Plutopia News Network

On this episode of the Plutopia News Network, Jon, Scoop and Wendy talk with Jennifer Granick, Surveillance and Cybersecurity Counsel at the ACLU, about the expanding machinery of government and corporate surveillance and its threat to civil liberties and democracy. Jennifer explains how long-standing rules limiting government use and combination of personal data have eroded, enabling massive dossiers on citizens and immigrants built from government records, data brokers, apps, and new technologies like ubiquitous location tracking, spyware, and facial recognition. She highlights how border zones and immigration enforcement operate as Fourth Amendment “gray areas,” how ICE and other agencies exploit data broker loopholes, and how surveillance harms vulnerable people, from abortion seekers to benefit recipients wrongly flagged as frauds. The conversation also covers the politics and dangers of spyware, the importance and limits of tools like Signal, the role of hackers and security researchers in exposing abuses, and the way popular media normalizes surveillance as necessary for safety. Jennifer closes by stressing practical self-defense steps, the need to understand one’s “threat model,” and the importance of legal and political resistance, reminding listeners that although the situation is alarming, organized pushback can still win real protections.

Jennifer Granick:

I think one of the biggest new things is that the rules that we had have kind of been thrown away. There were just these expectations that data I gave to the government in order to get Medicare or in order to get food stamps or something of that nature was going to stay used for those purposes. And there are rules about how the government is permitted to combine databases of information and when it’s allowed to do that. And what we’ve seen is a complete ignoring of those rules and this amalgamation of different databases of information into a dossier of people in the country, not just people who are immigrants, but also people who have been born here and were citizens as well. And you put together all these disparate pieces of information and it tells you a lot, maybe almost everything about somebody.

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Technologist and former British Telecom chief scientist Peter Cochrane joins the Plutopia to talk about his lifelong pursuit of truth and his work on a “truth engine” that used AI to grade the reliability of news sources and authors. Cochrane argues that real truth is hard, costly, and collaborative — unlike social media, which feeds users comforting falsehoods that match their worldview — and warns that losing a shared grip on truth threatens civilization.

Drawing on his career in communications, AI, and cybersecurity, Peter explains how he boosted lie detection rates by tracking sources over time, factoring in bias, and adding linguistic and psychological analysis, pushing accuracy toward 95%. The conversation widens into science as an ongoing search rather than final certainty, the distortions of corporate media, the risks and inevitability of AI-driven systems like driverless cars, and his own experiment living with AI-assisted hearing. Throughout, Cochrane stays optimistic but insistent on building human and machine ethics, noting that technology should be judged by whether it improves on fallible humans and helps us keep truth at the center of society.

Peter Cochrane:

Truth is very expensive. It costs you a lot of time, energy, concentration. You have to have these inner arguments. You have discussions with other people and you gradually zero down to an opinion based on the facts. Whereas on Facebook it is easy. You you just believe it. And it’s so outrageous — that it fits your world model. That’s the worst aspect. The whole of social media is tuned to your social or world model, and they just feed you the stuff that reinforces your belief system. I think that can be said of most religions, they do the same thing. Uh they feed you the story from being a child continually till it becomes perfect.

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The Plutopia podcast hosts Dr. Sophie Nightingale, a psychologist at Lancaster University, to discuss how digital technology — especially social media, generative AI, and the constant flow of online information — shapes human memory, judgment, and vulnerability to deception. She explains that people struggle to evaluate critically the sheer volume of information they encounter, so they’re more likely to accept content that aligns with their preexisting beliefs, and this helps misinformation spread. Nightingale traces her research from early work on how taking photos can impair memory to current studies showing that most people can spot fake or AI-generated images only slightly better than chance, and even training improves performance only modestly. She and the hosts dig into the limits of AI “guardrails,” the uneven global landscape of AI regulation, the rise of misogynistic online spaces, and the troubling growth of AI-enabled nonconsensual intimate imagery, arguing that legal reform, platform accountability, and public education are all needed to reduce harm.

One of the things that tends to make people quite susceptible is just information overload, purely that we live in an age where we are accessing so much information all the time we can’t possibly interpret, or critically think about, everything. So we might well just accept things that we wouldn’t otherwise. There’s quite a lot of evidence showing that’s especially the case, if that information coincides with your pre-existing beliefs. So for example, if I happen to be a huge fan of Donald Trump, let’s say, and I saw some misinformation around Donald Trump that was positive about him, then I would probably be more likely to believe that than somebody who was not a fan of Donald Trump already, if you see what I mean. So those biases definitely exist. There’s a lot of evidence showing that. And then I think, you know, it kind of comes back as well to — if you want to believe something, you will.

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Ben Collier, Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and chair of the Foundation for Information Policy Research, joins Plutopia to discuss his MIT Press book Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy. The book argues that media overstates Tor’s ties to crime. Originally developed at the U.S. Naval Research Lab as “onion routing,” Tor became practical and popular through the Tor Browser and usability enhancements, while crypto (especially Bitcoin) later enabled illicit markets that grabbed headlines. Ben traces Tor’s unusual early collaboration between military researchers and the cypherpunks. He clarifies that much “dark web” activity is mundane or pro-privacy (e.g., Facebook/BBC onion sites, SecureDrop for journalists), and suggests that most cybercrime now is industrialized “as-a-service” and often sloppy, with law enforcement increasingly operating undercover services and honeypots. He emphasizes Tor’s legitimate uses — censorship circumvention, whistleblowing, secure access to news, and services like Women on Web — and he discusses governance changes at the Tor Project and broader debates over surveillance, encryption, and the trends toward highly centralized platforms and AI. Usability and scale, he argues, are key to real-world privacy; many protections pioneered by Tor and Signal now surface in mainstream tools (e.g., Firefox, WhatsApp). For would-be contributors, he suggests running non-exit relays or funding professional operators, and he closes by stressing that privacy tech can rebalance power by resisting pervasive, automated surveillance.

Tor initially wasn’t particularly useful for crime because no one really knew how to use it, it wasn’t very easy to use, it was very slow, and there was no easy way to send money over it. Obviously, when you get the rise of cryptocurrency, particularly initially Bitcoin, suddenly now you can send money anonymously — or, well, you can send money without being censored. And now you can browse anonymously. So this led to crypto markets being created that put these two technologies together. But Tor is not intrinsically a technology for crime. And actually, to be honest, if you want to see crime on the Internet, social media is probably the place to go.

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In this episode of the Plutopia News Network Podcast, hosts Jon Lebkowsky, Scoop Sweeney, and Wendy Grossman talk with mathematician and juggler Colin Wright, who holds a PhD in pure mathematics from Cambridge and is known for his engaging talks on how math appears everywhere in life. Wright explains that math is not about numbers or formulas but about patterns, structures, and relationships, and he shares stories from his journey from academic research to applying mathematical thinking in radar systems and engineering. The conversation explores his development of Siteswap notation for describing juggling patterns, the intersection of art and science in juggling and ballroom dance, and his belief in teaching through curiosity and discovery rather than rote memorization. The group also discusses randomness, AI, human tendencies to attribute intelligence to machines, and Wright’s Maths Jam gatherings — global events where people come together to share puzzles, ideas, and enthusiasm for math. Throughout, Wright emphasizes creativity, collaboration, and the joy of seeing patterns in both the physical and abstract worlds.

Colin Wright:

Math is not about numbers, it’s not about formulas, it’s about patterns and knowing that the that patterns work forever, rather than just being spurious or ephemeral. So it’s being able to abstract from whatever you’re doing, throwing away irrelevant detail and working with the abstract setting. And it’s all about patterns and structures and relationships. And at its heart, that’s what math is really about. And it just turns up absolutely everywhere. I meet a lot of kids who have no apparent predisposition towards mathematics, who then — education is not about filling the bucket, it’s about lighting the fire. You give them something that engages them and gets them starting to think about a thing, and they can come to life and suddenly… they might be slow. They might not have the knowledge that other people have got. They might not have the practice and the practiced skills that some of the others have. But sometimes they just blossom and there’s no apparent reason why they they should have been pre-wired for that and yet they can do it.

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The Plutopia podcast welcomes Sumner Erickson, who discovered the tuba in sixth grade by chance and, at 18, won a job with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra after studies at the Curtis Institute. He recalls globe-spanning tours (Europe, Japan, China, Russia, Brazil), collaborations under André Previn, and contrasts between orchestral and other touring lives. Erickson’s new book, Actors of Sound, blends musicianship and mindfulness: music as emotion and sound, playing from a flow/“remote control” state, and the principle that music includes technique — not the reverse. He discusses body-use methods (Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais), embouchure insights, labrosones, and his patent work leading to a new brass mouthpiece venture, Unified Performance. Now a long-time teacher, he’s writing children’s songs and performing some of his brother Roky Erickson’s material, reflecting on joy, presence, and sustaining a deep, respectful relationship with one’s instrument.

Sumner Erickson:

I’m there, 18 years old. They had just told the seven people in the finals that they had selected this 18-year-old kid to be the tuba player in the Pittsburgh Symphony. So they pulled me into the office and they offered me a contract. And the manager looks at me, the assistant manager, he goes, you ever been to Europe? I’m like, no. He says, we’re going next spring. And the first stop was Bonn, Germany, and the first stop in Bonn, Germany was Beethoven’s birthplace. I mean, it was just, you know — how amazing to get to have those experiences and repeatedly go back to Europe. And we did seven tours of Japan, we played China, we went to Russia, we went to Poland. We always had to go to big enough places that could bring in a concert — a symphony orchestra, full symphony orchestra. So we didn’t go to little places often. But, you know, been on the beach in Rio, on the wall, in China, in the Kremlin. In Red Square

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On this Plutopia episode, Mike Aaron — once a renewable-energy policy aide, now a “digital lifeguard” — explains how fast-evolving tech and social engineering are fueling scams and identity theft, citing FBI Internet Crime Center figures of $6.5B in reported 2024 losses (likely ~10× higher) and ~$160B across all cybercrimes, with average losses especially steep for seniors. He walks through common tactics (bank and FBI impostors, investment cons, romance “pig-butchering,” Coinbase login texts, gift-card shakedowns, AI voice cloning); argues that the crime wave is eroding social trust; and offers practical defenses: secure and monitor the primary email, use password managers and multi-factor auth, adopt passkeys as they mature, set code words/shibboleths, call back through official numbers, add friction for large payments, and lean on education and resources (e.g., AARP) to help individuals, families, and small businesses stay safe.

Mike Aaron:

In 2024, the IC3, the Internet Crime Complaint Center, part of the FBI who track this sort of stuff, reported losses of $6. 5 billion. Go back to the New York Times estimate that only about 10% of this gets reported: we’re talking $65 billion. That’s just investment scams. The actual total was $160 billion for all of the different online crimes — for the ransomware, the botnets, the malware, the extortion, the real estate, the identity theft, the credit card checkfront, all of them. $160 billion. Average loss for people over the age of 60 is $83,000 each.

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In this Plutopia News Network episode, political historian Dr. Roy Casagranda joins Jon and Scoop for a wide-ranging conversation on leadership, U.S. presidents from Eisenhower to Trump, and the fragility of democratic institutions. Casagranda contrasts strong domestic achievements (e.g., LBJ, Eisenhower) with consistently troubling U.S. foreign policy, argues presidential “outsider” politics have degraded executive quality, and calls Trump uniquely brazen in his corruption, yet notably reluctant to launch foreign wars. He critiques tariffs as a regressive tax on Americans, worries about NATO reliability amid Russia’s aggression, and describes a global rightward lurch reminiscent of the 1930s, fueled by polarization, media algorithms, and oligarchic power. From campus protests to Quebec and South Korea, he cites sustained mass action as the realistic check on authoritarian drift. The discussion ranges through climate, tech “bros,” healthcare, and mislabeling of socialism, ending with a sober assessment that most leaders are neither wholly good nor bad—and that citizen pressure will decide the Republic’s trajectory.

Roy Casagranda:

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, There isn’t that kind of polarizing effect. There’s nothing to sort of latch on to. The world isn’t black and white anymore. And I see people struggling so hard to make it that way. Like Putin’s a good guy. Well, he invaded Ukraine. That’s not good. He was forced to do it. Nobody held a gun to his head and said if you don’t invade Ukraine we’re gonna blow your brains out. You know what I mean? Like there’s this weird thing that we have as a species where we want to have a good guy and we want to have a bad guy. And the reality is, is that most of the world leaders are somewhere in between.

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Nate Wilcox joins Plutopia News Network with a wide-ranging critique of U.S. politics, media, technology, and foreign policy. He argues the political center has collapsed, institutions lack credibility, and executive power dominates, while both parties fail in different ways: Democrats with performative resistance and hollow policy, Republicans with anti-democratic drift. He connects domestic dysfunction to global overreach, from NATO tensions to surveillance and deepfake threats. He is sharply skeptical of AI, seeing persuasion and control, not productivity, as its main value. Touching on topics from super-PAC influence and generational turnover in Congress to conspiracy-laced histories of state violence, Nate paints a picture of systemic rot but leaves open the hope of a “soft landing” and a reimagined international order.

Nate Wilcox:

The big tech money guys have all clearly gone over to Trump. Some of them, like Peter Thiel and Alex Karp at Palantir, are clearly vying to replace the deep state, or it’s like the IT guy pulling a coup in the office because Palantir was created by the CIA. And there’s these internal battles within the deep state happening in the Trump administration. It’s still impossible for me to figure out what went on with Elon Musk, and we’re also in this environment where companies like Tesla, whose financials make no sense, lose massive amounts of money every quarter. They’re losing market share hand over fist. If we weren’t keeping Chinese electric vehicles out of America, Tesla would be dead in the water. And we’re becoming the sort of technological hermit kingdom where Americans don’t even know what’s available in the rest of the world. Where most American citizens — like if you grew up in Joplin, Missouri, and most of those people that live in Joplin, Missouri don’t travel outside Joplin, Missouri very often, much less gallivant off to China and Shanghai and see how the first world lives, have no context for what’s going on on Earth.

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On this Plutopia News Network episode, hosts talk with In Formation magazine’s humor editor Brian Maggi and writer/contributing editor Paulina Borsook about their newly released Issue #3 — an intentionally high-quality, print-first, “anti-Wired” cult mag skewering tech culture with smart, insider humor. They trace the evolution from early-2000s issues to today’s broader “tech bro” mainstream, celebrate the tactile joy and permanence of a beautifully produced physical magazine, and describe their editorial approach: entertaining, evergreen pieces (from smartphones and surveillance to agile/Scrum and absurd job titles), dense visual jokes, and “inside baseball” references that reward readers who get them. They riff on the HAL-like AI cover and fair-use parody, discuss distribution (online, Europe via MagCulture, U.S. retail coming via Barnes & Noble), and gripe that Google search oddly buries their site. The business model is essentially philanthropic, with mostly fake ads by design; the goal is cultural critique, not clickbait. The conversation widens to iPhone’s societal impact, AI’s authorship and environmental concerns, and why sharp humor — made by people who’ve been inside the industry — is a necessary antidote to today’s hype.

Brian Maggi:

It’s funny how much more mainstream the term “tech bro” is today. As a joke even. Paulina and I did this piece in the last issue, in the second issue — was it the second or the first, Paulina?

Paulina Borsook:

Second, and that was “Silicon Valley Alpha Males.”

Brian:

Yeah.

Paulina:

Yeah. And, you know, the tech bro one is clearly a descendant of that. And you and I were vastly amused by what we did with the Alpha Males one, but it was very inside Silicon Valley. You know, you can go back and read it, and it’s held up pretty well, but it’s like you have to have been there at the time to understand why it was perfect in its small way. Whereas the tech bro thing has become “so everyone knows about them and everyone talks about them” and yeah. I don’t know what else to say about that.

Buy In Formation at https://informationmagazine.com/product/in-formation-magazine-issue-3/. In Europe: https://magculture.com/products/in-formation-3

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