Flock Off! – Episode 23 of Unbuffered

Christopher Mitchell (00:00)
Hey, look at us doing a little preview of this episode. This episode of Unbuffered looks at what’s it’s kind of a new technology, but it’s re-ignited an ancient debate, which is the tension between perceived security and privacy. This technology is newish and it’s centered around ubiquitous internet access. That’s why one of the reasons we’re talking about it, but also massive databases. the debate is timeless though. the technology is new, the debate is old.

and in this discussion we range all over while talking about it. We cover some areas that are hotly debated, and as usual, we don’t pull any punches. I just wanted to note that we aren’t observers in this. We are participants, all of us, in deciding whether technology will liberate us or imprison us. Or more accurately, to what extent it’s going to do both. Hope you enjoy the show.

Christopher Mitchell (01:09)
Welcome to Unbuffered, the the Unbuffered Podcast. I’m Chris Mitchell at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. And today I’m speaking with Daniel Boguslaw, who is an independent reporter. Welcome to the show, Daniel.

Daniel Boguslaw (01:21)
Thanks for having me.

Christopher Mitchell (01:22)
Hey, we’re doing a show today that I I don’t know. I was there’s so many different ways to title it, but I was thinking Flock off, given the way some of the cities

Daniel Boguslaw (01:29)
Flock off.

Christopher Mitchell (01:31)
are are responding to their contracts with Flock or proposed contracts with Flock. Flock seems like a big deal. I only learned about it earlier this year while I was riding around with with a friend and a guy who works with us on our Tribal Broadband Bootcamps, and we were driving through Southern California and he was like Flock, and I was like, What the Flock are talking about? And

He explained it to me and I was surprised I was so uninformed. But for people who haven’t picked up on it in the news, what is Flock?

Daniel Boguslaw (02:03)
yeah, so Flock is a well i I guess it kind of depends on who you ask. I think if you ask the company they’ll say that it’s a quasi-automated l law enforcement and also private community license plate reader and surveillance camera. you know, it’s it’s interesting insofar as it it

it seems to be i i it’s also and it’s also a service, right? And that’s I think maybe one of the key things that kind of differentiates it is, you know, you’re not just selling the physical whatever CC TV camera, security camera, you’re also kind of selling this entire system for tracking individuals’ cars, tracking, you know, the scratch on the car in addition to the license pip plate, the color.

and then the entire sort of database and and data infrastructure and storage as well. And so that’s sort of like the basic most basic interpretation, I guess you can say, of what they’re doing. I think you know there’s been a lot of reporting showing that they have all these other bells and whistles, or I mean maybe bells and whistles is is minimizing them, but you know, the there’s the potential for all kinds of

increased surveillance technology in the basic camera box in the in the basic hardware. So, you know, there was also you know, v voice recognition, potentially voice recognition products. There’s potential AI facial recognition products that were gonna get rolled out.

Christopher Mitchell (03:45)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel Boguslaw (03:46)
so, you know, I think part of the way that this was initially sold or or was pitched was like, you know, this is basically just like when you go through a toll booth.

right and it snaps a picture of your camera, like that that’s all that this is, and then if there’s a crime in the area we go search it. But really what we’re talking about is a huge quantity of data, basically anyone who’s going past it. so this is not activated if you’re speeding, right? This is bulk collection. and basically then creating a a a a database to to go hunting for anyone ex girlfriend well right, right. Anyone

Christopher Mitchell (04:21)
Ex girlfriends.

Daniel Boguslaw (04:24)
who causes an infraction, but then anyone

you know, that these officers want to track. and and so yeah, that’s I mean, that’s one of the big most high profile critiques that have emerged. There’ve been a like what, a dozen, over a dozen, I think well over a dozen, I think dozens of instances of law enforcement officers you know, using the these tools to go after domestic partners, to surveil their kids, you know, all kinds of things. But you know, my

feeling is like even without that, you know, we’re creating a sort of panopticon database of of human movement. you know, there’s

Christopher Mitchell (04:58)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel Boguslaw (04:59)
also been concerns, I think, of someone going across state lines to buy, you know, a small personal use amount of you know marijuana and then you know basically being tracked across the border and back and then and then prosecuted. So but at the same time like the variations of this technology have have existed for a while.

And so what’s really interesting about the national conversation is the fact that people are realizing they have a civic tool to attack this technology and they don’t like it. And you know, I’ll just say off the top, we can get into more why, but I think that like, you know, this is like I said, there there’s other versions of this, there’s other companies who are having who who are taking the place of Flock sometimes when people are successful successfully using their city councils to remove it.

But the point is that like the people have have seized on a way to exercise their civic muscle by banning, having their city councils

Christopher Mitchell (05:59)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel Boguslaw (06:00)
ban this technology in their in their municipalities. And to me, that’s anytime we see grassroots organizations or even just non-organizations, just random people in a community come together and and say, like, we are going to exercise political control instead of a corporation or instead of a rubber-stamped.

city council, I think that’s really interesting and and and is oftentimes a symbol of something bigger that’s going on, right? Like the pundit class, the reporter class in DC and New York have spent a lot of time, whether it’s Flock safety cameras or whether it’s data centers, you know, complaining basically about how the Hicks and Rubes in the heartland don’t really understand these technologies. They don’t really understand the cost-benefit analysis and they should sit down and shut up and let their corporate masters and pundits

you know, pontificate to them about how to, you know, create mass surveillance safely or create data centers safely. And the reality

Christopher Mitchell (06:54)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel Boguslaw (06:55)
is that, you know, people are channeling, I think, a greater frustration with a technology that has largely been ungoverned or at least ungovernable by them, and they are attempting and successfully attempting to regulate it in the ways that they can. So that’s my

huge

bird’s eye view of kind of what Flock is and and and and why I think we’re having this conversation, why people nationally are having this conversation. And as you can tell, I’m very hostile towards this idea of of criticizing our civic process and and and our American democracy, which which is supposed to function.

Christopher Mitchell (07:31)
Yeah, so this is this is what we’re gonna talk about. And we’re gonna be I think taking in a lot of different angles of this. But I did wanna before we get too deep into it, I did wanna t I did wanna ask you and tell you. I think you know, you and I haven’t talked before, except for one aborted attempt in which we learned that that not all of Europe has amazing Internet access, like some people say. There are

Daniel Boguslaw (07:48)
Not all of Europe has amazing effects. Yes. Some people say.

Christopher Mitchell (07:52)
a lot of gaps in apartments, it turns out. but when I when I was speaking with friends of mine that are working

diligently with I mean a right and left coalition on surveillance issues and the powers of the United States government in particular. I said, Who should I talk to about Flock? and they said you And so I’m just curious, why did they say that?

Daniel Boguslaw (08:14)
Yeah, I mean so I’ve been I I’ve been very interested in this new frontier. I mean, I think, you know, I used to work at the Intercept, which the founding premise was really about domestic and foreign surveillance, you know, based on the revelations that came out with with the terabytes of data or whatever that Edward Snowden released. but then everything just kind of

faded into the background and everyone kind of came to accept that like we have this whether it’s ad tech or whether it’s the US government. I mean the irony of that is that like, you know, just just to show how far things have sunk is the fact that like when I talk to people in the intelligence community, when I talk to people in national security world, you know, they’re like, who even cares about what the NSA is collecting? You know, it’s all bulk now. It’s all corporate. You know, like they can go and just buy this this stuff direct.

From the company and why even go through the hoops of putting tapping into the undersea cables and all this stuff when it’s getting sold for pennies on the dollar. So I I’ve become this is I’m gonna answer your question, I promise. But you know, for that same reason, I’ve become very interested in the intersection between corporations and and domestic surveillance. And you know, where in

can make the argument that you know, a lot of this cutting edge collection was happening from state actors or US intelligence community. You know, now it is can you hear that on your end? Someone is honking furiously. Okay, great. Okay,

Christopher Mitchell (09:47)
I d I’m not picking it up.

Daniel Boguslaw (09:49)
then I’m just gonna ignore it. maybe it’s maybe it’s someone collecting on my end, who knows? But you know, really corporations have taken the the center of domestic surveillance and domestic data collection.

And so I’ve been very interested anytime there’s a corporate a story about corporations getting involved in this, and I think it tends to reinforce. So if there’s one node that has anything to do with national security or anything to do with this so-called critical infrastructure designation, which is swelled to encompass basically everything, every part of our industrialized society,

Christopher Mitchell (10:29)
Ha ha.

Daniel Boguslaw (10:30)
Then then the companies that are touching it are going to be developing their own data processing surveillance apparatus. And you know, they don’t view it as big brother, they view it as this is the this is what doing business in in a twenty-first century looks like, but that’s why I think it’s really critical to to to drill down into these things and say, like, okay, but what does this actually look like? You know, this isn’t just a traffic camera, you know, this is actually mutated into something much crazier. and yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (10:58)
Right well, and

i I just I have to jump in because like we live in these wild times in which you’re talking about the essential infrastructure dis this being stretched and stretched, right? We’re gonna try and protect more and more things we’re told. At the same time, the best evidence suggests that Iran just attacked the water facilities of my

Daniel Boguslaw (11:16)
Right. Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (11:17)
state. And the United States government response, personified by the president, was that probably my governor did it.

It is it’s fascinating to live in this time in which like we’re told that we need to be more and more careful about more and more things. And then the attacks on like the most critical things feel like they’re they being taken less seriously and the tools don’t seem to be super helpful in in dealing with it. It’s it’s

Daniel Boguslaw (11:39)
Well yeah. Well, I mean i i

Christopher Mitchell (11:41)
a wild time.

Daniel Boguslaw (11:42)
absolutely and like you know w I think I think when it comes to national security, there’s a lot of discussion and historically there’s always been a lot of discussion about like is national security zero sum? You know, like i if you put resources into protecting one thing over here, you know, and and that’s a complicated question and there’s probably different answers depending on what you’re talking about. But I will say when it comes to this idea of cr the expansion of critical infrastructure, I mean you make a great point. It’s like

Surely we cannot be creating we cannot be creating new intelligence apparatuses, divisions, national security, counterintelligence for for every element of our soci you know, now they’re saying data centers are gonna be critical infrastructure after the after Iran hit one in Saudi. You know, they’re saying they’re next thing you know it’s gonna be you know, 7/11 is critical infrastructure because you’re gonna get stoned and you gotta get in there and you gotta get you know to

Ben and Jerry’s. Like it really and and that’s yeah,

Christopher Mitchell (12:40)
picked a good example. I’m a huge Slurpee fan.

Daniel Boguslaw (12:42)
and that’s crit you know, that’s critical. So I mean, it really does create this expansive net where then really what that means, critical infrastructure, is it means that the American people don’t get a say in how those things are developed and utilized, right? I mean, it’s really just putting this veil of secrecy onto everything, onto onto utilities, onto data centers.

onto

water infrastructure and saying, like, you know, you American people piss off. You don’t get to you don’t get a a say in governance of this entire thing. And meanwhile,

Christopher Mitchell (13:16)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel Boguslaw (13:16)
like you said, the government isn’t actually protecting it. I mean, these these things are porous. You know, these th these are we we live in a massive country with a lot of infrastructure. So yeah, I I think that that i net is crazy.

Christopher Mitchell (13:27)
Well, I think the American people aren’t

the American people aren’t buying it. I mean, I when I look at the reaction to the Amazon Ring commercial about saving the dog and people being horrified at the level of surveillance, I’m I’m heartened and and surprised. I wouldn’t have predicted that reaction to that. People love finding lost dogs. you know, people love dogs more than we like people, most of us. And and and and we see that we see we see people organizing

Push their city councils to end or to not begin Flock contracts. We see people taking matters into their own hand, sawing down the Flock polls where they’re out there, or putting trash bags on them or disabling them in other ways. and so it does feel to me like this is not popular. what we hear over and over again is this is essential for public safety, but it doesn’t feel like the public is buying that we need this level, that this is the right approach for public safety.

Daniel Boguslaw (14:25)
Yeah, I mean it’s I I think the the best way to conceptualize it is just like think about the sliding scale of security, right? Like the most secure would be to have a sort of Gestapo state where everywhere we go there are armed guards and a AI f system that immediately records your face and d withdraws money from your bank account for petty offenses and then

you know, shoots a laser beam into your skull for for capital offenses and it’s all fully automated and we and and we’re as safe as we can be and the laws are perfectly followed. You know, it’s like these arguments for the necessity of of of this increased security is is obviously BS and people s describe it as just being a obvious increase in overall abstract security, but of course we know that we are

always making trade-offs between liberty and freedom and you know totalitarian s quote unquote security. So it’s clear, like you said, that this is a bipartisan issue that people hate. People understand that even law and order conservatives don’t want to get docked if their odometer goes over, you know, two miles over the speed limit. You know, there is a acknowledgement, even with people who are very pro-law enforcement, that this is a this is a non-human

system that that doesn’t actually meet the needs of people and is and is rife as we know from from the reporting with the potential for for abuse. So

Christopher Mitchell (16:01)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel Boguslaw (16:01)
I mean an and and look, I’ll also just say the one other thing, which is that like

You know th again, going back to the pundits, you the pundits say like, well, okay, but y they’re going after Flock and it’s just gonna get replaced with the even bigger company Axon, which is basically has the same product and has already been shown to be moving in. But, you know, these are these are pund these are armchair pundits, right, who wanna say, Well, people our democracy is messy, it’s not going perfectly according to plan, it’s not super neat, it’s not perfectly organized, and therefore this whole endeavor is stupid. And what

To me, that really fails to see is that like this is part of a movement where for once, you know, people have an outlet to to r react not just to Flock safety cameras, but to the ubiquitous surveillance in all of our lives. Whether that’s you know, AI facial recognition with metaglasses and your face getting uploaded scanned, or whether that’s surveillance pricing, you know, whether that’s the the corporations knowing where your pain points are

Christopher Mitchell (17:01)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel Boguslaw (17:02)
and and and and watching everything you do so that they can extract the maximum amount of

you know, Uber rides or you know, they’re talking even about doing like surveillance pricing in the grocery stores where when you go to check out you’re paying different amounts of groceries t compared to the person next next to you based on your your you know ad tech surveillance. So again I think like this has to be viewed as a step of people finally f seeing something that they can affect and it doesn’t end with Flock, right? It’s not like okay we’re just gonna get rid of Flock and everything’s gonna be fine. You know, I don’t think anyone’s

Saying that, I I think if you talked to the people at the forefront of this movement, they would say this is not my only surveillance concern. But again, it’s a way of practicing and and also starting a national conversation about the the amount of surveillance we want in our society. And and Newsflash is a lot of other Western European societies, countries that just do not have the same tolerance for surveillance. You know, I’m calling in from from Germany right now. You try to take a picture.

you know, at a restaurant, you know, of of your table eating dinner or whatever, and the people behind you will get up and shield their face. You know, like they won’t they don’t tolerate it.

Christopher Mitchell (18:13)
My but y

you have the full range though, right? ‘Cause if you head over to London, then basically you can’t take a step without like your being three hundred and sixty degrees recorded is my impression.

Daniel Boguslaw (18:23)
Right.

But you know, they they’re trying to put one AI facial recognition camera at this one park w y with tons of open air drug use and all this stuff. And like this one camera, there’s all over the city there’s graffiti, there’s mass protests about this one camera. I mean it’s you know, it’s crazy. So yeah, I agree with you. I mean it’s it’s

Christopher Mitchell (18:40)
I mean it but

you’re you’re so you’re in Berlin, right? And and so that’s in eastern Germany, although Berlin had a significant presence that was not a part of the Soviet Union. My understanding is is that left a mark, right? When they when they saw what the Gestapo had done. I mean you

Daniel Boguslaw (18:54)
Yeah. Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (18:57)
used that term earlier. It’s literally comes from where you are, right?

Daniel Boguslaw (18:59)
Yeah. Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (19:01)
And so like it’s I I feel like this

Daniel Boguslaw (19:02)
And not only just the

yeah, not only just the the g the the Nazi Gestapo but then also the Stasi, right, after the war. I mean there’s fifty years basically of nonstop total surveillance.

Christopher Mitchell (19:15)
And it it left a major mark. And I hope we don’t have the level of I mean, I hope we get the mark and people have the aversion to it without having to go through that level of it. But I do feel like police using this technology and and let me say this to to set this off, this section off. I think the the problem the thing that set Flock aside, I think, is the national database. I think it is a different thing to have automated license plate readers, it is a different thing to have red light cameras and speeding cameras.

That take a photo, have evidence for a court of law for a proceeding, and then they send it and then they get rid of that information. They’re not using it in a network effect. One of the the things that set Flock aside, as I understand it, is that if you’re if you’re in Memphis and you’re trying to find a license plate, you could see if they drove through the Midwest, right? And and so like there’s this network effect and and this big database and and it was not police officers using it to harass their exes, which is something that I feel like we see.

is is that like, you know, lots of we’re we’re somewhat familiar with that. In my mind, it was when ICE was using this database to fulfill the orders which many of us believe are violating the constitution to harass certain people and they suddenly have access to everyone’s movements. That I think is that’s what I trace it to. But I could be wrong. I’m still a newbie relatively unflocked. So I don’t is there something to that, like the national database angle of it?

Daniel Boguslaw (20:41)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean I think that is a huge part of it. I think there’s a degree to which like the feds can kind of get there on their own, right? Based on their ability to just tap into local state police to subpoena, you know, whoever they want. But yeah, I think that and also like the fact that like this is all being centralized and it was being pitched to police, but then yeah, like it was being pitched to other federal law enforcement. It was also being pitched to like HOAs, right? Like private, like

Totally private communities. but yeah, I mean the whole point of the of all of this is to create, you know, there’s a term that DHS used a while ago in an article, like a a unified, a total unified vision or something, right? Like it’s really this idea of like total surveillance of everything all the time. And I mean, just like the this this America was founded on the idea that like our federal government

is supposed to be responsive to the people. And, you know, right now we have a wildly unpopular government that that is doing things that people don’t want. And, you know, it’s just i this type of immense power is i is is out of control. And and also just like I think that a lot of times when we talk about surveillance, it becomes very s abstract very quickly. And it becomes like f people fall back and they’re talking about this idea of it like

being creepy and being scary and it being abstract. But like if you look at what the administration is doing right now with all of this surveillance power that everyone has been warning about for the past, you know, 30 or 40 years, you know, they really are using it to target and intimidate their political rivals. You know, they’re using as we saw in Minneapolis, like DHS is using these administrative subpoenas, right, to just

You know, they they have the people, they have the research and intelligence on them, they have the surveillance, and you know, they it might not hold up in a court of law. You know, I think our courts actually are still pretty robust. But, you know, if you’re targeted with a subpoena and they say, you know, we’ve got you on tape doing this, you know, driving to a peaceful meeting, whatever, you know, that you’re not gonna go to jail for that, but you know, you’re probably gonna be pretty freaked out. And so I think like it’s also important to talk about like what it what is the real world impact. I mean, the real world impact is like if you get shown

your driving history from the feds, right? And they say we n like that’s gonna change your behavior. and so I think Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (23:11)
No, I mean let me I mean I’ll I’ll be very personal with this. It’s changed our behavior. I

and and I I don’t know that talking about this this is gonna I you may have strong disagreements. I know members of the audience may have extreme disagreements. I don’t have a gun in the home. I I’m not anti I’m I I guess I would say I have very complicated feelings about firearms in the United States. The reason I don’t have a gun in the home is because there’s a far greater likelihood statistically, it’s just math that someone’s much more likely to be significantly harmed.

And being a white man, I’m far more likely to commit suicide with it than to use it in other ways. Like it’s just really the statistics on guns. I feel like we don’t talk enough about where the gun deaths come from. but like if you keep a gun out of the home, you you really lower the chances of anything really bad happening. When the federal government was breaking into people’s homes without warrants, without

Daniel Boguslaw (24:00)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (24:02)
proper warrants, I guess I should say, my wife and I had a conversation about

Whether or not we should have a gun in the home. Because my impression upon watching what was happening is if you have someone at your door about to break in from the federal government and you say, I’ve got a gun, it changes everything. And they are less likely to break your door down. And that’s a like that’s a conversation that 10 years ago I never would have imagined having with my wife. Right.

Daniel Boguslaw (24:23)
Right. Right.

Christopher Mitchell (24:25)
Like, you know, I mean it’s just it’s wild. And

Daniel Boguslaw (24:28)
But it g it reminds

you why the Second Amendment is there. I mean, look, I agree with you. There there’s a lot of problems with our gun culture in America, but but it it it does remind you about like, yeah, like th the our constitution has stuff in there for for a reason, right? And like, sure, like we’re not we don’t have muskets anymore, you know, we’ve got extended mag round clips, sure, but and then same with surveillance, right? Same with right to privacy, s same same with freedom of speech and assembly, which are violated by by

By mass surveillance. So sorry, you can keep going, but it’s I’m just saying like

Christopher Mitchell (24:58)
No,

no, no. And I I think that’s the thing that it just for me it comes down to is you get you get used to a level of of of normal normalcy with a government and forget how rapidly things can change. Now, this is a show that’s about technology and community good. And and so from my point of view, I think bringing that up is just to I think get a sense of when you allow certain technologies and you have a national database, it is different.

When you give law enforcement, when you give federal agents more precisely the ability to track all this information by just logging in, as opposed to having to like subpoena or or demand a database from a local police department. I mean, I remember it’s fifteen years ago, I was in Santa Monica when they had they did amazing work wiring the city with fiber for for various public uses. And one of the things they did was they put in

Surveillance cameras in a variety of places, including structures that are parking garages for the city. And they had a procedure in which to to tap into the live feed or to use it, you had to get the permission of the chief of police and you had to, you know, there was like it was logged. And and I don’t know, maybe there was abused from time to time. Like I do think it’s not these policies aren’t magic. they’re human beings. But there’s a fundamental difference of having a local database that’s small and having a national database where everything is super convenient, I think.

And and I don’t know. Like I th it’s

Daniel Boguslaw (26:20)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (26:21)
a major distinction in my mind.

Daniel Boguslaw (26:22)
Well, yeah, I mean I do think that like there becomes a an issue which is something I’m working on report some reporting on, but which there’s been some reporting on, which is like, you know, that that these companies can come in and like buy a municipality’s data, you know, even law enforcement data, and then they can jack it into their mainframe. I mean, like Nexus does this, I think TLO does this.

So I mean, it gets it gets complicated. I mean and then and then it gets to a regulatory Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (26:55)
Right. So you’re telling I’m wrong. Like this should let’s just be very clear here. Like you’re

telling me that I’m foolish and I’m ignoring your specialty, which is that these databases, even if they’re not publicly combined, there will be a tendency that private entities may well buy them, combine them, or

Daniel Boguslaw (27:11)
Yeah, yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (27:12)
or collect other information and then sell that to the federal government. And there and this is something I’ve talked to Sascha Meinrath about. There is no law that stops the federal government from buying information it is not allowed to collect.

Daniel Boguslaw (27:23)
No, and and I talked to I mean shit, like two days ago I was talking to like a very senior counterterrorism official, you know, and you know, the most people on the inside, it’s like, you know, look, they’ve been on the inside. They’re they’re usually more gung-ho than critical reporters or whatever. But like, y you know, you talk to a lot of people these days and they’re kind of like freaked out about what’s going on. I mean, just the volume and specificity

I mean you can really basically like do Prism with private data acquisition.

Christopher Mitchell (27:59)
That was

a federal program that collected data somewhat illegally.

Daniel Boguslaw (28:03)
Yeah. A and I don’t think I even fully sometimes acknowledge the scope of it. Like I mean I’m very interested in th there was a time recently in my life where I got close to being able to kind of peer into that orb of darkness, of Palantir of darkness. Not Palantir specifically, but like really see some of that stuff granularly and I kind of wish I had because

I don’t know, like I’ve always said that I think the way to really jumpstart this conversation, I don’t know if you have any billionaire listeners, but who could front my legal fees, but is really to kind of like do the maximalist data acquisition of like the Senate members on the House on the Senate Intelligence Committee. I mean, I know that like Wired kind of did this like a couple of years ago where they bought a bunch of commercially available data on people, but like they kind of didn’t

go all the way. They kind of were like, you can do this, but they didn’t actually like name names and like actually create an international crisis. And so I think, you know, I think that would really show the level of granularity of like, I’m sure you could find politicians petty records, you know, petty misdemeanor stuff in a local record that then got hoovered up into one of the big national databases and repackaged. And you know, God knows what what

kinds of stuff in their browser history got pinged, right? And then creates an ad profile that shows that, you know, maybe their sexual orientation is different than the one that they’ve told, you know, wh whatever. Like, my point is that there we just have no regulation and people are pretty unaware o of that. And I I I think it’s different though than your question of like, is it wrong? Like, that to me is like that’s a whole other can of worms of like, yeah, maybe, I don’t know, sure. Like you get a small municipality and like you

Have a speed camera that’s clocking people doing 20 over, and you have regulations that are really harsh for for selling or manipulating that data, and there’s harsh penalties if anyone, you know, maybe then we’re talking about it. But to me, like we don’t, as you said, unlike Germany, unlike Berlin that’s had 50 years of hyper surveillance here, we don’t really have necessarily that same privacy culture necessarily. or at least we haven’t adapted to the data age in America.

Christopher Mitchell (30:23)
No, think that’s right. And the thing that that Flock is betting on, you know, and I think this conversation we’ve I think we’ve established the concerns. And I would say that that my concerns and the dramatic stories that we see coming out of Minnesota with the federal government violating the constitution on on multiple fronts and and bringing us back to the COINTELPRO age and and illegally surveilling people. that’s one thing.

If if Barack Obama was still president and we just had the level of of of government abuse of unconstitutional like telecommunications searches and things like that, it would still be concerning. and I think that’s what Flock, you know, Garrett Langley was on ABC seven in Los Angeles on July 23rd. And I just noted that a couple of quotes from that. But like he’s trying to return to that age, I feel like, which is like, you know, it’s it’s sort of like a level of concern that

doesn’t hit the limits of the overreach, I think. And and and I say that just, you know, to be very clear, like, I am uncomfortable with Democrats going a little bit over the line, and I’m deeply uncomfortable with with with Donald Trump going way over the line of like what is what is permissible. but the thing that that Flock and others are betting on is that safety is gonna rule the day, that people are deeply concerned. he said in that in an interview there, he there’s two things I wanted to get at. One is

We see that building confidence in a community, that they’re gonna be safe, that their kids can go out and play, that you can start a business is critical to thriving communities. And that’s why Flock is important. He feels like that message that’s what is gonna like get Flock back on top, I think. This idea that that and I mean, I guess I I wanna I wanna I wanna set this off against like my I love the Daredevil series, you know, like

the the defenders of of Hell’s Kitchen and and and Harlem and and all of the all the different areas of New York that that come together. But like it leaves a terrible taste in my mouth to watch this show set in the modern era with crime out of control. Crime is not out of control. We live in possibly the safest time that numbers of humans have gathered in the the numbers and space that we have. We have almost no murders historically by like from thousands of years of human history of living together. But

but like there’s this idea that like we are not safe and we need this technology to be safe.

Daniel Boguslaw (32:51)
Yeah. Yeah, I mean and I think part of that I mean I I’ve read different things about this. It’s obviously like a perennial issue for pundits, and I think there’s different answers that combine for why people have this obsession and why he, that CEO, thought it was a good idea to address that. I mean, look, I think that going back to my original point about the sort of total surveillance with armed guards and Gestapo and laser beams, whatever, like I think

We have to acknowledge that like if you build a Panopticon, you do c create more security, right? Like if everyone is being surveilled and thrown in prison, like I I think it’s fair to say that crime will go down. And in fact, I think that there have been some municipalities I think like there was an article about Jersey, I think, for example, where there was some crime rate and like basically the way they did it was by like incarcerating a shit ton of people using like AI security cameras. So

there is an an argument there,

Christopher Mitchell (33:53)
There’s not just

an argument. It’s like, I mean, I I spent four months in the Middle East in the year 2000. I was in Israel. I was in what is today called Palestine. It was West Bank and Gaza. I was in Jordan. And then I went to Lebanon. And there’s very little street crime in most of those areas, especially in Tel Aviv, because there was a guy with an sixteen, or there was a a person, a lot of times there was women, with an sixteen on every street corner. Now, there is a ton of domestic abuse, there’s a ton of rape.

But like there is no street crime. And so I think it’s important to understand when we’re talking about public safety, what we’re talking about. And and and you get that, but I want to make sure listeners hear it.

Daniel Boguslaw (34:21)
Right. Yes. So d totally. No, and yeah,

but that gets to our point, right? And that gets to like what a lot of the reporting I’ve done too, which is that it becomes a hyperfixation with certain types of of violent crime, at the expense of j yeah, I mean, just truly looking at any of the other factors that are degrading quality of life. And so like one thing I’ve tried to report on a lot is how

For

the first time, really, like what we’re seeing inside of the domestic intelligence agencies around this Flock stuff and around the AI data center protests is like this huge new threat category that is so big that like it to me it feels unprecedented because at least like when you go back and you look at things like okay, there was mass surveillance, Hoover era surveillance of the civil rights movement. Like, okay, that that’s

That’s maybe like the biggest, or the left or the red scare. Like that’s really big, but also it’s like still even those things are still like relatively confined to like African Americans and their allies, or to labor unions and and really vocal left-wing groups. Like w this the the the so-called threat categories that I’ve been reporting on from internal documents are anti-technology extremism, which is like

Literally there’s no person who hasn’t gotten pissed off at some horrible nightmare technology at some point and written a Facebook post about like how annoying it is. Or, you know, that they’re can’t get the right iPhone charger because, you know, they’re it’s a different model. And so to me there’s a really fascinating expansion. and at the same time, you know, that it’s be that all these people are being grouped under this new anti-technology extremism threat category, which I’ve reported on extensively.

you know, all these other issues are being completely ignored. And you know, the only way that the federal law enforcement apparatus and intelligence agencies can conceive of addressing this, right, is by increasing surveillance, increasing the dragnet, trying to minimize threat actors, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. And they’re not looking at any of the underlying reasons why people are upset about this. And it becomes this this paranoid hunt to increase surveillance and catch the and do pre-crime, you know, prevent the next person from committing

Christopher Mitchell (36:45)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel Boguslaw (36:45)
that act.

Instead of saying, okay, let’s take a holistic approach here, let’s turn the the anxiety down here, and let’s you know figure out how to actually address these concerns or work with municipalities and even this maybe the corporations. I mean, as much as that idea is revolting to me, it’s also like if these law enforcement agencies were really serious, you know, wouldn’t they be incentivizing these companies and these municipalities to turn the temperature down and to and to

create alternatives, but instead all they can do is look for the next threat, look for the next attack. And you know, maybe they’re gonna yeah, maybe they’re gonna pick off some lunatic on Twitter saying he’s gonna blow up a data center. But you know, is that is that really gonna solve the problem long term? I I don’t know. I don’t think so. And as we know historically,

Christopher Mitchell (37:33)
Well I’m we

Daniel Boguslaw (37:34)
these things don’t catch everyone. They never will and and they’re not effective systems for this.

Christopher Mitchell (37:39)
I I pay attention to some of the stuff that the FBI has done, among others among leftist movements that are sometimes often don’t, but sometimes do feature violent rhetoric about blowing up data centers, for instance. And what it seems to me you find is that like I think you’d probably be out honest to say nine times out of ten or nineteen times out of twenty, the person that is talking about blowing up the data center would never have a means to do it.

Absent the FBI showing up with an informant and saying, Here are the explosives, and

Daniel Boguslaw (38:06)
Right.

Christopher Mitchell (38:09)
then they lock that person in jail. And that person probably needs anger management more than like jail because they were never going to actually do it. Now, there are some people that may try to do it. There are people that do horrific things like that and they need to be stopped. But I think you’re right. They get hyper fixated on it. the law enforcement does. I think often because they’re not good at their jobs. you know, the leadership in particular.

I don’t know. I don’t want to get into a whole thing about my my theories about who rises up to leadership in these sorts of things. But like I will say that like we had an interesting test case here in Minnesota. ShotSpotter is a technology that’s kind of like Flock, I feel like. It’s it’s like the people that are organizing around Flock, a lot of them, the ones that have been organizing on this for years, were worried organized around ShotSpotter before. It’s a technology that supposedly allows you to find gunshots. And the theory being, if you can find the gunshot,

Then you can try and get guns off the streets, you can try and intervene earlier and things like that. The technology is expensive and arguably doesn’t work all that well. So in Minneapolis, you have ShotSpotter, and in St. Paul, there was this discussion about whether or not the city of St. Paul should do this. My mayor, his dad had been a cop, and he basically wasn’t sold on ShotSpotter, had disagreements with the with the with the police on it, and they came to a really good thing. This is like a perfect case of like politics working, I think.

They decided to to try a different strategy, put a bunch of money into public safety to resolve homicides. We were having some issues with homicides. They were not high historically, but unacceptably high for the community. And and to, I don’t know, I’m just rambling on, but like the point of this is that they embraced a strategy of trying to solve the non-fatal shots, gunfire. And they ended up with a St. Paul’s had a clearance rate of homicides for like 100% for a while.

they do a really good job of that. And they decided to really focus on the attempted homicides, which are difficult cases. A lot of times if you get shot at, you’re probably someone who’s engaged in something that you don’t want to talk to the police about. I mean, that’s just sort of the where this

Daniel Boguslaw (40:05)
Yeah. Right.

Christopher Mitchell (40:08)
crime happens often. and so but they they did it and they got the clearance rate for those up to 70 percent. And we went like half of the year without a homicide the following year. And Minneapolis d did not embrace that strategy. There’s also there’s complicating factors if you dig into any of this, but like

What we saw is that if you gazed in real policing and built trust in the community, you had far better results than if you just throw money at some like you know, surveillance company that promises to solve all your issues with some magic.

Daniel Boguslaw (40:37)
Yeah, and and it’s like I want places to be safe. Like I don’t like cri you know, I do think that there are people on the left who like have such an ideological commitment they hate police so much and you know, they hate the state of our horrible prisons so much that like it does become this complete ideological abstraction. and like I you know, I don’t I don’t feel that way. You know, I don’t like crime. I don’t think crime is good. I I but at the same time what I think is is

i is also not good is like you said, strategies that that don’t work that just give the federal government more control over our lives. And you know, that that’s why I’ve been really focusing on fusion centers. You know, these are these sort of like recombinators that cycle intelligence and surveillance between state and local police and DHS and FBI. And I actually sometimes also the CIA as I’ve come to learn, in very rare instances.

And if you talk to serious people inside of FBI or DHS, what they’ll tell you is that like the intelligence that these places are generating is total garbage. And it’s not serious. And it doesn’t really ever work. And a lot of it is, you know, one one guy said state troopers trying to play, you know, Jason Bourne, where, you know, they like the the shit you get in these reports, like I I published one on my Substack that was about like

Teenagers like pretending to pee on their like high schools and then uploading the the shit to to the Internet. And it’s like, why is that an intelligence product? Why is a state trooper writing up a report about a fake urination online and then sending that to the FBI in the Department of Homeland Security? Why does that exist? You know? And and so it’s just this logic of paranoia and fear. And, you know, it’s like, what if that guy went and like hung out in that?

High school and like top found some kids who w weren’t doing so hot and and could use a mentor. You know, it’s like just th there’s just it’s just this logic of paranoia that then feeds on itself and generates these insane intelligence products and then can give the feds under an administration like this the ability to go and nail people. Or exactly like what you said, I mean, look, the reality is that you get promoted in the bureau by by making cases, right? And I mean I’ve talked to senior FBI executives who you know are just

are really intelligent in some ways and then in other ways are like, you know, how are we gonna prevent crime if we don’t set people up in stings that they would never have had access to before? You know, to them, that really is a legitimate way of kind of like culling the herd of crazies, basically. And and their opinion is really like even if this person could have never had access to weapons, like we’re kind of lowering that this abstraction, this abstract threat level that we’ve all convinced ourselves of. and so, you know, whether it’s

The Flock camera going into its own national database or whether it’s local intelligence being fused in these centers and shot up the chain of command, it’s like, does it work? You know? And I think the the answer is usually it doesn’t, you know? And usually what it does is it gives the feds the ability to to mess with people like labor unions and activist orgs that are that are, you know, do engaging in constitutionally protected speech and organizing. And and that’s really the ultimate fear. And even if those people don’t go to jail, that like when you know you

see the New York Times article about the feds surveilling your your labor union and you know, maybe you’ve got an undocumented parent or maybe you’ve got a a friend who’s who’s an addict and is out and is clean, but you’re worried that now they’re linked to you and they’re gonna be under more scrutiny. You know, like there’s a lot of ways that these these intelligence agencies and law enforcement officials like to say, well if you’re not committing a crime, you know, then this isn’t gonna affect you and and it it’s just simply not true.

Christopher Mitchell (44:23)
Well, and I think there’s an i an an issue of national security as well, where I would agree with some with some of the hawks in terms of when China is able to hack our databases so easily, and then they’re looking for the some way to blackmail people, we’ve made it super easy.

Daniel Boguslaw (44:42)
And they have

acted. I’m pretty sure they’re still in our network. I mean Salt Typhoon was this massive breach and they were in there for like months. And then even after we realized they were in our system, we couldn’t get they were in all of our telecoms.

Christopher Mitchell (44:56)
Yeah, because i it so much of this is theater. I mean, Bruce Schneier, I think, you know, popularized the idea of security theater, and airports and things like

Daniel Boguslaw (45:03)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (45:03)
that. And so much of this is theater. But people are reacting to it. So let’s get back to something. I mean, you started off noting that it’s exciting to see people exercising the democratic will. A lot of them are being told you’re stupid, don’t you know, like you’re wrong about this stuff. I think

I have a negative tendency. I’ve really been trying to check it for years of like telling people, you don’t understand it enough or something. Like I encourage people to do more, but like, you know, people people people need to like act on their beliefs in an open society. And and this is wonderful. I mean, I I’m I’m less encouraging of people that strongly believe we need to ban books getting together and organizing for political power, but like for people who are like organizing against surveillance, like, what are the things they should focus on? Is flocks?

the right thing? Is is it trying to make sure the federal government cannot buy, cannot buy is it is it changing culture? I mean like how do we engage in like sort of the what was the the group that did the the culture jamming back like twenty, thirty years ago. they like they did the the billboards and they’re focused on like media and stuff. I can’t

Daniel Boguslaw (46:05)
Something? Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re talking about.

Christopher Mitchell (46:08)
yeah, but like you know it’s like that’s a real thing to like focus on changing the culture so people value privacy

more.

Daniel Boguslaw (46:13)
Yeah, but

but I would say that th this goes beyond changing the culture. I mean what you’re doing is you’re showing like like when I think of like city govern I grew up in the suburbs outside of Boston, okay? And when I think about what city government in suburbia looked like, it was some assholes fighting with each other about, you know, whose driveway can you extend the driveway and are you gonna put up shrubs or hedges and you know it’s like these

These little petty fights. And I think what this shows is that like you can take any fight to your local government, and you can go up against a multinational corporation, you can go up against Meta, you know, you can go up against one of these data center firms, and you can win at a local level with your community, with left and right teaming up, you know, to stop this stuff. And so I I I say do it all, whether it’s Flock.

Whether it’s data centers, I mean my new my new evangelical push next push is gonna be the elimination of memorandums of understanding with the FBI, right? through the FBI’s joint terrorism task forces, which exists, you know, all over the country, they’re ba basically able to go and plug Jack into local and state police. they’re able to basically deputize local and state police into the FBI. And we know that you know

Th these JTTFs, these joint terrorism task forces are being used really as like one of the central fulcrum for NSPM seven, which is this national directive criminalizing all kinds of dissent, you know, in very large, ambiguous terms. It cri criminalizes anti-Americanism, it cri criminalizes anti-traditional family values, whatever the hell that means. and most cities have a memorandum of understanding, and a number of them over the years have

Terminated that MOU and basically kicked the FBI out of their local government. and so I think that’s another great way that that something that people should get excited about and that I I’ve been ev evangeli evangelizing about. but you know the point is that like we don’t have to sit and take it. And the point of America is that it’s a huge country and that people can choose what they want to do. If they want to have extended mag clips and endless school shootings, so that they can go to the gun range and and blow stuff up with with you know saw

machine guns, they can do that in some states. You know, and if they think that, you know, whatever children you know, women don’t have rights to their body and all this crazy crap, you know, okay fine, then go lobby and do your state government and build your own weird little bizarro place. That’s America. But it also means that if you don’t want a data center destroying your pristine environment and neighborhood, you know, you can organize and stop that. And, you know, I just think people have really forgotten, they’ve been demoralized, they’ve been ground down. I think

You know, you look at what’s happening in in in national politics right now, you know, people are voting for whoever i th is shaking things up the most. That’s why I think they voted for Trump in the first place. But the reality is is that people are also waking up to the fact that they have a tremendous amount of power at the local level. And again, I mean, it’s one thing with Flock, but I think there’s more national hatred towards understanding of the hatred towards Flock. Certainly with the data centers, I’ve been seeing both left and right commentators really taking up this high horse thing of, they don’t actually use this much water and

we need this to be competitive with China and blah blah blah blah blah. And you know, I say great, you know, keep on that stuff. And you know, today it’s data centers and you know, tomorrow it’s nuclear weapons facilities. You know, it it it it it this is a unprecedented in my lifetime strengthening of local civil civic politics. And I think it doesn’t it does not stop with any one of these issues. and and it’s awesome, it’s great, it’s beautiful.

Christopher Mitchell (49:59)
Mm-hmm. I mean, I will

I will say that I just visited a a new data center built in an Indian country on a reservation. and the term data center doesn’t really do service. this is so that they can serve everyone with a fiber optic network locally. uses no water. it’s you know it’s built in a very responsible way, and it’s the hyperscaler and in like these massive out-of-scale data centers. I feel like

No one would even know this data center was there if they didn’t advertise it basically, because it’s like it just fits into the into everything. So I will just say that I’m I’m concerned with some people passing overly signif and we’re gonna talk about this in a future show. you know, not I think having a proper definition of which data centers to be concerned about. So I’m I am one of those people that says it’s complicated.

Daniel Boguslaw (50:45)
Sure, totally. And and no, no, no, that’s f fair, and

it is complicated. I’m not saying it’s not complicated. I’m not saying it’s black and white. And and in fact, you know, there’s something perverse to me a little bit when you see these politicians kind of jumping on the bandwagon where it’s kind of like, hold on a second, you’re a national politician, you’re just saying this shit, you don’t even have any data centers in your state or whatever. so I agree, but the point is that like you can’t let that impulse necessarily

You know, to me, look, data centers are different than vaccines, right? Like you know, it’s it’s it’s one thing to say, well look, the these effects are maybe overstated and there’s some some, you know, kind of woo-woo takes about the energy fields around these things. but, you know, look, people still have the right to to determine if they want it or not. Whereas, you something with like vaccines to me that’s kind of like, okay, well like this is more hard science and this is gonna have a horrible rippling effect and and

Christopher Mitchell (51:40)
Well there’s

a yeah, I mean, public health has is if you dig into it, a lot of people aren’t familiar with this, but like there’s there’s a millennia of how humans have had to deal with public health because it doesn’t impact ourselves. This is not the whole like it’s my body thing. It’s actually

Daniel Boguslaw (51:51)
Right. Right. Right.

Christopher Mitchell (51:54)
it’s actually like we put other people at risk based on different actions. So so yeah, I mean I fully agree with you. Like there’s different ways to respond to these different things. And and I also further agree with your sentiment. I mean, it was phrased in in very

direct terms in terms of your feelings about guns and and abortion issues. But like I do think that on on the number of issues we need to have a variance among the states and and people’s

Daniel Boguslaw (52:17)
Yeah, I mean

Christopher Mitchell (52:18)
people’s political power. We should take it seriously and and we we shouldn’t seek to resolve everything from from Washington D C. That’s it’s a it’s a mistake, I think, to resolve everything from there.

but when it comes down to the national surveillance, we have to be concerned. And I mean I’ll just wrap up the show by by noting that I I I do feel like this technology is different. And it is different to have like video cameras that are analog and used by police and perhaps even abused by police to having everything digitized and able to be searched and combined by commercial entities is like I always forget about this, but you reminded us of it.

You know, into these different databases and then to be available for the federal government to get information they shouldn’t otherwise be able to get, to have private companies able to like to get this together for their surveillance pricing. There’s just, there’s all kinds of implications. And I feel like I’m the kind of person that I’m like, hey, how do we deal with this in the past? And there’s times where that doesn’t serve you. There’s times where we have to have new policies and new ways to deal with things.

Daniel Boguslaw (53:17)
Right. Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (53:18)
I think we’re coming up on that.

Daniel Boguslaw (53:19)
Yeah, totally. And I think that’s what’s confusing to people where I think the policy wonks again are really like, wait a second, like this isn’t this isn’t gonna gonna be the perfect solution. It’s like, well again, it’s d we are developing something new. Something new is burgeoning and again it’s not being directed by DC or national politician and that means it’s it it’s going live, it’s mutating in the petri dish, you know, and that’s what democracy is. So yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (53:42)
Yes. Well,

this is I mean we call the show Unbuffered and I feel like we we didn’t hold anything back on this one. So

Daniel Boguslaw (53:50)
I I try not to.

Christopher Mitchell (53:52)
it’s great to it’s great to meet you. I I really I hope you have a lot of luck with the work you’re doing and look forward to following you. What’s the name of your substack?

Daniel Boguslaw (54:00)
yeah, my substack is called Deeper States.

Christopher Mitchell (54:03)
Excellent. All right. Well thank you, Daniel.

Daniel Boguslaw (54:05)
Okay, thanks for having me, Chris.

Jordan Pittman (54:07)
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Unbuffered Podcast. We have transcripts for this and other episodes available at ILSR.org/podcast. While you’re there, check out our other podcasts from ILSR, including Building Local Power, Local Energy Rules, and the Composting for Community Podcasts. Email us at [email protected] with your ideas for the show. Follow us on Bluesky. Our handle is @communitynets.

You can catch the latest research from all of our initiatives by subscribing to our monthly newsletter at ILSR.org While you’re there, please take a moment to donate. Your support in any amount helps keep us going. Unbuffered is produced

by Christopher Mitchell with editing provided by me, Jordan Pittman. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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