How AI Is Fueling an Explosion of Digital Crime: Chris Olson

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Online crime is on the rise, and the criminals’ methods are getting more and more sophisticated. How do these predators target their prey? And what can be done to stop them?

“In certain experiences, up to 50 percent of what a consumer feels and sees and hears on the web is designed specifically for that individual to hear,” Olson says Chris Olson, founder and CEO of The Media Trust, a security platform that protects digital consumers and corporations from online threats.

“Cyber security as an industry is designed to protect the corporate or the government castle. And, in doing that, it leaves people out of the equation,” he says. “Cyber is an attack on a corporation, perhaps even an attack on an employee. Digital crime is an attack on grandmothers and children and all of us in our daily lives.”

In this episode, we discuss the role of artificial intelligence and targeted ads in internet crime, and what the governments digital priorities should be.

“Governments need to protect from digital crime like they do crime—a state, federal, local issue. And we have yet to see that come in,” says Olson.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Chris Olson, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Chris Olson:
Thanks for having me, Jan.

Mr. Jekielek:
There’s a film that I watched on the plane not too long ago, “The Beekeeper.” Jason Stratham spends an hour-and-a-half fighting the bad guys, who turn out to be cyber thieves that have an elaborate operation to steal people’s funds. These days, I keep getting phishing emails and it’s amazing how sophisticated these things are. In some cases, I’ve even been halfway to clicking on something that would have been disastrous. Please tell us what’s going on here.

Mr. Olson:
First, “The Beekeeper” automatically became one of my top favorite movies of all time. I’ve seen it as well. I can make another recommendation, and that is, “Thelma.” What’s fascinating is what we’re seeing in movies is reflecting an urgency and a fear within society of digital crime and digital attacks, and that the only recourse that we have is some form of vigilantism. Certainly, they’re fairly far-fetched in their response to the actual attacks. It is interesting in that it is art reflecting life, and it’s bringing this issue to the fore.

Mr. Jekielek:
Yes. In this situation, a warning pops up on the computer. How do these things work exactly?

Mr. Olson:
Yes. We want to focus on not just how they work, but how precisely they are curated and targeted to our citizens. By taking a step back and looking at the holistic digital ecosystem, our job is to help companies not harm their consumers. We work for Big Tech, digital media, and advertising technology companies to ensure that when people are visiting websites, mobile apps, and experiencing advertising online, that they’re not being attacked. If something is nefarious, our job is to detect it.

The hard part about our job is understanding personal profiles, because everything is so perfectly targeted. We ourselves have to make sure that we are being targeted. If you aren’t a grandmother, you can’t see what happens to a grandmother, so we have to become profiles that reflect how the internet is targeting consumers. That really gets to how all of this works.

There are three basic components. The first step is data collection. Everywhere you go online, everything you’re reading, and also everywhere you go when you’re driving in your car is being tracked and collected. Then the primary second step is bundling us up into audiences. Then the third big step is that moment of targeting content, which is really what’s curating all of our individual experiences online, and sometimes that targeted content is nefarious.

The way that brand advertisers and big companies are communicating with us to sell products and services and the way that politicians are now campaigning to us, almost down at the neighborhood or even household level for political campaigns, has the exact same infrastructure that’s used by bad actors to put a tech support scam in front of a grandmother who is visiting a website that she goes to every day. Then it causes that chain reaction that makes the consumer feel unsafe and have not a good experience with the digital ecosystem. But then when it works, it is stealing their bank account or causing other bad things to happen down the line.

Mr. Jekielek:
Please talk about this targeting and the whole process that you just described, this data collection that is happening constantly in real time, all the time. I have this iPad here and it’s collecting data and then there’s this very specific targeting of ads. It’s hard to imagine that this is all happening at this speed and at this scale.

Mr. Olson:
To put it into context, we can use the timeline of 2010-11 which saw the initial use of AI to aid in collection of data. Then we’re going to move to the present and how real-time targeting is occurring, and even how content is created on the fly. In the beginning it was understanding our relationship with digital and then collecting that information so that advertisers could place targeted content. That raises the value of our individual eyeballs and our digital companies can make more money.

The second step, which is really in line with that time period, 2010-2012, was using AI to execute better organization of customers into cohorts that could be sold. That’s going to give you a better, hyper-target, and gives the advertiser a better ability to touch us individually. That created a requirement that messaging had to be tailored to all of us as individuals. We’ve gone through a process over the last 10 to 11 years where AI is becoming faster and faster at creating instant messaging tailored to us.

If you think about ChatGPT, you ask it a question, it’s going to give you back an answer that it is literally writing on the fly in response to what you requested. AI is so good today already, that based on all of the different attributes of you, both what they know and what they don’t know, it is able to write content on the fly based on that proclivity. There are a lot of ramifications to this.

But one of the big problems is that Big Tech, digital media, the ad ecosystem, and political campaigns themselves aren’t necessarily going to know what they’re saying to you at the moment that you’re looking at their device. Because AI and an algorithm have decided that they’re not going to know in advance what they’re saying to you at that moment. We’re moving into a space where it is not only computers that are collecting data and organizing it in incredibly efficient and effective ways. The battleground for finding digital crime is now literally on the personal device, because that’s where the content is being written on the fly as we sit there.

Mr. Jekielek:
The ramifications of what you just said are profound. In a number of cities, there are driverless cars. The question is, if there’s an accident, who’s responsible? Similarly, in this situation, if there is an algorithm that is creating the messaging that causes someone to affect a particular behavior, but there is no actual person that did that, who is ultimately responsible? This is a big question of ethics and something we’re going to have to face.

Mr. Olson:
Yes. In the future of our society, we have to face the idea that we can’t fully control what is happening to us through the internet. The good news is that this is a big kitchen table issue. The smart politicians are starting to understand this. It may be the largest kitchen table issue that has yet to be addressed.

Slowly but surely, this is becoming a mainstream issue. We can see that in the media movement. We can see that with the movies coming out where the thematic vigilantism says. “We’ve got to fix this ourselves.” We’re moving into a time where politicians are going to have to deal with it. Then from there, we’ll see more government action.

But it’s also a very complex question as to who owns the problem. Big Tech, digital media, and many companies spend a lot of time and resources trying very hard to not have their technology targeting and attacking people. But they don’t own the full internet. It’s a public domain.

People are acclimated to governments protecting them, certainly in Western society. Let me give kudos to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. They sentenced a tech support scam operator just yesterday, and that’s great work. But there isn’t any sustainable defense mechanism in the digital ecosystem for protecting people 24/7 on an everyday basis. That’s the big leap that we’re going to have to take. Governments need to protect us from digital crime like they do for federal, state, and local crime. We have yet to see that come in.

Mr. Jekielek:
There have been an inordinate amount of resources put towards protecting companies from cyber crime. We do that ourselves at The Epoch Times, because we face a lot of cyber attacks from communist China. We can set up very elaborate defense systems, but even then we can get slowed down with one of these big attacks. But I still get a ton of phishing emails. People that are older don’t even grasp how this all works. It’s very difficult for them to understand that an email, which looks very convincing, is going to harm them.

Mr. Olson:
Cybersecurity as an industry is designed to protect the corporate or the government castle. In doing that, it leaves individual people out of the equation. It’s a relatively mature industry at this stage. The basis of the industry is to monetize the chief security officer of the corporation [CISO], often risk managers, and the general counsel. This is a good thing for the companies and for the governments. Their core job is to ensure that that corporation is safe from cyber attack.

Often when a government says, “We’re protecting you from the internet,” what they mean is they’re protecting your data on their machine. Cyber is designed to enable those particular executives to execute on their primary goal and challenge. What that leaves out almost entirely is what happens to people. Why are kids still able to buy drugs online? Why are grandmothers being targeted with hyper-specific digital crime attacks?

Cyber is often looked at as a solution to protect all of us, and the technology to deliver a lot of these attacks is exactly the same. We have to think about it in the context of the victim. Cyber is an attack on a corporation, perhaps even an attack on an employee. Digital crime is an attack on grandmothers and children and all of us in our daily lives.
To appreciate how those attacks are occurring, we’ve got to put ourselves in the shoes of people, and not just the employees of corporations. Also, I think cyber has been geared technologically and even via compliance rules to simply protect a machine.
With a lot of these attacks, it isn’t just technology that’s targeting the person. The words and the content of the social engineering-style attacks, are what happen to people, and that has yet to become a cyber priority. Maybe it’s okay if it doesn’t stay cyber, as long as we start giving some amount of energy and thought towards protecting people as well.

Mr. Jekielek:
How prevalent is this? Do you have a sense of the scale of this?

Mr. Olson:
We’re 19 years in and every year it goes up. Our job is to help companies that are scaled globally. We’re trying to protect billions of people from millions of attacks every single day. Certainly, there isn’t anyone that I know that’s in the 35 to 55-year-old age range that doesn’t have a parent that hasn’t been hit by some kind of attack. We’re in a society now where everyone has either been attacked many times, or they certainly know someone who has. Too many of those targeted attacks are then resulting in actual bad things happening, so this is very prevalent.

To give an example that happened in the last two weeks, the CrowdStrike IT issue, which was not a cyber attack, created knock-on effects that used digital targeting and social engineering to steal a lot of people’s money and to get a lot of source code onto devices for future attacks. The way they did this is very similar to what happens in the movies or with tech support scams. Bad actors followed up by placing targeted pop-ups in front of people where they knew that antivirus solution was on the device, so it had been customized.

The pop-up said, “If you use McAfee, your McAfee is out of date. Click this button. If you’re using CrowdStrike, you’ve got to take this next step to fix your issue with Windows.” It was hyper-targeted, curated content delivered on the fly. This came out within hours of the announcement of the issue. This wasn’t designed by people in back rooms creating individual experiences.

We detected this in French, running in France, in German, running in Germany, and in Spanish, running in South and Latin American countries. It is curated and smart enough to tailor the message to your individual persona and how you approach the Internet. That would be hundreds of millions of people being targeted within hours of a geopolitical event such as this CrowdStrike issue.

The way that this likely needs to be addressed, certainly in the near term, until there’s some form of technology that helps the companies that are serving content understand better what they’re serving, it needs to be addressed at a local level and then moving up to a broader picture.

Our problem right now in prosecution is collecting data, which happens locally, but then also prosecuting global criminals and state actors who are then targeting people in very local markets. Again, the good news is that we have a structure today that helps us support prevention in local markets for any type of crime. That’s in place today. We have different levels of crime fighting leading up to the FBI that are looking at this across the country. We have facilities in place to work with our allies to find and prosecute criminals.

We are putting ourselves into the mindset of leveraging that existing infrastructure within crime and realizing that digital crime is just like every other crime. To the extent that we can influence cyber to be thinking the same way, and to reduce what’s targeting our corporations and governments, is a critical next step.

Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s offer viewers some examples of what this actually looks like.

Mr. Olson:
Looking at this first attack, what this is showing first is that the attacker knows the consumer is in France. You’ll notice that the entire experience is in French language. You’re going to notice that it’s suggesting that they are the Windows Defender antivirus solution to that person that is in France. The entire attack is designed around understanding that it’s a device that’s running Windows, that leverages Windows Defender, and that the person is in France.

What’s interesting about this is that you pick a country, pick a device type, pick a browser or an operating system, and you’re going to get customizations on the fly targeting that particular person. What’s so sinister about this, and this is a very simple example, is that it’s designed to make that person feel comfortable that it must know them, so therefore, they’re going to take that next step.

Mr. Jekielek:
How can you figure out that this is not legitimate?

Mr. Olson:
In this particular example, you don’t want to listen to what your computer is telling you. If it’s creating a pop-up and suggesting that you call a number that you’ve never heard of before, that’s not something that big technology companies are going to do. The bigger issue in explaining what a person would do is that we’ve been trying to educate the consumer for at least 15 years, and that is having very little to no impact. Not to suggest we shouldn’t continue consumer education on the problem, but that is not going to solve the things that are happening.

More broadly, we would recommend that you look at just about anything that appears on your device with a critical eye, and think through what the outcome is. We’ve trained ourselves to instantaneously respond to inbound communications on our devices. That’s a very natural human thing that we do. We could talk about the impact on society of just interacting with our devices and the problems that creates.

One of the manifestations is it’s very simple to put things in front of people to cause them to do something on a machine, and that’s what criminals are leveraging. My personal advice is to look at anything that’s delivered to you on your computer without you asking for it with a grain of salt. Your best protection is reducing the amount of interaction you have with things that are just appearing in front of you. The other thing is that if you know people that have been attacked and you’ve been attacked yourselves, it’s time to start talking about it, because I don’t think the consumer is going to be able to protect themselves from this problem.

Mr. Jekielek:
I recently talked on the phone with a friend of mine who had created an engagement ring. He had gotten an ancient Roman coin and had it placed into a ring setting. Later that day, an ad popped up on my phone that was basically an auction for that type of ring. Is that a coincidence? It’s an extremely unusual product.

Mr. Olson:
If you’re following that trail, then you know where we sit as a company at The Media Trust. If you’ve ever said something out loud, if you’ve ever even thought something, and moments later it appeared on your television or your laptop or your mobile phone, then you can understand and you can feel how the ecosystem works. Now, it is very unlikely that it’s coincidence because it’s Big Tech and digital media’s job to ensure that every single thing that you see is maximizing revenue.

It’s interesting that you would call it an auction model. A highly significant 10 to 20 percent, and in certain experiences up to 50 percent of what a consumer feels and sees and hears on the web is designed specifically for that individual to hear. People watching connected television and streaming are seeing that they’re pushing things in front of you, because they want to move you to watch a certain thing to keep you on their application. That’s getting better and better and it’s based on where you’re sitting.

If you’re in France, you’re going to receive movies in French. If you’ve watched things about tech support scams, you might get more cyber sci-fi types of movies. That moment is the point of monetization on the internet. That’s how this works. It’s where data collection is actually turned into dollars.
You’re not supposed to be seeing things arbitrarily. You’re supposed to be seeing and feeling things that are placed there to maximize overall revenue for that middle layer of tech and targeting, and then ultimately for the buyer of you and whatever goal that they have. The problem is understanding the goal of the person who’s buying you at that time and making sure those that do bad things aren’t allowed through.

Mr. Jekielek:
We’re being manipulated actively and constantly. If we’re using a computer, if we’re online, we’re being manipulated constantly. What does that do to us?

Mr. Olson:
We’re near the Capitol and political speak here in D.C. Fake news is in the eye of the beholder today. It’s very difficult to define what disinformation is and what it’s not. Certainly for the average consumer, there are facts out there. The design is to keep us engaged with the device,so the delivery of information is designed to either have us buy something or to stay on the device. That’s how the background motivation manifests.

What’s incredible is that for thousands of years, politicians have used divide-and-rule strategies to get elected and to rule whoever they’re trying to govern, which puts it in a nice way, or to manipulate and control, if you want to put it in another. The perfection that we’ve seen in human history was accomplished by a bunch of source code whose design is to monetize people. When we look at fake news, the first question is, “What do we do about trusted news? How do we make sure that that stays an important part of our society?”

Second, it is understanding the situation, and this is also teaching kids. For me, I might be too old. It’s too late to change how I look at digital content. Somehow, I will still be sitting there 30 minutes later looking at an article saying, “I can’t believe this. I didn’t ask for it, it just came, and I got stuck.” But the idea is that we are being given more than what we’re asking for in the digital world.

There are some very powerful global entities that are trying to create a situation where they can cause us to think certain things. That’s very real. At this stage, it will take a societal effort to beat it. We can’t throw all that on tech and media. We have to decide that Section 230, the First Amendment, and freedom of speech is not about delivering crime. Then from there, how do we get information and how are we all being moved?

Mr. Jekielek:
There is the question of who gets to decide what is true. We are dealing with profound questions for our entire society. You mentioned the perfection of the manipulation. What did you mean exactly?

Mr. Olson:
Maybe a better word is its influence and execution. In crime, many of the things that happen to us we don’t see. It’s not a pop-up. It’s the delivery of particular source code because the device is a sympathetic location for the cyber attack or the digital crime attack to occur. It is placing code on the device.

Later, you go to your bank account. You type in your username and password, or an employee of a company logs into a particular IT application that has broad access to other things. The next thing you know, people can’t take flights around the country for two or three days. That’s something that we can’t see.

But targeting the delivery of that source code to the device or the experience is what becomes perfected in leveraging AI. In particular, it’s hard for society to grasp that AI can do A-B tests more or less in real time all day. It’s putting things out—it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, then it works and stays there for a period of time. It doesn’t require human interaction and it’s trying to do things until it succeeds.

As I’m sure you’ve heard, they only have to get it right once to have the attack occur. You have to defend against it correctly every single time, and we’re losing that fight. The ecosystem will never be perfect in delivery. But we’re marching towards moments where content creation is designed on the fly to maximize interaction, and that’s just getting better and better and better every single day.

As we continue to move down that road, we have to continue to ask what is the motivation of those allowed to put that information in front of us, and then what can we actually do about it. It’s scaling now, so this is not a futuristic development. It only continues to get better over time.

For example, interacting with ChatGPT is absolutely fascinating. It’s just fascinating. They’ve just made an announcement that they’ve got a search engine. Now, Google and Microsoft and the other search engines are now looking at ChatGPT as a competitor. They’ve known this was coming for a long time because at the end of the day, as a business, ChatGPT has two goals.

One is to sell access to ChatGPT’s technology so that you can build that into your own applications where AI is going to help you better execute your business or whatever your goal is. The other side of the business is a search engine, and the way that you monetize that is through targeted advertising. A lot of our new technologies that are brought into society today are then brought to the lowest common denominator, which is how to monetize eyeballs on the web. ChatGPT, our most interesting search engine, is now starting to execute on the paid advertising model.

Mr. Jekielek:
These bad actors are trying to leverage this paid advertising model already.

Mr. Olson:
Yes. The way this works is you start to take in big brand advertising dollars, and that’s going to help you show some hypergrowth for a year to two years. That’s a typical media business. You have to continue to show your investors that you’re able to grow. The only way to grow is to move towards two things; self-serve, and the auction model.
Self-serve enables a very large number of diverse actors to leverage your data to then put content in front of people on their devices. That’s self-serve. The auction model means that you aren’t going to know what that person is going to be delivered until the moment in time of the transaction, because the monetary optimization is at that moment.

Mr. Jekielek:
There are all these different actors wanting to serve a particular ad. At that moment, maybe thousands are vying with each other, but the one that gives the most money to the company gets picked.

Mr. Olson:
Yes. The most benefit.

Mr. Jekielek:
Right. Who are these criminals?

Mr. Olson:
There are the state actors. Any government who needs to defend or have some sort of offensive capability at all is going to look to the Internet as a way to deliver source code and interact with not just the adversary, but anyone globally that they want to interact with. State actors are probably the ones who are going to be the most vulnerable. They’re not going to have to be in your presence.

There is organized crime, which is rolled up inside global or very large crime structures that have scale. They’re not in any one location, so you can’t hurt them in one spot and then expect them to go away. They are very sophisticated actors. It was not like this 15 years ago. It was more individuals who could find some way to monetize and get bad things done. When a business is so big that organized crime sees it, they say, “Let’s start to roll that up and make that a profit center.”

Then there are hacktivists and others that are just trying to get things done by leveraging this ecosystem to target us. Those are going to be your biggest players. Within the organized crime structure, even with state actors, a highly significant amount of the actual work is distributed among the experts in each stage of attack creation. It’s a very sophisticated industry with particular actors who are very good at particular components that are being leveraged as proxies to get things done.

Mr. Jekielek:
You’re working with very large companies to help them not serve the things that are coming from the bad actors. That’s basically your work.

Mr. Olson:
Yes. First and foremost, with Big Tech and digital media, it’s not in their interest to have bad things happen to people. They want to keep a positive net relationship with the consumer, and that’s the entire internet experience. They want to keep the connection with that experience, and they want to maintain that so that people continue to return. That’s first and foremost.

Also, a lot of bad guys don’t pay, so those are extra impressions or extra content that’s being run that they do not benefit from. Where we see larger issues and the bigger gap with people in society is that as much as those big companies want to control your entire digital experience, that hasn’t happened yet. This is incredible competition between the Big Tech giants inside of the United States. Looking at it globally, we’ve got Baidu, Google, Bing, and now ChatGPT. These are huge companies that are running their own search engines, and no one of them is able to control our experience fully.

They will work hard to protect citizens, and I want to be clear, they do. They’re working very hard to not have these things go through. Because they don’t control the experience, potentially millions of different buyers have almost direct access to our device. At that incredible scale which is diversified across that number of actors, someone really needs to be stepping in. We are trying very hard to keep our customers safe from harming people.
Society in general needs a broader and more sustained step in to simply protect people from digital crime. I’m a small government person when it all comes down to it. But in this particular case, we’re really yearning for bureaucracy. We need it to come in, because it’s persistent and it’s not at the whim of profit, those things that we naturally hope that the government is going to be there for.

Mr. Jekielek:
First of all, how can you tell if it’s a bad actor? How does that actually work? Your technology blocks the bad actor from serving the content.

Mr. Olson:
We have multiple solutions. The first big step is detection, so our job is to be personas. We have machines in 120 countries because information is targeted geographically. You can’t see what’s happening to people in France unless you look like a French consumer. Then we portray different behaviors and personas like we’re young or we’re old or we’re rich or we’re poor. We’re interested in sports cars. We work for corporations. We’re executives.

Mr. Jekielek:
Basically, you have all these AIs. You’re a client instead of being served content as people would.

Mr. Olson:
Yes, we’re rendering full experiences as if we are those types of personas. What gets interesting is depending on who you are, you get attacked more. The attack types are different. If you’re an 85-year-old grandmother, you are going to be targeted at a much higher proclivity than a 50-year-old male in Virginia. It’s in part because it’s just more successful, and in part because that audience is very well defined.

This is a grandmother, and you know it’s a female. That’s a very sweet spot for scammers and fraudsters, so we become those profiles. Then we’re rendering myriad different types of content and forms of content. A lot of it is delivered to us from clients. A lot of times we’re just scanning where people go and then we’re detecting based on source code. There’s regular expressions and domains and IPs and all sorts of things that we use that signal the delivery of attacks. We’re looking at content.

We use AI to kind of fight AI crime. We’re doing speech to text so we can understand what people might be saying inside of content. The idea is to have a good understanding of general information of just about everything that’s going to run regardless of the target. Once we know, we present that information back to the digital supply chain that is involved in the delivery of that so that they can shut it off.

Mr. Jekielek:
Here you’re going to the authorities in the business that you’re working with. But are you actually the auction where all these ads are going? There’s one that’s worth the most, and maybe that one’s a scammer. Is your system cutting that off before it actually gets served?

Mr. Olson:
We have a solution that’s very digital media. We have a solution that is specific to blocking bad things before they run. Again, bad things are in the eye of the beholder. It can be digital crime and it can also be running unsuitable content. Don’t run a picture of a man and a woman walking down the beach in their bathing suits in Saudi Arabia, because they have particular social norms that make that unsuitable to run in that market.

When it’s an auction model and it’s not controlled, you want to make sure that you have the facility to understand what’s going to be delivered before you get in trouble. It covers the safety issue in addition to straight crime. It’s trying to make sure that the internet is a reasonably nice place to be.

Mr. Jekielek:
Inadvertently, you could end up getting into the business of censorship. The term brave new world keeps coming up in my mind. I assume your company must be growing.

Mr. Olson:
Yes. The good news for us is when you read about these terrible things happening on the internet and you see digital crime and you hear about disinformation, that’s a good thing. As a company, that is pretty good for us. We’ve been watching this for a very, very long time. It is getting worse and worse. And we want to influence, you know, governments and others to get involved. And that is in cooperation with big tech and digital media.

It’s not to look at them and point a finger. There is plenty of room for legislative conversations. The Kids Online Safety Act may get through. Hopefully, that’s going to improve the experience of children and teens in their online interactions. But not everything is about, “They’ve built this in order to monetize this,” or “They’ve tried to create a situation where they’re the arbiters of what’s allowed to be told.”

Part of this is just how do we collectively as a society, including those companies, simply focus on protecting people as a community? That’s a really important component of the conversation and that requires a working together relationship.

Mr. Jekielek:
There is also this question of how much manipulation is okay. This is an arms race of manipulation that we are in and there doesn’t seem to be any safeguard on that. I also can see problems with putting a safeguard on that as well. But one would think that this is having a profound effect on our minds and on our behaviors and on our relationships.

Mr. Olson:
That’s a really tricky question. If they knew what was being placed on our devices, we would be in a reasonably good space. We still aren’t answering what’s true and whose opinion matters and those types of things. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit in here because companies don’t know what’s rendering on our devices, even though it’s their infrastructure.
This is cloud computing, this is CDNs, and this is the whole digital supply chain. Advertising happens to be in the center of it. Targeted content is a natural part of our dynamic internet experience, but all tech is involved.
Understanding what happens to us online is the truth that we should be seeking.

Mr. Jekielek:
What is a possible solution to that? What are some of the dimensions of that?

Mr. Olson:
Another part of good news about this is that it’s a bipartisan thing, so it doesn’t need to be political. I have heard both sides allude to something like the United States replicating an Iron Dome structure that Israel obviously uses. An Iron Dome for digital should be part of that. Our devices are the most open border in the U.S. Any company and any person in any country can put content and source code onto our devices at any time at minimal cost.

If we’re going to defend the nation, we should be thinking in context of not just protecting the homeland from the physical part of what may be coming in, but also protecting our devices. It’s happening today on our devices and it’s an activity that’s always occurring, maybe for the first time. In the last 10 to15 years, there has been a persistent, never-ending attack coming from other countries to U.S. shores.

Obviously, we’ve had big events like September 11th. We have been attacked on U.S. soil, but historically we’ve relied on allies on either side with oceans in between us. Digital attacks don’t care about that. That type of defense, where the government’s perception and goal would be to understand what’s coming in and deal with it at some level, is a very important step for our society. The balance is maintaining freedom of speech, and doing this at the same time.

Mr. Jekielek:
I use X a lot, but I get served stuff that I really don’t want. It has prompted me to turn the safety feature on, but I don’t know what else it isn’t showing me now. Social media is highly addictive and designed to capture people’s attention, especially kids, and get them hooked early. It really is such a fraught environment.

Mr. Olson:
There is GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation] and California privacy law. In order for opt-out to work, you can say, “Don’t track me.” There’s a bar that says we serve cookies. There is an accept option. Everybody says that they’re all right with it because they just want to get to the article or the content. That is only as effective as that opt-out mechanism that understands the dynamic nature of the entire digital asset and what’s actually being collected.

Just because you clicked accept doesn’t mean that they’re not collecting data. It just means that you clicked accept and that someone passed a compliance checkbox. They have an accept button and that is good. But you can’t opt out effectively unless the company that you’re visiting, the website, the app, the connected television app, whatever that might be, knows what’s being delivered to you.

The opt-out is only as good as their understanding. That is where this dynamic content, the new world of AI becomes incredibly interesting. There is a lot of risk. A lot of companies are working on it. We need a lot more help and support to put safety into that conversation.

Mr. Jekielek:
Everyone will be faced with this essentially. If you’re online, there is a 100 percent chance that people will try to scam you.

Mr. Olson:
Probably not 100 percent, but we’re well into the high 90s. If the rate of crime targeting just senior citizens in the U.S. were happening on the streets, we’d have the National Guard on every street corner. This is not just something that happens to people once or twice and they fall for it. This is a persistent level of attack. Two to three percent of everything served to senior citizens in certain environments is attempting to do something bad to them, so this is a huge issue.

There are successes with governments attempting to find these criminals and prosecute them as mentioned just yesterday with an announcement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, but that is not reducing the frequency with which people are being targeted and the scale. First, this is something that we can do as a society. We can dramatically reduce crime targeting people. It requires effort, for sure. Maybe it requires a different idea of policing
for that type of particular type of activity.

We’re going to be stepping in that direction relatively soon, but we’re not there yet. There are certain ways this has to be defined and ultimately scaled. Between now and that moment, yes, people are just going to be getting attacked and the frequency is going to grow.

Mr. Jekielek:
You’re talking about legislation coming into place?

Mr. Olson:
Legislation will have an impact and it is tactical. For example, local police need to understand what’s happening in the local market. Then they need to be able to get that information to the attributed party who can do something about it at a very fast rate. These attacks are coming and they’re going.

It’s not like standing on the street in certain ways where someone’s going to walk by and they just robbed somebody. They’ve stolen their purse and they’re running down the street and you stop them. That’s tactical. You don’t need legislation for that.

A crime is a crime. They’re trying to steal a grandmother’s money. It’s a crime. What we need is an action component where these crimes are seen and then ultimately taken down. More than legislation, tactical engagement is needed.

The other thing to realize is that by engaging in that tactical process, you’re collecting evidence. Evidence ultimately leads to more and more prosecutions, understanding who the bad guys are, and going and getting them. Standing that up as a model to protect U.S. citizens, that’s where all of this is going to go.

Mr. Jekielek:
I see. Because at the moment, they’re largely getting away with it.

Mr. Olson:
At the moment, they are getting away with it. It’s infrequent that someone is going to jail.

Mr. Jekielek:
The same infrastructure needs to exist to protect people from these increasingly sophisticated scams. It can be used to essentially shape how people perceive reality. Who gets to decide about that?

Mr. Olson:
We’re attempting to reduce digital crime. It’s called digital for a reason. It’s binary. There are ones and zeros. We think crime is a one. It’s known. If it’s doing something that’s going to hurt someone by stealing their money, things that are already defined as crimes, then we don’t need to talk about turning it off. We need to eliminate it from the ecosystem. It’s happening over and over again. We need to detect them, take them down, make it harder for actors to participate.

Content, on the other hand, is much more arbitrary, and it’s not binary. Certainly in Western society, there isn’t an arbiter of what the truth is. It isn’t the intention to try to defend Big Tech and social media on their content policies, but they can’t win. The job is virtually impossible.
The content conversation is incredibly difficult. Maybe the most important thing we can figure out is knowing who’s delivering the message, because there is an intention to what we see. If my monetization idea is correct, a lot of the things that we’re seeing are placed there for a reason. That could be a big step towards informing people. But again, there’s binary digital, and then there’s what people think and what they want to say.

Mr. Jekielek:
If you’re told who exactly is serving you, that would be very helpful in terms of your decision making. What are the best practices for someone that’s online that is going to be served a scam probably multiple times in the next week in various ways? What’s the best way to try to protect ourselves from that?

Mr. Olson:
There are two big things that consumers can do. The first is easier than the second, keep your devices updated with the latest versions of the software and protections that you can. The second is harder, and that’s to be very discerning on what you interact with on your device. Take a deep breath before you click. If you’re a senior citizen, call somebody before you do what the computer tells you to do. If you have any questions at all, take that step. These attacks are prolific, so keep your devices up to date. If you can’t do it yourself, have someone help you and then be very discerning on what you interact with in the digital ecosystem.

Mr. Jekielek:
Chris, a final thought as we finish up?

Mr. Olson:
I will reiterate that we can get this done as a society. It’s critically important that we talk about digital crime. Generally, it’s kind of a negative and a bit of a dour conversation. There are incredibly great things happening with AI. AI is going to find ways to cure cancer. AI is going to optimize how we’re traveling and ultimately maybe get rid of traffic. If you can imagine something like that, even our digital media consumption experiences are going to improve in many ways with AI. How can we do all of those great things and protect people at the same time? That’s the question that we’re wrestling with. That’s really important and something that we really need to tackle.

Mr. Jekielek:
Chris Olson, such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Olson:
Thank you so much.

This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.