← The Jordan Harbinger Show
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1308: Benn Jordan | The Surveillance State Stalking You Without Consent
01:28:05
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- [00:04]
A
Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers and performers. You even the occasional rocket scientist, Russian chess grandmaster, drug trafficker or arms dealer. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, and I always appreciate it when you do that, I suggest our Episode Starter Packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com start or search for us in your Spotify app To get started today on the show, imagine a company putting a GPS tracker on your car. Now imagine they tell you it's for public safety and the cops get access to it and private companies get access to it. And the database quietly mixes your driving history with consumer data, social media activity, photos, criminal records, whatever else they can buy. Now imagine the system is so poorly secured that hackers can get into it in under 30 seconds. Tonight's guest discusses exactly that. Ben Jordan is a technologist. That's the thing. That's the term we're using these days, I suppose, for hackers. Musician and security researcher. All euphemisms, except for a musician, I suppose, who decided to take a closer look at the massive network of automated license plate readers spreading across the United States. Cameras designed to track our cars, log movements and feed everything into a giant searchable database. What he found is unsettling. From stalkers using the system like Netflix for surveillance, to police departments relying on technology that's easier to break into than your Disney account, to the strange way this data can be merged with everything else about your life to quietly shape what you're allowed to do. This episode asks a pretty uncomfortable when somebody says I have nothing to hide, are they thinking about the world we're actually building? Because depending on who's in power, what counts as suspicious behavior can change overnight. This is a story about surveillance, hacking, data brokers, and why the most dangerous technology isn't the stuff we don't know about, it's the stuff that's already Everywhere. Here we go with Ben Jordan. We met through two friends, actually two of my closest friends. And it turns out that I actually knew you before trying to book you for the show because we were at my friend Tim's wedding and you got choked by Ash's mom because she was training mma, which quite memorable for everyone at the wedding to have a guest choked out.
- [02:39]
B
She still does jujitsu, I assume. Maybe. I don't know, she might be too old now. She's probably gonna hear that and choke me again. I've done Jiu Jitsu forever. And she started doing Jiu jitsu and I was like the only other person in the room who was doing Jiu Jitsu at the time. Maybe Ash was starting to get into it or something. And yeah, she just came behind me while I was sitting at a table and put me in a rear naked choke. And then. But the funny thing is, naturally when you get put into a rear naked choke, like from that position, the thing you do is answer the phone. You put your hand up really fast. And so it was funny. Like, I was actually a little proud of myself for, like putting my hand up and like, oh, I caught it. All right.
- [03:12]
A
So I didn't have to tap totally appropriate wedding stuff. Just walking down the aisle. Maybe the band hits, the DJ starts the dance floor and somebody gets choked out by one of the groomsmen's moms. It's just a thing that happens at weddings.
- [03:25]
B
His mom is. You could write like an entire book series about his mom or a Netflix documentary or something like that. She's such a fascinating person.
- [03:32]
A
Tim, he made a documentary about her called Mother I'd like to Fight, which I thought was excessively creative title. I should have had him name this show so that I wouldn't have just made it my name. Anyway, I want to talk about flop cameras because these are crazy. I've seen them. I can't remember where, but other people have posted them. Subreddit will be like, what is this thing? And people are like, this is a flock camera. You haven't seen these? They're like, no, there's 20 in my neighborhood. But I just. I don't know. What are they? Speed cameras. So what are these and what do they do? I know that's a massive question, but I'm going to pick it apart as we go here.
- [04:06]
B
I initially assumed that they were just monitoring traffic, and I knew that LPRs existed or license plate readers. And so I figured that they were maybe just doing that, monitoring traffic, maybe even similar to what A toll road one does or something which some people could argue is invasive, other people don't. And I'm sort of in the middle on that. What they do, it's a third party company that leases the cameras and the technology to cities and police departments. And every single time that you pass the camera, it logs your license plate. And then it also logs some, if your car has a dent in it, bumper stickers, color, things like that. And then that technology just gets a little bit more advanced as the cameras get newer. But most of the ones that you see, that's what they're doing. They're just using a mixture of AI and license plate readers and they're putting into a massive database. So your police, if they want to get a notification every single time that you pass a camera, they could find out everywhere that you've been over the last 30 days. Sometimes it's 15 days, apparently, sometimes it's longer too. Like in Texas, they have some sort of legal loophole and that's about it. And the bigger issue for a lot of people is that they found that police officers in Texas were tracking the license plate movement of women who they suspected were going out of state to have abortions.
- [05:21]
A
That's crazy.
- [05:22]
B
You had people in Texas searching for people in California. You've had a lot of cops just being asked by ICE to use it. But now this is a story that I'm literally going through the details now to do a short video on it. A lot of police departments in Georgia here are literally partnering with ice. They're getting the duties of an ICE agent, and if they don't, they don't get funding. And so now they can make immigration arrests, they can do investigations on immigration, and they use Fox Safety. So these cameras in that sense are pretty much you can see the data going directly or indirectly to ice.
- [05:56]
A
Where do we even begin tearing this apart? Because it's basically a GPS on your car. Not really because it's not connected to your car, but if you cross one of these things every 200 yards or whatever sort of spacing they have, the effect is the same, right? Maybe they don't know you made a right here instead of a right on the next block, but they basically kind of do. And they can narrow it down. And then if they really needed to look and find you on that specific block, they could probably look at people's ring cameras, which we've also found out that law enforcement is using the data on. So this is crazy to me.
- [06:25]
B
So, like with that used to be a point of contention. And I believe it was 2018 or 2019, there was Carpenter v. United States in the Supreme Court. And what that was about is, without a warrant, they were tracking someone with Carpenter. Whoever Carpenter is, they were tracking Carpenter with cell phone towers. And basically the Supreme Court said they made a pretty easy decision on it. They said if you're tracking somebody beyond one cell phone tower, then you could find out information about their sex life, about their religious life, all of the things that the Fourth Amendment protects you from handing over to the government. And. And yes, you need a warrant to do that. So how is that any different than this? Right? Like, if a cop can just find out your daily behavior? So, yeah, like, a lot of people wonder if it's constitutional, and I don't see a way that it can be. But also with, like, our administration right now and with our Supreme Court right now, I also just feel like that, like, justice isn't happening anywhere, so.
- [07:23]
A
Well, they don't care. Yeah, it's like, we'll unwind this later. Just kidding. It won't be my problem later. Right. Or we won't unwind it later because we'll figure out a reason to justify it. And people might say, who cares? I don't have anything to hide. And we'll kind of get into that exception because that's what people said about what was the Patriot act. And all the. All the same people who complained about the Patriot Act. Actually, many of them are going to be totally okay with this for reasons.
- [07:46]
B
Because reasons I do feel like a lot of, like, super conservative people or MAGA people or whoever, they can look back five years and they could say, okay, imagine if this camera gave me a ticket because I didn't wear my mask in Walmart or because I left my house during a lockdown or something. So it's pretty easy for them to envision that overreach. And then secondly, for the people who say, of course, in my YouTube comments, I've, you know, people saying, what are you, some kind of sexual predator? And you don't want people tracking you. And it's like, dude, just hand me your phone and unlock it and let me go into the other room with it for a while, if you're that comfortable, because I guarantee you wouldn't let me do that. And beyond that, it's like one of the things that we found when I got into the cameras and was able to just look at 30 days of, like, the behavior on a forest trail or a Lowe's parking lot or a playground and things like that it's like I ended up being able to just get these really advanced profiles on people that if I wanted to rob them, I would now know when they were home, I would know the kind of stuff that they have in their house. Even, to some extent, you could even zoom in on somebody's front door when they're putting the code in. And so just because you don't have any secrets doesn't mean that you don't have anything to hide. Like, your personal data is actually very valuable, right?
- [08:54]
A
Yeah, just. Yeah, exactly. The other thing that was crazy is I know people are going, okay, but like, the FBI, if they wanted to get in your house, they would just go into your house. But you were able to just look at the footage on these cameras, and you're not in law enforcement. You're just the guy that found that these things have security that's outdated by half a decade and was able to look at the videos that should scare people. There was sort of innocuous throwaway clip on your channel where you were looking at the footage, and it was like, hey, that girl, she jogs on this trail every day. How do I know? Every clip from this camera at the same time basically has her and, oh, look, it's zooming in on the kids faces from the family behind her. They must live in the area, too. Oh, here's one that's a playground and shows where the kids are and when. If you're looking at a live feed of that and you're a bad actor, it's Netflix for stalkers.
- [09:38]
B
Like you said right in the beginning, when we first found the security vulnerabilities and when I first realized how bad it was, it was during the first government shutdown. When that happened, it was like, right as a shutdown had started, or the first one in 2025. And I basically went to some senators and was like, hey, we have a national security problem. Like, above all things, like, if we're banning TikTok because we're worried about, like, China getting people's data from their phones, this is 10 times worse than that. This is actually a major problem. And Senator Wyden in Oregon, who's apparently the only senator who works when there's a government shutdown or who cares about national security when there's government shutdown, his team looked further into it, and they actually wrote a formal letter to the FTC for an investigation on national security over it. And so it's definitely not one of those things where it's like, I actually found accounts for sale on the dark web that like from hacker sites where people do like facilitating to get people into systems and stuff. And they were from Russia. It's very much already a thing. It's not even one of those. This could be a problem. It is.
- [10:38]
A
So to clarify what you mean by that on the dark web, so where people buy often illegal things on the Internet, you found, hey, I have an administrative account where you can log into these Flock cameras that are all over the United States and you can look at the footage.
- [10:53]
B
A law enforcement account. It was for a law enforcement person to be able to. Essentially some of their clients, like law enforcement agencies, don't want to use two FA or multifactor authentication. And so literally you could log in from anywhere. It had none of that. And so anybody could just sign in and then get hoplist updates or whatever.
- [11:12]
A
Two factor or multi factor authentication. This is where you try to log into Disney plus and it says, hey, we're going to text you because we don't recognize the phone that you're logging in from. And you go, okay, whatever. And it says type in the six digit code. They don't have that on these law enforcement accounts, at least not all of them. You can log in from Uzbekistan and you can spy on Americans using that in these videos. I would assume a law enforcement account. It's not just for one camera, right? It's for all of the cameras maybe in a specific area or possibly all the cameras in the United States.
- [11:40]
B
It depends which. Because some of them share to other agencies around the entire country. Other ones they have come under fire for that. Like Denver, for example, they found out that ICE was using it. They found out that people out of state were using it to track people in Denver. And so that created a whole bunch of turmoil. And now they're canceling their flock contract entirely. But for the last six months, they cut off generally everybody outside of Denver.
- [12:02]
A
Furthermore, you can use this data that tracks your car or your face as you're jogging by, or your kids faces as they play outside. They can mix that with other data, right? Because you get these data brokers that are like, oh yeah, we know Jordan spends a lot of money at coffee shops because we have his American Express data or his credit card data, his Apple Pay data, whatever it is. And we know he goes to the Westgate mall and he buys stuff there. So then they have like your location, your shopping habits, the stores you like. I mean it just, it starts to mix all this with consumer data. So you don't have like, hey, it's just a guy, he's maybe middle age. He maybe lives in this area. He's. They're like, no, this is Jordan Harbinger and this is where he was yesterday at 9:05am, period.
- [12:41]
B
Yeah, it all adds up. I think when people install an app or when they subscribe to a service or something, they take all of the data that they're sharing. Like the people that actually care about privacy a little bit, they say, okay, well this isn't that bad. Of course I have to give it my location access if I want it to connect to this Bluetooth thing I just bought and whatever else. But when all of that is mixed together, when you have an entire hodgepodge and you're able to connect all those dots, then somebody's Strava maps from when they're biking is directly connected to what time they're passing a flock camera and where they're spending their money and you know, what other accounts they've had. And so when you actually have that entire profile, I mean, that's called OSINT Open Source Intelligence. When you have that entire profile in front of you, you generally know everything about a person. And a lot of these things are breaches too. So you have passwords and all the other things that you wouldn't expect to have, but you can generally find that on just about anyone.
- [13:32]
A
One thing that was crazy, you did this on your channel. We'll link to a bunch of these in your videos in the show notes. But first of all, there's like 80,000 of these cameras nationwide, right? Something like that.
- [13:41]
B
Over a hundred now.
- [13:42]
A
Over a hundred thousand. Okay, so they're pretty much everywhere. I mean, that's just so many. Okay, I know that goes without saying, but that's enough to make a complete picture of millions of people's lives in many ways. When you mix it with other data and on your channel, you did something crazy, which was you saw a couple, like, I don't know if they were at a farmer's market or something, and they were clearly having a heated conversation. And you're like, oh, look, there's this random couple arguing. And then it was like step two, step three, step five. Oh, actually, this is the couple. Wow. They have a recent credit issues. Ah. They made a big purchase. Looks like maybe they were fighting over the fact that they are in debt and somebody wanted to buy the expensive strawberries and that was the last straw. You basically just found out so much personal info that that couple has probably not told their best friends and parents. The things that you found out about them and they don't know you.
- [14:31]
B
I didn't want to give enough information to where somebody else could identify them to good friends or family members. So I just used ambiguous things. Like I, I very quickly found out that the woman had irritable bowel syndrome and was suffering from it. And it was based on something like an old post where some doctor's office said, hey, could we have a quote about our services? And that was harmless enough, but it was attached to an email that was attached to her real name. That was. And so you could very quickly find out that this person's dealing with this chronic illness. But in terms of that, I was able to find out a whole lot. A disturbing amount. Most of you know that I didn't think it would be ethical to even
- [15:07]
A
share in a video and you spot them fighting in a farmer's market and it's like, now I know what you're fighting about. You bought a car you can't afford and you have to poop. I'd be in a foul mood myself. I understand. It's scary. It's a data broker play. This is not a, it's not just, hey, let's make our community safer. And you've said this on your channel, and I want to say it again here publicly. Law enforcement officials, the ones I know, sure, I probably know some bastards, but most of them are genuinely interested in making their communities safer. And the people that like these things or have developed these things are also generally interested in making their community safer. The problem is the people who have access to this data or are controlling this, they're not really only interested in that. They want all of this data so they can sell it. And they're doing that because that's where the money is. When you look at the VC firms that are funding these things, they're like, yeah, it's going to make communities safer, but you know what? It's also going to give us data on millions, hundreds of millions of people that we can sell to companies. And that's where the money is.
- [16:03]
B
Yeah, I mean, in this, in Fox case, they say they don't sell data, but they literally sell open source intelligence data. Like it's on their price sheet. But there's a lot of discrepancies between, like, what they say in a PR standpoint and what they actually do. But they are more or less leasing data between law enforcement agencies. One of the things that I've tried to tell a lot of cities and city councils and police departments that I've spoken To you have to understand that that is their business model. So if you want to say nobody can access our data, it's only ours, it's staying with the police department or city or whatever. There is incentive for them to try and make it available to the police department next to you because that makes the their entire service more valuable. So if everybody didn't share it, then they might as well just have normal ALPRs that you could buy on Amazon and just save it that way and go look at it if you need something. They wouldn't have to pay higher prices for this subscription service, but that goes into Ring and Google and everything else. These are data companies. Like that's how they make money. No matter what privacy settings you have, they're always going to be trying to figure out a new way to make money off of it. So it's better to just not have them.
- [17:12]
A
What if I'm a police officer, law enforcement, whatever, or just a concerned citizen and I go, look, Jordan, fine, but this is gonna make crime lower and fine criminals. So it's kind of like this is just what's happening. I mean, look, I don't want murderers in the community. So sorry you found out your neighbor had ibs, but come on, we're gonna catch criminals.
- [17:32]
B
It's funny cause win you actually show many decades of solid research suggesting that community policing drastically reduces crime. Nobody seems to care. But when a tech companies write a paper that their own employees write a research paper saying flock cameras make cities safer and no peers, you know, review it, nobody cites it and they just point to that over and over again. Everybody eats it up and hands over the money. Like that's what's amazing to me because I feel like most of the police officers that I know that either people who are in the family or people that I've just grown up with or something like that that became police officers like you said, like they really do care about making the community safer. And a lot of them, especially in Chicago, I knew a lot of them who would like bring lunches to like kids that like were routinely on their route and stuff. And they were actually like really compassionate people who cared a lot about the people that they were seeing day in and day out and that's not being utilized. So it's always interesting to me when like community policing is ignored for this colder system of just tracking everyone because it's like, well, the system of tracking everybody has not been shown to reduce crime. I can say this as somebody who reads research papers all day. It's not suggested that. What it has done is it's existed during a time when the national crime rate plummeted. If that's the case, then my music that I've released has also decreased crime by 30%. It's pretty amazing. Yeah. So another thing is the efficacy of them in terms of, like, how many license plates do they actually pick up? For example, right here, I have the same cameras that are used in Tucson around Nancy Guthrie's home.
- [19:12]
A
Oh, yeah?
- [19:13]
B
Yeah. When that happened, I was just like, wait, let's look at all the cameras. Let's see how many cameras she has surrounding her subdivision. And you can't get out of the subdivision without passing an ALPR camera. And so it was like, okay, there is flock all over the place, but there's also Verkata and Axon, which is a different company, is more or less trying to do the same thing. And it was like, wait, how did not one of these pick up any license plate that could be used for this? And yeah, the reason I have this is I wanted to test the efficacy. I wanted to literally put it on a bridge and see how many pings it actually gets and how many it doesn't. Because I never actually thought to do that.
- [19:44]
A
Can I ask, did we find anything in the cameras around Nancy Guthrie's neighborhood?
- [19:50]
B
No, nothing. It's not helped anybody.
- [19:51]
A
Wow.
- [19:52]
B
Yeah. And, I mean, it's like, Tucson's crazy. Like, they have cameras all over the place, every intersection, and then in the surrounding areas, they have tons of flak cameras as well. Like, I was just there a few weeks before that happened, and I remember because I was in Death Valley before that and some other places, and I was kind of like, ah, it's nice to not be tracked everywhere.
- [20:08]
A
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- [23:24]
B
Yeah, that's the name of the person on TV's name is Megan Guthrie.
- [23:29]
A
Okay. Because I always confuse something.
- [23:30]
B
Guthrie. Yeah. I don't know. I don't watch the show.
- [23:33]
A
But I also don't follow this too closely because I have kids in a business and a life and I don't want to follow the news. It's so sad. I thought this is a perfect use for flat cameras. Right? We're going to find the guys that took her. They're going to find the car here. Okay. It parked in this house thing.
- [23:46]
B
Taxpayers paid for this massive surveillance state around Tucson to resolve issues just like this one. Oh, it doesn't work. And then another thing that caught my eye, I remember initially thinking about this from the perspective of a surveillance researcher, you know, which is what I've been doing almost accidentally for the last year. And I was like, wait, certainly she had a ring camera or something. And I was like, okay, she had a nest camera but she wasn't paying the subscription. So they couldn't find footage. And then it turns out this nest footage shows up nine or 10 days later and I'm like, wait a minute, hold on. Like it wasn't being stored on the server. She wasn't paying the subscription. That's part of the agreement is like it's not being stored on Google server. And I believe Kash Patel or then the FBI said that it was. Oh, what did they call it? Like residual data was the word that they used. And it was like, that's not a thing.
- [24:33]
A
Like that's not a thing. So what they mean is you're not paying your subscription. It's not being stored on the server that you can access, but it's still being stored on the server for purposes of training, the doorbell technology, yada yada. Basically, the FBI can get it if they need it because it's on the server. You just can't look at it because you're not paying $10 a month.
- [24:51]
B
That to me was just like, okay, this is the time when you run, remove the cameras that are connected to any third party cloud. It's time to downgrade or whatever, your surveillance system to one that isn't actually watching your kids in your yard or whatever. You know, people have these cameras pointed at their kids in their bedrooms to like monitor them and stuff. But one thing I was able to do, which is oddly enough, like going through this, I had ring cameras all over the place, which I was already kind of uncomfortable with. It was like on my list, take them down. And I contacted Amazon and was like, hey, this super bowl ad where you're using AI to detect lost dogs with dog facial recognition. At the time, they had an agreement with flock Safety. Like they were partnering with flock safety. And then a couple other things. I was like, yeah, I looked through your last terms of service that I didn't agree to yet, and I want to return every ring device that I have, which is like $800 worth of stuff. After about an hour of chatting, they're like, okay, just throw it all in a box, send it back, we'll give your money back. And I was like, okay, that's great. Two days later, they ended up getting rid of their partnership with Flock.
- [25:52]
A
That's interesting. I will say that I got some notification in my ring app that was like, hey, do you want to participate in the lost dog thing? Because your camera can do that. And then it was like, if you want to upgrade to know, like when your nanny comes in and your housekeeper or your parents or somebody comes in and drops off the mail or the Amazon, we can do facial recognition. And I was like, no, I don't need that. It's an additional fee and I don't really want to deal with that. And then they're like, oh, okay. But you just reminded me of this. It's like, oh, co facial recognition is off. No, it's not off. I just can't access it. But ring slash, Amazon slash Google, they still know when my housekeeper comes in because that is on that camera is doing that. It's just that I can't utilize that to get a notification that tells me about it.
- [26:34]
B
Mine, I still had the app installed on a tablet. I got notifications saying, hey, we found a lost dog. On your property? It was a dog that was on. Not on my property in the little image until I agreed to the new terms of service and whatever else. It wouldn't let me see the entire image, but it was like a dog that kind of looked like one of mine. I was like, analyzing, and I'm like, I don't have a gate that looks like that's not my property. So they're just like, at this point, what are they doing? Just sending weird, like, images of something that looks like my dog for me to go, oh, no, let me agree to this really fast on my way to checking it out. It's insane.
- [27:08]
A
A lost dog. This is the equivalent of this, the tricky subject line that I wanted to use in the newsletter where it's like, hey, saw your name in the Epstein files. And then when they open it, it's like, just kidding, I just wanted you to open this email. And my team's like, don't do that. And I thought, God, it's so funny though, but that's what Amazon's doing to you. Like, hey, we found a lost dog on your property. Like, all right, I'll agree to it. Oh, nope. This is just a literal spam image that's been sent to a million people who didn't approve the terms of service to see if they would agree to it so that they could see the dog is a stock photo or some AI created thing or just a random photo from their network. Oh, oops. But thanks for accepting the terms of service.
- [27:42]
B
I'm sure a large portion of your viewers have a ring camera somewhere on their property. And listen to that and look at that camera and ask yourself, are these your friends or enemies? Is this a good or a bad thing? Does this company actually care about you? Because they're tricking you into things I
- [27:56]
A
think a lot of people don't realize. Again, now we've figured out the data is not really anonymous when it's all mixed together, but they don't really see how this is going to affect them. Like, okay, so what? So some guy who's a hacker type can find out I have ibs, Big deal. What if they use your old Facebook, your Instagram, your driving record from the Flock cameras, and your DMV record, photos of you from social media, plus your criminal record. You know that thing that you did in college that's not really that bad and kind of got swept under the rug? That doesn't matter anyway. Plus your consumer behavior, plus your credit card payment stuff. Now this bank buys access to this Data that's quote unquote, anonymized and says, you know what? Jordan's high risk for a mortgage. We're not going to tell you why, because that would be illegal. But we're going to tell you that he is a little bit higher risk with the mortgage. In fact, even if you sued that company and you went to discovery and you went, hey, we want your AI to say why they're not letting guys like Jordan get mortgages. AI is not going to go well, we notice his phone battery is typically below 50%, which is one of 10,000 indicators we use. And his consumer behavior says this. And he was late on a payment and he peed in public in 2008 and got arrested for it, and he drives like a maniac and blah, blah, blah. So we're just going to say that he's high risk for a mortgage, so just deny him or give him a terrible interest rate and you will never find out why that is happening to you.
- [29:13]
B
And that's already a thing even outside of the ring and the flock. Stuff like, that's already a thing where it's like you leave breadcrumbs about health events and that affects how much your insurance costs. And things like underwriters use open source intelligence all the time. Like, it's standardized at this point, but they use AI now. Yeah, that was like, part of the United Healthcare scandal where they were using an AI model that was denying healthcare to people just based on, like, what it was scanning, based on, like, their health records, plus what it was finding online. But also, like, it does make me concerned too. Like, when this much data is being used by police or when it's being used by law enforcement, whether it's federal or state, regional, I really start to worry, I guess, like, when I grew up, the rule was always like, don't talk to police ever. Like, just don't. If they ask you a question, don't talk to them. Like, you'll make yourself a mark in the neighborhood. Or, I grew up in, like, a pretty high crime neighborhood. It was just like, don't ever talk to cops. You're literally safer talking to a gang member than a police officer here. Then growing up, you kind of realize if a cop comes to your front door and says, hey, could we look at your camera footage? There's a house that somebody broke into, a house down the street, and if you give that to him, you may have to go to court and be in that criminal or gang or whatever will then look at you and you're just Getting yourself involved in something that like is going to take a bunch of your time and you're not actually going to get compensated anything for it. And so it's generally best to just say no, thanks, goodbye. But when you think about like all of those breadcrumbs that now when you have something like a Nancy Guthrie situation or you have like a high profile case where they're just combing through things, like they found out that the person had like a Walmart backpack or whatever, right? And so Walmart was like, oh, here's all of our data. Here's all the data of everybody who bought this backpack. And so now you have a bunch of innocent people who may have bought this backpack being investigated by the FBI. It's like not only a really bad thing for innocent people, but it's also like a huge waste of resources in my opinion. How many murders have there been since Nancy Guthrie's disappearance that the FBI could have been involved with? It just gets really messy.
- [31:11]
A
The security on these cameras, I mentioned earlier that it's outdated by a half decade. I don't know, maybe you can sharpen this point a little bit. I believe you said some of the cameras that you tested were running on a version of Android that had been deprecated in 2021 or really old. So there's no security updates for these particular os. And you were like, oh, well, I'll just look at all the footage on here.
- [31:31]
B
Which to me is, yeah, incredibly, they're running on Android 3 things. So it's Android 8 things, which is something that Google made for one year, where it's meant for really like lower power devices that don't have a display. Now it is funny because these original Flock cameras, like the older ones that came out pre2023, when opening them up, they actually inside they have like little volume controls and things like that because it's literally acting like a phone. So you have that input. So they have the volume up, volume down, power, like, you know, stuff, which is ridiculous. But these all run from everything I've seen, they all run on an Android operating system of some sort. Most of the ones that you see on the side of the road are running on an outdated one that can't be updated anymore that you can route relatively easily. And then the newer ones, they run on a more recent version of Android, but it's still Android. It's not like a closed system for surveillance. It's literally Android. I think the problem with that above all things is that Android does a million things. It Opens ports for a bunch of things. It's also run by Google who needs user data. So I mean there's so many reasons why you wouldn't use Android for a security camera. And in this case it's just. My opinion would be just from spending a year looking at these things. They started with that, that's how they made their prototypes. Their prototypes literally used to run on modified phones and then they ordered hardware for it and they just blitz scaled the company to raise value and never actually paid attention to changing that to actually harden it. And so they're still running phone oss.
- [33:04]
A
It's shocking to me because this company has a multi billion dollar valuation.
- [33:09]
B
Yeah, 7.5. Last year it was 7.5. No idea. There's been a lot of controversy with them. So it might be less, but let's
- [33:15]
A
just say enough where they could hire a team of pretty good software developers and engineers to go. We need an OS for these things. That is security forward because this has a ton of sensitive data on it. Maybe we shouldn't use something that is designed for a thermostat.
- [33:31]
B
Most tech companies, generally all tech companies, but most big companies have chief Internet security officer. It's like an executive. That's a very important position that sort of leads security. They haven't even had one for most of 2025. Like when we were doing our research, there was nobody to report to for them, there was nobody in charge. I think their security team was like one or two people at the worst of it. And they like weren't people in senior positions who could actually find these things themselves. That was what was really alarming. And now they've, I mean they hired a CISO and they've also hired a third party company. But the issue with that is that when you hire a third party company formally there's generally, and I can't speak for every agreement, but generally the way it works is they have non disclosure agreements. When that security company finds a bunch of new vulnerabilities or confirms the old ones, then flack decides whether they tell the public about it. And as a company that really would like to launch an ipo, they're probably not going to do that. Then people like me will continue to find it, but I'm getting exhausted and making videos about it. And so like any new vulnerabilities that myself or other people have found, we've just been like, okay, I assume they've
- [34:35]
A
been very thankful to you for finding all these vulnerabilities and telling them about it, Correct?
- [34:40]
B
Yeah, the Security researcher that I worked with, John Gaines. He's probably responsible for 80 to 90% of them. I would assume he knows more about Flock safety, cameras and ecosystem than literally anybody on earth, just because his security research is incredibly deep. Two days after my video launched, the first video I made exposing the vulnerabilities, he got fired from his job. He had a senior level position at a infosecurity firm. He got mysteriously fired, but didn't make any sense. He wasn't like, working on this at work. He was doing all of his duties at work, and he was doing all this at home on his own time and expense and equipment. And then, of course, when we were doing that video, we started seeing people parked in front of the house. Like, I live on kind of like a farm, so it's down the driveway, we'd see people parked. And then finally one day managed to have my phone in my hand when somebody was like pointing a camera at me, recording video. And so we were like, okay. And okay. So we have private investigators outside. Some days they're here, some days they're not. And that still happens. They're still here. Sometimes they might even be out there right now to the point where it's funny.
- [35:44]
A
Okay?
- [35:44]
B
Like, I feel bad for these people because I'm not doing anything that interesting out in the open.
- [35:48]
A
And so the most boring PI gig ever, right?
- [35:51]
B
Yeah. Like, wow, you get to watch me, like, carrying a wheelbarrow full of chicken poop. That's really cool. Like, one time I actually brought a coffee down for them. I like, put a coffee in a little plastic thing and went down and they drove away as soon as I got near them.
- [36:03]
A
So, well, guess I'm having a second coffee today.
- [36:05]
B
Yeah, I think it was Christmas Eve or something. And I was like, ah, I should bring him a coffee.
- [36:08]
A
He's coming to poison us. No, dude, I'm just wondering why you're filming me rolling a spliff on my porch. What are you doing?
- [36:16]
B
It's so silly because it's such a waste of money. For example, John Gaines, he initially had reached out to Flock. He had reported this to them. He, for the most part, like, up until my videos came out, everything was being done through, like, standard responsible disclosure guidelines where you give 90 days for remediation before you make something public. It's very strange. I didn't understand it at first until I saw some of the CEO's behavior of calling people terrorists. He sent out an unsolicited email to law enforcement agencies around the country saying that I Was attacking police. By me attacking Flock. I was also attacking police. I was a lawless activist. He didn't say Ben Jordan, but he was referring to a YouTuber who made YouTube videos with false claims and things like that.
- [37:00]
A
That narrows it down. A guy talking about Flock cameras that gets millions of views. Who could that be? That's not me.
- [37:06]
B
Yeah. And fortunately, in Virginia, there was a police chief who just said, yeah, this is crazy, and just canceled the contract. After reading that email, I think he responded to the CEO being like, yeah, what we're seeing is democracy in action. I wouldn't call them lawless activists. They're just concerned citizens. And we're going to cancel the contract now because you've now convinced us that you're an irresponsible tech company, not somebody who's actually dealing with responsibilities that a normal company would.
- [37:33]
A
Being cagey with security is bad. Good security is robust and transparent. Because if you're creating a tech product and you want it to be secure, you would love it if hackers take that thing down to the studs and then email you all the vulnerabilities, giving you 90 days to fix them, because you're saving hundreds of thousands of dollars on research and development. Yeah.
- [37:52]
B
It's funny in hindsight because this is still going on. They're still losing contracts. It's like a massive issue. And it's funny because, like, in hindsight, John Gaines is not like an anarchist. He's not like somebody who hates surveillance. He's obviously uncomfortable with it, which is why he got involved in researching it on his own time. But they could have just reached out to him and hired him as ciso. Like, when those videos came out, I would have had a lot of ethical issues with continuing to do the research myself, because now, like, this researcher I worked for is now with the company. So now there's all this conflict of interest. That would have shut me up. That would have ended the whole thing. But it's just ego.
- [38:25]
A
Yeah, we want to ruin this guy for pointing out a flaw. It's crazy, because this company, they have to know, hey, we made a product that's pretty much very basic. Security's not really there. Oh, somebody pointed out the flaws. We can either get upset about it or we can fix them. Let's get upset about it and ruin people's lives just so that we can say, don't mess with us. We're not even trying to mess with you. We're trying to show you the flaws so that you can fix this, so that they're less dangerous to society. And they're just like, no, thank you. We'd rather take this personally. Totally insane.
- [38:52]
B
Yeah. When the CEO sent those emails, I was just like, at what point do you just grow up and remediate the security issues? I've formally, in a public letter, offered to fund security research. Additional. Another thing that they'll do, or they were doing, is they were saying the cameras he had access to were different. He doesn't actually have access to the flock ecosystem because once it's a flok ecosystem, then, you know, everything changes magically. And I said, okay, well, give me access to the ecosystem, then I'll prove you wrong. But you know that if I go up to the flak camera a couple hundred feet away from my house and press the button three times on the back and type in a curl command and root the thing, like, you know that then I'll go to jail. Then you'll be able to put me in prison immediately. But right now, I've managed to equip myself with good attorneys and stay on the right side of the law. So there's nothing you could do in that department. They still do that. But fortunately, I found a legal way to get into their ecosystem and. And watch people.
- [39:47]
A
It's crazy to me that you can get that footage. I know I keep harping on this, but you don't even have to have crazy technical knowledge. This is not. I need this $300,000 device that can read the signal going through the wire. That's highly sensitive. No, you basically just went, oh, they don't have really any sort of decent security on here. Oh, look, there's all the footage. They said something like, oh, we get rid of the footage after seven days or 15 days or 30 days. And you're like, here's a camera that has footage from the factory where it was manufactured. When they tested the recording capability, that's what, three years ago or five years? Like that's still on there?
- [40:21]
B
Yeah, still there. Yeah. It's funny to see like the goalposts moving around. They're like, no, no, no, no. We delete it from the server, but it might stay on the device. Or oh, another thing, I have no idea if it still says this on their fact, but they said we don't take pictures of people. And it's like, okay, well a. That's not true. Like your open source intelligence has a bunch of personal information beyond vehicles. But also like, I am looking at files of me from walking past the camera when I had it powered on my Tool desk, something like that. Like, it's just lie after lie from my perspective.
- [40:50]
A
Crazy, crazy. The license plate reader thing, There's a video where you make one yourself. They used to call us nerds. Ben, that was incredible. I mean, you're like, a very skilled, impressive, technical mind in many ways. But I don't want people to think, okay, so you got to be a Ben Jordan to get footage off this thing. If you're not as technically skilled as you, you could just rip one of these things off a post. Illegal, don't do it. And plug it into your computer and copy the files. The highly technical, skilled part is what allows you to do it legally. If you're just a bad actor in China, Russia, another hostile state, you just hack into this thing and suck all the footage off and go, come at me, bro. And nobody can do anything about it.
- [41:29]
B
It's funny because there are people out there. I've explained to them that they're breaking the law and that I can't have anything to do with them due to my position. But there are people out there who have, like, access cameras and through questionable means, and. But I'm still like, what are you trying to do now? There's an interesting thing that's happened here where, like, you can't really own the system any more than it's already owned. If you wanted to break the law, yeah, of course you could use the API keys and use the credentials that are on the hardware to get into the cloud service and go around in there. But it's just one of those things where it's almost not even worth researching for me, because it's like, I can't think of anything else we could do with it. I've literally. I ran doom on it. When you could root a device, you think about it, like, you could install malware that could install malware on other devices. You could have it let the battery overheat so it starts on fire or explodes. It's like, how much further could you possibly hack a device beyond that?
- [42:21]
A
Geez, I hadn't even thought about that. The fact you could install malware probably on the whole network by just forcing a bad update, and that would shut all of these things down. I'm not trying to give anybody any ideas. I'm just saying a bad actor could do something like that, or a nation state that wanted to take down our capability or Flock's capability to do that, or just some domestic terror type. I'm worried about even saying this as a hypothetical, because it came now it comes out, like, I'm recommending it. I'm just saying somebody could do terrible things with these.
- [42:49]
B
Like, a lot of people have reached out to me being like, okay, so infrared lasers, what if we shoot them at the sensor and do this? Okay, so you're going to set up a laser for an hour in front of a camera that's recording you and sending it to police, and then you're going to turn it on, and for, like, at that point, why don't you just shoot the camera? But, like, the important thing, these are very easy to shoot off of poles or spray paint or to hit with a baseball bat or whatever. I mean, a lot of these are, like, below my head level around where I live. Like, I literally just jab it and it'll come off the pole and break on the ground. But instead, we're doing this the right way. Because it's really important to me that when a law enforcement agency or the government or whoever, an attorney, looks at the posture of both sides of this, like, there's flock, who's saying this and then doing another thing, and then they're saying this, and then there's national security risk, and they're ignoring it. And they're paying a bunch of money in SEO to make sure that if you type Flock safety vulnerability in Google, you won't find any of the thousands of articles about it at this point, unless you use DuckDuckGo or something else like that. Like, they're putting in so much work, in my opinion, being dishonest to their clients who are law enforcement agencies. And I am putting so much work and money into not doing that, into actually being as straight arrow as I possibly can and following all the rules for, you know, probably the first time in my life and paying, like, exorbitant attorney fees to be able to do so. That's really important that, like, when you look at that entire situation, at that point, you can say, okay, who is the good guy and the bad guy here? Who's the person who's spending money to try and make people safer? And who's the person who's making money while covering up things that. Or making people less safe?
- [44:24]
A
If you're thinking, Jordan, I've got nothing to hide. Cool. But history shows that what counts as nothing to hide tends to change every four years, depending on which direction the political wind is blowing. So while we all process that comforting reality, let's take a quick break and thank the sponsors that keep the show running. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part By Deleteme. Deleteme makes it easy, quick and safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. And, and look, this stuff is kind of wild when you actually think about it. It's easier than ever for somebody to find your address, phone number, even your relatives names just by sitting there on random data broker sites. That's not just creepy, it can have real world consequences. I don't love the idea that anybody with five minutes in a search bar can piece together where I live or who my family is. That's just not information that needs to be floating around. That's where DeleteMe comes in. They go out and remove your personal info from hundreds of these data broker websites, which helps you protect yourself before that info gets used in ways that you didn't sign up for. And they're not some random fly by night company. The New York Times wirecutter actually named Deleteme their top pick for data removal services. Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me now at a special discount for our listeners. Get 20% off your delete Me plan when you go to join deleteme.comjordan and use promo code Jordan at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to JoinDeleteMe.com Jordan and enter code Jordan at checkout. That's JoinDeleteMe.com Jordan code Jordan. This episode is also sponsored by Zocdoc. You ever notice how health concerns always seem to hit at the worst possible time? 11:30 at night, you're tired or you google one thing, suddenly you're three searches deep, wondering if you need to completely rethink life. And then what do we do? Nothing. We just hope it magically resolves. That's where ZocDoc actually helps break the cycle. ZocDoc is a free app and website that helps you find and book high quality in network doctors so you can find somebody you love. There are more than 150,000 providers across all 50 states. So whether you need a dentist, primary care, doctor, dermatologist, whatever, it's all there. You can search by specialty or even by symptoms, read real patient reviews, see actual availability, then just book it right there. No calling, no waiting, no, I'll deal with this later. And the turnaround is quick. Appointments are usually within 24 to 72 hours, sometimes even the same day. It just makes it way easier to actually do something instead of just thinking about it. Stop putting off those doctor's appointments and go to Zocdoc.com jordan to find and instantly book a doctor you love today. That's z o c-o c.com Jordan Zocdoc.com Jordan thanks Zocdoc for sponsoring this message. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do. That is take a moment and support the amazing sponsors. They do make the show possible. All of the deals, discount codes and ways to support the podcast are searchable and clickable on the website@jordanharbinger.com deals if you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find a code, email me. We are happy to surface codes for you if you it is that important that you support those who support the show. Now back to Ben Jordan. So if they're able to track car locations essentially in real time using this system, can you track all the police cars in a city using this system? They have license plates.
- [47:29]
B
Yeah, you definitely could. And there was even one of the breaches that Joshua Michael found. He was another one of the security researchers I worked with. So there's something called ArcGIS. It's basically a cloud service that kind of gets check ins from different devices to tell them, for example, if you have a flak camera, a lot of them know how close the nearest police officer is. You know, they catch somebody who had just stolen a car or they believe did something, dispatch knows what cop to send on them and try and find them. Or for a lot of more routine reasons, oh, there's a bad accident here. We need to find the closest cop to come, make sure everybody's safe. And so because of that, police cars have GPS units in it that give their data to ArcGIS and then ArcGIS then gives it to the dispatch and a flock and so on and so forth. So we found over 100,000 API keys for ArcGIS. And that was just Josh found those on Google.
- [48:22]
A
Explain briefly what an API key is for people who don't know.
- [48:24]
B
Oh yeah, in this sense a good analogy would be like your credentials, your username and password, so you can access data, but it doesn't have a GUI with buttons that you click and stuff. It's like a very quick way for computers to talk to each other. Basically it's just like a way that a computer can visit a website and get the data that it needs without the overhead of everything else. And so in this case it was an API key. I mean they had the location of all the police Officers in these areas. And so you just had a nonstop. If you ever wanted to figure out what the cops were in 10 seconds, you could have AI build an app that just pings the API.
- [48:58]
A
So this is where I'm going with this, right? Because I think there's a lot of people, cops included, again, good people who are trying to do good work. Let's give them the, like, maximum benefit of the doubt. I wonder if, now that they know that these security bugs allow citizens and criminals to find out where they are at all times when they are on duty, working, do they feel safer knowing that that is out there? Because I know that there's a lot going. Look, I know that this makes you feel unsafe. We're only using this to protect you. That's all right. I'm only using this. Officers, I just want to know where you are so that if a friend of mine commits a violent crime, he doesn't have to shoot you. He just knows you're too far away. Do you feel this? Again, obviously hypothetical. Do you feel safer knowing that a criminal can find out where you are? You're parked somewhere, eating lunch. Ok. Every gang member who has technical access, which even the slightest modicum of technical access or the ability to hire somebody with technical access can now get data that says every day Officer Jones takes his squad car and he eats lunch at this place at 1pm or 1am when his shift is on break, when he's on lunch. Does that make you feel safer? Because that's kind of how all of us are feeling right now.
- [50:07]
B
Yeah. And it's funny too, because when I found out about that. Yeah. When I talked to Josh, like, the thought in the back of my head was like, shouldn't we already know that, though? Because it's a public service. Like, I understand the safety, but, yeah,
- [50:20]
A
we should not know where cops eat lunch at 1am when they're on the night shift. We should not know that. No.
- [50:25]
B
But, yeah, it's like, I'm sure upon finding that out, a lot of police officers were not happy to find out that they know that they have GPSs in their cars.
- [50:34]
A
Like, their boss and other police should know where they are. Just like for citizens, people should be able to find out where I was if I'm suspected of a crime. But I don't want, I don't know, a random YouTuber, no offense, to know where I was yesterday and what I was doing. Because that's none of your business, Ben.
- [50:51]
B
Of course. Yeah. Well, not only that. Yeah. Somebody who might actually just be Using that system to find people to rob that have just bought the Christmas gifts at the store that has the camera out there. And then they could just find the address through their license plate, through like a park mobile data breach or something like that. And then off to the races, I guess maybe. An analogy that I often use is bumper stickers. So many times I'll be like, driving and I'll see somebody with a bumper sticker that like brags about their kid being in a private school and they have a bunch of kayak paraphernalia all over it. Nice bike racks on the top. And okay, this person probably has $10,000 worth of stuff in their garage. It's like you tell the public so much if you have a bad actor, but we do that times 100 in the digital world when we just visit websites and do so. I mean, we end up with this massive profile of our behavior. But obviously when it gets involved, when that open source intelligence, when a company like Flock turns it into this organized system that law enforcement can access, it's just really bad. There's a lot more bad things that could happen than good things.
- [51:50]
A
With that, I want to double clarify that. I want citizens and police officers to stay safe while they're out. And about the whole thing about, hey, now we can find out where cops eat lunch. I want to just highlight. I'm saying that is scary and we should plug that hole that allows people to do that. Because it's a bad thing. Because I know that there's people who are like, you're trying to get cops killed. No, actually I'm trying to make sure that people can't find us on a whim and do something bad with the information.
- [52:17]
B
It's like, funny how polarizing it is anytime you talk about police. And I feel like growing up in that atmosphere where like, you never talk to police, you don't trust police. It's interesting because usually, like, if I were asked like how I would do things if I were king or whatever, like, cops would be paid a lot more and they would be trained a lot better. And you would have cops that dealt with things like narcotics, and you would then have cops that dealt with things like mental illness. And not all of them would need guns. Not all of them would need to be this crazy thing to be reckoned with.
- [52:45]
A
Yeah, militarized policing.
- [52:46]
B
Yes. You'd have like your oh shit cops in case things went down. And then the rest of them would be highly trained in specific areas that would actually help people. And then you would have People. You wouldn't have this bad relationship that you have right now with people and police?
- [53:00]
A
Well, yeah. People in the UK are like, I can't believe you guys are not on this. What is wrong with you? For people who don't know, the UK has armed police. And they come when there's a bank robbery where people are throwing grenades or whatever. The rest of the cops, they don't need guns. They don't need guns. They call the people with guns.
- [53:16]
B
You need guns to write a parking ticket. It's insane.
- [53:19]
A
Or to investigate something. And it's a different environment. Yes. But also, like, there's a reason for that in our data. I think we touched on this before quite a bit, but our data is super vulnerable to being grabbed by foreign actors, spies, criminals. But does it make us safer? A lot of people are going, yeah, but how many criminals have they caught using this stuff? It must be millions.
- [53:38]
B
Ben. Yeah. The problem is researching what solves crime is actually incredibly difficult. And it takes a very long time, like, researching how to make crime go down. You have so many variables, and, like, crime goes up and down based on so many different things and in so many different areas. And you could literally have a gang leader getting out of prison. And that either making crime go wildly up or down, like, simple things like that can change, like an entire neighborhood's profile. And so an interesting thing that happened to me a couple of years ago. I read this paper from, I believe it was the University of Chicago, and they had this AI system that could predict crime with over 90% accuracy down to one given block. And I, like, read the paper and actually kind of checked out. And I was like, okay, this is crazy. I have to go there. And so I already lived in Atlanta at the time, but I went back to Chicago and I visited the professor of sociology who, like, led the project, and then some of the developers and interviewed them and stuff for a video. And it was, like, really interesting because, like, the first thing they were studying a neighborhood that was in Englewood, which I grew up in, West Englewood. So it was right next to the neighborhood that I grew up in Inglewoods, California. And so I was like, okay, this strange. And so I asked them, not even, like, it wasn't like a gotcha question. I was like, how often do you go there? And they were like, oh, we've never been there. And I was like, wait a minute, wait a minute. This is 15 minutes away from your campus, and you've been spending years training an AI model on the data that you get from this neighborhood, but you never thought to drive through it. Are you kidding me? That's insane. Are you that scared of black people? What do you think's going to happen? It was mind boggling. That day I had another thing in that neighborhood I was interviewing and working with a nonprofit called Purpose Over Pain, which is literally a nonprofit founded by mothers who have lost their children to gun violence. So it's very hard to find anything but empathy for what they're trying to do in that nonprofit. They basically have a helpline that you could call if somebody close to you has died or do you think that somebody's in trouble? They don't really work with police. If there's a murder in the neighborhood, if there's a drive by, if there's something like that, they generally, they know who's in the gangs, they talk to them. They just try to make sure that there's not a retaliatory one or that if there is a retaliatory one, they make sure that it's not somebody in the neighborhood. They make sure that it's not somebody innocent. They basically talk to people and work with them. And it's essentially people voluntarily doing community policing. And it was really interesting because the person who leads that, Pam Mosley, she said to me, I can predict crime with a higher accuracy rate than that. And I was like, what do you mean, though? Like how? And she was like, just talking to people. I guess with all of its absurdity, the best way to predict crime is to commit a crime, right? And so it's like the closer you are to the actual thing. And I think that just made me realize how ridiculous a lot of tech and a lot of anything with AI obviously, But just in general, like, how technology doesn't really solve problems like that. Like it could claim it does, and it could like cherry pick stats and stuff like that. But to say if license plate readers have made things safer. There are cities in California where car thefts doubled after they installed flak cameras or ALPR cameras rather. And then there are places where it's dropped. There are places where nothing's happened. There's just not been a study on it. And even if there was, it, it would probably take two decades before you actually had an answer. Because we don't even know if increasing police solves crime. Like, we have no idea. That goes both ways. Sometimes you increase police, you have more crime. Sometimes you increase police, you have less crime. It depends on so many things.
- [57:06]
A
There's a good concept in the video that I Want to have you take us through the Hawthorne effect, where behavior changes when observed. Tell me about this. I'd never heard of this, and I think it's a really interesting phenomenon.
- [57:18]
B
Yeah, we take for granted the things that we do in private, which are like, generally, if you're singing really loud, dancing, things like that, something for the first time. That's one of the important things. Like, I learned how to play music instruments. I learned how to solder. I learned how to do so many different things that I do constantly by myself, without judgment of other people. And it's actually really fascinating to me to think about how closely connected you can become to something if you don't have judgment involved. That's what a child needs to practice a cartwheel properly. Or there's so many things where, like, you just need a judging person to not be watching you. And your brain doesn't really see the difference between somebody who's just very judgmental or security camera. It's like somebody's watching you. You're vulnerable. You have that vulnerability. So you're not going to act the exact same way that you would if you didn't have anybody. And like, a weird crossover from that is people who've had a pet die. A lot of times you'll hear people saying, like, when they have a pet died, that they were actually more upset than when they had a family member die or something like that. And yeah, that doesn't make any sense. It's like, yeah, but your pets are incapable of judging you. Your mother judges you. Your kids judge you. Pets don't. You can act completely organically in front of your pets, and as long as you're not making them scared or something, they're not going to go tell the other dogs about it. They're not going to give you less social value. And that makes you love them, and that makes them love you unconditionally. That's just a good metaphor for how important it is to actually have time and be able to do things that are completely devoid of judgment. And a surveillance state makes that close to impossible. In fact, having ring cameras around your house makes that impossible because your significant other or another family member or the cops or whoever might be able to see you scratch your balls in the driveway or whatever it is, whether you're doing something that stupid or they might be able to see you practicing archery for the first time when you're super embarrassed for anybody to find out that you shot your foot with an arrow or whatever. Sure, there's so many different things, but Especially for young people. What really triggered that in that video was I just was watching a man who seemed to be like a grown man just swinging on a swing by himself for a while. And it was like, this is something I do. Like, I actually do this. I've gone to parks and I've just gone on a swing because I want to. Because I remember going on a swing when I was younger and I see a swing and I go, I really want to do that. But I only do it if I'm the only one around because I'm a grown man and me walking into a playground and going on a swing looks weird. So it's like one of those things where I feel like out of all the footage that I went through in those few weeks, that was the one that really drove it home for me because it was like, this person would have not done this if they knew this camera was there.
- [60:05]
A
Yeah, that's true. So the Hawthorne effect, where behavior changes when observed, might be good with respect to crime. Like, you know, you go to a store, it says, smile. You're on camera in that weird corner where the clerk can't see you. And it's because people steal crap that's on that shelf. And it's like, oh, you're being watched. Oh, maybe I won't. You know, the casual shoplifter might be like, maybe I won't do that. But this is bad with respect to, hey, I'm being observed in my own neighborhood all the time. This is tmi. But I have a hot tub in the back. And sometimes I'm like, I want to jump in here totally naked. But the problem is it's on a deck, right? It's on a deck. And I got to get up on the deck to get into the tub. And when I get up on the deck, I can clearly see my neighbor's kitchen window over here, neighbor's kitchen window over here. And the other day when I was like, I can do this because it's getting dark, there was a guy on the roof across there putting in solar panels. And I was like, nope, that guy can see me really clearly. So I just don't do it. And I've got a neighbor who's thankfully my brother in law, where his bathroom window is huge and looks directly down in there. And I'm like, one day his fiance is going to go, I saw Jordan naked as the day he was born, jumping into the hot tub and oops. And it's fine because it's like relations. But you don't want Your whole life, everywhere you go having that same effect where you have to go, I know people at home are going, oh, I don't care, I'll do whatever. No, you won't. The Hawthorne Effect literally proves that your behavior will change.
- [61:18]
B
Yeah, there's like, simple. A weird thing that I do around here is we have coy wolves, which are like coyote wolf hybrid dogs down here in Georgia. And I have chickens. And so they're always very interested in my chickens. And one way that effectively gets rid of them is pissing all over your property. Like, they smell human urine and they go, maybe not. You know, maybe we'll check something else out.
- [61:38]
A
I can see where you're going with this. Continue.
- [61:40]
B
Yeah, quite frequently I'll be like, ah, I got a pee. I'm going to go outside.
- [61:44]
A
Yeah, don't waste a good piss on the toilet. Yeah, go outside.
- [61:46]
B
But yeah, a grown man whipping it out to a third person who might be watching through a security camera or something like that, like, very different. Or, you know, could just be an inconsiderate person who's just urinating over the, you know, whatever it is. People tend to judge when they don't know the whole story, which kind of goes back to that. But also when you mentioned about it, having surveillance everywhere could reduce crime. That does happen on a micro level. Like you mentioned a store. They have an area where, like, things are constantly being stolen. They put a camera in front of it. And then, yes, it is true that those things might not be stolen as much, but that doesn't mean that the person who was stealing those things is going to reform, become like a preacher instead, and not steal anymore. Like, they're just going to go to another place and find a different victim, or they're going to figure out a way to adjust how they're committing crimes to obfuscate it from happening, which makes it more complicated to solve from, I guess, general policing way. And so when you end up with, like, areas where that would actually come into play with something like a flat camera, where he's like, okay, well, we have one on the block and we don't want any of these cars broken into. It's like, that just means that cars are going to get broken into more often on the next block in most cases, because people are not just going to immediately not want money anymore, not whatever reward they're getting for breaking cars. And so it's like one of those things, especially crimes like that, like petty crimes like theft and like, the things that, like a lot of, like, homeowners associations, they'll sign a contract with Flock because they want to. To reduce things like that. Like, having a surveillance camera is such a band aid, like, rather than healing an actual problem, but it just requires everybody to be on board. It is one of those things where it's, guess what? Crime and poverty are really closely connected. When you have people who are desperate, the petty crime goes way up. Like, that's plenty of research proves that. So maybe looking at the problem a little bit more proactively.
- [63:35]
A
Speaking of that, what do we do? Put signs that tell crackheads that there's copper in the cameras and have the meth community take all these things down Again, hypothetical. Just joking.
- [63:44]
B
You know what's funny to me? I remember maybe it was during the George Floyd thing or something like that, when everybody was talking about defunding the police or getting rid of police. And I remember some Texas senator or something, his entire platform was like, you don't want cops, Fine. Call a crackhead. And that was his whole thing. And it was like his, like, edgy little shtick. And it was so funny because I could think of multiple times in my life where a crime had been committed, like, on my property. I used to run a nonprofit music school. Somebody broke in, stole all the bikes. You go to a crackhead and you ask them, who took the bikes? Who steals bikes around here? Who do you see here? You're always outside waiting for crack to drop off the back of a truck or whatever it is that you're doing out there all day. But surely you saw somebody going to the alley. Yes, we did. Oh, yeah. Oh, this guy. He's the guy who steals bikes, and they sells them up at this flea market. And without police, we were able to get it back. And so it's funny because the idea here is not like, crackheads save the day all the time. The idea is that crackheads aren't scary, first of all. Like, they're crackheads. I don't understand why so many Americans right now are, like, terrified of homeless people and crackheads. Like, these are generally harmless people. It's probably more harmful to, like, approach a frat boy or something. Like, that's, like, way more dangerous in my eyes, statistically.
- [64:57]
A
I would love to see the data on that. Yeah, that would be interesting.
- [65:00]
B
Exactly. But also, that is what community policing is. I saw the crackhead every day because I walked by him, and so it was familiar. And he was happy to tell me where my bikes went when somebody stole it, where the cops would have never found it because it was Chicago and how are you going to find. Yeah, they're just like, yeah, sure, we'll fill out a report, I swear. But yeah, I mean, it kind of goes back into that where it's like if you actually have some level of community policing and if your community trusts the people who are enforcing the law and are receptive to them, I think that goes a longer way than just installing a bunch of surveillance cameras everywhere and then arresting everybody who does something wrong in front of them.
- [65:36]
A
We now live in a world where your car, your phone, and half the streetlights around you are probably generating a permanent record of your day. But don't worry, the people in these systems assure us that everything is totally under control, which historically has been a rock solid promise. Before you throw your phone into the nearest lake, use it to support our sponsors. We'll be right back. This episode is also sponsored in part by BetterHelp. Financial stress isn't always just about not having enough. Sometimes it's about feeling like no amount is enough. It's comparison pressure and that voice in your head telling you that you should be further along by now. That stuff can wear on you. Even when from the outside, everything looks fine. Even I fall victim to that. I look what I built. Instead of thinking like, this is great, my brain goes to, yeah, well, why didn't you build something even bigger, Jordan? Why isn't the show 10 times larger? That's the trap. And therapy can help you sort through that. Not because it's going to tell you how to make more money, but because it'll help you deal with the stress and anxiety that come from tying your value to achievement. BetterHelp matches you with a licensed therapist based on a short questionnaire. And if the fit is not right, you can switch anytime. I've done it myself a couple of times. They have over 30,000 therapists. They've helped more than 6 million people worldwide, and live sessions have an average of 4.9 out of 5 based on over 1.7 million client reviews. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can definitely help. Sign up and get 10% off@betterhelp.com Jordan that's better. H E L P.com Jordan all right, now for the rest of my conversation with Ben Jordan. The blowback for you is crazy. I mean, okay, you're being tracked by private investigators here and there for, I can only assume, intimidation purposes because they're not actually delivering any important data to their client. Are you being threatened by the companies at all? Like, are they saying, hey, cease and desist, and you're like, well, I'm not doing anything, so fly a kite.
- [67:21]
B
Surprisingly, no, I haven't. But I know people who have. Other people that have worked have been, like, directly threatened by the company and have gotten cease and desist and stuff. The person who runs dflock.org for example, which tries to map out where Flock cameras are, got a cease and desist. A really frivolous and stupid one in my case. I assume that they probably know that I have legal representation and that I'm also pretty closely tied in with the eff, the Electronic Frontiers foundation, which is essentially a bunch of lawyers. And also some part of them has to understand the Streisand effect is a real thing. And that, like, the number one video that I could release on my channel is Flock Safety sued me and then going over everything that happened and it would just make them look worse.
- [68:01]
A
Hey, this guy, he's full of it. He's overstating the problem. We're also suing him because we don't want him to say anything anymore. Not because he's right or anything, but just because. Anyway, let's change the subject. I mean, their lawyers are probably, like, chomping at the bit. And then somewhere somebody with more than two brain cells firing said, yeah, no, he would love it if we sued him.
- [68:19]
B
I feel like it's the other way around. I feel like the. Maybe the executives and, like, the investors and CEO are chomping at the bit, and the lawyers are like, actually, he's doing everything appropriately.
- [68:29]
A
We can sue him and it's not going to work, and he's going to make a video about it, and he's going to have a right to go into discovery and grab a bunch of documents from us that you guys don't want to release. When I do stuff about Scientology, this is always what it is. I'm like, or a cult or something. People go, aren't you worried about getting sued? And I go, yeah, but then I'll go to discovery and I'll be like, hey, so all these things we said were true, and now we have it on public record in your own writing. So sure, do it. They send a cease and desist, and I'm like, I will neither cease nor desist, but I would love to get the documents where. When your email threads and everything where you talk about how I'm saying something that's totally true and you just want me to be quiet. Let's do it. Let's dance. They don't want to do that. They don't Want to dance, they want to scare you. And when that doesn't work, that's it, man.
- [69:12]
B
Yeah, there's been moments like I've had cops come here and do weird things and stuff like that. At one point, I think it was the morning when the video came out about the security vulnerabilities. A cop randomly went to my neighbor's house and then came on my property. And at this point there had already been private investigators and stuff. And I didn't know why they were here. I just saw them and the dogs was like keeping the dogs in the house so they didn't get shot. And I was literally taking off my belt, getting rid of my valuables and like taking, you know, you're not allowed to have a belt in custody. And so, you know, stuff like that. And I was just like, all right, yeah, here's my attorney's number, here's this person, blah, blah. And then, yeah, other things where it's making sure that if the cops came or if there's some sort of frivolous thing where something happened, because honestly, if the cops did come here and arrest me, it would be over a made up charge. I've not done anything illegal in regards to this and making sure that like the animals could be cared for and stuff like that. In that sense, it's been stressful. And then people in my family and then even people who visit or like had people pet, sit and stuff like that, like they're genuinely freaked out just because you have private investigators and they're just like, there's people literally watching the house and. Yeah, sucks.
- [70:12]
A
That's. It's crazy to me. I find it unbelievable. Speaking of eff, I've worked with them before because I gave a talk at Defcon, which is a hacker conference, 15 plus years ago, and I basically had to expose how I was using LinkedIn to trick people who should know better into giving me confidential slash potentially classified information about projects at defense contractors. And the lawyer was like, here's what you can do and here's what you definitely should not do. It's like, you want to expose this so they can fix the problem, but then you don't want it to be like, and here's all the information that got exposed. And they're like, oh, we want to nail somebody to the cross. This guy just committed a crime, let's embarrass him and then nobody will do this again. Make an example out of this guy.
- [70:51]
B
There's also like the dead man's mechanism, which I'm not going to say that I have one. I'm not going to say one that I don't. But it's one of those things where it's like, yeah, if I went to jail on a frivolous charge, there is a chance that, like an exploit could go up on GitHub or there's a chance that other people in the media would release information that they've not released so far. And I've used that in videos before. Like in videos where I felt like I might get frivolously sued or something like that. But I left some details out. But it would be a big deal if they were known on things like that.
- [71:18]
A
Let their imagination run wild where they're like, oh, what's he going to do from prison? Nothing. But the guy who was on the dark web, potentially buying law enforcement accounts and found 400 open access API keys to our entire backend. That guy, yeah. All that has to happen is he has to not click a button on his desktop for three days and then maybe something happens and let your imagination run wild on what that could possibly be like pick the worst case scenario and then double it because he's been thinking about this and we haven't and that's what might happen. Or we just let the guy do the thing and fix the problems in the software.
- [71:51]
B
Yeah, that's the thing is, like, it, this is all within the legal bounds. I mean, let's just talk about, like, John Gaines, rather, like, than just me. Like, imagine if he was a black hat hacker. Imagine if, like, he got pushed to the point where, man, he just wanted to do this for his own gain and not for public safety. Imagine the damage that would have been caused. I truly do believe that if we were acting outside of that, like, Flock maybe would have already not existed. Like, it would have been bad enough. When you just think about what could have happened had we gone onto the servers and rooted around there and actually would have been a much bigger issue and it would have been disruptive for all of their clients.
- [72:26]
A
I thought about this and I was like, why hasn't that happened yet? The reason is because if China and Russia are in that back end, they don't want to take down Flock. This is the best spy network that they've had in possibly all of history where they can look at everything in all these cameras and get all the footage. Like, the last thing they want to do is dismantle it. You have 100,000 tiny spy satellites in every urban area in the United States. We're not taking this thing Down. We're going to use the crap out of this. They're the first in line to buy this data.
- [72:52]
B
Thinking about like people thinking that the drones were like Chinese spy drones and stuff. Like that drone thing we had a year and a half ago or whatever. Yeah, it is funny to think about that when we have like the fuck cameras everywhere and TikTok and everything else.
- [73:03]
A
Yeah, like DJI drones are spying on you. Cool. There's two in every neighborhood. Ish. Maybe less. There's 120,000 flock cameras. You don't need drones.
- [73:11]
B
My little conspiracy theory with that. About a year ago I worked for about six months on. It was like basically a private contract with a group that is employed by Ukraine. Like basically Ukraine set it up and as part of their defense. And it was essentially for drone defense in civilian areas. Like how could you prevent drones from exploding on a school? Things like that. And usually they are DJI drones. Like those are like the ones that are being used in that conflict. Right off the bat, it immediately threw me into the world where it's like, holy shit, Drones are a really powerful weapon. That is what modern warfare looks like. It doesn't look like what we think it looks like. It is 100% automated drone shit happening all over the place and then people like scrambling to remediate the issues. And so some of this stuff was like adversarial noise attacks on the drones and things. But when we started getting closer to that ban and like finding out what we were doing with it, where we were essentially like setting up a goalpost for DJI to say, okay, we're scared we're giving you this much info and then just not actually allowing them to do it and then just banning their drones from being imported. I thought about that and it's like happening at the same time when we're sending National Guard into cities and when we have ICE agents all over the place and yeah, I mean it's particularly when you have like groups of national guards in cities. A drone is way more powerful than a gun to somebody who's actually trying to fight that system. If you actually had a second civil war or even if you had a small insurgency, drones are the number one tool that the little guy could have in that it still checks out. To me. Like it actually is really concerning. And it's concerning to me that 2A people aren't more onto that where they're like, if we're actually protecting ourselves against a government that might take over and get rid of democracy and everything else, then we probably should have drones more than guns. Actually is a bigger threat to the military than just a dude with a ar.
- [75:00]
A
It's funny you should mention this because last night I was watching the Purge, which is a masterpiece of modern cinema and if you haven't seen it, one of the ten Purge movies, because I'd never seen them. And I was thinking like, wow, what would I do in this situation? First of all, I would absolutely get the hell out of here. But let's say I couldn't. I would fly my drone around. I want to see what's going on, and I would use it to defend myself. I'd probably have 50 of them and I'd just be zooming these things around all over the place and I don't know, dropping grenades on gangs of people in crazy scary clown masks that are headed towards my house. That's what I would be doing.
- [75:31]
B
It's so interesting. Like, I love the premise of that movie because the thought experiment that comes after for everybody. My take on it is that I feel like nobody would do anything. Everybody would just stay in. Like, even the most hardened criminals, they do. I don't want anything to do with this.
- [75:45]
A
I thought about that too. Unless you are like armed to the teeth, drug cartel love, and then you're just defending your grow house or whatever, you're not running around the city like, I'm going to shoot some random people. No.
- [75:55]
B
Yeah. If you're a drug cartel member or something like that, like, you just want to keep your income coming in. Like, that's sort of. The funny thing is, like, most of the hardened criminals that we think of, like, they're involved in it so they can make money. They're just going to become like capitalists protecting their capital. Right. I feel like only like mentally ill people would be outside.
- [76:12]
A
To be fair, that's what the Purge looked like. It was guys standing on the corner going, I am God. I choose who lives and who dies. And then they get murked by like an old lady with an AK47 who's like a middle aged woman. Or like it's a wife lighting her husband on fire and then singing nursery rhymes next to him while in a rocking chair on the street corner of Manhattan. You're like, whoever wrote this is both genius and absolutely brain dead at the same time. Like, I don't understand.
- [76:34]
B
Yeah, definitely a person who thinks of society in a very bizarre way. That the people who think that we need security cameras everywhere, that kind of is how they probably see society. I have friends who live outside of Atlanta. And just like, I have a friend who does like a jujitsu thing and I sometimes visit him in South Carolina and he'll be like, so what's Atlanta like now? Is it really bad there? And it's like, what are you talking about? It's not.
- [76:55]
A
It's turn off Newsmax, bro.
- [76:57]
B
Yeah. Like, it's actually. It's obnoxious how gentrified it is. That's how I would describe Atlanta right now. I'm not sure what you think it is. It's not a war zone. It's crazy to me that. I don't know, I mean, not to get like too political, but like, I do think that a lot of people, especially on that side of the aisle, on like the right side of the aisle, it's just like, why are you so scared of everything? Why are you so scared of immigrants? Why are you so scared of crackheads, of homeless people? Just go outside, it's fine, I promise you.
- [77:24]
A
Yeah, there's a meme I saw the other day. I think my buddy made it. I'm not sure I have to ask him, but it was essentially like New York, what people think New York is. And by people he meant like his crazy right wing relatives. And it's like Escape from New York, right? It's Mad Max. And Brooklyn is like this war zone between gangs shooting each other and throwing each other off the balcony. And then the reality of it is $11 pistachio espresso drinks. Like you can't afford your rent because it's $6,000 a month to live in a glorified walk in closet. And it's. The cities definitely have issues with unhoused people and crime, but it's not even remotely close to what it was even a few years ago. And it's nothing like you see on the news. Like you see a lot of homeless people in Hollywood or something like that, but if you look at crime stats, they're way down. That's a whole different show.
- [78:11]
B
I think I was just in LA a month ago and I was taking infrared photography of Waymos, like to see what the light that comes off of them, the invisible light spectrum. And I was like in downtown LA all night doing it. So many people who lived in la, they're like, oh, dude, you're crazy. Don't go over there, don't bring your camera over there. This and that. And it's like, not one person even asked me for money. Not one person even was like, yo, do you have an extra? Like, I ran into plenty of Unhoused people. And some of them asked me if they saw the screen on the camera, and they're like, whoa, what's that? And I was like, oh, it's like invisible light. And then other ones just talked about the weather, and I can't grasp it, how scared people are of poor people. Yeah, really, that's what it is.
- [78:49]
A
To be fair, I looked at running a place down there, and outside the building, a guy with no shirt on who was sweating profusely in the middle of winter said, yo, man, you want some batteries? And, like, held out a handful of batteries that he had found. And I was like, I don't want to live in this area.
- [79:02]
B
You turn down free batteries.
- [79:03]
A
I turned down free batteries potentially for life.
- [79:05]
B
He may have just respawned them every morning.
- [79:07]
A
That's why he was sweating. He's running on batteries, and he has an unlimited amount of batteries. But you're right, I've got friends who are youtubers that go through these areas where it's like a tent city. And I'm like, wow, that's really dangerous. And I'd be worried about getting stabbed with a needle. And they're like, man, can you just come with me on one of these? You're not going to get stabbed with a needle. People are going to offer you a smoke or a drink, or they're going to ask what you're doing, or they're going to ask why you're filming, or they're going to say, hey, can you not film me? Because I'm in the throes of the worst year of my life and I don't want to be in your video. That's all that's going to happen. Or people are going to chat you up because you're a new face, and they're sick of seeing their neighbors who they've lived with for the last three. Like, it's. That's kind of it, man. So I did go with him because I was curious. I was like, all right, I got to get some exposure therapy here and get, like, a reality check before we wrap here. I'd love to talk about this malware for music that you created, because I think it highlights your technical ability in a kind of fun, unique way.
- [79:58]
B
Yeah, the adversarial noise attacks. Yeah. I mean, essentially, I was doing a lot of research into. I just thought it was really interesting how AI hears things differently than humans do, obviously. And I've sort of been on the AI music thing since probably 2016, when Google's Magenta project first started. And I'm not a fan of the generative AI stuff. I think that you'll soon find out why I did this. But I started looking into technology where, like, for example, I could play a bird sound or, you know, whatever sound effect, but an Amazon Echo or Alexa would hear it as a command to open the garage door or something like that. So these are called targeted adversarial noise attacks. And. And so then I thought to myself, like, oh, wow, I could just put this on my music. And then when AI tries to train off of it, it'll just make it really inefficient and it'll just be like, it won't be able to figure out what's going on. And then I met with Jen Liu. He's a researcher who initially was at University of Tennessee, but now he's here in Georgia. And he was working on something similar that, like, obfuscated harmony. If AI tried to hear a chord progression, it would just hear nonsense. And so in both of those cases, the training just is super inefficient. And it actually has the capability of then making the overall model because it learns from its training. Like, it's just like this feedback thing. It actually, as it scans more content like this, it actually becomes less and less efficient on its own because it's learning off of the wrong thing. And so it's almost like a poison pill, just sort of like poisoning the AI model.
- [81:26]
A
And why do this? So that it can't take your music and create other music based on that.
- [81:31]
B
Yeah, so for me, I'm almost an IP abolitionist. Like, I like it when people steal my music. I think it's fine. I don't see a reason in preventing somebody from listening to my music or watching my content if they can't afford it. Otherwise, go nuts, have fun. But a lot of people aren't, and a lot of people are. A lot of musicians are just really tired of being treated this way by the music industry initially and now by the tech industry now it's sort of like double teaming between both of them. But they're just so tired of it that, like, a lot of musicians just aren't releasing music anymore and some of them aren't even making it. They're just, ugh, this business sucks. Like, why even do this? And I think that's actually a much bigger problem than copyright issues with AI. I think that, like, the amount of people contributing to culture lowering is a massive problem. You know, I'm not saying that it's necessarily happening in droves, but like, it's something that you would want to prevent. And so it was in more so than that. It was just like, there's all this tech shit going on right now. We have facial recognition. We have our ring cameras giving data to police. We have the Flock safety cameras. We have Amazon Echo and all these devices that are constantly listening to us and using our data for one purpose or another. And now we have any music that we put out there, AI is training off of it. Any graphics or photography that we put out there, AI's training off of it and then reselling it. And so, guess what? You can actually fight back with technology. You don't need a senator to hear your case. You don't need anybody to feel sorry for you and make a law. You can actually fight back organically with technology the same way that they're oppressing you. And so that was the reason why I did it. I feel like that was actually a much stronger statement in general. I hope that a lot of people start thinking more like that and that sort of DIY way of figuring out a way to protect themselves against things like this.
- [83:13]
A
Yeah, this is interesting. So it's essentially, to put it in practical terms, if I play your music, I hear music, but if I play your music, AI Shazam. Whatever. Listening just hears like. Or something like that.
- [83:24]
B
Yes. Mine actually can do targeted or untargeted. So, for example, if I played music that had a guitar solo over it, it could make the AI hear a harmonica or something like that. And then the harmony cloak version, that could do targeted as well, where you hear, like, the wrong chord progression. But that also could just make it, like, a lot of inharmonic tones that don't make any sense. And then it's okay. This is the country song that we scanned. So we learned how to do that. So let's move on to the next artist. And at that point, it actually may have become less efficient as a model overall.
- [83:56]
A
And they're going to have to go in there and write an algorithm to unlearn all of that, and that's going to be very difficult. Yeah, it's just an arms race.
- [84:01]
B
They can't. It's a black box. Oh, that's right.
- [84:04]
A
That's right. They can't do that.
- [84:05]
B
You got to start over.
- [84:06]
A
Ben, Jordan, thank you very much. Really interesting conversation. I love your videos. I watch ton of them. And it's not just technical flock camera stuff. I watched one the other day on why you can't get ADHD medication. I had no idea about that. All kinds of cool investigative journalism, I guess. I don't know. Can I call it that?
- [84:22]
B
Yeah, no, it is. Yeah, it is that at this point. So I.
- [84:25]
A
And it's a miracle that you're not sued into oblivion, slash in prison. But hey, there's still time.
- [84:31]
B
Yeah. Well, if I am, you know, fight with me. You got it. Whoever sets up the GoFundMe to.
- [84:36]
A
That's right.
- [84:37]
B
Yeah.
- [84:40]
A
Think you need top secret clearance to catch war criminals. In this preview, Elliot Higgins shows how everyday citizens with nothing but wi fi and curiosity are uncovering global crimes that governments tried to bury.
- [84:51]
B
Bellingcat does something called open source investigations. Thanks to smartphone technology, social media and the wealth of information we have online. Stuff like Google Maps giving you satellite imagery, ship tracking websites, plane tracking websites, all kinds of information that's accessible to you now. I started doing this in 2012 as a hobby. I just tried to figure out how
- [85:12]
A
can you prove if a video is filmed somewhere.
- [85:15]
B
And I realized that you could compare landmarks visible in the video with satellite imagery and do a kind of spot the difference fit. Now that's a technique known as geolocation. But back then it was just me playing adults. Spot the difference on social media platform. I think when we live in an era we where the truth is constantly contested, especially on the Internet, it's good to have something where you can not only point to the evidence, but the actual process you use to come to your conclusions and open it up for debate. Because there is a tendency for people just to read stuff that reinforces what they already believe and that causes a lot of problems.
- [85:48]
A
If we're going to have a debate
- [85:49]
B
about something, it should be on actual
- [85:51]
A
facts, not just the opinions of a new paper columnist.
- [85:55]
B
Just read what we do is important.
- [85:58]
A
It's not just about allowing people to
- [86:00]
B
see our working, but giving them the
- [86:01]
A
ways to actually do it themselves. And if we let the world just
- [86:05]
B
be run by people who want you to shut up, then it's going to be a very dark place indeed. For me it's really about taking open source investigation and getting as many people as possible to use it.
- [86:15]
A
Yeah, I would just say give it
- [86:16]
B
a go if you're interested because that's what I did and like turned out quite well.
- [86:20]
A
To hear how bellingcat is using open source sleuthing to expose war crimes and rewrite the rules of intelligence, check out episode 1192 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. If there's one takeaway from this conversation, it's that surveillance technology almost never shows up as something scary, it shows up as something helpful, something efficient, something convenient, something that promises to make us all safer. And sometimes it does. But the real issue isn't whether the technology works. It's who controls it, who secures it, and what happens when enormous databases about our lives are built faster than anyone bothers to protect them. Because once systems like this exist, they don't go away. They just get bigger. So next time somebody says, hey, I've got nothing to hide, it might be worth asking a better question. Who gets to decide what counts as suspicious? Five years from now, all things Ben Jordan will be in the show notes@jordanharbinger.com advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show all@jordanharbinger.Com deals please consider supporting those who support the show. Don't forget about six minute networking as well. It's over@6minutenetworking.com I forgot to shill it this episode, but you've heard me do it a million times. So there it is. I'm ordanharbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn and this show is created in association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tata Sidlowskis, Ian Baird and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in the hacking and tech angle, the privacy angle, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn and we'll see you next time.
- [88:06]
B
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- [88:34]
A
Quick break to put you onto another show you should be listening to. If you enjoyed my interview with Javier Leva about romance scams back on episode 1195, you'll want to check out his podcast Pretend. Javier is an investigative journalist who lives in the world of lies, manipulation and deception and but he's still a nice guy. And on Pretend, he doesn't just tell these stories, he gets inside them. He talks directly to scammers, cult leaders, and the people they've conned. He just has a way of getting them to reveal things that'll make you go, wait, okay, you're just gonna admit that? And the cases are bananas. A cyber stalking story where the victims turned out to be the stalkers. A true crime podcaster accused of harassing victims for content? No, it's not him and Javier spending a day with a cult leader. Yes, including an exorcism. That must have been a fun afternoon. Plus, he digs into the real Frank Abagnale from Catch Me if youf Can. Let's just say the movie took some liberties. Pretend has been featured on Netflix's Don't Pick up the Phone, Spotify tagged it as a breakout hit, and it's consistently up there with the top true crime shows. Search Pretend wherever you get your podcasts.