Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Hello, welcome to it could happen here.
Speaker 3: It's me today, James, and I'm very lucky to be
Speaker 3: joined by Cooper Quentin, who is a senior staff technologist
Speaker 3: at the EFF and Colonel Panic, who is a hacker.
Speaker 2: And we are going to be talking today about.
Speaker 3: The privacy apocalypse that is coming our way, I guess,
Speaker 3: the end of privacy and what you can do just
Speaker 3: stop it being the end of privacy. So thanks for
Speaker 3: joining me both you.
Speaker 4: Absolutely Hey, James, happy to be on the show again.
Speaker 4: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks for making the time.
Speaker 3: So I guess, like in the case that somebody lives
Speaker 3: under a rock, we should start breaking down some of
Speaker 3: the different like surveillance mechanisms that the state is building.
Speaker 3: And maybe Colonel Panic you can kick us off with
Speaker 3: flock because that is the one that has probably got
Speaker 3: the most attention recently, and then Cooper we could pick
Speaker 3: up on some of the many other private see violation tools.
Speaker 5: Certainly, you may notice all these cameras popping up around
Speaker 5: your town.
Speaker 4: They're on a black pole.
Speaker 5: It's a black camera with a solar panel, and these
Speaker 5: are what we call flog cameras. They're really easy to spot.
Speaker 5: But they're essentially ALPRs. They're automatic license plate readers, So
Speaker 5: this is like a form of drag net surveillance where
Speaker 5: anytime you drive by these things, they're just logging your
Speaker 5: license plate. And they've expanded this to do other things
Speaker 5: like facial recognition and gunshot detection and so on. Distressed
Speaker 5: person detection is another one which is really dodgy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, fascinating, but it just looks for people who are
Speaker 3: acting distressed.
Speaker 4: Or I think it's a sound thing too, right.
Speaker 6: Oh, okay, yeah, I think it's pretty similar to gunshot
Speaker 6: detection in the books for people shouting, people in the
Speaker 6: heightened state of emotion. Right, I mean this could really
Speaker 6: easily be a protest detector, right yeah.
Speaker 3: Or imagine if that was a fucking peacock, like you
Speaker 3: have cooks get angry. They really sounds like someone's dying
Speaker 3: or folks.
Speaker 4: So yeah, I mean false false positives.
Speaker 6: Are already a huge issue for gunshot detections in general.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 6: They can go off for a balloon popping, they can
Speaker 6: go off for fireworks.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and then just because you're in the area, you
Speaker 5: know you're now part of an investigation.
Speaker 3: So press, we should talk a little bit about some
Speaker 3: of the other ones to keep it, Maybe we start
Speaker 3: with facial recognition.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, facial recognition is all the raise these days.
Speaker 6: A lot of law enforcement is unfortunately investing in this.
Speaker 6: We've seen, of course, Ice with their Mobile Fortified tool
Speaker 6: that's gotten a lot of press lately. And then this
Speaker 6: is this is an app that that runs on Android
Speaker 6: phones that they can scan people with and you know, apparently,
Speaker 6: according to them, get a fully one hundred percent accurate
Speaker 6: identity for that person within seconds. Anybody who understands facial
Speaker 6: recognition will tell you that that is not true, and
Speaker 6: that can't possibly be true. Facial recognition is never one
Speaker 6: hundred percent accurate, and in fact, there have been dozens
Speaker 6: of cases where people have been falsely arrested and wrongfully
Speaker 6: imprisoned and charged because of incorrect facial recognition results.
Speaker 4: This has also already happened in the case of Mobile Fortify.
Speaker 6: There was a woman in Oregon who I scanned her
Speaker 6: face and they scanned her twice. Both times it came
Speaker 6: up with a different identity for this woman. And it
Speaker 6: turns out that both of those identities, neither of them
Speaker 6: were the correct.
Speaker 4: Identity for this woman.
Speaker 7: Jesus but it has been using this as as a
Speaker 7: you know, sort of judge jury and execution to determine
Speaker 7: whether to arrest, detain, and possibly even deport somebody.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's pretty bleak.
Speaker 3: Something that happens if when you come to the United
Speaker 3: States you're a migrant rate is that they will collect
Speaker 3: a large amount of your biometric data. But it seems
Speaker 3: to be even with all of that, the resolution that
Speaker 3: they have on the scan, it's actually very poor.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, that's I mean, that's that is correct, right.
Speaker 6: So the way that this works, the databases that they have,
Speaker 6: it's checking against various immigration databases. We think that it's
Speaker 6: most likely checking against the like tsa database of biometric
Speaker 6: scans that you do every time you take a flight.
Speaker 6: Of course, all of the at the border biometric scans,
Speaker 6: the ingress and egress scans. Yeah, any sort of visa
Speaker 6: information or anything like that. There's also the clearview AI,
Speaker 6: so even if you've never done any of these, there's
Speaker 6: another app called clear Viewer which is used by law
Speaker 6: enforcement and by ICE, which does a similar thing. But
Speaker 6: it's back end data is all of the photos that
Speaker 6: have been posted online, so they're using data from social media, Facebook, Instagram,
Speaker 6: everything else to make a face match and determine who
Speaker 6: you are based on that sort of publicly available data
Speaker 6: as well.
Speaker 2: Great, Yeah, they would have reassuring thing to hear.
Speaker 4: High cost of the free service, Yeah absolutely.
Speaker 3: Let's talk about a couple of other things. I think
Speaker 3: those are things that people have a very reasonable fear
Speaker 3: of concern with anger about however you want.
Speaker 2: To put it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there is some stuff which I think preps we
Speaker 3: We just need to understand what it means, I guess,
Speaker 3: and maybe we could start there and a coup. You've
Speaker 3: done a lot with stingrays or cell phone sight simulators,
Speaker 3: with lots of names for them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 6: So I've been for the last couple of years working
Speaker 6: on a project called ray Hunter, which is a open
Speaker 6: source project to detect cell sized matters or stingrays or mccatchers,
Speaker 6: whatever you want to call them.
Speaker 4: I will probably use these terms interchangeably.
Speaker 6: And in short, the way it works is it's a
Speaker 6: little piece of software that sits on a mobile hotspot,
Speaker 6: one of those little things that you buy to get
Speaker 6: like Wi Fi in various places from a cellular connection,
Speaker 6: and looks at the traffic between the hotspot and the
Speaker 6: towers that it's connected to, specifically the control traffic, not
Speaker 6: what you're doing, but what the control traffic is, how
Speaker 6: it's connecting to the towers.
Speaker 4: It looks for a number of suspicious things, signatures.
Speaker 6: That we've written of what we think are indicative of
Speaker 6: MC catcher activity. So we've been running this for a year.
Speaker 6: There's several hundred of these.
Speaker 4: Around the US, if not a couple of thousand, but
Speaker 4: we don't have exact numbers.
Speaker 6: There's a bunch of these all over the US. We
Speaker 6: had a bunch of Minneapolis. People have been running them
Speaker 6: in Chicago, in LA when that was going on.
Speaker 4: People have been running them all over the country.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and we have found some evidence of mpcy catchers,
Speaker 6: but a lot less than we expected, or a lot
Speaker 6: less than many people expected.
Speaker 4: I actually didn't expect to find many.
Speaker 6: And specifically, we have not found any evidence of MC
Speaker 6: catchers being used at protests.
Speaker 4: And I just stop here for a second to explain
Speaker 4: what a sting ray or mccatcher is.
Speaker 6: Yeah, this is a fake cell tower essentially that tricks
Speaker 6: your phone into connecting to it so that your phone
Speaker 6: will identify itself to the MC catcher. These are used
Speaker 6: for the primary reason these are used for is to
Speaker 6: track down a specific person. So like what we see
Speaker 6: in court documents is that these are used to verify
Speaker 6: that somebody is home before a police rate happens. Right,
Speaker 6: This is what the vast majority of use for these is.
Speaker 6: That is one use. The other potential use, and the
Speaker 6: one we're actually more concerned about, is that these could
Speaker 6: be used to identify who is in a specific area.
Speaker 6: You can set one of these up outside, let's say,
Speaker 6: outside of a mosque or outside of a protest an
Speaker 6: anarchist meeting or a anti fascist meeting is regularly happening, right,
Speaker 6: and identify the people who are in that meeting by
Speaker 6: getting those unique IDs and then going to the phone
Speaker 6: company and saying, give us the subscriber information for these people.
Speaker 6: And that is a farm concerning use, and we are
Speaker 6: not seeing it so far with ray Hunter being used
Speaker 6: for that. What we're seeing is uses that seem to
Speaker 6: be more in line with the sort of manhunt or
Speaker 6: like verifying that somebody is home style of operation, which
Speaker 6: is also what we're seeing in core documents.
Speaker 3: Interesting, Yeah, it doesn't mean that they government cannot find
Speaker 3: out that you were at a place or at a protest, right,
Speaker 3: it just means that they're not using this mechanism of
Speaker 3: doing that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's that's exactly right. So people have asked us,
Speaker 4: what are what our.
Speaker 6: Theories are for about why we're not seeing these a
Speaker 6: protest because for a lot of for a long time,
Speaker 6: there were a lot of activists that were pretty convinced
Speaker 6: that these were showing up at every protest, right, or
Speaker 6: that maybe like you know, to use the old there
Speaker 6: was the old co Intel pro language was like the
Speaker 6: architects of co Intel Pro wanted activists to feel like
Speaker 6: there was a cop behind every bush and inside every mailbox, right,
Speaker 6: And that was really the impression that a lot of
Speaker 6: activists had about mccatchers, right, that they were in every
Speaker 6: cop card, that they were everywhere, that they were just
Speaker 6: constantly being used. And it seems like that's not the case.
Speaker 6: And I think there's a couple reasons why. One is
Speaker 6: that they're expensive. It costs about a million dollars for
Speaker 6: an mccatcher contract. So these are actually like fairly rare,
Speaker 6: and they're hard to operate. They require a lot of
Speaker 6: technical knowledge, they require a lot of understanding cops are idiots,
Speaker 6: they don't want to actually go do all this work
Speaker 6: if it's not necessary, right, and it's a lot more
Speaker 6: expensive then using one of the many other surveillance technologies
Speaker 6: they have flock facial recognition, things like pen Link, which
Speaker 6: we can talk about in a little bit, but other
Speaker 6: databases of location because our phone advertisements on our phones
Speaker 6: are constantly giving up our location, right, and there's a
Speaker 6: whole surveillance industry around that selling.
Speaker 4: That data to police. Also.
Speaker 6: The other big issue is that there was a legal
Speaker 6: decision in twenty twenty, twenty nineteen.
Speaker 4: I'm gonna mess this up. Fact checkers will.
Speaker 6: Need to get on this in twenty nineteen called Carboner
Speaker 6: versus USA, and the Supreme Court in that decision decided
Speaker 6: that to access historical cell site location information, so this
Speaker 6: is where people were located based on what cell towers
Speaker 6: they're connected to, that police would need a warrant for
Speaker 6: that information.
Speaker 4: And it seems like at that time a.
Speaker 6: Lot of law enforcement agencies decided that that also extended
Speaker 6: to stingrays, whereas previously.
Speaker 4: They had not been needing to get a warrant to
Speaker 4: use their stingrays.
Speaker 6: It seems like a lot of them thought, oh, Okay,
Speaker 6: this seems like it probably also applies to stingrays. Therefore,
Speaker 6: any case using stingrays without a warrant will get thrown out.
Speaker 4: Therefore, we're going to need to get a warrant to
Speaker 4: use this thing.
Speaker 6: And it turns out having to get a warrant was
Speaker 6: too high of a bar for most police agencies and
Speaker 6: made them not want to use this technology, you unless
Speaker 6: they absolutely had to and thought they.
Speaker 4: Could get a warrant for it.
Speaker 6: But there's a lot of other things they don't have
Speaker 6: to get a warrant for, so we think my theory
Speaker 6: is that they are using these other technologies that are
Speaker 6: easier to use, cheaper to use, don't have to get
Speaker 6: a warrant, and saving the sting rays only for when
Speaker 6: they are sure they can get a warrant and when
Speaker 6: they cost and complexity is justified.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 3: It's the twenty eighteen June twenty second, twenty eighteen, that
Speaker 3: supreme cool case.
Speaker 4: Thank you real fun fact checking here on ICHH.
Speaker 3: Yep, that's what we do. Let's talk about PenLink and
Speaker 3: like other location data. I did hear recently that it's
Speaker 3: possible that Iran had used commercially available location data to
Speaker 3: target some of its strikes on US troops in the
Speaker 3: Middle East, which is wild to consider.
Speaker 6: I had not heard that, but it's not surprising and
Speaker 6: it is absolutely wild, right. So yeah, So PenLink is
Speaker 6: a company that actually previously had sold a lot of
Speaker 6: software to help out with mccatchers. So interestingly they have
Speaker 6: now pivoted to different types of surveillance. So they a
Speaker 6: few years ago acquired this company, is Raeli company called Cobwebs.
Speaker 6: Cobwebs makes a lot of different software. There's actually just
Speaker 6: recently a fantastic report about all of the software in
Speaker 6: that was acquired by PenLink. In this sale, there were
Speaker 6: links to a couple of spyware manufacturers. Anyway, there was
Speaker 6: a report on citizen Lab that's excellent. I highly recommend it.
Speaker 6: But the short of it is that PenLink has acquired
Speaker 6: two of their main products, one of which is called
Speaker 6: Tangles and the other one is called Weblock. Tangles is
Speaker 6: a social media surveillance tool that allows investigators to scrape
Speaker 6: social media for specific keywords and make links between different
Speaker 6: people different organizations, say like anybody who has interacted with
Speaker 6: the Jean Brown gun Club or anybody who has interacted
Speaker 6: with the socialist ra or anybody who has mentioned the
Speaker 6: words Antifa. Right, you can go build a dossier on
Speaker 6: that person, build a dossier on who their friends are,
Speaker 6: what they're talking about, scrape specific groups, any sort of
Speaker 6: left leaning group. Right, they can build a dossier on
Speaker 6: that who all the people are, who their friends are.
Speaker 6: And then they have this tool called Weblock. And what
Speaker 6: Weblock does is it is a near real time database
Speaker 6: of the locations of millions of phones worldwide. And so
Speaker 6: how it works is police can circle a specific area
Speaker 6: on a map and it will show information about all
Speaker 6: of the phones that they know.
Speaker 4: You know, that we're in that.
Speaker 6: Area in some sort of timeframe, and I think that
Speaker 6: the data gets updated every twenty four hours, so you're
Speaker 6: going to have about a twenty four hour delay in
Speaker 6: that data piece. So you circle an area just like
Speaker 6: with your finger, and you're going to see who was there,
Speaker 6: you know, as of twenty four hours ago and back
Speaker 6: to so you know, whatever time brame you said. You
Speaker 6: can then select any one of those phones that were
Speaker 6: in that area and see information about that person, which
Speaker 6: is mostly advertising demographic information, like what what sort of age.
Speaker 4: Racket that person's in?
Speaker 6: What their interests and hobbies are, whether they have kids,
Speaker 6: whether they're a parent, what their nationality is.
Speaker 4: Et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 6: But you can also see a historical map of where
Speaker 6: that person or where that device. We should say, yeah,
Speaker 6: has been right, And so you can see where they
Speaker 6: spend their days, which is probably their work or something
Speaker 6: like that. Where they spend their nights, which is probably
Speaker 6: their house. You know, where they spend sort of their
Speaker 6: afternoons or evenings, maybe a third space, maybe a lover's house,
Speaker 6: something like that. Right, But you can see everywhere they've gone.
Speaker 6: You can see if they were at a specific protest,
Speaker 6: you could see everybody who was at a specific protest.
Speaker 4: You could do a lot of different things with that.
Speaker 6: And we think that they can that data from advertising networks.
Speaker 6: We know they get it from apps on your phone,
Speaker 6: and basically those apps are sending information to advertising networks
Speaker 6: which is then sold or scraped by PenLink to add
Speaker 6: to their database for this app. And all of this
Speaker 6: is then sold to law enforcement. So law enforcement can
Speaker 6: get this.
Speaker 4: Information and none of it.
Speaker 6: Requires a warrant. Currently, law enforcement does not think they
Speaker 6: need a warrant to acquire this data and judges have
Speaker 6: upheld that so far.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so you're saying when you download an app and
Speaker 5: you give it location permissions, that this is aggregated and
Speaker 5: then sold to third party.
Speaker 6: Not every app, but yeah, a lot of apps, like
Speaker 6: most of them. We've been really strongly encouraging people to
Speaker 6: not give apps location permissions unless there's a very good
Speaker 6: reason why that app should have location permissions. Right, Like,
Speaker 6: on my phone, the only app that has location permissions
Speaker 6: is my maps app and my weather app, and that's
Speaker 6: because I know those apps don't have advertising SDKs in them.
Speaker 6: But if you wanted to, if you are extra paranoid,
Speaker 6: like if I was heading throughto something, I mean, if
Speaker 6: I was setting to something that I didn't want people
Speaker 6: to know I was there, I would turn my phone
Speaker 6: off or at least put it on airplane mode, right. Yeah,
Speaker 6: you know, short of that, you could turn off location
Speaker 6: services entirely for your phone, right and give no app
Speaker 6: your location.
Speaker 4: But yeah, it's our phones are snitches, man, Our phones
Speaker 4: are snitches.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that is the big take home, is the big
Speaker 3: snitch you carry around in your pocket take everywhere with you.
Speaker 3: Talking of snitches, I can't think of a way to
Speaker 3: fucking pivot then.
Speaker 4: To add down products and services. Here's something so you
Speaker 4: can buy the snitch on you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, hey, buy these things.
Speaker 3: They'll give away information data, send it to his rainy
Speaker 3: company will send it back to the cops.
Speaker 2: All right, we are back. I hope you boil something nice.
Speaker 3: I want to talk about community counter surveillance because it
Speaker 3: is interesting. It gives people something they can understand a
Speaker 3: little more about the web of surveillance around them, right,
Speaker 3: they can they could feel a little bit more informed.
Speaker 3: So let's let's talk about it. Maybe kind of panic
Speaker 3: if you want to kick off. You've been involved in
Speaker 3: some of these devices. I don't know how you want
Speaker 3: to put it behind some of them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, certainly.
Speaker 5: I came up with the idea for what people are
Speaker 5: now calling we spy. It actually was initially called OUI spy.
Speaker 5: It was organizational unique identifier, which is the first six
Speaker 5: characters of a Mac address.
Speaker 4: But it's art. You know, it's going to be pronounced
Speaker 4: however people want it. It has dual meanings we spy.
Speaker 5: But this this actually kind of was born from the
Speaker 5: war driving community, which is old school driving around trying
Speaker 5: to find devices, just seeing what's out there, and so Essentially,
Speaker 5: you have all these devices that are transmitting around you,
Speaker 5: and it's totally fine and totally legal to just receive passively.
Speaker 5: And so things like Wiggle or Kismet you can use
Speaker 5: on Linux to just drive around and just kind of
Speaker 5: see what devices are in your area. And through this,
Speaker 5: I came up with a device that was based on
Speaker 5: remote ID stuff prior to we spy that just detects
Speaker 5: drones and then transmits it over mesh tastic, or it
Speaker 5: detects a device and transmits it over mesh Tastic. And
Speaker 5: then I was like, it'd be really cool to have
Speaker 5: a device that if you have a device that you
Speaker 5: want to know when comes around you, it'll just beep.
Speaker 5: And so I just took a micro controller and drew
Speaker 5: out the design for this thing to connect to a
Speaker 5: beeper and essentially made the firmwares that do a few
Speaker 5: different things. For instance, if you wanted to know when
Speaker 5: a Tesla drove by or something, you could put in
Speaker 5: the OUI for that or the MAC address for a
Speaker 5: specific device, and you can just tell you get alerts
Speaker 5: when devices are around you.
Speaker 4: Essentially, so that's where all that began.
Speaker 2: Yeah, to explain how like this might help someone.
Speaker 3: Let's say, like you just wanted to get an idea
Speaker 3: right of the surveillance infrastructure that exist that you encountered
Speaker 3: in your daily life.
Speaker 2: You haven't been going to city council meetings. You don't
Speaker 2: know what that shit is.
Speaker 3: Your local newspaper is dead now, because everyone's local newspaper
Speaker 3: is dead now, right, so there's no reporting on it,
Speaker 3: Like if they wanted to get one of these devices,
Speaker 3: cruise around town and work out, like when they were
Speaker 3: being spied on, what kind of.
Speaker 2: Abilities would it give them?
Speaker 5: Certainly, so there's drawn detection on this device, so you
Speaker 5: can have it alert when drowns are near, or have
Speaker 5: it map via remote ID. But the biggest one I
Speaker 5: think that has been the most important one is the
Speaker 5: flock camera detection. There's a ton of other cameras then Flock,
Speaker 5: but this is the important one lately. So a lot
Speaker 5: of people are out on you know, out doing war
Speaker 5: driving and doing real time research and contributing to you know,
Speaker 5: adding to this database of flockcams signatures essentially, and it's
Speaker 5: either Wi Fi or Bluetooth, and some of them are
Speaker 5: over cellular too, But essentially this I made a firmware
Speaker 5: called flock you when you drive around, it just war
Speaker 5: drives flockcams.
Speaker 4: And a good friend of mine did some recent research.
Speaker 5: And found out that if you put the micro controller
Speaker 5: into Wi Fi promiscuous mode, it'll detect more flockcams. So
Speaker 5: that firmware just came out a couple of days ago,
Speaker 5: so constantly being added to.
Speaker 4: So if anyone has.
Speaker 5: You know, mac addresses OUIs, please contribute. It takes a
Speaker 5: village to raise a surveillance detection kit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it allows people to then, yet let the crowds
Speaker 3: or do you do community? It's mapping of this stuff
Speaker 3: right to give people and like I know, I have
Speaker 3: friends who've reported on gunshot detection software, Like it won't
Speaker 3: surprise people to find out which communities are the most
Speaker 3: surveiled and which communities are the least survailed. Right, but
Speaker 3: it nonetheless it is important, Like that's an important function
Speaker 3: in making that obvious to people. Likewise, drones, people might
Speaker 3: be thinking, why why would I want to look for drones?
Speaker 3: Drones are super cool. I just fly them around to
Speaker 3: see the birds. Like you can explain that drones might
Speaker 3: also play a role in surveillance.
Speaker 5: Yeah, absolutely, I'm an avid drone flyer. So I developed
Speaker 5: this just for funzis, you know, and made a drone detector,
Speaker 5: and I quickly realized that the most frequent flyers are
Speaker 5: the PD unfortunately, you know, surveiling the area. So it's
Speaker 5: really interesting to see and to see that they're flying.
Speaker 4: You know, more regularly than any hobbyist.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this has become a big part of flak coups.
Speaker 3: You used to have to send up a helicopter to
Speaker 3: look at something from above, right, and they still do
Speaker 3: all the time, and hear that ship over my house
Speaker 3: every day. But they can also do it with it
Speaker 3: right now for much less money. But do you want
Speaker 3: to explain ray Hunter a little bit for people who
Speaker 3: are like suddenly shocked by all of this and they
Speaker 3: want to turn the car into a beeping machine.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure I will do that. I
Speaker 4: want to.
Speaker 6: I want to extol the virtues of we buy for
Speaker 6: for a little bit before that, though, Yeah, I mean
Speaker 6: this is this is how I linked up with Kernel
Speaker 6: Panics because I thought this was such a really amazing project,
Speaker 6: and I think that it's it serves a couple of purposes, right,
Speaker 6: I think that there's there's one very practical purpose of
Speaker 6: like this can help you map out the surveillance in
Speaker 6: your town, right, you can. You can export the data
Speaker 6: from this and upload it directly to block mapper, right,
Speaker 6: or there's some other site that will help you, like
Speaker 6: plotter route from point A to point B avoiding flock camerage,
Speaker 6: which I think is really cool. It also just helps
Speaker 6: sensitize you to how many flock cameras are in your town.
Speaker 6: Like people like they they they are unobtrusive to a degree, right,
Speaker 6: Like they are easy, easy visual noise to just ignore. Yeah, right,
Speaker 6: but when you're like I was surprised by how much
Speaker 6: it went off in my town, and then I look
Speaker 6: up and I'm like, oh yeah, flog cameras, flock camera okay, right,
Speaker 6: And it got me used to like spotting those cameras around, right,
Speaker 6: And I think that it's a really it's a really
Speaker 6: useful piece of propaganda work essentially in that in that
Speaker 6: way to get people used to spotting these, to get
Speaker 6: people thinking about, well, where are these how many of
Speaker 6: these are there in my town?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 6: Like people are like, well, you could just go look
Speaker 6: for them, yeah, but people don't.
Speaker 2: Right, You've got the ship to do yeah, like, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 6: But if I hear that from the from their you know,
Speaker 6: really loud buzzer, right, I know that something is going on, right,
Speaker 6: it's more of a it's a little more jarring, and
Speaker 6: it's it's good in that way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I see it.
Speaker 3: It's like a like a little imagine a little parrots
Speaker 3: at your shoulder.
Speaker 2: And when you'll be spied on, You'll being spied on.
Speaker 2: You'll being spied on just constantly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, and you realize the extent to which that
Speaker 3: is happening.
Speaker 4: Surveillance coal mine canary essentially, and.
Speaker 2: Yeah it canary is better better enalogy.
Speaker 4: Kind of like lying cat, but surveillance cat, right yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, instead of every time you're lying and says that,
Speaker 6: it just says surveillance every time somebody's spying on you.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: The other thing that I think is is cool.
Speaker 6: I know U I spy and and raiment And why
Speaker 6: I think these are good projects is it gives a
Speaker 6: lot of people something to do, right. Fascism can really
Speaker 6: make people feel helpless, and this overarching surveillance can really
Speaker 6: make people feel helpless, and it's really easy for people
Speaker 6: to fall into privacy, nihilism, and security nihilism, right, and
Speaker 6: just be like, well, I'm gonna be watched constantly.
Speaker 4: There's nothing i can do, so, you know, spirit why
Speaker 4: do anything? Right? And this gives people something to do.
Speaker 6: Right, there's a thing you can and Americans love buying
Speaker 6: a thing, right, we love a gadget, and so there's
Speaker 6: a thing you can go.
Speaker 4: Buy or build or set up or whatever.
Speaker 6: Right, and go start pushing back, even just a little
Speaker 6: by little on the surveillance around you.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 6: And then once you start doing one thing, it lowers
Speaker 6: the energy of activation.
Speaker 4: It becomes easy to do other things.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 6: It becomes easier to go to your city council and
Speaker 6: demand that they rip these cameras out. It becomes easier
Speaker 6: to find and organize with other people in your community. Right,
Speaker 6: it becomes easier to start to you know, think about
Speaker 6: direct action, you know, in that sense, it becomes a
Speaker 6: bit of like propaganda bdeed, Right, Like we're giving people
Speaker 6: the tool to get off their couch and start to
Speaker 6: push back and start to fight back and start to
Speaker 6: become a part of a community.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 6: So I think it's really important for that with ray Hunters.
Speaker 6: So I already kind of described how it works, but
Speaker 6: we had. We had a few goals with ray Hunter.
Speaker 6: One was to figure out, you know, how often cell
Speaker 6: size simulators were being used in the US and around
Speaker 6: the world.
Speaker 4: But but you know, I live I live here, so
Speaker 4: this is my main focus, but specifically how often.
Speaker 6: They're being used to spy on protesters, right, because we
Speaker 6: were getting this idea that a lot of activists thought
Speaker 6: that they were everywhere, right, and I thought that other
Speaker 6: things were a much bigger threat, right, like, I'm there
Speaker 6: are there are things that I'm more concerned about. But also,
Speaker 6: cel size simulators, stingrays are pretty mysterious, right, Like, we
Speaker 6: don't we know the broad strokes of how they work,
Speaker 6: but we don't know the technical details of what exploits
Speaker 6: they are using to you know, essentially trick people's phones
Speaker 6: into connecting to them. Right, So this was a this
Speaker 6: was a chance to try to get some ground truth information.
Speaker 4: About that as well.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and we have succeeded in that we have a
Speaker 6: bunch of recordings from around the US of things that
Speaker 6: we think are quite likely to be side stimiliators actively
Speaker 6: in use by law enforcement, and we've bout some ideas
Speaker 6: about how they're working and what they're doing, and The
Speaker 6: other goal is that we wanted to try to like
Speaker 6: calm down some of the fear and uncertainty and doubt
Speaker 6: among activists about whether this was a threat model that
Speaker 6: they need to worry about and give people more accurate
Speaker 6: threat models.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and like also give people, you know, a modicum
Speaker 6: of comfort.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 6: This is not a self defense device, right, this is
Speaker 6: actually like at the end of the day, this is
Speaker 6: a data collect like not data collection. We're not collecting
Speaker 6: your data, but this is this is a research project.
Speaker 6: We're collecting the data about like how often do we
Speaker 6: think that we're actually seeing these?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 6: But it gives people a modicum of comfort too, Right,
Speaker 6: because you have this, you have Ryhunter with you, Right,
Speaker 6: and if it doesn't go off, you're like, every time
Speaker 6: it doesn't go off, you're like, Okay, you know, maybe
Speaker 6: this is.
Speaker 4: Not actually a threat model that I need to worry
Speaker 4: so much about.
Speaker 6: Right, And then I hope you'll think, well, what do
Speaker 6: I need to worry about? Oh, things like penling. Probably
Speaker 6: things like celebrate and the cops arresting me and making
Speaker 6: a copy of all the data on my phone. Yeah, right,
Speaker 6: probably other you know, facial recognition and other things like that,
Speaker 6: which I think are the things that you should be thinking.
Speaker 4: About and worrying about.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's been the point of bran Hunter, and I
Speaker 6: think it's been successful in that sense.
Speaker 4: Right. But yeah, we really, I mean, we want we want.
Speaker 6: More people to install this, right, especially the next time
Speaker 6: Ice lays siege to a city, right, we want to
Speaker 6: have we want to have some there. You know, late
Speaker 6: in the game to Minneapolis, a ground game got set
Speaker 6: up where we then had like a couple hundred of
Speaker 6: these on the ground of Minneapolis, and we.
Speaker 4: Didn't find We did not find.
Speaker 6: Anything in Minneapolis that we felt was conclusive evidence of
Speaker 6: an MC catcher. Well, Ice was there laying siege to
Speaker 6: the city. Hopefully there is no next time they lay
Speaker 6: siege to a city.
Speaker 2: Yeah, hopefully that doesn't happen again.
Speaker 6: But if that does happen again, hopefully we can get
Speaker 6: you know, sort of a ground game set up very
Speaker 6: quickly to try to determine if they're using this form
Speaker 6: of surveillance or not.
Speaker 3: So talking of surveillance, here are a couple of products
Speaker 3: and services. If you buy them that will probably result
Speaker 3: in your data being collected, which will in turn be
Speaker 3: sole perhaps to and it's really a company who will
Speaker 3: say to the cops.
Speaker 8: Sambo would never sell my data.
Speaker 2: All right, we are back.
Speaker 3: I think that's really good explanation of the value of
Speaker 3: these devices. The more you know, the more you know.
Speaker 3: And this is a struggle that I have on a
Speaker 3: daily basis at the moment. There are so many things
Speaker 3: to be angry and scared about right now. We don't
Speaker 3: need to invent shit that we shouldn't be angry and
Speaker 3: scared about. We need to focus on the things that
Speaker 3: are a real threat. And there are things in this
Speaker 3: landscape which are a real threat. And so I think
Speaker 3: it helps people to have that. Like it's one thing
Speaker 3: to go on flog map or whatever and Okay, well
Speaker 3: they're there and there and there. It's another one to
Speaker 3: be like, well, shit, in my going out to get
Speaker 3: a pizza with my friends, I was spied upon five times,
Speaker 3: and I think that that is very valuable. At the
Speaker 3: same time, nobody tried to sell sites, spoof and get
Speaker 3: my information that way.
Speaker 2: I think that's very important.
Speaker 3: Let's talk a little bit about like how people can organize.
Speaker 3: San Diego has done a spectacular job of signing a
Speaker 3: contract that it can't stop paying for surveillance cameras. So
Speaker 3: even if we stop using them tomorrow, we would keep
Speaker 3: sending our taxpayer money to a spying company, which is great.
Speaker 3: Because our city is and run by the sea, it
Speaker 3: will continue to be a shit show forever apparently, But like,
Speaker 3: let's assume that other people have slightly more competent local government.
Speaker 4: What an amazing contract. I can't believe that they said.
Speaker 3: That California politics is a shit show, but San Diego
Speaker 3: is a fucking joke.
Speaker 2: Many examples of this.
Speaker 6: Listen, my city council member just got it indicted buy
Speaker 6: the FBI on corruption charges. So in the year of
Speaker 6: our Lord twenty twenty five, if you got indicted by
Speaker 6: the FBI, So like, how stupid do you have to know?
Speaker 4: Well, so I have no legs to stand on. But
Speaker 4: also any California so it all tracks.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, the greatest great times on the left coast.
Speaker 3: Let's talk about how people have organized their communities against surveillance,
Speaker 3: Like just to like paint a picture for folks here, right,
Speaker 3: Like the flock camera does not know if you're doing
Speaker 3: a crime. The flock camera doesn't know if you came
Speaker 3: from another state to obtain reproductive healthcare. The flock camera
Speaker 3: doesn't know if you're a migrant parent popping out to
Speaker 3: get formula for your little baby. It captures all of
Speaker 3: that shit, right, Like, there's a broad range of people
Speaker 3: in this country who are fucking disgusted at that, people
Speaker 3: who we might not be used to organizing with. But
Speaker 3: perhaps you guys could like explain the how or if
Speaker 3: you're aware of instances where people have organized against states avalience,
Speaker 3: it would be cool to hear about that.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I recently did talk here in Asheville, North Carolina, at
Speaker 5: an event called nerd Nite, and nerd Night is essentially
Speaker 5: it's a way to go to a bar without just
Speaker 5: a bunch of drivel. You know, you go and then
Speaker 5: somebody does three talks fifteen minutes each, And so the
Speaker 5: host was kind enough to give me a twenty five
Speaker 5: minute slot at the end to talk about flock cameras
Speaker 5: in our city here, and it just so happened to
Speaker 5: be happening before they tried to vote on a real
Speaker 5: time intelligence center that centralized flock ax on and all
Speaker 5: of our drone data into one just like wall of surveillance.
Speaker 4: For the city.
Speaker 5: And so I did this talk and a City council
Speaker 5: member showed up our toolest City council member Kim Roni,
Speaker 5: she showed up and dearing the questions at the end,
Speaker 5: I was unsure because on our portal here it's the
Speaker 5: APD says, you know, we don't share our data with
Speaker 5: outside agencies. And Kim Ronnie came up and confirmed that
Speaker 5: something like four thousand agencies have access to our data. Yeah,
Speaker 5: we don't share them, but they can request and we
Speaker 5: just hand it over.
Speaker 4: So yeah, that's that's one thing that we learned at
Speaker 4: that time.
Speaker 5: So this this prompted a big push that was kind
Speaker 5: of happening for city council. So a lot of folks
Speaker 5: that came to that talk came to City council and
Speaker 5: I'm telling you, like, it's folks all over the board.
Speaker 5: I mean, this is Appalachia here, nobody, nobody wants to
Speaker 5: be surveilled in these hollers, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is one of those areas where we can
Speaker 3: build really broad coalitions, like of people who we might
Speaker 3: not agree on with on everything, like this is a
Speaker 3: threat to anyone who wants to do almost anything apart
Speaker 3: from them, I guess just go shopping.
Speaker 5: One interesting point is that over one hundred people showed
Speaker 5: up to city council.
Speaker 4: I'm you know, this is this is new to me.
Speaker 5: I'm working on getting out there a little bit, and
Speaker 5: I seded my time to another a speaker. But over
Speaker 5: one hundred people showed up and then they pulled it
Speaker 5: from the vote. They pulled it from the agenda, so
Speaker 5: lots of folks left, but then some folks stepped around
Speaker 5: for general comment and still got it out there. But
Speaker 5: you know, we'll see what happens down the line.
Speaker 4: They love to do that tactic.
Speaker 6: They did the same thing in Oakland when it was
Speaker 6: up for When it was up on the agenda, they said,
Speaker 6: a ton of people shout up to discuss it, and
Speaker 6: then they were like, oops, no, never mind, we're gonna
Speaker 6: pull that from the agenda today. Yeah, it's such a
Speaker 6: shitty tactic. But no, I mean at uff, we've seen
Speaker 6: We've seen similar things all over the country. You know,
Speaker 6: a ton of different cities have dropped their flock contracts
Speaker 6: recently because of community pressure. Right, this doesn't happen in
Speaker 6: a vacuum. Your city council doesn't care, Right.
Speaker 4: They they want to score easy political wins.
Speaker 6: Right, flock sells them this as an easy political win, right,
Speaker 6: this they can stop carjackings, right, they can, They can
Speaker 6: find car thefts, they can, they can you know, do
Speaker 6: all these things that are popular. Nobody likes being carjacked,
Speaker 6: nobody likes having their car stolen. Right, But when people
Speaker 6: show up to city council and push back and fight
Speaker 6: against this, it makes it not an easy political win. Yeah, right,
Speaker 6: it makes it. It makes it actually politically a bit
Speaker 6: poisonous to push these technologies.
Speaker 4: And it should be.
Speaker 6: Yeah, we shouldn't be surveilled constantly just because we happen
Speaker 6: to be outside.
Speaker 4: And like, look, I would.
Speaker 6: Love to not have a car, right, but this is America,
Speaker 6: Like everybody drives all the time.
Speaker 4: That is that is the society we live in. Unfortunately.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and you shouldn't be you shouldn't be subject to
Speaker 6: surveillance just for participating in society. And and like you said,
Speaker 6: I think we can build very broad coalitions around this, right,
Speaker 6: and we can start to like, hey, you know, remember
Speaker 6: how you know how mad you were about flock, Like yeah,
Speaker 6: wait till you find out about these other surveillance technologies, right, Like,
Speaker 6: now let's talk about campaign finance and how how all
Speaker 6: these companies you don't like are financing politicians, right, Like,
Speaker 6: you can you can pull people to the left, and
Speaker 6: this is a good way to start interacting with those people.
Speaker 4: Yeah, even people on the right, even sort of our
Speaker 4: more you know, the more libertarian folks, they hate them to.
Speaker 6: A lot of them have gone full Nazi, but the
Speaker 6: ones that haven't gone full Nazi, right, like, should really
Speaker 6: care about this stuff.
Speaker 4: Right, and you can you know, this can be away
Speaker 4: in with them as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like everyone we can bring with us, we need
Speaker 3: to earn everyone else fuck them, Yeah, absolutely, But I
Speaker 3: think this is a really good area to organize because
Speaker 3: all of us stand to lose something. It's so fucking
Speaker 3: creepy when you realize the extent to which like someone
Speaker 3: is watching or could be watching. There's a million reasons
Speaker 3: why people could be mad at that.
Speaker 5: There's plenty of room for abuse, you know there too,
Speaker 5: and it's it's been documented, you know, a recent video
Speaker 5: with Ben Jordans. I mean you know, oh yeah, if
Speaker 5: you give people this kind of surveillance access, it's impossible
Speaker 5: to vet people on this level, you know. And if
Speaker 5: if you give people who got you know, God likes
Speaker 5: surveillance power, what are they going to end up doing.
Speaker 5: And there's been cases where they've shown that police officerships
Speaker 5: surveiled their ex partners and then consequently pulled that person over,
Speaker 5: which is just insane.
Speaker 6: Yeah, no, they've used this to stop people to surveial
Speaker 6: current partners ex partners. Like the idea that police would
Speaker 6: never abuse their power is completely absurd and anybody who.
Speaker 4: Is arguing that is not arguing in good faith, I think.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And yet like it is another the Dems are like necessarily,
Speaker 3: I mean they're not on the side of goods, especially
Speaker 3: in this area. But like it is a big blue
Speaker 3: state thing, Like don't think that because you live in California,
Speaker 3: this isn't happening, right, It is very much happening.
Speaker 6: Yeah, right right, Yes, I mean to talk about that
Speaker 6: real quick, right, Like we have I am blanking on
Speaker 6: the bill number, but we have a lot in California
Speaker 6: that prevents California police agencies from sharing data from FLOCK
Speaker 6: with from LISO played regions in general, with outside agencies
Speaker 6: and with and it still happens all the time.
Speaker 4: Yeah, pollice just willfully.
Speaker 6: Ignore this law, you know, I mean, like we see
Speaker 6: immigration or ICE support as the reason they put down
Speaker 6: for searches, even though that's illegal. And when they don't
Speaker 6: do that, we know that ICE. You know people and
Speaker 6: ICE have buddies in Califorated law enforcement. They text them,
Speaker 6: they say, hey, run this plate for me. Law enforcement
Speaker 6: texts runs the plate, puts the reason down as investigation
Speaker 6: or crime or you know, some other such nonsense. Yeah,
Speaker 6: and then and then you know, sends the information back
Speaker 6: to ICE.
Speaker 5: Right, it's we call that the good old boys system
Speaker 5: down here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I've here too, And they've made a concerted
Speaker 3: effort to recruit people from local law enforcement all across
Speaker 3: the country. And this is part of why right like,
Speaker 3: it gives a work around SP fifty four.
Speaker 2: It's the California Values Act, which thank you, thank you,
Speaker 2: you are welcome. That is my shit.
Speaker 3: There has never been a prosecution under SP fifty four
Speaker 3: as far as I'm aware. This law exists largely to
Speaker 3: make the politicians who passed it feel good. There are
Speaker 3: some parts about transferring people who are in detention already,
Speaker 3: but like these, these systems give so many workarounds, right
Speaker 3: or like if the data belongs to the company and
Speaker 3: not to the city, or if it's stored on a
Speaker 3: service somewhere else. Like, all of these things provide potential workaround.
Speaker 3: So I don't think I guess that because your local
Speaker 3: city council member has tweeted about ice being bad, that
Speaker 3: that means that your flock cameras are not being used
Speaker 3: for that.
Speaker 2: It's very hard to ring fence this shit.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, if people want to learn more about this, if
Speaker 3: they want to maybe get a ray hunter, they want
Speaker 3: to get a wee spy or a mesh detect, don't
Speaker 3: explain mesh de tech for people really quickly.
Speaker 2: We didn't touch on that one.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Mesh detect is essentially it's the first advice that
Speaker 5: I made, and its primarily function was to detect drawing
Speaker 5: remote idea. The FAA requires remote ide which is any
Speaker 5: drone over I believe it's five hundred grams has to
Speaker 5: transmit pilot location and drone location in real time, either
Speaker 5: via ble or Wi Fi, which is pretty whack for like,
Speaker 5: you know, amateur flyers that just want to fly around.
Speaker 4: But that being said, it's a great ocent tool.
Speaker 5: So I started with that, and essentially what this does
Speaker 5: is mesh detect. It takes that detection and sends it
Speaker 5: over mesh tastic Laura Networks, So you can set up
Speaker 5: a for instance, set up a node way out somewhere
Speaker 5: and then you can have it sends you a message
Speaker 5: down the line when a drone comes by over mesh tastic,
Speaker 5: or you can set it up somewhere and have it
Speaker 5: say okay, there's a body cam down here, or whatever device,
Speaker 5: a Tesla, anything, you know.
Speaker 4: A lot of devices.
Speaker 5: Randomize their OUI these days, mostly phones, but there's plenty
Speaker 5: that don't easily detectable, So send it over mesh.
Speaker 4: It just gives you a network of detection essentially.
Speaker 3: So if people wanted to get a wee spy, to
Speaker 3: get a mesh de teg, how would they do?
Speaker 2: How they go about it? What are the ways they
Speaker 2: could get on make one?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I have a website called Colonel Panic dot tech
Speaker 5: and it's co l O N E L it's a
Speaker 5: little bit of a play on words. But these devices, like,
Speaker 5: if you really need one of these things, hit me up,
Speaker 5: we'll talk. But also it's just two wires, you know,
Speaker 5: like you can take my design and just reverse engineer
Speaker 5: it and copy it, and I put the wiring on
Speaker 5: my GitHub. Every bit of this is open source, so
Speaker 5: if you look up Colonel Panic GitHub. You can take
Speaker 5: this and make it on your own. I've made Home
Speaker 5: Assistant integration, so like if a OUI pops up around
Speaker 5: your house, you can just get an alert via your
Speaker 5: smart home.
Speaker 4: You could just go on there, you know, dev it out.
Speaker 5: If you see something that's that I screwed up, just
Speaker 5: let me know and I'll.
Speaker 4: Fix it or we'll we'll collab. So it's all open source. Yeah.
Speaker 2: How about Rayhunter?
Speaker 6: Yeah, so folks can go to Rayhunter dot eff dot
Speaker 6: org and that is our ray Hunter documentation. That's our
Speaker 6: the ray Hunter book essentially, and there you can find
Speaker 6: links on where to buy the hardware. We do not
Speaker 6: sell the hardware, but you can buy the hardware on
Speaker 6: eBay or Amazon. Sometimes the Orbit is what people use
Speaker 6: in the US primarily, and like South America, in Europe
Speaker 6: and parts of Africa, there's a tp link device that
Speaker 6: fits the bill better for those areas, and once you
Speaker 6: buy the hardware, you can install the software on it there.
Speaker 6: The hardware, unfortunately, is not open source because like I said.
Speaker 4: We didn't buil the hardware. We're just repurposing old hardware.
Speaker 6: Right when this when the project started, you could buy
Speaker 6: the hardware for like ten or twenty bucks. Now it's
Speaker 6: harder to find because of people have bought out a
Speaker 6: lot of the supply and other scalpers have wised up
Speaker 6: to the fact that people are trying to buy these.
Speaker 6: So unfortunately, we've created a whole like mini market. I'm
Speaker 6: a I'm a I'm a market maker. Goddamn it, We've
Speaker 6: got a hyper capitalists right here. But no, there's like
Speaker 6: there's a whole you know, midi market of people selling
Speaker 6: like already installed ray Hunters on eBay and stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 6: I don't recommend paying more than like forty or sixty
Speaker 6: bucks for the hardware, but then yeah, the software is free.
Speaker 6: It's free, it's open source. Right, it's on get ub
Speaker 6: you can go edit it right now. And you know,
Speaker 6: I know there's a lot of tech folks that listen
Speaker 6: to the show, and I just want to say, like,
Speaker 6: there's so many cool opportunities for counter surveillance, right, Like
Speaker 6: we keep kind of kind of mentioning that, like a
Speaker 6: lot of police hardware is made by this company Axon,
Speaker 6: and it has a very unique.
Speaker 4: Bluetooth signature that can be easily detected.
Speaker 6: Right, There's a lot of really interesting stuff that you
Speaker 6: can do with casual balance.
Speaker 4: And the chip that the OUI.
Speaker 6: Spy runs on, the ESP thirty two, is this really
Speaker 6: powerful little chip that only.
Speaker 4: Costs like six bucks if you buy them wholesale, and it's.
Speaker 6: Got Wi Fi blue shooth and a bunch of really
Speaker 6: cool capabilities you know, that you could use to make
Speaker 6: some really cool counter surveillance stuff. And so I really
Speaker 6: want to encourage the tech minug folks to like think
Speaker 6: about this. Come look at these projects, you know, come,
Speaker 6: you know, write your own code or make your own projects. Right,
Speaker 6: But like the quote from hackers, and as as your
Speaker 6: beautifully designed PC board says colonel, we can snoop onto
Speaker 6: them as they snoop onto us, right exactly, we need
Speaker 6: to spy back, right, and we need to raise the
Speaker 6: cost of them spying on us, right.
Speaker 4: And that's like, sorry, let mean that that brings me
Speaker 4: to another attemp to go off.
Speaker 6: What's really cool about these products is like you can
Speaker 6: build ryhunter for about twenty bucks, right you could. You
Speaker 6: could buy a beautiful PC board and the already assembled
Speaker 6: thing from Colonel for you know, a few dollars.
Speaker 4: I don't know the price off timets.
Speaker 6: I don't want to say, or you could build one
Speaker 6: for you know, under twenty bucks, right yep, And you
Speaker 6: are then for you know, twenty or forty bucks, you
Speaker 6: are making useless a surveillance tool and a surveillance network
Speaker 6: which costs hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.
Speaker 4: Right The economics here are on our.
Speaker 6: Side, yeah, right, Like this is just like any sort
Speaker 6: of asymmetrical warfare, right Like it costs millions and billions
Speaker 6: and really billions of dollars for the governments of the
Speaker 6: US to set up this surveillance economy, and we can
Speaker 6: defeat it for you know, twenty or forty bucks each, right, Like,
Speaker 6: we can do this a lot longer than they can.
Speaker 6: They will go broke before we do. And I think
Speaker 6: that that's really important, right, Like, like the asymmetry here
Speaker 6: and the economics here are actually on our side.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And it's also like it's cool to understand and make stuff.
Speaker 2: I am very good at fixing things that work on
Speaker 2: you know, like explosion happens and piston lifts, right like
Speaker 2: that that's my wheelhouse. I can fix my truck, I
Speaker 2: can fix my bicycle.
Speaker 6: I can fix are you saying you like ice internal
Speaker 6: combustion yea.
Speaker 2: In many ways, both ices will be the end of
Speaker 2: all of us. I enjoy to fix one.
Speaker 3: I like to look at it and go like, uh
Speaker 3: huh okay, this goes bang and then this goes up.
Speaker 2: And it's cool to learn this stuff.
Speaker 3: It's cool to learn a new skill, especially like once
Speaker 3: you get into your thirties, it's like it's good to
Speaker 3: learn shit. Yeah, and this is approachable, especially like the
Speaker 3: guides for these are very approachable, even if you're not
Speaker 3: like a tech punk. If this is your first time
Speaker 3: going on GitHub and that there are people you can
Speaker 3: reach out to, like real nice people. You won't get
Speaker 3: an AI tech support. Someone will help you understand this shit,
Speaker 3: and that is cool.
Speaker 5: There's a platform called the M five stack that makes
Speaker 5: it really easy, so like you get you get a
Speaker 5: jaw ESP thirty two, but M five stack makes it
Speaker 5: so that like you don't even have to do soldering,
Speaker 5: and they have drag and drop coating so you can
Speaker 5: just plug in sensors and things like you can make
Speaker 5: a drawing detector out of one of those and already
Speaker 5: has like a screen onboard, and so like it's super
Speaker 5: cheap and you could just deb it out really hard
Speaker 5: and just go for it.
Speaker 4: You know, it's it's easy for makers nowadays.
Speaker 5: Like in the fifties, right, you have to have an
Speaker 5: entire military and industry complex behind you to do this
Speaker 5: kind of stuff, right, or a corporation, And now you
Speaker 5: can just.
Speaker 4: Just make yourself a little thing in your house. It's
Speaker 4: really cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And like, you know, I was in Minnesota there
Speaker 3: at the time when lots of ice and CBP agents
Speaker 3: were too when they took a lot of people and
Speaker 3: killed two people. And like, one of the things that
Speaker 3: was beautiful about that really horrible time was that everyone
Speaker 3: was so locked in, like to include grandmothers, to include
Speaker 3: a dude with a sign that said, what would Ronald
Speaker 3: Reagan do? Like, no one wanted those people in their town, right,
Speaker 3: And that requires everyone to do what they do best.
Speaker 3: Not everyone can be out on a street corner whistle
Speaker 3: in a whistle or driving around.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: Some people that have had like a really powerful skill set.
Speaker 3: And if you are someone who can't be out, you
Speaker 3: can still help create these You can help code this stuff.
Speaker 3: Like it's beautiful when our resistance takes the best from
Speaker 3: all of us, and then we are all better because
Speaker 3: of that.
Speaker 4: Absolutely beautifully said.
Speaker 3: Anything you guys would like to plug before we go, websites,
Speaker 3: util aid projects, favorite snacks, whatever you want.
Speaker 5: Take a peek at d flock dot emmy if you
Speaker 5: want to. I have nothing to do with that project yet,
Speaker 5: but you know they map in the flock cams. You
Speaker 5: can use these detectors as supplementary devices to confirm or
Speaker 5: to find things you haven't seen. But other than that,
Speaker 5: just kernel, panic, dot tech, and definitely check out e FF.
Speaker 5: They get a lot of good stuff going on and
Speaker 5: they've been doing it since the early days.
Speaker 6: I guess i'll plug EFF's surveillance self defense guys specifically,
Speaker 6: that'ssd dot eff dot org.
Speaker 3: We got it.
Speaker 6: We're the only continuously updated and long longest maintained security guys.
Speaker 6: There's also the act of this checklist, which is a
Speaker 6: really great another really great resource. The Survellans off defense
Speaker 6: guides are almost like a textbook, like there's a lot
Speaker 6: of info there, but if you just need the like
Speaker 6: quick and dirty cliffs that it's version. The Activist checklist
Speaker 6: is really great for that, right and they're doing a
Speaker 6: good job keeping that up. A lot of respect to them,
Speaker 6: and then yeah, I checked out you know Rayhunter dot
Speaker 6: eff dot org for Ray Hunter stuff, Colonel Panic dot
Speaker 6: tech for his stuff to see plugged my stuff.
Speaker 4: I guess the.
Speaker 6: Other thing that I will plug is open Archive, which
Speaker 6: is a nonprofit that I'm on the board of. They're
Speaker 6: making an app called save which allows you to securely record,
Speaker 6: archive and verify videos of whatever you want, say, such
Speaker 6: as human rights abuses or you know, police atrocities or
Speaker 6: things of that nature. And so I recommend that project.
Speaker 4: Go check them out. They're really good folks.
Speaker 6: If you're doing a lot of cop watch type stuff,
Speaker 6: that's a good place to go.
Speaker 2: Fantastic nice Well, thank you very much for joining us.
Speaker 2: It was great.
Speaker 4: Thank you for having us. Thank you.
Speaker 1: It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 1: Coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
Speaker 1: now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly
Speaker 1: in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.