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- [00:00]
A
There's like these rare times where you have an opportunity to get free money by you know, posting something very stupid online. And this, I feel like the Charlie Kirk bonanza was, was a great example of that. Like, oh yeah, if you were making fun of Charlie Kirk in the immediate aftermath of his death, there's like multiple people who've made tons of money, like suing the government because of the backlash from that.
- [00:23]
B
So this was what the teacher. And my favorite thing always is seeing what they posted because they never did our posts about it. They never did anything like that. They were very serious.
- [00:34]
C
They never quote, tweeted it with me when I listened to that one Feist album. They never quote, tweeted it with that. It was always just like, I actually think that Charlie Kirk by his rhetoric was making the world a worse place. And I'm glad he's dead. Which is less objectionable, arguably than to say that he turned into the reminder. You know, there's the thing.
- [00:57]
B
It wasn't even that. All she did was post on a private Facebook page a quote from Charlie Kirk saying, I think it's worth it. I think it's worth to have. It's worth to have a cost of unfortunately some gun deaths every single year so we can have the second amendment to protect our God given rights. Charlie Kirk and a former classmate grassed her to her employer, thereby making her life changing amounts of money. Incredible.
- [01:22]
C
I love Facebook.
- [01:23]
B
Yep. So look, action item for forever. If you see an entry in the Kirk fund, you. You send it to me. You send it to me and I will talk about it on the show because I will never get tired of this. But there's one more piece of news I wanted to go into before we get to our core subject for the day, which is. Look, all of our listeners want to hear how you got rich enough to buy a private jet in the glamorous world of worker owned tech criticism. But there's something that's gotta come first. And this is Jason, something you talk about all the time. Remember how anytime anybody talks about flock cameras, immediately people ask, hey, what happens if police officers use the flock cameras to stalk people? Almost certainly mainly women. Almost certainly mainly women known to them. And the answer from flock safety and bought and paid for town councils was that probably won't happen. And even if it did, it would be bad apples and we're not worried about it. And it's against the terms of use, so stop asking questions. Can I ask, in the last few months, has that borne out?
- [02:22]
A
Oh, it has not. It has not this happened like dozens of times at this point where cops have abused Flock cameras not just to like spy on Gaza protesters, which they do all the time as well, but to stalk like exes. And I just wrote about this guy in the Florida Keys who was doing like off duty security for the Apple TV show Bad Monkey and he met this woman there who he harassed on set. And then he used like various Florida state surveillance databases to look her up, to look up her license plate information and then to stalk her over the course of weeks. And then I got video of him chasing her down, like nearly causing several head on collisions because he was speeding down like this two lane bridge and was pass illegally passing cars in order to pull this woman over. And when questioned about it, he basically told his colleagues that she was a hot piece of ass and that is like why he did this. So if you're wondering like how the Flock situation is going in the United States, it's going extremely poorly. Things like this are happening all the time. Every time I write about this company, I get like dozens of emails from people all over the country who are like, oh, did you hear about this new and horrifying thing that cops are doing? You should look into it. It's. It's really not going well.
- [03:46]
B
Was this the same guy? Was this the same person, Jeremus Brown, or is this a different police officer?
- [03:52]
A
Oh, this is a different police officer. Yeah, this is. Yes, yes. Jesus. And just actually, like I believe yesterday this website, the Drive, which is a car review website, like they do car journalism, one of their editors was test driving a new car, which happens all the time if you're a car journalist. He got like a loaner car from, I believe it was from Cadillac or something. It was a very nice suv and he was driving somewhere on the east coast and he was at the mall with his wife and four cop cruisers descended upon him in the parking lot of a mall. And it is because a cop in California had a typo in the license plate that they were looking for. And so Flock, like the Flock system, determined that the car he was driving was stolen. And so he was basically like accosted by cops across the country because of a typo in the system. So every day like a new horror.
- [04:53]
B
I feel like a new horror basically because they. Because this Panopticon was built and then sold to terrified and sort of wealthy. But for security purposes only Towns, I'm
- [05:08]
C
slamming the movie Brazil into the movie white noise just to see what happens.
- [05:13]
B
Yeah. And I mean at this particular article you're talking about this. The drive one. One of the officers who, like, box this guy in and was like, hey, you're driving a stolen car. Had heard of, like, had read the, like, the publication. Otherwise they would have. They would have been like, well, you're lying. We're going to shoot you. But there. There's another one. There's another one. So Jerem Brown, you know, he again, is like, he searched like, the flock database like, 108 times in, like, less than a couple of months again, to just. To, like, constantly be tracking where his. Where his ex was and questioned about it. All he said was, it was dumb as hel. My end, emotions flowing, mind going, you know how it is.
- [05:55]
A
Huh?
- [05:56]
C
Sure, I guess.
- [05:58]
B
I suppose I don't.
- [05:59]
C
I guess I don't know how it is. Like, I. I've. Maybe because I've never stalked anyone, but maybe also because I don't have access to the kind of nationwide Panopticon as well.
- [06:10]
B
Yeah, because it's like, if you're a police officer in America and anywhere, but specifically America, because that's where these technologies are, especially in the American South, a lot of them are there. And you decide, I'm going to become a Florida, Florida police officer, you are most often the type of person who is very dangerous to intimate partners. And then Flock is basically like, hey, constantly telling you, hey, do you want to know where your ex is? And all the time is telling you that. And the only thing stopping you is, like, a thing you sign that says, I promise to not stalk my ex. Swear down. Because most of the time, the complaints that are brought against them for this, and I mean, Jason, I'll look to you for this for. To comment on this more, is because it's not that they get caught by internal processes, is that they get caught when, like, local advocacy groups highlight instances of stalking, and then they find that the cop was stalking someone using Flock.
- [07:07]
A
Yeah. So basically, the way they get caught is because Flock, I guess to its credit, I mean, it logs all the searches that these cops are doing, and then those become public records. So then either journalists or these public advocacy groups that are trying to get Flock out of their town file public records requests, they get this huge spreadsheet of all of the Flock searches that are performed, and they can see that an individual cop is searching hundreds of times over the course of months for a single license plate and its whereabouts. And very often they will just put something super vague in the reason category. You have to put a reason for why you're Searching flock. And sometimes they'll just say test or it will say investigation. Or in some cases it will say protester. These cops are not very smart about what they're doing. In this, this case in Florida I was just talking about, there's a quote from the police report and he basically, after he was caught, he said, quote, I knew that when I put her into the system, I'm like, fuck. And that's why I stopped right then. And nothing else.
- [08:13]
B
Yeah, I mean, why are we giving some of the most like violent and impetuous people in an already quite violent and impetuous country access to everybody's whereabouts?
- [08:23]
C
No, no, no, it's fine. He developed self control after stalking her. So, like, you shouldn like, punish him.
- [08:29]
B
Yeah, I don't know. I was doing all the license plate searches to see where she wasn't so I could take a different route because
- [08:35]
C
he was like, you know, which is like. I think that's a defense anyway.
- [08:39]
B
Your honor, I was like, motion, Motion to motion. Motion to motion to say, as opposed
- [08:46]
C
to when you're sort of like driving around and like the same cop car has been in your rearview mirror for like five days, then you're not like,
- [08:54]
B
you know, yeah, yeah. You're like, hey, I have personal protection now. Yeah.
- [08:59]
C
Feeling pretty important.
- [09:01]
B
Yeah. Hey, this is what, this is what kings must feel like.
- [09:07]
C
If I can get enough cops to sexually harass me, I can get like a motorcade going.
- [09:14]
B
I just need to somehow get some to tail me from the front. I don't know how to manage that. But this is from Madison County. The sheriff's office claims they are only using this technology for serious crimes. Yet the published audit logs tell a different story. Website called Madison for privacy says this is quoting from 404 Media. Madison county has searched the nationwide database over 1200 times in just a 60 day period. In a country with over only 20,000 residents, it's hard to understand what could warrant this many searches. Flock's response is, of course, you know, very deflective. It's. Well, there's 140,000 monthly active users of Flock. And so instances of abuse are rare and wrong and awful, but they're exactly that rare. Humans, you see, are fallible, which is just a great defense of the infinite law. Infinite cop surveillance, Panopticon, humans. But cops are human. They make mistakes. So only 1% of the infinite surveillance Panopticon is going to be misused. And what's 1% of infinity? Don't worry about it.
- [10:10]
C
Yeah. 99 times of the times that you see that same cop car in the rearview mirror. He doesn't want to stalk you. He's just doing it for, like, normal surveillance reasons.
- [10:20]
B
Yeah, because you're a protester.