Byron Tau on government surveillance from Sep 14, 2026

The last thing I want to say is that I'm doing this episode today about the growth of the surveillance state.

And I would guess that some listeners out there are saying, well, Mark, isn't there a more pressing issue? Because all of the tech news, I mean, it feels like over 90 percent of the tech news in the last week or so has been about A.I., The existential risk, you know, the AI is going to achieve consciousness or super intelligence or AGI, the artificial general intelligence.

And it's going to run amok and it's going to start killing people and destroying institutions.

And the world is just going to go to hell in a handbasket due to AI.

Shouldn't we be talking about that as opposed to the slow metastatic growth of the surveillance state? And what I want to say is a lot of the AI coverage is being driven by the tech oligarchs for their own purposes.

There's this concept called Krita hype.

which is that as the hype comes out about the doomsday scenarios of AI, that kind of doom hype is really a way of marketing AI by reminding us how very powerful it is and how the only people who can save us from that horrible, scary thing of the AI running amok is the tech oligarchs themselves.

So you have to take the AI news with a grain of salt.

There was also the security incident from Hugging Face where an AI supposedly got loose and it hacked into another system.

I mean, let's be real.

What really happened there is that researchers set up a testbed without proper controls, without proper security controls.

It was a human error.

And the automated system does what they had programmed it to do.

It was not some conscious AI bot coming to kill us all.

It is either incompetent or irresponsible or both teams in Silicon Valley who are running their tools in a way that is harmful, is dangerous for the rest of us.

And so those are the people who need to be held to account for their decisions and their behavior.

And in the meantime, as they are trying to, I think, in part distract us from what they're doing by running all these scary stories about AI, what we should pay attention to is the reality on the ground.

There are flock cameras probably in your town, in your community, watching you wherever you drive.

Or if they're not from flock, they're from some other surveillance company.

The surveillance phone that you walk around with, likely made by either Apple or Google, is tracking you.

Your data is available to data brokers and government agencies, as Byron Tao talked about.

Read his book, Means of Control, to get the details.

You are being spied on in a way that, if you're American, is totally unconstitutional.

And that's something that we should be paying attention to.