Loading summary
Transcript137 lines
- [00:00]
Beau Friedlander
Where is Daredevil?
- [00:03]
Ben Jordan
A minor. Don't miss the return of Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again.
- [00:08]
Podcast Host (Ad Reader)
So what's next?
- [00:09]
Ben Jordan
I feel liberated.
- [00:11]
Expert Guest (Technologist/Scientist)
We're gonna take this city back over medicated.
- [00:14]
Ben Jordan
In an all new season now streaming only on Disney.
- [00:18]
Podcast Host (Ad Reader)
They're hunting us. It's time we started hunting them.
- [00:21]
Beau Friedlander
I can work with them. This should be tons of fun.
- [00:26]
Ben Jordan
Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again now streaming only on Disney.
- [00:31]
Beau Friedlander
We see something moving 40 miles away.
- [00:34]
Ben Jordan
The head of a human being. I'm telling you, it's moving. And then all of a sudden, 45
- [00:39]
Beau Friedlander
minutes later, he moved a lot, stood
- [00:42]
Ben Jordan
up and they said, we have him. And that was really the beginning of something incredible.
- [00:48]
Beau Friedlander
This week we're talking about mind blowing new technology. I don't know.
- [00:55]
Ben Jordan
I think this is the biggest military operation of my lifetime. Like this thing just popped up.
- [00:59]
Beau Friedlander
You don't know what they're up to.
- [01:01]
Ben Jordan
The smartbeat senso. They call it Ghost Murmur. The CIA used a futuristic new tool called Ghost Murmur to find and rescue the second American airman who was shot down in southern Iran.
- [01:12]
Beau Friedlander
The rescue mission involved 155 aircraft, including four bombers, 64 fighters, 48 refueling tankers, 13 rescue aircraft, and there's probably a lot more. And according to the President of the United States, some top secret technology to rescue the airman, codename Dude44 Bravo.
- [01:34]
Ben Jordan
We gotta look into this like this is science fiction. This is full minority report science fiction level technology. They can find a guy's heart rate.
- [01:44]
Beau Friedlander
Is Ghost Murmur ripped from the pages of a spy thriller? Is it real and can it be used against you and me? That's anyone's guess. But that's what we're going to talk about this week. I'm Beau Friedlander and this is what the hack, the podcast that asks. In a world where your data is everywhere, how do you stay safe online? Last week news broke about top secret technology called Ghost Murmur. Classified tool that can supposedly detect a human heart from miles away using quantum sensors and parsed by AI. It sounds generic, but whatever. It was reportedly deployed for the first time in the field to locate a wounded, a very badly wounded American airman hiding in a mountain crevice 7,000ft up deep inside Iran, invisible to enemy forces. Sort of. I think they were closing in on them. But not to the CIA.
- [02:53]
Ben Jordan
According to the New York Post here, secret technology uses long range quantum magnetometry to find the electromagnetic fingerprint of a human heartbeat and pairs the data with artificial intelligence software to isolate the signature from Background noise.
- [03:11]
Beau Friedlander
Okay, so if this technology exists, what happens when it's pointed at us? Now, when I think of people who truly understand how technology gets used in strange and unexpected ways. Audio sensors, surveillance, signal processing, acoustic manipulation, I think of Ben Jordan. Hi, Ben.
- [03:34]
Expert Guest (Technologist/Scientist)
How's it going?
- [03:36]
Beau Friedlander
It's going fine. I've been having dumb conversations all day about ghost murmur.
- [03:43]
Expert Guest (Technologist/Scientist)
Oh, boy.
- [03:44]
Beau Friedlander
Ben is a musician, a technologist, a YouTuber, and someone who has gone far deeper down far more rabbit holes than anyone I know. I read the article. I heard the news with the rest of the world. It was suspect because it was in the New York Post. I wrote to a researcher at the University of Maryland and he immediately wrote back, said, no comment. And I thought, aha, it's real.
- [04:11]
Expert Guest (Technologist/Scientist)
Yeah, I mean, it's. It's pretty far fetched. I. I mean, and I've heard like different versions of it or like different claims that somebody could be identified by their heartbeat or that it's just detecting a heartbeat remotely. The idea of detecting a heartbeat remotely doesn't seem that crazy to me just because, you know, with thermal cameras and like, I've done stuff with kind of like motion exaggeration when trying to make like visual microphones and I mean, that, that stuff's pretty crazy. You could see your pulse in your wrist, like just by holding up your wrist. And it works with motion tracking and so it's like, yeah, I suppose that could work. But beyond that, I'm. I don't. I don't see what it has to do with like quantum magnetromity or magnet. I can't even say the word. I read it, couldn't either say it a lot. I. Magnetometry. Yeah, magnetometry.
- [05:00]
Podcast Host (Ad Reader)
All right.
- [05:00]
Expert Guest (Technologist/Scientist)
Yeah. It just doesn't. There would just be so much noise and then, you know that. Then the next after the magic word, quantum, which makes people's imaginations go crazy, then AI. Well, AI can reduce the noise. It's like, no, not at that level. If it could, then you'd be able to wear headphones and they would operate as an eeg. What was supposedly the time of day that this happened?
- [05:25]
Ben Jordan
Oh, my gosh.
- [05:26]
Beau Friedlander
I don't know.
- [05:27]
Expert Guest (Technologist/Scientist)
Because if the sun was out, I can tell you absolutely not under any circumstances. Just because the sun creates so much noise that like, I mean, there's people who use like shortwave radio and ham radio to bounce off the ionosphere and you know, they have to like, do it at certain parts of the night to make sure that the sun, because it creates so much interference, even with something as broad as that, I'm just
- [05:49]
Beau Friedlander
curious, do you think it could have had anything they're finding him could have had anything to do with the Boeing made combat survivor evader locator beacon that he also used while he was there in the desert?
- [06:02]
Expert Guest (Technologist/Scientist)
Yeah, I suppose if you have a beacon, that will make it a lot easier. And also, like, again, if you just have a thermal camera, like, if I go out in my woods and, you know, I have coyotes in my yard or whatever, deer in the distance or something, I could. I could see them in pitch black just from the heat signature coming off their body. That works depending on what the temperature was like. If the temperature was, like, cold out, which I know it can get in the desert at night. And with, like, if it's a desert and you don't have a bunch of trees over you, then, yeah, that would be easy. I mean, you could literally be like, oh, there's a red pixel down there.
- [06:35]
Beau Friedlander
There he is right there.
- [06:36]
Expert Guest (Technologist/Scientist)
Right.
- [06:38]
Beau Friedlander
So here's what gets me about Ghost. I don't care if it's real or not. I assume there's something that Trump half heard in a brief briefing, and what he said about it was completely wrong. What gets me is that when I read that New York Post piece, my first reaction wasn't disbelief. It was something closer to, of course they have that. Of course something like that exists. And then I was like, yikes. Like, for real yikes. That reaction scared me more than the story itself, though, because I've been paying attention to surveillance technology for years. I've talked to researchers, I've talked to hackers. I've talked to people who build this stuff and people who try to stop it. And I still read that article and felt the pull. I felt it in my chest in a totally bad way. The technology is moving faster than our ability to understand it. So it's not hard to believe that there could be some tech that makes the line between science fiction and the Pentagon press release, you know, quote, unquote, Pentagon press release go kind of fuzzy, I guess that's the story for me. What else can they do? How else am I vulnerable? Because even if Ghost Murmur is exactly what it sounds like, which is very good name for a very good story, but probably not very real, the fact that Joe Rogan lost his mind over it, that the physicist I called at a big university wrote back after eight minutes saying, no comment. All that says, we're at a weird moment here. We're ready to be defeated. We've been trained by the last 20 years of actual surveillance. Revelation, Snowdin Prism, Stingrays, Fog Reveal, Clearview. To believe that whatever we think the government can do, the truth is probably worse. And we can't pump the brakes because there is no car. And the people who own that car, that doesn't exist, that's roaring towards the finish line of what's left of our privacy, are not open to being asked questions. So here's a When did they stop lying about there being nothing to worry about? Okay. Ben doesn't seem to think this is the most pressing threat when it comes to personal identification, re Identification, surveillance. And, yeah, I'd like to believe that Ghost Murmur wasn't the main tech solution that found dude44 Bravo. I don't think it was. But I don't have a PhD in quantum physics or quantum computing, and neither does Ben.
- [09:07]
Ben Jordan
This does work. I mean, you can measure a heartbeat with one of these magnetometers.
- [09:13]
Beau Friedlander
So I reached out to Chad Orzel, an associate professor in physics and astronomy at Union College, to see what he had to say about it.
- [09:22]
Ben Jordan
But you have to butt it right up against the person's chest.
- [09:24]
Beau Friedlander
What's the distance you're talking? Centimeters.
- [09:26]
Ben Jordan
Centimeters against the chest, like in contact with your skin. So, you know, 5, 10 centimeters from your heart. And you can pick up a very clear heartbeat signal using this. And, you know, that is useful for some medical applications. There's some circumstances in which it's more useful to measure the magnetic properties than the, like, EKG that they, you know, that they hook you up in at your regular doctor's office and, you know, which is electrical. And there's some pros and cons to doing the magnetic thing that I don't entirely understand, but people assure me that there are cases where that's the way to go.
- [10:10]
Beau Friedlander
My first reaction to hearing about Ghost Murmur was I reached out to my friend Ben Jordan, who does explainer videos on YouTube and takes things apart and is really interested in surveillance. And he said, not nonsense, but not right.
- [10:31]
Ben Jordan
Yeah, I think there's. There's. I mean, the most charitable interpretation I could come up with is that there's some kind of game of telephone going on where, you know, somebody used some buzzwords, and then another person used some buzzwords, and then the person who talked to the reporter, you know, misused them in a third way, and then, you know, the reporter did something else with it. And, you know, the. The thing that got reported in the Post about, you know, picking one person's particular heartbeat out of, you know, from a Distance of miles seems like complete nonsense, but I think there might be some, some pieces of the description might actually have some relevance to whatever it is that they actually did to a
- [11:23]
Beau Friedlander
reasonable reader of that article would walk away thinking that this tool, ghost murmur, could be brought to the big house in Ann Arbor and you would be able to identify Chad's heartbeat.
- [11:37]
Ben Jordan
Yeah.
- [11:39]
Beau Friedlander
You know, among all the heartbeats in that stadium, Chad's heartbeat. And, and, and, and then, you know, obviously deliver up some sort of horrible payload or pick you up.
- [11:49]
Ben Jordan
Yeah, yeah. One, one or the other, depending on, you know, what kind of day they're having.
- [11:55]
Beau Friedlander
So. But, but, but do you think I'm alone in thinking that that was the message of that, that was kind of the takeaway was that this, this technology works? I mean, there are buzzwords like artificial intelligence. That was one. And quantum mechanics was in play. So, like, you know, whenever I hear the word quantum, I think, oh, well, it's certainly not anything I can understand. And it explains everything.
- [12:18]
Ben Jordan
Yeah.
- [12:18]
Beau Friedlander
So tell me, talk to me about, like, let's back up a step because we, I think, I think a reasonable person can understand why that was a big statement to make. And I believe this. The, to be precise, I think it was 40 miles. They said they were able to hear this heartbeat in the wilderness. And for me, just, I was like, this is more Old Testament kind of narrative than it is real, particularly when
- [12:46]
Ben Jordan
you, once you get the 40 in there. Right. So 40 days, 40 nights, 100%.
- [12:51]
Beau Friedlander
So, so tell me, like, what, what, what are we talking about? What is the technology they're even bringing up here?
- [12:57]
Ben Jordan
So what they allude to is they mentioned two things that are buzzwordy. One is, is artificial intelligence, and the other is quantum magnetometry. And the idea of quantum magnetometry is just, you know, it's, it's in the root words. Right. It is used in quantum mechanics to make very precise measurements of magnets. So, you know, you're, you're looking for really, really tiny magnetic fields. And this is a thing that, that people in quantum physics do all the time, because atoms and atom like things in quantum mechanics are sort of exquisitely sensitive to very weak magnetic fields.
- [13:40]
Beau Friedlander
They're measuring very small variations of, I would imagine, energy or packets of something or other that are, that are, Is it possible that you can reverse engineer the butterflies wings flapping in India that creates the storm in Massachusetts by saying the opposite? Is saying like, okay, yes, atoms are going to be affected by that man's heartbeat in the mountains of Iran, and they're going to continue rippling out and affect other. All the other atoms. And now the Pentagon has a way of measuring that.
- [14:11]
Ben Jordan
I think that's what the claim sounds like by the time it ended up in the. In the New York Post story. That's the thing that I saw. That's what it sounds like. But it is a very tiny signal. And if you go farther away, every time you double the distance away from the heart, you decrease the size of the signal by a factor of eight. So if you have a signal, you go twice as far away, you have one eighth the signal that you started with four times far away, and so on, you're at 164th. It decreases very rapidly. So, you know, by the time you're a meter away, it's already tricky to measure right in contact with your skin. By the time you're a meter away, it's heroic effort to measure. And if you're a kilometer away, it's comically impossible.
- [15:17]
Beau Friedlander
Now, what happens in the. Let's say you're half a meter away, but there are other people in the room. I know enough about quantum mechanics to know that if you introduce anything else into the situation, it changes the situation, right? So.
- [15:31]
Ben Jordan
So that's where there's plausibly, you know, you could say there's plausibly an. An AI element where I'm doing the wiggly fingers for quote marks, because it's not really like an AI. It would be some kind of machine learning, pattern recognition sort of thing. And there's already a lot of that going on in. In just the, you know, if it's butted right up against your chest to pick out the heartbeat signal from all the other things that make tiny little fluctuations in the magnetic field. They're doing some fairly sophisticated signal processing to, you know, pull out the one signal that they're interested in from all the others. And so, you know, when they do these experiments, there's a person who's being tested, whose heartbeat they're measuring. There's usually like a grad student or a postdoc supervising the experiment. They're, you know, not picking up that person's heart, which is some combination of them standing far enough away. And, you know, you're doing a little bit of signal processing to make sure you're seeing the one that you want to see and not seeing the other one.
- [16:36]
Beau Friedlander
So, but if we go to the biblical version and we're 40.
- [16:39]
Ben Jordan
40 kilometers away.
- [16:41]
Beau Friedlander
40. Whatever. Yeah, 40 rods, 40 cubits away. I imagine there's probably some sort of Mouse in the way and there's probably birds flying around.
- [16:53]
Ben Jordan
There's all kinds of things at that distance scale.
- [17:11]
Beau Friedlander
What does that do to the experiment? What does it do?
- [17:14]
Ben Jordan
It makes it really incredibly noisy. You're trying to pick out a signal that's gotten, you know, exponentially smaller as you're going farther and farther away. You're trying to pull that out of a background that is extremely complicated and has lots and lots of things that are making little tiny wiggles in the magnetic field at the point where your sensor is.
- [17:36]
Beau Friedlander
So the signal to noise ratio is incredibly high.
- [17:39]
Ben Jordan
Yeah, yeah, it's. It's an incredibly tiny signal and a vast amount of noise.
- [17:45]
Beau Friedlander
Is there a version of this where you're wrong? That's coming up after the break.
- [18:00]
Ad Voice
You tell yourself no one wants your college era band tees, but on Depop, people are searching for exactly what you've got. You once paid a small fortune for them at merch stands. Now a teenager who calls them vintage will offer that same small fortune back. Sell them easily on Depop, just snap a few photos and we'll take care of the rest. Who knew your questionable music taste would be a money making machine? Your style can make you cash. Start selling on Depop, where taste recognizes taste.
- [18:38]
Beau Friedlander
The. The source that the Post talked to said it's like hearing a voice in a stadium, except that the stadium is a thousand square miles of desert. Fine. So there's the mice and stuff, birds. Okay. So in the right conditions, if your heart is beating, we will find you. All right. That's ominous. It sounds cool. It feels like, I feel like they were talking to like somebody who felt like he wanted Tom Cruise to play him in the movie.
- [19:02]
Ben Jordan
Yes, very much so. So I think, you know, the plausible elements of this are you could be doing something that makes the signal much larger. Right. If you're trying to pick up an individual heartbeat, I don't believe that. That, you know, just the magnetic field created by the beating heart of one pilot in, you know, many square kilometers of desert. I don't believe that anybody has a sensor that'll pick that up. Something that the person could be carrying on them that would make an artificial signal that is vastly stronger than the heartbeat of a single person that you then pick up with some technology along the lines of quantum magnetometry and some sophisticated signal processing that you could squint at and call AI That I could believe that there's something going on like that.
- [20:03]
Beau Friedlander
But however, weirdly enough, there was a line in that article about the missing airman activating a Boeing made combat survivor evader locator beacon.
- [20:20]
Ben Jordan
Right. And it.
- [20:21]
Beau Friedlander
Okay, so which one was it? Was it the flare they shot off into the sky or the heartbeat?
- [20:28]
Ben Jordan
Yeah, I suspect they had something else that was doing. And there could plausibly even be some quantum sensing kind of element to it where you make some artificial electromagnetic signal that has characteristics that make it really stand out from the background. And you pick it up with an exquisitely sensitive detector at a very long range. And, you know, that could be a thing that's portable on a person's body that would enable you to home in on them in a very effective way. I could believe that there's some element of that. And they're dressing it up a little bit to make it sound sexier by bringing in quantum mechanics and artificial intelligence as key elements of this. To make it sound cooler than just like, yeah, the guy had a beacon. And we. We zoomed in on that.
- [21:25]
Beau Friedlander
What does the enhanced version that you're talking about look like? Just walk me through it. I mean, we know there was a beacon there, and we don't know how that beacon works, but we have to assume it works like some sort of beacon, you know, that we can imagine. It sends a signal. Probably not an airtag, but. And then we have this idea that there's quantum magnetometry being used to identify a quantum level ripple at the atomic level 40 miles away.
- [21:54]
Ben Jordan
To make an analogy to another very complicated area of. Of science, right? There's, you know, radio astronomers do these SETI projects, right? They're looking for alien signals. And the thing that you look for there is, you know, there are billions of things in the universe that are spewing radio waves in all directions. What you look for as a signature of an artificial signal is something that really stands out from the background that most naturally occurring things make. Kind of a big, broad smear of many different frequencies of radio waves coming out with all different intensities. And they do complicated things, and they're very wide and complex. What you would do if you're trying to be detected or to have somebody else know that you're there, is you make a signal that is very, very simple, that has a very narrow range of frequencies. It's very intense in a small region and has some simple pattern to it.
- [22:59]
Beau Friedlander
It repeats like S.O.S.
- [23:02]
Ben Jordan
yeah, yeah. So like a Morse code signal is the classic example of this. You know, you're doing it. You're doing this at radio frequency. That's very narrow. It's not spread over A huge range. So this is why when they first discovered pulsars, these rapidly rotating neutron stars that they were initially tagged LGM for little green men, because the signal sort of has the characteristics that you want. It's a, it's a periodic repeating signal that happens very rapidly and is in a pretty narrow band of frequency, at least the early detections. And so that seems like something that could be artificial. So that's probably the kind of thing you would do if you want a beacon for, you know, homing in on a downed pilot.
- [23:49]
Expert Guest (Technologist/Scientist)
Right.
- [23:49]
Ben Jordan
You, you make some signal that is very much not like, you know, the heartbeat of a human. And there's lots of humans around. The heartbeat of, you know, mice and deer and goats and whatever else is, is in that part of the world. You make something that is a very simple, very sharp, well defined signal that's pretty intense, that goes out. And then the most important thing is, you know, what that signal should look like. So you can go and pattern match in that. You know, you record all of the changes in the magnetic field that are happening. And you say, I am looking for something at this particular frequency that has these characteristics and I look for that pattern and then sort of home in on that.
- [24:37]
Beau Friedlander
Now if the heart thing did work, let's just say it works. Would it work better if you had a sample of the heartbeat of every single airman that was going into dangers, into harm's way?
- [24:53]
Ben Jordan
I mean you could, you know, you could, that would be helpful kind of characteristic, you know, like, okay, we've got, you know, a record of like in the, the movie Hunt for Red October where they record like the snippet of the, the submarine. And then they're matching it to, you know, all of the, the recordings of submarines that they, they other submarines. And they identify it by well, that this sounds like the engine of that one.
- [25:19]
Beau Friedlander
And so let's, let's just say that, you know, because it's the Pentagon, they know what an American heart sounds like. They're like, that's an American, that's an American. That's, that's not, that's not, that's not a. Yeah, it's not a goat. So let's just say that is the case and that we don't know that they have this crazy quantum magnetometry sniffing device that has also been pre fed every single airman who's going over hostile territory. How well do you think it would work?
- [25:47]
Ben Jordan
You know, I think that that would be an enormously challenging thing because just, you know, even a normal Person in normal circumstances, your heart rate changes somewhat substantially depending on what you're doing, right? If I, you know, if I get up and go into the other room and get myself a cup of coffee, right, My heart rate's going to increase as I go over there. If I come back and I drink caffeinated beverages, it's going to probably increase in a different way. If I, you know, exercise, you know, and then if I'm like, I just crashed my plane, you know, running through the desert trying to get away from people, that heart rate isn't going to look very much like that heartbeat isn't going to look all that similar to, you know, what was recorded in a unmarked office park in Northern Virginia by the CIA. So, all right, so let's grade it. Really challenging in that.
- [26:39]
Beau Friedlander
Yeah, I hear you now. So let's grade this. All right, now I'm going to ask you, just don't overthink this. So we have the beacon model where there's a simple, simple signal being repeated over one channel. And that's how we find people. Ten is we'll likely find that person. One is we won't. Where are you going to put it?
- [27:02]
Ben Jordan
If you're doing a beacon kind of model, I would say, you know, that's, that's a pretty well tested idea. You know, some like nine kind of, kind of range. Right. We can, we're really good at homing in on, on artificial signals if you can. As long as you have something like clearly identifiable that you can pick out
- [27:22]
Beau Friedlander
of the background magnetometry. Now, we are not touching skin above a heart. We are 40 miles away and we have an incredible machine that no one has ever seen. It's amazing. It's just unbelievable. It's amazing. I don't know how to talk like him, but you know what I mean. So the chances, 10 being the best, one being the least best, one
- [27:53]
Ben Jordan
less than one.
- [27:54]
Beau Friedlander
So you would go negative numbers, you would put it up.
- [27:57]
Ben Jordan
I don't believe that that could be. That you could have a sensor sensitive enough to be picking out an individual heartbeat in the desert.
- [28:05]
Beau Friedlander
I don't believe that. Now, I reached out to somebody yesterday who I was sort of surprised because he came up as somebody that I should talk to about this. I wrote to him at 4:36pm saying, Yada, yada, yada. Same thing I said to you, given your lab's work, I'd love to have you on to talk about this technology. Would you be up for a conversation? And he immediately wrote, I have a conflict of interest related to this matter. So I will decline. And that was eight minutes later.
- [28:50]
Ben Jordan
Yeah, that's.
- [28:56]
Beau Friedlander
It was one Ron Walsworth from the University of Maryland.
- [29:00]
Ben Jordan
Oh, I know Ron.
- [29:02]
Beau Friedlander
Now what? Like, is it because he created this sniffer or because he thinks it's nonsense? But he can't say that because he works for people who make stuff like that, I think.
- [29:13]
Ben Jordan
So it's a combo of he probably just doesn't want to like, doesn't want to talk. But also I think he has contracts that are funded by the people who build these kinds of things and so would not want to accidentally say anything and.
- [29:37]
Beau Friedlander
Okay, so ghost murmur, at least for now, seems like something we don't really need to be worried about. But is there anything in the realm of spycraft that is real, that is like something we might want to think about as you know, if you're so don't worry about your heartbeat being picked out in the middle of the big house during the Ohio State Michigan game. Probably not going to happen. But do worry about this.
- [30:00]
Ben Jordan
I would say the big killer app for a long time now has been the idea of using quantum mechanics to do quantum computation that could, could crack codes. So there are a lot of modern cryptosystems are based on it being hard to do certain kinds of math problems. And if you could make those problems easier to do, suddenly these codes would fall apart. And that has implications for national security. Though most of those people have moved to post quantum codes already. It has implications for the financial system. And so spies and bankers put a lot of money into quantum computing research in an effort to find out if it's possible to make a quantum computer that would enable you to crack these kinds of encryption. There's been a lot of progress in quantum computing over the last five to 10 years. And that's an area where something could happen relatively quickly that would maybe have some implications for that sort of thing.
- [31:10]
Beau Friedlander
And we're talking about something that could crack end to end encryption.
- [31:16]
Ben Jordan
Most of those systems are doing something fancier that that's harder. It's more like it's cracking like RSA encryption. Your public key crypto systems, which are the things that you, you know, you use to, they enable like the really open web, right? That I can go and I can, I can send my credit card to any number of retailers because there's this public key method of encrypting the message so that only they can read it.
- [31:46]
Beau Friedlander
It's, it's more, it's more on the commerce side and the banking side.
- [31:49]
Ben Jordan
That, that kind of. That kind of thing, that area. The other thing worry about in these sorts of technologies is these. A lot of these quantum ideas are good at kind of pattern matching. And so looking at, you know, it's closely related to a lot of the LLM stuff that goes on with these. These AI wiggly fingers for quote marks, AI models where you're.
- [32:19]
Beau Friedlander
Because that's all pattern matching.
- [32:20]
Ben Jordan
All of that is pattern matching. You're looking at, you know, analyses of traffic or things like that. And you can do some very clever things with those kinds of systems that are a little scary of, you know, like de. Anonymizing things that we would prefer to remain anonymous.
- [32:37]
Beau Friedlander
Right.
- [32:38]
Ben Jordan
And that is kind of a. It's a data processing problem because the scale of information of all of the transactions of all of the people is an incredibly gigantic data set. If you have a way to sift through that very quickly and look for patterns of activity that you might want to and attribute them to particular people, that can have some scary implications.
- [33:08]
Beau Friedlander
And we've seen researchers like Yves de Montjoy in France, and there's plenty of people in the States working on this too, show exactly how that reidentification process occurs. And it's scary because it really only requires for data points.
- [33:23]
Ben Jordan
Yeah. And it's, you know, the reason it's not done at scale is that it's, you know, it doesn't require all that much for any one person, but there are a lot of people. And, you know, to do it for all of the people in the United States would be, you know, computationally overwhelming. But if you could speed that up, then, you know, then you can be in a situation where they can, you know, you could worry about somebody tracking everybody.
- [33:51]
Beau Friedlander
So, you know, looking at the way that quantum mechanics and quantum computing can be used or deployed in the realm of data, we're still talking about traditional surveillance. Really just more effective or faster?
- [34:05]
Ben Jordan
Pretty much, yeah. It's the same. You know, you'd be trying to break codes to read messages that you can't read, or to identify patterns of activity that allow you to track down particular people, but you're not doing anything really qualitatively different.
- [34:24]
Expert Guest (Technologist/Scientist)
Right.
- [34:25]
Ben Jordan
And I should also make a note that we have friends who, one of them used to work in Naval intelligence, and we were talking about this one time, and he said that the thing to keep in mind is that the number of codes that have ever been broken by mathematical cryptography is approximately zero. Like, you know, the, the, you know, everybody. They talk about hacking the enigma machine and in World War II and that sort of thing. But, you know, Polish commandos captured an Enigma, a working Enigma machine and delivered it to the British. And that's how they figured out how to, you know, how the thing was put together. And they, you know, some submarine commanders in the German navy reused one time pads that enabled them to back out. You know, they did something very dumb that made it possible to crack the code. Like it wasn't that people figured it out purely through math and fancy computing. And that's remained true largely up to the present day. He had an interesting taxonomy of types of cryptography that were things like, you know, black bag cryptography where you, you sneak into somebody's office and install a keylogger on their computer and that you just get their password that way. Or there's rubber hose cryptography where they kidnap you and just beat on you until you tell them what your password is and then they get access to your messages or bag of money cryptography where they just buy it from you. Or my favorite the categories was dumb shit cryptography where they break into your office and they find the post it that has your password on it.
- [36:13]
Beau Friedlander
Right.
- [36:13]
Ben Jordan
And you know, like, you do something completely idiotic. And that's mostly how people who are actual spies crack codes is not by doing anything really fancy, is just exploiting human weaknesses of various kinds.
- [36:27]
Beau Friedlander
Well, you heard it here first, so from a physicist, dumb shitography is what's really going to get you.
- [36:33]
Ben Jordan
That's. That's mostly what does people in is. Yeah. Like, yeah, I had, I couldn't remember the strong password, so I had it written on a piece of tape, you know, on the, on the drawer in my desk. And, you know, that's how it got broken.
- [36:49]
Beau Friedlander
Yeah. And my home address was online. Yeah.
- [36:53]
Ben Jordan
So exactly.
- [36:56]
Beau Friedlander
The thing is, I understand why people want Ghost Murmur to be real. There's something almost comforting about a threat so unavoidable. Supervillain technology with a supervillain name that finds you by your heartbeat. Game over. Nothing you can do about that. But what's actually happening to your privacy doesn't work like that. It's not a beam pointed at you from 40 miles away being parsed by AI. It's more like house paint. Every day the sun hits it. Some days it rains, some days it's cold, it's hot. The paint cracks, the click, the location ping. Because you haven't told apps to stop knowing where you are in real time. The search you did at midnight and forgot about that is resurrected on social media. The Next day, the purchase that was broadcast to an entire ecosystem of products and services. The app you said yes to without reading why it wanted your contacts. None of it feels like surveillance when it's happening. It feels like the weather. And the one day something pops up that skeeves you to the bone. An ad knows too much about you, the price has changed for no reason that at least you can identify. There's a knock at your door or someone just kicks your door down. It's too late. Something way creepier than Ghost Murmur already exists. It's called big data. That's why I can't stop thinking about Ghost Murmur because it's not a big worry. But the attention that it gets makes me absolutely crazy because there's nothing exotic about the actual threat. Ghost Murmur seems like a non issue. What should people be worried about?
- [39:03]
Expert Guest (Technologist/Scientist)
I think breadcrumbs. I think that people don't really realize how damaging it is until they actually realize how damaging it is when their insurance rate goes up for some reason that they don't understand. I mean, a lot of people, I just tell them to go to LexisNexis or something and see how much data they have about you, just one of those companies, and then know that that's the data that's being used by your insurance company and now unfortunately being used by the federal government and the NSA and the FBI and whoever else they're purchasing all this data and then adding that to your file. And so you have to ask yourself, like, did meta tracking you on your visit when you explored some weird fetish on pornhub? And then that ended up in your, you know, in this massive data broker's file of you. And now the, the federal government or your local police even could be looking at that and using that to possibly incriminate you for something that you didn't do. Like all this stuff is happening and I feel like it's just so complicated that we don't realize it's not as cut and dry. And we just look at, we look at things like surveillance, even when it's a camera in our house as like, you know, it's going to keep us safe from this thing. It's good, you know, in case something bad happens, but it really doesn't in most of those cases, usually it's just sort of making you more vulnerable. I mean, in a weird way, it kind of reminds me of Havana Syndrome too. It's like people got. People seem to be really obsessed with the idea of the government using sonic weapons on them or Something like that. And it's like, no, the government's using, like, actual weapons against you. Like, if we're at the point right now where you could say something on Facebook and. And you'll have an FBI agent show up to your house with the gun, and that's. They'll just do that. They don't need the sonic weapon.
- [40:54]
Beau Friedlander
Oh, my God. Oh, my God. It's like, you know, it's like, wait a second. It's like that Instagram's listening to you, you know, because you were thinking about, you know, all of a sudden, there's a grill that you didn't. You know, that only you thought about. But you didn't Google. You sure you didn't Google it? You sure he didn't, like.
- [41:08]
Expert Guest (Technologist/Scientist)
Yeah. You sure he didn't, like, Google a bunch of meat to cook out and, like, a bunch of other things? And you know how to.
- [41:13]
Ben Jordan
Or likes and meat on Instagram, right?
- [41:16]
Expert Guest (Technologist/Scientist)
Yeah, Yeah. I mean, that's. That's. I think about that a lot. Because it does. That's the thing that everybody's scared of when really their breadcrumbs are causing all of that. And they're not thinking about the breadcrumbs. They're thinking about this. Oh, what if the microphone's just listening to me 24 7? It's like, well, if it helped them, it would. But you already give them all this data, so they don't need it. That's the reason it's not recording you 24 7.
- [41:47]
Beau Friedlander
I am at some point gonna hold up an airtag and say, this is how they did.
- [41:54]
Ben Jordan
Could easily be, you know, could easily be like, yeah, there's basically an error tag on the guy's flight suit.
- [41:59]
Beau Friedlander
And.
- [42:00]
Ben Jordan
And we found that. And, you know, but we. We convinced some reporter that it was quantum magnetometry.
- [42:06]
Beau Friedlander
And it's kind of like, you know, like in. In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where there's a Frenchman at the top of the parapet. And. And they say. And they asked if we have a. A Holy Grail. And he said, what did you tell him? He said, I told him we got one.
- [42:19]
Ben Jordan
So they all laugh. Yeah, exactly.
- [42:22]
Beau Friedlander
You know, and then they throw a cow. But maybe this was something that was misheard or just, like, nonsense. Let's see what will stick. Like crazy spaghetti, Psycho spaghetti. Just throw it in a cabinet.
- [42:37]
Ben Jordan
Yeah. And that's a business in which, you know, they do that kind of thing. They'll just throw some stuff out there just to see who writes it down.
- [42:44]
Beau Friedlander
It could have just Been misinformation for the sake of freaking out the Iranians.
- [42:47]
Ben Jordan
Yeah, they could. Could do that too. It's. It's. You know, those people play. Play weird games.
- [43:08]
Beau Friedlander
And now it's time for the Tinfoil Swan, our paranoid takeaway to keep you safe on and offline. This week, skip the quantum magnetometry and go to LexisNexis. I want you to go there and request your consumer disclosure report. Just like Ben said, it's free, it's your legal right, and it will tell you more about what people know about you people. I use that term lightly, loosely anyway, than any classified technology the CIA may or may not have. Once. And once you've had a good look and recovered from the shock of what's on that, that report there. Opt out. LexisNexis has an opt out form. It's not elegant, it's not very interesting. You're gonna have to just slog your way through it, but it works. And it removes you from the data they sell to insurers, landlords, and yes, law enforcement. Two steps. Look at the file, then close it. Be open, be ready. Stay focused on what matters and most importantly, stay safe. See you next week. This episode of what the Hack was produced by me and Andrew Steven, who also did the editing. Our theme music is by Andrew Stephen. If you think you heard Ben Jordan's music in the mix, you're right. There's some other stuff, but there's some Ben Jordan too. Check him out on Bandcamp or wherever you get your stuff. What? The Hack is a production of Deleteme, which was picked by the New York Times Wirecutter as the number one personal information removal service. You should be using it already. If you're not and you want to, well, you can. Here's what to do. Go to joindeleteme.com wth that's joindeleteme.com WTH and get 20% off. I kid you not. 20%. 20% off. That's joindeleteme.Com wth now, stay safe out there. See you around.
- [45:21]
Podcast Host (Ad Reader)
Do you want the truth about the organic food on your plate? Then check out the chart topping Real Organic podcast. Recently named one of the best climate podcasts by earth.org it's hosted by Dave Chapman and me, Lynley Dixon. Each week we feature eye opening interviews with farmers, scientists, authors and journalists to uncover the forces reshaping the food system from why corporate lobbying is redefining what organic means to how organic farmers are fighting back. So don't miss it. Follow and listen to the real organic podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
- [45:55]
Ad Voice
Have you ever wondered what businesses are doing and should be doing to tackle climate change? Then check out the award winning and chart topping podcast Climate Rising, produced by Harvard Business School and hosted by ME Professor Mike Toffel. Recently named one of the best environmental podcasts by Earth.org, climate Rising shares a behind the scenes look at how some of the world's top entrepreneurs and business leaders are addressing climate change, from climate storytelling and marketing to AI regenerative agriculture and beyond. Don't miss out. Follow and listen to Climate Rising wherever you get your podcasts.