Miracles and wonder

Summary

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Podcast Summary: "Miracles and Wonder"

Click Here, Recorded Future News – May 22, 2026
Host: Dena Temple Raston
Guest: Barry Friedman, NYU Law Professor and Founder, The Policing Project

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the quiet normalization of surveillance technologies in everyday life and their far-reaching implications for democracy, privacy, and policing. Host Dena Temple Raston interviews Barry Friedman, a leading voice on police accountability and technology, about how society can balance the “miracles and wonder” of modern surveillance tools with the urgent need for democratic guardrails and accountability.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Ubiquity of Surveillance

• Opening Reflection: Dena Temple Raston sets the scene by highlighting how cameras, license plate readers, and doorbell recorders have become ingrained in daily life, often without notice.
  [00:02]

The "Miracles and Wonder" of Technology

• Dual Nature of Tech: Barry Friedman invokes Paul Simon’s lyric — “We live in an age of miracles and wonder” — to underline the extraordinary capabilities of contemporary surveillance. But, he cautions, these wonders come with significant risks.

  "The technologies we have are miracles and wonder, right? But miracles and wonder have downsides. And our goal has to be, as a society, to milk the technologies for all the upside while avoiding the downside."
  — Barry Friedman [04:34]

Data, Privacy, and Power

• Data Surrender: Friedman argues that the public’s personal data is routinely funneled to private companies, who in turn provide it to law enforcement, compounding state surveillance power.

  "We have turned over all of our data about every one of us to companies that can now sell that to policing agencies, manufacture it for the government, use AI to analyze it and know kind of where we are and what we're doing all the time. And it's scary. And it should be scary to everybody."
  — Barry Friedman [00:55]/[10:17]

Frameworks for Responsible Adoption

• The Two Checklists:
  1. Technology Evaluation Checklist:
     • Identify the benefits sought.
     • Assess if benefits can truly be achieved through testing.
     • Evaluate and mitigate risks.
     • Weigh benefits versus risks—move forward only with appropriate safeguards. [05:40]
  2. Democracy & Transparency Checklist:
     • Engage the public through legislative bodies, privacy boards, or community meetings.
     • Ensure transparency in all processes.

     "...What you're supposed to do is do things openly and transparently."
     — Barry Friedman [06:33]

The Axon Case Study: Facial Recognition and Ethics

• Industry Ethics Board Experience: Friedman describes his tenure on Axon’s AI ethics board, recounting how the company initially refused to put facial recognition in body cams (2019), but notes that such responsible pauses are rare and difficult to sustain.

  "They made the decision not to put facial recognition on the cameras because the technology wasn't ready. … I thought that was incredibly responsible…"
  — Barry Friedman [07:26]

Technology Outpacing Oversight

• Post-2019 Turbulence: Friedman comments on shifting public attitudes—from reform after George Floyd to renewed demands for “strong” policing—with the risk that caution and democratic oversight vanish in urgent moments.
  [07:49]

Clearview AI & the Temptation of Powerful Tools

• Widespread, Unregulated Use: Clearview AI became a lightning rod as police agencies secretly adopted its facial recognition, often outside public knowledge and policy.
• “Back Scratching” Culture:

  "...departments would be interested in Clearview and they'd have access to it, and an officer in another department would say, hey, could you run this for me? ..."
  — Barry Friedman [09:02]

Why Everyone Should Care

• Fundamental Inversion of Control:

  "...The people that founded this country … would have gone crazy thinking that we thought it was okay for the government to know everything about us all the time. … we've got just the opposite situation here."
  — Barry Friedman [10:17]

Expanding Surveillance Capabilities

• Beyond the Face: Tools now identify gait, voice, and track vehicles, making individuals pervasively traceable, not just identifiable.
  [11:03]

• License Plate Readers:

  "…the scariest things, to me, in a free society, is to give the government the possibility of tracking any one of us anytime it wants."
  — Barry Friedman [11:21]

Accumulation & Interconnection

• Surveillance as a Trail: Raston summarizes that it’s not just the individual tools, but their interconnection—logging faces, cars, locations over time—that transforms surveillance into a “trail” rather than just a “snapshot.”
  [12:34]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Opening problem and Barry Friedman intro: [00:02]–[01:17]
• Societal backdrop & checklists for tech adoption: [04:32]–[06:33]
• Facial recognition and the Axon episode: [07:04]–[07:46]
• Clearview AI & informal sharing: [09:02]
• Why privacy matters to everyone: [10:11]–[10:17]
• License plate readers and tracking: [11:21]
• Concept of surveillance systems becoming interconnected/inescapable: [12:34]
• Segment on possible solutions—Data Trusts: [16:10]
• Guidelines for city councils/oversight boards: [18:04]
• Barry’s final message to listeners: [19:12]

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On balancing benefits and risks:

  "At the end of the day, you look at the bottom of your ledger at your benefits and your risks. And you say, should we move forward? Often the answer … is, sure, we can move ahead, but we need particular safeguards in place."
  — Barry Friedman [06:28]

• On the risk of tracking technologies:

  “One of the scariest things, to me, in a free society, is to give the government the possibility of tracking any one of us anytime it wants.”
  — Barry Friedman [11:21]

• On data trusts as a solution:

  “...the idea of the data trust is a way to have the data and use the data, but to limit who can get access and under what conditions...the data trust may be a way to have our miracles and benefit from them without the harm.”
  — Barry Friedman [16:10]

• On the ‘horse out of the barn’:

  “The great thing about horses out of barns, as opposed to, for example, toothpaste out of tubes, is you got a lot better chance of getting the horse back in the barn…”
  — Barry Friedman [17:35]

• Advice for policymakers:

  “I would want to see the data on the testing of the technology … most of it’s going to flunk. … I'd want rules about how long the data is retained, and I want rules about once we think we have a match, what the police do next…”
  — Barry Friedman [18:04]

• Call to Action:

  “Object. Fight back. You don't have to say no … but you should insist that it all be adopted in a way that is democratically accountable and that they can see the safeguards.”
  — Barry Friedman [19:12]

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Tone & Takeaways

The conversation is urgent but measured, emphasizing the very real marvels (and real dangers) of contemporary surveillance. Friedman’s tone is practical and clear—neither alarmist nor complacent—urging listeners to demand transparency, perform rigorous testing, and protect the core principles of democracy.

Main Takeaways:

• Surveillance and data-gathering technologies are becoming deeply embedded and interconnected, creating risks that outpace democratic oversight.
• Meaningful oversight requires both technical evaluation (does the technology actually work?) and democratic consultation (do we actually want it, and with what limitations?).
• Potential solutions like data trusts offer hope, but are not panaceas; reducing data collection remains a crucial guardrail.
• Policymakers must demand strict testing, clear constraints, and robust transparency before deploying surveillance technologies.
• Citizens should be vigilant: fight for transparency, accountability, and real democratic checks—miraculous technologies demand rigorous guardrails.

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Transcript

[Dena Temple Raston]

From recorded future news and prx, this is click here. Somewhere right now, a camera is scanning a face, a license plate reader is logging a car, a doorbell is recording a stranger, and most of us barely register it anymore. But Barry Friedman has been focused on this for years. He's a law professor at New York University School of Law and he started something called the Policing Project. It's a non profit that looks at the intersection of law enforcement, technology and civil liberties. And he's been warning for years that the tools we build in the name of safety can quietly shift the balance of power between citizens and the state.

[Barry Friedman]

We have turned over all of our data about every one of us to companies that can now sell that to policing agencies, manufacture it for the government, use AI to analyze it and know kind of where we are and what we're doing all the time. And it's scary. And it should be scary to everybody.

[Dena Temple Raston]

From Recorded Future News and prx, this is Click Here, a show about the people making and breaking our digital world. I'm Dena Temple Raston, and today on the show, how surveillance became the background noise of modern life and what it's doing to democracy. We'll be right back. Support for Qlik here comes from Servil. Every company says AI will make employees more productive. But most employees are still stuck waiting on it, waiting for app access and password resets, waiting for someone to fix a laptop issue so they can get back to work. That operational drag adds up fast, and IT teams are overwhelmed trying to keep up. Servil was built to automate that work. You describe what you want in plain English and Servl builds it for you. No complicated workflow, no consultants, just faster support and fewer tickets slowing everyone down. The platform is designed to eliminate repetitive tickets so it can focus on strategic work instead of constant firefighting. The company guarantees customers can automate 50% of it tickets. Learn more or start a free four week [e-mail] clickhere that's S E R V A L.com clickhere servil.com support for click here comes from Quince. Lately, I've been more intentional about what I wear day to day, leaning into pieces that feel effortless, comfortable, but still put together. It just makes getting dressed less of a chore. And for a while now, Quince has been my go to. The fabrics feel elevated, the fits are flattering, and everything just works without overthinking it. Quince makes it easy to refresh your everyday this spring with pieces that feel as good as they look. They use premium materials like 100% European linen, organic cotton and ultra soft denim. Their lightweight linen pants, dresses and tops start at $30 and are effortless, breathable and easy to wear on repeat. Everything at Quint's is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen. So you're paying for quality and craftsmanship, not brand markup. I just got a Quince bathing suit that looks like one of those expensive European brands, but for a fraction of the price. Refresh your everyday with luxury you'll actually use. Head to Quince.com clickhere for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com clickhere for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com clickhere it is called Internet. I use the world Wide Web information superhighway.

[Barry Friedman]

Cyber security.

[Dena Temple Raston]

Why do things go viral?

[Barry Friedman]

Click here. You know that Paul Simon song, We live in an age of miracles and wonder.

[Dena Temple Raston]

Graceland. Yeah.

[Barry Friedman]

Yes, Graceland. And the technologies we have are miracles and wonder, right? But miracles and wonder have downsides. And our goal has to be, as a society, to milk the technologies for all the upside while avoiding the downside. And part of that involves caution and process. And when we don't have caution and process, bad things happen.

[Dena Temple Raston]

Barry has spent his career warning that we're rolling out powerful surveillance tools faster than we're deciding whether we actually want them. He started a not for profit called the Policing Project. It focuses on assessing law enforcement practices and the responsible use of policing technologies.

[Barry Friedman]

We work with anybody who will come to the table in good faith to try to achieve sound policing and public safety.

[Dena Temple Raston]

I sat down with him to talk about how we got here and what responsible adoption could actually look like. In the course of his work, Barry's come up with a kind of checklist, actually two checklists.

[Barry Friedman]

So there's two different sorts of checklists. So one of the checklists is about whether we should be deploying technology. And it asks a bunch of questions, which are, what are the benefits you want out of the technology? And have we done any testing to see whether those benefits are possible and can be accomplished? And then you go to the other side of the ledger and you say, are there any risks from the technology? And have we identified the risks correctly? Have we taken measures to guard against those risks? And then at the end of the day, you look at the bottom of your ledger at your benefits and your risks. And you say, should we move forward? Often the answer to that set of questions is, sure, we can move ahead, but we need particular safeguards in place.

[Dena Temple Raston]

The other checklist is less about technology and more about us and the society we want to live in.

[Barry Friedman]

We live in a democracy, and it's a complicated democracy, but it is a system of government in which the will of the people is supposed to prevail. And you can't be confident of that unless you've consulted in some fashion with the people. You can do that through a legislative body, you can go to privacy boards, you can hold community meetings. But what you're supposed to do is do things openly and transparently.

[Dena Temple Raston]

A few years ago, Barry served on the AI ethics board for a police technology company called Axon. It makes Tasers and body cameras for law enforcement. And back in 2019, the company floated the idea of adding facial recognition software to police body cameras. And Barry and the AI ethics board pushed back.

[Barry Friedman]

They made the decision not to put facial recognition on the cameras because the technology wasn't ready. And being the industry leader that they were, I thought that was incredibly responsible, as did all the members of the board, and increased our faith in Axon doing the right thing.

[Dena Temple Raston]

But that decision didn't stick.

[Barry Friedman]

Now, there still may be really good reasons not to use it. Again. I want to separate out two questions. Is it good enough to do what it's promising to do, and then do we want the thing that it's promised to do done? And then even if we do, what should the rules be to do it in a responsible way? I think anybody that works in the policing space has whiplash. We've gone from 2019 was before George Floyd was murdered, then lots of people very publicly out in the streets concerned about policing since then, concerned about crime and crime rates and public disorder. And so now we're back at a gung ho policing mode, and I think that's gotta be part of it. But we're hardly living at a time in the United States when we should be sanguine about surveillance.

[Dena Temple Raston]

That tension between capability and caution isn't new, but the tools are. Let me back up for a second. Just ask about Clearview AI, which was basically a flashpoint for a lot of this. They scraped billions of photos without consent. Police department started using it without telling anyone. Do you remember what the sort of machinations that got to that were?

[Barry Friedman]

It was true. And I actually have reason to believe this is still going on, not necessarily in New York, but in other police Departments where departments would be interested in Clearview and they'd have access to it, and an officer in another department would say, hey, could you run this for me? And there was a lot of kind of back scratching going on. You know, it can't be that much of a surprise. First of all, miracles and wonder, like, wow, this is astonishing. I just take a picture of somebody and I know who they are. But then policing's a complicated institution. But individuals in policing are highly dedicated to a mission of making us all safer. And so it's hard to kind of just wave a tool in front of somebody's face that could help with that and say, ha, ha, ha, I've got this tool, but you can't use it. What police will tell you all the time is that they don't want to be the ones when something terrible happens. And then they have to explain why they didn't do something they could have done. But, I mean, everybody's under a microscope. And that is not a prescription for how we should run a free, democratic society. It is just the opposite.

[Dena Temple Raston]

And so for people who say, I haven't done anything wrong, why should I care? This is why you need to care.

[Barry Friedman]

Well, I have two answers. We all want to have an eternal private life. I've never met the person who doesn't want to have a private life. The people that founded this country, the United States, would have gone crazy thinking that we thought it was okay for the government to know everything about us all the time. We needed a government, and we needed the government to be effective. But then we needed to control the government, and we've got just the opposite situation here. We have turned over all of our data about every one of us to companies that can now sell that to policing agencies, manufacture it for the government, use AI to analyze it and know kind of where we are and what we're doing all the time. And it's scary, and it should be scary to everybody.

[Dena Temple Raston]

And it's not just facial recognition anymore. Now there's software that can recognize the way you walk, systems that identify your voice with just a handful of words. And then there are tools designed not to just identify you once, but to follow you over time, like license plate readers.

[Barry Friedman]

So license plate readers, we're doing something that facial recognition, by and large, has not been used for here in the United States, which is tracking people. And one of the scariest things, to me, in a free society, is to give the government the possibility of tracking any one of us anytime it wants. And that's what license plate readers do, you know, if you're driving around and they've gone from just capturing license plates to taking images of cars and the drivers. I have seen, you know, you ask, I want to see all the red Mustangs that were in this one mile square that have body damage in the last two days. And it can show you, like, the tracking capacity now with AI is astonishing. And it's that tracking that I worry about, as opposed to having a clear image of somebody who's done something horrific and identifying who that person is.

[Dena Temple Raston]

What worries Barry isn't just identification anymore. It's accumulation. One system logs a car, another captures a face. Another stores where you were and when. And once those systems start talking to each other, surveillance stops being a snapshot, it becomes a trail. That's why Barry has been thinking less about the existence of these technologies and more about whether democracies can still build guardrails around them. That's when we come back. Stay with us. Support for Click here comes from NPR's Planet Money podcast. Planet Money has a knack for taking big, complicated stories and making them feel human. Take the conflict between the US And Iran in a recent episode. The show followed a Seattle comic book publisher trying to track down two comic books stuck on a container ship in the Strait of Hormuz. To explain what was happening, Planet Money called a man in Tehran and he described Iran's strategy, like five seconds to pay or your ship doesn't get to pass through. Just like that, a geopolitical standoff turned into something that you could actually picture. That's the trick Planet Money pulls off over and over again. It funds the people living inside these enormous economic stories and through them, helps explain how the world really works. From global shipping to sanctions to why Pokemon cards are suddenly worth so much money, Planet Money makes complicated things feel surprisingly clear. Follow NPR's Planet Money podcast and understand how money shapes the world.

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[Mike Pesca]

Hi, I'm Mike Pesca, host of the gist, the longest running podcast on news and analysis in the business. Every day I do I think a fascinating interview, but I also do a spiel where I will challenge you because I hate listening to podcasts that just agree with each other and only agree with me. So I'm going to say 25% of the time you'll say, mike, I think you're wrong. And 75% of the time you'll say, great point, well said. Now, those numbers might be reversed. For some people, they probably shouldn't listen. Check out the gist every single day for a decade now.

[Dena Temple Raston]

Welcome back. If we've learned anything about surveillance systems, it's that they don't stay small for long. A camera becomes a network, a database becomes searchable. Separate tools start talking to each other, and eventually the system starts seeing more than any one person ever could. Barry Friedman has spent years trying to answer a very difficult, overriding question about that. If democracies are going to build systems like this, what would responsible control actually look like? And one idea he keeps coming back to is something called a data trust.

[Barry Friedman]

And just like you would put money in the bank with very specifically defined people who could withdraw that money, you put the data in a data bank, a data trust. And there are rules about who has access to the data, for what purposes, and people who have access could have different permissions. But the idea of the data trust is a way to have the data and use the data, but to limit who can get access and under what conditions. And I found it appealing as an idea to allow the government, law enforcement, public safety agencies to use data without having access to all of it, all the time. It's a project that I've been working on with Jennifer Eberhardt, who's a psychologist at Stanford. And we're trying to do something with body camera footage because the data trust may be a way to have our miracles and benefit from them without the harm.

[Dena Temple Raston]

He's not saying this fixes everything.

[Barry Friedman]

I mean, look, we could create the best data trust on the planet, and some private or government entity could come in, guns a blazing and get control. There are no guarantees in this world, but you do the best you can. The one thing I'm certain is that we're not anywhere near doing the best that we can. In fact, in some ways, we're doing the worst that we possibly can. One other answer is not to collect the data in the first place. Right.

[Dena Temple Raston]

Hasn't that horse left the barn?

[Barry Friedman]

Yeah. The great thing about horses out of barns, as opposed to, for example, toothpaste out of tubes, is you got a lot better chance of getting the horse back in the barn than you have of getting the toothpaste in the zoo.

[Dena Temple Raston]

We've already built the system. Now the question is whether we can control it. So if you were advising a city council or a police oversight board right now, what would you tell them to require before approving any kind of facial recognition?

[Barry Friedman]

I would want to see the data on the testing of the technology to see that it actually does what it says it's going to do on the tin. And frankly, most of it's going to flunk. I'm pretty confident of that. I think that's not true for your stationary camera on the train platform, but it is going to for the body camera footage. I'd be very surprised to find that this footage is effective in the sense that, yes, it will catch some people, but we're going to have some really bad false positives. Wrong. People are going to get nailed. Then I want a set of rules about what it's going to be used for. I mean, are we going to use this to catch everybody who's littering or spitting on the sidewalk or jaywalking? Because then we're going to be living in a police state. I'd want rules about how long the data is retained, and I want rules about once we think we have a match, what the police do next, because there's a tendency to rush in as opposed to making sure that it's actually a good match.

[Dena Temple Raston]

If listeners should take away one thing from this conversation, what should it be?

[Barry Friedman]

Object. Fight back. You don't have to say no to things that can make everybody's lives better, but you should insist that it all be adopted in a way that is democratically accountable and that they can see the safeguards.

[Dena Temple Raston]

Facial recognition can do extraordinary things. Find a missing person, identify a suspect. But the problem is, once a society builds systems that can identify people everywhere, it also builds systems that can track them everywhere. And that changes something fundamental, not just about policing, but about what it means to move through public life without being constantly legible to the state. Barry Friedman calls these tools miracles and wonder. And maybe that's the tension at the center of all of this, because the technology really can help people. The question is whether democracies can put enough rules and guardrails in place before surveillance simply becomes the background noise of everyday life. I'm Dina Temple Raston, and this is Click Here. Click Here is a production of recorded Future News and prx. Today's show was written and produced by Megan Dietre, Sean Powers, Erica Gajda, Zach Hirsch and Casey Giorgi. It was edited by Karen Duffin and Sarah Covedo and Fact Checked by Darren Ancrum. Original music is by Ben Levingston, with additional music from Blue Dot Sessions. Our staff writer is Lucas Riley, our illustrator is Megan Goff, and our sound designers and engineers are Jake Carlos Cook and Jesse Niswonger. Find us on X or Facebook at Click Here. Show or leave us a voice message at 661-5ch. Talk sometimes we'll turn those moments into recording, sometimes into a conversation, and sometimes into a future story you'll hear on this show. I'm Dena Temple Raston and thanks for listening.

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[Barry Friedman]

o.com looking for more of the cybersecurity and intelligence coverage you get on? Click Here. Then check out our sister publication the Record from Recorded Future News. You'll get breaking cyber news from reporters in New York, Washington, London, and Kyiv, among others, and you'll see for yourself why it attracts hundreds of thousands of page views every month. Just go to the Record Media.