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One individual cop in his free time printed out the plastic shell of a camera, and then they hung it on the poles where the Flock cameras used to be. The mayor argued to me that this is art. Is downloading a three d printed model off of a free three d model website and printing it art?

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 standard company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to four zero four Media dot c o. 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.

Also, do remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel where you can watch all of our episodes. Subscribe at youtube.com404mediaco. Another reminder that four zero four Media has turned three years old. Well, that's pretty crazy. And we're having two events to celebrate.

The first is on September 3. And that's like a live podcast recording of the abstract. We're to talk about data center stuff as well. And then on Friday, September 4, we have an open bar party. You can buy tickets at the link below or if you are paying for a full media subscriber, you're going for free.

This is a freeze brewing in New York City, one of those locations. So these tickets will probably sell out quite soon. This is very very this is on horizon, this party, so do get your tickets in now if you want to secure your spot.

You did save yourself in the end, but all of you, all three of you, keep talking about the party without mentioning the city that it's in until like the end where it's like New York is not the center of the universe.

Yes, There's

other places. Los Angeles is also a place, and we're doing an event Thursday, September 10 in Los Angeles, if you're in Los Angeles with our friends at The Intercept. We're gonna be talking about Flock and Palantir and other surveillance things. There will be an RSVP in the show notes for that, but it's going to be at The Loved 1 in Los Angeles. So there are at least two cities on planet Earth.

Apparently. So, I mean, this story we're gonna focus on is obviously a specific incident and it is about Flock and we'll get into that. But there is sort of a broader thing here about really elaborate and stupid police stings. So the headline for this one at the moment is man charged with free felonies for breaking three d printed decoy flock camera. So we've had a lot of flock vandalism across the country, Jason.

People are breaking cameras, obviously, they are crashing trucks into them, they are apparently shooting them, they are pulling them down or whatever. This is now a to be charitable novel way of cops combating it to be less charitable, fucking batshit and stupid way for cops to combat it and shows how at least one police department is trying to go about it. So what happened in this Florida town with this decoy Flock camera?

Yeah. So this was in Oviedo, Florida, which is a suburb of Orlando. And like some cities across The United States, their Flock cameras were vandalized and stolen, in late July and early August. And while the police department is waiting for replacement cameras, someone at the police department had the idea of making a decoy camera. The details here, like, we've been able to suss out over time.

I've been, like, battling with the city's police department on some public records requests I filed. There's also been good local reporting on this. And then also the mayor has been posting a lot on Facebook, and I've been emailing back and forth with the mayor. So so basically, like, everything I'm about to say comes from a mix of police reports, beefing with this city over a public records request and, like, emails and social media posts with the mayor. Basically, sounds like one individual cop in his free time downloaded a three d model of a Flock camera at home on his three d printer and printed out this camera, not a camera, just a plastic shell of a camera.

Actually did multiple of them. There was at least two of these decoy cameras, and then they hung it on the poles where the Flock cameras used to be. The police then watched these cameras all night. So they had human beings sitting and watching these cameras between Sunday of last week and Thursday night, when this man was arrested. He was arrested, like, shortly after midnight.

And basically, this man had garden shears, like hedge clippers, and he knocked one of the fake cameras off the pole and destroyed it. And then he was arrested. And very interestingly, he was charged basically with, like, attempted grand larceny. So he was charged with three different felonies despite the fact that these cameras are worth these fake cameras are worth a few dollars at most. Like, three d printing plastic filament is quite cheap.

And, the mayor actually told me that the camera was, quote, free. And so he destroyed like a free thing. And so it's one, like a very interesting policing tactic that shows the escalation of this sort of like cat and mouse game between Flock vandals and police trying to catch them. But then it also is like a super interesting legal question because how is this going to play out?

Yeah. So just to summarize before I ask one of those legal questions, this cop, as you say, apparently on their free time, made a fake, a decoy flock camera, put it up as bait essentially. They did a stakeout waiting for somebody to come vandalize it. This person, Evan Meyer, allegedly did that, came and chopped it down with their hedge clippers. They then arrest this person and charge them with a variety of crimes.

And one of those is alleged property damage of more than $1,000 How can you charge someone with alleged property damage over $1,000 if the property was a very, very cheap, essentially free fake camera. Like, have the police or the authorities justified that at all? Because that's the most obvious question.

Yeah. And then just loop this in there. He was also charged with property crimes against computer equipment. Is this computer equipment? It's like a nonfunctional piece of plastic, literally.

But, basically, the way that it's described in the arrest report is here's a quote. It says, when asked how much he believes the camera cost to replace, he stated approximately 1,000 to $5,000, proving that Meyer knew it was an expensive real piece of equipment and not a fake replica. So one, it wasn't a real expensive real piece of equipment. But basically, it's like because they're arguing that because he thought that it would cost more than a thousand dollars to replace, that they are allowed to charge him with this, like, bigger grand larceny attempted grand larceny crime as well as this criminal mischief of more than a thousand dollars crime, which is also super interesting because they say in the police report that the actual cost to replace our Flock camera is $800, which is less than 1,000. And then also it's like we have seen a bunch of Flock documents.

Like, I've been reporting on this. We haven't published, like, a bigger article about it yet. But Flock often charges $300 to replace these. It's not $800. So I don't know.

That that, like, raises all sorts of questions for me. I think that I've seen a mix of kind of, like, public sentiment on the town's Facebook page where a lot of this, like, discussion has been happening. A lot of people are furious at the police that they did this. A lot of people are saying that the police should have told people that they are putting up a fake camera, which is, I guess, defeats the purpose of doing a sting like this. Then other people are like, well, cops pose as child traffickers all the time and and cop or sometimes at least, and cops sometimes do sting operations with drugs and things like that.

I don't I really don't know how to think about this because the thing that he destroyed is essentially worthless.

Yeah. You bring up the drug example, and that was the parallel that immediately came to me, which is that when you go through court records and a new criminal charge or indictment or a criminal complaint or whatever, and you have these documents that explain how the investigation came about, a ton of those are undercover buys by, I don't know, DEA or ATF or even like local police or something like that. And what will often happen there is that the cops will go to a dealer and they will pose as a buyer and they will buy drugs and they'll do what they call a controlled buy. What is happening there is that they're getting real drugs, you know, so that sort of sting operation is much, much clearer. Now, cops do sometimes use fake drugs, you know, I've seen it where they'll intercept a shipment of real drugs, they'll replace it with fake stuff, they'll ship that over to the people, and they'll still arrest them based on the intent to source real drugs, but they still got the cops still got the real drugs in the first place.

And then finally, there are some cases where cops will try to sell fake drugs, but I feel like anecdotally, just in my experience from reading a ton of drug cases, that is rarer because, you know, that that's just gonna be a harder thing to stick, right? I think you can say, based on the evidence available, this person intended to vandalize a flock camera. Sure. Whatever. I don't know if these charges line up with that necessarily.

Right?

There's that. And then also the mayor, who's this woman, Megan Sladek. I didn't know that I guess this is a thing in many places, but the the mayor is a part time job. So she's like, I'm an attorney also. And so she's like, I'm very inter she told me in this email I sent her back and forth that she's interested in the legal ramifications here.

One, first of all, she said she was totally surprised. She had no idea the cops were doing this, and she was like quite concerned that they were doing this. And then she was like, oh, it didn't cost us any money. Great. And then and then she said, well, I'm really interested in the, like, legal thing here.

And then she and the cops both seem to imply that they think that perhaps this guy also did the earlier vandalism of the actual real Flock cameras. And of course, there's no evidence of that to our knowledge. Like, that's not mentioned in the police report at all other than the fact that they were previously stolen. But the mayor sort of was like, well, if he tried to steal this one and our and our cameras were stolen a month ago, is it the same person? It sounds like they want to make that argument in some way.

Like, not only did he is this a crime, but, like, perhaps he did earlier crimes. And, you know, there's no indication at this moment that that's actually the case. So that makes it a bit different from like a a drug buy as well where they're they're like, oh, maybe we can, like, investigate earlier crimes based on this. And then also, the mayor argued to me that this is art, and so he has destroyed art, which is a crime, obviously. I mean, just Uh-huh.

She's like, well, destruction of any property is a crime, and, like, this is art, and therefore, it's a crime. And it's like, not that that is terribly relevant here, but I'm curious throwing this to the art historians here. Is downloading a three d printed model off of a free three d model website and printing it art when done by the police?

To be fair, the cop was doing this in his spare time. So maybe it was a nice little art project, you know, like after work, he clocks off and I'm gonna make a little Flock camera. It actually wasn't for a bust at all. It just really, really likes Flock, you know.

Dude, the whole thing is a is a performance.

Right.

And I think it's literally priceless. But the the guy is part of it, and he should, like, benefit from this beautiful happening that

Oh, the guy the guy cut it down. Right.

Yeah. Like, he's obviously a participant in this

Everyone's playing a role. Yes.

You said that, you know, this is based on your conversations with the mayor and then public records, the police report? Well, partly public records because it sounds like the police either don't really have a paper trail on this at all because a cop was doing it in his spare time, or they don't want to give it it to you, or it's a bit of both? Like, weird and secretive and, like, vague are the cops being to you around this?

Yeah. So, I've been extremely aggressive here because I think it's I think it's nuts. Like, the whole the whole thing is pretty nuts because, again, the community is like, how did this happen? The mayor is like, how did this happen? Who approved this?

How was this made? That sort of thing. So there's questions as to, like, how this went down. And the police have described this as separately a pretty intense investigation that was approved by the police chief where multiple police officers spent multiple nights sitting in their cars staring at these things.

Right. That's not done by a cop on his spare time. Maybe they made the camera in their spare time, but the stakeout is obviously official police business.

Yes. And so the cops are arguing that anything having to do with this decoy camera is part of the investigative record and therefore exempt from being released to the public and that they can't even talk about it, which is also notable because there's a meeting about getting rid of flock in Oviedo in a few days. And so this town is already considering getting rid of flock. And like the mayor is like, we need to know more about all of this so that we can make an informed decision about how people feel about Flock, how the police are using Flock, whether we want to get rid of it or not. Like she says that it's relevant.

The police are like, we won't talk about it. And then they are refusing to release the records to me. Like, I filed various formal freedom of information requests in Florida. They're saying that anything having to do with Cameras is related to this investigation. I then was like, well, if this was made by a cop in his free time prior to any of this happening, that shouldn't be part of the investigation.

That should just be a public record. And then they are they basically argued, like, he did this as a private citizen and then donated it to the police. And therefore, any records of how he made this, where he downloaded it from, like text messages, conversations about it are not releasable, which I think is, like, fake. Like, I don't think that's right. And I think that it is something that I'm gonna keep challenging because using your personal phone or your personal computer, if it ultimately is for taxpayer related business, is a public record and should be a public record.

And it either is a public record that they can then argue as exempt or it's not a public record. Basically, I'm just like in this argument with them about and then they are, like, alternately claiming that one, there there are no records. They're saying there's no records. And then I'm like, how are there no records for this multi day quite involved thing? How is that possible?

And they're like, all the records are exempt, and you're not getting them.

Oh, wait. Wait. So the records, they don't exist, but also they exist and they're exempt. Okay. Sure.

Thank you for clearing that up, the police department. So just briefly, this is very much like some of these fake Amazon package stings we covered back at motherboard. Just run us through like what did cops do there and were they effective at all?

Yeah. So while we were reporting on Ring, our former colleague Caroline Haskins filed a bunch of Freedom of Information requests with about Ring partnerships with police. And for a while, and I guess still to this day, Amazon was pitching Ring as like a solution to a package theft problem, like porch pirates where Amazon would deliver a package and then someone would steal it and then Amazon would have to, like, send another package, and it costs them a lot of money. It still costs them a lot of money. And so what some police departments did was they set up these sting operations where they took empty Amazon packages, put them on people's porches, and then staked out those porches waiting for someone to steal them and then wanting to arrest the person who who took the empty boxes.

And they did this in, like, I think, at least three or four cities that we're aware of. And they this resulted in zero arrests, like no arrests whatsoever. But we were able to get public records about, like, essentially the police interactions with Amazon about how these were set up. And then police records about like, oh, yeah. Like, here's the plan, operational type stuff.

That to me suggests that some of how this was set up should be released. But it also shows that, like, cops have been interested in this, like, decoy situation for years at this point. And it's now escalated to the point where, one, it has resulted in this arrest in Florida, but also, you know, maybe this is something that other cops are gonna try throughout the country. I suspect that they will just because this flock vandalism problem has become such a big thing. Like, we we did reporting showing that cops all around the country are being warned about it.

There's now like dozens of cities where this has happened. I know that some cities have set up patrols where they like are monitoring the cameras twenty four seven. Some places have definitely put up other video cameras like surveillance cameras to surveil the Flock cameras. And so this idea that they can like put decoy cameras out and then then arrest people for them. Like, think that that is something that we're probably gonna see more of if it's not already being done.

Yeah. Totally. Alright. We'll leave that there. When we come back after the break, we spoke to Darth Vader.

We'll be right back after this. And we are back. The headline for this one is the man behind anti flock Darth Vader mask wants to know when will this end? So I think a lot of people may have seen this go pretty viral and we'll get to that virality in a minute. But Sam, Anthony Ralphs, this person, he says he's done all of the right things.

What does he mean by that exactly?

Yeah. So Anthony, who's the the guy who's behind the mask in this like Vader stunt that I'm sure people have seen and we can play a clip of it also.

The emperor is a fan of Flock.

I should not have had to wear this Darth Vader outfit in order to get your attention. I think we know who the bad guy is now.

He has been going to San Diego city council meetings for about a year now. The first one he went to, it was like a really big noisy meeting where, like, there was bunch of groups, bunch of organizations, of privacy and surveillance organizations. Hundreds of people showed up in person and online to oppose Flock in San Diego, which has had a deal with San Diego, the city since 2019, but they were trying to oppose it getting renewed. So he's been going and showing up and feels passionate about this as just a person who wants better privacy rights in San Diego for a long time and, you know, has been coming in with all of his papers and like his case law and like citing the constitution and citing previous cases and dresses like you would if you're going to like a government meeting. He's someone who, like, took it very seriously and has been very frustrated by the fact that you show up and you do all that and you do it, like, right, quote, unquote, correct, and still end up getting ignored.

Or, you know, like, over and over, the city council votes against what the constituents overwhelmingly say they want. So they just say, okay. We hear you. We're not listening, is is the the impression that he's getting from these elected officials. So, yeah, he he got sick of it, and he said, gonna show up in a really blatant metaphor.

Yes. And I mean, you mentioned how prepared he was, and he absolutely was. Like, early on in this story, you mentioned that he brought up a specific Supreme Court ruling, which challenged the constitutionality of geofence warrants. We had that recently, it was a Google geofence warrant, and that was where, you know, law enforcement would go to Google and say, we want details on all of the phones that were in this particular location across this stretch of time, and they can be really, really broad and invasive and sweep up lots of innocent people. That was a really interesting ruling recently that says you actually do have an expectation of privacy potentially over sort of digital or digital location data.

So the idea that it could be applied to Flock is something that people are exploring and like, that's a pretty sophisticated thing to bring, I think, to a city council meeting. But as you said, and as he told you, that doesn't work exactly. So obviously, as people have heard and seen the clip, he comes dressed as Darth Vader and starts saying stuff like the the emperor loves flock and all of that sort of thing. This goes massively viral, right? Like we clip it and we post it to our socials, but like how much this spreads?

Because it it kind of broke containment a little bit, although that's hard to say with Flock now because kind of Flock is everywhere.

Yeah. I mean, I was looking at it. So we published this late last week. I think it was maybe Friday, Thursday or Friday, but the the appearance was on the nineteenth. And he obviously went viral in large part because we had clipped it.

We wrote about it. And I was like, oh, know, like, we write about these kind of city council, like, stunts for lack of a better word pretty often. I was like, you know, probably, like, the people who write about Flock will write about this. And I looked on Monday morning, and it was every outlet on the planet, like, had written about this. It was stuff like, you know, it was everything from like Yahoo to the Hill to like, I think it was it was a couple like other, countries like it was translated to Arabic and Spanish.

The straight times, which is in Singapore wrote about it. It just like captured people's attention in a way that I think a lot of other coverage of Flock and City Council hasn't. I think because it is this, like, really strong visual, you know, symbol. And he's getting up and saying, I love flock. Flock is something that the emperor is so interested in.

It's something I think people are immediately like, yeah, I get what this is saying without reading too much into it.

So he does that, it obviously goes viral, he gets, I imagine, a bunch of interview requests, including from us. Does he have any sort of indication or insight or information about whether it was effective? I mean, and I guess there are two, like was it effective at convincing the city council or effective at raising the issue? Because the latter seems obviously true, like it went massively viral. But what does he think about the the sort of the effectiveness of what he did?

So I don't think there's anything, big to be done as far as the city council members until next month. They're gonna have another meeting about this, but, I would say he considers it effective just because it's something that he's been trying to raise awareness about in San Diego and beyond for such a long time. And now it finally, like, clicks. It finally is something that people are talking about. I think because, like you said, the the wave of, like, everything is flock all the time now on social media.

Like, everyone is talking about flock and protesting flock and, you know, like, cutting on cameras and stuff like that. So I think it's hitting at the right part of this news cycle, but it's also something that he's been grinding at for a long time. And I think he really wanted people to know that this isn't just like, oh, I had a I had a costume at home, and it was a quirky idea. And I'm just like some guy who showed up and wanted to, like, go viral and be famous. He really was like, this is something that's been thought about.

It's been worked on for years. It's not like the costume itself, but like the the subject bringing it up for years. And finally, it's like, okay. Now I have people's attention. And he didn't want to, like, make the city council, like, the butt of a joke.

It's something that he told me. He was like, don't wanna, like, get up here and embarrass you guys. I just am so sick of getting up here and saying what everyone is also saying and thinking and telling you and council members just voting against those wishes anyway, the wishes of their own constituents. So I think that was really his message was this is something that's that's been in in the works that we care about and are very educated on locally. And now finally, you know, is this gonna be what changes city council's mind?

Because it's not without precedent. It's like so many communities around the country are are kicking Flock out or are putting limits on Flock or bagging the cameras that we've read about quite a bit. So I think that's his frustration is, you know, it is possible to listen to people about this, but they're just they're not doing it until something major like this goes viral. So we'll see what happens. I don't know if it'll actually result in any change, but I don't know.

People are paying attention.

Yeah. And then he actually went back to the city council, like, as himself carrying the helmet, I think, like, towards the end of the piece to be like, hey, look. This is me and this is still like a a serious issue, you know, so that makes sense. We'll leave that there. If you are listening to the free version of the podcast, I'll now play us out.

But if you are paying four zero four media subscriber, we're going to talk a little bit about what it's been like to run four zero four Media for three years, know, just reflect a little bit on what we've done and what we have planned for the year ahead. You can subscribe and gain access to that content at four zero four media dot co. We'll be right back after this. Alright, we're back in the subscribers only section. To be honest, we kind of just put this in the podcast while planning because I felt like, well, we have the stories.

Well, actually, our third anniversary was August 22, right, which at the time of recording was a few days ago. We should probably do a longer version of these unless the longer version, excuse me, is going to be what we record at WMYC. Is that you think that's the case, Sam? Because we're doing abstracts and data center, and we might do, an overview of what we did.

Yeah. I think we'll definitely talk about the state of the company, the State of the Union at at WYC Green Space, which is this is a live taping of of this of this podcast, so you'll be able to listen to it. But I don't know. I kinda want people to to submit questions. I asked people to submit questions in the newsletter a couple weeks ago, so we'll see what comes through.

Yeah. We can talk about it now, and we can talk about it then. We can talk about it all year. I don't care.

Yeah. I mean, so if you're listening to this and you do have specific questions maybe about the company, the organization, the business side, and obviously the journalism side as well, related to the three year anniversary, write in and let us know. But I guess just for all of you, while we have this little bit of time, like what felt different this year to all of you? I guess, for me, was more how absolutely insanely quickly the year went and just how we're so in the groove now that we kind of don't, I mean, obviously we still have to think about it and we do all the time, but there isn't like the reinventing the wheel of the process of running this company or anything like this. We kinda just woke up and did it for a year, in my opinion.

What do you guys think about what felt different this year?

I can just speak for myself. I think I wrote a little bit in behind the blog last week, but I think something that's different is I feel very overwhelmed with the number of tips and stories that we're getting, which is a good thing to be clear, like, please keep sending them. But, like, basically, over the last year, I think that this has become a bit of a group project between us and our readers in a way that I think is good and healthy in that you guys, like, understand the types of things that we're very interested in and very often send us tips and sources and things that we should be looking into. And I think that when we started, it's like, there was an aspect of this always because we've been a reporter for a long time. And when we when we wrote stories, we would put out calls for sources saying like, do you know more about this thing?

Please tell us. And that happened very often. But now we're getting a lot of tips from people who are like, I'm a four zero four media reader, and I saw something happen in my town. You guys should look into it. And that's a bit different from, hey, I work at Amazon and wanna leak you something, or like, hey, I'm a lawyer and wanna leak you something.

It feels like a lot of the stuff is coming from like ordinary citizens, which is cool because we've always talked about wanting to do ground up reporting and like focus on local communities, whether that is like in a specific online hobby or profession or a literal geographic place and sort of amplifying that. But I think something that's happened is we've just gotten like tons of people who was like, oh, something crazy is happening in my town. You should look into it. And that's been a really good thing. It's led to us having, like, a lot of really good stories.

It's led me to feeling a bit like I can't cover the entire country, like all the time. And of course, that's like, you know, especially with something like Flock, it's like there's been so much great local reporting, other national reporters have like, picked up the story and stuff. But like, multiple times a day, someone will email me being like, here's a thing that happened in my town. And I used to try to respond to all of those. I still try to respond to some degree, but like, it's gotten to the point where I would just be responding to emails all day if that happened.

And it feels a bit it feels a bit like I like, it's hard to find the time to focus a bit on the bigger picture type of things. And whereas like in the first two years, I think we were focusing a lot on the bigger picture and like what what can we do to improve the business? What like stunts and events and things can we do? And like, for me personally, I feel like I've focused a lot more on the actual journalism this year, which is good. But also, I think that we probably at some point are gonna wanna be like, okay, like, what is the next, like, big thing that four zero four Media is gonna do beyond the reporting?

That's like my kind of personal thought on Meta.

Yeah. Focusing on the journalism, but almost so much so that we can't actually zoom out business wise, but also zoom out journalism wise and be like, here's an overarching larger piece or something like that. It's very beep beep beep reporting. Emmanuel, what what are you thinking?

I think it's been a very weird year for news, at least for us. And I think some of that is it's like a midterm election year, and that happens sometimes because that is taking up a lot of people's mind space. And that is not naturally a b for us. We obviously have in the past and we'll continue to find ways to cover that. But like horse race politics and like which influencer is most important and who's a kingmaker and like just this kind of like hill type reporting is not the thing that we're focused on.

So I think that has been weird. I think there hasn't been, like, a huge narrative that everyone is paying attention to that we have found a way into, like the other example, and we've talked about this before, but it's the Iran war. We've written a couple of stories about that, but certainly we're not in that every day. But I think and I think this goes to what you were saying, Jason. On the other hand, I think we basically have been creating our, like, own or, like, determining what are the other narratives.

Flock being the best example of that, and that has turned into like, I don't know, one of the biggest biggest stories in the country for sure. At least it seems that way from where I'm sitting. Then data centers as well, I think we've been like really paying attention to that, covering that really well. But yeah, it just it's kind of it's kind of been a weird news year in my opinion. That's a big part of it.

I I don't know if it sounds like we might be at odds about this, but I think we actually, and I feel like we said this as a goal last time we had like one of these anniversary discussions where I think we actually did a lot of boring behind the scenes work this year on like workflows and different contractors that are helping us, how we produce podcasts, the interview podcasts, which is a relatively new thing for us, which I think has now hit kind of a groove, various admin things, support things. We have some plans for like more technical website related stuff coming up, but I think we actually got a lot better at that stuff, which allowed us to focus on reporting more, which I'm very happy about. And then, I don't know, I guess we do usually when we have one of these anniversary parties, we we get together. That's the only time we're all in the same space, and we have some kind of conversation about what we want to do next. And I think we're due for one of those conversations for sure.

And I think this time it's a little bit different because in the past, I feel like we came into the conversation where it's like, here are like three major projects that we know need to we need to do sometime soon. It's like, one or two of those do we want to focus on this year? Right? Like, do we do we want to do an interview podcast? Do we want to sort our our our social posting plan, which is another thing I think we really nailed this year.

But it's like there were always like really important, like must do things on the list just to build like a healthy business. And I think the conversation this year is really kind of like, we can kind of do a lot of things. We don't have to do any of them. Like, what are the things that we are passionate about? Like, what would be a cool thing to do?

That's kind of the conversation I think we can have now. Do we want to make a documentary? I think that's an idea that we've been we've been circling for a bit. Do do we want to improve the podcast quality? Do we want to do whatever?

I don't know. Partnerships. Yeah. And that's kind of a exciting but also intimidating conversation, in my opinion.

Sam, what what do you think to wrap us up? And again, we'll talk about this in more length in another spot, but what do you think was different about this ESM?

Yeah. I agree with all of that. I think that's all a totally accurate assessment. It has been a year of just, like, a ton of staying on top of, like you guys said, like the Flock stuff, the surveillance stuff, the data center stuff. I feel like a lot of the theme of this year just in general has been these abstract concepts of AI, surveillance, privacy, big data, things like that have become real life objects, which has been interesting.

So I think that has changed the way that we cover it almost. And going back to, like, what Jason said about just, like, sourcing and coverage like that, you don't have to understand, like, how AI is trained to see a data center going up in your town. And you don't have to understand the minutiae of the the networking capabilities of Flock to see a big ass Flock camera pointed at your playground. It's like these are things that people are physically tangibly seeing in their space. And I think that has changed the coverage and the way that it gets followed because everyone's seeing it.

It's like it's here. It's in it's in your face. It's in your real space. So I think that has been interesting to keep up with, I guess. Whereas before, it was kind of like, we know that something's going on because we are no experts or we have sources, we have leaks, But you kind of have a little bit more control over, like, the coverage of that versus, like, everyone's seeing it and sending you tips about it all the time because it's, like, intruding on their their daily life.

It kind of feels like it's reversed the flow of how sourcing happens. So I think that's probably the biggest thing that's happened this year as far as coverage. And I do agree. It's like we need to actually think about what the big projects are because I think the big creative projects that aren't the daily blogging are super energizing for us. It's like it's very exciting to, like, you know, make a zine or throw a DIY party or, like, do these things that are not the journalism.

And I think it's important to have both just for our own well roundedness and sanity. Because when we're blogging all the time, we're just grinding. So, yeah, I think that's that's going to be a big conversation. And, yeah, I'm curious what people want us to do in the new year, the new year, the new annual year of four zero four Media, which is now a holiday. Yeah.

I'm curious what people want to see us doing more of because I feel like we're we're responding to people's to people's input as best we can. But I'm curious what people are not seeing that they want to see more of.

Yeah, absolutely. All right. We'll leave that there. We'll talk about this more in another venue soon. But with that, I'll play us out.

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