AI Power, FBI Data-Theft Claims and Online Grooming Risks

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Techstrong gang for this day on Wednesday. And well, as always, there's just been more amazing things happen that just continue to blow our collective minds. And well, we're going to discuss all of them as we go forward here, but let me introduce the guest for today, John Schwartz, who has come to us from Las Vegas.

How you doing, buddy? I'm doing well, and I'm happy to say it's actually in the 80s, so it's actually somewhat livable here right now. Right.

Are you like me? " Yeah, I know exactly. Exactly.

I should get a timeshare or something. We should have a timeshare for Techstrong, and we could all rotate our stays here. Yeah.

It would be a little crazy, but the parties would be great, right? There you go. All right.

Also joining us, of course, is Terry Robinson, who I can tell by the brick wall is home in New York. Finally. Yep, I'm back.

All right. And Andy Mann, who has got a new location, I think. I don't know if you've been on the show since you've moved to parts of Europe, but you are, I think, in Spain now?

You got it. I'm coming to you live from Girona in Spain, just north of Barcelona, just south of the border with France. All right.

I know when I went to Denver, you had already gone, but I will tell you that I think both Alan and I are coming to Barcelona at least twice in the early part of next year, so we'll come find you. We shall serve paella and tapas together. There you go.

All right. Tapas for everyone. All right.

Let's just jump into it from here. So President Trump showed up at the UN and basically told everybody that we, the United States, are going it alone. We are not going to participate in any kind of global governance of AI.

And by the way, it's not even called AI anymore, it's called super intelligence. Sorry. Now, we can take issue with whether that's right or wrong, and I'm sure most people probably lean to the wrong side of that, but I'm sure there's other folks out there that say, "Hey, it's America first," and it is what it is.

But John, what are the implications of all of this from your perspective as you think this through for a minute? Right. I think, there's all these other countries out there, and they are likely to make some decisions as a result.

Yeah, they are. In a sense, in his grand plan and his grand thinking, in a sense, he's probably ceding the race to China. China actually comes across as somewhat reasonable.

In fact, today at the UN, we're going to have not just OpenAI's Sam Altman speak, as well as somebody from Anthropic, but DeepSeek and Moonshot AI are both going to be talking to the UN Security Council. And they're all going to be talking ostensibly about responsible AI use, which runs counter to what Trump has been saying. In addition to his anything goes mentality, which in a sense is going to spook more and more Western countries, by the way, including Europe and North America.

There's a reason behind the seeming madness. It's all based on money, always. With him and his administration, it's always based on money.

So there's a lot of heavy-duty investments by himself, his allies like Michael Dell and his sons in AI and AI-related properties, so they want nothing to do with regulation. But in their- ... greed, in a sense, they're setting this agenda where it's the US alone, as you said, Mike.

And again, China, there's a meeting today between President Xi and Trump, and in a sense, Trump has kind of isolated us, as he often does. And this has huge implications. So the companies that are benefiting at this point, and I'm thinking of the Nvidias, OpenAI, Anthropic, who are kind of doing this dance.

Nope. I think that that's John who's stuck. Yeah.

All right. No, I think John's got a little bit hung up there. Look, honestly, I wouldn't blame him for freezing.

Maybe it's just a pause so he doesn't have to talk about it too much. Look, I'm going to jump in because I have to. I'm a political science grad myself, and I just have to...

I actually get it. Oh, I have to say, I actually get it. I don't agree with it, but I do get it.

Geopolitically, look, AI is a weapon now. We're talking about extension level events, and I think that's going maybe too far for now. But as we talk about that sort of thing, you have to realize that AI absolutely is a weapon, and potentially a geopolitical weapon, and to be able to put your own side forward first.

And every country will want to do this, of course, they will. Everyone from large to small will want to have their own AI presence. Some will want to have massive AI.

Look, if we don't suspect that North Korea is currently working on an AI project of some kind, we've got our heads in the sand. And so from that respect, look, I understand it. I also understand that we've dealt with this before with things like global compacts on nuclear weapons, global compacts on chemical weapons, global compacts on biological weapons.

Look, this is a technological weapon. It doesn't mean that we should necessarily go it alone. I do believe that there should be global regulatory frameworks.

I absolutely understand that this administration is tied at the hip to the Michael Dells, as you said, John, the Elon Musks, the Larry Ellisons of the world, the Jeff Bezoses to the tune of millions and millions and millions of dollars in his bank account. Or I'm sorry, his inauguration fund. I'm sorry, no, I mean his library, where there will be no books.

I understand it. I don't agree with it. I think geopolitically it makes sense, but I think it's the wrong direction for us morally, ethically, and as a world.

One thing, I'm sorry about my connection's bad. Usually it's good here. The thing that I wanted to point out was these companies that are right now benefiting, they get cozy with Trump, like NVIDIA, OpenAI, Anthropic, whoever, Amazon.

They better be careful because we have something called ETTD now, which Everything Trump Touches Dies. And in the short term, they're benefiting. But longer term, I wish I could use the other word, but they are screwed if he ends up alienating or in a sense undermining what they're trying to do.

And it does happen over and over again. So they've got to be careful. That's why I think today it's important to hear what Altman and some of the others say.

I think that there's a little subtlety in all of this because, if I'm looking at a nuclear attack or a chemical attack, it's kind of a one and done, right? I'm kind of like, we're going to all have mutually assured destruction. The AI, though, other countries are going to look at this and say, "This impacts everything we do in life.

" And Trump seems to want to treat this as a tool in his negotiation quiver that he's going to go in and basically extort these countries into a certain amount of behavior that he wants to see based on the fact that he will unleash this so-called super intelligence. Those countries, and Terry, I'll throw it to you, but they might just view that as flat-out extortion. What do you think?

Oh, yeah. I think for sure, flat-out extortion. And honestly, Mike, I don't know how well that'll work.

First of all, yes, he's in a position of power and influence, and that's scary and everything else, especially when it comes to something like AI and the stance. But his star is starting to fade some, and you're seeing a lot of pushback around the world on his policies and the fear factor. They're afraid of how crazy he's going to be, but they're not really falling into line the way that they did, say, two years ago, or almost two years ago when he took office again.

So yeah, I think they're going to view it as extortion. I think they're going to be- ticked off about it, and I also think they're going to align themselves with other countries. You know?

One thing I was going to mention is we are trying to make this last-ditch effort to regulate AI in some sort of manner, which is not going to work, by the way. It's going to go nowhere. And every other country, region, is looking at this and taking it seriously.

So we're going to be the renegade country without any regulation or any safeguards or guardrails, and other countries and companies notice this. Right? And they have to apply their governance and have to put something in place to be responsible.

They don't want to get sued. They don't want to alienate their customer base. Right.

Yeah. And I think also you- Sorry, Terry ... well, I was going to say, you hit the nail on the head early on, John, that it's about money, dollars, for this president.

Yeah, point taken that AI is now a weapon, or whatever, but if you look at the very heart of this, he's doing it for money and ego, like the whole name changes. He's got to rename something. He's got to take the sting out of it so it doesn't sound like artificial intelligence sounds very scary, that it's going to take over now and kill us all or whatever it's going to do.

Super intelligence, maybe that doesn't scare people quite as much. But it's ego with him, too. And I just, I think that- I'm surprised he didn't rename it Trump Intelligence, honestly.

Well, come on, guys. People could have a field day with that. So Andy, put your academic hat back on for a minute, but at some point, will other sources decide that there's too much AI power in the United States and it's all built around Anthropic and OpenAI, and they will start concluding that more money from China and all these other countries will be poured into AI labs somewhere else that's beyond the reach of the United States, and we're going to see this whole movement and shift away towards, whether that's a China model, maybe unlikely, but maybe there's something in between those two extremes, and suddenly there's going to be a lot of money from all over the world pouring into something that is not based in the United States.

Yeah, absolutely. And leaning on from what you were saying, Terry and John, the idea that other overseas governments, as opposed to local governments, other overseas governments are going to imply, impose some kind of regulatory standards. Big enterprises want to be able to operate globally, much like California has in the past been able to drive standards around pollution and motor manufacturing, auto industry, by imposing stronger standards.

Same thing with reducing CFCs, for all greenhouse gases. California has the, what is it? The fourth biggest economy in the world.

If it was a country, it's been able to establish and force the rest of the country to follow that lead. I believe that if we continue to do this, we are abnegating our ability to have influence over these other businesses, and they will go to where the regulation is predictable. For the most part, these large businesses and enterprises, automakers included, AI makers included, want predictability.

Shareholders, stockholders, Wall Street want predictability more, and stability more than anything else, really. Even more than they don't want regulation, they do want to be able to predict next year's earnings cycle and what they have to spend. You think about data center building.

That's a long-term cycle. They have a 25-year project to have a building. You need that predictability.

If we don't have regulation of some kind in the US, yes, one, the other nations will be also, look at what Canada is doing in terms of becoming an associate member of the European Union as a response to Trump's unilateral tariff actions. And so I think that that will continue to happen. And we'll get that with AI, with companies losing control and going, "You know what?

I need predictability and control. " Well, and then it goes back to what you guys were saying earlier. If that happens, the money pours into other places and all these alliances formed and whatever, then it does screw those companies here in the United States, right?

The AI companies that are buddy-buddy with Trump. I don't think any of this can be good. But to Andy's point about liability, right?

" Well, the early aggressive adopters are, I think, in healthcare, financial services, which are heavily regulated industries, some government agencies. They're going to think twice about this. We're barreling towards this horrible moment.

And you know one thing, I'm not going to be an alarmist, but we're just... Oh, that's interesting. That was pretty funny.

A long one there. Bloomberg might have censored him. I think every time John's about to say something pointed.

Oh, NVIDIA's market value has been declining lately. There's more and more pressure for them to be profitable. And I'm just saying, you tie yourself into this behemoth and there's no regulation, and you start seeing some impact.

So Terry, let me ask you this. Is this going to be an election issue? " Well, okay.

Sure. I think it is sort of an election issue. We're getting a little close to the elections for people to really think about stuff.

But I think it can go on either side. I think those of us who are alarmed that we've become isolationists are going to be, we know how we're going to swing, and then there are some diehard MAGAs out there, quite frankly, who think we should be isolationists in everything. They don't really look forward at what those consequences might be.

So this might solidify some of them. But I really do think there's a real possibility that those that align themselves with the president will lose that voter base that's in the middle because they will be alarmed about this. And they've seen isolationism before, and it not working.

And according to the latest, by the way, I believe in Texas, Ken Paxton's put a moratorium on data center approvals. In Florida, Ron DeSantis has put a moratorium on data center approvals. Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro.

Ossoff in the Senate is already proposing an AI regulation bill in direct contradiction to what Trump's thinking. And if nothing else, Trump is going to make an election issue because it's about him. Well, that's right.

He's going to make it about him, and that of course is going to set people off. There are even a lot of people who followed him that are really tired of him making everything about him, right? That's why, in some ways, as gross as it was for them to have that sort of convention-y thing in Dallas, whatever that bit was.

I know what I called it, and I can't say it on air. But I think that as gross as that was, it was like some people were going, "Go ahead, have it," because it's just going to reinforce what is sort of grossing people out about him now or giving people pause that it's all about him. So yeah, he'll make it an issue.

I did notice today, because I was looking at some of the assessments of the races going on around the country, and they were saying they're stripping out references to him in their campaign platforms and on their websites. Ron DeSantis in Florida. Yeah, exactly.

He's scraping him out of his website. Yeah. We got to move on to the next topic, but I would just note that even our friends might be telling us one thing but doing another.

So here we are. So shifting a gear, though. There was an attack on the, I guess, the FBI's IT infrastructure, and the concern is that those crafty ShinyHunters people have stolen a lot of FBI data, including the addresses and the names of the people who are in the FBI, and some of them may be undercover or whatever else is going on here.

It certainly is embarrassing, shall we say, but Terry, what's your take on what does this mean? What's going on here? And ShinyHunters suddenly become public enemy number one.

I think Shiny Hunter just keeps proving that they've got the secret sauce right now. And they go in and they exploit trust. That's what they're known for.

And yeah, maybe they're turning themselves into an enemy. I'm not quite sure that's what they're trying to do at this point, be an enemy of the people, right? I feel like they're a little more activist than that, but I could be completely wrong.

I think they're making money too. But I do think that this reminds me of EternalBlue and all of that. It is kind of a stain now on an agency that's supposed to be better protected and should know better.

Andy, is anybody safe from these guys? Am I going to wake up tomorrow morning and they're going to be hacking into MI5 and MI6 and everybody else out there? And it does seem, to me at least, that their tactics are not especially, shall we say, sophisticated.

They're just consistently clever. Yeah, look, I would point out there's some fundamental differences between the structural administrations of the US security services and British and everyone else, and it starts at the top, doesn't it? We've cut a lot out of the budgets and stuff.

Look at DOGE, whatever you want to call it, Elon Musk trying to get money out of it. Look at the leadership, Kash Patel, flying around on jets with his girlfriend and changing the law to admit people who have done pretty gross things. I think the administration and the leadership definitely has something to play here.

Look, I think the tinfoil hat brigade's going to go crazy on this, by the way. Because post Putin meeting Trump many years ago, I think it's the first time, all of a sudden, theoretically, what I've read on the forums, a lot of CIA agents' covers were blown and many people died. That's the bad part.

I don't know if that's going to happen again now with the FBI. Getting in there is bad. But yes, we are all exposed to this potentially, and it doesn't need to be sophisticated attacks.

Don't forget, the biggest challenge, the biggest cybersecurity risk still is inattentive individuals internally. Losing a password, sharing a password, leaving a screen logged on. Look, we need to run the kill chain on this.

We need to find out what happened, where it came from. I've been involved with these incidents. I'm a CTO, of course I have.

I've been a consultant to various companies who have been attacked. Bottom line, you've got to run the kill chain. You've got to understand where it came from and protect against it and share that knowledge.

And now we come back again to the administration and what they've done with CISA. How do we now get to share that knowledge? These are the things which I talk about, structural differences between, say, MI5 and CIA or FBI.

I think there are fundamental differences. Everyone's open to attack. I don't think everyone's got the door as wide open as maybe we do.

Well, yeah. I don't know. John, do you think this will get tied to other issues and Shiny Hunters will become the latest Trump administration boogeyman that we're chasing, and somebody will wake up tomorrow and say, "Shiny Hunters and all those communists and everybody else-" "...

" Yeah, this is why we don't need to regulate or oversee anything involving security or AI. Yeah, this just underscores that the communists are taking over our systems. Do you know the most uncomforting thing to me in this?

Did I read this right? The FBI only acknowledged investigating unauthorized activity without confirming a breach of core systems. That kind of almost begs the question, do they actually know what happened to themselves, or how to address what happens?

And when in doubt, always blame communists. That seems to be the last gasp these days. Communists and the mainstream media, those three things together.

That's true. Wait, those things are separate in your mind? Hold on.

They're all the same, right? They're the same to us. I'm a card-carrying member of the...

Yeah, right. But yeah, this whole thing is insanity, right? It's all going around us, and it ties into the next segment.

I hate the phrase Wild West, but I really think it applies here. It's just laissez-faire, just grab whatever you can, enrich yourself, screw the vast majority of people, and we'll see what happens. And actively decimate the protections that we have.

That's the other thing. Actively decimate it. Tear up the infrastructure, tear up the collaboration, the ability to collaborate.

Look at poor CISA. Just every time I hear CISA, I just almost want to cry. It's so sad.

We knew this was coming, though, right? We talked about this. Right, exactly.

" We're not surprised. But do people connect those dots, though? That's what I'd ask about the electorate.

Do they see like, "Oh, well, because this has been torn apart and this has been torn apart, now we're more open to attack. " Then there's this cloak of either secrecy or just incompetence, like we don't even know what was going on from the agency I'm talking about. I don't think the average voter connects all that, yet they may at some point.

So in the meanwhile, we're making more enemies, right? Yeah. We're inviting a lot of this because we're deliberately going out in the world and making more enemies.

Not to say that a nation-state like Iran or North Korea weren't already trying to do this. Right. But how does that- But they're incented, aren't they?

Yeah. To incentivize them. So Andy, though, we've seen this play before, right?

" So will the administration turn around next saying, "Well, these cyber criminals are clearly after the United States," and then they're going to go apply more controls and basically erode more freedoms in the name of security, and this whole thing will start to spiral completely out of control. Oh, look, that's entirely possible, but not because anyone in this administration wants to unite anyone. Rather, because they want to foster anger and reaction and move attention away from other critical issues which people will vote on.

I don't think people will vote on this. I don't think this particular incident, I don't think cybersecurity, the FBI is going to sway anyone to change their vote. But it's going to make people angry maybe, and maybe you could use it as a device to get people out for other reasons, or to ignore, I don't know, $7 diesel prices or something like that.

So I think this is potentially... And again, the tinfoil hat brigade, right? They'll say that this is all happening deliberately anyway.

Sure. That you couldn't ruin America more if you tried to do all these things, to kill the NCSA, to have the FBI invaded and hacked, to not regulate AI, to start a new war in Iran, to drive prices through the roof, to all of this stuff. Oh, look, I don't think it's anything to do with unifying and creating any kind of common enemy.

I think it is going to be used to mark an enemy somehow. Well, I would say also maybe they should be a little careful there, because this is their FBI, and it's under their FBI director. And I know there's no accountability in this administration, but you could make the argument that it happened on these guys' watch.

Well, I think that the American public, it all comes back to money. I hate to say this, but they only vote based on things that affect their pocketbook directly. So cybersecurity, unless you're directly impacted, they don't care.

That's always been the case. I'm not even sure people are voting with their wallets. They're voting against their wallets half the time because they just have some sort of perception of what life's supposed to be, and they are somewhat disenfranchised one way or the other.

But here's the thing. So let's assume that in November, that there is at least one of the two houses of Congress is now in the hands of the opposing party. So Terry, am I going to be sitting back with a bucket of popcorn watching a bunch of investigations into this and what happened with CISA and all this other stuff for the next 12 months or so?

Is that what we have to look forward to? God, I hope there's going to be some sort of balance with that. Yes, obviously, things need to be looked into, right, and resolved and fixed.

You look into it because you want to have a resolution. You want to fix it. It's broken.

It's broken, and somebody deliberately broke it. So you need to investigate. You need to put in some guardrails so...

I know, guardrails, everybody hates to hear that word. But you need to put some in so this can't happen again. That somebody can't come into the White House or into the administration and just start blowing things up.

So yes, we're going to see a lot of investigation if the opposite party is smart, they will minimize that, or at least have some other more public things going on to show people what they are doing for them to improve their lives. Well, there you go. " So- Well, we already know the NSA had their little moment a few years back, so they'd be- Exactly ...

likely to invest too. So. There we go.

All right. I'm going to shift the gear and talk about a story that Terry wrote up on Security Boulevard, talking about how Roblox and these other gaming platforms are now starting to be used to recruit potential terrorists and basically starting to show some games to children that reinforce some ideas and concepts that hopefully, I guess the people who are putting these things together are expecting will lead to them becoming more indoctrinated. Terry, what's going on here?

Oh, boy. Okay. So this one's...

I feel like this one's just, it's awful, and we can get into some of the motivations and whatever, but this is from a Europol report. And yes, extremists are tapping into these gaming platforms like Roblox, and they're trying to basically radicalize young people, mostly young men who game. They run their content within the platforms.

I'm not saying it's the gamification of terror, because I think we probably already have that in legit channels, but it's that this is a way to reach people who might be willing to be radicalized, if you will, or might be vulnerable to radicalization. And so I think it's interesting. It's happened on a lot of different platforms, and the recruiters spread this game-related propaganda through Discord links and TikTok, and then the potential recruits might express some interest, and then the recruiters introduce them to the games that simulate terrorist-type activities.

That's how you get there, and slowly but surely radicalize. And the idea is to push them into becoming lone wolves, to orchestrate attacks. And we know that those are some of the hardest attacks to guard against, because a lone wolf is just that, a lone wolf, and there's not a lot of infrastructure behind them, and organization behind them.

And they're hard to spot. So we have that. At the same time, the Global Citizens Alliance came out with a report that said that channels that are tied to Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, and militias that are backed by Iran are streaming their content or using piracy streaming platforms to stream their propaganda and whatnot.

So they're coming right into American homes. This focused a lot on American homes, but they're coming right into homes with this content running side by side. The interesting thing about that is you all know that there had been a big push to bury these privacy platforms or end them or whatever.

They never did really go away, but there had been some real progress there, and now they're roaring back and introducing, going for pretty much the same thing. They're trying to hit those vulnerable people who could be radicalized. So let me play devil's advocate with this for a minute, because there are other entities that are creating games for particular causes, and some people would say, one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter.

And we have- Right ... conservatives that are creating games on these blocks to drive a particular opinion, and there's probably a few liberals out there doing something similar. Annie, is this just the nature of the beast at this point, and we just need to be able to shine a light on it and observe it, or is there something that the providers of the platforms like Roblox should be doing here?

Oh, a bit of column A, a bit of column B, right? This is absolutely the way of the world, and by the way, it has for a long time been. You think about forums and online chats and voice chat.

It goes back to IRC. It goes back to 4chan and 8chan. You look at how the Christchurch bomber from several years ago was groomed on, I think it was 8chan or one of the chans, one of these underground anonymous...

This is where the term "the anonymous" came from. It was a group on 4chan, or maybe that was 6chan. It was one of the chans.

These are all separate message boards built for anonymity. And it's also just a new version of this. TikTok succeeded YouTube.

Discord succeeded IRC, essentially. These are streaming platforms and lots of algorithmic content as well. Go and search for one thing you've never searched before on YouTube and see how much more of it it puts you up.

And to Terry's point, if they just plant the seed, and that's all they have to do, really. They don't really have to push it or promote it. " Then they look it up, and then all of a sudden the algo has pumped it through every platform, by the way, because the cookies are shared, and all the session cookies are shared.

And by the way, this fits really well with the terrorist model of sales and distribution and so forth. These are gamers, lonely people, a lot of them by themselves in their own room, not really contacting, attracted to the gaming world and attracted to those non-direct human interactions because of their person and what they feel and these sorts of things. There's a lot of opportunity there.

As we would say in cybersecurity, it's a wide attack surface, right? Right. And so I think that this is the modern way, but I also think we need to do something about it.

I think the platforms do carry responsibility- Well, you know- ... and that they should be monitoring for this. They do, and so you hit maybe on what's the biggest problem, and it's the harder one to solve.

It's societal. How do you lift people up and make them less susceptible to this kind of thing? We know a lot of it can be tied to poverty and feeling like you have no power, and whatever.

Those are things, I think, for societies to figure out. Some do it better than others, some not so much. And there's a real tendency right now not to, I think, focus on that stuff.

But yes, the companies and governments can do a bunch of stuff. At the time that I talked to Tom Galvin over at GCA, he was just sending out, the next day, a letter to Treasury asking them to send out a sanctions advisory telling any company that's associated with this, including the platforms and any associated company that this stuff is carried over, that they could find themselves sanctioned. And you have to put some teeth into it if you're going to say it, if they're going to do that.

They've done some of that in the past, but I don't know that the appetite is there right now, but as maybe the cloud lifts, there will be. DOJ could seize more domains, he said. They've done that in the past, so why not ramp up those efforts?

And then I guess that the platforms themselves then also have to ... there's got to be some consequences for hosting this stuff. Of course, you're a piracy platform.

You're not so concerned about the legalities. " But Jon, is there a world of difference between what happens when someone's over 18 versus under 18 and do different- Well, that's what we're seeing with... Yeah.

We've seen the consequences, at least for the under-18 crowd, and saw what happened with Meta. They had to pay the settlement of $18 billion. So we're going to see more lawsuits because there's no regulation.

So the only way we're going to enforce this to protect the younger people is either through, I think in California, there's an- Do you maybe want to guess at that? Jon's only allowed 50 words before he gets cut off, so I think that's how that's going to be. Clearly bandwidth issues.

He's filling up his network, isn't he? I guess. What's happening is 1,000, maybe 5,000 people are all waking up at the same time and logging onto that hotel network that Jon's trying to use to be on the show.

So that's what's really going on there. Well, I think there's some truth to the fact that people who are over 18, they're adults technically, and they can listen to and see what they want. However, the kind of content that's being put up there is, I think, illegal in and of itself when you're trying to ask or persuade people to do acts against humanity, to kill other people.

In this country, that's not protected by the First Amendment. Mm-hmm. And I doubt in any other country that you have a lot of rights to that kind of content.

So yes, you're not allowed to yell fire in a theater, right? Yeah, that's right. But Andy, at the other end of it, how complicit do you think these platform providers might find themselves being in the event that something does happen and somebody traces it back to Joe Bob the terrorist was watching some gaming thing for the last 10 years on their platform?

Yeah, look, I don't think they're complicit yet. By the way, I am a gamer, and I do like the solitary gaming. I actually game online for so many different reasons.

But I absolutely see this as something that the platforms need to address. I don't think they're complicit. I want to assume positive intent.

There's really good people running PlayStation Network, and Xbox, and Roblox, and all these other places where, as you said, Teri, young people, impressionable people, who've not yet formed their own politics, who latch on very easily to these unsubstantiated ideas and this foment of anger and a fomenting of this artificial enemy or even a real enemy. And I do think that there's ways to look at that. And it is, to your point, Teri, potentially just straight-up illegal.

There's been a recent news story, I think last week, where the FBI ran a sting operation against a number of people who are being offered and even paid to assassinate political enemies. And they ran this sting operation, and you don't have to do the act, right? Planning is enough.

There's a lot you can do to detect crime. This is not necessarily about free speech. Some of it is.

Discussing philosophies, discussing politics, discussing ideologies. To your point, Mike, where does the line flip between freedom fighter and terrorist? For different people, it will flip at different points.

But at some point, there is a bright line where there is a crime being committed. And I think the platforms do need to understand that it's not just Xbox, not just YouTube and TikTok anymore. It absolutely is getting at younger people where they are.

Like you said, like your articles said, Roblox, Discord, these sorts of new platforms. Mm-hmm. In fact, you're starting to see political messaging on those platforms because Elon Musk figured out that this was a great vehicle to rally the troops to get them out to vote last election cycle, right?

Oh, my God. Yes. Right.

So, I don't know. At some point, do we need new laws to address this? Or are we just going to let this whole thing fight its way through the courts?

Well, that's another thing that GCA is advocating, is that there's legislation for this. But again, it has to be legislation with teeth, and it has to make sense, and it has to be reasonable. I'm going to try to get this in before I get knocked off again.

I'm like the Whac-A-Mole here on the show today. So there was federal legislation that was done 25 years ago with MARKY and COPPA. So when it comes to children and safety, that seems to be a bipartisan agreement.

So maybe if the Senate wakes up and decides they want to actually help create laws, maybe we can move in that direction. But until then, it's just going to be a bunch of lawsuits. Yep, exactly.

All right, folks. I'm going to end this here because it's pretty clear that we just have an absence of leadership across the board at the moment, and we'll see how this will all play out at the end of the day. But my best advice at the moment is write to your local congressman and make them aware of the fact that you care about these issues because then they might actually do something about it, because otherwise money will talk more than common sense.

And check what your children are doing online. There you go. And Teri, Andy, Jon, as always, thanks for being on the show.

Thank you all for watching, and also please stay tuned for the rest of the replay of the "Tech Show" on that TV lineup. And stay tuned for this little vignette we have coming up right after this talking about, well, who are the most influential people in quantum computing? We want to hear your vote.

Until then, we'll talk to you tomorrow.