Western Standard - The silent thief

00:00:00.000 Good evening, Western Standard viewers, and welcome to Hannaford, a weekly politics show

00:00:21.600 of the Western Standard. It is Thursday, January the 15th. It's a bit of a cliche, I know, but

00:00:28.480 everybody has got their own story about their phone picking up the conversation and then getting

00:00:34.740 unsolicited advertising somebody is listening but that's really surface stuff these days there's a

00:00:41.000 whole issue now of artificial intelligence and the 6g never mind the 5g the 6g surveillance state 1.00

00:00:51.020 There's Elon Musk's deepfake programs.

00:00:55.160 The list goes on and on.

00:00:57.620 If you're the worrying kind, there's a lot on the Internet to worry about.

00:01:02.460 With me today is Tim Jordan, an Internet security expert with Shield Networks, Inc.

00:01:09.500 He will make you worry even more, but he may have some suggestions as to how you can diminish your risk.

00:01:16.080 Tim, welcome to the show.

00:01:18.220 Thank you very much for having me.

00:01:19.260 Well, it's a great pleasure.

00:01:21.300 Tim, let's just talk a bit about where we're at with all of this.

00:01:33.220 Your business card says you're a cybersecurity apostle.

00:01:39.400 You're obviously having a little bit of fun with us there,

00:01:42.320 but apostles tend to be popularizers of something.

00:01:46.620 What are you popularizing?

00:01:49.260 Yeah. Well, I use that term because I feel sort of like I'm one sent forth, as the term apostle

00:01:55.820 means, to keep people protected and business protected. And it feels like a divine mission,

00:02:01.980 honestly. Really? Yeah. Well, protected against what?

00:02:05.740 The bad guys. They're constantly, they're improving and you just got to always be on the

00:02:12.780 defense like we've said when we were talking earlier you you mentioned 6g now i'm not a

00:02:19.500 i'm not into this stuff the way you are the first time i've heard 6g what um what does it do that

00:02:27.100 5g is not going to do yeah so it's not just about like faster internet um and it's still still maybe

00:02:33.180 a few years away maybe about five years away from actually being a standard that's finalized but

00:02:38.140 different nations are jockeying for what they're going to what it's going to be but

00:02:42.700 they're talking about it's more of a sensing network it means the very fabric of the network

00:02:47.180 is the computer and that means ai will be the fabric like it'll be the radio waves coming through

00:02:53.740 being so am i going to think it and it's going to go on the screen yes is that what you're

00:02:57.340 is that what this is that's what this is this could be uh socially disadvantageous to some

00:03:02.940 people i think all right um does that and it is tempting to be frivolous about this kind of thing

00:03:10.860 but the way you put it you think it it'll go on the screen does that mean your wife is going to

00:03:16.220 know what you're thinking yeah i mean i hope there's some safeguards there like to uh be able

00:03:21.340 to uh you know stop this from being projected i'm sure there will be i mean no one will want to use

00:03:26.300 a system that is uncensored thought from your brain that would be a disaster obviously but

00:03:33.900 okay so you know okay to be totally serious now this is something that's in the works

00:03:40.220 it's going to do things that we that we don't anticipate yeah and that if you speculate you

00:03:46.700 You sound like either a genius before your time or a total crackpot,

00:03:54.240 but in all seriousness, what does 6G mean from the angle of maintaining

00:04:00.820 the security of your personal information?

00:04:05.260 Yeah, I guess that's a tough question.

00:04:08.560 And when is it coming in?

00:04:09.940 Yeah, the standards won't be finalized for a few years.

00:04:13.140 And again, like I said, each nation is jockeying for like, they're doing this in their labs and they're trying to figure out the extent of what it's going to be.

00:04:20.760 Like it's, it's a sensing network.

00:04:23.040 So the photons and the radiation coming off the antennas will be inside your house reading your movements and tracking.

00:04:30.900 And so, yeah, from a personal, like we're going to probably need laws and regulations to really stop the overreach.

00:04:40.640 Okay.

00:04:40.980 what what could overreach and i appreciate all you said that the standards are still being set

00:04:46.820 but the fact that they upped the number from you know it used to be three and then it was four it

00:04:52.600 was now five now they're talking about this quantum jump yes 6g uh what kind of things could

00:05:01.500 could we run into on this and i'm talking about from the point of preserving your personal

00:05:06.540 information we've already had we're joking about the fact that it'll the wretched phone listens

00:05:11.900 to your conversations and then start sending you ads well all right that's just picking up your

00:05:18.180 voice what what's this going to do yeah like you said hard to speculate and it it can do a lot more

00:05:26.380 than than they would allow it to do so they're going to be they're going to be taming it down

00:05:30.440 of course they'll be using probably in environments to spy on people like oh i just wonder about this

00:05:35.360 Venezuela thing there and how they knew the environment before they went in and they could

00:05:42.540 have been using elements of 6G already for that operation. Really? Yeah. I mean, do you know that

00:05:48.220 or are you just sleeping? Speculating, but just kind of hearing the way they talk and what I've

00:05:52.700 heard about how 6G is going, it's like very interesting. Well, okay. So let's go a little

00:05:59.760 further along this line, you have, uh, spoken, uh, about, um, the, the, the phrase, the AI native

00:06:10.180 to describe the future of the internet. What does that mean?

00:06:17.060 So everything AI right now, we use it like, we sort of use it like an app. You pull up

00:06:22.040 your grok or your chat gpt app and you ask it questions um but in the future the very near

00:06:30.140 future it's not going to be an app anymore it'll be more like the operating system

00:06:33.260 or the very fabric of the network the network will be the ai so you won't necessarily go

00:06:37.920 you won't need an app to get this the ai will be generating it like procedurally generating it for

00:06:44.120 you as you need it that's where we're going okay can you give me an example what that would look

00:06:49.940 like in what today would be a normal office transaction? You have to, okay, you've got to

00:06:56.600 read a memo, you have to make a phone call, talk about it, make a decision, hang up. Now,

00:07:04.720 when it's AI native, what does that sort of transaction look like?

00:07:09.100 It could look a lot like it doing it for you before it knowing what you need to have done

00:07:13.720 and it doing it for you and just reporting on what it did later

00:07:18.720 on the day for you.

00:07:22.240 So I called Premier Smith and told her that and she said,

00:07:27.680 and there you go, you're fired.

00:07:29.840 What's the, uh, well, yeah, a lot of things that's coming

00:07:34.480 now is like you could, you could spawn an AI persona of yourself,

00:07:38.120 knowing everything and say the premier also does that.

00:07:40.780 And your AI's negotiate.

00:07:43.720 come up with a solution and inform you of it later.

00:07:48.260 But this is already happening.

00:07:50.100 Like certain governments are doing this.

00:07:52.440 Really?

00:07:53.000 Yeah.

00:07:53.880 They're using a lot of AI to,

00:07:56.380 I think it was the government of Sweden,

00:07:59.100 the leader of Sweden was criticized

00:08:00.700 for using ChatGPT to make some policy decisions.

00:08:05.920 But yeah.

00:08:06.820 Yeah, but I mean,

00:08:07.700 there's one thing to call ChatGPT

00:08:09.820 and say, give me a summary of all the such and such.

00:08:13.720 and then use that as your basic research.

00:08:16.800 I mean, I think a lot of people do that now.

00:08:20.880 What was the line she crossed?

00:08:23.900 Well, I don't think it was a line.

00:08:24.880 They were just being criticized that you're just heavily using the AI too much for policy decisions.

00:08:32.780 Like you said, it's not that.

00:08:34.140 That's one thing.

00:08:35.220 Well, yeah, spawning an AI persona of yourself that intimately knows who you are and acts as you,

00:08:40.100 sending it out to negotiate for you that's something that's real and coming okay well

00:08:45.940 just to kind of help the poor old listener um wrap his eye or her a head around this

00:08:52.540 we've already got thanks to one of the the ai programs where people have ai companions you

00:09:03.620 know this guy's got a always available girlfriend she's completely fictitious but she comes on 1.00

00:09:09.240 there's a picture of her on the screen they they talk i guess with a long long language model it 0.85

00:09:14.440 probably isn't going to be too deep but at any rate there she is and he takes some consolation

00:09:19.640 from that and presumably there are males for for females now that's not what you're talking about

00:09:28.360 when you're talking about an ai persona is it not really yeah how does the ai persona

00:09:34.040 go beyond what we'd already know how to do.

00:09:38.780 Well, I guess it would be like really digging deep into you,

00:09:44.280 digitally cloning you in a sense,

00:09:47.800 putting what you would, saying what you would say

00:09:50.880 and doing what you would do and deciding how you would decide.

00:09:53.240 So my AI persona thinks it's time that I talk to somebody else's AI persona

00:10:01.460 it and some somehow the two connect well okay i actually can picture that but isn't there

00:10:13.380 a problem with the whole idea of the ai language itself that is essentially like it doesn't think

00:10:23.140 everybody thinks it thinks what it does is if the long language model if i'm correctly informed and

00:10:28.900 you would know better than I if I am. But as I understand it, it has an enormous reservoir

00:10:35.540 of knowledge, but it only knows what's in that reservoir. It's not actually going to be able to

00:10:45.220 think and go outside of that gateway. So the idea that it would think, you know,

00:10:56.260 it's really time that Nigel had a talk with so-and-so about such and such a thing. It's

00:11:01.780 not going to do that. It's only going to wait for me to say, I really should talk to so-and-so

00:11:08.660 about such and such. And this is what I would want to get out of the conversation. Oh, all right.

00:11:12.900 And then it goes off and it contacts the other persona. Are you suggesting this thing can really

00:11:19.700 actually think and make forward looking decisions? Yeah. So what you're describing

00:11:24.820 there is what all AI companies are going after. They call it artificial super intelligence or AGI,

00:11:30.420 general intelligence. Really?

00:11:32.020 And they're talking about exactly that for an AI to be able to think outside of the information

00:11:37.940 given it and create. And they're all racing towards it.

00:11:42.260 I mean, are they close?

00:11:43.700 I would say so.

00:11:44.660 Really? So, all right, let's talk about Derek Fildebrand, who's the

00:11:52.980 publisher of the western standard he walks into his office one day the computer on his desk

00:12:02.900 just knows that he's coming in because it's been tracking his cup truck and yeah

00:12:10.180 and it turns itself on and says good morning derek um i had a little chat with so-and-so for you

00:12:16.100 and the stuff's on the way.

00:12:19.340 We don't want to order anything.

00:12:21.760 You know, are we looking at those situations?

00:12:24.420 Absolutely, 100%.

00:12:26.040 Why would we do that?

00:12:28.440 I guess it just makes your life easier,

00:12:31.040 more, less friction.

00:12:34.500 It knows you're going to want that egg McMuffin

00:12:37.640 this morning or something like that,

00:12:39.180 studying your patterns.

00:12:41.160 So, you know, a 50-pound bag of dog food arrives,

00:12:45.060 but your dog died last night you know i can see problems with this indeed um let's get to the

00:12:52.280 serious stuff here i mean there are two things i think that people are legitimately concerned about

00:12:57.780 as artificial intelligence invades our lives first it is an invasion we feel like we're losing

00:13:04.820 control but the most important thing is we feel that our personal information is at risk so i would

00:13:14.280 would love you to tell us how it's at risk, thinking particularly of banking information,

00:13:20.440 but also all the information you would need to secure personal identity, everything you

00:13:24.560 need when you put in for a driver's license or anything else like that, or a credit card.

00:13:32.920 What risks are we facing right now from artificial intelligence's ability to scan?

00:13:39.840 yeah i think the biggest uh threat is impersonation it it can it people can act as you talk as you

00:13:48.000 synthesize your voice like we could we could overlay something over me right now and change

00:13:52.800 me a different person different voice that i could be talking in real time moving my hands

00:13:56.140 i could be acting as you and you i could talk to your wife or whoever and say please wire me this

00:14:02.180 information or send us check or this information over here and so that's the biggest it's

00:14:07.520 impersonation and the so that's what we really have to think about that's going to be wrapping

00:14:14.280 up a lot in the next year or two and you'll be probably getting calls from people that you think

00:14:19.420 you know but it's not them or video even video calls and to verify it you think oh that's them

00:14:25.220 well no it probably isn't and they're going to be studying your movements they'll know that you might

00:14:29.820 rub your eye a lot or whatever you do so impersonation and

00:14:34.920 well okay we already have i believe the ability for somebody to fake a voice and claim to

00:14:43.340 you know your grounds i'm your grandson and i'm in prison in venezuela you know whatever yeah

00:14:50.560 um send money immediately for legal fees they can do that yeah and people do fall for it

00:14:57.420 in what way is this going to take it a step further and make you more vulnerable?

00:15:03.980 Just a lot harder to decipher if that's like a fake thing,

00:15:08.940 like trying to get you to, you know, that, that, that, since there, there's,

00:15:13.520 you know, people have fallen for it. It's kind of getting public.

00:15:16.960 Those, those attacks might not be, you know,

00:15:20.640 they're easier to protect against, but now you're going to be falling for,

00:15:23.660 you know how do you know if someone's real if someone's not and well i mean how do you know

00:15:30.880 do you have any uh tips i do for example i had a client that called me uh from banff he said oh

00:15:38.600 forgot the password and i just call him back said all right and i happen to know this person from

00:15:46.540 young i said so just to verify what what uh where did you live when you're young and then

00:15:51.840 he verified some other things that we did when we were young. So something in AI wouldn't know

00:15:56.640 if it's not on the internet. So they didn't know then, but I bet it's listening and it knows next

00:16:01.120 time. And that was next time. So you, oh, yes, exactly. You gotta always change the key.

00:16:06.000 Yeah. A lot of times they talk about a safe word where you come up with it before, but then you

00:16:10.800 always have to change the key. Right. And also another thing, if you did get a call, you, you

00:16:15.200 don't use end the call. If they're asking you to do something, you end it and call them back

00:16:19.040 through a different channel to you know it's is rare that the ai or the the attackers will be

00:16:25.520 attacking you on multiple fronts now it can happen but that's a good one of the good golden rules is

00:16:31.040 if you call me asking me to do something okay i'll call you back yeah and make sure that it's you and

00:16:37.120 then do your other things yeah okay well i guess all right fair enough that that's one thing yeah

00:16:44.560 Um, there's, uh, what, what danger is there that sophisticated scammers could get hold

00:16:54.380 of your bank information simply by looking for it?

00:16:59.100 I mean, one of the things we've found here, the Western Standard is that you can ask one

00:17:04.460 of the, one of the chat GPT or Grok or something like that and review all the answered for

00:17:11.940 the last five years looking for references to this particular pipelines or something like that

00:17:17.440 well it chalters away for a couple of minutes comes back with it and there there there's all

00:17:23.600 the information you still got to check it but at least you've saved yourself that step of searching

00:17:29.960 for it now in the let's not think about Hansard let's think about your banking information or my

00:17:38.040 banking information, can they get past with AI, can they get past the basic bank security

00:17:48.060 and look at your information?

00:17:50.440 Yeah.

00:17:51.560 So the AIs now can act as a user on a computer, moving the mouse cursor around, clicking on

00:17:58.080 the things.

00:17:59.080 So if it has access to, say you store your banking information in a notepad on your phone

00:18:04.840 or on your computer could potentially go in and read that plug the information to the site

00:18:09.240 you transfer to contacts that you didn't want to so absolutely yep could act as a human

00:18:15.380 again how do you protect yourself as best you can

00:18:23.620 yeah with banking and that terms would be make sure you keep if you can if you if you're at all

00:18:31.940 possible don't keep your the keys to your account written down so to speak in the digital realm for

00:18:38.960 an ai to watch or to find if you can keep it in your head somehow or or create a series of keys

00:18:46.420 on notes that you can if you do forget it you can piece it together um like manually and in the

00:18:53.380 analog world it's gonna just take a lot more thinking and a lot more well it obviously must

00:18:59.160 be possible to predict yourself somewhat because i haven't read any stories about people

00:19:03.560 um losing their bitcoin fortune because somebody worked out their password i've heard of people

00:19:11.460 losing their password forgetting it and being unable to access their bitcoin account um but

00:19:18.580 i haven't heard of anybody actually saying what just happened here like deciphering it i mean it

00:19:24.280 would happen that they could steal it if they had it written down right but uh if they don't have it

00:19:28.840 written down digitally then it would be tough

00:19:30.960 but not impossible I

00:19:32.840 suppose. Well I mean again if

00:19:34.780 they're watching once you've done one

00:19:36.740 transaction now they know

00:19:38.980 the keystrokes. Yep.

00:19:42.620 Yeah and all the data is being collected and it's

00:19:44.740 never being forgotten.

00:19:46.440 So you keep changing your passwords.

00:19:51.000 I don't know whether I like the world we're going

00:19:52.780 into very much at all Tim. This is

00:19:54.560 brutal stuff and

00:19:56.420 if we're talking about things that we don't like

00:19:58.840 Um, talk to us about the, uh, the, the, uh, the deepfake technology that's out there now.

00:20:08.380 It's extremely sophisticated.

00:20:10.760 Um, Mr. Musk has been making the headlines with Grok recently.

00:20:16.780 Apparently there's some, um, software there that allows you to play around with images.

00:20:23.120 Yeah.

00:20:23.300 Um, we live in a society that's highly image driven.

00:20:27.880 and we don't use words anymore than what we do,

00:20:30.460 but, you know, we'll say Facebook, for example,

00:20:33.860 and various other social media,

00:20:36.800 there are pictures of people,

00:20:40.100 and once you have one picture, you can start to manipulate it.

00:20:43.620 Yeah.

00:20:45.340 Do you think we should stop putting our pictures on Facebook?

00:20:47.820 I kind of do.

00:20:50.760 Okay, say that again, Lyle.

00:20:52.920 Do you think it's time to stop putting pictures on Facebook?

00:20:56.160 I would say so.

00:20:57.880 yeah because these programs this this ai can probably be sent to look for pictures of

00:21:07.960 individual people when you retrieve the image and you manipulate the image

00:21:12.800 yeah and in a way there's no real hiding from it either because like you go in public your

00:21:17.700 your your picture is being taken by all the uh surveillance cameras all around but yeah

00:21:23.320 i think a lot of people are going to start pulling back when they start to see the pictures themselves

00:21:27.860 in various scenarios and you know the bad guys are doing this there's no there's no guardrails

00:21:33.440 you know some the bigger companies started with the censorship and guardrails but that's

00:21:38.200 quick those wheels are quickly falling off as the private ai guys build their super clusters at home 0.53

00:21:44.380 with no guardrails putting out whatever they want okay and i had i this is why you were here you're

00:21:52.600 here to straighten me out on things i got the impression that when you uh use ai for whatever

00:21:59.780 purpose you're dealing with a massive computer set up somewhere else like your little desktop

00:22:06.320 computer is not going to do what you want it to do you are instructing a computer somewhere else

00:22:12.540 now it seems like you're saying that there are some people who have invested and been able to

00:22:20.380 and afford to invest in computers that'll do all kinds of dreadful things.

00:22:26.440 Yeah.

00:22:26.760 The, the power is this common, it's just emerging, just emerging.

00:22:31.480 The power that you can buy now, you can get a super cluster of Apple Mac

00:22:36.220 studio computers for them and you can put them all together and you can, you

00:22:39.760 can process, you can churn out AI answers and AI, uh, processing almost

00:22:45.220 as fast as the big guys.

00:22:46.260 now this is just going to get so so you have that in your house doing your bidding

00:22:52.260 and you can connect to the internet you can make it go out and attack certain sites or

00:22:58.920 go after certain people but on the on the on the bright side too like the good guys can use this

00:23:04.520 too like you need to be able to you know you know less censorship is generally a good thing so

00:23:11.480 So while it's dangerous, obviously, and then, but the good people can also use the same

00:23:17.540 tools to protect.

00:23:20.080 Well, all right.

00:23:22.020 We're good people.

00:23:23.160 We want to protect.

00:23:25.340 Do we have to go out and buy a super cluster to do it?

00:23:29.460 Some, yeah.

00:23:30.640 I mean, I'm not saying you and I have to do that.

00:23:32.740 Like right now to get something like that would be about $70,000, which is not out of

00:23:39.300 reach for some people especially if you're going to be making money with it so yeah i don't i

00:23:44.920 wouldn't say everyone needs to do this but definitely uh the good guys need to keep thinking

00:23:50.300 keep keep maybe stay up at night a little bit later get up a little bit earlier and then and do

00:23:56.900 what i guess strategize like it's always been that way honesty and it and cyber security it's always

00:24:04.860 been you're a defensive posture you're you're reading what's out there and then you're going

00:24:10.220 oh boy how do we protect so and then you just you come up with plans and you build your defense

00:24:17.340 well you're you're frightening me i think you've that i mean the question is if the government

00:24:24.620 can't stop these these um robo callers and ai scammers what can regular people actually do 1.00

00:24:33.820 yeah and uh this was a what would what would you if they came to a shoot your name shield network

00:24:44.860 is the name of your company yeah so if somebody came and said i saw your interview with hannaford

00:24:49.980 you got me really rattled i want you to help me what could you do for them yeah so a company say

00:24:58.380 business would hire our company to uh to really like start take a look at their it infrastructure

00:25:06.220 kind of inherit it and manage it and shore it up against with defenses that we have learned

00:25:15.020 and that we're continually learning every day like there's it's non-stop it's getting faster

00:25:18.940 and faster so yeah it would be we people hire us and trust us to keep their systems

00:25:27.660 out of the hands of the bad guys yeah okay yeah well well that's your free ad but uh i wish you

00:25:35.820 well with that uh tim yeah um you know have you ever heard of flash paper flash paper yes it's

00:25:44.540 it's a mafia thing and it's a paper that's been soaked in a highly inflammable

00:25:51.820 chemical compound so the second that the police burst through the door you hit it with your

00:25:58.680 cigarette and it's gone oh there's no evidence i think that that's the future of communications

00:26:04.140 interesting yes i sent it over in an envelope and second you don't need it anymore it's gone

00:26:09.720 tim this has been great thank you very much for coming on coming on in it's you know it's a new

00:26:15.920 world with different challenges i'm sure we will negotiate them in the end if people can think of

00:26:20.800 way to do it they can probably think of a way to undo it that is got to be our hope 100 yeah

00:26:26.560 as we say goodbye thank you very much thanks for coming in for the western standard i'm nigel

Western Standard - January 16, 2026

The silent thief

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