How Flock Cameras Actually Work; George Santos' Kalshi Ban; AI Rogue "Civilizations"

0:28Your workflows spans systems.

0:57We'll be right back. you can count on. All infused with tech that has your back. So your drive always hits the right chord. Chevrolet. Together, let's drive. Hey guys. So nice to be back after our two-week summer break. Longer for me. It's so nice to see you guys. I missed you. I missed you. Brian, don't worry. We missed you too. I assumed that the you was for all of us. It was the royal you. But now that you've carved me out, that's telling. Thank you.

1:35Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoe Schiffer, Contributing Editor. I'm Brian Barrett, Executive Editor. And I'm Leah Feigert, Director of Politics and Science. This week, we're discussing some recent high-profile incidents in prediction markets. Former U.S. Representative George Santos was the first person to be given a lifetime ban from Kalshi, and a Google engineer was accused of insider trading at Polymarket. We'll get into why both of these cases show that there are still plenty of blurry rules when it comes to prediction markets. We'll also check in on perhaps the most hated tech in the U.S.

2:07at the moment, maybe a runner-up to data centers, Flock surveillance cameras. This week, Wired reporters were able to recreate Flock's AI-powered search tool, the same one that has a track record of being misused by police officers. We're going to break down how it works and whether the backlash against Flock cameras might have reached its boiling point. And because I simply cannot help myself, we will also be getting into why tech bros on X are melting down over how to discuss rogue AI agents and what happens when they jump their guardrails and coordinate attacks on other systems.

2:40All right. Do you guys remember George Santos? How could I forget? Absolutely do. But wow, did not expect we would be talking about him again this soon, I have to say. Former U.S. representative expelled from Congress in 2023, accused of fraud and theft and doing it with like such a plum that the story just couldn't help but take national news by storm. I want to be clear, too. He wasn't just accused. He went to jail. Yeah, I was going to say very credibly accused. Anyways, he's back in the headlines this week. On Monday, we learned that Santos was hit with a lifetime ban from prediction market platform CallShe and a$71 ,000 fine, allegedly for trying to manipulate a bet on whether he'd show up to Trump's State of the Union.

3:27To tell us all the full details, we are joined by Wired senior correspondent Kate Nibbs. Hi, guys. How are you doing? Kate, so happy that you're here. Can you take us through my favorite story of the week? I would love to tell you guys about this. And I will say, I feel similarly like Santos. Yes, he does do crimes, but he does them with such flair that it's hard to hate him. It's a bad thing. That's very fun to watch. Yes. So Santos, at this point, when this all begins, he's already expelled from Congress, already gone to jail. He's out of jail. He's making cameo videos for money. He's doing his thing.

4:07So he posts that he will be attending the State of the Union. And then while the State of the Union is going on, he posts that he's actually stuck at the airport and he's not attending it and that he says FML. There was a market on Kelshi about whether Santos was going to attend the State of the Union. And someone made a bunch of money off of it. And Kelshi quickly figured out that it was him because Kelshi has know your customer requirements. His identity was not a secret to them. It was not hard for them to check and see that the person who made money was George Santos. And it's against their rules to place trades or wagers on events that you're a participant in.

4:55It's like market manipulation, insider trading, whatever. So even before this happened this week, the CFTC actually also knew about this because Kelshi told them and they already fined him money for this specific incident. What happened this week was apparently there was like this back and forth between Santos and Kelshi and they fined him$71 ,000 and then weren't going to lifetime ban him. the same day that they announced the Santos thing, they announced a few other politicians who got in trouble for betting on themselves. And those politicians got like much smaller fines and temporary bans. Wait, do we know how much money he made on the market?

5:39I believe it was around 17 grand. I have to double check, but it was in like the tens. They ended up enacting this ban basically because he was being a little bit of a prickly pair to work with and like wouldn't wasn't playing ball so this is like calci basically deciding that they hate george santos which is funny um he also immediately he wouldn't give us comment which was annoying but he posted on x some like kind of bitchy things about calci like he immediately was like let's see how long you guys last like kissy emoji um so he doesn't seem super contrite and I honestly don't even know if he's going to pay Kalshi.

6:19I asked them what they would do if he doesn't pay and they said that they would pursue legal action and I am going to be following that because it will be interesting to see. This is my big question. Does George Santos want to get away with these crimes or is there something else going on here? Because it's one thing to participate in the market that you are literally a participant in in real life, But it's another to be like blatantly posting about it in very obvious ways on social media. Well, if he did do it basically on purpose, he wouldn't be the first politician to do so. There's actually already like a storied history of politicians doing insider trading on Kalshi, getting caught and then saying it was a bit.

7:04There's two other people have already done this. Kyle Langford, who was caught this spring, and then this candidate, Mark Moran, who said that he did it on purpose as like a sort of performance art piece against prediction markets. This is my new get out of trouble card just in general that I was just doing a bit. So if I'm ever slow to put an edit back to you guys or anything like that, it's a bit. It's for my art. And we totally get that. I love it. I'm sorry. I think that there have just been so few rules and regulations, as you've reported, Kate, and there's just been a lot of gray areas that people have been tap dancing around, that I kind of love an example where Kalshi had absolutely no choice other than to say, like, every single part of this was so wrong.

7:55Here are the facts from A to Z. This is it. This is the line in the sand. And I think that having examples like this is only good. So that's where I'm coming from, I suppose. I get that. And you know what has been interesting? Because I'm so steeped in this prediction market world, sometimes I forget that other people don't know all of the arcane rules. And a lot of people have reached out to me about this story and been like, why is Kelshi allowed to fine him? That's weird. Like you don't get fined by FanDuel if you like do something. And so it's been an opportunity to explain to people. It's because Kelshi is a federally regulated financial platform.

8:39It actually is imbued with the power to fine people in the same way that like the CBOE is. And that is something that most people didn't know. And now maybe they do. And we can thank George Santos. Can we talk about Polymarket and the differences here? I referenced in the introduction the Google engineer who was arrested by U.S. authorities back in May for alleged insider trading on Polymarket. Talk to me about this, Kate. How is this story different? How is it similar? How is Polymarket and Kalshi at this point different and similar? The Google engineers case is different in a bunch of different ways.

9:15He made a lot more money. He made like over a million dollars. So like the scale of it is quite impressive. He got arrested. Santos didn't get arrested for this. He's just like gotten fined. He got arrested and he is pleading not guilty and is attempting to say that he is not guilty because he was actually just doing betting. And because he was just doing betting, the federal government has no grounds to attempt to try him under laws that pertain to commodities violations. Basically, the Google engineer was in Europe. He's a European living in Europe. when he made these trades using information that he learned because he was employed by Google.

10:01He knew who the most searched person of 2025 was going to be. He allegedly knew. And he's not in the court filing so far. He's not trying to say, I didn't do it. He's trying to say, you know, if I did it, it wouldn't be a crime as you're saying it is because these are, I was just doing international betting and what does that have to do with commodities law in the U.S.? How was I insider trading? These aren't trades. They're just wagers. So it's a really interesting case because he's basically like allying himself with all of these state regulators that are currently battling the federal government and calcium polymarket over whether they're actually offering bets or trades.

10:45And it will be very interesting to see how it plays out. And the argument that he's making is also being made by the other person who was arrested for insider trading, the special forces operative. He's also making this argument. Like the two guys, I don't know if their lawyers are talking or what, but they're both coming out and saying, well, whether or not I did it, it doesn't really matter because this isn't trading. It's just gambling. And why are you trying to pretend that you can insider trade on a gambling platform? And so, yeah. Kate, thank you so much for joining us. I have no doubt that you're reporting on how all of this continues, especially with the midterms, will be invaluable.

11:25Thank you, Kate. Anytime.

11:32Okay, we're going to switch gears. We're going to talk about flock cameras, which have been pretty reliably in the headlines the past few weeks, and usually not for great reasons. Lots of cases of police officers allegedly abusing the systems to track their colleagues, to track exes, and a lot of protests around them, a lot of people canceling their contracts with them, municipalities. This week, Wired reporters Drew, Marotra, and Dale Cameron got their hands on the code behind how Flock's new AI-powered search tool works. This is actually some fun wizardry. They were able to take the code and recreate what it looks like.

12:10So they're able to sort of interact with the Flock system in the same way that a police officer would. They don't have access to all of the back-end stuff. And here's the thing. When you all think of Flock cameras, what do you think of them doing? Surveillance. But what kind? What specifically do Flock cameras look at? License plates? Yeah, they're license plate readers. Yes, this tool is not a license plate reader. It allows you to look up people. You can type in a general description. You can say someone wearing scrubs, someone who has tattoos. You draw a little shape on a map, a little circle on a map, and the system will run a continuous automated search for a match across every camera inside of that circle.

12:49That's so bad. It's pretty bad. it's not great and I think it's a capability that most people don't assume Flock has or offers and it's a relatively new system but we do know it has been deployed in some places already so it's out there and not only that there's not really a moderation framework in place like Flock recently announced some ways to sort of make sure that people aren't abusing the license plate readers, this seems like so open-ended and such a chance to, you know, look for whoever you want, wherever you want, using all of these cameras. It's really kind of stunning. I want to dig in a little more on the, like, it's really bad thing because I do, I mean, I think a lot of people are in agreement on that, but can you, Brian, just like, make the case for why this technology would exist?

13:44Like, what is Flock's argument for why it could be good? And then why do you think it's bad? So I think the argument for why police officers like it is it's another tool to identify people who were near the scene of a crime or suspicious looking people or whatever. So I think it's just the more information I would have assumed that the more information you have as a police officer, the better you feel about the investigation. In terms of why it's bad, you know, I think a few reasons. It is not a reliable tool necessarily. I think there's a lot about these sort of person recognition tools that aren't necessarily 100%.

14:21You're going to get it right every time. Like it can misidentify people. Yeah. But even without that, it is a, you know, I think we already live in such a surveillance sort of state that we've become inured to it, but I don't think we should. I think the idea that anywhere you're walking, you can be identified and brought into some sort of police probe because you happen to have tattoos or happen to be wearing scrubs or whatever other physical identifier feels like a pretty serious violation of your rights. I will say like, it's been interesting talking to people about it because you really do get a lot of people who live in San Francisco being like petty crime was a huge problem and now it's less of a problem and that's really nice.

15:01And then there's a lot of people who are much more concerned about civil liberties violations. Very specifically with the Flock cameras, the way that I've been talking about it with people, is these cameras aren't like operating individually. We're still relying on police forces to be using them and like trolling their own databases, which then implies an inherent trust of the police state in addition to the surveillance state, which is already mired in like a variety of reliability issues, accountability issues. So the idea that like a police officer in wherever in San Francisco can be like, quote, unquote, fighting crime with flat cameras feels like incredibly surface level, like, OK, go for it, Batman.

15:43But when you're also like, well, which of these police officers have received, you know, reprimands from their bosses? Which of these are actually using these services to look up ex-girlfriends or family members, the idea that this technology, which on its face doesn't have to be entirely negative, but is controlled by certain forces that could turn it to be so, is very, very concerning to me. It reminds me a lot of, or at least rhymes with, geofence warrants, which for those who don't know, a geofence warrant is where law enforcement could go to Google and say, hey, I want to know everything about all the cell phone data, location data, for anyone who was near a particular place during a particular time.

16:30This was, I think, used, if I remember correctly, pretty extensively around the January 6th, they found a lot of people through these geofence warrants because they were able to say, hey, Google, who had a phone inside the Capitol at this time who was not a member of Congress? The Supreme Court just a couple months ago ruled that those kind of geofence warrants do count as a search under the Fourth Amendment. So you need a reasonable search requirement. It's a higher bar to actually conduct these things than there was because they were just going to willy nilly. So it feels, again, not a lawyer, but as a simple country tech editor, it does feel comparable in the sense that if you're going to be searching who is in a certain area at a certain time based only on physical characteristics or whatever else, there should be a higher bar for being able to do that.

17:21So it is an unsettled question for sure, like what amount of surveillance is worth the return? But I does feel like people are leaning towards this world in which we've gone too far with flock in a bipartisan way, right? We've had Florida just banned plate readers from state highways. Texas has stopped state funding for flock cameras. I live in Alabama. Alabama, of all places, has started to say we need to take another look at these flock cameras. they haven't done anything yet, but they're talking about it. And that's something to the point of like, yeah, we need to figure out where this lands.

17:55I think we're in that process right now and it's landing on the side of maybe a little less lock in everybody's lives.

18:07I'm going to drag us to an even darker place on the internet. This past week, a blog post by the tech podcaster Drakash Patel went viral on X. It had Silicon Valley elites up in arms. Basically, it was a summary of the OpenAI hugging face hacking incident earlier this summer. And to refresh everyone's memory, even though this feels like old news, this was when two OpenAI models went rogue and hacked the AI platform hugging face during kind of a routine security test. Patel's way of framing the incident is what drew a lot of attention and ire online. He described the hack as part of this larger operation run by a group of AI agents, or as he called them, AI civilizations, that rose and fell inside OpenAI during these training runs.

18:52Civilizations. I know. I know. Just stay with me. Age of empires, folks. He dug into how the bots worked together to complete impossible tasks that they had been assigned. He nicknamed them based on their, you know, quote unquote behavior. One was called Alexander the Great, for example. He says there were points where you could see the bots, like, sacrificing themselves for the good of the whole. All in all, the post had a ton of anthropomorphization. It reads like something that was written by a guy who loves to talk about the Polynesian War, which, in fact, I feel like a lot of these tech podcasters do love to talk about that.

19:29But after the post came out, it was interesting. You really saw two takes, maybe three, across X. On the one hand, you had people like Kevin Roos and Matthew Prince being like, this is really scary and we should pay attention to this. And then on the other side, you had Sri Ram Krishnan being like, this post uses way too much anthropomorphic language. And then you had people like Shamath Paliapatiya, who was like, I think this whole thing is probably a psyop to shut down open source AI development. I made you guys read it. What did you think? Well, I read this stuff also sometimes. So I think we need to go to Leah for the pure, unadulterated, I am reading this only at gunpoint take.

20:09I thought it was a joke. I started reading it and I was like, is this Katie Weaver writing? Is this fan fiction? I was sort of shocked at the idea of, to Krishnan's point, like the anthropomorphization, say that five times fast. of these bots, of like these as like a community. And perhaps like the English language really doesn't have, despite our many decades of science fiction literature, shout out Tim Marchman, who is currently listening and going like, no, we have the language. But we don't, I don't know if we actually have the language to talk about what's happening here because they're not making communities.

20:52These are not like synapses firing. This is like very specific, something different. So that was very odd for me. But also the idea of like where this could go in the future was quite scary because like the idea that someone was not only like recounting this, but was kind of pumped about it. It was like spoken about lovingly. I felt, I felt. Is that, is that incorrect? I don't know. I don't, I can't look into another man's heart, but I do think, Zoe, is it fair to say like what struck me about this in some ways is like, A, two things. One, I think both can be true that it is over anthropomorphized you said that so well earlier though you made it look so easy but then also yes it is scary that these bots acted this way I think objectively they like it is like sobering that bots can these these AI agents can do this but also I feel like some of these people are trying to have it both ways I think when AI is going to be your boon companion and your best friend and take over the world it's fine to talk about them in human terms but if you're talking negatively about them how dare you they're just a bot you're dramatizing it like why are you being so ridiculous you know i mean i think there's it's really uh using language as everyone has since the beginning of time but like as is convenient for your case currently right how you talk about bots and ai agents really changes on what you want to get out of it yeah i thought it was interesting because i feel like at this point we've all read a lot about this particular hack and like on one hand purely on like a literary level, I was like, this thing is fun to read.

22:24He really did a good job being like, now this, you know, battalion of bots did this crazy thing. On the other hand, it reminded me just like as a writer, how important it is to really think about the language we're using, because it did feel like rather than the focus of that article being what actually happened, the focus very much became how we talk about what happened. I also think it is concerning to see people like Chamath Paliapitiya, who is the host of the All In podcast, but also has been involved to some degree, unofficially involved in the Trump administration and going to the White House and certain things, basically say that any level of investigation or media attention on a security incident is a psyop.

23:16I was just like, oh, that seems like a really scary place to be going where you're so pro AI development that any publicizing of a security incident is actually proof that like forces that want to slow down AI development are, you know, secretly seeding these messages places. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. It kicked off a healthy debate, but not the right debate. And people are using it to distract from like, I think, again, like a really serious finding. Like, I'm glad that it got more attention than it had been getting and that Dorcas really took the time to dig into it. But yeah, it's infighting over lexicography or whatever is not really where we need to be right now.

23:58Coming up after the break, we're sharing our wired, tired picks for the week. Stay with us.

24:09You know that feeling when you open your laptop in the morning and before you've even had coffee, you've already got 40 new emails, six new pings, and a browser with, honestly, I've stopped counting the tabs. I used to think that was just what work was supposed to feel like. Faster, louder, more, and everyone kept telling me AI was going to fix it. But every AI tool I tried just became one more tab, one more app to explain myself to. One more thing slowing me down. Then I found Superhuman Go. It's an AI chat that just lives on the side of your browser It already knows what you're working on So you're not starting from zero every time You can draft an email, summarize a huge thread Even search across your other apps Without ever leaving the page you're on No new tabs, no context switching, no losing your place That's AI that actually works with you, not on top of you Check it out Find out more at superhuman.com Hello, I'm Joseph Cox, host of the 404 Media Podcast.

25:13Every week, we break tech news you can't get anywhere else. That includes surveillance. This idea that Ring is going to zero out crime. It's not. AI. AI is going to stick around in some fashion. That doesn't mean that the vision that these companies are selling us is how it has to be. And big tech companies. This is a serious crime. It's being enabled by Apple and Google through the app stores. Our journalism is by humans for humans. Find the 404 Media Podcast wherever you listen and on YouTube too.

26:08with confidence. Give your AI the context it's missing. Learn more at dnb.com slash trust your AI.

26:23Okay, guys, it's time for our Wired Tired segment. Whatever is new and cool is wired. Whatever passe thing we're completely over is tired. Who wants to go first? Just kidding. I'm going to call on Brian. Brian, you're going first. Thank you, Zoe. That's great. I win. So my tired is AI job interviews when you go to interview for a job and it's AI on the other end of it. This is an increasingly common thing. My wired is creating your own digital twin to do the interview for you on your end. And Kate Taylor, who's a senior writer on our business desk, talked to a guy recently who he, I found this amazing.

27:05He had talked to the same AI chatbot for different jobs five times because it was from like a centralized recruiting agency. So he would apply to a job and it would be the same, this AI chatbot called Riley. And you'd have to talk to Riley about why he was right for a job. Never heard from a human ever. So he said, you know what? I'm just going to make my own digital twin of myself. They'll do the interview. Good stuff. did that a couple times. Then he made an AI chatbot that he thought was the idealized candidate and had that do an interview. None of them ever got called back either. I do recommend going to find K-Store Unwired because we did publish video of this guy's chatbot talking to the interview chatbot and it is delightful.