March 21, 2025 • 27 mins
How do you calm down a chatbot? This week in the News Roundup, Oz and producer Eliza Dennis dig into the book that Meta doesn’t want you to read, chatbot reactions to stressful stimuli, and the new home of Pokémon Go data. On TechSupport, 404 Media’s Joseph Cox discusses a tool with surprising data scraping capabilities that is used by US agencies like ICE.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of iHeart Podcast and Kaleidoscope.
I'm os Valoshan. Today will bring you the headlines this week,
including unearthed executive drama meta. Then in the tech Support segment,
we'll talk to four of Form Media's Joseph Cox about
the aggressive data scraping carried out by an Ice contractor
(00:21):
all of that on the weekend. Tech is Friday, March
twenty first. This week with covering everything from the future
of AI assists science to gaming, to anxious chatbots and
(00:42):
executive upheaval in Silicon Valley. Eliza Dennis, our producer, is
here with me. Hello us, So let's start off with
some meta drama. The former director of Global Policy for Facebook,
Sarah Wyn Williams, wrote this memoir called Careless People, a
cautionary tale of power, greed, and lost idealism. The phrase
(01:03):
careless people, I believe, is a reference to the Great Gatsby.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
It is, indeed, and it is not subtle. Fitzgerald referred
to his wealthy characters as careless people who quote smashed
up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
You know, it's interesting because people talk about this time
as a new Gilded Age, when Williams obviously alluding to that,
but also her allegations against her former bosses meta range
from the geopolitical to the sexual. There are multiple allegations
of sexual harassment in the book, and some involve the
form of Facebook COO Cheryl Sandberg.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Cheryl Sandberg of lean In fame and if I remember correctly,
I believe that's essentially about being a girl boss at
home and at work.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
Well, when Williams says that, in addition to writing Lean In,
Sandberg had an inappropriate relationship with her twenty six year
old assistant, and that this employee, a cooting to the book,
was quote very conscious of the benefits of being Cheryl's
little doll, as she calls it, and having Cheryl tell
her she loves her right.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
And to my knowledge, Sandberg has yet to comment on
any of these allegations.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Beyond sort of personnel relationships. Win Williams also alleged that
Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook were willing to do just about
anything to make their platform available in China and reap
the benefits of that enormous population of potential users. This
reportedly included plans to comply with the Chinese Communist Party's
censorship requirements and to appoint a chief editor. His job
(02:36):
will be to take down unacceptable posts and share user
data with the Chinese government. Now this is according to
the book, but also to a whistleblower complaint that win
Williams filed with these Securities and Exchange Commission. METTA is
taking legal action against win Williams. They argue that she's
being paid by anti Facebook activists and that the book
violates a non disparagement agreement that she's signed during her
(02:58):
Facebook days. On the non disparagement issue, an arbitrator recently
ruled in Meta's favor, saying that Wim Williams can't promote
the book, but you can still buy it Careless People
remains on sale. Our next headline is a little bit
more uplifting, and it's about a startup that wants to
use AI to speed up scientific discovery. So the New
(03:18):
York Times are about a company called Lila Sciences. The
headline is the Quest for AI Scientific Superintelligence, and the
story is about Lilah, whose mission is to quote soul
humanity's greatest challenges. Has been working secretly for the past
two years on an AI program trained on scientific data,
(03:38):
scientific process, and scientific reasoning. And then they let this
AI software loose in an automated lab to run its
own experiments.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
I don't know exactly how this works, but I love
the image I've created in my head.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Likewise, and in fact, the results seem promising. With the
help of a few human scientists to assist, Lila's AI
made novel antibodies to fight diseases, and developed new materials
for capturing carbon in the atmosphere. And it made these
discoveries quickly. Studies that would normally take years reportedly took months.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
Using AI to speed up the scientific process is very
popular these days. I just want to shout out the
Nobel Prize in chemistry went to two scientists who used
AI to predict and create proteins.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
Yes, that was the alpha fold initiative coming out of
Google's Deep Mind. Lila Sciences is attempting to systematize AI
driven scientific discovery, and their goal is to create, as
I mentioned, what they call scientific superintelligence. There are early
signs of success, but the times reported or perhaps worn,
should I say that since Lyla's been operating in secret,
(04:47):
outside scientists have not been able to evaluate its work.
But Liila Science's secret is out and they're getting more
lab space, and I'm sure we'll hear more about them soon.
In a fun aside, George Church, the Harvard geneticist also
behind Colossal Biosciences, the company that recently created the Wooly Mouse,
recently joined Lilah as chief scientist.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
We love the Wooly Mouse. I can't wait to see
where Lila Sciences goes.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Speaking of going place to Eliza, do you remember Pokemon Go?
Speaker 2 (05:19):
I definitely do, though I admit I never.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Played well for Media reports that Niantic, the company that
made Pokemon Go, is now selling the game to scope
Lee in a three point eight five billion dollar deal.
Scopely is a subsidiary of Savvy Games, which is wholly
owned by Saudi Arabia's public Investment Fund. Now, if you're
wondering why you should care, it's because Pokemon Go uses players'
(05:45):
locations as part of the gameplay. In fact, this deal
will pull in location data from one hundred million players.
So what happens to all that data?
Speaker 2 (05:55):
It's a great question, do you know?
Speaker 1 (05:57):
It may be that it's a three point eight five
billion dollar question. We don't know, but Scope he assured
for or form media that user data will remain private
and handle it on US servers. But Niantic and Scope
Lee say they have a partnership that goes beyond Pokemon Go.
Niantic is building a quote large geospatial model using Pokemon
Go data and spinning it into a separate business called
(06:20):
Niantic Spatial. Scope Lee has invested a further fifty million
dollars in this nascent mapping business, and the idea is
to make an AI model trained on millions of geolocated
images from around the world from places that only pedestrians
can go. So unlike data from say Google street View,
Pokemon Go's view is not limited by what you can
(06:41):
see from a car on the road. Right.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
This is so wild to me how data from a
game just might one day help robots navigate the world
or something like that.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Something else that's wild, though, is a new study shows
that chat GPT can show signs of distress when shown
disturbing material.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
So, as we've been told over and over that we're
not supposed to answer promortize chatbots, how am I supposed
to do that?
Speaker 3 (07:09):
With this news?
Speaker 1 (07:10):
It seems like it may be anthropomorphizing themselves, but Chatchipt
models have been integrated into therapy apps to give people
advice or be a source of support. And researchers conducted
this experiment where they first had Chatchipt read very boring material.
I mean, we're talking about vacuum cleaner manuals. But then
the AI therapist that integrates Chachipt was given a quote
(07:34):
traumatic narrative that described a scenario like an intruder breaking
into an apartment or a soldier in a firefight, and
after each activity, the chatbot was given this questionnaire called
the State Trait Anxiety Inventory, which is used in mental
health care to basically analyze anxiety. The research has found
that after seeing a traumatic narrative with the soldier, Chatchipt
(07:56):
answered the questionnaire in a way that signaled severe anxiety.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
I genuinely don't know how to respond because I feel
bad for the chatbot.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Well, in that case, you'll be pleased to hear that.
The researchers then gave the chatbot information on deep breathing
and mindfulness exercises, and the chatbot's anxiety score came down
to vacuum manual levels. Wow, so time to take a
deep breath for all of US, and I'm going to
run through the rest of this week's headlines. Google struck
(08:25):
a deal to buy cybersecurity startup Whiz for thirty two
billion dollars, making it the biggest acquisition in Google's history.
Wiz was founded only five years ago in twenty twenty,
and it scans cloud service providers data for potential security risks.
If the transaction is approved, Whiz will join Google Cloud,
which plays a critical infrastructure role in supporting Google's AI ambitions.
(08:49):
Our friends at four or for Media reported that human
generated content is getting drowned out by aislop. AI generated
videos are cheap and easy to produce, and they are
getting views of The video of this horrifying creature with
a giraffe head and a spider body has over three
hundred and sixty two million views on Instagram reels. AI
generated content is apparently overwhelming algorithms and turning social media
(09:13):
feeds into fever dreams. Finally, tech Crunch reports that people
have discovered Google's newest AI model, Gemini two point zero Flash,
has a controversial use case, convincingly removing watermarks from stock
media outfits, including Getty images. This new feature from Gemini
is labeled as experimental and quote not for production use.
(09:36):
I'm sure everyone will follow those rules. Coming up, we
hear from four or four Media's Joseph Cox about a
tool US agencies used to scrape social media data. Stay
with us. If you're listening to this show, you're probably
(10:04):
someone who cares about or at least pays attention to
data privacy. Every day, our online movements being tracked in
some manner by companies who do targeted marketing, social media platforms,
and government agencies. For Americans, this type of tracking has
gone on in the background of people's digital lives for decades.
Since two thousand and one, the US government has ramped
(10:24):
up surveillance efforts, including tracking americans phone calls, emails, search histories,
with the stated goal of preventing terrorism, and as technology
has evolved, the idea has lived on. In recent years,
agencies like immigration and Customs enforcement have been working with
one company in particular to get the data they want.
Here to tell us more is four or four Media's
(10:45):
Joseph Cox. Joseph, welcome back to the show.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
So you wrote an article which as soon as I
saw the headline, I wanted to have you on the show.
The headline was the two hundred plus sites an ICE
surveillance contractor is monitoring. Who is the contractor, what are
the sites, and what's the story?
Speaker 3 (11:03):
Sure? So the contractor is a company called Shadow Dragon.
I seriously doubt many people have heard of this company
relatively obscure, but over the past months and years they
have become sort of a go to contractor for not
just immigrations and Customs enforcement, but the DEA, the State Department,
(11:24):
and other US government agencies. And what they do is
basically something called open source intelligence OSANT, or social media monitoring, right,
And typically we used to think that was monitoring sites
like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all of those sorts of things,
and shadow Dragon does that as well, but as you
(11:44):
say by reading out the headline, there are many many
more sites as well. Essentially, any sort of open website
that you may perform some sort of activity on there's
a chance it's on this list.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
So all day, every day, we create these digital breadcrumbs,
and essentially there's somebody hoovering them up to process them
and repackage them in some cases for the US government.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
So what the shadow Dragon tool does It is called
social net the specific tool. It allows the automation and
streamlining of searching those sites and social networks for a target.
So let's say I'm in ICE or another government agency.
I'll enter a phone number. It will then take that
and see, well, there's that link to accounts on Facebook,
(12:30):
or this site, is this username available on this social
network or then this obscure platform as well, And some
of these sites are much more revealing than others. Again,
it's not just the big social networks. There's stuff like
hiking apps on here as well. So if you want
to find out where somebody's located, oh, they take a
load of hikes in southern California or something like that.
(12:53):
I think people would be, on one hand, not surprised, because,
as you say, people listening probably care about data privacy
see well. On the other I think they might be
surprised in that you think it's just this sort of benial,
insipid information you're putting out there, But when it's an
aggregates pulled by a tool like this, it can be
really really revealing. It almost becomes more than the sum
(13:15):
of its parts.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Jose, can you help me understand because obviously everyone's been
very focused on the case of Mahamud Khalil, the Columbia
student with the green card who looks like he may
be deported. Is this tool about identifying people whose profile,
who's on activity contravenes the current administration's priorities or is
(13:37):
it more about, hey, this person is a target, help
me build a stronger case against them.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
So at the moment, it's almost certainly the latter, as
in ICE has access to this tool, and specifically Homeland
Security Investigations as well HSI part of ICE, and they're
able to use this tool for whatever part of their
mission they wish to do so. Axios also reported somewhat
recently that the State Department is going to be using
(14:05):
AI to scan the social media feeds of students to
see if it can detect what it deems as anti
Israel or pro mass views. That's not to say Shadow
Dragon is being specifically used for that. We don't know
exactly what TALL the State Department may or may not use,
but it absolutely sits in that context. You're right in
(14:25):
that there are these deportations happening of various people, students
and then other people visiting the US, and Shadow Dragon
is very much at all there is available to US
agencies if they do wish to use it for their mission.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
How did you first hear about Shadow Dragon.
Speaker 3 (14:44):
I first heard about shadow Dragon probably a couple of
years ago at this point, because I was actually covering
other companies in this space. So I've covered the sale
of location data for a long time. I've covered the
gathering of social media monitoring, and I got sent some
email that showed that ICE was moving from one provider,
a company called Babble Street, over to shadow Dragon, And
(15:06):
the actual reason was because it was cheaper. At the
end of the day, even when you're talking about surveillance systems,
sometimes it's just about you know how much it actually
costs to one of these agencies. So that move happened
a while ago at this point, But then every so
often I go back and check, well, his shadow Dragon
got in a new contracts, and sure enough, every few
months there'll be something in there. And they did just
(15:26):
continue this contract with ICE as well. So it started
very very quiet, but now they've absolutely become sort of
a pretty it seems reliable solution for the US government.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
So the company is shadow Dragon, but the product is
Social net can you just explain a bit more detail
how it actually works.
Speaker 3 (15:47):
Yeah. Sure, So somebody will log into social net and
they get the sort of graph interface of all of
these dots and lines. Honestly, it almost looks like the
stereotypical like hacking or surveillance move right, And of course
that's funny on one end. On the other, I don't know,
it's very easy for an analyst to process. I think
they have this interface in front of them now, then
(16:09):
enter some information, maybe somebody's name, they email address, their
phone number, they use the name, they can click a
few buttons and it will then search all of these
different sites for information related to that. Did this person
us a username on this dating site? Did they use
the same username on this fetish website for example? That's hypothetical,
(16:30):
but those are some of the websites that are included
in this tool. It's not just the mainstream stuff. Now,
an analyst could do that manually if they wished, but
that would require a lot of time. And this streamlines
the entire process of mapping out someone's online profile, their relationships,
(16:51):
and potentially some of their movements as well. Well.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
And how do you get this list of the two
hundred sites that shadow Dragon is pulling from, and can
you give an example of what some leative sites are.
Speaker 3 (17:03):
Yeah, so I can't go to too much detail, just
beyond you know, we obtained this list and then I've
verified it. But when I first got the list, I
was quite blown away by the length of it, really,
and I started putting all of those sites into sort
of buckets. So you'll have ones that focused on hobbies
like I mentioned the hiking site all Trails, and a book,
(17:27):
sort of fan website. Even chess dot com is on
there as well, do a lingo. You have payment ones
like cash app and PayPal, communication apps like discorder, WhatsApp.
Now they're all going to have different data in different
degrees available to the tool. Like there's absolutely no indication
(17:47):
that it has access to, you know, private messages on
any of these services, and I don't think that's the case.
It's purely publicly available information. But again, people may not
know what they're exposing in advertently or not on one
of these sites.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
And these sites that you mentioned, I mean, are they
sort of collaborating with shadow Dragon? Do they know this
is happening? What is the range of responses from these sites?
That shadow Dragon is pulling from, so.
Speaker 3 (18:15):
They're not collaborating in that shadow Dragon is going and
basically grabbing the data. But there is still great variety
in the responses from the companies. I actually think the
most illuminating one and the most helpful one came from
chess dot com, who told me on the record that,
you know, we didn't know about this. We don't like it.
Any sort of data scraping has to be done within
(18:36):
the law, and if it's in within the law, it's okay,
but generally we don't like it. And then you have
the big companies like Meta and Snap and all of
those sorts of people just pointing to their terms of
service saying we don't like people scraping our website. And
then I actually had a bunch who never got back
to me. Essentially, even when it seems like a pretty
(18:57):
I'm not a pr professional, but it seems like a
pretty easy to just reply and say, here's our terms
of service, we don't like scraping. But yeah, a lot
of companies didn't even acknowledge the request for comment.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
On this one. So there's really these somebody don't really
have a choice. I mean, their choice is to sue
Shadow Dragon for violating their terms of service, which is
an unlikely thing to happen because it's not directly harming
their business unless there's a kind of groundswell of consumer complaint.
Speaker 3 (19:22):
Yeah, I think that's fair when it comes to the lawsuits,
like there would have to be some sort of tectonic
shift around that. We have seen WhatsApp, for example, sue
NSO Group, which was or is a company that delivers
packing tools to iPhones. But that's much more aggressive. That's
much more active that the.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Group behind the Pegasus product, that spyware product that was
able to be covertly and remotely put onto people's.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
Phones exactly, and WhatsApp has sued them. But that's sort
of you know, one company versus another company. It's not
as broad as this. That being said, you know, companies
try to scraping all of the time. They don't like
it when you make multiple accounts, for example, they don't
like it when you use a VPN to log into Facebook.
I can't tell you how many times Facebook has closed
(20:11):
my account and they have to make a new one
every single time. So they do have all sorts of
measures to stop weird, potentially suspicious or just unusual activity,
and this would fall into that. It's just a question
of whether these services can actually detect that specifically shadow
Dragon or not, or of course whether they actually want
(20:31):
to or not, because if they started doing that, I
don't know, US government agencies might not be too happy.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
When we come back how shadow Dragon fits into the
largest surveillance ecosystem used by the US government. To stay
with us, have any specific examples of how shadow Dragon
has been used in the real world.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
We only have what shadow Dragon says publicly in its
marketing material because the agencies are very tight lipped or
simply don't respond when talking about that sort of thing. Obviously,
when it comes to ice in HSI, there's going to
be an immigration component there, so I feel it's safe
to assume there's a chance it's being used for those.
And then some of the concrete cases that shadow Dragon
(21:26):
has mentioned is fighting child exploitation, potentially even mapping out
the opioid crisis as well. So don't get me wrong,
there are clearly useful use cases for this technology. It's
just that people don't really know it's going on necessarily,
or that you know their government is buying this tool
(21:48):
or again that all of this sort of data is
publicly exposed.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
And how practically does the US government actually use this tool,
and let's use ICE as an example. Is it like
there's like a shadow Dragon consultant and the ICE agent
sends their request to the shadow Dragon employee and the
Parodragon employee generates a report or is this more like
a kind of plug and play platform.
Speaker 3 (22:10):
It's much more a plug and play platform, almost a
software as a service tool. The agency will buy licenses
to use it for a year, two years, whatever. They'll
log in just like you log into any sort of
internet service or piece of software, and then they can
use it within the parameters of what they've been allowed
(22:30):
to do. And that's probably good for the agencies. I
don't know if they necessarily want to give up information
about who they're targeting to a third party, like a contractor,
but it absolutely puts the honest on ICE or whoever
is using it to be just very very careful with
this tool as well. And I think just more broadly,
we've seen repeatedly over the years that not specifically with
(22:52):
shadow Dragon, but just other social media surveillance tools, we've
seen authorities use it to monitor protests, and there was
an article just in the Intercept recently that I think
it was the LAPD use as similar tool to monitor
protests there as well. So this is very very long running.
Social media surveillance has been going on for many years,
(23:13):
but now the playing field has expanded where it's not
just the big platforms, it's every platform.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
How does shadow Dragon compare to pan andeer as a technology?
Speaker 3 (23:23):
So Palenteer is also used by government agencies and some
private companies to link all sorts of disparate data that
could come from various places together, where shadow Dragon is
much more about We're going to go out and pull
the data for you. It's not just about the oh
look we're shadow Dragon and we linked this phone number
to this Facebook profile or whatever. It's that shadow Dragon
(23:47):
is making what I presume would be pretty reliable technology
to go grab data from these websites. And that's not
you know, it's not the hardest thing in the world,
but I don't think it's necessarily trivial. Even that shadow
Dragon is going to have to custom code all of
these small little tools that go and grab that data
from these websites, and presumably if you're selling to the
(24:10):
US government. It has to be quite good, quite reliable,
So there's a sizeable amount of work going on here
to we even grab that data in the first place.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
How much do you think about the scope for abuse here.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
I absolutely do think about it, and it would be
very much a case by case basis. It would depend
on the agency, the individual official, all of that sort
of thing. What makes this sort of maybe not a
form issue, but a quite complicated one is that, yes,
it may be violating terms of service of individual websites,
(24:45):
but like, it's not illegal. There is no Fourth Amendment
search going on here. It's not like the agents have
kicked down the door and they're searching somebody's house or
they're breaking to somebody's phone searching it there. Technically and legally,
it is all public data, so there's not much room
for legal abuse because it's perfectly legal generally speaking. That
(25:07):
being said, agencies can't just rely on that idea that well,
it's all public so it's fine. It can still be
abused by certain people in the unfortunate correct context.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
Suit me out a little bit. How does this fit
into the kind of wider surveillance ecosystem and how it's
being used by the US government, And I think it's
a timely moment to discuss that, given that this Macamu
Khalil case is kind of top of mind for so
many people.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
Yeah, so I see it on the lower end of
sophistication when it comes to US surveillance tools. You imagine,
on this lower end you have social media monitoring tools
like this, Somewhere in the middle you'll have wire taps.
After that, maybe you have direct hacking tools, and right
at the top you have I don't know, NSA, mass
surveillance programs like Edward Stoden Reveal or whatever. And even
(26:00):
though social media monitoring like this maybe on the lower
end of the spectrum, I think it's still vitally important
for people to at least know about it so they
can decide whether they care or not. And maybe they don't,
and that's absolutely fine. But the key thing here is
that these sorts of tools are also available to local
(26:22):
law enforcement sheriffs, state police as well. Is not purely
a federal agency thing. So while the federal agencies may
only get the very sophisticated tools, basically everybody gets social
media monitoring and that does open up the potential room
for abuse as well, again, depending on what the individual
(26:43):
person using the tool is doing well.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
Joseph, we're both we're both Brits. We didn't live through
the Second World War, but sure we're both familiar with
the phrase loose lip sync ships, and so yeah, be
careful what you put out there exactly.
Speaker 3 (26:57):
I think there is the message that people should take away. Joseph,
thank you, Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
That's it for this week for tech Stuff. I'm mas Vlosen.
This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and Victoria Domingez.
It was executive produced by me Carrot Price and Kate
Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvel Fireheart Podcasts. Bahid Fraser
as I Engineer and Kyle Murdoch mixed this episode and
wrote our theme song. Join us next Wednesday for tech
(27:34):
Stuff The Story, when we'll share an in depth conversation
with one of the most interesting people working in and
around tech. Please rate, review, and reach out to us
at tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot com. We want
to hear from you.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of iHeart Podcast and Kaleidoscope.
I'm os Valoshan. Today will bring you the headlines this week,
including unearthed executive drama meta. Then in the tech Support segment,
we'll talk to four of Form Media's Joseph Cox about
the aggressive data scraping carried out by an Ice contractor
(00:21):
all of that on the weekend. Tech is Friday, March
twenty first. This week with covering everything from the future
of AI assists science to gaming, to anxious chatbots and
(00:42):
executive upheaval in Silicon Valley. Eliza Dennis, our producer, is
here with me. Hello us, So let's start off with
some meta drama. The former director of Global Policy for Facebook,
Sarah Wyn Williams, wrote this memoir called Careless People, a
cautionary tale of power, greed, and lost idealism. The phrase
(01:03):
careless people, I believe, is a reference to the Great Gatsby.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
It is, indeed, and it is not subtle. Fitzgerald referred
to his wealthy characters as careless people who quote smashed
up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
You know, it's interesting because people talk about this time
as a new Gilded Age, when Williams obviously alluding to that,
but also her allegations against her former bosses meta range
from the geopolitical to the sexual. There are multiple allegations
of sexual harassment in the book, and some involve the
form of Facebook COO Cheryl Sandberg.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Cheryl Sandberg of lean In fame and if I remember correctly,
I believe that's essentially about being a girl boss at
home and at work.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
Well, when Williams says that, in addition to writing Lean In,
Sandberg had an inappropriate relationship with her twenty six year
old assistant, and that this employee, a cooting to the book,
was quote very conscious of the benefits of being Cheryl's
little doll, as she calls it, and having Cheryl tell
her she loves her right.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
And to my knowledge, Sandberg has yet to comment on
any of these allegations.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Beyond sort of personnel relationships. Win Williams also alleged that
Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook were willing to do just about
anything to make their platform available in China and reap
the benefits of that enormous population of potential users. This
reportedly included plans to comply with the Chinese Communist Party's
censorship requirements and to appoint a chief editor. His job
(02:36):
will be to take down unacceptable posts and share user
data with the Chinese government. Now this is according to
the book, but also to a whistleblower complaint that win
Williams filed with these Securities and Exchange Commission. METTA is
taking legal action against win Williams. They argue that she's
being paid by anti Facebook activists and that the book
violates a non disparagement agreement that she's signed during her
(02:58):
Facebook days. On the non disparagement issue, an arbitrator recently
ruled in Meta's favor, saying that Wim Williams can't promote
the book, but you can still buy it Careless People
remains on sale. Our next headline is a little bit
more uplifting, and it's about a startup that wants to
use AI to speed up scientific discovery. So the New
(03:18):
York Times are about a company called Lila Sciences. The
headline is the Quest for AI Scientific Superintelligence, and the
story is about Lilah, whose mission is to quote soul
humanity's greatest challenges. Has been working secretly for the past
two years on an AI program trained on scientific data,
(03:38):
scientific process, and scientific reasoning. And then they let this
AI software loose in an automated lab to run its
own experiments.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
I don't know exactly how this works, but I love
the image I've created in my head.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Likewise, and in fact, the results seem promising. With the
help of a few human scientists to assist, Lila's AI
made novel antibodies to fight diseases, and developed new materials
for capturing carbon in the atmosphere. And it made these
discoveries quickly. Studies that would normally take years reportedly took months.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
Using AI to speed up the scientific process is very
popular these days. I just want to shout out the
Nobel Prize in chemistry went to two scientists who used
AI to predict and create proteins.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
Yes, that was the alpha fold initiative coming out of
Google's Deep Mind. Lila Sciences is attempting to systematize AI
driven scientific discovery, and their goal is to create, as
I mentioned, what they call scientific superintelligence. There are early
signs of success, but the times reported or perhaps worn,
should I say that since Lyla's been operating in secret,
(04:47):
outside scientists have not been able to evaluate its work.
But Liila Science's secret is out and they're getting more
lab space, and I'm sure we'll hear more about them soon.
In a fun aside, George Church, the Harvard geneticist also
behind Colossal Biosciences, the company that recently created the Wooly Mouse,
recently joined Lilah as chief scientist.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
We love the Wooly Mouse. I can't wait to see
where Lila Sciences goes.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Speaking of going place to Eliza, do you remember Pokemon Go?
Speaker 2 (05:19):
I definitely do, though I admit I never.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Played well for Media reports that Niantic, the company that
made Pokemon Go, is now selling the game to scope
Lee in a three point eight five billion dollar deal.
Scopely is a subsidiary of Savvy Games, which is wholly
owned by Saudi Arabia's public Investment Fund. Now, if you're
wondering why you should care, it's because Pokemon Go uses players'
(05:45):
locations as part of the gameplay. In fact, this deal
will pull in location data from one hundred million players.
So what happens to all that data?
Speaker 2 (05:55):
It's a great question, do you know?
Speaker 1 (05:57):
It may be that it's a three point eight five
billion dollar question. We don't know, but Scope he assured
for or form media that user data will remain private
and handle it on US servers. But Niantic and Scope
Lee say they have a partnership that goes beyond Pokemon Go.
Niantic is building a quote large geospatial model using Pokemon
Go data and spinning it into a separate business called
(06:20):
Niantic Spatial. Scope Lee has invested a further fifty million
dollars in this nascent mapping business, and the idea is
to make an AI model trained on millions of geolocated
images from around the world from places that only pedestrians
can go. So unlike data from say Google street View,
Pokemon Go's view is not limited by what you can
(06:41):
see from a car on the road. Right.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
This is so wild to me how data from a
game just might one day help robots navigate the world
or something like that.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Something else that's wild, though, is a new study shows
that chat GPT can show signs of distress when shown
disturbing material.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
So, as we've been told over and over that we're
not supposed to answer promortize chatbots, how am I supposed
to do that?
Speaker 3 (07:09):
With this news?
Speaker 1 (07:10):
It seems like it may be anthropomorphizing themselves, but Chatchipt
models have been integrated into therapy apps to give people
advice or be a source of support. And researchers conducted
this experiment where they first had Chatchipt read very boring material.
I mean, we're talking about vacuum cleaner manuals. But then
the AI therapist that integrates Chachipt was given a quote
(07:34):
traumatic narrative that described a scenario like an intruder breaking
into an apartment or a soldier in a firefight, and
after each activity, the chatbot was given this questionnaire called
the State Trait Anxiety Inventory, which is used in mental
health care to basically analyze anxiety. The research has found
that after seeing a traumatic narrative with the soldier, Chatchipt
(07:56):
answered the questionnaire in a way that signaled severe anxiety.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
I genuinely don't know how to respond because I feel
bad for the chatbot.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Well, in that case, you'll be pleased to hear that.
The researchers then gave the chatbot information on deep breathing
and mindfulness exercises, and the chatbot's anxiety score came down
to vacuum manual levels. Wow, so time to take a
deep breath for all of US, and I'm going to
run through the rest of this week's headlines. Google struck
(08:25):
a deal to buy cybersecurity startup Whiz for thirty two
billion dollars, making it the biggest acquisition in Google's history.
Wiz was founded only five years ago in twenty twenty,
and it scans cloud service providers data for potential security risks.
If the transaction is approved, Whiz will join Google Cloud,
which plays a critical infrastructure role in supporting Google's AI ambitions.
(08:49):
Our friends at four or for Media reported that human
generated content is getting drowned out by aislop. AI generated
videos are cheap and easy to produce, and they are
getting views of The video of this horrifying creature with
a giraffe head and a spider body has over three
hundred and sixty two million views on Instagram reels. AI
generated content is apparently overwhelming algorithms and turning social media
(09:13):
feeds into fever dreams. Finally, tech Crunch reports that people
have discovered Google's newest AI model, Gemini two point zero Flash,
has a controversial use case, convincingly removing watermarks from stock
media outfits, including Getty images. This new feature from Gemini
is labeled as experimental and quote not for production use.
(09:36):
I'm sure everyone will follow those rules. Coming up, we
hear from four or four Media's Joseph Cox about a
tool US agencies used to scrape social media data. Stay
with us. If you're listening to this show, you're probably
(10:04):
someone who cares about or at least pays attention to
data privacy. Every day, our online movements being tracked in
some manner by companies who do targeted marketing, social media platforms,
and government agencies. For Americans, this type of tracking has
gone on in the background of people's digital lives for decades.
Since two thousand and one, the US government has ramped
(10:24):
up surveillance efforts, including tracking americans phone calls, emails, search histories,
with the stated goal of preventing terrorism, and as technology
has evolved, the idea has lived on. In recent years,
agencies like immigration and Customs enforcement have been working with
one company in particular to get the data they want.
Here to tell us more is four or four Media's
(10:45):
Joseph Cox. Joseph, welcome back to the show.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
So you wrote an article which as soon as I
saw the headline, I wanted to have you on the show.
The headline was the two hundred plus sites an ICE
surveillance contractor is monitoring. Who is the contractor, what are
the sites, and what's the story?
Speaker 3 (11:03):
Sure? So the contractor is a company called Shadow Dragon.
I seriously doubt many people have heard of this company
relatively obscure, but over the past months and years they
have become sort of a go to contractor for not
just immigrations and Customs enforcement, but the DEA, the State Department,
(11:24):
and other US government agencies. And what they do is
basically something called open source intelligence OSANT, or social media monitoring, right,
And typically we used to think that was monitoring sites
like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all of those sorts of things,
and shadow Dragon does that as well, but as you
(11:44):
say by reading out the headline, there are many many
more sites as well. Essentially, any sort of open website
that you may perform some sort of activity on there's
a chance it's on this list.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
So all day, every day, we create these digital breadcrumbs,
and essentially there's somebody hoovering them up to process them
and repackage them in some cases for the US government.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
So what the shadow Dragon tool does It is called
social net the specific tool. It allows the automation and
streamlining of searching those sites and social networks for a target.
So let's say I'm in ICE or another government agency.
I'll enter a phone number. It will then take that
and see, well, there's that link to accounts on Facebook,
(12:30):
or this site, is this username available on this social
network or then this obscure platform as well, And some
of these sites are much more revealing than others. Again,
it's not just the big social networks. There's stuff like
hiking apps on here as well. So if you want
to find out where somebody's located, oh, they take a
load of hikes in southern California or something like that.
(12:53):
I think people would be, on one hand, not surprised, because,
as you say, people listening probably care about data privacy
see well. On the other I think they might be
surprised in that you think it's just this sort of benial,
insipid information you're putting out there, But when it's an
aggregates pulled by a tool like this, it can be
really really revealing. It almost becomes more than the sum
(13:15):
of its parts.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Jose, can you help me understand because obviously everyone's been
very focused on the case of Mahamud Khalil, the Columbia
student with the green card who looks like he may
be deported. Is this tool about identifying people whose profile,
who's on activity contravenes the current administration's priorities or is
(13:37):
it more about, hey, this person is a target, help
me build a stronger case against them.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
So at the moment, it's almost certainly the latter, as
in ICE has access to this tool, and specifically Homeland
Security Investigations as well HSI part of ICE, and they're
able to use this tool for whatever part of their
mission they wish to do so. Axios also reported somewhat
recently that the State Department is going to be using
(14:05):
AI to scan the social media feeds of students to
see if it can detect what it deems as anti
Israel or pro mass views. That's not to say Shadow
Dragon is being specifically used for that. We don't know
exactly what TALL the State Department may or may not use,
but it absolutely sits in that context. You're right in
(14:25):
that there are these deportations happening of various people, students
and then other people visiting the US, and Shadow Dragon
is very much at all there is available to US
agencies if they do wish to use it for their mission.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
How did you first hear about Shadow Dragon.
Speaker 3 (14:44):
I first heard about shadow Dragon probably a couple of
years ago at this point, because I was actually covering
other companies in this space. So I've covered the sale
of location data for a long time. I've covered the
gathering of social media monitoring, and I got sent some
email that showed that ICE was moving from one provider,
a company called Babble Street, over to shadow Dragon, And
(15:06):
the actual reason was because it was cheaper. At the
end of the day, even when you're talking about surveillance systems,
sometimes it's just about you know how much it actually
costs to one of these agencies. So that move happened
a while ago at this point, But then every so
often I go back and check, well, his shadow Dragon
got in a new contracts, and sure enough, every few
months there'll be something in there. And they did just
(15:26):
continue this contract with ICE as well. So it started
very very quiet, but now they've absolutely become sort of
a pretty it seems reliable solution for the US government.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
So the company is shadow Dragon, but the product is
Social net can you just explain a bit more detail
how it actually works.
Speaker 3 (15:47):
Yeah. Sure, So somebody will log into social net and
they get the sort of graph interface of all of
these dots and lines. Honestly, it almost looks like the
stereotypical like hacking or surveillance move right, And of course
that's funny on one end. On the other, I don't know,
it's very easy for an analyst to process. I think
they have this interface in front of them now, then
(16:09):
enter some information, maybe somebody's name, they email address, their
phone number, they use the name, they can click a
few buttons and it will then search all of these
different sites for information related to that. Did this person
us a username on this dating site? Did they use
the same username on this fetish website for example? That's hypothetical,
(16:30):
but those are some of the websites that are included
in this tool. It's not just the mainstream stuff. Now,
an analyst could do that manually if they wished, but
that would require a lot of time. And this streamlines
the entire process of mapping out someone's online profile, their relationships,
(16:51):
and potentially some of their movements as well. Well.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
And how do you get this list of the two
hundred sites that shadow Dragon is pulling from, and can
you give an example of what some leative sites are.
Speaker 3 (17:03):
Yeah, so I can't go to too much detail, just
beyond you know, we obtained this list and then I've
verified it. But when I first got the list, I
was quite blown away by the length of it, really,
and I started putting all of those sites into sort
of buckets. So you'll have ones that focused on hobbies
like I mentioned the hiking site all Trails, and a book,
(17:27):
sort of fan website. Even chess dot com is on
there as well, do a lingo. You have payment ones
like cash app and PayPal, communication apps like discorder, WhatsApp.
Now they're all going to have different data in different
degrees available to the tool. Like there's absolutely no indication
(17:47):
that it has access to, you know, private messages on
any of these services, and I don't think that's the case.
It's purely publicly available information. But again, people may not
know what they're exposing in advertently or not on one
of these sites.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
And these sites that you mentioned, I mean, are they
sort of collaborating with shadow Dragon? Do they know this
is happening? What is the range of responses from these sites?
That shadow Dragon is pulling from, so.
Speaker 3 (18:15):
They're not collaborating in that shadow Dragon is going and
basically grabbing the data. But there is still great variety
in the responses from the companies. I actually think the
most illuminating one and the most helpful one came from
chess dot com, who told me on the record that,
you know, we didn't know about this. We don't like it.
Any sort of data scraping has to be done within
(18:36):
the law, and if it's in within the law, it's okay,
but generally we don't like it. And then you have
the big companies like Meta and Snap and all of
those sorts of people just pointing to their terms of
service saying we don't like people scraping our website. And
then I actually had a bunch who never got back
to me. Essentially, even when it seems like a pretty
(18:57):
I'm not a pr professional, but it seems like a
pretty easy to just reply and say, here's our terms
of service, we don't like scraping. But yeah, a lot
of companies didn't even acknowledge the request for comment.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
On this one. So there's really these somebody don't really
have a choice. I mean, their choice is to sue
Shadow Dragon for violating their terms of service, which is
an unlikely thing to happen because it's not directly harming
their business unless there's a kind of groundswell of consumer complaint.
Speaker 3 (19:22):
Yeah, I think that's fair when it comes to the lawsuits,
like there would have to be some sort of tectonic
shift around that. We have seen WhatsApp, for example, sue
NSO Group, which was or is a company that delivers
packing tools to iPhones. But that's much more aggressive. That's
much more active that the.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Group behind the Pegasus product, that spyware product that was
able to be covertly and remotely put onto people's.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
Phones exactly, and WhatsApp has sued them. But that's sort
of you know, one company versus another company. It's not
as broad as this. That being said, you know, companies
try to scraping all of the time. They don't like
it when you make multiple accounts, for example, they don't
like it when you use a VPN to log into Facebook.
I can't tell you how many times Facebook has closed
(20:11):
my account and they have to make a new one
every single time. So they do have all sorts of
measures to stop weird, potentially suspicious or just unusual activity,
and this would fall into that. It's just a question
of whether these services can actually detect that specifically shadow
Dragon or not, or of course whether they actually want
(20:31):
to or not, because if they started doing that, I
don't know, US government agencies might not be too happy.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
When we come back how shadow Dragon fits into the
largest surveillance ecosystem used by the US government. To stay
with us, have any specific examples of how shadow Dragon
has been used in the real world.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
We only have what shadow Dragon says publicly in its
marketing material because the agencies are very tight lipped or
simply don't respond when talking about that sort of thing. Obviously,
when it comes to ice in HSI, there's going to
be an immigration component there, so I feel it's safe
to assume there's a chance it's being used for those.
And then some of the concrete cases that shadow Dragon
(21:26):
has mentioned is fighting child exploitation, potentially even mapping out
the opioid crisis as well. So don't get me wrong,
there are clearly useful use cases for this technology. It's
just that people don't really know it's going on necessarily,
or that you know their government is buying this tool
(21:48):
or again that all of this sort of data is
publicly exposed.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
And how practically does the US government actually use this tool,
and let's use ICE as an example. Is it like
there's like a shadow Dragon consultant and the ICE agent
sends their request to the shadow Dragon employee and the
Parodragon employee generates a report or is this more like
a kind of plug and play platform.
Speaker 3 (22:10):
It's much more a plug and play platform, almost a
software as a service tool. The agency will buy licenses
to use it for a year, two years, whatever. They'll
log in just like you log into any sort of
internet service or piece of software, and then they can
use it within the parameters of what they've been allowed
(22:30):
to do. And that's probably good for the agencies. I
don't know if they necessarily want to give up information
about who they're targeting to a third party, like a contractor,
but it absolutely puts the honest on ICE or whoever
is using it to be just very very careful with
this tool as well. And I think just more broadly,
we've seen repeatedly over the years that not specifically with
(22:52):
shadow Dragon, but just other social media surveillance tools, we've
seen authorities use it to monitor protests, and there was
an article just in the Intercept recently that I think
it was the LAPD use as similar tool to monitor
protests there as well. So this is very very long running.
Social media surveillance has been going on for many years,
(23:13):
but now the playing field has expanded where it's not
just the big platforms, it's every platform.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
How does shadow Dragon compare to pan andeer as a technology?
Speaker 3 (23:23):
So Palenteer is also used by government agencies and some
private companies to link all sorts of disparate data that
could come from various places together, where shadow Dragon is
much more about We're going to go out and pull
the data for you. It's not just about the oh
look we're shadow Dragon and we linked this phone number
to this Facebook profile or whatever. It's that shadow Dragon
(23:47):
is making what I presume would be pretty reliable technology
to go grab data from these websites. And that's not
you know, it's not the hardest thing in the world,
but I don't think it's necessarily trivial. Even that shadow
Dragon is going to have to custom code all of
these small little tools that go and grab that data
from these websites, and presumably if you're selling to the
(24:10):
US government. It has to be quite good, quite reliable,
So there's a sizeable amount of work going on here
to we even grab that data in the first place.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
How much do you think about the scope for abuse here.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
I absolutely do think about it, and it would be
very much a case by case basis. It would depend
on the agency, the individual official, all of that sort
of thing. What makes this sort of maybe not a
form issue, but a quite complicated one is that, yes,
it may be violating terms of service of individual websites,
(24:45):
but like, it's not illegal. There is no Fourth Amendment
search going on here. It's not like the agents have
kicked down the door and they're searching somebody's house or
they're breaking to somebody's phone searching it there. Technically and legally,
it is all public data, so there's not much room
for legal abuse because it's perfectly legal generally speaking. That
(25:07):
being said, agencies can't just rely on that idea that well,
it's all public so it's fine. It can still be
abused by certain people in the unfortunate correct context.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
Suit me out a little bit. How does this fit
into the kind of wider surveillance ecosystem and how it's
being used by the US government, And I think it's
a timely moment to discuss that, given that this Macamu
Khalil case is kind of top of mind for so
many people.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
Yeah, so I see it on the lower end of
sophistication when it comes to US surveillance tools. You imagine,
on this lower end you have social media monitoring tools
like this, Somewhere in the middle you'll have wire taps.
After that, maybe you have direct hacking tools, and right
at the top you have I don't know, NSA, mass
surveillance programs like Edward Stoden Reveal or whatever. And even
(26:00):
though social media monitoring like this maybe on the lower
end of the spectrum, I think it's still vitally important
for people to at least know about it so they
can decide whether they care or not. And maybe they don't,
and that's absolutely fine. But the key thing here is
that these sorts of tools are also available to local
(26:22):
law enforcement sheriffs, state police as well. Is not purely
a federal agency thing. So while the federal agencies may
only get the very sophisticated tools, basically everybody gets social
media monitoring and that does open up the potential room
for abuse as well, again, depending on what the individual
(26:43):
person using the tool is doing well.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
Joseph, we're both we're both Brits. We didn't live through
the Second World War, but sure we're both familiar with
the phrase loose lip sync ships, and so yeah, be
careful what you put out there exactly.
Speaker 3 (26:57):
I think there is the message that people should take away. Joseph,
thank you, Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
That's it for this week for tech Stuff. I'm mas Vlosen.
This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and Victoria Domingez.
It was executive produced by me Carrot Price and Kate
Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvel Fireheart Podcasts. Bahid Fraser
as I Engineer and Kyle Murdoch mixed this episode and
wrote our theme song. Join us next Wednesday for tech
(27:34):
Stuff The Story, when we'll share an in depth conversation
with one of the most interesting people working in and
around tech. Please rate, review, and reach out to us
at tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot com. We want
to hear from you.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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