Data Centers, Hackers, and AI: Oh My!

0:00Welcome to this week's Intek with Gene Destro. Now is your chance to get caught up in all that's happening in technology around Akron and the rest of the world. Now here's your host, Gene Destro. This week, growing concern about data centers and AI-based dispute between Meta and Amazon plus a major hack on the FBI that exposed the names, addresses, and other confidential information on thousands of applicants, agents, and even reportedly FBI Director Cash Patel. To find out more, I talked to two ABC News National Correspondents, Mike Debusky and Brad Garrett. But before we get to those conversations, let's start out with the continuing controversy over data centers and citizen pushback against the massive facilities that power AI.

1:10Data centers are making headlines in Ohio again this week where it's now a major campaign issue in the race between Democrat Sherrod Brown, who's seeking to return to the US Senate by unseeding Republican incumbent John Houston. Houston championed the construction of data centers in Ohio while he was Lieutenant Governor and has also been instrumental in helping big tech companies get tax breaks in exchange for locating them here. With National polls now, though, showing his support among potential voters going down as a result. This week in Cleveland, City Council held a public hearing on data centers as a three-month moratorium on allowing them to be located in the city as close to ending. What they're hoping to find out is how residents feel about big issues like power and water consumption as well as the potential upside when it comes to job creation and perhaps increase tax revenue. From Washington, word this week about a big data breach at the FBI, I talked about it with

2:20ABC crime and terrorism analyst Brad Garrett. So the FBI is reporting that they're basically their website that covers, I think it's called FBI.gov. He covers people who want to apply to the FBI and so forth and so on or just inquire about the FBI. But it also apparently is the portal they use for people who are already apparently in the system. So in other words, like current agents, their data apparently is in this part of the FBI system. But it includes current agents, retired agents, former agents, and other employees, which is going to be specific information about where they live, what their home address is, what their telephone numbers are, and they may have some of their medical history. There are all sorts of things that apparently these hackers got access to. My big concern is, did they get beyond that? Nobody's talking about that, but were they able to work their way into

3:25other FBI data sets that would give them information about cases and people that are undercover and relationships with governments and people we have in place and across the country or in other parts of the world. I don't know the answer to that, of course, but that would be one big concern as far as I'm concerned. One of the reports that I saw related to this was that at least allegedly this hack was done in retaliation for some criminal enforcement action that the FBI had taken against members or at least the collective of this hacking group. Have you heard anything like that? I've heard a version of that. That combined with the FBI had apparently released a statement about shiny hunters that they've used extortion, they've threatened people, and so they don't like that statement. Apparently, one thing they're saying is they want the FBI to retract that, which doesn't make any sense to me. I'd be shocked if that's the real reason

4:31as to why they did it. But we'll see. The real concern is, what are they going to do with it? Are they going to release it to the public? Are they going to sell it on the dark web? Are they going to give it to some adversary or sell it to some adversary like China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, the White House, or even the White House? We just don't know. But once it's out there, it's out there. It isn't like you can scoop it up and stick it back at a computer. Right. That certainly is of concern to me. I'm sure it's of concern to everybody who's ever gotten a notice that they've been involved in some kind of data breach. At this point, I'm losing track of how many notices I've gotten in the mail from organizations that I'm connected with. It's said, oh, by the way, we got breached and we'll give you a free year of credit monitoring. That's going to do me a lot of good because there's no way that I can go erase that from the quote unquote dark web where it's hanging out there. That's exactly right. What's this going? It's gone. So, this shiny hunters, are they US-based or Russia? Do we know?

5:37I don't know. I'd be surprised that they're based here. The problem is that just because they call themselves that, that doesn't mean it's one group of people in one location. This is probably people that are all over the place, all over the world, maybe, that have this commonality that they connect with this particular group. We'll ask specs of it, hack, accompany, agency, and individual. The answer is yes. But it may only be a component of a shiny hunter. That's the problem. Many of them will may well live in countries we don't have a relationship with. You couldn't extra-diet them if you charged them anyway. That's another obvious problem. But the biggest problem clearly is the data is out there and it will stay out there. Well, yeah. Can you imagine if you were an FBI agent right now and you knew that your name and information was in there and maybe even the name of your wife or your daughter or something like that. Sure. And then you were involved

6:42in some kind of an investigation and it turns out that the target of that investigation could just follow you home and do you harm? Well, that's right. I mean, that's that that is a reality. And there's really not much you can do about that. Well, there's nothing you can do about it other than take obvious safety precautions. But beyond that, there's not much else you can do. Well, right. And all this is coming at a time of increased concern about cybersecurity. One, because the federal government itself has reduced cybersecurity safeguards over the past couple of years since the new administration came in. And two, because AI has become so much more robust, particularly with some of the new models. And they're actually running rogue and they're doing their own cyber breaks. But even if they weren't rogue and they were just controlled by a human being that sicked them on somebody, they're really good at hacking. There is no doubt. I mean, this will get even more and more sophisticated and difficult. And by some people's

7:43thoughts and makings will get to the point we can't control any of that's been touted a lot recently. I think there's some accuracy in that statement. But we'll see. But yeah, we're headed into rural. What I would call treacherous territory here. So based on your reporting, what have you heard from the top echelons of the FBI about this particular incident? I mean, I heard, I'm not sure if it's true, but I heard that cash betels information was also in there. Is he saying anything about no, but he was apparently hacked sometime ago. So it's so that's part of that's not new information. But they're not really talking about it. What's I totally get? I wouldn't be talking about it either at this point publicly. There may still be evaluating how bad this is. But even on the surface certainly affects as you mentioned earlier, thousands of people. Wow. So if people regular

8:44citizens are listening to this and saying, Jesus seems scary. Is there anything I can do about this? You know, is there any cage I can rattle to get some action on it? I mean, is there one? Well, it all boils down. If you're talking about individuals, you have to make sure that all of your security stuff is up to date. In other words, when you get a patch from the your cell phone provider, whomever it might be, you know, do that immediately change your passwords regularly. And just be extremely careful online. There's so much stuff that looks real today that's not. This is all designed to compromise your system. So you kind of have to be in guard. Every time you open up your phone, your iPad, whatever it might be, you have to be convinced that what you're about to open is real. Right. And it's really hard these days because one, the hackers are really smart and two. Now they're using AI to outfox people and do a lot of, you know, cyber activity. But what about, you know, collectively? Is there any will in Congress

9:49to beef up laws to increase cyber protections even internally for the federal government? Yes. I think that's the short answer. However, you can pass all the laws you want. And, you know, you can't, you can't make a corporation, you know, abide by them from the standpoint of, yes, do they have adequate security? They spend billions of dollars under the year, probably. Would that be helpful? The answer is probably yes, depending on what it is. But it's just not going to fix this because it's not really fixable. It's kind of like fighting. If you go back in history, like fighting organized crime, you never get rid of organized crime. You just keep it on the move and reduce its power and arrest people and put them in jail and then new people pop up. It's not the same, but it is sort of the same as to where we are and where we're going. So if you had to like, you know, you were wrapping this up and you had to kind of summarize this and then like where we might be going as a result of it, what would you say? I would say that

10:52what has happened to the FBI and other government agencies and corporations is just going to continue to happen. And as AI grows and it gets involved in this, it's even going to make it more tricky and difficult to slow it down. So we're not in the best place. I guess it's a short answer. I also had the opportunity this week to talk to ABC News Technology reporter Mike Tabusky about a dust up between meta and Amazon. It's not a legal feud just yet, but it is a kind of growing dispute between these two major tech firms. This all really kicked off after meta launched what they call Mewd AI, which is an AI agent. We've heard a lot about this type of technology. Recently agents are essentially AI programs that can go off and do stuff for you. They have agency. They can execute on tasks. Meta marketed this as an assistant that can basically organize stuff

11:58on your calendar, sort through your emails, even do stuff like online shopping. And that last one is where Amazon started to throw up some of their hackles. Over the weekend, Amazon announced that it's blocking meta's AI, their Mewd AI agent from accessing Amazon platforms because they say meta never properly disclosed that this was a robot. And they don't like when this kind of robot is allowed to browse freely on their platform. We widen out here and think about how Amazon makes money. Sure, they do take a cut of every purchase that happens on their platform. But a huge revenue stream comes through things like sponsors listing. Those are the listings that show up first in your search results that companies can pay a little bit extra money to get preferential treatment for. Things like advertising, right? Little banner ads or other ads that kind of follow you around the page. Amazon makes money off of that. And humans are susceptible to that type of advertising. We have decades of online digital advertising to prove that. Robots don't care

12:59about that, right? AI agents can breeze right past that. And Amazon doesn't make a dime off of it. And that's a real concern for a company even as big as Amazon when you think about how many companies on the web rely on this business practice. Things like Uber, Globhub, DoorDash, even things like Zock-Zock. These AI agents that they become more prominent really do start to represent an existential threat. And that means that we could see more of this stuff where there's this kind of standoff between a platform like Amazon and a platform like Meta over this technology. I actually tried to get used AI to access Amazon yesterday just to see if it would do it. And the way new AI works is that it essentially has its own little digital computer that you can follow along with. How it kind of, you know, serves through the web. And when I asked you to go to Amazon and order some toothpaste for me, it actually showed me the firewall that it ran into with Amazon's website reading continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's conditions of use to which our customers have agreed. That's interesting. You know, what I was

14:02thinking, I don't know if this has anything to do with it, but Amazon is also developing its own AI capabilities. And honestly, why should they let a competitor go in there and gain all of their information and use that data to make their AI more robust when Amazon wants to do it themselves, right? Yeah, exactly. Now, it's worth mentioning that Meta is not the first company to come out with a Gen.Tik AI. Really all the major AI firms, the anthropic open AI Google, they all have a version of this technology that's out there. However, Meta is very prominent, right? They own Facebook and Instagram. We're really used by billions of people worldwide. This technology is in front of way more eyeballs than it would of otherwise been just because it belongs kind of under the Meta umbrella. But you're absolutely right to say that Amazon is also in this space. They also have their own large language model technology that they've integrated into the Alexa platform, their voices assistant platform. And while they don't have sort of AI agents like this, just yet they very well

15:02could. And that also is a piece of this story. Down the line wants to stop Amazon from launching its own kind of version of this service that can, you know, scroll through Amazon by things for you, organize wish lists and things like that. It's not a huge barrier for Amazon to do that. It doesn't seem like. So that could be something that we see down the line. That would, again, kind of, you know, represent just another sort of volley back and forth in this ongoing battle over AI agents and e-commerce. You know, I think that was an interesting point you made about the sponsored ads, for example, because I have joked that I'm keeping Jeff Bezos in business, you know, single handedly by how much I order on Amazon. And of course, you get the sponsored results. And then you scroll down more. And then all of a sudden, you see that same ad again, you know what I mean? It's like you kind of can't get away from it. It follows you. But if I was an AI agent, then I could just blow through all that and find the best deal, right? And that's exactly the thing that Amazon is concerned about effectively, right? Like AI agents are

16:06ruthless. The way Mewd works is, you know, you say, hey, go order me some toothpaste. And you say, I won't, you know, coldgate whatever, this flavor, this type. And it will go off and find the cheapest possible version of that for you. But I thought it was also interesting in getting, you know, Mewd AI to try and access Amazon is that when it couldn't, it offered to go over to Walmart or it offered to go over to these other e-commerce platforms and try and find the same product over there. And again, that kind of represents how shallow this moat is between these major e-commerce providers. A lot of people go to Amazon because it's convenient. A lot of people go to Amazon just because it's kind of the thing they're used to. And if there's a problem with the AI agent that you're using accessing it, well, you really care that it comes from Walmart versus Amazon? Probably not, right? It's the same product at the end of the day. So that's again something that Amazon's going to need to negotiate over these next few months and years as these AI agents become more popular.

17:07That was ABC News Technology Reporter Mike Tabuski and I'm Gene Destro. Thanks for listening. Stay happy and healthy and we'll see you again next week. That was This Week in Tech with Gene Destro. Tune in next week for more tech news on 93.5 1590 WAKR and wakr.net