WIRED Politics Lab

This Fall, back to school is unlike anything we've ever experienced. Due to COVID-19, some school districts in the US are going entirely remote, while others are trying hybrid learning. Parents suddenly had to change plans. Teachers are watching the pandemic exacerbate the digital divide. And little kids who really hate Zoom now have to do it all day long. In this episode of Get WIRED, host Lauren Goode talks to Adrienne So, WIRED Senior Writer, about the chaos of raising her kids and figuring out her daughter’s first day of kindergarten amid the pandemic. Later, Education Technology Specialist Regina Schaffer tells us what her district is doing to address the digital divide and discuss the future of our schools.

We're sharing the latest episode of our sister podcast, Gadget Lab. And we need your help! For our upcoming Back to School episode of Get WIRED, please call 415-534-9498 and leave us a voicemail about the challenges you're facing, and tricks you've learned for dealing with school and kids during the coronavirus pandemic.

As smart speakers for the home continue to grow in popularity, police departments have started to take notice. Now, whenever attorneys and law enforcement officials are investigating a crime, they can put your virtual assistant in the hot seat. They can cross-reference a variety of information from smart devices, including location data, audio recordings, and biometric data. Together, it can paint a picture of where a suspect was and when, often far more reliably than any human witness.

This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED senior writer Sidney Fussell joins us to talk about the strange murder case where a smart speaker became the star witness. We also share tips about how to manage the privacy settings in your own smart tech.

Warning: This episode features a brief conversation about domestic violence and assault.

Show Notes: 

Read Sidney’s story about law enforcement collecting information from smart speakers here. Find more episodes of the Get WIRED podcast here.

Recommendations: 

Sidney recommends the show I May Destroy You on HBO. Lauren recommends Vanity Fair’s September issue, with a cover story about Breonna Taylor. Mike recommends the episode of the podcast Questlove Supreme with Bootsy Collins.

Sidney Fussell can be found on Twitter @SidneyFussell. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our executive producer is Alex Kapelman (@alexkapelman). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

Last week, we took you inside a factory farm with the co-founder of Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), a group the meat industry says is one of the “most dangerous animal rights groups out there.” In this episode, WIRED senior writer Andy Greenberg joins us for another chapter in the story of slaughterhouse break-ins. This one unfolded alongside the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s an example of how everyday tech is being used for surveillance of typically secretive operations—in this case, a massive pig farm that is killing its pigs in a morally questionable way.

Who is an animal activist? What do they do? Described as “the most dangerous animal rights organization out there,” Direct Action Everywhere (or DxE) hopes to expose the controversial practices of the factory farm industry. A self-described “global grassroots network of animal rights activists,” DxE engages in non-violent forms of protest as a way of both educating the public and pushing reform. WIRED Senior Writer Andy Greenberg learned more about the people who make up this network of activists and their operations.

In Part I of this two part story, we talk to Wayne Hsuing, co-founder and activist of DxE, as he describes the groups’ origin and his involvement in Operation Deathstar -- a sting operation (with a full Virtual Reality camera rig), in hope of bringing awareness to the practices of industrialized farming.

On this special episode of Get WIRED, WIRED’s Editor-at-large, Steven Levy talks with Bill Gates— philanthropist and co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. At the start of the pandemic, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation pledged more than $1 billion to vaccine development, and $100 million of that is specifically for Covid-19 vaccines. Meanwhile, he’s also become the target of conspiracy theories related to the coronavirus. They discuss everything from the US response to the pandemic, to a timeline when things might go back to “normal.” They also cover the recent Big Tech antitrust hearings, and of course, they talk about TikTok!

On the latest episode of the Get WIRED podcast, we attend a Virtual Beings Summit and contemplate what it means to be human. WIRED staff writer Emma Grey Ellis reports on how virtual beings are taking over our timelines—sometimes, without our even noticing.

Facial recognition tech has been critiqued for being inaccurate for a while now. But its problems became pretty clear last month, when the New York Times reported a story about a Black man named Robert Williams who was identified incorrectly as a suspect in a crime. In this episode, WIRED Senior Staff Writer Sidney Fussell, who covers surveillance technology, traces racialized surveillance tech to its origins, as far back as slavery and early prison designs. He draws parallels between the intentional, all-seeing design of the panopticon and the omni-present cameras that surround us today — and explains how these kinds of systems become so flawed in the first place.

The idea behind the Citizen app is that its users upload videos of the things that are going on in the neighborhood in real time — anything from as a gas leak to something potentially a lot more violent. It's an app built on the premise that the more information a community has the better off it is, but it also comes with all of the trappings and problems of a lot of community surveillance — the app has some toxic comments, it can lead to racial profiling, and it has sparked a lot of discussion about who’s benefitting most from all of these neighborhood alerts — the users, law enforcement, or Citizen itself. WIRED's Boone Ashworth has spent months on the Citizen app, trying to better understand exactly what its mission is, and what this kind of hyper-vigilance does to our psyches. But he's also been talking to people who are on the app, who rush to the scene to capture what’s going on in their neighborhoods; and he found one who is particularly interesting, and who agreed to take us behind the scenes.

From our first episode "Citizen and the Bizarre World of Live-Streamed Crime", WIRED's Boone Ashworth introduces us to a surprising superuser of this neighborhood watch app.

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