Plutopia News Network

Jennifer Granick: Surveillance and Cybersecurity

On this episode of the Plutopia News Network, Jon, Scoop and Wendy talk with Jennifer Granick, Surveillance and Cybersecurity Counsel at the ACLU, [https://www.aclu.org/] 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, [https://signal.org/]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. The post Jennifer Granick: Surveillance and Cybersecurity [https://plutopia.io/jennifer-granick-surveillance-and-cybersecurity/] first appeared on Plutopia News Network [https://plutopia.io].

Pete Cochrane: Pursuing Truth

Technologist and former British Telecom [https://www.bt.com/] chief scientist Peter Cochrane [https://cochrane.org.uk/bio/] 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. The post Pete Cochrane: Pursuing Truth [https://plutopia.io/pete-cochrane-pursuing-truth/] first appeared on Plutopia News Network [https://plutopia.io].

Sophie Nightingale: Our Minds on Digital Technology

The Plutopia podcast hosts Dr. Sophie Nightingale, a psychologist at Lancaster University, [https://nightingalelab.co.uk/] 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. The post Sophie Nightingale: Our Minds on Digital Technology [https://plutopia.io/sophie-nightingale-our-minds-on-digital-technology/] first appeared on Plutopia News Network [https://plutopia.io].

Ben Collier: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy

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. [https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5761/TorFrom-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. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk] 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 [https://www.womenonweb.org/en/home-en/] — 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. [https://plutopia.io/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/tor-book-200x300.jpeg]https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5761/TorFrom-the-Dark-Web-to-the-Future-of-PrivacyTor 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. RELEVANT LINKS * The Tor Project [https://www.torproject.org/] * Wendy’s review of Dark Wire, by Joseph Cox [https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2025/01/27/review-dark-wire/] * Cybercrime is (often) boring [https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~bjc63/Crime_is_boring.pdf] * Foundation for Information Policy Research [https://www.fipr.org] * Your grandmother is smarter than you think [http://www.pelicancrossing.net/netwars/2017/01/your_grandmother_is_smarter_th.html] The post Ben Collier: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy [https://plutopia.io/ben-collier-from-the-dark-web-to-the-future-of-privacy/] first appeared on Plutopia News Network [https://plutopia.io].

Colin Wright: Juggling Mathematics

In this episode of the Plutopia News Network Podcast, hosts Jon Lebkowsky, Scoop Sweeney, and Wendy Grossman talk with mathematician and juggler Colin Wright, [https://www.solipsys.co.uk] 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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siteswap] 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. LINKS * MathsJam [https://mathsjam.com/] * Juggling and Maths on the BBC [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20728493] * Juggling on Numberphile [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dwgusHjA0Y] * From Doodling to a Million Dollars [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6YR2xcV588] * The Mutilated Chessboard [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCyHGsi6bvY] * Circles in triangles [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VykT1-DGl-k] The post Colin Wright: Juggling Mathematics [https://plutopia.io/colin-wright-juggling-mathematics/] first appeared on Plutopia News Network [https://plutopia.io].