The Assignment with Audie Cornish
Oct 23, 2026 · 36 min · 15 segments
We’re living in an age of surveillance anxiety. And yet, hand us a leaked DM or security footage of Kelly Clarkson at a Brooklyn toy store and we’re here for it. Are we feeding into the very…
Audie CornishHost
Ari ShapiroHost
We are going to talk about this new world we're in where basically we're in a surveillance economy that some people have doubts about, right? They talk about Big Brother.
But then I want to talk about Little Sis, which is the world of people who are more than excited to see the receipts.
And we're all going to click and like and thumbs up because we all love to see it.
I think we should start with two examples, one of each, that kind of capture the moment we're in.
this idea that this camera collects not just your license plate information but can theoretically share it in a database, cross state lines if someone wants to do that, and you can end up in a warrantless search sort of situation, which is – I'm sorry going down the rabbit hole, but the point is this backlash is huge.
If you've got a missing person or a stolen car, it can very quickly track the location of that car.
And all summer long, we saw protests and people taking videos of themselves committing crimes, smashing these cameras.
But there was a quote in a New York Times piece that jumped out to me that I think gets at the pivot we want to make, where this story said, there is something faintly absurd about watching a TikTok about taking a buzzsaw to a license plate reader.
While staring directly into a device with a camera and a microphone and GPS and facial recognition technology and your credit card and your browsing history and your photographs and your entire social graph and nearly every message you've sent to anyone ever encrypted or otherwise, the paranoia feels almost comically displaced.
Can I tell you, I had that same clip listed under burning hot take from Willie Staley at the New York Times.
And that article was titled, Flock Camera's Canoodling Lawyers, How Much Surveillance Are We Comfortable With? Okay, so let's get to the canoodling lawyers.
We are going to talk about this new world we're in where basically we're in a surveillance economy that some people have doubts about, right? They talk about Big Brother.
But then I want to talk about Little Sis, which is the world of people who are more than excited to see the receipts.
And we're all going to click and like and thumbs up because we all love to see it.
I think we should start with two examples, one of each, that kind of capture the moment we're in.
this idea that this camera collects not just your license plate information but can theoretically share it in a database, cross state lines if someone wants to do that, and you can end up in a warrantless search sort of situation, which is – I'm sorry going down the rabbit hole, but the point is this backlash is huge.
If you've got a missing person or a stolen car, it can very quickly track the location of that car.
And all summer long, we saw protests and people taking videos of themselves committing crimes, smashing these cameras.
But there was a quote in a New York Times piece that jumped out to me that I think gets at the pivot we want to make, where this story said, there is something faintly absurd about watching a TikTok about taking a buzzsaw to a license plate reader.
While staring directly into a device with a camera and a microphone and GPS and facial recognition technology and your credit card and your browsing history and your photographs and your entire social graph and nearly every message you've sent to anyone ever encrypted or otherwise, the paranoia feels almost comically displaced.
Can I tell you, I had that same clip listed under burning hot take from Willie Staley at the New York Times.
And that article was titled, Flock Camera's Canoodling Lawyers, How Much Surveillance Are We Comfortable With? Okay, so let's get to the canoodling lawyers.
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