Also media.
Hello, welcome to it could happen here.
It's me today, James, and I'm very lucky to be joined by Cooper Quentin, 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 just stop it being the end of privacy. So thanks for joining me both you.
Absolutely Hey, James, happy to be on the show again. Thanks for having me.
Yeah, thanks for making the time.
So I guess, like in the case that somebody lives under a rock, we should start breaking down some of the different like surveillance mechanisms that the state is building. And maybe Colonel Panic you can kick us off with flock because that is the one that has probably got the most attention recently, and then Cooper we could pick up on some of the many other private see violation tools.
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 flog 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 drag net 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.
Yeah, fascinating, but it just looks for people who are acting distressed.
Or I think it's a sound thing too, right.
Oh, okay, yeah, I think it's pretty similar to gunshot detection in the books for people shouting, people in the heightened state of emotion. Right, I mean this could really easily be a protest detector, right yeah.
Or imagine if that was a fucking peacock, like you have cooks get angry. They really sounds like someone's dying or folks.
So yeah, I mean false false positives.
Are already a huge issue for gunshot detections in general.
Right.
They can go off for a balloon popping, they can go off for fireworks.
Yeah, and then just because you're in the area, you know you're now part of an investigation.
So press, we should talk a little bit about some of the other ones to keep it, Maybe we start with facial recognition.
Yeah, yeah, facial recognition is all the raise these days.
A lot of law enforcement is unfortunately investing in this. We've seen, of course, Ice with their Mobile Fortified tool that's gotten a lot of press lately. And then this is this is an app that that runs on Android phones that they can scan people with and you know, apparently, according to them, get a fully one hundred percent 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 one hundred percent accurate, and in fact, there have been dozens of cases where people have been falsely arrested and 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 I 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.
Jesus but it has been using this as as a you know, sort of judge jury and execution to determine whether to arrest, detain, and possibly even deport somebody.
Wow.
Yeah, yeah, it's pretty bleak.
Something that happens if when you come to the United States you're a migrant rate is that they will collect a large amount of your biometric data. But it seems to be even with all of that, the resolution that they have on the scan, it's actually very poor.
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. Yeah, any sort of visa
information or anything like that. There's also the clearview AI, so even if you've never done any of these, there's another app called clear Viewer which is used by law enforcement and by ICE, which does a similar thing. But it's back end 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.
Great, Yeah, they would have reassuring thing to hear.
High cost of the free service, Yeah absolutely.
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.
Yeah, there is some stuff which I think preps we We just need to understand what it means, I guess, and maybe we could start there and a coup. You've done a lot with stingrays or cell phone sight simulators, with lots of names for them.
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 sized matters or stingrays or mccatchers, 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 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 towers.
It looks for a number of suspicious things, signatures.
That we've written of what we think are indicative of MC catcher activity. So we've been running this for a year. There's several hundred of these.
Around the US, if not a couple of thousand, but we don't have exact numbers.
There's a bunch of these all over the US. We had a bunch of Minneapolis. People have been running them in Chicago, in LA when that was going on.
People have been running them all over the country.
Yeah, and we have found some evidence of mpcy 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 MC catchers being used at protests.
And I just stop here for a second to explain what a sting ray or mccatcher is.
Yeah, 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 rate 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 can set one of these up outside, let's say, outside of a mosque or outside of a protest an anarchist meeting or a anti fascist meeting is regularly happening, right, and identify the people who are 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 farm concerning use, and we are not seeing it so far with ray 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 core documents.
Interesting, Yeah, it doesn't mean that they government cannot find out that you were at a place or at a protest, right, it just means that they're not using this mechanism of doing that.
Yeah, that's that's exactly right. So people have asked us, what are what our.
Theories are for about why we're not seeing these a protest 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, right, or that maybe like you know, to use the old there was the old co Intel pro language was like the architects of co Intel Pro 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 mccatchers, right, that they were in every cop card, 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 mccatcher 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 then using one of the many other surveillance technologies they have flock facial recognition, things like pen Link, which we can talk about in a little bit, but 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 twenty twenty, twenty nineteen.
I'm gonna mess this up. Fact checkers will.
Need to get on this in twenty nineteen called Carboner versus USA, and the Supreme Court in that decision decided that to access historical cell site location information, so this is where people were located based on 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.
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, you 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 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 sting rays only for when they are sure they can get a warrant and when they cost and complexity is justified.
Yeah, that makes sense.
It's the twenty eighteen June twenty second, twenty eighteen, that supreme cool case.
Thank you real fun fact checking here on ICHH.
Yep, that's what we do. Let's talk about PenLink and like other location data. 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.
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 mccatchers. So interestingly they have now pivoted to different types of surveillance. So they a few years ago acquired this company, is Raeli company called Cobwebs. Cobwebs makes a lot of different software. There's actually just recently a fantastic report about all of the software in
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 Jean 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.
You know, that we're in that.
Area in some sort of timeframe, and I think that the data gets updated every twenty four hours, so you're going to have about a twenty four hour delay in that data piece. So you circle an area just like with your finger, and you're going to see who was there, you know, as of twenty four hours ago and back
to so you know, whatever time brame you said. 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 what sort of age.
Racket that person's in?
What their interests and hobbies are, whether they have kids, whether they're a parent, what their nationality is.
Et cetera, et cetera.
But you can also see a historical map of where that person or where that device. We should say, yeah, has been right, And so you can see where they spend their days, which is probably their work or something like that. Where they spend their nights, which is probably their house. You know, where they spend sort of their afternoons or evenings, maybe a third space, maybe a lover's house, something like that. Right, But you can see everywhere they've gone.
You can see if they 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 can 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, law enforcement does not think they need a warrant to acquire this data and judges have upheld that so far.
Yeah, 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.
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. Right, Like, on my phone, the only app that has location permissions is my maps app and my weather app, and that's because I know those apps don't have advertising SDKs in them.
But if you wanted to, if you are extra paranoid, like if I was heading throughto something, I mean, if I was setting 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. Yeah, 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 our phones are snitches, man, Our phones are snitches.
Yeah, that is the big take home, is 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 then.
To add down products and services. Here's something so you can buy the snitch on you.
Yeah, hey, buy these things.
They'll give away information data, send it to his rainy company will send it back to the cops.
All right, we are back. I hope you boil 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 could feel a little bit more informed. So let's let's talk about it. Maybe kind of 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 behind some of them.
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 mesh tastic, or it detects a device and transmits it over mesh Tastic. And then I was like, it'd be really cool to have a device that if you have a device that you want to know when comes around you, it'll just beep.
And so I just took a micro controller and drew out 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 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 you get alerts when devices are around you.
Essentially, so that's where all that began.
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 exist that you encountered in your daily life.
You haven't been going to city council meetings. You don't know what 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, what kind of.
Abilities would it give them?
Certainly, so there's drawn detection on this device, so you can have it alert when drowns are near, or 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 then 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 and contributing to you know, adding to this database of flockcams signatures essentially, and it's either Wi Fi or Bluetooth, and some of them are over cellular too, But essentially this I made a firmware called flock you when you drive around, it just war drives flockcams.
And a good friend of mine did some recent research.
And found out that if you put the micro controller into Wi Fi promiscuous mode, it'll detect more flockcams. So that firmware just came out a couple of days ago, so constantly being added to.
So if anyone has.
You know, mac addresses OUIs, please contribute. It takes a village to raise a surveillance detection kit.
Yeah, it allows people to then, yet let the crowds or do you do community? It's mapping of this stuff right to give people and like I know, I have friends who've reported on gunshot detection software, Like it won't surprise people to find out which communities are the most surveiled and which communities are the least survailed. Right, but it nonetheless it is important, Like that's an important function
in making that obvious to people. Likewise, drones, people might be thinking, why why would I want to look for drones? Drones are super cool. I just fly them around to see the birds. Like you can explain that drones might also play a role in surveillance.
Yeah, absolutely, I'm an avid drone flyer. So I developed this just for funzis, you know, and made a drone detector, and I quickly realized that the most frequent flyers are the PD unfortunately, you know, surveiling the area. So it's really interesting to see and to see that they're flying.
You know, more regularly than any hobbyist.
Yeah.
Yeah, this has become a big part of flak coups. You used to have to send up a helicopter to look at something from above, right, and they still do all the time, and hear that ship over my house every day. But they can also do it with it right now for much less money. But 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 the car into a beeping machine.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure I will do that. I want to.
I want to extol the virtues of we buy for for a little bit before that, though, Yeah, I mean this is this is how I linked up with Kernel Panics because I thought this was such a really amazing project, and I think that it's it serves a couple of purposes, right, I think that there's there's one very practical purpose of like this can help you map out the surveillance in
your town, right, you can. You can export the data from this and upload it directly to block mapper, right, or there's some other site that will help you, like plotter route from point A to point B avoiding flock camerage, which I think is really cool. It also just helps sensitize you to how many flock 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 look up and I'm like, oh yeah, flog cameras, flock 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, You've got the ship to do yeah, like, yeah, exactly.
But if I hear that from the from their 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, and it's it's good in that way.
Yeah, I see it.
It's like a like a little imagine a little parrots at your shoulder.
And when you'll be spied on, You'll being spied on. You'll being spied on just constantly.
Yeah, yeah, and you realize the extent to which that is happening.
Surveillance coal mine canary essentially, and.
Yeah it canary is better better enalogy.
Kind of like lying cat, but surveillance cat, right yeah.
Yeah, instead of every time you're lying and says that, it just says surveillance every time somebody's spying on you.
Yeah.
The other thing that I think is is cool.
I know U I spy and and raiment And why I think these are good projects is it gives a lot of people something to do, right. 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, right, and just be like, well, I'm gonna be watched constantly.
There's nothing i can do, so, you know, spirit why do anything? Right? And this gives people something to do.
Right, there's a thing you can and Americans love buying a thing, right, we love a gadget, and so there's a thing you can go.
Buy or build or set up or whatever.
Right, and go start pushing back, even just a 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.
Right.
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 you know, think about direct action, you know, in that sense, it becomes a bit of like propaganda bdeed, 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 Hunters. 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 were everywhere, right, and I thought that other things were a much bigger threat, right, like, I'm there
are there are things that I'm more concerned about. But also, cel size 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.
Yeah, 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 side stimiliators actively in use by law enforcement, and we've bout some ideas about how they're working and what they're doing, and The other goal is that we wanted to try to like calm down some of the fear and uncertainty and doubt among activists about whether this was a threat model that they need to worry about and give people more accurate threat models.
Right.
Yeah, and like also give people, you know, 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 this is a research project. We're collecting the data about like how often do we think that we're actually seeing these?
Right?
But it gives people a modicum of comfort too, Right, because you have this, you have Ryhunter 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, things like penling. Probably things like celebrate and the cops arresting me and making a copy of all the data on my phone. Yeah, right, 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 bran 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 some 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 of 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.
Yeah, hopefully that doesn't happen again.
But if that does happen again, hopefully we can get you know, sort of a ground game set up very quickly to try to determine if they're using this form of surveillance or not.
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 sole perhaps to and it's really a company who will say to the cops.
Sambo would never sell my data.
All right, we are back.
I think that's really good explanation of 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. Like it's one thing to go on flog map or whatever and 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 sites, 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 and run 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.
What an amazing contract. I can't believe that they said.
That California politics is a shit show, but San Diego is a fucking joke.
Many examples of this.
Listen, my city council member just got it indicted buy the FBI on corruption charges. So in the year of our Lord twenty twenty five, if you got indicted by the FBI, So like, how stupid do you have to know?
Well, so I have no legs to stand on. But also any California so it all tracks.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, the greatest great times on the left coast. 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 the how or if you're aware of instances where people have organized against states avalience, it would be cool to hear about that.
Yeah.
I recently did talk here in Asheville, North Carolina, at an event called nerd Nite, 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 fifteen minutes each, And so the host was kind enough to give me a twenty five 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 ax on 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 toolest City council member Kim Roni, she showed up and dearing the questions at the end, I was unsure because on our portal here it's the APD says, you know, we don't share our data with outside agencies. And Kim Ronnie came up and confirmed that something like four thousand agencies have access to our data. Yeah, we don't share them, but they can request and we just hand it over.
So yeah, that's that's one thing that we learned at that time.
So this this prompted 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.
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 them, I guess just go shopping.
One interesting point is that over one hundred 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 seded my time to another a speaker. But over one hundred people showed up and then they pulled it from the vote. They pulled it from the agenda, so lots of folks left, but then some folks stepped around for general comment and still got it out there. But you know, we'll see what happens down the line.
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 shout up to discuss it, and then they were like, oops, no, never mind, we're gonna pull that from the agenda today. Yeah, it's such a shitty tactic. But no, I mean at uff, 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, this they can stop carjackings, right, they can, They can find car thefts, they can, they can you know, 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. Yeah, right, it makes it. It makes it actually politically a bit poisonous to push these technologies.
And it should be.
Yeah, we shouldn't be surveilled constantly just because we happen to be outside.
And like, look, I would.
Love to not have a car, right, but this is America, Like everybody drives all the time.
That is that is the society we live in. Unfortunately.
Yeah, and you shouldn't be you shouldn't be subject to
surveillance just for participating in society. And 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, right, Like, now let's talk about campaign finance and how how all these companies you don't like are financing politicians, right, Like, you can you can pull people to the left, and
this is a good way to start interacting with those people.
Yeah, even people on the right, even sort of our more you know, the more libertarian folks, they hate them to.
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 away in with them as well.
Yeah, like everyone we can bring with us, we need to earn everyone else fuck them, Yeah, absolutely, 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. There's a million reasons why people could be mad at that.
There's plenty of room for abuse, you know there too, and it's it's been documented, you know, a recent video with Ben Jordans. I mean you know, oh yeah, 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, God likes surveillance power, what are they going to end up doing.
And there's been cases where they've shown that police officerships surveiled their ex partners and then consequently pulled that person over, which is just insane.
Yeah, no, they've used this to stop people to surveial 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.
Yeah.
And yet like it is another the Dems are like necessarily, I mean they're not on the side of goods, especially in this area. But like it is a big blue state thing, Like don't think that because you live in California, this isn't happening, right, It is very much happening.
Yeah, 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 lot in California that prevents California police agencies from sharing data from FLOCK with from LISO played regions in general, with outside agencies and with and it still happens all the time.
Yeah, pollice 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 and ICE have buddies in Califorated law enforcement. They text them, they say, hey, run this plate for me. Law enforcement texts runs the plate, puts the reason down as investigation
or crime or you know, some other such nonsense. Yeah, and then and then you know, sends the information back to ICE.
Right, it's we call that the good old boys system down here.
Yeah, yeah, I've 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 work around SP fifty four.
It's the California Values Act, which thank you, thank you, you are welcome. That is my shit.
There has never been a prosecution under SP fifty four as far as I'm aware. This law exists largely to make the politicians who passed it feel good. There are some parts about transferring people who are in detention already, but like these, these systems give so many workarounds, right or like if the data belongs to the company and not to the city, or if it's stored on a service somewhere else. Like, all of these things provide potential workaround.
So 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.
Yeah.
Absolutely, if people want to learn more about this, if they want to maybe get a ray hunter, they want to get a wee spy or a mesh detect, don't explain mesh de tech for people really quickly.
We didn't touch on that one.
Yeah, Mesh detect is essentially it's the first advice that I made, and its primarily function was to detect drawing remote idea. The FAA requires remote ide which is any drone over I believe it's five hundred 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, amateur flyers that just want to fly around.
But that being said, it's a great ocent tool.
So I started with that, and essentially what this does is mesh detect. It takes that detection and sends it over mesh tastic Laura Networks, So you can set up a for instance, set up a node way out somewhere and then you can have it sends you a message down the line when a drone comes by over mesh tastic, or you can set it up somewhere and have it say okay, there's a body cam down here, or whatever device, a Tesla, anything, you know.
A lot of devices.
Randomize their OUI 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.
So if people wanted to get a wee spy, to get a mesh de teg, how would they do?
How they go about it? What are the ways they could get on make one?
Yeah, I have a website called Colonel Panic dot tech and it's co 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, 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 put the wiring on my GitHub. Every bit of this is open source, so if you look up Colonel Panic GitHub. You can take
this and make it on your own. I've made Home Assistant integration, so like if a OUI 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 we'll collab. So it's all open source. Yeah.
How about Rayhunter?
Yeah, so folks can go to Rayhunter dot eff dot org and that is our ray Hunter documentation. That's our 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 Orbit 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 buil the hardware. We're just repurposing old hardware.
Right when this when the project started, you could buy the hardware for like ten or twenty bucks. Now it's harder to find because of 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 like mini market. I'm a I'm a I'm a market maker. Goddamn it, We've got a hyper capitalists right here. But no, there's like there's a whole you know, midi market of people selling
like already installed ray Hunters on eBay and stuff. Yeah, I don't recommend paying more than like forty or sixty bucks for the hardware, but then yeah, the software is free. It's free, it's open source. Right, it's on get ub
you can go edit it right now. And you know, I know there's a lot of tech folks that listen to the 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.
Right, There's a lot of really interesting stuff that you can do with casual balance.
And the chip that the OUI.
Spy runs on, the ESP thirty two, is this really powerful little chip that only.
Costs like six bucks if you buy them wholesale, and it's.
Got Wi Fi blue shooth and a bunch of really cool capabilities you know, that you could use to make some really cool counter surveillance stuff. And so I really want to encourage the tech minug folks to like 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 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, and we need to raise the cost of them spying on us, right.
And that's like, sorry, let mean that that brings me to another attemp to go off.
What's really cool about these products is like you can build ryhunter for about twenty bucks, right you could. You could buy a beautiful PC board and the already assembled thing from Colonel for you know, a few dollars.
I don't know the price off timets.
I don't want to say, or you could build one for you know, under twenty bucks, right yep, And you are then for you know, twenty or forty bucks, you are making useless a surveillance tool and a surveillance network which costs hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.
Right The economics here are on our.
Side, yeah, 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, twenty or forty 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, like the asymmetry here and the economics here are actually on our side.
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 that's my wheelhouse. I can fix my truck, I can fix my bicycle.
I can fix are you saying you like ice internal combustion yea.
In many ways, both ices will be the end of all of us. I enjoy to fix one.
I like to look at it and go like, uh huh okay, this goes bang and then this 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 thirties, it's like it's good to learn shit. Yeah, 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 shit, and that is cool.
There's a platform called the M five stack that makes it really easy, so like you get you get a jaw ESP thirty two, but M five stack makes it so that like you don't even have to do soldering, and they have drag and drop coating so you can just plug in sensors and things like you can make a drawing detector out of one of those and already has like a screen onboard, and so like it's super cheap and you could just deb it out really hard and just go for it.
You know, it's it's easy for makers nowadays.
Like in the fifties, right, you have to have an entire military and industry complex behind you to do this kind of stuff, right, or a corporation, And now you can just.
Just make yourself a little thing in your house. It's really cool.
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. And 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 whistle in a whistle or driving around.
Right.
Some people that have had 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.
Absolutely beautifully said.
Anything you guys would like to plug before we go, websites, util aid projects, favorite snacks, whatever you want.
Take a peek at d flock dot emmy if you want to. I have nothing to do with that project yet, but you know they map in the flock cams. You can use these detectors as supplementary devices to confirm or to find things you haven't seen. But other than that, just kernel, panic, dot tech, and definitely check out e FF. They get a lot of good stuff going on and they've been doing it since the early days.
I guess i'll plug EFF's surveillance self defense guys specifically, that'ssd dot eff dot org.
We got it.
We're the only continuously updated and long longest maintained security guys. There's also the act of this checklist, which is a really great another really great resource. The Survellans off defense guides are almost like a textbook, like there's a lot of info there, but if you just need the like quick and dirty cliffs that it's version. The Activist checklist is really great for that, right and they're doing a
good job keeping that up. A lot of respect to them, and then yeah, I checked out you know Rayhunter dot eff dot org for Ray Hunter stuff, Colonel Panic dot tech for his stuff to see 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.
Fantastic nice Well, thank you very much for joining us. It was great.
Thank you for having us. Thank you.
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonmedia dot 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.