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- [00:00]
Cooper Quintin
This is an iHeart podcast.
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James
Guaranteed Human warning.
- [00:05]
Cooper Quintin
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Podcast Announcer
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- [01:25]
Cooper Quintin
Save on family essentials at Safeway and Albertsons. This week at Safeway and Albertsons, Fresh cut cantaloupe, watermelon, pineapple or melon medley
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James
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Cooper Quintin
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James
and varieties of Doritos, Lays, Cheetos, Sun Chips and Kettle Cooked chips are $1.99 each.
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Cooper Quintin
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James
Hurry in.
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Cooper Quintin
These deals won't last.
- [01:51]
James
Visit Safeway or albertsons.com for more deals and ways to save.
- [01:56]
Colonel Panic
Warning this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.
- [02:03]
Podcast Announcer
Views is vapor done right. What does that mean? Well, we sweat the small stuff so you have a smooth, consistent draw every time. That way you can focus on what matters, like getting back to your podcast. Learn more@views.com that's v u-s e.com underage
- [02:20]
Colonel Panic
sale prohibited views as a vapor product Website restricted to age 21 tobacco consumers Copyright 2026 RJRVC Call Zone Media
- [02:33]
James
Hello. Welcome to It Could Happen here. It's me today, James, and I'm very lucky to be joined by Cooper Quintin, who is a senior staff technologist at the eff, and Colonel Panic, who is a hacker. And we are going to be talking today about the privacy apocalypse that is coming our way. I guess the end of privacy and what you can do to stop it being the end of privacy. So thanks for joining me, both of you.
- [02:57]
Colonel Panic
Absolutely, yeah.
- [02:58]
Cooper Quintin
Hey, James, happy to be on the show again. Thanks for having me.
- [03:01]
James
Yeah, thanks for making the time. So I guess, like, in the case, if somebody lives under a rock, we should start breaking down some of the different, like, surveillance mechanisms that the state is building. And maybe cattle Panic, you can kick us off with, with Flock, because that is the one that has probably got the most attention recently. And then, Cooper, we can pick up on some. Some of the many other privacy violation tools.
- [03:28]
Colonel Panic
Certainly. You may notice all these cameras popping up around your town. They're on a black pole. It's a black camera with a solar panel. And these are what we call flaw cameras. They're really easy to spot, but they're essentially ALPRs, they're automatic license plate readers. So this is like a form of dragnet surveillance where anytime you drive by these things, they're just logging your license plate. And they've expanded this to do other things like facial recognition and gunshot detection and so on. Distressed person detection is another one, which is really dodgy.
- [04:02]
James
Yeah, Fascinating. But it just looks for people who are acting distressed or.
- [04:07]
Colonel Panic
I think it's a sound thing too, right?
- [04:09]
James
Oh, okay.
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Cooper Quintin
Yeah, I think it's. It's. It's pretty similar to gunshot detection in the. For people shouting, people in a heightened state of emotion. Right. I mean, this could really easily be a protest detector, right?
- [04:23]
James
Yeah. Or imagine if that was a fucking peacock. Like you have. Peacocks get angry. They. They really sounds like someone's dying. Or a fox.
- [04:30]
Cooper Quintin
Yeah. I mean, false false positives are already a huge issue for gunshot detection in general. Right. They can go off for a balloon popping, they can go off for fireworks.
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James
Yeah.
- [04:41]
Colonel Panic
And then just because you're in the area, you know, you're now part of an investigation.
- [04:46]
James
So perhaps we should talk a little bit about some of the other ones. Cooperation. Maybe we start with facial recognition.
- [04:51]
Cooper Quintin
Yeah, yeah. Facial recognition is all the rage these days. A lot of law enforcement is unfortunately investing in this. We've seen, of course, ICE with their mobile Fortify tool that's gotten a lot of press lately. And then this is an app that runs on Android phones that they can scan people with and apparently, according to them, get a fully 100% accurate identity for that person within seconds. Anybody who understands facial recognition will tell you that that is not true, and that can't possibly be true. Facial recognition is never 100% accurate. And in fact, there have been dozens of cases where people have been falsely arrested, wrongfully imprisoned, and charged because of incorrect facial recognition results. This has also already happened in the case of Mobile Fortify. There was a woman in Oregon who ICE scanned her face, and they scanned her twice. Both times, it came up with a different identity for this woman. And it turns out that both of those identities, neither of them, were the correct identity for this woman.
- [06:02]
James
Jesus.
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Cooper Quintin
But ICE has been using this as a sort of judge, jury, and executioner to determine whether to arrest, detain, and possibly even deport somebody.
- [06:16]
Colonel Panic
Wow.
- [06:16]
Cooper Quintin
Yeah.
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James
Yeah, it's pretty bleak. Something that happens if, when you come to the United States and you're a migrant. Right. Is that they will collect a large amount of your biometric data. But it seems that even with all of that, the resolution that they have on their scanners is actually very poor.
- [06:31]
Cooper Quintin
Yeah. Yeah, that's. I mean, that's. That is correct. Right. So the way that this works, the databases that they have, it's checking against various immigration databases. We think that it's most likely checking against the, like, TSA database of biometric scans that you do every time you take a flight. Of course, all of the at the border biometric scans, the ingress and egress scans, any sort of visa information or anything like that. There's also, though, Clearview AI, so even if you've never done any of these, there's another app called Clearview AI which is used by law enforcement and by eyes, which does a similar thing. But it's backend data is all of the photos that have been posted online. So they're using data from social media, Facebook, Instagram, everything else to make a face match and determine who you are based on that sort of publicly available data as well.
- [07:24]
James
Great. Yeah. What a reassuring thing to hear, the
- [07:28]
Colonel Panic
high cost of the free service.
- [07:30]
Cooper Quintin
Yeah, absolutely.
- [07:33]
James
Let's talk about a couple of other things. I think those are things that people have a very reasonable fear of concern with anger about, however you want to put it. There is some stuff which I think perhaps we. We just need to understand what it means, I guess, and maybe we could start there. I know, Cooper, you've done a lot with Stingrays or cell phone site simulators. Or lots of names for them.
- [07:57]
Cooper Quintin
Yeah, definitely. So I've been for the last couple of years working on a project called Ray Hunter, which is a open source project to detect cell size emitters or stingrays or MC catchers, whatever you want to call them. I will probably use these terms interchangeably. And in short, the way it works is it's a little piece of software that sits on a mobile hotspot, one of those little things that you buy to get like WI fi in various places from a cellular connection. And it looks at the traffic between the hotspot and the towers that it's connected to, specifically the control traffic. Not what you're doing, but what the control traffic is, how it's connecting to the to. It looks for a number of suspicious things, signatures that we've written of what we think are indicative of McCatcher activity. So we've been running this for a year. There's several hundred of these around the US if not a couple thousand, but we don't have exact numbers. There's a bunch of these all over the us. We had a bunch in Minneapolis. People have been running them in Chicago and LA when that was going on. People have been running them all over the country. And we have found some evidence of IMSI catchers, but a lot less than we expected or a lot less than many people expected. I actually didn't expect to find many. And specifically we have not found any evidence of IMC catchers being used at protests. And I should stop here for a second to explain what a stingray or IMSI catcher is. This is a fake cell tower essentially that tricks your phone into connecting to it so that your phone will identify itself to the MC catcher. These are used for. The primary reason these are used for is to track down a specific person. So like what we see in court documents is that these are used to verify that somebody is home before a police raid happens. Right. This is what the vast majority of use for these is. That is one use. The other potential use, and the one we're actually more concerned about is that these could be used to identify who is in a specific area. You could set one of these up outside, let's say outside of a mosque or outside of a protest, an anarchist meeting or anti fascist meeting is regularly happening and identify the people who were in that meeting by getting those unique IDs and then going to the phone company and saying give us the subscriber information for these people. And that is a far more concerning use and we are not seeing it so far, with Rain Hunter being used for that, what we're seeing is uses that seem to be more in line with the sort of manhunt or like verifying that somebody is home style of operation, which is also what we're seeing in court documents.
- [10:43]
Colonel Panic
Interesting.
- [10:44]
James
Yeah. It doesn't mean that the government cannot find out that you were at a place or at a. A protest. Right. It just means that they're not using this mechanism of doing that.
- [10:58]
Cooper Quintin
Yeah, that's exactly right. So people have asked us what our theories are for. About why we're not seeing these at protests. Because for a lot of. For a long time, there were a lot of activists that were pretty convinced that these were showing up at every protest.
- [11:11]
James
Right.
- [11:11]
Cooper Quintin
Or that maybe like, you know, to use the old. There was. The old cointelpro language was like the architects of cointelpro wanted activists to feel like there was a cop behind every bush and inside every mailbox. Right. And that was really the impression that a lot of activists had about IMSI catchers.
- [11:29]
Podcast Announcer
Right.
- [11:29]
Cooper Quintin
That they were in every cop car, that they were everywhere, that they were just constantly being used. And it seems like that's not the case. And I think there's a couple reasons why. One is that they're expensive. It costs about a million dollars for an IMSI catcher contract. So these are actually like fairly rare. And they're hard to operate. They require a lot of technical knowledge. They require a lot of understanding. Cops are idiots. They don't want to actually go do all this work if it's not necessary. Right. And it's a lot more expensive than using one of the many other surveillance technologies they have Flock facial recognition, things like Penlink, which we can talk about in a little bit. But other, other databases of location. Because our phone advertisements on our phones are constantly giving up our location. Right. And there's a whole surveillance industry around that, selling that data to police. Also. The other big issue is that there was a legal decision in 2020, 2019. I'm going to mess this up. Fact checkers will need to get on this in 2019, called Carpenter versus USA. And the Supreme Court in that decision decided that to access historical cell site. So this is where people were located based on what. What cell towers they're connected to that police would need a warrant for that information. And it seems like at that time a lot of law enforcement agencies decided that that also extended to stingrays. Whereas previously they had not been needing to get a warrant to use their stingrays. It seems like a lot of Them thought, oh okay, this seems like it probably also applies to stingrays. Therefore any case using stingrays without a warrant will get thrown out and therefore we're going to need to get a warrant to use this thing. And it turns out having to get a warrant was too high of a bar for most police agencies and made them not want to use this technology unless they absolutely had to and thought they could get a warrant for it. But there's a lot of other things they don't have to get a warrant for. So we think my theory is, is that they are using these other technologies that are easier to use, cheaper to use, don't have to get a warrant and saving the stingrays only for when they are sure they can get a warrant and when the cost and complexity is justified.
- [13:51]
James
Yeah, that makes sense. The 2018, June 22, 2018, that Supreme Court case.
- [13:56]
Cooper Quintin
Thank you. Real time fact checking here on ichhh.
- [13:59]
James
Yep, that's what we do. Let's talk about Penlink and like other location data. I, I did hear recently that it's possible that Iran had used commercially available location data to target some of its strikes on US troops in the Middle east, which is wild to consider.
- [14:18]
Cooper Quintin
I had not heard that, but it's not surprising and it is absolutely wild. Right. So yeah, so Penlink is a company that actually previously had sold a lot of software to help out with MC Catchers. So interestingly they have now pivoted to different types of surveillance. So they a few years ago acquired this company, Israeli company called Cobwebs. Cobwebs makes a lot of different software. There was actually just recently a fantastic report about all of the software that was acquired by Penlink in this sale. There were links to a couple of spyware manufacturers. Anyway, there was a report on Citizen Lab. That's excellent. I highly recommend it. But the short of it is that Penlink has acquired two of their main products, one of which is called Tangles and the other One is called WeBlock. Tangles is a social media surveillance tool that allows investigators to scrape social media for specific keywords and make links between different people, different organizations. Say like anybody who has interacted with the John Brown Gun Club or anybody who has interacted with the socialist RA or anybody who has mentioned the words antifa. Right. You can go build a dossier on that person, build a dossier on who their friends are, what they're talking about, scrape specific groups, any sort of left leaning group. Right, they can build a dossier on that, who all the people are who their friends are. And then they have this tool called WeBlock. And what WeBlock does is it is a near real time database of the locations of millions of phones worldwide. And so how it works is police can circle a specific area on a map and it will show information about all of the phones that they know that were in that area in some sort of timeframe. And I think that the data gets updated every 24 hours. So you're gonna have about a 24 hour delay in that data. So you circle an area just like with your finger, and you're going to see who was there as of 24 hours ago, and back to whatever timeframe you set. You can then select any one of those phones that were in that area and see information about that person, which is mostly advertising demographic information, like what sort of age bracket that person's in, what their interests and hobbies are, whether they have kids, whether they're a parent, what their personality is, etc. Etc. But you can also see a historical map of where that person or where that device we should say has been. Right. And so you can see where they're at, where they spend their days, which is probably their work or something like that, where they spend their nights, which is probably their house, where they spend sort of their afternoons or evenings, maybe a third space, maybe a lover's house, something like that. But you can see everywhere they've gone. You can see if they've were at a specific protest, you could see everybody who was at a specific protest. You could do a lot of different things with that. And we think that they get that data from advertising networks. We know they get it from apps on your phone. And basically those apps are sending information to advertising networks, which is then sold or scraped by Penlink to add to their database for this app. And all of this is then sold to law enforcement. So law enforcement can get this information and none of it requires a warrant currently, or law enforcement does not think they need a warrant to acquire this data. And judges have upheld that so far.
- [17:59]
James
Yeah.
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Colonel Panic
So you're saying when you download an app and you give it location permissions, that this is aggregated and then sold to third party?
- [18:08]
Cooper Quintin
Not every app, but yeah, a lot of apps, like most of them, we've been really strongly encouraging people to not give apps location permissions unless there's a very good reason why that app should have location permissions.
- [18:20]
Colonel Panic
Right.
- [18:20]
Cooper Quintin
Like, like on my phone, the only app that has location permissions is my maps app and my weather app. Right. And that's because I know those apps don't have advertising SDKs in them, but if you wanted to, if you were extra paranoid, like if I was heading into something, I mean, if I was heading to something that I didn't want people to know I was there, I would turn my phone off or at least put it on airplane mode. Right?
- [18:43]
James
Yeah.
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Cooper Quintin
You know, short of that, you could turn off location services entirely for your phone. Right. And give no app your location. But yeah, it's the, the. Our phones are snitches, man. Our phones are snitches.
- [18:56]
James
Yeah. That is the, the big take home is the, the big snitch you carry around in your pocket. Take everywhere with you. Talking of snitches, I can't think of a way to fucking pivot this into adverts.
- [19:10]
Cooper Quintin
Damn products and services. Here's some things you can buy to snitch on you.
- [19:14]
James
Yeah, hey, buy these things. They'll give away information, data, sell it to an Israeli company who'll sell it back to the cops. All right, we are back. I hope you bought something nice. I want to talk about community counter surveillance because it is interesting. It gives people something they can understand a little more about the web of surveillance around them. Right. They can, they can feel a little bit more informed. So let's, let's talk about it. Maybe Colonel Panic, if you want to kick off, you've been involved in some of these devices. I don't know how you want to put it. You're behind some of them.
- [19:58]
Colonel Panic
Yeah, certainly. I came up with the idea for what people are now calling We Spy. It actually was initially called Oui Spy. It was Organizational unique identifier, which is the first six characters of a Mac address. But it's art, you know, it's going to be pronounced however people want it. It has dual meanings, We Spy. But this, this actually kind of was born from the war driving community, which is old school, driving around, trying to find devices, just seeing what's out there. And so essentially you have all these devices that are transmitting around you and it's totally fine and totally legal to just receive passively. And so things like Wiggle or Kismet you can use on Linux to just drive around and just kind of see what devices are in your area. And through this, I came up with a device that was based on remote ID stuff prior to We Spy that just detects drones and then transmits it over meshtastic, or it detects a device and transmits it over meshtastic. And then I was like, it'd be really cool to have a device that if you, if you have a device that you want to know when comes around you, it'll just beep. And so I just took a microcontroller and drew out the, the design for this thing to connect to a beeper and essentially made the firmwares that do a few different things. For instance, if you, if you wanted to know when a Tesla drove by or something, you could put in the OUI for that or the Mac address for a specific device and you can just tell, get alerts when devices are around you essentially. So that's where all that began.
- [21:39]
James
Yeah. To explain how like this might help someone, let's say like you just wanted to get an idea, right. Of the surveillance infrastructure that, that you encountered in your daily life. You haven't been going to city council meetings. You don't know all that shit is your local newspaper is dead now because everyone's local newspaper is dead now. Right. So there's no reporting on it. Like if they wanted to get one of these devices, cruise around town and work out like when they were being spied on, like what kind of abilities would it give them?
- [22:08]
Colonel Panic
Certainly. So there's drone detection on this device so you can have it alert when drones are near or have to have it map via remote id. But the biggest one I think that has been the most important one is the flock camera detection. There's a ton of other cameras than flock, but this is the important one lately. So a lot of people are out on, you know, out doing war driving and doing real time research in contributing to, you know, adding to this database of flock cam signatures essentially. And it's either WI fi or Bluetooth and some of them are over cellular too. But essentially I made a firmware called flocku. When you drive around, it just war drives flock cams. And a good friend of mine did some recent research and found out that if you put the microcontroller into WI fi promiscuous mode, it'll detect more flock cams. So that firmware just came out a couple days ago. So constantly being added to. So if anyone has Mac addresses, Ouis, please contribute. It takes a village to raise a surveillance detection kid.
- [23:20]
James
Yeah, it allows people to then crowdsource or do community based mapping of this stuff. Right. To give people. And I know I have friends who've reported on gunshot detection software. It won't surprise people to find out which communities are the most surveilled and which communities are the least surveilled. But it nonetheless is important that's an important function in making that obvious to people. Likewise, drones. People might be thinking, why would I want to look for drones? Drones are super cool. Just fly them around to see the birds. Can you explain that drones might also play a role in surveillance?
- [24:00]
Colonel Panic
Yeah, absolutely. I'm an avid drone flyer, so I developed this just for funsies and made a drone detector. And I quickly realized that the most frequent flyers are the pd, unfortunately, you know, surveilling the area. So it's really interesting to see and to see that they're flying, you know, more regularly than any hobbyist.
- [24:22]
James
Yeah, yeah. This has become a big part of, like, cops used to have to send up a helicopter to look at something from above, right? And they still do all the time. I hear that over my house every day. But they can also do it with the drone now for. For much less money. Cooper, do you want to explain Ray Hunter a little bit for people who are, like, suddenly shocked by all of this and they want to turn their car into a beeping machine?
- [24:44]
Cooper Quintin
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. I will do that. I want to extol the virtues of we spy for a little bit before that, though. Yeah. I mean, this is how I linked up with Colonel Panic, because I thought this was such a really amazing project, and I think that it's. It serves a couple purposes, right? I think that there's one very practical purpose of, like, this can help you map out the surveillance in your town, right? You can export the data from this and upload it directly to lockmapper. Right? Or there's some other site that'll help you, like, plot a route from point A to point B, avoiding flat cameras, which I think is really cool. It also just helps sensitize you to how many flaw cameras are in your town. Like, people like, they. They. They are unobtrusive to a degree, right? Like, they are easy, easy visual noise to just ignore. Yeah, right. But when you're like, I was surprised by how much it went off in my town, and then I'd look up and I'm like, oh, yeah, flood camera, Flood camera. Okay. Right. And it got me used to, like, spotting those cameras around, right? And I think that it's a really. It's a really useful piece of propaganda work, essentially, in that. In that way to get people used to spotting these, to get people thinking about, well, where are these? How many of these are there in my town? Right? Like, people are like, well, you could just go look for them. Yeah, but people don't, right?
- [26:11]
James
You've got other Shit to do. Yeah, like.
- [26:13]
Cooper Quintin
Yeah, exactly. But if I hear that from the. From the, you know, really loud buzzer, right. I know that something is going on. Right. It's more of a. It's a little more jarring. It's good in that way.
- [26:26]
James
Yeah. I see it as like a. Like a little. I don't know. Imagine a little parrot sat on your shoulder and went, you're being spied on. You're being spied on. You're being spied on just constantly. Yeah, yeah. And you realize the extent to which that is happening.
- [26:38]
Colonel Panic
Surveillance. Coal mine Canary, essentially, you know?
- [26:41]
James
Yeah, Canary is better. Better analogy.
- [26:43]
Cooper Quintin
Kind of like lying cat, but surveillance cat, right?
- [26:47]
James
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [26:48]
Cooper Quintin
Instead of every time you're lying, it says that. It just says surveillance every time somebody's flying on you.
- [26:52]
James
Yeah.
- [26:54]
Cooper Quintin
The other thing that I think is cool about UI Spy and ragementer and why I think these are good projects is it gives a lot of people something to do. Fascism can really make people feel helpless, and this overarching surveillance can really make people feel helpless. And it's really easy for people to fall into privacy nihilism and security nihilism and just be like, well, I'm going to be watched constantly. There's nothing I can do, so screw it. Why do anything? And this gives people something to do. There's a thing you can. And Americans love buying a thing. We love a gadget. And so there's a thing you can go buy or build or set up or whatever and go. Start pushing back, even just little by little on the surveillance around you, Right? And then once you start doing one thing, it lowers the energy of activation. It becomes easy to do other things.
- [27:51]
James
Right.
- [27:52]
Cooper Quintin
It becomes easier to go to your city council and demand that they rip these cameras out. It becomes easier to find and organize with other people in your community, Right. It becomes easier to start to think about direct action. In that sense, it becomes a bit of propaganda by deed, Right. Like we're giving people the tool to get off their couch and start to push back and start to fight back and start to become a part of a community. Right. So I think it's really important for that with Ray Hunter. So I already kind of described how it works, but we had. We had a few goals with Ray Hunter. One was to figure out, you know, how often cell size simulators were being used in the US and around the world. But. But, you know, I live. I live here, so this is my main focus, but specifically how often they're being used to spy on protesters. Right. Because we were getting this idea that a lot of activists thought that they, they were everywhere. Right. And I thought that other things were a much bigger threat. Right. Like I'm. And there are, there are things that I'm more concerned about, but also cell site simulators, Stingrays are pretty mysterious, right. Like we don't, we know the broad strokes of how they work, but we don't know the technical details of what exploits they are using to, you know, essentially trick people's phones into connecting to them. Right. So this was a, this was a chance to try to get some ground truth information about that as well.
- [29:17]
James
Yeah.
- [29:17]
Cooper Quintin
And we have succeeded in that. We have a bunch of recordings from around the US of things that we think are quite likely to be suicide simulators actively in use by law enforcement. And we've got some ideas about how they're working and what they're doing. And the other goal is that we wanted to try to calm down some of the fear and uncertainty and doubt among activists about whether this was a threat model that they need to worry and give people more accurate threat models. Right?
- [29:48]
James
Yeah.
- [29:49]
Cooper Quintin
And also give people a modicum of comfort. Right. This is not a self defense device. Right. This is actually like at the end of the day, this is a data collect. Like, not data collection. We're not collecting your data, but this is a research project. We're collecting the data. About how often do we think we're actually seeing these. But it gives people a modicum of comfort too, Right. Because you have Ray Hunter with you. Right. And if it doesn't go off, you're like, every time it doesn't go off, you're like, okay, you know, maybe this is not actually a threat model that I need to worry so much about. Right. And then I hope you'll think, well, what do I need to worry about? Oh, probably things like pen link. Probably things like Celebrate and the cops arresting me and making a copy of all the data on my phone.
- [30:33]
James
Yeah, right.
- [30:34]
Cooper Quintin
Probably other, you know, facial recognition and other things like that, which I think are the things that you should be thinking about and worrying about. Yeah, that's been the point of Ray Hunter and I think it's been successful in that sense. Right. But yeah, we really, I mean, we want, we want more people to install this. Right. Especially the next time ICE lays siege to a city. Right. We want to have, we want to have them there. You know, late in the game to Minneapolis, a ground game got set up where we then had like a couple hundred of these on the ground. In Minneapolis and we didn't find, we did not find anything in Minneapolis that we felt was conclusive evidence of an MC catcher. Well, ICE was there laying siege to the city. Hopefully there is no next time they lay siege to a city.
- [31:16]
James
Yeah, hopefully that doesn't happen again.
- [31:17]
Cooper Quintin
But if that does happen again, hopefully we can get sort of a ground game set up very quickly to try to determine if they're using this form of surveillance or not.
- [31:26]
James
So talking of surveillance, here are a couple of products and services if you buy them, that will probably result in your data being collected, which will in turn be sold perhaps to an Israeli company who will sell it to the cops.
- [31:38]
Cooper Quintin
Shamba would never sell my data. Warning. This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. Hey, it's the Velo guy. If Henry Ford popped out for a smoke, horsepower wouldn't be your flex, it'd be your ride. Because no one made history by popping out, they stayed for more. Get more wherever, whenever Enjoyment with Velo Nicole Nicotine Pouches discover more@velo.com underage sale prohibited nicotine pouches Velo plus is a synthetic nicotine product website restricted to age 21+ nicotine consumers. Copyright 2026 MBI let's be honest.
- [32:18]
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- [33:45]
Colonel Panic
We don't want to waste your time, so we won't. VUSE is vapor done right, simple, sleek, stylish.
- [33:52]
Cooper Quintin
Because when you find a vape that
- [33:54]
Colonel Panic
goes with everything, everything just clicks. Find views at your local convenience store down the block.
- [34:00]
Podcast Announcer
Underage sale prohibited. Views as a vapor product Website restricted to age 21 plus tobacco consumers. Copyright 2026 RJRVC.
- [34:12]
James
All right, we are back. I think that's a really good explanation of like the value of these devices. The more you know, the more you know and this is a struggle that I have on a daily basis at the moment. There are so many things to be angry and scared about right now. We don't need to invent shit that we shouldn't be angry and scared about. We need to focus on the things that are a real threat. And there are things in this landscape which are a real threat. And so I think it helps people to have that. It's one thing to go on Flock Mapper or whatever and be like, okay, well they're there and there and there. It's another one to be like, well shit. In my going out to get a pizza with my friends, I was spied upon five times. And I think that that is very valuable. At the same time, nobody tried to sell, site spoof and get my information that way. I think that's very important. Let's talk a little bit about like how people can organize. San Diego has done a spectacular job of signing a contract that it can't stop paying for surveillance cameras. So even if we stop using them tomorrow, we would keep sending our taxpayer money to a spying company. Which is great because our city is Enron by the sea. It will continue to be a shit show forever apparently. But like let's assume that other people have slightly more competent local government.
- [35:31]
Cooper Quintin
What an amazing contract. I can't believe that they signed that.
- [35:35]
James
California politics is a shit show, but San Diego is a fucking joke. Many examples of this.
- [35:39]
Cooper Quintin
Listen, my city council member just got indicted by the FBI on corruption charges. So in the year of our Lord 2025 he got indict by the FBI. So like how stupid do you have to be? So I, I have no, I have no leg to stand on. But also in California. So it all tracks.
- [35:56]
James
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The great, great times on the left coast.
- [35:59]
Cooper Quintin
Yeah.
- [36:00]
James
Let's talk about how people have organized their communities against surveillance. Like just to like paint a picture for folks here. Right. Like, the flock camera does not know if you're doing a crime. The flock camera doesn't know if you came from another state to obtain reproductive healthcare. The flock camera doesn't know if you're a migrant parent popping out to get formula for your little baby. It captures all of that shit, Right? Like, there's a broad range of people in this country who are fucking disgusted at that. People who we might not be used to organizing with, but perhaps you guys could like explain like how or if you're aware of instances where people have organized against state surveillance. It would be cool to hear about that.
- [36:46]
Cooper Quintin
Yeah.
- [36:46]
Colonel Panic
I recently did a talk here in Asheville, North Carolina at a, an event called Nerd Night. And Nerd Night is essentially, it's a way to go to a bar without just a bunch of drivel. You know, you go, and then somebody does three talks, 15 minutes each. And so the, the host was kind enough to give me a 25 minute slot at the end to talk about flock cameras in our city here. And it just so happened to be happening before they tried to vote on a real time intelligence center that centralized Flock, Axon and all of our drone data into one just like wall of surveillance for the city. And so I did this talk and a city council member showed up, our coolest city council member, Kim Roney, she showed up. And during the questions at the end, I was unsure because on our portal here it said, the APD says, you know, we don't share our data with outside agencies. And Kim Roney came up and confirmed that something like 4,000 agencies have access to our data. Yeah, we don't share them, but they can request and we just hand it over. So that's, that's one thing that we learned at that time. So this, this prompted a, a big push that was kind of happening for city council. So a lot of folks that came to that talk came to city council. And I'm telling you, like, it's folks all over the board. I mean, this is Appalachia here. Nobody, nobody wants to be surveilled in these hollers, you know.
- [38:15]
James
Yeah, this is one of those areas where we can build really broad coalitions like, of people who we might not agree on with on everything. Like, this is a threat to anyone who wants to do almost anything apart from, I guess, just go shopping.
- [38:30]
Colonel Panic
One interesting point is that over 100 people showed up to city council. I'm, you know, this is, this is new to me. I'm working on getting out there a little bit. And I ceded my time to another, a speaker. But over a hundred people showed up. And then they pulled it from the. The vote. They pulled it from the agenda. So lots of folks left, but then some folks stuck around for general comment and still got it out there. But, you know, we'll. We'll see what happens down the line.
- [38:56]
Cooper Quintin
They love to do that tactic. They did the same thing in Oakland when it was up for. When it was up on the agenda, they said a ton of people showed up to discuss it and then they were like, oops, no, never mind. We're going to pull that from the agenda today. Yeah, it's such a shady tactic. But no, I mean, at eff, we've seen. We've seen similar things all over the country. You know, a ton of different cities have dropped their flock contracts recently because of community pressure, right? This doesn't happen in a vacuum. Your city council doesn't care, right? They. They want to score easy political wins, right? Flock sells them this as an easy political win, right? They can stop carjackings, right? They can, they can find car thefts. They can do all these things that are popular. Nobody likes being carjacked. Nobody likes having their car stolen, right? But when people show up to city council and push back and fight against this, it makes it not an easy political win, right? It makes it actually politically a bit poisonous to push these technologies. And it should be. We shouldn't be surveilled constantly just because we happen to be outside. And look, I would love to not have a car, right? But this is America. Like, everybody drives all the time. That is the society we live in, unfortunately. And you shouldn't be subject to surveillance just for participating in society. And like you said, I think we can build very broad coalitions around this, right? And we can start to like, hey, you know, remember how, you know, how mad you were about flock? Like, yeah, wait till you find out about these other surveillance technologies.
- [40:34]
Colonel Panic
Right?
- [40:35]
Cooper Quintin
Like, now let's talk about campaign finance and how all these companies you don't like are financing politicians, right? Like, you can pull people to the left and this is a good way to start interacting with those people.
- [40:50]
James
Yeah, right.
- [40:50]
Cooper Quintin
Even people on the right, Even sort of our more, you know, the more
- [40:53]
Colonel Panic
libertarian folks, they hate them too.
- [40:56]
Cooper Quintin
A lot of them have gone full Nazi. But the ones that haven't gone full Nazi, right, Like, should really care about this stuff, right? And you can, you know, this can be a way in with them as well.
- [41:07]
James
Yeah. Like everyone we can bring with us. We need to. And everyone else. Fuck them.
- [41:11]
Cooper Quintin
Yeah, absolutely.
- [41:12]
James
But I think this is a really good area to organize because all of us stand to lose something. It's so fucking creepy when you realize the extent to which, like someone is watching or could be watching you. There's a million reasons why people could be mad at that, that there's plenty
- [41:29]
Colonel Panic
of room for abuse, you know, there too. And it's. It's been documented, you know, a recent video with Ben Jordan. I mean, you know.
- [41:36]
Cooper Quintin
Oh, yeah.
- [41:36]
Colonel Panic
If you give people this kind of surveillance access, it's impossible to vet people on this level, you know, and if, if you give people who got, you know, godlike surveillance power, what are they going to end up doing? And there's been cases where they've shown that police officers have surveilled their ex partners and in consequently pulled that person over, which is just insane.
- [41:57]
Cooper Quintin
Yeah, no, they've used this to stop people to surveil current partners, ex partners. Like, the idea that police would never abuse their power is completely absurd. And anybody who is arguing that is not arguing in good faith, I think.
- [42:14]
James
Yeah. And yet, like, like it is. I'm not that the Dems are like necessarily. I mean, they're not on the, on the side of goods, especially in this area. But like, it is a big blue state thing. Like, don't think because you live in California, this isn't happening. This is very much happening.
- [42:30]
Colonel Panic
Yeah.
- [42:31]
Cooper Quintin
Right, right. Yes. I mean, to talk about that real quick. Right. Like we have. I am blanking on the bill number, but we have a law in California that prevents California police agencies from sharing data from flock from license plate regions in general with outside agencies and with ice. And it still happens all the time. Police just willfully ignore this law. You know, I mean, like, we see immigration or ICE support as the reason they put down for searches, even though that's illegal. And when they don't do that, we know that ice, you know, people in ICE have buddies in California law enforcement. They text them, they say, hey, run this plate for me. Law enforcement text, runs the plate, puts the reason down as investigation or crime or, you know, some other such nonsense.
- [43:15]
James
Yeah.
- [43:16]
Cooper Quintin
And then. And then, you know, sends the information back to ice. Right. It's.
- [43:20]
Colonel Panic
We call that the good old boy system down here.
- [43:24]
James
Yeah. Up here too. And they've made a concerted effort to recruit people from local law enforcement all across the country. And this is part of why. Right. Like it gives a workaround. SB54 is the California Values act, which.
- [43:37]
Cooper Quintin
Thank you.
- [43:38]
James
Thank You. You are welcome. That is my shit. There has never been a prosecution under SB 54. As far as I'm aware. This law exists, like largely to make the politicians who passed it feel good. There are some parts about transferring people who are in detention already. But these systems give so many workarounds. Or if the data belongs to the company and not to the city, or if it's stored on a server somewhere else. All of these things provide potential workarounds, I don't think. I guess that because your local city council member has tweeted about ICE being bad, that that means that your flock cameras are not being used for that. It's very hard to ring fence this shit.
- [44:24]
Cooper Quintin
Yeah, absolutely.
- [44:26]
James
If people want to learn more about this, if they want to maybe get a ray hunter, if they want to get a We spy or a mesh detect. John, explain mesh detect for people really quickly. We didn't touch on that one.
- [44:38]
Colonel Panic
Yeah, Mesh detect is essentially. It's the first device that I made and its primary function was to detect drone remote ID. The FAA requires remote ID, which is any drone over. I believe it's 500 grams. Has to transmit pilot location and drone location in real time either via BLE or wi fi, which is pretty whack for like, you know. Yeah, amateur flyers that just want to fly around. But that being said, it's a great OSINT tool, so I started with that. And essentially what this does is mesh detect. It takes that detection and sends it over meshtastic LoRa networks. So you can set up a. For instance, set up a node way out somewhere and then you can have it send you a message down the line when a drone comes by over meshtastic. Or you can set it up somewhere and have it say, okay, there's a body cam down here or whatever device, a Tesla, any, anything. You know, a lot of devices randomize their UI these days, mostly phones, but there's plenty that don't easily detectable. So send it over mesh. It just gives you a network of detection, essentially.
- [45:47]
James
So people wanted to. To get a We spy to get a mesh detect. How would they do, how they go about it? What are the ways they could get. Or make one?
- [45:55]
Colonel Panic
Yeah, I have a website called kernelpanic Tech and it's C O L O N E L. It's a little bit of a play on words. But these devices, like if you really need one of these things, hit me up, up, we'll talk. But also it's just two wires, you know, like you can take my design and just Reverse engineer it and copy it. And I, I put the wiring on my GitHub. Every bit of this is open source. So if you look up kernel panic, GitHub, you can take this and make it on your own. I've made home assistant integration. So like if a UI pops up around your house, you can just get an alert via your smart home. You could just go on there, you know, dev it out. If you see something that's that I screwed up, just let me know and I'll fix it or we'll collab. So it's all open source?
- [46:39]
James
Yeah. How about Ray Hunter?
- [46:42]
Cooper Quintin
Yeah. So folks can go to rayhunter.eff.org and that is our Ray Hunter documentation. That's the Ray Hunter book, essentially. And there you can find links on where to buy the hardware. We do not sell the hardware, but you can buy the hardware on ebay or Amazon sometimes. The ORBIC is what people use in the US primarily and like South America, in Europe and parts of Africa there's a TP link device that fits the bill better for those areas. And once you buy the hardware, you can install the software on it there. The hardware unfortunately is not open source because like I said, we didn't build the hardware, we're just repurposing old hardware. Right. When the project started, you could buy the hardware for like 10 or 20 bucks. Now it's harder to find because people have bought out a lot of the supply and other scalpers have wised up to the fact that people are trying to buy these. So unfortunately we've created a whole mini market. I'm a market maker, goddammit. We've a hyper capitalist right here. But no, there's a whole mini market of people selling already installed Ray Hunters on ebay and stuff. I don't recommend paying more than 40 or 60 bucks for the hardware. But then yeah, the software is free. It's free, it's open source. Right. It's on GitHub. You can go edit it right now. And you know, I know there's a lot of tech folks that listen to this show and I just want to say like there's so many cool opportunities for counter surveillance. Right. Like we keep kind of, kind of mentioning that like a lot of police hardware is made by this company, Axon, and it has a very unique Bluetooth signature that can be easily detected.
- [48:28]
James
Right.
- [48:28]
Cooper Quintin
There's a lot of really interesting stuff that you can do with counterfeit valence. And the chip that the OUI spy runs on the ESP32 is this really powerful little chip that only costs like six bucks if you buy them wholesale. And it's got WI Fi, Bluetooth and a bunch of really cool capabilities that you could use to make some really cool counter surveillance stuff. And so I really want to encourage the tech minded folks to think about this. Come look at these projects, you know, come, you know, write your own code or make your own projects, right? But like the quote from hackers. And as your beautifully designed PC board says, colonel, we can snoop onto them as they snoop onto us, Right, Exactly. We need to spy back, right? We need to raise the cost of them spying on us, right? And that's like. Sorry, that brings me to another tangent.
- [49:17]
James
Go off.
- [49:18]
Cooper Quintin
What's really cool about these projects is like you can build Ray hunter for about $20, right? You could buy a beautiful PC board and the already assembled thing from kernel for, you know, a few dozen dollars. I don't know the exact price off top of my head, so I don't want to say. Or you could build one for, you know, under 20 bucks, right? Yep. And you are then for, you know, 20 or 40 bucks, you are making useless a surveillance tool and surveillance network which costs hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. Right? The economics here are on our side, right? Like this is just like any sort of asymmetrical warfare, right? Like it costs millions and billions and really billions of dollars for the governments of the US to set up this surveillance economy. And we can defeat it for you know, 20 or 40 bucks each, right? Like we can do this a lot longer than they can. They will go broke before we do. And I think that that's really important, right? Like the asymmetry here and the economics here are actually on our side.
- [50:21]
James
Yeah. And it's also like, it's cool to understand and make stuff. I am very good at fixing things that work on, you know, like explosion happens and piston lifts, right? Like that's my wheelhouse. I can fix my truck, I can fix my bicycle. I can fix.
- [50:38]
Cooper Quintin
Are you saying you like ice? Internal combustion engines.
- [50:44]
James
In many ways both ICEs will be the end of all of us. But I enjoy to fix one. I like to look at it and go like, huh, okay, this goes bang and then it goes up. And it's cool to learn this stuff. It's cool to learn a new skill, especially like once you get into your 30s. Like, it's good to learn shit.
- [51:02]
Cooper Quintin
Yeah.
- [51:02]
James
And this is approachable, especially like the guides for these are very approachable, even if you're not like a tech punk. If this is your first time going on GitHub and that there are people you can reach out to, like real nice people, you won't get an AI tech support. Someone will help you understand this. And that is cool.
- [51:22]
Colonel Panic
There's a platform called M5Stack that makes it really easy so like you get, you get a Xiao ESP32 but M5 stack makes it so that like you don't even have to do soldering. And they have drag and drop coding.
- [51:35]
James
Oh cool.
- [51:35]
Colonel Panic
So you can just plug in sensors and things. Like you can make a drone detector out of one of those and already has like a screen on board. And so like it's super cheap and you could just debit out really hard and just go for it. You know, it's, it's easy for makers nowadays. Like, like in the 50s, right. You'd have to have an entire military and industry complex behind you to do this kind of stuff.
- [51:55]
Cooper Quintin
Right.
- [51:55]
Colonel Panic
Or a corporation. And now you can just, just make yourself a little thing in your house. It's really cool.
- [52:00]
James
Yeah. And like, you know, I was in Minnesota there at the time when lots of ICE and CBP agents were too when they took a lot of people and killed two people. I had like. One of the things that was beautiful about that really horrible time was that everyone was so locked in like to include grandmothers, to include a dude with a sign that said what would Ronald Reagan do? Like no one wanted those people in their town. Right. And that requires everyone to do what they do best. Not everyone can be out on a street corner whistling a whistle or driving around. Right. Some people have, have like a really powerful skill set and if you are someone who can't be out, you can still help create these. You can help code this stuff. Like it's beautiful when our resistance takes the best from all of us and then we are all better because of that.
- [52:55]
Colonel Panic
Absolutely.
- [52:56]
Cooper Quintin
Beautifully said.
- [52:58]
James
Anything you guys would like to plug before we go? Websites, mutual aid projects, favorite snacks, whatever you want.
- [53:05]
Colonel Panic
Take a peek at dflock me if you want to. I have nothing to do with that project yet. But you know they map in the flaw cams. You can use these detectors as supplementary devices to confirm or to find things you haven't seen. But other than that, just colonelpanic tech. And definitely check out eff. They got a lot of good stuff going on and they've been doing it since the early days.
- [53:25]
Cooper Quintin
Yeah, I guess I'll plug EFF's surveillance self defense guys specifically. That's@ssd.eff.org, we got it. We're the only continuously updated and longest maintained security guides. There's also the Activist Checklist, which is another really great resource. The Surveillance Self Defense guides are almost like a textbook. There's a lot of info there, but if you just need the quick and dirty Cliff Notes version, Activist Checklist is really great for that. And they're doing a good job keeping that up. A lot of respect to them. And then, yeah, check out rayhunter.eff.org for RayHunter stuff. ColonelPanic Tech for his stuff. Since he plugged my stuff, I guess the other thing that I will plug is Open Archive, which is a nonprofit that I'm on the board of. They're making an app called Save, which allows you to securely record, archive and verify videos of whatever you want, say, such as human rights abuses or, you know, police atrocities or things of that nature. And so I recommend that project. Go check them out. They're really good folks. If you're doing a lot of cop watch type stuff, that's a good place to go.
- [54:43]
James
Fantastic. Thank you very much for joining us. That was great.
- [54:46]
Colonel Panic
Thank you for having us. Thank you.
- [54:51]
Podcast Announcer
It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our our website coolzonemedia. Com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
- [55:10]
Cooper Quintin
This is an iHeart podcast.
- [55:12]
Podcast Announcer
Guaranteed Human.