The DARPA Data Hacker Who Exposed Delta Force & Tim Cook's Lies | Mike Yeagley

Shaq here, what's it like to buy a car from Carvana or 100% online and get it delivered to your door? Let me tell you, your car is here Mr. Shaq, thank you Mr. Carvana guy, can't wait to take it for a spin. Only the best for you Mr. Shaq, hey, have you always been so big tall and handsome? Not always, I was 6-10 once, seven days to live and return it Mr. Shaq, not that I would. You never do, no, I never do, so buy your car today on Carvana, delivery fees may apply. See our seven day return policy at Carvana.com. Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge help. Thank you. All right, so I was on the phone with our mutual friend Tommy J and he's like, "Droin, you got to talk to his, Mike, he's out of his mind." So I was like, all right, say less, let's do it, but I was looking at what you did. I was like, "I've never talked to a guy like this before." It's not really that special. We all carry these mobile phones and these mobile phones bleed all sorts of data about everything that we do. Everywhere we go, it's gotten a little tighter, but when I first started this. And if you think about it, the kids across the river here that are doing mobile advertising and their skinny jeans and fancy socks, really some of the best geospatial intelligence analysts around. Because they were taking these data sets, these very messy data sets, and creating what are called audiences. People who have, who are signaling, I'm in the market for a new car, based upon their patterns of life. Seemed dwelling on a parking lot of a European car dealership. Boom, that's a signal, package that up, and they can sell it to Mercedes Audi Porsche. Say, here is somebody that is ready to go. Fitness lifestyle, fast food, dining, children, household dynamics. All of these things were foundationally became more targetable, based upon where you were going in the real world. When we're browsing, we have cookies. Everybody knows what a cookie is. Can you explain to people who don't? Cookies, a little piece of software. Hopefully everybody's got them blocked. It's a little piece of, it's just a little piece of software that sort of sticks on your browsing session and allows. Whoever, whatever site you're on to sort of track you from that site, where you go on their site to where you go. On other sites, the mobile devices came with this thing called an ad ID, which was like a virtual cookie. This one's in series of ones and zeros, but that allowed apps, advertisers to track a single device based upon this advertising ID through time and space. So I see you at the gym and I see you at organic food grocery store. And this is because I hit like accept every time I download one of these apps or something like that. This is about your settings. You were allowing the app to track your location. And the interesting thing was, you know, back in the day, and I'm talking about 10 years ago when people were just completely ignorant, not by virtue, not by any fall to their own. You download a calculator app or a flashlight app. Is flashlight app need to know where you are? No, but it would always ask. Or it didn't have to ask. Oh, they didn't legally have to do it back then? No. Now, oh, yeah. So you're you're in an environment where it's constantly asking you, can I track you back in the day, which, you know, we talk about the rap, how tech is just moving so fast. I'm talking 10 years ago back in the day, not that long ago. These apps you download and install this app and all of the permissions would be set to accept. So you'd be bleeding your location data to some free sh** ass app, like a flashlight app. And they would then the app, because it was free, or had no value that anybody was spending any money, they would take those data sets, package them up and sell them to this, you know, this deplorable broker data broker community, who would then create these audiences, these pre-packaged groups of people based upon. Part elections of of intent. Right. So when they, I have so many questions here, I don't want to get like two, two lost in the weeds, but we'll just kind of jump around a little bit. When I would give my data to a flashlight app or something simple like that, even today, but back then as well, wherever it's applicable. Am I just an IP address or a cell phone number or like serial number, or am I Julian Dory? You're mostly, you're mostly a benign identifier, okay, an ad ID, which is, you know, 174, 75 echo Bravo Charlie, 125, 70. That sounds like my name, yeah, and that's what they would use to maintain the protection of your identity, but as a browsing session, your identity was that, that identifier, that selector. If you have a direct relationship with the app, Uber, Amazon, you're logging in, they know exactly who you are, and what you're doing on the app. Yes, but if it's, you know, this sort of an app that doesn't have, there's no reason to have that one to one relationship, they have, they are identifying you based upon this ad ID. Right, so that might be like the one thing where Apple has a little bit of privacy where they're just like, here's the number of the person rather than, here's the full Apple ID and all that. Yeah, so in the advertising world or in the marketing world, they're not getting your phone number, they're not pulling your IMEI or your MZ or any of the other meta selectors from your device that are attributable to an identity. You have to subscribe to a mobile phone and that those those selectors march right back to your identity. The ad ID is this privacy compliant way of cross app tracking you. Right, and you brought up Apple, so it's about three years, four years ago, Tim Cook declared a thought law on data brokers. Oh, he is an actual fat law. Remember that episode of curb or the other one, there's another one when they were fighting over the Palestinian chicken that one too, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, the media or there had been stories about these data brokers and this suggestion that somehow the government was getting involved and, you know, it was targeting communities, disenfranchised communities. So Tim Cook stepped in and Apple had a hypothesis that privacy would sell and so they went all in on privacy similar it was almost like the counterfactual to the car companies back in the day when they told told Congress that safety doesn't sell privacy is sort of this modern day version of safety. I remember that ad that was fall 2021. Yeah, we talked about it on the podcast back then. Yeah, and so they've done, but let's keep, you know, everything is they can declare themselves the private phone, but what they've effectively done is just consolidated the duopoly between Google and Apple. Okay, all of the data that Apple isn't letting data brokers or an ad advisor get directly, they're controlling that flow through something called app tracking transparency. Okay, before we get there, because like, obviously, the reason you come into this story and the reason Tommy G was interested in talking to you is because you came from the private side as someone who was in the marketing data business, which we'll talk about in a little bit, the exact details of that. But you realize that all these very publicly available tools this, I don't know, like ad int or whatever effect, we never called it that by the way, because it's just so gay. They all sound gay, like, oh, sin, human, you know, it's like, whenever I get like the military guys in here, they start dropping like the e4s and I'm like, guys, I don't know what that is, you got it. So that was that was something that got us scribe to it or somebody dropped that in there, but yeah, I mean, it's it's creative because it's really at the end of the day, we weren't doing anything related to advertising. It was slices of the data that made advertising more efficient that we were collecting. Yeah, so anyway, but you come into the story because you realize, hey, this is a public utility, meaning like me, a private citizen can go get this information and then I can take that data set and extrapolate that into things that would be relevant to a place like a spy agency trying to watch, I don't know, other international leaders or whatever. So we're going to get to how all that came down, but I'm interested in you explaining the nuts and bolts things and one of the examples you were given a few minutes ago about, you know, the kids across the river who put all the stated together and then packaged it up and sell it. But it's a great visual because when we think of pretty much any industry, there's a product, right? And of course, there's a product with this, the product is us and our data and everything. But you look at things that are physical products that you can buy. You can put it in your house and you can see it, right? You look at things that are software products like a Google. You pull it up on your phone and it's got advertisements on there and all the things you're searching for. It just works. It's a product, right? Most people, like I couldn't name you. I know there's a billion of them. I couldn't name you an Ad Middleman data collection company, even though some of these places are, I'm sure without a doubt, some of the biggest companies in America. Yeah. You wouldn't, and there are thousands of them and there are companies you've never heard of. Yeah. But they are the ones who know that you're a Catholic, you go to the gym, you live here, they have this foundational understanding, not just of what you're doing online on a browser, but where you go and what they are, where they see that is they can attribute, okay, you saw an ad online and what was the effect of that ad? Did we actually see you, you know, visit a store or something like that? So it provided this new foundational understanding of human behavior, human geography. Right. And that's where the utility for the government seemed a natural fit. Yeah, because the government is using, of course there's open source intelligence on things, but then they're using human intelligence on the ground where they get assets, obviously, we know all about that and then they're using data, amalgamation that they create, but they weren't necessarily taking like the public utility of it and then using that as like a targeting mechanism. That's where you come in. Right. Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door and that they've found a way to combine THC with carefully selected functional ingredients to target nearly every mood and health concern you can think of? Well, the company I'm talking about is mood.com and they're incredible line of functional gummies. 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The market in software that I spent all those years in was in data analysis and had some really good learning experiences with companies that were just either too early in the market, but understanding, okay, how do we make this work? If I had the language that we have now to describe AI and large language models and machine learning, if I had that in 2006, when the value proposition for a national security app capability, if I had the language that we have now to describe the power of this thing, to take a bunch of text-based data and start learning about it, I might not be sitting here right now. And Darpa had it. Well, it was, and DARPA couldn't even come up with the right language. I believe, yeah, a lot of interesting stories there, put a bookmark on that, you know, so I have this experience where, you know, you're trying to find weak signals in data, right. Back in the day, everything was sort of a proprietary data set. A data set that the organization you were selling to had all this data, they needed a slap of front end on top of it to make it easier for their analyst to make sense to navigate it. Yeah. Palantir. You've heard of Palantir. Never heard of him before. Never heard of him. Wouldn't know. You don't work for them, do you? I don't. All right. I don't think I could pass their employee test to determine how wicked smart you are. Right. I like this guy. He can stay. It's true. This podcast is sponsored by Palantir, by the way. Is it really? Yeah. It's not. He was about to leave. So I came from this ability to talk about data and analysis in a way that wasn't so much locked in the ones and zeros, but, you know, I could sit across the table from somebody who knew even less about it than I did and explained to them why this mattered and why this was going to impact what we're doing in these frontier locations where, you know, you're trying to get heads or tails as to what's going on. And you can't fly, you know, you can't, you can't have airborne assets, flying, collecting, all of this stuff. You need something else that's sort of coming in to, to hydrate all of that information. This is way too obvious. I mean, it's just, it's, we can, and that was, you know, for 20 years, we owned the airspace. We could fly and collect against anybody, collected really good stuff because we were basically intercepting cell phone signals, right, with these devices that would emulate a cell phone tower. So we could attack these phones. But what about the signals? What about the phones that we don't know about? The populations that we're not able to understand their patterns of life, their movements, their centers of gravity. How can we get a better sense of what populations in Syria are doing or populations in Libya are doing or populations in Yemen, the, you know, the high-traveled destination spots for the, for the first world? Right. Yeah. I was going to take a vacation. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What does Yemen, have you ever been to a Yemen restaurant? That's what I said. I'm like, I didn't know this was a thing. Yeah. They feed you. They're great. Yeah. I like them a lot. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, I don't know if I'm visiting there. Yeah. Probably not anytime soon. Right. So I understand how to, how to present the value proposition that breaks it down in a way where I'm not sitting here talking about, well, sir, you know, there are these demand side platforms and supply side platforms and ad tech and, you know, by that time he's like asleep. Yeah. Whatever. Yeah. So I talk about human geography and patterns of life and population movement and the ability to sort of do this at a really good deal for the taxpayer. To get sort of this hyper local sense of how populations behave. One of, if not the most common DMs I get on Instagram are many of you asking me what my favorite books are. Well, today's your lucky day because if you use the link in my description below to join my newsletter, I'm going to give you my top 10 book recommendations right now. Also, if you'd like to join my clipping community for a chance to make money producing content from the show, you can do so via the Discord link in my description below. And finally, you can join my Patreon for early uncensored releases of the full episodes via the Patreon link about a subscription below. As always, please take one second to hit that subscribe button. If you haven't already, I really appreciate that. Also the like buttons, a big help and you can join my newsletter via the link in the description. All right. That all sounds good. Prove it. Uh, which sort of leads into how all of this unraveled, um, I'm giving a presentation to an investor conference. I'm going to give you the, I'm going to show you the week signal, uh, uh, in, in, in data. You might have heard of, you know, quants like counting cars and parking lots to determine, store traffic. I'm like, I'm going to show you this at a, at a, at a more precise level. It's like out of four seasons, hotel or Ritz Carlton. Thank you. Tell goes to those things. Patagonia and Prius is, you know. So sitting in the back, didn't even notice them. You know, I'm done with my presentation. Two dudes approach me and they look like one percent from an MC. From what? Motorcycle. Motorcycle. Psycho gang, they look like bikers and John doesn't mind me talking about this because me and I are friends now, but sleeves, they look, they're not from Sandhill road in the valley, but they know data and the questions they're asking me are really different. They're asking me about Libya, Yemen, Syria. Is there data as you've described from these places? I don't know, want to find out. So as that story unfolds, I go to work and I start talking to these data companies. As I've described these audience attribution companies, data brokers, I have this cover for action where I'm facilitating analysis for an NGO who wants to know about populations that are refugees along the Syrian Turkish border. At a backstop, I built out, I was talking about, you know, we need to know the distribution between men and women. We need to know what types of facilities we need to have for women like I had this thing laid out. But these are data companies, so it was probably overkill. If I had bank, they were going to sell. I'm like, so, but this, you know, we're not, you're not selling Nike's in along the Syria Turkish border. You're not advertising for Starbucks along the Syrian border. Hey, listen, they got to sell some grand data. Mocha chinas. That's right. No, no. And so, you know, they're like, yeah, we've got data, it usually ends up on the cutting room floor because nobody really, we're not monetizing it, nobody's advertising. But we have data. All right. How much? No one guy goes, how much you got? Like, ask a stupid question, I'm going to get, yeah. So we go through, we go through the process, get a data set and start lighting up these areas. So, you know, we've got millions of data points, data point being at a lat long observation of a unique device. Lat long observation of a unique device. Yeah. So this is, so you asked earlier about IP addresses. Yes. Um, the apps are pulling location of your GPS location as your phone is detecting where it precisely is, not an IP address, which is sort of centroid to a city center or wherever the cutout is. This is putting you like in this parcel, yeah, um, which to get that, to get that distribution, that many observations of unique devices with that degree of precision, that was like, that was cutting edge. And so we're seeing all of this data and it's like, all right, so what is the use case? Like, I haven't gotten there yet. And you know, like, okay, we can do this. This is kind of cool, but what's the use case? And so I'm sitting in my classified home office skiff. No. I was going to say that was quite, my home office in between my master bedroom and my daughter's room. You're in mine right now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and usually it's probably better. Usually it's probably soundproof. Cause I'm sitting in it. We did kind of soundproof. Yeah. It's nice in here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so I'm sitting there like, okay, I have this data. I have this, um, you know, user interface, a geospatial, user interface, a map. Like, I need a use case that's going to matter. I'm like, all right. Where are our devices that I know are at Fort Bragg, North Carolina? Where do they go next or where else in the world are? So I draw a little geofence around Fort Bragg, um, hit play and the map starts lighting up. You know, lots of lots of observations, um, in and around the lovely Fayetteville, North Carolina. Right. Right. But I'm seeing clusters in Syria from Fort Bragg, from Fort Bragg. That's promising. So I'm like, this is interesting. What's this all about? Um, so I light up, you know, I start examining like, where are they? And they are located at this abandoned cement factory. Lafars, the mint factory, Lafars, it's a French company, um, they were, they were manufacturing cement there. And if you think about the configuration of it, it's like the perfect for an operating base. Yeah. You put some bodies and cement, no one ever finds it. That's right. You got lots of room. And so I'm looking at this. And then I'm like, all right, let's see where do these devices that I know are attributable between Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where nothing goes on related to special operations. Nothing. Nothing. I didn't even know that. Yeah. Um, where, uh, Jacek's headquartered, as well as, um, Delta. Um, they are located kind of down the road a little bit from, okay, I mean, campus. I understand. Anyway, um, and it's like a division one football facility, yeah, you think about, or, you know, professional football facility. It's, if you've ever been to one of those, oh, they're nice. That's, they're nice. Um, so where, so these devices that are in Syria that are affiliated with Fort Bragg, where else are they? And I start seeing these devices at residential properties in a town called Southern Pines, North Carolina. Oh, still here. Still here. But Southern Pines, North Carolina is a really nice, sort of upscale, um, residential community, um, where if you make a few extra bucks and you're in the army, you can afford to live there. Oh, all of this, like, I have no operating knowledge. I am not looking for Delta operators. I didn't know what Southern Pines met. No idea. But you're sitting like in your house with your daughter's bedroom right over there. She's sleeping next door looking at open source information going. Am I about to find the fucking DaVinci code like is this it? I'm thinking, all right. So what is the use case here? And I don't really know what I have, which is the beautiful thing about this stuff because you go in with like, I'm going to prove something and you'll make it work. I didn't know really what I was looking at, um, develop that, uh, those, those location points such that, you know, I'm seeing contractors from other military bases. I'm seeing how they are, uh, moving into Syria, their routes. Uh, so they all sort of started Fort Bragg and then some guys go to this airport and other guys go to this airport and they all end up making cement in Northern Syria. Um, so, and that's where I have this meeting that's been written about, um, and I'm about to step, you know, like, this things are about to get hot, um, because nobody has any idea about this. Um, and so my partner, uh, my government, a civilian government employee, the biker dude that approached me at the four seasons without his Patagonia and Pryus in the parking lot. I like this guy. Yeah. John Fritchley, like, and he is not in government anymore, which is one of the, read into that what you want, but he's one of the guys, you know, he works, he's, he, he, he, yeah, big air quotes there. He's, he's making bank as a, as a sales guy, um, right. Um, you know, I'm showing him, you know, I have this PowerPoint sort of built out like that I can click through quickly, he's, he's looking at it, you know, he's like, what a rip. This is that we need to know this is, this is why we are doing this. Were you uncovering, I, I'm tracking here as best I can. Were you essentially uncovering that like, we were using military and some say intelligence related operations that we were doing through a concrete company over in Syria. And because you track the neighborhood in North Carolina, it says, oh, they're definitely a little higher level military there. You were able to say, hey, guys, we're doing shit undercover. And if I have this tool and I'm sitting in fucking Saudi Arabia and I don't like you, I can use this against us to unload it. If I can do it, we must assume that an adversary can do it. And so that was the, this is what we've, this is what commercial data without any real, we weren't targeting anybody. I was, let's see what we can find out. And so the use case became counterintelligence, op-seq identity management, but more of an operational security use case. And you had never really done anything ever involved in the government before. You had just been in the software business, essentially. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So this is like a whole new world for you out of nowhere. For the, for the, for the special operations community, 100%. Like, well, as I said, you know, you're Delta, so what does that mean? I mean, I kind of knew, right? But it just, this was not, I was not coming from that community knowing what I was looking for. Got it. Which is why this southern, these southern pines, residences where I'm like, and here's a house in southern pines, North Carolina. Anyway, so I'm going through this and I, and I can see like at first, you know, it's a typical presentation. People are barely paying attention. And I'm like, walking through my methodology and, you know, and the LaFars, and that's, you know, I kind of, I see this, this got their attention. Oh. Hello. And then the next slide is, and I, you know, these are the, these are residences that are attributable to the LaFars cement factory and, you know, everybody gets a little closer and they're, one guy's looking at it and you know, the two guys start whispering to each other. Did you fuck with them and all like, oh, you guys have got attention now? Yeah. I wasn't, I wasn't dialed in enough to know what I knew. Okay. And then the meeting went, didn't go high and right, but it was sort of like, stop. How are you doing this? I just told you how I was doing it. You weren't paying attention. But the immediate, you know, you know, they were, they were learning systems or their, their perception was, I must have hacked, intercepted, engineered, or stolen data in order to do this. I'm like, I didn't do any of those things. Let's go back to the first part of the presentation. Yeah. I bought it. That's not how, so how expensive was it to buy like that iteration? 600,000 bucks. The previous wallet I used over the past 12 or 13 years was so bulky, clunky and terrible. I don't know why I never changed it. Well, actually, I do. It's because I'm lazy and didn't think to change it until my friends at Ridge sent me over theirs. The Ridge wallet is unique and slim and fits into any pocket absolutely seamlessly. This modern design is going to hold up to 12 cards plus cash and you can push them right out from the bottom to get what you're looking for. It's like a deck of cards in a way. 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For a limited time, our listeners are going to get 10% off at Ridge using promo code Julian at checkout. Just head to Ridge.com, link in description below. Use code Julian and you're all set. After your purchase, Ridge is going to ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them I sent you. So you know, people say who gave you that money again? Yeah, this was Jay Sock. Okay. Yep. Yep. Yeah, no, this was not. Yeah. I'm so fucking sick. Send me money, Mike. Yeah. I need some. Yeah. Yeah. So this was like the initial sort of proof of concept. A little bit of money. Let's see what this can do. And all right. So you have hyper local awareness of the movements of special mission unit operators. Yeah. You know, who get, you know, trained on all this stuff and counterintelligence and op second and all of these things and they're like, so you're telling me that all of this was put together without any operating knowledge. You didn't have any sheets or shortcuts or hacks. And I'm like, my only hack was, I know Fort Bragg. That was all I needed as my seed location. Yeah. Fucking China. Fuck, you know, they know there's no secret. They own land all around it. And that's right. The United Front Work Department. They buy it. Yeah. They're watching from the farm. Yeah. Yeah. Talk about that. Yeah. And so, and that was sort of the, okay, you haven't proven anything yet, but we're paying attention. They probably thought you were a massage or something. They thought I was a charlatan. They thought I was a snake oil sales. I mean, they said it, like one guy said it to my face and walked out like, I don't, even after you got the name of the place and their addresses, but how could you be a charlatan? That's insane. You're familiar with remote viewing? One guy accused me. He's like, are you doing that remote viewing stuff? So you're like, so you're admitting that's real. I mean, I was like, no, this is, I promise you, I'm a deep thinker, but, you know, not like that. Let's get all of Zando in here, test him out, see what's going on. Yeah. Yeah. And so we've started to build that out a little bit. This has all been documented and there's nothing, and this is, you know, going back almost 10 years ago. It's going to say so. So we've gotten much better at all of this, the platform, you know, the devices have gotten much better at just not protecting special mission unit operators and spies and case officers, just for population for humanity, the platforms, the devices have gotten better with, with privacy and not making it so easy for just anybody to start doing this. Can you explain how they've done that, like some key ways? Yeah. So anything where, for example, every time you open up an app and it gives you, you know, 70 boxes to check to provide permissions as a matter of getting that app to work on your phone as opposed to the app just loading on your phone and having all of those permissions set like and do cross, cross app tracking, your location, all of that stuff. But people to be clear though, and I'll speak for myself, but I'm sure I speak for a lot of people listening right now. This some apps when they ask like a flashlight app or something like that, I'm like, yeah, fuck that. But then there's other apps like maybe off the top of my head, like an navigator app or something. Like, can we know your location? Fuck yeah, you have to know my location or it doesn't work. So that stuff is all still, we're still all hitting yes to that. And I, this is, this is the, the choice that we have to make. Like when I, when I'm, when I have 3% battery and it's raining outside and I need an Uber, I don't want to be fucking around trying to get my little drop of pin and all this shit. I want it to work. So I make that trade off and I, we have this trust because Uber's relationship or any app where you, you have that trust, like your, your data is important and they're not going to be, you know, selling it to anybody and everybody, but they don't need to. Firstly, it's too valuable, but they're not going to be doing that. And you have to make those, you have to make those choices. But you're right. And when you want, when, when location is fundamental to the apps functionality, yeah, that's, that's a choice. That's a choice to make. So how do our, how does our government now would like the special forces guys and stuff like that adequately defend against this when those guys, you know, they have a life too. So they have a phone. They use Uber and stuff like that. How, how do they set it up so that if they are using those services, you can't track them to Lafarza anymore? Yeah. So this is what we have to understand as the society is the capitalization behind being able to segment us into cohorts, into audience groups. That cap structure is so huge that there isn't a silver bullet that's going to defeat that. It's just, it's just, there's just nothing, there's just nothing that'll allow you to, to, to fully fight back, I mean, you, you're going to tell me that there's, you know, something you can do on your phone to defeat Google. No. And even when, you know, when a, when a new privacy regulation comes online, you know, their ability to pivot in to other ways and methods of understanding sort of your device behavior and activity through all sorts of mains. I mean, these things are already meeting so much telemetry, telemetry data. You know, it's, you know, they're packaging up telemetry packs and at, you know, two o'clock in the morning, if you were observing the processing, the CPUs of your device, all of the sudden, it would, you know, you'd be like, what's going on? Because it's, you know, it's transmitting diagnostic information about the device. You know, there was, when did we have the Beijing Olympics? Was it the 2020, which got pushed to 2022, but it was supposed to be in 2020 in Beijing? Or was that Hong Kong in early, I don't remember. Anyway, so the most recent Olympics in Beijing, they, they, every athlete, all of the Olympic, you know, if you were part of the, if you were part of the Olympics, if you were going to go and spectate, you know, the download an app. And if you look at what that, and there was no, you know, select which permissions you want to allow to be, to be collected. It was your location, your battery power, processing power, what apps you have open the full gamut of device behavior. And so, all right, I can understand, you know, like all of these conveniences that we, we convince ourselves that it's more convenient to let tech do these things. So I'm just going to let it, autumn, I'm just going to automate it and let it know, you know, where I am. So that, so they're, you know, we could, we can make the case that, um, knowing precise location as you're navigating venues is somehow, you know, to allow access or control or, but at the end of the day, if you look at the data that this app is collecting, they'd be able to segment the differences between the Australian ski teams device usage from the New Zealand ski team. And it could be this week's signal, like their battery power at these times is at this level and they're, what is that signal? I don't know if there's a signal there, but over time and collected in context with maybe other things. Um, and now do we know that there's unusual, there's something unusual about, Hey guys, if you haven't already subscribed, please hit that subscribe button. It's a huge, huge help. Thank you. This cohort based upon some non obvious indicator that doesn't make sense to anybody else, but when you layer that in with other things, that is a signal of intent. Imagine if, like, this is one thing I think that gets lost on, on people when, when you have this conversation, because people think like, Oh, well, there's a million things going on. How could it be figured out so easily? First of all, you guys have incredible tools to do it. Secondly, we now literally have AI to help do it. So before that, that shit is, that shit is faster. Yep. Then, uh, Stasi train Roomba on Adderall. Stasi train Roomba on Adder, so wait, the Stasi's are training Roombas, too. Do I need to know about that? I even bought a Roomba kind of freaks me out, but I shouldn't do that. It's, it's really fast. So at scale, to think as a human, and you asked earlier about what can, you know, what can operators or, or, or sensitive cohorts do? Yeah. It's happening so fast. And if you look at the litany of things that you should be concerned about, we don't have the cognitive capability to manage all of this, especially if we are operating. Yes. You can't think about like fucking 150 apps on your phone. They're like, you know, right. So it's, it's, it's not a solution, and there's not much to sell when I, you know, talk to these communities. It's about understanding, you know, what is it? What am I, what am I communicating? What am I saying about myself when I do these things? And at least being able to use it against the adversaries, too. So what's the level playing? So this is, so because of podcasts and because of the availability of former tier one operators to appear on podcasts. You've had a few. And this is not a criticism. I don't want to get into that lately was fucking tracking our podcasts every time they were here. It's like, up there. That's right. That's right. That's all in Jersey again. But if you think about it, the, the tactical cohort or the tactical audience, which is now access to the lifestyle of an operator, what they wear, how they dress, where they go, how they talk, all of these things has created this new group of consumer who aren't operators. But they wear all the shit and they buy all the guns and they go to the gun ranges and they drive trucks and they do all of this stuff that is the operator lifestyle. Yes. So for that community, we now have cover ballast. That's for sure. So you're contributing to the operational security. All right. I'm okay with that. Yeah. I like protect. But it's like, you know, 20 years ago, be familiar with 5/11, the, the clothing store. I know 7/11. 5/11. You know, 5/11 would not be, it's like this, car heart. I've been wearing car heart since 1993. Nobody, you know, you were either a working man to wear a car. Now it's like, it's back. It's fashionable. Oh, it's back. Yeah. They wear it on like, they wear it at fashion week. Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. Yeah. What's his name? Wrote a song about it. Kanye. Was it Kanye? And he's written a song about a lot of these things, but you know, I won't go down that. Okay. But 5/11 is like this tactical, you know, clothing store 20 years ago, they would never have had a storefront, you know, suburban, Washington DC. And now everybody's wearing 5/11. Yeah. I see what you're saying. You know, and so this tactical lifestyle, the interest in it by virtue of the availability, you know, to hear these guys talk, to see what they wear. It's kind of like, you know, I want to be a cool guy too. Yeah. So that provides this sort of this little bit of operation because an adversary is going to be like, all right, unless I see, you know, all of these, you know, unless I'm able to observe them at overt, known government facility, like, I don't know what I'm looking at. Is that an operator? Is that just the guy that can afford to look like one? Yeah. So, you know, there are, it's not all bad. And everyone had like, that's the thing. There's like, mutually assured blackmail tracking destruction in a way around the world. Now, when you're talking about like the best intelligence agencies, they got your handful because especially when you're talking about publicly available information, they all can get access to it. As long as they know how to read the language now, thanks guys like you, like, they can all do it on each other. It still puts in danger. The quote-unquote chest pieces that are on the board, though, because you know that that's a risk. You know if you're setting up an intelligence operation now, you know, your guys still carry iPhones or something. Now, there are some things. This is, I'm very not well read in this. So please just fill in correct me or I'm wrong. But, you know, I've heard about things like they'll make guys carry Faraday cages and stuff like that. But again, that come to me, I would assume that comes back to the question of like giving up the convenience of even having the fucking thing in the first place. Yeah, the Faraday bags. So here's this is, and this is really sort of into the weeds, but so I see a device behaving in a certain way. And then all of a sudden, I don't see it. It's a Monday afternoon, Tuesday afternoon. Normal people, their devices are functioning. I am able to see signal throughout the day, checking, checking Instagram, fucking off. But these devices that are in the Washington DC area, from time to time, or at very specific times, are not emitting any signal. That's a jump, but you know, like if you're looking for that non-obvious indicator, like what devices, if I've got a million devices that behave in a very predictable manner, and then I've got a hundred devices that exceed that predictable parameter. I'm interested in those hundred devices. Right. Because somebody dropped it in a Faraday bag. So I just had in Joe while who's while who's the CEO of that Israeli spyware phone, the unplugged phone, I joke, it's, you know, it is kind of run through Israel. But anyway, so he was explaining that when they've used is for some of the tactical guys like out in the field and stuff like that, they have to have a product that creates a false signal so that they don't stand out for that very reason, you just said. Yep, so when you need your device to continue a pattern of life, or a technical pattern of life, you need to, you're posting, you're doing shit on Instagram like once an hour, you need that device to continue to behave that way, which is, you know, there's a lot to go into that to scale it and make it work, but that's the kind of thing you want to maintain that degree of normal sea or usualness. You don't want to be that unusual device in and around Fayetteville, North Carolina, Virginia Beach, Washington DC, Tyson's Corner that does weird things. Yep. So how do we maintain that degree of normal sea? And the idea of the concept that privacy has sort of developed into this normal, like you're not hiding something if you are into data privacy. That's become a normal sort of trait feature, um, cover again. It's because normal people are using proton male and signal. Yeah. And all of these VPNs, VPNs, it is a normal behavior. Even if you're not hiding, cheating, dealing drugs or whatever, right? I don't do any of those things. Definitely not. What would talk? Because I, I may have some other thoughts on that for you based upon your patterns of life. Okay. Those days are behind me. Yeah. Um, yeah. So, you know, again, maintaining that posture of normal sea through privacy, which, you know, that's one of the, if you think about, you know, your personal pillars of privacy, like what is your privacy stack? I use a VPN. Okay. Make sure you're using the right one, not one that's free or developed and hosted in Romania. Use one that's from Switzerland. Yeah. You know, an email service that's based in Switzerland. What does your privacy stack look like? Because why Switzerland? Because it's literally Switzerland. Because of, you know, in terms of their data privacy laws, it, you know, it's rooted sort of in that mindset of their banking, what they were for banking. They have, they have become for, for data privacy. Got it. Okay. Shout out Switzerland. Yeah. You know, they, they, they, they don't have a de facto compliance agreement for data seizures. Love that. And, you know, Switzerland has always sort of had this, this posture of, of secrecy. Yeah. You need to longer money. That's where you go. You're not laundering it in Hoboken. That, allegedly. Yeah. Yeah. You're gonna go to Switzerland. I know. I know a couple of guys. Yeah. Yeah. You're gonna. So you, you know, everybody should have their sort of pillars of privacy for a whole host of reasons that is more about personal dignity and autonomy and, and identity than anything else. It's not about hiding. And so, you know, you look at some of the, um, the operating systems or the unplugged phone as, all right, if I'm going to upgrade my privacy game, maybe I want to, maybe I want to go down this route. What do you, let's actually get a little specific though, just because I literally had Joe in here at the CEO of unplug. What, what do you think of that? I think it's, so from, from the personal, you know, from a personal individual perspective, I think it's, it's all about preference and how, how deep you want to go. And I think from, you know, an operational perspective, the more we can move tech to tech that is commercially overt in that it's not going to look weird if I have some, some science and technology directorate built phone that does weird things that doesn't look like 10,000 other devices. If, if we can, if we can mirror all of the tech that is commercially available, that provides covert communication or protected communication against an adversary that is looking for that outlier. Well, it's hard to look for an outlier amongst thousands or millions versus an outlier. Like, I've never seen this messaging app before. Oh, and I see four other devices that are communicating there. And, you know, they're staying two blocks away from the US embassy. That's, now you're speaking my language as far as like where I was going in my head when I was talking with Joe about what the intentions of like Joe and Eric Prince might be. And like viewing, seeing as Eric Prince founded it and he's like a long time, you know, defense, military guy and all that, I could see him thinking, I don't know this, but I could see him like, all right, well, if we could get like 5% of marketplace, that's enough noise. It's enough noise to make our.01%. We actually care about blend in. I think that that's whatever that market share is 5% against the Apple Google DeWoply. That'd be, that'd be like, if I, you know, there are 10 million kids wearing sneakers, if I can just corner 1% of that, I'll be rich. That's 1% of fucking hard. Oh, of course. I'm not even taught, by the way, like, yeah, I'm sure that's part of it to it's a business trying to make money. So yeah, that'd be great for them in their goals. But I'm even talking about it from like the second order effect of, all right, well, Eric Prince blown up people on Haiti right now. So at the government's behest and he's thinking about projects like that that involved intelligence and protecting people. And it's like, if we had more of these funds on the ground, they could blend in. And there are plenty of businesses, legitimate, not fucking props and, you know, intelligence entities, but like legitimate businesses where protecting data and communications is essential. Of course, investment banking. You're doing, you're, you're the investment banker that's fucking organizing the, the private planes and the meeting places between a company that's going to acquire and company that's getting acquired. You don't want the arms to come in and play that against you. You want to protect that. You want to have secure reading rooms. You want to have the ability to share documents without, you know, without anybody intercepting them. The movie business is really good at this where they need, you know, their own location. And they need the ex-fill, you know, the dailies from their next billion dollar blockbuster with Tom Cruise. They don't want those intercepted. That's right. So there are lots of, there are many commercial applications where secrecy is essential that create that, that market share where, you know, we're proliferating within the consumer industry to create that, that ballast, that noise that, you know, somebody who's operational carrying this phone is, I can't tell the difference between them for an investment banker or, you know, somebody that's protecting intellectual property or pharmaceutical research. Oh, there's so much of it. You're making an amazing point there. You look at any major industry, doesn't matter what it is, even take, even take the conspiratorial hat off. Just regular business that has to happen where there's a lot of dollars and cents on the line. It's in form of intelligence. It's business intelligence. People can go and fucking bet on that if they find something out. That's how the public markets work. I mean, they're not supposed to do that. But, you know what I mean? Yeah. You know, my commercial side of the business, you know, I work with a lot of hedge fund managers. I was just going to bring it up. These guys will put fucking drones over farms in China to find out if, you know, apples making a new chip. And, you know, it's really great about, they all want there. They all want, like, their own little CIA. Right. That's good for you. Like, yeah, I'll be three million dollars I can get there. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's amazing. Like, they all want their guy. If you ever watched billions, billions, they all want their Iceland. Oh, dude, that show is, is, you know, scarily realistic on something. It's not all of it. But, like, yeah, they all want their fixer, their guy who can do shit. Yeah. And you look like you beat the shit out of people too. I like that. Yeah. That's good. Right. As you say, how you fucking pulls out, fucking going on. So, so there are the, the, the shift that is occurring that started, you know, when commercial data became, you know, the community became aware of its, of its risk and of its power. And we do a lot, we did a lot of stuff, not, you know, cowering in the corner, we used it. Yeah. We'll get there. Moving to that sort of commercial mindset, not everything has to be a black box built by Q. We need to sort of in this data environment where maybe you've heard people talk about something called ubiquitous technical surveillance UTS. Actually, I have heard UTS, but Phil Man on this. Yeah, so it's everything that we've talked about, but the community refers to it as ubiquitous technical surveillance. So it's the cameras, the Wi-Fi Sniffers, AdTech, everything that's sort of ambient, you know, the Stasi-Train Roomba on Adderall, particularly in environments where surveillance is just part of the deal. UTS has made it such where it's like I'm going to go down the street and I can never consider myself black. So instead of, you know, I can run an eight-hour surveillance detection route. And there's no physical surveillance. I don't have, you know, guys following me, but they're following me through my phone. Right. Thank you guys for checking out this clip. If you haven't already subscribed, please subscribe and hit the like button on this video. It is a huge, huge help. And if you'd like to check out this clip, full podcast episode, that link is in the description below or right here. 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