Air Date: 8-25-2026

Today we explore the resistance to Flock cameras and mass surveillance as a whole. Communities across the country are voting to cancel their tracking-camera contracts, others are filing records requests to drag secret police deals into daylight, and some people stopped waiting and went out at night with wire cutters.

Full Show Notes

Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.

Today we explore the resistance to Flock cameras and mass surveillance as a whole. Communities across the country are voting to cancel their tracking-camera contracts, others are filing records requests to drag secret police deals into daylight, and some people stopped waiting and went out at night with wire cutters.

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 55 minutes today include

Democracy Now!

More Perfect Union

Benn Jordan

The Canvas

This Is Hell!

The Current

and The Final Straw Radio

Then, in the additional, Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in 4 sections;

Section A, What Flock Actually Is & the Business of Surveillance

Section B, Beyond Flock - The Full Surveillance Machine

Section C, Copaganda & the ICE Enforcement Arm

And Section D, Fighting Back

And now, on to the show.

Flock is marketed as a tool to fight crimes, but the cameras collect data on millions of vehicles regardless of whether the driver is suspected of a crime. And as President Trump's immigration enforcement crackdown has escalated, concerns are growing over whether the local data from these cameras could be aiding the deportation dragnet Flock claims it doesn't work with ICE and that ICE does not have direct access to Flock's cameras or systems or data.

But an investigation from 404 Media last year found more than 4,000 searches that may have been conducted on behalf of or in partnership with ICE. This past May, an audit by the Dayton, Ohio Police Department found its cameras were searched more than 7,000 times for immigration enforcement purposes. This is what Flock CEO Garrett Langley said in a podcast just last month.

And so when the topic of immigration enforcement comes up, I'm like, "Guys, the company has no opinion on this." If the state of Texas wants to enforce immigration, they might use Flock, but they're going to go enforce immigration no matter what Flock does, and that's the state of Texas's choice. That's the city's choice.

And it's tough, right? It's really tough for my employees to work at a company where they're like, "Oh, I, I don't like that law," but our technology's used to enforce it, but we can't make that our problem as a company. 

So Flock is being used by universities, by big box stores. for more on it and the movement against it, we're joined here in New York by Chad Marlow, senior policy counsel at the ACLU, where he focused on privacy, surveillance, and technology issues.

He leads the ACLU's efforts against Flock. Explain what we're talking about here and how Flock has been used, Chad. 

So basically, automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs, are cameras that take a picture of every single car that goes by it, not just the cars that are suspected of criminality or have done something wrong, but every single car.

they record the information about the car, including where it is and when it was there, and then they put it into a database, and this is where it gets really scary. Because now you have pictures of every innocent person who drives by in a database that is kept for a month or more and shared throughout the nation with all of Flock's law enforcement customers, and in fact, even, internationally with people associated with Flock.

And so essentially You know, even though in America, one of our core constitutional principles is privacy, we have a company working with governments to record the comings and goings of every single person in the country as if you and I and everyone else were potential criminals. And that is a, in my opinion, a very un-American, take on privacy, and the way that we engage in criminal justice enforcement.

and Chad, this company is less than 10 years old, and it spread so rapidly. Could you talk a little bit about how it was created, and also what's its business model? Does it set up its cam- does it rent spaces in private, on private property to set up its cameras, or is it using public rights of way or public streets?

And if so, how is that permitted? 

Yeah, so the company was formed by, a, an engineer, billionaire engineer named Garrett Langley. and what is really interesting and very important about the company is that it is backed by almost a billion dollars in venture capital investment. And that is very critical, because what those venture capitalists invested in was a company that basically trades privacy for profits.

And so they will record the information about people. Flock always says it doesn't sell data, but Flock saying it doesn't sell data is like Ford Motor Company saying it doesn't sell steering wheels. yes, I understand the larger product is cars, and it's monitoring vehicles, but it's that data that is part of Flock's product, just like a steering wheel is part of Ford Motor Company's car product.

So then it collects all this information, and the more information it can collect and the more it can share, the more value that their product is. And most recently, Flock was valued at an almost an $8 billion company. And so- In order to increase the value of their company, they need to take more people's data, invade their privacy more, and share it more broadly.

And although they may say things like, "We have, certain methods in place and systems in place to prevent broader data sharing to make sure it's not misused," that is all simple public relations response. Their venture capitalist investors who want to receive massive returns on their investment are, have forced Flock's hand, and say, "We need to put the pedal to the metal, violate privacy as much as possible if doing that will increase our profits."

And there's a direct correlation between more monitoring, more surveillance, more data collection, more data sharing, and more profits. 

but again, I wanted to ask you this issue of how do they do this, set up so many cameras? Are they, for instance, like cell phone companies that rent their towers in buildings to be able to create their network, or how do they do it?

how does Flock do it? Yeah. 

So what they do is they go to your local police department and they say, "We want to rent you the cameras that you need. We will also take care of storage. We will create a back system that will take care of data sharing. We'll do everything for you. All you need to do is sign on the dotted line."

Now, what's interesting about Flock is this process of using your local police department, your local government, to increase their network to spy on everyone, they have to keep pushing that in order to get as broad of a network as they possibly can. And so they sneak in these contracts, they do it with their salespeople.

But they try to do it out of public view. And what we've actually seen in the country is once eventually it comes into public view, because their cameras are fairly, easy to recognize when you see them in public, communities have risen up throughout the country and demanded those contracts be canceled.

In fact, in just the last 13 months, nearly 60 municipalities have either canceled their Flock contracts or have said, "Do not renew them." and in fact, Flock is going out in the country not only promoting its products, but trying to quash any efforts to promote transparency and public engagement before their contracts are signed because they know the more the public knows, the greater resistance to their product will be, and they want to stop that anywhere they can.

my name is Dr. Viet R. Trinh. I'm a professor at Ohio State University. at the Ohio State University, my areas of expertise include crime, surveillance, and policing. I've been doing this research for fourteen years now, first at the University of California and then at Yale, and now in Columbus.

it is my professional opinion that Flock is a dystopian violation of our rights. And what I mean by that, what I mean by that is that it inverts the very nature of how police are supposed to function. So in traditional investigation, a crime is supposed to happen first, and then detectives are supposed to identify a list of plausible suspects, and then those suspects are placed under investigation.

But under Flock, we are all, everybody in this room, every day, every time we get into our cars, we are all under investigation at all times for all crimes. Then when a crime actually does occur, the police have a list of pre-investigated suspects. That's you, that's me, that's everybody in this room who gets in a car, that's everybody in this city.

So today in Columbus, our constitutional rights, especially our Fourth Amendment rights, are f-flagrantly violated every single day as a matter of regular government policy. Let me ph-phrase this another way. Today I've heard a lot, in these chambers about investigating crimes. I've heard that a lot. Flock lets us investigate crimes, Flock lets us prevent crimes.

But it's my position that this is actually a misnomer. Despite what others have said here, Flock does not investigate crimes at all. It is not a tool for investigating crimes. and that misnomer has apparently bamboozled several people in this room. Flock is, at its very foundation, a tool for investigating pre-crimes.

Not crimes, but pre-crimes. others have a-- others in this room have implied that we can reform Cl-Flock, we can have Flock and preserve our civil liberties. We can make this technology work for us. We just need to install more safeguards. We just need to install more protections. We just need guardrails that will prevent abusers from stalking their ex-girlfriends.

Yet the very nature of this technology, that is, the technology as a tool for investigating pre-crime, categorically precludes that. This is not a technology that can be reformed or regulated or managed. It is not a technology that can be made righteous. On this matter, we cannot, and we can never, have our cake and eat it too.

to believe otherwise is hubris, and to be frank, I have seen a baffling amount of hubris in these chambers today.

This naturally led me to the dark web, where I have access to some semi-private communities dedicated to hacking and open source intelligence. Some of these communities have well-organized marketplaces for breached data, credentials, exploits, and all that stuff. And that is where I found this. Please excuse the poor English translation, but these were law enforcement Flock Safety accounts for sale with escrow protection by a reputable vendor.

And a few days later, the listings were removed in a way that suggested that someone had bought them. Not long after that, I got in touch with a professional security researcher regarding other things on this list. And what do you know? He found something very similar on the dark web. 

So in the cyber industry, there are things called access brokers, and some people specialize in government agencies or maybe local law enforcement.

I started digging more to find out where these accounts could have come from. Were they bought or stolen off of a police officer or a Flock employee? Or just maybe Flock Safety had some security vulnerabilities The most significant and troublesome and mind-boggling vulnerability on this list was discovered nearly a year ago.

Late 2024, I stumbled down a rabbit hole, and then probably a few nights later was messing with the buttons and the dip switch, and then was able to figure out how to get, a shell on it. Yeah. So I'm, John Gaines Gaines. Professionally, I've been in the offensive security field for over a decade.

Obtaining shell on a device means that you can remote control it, exfiltrate data, and escalate privileges, which is exactly what John did. As detailed on John's blog and formally published paper, John had found a user named Kager on social media who was trying to recreate some of the disclosures. He reported that by merely pressing the button on a device in a particular sequence on a Flock Safety camera, a wireless access point is created.

Hey, partner, don't do any of this stuff unless you can legally acquire a Flock Safety camera. If you do this to one of the 80,000 all over the US of A, you'll be put in the clink First thing you're gonna wanna do is go ahead and press the button to turn on that police camera. Then press the button on the back a number of times I can't disclose in this video.

There she is, the Flock wireless access point. Go on and connect. Send a command to enable ADB. Connect. And now you can connect to the Flock Safety device and access its data or install whatever the hell you want on it. Have fun. 

This, along with Jon's previous discoveries, are encapsulated in an easy-to-use tool that he made so even a novice user could obtain full control of the cameras.

We let George Chidi from The Guardian do the honors. 

The longest part actually is waiting for the hotspot to turn on. but realistically in about five seconds. And in fact, with the Compute Box, you don't need to hit the buttons, because the USB-C ports are exposed, so you can just plug in a rubber ducky and then walk away.

A rubber ducky, sometimes referred to as a bad USB, is a USB drive that a computer or device detects as a USB keyboard, and then executes scripts called payloads. One can make a device like this for as little as $5. This quite literally raises the limit of how one could use Flock Safety devices to their imagination.

You can clone or decompile the apps. You could send the video stream data to a remote server. You could use it as a botnet client for malware. You could have it capture Wi-Fi handshake credentials and do middleman or honeypot attacks, or replace or modify captured footage or images. And if that is the case, this could bring into question the integrity of the data being used as admissible evidence in court, in general.

Unless, of course, a prosecutor could prove that a security breach wasn't detected, and, about that. 

The apps that are installed that are, custom of the vendor, all have debug enabled, which on these types of devices, on Android devices, means that you can pause them in runtime and modify the memory, right?

which gives you system, injection. System can write properties. and in this case, there's one that you can modify, a cleanup script, that is ran as root. You can consider it either a wireless RCE or a gated wireless RCE that goes from no access to, to root, which is the worst case. 

This means that malicious code can be installed and executed outside of the operating system.

like, when you first turn on a computer and see the BIOS screen where the system does its little self-check, it could exist right there, acting as a superior to Windows or iOS or whatever it is that you're booting into. Multi-factor authentication or two-factor authentication or two-step verification is part of our daily lives.

We use it when we log into everything from Gmail to TikTok to our banks and nearly everything in between. But not all 2FA is equal, and different types have their own strengths and weaknesses. For example, some 2FAs simply pop up on your phone or your desktop and ask you if you've just logged in from a certain device or region, in which you can approve or decline the new device.

This is an excellent security protocol if you're sitting at home in Kansas and see that somebody from Bangladesh just used your password. But if I'm sitting in your driveway in Kansas, or especially if I'm using your Wi-Fi using a device like this, I can clone your Wi-Fi signal and then send a deauthorization or deauth signal to your device's MAC address.

Either you will notice this and try to reconnect, or your computer or phone will automatically reconnect, and now you'd be accessing your own network through my device. I could use a script to clone the login page of whatever credentials I'm trying to get and then feed it to you, capturing your session and, depending on the service, your username and password.

Then, as expected, you would get a two-step verification asking you if you just logged in, and you would say yes, granting me access. This means that when it comes to credentials like this, even with 2FA or MFA, a police surveillance company's security can only be as good as the least security-minded person with access to that system.

If you're wondering how low this security bar can go with clients, you'll be disappointed to know that Fox Safety doesn't require two-factor authentication with some police departments. Yes, you heard that right. The security process you go through when you log into Disney+ is just too much to ask some police departments to do when accessing confidential information and the location of, in some cases, virtually everyone.

When I first found this out, I simply couldn't believe it, and neither could US Senator Ron Wyden's team, which is why it's among the issues leading to a request for the FTC to open an investigation into the company on the grounds of national security. Fortunately, there's a super easy solution to this, a USB or NFC authenticator.

It costs as little as $10, and you just plug it in or wave it in front of your device for the second layer of authentication. And if this is too much hassle for an able-bodied police officer or employee to use, then maybe they shouldn't have access to secure information. It's really frustrating to spend this much time talking about a problem when a very simple and common-sense solution to that problem has existed since day one.

A concerning amount of hard-coded information is stored inside Flock Safety cameras, and we'll hear all about it in the next vulnerabilities on this list. But within this information is a list of Wi-Fi network names. So I set up a dummy network with one of these Wi-Fi names. Then when removing the SIM card or when the device couldn't find an LTE signal, some of our Flock Safety cameras happily connected to the dummy network and routed upstream traffic through it.

Others seemingly prioritized my dummy network by default, regardless of if it had a SIM card in it or not. So I captured the PCAP data being transmitted from one of these cameras for a little while and analyzed it with Wireshark and unblob, which is an open source extraction suite. And sure enough, there were clear text credentials in the data.

These exact vulnerabilities were originally disclosed by John in April, another in September, and with another pending. This attack requires knowing the name or credentials of the Wi-Fi networks the camera is looking for. But what concerns me more is that this information wasn't in an encrypted upstream to begin with, which means that by using a professional grade SDR or IMSI catcher, which is more or less a DIY stingray device, a malicious hacker could just hijack the LTE connection and then do the exact same thing without needing to know these network names or even being physically near the camera.

This could also allow a more modern version of a tempest attack, which I'll demonstrate in a few minutes, and that's where a hacker could decode the motion JPEG video stream. I actually tried to accomplish this as I love puzzles, but unfortunately time forced me to choose between decoding the pixel sequence or finishing this video.

And here we are When I recreated John's research on these devices as previously shown, it was as clear to me as it was to John when he first discovered it that they inadequately protected credentials, API keys, passwords, and more. As I mentioned, the Gaines blog and the papers have a lot more details on this for the technically minded, but I'm going to use this segment to talk about some of the other troubling things that were found stored in the camera.

On Fox Safety's website, it is stated that they do not capture or record data of people, but only vehicles. They also state that data and footage is encrypted throughout the entire life cycle, and that data is automatically removed from devices after seven days. Speaking for myself, when I recreated John's research across multiple devices, I confirmed exactly what he was seeing.

If Fox Safety's cameras in the wild are operating like the ones we researched, this would be a clear contradiction to their statements. Firstly, when I moved in front of the camera, the radar module triggered the camera module to take a picture of me. Then the onboard AI looked for a license plate and didn't find one, but it stored the image anyway to a separate folder.

Now, this doesn't seem to target people. It will also take a picture of my hand if I move in front of the lens or a picture of my desk if I move the device. But what I observed were the devices intentionally saving the footage, not erasing it. Secondly, throughout the entire process of verifying John's research, I didn't crack or decrypt a single thing.

Any of the information, footage, or data that you see or hear about in this video was unencrypted at runtime. And finally, when going through the files and temp folders of the Falcon cameras, we absolutely found images older than seven days. In fact, John found stored images that were captured when the camera was triggered inside the factory where the device was made.

So hypothetically, this suggests that if you had a camera deployed and pointed at your front door, one could access this data and figure out when you entered or exited your house

Call me James Jonah Jameson, 'cause I'm about to rip into Spider-Man 

I want the public to see Spider-Man for the two-bit criminal he really is. He's a fake. He's full of stickum. Catch him in the act. 

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is an authoritarian movie that promotes stronger police power and government surveillance, and I brought receipts.

Peter has, and I'm quoting him, "Every camera in the city running facial recognition scan," a highly unethical authoritarian practice. I hope we can agree on that. Peter says this to the police as he's trying to help them. Does Officer Jean DeWolff say, "Hey, that's highly unethical and contrary to the democratic values we are trying to protect"?

No. She says, and I quote again, "That sounds super illegal, Spider-Man. I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that." Now, this exchange is problematic for many different reasons. One, DeWolff isn't telling Peter that running facial recognition across a city is unethical. She says it's illegal, implying that if the law accepted it, she'd be fine with it.

If I said I murdered someone, would you think, "That's terrible," or would you think, "That goes against the law"? This legalist framing of how wrong technological mass surveillance is turns this ethical question into a technical one. this isn't a it's illegal to trespass on private property to get information, Spider-Man situation.

This is a you facial recognizing all of New York is fucked up situation. Two, despite recognizing how super illegal that shit is, DeWolff decides to ignore it. Here, our protagonists are shown to be flexible on law and ethics, and this flexibility isn't criticized. It's actually shown as a virtue.

Violating people's privacies is good, actually, if it shows how eager you are to stop a criminal. Three, I think this bit was supposed to be funny. Spider-Man is invading every New Yorker's privacy. We're completely desensitized to that, aren't we? We've normalized having facial recognition used on us, right?

This won't even come off as something fucked up done by a character we love, right? Spider-Man is by no means shown as perfect in Brand New Day. He hurts a police officer, probably the worst thing anyone could ever do, and you see him reckoning with this. But unethically surveilling one of the biggest cities in the world?

Now that's a ha. Despite some people saying that Brand New Day is one of the best Marvel movies because it decided to leave politics aside, I think it embraced politics in its most pernicious way. That is, in an apolitical appearance. Because what's a better way to deliver a political message than by making it appear apolitical?

This is not a surprise coming from a Marvel movie. At least six of their movies were made with funding from the US military at the cost of having their script reviewed by them. And this sort of propaganda isn't only shown through Spider-Man's good use of AI and surveillance technology, it's also shown through the depiction of the police Of course, Spider-Man's best friend now that he lost his actual friends is a cop.

They love each other, so endearing. But the copaganda goes beyond showing friendly cops. The whole movie starts with exposition, and again, I quote, "It's a New York. Thanks to Spider-Man, crime rates have dropped to a record low." Basically, what it's saying is that if we had more resources to intervene on crime rates would go down.

A stronger police force, a better funded one, with more personnel could drop the crime rates as Spider-Man is doing. But this sort of narrative given by the Spider-Man movie is an ideological one. It's saying that crime rates will go down if we were better at stopping crime through repression. And that may sound intuitively right, but it doesn't take in consideration what the police actually does and the alternative solutions.

First, the police is a reactive force. It often only intervenes after a crime has been committed. They don't arrive late to a crime scene because they're underfunded or incompetent, but because that's the nature of their work. An article written for the American Military University, yeah, I opened their website, says that 75% of serious crimes reported are a discovery crime, where the incident has already occurred and the crime is essentially over.

The remaining 25% are ongoing crimes, but that still means that by the time someone reports it to the police, that the dispatcher gets the information and dispatches, and that the police arrive on the scene, the criminal could be long gone. So the police is a reactive force, and relatively rarely do they arrive on a scene with ongoing crime, as Spider-Man does.

So instead of showing that crime is preventable with more guns on our streets, as Spider-Man does, what could actually reduce crime rates? Prevention. If you want people to stop committing crimes, take away the reasons why they do crimes. Is it poverty? Eliminate poverty. Is it substance abuse? Get resources to prevent it and help its victims.

Is it homelessness? House them. And before you say, "Oh, we don't have the money," the US is literally the wealthiest civilization in the history of humanity. It's not a finite resource problem, it's a distribution problem. Anyway, Spider-Man doesn't do any of that. He's only treating crime with violence, and shows that more violence means less crime.

He's encouraging his audience to accept not only surveillance, but to see repression as a pretty good solution to crime reduction. The root of the problem of criminality can often be boiled down to inequality, but of course we can't address that. Let's just play Whac-A-Mole with criminality for the rest of time.

That just means unlimited superhero movies with unlimited criminals.

I'm old enough to remember when cops used to look like this. Baby blue shirts. Now they wear black, a more authoritative, less community-oriented, and more repressive representation. And of course, nobody will openly admit that wearing black is meant to be intimidating Except for Montgomery County in Maryland.

They explicitly said out loud what others deny, and I'm quoting from a Fox News article. County Executive Marc Elrich said that people found Black police uniforms intimidating. Elrich said, while they were initially meant to be interpreted that way, they no longer want people to be intimidated. How nice of them.

They are meant to be intimidating, he said. But why would cops want to look intimidating? Don't they want to protect and serve? Aren't they the good guys? in a Vox video titled Why America's Police Look Like Soldiers, which closely ties in with the idea of Spider-Man getting stronger powers, US Army veteran, former police officer, and university professor Arthur Rizer shares a poll he did with police officers.

In short, the data he gathered showed that 94% of officers had no problem carrying or wearing military grade equipment. 77% of them said that this military grade equipment changed the way they perceived themselves and their role in policing, finding themselves to be more assertive and sometimes more violent.

And when Rizer asked them how they thought the public perceived them differently, they answered with an impressive 83% that people were scared of them. It doesn't seem to be a problem for police officers, it doesn't seem to be a problem for Peter Parker, and the film doesn't really present this as a problem either.

And by refusing to present Peter Parker's growing powers as problematic, by showing him being able to control them, by casually showing him using AI powered facial recognition technology and mass surveillance, by making Spider-Man so uncritical of cops and the systems which incentivize crime, Marvel is trivializing and normalizing these incredibly important issues.

And these incredibly important issues are particularly relevant now. Check out Flock, Palantir, Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel? Thiel? We love queer representation in mass surveillance technology, business, fascism, techno fascism. We love that. So as a final call to action, I encourage you to share this video with your Marvel loving friends and to give Spider-Man: Brand New Day a shitty review on Letterboxd, because it's way too high right now, and it's obvious slop.

It's very political and not in a good way. 

does the more establishment corporate media, both private and public, do they represent business interests and a business-oriented political agenda? Because if they do not, they will not attract advertisers. Is copaganda a business decision, a bottom-line decision to make a l- to make a living in journalism?

Is it necessary to cater to business interests, to be uncritical of not only the police, but the status quo capitalism as well? 

I won't go so far as to say that it's necessary. I don't actually believe that it is, and I think there are a number of, smaller and more independent outlets, and even some larger outlets that have figured out a way of, operating without, advertising dollars from big business.

But I think the, the biases and the role of the news in serving the most powerful and wealthy people in our society is, much deeper than decisions that are made based on advertising dollars. the... and, know, Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman's book, Manufacturing Consent, I think remains, in my opinion, the best book on this subject about how the political economy of the news and the revenue streams and the ownership, of mass media sort of influences every single moment and every single decision of what they cover and how they cover it.

there's also an incredible book, that I rely on a lot called Policing the Crisis by Stuart Hall and a number of other collaborators, which analyzes the political economy behind the, the connection between the police and the legal system and the media, I think, really beautifully. but I think that the, the deeper problem to me is not necessarily that reporters are making intentional decisions, based on advertisers or things like that.

I think there are certainly, there are some publications that are particularly depraved, like The New York Times, where I do think there are high-level decisions being made, that are prioritizing certain types of business interests. I think the same is true of, NBC and CBS, et cetera. There are certainly, institutions where that is part of the problem.

But I think the deeper problem that we don't talk about as much is the Multi-billion dollar police public relations industry actually makes reporting copaganda the path of least resistance for these news outlets. So these reporters are incredibly busy. Many institutions around the country, journalistic institutions, have lost a lot of staff, and they're strapped.

And I've been talking to a lot of news anchors and editors at local, news outlets, and they, tell me openly, they're like, it's not that we're pro-police, and we really appreciate and hadn't thought about a lot of these criticisms you're making, and it's very troubling to us.

But you have to understand, there's these huge problems with our, the sort of operationalization and implementation of these, news processes within our own bureaucracy. We don't have the s- the resources to cover things differently because every single day we have to fill twenty to twenty-three minutes at six PM and six thirty PM and seven PM and ten PM, and then the morning news shows.

And the police make it so easy for us. They send us lists of stories every day, not just with police reports and facts, but they send us videos and images and charts and sources to quote." And, one reason why the local news is so distorted and contains so much language directly from police press releases and contains the stories that police wanna tell is that unlike public schools and teachers or nurses or the people that test our water for lead or soil for toxins in our air, and unlike the people that, that, that look at the, legal violations of landlords or wage theft by employers, none of those people have large PR departments.

Our society is underwriting and funding to the tune of billions of dollars, straight up PR by the police that then enables them to create this massive, unstoppable avalanche of information to newsrooms that, that need somebody to do that for them. And so I have a whole thing in the book about how ordinary people in our society, public defenders, teachers, nurses, doctors, directly impacted people, eh, basically anybody can start coming together in their local community.

And we're not gonna get paid to do this work, unfortunately. It's gonna have to be done as a mutual aid and community organizing project. But we can actually significantly change our local news through organizing to pr- provide and produce for the news, different types of stories about different types of understandings of safety, that, that will compete with and can actually...

Because those stories end up being more honest and more true and more important and more consistent with reality, in terms of, what matters to our safety, I think the news, what we've seen in some of the newsrooms we've been working with is the news will start covering those things. So that's another Of, thing that we don't really talk about that much.

And then the, the second thing I would say is that as a deeper cause is I think a lot of people in the, especially in the, the more elite national news, ideologically, they really have been brainwashed, and they really do believe many of the mythologies that they themselves have been reporting.

And so it's not necessarily that there's these sort of conscious corrupt decisions to cover or not cover things because, they believe they're gonna get advertising dollars or some owner of the paper is gonna get upset. that stuff does happen, but it's also that they really do believe, many of the, the underlying propagandistic assumptions.

and that is a problem that I think is fixable through coordinated effort and political education and organizing of the people that work in media. 

Alan, this is why I enjoy conversations with you. I wrote seventy plus questions beforehand, and now I'm gonna give you a follow-up on that because I found...

There's just something that you said that I found absolutely fascinating. Do you think that this reflects a larger, and I know this is a more general question, but a larger problem within journalism? And that is with all these cost cuts, with the continued corporatization of newspapers and journalistic outlets, are we seeing more and more of a dependence on public relations?

Has cost cuts led to a decline in journalism because of a dependence on private public relations instead of public news sources? 

I think that across our society, in a variety of different domains, we're seeing a very consequential and troubling consolidation of ownership. it's not something that's just affecting the news media industry, but it has particularly pernicious effects in the news media industry.

Fewer and fewer people who are richer and richer are owning a higher and higher percentage of the entities that are supposed to shape how we get information about the world. And those people, not only, I think everybody understands those people have certain business interests, but what is less, I think, fleshed out in a lot of the public critique is those people also have certain social networks and certain ideological commitments and ideological biases that really shape The news.

and, they are still subject to a lot of the business realities that you describe. the, the m- the sort of the rise of Facebook and Google and other social media has fundamentally transformed the political economy of the news in a lot of places just still haven't quite figured out how and if they can create, sustainable, rigorous news coverage, especially at the local level.

and a lot of these decisions, like in the case of Facebook, were intentional decisions to try to demonetize, regular journalism. And these are facts that we have to face. These are large monopolies that made an intentional decision to try to crush the apparatus through which especially local people can learn facts about their communities.

and so this is a problem that we have to think about more holistically in terms of building back, through civil society, some of the social networks, that enable us to inform each other of important things that are going on in our community. And I think we need to, basically do a reverse of what you just described.

the more that the news consolidates and the more that it relies on a smaller and smaller range of what I think of as fundamentally corrupt and biased sources like police, PR officials, et cetera, the more we need to organize in our own community to present alternative sources of information, whether those are, court watching programs where people in the community, a lot of people who retire from their jobs are getting together to just go and watch court and report on it to their own community.

Participatory defense hubs where people are, whose loved ones are charged with crimes or inside criminal or immigration proceedings come together and report on what's happening, to the public about what's happening to their loved ones and help educate each other. there's really good opportunities for students and faculty at schools across the country to set up their own little, mutual aid kind of journalism and counter-propaganda, groups.

there's public defenders, there's, landlord-tenant lawyers, there's teachers, there's nurses and doctors. All these people are every single day getting a lot of information that is so important for us to understand in terms of our safety And so we need to be thinking about how do we organize outside the profit model, outside of the ownership of these large institutions to create, flows of information that are really important for people, in their own communities.

Given your vast experience at both ICE and the DHS, what stands out to you about these, two deadly shootings in Houston and Maine? 

I think, Pia, unfortunately, this is just an- a yet another indicator of how this administration has really, devalued the human life of people attempting to enter this country.

And I think what we see is, you s- you heard about the push for higher arrest numbers. that's been the administration's signature issue almost from the beginning prior to his, his first term. And so that is going to be the overriding, goal and mission almost above all else.

even in the wake of, these killings, you're seeing, the president come out and say, no, we need to keep doing it," because, they're trying to send a very clear message, I think. 

Senator Angus King of Maine, said he'd spoken with Homeland Security secretary who confirmed to him that the 26-year-old Colombian man, Guerrero was, who was shot in Maine, was not the person ICE officers were targeting.

There's similar reporting coming out of Houston. What does this suggest to you or tell you, Peter, about how people are being profiled in the United States? 

I think, this goes back to, there's a couple factors at play. One, this goes back to, the opinion from the Supreme Court last year by Justice Kavanaugh that basically says, if you're brown at Home, at, and at Home Depot, and I'm certainly sim- oversimplifying a little bit, but, you could be, stopped by ICE and questioned about your status.

And, that has been, very inconsistent with not only, constitutional principles, but even the department's own, policies. And so I think now what you're also seeing is, and this is not, new necessarily, it's gone back and forth, this idea that, okay, if I'm pursuing a target and I happen to encounter someone that is also without status, I can certainly go ahead and, detain or question that person.

But what's happening here, it seems, is there is, again, this push for thousands and thousands of arrest numbers per day. And I think, one, I think that may be driving, maybe a less rigorous, process of determining who actually the target is. And then I think the other thing, too, as I understand the reporting, this was a new recruit.

And what we've seen is that there's been a gutting of the, standards for hiring as well as a gutting of training. And unfortunately, it's not al- it's not just putting the public at risk, but it's also putting ICE officers at risk. they're being s- they're being set up to fail.

And of course, they are, they're making decisions that, we look back and we say, "Look, it's costing lives." 

Can I ask you, when you worked at ICE, what was your training like? 

Sure. So just to be clear, I was not a law enforcement officer, nor was I, necessarily operational.

I was actually the employment lawyer- 

for the, for ICE, or the, I ran their labor and employment law division. And where I, intersected with this was, I advised my clients on the personnel issues and, that may include misconduct, it may include selection processes.

and so you get to learn the business. But I think, getting back to questions of accountability, even with body-worn cameras, the question is going to be, okay, how are you going to use that footage? Is there gonna be a full and fair investigation? either way, we shouldn't be making assumptions.

there should, we should get to the facts. But the question is, and it seems very apparent over the last two years, that's not the point here. The point is deterrence and intimidation and fear. 

I'm glad you brought up inve- investigation because inf- officials in both, states are calling for independent investigations into what happened in these individual cases.

How likely do you think that is? 

I think it all gets to the definition of the word independence. and this strikes, a very direct chord for me because I, you know, helped... I oversaw the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the very end before our office was eliminated. And we would've been investigating, these, these incidences.

and, and now, there's a shell, but it- we basically don't exist. And then, so you're left with offices of professional responsibility, or as other people might, refer to them, offices of internal affairs, at ICE or, and CBP to the extent that there's a CBP officer or agent involved, doing these investigations.

And look, there are a lot of good people there, but I really wonder, whether they have the freedom to do their job. And so it really gets into this question of, how independent is independent? Even if you were to go to DOJ I, I don't have confidence anymore. and they seem very reticent up until, I think, recently I saw a report where, federal law enforcement was actually starting to share some information, with state and locals.

But, again, they're trying to keep the information close so they can maintain a narrative. 

So how do you understand, the response to these killings in terms of, they now say that at least one agent will be wearing a, a body camera, that the traffic stops should be halted for the most part.

What is that telling you about agency accountability and what we might see going forward? 

again, I think this gets back to, consistency and application of that policy. I can tell you when I was at the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, we did investigations of vehicular pursuits all the time, and these traffic stops because they can be very dangerous for, again, for all people involved.

and as I think, people have reported, and there was discussion earlier in the program, look, there, there are absolutely times where unfortunately deadly force has to be used, but that force has to... the force has to be objectively reasonable. And, based on what we're seeing, absent more facts, I just don't see how you get there.

and even with the body cam footage, the f- the question becomes, h- are you going to use those to con- use that footage to conduct a real investigation? And based on those findings, have some measure of accountability, discipline. there's all, there are people involved that have to make those decisions.

It's not just a matter of saying, John Doe has a body, had a body camera on." and I think the other thing, too, that, even with the criticisms of, oh, we, don't need to do this or what have you, it's actually a tool to protect officers as well. 'Cause if you're doing it, things the right way, that footage should back you up.

Peter, as Katie was saying, the ICE enforcement over the last number of years, it's been pretty consistent. there have been ramping up at, at, at certain points in times, and it becomes news, when there are these tragic, deaths. but we know that there has been a lot of fear, in immigrant communities, in Black and brown communities.

Talk to me about where that is now, some, couple years into this real big push by ICE. 

I think it, it probably hasn't been higher. I, I- to me, it seems as though that, that's the point. The point is to engender fear in Black and brown communities. It's to engender, the belief that you shouldn't come here, and so we're gonna make it as, difficult and, a- and terror-filled as we can.

I think honestly the biggest thing that I wanted to really get through, especially in this conversation, is that it's really easy to feel like you can just get steamrolled by these systems. I know that in our community... So the town I live in is actually unincorporated, which means that we are ruled by the county.

That's kind of our roll-up government. But even then, the county commissioners have very little power over sheriffs. So the office of the sheriff is an independently elected position, and in many communities like ours, they operate quite independently. Really the only person who can do much to sh- stop the sheriff from doing anything is the governor of the state.

the, the county commissioners have the power of the purse, but, as we can see, even with our national context, that's not always quite enough to stop folks from doing what they want. So we actually really don't have much we can do to force the office of the sheriff to give up these systems.

So you have to start getting creative and thinking about what is actually more motivating. I know that y- you and I, we come from these, very activist backgrounds where, I think we all suffer a little bit from the overstatement of the idea that, the law is gonna be where get your relief.

the, who, who could s- try and sue somebody or force them with a, a ballot initiative or whatever to do something. but often it's very limited, and it's also expensive and not often super practical. It doesn't always also reflect, a vision of a world we want to live in where people are only, you know, accepting something like mass surveillance or not because there's, some big court case that we're waiting to go through, a federal circuit court.

Realistically, I would say the biggest thing that has motivated our community is getting together and just seeing how many people agree, and hearing the stories and hearing the concerns. I think one of the most pleasant surprises that I encountered was that a lot of the people who, in the room, were the most vocal about their concerns for the system and its, lack of, I think, appropriateness for our community, were former law enforcement, that there were people who had been, either themselves worked for the sheriff's department or been, police officers and did not like the level of access that this conveyed, understood that, it's difficult to ensure that it's used responsibly.

And just having that space where I think people felt like they weren't by themselves and that they could speak out and that, hear your neighbor, and that, I was actually also very pleasantly surprised that it turned into a space where, unlike a lot of those horrible videos you get of what's going on at school board meetings or something, there were nobody screaming conspiracy theories at each other, no accusations of, this sort of Government, mythologies that, that have, kinda go through some of the more sensational media.

But I think generally speaking, bothering to get in the habit of actually using the space that's available to you, anybody can go and rent a space at their library. Anybody can go and put up some flyers and talk to your neighbors. You can ask people to come with you to your... almost nobody comes to these public meetings.

And things happen, like this, this decision got pushed for us on something called the consent agenda, which is just this like big, huge packet of invoices that's like hundreds of these long. And so I think like whatever way feels right for your community, I think just knowing that being in the room where it happens matters quite a bit, and it can be really tough to do that by yourself, but it doesn't actually

you don't need to be like a member of an official organization that, feels like it's their job to cop watch to know that like it's your right as a citizen and as somebody who is just living in that community to speak your mind and to ask your neighbors to help you out. I know that one of the other kinds of projects that I'm really appreciating lately has been the Deflock project.

I think that had come up as a sort of map that people were making together. I know we'll probably link that in the show notes, but, to be able to then go through and use... I don't know if you've ever done something called wardriving, but it's where people try to collect the sort of public information that's available about the wifi networks that are connected to these cameras, and then they upload them to, Wigle, which is like W-I-G-L-E, a, database of wifi networks as they're seen around the country.

and those can actually then be pulled into this Deflock map, so you can actually see where all of these cameras are. And I think just like having that level of transparency to know that like you have the right to know where they are in your community, you have the right to tell other people where they are.

I know that one of the pieces of like kind of funny bit of advocacy that I thought was actually quite effective was one of these cameras was actually close to a cannabis store, in my community, and could basically track everybody going in and out of the parking lot. So I took some flyers, and I went into the weed store, and I talked to the staff there and talked to the people who use the weed store and said you probably didn't know that this is what this thing out here does, and I bet you wouldn't like that very much."

And so people brought it up at the, local meetings, and it's one of the cameras that ended up being removed. these things that don't feel like they matter a lot, which is that one-to-one person discussion, actually do matter quite a bit. And I think we forget sometimes that like our power doesn't have to come from like ballot initiatives or lawsuits or, passing new laws or anything like that.

It often comes from like- Our desire to live together and for people to win their elections again for sheriff or just to understand that we all actually have to see each other every day. So I hope that, if this conversation inspires folks to do anything, it's to understand that your personal influence in your community, and especially like knowing that, people want to hear from the person who they live near who knows about this stuff, and they feel grateful.

I was very surprised at the amount of like really positive feedback from across the political spectrum, people coming up after these meetings and like shaking my hand and saying, "Thank you, young lady, for, bothering to put this together." it was like a really like heartwarming moment where I feel now also like we're gonna be able to carry the conversation forward in a way that's actually productive with the sheriff, the office of the sheriff, and with the company moving forward.

So wish us luck. 

Yeah. No, that's really awesome. And yeah, I totally agree. I think that we're the... I think it makes sense to pay attention to the laws that are getting enforced and who's enforcing them and all that, but... And it can be a lever that like to avoid using could very well be to your be- detriment, but our strength is in our community and our relationships, for sure.

Yeah. And I think, it's so easy to get discouraged too because I think when I was thinking about next steps of what we would do here, but also, are there experiments like... Something that's kinda cool about a community where like my county has 10,000 people in it. It is fairly- Easy in many ways, in a way in which is not in other types of larger cities, to actually get a pretty significant amount of involvement.

you can pretty much talk to almost everybody about it. And getting enough of a quorum of people to take a specific action is a lot more doable than you think. But I remember getting discouraged because I was like t- thinking about, okay, is it a ballot initiative? Do we have to put something on our like next county level election?

And to just find out that was gonna be like really expensive, that the company Flock might i- put their tremendous resources towards like battling us out on it. And then, just understanding that, I have to remember that I am not limited to like this marketplace's imagination.

And I think, the way they operate is by throwing money at the problem. But, as we have figured out from how a lot of politics are going these days, there is a ceiling on how much you can purchase people's like trust and, like for you. So I think I'm excited to like just keep people understanding that like if you believe that you live here and you love privacy and that's the thing that brings us together, then there's no amount of money that you should have to, pay to be able to buy back your right to that kind of like peace of mind from the place that like supposedly wants your votes and wants you to live there.

So yeah, I'm excited to see especially how this changes the conversation in our next office of the sheriff election, but also just the fact that it's come up multiple times now in p- community meeting sense means that like you change what people think is possible by telling them that they are al- that's like this is a topic you are allowed to talk about and to have an objection to.

you can really change a lot of people's minds about what they're allowed to expect from the world, which is I think the most fun part. 

We've just heard clips starting with

Democracy Now! tracing how Flock, a nearly $8 billion venture-backed company, built a nationwide surveillance network by renting cameras to local police, quietly signing contracts before communities could push back.

More Perfect Union featured a policing professor's testimony to Columbus lawmakers that Flock cameras cannot be reformed or regulated because the technology investigates pre-crime.

Benn Jordan demonstrated how anyone could obtain full control of Flock police cameras in seconds, and found law enforcement Flock accounts for sale on dark web marketplaces.

The Canvas argued that Spider-Man, Brand New Day is authoritarian propaganda, normalizing citywide facial recognition and mass surveillance while a cop shrugs off Peter Parker's "super illegal" scan as a joke.

This Is Hell! explained how the multi-billion dollar police public relations industry floods understaffed newsrooms with ready-made stories, making pro-police coverage the path of least resistance for local news.

The Current described how ICE's arrest-quota push and eliminated oversight have raised fear in Black and brown communities, which a former agency lawyer called the goal.

And The Final Straw Radio shared how organizing neighbors, including former law enforcement, built enough community pressure to challenge sheriff-controlled Flock surveillance where lawsuits and ballot initiatives proved impractical.

And those were just the top takes, there's lots more in the deeper dives sections,

If you get value out of the show - and want to make sure we can keep going while getting it delivered ad-free to the new, members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support - there's a link in the show notes - through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcasts app.*

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or you can simply email me to [email protected]

[Episode As for today's topic,

Learning about the Flock camera network and competing companies doing the same thing got me thinking about the Fugitive Slave Act. And honestly, even though that sounds ridiculous, the more I pulled on the thread, the clearer the picture became.

Not to worry. I'm not actually comparing anything to the horrors of slavery, in particular. Just the overall shape of what it looks like when authoritarian governments look to stretch their reach beyond their own borders, which they do consistently and which has happened repeatedly within our own country.

The slaveholding South was unquestionably a bloc of authoritarian states, enslaving and suppressing the rights of millions, but doing that within their own borders wasn't enough. They wanted any formerly enslaved people who'd made it to the free Northern States to be forcibly returned.

After the Civil War and the reprieve of Reconstruction, the former Confederate states resumed their authoritarian instincts with the implementation of the state-backed campaign of terror known as Jim Crow. Naturally, people subject to that authoritarian campaign of terror began to think that leaving and heading north made sense. Authoritarian states always drive people away, after all, which is why they almost inevitably have to pass laws, build walls, or both to prevent people from leaving.

Since Black people in the South during Jim Crow were a large portion of the labor pool, the South saw the burgeoning trend of those people moving north as a threat. They responded by passing laws imposing exorbitant license fees on any labor recruiters coming to the South, enticing people to move north. In some places, they even had police go through train platforms and round up people on northbound trains, tearing up their tickets to prevent them from leaving. In the end, around 6 million people moved out of the South during what became known as the Great Migration.

So when I say authoritarian states frequently overreach their borders to impose their will, this is what I mean, and there are more examples. The Supreme Court case that made interracial marriage legal nationwide, Loving v. Virginia, was based on a Virginia law that didn't just ban interracial marriage within their borders but also made it illegal for people to go to another state where they could be legally married and return. When the interracial Loving couple was married in Washington, D.C., that wasn't the crime. The crime was that they crossed the border back into Virginia as a married couple.

We've been seeing the pattern play out again in recent years relating to gender-affirming care for trans people and abortion access after Roe v. Wade was overturned. Republican-controlled states didn't stop at banning, to various degrees, healthcare for trans people and abortion within their own borders but also implemented travel bans at the same time.

For instance, Idaho passed a law in 2023 making it a felony to help a minor leave the state for an abortion. Thirteen or more Texas municipalities also ban transporting someone through their jurisdiction for the purpose of receiving an abortion. But they didn't stop at travel. Doctors in Indiana have been banned from making out-of-state referrals and Ken Paxton in Texas famously subpoenaed Seattle Children's Hospital for the medical records of Texas minors who received gender-affirming care there even though Seattle Children's doesn't operate in Texas or treat Texans by telehealth. He just wanted to stalk their private medical records across state lines.

Now, technically, you could argue that there are some blue-state laws that seek to reach beyond their own borders, but it's clear as day that the authoritarianism only flows in one direction. California has of habit of passing regulatory standards for products that flow into their state which end up impacting producers located elsewhere. But that's all about commerce, there's no threat to any individuals in those cases.

When things get personal, it arrives as shield laws, states vowing non-cooperation with authoritarian states in order to protect people within their borders. The northern states passed such laws, vowing to not cooperate with those from the South hunting formerly enslaved people, and the South called that an act of aggression.

Today, blue states are attempting to defend those needing gender-affirming care, abortions, or their simple right to privacy.

It was Washington State's shield law plus a Washington court order that barred Seattle Children's from complying with Ken Paxton's subpoena and a few months later, he withdrew the demand entirely.

New York is defending their doctors providing tele-health care. Texas sued Dr. Margaret Carpenter and won a six-figure judgment for mailing pills to a Texas patient. Louisiana went further and criminally indicted Dr. Carpenter, the first criminal charges ever brought against a doctor for prescribing across state lines, and New York refused extradition.

In each of these cases, the Blue State laws that reach beyond their own borders are about protecting people while the Red State laws are about reaching beyond their borders to track, and potentially prosecute, individuals who have broken no law in the states they were fully within their rights to travel to.

That's the pattern and it dates back hundreds of years. In the hands of authoritarians, camera networks and their databases managed by companies like Flock become another way to reach across state lines, gather information on people's movements and actions, with the intent to prosecute when no crime has been committed.

The example that went viral in 2025 involved a sheriff's deputy, who only has jurisdiction in Texas and had no search warrant, searching for a person using a nationwide network of cameras, entering the reason as, "had an abortion, search for female." It turns out the woman in question they wanted to investigate hadn't left Texas but that search pulled in information from cameras in Illinois and Washington because that's what it does by default.

Knowing this sort of thing was coming, Illinois had explicitly banned plate data sharing for out-of-state abortion or immigration hunts but that search from Texas swept through Illinois anyway. It turns out that, in effect, that kind of state law, as it was written, is only as enforceable as the settings and preferences the private companies implement. Because the law was targeted at banning police agencies from sharing data, when it's the private company that messes up, there's essentially no one to hold accountable.

Naturally, there have been thousands of additional cases of agencies violating the intent of those state shield laws, if not the letter. ICE has taken to simply asking local police to run Flock searches on their behalf when they're legally banned from doing it themselves, reporting puts it at more than 4,000 searches so far.

It's true that there's a bipartisan backlash against Flock cameras, but the coalition is a lot thinner than it looks. It's pretty easy to see how things are going to play out in the long run by what different people are objecting to. The conservative objections are much more narrowly focused on warrantless searches of people they perceive to be presumably law-abiding, like themselves. The progressive objection is much more expansive and sees the entire system as one almost precisely designed for repression.

The contract cancellations and calls for abolition have already pushed the company to update their policies in an attempt to assuage the fears of at least the conservatives who still have some modicum of civil libertarianism in them, but they know they'll never satisfy the progressives. It's very likely they'll do just enough to calm the conservatives and maybe even bring a few moderates along, and that's where things will settle. It might be slightly better than the full-blown dystopian nightmare they initially designed, but it'll still end up being the high-tech version of Chairman Mao's "sharp eyes" slogan, encouraging neighbors to watch other neighbors.

Trans people, people seeking abortions, and immigrants were the first targets because, of course they were. But there's no reason to think they'll stop there. The explicit misuse has already spread to girlfriends, exes, and neighbors.

And once the infrastructure is set up and normalized, changing the classes of laws the cameras are used to enforce would be trivial. You may be confident that you won't be targeted now based on who's using them and for what but those details can change. This is exactly what turnkey tyranny looks like.

Any state or municipality that opposes authoritarianism should ban these cameras as being fundamentally at odds with what it means to live in a free society. That's both easier and more effective than trying to manage and regulate them.

But if they're going to exist, we clearly need state laws banning the sharing of data that apply to the camera companies themselves, not just the police agencies contracting with them, and there need to be penalties that actually hurt.

In the meantime, the pattern repeats and it's again up to the more progressive states to defend against the authoritarian instincts flowing across the borders from those Republican-controlled states now carrying on the authoritarian tradition born in the old Confederacy but long since spread beyond it. Restricting the flow of data from these camera networks and adopting strong non-cooperation shield laws against them is just the newest version of the same old work.

And now, we'll continue to dive deeper on 4 topics today. First up;

Section A, What Flock Actually Is & the Business of Surveillance

Followed by Section B, Beyond Flock - The Full Surveillance Machine

Section C, Copaganda & the ICE Enforcement Arm

And Section D, Fighting Back

To the best of my knowledge, there is no federally mandated or standardized typeface for license plates in the United States. It's up to the individual state. Otherwise, I'm not sure collecting license plates would be as popular or fashionably decorative as it is, if it even still is. But this opens up the issue that some states have license plates that are more legible than others to an AI system that only seems to kinda know what it's doing.

Even ignoring the typeface, some license plates have wacky designs that can intermingle with or otherwise obscure the plate number's legibility. look at a Florida plate, a phallic mess of circumcision silhouettes and oranges the size of a man's biological seed garage. The design underlaps the typeface in such a way that it's not inconceivable that it could mess with an AI system's ability to make out the plate number.

Ohio has a fairly clean plate design without any juiceable fruit taking up surface real estate. But even then, Flock still got it wrong in Brandon Upchurch's case, as the system misread a seven as a two, mistakenly matching his plate with one flagged as stolen and sending an innocent man to the hospital, and then to county jail.

Now, automated license plate recognition isn't exactly new. In fact, ALPR technology dates all the way back to 1976 when the UK's Police Scientific Development Branch began utilizing plate tracking as an anti-terrorism measure. In the decades that followed, they spread around the globe, although ALPR technology was mostly limited to major metropolitan areas with the funding to afford the pricey infrastructure demands and utility costs that were necessary to install these things and to keep them operational.

But then, if they're so expensive, how did they become so prevalent, even in areas that you wouldn't think would have the budget to afford these cameras? Flock is far from the only ALPR company on the market. But when they were founded in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2017, they operated through a unique business model.

Flock cameras are solar powered and cellular, thereby reducing electrical and network infrastructure costs. But they also ran on a subscription model that packaged hardware, software, and maintenance into a single annual price. So you had the cost benefits for one, but you also had significant potential reach because Flock cameras allowed law enforcement to tap into a broader network of private users and businesses.

Now, of course, these other users needed to first opt into sharing with law enforcement, but that mom-and-pop bakery that keeps getting robbed, that's exactly what they're gonna do since these cameras are presented as being way more technologically sophisticated than simple CCTV cameras. And from all appearances, they are.

For instance, while ALPRs don't have facial recognition capabilities, they can track individuals since a lack of facial recognition doesn't really preclude the camera from being able to make out personal details. And from an automotive standpoint, they can not only track the color, make, and model of your car, but even modifications and flaws.

Roof racks, temp tags, bumper stickers, it's all capable of being logged as machine-readable information that theoretically provides police with more to go on than just a grainy image of a possible suspect. And with Flock extending their hardware into the drone space and even into mobile security trailers, I can understand why a business would subscribe.

Flock projects an identity of comprehensive protective surveillance that fills in the gaps of police capability. But if the goal for Flock is to protect public safety, the message kinda gets undermined when entire communities are being opted into a surveillance network that extends far outside the bounds of that community and without their direct consent.

Flock makes it clear on their website that they do not sell your data to third parties and will not provide law enforcement access to your camera if you don't allow it. And if you're a private customer with a Flock camera, that's all well and good. But the decision on whether or not to grant access to third parties rests with whomever controls the Flock subscription, not with whomever is being surveilled or having their information collected.

For example, Flock denies that US Border Patrol has access to their database. But an October 2025 audit by the University of Washington's Center for Human Rights found, quote, "Limited cases of law enforcement agencies in Washington State conducting side door searches on behalf of federal immigration enforcement agencies."

End quote. Reportedly, Flock pilot programs with federal agencies have been put on hold for the time being. So I guess technically, Flock isn't contracting with the federal government, although that's really just semantics. But in the grand scheme of things, the federal government doesn't even need to have a contract with Flock to have access to their database if local law enforcement agencies agree to conduct database searches on the government's behalf.

And I know the argument is that, if you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about, right? But that presumes that these cameras are far more effective at catching actual criminals than the data would suggest. A study by the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that, quote, "On average, only point five percent, that is one half of one percent, of license plate scans were attached to a hot list.

This means that ninety-nine point five percent of the license plates captured by ALPR are actually not connected to a public safety interest at the time they are captured." End quote. And of course, most people aren't criminals, so naturally, most people recorded by these cameras aren't going to be criminals.

But while the half of 1% number doesn't prove that ALPRs never solve crimes, it does show that roughly one hundred ninety-nine out of every two hundred scans involved vehicles that had no connection to any crime or public safety issue at the time that they were recorded, which suggests to me that by serving as a sort of technological dragnet collating the information of majority innocent motorists, the system is working exactly the way it was intended to work.

But okay, let's say for argument's sake that ALPRs like Flock are a significant investigative tool for law enforcement. that's great, but the problem is that not everyone with access to the data Flock collects is using it in good faith. In 2022, a police lieutenant in Kansas was arrested for using Flock to spy on his estranged wife.

Two years later, also in Kansas, a police chief used Flock's database to track his ex-girlfriend two hundred twenty-eight times. Just last week, a detective in Central Florida was arrested for allegedly using Flock and other law enforcement databases to spy on her husband's ex-wife. Another Kansas man was targeted by his local police department for writing an op-ed piece criticizing them.

And what the hell are you guys even doing over there in Kansas? Working on your pulled pork recipe in between violating each other's civil liberties? What even is this? But perhaps most alarmingly of all, last November, a Colorado woman's Rivian was wrongfully connected to a theft by flock cameras, and the result was that she then had to go and collect her own evidence to prove her innocence before police would drop the case.

So now, this supposed tool to keep people safer is something that can be used for harassment, retaliation, and stalking, and arguably at worst, for falsely accusing you of a crime and then moving the goalposts on burden of proof. So naturally, people aren't really all that happy about any of this, and some communities are downright fed up.

the business model of companies like this is actually quite brilliant. They market themselves as public safety services licensing cutting-edge technology, but license plate readers and security cameras have existed for decades. Flock Safety and their competitors are data brokers.

A city police department, business, or homeowners association pays to borrow their cameras, and then they retain the right to make some of that data accessible behind the same licensing paywall scheme for other clients or customers. Andreessen Horowitz, who is the VC of choice for data brokers and big data startups like Databricks, Fivetran, Scale AI, and Golden, just to name a few, they've invested nearly half a billion dollars into Flock Safety, adding another two hundred and seventy-five million just a few months ago.

These are data broker numbers. For example, ADT, the largest and most recognizable home security company and brand in the world, went public in 1969 and has a market cap of six point eight billion dollars. And that market cap is eclipsed by Flock Safety's recent F series valuation of nearly eight billion dollars.

Maybe you are a law enforcement officer, and Flock Safety has helped you solve cases.

Or maybe you think that a poorly substantiated claim about a drop in crime is worth the constant monitoring and tracking of hundreds of millions of tax-paying citizens who are not criminals. And those small little glitches that result in young children being held at gunpoint face first on the hot asphalt in a parking lot are just some cracked eggs in the overall omelet that society is trying to make.

And if you agree with that, and that's your perspective, fair enough. I strongly disagree with you, but this is a conversation that's not even worth having because all of this is about to get a whole lot worse for everyone, except for the billionaires extracting wealth from taxpayers, of course. 

Hey, guys.

I'm still in the studio. We just finished our Q1 product launch. Fingers are still a little bit shaky. Flock Nova is going to change the game for criminal investigations. I've heard from so many chiefs that they have this system and that system. They know they have the data, but it's taking their analysts hours and hours to build a case.

And now with Flock Nova, it's one click to one case solved

Flock Nova is a brand new product that is in beta at the time of me recording this, and it combines computer-aided dispatch, criminal records, video surveillance, automated license plate reader data, and here's the kicker, third-party data acquired by Flock Safety. What third-party data, you ask? They haven't exactly been transparent, but 404 Media asked the same question and found out that Flock Nova was using data leaked and sold from large-scale hacks and security breaches.

And since that story broke, Flock made an announcement claiming to no longer be using illegally stolen 

personal data. 

Most of us at face value don't really seem to mind, or at least don't think it's a big deal that our data is being farmed from us. is it really that big of a deal that your activity on Pinterest under a mostly anonymized account is being stored and analyzed and sold?

it becomes a very big deal when it's combined with other data and stops being so anonymous, and when your health questionnaire information on BetterHelp was sold to Facebook, where you posted a bunch of photos from bars 10 years ago. And then all of that gets bundled by a data broker with your tracked and logged bad driving habits that your vehicle manufacturer sold.

Yeah, that's a thing, too. Guess what? All of this may explain the reason your car insurance costs twice as much as anybody else in your age demographic, or it may explain why you can't seem to get a good interest rate on a loan. And now, especially in 2025, where something you may have posted a decade ago will get you arrested and deported.

My point is, data privacy never really seems like a big deal until it is. 

Some states have various laws regarding this, but nobody really seems to give a shit, because in the few cases where they do get caught, the fine or settlement is a mere fraction of the income generated from buying and selling your third-party data.

If a large retailer or fast food chain is not using Flock Safety, then they're probably using some other type of automated license plate reader. But once you walk in those doors, oh my God. Let's just use Walmart's corporate privacy policy as an example. They're logging your personal identifiers, your name, your phone number, your address, your email, your driver's license number, your signature.

Device identifiers such as your phone or smartwatch's MAC address. They're sussing out your age, gender, citizenship, race, marital status, household income, education, unemployment information, family health, number of children, credit card numbers and other payment information, geolocation history, photographs, audio recordings, video recordings, and if known, background checks and criminal convictions.

Oh, hang on. I haven't even gotten to the creepy part yet. Inferences, AKA your behavior and preferences from your shopping patterns, intelligence, and aptitude. And they reserve the right to share any and all of this with third parties, including but not limited to, you guessed it. It's been reported that police departments have been running queries and sharing Flock Safety's data with ICE.

Some Home Depot and Lowe's locations are also Flock Safety customers, and they have also been known to share Flock Safety's data with law enforcement. It might be safe to assume that some of the immigration raids happening at Home Depot and Lowe's locations may be connected to this honeypot of data.

So when an immigrant picks up some construction supplies before work, the store will then send the license plate and vehicle identification data to Flock Safety. That would trigger an alert on the hot list, and just like that, masked men arrive and pick up the Venezuelan day laborer with no criminal record and ship them off to a prison camp 

in El Salvador.

Why? Can't y'all just sell tools? 

So we have these creepy AI cameras everywhere proving every paranoid schizophrenic person right by logging our vehicle's every move for police, retailers, and even gated communities. Then we have retailers building advanced personal and psychological profiles about us, which are then being traded to data brokers and combined with our internet shopping, browsing, and social media activity.

And now law enforcement data brokers are buying it all up. Here's a hard truth that we all need to know and consider. If every single actor in this database brokerage theater were playing by the rules and following every single law and acting ethically, your data is still only as safe as the database with the weakest security policies, or that one employee that falls for the phishing email.

In 2024 alone, if we are only counting data breaches that were formally reported, that number exceeds over 10,000 incidents affecting 4.2 billion compromised records. But fear not, our legislators are coming to our rescue by banning TikTok. Did I hear that right? And it doesn't even matter at this point.

Debating the safeguarding of personal data in 2025 is like standing on the burnt remains of a home and debating what kind of fire extinguisher you're gonna put in the kitchen. This next section isn't about big data or retailers. We're going to circle back to the data mining that your tax dollars pay for, and we're gonna see just how insecure it is, and we're gonna try to come up with some ways to defend ourselves from it

In this chapter, we'll be technically going over how ALPR 

cameras work and examining a few hardware vulnerabilities, but we don't have to. From what I gathered, FLOCK Safety cameras can be reached by Bluetooth, and without breaking off into a completely separate tangent, security is not Bluetooth's strength.

To FLOCK Security's credit, from what I could tell, all the Bluetooth seems to be doing is relaying hardware and status information about the camera and transmission system. The camera system also has a Wi-Fi radio that acts as a router with WPA2 encryption, which a lot of consumer products still use despite it being a 20-year-old technology with a lot of flaws.

One of those biggest vulnerabilities is in the handshake. If you were to try to guess the passcode on an iPhone, you have about six tries before the device times out and makes you wait before you can try again. And this is the same or very similar for any smartphone or Gmail or any modern login page.

With WPA2 Wi-Fi, there's a pre-shared password key, and an attacker can capture the handshake on their own device so they can sick their GPU on it. And if everything's updated and working properly, and there are no other security vulnerabilities at all on the router, a modern gaming GPU can crack an eight-digit key in under three hours.

If your Wi-Fi password is a known word that would be in a password dictionary, I'd give it about 60 seconds. With some other vendors and services, you don't actually have to crack anything because they failed to secure their RTSP video feeds properly. And in just a few hours with some specialized search engines, I managed to browse my way into accessing live feeds from over two dozen traffic cameras.

And what's even more troubling is that in a couple small towns that I audited, if one camera wasn't secured, none of them were, allowing anyone the capability of tracking every single vehicle in the town indefinitely without ever having to see or write a line of code. Another troubling example, Hikvision, the largest IP camera company in the world, they make all types of cameras, many of which have ALPR technology and are marketed towards police departments.

In 2022, hackers were able to not only view the feed, but exploit the firmware used in over 80,000 cameras, allowing them to execute code remotely. And then just last year, the Russian military compromised Hikvision cameras in Ukraine to obtain intelligence to plan airstrikes on Kiev and subvert Ukraine's air defense systems.

In fact, right now, at the time of me recording this video, you can download an exploit for 

Hikvision cameras on GitHub that allows you to view the feed, retrieve snapshots, and extract user credentials. 

Then you have Verkada, a massive security camera company whose chairman has bragged about locking clients into a predatory subscription model.

There is a hardware component and a licensing component Now the license, you might have bought a one-year license, but you like literally bolted the hardware to your ceiling. So like you're not taking it down 

Many of their clients in healthcare, prisons, police departments, and so on couldn't afford to leave for a more secure ecosystem.

So when every single one of their 150,000-plus cameras were hacked due to a corporate administrator account having their username and password publicly exposed on the internet, hackers not only had access to the private video feeds, but the networks that they were connected to. 

Jason, you've been tracking this closely. there's been a lot of mistakes recently, right? 

Yeah. Yeah. So I wanted to bring up one. This is actually... it's a free-form search, but it's a free-form search for car. as you mentioned, this can be used to track people, and we'll get back to that in a second.

But, it can also be used to track cars when the police are not sure of a license plate. So we've seen searches that are just like black SUV in Florida, like things like this, like very vague terms that are going to necessarily catch a bunch of different cars. rather than just like a specific license plate, you can type in like red Acura, and it will pull up all of the examples that they have of something like that.

And so in Florida, this happened in October of twenty twenty-five. There was a hit-and-run collision in which a black, Dodge Durango hit another car and three people died, and the driver of that car drove off. And so the Florida Highway Patrol put in- Black Dodge Durango because some witness said that, "Oh, it was like a black Dodge Durango."

And they pulled over this woman named Lindsay Isaacs, who was driving a black Dodge Durango, and they arrested her, and they put her in jail for 13 days. but she wasn't... It was the wrong car. It was the wrong person. very interestingly and very insanely, they pulled her over in this black Dodge Durango that allegedly, hit another car and caused three people to die, and it had not a scratch on it.

but they still arrested her, and it turned out that a different black Dodge Durango had hit the family and killed them. And so this is just this woman spent 13 days in jail because she was falsely arrested. And this is like an example of a free-form search gone wrong. they can do that for cars, and then as Joseph has been talking about, they can also put in people descri- descriptors in there.

And so we've seen both types of searches where they're searching, a vague term for a car, or they're searching for, as Joseph said, tool man, like protesters. Like I- I've seen searches for signs. like people holding white signs is, a search that we have seen. and so these are, like, the types of things that, can go in there.

just 'cause you mentioned, political stuff as well, I contacted the Center for Democracy and Technology, this good organization who have their finger on these issues, so they're very, reliable when you're, like, trying to work on a story quickly. "Please, I need expert comment on this."

And I pinged them about it, and they were already looking to something, similar 'cause they sent me a link on Have I Been Flocked to some of the results, and one was very explicit in nature, where it said, one police department searched 198 networks for quote, "White Jeep with Trump flag." End quote.

Now, I don't know the context, beyond that, but it shows that clearly they can look for a vehicle with a certain political symbol on it, a political flag on it, like no matter what it might be, right? So that was very interes- That... Again, that was a vehicle search, like the one you're talking about, Jason.

but then the people searches do show you can like... Oh, you can look for somebody with a certain branded T-shirt, maybe a sports jersey, some- something like that. So I, I know these searches can get pretty narrow, when you're not typing in like Black SUV and arresting the wrong person. 

Yeah. and just on that, like I said, Of course, these cameras are networked together, as we've reported many times, as people know now.

But sometimes, the search is both vague and they're searching a lot of different networks, meaning a lot of different cities or, across an entire state, things like this. And so if you're doing a vague search and you're searching, tens of thousands of cameras It's going to pull up people who are-- who have nothing to do with the incident that's being investigated.

Joseph, does this mean that, every Flock camera is also tracking people, or what did you see in these freeform searches? 

Yeah. That, that, that's probably, the one bit of nuance that people really should take away from it because, yes, people should understand that Flock cameras are also searching for people, and cops are using that based on the searches we've seen, but it's not every single Flock camera, right?

So ordinarily, when you think of a Flock camera, and you see it on, a lamppost or whatever, or the intersection or wherever you're seeing it, that's probably a license plate reader just in that I think there are more of those cameras, right? These ones are... one type they can be are these Condor cameras, which they are explicitly for people tracking, where somebody will walk past them, and the camera will automatically pan and zoom on that person because that wa- that's what it's looking for.

These are not strictly the same as the license plate ones. I think that you can also see this in some of the data where when you look up a search on have I been flocked or if you have the original spreadsheets yourself, it will also say how many cameras were searched and how many networks were searched.

When we look at license plate data, when we get that, and we've, I think we've had untold number of those results at this point, I can't even keep track. It is, often, eighty-eight thousand cameras or something like that or thousands of networks, and when you see that, I feel like you and I, Jason, and you especially, Jason, have got a feel for just "Oh, that's a nationwide search," because, it's around eighty k, eighty thousand, something like that.

So that shows they searched basically every camera on the national Flock network for a certain license plate. That doesn't seem to happen with these freeform searches. You'll look at them and, like that white Jeep with a Trump flag one. That was a hundred and ninety-eight networks. Still a lot. That's probably not the entire country, right?

Or even some of them are just like a hundred cameras, which are probably Condor or other people tracking cameras installed in that single town or, as you say, Jason, maybe in that single state, something like that. So in the data, it doesn't say the type of camera. You just have to extrapolate that from looking at this data so much over the past, more than a year at this point.

So I would just stress that, yes, Flock cameras are tracking people, as we show, but it's not necessarily the same one that's on your street corner. It's hard to tell because they look a little bit different, to the, the Condor ones. But we know they track people 

The people who created predictive policing that incorporated racist police practices and data were probably inherently racist. A lot of people are, either knowingly or not, and the effect is definitely racist. It's just one of many uncomfortable truths we should probably all be more upfront about, along with death comes for all of us, people lie, and unfortunately, the goal of most dating reality shows isn't to find love, it's to get enough Instagram followers so that you can get a couple of brand deals and maybe one day start a skincare company.

It's just a regrettable fact. And those who push all these tools w- will insist that the technology isn't the problem here, it's- How it gets used. Flock, which makes many of those ALPRs I showed you earlier, has been branching out into selling cameras and real time crime centers to local departments. And here is how a segment on one of them dealt with citizens' concerns.

Those eyes in the sky and on the roads raise concerns over privacy. The ACLU has raised concerns with Flock's surveillance network, but Flock says it's all about how you use it. 

As long as departments hire ethical people, write sound policy, and have oversight, on those policies, then you can start to ensure that this is all used ethically.

Okay. First, enough with the beard, we get it. But second, oh, it's that easy, is it? Just hire ethical people, write sounds policy, and have oversight and it will all be fine. My brother in Christ, have you, and this is a technical term, looked around recently? Because as nice as that sounds, the fact is departments don't necessarily do any of those things.

There have now been many stories from around the country of police officers accused of using ALPR databases to stalk and harass women. As for oversight, Flock claims that every search request is logged for accountability purposes. When this man in Georgia tried to find out who'd accessed the cameras near his home, his city told him it would cost him half a million dollars to fulfill his request, which is clearly crazy.

Now, they did give him a much more limited data set, but interestingly, he still found enough troubling new information in that to then take it to a city council meeting. 

Hunyar went to City Council with the limited Flock audit records Dunwoody gave him. 

Nobody from Flock Safety is accessing or monitoring your footage.

Once again, I have evidence of Flock employees looking at parks, schools, playgrounds. 

The audit logs also showed Flock executives watching private cameras inside the city's Jewish Community Center, which the mayor confirmed. 

Members of the Flock sales team were using it as a demonstration. 

Okay, hold on.

Hold on, 'cause there is just a cascading set of yikes there. First you get the news that it's not just cops and security guards, Flock employees are watching these cameras too. Then you get to parks, schools, playgrounds, and a scrolling list of cameras with labels like gymnastics and gymnastics side view.

Then you learn that the Jewish Community Center, and finally that it was for a sales demonstration. What was even the pitch there? Ever wonder what your Jewish neighbors were up to but didn't feel like going over there to ask? Ever wonder what they look like doing yoga? now you don't have to. Why knock when you can Flock?

A- and when a reporter asked a Flock spokesperson about that, it didn't go great. 

Why didn't Flock find those vulnerabilities? 

Why did it take a citizen... Sorry, go ahead. We actually can't 

talk about the JCC by name

Sure we can talk about something else available. why can't you talk about the JCC? 

Because we've worked with their team and we- we're not 

A Flock PR person stopped our interview twice when we tried to ask about Flock employees viewing cameras inside the Jewish Community Center. 

Did the people in those videos give permission to be part of a demo?

We're not gonna answer questions about JCC. We cannot answer questions about JCC But any partnership going forward- I have 

to ask the question however you guys want to answer it. And if you want to say you can't answer it, you can't answer it, that's fine. But I have to ask the question. I can't... It's not a PR video.

This isn't like a promotional video. it's a... this is... I think it's pretty clear we're not, it's not a PR video. We're good though. 

Yeah. I'm not sure you're quite as good as you think you are there. And I know it is hard for you to deal with cameras that you don't control, but what did you think that news crew were gonna do there?

Leave that exchange out? News stations fucking love it when someone tries to stop an interview. All you've really done there is manage to look suspicious and to get them to break out the good subtitles. The fact is, it currently takes far too much pressure to expose what systems cities are using and how they are using them.

In fact, remember how I mentioned that Rialto, California requires new businesses to hook their security cameras up to Fusion? three years ago, we filed a narrow public records request with their police department asking for emails in which Fusion was discussed. They told us they didn't have any, which seemed implausible.

So we filed a much broader request, and over the next two years they sent us 28 pages, which still didn't seem like all the material they probably had. So last February we said, "Fuck it. Send us an export of your whole log database for Fusion showing us every time your officers peaked at a privately owned camera."

And we asked for it as a searchable digital file as the law requires. But instead, what they did was send us a 30,413-page PDF. To give you a sense of just how massive that is, if you printed it out, it is all of this shit right here which was clearly pretty irritating because it's a huge amount of information that is impossible to look through quickly.

Now, thankfully, we managed to convert it into a searchable file, and in doing so, we found some things that it does feel the people of Rialto should probably know about. For instance, this is just all the times police there access cameras at fast food places. And you should know some of those cameras are inside the restaurant in areas only employees can access.

For instance, it seems they can check in on the grill at the local Wiener Schnitzel anytime they want. And if you work at the Chick-fil-A there, just know that on one Tuesday afternoon, Rialto had five of your interior cameras open for two hours straight, the front counter, the drive-through register, the multipurpose room, the manager station, and the office, which feels a little weird to me.

As to the fact that they access cameras at the Rialto Days Inn for hundreds of hours, including the one facing the pool. And come on, getting secretly watched in your swimsuit is not supposed to be one of the perks of staying at a Days Inn. You are supposed to get a room that is fine, a bed that will do, and a front desk that occasionally has an employee behind it.

That is the Days Inn promise. And I should say the Rialto PD insists some of those hits are because they were watching a whole area and scooping up all the cameras, or that they'd left a set of cameras on in the background at their office. But that is just not as reassuring as I think they want it to sound.

Look, it sure seems to me like these surveillance tools have much bigger flaws than the people both selling and using them are comfortable admitting. Because time and again, the pattern when they get rolled out is they get deployed in secret and then publicly presented in the most positive light, and only much later do we start to fully understand the damage they can do.

Basically, the public conversation comes last, not first. And the good news is, due in part to the vast overreach of the current administration, we are now finally starting to have those conversations. around the country, people are showing up to demand their cities and towns end contracts with companies like Flock, including a man in Seattle who did so while dressed as an ALPR.

And while I admire his commitment to the cause, he does look more like what would happen if a Pixar dad fucks the Pixar lamp. 

Part of my research was trying to figure out just how effective the adoption of Flock Safety and similar ALPR services have been at reducing crime rates or increasing crime clearance rates, and this is a deceptively difficult task. For example, let's do what most people concerningly do these days and ask Google and let AI answer it for us.

hey, there you have it. Let's maybe look at those actual sources, though. By the way, I wanna take a moment to congratulate Flock Safety on their search engine optimization skills. It's so good that even services that only exist to help companies improve their SEO are like, "Bro, sorry, it's literally impossible to improve beyond your elite talent."

This means that whenever you want to find information about Flock Safety or ALPRs or police cameras, Flock is going to be the most prominent and influential force in your initial results, and subsequently, so will the AI assistant's answer. More on that hellscape in a future video. But hey, look, some studies.

Let's check 'em out. Okay, so only two of these studies took place after Flock Safety was even incorporated, and they tell us nothing about the efficacy of surveillance or data collection. 

Flock Safety's website claims that 10% of all crime in America is solved using their services, which 

is a pretty impressive thing to brag about.

However, the source that they cite this claim with was a research paper created by two Flock Safety employees that doesn't really outline regional analysis. In other words, crime has been dropping nationally in America since 2021, even in the last year. The first thing that I personally would want to look for is a crime rate and clearance comparison between cities that use Flock Safety services and cities that do not.

And when you do it that way, it's extremely 

difficult to find any meaningful changes related to surveillance technology in general. 

But there have been other studies not directly related to the surveillance industry. The National Policing Institute did a multi-site evaluation and said that license plate readers can improve public safety, but the technology's impact depends on its implementation.

It could just be me, but this sounds quite a bit different than what Flock's CEO is saying. 

Over 5,000 cities leverage Flock to solve north of 14% of all crimes in America. But Flock's story is an Atlanta story. We can now rest assured that if a crime happens in South Downtown, it will be solved. 

It wasn't

In 2023, the Berkeley Police Accountability Board did some data diving and found that ALPRs in other California communities were sometimes more correlated with increases in vehicle theft and lower crime clearance rates. In the case of Bakersfield, California, it was only after ALPRs were installed when the city rose to have the highest motor vehicle theft rate in the United States.

The board also noticed that Flock Safety had claimed their services were responsible for a 33% decrease in motor vehicle thefts in Vacaville, California, but were citing data from years before the cameras were even installed. Which brings us to Oakland, California, and in full transparency, I've been informally consulting with and sharing some of this research with their city council, who had just delayed a vote on a $2.25 million expansion to its Flock Safety network.

Flock Safety's public website claims that their services have helped Oakland's violent crime clearance rate rise by 11%. Not bad. actually bad because they failed to mention that violent crime decreased by 19% in that period, which is on par with the FBI crime stats for the entire country.

They also conveniently failed to mention that in 2023, Oakland had a violent crime clearance rate of 3%, and that was later acknowledged as an error by the police department themselves, and this was a pretty big news story last year. And the Oakland Police Department were the ones to acknowledge and confirm the error in the first place, so how are so many cities like this failing to call bullshit on these types of claims that may result in millions of tax dollars being spent on these services?

This is what I keep running into again and again when researching the efficacy of police surveillance technology. A private business will cite statistics that are often misleading, and somehow nobody from these cities or police departments seem to have actually validated the information quoted in the sales pitches.

So all of this aside, even if we're not considering 

all of these questionable data sources and marketing, sociology is an incredibly chaotic field of study, one that typically requires decades of adeptly sourced data to accurately suggest whether a technology or a policy change reduces crime. For decades, we've been trying to figure out if an increase in police can even reduce crime.

So at the very least, there should be an independent, robust meta-analysis to figure out how effective private surveillance and data sharing is before we take money away from other resources to pay for it, right? And without getting too philosophical here, it is worth considering for a second that catching people committing crimes is very different than total antisocial or criminal events.

Like a thief or a serial killer or a drug dealer or a drug addict is not going to see a bunch of police cameras and then just tap out from crime and become a plumber. They're just going to commit crimes in a more obfuscated way, which more often than not complicates the process of finding a reformative solution.

By the way, what an exhausting amount of sociology studies have figured out over the last 50 years is that high levels of surveillance drastically decreases wellbeing, morale, and even workplace productivity. If you think about that for a moment, it shouldn't really surprise anyone. If you have a job where you think your superiors are constantly watching you and judging your every move, you'll be concerned with appearing to be productive instead of learning and developing your skills at your natural speed.

Or consider this recent study that strongly suggests that high levels of surveillance causes a steep decline in voluntary visual processing, meaning that it quite literally impairs the brain's ability to process and recognize human faces. And once again, this is one of those things that you hear and you're like, "What?"

But when you think about it, it's not all that surprising. When you feel like you're in an environment where you are intrinsically not trusted, you're going to be far less likely to make friendly or meaningful social connections with others. And I'm sorry, but that just doesn't sound anything like a safe environment to me.

And that's on top of an exhaustive amount of studies outlining exactly how and why increased surveillance decreases wellbeing and mental health. But some people seemingly only read the studies conducted by companies trying to sell them something

Meet Mike Johnston, the mayor of Denver. At first, it seemed like he had the same careful agnosticism about Flock Safety cameras that many researchers have 

Our Flock cameras are shut off to every federal agency, everyone outside the state of Colorado, everyone outside the city and county of Denver, and no one can access them other than Denver Police Department officers 

You could interpret all of the research that I showed you in this video however you like, but the way I interpreted it was that it technically demonstrated and proved that statement to be false.

But guys, don't worry about this 

Could a federal law enforcement agency use this database to track someone down on an ICE hold and arrest them? no, 'cause the system is not designed to do that. 

The- In just over a year of data of usage of Denver's Flock Safety services, queries openly admitting to be used for immigration services amounted to over 1,800.

Mike even warns us of the grave dangers of cutting this data off from external communities 

I wanna be clear that this is a risk on public safety. If you have someone that commits a crime in Lakewood and flees into Denver, they will not be able to find that person in Denver. Now, we had a, a trans woman who was kidnapped and murdered, picked up in Denver, murdered in Lakewood.

We solved that crime because Denver and Lakewood could talk to each other across a Flock camera database 

Except that didn't happen at all. He's referring to the death of Jax Grafton, which was not a solved murder. Jax's mother was more than happy to speak her mind about this 

I'm shocked and appalled that a public official would use my daughter and claim that Flock had anything to do with her fi- being found 

Fortunately, as a result of all of this bullshit and citizen backlash, the Denver City Council overwhelmingly voted to not renew the Flock Safety contract.

And in their council letter on the issue, they went as far as calling out Flock Safety's ethics and credibility, and I quote, "We do not believe that the city and county of Denver should continue doing business with a company that has demonstrated such disregard for honesty and accountability." Whoa, now hold on.

Before you celebrate your renewal of faith in humanity, Mayor Mike Johnston sidestepped city council and signed the Flock Safety contract anyway, which council members are now calling a backroom deal with a known bad actor. And all of this shit happened just in time for police to drive out from Columbine Valley, Colorado, to knock on a woman's door in Denver with a summons wrongfully accusing her of stealing a package off of someone's porch.

Any guesses on what technology they're citing as evidence? 

Flock cameras 

You know we have cameras in that town, and you can't get a breath of fresh air in or out of that place without us knowing, correct? 

To be fair, that seems like a pretty safe prison, city. While the officer refused to look at the overwhelming dash cam, porch camera, and Google Maps evidence exonerating the woman, fortunately, the police chief eventually did.

Next, Section B, Beyond Flock - The Full Surveillance Machine

In the very early prisons, you had one, one s- cell to yourself, and you were not allowed to speak. If you went to work, you would wear a kind of bag over your head so nobody would recognize you.

So solitary was solitary. 

The Dutch believed that this form of punishment was the best way to make criminals more fit for a God-fearing society. The Netherlands enthusiastically used solitary confinement to both discipline criminals and prevent crime. 

But by the early 1930s, about four decades after the Breda dome prison first opened, people were realizing that this whole theory of rehabilitation was nonsense.

The expensive, groundbreaking panopticon experiment in the Netherlands was actually a torturous disaster. 

Dutch researchers were finding that isolation wasn't rehabilitating anyone. Instead, it was causing severe mental illness and death among prisoners. Although this was a panopticon building, the main issue wasn't surveillance.

It was solitary confinement. 

People do not really improve if you lock them up, solitary confinement with the Bible. They got crazy. 

It's been very hard to find personal accounts of the inmates who experienced the horrific conditions inside Breda. But prison administrators were reporting what we all know today, that solitary confinement is one of the cruelest and ugliest forms of punishment ever invented.

And they say that there were, quite some numbers of, suicides in those, prisons. So the criticisms, of the system, they were, growing in numbers through the years. 

But the Dutch government had spent a lot of money building prisons like Breda and wasn't eager to give up on them. So they stayed open

And then came World War II. 

When the sun rose on that fateful day, the Nazis invaded the Netherlands. Without warning or the slightest provocation, they unleashed upon their innocent neighbors- 

When the Nazis occupied the Netherlands in 1940, they turned many Dutch penitentiaries into prisons for those who resisted the occupation.

Most of the Dutch elites who do not want to collaborate with the German occupier, with the Nazis, ended up in prison. 

State officials, judges, and lawmakers were all put behind bars. Obviously, a pretty unusual situation, but those Dutch elite got to experience firsthand the sheer awfulness of prison. 

And people said, "Oh, what hellholes these are."

And they said, if the war is over, we're gonna reform drastically the prison system, try to humanize it." 

After the war, Dutch leaders once again called for transformation of the nation's prisons. This time, criminal law reformers pushed for alternatives to incarceration. 

Decriminalizations. Certain things were decriminalized.

Also, shorter sentencing. Why sentence somebody to 20 years if five would do as well? 

The Dutch were also, once again, rewriting their laws to emphasize rehabilitation, this time not by trying out a new and untested design theory, but instead by reducing the number of penitentiaries around the country.

Because prison is not inherently good, so you want to be creative and do something else. 

Starting in the early 1950s, the Dutch also began decreasing their use of solitary confinement. Inside of Breda, they got rid of strict isolation. They built spaces where inmates could interact, including a library, a gym, and several workshops.

Formerly, they slept, they ate, and they worked in their cell. But later, they had, yeah, rooms for eating, for sports, and for working in different buildings around the dome prison itself. 

More recent changes in Dutch law have led to an overall drop in the national prison population. In just 10 years, starting in 2007, the number of prisoners in the Netherlands fell 20%.

Breda's prison was emptying out, and the building was falling apart. With so many vacant cells and a giant maintenance bill, in 2014, the Netherlands finally moved all the remaining inmates out of the 130-year-old prison. 

A deafening silence. Breda prison is empty of inmates, like so many others in the Netherlands.

After Breda's penitentiary closed as a prison, Dutch leaders hoped to repurpose the entire complex. They began rebranding the space with its giant panopticon dome as the Crown of Breda. The Dutch government put out a call for proposals for ways to reuse the entire facility. The place is huge, nearly 400,000 square feet, about seven football fields, and it's on prime real estate right in the middle of downtown.

While waiting for a buyer, it was rented for lots of things. Easily one of the most shocking was where you'd show up to the dome, put on an orange jumpsuit, and join hundreds of others in an immersive prison escape game. 

In this rotten place, they will ru- And you will obey 

You're nothing in here 

Last September, two companies with bigger ambitions for the space bought the entire complex, which covers more than eight acres.

The new owners are planning to turn it into a small village with green space, offices, and concert halls. But making any changes will not be easy. The prison has been designated a national monument, which seriously limits how much the structures can be modified. 

And city officials have asked the new owners to hold off on any renovations so that the space can be used immediately, not as some weird escape room, but as a shelter for Ukrainian refugees Just outside the Dome, there is an entryway decorated with welcome signs in Dutch, English, and Ukrainian.

Inside the large circular hall, there is a glass floor and that epic dome roof. 

Wow. That is quite the space. From outside, it's hard to tell the Dome is so big and impressive. It's just massive. Makes you feel really small, really. 

The Panopticon building has preserved some questionable elements from the past.

There are still bars on the windows, and the doors to the rooms where the refugees sleep cannot be locked from inside. But the space is actually pretty inviting. Today, there is a dining hall in the center. Sun pours in through the dome skylights and falls on cozy armchairs. There is a gym in the basement where refugees get together for yoga lessons and volleyball.

I met one of the Dome residents, a Ukrainian athlete named Katya. She's sharing her room with another woman from Ukraine. I ask her if it's weird to live with someone you just met. She smiles, and she says that having a roommate makes you feel less lonely.

When Jeremy Bentham first designed the Panopticon prison, he said he wanted it to be a place where people were treated well, where their lives might even be improved. But the failure of Breda's Panopticon shows that there's just no such thing as a humane prison. As Bentham himself once wrote, "All punishment is mischief.

All punishment in itself is evil." 

So much thought went into ensuring strict solitude in the Breda prison, so it's ironic how much effort is going into using that exact same space to achieve the opposite goal, bringing people together and helping them feel safe and connected. 

Despite the cell doors and old iron bars and gates, Breda's Panopticon has finally managed to become a truly humane place, but only after it stopped being a prison.

There seems to be a phenomenon where if you're a white dude with an unfathomable amount of wealth, movies like Iron Man or The Dark Knight not as 

comic-based action movies based on fictional universes, but an idea board for the next chapter of your life.

Unfortunately, the person who put cameras in and around everyone's home also has shown symptoms of this particular type of psychosis. Within a few short years of pitching- 

Caller ID for your front door. 

Jamie Siminoff sent emails to his employees quite literally declaring a war on crime. They stated that Ring was going to war with anyone who wants to harm a neighborhood, which is interesting because a few months ago when visiting neighborhoods severely harmed by data centers, I didn't see any Ring troops with feet on the ground.

Jamie went on to directly address criminals by indirectly emailing all of his employees. 

To the dirtbag criminals that steal our packages and rob our houses, your time is numbered because Ring is officially declaring war on you. 

He then sent his employees camouflage shirts with the Ring logo on them, I suppose because he expected this war on porch pirates to take place in Panama or something.

From the leaked emails I've seen, it appears that there were actually multiple Ring wars, which Jamie would abbreviate with RW1, RW2, and so on. RW3 was a battle against ADT, I assume because they were competitors. I didn't really go to business school, so I'm not really sure how the militarization of an IP camera company is organized.

I assume that, much like Flock Safety, Ring realized that there's a whole lot of money to be made by wedging themselves in between law enforcement agencies and their own communities. The loud and performative anti-crime obsession operates as a great distraction for both the potential violation of Fourth Amendment rights and the amount of money that those violations will cost taxpayers.

If a company like Flock or Ring is working with your local government and you're not interested in Flock or Ring's products, then you'll be buying them anyway with your property taxes. Right around the time that RW1 was declared, the company started cozying up to law enforcement. They hosted lavish events for police with free dinner and open bar, giving every attendee a bunch of free Ring cameras that they were encouraged to use with their department or community.

Also worth mentioning, many of these events featured Shaquille O'Neal, and the CEO seemed to hire Shaq to hang out with him quite a bit. 

We've given away over a million dollars' worth of stuff. We've gone into neighborhoods, actually personally both of us, done it together, installed them on people's houses that have had crime issues in crime-ridden areas.

And so doing that kind of stuff. 

All of this accompanied the launch of the Ring Neighbors app, which more or less combined the cameras with a social media network. But the app that people living in these neighborhoods didn't usually see or even know existed was the police access portal, where law enforcement could utilize the data volunteered through the Neighbors app to cross-reference with police reports and criminal records.

Welcome to Ring Neighborhoods Portal, a community-supported crime-fighting tool for law enforcement. You can enter an address and timeframe of interest. and see a map of active cameras in your chosen area and time. No more going door to look for cameras and asking for footage. When you select a case, you see a map and timeline of available videos and captured security events related to that case.

In future versions, we will also be enabling Ring's smart search functionality that will allow for suspicious activity detection and person recognition. 

That may not even sound that problematic if you've never spent time on apps like Neighbors or Nextdoor. But within a couple of minutes of it, you'll get a really good understanding of why the Constitution is a thing.

As the company scaled in the direction of government surveillance, customers and journalists started taking note. When Amazon acquired Ring in 2018 for $1.1 billion, the war declarations and edgy language seemed to simmer down a notch. But the company continued to comply with subpoenas and give customer data and footage to police without requiring a warrant or the customer's consent.

After the pandemic and the George Floyd protests worried that privacy concerns would harm sales, Amazon carefully took a step back from its direct relationship with police. Jamie Siminoff stepped down from his CEO position, and by January 2024, Ring stopped allowing police to request data from the Neighbors app entirely.

This was seen as a big win by privacy advocates and customers alike, but Ring wasn't giving up on this strategy. They were seemingly just removing themselves from the controversy regarding it. Instead of directly providing law enforcement with an interface to download customer data, they would partner with companies that were in the business of aggregating and selling data to the government, like Axon and Flock Safety.

Jamie Siminoff stepped back into Ring leadership, and it wouldn't be long before his employees got his controversial emails again, this time using an emotional reference to Charlie Kirk's murder to highlight how important it was to roll out another community request tool for police. And not long after that This happened.

One post of a dog's photo in the Ring app starts outdoor cameras looking for a match. Search Party from Ring uses AI to help families find lost dogs. Available to everyone. A lot of people weighed in after seeing that Super Bowl ad, worried about privacy. 

Still, the ad is enough for some people to turn away from the company altogether.

They want nothing to do with this technology. 

The plan to use people's love of their pets as a way to roll out and introduce an invasive technology backfired, to say the least. Channels like this one have been pleading with people to defend their right to privacy for a really long time, and somehow Ring accomplished this in under 30 seconds.

People of all demographics and political leanings and walks of life saw this ad, looked at their Ring cameras and said, "Wait, what if they tracked me this way?" And they weren't paranoid for thinking this at all. In emails obtained by 404 Media, Jamie Siminoff proudly said that the Searchlight feature is first for finding dogs, insinuating that it will expand to other subjects.

And all of this is happening as Ring is rolling out its facial recognition features. This is just my opinion, but it seems to me that it is very much within Ring's interest to distance themselves from government-related privacy concerns. After all, they're selling you the cameras that could be used against you, and you're paying them a monthly fee to keep them working with these features.

They need to appear as your friend. And that's probably why their partnership with Flock Safety was terminated shortly after that controversial ad aired. But there is nothing that suggests that ending the Flock partnership ends the Community Requests program or Ring's posture regarding working with law enforcement.

recently, public records obtained from state law enforcement purchases gave us a look at what modern spy vehicles actually cost and what they can do. In early twenty twenty-six, public procurement files revealed that the Texas Department of Public Safety requested approval for an emergency purchase totaling nearly four point five million dollars.

The paperwork listed four twenty twenty-six Chevrolet Tahoes. Now, a standard police-issued Chevy Tahoe costs about fifty thousand to sixty thousand. Even fully outfitted with standard police gear, four of the trucks might run around two hundred and forty thousand. But on this purchase order, those four vehicles came out to six hundred thousand, or a hundred and fifty K each.

The massive markup is because General Motors builds these specific police pursuit vehicles with high output, two hundred and fifty amp alternators and secondary battery banks. Instead of being built for high-speed chases, they're built to supply continuous heavy electrical power to military-grade surveillance hardware hidden inside the cabin.

The remaining three point nine million went directly to a foreign intelligence and defense vendor called Cognyte. Cognyte is a publicly traded spin-off of Verint Systems, often described as a direct competitor of Palantir and NSO Group. They specialize in what the defense industry calls tactical intelligence solutions, which is software and hardware designed to snoop on target communications.

While Cognyte historically sold most of its gear to intelligence agencies in Europe and the Middle East, they have been aggressively expanding into US law enforcement market. Texas wasn't the first. Florida State Police previously dropped nearly eight hundred thousand on Cognyte surveillance packages designed to be mounted inside aircrafts.

So what does a one million dollar spy truck actually come equipped with? The core of the order was a platform called FalconNet. To understand why FalconNet is so dangerous, you need to understand two pieces of tech. IMSI catchers and software-defined radio. Every mobile phone has a unique digital ID burned into its SIM card called the IMSI, which stands for International Mobile Subscriber Identity.

It acts like a digital fingerprint of a license plate for your phone. Under normal circumstances, your phone is constantly scanning the area for the strongest signal from a cell phone tower operated by your carrier. An IMSI catcher or cell site simulator is essentially a fake cell tower. When mounted inside a moving vehicle, it broadcasts a signal that tricks every nearby smartphone into believing it's the strongest, closest available tower.

And because your phone is programmed to always seek the best connection, it automatically drops its connection to your carrier and connects to the fake tower in the SUV. In older generations of this tech, the original Stingrays from a decade ago, police could only force older 2G or 3G phones to connect.

Carriers and tech manufacturers promised that 4G LTE and 5G networks would fix this vulnerability by encrypting mobile IDs, enforcing two-way authentication between your phone and the tower. But this is where Cognyte's FalcoNet comes in. The purchase receipt specifically mentions two hundred and eighty thousand spent on Delta 5G perpetual licenses and hardware capable of running software-defined radio or SDR.

Normally, radio hardware is fixed to specific frequencies, but software-defined radio changes that by using computer code to manipulate radio signals dynamically. FalcoNet uses SDR to run six independent base stations at the exact same time, spanning 2G, 3G, 4G, and native 5G networks simultaneously. If your phone is on 5G, FalcoNet blocks you and simulates a valid 5G environment or uses fallback protocols to forcibly downgrade your phone's connection to an unencrypted state, and it does all of this in under three minutes.

Once your phone connects, the operator inside the Tahoe gets your IMSI number, your exact GPS location, real-time tracking data, and depending on the configuration, metadata about your active calls and SMS text messages. 

So what happens if officers step out of the SUV and go on foot into a crowded shopping mall or public protest?

This is covered by something else on the invoice, a piece of hardware that allows this dragnet to follow you anywhere. Itemized in the Texas purchase order was three hundred and fifty-five thousand spent on FalconNet Backpack Core V2 units. These are fully portable, battery-powered 5G interception units designed to fit inside a standard tactical backpack.

An officer can strap this on, walk through a crowded building or a protest, and quietly harvest mobile identifiers from everyone around them. This highlights the fundamental flaw of IMSI catchers. They are non-discriminatory dragnet surveillance devices. 

Typically, if a police officer obtains a traditional search warrant for a specific subject's house, they only go into that house.

But when law enforcement turns on a FalconNet unit in a v- vehicle or a backpack, it cannot selectively isolate only a suspect's phone. To catch one phone, it forces every phone within range belonging to commuters, delivery drivers, shoppers, and bystanders to reveal their digital identifiers. This raises massive legal concerns under the Fourth Amendment, which protects citizens' rights against unreasonable searches.

In landmark federal cases like Chatry versus United States, courts ruled that sweeping location tracking requires strict legal safeguards. So how does law enforcement agencies bypass the standard public bidding and judicial oversight? By utilizing an emergency procurement exception. In the Texas case, state documents showed that the purchase was processed under an emergency memo, claiming immediate operational risk if delayed.

Yet state budget records revealed the legislature had pre-funded the cellular tracking vehicles months earlier as a part of a planned expansion. When military-grade interceptors are driving public streets inside unmarked Chevy Tahoes, it can feel like individual privacy is obsolete. However, let me share four ways that you can defend your devices and minimize what these systems can collect from you.

First, disable 2G settings in smartphone settings. Many IMSI catchers force phones to downgrade to legacy 2G networks because 2G lacks modern encryption and authentication. On Android, go to your settings, network and internet, then go to SIM, scroll down and toggle off Allow 2G. On iOS, ensure your cellular options are set to 5G Auto or LTE, and keep your iOS updated as Apple frequently patches baseband security vulnerabilities.

Second, use end-to-end encrypted messaging. IMSI catchers can capture traditional SMS text messages and unencrypted cellular phone calls. They cannot break end-to-end encrypted traffic passing through apps like Signal or WhatsApp. Even if a FalcoNet unit intercepts the raw data packets leaving your phone, the content of your messages remains encrypted noise.

Third, utilize lockdown modes or a Faraday bag for sensitive travel. If you're attending a sensitive event, public demonstration, or simply want total location privacy while commuting, standard airplane mode isn't always foolproof. Storing your phone inside a Faraday bag pouch completely blocks all radio frequency signals, preventing fake base stations from connecting to your device.

And turning your device completely off also prevents baseband processor interaction with nearby software-defined radios. Last, support public Freedom of Information Act requests and surveillance transparency initiatives. Surveillance works best when people don't know what's happening. Organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and ACLU actively track police department equipment purchases and force agencies to disclose when IMSI catchers are being deployed.

Pay attention to local city council and state procurement budgets because that's where surveillance upgrades are hidden first. 

unnamed workers spoke about their experience at Sama, a Kenya-based company contracted by Meta to review footage captured by their glasses, to two Swedish newspapers. And to everyone's surprise, you have rows of employees that are seated for their 10-hour shifts as data annotators to view captured content and describe, label, and check for quality.

Meaning that basically anything recorded by the user's glasses goes for review in these offices. And workers have claimed to have seen users' most private moments and information, including people's bank cards. "We see everything from living rooms to naked bodies," one worker reportedly said. Another says, "It can be about any topics at all.

We see chats where someone talks about crimes or protests. It's not just greetings, it can be very dark things as well." Now, if you've never used Meta glasses, Meta platforms, or just general Meta AI, upon sign-up, users are asked if they'd share their data to improve Meta AI. But what wasn't made clear to users was that these were all sent to a review somewhere unknown, all to be seen by people that they don't 

know.

Far as I can tell, when you choose to share your data with Meta to help improve the Meta Ray-Ban's product and you agree to upload your photos and videos to Meta's server for processing, when you trigger the Meta AI, video and photos were apparently being captured and then sent to Meta for review. Now, the issue here is Meta just did not make it obvious to users that this was happening, which is a bad design.

In one of these Swedish newspapers' investigation, they found in Meta's terms of use that the AIs may store and use more information shared with them, and that the user should not share information that you don't want the AIs to use and retain, such as information about sensitive topics. The user is given no choice.

It is mandatory to participate. And in general, what it records and stores is unclear, just as they like it. So yet again, Meta is putting the safety of our data and others in our hands. And what they just did is absolve the responsibility to protect you, and then got you to consent to it. And where is all the footage going?

To train their AI, of course. In due time, it will have your ideas, but work faster with better accuracy and maybe be even more Human. And if that wasn't sus enough, Meta severed their partnership with Sama only two months after the expose, claiming that they weren't meeting their expectations, whatever that means.

In a tumultuous time plagued by heightened fears of surveillance, the normalization of deepfakes, and the breaking news of things like the, the Epstein Isles, it's only evil for Meta to continue exploiting workers and capitalizing on fear while maintaining their claims to internet freedoms. And it begs the question, who is the internet truly free for?

And what's funny is all those Republicans for the government staying out of our business being real quiet right now. y'all had all that say in the press, I need y'all front and center fighting this battle right now. And unfortunately, 2026 only seemed a clear path to victory for Meta in launching an affiliate influencer program for Ray-Ban Meta glasses.

After all the growth in 2025, most of the description is waterlogged with big promises and minimal information. Essentially, just love poems of commission rates that add up fast, basically preying on influencers, both micro and macro, need to put food on the table during these unprecedented times with the economy.

But a real question that I have is, do you think that they're using the Ray-Ban Meta's brand name to hide away from the mistakes and the brand faux pas of Meta?

it seems like it, and it seems like Meta's been trying to do a bit of rebranding. Because Meta the company, along with their CEO, has had a majority male consumer base and a growing creep factor among the public. But as of recent times, there's been a bit of a narrative shift. 

Zuck now front row at a Prada fashion show during Milan Fashion Week. And as much as he looks happy as hell to look a mess, it seems to be working. And, my little marketing brain is making me wonder, is this just like a soft launch or like an olive branch to a potential Prada X Meta glasses collab coming in the future?

I do think that is coming, unfortunately, and that mostly has to do with the success of what is coming next. Yes, this is the part where we talk about Kylie Jenner.

If you have not been in the loop or have seen any of the billboards or promotion pretty much everywhere, especially if you live in LA, Kylie Jenner has just dropped a meta collab

oh Nobody clapped? Nobody gave a gaff? Oh, al- all right. this video just took a turn 

Kylie knows better than almost anyone what it feels like to be filmed without knowing. She signed the Meta glasses deal anyway, and when you see what this deal is worth, it starts to make sense. Kylie Jenner has spent years talking about the trauma of being filmed without consent, but now she's the face of a product designed to record people without them noticing.

Anyways, this is clearly Meta's way of addressing their market gap when it comes to women, because women sell products. They're thinking that the cute factor is what's going to sell you, because, yes, the Ray-Ban Meta glasses traditionally are very, like, manly, kinda cheugy, gross-looking. But when they're super sleek and fancy and Kylie Jenner is wearing them, maybe the girlies or those that are a little bit more into fashion are going to wear them.

But what I really doubt is Kylie's influence. It just isn't what it used to be. And not saying that the collab isn't going to work, 'cause it definitely is, and people are definitely still going to buy the glasses simply because Kylie's name is on it. But it's not a coincidence that in the middle of a PR crisis, Zuck makes a product to sell to women, almost as if to tell women to reclaim their perspective and gaze by purchasing a product, too, to gesture to an even playing field, which fundamentally can't exist inside of a patriarchy.

it's giving men who only fight for women's equality and rights when it benefits them, because in reality, women are putting themselves and other women more at risk. But the collaboration itself is just generally disappointing. Kylie has the most experience with paparazzi and randoms following her around with cameras, but is now supposedly sold out to encourage more consensual and invasive surveillance of women, as if we haven't been rage-baited enough.

And I fear this collab is bound to set us back a couple years and it's just generally upsetting to think about all the potential harm that these glasses pose to Kylie herself, when users can supposedly make her voice say whatever they want it to. 

Meta does not have a great history with having a control over the safety and responsibility of their AI model.

There was an internal report that surfaced somewhere last year that exposed that Meta's rules against their models allowed their models to engage in romantic and sensual conversations with users, including with minors. I'm seeing an eval rate on some of their internal testing that found their chatbots broke their own content rules that they did have roughly two-thirds of the time, including a 66% failure rate on child sexual exploitation.

So if I were Kylie Jenner and worth a billion dollars, I might be really concerned on the kind of deepfakes of things that I could be made to sound like I'm saying from a model such as this one. 

And while I'm sure that there are some kind of concepts of guidelines, since they are so new, we haven't seen the extent of them yet.

so far it seems business as usual, but according to this creator, Meta's AI hasn't been doing all that well at protecting women and children before, so why would they just start to protect her now? And where does hypocrisy lead us to after a campaign as contradictory as this one? It does add up.

if we're seeing Vogue, the most iconic fashion leader and powerhouse, rely on AI and celebrities traumatized by surveillance, like Kylie Jenner, signing a brand deal with the enemy itself, then, yes, that might begin to wear on the integrity of the arts themselves, rather than the companies degrading them.

And if Kylie Jenner- If that wasn't enough to convince you, niche influencers are also being enlisted because these companies know that there's a cool girl that you don't play about that could convince you. Meta glasses are no longer for tech nerds, pickup artists, or food influencers, but are for niche fashion people and cool kids.

Their experiences, jokes, and ideas are all theirs now under the law because of these collaborations. And the question is, how much longer until your favorite athlete or influencer convinces you to do the same? 

New York became the first US state to ban smart glasses from all 1,240 courthouses, state, county, city, town, and village courts. Starting July 20th, in celebration of the World Cup ending, anyone wearing them has to surrender the device to a uniformed court officer before entering. Even prescription smart glasses are banned.

Bring a normal pair. But the trigger for this was genuinely perfect. When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in a social media addiction trial back in February, members of his own team were wearing Meta Ray-Bans when they escorted him inside, prompting the judge to issue a warning about recording jurors.

Meta's own security detail, wearing Meta's own product at Meta's own CEO's trial, inadvertently demonstrated why the product needed to be banned from courtrooms. You really have to admire the sheer unblinking consistency of the public relations strategy here, right? Walking into a massive court trial about the societal harms of your technology while actively wearing the exact surveillance equipment being litigated is a stroke of marketing genius usually reserved for cartoon villain syndicates.

It's the corporate equivalent of turning up to a product liability lawsuit for a chainsaw manufacturer while revving a chainsaw in the gallery to show the judge just how smooth the idle is Wisconsin and Pennsylvania already had partial bans. Illinois is considering banning them while driving. Royal Caribbean banned them from children's areas, restrooms, and medical facilities on its ships.

And through all of this, Meta launched a three hundred and ninety-nine dollar Kylie Jenner collaboration, smart glasses with Jenner's AI voice built-in, marketed as a fashion accessory. The protest collective Everyone Hates Elon responded by installing guerrilla lenticular advertisements near Meta's London headquarters, holographic posters that flip between Jenner's glamorous marketing photo and a skeletal X-ray vision reading, "We're always watching," referencing the 1988 film They Live.

Their statement to HuffPost, "Meta and Ray-Ban's new AI glasses can be used to secretly record women and young people for sexual reasons. Simply put, that's abuse." They also added, "Billionaires could fund cures for cancer, so why are they funding glasses for perverts instead?" And then Lorde performing at Madrid's Mad Cool Festival told the crowd, "Increasingly in our world, it gets harder and harder to know what is real.

Can I just say for the record, F the glasses. Don't get the glasses. Not sexy." When a Grammy-winning indie pop icon publicly declares your flagship hardware to be an active threat to human sex appeal, it is time to close the laptop and order a dirty martini that tastes like a gin-infused Mediterranean Sea.

The product's cultural identity calcified around its worst use case before the best use cases had a chance to breathe, and Meta's respond to this has been, and I generally wish I were exaggerating, to try to make the glasses less detectable. Honestly, it just goes from bad to worse in the story.

According to the Financial Times, Meta is testing a prototype of the glasses that continuously records audio and takes photos every few seconds without any warning light. Mark Zuckerberg has personally questioned whether the LED indicator should remain on during background AI mode, which is the mode in which the glasses passively observe everything and hear for hours at a time.

The company is also exploring facial recognition capabilities. In practice, this would mean you walk into a room, you look at someone, the glasses identify them, pulling from Meta's database of four billion users, and display their name and potentially other information on the private in-lens screen that only you can see.

You scroll through that information using subtle wrist movements via the neural band. The other person has no idea any of this is happening. There's no light. There's no sound. There is no visible camera, just somebody looking at you through what appear to be ordinary sunglasses while a trillion-dollar surveillance infrastructure silently catalogs who you are.

It's the ultimate introverted superpower, provided your definition of introversion is covertly operating as a walking, breathing branch of the NSA. The guardrails on something like this would need to be insanely strong. Not just strong, literally architectural, built into the product at the hardware level, not bolted on as a software afterthought that can be modeled away for the price of a YouTube tutorial.

Instead, Meta is exploring removing the one guardrail that currently exists, the LED light that tells the people around you that the camera is active. They'll try to sell it as some feature improvement, but realistically, it's a serious category change. It transforms the glasses from a camera you wear on your face into a surveillance device that is indistinguishable from ordinary eyewear.

And this is being developed by the same company that contaminated a city's water supply through negligent discharge, that secretly paid hundreds of contractors to pose as teenagers to attack the competitor's chatbots, and that has a 66.8 failure rate on its own child safety systems. This is a safety record so profoundly unimpressive that you wouldn't trust them to operate a toaster, let alone manage a database of several billion human faces.

To their credit, Meta recently announced that its glasses won't take photos or videos if the system detects the LED is covered, and that an upgrade will disable the camera if the LED has been physically tampered with or destroyed. That is a step, yes. But it's a step taken after the cultural damage was already done, and it only addresses the current product, not the next generation that may not have an LED at all.

It's also a remarkably optimistic piece of engineering. If you design a pair of glasses whose primary selling point to a specific demographic is that they can secretly record people, and then you add a software patch that says, "Please don't cover the secret recording light," you haven't actually solved the problem.

You've just issued a very polite request. This is the same as putting a wet paint sign next to a nuclear reactor and just kinda hoping for the best. Let's discuss for a second. There is a thought experiment that I keep turning over in my mind, and I think it's worth sharing, even though I don't have a clean answer to it yet.

What happens if everyone has these glasses, not just men with disposable income and tech enthusiasm? legit everyone, ladies, children, elderly people in every income bracket, every neighborhood, every country. If everyone is recording everyone all the time, does the power dynamic change? There is a version of that future that looks genuinely utopian.

Universal accountability, permanent evidence of everything. Crime becomes harder because there's always a witness. Bad behavior in public carries consequences because there is always a record. The asymmetry that makes the current situation so toxic, people filming people without consent, disappears because everyone is filming everyone, and everyone knows it.

This is a theory of social harmony based on mutually assured destruction. The idea is that if we are all constantly and aggressively spying on each other, a beautiful, polite utopia will just naturally emerge. It is the exact same logic that suggests the best way to prevent accidental kitchen fires is to keep your oven permanently turned up to four hundred degrees and filled with premium unleaded gasoline.

Technically, everyone in the room becomes highly alert to the risks, but it isn't a particularly relaxing environment to make toast in. This is actually the premise of Dave Eggers' novel, The Circle, later adapted into a film with Tom Hanks and Hermione Granger, where a tech company achieves total transparency by putting cameras everywhere.

In the novel, this is framed as liberation. In practice, it functions as control. And the question the story keeps asking is, "Who benefits from universal surveillance?" The answer every single time is whoever controls the infrastructure, and in this case, that's Meta All the data from all the glasses flows through Meta's servers, processed by Meta's AI, stored according to Meta's policies, governed by Meta's terms of service.

Universal surveillance sounds democratic until you realize that the democracy has a landlord, and the landlord is a company that parks super yachts in the harbors of cities where it just cut one thousand four hundred jobs. A landlord that actively wants to know what you look like when you wake up, what brand of cereal you stare at, and exactly how many seconds you spend looking at a billboard before you feel the crushing weight of capitalism.

And right now, the glasses are not universal. They're disproportionately owned by one demographic, and the people being filmed without consent are disproportionately in another. The power asymmetry is not theoretical. It is the bedrock of deploying this kind of tech. It's the reason the product is called Pervert Glasses and not Accountability Glasses.

The surveillance argument, the idea that surveillance from below can check surveillance from above, only works if the surveillance is symmetrical. When it isn't, it's not accountability. It's just one more tool in the hands of people who already had too many. Could the technology equalize over time? Maybe.

Glasses could become cheap enough for everyone. The accountability applications could become the primary identity of the product. Public trust could be rebuilt through transparent policy, strong guardrails, and a demonstrated commitment to preventing misuse, but that requires a company that treats privacy as foundational rather than as a speed bump on the way to engagement metrics.

And Meta, based on everything I've covered on this channel, has several light years before it gets that far. 

Now, Section C, Copaganda & the ICE Enforcement Arm

after a year of making headlines for using deadly force against civilians, US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement is planning to equip its agents with gloves that can deliver painful electric shocks. Yes, you heard that right. Department of Homeland Security plans to spend up to $20 million on these new gloves, and it's calling them de-escalation devices.

Ryan Schwenk is an ICE whistleblower who previously trained new officers. He spoke with Scott Tong about the new gloves. These gloves have, I understand, a button to deliver an electric shock, and videos on the manufacturer's Instagram page show people falling to the floor screaming when they're shocked.

In your view, are these a good idea? So these are not necessarily a good idea in the way that ICE is likely to deploy them. I've done a lot of reading on these, and in very limited circumstances, for instance, in jails or situations where there's a lot of control over how they're used, these are a viable device.

But not in the most likely scenarios where ICE is gonna use them. Yeah. they're sc- they're described as de-escalation devices. I wonder if you can contextualize, how are ICE agents trained to de-escalate, and how might these fit in or not fit in? So ICE officers receive a limited amount of training on de-escalation.

It's not anywhere near the level other law enforcement agencies receive. These gloves are primarily used in up close, hand-to-hand situations, and they're described as de-escalation because essentially what they do is they deliver an immense amount of pain to a small location, and that causes the person who is being touched by the gloves to fall to the ground.

And in theory, that means that they deescalate because the officer doesn't have to use hard techniques, a baton, a choke hold, ... an arm bar. They can disable the person just by using the glove. Understand. Now, the manufacturer's materials that accompany the product say these gloves should not be used to control verbal defiance or for belligerent people or for punishment or torture.

As a former trainer, for new ICE officers, are you confident that they will be properly trained to use these? They, in order for them to use these gloves, they're gonna have to go through a whole new training program. There's gonna have to be a class developed, and there's gonna have to be something put in place to make sure the officers know when and how to use them.

But based on what we've seen from the way officers lose their temper and behave in public recently, it, it concerns me deeply that officers might use these gloves inappropriately. Yeah. is there a scenario you worry about? yes. So from what I understand of these gloves, they're not likely to cause permanent injury or death.

the, the, the mechanism doesn't seem to allow for that. But it does allow an officer to hurt someone, and we've seen officers who've lost their temper with people in crowds. We've seen officers lose their temper with, bystanders who protest or object to the officer's actions. And I can absolutely see a scenario where an officer deploys these gloves against someone for, when it's absolutely unjustified in order to induce pain, to stop them from yelling at them or to, to stop somebody from complaining.

One of the big fears I have is these gloves essentially leave no record behind, ... when they're used, right? So an officer could hurt somebody with it, and the person could say, "Hey, he shocked me three or four times," and there's not really proof of that other than- Oh. an internal tracking record the glove has Yeah.

I understand. interesting question. Now, just, briefly, I wanna, t-talk about the broader deportation effort. in May, White House official Stephen Miller told Fox News of a target to have 3,000 ICE arrests a day. Then the administration last week denied having a target in a court filing.

What pressure do you sense ICE being under now? I think they're under enormous pressure to get those 3,000 removals a day, right? ICE didn't go to the trouble of buying all of these- ICE has been going through buying all these, these detention facilities, these warehouses they're converting or the airplanes they've bought not to remove people.

There's an immense amount of pressure to do it, and it shows up in the way the agents enforce the law and the way they act with the public. They're rushed to get the job done because they have to hit metrics. Yeah. and then these gloves, do you sense that, this is in a public notice because ICE wants to talk about this publicly?

Yeah. I think ICE wants the public to know they have these, these, essentially, these pain tools as a way of creating more fear. in practice, I doubt that officers will ever use these very often. They have very limited circumstances where they're usable. I think this is more about sending a message than actually equipping officers with a new tool.

ICE is now apparently so flush with cash that they're choosing to spend $20 million to give their goons electric shock gloves, which I guess are a thing that exists. We have a photo. This is a real image from the real website of Compliant Technologies showing blue and purple lightning bolts coming off of them, like they make ICE agents Emperor Palpatine or something.

But why not? ICE does have unlimited power at this point. The device is called the GLOVE, because everybody's gotta be cute these days. It's the Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, and, they're not new necessarily. They've been used in some cases by jails and police departments, and I'm sure they never abused it either.

But now it's gonna be for ICE. And supporters of this particular device, they say that it's generally used in specific jail and transport situations rather than to just, strap on and then patrol the streets. We'll see about that. But anyway, here is what the founder and CEO of this company, Compliant Technologies, has to say about the company and how these gloves work.

Take a look. 

Because CD3 technology really, if you think about it, if y- if you know about our glove and you've heard about our technology, for the first time in law enforcement, corrections, and security history, we have a technology that can be used in the vicinity of soft empty hand control. It does not penetrate through clothing, hair, metal, or fur.

It only activates on human skin. Neural peripheral interference is simply this. When we grab somebody's skin, we are overstimulating that sense of touch within the peripheral nervous system. That in turn sends signals to the central nervous system up to the brain. Most people break their weight, go to the ground.

And because officers have a hold on them, we're automatically mitigating risk leading someone to the ground. We're able to get them cuffed up much faster.

Yeah, okay, so it overstimulates the sense of touch. Basically you touch their human skin and they, recoil from it, which is appropriate because I imagine that's the experience a lot of these ICE officers have with their partners once their partners- ... discover what they've become. But anyway, look, is this the worst thing that they could use?

I don't know. They shoot women in the face, so maybe this isn't as bad as that. They execute American citizens in the streets. Maybe this isn't as bad. 

But I don't know if there is anyone I trust less to have any technology like this than ICE officers. Because the second they get it, they are going to look for an opportunity to use it.

They are going, they're hoping that there will be someone who isn't even necessarily gonna be somebody that they're targeting. They shoot people they're not targeting. It could be protesters. It could be media. They brutalize all sorts of people, and now they're gonna think, "Oh, I'm technically not supposed to shoot them, but I've got my glove.

I could touch them." This, if this is used, if this is distributed, it is going to be abused. Just you know it's gonna happen. Now they say, Compliant Technology says, it's not to be used for punishment against people exhibiting verbal defiance or belligerence or on high-risk populations, and they can say that.

Once they put it in the hands of ICE officers who've been trained for two and a half minutes before being thrown out in American streets, they're gonna use it however the hell they want. And we do know, if we just jump to graphic four, 2025 was already the deadliest year for those in ICE custody in decades.

And that's before they start trying to become like that Shocker villain from the Spider-Man movie or whatever. it's just, this is gonna go so poorly. What do you think? 

Yeah, I don't trust the company, and I don't even think it's just a statement. With the state of law enforcement, with the state of ICE, for you to be presenting this, I think you probably came up with it because it can be used to torture people.

That's actually what I believe. It's also not really human. I don't even think you should be putting shock collars on dogs, quite frankly, and I think that it's an invitation to abuse people. That's exactly what it will be used for, and it's just not necessary. Now, if we have to choose between shooting a mother as she's driving away from you in the head or Alex Presley, who's just trying to protect the woman, killing him, shooting him dead, I guess we can go with the gloves, but this is a problem.

Another one. 

The electric shock gloves that Donald Trump's ICE wants to start using on people turns out have already been used against Americans here at home, kids in schools.

I'm JT Cestkowski with Status Coup. The kids are from the Omaha School District. This is local reporting here from Nebraska Public Media, where they go with the headline, "Omaha Police and Mayor Detail Two Uses of Electric Shock Gloves by School Resource Officers." If you are not familiar with what these gloves are, welcome.

Thank you for taking, for crawling out from under the rock that you've been living under to watch this video. Can I please crawl under that rock with you so I don't have to deal with horrifying stories like this? But this is the AP headline from several days ago. "AP Exclusive: ICE Plans to Give Officers Gloves That Can Deliver Painful Electric Shocks."

I don't think you need a whole lot more than that headline to understand the implications here, that ICE want to be given a new tool at their disposal to inflict cruelty on the people that they are trying to detain and separate from their families and communities, and the people who are attempting to resist them or peacefully protest against them.

But as it turns out, as we're seeing from reporting here, these gloves used in Omaha schools before ICE decided to shell out twenty million dollars for their own pairs. Omaha Police Chief Todd Schmaderer and Mayor John Ewing provided new information Monday about the use of electric shock gloves by school resource officers.

The Omaha Police Department previously said the gloves had been deployed twice in the twenty twenty-five to twenty-six school year on students. In a Monday joint statement, they elaborated on the circumstances of those two instances. The first occurred when a student from a different high school who was trespassing at Omaha South High School, according to police.

The glove was applied to his wrist for approximately two seconds for the purpose of detaining him as he attempted to flee after fighting with a security guard. Now of course, this is information according to police. That's the one source we have here. We don't hear the, teen's side of this story about what happened.

We don't have any independent witnesses about h- what happened, and so of course, the police are going to be incentivized to try and frame their use of force in the most charitable way to them as possible. So is this actually what happened? Could be. Could be, and I don't want to discount that, but at the same time, we should take, a degree of skepticism when looking at a report like this that is only cited to police.

But there was a second use here. Before we pass judgment on either of these two instances, I wanna hear from both of the instances in which these gloves were used. The second glove use occurred at the district's integrated learning program, described by Omaha Public Schools as a specialized program for students with social, emotional, behavioral, and learning deficits.

In that case, police said the student made verbal threats and threw a chair at the school security guard. The chair hit the guard in the head, and police said the student also punched the guard in the head. The student was detained after the officer deployed the glove twice, the first time for about a second and the second time for two to three seconds.

Okay. Again, only cited to police there in that report. We don't know anything beyond what happened there. But what I will say here is, do police really not have any other way of dealing with minors, with children, even if they are teens? Dealing with children who are going to be usually smaller and weaker than the officers themselves.

Do officers not have any other tools at their disposal where they actually have to shell out the money for these gloves, shell out the money for the training on this weapon, and then actually use this weapon on children? Is there no other tool at their disposal here? And in the case of the second incident that we just heard, which was used at a place that is described by Omaha Schools as a specialized program for students with social, emotional, behavioral, behavior and learning deficits, I will note that this is part of the police reform movement in this country, is to try and get officers to respond to fewer instances where the person that they are responding to could have that social, emotional, behavioral, or, learning impairment that could impact their ability to interface with an officer, and the officer is trained to use force.

Is that really the kind of response that you want to see, especially against children? This is a, a, a question that was actually asked by a in Omaha of the police department. 

I asked why these gloves are being used in schools but not in the general public. 

I think because of the low level of force, plain and simple.

It's, I don't have taser barbs. I'm not gonna s- spray pepper spray where there's a lot of aftercare. This, as you saw has lesser effects than each of those areas. 

Last June, the Omaha City Council approved OPD purchasing 40 pairs of the gloves.

According to city documents, OPD said that it was making the purchase to give SROs, quote, "Another use of force option with the goal of de-escalating and preventing use of force situations." 

Apparently applying electrical shocks to children, electrocuting children, is de-escalatory and is also designed to avoid use of force.

Shocking kids is designed to avoid use of force. That is an Orwellian turn of phrase there from the Omaha Police Department in a way that is truly shocking and galling if you have even a rudimentary understanding of how words work in the English language, and meaning of those words when they are put together into a sentence.

This is also a statement that was released jointly from the mayor and police chief down there. Quote, "We are constantly seeking ways to keep the public and police officers safe through innovations like GLOV." Again, keeping people safe by electrocuting them, the joint statement said. Quote, "We believe it is the safest use of force option in the rare times when it is used."

On May 18th, 2026, after a thorough investigation, the Hennepin County Attorney's Office, Mary Moriarty, charged an ICE agent, Christian Castro, with four felony counts of second-degree assault with a dangerous weapon as well as a misdemeanor charge of falsely reporting a crime.

My office is joining with her office, in that prosecution, and I c- wanna commend the Hennepin County Attorney's Office for their professionalism and excellent legal and investigative work. At the press conference where we announced the complaint against Castro, we noted that no one's above the law. A little bit of a refresher.

The criminal complaint alleges that on January 14th, 2026, during Operation Metro Surge, Castro fired a gun at the door of the home in North Minneapolis. Despite knowing the home was occupied with multiple people, his gunshot struck Julio Sosa Solis in the leg and injured him. The final impact point of Castro's bullet was a child's bedroom wall.

Children were in the house when Castro fired into it. The Hennepin County criminal complaint also alleges that Castro falsely told the FBI that Mr. Sosa Solis- and another man assaulted him with a broom handle and a sh- snow shovel and that he fired his weapon in self-defense. As a result, Sosa Solis and another man were charged with federal felonies.

However, after video evidence emerged, those federal charges were dismissed with prejudice. After Hennepin County filed its charges against Castro, a district court judge found that probable c- found probable cause to believe that he committed those crimes. The judge issued a nationwide warrant for Castro's arrest.

Castro was taken into custody in Cameron County, Texas on May 29th. Just four days later, Governor Walz asked Governor Greg Abbott of Texas to extradite Castro to Minnesota, yet Castro is still not here to face justice. Under extradition clause of the US Constitution and the 1797 Federal Extradition Act and Texas law, Governor Walz request triggered a mandatory obligation for Governor Abbott to issue a governor's rendition warrant to Cameron County Sheriff Manuel Trevino to begin the transfer of Christian Castro back to Minnesota to face justice.

Instead of promptly fulfilling his legal ministerial duty to execute governor's rendition warrant for Castro, however, Governor Abbott has withheld the warrant and held up Castro's extradition for nearly three months. The framers of the Constitution, the US Constitution, and Congress intended the interstate extradition process to be swift, summary one in which a state that is harboring a person charged with a crime in another state promptly returns the fugitive as soon as requesting state demands it.

The US Supreme Court unanimously upheld this black letter law as recently as 1987. This means that Governor Abbott has a mandatory obligation to issue the governor's rendition warrant for Castro. He has no discretion, I repeat, he has no discretion to decline to do so. None. Yet Castro is still not here to face justice Governor Walz's office has repeatedly asked Governor Abbott's officer for updates.

Governor Abbott did not respond. On July 30th, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty wrote Governor Abbott requesting an update. Governor Abbott did not respond. Last Thursday, August 13th, I sent Governor Abbott, a letter, which is, available for your review, to inform him that of his mandatory legal obligation to effectuate the return of Christian Castro to Minnesota to face justice.

Whether or not he needed the lesson, I cited all relevant constitutional and legal authorities that leave him no discretion in this matter. I informed him that if he did not sign the rendition warrant by the end of the day yesterday, I would sue to compel him to do so. Governor Abbott did not respond.

Christian Castro, Castro is still not here to face justice. Therefore, this morning, my office filed suit, asking the federal court in Texas to require Government Abbott to sign the warrant to block, and to the block the Cam- to sign the warrant and to block the Cameron County Sheriff from releasing, Castro until Minnesota law enforcement can arrive there to physically transport Castro here to face the charges laid against him.

The court has the authority to order the governor to, and the sheriff to do this. The 1987 Supreme Court decision that I referenced earlier, known as Puerto Rico versus Branstad, affirmed the principle that states, states must honor each other's rendition extradition requests, and asserted that the federal courts have the authority to compel states to honor each other's extradition request.

The urgency of this filing Is that, Texas law imposes a 90-day limit on the detention of fugitives awaiting extradition. This means that as early as August 26, a week from tomorrow, 90 days after he was first captured and detained, Christian Castro could walk free from jail in Texas and flee justice in Minnesota, including by leaving the country.

In the last five years, Governor Walz has honored all 21 of Governor Abbott's requests to extradite fugitives to Texas. In that same period, Governor Abbott has honored 11 of Governor Walz's requests to extradite fugitives to Minnesota, until today. When I said none of us should be here today, this is exactly what I meant.

Christian Castro has been charged with breaking the law in Minnesota. He must face justice in Minnesota. Governor Abbott should have granted Governor Walz's extradition request long ago, and is required to do so now. I should never have to, have to file this lawsuit, but I have done so today to protect the Constitution, the rule of law, Minnesota's rights, and the people of the State of Minnesota, and of course, the fair administration of justice Christian Castro is not above the law, and Greg Abbott isn't either 

this one's for my buddies in ice. It's about those new shock gloves that you guys are getting. Listen, don't tell anyone, but apparently the orgasm that you get from jerking off with these gloves is beyond anything you've ever experienced. Like that first hand job that you got under the bleachers in high school kind of thrilling.

Just don't ask around. Trust me, you're gonna love it

And Finally, Section D, Fighting Back

when you first become aware of the Flock cameras, and what did you make of them when you first encountered them? 

I actually became aware of them a kind, a long time ago, like 2024, like two years ago.

I had no clue. I'd never heard of 'em before that, but someone I know brought it to my attention. he was talking about them 'cause we went to a skate park, and at the skate park there was a Flock camera, and he was like, "We gotta avoid that thing. I don't wanna be near it." And I was like, "Why? It's just a camera."

And he was like, "That thing tracks you. It's, it stores your information," and all this stuff, and I didn't really know what he was talking about at the time. and I didn't really think much of it for a whole year until earlier this year when they came up again and I saw something about Flock, and I was like, I know about that.

I heard about that before. What is this?" So I started doing my research and that's when I learned what they're doing and I looked on a map and I saw how many were in my city, and it just was... I don't know. It was kinda crazy 

So a few months ago, you started taking flock cameras down when you encountered them in Minneapolis.

Tell me about your experience taking that first camera down. 

Yeah, that first camera, I was definitely nervous. I, drove out to one pretty far away. I had previously scouted it out, so I already knew kinda like the area around it. and I walk up to the bushes and, I... It was on the side of a road, obviously.

And I was wa- just waiting in the bushes for the right time to, do my thing. And for a whole hour I did that until eventually I didn't hesitate, and then I did it. and I just... It was so much adrenaline. it was a big rush the first time. 

When you say you did it, what specifically did you do to the camera?

Yeah, that first one, all I did was I climbed the pole, and I taped it up, and I cut the wire. 

Why did you feel anxious doing this? 

I don't know. I don't normally, go out and destroy things like this. it's definitely, I don't know, it's not something I, I typically do, but I felt like it's necessary in this case 'cause these cameras just keep popping up, and there's not much we can do about it.

Why is it necessary? 

they're in my city. No one likes them. They're stealing our... They're actively taking our information. I've been to, city council meetings, where they talk about these cameras, and there's a just overwhelming majority of people just they wanna get rid of these. But the city hasn't done anything yet, and it's just there's no one, helping the people here.

So I just, I wanna do what I can there, and this feels like the only way. I- if they're not gonna take them down, then I'll do it myself. 

It sounds like you're saying that for you, the wheels of government are just turning too slowly. 

For sure. It's definitely a very slow process. In Minnesota, we've had, one city ban these flock cameras already.

but there's still hundreds that still have them in them. every single meeting these things get brought up, and it's just, nothing happens yet. And a- as that process, as that process is going, it's a slow process, but they're still taking all our information, as this is going. So if you don't take it down now, it's just gonna actively still take more and more information, and it's, something like 20 billion license plates these things scan a month.

So it's-- I think it's pretty urgent to get these things down. 

So you took down that first camera, and then you've taken down several cameras since. 

How many cameras do you think you've destroyed from Flock so far? 

It's been about 36, I believe now. it's been a few weeks. I usually go out and do, three to five a night, and I was doing that, every night for a while.

Recently, I kinda slowed down because I got some tips that there's been some cars at the places I've destroyed 'em, some, government cars. So I'm just kinda slowing down in my city a little bit. I am going to different cities here soon, but until then, I've just been kinda posting a little bit.

You're gonna go on, a anti-Flock road trip? 

I'm not driving, I'm flying, but yeah, essentially. 

So you're going on this anti-Flock trip. You're flying elsewhere to get rid of Flock cameras. How are you paying for all this? 

Yeah, I've actually... I've had a lot of support from people, which is f- I have, a, like a GoFundMe.

and I have people that, donate to me, which is very nice, and I'm very appreciative of it. some people have sent me money. All the money that people have sent me I've used to, buy these flights and find places to stay, but I use it to go to other places 'cause people keep telling me, "I need you to come to this city.

I would do this, but I'm, I have too much to risk," or, "I'm too old," or whatever, "But I would really appreciate it if you came to my city and did this." 

How much money have you gotten in donations for this campaign? 

I don't have a ton of money, but it's been a pretty decent amount. probably around 4,000, 5,000 maybe.

It sounds like your concerns around surveillance are genuine and earnest, but I also feel like there is this question always when anyone's doing anything on social media. It's like, are you doing this because you believe in this cause, or are you also doing this because, it's helpful when, for your social media branding?

What do you make of that? How do you respond to that critique? 

I do think Flock right now is, a pretty hot topic, and it's been something I've been posting about online, so I can understand that. I would say, I am in social media, and the goal is to reach as many people as possible.

I think Flock is just such a, a... People really feel strongly about this, including me, and so that's why I'm making videos about it, is because of how many people feel strongly about it. And I wanna help, that's what I'm doing. I'm not doing it just because of social media. I'm not doing it for my personal branding.

It is interesting that you're filming yourself, that you're talking to me, that it sounds like you're using your real voice. you could be doing more to obscure your identity and to obscure your location. Why aren't you? 

I definitely, like I do believe if they wanted to find me, it's, I have an Instagram account, I have a TikTok I don't think it's impossible to find me.

There's a chance they already know who I am, but- 

They being the cops or they being Flock? 

Yeah, probably cops or, government potentially even if they wanted to. 

And that doesn't bother you? 

I don't know. I think something could happen here that for sure I'm willing to fight for this. our freedoms, our rights are worth fighting for.

Some anti-Flock activists have said that destroying Flock cameras can actually be harmful to their cause because it complicates that anti-Flock narrative, right? there's no longer a clear sense necessarily of who's the bad guy and who's the good guy because people like you are out there breaking the law.

What is your response to that? 

I can get that perspective for sure. I just I don't know, so many people are being affected by this, they're actively being hurt by Flock. Even here just in Minnesota recently, some dude, his, license plate was like entered wrong into the system. someone who stole a car, their license plate was put in the system, and then it was wrong, and then it was his license plate.

So when he drove out, like in Minnesota, he passed a Flock camera and got surrounded by a bunch of police officers, and it's just like there's so many instance- instances where people are being harmed by these cameras and it's... A lot of people feel just like helpless. They don't know what they can do to, feel safe.

They don't feel safe going out anymore. They don't feel safe whatever. There's so many people being harmed by it. I just think something needs to happen. I'm not a person who's just gonna sit here and hope. I, I wanna actually do something, and this is something I can do. 

I wanna put Flock's argument around law enforcement to you, which is that in a blog post about the destruction of cameras, Flock said, quote, "Flock cameras are purpose-built public safety tools.

Their value is in the investigative leads they generate, the stolen vehicles they help recover, the missing people they help locate, and the cases they help solve. Not in the hardware itself. Illegally damaging a camera doesn't change that mission, and it doesn't change ours." How do you reconcile your respect for that work, for the legal side of things and for the importance of fighting crime, with the idea that by taking the cameras down you might be hindering, police's ability to actually solve crimes?

I think it's a to- it can be a tool. Like Flock is, it is a very powerful tool, and I think there's a lot of police officers that are not good people. I respect the police for sure. they have a job. It's to maintain the law. But it's just been the amount of police officers that are misusing these cameras is insane, which it's because it's just so powerful.

I've been very interested in this idea of watching the watchers, of turning the cameras back on the police. I think most of my reporting over the last few years has been on police surveillance and the cameras and tools and just the incredible number of ways that they h- have to get information to not only use their own cameras, but to subpoena information from other tech companies, things like this.

I want to talk about Flock in a minute, but I want to start with the delivery robots because some of my favorite videos are of you talking to the Serve delivery robots, which are in... They're all over the place in LA, but especially in Hollywood. They're these delivery robots. They have names, they have, faces on them.

You film them quite a lot, so are these robots cops in your mind? 

this is my most important activism to begin with. I have so many mixed feelings about them. At first, I didn't see them as that. I didn't know how they worked, right? I didn't know, I didn't know that they had a ton of cameras. I figured it was like a guy with a remote control just delivering stuff.

I'm like, "All right, seems harmless enough." And then I didn't think it was very efficient because I just watched the way they move. They're very slow. They're running off the curbs. If you're waiting for your delivery, it's probably just takes forever, it seems like. And then I started seeing that they had those cameras.

I became... I was becoming skeptical. I'm like, what are they filming?" another thing that pissed me off was they were displacing a human. truly, they are taking a human's job. Serve will tell you, "Oh no, we have a human controlling them at intersections." Yeah, they're controlling multiple.

So at the end of the day, it's, you're going to have fewer humans doing the job. They may seem benign right now, but what happens if it has that camera that's recording everything and then the police, a major crime happens and the police say, "Hey, we want to subpoena the information"? That's there, and it's being done on our public sidewalks using our public infrastructure.

I have a little bit of a problem with that 

Yeah. So we did some reporting where basically, like, when there have been instances of people messing with these robots, the company can give that footage to the police. There's nothing stopping them from giving footage of some crime or anything that they incidentally film to the police.

The police could subpoena it. And I think it's a similar problem with Waymo, where-- which are also all over LA. It's like these are cameras on wheels that are filming at all times. They're being retained, and they're not specifically for police use, but they are surveilling at all times, and cops either know or they're going to find out that it's not a secret that they can go get this footage from these companies.

These are technologies that, I don't know, theoretically a driverless car... I drive around LA. People are horrible drivers. Like some-sometimes these Waymos, I'm like, "Oh, you're driving quite safely." But then there's been multiple instances where either Waymo has called the cops on its passengers or where cops have taken footage from a Waymo where the Waymo just happened to film some other sort of like potential crime.

And so then I start thinking like, is this just an extension of the surveillance state? 

At the end of the day, if they can get a subpoena for it, that makes me uncomfortable. But a lot of times I'm thinking they won't need to get a subpoena for it. They can just go to the company, and the company will gladly deliver it to the police department because of course they want to be in good standing with them because they want to get more, approvals and expand what they're doing.

it makes me uncomfortable. Again, we can't think about what they're doing today. We have to think about where this is going to lead. And when I-- we talk about these, the police robot dogs, the quadruped spider, whatever you want to call it In theory, it sounds like, "Oh yeah, it's just going to get a, a picture of the person that's over there."

how long before they have a gun attached to it? it's gonna end up there eventually. So you have to think about where does it go with Waymos? Do we get to the point where, yeah, do you even need Flock anymore? You have the Waymos everywhere. Are they able to retain all the information and track using that information?

Is it then given to a third party or directly to the police department? Is it given to, the f- police foundation gets the information, and then is giving it to the police department? There's a lot of questions that makes me uncomfortable. 

Yeah, let- let's talk about Flock. I actually learned about this OIG report.

Pe- for people who don't know, it's Office of the Inspector General. Most, government agencies have something like this, where basically it's an oversight board that's quasi-independent. It usually is somewhat independent. Usually. Depends. it definitely depends on the department, depends on what it is.

But as we're recording, last week in LA, they came out with, an OIG report that basically found that 

the automated license plate readers in Los Angeles are being used all the time to pull over innocent people, essentially, because these license plates are ending up on a hot list, which is basically, the alert system that you can put in there.

and basically, like, because of data entry errors and all of this sort of thing, innocent people are getting pulled over because the car is suspected as stolen. 

What did you make of this whole report? I saw you posting about it quite a lot. 

Yeah, I've been on the other end of these over the last couple of years, where they've been these stops.

People who've been pulled over for these stops, and they were innocent. This happened, probably maybe a year ago was the last one. You gotta understand, O- OIG even says these are high-risk stops. So that's code word for you get this hit, they go to pull somebody over, they're not just turning on their sirens.

Before they even turn on their sirens, they're on the radio saying, "This is a code 37 stolen car. I need backup, air unit, and a supervisor." So you're asking for every cop in that area to come flying code three, lights and sirens. You're asking for the helicopter to get there, and it's gonna be there within seconds to minutes, and supervisors coming to scene immediately.

Once that happens, they're gonna be ordered out of the car, they're gonna be told to turn around, walk backwards to them, get down on the ground, lay down on the ground, helicopter in the air circling low, it's crackling. Person that's giving the command, you can barely hear what they're saying, so you have this guy who's- or woman, on the ground laying there, and they can't really hear the command, so they're kinda looking over their shoulder.

And anything can happen in those situations. Luckily, we haven't had a shooting in one of those situations, as I can remember, in, recent years. It's inevitably going to happen. And it's happening because of not a human error, but a flock error. Like you said, the OIG report, it's interesting.

It's important to understand, the inspector general, yeah, quasi-independent, but not really. the, the mayor appoints a chief, the mayor appoints the police commission, and the police commission appoints the OIG. The police commission is literally part of the LAPD. they are the head of the LAPD, and they are putting in place the OIG.

So it's like, it-- they're not really independent. With that having been said, this report was astounding because they were so f- forthcoming with the problems, and getting that sort of honesty was surprising to me. That tells you that r- the problem's way worse than we think, right? They had this flock contract.

It's been in place for three years. It wasn't even signed by the city attorney. I work in finance. if you don't have contracts signed, it's not executed. But they were operating with this MOU for three years without it. They even submit it to ethics, and it has to be resubmitted every three months, three months.

They never did that. But yet they had this contract in place. Nobody was able to get access to this contract until... The earliest I was able to find it was m- February of this year. Secret contract with Flock, and they w- When they were trying to get answers on how this data is being shared, they didn't really have answers for it.

And that report is the one that says that we're having, during a two-month period, three high-risk stops a day Because of these Flock errors on hit lists 

Yeah, I believe it's 116 in a two-month period, so- 

161, yeah. So I wanna talk a little bit about how some of those errors may have come to pass, because it does say in that OIG report, basically, like the LAPD has Motorola, it has Axon, and it has Flock.

The Motorola ALPRs and Flock ALPRs are both pole-mounted, so basically like static cameras. And then Axon, they have, I think, 2,500 of them or something like this, and they're in every single cruiser, police cruiser that, LAPD has. And basically there's like a data sharing agreement between Axon and Flock where the cops are using Flock's back end to search.

The Axon ALPRs are going into that back end. And so basically, like what's happening in addition to just like clerical errors, like typos, like people in other cities, like putting a stolen car on a hot list, what's happening is either a car is being stolen at some point and then it's either being found or misreported as stolen, and then it's supposed to be taken off of this list, and it's not.

Because they're combining data from multiple different departments or multiple different technologies at once. And I think this just speaks a little bit to the fact that cops are taking all of these different surveillance systems, like smashing them together, and the oversight is a disaster. 

I'd like to thank ICE for putting me out of a job, or at least part of my job. See, I'm the person who's been doing the frame by frame and multi-angle analyses anytime there's an incident involving ICE and a life is lost or close to it when there is footage. Because as you probably know by now, the version of events that we get from ICE on these incidents is rarely if ever accurate.

They lie straight to our faces. But like I said, I'd like to thank ICE because they just made all that work I've been doing exposing their lies and determining that they in fact have murdered people in the streets largely unnecessary moving forward. Because despite the fact that we, the taxpayers, the people that are constantly being lied to about these events, the people who are being put in danger by these actions, paid tens of millions of dollars to ensure that these agents were equipped with body cameras precisely because they cannot be trusted and we know that.

The agency's explicit policy is going to be to only release footage following an incident where a person's life is lost or someone is seriously injured if and only if, quote, "It is in the best interests of the agency to do so." Now, obviously this isn't groundbreaking, but hey, at least by making it this open and explicit, we now know two things for a fact.

Anytime they don't release the footage, number one, they're lying, and number two, it was murder. Simple as that. They have just admitted as much. This is not a leap. This is not a stretch. The only time footage of an incident is not in the best interests of the agency, the only reason the truth, the facts would be harmful to them, is if their version of events is a lie and they are responsible for the harm.

It also means that they're not just admitting it, they will be admitting to the fact that they know that they have evidence of misconduct to the highest level, and they will be choosing to do nothing about it, not externally, and most likely not internally. It actually does make them even more legally liable, which may not matter today, but one day it will matter.

Impunity is temporary. And by the way, this is worth the reminder to document everything. Do not let them intimidate you, scare you, manipulate you, or lie to you to convince you not to exercise your right to document and film their activities. You may assume that just because we spent tens of millions of dollars on body cams, that now this will be covered.

It bears repeating they just want complete control over the narrative, and we will not, cannot cede it. But anyway, thank you ICE and DHS for making it abundantly clear and admitting it publicly. Anytime there's no body cam footage, it's because you're lying and the blood is entirely on your hands. I'm gonna have so much more free time now

That's going to be it for today.

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