It Could Happen Here - Fighting Back Against the Surveillance State

Episode Date: May 11, 2026

James is joined by Colonel Panic and Cooper Quintin to discuss state surveillance and community counter surveillance. Sources:  https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/meet-rayhunter-new-open-source-tool-eff-detect-cellular-spying https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-402_h315.pdf  https://citizenlab.ca/research/analysis-of-penlinks-ad-based-geolocation-surveillance-tech/ https://colonelpanic.tech/ SSD.eff.org  Rayhunter.eff.org https://www.open-archive.org/saveSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform?

We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal, but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential.

Either way, the podcast's Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, what's good, y'all? You're listening to Learn the Hard Way with your favorite therapist and host, Kear Games. This space is about black men's experiences, having honest conversations that it's really not safe to have anywhere, but you're having them with a licensed professional who knows what he's doing.

How many men carry a suit or armor? It signals to the world that you're not to be played with. And just because you have the capability that does not mean that you need to. Listen and learn the hard way on the IHare radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. My mother-in-law spent years sabotaging our relationship until Karma made her pay for it. All right, Sophia, tell me about how we started this story. She moved in for two weeks, lasted five days, left a mess, and then pressed her ear against their bedroom door and burst in screaming. When kicked out to a hotel, she called her son-in-law's workplace, pretending his partner had,

then rushed to the hospital by ambulance. She faked a medical emergency. And spoiler, that was just the beginning. To find out how it ends, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. CallZone Media. Hello. Welcome to It Could Happen here.

It's me today, James. And I'm very lucky to be joined by Cooper Quentin, who is a senior staff technologist at the EFF. And Colonel Panic, who is a hacker. and we are going to be talking today about the privacy apocalypse that is coming our way, I guess, the end of privacy and what you can do to stop it being the end of privacy. So thanks for joining me, both you. Absolutely. Yeah, hey James, happy to be on the show again. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, thanks for making the time. So I guess, like, in the cases somebody lives under a rock, we should start breaking down some of the different, like, surveillance mechanisms that the state is building. And maybe, Colonel Panic, you can kick us off with Flock, because that is the one that has probably got the most attention recently. And then Cooper, we can pick up on some of the many other privacy violation tools. Certainly, you may notice all these cameras popping up around your town. They're on a black pole. It's a black camera with a solar panel. And these are what we call Flock cameras.

They're really easy to spot, but they're essentially AOPs. They're automatic license. plate readers. So this is like a form of drag net surveillance where anytime you drive by these things, they're just logging your license plate. And they've expanded this to do other things like facial recognition and gunshot

detection and so on. Distressed person detection is another one, which is really dodgy. Yeah, fascinating. But it just looks for people who are acting distressed. Or I think it's a sound thing too, right? Oh, okay. Yeah, I think it's

pretty similar to gunshot. detection in the end up for people shouting, people in the heightened state of emotion, right? I mean, this could really easily be a protest detector, right? Yeah, or imagine if that was a fucking peacock. Like, when peacocks get angry, they really sounds like someone's dying, or a fox. So, yeah, I mean, false positives are already a huge issue for gunshot detections in general, right? They can go off for a balloon popping, they can go off for fireworks. Yeah.

And then just because you're in the area, you know, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're now part of an investigation. So perhaps we should talk a little bit about some of the other ones, Cooper. Maybe we start with facial recognition. Yeah, yeah. Facial recognition is all the raise these days. A lot of law enforcement is unfortunately investing in this. We've seen, of course, ICE with their mobile fortify tool that's gotten a lot of press lately.

And then this is a app that runs on Android phones that they can scan people. with and, you know, apparently, according to them, get a fully 100% accurate identity for that person within seconds. Anybody who understands facial recognition will tell you that that is not true and that can't possibly be true. Facial recognition is never 100% accurate. And in fact, there have been dozens of cases where people have been falsely arrested, wrongfully imprisoned, in charge because of incorrect facial recognition results. This is all. also already happened in the case of Mobile Fortify. There was a woman in Oregon who ICE scanned her face, and they scanned her twice. Both times it came up with a different identity for this

woman. And it turns out that both of those identities, neither of them were the correct identity for this woman. Jesus. But ICE has been using this as a, you know, sort of judge, jury, an execution to determine whether to arrest, detain, and possibly even deport somebody. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty bleak. Something that happens when you come to the United States, you're a migrant rate, is that they will collect a large amount of your biometric data.

But it seems that even with all of that, the resolution that they have on this scan is actually very poor. Yeah. Yeah, that's, I mean, that is correct, right? So the way that this works, the databases that they have, it's checking against various immigration databases. We think that it's most likely checking against the

like TSA database of biometric scans that you do every time you take a flight. Of course, all of the at the border biometric scans, the ingress scans, any sort of visa information or anything like that. There's also the Clearview AI. So

even if you've never done any of these, there's another app called Clearview AI, which is used by law enforcement and by ICE, which does a similar thing, but it's back-end is all of the photos that have been posted online. So they're using data from social media, Facebook, Instagram, everything else to make a face match and determine who you are based on that sort of publicly available data as well.

Great. Yeah. What a reassuring thing to hear. The high cost of the free service. Yeah. Absolutely. Let's talk about a couple of other things. I think those are things that people have a very reasonable

fear of, concern with, anger or about, however you want to put it. There is some stuff which I think perhaps we just need to understand what it means, I guess. And maybe we could start there. I know Cooper, you've done a lot with stingrays or cell phone site simulators, lots of names for them. Yeah, definitely. So I've been for the last couple of years working on a project called Ray Hunter, which is a open source project to detect. cell size simulators or stingrays or MC catchers,

whatever you want to call them, I will probably use these terms interchangeably. And in short, the way it works is it's a little piece of software that sits on a mobile hotspot, one of those little things that you buy to get like Wi-Fi in various places from a cellular connection. And it looks at the traffic between the hotspot and the towers that it's connected to, specifically the control traffic, not what you're doing, but what the control traffic is, how it's connecting into the towers. it looks for a number of suspicious things,

signatures that we've written of what we think are indicative of MC catcher activity. So we've been running this for a year. There's several hundred of these around the U.S., if not a couple thousand, but we don't have exact numbers. There's a bunch of these all over the U.S.

We had a bunch in Minneapolis, people have been running them in Chicago and L.A. When that was going on, people have been running them all over the country. Yeah. And we have found some evidence of MCCcatchers, but a lot less than we expected or a lot less than many people expected.

I actually didn't expect to find many. And specifically, we have not found any evidence of emcee catchers being used at protests. And I should stop here for a second to explain what a stingray or emce catcher is. Yeah. This is a fake cell tower, essentially, that tricks your phone into connecting to it and so that your phone will identify itself to the

emce catcher. These are used for the primary reason these are used for is to track down a specific person. So like what we see in court documents is that these are used to verify that somebody is home before a police raid happens, right? This is what the vast majority of use for these is. That is one use. The other potential use and the one we're actually more concerned about is that these could be used to identify who is in a specific area. You can set one of these up outside, let's say, outside of a mosque or outside of a protest, an anarchist meeting or a anti-fascist meeting is regularly happening, right?

And identify the people who are in that meeting by getting those unique IDs and then going to the phone company and saying, give us the subscriber information for these people. And that is a far more concerning use. And we are not seeing it so far with Ray Hunter being used for that. what we're seeing is uses that seem to be more in line with the sort of manhunt or like verifying that somebody is home style of operation, which is also what we're seeing in court documents. Interesting. Yeah. It doesn't mean that the government cannot find out that you were at a place or at a protest, right?

It just means that they're not using this mechanism of doing that. Yeah, that's exactly right. So people have asked us what our theories are for about why we're not seeing these to protest because for a lot of, for a long time, there were a lot of activists that were pretty convinced that these were showing up at every protest, right? Or that maybe like, you know, to use the old, there was the old Cointel Pro language was like the architects of Cointel Pro wanted activists to feel like there was a cop behind every bush and inside every mailbox, right?

And that was really the impression that a lot of activists had about MCC catchers, right? that they were in every cop car, that they were everywhere, that they were just constantly being used. And it seems like that's not the case. And I think there's a couple reasons why. One is that they're expensive. It costs about a million dollars for a NAMC see-catcher contract. So these are actually, like, fairly rare. And they're hard to operate.

They require a lot of technical knowledge. They require a lot of understanding. Cops are idiots. They don't want to actually go do all this work if it's not necessary, right? And it's a lot more expensive than using one of the many other surveillance technologies they have. Flock, facial recognition, things like PennLink, which we can talk about in a little bit, but other databases of location because our phone advertisements on our phones are constantly giving up our location, right? And there's a whole surveillance industry around that selling that data to police.

Also, the other big issue is that there was a legal decision in 24. 20, 2019, I'm going to mess this up. Fact checkers, so need to get on this. In 2019, called Carpenter v. USA. And the Supreme Court in that decision decided that to access historical cell site location information. So this is where people were located based on what cell towers they're connected to. That police would need a warrant for that information. And it seems like at that time, a lot of law enforcement agencies decided that that that

also extended to stingrays, whereas previously they had not been needing to get a warrant to use their stingrays. It seems like a lot of them thought, oh, okay, this seems like it probably also applies to stingrays. Therefore, any case using stingrays without a warrant will get thrown out, therefore we're going to need to get a warrant to use this thing. And it turns out having to get a warrant was too high of a bar for most police agencies and made them not want to use this technology unless they absolutely had to. to and thought they could get a warrant for it.

But there's a lot of other things they don't have to get a warrant for. So we think, my theory, is that they are using these other technologies that are easier to use, cheaper to use, don't have to get a warrant, and saving the stingrays only for when they are sure they can get a warrant, and when they cost and complexity is justified. Yeah, that makes sense. The 2018, June 22nd, 2018, that Supreme Court case. Thank you. Real-time fact.

checking here on ICH. Yep, that's what we do. Let's talk about Penlink and other location data. I did hear recently that it's possible that Iran had used commercially available location data to target some of its strikes on U.S. troops in the Middle East, which is wild to consider. I had not heard that, but it's not surprising. And it is absolutely wild, right?

So Penlink is a company that actually previously has. sold a lot of software to help out with MC catchers. So interestingly, they have now pivoted to different types of surveillance. So they, a few years ago, acquired this company, Israeli company called Cobwebs. Cobwebs makes a lot of different software. There's actually just recently a fantastic report about all of the software that was acquired by Penlink in this sale. There were links to a couple of spyware manufacturers.

Anyway, there was a report on Citizen Lab. That's excellent. I'd highly recommend it. But the short of it is that Penlink has acquired two of their main products, one of which is called Tangles and the other one is called Weblock. Tangles is a social media surveillance tool that allows investigators to scrape social media for specific keywords and make links between different people, different organizations, say like anybody who has interacted with the John Brown Gun Club or anybody who has interacted with the socialist R.A. or anybody who has mentioned the words Antifa, right? You can go build a dossier on that person, build a dossier on who their friends are, what they're talking about, scrape specific groups, any sort of left-leaning group,

right? They can build a dossier on that, who all the people are, who their friends are. And then they have this tool called Weblock. And what Weblock does is it is a near real-time database of the locations of millions of phones worldwide. And so how it works is police can circle a specific area on a map, and it will show information about all of the phones that they know, you know, that we're in that area in some sort of time frame. And I think that the data gets updated every 24 hours. So you're going to have about a 24-hour delay in that data.

So you circle an area just like with your finger, and you're going to see who was there, you know, as of 24 hours ago and back to, you know, whatever time frame you said. You can then select any one of those phones that were in that area and see information about that person, which is mostly advertising demographic information, like what sort of age bracket that person's in, what their interests and hobbies are, whether they have kids, whether they're a parent, what their nationality is, et cetera, et cetera. But you can also see a historical map of where that person or where that device, we should say, has been, right? And so you can see where they spend their days, which is probably their work or something like that, where they spend their nights, which is probably their house, you know, where they spend sort of their afternoons or evenings, maybe a third space, maybe a lover's house, something like that, right? But you can see everywhere they've gone.

You can see if they were at a specific protest. You could see everybody who was at a specific protest. you could do a lot of different things with that. And we think that they get that data from advertising networks. We know they get it from apps on your phone. And basically those apps are sending information to advertising networks, which is then sold or scraped by Penlink to add to their database for this app. And all of this is then sold to law enforcement,

so law enforcement can get this information, and none of it requires a warrant currently. Law enforcement does not think they need a warrant to acquire this data, and judges have upheld that so far. Yeah. So you're saying when you download an app and you give it location permissions, that this is aggregated and then sold to third party? Not every app, but yeah, a lot of apps.

Like most of them. We've been really strongly encouraging people to not give apps location permissions unless there's a very good reason why that app should have location permissions, right? Like on my phone, the only app, the only app, that has location permissions is my Maps app and my weather app, right? And that's because I know those apps don't have advertising SDKs in them. But if you wanted to, if you were extra paranoid, like if I was heading to something, I mean, if I was heading to something that I didn't want people to know I was there,

I would turn my phone off or at least put it on airplane mode, right? Yeah. You know, short of that, you could turn off location services entirely for your phone, right? And give no app your location. But yeah, it's, our phones are snitches, man. Our phones are snitches. Yeah, that is the big take home is the big snitch you carry around in your pocket. Take everywhere with you.

Talking of snitches, I can't think of a way to fucking pivot. It's into adverts, damn. Products and services. Here's some things you can buy the snitch on you. Yeah, hey, buy these things. They'll give away information data. Sell it to an Israeli company who'll sell it back to the cops. Experience Harry Stiles live in London, England at Wembley Stadium.

This is Harry Stiles. IHart Radio wants to send you and a mate across the pond, with flights from Virgin Atlantic, hotel from TripCentral.C.A., tickets, and $1,000 cash. Here we got it! Download the free IHart Radio app. Listen to IHart new music for 10 minutes. Enter to win.

Every day is another chance to see Harry Stiles. Very excited to see you with the show. Kiss all the time, disco occasionally. now. Another podcast from some SNL, late night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends.

Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter.

There's the worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, uh, You only got in because your parents made a huge donation.

The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yardt Yard's, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged. One erection.

Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast's Superhuman documented it all,

embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the I-Hard radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you remember when Diana Ross double-tapped Little Kim's boobs at the VMAs? Or when Kanye said that George Bush didn't like black people. I know what you're thinking.

What the hell does George Bush got to do with Little Kim? Well, you can find out on the Look Back at it podcast. I'm Sam J. And I'm Alex English. Each episode, we pick a here, unpack what went down, and try to make sense of how we survived it. Including a recent episode with Mark Lamont Hill, waxing all about crack in the 80s.

To be clear, 84 is big to me, not just because of crack. I'm down to talk about crack on day, but just so you all know. I mean, at this point, this is the second episode where we've discussed crack. So I'm starting to see that there's a through line. We also have AIDS on the table right now. Thank you for finishing that sentence. I don't think there's a more important year for black people. Really?

Yeah. For me, it's one of the most important years for black people in American history. Listen to look back at it on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. We are back. I hope you bought something nice. I want to talk about community counter surveillance because it is interesting.

It gives people something they can understand a little more about the web of surveillance around them, right? They can feel a little bit more informed. So let's talk about it. Maybe, Colonel Panic, if you want to kick off, you've been involved in some of these devices. I don't know how you want to put it behind some of them. Yeah, certainly. I came up with the idea for what people are now calling we spy. It actually was initially called OUI spy.

It was organizational unique identifier, which is the first six characters of a MAC address. But it's art, you know, it's going to be pronounced however people want it. It has dual meanings, we spy. But this actually kind of was born from the war driving community, which is old school. driving around trying to find devices, just seeing what's out there. And so essentially you have all these devices that are transmitting around you, and it's totally fine and totally legal to just receive passively. And so things like Wiggle or Kismet you can use on Linux to just drive around

and just kind of see what devices are in your area. And through this, I came up with a device that was based on remote ID stuff, prior to We Spy that just detects drones and then transmits it over mesh-tastic, or detects a device and transmits it over mesh-tastic. And then I was like, it'd be really cool to have a device that if you have a device that you want to know when comes around you, it'll just beep. And so I just took a microcontroller and drew out the design for this thing to connect to a beeper and essentially made the firmware that do a few different things.

For instance, if you wanted to know when a Tesla drove by or something, you could put in the OUI for that or the Mac address for a specific device. And you can just tell, you can get alerts when devices are around you essentially. So that's where all that began. Yeah. To explain how, like, this might help someone. Let's say, like, you just wanted to get an idea, right, of the surveillance infrastructure that you encountered in your daily life. You haven't been going to city council meetings. You don't know all that shit is.

your local newspaper is dead now, because everyone's local newspaper is dead now, right? So there's no reporting on it. Like, if they wanted to get one of these devices, cruise around town and work out, like, when they were being spied on, like, what kind of abilities would it give them? Certainly. So there's drone detection on this device. So you can have it alert when drones are near or have it map via remote ID. But the biggest one, I think, that has been the most important one is the flock camera detection.

Yeah. there's a ton of other cameras than flock. But this is the important one lately. So a lot of people are out on, you know, out doing war driving and doing real-time research and in contributing to, you know, adding to this database of flock cams signatures, essentially. And it's either Wi-Fi or Bluetooth and some of them are over cellular too. But essentially, I made a firmware called flock you. When you drive around, it just war drives flock cams. And a good friend of mine did some recent research and found out that if you put the microcontroller into Wi-Fi permiscuous mode, it'll detect more flot cams.

So that firmware just came out a couple days ago. So constantly being added to. So if anyone has, you know, Mac addresses, OUIs, please contribute. It takes a village to raise a surveillance detection kid. Yeah, it allows people to then let crowd source or do community-based mapping of this stuff, right, to give people. And like, I know I have friends who have reported on gunshot detection software. Like, it won't surprise people to find out which communities are the most surveilled and which communities are the least surveilled, right? But it nonetheless is important.

Like, that's an important function in making that obvious to people. Likewise, drones. People might be thinking, why would I want to look for drones? Drones are super cool. I just fly them around to see the birds. You can explain that drones might also play a role in surveillance. Yeah, absolutely. I'm an avid drone flyer. So I developed this just for funsies, you know, and made a drone detector. And I quickly realized that the most frequent flyers are the PD, unfortunately, you know, surveilling the area. So it's really interesting to see. to see that they're flying, you know, more regularly than any hobbyist.

Yeah, yeah, this has become a big part of, like, cops you have to send up a helicopter to look at something from above, right? And they still do all the time. I hear that shit over my house every day, but they can also do it with it right now for much less money. But do you want to explain Ray Hunter a little bit for people who are, like, they're suddenly shocked by all of this and they want to turn their car into a beeping machine? Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

I will do that. I want to extol the virtues of We Spy for a little bit before that, though. Yeah. I mean, this is how I linked up with Colonel Panache because I thought this was such a really amazing project. And I think that it's, it serves a couple of purposes, right? I think that there's one very practical purpose of like this can help you map out the surveillance in your town, right? You can, you can export the data from this and upload it directly to lock mapper. right or there's some other site that'll help you like plot a route from point A to point B avoiding flock cameras which I think is really cool. It also just helps sensitize you to how many flock cameras are in your town. Like people yeah, like they they are unobtrusive to a degree, right?

Like they are easy, easy visual noise to just ignore. Yeah. Right. But when you're like, I was surprised by how much it went off in my town and then I'd look up And I'm like, oh, yeah, fly camera, flat camera, okay. Right? And it got me used to, like, spotting those cameras around, right? And I think that it's a really, it's a really useful piece of propaganda work, essentially, in that way to get people used to spotting these, to get people thinking about, well, where are these?

How many of these are there in my town? Right. Like, people are like, well, you could just go look for them. Yeah, but people don't, right? You've got other shit to do, yeah. Yeah, exactly. But if I hear that from the, you know, really loud buzzer, right? I know that something is going on, right?

It's more of a, it's a little more jarring. It's good in that way. Yeah, I see it as like a little, I don't know, imagine a little parrot sat on your shoulder and went, you're being spied on, you're being spied on, you're being spied on. Just constantly. Yeah, yeah, and you realize the extent to which that is happening. Surveillance, coal mine canary essentially, you know. Yeah, canary is better, better analogy.

Kind of like lying cat, but surveillance cat, right? Yeah, yeah. Instead of every time you're lying, it says that, it just says surveillance every time somebody's spying on you. Yeah. The other thing that I think is cool about no UI spy and Raimentor, and why I think these are good projects is it gives a lot of people something to do, right? Fascism can really make people feel helpless,

and this overarching surveillance can really make people feel helpless, and it's really easy for people to fall. into privacy nihilism and security nihilism, right? And just be like, well, I'm going to be watched constantly. There's nothing I can do. So, you know, screw it. Why do anything, right? And this gives people something to do, right?

There's a thing you can, and Americans love buying a thing, right? We love a gadget. And so there's a thing you can go buy or build or set up or whatever, right? And go start pushing back even just little by little on the surveillance around you, right? And then once you start doing one thing, it lowers the energy of activation. It becomes easy to do other things, right? It becomes easier to go to your city council and demand that they rip these cameras out. It becomes easier to find and organize with other people in your community, right? It becomes easier to start to, you know, think about direct action. You know,

in that sense, it becomes a bit of like propaganda by deed, right? Like, we're giving people the tool to get off their couch and start to push back and start to fight back and start to become a part of a community, right? So I think it's really important for that with Ray Hunter. So I already kind of described how it works. But we had we had a few goals with Ray Hunter. One was to figure out, you know, how often the South Side simulators were being used in the U.S. and around the world, but, you know, I live, I live here. So this is my main focus, but specifically how often they're being used to spy on protesters, right? Because we were getting this idea that a lot of activists thought that they were everywhere,

right? And I thought that other things were a much bigger threat, right? Like, there are things that I'm more concerned about, but also, cell site simulators stingrays are pretty mysterious, right? Like, we don't, we know the broad strokes of how they work, but we don't know the technical details of what exploits they are using to, you know, essentially trick people's phones into connecting to them, right? So this was a chance to try to get some ground truth information about that as well.

Yeah. And we have succeeded in that. We have a bunch of recordings from around the U.S. of things that we think are quite likely to be self-side simulators actively in use by law enforcement. And we've got some ideas about how they're working and what they're doing. And the other goal is that we wanted to try to calm down some of the fear and uncertainty. and doubt among activists about whether this was a threat model that they need to worry about and give people more accurate threat models, right?

Yeah. And like also give people, you know, a modicum of comfort, right? This is not a self-defense device, right? This is actually like at the end of the day, this is a data collect, like, not data collection. We're not collecting your data, but this is a research project. Yeah. We're collecting the data about like how often do we think we're actually seeing these, right? But it gives people a modicum of comfort too, right?

Because you have this, you have Ray Hunter with you, right? And if it doesn't go off, you're like, every time it doesn't go off, you're like, okay, you know, maybe this is not actually a threat model than I need to worry so much about, right? And then I hope you'll think, well, what do I need to worry about? Oh, probably things like Penlink, probably things like celebrate and the cops arresting me and making a copy of all the data on my phone. Yeah. Right. Probably other, you know, facial recognition and other things like that, which I think

are the things that you should be thinking about and worrying about. That's been the point of Ray Hunter, and I think it's been successful in that sense. Right. But yeah, we really, I mean, we want, we want more people to install this, right? Especially the next time ICE lays siege to a city, right? We want to have, we want to have them there. You know, late in the game to Minneapolis, a ground game got set up where we then had like a couple hundred of these on the ground in Minneapolis.

And we didn't find, we did not find anything in Minneapolis that we found, that we felt was conclusive evidence of an MC catcher. Well, ICE was there laying siege to the city. Hopefully, there is no next time they lay siege to a city. Yeah, hopefully that doesn't happen again. But if that does happen again, hopefully we can get sort of a ground game set up very quickly to try to determine if they're using this form of surveillance or not. So talking of surveillance, here are a couple of products and services.

If you buy them, that will probably result in your data being collected, which will in turn be sold, perhaps to an Israeli company who will sell to the cops. Shamba would never sell my data. Experience Harry Styles live in London, England at Wembley Stadium. This is Harry Styles. IHart Radio wants to send you

and a mate across the pond with flights from Virgin Atlantic, hotel from tripcentral.ca, tickets, and $1,000 cash. Here we got it! Download the free IHart Radio app. Listen to IHart new music for 10 minutes. Enter to win.

Day is another chance to see Harry Styles. Very excited to see you with the show. Kiss all the time. Disco occasionally available now. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel,

help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's that more singer in the group. The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group.

The yard herds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle age, one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get.

your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal, but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast's Superhuman documented it all,

embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you remember when Diana Ross double-tap Little Kim's boobs at the VMAs? Or when Kanye said that George Bush didn't like black people. I know what you're thinking. What the hell does George Bush got to do with Little Kim?

Well, you can find out on the Look Back at it podcast. I'm Sam J. And I'm Alex English. Each episode, we pick it here, unpack what went down, and try to make sense of how we survived it. including a recent episode with Mark Lamont Hill waxing all about crack in the 80s. To be clear, 84 was big to me, not just because of crack. I'm down to talk about crack all day, but just so y'all know.

I mean, at this point, Mark, this is the second episode where we've discussed crack, so I'm starting to see that there's a through line. We also have AIDS on the table right now, so... Thank you for finishing that sentence. Yes, I don't think there's a more important year for black people. Really? Yeah. For me, it's one of the most important years.

for black people in American history. Listen to look back at it on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We are back. I think that's really good explanation. It's like the value of these devices. The more you know, the more you know. And this is a struggle that I have on a daily basis at a moment.

There are so many things to be angry and scared about right now. We don't need to invent shit that we shouldn't be angry and scared about. We need to focus on the things that are a real threat. And there are things in this landscape, which are a real threat. And so I think it helps people to have that. Like, it's one thing to, yeah, go on flock map or whatever and be like, okay, well, they're there and there and there. It's another one to be like, well, shit.

In my going out to get a pizza with my friends, I was spied upon five times. And I think that it's very valuable. And at the same time, nobody tried to sell site spoof and get my information that way. I think that's very important. Let's talk a little bit about, like, how people can organize. San Diego has done a spectacular job of signing a contract that they can't stop paying for surveillance cameras. So even if we stop using them tomorrow, we would keep sending our taxpayer money to a spying company, which is great because our city is run by the sea. It will continue to be a shit show forever, apparently.

but like let's assume that other people have slightly more competent local government. What an amazing contract. I can't believe that they signed that. California politics is a shit show, but San Diego is a fucking joke. Many examples of this. Listen, my city council member just got indicted by the FBI on corruption charges. So in the year of our Lord 2025, he got indicted by the FBI. So like, how stupid do you have to be?

So I have no leg to stand on, but also in California. So it all tracks. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the great times on the left coast. Let's talk about how people have organized their communities against surveillance. Like, just to, like, paint a picture for folks here, right? Like, the flock camera does not know if you're doing a crime. The flock camera doesn't know if you came from another state to obtain reproductive health care. The flock camera doesn't know if you're a migrant parent popping out to get formula for your little baby.

it captures all of that shit, right? Like, there's a broad range of people in this country who are fucking disgusted at that, people who we might not be used to organizing with. But perhaps you guys could, like, explain, like, how, or if you're aware of instances where people have organized against state surveillance, it would be cool to hear about that. Yeah, I recently did a talk here in Asheville, North Carolina, at an event called Nerd Night.

And Nerd Night is essentially, it's a way to go to a bar without, just a bunch of drivel, you know, you go and then somebody does three talks, 15 minutes each. And so the host was kind enough to give me a 25-minute slot at the end to talk about flock cameras in our city here. And it just so happened to be happening before they tried to vote on a real-time intelligence center that centralized flock, axon, and all of our drone data into one just like wall of surveillance for the city. And so I did this talk, and a city council member showed up.

Our coolest city council member, Kim Roney, she showed up. And during the questions at the end, I was unsure because on our portal here, it said the APD says, you know, we don't share our data with outside agencies. And Kim Roney came up and confirmed that something like 4,000 agencies have access to our data. Yeah, we don't share them, but they can request and we just hand it over. So that's, that's what we're. one thing that we learned at that time. So this, this prompted a, a big push that was kind of happening for city council. So a lot of folks that came to that talk came to city council. And I'm

telling you, like, it's folks all over the board. I mean, this is Appalachia here. Nobody, nobody wants to be surveilled in these haulers, you know. Yeah. This is one of those areas where we can build really broad coalitions, like, of people who we might not agree on with, on everything. Like, this is a threat to anyone who wants to do almost anything apart from my guess just go shopping. One interesting point is that over 100 people showed up to city council. You know, this is new to me. I'm working on getting out there a little bit. And I seated my time to another speaker, but over 100 people showed up and then they

pulled it from the vote. They pulled it from the agenda. So lots of folks left, but then some folks stuck around for general comment and still got it out there. But, you know, we'll see what happens. down the line. They love to do that tactic. They did the same thing in Oakland when it was up for,

when it was up on the agenda. They said a ton of people showed up to discuss it. And then they were like, oops. No, never mind. We're going to pull that from the agenda today. Yeah. It's such a shady tactic.

But no, I mean, at EFF, we've seen similar things all over the country. You know, a ton of different cities have dropped their flock contracts. Recently, because of community pressure, right?

This doesn't happen in a vacuum. your city council doesn't care, right? They want to score easy political wins, right? Flock sells them this as an easy political win, right? They can stop carjackings, right? They can find car thefts. They can, they can, you know, do all these things that are popular. Nobody likes being car jacked.

Nobody likes having their car stolen, right? But when people show up to city council and push back and fight against this, it makes it not an easy political win, right? It makes it actually politically, bit poisonous to push these technologies. And it should be. We shouldn't be surveilled constantly just because we happen to be outside. And like, look, I would love to not have a car, right?

But this is America. Like, everybody drives all the time. That is the society we live in, unfortunately. Yeah. And you shouldn't be subject to surveillance just for participating in society. And like you said, I think we can build very broad coalitions around this, right? And we can start to, like, hey, you know, remember how, you know, how mad you were about flock? Like, yeah, wait until you find out about these other surveillance technologies, right?

Like, now let's talk about campaign finance and how all these companies you don't like are financing politicians, right? Like, you can, you can hold people to the left, and this is a good way to start interacting with those people. Yeah. Right? Even people on the right, even sort of are more, you know, the more libertarian folks. They hate them too. A lot of them have gone full Nazi, but the ones that haven't gone full Nazi, right,

like should really care about this stuff, right? And you can, you know, this can be a way in with them as well. Yeah, like everyone we can bring with us, we need to and everyone else fuck them. Yeah, absolutely. But I think this is a really good area to organize because all of us stand to lose something.

It's so fucking creepy when you realize the extent to which, like someone is watching or could be watching you. There's a million reasons where people could be mad at that. There's plenty of room for abuse, you know, there too. And it's been documented, you know. Yep. A recent video with Ben Jordan.

I mean, you know, oh, yeah. If you give people this kind of surveillance access, it's impossible to vet people on this level, you know. And if you give people who, you know, God-like surveillance power, what are they going to end up doing? And there's been cases where they've shown that police officers have surveilled their ex-partners and then consequently pulled that person over, which is just insane. Yeah, no, they've used this to stop people, to surveil current partners, ex-partners.

Like, the idea that police would never abuse their power is completely absurd. And anybody who is arguing that is not arguing in good faith, I think. Yeah. And yet, like, it is, not that the Dems are, like, necessarily, I mean, they're not on the side of goods, especially in this area. But it is a big blue state thing. Like, don't think that because you live in California, this isn't happening. Right.

This is very much happening. Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, to talk about that real quick, right? Like, we have, I am blanking on the bill number, but we have a law in California that prevents California police agencies from sharing data from flock with, from licenseally

in general, with outside agencies and with ICE. And it still happens all the time. Yeah. police just willfully ignore this law. I mean, like, we see immigration or ICE support as the reason they put down for searches, even though that's illegal. And when they don't do that, we know that ICE, you know, people in ICE had buddies in California law enforcement.

They text them. They say, hey, run this plate for me. Law enforcement texts, runs the plate, puts the reason down as investigation or crime or, you know, some other such nonsense. Yeah. And then, you know, sends the information back to ICE, right? We call that the good old boy system down here. Yeah, I'm here too.

And they've made a concerted effort to recruit people from local law enforcement all across the country. And this is part of why, right? Like, it gives a workaround. SB 54 is the California Values Act, which... Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, you are welcome. That is my shit.

There has never been a prosecution under SB 54 as far as I'm aware. This law exists, like, largely to make the politicians who passed it feel good. there are some parts about transferring people who are in detention already. But like these systems give so many workarounds, right? Or like if the data belongs to the company and not to the city or if it's stored on a server somewhere else, like all of these things provide potential workaround. So I don't think, I guess, that because your local city council member has tweeted about ice being bad, that that means.

that your flock cameras are not being used for that. It's very hard to ring fence this shit. Yeah, absolutely. If people want to learn more about this, if they want to maybe get a ray hunter, if they want to get a wee spy or a mesh detect, do you want to explain mesh detect for people really quickly? We didn't touch on that one.

Yeah, mesh detect is essentially, it's the first advice that I made, and its primary function was to detect drone remote ID. The FAA requires remote ID, which is any drone over, I believe it's 500, grams has to transmit pilot location and drone location in real time, either via BLE or Wi-Fi, which is pretty whack for like, you know, amateur flyers that just want to fly around. But that being said, it's a great Ocent tool.

So I started with that. And essentially, what this does is mesh detect. It takes that detection and sends it over mesh-tastic Laura networks. So you can set up a, for instance, set up a. for instance, set up a node way out somewhere, and then you can have it sends you a message down the line when a drone comes by over mesh-tastic, or you can set it up somewhere and have it say, okay, there's a body cam down here, or whatever device, a Tesla, anything, you know, a lot of devices randomize their OUI these days, mostly phones, but there's plenty that don't easily detectable.

So send it over mesh. It just gives you a network of detection, essentially. So if people wanted to get a We Spy, to get a mesh detect, how would they do, how they go about it? What are the ways they could get or make one? Yeah, I have a website called Kernelpanic. Tech, and it's C-O-L-O-N-E-L. It's a little bit of a play on words, but these devices, like, if you really need one of these things, hit me up, we'll talk. But also, it's just two wires, you know, like you can take my design and just reverse engineer it and copy it. And I put the wiring on my GitHub. Every bit of this is open source.

So if you look up Colonel Panic GitHub, you can take this and make it on your own. I've made home assistant integration. So like if a UI pops up around your house, you can just get an alert via your smart home. You could just go on there, you know, dev it out. If you see something that's that I screwed up, just let me know. And I'll fix it or we'll collab. So it's all open source. Yeah.

How about Ray Hunter? Yeah. So folks can go to rayhunter.ef.org, and that is our Rayhunter documentation. That's the Ray Hunter book, essentially. And there you can find links on where to buy the hardware. We do not sell the hardware, but you can buy the hardware on eBay or Amazon sometimes. The orbic is what people use in the U.S. primarily. It's in like South America.

In Europe and parts of Africa, there's a, TP link device that fits the bill better for those areas. And once you buy the hardware, you can install the software on it there. The hardware, unfortunately, is not open source because, like I said, we didn't build the hardware. We're just repurposing old hardware, right? When the project started, you could buy the hardware for like 10 or 20 bucks. Now it's harder to find because people have bought out a lot of the supply and other

scalpers have wised up to the fact that people are trying to buy these. So unfortunately, we've created a whole, like, mini market. I'm a market maker, God damn it. We've a hyper-capitalist right here. But, no, there's a whole, you know, mini market of people selling, like, already installed Ray Hunters on eBay and stuff. I don't recommend paying more than, like, 40 or 60 bucks for the hardware. But then, yeah, the software is free.

It's free. It's open source, right? It's on GitHub. You can go edit it right now. And, you know, I know, I know there's a lot. lot of tech folks that listen to this show. And I just want to say, like, there's so many cool opportunities for counter surveillance, right? Like, we keep kind of, kind of mentioning that, like, a lot of police hardware is made by this company Axon, and it has a very unique

Bluetooth signature that can be easily detected, right? There's a lot of really interesting stuff that you can do with counter surveillance. And the chip that the OUI spy runs on, the ESP 32, is this really powerful little. that only costs like six bucks if you buy them wholesale. And it's got Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a bunch of really cool capabilities that you could use to make some really cool counter-surveillance stuff. And so I really want to encourage the tech-minded folks

to think about this. Come look at these projects, you know, come, write your own code or make your own projects, right? But like, the quote from hackers, and as you're beautifully designed PC board says, Colonel, we can snoop on to them as they snoop onto us, right? Exactly. We need to spy back, right?

We need to raise the cost of them spying on us, right? And that's like, sorry, that brings me to another tangent. What's really cool about these products is, like, you can build Ray Hunter for about 20 bucks, right? You could buy a beautiful PC board and the already assembled thing from Colonel for, you know, a few dozen dollars. I don't know these price off my heads. I don't want to say.

Or you could build one for, you know, under 20 bucks, right? Yep. And you are then, for, you know, 20 or 40 bucks, you are making useless a surveillance tool and surveillance network, which costs hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, right? The economics here are on our side. Yeah. Right. Like, this is just like any sort of asymmetrical warfare, right? Like, it costs millions and billions and really billions of dollars for the governments of the U.S. to set up this surveillance economy. And we can defeat it for, you know, 20 or 40 bucks each, right? Like, we can do this a lot longer than they can. They will go broke before we do. And I think that that's really important, right? Like, the asymmetry here and the economics here are actually on our side.

Yeah. And it's also, like, it's cool to understand and make stuff. I am very good at fixing things that work on, you know, like, explosion happens and piston lifts, right? Like, that's my wheelhouse. I can fix my truck. I can fix my bicycle. Are you saying you like ice?

Internal combustion engines? In many ways, both ices will be the end of all of us. I enjoy to fix one. I like to look at it and go like, aha, okay, this goes bang and then this goes up. And it's cool to learn this stuff. It's cool to learn a new skill, especially like once you get into your 30s.

It's good to learn shit. Yeah. And this is approachable, especially like the guides for these are very approachable, even if you're not like a tech punk, if this is your first time going on GitHub. And that there are people you can reach out to,

like real nice people. You won't get an AI tech support. Someone will help you understand this shit, and that is cool. There's a platform called M5 Stack that makes it really easy. So, like, you get a Zhao ESP 32, but M5 Stack makes it so that,

like, you don't even have to do soldering, and they have drag-and-drop coding. Oh, cool. So you can just plug in, sensors and things like you can make a drone detector out of one of those and already has like a screen on board and so like it's super cheap and you could just debit out really hard and just go for it you know it's it's it's easy for makers nowadays like like in the 50s right you'd have to have an entire military and industry complex behind you to do this kind of stuff right or a corporation

and now you can just just make yourself a little thing in your house it's really cool yeah and like I was in Minnesota there at the time when lots of ICE and CBP agents were too when they took a lot of people

and killed two people and like one of the things that was beautiful about that really horrible time was that everyone was so locked in

like to include grandmothers to include a dude with a sign that said what would Ronald Reagan do like no one of those people

in their town right and that requires everyone to do what they do best. Not everyone can be out on a street corner, whistle in a whistle or driving around, right? Some people that have a really powerful skill set. And if you are someone who can't be out, you can still help create these. You can help code this stuff. Like, it's beautiful when our

resistance takes the best from all of us. And then we are all better because of that. Absolutely. Beautifully said. Anything you guys would like to plug before we go, websites, mutual aid projects, favorite snacks, whatever you want. Take a peek at deflock.m.m. I have nothing to do with that project yet, but, you know, they map in the flog cams.

You can use these detectors as supplementary devices to confirm or to find things you haven't seen. But other than that, just kernelpanic.com. And definitely check out EFF. They got a lot of good stuff going on and they've been doing it since the early days. Yeah.

I guess I'll plug EFF's surveillance self-defense guys specifically. That's at sSD.eff.org. We got it. We're the only continuously updated and longest maintained security guides. There's also the activist checklist, which is a really great, another really great resource. The surveillance self-defense guides are almost like a textbook. Like there's a lot of info there.

But if you just need the quick and dirty Clif Notes version, activist checklist is really great for that, right? And they're doing a good job keeping that up. A lot of respect to them. And then, yeah, check out, you know, Rayhunter.e.f.org for Rayhunter stuff. Colonelpanic.com for his stuff since he plugged my stuff. I guess the other thing that I will plug is Open Archive, which is a nonprofit that I'm on the board of. They're making an app called Save, which allows you to securely record, archive and verify videos of whatever you want, say, such as human rights abuses or, you know, police, atrocities or things of that nature.

And so I recommend that project. Go check them out. They're really good folks. If you're doing a lot of cop watch type stuff, that's a good place to go. Fantastic. Well, thank you very much for joining us. That was great. Thank you for having us. Thank you. It Could Happen here is a production of Coolzone Media.

For more podcasts from Coolzone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite.

Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an acapella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes.

Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential.

Either way, the podcast's superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the I-Hard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, what's good, y'all? You're listening to Learn the Hard Way

with your favorite therapist and host, Kear Games. This space is about black men's experiences, having honest conversations that it's really not safe to have anywhere, but you're having them with a licensed professional who knows what he's doing. How many men carry a suit or armor? It signals to the world that you're not to be played with, And just because you have the capability that does not mean that you need to.

Listen and learn the hard way on the AHA radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. My mother-in-law spent years sabotaging our relationship until Karma made her pay for it. All right, Sophia, tell me about how we started this story. She moved in for two weeks, lasted five days, left a mess, and then pressed her ear against their bedroom door and burst in screaming. When kicked out to a hotel, she called her son-in-law's workplace, pretending his partner had been rushed to the hospital by ambulance. She faked a medical emergency.

And spoiler, that was just the beginning. To find out how it ends, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.