Uncanny Valley is back! This week, senior writer Kate Knibbs joins Brian Barrett, ZoĆ« Schiffer, and Leah Feiger to discuss the two incidents that have been making noise in prediction markets: George Santos getting lifetime ban from Kalshi and a Google engineerās Polymarket insider-trading case. Plus, reporters reverse-engineered Flockās AI-powered person-search tool and spoke to experts about the accuracy of such technology, and the hosts unpack the online meltdown over how to talk about ārogueā AI agents.
Articles mentioned in this episode:
George Santos Just Got Hit With Kalshiās First-Ever Lifetime Ban
Google Engineer Accused of Polymarket Insider Trading Says He Was Just Gambling
This Is Flockās AI Search Tool for Cops
What We Still Donāt Know About OpenAIās Hugging Face Hack
The Logical End Point of AI Job Interviews Is Two Bots Talking to Each Other
You can follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at @brbarrett, Zoƫ Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer, Leah Feiger on Bluesky at @leahfeiger, and Kate Knibbs on Bluesky at @knibbs. Write to us at [email protected].
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Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Leah Feiger: Hey guys, so nice to be back after our two-week summer break.
Zoƫ Schiffer: Longer for me. It's so nice to see you guys.
Leah Feiger: I missed you.
Zoƫ Schiffer: I missed you.
Leah Feiger: Brian, don't worry. We missed you too.
Brian Barrett: I assumed that the you was for all of us.
Zoƫ Schiffer: It was the royal you.
Brian Barrett: But now that you've carved me out, that's telling. Thank you.
Zoƫ Schiffer: Welcome to WIRED's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoƫ Schiffer, contributing editor.
Brian Barrett: I'm Brian Barrett, executive editor.
Leah Feiger: And I'm Leah Feiger, director of politics and science. This week we're discussing some recent high profile incidents in prediction markets. Former US representative George Santos was the first person to be given a lifetime ban from Kalshi, and a Google engineer was accused of insider trading at Polymarket. We'll get into why both of these cases show that there are still plenty of blurry rules when it comes to prediction markets.
Brian Barrett: We'll also check in on perhaps the most hated tech in the US at the moment, maybe a runner-up to data centers, Flock surveillance cameras. This week, WIRED reporters were able to recreate Flock's AI powered search tool, the same one that has a track record of being misused by police officers. We're going to break down how it works, and whether the backlash against Flock cameras might have reached its boiling point.
Zoƫ Schiffer: And because I simply cannot help myself, we will also be getting into why tech bros on X are melting down over how to discuss rogue AI agents and what happens when they jump their guardrails and coordinate attacks on other systems.
Leah Feiger: All right. Do you guys remember George Santos?
Brian Barrett: How could I forget?
Zoƫ Schiffer: Absolutely do, but wow, did not expect we would be talking about him again this soon, I have to say.
Leah Feiger: Former US representative expelled from Congress in 2023, accused of fraud and theft, and doing it with such a plum that the story just couldn't help but take national news by storm.
Brian Barrett: I want to be clear too. He wasn't just accused, he went to jail.
Zoƫ Schiffer: Yeah, I was going to say very credibly accused.
Leah Feiger: Anyways, he's back in the headlines this week. On Monday we learned that Santos was hit with a lifetime ban from prediction market platform Kalshi, and a $71,000 fine, allegedly for trying to manipulate a bet on whether he'd show up to Trump's State of the Union. To tell us all the full details, we are joined by WIRED senior correspondent Kate Knibbs.
Kate Knibbs: Hi guys, how are you doing?
Leah Feiger: Kate, so happy that you're here. Can you take us through my favorite story of the week?
Kate Knibbs: I would love to tell you guys about this. And I will say, I feel similarly like Santos, yes, he does do crimes but he does them with such flare that it's hard to hate him.
Zoƫ Schiffer: It's a bad thing that's very fun to watch.
Kate Knibbs: Yes. So Santos, at this point when this all begins, he's already expelled from Congress, already gone to jail. He's out of jail, he's making Cameo videos for money, he's doing his thing. So, he posts that he will be attending the State of the Union. And then, while the State of the Union is going on, he posts that he's actually stuck at the airport and he's not attending it. And then he says, "FML." There was a market on Kalshi about whether Santos was going to attend the State of the Union, and someone made a bunch of money off of it. And Kalshi quickly figured out that it was him because Kalshi has know your customer requirements. His identity was not a secret to them, it was not hard for them to check and see that the person who made money was George Santos.
Leah Feiger: Awesome.
Kate Knibbs: And it's against their rules to place trades or wagers on events that you're a participant in. It's like market manipulation, insider trading, whatever. So even before this happened this week, the CFTC actually also knew about this because Kalshi told them, and they already fined him money for this specific incident. What happened this week was apparently there was this back and forth between Santos and Kalshi, and they fined him $71,000 and then weren't going to lifetime ban him. The same day that they announced the Santos thing, they announced a few other politicians who got in trouble for betting on themselves, and those politicians got much smaller fines and temporary bans.
Zoƫ Schiffer: Wait, do we know how much money he made on the market?
Kate Knibbs: I believe it was around 17 grand. I have to double check, but it was in the tens. They ended up enacting this ban basically because he was being a little bit of a prickly pear to work with and wasn't playing ball. So, this is Kalshi basically deciding that they hate George Santos, which is funny. He also immediately, he wouldn't give us comment, which was annoying, but he posted on X some kind of bitchy things about Kalshi. He immediately was like, "Let's see how long you guys last," kissy emoji. So, he doesn't seem super contrite, and I honestly don't even know if he's going to pay Kalshi. I asked them what they would do if he doesn't pay and they said that they would pursue legal action, and I am going to be following that because it will be interesting to see.
Zoƫ Schiffer: This is my big question. Does George Santos want to get away with these crimes, or is there something else going on here? Because it's one thing to participate in the market that you are literally a participant in in real life, but it's another to be blatantly posting about it in very obvious ways on social media.
Kate Knibbs: Well, if he did do it basically on purpose, he wouldn't be the first politician to do so. There's actually already a storied history of politicians doing insider trading on Kalshi, getting caught and then saying it was a bit. There's two other people who have already done this. Kyle Langford, who was caught this spring, and then this candidate, Mark Moran, who said that he did it on purpose as a sort of performance art piece against prediction markets.
Brian Barrett: This is my new get out of trouble card just in general, that I was just doing a bit. So, if I'm ever slow to put an edit back to you guys or anything like that, it's a bit. It's for my art.
Zoƫ Schiffer: And we totally get that.
Leah Feiger: I love it. I'm sorry, I think that there have just been so few rules and regulations, as you've reported, Kate, and there's just been a lot of gray areas that people have been tap dancing around that I kind of love an example where Kalshi had absolutely no choice other than to say, "Every single part of this was so wrong. Here are the facts from A to Z. This is it. This is the line in the sand." And I think that having examples like this is only good. So, that's where I'm coming from, I suppose.
Kate Knibbs: I get that. And you know what has been interesting? Because I'm so steeped in this prediction market world, sometimes I forget that other people don't know all of the arcane rules. And a lot of people have reached out to me about this story and been like, "Why is Kalshi allowed to fine him? That's weird. You don't get fined by FanDuel if you do something." And so, it's been an opportunity to explain to people it's because Kalshi is a federally regulated financial platform. It actually is imbued with the power to find people in the same way that the CBOE is. And that is something that most people didn't know, and now maybe they do, and we can thank George Santos.
Leah Feiger: Can we talk about Polymarket and the differences here? I referenced in the introduction the Google engineer who was arrested by US authorities back in May for alleged insider trading on Polymarket. Talk to me about this, Kate. How is this story different? How is it similar? How is Polymarket and Kalshi at this point different and similar?
Kate Knibbs: The Google engineer's case is different in a bunch of different ways. He made a lot more money, he made over a million dollars. So, the scale of it is quite impressive. He got arrested, Santos didn't get arrested for this. He's just gotten fined. He got arrested and he is pleading not guilty and is attempting to say that he's not guilty because he was actually just doing betting. And because he was just doing betting, the federal government has no grounds to attempt to try him under laws that pertain to commodities violations. Basically, the Google engineer was in Europe. He's a European living in Europe. When he made these trades using information that he learned because he was employed by Google, he knew who the most searched person of 2025 was going to be. He allegedly knew. And he's not, in the court filing so far, he's not trying to say, "I didn't do it." He's trying to say, "If I did it wouldn't be a crime as you're saying it is, because I was just doing international betting and what does that have to do with commodities law in the US? How was I insider trading? These aren't trades, they're just wagers." So, it's a really interesting case because he's basically allying himself with all of these state regulators that are currently battling the federal government and Kalshi and Polymarket over whether they're actually offering bets or trades, and it will be very interesting to see how it plays out. And the argument that he's making is also being made by the other person who was arrested for insider trading, the special forces operative. He's also making this argument. The two guys, I don't know if their lawyers are talking or what, but they're both coming out and saying, "Well, whether or not I did it, it doesn't really matter because this isn't trading, it's just gambling. And why are you trying to pretend that you can insider trade on a gambling platform?" And so, yeah.
Leah Feiger: Kate, thank you so much for joining us. I have no doubt that your reporting on how all of this continues, especially with the midterms, will be invaluable.
Brian Barrett: Thank you, Kate.
Kate Knibbs: Anytime.
Brian Barrett: OK, we're going to switch gears. We're going to talk about Flock cameras, which have been pretty reliably in the headlines the past few weeks, and usually not for great reasons. Lots of cases of police officers allegedly abusing the systems to track their colleagues, to track exes, and a lot of protests around them, a lot of people canceling their contracts with them, municipalities. This week, WIRED reporters Dhruv Mehrotra and Dell Cameron got their hands on the code behind how Flock's new AI-powered search tool works. This is actually some fun wizardry, they were able to take the code and recreate what it looks like. So, they're able to sort of interact with the Flock system in the same way that a police officer would. They don't have access to all of the backend stuff. And here's the thing, when you all think of Flock cameras, what do you think of them doing?
Leah Feiger: Surveillance.
Brian Barrett: But what kind? What specifically do Flock cameras look at?
Leah Feiger: License plates?
Brian Barrett: Yeah, they're license plate readers. Yes, this tool is not a license plate reader, it allows you to look up people. You can type in a general description. You can say, "Someone wearing scrubs, someone who has tattoos." You draw a little shape on a map, a little circle on a map, and the system will run a continuous automated search for a match across every camera inside of that circle.
Leah Feiger: That's so bad.
Brian Barrett: It's pretty bad. It's not great. And I think it's a capability that most people don't assume Flock has or offers, and it's a relatively new system, but we do know it has been deployed in some places already so it's out there. And not only that, there's not really a moderation framework in place. Flock recently announced some ways to make sure that people aren't abusing the license plate readers. This seems like so open-ended and such a chance to look for whoever you want, wherever you want using all of these cameras. It's really kind of stunning.
Zoƫ Schiffer: I want to dig in a little more on the it's really bad thing, because I mean, I think a lot of people are in agreement on that, but can you, Brian, just make the case for why this technology would exist? What is Flock's argument for why it could be good, and then why do you think it's bad?
Brian Barrett: So, I think the argument for why police officers like it is it's another tool to identify people who were near the scene of a crime, or suspicious looking people or whatever. So, I think it's just the more information, I would assume, that the more information you have as a police officer, the better you feel about the investigation. In terms of why it's bad, I think a few reasons. It is not a reliable tool necessarily. I think there's a lot about these sort of person recognition tools that aren't necessarily 100 percent you're going to get it right every timeā
Zoƫ Schiffer: Like it can misidentify people.
Brian Barrett: Yeah, but even without that I think we already live in such a surveillance sort of state that we've become inured to it, but I don't think we should. I think the idea that anywhere you're walking you can be identified and brought into some sort of police probe because you happen to have tattoos, or happen to be wearing scrubs, or whatever other physical identifier f
