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Cultivating Resistance to Flock and the Expanding Surveillance State
2 Plays3 seconds ago
The mass proliferation of Flock cameras and other means of state spying has slowly inaugurated an era characterized by the most dense concentration of surveillance experienced in human history. Over the past two decades the US has witnessed the development of an integrated public-private surveillance apparatus where the outputs of dozens of integrated private surveillance tools are allowed to be cross-referenced using AI facilitated analysis.
In this episode we speak with Joan and Jeff about the proliferation of Flock systems, their roll in a growing mass surveillance apparatus, some of the actions that are being taken to fight back, and how to support those that have fallen into the clutches of the state. We review the growth of the police in the US from their origins in slave patrols and private police agencies to today, where they are a force tens of thousands strong, with military capabilities, and their hands on a mass privatized surveillance apparatus. Finally we discuss the role direct action can play in public campaigns against Flock and other surveillance systems.
A fundraiser is active to support two comrades who were sentenced to months in jail for being accused of destroying multiple flock cameras. The fundraiser is going toward restitution, court fees, lawyer fees, commissary, postage and writing supplies, medical fees, phone time, etc., and a cushion for recovering from jail and solitary confinement when they are released.
To donate, venmo @deez_zines. If you donate $20+ and want a thank you gift, send proof of donation and an address to deez_zines@tutamail.com. Any amount helps. Thank you!
Resources:
https://haveibeenflocked.com/ - See if a license plate turned up in FOIA'd documents regarding flock
https://www.atlasofsurveillance.org/ - Reference of what surveillance technologies different police departments have
https://deflock.org/ - Community-sourced map of flock cameras, flock-avoiding navigation
https://colonelpanic.tech/ - OUI Spy device may help find flock cameras, a bit technical. (source code: https://github.com/colonelpanichacks/oui-spy)
https://www.notrace.how/ - Database of security resources, a threat library, and more! Visit on a public-access computer/using tails https://tails.net/
Birds of a Feather Destroy Flock Together - Zine on Flock cameras https://www.sproutdistro.com/catalog/zines/direct-action/birds-feather-flock/
News Articles Mentioned
https://www.404media.co/home-depot-and-lowes-share-data-from-hundreds-of-ai-cameras-with-cops/
https://www.daytondailynews.com/local/morning-briefing-dayton-releases-flock-camera-data/article_494658d4-c8a7-5eb8-91b9-517238b894c7.html
https://www.fox21online.com/news/political/ashland-police-department-to-remove-flock-cameras-from-city/article_794afeda-e1e4-4762-84c0-3952d291204c.html
https://www.404media.co/footage-shows-cop-stalking-woman-he-met-on-a-tv-set-after-surveilling-her-with-a-license-plate-reader/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Theme
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello. You're listening to The Beautiful Idea, a podcast from a collective of several anarchist and autonomous media producers scattered around the world. We're bringing you interviews and stories from the front lines of autonomous social movements and struggles, as well as original commentary and analysis.
00:00:25
Speaker
Follow us on Mastodon and at thebeautifulidea.show. Thanks for listening.
Climate Change and Surveillance Systems
00:00:44
Speaker
All right, everyone, welcome back to The Beautiful Idea. Today, i am coming to you from the northern edge of the Double Heat Dome, where we can definitely tell that climate change is real.
00:00:57
Speaker
It's incredibly hot here, like dangerously so. And yeah, I think this is one more reminder of the unfortunate future that many of us have have in store for us. So today we're going to talk about flock systems, but not just flock systems, because talking about flock systems always involves talking about many other things.
00:01:18
Speaker
We're going to be talking about the integration of surveillance systems, right? Flock cameras being the specific focus of discussion for today. But we're going to be talking about the ways that surveillance systems have grown from, you know, expensive individual individualized systems.
00:01:34
Speaker
to massive backend data matrices that can be referenced by ai bots and all kinds of things, right? And so we're going to get into some actions that have been happening in resistance to Flock very specifically. And we're going to talk about sort of what the shape of that system looks like in the United States today, and maybe some mechanisms that we can use to to
Anarchist Indictments and Government Resistance
00:01:55
Speaker
push back. But before we get there,
00:01:57
Speaker
I want to talk a little bit about what happened in in Minneapolis. So for most of you, I'm sure you're aware that 15 anarchists have been indicted in Minneapolis for you know allegedly conspiring to impede federal operations.
00:02:11
Speaker
The indictment is very long. It's like 94 pages long. It feels very much like it was written by AI. The things that they focus on in this indictment are things like you know shocking, horrible things like standing in a road during a road blockade when there's hundreds of other people around in the road or wait, driving a truck at a protest.
00:02:33
Speaker
That's crazy. Or even crazier going to meetings or even crazier, for some people, being on a tour. That what was happening here in Minneapolis, what we saw involved thousands of people doing incredibly brave things to stand up to a federal occupation of their city.
00:02:56
Speaker
The thing that these defendants did differently is that they were public about their involvement and they were anarchists while doing so. That we have to focus right now on a sort of fundamental core part of modern history, which is that that history is full of people who have seen government tyranny and taken a fundamental stand.
00:03:22
Speaker
And we don't demonize those people for the most part. We have holidays to them. We make statues in their honor. We talk about their work as fundamental in the attempt to try and find some measure of justice in this incredibly fucked up world that we live in. Right. That every one of these people, whether we're talking about union organizers, civil rights leaders, student radicals, pacifists that sat outside of nuclear power plants,
00:03:47
Speaker
Anarchists in black, right, have all participated in the activities that are outlined in this indictment, right? That it's nothing less than the attempt to criminalize the very basic act of community self-defense against tyranny.
Political Dynamics and Regime Critique
00:04:02
Speaker
It's something that we should take as a ah fundamental, irreducible ability that we hold in our hands, right? But at the same time that that's happening, we also have to interpret what it is. That this is a show fundamental sign of weakness, right? That it's an attempt to kind of claw back something from a defeat that now that we can look at it in retrospect,
00:04:24
Speaker
we can see really broke a lot of their ability to have forward momentum, right? That since January, this regime has been stuck in a cycle in which they're expending political capital, energy, resources, just to maintain all the threads that they have going at once.
00:04:43
Speaker
So instead of making forward progress, now they have to expend a bunch of momentum on trying to convince people that somebody sabotaged a reflecting pool. Or trying to convince people that what what is going on in Iran makes any sense at all and that they're winning.
00:04:58
Speaker
Or trying to convince people that the economic situation is stable when gas is $5 a gallon, right? All of these things are taking up all the energy and momentum that otherwise in the first year that this regime was in power, they were putting into gaining forward momentum.
00:05:14
Speaker
And we can look in hindsight at the point in which that broke. And right now, it looks like that broke in the streets of Minneapolis.
Societal Collapse and Community Solidarity
00:05:22
Speaker
So that we need to understand that what's happening here, you know, and we sort of have been talking about this since the beginning of this administration, is that the dynamics of concentrating power and the dynamics of the sort of devolution of the ability of the federal bureaucracy to function for any number of reasons.
00:05:42
Speaker
has sort of hit a point in which now we're dealing with a collapse dynamic. But what does that really mean? Right. It doesn't mean that tomorrow the administration falls.
00:05:53
Speaker
It definitely doesn't mean that things get easier for us. But really what it does mean is that this collapse process, when we look at it historically, tends to exist in fits and starts.
00:06:05
Speaker
It tends to be indicated by desperate measures like this, right? It tends to be indicated by strategic overreaches like what's going on in Iran. That this means that we're going to have a couple of very difficult years ahead of us as the situation degrades further. you know The planet warms, we become less and less able to make ends meet, and that we're kind of trapped in this cycle as the regime lashes out, trying to gain any lost momentum.
00:06:31
Speaker
These years are going to be difficult. But what we have learned in the past as anarchists that have gone through mass defense before, and I know I've been doing this for 25 years now,
00:06:42
Speaker
I've lost count of how many times I've seen mass defense situations sort of emerge. We've always gotten through that and we've always gotten through crisis in the same way. And that's by banding together, acting where we can, disrupting the things that try and destroy us and coming out stronger on the other side.
00:07:00
Speaker
It's going to be a difficult time. The things that we're seeing in the Minneapolis indictment are nothing less than a blatant attempt to punish people that the state puts at the center of a narrative in which they lost.
00:07:14
Speaker
That will become more common as they lose more and more. right And so these next years are going to be difficult. But you know just as we did with the Atlanta case, just as we do with J-20 before this, like we have to stick together. We have to raise money for people's legal defense. Link will be down in show notes.
00:07:31
Speaker
But we have to take this indictment specifically seriously, because what they are trying to do is they are trying to criminalize people. our very ability to organize together as a group of people for our own self-defense and our own autonomy.
00:07:47
Speaker
And that is and irreducible building block for us to be able to push forward at all. So we're not here just sort of fighting about like people being unjustly indicted. We are actually fighting an indictment, which is challenging our very right to exist as anarchists that do politics.
00:08:08
Speaker
And so I want everyone to pay attention to this case. It's going to start playing out relatively soon. I know we're going to have people that are working on support on this show in the very, very near future. So pay attention to what's going on in Minneapolis and how that case is playing out.
Evolution of Surveillance and Policing
00:08:22
Speaker
One of the things that's coming up in that case is this fundamental shift in the way that we experience surveillance. that In this indictment repeatedly, there's all kinds of mentions of following people, getting camera footage from public cameras, getting cell phone location data, all sorts of things.
00:08:43
Speaker
flat camera reads, all sorts of things that we're dealing with beginning to understand the growth of a surveillance apparatus, which is far bigger and far more complex than anything that we've dealt with as humans prior to this.
00:08:58
Speaker
So before we get into what is going on, it makes sense to get into where we came from. That, you know, I do operational security stuff. One of the things that I run into a lot is a sort of defeatism.
00:09:11
Speaker
This idea that this condition is irreversible and total and that we just sort of have to accept it. And it's not really worth doing all of the things that you have to do in order to have operational security.
00:09:26
Speaker
Now, I would say that tends to be a perspective that is voiced by people that are newer to direct action rather than people that have been around for a long time. But nonetheless, it is a view that is out there.
00:09:36
Speaker
But I think the thing to highlight about that view is that that view seems to posit a certainty, of permanence to a condition which is actually incredibly new.
00:09:47
Speaker
You know, there's a tendency to think of police as something which are always there. But if we really look back into American history, we see that policing agencies really began You know, not much before the Civil War. um They began with private inspectors who were being used to break unions. They began with slave catching outfits, right? Bounty hunters, things like this.
00:10:06
Speaker
And from that route, formal outfitted police forces with rank and command structures started to slowly emerge. But even into the beginning of the 20th century, we are talking about police forces that are fraction of the size of the ones that exist today. So when the FBI was birthed, just to give you all a bit of an idea, when the FBI was birthed out of the Bureau of Investigation, the entire Department of Justice fit inside of a large D.C. mansion.
00:10:34
Speaker
Now, it was a three-story D.C. mansion, mind you. But the entire Department of Justice, everybody, the whole Department of Investigation, everybody, fit into a large DC mansion. And this was at a period of time just after people had telephones, right? Still most inter-office communications were happening over telegraph.
00:10:50
Speaker
People were not traveling long distances. That's how many federal agents existed at the beginning of the 20th century. Now that grew rapidly during prohibition and that grew rapidly during the repression of the anarchist movement. And then later the repression of the communist movement in the United States. And by the time we get to World War II, we start to see a relatively massive bureaucracy starting to build itself up. But it's still a bureaucracy which is built on isolated agencies.
00:11:19
Speaker
It's still a bureaucracy which doesn't have many advanced means of doing surveillance and intelligence gathering. They could do phone taps. They could listen to radio waves. They could do things like this.
00:11:30
Speaker
But they didn't really have freely available cameras, for example. Starting in the nineteen sixty s Actually, one of the first uses of the American internet was to exchange criminal records between FBI offices.
00:11:44
Speaker
And so they figured out a way to digitize the records. They put them into publicly accessible computers. They linked them all together. And that's where we started getting the beginnings of the sort of nationwide criminal databases that we see today. This was in the 1960s. It was still very slow. ah Back in that day, if you wanted records on somebody, you would...
00:12:06
Speaker
call an office generally, tell them to look it up. They would look up the paperwork, digitize it, put it on the computer, and then you could download it. And the download would take a ah relatively sizable amount of time. it It often took multiple days to do, right? By the 70s and eighty s we started seeing two things happen. We started seeing cameras become freely available.
00:12:27
Speaker
We started seeing VCRs become freely available. And when those two things came together, we started seeing this massive growth of a public-private surveillance integration where police in a city would very routinely ask private entities for access to their surveillance camera information.
00:12:45
Speaker
And those private entities very routinely gave that over to the point where that has become fundamentally integrated into the way that police operations work. Starting in the mid 2000s, after September 11th, a lot of money got put into figuring out how to do cross jurisdictional data share.
00:13:03
Speaker
So just to give you all a bit of an idea of what this used to look like, people that I know that were, say, running in the anarchist scene at that period of time. say 2004, 2005, it was not particularly rare for you to be on probation in multiple states at the same time.
00:13:22
Speaker
And if you've ever been on probation in the the contemporary period, you might ask, how is that possible? Because if you get arrested in another state, that's going to be a probation violation. And you're right. But there was no way for them to know you got arrested in another state.
00:13:34
Speaker
So you just never said anything. And it was fine. And that was an incredibly normal thing to do. um Starting in 2007, there were two changes that really happened.
00:13:45
Speaker
The first was the advent of joint terrorism task forces, which started integrating intelligence gathering operations between local police agencies and the federal government.
00:13:56
Speaker
and also the growth of real-time crime centers. So the first of these in the United States, a lot of people knew about was in New York. And it's that room with all the screens that the NYPD, they don't use it anymore, but used to sit in and monitor all the public surveillance systems, right? If you live in a medium or large city in the United States, something like that likely exists in your city.
00:14:18
Speaker
And at least in the city I live in, What that is, is it is an entire floor of a police district station. They have 24 hour a day monitoring team who sits there and monitors, feeds all the public cameras.
00:14:32
Speaker
They can turn up or turn down the intensity of certain streetlights if they want to. They can pan cameras that are capable of being panned. They can so look up any flock information.
00:14:44
Speaker
They can look up any shot spotter information. They have full access to the data records from every single call that's come into any of the emergency services. And they sit there in a room and say there was a bank robbery.
00:14:59
Speaker
Well, the police on the chase will call into the real-time crime center and go, oh, hey, there was this bank robbery. Can you tell me whether you've gotten any flop kits for this license plate? And they'll go, oh, yeah, we got them at this intersection, then this intersection, then this. I bet that person's going this way. And you can hear them talking about it on the radio.
00:15:15
Speaker
That was the beginning of the sort of data integration that we're going to talk a lot about today. When we really started seeing the systems build up that we're starting to to get into in the contemporary period.
00:15:27
Speaker
We really started seeing this with the proliferation of private cloud-based security systems. Whether that be SimpliSafe, whether that be ah your Nest camera, whether that be whatever, all of these services were saving data up into cloud databases and rendering that data accessible to law enforcement.
00:15:48
Speaker
Now that's gotten so normalized that that access is more or less expected, that they access it dozens of times year. They use it for all kinds of information.
00:15:58
Speaker
Sometimes they ask, often they subpoena, at least where I live. But we've started watching this massive growth of small private surveillance systems that are linked to the internet and that store data in places that are accessible to others, potentially.
00:16:13
Speaker
What's happened since that proliferation of these initial sort of cameras, right? Which happened, and again, if you live in a you know small to medium city in the United States, you probably saw a program where the police were handing out doorbell cameras to people on the agreement that those people would furnish footage when asked.
00:16:31
Speaker
And what that did was it massively increased the the visibility that police have access to at any given point. Since that time, we've watched private companies take on intelligence extraction from the internet. So now they go and build intelligence profiles and send them to local police departments on a subscription basis. We've seen private companies take on aerial surveillance on a contract basis. We've seen private companies take on mass data aggregation and, you know, quote, data inferencing like Palantir, right? Taking in all kinds of code violation records, things like this.
00:17:08
Speaker
And what we're now watching is this sort of integration of all of these systems into somewhat seamless systems. beginning to end lookups, right? So in the streets of Minneapolis, one of the things that you might've seen was ICE agents holding a phone up to somebody in a car, looking at their phone, pausing for a second, and then pulling the person out of the car.
00:17:27
Speaker
And what was happening in that moment is that they were taking a picture of a person. That picture was getting sent off to Clearview AI, Clearview AI was taking that picture and going, this picture matches this person, looking up information in back-end ah person lookup databases, pulling all that information down, sending it to the ICE agent in the field.
00:17:47
Speaker
And all of that was happening in 30 seconds or so and using almost entirely private services on a private ICE agent's phone. Right? That we've gone from having a Department of Justice that lives in a three-story DC mansion,
00:18:03
Speaker
to in the city i live in, there are 1,700 surveillance cameras of different types that are just run by the the state and thousands private ones. So when we're talking about resistance to these systems,
00:18:18
Speaker
We're not just talking about concerns about civil liberties or things like this. We're talking about really this fundamental growth of the state's ability to monitor and track people across time and space in ways which, you know, Edward Snowden cautioned in 2014 that regardless of whether you trust the government today, when you build the tools of totalitarianism, they can always be used that way.
00:18:41
Speaker
And we have now entered a period in which there are people in power that are unapologetically willing to use them that way. Right. So obviously resistance to these systems has sort of risen across the country.
00:18:55
Speaker
I know where I live, organizers are pressuring, you know, the city I live in and all of the the surrounding suburbs to cancel
Guest Introduction: Flock Systems and Resistance
00:19:02
Speaker
contracts. There's been sabotage against surveillance infrastructure. There's tools like DFLOP that are emerging.
00:19:07
Speaker
Today, what I want to do is I want to have a little bit of a conversation about FLOC and some of the resistance to FLOC. And we're going to set the stage for with a discussion of some actions that might have happened in the Great Lakes region. So today we're going to be joined by Joan and Jeff to talk a little bit about ah Flock and some of these resistance actions. Would the two of you like to introduce yourselves?
00:19:30
Speaker
Sure, I can go. I'm Joan. I use they pronouns. Yeah, I'm here on behalf of a jail support group for two people who were sentenced to jail time for allegedly destroying flaw cameras in the Great Lakes region.
00:19:45
Speaker
And I just want to say that any opinions that I say on this episode, they're just my opinions. They're not the opinions of any group. Hi, I'm Jeff, PN pronouns fine. And I'm just someone who has followed tech surveillance privacy stuff for a long time. so I'm kind of bringing in some of an analysis of what Flock is doing and how.
00:20:10
Speaker
Joan, why don't we start with you? Sure. why don't we go through, you know, some of the elements of of this case and, you know, maybe walk us through a little bit of what happened. Sure. so what happened is there were a handful of flat cameras that were destroyed in one area and then warrants were put out for two people related to that action. the They were for felony malicious destruction of property. And today I want to talk a bit about the evidence that was presented because or the discovery, because that relates to what you were talking about earlier, tom um just yeah your whole introduction. And the two folks pled down to misdemeanor because it had a lower maximum jail time, five years for the felony and one year for the misdemeanor.
00:21:05
Speaker
And there was no evidence that they actually destroyed the Flock cameras, which kind of gets into what you were talking about, Tom, about the how the integration of the technology and how they were how they investigated this action. And so in sentencing, they were charged for 90 days in jail and 120 days in jail. The two of them got different charges.
00:21:28
Speaker
And they're both trans. And one of them, the one who was charged with 120 days has been in solitary confinement because she's a trans woman. And that's what they do with trans women in jail. So speaking of flock cameras, the state looked at where the flock cameras were and then estimated where maybe the people who did the action may have parked. And they figured out a parking lot that had a CCTV camera and they subpoenaed that camera to get that footage
00:22:03
Speaker
And or you know, maybe they got the footage, but then formally subpoenaed, you know, like you were saying, maybe they already had automatic access to it. I don't know. But there was a subpoena. And then through that footage, they saw a vehicle. And then the vehicle did not have license plate ah plates on it. But yeah by the make and model and color, were.
00:22:25
Speaker
obtained a vehicle fingerprint through Phlox database, and then through that, identified the owner of that vehicle. So that was one piece of the evidence that used this technology.
00:22:39
Speaker
Another thing about, you were talking about Being able to be in different states and have different like legal statuses in different states, um like being on probation, it seemed like also in the evidence that like state lines or like practices that people have done for a long time like are not any longer viable, especially related to SIM cards.
00:23:00
Speaker
So in this evidence in the evidence in this case, there was a sim that was turned off during the action, and the state used that to say that not only that that means that that person was in that region because of where it was turned off and turned back on,
00:23:17
Speaker
So it wasn't at the action at all. It was actually out of the state. So not only was it turned off and that they're saying that that means the person was at the action or could mean, it means also that the state says it was like shows a political seriousness and planning. So they used it to augment their sentences also.
00:23:38
Speaker
Oh, can I share a win? Yeah, of course. of course Okay, cool. So i guess like something i want to add into the conversation is that, yeah, the state is building all these automatic technologies to be able to identify people and everything. And they're also still like dumb cops, right? So in this case, um like, let us not forget. So in this situation, a communique went out saying like, hey, these flocks cameras were destroyed.
00:24:07
Speaker
And the state is saying that they didn't even know the flocks were down until they saw the communique two days later. And then they looked and they were like, oh, wow, these cameras are non-functional and have been non-functional for a couple days. So, yeah, we shouldn't plan for those things. But I don't know. They're still themselves.
00:24:26
Speaker
Yeah, well, and so what I think is really interesting about that chain is they use multiple technologies in concert with each other to put together a narrative without any direct evidence.
00:24:39
Speaker
Yes. Right? And I see this. So they use SIM card. geolocation information, which they had to have gotten from a carrier or someone who was a broker of that data. They used clock information, right? They used open source intelligence gathering. They found that communique and then went and checked up on it Right. Like all of these are different systems that I would say 10 years ago would have functioned in isolation from each other.
00:25:03
Speaker
And today they're all functioning in concert. That's the thing that's really striking to me. I've been listening to, let's just say a warrant task force in my area.
00:25:14
Speaker
OK, on the daily, pretty much. And we have figured out a couple of things. But one of them is that they tend to stage. Then they tend to use flock information to locate a suspect.
00:25:28
Speaker
Then they tend to move. It is so baked into their process that a lot of times they won't even go to an address until they have verification that the person's in the area. That's how baked in it is. If they can't get flock, they use phone geolocation and they're able to just call over the radio and ask for it.
00:25:45
Speaker
That's the thing that's really terrifying in this case, I think, right? Well, I don't think that that applies in this case. They issued warrants and then found, yeah, they just issued warrants and didn't even pursue them. Yeah, that's what I'll say on that.
00:26:03
Speaker
Did I understand what you were saying? Kind of. I mean, it's, I think more what I'm getting at is this idea that they're not just using traditional methods and old school means. They're using technical systems in coordination with each other to build narratives and then charging people based on them.
00:26:21
Speaker
Right. And that that's the part that feels really new. Right. Like that's the part that feels very different to me. And I saw that a bit with the Atlanta case, but this seems to be like another real clear example of them doing something like that.
00:26:33
Speaker
Sure. Yeah. And they're doing the the classic move of like overcharging for crimes so that then people end up taking the plea deal because fighting it is like through trial is scarier.
00:26:45
Speaker
Yeah. Well, cool. ah Jeff, why don't we turn it over to you? i mean, we've been talking a little bit about actions against these systems. I want to come back to whatever strategy and tactics discussion we want to have later.
Flock Systems in Action
00:26:59
Speaker
But I think the question, so I know where I live, they're dense, like they're everywhere. If you look at the deflock map for my area, at every major road, every major intersection, all four directions, and that's definitely backed up with the way that the system is used.
00:27:13
Speaker
So Flock was flock as ah as a company only really started in 2017, right? And I don't know if you all remember. So for those of you that are a little bit older, you might remember the really hilarious things that happened when Flock started being a system.
00:27:31
Speaker
I very specifically remember that the Boston police ah had set up a really early flock system and they had like 10 or 15 cameras on the bridges in Boston.
00:27:43
Speaker
And they stored all the pictures that it took because it would take pictures and then drop them into an unsecured Amazon S3 bucket. And somebody went and just downloaded all of them at some point.
00:27:54
Speaker
right And there are these kind of hilarious moments like this. right There have been you know situations where Flock is just wrong, and that's come up a number of times in court. But like clearly the company has really evolved and the product has really evolved. So where are we right now with Flock systems? like Nationally, technologically, what are they doing? What are they capable of doing? How widely deployed are these things really?
00:28:21
Speaker
Yeah, they're they're all over the place. There's been a lot more reporting on them. And within the anarchist movement, there's like some scenes about them and stuff. But if if you look around, if you know what to look for, you might start seeing them surprisingly often. There's like a particular model of flat camera that is maybe one of the more recognizable ones. Like it's the one that's used in the photo of um ah news articles It's not the only one that they have. They sell a variety of products.
00:28:49
Speaker
But if you start to pay attention as you drive around, depending where you live, you'll probably start to notice them. So compared with how it started, you know, it's they've really blanketed some areas. The major city I live closest to, that's that's a similar story. Every major, every intersection of a main road, every traffic light, it feels like they're just everywhere.
00:29:09
Speaker
I think they really pose a danger of making it impossible or at least feel impossible to travel with any amount of privacy. it It feels like certain areas you drive through, it's impossible to actually go from point A to point B without being surveilled and put into this massive dragnet database.
00:29:28
Speaker
that they can just look up whenever. And I've got, i i did some research for this podcast. I've got some poll quotes that I thought were interesting to kind of illuminate some of this. Something from June 27th in Daily News for Dayton, Ohio. This is just like in one of their morning briefing, like here's three news stories or whatever, but they report more than 140 agencies access Dayton's flock camera system for searches related to immigration over the past three years and with more than half of the searches performed by the U.S. Border Patrol, according to an analysis of their news team.
00:30:01
Speaker
So one city's FLOT camera is accessed by 140 agencies. That's like the way these things are is it's basically, it's not just a city's police department has cameras that watch for license plates.
00:30:16
Speaker
It's a nationwide system. So the FLOT camera in Ashland, Wisconsin, for example, which they actually are removing those, but that's a different story, can be tied into this large network that a cop in Texas can use to try and track down a woman who's had a fully legal abortion.
00:30:34
Speaker
You know, that's one of the One of the news stories that's gotten more coverage is that incident where woman in Texas went and had an abortion elsewhere where it was, you know, more fully legal than in Texas.
00:30:46
Speaker
And a cop was using the flock systems to track her nationally to try and make something of it. Thankfully that did not become a case, but yeah, just to cut in really quick, we heard a case around here where they used flock to pin someone to a location, then looked up all the names of the people that were from like living at that address and their immigration status based on public records from completely different agencies and totally different jurisdictions. Yeah.
00:31:17
Speaker
It was wild and they were doing all of this from their phones, right? Like this is this is the kind of scope that you're talking about. Anyway, sorry, continue. No, no, I think that's like the way that these systems are being networked together and being combined into one larger system is a huge problem.
00:31:34
Speaker
and And it's not just that it's cities or police departments, but Lowe's and Home Depot are kind of ah notorious for this. A different quote from a reporting done by 404 Media, August 6th, 2025, is they they were able to get some records from ah the Johnson County, Texas Sheriff's Office, or or rather the EFF did, the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
00:31:55
Speaker
they show, they're reporting that that office was able to tap into flock cameras at 173 different low locations around the U.S., as well as into the flock cameras and the gunshot detecting microphones at a bunch of Home Depots just within Texas. And so it's a nationwide networked thing, but it's it's also not just...
00:32:16
Speaker
municipalities. It's not just police departments. It's not just like the county has their system, but private entities like Lowe's or Home Depot or fucking HOAs can wire into this. And so it's a really, i don't know. I think it's, it's such an amazingly broad and deep,
00:32:32
Speaker
threat to privacy, that it we really need to figure out how to stop this. And I think there's some there's some promise in the fact that a lot of other people see how creepy this is too.
00:32:44
Speaker
Like the ACLU has a campaign about it. If you talk to the right people, like I think think the challenge here is it's not going to be as easy as taking out a few cameras, which You know, you can cover them with trash bags. You can you can do a number of things to directly interfere with this if that is something you so choose to do.
00:33:04
Speaker
If you do do that, our friend Joan can tell you there's a lot of things to be concerned about. You know, the state, the state may find ways to tie you to it, whether it's whether it's like actually valid or not. If they throw an indictment at you, it fucking sucks.
00:33:18
Speaker
So like there's there's ways that people can like go after these themselves, do the whole direct action thing.
Political Solutions and Community Resistance
00:33:24
Speaker
But I think this the kind of problem that it is does call for a political solution that involves a larger number of people than us. And I think it'll be possible to do that because a lot of people are getting sick with stuff like this. like The anti-AI sentiment is so broad-based and so easily tied to Flock Camera, to Flock Safety, the company, and these Flock Cameras.
00:33:48
Speaker
that I think that's just one angle somebody could take to try and build movements in cities or in states. to cancel these contracts and get the cameras taken down. like I mentioned earlier, it's happened in Ashland, Wisconsin. I just saw a headline that Cleveland is considering letting the contract expire. Like it's a thing that can be done.
00:34:08
Speaker
And I think that there's ways that that approach has interesting promise to it that, you know, a more direct action approach may have challenges.
00:34:20
Speaker
Can I directly talk about that? Of course. Yeah. So yeah, so something that I've seen that's really interesting to me about the direct action part of taking down flocks is that a lot of times it works together with the community pressure campaign that you're talking about, Jeff. I think it depends on like region by region and like the flock landscape of that area. But yeah, i have seen where people are taking down cameras and that's also used to be like, look, people hate the cameras and and the Community supports supports the direct action of taking down the cameras. I think in the location where the two folks who were doing the jail support for, i think that was a region where it doesn't have that like local culture against Flock. um But I think they do tend to work together tactically. And I think there's also a yeah a really broad community support for people taking them down, which is cool and not always present in direct action situations.
00:35:22
Speaker
Yeah. So a good a good example of this, and this is you know from back in the day, I mean, this must have been 10 years ago, but the place where I live used have traffic cameras. I say used to very intentionally because the traffic cameras existed for a couple of years, but they kind of got defeated by two things.
00:35:42
Speaker
The first was an actual ballot initiative. Where I live, it's really easy for citizen ballot initiatives. And so there was one and people overwhelmingly voted to get rid of the cameras. And there was a massive organizing campaign around.
00:35:54
Speaker
which ACLU was involved in it and all kinds of other people. was really amazing. It was great. It's probably the widest discussion of privacy i have seen in public in my lifetime.
00:36:06
Speaker
Right. It was very cool. But the second thing was that people were rendering the system untenable. It would get sabotaged constantly, like literally constantly. But without all that political work, people sabotaging those things probably would have been at significantly more risk.
00:36:21
Speaker
Right. If the political dynamics of the place that I live were different, that would look significantly different. And I think that this is one of the this is one of these points where the fundamental connection between political work and direct action work can become amazingly clear.
00:36:38
Speaker
Right. Because this is a thing that I don't know, maybe I'm hyperbolic about it. Maybe I'm just old. And I remember living in a world where there were just way fewer cops. And i remember being an anarchist in a world where there were way fewer cops, right? And you could do a lot more.
00:36:53
Speaker
But there's an element of this which feels like this fight is fundamental, potentially one of the more important fights that we have to engage in in our lives at the moment. like The thing I worry about mostly is not so much that they can even gather all the information, and put it all together. I think the fundamental connection here is, you know, in the past, there was this idea.
00:37:13
Speaker
And I used to talk about this during operational security training. So there's this idea called the intelligence funnel, which meant that at a certain point after September 11th, the and NSA and associated agencies were were collecting way more information than they had the capacity to process. And so the information got old and stale.
00:37:31
Speaker
Stop being useful. They don't have that problem as much anymore. Because all these data centers exist, because they can plug things into an AI backend, because they can share all the data. I don't know. It feel it feels like a broad social approach is is really necessary along with adversarial activity.
00:37:48
Speaker
I don't know. That's just the sense I get. are your thoughts? Joan, you can go. Oh gosh.
00:37:58
Speaker
Oh, you're talking about how ah how all the tactics are needed and how this is a really important issue to focus on. And yeah, I definitely agree with that. I think everyone should hate flock cameras. I think most everyone does, except for the state. And yeah, what you brought up in the beginning about the support for flock cameras also was like relevant in this case.
00:38:20
Speaker
You were talking about the politicization of activism and how it's not just like, oh, A malicious destruction of property, which almost never carries jail time, or at least in this jurisdiction. But instead, these people were sentenced to three and four months in jail. The state was really mad at these folks because of the politicization through the communique, because it talked about like it had like clear anti-state language. And it talked about like solidarity with another anti-state action that had happened. So the state is pretty strong right now. you were talking about how there's, it's going to be a tough next couple of years. And yeah, this is another example of that. And like, of course, also like the Prairie land sentences that just came down, that's horrible and a sign of what the state is wanting to continue doing to stay strong. And one other thing I wanted to mention was the prosecution in this case.
00:39:16
Speaker
You were talking about resistance to tyranny. so another thing that came up in this case was the prosecutor and the judge were on the same page, but the prosecutor said it with his own mouth, was that the cameras are a part of our community. And i think that just shows the state's emotional attachment or like that how much they value their ability to be able to watch us at any time.
00:39:41
Speaker
yeah Yeah. And I think this is a really important issue for, you know, so a typical anarchist analysis is that the cops are there to make sure that the the state actually is a thing that's real instead of just like some guy's opinions, you know, because they're the ones that make their opinions actual on the ground fact. And the cops love flock because it makes people their job easier in the sense that it gives them immense power of surveillance to just like pick people to go after and go after them, whether they did something that was like actually some kind of social harm or not.
00:40:19
Speaker
And so I think pushing back against flock and fighting it is, you know, directly fighting the state's ability to do violence to us and you know control us.
00:40:29
Speaker
So it's extremely important, although it is just like one facet of policing. But it's also one that I, like I said, I think there can be good opportunities for a broader approach.
00:40:43
Speaker
If you follow the reporting, especially that 404 Media does, I just want to shout out 404 Media for consistently doing a great job. Yeah, they're incredible. covering and breaking stories on flock cops regularly are getting caught using flock to stalk their ex-girlfriends their current girlfriend like it's it's a toy that gives cops power and then they abuse it like they always do you know And especially with cops, it's like it's it's feeding in some so into some like really bad shit. you know Outside of what they're paid to do as their job, you've got that kind of stuff happening. And I say that because it's like a thing that the average person would see and say, that's messed up.
00:41:21
Speaker
And it's one of it's one of the many things we can point to to try and help deepen and grow a broad refusal of this technology. Because like the the hope is that you have enough people that are mad about it And you can make it a political problem for the people who would be able to cancel those contracts or not sign them in the first place. The small town near where I live was considering getting a ah contract with Flock and pressure, public pressure made them back out of that real quick.
00:41:50
Speaker
So I think like this this ties in with fighting the state in a very obvious way. It's popular in ways that other aspects of fighting state power are not, you know, but I think also there's, there's some things I do want to mention towards the end. I could plug some resources, but I just want to say that I think something really important is that because of the reporting and stuff, people have a vision of what a flock camera is in their heads, but it's much more than that. Not only are there other companies that do the same, well, not to the same degree, like Motorola has license plate reader systems. Harris has license plate reader systems. If Axon doesn't have one, I'd be surprised and maybe they'll come up with one. But like these defense contractors and ah companies that make their bread and butter selling gadgets to law enforcement,
00:42:37
Speaker
or have their own license plate reader systems. I don't know of any that are like a nationwide linked connected network like flox like Flock has or ones that sell to private companies rather than just focusing on law enforcement customers.
00:42:52
Speaker
But there's other ones out there. We shouldn't think this is only Flock safety, the company. And also focusing a bit more on Flock safety again, like they have their Flock cameras. There's a few different models on their website you can look at to get a good idea of what they look like.
00:43:07
Speaker
But they also have, and this took a little bit of digging for me to pull up again, but they have a product called Wing Gateway, Flock Wing, because they think they're
Flock's Technological Reach and Resistance Strategies
00:43:16
Speaker
very clever. And I want to bring that to people's attention because I haven't heard it talked about much in these circles, but it's a product that Flock Safety sells that allows cities and police departments, and it allows entities that might already have their own existing IP camera system or CCTV system.
00:43:34
Speaker
It allows them to buy this gateway product and connect the video feeds they already have for the cameras they already have into a source of data that feeds into flock safety systems. So personally for me, I've been driving around where I live and noticing more lights and more more cameras at major intersections that on the one hand, I look at them and I'm like, I don't know, maybe it's just a traffic camera.
00:43:57
Speaker
But on the other hand, you know, you don't know. They could buy one of these devices to turn an existing camera system into something that feeds into Flock data. And I think, you know, like it's not going to be as obvious as looking at the camera on the pole and seeing the Flock safety logo on it.
00:44:14
Speaker
I think that's going to take some digging with like FOIA requests, trying to get documents, trying to see if anybody internal to these institutions leaks data. I just wanted to bring that, made made sure i talked about that, because it's one thing to recognize a flat camera on the pole and be able to see it and go that there's another one. But it's potentially something that can involve basically any camera that's installed and looking at a road. and has, you know, good enough quality that they can use it to recognize license plates or or just, you know, cars because flock can recognize or they claim anyways, it's never perfect, but it can, you know, recognize car, make model color. They advertise that it can like tell you what bumper stickers it has.
00:44:57
Speaker
and so it's not strictly only license plates, but yeah, that's, that's my quick bit on that.
00:45:44
Speaker
So before we wrap up, I guess the question is, you know, resistance to this is going to evolve, right? The systems are evolving. What does resistance to this look like long term?
00:45:55
Speaker
Right? Like, what is the next step? You know, i'm I'm a, you know, security researcher, right? So... I'm really interested in like technical countermeasures, things like that. But where do we really see this going? I mean, if, you know, in your area, if you're fighting against a flock camera, against a flock camera system, or the integration of your cameras into flock, or the adoption of any number of other systems isn't successful, resistance is going to become a lot more complicated, and a lot more difficult.
00:46:21
Speaker
So what does it look like going forward for us to resist these on like a systematic level? What does it look like for us to do political action in a world where we know that these tools exist?
00:46:34
Speaker
I guess one thing I want to highlight about that question is I think it really, personally, i think it really depends regionally and in the specific locations where people are doing it, doing the local organizing and the local actions.
00:46:50
Speaker
Yeah, there's just so much variation of the landscapes. Like whether it's like urban or rural or a small town, smaller town or a huge city with flock drones. I think those are really different approaches or like different tactics would be more successful in each depending on whatever's going on locally. But to answer your question in a zoomed out way, I do not have an answer. You guys can talk about that.
00:47:16
Speaker
Well, i guess I guess I could joke and say that I'm ah selling a course on how to do that and you can pay me $30. But I don't know. um It's hard because it's on the one hand, it's like, you know, if you're direct action minded and you're like, I don't want to just sit around and wait for a politician that approved this to decide magically one day that they don't like it anymore. But if you go and look at the DFLOK website, there is so many of these things. There's just so many of them.
00:47:45
Speaker
And that's just the like for deflock, that's probably the cameras that are like very obviously flat cameras that people can go log, which if you have not looked at the deflock website yet, I recommend you do it. And, you know, maybe maybe here's a good idea. i i think that a good approach to this will be making it a political problem and involving a wider base of people to exert pressure on the people who can cancel contracts.
00:48:10
Speaker
You know, if your city has 100 flat cameras, if you rely only on a direct action approach, let's say, where someone goes and disables every single one, not only is that good deal of risk, as we've seen, but also just a lot of effort. I'm not sure it logistically is practical.
00:48:27
Speaker
As much as i applaud to anybody who does it, fuck yeah. like the So like the stuff that comes to my mind is like building a broader base of people that can make it a political issue so that it's not just some people going off and doing things in the night without like a broader base of support. And also, like Joan mentioned, that base of people to be a real pan in the ass and annoying as hell for city council people or county commissioners or whatever people structure of power is signing these contracts and paying the money for them.
00:48:58
Speaker
but I think the two things can work together pretty well. And I think that there's a moment right now where the stuff that Flock is doing and the moment it's in makes it really unpopular and provides openings for getting them kicked out of cities. Like I said, the ACLU has a program on getting flock contracts canceled. And like, I'm not going to be one to like uncritically stand the ACLU or various kinds of liberal nonprofits. But if they've got resources for lawyers, large mailing lists, and can turn people out to like be annoying at city council meetings, that's useful.
00:49:31
Speaker
Maybe some people can be introduced to the idea of doing an annoying but otherwise perfectly legal home demo outside of a decision maker's house to try and like help drive the point home or like try and introduce some of these people to more radical ideas. So that way it's not just like being the foot soldiers for liberals to go and, you know, get their, get them a policy win and a a thing they can use to get donations. Yeah.
00:49:55
Speaker
Yeah, I think focusing on the surveillance technology as a problem, making it a political problem is a good idea. i think focusing on Flock is smart because it's got the name brand recognition and pointing out, and and it's got the reporting. like Like I mentioned, all the cops who are getting caught stalking people using Flock.
00:50:12
Speaker
I also think it's smart to make sure to broaden the conversation so it's not just we got rid of Flock cameras and now some other company doing the same thing can
Legal Impacts and Activist Support
00:50:20
Speaker
move in. But like trying to push broadly against the rest of that stuff, because if if it's not Flock doing it, then it's going to be some other company.
00:50:27
Speaker
And I think there could also be very interesting openings because just yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled that cell phone location data, like Google location history, cell phone location data requires a warrant to get. And they used a previous ruling for cell site location data from cell networks.
00:50:47
Speaker
They ruled that that also required a warrant to get. And so this doesn't like solve the problem for us. Police can get warrants for all sorts of stupid bullshit. But I think it's a thing that we can point to, to talk with people, to try and get them enraged about this mass surveillance dragnet system that we've allowed to get built.
00:51:06
Speaker
Because like even the Supreme Court, as right wing as it's become, says that that's like, okay, maybe that's like a little bit too far. Right. Which is kind of a crazy thing to imagine.
00:51:16
Speaker
And it also, i don't know, maybe it gives the ACLU some fodder or not fodder, but maybe it gives them a thing they can use in their legal avenue to slow these things down a little bit. Because if a police department has to get a warrant to run a plate through Flock, it at least is going to slow them down and maybe help give us more of a paper trail than just Flock the company decides to keep a log of the searches that people run.
00:51:41
Speaker
i was just going to say, if you're done, i was just going to bounce to closing thoughts, if either of you have closing thoughts. I wanted to say a couple of short things back to what Jeff was talking about.
00:51:52
Speaker
Yeah, Jeff's talking about like community organizing home demos and ah the diversity of tactics. And i think that's something that makes lanes really beautiful. So like the direct action kids, there's plenty of other things to do direct action on if that's your lane. So I had I don't think everyone needs, and you weren't exactly saying this, but I'm not trying to discourage anyone from doing what needs to be done. And I appreciate your point about um how it should be a broad struggle with many tactics. And I also really appreciated your point about the narrative of how like it's not just about Flock and how all these other companies want to just step right into Flock's place. There's a place where they got
00:52:36
Speaker
the flock contracts canceled this is on the east coast and people in charge of the contract agreed like yeah we won't do any business with flock but they're completely open to signing a contract with any other surveillance company it's just like oh flock is the bad one flock ah does the evil things so obviously we want to not be supporting that narrative and and uh shifting it whenever we can Yeah.
00:53:01
Speaker
Yeah. And I also wanted to say, yeah diversity of tactics. I love love and support anybody who takes the direct action approach on this. It's honestly inspirational. And I think, like we said a few times, I think these things can can work well together.
00:53:15
Speaker
But I also think that, like, I mean, big shout out to the support crew for supporting people if they do wind up with charges and consequences yeah for this stuff. Yeah, yeah.
00:53:26
Speaker
I think that's super important and I'm very impressed and grateful for the the work i've seen people do with that. Yeah, I'm just going to leave with this really quick thought and then we'll do we'll do plugs Yeah, I mean, i don't I don't think it's just me as sort of like a operational security nerd.
00:53:43
Speaker
This fight feels existential. Like I remember back to 2001. I'm old, right? Remember, I'm old. Back to 2001, I remember being in college because I'm old and feeling like the world was starting to head down a particularly really dark path.
00:54:02
Speaker
And we had already seen at that point the growth of SWAT teams. Right. We had already seen the militarization of the police. We had already seen the National Guard called out against the riots in 92. You know, like all those things that happened in my lifetime.
00:54:18
Speaker
But after September 11th, it felt like something qualitatively shifted and it was hard to really point to. And I think it's still hard to articulate, but what really shifted is that the precursor conditions for what we're experiencing today were set. and what we were worried about then was that the ability of federal agencies to share data was going to allow them to organize a national repression campaign.
00:54:43
Speaker
It feels hopelessly naive at this point, hopelessly naive. But that's where we were 25 years ago. And think about where we are today. I just want to leave everyone, my closing thoughts that want to leave people with are that as far as I'm concerned, this might be one of the most important struggles that we have in front of us.
00:55:02
Speaker
And it's a precursor to everything else that we can approach operational security. We can approach counter surveillance as direct action, right? It is direct action.
00:55:13
Speaker
That every time we're successful, we blind the state just a little bit more. And that gives us just that little bit more space to do the things that need to be done.
00:55:23
Speaker
So that's what I'll leave everyone with. ah Let me toss it to to you. Any final thoughts, plugs, anything like that? Yeah, my final thoughts. Yeah, thanks, Jeff, for talking about the hard work of jail support crews. Yeah, it's behind the scenes. It's invisibilized. Anyone who's doing jail support, I love you It's so needed.
00:55:45
Speaker
And so many people are doing it for different people. And part of this jail support crew is we are fundraising for the two folks. And yeah I mean, there's, you know, court fees, restitution,
00:55:58
Speaker
You have to pay for prescription medication, phone, postage. They're not able to get letters or books. And you can donate if you're able to on Venmo.
00:56:09
Speaker
And the Venmo is Deez underscore Zines, D-E-E-Z underscore Z-I-N-E-S. And if you want a thank you gift from the merch collection for the support group, if you email a proof of donation and an address to ds underscore zines at tutamail.com, someone can send you a little thank you gift.
00:56:35
Speaker
And thanks for having me on the show. It's been a really interesting conversation and I appreciate you putting it together. Yeah. Thank you for being here. Yeah. Thanks again for the support crew's work.
00:56:46
Speaker
Yeah, yeah my my my closing thoughts, I think like when I think about this stuff, it actually makes me very depressed and it makes me feel like we have no hope for the future outside of just the normal stuff. It's just like, wow, we can't even travel.
00:56:59
Speaker
But I think trying to maintain a positive attitude is good, especially like, I don't know, I'm trying to be hopeful that the stuff's inherent unpopularity is going to help help us find people and get together to fight it And find new comrades. I think there will be people who get activated about this that can get brought into, you know, a life of being an active anarchist over this. Like this stuff connects to ICE. It connects to AI data centers. It connects to police police violence.
00:57:28
Speaker
I think it's a great thing to push and connect with other stuff. And I think if I wouldn't pull together some resources to just kind of throw out here at the end, if someone was like, oh, I want to look into some more of this stuff.
00:57:41
Speaker
um And i'll I'll make sure these get added to the show notes. But if you're like a kind of techie person, there's an interesting device called an OUI spy device that I've wanted to try out, but I haven't tried myself. This Colonel Panic person sells them. The website is colonelpanic.tech spelled like C-O-L-O-N-E-L panic.com.
00:58:02
Speaker
tech it's It's supposed to be something that can watch for Bluetooth IDs that some Flock cameras will have, so might help you find some. The DFlock website we mentioned, DFlock.org, is a great way to look up a user-submitted map of Flock camera locations, and you can add locations to it yourself. So you can like get a crew together, go do a surveillance walk or surveillance drive, and map them in your own area.
00:58:26
Speaker
You can even do route planning so you can avoid them getting from point to point sick. I didn't... Yeah. They just added that. I don't know when. It was like within the last month or so, but they added a route planning thing. Yeah.
00:58:39
Speaker
Wow. God bless. Yeah, right. There's haveibeenflocked.com, which you can use to look up and see if a plate has been searched by Flock, but its source of information, I believe, is FOIA documents. So documents people were able to get through FOIA requests. so That's probably going to be pretty incomplete, but I don't know. It could be a neat demo to like, if you find a hit in there, tell somebody like, hey, look, you got spied on for no reason.
00:59:06
Speaker
And then the last one, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has an atlas of surveillance that is just kind of like a database of different police departments and institutions and stuff that have surveillance tech and what they use.
00:59:19
Speaker
That's at atlasofsurveillance.org. There's the EFF has that other NGOs might have other useful resources of just like the data sets, or maybe there's like helpful language that they have. I don't know. That's, that's the stuff I've got.
00:59:36
Speaker
Excellent. Well, thank you both for being here. And this has been the beautiful idea. We will talk to y'all soon.
00:59:52
Speaker
Thanks for listening to today's episode of The Beautiful Idea, news and analysis from the front lines of anarchist and autonomous struggles everywhere. Catch you next time.