From the drones over New Jersey, to the surveillance cameras that captured Luigi Mangione, to even TikTok - our movements, our likeness, even our shopping habits can be tracked. But how did we get to this point? Host Brittany Luse sits down with NPR Cybersecurity Correspondent Jenna McLaughlin and the Brennan Center for Justice's Faiza Patel to get into just how much of our daily lives are up for grabs. Then, Brittany turns the page to the best books of 2024. She is joined by NPR Arts Desk reporter Andrew Limbong and Traci Thomas, host of The Stacks podcast to rank the good, the bad, and the "I just can't put it down."Support public media and receive ad-free listening & bonus content by joining NPR+ today: https://plus.npr.org/Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Full Episode
Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. This week, we're connecting the dots between a backpack, drones, and TikTok. I know, I know. How are all of these things connected?
Well, we're going to find out with NPR's Jenna McLaughlin and the Brennan Center for Justice's Faiza Patel. Jenna, Faiza, welcome to It's Been a Minute. Great to be here. Thanks for having us. Happy to have you both. So last week, we covered the Luigi Mangione case and what it says about the larger feeling toward health care in this country.
But there's one part of that conversation that I wanted to poke at a little more. The photos authorities used to ID Mangione. In Starbucks, in the taxi, and in the hostel, Mangione's face was captured by surveillance cameras. And granted, he was in Midtown New York City, one of the most heavily watched areas in the world.
But I thought it was really striking that no one seemed concerned about how easy it was for authorities to follow his every move. In fact, a lot of people were surprised he wasn't caught sooner. Constant surveillance is something we've kind of come to expect in this country. Cameras on the streets, when you enter a store, even in the self-checkout lines, more cameras.
And haven't we all joked about how our phones are listening to us when we get a super specific Instagram ad? And now there are drones flying over New Jersey and no one seems to know whose they are or what they're doing. I feel like there's been a shift, at least for me, in the way we talk about being watched.
Whether it's the government or private companies collecting our data, it always feels like somebody's watching me. So I have to ask, why are we so okay with constantly being watched? And have we unknowingly negotiated a new social contract?
Well, it was a slow burn, and I think you have sort of two things happening at the same time. So one is you have huge leaps in technology, right? It becomes much cheaper. to have cameras everywhere and to process the data and their ability to capture images and voices and other kinds of data about us has also gone up dramatically.
At the same time, you have two other factors on the buy side, if you will, right? So one is the government after 9-11 builds a huge surveillance infrastructure and that includes police-owned cameras in our city streets. It also includes purchasing data from all of these different apps and cameras and license plate readers that are all over our cities. Right.
I feel like that's a fact that a lot of people just are not aware of, just how much our information the U.S. government is buying from private companies.
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