about yourself or the
Speaker 4: information that you're generating. So what privacy interest do you
Speaker 4: have in it? And if it's available for sale and
Speaker 4: the government's buying it just like any other buyer. Most
Speaker 4: lawyers have blessed these kind of programs.
Speaker 2: You you go into the apps like Grinder, and initially,
Speaker 2: as I'm in the book, that's.
Speaker 3: No judgement, no judgment, no judgment.
Speaker 2: In the book you talk about apps like right and
Speaker 2: how that data was suddenly being used for nefarious purposes.
Speaker 2: And you even talk about a Catholic blog essentially that
Speaker 2: purchase information on a bishop and then publishes that and
Speaker 2: outs that bishop against that bishop.
Speaker 3: Fire Right is that.
Speaker 2: Some of the like what are some of the examples
Speaker 2: of these this information being used for nefarious purposes.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So with that Grinder example, it's not that Grinder is
Speaker 4: out there selling its user's data. It's that Grinder wants
Speaker 4: to serve ads to its users, like many other apps.
Speaker 1: But when you.
Speaker 4: Serve ads, you are exposing all of your users to
Speaker 4: these thousands of advertisers, these entities that can collect this information,
Speaker 4: and again, some of them sell it and some of
Speaker 4: them sell it to people that they don't look very
Speaker 4: closely at. And so in this instance, there were a
Speaker 4: bunch of Catholic journalists who had received tips from people
Speaker 4: who had acquired this data through purchasing it, and they
Speaker 4: were going around and they were saying something like, you know,
Speaker 4: we have a lead on some priests that might be
Speaker 4: using Grinder and violating their vows. And one of those
Speaker 4: journalists bid it and publish a story about this, and
Speaker 4: this Catholic official had to resign. And this is true
Speaker 4: not just Grinder, but basically any app where we share
Speaker 4: our location and that wants to service banner advertising. We're
Speaker 4: sharing a ton of data with them, and whoever's out
Speaker 4: there and you know, has access to it, can buy it.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: You mentioned something here at the end of the book
Speaker 2: talking about the recent Dobs decision. Right and right now,
Speaker 2: access to abortion services is limited in some states. People
Speaker 2: are crossing the state lines to get that. Is this
Speaker 2: the type of thing that you see as a harbinger
Speaker 2: for a tactic or a tool for states to purchase
Speaker 2: through advertisers, ways in which to track people potentially committing
Speaker 2: what they see as a crime.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's certainly possible that state governments who have decided
Speaker 4: that they want to make abortion unlawful and want to
Speaker 4: even take the step of potentially, you know, seeing what
Speaker 4: residents travel out of state. The sheer amount of data
Speaker 4: that's slashing around about all of us all the time
Speaker 4: is a target for states like that, and it's entirely
Speaker 4: possible that states could either purchase data or you know,
Speaker 4: if they're going to go down the root of criminalizing
Speaker 4: traveling out of state for abortion, they could simply subpoena
Speaker 4: it or go to court for it. And so it
Speaker 4: really does make it hard to move around the world
Speaker 4: anonymously these days, just because of all the data that
Speaker 4: we all generate every day.
Speaker 2: You talk about the privilege of disappearing, and you also
Speaker 2: talk I mean, I guess I hear this, and I
Speaker 2: understand it, and it scares me. But I also, on
Speaker 2: the other hand, think like can we avoid this? Is
Speaker 2: this sort of the world we are in right now?
Speaker 2: As a journalist, as an investigative journalist, there's an element
Speaker 2: of secrecy, at least assumed with some of the conversations
Speaker 2: you have or what have you. In the book you
Speaker 2: talk about you even went to go purchase a car,
Speaker 2: and somebody who's researching a book about the ways in
Speaker 2: which people can weaponize data on you purchasing a car
Speaker 2: that you already see ways in which that ties you
Speaker 2: to location. How do you go about a process of
Speaker 2: purchasing that and be an investigative journalist who cares about secretcy.
Speaker 4: Well, the poor Hyundai dealership that I walked into, I
Speaker 4: had no idea what they were getting.
Speaker 2: Into another investigative is a data brokerage.
Speaker 3: Goddamn it.
Speaker 4: They didn't even know how to answer the questions I
Speaker 4: was asking, So, you know, I eventually made them go
Speaker 4: get a car from like two states over that didn't
Speaker 4: even have the little cell chip that can transmit the data.
Speaker 2: Because so because you walk in there, I just think
Speaker 2: it's a car. It's a car, But you're talking about.
Speaker 2: There's cell chips essentially like the bluetooth that's in the
Speaker 2: car and also in the tires.
Speaker 4: Right, So one thing people don't realize, but your tires
Speaker 4: actually are broadcasting a little radio signal constantly, and it's
Speaker 4: meant it's there to tell the car central computer that
Speaker 4: your tire pressure is low. Perfectly reasonable safety mechanism. But
Speaker 4: clever governments have figured out, hey, a tire is a
Speaker 4: proxy for a car. That tire is screaming a unique
Speaker 4: identifier all the time. We put a little sensor here,
Speaker 4: a little sensor there, a little sensor under a bridge,
Speaker 4: a little sensor in a tunnel. We can track cars
Speaker 4: around based on their car tires. And car companies don't
Speaker 4: seem to realize that this is vector for tracking and
Speaker 4: have never done anything to you know, make these vehicles
Speaker 4: or make these systems work better for privacy.
Speaker 3: And they can sell that information to insurance companies. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so a lot.
Speaker 4: There's a big controversy now about selling car data to
Speaker 4: insurance companies. So car companies like GM, we're doing that
Speaker 4: and they recently said they were stopping selling it to
Speaker 4: data brokers, that we're selling it to insurance companies for
Speaker 4: public safety purposes. It seems like governments are putting up
Speaker 4: these little sensors that might be able to track either
Speaker 4: your license plate reader or your car hires or both,
Speaker 4: or all sorts of other things that I don't even
Speaker 4: know about.
Speaker 3: Yes, but yes, this is entirely possible.
Speaker 2: So you have to take extra steps as an investigative
Speaker 2: journalist to keep this anonymity.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and there are things that ordinary people can do, right.
Speaker 4: You can be a little bit more careful with the
Speaker 4: permissions on your phone. You know, not every game needs
Speaker 4: access to your twenty four to seven location, your photo role,
Speaker 4: and all this data about you, right, Like, it'll work
Speaker 4: just fine without it. You know, every time you open
Speaker 4: the Uber app, you don't need to let it have
Speaker 4: your geolocation to type the address this you're at. You know,
Speaker 4: so you can do small things to reclaim privacy and
Speaker 4: make sure that you know, parties that don't need your
Speaker 4: data don't get it.
Speaker 2: Now. As I read this, I thought about this about secrecy,
Speaker 2: about ways in which you can take small steps, and
Speaker 2: then I saw your acknowledgments, And in your acknowledgments, you
Speaker 2: were very grateful to.
Speaker 3: People who help you write this book. You said.
Speaker 2: The first words of this book were written on an
Speaker 2: Amtrak train between DC and New York. A full chapter
Speaker 2: outline was completed at a rented farmhouse in Risers Down, Maryland,
Speaker 2: in January twenty twenty two. The final few weeks of
Speaker 2: writing this first draft were spent in New York City
Speaker 2: at the Work Heights on Franklin Avenue.
Speaker 3: This is remarkably specific for some money, so I was
Speaker 3: worried about location. Coremany perfect, nobody's perfect. Well, it's a
Speaker 3: good rate. It's scared the be Jesus out of me.
Speaker 3: I appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Means of Control is available now by rental.
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