The Surveillance State Trump Is Inheriting
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This episode is brought to you by Google Gemini. With the Gemini app, you can talk live and have a real-time conversation with an AI assistant. It's great for all kinds of things, like if you want to practice for an upcoming interview, ask for advice on things to do in a new city, or brainstorm creative ideas. And by the way, this script was actually read by Gemini. Download the Gemini app for iOS and Android today. Must be 18 plus to use Gemini Live. When I sat down to talk to Ronan Farrow, I had my phone with me.

It was next to me on the table in the studio. It is turned on. All the apps are closed. But I wanted to know, based on your reporting, if my phone was hacked right now, what could someone have access to? So the highest tech, most intrusive forms of spyware technology can basically access everything.

At this point, Ronan probably doesn't need much of an introduction. His reporting helped bring down Harvey Weinstein, among others. His latest project is a documentary called Surveiled. It's paired with some companion writing in The New Yorker about the surveillance technology industry. Everything on that phone's storage, your photos, your texts, your emails, everything that you are doing in real time around the phone.

Like this conversation? Like this conversation. A technology like Pegasus, made by NSO Group, is a famous example. There's a whole flourishing industry, so I want to make it clear it's not just that, but that's one example we follow in this film. That can silently appear on your phone. There's different ways you can get affected, clicking a link, or there are even zero-click approaches. And once it's on there, it can turn on your microphone, it can turn on your camera, and

all without you ever knowing. So these are essentially ways to turn your phone into a spy in your pocket. Watching Ronan's documentary and reading his work, it becomes clear that the surveillance industry has shifted.

Something that maybe once felt far away or like a creepy one-off situation is becoming more and more common. In recent years, one of the things that I've been tracking in my reporting is that in one Western democracy after another, we've also seen scandals wherein governments have purchased this technology, which is now much more cheaply available, and

And suddenly we've seen it used against peaceful activists, dissidents, just political opposition members that a government doesn't like. We've seen this happen in Greece, in Poland, and we've seen it happen in Spain where some of this film takes place. After Catalan's bid for independence back in 2017...

Ronan says the Spanish government used spyware to hack the phones of scores of Catalonian separatist politicians, civil society members, and innocent bystanders.

There's a moment in the film where one of the investigators with the watchdog group is testing members of his family, and his whole family is infected. And they're just apolitical bystanders, both his parents and their doctors. They have all their patients' private data on their phones. And then suddenly that information can be used as a leverer

by the government. You know, the allegation in this case is that the Spanish government was doing the hacking, and that's something they tried to deny and then later admitted in the wake of this reporting. One of the spy chiefs there was fired after this. But there's been relatively little accountability in any of these cases, all told. So it's tough to control. Overreach feels almost inevitable if you don't have a more robust framework than exists now for policing how this technology is used. And people get hurt.

Today on the show, we are entering a new era of surveillance technology, one that administrations around the world, including Donald Trump's, could soon use. I'm Lizzie O'Leary, and you're listening to What Next TBD, a show about technology, power, and how the future will be determined. Stick around.

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Americans have long understood that the U.S. government has some interest in listening to them, whether that was during prohibition from the intelligence agencies or with court-executed search warrants in criminal cases. But in recent years, the private surveillance industry has grown to a point where an off-the-shelf system is easy to buy.

Basically, any government and any government office within the United States government can purchase its own kind of CIA in a box. The number of people who are able to deploy this technology, whether it's to advance a legitimate law enforcement goal or it's to go after someone theoretically in a politicized way, has really risen. The number of people has risen. The ease with which the technology can be acquired and used has risen. The history of surveillance tech

in general is, of course, the history of the abuse of that tech and surveillance, full stop. You know, this was true when there was old-fashioned wiretapping. So we know how this story goes. Governments and law enforcement entities are always going to overreach and are always going to intrude on people's privacy. And that's not just an abstract value. That is a form of intimidation. That's a way to quash dissent. That's a way to scare people. Sometimes it's a way to silence people.

And what we're seeing now is there are just more people who can do that in an easier, more intrusive way than ever. And while, you know, we do have constitutional protections against searches and seizures without justification, and there is a body of case law that applies those protections to data privacy, right?

Those protections are really porous. There's lots and lots of loopholes. So we've seen a situation where the United States government has acquired more and more of this technology under both parties. Last year, President Biden signed an executive order intended to stop the federal government from using certain commercial spyware. But Ronan says that order was vague and perhaps purposefully so.

I talked to Biden administration officials in the film where I grilled them and I'm like, "Why are you not being specific about what exactly is allowed and prevented?" The United States uses every tool of national power in pursuit of our interests grounded in our values. And so we do believe and openly acknowledge that there are legitimate law enforcement and national security uses of these technologies.

They want as much freedom as they can have. And the inevitable consequence of that is we've seen more and more purchases of this kind of tech. In this story that I ran in The New Yorker, I talk about how this fall, the Department of Homeland Security, under this Biden administration, purchased another powerful form of Israeli spyware made by a company called Paragon that's focused on hacking messaging apps. Right. Signal and Telegram, which I think a lot of people often think of as secure.

Yeah, that's right. And in all of these cases, that security is really tenuous. The makers of these messaging apps and of the operating systems and hardware that we use, the good ones anyway, they have teams of people who are constantly on guard waging a war against spyware makers. And there's really smart, creative engineers on both sides of that battle. And I talk to both sides of that conflict in this reporting and in this film where you have these

programmers at WhatsApp, for instance, who, you know, there's a terrifying moment where they catch a bit of spyware in their system. At that point, it wasn't clear that this is something intentional. However, what we ended up finding was actually the tip of the iceberg. At what point was there kind of a first all hands on deck emergency meeting about this?

The first meeting that I had was maybe around 10:00 AM with the security team. Everything was on fire at that point and on high alert status.

Signal and Telegram, it's the same situation where every day it's a battle to try to keep the thing secure. I did have a conversation with a source within this company, Paragon, where they tout their ability to get into all these apps, but they were like, it's still a struggle every day to try to get into Signal. So if you're doing private communication, don't count on Signal being fail-safe, but it is probably one of the best bets as of now.

But the point is, the U.S. government has at its fingertips this technology. The Biden administration did pause that particular contract after reporting emerged around it, and they said they're reviewing it. But, you know, they're out shortly. Let's talk about the Trump administration, because Trump has named Michael Waltz to be his national security advisor. You wrote about his choice, and you've talked about this a bit earlier.

Why is Walt's history so important when we talk about this technological surveillance debate? Well, Walt, when he was in Congress, advocated for the expansion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Basically...

expanding how easy it is to spy on people with a national security rationale. And one of the particular arguments he made was that he wanted to be able to more readily surveil people entering the country potentially illegally. Mr. Speaker, we have these tools. We have reformed the abuses of these tools.

And we have to allow our national security professionals to have the best information possible to keep Americans safe. We can't wait until there's another attack and then throw up our hands in this body and say, why didn't we stop it? He specifically talked about people coming into the United States from China and our geopolitical standoff with China and needing to be able to keep tabs on

Chinese individuals coming into the United States. So this is interesting then against the backdrop of him potentially coming in in a very senior role at a time when the government and specifically the Department of Homeland Security and ICE, the immigration agency, have at their fingertips this technology that really can very readily create an Orwellian surveillance state where anyone involved in an immigration hearing process, you

You know, certainly anyone who's undocumented might have a situation where their information is completely up for grabs and can be used against them. Ronan says that if you think DHS will stop with undocumented immigrants, maybe they will, but maybe they won't.

What the privacy law experts I talked to around this piece point out is the Department of Homeland Security is very often the government organ through which legally questionable technology is purchased, right? Because they have a clear national security rationale all the time. So they can kind of avoid scrutiny relative to other government offices.

The Department of Homeland Security doesn't necessarily have to just use this in a targeted immigration context and as it enacts potentially Trump's commitment to mass deportations. The Department of Homeland Security can deploy this against all sorts of people. And we don't right now as a people have transparency and commitments on how that is going to be limited.

And so you have a combination of a porous legal framework of protections already and then an incoming leadership that seems to be indicating that they have a lot of disregard for even that thin rule of law component that might protect. Coming up, let's say you think, I've got nothing to hide. Ronan says you should worry anyway.

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One of the things that I was thinking about as I was reading your reporting is that, you know,

There have been things like this in the past. The Trump administration did this in 2021. They secretly got the phone records of New York Times reporters. The Obama administration did a similar version as well with Associated Press reporters. But those were phone records. And I wonder how much further and more detailed and intimate, really, the kinds of things that are available in a digital version of that kind of surveillance are.

Well, this is how I came to this issue. I've experienced the old school forms of surveillance and seen firsthand how intimidating it can be and how it can shrink the space for us to do our work. I was reporting on Harvey Weinstein and he hired an Israeli private intelligence firm to have me followed around through subcontractors. They sometimes used my phone geolocation data to follow me to meetings.

And then in looking into and experiencing how much this dynamic of surveillance wasn't just incidental, but was like really instrumental to breaking important stories, I realized what I had experienced was nothing compared to what was out there and how it was evolving. So yes, to your point, the information that will be up for grabs is going to be much more detailed. And we're just headed down an inevitable path of being more and more meshed with our devices, right? So...

Every bit of private information can be used against us, and every bit of private information is on these devices that are now pretty freely and openly crackable if you have the resources and willpower. And for governments, even a very thin rationale. I want to talk about that rationale component as well, because you spend time talking to people in Greece, in Spain, in

Tell me a little bit about what you learned in that reporting process. And I guess who was also caught up in this who maybe wasn't the original target? What you hear over and over again is people saying, well, we just thought it couldn't happen here. It seemed unthinkable. And that even goes for some Americans. I talked to a U.S.-Greek dual national who was hacked during the Greek surveillance dragnet incident.

And I think people underestimate how quickly it can happen in settings where it's supposed to be illegal, how quickly it can be misdirected in those settings, and how...

and how intruded upon the feeling of being hacked can be. It really isn't just information gathering. It is a form of silencing and intimidation. It does frighten people. What did people tell you about the lessons that they took away from this? Because you will have governments saying, this is national security concern, we needed to do this. And I wonder how...

regular people who experienced this felt about that, that, you know, that felt maybe something they would agree with or like, wait a minute, I'm not a national security concern. Why are you even talking to me about this? Yeah, sure. I mean, for so many of us, it's like, well, who, who the hell would want my nudes? Like, well, what, who cares? Sure. Give them up, you know, free, free feet content for all in this economy, even, um,

I think that it's easy to kind of be glib about it and hide from the issue and think of it, as you pointed out at the start of this interview, as some foreign issue. And that's one of the reasons I wanted to make this film and to tell the stories in this film of people who even were just apolitical bystanders and were kind of in that category of like, well, why would anyone want my information? And then they do get hacked and they realize...

how alarming it is to feel the space for freely expressing yourself shrunk in that way and to fear how your private information might be used against you in the wrong hands. And I've experienced versions of that. And I can tell you, it really does impede our ability to keep information flowing in a democracy. And, and I, so I think, you know, there's these twin arguments for everyone caring about it. It's,

It could happen to you, and you might not even know that you're on some list and that you're getting hacked. And you might not be in an obvious category of vulnerable people. And then it's also for anyone who cares about having a thriving democracy where people can freely express themselves and where there's access to information that isn't being suppressed.

you've got to understand that the rising tide of surveillance technology and any cases in which it's used without legal fetters

is something that threatens all of that. There is just less space for dissent and freedom of expression when you have people being watched all the time by a government that might use information against them. And that is something that we have seen not just with the governments where you expect it, but also with the governments where you don't expect it. I mean, location data around health care and abortion is one example.

Oh, absolutely. You know, we've seen these abortion prosecutions where in a number of cases, people's search history, people's private health care information have been weaponized in a law enforcement context. And that's very controversial. And the path of this booming spyware industry intersects with that because people

Not just the federal government, but also states have been flirting with this technology and in some cases acquiring it. And you don't have a ton of limitations on what kind of private information can be integrated into prosecutions. There have been a few attempts in Congress to further a national data privacy law. Senator Maria Cantwell, Democrat from Washington, has put forth bills. In your reporting process...

Where did you see any legal pushback here? Any kind of framework that would stop what feels like a real drumbeat toward, gee, all of my information is laid out and bare for the government to look at? It's a really good question that I haven't encountered a fully satisfying answer to. The incoming administration said,

will need, for anyone who cares about this issue, to have checks and balances on it. That's got to come from Congress, as far as I can see. So you're right to highlight the kind of halting legislative efforts on this. I think one thing that gets lost in the conversation around this often is that it is truly not a partisan issue.

Yeah, I come at this from a standpoint of being a thing that people don't believe exists, but I am just going to, you know, open up my heart and tell you sincerely, this is how I come at it. I'm a nonpartisan investigative reporter. I am an unaffiliated voter. I often don't vote in elections where I'm covering one of the candidates. You know, I make that decision on a case-by-case basis, but I want to stay out of remove. And actually, most of my stories have been most harmful to Democrats, right?

This particular issue of the overreach of spyware technology is something that really should be red meat for classic conservatives, right? Anyone concerned about the intrusions of big government should care profoundly about this issue. So it's only this sort of

newfangled infatuation with a strongman and with authoritarianism that has kind of hijacked the Republican Party that now makes this a partisan issue where you have all of these sort of threats to these vulnerable groups and this disregard for rule of law and restraints on government. The classic conservatives who really espouse conservative ideology on the Hill are

should be the ones who champion this issue because that's really where the accountability is going to have to come from. We're going to have to have aggressive efforts from the Hill to

to regulate this technology, which is, it's shocking that it's so unregulated. I talk to these spyware companies and they say point blank, like, we're arms dealers. We're, this is on camera in the film. There's, you know, the top lawyer at NSO Group. We're selling a dangerous technology and it's not our fault that there's no equivalent of the Geneva Conventions, you know, to rein it in. ♪

So I really hope that policymakers will get on that and will seek to limit it internationally, but also seek to limit our own government's abuses of it. Ronan Farrow, thank you so much for your reporting and for your time. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Ronan Farrow is an investigative reporter for The New Yorker.

Surveiled is available on Macs. And that is it for our show today. What Next TBD is produced by Evan Campbell, Patrick Fort, Shaina Roth, and Ethan Oberman. Our show is edited by Paige Osborne. Alicia Montgomery is vice president of audio for Slate. And TBD is part of the larger What Next family. And if you like what you heard today, the single best way to support us is by joining Slate Plus. You get all your Slate podcasts ad-free.

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