95.

Reality Bytes: the URL-IRL crash

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: You’re listening to Click Here. I’m Dina Temple-Raston. This
past Fall we did something a little different. Since we all come from the world of public
radio… we decided to create five radio shows…

You might have already caught one or two of them on your local public radio station. If
you didn’t, we thought we’d give you an opportunity this month to hear them for
yourselves. Same Click Here stories about people making and breaking our digital world,
but in a little different format. We hope you like them.

STINGER

TEMPLE-RASTON: We begin with something you don’t generally think about when you
think about hacking: The tractor.

[MUSIC]

[ROOSTER CROWING]

DINA: Could you just introduce yourself to us please?

JON ABBOTT: Uh, yes, ma'am. I'm Jon Abbott.

DINA: And what do you do?

ABBOTT: Um…

[ROOSTER CROWING].

TEMPLE-RASTON: Jon is having trouble telling me about himself because of Jeffrey.

That’s the very un-audio-friendly rooster who keeps interrupting him. Jeffrey the rooster
and Jon live on a farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, population seventeen thousand. It’s
about two hours southeast of Atlanta. And the tractor has always been a big part of
Jon’s life.
ABBOTT: Growing up, I was used to riding on the older tractors that were just a straight
shift diesel engine tractor that really the only electrical wiring on it was from the battery
to the starter and headlights.

TEMPLE-RASTON:But now…

ABBOTT: Now the tractors can basically control themselves. And you're just up there in
case something malfunctions. This is our newest tractor we’ve gotten…

[SOUND OF GETTING IN TRACTOR fades under]

TEMPLE-RASTON:Jon climbs into the cab of a John Deere 5075 E…

[IGNITION]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Once it’s cranked up and running, well, it’s more like a cellphone on
wheels than that tractor he grew up with. In fact, as soon as he’s aboard, Jon pulls out
his phone and fires up an app to see how the tractor is doing.

ABBOTT: I can actually go to my live dashboard and it'll show me every — everything
the tractor's tell on the computer, the computer is telling my phone.

TEMPLE-RASTON: It’s telling him the outside temperature, that his coolant is working.

ABBOTT:…my fuel temperature, my fuel level, how much fuel I'm consuming, how fast
I’m going.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Which, on the one hand is kind of incredible — to have all this
information right there on your phone. But on the other hand, if all that is Bluetooth
enabled and constantly connected to the Internet, well, someone can break into it – it’s
hack-able.

MUX: [LEMON AND MELON] – align with tractor shutting down

[TRACTOR SHUTTING DOWN SOUND]

TEMPLE-RASTON: And if some bad actor got into a network that all these tractors
share… well… among other things it could put the entire food supply at risk. And
because of how John Deere approaches that risk two unexpected things happened:
Farmers are unable to defend themselves against hackers…And they are losing the
everyday battle to keep their farm equipment running. And it turns out the person who
brought this whole problem to light wasn’t a farmer at all…

MUX OUT

TEMPLE-RASTON: He was a master hacker from Australia who goes by the name…
Sick Codes.

SICK CODES: I'm Sick Codes. I'm a white hat hacker from Australia. I live in Asia and I
hack for a living.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Actually, he does more than that.

SICK CODES Companies reach out to me, want me to hack their things. Or I reach out
to companies with things that I've hacked into. And, uh, that's what I've done in this case
with the John Deere stuff. It's kind of blown up a little bit bigger than expected.

MUX: Chase and We Follow (Blue Dot)

TEMPLE-RASTON: Sick Codes is a penetration tester…That’s someone who is hired

by companies to find vulnerabilities in their networks before some bad actor does.

And what has made him the latest king of farming hacks is how he figured out a way to
bypass the digital locks on the John Deere tractor — kind of like the iPhone jailbreaking
that was so popular a few years ago.

His hack would allow farmers to monkey around with the tractor’s touchscreen which
something that companies like John Deere have said they’re not allowed to do.

SICK CODES: So tractors are kind of like this thing that I've never been inside of
(laughs). So I've never actually been in a tractor. It just seemed really interesting to find
a niche that nobody was hacking that, uh, or hacking publicly.

MUX OUT

TEMPLE-RASTON: So it became his pet project. And he started by buying a John

Deere tractor touch screen.

SICK CODES: Yeah. I bought one, yeah. On ebay.

TEMPLE-RASTON: He paid 7,000 dollars for that console display — without the tractor.
Not easy to find, apparently. And then he just cracked it open and restored the factory
settings.

SICK CODES: I can reset my own tractor and I did bypass that with a guy, a guy's help
from Brazil.

TEMPLE-RASTON: So this guy in Brazil gives him John Deere’s official software. He
downloads what he needs to break into the system, and to prove that he could now
install whatever he wanted. He uploaded a slightly modified first person shooter game
from the 1990s, called Doom.

[DOOM MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Instead of a shooter, there was a farmer. Instead of a gun, a farmer

was riding a tractor. And he unveiled his hack at a place where he was sure it’d get lots
of attention: last year’s DefCon hacking conference in Vegas. [MUX OUT] And while he
didn’t reveal every detail of what he did, he made clear that anyone who really wanted
to could get into the John Deere tractor software.

SICK CODES So it did take me a while to break in. I could do it now in about an hour,
but yeah, it was a sophisticated attack as John Deere said, and it was also persistent
and invasive, but it was hardware and it was physically involved. So it's not remote.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Not remote: in other words, he hacked into just one tractor. But still,
he was making a point — to both farmers and to Deere and Co.

SICK CODES: This stuff isn't as secure as it looks. And John Deere may not be as
secure as they sound.

TEMPLE-RASTON: The fact that someone could hack into that system with such ease
suggested that maybe anyone could.

And this isn’t just a John Deere – they just happen to be the biggest farm equipment
manufacturer on the planet. SickCode’s hack suggests that any piece of farm
equipment that is hooked up to the Internet is vulnerable.

His performance ended up being the big headline out of DEF CON.
SICK CODES: I just thought that it would be interesting to people, but I didn't realize it
was gonna be so interesting to so many people, because I thought it was just, you
know, agriculture and cyber security, but it turned out to be gaming news. It turned out
to be national security news. It turned out to be gadget news.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Needless to say, John Deere isn’t really a fan of Sick Codes’ DEF
CON performance. They were quick to say that this was a hardware hack…That he’d
disconnected the console from the tractor itself. We reached out, but John Deere
declined to comment for this story. Suffice it to say, John Deere’s relationship with Sick
Codes is…

SICK CODES: It's not the most….we need marriage counseling. Honestly, we need
marriage counseling.

TEMPLE-RASTON: John Deere declined to comment about their relationship, so maybe

it's not surprising that they haven't invited him to come to their factory.

SICK CODES: I've actually asked for an invite too, which is kind of weird, but they still
don't want to invite me.

MUX (fading in)

TEMPLE-RASTON: Maybe the marriage counseling will help. So John Deere has this
rule: Farmers aren’t allowed to do their own repairs on their newish high-tech
equipment, which means they can’t just pick up a wrench anymore. They have to have
a company technician come in and do it. The techs arrive with these special laptops,
they plug it into the tractor, the software diagnoses the problem, then they order the
part.

You’ve probably seen your mechanic do that to your car. But here’s the difference: if you
have to bring your car into the shop, leave it there, get a loaner – it’s an inconvenience.
If you’re a farmer, whose margins are thin even at the best of times, waiting for
someone from John Deere to show up during that small window of harvest time — that
can ruin your business for the year.

Consider what happened to Walter Schweitzer a couple of years ago. He raises black
Angus cattle outside of Great Falls, Montana, and out of the blue his tractor started just
randomly shutting down.
MUX OUT // cuts off with “shutting down”

WALTER SCHWEITZER: I had a sense, a gut feeling, that it was something in the fuel
system. I changed fuel filters. I started running the tank at above half full. But it just kept
getting worse and worse. And finally I called in John Deere…asked if they could send
out a tech to work on my tractor. They said, Well, you know, we're slammed, it's haying
season, everybody's out, broke down.

TEMPLE-RASTON:They said they wouldn’t be able to come out for a week or ten days.

SCHWEITZER So I said, okay, well maybe I can, uh, can I borrow your computer and
hardware stuff so I can figure out my problem?

TEMPLE-RASTON: John Deere says, no can do.

SCHWEITZER: All right. Well, can I rent it?

TEMPLE-RASTON: Nope.

SCHWEITZER: Okay. Well, dang it I'll buy the dang stuff. How much is it? And they
said, No, we don't sell it.

TEMPLE-RASTON: You’ve got to call a technician. Doesn’t matter if it’s haying season,
doesn’t matter if there is a wait. And that’s the right-to-repair debate in a nutshell. It’s
based on every farmers’ fundamental belief in self-sufficiency. And the farmers
reaction? Well, they took matters into their own hands.

KYLE WIENS: So I live in a little bit of a rural area and a friend of mine is a farmer.
Farmer Dave.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Kyle Wiens is the founder of iFixit. He’s part of a do-it-yourself

community that teaches people to fix what they own.

WIENS: He called me, he knew I was a computer guy. And he said, Hey, my tractor
won't turn on. I said, what do you mean it won't turn on? He said, well, there's a
hydraulic sensor on the tractor tread. And the sensor is bad and the tractor won't boot
because it's a bad sensor.
TEMPLE-RASTON: So nothing is actually wrong with the tractor. There’s just a bad
sensor. This happens with the onboard computers all the time. It has probably
happened to you. It’s a thing. So Dave the farmer asks Kyle the computer guy if he can
figure out a way to just get the computer to ignore the sensor, so the tractor would get
going again.

But there was a problem — and it wasn’t technical, it was legal. If he did a workaround,
it would be against the law.

WIENS: A section of Digital Millennium copyright act called Section 1201, which is a law
that is designed to prevent tinkering. It says that you cannot bypass a lock on an
electronic device without permission from the manufacturer.

MUX (fading in):

TEMPLE-RASTON: And Deere and Co. wasn’t giving permission. So, back in 2017 a
bunch of American farmers started buying pirated versions of John Deere’s software in
members-only online forums. Hackers from Ukraine had created a fix — a kind of
firmware that allowed farmers to give basic instructions to the tractor and its software. It
allowed them to do what they’d always done: fix their farm equipment themselves.

And it drove John Deere so crazy, farmers told us they had to sign a contract, ensuring
that they wouldn’t hack into their own tractors. Which only made farmers angrier.

WIENS: why do you think farmers are so stupid? Why can't farmers, uh, use the same
tooling that the dealers have?

TEMPLE-RASTON: John Deere wouldn’t comment on that, either.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: So it’s fair to ask another question: Why is John Deere being so
stubborn about this? Why make their customer base so darn mad? John Deere has said
publicly that, first of all, the software is intellectual property. So it belongs to them.

Second, they’re worried farmers will tweak the software — for example, they might
adjust the engine to get better gas mileage, but that could also increase emissions. And
John Deere says it worries that it might add to climate change. Walter Schweitzer says
the answer is simpler than that: it is about how much they can charge for a tractor.
MUX OUT

SCHWEITZER: On most newer models, the frame, the transmission, the engine, uh, all
of the, of the critical pieces of that implement are the same. It's just the computer
programming that makes the difference between a 120 horsepower tractor and 160
horsepower tractor.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And, no big surprise here: a 160 horsepower tractor costs more.

SCHWEITZER: And you'll end up paying 20, 30% more for a bigger tractor that all they
did is change the programming.

TEMPLE-RASTON: So in other words, they toggle something in the software and

they’ve got a more expensive, more powerful tractor. We asked John Deere about that,
and they declined to comment. But it makes you wonder about this other thing that
happened with some stolen tractors in Ukraine shortly after Russia invaded.

After the break, we’ll explain. This is Click Here.

[BREAK]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Welcome back. I’m Dina Temple-Raston and this is Click Here. And
Today we’re taking a look at technologies that were intended to do one thing… and
ended up doing quite another. Before the break, we heard from farmers battling for the
right to repair their own high tech John Deere tractors…The machines have morphed
into what is essentially a computer on wheels…

Which allows someone like Georgia farmer Jon Abbott to actually control his tractor
from his phone. That’s the upside. The downside is that… like anything connected to
the Internet… those tractors are now vulnerable to bad actors. Just consider this crazy
thing that happened last May, on the fringes of the war in Ukraine. Some stolen tractors
just stopped working … no explanation. I asked Montana farmer Walter Schweitzer
about it.

WALTER: Oh yeah, that's creepy.

TEMPLE-RASTON: What creeped him out was this. These Russian Federation troops
raided a John Deere dealership in Ukraine and drove a bunch of tractors back to
Chechnya. You can imagine the scene. They are feeling pretty good about all their new
equipment and when they go to start the tractors up again, nothing. They won’t even
turn over. They’d been shut down, bricked. Remotely.

WALTER: What went through my head is now the world will see what John Deere can
do.

TEMPLE-RASTON: John Deere didn’t deny it happened, but wouldn’t confirm they were
behind it either. And CNN, which had the original story, said their source was an
unnamed businessman in Ukraine.

MUX fading in

TEMPLE-RASTON: So, that leaves just two alternatives: John Deere disabled the
machines remotely, or some random hackers did. Either way, it’s troubling.

MUX POST: Illa Villardo

WALTER SCHWEIZER: The fact that they can, can make your $500,000 piece of
equipment, nothing more than a paperweight by pushing a button, that's disconcerting.

[Tractor starting / Farm Ambi]

TEMPLE-RASTON: So here’s the doomsday scenario: It’s harvest time, farmers are out
in the field bringing in crops, haying. And a bad actor has been sitting in John Deere’s
networks for months, waiting for harvest time, working their way into the system,
burrowing into the communications software that speaks to John Deere tractors. And no
one has noticed. Until…the hackers activate some malware.

[REVVING TRACTOR]

TEMPLE-RASTON: And it sends a little command that tells all the engines connected to
the network to start revving.

[LOUDER REVVING]

TEMPLE-RASTON: RPMs go up. They keep climbing…until the engines actually die.

[TRACTOR STOPPING]
MUX OUT

TEMPLE-RASTON: It’s not far-fetched. Kiersten Todt used to be chief of staff at the
cyber security and infrastructure security agency or CISA. And she says these were the
kinds of scenarios they were thinking about all the time.

KIERSTEN TODT: We look at the interdependencies of, you know, the internet of things
and quite frankly, the interdependencies of the digital economy. What is critical and what
is not? Those lines have become more and more blurred. And she says there is a good
case to be made that tractors should be seen as part of the nation’s critical
infrastructure and protected that way.

TODT: The fact that we are now connecting tractors to the internet, that we're seeing an
increase in more smart technologies in the agriculture sector means that we've gotta be
thinking differently.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And by that she means viewing an attack on agricultural targets

through the same sort of lens we might see, for example, an attack on a hospital. In
both cases, lives could be at stake.

[OUTSIDE AMBI SOUNDS]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Walter, in Montana, has dealt with drought, trade wars, a pandemic,
skyrocketing prices. And all these hassles about repairing his own tractor. Against that
kind of list, he says he can’t dwell on people with keyboards trying to turn off his
equipment.

SCHWEITZER: If I lost a lot of sleep worried about hackers, then they would be winning
and I don't like to let them win.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Even the farmer we met at the beginning of the show, Jon Abbott,
says he’s looking at all these technologies in a new way. He sees how vulnerable
everything can be: the combine, the grain bins, sprinklers that keep your crops fed and
healthy.

ABBOTT: I mean, honestly, if you hacked our water sprinklers and turned our sprinklers
on. That, you know, you could ruin everything that we've got or you make it die by
keeping 'em off.

[MUSIC]
TEMPLE-RASTON: For once, Jeffrey the rooster, has no comment.

So hacking tractors turned out to open up the whole debate on Right to Repair and,
more fundamentally, whether farmers are the owners of their own fate. And it still isn’t
resolved. although John Deere is slowly providing farmers with a little more freedom to
work on their new computer-driven machines. Today on the show, stories about some
technologies that have taken on a life of their own… often in completely unintended
ways. We just heard about internet-connected tractors and the new problems they face.
But sometimes these high-tech breakthroughs can be used in ways that are truly
dangerous…

That’s the subject of our next story. How one company suggested we put a weapon of
war into a completely unexpected place. And just a warning, this story includes
references to school shootings.

[MUSIC]

[RADIO STATIC]

RADIO-1: We got a guy with a long rifle. We dunno where the hell he's at…

RADIO-2: He’s in the damn building right there!

TEMPLE-RASTON: This is radio traffic from Dallas police…

RADIO: We may have the suspect pin down northwest corner of the building. On the
second floor…

TEMPLE-RASTON: It’s from 2016. They were in a standoff with a sniper who had killed
five officers. He was a military veteran who had served in Afghanistan.

RADIO: Those officers by squad car 2091, you’re facing the wrong direction. You need
to get some cover.

TEMPLE-RASTON: So they sent in a robot. You know one of those robots that bomb
techs use to defuse explosives. But in this case the robot wasn’t there to take a bomb
apart. It was there to deliver one. Police detonated it, and killed the shooter.

[MUSIC]
TEMPLE-RASTON: This incident was incredibly controversial because it blurred the line
between policing and warfare.

SMITH: Gun control in the United States, as a political movement, has not made a
significant impact, and I wanted to take a different approach. What if I could make the
bullet obsolete?

TEMPLE-RASTON: This is Rick Smith. He’s the CEO of Axon. It provides technology to
police departments: Tasers, body cams…

TEMPLE-RASTON: He wants to look at giving police a new tool: tasers on drones.

SMITH VIDEO: This response could bring a situation under control in a matter of
seconds.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Rick Smith may have thought he’d come up with the perfect
solution…

TEMPLE-RASTON: But not everyone agreed that putting tasers on drones was a good
idea…

BARRY FRIEDMAN: Weaponizing drones and robots has been a frontier, right? And so
the question was, is that a line that we just don't wanna cross?

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Barry Friedman is a law professor at New York University and the
director of the NYU Policing Project. He was also the head of Axon’s AI Ethics Board.
It’s a group of independent experts who give feedback on potential products. And these
sorts of boards are becoming more and more common because of the ethical questions
that seem to swirl around technologies powered by artificial intelligence. In case of
Drones use AI software to perceive their surroundings…

They can track objects and provide analytical feedback in real time. The problem is…
and this has been the case for years… the algorithms that power AI can be biased. The
cameras AI controls can invade privacy. And because, as a general matter, these kinds
of devices are built to operate at scale, any problems they have don’t just affect
individuals…They affect lots of people — all at once.

[MUSIC]

CNN: There have been some whistleblowers who have been warning about the dangers
of AI for some years. One of them…

SAM ALTMAN: I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong. And we want
to be vocal about that. We want to work with the government…

GEOFFREY HINTON: I'm just a scientist who suddenly realized these things are getting
smarter than us. And I want to sort of blow the whistle and say, we should worry
seriously.

MUSIC UP AND OUT.

TEMPLE-RASTON: All this is one of the reasons why Axon, one of the country’s leading
manufacturers of policing technology, decided to create an independent review board,
to advise the company on how to develop AI-powered products without trampling on
civil liberties.

FRIEDMAN: they were operating in a space that was fraught and where they got
criticized a lot and thought it would be good to have an independent outside body that,
uh, would guide them. We were a little skeptical of it, frankly, but we, we agreed to
listen. It's interesting, a number of civil liberties and racial justice organizations declined
to participate. And I think over the period of time in which the ethics board was
operating and operating well, everybody felt that good work was being done.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Good work like convincing Axon not to put facial recognition
software on its police body cams. Because it just had too many issues. It misidentifies
the faces of women and people of color.

TEMPLE-RASTON: They also convinced the company to modify plans to use high
speed license plate scanners.

AXON VIDEO: We’re going to test the Fleet 3 system with license plate reading
technology against some of the fastest cars in the world. Ferrari!
TEMPLE-RASTON: The AI ethics board thought it could be used to illegally track
people. And the company eventually agreed. So when Axon’s chairman asked the
board to take a look at something they called Project ION, an effort to put Tasers onto
drones. They weren’t in LOVE with the idea…

BARRY: We did let them know that we were surprised, and really had some concerns.

TEMPLE-RASTON: But they all agreed to keep an open mind.

BARRY: The most compelling use case to the board was these are folks who might well
get shot. And if we can figure out a way to create greater distance with the taser, we
might save lives and the drone was a way to do that.

TEMPLE-RASTON: According to a report of their internal deliberations obtained by

Click Here, the board quickly agreed that there were certain use cases for the
taser-drone technology that were just non-starters. Things like crowd control at protests
or patrolling the border.

FRIEDMAN: Drone has value as an eye in the sky. That itself is incredibly invasive, but
to then think that that's gonna be able to zap people that it sees, like, that's, that's
disturbing science fiction.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Which is I think why everybody's first reaction when they hear
about weaponizing drones is the one like, nah, this seems like a bridge too far.

FRIEDMAN. Sure. I mean it, you know, some level conjures up, you know, images from
Star Wars or something. It's not so good.

[PLANET EXPLOSION]

MAX ISSACS: You know, often I, I think that people working in technology can ignore,
uh, the social context in which these products are used.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Max Issacs is general counsel at NYU’s Policing Project. He did a

lot of the research that went into the board’s assessment.

ISSACS: You can't just develop the technology with some safeguards. You need to look
at the types of policies that agencies are enacting, the way that they're enforced, the
way that officers are trained, all of the pieces kind of combined.
TEMPLE-RASTON: Which is why the board wasn’t just looking at adding wings to a
taser. It had to take into account some of the issues that dogged the tasers themselves.

ISSACS: We've heard some really disturbing reports about the abuse of tasers against
school children, elderly people, uh, even against people who, who have been
restrained, who are in handcuffs. Uh, and, and given that context, given the fact that the
taser exists today, and we haven’t found a way to prevent these abuses from
happening, those concerns are only magnified.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And that doesn’t even take into account the racial disparities that
seem to come up

FRIEDMAN: It gets used disproportionately on black and brown folks. That just always
is the case.

TEMPLE-RASTON: The report cited worries about dehumanization.

FRIEDMAN: The idea of a control panel with a taser drone felt a little bit too much like a
gaming platform.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And even if they had thought of every eventuality, how could they
ensure that the rules of engagement would be followed?

FRIEDMAN: 18,000 agencies in the country, as you might guess. There's a wide variety
in the quality of those agencies.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Which was one of the problems, the report said, they just couldn’t
overcome.

FRIEDMAN: There was a group of us that were just concerned that as well as we could
design this, and if designed well, as much as we believed it was something the world
could benefit from, we couldn't trust the overall variance in policing to make this a
commercially viable product.

TEMPLE-RASTON: So after a year of study. The ethics board decided to put it to a

vote.

FRIEDMAN: It was easily our most fraught meeting ever.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Barry Friedman was in the room.

FRIEDMAN: And I think it was fraught in part because all of us understood the
compelling use case. And I wanna stress that we unanimously understood why you
might want to be able to use less lethal force from a distance to save lives.

And the police on the board, you know, told stories about horror shows they'd
experienced in their departments where somebody had been shot and their lives might
have been saved with something like this.

TEMPLE-RASTON: To avoid situations like what happened in Dallas that we talked

about before… maybe a taser would have given police the room they needed to just
arrest the guy, instead of sending in a robot carrying a bomb.

FRIEDMAN: We all kind of went around the room and said how we felt. And then we
had back and forth. And then after that, uh, we took a vote.

TEMPLE-RASTON: In the end, it was 8-4 against. They decided Axon should not
develop tasers on drones.

FRIEDMAN: We decided not to go ahead with the pilot, uh, and, and it, it was a tough
decision. I know Rick was very disappointed.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Rick Smith, the CEO of Axon.

FRIEDMAN: This has really been one of his, his dreams. I think.

MUSIC UP AND OUT

[MOURNERS SING AMAZING GRACE]

TEMPLE-RASTON: The summer of 2022 was a terrible one for mass shootings.

[MONTAGE]

TEMPLE-RASTON: The Buffalo and Uvalde shootings happened just a couple of weeks
after Axon’s ethics board came to the conclusion that tasers and drones shouldn’t mix.
Which is why it seemed so odd when Axon’s CEO Rick Smith released this video.

SMITH: We’ve talked about these horrific school shootings. They just keep happening…
TEMPLE-RASTON: He announced that Axon would be developing a taser drone for
schools. He explained how it would prevent mass shootings.

SMITH: And if that human operator gives the go signal, then the drone rotors up, it
immediately deploys into the seam and there, it could incapacitate that threat… I believe
this is how we can end school shootings.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Did like using it in schools ever come up?

JORDAN-MCBRIDE: Absolutely not. Like that wasn't even, I don't think I ever crossed
anyone's mind as a potential case scenario.

TEMPLE-RASTON: This is Mecole Jordan-McBride. She’s a community organizer in

Chicago and she was on the Axon ethics board. She was one of the four members of
the board who voted to give that Taser drone pilot program a try. And she thought that
Rick Smith’s school taser plan was a little nuts….

JORDAN-MCBRIDE: It just felt fanciful to me and it felt like an emotional response that
wasn't completely thought through.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And we should say here that we asked to interview Rick Smith for
this show… and his company, Axon, declined.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Mecole said she tried to imagine how drones in schools would even
work.

JORDAN-MCBRIDE: I was thinking like even in Chicago, like how many school
buildings are in Chicago, it's impossible for you to know which school would potentially
be victim to this, right.

TEMPLE-RASTON: In order to make an armed drone helpful in a school shooting, it

needed to be inside the school.

JORDAN-McBRIDE: And so now are we talking about literally putting a drone in every
single school across America? I thought about the, the, the amount of money that would
be, you know, I thought about the over surveillance of that.

MUX: Low Light Switch 48000 1 Copy-04

TEMPLE-RASTON: To figure out where the shooter was, Axon would either need
access to any cameras that were there, or it would need someone to install them.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Though Axon’s video of how it would work made it seem a lot
simpler than that.

SMITH: Working through partners, we're gonna activate any camera in any school,
church, or public building so that it can be easily shared with first responders.

TEMPLE-RASTON: But actually… Think about every school shooting you’ve ever read
about.

TEMPLE-RASTON: The gunman gets into the school, armed to the teeth… he’s
wearing body armor, they barricade themselves in a classroom…

FRIEDMAN: You know, drones have to get around and shooters go into rooms and
close doors.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Barry Friedman again.

FRIEDMAN: And the company's answer was, well, we'll just, you know, we'll cut holes in
all the doors so the drone could get through. I mean, you know, you're trying a little too
hard. Then, people that go in and commit these shootings have enough body armor on.
It's not like the drone’s gonna work.

TEMPLE-RASTON: For the board, the taser drones in schools was a bridge too far.

FRIEDMAN: We could have talked as a board and we could have talked with the
company, but there was this great eagerness on Rick's part to, you know, get this idea
out there in the aftermath of Uvalde. And, um, it just, we couldn't operate that way.

TEMPLE-RASTON: So, just days after Rick Smith’s surprise announcement. Axon’s AI
ethics board began a chain of phone calls, they held an emergency meeting.

FRIEDMAN: Do we issue a statement?.Do we resign? Who's gonna resign? We had

emails about who would resign. Uh, nine of us resigned.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Friedman said he felt like there wasn’t a choice.

MUX OUT
FRIEDMAN: Uh, board members were often attacked from the outside world for, you
know, working with Axon, but we believed that we were making progress and it was the
right thing to do. And it's interesting because in the aftermath of the collapse of the
board, I got a number of emails from folks in different places in the civil liberties and
racial justice community saying it's a good thing that you did the work and it's a good
thing that you stopped when you did, given the circumstances.

JORDAN-MCBRIDE: I know that they have a new ethics board or, or something like the
ethics board. You know, my hope and my prayer is that, those individuals are asking the
hard questions, and that their design team, is really pushing back and, and trying to
answer for all of these what ifs.

MUX IN: The Shoes they Wear

TEMPLE-RASTON: Axon, for its part, says it has shelved the idea of having armed
drones in schools for now.

TEMPLE-RASTON: The company told Click Here in a statement that taser drones in
schools is an idea, not a product, and it’s a long way off. In the meantime, Rick Smith
has said publicly that he’s engaging with teachers and school boards and continuing to
explore the idea.

[MUX POST]

TEMPLE-RASTON: When we come back, a particular kind of scammer takes a turf war
into a totally unexpected direction. This is Click Here. Stay with us.

MUSIC

TEMPLE-RASTON: This is Click Here. I’m Dina Temple-Raston. Today, we’re looking at
how tech can take on a life of its own…and move from an online world, into our real
one. And we’ll finish with a crazy story about how a group of young men – in their teens
and 20s – decided to start a new kind of business. Something they called
violence-as-a-service. It’s an online marketplace that allows you to connect with
someone who is willing to exact violence in real life. And just a warning here, this story
contains the sound of gunfire and some strong language.

STINGER // CLICK - BEEP

TEMPLE-RASTON: Violence as a service was the brainchild of an existing community
of cyber criminals who do something called SIM swapping. Which, at its most basic
level involves a hacker taking over a mobile phone number and grabbing all the things
associated with it. It allows them to steal passwords, take over multi-factor
authentication, even drain cryptocurrency accounts…

MUSIC IN

And the people who are good at SIM Swapping can literally make millions.

TEMPLE-RASTON (from interview): Do you have like… a plan… when you won't do this
anymore, is there a certain amount of money you'll get to…

YUKI: I think about nine figs.

TEMPLE-RASTON (from interview): Really? And how close are you?

YUKI: Really far… Nine figs that's a hundred million dollars, right? That's a few more
years at least.

TEMPLE-RASTON: That’s Yuki… he’s big in the SIM swapping community…

TEMPLE-RASTON (from interview): Is it right to think of SIM swappers ss as being

younger people or do I misunderstand that

YUKI: That is very accurate, by the way, a lot of SIM swaps are actually like 13 to like 18.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Yuki is a little older than that. And we found him and the other SIM
swappers we talked to on a Telegram channel for SIM swappers. Most SIM swappers are
teenagers… which is a large part of the problem. If you have a bunch of adolescents –
breaking the law, with tons of cash and time to burn. It isn’t too surprising that things
would get a little violent… and a little weird.
MUSIC BUMP

TEMPLE-RASTON: But I’m not sure anyone really expected for it to get this wild:

FADE: I say, what you need done? He say, I just need you to throw a brick through his
window.

GOTTI: Shootings, firebombings….

FROG: I mean the worst one we’ve probably done (chuckles) was kidnap someone.

YUKI: And like, if I had to come to it like killings, which has came to that, but I'll speak on
that later.

MUSIC OUT

TEMPLE-RASTON: The story that took violence-as-service out of the shadows was the
arrest of a 21-year-old in New Jersey man back in August of last year. His name is
Patrick McGovern-Allen…and he was pretty well known in SIM Swapping circles. His
alias was Tongue – as in… inside your mouth. And up until recently, he was living with
his grandparents in Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey. He worked at a local restaurant
called A Touch of Italy. That is until the FBI arrested him accusing him of taking part in
some violence-as-a-service operations.

Patrick’s arrest was first reported in by a cyber security publication called Krebs on
Security And he appears to be one of the first people to be arrested for this kind of
score-settling cyber-meets-real-world-crime. Turns out, he’s good friends with this guy:

JOHN GOTTI: I'm John Gotti.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Not THAT John Gotti…

GOTTI: Uh, it's like my alias. Uh, nobody knows like my real name, obviously. So I'm not
gonna bring that out there

TEMPLE-RASTON: John Gotti is a fellow SIM swapper. And he’s co-owner of a group
that’s dedicated to brickings and other violence-for-hire.

GOTTI: pretty much these people like have voice chat, like arguments over like a video
game or. It, it sounds silly, but like literally a video game kind of thing. and then they'll like
dox each other. And then they find somebody to do the work so they can brick 'em or do
a shooting or robbing or stabbing completely depends on the situation.

DTR: Did you know Patrick McGovern-Allen? His name was Tongue.

GOTTI: I did. I do. I do. I do. That's my boy

TEMPLE-RASTON: Patrick was a member of a SIM swapping group Gotti founded called
FNM. Gotti showed us a screenshot of its ownership page to prove he really was who he
said he was.

DTR: Did you know him only virtually or did you know him know him?

GOTTI: Um, It is possible that we've encountered each other two or three times IRL.

DTR: Okay. And what was he like?

GOTTI: He was a chill dude. Uh, I don't, I don't really know how to explain the guy. He
was, he was a bit off, but he was, he was a chill dude. He was honorable

DTR: meaning if he said he was gonna do something, he did it.

GOTTI: Yeah.
MUSIC

TEMPLE-RASTON: But SIM swappers we talked to told us that even THEY found Patrick
a little reckless. Like the time a few years ago when he drove his Lexus into a building…

TEMPLE-RASTON (from inteview): He did drive a car into a house.

GOTTI: He did, he did. it is what it is. Some people do things sometimes. Me too. you
know, accidents happen.

FADE: I mean, he crashed the car into a building for no reason. just cause he felt like it.

TEMPLE-RASTON: This is a SIM swapper who goes by the name Fade. He knew
Patrick too.

FADE: I knew him for a while. We weren't like super close or whatever, but I knew him.
He had like a few brain cells missing, but that’s about it.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Fade told us Patrick was so out there, he wasn’t surprised when the
FBI rolled up on him back in August. He said everyone in the community was expecting
him to get arrested.

FADE: it's like a family, everyone knows what's going on.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Patrick stands accused of taking part in two separate

violence-as-a-service jobs in Pennsylvania. A firebombing… and then a shooting a few
weeks later.

FADE: I mean, every one of Patrick's friends knew he was gonna get arrested. Patrick
knew himself He was gonna get arrested. I mean, you know, it, weren't no secret, but
Patrick didn't have much choice.
TEMPLE-RASTON: The criminal complaint against Patrick made clear that his
operational security wasn’t…. top notch. For one thing, he put the proof videos of the
shooting on both. Discord – a kind of messaging platform for gamers…and on Telegram
– an encrypted communications app… This is one of the videos he posted.

BEGIN SNEAKING IN THE JUSTIN ACTIVE VIDEO

DETECTIVE DAVID HALE: it looks like there's two males wearing all black face masks.

TEMPLE-RASTON: This is Detective David Hale… he is with the Criminal Investigations

Unit in the Westtown East Goshen Police Department. It’s outside Philadelphia. He’s one
of the investigators in the case…And this is him describing a proof video Patrick is
allegedly linked to.

HALE: An individual flashes, a handgun, uh, semiautomatic pistol, um, he walks up to the
front window. He's probably about 20 feet away from the window. And then unloads eight
consecutive shots within, you know, a second or two.

VIDEO: You ready? Mhm. Justin Active was here.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And they shout something… See if you can make out what they say.

VIDEO: (shooting) Justin Active was here…

TEMPLE-RASTON: They are saying Justin Active was here. Justin OR Active….is
another SIM swapper in the community. We talked to him by text and he said Patrick was
targeting him. In the criminal complaint against Patrick, the FBI said the shooter was
wearing an Air Jordan Hoodie, a dark balaclava, and semi-rimless glasses. Patrick, the
FBI says in the complaint, wears dark semi-rimless glasses… just like the guy in the
video. The firebombing — which had happened a few weeks earlier — wasn’t exactly
stealth either.
MUSIC

VIDEO CLIP

TEMPLE-RASTON: The video shows two suspects in front of the house. One is wearing
a red and black lumberjack shirt. The camera focuses on a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20
grape wine. It’s stuffed with a cloth fuse. And they are trying to light it. Light it, light it…
They say.

VIDEO: LIGHT IT, LIGHT IT

TEMPLE-RASTON: The Molotov cocktail bounces off the window frame and sets the
front of the house on fire. The video shows them starting to run… and then it ends
abruptly.

VIDEO / MUSIC OUT

TEMPLE-RASTON: According to the FBI, the people inside the house called 911 and
said that something was thrown at the house just before a fire started. They told the
police that they heard male voices outside, and there was some laughing just before they
heard a loud noise and smelled smoke. That video was posted on Discord too…

Discord’s trust and safety department found chats from someone named Tongue that
seemed to be taking responsibility for both operations. Details about those are in the
criminal complaint against Patrick too.

YUKI : Pat was an idiot.

TEMPLE-RASTON: This is Yuki again…

YUKI: He got caught and that doesn't happen to people who are smart and.
TEMPLE-RASTON (from interview): And careful.

YUKI: And careful. Yeah. I mean, you can be reckless and you can be smart and nothing
will happen, but he was just reckless and didn't care about any of it.

MUSIC BUMP

TEMPLE-RASTON: And Yuki decided to take this informal dangerous thing Pat was
doing… and make it into a business. He created an actual violence-as-a-service online
marketplace that not only solitics but offers up people willing to commit real life violent
crime. He calls it BrickSquad

YUKI: BRICKSQUAD is the front lines.

TEMPLE-RASTON: He says this is the first time he’s spoken to journalists about it. You
can order to throw a Molotov at their house. Get their house, like shot up, even get the
person who's in the house robbed, you know, just a bunch of other things.

MUSIC

YUKI: I started it as a side project and it's more like a supply to demand type of thing.
You know, like people really want to get back at their enemies online. So I just decided to
hop in on it and be like, you know, why not? Like, why not?

TEMPLE-RASTON: Well, there are lots of reasons why not…

MUSIC OUT

TEMPLE-RASTON: As if to show just how ubiquitous violence-as-a-service is becoming.

Yuki set up a new website to publicize his new BrickSquad venture. And I went online to
take a look… the website looked pretty basic, like websites did when the Internet was
just starting out: It had Black background, red type… three simple columns. The heading
on the first read: weapon… and it is followed by a short list: brick, molotov, shooting,
robbery, custom. The second column had corresponding prices: two grand for a molotov,
four for a shooting. And a link in the third column allowed you to go ahead and order –
though Yuki said Bricksquad doesn’t really do its IRL business there…

YUKI: I only put up the website because I wanted to, you know, redirect people to the
telegram, add more attention to it, more accessibility, you know

TEMPLE-RASTON: Their Telegram channel doesn’t leave much to the imagination. It’s a
kind of match.com of violence: they put people together. One ad asks if anyone can be in
Sydney’s Hyde Park: Anyone who can be here on Sept 8th around midday and wants to
make a thousand dollars… dm me… it reads. Houston, FL… reads another… wanna
brick a window for $500… let me know.

YUKI: Well, the prices actually vary…. normally the starting price would go like $5,000 to
shoot…up a house, but not hurt anyone… .

TEMPLE-RASTON: BrickSquad… facilitates things. They get the address, the

instructions, and then hold money in escrow until the deed is done. BrickSquad typically
acts as a middle man… though sometimes, if a job is local, they will go ahead and do it
themselves…

TEMPLE-RASTON: This is a bricking video that Yuki appears to be in…

YUKI BRICKING VIDEO

TEMPLE-RASTON: When BrickSquad just facilitates a job, they take a cut for their
trouble. If this feels like something out of GoodFellas, there’s a good reason why. All
these brickings and arson and drivebys don’t exist in a vacuum. They’re motivated by the
same things that motivate most criminals in the real world: big money… And power…
and striking fear in the hearts of anyone who crosses you.
YUKI: It's all business. If you wanna steal someone's money, there's a lot of
consequences from that.

TEMPLE-RASTON: You cross a guy in the SIM swapping community… he’ll hire
someone to make your life miserable. And this may seem reminiscent of something else
you may have heard about. Something called Swatting…

ABC Action News (2012): An apparent hoax had a home in Sarasota surrounded. Nearly
three dozen personnel responded to a situation thinking that a teenager killed his own
family and then threatened to blow up his home….(fade under)

TEMPLE-RASTON: Young kids call emergency services and get the police to send
SWAT teams to somebody’s house. Just to intimidate and harass someone they don’t
like and it was getting people killed. Detective Hale of the Goshen police department
says violence-as-a-service is what swatting has become.

HALE: I think swatting is… becoming kind of old hat and now they're stepping it up to
make it a little bit more serious

MUSIC IN: KeoKeo

TEMPLE-RASTON: In one sense, you could think of this as a thing that only affects
cyber criminals… bad people doing bad things to other bad people. But that’d be naive.
Once this violence moves into the real world and you’ve got people throwing bricks at a
house… it’s no longer just inside the SIM swapping community – no matter what Yuki
and Fade and Gotti say. The people ordering up these jobs are 13 to 18 year old SIM
swappers who have made a lot of money. And it wouldn’t be a stretch to think they’re
probably living with their parents, and their parents probably have NO IDEA that their
kids are somehow involved in cybercrime.

Detective Hale says families become casualties too.

HALE: So it, it it's almost laughable that these people literally live in their parents'
basements and they're 19 20, 21, 22 years old…. It's like the cliche. Right? And a lot of
the parents can't stand the fact that their kids live in their basements, cuz they are getting
their doors kicked in. Routinely. I mean, we, we, we had an individual who lived in our
town that she was swatted probably at least a half a dozen times over the course of a
year. Um, other individuals on the other receiving end, it's almost a weekly occurrence.

MUSIC BUMP

TEMPLE-RASTON: What makes this so hard to control is that most of the people
throwing bricks… or shooting up a house… are minors.

HALE: it's a criminal mischief, right. You know, it's a kid breaking a window… Guilty. I've
done it when I was a kid, you know, throwing an egg on mischief night.

TEMPLE-RASTON: The FBI is unlikely to charge a minor for throwing a brick. So there is
an aspect of invincibility that goes along with this… and that could explain why it is
getting bigger and more commonplace. But this is about more than mischief or punking
someone you don't like.

HALE: The intent behind it is a little bit more malice based…We're looking at a lot of
people beginning in their mid teens and it goes up until 20 21, 22. (fade under)

MUSIC fading in:

TEMPLE-RASTON: Patrick was in his twenties, so a grand jury was able to charge him
with stalking, use of a firearm to commit a felony…and aiding and abetting a crime. He
eventually pleaded guilty to all counts, and was sentenced to more than 13 years in
prison. As for the Brick Squad site, it’s since been taken down. But that doesn’t mean the
violence-as-a-service marketplace is gone.
HALE: I think it's fair to say that it's an issue and it's not going away anytime soon. it
almost seems like they're living an online video game in real life. And it's like, it's not real,
you know, a SWAT call is just a phone call, no big deal, but now people are potentially
getting shot. I mean, that's, that's, that's a problem.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And the guys running these operations…they have NO REMORSE

about what they’re doing. When we asked about that, they seemed to shrug it off…

YUKI: it's not because I have like morals or whatever.

FADE: I mean, I don't really care, man. It's like a, it's a man's business.

FROG: It's just a job. I wouldn't be doing it if I felt bad.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Which means it’s escalating in such a way that even SIM swappers
like Yuki are starting to take unusual precautions…

YUKI: Okay, the thing is, I'm gonna tell you, I don't actually have a phone because, well,
yeah, I don't have a phone….

DTR: Is that because you know how easy it is to SIM swap?

YUKI: no comment.

TEMPLE-RASTON: This is Click Here.

[THEME MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Click Here is a production of Recorded Future News. To hear some

of our other stories, look for the Click Here podcast wherever you get your podcasts or
go to clickhereshow.com to find our whole catalog. Our team includes senior producer
Sean Powers, producer Will Jarvis and editors Karen Duffin and Lu Olkowski. John
DeLore is our sound engineer. Darren Ankrom is our fact checker and Ben Levingston
 wrote all the original music in the show. Other music is by Blue Dot Sessions. For more
cyber news, check out our sister publication, The Record by Recorded Future News at
the TheRecord dot media.

Next week on a special holiday episode of Click Here… we look at how technology has
democratized our ability to dissect and decode the actions of dictators…..

TEMPLE-RASTON (from interview): Okay, so…so why are we talking to you today?

JEFFREY LEWIS: I would imagine it is some combination of being interested in all the
horrific and terrifying things that North Korea is doing and tracking that.

TEMPLE-RASTON (from interview): That is exactly right. That is why we want to talk to
you.

I’m Dina Temple-Raston… that’s next Tuesday on Click Here.