The 404 Media Podcast (Premium Feed)

Frankly, I'm more scared of stuff like this. The idea that you can walk around, you have no idea if you're being filmed. I hate it and it's terrifying and it's gonna change how we all act and behave in public. It sucks. 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. 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, including this one.

Subscribe at youtube.com/404mediaco. I'm your host Joseph and with me are four zero four Media co founders, Sam Cole.

Hey.

And Jason Kevlar.

Hello.

And we also have regular contributor, Matthew Gault. Hello. Before we get to this week's stories, this week, on Thursday the thirtieth at 1PM Eastern, we are hosting our latest FOIA forum. This is a hour, probably two hour realistically live stream where me and Jason walk four zero four Media subscribers through how to get records from the government. You know, we've done this for emails, body camera footage, audios, Slack chats, all sorts of things.

Jason, what are we going to talk about this time?

Yeah, I think we're going to focus on how to watch city council meeting, which is not necessarily a hard thing to do, but sort of like, conceptually how to think about them, how to search information on them because city council meetings are often three hours long or more. There is usually a lot of throat clearing. There's usually a lot of discussion about whether to approve a permit for an apartment complex or like cut a tree down, like a lot of stuff that is relevant to the local community but might not be relevant if you're a journalist or if you're someone looking for a specific thing. So we're gonna talk about how we approach it. There's also every city has, a different system that it uses for uploading and archiving them.

So sort of, like, how to search them and then also how to take things that happen at city council meetings and then file public records requests based on the back of that. So there's a bunch of different systems. We'll go through a few recent articles that we've done and some general thoughts about how to do this.

Yeah. And we show you how to file public records requests. We'll probably go through some previous ones we have going. And if you are a for a full media subscriber, you'll also get access to the whole archive of foyer forums where we've spoken about court records or getting police emails or anything like that. We have ideas of ones in the future, you know, focused on fusion centers and then some other stuff as well.

So if you want to join that again, that is Thursday, July 30 at 1PM Eastern. Check the website and it'll be in the show notes for the link to the livestream. And then if you can't make it for whatever reason, you can watch the video later. But speaking of city council meetings, that brings us to this first story that Matt wrote. The headline is what happened when Flock came to my town.

So I'm gonna ask you, Matthew, about like the specifics of your particular town and how it impacted things there and what you did, and then I'll throw to Jason for some of the broader context. But first of all, just describe your town. How big are we talking here or how small are we talking?

It's pretty small. It's 12,000 people. And it's one of these places, I think there's a lot of these kinds of places in America where it's kind of in a ring of other suburbs in suburban sprawl. So kind of on the edges of Columbia, which is the capital city of South Carolina, and it's basically like a couple of major streets and a bunch of suburbs kind of all linked together and called a town. And the unincorporated area is kind of around it, and yeah, it's only 12,000 people.

But as a mayor and as a city council, we have an okra strut every year.

Mean,

that's The the most important

okra strut is, you know, we get a guide in okra costume and there's a parade down one of the major streets and people strut because okra is one of the major, like, agricultural products we do.

I just cooked okra for the first time on Friday.

Did you do it? What was the I

I like sauteed it for a while and then I turned it into like a coconut curry with cod. That's And I put over rice. I think it was pretty good. I never made okra and I heard I didn't know it was like slimy, but I also didn't mind that. I thought it was good.

You gotta I mean, you cook it right, it's it's it's you don't mind the slime so much. I like okra.

Well, this okra parade or however you described it Strut? It's a strut. Sorry. Sorry. The okra strut is presumably why your town needs automatic license plate reader cameras which are get constantly getting the license plate of all the people in okra costumes walking by them.

Your town already has Flock cameras. 11. But in the context of this story, they wanted more. Can you just give us sort of the beforehand? You said they had 11, like, when did they first come in and like what were they being used for sort of before this meeting that we're going to talk about?

They came in about two years ago. You know, it's the same thing that Flock cameras are used for everywhere, which is tracking the movements of people coming in and out. And I actually looked through the audit logs. It's a little bit of everything. There's domestic disturbance cases that are tracking somebody that's leaving different scenes.

There's traffic violation stuff. I saw that there were flock searches involved in like an embezzlement case. I mean, really is just kind of everything.

Yeah. Right? And now they want more, which brings us to this city council meeting where the city council has a vote, And then if it passes, they'll install these cameras or something. So you went to this meeting just recently, and we'll get to what you said in a little bit. But first of all, just what was the vibe of the meeting both from other residents who were there, but then the city council itself?

Like what was the vibe when you

went in? Combative. Bad. I will say there was one resident, who's an older woman, who's the last person to speak, during public comments who was pro cameras, and seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of all of the, police calls that she had made over the past five years. But other than that, and there's like more than 10, were people very, very, very angry about Flock cameras being installed.

Did not want the previous 11, did not want the 22 new ones that were being installed, and had fairly decent working knowledge of how these things work, Fourth Amendment questions around them. Does this constitute an unlawful or unlawful search and seizure? And had been watching the Supreme Court cases and like spoke to that, and kind of just understood what flock was about and why they didn't want it.

And I mean, I don't expect you to go through all of these people's particular criticisms or issues with flock, but generally, why did they not want this stuff? Was it like what they perceived as a waste of money? Was it a privacy issue? I mean, it sounds like the latter.

It was the latter. I don't think I heard one person. I mean, maybe like one or two were like, Why are we spending money on this? But overwhelmingly, it was, This is a violation of my privacy. This is part of a long thing that we've seen in this country where there's more cameras and we're being monitored more and more, and some of it we've opted into with our phones.

If we know about it.

If we Yeah. If we know about it. But a lot of this is like governments putting up cameras in places that they don't trust, and a couple people also made the point of like, our town isn't very violent. It's 12,000 people. Why are we doing this?

This is crazy. It's so many cameras. It would

be 33 cameras. I think with the total number of cameras, wasn't it that there would be more cameras than police officers? Is that right?

Yeah. There's 29 officers. Right. And so there would be 33 cameras. There'd be cameras than officers, about one camera for every 300 residents in the town.

And I think the police chief went on to say, or maybe they said this in an earlier point, that these new cameras, if they were installed, would mean that all of the entrances and exits to the town would be covered, which is something that's very attractive to law enforcement with Flock, of course, because it's not just monitoring movements of people and vehicles inside the town, but if you see anybody coming or going, that's going to be useful information to them. And that's the same sort of thing where homeowners associations buy these cameras as well, sort of for their private use, and of course, they may share data with law enforcement after the fact. But that was sort of the reasoning from the police chief, right?

Yeah. He said this in interviews before and during the meeting explicitly he wanted to be able to cover all of the entrances and exits of the town, which is really, and again, I can't stress this enough, but it's like a couple of major streets and some like suburbs going off of it. So when look at the map, there's like one of them that is across the street from a CVS that is part of the town just by dent of like it happened to be a piece of it that was incorporated, and so they like put a flock camera there. It is really one of these places where when you cross the road, suddenly you're in a different town. You know what I mean?

Right. You're kind of in this, like this urban sprawl area, and you're putting a bunch of flock cameras around your little section of the urban sprawl. Yeah. Suburban sprawl rather than urban sprawl, but Yeah. Which is which kind of makes it sillier to me.

Gotcha. So you also signed up for this local city council meeting. I think you spoke first actually in

I did. Because I signed up. I sent them an email telling them I was coming beforehand, so they put me on the list first.

Do people usually just rock up and sort of just like get in line and you're like the only one who'd like bother to email? Was that it?

Yeah. I mean, this is to I'll be this is my first city council meeting that I've attended or done anything like this, in person. And I like, I was thinking about it when I heard the thing was coming along. I was like, do I have a responsibility to do should I do this?

Right. Because we've covered it a bunch.

Right. You We've have access covered it to a information. I know this information. Like, I know more than the average person about this stuff. This is the place that I live.

Should I do this? And I was like, Yeah, I guess I should. I can't expect other people to fight if I'm not willing to do like the basics of like giving people information. So I signed up, and yeah, apparently is like everyone else just kind of walked up and put their names on the signup sheet, and I emailed and called because I'm a nerd and got on the list. And so like I walk in and they've got the sheet printed up with my name printed up on it, and everyone else is just signing in below.

So yes, I was the first to go up.

And what stuff did you did you talk about? Because you you flew to some of our well, a lot of our reporting over the the years at this point. Like what were the some of the things that you thought was worthwhile residents knew about? Because not everybody in town is going to read for media presumably.

No. What I did was Flock had a closed door meeting with the city council on the July 7, and there were some of the minutes from that had published basically like a summary of what they had talked about. And I knew that one of the concerns for one of the city council members was like data security. And so that's kind of what I really, you know, I wanted to highlight data security. And so I kind of went in at the beginning with the like story from earlier this year that y'all did with the access to the Condor cameras being exposed and people being able to jump in and kind of watch them just by looking in a web portal.

And I went through the audits and was just like, know, look, it's very easy to pull up. And I went and looked, I was like, here's our searches in June. Here's what they were looking for. Here's exactly when they happened. And just wanted them to be very aware that the data security around this stuff is not super tight.

Then my plan was to then transition to how they make mistakes, and I had written a little thing, but my presentation was about five minutes, but they only gave me three minutes. So I was kind of cutting in the moment.

At which point you were arrested escorted No, from the obviously you weren't, but like, I know that there's a non zero chance of that when of course I'm referring to what you reported a bunch when that farmer was escorted from speaking ever so slightly over his allotted time by a data center.

They were very polite. They had a timer up on the wall. I went over and I think she was A woman sitting next to the police chief turned around and was like, Your time is up. I was like, Okay. Sure.

So you do that of a resident speak. What was the vote? What did they vote to do?

Well, they voted four to one to install the cameras, and it's kind of a contingent It interesting because the mayor made a big speech about why they need the cameras, and he he opened the speech with being very mad at he says he's being bullied on social media a lot about a lot about this topic, and people are posting comments that are that are mean to him on Facebook, and he knew some of those people are in the room. But it's going to take more than that to get him to back down. The guy that voted against also talked at length and kind of explained the stuff about He's like, I know that people are being tracked on their phones and their purchases and all this stuff, but he's like, At least there's a sense of like opting into that. Like, you can find out that information. If you don't want to be a part of that, there's ways that you can work around it.

Like, this is like we're taking people's choice away. And he was also concerned about, so there's two plans on the books. One is just the 22 cameras. Another is if the city gets some money from the state, it's also going to buy one of Flock's drones for a drones as first responder thing. And the city councilman that voted against was concerned about how the footage from that drone might be used and if that would be a privacy violation.

Yeah. I mean, we haven't covered the drones, Flock's drones a ton. You know, I have spoken to Flock current and former employees about it, and you know, they do have some concerns about it, but yes, essentially that when there is an emergency call, a law enforcement agency or some sort of first responder can deploy this drone, or you know, go out there and provide live footage and then recorded footage as well. And of course, this is a big push of Flock to provide not just the license plate reader stuff, but sort of an all in one suite of tools where they love to use, and I mean, the industry broadly loves to use the term sort of single pane of glass where you'll have your license plate reader data there, you'll have information from the 911 call and with Flock, you'll have this drone, the footage as well. So as you say, they're planning on purchasing one of those as well.

If they can get money from someone else to pay for it, yes. Gotcha. That's the plan.

So that vote happens, I guess not surprising given some of the comments from the mayor and the police chief and that sort of thing. But the reason that I think this is interesting and important is that this is a snapshot of what is happening all across the country, right? This is like a microcosm of what is happening all over the place. Jason, you've watched a ton of these meetings. You've like read transcripts from them.

You've reported on them. Give us some sense of like, what's the scale of this around the country? Is this like a constant, the sort of meetings that Matthew went to?

These meetings are happening every single day at this point. They are happening in essentially any town that has flock or is considering flock, which is good and is a change or I mean, it's hard to quantify because one thing I've learned reporting on all of this is that there's a lot of towns in The United States Of America. It's like

It's crazy. I say this all the time. It's just like It's a big country. Yeah. You've you've never heard of this town, but people are having this exact same conversation there.

It is crazy to me.

I mean, it's obviously like, this this conversation is being had in big cities that have millions of people, but then also, this sounds probably very obvious, but if you don't live in The United States and also just like if you live in a big city or like have your head in the sand, don't really know how things work, it's like The United States is made up of like unincorporated places and townships and like, of course, like cities and villages and things like this. And so when we were talking earlier about their, like, about our FOIA forum, it's like, in some places, the county is buying the Flock cameras. In other places, the town is buying the Flock cameras. In other places, it's like the state highway patrol, like so on and so forth. And each of these government bodies has some sort of meeting.

And sometimes there is a meeting about how to appropriate funds and whether to buy FLAC cameras, or any surveillance device. But then in other places, the police have, like, what's known as a discretionary fund where they are able to just buy technology that they want, usually with no public oversight whatsoever. And so a lot of Flock, cameras were installed around the country without any sort of meeting. But what has happened over the last few months as people have learned more and more about this company, they've been demanding meetings about the contracts and about Flock cameras. And so you're starting to see a lot more cities and towns and villages and counties have these meetings about whether they should buy FLAC cameras in the first place.

But then you're also seeing a lot of, cities have meetings about whether they should renew the contract, whether they should cancel the contracts, whether they should, like, renegotiate them to have different protections, things like this. And so there have been there's meetings like this happening constantly, essentially. Like it's hard to quantify because doing any sort of like study of what cities are doing is really difficult because, like, we have a good sense of how many cities have FLoC and, like, there's this open source effort through DFoC to sort of determine where the FLoC cameras are and all this. But, again, The United States is vast and is like a complicated mix of state, city, local, and federal, governments. And so figuring out like who owns a Flock camera, who approved it, like why it's up is like quite can be difficult.

And so that's why it's important that this movement has been so decentralized and that it's been local residents sort of organizing to to figure out who the contract is with, and then like sort of push back against them. And so these are happening all the time. People are showing up, you know, as like a overall percentage of the population. Of course, it's not that much, but like, again, I've watched a lot of city council meetings. Basically, my mom used to video, videotape city council meetings for a small city in Maryland for, like, decades.

And so as a, like, seven year old, I would go to these meetings sometimes, like, if she didn't have a babysitter or if my dad wasn't home or something, and I would sit there and I got a sense for, like, how these things work just through osmosis, basically. And so, I've I've when I say I've seen a lot of city council meetings, I mean like I've seen a lot, a lot of city council meetings like over the course

of You know my saying? Yeah.

And so, usually no one shows up to these. Like the a standard city council meeting, there will be, like, a it's like an episode of Parks and Rec, if you've ever watched Parks and Rec. And there will be, like, an old man who comes to every single one and complains about, like, a crosswalk not like not being put in place or something like that. Like really esoteric stuff, and they'll beef about it. But like for the most part, like, these things are not usually well attended.

They're super long. They're super boring. Usually, there's like a public comment, period for like anything that's happening in the city and you'll have a handful of people who show up like two, three, four, something like that. Even at bigger even in bigger cities, unless there's like some sort of hot button issue happening. And it's not always Flock.

Sometimes it's something like, we're gonna build a pickleball court. Like, that's an early story that we did on four zero four Media. It was like pickleball has become quite controversial and so people will come up and like shout at each other about the noise and things like that. But like, Flock has become one of those hot button issues where when they do a meeting, it's not like one or two people show up. It's like 50 people show up and a lot of them talk and many of them use up all their time.

And sometimes there's like special meetings being called just for this issue. So this is something that's happening like over and over and over again. And it's something we've been covering like because often these meetings kind of go off the rails where you have people who are mad, understandably so, but then you have like varying levels of politicians either taking

Crashing out.

Like, either crashing out or, I mean, or voting down Flock. Like, it is a mixed bag. Like, a lot of cities have canceled the contracts and so they have, like, city council members who have, like, informed themselves on the privacy concerns, on the concerns of like this data filtering up to ICE, things like that. And then you have cities and towns where that are just like really flock pilled. Like they're just like, you know, this can be used to find stolen cars.

This can be used to find criminals. And they are the ones who tend to crash out because they are like, we don't understand why all of our residents are mad at us. We're keeping this. Fuck you. Goodbye.

And so it's it's really been kind of like a mixed bag in terms of like how these meetings go. I would say largely the experience is similar to what Matt had, I think, where all of the residents who come to speak are mad about this. And then the politicians are like, oh, that's nice. We're getting them anyway. That's what happened in Dunwoody.

And it's like, it will be very Dunwoody is in in, Georgia, which we covered like quite recently. But basically, like, they they've had a flock for a really long time and the residents are like really outraged and the city council is like, we don't care. We're keeping them. But basically, like, it will be interesting to see whether the politicians who ignore this issue who are like, hey, we're keeping them anyway, whether they face consequences the next time they're up for reelection because this has become such a hot button issue. I'm curious if we're gonna see a bunch of people run on sort of like a pro privacy, anti surveillance, platform like around the country.

I think we're starting to see it already.

I have a have a small anecdote to follow-up on that. So in the in milling people milling about outside of the city hall, the guy that voted against the city councilman that voted against the Flock cameras was doing some direct to camera stuff with somebody, and the mayor came up and was like, You're not authorized to speak on behalf of Vermo about this. They got into a little bit of a fight, and then another resident who was filming it yelled at the mayor and said that we should have a recall election, and now that guy is running for city council in his like set of pages and is like doing a push to get on the council as part of an anti flock agenda.

Jason, I was just gonna say, have you heard of paddleball? It's the thing that's gonna replace pickleball.

I've heard of paddle tennis, which is you use a paddle and a tennis ball instead of a pickleball, like a football.

This new one I've seen rumblings of. I feel like it's gonna be the new thing we need to send a bunch of public records requests on.

Wait, what's it called?

Maybe I'm mispronouncing it. P a d e l ball. Padel.

Yeah, I know paddle. I've seen this.

I've It's seen in like a glass container. And the construction is obviously a lot more invasive and single use than a tennis court or a pickle court. So I think it's gonna piss off a lot more people. You see what I mean? Because if you build that, you can't use it for anything else.

Yeah. I think this is paddle tennis. Like as in I think I think I it's not called paddle tennis. I think it's called paddle, like you are correct. But I've I've just called it paddle tennis because there's like a tennis ball involved.

Yeah. Yes. Interesting. Rubbing some blood.

Yeah. Can I ask a stupid question just because I don't know? Why why is pickleball worse than like a tennis court?

Jason?

It's louder is the thing. It's like, basically, what happened I mean, we did a whole episode about this, which is like like long ago. But basically, sound of the, like, hard paddle, like a solid paddle hitting a wiffle ball, like, it makes just like a loud noise and it happens all the time because as in it's like a shorter court. So it's like constant kind of, and you can also fit more pickleball courts in a smaller spot. And so the basically, it's like nimbyism kind of gone wild where it's like people living like really close to these things are like, I can't sleep.

My kids can't sleep. We had like anecdotes of people taking like decibel readers, like sound readers out into their backyards being like, oh my god, this is so loud. And like, it's not that loud. And it's also it's funny. I mean, this is not an episode about pickleball, but it has just quickly become one.

I'm gonna put it in the show notes. It'll be fine.

It's like popular with older people for the most part, although like younger people are getting into it. But like, basically, it's wealthy homeowners versus other wealthy homeowners. So you have like the like the NIMBY wars, like, and it's been quite funny. I haven't kept up on it. Like this is something we did soon after we launched four zero four Media.

I don't know if this battle is still occurring or if it, if it's like, yeah, past. And then there's also beef because like tennis players are like, you're taking our courts, vibes. And but I think what may have happened is that there's been the rise of like the private pickleball club. Yes. Which are basically like big warehouses where there's like 20 pickleball courts in them and it I think it's like a classic supply and demand problem where like capitalism has won and it's become like the market the market has provided.

But I'm not sure if that's the case. If if you know, let us know. God bless Big Pickle.

Yeah. I feel like you're gonna get to the back to the okra strut by saying big pickle in some sort of way. Alright. We'll leave that there when we come back after the break. We're gonna talk about how being a Luddite is fun again.

We'll be right back after this. All right, and we are back. This one is by our contributor, Janice Rose, but Sam edited it. The headline is being a Luddite is fun again. So Sam, this piece opens with a scene containing some gnomes.

What is happening at the start of this piece? Like, what are people saying?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just to, I guess, back up a little bit. Janice hit me up on signal and said, I'm gonna go to this Luddite festival thing. Do want me to cover it?

I was like, yeah. Check it out. You know, see what see what it's about. It was weeks before it even was gonna happen. And I was like, to an event, see what it's like, and she did.

And while she was at the event, I think, or maybe right after because they didn't allow phones at the event, she was like, the spokesperson is a puppet. And I was like, what do you mean? Like, that could mean a lot of things. Like, mean

they're corporate puppet.

Yeah. They're like, whatever. Yeah. Are they like a stand in for someone else? Are they like is are we talking about a literal puppet?

She was like, no. It's a literal puppet made of garbage. So I was like, yeah. Stay there. Keep keep writing notes.

Keep taking pictures, whatever you need to do. The gnomes are a part of I think in the story, she called it the million gnome march or something. It's like a march of of people wearing gnome hats. So they were pointy little paper hats, colorful hats. They were in New York City to celebrate the summer of Ludd, which is short for Luddite.

So summer of Luddism. It's this group that their their entire thesis is that you can have just as much fun in real life and you can organize in real life and have a really cool event in person that you would online or that, you know, we can we can let go of the technology and have a phone less Internet less good time still.

And what does the summer of Ludd look like in practice beyond the march of the million gnomes? And people like what what what was actually going on, for the summer of Ludd?

Yeah, it was I think it was a full week of events. You couldn't find out about the events online. You had to go. You had to see one of the posters in real life, like on a on a phone pole or something, paste it up. And then you could go to a bookstore and find like a list of what was happening, or you could call a phone number and they would tell you what was happening that day.

So very like old school retro, how you used to how we used to do things in New York and elsewhere. But especially I think it works really well in New York because everyone's kind of close. And there's already kind of this feeling of like, you know, you can serendipitously strumble into something weird and fun happening. But, yeah, it was it's an it was a specific group of events that were happening in a specific week in New York, but it is part of a bigger thing where they're they're organizing and and saying, you know, we need to get off of social media and get together in person. The some of the the events that were scheduled were called an offline Riz workshop to get off of dating apps, which I wonder how that went.

Wait. So I'm sorry. So you're educated in how to obtain and project Riz. Is that correct?

Yes. Yes. Yes. A phone free rave called Let's Get Off Together, which is becoming more and more popular. Phone free raves and phone free dance parties are more and more of a thing.

Yeah. Very it's very funny they have to have a dedicated event for that when it's just like, oh, I mean, in Europe, that is the thing.

That's Really? Didn't know that.

Mean, is when you go to an event and, you know, I think this is more popular in The States now, but you go and they they will give you stickers to put over your phone cameras. And if you bring your phone out, it's not just rules of the event say that, like if you bring your phone out at a certain venue, people will look at you like what

the fuck are Like you bad form, yeah.

Yeah, like what the hell are you doing? It's interesting that that is now, because that was obviously a much more privacy and living in the moment thing. And now it's like manifesting in The States as a response to like big tech specifically, at least in a way.

Yeah, exactly. Just like the the the feeling that you're always gonna be posted on social media if you're dancing weird or like, you know, people are always like worried about being in the background of a video or like, you know, it's just it's I think it's great that more and more venues here are doing the sticker thing especially.

Well, let let me just say on that because I meant to cover this and frankly, I couldn't find a smart way to say it. So I just I didn't, but there was this viral video that went around of two lawyers on a bench right in New York and they were making out I think during a weekday afternoon or something, somebody comes up and films them and then just posts it online and it goes viral and random people identify them, find the law firms they work at. And frankly, I didn't even go much further than that, like maybe they're single, maybe they're not or whatever, but it's none of your business. And it's just created this insane environment where if you're walking in public, you have no idea if you're being filmed or not. And I of course, agree that flock is a big privacy issue, for example, or location data, all the stuff I write about.

Frankly, I'm more scared of stuff like this, where you have no idea if you're going to be in the background of somebody's attempt at a viral video and maybe it does take off when you're just trying to mind your own fucking business. I find that weirdly sometimes more scary than the very scary stuff I cover. It's a completely different threat, The dynamic is different, but the idea that you can walk around, you have no idea if you're being filmed. I fucking hate it and it's terrifying and it's gonna change how we all act and behave in public. It fucking sucks.

Yeah. I think it already has changed the way that people act and behave. It's it's changed how I like move around the world and think about what I'm doing But

how do mean

in public.

Like, how's it changed it?

I mean, it's just like when I'm like having a conversation in public, I'm like very aware of what's around, which I guess is good security practice. But like just being more mindful about like who's around. It's like I, you know, I went to people's beach a couple weekends ago, which is like, you know, kind of a like tops optional beach. And I was like, I definitely see this in a different light than I would have years ago. I mean, I think it would I think it would get you thrown off the fucking beach if you tried that there.

Oh, filming is a nudist beach.

Yeah. Exactly. It's like it's just it feel like even having that thought cross my mind in a place that like is actually very friendly to like privacy And people wouldn't do that there, but just having that thought cross my mind. It's like, oh, like people could be, you know, recording this or you never know. It's like you just you just don't know.

And especially in New York, it's like everything is so condensed and people are on top of each other anyway. So like I think it does change the way people move and I think it's it's been kind of beaten to death and maybe it's more of a panic than it should be. But like the idea that like young people don't dance, don't go to parties anymore, don't like take risk anymore. And I think part of that is probably because you might be like in some kind of weird viral moment. I think with the lawyers, people were justifying it because these two lawyers were big law.

And they allegedly, I guess, worked with OpenAI and and defended OpenAI against Elon in that big lawsuit.

Oh, that means they're not allowed to make out then.

Right. I mean, the so stupid to do that. First of all, don't make out in Central Park if you're big all partners. Probably don't do that. But people are using that as justification as like, oh, well, you deserve it.

You're gonna get it thrown back to you. But I don't think that that's I don't think that's anything gonna change. You know, it's not they're not gonna be like, oh my god. I have a different view of privacy now that I have been recorded. It's like, you know, I don't know.

It's and the guy who recorded it was like a he's like a known

He's a troll.

He's a known TikToker. Yeah. He's like a an antagonizing TikToker. So

Yeah. Last thing I'll just say about this because I think it is related to the Luddite conversation is that with Meta's smart glasses, and Apple's basically rumored but basically confirmed smart glasses also coming at some point in the very, very near future, the argument is that, well, the metaglasses have a light on them. But now actually, maybe we'll get rid of that light because people don't actually want the light, whatever. I think those technical discussions are interesting and important, but that also just misses the fact sometimes that people aren't even doing this surreptitiously. They're just shoving a phone in your face and they don't really care if they know they're being recorded.

There's an element of that where this troll and various other people, they don't really care that they're being open about it because it's so acceptable now to just film people and to just post it online in the first place because people lap it up and then they justify it in all the ways you were laying out, Sam. So I think like, obviously, when more people start using smart glasses, we're going to contend with more of that. But like, this is worse right now, almost, or very, very bad in a lot of ways. So anyway, back to our lido stuff. A lot of these people are saying, obviously, you can't.

They're a phone free event. I imagine they're also you're not allowed to bring meta smart glasses to some of these events.

Oh my god. That would get your ass kicked.

Yeah. You get punched in the face. Yeah.

For sure. Yeah. I mean, it's that would definitely be bad. They they had all of the journalists present sign this big, like, comically long scroll. Like, initially?

Said yeah. Like, literally, like, a scroll that was, like, long and, like, draped over. And it said, I think it said you don't you agree not to make short form video content, which is like, you know, fine, obviously. We didn't. We we obeyed the rules.

But, yeah, a lot of it was, you know, something that Janice notes in the story is how, people were she recorded with a like a offline, like old school voice memo recorder and took notes in a notebook, and that's what everybody was doing. It's like, that's that's how it was done ten years ago. You know, it's not even that that long ago, but like now it's like, my god, everyone's taking notes on paper. It's very crazy.

No. Yeah. I remember using a dictaphone like that. Yeah. Same.

Yeah. Carrying around all the time. So just to get more specific on their issues before I ask Jason something like, what were some of these people's specific issues with big tech that they wanted to highlight through this series of events and stuff? Like what specifically were they sort of talking about?

Yeah, mean, so one of the things that they did that Janice saw was a mock trial for Sam Altman. So they had like a big chatty bitty like a giant phone made of cardboard. And the phone said, you know, may may exploit loneliness, erode cognitive ability, hallucinate, include induced psychosis, may have Pentagon contracts, mass surveillance, maybe one of the largest owners of the Trump administration. It's just like they were listing like the agreements that have been very much public about OpenAI and ChateapT and companion apps and LLMs and things like that. So they're they're anti AI, which is pretty much a given, I think.

One of the people said, I I used AI to write one of my essays and got in trouble. Now I'm starting a war on AI.

It's just That's an interesting way to get into it. Yeah.

Yeah. Just like radicalized by, by your professor thinking that you cheated.

Uh-huh. Well, you did

Fair enough.

To be clear.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

You got in trouble for a reason.

Yeah. It wasn't a perception. You did use AI to write the essay. Yeah. But, yeah, now you're on the other side.

Yeah.

Exactly. Yeah. And I think they had a lot of grievances that were very much valid and they were pointing to very specific things as part of this event. But I think what was interesting about this in particular is it wasn't just like, here's here's how, like, dark and horrible everything is. Like, here's how depressing and terrible big tech has made our lives.

It's like, you know, we could still be like joyful and playful and participate in things in person and create community in person and have these organic experiences that are not facilitated by an app. So I think that's a big part of it is like we're it's not just like, here's what we hate. It's like, here's what we really love and here's what we wanna keep in our lives. And that is like the the connections with real people, the connections with their community. They they're obviously very against social media, but I think it's interesting that, you know, it's like they they opted to just advertise this completely offline.

I do think that they got into some mailing list and that's how Janice found them. So like people were still finding them online. That's just how people find

sort of thing.

Yeah. They were it was like a

We got emails about it. There were like some emails about it happening. Yeah. That that there was like a mailing list, but I didn't see it really on social media in the way that you'd normally expect.

No. They were very intentional about like, please don't, you know, we ask you not to, like, upload all this stuff to social media and while it's happening or, you know, we were allowed to they provided a bunch of pictures to journalists, that they took. And, you know, you're allowed to take pictures, of, like, the the other stuff that was going on. But the whole point is like it's very DIY. It's very offline, which I think is I think it's cool.

I think it's an interesting experiment in a time. You know, you have to almost be like so radically the other way about this stuff, because if you're just kind of in the middle, like we're going to advertise this on the Internet, people just end up having their phones out the whole time or like trying to get some kind of viral moment out of it, like we said. So I think going completely the other way and saying, you know, we're gonna reject not only just reject doing this online, but really make it something that people are participating feel obligated to respect that as well, to the point where they're making journalists sign big comical scrolls. Like, you have to go in such an extreme direction or people will just like be on their phone the whole time TikTok ing it.

Jason, how old do you think this plays into like the broader Luddite movement, which is definitely a movement now?

Yeah. I mean, I think that this is all part of it as in like, I I don't have any, like, huge takeaways here other than we are starting to see more and more offline focused, like, events, like part like, not just in an activism y sort of sense, but also just in a, like, people are valuing getting offline. I think that the other like, I've seen quite a few, like, no phones dating events in both like Los Angeles, New York, probably happening elsewhere where it's like, just show up, no pictures, no phone, no Instagram, like that sort of thing. And I don't think that that's necessarily part of the Luddite movement, but I think that this is something that is compelling to people. I think people are just like really sick of AI.

They're sick of social media. They're sick of the algorithm. They're sick of staring at a computer and doom scrolling all day. Like, I think that and and so I think that this sort of rejection of needing to be online at all times and needing to be reachable and tracked and and all the things that we report on all the time is part of the broader kind of Luddite movement. Like that is just reassessing our relationships with technology and our relationships with the Internet, our relationship with social media, our relationship with, other people.

And so I sort of put it firmly in that. I think this is very cool. I think it's a little bit of a like it's earnest in a way that would be easy to make fun of, but I won't make fun of it. I I think it's cool. But I I think it's like it's like idealistic in a way that that kind of, it would be easy to to be like, oh, this is just a flash in the pan.

This doesn't mean anything. But I think that it does. I think that we are starting to see more and more things like this, and I think that is good.

Yeah. I mean, I I I definitely agree. It's not a flash in the pan. I mean, people are gonna do their own things to get offline. I mean, literally the coming weekend, I'm gonna go to an Airbnb, turn off all devices, cover up all the clocks with post it notes, so I have no idea what time it is, and have zero screen time for forty eight hours and just be like, finally, I'm not having a fucking notification pushed into my face.

I read some article when a guy did this, I was like, I kind of want to see how my body reacts to not having external social media or really anything, YouTube or whatever stimuli for at least two days. Maybe I'll transcend, maybe I'll reach enlightenment or something. I think it takes longer than two days to do that, I'm going to guess, but I'll give it a shot. All right. We'll leave that there.

If you're 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 the Flock influencers who frankly make a bullshit for clout. You can subscribe and gain access to that content at 404media.co. We'll be right back after this. All right, we're back in the subscribers only section.

Jason, you wrote this one. We'll just talk about it for a bit. The rise of anti flock influencers who make up things for clout. So, I mean, look, we've been covering flock for a long time, listeners know that, readers know that. I actually covered flock for the first time back at motherboard when I think one of their tools was called Falcon and it was sort of more the national lookup database, I think.

Anyway, there's a lot of good stuff in this nationwide debate. You know, we heard about the city council meeting that Matthew went to, there's journalism all over the place from local to national. Think CNN just published something like two days ago, like it really isn't a nationwide conversation in The United States. But there's also just a lot of bullshit as well, especially on Instagram, I would say. And it's different to some of our ICE coverage where we'll cover ICE stuff and then people will maybe potentially misunderstand it and make their own vertical video on TikTok or Instagram, sort of misrepresent or exaggerate what is happening.

This isn't really bad. This is people being way more malicious and like grifting, basically. So we'll get to the broader stuff, but tell us first about this specific guy and his cease and desist.

Yeah. Yeah. This is gonna be kind of whiny probably, which is fine, because we're in subscribers only section. But basically, there's this guy named Noah Orion who is a bro, like a bro influencer. Okay.

Like, I I I just like I don't know how to describe him other than like his thing is just like being brash and loud online being like, yeah, brother. Like, let's smash beers. Like, he sells stickers that are like 1,000,000 like, wanna drink 1,000,000 beers, like, things of this nature. He's, like, nominally, like, a country music singer, who went on American Idol, earlier this year, and he has, like, 800,000 Instagram followers. He did this thing that he called the wall of sound, which is very funny because the wall of sound is a thing that the Grateful Dead did.

Yeah. And this is different. It's like he turned a school bus into just like a gigantic speaker system and just, like, blasted music around the country on a road trip more or less. And this is to say that, like, anyone can be can care about surveillance, can care about privacy. Maybe Noah Orion cares about Flock, and maybe he doesn't.

I'm not sure. But basically, a month ago, it seems like he learned what Flock was. And I say that it seems like he learned what Flock was because he never posted anything about Flock ever before that on Instagram. And ever since then, he's posted about almost nothing besides Flock. It's just like days and days and days and days of posts about Flock, like multiple posts a day, multiple videos.

And most of his posts are of him holding a piece of paper that say cease and desist from Flock on it, and it is just a fabricated cease and desist from, like, allegedly from, or it's not even allegedly from. It's just not from. He made the whole thing up. But basically, it's just like a cease and desist that says, stop talking about Flock or we're gonna, like, sue you. You're gonna face, like, legal consequences because you're, like, telling the truth about our company and therefore, like, we are going to, like, come after you.

Yeah. So he's presenting it as if Flock is coming down on him hard legally because he's telling the truth about Flock and they're out to get me, but it's complete bullshit. How do you know it's complete bullshit?

Well, it's it is complete bullshit in like many ways. One, there's just, like, a bunch of typos in the letter. The it it's just, like, unlike any cease and desist that we've ever seen before. Like, we've seen a lot of cease and desists. They they are, like, usually not this is only, like, two and a half paragraphs long.

It is just, like, obviously not a legal letter. I think that, like, it it is possible that there could be a typo in illegal letters, but, like, there's so many. There's, like, weird capitalization. And also Flock is very touchy. They are, like, they are a litigious company.

They do send cease and desist. We've seen cease and desist that they've sent before. They come from a different law firm. They are longer. They complain about other things having to do with, their trademark.

Like, it's it doesn't have to do with don't talk about us. And there are many, many, many people who have been shouting about flock, journalists, activists, influencers, random people, none of them have gotten a cease and desist. And so it is like, it would be weird for this one person who had never talked about Flock before to suddenly have a cease and desist from Flock. So like all of the sort of circumstantial evidence makes no sense, but then also just like asking Flock, they're like, we didn't send this. And that's not the type of thing that you lie about.

Like that is No.

That'd be bad to lie about.

Yeah. That's like when you ask a company for comment on something like that, like, hey, did you send this legal letter? And they say, no, it's not. It's a forgery. That that's like, that's not something that that they lie about, you know?

That's just like Yeah. It would be insane. And I also talked I like, messaged the Flock's lawyer, like, on LinkedIn as well. And he was like, no. It's not me.

So, like, two different, like, entity like, Flock, the company said this is fake, but then also the person whose name is being forged was also like, of course, this is not real. Right.

Yeah. So we'll get to some of the other people in a second, so why is he doing this? And he didn't respond to your messages, think. Right? But so

No. He didn't respond to my messages. I mean, he's doing it because it's going viral on Instagram. It's like Flock has become a meme on Instagram. People destroying Flock cameras, people selling stickers to, like, put over Flock, cameras, like an entire type of content has has started to happen where people are like, don't shine this green laser at a flock camera.

Like, oh my god. Don't oh, you know what you shouldn't do? Like, you shouldn't buy this pole saw and cut down a a flock camera. That would be illegal.

Wink. Wink. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's like, I like, that's the type of content that people are feel comfortable making, and I I don't know. I don't really have a feeling on it exactly. It's like people can make what they want. There's also, like, lots of just viral videos of people cutting down flock cameras.

I think a lot of them are fake. I think some of them are definitely real because we've seen a lot of people arrested for this. We've, like, talked or I at least have, like, followed a lot of local news coverage where cities are talking about their flock cameras getting, like, damaged or taken down, whatever. I think that that is, like, a form of direct action that represents how frustrated people are with this technology. I as discussed like in our podcast with Brian Merchant a few months ago on this topic, like this is not something that like I condone, but I think it is it's something that's happening, so it's not something that we can, like, fully ignore.

I I wouldn't ignore it. And like we are doing more reporting on the fact that this is happening. But this is just this is just to say that this is going viral on Instagram and not in a, like, not in a, hey, this is an interesting tech story that, like, is getting a few 100 views or, like, a few thousand views. It's like, these are millions and millions of views. Flock has become, like, a big topic on Instagram.

And so that's what's happening. It's like this guy is just trying to cash in on that. And I think that this is like what influence influences in general are like trying to catch on to whatever trend is happening and they put their spin on it and all that. And it's like, don't really have a problem with that. And no one would care what I think about such things, like do whatever you want.

I think you can have your, like, different opinions on influencers in general and influencer culture and the algorithm and Instagram and Mark Zuckerberg and whatever. But it's like people are gonna do that. That's fine. People are wrong on the Internet all the time. People exaggerate on the Internet all the time.

And often that exaggeration or that, like, getting things slightly wrong is not the end of the world. Like, it's

often Or malicious.

Yeah. Or malicious. And it's like, often it has, like, a positive effect on society, I guess, I'd say, where it's like, I don't know. If you're if you're, like, sounding the alarm about ICE and you are, like, overselling what Ice is doing at that moment, but, like, could do in the future or something, it's like, I don't know. Maybe that has the effect of, like, raising people's guard and then, like sounding the alarm and then that like has a positive effect.

Maybe if you are like one thing that we were seeing at the beginning of this reporting like months ago is that people were misconflating, the Ring partnership like, with Flock and saying that, like, Ring had access. Ring was giving footage to Ice, which was wrong as in, like, basically, they weren't explaining this, but basically, they were drawing this, like, complicated diagram of data where it was like, well, Ring has a partnership with Flock, and then Flock, like, works with local police and and those local police work with ICE. And, like, therefore, Ring camera footage like, Ring is working with ICE was, like, what people were saying on Instagram. And it's just like, that's not, like, what was happening and that was wrong. But I also think that, like, there was had that, like, partnership become more robust, there was maybe a world in which that could have become the case.

And, like, if I'm Flock, I'm probably pissed about this, but also, like, maybe don't get in bed with Ice. Maybe don't get in bed with Ring. Like, it's just, like, messy and complicated and people are not gonna understand this, and also people are gonna be right to be concerned. But I think that when, like, what's happening here with Noah O'Ryan is he is, like, just making shit up, like, out of thin air. Like, he's he's just making stuff up to go viral, to get more followers, to get more likes, to get more shares, to sell like, he started talking about how he's, like, probably gonna go to jail, which is definitely not true.

With a GoFundMe. Right?

He it's not a GoFundMe. It is like a Shopify page that has, just like give me money on my Shopify page for my bail fund.

I didn't even know you could do that.

Yeah. It's like crazy. It's not even a GoFundMe, but, and so it's just like, it's it's fucked up. It's really fucked up. And I think that explaining why it's fucked up is really hard, in the way that the Internet works because I think anyone who actually, like, read the article or understands, like, what's happening here would be like, this is a grift.

It's not good. Like, it's as in it's like, it's very self serving.

It's actually helping the conversation. People aren't getting more accurate information so they can make informed decisions in their communities about Flock is not providing that. Even if the people who sometimes get stuff slightly wrong and exaggerate still kind of inform their communities, even as you say, they sign they kind of misfire, they can still be at least a positive community aspect here. This just does not have that whatsoever.

Yeah. Right. And so, I mean, the thing that I have seen online, like, basically, like, our articles get posted to Reddit basically immediately and say what you will about Reddit. I feel like there's often quite good and robust conversations happening on Reddit about technology and surveillance and privacy. Our article got posted on Reddit and it was just immediately downvoted to nothing because and like no one saw it and the few comments that I did see were like, I don't care if people make things up about Flock because fuck them.

Like, it doesn't matter if people lie about them and and like if this hurts flock, I don't care what this person is doing. And it's just like this doesn't hurt flock. It hurts the conversation. Maybe maybe maybe maybe there are people who who are seeing this guy go viral and they're like, oh, what's a Flock camera? Let me look it up.

And then they're like informing themselves some other way. But there's a million other people who are doing that in a better, more informed way. And he is just adding disinfo to this really technical, difficult, like, conversation about privacy and technology and in a way that is just very self serving and super fucked up. And then people are are, like, copycatting him. So other people are posting, like, cease and desist letters, and it's just like those are going viral and it's then it seems like Flock is going after all these people who are, like, talking bad about them.

And it's like that's not. Flock has never done that. What Flock has done is they've filed cease and desist against people who have done, like, actual organizing that actually threatens them, such as d Flock. Like, they got a cease and desist because it used the flock, like, name in its in deflock. And they also went after have I been flocked, which are two separate software projects that and, like, website open source projects that have, like, actually resulted in the company being held accountable, you know, for expanding throughout The United States in the case of DFLOC.

And then in Have I Been Flocked, they post the audit logs, and that's led to cops getting fired. It's led to cops getting arrested. It's led to, like, all of these kind of, like, improper searches being discovered, like that sort of thing. And both of them are just, like, single people who have been running these websites, and they've had to, like, retain league law lawyers. Like, Deflock had to work with the EFF.

Like, these people are not posting about their cease and desist for clout. They are, like, fighting these things or have fought these things over the last year with, like, actual lawyers, and that's good. Like, that that's good that they've been doing that, but, like, then you have some dipshit just, on Instagram, like, whining, and he's going more viral. And I I think that that's like not not good. And then finally, it's like, what Flock has been doing is they've been saying that people like us, like he said, you know, Garrett Langley, their CEO in that interview with Forbes said, like, four zero four Media are just activists.

Like, they don't understand what's going on. Like, they try to sow Flock has tried to sow disinformation about the activists and journalists who have reported accurate information about them. And none of that has stuck because our stories do check out, like, the local journalists who are doing this work, Like, they are doing rigorous work. But then if Flock is able to point out, like, oh, all these activists just, hate us

And they'll make shit up.

And they'll make shit up. And then you they have an example of this guy just, like, making shit up. Like, that is not good. Like, that's that's bad for the kind of, like, broader activist movement happening here. And so I don't know.

I think that this is actually, like, a pretty important story. Almost no one read this story because, like, our normal distribution channels, like, Reddit, Hacker News, like, yeah, people just, like, hated it. And the our readers, like, the ones who actually read the article, like, the comments on it are very positive, like, about us. Like, you know, they understand it. You guys get it.

And I don't know what there is to be done about this other than it's just like, I don't know. It's you can't like, whining into the void about an influencer lying on the Internet is, like, probably a losing game, and I should have known that before I wrote this article. But it's, like, super toxic. It's, like, really fucked up that that that they do this and that, like, there's no recourse really, and that it, like, is taking this movement that it has, like, a lot of momentum and it's just, like, drifting off the back of it. I I it really, like, really annoys me, but, yeah, I don't know what can be done about it.

I guess nothing.

I think it was well, you can write about it, and I still think was important to write about it, you know? Like, even if only our subscribers get sort of the point behind it, you know? Alright. We'll leave that there. And with that, I will play us out.

As a reminder, 404 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. You'll get unlimited access to our articles and an ad free version of this podcast. You'll also get to listen to the subscribers only section where we talk about a bonus story each week. This podcast is produced by Alyssa Midcalf.

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I have some more of these to read out. I'm really sorry if I repeated that one. I think I'm good, though. This has been four zero four Media. We'll see you again next week.