← 5CAST w/ Andrew Callaghan
5CAST w/ Andrew Callaghan
How The FBI Buys & Sells Our Private Data - 5CAST (#18) ft. Jake Laperruque
00:56:05
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- [00:00]
A
The government was on a continuous basis collecting in bulk every American's phone records. Even the author of the Patriot act said that's not what we allowed. We never thought it was going to be used for bulk collection of everyone. Now there's so many ways that you get this data. Proliferating data brokers will pile up that information from various apps, various services, and then they'll sell it to a whole bunch of people, including selling it to law enforcement. So now instead of going and getting that warrant like the Supreme Court says you need, they can just buy it from a data broker. It's been used as the basis for detainments. It could be investigated by federal police or end up in the hands of federal and the federal government. We don't know exactly who would have what or then where it would be shared out. You know that there you should care about your privacy and not feel like you're always being watched. But that unfortunately is not the case now.
- [00:46]
B
Breaking news, breaking news. Are you watching this on a phone or a computer? I bet you are. And guess what? Since you first started fooling around on the Internet back in the day, particularly on social media and online shopping platforms, there have been private data companies building an individual profile on you to sell to advertisers and corporations like Oracle who build regional and market market specific algorithms based on consumer data. And guess what? You're the consumer, pal. For a long time this could have been seen as all fun and games. You buy a poolside basketball hoop on Amazon one day and then get served a whole gang of LeBron James highlights the next. It was chill, but now it's getting freakin scary. Three days ago, on March 18, 2026, FBI Director Cash Patel sat before the Senate Intelligence Committee and confirmed under oath that the FBI is actively purchasing Americans data in bulk from these same private data companies who'd worked in the ad space create domestic profiles on American shoppers. And what these data brokers have is a full dossier built from your entire digital footprint from your first MySpace profile in fourth grade to whatever the frick you're doing online right now. This to me and many other people is seen as a bit concerning. You know, why does the FBI want all of our data? Are they developing some kind of dissident database to map and classify people who speak out against the federal government? Or maybe uncomfortable with the Epstein class forcing Americans to fight a war on behalf of a country that's bought and blackmailed its way into our political immediate establishment with the sole purpose of manufacturing consent to expand their colonial project? I don't know. Hard to say. But I do know this previously, keeping track of dissent in a country this large would have been a huge undertaking. But now, with powerful AI tools, it's not super hard for federal bodies like the FBI, ICE or CBP to do that. Especially after Palantir, Peter Thiel's super chill company, has just formalized a $1.3 billion deal with the Pentagon, establishing Palantir as the default core AI system across all branches of the military and federal government. So that's where we're at, Pete Hegseth Gonna build a big old cracker barre in Damascus in 2050 and the edge of Death dinosaur humans making these calls for us right now. Won't even be around for the ribbon cutting ceremony. But I will. Channel 5. But speaking a bit superficially here, I just hope that for purely aesthetic purposes, America 2050 looks more like the New Vegas strip and less like the capital wasteland if the bombs do drop. But anyways, today's five cast isn't so much about war as it is about domestic surveillance. In this episode, we're going to sit down with Deputy Director of the Security and Surveillance Project at the center for Democracy and Technology, who is currently on the front lines of the policy war in Washington, D.C. and doing anything you can to help bring forth legislation to protect American cybersecurity. But first, I gotta tell you guys about something. Hey, what's up guys? This is not an advertisement, by the way. But did you hear that about a year ago we bought back our old show, All Gas no brakes.
- [03:25]
A
Remember?
- [03:25]
B
From 2019 to 2020. My first show, we bought it back. As well as the entire catalog of unreleased All Gas no Brakes episodes. If you're my friend and you come visit me in the RV, do not take a shit. Oh fuck.
- [03:37]
A
Jesus.
- [03:38]
B
Course, Ms. 13 is actually the biggest
- [03:40]
A
piece of shit I've ever met.
- [03:42]
B
And guess what? We are currently on tour right now going across the country screening OG and new All Gas no Brakes material and screening some never before seen Channel 5 documentaries that I think you'd like to see. So if you want to come to our C5 carnival, which is a hybrid all gas channel 5 screening with a talent show and a rap battle embedded inside of it. You should definitely buy a ticket right now at www.channel5.news. It's called the C5 Carnival. Link description and pinned comment. Tickets on sale now. And just so you guys know, Mr. Hunter Biden will be moderating the Q and A and judging the talent shows for the final dates in Phoenix, San Diego, and Albuquerque. Hope to see y' all there. Let's get into it. Well, thanks so much for making the time, man. I really appreciate it.
- [04:32]
A
Yeah, thanks so much for chatting.
- [04:33]
B
Yeah. For those who don't know, can you just tell us your name and where we're at right now and I guess where you work for?
- [04:38]
A
I'm Jake La Perouse. I'm the deputy director of the Security and Surveillance Project at the center for Democracy and Technology. We're a non profit, nonpartisan advocacy organization focused on promoting rights in the digital age. So everything from free speech and your ability to speak online to consumer privacy, to antitrust and tech, to my area of work, which is privacy from the standpoint of what's the government doing? What might they be watching or listening to? And how do we make sure that even as folks want to use more and more kind of new tech that can make their lives better in a whole bunch of ways that they're not sacrificing their rights to do it?
- [05:13]
B
And in layman's terms, what the heck is going on right now?
- [05:16]
A
There's a lot going on right now. I mean, one thing I love about the space is, you know, there's always new technologies on the horizon, and a lot of the time that can be really promising and can be really fascinating, but also it creates a lot of risk. So it's really important to make sure that whether it's all kinds of AI tools you might be using or whatever new ways people are using their cell phones or smart vehicles, that we're making sure that there are the right rules built in. And, you know, there's a lot of my peers are doing great work on kind of, well, how do we make sure that as consumers, you have your rights, that your privacy and data is protected? But also, from my vantage point, that's how do we make sure that we have the right rules and checks in place for how the government might respond to the fact that there's just more and more data out there in every aspect of our lives.
- [05:59]
B
Well, then I guess a better question is, as it currently stands, what is the most pressing threat to digital privacy for Americans?
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A
I have to pick one.
- [06:06]
B
Ring cameras being brought up a lot because people saw the super bowl commercial being like, hey, if you have a lost pet, you should get a ring camera. We've saved one dog over the past, you know, two years or something like that. But we know now that there was some cooperation between law enforcement and ring, which is supposed to be something private for Your own home. So maybe we could start there.
- [06:23]
A
Yeah, Well, I think kind of that's, you know, if I had to say one thing, probably the biggest thing is the fact that, you know, you used to. In an analog world, the private stuff would be inside your house. You'd have things inside your home, inside your filing cabinets, desk drawers. And that's where you keep all your private things, is within your own, you know, very clearly marked private sphere. And now everything routes through third parties and companies and services. How do we all communicate? We text and we email, and those are held in a server by Google or Microsoft. We browse online to get our information instead of potentially going to the library or having a bookshelf at home. You know, we're going to be talking on smartphones that we're carrying in our pocket and that are sending signals off everywhere that are going to paint off cell towers or satellites and generate information that way. Nowadays, we just live in a world where the only way actually really to participate in modern society is you're going to be generating a lot of data and you're going to be putting a lot of data in the hands of companies and third parties. And that creates a lot of risks that we didn't have to deal with before. And a lot of tough questions about, wait, we always assumed this stuff was private because it was just in our home. But what if that actually wasn't where all of our private data was located? The sensitive data we care most about, the sensitive information that can say the most revealing things about our lives. If suddenly that's something that you can reveal by going to a company or something that can be revealed by clicking a button and a bunch of cameras can scan where someone was last night or can paint up a record of where your car went or where your phone was then, what does privacy mean in that sense?
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B
Yeah. And what was happening with the ring camera? So can you kind of elaborate on the controversy recently?
- [07:58]
A
Yeah. So with ring cameras, this is they becoming more and more common. I think I read recently that one in every four homes at this point has some sort of video doorbell or camera. And there's a lot of questions of exactly how they should be used. For a long time, Rain has offered ways for a local police to be able to ping folks and say, oh, there was a crime in your neighborhood. Can we access your footage? Or something like that. As that's become more common and there's also been growing uses of it, like, say, potentially, ICE wants to be able to access those cameras, video, license plate networks, Like Flock want to be able to access those cameras. Folks, I think are starting to take a much more skeptical idea of, oh, wait, just because I've been using this for my own purposes, what happens when others want to be able to grab and access that data?
- [08:40]
B
And was there evidence suggesting that ICE was grabbing people's ring data without asking them?
- [08:44]
A
Probably through a couple hours there. So Rain had been planning a plot partnership with Flock. This is an automated license plate, automated license plate reader company that will scan footage, computers, AI software, automatically figures out what license plates are on it. And they can either use that to sort of track a network of where certain cars are moving, or they can have vehicles on a watch list and they'll get a ping when that comes up. Flock has come under a lot of controversy in the past year because of ICE using their networks and because of local police, sometimes on DHS's behalf, running queries and searches for vehicles and saying immigration enforcement is the purpose of them. So, you know, now when Flock is being potentially built into these services, that starts to raise questions of, oh, wait, folks say this is going to be used for law enforcement. Does that mean you're going after a porch pirate who's stealing some packages? Or does this potentially mean that there's something much more pervasive in types of law enforcement activities that individuals might not approve of?
- [09:37]
B
And is that a speculative concern or is there evidence of ICE actually using, you know, I guess, seized ring footage to prosecute people who, as far as
- [09:44]
A
saying, like Rain, I think it's a speculative concern, but there has been some documented cases over the past year of ICE and cpb, Customs Board Protection using Flock and their services. So I think, you know, it's a real definitive issue of that company is used by ice and other automated license plate rears tools are used by ICE in immigration enforcement.
- [10:06]
B
Yeah, there have been a couple things that have been used by ICE that breach legality, such as the use of LRADs Long range acoustic devices on the ground in Minneapolis. But also I have heard there's some other surveillance methods that have been used that are supposedly unconstitutional in the rounding up of supposed dissidents, antifa members, or what they call like anti law enforcement operatives. What do you know and what do we know about the surveillance tactics DHS has been using on the ground in Minneapolis?
- [10:30]
A
So ice, Customs Board Protection, DHS as a whole have a incredibly vast arsenal of tools for surveillance and investigations. And we have seen some of those documented in use in Minneapolis, including against protesters and dissidents. Some it's more speculative how they might be used. And there's also a lot of big questions. Unfortunately they're coming up and we don't have really info into about these threats of, oh, we're building watch lists of protests, we're building lists of people who engage with DHS officers where I think kind of the, the ambiguity is part of the point, potentially to chill out speech. But as far as the things that we do know, probably the most pervasive and powerful tool DHS ICP possess is their wallet. It's the ability to buy data from data brokers. And this is a huge pervasive problem for surveillance at all levels, from local policing to immigration enforcement to intelligence agencies, the nsa, CIA, FBI. It is a common tactic now, instead of going to court and saying, here's my evidence, here's how I know someone did something wrong, give me a warrant or a subpoena or other, whatever legal documents I need to go to a company, demand that data. Instead of going to the court, they'll go to a data broker and they'll say, I don't want to have to go through that process. I'm going to pay you, you're going to hand over a big data set for me and I'm going to collect it all and use it. That this is something DHS has done for immigration enforcement for a long time. And that's everything from location data to web activity and data purchase records to utility bills, which can reveal just something as basic as last known address for an immigrant, that individual that ICE might be looking for. When you take that power and all the data that's within it and potentially turn it towards more general internal policing, or in this case, potentially policing and tracking of dissidents, protesters, observers, it starts to get very worrisome in terms of what that could entail. There's been some great reporting recently on just the location privacy side of this. You know, your cell phones, they can be used to track where you go. There's actually a pretty long stand at this point. Clear case on this. The Supreme Court said seven, eight years ago that if you're going to track someone with your phone, you need a warrant to do that. Just as invasive if you're wiretapping someone's phone conversations or going in to search their house in terms of how revealing that is. So they said you need a warrant if you're going to track someone's phone. But now there's so many ways that you get this data. Proliferating data brokers will pile up that information from Various apps, various services, and then they'll sell it to a whole bunch of people, including selling it to law enforcement. So now instead of going and getting that warrant like the Supreme Court says you need, they can just buy it from a data broker.
- [13:01]
B
Yeah. And so a big thing here would be the digital trail that all of us have through our consumption habits, using third party services to, I don't know, shop or, you know, register our utility bill and stuff like that. So as far as cleaning up your own digital trail, what are some methods that you have seen are most effective in doing that, making it harder for data brokers to mine and sell your data?
- [13:21]
A
Yeah, I think at a base level it's worth thinking about, you know, what's most sensitive to you because there's really, there's no way to make sure that you have no footprint beyond going off and living in the woods. So it's worth thinking, what do you really care about keeping private? There would be some times where you don't mind if there's some data indicating you went out to Chipotle, but you might not want to know if you went to a house of worship or a protest. Do you think that's a little more sensitive? So it's worth thinking about those scenarios and making sure that you're putting in the time and effort to where it's most needed in terms of steps you can do. I've seen your cell phone can be very revealing about your location. Unfortunately, really the only way to stop those pins from happening is to turn it off or to leave it at home. So you might want to consider that if you're going somewhere especially sensitive. But in general, phones, you know, aside from cell signal, gps, even if your phone is in airplane mode, is probably going to be pinning off a bunch of apps. It's worth being cognizant of that for your most sensitive activities. Things like purchase records kind of similarly, that can reveal a lot about folks. There are stories as old as like 15 years ago about Target sending, you know, a woman ads about here's like prenatal care. If things were pregnancy, they knew that she was pregnant even before she did. Purchases can be really revealing, especially when these things are aggregated.
- [14:36]
B
So a lot of people have. This is a common conversation that people have casually, like, hey, weren't we talking about this topic yesterday? We were mentioning that we wanted to go to Utah to go, you know, camping and rock climbing. And that was just a conversation we had in our living room with an earshot of the Alexa system or our phones and the next day, their whole homepage on their Instagram and their whole Amazon wish list or whatever, all ads that are being targeted to them are all about that thing that they had privately discussed in their home. Is that a coincidence or wishful thinking? Or is that a coincidence or are the devices listening to us?
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A
It's not a coincidence, but the devices are not listening to you. This is one of my, like, favorite or most infamous misnomers. Because, you know, there are reasons why that happens. But it. But it. Your advice is not listening to you. You're not being illegally wiretapped all the time. I think it is kind of important to be thinking about that baseline of. I worry sometimes people get a little cynical or apathetic of, oh, you're just being spotted all the time. And that's not true. You actually, the Fourth Amendment provides a great shield for your rights, and other laws provide great shields for your rights. We have to keep fighting for them and updating them, but you know that they're. You should care about your privacy and not feel like you're always being watched. As far as saying like this, it's a good example of that big data issue, how everything can be combined. So if you're talking to your friends about this ski trip you're about to take, as you know, the example you're giving, your phone's not going to be listening to you and telling the company, give the man's about the ski trip. But you're talking about that you've probably been Google searching it, looking for places to stay. Or if your friend was, you know, going on that trip and they're telling you about it, well, that's pinning their phone on your WI fi signals, registering they were there. This person who also maybe was doing web searches about this, who was calling a friend there, or travel agents booking a place to stay on Airbnb, maybe renting skis or whatever equipment they're going to use. All that data is potentially getting piled up and then repackaged to not even a person. But, oh, here's user number 5, 1, 7, on and on and on. And here's all this data about them that indicates to an advertiser this is someone we should be sending ads about a ski trip to.
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B
So you're saying that, like, even when people have what they think is organic conversation, most of the time was premeditated by some sort of Google searches that will then algorithmically suggest things about the ski trip.
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A
Yeah, I'm just a lot of the time, if you're talking about Something like that, you're probably also doing a lot of other things you're not even thinking about in the background. And those are the things that are probably getting picked up and built into a profile that can support advertisers or in cases like this, can support a profile that a data broker then might sell to the police. Yeah.
- [16:59]
B
So looping back to the beginning, I mentioned, like, is there any way to live a surveillance free life? And you kind of mentioned, like, unless you want to live in the woods, it's pretty much impossible. So the Unabomber route is the only way to get out of having no digital footprint.
- [17:11]
A
If you want no digital footprint, I mean, we also can, and we probably should be passing comprehensive consumer privacy laws. Stop making sure that folks actually can control how this data is collected and used in a way that unfortunately is not the case now. And then. Yeah, I recommend that folks can look at piecemeal measures. You shouldn't try to reroute your whole life, but if you're doing again, sort of with your phone, if you're going somewhere really, really sensitive, maybe don't bring your phone with you. If you're browsing for something really, really sensitive that you wouldn't want anyone knowing you were doing that. Maybe use Tor or a vpn. Don't use the privacy settings on your browser. Those are not as secure as you might think they are. But if you use Tor, the Onion network, or if you use a VPN that's well vetted and there's a lot of great organizations like our peers at the Electronic Freedom foundation, eff, who will be able to tell you this is a good vpn. This is one maybe that's not as trustworthy. Those can be really great for protecting your web browsing activity.
- [18:03]
B
Yeah, I just want to root the conversation more in reality of like, everyone has a digital footprint. There's no erasing it. It's about maneuvering in a smart way that minimizes potential extrajudicial surveillance measures.
- [18:14]
A
Yeah, I would say kind of in a baseline, like, think about what your threat vectors are. That's something that folks say in cybersecurity a lot. And I think there's a way to apply that in the analog world too, is what do you care about being most private and put your efforts there as a way to sort of live in that modern society, not have to be the Unabomber in the woods, but also being able to actually have some control over this stuff.
- [18:34]
B
I want to talk about the word terrorism because I'm going to ultimately get to the Patriot act and where some of the surveillance policy on the government level began after 9 11. But you've seen an interesting resurgence of the word terrorism used for domestic groups recently. Yeah, you've seen it used for anti fascist protesters, antifa in Portland, antifa in Minneapolis, different Ice Watch groups. Right after the Renee Good and Alex Preddy murders. Some of the first language used by the DHS was like domestic terrorists. You're also seeing it used for like prosecuting people like Maduro and those who are involved in the transportation of supposedly fentanyl through boats in the Caribbean. You're like, okay, well these people are terrorists. Therefore we don't need to respect their constitutional rights. All measures that we take to I guess override their personal data privacy and personal privacy is in the interest of the greater public safety. Where do you see that connecting to where all this began? I guess a better question is where are you seeing that in application today?
- [19:32]
A
It's always hard when defending civil rights, civil liberties to kind of, to look at the scariest or worst situations. But it's really important, I think that it's bedrock of our system is we don't have different laws or rules for different crimes. No matter if you're investigating murder, terrorism, child exploitation, Constitutional rights apply the same way, the law applies the same way. And that's kind of part of the reason why we don't actually have domestic terrorism statutes. They're kind of, if you go into nitty gritty sentencing enhancements, we prosecute the conduct, not ideology. There's very important reasons for that, both for free speech and also for your right to due process and having a trial, your right to privacy and that if you're going to be searched, there has to be a warrant attached to that. You know, it's something we dealt with across the war on terror. When there's discussions about oh, maybe we can this way, can we change it that way, can we try to water down here? Because this is all so serious. We always have to, in one form or another confront the idea of, you know, there's always going to be really serious threats and issues we have to deal with. But these foundational rights are there for a reason. Because once you start to water them back for any scenario that seems tough, suddenly you're going to have nothing left very quickly.
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B
I guess the main point I'm trying to harp on is the weaponization of langu to justify surveillance. In your experience working in this field, when did you see that really first start to happen?
- [20:46]
A
Honestly, it's always been There and you know, it might be for one new form or another, like whatever is either the boogeyman or some very real threat that should be taken seriously. Things are going to be framed in the worst way possible to make it seem like you don't actually have a choice when talking about these debates of how much do we maintain privacy rights, due process protections and things like that.
- [21:08]
B
But I mean, would you say that 911 was a big jumping off point?
- [21:11]
A
Yeah, I think it certainly was. And I think there's always been that sort of debate of security and liberty and how we protect rights. But 911 really was sort of the as far as privacy rights and surveillance, the combination of two really, really important things. First of all, after the 911 attacks, public discourse and Congress and policymakers completely reworked what they were thinking about. You know, we were no longer looking at how do we protect privacy rights, how do we enhance them. We passed the Patriot act. We the next year created the Department of Homeland Security. We in the following five or six years continue to make changes to FISA national security surveillance laws. And the goal was always how do we ramp this up and up and up in terms of what the government can do and how we can take any checks or guardrails off and not bind us hands? That's all happening at the exact same time that we're dramatically changing the way we communicate and generate data. You know, we had commercial Internet before 9 11. You could go on your dial up Internet and could send a couple emails through aol. But really this was all happening at the exact same time that society was being transformed around. You can now communicate with anyone at any time. You can text people, you can email people, you can browse the web and go on Wikipedia, which was being created around this time and find out on everything you want. Social media, you know, is being developed at this time and starts to pop up in the same time that we're making all these changes to the law and the FOS in the post 911 environment. So at the exact same time that Congress is ramping down all the protections for privacy and safeguards there and giving the government new powers for how they can surveil folks, society and tech innovations are really ramping up. What data is going to be out there and what type of channels and communications that the government can tap into with all those tools.
- [22:52]
B
And how has government surveillance changed since then?
- [22:54]
A
There's been a big back and forth, I would say. So after this kind of big influence with 911 just sort of that ramp up that happened the Next big sort of inflection point was the Snowden disclosures. And a lot of what was revealed. There were things that had been happening for a long time, some completely out of public knowledge, some a little more just in the dark. But that was, I think, a big real reckoning point for the country to say, oh wait, you know, we're now over a dozen years out from 9 11. This sort of natural fear about it has pared down a good bit and suddenly we see all the consequences of what was unleashed, not just through the Patriot act, but through a lot of secretive programs that the public, even in a lot of time members of Congress did not know was going on.
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B
Like what?
- [23:34]
A
So bulk collection was the biggest one for that. This was the first big revelation of the snow and disclosures and probably the most important, which was that the government was on a continuous basis collecting in bulk every American's phone records. So this isn't the content of the calls, but it's, you know, who's calling who when. Just like, like having all those logs of every time you would call someone, someone would call you. The government would have a record of that. That caused a huge amount of controversy because even the author of the Patriot act, which is what the government said, oh this, we're allowed to do this because of this law, said that's not what we allowed. We wanted to try to broaden some authorities, but we never thought it was going to be used for bulk collection of everyone. So Congress then that kicked off a two year debate about that and a bunch of other surveillance authorities. And then in 2015 Congress passed a new law, the USA Freedom Act. Kind of a tongue in cheek bit of satire in the Patriot act that said we need to cut off this idea of bulk collection. And in addition to a number of other forms said you can only collect individuals information in a particularized way. You have to have it targeted at a specific person. If you want Jake's phone records, you have to say, here's why Jake's relevant to the investigation and connected to it that I'm looking into. You can't just grab the haystack of everyone in Washington D.C. or everyone in the United States and say, maybe I'll need to look for Jake later, so I might as well collect everyone. That also included a bunch of transparency reforms, tried to make the FISA court, which had stamped all these very, very dubious interpretations of the law, said if you're going to interpret the law, you need to tell the public how you're doing it. So that doesn't happen in the dark and tried to make other reforms to make things more transparent than they'd been, which had kind of gotten us to that point of, oh, wait, all these surveillance programs are happening in secret in ways we don't expect. So that was 2015. Since then, I think there's been kind of a continuous back and forth where we've had some good measures for privacy. Like I mentioned, Supreme Court in a couple years after that ruled that you need a warrant if you want to track someone's phone. But we've also had a lot of innovations and changes that create new risks. The biggest one's probably the fact that you have data brokers and you have the ability for the government to go and get information not through a court, but by buying it from a data broker. AI is making a lot of big changes, creating new capabilities to gather information, to generate leads, to generate suspicion in ways that create a lot of new risk. So there's always kind of going to, I think, be this back and forth of trying to be aware of new technologies, aware of what's going on and try to respond accordingly, but also needing to deal with whatever's on the horizon and emerging.
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B
For people watching this who have no idea what's going on, what are the most common unseen ways that people are being spied on today?
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A
Yeah, I'm going back and back to data purchases. I do think that's probably the most important one is the fact that, you know, even if you're not being directly monitored by the government, if you're, whether it's, you know, through your phone, through your app, through your web browsing activities, generating data, there's a good chance that that will be built into a data broker's, you know, stockpile of information that they're generating about folks and that that won't just be sold to advertisers, but it could potentially be sold to the police. Another area that I think a lot about and worry about is just surveillance of public places. If you live in a city, there are cameras everywhere nowadays. And that's not, that's something that's not going to change. Between private CCTV came that businesses might have outside their store traffic cameras, blue light cameras, which are the formal sort of place, we'll put them up for public safety. And now not only do you have those, but you have automated license plate readers, you have face recognition systems, you have other AI video analytic tools that can all take this huge amount of video feed that no one could ever possibly watch all of it and say, oh, I'm going to scan through, you know, eight hours of feed on a thousand cameras across an entire city and now I'm going to find the three things that are relevant to you. That really changes what our concept of privacy is, because in the past, yeah, you're in a public place, it's not quote unquote private, but there's always been an obscurity to it. You can't track everyone in a crowd across the city at all times on a human level. But that's very different when we're talking about AI. So that's a whole nother level of surveillance that's becoming more and more important all the time.
- [27:35]
B
And you mean AI being able to sift through hours of video footage to, to identify a targeted person?
- [27:41]
A
Yeah, exactly.
- [27:42]
B
So you mentioned the data brokers. I don't think people really understand how massive the data brokerage industry is. Could you kind of explain just like what's going on there?
- [27:51]
A
Yeah. So in terms of numbers, this is something on the law enforcement side especially, we don't really have enough insights into. We know that a huge array of law enforcement agencies at the federal level, the FBI, the dea, Military Intelligence, ice, dhs, Customs Border Protection, they all use data brokers to engage in purchases. And it can be a whole variety of materials, everything from cell phone location data, cars, vehicle data and information web browsing purchases. But the scale on it is something that unfortunately we still don't have a lot of knowledge of. There hasn't been a ton of transparency on the government side to how many Americans are they buying data of how much of your tax dollars are being spent to funnel this data broker loophole where instead of going to a court, they're going to go to a data broker. So that's kind of a base level thing that we really are constantly trying to get more light on, trying to figure out sort of the scale of the issue.
- [28:46]
B
What are the names of the biggest data brokerage companies?
- [28:49]
A
Babel street is one, Penlink, Thomson Reuters is one that ICE has used for a long time and provides a whole array of information. LexisNexis provides a variety of data.
- [29:00]
B
And they're just allowed to sell our information to the police.
- [29:03]
A
As far as what information they can acquire and how they sell it from like a commercial standpoint, there are rules and regs which honestly I'm not as much of an expert in. But right now this is, as far as selling to the police, a very big loophole and something that we probably want kind of addressed more from that surveillance standpoint Yeah, I know that there's
- [29:19]
B
been some pretty drastic real world things that have happened as a result of people buying private information from data brokers. There were those two politicians who were killed by a conspiracy theorist in Minnesota who used Fast People Search to get their home addresses. I looked up my name on Fast People Search and I had the name of every residence that I lived in Since I turned 18 and went to college was on there, all of my phone numbers and a ridiculous amount of personal information. And I was just curious about the mechanics of how all of that landed there.
- [29:45]
A
Yeah, so I mean it can come from a whole variety of sources. You know, some of this is originally public information that is scraped is just compiled and oh, this is much more efficient way. Some of it will come from a business be, you know, it can be an app on your phone that maybe you're using a service to try to figure out where to go somewhere, ride sharing app, things like that, and you're generating location data from that. But depending on the terms of service for each app, that might be something they can sell or maybe it's an app that does something that has nothing to do with that type of information, but that's good business for them to grab this data of. Oh, let us access your contact list, let us have access your web activity or your location and depending on your settings, depending on the terms of service, maybe that's a whole sort of under the radar side business they have where they're grabbing and funneling that data to someone else.
- [30:33]
B
So there's one side which is the data brokerage side where it's mostly about money selling the data, but the collection of the data seems to be like, I don't want to be too speculative here, but like a future play to quell or quash, let's say any domestic uprising or resistance that may occur stateside.
- [30:50]
A
So you mean collection by the government or collection by like the companies that
- [30:54]
B
are by the government themselves. Like why they would want to keep such tight tabs on people is what they call security. And security would mean keeping order.
- [31:02]
A
So another thing that came up from the Stone revelations that I think has really continued to resonate the then I said a director, a phrase he used for kind of why their mentality for that bulk collection program was they were in a collect it all mentality. And the mindset there was we don't want to be in a situation where another 911 has happened and we look back and say why didn't we have that piece of info that we needed? Why didn't we have whatever little bits of data would have allowed us to collect the dots? I think it is very common across government, law enforcement, intelligence agencies. Not even necessarily for any nefarious purposes, but just from a practical standpoint, say our job is to keep people safe. Let's just grab everything we possibly can get and if we need it later, then we have it and if there are consequences, we'll sort it out. So I think that that's a kind of a common theme that you see across this a lot is it is the collect it all mentality of we're better off having it and not needing it than needing it and not having it. But that's why we put rules in place is to say your job is to try to, yeah, get data, pursue investigations, keep us safe. And it's the job of lawmakers, it's job of legal safeguards to say, and here's the guardrails that you have to operate in while doing it.
- [32:11]
B
I just want to zoom on that specific keep us safe point because. Safe from what? Safe from acts of terror perpetrated by foreign nationals, Safe from anti government speech from US citizens. We can look at other governments, right, that have implemented advanced surveillance across territories they occupy. Let's look at the west bank in Palestine. For people there, if they've spoken out against the government, if they have done something that makes people upset, makes people in Israel concerned about their future potential for committing terrorism, they are essentially marked. So when people scan their IDs at certain checkpoints and they go through society, they are subject to advanced questioning, people making sure their intentions are pure. I think a lot of people are concerned that may be happening here, especially as you see a ramp up of certain government activity in places like Los Angeles and Minneapolis. So I just want to ask you the straightforward question. Is the DHS doing something like that? Are they making lists of suspicious individuals and mining data in the background and creating these archives?
- [33:11]
A
Yeah. So as far as DHS and whether there's been lists of protests or dissidents, this is something that there's, I think been a very alarming amount of sort of contradictory information from the administration because you have high level statements from White House officials, DHS officials saying, no, we do not make lists of protesters. That's not American, we don't do it. But then you also have, you know, right alongside it, statements from folks at those same high levels of DHS in the White House saying, if you're protesting, we're going to keep track of that or we'll vote in a database and we're going to know it. I worry about the possibility that it's real. I also worry about the possibility of sort of creating a panopticon. Panopticon. That's the idea of not necessarily even surveilling everyone, but making sure everyone feels like they're being surveilled, feels like they're being watched. And if you're always operating under that risk of surveillance, then that's going to shape your behavior, it's going to chill speech. So I worry about the fact that, so I mean, certainly we should be concerned if this is happening, but even if it's not happening, trying to weaponize that threat and make it seem like it's something that could happen. So that's why I think it's really important at baseline to continue to try to push for clarity in exactly what DHS is doing and how it's operating. But it is, I think, a real threat. Like as you mentioned, it's something that you can see in a lot of other areas in the world, from Palestine and Palestinian territories, Gaza and the west bank to China, where you'll have social scores to a whole other array of, especially in authoritarian regimes, listing out kind of folks that might be seen as threats against social order. And in the United States, even for all the rights and protections we have here, there's a very law and bad history of surveillance of dissidents and protesters. If you go back to just a few years ago for Black Lives Matter, there was a lot of practices both from federal law enforcement and local law enforcement to catalog protesters. You can go back further. Post 911 environment, huge efforts to catalog and monitor at large scale Muslim communities across the nation. But especially around New York, you would have infamous programs for literally called mosque crawlers that would be tasked to go into Muslim communities, mosques, meeting center, et cetera, and try to catalog just what folks are doing. And that had a huge impact on social behavior in those communities, that sense of we're being watched. If you can go back Further to the 70s, COINTELPRO was a very nefarious series of FBI programs for monitoring a whole array of protesters and dissidents, from environmental activists, especially anti war activists, and then before that in the 60s and through into the 70s, a huge amount of monitoring of the civil rights movement. So you know, even for all the protections that exist and a lot of that conduct that I've, you know, described flew in the face of various laws and protections, let alone the fourth Amendment. But it is kind of constantly a threat and something that I think folks should be keeping a critical eye on. You know, surveillance tools that are often promised to keep you safe can actually be used against you.
- [35:55]
B
I don't think cointelpro ever really ended.
- [35:57]
A
Yeah, I mean, it's. You know, it depends on how you define it. But no, I think that there is kind of, yeah, talking about sort of Muslim surveillance and Muslim communities following 9, 11 monitoring. You know, Black Lives Matter activists, or black identity extremists as the FBI termed it, as a way of doing investigations. There is, I think, a through line there where a lot of the time, if you talk to folks that try to support government surveillance, we'll say these are isolated incidents. This was the few bad apples. We should respond to that, but we shouldn't do it. I think it is, unfortunately, much more the norm than the exception for there to be, in one form or another, treatment of protesters, dissidents, folks who criticize the government to varying degrees, be watched and be monitored.
- [36:41]
B
What I mentioned about cointelpro is I feel like even when some of the elements of the program had officially concluded, there was great effort put into the maintenance of the results of some of these programs. For example, when they systematically dismantled the Black Panthers while simultaneously creating Bloods and Crips in the strongholds like Los Angeles of these groups, there was great effort put into managing the culture that was promoting that kind of behavior through the music industry for a very, very long time. You saw at the exact same time they, you know, the Fred Hampton assassination occurred, Huey Newton was jailed. The industry starts promoting gangster rap immediately and commodifying that while simultaneously infiltrating the group itself. So you see a baseline set for infiltration. The American Indian movement, the same thing. Brown Berets, all these groups got infiltrated, and it was made easier to do by creating these lists. So moving to what you call the catalogs of Black Lives Matter protests decades and decades later, did anything ever come of those catalogs or were they more used in 2020 and, you know, the months in 2021 to try to keep tabs on people, a lot of these
- [37:46]
A
things, it is kind of hard to figure out what is coming out from, like, the black box or behind the curtain. So, yeah, I don't think we have a ton of explicit stuff about kind of anything that came from that. But a lot of time it can become very hard to sort of know what's the source of investigations, what's the source of police activity, especially just for how much information like this. Like, you know, a network of just someone's social media profile or just listen to their past activities, if that might go through an interagency database, something like nlets. This is a communication system where law enforcement will, you know, police departments across the country will share information with each other. Fusion centers, a lot of these were set up in the post 911 environment. Ways for law enforcement, state and local entities to lase and share information with each other as well as with the federal government. Once information being generated and put in that ecosystem, it can be hard to find the origins of it. But that amplifies those risks because you don't know if there might be some nefarious ends for where something occurred, or there might be also unreliable information going in and saying this person's a threat, when that's actually based on false or maliciously thought out information.
- [38:49]
B
Yeah, I think a lot of people are curious about some of those law enforcement back channels. Like back in 2020, I was reporting at the BLM protests in Seattle and Portland and Minneapolis. And when I got pulled over in South Dakota for like an unrelated reason, the officer asked me if I had a connection to the Seattle and Portland protests and he didn't look me up on social media, there would have been no way for them to figure that out. So I was curious and I've wondered ever since, like, what was he looking up on that police computer? Because I never got arrested at any of those protests.
- [39:16]
A
Yeah, and I mean that's, you know, this is like entirely speculative, but like that could be something potentially like an automated license plate reader, a stingray. That was something that was speculated happened a lot during Black Lives Matter protests. These are devices that sort of imitate a cell tower. So all the phones in area will ping that device in addition to ping the cell tower and tell the device, hey, I'm, you know, Jake's phone, I'm over here. Something like that to potentially like data purchases which can say, oh, we have everyone who moved down this avenue or a protest was at this time, something like that. Those are all potential ways that that type of information could be gathered up. And something like that could might, you know, potentially go into a profile of was at this protest where 100 people were arrested. Was that this event where dissidents or
- [39:58]
B
agitators and who manages that profile, like where, where does that profile live?
- [40:02]
A
You know, a lot of these things, they are decentralized. They, they might. It could be a very. A police department that can maintain something like that. It could be investigated by federal police or end up in the hands of federal and the federal government bought a of lot. It does kind of live in that black box of we don't know exactly who would have what or then where it would be shared out.
- [40:21]
B
I wonder if it's deliberately stratified to be hard to pinpoint or if it's just an organizational problem.
- [40:26]
A
I think problem organization. One thing I think we've seen from the past year and all the concerns about ICE is how important it is and how valuable it has been to American democracy that we actually have an incredibly decentralized police force. And that's not true of a lot of countries, including other democracies. But, you know, it's one of the ways that we have a federal system and when there's concerns of, oh, you know what, if an entity like ICE is actually more focused on trying to clamp down on dissent than any sort of actual law enforcement mission, they were focused on the fact that it's decentralized and that you have local control, residents can hopefully maintain a good control over how their own police operate. And that you don't have one person who gets to decide, I want you to be used in this way or that way probably has some benefits in terms of. Of any sort of nefarious goals for how police would be used is something that can't be turned on and off nationwide.
- [41:17]
B
So moving to ICE and cbp, I saw a lot of videos in the field and in person of them using the CBP1 mobile app, which they only really give to law enforcement officers to conduct the facial scans of detainees. What's going on with that app and what is it doing?
- [41:33]
A
So ICE has for a number of years used some limited forms of face recognition, but typically this is kind of the investigative uses behind a desk where we'll have a photo of someone, will want to do a scan to figure out who it is, and then you'll process the results and look at potential candidates. What's entirely new from the past year is that ICE now has an app, it's called Mobile Fortify, that they can have on their smartphones if they're going to someone in the field can take a picture, do a scan, get a result right there, and then process what are the results of that are. In general, using face recognition in the field is pretty worrisome because it's a technology that has a lot of capabilities, but it's very situationally dependent. Whether you have good lighting, consistent lighting, good angle, all those factors, even if you're using the best algorithm, are going to impact whether your matches are reliable. Or not. And then also you need to have good system settings and good way you treat it. Typically for if you do a face recognition scan, you're not going to get a one to one, oh, here's exactly who this is. You're going to get a gallery of 10, 20, 50, 50 potential matches. It could be a bunch of these people, they all look reasonably similar. And then you're supposed to do follow ups, you're supposed to go through that all those lists, see who seems like they actually match, do other additional investigative work and vetting. So it's really supposed to be a starting point, not an end point. The way this apparently works is you get one match, you do not get any sort of score from the system saying, this is a 98% confident match. This is a 90% match. It's just one match we think is probably this person. And then on top of all these factors, what ICE is apparently doing that as far as I've seen, no other police department in America has ever done as a policy, is treating a match as a definitive id, which means if they take that photo, take a skin of someone and it pops up a match saying, here's a match, this person is this undocumented immigrant we have listed in our system, then that is for them alone enough to detain that person and take them into custody. Or what I actually told Congressional Congressional Oversight Committee was that they could override if the person has documentation paperwork saying, no, I'm not that person in your photo, I'm someone else, I'm a lawful resident here. They can say, nope, the app says that based on your photo, this is you. And we're gonna say we're trusting the app, not your paperwork, and we're going to detain you and bring you into custody.
- [43:44]
B
Has that kind of thing happened before?
- [43:46]
A
It certainly has been used on individuals. Whether it's been used to override paperwork, I'm not sure if we have documented cases on that, but it's been used as the basis for detainments. And again, this is saying that virtually every police department in the country that has policies and rules on face recognition says, you cannot use this as the sole basis for an arrest or a law enforcement action. We have a bunch of really troubling incidents where police have cast aside those rules and gotten too over enthusiastic of, oh, we have a match, we're probably good. But if you talk about to chiefs, the department and their policies, they say those officers shouldn't have been using it that way. Our policy says do this. The constant thing you'll hear from them is that it is a lead generator that is supposed to be a starting point. So this is something that's not even just ICE saying we should use it this way, and civil liberties folks like me saying we really need to rein in this technology. This is saying that even. Even the police, who I will argue with for hours on, hey, you guys are using this more than you should. You should have stricter rules. They say, yeah, that's a rule we can all agree on, is that it should not be a definitive id. The use of this app really does kind of fly in the face of what are the norms and expectations for how to responsibly use the tech and its limits.
- [44:47]
B
Moving to a bit of the other side of the political spectrum, as a civil liberties person, how did you feel about the mass censorship of Facebook accounts under the Biden administration?
- [44:55]
A
So that's more of a free speech issue that a lot of my peers in a free speech team work on on jawboning issues. And I don't want to step on what they kind of can speak to about. You know, it's an issue of a lot of complexity for jawboning as far as what are the proper limits and concerns there. And it's something that's carried across, you know, there. There are a lot of jawboning concerns going on right now, just like there were then. Yeah, that's something I. I would definitely recommend reading the work that they have done and continue to do in that space. I guess I'm trying to set a
- [45:25]
B
set of framework for, like, bipartisan distrust in the establishment. It's not just something that concerns progressives who go to protest. It's also something, you know, from a free speech level. Different types of overreach have also pissed off a lot of conservatives, too.
- [45:38]
A
Yeah, absolutely. And I'll say from just the pure surveillance issues we've been talking about, you know, maybe not so much on the ICE stuff, but in general, it's an issue that really quite often defies a lot of partisanship. You get a lot of bipartisan support in this stuff and a lot of unusual bedfellows. Talking about that USA Freedom Act Millie mentioned before and all the Pfizer reforms that happened post Snowden, that was very bipartisan. You had about just as many Democrats and Republicans coming together and saying, we need to change these laws. When you look at new technologies, like some of the hearings we've had on face recognition, you will have, like, just as much consternation of, this is out of control. We need to put limits on this from Democrats and Republicans, you quite often get a really interesting set of like the folks all the way over on the left, really hard progressives and folks all the way over on the right. The like very Mag and Freedom Caucus folks line up in agreement saying, yeah, we are worried about the government having too much power and it might be you today whose, you know, party is not in the White House who's worried about how this is be using, but it's going to be me tomorrow and we are on the same page as the values on it. So that's one thing I'll say I do really like working about on this space is not every time, not every example, but most of the time it really is one of those odd issues that defies the partisan expectations and where you get folks from all the way over on the left and all the way over on the right working together.
- [46:53]
B
Where's Snowden at now?
- [46:54]
A
Snowden, I believe is still in Russia, but has not been in the conversation for a long time, which I think is fine. We've always kind of tried to take the attitude of making sure that we focus on the policies and not let the personal stuff try to veer the conversation away from the issues that were raised and how the laws should be changed.
- [47:11]
B
So what law do you think needs to be changed most imminently to give us a more perfect union?
- [47:15]
A
If I could pass one, it would be the Fourth Amendment's Not For Sale Act. This is saying that kind of going to that bipartisan trend. It has Democrats and Republicans on it in both the House and the Senate. But Ron Wyden, very progressive Democrat, has been the leader of that in the Senate for a long time. Warren Davidson, for a conservative Republican, has been the leader on that in the House for a very long time. And that would close that data broker loop. What we've talked about and say that if law enforcement wants to get your data or intelligence agencies want to get your data, they have to go through the court process. They can't skip it by buying it from a data broker policing to immigration enforcement to federal law enforcement, all the way up to what the NSA and CIA and the Alphabet soup of intelligence agencies are doing would make a big difference for protecting people's rights.
- [47:59]
B
So to make it illegal for data brokers to sell our data to law enforcement.
- [48:03]
A
Yeah, yeah. And to not say that law enforcement can't get that data, but that they have to go through the process, that that's been expected, you have to go to a court, you have to show Whatever cause you need for especially sensitive data, you have to get a full probable cause warrant and you have to tie it to a specific person or specific information. Because a lot of what's happening through this is not just that you're avoiding the court process, but that you're getting it in bulk. You're getting data on hundreds of people's location, thousands of people's web browsing or purchase activity. It's exactly that sort of bulk collection that we thought we were getting away from when we passed the post notes and reforms of these Poststone reforms of, oh, I, you know, we shouldn't be allowing the government to collect it all and then sort it out later. We always have had the expectation, and I think still now a lot of people assume that if the government wants the most sensitive information about you, they're going to have to go through a court. You're going to have to get a judge to sign off and say that's justified, that you're going after this information. But a lot of the time now we have a loophole that means instead of going to a court, going through this independent approval process, police are simply going to a data broker and buying it. And they're using that as a loophole to get around the checks and guardrails and protections that are supposed to stop abuse and supposed to stop pervasive surveillance.
- [49:15]
B
How much business has ICE done with
- [49:17]
A
these data brokers in terms of amounts? Kind of hard to like isolate specific amounts. Ballpark, I mean, tens of millions, probably hundreds of millions as we start to get into all the funding from the big beautiful bill from last year and
- [49:34]
B
the names of the biggest data brokers.
- [49:36]
A
Sorry, there's one that I'm blanking out on that Babel Street. Yeah, there's Babel Street, Pen link, Thomas, Reuters, and sorry, there's one that's on the tip of my tongue, but yeah, those are a few. Babel street in particular is one that there's been documented contracts of a whole variety of law enforcement agencies, including dhs.
- [49:55]
B
So that might explain some of the videos we've seen in Minneapolis of ICE just rolling up on people's houses. No warrant, no probable cause note signed by a judge, nothing. Extracting people, taking them to a facility with no judicial process in place.
- [50:10]
A
Yeah, and something like that. There could be a whole variety of data points, it could be a utility bill, it could be a whole variety of just addressing records. There's been a lot of controversy this year in addition to kind of data points being grabbed from brokers or grabbed From a bunch of sources of what about other parts of the government? You know, what about people's tax filings in the irs? This is Lane where there's been new efforts to say if one agency has it, why don't, why doesn't DHS have it? Why doesn't everyone across the government have it? And you know, sometimes that's a policy question. Sometimes there's actually been other rules and laws already built in IRS and tax day being one of them, saying actually there's a lot of good reasons why we want to keep that private. We want people to file their taxes and not worry that that's going to be be misappropriated or misused in some other way. So there's supposed to be pretty strict rules in that, but there's been a big effort to try to share out that information and to make sure that DHS can kind of have access to anything that's anywhere within the federal government.
- [51:05]
B
To be clear, is this data brokerage loophole legal?
- [51:07]
A
This loophole is not consistent with the fourth Amendment. I think it's an end run around it and it shouldn't be legal. Whether it is is something that courts haven't taken on yet. You know, if you ask DHS's or the FBI's lawyers about it, they'll tell you it is legal. So right now it is something that the law is not successfully stopping them from doing. Hopefully one day it can get before courts and that can change or Congress can step in and pass a law to stop it.
- [51:31]
B
Right now, what do you think the long term trajectory of America would look like if that change was unable to be made?
- [51:37]
A
It's always kind of a battle on a bunch of fronts for protecting privacy and making sure the proper guardrail's in place. And even if, let's say we solve the data broker structure to tomorrow Congress passes that fourth Amendment's not for Sale act, some new issue is going to pop up. There's going to be a whole variety of how we're using AI tools, some other new loopholes, some other new way tech applies. It's unfortunately saying that there's never going to be a moment where we win for privacy rights. It's always going to require constant ongoing work. Fortunately, I think it's something that a lot of folks care a lot about and that there's always going to be engagement on.
- [52:07]
B
It's just hard because there is a part of me when you think about these issues, you think about on one hand, police overstepping boundaries and getting information on People that they don't have constitutional rights to do so. They don't have a proper reason to do so. But then you think about, like, I don't know, online predators who hide behind encrypted servers and take advantage of, you know, kids and stuff. I don't know if you heard about, like, 764 cult or some of these, like, horrific child exploitation cults that use AI tools to target vulnerable kids on places like Roblox and elsewhere, and oftentimes have layers of encryption and are able to evade law enforcement that way. You kind of think to yourself, like, man, well, shouldn't there be room for law enforcement in very fringe cases to be able to use whatever tools they have to catch these people?
- [52:50]
A
Yeah. And I think, honestly, a lot of the time, you know, law enforcement has lots and lots of powers. And even if we pass all the reforms and rules that most privacy advocates like myself want, law enforcement will have lots and lots of powers. I mean, you know, I won't speak for everyone. They're probably, you know, there are abolitionists out there who say, no, we should completely change the fundamentals of the system. But I think most folks that talk about privacy rights and try to enact stronger reforms and rules like I do, it's not about shutting off law enforcement's ability to do things. It's about putting checks and processes in place so that you can go after bad actors and bad guys and do those things. But you have to jump through enough hoops that you can't misuse these powers in a variety of ways. And those hoops can be annoying. But I think, you know, for a lot of folks like me, it's a cost worth having to make sure that the system can't be abused because a lot of power does come with it.
- [53:43]
B
Yeah. My final question is, I'm sure people at home are watching right now thinking, man, how do I keep my digital trail clean? I want to live online and be able to look up whatever I want and not have data brokers selling it to the cops if I speak out against the government. What is a way that the average person at home can keep their digital trail clean while still using the Internet and having fun?
- [54:01]
A
So for things that are most sensitive, use encrypted communications platforms like Signal. If you want to browse privately, use a system like Tor or a vetted and reliable vpn. Think about when you're carrying your smartphone with you, if that's something you feel safe with in terms of your information being out there. But I think fundamentally, folks shouldn't have to be constantly doing an endless amount of work and checks to try to be private. So I would say the number one thing I'd recommend is call your member of Congress call your state lawmaker and and ask for them to care about and push for stronger privacy laws because really the burden should be on the system and our laws to protect you. You shouldn't be off on a loan endlessly trying to protect yourself. So whether it's you know organizing with local activists and community organizers, calling your representative specifically emailing them find ways to speak out and try to make sure that we get those protections we needed enshrined into law.
- [54:56]
B
Awesome. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Hope I asked some good questions. One good yeah. Okay. I'm glad everything went well. Awesome. Channel 5 live worldwide Hollywood advice the
- [55:06]
A
authority Channel 5 news Channel 55 we
- [55:09]
B
don't with custers and 5 is the best number.