The 404 Media Podcast (Premium Feed)

And throughout this whole time, I'm expressing my concern. Do we work with ICE? Are we working with ICE? Are there plans to work with ICE? And throughout the whole time, the company line was, we don't work with ICE.

I didn't know that there were these mechanisms inside the company that were essentially fighting to get this pilot to happen.

Hello, and welcome to the four zero four Media Podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds both online and IRL. Four zero four Media is a journalist founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments, and they get early access to our interview series too, like this episode. Gain access to that content at 04:04 media dot c o.

Also, remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel where you can watch all of these episodes, including this one, of course. Subscribe at youtube.com/ at 404mediaco. This week, I'm speaking to Jonathan Pass. As you'll hear, he is a former Flock employee and now a candidate for Congress in Massachusetts 5th District. Obviously, interesting to hear from somebody who worked inside Flock.

There is this nationwide debate about these automatic license plate reader cameras, which comes in large part after our coverage about how ICE was having local cops perform lookups on their behalf, how a woman who self administered an abortion was tracked with the technology, but it's really become something else now with it being all over social media, mainstream media outlets doing articles on this constantly. There was just a CNN one recently, for example, this movement to destroy Flock cameras in lots of cases and these constant city council meetings where individual communities are deciding do we want these cameras in our neighborhood or not? Some say yes and some say no, but that is really developing across the entirety of The United States. I've spoken to a lot of current and former Flock employees during our reporting. I would point back to some of the earlier stuff we did about Nova, which is a Flock product which was going to bring together all sorts of different data sets, including hacked data from the dark web to let police jump from license plate reader data to who's actually driving the vehicle.

When we did that coverage and after internal pressure, Flock decided to not go ahead with the hacked data integration. But it's very unusual to have a former Flock employee speak on the record about their experience in the company. So you'll hear about that now and I'll throw to the conversation. I hope you enjoy it. Hey, it's me again.

Given that this episode was mostly about a company rather than a chat just between two people like these episodes often are, I did ping Flock for a statement. I'm just going to read some of that now, especially as Jonathan has a specific role in the company. I asked Flock, well, what do people in that role usually do? And here's part of the statement that Flock replied with. Flock's public affairs team works with city leaders, law enforcement agencies, and community stakeholders who are weighing whether or how to adopt public safety technology.

In practice, that means participating in public forums, appearing at hundreds of council meetings and town halls, answering questions directly from residents and sharing best practices around accountability, oversight and policy controls. We also engage directly with civil society, grassroots advocates, and other partners to elevate the voices of people impacted by crime. We are proud to participate in the public process and to advocate for technology that helps communities solve crimes, locate missing people, and improve public safety. Jonathan, thank you so much for coming on the show and for speaking with us. I really, really appreciate it.

It is an absolute honor to be here with you, Joseph.

So I think the best place to start quite simply is could you explain for people what your job at Flock was? And I mean, literally the title and maybe how that title changed, but then also just that role specifically, what were you literally doing at Flock like day to day?

Yeah. So I was a government affairs manager at Flock. So at the time, I helped represent the company to municipalities, to local officials, and, you know, other conferences where you're basically meeting with potential customers and decision makers. So we were very much in the mix of everything between what's cutting edge in terms of technology, but what's also going on in terms of the market and what's going on in terms of regulatory affairs, updates, lawsuits, everything. So we were very much at the forefront of everything happening at Flock.

And my job was to make sure that we were not only defending the company, but also representing the product as best as possible and making sure that we can get approved at council. If I had to, you know, summarize it, I would represent the company during these public hearings, during deliberations from local elected boards.

What does the process of trying to get Flock sold to a city and installed look like? Is it Flock maybe approaches the city and says, hey, we have this product that we think would be really useful, then you explain the use cases and then the process goes on and on. Like, what does the process of Flock pitching its products to a city than a city actually getting the product? What does that look like?

Yeah. So there's a sales team, right? And their job is to go out there and, you know, they're they're going after smaller accounts, bigger accounts, and what that means is smaller cities to bigger cities. You know, there's a difference between some town in Ohio and the city of San Francisco. Right?

And these could be, you know, from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars of product being sold. And so, part of what it looked like was police departments approaching us because police departments are honestly the best people to sell the product. You know, one one police department says, hey. I have this new gadget, and I would love for you to be a part of it so we can better go after criminals together. There's a lot of socialization that happens across law enforcement agencies.

So many times our salespeople would already be in touch with someone. Sometimes they would go out into the field and pitch people, but a lot of times businesses would come to us, and business would come to us as local police departments who want in.

So how did you get involved in the first place? How did you sort of get that role to begin?

It's really ironic because I I have more of a career in social justice work from being like an activist, a union organizer, a local elected official in my city in Waltham, Massachusetts. I was the second youngest ever to get elected. So I started getting really involved with municipal broadband, and I really was thinking at the time it was this techno optimism that maybe technology can be the answer to some of these existential crises of our time. It doesn't just have to be this bad thing. So I I kind of came out of an election where I was running for for mayor at the time.

I was a two time elected city councilor. We didn't quite win the mayor oath run. We got very close, but, I came out of that, and I remember going to this conference in Atlanta. And my friend at the time who was also a city councilor, it was the National League of Cities. And it's not my first time as an elected official to go to these conferences where you go network and meet with people, but that's basically where I was kind of pitched the opportunity to to join the company.

And I wanna speak to this more later, but, you know, it was during this moment that, I was like, oh, they sell cameras. And I I just remember thinking like, oh, like, they're helping find missing people.

Right.

You know? That to me was like, that makes sense. Like, we're using the same cameras in the highways that I'm used to paying tolls to help find missing people and like we are like basically hand in hand partners with the people with the milk carton, you know, like missing person. Right.

Right. Right.

You know? So to me, it was this kind of naivete, you know, to think that this wasn't like part of a broader surveillance apparatus. So when I joined the company, I came in with this optimism that, you know, this was a different company. This wasn't like Palantir. Right?

Like, this was like a very specific company that had a a deep respect for civil rights and liberties and that, you know, we wanted to make sure that we were sensitive and catering to the values of whatever municipality we were working with, whatever police department, whatever their policy was. So there was always this this thing, in my view, at least really throughout my career there, that we were honoring and respecting the wishes of the people. You know? And then on top of that, we were better than the competition. Right?

Because there were other competitors like Axon and Recor and all these other in the industry that didn't quite have our ethical standards in a tech industry that is only growing. So that was kind of like the the blinders that I had on. And, you know, when you're in the company like this one and it's you know, everyone's working remotely, you're not exactly able to see some of the fires being put out. You know? Part of my job was putting out fires, but it was in this very public domain arena.

You know? And and I wasn't privy to how our technology was doing damage and how it was being abused and all these other things. I was just aware about concerns that the communities had, that legislators had, and my job was to make sure that we assuaged those concerns and that we were able, the end of the day, be part of some city budget and be part of the operational budget. So then, you know, it's just a reoccurring expense and we're part of the everyday practice of law enforcement at the local level.

When you first joined the company, as you say, where the company presents itself as finding missing people in this kind of narrow technology, When you first joined Flock then, what's it like working at the company? What's the culture?

It's a very fast paced environment. It's startup culture. You're moving fast. Things are moving fast. Everyone's out to, not everyone, but most people are trying to make a name for themselves.

People are clearly making a lot of money. So it's pretty cutthroat across departments. And you're working with brilliant people. Right? And sometimes you're able to solve real issues.

We were in the news constantly helping solve crime. You know? So there's this overemphasis of look at the remarkable work that we're doing, and we would dramatize these things. It's a missing person. It was someone who was kidnapped.

Even t Payne, you know, had his car, I think swiped at some point, and a camera helped track that down.

Bountyman facing charges accused of rear ending artist t Payne not far from his Roswell home. Roswell police say that they use an eyewitness as well as Flock cameras to quickly track down this driver.

So T Pain was like, you know, singing our praises. You know? And it's it's that kind of environment where everyone's kind of sipping sipping the Kool Aid, you know, because the deal is so good. People are getting paid probably a lot more in an economy even at that time that isn't very friendly to young people, right, that isn't very inclusive of people of color like myself and some of the other people that were in the company. So, you know, there's this real entrepreneurial spirit and there's also this real like, we are at the next Microsoft.

We are at the next Facebook. You know, like we are at the forefront of this amazing thing and we're about to become the dominant name in this industry.

Yeah, and you know, obviously I've spoken to many current and former Flock employees and one thing that stood out to me is that, you know, a lot of people really enjoy the engineering environment there. They feel that just on a purely sort of personal selfish motivation, there's interesting computational problems where these engineers have to work on that sort of thing, and then you combine that with, you know, it feels like we're working towards a very, you know, good mission and we are helping people and that sort of thing. You can see why people would like to work somewhere like this. And as you say, the pay is presumably much better than some other places as well. And then to move to the work you were doing a bit more specifically, you were mentioning that you were putting out these fires publicly.

I mean, can you give us some examples? Like, what do you mean by that?

Yeah. I mean, I remember there was this city. I I would get phoned out to different cities. I would get phoned out to different towns, and sometimes I was the, you know, in case of emergency button. So we had a deal, a multimillion dollar deal in the city in Florida.

And because the sheriff was presenting it, the county board wouldn't question it a lot. But in case they had questions, that was my role to jump in. And if there were, like, these, civil rights questions, these privacy questions, legal questions, it was my role to jump in there and help, you know, calm those concerns and make sure that we we we we had a a win. You know, I I remember going to a board where the people of color in the board were the ones the legislative the city councilors in that board were the ones raising the alarm saying, hey. These cameras are gonna be installed in predominantly communities of color.

You know? How are you gonna guarantee me that this isn't gonna further criminalize our communities? Right? So it was part of my job to go there and say, hey. You know, we we we map these cameras out very thoughtfully.

We go where we think that there's likely to be the entry points and exit points of of a community. We go where there's a lot of traffic, but then at the same time, you know, we can we can respect your wishes and have a really strong policy. So there was this kind of deliberative approach where I would go to these meetings, and if it was a legislator, we would have meetings with them sometimes in advance, sometimes in the public realm. Right? Or if it was the town hall and there was community pushback, in that very that very example that I'm talking about, there was a lot of community pushback.

And I remember there was a vigil outside related to something completely else, and I was just taken aback. Like, these people outside that I very much respect and probably resonate with probably hate what I'm representing.

Right.

And I and I stood out there with them in this vigil. And I was there with them in this vigil, and it was really related to something else, but it was it was incredible to think that my job is to basically make sure that this resistance doesn't become a vote reflected in the vote of the council. Right? So it's kind of like this dismantling of, you know, the public input. Yeah.

And that's that's kind of what started unraveling for me very quickly, this facade that we were helping these democratically elected boards represent, know, number one, take care of their people. Right? This is the the number one marketing tool for Flock is that this is somehow gonna improve public safety. But number two, it's that we are partners. We will go to the town hall and present this product.

We will go there and meet with the people and address concerns. And we'll make sure that your policies reflect your community's wishes. But what became clear to me over time is that real decision making isn't happening in the public process. The real decision making is happening between the company and some police department, and they're just trying to get to a win. They're trying to get to a check mark on the on the budget, and no matter what is said, they just want cameras out there.

Right? For one reason or another, the their mode of operation is, by any means necessary, we're gonna get cameras out there. And if it's working with the mayor or putting pressure differently and working around different constituencies that will put pressure on the mayor or the city council, we are there to, you know, really enforce the will of Flock. We're we're there to pay lip service, but we're really there to do the will of Flock. These companies are a workaround.

If it was just a public process, right, where these where license plate readers are controlled by the public and they're regulated in the public domain and there's actual laws involved in how we regulate them, right, there would be a lot more scrutiny, and there would be a lot more legal scrutiny to justify. But because it's a public private partnership, you know, these police departments have a workaround, not just state law, but also municipal law, but also, like, just basic public scrutiny. So, I mean, this is just so business as usual. It's so business as usual, right, is to say these police departments, these law enforcement agencies are their own basic lobby. Right.

They they are their own political force. They're not just public sector employees. They are their own political force.

With a lot of leverage, a lot of power.

And they they know they know how to implement their leverage. They have relationships with elected officials. And this is nothing new to me. I was a city councilor at the time. But what really disturbed me was my own city.

What happened in my own city? Right? So I live in Waltham, Massachusetts. Towns around in Massachusetts, I was aware, were getting cameras. When I was working at Flock, had no idea my own police department was having talks with Flock.

And what's ironic is that our police department knew there would be public scrutiny around this. There there would be a public outcry. So you know what they did? They have a forfeiture fund, and they basically went straight to the mayor and they said, we wanna buy these cameras. And they basically bought them directly through the mayor and used these these public forfeiture funds which are only controlled by the police department.

So they completely bypassed the city council.

Yeah. No need for a vote. No need for it to be in a city budget, anything like that. It's just purely a police department purchase through the mayor to Flock. Yeah.

Yeah. That was to me at the time, I was I already left the company. But to me, it was kind of like this, like, you think you're onto something, and then I was like, I figured it out. And then it was like just this overdetermination of what I figured out, which was they completely worked around the public process, public scrutiny, democratic processes, and they're like, here are Flock cameras. 16 cameras just appeared overnight.

No policy in place. No ordinances in place. Just people getting surveilled.

No discussion. Yeah.

Yeah. There was public outcry as soon as those cameras were in place. So then the city council went back and asked them, you know, how did you procure these? How did this happen? What's what happened?

And he he got he got corrected. I'm not gonna say he lied. He was basically forced to backtrack and say because he was, like, acting as if he didn't know, and then he said, no. No. We went through the normal process.

And then he's and then the chairman of the committee had to tell him, you did not come to my committee. So he said, oh, no. We used our forfeiture fund. So now there's been a whole process to roll these back and push against these contracts. This very contract that's here, people wanna take down these cameras.

But, again, what's remarkable is that we needed to organize. I organized with city councilor at large to have a town hall to basically really get everyone on the same page to say, you know, this company is a leaky boat. The data is not well secured. And then on top of that, they just completely bypassed a democratic process, public procurement process, and they just installed cameras. So, you know, it it it's a slap in the face to I think a lot of the people.

So briefly go back to your role in putting out fires. When you go to one of these places, and as you say, you're almost like the break glass emergency button, in your role doing that, is your job to tell a city council the truth or is your job to calm them down? Because they are not necessarily one of the same thing, you know, as we've seen, I think the ACLU did the blog post where they listed out some of the examples where people fulfilling similar roles from Flock would, I don't I'm not sure if the ACLU's would lie, like the information was incorrect, you know, and they that's the information that was provided. So like, was your job to tell the truth or was it to basically just calm the city council down?

You know, at the time you think you're giving them the best information possible and that it boils down to maybe ideological differences with the ACLU. I mean, that I I just remember in my training and then over and over again, it's like, in this team, we would say, we're not really in opposition with the ACLU. We actually agree with the ACLU that these things should be regulated and that there should be transparency, there should be robust policies to keep a check on these things, and there should be data storage limits. You know, we agree with those. We may disagree on the store the amount of storage.

You know, we think thirty days is a good amount of time. It makes me uncomfortable to say we.

Sure, but is it a force of habit?

It's a force of habit and Yeah. Again, I'm just I'm here in the spirit of being vulnerable, but also I think in the spirit of opposing this, and I'm part of this broader movement against it. But I'm just again, just gonna say this was a different time.

You were accounting it. People people understand why you're saying we. Yeah. It makes sense.

I'm cringing inside. But it was this understanding that we weren't the bad guys. The bad guys were the people in the streets committing crime. And then the bad guys or like the lesser good guys were our competition. Because even there's competitors out there who do sell the data.

Right? So that was the big talking point for us was and I had all these talking points in my mind. I knew how to rebut just about everything that you can throw at me. And, you know, one of the major selling points was no facial recognition, and then the data is yours. The data is yours.

Like, why are you so worried? Right? The data is yours. You can do as you please. Contractually, it's yours.

Right? And I'm like, there's another vendor out there who will sell your data.

And that was usually effective, those those talking points.

Yeah. And I mean, there was this whole horseshoe theory thing, and it's not like a unique thing to Flock. It's just there's this theory that, you know, the extreme left and extreme right eventually, you know, agree on something, and it's like everyone has a libertarian sensitivity because no one wants to be supporting big brother. You know? So we were always addressing these big brother concerns.

And then whenever there was these civil rights concerns, that's when the job got harder. Right? That's when you needed to really think through what are the demographic concerns. So, you know, if it wasn't privacy concerns on the right, it was civil rights concerns on the left. But the reality is Flock does a phenomenal job with their propaganda system.

Right? It's it's lying by omission. It's it's lying by not telling you the whole truth. It's lying by not telling you the weaknesses within the system that they've created that enables data sharing with with ICE, that enables police officers to go track down their ex girlfriends, that enables, you know, people to go after law enforcement agencies to go after women who are seeking to have abortion access. So Flock, that level of omission, in my view, is perpetuating a propaganda model and not actually informing people.

Right? And it's it's it's business as usual. But people in the company are aware of these flaws, you know, and there's there's brilliant people in that company who also don't agree with the future of that company. Yeah. And they're still there.

And then many many of us left, you know. But even when there were these bigger debates happening, there were people like myself pushing back against Flock having any partnership with the feds. And then we were right because they eventually went on to work, have a pilot with the Department of Homeland Security. And then, you know, there were many concerns around having these broader contracts that were, by design, not putting the real limits that there should be on the data and the data sharing. The reality now, and again, I'm just gonna remind people, it wasn't as popular to oppose Flock.

Like, Flock was under the radar. I mean, four zero four Media, you know, has been, you know, at the cutting edge, you guys have always been, you know, way ahead of the curve, but it's always this, critical mass that needs to bring up a broader movement. Right? So, you know, if history will absolve me, it's because we we weren't aware of how deeply entrenched this broader surveillance system was. And now it's becoming more and more clear as we have a fascist administration, like kidnapping people in broad daylight.

Right? Like literally trampling over the constitution. So these were concerns, and I remember my colleague who wrote a whole thing and got laughed at.

What what was the thing about about these concerns about it being in the second Trump administration, that sort of thing?

Yeah. I mean, it's 2025, and we know Trump really loves to violate human rights. Right? We know that there's this concerted agenda to go after immigrants, to go after women seeking abortions, that there's a concerted effort to federalize a lot of local law enforcement, right, to have deeper partnerships within between the feds and local police departments that wanna pretend they're feds. You know?

And and I remember my colleague getting laughed at, you know, and he said, hey. There's a broader you know? And I knew he was gonna get laughed at, but I you know, you still try. And at the time, it's like me and him were part of different sides ideologically, but we understood a company like this one is very dangerous when you don't have a constitution that's updated for the Internet. You know?

So we just we just understood that the Fourth Amendment had no teeth. We understood that. And we understood that there's no parameters behind this in a company that is this self delusional, right, is very dangerous when you have a fascist administration like Trump. He and I eventually left, but he did his best to try to steer the ship, I was just making an exit plan.

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, just briefly on even people inside the company not knowing, I remember when we obviously covered the local police were doing lookups in the nationwide Flock system on behalf of immigration customs enforcement or HSI as well and searches all related to immigration, that sort of thing. We of course get comment from Flock various times and they do acknowledge that that was happening, but they say very strongly, no, we do not have a contract with federal immigration authorities. Seems there was some sort of miscommunication, I remember, at the time because local media then found in the network audits themselves and Flock had to come out and say, yes, actually, we are having a pilot program with federal authorities. So as you say, even employees inside the company were like siloed off from that.

And I'm just wondering, was that sort of a culture thing that shifted? It seems like at the start, Flock is like quite open and and people are, I don't know, maybe debating fairly openly internally. And now you're siloing off like a very important piece of information. Was that a shift or was it always like that?

It's hard to say because looking back now, I think it was just very clear that there was an insider circle that was making all these decisions and everyone was there as decoration. You know? And that's easier for me to say now that I'm the outside. But when you're inside, you think you're you know, you actually have real say and you think that it's like an open door policy. Everyone can talk to anyone type of thing.

Reality is that it's a business, and they want those federal contracts. Right? They have competition. I don't wanna get to too many specifics, but, you know, there are other competitors. And that's part of what I also wanna impart on people here is that it's not just Flock.

Flock has other serious competitors, and they they are a company like any other that had to take on an enormous amount of investments that they have to pay back, and it's it's capitalism as usual. They have to take over the market to justify the amount of money it took them to become to get at that level. Right? Like, they have an investment portfolio like that. That's like a real thing.

And I mean, they even acquired drones. So you you all of a sudden are increasing your overhead, and your margins get very thin. Right? Like, it's it's this thing about companies when you grow very big, you start absorbing market share and all that. You have to be competitive.

So enough so that I felt like I was lied to for many months. And I and I I really just wanna share this part of the story. In 2025, I was supposed to run for city council in my city in Walton. I was supposed to run again. And then I started abducting people in broad daylight.

And my city went viral, like just the level of violence that was involved in some of these abductions in broad daylight. So I helped start a rapid response hotline in in Massachusetts called Luce, and I also started a a rapid response system in my neighborhood. And throughout the better part of that year, I chased ICE agents. I saw people get kidnapped. I saw families be destroyed because I lived it myself.

I'm the son of immigrants. It it's no secret. My my my dad was deported when I was 14 years old. I've I've seen the violence that happens with the state. To me, I said over my dead body, we're gonna let this happen.

So we not only responded to ICE activity, we raised money for families while I'm working for Flock.

Mhmm.

And throughout this whole time, I'm expressing my concern within the company. Do not work with ICE. Do we work with ICE? Are we working with ICE? Are there plans to work with ICE?

Right? And throughout the whole time, the company line was, we don't work with with ICE. If it's if someone wants to use the technology to partner, you know, it's a $2.87 g agreement, they can do that, and they can buy the technology. It's called all of Florida, by the way.

Right.

You know? That was what I was sold and lied to about. You know, I didn't know that there were these mechanisms inside the company that were essentially fighting to get this pilot to happen.

How did you feel then when you were doing all this work on the streets and you're asking these questions internally and then you do find out that, yes, local police are doing local lookups for ICE and they do have this pilot program. How did you feel when those two things collided mentally?

That's when I knew I needed to make an exit. Yeah. You know, and and I'm just gonna say this out loud, you know, I I come from very modest means. I'm, again, the son of immigrants. I'm the first in my family to go to college.

It was a miracle for me to go to college. I actually graduated with Joe Biden's granddaughter and Trump's youngest daughter, if you can believe it. It was a crazy commencement.

That's a pretty that's a pretty interesting combination. Yeah.

I'm an outlier. You know, I I I needed a job at the time. And when I knew that this job was really toxic and against my values, I needed to make an exit plan. But at the time, you know, I was deeply aware and asking questions and critical. You know, I wasn't self deluded, but I was kind of living like a Hannah Montana thing where, like, I'm I'm doing this in the daylight and I'm like a vigilante in the nighttime.

You know? Like, I'm you know? And and that was that was really painful. And that aged me, is to become fully aware that there is a massive surveillance apparatus that's only growing to do an ethnic cleansing in this country, you know, to go after immigrants, to completely destroy due process, to to like, I've seen literally ICE agents racially profile people and I've defended mothers who were supposed to get picked up and they were getting harassed. Right?

And then I went to go do a meeting to sell our product in a city council meeting. Yeah. Could you imagine?

Yeah. It's a lot of cognitive dissonance. I I can absolutely imagine. So that happens. You leave, and frankly, when we were covering the the ICE stuff, primarily Flock, but then also, you know, of course, we will reveal ICE as the facial recognition mobile fortify and using sources inside ICE and DHS and all of that sort of stuff.

I kind of thought the Flock conversation, that was maybe going to be the peak of it, but I was very, very wrong because now the conversation around Flock is bigger than ever. It is a nationwide conversation every single day, new outlets are publishing stuff, activists find new information, concerned residents are turning up to city council meetings essentially every single day. It's now become this really, really huge thing where individual communities are deciding, do we want these cameras in our local neighborhoods or not? And some do vote to do that, of course, taking into account everything you said with the lobbying efforts and sometimes just going around city councils. Other times they say, no, we don't want these, and they get them out.

What do you think about when you look at the nationwide debate today, which is the most fierce it's ever been? Like, what do you think when you see that nationwide debate going on at the moment?

Organizing works. Organizing works and it's the only thing that's ever changed history. It's the only way that people have overcome massive odds that we've we've, you know, taken down tyrants. Organizing is the the key to success here, and I'm standing on your shoulders, Joseph, because people that were honest and asking these critical questions went on from asking critical questions and having an understanding to doing something with that. Right?

Enough that it became a movement and there's a critical mass now to the point where, what, like the doorbell door ring camera thing, like

The ring partnership. Yeah.

That got completely destroyed after because of the outcry of it. Right? Like, that doesn't happen overnight. That is consciousness raising and people doing something with that consciousness. Enough that there's a bunch of vigilantes, people going out and taking down these cameras and perfecting that.

And I I think what we have to appreciate and understand is that the fight's not over and that there there needs to be broader systemic change. So I love the energy. I'm I'm here for all of that. You know? And, again, I will remind people, it wasn't always popular to hate on flock.

Right? The flock aganda was actually the status quo where you had images of babies that were that were rescued because, you know, someone was abducting someone else's child. Right? Like, that was the status quo was people going after crime. They were crime solvers.

But now there's a movement to fight back to restore the Fourth Amendment. You know? And and I think that everything is leading to this systemic analysis and this need for, like, systemic transformation where we do need to restore the Fourth Amendment. And we I don't think it's enough to just say, hey, we need a federal law that anytime you want to use license plate reader data, you need to get a a warrant. Right?

Like, we need to restore the rights of privacy in a digital world. Right? Does that look like a digital bill of rights? I hope so. Right?

Does that mean ethical use of AI and algorithms? Right? Like a people's AI, right, that brings takes back our intellectual property and takes it away from the hands of what these six individuals that completely control the AI sector that's propping up our economy. So I just I encourage people, keep fighting. Keep fighting.

Keep taking these cameras down, in your city budgets in your city's budgets. But we need to talk about the federal picture, and we need to make sure that we are addressing the broader surveillance apparatus. Right? Because it's not just Flock. The the thing about Flock that's very healing is that it's a physical thing looking at you.

Right? You're driving. You see it.

It's very easy to grasp. Yeah.

This phone of yours is doing something similar. And that was always a talking point of ours was like, well, your phone's already tracking you. So what's the difference? You know? And then people were like, woah.

And it's like, you want to be able to find someone who jacks someone's car? Like, do you wanna be able to solve crime in your cities? A murder? And then people are like, yeah. Well, that's my job, and I need to get reelected.

So they're like, okay. I will support this technology. Right? But I I think it's just important that we talk about the broader federal picture and we restore our constitutional rights to the Fourth Amendment, and also we need to have rights when it comes to this data because it's all connected. Flock cameras are basically cameras with algorithms and AI that are super powered.

Right? Like that's basically what's happening is super powered cameras. Twist it whatever way you want, I think we need to protect ourselves from those things.

Yeah. That makes sense. I mean, the the recent supreme court ruling, which I covered briefly from a perspective of smartphone location data, also has ramifications for Flock cameras, it has ramifications for all sorts of other surveillance technology. We're yet to see sort of the fallout from that recent ruling, but maybe in the coming months and years, we'll see that. Obviously, this stuff takes some time.

For my last question, I'm gonna ask you to speculate a little bit. So I appreciate this is gonna be your own opinion and like not direct knowledge because of course you've left the company, but like what do you think is happening inside Flock right now? As in, do you think this is like a crisis for the company, this nationwide debate? Is it existential for Flock? And again, I know you're outside, but as someone who was previously inside the company, like is this a crisis to Flock, everything, this whole nationwide discussion?

I wanna try not to enjoy the answer to this question. But they're doing damage control. You know? Their CEO who called basic, you know, public participation, basic democratic participation against their technology, he called it terrorism. You know?

And now he's backtracking that. Right? They're a company that's very attuned to where the wind is blowing. They had talking points after the killing of George Floyd. Right?

And they they had talking points when Trump got elected. It's a very adaptive company, as many tech companies are. So we should not be naive to the fact that they are going to evolve their flock of ganda. They're they're going to evolve their reach. They're gonna find ways to stay competitive in a market, and we should not be naive.

They're not going to change their mission. Their very purpose is a workaround basic public scrutiny. They're a very sophisticated company and they exist to help surveil people. And that's what they're great at doing. So we we should you know, the the CEO again flip flopped, you know, saying calling people terrorists and then taking that back.

They they're seeing people take down their their their poles, and these are poles that can actually withstand extreme weather. So it's really impressive to see the level of commitment that people have in taking them down. I I never thought it would be perfected as a science, to be honest. What I'm saying is this, we need to make sure that companies that are driven by profit to surveil people are obsolete. If the best that your state can do is pass some kind of, like, data protection law, then do it.

But federally speaking, we need to have our eyes on the prize and make sure that we restore the Fourth Amendment and that there needs to be a a real people's led movement to have our right to privacy, our right to our bodies, our right to our movement around in our community, our right to our data, our right to our intellectual property via AI, and be very clear about, you know, our right to freedom and not be surveilled and not be controlled in a police state. I just wanna, you know, make one quick point that I think is also just not being mentioned enough is that companies like Flock really propagandize street crime. You know, they're they're they're really good at making you see that there's criminals out there and violent violent crime, property crime. They're really going after poor people, working people. And, is there violence?

Sure. But as we found out, there's also crime in the sweets. It's not just crimes in the streets. Right? Like, have a whole Epstein class of people that we're not holding accountable, and we need to hold accountable these billionaires, these warmongers, these fascists.

This country is running amok, and there's a lot of corporate crime that's going under investigated, under, you know, underreported. So, you know, this is a time for, you know, for this movement against Flock, we need to be we need to have some degree of class conscious and say, we need to have each other's backs and not talk about the good criminal versus the bad criminal. Like, we need to go after the very rich and powerful who are making our lives difficult. Right? Because we know that crime just doesn't happen because people are bad.

Right? And that's literally the the the language that police departments use all the time. A bad guy, we're going after a bad guy and you wanna it it it is phenomenal and it is perfected propaganda that they have. Right? So we need to be able to have a better understanding of how to treat people and treat our neighbors because not everything needs to be criminalized.

Right? So I just wanna make this point very clear is that we need to have working class solidarity and go after these rich and powerful people. And then if we're gonna talk about public safety seriously, we need to talk about having quality housing, education, universal health care, accessible and affordable child care. Right? Like, you wanna prevent crime, give people a chance.

Yeah.

Right? Give people a chance at life, right, rather than going after the people who are most vulnerable and left behind. So I just wanna be that's the hypocrisy and contradiction that I think that we need to really appreciate is that there is a lot of corporate crime that's going underreported. If you really are serious about that, we need to go after those people who are committing social violence, you know, in a whole host of ways. So I I think that's kind of under theorized, I think, in this conversation, but we should we should delve deeper.

Yeah. Absolutely. Well, I think that's a good place to leave it. Jonathan, thank you so much for doing this. I really, really appreciated and enjoyed this conversation.

So thank you so so much for joining us.

Thank you so much for having me.

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