The 404 Media Podcast (Premium Feed)

It was so painful to get those emails. Calling the event rumors and speculation when a crime occurred was almost worse than the crime itself.

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 family 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. Gain access to that content at 404media.co.

I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are the other four zero four Media cofounders, the first being Sam Cole

Hello.

Emmanuel Mayberg Hello. And Jason Kebler.

Hello. Hello. Let's let's mention yeah. If you are in Los Angeles, we are doing a an event at the LA Public Library, like the Central 1, on Sunday, May 31. I guess the best way to learn about it would be we'll, like, include a link in the show notes.

But Sam, and I, as well as our friends, Dexter Thomas and Geeta Jackson will be talking about AI and AI slop and how it is changing the internet and all that sort of thing. So it's Sunday afternoon. Please come out if you can. Link is in the show notes.

Yes. Get the get the details there. Alright. With that, we'll get to this week's stories. The first one is one that Sam wrote that she's been working on for a long time and it really paid off.

It's a really, really deeply reported piece here. The headline is how deepfakes tore a high school apart. I'm actually going to add a question to this. Sam, before we get into sort of the story itself and the specifics and like what happened here, just broadly, like what do you think about Deepfakes in schools at the moment and sort of the value of this sort of story? Because I feel like we hear that Deepfakes are all over schools.

Boys are using it against girls non consensually, all of that. What was the idea here to be to like focus in on a specific like example and case or like what was the idea here?

Yeah. I mean, I so, yeah, like you said, schools dealing with deepfakes is not a new topic. Four four has written about this quite a bit. We've been covering this as it comes up for the past several years. Emmanuel Jason wrote a really good story based on police reports in 2024.

So that's two years ago now about how a school failed to report deepfake harassment among their their students and how the police just kind of also bungled it, And everyone was kind of like, who dropped the ball and where. And since then, it's been something that it's it's just in the news so much lately. I think that people start to kind of stop paying attention to it. It's like, oh, another school is dealing with Deepfakes. Another school is dealing with, like, synthetic, nudes and these Nudify apps that we hear about all the time.

So I think there's value in just taking a beat and breaking down what is actually happening when this happens. It's not even that this particular school was an extraordinary case or that it was, like, really uniquely fumbling the situation because these schools are failing students and the police are failing students in the same way over and over and over. It's a pattern. So I think there is value in just breaking down where exactly what points in this kind of system fail, where they actually are lacking in good response and, you know, breaking down actually, like, you know, at what point were the images talked about? At what point were they reaching the victims?

What point were the was the school notified? Was the police notified? I think it's really helpful. And I think that's the only way that you can actually prevent something like this happening again is learning from the ways that other schools have responded and, how parents respond, how police respond. So that was the point of the story is just kind of getting in, basically from the moment where it started.

So I I think I reached out to one of the parents from like a Facebook thread a couple months ago and was like, you know, hey. I saw that this is something that you guys are dealing with in real time. It's not resolved. It's something that is actually still being, like, litigated amongst you, debated about what's what the response is. So, I reached out directly to one of parents.

Was like, hey. Do you wanna talk about what is actually happening and then kind of follow through as this goes on? So that's where that's where the story took us. And I would say it's still not totally resolved. It's it's still very much in progress, but it's the sort of thing that takes takes a long time to follow.

Yeah, exactly. And that is part of the story, the amount of time that is sort of elongated here. So let's start with the creation of the images themselves. What exactly happened? How many people impacted?

Like, right in the beginning, what is literally like the starting moment of this, you know, of these Deepfakes taking over the school?

Yeah. So it was the first week of December. And among the freshmen at Radnor High School, which is in Pennsylvania. It's one of the top schools in the state. It's on the main line, which is like a very, affluent area.

I just kinda paint a picture of of the the student body and what we're dealing with here. It's a well resourced school. It's, I would say, upper middle class. It's a good school. But in early December, these kids started talking amongst themselves on Snapchat, which has disappearing messages and elsewhere, talking about how one of the boys, one of the the boys in the high school had made images of his classmates.

And they were discussing the fact that he his parents caught him, and he had to delete the app. And they were talking about how he had spent, you know, $250 on this app and on making these images and how he was caught and his friends were like, you know, you're dead. Like, your your parents are gonna kill you if they find out what they what you were making with that thing. And so from there, the next morning, the girls who were in the images had to go to school and face other kids talking about them. Everyone had been talking all night about how these images were going around.

Like, they were they were saying, you know, we've seen this. We've seen that. It was really unclear about what was actually being spread and what was actually just kids talking. But the girls were dealing with, you know, high school stuff. It's like the kids were the boys were high fiving each other.

They were, like, you know, harassing them the next morning after a night of just, like, being bullied over these images. And they were really upset. They were texting their parents. I talked to one of the parents extensively about this, and she was saying, you know, they that her daughter was just like, this isn't okay. The kids are defending their friends.

They're, you know, lying about what's happening. So that was kind of what they walked into the next day. And I don't know. I mean, I like, I remember high school, that's a nightmare.

High school is a nightmare without AI enabled apps that can instantly nudify you or whatever. And now you have all of that and this. And just to clarify, what what was the app capable of exactly? Is it one of like these undressing apps? Like, is it?

Yeah. So I'm told and again, I don't have, you know, definitive proof of this, but I'm told by the parents and by, you know, people who are familiar that the app was called Movely, which, we know what Movely can do because Uh-huh. The tech transparency project did a big report about Nudify apps recently that I wrote about, last month, where Movely was one of them. And Movely is one of those, like, those apps that on the face of it looks like, you know, put your face in, Spider Man or like in a cat picture. You know, it's like it's or even like put yourself on the beach, stuff like that.

But then once you pay up for the subscription, you can put someone's face into whatever you want. And it's, you know, it's like sexy undressing videos and, you know, this is how they're like marketing the the app to paid users. So I as I understand it, the images were, you know, like, sec highly sexualized images of minors, of girls, young girls, and they were all between, I think, 14 and 15, so freshman girls. And, you know, it looked like nudes of them going around, and being shown off by by the boy who made them. So that's that's what we're dealing with.

Movely is still online. Like, it still has the website, but I haven't been able to, like, log in. I can't make a I can't buy a subscription anymore. I think after the tech term finance project support, Apple took Movely off the App Store. But,

you

know, there are tons of other apps like this out there, tons of other apps specifically targeting young boys. And then for this sort of content, it'll be like, you know, like, make her boobs bigger, make her butt bigger, make, you know, make her do this, make her take off her shirt, stuff like that. So that was Mooley's entire entire gig.

Yeah. I mean, every day I mean, essentially, every day we learn about a new one. I think I got a text yesterday from a four zero four media reader being like, hey. Here's another app I got recommended on Reddit or something, and it's exactly the same thing.

And they're recommended on, like, social media. It's like on TikTok and Yeah. On the on the other Instagram, Reddit.

We've now done many stories about this. Like, Emmanuel's done a bunch of stories about, the fact that these are being advertised often to kids, often on Instagram, often on TikTok. And the Apple App Store has removed a lot of these apps. There's been like academic reports about this happening like over and over again, like like systematic attempts to document this problem. And yet, like, every time I go on TikTok, I am get still getting ads for similar apps.

And they're often, like, really blatant, actually. Like, the advertising is very blatant, like, what they're for for, where it's like, oh, make anyone nude or, like, replace anyone's face with any anyone else's. But then, yeah, again, like, when you look at the App Store description, it seems like innocuous or like an app that's just for fun. And it's they have not gotten a handle on this problem from what I can tell.

Yeah. It seems like it. So those images are made. They're spread around the school. As you said, the girls are obviously, I imagine pretty traumatized by that and it's really, really horrible.

What happens next? Does the information sort of get to more parents? Like sort of what's the next stage of this? Because there's parents, there's a school, there's law enforcement, but which bit comes next exactly?

So the parents tried to get on top of this from the start. They emailed the school. They called the school. They were like, you know, please don't bring my kids into a one on one meeting with anybody until, you know, we have a chance to talk to you. You know, they're they're having a hard time already.

It's like it's, you know, it's they're an hour into the school day, and they're already facing so much just trying to get get to their class. So the parents are are just immediately in action. They're like, we have to we have to get a handle on this. We have to figure out what's going on. What the school does is, well, first, they they take too long.

Basically, they take several hours to to get back to the, the parents. They they say, you know, we're we heard from a safe to say hotline, which is the it's like a hotline where you can report harassment if you're a teenager or anybody, for, like, cyberbullying or, like, a shooting threat or something like that. But they someone had reported to the hotline that this was happening. So the school was already kind of aware of it, but they were they were just kind of scrambling also behind the scenes. The school sent a statement, which is in the story, but they they didn't answer any specific questions about like the response and things like that.

But they sent an email. A lot of this is happening over email, honestly. They sent an email a couple days later where, they addressed rumors. They called it rumors, which I think was upsetting and, you know, inaccurate.

Parents Because the images are real. Well, they're not real. But they're real. Yes.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's definitely happening. But the the principal emailed and said, you know, there are rumors about AI generated videos that are going around.

We understand how upsetting and serious the situation is. We're treating it with the highest level of urgency. You know, they're they're trying to kind of get a handle on on the response. They say that they contacted the police as soon as it was brought to their attention, and that the police were actively involved. The police also didn't reply in any way, or they didn't they didn't answer any questions specifically.

They didn't, they directed me to the DA's office, which took took over the case. But they said that there were supportive measures in place for the girls. So there's five girls in total dealing with us at the school, but those supportive measures were you can leave class early. You can eat lunch separately. You know, you can isolate yourself basically from the from your bullies if you want.

But not but the school didn't in that particular at that particular time, like, take the bully out or the boy who generated the images out?

As far as I can tell, he wasn't suspended or anything. He didn't show up to class the next day. I think his parents were like, you're not going to school the next day. But the response was definitely not not great because it was isolating the girls. It was they were being punished for something that was happening to them.

You know, they were told that they could request accommodation, basically. They were like, you know, you can come to the school counselor if you want and talk about this, which is not you know, it's that again, it's like it's part of the pattern that we see over and over at schools. It's like they they give the targets of this stuff the option to, you know, isolate and be away from, you know, their bully, but they don't actually respond to the the actual trauma that's happening. So that's that's where that stood for a long time. And then the parents started going to school board meetings, which is where a lot of the story was reported was just watching school board meetings and watching how the board is grappling with us.

The student the parents are coming to school board meetings and saying, hey. We need to change policies. We need to talk about the response, all this stuff. So

And those are public. Right? Those

Yeah. They're on YouTube. One of the biggest points in the school board meetings that parents kept coming back to was the way that the school and the police jointly were responding to to these things.

It was so painful to get those emails, Calling the event rumors and speculation when a crime occurred was almost worse than the crime itself. I mean, you're gonna put out a statement like that, make sure the facts are right. I mean, at a bare minimum. I mean, the victim centered thing, great. But to say these images move and dance, I mean, for crying out loud, this is pornographic material.

This is not Mickey Mouse. This is not Disneyland. We don't have snuffleupagus moving around on a stage. This is pornography. And this email was so damaging and hurtful.

It was the school administration and the police cosigned this email. And the email said that they the police had concluded their investigation. So it had been a month and said that, there was an an incident off school grounds outside of school hours, which again kinda doing a little cover your ass. The student used an app that animates images, making them appear to move and dance, which downplays what actually is happening on this app pretty severely. You know, it's it sounds like it's some kind of goofy like elf yourself app.

It's not. It's realistic sexualized images. And then they say in this email that after the investigation, they found that there was no evidence shared with law enforcement depicting anything inappropriate or any other related crime, which was just galling to the parents and to the the girls because they were saying there was no crime. They were saying there was investigation, but they have all these screenshots. They have, you know, knowledge of these things happening over other apps, over Discord, places like this.

They know that the app was used, but the police just say say they didn't find anything, which is shocking.

So I I guess just on that before we get sort of the the bigger takeaway question is, like, what is the legality around this? Obviously, it will depend on the the images, so it can be hard to say. Like obviously, possessing child abuse imagery is illegal in The United States and that does extend to AI generated imagery. We've seen like, you know, more and more cases of that recently. I guess there's like a cyber bullying element here, like an harassment element.

Like legally, where might this case fall into? And I appreciate stuff might be ongoing, but like where do you see it potentially?

Yeah. For sure. I mean, there is like a legal precedent for this is the the frustrating thing. And that was what was really frustrating about this email because they were like, there is like, something happened and we need to figure out what it is. And, you know, like, where are the where are the images now?

Like, did he delete them? He said he deleted them off his phone. Where are they, you you guys like the police relied on teenage boys to forfeit evidence is kind of the takeaway from this, which is crazy. You know, anyone should know that that's insane. And then just before we get into like the actual the law here, just to close the loop on that email, a week later after that initial email where they said nothing happened, the police released a statement and said that a juvenile offender was charged with the crime of harassment.

So something did happen. And they kind of flip the story at that point. So I mean, it's I think it's hard because, first of all, we're talking about minors. We're talking about, images that the parents did not see and that apparently the police didn't try to actually find as is what's what the parents believe at this point. In Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania actually has pretty good laws against deepfakes.

They they criminalized deepfakes, malicious deepfakes in 2024. They're they're among the states in The US. They're a leader in this sort of thing. And then in 2025, a man was actually an adult man was charged with 30 counts of felony possession of child sexual abuse material that were AI. Mhmm.

And AI generated child sexual abuse material has been a federal crime for years. So it's there's a lot of confusion about like, you know, because it's fake, is it really a crime? It is. It's a felony. Child sexual abuse material is very serious.

So I the I think a lot of the the confusion and the hesitancy in these cases is because they're children. They're children making images of children. But, you know, we have precedent of kids actually being charged with serious crimes, you know, 13 year olds being charged. I think it was 2023 where the first case of a child being charged with child sexual abuse material happened. They were arrested.

They were charged with third degree felonies, which is itself very wild. You know? It's like the the kids are being failed in every direction here.

Right.

You know, a 13 year old being charged with a third degree felony is not, you know, that's not solving obviously, it was three years ago that didn't solve the problem here.

Right. And they may not understand what they're doing is like, they may

I don't think

they do. Yeah.

Right. Or they may not understand that it's obviously a horrible thing to do to another human being because we're talking about literal children who

don't care. Yeah. And the kid, the adults don't even seem to understand. You know? It's like no one is no one is actually taking this as seriously as it is.

And that's something that I talked to quite few experts about this for this story and, you know, just bringing home the fact that this this is a serious crime. It's being enabled by Apple and Google through the App Stores. It's being pushed by social media, just handed to them. And then when it when they actually take the bait, they use the they use these apps. There's just immediate handoff to police, which there should be.

You know, police should get involved at that point. But there's no there's so little preventative education about this at this point. It's like when you get caught, you will get charged with a felony, and your life is ruined. And these girls' lives are ruined because they are so traumatized at this very tender age where, they're now confronting sexual abuse material of themselves being spread in their school. They can't study.

They're they're in therapy now. You know, they're they're leaving class early, stuff like this. So it's just in every direction, these kids are being let down by the adults in the room. And I don't think you can wait until there's a serious crime committed by a 15 year old or 14 year old or 13 year old, to actually take some action on this. I think schools need to realize how serious this is and start talking to kids about it, you know, and not just like, here's an AI class.

Here's like an AI education class, which is what a lot of the schools end up doing. Actually talking about consent and sexuality and having some literacy around what you're actually doing with these apps and what you're what you're up against is is a serious thing. So I don't know. It's just I again, that's why this sort of story I think is important to to really dig into and examine because the the failures start before it actually happens. It's long before that.

You know, it starts when you when you hand a kid a phone and say, good luck.

I think it's tricky because none of us would want to excuse the behavior, but I also agree that I mean, imagine you're a kid, it is hard to understand that it's a serious felony when it's being pushed at you from like the biggest social media platforms in the world, and then all you have to do in order to partake in it is download it from Apple, from the Apple App Store, which is readily available on your phone, and it's just so frictionless, and it's like your way to arrive at a felony is so frictionless, which is not the same. It's not as if, I mean, we've reported on drugs being offered on social media and guns and things like this, but that is way more in the underbelly compared to something that's like a paid advertisement. And then I guess the other thing I wanted to say is that we report on all the many ways that you can produce non consensual content, and there's a spectrum. Like, there's people who roll their own models and make their own models and they're using their own GPUs and all that stuff is extremely hard and probably impossible to stop because you can just like make your own DIY method of making non consensual content.

And then there's people who are subverting existing image models and using all these hacks, and that's like more available. But whenever we write about one of these abuse cases in high schools or junior highs, it is never one of those solutions. It's always the lowest hanging fruit, which is there's an app advertised on TikTok, you download it from the app store, and you use it for money. And like, people often ask me, and I'm sure with Sam, you get the same question as well, it's like, what do we do about this? And it's like, that's a big question, and ultimately the answer is, you can't stop it completely.

You probably are never going to stop this completely, but what you can do is like take care of the lowest hanging fruit, which is these apps on the app store and the advertisements on social media, and we don't know what that world looks like because we haven't tried that really, like these companies haven't really tried that. And maybe kids do get more sophisticated and start using their own GPUs to make this stuff. But the least we could do, we haven't done, which is just taking care of these apps.

Yeah. That makes total sense. Alright. Let's leave that there. Everybody listening, definitely go read the article for all the much deeper specifics as well and sort of the the play by play of what exactly happened.

After the break, we're gonna talk about a company called, Bus Patrol. We'll be right back after this.

Okay. And we're back. We're gonna talk about, our favorite topic, which is automated license plate readers. But this time, not about FLoC. We're gonna talk about a company called Bus Patrol.

It's a story Joseph wrote. It's called Bus Patrol put AI cameras in tens of thousands of school buses. Now they want to give cops access. Joseph,

first

of all, what is Bus Patrol?

Yeah. So Bus Patrol is a company that is very focused on something called stop arm laws. So in The US, when there's one of these quintessential yellow school buses, they will stop so kids can get out or get into the bus and these stop signs will eject from the side of the bus and that tells obviously cars nearby, hey, please don't overtake this bus because there's probably a bunch of kids coming in or out and that would be really, really dangerous to the point where it's illegal to do that. Right? So what bus patrol does is that it has these AI enabled cameras on the bus, I think to the side, maybe to the front as well.

And what it will do is that when a car passes a school bus, when it has these stop arms extended, it will record that interaction or that potential violation, right? Bus patrol will then review that footage. It will then, if it believes there was a violation, send that to law enforcement. The police will double check it and say, yes, we think this was illegal. Bus patrol will then send the ticket or the citation to that driver.

They're using license plate reader technology there to identify them and communicate with them. And then the person gets a ticket and they can go and dispute that in court or they can just pay it or whatever. But the attraction, at least the way it's pitched from bus patrol to counties and cities is that you have all of these people maybe, probably violating stop arm laws and you're not catching them. We can catch them and we will also provide the mechanism of enforcement in a way to deliver the tickets to them. So it's kind of a win win for the counties and and the cities and and that sort of thing.

That's the that's what bus patrol does today.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess let's let's talk about that real quick just to, like, as someone who has driven a lot. People do drive very recklessly around school buses and children can be, like, quite unpredictable. And and I see all the time, the stop arms come out on a school bus and and cars drive by it.

And so, like, the problem that they're nominally trying to solve is a good one. I think that's like one of the worst traffic infractions that you can do is just like speed around a bus where where the kids like can't see around, like lots of kids die in this way. Like it's it's pretty it's like theoretically a limited problem as in like it's a very specific thing that bus patrol is is trying to solve or at least saying that they're trying to solve. But now we're getting mission creep.

Yeah. I think mission creep is a good way to put it. So according to leaked bus patrol documents and a source familiar with the plans, bus patrol intends to really rapidly and dramatically expand that data collection or surveillance. I mean, look, the stop arm stuff, you might not even call it surveillance because of the use case and because of the the very limited application which is being used. But according to these documents, Bus Patrol plans to turn those cameras into much more general purpose automatic license plate readers, which, you know, regular listeners will know about explain it.

A automatic license plate reader just scans the license plate, the brands, the color, the model of every vehicle that goes past a camera. Usually they're stationary, but in this case, they're going to be on a bus, obviously. So what bus patrol is planning to do is turn those cameras into general ALPR cameras and collect much, much more data. It's not just about people violating stop arm laws anymore or speeding past school buses. This is general purpose and then giving that data, that license plate reader data, to law enforcement or to law enforcement contractors.

And according to the documents we've seen, Axon comes up a few times, Axon being the massive law enforcement contracting giant that does everything from cameras to body cams as well, And tasers and all of this sort of stuff and all in one integration software and all of that sort of thing. It really is expanding this pretty innocuous program to something much, much broader. I think there's a quote right at the top of the story from an attorney involved in multiple license plate reader cases that just says, who would have thought the school buses would be turned into the mass surveillance state? And that kind of encapsulates what's going on here.

Yeah. I mean, so what you are describing or what what sort of like it seems they're proposing is basically like flock on wheels. You know, obviously, school buses move. So I'm curious sort of like why is that potentially more powerful than than what flock has?

Yeah. Yeah. And and the reason I kinda use the term flock on wheels, I don't think I did this in the copy, but I did it on on Blue Sky and in this Google Doc here, is just like people know what the word flock means and for better and for worse, I think people understand the word FLOC more than they do automatic license plate readers. And I just want to stress, FLOC is mentioned in this story because FLOC is mentioned in the documents, but FLOC told me it does not work with bus patrol. So I don't want to conflate the two, it's just like a term so people understand it.

But yes, normally, a license plate reader camera is stuck on a pole somewhere, right? It's like at a fixed point on a highway or an intersection or a cross section or something, and it's looking in one place and it captures all the vehicles that go past there. Obviously, school buses drive around. They do not sit in a car park all day, right? So as they're driving around, they're going to collect presumably much more information than an individual camera.

Now that's not to say all of the data that a school bus may collect may be worthwhile. I don't know, maybe they go down a particular road to drop off or pick up some kids and like there's barely any cars there and nothing happens there or whatever. But the idea of having a roaming surveillance vehicle, I imagine could be quite attractive to law enforcement and it seems attractive to bus patrol to come up with the idea of sort of selling access to this data in the first place as well. Yeah, it puts that capability on wheels and makes it into a portable sort of surveillance capability.

Yeah. I think it's also it's kinda interesting because it almost serves a different purpose than FLoC, which are stationary cameras where, with FLoC, you kind of can catch a car in motion and track it around a city or from city to city. Whereas a school bus is likely going to scan parked cars, which, you know, is like something that FLAC cannot really do unless you're parked directly in front of a FLAC camera. And so it it can kind of like find cars that are maybe like stationary, which could then lead to someone's house theoretically, like depending. And also, of course, like if the bus is driving next to someone that's moving, I guess it could track them as they move there.

But it it almost serves like a separate purpose, to to some degree. And, yeah, it's it's like sort of part of this trend where we are seeing like ALPR data being gathered in unusual ways, like new and interesting ways?

Yeah. So there's a couple. There's one that we reported, I think last year at this point, where there's a dashcam company called Nexar. And these are just the dashcams that people put in the front of their cars and they capture whatever. There were at least exploratory plans around integrating Nexar with Flock.

I don't know the current status of those plans, but that's what we reported at the time. And that would be sort of similar to this bus patrol thing, albeit not on a fixed route like a bus. It would be, I don't know, people driving to work or people driving away for the weekend or whatever, it could be anywhere. The other one that comes to mind is sort of like the harbinger of like this approach, which is a couple of companies called Vigilant and Digital Recognition Network. We covered DRN, the latter one back at motherboard because the source had access to it and they performed a lookup with a target's consent and we just saw how powerful this thing was.

And the way that data was collected was that DRN partnered with repo men, people who are going around to tow vehicles and that sort of thing. They had a dashcam in their cars and that captured all of the vehicles that they drive by and all the license plates. And exactly what you said, Jason, it was really good at finding parked cars. And we saw that because when this source of ours tested DRN and provided the results of the lookup, we found the Target's car parked right outside their house. And then we found where else they drove.

I think they drove somewhere on holiday or some or something like that. But it was exactly that. We could see where they lived and then where else they went, which is something that a stationary camera may not get. I I I don't well, I guess it's obvious why why are surveillance companies trying to get more license plate reader data from more unusual sources. I mean, I guess it's like, well, it's more data, so that's better presumably.

But I think it's kind of what you touch on in that these mobile cameras get something that like the stationary ones can't, and it almost seems like a gamble or like a hit and miss. It's like, dude, is the target going to appear in a school bus camera or something? Who knows? But we have the data, so we might as well look. And crucially, the cost, like the cost of looking is basically nothing because this stuff doesn't require a warrant because the argument is that this is publicly available data in a way or rather I'll rephrase, there are cameras in public places.

So law enforcement do not need a warrant to query them and and that sort of thing. So, yeah, this is this is happening. The Nexar stuff was exploratory. This is like a plan with Nexon and the repo man repo man stuff definitely happened as well. But, it's coming from all over now.

Yeah. And I think that this speaks a little bit to just like the expansion of AI for compliance. And, you know, this would be ALPRs, but we're seeing it with, like, all sorts of cameras and sentiment analysis and and all of that sort of thing. I think with ALPRs in general, I think cops are learning that they can be useful for a lot more things than originally thought. And with a company like Bus Patrol, again, it's like it was formed for this very one specific purpose, and now they're finding like, well, we could actually expand it to do a lot of other things.

Maybe we could, you know, make a lot more money doing this because instead of just catching cars driving past, you know, driving past school bus that stopped, we can use to find stolen vehicles. We can use it to find, like, fugitives. We can use it for all the other reasons that cops have been using ALPRs. We've also seen, like, flock cameras used for, like, speeding enforcement, which is something they said that would not happen and has now happened in at least one case that we know of. And I know that there's also another company that put cameras on buses like like city buses and did like automated parking enforcement.

So if cars were parked in bus lane, which again is like another problem that needs to be solved. It but it but it's one of those things where it's like the way that it's being solved is via these like automated systems that that are constantly collecting data, constantly surveilling, like there's all sorts of like potential issues with it.

Yeah. Yeah. That other company, Hayden AI, they they do like the bus lane compliance, you say, I actually have some documents on them that I've been meaning to write up, but then this bus patrol one came along and it was like, oh, okay, they're actually doing the thing that I suspected that maybe another one of these companies would do. I'll also just say before I take us to the subscriber section is that there was a really good Bloomberg Businessweek investigation into Bus Patrol a few weeks ago at this point, and they did a bunch of public records requests I think to get a bunch of data. And they were finding that in at least one case, and I'll say that, I think it was multiple, I'll just say in at least one case, there was like no evidence that the county that was using bus patrol actually had reduced number of violations or that sort of thing, and the county ended up paying tens of millions of dollars to bus patrol.

A pretty good that So was pretty interesting as well. Even the original use case may not actually be effective, which kind of relates to the thing you wrote about a while ago, Jason, which is like, Flock says reduce crime by x y z amount or whatever. And you look at the numbers, it doesn't really gel.

I mean, that's that is the thing with, like, all of these surveillance companies is that they have usually a few high profile anecdotes that prove their point. Like for Flock, Flock was used to find a mass shooter in Boston, I believe it was. And like Flock loves to now talk about that. But if you look at sort of like crime statistics and all all that sort of thing, it's like the studies that say that the surveillance technology is reducing crime are usually studies that are funded in some way by the surveillance companies, like we've seen that with Flock. And often those studies are like, you know, they're in very specific cities, and they're looking at very specific types of crime.

And then they kind of ignore a lot of the the a lot of the cases where it's like, well, it was used to violate this person's rights. It was used to stalk people, like all all of these things that we've seen over and over again with these systems. And so, yeah, it's like, there's a lot of kind of cherry picking going along. And I think that the jury is still out as to whether these things actually reduce crime. I I would think also, these systems probably can be used to raise revenue, as in just like to issue tons and tons of tickets.

But like we as a society kind of need to decide like is that what we wanna use surveillance for?

Yeah. In the Bloomberg one, there was also they spoke to a couple of people who were like incorrectly ticketed by the system. But yeah, people can go read the details there. Let's leave that there. If you are listening to the free version of the podcast, I'll now play us out.

But if you are a paying four zero four Media subscriber, we're gonna talk about a really big crash out, big time crash out. You can subscribe and gain access to that content at 404media.co. We'll be right back after this. Alright. We're back in the subscribers only section.

Jason, this is one you wrote. The headline is after town bans flock, council member crashes out, proposes Internet and phone ban. Seems like a bit of overreaction, really.

I mean, this is a this is like one of my favorite types of stories, which is like small town drama escapes containment, which I don't I don't think that the, city council members, like, want this to happen, but but yet again, like, they do represent their constituents and are supposed to, like, engage with them, you know, in good faith and and kind of like respect the will of their constituents and so on and so forth. And so basically what happened here is there's a town in Texas called Bandera, which has a population of 900 people. So it's very small. It's like mostly a tourist town as I understand it. It's like an old West town.

It's they call themselves like the cowboy capital of America. And so like that's the vibe. Mhmm. And they, I believe it was earlier this year or late last year, got a grant from the the state of Texas, to implement FLoC. And so basically, like, this has happened in a lot of states where, the state will have some fund that you can use to buy surveillance equipment.

Like, this is sort of how, this, like, AI sockpuck puppet company that Emmanuel and I wrote about last year, was funded in Arizona. It was like that the city didn't really have to pay anything. It was like it came out of this like state anti immigration fund for that. And then this one or like an anti drug trafficking fund like that. That's sort of like a very common funding practice.

And so basically, the city was like, well, we can get these cameras for free. Let's do it. And then they kind of like started to deploy the cameras. Like in this case, they installed a couple of the cameras in Bandera. They're supposed to be eight.

And within like a day, someone had cut the camera down. Like, you put you basically put a flat camera on a pole and it's installed in a pole, and they didn't destroy the camera, but they cut the pole down and destroyed the pole. Therefore

Camera not very effective.

Camera camera not very effective. And and so then what happened was like, the city had to reinstall the pole at its own. Like, they had to pay for that. And so they were like, hey, we thought this is gonna be free, but this is actually costing our taxpayers money because people keep cutting the poll down. Like, this happened a few times.

And so, then the residents were like, we don't want our tax money to be going to this surveillance company that we didn't really want in the first place. And also, you said that it would be free, but like we now have to keep paying for the poll. And so they had like many, many meetings about this. They had like five or six city council meetings. And eventually, like, I watched a few of these city council meetings.

Eventually, the city council was like, why are we still talking about this? Clearly, our residents don't want it. And they voted to end the contract with Flock immediately. And they voted three to two to end the contract. And one of the people who was the two voting to keep it was this guy named Jeff Flowers, who's a council member.

And he had been supporting Flock through, like, a series of these previous meetings. They had, like, a town hall where a Flock executive came in, And he was like, oh, you guys don't want surveillance? Well, you're surveilled on your phone, you're surveilled through the internet, you're surveilled through like all sorts of cameras. So I'm gonna introduce a measure in which we are going to ban phones, we're gonna ban the Internet, and we're gonna ban all cameras. And he, like, wrote a big, like, op ed, like a a letter, and he sent it to his residents through the local newspaper, which is called the Bandera Bulletin.

And it's a crazy letter, basically.

I mean, what was what's crazy about it? Just how unhinged or, like, the tone or what? I mean, the request is insane.

All of the above. He was like, we should go back to how technology was in 1880. Uh-huh. And so he's like, I wanna he basically was like, I wanna ban technology that came up up after 1880. And so the letter says, quote, for months, I've listened to the outcry regarding license plate recognition technology.

I've seen the eye rolls, and I've even been met with Nazi rhetoric, which means, like, some of the constituents said that he was using Nazi rhetoric because he at one of these meetings, he said, like, if you don't have anything to hide, then why are you worried? Which is like, we've talked about 1,000,000 times. And then he says, quote, the dangerous claim that believing in accountability and community safety is somehow equivalent to totalitarianism. Comparing a neighbor's desire for a safe street to a dark chapter of history is a classic case of comparing apples to oranges. It is it is a distraction used to avoid the reality of the threats our town faces today.

And then he said he was gonna propose, quote, a total ban on all cellular and GPS capable devices for all operations within city limits. If we want to be truly private, we must leave our smartphones at the city line. And then he also said he was gonna have a ban on outward facing cameras and, quote, a total termination of all Internet services and electronic record keeping. We are going back to eighteen eighty paper ledgers and cash only. Pretty pretty intense.

Yeah. So look. Obviously, well, I would say, obviously, he's being facetious. Right? He's joking, obviously, but just for a second, I'm gonna entertain it.

Like take him literally for just a second.

Yeah, sure.

But for two secs. And it's just like the the argument that, well, you don't want this sort of surveillance, you don't have this sort of surveillance. If you're gonna take that at face value, even though it's a ridiculous argument, obviously, it would be like, yeah, your phone is surveilled, but not in the same way Flock is where it's recording all of your movements and crucially, who has access to their data. And as we've reported, the local cops are doing lookups for ICE and that sort of thing. That is the stuff people are concerned about.

People are less concerned, not totally not worried about it, but less concerned about a foreign intelligence agency sweeping up all of their phone location data or anything like that. But, yeah, he well, you think he's being facetious, Jason? Like, must be. Right?

I mean, I think it's facetious, but he's serious in that he's like, well, like, you are being surveilled through your phone. Like, why why are you so mad about this when you are not not, like, raising a fuss about phone surveillance and Internet surveillance and all this. And to your point, it's like, FLoC is specifically a surveillance technology where, like, everyone is kind of passively surveilled and also you don't get, like, a benefit from it. As in Flock would argue there's like a community benefit, but it's like in using social media, like, get to use that service. In using your phone, you, like, get to use that phone, and it's like the trade off, and it's not a good trade off, but it's like one that, like, human beings are getting some sort of benefit out of, whereas this is like specifically a government surveillance technology.

And it is the government surveilling you, whereas, like, you know, surveillance on social media, sometimes that works its way back to the government. We've been like doing tons and tons of articles about about this, but it's like fundamentally like a company doing it. Whereas like Flock is like a government contractor. And yeah, mean, facetious is like and joking is like, yes. Like, I don't think he actually wants to ban phones, but I think that he is serious in terms of like, he's like pissed that the town doesn't want this technology.

And he he tells some story at at the city council meeting where he was like, Flock was used to like find a robber near my house or something like that at some point. He's like, it's keeping us safe. And, yeah, he he is like very pro this technology, and he's very annoyed that the community was so so against it. Mhmm. Mhmm.

What's the the status of his piece of legislation banning phones? Has he passed it yet? So Did they ban phones?

I believe that the meeting is tonight. As in like the next city council meeting. I believe it's I believe it's today as we're recording this. So

On Tuesday, May 26.

Yeah. I I yes. It is. It is today. So we'll see.

I think that I think it'll come up because our article went pretty viral, and I heard from multiple people in Bandera being like, we're not used to being in the news because there are 900 people there. So we shall see. We shall see.

Yeah. Last quick question is just like

I feel Oh, it's on the agenda. It is on the agenda.

Damn. Okay. Should we just keep recording the pod until then?

How long it?

Eight hours, nine hours?

I'm just thinking about The annoying thing is they don't put they don't put the video up until a few days later. So Oh. So I'll check it when it Okay. When it's up.

Sure. Last question is like, I don't know if this is right or not, because you've been paying a lot more attention to sort of like the local fallout around flock recently. Is that like a vibe shift where like, there's more crashouts or something? Or is it just a single

Well, I don't think there's more crashouts. I think it I think that this actually is instructive in ways that are beyond just like this council member got really upset, which is this is a very rural town in Texas. It is like super Republican, and they are very anti flock. Like, the the town is very anti flock and to the point where they're destroying the polls and things like this. And like, again, it's another example of a town where when the residents come and they talk about it, they're very well informed.

They really don't like this technology. They're aware of like our reporting and other reporting on it, like the the story we did about Dunwoody, which is the Atlanta suburb where Flock was using, like, a kid's gym in its sales pitches, came up like multiple times in the city council meeting. And so this is this is like spreading, the sort of like anti flock sentiment is spreading. And then the other thing that's interesting is flock sent like a salesperson or rather like comms person to one of these meetings. And it's like Flock is sending executives to towns with 800 people in them to like pitch this technology.

And so I think it demonstrates like how important the company is considering like each and every city to be. And it doesn't want to be losing these contracts, and it does want to be like expanding its footprint. I think it's too we don't really have the data right now, but I'd be very curious to know, like, whether one, like, how many cities have canceled their contracts? Like, it's possibly knowable. And also, like, how fast is flock expanding now?

And I guess we'll see. I mean, it's like, one of the hard things is that there are so many small towns that are using it, and they all use different systems, like different city council agendas, different like technology platforms to upload their meetings and that sort of thing. So it's kind of hard to get like a full census of this at the moment. And then FLoC has also started to limit some of its audit reporting that is available via FOIA. And so it's getting a little hard to kind of tell exactly how this is going.

But if you know, please tell us. Yes. If you if you can think of some way of studying it or or whatever, like, very interested.

Absolutely. Alright, we'll leave that there. And with that, I will play us out. As a reminder, four zero four Media is journalist founded and supported by subscribers. If you do wish to subscribe to four zero four Media and directly support our work, please go to 404media.co.

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Here is one of those from Lanouche. Incisive tours of media. Not talky, even though it's talk, the intelligent questions turn up wary of banter. This was a breath of fresh air. Thank you so much.

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