Latest / Computer Says Maybe / Flock Shock: How Local Fights Over Surveillance Are Reshaping American Politics w/ Sarah Hamid & Anthony Ralphs
Transcript
- [00:00:00] DARTH VADER: The emperor is a fan of Flock, and we must continue utilizing Flock technologies so that we can follow and surveil the rebel scum as they move from playground to playground, from playground to pool, from pool to gymnasium. Because we all know that the Flock cameras are not only following the license plate readers, they are following children. They are following children in parks and gymnasiums, and we need this. I need this so I can stalk my ex-girlfriend ALIX: Hey, everyone. I'm Alix Dunn, and welcome back to Computer Says Maybe, where I talk to the people pushing back on tech power and fighting for something better. You've probably heard of Flock by now. It's the company behind the license plate reader cameras that track where you drive, collecting data about your movements that can then be shared with a [00:01:00] huge range of people and organizations. As these systems spread and more people learn about how they work, the backlash is growing. The fight is reaching people who might never have thought much about surveillance before, but once they learn what's at stake, they're finding new ways to push back in their own communities. Today, we're gonna talk to one of those people. Anthony Ralphs went viral after showing up to a San Diego City Council meeting dressed as none other than Darth Vader in an unconventional effort to make his community heard after the council voted to keep Flock, despite the objections of hundreds of residents. After hearing from Anthony about his organizing, we'll dig into these systems with Sarah Hamid from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She spent the past couple of years working directly with communities across the country to challenge Flock's surveillance system and get cities to cancel their contracts. This episode gets at a bigger question we're trying to answer this month: What [00:02:00] does winning politically actually look like in this new AI landscape? If this is something you're thinking about a lot, I know I am , uh, you should join the Maybe Collective. You can connect with fellow co-conspirators and keep the conversation going beyond the episode . There's a link to learn more in the show notes. Now, let's kick things off first with Anthony Anthony Ralphs: my name is Anthony Ralphs. I am an actorvist, an artivist, an event producer, an organizer, an elected official, and a concerned citizen just like everybody else. And on occasion I am Darth Vader and was recently Lord Farquaad at Oceanside City Council as well Alix: hi Anthony. Thank you so much for joining, Computer Says Maybe. Uh, we have an audience that is interested in getting politicians to listen, to what people want, uh, in our current moment and stop listening so much to industry. and the way that you have managed to get some attention around, some of these issues has been really compelling and interesting, and I suspect, will be really inspirational for certain people in our audience. maybe they won't, uh, take the, steps that you took to get that attention, but maybe we'll see some inspiration, based on the things that you've done, which I think have gotten significant media attention. Anthony Ralphs: First of all, thank you so much for having me on. it's great to be on the show, and, [00:04:00] I love the work that y'all are doing, and I think this is a fantastic medium to have this conversation. 404 Media, they- shout out to them. they just, gave me an interview last week. Uh, but they just released, a report about how, police, are utilizing, Flock cameras to track protesters at No Kings protests. And of course, you know, I was at an Oceanside, City Council meeting last week where the police department was applying for a grant that would, allow them to have more Flock cameras. They currently have, I believe, 17 in the area. And the argument that the police department was making was that, you know, these Flock cameras specifically only take pictures of license plates. They don't record people. They don't record anything but vehicles. And now I'm seeing on Flock's own website a pitch for Flock cameras to be used at, event productions, which I would assume would be drones, which I assume would be cameras. But I mean, where at a field of people attending a festival is there a license plate? I mean, Alix: I would love to hear, like when did you first learn about flock cameras? Like when did you first find out about this, and like what was your first reaction? Were you d- were you immediately like absolutely not? Or were you like, "Okay, I don't know. Maybe. Uh, what is this for?" Anthony Ralphs: I'm the vice chair of my planning group where I live out, out in Boulevard in San Diego. And so I found out about it because it was on an agenda, in an information item that we had on an agenda in one of our meetings that I wanna say goes as far back as, like, 2023. And it was notification that the backcountry was gonna be installing a bunch of these cameras. Our back country's already littered with these cameras. We already have a border patrol checkpoint station, because we're so close to Mexico, You know, there's no way that you can leave my mountain and go from my mountain, say, into the city of San Diego proper, without going through a border patrol checkpoint and an army of cameras following you there. And so I just thought it was [00:06:00] particularly suspicious that there would be a need for even more cameras to go up when there's already checkpoints, and there's already a border patrol station just right up the street from where I live. There's so much surveillance. There's so many hidden cameras. There's hidden microphones. there's drones, that are constantly surveilling this area, and I thought, license plate readers, that just seems a little bit over the top. And I found out about this back in 2020, uh, 2023, but I didn't know of any organizations that were actively doing anything, to fight this until, I wanna say, almost a full year later when I read in the San Diego Union-Tribune a full in-depth article that was talking about an organization called, the TRUST Coalition, which stands for, Transparent and Responsible Use of, Surveillance Technology. it was a, a rule that was implemented by the TRUST Coalition years ago, to basically make sure that there was a mandate [00:07:00] requiring San Diego Police Department would disclose and divulge all the new technology that they were using because it was getting sprung up on us the way that I was describing where, hey, one day you're just finding out about it in a new agenda information item on your planning group, and if I wasn't a member of the planning group, I wouldn't have even known about it. I mean, there's tons of my constituents that live out here that have no idea that the Flock cameras are even out this far in San Diego County Alix: So how did you go from learning about the cameras, being like, "Again? We're getting like more surveillance, more technology that's being invested in, in a way that we don't quite have visibility into,"from that to a local council meeting? Like when did you decide to try and express yourself in the context of local governance to say what you felt about the cameras? Anthony Ralphs: So after I read that newspaper article, I wanna say that was near the beginning of 2024, And I found myself thinking, you know, we've been talking about we're living in fascism for a long time here in the US, but the technology is really [00:08:00] what takes it from being a theoretical to an actual, practical, everyday reality that we're living under. and so when I read this article, I thought, "I need to get... I need to meet this organization. I need to get involved with them somehow." I found them on Instagram. I started following and engaging with all of their content, with all of their posts. I started trying to regularly keep an eye on when they would have their calendar dates for days of action. and then I noticed that they had something that I saw as far back as November. All of the attention started really ramping up, and it, it had a large part to do with the fact that two things happened in November of 2025. there was both the case of, Hugo, Hugo Parra, who was, arrested, falsely imprisoned for over a month for a crime that he didn't commit, for a false, flag on a ALPR, a false fla- flock, tag, excuse me. And, then there was also, within that same month, there was the report in the San Diego Union-Tribune [00:09:00] that the former captain of the police, right after he quit working for the, San Diego Police Department, and he'd been shilling for Flock the entire time that he was working for the police department, and he helped, get it passed through city council. Right after he did that, he quit working for the police department and went on to work for Flock. And that was two weeks before, a big major city council meeting in December, on December 9th, where the fate of Flock would be decided. because Flock had been shut off for like a year and a half, it had been discontinued, and it was going through a review process when it had been determined that, it was out of compliance, and it was actually being used by agencies outside of San Diego. and that raised alarm bells for city council, who had been told that it wasn't gonna be used by ICE or any other outside agencies, and it was. so it was suspended, and then, you know, they reviewed it, and then they were gonna... They put it up to a vote. Alix: So you go to this meeting, which has this... So what, like give us a, paint us a picture. Who's there? Like, what are these meetings like? [00:10:00] What are you wearing? Which I feel like becomes relevant in the next time, but like, what was it like in this meeting? Anthony Ralphs: there was over 100 organizations there, the majority of them were nonprofits. There was over 300 people at the meeting, itself, which is... You know, I walked in and there was not a single place to sit. the overflow room was completely full. the lobby hallway was completely full as well. And I would say that over 90 to 95% of the people that were speaking, that were giving their testimony were completely against Flock. and it was the only people that were speaking in favor of Flock were, police, former police, family horror stories of, people who had had personal tragedies who had almost made you question if they had maybe been paid by Flock. not to discount the incidences of tragedy that, the specific maybe cases of, people that have had, their crimes or tragedies, say, resolved [00:11:00] through the use of the technology. I don't wanna discount that But the vast- what I'm trying to get at is the vast majority of people were expressing their disinterest in having this since, and expressing The clear reservation and the clear opinion that they did not feel safer with this technology in place. And in spite of that, in spite of nine hours of testimony, in spite of all of these wonderfully well-thought-out, well-crafted points, presentations given by nonprofits, by incredible public speakers way more experienced than myself, and everyone is dressed up. You have people in suits and ties. You have people dressed, in their, labor, union shirts, you know, to show solidarity. You have people with their signs. If you look back at the footage, overwhelmingly clear what the vast majority of people wanted. You know, they, they asked them so many questions that the police couldn't answer. The police had [00:12:00] suspicious- suspiciously long pauses before providing answers, and it just was not looking good for them overall. there was no way that city council could take that meeting based off of the police responses, based off of the people there, that were present and say, "This is what the people want and this is what, is good for our town, and this is what is, is justifiable based upon the arguments presented today by the police." it was very clear that which, which arguments were more compelling and which arguments had more cogency. Uh, but at the end of the day, they decided to vote in favor of the technology six to three. So we left there extremely Alix: did that, yeah, how did that feel? That must've been terrible Anthony Ralphs: Yeah, we were, I mean, we were just, uh, kind of a- aghast, you know, uh, at a loss for words, besides ourselves and kind of struggling to pick ourselves back up. Thankfully, within that week, a- a- the week [00:13:00] afterward, there was so much solidarity shown, from all these organizations that it really demonstrated to all of us that although we didn't get the vote that we wanted, we showed such a, massive display of solidarity, across, across party lines and really across organizational ties, that we saw there was a massive coalition that wouldn't be silenced just from this one vote. And I thought, kind of foolishly or naively thought, "We'll get 'em next time," you know, "We'll come back in a week or two weeks. I'll, I'll ... Once I get done with finals," and they didn't come back. They didn't resume their recess until, like, half a month later. And when I returned, I was shocked and incredibly disappointed to see that there was almost empty chambers. I mean, there couldn't have been more than five people, and I was maybe the only person. There maybe was one other person that spoke against [00:14:00] Flock. but that really opened my eyes, to the need for there to be constant advocacy, and it,impressed upon me the fact that, you know, sometimes if you don't do it, no one else will. It was kind of a, a startling a- and unsettling thought to think, you know, in a city of 1.7 million people, and the majority of us, as studies have shown, like 70% of people in this country, both on the left and the right, are against this technology. In a city of 1.7 million people, you could be one of five people to be at a city council meeting, and you could be one of two people and maybe even feel like you're the only one who's really speaking the, to the topic and doing it justice, you know? And it, Alix: If they're not there every time in huge numbers, there's like no chance of actually pushing back on this stuff, which means that sustained level of energy requires attention. Which is, I [00:15:00] imagine, how you kind of arrived at the conclusion that maybe taking a different tack was strategic. But like how did you go from being, like, disappointed by local democracy and the needs of everyday people to have to so consistently show up to show local policy makers that you are watching to such a degree that they actually have to listen. You have this moment of hopelessness, you're thinking about all these things, and then you're like, I'm showing back up again, but different this time." Like, how did you, like how did you come up with the idea? Anthony Ralphs: Yeah, I think, um, at, first it was really discouraging, but I also realized that what a privilege it was to be in a position where I could go, you know? I thought about all the people who can't go because they have work. I thought about all the people who can't go 'cause they don't, they don't have a flexible schedule with work that enables them to show up every Monday at 2:00 PM, every Tuesday at 10:00 AM, because the days alternate when they have their, city council sessions, [00:16:00] right? So it's going in there by yourself too you also realize it's a completely different experience when it's kind of one versus nine speaking to city council and you don't have a room full of people behind you agreeing with you, giving you snaps, every time you say something that they agree with or clapping once you're done speaking or, giving you thumbs up and giving you like the winks and the nods of approval and the encouragement. it's a fundamentally different process When you only get 60 seconds to get your point across, which is, if it's on an agenda item, it's, it can be anywhere from 60 seconds to three minutes long But I mean, even having to learn that process of like adjusting your speech and adjusting your talking points so that you can cram them into 60 seconds or 120 Alix: thinking Anthony Ralphs: 180 seconds, Alix: so hard on these topics too. That's just like, it's so impossible. Anthony Ralphs: You never get to say as many things as you want to.you're the only one a lot of times there saying it, in addition to, the fact that you have [00:17:00] such, little time to say it, and then on top of the fact that you have to pay to park to be there in the first place, it just feels like such a defeating process. Alix: Do you wanna talk a little bit about how you decided that Darth Vader was the right character? Like is it because you see the US as Andor now? Like what is the what is the, like why did you choose that character? Anthony Ralphs: there was like a, like an aha moment in the shower. one of those where I just kind of thought... Alix: You know, I, I have experience as an actor. "What, what can I do as an actor potentially?" Anthony Ralphs: I remembered in one of my playwriting classes talking about the elements of guerrilla theater and talking about how any time that you're at a political building that you have like a... Or a, like a capital building or a state building or any like, local office building, that you naturally have a theater built in. and that like if you have, say, a union that all has their, union T-shirts on [00:18:00] and they're all showing solidarity, then you have costumes, right? And then if you have, the narrative fleshed out, say, of who the villain is and who the, protagonist is, right, who the hero is, you have the elements of the story, right? And then if you have the strike or if you have the direct action, then you have the forwards driving the plot. And I thought, "Huh, that's really interesting." You have all the elements of, telling a story, of a theatrical component of telling a story baked into protest, and the only thing that you're really missing is outright designation or the outright, dedication of that protest to a theatrical form, right? And that's, I realized that holy, holy crap, that's kind of what guerrilla theater is. And I, so I thought, how could I do that at city council? And then I thought, how could I make fun of [00:19:00] or satirize or mirror the ridiculousness of the positions that they're taking back to them in such a way that enables them to see how, how dastardly and villainous their actions are? I mean, it can't get any more explicit than a company like Palantir that's literally named after an evil all-seeing eye in The Lord of the Rings, right? And Alix: It's in the name. Anthony Ralphs: In the name, they, they are literally identifying with comic book villains. So it stands to reason that if anyone is supporting a comic book villain's technology, they themselves are either a witting or an unwitting, which is almost even worse, participant in some comic book Alix: Yeah Anthony Ralphs: deserves to be ridiculed. You know, that deserves public scorn. If you wanna be a villain, prepare to be [00:20:00] treated like a villain Alix: Yeah. I love it. so I think, I mean, just in kind of reflecting a little bit on the success of this strategy and, like, to the extent you think it's a success, I'm curious if you think it's a success, what would you encourage people to do? Like, is it, you know, lean into satire? Is it lean into ways you can draw attention? Is it try and build a network of people that consistently show up at these kinds of procedural meetings and do something interesting? Like, what, what is,what's your advice, for people who are thinking, "How do I engage meaningfully in a local democratic process, to put sand in the gears of these companies and these governments who are basically just deciding to roll out all this technology?" Anthony Ralphs: there's something to be said for the shock value of showing up in a Darth Vader outfit unexpectedly. There's something to be said about the shock value of doing things unconventionally. I think the, the ridicule, the satire, the humor [00:21:00] really works because I think, um, at the end of the day, it really plays upon the fact that a lot of these elected officials have egos, and they don't want their egos to be hurt, and a lot of them, feel the need to be praised. Incentivize me to keep showing this respect, and incentivize the people of San Diego to keep showing you the respect that you wanna be shown. we'll praise your ego. we'll stroke your ego. We'll l- l- leave you all of the, compliments and all of the accolades and everything like that If you're gonna listen to your constituents. But if not, prepare yourself for the ridicule, and know that it's coming." 'Cause I warned them months ago, I said, "You've awoken the sleeping giant of our civic participation. Not just my civic participation, but this city's civic participation." And just three to four months later, I got to deliver on that promise, and now they're at the butt end of a global joke, you know, that went globally viral, and now they get to be known as the elected officials that didn't listen to their constituents and got [00:22:00] made fun of in different languages because of it Alix: I mean, it's really impressive what you did, which is take a boring, process, that is actually engaging with something extremely important and interesting and, like, should be of interest to everyone, and make it interesting again and make it something that more people... It's more visible, it's sort of surfacing these core questions rather than letting them be buried under boring local democratic procedural things where the biggest cost may be in participating is time and parking tickets. and I just think it's really cool. 'Cause, so congratulations for, I don't know, driving this much attention to something that deserves this much attention, which is really hard, it's really hard to do Anthony Ralphs: Thank you. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that, and I really appreciate all of the efforts and all the work that you're doing to spotlight this, this struggle that's a, that's really a global struggle ALIX VO: Anthony's story raises a frustrating question. What do you do when your elected officials just won't listen? Sarah Hamid [00:23:00] works with communities to answer that, , turning public frustration into sustained pressure for change Sarah H: So my name is Sarah Hamid. I am director of strategic campaigns at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which basically just means I spend my time looking for really high impact, solutions to everyday technology problems that everyone's having, and I've spent the past year and a half working on automated license plate readers Alix: well, thank you Sarah for joining us to talk a little bit about something everyone's talking about, um, flock cameras. before we get into what these cameras are and what they mean for organizing, against them, I guess, do you wanna say a little bit about how you got into this fight against, mass surveillance? Like, how'd you get into it? Sarah H: a lot of us that come from the generation that started organizing around Ferguson, right, in abolitionist spaces really around police violence and state violence articulated through policing, like, we started to notice things like predictive policing programs that were being rolled out, right? We started n- noticing things like gang databases. And then, like, [00:24:00] over time, on top of that, like, especially as you entered into the 2020 moment, and then you entered into moments like the Student Intifada recently where that, that analysis globalized, and it became international with Stop Cop City, where you had this place-based organizing that was developing, right? Over time, what became... what was just an, like, an ancillary portfolio really grow to be the totality of my organizing. And I am not unique in this space because a lot of us have been developing this analysis over a really long period of time as what technology does to us has increased and intensified Alix: you wanna talk a little bit about the Carceral Resistance Tech Network, and like how... 'Cause that feels like an expression of a lot of those logics, that like these technologies create this oppressive structure, that connects to so many others. like s- you wanna say a little bit about the network? Sarah H: Yeah. So, CTRN was a network that I helped built out, I think it was like 2018 was our genesis, around [00:25:00] that time period. And, it was because, like I said, we were like building this like, first of all, it was like more of an observation capacity, right? Like, we were watching technologies being rolled out, and you can imagine, like, folks who are doing things like cop watch functions, right? Who are, like, paying Alix: Mhm Sarah H: to police behavior, are starting to notice the way that these technologies are creeping into the Alix: Uhum. Sarah H: right? there were like these early campaign experiments that were analogous to the work that usually follows cop watch culture, were very place-based. They were localized. They were attending to the practices of a particular police department, right? And so we would be, like, confronting a specific police technology program, right? A specific surveillance program, a specific instance. But we noticed very quickly that these technologies travel, and they're, they have afterlives because they're an entirely different kind of formation that's being layered on top of traditional place-based [00:26:00] policing. And so, we use the term carceral technology really deliberately, this network of organizers that started to kind of really sh- share this information and knowledge across jurisdictions because we weren't organizing against technology. We were organizing against a category of what we saw as state violence, and what was state violence, right? It was carceral violence, and it was technologies that were used to facilitate the capture, confinement, coercion or exile of entire categories of people. And, we only needed to learn more about these technologies, but also started to share, like tactics and strategies across these jurisdictions as these technologies moved, right? Because, you know, you can turn, you can turn off or you can cancel a gang database program, but you can just also fully export that gang database to an entirely new jurisdiction, and what does that mean for our organizing? And so we wanted a way to kind of share research and strategic knowledge without, like, reproducing surveillance [00:27:00] practices or really thinking about what it means to research and investigate. We're very much just a knowledge-sharing network for the large part of this network's existence. And what CTRN really taught me was that, like, these local campaigns need this connective tissue, right? They need this kind of movement infrastructure, and that's a lot of the work that I brought into EFF when I joined in 2024. I mean, I feel like it may be worth teasing out the different ways that technology shows up in the context of policing, 'cause I feel like you, you just named several that feel, I don't know, maybe useful to tease out. I mean, I think that there's this like, you used the term policing workflows, which I really like as like a way of understanding integrating technology into normal practices of a, you know, the policing process in a way that expands reach, that expands the number of people that can get kind of trapped within these systems. Alix: Like, if I thought a lot about technology and policing, like are there ways or like, kind of simple structures you use to help people tease out where it shows up and the [00:28:00] implications? Sarah H: Yeah, it's not too different from thinking about just technology in general because a lot of these are just startups that are trying to introduce new technologies into every part Alix: right? So like as soon as you had LLMs, you had AI, like, generated course. Yeah Sarah H: And so you're seeing, like, the same kind of proliferation of technologies in the consumer sector just embedding its way into policing. The one unique place that I would say, however, is like, policing and military contexts also facilitate research because that's state-funded research that has a different relationship to that innovation pipeline, right? And many times those are the... Like, that's the genesis of the commercial technology because that's where the innovation is happening, because that's where the funding is, and that funded research that's usually funded in contexts of violence or contexts of war or [00:29:00] to facilitate state violence then finds a commercial afterlife, right? And this is not, like, unfamiliar to people who think about the history of technology. I spent a long time just hanging out with historians of technology and like, you know, just the long history of what is, like, in effect a global export coming out of World War II that we used to buy our way out of the welfare state, right? Like, that's kind of the same thing, just embedding itself into policing. the other thing that I think is a little bit different is that, when people talk about technology, kind of the glamour of it makes it feel like it's changing everything, and it's really important to resist that as a political analysis because that's not how policing functions. policing, and this comes from, you know, movement spaces being embedded in intergenerational struggles against policing, requires random acts of terrorism, state terrorism, right? And so of what workflows are automated and how much computation is [00:30:00] injected into those workflows, at the end of the day, you still have a s- street-level bureaucrat with a gun, right? And that street-level bureaucrat with a gun is acting according to the structures that define its entire position, and the violence, and the histories of violence that make that kind of m- like, identity possible. Alix: Yeah, no, I think that's really helpful. And I think the idea of, like, computerized policing as anathema to the idea of policing is, like, a really important point, and I think it, shows... also kind of digs into this idea that adding technology to policing is an attempt to create a permission structure for all the bad stuff that came before, not to, like, somehow make it so definitely heard on that front. Okay, do we wanna... Let's get into ALPRs, um, and Flock. what are ALPRs and, like, how do they work? Sarah H: Okay, so ALPRs are like a ridiculously simple system, right? It's just a high-speed camera [00:31:00] that photographs a passing vehicle, and then it converts that image of that plate into a machine-readable text, attaches a time and a location, to every single scan, and then uploads that information into a database. And that searchable database can be queried, it can be matched up against other databases like hotlists, and it's really important to remember how simple these systems are, because ALPRs have been around for a very, very long time. they've been around for something like 60 years. I think they were first introduced, for like counter-terrorism policing in Ireland, right? and over that long history of, like the history of computing and technology, ALPRs have evolved, and parts of that tech stack have gotten better, have improved because technology has improved, right? So initially, like these cameras were like very bad at capturing images because the cameras themselves weren't very good, but cameras got better, right? Like [00:32:00] now a lot of these cameras that can be either like mounted on cars, they can be mounted on specific locations, they can move. A lot of these cameras have infrared capabilities. They can capture images like very, very well, right? another thing that got really better, and this correlates with Flock a little bit, is around like 2017 when Flock hit the market, hardware got really cheap, right? and as hardware got really cheap, Flock was able to introduce a really low price point product. We are now living through a moment where compute is really cheap, which means that you're seeing those databases that those ALPR systems are collecting, more and more information is able to be collected because more things can be extracted from the images that these cameras capture, and also there's data fusion happening, so they can be combined with different data sets. So a very, very deceptively simple technology that's evolved for a very long time and has-- there have been countless attempts to try and govern the system, and all of those attempts has failed, which was, brought us to this nationwide uprising against ALPRs that we're seeing Alix: [00:33:00] Also, what does it stand for? So is it auto license plate re- Sarah H: Au- automated license Alix: reader. Okay. Automated license plate reader. Okay. what is Flock? So Flock is essentially a commercial provider of ALPRs that has, like, done good. Sarah H: Flock is a startup. It's a tech startup. It's a disruptor. It actually sits in the same investment portfolio as Anduril. and, it tried to disrupt first the private security m- like market with ALPRs by introducing a low price point product for HOAs and private security systems. Flock is unique because it sells to both private, for private security and private users, and it also sells to police, and it has absolutely exploded with how it sells to police departments across the country. and it operates like a startup does, a pre-IPO startup, which means it has, like, three primary interests, right? Which is market [00:34:00] capture, product differentiation, and valuation, and that is exactly how... what explains why Flock moves as fast as it, as it does, introduces new product features all the time that may or may not be constitutional and has to backtrack all the time, and their primary motivator is Alix: paint us a picture, when you are pushing back against these, like help people understand what is so wrong about them. Sarah H: Yeah, so it's a lot of data Alix: Mm. Sarah H: it is capturing every single vehicle that is passing by, and it's logging that vehicle's location information and the time at which it passes, right? And so if you have these, like, peppered throughout a city, right, it is capturing all of that information, 99.99% of which have n- has no law enforcement, like, interest whatsoever. it's not only capturing them, however. One lawmaker described the, a vendor having described Flock to them as Facebook for police data, right? [00:35:00] They were a social sharing Alix: Okay Sarah H: so they would go to these conferences, right? And they would, like, introduce this element where you would meet the person next to you and y- you know, that's how you ended up with these really bizarre sharing relationships where law enforcement agencies in, like, Hawaii were sharing with law enforcement agencies in Maine, right? Because there is this social layer that helped them sa- scale very, very quickly, right? And, that sharing relationship, that network sharing relationship, you wanna think about it this way. Like, so you have your city's cameras, and you have your private cameras, and they might be sharing out that data to other camera... Like, basically a single pooled data network for your city, right? And your law enforcement agencies can search that data continuously without a warrant, which is why you're seeing all of these cases come out about how that data is being used abusively, right? but also, that data then gets shared. It gets shared up to state networks. It gets shared up to national networks, and it can then be searched, [00:36:00] like, for other jurisdictions' reasons, and that's how you get to a situation where 80,000 cameras were searched to find a woman who'd done a self-managed abortion Alix: Oh my God Sarah H: parts of the country- Right, right? Like all of those camera networks can then be searched for that data because in parts of the country where abortion is criminalized, right, that then becomes a, quote-unquote, "law enforcement i- interest" to search for and use that data, right? but remember what I said about those, like, that social network, right? So it's not just that direct sharing where people, where it, like different nodes in this network permit sharing. There is also side door sharing. Side door sharing is when you don't have access to the network, but you tap a friend, a friend that you made conveniently at that same conference where Flock was bringing you together in a room, right? You ask them to do the search for you. Side door sharing is happening at that social layer, which is what made these systems so fundamentally ungovernable. It doesn't matter what your city's [00:37:00] lockdown policies are if you can always work around them through that human social layer. And then there's backdoor sharing, right? a shitty startup, which means that, like, security practices, right? like you're seeing so much come out from security researchers about, like, logins found, no t- two-factor authentication activated, right? Like, all of those security issues. So this massive nationwide database of everyone's driving data a single point of failure, and that's this one pre-IPO vendor, Flock Safety So I had a very strange, just kind of a funny actually exchange with my mom about flock cameras the other day. and she was asking me what I thought about them, and I was like, "I think that they're bad." and, and she was like, "Oh, like, that's so interesting." She's like, "I'm kind of working through what I think about them." Alix: And I was like, "Oh, what do you think about them?" And she's like, "Well, I've had uh, a friend, get a car stolen, and the law enforcement was able to essentially like find the car because of flock cameras." And then, I [00:38:00] started explaining why that could be a good use case that feels very positive, but there's other use cases that are obviously, not positive, and we started talking about it. And she asked me, "Do you have to get a warrant to access it?" And I was like, "Oh, that's a really good question. I don't know."but basically this is an ongoing legal conversation about whether or not a warrant is required, because right now in the vast majority of the US it is not, right? Sarah H: No, it's not, and I think it's more than just whether or not a warrant Alix: Yeah Sarah H: access this data, right? It's that the lack of warrant requirement makes the entire infrastructure unconstitutional of how much right? So Alix: Yeah. Sarah H: that's, that's the key piece here that a lot of folks are missing. It's not that we want a... It's that the lack of warrant requirement and the mass proliferation of these sensors, like peppered across a city, make the entire existence of this system unconstitutional Alix: Yeah. Yes. Sarah H: Okay, um, so this seems [00:39:00] bad, but also like many bad things, is an opportunity, to organize, and connect people in communities that don't want something bad, and potentially create space for there to be mobilization that can be, I don't know, important to like energize people to get more involved in politics. Alix: like what is the reaction to Flock from communities? Sarah H: So it's interesting because we're living in this moment, like you said that, like, Flock is in the headlines. Everyone knows about Flock. Your mom talks to you about Flock, right? And it's, uh, it's polling cross-partisan. it's a lot of interest- to a lot of politicians all of a sudden. when I joined EFF, we were really focused on, like, how do we close the gap between the demands that communities and frontline communities have and the policies that we're seeing enacted? And this gap, especially around surveillance and surveillance technologies, had created, like, this s- this terrible feedback loop where, like, the oversight rules were just rubber-stamping technology and allowing the police to [00:40:00] proliferate more and more and more from the public coffers, right? so, with community groups that I was embedded in, like, we really started to interrogate, like, what are the opportunities here for, Finding new points of leverage and for closing that gap, right? And that gap is really important because the demand is never oversight. The demand is we don't want surveillance, right? We don't want these surveillance technologies. How can we, find pathways to get to a place where there is no surveillance technology? And so at EFF, you know, we started this, like, l- basically very small scale lean policy experimentation hub, and we were testing through a range of different technologies. We were like, "Let's look at drone purchasing. Let's look at ShotSpotter or gunshot detection," right? we landed with ALPRs, I think it was, like, April 2025, and a few prominent, like, like, significant site fights around ALPRs. And that long history of how long ALPRs have been around is really important because that is also a history of policy [00:41:00] failure because there is not a single guardrail that you can point to that I cannot find a case, I'm pretty sure, where I'm like, "Oh, Alix: Yeah Sarah H: That failed," right? Like, Austin, Texas, had one of the most restrictive data retention policies I've seen, it was seven days. That failed because you can just download a local CSV export, which means that it eliminates the data retention policy entirely, right? So we saw a lot of heat around ALPRs because they had been around for so long, they had proliferated very, very quickly in a very short amount of time. They had both use cases, private and public, and they were mass surveillance. They were mass surveillance because they were surveilling the masses, right? and we began to, like, kind of test through really, really, like, with these community groups that were on the frontline on these, in these fights, like, what is a s- policy solution to this, right? and we worked with both the lawmaker side and the community side, and we came down to contract [00:42:00] cancellation. If you just cancel the contract, then you don't have the surveillance system, and that's it. That's the demand. Alix: Nuke it. Yeah. Sarah H: the demand. Absolutely, right? You can just say no, and 2025 was really this turning point where we were like, "Oh, it turns out you can just say no to the system, and that is a viable, that is a viable policy solution." And through this process of, like, really figuring out why it is that we arrived at this moment of runaway surveillance purchasing, why it is that it wasn't even a considered, a viable solution to cancel it, why it is that we're here exposed the ways in which procurement and purchasing have been de- like basically depoliticized, and how information asymmetry with these vendors had made it so that these decisions were being treated as casually as though the city were purchasing pencils or printers, right? Like figuring out all of those, we arrived at this like replicable, scalable solution around contract cancellation, and really [00:43:00] activating people around the procurement process itself, building a cop watch culture, but for technology. That was the animating logic. And so, yes, people are contesting ALPRs. Yes, they are canceling their contracts. But this is a, this is applicable to the entire surveillance stack, right? These techniques that they've learned around how to cancel a flock contract are being applied not just to ALPRs. Those same procurement strategies and anti-procurement strategies are being applied to drone purchasing, to purchasing of different video analytics programs, right? Like that culture can be multiply applied, and that's what we are looking for. And when we... That's what we were working to build for the past two years Alix: So there's a causal link here. So the public gets angry, rightfully, about these technologies, then appeals to local policymakers to say, "Cancel these contracts." There's a step there of a local policymaker having to, like, listen. do you wanna talk at all about [00:44:00] challenge of getting local policymakers to listen and sort of what you think is working to kind of translate that, bigger movement energy to these more, like, probably technocratic choices that, like, w- you know, a city council or, you know, a politician gets to, gets to decide on? Sarah H: So what was really interesting about kind of the formula that we time refined was that we didn't have to make appeals to electeds and decision-makers, and here's why. It's because electeds and decision-makers became participants in the coordinated Alix: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Right. So how do you get around them? Sarah H: they're part of the advocacy stack, right? We... Like, this coordinated stack model where, like, researchers and lawyers and community groups and frontline advocates and lawmakers all have a role to play, right? And the earlier that lawmakers can be, like, brought into actual coordination with the campaign and not just treated as, like, the decision-maker or some [00:45:00] abstract person who's removed from this process, the more, like, buy-in we had from them, right? Because they were trying to do the thing that they were elected Alix: Uhum Sarah H: do, which is represent the needs of their community. So we brought lawmakers in very, very early, right? And we put them in contact directly with these frontline communities, and we said, "Okay, now you need to pull the levers that you have." Alix: So you get the lawmakers that, like, get it, and then you get them on your side, and then they say, "Hey, I'm a representative." They go to law enforcement and say, "We actually have responsibility and oversight power over the police. You actually need to show me this thing, and these are my constituents who I'm representing vis-a-vis this pr-" That's so... 'Cause I, like, I was- wasn't thinking about that triangle of, like, lawmaker, police departments, public. I was thinking, I always think of lawmakers as just, like, on the side of the police department, which maybe is the case in some places. But that's amazing. So you, like, peel them off basically, and then [00:46:00] use their political power in the system to, like, make the thing happen. Sarah H: When I say we kind of figured out Alix: Yeah Sarah H: how we got here, what I mean is that we figure out how it is that these critical decisions, that our policy decisions are showing up Alix: Mmhm Mmhm Sarah H: nothing, and why it is that so many lawmakers are rubber-stamping them, right? Like, the assumption was that the vendor was the one with all of the technological information. They were the experts of these systems, and so the lawmakers just deferred to the vender to explain Alix: Interesting Sarah H: the tech to them, and they became Alix: Yeah Sarah H: and over 20 years, surveillance purchasing became depoliticized. Our project was Alix: Right Sarah H: these decision-makers, right? There are now cities in the country where maybe the Flock contract vote didn't go the way that you wanted it to go in your campaign, but we're h- they're holding these lawmakers. Now there are, like, cards for candidates saying, "Where do you stand on Alix: So [00:47:00] good Sarah H: this is a political policy issue, right? They're holding these lawmakers accountable now, so you can't make these decisions Alix: That's amazing because I think mass surveillance as an idea for a while was kind of abstract. Like, I think there have been moments when, like, the, there was broad public understanding that something big was happening. Like, I don't know, like the Snowden revelations or, like, these, like, key moments when it became this political conversation. But then the kind of slow, steady march of everyday governing and budgets and, like, the boringness and then, like, the line item that shows up over and over again. Like, I can imagine them kind of being lulled into feeling like this is just a neutral, boring set of administrative decisions, and the idea that this is now, like, being politicized, I mean, it was always political, but now it's being politicized and sort of the public is engaging in this way, is just so exciting because it feels like an entry point into people feeling more empowered to participate in the decisions made ab- like, that affect them, and the kind of conception of city budgets, local budgets as an [00:48:00] expression of public consent and, like, cons- what constituents want, which just feels like such a cool moment. Like, how are you feeling about this as an entry point? I mean, like, obviously you want the issue to change, but does that feel like... Does it feel like that to you? Does this feel like a thing gathering momentum? Sarah H: So I don't know if you've been to any of these Alix: I have not Sarah H: but in all of my organizing in the space, I have never seen hearings like this, where, like, 200 people are showing up, and they're only given 30 seconds because there's just not enough time to get everyone in for public comment, right? is democratic engagement at the level of tech policy that I've never seen before. So absolutely, people have a techno politics, and if you give them a pathway to actualize the technological future that they want, they're gonna act on it, and that's exactly what's happened, right? People don't want the in their community. We gave them a pathway on how to get there, and they're doing it, and it's viral, and it's totally This Alix: Which is amazing. Yeah Sarah H: now, [00:49:00] right? I'm feeling very, very hopeful because I feel like we've been working up to this Alix: Uhum Sarah H: right? Like, the... There is a movement history here that is, you know, like, Alix: Uhum Sarah H: it's convenient, right? Like, it's convenient to forget that we got to this moment because people put so much labor into, like, persuading these different constituencies. Like, this was on-the-ground work. And the genesis of this movement is, like, folks who are immediately concerned around, like, what... like, bodily autonomy after Dobbs, right? And folks who are immediately concerned about, like, the violent state attack against racialized labor and immigration, right? And so they were looking for, like, using that analysis to find a way to intervene, and they're the ones who massified this movement because they're the ones who went to constituencies that don't share the beliefs that they do and made ALPRs relevant to them, [00:50:00] right? They went to things like gun owners associations. They were like, "Your bumper sticker," right? "That can be tracked by a flock camera," right? They went, like... The kind of cross-movement solid- not even a solidarity, but just engagement, was phenomenal to watch all of this message testing that's happening. That movement was ma- what, what, what made this mass uprising against ALPRs Alix: think it's such an important thing to remind people that can feel-- Like organic oftentimes implies passive or accidental. and I think it's so important to sort of call back the kind of, to the intellectual leadership coming from organizations like EFF, um, and this on the ground organizing that has been happening to make the case to socialize these ideas, and I think to sort of till the ground to plant these seeds because I think that there's a-- I don't know, there's always like a revisionist energy with these kinds of things. So thank you for, I don't know, for naming the labor and the commitment and the kind of early identification of this as an issue and the kind of pushing. I wonder, sort of last [00:51:00] question, bigger picture, how do you see us mobilizing this kind of frustration into movement energy that can, build and build and sort of take us into a direction that kind of gets to a politic that we were talking about at the beginning of the conversation to kind of take out the kind of carceral thinking and logics and the kind of continued construction of the surveillance, state, I guess? like what do you think it's gonna take? Like what does it look like to sort of use this as a, a snowball kind of going down a hill, and like keep the snowball going? Sarah H: Absolutely. I think what the past, like, year and a half has taught me is that people have a techno politics, right? They have a belief about what technology should and shouldn't do for them, right, and what it is and isn't doing, and how it's impacting their lives. And, our job as organizers is to sit in the middle. They have a demand and they have a world they wanna see, we have to sit in the middle and figure out how to get them there, right? And that, like, e- everyone who [00:52:00] sees their work in this world as doing anything from community organizing to policy work, right, is supposed to sit in the middle right now because it worked. It works with ALPRs and it's working with data centers, a very analogous movement, right? As long as you sit there in the middle and hold yourself accountable to those demands, right, and really try and actualize those demands, that there, there's tremendous amount of power and change there. Because we are n- you're not having to, like, restructure the way people believe or any of their ideologies. They're coming to you ready, right? You're just packaging it for them in a way in which they can act, and they will act. And that, seeing that happen in my lifetime was something that I never thought I would be able to see or experience, but I've seen it and I've experienced it, and I'm absolutely convinced that this is where our work is now for the next 10 years. Because technology has proliferated every aspect of our lives, and people want to see a different Alix: Hmm Sarah H: [00:53:00] their kids, right? And we keep running up against this expert-driven, very stale policymaking Alix: Yeah Sarah H: the creative work is happening on the ground with folks, getting them to leverage their own power. And, you know, that power's threatened by that because we're politicizing things that they deliberately made apolitical, right? Power's threatened even by that because we're showing up in masses. Po- power is... We're trying to criminalize anti-flock activism, right? It's very bizarre. But power is responding to that. but that's where the power is, and that's where our work is for the next decade because we, you know, we find the present technological condition to be intolerable, so we have to do something about it Anthony's performance is exactly the kind of creative, on-the-ground resistance work Sarah was referring to at the end of our conversation. And I wanna thank both of our guests for showing us what it looks like to push back when people in power aren't listening, and how local action can become part of something bigger. Does your city or county have a flock contract? Or use other surveillance tech? Find out! Do some digging this week [00:54:00] in your area are saying, and find out when your next city council meeting is. Next week, we're joined by Steven Rendaros, executive director of Media Justice, to talk about what happens next. As these fights move into the mainstream and more money and formal politics get involved, how do organizers keep them from being co-opted, and how can we turn scattered backlash into durable political power? ALIX VO: Thanks to the podcast team, Kushal Dev, Marion Wellington, Van Newman, and Zoe Trout for all their work making this podcast happen every week, and we will see you next time