Ep. 251: Surveillance In America, Pt 3: Just Say No

“What the Hack?” is DeleteMe’s true cybercrime podcast hosted by Beau Friedlander

News 8 Clip: They’re easy to miss, but they’re watching you. Small cameras are popping up on the side of public roads throughout our communities.

ABC 3 Clip: But those cameras, the use of those at least, has sparked debate over surveillance and privacy concerns in Pensacola.

KOMO News Clip: Many cities in Washington have kept their license plate reader cameras off due to concerns over privacy and the access to data. The city of Stanwood says they’re turning theirs back on.

ABC 3 Clip: We need every single Flock camera turned off and uninstalled.

News 8 Clip: Now officers call them a public safety game changer. The privacy advocates say they’re a quiet expansion of government surveillance.

Beau: Something is happening. People are paying attention. Cities are pushing back. The debate that used to happen just on tech journals or podcasts like this, or an ACLU white paper, is now happening in city council chambers. So the question is no longer what these surveillance companies are doing wrong or how broken they are from a constitutional point of view. The question is now, what do you actually do about it? What does fighting back look like when the thing you’re fighting is, I mean, really an amazing number of cameras? I’m Beau Friedlander, and this is What The Hack, the podcast that asks, in a world where your data is everywhere, how do you stay safe online? Surveillance cameras have been around for decades. They were in banks, in parking lots, convenience stores. No one lost sleep over them, unless, of course, they had just committed a crime in front of one. Then the internet happened, social media, smartphones, Internet of Things, AI, data brokers, then Amazon, then Google, eBay. Ah, Pierre Omidyar is such a good guy, but still, data, data, data. Then politics became a spectator sport and started chowing down our data to achieve this or that goal. And here we are, the nightmare version of “Minority Report.”

Minority Report: Look at me. Look at me. Positive for Howard Marks. Mr. Marks, by mandate of the District of Columbia Pre-Crime Division, I’m placing you under arrest for the future murder of Sarah Marks.

Beau: Still want that retina scanner? How about the Ring camera or the digitization of your neighborhood watch in the form of a private company’s camera feeding real-time video and still images of your daily life to law enforcement and possibly secret courts?

Minority Report: It’s like my daddy used to say, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

Beau: Minus the deployment of parapsychology, you know, the Minority Report features precogs, a group of ESP unicorns captured and used to create a zero-crime world… I’m sure these companies would love to have those precogs. The world that Steven Spielberg created, right? That seemed improbable. Now, the one-eyed king is among us. It’s everywhere. It’s legion. It goes by different brand names, but its family name is surveillance. Even the precog thing seems plausible in our post-telepathy-tapes, AI-is-everywhere world.

Ring’s Jamie Siminoff thinks AI can reduce crime | Decoder: Zeroing out crime with Ring cameras, there’s a lot of steps there. Explain what you mean by we can get close to zeroing out crime.

Jamie Siminoff: And also, but I’d like to asterisk that. Like, if you go to the, the overall what I saw- Yeah, I said in certain situations. Sure. So like around neighborhoods…

Beau: That’s Ring’s chief inventor, that’s what he calls himself, Jamie Siminoff backpedaling a claim he made to Jennifer Pattison Toohey that Ring and AI could zero out crime.

Ring’s Jamie Siminoff thinks AI can reduce crime | Decoder: I think with our products in neighborhoods, and again, this is, like, you have to be a little bit specific to it. I do see a path to get where we can actually start to get to where, like, yeah, we’re take down crime in a neighborhood to, like, call it, call it close to zero. 

Beau: Zero out crime.

The Logan Bartlett Show, The $4B Tech Startup Solving Crime with AI: While at the same time, like I just said, I do generally think that in 10 years from now Flock will have eliminated crime in America…

Beau: That’s Garrett Langley, the CEO of Flock Safety. Now, there’s a cost to doing what Langley and Siminoff envision. It’s what we’re going to talk about. It’s not something you can measure in dollars or even in the number of crimes solved. Our system of government is the cost. Let that sink in. Made possible by the same ethos that gave birth to for-profit prisons, companies like Ring and Flock Safety and a host of also-rans are providing prosecutors and law enforcement with a workaround for that pesky Fourth Amendment, which, by the way, is our nation’s privacy policy. There are two parts to it. The first is the reasonable clause, which is reasonable cause, which you’ll probably recognize from police procedural shows, right? The government as represented by the police or the FBI or whatever you like, cannot search you or take your property without a reasonable justification. The law is interpreted and enforced based on determinations of what constitutes a reasonable expectation of privacy. You make a phone call to a friend, it’s reasonable to assume no one’s listening. You walk to the corner store, it’s reasonable to assume no one’s filming and recording that. You hit the garden, Madison Square Garden, to catch a game, you’re not being watched.

Eyewitness News ABC7NY New calls for Madison Square Garden to halt use of facial recognition: Calls tonight from Madison Square Garden to halt its use of facial recognition technology. In six months, Madison Square Garden Entertainment…

Beau: Okay, so it’s fair to say that it’s reasonable to assume that you are being captured by a camera a lot of the time, unless you live somewhere sparsely populated. Even so, the Fourth Amendment is super clear that the tape is not something law enforcement can use without a warrant. Because the Fourth Amendment has a protection clause for that kind of material, whether it’s video, telephone conversations, or even diary entries. The second part of the Fourth Amendment is more important, actually, here. It’s the warrant clause. Much simpler. Law enforcement needs a warrant signed by a judge before they can search you or your property.

Mapp v. Ohio: The police officers claim that they were informed that there were some paraphernalia for the numbers game in the house, and they were also informed that a person wanted for questioning in a bombing was in the house.

Beau: In May 1957, Cleveland was a numbers town. Numbers. Policy rackets. Street lottery. It ran on slips, ledgers, and cash. It was a multi-million dollar business controlled by men like Don King before he was a boxing promoter and a mobster named Shondor Burns. The Cleveland PD was under intense pressure to shut it down, and they had developed a by-any-means-necessary culture to do it. Dollree Mapp was no pushover. She’d been married to a mobster, was dating a light heavyweight boxer, and when three police officers showed up at her door on May 23rd, she did exactly what they didn’t expect. She called her lawyer. “Don’t let him in without a warrant,” he told her. So she didn’t. The police loitered outside for three hours and then they kicked the door in when they got some backup, smashing the glass. Mapp demanded to see a warrant. The sergeant held up a piece of paper. Now, according to the U.S. Supreme Court opinion, what happened next was a…

Mapp v. Ohio: She put this piece of paper into her bosom, and very readily, the police officer put his hands into her bosom and removed the paper.

Beau: However that works. So they tossed the house and found what they were looking for: numbers slips, betting gear, and in that same trunk, four books or magazines, it’s not clear, and some sketches. Among those officers, one who had reached into Dollree Mapp’s shirt, they decided those pictures were lewd and lascivious. So Ohio knows this search is dirty and the gambling charge isn’t gonna stick, but the state had a really strong obscenity statute that was easy to prosecute, and it didn’t require any explaining about how they got through the door. So they dropped the numbers charge and tried her for the books, magazines, whatever. In 1958, Dollree Mapp was convicted and sentenced to one to seven years in prison for possessing obscene literature. So she did appeal. She had a lawyer. She knew people. And in 1961, it had reached the Supreme Court. But they weren’t ruling on the obscenity charge. They ruled on the Fourth Amendment because it decided even at the state level, illegally obtained evidence had to be thrown out. No warrant, no case. So what does this have to do with surveillance companies? The ones that are currently selling millions of dollars worth of license plate readers, AI-powered cameras, and even drones to law enforcement across the nation. In 1957, the police used a tip about a numbers racket to kick in Dollree Mapp’s door and ended up busting her for pornography. In 2026, that same scenario is getting a green light. Flock Safety cameras ping a stolen plate, someone gets pulled over, there’s a gun or drugs in that car. If the ping counts as an unreasonable search, if tracking your movements without a warrant violates the Fourth Amendment, your expectation to privacy, Garrett Langley has built a system that may well end up in the dumpster behind the Supreme Court, because the company and others just like it, they’re selling a dangerous idea: that solving crime justifies anything, even our expectation of privacy as guaranteed by the law of the land. So if Mapp v. Ohio is the 60-year-old law school one-finger salute to the aspiration of a panopticon state, I thought we ought to see what’s being done about that.

404 / Jason Koebler: I’m only one person and you know, there’s lots of people doing really great work on this, but so much of it is happening at the local level, and it’s happening… it happens really slow at first, and then it explodes, and I’ve seen it time and time again.

Beau: That’s Jason Kebler. He’s the co-founder of 404 Media, which has produced some of the best reporting about Flock Safety. 

404 / Jason Koebler: You know, there’s a lot of different drone programs right now. There’s something called Drone as First Responder. This is like, basically autonomous drones that are connected to the 911 system. And so when a 911 call is placed, a drone just like automatically goes and starts recording, and this was a pretty much like unheard of thing a couple years ago and now there’s like thousands of towns that have this. And it’s largely been pushed by like a couple small-ish companies that have become really big companies by doing this. The pattern that I’ve seen over and over and over again is a new surveillance company will pilot something in a small town that often doesn’t have like a newspaper or journalist there like you sort of wouldn’t know. They get one police officer to advocate for like a pilot program for their technology. That cop wants a new toy. They try the new toy and then that cop starts advocating for other police departments to use this. Like, Hey, we use this drone program and there’s like a grant to get it for free or to try it out. And then suddenly they’re at like police tech conferences and it just like spreads from there. And it, it’s pretty crazy how quickly that can happen.

Beau: Yeah, I mean, that’s how the surveillance state started in China. It started in a small town where there was no newspaper and nobody really cared about the people there because they were Uyghur. The difference here is smart marketing dressed up as public safety. Grassroots, word of mouth, cop to cop, and it works. Part of the reason these surveillance companies are growing, part of the reason it spreads from town to town, from small town to small town, and then, you know, gets bigger without anyone really noticing, is that a lot of people feel safer when the cameras go up. Not because the data says they should, not because anyone checked, just a feeling the camera is there, therefore something is being done.

Benn: These days, one third of American households have voluntarily installed surveillance cameras inside their home that connect to a third-party cloud service. And nearly two thirds of households have outdoor cameras.

Beau: That’s Ben Jordan, who found a Flock camera outside and got curious, and that curiosity turned into two of the most watched investigations into the company anywhere on the internet, a formal security briefing with members of Congress, and a public push to warn people about the privacy concerns and security risks.

Benn: The vast majority of these camera owners have a very poor understanding of who may be able to watch the footage coming from them.

404 / Jason Koebler: The most common thing that I hear about Flock and about Ring is this idea that if you’re not doing anything criminal, then there’s nothing to worry about.

GainSec: I mean the Lewis Mon thing, like, okay, you have nothing to hide then, then let me see your phone. Like, unlock your phone and let me see it. Let me have it.

Beau: That’s John Gaines, or GainSec, an independent cybersecurity researcher who helped Benn Jordan understand what he discovered when he was looking into Flock Security systems.

GainSec: But that’s beside the point.

Beau: Am I doing anything criminal isn’t the right question to ask.

GainSec: I think that the biggest thing is like, is this necessary? But the guys that it’s law enforcement, that it’s law enforcement infrastructure, you know, so we don’t have to worry about it. That makes people feel fine. Okay. Yeah.

Beau: At some point, we moved from do we need these to how can we make them better, smarter, more, quote unquote, “efficient.” But nobody really answered the first question. We just moved on to the second. Do you actually need a camera? What’s it gonna do for you? And if the answer is it makes you feel safer, is that feeling worth what you’re paying for it? Not just in dollars, but in what you’re feeding into the system that you can’t opt out of?

Benn: If, God forbid, your house gets robbed and your doorbell camera records it, is that actually going to result in you getting your things back and your window repaired? Maybe instead of paying $200 a year for a cloud camera subscription, you could increase your homeowners or renter’s insurance to include replacement cost value.

Beau: Okay, but maybe you feel like you need the camera. Maybe you run a business and your insurance costs are lower if you install them. There are options that don’t require connecting to a cloud server, and you should think about that. It’s a kind of a pain in the butt, but you should think about it. Plenty of cameras do encrypted video and can record directly onto a memory card. You don’t even need to connect them to Wi-Fi, and there are no terms of service that come with that monthly or yearly subscription either, which is a bonus, but it is more cumbersome, to be fair.

404 / Jason Koebler: Consumers don’t read the terms of service, and that is objectively true. There’s been studies that show consumers don’t read it, but why would you, first of all, and second of all, you can’t alter these terms of service. You either have to agree to them or you don’t get to use the product or own the product.

Beau: Terms of service are not a contract between equals. You didn’t get to negotiate. You can’t change them. Like Jason said, you either accept what they’ve decided for you, or you don’t get to use the product. And what they’ve decided can change at any time.

Benn: I actually, I had Ring cameras around the house here, and I was like part of that ecosystem and I mean, I had been thinking about taking them down for a long time and I had taken a bunch down. And I actually contacted Amazon’s customer support and just sort of stuck with it for about an hour, just chatting with them and got a refund for $800 worth of Ring cameras that, some of which are like two years old, and they literally, I’m just gonna like pile ’em in a box and return ’em. And it was because their terms of service changed and ’cause of all that stuff. And I was just like, yeah, they’re useless to me now, so I want my money back. And they’re like, okay, we’re gonna make a one-time exception. It’s like, all right.

Beau: Well now, and if you’re listening right now and you think like that’s a one-time exception, you’re absolutely wrong. The fact is, if they’re gonna change their privacy policies, let’s say they sold it again, let’s say Flock bought Ring at some later point from Amazon, you know, we would be looking at a situation where you would absolutely be able to say, I don’t want these anymore. Take ’em back. And they would have to take them. It’s amazing the money you can find in the couch when people, when it comes to tech and people doing evil things.

Benn: Oh, yeah.

Beau: You might not be able to do much about the camera on a pole outside your house, but so what can you do? There’s one camera you for sure have control over, the one that you bought, the one you installed, the one you’re paying a subscription every month to a company whose terms of service you didn’t read and couldn’t change anyway if you did. We were safe before our homes had cameras. Not perfectly safe. Nobody’s ever been perfectly safe, but we’ve managed and whatever that package was that got stolen off your porch, there’s a decent chance that Amazon or whoever will just send you another one. That’s how it works now. So before we talk about fighting the surveillance infrastructure you didn’t choose, it’s worth asking whether you want to start by dismantling the one you did. Take them down. See what happens. Probably nothing. And if you still feel like you need something, get a camera that records a memory card. Skip the cloud, skip the subscription. The footage is yours, and it stays yours. Fill your front yard with geese. Geese are really good at this sort of thing. Anyway. So if the first step is asking whether you actually need a camera on your home by your door, what’s next? Here’s one way to think about it. Privacy isn’t binary. It’s not something you either have or you don’t. It’s more like a surface area. Every camera, every social media post, every job listing that’s your LinkedIn, it’s all surface area. You just made yourself a little more visible with each one of those things. Taking down your Ring camera shrinks that surface area. You know, going online and having your, you know, having a company like DeleteMe remove your personal data doesn’t make you invisible, but it reduces that surface area. Invisible isn’t really the goal. The goal is something simpler, like to not be watched by people who shouldn’t be watching.

Benn: There’s a funny, funny trivia is that Garrett Langley bought his home through a trust so he could hide his address.

Beau: Garrett Langley, the founder and CEO of Flock? 

Benn: Yeah. 

Beau: Now I have a friend who bought their house through a trust, and, and they, and let’s just say their name was, Quigley Copper and Old Quigley Copper called the LLC Quigley copper, LLC.

Benn: Hmm.

Beau: Didn’t work. No.

Benn: Oh, I know where Garrett Langley lives. Like, it still didn’t work, but it, but I thought it was ironic that somebody who thinks that we’re all safer when we know data about everybody and where they’re all traveling and stuff like that went through such great lengths to hide his address.

Beau: The person selling surveillance to your police department didn’t want to be surveilled, which tells you everything you need to know about who these systems are actually built for. And nowhere is that more clear than in this little story, something that happened in Mountain View, California.

KRON 4 Clip: On Friday, the city of Mountain View released a statement that multiple federal law enforcement agencies accessed data from one of Mountain View’s ALPR cameras. Mountain View officials say this is a system failure on Flock safety’s part. But Saturday, Brian Hofer, executive director for Secure Justice says, this is farthest from the truth.

Clip: These features are not turned on by default. So when Mountain View says, oh, we don’t have any idea how this happened, well, it’s someone from your department turned it on and provided that access. That’s the real story.

Beau: In August of 2024 in Mountain View, California, the city launched a Flock Safety pilot program, 30 brand-new cameras. After a few months, someone ran a routine audit and buried in the results was something that shouldn’t have been there. 29 of the 30 cameras had been opened up to outside agencies. This wasn’t approved by the city of Mountain View. It wasn’t approved by anyone. The city said they had no idea. A door was left open in a house and you thought it was locked. Look, maybe it was on purpose, maybe not. Maybe this was just a glitch or someone not setting it up right. Although a glitch like this probably should have been fixed before it was shipped. It probably shouldn’t have been possible. But for months, agencies Mountain View never authorized were looking through their cameras. What agencies? It’s still not entirely clear. What did they do with what they saw? No idea. No one knows. That should bother you. And that’s the thing that should keep us all up at night. It isn’t a nation state hacker breaking a heavily guarded system. This is a system setting, a default that got changed or maybe never even got correctly set in the first place that was just broadcasting anyone who happened to be there. And somewhere someone was watching a feed and they never were supposed to see in a city and a population that had, they had no idea they were being watched. California even had a law that said this was illegal. It didn’t matter.

KRON 4 Clip: California Senate Bill 34, a state law that restricts how automated license plate reader data can be shared, especially with out of state and federal agencies. This law is 10 years old. SB 34 went into effect January 1st, 2016 .

Beau: So when we talk about who’s watching and what they’re gonna do with that, we don’t know. And that’s not a bug if that’s how the system was built.

Benn: You know, one thing that, another thing to be scared about…

Beau: Benn Jordan again.

Benn: That I’ve been thinking about a lot this week is, this week we met my friend, Jason Hunyar. He’s basically a resident of Dunwoody, Georgia, and he’s been pulling FOIA records for the last couple months and spending an arm and leg on it. And he had found out that Flock employees and the Dunwoody police officers, they’ve been watching cameras that aggregate to Flock through, you know, it’s like a third party camera that aggregates their data to Flock.

Beau: Meaning you could get the benefit, I guess benefit, of Flock’s network and their AI services, but with a camera that Flock didn’t sell you, maybe one that you’ve already installed.

Benn: Basically this Jewish community center was worried about anti-Semitic attacks or something. So they agreed to share their stuff with Flock so the police would’ve access to it in case something happened. And then what ended up happening, they ended up having, people or random employees from Flock just, you know, 60-year-old dudes watching the gymnastics room of children, a children’s gymnastics room in a preschool center and stuff like that. And then police just randomly spending their days watching the footage here. I mean, it’s like things like that. It’s like, that’s that, that doesn’t sound like safety to me at all. That sounds terrifying.

Beau: Just to be clear, in case you had trouble following that, Flock doesn’t just run their own cameras. They can also take footage from any third-party camera. Security cameras at a business, a parking lot, a community center. If you own a store and you have a camera out front, Flock can connect to that. Now Flock Safety says in their contract that only authorized users can access that footage. Not even Flock Safety employees can. 

Benn: Bob Carter searched the flock database 63 times last year for all sorts of things, like “person on skateboard” or “yellow truck.” But the problem is, Bob isn’t a Dunwoody police officer. He’s not a police officer at all. He’s flock’s VP of Business Development and also a registered lobbyist. Also, according to public records, on September 30th of last year, this same Flock safety employee logged on and accessed a camera in the gymnastics room of the MJCC in Dunwoody, and as it would turn out, Bob is not the only Flock employee that accessed these gym’s cameras. Randy Gluck is also in the audit accessing these cameras on three separate occasions on three separate days. Between Flock employees, police officers, and names that I can’t trace back to either organization, you can see the combined hours of these people watching strangers and children through this facility’s cameras, including, but certainly not limited to the pool, the Fitline studio and the preschool, daycare areas.

Beau: The fact that these systems are being marketed as law enforcement, but are in fact private sector projects where if it were government there would probably be more oversight over how they were used and who has access, and we’re now in an ecosystem where there’s no oversight because, I mean, they’re not even using software that protects the machinery.

Benn: At the very least, it would be less of a waste of money. Right? Like, well, like if the government was spying on people directly, they wouldn’t be paying, you know, billions of dollars to data brokers, that stay in business through that. But I mean, that’s like. That’s literally the worst case scenario by doing it directly through the government, not through third parties, and obviously it can only get better there with like regulation and things like that.

Beau: Which leads us to the next thing that we can at least push for, which is regulation. 

Benn: It’s to the point where like with this Flock thing, people will reach out and say, Hey, this senator wants to speak to you. And I, and at this point I’m just kinda like, I don’t, I can’t really make it happen. Like just because I know how it’s gonna go. And I know that even if they, I manage to motivate them and even if they just repeat Flock stuff to me over and over again and I manage to like get them on the other side of it, what are they gonna do? Write a bill and pass it? ’cause that’s crazy talk in 2026.

Beau: Well, what do they say about the USDA angle? What do they say about that? I mean, I’m sure you’ve said that to senators. What’s the response when you say you wouldn’t allow, you wouldn’t allow the local butcher to do this?

Benn: Oh, I mean, but it’s almost as if you like go into McDonald’s and the person working at the front that’s taking your order and you’re like, Hey, if you use a little bit less salt, in your burger recipe, you will make this much more money. And less people will get food poisoning. I figured this out. I have all the paperwork here. They’re gonna say, okay I’ll talk to my assistant manager about it. It’ll never get to the top. You know, like it’ll, it is just one of those things. Like, that’s sort of where we’re at right now with politics. ‘Cause like, well, I mean, okay, great example. I’m supposed to be in DC and I was gonna go to New York and DC, and in DC I was going to meet with a bunch of different senators or just general people in Congress talking about this very thing and about passing this law and things that, you know, remediation strategies for, like how we could do this and, you know, needs happen on a local level, on the state level and yada, yada, yada. And, for the second time, the government shut down and everything is being postponed. And so it’s just like, okay, this is a matter of national security that’s been shut down twice because like, you know, because of how ineffective our government is right now.

Nate: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the most straightforward way is just to bypass the courts and Congress just has to fix our data privacy laws.

Beau: This is Nathan Freed Wessler.

Nate: Congress could tomorrow. And there have been very serious proposals to do two different things, each of which would address this problem.

Beau: Nathan Freed Wessler is the deputy director with the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project where he focuses on litigation and advocacy around surveillance and privacy issues, including government searches of electronic devices, requests for sensitive data held by third parties, yada, yada, yada. Here’s what you want to know about Nate, is he argued the Carpenter versus United States case that has changed the way that tech and the Fourth Amendment interact for hopefully ever. 

Nate: One is just general consumer data privacy legislation to dry up the abusive data broker market that’s gathering and monetizing incredible volumes of information about us. It’s location records, but it’s also our purchasing records from online and retail establishments. It’s our browsing history. It’s everything. And it just creates this incredible detailed look. an encyclopedia about every one of us that then is for sale. One of the buyers for that is law enforcement, but there are lots of commercial buyers, and then of course there are hackers, there are extortionists, there are lots of reasons to worry about that. So that’s one thing Congress should do. The other thing is a piece of legislation called the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. That has very strong bipartisan support. In fact, it passed the house in the last Congress passed it with more votes from Republican members than from Democratic members. Republicans were more unified in support than Democrats were, and this would just close the loophole for law enforcement. It would say, police cannot pay money to get location data or other sensitive records that they otherwise outside of this data broker market would’ve needed a warrant for. It’s a really easy fix and one that Congress can just pass anytime now.

Beau: Yeah. Now here’s the, there’s the rub. Congress can pass this law. Now, I don’t want to get into the politics of why a law like that wouldn’t be passed any more than I want to talk about the CFPB right now. But it is a hot potato. Shouldn’t be, but it is. And there, and it’s because there’s money on the table. And the money that’s on the table is being protected by who– you all know who you are. If you’re listening, I doubt you are listening because I doubt you care very much about privacy if I’m talking about you in such a pejorative way. But here’s the deal. Flock Safety comes to mind. And Ring now with it’s quote unquote social searching, you know, like, let’s go find the dog, or, you know, the person who we don’t want in our home, you know, our HOA or whatever. So was… this law sounds like it’s kind of tailor-made for the problem that is Flock Safety. But the problem is, we live in a country where you’re very busy because there’s so many things wrong with privacy and surveillance in this country. There just needs to be somebody slapping the hand that’s grabbing all this dough attached to all this data and it hasn’t happened. There is no CFPB for privacy and surveillance and those issues in the United States. Do you foresee anything like that happening? I know there’s legislation to try and make something like that happen, but what’s your, what’s your take? ‘Cause you’re, you’re in the middle of it.

Nate: Yeah. I mean, I think, I think right now, state governments are maybe the best hope, right? There are, you know, a small number of state attorneys general who are actually taking some of these questions very seriously. There are a small number of states where legislatures have passed consumer data privacy legislation that has some teeth. None of them have gotten as far as we would want, but there are some good faith efforts. And I think over time, you know, maybe in a few years we could see the Federal Trade Commission reinvigorated and really, you know, there were some important enforcement actions that it took over the last decade. Much of that has dried up, but it could come back pretty quickly in a new administration. And none of those are gonna fix everything at once, but we need to kind of cover the field and those can make a difference. This current presidential administration with ICE and CBP, Department of Homeland Security, that’s really just running wild. We have to, you know, think really critically about who are the entities that can help protect us, and the tech companies actually have a really important role. One of the issues that I work a lot on these days are abusive administrative subpoenas by ICE to the tech companies trying to get information about people who are just posting stuff online, on social media, critical of these incredibly abusive immigration raids and other enforcement actions that are happening.

Beau: What’s actually happening there?

Nate: So we, people are posting online, often under, you know, social media handles and-

Beau: And saying “ICE is bad”?

Nate: ICE is bad or posting a photo of ICE brutalizing someone or ripping them outta their car in a, you know, out in the open in a neighborhood.

Beau: A murder.

Nate: That’s right. And then you have ICE sending subpoenas to the tech companies to try to get the information about who that poster is. They’re using just a handle, some social media handle, trying to get their name-

Beau: That sounds not just illegal, but that sounds terrifying.

Nate: It’s terrifying. It’s a violation of the First Amendment. It’s actually statutorily illegal. And what we really need is the tech companies to stand up as strongly as they can, scrutinize those requests, push back on them, go to court, and protect us.

Beau: Are they, are they?

Nate: They are starting to do better, but they’re missing a lot of them. They’re not, you know, I think they’re pushing back in quiet ways. Sometimes they’re providing notice to people sometimes that these subpoenas have come, but there’s more they could do, to be out front, because they’re the ones who know about it. They have to, they have to protect us. We often can’t protect ourselves.

Beau: So that’s something that I find frightening, Nate, which is that you just said that companies like Meta and X and TikTok have to protect us. I don’t think they feel that way.

Nate: At, you know, their motive is to make money. Now, hopefully they understand that they’re gonna lose customers if their privacy practices are bad enough and get enough coverage. So I think they have some incentives in the other direction, but it’s not a good place where we have to rely on them to be the watchers. We really need stronger laws and state legislatures and congress and cities need to step in and set strong durable rules and to keep them updated to protect all of us.

Beau: Here’s where we started. Cameras went up and people felt safer, not because the data said they should, just a feeling. But feelings aren’t facts, they aren’t policy, and they’re certainly not law. Dollree Mapp had a feeling too. She felt like she should call her lawyer, that she had rights and that they meant something, and she was right. The question now is whether we believe that, whether the feeling of safety is worth what we’re trading for it, because what we’re trading for it is the thing itself. So what does that leave us with?

Benn: One thing that I really like about my platform, and one thing that I’m trying to really push more is that you can still fight back with technology. Like the stuff that like Flock has access to or the stuff that the police have access to is not exclusive to them. And a lot of times when we think of like government power and military tech and stuff, we imagine this like almost like, you know, action movie-esque type, James Bond world, where it’s like, no, like it’s not that advanced. Like most of the stuff is insecure or most of this stuff that you can build something to I guess help preserve your privacy and you can take these extra measures, but it needs to be more accessible so my mom can do it. It needs to be more accessible so somebody who, you know, isn’t comfortable, side loading apps or something like that can, can use this stuff. And, and especially when it comes to things like ICE, especially when it comes to things like IMSI catchers, like all, all this stuff is… you can defend yourself against it. And I really like the idea of trying to motivate people to keep digging in that direction. And I think SEO, one…like I was really bummed out by it at first, because it does like, suppress my video. It definitely suppresses John Gaines’ research. Like I didn’t know about John’s work until I was, well, like he reached out to me on Instagram because like he couldn’t get in touch with me, like, you know, just through like some other network.

Beau: GainSec. That’s GainSec. For those of you who are in that world, he doesn’t, he doesn’t, pop up at all, I think for quite a while. Is it any different? I haven’t checked, because I think those are all…I think DuckDuckGo is-

Benn: DuckDuckGo, you can find him.

Beau: But it’s powered by Bing. That’s part of why. And it’s different search, but-

Benn: It’s definitely better. One positive thing that Flock Safety has done for me is fully convinced me to stop using Google, which is like, kind of funny. Like, just because I found out how bad it was and I was like, this, it, like, and I’m, this is, I’m not using hyperbole here. Like it, if you search Flock Safety security vulnerability, Flock Safety ICE, anything like that on Google, and look at it, you will fully realize how utterly useless Google is at what it’s supposed to be doing. Like-

Beau: But you will find you on YouTube and they do own that.

Benn: yes. Yeah. they can’t really, I’m making Google too much money to, for them to, that’s a whole new level. But, yeah, I mean, it’s actually ridiculous. Like, you could go pages in before seeing any sort of like, legitimate journalism that is, you know, usually by a major source or by a well-respected source.

Beau: Well, let me ask you. Did you know that? And is, do, do you think that there’s any, is that just an algorithmic thing or is there suppression happening on Google?

GainSec: I mean, look, I’m gonna say, like if you were to ask me about what happened to my last job, I’m not gonna speculate.

Beau: This is GainSec again. He’s part of the story in a unique way because he spent months researching the vulnerabilities of Flock and he documented over 50 of them. Then he tried to report them back to Flock to let them know, like, “Hey, something’s up.” Sent his findings to the government to be like maybe you should look into this. And then he was let go from his job.

GainSec: The timing is suspicious. You know, it’s in the same sense that, you know, if you look at the three PR statements they put out about my research, like, you know, we’ve been working together. But I didn’t know that, so…

Beau: Wow. That actually says it all. Thankfully, as more and more have been reporting this is not so much the case anymore. But that doesn’t mean the underlying problem got fixed. I mean, it sounds, it sounds sort of like…years and years ago, I’m guessing it was a little more than 10 years ago when all those CCTVs were found all, you know, like there was just, you could go to websites where there are thousands and thousands and thousands of feeds and people who used the default password. Like it sounds like nothing’s changed, you know, maybe it’s become a little harder, but like that we’re still there. Are we still there?

GainSec: So to answer you, I think to drill down your question, like, was there an expectation of privacy? Like, I think that would be a hard argument, you know, when these camera feeds ended up, right exposed. It’s like, you know, you could have the understanding that you’re building this to be internal, but like everything else on the internet, right, you need to assume that like, it’ll eventually it’ll end up there. So.

Beau: Yeah, and if you’re laaw enforcement, you have to assume that with like a bag of chips.

GainSec: Yeah, I think, I mean, I’m kind of past the point in the realm of security to expect more from anything, but I really thought that like, okay, this round of research people are going to care. Okay, what needs to happen before you say it’s not okay? You know?

Beau: Is Flock Safety right now creating a structural workaround for the Fourth Amendment in the United States?

Nate: Yeah, I think it’s tremendously dangerous. Yes, it is.

Beau: This is Nate Wessler again from the ACLU.

Nate: There’s litigation about this right now in the federal courts and state courts under the Fourth Amendment or state constitutions, about what you do with a company that’s putting a whole bunch of location trackers, right? These license plate reader cameras scattered around our cities. And then the really pernicious thing is feeding all that location data into giant databases, right? That Flock is, you know, the most controversial these companies, but it’s not the only one. There are other-

Beau: No, there’s a whole cohort.

Nate: Right, DRN, that are doing similar things. And these databases have billions and billions of plate reads, right? And by plate reads, I mean geotagged records of where every car that goes past anywhere of these cameras is, and the time it’s there. And it doesn’t take too many cameras around a city to then create a durable record of where we’re going and when, and not just a particular person who’s suspected of a crime, but all of us, right? It’s then this record, just sitting there, ripe for the picking. And that’s dangerous. And we’ve seen around Flock in particular, we’ve seen that, you know, despite Flock saying that it won’t sign a contract directly with ICE for immigration enforcement, we’ve seen tons of audit logs now showing ICE agents just asking their buddies and local police forces to run searches for them. We’ve seen records showing that police in Texas were tracking a woman who went to Illinois for an abortion, a Texas resident, using these license plate reader cameras. These cameras, you know, one of the things about Flock and some of the other systems that is so dangerous, it’s not just localized tracking. The profit motive, the profit model of these companies is to create a nationwide database that they can sell access to, right? So it might be that police in, say, Norfolk, Virginia, you know, have 140 or 180 of these cameras around their own city, but the database they get access to isn’t just the Norfolk cameras. It’s cameras nationwide. And so they could track a car starting in Virginia as it winds its way across the country, or they could just look and see, oh, what’s going on in Illinois right now? We wanna know what cars are doing there, what this particular person was doing in this time period. And it’s literally just at the click of a button, unless courts can step in and say, no, no. The Fourth Amendment applies here too, because this location record is so sensitive.

Beau: Well, the insanity of this is that the Fourth Amendment does apply here. It’s obvious. It is obvious that I have the expectation of privacy going to the supermarket, because if I don’t then this is kind of like Covid but the whole world has turned into quarantine. There’s no place. There is no place to be in the whole world where you are literally not known and not tracked. Now, we already know that we’re carrying a tracking device in our pockets, most of us. Right? Now, unless you have very specific hygiene habits. Like, look at me. Do I look normal? No. Okay, I know that. Whatever. I got this phone, right? Do you know, I turn it off all the time when I’m going places for a reason, ’cause I just want to pollute their data, and I turn it on when I need it, and I think that’s something people don’t realize. Like, that seems a little extreme. It’s not extreme at all. I mean, tell me what extreme looks like to you. I mean, is my behavior of trying to evade it, which is not working, I’m not using Meshtastic to, you know, communicate all the time, is that extreme, or is what Flock Safety and its cohort of companies are doing with license plate readers extreme? Which one is the extreme?

Nate: Yeah, I mean, your question, you know, your question to me answers itself. Of course these companies are the extreme ones. And you know, we, I think it’s really critical. You know, just to say that like, we shouldn’t be living in a society where every individual has to figure out if they can help themselves to maintain privacy because these digital systems aren’t designed to let us do that, right? These surveillance systems are designed actually to force us into surveillance, so yes. You know, smartphones have some features that can help, right? Like I turn location services off on my phone unless I’m actively using a map or some other app where I like literally right now need to know my GPS location. So there’s, you know, just less chance of apps, random apps monetizing my information most of the time. That’s great. It’s, you know, it’s not hard to do, but I have to remember to do it and it’s not something that automatically will turn on and off. And that’s actually a lot to ask of people who are busy. We all have a lot on our minds. We all have a bunch of tech. What we really need are legal solutions. We need legal rules that cut off avenues for abuse. So things like courts saying that, as you said, of course, pervasive vehicle tracking by this network of private cameras, operated by police is a Fourth Amendment search. And at the very least, if you’re gonna have these cameras dumping into a database, police shouldn’t be able to go into that database unless they’ve gone to a judge and gotten a warrant first.

Beau: If you’re interested in this area, I want you to go and subscribe to Benn Jordan’s YouTube channel and check out his work on Flock Safety and also, really, really important, go to 404 media and subscribe. They’ve been covering this beat. They have no rival in journalism right now when it comes to this topic, so go check out 404 Media. Check out Benn Jordan and subscribe. Do your homework. The more you learn, the more you will want to do something about this. So now it’s time for the Tinfoil Swan, our paranoid takeaway to keep you safe on and offline. This week’sTinfoil Swan, you’ve just been listening to it for however long this episode is. You know, if you are concerned about these cameras, write to your lawmakers and talk to them. I mean, Ron Wyden and Rand Paul, who we’re gonna be talking to on this show, put forward an act, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. It could change things. While you’re waiting for that to happen, I want you to do something simpler. I want you to, if you’re using any surveillance in, around your house, I want you to try and take it offline. Don’t let it feed into the cloud. Look at what you’re sharing and to whom, and take some agency over it. If you feel like… Listen, if you are on… There’s sides here, right? Privacy, not privacy sides. If you don’t believe in the Fourth Amendment anymore, or if you think that’s a carve-out in the Constitution, that’s your right, I guess. But as long as it’s the law of the land, I do suggest turning off the features that are in conflict with the law of the land. And that’s it. Stay safe out there. Be smart. Be a privacy protector when you can and we’ll talk to you next week. This episode of What the Hack was produced by me and Andrew Steven who also did the editing. Our theme music is by Andrew Steven. If you think you heard Benn Jordan’s music in the mix, you’re right. There’s some other stuff, but there’s some Benn Jordan too. Check him out on Bandcamp or wherever you get your stuff. What the Hack is a production of DeleteMe, which was picked by the New York Times’ Wirecutter as the #1 personal information removal service. You should be using it already. If you’re not and you want to, well, you can. Here’s what to do. Go to joindeleteme.com/wth. That’s joindeleteme.com/wth and get 20% off. I kid you not, 20%. 20% off. That’s joindeleteme.com/wth. Now stay safe out there. See you around.

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