[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: When you least expect it, you're expected, you're the one today.

JAD: [laughs] Okay, just to set that up, so there used to be a time in our media history where, like, the line between show and life was really clear. Then along came a guy named Allen Funt who muddied that line in a way that was fascinating, would bite him in the butt. In fact, spiritually speaking I think those bite marks are on all of our butts, so check your tush.

ROBERT: [laughs] And while you're doing that, we want to tell you some stories. Of course. And so the first one is the story of Allen Funt, who is really the godfather of watching people and making you and me and everybody who's just Joe into a TV celebrity. And then we're gonna change gears and we're gonna—we're gonna watch you from a different angle and maybe you're gonna feel a little differently about that.

JAD: Yeah. The first, let's—let's go to our producer Latif Nasser.

LATIF NASSER: So I first heard about Candid Camera a few years ago, and I—when I did, I just dove in deep! Like, I just binged all of—I watched every single clip I could get my hands on. And then that's around the time when I found out that it started as a radio show, which was even more interesting to me because I was like, a radio show? I was like, how does that even make sense? What does that even—what would that be? So I called up one of the few people who have studied this.

JACOB SMITH: That's right. So I'm Jacob Smith.

LATIF: An associate professor at Northwestern University's School of Communication.

JACOB SMITH: And the director of Northwestern's masters in sound arts and industries.

LATIF: And it turns out there's this kind of wonderful, kind of creepy backstory.

LATIF: Do you just want to start with World War II?

JACOB SMITH: Yeah, so during World War II, Allen Funt was working in the Signal Corps.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Signal Corps is known as the nerves of the army.]

JACOB SMITH: The kind of communications arm for the armed forces at the time.

LATIF: So Funt, he's a few years out of college by this point. He is stationed in Oklahoma at Camp Gruber. And his job there is to make radio shows.

JACOB SMITH: For the armed forces radio.

LATIF: One of these shows is called The Gripe Booth.

ROBERT: The gripe? G-R-I-P-E?

LATIF: The Gripe Booth.

ROBERT: Yeah.

LATIF: Basically the show worked like this: Funt would get a soldier stationed at the camp to come into his studio.

JACOB SMITH: And talk about their gripes.

LATIF: About, like, their barracks, and about the food and about, you know, their girlfriend is cheating on them back home or whatever.

JACOB SMITH: You know, things that were bothering them.

JAD: That's not a very good idea for morale.

ROBERT: Oh, I think it's a great idea for morale.

JAD: Really? I would imagine it would bring the soldiers down.

LATIF: It would bring them down, but maybe it would bring them together.

JAD: Fair enough.

LATIF: Anyhow, so he's bringing these soldiers into his little recording studio.

JACOB SMITH: And one of the things that he found was that as soon as the red light would go on to indicate that recording was going on, they'd clam up.

LATIF: They would get ...

JACOB SMITH: Tongue tied. And he tells these stories about how it was amazing to see these soldiers who would go out into battle without maybe blinking an eye, but break into a cold sweat at the thought of sitting in front of a microphone.

ROBERT: So what does he do?

JACOB SMITH: Well, so his solution was to disconnect the red light and record them secretly.

LATIF: So basically he'd bring them in and say, "Okay, let's just do a practice round. Let's just talk over the things—the kinds of things you will talk about. Just for practice." And then when finally they were ready to start, he'd be like, "No, no, I already got it."

JACOB SMITH: He would get better material when they didn't know they were being recorded.

ROBERT: Would they be okay with that?

LATIF: Well, he would get permission afterwards.

JAD: So is that a lie? No, I don't think it's a lie anymore.

LATIF: It's a sort of truth deferred, you might say.

ROBERT: [laughs]

LATIF: But according to Jacob Smith, Funt was like, "This is a great trick!"

JACOB SMITH: Yes. You know, the red light goes off in the gripe booth, but a red light goes on in Funt's mind. And so after the war, he pitches this idea as "Candid Microphone."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, radio: The Candid Microphone.]

JACOB SMITH: Which goes on the air on ABC in 1947.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, radio: The program that brings you the secretly-recorded conversations of all kinds of people as they react in real life to all kinds of situations. No one ever knows when he's talking into the candid microphone.]

SONNY FOX: Me, me, me, me, me, me, me. Mm. No. Oh.

LATIF: All right. So this is Sonny Fox, and he was one of the original guys to work with Allen on Candid Microphone. And it just so happened when he came into our studio, we managed to catch him on our candid microphone.

LATIF: Can you hear me?

SONNY FOX: I can. That is tepid water.

LATIF: Tepid water? I'm sorry the water's not ...

SONNY FOX: You know, not to my liking.

LATIF: ... up to snuff.

SONNY FOX: Yeah. And my standards. Why is my throat so tight?

LATIF: See? That's the tepid water. Now all of a sudden it's not so ...

SONNY FOX: [clears throat] Bourbon would've helped.

LATIF: [laughs] All right. Okay. We're here to talk about much more exciting things I think. So when you were working with Allen on Candid Microphone, what was he like? Like, how did you see him?

SONNY FOX: Allen was a very able, very bright young guy. He had a face of an every man. And he could charm you when he wanted to, charm you right out of your shoes. Or he could be this wildly maniacal, overwrought person. I mean, he had this huge temper.

LATIF: Sonny says when they were just starting the show, sometimes Allen would get so mad ...

SONNY FOX: ... that he would throw things sometimes.

LATIF: Like fling pencils at other producers.

SONNY FOX: Well, there were only four of us and the secretary. That was it. That was the core of what we did. And we all had to do everything. I mean Allen ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: The man with the hidden microphone may even get around to you someday.]

LATIF: That man was Allen.

SONNY FOX: Allen was the arbiter obviously of whether we did something or didn't do something.

LATIF: So what was—like, what was the goal for the show?

SONNY FOX: The goal was to reflect people as they are in their unguarded moments.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: We try to bring you the real McCoy on Candid Microphone.]

JACOB SMITH: That's what fascinated Funt: the beauty of everyday conversation.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: We go out of the studio into the world.]

JACOB SMITH: Everyday life.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Capture our candid glimpses of people like you.]

JACOB SMITH: What the sociologist Erving Goffman calls bugging the backstage, right?

SONNY FOX: So what we would do is ...

LATIF: Every day, Sonny and crew would go to their office in Manhattan.

SONNY FOX: This two-room office.

LATIF: And sit down at their desks.

SONNY FOX: And think up ideas. Separately scratching our heads and say to Allen, "What about this?"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Candid Microphone: I gotta shave every day. If I don't shave, my wife gets right after me.]

LATIF: Like, what if we bugged a barbershop or a magazine stand?

SONNY FOX: Oh, maybe that's something we could—you know?

ARCHIVE CLIP, Candid Microphone: Did you see those green shoes?]

SONNY FOX: Or ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Candid Microphone: Green!]

SONNY FOX: ... a restaurant or a shoe store.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Candid Microphone: I don't know where she gets the taste.]

LATIF: So what they do is they'd take this big ...

JACOB SMITH: ... clunky ...

LATIF: ... portable recorder.

JACOB SMITH: It was like a suitcase.

SONNY FOX: It weighed I think maybe 60 pounds, but they put a handle on top and said it's portable.

LATIF: [laughs]

LATIF: He says that they would lug around this massive suitcase to wherever it was they were recording, and they'd try to hide it so that no one would see it so they could record this tape. Which they did in all these different locations, including the women's bathroom.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Candid Microphone: I don't know what to say to him. I really don't.]

LATIF: But by and large, the tape they gathered ...

JACOB SMITH: Funt was disappointed to discover that it was the most uninteresting garbage you could imagine.

SONNY FOX: Yeah, it was frustrating.

JACOB SMITH: It doesn't have, you know, the nice shape, the rise and fall, the climax that is gonna keep listeners hooked.

SONNY FOX: Now that presented us with a neat problem.

LATIF: Here they had this show.

SONNY FOX: Prime time.

LATIF: That was supposed to be about real people, real talk.

JACOB SMITH: Everyday conversation.

LATIF: But turned out that sucked. So then the question became ...

JACOB SMITH: How can we mix it up? How can we stir it up? How can we change this into something more spectacular?

LATIF: And that's when Allen Funt added a little wrinkle. It's something that Jacob Smith has called ...

JACOB SMITH: I was calling it the rile.

LATIF: So the basic idea of the rile is that instead of just letting people yammer on, which didn't seem to work, you gotta get in there, you gotta juice the action to get that right shape.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: The man with a hidden mic had a good one when he dropped into a tailor shop.]

LATIF: What you started to hear in Candid Mic is, like, these strange situations. Like, he would go into a tailor shop with a microphone up his sleeve, and he would ask the guy ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: I have to have a suit of clothes made up for a kangaroo.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, clerk: A kangaroo?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: That's right.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, clerk: For heaven's sake.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Oh, you can handle that?]

LATIF: Like, here's another one.

SONNY FOX: Play the moaning trunk.

LATIF: This is Sonny's favorite. He says that one day they called a mover to come over to their office to move this trunk.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Be real careful with it now.]

LATIF: And inside the trunk—the mover didn't know this—was a guy.

SONNY FOX: And his job was to sound eerie.

LATIF: To basically moan every time the mover tried to move that trunk.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Just be very gentle with it, will you?]

[moaning]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, mover: What is it?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Never mind. Just take it.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, mover: But it makes that noise. I want to know ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: No, that's nothing. Just forget about it.]

LATIF: [laughs] I'm laughing now.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: We've been trying to get rid of this thing since last night.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, mover: But what is it? I don't know what it is.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Never mind. Deliver it to 108 ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, mover: Give us a slip.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: What do you mean a slip? I want to have a signature when it's delivered there. I want to have signature sign for this.]

[moaning]

SONNY FOX: [laughs] Phil got off such great moans. The classic format that worked for Alan was getting people into situations ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, mover: Tell us what it is.]

SONNY FOX: ... where they were frustrated.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: No, it's none of your business what's in the trunk.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, mover: Yeah, but it makes that kind of noise.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: There's no noise. You don't hear anything.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, mover: What do you mean I don't hear anything?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Come on, fella. We've been waiting since last night. Let's get this thing out of here.]

JACOB SMITH: And it just keeps going and going and going.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, mover: It's giving me the creeps just handling it, because I don't know what it is.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Oh, come on. Don't be silly. Never mind what it is.]

JACOB SMITH: Just driving them nuts.

LATIF: Until finally ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, mover: Here's your $20 to look for another truck man.]

JACOB SMITH: ... they lose their temper, and we get, "Cue the music!" And that's the climax. That's the closure.

LATIF: Now the whole thing has a shape. It starts slow and then crescendo, crescendo, crescendo, boom!

JACOB SMITH: He's inventing this new kind—a new format of entertainment.

LATIF: It sounds totally obvious, but this is basically like reality TV in a nutshell. Like, this is one of the first times where you have that familiar hybrid of this highly artificial and constructed situation. But then inside of it ...

SONNY FOX: A snippet of life. We've all been there: situations where we've been frustrated, where we don't understand what's going on, situations where we're bewildered.

LATIF: So Funt would start pushing this format.

JACOB SMITH: Tweaking it, changing it.

LATIF: Trying out new permutations.

JACOB SMITH: And sometimes it's very much like a fly on the wall, you know, they're these—these kind of poignant segments of listening to ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Tom? Tom, it's time to get up.]

JACOB SMITH: ... a wife trying to wake up her husband.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: Uh ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Darling, the clock rang 15 minutes ago.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: All right, honey. I'll be right up.]

MATT KIELTY: You know, that one's kind of beautiful.

JAD: That's our producer Matt Kielty.

MATT: It's so intimate is what's so incredible.

JACOB SMITH: Right.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: You've got a lot to do today. You're supposed to be in early.]

LATIF: In this one, Funt got the wife to be in on the gag.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Come on, darling. You can't keep this up. Don't stall anymore.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: All right, I'm up. I'm up.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Well, if you're up why are you ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: All right. Listen, I'll be up. Just leave me alone, will you please?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Would you please get up?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: Please go away and lose yourself.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Tom, I think if you take a shower you'll feel good.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: I think if you go get lost, I'd feel better, honey.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: I don't like you talking to me that way. Once and for all I insist that you get up out of this bed.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: All right then, I'm up. I'm awake.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Well, let's see you move. It's very late. It's nine o'clock.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: Nine o'clock?]

JACOB SMITH: So, you know, you get this beautiful backstage glimpse of everyday life, but where do we stop? And obviously, it did prompt letters.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: A few hisses and cat calls.]

JACOB SMITH: Have you heard the one where—I was just listening to it the other day, where a listener writes in to complain about that one?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: One lady took us at our word and wrote us a few well-chosen ones that really made our ears burn.]

JACOB SMITH: She's writing in to complain that this was, you know, crossing a line.

LATIF: So what Funt does is he goes up to her door to talk to her, but he goes with a hidden mic.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: I'm with the American Broadcasting Company, and I wonder if I could have just a couple of minutes of your time. Is that all right?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Yes.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: You wrote us a letter the other day about one of our programs called The Candid Microphone. And I gathered from your letter that you don't like it very much.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: No, I don't.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Well, why? What are some of the things you find objectionable about it?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Well, I don't like it because I think it's snooping. Out and out snooping.]

LATIF: Out and out snooping.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Is that right?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Mm-hmm.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: In your letter, you said it a little more strongly. You said you thought we were a bunch of dirty, sneaking spies.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Well, I suppose at the time when I was listening to the program, I felt that way. You get these people in their homes extemporaneously. I heard that one program about the—what was it? You went into some man's bedroom?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Oh, you mean the one where the wife awakened the husband?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Awakened the husband, and there was the poor fellow. He didn't know he was talking for—speaking for the public. It sort of put him in a bad light, don't you think?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Well, you may have something there, but don't you think it's funny the sounds a man makes when he awakens?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Yes, they're funny. But they're only for him though in his own bedroom, and I'm sure he doesn't enjoy having the whole world know about it. Do you?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Well ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Would you?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Don't you think most people are nervous and self conscious in front of a microphone?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Not anymore. I think most people take to a microphone very nicely.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Do you feel you'd talk this about the same way if you know—you knew you were talking into a microphone right now?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Yes, I would.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: There'd be no difference whatsoever?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: No difference.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Well, now look, let me show you. This is a microphone, and what you just said is—is ready to go out from coast to coast. Does that make any difference to you?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Then I suppose ... [laughs]]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Do you mind us coming in here and talking to you this way? Do you think we took an unfair advantage of you?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: I think so at the moment.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: This conversation may not be worth a nickel, but would you like to have it on the air?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Yes.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: You would?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Of course I would, because I want the whole world to know of my opinion on this question.]

JAD: Oh my God, that's amazing. She just switched!

LATIF: Exactly! And—and you can hear in her voice this weird tension, right? I have this one advisor, her name is Jill Lepore. She has this idea—I'm bastardizing it, but to put it crudely, like, we all kind of have these two drives: one drive for privacy, we don't want people in our bedrooms listening to us. That is the height of creepiness. And then on the other hand, we have this drive for publicity. It's exciting to be the star, and it's exciting to have people pay attention to you. And these two drives, the drive for privacy and the drive for publicity are sort of competing in us.

JAD: So coming up, that tension ...

ROBERT: Well, it just takes off.

LATIF: Literally! Actually, literally it takes off.

JAD: Yeah, and it gets super interesting.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: That's after the break. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Stay with us.

[LISTENER: This is Joshua Rush calling from Los Angeles. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org]

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. Let's get back to our story from our producer Latif Nasser about Allen Funt, the man with the hidden microphone. Where we left off, he had just made a radio show called Candid Mic.

ROBERT: Well, did in fact people like this program? Was it a hit?

LATIF: Oh yeah.

JACOB SMITH: Yeah, it moves pretty quickly to television.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, announcer: Candid Camera, with Allen Funt.]

LATIF: In the spring of 1949, the show premieres on NBC.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, announcer: Welcome to the Candid Camera program.]

LATIF: And the show, it's the exact same premise: set up weird or frustrating situations, try and catch people's reactions. But when the show goes out on TV ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, announcer: And here's the man who someday may ...]

LATIF: ... according to Jacob Smith, it just doesn't catch on.

JACOB SMITH: A lot of viewers think that it's mean-spirited, that the subjects are being somehow mistreated.

LATIF: There were critics who were very unnerved and upset by it. There were people certainly, but ...

JAD: Well, what did the critics say?

LATIF: Okay, so there was this one guy in the New Yorker, this is in 1950, who said, "For my money, Candid Camera is sadistic, poisonous, anti-human and sneaky."

ROBERT: [laughs]

LATIF: Wait, there was another—hold on, there was another kind of great string of adjectives. Let me just find it. Here. Another guy, different guy from the New Yorker, he found Allen Funt "Coarse, nagging, suspicious and misanthropic, and to make matters worst zestfully so."

ROBERT: [laughs] Wow!

JACOB SMITH: But I mean, I think that becomes kind of the PR problem that he has to fix.

LATIF: And according to Jacob Smith, it was not a small problem.

JACOB SMITH: No.

LATIF: When it first aired, and even all through the '50s, the show ...

JACOB SMITH: It's on and off.

LATIF: ... doesn't really get its audience.

JACOB SMITH: It moves around different networks.

LATIF: And all the while ...

JACOB SMITH: He's tweaking it and changing it, adapting it.

LATIF: And in the early '60s he hits on something, a second little tweak that would make all the difference.

JACOB SMITH: Funt's term was "The reveal." The reveal.

LATIF: Now he'd done it here and there, but by 1962 he locks it in. You start to see this thing happen over and over at the end of segments. It's so commonplace now that it seems crazy someone even had to invent it. Classic reveal is let's say the gag is in a diner and they're serving this guy a tiny little tea cup.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: Hey, what is this? Get me a cup of coffee, will you?]

LATIF: And he wanted a big coffee mug and they serve him this tiny little tea cup.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: Oh, come on!]

LATIF: And he's like, "What? What's going on?"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: Is this your idea of a cup of coffee?]

LATIF: So this guy gets pissed off. And previously, Funt would have let that keep going. But now, right as the guy is about to blow, Funt either walks out himself or he sends someone out and they kind of grab the guy and they're like ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: See the camera in there?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: [laughs]]

LATIF: They show him the hidden camera on camera. And as he's looking at that hidden camera, and he's like, "Huh?" the camera zooms in on his face. And Jacob Smith says that sometimes Funt would even actually have to hold people in place for that very moment.

JACOB SMITH: Because one of their first reactions are to turn away or to cover their face. So he would sometimes have to physically restrain them and turn them towards the camera so that they can capture that one fleeting moment.

LATIF: And in that moment you see so much on their face. They're angry, they're embarrassed, they're ashamed, they're confused. They don't know how to feel. And then right at that moment, Funt says the magic words, "Smile. You're on Candid Camera!" And it's all—everything's absolved all of a sudden.

JAD: Everything is made okay in that moment.

LATIF: Everything is made okay.

ROBERT: And then the chorus goes, "When you least expect it, you're the star today. Smile, you're on Candid Camera!"

LATIF: Yeah.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: Here I am on television!]

LATIF: "Something, something, hocus pocus. You're in focus. It's your lucky day!"

ROBERT: It's your lucky day.

JAD: That's interesting. So it went from being like, "Ooh, you've been creeping on ..."

ROBERT: "I hate you, Allen Funt!"

JAD: To, like, "Oh, thank you, Allen Funt."

ROBERT: And this works much better I take it?

LATIF: Yeah, it was hugely successful. It was one of the top-ranked shows for basically all of the early 1960s. Millions, if not tens of millions of people watched it. They'd bled out the meanness, and people could now sort of freely see it as kind of little peepholes into human nature. Like, the first one I ever saw was the elevator sketch.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: The gentleman in the elevator now is a candid star.]

LATIF: Basic setup is: guy walks into an elevator, there's a hidden camera. He doesn't know it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Here's a fella with his hat on in the elevator.]

LATIF: He is like everybody else wearing his overcoat and a hat. And he stands in the middle of the elevator and then all of the other people in the elevator, they ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: They take off their hats.]

LATIF: ... take off their hats and ...

ROBERT: One by one by one, one hat off, two hats off, five hats off.

JAD: [laughs]

LATIF: You're watching him through the open elevator door, and he's just sort of standing there awkwardly, and then he just sort of ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: Little by little ...]

LATIF: ... hesitantly he just takes off his hat and then holds it in front of his chest.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Allen Funt: And now, do you think we could reverse the procedure? Watch.]

LATIF: Then all of the people around him, they put their hats back on.

JAD: [laughs]

LATIF: And then he sort of is looking around and, like, it's almost—it's happening at this—it's somewhere between conscious and subconscious level, and then he sort of just puts his hat back on. It's really funny. It's really, really funny.

JAD: And this guy wasn't in on it?

ROBERT: No, no.

LATIF: He was not in it. He clearly just was trying to fit in in this weird way.

JAD: It's interesting though, I never watched the TV show when I was young, but it's weird, like, when I was seven, we still—we would say all the time, like, "Smile, you're on Candid Camera." Even though I'd never seen the show. So it was like the idea of the show was in a way, way bigger than the actual show.

LATIF: Yeah. It kind of became a meme, but it was less about kind of investigating human behavior and more about vanity in this weird way. It was like this idea that you—this tiny sliver of your private life could be excised and then broadcast to the world. And that idea, that idea would get away from Allen Funt, and it would go all over the world and then it would come right back and bite him in the butt in this really funny and strange way.

JAD: What happened?

LATIF: Okay, it starts like this.

MARILYN FUNT: Hi there.

LATIF: Hi, how are you?

MARILYN FUNT: Good. Come on in.

LATIF: We'll start the story with this woman.

MARILYN FUNT: Oh, are we on now?

LATIF: Marilyn Funt.

MARILYN FUNT: The ex-wife of Allen Funt. And we're on—do you want me to start where we're on the plane? Okay.

LATIF: So it's February 3, 1969.

JULIET FUNT: New York airport.

LATIF: That's Marilyn Funt's daughter, Allen Funt's daughter, Juliet Funt.

JULIET FUNT: My mom, my dad, my baby brother and I are on a flight.

MARILYN FUNT: Straight flight to Miami.

JULIET FUNT: And I'm about one and a half, so me, I don't have any personal recollection of it.

LATIF: But she says she knows this story because it's like family lore.

JULIET FUNT: So ...

MARILYN FUNT: We were in first class, and we were on the flight.

JULIET FUNT: A largely uneventful flight for about the first 20 minutes.

LATIF: Maybe an hour, who knows? They're about a hundred miles or so offshore and, you know, they get their meals, they go to the bathroom.

JULIET FUNT: And ...

MARILYN FUNT: All of a sudden ...

JULIET FUNT: ... a man stood up in the back of the flight, and he took out a knife and he put it to the throat of one of the flight attendants, and he walked her all the way down the center aisle and into the cockpit, passing every passenger on the flight.

FRED WEAVER: I did hear noises which were a little bit different in the back.

LATIF: That's Fred Weaver.

FRED WEAVER: Retired Eastern Airlines pilot.

LATIF: He was one of the flight crew. And next to him ...

LOWELL MILLER: Yes, sir.

LATIF: Co-pilot Lowell Miller. They were expecting breakfast.

FRED WEAVER: You know, I hear the knock on the door and I just opened the door.

LOWELL MILLER: And I turned around to see who it was.

FRED WEAVER: There she is.

LOWELL MILLER: The flight attendant.

FRED WEAVER: With the hijacker behind her with the knife up against her throat.

LOWELL MILLER: He was agitated, saying "Cuba, Cuba!" He also was saying that his friend had a bomb in the back of the airplane.

FRED WEAVER: I knew right then. I said, "Uh oh, here we go."

JIM ZACK: The stewardess was walking around talking with all the passengers, asking them if anybody knew how to speak Spanish.

LATIF: That's Jim Zack. He was back in coach. He was 11 years old at the time.

JIM ZACK: I didn't think much of it until the announcement came on the loudspeaker.

MARILYN FUNT: The pilot gets on and says ...

JULIET FUNT: Ladies and gentlemen ...

JIM ZACK: Ladies and gentlemen, we have some gentlemen up here that want to go to Cuba, so we're going to Havana.

JULIET FUNT: And then came the part of the story that I've been told was the waiting, the frozen, silent, staring at each other, waiting portion. But then this one woman ...

LATIF: A few rows away.

JULIET FUNT: ... began to recognize my father. And she began to look, and look back and forth to other folks and point a little bit. And there was this slow building of her certainty. And then ...

LATIF: All of a sudden she bolted up.

JULIET FUNT: And said ...

LATIF: "Wait a second ..."

JULIET FUNT: "We are not being hijacked. It's a Candid Camera stunt!"

ROBERT: [laughs]

LATIF: I'm quoting him. "The plane went absolutely crazy."

MARILYN FUNT: Everyone started laughing.

LATIF: People began cheering.

MARILYN FUNT: "Oh, and look who's here! He's pulling one of his stunts!"

LATIF: Stamping their feet.

JULIET FUNT: And the tension dripped off of them.

LATIF: Everyone's so relieved.

JULIET FUNT: People were lined up with their air sickness bags to get autographs from my father.

LATIF: [laughs]

MARILYN FUNT: So then they relaxed.

JULIET FUNT: And through all of this, my dad is begging.

MARILYN FUNT: "No. No, it's not me. I'm not involved. We are being hijacked!" And they said, "Come on, Allen. We know it's you."

LATIF: So Allen Funt is trying to persuade people. He's not getting any purchase. He sees—behind him he sees a priest.

JULIET FUNT: [laughs] Right.

LATIF: He runs over to the priest ...

JULIET FUNT: And said, "Father, will you please help me convince these people?"

LATIF: "Tell them this is no joke."

JULIET FUNT: "This is not a stunt."

LATIF: "That maniac is for real."

JAD: And what does the guy say?

JULIET FUNT: "You can't get me, Allen Funt!"

ROBERT: [laughs]

LATIF: "Oh, no you don't."

ROBERT: I see a guy with a cleric, with a little collar and everything. "Oh, no you don't, Allen Funt."

LATIF: Right, right, right.

ROBERT: Meanwhile, where is the hijacker?

JULIET FUNT: Terrifying people up in the cockpit.

FRED WEAVER: Oh yeah. He stayed in the cockpit.

LATIF: But eventually at some point, he hears this kind of commotion from first class.

JULIET FUNT: And so he does open the door ...

LATIF: And he pokes his head out ...

JULIET FUNT: ... and everybody begins to applaud and applaud and applaud.

ROBERT: [laughs]

LATIF: We're not totally sure about that last detail—it might be an embellishment. But what seems clear is that around this time, Allen Funt is starting to feel kind of trapped. He'd been so successful at bugging the backstage, at mussing up the line between private and public and real life and show biz that he couldn't—when he needed to, he couldn't reassert that clear line.

MARILYN FUNT: I was worried that he was gonna come up with some idea to try to mitigate the situation and deal with it.

LATIF: Actually, what she says ended up happening was he got so frustrated that he decided to just deal with the hijackers himself.

JULIET FUNT: Yes.

LATIF: So he starts formulating a plan ...

JULIET FUNT: To grab the guy and knock him to the floor. And my mother's saying ...

MARILYN FUNT: Don't you do anything!

JULIET FUNT: "You idiot, I have two babies on this plane."

MARILYN FUNT: Leave it alone!

JULIET FUNT: "Sit down!"

ROBERT: Oh, so he's gonna be like Zorro?

JULIET FUNT: Yes.

LATIF: Apparently, the flight attendants had to tell him to sit down.

ROBERT: Like, what happens now? Well, you took it to the point where now the plane is landing in what I guess the people in the plane think is Florida. The people in the front of the plane know it's Cuba.

JULIET FUNT: Right. No, it's Cuba. Correct.

LOWELL MILLER: When we taxied into the terminal ...

JULIET FUNT: We're greeted as the plane is opened by Cuban military officers.

JIM ZACK: I saw a Cuban soldier. He had a gun in his hand, and he had bandoliers, you know, with lots of bullets on it.

FRED WEAVER: And they'd been circling the airplane.

LATIF: And it seems at this point everyone on the plane for maybe the first time was like, "Oh!"

JULIET FUNT: Everybody really got it. That it was a hijacking.

LATIF: That was finally the reveal—just really late. And the story goes when they're getting off the plane, when these Cuban soldiers are escorting them off the plane, he was standing at his seat ...

JULIET FUNT: And through a twisty aspect of human psychology ...

LATIF: ... all the passengers were filing down the aisle past him.

JULIET FUNT: ... they began to take their feelings out on him, and they became angry at him.

LATIF: And each one of them had sort of their own grab bag of curses for him.

JULIET FUNT: As if he had tricked them, as if he had set them up in some way.

LATIF: And the last person in that line ...

JULIET FUNT: Turned to my father ...

LATIF: ... and said ...

JULIET FUNT: ... "Smile, my ass."

MARILYN FUNT: [laughs] That did happen. "Smile, my ass" was the closing remark on the whole business.

LATIF: Smile, my ass.

ROBERT: Here's a man who he has helped create a situation where people in some kind of peril don't know that they're in peril, that they've been blinded by the device that he created. It suggests that's the beginning of something blurry which didn't used to be as much.

JAD: You know, it's funny, like, when I hear that plane scene, it's like I'm almost nostalgic for that kind of confusion because what we have now is, like, actually way more confusing, I think.

MATT: Well, I think what's interesting nowadays is what Jacob Smith talks about ...

JAD: That's producer Matt Kielty again. He was sort of off mic as we were hashing this out.

MATT: ... now what becomes fun to look at isn't looking for people in their—the faces they make when they find out that they're on camera. It's, like, poking and pulling apart people who know that they know that they're on camera. Like, what I do when I read people's Facebook pages and Twitter is I'm trying to figure out what they were thinking when they crafted that sentence, and how they were trying to represent themselves and present themselves to the world.

JAD: You're trying to figure out what part of that post is real.

MATT: Yeah, exactly.

ROBERT: Huh. Well, what he's really saying is that everyone becomes an Allen Funt and the people on the plane. Like, the confusion is very basic. Like, if you're going to go on Facebook, then you are a little bit of an Allen Funt. If you're gonna go on Twitter, if you're going to do that, then you're producing these shows. Then if you're actually trying to figure out how the other people are reacting to you or how you read them or how they're reading you ...

JAD: Yeah, then you're a little bit—like, you're stuck on the plane because you don't know what's real and what's show.

ROBERT: Yeah.

LATIF: It's like I think we're Allen Funt-ing ourselves.

ROBERT: Yeah.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: You're the star today. Smile, you're on Candid Camera.]

ROBERT: Enormous thanks to our producer, Latif Nasser.

JAD: Also co-producer Matt Kielty. And a special thanks to ...

ROBERT: The Funt family. They couldn't have been more accommodating and more generous.

JAD: Also Jim Zack and the Eastern Airlines Employee Association. Up next, we're gonna offer another way of looking at people, this time from high above down into every—every movement you make in public, which maybe is the solution to crime—crimefighting.

ROBERT: [singing] Every breath you take ...

JAD: Exactly. Or maybe it's creepy like that song. You decide. [laughs]

***

JAD: So how did you guys find out about this? How'd you get into it?

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: I think it was somebody was reading about it. Was it ...

JAD: This is Manoush Zomorodi.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: It was you reading about it.

ALEX GOLDMARK: Right.

ROBERT: And that's her producer Alex Goldmark.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: And I just said, "His name is McNutt." And I just wanted to do a show where I get to say that name at least 10 times please. But then, like, we actually read it and it was weird and interesting and brought up lots of issues.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barack Obama: Technology is remaking what is possible for individuals and for institutions and for the international order.]

JAD: So here we are in this moment in time, post-Allen Funt, post-Candid Camera, where we're faced with these decisions.

ROBERT: About what we want our future to look like, to be like.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barack Obama: There are fewer and fewer technical constraints on what we can do. That places a special obligation on us to ask tough questions about what we should do.]

JAD: In this next segment, we're gonna look at the "can" and the "should" with our friends down the hall, Manoush Zomorodi and her producer at the time, Alex Goldmark. They run a great podcast called Note to Self. They will be our guides into the world of ...

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: McNutt.

ROSS MCNUTT: Yes. My name's Ross McNutt.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: So the McNutt, as I refer to him, he's an ex-military guy.

ROSS MCNUTT: Did 20 years in the Air Force. I enjoyed it. I did a lot of good.

JAD: Like combat military?

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: He was an engineer in the military.

ALEX GOLDMARK: Yeah, I mean I think he's actually special military.

ROSS MCNUTT: My background, I've got a PhD in rapid product development out of MIT, and what I do is I teach young people how to build new systems.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: And the new system—that's the system that we want to talk about—that kind of began in 2004. Ross was teaching a course at a military college.

ROSS MCNUTT: Was at the Air Force Institute of Technology here at Wright-Patterson in Dayton.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: He says one day in 2004, the whole school gathered together for a rally.

ROSS MCNUTT: And our commander got up in front of the whole school and said, "We need to do something to help the war effort."

[NEWS CLIP: Terrible violence today in the Iraqi city of Basra.]

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: So at that time in the Iraq war ...

ROSS MCNUTT: Before the surge.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: ... things were not going well.

[NEWS CLIP: Suicide bombs ripped through police buildings and city streets.]

ROSS MCNUTT: IEDs going off all over the place.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Constant news about IEDs going off everywhere, soldiers being blown up.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, soldier: In one week, I got blown up three times.]

ROSS MCNUTT: And to be honest with you, in 2004 it looked like we were gonna lose.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: So Ross, he gets together some of the students, some of his colleagues, and they decide, you know, let's sit down and see if we can find a solution quickly, find a solution to figuring out who is planting all these roadside bombs.

ROSS MCNUTT: Yeah, bombs going off were pretty easy to detect in images. The problem is how do you go from a bomb going off backwards in time to be able to figure out who planted it?

ALEX GOLDMARK: They were just like, "Hey, let's use planes. Let's try this, let's try that."

ROSS MCNUTT: And then drew this out on the back of an envelope.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Making it took a little while.

ROSS MCNUTT: I had 38 students working for me for two years.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: But eventually they developed what became known as Project Angel Fire. And here's how it worked: they'd take a small plane, and on the belly of the plane they hook up this array of cameras that sort of swivel around.

ROSS MCNUTT: It's a camera system we designed and built.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Super high end. And then the pilot takes off, flies the plane high over Fallujah.

ROSS MCNUTT: In the military, we were up at about 15 to 16,000 feet to stay out of the missile range.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Let's say I'm an Iraqi on the ground in Fallujah and I look up, what would I see?

ROSS MCNUTT: You wouldn't see us. You wouldn't hear us or you wouldn't see us.

ALEX GOLDMARK: So you've got this plane flying just below the clouds, doing an orbit over Fallujah. Circle, circle, circle.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: For six hours at a time.

ALEX GOLDMARK: And every second ...

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Click, click, click, click.

ALEX GOLDMARK: Every second it takes a still image of the entire city of Fallujah—25 square miles—and then beams it down to an operator.

ROSS MCNUTT: We take a picture, process it, downlink it, process it, downlink it every single second.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: So the plane is snapping picture after picture after picture. But here's what makes the system so powerful: the operator on the ground has, let's say, an entire day's worth of these high-res pictures of the entire city of Fallujah. And then let's say there's an explosion.

[NEWS CLIP: Officials say at least 20 people were killed in explosions at a market.]

[NEWS CLIP: ... people, and wound 11 others.]

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: First, the operator would pull up the most current image of the city, zoom into the place within Fallujah where it happened, and then click, click, click in one second increments, go back in time and see who was there, what happened.

ALEX GOLDMARK: When was the last time somebody fiddled around in that spot, yeah. And you're like, "Okay, I've gone back two hours and, ah! It's that car.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Fast forward, click, click, click. They can now follow that car forward in time to see where it goes.

ALEX GOLDMARK: And you see that it went to a house in another neighborhood two miles away. Well, that's where you dispatch your troops to right then.

ROSS MCNUTT: Basically, we'd be able to send either the Special Forces in or the Marines in and sort of take appropriate action.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Now look, the military doesn't release statistics on how well some of its military technology works, but there are officers who will be quoted saying, "Yes, Project Angel Fire saved lives." But the reason why we decided to do this story is because it's not just a military thing, right? Like, with a lot of these technologies, they maybe start in the military, but then they trickle down, all the way down to all of us. And actually, in this case it trickled down to Dayton, Ohio.

ANDY MILLS: Ross Group Incorporated. Do you think that's it?

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: By first name?

ANDY: Yeah, it'd be weird.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: [laughs] Oh, you've gotta go with the pun.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Producer Andy Mills and I actually went to Dayton, Ohio, to visit Ross at his business.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Persistent Surveillance Systems.

ANDY: There it is!

JAD: Persistent Surveillance Systems. Right, that feels Orwellian.

ROSS MCNUTT: Yeah.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: And this is where all the plane pictures end up, because Ross's basic idea in taking this technology from Fallujah to a city like Dayton, Ohio, is basically this ...

ROSS MCNUTT: The US cities have just as large a problem as we do in Afghanistan and Iraq, only it's not IEDs, it's crime.

RICHARD BIEHL: We've had a lot of major events this year. We've had four officer-involved shootings so far this year. Our homicides are up this year.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: So this is Dayton police chief, Richard Biehl.

RICHARD BIEHL: B-I-E-H-L.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: I talked to him last summer. A couple of years ago, Ross called him up and was like, "Look ..."

ROSS MCNUTT: A city like Dayton, Ohio, we've got 28,000 crimes a year. About 10,000 part one crimes.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Murder, rape, assault.

ROSS MCNUTT: 10,000 part one crimes comes out to be $480 million a year.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: But McNutt is like, "For about the price of a police helicopter ..."

ROSS MCNUTT: We believe that we would be able to decrease crime by 30 to 40 percent.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: The Dayton police were like ...

RICHARD BIEHL: Alrighty.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: "Let's give it a shot."

RICHARD BIEHL: So we basically set up a test in June of 2012 for a five-day flight to see for ourselves what it was capable of doing.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: They sent the plane up in the air. It started doing its thing just like in Fallujah, and within just a few hours ...

RICHARD BIEHL: There was a call of this breaking and entering in progress with a description of a van.

ANGIE HORN: It was an older white box truck. Just a regular random moving truck.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: This is Angie Horn. She's the one who called 911. She was just home on her lunch break, and she sees a moving van pull up in front of her neighbor's house. The guy gets out, breaks in, starts moving furniture out.

ANGIE HORN: So we immediately called the police. They got there relatively quickly from what I remember, but he had already taken off.

ALEX GOLDMARK: Now normally in a case like this, the police would be like, "Well, how do we follow him? We don't know where he went." But in this case, the police contact Persistent Surveillance Systems, and ultimately they get connected to this guy.

ALEX BLASINGAME: My name's Alex Blasingame. I'm the senior analyst for the company.

ALEX GOLDMARK: Alex pulls up the image of Dayton, zooms in, clicks backwards about five minutes until he sees this little grainy white dot appear in front of her neighbor's house.

ALEX BLASINGAME: This is the vehicle here that we're wanting to track. I'm gonna put a tag down on where he's at.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: He places an orange circle over that random little shape and then click, click, click. He moves forward, forward, forward.

ALEX BLASINGAME: To follow him to his real time location.

ALEX GOLDMARK: Alex follows it up some roads, finds out that it is parked in a parking lot.

ALEX BLASINGAME: Six blocks away.

ALEX GOLDMARK: He calls up the people in the field, goes, "Go over there." They get there, they see the guy, they see a truck full of stuff, they send a different cop over to pick up the witness. The witness goes, "Yep, that's the guy."

JAD: Oh, the lady who called?

ALEX GOLDMARK: Yeah. This is minutes later.

JAD: No kidding!

ALEX GOLDMARK: That could have been a murderer, right? That could've been an armed robber. It could've been a lot of things.

ROBERT: This is so weird. It's like having a superpower.

JAD: It is kind of.

ROBERT: This is actually better than Batman. You can't go back and forth in time if you're a superhero.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: It just seems like the antithesis of what a lot of police departments seem to be trying to do in the aftermath of Ferguson and Staten Island and other horrific things that have happened, which is getting the police on the streets, making personal connections, creating relationships.

RICHARD BIEHL: There's nothing in this system that prevents you from having effective community policing at the same time.

ROBERT: But then you can watch so many other people all at once. Here's other things that people in Dayton do: like Romeo and Juliet, they sometimes meet without their parents' permission in the playground and smooch. There are gonna be divorce lawyers who are gonna be tracking errant spouses. There are gonna be traffic police who are watching who goes through the red light. There are gonna be realtors who are wondering who are—how many tenants do you really have in that building? And I guess the thought might be that if the information exists that will show what my pixel was actually doing, then—then I'm a little less free.

ROSS MCNUTT: There is a clear trade off between security and privacy. And, you know, in our major cities where we have tens of thousands of major crimes, you are a lot less free when you can't leave your house at night.

ROBERT: There's obviously a huge advantage to knowing what you know, but then there's a huge thing to knowing what you know. Like, knowledge all by itself is sort of a—is pregnant with funny ...

JAD: You know, here's my problem with this, with all of these privacy stories. It's like when you're talking about these technologies, the advantages are always so concrete and the trade offs always feel so abstract. I feel like there is something being lost here, but I can never quite put my finger on it. It's weird.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Well I was feeling like you have not convinced me. I am not going for this. And then I saw Juarez, Mexico. And that? I mean, that's what made me start to think otherwise.

ALEX BLASINGAME: Juarez, especially at the time we did this, they averaged 300 murders a month and 52 kidnappings a week.

ANDY: 300 murders a month?

ALEX BLASINGAME: Yeah.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: McNutt and the gang, they got a contract—we've been asked not to say for whom—and they went down south, set themselves up in a hotel room, got the plane up in the sky, and then whoever the client was started bringing them crime reports.

ALEX BLASINGAME: So this is kind of what you never want to see happen, but this is kind of why the system was up.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Alex pulls up on the screen this very grainy aerial shot of Juarez.

ALEX BLASINGAME: This is Juarez, Mexico.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: It looks like any city, right? You've got, like, grids of streets and cars and houses. And then, like, over on the left of the screen, he points to this dark little square. It's a vehicle that's going down the street.

ALEX BLASINGAME: This is a female police officer. She was actually headed to work on this morning, so we'll kind of go through it here.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: He starts at the beginning, and you see there's her house. And her car is parked outside. You see that, like, teeny little pixel gets in her car.

ALEX BLASINGAME: She pulls out of her driveway. That was her home.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Starts to drive to work. And then ...

ALEX BLASINGAME: Right when she leaves, if you look up here ...

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: He points to the upper left of the screen.

ALEX BLASINGAME: Several cars were parked up on the corner. As soon as she left her driveway, those cars become active.

ANDY: So this is a stakeout?

ALEX BLASINGAME: Yeah, they were waiting for her to leave.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: He's so zoomed in that you can see it's like a Tic Tac moving down the street. And then two more Tic Tacs come alongside.

ALEX BLASINGAME: Until they get right about here.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: He's clicking forward on the photo and you see ...

ALEX BLASINGAME: That right there is a speed bump.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: These cars just inch closer.

ALEX BLASINGAME: So she'll kind of hesitate there, which is unfortunate.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: So she's driving down the street, and there's these cars following behind her. And then there's this car up ahead of her.

ALEX BLASINGAME: A vehicle that had been parked here for 15, 20, 30 minutes, all of the sudden backs out into traffic and seemingly slows them down. Almost gets in an accident right here, which gives these guys enough time to catch up. This is where they're gonna pull up beside her.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: And then suddenly, Alex says this is the point where ...

ALEX BLASINGAME: Here the first car pulls up and shoots her multiple times.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: ... she was shot in the head.

ALEX BLASINGAME: Multiple times in the head right here. She's actually gonna roll through the intersection.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Her car continues to go, even though she's been shot in the head.

ALEX BLASINGAME: And then these guys take off.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Yeah, it was not fun to watch. It was upsetting. But what happens next made me really start to understand what this technology is capable of.

ROSS MCNUTT: I just wanted to real quickly just show you some of the other ...

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Ross walks in. He takes that moment—horrible moment—and then he starts to, like, shoot back and forth in time.

ROSS MCNUTT: So suspect car one, here's his path before the murder, here's his path after the murder.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: He actually takes the two cars from that murder and you see—he draws on the map, you see that they meet up with two other cars ...

ROSS MCNUTT: See that guy there?

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: ... that were involved in a different murder. Now one murder becomes two, two cars become four.

ROSS MCNUTT: Car stops ...

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: And if you follow all four of these cars, drawing lines as they move through the city, you find out who they meet up with. And four becomes eight, eight becomes 16, so on and so on. And you have all these lines criss-crossing the city, and then you see that a whole bunch of those cars are headed to one place.

ROSS MCNUTT: This house appears to be their cartel headquarters.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: And that's when you start to think well, that's how you have to take something like this down. It's not a one-shot thing like solving the crime. It's about cracking an entire system.

ANDY: In fact—this is Andy here—when I was doing some research into this, I made a bunch of calls. And I spoke with this one governmental source who told me that this information that Ross had just showed us, like, it was one of the primary tools used to dismantle an entire cartel in Juarez.

JAD: Wow.

ANDY: And that apparently, the leader of that cartel was responsible for something like 1,500 murders.

JAD: Whoa! So I gotta ask again. So how are you feeling at this point? Are you happy or scared or—I don't know.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: I felt ashamed of myself because I thought oh, the reason why I'm so excited about it is it's because it's in a country where I don't live and I'm an outsider and I think of it as being messed up. So it's okay for them, but it's still not okay for us. What did you think, Andy?

ANDY: I mean, it feels wrong to not solve these crimes that we can solve.

JAD: And what if this plane is on top of New York?

ANDY: Good.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: God, really?

ANDY: For me, it became ...

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: But do you remember, like, after 9/11 when you'd walk down the street and you'd hear the F-16s circling over the city? And I just remember the feeling in my stomach was like nausea. Like, I felt sick. It felt gross. It felt like we had no autonomy over ourselves. And at that point I was scared enough that I could live with it. But right now I don't feel that way, and look, it's a very privileged position to be able to say that we shouldn't have it. I get that.

ANDY: I mean, that's what I'm saying. Like, I became a convert because, like, somebody got kidnapped today, and if we had an eye in the sky we might be able to get the kid back in a few minutes, hours compared to, like, you see the stats on the amber alerts? They're not good.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Yeah. But what we're talking about is, like—and I'm not saying that I'm, like, anti-McNutt at all, but what I'm saying is, like, it's very easy to paint it as "We're going to get bad guys." And I just don't think it's that simple. The McNutt and co., they seem like decent people. They have set limitations for themselves. They have said they will not use photography that could get any closer. They've made a moral choice with that. How do we know other people will make the same moral choice? And ...

ANDY: You're saying that even though this thing might solve a ton of crimes, might save lives, it's still not worth the risk because it just asks a level of trust in government that we shouldn't—we shouldn't give. Is that what you're saying?

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: For now, yes.

ROBERT: So back to Dayton. What happened in Dayton?

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Well ...

RICHARD BIEHL: I was pretty impressed. I was pretty impressed.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: After that five-day demo, the police chief, Richard Biehl ...

RICHARD BIEHL: I recommended that we enter into a contract with Persistent Surveillance Systems.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: And so they took it to the City Commission.

KERY GRAY: Hi, this is Kery Grey.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Oh, hey, Kery. It's Manoush in New York.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: And according to Kery Grey ...

KERY GRAY: Director of the City Commission Office for the city of Dayton, Ohio.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: The committee saw the presentation and they liked it.

KERY GRAY: The City Commission was interested in the presentation.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: But they decided that before they go forward, they should have a public forum. So they could just, you know, sort of hear from the people.

KERY GRAY: There was about 75 or so people there.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: And he says that the people of Dayton, like, much like the people of Radiolab and Note to Self, were very divided.

KERY GRAY: A quarter of the people were supportive of this technology, and they were frustrated with the amount of crime. Their belief was, "I'm not doing anything wrong so I don't care what people see me doing. We want this implemented and we want it implemented very broadly."

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: So a quarter of them were like, "You know, bring it on!" They were basically in the Andy camp.

ANDY: Woo hoo!

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: But then there was another group, slightly smaller, but not by much.

KERY GRAY: Maybe 15 percent.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: That was the Robert/Manoush camp.

KERY GRAY: Who believed that this was a grotesque invasion of privacy, and some of the people spoke in very impassioned terms. So ...

ROBERT: Yay!

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Yay!

KERY GRAY: ... I think calling it grotesque invasion of privacy would pretty much reflect the way this group was feeling.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: This group, too.

KERY GRAY: And that there was no way that you could trust government with this volume of information and this breadth of information.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: So you had your pros and your cons. The rest of the people, like the majority ...

KERY GRAY: Maybe had some feelings one way or another, but just didn't have enough information. And so they came and kind of asked questions.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Like, how long will Persistent Surveillance Systems keep the images? 90 days. How far can they zoom in? Can they see my face? No. So they had a lot of questions, but in the end, even though the room was basically divided into three parts, the naysayers were so loud and so impassioned that they sort of defined the conversation.

ROBERT: As we do.

KERY GRAY: So we took that lesson to understand that there was going to be some significant education that was gonna be needed and some significant hurdles that were gonna have to be crossed before we were able to do a broad based implementation. And based on the amount of time that was gonna have to be spent, we decided there were other more immediate techniques that could be used, that could be invested in, and we took the money that could have been spent on this and spent it on some other activities.

JAD: It seems like what you're saying is that, like, it was just gonna be too hard to get people over the hurdle. So like, eh, it's not worth it.

KERY GRAY: Yeah, I think that's probably accurate.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: So the plane is off the table, so to speak.

KERY GRAY: It's off the table for right now, but that doesn't mean that it's never coming back on the table.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Which I think is fair to say is frustrating to him.

ROSS MCNUTT: Right now, we've got about $150 million worth of proposals sitting out there for a large number of cities: Baltimore, Philadelphia. We've been to Moscow, we've been to London. We're waiting for them to make decisions. We've done Compton, we've been to Rome.

ANDY: So Compton's like, "Maybe." Juarez is like, "Maybe." Dayton is like, "Maybe.

ROSS MCNUTT: There's a whole lot of maybes out there.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: And what McNutt and his team are doing now—and this is actually what they were doing when we went to visit them—they're analyzing ...

ALEX BLASINGAME: What we're doing here in Dayton is we are looking at a turnpike or something?

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Yeah, traffic in New Jersey. They're studying traffic problems.

ALEX BLASINGAME: We look at congested areas which are typically, especially in that part of the country, exits and on-ramps, any kind of junction in a highway.

ROSS MCNUTT: Well, sometimes you just want to scream.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: McNutt. McNutt, McNutt, McNutt. I think that might be 10 times.

JAD: [laughs] Thank you, Manoush.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Thank you.

ROBERT: Thank you, Alex.

ALEX GOLDMARK: Yeah, sure.

JAD: Special thanks this hour of course to Manoush Zomorodi and Alex Goldmark. Also to Dan Tucker and George Schulz. And I would urge everybody listening right now to go to iTunes and download the latest podcasts from Note to Self. It's a show that's all about grappling with the difficult questions of living in the digital world.

ROBERT: Oh, and you can find an update to this episode that we did with the Note to Self team on our website, Radiolab.org. And you'll want to because what happened after we broadcast this was amazing!

JAD: This piece was produced by Andy Mills, and we had original music from Dylan Keefe.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: Received at 4:50 p.m.]

[MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Hey, it's Manoush Zomorodi, the host of WNYC's Note to Self.]

[ALEX GOLDMARK: This is Alex Goldmark with the credits. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad.]

[MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Their staff—our staff—includes Brenna Farrell, Ellen Horne ...]

[ALEX GOLDMARK: ... Dylan Keefe, Matt Kielty, Lynn Levy ...]

[MANOUSH ZOMORODI: ... Andy Mills, Latif Nasser, Malissa O'Donnell, Kelsey Padgett ...]

[ALEX GOLDMARK: ... Arianne Wack, Molly Webster, Soren Wheeler and Jamie York.]

[MANOUSH ZOMORODI: With help from Damia—is it Damiano or Damiano? With help from Damiano Marchetti, Molly Jacobson and Alexandra Lee Young.]

[ALEX GOLDMARK: Our fact-checkers are Eva Dasher and Michelle Harris.]

[MANOUSH ZOMORODI: That's it, right?]

[ALEX GOLDMARK: Okay, bye.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

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