A hacker stole a trove of personal information from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The breach exposes the names, job titles, phone numbers, email addresses, and office locations of more than 41,000 employees, including those in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), according to TechCrunch and Wired. The data also linked the agencies to specific surveillance tools.

As reported by TechCrunch, a hacker known as "Department of Peace" gained access to the data through Okta, an identity and access management service used by the DHS. Around 21,000 records pertain to CBP employees, and ne …

Read the full story at The Verge.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr announced the agency will vote on November 19th on rules that would allow prisons to use signal jamming. Radiofrequency jammers are generally banned under Section 333 and the Communications Act of 1934, with few exceptions, and Carr has noted they've been permitted for use at some federal facilities already. Carr claims in a statement that jammers are needed because "For years, thousands upon thousands of contraband cellphones have been pouring into prisons, and some of the worst possible offenders have been using them to order hits, coordinate violent gang activity, and aid criminal enterprises."

When the FCC appr …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Ask Texas NAACP president Gary Bledsoe what it's been like to see data center developers descend upon Austin and its surrounding suburbs and he can rattle off project after project facing opposition from locals.

There's the fight in Taylor over plans to build a data center at a site that's supposed to be a park. Temple, around 40 miles away, is another sore spot, Bledsoe says. The mayor and City Council members there face recall attempts over data center developments. And some 30 miles outside of Austin, San Marcos became the first city in all of Texas to ban data centers.

Nowhere in the world are data centers growing more explosively than …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Elon Musk claims Ukraine violated Starlink's terms of service before the recent slowdown, as reported earlier by Ars Technica. According to Musk, "Ukraine military violated Starlink terms of service and used it for offensive drone strikes to kill people. That loophole was closed last week," however Ukrainian officials have denied that happened, or that it is actually possible for them to do.

The statement comes nearly two weeks after Ukrainian officials accused SpaceX of putting limits on the military's satellite internet service that disrupted its drone missions and operations. As reported by Axios, Ukraine uses Starlink for communications …

Read the full story at The Verge.

If there's one issue that seems to activate all kinds of voters in 2026, it's data centers. The rapid buildout of these massive server storage facilities - and the infrastructure construction and expenses that come with them - has sparked local opposition in communities across the country and become a major issue in many congressional and gubernatorial campaigns.

At the same time, tech money has been pouring into many of these races. Leading the Future, a super PAC backed by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and OpenAI President Greg Brockman, has already spent $45 million in a year. And Public First Action, an Anthropic-backed group that …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Two years ago, University of Houston student Vasant Bhatt was doing everything he could to help Republicans regain power. He knocked doors for Sen. Ted Cruz's reelection campaign and helped organize his community for Donald Trump, two victories he, like many other Republicans, celebrated in 2024. But this week, Bhatt did something unexpected: He voted for Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico, and he publicly urged others to do the same.

Bhatt, whose father is a small-business owner, tells The Verge he was initially drawn to the Republican Party due to its economic principles. "The strong belief in individual liberty and limited …

Read the full story at The Verge.

After renaming Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico on Google Maps following Trump's executive orders, Google CEO Sundar Pichai might be drawing the line at the Atlantic Ocean. As reported earlier by the Washington Post, Trump said at a Wednesday night rally that he would "probably pass" on renaming the Atlantic after he contacted Pichai about it, to which Pichai allegedly replied, "Please don't ask us to do that."

Trump claimed Pichai said, "No, no, no. This time, I'm not doing it," adding "Oceans are different, sir." The Verge reached out to Google for comment, but didn't immediately get a response. Apple has joined Google in making Trump' …

Read the full story at The Verge.

It was a busy summer for AI lobbyists. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Nvidia each had their highest-spending lobbying quarter between July and September, federal disclosures show.

Nvidia spent the most of the group at $2.2 million, followed by Anthropic's $2.1 million and OpenAI's $1.5 million. Compared to other Big Tech companies with long-established presences in Washington, the sums aren't out of the ordinary. Microsoft, for example, has spent at least $2 million a quarter going back to 2021, and Google regularly spends over $3 million, including this quarter. But it's a clear signal that the three AI firms recognize how important shaping policy …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance said on Tuesday that the Trump administration was giving right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley $10,000 and launching a $25 million bounty program for members of the public to report fraud.

In December 2025, Shirley published a viral video alleging fraud at daycares in Minnesota that were operated by members of the local Somali community. Shirley lingered in parking lots and asked to enter childcare centers, taking refusals as evidence that the centers weren't actually caring for children. The video quickly went viral, triggering a massive governmental response: Federal immigration agents descended on the …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Today, I’m talking with Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who has a lot of thoughts about AI, tech, and privacy.

If you’ve been listening to the show, you know that one of my running theories is that those issues are driving a big and maybe kind of unexpected political realignment — and with the midterms coming up next month, and early voting already underway in a lot of places, the stakes are pretty high right now.

So I asked Gov. Pritzker about all that, and he was surprisingly willing to dive right into the absolute existential weeds of what government is even for. You’ll hear him say — and it’s hard to disagree — that some problems are just collective action problems that require the government to do a lot of work. We can’t solve all these problems one at a time, or even one state at a time. It’s a pretty deep conversation, and we really got into it on a lot of issues.

And of course, I had to ask him: Are the Bears gonna stay in Illinois?

Before we get going, do me a favor and subscribe to Decoder on YouTube, where we put out new episodes every Monday and Thursday.

Okay: Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. Here we go.

Gov. JB Pritzker, you’re the governor of Illinois. Welcome to Decoder.

Thanks, Nilay. Great to be with you.

I am very excited to talk to you. We’re in the heart of midterm season. You are running for reelection. I have to tell you. I have to be very honest with you. I personally feel a lot of pressure in this interview, not only because I’m speaking to a governor, but because I went to school in Chicago. My sister still lives in Chicago. My wife grew up in Illinois. Her entire family is farmers in North Central Illinois. Boy, do I have a list of questions for you. I have to do a good job here.

Well, we’re claiming you. Now that I know all that, we’re claiming you. You’re an Illinoisan.

I don’t know about that. I grew up in Wisconsin. Here’s my first question for you. I’m a die-hard Packers fan. Are you going to let the Bears move to Indiana?

That is not our intention. We are, in fact, in discussions with the Bears and the NFL about keeping the Bears either in Chicago or in Arlington Heights, but in Illinois.

I’m saying, as a Packers fan, nothing is funnier than the outcome of the Bears moving to Indiana. I just want to put that out there. Openly biased in this case — I own two shares of that stock — but I’m going to make the comparison here. And the reason I started there is not only because I think that’s a funny outcome, although I do, but it feels like we are in the middle of a generational political realignment.

I’m sure you feel that, in this election campaign, the idea of big business and how that should interact with the government, and how the government should be able to push back on big business and not give in to big business. All of that feels up for grabs.

And the comparison I will make in this specific case is your fellow governor, Gavin Newsom, in California. They sued the Ellison family, Paramount, over the Warner Brothers merger. Paramount threatened to leave. They made a lot of noise about Nashville, Texas, Miami, or wherever you make noise about these days, and it feels like Newsom caved. It feels like he pressured his Attorney General, Rob Bonta, to settle that lawsuit and keep them there.

They settled the lawsuit. The next day, the Ellison family is like, “We never… We’re from California. We would never leave.” I see a parallel here with the Bears that is connected to that larger realignment, how government and business should interact. Do you see that parallel? Do you feel that realignment?

Well, what I can tell you is we’re pretty tough negotiators in Chicago and Illinois, and that’s really what we’re in the midst of now with the Bears. But I understand your point about realignment. I mean, there is a generational change, and I think it’s also an attitudinal change about protecting taxpayers, protecting people who frankly are among the most vulnerable to all the technology that’s overtaking people’s lives and invading people’s homes.

And so I do believe that the government has to be more active now and become a fighter for our people and not just a collaborator with business on everything. I’m a businessman, as you know, before I became governor. But I also know that, for the people of Illinois anyway, my job is to protect the working people of this state who often don’t have anybody protecting them except a government that will stand up for them. So that’s kind of the realignment that I see.

And that generational shift, I agree with you. It’s partly a Democratic Party generational shift. Generationally, we’re a little more aggressive. And I’m probably older than the next generation that’s already possibly taking office this November. I’m 61 years old, but I think of myself as having come out of the tech world and as somebody who has been a fighter for progressive values that, yeah, we’ve got to become more aggressive and make sure we’re standing up for our people.

There are two places where I see the realignment in particular. One is data centers, one is privacy, and you just see that as a bipartisan backlash to those things. I would actually add a third, which is antitrust broadly. It’s weird if you go into Silicon Valley. David Sacks is retweeting Lina Khan from the Biden administration talking about whether the AI industry needs an antitrust exemption to manage safety.

They both agree that these companies don’t need antitrust exemptions. They actually should be more competitive. Again, putting that in the context of regulating these companies, thinking about the dynamic between the government and the biggest companies in the world. I’ll just ask the question, I guess, more directly. Do you think Newsom was right to give in to Paramount, or do you think he should have forced them to make good on that threat to leave?

I can’t speak to the Paramount situation well enough to give you an answer, so it would be unfair for me to do so. I can say once again that our orientation today — and I think about the big AI companies and the big social media companies as well — has to be like, wait a minute, too much power in too few hands.

Particularly when we talk about AI, where it’s potentially existential, but certainly transformative, which is probably a kind way to say it about the economy, that we’re going to have to get very engaged. Guardrails, of course, on both parts, but also addressing what I think on the AI front is potentially a significant change in employment in the United States. I’m not somebody who is necessarily convinced that we have to see a whole bunch of job loss, but that does feel like that’s the direction this is going.

What I’m suggesting is we better be prepared, and we better be protecting people who are going to lose their jobs, or at least it appears they’re going to lose their jobs. And I’ll just give you this thought. If these days 4 percent unemployment is kind of the acceptable near full employment number, I think the problem we’re going to see is — if that’s sort of the level that we’re going to hopefully aim for and stay at — that in very short order, we could end up at 7 percent and have that be the baseline, or maybe 10 percent.

And if you think about what’s happened, the upheavals of economies and of governments when you get to 10 percent unemployment in any country. We better be focused on how we’re going to give people the dignity of work and enough income so that they can make a life for themselves when you’re going to put people out of work by virtue of this technology. By the way, much of the benefit of that is going to go to a very, very few people. So we’ve got to wrestle with that and come to a conclusion.

I wanted to start with some of the brinksmanship we have seen in the negotiations between, particularly, states and the big companies, because that brinksmanship is real. The threat is we will leave. We just covered, I don’t know, Kevin O’Leary in Utah talking about data centers, and the people of Utah really pushed back against Kevin O’Leary building that data center. But his argument was, “Well, I’m just going to shop around.”

This is what states do. They compete with tax incentives and benefits, maybe for data centers, which will put everyone out of a job. They compete for land use rights. You’ve got a rural state with a lot of farms in it. How are you thinking about that dynamic? Do you feel like you’re in competition with the other states, or is this bipartisan realignment creating more of a level playing field where these companies are going to have to actually give something?

We are in competition. We just are because it isn’t bipartisan, at least if you ask me. Unless there is a change in the government. I’ll pick on Texas for a second, and there is a chance that you’ll see a new governor in Texas as of November 3rd. In fact, a good chance. But if you look at Texas as it’s run today by a three-term, hoping to be a four-term, Republican governor and a Republican legislature, they have no intention of changing their alignment about incentives.

In the state of Illinois, we don’t want to have to do that. I mean, we obviously want to protect the revenue that we’ve got for the state to pay for the things we think are valuable to our people, but we also want to make sure that we’re attracting jobs and not losing jobs. And in a world where South Carolina, Michigan, Texas, Florida — pick your poison. Michigan may be slightly different just because it’s got democratic control, but these are our competitors. When I’m competing to have a company move to Illinois, I’ve got to make sure, first of all, that I’m somewhere in the ballpark when it comes to the incentives, because otherwise we don’t even get considered.

And then when I say somewhere in the ballpark, I mean, I want to give away less than more, and then I want to provide whatever other advantages I can that aren’t financial so that I can protect the resources that we have. An example of that is, we like to talk about a kind of white-glove service that we offer to companies. If you’re going to bring a factory here, let’s say, just to give an example, we want to make sure that we’ve got somebody who’s kind of a concierge for your company that’s walking you through each of our departments where you need a permit. It doesn’t mean we’re lowering the standards. It just means, a lot of times, the bureaucracy eats up so much time that it makes it impossible for a company to actually do what they want to do in your state.

We try to make sure that if we’re going to attract a large company, with 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 jobs, that we’re at least making it a little easier for them to go through without having to give them massive tax incentives. So that’s the way I think about it. We are in competition. There’s just no doubt about it. Should we be? There’s a lot of discussion about whether we shouldn’t, and maybe at the federal level we should do something about leveling the playing field, but this is the world we’re living in right now.

I wanted to ask those questions just to set the baseline. I really do think something is happening. A lot of young people are dissatisfied with the status quo. A lot of people in general are dissatisfied with what big tech companies are trying to do with AI, with the potential for job loss.

And the relationship between the people, the government, and those companies seems more fraught than ever, especially as they’re trying to expand their physical infrastructure with data centers, as they all become defense contractors, literally taking our tax dollars to sell weapon systems and collect data for the government. That’s a big swirl.

I wanted to start there, but I just want to take one second here and ask you the Decoder questions because I personally think the operation of government is so opaque. It’s very easy to figure out how big companies are run. The CEOs won’t shut up. They’re on podcasts all day long. I think most people have no idea how your job works.

So you were elected governor. How is your office set up, and how have you structured the state government of Illinois?

Just starting from where I sit, and then, of course, we look at it from a customer service perspective. But starting just at the top, I actually did something that no governor of Illinois has ever done — which is that I created not just one deputy governor. We obviously have a lieutenant governor who’s elected also, but a deputy governor is somebody getting appointed by me to serve under me, to help manage the government with me. What I did was put four deputy governors in place, a general counsel, and my chief of staff.

Why is that important? Because what I’ve tried to do is to break down the silos of government. I took all of the health and human services-related departments — that’s the Department of Public Health, the Department of Human Services, the Department of Healthcare and Family Services, everything from health insurance, Medicaid, and public health during the pandemic — and put it all under one deputy governor working directly for me. The idea is that instead of my having, let’s say, 26 direct reports, I’ve got four or five direct reports plus my chief of staff, who each have, let’s say, six or seven departments underneath them.

From my perspective, what I wanted to do was make sure that I’m breaking down the silos of government, making these departments that are often building walls, and they don’t want to talk to one another because they’re afraid they might lose jobs in one department to another department, or lose control of a program if they’re talking to one another. That’s the way it used to be. Now we’re like the deputy governor is there to either beat the heads together or at least bring them together so that they will be operating the government more efficiently. Okay, so that’s from the top.

From the bottom, which is: how do people who live in Illinois interact with the state government? And obviously, technology is one of the upgrades that’s occurred and made it easier. Illinois, frankly, had not significantly invested in those processes before I became governor, or in the technology that was necessary. And I’ll just give you one example of this: We created something called BEACON, which is designed to address the problem that parents and families have with mental health for children. It turns out that there were seven different ways in which people approached the government to get help, and we weren’t coordinating those, and we weren’t helping to provide all of the resources.

I’m talking about outside resources. How do you find a therapist? How do you find a psychiatrist? And how do you pay for those things? Medicaid, if you can’t afford it on your own. But the point is, there’s one door to enter through BEACON that allows you to get access to all of those resources, even if they’re in multiple departments. So that’s just one example. We’re trying to think of this as a customer service operation. It’s one thing to say this is how the org chart looks and another thing to say, this is how you access all the resources of the government that you need.

We provide programs that really matter to people. We have a birth equity initiative to reduce maternal mortality, particularly in Black and Brown communities. And free diapers for some people. The problem is, people don’t even know that the programs exist, and how would you ever figure out that the programs exist, especially if you’re a working person who’s working two minimum-wage jobs? You don’t have any time, and you don’t have any money, and you don’t even know how to talk to the government. And so we’re trying to fix all of those problems of the government with the way that we interact with people.

It’s funny. It feels like that is one of the bigger opportunities when it comes to AI, just letting the AI navigate a bureaucracy for you and communicate what resources are available. The flip side of that is that people hate AI. They truly dislike it, and it doesn’t feel like that connection has been made — that a lot of these tools can actually just navigate a bureaucracy for you. Are you thinking that should be an investment that you make, that it might be what turns the tide in terms of how people feel about these tools?

Yes, but I’m not plunging headlong into it. And I realize that there are probably states that are plunging headlong into it.

I mean, the United States government rolled out its AI chatbot to look at webpages across the government.

Well, there you go.

I guess what I’m trying to do is make sure that… I created something called the AI Cabinet in my government, and that is to essentially bring the experts on AI together with the leaders of my mainstay agencies of state government, so that we’re thinking about privacy, safety, and efficiency. And those things have to be talked about together. You can’t just say we’re going after efficiency and we don’t really care about the other two.

So that’s the idea, the AI cabinet. It’s also that, honestly, there are things, as you know, about AI that are dangerous. And so we’ve got our emergency management agency on that AI cabinet. We’ve got our state police on that AI cabinet. And remember, a lot of the people that work in those agencies aren’t particularly proficient at AI or really understand the potential and the potential dangers.

That’s why we brought in experts, for example, from the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, just as two examples of places where we’re drawing expertise. So yeah, there’s a lot to be done. I would say we’re trying to approach it carefully before it gets out of control to a point where we have no way to pull it back in.

The other Decoder question I ask everybody is about decisions. You have a big job. You have some constraints in your decision-making process, right? There’s a state legislature, there’s a federal government, you have other agencies in your state. How do you make decisions? What’s your framework?

Well, I don’t do it the way Donald Trump does.

It’s funny you say it that way. I guess I start with the idea that we have a problem to solve and that decisions have to get made. Are those decisions ones that need to come to the governor? Because you’re right, I only have so much bandwidth. So the question is: which are the most serious ones that can’t be solved by other people, or are unlikely to get the outcomes that I would want by handing them over to other people? And then those automatically come to me.

So what I’m making decisions about is kind of the first answer to your question, and then it’s how do I actually make the decisions? For me, I am not one of those people who thinks that I’m right 100 percent of the time. Maybe a good way to describe it, and I’m joking a little bit when I say it, is that I’m 90 percent sure I’m right, but there’s also a 10 percent chance that I’m dead wrong. I want to make sure that I’m getting input and a debate before I actually make the final decision.

Someone once told me that the best CEOs are ones that, in their organization, are a little bit below average in terms of their capability and intellect. I’m not saying we want below-average leaders. I’m just saying you’re so good at hiring that you’ve got people in your organization who are really far better than you are at various things that you’re not particularly good at. Maybe knowing what you don’t know and being willing to ask for help is a philosophy that I have. Be willing to ask for help if it’s something you really don’t know.

And I’ll be honest, when you become governor of a state, there are a whole lot of topics within the purview of a governor. Making decisions about all those topics, maybe a human being who has super intelligence might be able to do it, but most people don’t start out knowing everything there is to know about public health, public safety, and education. And so you start out with what you know and then try to add expertise to it and then make decisions based upon the best experts debating one another in front of you. At least that’s how I like to do it.

Give me an example. Governor Kathy Hochul from New York was on the show. She said in her first week she needed to declare a state of emergency because of a hurricane, and she just didn’t know how, which was very humanizing in its way. Give me an example of when you became governor, and there was something where you just didn’t know.

COVID.

Sure.

I mean, honestly, no one runs for governor thinking there’s going to be a global pandemic. You think you’re going to solve education problems for people or put more money in people’s pockets by raising the minimum wage or whatever, but COVID comes along. And I have to admit, the level of expertise, I don’t think any governor… Well, maybe Josh Green, the doctor who’s the governor of Hawaii, maybe he had a lot to [of expertise] start with — but for the rest of us humans, that was one where we were learning on the job.

We were working 18 hours per day. My entire team was all in, and we had to do things like emergency procurement of ventilators and masks, and we had to go outside the box. It’s not like we could just put it through our central management services, look for a contract, or whatever. This was like, I need masks in three days.

I’ll tell you a quick story, if you’re interested, about my interaction with Donald Trump at the time because I think it’s interesting, anyway. But I’m not a big fan of Donald Trump, in case you didn’t know. I was one year into office when the COVID pandemic hit, and I had not… I mean, I talked to his administration, but I didn’t talk to him directly. So I picked up the phone and called him, and I said, “Mr. President.” By the way, I wrote a script for myself because I know he likes to be flattered, and I’m not somebody who normally likes to flatter him, but I wrote a script for myself. I saved it; I even have it today.

And I said, “Mr. President, you’re a great businessman, but you can understand that paying $8 for an N95 mask that should cost us 75 cents means we’re in a national emergency. We need to be able to get these things and afford them, and I’m competing against all the other states. We need to invoke the Defense Production Act in order to make sure that we’re making enough masks in the United States.” That’s what I told him. And then I said, “But I need masks right now. What can you do for me?” I said, “I need 2 million N95 masks, and I need 4,000 ventilators.” And he never delivered, just so you know, even though he promised that he would deliver.

The challenges in COVID were mighty, and the organization that we had to create around it… I had meetings every morning just on this topic, figuring out, okay, how many hospital beds [are available]? We didn’t have a system that would tell us statewide how many hospital beds are available in each region. What happens if you have an outbreak and it really is overtaking some region? What do we do?

And so these were all the things we had to learn on the fly. And all I can tell you is, once again, back to hiring great people to have around you, I really felt like I proved that I had done a good job of hiring because the people around me were tremendous. One of whom, by the way, is now running as my lieutenant governor partner in this election.

It’s interesting you brought up COVID in the context of our conversation about generational political realignment. I would actually point to COVID as the beginning of a particular realignment around what the government should measure, how much control the government should have over people, and all of that has led, I think, directly into the bipartisan pushback against Flock cameras.

The very notion of privacy is not, in my mind, left or right anymore. The CEO of Flock got himself in all kinds of trouble because he kept saying all the people who wanted to ban Flock cameras are criminals, and he would go on MAGA media and say this. I think that position was just rejected. We can see in states around the country that there’s pushback against Flock cameras. I would point to COVID as the beginning of that.

The idea that the government could be too intrusive, and in particular, the government should not be able to measure things. “If you don’t test, there won’t be COVID” just became an idea. And the idea that we shouldn’t measure things, or we should tear down our systems of measurement, is a big part of the second Trump administration. But I see that privacy connection very clearly to COVID. In one world, the government coming together to protect its citizens and build a bunch of systems could have gone a very different way. In the one we live in, there’s ferocious pushback to that, on the left and the right in some ways. How do you feel about privacy right now?

I know Illinois leads the nation. You’ve got the Biometric Identification Protection Act. Every time I fly to Chicago, I’ve got to push the button at the airport to say that it’s okay to look at my face. That’s one way of going about it. But then you do have, I think, hundreds of Flock cameras in Cook County alone. People have Meta glasses with cameras in them. There’s something happening with privacy that is running right into the aftershocks of COVID and how people feel about government intrusion. How are you finding a way through that balance?

Well, and don’t forget AI.

Yep.

As you’re suggesting. I mean, talk about a collision. This focus on privacy is warranted and long overdue, to be honest with you. I understand what you’re describing about COVID, but I think something that came out of COVID got accelerated, and that was conspiracy theories.

Yes.

And I’m not suggesting that everything you hear now about the pushback around privacy is a conspiracy theory, but it is easy for these things to spread, and people have misinformation that’s informing them about how these things are used. Having said that, I guess what I think is that we are having to solve multiple problems at the same time, and that AI is coming.

Let’s just go to AI for a second. It’s here. I mean, I say it’s coming, but it’s here. It’s not going to stop. We’re not going to become Luddites without any AI. So the question is, in the context of privacy, what guardrails are we putting on AI, and how are we managing it? This idea that the president and David Sacks had, where they got all the companies together and said, “Hey, how about you guys self-police?” That’s not going to work, at least not for protecting people’s privacy. And frankly, it’s not going to provide any safety either because everybody’s going to operate in their own self-interest. It’s one of the reasons why you need a government, in my view.

I’m not suggesting the government is any smarter than these companies. But one of the reasons you have any kind of collective action of the government is because, separately, as you know, people operate in their own self-interest. I mean, you could have a Hobbesian world where people are killing each other, and there are no rules about it. So I think we’ve got to use the government as a tool and also be smart within the government. And that’s where the generational change, I think, is hugely important. Use the government as a smarter, less bureaucratic collection of people devoted to protecting the privacy of everyone and making sure that we’re addressing all the other challenges that come from AI.

So I guess I’ll just say, I don’t think we’re anywhere near where we need to be, but I will say, if we don’t have a federal government, now I’ve got a lot of… I’m very proud of the things that we’ve done here in Illinois around the AI Safety Measures Act, which is the toughest in the country, the Children’s Social Media Safety Act, and so on. I’m proud of the work we’ve done, but state by state, this is not the way to do this. We’re doing the best we can in the absence of a federal government that is addressing these issues.

And when I say federal government, I’m not just pointing at Trump. I’m pointing at Congress. No action on their part means that we’re going at it alone. And right now, I don’t know how many AI safety measure acts have been passed, but it looks like three to me. I mean, it’s New York, California, and Illinois. Maybe you could name a couple of others, but we three were the first. And yet, we’ve got 47 other states.

This worries me a great deal. You’re raising issues, and I’d love to tell you I have all the answers. I can tell you what we’re trying to think about is that we are the… People sometimes say that the states are laboratories of democracy. They’re actually laboratories of policy, and we are trying to, at least in Illinois, use ourselves as a laboratory for policy while not creating disadvantage for ourselves. And so that’s a very challenging thing to do, and why we need to change what’s happening at the federal government.

Focus on privacy for one second. I understand what you’re saying about AI. I think part of the privacy debate around Flock cameras, for example, is, well, sure, you can have one license plate reader in one intersection. And if the cops had to go there and pull the SD card out of it, drive it back to headquarters, upload it to their Apple IIe, and look at it manually, maybe people would feel one way about it.

But those cameras are all networked. They don’t have any access controls really. There are infinite reports of local police chiefs tracking their girlfriends across state lines with these cameras. You add in a system like Palantir, which can synthesize multiple databases and do all kinds of tracking across all kinds of systems. People see that.

The turn that is being made is that you can connect a lot of databases of information together, search them without a warrant, and track people across the entire country. You could ban that state by state. You could regulate it city by city, which we’re seeing happen with Flock, and you could maybe have some federal controls around privacy there. None of it’s really happening, but on the ground, people are ferociously pushing back. And that’s the connection I’m making to COVID, conspiracy theories, and how much power the government should have to surveil you and look at you.

Something happened in there where people’s attitudes about that really shifted. And I would say one of my core beliefs is that Americans do not like being told what to do. Party politics aside, Americans don’t like being told what to do. Something about that flipped and connected to: we have a network of license plate-reading cameras, and we’re going to tear them down when we see them because there’s something about that that offends us as Americans.

Illinois does have privacy laws. I think the last update to the biometric law you did was in 2024, and it has changed again. It’s gotten more vociferously opposed to tracking and surveillance in this country. Do you think you need another update to that privacy law?

I think we should be looking at that question every year. I’ll give you an example of it. We passed it, and again, I’m back to AI because I think how you’re describing it was a perfect way to say it. If it was an SD card that they had to go grab and then analyze back at the station, it’d be a different thing. But it’s AI that’s operating these things, and that’s allowing this stuff to move instantaneously and track people.

Look, should we be addressing it? Yeah, every year. It’s like the issue of ethics in government. What I mean is, the minute you put an ethics law in place, there’s somebody who’s trying to get around it. I mean, every year, it’s like every law… this is probably true across all of capitalism, maybe. There are always people trying to find a way around the law. Put a tax law in place, and someone’s trying to figure out how to get around it. And I think the point you’re making is that that’s why you need to have a proactive government, less bureaucratically and more aggressively trying to address these things. Are we going to be able to keep up with it? I’ll be honest, I don’t think so. And I also don’t think you can say, “Well, we’re just going to shut it all down” because there are things you’re missing out on.

It’s sort of like, and again, I keep going back to AI, but I think a lot about it. My children are 21 and 24. They’re going to live to 100 or 110 years old because AI is going to solve a whole bunch of medical challenges, and already is. There’s a cure now for sickle cell anemia, and people who would otherwise die at 25 or 30 years old are going to live full lives. This is going to happen across the board in cancer and everything else. And so there’s all good in there, and then there’s the bad. So I know what you’re saying. I guess all I can tell you is I’m a believer that we can progressively — I don’t mean that in a political fashion — address these challenges.

In Illinois, we passed a law that disallows the use of AI in therapy for people because we think too much information gets collected, not enough humanity in the process, and we think that it should have humanity in it. Again, we’re not trying to shut it down across the board, but we’re going to have to see how it gets used and where it’s improper.

And I know that sounds imperfect because the technology is moving so fast that the idea that we’re going to be able to keep up with all the ways in which someone’s privacy could be breached seems very difficult, but I don’t know any other way to do it. That’s why you have a government, and maybe in the end we’re going to have this competing use of things like AI, where AI is monitoring AI, and AI that’s kind of privacy-friendly or focused on privacy is going to be monitoring the AI that’s not. But again, I know you don’t want to just talk about AI.

I am concerned. This issue of privacy has been around for a long time. You’ve been talking about it, I’m sure; I’ve been talking about it since before AI. This is like everybody giving over their personal information in exchange for access to something. And that was happening for a while, and then we’re all getting ads that are personalized to us based on stuff that we’ve essentially given up privacy for.

No, it’s funny. People believe, and we can write as many stories as we want about how your iPhone is not actually listening to you, but the ad tracking is so good that everyone believes that their iPhones are listening to them. The next turn is that it is now technologically feasible for these systems to listen to you all the time. And I can’t fall back on the idea that it’s cheaper for them to do the ad tracking when you hit I accept than to listen to you all the time, which was, for a decade, the right answer.

The economically correct answer was that ad tracking was cheaper than listening to you all the time. That might be very different in the future. There are already devices that we cover here at The Verge that purport to listen to you all the time and turn that into some actionable data. And it feels to me like the tech industry is trying to drive a truck through our privacy law, through our lack of AI regulations, through an entire system of governance that is designed for the pre-AI era.

The notion that you don’t have privacy in public worked really well when everyone didn’t have a cell phone that could connect to the cloud and instantly search every photo all at once, all the time, and do facial recognition. We live in that world now. I would say the public sentiment towards the idea that you don’t have privacy in public places has turned.

They don’t like the Meta glasses. They call them pervert glasses for a reason. And somewhere in there is, well, the federal government should pass privacy law. It is a failure of imagination in the United States. We don’t have federal privacy law. And then somewhere in there is the notion that the states are laboratories of democracy and policy.

It is amazing, by the way, how often on this tech and business show, Thomas Hobbes comes up and the very notion that the government is there to serve as an extension of us solving collective action problems. It comes up over and over again because I think the tech industry does not want to respect that dynamic.

This is why I started with that relationship between government and business, and the pushback and the negotiation, because here it feels like the tech industry is in a bubble of its own making. Truly, in a media bubble of its own making. And then all of the polling is, well, we hate AI. In particular, young people hate AI. And then all of the action is around data centers where NIMBYism, the most American of policy levers, is being pulled to keep these data centers out of communities. And that’s one way to stop AI.

You just pulled back on data center tax incentives in July. You’re pushing the state legislature to adopt a suite of guarantees on reforms for new construction. Do you think data centers and the pushback on data centers is an effective route towards AI regulation?

No, I don’t. I think it’s an effective route toward data center regulation. I know that people have conflated and put together their opposition to data centers with their opposition to AI. And a lot of people can’t describe why they’re opposed to one or the other because they’re conflated with one another. But I can say that — I mean, at least our aim is focused on the idea, and people really feel this, right, and there’s real data to back this up — the data centers themselves put aside what they’re doing inside a data center.

The data centers and what’s happening are eating up the available electricity, and that’s causing your electric bill to go up. At least that’s how everybody feels. There are a lot of things that we should have been doing in many years gone by to get to a point where electricity bills shouldn’t have to go up now. And that has to do with building out the grid. It’s a world where regulation and cross-border challenges have made it nearly impossible for a lot of the grid to get built the way that it should have. We produce a lot more electricity in the United States than we use, but we just don’t transport it well enough, and we would have a lot more available if we transported it better.

Okay, but even if you think that can’t happen efficiently, we need to build more capacity on the grid. My only point is the opposition to data centers is, in part, a result of the economic situation that’s happening right now in the country, where electric bills, gas, rent, everything has gone up. Your electric bill shows up every month, and it continues to go up, and people kind of scratch their heads and say, “Who am I paying for?” This is happening, and this is particular to Illinois.

We’re not going to have a whole discussion about energy policy, but I could just say this: We produce more nuclear power in the state of Illinois than any other state. Roughly 53 or 54 percent of our electricity comes from nuclear power, and we’re a net electricity exporter. So we have an excess in Illinois, but our bills are going up, and that’s because of the methodology of the regional transmission organizations. Again, not to get into all the details of it, but essentially, if Ohio decides to build a hyperscale data center, our bills in Illinois are affected, and that’s shocking to people who live in Illinois. But what they know is they don’t want their bill to go up, so they don’t want another data center nearby — even though the one in Ohio is actually causing the problem, even if you choose to oppose data centers.

So this is a challenge. I think there’s a lot of information that needs to be spread. But most of all, we just need a whole lot more capacity and a whole lot more grid that will, I think, subside some of the concern about data centers. To your point, privacy is, I think, more related to AI than data centers. And it’s not just AI, but the way AI is used. So we’re going to have a lot of opposition. You make an excellent point. I think this feeling of being out of control — you are not in control of your environment anymore — that’s the thing that is causing anxiety.

I want to go back to something really important that I was saying earlier. We need better people running for public office. We need smarter policy development in government. And part of that is a generational shift that’s needed and a better understanding. We have people who are serving in the United States Senate who have no idea. Was it the Secretary of Education, Trump’s Secretary of Education, who called it A1? I mean, because we’ve got older people who don’t have any exposure who are making policy theoretically on these things, and it should disturb us all. It’s one of the reasons we’ve got to advance the cause of better people and better systems in government.

We are on the cusp of an election. There might be a new Congress. There might be new leadership in Congress. There are a bunch of old Democrats too. In fact, I could probably point directly to Joe Biden’s age in the last election as the reason that he lost. Do you think that you need a wholesale change of leadership of the older Democrats as well?

You said, “Do we need a wholesale change?” I mean, I can tell you that I don’t think we should be telling —

Well, now I live in New York. I’ll just ask you, do you think Chuck Schumer should be the Senate majority leader if the Democrats take the Senate?

That’s a decision people in the Senate are going to make. I have no influence over it. I can tell you this: I am opposed to term limits because I think that you should have all the choices. You’re a voter. If you want to vote for the 75-year-old, I mean, go ahead.

I’m just suggesting that a great case could be made for the 45-year-old who’s just as smart as the 75-year-old was when he was 45, or maybe is now, but has a modern look at the issues around AI privacy, everything else we’re discussing, and a more aggressive view of how we ought to be reining in big corporations in their invasion of our lives. But I think people ought to make their own choices. I mean, for us to say, “Well, we should have an age limit. You’re 70, that’s it, you’re out.” I think that belies who we are as a democracy.

Well, you convinced me. I’m 46. I’m announcing my run for president here with you, Governor. That was a rousing speech.

Listen, I would vote for you in a second if the choice was you and Donald Trump.

A low bar, but I’m glad I crossed it.

Let me tie two ideas together at the end. We’ve talked a lot about AI regulation. You mentioned social media regulation a little bit earlier in this conversation. I know that Illinois has a social media law. You have a bell-to-bell ban on phones in schools for kids.

I’m just going to pick on Mark Zuckerberg. It’s easy to pick on Mark Zuckerberg. If you look at how he talks about social media regulation, he basically describes the tragedy of the commons. You signed the landmark settlement with him. I think Illinois is due to get $750 or $760 million out of that settlement. And a big part of it is that TikTok and YouTube have to agree to the same terms, and then Meta will pay the rest of the money. And Zuckerberg very clearly has said that’s because if Instagram falls back on engagement bait and TikTok doesn’t, the kids will just use TikTok. And so the government has to get everyone to agree.

I will tell you that Neal Mohan, the CEO of YouTube, does not agree. He’s not going to sign onto this. That’s one whole fight. Look at how Mark Zuckerberg talks about AI regulation. There’s none of that dynamic at all. He’s like, “It should be a free-for-all. We’ll all compete. If it’s not safe, the market will tell us. We’ll be fine.” And in my mind, these ideas are at total odds with each other.

In the market where he makes all the money, the government has to step in and stop him from hurting kids because apparently there’s no market demand for safe social media. And in the market where the AI CEOs are telling us they might kill us all if we don’t stop them, it’s a free-for-all, and the market will tell us if they accidentally kill everybody. How do you reconcile those things? Are you just happy that you got the social media case done after a decade of failing to regulate social media, or do you think you can solve AI with regulation this time instead of letting it just cook?

Look, I’m an optimist at heart, so I’m not going to suggest to you that I absolutely know that we can solve all the problems that we’re now facing, but I don’t know what else we can do. Other than, again, progressively making sure that we’re trying to address each of these things, trying to anticipate them to the extent we can. Can we be faster than AI is developing? I don’t know. But we can’t stop trying. I know that. And I would suggest to you that my optimism is founded because I think the vast majority of people want what you’re describing, which is reining it in.

And again, without destroying companies. I don’t think we’re all trying to do that. What we’re trying to do is stop the invasion into our home, stop the invasion into our children’s lives. I do think we can do that, but that’s because we’ve solved a whole lot of huge problems. That’s kind of like my answer to: is AI potentially existential? The answer, of course, is yes. And can we solve it? I don’t know. Nuclear weapons… I mean, just to give something of an analogy to something else. I mean, nuclear weapons are still hanging over us as a danger to humanity. And so far anyway, we’ve managed not to blow up the world. I don’t know whether that gives you any optimism, but it does to me.

We, as a country, can figure out how we want to rein it in here. That we, as a country, can work with our allies to figure out how we want to collectively try to rein it in. And then we have enemies in the world and competitors in the world, and we’ve got to figure out how we’re going to… Maybe it’s mutually assured destruction, like it was with nuclear weapons, but these are all things we’re going to have to work on, and work on fast.

And it’s scary because someone analogized this to… I mean, think about the early 1950s when every kid had to learn that if there was a nuclear blast, an atomic bomb that went off, get under your desk. That wouldn’t have been very effective. But the point is, people lived with the idea that a terrible nuclear holocaust could occur with a nuclear explosion. And so I think we’re heading into that world again with AI. I hope I didn’t stray too much from your question, but —

Let me ask you this, and it’s a little bit of a wild card here at the end.

We cover this industry so closely here, and the big difference with nuclear weapons is that there weren’t five companies building bleeding-edge nuclear weapons in private capacity, led by five guys who all hated each other. But that’s the dynamic of the AI industry. They all truly hate each other, and they’re all trying to make as much money as they can as fast as they can.

And then some of them think the AI is alive. If you ask Anthropic, and we’ve done this, “Is Claude alive?” They don’t say no. They will argue with you about the definition of alive and suggest that, to them, alive means having a biological component and Claude doesn’t have that, but it might be conscious.

There’s a race to build AGI in the industry. Some people truly believe they’re building alien minds that have a different kind of consciousness. I’m not sure any government at any level has ever had to regulate that, or has ever come up against an industry that is religious about the fact that it might be building the next kind of intelligence.

Where do you stand? Do you think that they’re building a next kind of consciousness that stands alongside humans, or do you think that this is normal technology as some others do?

Boy, that is really another podcast for us, but I’ll just say this one thing: I just want to disagree with you for a second. Nobody could ever imagine a nuclear weapon either. And…

But the government built nuclear weapons. It wasn’t —

I understand. I’m not suggesting it’s the same. I’m suggesting it’s so new at the time that figuring out how you’re going to rein it in… Because remember, it’s not just one government, and the same thing with AI. It’s not just those five guys either. I mean, it’s like there’s somebody in China. Maybe five of those. I don’t know, and somebody in Europe or whatever. You could say we’re ahead, or they’re ahead. I don’t know.

But all I’m saying is, yeah, this is a proliferated situation and it’s not government-controlled. One hundred percent, you’re right; it’s not like nuclear weapons in that sense. But it is like nuclear weapons in the sense that nobody’s ever seen it before. It’s a complete mystery to start with. How are we going to rein it in? I mean, nobody thought Russia was going to get the bomb, and they got it. We’ve figured out somehow how to deal with it.

Again, you’ve got to be an optimist to believe we can end up with the right solution here. I don’t know that we have the answer to “how do we rein it in?” I will say, though, that if we had the power to create it, we have the power, in my view, to rein it in. Is it conscious? You’re asking a deep question.

Have you felt the AGI?

I mean, do you think it’s conscious? Because I understand why people think it might have consciousness or it’s going to be conscious. But I think that’s why the ethicists and technologists need to be involved. And especially, in my view, the government’s got to be involved because how else are you going to rein in the five guys and the companies that have developed this? There is no other way.

I will tell you, I don’t think it’s conscious. And every now and again, you have an experience where it’s blindingly clear why other people believe that. When you watch a reasoning model take 90 steps over an hour and arrive at a conclusion, it’s impressive, and you can see why people believe that. I do not, and I have a lot of reasons for that.

It just occurs to me that if you set out to regulate a technology like this, if you believe one thing, you would maybe go down one path. And if you believe that you were building a consciousness, you might go down another.

Again, the whole industry itself does not agree on this. Jensen Huang and Dario Amodei do not agree on whether it’s alive. Jensen just wants to sell a bunch of chips, and he will happily tell you it’s just technology and you can control it. I think Dario thinks he’s building AGI, and that’s a different… There’s a whole reason he proposes different kinds of regulatory structures there. I’m just asking you, have you felt the AGI? Do you think it’s one path or the other?

I’m not going to give you a satisfactory yes or no.

I mean, I haven’t felt it. I guess that’s what I’m… My basic answer is I haven’t felt it.

Governor Pritzker, this was very fun. Thank you for indulging this last existential loop of a question. You’re going to have to come back to Decoder soon.

I would like to do that. Thanks, Nilay.

_{Questions or comments? Hit us up at decoder@theverge.com. We really do read every email!}

Elon Musk says he plans to give one of his SpaceX shares to every child in the US starting next year. With around 72 million children in the US as of July 2025, Musk would be giving away about $10.5 billion worth of shares, according to a report from CNBC.

Musk, who runs SpaceX and Tesla, appears to be giving away the shares through Trump Accounts, the tax-advantaged investment accounts for American children. Musk responded to a post from Brad Gerstner, who helped launch Trump Accounts, saying "Thanks for helping enable this." Musk adds that this giveaway "will be the first of many."

The move comes just months after SpaceX president Gwynne …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Democrats could win back control of Congress this November, and if they do, they'll need to decide how to approach one of the country's newest and thorniest political issues: AI.

Polls predict Democrats will flip at least one chamber of Congress in the midterm elections, which would put committee leadership back in their hands. That could usher in a wave of newfound scrutiny for AI companies. Top Democrats on key committees have already signaled their willingness to press the industry on tax credits tied to data centers and recent hacking incidents, and would be able to set committee agendas if they take over, allowing them to call CEOs to …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York's 15th congressional district in the Bronx introduced the Power To The Players Act this week. If passed, the bill would direct the Federal Trade Commission to establish regulations that guarantee consumers ownership of a game when they pay for it, rather than a licensing agreement.

It's increasingly common for games sold to require a connection to a server. Meaning that when a company decides to shut down those servers, the games often become unplayable. Rep. Torres singles out NBA 2K25 as a recent example. 2K will be delisting the game from storefronts at the end of the month and shutting down its servers on …

Read the full story at The Verge.

During a rally on Saturday, October 17th, in Highland Heights, Kentucky, Donald Trump bragged about how much more powerful and influential he was during his second term. While listing off his accomplishments, he mentioned his decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario.

"This is a much more powerful term. I can do stuff that's unbelievable … I called Google, Google Maps. See, Google wouldn't have taken my call in the first term. Now they kiss my ass."

Trump seems to be implying that he convinced Google to reflect the name change personally. That would seem to contradict Google's statement on the matter, in which it said that …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Just ahead of the wider release of Alex Gibney's Musk documentary, TikTok has banned the film's social media account from its platform. TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the film's distributor, Bleecker Street, was informed Friday afternoon that a "permanent suspension" was imminent. Bleecker Street has not yet responded to a request for comment from The Verge.

While TikTok has no official affiliation with Elon Musk, part owner Larry Ellison appears in the film via a text message offering to help Musk fund his Twitter purchase.

Last month, YouTube, Meta, X, and TikTok all face …

Read the full story at The Verge.

In 2024, Elon Musk promised to give away $1 million a day to a randomly selected registered voter in a swing state. That prompted legal challenges, raised questions about its legality, and drew lawsuits from two Arizona residents claiming the lottery was a fraud. Musk has now agreed to settle the two lawsuits filed in Austin, Texas, though the details of the settlement have not been made public.

The plaintiffs claim that when Musk announced the sweepstakes, he falsely claimed the prizes would be awarded randomly. Philadelphia's District Attorney sued to stop the giveaway, claiming that Musk was running an illegal lottery. During a hearing, …

Read the full story at The Verge.

President Donald Trump posted a series of photos on Truth Social showing off renovations to the White House - but one of them appears to be modified with AI. The picture, which compares an old White House column to a "restored" one, has several discrepancies and was flagged by Google's AI detector as "made or edited with OpenAI."

As pointed out by users on Reddit, the picture of the "restored" column has an uneven number of steps on both sides of the structure. The number of steps also doesn't match up with the ones in the "before" photo. Additionally, the before and after photos appear nearly identical in angle and detail; the reflection i …

Read the full story at The Verge.

We knew that a number of big tech firms were helping to fund the construction of Trump's ballroom, but we didn't know just how much they were giving to the cause. Now the Washington Post published a list of all the major donors to the White House ballroom project, along with how much each contributed. In total, Silicon Valley and the crypto industry have reportedly delivered over $150 million for the effort.

Some of that money has come from individuals, some from charitable organizations tied to major firms or industry players, and some directly from the companies themselves. In Google's case, the $22 million was part of a controversial se …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan will not be livestreamed as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had previously announced.

Donald Trump announced the plan was off in a post on Truth Social:

I think streaming the execution for all to see might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM like Hasan but, many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device. He will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed. That said, the execution may be viewed in person by the immediate fami …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Today, I’m talking with Benn Jordan, musician, YouTuber, researcher, and investigative journalist. You might know Benn from those first two titles — he’s got a prolific discography of experimental music dating back decades.

But in the last couple of years, he’s become a high-profile face in the creator and media spaces for his work investigating Flock Safety, the maker of automatic license plate readers and the software that powers them.

Benn recently testified in front of Congress, at a hearing the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism held, dedicated to Flock and other ALPR systems. This hearing felt like the culmination of months and months of growing criticism and bipartisan backlash against Flock — all of which is taking a shape similar to the pushback against AI data centers.

This has led to major fallout for Flock. Hundreds of cities, counties, and other local governments have begun canceling contracts, and Flock is now under investigation by Republican Sen. Josh Hawley. Last week, Reuters reported that Flock plans to cut about 18 percent of its workforce.

So of course I wanted to dig into all of that with Benn, not just because he played a role in that, but because he’s also become in some ways the face of a new front in the broader debate about surveillance and privacy.

A point you’ll hear Benn make is that he doesn’t actually hate Flock as a company — he thinks its posture toward critics has been a colossal PR failure that made it low-hanging fruit, while competitors like Axon and Motorola quietly build the same kind of networks. Instead, Benn now talks to Flock directly, including to its CEO Garrett Langley, and reports security vulnerabilities to the company when he finds them. (As a side note: we have also invited Flock’s CEO on the show; Garrett if you’re listening, we would love to have you.)

Benn says his outreach to the company is an olive branch he’s extended to Flock as part of his goal of working toward real, tangible solutions to surveillance overreach, rather than part of a crusade to tear one single company down.

That’s a real theme throughout our conversation: that Flock and other high profile names in surveillance are just part of the problem — our real focus should be on the interlocking relationship between private industry, government, and law enforcement that prioritizes secrecy over transparency.

We never voted for an insecure network of cameras on every street corner, and we’re certainly not being asked if we’re comfortable with access to this network being given to police officers with a penchant for abusing it. So Benn sees his work on YouTube and with other researchers, civil rights groups, and journalists as an accountability function that forces this conversation to the forefront. And so far, it’s working.

Okay: Benn Jordan on Flock, privacy, and the new surveillance backlash. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Benn Jordan, you’re a musician, YouTuber, and researcher. Lately you’ve been an investigative journalist. You are a witness in Senate hearings. Welcome to Decoder.

Thanks for having me.

I’m a huge fan of yours. It’s just a delight to have you here. A lot of people in the Verge audience know you as a musician, but lately you have been relentlessly focused on Flock cameras, which are automatic license-plate readers (ALPRs). You recently testified in front of a Senate hearing on those cameras and the surveillance they enable.

Give us a sense of your background. For people who don’t know you or haven’t been following you for years, where did Benn Jordan come from and how did you end up being the person who makes videos about Flock?

I’ve been a musician my entire life, pretty much. I’ve also always been kind of a hacker, or somebody who is that type of person who always takes stuff apart. If I get a product that wants me to pay for a service that’s already in the product, then that’s a puzzle I want to solve and I get excited about it. But a lot of times that blends into investigative journalism as well.

With the Flock stuff, it’s just that I live in Atlanta, which has more Flock cameras than anywhere else per square mile. About two years ago I started noticing them. I thought they were traffic cameras or something like that. Then I started looking into what they were actually doing and then started looking into things like security vulnerabilities. More than anything, everything that’s happening right now in the public, in the news, has to do with people just figuring out that these have existed the entire time.

A lot of my focus now is on the lack of transparency from the government, because the companies are always going to make money and try to make as much money as they can, especially if it’s from taxpayer money. But in this case, I feel like our government missed it. And that’s where we’re at.

There’s a question that’s been rattling around my head the entire time we’ve been having what I would call the modern privacy and surveillance debate.

When I say “modern,” what I mean is it feels like we woke up sometime in the last year and everything is recording us all the time and everything is watching us and the glasses have cameras in them and Mark Zuckerberg is saying phones don’t have a light, and that is meant to end a conversation.

That’s it. That’s the argument. Phones don’t have a light, no further questions. The Apple Watch is going to start doing automatic transcriptions, and everyone said, “Wait, hold on. No thank you. We actually don’t want this to happen.” But my personal experience of this is that my political coming of age was the Iraq War and the Patriot Act.

This is the stuff that people were talking about twenty-five years ago — don’t do warrantless wiretaps, don’t make the databases all connect to each other so you can take the metadata and de-anonymize people at will.

What is it about this time that has made everybody so angry? Because we could have been angry twenty-five years ago.

I’m always trying to get people more informed on the information that’s being collected about them every time they go to a website, every time they sign up for something, every time they check into a restaurant online, every time they use their phone. In this case, one of the reasons that people are really upset about is that you can’t opt out. That’s the first thing.

I can’t say, “I don’t want these Flock cameras or Axon cameras or whatever they are tracking my every move and giving it to law enforcement.” I have no option to do that. I was never given an option on whether to vote for them or vote for somebody who was in favor of them. It just kind of happened and you know people weren’t told about them. That would be the first thing — that you can still install a separate OS on an Android phone or you could turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth or just leave your phone at home. Whereas now you can’t actually go to the grocery store without somebody tracking your vehicle.

The second thing is that — and this is kind of related to opting in and opting out — I can pay for a new AI smartwatch or I can pay for an Amazon Echo device or something like that, or I cannot. Whereas this way I’m paying for this already. This is just my property taxes going up and I’m paying for surveillance.

In some ways it is the same as the NSA, but I feel like it’s much more local now.

You don’t get to go to the town board meeting and yell at the NSA. Although maybe you should. Honestly, that might be good for everyone. There is that part of it, and you’ve certainly been at a bunch of local town board meetings. I’ve watched a lot of videos of you talking to them and helping other people articulate their concerns.

That, to me, is one of the more fascinating aspects of all this. Flock went from a company that was selling cameras to everyone, and the idea that adding Flock cameras would increase the safety of your town went from all but assumed to, “Hold on, we all have a lot of questions,” and now this company is struggling a little bit. They’re losing contracts, they are retrenching, their communication strategy has changed.

What do you make of that? Is that just the power of local democracy in action, or is there something else?

It definitely is democracy in action. That’s the good news. The best news out of anything that’s happened is that with both Flock and data centers, it’s two things that have made people actually look up who their mayor is and who their city council members are and show up to meetings and then get involved in those local politics.

Because those local politics affect your life way more than national politics. They just don’t make the headlines. We’re not as involved. Your day-to-day following what Donald Trump is doing is likely not going to make that big of a difference other than what you argue about over Thanksgiving. Whereas local politics, that’s straight up, in the next year, going to have a big effect on your life.

People are getting involved in that, and then in cases like Asheville, North Carolina, where it’s actually changing the political landscape. People are so dissatisfied with the surveillance policies of their local politicians that it looks like that they may have a new mayor as a result of it, who also comes with a bunch of other interesting and progressive ideas that would probably help the city a lot more than the current mayor has.

That’s a big deal right there. The other part that discourages me a little bit, or the part that I find a little disappointing, is that Flock has become this buzzword, but a lot of people don’t look beyond that. I just heard in the race for governor in Georgia that the Democratic candidate yesterday talked about getting rid of Flock cameras and being anti-Flock, when this is somebody who as mayor of Atlanta welcomed Flock. You see a lot of that happening now, too, where they just say “Flock bad” and then they go sign an Axon contract or they put Verkada or Motorola cameras everywhere.

In my research, Flock has been the low-hanging fruit, just because they were the loudest and most defensive, whereas every other company was just taking a step back and cashing the checks.

One of the pieces of the puzzle here that is just fascinating is that Flock is a startup, essentially. They’re a new company, they have a new go-to-market strategy. They talk a big game about what AI can and can’t do and with what they as a platform should and should not enable. Your Axons and your Motorolas are government contractors. They are not companies that are meant to have a personality.

There’s something about Flock where Garrett Langley, the CEO, had a personality. He would go on TV and deride any critics as left-wing terrorists and that did not work. There’s something about surveillance in that case where that strategy didn’t work. There’s something about data centers where that strategy didn’t work.

We just ran a big piece about the people of Utah pushing back on Kevin O’Leary, who called them all Chinese agents, and they were like, “What are you talking about?” That cut across party lines. Again, you’ve been out there. I know you’ve talked to a lot of people pushing back on surveillance.

Is it just that Flock had a personality, and that enabled bipartisan pushback? Or is it surveillance more generally?

In terms of the media getting attention, Flock had a lot of personality and they were very defensive. I’ve met a lot of the people from Flock who are so villainized and they don’t seem at all the way that they’ve seemed in the clips that I’ve covered in my content. It’s very different. You would assume that there’s a publicist behind a lot of this.

Especially in something that serves law enforcement, where you would maybe have a publicist that’s used to dealing with Republicans and right-wing things, they just tell you to keep repeating the same thing over and over again and take a firm stance and dig your heels in. Most people who aren’t Donald Trump, when they do that, get wrecked. Flock got wrecked. They kept saying things and they kept denying security vulnerabilities and they used clever ways of reframing or redefining words and people picked up on it and now they are the villain.

Whereas companies like Axon are not as sexy for a journalist. They just aren’t, and that’s probably intentional on their part. Any company that’s taking your tax dollars or trying to court your government to give your tax dollars to them probably wants to be out of the spotlight.

We’ve covered Axon before. They do not want to be a company with characters. They are as anonymous as they can be.

One of the things that I want to see with you on the show, most importantly of all, is to describe what a Flock camera is and what the technology behind the hardware does that makes it new.

Because from watching all the videos that you make, I think, “It’s just an Android phone. They’re just putting a bunch of Android phones around town,” but it’s actually the database and the AI that makes it more dangerous than usual. Describe what the actual Flock hardware is and then how that connects to the system that makes it as controversial as it is.

So ALPRs have existed, I believe, since the 1970s. They started getting used in the United States in the late 80s and 90s. One of the classic ways that they would be used in the 2000s is they would be mounted on a police car. If a police car wanted to run someone’s plate, that way they didn’t have to type it in while they’re driving, and they could run a plate over to dispatch. I personally don’t have any problem with that. I think that makes sense. That’s a decent use. However, you would have issues where you would get plate misreads and then people would get taken out of their car at gunpoint as a result.

Flock is a lot different. Flock basically started a private nationwide network where any police department or city that’s using Flock’s network can opt into it and share their data with it. Police departments across the country can then run a license plate with 30 days of retention on everywhere someone’s been, anywhere in the country, as long as they’re sharing the data. So you would have someone in Texas being able to search somebody’s movement through New York or Atlanta or something like that.

They were doing this — they are doing this — without a warrant. Whereas any type of ALPR data sharing previous to Flock had to go through the National Crime Information Center, which does require a magistrate judge to look at the overall context of a situation and then issue a warrant to allow tracking.

That’s the innovation here. They built the private network, the private database, and convinced a bunch of law enforcement agencies to buy their system and they could opt in. There’s some kind of legal innovation here where by making it a private database, they could just excuse themselves from the warrant process.

But the actual hardware of the cameras is not all that impressive. There’s something about that that I really just want to hone in on. The idea of the Flock camera being the problem is secondary to the Flock network being the problem.

One way that I think about it, in the defense of Flock cameras and even outside of Flock itself, is that it’s all happening in public. This is all in public view. It’s generally the same as arguing that you’re allowed to take a picture anywhere in public. So why can’t they do this?

My argument against that would be if you have a police officer follow someone or go through public traffic cams, which are all over the country, and go through every single public traffic cam and wait for your car to come and then write down when that was there and do that for 30 days, that’s generally a serial killer situation.

The amount of resources that you have to dump into that would have to justify that expense with a very serious crime. But doing that for somebody who stole steaks from a Kroger is very different. What worries me about it is that you might end up with police officers being able to get a lead on a case much easier that doesn’t necessarily need police for society to become safer in a better place, like a nonviolent crime or something that’s not a huge deal, rather than investigating more serious crimes.

That’s the argument that Flock makes, and that proponents of this technology make. We had Jamie Siminoff from Ring on the show, and the argument he would make is if you put enough cameras into certain neighborhoods, you will “zero out crime.” That is a thing that he has said to me in the context of Ring doorbells and floodlight cams.

It’s the same argument that proponents of Flock make. “We put up all these cameras, we can catch criminals, thus we will deter criminals, the crime rate will fall.” Do you buy into this?

No, I don’t. Because first of all, we’ve never tested this. We’ve never had a city in a vacuum where we put in a bunch of cameras. One of the metaphors I like to use is if you have a supermarket and you put one camera in one aisle where you think that things are going to get stolen, that will probably increase theft in other aisles rather than just assuming that every shoplifter is just going to become a plumber instead, like I’ll be a doctor instead of a shoplifter.

That doesn’t actually deal with the overall problem. If you have a Walmart that has cameras all over it, and then you have a neighborhood store that can’t afford all of those fancy cameras, then maybe the shoplifters and people who would hold up a store will go to that place instead and you have the same thing with cities. You have crime relocation happening.

So, yes, of course, if you put a camera above a street, it’s less likely that a car on that street within the view of the camera will get broken into. But does that make it more likely that a car a block over where there is no camera will get broken into? This is something that has been observable by criminologists, like crime relocation is a real thing. A lot of times effective policing just moves criminals elsewhere.

Selfishly, you could say, “In my subdivision, we have less crime, and I don’t care about anything other than that.” But over time, over the next decade, it doesn’t really work out that way. You end up with more crime overall, or you end up with bigger problems in society. So I would argue with that.

Also, we’ve seen that Ring cameras don’t really reduce crime all that much. You end up being able to see somebody stealing a package off your porch or you end up being able to see somebody breaking into your house. But do they actually increase clearance rates? I would argue I’ve not seen any evidence that they do.

You have to connect them to the nationwide database of license plate readers.

[Laughs] Right, yeah.

If you put a camera everywhere, you can’t relocate anywhere. That’s the argument. It’s the end point of the argument that they are making: “If putting up some cameras would move the crime, putting cameras everywhere would make that impossible and there will be no crime.”

With a lot of that stuff, it’s just like, “If you have a problem, if you’re worried that you’re going to have a porch pirate, if you’re worried that your house is going to be broken into, I’m not sure why you would jump to put cameras all over your house?”

It’s the same thing with cities, like why wouldn’t you just increase your insurance? You know, increase your insurance payoff or something like that, because that actually will get you new things and you know, the other one will just get you a police report with evidence that the police might not even be able to handle or will not be able to connect to any sort of criminal.

Because even if that criminal gets caught, it’s not like they’re just saving all the money to pay back their victims. It’s figuring stuff like that out. Another thing that I don’t like about surveillance in general, especially things like ALPRs, is that they’re not solving crime with embezzlement. They’re not solving crime with corruption. They’re not solving bigger crimes.

They’re really honing in on things like car theft and things like shoplifting out of a Lowe’s parking lot and then sharing that data with the police and then the police tracking the car two days later and pulling it over. Most of the time those crimes actually have solutions that are in broader public policy.

If somebody’s shoplifting from Lowe’s, I would assume they probably either have a drug problem or they have a problem with poverty, because I don’t want to shoplift from Lowe’s. I don’t have any desire to do that. It’s not a crime of passion. It’s a crime of necessity. I would say that like along the lines, like even if the clearance rates were improving, which I’ve not seen evidence of, what does that mean? Does that just mean that we’re putting more nonviolent offenders in prison or through the justice system? Does that actually make society safer?

We’re getting into the trade-offs of using technology to solve social problems. One of the most important trade-offs that you have brought to light repeatedly is that these devices are not secure.

So even if you solve the problem of “you should get a warrant” — or even if Flock responds to the public pressure and says, “We ought to make people type case numbers into the system before they start searching,” which was their big concession recently — even if you get to, “We’re going to control the system a little bit better,” the devices themselves are insecure. The network is insecure.

That means anybody can do almost anything they want with it. You’re a security researcher. Describe how you began digging into the security problems here and what the response has been.

Starting out, I found out that they didn’t, in early 2025, require multi-factor authentication. I also witnessed a police officer logging into Flock from a Wi-Fi network that wasn’t at a police station. Had you told me those things, I wouldn’t believe them. But witnessing it happening made me say, “This is something that needs more looking into.” I started thinking, “It’s probable at that point, because now you have human error.”

If all of these police departments are sharing data with one another, then it could just be the dispatcher, somebody who’s not even deputized, who has a Flock account at a rural Louisiana police department. That person could sell their account or that person could click the wrong link in an email and whatever. I started looking for Flock credentials on the dark web and I found some and they were coming from a Russian vendor.

I started thinking, “How exactly did that happen?” That’s how I met [cybersecurity researcher] Jon Gaines, and we found that a lot of the time there were hardware vulnerabilities in the camera where you could get them to open up a Wi-Fi access point, and then you could get complete control over the Android device and you could root it and have it do whatever you wanted in a way that would be undetectable because it’s happening outside of the Flock ecosystem on the device.

I had found a bunch of Flock cameras with administrative interfaces that were open on the internet. So you could just type in the IP address and then delete footage, or watch footage from 30 days ago. You could even put files on the device and look at all the logs. In all these situations, we found a lot of plain text credentials, things that shouldn’t have been there.

At first the pushback from the company was that I’m a YouTuber and I was doing magic tricks and I’m not a serious security researcher. Reading their own statement about having never been hacked through a Flock camera and then downloading it on my own machine made that indisputable.

They still disputed it for a while, but that is what really got the media involved and finally paying attention to it. Since then, it’s been smaller things that I’ve found, but more so the bigger deal here is that no matter if you’re using Flock or Axon or whatever it is — because now you have Axon and Motorola also launching their own private networks outside of the National Crime Information Center — the person on this network with the worst security hygiene is going to be as secure as the entire network will be. That’s the big problem.

If I were to have it my way, police officers would not have access to Flock at all. If I were to have it my way, you wouldn’t have this level of surveillance at all. But let’s just say if I were to have it my way on security policy, a police department would have one person who is trained and has a lot of security hygiene and privacy hygiene and is trained to look up Flock searches for police officers. But what we’re seeing is a lot of police chiefs who have Flock accounts. Why would a police chief ever even need to use this service? It’s their job to manage the department.

In the action movie, the cops usually have to bribe the person with access to the surveillance tool with cookies and booze to run a search without a warrant, right?

Yeah, and they usually have bifocals and are really smart.

We’ve been conditioned to think that’s how it should work. At the very least, there should be some light bribery involved, not free access. I am not a security expert by any means. I’ve been covering tech for a long time, and it just strikes me that there are some very basic concepts about security that Flock in particular missed.

The idea that we have open access, there are no access controls, that they were practicing what is called security by obscurity. You could just drive a truck through it and they would deny it. All that seems very basic. Is it just that they’re a startup and they didn’t know any better?

I think they knew better and they didn’t have to do anything about it, because nobody made them. Because somehow across America, police departments and city councils and senators and your federal government allowed these cameras to be put up everywhere without any type of security test or any type of security protocol, any type of triage for what to do if something goes wrong. None of that exists.

Circling back, when I’m actually sitting there in front of the Senate, I’m not going to say, “I can’t believe how bad Flock is.” Flock is a for-profit tech startup. Of course they’re going to do whatever they can to stay competitive. That’s their job that we give them as a society. The job of a legislator is to protect us from them. Because even when we yell at police for the privacy stuff, you wouldn’t consider a police officer or a police department to be Fourth Amendment defenders. They would be on the other side of that argument.

We need somebody on the side that actually defends people’s privacy. Our government has been utterly asleep at the wheel, especially when it comes to security vulnerabilities, but that’s across the board. That’s everywhere. Right now, it’s actually a really terrifying time that we’re in.

You recently testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism. That was a hearing about Flock. That subcommittee is chaired by Josh Hawley, who’s a Republican. He opened a probe into Flock.

I’m curious about that experience, preparing for that testimony and what message you wanted to send. But I just want to note that it is remarkable that a Republican is holding hearings into law enforcement technology and whether or not it’s appropriate, and that’s happening across the country.

What do you make of that? That it’s this bipartisan? Is it that everyone’s just woken up to civil liberties? This is a convenient punching bag, and everyone hates tech? How do you see the shape of it?

For any politician at the Senate level, there’s going to be theater. I don’t consider that to be a meeting where there’s going to be a solution at the end.

But what I did do there, in full transparency, is I wanted to testify with the C-SPAN cameras on in front of a Senate committee, explaining that things like FISA 702 or CORCA — these things that a lot of these politicians, even some people on that subcommittee, co-sponsored — are massive risks to privacy and security.

Because you can’t say that they didn’t know when an expert witness who’s a hacker told them in testimony. That’s ultimately why I went to Washington, DC, because I knew that it would be basically just a bunch of people proudly saying that they’re angry at Flock because everybody’s angry at Flock.

A lot of the things in Hawley’s proposals are things that Flock is already kind of doing, in their own defense, which is good news. It’s not to choose one over the other. Both are actually taking positions that are big compromises from where they probably stood a year or two years ago.

It was a wild experience. It was strange. They expected me to just talk about how bad Flock was. I really didn’t really see a purpose to that. If I wanted to scream about how bad Flock is now, I would just contact somebody at Flock and say, “We need to talk about this. I’m really mad about the security vulnerability,” because they do talk to me now. If I find a security vulnerability, I tell them about it and they take it seriously. Of course it took a lot of damage for them to take me seriously.

But if I’m standing in front of the Senate, I’m going to say, “Why don’t you do something? Because this is your job and this is what we voted for you to do.” As far as the bipartisan stuff, I’m really happy about it, honestly. It’s great. It’s awesome to see our country agree on anything as a whole right now. That’s wonderful.

A lot of Republicans remember COVID and they remember mask mandates and stuff and they probably imagine what a Flock camera would do in that situation. It might automatically send them a ticket or an arrest warrant for leaving their house during lockdown. Who knows? But that is all related to privacy risks and authoritarianism and it’s all very real in their memory.

It is interesting to see a lot of politicians take the side of ICE and take the side of the National Guard driving into a city where the police department doesn’t even want them there, and then also be anti-Flock or anti-surveillance. It’s an interesting time.

There’s something there. One of my early career rookie mistakes was that I covered telecom companies and ISPs as a baby blogger at AOL and I got it into my head that I should testify in front of Congress to talk about how the ISPs were charging everybody too much money.

I called the general counsel and the policy office at AOL and I said, “Can you get me in front of Congress?” They said, “About what?” And I said, “The ISPs are bad,” and they went, “You know, we’re an ISP,” and that was the end of that conversation. It didn’t go any farther.

[Laughs] You definitely need a lawyer if you’re going to testify in front of the Senate. There are a lot of legal expenses involved. It’s pretty stressful all in all. I feel like a lot of people think it’s a lucky thing, but  it’s a very stressful two weeks of your life.

You are in the center of that swirl, and it is bipartisan. I would put up surveillance and data centers as the issues that are uniting Americans today. Are you hearing from both sides? Did you sit with Republican senators individually? I’m sure you hear from regular people on both sides of the aisle.

Is it really that we don’t want the government to spy on us, so we’re going to yell at these cameras? Or is it bigger than that?

I think, and what I hope, is that when people discover what’s going on with Flock, and what’s going on with other police surveillance technology, they also don’t immediately go to misinformation, because that’s what a lot of people do. A lot of people will hear about the Flock cameras and then they’ll go, “How is Israel involved in this?” Then they immediately go down that rabbit hole on X or 4chan and then it builds this conspiracy theory that’s completely not in parity with the actual problem that we’re trying to solve.

What always entertains me so much about those types of conspiracies is that reality is just as crazy. It’s just as wild. There’s just as much outrage in reality. Somehow conspiracies are more attractive, even though on many occasions they’re not even as interesting as reality.

LexisNexis, for example, is a data broker that police use, that your car uses, that your devices sell data to constantly. If people knew the average amount of data that this data broker has about them that’s being sold and traded constantly, I feel like their anger about Flock would be completely eclipsed by it.

Can I connect those thoughts? I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Five years ago, we could confidently write a story debunking the notion that Instagram was listening to you. [Instagram CEO] Adam Mosseri, this poor man, has to make a video once a week insisting that he is not listening to you. Part of the reason that five years ago we would be confident in writing that story is the technological cost of listening to every Instagram user and figuring out what they had said to serve you ads was actually very high.

It was much cheaper to say, “You were on your friend’s Wi-Fi network six months ago, they searched for vacations, we’re going to serve you the ads and the coincidence will be astounding and you will believe that we’re listening to you, but it’s actually just a bunch of like data matrix synthesis, right? But that’s going to be very effective.”

We could write that story and say, “Actually you were in the same place at the same time. There’s no way they’re listening to you, it would be too expensive.” But here in 2026, I’m not sure I can make that claim anymore. Everyone wants to listen to you all the time. The amount of databases that we are synthesizing have skyrocketed all the way to “I’ve seen all the license plates on all the highways at all times, and the police chief has that data.”

How do you regain a sense of privacy? There’s a part of me that says so many people believe their phones are listening to them that you can never claw your way back, that you can never end the conspiracy theory.

The “phone listening to you” thing is so interesting to me because it’s one of those perfect examples of conspiracy versus reality, where if somebody is having a discussion about something, like that they want to get a horse. Weird example. But I was thinking about learning how to ride a horse. You have that discussion with your partner and then later on that day, you get a suggestion or an ad for horse-riding lessons on your phone. The conclusion and the conspiracy theory is my phone is listening to my conversations.

That’s pretty reasonable until you find out that it’s very inefficient for them to do so. The crazy part is that you’ve been giving subtle hints to Meta, to Google, and to all these companies and they have an algorithm that can figure out that you’re going to want horse-riding lessons and so when you feel like your phone’s been recording your conversations, it’s almost like this glitch in the matrix where you have a moment to realize how powerful the algorithm actually is at predicting what you’re about to think. That is scary and that’s not a conspiracy. That’s actually how it works.

That always boggles my mind like that. Wow, look at the real thing happening because it’s so much crazier than the conspiracy is. Of course they could listen to you. There are a lot of devices that listen to you that say they’re using your data to self-improve. Tesla listens to you. Like there’s a lot of different services and products.

But the scary part is that listening to your conversation is one of the least efficient and least valuable things it could do because it already has so much more important information. What you’re communicating verbally is usually not nearly as valuable as just your subtle pattern.

Yeah, and your transaction history. I guess what I’m getting at is again, five years ago, I would say some version of that all the time: “They’re not listening to you. The real thing is way scarier and listening to you isn’t valuable.” And it would be costly. You have to store all this audio, you have to process it, you have to figure it out. And now it feels like actually it’s not costly. It is happening all around us all the time.

If I look at Flock, the problems break down into two buckets. One, the very idea of a private database that anyone can search without controls is bad. And we should legislate a bunch of controls around that thing. And then two, letting a startup kind of YOLO that technology into the world without any security best practices, equally bad. These are two different problems that have come together to create a privacy disaster.

But even if you think Axon or Motorola will have better security, you’ve got the first problem, which is you need controls around these private networks. All that in my mind is right next to the conspiracy style thinking you’re describing, where it’s technologically plausible that all the bad things are happening.

I can’t rule them out anymore. My Apple Watch might just make transcripts of all the meetings without anyone’s permission. The loophole you describe in our legal system for years, the idea that you don’t have privacy in public, has been a lodestar. It is just foundational, and now people don’t love that anymore. Because the idea that you don’t have privacy in public enables a bunch of people to do a bunch of things people don’t like.

Maybe we should rethink that as a moral, ethical, and legal matter, but we’re nowhere close to that. I just feel like all that is pouring fuel on the conspiracy theories. You’re in the center of the storm here, and so I’m wondering if you can find a rational set of policy outcomes here that tamps down on those flames.

A little over a year ago, when my first video on Flock came out, if the company’s response and the government’s response to it was, “Audit logs are now going to be open and they’re going to exist on something that uses immutable data storage. It could be the blockchain, could be WORM or something like that. Basically, anybody can look at them, anybody can own them, nobody can change them…”

If they said that, then they immediately went and fixed all the security vulnerabilities and you just had a smarter way of looking at these things… Also one thing that would have been really interesting around them is to be able to go to your DMV and show them your license and opt out.

You could say, “I’ve not been convicted of a felony, I’ve not done anything wrong, I don’t want to be tracked.” And then all of a sudden, when a Flock license plate reader detects your plate, it says “opt out,” unless a cop puts you on a hot list because you’ve murdered someone or something like that. These are all reasonable compromises that could have been made with relatively little expense.

But now a year later, who’s going to trust anybody who makes those compromises? Now there’s no trust anymore because of that. Because Flock dug its heels in so much, and because police departments constantly gaslit everybody over and over again with, “There’s no abuse, there’s no record of abuse. We’re checking it. We’re checking these audit logs constantly. It makes you safer. If you take these cameras down, your kids are going to go missing.” That type of thing.

Now how can you fix this? Now people are just destroying cameras. Now, people are just threatening executives of these companies because that’s what they do when they get taken this far out.

That’s my big problem now. If I have any goal in this or any dog in this fight, I’d like to bring people back towards solutionism, because I don’t want surveillance at all, but we don’t live in Benn Jordistan. We live in a democracy and a lot of people are okay with it to some degree. Most people are not okay with it, from polling I’ve done, if it doesn’t involve a warrant.

Somewhere along there is a solution where nobody’s happy, but everybody’s content. If I could do anything right now, it would be bringing people back towards a path where a solution can be found.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot is the widespread assumption that surveillance does exist. When there’s some high profile crime, the assumption that there will be cameras that will show us something about this crime actually kind of redounds in favor of the surveillance companies. Ring had an ad at the Super Bowl about tracking lost dogs. They got in a lot of trouble over what else we’re going to do with this surveillance network.

I think it was a week later that Savannah Guthrie’s mom was kidnapped and Jamie was on every news network in town saying Ring cameras are going to solve it, whether or not the footage that we saw was even from Ring cameras.

There was this notion that surveillance would help. That is a real pendulum swing back and forth. The cameras are the solution at one time and the abstract concept of the cameras makes people mad because why are you passively surveilling me? You’re talking about solutions. How do you thread that needle?

Most people need to understand, especially police departments, that most of the things that are being promised by people like Garrett Langley, the CEO of Flock, and Jamie Siminoff, the CEO of Ring, are their sales tactics. These CEOs or executives or anybody from any company, they’re not actually going out and doing this research in a way where they’re not cherry-picking data and looking for statistics that support their product.

You could say that’s unethical, you could say that’s wrong, but that’s what you expect from a tech company. Nobody believes that a tech company would all of a sudden become a humanitarian while they’re still representing their company. We could take that and we could isolate that, and then we say, “Research needs to be done,” and research is very, very complicated for this.

In sociology and criminology, we don’t even understand if increasing police reduces crime as a society. We’ve not even proven that. Putting cameras up is a really big ask. We just need to be asking these questions a lot more, and being more careful about putting these cameras up. What will they actually help?

If we could find something that actually helps, we could say, “We have a lot of cars being stolen in this neighborhood. Hey guys, how do you feel about an ALPR that has 24 hours of retention time coming up in this neighborhood and everything that we search on it will be in an immutable audit log that you’ll be able to see every single day? How do you feel about that?” I feel like a lot more people would say, “Yeah, I don’t want my car stolen.” They would maybe err on the side of trying something to reduce a crime problem rather than the police just behind closed doors signing a multi-million dollar contract to put cameras up all over the city without asking anyone.

That’s one of the first solutions. Transparency in general. If I were running Flock in some weird parallel universe, a year ago when Have I Been Flocked? came out — the website that allows you to search your own license plate — I would have immediately partnered with them. I would have said, “Here’s all our data. Thank you for running this. Let’s give you some money so you can keep this server running fast. Because I want everybody to not be mad at us. I want everybody to understand what’s going on.”

A lot of it comes down to quantifying things at a local level to see what people want, and maybe even having referendums in certain places. Referendums are usually really tricky and you have your Brexit situations with referendums, but sometimes they’re also useful.

For a general person watching this right now, the one thing that I strongly urge is to find out who’s voting for this stuff. Find out who actually signed the paperwork to spend the money on it without any form of security vulnerability check, without any sort of special license or any sort of audit data, without going through anything else, because that person is typically a city council member and you can run and be one of those quite easily.

It’s not that difficult. Most city council members that I’ve met are just like me, just like my viewers. They’re not these prestigious politicians. It’s something that most people could do if they have a few friends helping them campaign.

You said immutable record again and it reminded me that earlier you earned the distinction of being the only person on Decoder to ever suggest the blockchain as a solution for something in a way that did not immediately imply that you would make a bunch of money. I want to congratulate you for that.

[Laughs] It’s interesting that all of this ALPR stuff blew up at the same time that crypto and blockchain and NFTs blew up. Yet nobody ever thought, “Hey, we could use a proof-of-stake network, one that’s not actually scorching the Earth to solve Sudoku puzzles, but we can actually use a highly efficient proof-of-stake network to immutably store data for these audit logs.”

But it’s not too late. These things still exist. You don’t have to use blockchain. There’s IPFS, which is a decentralized file system. There’s WORM, which is “write once, read many.” That’s a thing that IBM, I think, invented, but it’s used everywhere. There are a lot of ways to do immutable data, but it being democratized data is what’s the most important part.

[Laughs] We’re not using the GPUs for Sudoku puzzles anymore. We’re running them red hot for other stuff. Don’t worry. We switched those over.

You mentioned working with the companies. You mentioned the idea that Flock is now partnering with some of its critics, which would have helped them early. They have invited you in, right? One of your strongest calls is for external auditors and researchers to evaluate these systems. It’s one of the things you said was needed in your congressional hearing.

They’ve invited you in. You’re now a third-party reviewer with Flock. What is your relationship with Flock like now? And do you think it’s changed how you view and evaluate the company?

There are certainly people at the company who really dislike me. And then there are people at the company… I’ve spoken to the CEO. I’ve spoken to a couple of the executives. There are people at the company who are absolutely willing to have a conversation and figure out what a solution actually looks like. Unfortunately, and I say “unfortunately” because throwing poop is really easy, but cleaning up the room so people can sit in it again without smelling poop is really hard, and most people are only willing to do the throwing poop part.

But one thing that happens in our society all too often is when we have a big controversy, especially on social media, and then there is no remediation at all. There’s no allowance for remediation. If you think about somebody getting canceled or something, one thing I always think is, “What do you want them to do? What should they do now? Do you have any ideas or should they just die?” Because that’s not a solution.

We can’t just snap our fingers. If, in the next month, Flock just said, “We can’t do it anymore. We’re going out of business. We quit. We’re going to make toys or something else, or we’re going to just leave,” Axon, Verkada, Palantir, and all these other companies would just step in and do the exact same thing and they would learn from Flock’s mistakes and do it more efficiently.

We’re in a place right now where, had Flock not dug their heels in and not listened to press strategies that make them seem more confident than they actually are, and actually had listened to people and maybe worked on a solution — it’s going to be rough and I’m going to get a lot of hate for even suggesting that that’s a thing — but if we actually want to solve this problem, we have to do that.

You have to have an olive branch. You could still hit back. You can still wear a boxing glove in one hand, but you have to have an olive branch in the other one. Otherwise, I can’t fix this myself as a YouTuber. One of the more powerful things — and this is almost two months ago — was someone high up at Flock said, “We want guardrails. Give us some guardrails. Just tell us what to do. Tell us what to do, and we’ll make the changes we need to do and stay in business and grow that way. But we need those guardrails.”

Unfortunately, the people who make those guardrails are just saying, “I don’t like Flock. Flock is bad.” They’re not actually setting these guardrails up. You also have a lot of different bills being passed around election time. I just wish a lot of these people would get together in one room with Flock and make a decision on what they think would be best to move forward.

You’ve made some very aggressive YouTube videos about Flock. One of my favorites was you went to the Flock Forward convention where they banned you. They canceled your hotel room, and then you set up Wi-Fi scanners and Bluetooth scanners outside. You figured out who was there.

This is perfect stunt journalism. I watched that video and I went, “I should stop running this fussy web magazine and I should just do this.” It was a great video with a super aggressive posture towards Flock.

Can you still be in that mode when you’re in the company trying to help create solutions?

It’s a great question that I think about all the time. It’s really difficult to be a journalist in that type of situation where you’re talking to the company and you’re producing things that harm the company or its public image at the same time.

At the end of the day, you just can’t lie. You just have to be as honest as possible, which is one of the reasons I’m even saying that I’ve spoken to the Flock CEO and stuff like that. Because I just want to have a 360-degree understanding and find out as much information as I possibly can, and then let my viewers decide how they feel about that.

Maybe the only thing I really want to guide them toward at this point is away from things like violence, away from things like threatening the CEO, because that actually makes us less safe as a society. That also makes cops more likely to put cameras up everywhere. It’s not a very good way of dealing with the issue and also just threatening or terrorizing people’s families is not a solution for anything.

That’s a question I think about constantly because it’s really, really hard to navigate this ethically, knowing that your next story might hurt the person you just had a conversation with, or vice versa, that the person you just had a conversation with might actually make your audience think less of you or judge you in some way.

But I truly do believe that if you hang onto nuance as much as possible, and if you’re always sort of letting nuance guide you, that in the long term it’ll be very bumpy, but in the long term you’ll be rewarded for it. That’s maybe why my channel gets the views it does. I hope, or I like to think that, and maybe it’s egotistical to think that, but I think it’s because I always try to hang on to nuance to some extent.

I always say, “To be fair,” and then look at that side because otherwise I’m just making content that’s telling people how to think. Whereas I feel like people want to be led on a mission to discover things and learn about things and then come up with their own opinion afterwards.

I’m glad you brought this up because I wanted to end with a little bit of you as a YouTuber, as a person who tries to gain an audience on these platforms. One of my longstanding jokes on the show is every YouTuber gets their wings when they make a video about how mad they are at YouTube, about the algorithm or demonetization or whatever YouTube thing.

Marques Brownlee just made a video about how mad he is at YouTube about A/B testing. It took a long time, but here we are. You’re describing succeeding on an algorithmic platform with nuance, with data, and with journalism. I look at the algorithmic platforms and I think that doesn’t exist.

What’s your relationship like there? If you’re a self-described YouTuber, are you on the road to becoming MrBeast? Can you still fight the fight?

I don’t try to analyze it. If I get a video that doesn’t have a million views or something, I don’t say that video is a failure. I think that video really worked probably for the demographic that watched it and then it didn’t work for another slice of the demographic. In terms of nuance, enough people are exhausted from being told how to think about it and they feel like they’re being worked nonstop when they’re on social media and watching things.

Maybe that nuance helps my channel provide some form of relief from that. I try to do better and better. And it’s interesting because maybe my content will be less exciting if I try to be more and more nuanced. But I speak to a lot of journalists. Brendan Keefe from Atlanta News First is a great example. I would almost consider him a mentor at this point because he’s extremely rigid with his nuance and with his ethics.

A good example is that Flock Forward thing that you mentioned. Before that, I had found the entire guest list. I had opened up and downloaded the app and then decompiled the app and probed it and found the entire guest list and a bunch of information about all of the guests who were going to Flock Forward. This is valuable info. These are police officers and senators, and most of these guests, our tax dollars paid for them to fly to Atlanta to come to this event.

Immediately I told a couple of journalists and they said, “Yes, give it to me,” and I thought to myself, like, “No, this is wrong. I need to report this to the company if I want to actually have principles. If I want to stay on this side of things, if I want to be able to tell police that they can’t search their wives because it’s personal information that they’re not supposed to see, then I also can’t release breach data.” It’s those types of things that are really hard. That would have been a banger video for me to release that guest list. But over the long run, that actually pays off.

People just watch your content and feel like you’re more trustworthy, which is the number one area where people struggle with YouTube or any sort of social media, because you have to somehow say, “I actually have standards and ethics and I’m going to try and tell you the truth in this crazy noise.” That’s what I’m trying to do. I don’t know if I’m going to achieve it, but that’s a big goal of mine.

I can’t agree with that more. Anybody who listens to our other show The Vergecast knows that I prattle on about our ethics policy all the time. In this media environment, you actually have to make the subtext text and say, “I made this information this way. This process generated this outcome.” It’s the process that you actually are buying from me, not the headline.

There’s something about that that I think is very challenging on a platform like YouTube. That’s why I asked about it. Because you can see what the platform naturally wants to do and you’ve managed to grow a lot with very in-depth coverage about very wonky topics that our elected officials would maybe prefer not to know about and that’s a success.

I’m just wondering if you fight the platform’s dynamics openly and explicitly, if you think about them, or if you’re just riding the wave.

My ultimate wish — which you know, unfortunately isn’t going to come true — is that I can make a video about Unitree robots, let’s say, and then find a security vulnerability, find a backdoor, which I did, and then some of my viewers actually take that research and improve on it and make it better. And then continue doing that, and then that actually results in something bigger and then I’m able to just move on to something else entirely.

It doesn’t work that way. I’m still talking about Flock, and I’m still talking about data centers. I’m still talking about storing an image in a bird. All these things I’m still constantly connected to.

But looking past just the views and retention and looking towards the reason I made that Flock Forward video was because a lot of my viewers saw that and said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, what is that? A [software-defined radio]? You can listen to that stuff. How do you do that?” And now they’re into radio, which is crazy. There are so many more interesting things than listening to a bunch of Flock employees talking on a wireless microphone with radio.

It encourages people to sort of explore with tools that they could pretty easily obtain. I hope that that results in more people doing more interesting things in collecting and processing data in ways that actually help the world.

I can’t think of a better place to leave it than there. Benn, thank you so much for being on Decoder. Like I said, this was a dream come true.

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.