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Hello, world. This is code Breaker. I'm Ben Brock Johnson. Let's play a game. Where are you right now? Are you driving on a train? Are you standing on a corner waiting for a walk signal? Meditating next to a pharmacy deodorant aisle? Do me a favor. Spot the cameras. Every single one. Smartphones count. Closed circuit counts stuck to a wall, pointed at a doorway on a lamp post. Don't worry, I'll wait. Odds are you are very close to a video camera right now. While wherever you are, they are everywhere. But there are a few places where surveillance cameras are on another level. A couple of months ago, producer Claire Tennisketter and I were driving into one of these places, one of the most surveilled small cities in America. Oh, I can go right on red here, right?

If you can't go right on red, they just caught you doing it.

But when you hear the name of this place we are driving into, you are more likely to think horse carriages and pieces. You ready? Lancaster City, Pennsylvania. Right in the middle of Amish country. The surveillance cameras here are easy to spot. So we're playing this game. Where?

Where?

Did you see another one?

Right here.

Where? On the left. On the left. Oh, yeah. Oh, wow.

They're everywhere.

There are two modes of surveillance as a form of social control. The kind where the people being watched don't know they're being watched. And the kind where knowing you're being watched is part of the plan. The city of Lancaster has the second kind. And maybe that's why outsiders hear Lancaster and think Amish Bonnet. Maybe it's working. The whole idea of living under surveillance is that it's supposed to be a good thing. A little bit of watching to make sure everybody abides by society's social contract. And what's more American than checks and balances? Maybe apple pie. They got that in Lancaster, too. That in a system of surveillance, that means a little bit of privacy, a little bit of trust lost. But, hey, small price to pay, right? On Codebreaker, we decipher our complicated feelings about technology by asking straightforward questions with a sense of humor, a sense of awe, and, hey, sometimes a sense of dread. This season, we got one question in mind. Four little words.

Oh, geez.

Oh, I hope so.

Can it save us? We are asking this one question about one kind of technology in every episode. Today, a story about Lancaster's strange pattern of watching an old lady in Northern Ireland who's obsessed with watching video feeds from Brazil and putting cameras onto sharks. Big frickin sharks.

There was about four seconds of sheer terror.

So camera surveillance, watching. Can it save us? Hey, remember, there's a code hidden in every one of our episodes.

So.

So listen closely. Surveillance cameras really are a part of our modern daily lives. Cameras and storing footage have gotten cheaper and cheaper, and the business of watching is booming. Private companies and employers watch their employees. Governments watch their citizens. In the next five years, some estimates put the annual video surveillance market at nearly $100 billion. And again, the goal here is security and safety. Here in Lancaster, the security cameras all look the same size of a cantaloupe. They're in these droopy white, almost Dr. Seuss like housings called goosenecks. It is abundantly clear that you are supposed to know that you're being watched. What isn't clear is what the effect has been and how the cameras got here in the first place. To me, a city this small doesn't need surveillance like this. Feels like overkill. I can't imagine the people who live here are super comfortable with it either.

Is this union?

Pretty sure this is a small gas station. After driving in, Claire and I reach the nerve center of this surveillance system to talk to the people who run it. The Lancaster Safety Coalition. It's an organization that's not part of the local law enforcement, not part of the government. It's a nonprofit, a group of about a dozen citizens, some part time, who help maintain this unique system of more than 150 cameras. Oh yeah, here we go. They're opening up the gates. The coalition works in this pretty nondescript corner of a low slung brick building that sits across from a gas station and is mostly taken up by their landlord, a local gas utility. Most of the shades are drawn. The outside of the entrance has another one of those gooseneck cameras on it. We had some questions for the people working inside. Have you ever been tempted to try and just like find something out that's totally innocuous? By going back and looking at the footage, you're like, where did I park that day? No, that's David Greiner. He's the Coalition's monitoring and evidence supervisor. No, I don't use this for my personal amusement. I'm a city resident. I've been involved with the coalition since day one. I believe in the mission of the coalition and I take it very serious. He does. When we walk into the dim, mostly windowless offices of the coalition. David is hunched over a work desk, eating his lunch. One of the cameras is there under construction. It looks kind of like a sad disembowelled robot. Considering how fast David's hands are working to show the camera's features, it won't be a sad robot for long. A few minutes later, he's doing a shift at the actual spot where the camera video feeds from all over town come in. Yeah, so we would have. In effect, there's like 20 feeds here, 21 feeds in this workstation. David and one of his colleagues sit in front of these two large banks of screens with a keyboard, a phone, a police scanner, and a sort of joystick that can be used to control a camera manually when needed. And remember, the Lancaster Safety Coalition is not operated by the police, but they have a good relationship with local law enforcement. On this lazy weekday, the camera feeds look mundane. Sun dappled streets with lines of parked cars. Kids at the local pool. Hey, no running people doing errands during their lunch break. But then the police radio next to the bank of screens crackles with a report of a possible crime in progress. And coalition executive director Wes Farmer, a retired cop who came to Lancaster a few years back from San Bernardino, California, kicks me and Claire out of the watching room while coalition members talk on the phone with police. It's a call of a crime in progress of some sort. We had to walk out of the room, basically, so we don't get subpoenaed or become an inadvertent witness to a criminal investigation and then just muck up everything. Sure. Although it does sound exciting. Oh, yeah, I understand.

Yeah.

While we are visiting the coalition, the office printer spits out a press release from the Lancaster police. It's about a domestic dispute between a young man and his girlfriend. A gun was involved. The cameras had helped catch the guy. The press release came from Lieutenant Todd Umstead. Since the coalition works closely with law enforcement, that was our next stop.

Thank you.

Yep.

First we ask Lieutenant Todd Umstead an obvious question. What kind of crime happens in the city?

Same crimes that happen everywhere else. You know, see property crimes, car break, ins, shootings too.

He says about eight this year. So is the surveillance system useful in fighting crime?

I can't imagine us not having it. Now, our guys have come to rely on that. I mean, it's an everyday thing. I mean, every day there's some call that we're going on that the camera operators are feeding our guys information or reviewing things after the fact.

Todd says the cameras and the coalition's camera operators, who watch feeds 14 to 18 hours a day, are key sources when an incident is happening. Which way did the suspect run? Do they have a weapon? The system can corroborate or disprove the testimony of victims, suspects, and bystanders. Footage is stored at the coalition, kept for two weeks, and then wiped unless it's been saved for an investigation. How often does a camera actually get footage of the crime itself? The answer to this question is really important to what is happening in Lancaster. The cameras are always panning through this pre programmed automated rotation, so it's useful.

But the odds of those cameras actually picking up a crime as it happens are extremely lower.

It's an imperfect system. It doesn't have total coverage. And Todd says that's a problem because the result is people always want police to release the footage of the crimes that happen. People comment on newspaper articles. Where's the footage? Why didn't the camera catch the guy in the act? And this is the moment where we realize something odd is happening in Lancaster. People complaining about the cameras. I expected that. But a lot of that complaining has turned into requests for more footage. And the way you get more footage is to have more cameras.

Right.

As we're leaving, we asked Todd something. We're still trying to figure out. How did the camera system get installed in the first place?

Yeah, you're gonna make me wreck my memory here.

But does he know anyone who would remember?

Yes, it was under Smith Gall when the whole thing first started rolling. Charlie Smith Gall.

Okay.

He's got a pharmacy over on Lemon.

Street if you want to try and track him down. Oh, yeah, yeah. Lemon street.

Smith Gall's pharmacy. It's over on west Lemon.

So we go to Charlie Smith Gull's pharmacy on west Lemon street. We're in search of Charlie. Well, you've come to the right place. Charlie is in the back. Hi. How's it going?

Good.

My name is Ben. I'm Ben Johnson.

Never stand when you can sit down and never sit down when you can lay down.

So can you give me what we call a self id? Full name, title?

Charlie Smithcall Pharmacist. Used to be mayor. Who knows what a whole lot of things.

When Were you mayor?

98 to 2006.

Okay. What made you decide to run?

Didn't like the way the city was gone and turned it around.

Turn it around.

Ah.

A history of a time in office told by the office holder. Charlie didn't have a clear answer for the origin of the cameras. Maybe it was 9, 11, maybe. It was a company downtown worried about crime. We looked into it later. In the early 2000s, a local crime commission concluded that cameras might make the city safer. Eventually, administrators landed on a plan. The city helped install the first group of cameras, and the network expanded. More are going up. Do you think overall, the city has gotten better over time?

Right now it's sliding. It's getting worse. I can show you in my backyard with a bullet hole in my back window from a shooting a couple months ago. My daughter's car got shot. It was wild out here one night, and we're supposedly in the safe area.

Why do you think it's vaccinated?

Not enough police.

Along with more police, Charlie also wants more cameras.

I think the city would be a little bit better if there was more, you know, just. Even if it's just watching an intersection, if there's an accident, you know who caused it, you know it's a good witness.

When we say goodbye to Charlie Smith gall and cross the street in front of his pharmacy, we decide to go to a less nice part of town. So we go down to South Lime street where we find Margarita and Sharmila Rodriguez taking groceries out of their minivan. Sharmila hands a new toy to a little boy standing in the doorway. He scampers off. We ask Margarita how she feels about the cameras.

I think they suck because they always work in the favor of the police and not in the favor of us.

Tell me more.

We've had damage done to the vehicles. There was a situation that had taken place, and it's always, oh, we can't see, there's nothing there. We can't tell who did the damage. But then when the police officers need it to their benefit, they can always see everything.

Can you tell me about the process that you went through trying to get footage?

Well, we called, called the police. Down they went. They checked the vehicle and then said that they were looking into the cameras, and then got back to us two days later and said that they couldn't see anything in the cameras.

Even though she thinks police are using the surveillance system, the cameras and their operators against her or not at all. When we ask Margarita about the solution, she echoes Charlie Smith call. She wants more surveillance. Almost every single person we talk to says the same thing. Visitors, longtime residents, shopkeepers, a waitress on a smoke break. I personally feel safer with the camera. Surveillance cameras is going to be the greatest thing to prevent crime and help.

Catch the people that are doing it.

I am 100% for it.

I think it's great. I think it's great that we have them.

Yeah, seems like they need it.

Except there is one guy. In our whole time in Lancaster, we talked to one person who not only doesn't trust the Lancaster Safety Coalition's surveillance system, he fully opposes it.

Those cameras are supposed to make us.

Feel safer, but they don't make you feel safer.

Oh, absolutely not.

Kevin Ressler has lived in Lancaster for a while. He's got a lot of titles.

I operate as a community activist as well as a pastor in the community, a public theologian, and my day job is as the executive director of Meals on Wheels of Lancaster.

Kevin makes a point we haven't heard yet, that relying on the cameras actually makes more traditional community policing tactics less effective.

Because the police officers rely on these cameras, it means they themselves are less likely to be in the neighborhoods. They have less relationships with individuals, which means people are less likely to report things. They don't know the areas as well, or who's regularly there, who belongs, who doesn't belong. So they make determinations based on things like race or based on things like perceived wealth of vehicles and other things in neighborhoods that they don't expect that to be in. So you remove the cameras. Everything operates in a vacuum. And so the vacuum gets filled. The vacuum will get filled by individuals, neighborhood watches and things like that, where people know the names of the people who they're seeing, as opposed to a camera blurry, seeing someone with a hat on. Now, you know, oh, that was Joe, or that was Ann, or that was whomever, because the people reporting knew that person. The camera doesn't know anybody. So if I only have one choice, all or none, it's adamantly none, because it will increase the safety of our community.

Kevin tells a story about a shooting that just happened on the block of his friend's house while he was over there. The shooter was caught, he says, because of real witnesses at the scene, not because of the cameras. He's worried that relying on the cameras will make police and citizens less likely to do the real work of keeping Lancaster safe. We're going to come back to Lancaster and its surveillance, but let's take a second and explore Kevin's idea about behavior change. Neil Richards, the Thomas Thomas and Carol Green professor of Law at Washington University, has been looking very closely at the science on this for years.

The bottom line for this is when we know that we are being watched, we conform our behavior to that which is socially expected of us, that which is inoffensive and boring and bland and mainstream. There are two studies, I think, that show this the best. The more serious one is in the advent of the Snowden revelations about the way people use social media and search engines and particular. And they found that after Snowden, controlling for a lot of variables, after the Snowden revelations leaked, people were less likely to use Google to search for terms like terrorism or bomb making or Al Qaeda. The problem is they also searched less knowing about NSA surveillance for things like divorce lawyer or eating disorder, am I gay? That kind of.

Those sorts of searches, in aggregate, these searches were reduced after the Snowden revelations.

Yes, people search less, not just for things associated with terrorism or radical Islam, but they search less for other social activities that are legal but which were socially disfavored.

What do you think is scary about that?

It drives us to sort of a society that is beige, that is not unlike some depictions, accurate or not, of the 1950s, that people want to live their lives or read or learn or explore ideas that are different from the normal, but they're stifled.

Don't you think some of the people that you would present this choice to beige society seems like a small price to pay to anyone who doesn't want to experience terrorism?

Absolutely. And I think the response to that is mass surveillance doesn't stop terrorism. Now, it can certainly investigate crimes, but we also have to bear in mind it's incredibly expensive, and it might not be the best use of our large but finite resources for public safety.

But if you had to choose a society where there was total surveillance, in a society where there was zero surveillance.

I don't think such a society is possible. But I would say I would prefer a society in which there is more freedom than less freedom. I think I would prefer a society in which we realize that absolute safety is impossible.

Neil Richards is the Thomas and Carol Green professor of Law at Washington University. Neil, thank you very much for talking to me.

Thank you for having me.

Stick with us for a minute. We'll be right back. Okay. Remember that game we played, spot the cameras?

Where?

Did you see another one? Have you ever wondered who might be watching on the other side of those cameras? Hello, this is Barbara Morrow. She lives in a tiny town called Ballyhalbert on the coast of Northern Ireland. She doesn't get out of the house much, so we called her on the phone.

We live in an old Irish cottage, a whitewashed Irish cottage.

Do you have any animals?

No. We did have dogs and things, you know, but we're both 80 now, and when our last dog went about 10 years ago, we decided then not to have any more animals.

Barbara and her husband may not have animals, but that's okay, because these days, Barbara gets to see a lot of cats. Where? Where else?

The Internet in Brazil. They have an awful problem with cats getting into the shop and hiding.

You know, cats. Cats, Yep. Cats live on the Internet in Brazil. Why is this lady in Northern Ireland watching for cats in the night in Brazil?

No, it was actually on the tv. There was a snippet on the TV about this new business that had started up in England that you could catch shoplifters on your computer.

The business is called Internet Eyes, and it's basically what it sounds like. She logs onto her computer and sees a bunch of feeds from security cameras in stores all over the place. You watch for stealing stray cats or other bad behavior. As soon as Barbara flags something, she gets a new feed. Sometimes the feeds just disappear without explanation. Store closes, camera comes down, whatever. When you see something and say something by filling out a form, you get a reward, a few dollars. Barbara is way up there on the Watcher leaderboard, usually top three.

My husband has a big fixed computer.

Yeah.

So I have two cams on my computer and four on his. So I'm actually watching six.

Wow. Can you walk me through, like, what happens when you. When you see something that looks suspicious? What do you do there?

There's a red alert button, and then this other screen comes up and it says, man, woman, boy, girl. And you tick who it is that's doing it. Lady in red coat put chocolate in her pocket. Or child is throwing all the produce on the floor out of the fridge.

Barbara is logging at least six hours a day on this. I asked her if it's an addiction.

I suppose it is a kind of addiction, really.

I gotta admit, I was worried for Barbara, watching this stuff all the time. A little old lady seeing maybe robberies, burglaries, something more violent. Do you sleep okay?

Oh, yes.

Barbara actually used to be a store manager in real life before she retired. She's chased people trying to steal meat. She has faced a weirdo menacing shoppers with a knife, so she says she doesn't scare easily. She's tough. But what is it that keeps Barbara watching these feeds?

Well, I don't know whether it's because I've always liked shop work and I've hated shoplifters. I turned, you know, one of the cameras on the other day, and there was a man just right in front of me shoving a big bottle of wine off his coat. And so, you know, I just like catching shoplifters I think I should have been a vigilante or something.

Not every feed has its own Barbara, but there are a lot of Barbaras on the other side of these cameras all over the world watching. I have another quick story for you. This one doesn't just stretch across the ocean. It goes beneath the waves into one of the world's most formidable predators that we are still trying to understand. This is the last place you would expect us to tell you a story about surveillance or salvation. But here goes.

This is Eric. Testing, testing. Hi, my name is Eric Burkinpas, and I'm the director of engineering at National Geographic remote imaging. One of my most memorable projects was trying to put cameras on great white sharks. We were working off of a rusty fishing boat off of the coast of Mexico. We were near an island called Guadalupe island, and our task was to put cameras on great white sharks to capture shark migrating behavior. It was me and another National Geographic staff member. The first two days we were there, we didn't see any sharks and we kind of got complacent. And I remember out of the corner of my eye on the second day, seeing this kind of wake and a fin come up and this shark that was actually bigger than the boat we were working off of took our bait without even pulling on the rope. His teeth sliced through the rope and it just kind of dangled there. I remember thinking like, I couldn't believe there was a fish that was that big. It was more like a submarine. So the way you put a camera onto a great white shark is you use a special pole that's connected to a camera that's on a fin clamp and you lure the shark to go past the boat. You put a tuna on the end of a rope, you pull that tuna out of the shark's mouth. The shark goes after the tuna. And for like half a second you have this window where you can lasso this camera fin clamp over the shark. You push a button, it cinches the clamp down, releases the camera and cuts it free, all with one go. It kind of sounds like the terminator. It's like a chunk. And then the camera's on the shark and it's kind of not your problem anymore. And it just films whatever the shark was doing. It's also got some sensors inside that capture how fast the shark's moving, how warm the water is, what direction the shark's facing, what depth it's at. Try that again. I remember my co worker was baiting the shark with the tuna, trying to get the shark to go by the boat the right direction at the right speed, and right there.

Okay, we got a shark. There we go.

He pulled the tuna out of the shark's mouth, and I was standing behind him with the camera.

Yeah.

And the shark was obviously angry about this and knocked the boat back about 4ft. My CO worker ended up landing on the shark, and I landed where the. Where my co worker is standing. So there was about four seconds of sheer terror. He was basically drifting away with the current, but he thought he was holding a rope that was tied to the boat, but in fact, it was tied to the tuna that he had been baiting the shark with. So I reminded him to swim, and then he swam like Michael Phelps and jumped back into the boat and told me never to tell his girlfriend about it.

Eric and his team have done this all over the place. And a similar visit in South Africa helped make it clear that, contrary to popular belief, great whites were coming in close to the shore during the day to sun themselves and warm up, not to feed, as a lot of beachgoers had feared. In a world where removing the fear of great white sharks helps them continue to survive and exist in a fragile ocean environment, that's the kind of surveillance most people can get behind.

That's why we do it. That's why we build cameras that can probe these places that no one typically goes.

Before we wrap things up, there is one more voice you need to hear. Back in Lancaster, Freda Hall. She's an African American woman who has lived through something no mother should live through.

He wasn't even supposed to be there. He was supposed to be at a party where it was a private party. And his cousins told him, come on, let's go down here. There's a house party. Let's check it out. And he got. He was only there seven minutes, and seven minutes cost him his whole life.

Frida is talking about her son, Tyquan Hall. In 2007, Tyquan went to a party just for a few minutes. Someone pulled out a gun, and Tyquan was shot and killed in the street outside that party. Frieda can still remember arriving at the scene and what it felt like to come up to the police tape wrapped around the scene of the shooting.

So I said, what about my son? And they were like, well, ma', am, who is your son? And I said, his name is Tyquan Hall. And they kind of walked away from me. And then they came back, and they brought another individual back with them and said, until we can identify him, we Cannot say it's your son. So I said, what do you mean? Identify him and come to find out. My son was in the middle of the block. He was the only one that didn't make it that night.

Not long after her son was pronounced dead, police brought Frieda to the nerve center for the cameras, the Lancaster Safety Coalition.

And they took me to where all the. The screens were, and then they explained to me how everything worked. They took the time to say, don't worry about anything. We were able to zoom in close enough to see the murder. And my son was actually the first murder in 07, and it was the first murder that was caught on camera.

The guy who shot Tyquan wasn't from around Lancaster, but he was found thanks to the cameras and the footage was a witness.

I was grateful for that because I had some concerns, like, oh, my God, the camera was at the top of the block. How did you see my son in the middle of the block? How did you see the shooter? And then they showed me how they zoomed in. They took the time to really let me understand what the cameras are really about, and for that, I was so grateful.

Did you have a different opinion of the police and the way that law enforcement existed in the city before that experience?

Definitely before. I used to feel like, oh, they're always picking on somebody, you know? And then when that happened to me and I seen how I was treated, I was like, wow. You know, even to this day, Detective Nichols still asks about me. And that's something that I never thought in this lifetime that I would ever build a relationship with a detective, you know? And the Mayor Gray, he came to my son's funeral. He took the time to come to my son's funeral, and that meant so much to me, because I'm like, wow, for a mayor to come out, you know, just for my son, a black kid, you know, when at one time we thought that blacks wasn't important, it gave me a whole different aspect. I'm not gonna lie, because I used to feel like we weren't important. Blacks wasn't important. And that day really opened my eyes up that, wow, they do look at us like we're somebody.

You've heard lots from us about all of this, and there's a lot more to say about the impact of surveillance around the world. Time to answer our question once and for all, though. And to help us do that, we've asked Anil Dash, technologist, advocate, and much more to come and talk to us. Anil, how are you?

Glad to Be here.

So let's start talking about the episode. I mean, what did you think about some of these stories? Was there anything that jumped out to you?

Yes, the first thing that really jumped out to me was I grew up not far from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, really, in south central Pennsylvania, as we called it. One of the things that suffuses growing up in that area is this immediate awareness of people who have a very thoughtful relationship with technology because there's so many Amish and Mennonite people around.

Right.

What do you do if you're Amish and you're on these cameras? There is no appeal.

They don't have a choice, really. It's happening.

There is no reckoning, and there is no agency.

So do you think in this particular example, are you concerned that even people who took exception to this basically took exception on the basis that they wanted more of it?

We're in an interesting moment in American history where consumer technologies1 have merged with surveillance culture. People are like, I love being on Facebook, and it's a surveillance engine. And so we have this complete merger of technology with surveillance across every consumer category. Our cars, our social media, our social networking, our vacuum cleaners, everything that is called smart is surveilled.

And we're trained to opt in. Yes, Culturally trained to opt in.

What is a smartphone without an Internet connection? I mean, that's like. It's a weight. Yeah. So that's sort of one part. The other part is there's long been an American view of technology as the secular religion of the country. Right. And it didn't matter. When it was tv, it was tv. When it was the Internet, it was Internet. And probably when it was Morse code, it was that. And in each case, to be against the adoption of technology is to be a heretic against the secular religion of America. And it's a weird position for me, as somebody who builds technology and loves it and has worked in the industry to sort of be skeptical of. But like most things, it's mostly good, a little bit bad. And we should be thoughtful. But you don't hear that about the sort of mass surveillance that we're deploying. It's just. It's good. And more would be better. Well, you know, even ice cream, you have to eat, like, a limited amount.

That is true.

And even if, you know. And I don't think, like, private surveillance via webcam of public squares is as good as ice cream.

What did you think about the story about the sharks?

That is incredible. I mean, I have a lot fewer qualms about observing Sharks.

Right. As we all do.

I think if they were dolphins, it would be a different reckoning. I think dolphins, they probably have more rights than sharks, unfortunately, or fortunately. What's interesting was the intent of the use of the technology. It's this empathy. Let's understand them, let's protect them, let's save them.

Which maybe starts at a different point than let's stop the criminals.

Well, and that's it. And so you never hear an advocate of video tracking of humans talk about, let's empathetically save the humans. And I like sharks, but I like people, too.

Yeah. Let's chat about Frida for a minute. It was really interesting to hear that perspective of. I thought, as a black woman, that I had a particular relationship with the police in my community. And that thinking changed after this happened to me.

Yeah. You know, the story was striking and heartbreaking, of course, but it wasn't the technology what changed that relationship. And her view of the police was confronting the humanity of somebody when you're vulnerable and you're hurt and you've suffered a grievous loss. I don't want to dismiss the compassion she was shown by the police, but, my God, if you can't be compassionate towards a woman who's lost her son, there's a far, far deeper problem. But it's a separate issue from the role that technology played. One, I think a lot of police are very good at their jobs and can find and hold people accountable for crimes like murder and other forms of violence without cameras. I think. Two, the fact that she only got the compassionate treatment from this institution after suffering this kind of loss is a problem, not something to be featured after. Right. And I think it speaks to the distancing that the cameras do. I think, as the critics pointed out, that that was the first conversation she'd had with those detectives. If they weren't trying to police by camera, would they have been in the neighborhood and already had a relationship with her to where she would have seen their humanity and they had seen hers?

Yeah. Do you think we can build surveillance responsibly?

No.

And that it can save us?

No. You know, I think only we can save us. The tech does what we want. Right. And the tech follows our values. And we haven't had the conversation about what our values are about this.

Can we trust ourselves to have the value conversation? And if not, then what's our option?

When we use tech to try to mediate our values, it just postpones the conversation and heightens it until it is too fraught to go undiscussed.

Anil Dash, thank you for talking to me about this.

Thank you so much for having me.

Okay, that's it for now. By the way, if you want access to all of this season's episodes, you don't have to wait for them to come out. Find our code somehow. Once you get it, you can input your code at the website. Codebreaker codes. Our show is produced by Claire Tennisketter. Our senior producer is Golda Arthur. Our engineers, Jake Gorski. We got production support from Levi Sharp and Marketplace tech producer Stephanie Hughes. Marketplace's executive producer, Setara Nieves, and Marketplaces vice president is Deborah Clark. Our theme music is by Mux Mool. Our show is made in partnership with the nice folks at Tech Insider and their robot overlord, Dan Bobkoff. You can get updated on their stories and much more@businessinsider.com just don't believe what they say about us.

The man shoving a big bottle of wine up his coat.

I'm Ben Brock Johnson. Codebreaker is a Marketplace production from AP.