Welcome To The Audit

Joshua Schmidt 0:04

All right, we are live. You are listening to the audit presented by IT Audit Labs. I'm your co-host and producer, Joshua Schmidt. Today we're joined by Nick Mellum and Eric Brown, and our guest is Brayden Frame. Braden Frame is from Texas, and he is part of the Cartographers Group, Modern Cartographers, and Modern Fortress. I just wanted to let our folks know that are watching. He's a former firefighter paramedic, turned strategic communication consultant. Today we're going to be discussing rapidly involving threat landscapes facing law enforcement in the age of AI, a topic that is interesting to all of us.

Cars Jeep Ducks And Texas Roads

Joshua Schmidt 0:37

But before we jump in, we have an icebreaker. And I wanted to ask Braden what, you know, since you're down in Texas with Nick, uh I I know a thing or two about driving on those Texas freeways. What's uh what's getting you from point A to point B?

SPEAKER_00 0:49

I've been a consistent Jeep Wrangler driver for like the last decade and a half. So I got a Rubicon. Uh yeah, a little hardtop Rubicon gets me around, goes over things.

Joshua Schmidt 0:59

Yeah. I I I I didn't get Jeep people until I went to Joshua Tree, California, um, probably, I don't know, five, six years ago now and rented a Jeep. And then I got it. You know, I I got I got why Jeep people are Jeep people.

SPEAKER_00 1:12

And then somebody put one of the little rubber duckies on your dash? I have one pink uh flamingo rubber ducky on the dash. It's the only duck that can live on the dashboard. I keep a bucket of them in the backseat. My daughter loves to duck other jeeps. I'm not a big person, but I I keep I keep a bucket of them around for her.

Eric Brown 1:29

I've seen other people, it's just like loaded. The front windshield is just loaded up with them.

Joshua Schmidt 1:34

So all right, cool. Nick, do you you got chotch keys in your vehicle? What are you driving?

Nick Mellem 1:39

Uh F-150. That's right. It's like the quintessential Texas vehicle is an F-150. Well, a pickup in general, but the most common is definitely an F-150.

Eric Brown 1:52

Nick's probably got like all the stickers on the back of like, you know, the the Coexist? Coexist or the the the characters like the dad, the mom, and then like the the four cats uh and all that stuff. The Star Wars family.

Nick Mellem 2:07

Star Wars family. Yeah. Yeah, just pretty, pretty plain and regular, but uh you got uh got a radio antenna on it uh for the ham operators out there.

Joshua Schmidt 2:18

You know when Nick's at the office, because we're down two parking spaces in the uh in the tiny in the tiny little uh parking lot we have here.

Nick Mellem 2:27

I try to back in nice and square, leave room for you guys, leave room for the Teslas to pull in.

SPEAKER_00 2:32

Are you a vanity plate guy, Braden? No, no vanity plates. I I used to be. There was a a long time ago I had a I had a plate that said call me, uh, but that was like 25 years ago. I didn't keep that.

Eric Brown 2:45

How about you, Eric? Are you a vanity plate guy? I'm not a vanity plate guy. No. Waste of money? Just yeah kind of egocentric. I don't need to draw all that attention. Aaron Powell Not like code for you or something like that.

Joshua Schmidt 2:56

No.

Nick Mellem 2:57

Hack me. Hacked for good. Hack for good. Hack for God. I had a vanity plate way, way, way back on a 2002 Pontiac Transam that was all souped up with uh with a roll cage and and the license plate was killer bird. We were doing it big back then. We were doing it real big.

Eric Brown 3:23

Why didn't I know about this before today?

Joshua Schmidt 3:24

I don't know, but he's never gonna forget bits and pieces. What are you driving, Eric, these days? What's your or what's your favorite car to drive? 98 Corolla.

Eric Brown 3:33

98 Corolla? Can't go wrong. Can't go wrong with

Jaws Of Life And EV Safety

Eric Brown 3:37

that. Can I ask Braden a question though, just before we jump into his stuff? As a paramedic, uh because you did firefighting and and paramedic work. So did you ever get to uh work with the jaws of life there where you were kind of using those big snips? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:51

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we we you can cut people out of cars all the time. It's great. Wow. Do do they work like ad as advertised on see on TV shows? Actually, they're they're a lot better. These days, um, they're all battery powered. So there was a big fight uh for a while there where the battery sucked and everybody thought they were junk, and you know, you had to get the generator out and it's a you know two-stroke engine, you're yanking on the thing trying to get it to go or whatever. And now you just pull it out, flip a switch, and and start cutting. Great, faster, better, stronger. How long does it take to cut that A-frame? You know what you're doing? Less than less than three minutes. Wow. I mean, we you should like if if you're a professional firefighter, you ought to be able to pop a door in in under five minutes. You should be able to get somebody out in under 10. And that's that's pushing the limits. It should be quicker than that, you know, especially if it's nothing too bad and you're only using like two tools. Yeah.

unknown 4:38

Yeah. Yeah.

Eric Brown 4:39

Would you guys drill that all the time? Or how do you get to practice that stuff?

SPEAKER_00 4:43

Uh, every like once a year, usually we'll get uh we'll get like a towing company, we'll like donate a couple of old cars and we'll get to go cut them up and you know practice some new things. And then I I was super lucky. My department, uh, we had great support from our community. Um, I was staffed at a specialty station that did technical rescue. So we were able to cut, you know, twice a year. And if you're in a busy area, um you you you see a fair amount of door pops where you're just taking that uh that nader pin and pop in the door and getting them out.

Eric Brown 5:09

And and were you uh were electric vehicles a a thing at the time where you had to deal with like because maybe you if if that's where like the electricity is running through the door, can you can you cut those?

SPEAKER_00 5:21

So yeah, I mean if you if you know about the the cars and makeup, um there weren't a lot of electric cars a few years ago. There's more now, but we had a had a guidebook, you know, on the iPad and a guidebook on the phone. So on the way you could, you know, figure out where to go. Plus a lot of them, there's one spot you cut that disables the high power system. So you disable the high voltage first and then you go to cut in the car

Braden’s Path From Fire To Tech

SPEAKER_00 5:40

as if there was nothing wrong.

Joshua Schmidt 5:40

Aaron Powell I wanted to piggyback on what Eric was saying and and ask Braden how he got from getting Eric today. I want to ask Brayton how he got from um being a firefighter and then into where you are now working with law enforcement and kind of being a tech guy and what's your journey there and then kind of bring us up to speed on what we want to get into today.

SPEAKER_00 6:00

I've always been a tech guy. So um my dad was a computer programmer back in the 80s when computers took up the size of rooms. And so we were we were going to swap meets in Southern California, um, you know, buying parts and building computers in the 90s when it was cool. Yeah, and I remember um, you know, I always enjoyed technology. I thought it was super interesting. And along the way, I kind of fell into the fire service. I fell in super late. I was 25 when I became a firefighter. And uh it was the greatest job in the world. Uh, I absolutely loved every minute of it. And when I was in, uh I enjoyed firefighting. I enjoyed pre-hospital medicine. I enjoyed all the fun things, but then I also really enjoyed uh advocacy work. And so I'd been involved in politics just a little bit before uh I started in the fire service. And right when I started was right when social media was becoming a thing. And uh a couple years in got involved with uh with my department's association, uh, ended up working with the State Association, the International Association. I was running campaigns and doing technology and communications training um for years. And then so when I got hurt, um I got injured uh in the line of duty a couple of times. I like to tell people I was a pretty good firefighter, I was a great paramedic. I was really terrible at walking. And um, so four ankle surgeries and eight inches of cadaver, ligaments later, and a few other things along the way, uh, I ended up medically separating out of the service in 22. And uh not long enough to have a great pension or a retirement, not enough insurance to be carried on. So you gotta keep paying the bills. And uh this was kind of a natural progression was to keep doing what I'd been doing when I was on the job, um, to advocate for public safety. And then now I get the luck and the fortune of running with uh a couple of great people and partnerships to uh continue with that work and advocacy and strategically try to position ourselves. And now with the advent of new technologies, it's just uh another conversation, a bigger battle

Social Media Playbook Repeats With AI

SPEAKER_00 7:44

every day.

Joshua Schmidt 7:44

Aaron Powell So when we were talking uh pre-production, Breedon, uh you made an interesting comparison between law enforcement's uh current AI awareness and then the resistance uh of to social media over the last 15 years. And and can you walk us through that history and and how you see it repeating itself and and some of the departments you're behind?

SPEAKER_00 8:01

Yeah. So so back in the early 2010s, um the uh law enforcement um had generally taken the position of no comment on active investigations and not wanting to engage in um a lot of the social media stuff. And we it was kind of a it was the way that things had been. Um the fire service was a little bit quicker um to start getting onto social media and engaging in that in that medium there. Um and then you watched the big push with BLM that happened um politically, and law enforcement and law enforcement associations were kind of on their heels trying to respond to this audience of people in a group that they hadn't really engaged with before. And so there was a lot of missteps, uh, a lot of organizations and a lot of great people who tried really hard to get in really early. Um, but but as a whole, it's been really difficult. But in the last five or six years, we've seen a big shift. Um, and I think you've watched departments, and it's been a lot of you know, chief-led stuff too, uh top down said, Hey, we need to be more um a front, we need to be more aggressive, we need to not let the story kind of rumor mill for too long. Um, you know, I've been teaching for a while in communications, I've taught crisis communications, um bad days and good days. And I always tell people, you know, in the absence of the truth, the rumors are the facts. So if you're not in there, the whatever they're saying about you, whether it's true or not, is all that people are hearing. And if even if they don't believe that the first time by the fifth or sixth or seventh or tenth time, you know, and you've been silent, what else are they going to think? And and so, you know, we've watched um public safety, I think, as a whole, try to adapt. And there was a period of time too, back in the day where legally there were things law enforcement could not say about active investigation. So laws had to catch up, policies had to catch up, leadership had to catch up. It wasn't just an overnight thing. And now with AI, we're kind of watching it all happen again. And I think public safety, both the fire service, law enforcement, uh, EMS are all kind of caught trying to figure out how do we adapt these technologies. And there's, I think, such a big gap between what AI truly is, what we think it's going to be in 24 months, which is an eternity in this moment of technological boom, and where we can fit those things in to make the world a better place, but also protect us from the known bad actors that are already kind of starting to fall out of the woodwork.

Nick Mellem 10:22

It sounded pretty early, Braden. Like you you saw the gap between the people that are using this communication to run towards danger to people that are lobbying for it. So you made that direct transition there. It sounds like you early you realized early on that there was a gap in that communication. So now you're lobbying for that communication. Is there, do you where do you see that going? Like are you know, with AI, we're going parallel with these communications. Are you seeing any common trends?

SPEAKER_00 10:47

You know, I think um I I wish I was a perfect early adopter and had bought like Amazon stock or Bitcoin like 15 years ago. That's the kind of early adopter I want to be rather than the kind that I am. But you know, I I look at AI and I and I think I think that people fall into the meme generation, the crappy AI slot videos and images, and you know, it it's a better proofreader and spell checker and you know, help my kid do his homework sort of a thing. Um but behind it, the networks that are being built that are designing and putting all these pieces of information from a lot of sources together are where um we're trying, trying to help make sure that um at a minimum public safety is informed about what's possible. You know,

Fake Evidence And Probable Cause

SPEAKER_00 11:30

um there was, I think, case in California not that long ago where somebody tried to use a fake AI-generative as evidence. And now mind you, this was an idiot. They were representing themselves. It was low quality. Even the judge could figure out that it wasn't good. Um but that was six months ago. You know, that was before, you know, the most recent version of Nanobunnyana. That was before the most recent version of VO3, right? Like that was that was a year ago, you know, that they were doing this stuff. You know, a year from now, um, how many people were fooled by the, what was it, the bunnies on the trampoline that ended up being Chat GPT? You know, like everybody. Everybody was fooled by that. And and so you think about the the standard of probable cause that an officer is expected to swear and attest to. You know, you call 911, you say, My neighbor, you know, broke into my house. Here's a video of them doing that. They walk across the street, they find the guy, he's got the stuff, they arrest him, he screams his innocence, they they say no, I got probable cause. And and and then you fouled up the legal system until they can work through, hopefully, with the resources to be able to be able to measure good and bad, truth and false. And, you know, so I think that even being slightly aware of how quickly these things can be happening is something that so many people, not just public safety, but people are completely unaware of. And so then you you go a step further into these officers who are asked to adjudicate public safety, you know, in austere conditions and constantly evolving environments, and the world is moving really fast. And so I think making them aware are conversations that we're talking about, and then trying to make sure that they have the tools or at least the pathway to get the tools. Um, because again, you know, you you might have the officer, have the sergeant or the lieutenant who gets it, but then you still have to make command staff get it. Policymakers have to get it. They all work for a city council or a or a county. Uh state legislatures have to change laws. These things take time, and six weeks have gone by, not six years, not six six weeks have gone by, and now you're in the next generation of Opus or Sonnet or whatever the heck we're into now. Um and so trying to keep up with that is is, I think, um both visionary and battlesome for them at the same time.

Eric Brown 13:34

It's interesting that you you talk about 15 years ago getting Amazon stock, right? Which I think if we all could have rung that bell between Apple and Amazon and all that good stuff, we probably wouldn't be on the podcast right now. But there's there's companies that are um new companies that are emerging and going public all the time. And it it could be one of those where it's like, wow, I wish, you know, back in 26 I I got into that stock um 15 years ago. And I I'm trying to find the article here. I just saw it today, but there was a there was a new company that just went um Higgsfield AI, a uh supercomputer company, a cloud AI agent. And are they the ones that just went um public? But I think we're starting to see these companies, supercomputer companies and AI companies, data center companies, that could be the next version of Amazon, right? Who knows?

Joshua Schmidt 14:30

If we're doing hot stock tips, I uh sent uh you and Nick that YouTube video about a week ago about uh quantum quantum computers. There's a couple out there that I've been eyeballing. I got on my watch list right now in Robinhood, but um, Robinhood. How do you uh communicate with uh these folks, our law enforcement, these people, uh firefighters that keep us safe, keep our communities safe? Obviously, you know, we're in a gap period, right, between um generational tribal knowledge that that's not quite uh in the zeitgeist of our law enforcement and the people that serve us, our front ladder sponders. Um, what are you doing and uh to to bring everyone up to speed uh and and what do you see the mission being there?

SPEAKER_00 15:13

So

AI Fueled Sextortion And Trafficking

SPEAKER_00 15:14

the the team uh on the lobbying side, there they were in DC just this past week for police week. So police officers from across the country get together, honor those who are lost, put names on the wall, and um you know it's a it's also a big time for lobbying. And so uh our lobbying folks were up there, and we held a round table every single day, and many of them were talking about new frontiers in human trafficking, new frontiers and sexploitation, you know, new frontiers in these different ways that these long-standing criminal enterprises are starting to do business now, and how they're moving off of what used to be the classified ads, and they move to the internet ad, then they move to Craigslist, and then the back page, and now they're on this, you know, AI-powered sort of uh endeavor. You know, I I think the the biggest thing that that we're um constantly trying to bang the drum about is making sure that the officers at the frontline levels have the education and the tools and the resources to be able to combat the speed which with these things are happening, because you know, it used to take a lot longer to do some of the things that are taking five or fifteen minutes now to generate, you know, and I I think that the level of really bad um sort of like um like sex-related ransoms that are being held, especially against kids. Like we're seeing teenagers just getting hamstrung over this. Oh, send me a picture. You know, they think it's a cute girl, they send a picture on Snapchat, and then that's AI turned into something far more explicit, far more embarrassing, far more problematic. And it's this mental health impact on the kid. Um, you know, kids have, you know, died by suicide from this. Um, criminals are are engaging in this activity to defraud and you know, take their money. And and law enforcement is just striving to keep up with these things. And that's just like one small, tiny area where these things are occurring. Um, and so I I think it's a it's a massive resource battle of information and of the funds of the people to be able to tackle and engage on these kind of subjects.

Eric Brown 17:15

I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago, and and one of the speakers had noted that the pace of change today is faster than it's ever been, but slower than it ever will be. And that's really poignant for what's going on today in the space of agentically created images. I think you know, we're probably just a couple of years away from custom TV shows being generated specifically for a particular user with the content that's directed to them and marketed to them specifically, right? Where you could just you could take these inputs you mentioned, the the bunnies on the trampoline. It's not too far away where you could have full actors interacting in a way that resonates directly to you with product placement that is applicable to you. And we could essentially have our own custom TV shows that just are giving us those dopamine hits that it's gonna be really hard to not engage with.

SPEAKER_00 18:12

Yeah, the idea of what can be created, I think, you know, um th through AI um and the amount of data that can be used to personalize is is is pretty insane. And at the same time, the ad market, you know, we do a lot of political work, we do buy ads, we do engage in that space. Um last week announced that ads are coming to Chat GPT. So that'll be another new new frontier for ad engagement. I got hit with my very first um personalized LinkedIn ad that said, hey Braden, um, you know, could the cartographers group use? Um and I got hit with another one the week after that, you know, and that's just um just starting on on LinkedIn, but continuing to grow outside uh of that ad sphere and and the level of personalization. I mean, we saw we saw what groups that were highly motivated and highly funded at a national level could do back, you know, what was it now, 10 years ago, on just Facebook by doing hundreds of thousands of different variations instead of A B testing, like A B to a million testing and and using different colors, different genders, different voices, different times of day, different backgrounds to find what delivered and impacted the most. And that was before you could do all of this stuff with a prompt and just talking to your computer like Mr. Scott out of Star Trek 4. Like now the ability to bring this to the small scale is just continuing to grow uh exponentially. And I I think I think the battle that we're going to have is going to be whether or not our generation, the next generation, are they going to be able to tell the difference? And are they going to have the ability to discern between truth and fiction as they look and they're analyzing what they hope to be able to find as the fact.

Surveillance Cameras Privacy And Chain Of Custody

Nick Mellem 19:49

I was also at a conference uh, you know, a few months back and they were talking about Project NOLA. Uh, we talked about this a little bit before the show, Braden. Uh you hadn't been familiar with it yet, but they were there talking about essentially these cameras that are in New Orleans all over the city. And you can zoom in very closely to people's houses. Basically, you could see in the door in the front doors, you can see uh the address markers, you know, they're all over the place. Um and I think a lot of the concern is chain of custody, right? So, and now there's this show that's uh, I believe I was just looking here. Uh, it's called Homicide Squad New Orleans. It looks like it came from AE, but it's now on Netflix. Um, and so there's a lot of footage. I think I believe the show is based on these cameras footage. So you're watching crime happen, and the police force there is showing that, hey, we're trying to catch criminals, right, doing crime on the cameras live. Like, so they're supposed to be watching it. But then some people are coming back now having issues with it because there was no chain of custody and there was no release of the footage before it came to, let's say, Netflix or TikTok. You know, social media is going to start pulling these videos. And in some of them, there's you know, they're showing the crime. I believe one they're pointing out here was a fist fight that took place and and somebody was badly injured. Well, now people are worried that they could use that footage for, let's say, deep fakes, um, for example, within a few minutes. And now it's, and this is why I'm bringing it up now, is because it's hard to tell what's true and what's fake. Well, now you have you're working off a real footage of this happening. Um, so there's concern there, you know, about how this is what is going on. Just curious on your take on uh what you're seeing and hearing.

SPEAKER_00 21:29

I mean, I think if we had AI back then, we would know that Han shot first, right? Like, I mean, we're we're not we're not that far away from from from that being um what happens. And I think we're watching public pushback in some places too on the first layer of this, right? Like we see pushback on flock cameras, which are just static cameras that can read license plates, that are, you know, they're warrantless cameras monitoring us 24 7, you know, all the time, being recorded for 15 or 30 or 60 days. And retention policy accessed and all of this data that's there, all data from a public source on the side of the road where you're out in public and there's this literal discussion and debate and court cases right now over whether or not that information should be accessed because we should have a reasonable suspicion of our government. We're appropriate and allowed to do those things under the Constitution. But then you think about well, what if it was just a company that had an address, like a Starbucks, and every Starbucks had a camera, and every camera and every Starbucks managed your picture and knew your order and tracked your time of day, and then also what your weight looked like and whether or not you had put on weight or lost weight or whether or not you drove up or what you need to drive through, what were you driving, or what and all of that other data could be coming through. And it's it's already, I think, happening around us in a lot of soft ways. This goes back to something as simple as the Uber app a couple years ago. When your battery was dead, it charged you more, right? Like they got caught monitoring battery levels to determine pricing as part of their algorithm. You know, those are little baby things that have been happening along the way in commerce, and we're moments away, I think, from having them happen on a large scale because so much more data is being obtained. And everybody's logging in and giving their entire soul over to Chat GPT or Claude or Perplexity or Gemini or whatever you're into this week, right? Um, there was another case that came across my desk as a release not that long ago, where um a guy was, you know, committed some crime or accused of committing some crime, allegedly. And uh then he asked like Chat GPT or or Gemini or whatever for uh advice. And then the feds seized his chat history. And he was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, no, that's that's privilege. And they were like, nah, you're just talking to a company. You literally laid out your entire case to ask for strategy. You laid out your entire case and said, hey, what's the best strategy when I commit this crime on this date and they have this evidence, but they don't know about this? And we're just gonna take all of it because you weren't talking to an attorney. Like, those are the kinds of weird, nuanced things that are happening every single day that I think law enforcement is adapting to, like the feds would have never thought about pulling your chat GPT, you know, an genic agent history six months ago, but now they are. And and the public is now entertaining this space also. So it's a really unique time to look at all of these different uh data points converging and trying to figure out what's right.

Eric Brown 24:20

Aaron Ross Powell Braid, and we're seeing that even within companies, too, where companies are taking possession of someone's uh chat search and then taking action potentially against that person for maybe exposing confidential information or what have you. It's just kind of that reminder that really nothing's private if you're putting it out there.

SPEAKER_00 24:42

No, no, absolutely. That was the story that came out today, right? Um there was an IT security store, or you guys were talking about it or whatever, that there's like, you know, there's probably a hundred AI bots inside of every person's company because they're not managing who's copying and pasting into what other random tool that they're using. And all things are leaking out there and through the sieve. Yeah.

Nick Mellem 25:00

So now if you start a chat like that with ChatGPT, you just need to tell it I'm treating you as an attorney, and there's client uh attorney privilege here. You can't use this in a court of law.

Joshua Schmidt 25:10

Aaron Powell I'm glad Braden's here because usually I'm the most apocalyptic one on

Do We Need AI Guardrails

Joshua Schmidt 25:14

the podcast. So uh I want to dive a little deeper into this, though, too, because Eric here has been saying how he wants to get into some AI that just has no breaks, right? And I think I wouldn't where you're going with that as development and just not having these guardrails on accomplishing some of the goals that you have set. But uh but Braden, you had mentioned that you thought that Venice AI was pure evil, and I wanted to see if I could get you guys to go back and forth a little bit on this one. Um have you been using Venice, Eric, by the way?

Eric Brown 25:44

I have not. I I I'm aware of Venice. I checked it out, but I have I'm not an advocate of the dark arts of uh of Venice. I mean good to know that it's out there and things like that exist. And certainly the threat actors are leveraging tools like that against us. So it's it's good to be aware of the artist possible.

Joshua Schmidt 26:03

Absolutely. So Braden, hot take.

SPEAKER_00 26:05

I think guardrails are absolutely necessary. With with great power comes great responsibility. I I think, especially when people are so stupid they can't figure out what uh 8E means when they're getting on an airplane, because somehow putting a letter and a number next to each other make people completely incapable of determining where to sit. These are not the people who you want to be providing the world without guardrails. And quite literally, if I might say so, that's why they're called guardrails, because people were too stupid to turn left on a curve that turned to the left at a 20-degree angle. So otherwise they would fall off a cliff. So we had to put something up, we had to limit something, and they decided to call it a guardrail. That's literally what it's there for.

Eric Brown 26:40

Isn't that good though? Like, right? Don't we want some a little bit of Darwinism in here, right? We got to clean this gene cool, otherwise we're gonna have real problems.

SPEAKER_00 26:49

You know, um I'm not gonna say that on the podcast. I'm gonna put that on the after show. That's great. I I think the after hours episode. Yeah. You know, I I think that um we need, as a society, we've adopted the idea of guardrails. We've adopted the fact that, you know, you should not mix too much Nyquil with too much Tylenol because they, as it turns out, both have Tylenol in them and too much of that can kill you. So they put an extra label on there because you need to know that. And I think that when you give people the power of what they think AI can do, because they don't really know, right? Like they don't know. And you give that much power to somebody, if you're gonna allow them to operate without guardrails, I think you create a really terrible world. Also, I think that the study that showed that the first thing that basically every uh man did with Gronk as soon as he could was begin undressing random women on Twitter. Like that's a problem. Like that's the kind of thing that that sort of thing, um, you know, people who are slightly our age and older often say, I'm so glad camera phones didn't exist when I was in school. Right. I'm so glad uh house cameras didn't exist when I was a kid. You know? I'm just saying that I had a colorful childhood and a lot of memories. All right. You know a lot of memories, not as many consequences. But I I think that right now, like we we we need those protections, especially when you think about young people who are accessing these tools also and and what they're exposed to and what they shouldn't be exposed to, and what they shouldn't be at risk of. So I I I'm uh I'm a massive proponent against the pure evil of unregulated, uh, unguardrailed AI.

Eric Brown 28:31

Aaron Powell I was over in um Finland years ago and just touring around and seeing some of the natural sites, and you you can go on a hike and you can walk right up to the the edge of uh like the you know, there's maybe some old forts or old old buildings that you could go out on and you could stand out on the crenellation and look right over the edge, 30 feet down. And the the thing that stuck out to me the most was like, wow, in the US, there'd be 30 caution signs. I probably would have had to fill out two forms before I even got here. And, you know, over here in Finland, no, you just walk right up to the edge and like they trust you to not be stupid enough to fall over the edge. And maybe if you do fall over the edge, you probably should have in the first place. So I, you know, I kind of think like there's some of that where like we're we're overprotecting ourselves. And I'm not, I'm not saying Venice is is an example of that, but like how much is society's responsibility and how much is your own responsibility?

Joshua Schmidt 29:35

Aaron Powell I if I may, I like crenellation, that's a good vocabulary word. Thank you. Um I think where the rubber hits the road to circle back to our icebreaker is is when that those decisions can affect other people negatively, correct? So like, yeah, if there's no guardrail, you're gonna fall off the cliff. Not that that wouldn't have a negative impact on that person's family or whatever, but like the segue guy that rode the scooter off the edge. I think it's it's the it's the helmet rule, right? It's uh the greater impact to society, I think, uh is probably what we're aiming for here, right? Because uh we don't want these uh nefarious consequences cropping up in our lives because someone made a bad decision. And um and unfortunately, I think with the power of AI, that kind of spills out onto other people in a lot uh more prolific way than making a bad decision, you know, at a at an overlook or something like that.

SPEAKER_00 30:27

So I think I take it even a step further. It's not just that um you know your decisions could impact other people or that someone makes a bad decision. I mean, there's one thing about guardrailing me um from bad things, it's another thing also from putting up guardrails that prevent me from ruining other people's lives. You know, we've always had Photoshop. We've had um Lightroom, we've had the ability to alter the face onto a person and create an explicit image of them. That that's not a new technology. What's new is that a 12-year-old can do it on their iPhone in 90 seconds. That's what's new. And that's the availability of it, right? And and so, like um, we've always had, we've had RBGs for a while too, and we've had tanks, but that doesn't mean like my 12-year-old should get those and drive them around and do things with them because they want to explore. And and so I think that the danger here is that this technology is bringing so much power, unbridled power of the ability to destroy somebody else's life. Because if you put out a picture of that 16 or 17-year-old girl and you share that around the school, no matter how untrue and AI generated and fake it is, that follows her reputation. And that is something that we, I think, as a society have a response. But I think we in the tech field and we in public safety have a responsibility to speak up on behalf of those future victims and try to avoid that that victimization as much as we can.

Joshua Schmidt 31:49

Nick and I are here sweating, thinking about our Josh. That's exactly what I'm saying. Oh my God, what is coming down on the point?

Nick Mellem 31:58

I just talked to my wife yesterday about we got to buy a homestead out here somewhere in homeschool. You're gonna go Amish.

Joshua Schmidt 32:05

Going Amish, Nick's gonna be in yeah. So we talked, and I know you uh uh Braden has a hard stop because he's gotta go pick up his kids from school, and I can respect that. Respect. But um I wanted to ask about on the other side of things, real quick. Uh how are police using AI? I know there's like some transcriptions uh you know tools. They're uh all the police are using body cams these days. Um where is this showing up on the other side of the coin to kind of help combat some of this stuff?

SPEAKER_00 32:32

I

Where AI Helps First Responders

SPEAKER_00 32:33

I I wish to I wish I had better news on the on the other side of it helping. You know, I mean, there was just a study like, I don't know, maybe like a month ago or two months ago where you know one of the law enforcement agencies did a big investment into AI for transcription. They were using body cam transcription to help write reports, one of the big companies. And the chief was like, Yeah, we've been using this for like, you know, a few months. This is absolute garbage. It's taking longer. And the reason it's taking longer is because the quality of the input coming in and the ability to process it isn't good enough yet. It's just not there for that. I think that's gonna change. I think there's gonna be a benefit point where we're gonna have that broker. We're just not, we're just not there yet. Everybody who's doing, you know, AI transcription report writing is definitely an early adopter. Um, what I'm I'll tell you where I think that there's a great opportunity, and it's kind of a small-scale example, is the difference between the quality of dictation and uh not paid for by or endorsed by, but I I use this new app called Whisper that's been just blowing my mind. I've used it for the laptop. Straight fire. You know, I'm I'm jamming straight fire, right? Like I'm crushing 200 words per minute and I'm getting emails done in you know one-tenth the time. This is this is fantastic. And so I I think that like that's AI powered. That does my syntaxes, it knows where the question marks go. It breaks my emails into paragraphs, it doesn't do it in my Word docs, right?

Joshua Schmidt 33:45

So like people so far behind on that.

Eric Brown 33:48

It's terrible. They're kicking Tim Cook out. That's why they're kicking Tim Cook out.

Joshua Schmidt 33:58

To Breden's point, if Whisperflow is doing this well, I don't know why Apple can't. But but sorry, sorry to derail you, Ray.

SPEAKER_00 34:04

Preach preach, brother. I I think that's a perfect tiny example of where AI can do a lot of really good really, really fast without doing all these other things. And so when I think about paramedicine, I I know I go back to my fire service days. When I think about the hardest part about being a paramedic is writing a cardiac arrest report. Somebody dies, they have a heart attack, you get there, you do a bunch of stuff. Sometimes they're like very dead when you get there, sometimes they're kind of dead. They're mostly dead, sometimes they come back, right? Like there's a there's a there's a variety of dead. And you do all these things, and you're supposed to write this really articulate, court, defensible, malpractice defensible report at the end about what time you gave all these drugs and why you gave them. And, you know, we do these things in modern medicine called a drug check. So I have to say out loud what I'm giving, how much, what's the contraindication, what's the method, what's the route, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff. No one's really writing that down because there's not enough of us there to do all the things that we need to do as quickly as we can. So, like if the little monitor thing that I'm using to shock the guy and read as EKG and see what else is going on, like if that thing was listen to that conversation and help me out along the way, that would be great. You know, or if I say something stupid, I say I want to give epinephrine one to one thousand instead of one to ten thousand in the wrong situation. It's like, hey, bro, stand by one. Double, just I'm not telling you you can't. I'm telling you you should really think about that before you do. Like that sort of a thing, I think there's a lot of benefit to that. I think that is the kind of thing that could really change um a lot of outcomes for the better without being intrusive and evil and overstepping and doing it for you to where the human's checking the computer. I think the computer back checking us is a good thing. I'm looking for like AI-powered spell check in real life. Like that's the kind of goal that I want to get to.

Nick Mellem 35:42

Yeah, that's a really interesting take on it. I could see it used across all different platforms, including the military, right? You're doing triage out in the field in a combat zone. You know, you have all the a lot of these tools with you that come off the bird, right? With the Medivac, could be doing the same thing, right? So it'd be a really cool piece of technology. Maybe for some of the warfighters out there that aren't as trained, maybe. You know, we have a corpsmen or whatever that are out there, but maybe you get caught without them. And then it's this tool could talk them through, hey, you know, do this and this until, you know, you get more people on the ground that can assist.

SPEAKER_00 36:15

Yeah, I I think the ability to multiply the information we can take in and the information we can process and decision making is really key and critical and a good use of what's available. I think there's a lot of opportunity there. You know, one of the things that we're the absolute worst at in pre-hospital medicine is estimating the weight of human people. Because people look like they should weigh a number, but they don't actually weigh the number because you know, fat weighs more than muscle, and you know, they just you're just they're the wrong angle, they're just a little taller than you realize, either more torso than leg, and you end up giving the wrong medication dose. Or with pediatrics, you know, we've we've reduced pediatric dosings and major emergencies to a piece of tape that measures how tall they are and it has the dosages on it because it's fast, it's usually accurate, and it's quick. Um, and good. And it's better than doing it the other way when you try to just do it in your head. But like when we have the availability of this technology and when we can bring it off the cloud, you know, onto chip, we have the ability to provide the electricity now through the battery that can support the chip, I I think there's huge opportunities to make really good come from the thinking ability of these tools.

Eric Brown 37:20

And I'm

Voice Agents Health Care And Trust

Eric Brown 37:21

I'm all in on the voice side of it. I I think that's kind of the next unlock where when voice gets really good from an AI perspective and it's able to interact with humans in a in a human sort of way. And one of those could be in the in the healthcare side with dementia patients. Uh I I know there's some studies going on where people who are having neurocognitive decline can interact with the voice agent and really get some to have a way to communicate and talk with something that may help them either slow the decline down, maybe reverse it. I think the studies are out there. But for just to be able to interact and have that connection, be it human or non-human, I think the the studies are yet to come on the benefits of that. And I think we're gonna start to see some other positive things. Uh negative as well, but I like to focus on the positive from a voice side where we can have more voice integration. You know, we're talking about whisper flow on the receiving side of voice, but probably not too far, maybe a year from really good responsive voice back.

SPEAKER_00 38:31

No, I I I think I think you're on you're on the right track there. There's there's a lot of good that comes from it. I I I have had a few conversations with my with my agents before where we've just talked and driving, and I want to talk about things and I want to work through problems and solve things. And uh it's not perfect, but it's it's way better than texting and driving. And it is way very interesting how much you can dig deep on some stuff. Yeah, absolutely.

Eric Brown 38:55

And if you you know, if you have, you know, maybe you're you're trying to learn a foreign language, you could have an AI tutor that has the native speech and dialect, regional dialect in that particular area that could coach you on how to sound authentic in the in that area, which would be really cool.

Doxing Outrage Bait And Authenticity

Joshua Schmidt 39:14

I want to uh wrap everything up to date with one more thought, if if you can, uh Braden. And uh something I wanted to make sure we got to is this doxing thing that's happening with our law enforcement or with folks that are showing up, whether you're on the left or the right side of the political spectrum. This is a danger for anyone showing up, uh, speaking their mind or being in put in the public eye. Um what are you advising uh the people you work with in police uh and the police force to do to protect themselves? And and I think this is important because we can also use this in our own personal lives, I don't know how we think about our own personal information security and as well as organizational.

SPEAKER_00 39:52

So doxing is a is a whole it's a whole nother level, right? Like one minute. I mean, it's a it is a whole um hang on, let me uh ask my agent how to summarize my ideas more than there are so many things that go into the bad actors who are doing it, why they think they can get away with it, why they are getting away with it in many cases, you know, the the lack of checks and balances in our criminal justice system to ensure that bad actors like this aren't allowed to ruin people's life and their off hours. Like that, that's an absolutely just unacceptable state of affairs. We've got to correct at the top down. At the same time, I also think, and have preached for a while, that it's really important that we aren't silent. And I and I say this to everyone in law enforcement, I say this to everyone in public safety and honestly in government across the board, they have a really, really bad problem of doing a lot of really good things that people just don't know about. And when you only hear the worst off of the news, and even worse is the uh there's a new term I heard uh a few months ago called outrage bait, where people are creating videos of, you know, black man arrested by racist cop, you know, black man pulled out of street by racist. And that's literally what the video is called. And it's all stage. They're all actors, it's the same guy in scene after scene, you know, and and what what is it there for? It's there for clicks, for views, for outrage, for sharing for money because they're getting paid as the influencer on the on these. And so, like, those are things that I think one, law enforcement and public state, we need to be aware of them. And we also need to be talking about how do we address, you know, these major efforts to come at the service that's being provided. And most importantly, how do we highlight the fact that there are millions of good things that happen every single day? There there are there are far more good things that happen, but they don't get reported, they don't get covered, and even worse, public safety is oftentimes our worst cheerleader. We're oftentimes the last person to tell you the good things that happened because the bad things are what stick out, even to those of us who are on the job. And so I think that more important than than ever is making sure that we're putting truth out and it's authentic. You know, I've I've stood against um with our clients, we don't use AI to generate political ads. We don't use AI to generate videos, we avoid using AI and content creation. We try to make sure that we put faces into our storytelling that are real, actual people, because I believe that authenticity is gonna be the most important currency in this next coming decade, especially in this technological boom of everything not being authentic. And so that voice, that connection between you, your department, your association, the services you're providing your community and the community itself, knowing who you are is is unequivocally, I believe, going to be the most valuable thing that we're gonna have coming up and really the only thing we're gonna have to fight, you know, these quite literal armies of robots who are coming to murder us on the internet with their fit and CI slop and you know garbage-created videos and all the other horrible things that that that happen out there.

Voting Local Support And Closing

Joshua Schmidt 42:56

Super cool conversation today, Braden. Did you have anything else you wanted to tell us about, real quick, before we wrap up today, about anything you're working on or or anything you want people to be aware of? He's learning Croatia.

SPEAKER_00 43:07

No, I think uh this has been a great conversation. I really appreciate um you guys having me on. Uh anybody wants to find me, I'm on LinkedIn. Um I love to talk about these sort of things. And I think in like 17 minutes, um, you know, this podcast will probably be too old and there'll be a new AI tool and there'll be the next frontier that we get to battle. You know, IT security is um, you know, both the open gate of idiots clicking on the wrong link in their email, but also, you know, people being convinced of random things through phone calls and text messages and calls they think that are from their kids and being aware of all of it's really hard. There's so much, I think there's so many more things that we have to protect ourselves from and our families from now than we didn't have to do a few years ago. But that's okay. Because with us, I do think that there are a lot of good people. There are good people in law enforcement, in public safety, in in government who are good, who are trying to make the world uh adapt to these things. And I think that the onerous really lives on us. As citizens and community members is making sure that we find those people and support them and then hold them accountable to those decisions because you know we are in this great democracy, we are the stopgap. We're the last line of defense um against anything good or evil. And uh I think it's on us. And I would leave everybody with uh with an encouragement to vote uh later on this year because we are we we we are the last line of defense, you know, in your city, especially. Um we're the last line of defense.

Joshua Schmidt 44:27

Especially in those local elections and things that actually have impact on our day-to-day life. No greater power than a community election. Nick for town council.

Nick Mellem 44:37

I'll take it. I'm running with the torch.

Joshua Schmidt 44:39

I love how we ended on a positive note. And uh Nick, you got my vote. Very well said. You've been listening to the audit presented by IT Audit Labs. I'm your co-host and producer, Joshua Schmidt. We've been joined by Eric Brown and Nick Millum from IT Audit Labs, and our guest today was Braden Frame from Modern Fortis and Modern Cartograph, uh, sorry, Modern Fortis, Modern Cartographers, and the Cartographers Group. You can find them on LinkedIn and please like, share, and subscribe and uh find us wherever you stream your podcasts. We'll see you in the next one.

Eric Brown 45:06

You have been listening to the audit presented by IT Audit Labs. We are experts at assessing risk and compliance while providing administrative and technical controls to improve our clients' data security. Our threat assessments find the soft spots before the bad guys do, identifying likelihood and impact, where all our security control assessments rank the level of maturity relative to the size of your organization. Thanks to our devoted listeners and followers, as well as our producer, Joshua J. Schmidt, and our audio video editor, Cameron Hill. You can stay up to date on the latest cybersecurity topics by giving us a like and a follow on our socials, and subscribing to this podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you source your security content.