Ep. 247: “Ghost Murmur and the Real Assault on Privacy”

“What the Hack?” is DeleteMe’s true cybercrime podcast hosted by Beau Friedlander

Trump Clip: You see something moving 40 mile away, the head of a human being. I’m telling you, it’s moving. And then all of a sudden, 45 minutes later, he moved a lot. They stood up and they said we have him, and that was really the beginning of something incredible.

Beau: This week we’re talking about talking about mind-blowing new technology. I don’t know.

Clip: I think this is the biggest military operation of my lifetime. Like, this thing just popped up.

Clip: You don’t know what they’re up to.

Clip: A heartbeat sensor? They call it Ghost Murmur.

New York Post Clip: The CIA used a futuristic new tool called Ghost Murmur to find and rescue the second American airman who was shot down in southern Iran. 

Beau: The rescue mission involved 155 aircraft, including four bombers, 64 fighters, 48 refueling tankers, 13 rescue aircraft. There’s probably a lot more, and, according to the President of the United States, some top secret technology to rescue the U.S. Airman, code name Dude44Bravo.

Joe Rogan Clip: We gotta look into this. Like, this is science fiction. This is full Minority Report. It’s science-fiction level technology.

Clip: It’s AI.

Clip: It can find a guy’s heart rate.

Beau: Is Ghost Murmur ripped from the pages of a spy thriller? Is it real, and can it be used against you and me? That’s anyone’s guess, but that’s what we’re gonna talk about this week. I’m Beau Friedlander, and this is What the Hack, the podcast that asks, in a world where your data is everywhere, how do you stay safe online? Last week news broke about a top secret technology called Ghost Murmur, a classified tool that can supposedly detect a human heartbeat from miles away using quantum sensors and AI. It sounds generic, but whatever. It was reportedly deployed for the first time in the field to locate a very badly wounded American airman, hiding in a mountain crevice deep 7,000 feet up deep inside Iran. Invisible to enemy forces, sort of; I think they were closing in on him, but not to the CIA.

Social Media Clips: According to the New York Post here, secret technology uses long range quantum magnetometry to find the electromagnetic fingerprint of a human heartbeat and pairs the data with artificial intelligence software to isolate the signature from background noise.

Beau: Okay, so, if this technology exists, what happens when it’s pointed at us? Now, when I think of people who truly understand how technology gets used in strange and unexpected ways- audio sensors, surveillance, signal processing, acoustic manipulation… I think of Benn Jordan. Hi, Benn.

Benn: How’s it going?

Beau: It’s going fine. I’ve been having dumb conversations all day about Ghost Murmur.

Benn: Oh boy.

Beau: Benn is a musician, a technologist, a Youtuber and someone who has gone far deeper down far more rabbit holes than anyone I know. I read the article, I heard the news with the rest of the world. It was suspect ’cause it was in the New York Post. I wrote to a researcher at the University of Maryland and he immediately wrote back, said, no comment. And I thought, aha, it’s real.

Benn: Yeah, I mean, it’s pretty farfetched. And I’ve heard like different versions of it, or like different claims: that somebody could be identified by their heartbeat or that it’s just detecting a heartbeat remotely. The idea of detecting a heartbeat remotely doesn’t seem that crazy to me, just because, you know, with thermal cameras and like, I’ve done stuff with kind of like motion exaggeration when trying to make like visual microphones. And I mean, that stuff’s pretty crazy. You could see your pulse in your wrist, like just by holding up your wrist and it works with motion tracking. And so it’s like, yeah, I suppose that could work. But beyond that, I don’t see what it has to do with like, quantum magnet or magnet… I can’t even say the word. I read it a lot. I don’t say it a lot.

Beau: I had to take a lesson. Magnetometry

Benn: Yeah, magnetometry. All right. Yeah. It just doesn’t… There would just be so much noise and then, you know, after the magic word quantum, which makes people’s imaginations go crazy, then AI. Well, AI can reduce the noise. It’s like, hmm, no, not at that level. If it could, then you’d be able to like wear headphones- then they would operate as an EEG, you know. What was supposedly the time of day that this happened?

Beau: Oh my gosh. I don’t know.

Benn: Because if the sun was out, I can tell you absolutely not under any circumstances, just because the sun creates so much noise that like… I mean, there’s people who use like shortwave radio and ham radio to bounce off the ionosphere and you know, they have to like do it at certain parts of the night to make sure that the sun, ’cause it creates so much interference. Even with something as broad as that.

Beau: I’m just curious, do you think it could have had anything… their finding him could have had anything to do with the Boeing-made combat survivor, evader locator beacon that he also used while he was there in the desert?

Benn: Yeah, I suppose if you have a beacon, that will make it a lot easier. And also like again, if you just have a thermal camera, like if I go out in my woods and, you know, I have coyotes in my yard or whatever, deer in the distance or something, I could see them in pitch black just from the heat signature coming off their body. That works depending on what the temperature was like. If the temperature was like cold out, which I know it can get in the desert at night, and with like if it’s a desert and you don’t have a bunch of trees over you, then yeah, that would be easy. I mean, you could literally be like, oh, there’s a red pixel down there.

Beau: There he is right there.

Benn: Right.

Beau: So here’s what gets me about Ghost Murmur. I don’t care if it’s real or not. I assume there’s something that Trump half-heard in a briefing and what he said about it was completely wrong. What gets me is that when I read that New York Post piece, my first reaction wasn’t disbelief. It was something closer to, of course they have that. Of course something like that exists. And then I was like yikes. Like, for real yikes. That reaction scared me more than the story itself. Because I’ve been paying attention to surveillance technology for years. I’ve talked to researchers, I’ve talked to hackers, I’ve talked to people who build this stuff and people who try to stop it. And I still read that article and felt the pull. I felt it in my chest in a totally bad way. The technology is moving faster than our ability to understand it. So it’s not hard to believe there could be some tech that makes the line between science fiction and a Pentagon press release, quote unquote Pentagon press release, go fuzzy. I guess that’s the story for me. What else can they do? How else am I vulnerable? Because even if Ghost Murmur is exactly what it sounds like — which is a very good name for a very good story, but probably not very real — the fact that Joe Rogan lost his mind over it, that a physicist I called at a big university wrote back after eight minutes saying no comment — all of that says we’re at a weird moment here. We are ready to be defeated. We have been trained by the last twenty years of actual surveillance revelations — Snowden, PRISM, Stingrays, Fog Reveal, Clearview — to believe that whatever we think the government can do, the truth is probably worse. And we can’t pump the brakes because there is no car, and the people who own that car that doesn’t exist that’s roaring towards the finish line of what’s left of our privacy are not open to being asked questions. So here’s a question: When did they stop lying about there being nothing to worry about? Okay, Benn doesn’t seem to think this is the most pressing threat when it comes to personal identification, re-identification, surveillance. And yeah, I’d like to believe that this Ghost Murmur wasn’t the main tech solution that found Dude44Bravo. I don’t think it was, but I don’t have a PhD in quantum physics and quantum computing, and neither does Benn.

Chad: This does work. I mean, you can measure a heartbeat with one of these magnetometers. 

Beau: So I reached out to Chad Orzel, an associate professor in physics and astronomy at Union College to see what he had to say about it.

Chad: But you have to butt it right up against the person’s chest.

Beau: What’s the distance? You’re talking centimeters, or- Against the chest?

Chad: You know, like in contact with your skin. You know, 5, 10 centimeters from your heart. And you can pick up a very clear heartbeat signal using this. And, you know, that is useful for some medical applications. There’s some circumstances in which it’s more useful to measure the magnetic properties than the EKG that they hook you up in at your regular doctor’s office which is electrical. And there’s some pros and cons to doing the magnetic thing that I don’t entirely understand, but people assure me that there are cases where that’s the way to go.

Beau: My first reaction to hearing about Ghost Murmur was, I reached out to my friend Benn Jordan, who does explainer videos on YouTube and takes things apart and is really interested in surveillance. And he said, not nonsense, but not right.

Chad: Yeah, I think there’s… the most charitable interpretation I could come up with is that there’s some kind of game of telephone going on where somebody used some buzzwords and then another person used some buzzwords, and then the person who talked to the reporter, you know, misused them in a third way. And then, you know, the reporter did something else with it. And the thing that got reported in the Post about, you know, picking one person’s particular heartbeat from a distance of miles seems like complete nonsense, but I think there might be some…some pieces of the description might actually have some relevance to whatever it is that they actually did do.

Beau: A reasonable reader of that article would walk away thinking that this tool, Ghost Murmur, could be brought to the Big House in Arbor, and you would be able to identify Chad’s heartbeat, you know, among all the heartbeats in that stadium. Chad’s heartbeat. And then, you know, obviously deliver up some sort of horrible payload or pick you up.

Chad: Yeah. Yeah. One or the other depending on, you know, what kind of day they’re having.

Beau: But do you think I’m alone in thinking that that was the message of…that was kind of the takeaway was that this technology works- I mean, there were buzzwords like artificial intelligence, that was one and quantum mechanics was in play. So like, you know, whenever I hear the word quantum, I think, oh, well, it’s certainly not anything I can understand and it explains everything. So tell me. Talk to me about like, let’s back up a step because I think a reasonable person can understand why that was a big statement to make. To be precise, I think it was 40 miles they said they were able to hear this heartbeat in the wilderness. And for me that just, I was like, this is more Old Testament kind of narrative than it is real.

Chad: Particularly once you get the 40 in there, right? So 40 days, 40 nights, and-

Beau: A hundred percent. So tell me, like, what are we talking about? What is the technology they’re even bringing up here?

Chad: So what they allude to is they mentioned two things that are buzzwordy. One is artificial intelligence and the other is quantum magnetometry. And the idea of quantum magnetometry is just, you know, it’s in the root words, right? It is using quantum mechanics to make very precise measurements of magnets. So, you know, you’re looking for really, really tiny magnetic fields, and this is a thing that people in quantum physics do all the time because atoms and atom-like things in quantum mechanics are sort of exquisitely sensitive to very weak magnetic fields.

Beau: They’re measuring very small variations of, I would imagine energy or packets of something or other that are- is it possible that you can reverse engineer the butterflies’ wings flapping in India that creates the storm in Massachusetts by saying the opposite… is saying like, okay, yes, atoms are going to be affected by that man’s heartbeat in the mountains of Iran and they’re gonna continue rippling out and affect all the other atoms, and now the Pentagon has a way of measuring that?

Chad: I think that’s what the claim sounds like by the time it ended up in the New York Post story, the thing that I saw, that’s what it sounds like. But it is a very tiny signal. And if you, you know, go farther away, every time you double the distance away from the heart, you decrease the size of the signal by a factor of eight. So, you know, if you have a signal, you go twice as far away, you have one eighth the signal that you started with, right? Four times as far away, you know, and so on. You’re, you know, at one 64th, right? It decreases very, very rapidly. So, you know, by the time you’re a meter away… it’s already tricky to measure right in contact with your skin. By the time you’re a meter away, it’s, you know, a heroic effort to measure. And if you’re, you know, a kilometer away, it’s comically impossible.

Beau: Now what happens in the…let’s say you’re half a meter away, but there are other people in the room? I know enough about quantum mechanics to know that if you introduce anything else into the situation, it changes the situation.

Chad: Right. So, so that’s where you could say there’s plausibly an an AI element where I’m doing the wiggly fingers for quote marks, because it’s not really like an AI. It would be some kind of machine learning pattern recognition sort of thing, and there’s already a lot of that going on in just the, you know, if it’s butted right up against your chest to pick out the heartbeat signal from all the other things that make tiny little fluctuations in the magnetic field. They’re doing some fairly sophisticated signal processing to, you know, pull out the one signal that they’re interested in from all the others. And so, you know, when they do these experiments, there’s a person who’s being tested whose heartbeat they’re measuring. There’s usually like a grad student or a postdoc supervising the experiment. They’re, you know, not picking up that person’s heart, which is some combination of them standing far enough away and, you know, you’re doing a little bit of signal processing to make sure you’re seeing the one that you wanna see and not seeing the other one.

Beau: So, but if we go to the Biblical version and we’re 40-

Chad: 40 kilometers away.

Beau: 40 whatever. Yeah. 40 rods, 40 cubits away. I imagine there’s probably some sort of mouse in the way and there’s probably birds flying around and-

Chad: There’s all kinds of things at that distance scale.

[Heartbeat sound, other noises join until its unhearable]

Beau: What does that do to the experiment? What does it do?

Chad: It makes it really incredibly noisy. You’re trying to pick out a signal that’s gotten exponentially smaller as you’re going farther and farther away. You’re trying to pull that out of a background that is extremely complicated and has lots and lots of things that are making little tiny wiggles in the magnetic field at the point where your sensor is.

Beau: So the signal to noise ratio is incredibly high.

Chad: It is. Yeah. Yeah. It’s an incredibly tiny signal in a vast amount of noise.

Beau: Is there a version of this where you’re wrong? That’s coming up after the break. The source that the Post talked to said it’s like hearing a voice in a stadium except that the stadium is a thousand square miles of desert. Fine. So there’s the mice and stuff. Birds. Okay. So in the right conditions, if your heart is beating, we will find you. Alright. That’s ominous. It sounds cool. I feel like they were talking to like somebody who felt like he wanted Tom Cruise to play him in the movie.

Chad: Yes, very much so. So I think the plausible elements of this are you could be doing something that makes the signal much larger, right? If you’re trying to pick up an individual heartbeat, I don’t believe that you know, just the magnetic field created by the beating heart of one pilot in, you know, many square kilometers of desert. I don’t believe that anybody has a sensor that’ll pick that up. Something that the person could be carrying on them that would make an artificial signal that is vastly stronger than the heartbeat of a single person that you then pick up with some technology along the lines of quantum magnetometry and some sophisticated signal processing that you could squint at and call AI? That I could believe, that there’s something going on like that.

Beau: But however, weirdly enough, there was a line in that article about the missing airmen activating a Boeing-made combat survivor evader locator beacon. So which one was it? Was it the flare they shot off into the sky or the heartbeat?

Chad: Yeah, I suspect they had something else that was doing… and there could plausibly even be some quantum sensing kind of element to it where you make some artificial electromagnetic signal that has characteristics that make it really stand out from the background and you pick it up with an exquisitely sensitive detector at a very long range. And, you know, that could be a thing that’s portable on a person’s body that would enable you to hone in on them in a very effective way. I could believe that there’s some element to that, and they’re dressing it up a little bit to make it sound sexier by bringing in quantum mechanics and artificial intelligence as key elements of this to make it sound cooler than just like, yeah, the guy had a beacon and we zoomed in on that.

Beau: What does the enhanced version that you’re talking about look like? Just walk me through it. I mean, we know there was a beacon there and we don’t know how that beacon works, but we have to assume it works like some sort of beacon, you know, that we can imagine it sends a signal. It’s probably not an air tag. And then we have this idea that there’s quantum magnetometry being used to identify a quantum-level ripple at the atomic level 40 miles away.

Chad: To make an analogy to another very complicated area of science, right? Radio astronomers do these SETI projects, right? They’re looking for alien signals, and the thing that you look for there is, you know, there are billions of things in the universe that are spewing radio waves in all directions. What you look for as a signature of an artificial signal is something that really stands out from the background. That most naturally occurring things make kind of a big broad smear of many different frequencies of radio waves coming out with all different intensities. And they do complicated things and they’re very like, wide and complex. What you would do if you’re trying to be detected, or you know, to have somebody else know that you’re there is you make a signal that is very, very simple, that has a very narrow range of frequencies. It’s very intense in a small region and has some simple pattern to it. It repeats.

Beau: Like SOS.

Chad: Yes. Yeah. So like a morse code signal is the classic example of this. You know, you’re doing it. And you’re doing this at some particular radio frequency that’s very narrow. It’s not spread over a huge range. So this is why when they first discovered pulsars, these rapidly rotating neutron stars, they were initially tagged LGM for little green men because the signal sort of has the characteristics that you want. It’s a periodic repeating signal that happens very rapidly and is in a pretty narrow band of frequency, at least the early detections. And so like, that seems like something that could be artificial. So that’s probably the kind of thing you would do if you want a beacon for, you know, honing in on a downed pilot. Right? You make some signal that is very much not like the heartbeat of a human and there’s lots of humans around, the heartbeat of, you know, mice and deer and goats and whatever else is in that part of the world. You make something that is a very simple, very sharp, well-defined signal that’s pretty intense that goes out. And then the most important thing is you know what that signal should look like. So you can go and pattern match in that. You know, you record all of the changes in the magnetic field that are happening and you say, I am looking for something at this particular frequency that has these characteristics. And I look for that pattern and then sort of hone in on that.

Beau: Now if the heart thing did work, let’s just say it works. Would it work better if you had a sample of the heartbeat of every single airman that was going into danger, into harm’s way?

Chad: I mean, you could…

Beau: That would be helpful.

Chad: You could have some kind of of characteristic, you know, like, okay, we’ve got, you know, a record of, like, in the movie Hunt for Red October, where they record the snippet of the submarine, and then they’re matching it to, you know, all of the recordings of other submarines and they identify it by, well, that this sounds like the engine of that one.

Beau: And let’s just say that, you know, because it’s the Pentagon, they know what a American heart sounds like. They’re like, that’s an American-

Chad: That’s an American, yeah.

Beau: It’s not a goat. So let’s just say that is the case and that we don’t know that they have this crazy quantum magnetometry sniffing device that has also been pre-fed every single airman who’s going over hostile territory. How well do you think it would work?

Chad: You know, I think that that would be an enormously challenging thing because just, you know, even a normal person in normal circumstances, your heart rate changes somewhat substantially depending on what you’re doing. Right? If I, you know, if I get up and go into the other room and get myself a cup of coffee, my heart rate’s gonna increase as I go over there. If I come back and I drink caffeinated beverages, it’s gonna probably increase in a different way. If I, you know, exercise, you know, and then if I’m like, I just crashed my plane, running through the desert trying to get away from people, that heartbeat isn’t gonna look all that similar to, you know, what was recorded in an unmarked office park in Northern Virginia by the CIA. So it’s really challenging in that.

Beau: Yeah, I hear you now. So let’s grade this. All right. Now I’m gonna ask you, just don’t overthink this. So we have the beacon model where there’s a simple signal, being repeated over one channel. And that’s how we find people. 10 is we’ll likely find that person. One is, we won’t. Where are you gonna put it?

Chad: If you’re doing a beacon-kind of model, I would say, you know, that’s a pretty well-tested idea. Some like nine-kind of kind of range, right? We’re really good at homing in, on artificial signals if you can, as long as you have something like clearly identifiable that you can pick out of the background.

Beau: Magnetometry. Now we’re not touching skin above a heart. We are 40 miles away and we have an incredible machine that no one has ever seen. It’s amazing. It’s just unbelievable. It’s amazing. I don’t know how to talk like him, but you know what I mean. So the chances, 10 being the best, one being the least, best?

Chad: One. Less than one.

Beau: So you would go negative numbers, you would put it off the chart.

Chad: I don’t believe that that-

Beau: You don’t believe.

Chad: -could be, that you could have a sensor sensitive enough to be picking out an individual heartbeat in the desert. I don’t believe that.

Beau: Now I reached out to somebody yesterday who I was sort of surprised ’cause he came up with somebody that I should talk to about this. I wrote to him at 4:36 PM saying, Hey, yada, yada, yada. Same thing I said to you. Given your lab’s work, I’d love to have you on to talk about this technology. Would you be up for a conversation? And he immediately wrote, I have a conflict of interest related to this matter, so I’ll decline. And that was eight minutes later. 

Chad: Yeah, that’s…

Beau: It was one Ron Walsworth from the University of Maryland.

Chad: I know Ron.

Beau: Now what- is it because he created this sniffer or because he thinks it’s nonsense, but he can’t say that because he works for people who make stuff like that?

Chad: I think… so, it’s a combo of he probably just doesn’t want to. Like doesn’t want to talk. But also I think he has contracts that are funded by the people who build these kinds of things and so would not want to accidentally say anything.

Beau: Okay, so Ghost Murmur, at least for now, seems like something we don’t really need to be worried about. But is there anything in the realm of spycraft that is real, that is like something we might wanna think about? As, you know, don’t worry about your heartbeat being picked out in the middle of the Big House during the Ohio State-Michigan game. It’s probably not gonna happen, but do worry about this?

Chad: I would say, you know, the big killer app for a long time now has been the idea of using quantum mechanics to do quantum computation that could crack codes. So there are a lot of modern crypto systems are based on it being hard to do certain kinds of math problems. And if you could make those problems easier to do, suddenly these codes would fall apart. And you know, that has implications for national security, though most of those people have moved to post-quantum codes already. It has implications for the financial system. And so spies and bankers put a lot of money into quantum computing research in an effort to find out if it’s possible to make a quantum computer that would enable you to crack these kinds of encryption. There’s been a lot of progress in quantum computing over the last, you know, five to 10 years, and that’s an area where something could happen relatively quickly that would maybe have some implications for that sort of thing.

Beau: And we’re talking about something that could crack end-to-end encryption.

Chad: Most of those systems are doing something fancier, that’s harder. It’s more like it’s cracking, like RSA encryption, your public key crypto systems, which are the things that you use to…they enable like the really open web, rather, that I can go and I can send my credit card to any number of retailers because there’s this public key method of encrypting the message so that only they can read it.

Beau: It’s more on the commerce side and the banking side.

Chad: That kind of thing, that area. The other thing that you could worry about in these sorts of technologies is, a lot of these quantum ideas are good at kind of pattern matching. And so looking at, you know, it’s closely related to a lot of the LLM stuff that goes on with these AI wiggly fingers for quote marks, AI models of, where-

Beau: Because that’s all pattern matching.

Chad: You’re looking at, you know, analyses of traffic or things like that. And you can do some very clever things with those kinds of systems that are a little scary, you know, like de-anonymizing things that we would prefer to remain anonymous. And that is kind of a data processing problem because the scale of information of all of the transactions of all of the people is, you know, an incredibly gigantic data set. If you have a way to sift through that very quickly and look for patterns of activity that you might want to, and attribute them to particular people, that can have some scary implications.

Beau: We’ve seen researchers like Yves de Montjoye in France and there’s plenty of people in the states working on this to show exactly how that re-identification process occurs. And it’s scary ’cause it really only requires four data points.

Chad: Yeah. And the reason it’s not done at scale is that it doesn’t require all that much for any one person, but there are a lot of people and you know, to do it for all of the people in the United States would be computationally overwhelming. But if you could speed that up, then you know, then you can be in a situation where you could worry about somebody tracking everybody.

Beau: So, you know, looking at the way that quantum mechanics and quantum computing can be used or deployed in the realm of data, we’re still talking about traditional surveillance, really, just more effective or faster.

Chad: Pretty much, yeah. It’s the same. You’d be trying to break codes to read messages that you can’t read or to identify patterns of activity that allow you to track down particular people. But you’re not doing anything really like qualitatively different.

Beau: Right.

Chad: And I should also, you know, make a note that we have friends who, one of whom used to work in naval intelligence, and we were talking about this one time, and he said that, you know, the thing to keep in mind is that the number of codes that have ever been broken by mathematical cryptography is approximately zero. Oh, like, you know, everybody, they talk about hacking the Enigma machine in World War II and that sort of thing, but, you know, Polish Commandos captured a working enigma machine and delivered it to the British, and that’s how they figured out how to, you know, how the thing was put together. And some submarine commanders in the German navy reused one-time pads that enabled them to back out, you know, they did something very dumb that made it possible to crack the code. Like it wasn’t that people figured it out purely through math and fancy computing. And that’s remained true largely up to the present day. He had an interesting taxonomy of types of cryptography that, or things like, you know, black bag cryptography where you sneak into somebody’s office and install a key logger on their computer and that you just get their password that way. Or there’s, you know, rubber hose cryptography where they, you know, kidnap you and just beat on you until you tell them what your password is and then they get access to your messages. Or bag of money cryptography, where they just buy it from you or, my favorite of the categories was dumb shit cryptography, where they break into your office and they find a post-it that has your password on it. Right? And, you know, like you do something completely idiotic. And that’s mostly how people who are actual spies crack codes is not by doing anything really fancy, is just exploiting human weaknesses of various kinds.

Beau: Well, you heard it here first. So from a physicist, the dumb-shit-ography is what’s really gonna get you.

Chad: That’s mostly what does people in is, yeah, like, I couldn’t remember the strong password, so I had it written on a piece of tape, you know, on the drawer in my desk, and, you know, that’s how it got broken.

Beau: Yeah. And my home address was online.

Chad: Yeah, exactly.

Beau: The thing is, I understand why people want Ghost Murmur to be real. There’s something almost comforting about a threat so unavoidable. Supervillain technology with a supervillain name that finds you by your heartbeat. Game over. Nothing you can do about that. But what’s actually happening to your privacy doesn’t work like that. It’s not a beam pointed at you from forty miles away being parsed by AI. It’s more like house paint. Every day the sun hits it. Some days, it rains. It’s cold. It’s hot. The paint cracks. The click, the location ping because you haven’t told apps to stop knowing where you are in real time, the search you did at midnight and forgot about that is resurrected on social media the next day, the purchase that was broadcast to an entire ecosystem of products and services, the app you said yes to without reading why it wanted your contacts. None of it feels like surveillance when it’s happening. It feels like the weather. And then one day something pops up that skeeves you to the bone — an ad knows too much, a price changes for no reason, at least that you can identify, there’s a knock at your door, or someone just kicks your door down. It’s too late. Something way creepier than Ghost Murmur already exists. It’s called Big Data. That’s why I can’t stop thinking about Ghost Murmur. Because it’s not a big worry, but the attention that it gets makes me crazy because there’s nothing exotic about the actual threat. ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Ghost murmur seems like a non-issue. What should people be worried about?

Benn: I think breadcrumbs. I think that people don’t really realize how damaging it is until they actually realize how damaging it is when, you know, their insurance rate goes up for some reason that they don’t understand or… I mean, a lot of people, I just tell ’em to go to LexisNexis or something and see how much data they have about you, just one of those companies. And then know that that’s the data that’s being used by, you know, your insurance company. And now unfortunately, being used by the federal government, and the NSA and you know, the FBI and whoever else. They’re purchasing all this data and then adding that to your file. And so you have to ask yourself like, did Meta tracking you on your visit when you explored some weird fetish on PornHub, and then that ended up in this massive data broker’s file of you, and now the federal government or your local police even could be looking at that and using that to possibly incriminate you for something that you didn’t do. Like all of this stuff is happening and I feel like it’s just so complicated that we don’t realize that it’s not as cut and dry and we look at things like surveillance, even when it’s a camera in our house as like, you know, it’s gonna keep us safe from this thing. It’s, you know, in case something bad happens. But it really doesn’t in most of those cases. Usually it’s just sort of making you more vulnerable. I mean, in a weird way, it kind of reminds me of Havana Syndrome too. It’s like people seem to be really obsessed with the idea of the government using sonic weapons on them or something like that, and it’s like, no, the government’s using like actual weapons against you. You know, like if we’re at the point right now where you could say something on Facebook and you’ll have an FBI agent show up to your house with a gun, then they’ll just do that. They don’t need the sonic weapon.

Beau: Oh my God. Oh my God. It’s like, you know, it’s like, wait a second. It’s like that Instagram’s listening to you, you know, because you were thinking about, you know, all of a sudden there’s a grill that only you thought about but you didn’t Google. You sure you didn’t Google it? You sure he didn’t like-

Benn: Yeah. You sure you didn’t like go Google a bunch of meat to cook out and like a bunch of other things and you know how to, how-

Beau: Or like some meat on Instagram.

Benn: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think about that a lot because that’s the thing that everybody’s scared of when really their breadcrumbs are causing all of that. And they’re not thinking about the breadcrumbs. They’re thinking about this, oh, what if the microphone’s just listening to me 24/7? It’s like, well, if it helped them, it would, but you already give them all this data so they don’t need it. Like, that’s the reason it’s not recording you 24/7.

Beau: I am at some point gonna hold up an air tag and say, this is how they did it.

Chad: It could easily be. It could easily be like, yeah, there’s basically an air tag on the guy’s flight suit, and we found that, and, you know, but we convinced some reporter that it was quantum magnetometry and, you know-

Beau: It’s kind of like, you know, like in in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where there’s the Frenchman at the top of the parapet, and they asked if we have a holy grail. And he said, what did you tell ’em? He said, I told them we already got one.

Chad: Yes. So they all laugh. Yeah, exactly.

Beau: You know, and then they throw a cow. But, maybe this was something that was misheard or just like nonsense. Let’s see what will stick? Like crazy spaghetti, psycho spaghetti. Just throw it at a cabinet.

Chad: Yeah. And that’s a business in which, you know, they do that kind of thing. They’ll just throw some stuff out there just to see who writes it down.

Beau: It could have just been misinformation for the sake of freaking out the Iranians.

Chad: They could do that too. It’s, you know, those people play weird games.

Beau: And now it’s time for the Tinfoil Swan, our paranoid takeaway to keep safe on and offline. This week, skip the quantum magnetometry and go to LexisNexis. I want you to go there and request your consumer disclosure report. Just like Benn said, it’s free, it’s your legal right, and it will tell you more about what people know about you-people. I use that term lightly, loosely anyway- than any classified technology the CIA may or may not have. Once you’ve had a good look and recovered from the shock of what’s on that report there, opt out. LexisNexis has an opt-out form — it’s not elegant, it’s not very interesting, you’re going to just have to slog your way through it, but it works, and it removes you from the data they sell to insurers, landlords, and yes, law enforcement. Two steps. Look at the file. Then close it. Be open, be ready, and stay focused on what matters. Most importantly, stay safe.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ See you next week. This episode of What The Hack was produced by me and Andrew Steven, who also did the editing. Our theme music is by Andrew Steven. If you think you heard Benn Jordan’s music in the mix, you’re right. There’s some other stuff in the mix, but there’s some Benn Jordan too. Check him out on Bandcamp or wherever you get your stuff. What The Hack is a production of DeleteMe, which was picked by the New York Times’ Wirecutter as the number one personal information removal service. You should be using it already. If you’re not and you want to, well, you can. Here’s what to do. Go to joindeleteme.com/wth. That’s joindeleteme.com/wth and get 20% off. I kid you not. 20%, 20% off. That’s joindeleteme.com/wth. Now, stay safe out there. See you around.

Learn More:

• See where your data is exposed with our free scan.
• Learn more about data brokers and how they misuse your data.
• Discover how to opt out from Lexis Nexis.