Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - AI Spy Towers And Mass Surveillance Tech Coming To Your Town Next

Episode Date: October 9, 2026

Have you noticed surveillance cameras appearing in your community?SUPPORT MY WORK: Buy a paid subscription to my newsletter at https://www.usermag.co         Support my work on Patreon: http://patreon.com/taylorlorenzFor decades, the US-Mexico border has served as a proving ground for invasive, next-generation surveillance tech like AI surveillance towers, cameras hidden in traffic cones, license plate readers, drones, and spy balloons. Now, those same tools, autonomous AI watchtowers, hidden license plate readers (ALPRs), thermal imaging trucks, and military aerostat blimps, are moving into domestic US cities, suburbs, and neighborhoods. On this week's episode of Free Speech Friday, I’m joined by Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to discuss his reporting on border surveillance and the expanding systems that track people’s movements.Dave explains what he found during his latest trip along the border, how Anduril’s AI-powered surveillance towers operate, and why people living in border communities are caught in these systems. We also discuss Flock Safety, Axon, automated license plate readers, and the connections between local police surveillance and federal immigration enforcement.Who can access the data? How is it used? And what happens when technology promoted as a way to catch criminals is used to investigate protesters or monitor ordinary people?In this conversation, we cover:• AI border surveillance and the “virtual wall”• License plate readers concealed in roadside objects• Surveillance balloons, thermal cameras, and police drones• How military technology moves into domestic policing• Phone location data brokers and social media monitoring• Privacy, free speech, and the “nothing to hide” argument• Public records requests and community efforts to challenge surveillanceSupport my independent journalism and subscribe to User Mag:https://www.usermag.coYou can also support this series through Patreon: http://patreon.com/taylorlorenzSupport the Electronic Frontier Foundation:https://www.eff.orgExplore the Atlas of Surveillance:https://atlasofsurveillance.org

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free of charge. BetMGEMGEMP operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. Is this a person? And is this a car? Is this a dog? Is it somebody on a bike? We don't know how it tells the difference between somebody who's a hiker and somebody who is a migrant. We don't know how it tells the difference between a drug smuggler and a farmer. No administration has released any data on how this technology works. For decades, the U.S.-Mexico border has served as a laboratory for next-generation surveillance technology. Horrific invasive experimental tools are being deployed in border towns

long before most Americans have ever even heard about them. David Moss, director of investigation, at the Electronic Frontier Foundation knows this better than anyone. Because for over a decade, he has cataloged the expansion of surveillance technology like AI-powered watchtowers, hidden license plate readers, drones, thermal cameras, spy balloons, and more. Last week, he traveled down to the U.S.-Mexico border to do firsthand reporting on what it's like on the front lines of the surveillance state. Today, we're going to be discussing what he found. The insane new technology that our government is deploying at the border,

that you've probably never even heard of, and how more of this dangerous technology is making its way from the border into cities throughout the United States, maybe even in your own backyard. This is one of the most important episodes that I've done in a while. It's literally everything that I care about, and it's why I started my Free Speech Friday series.

So if you can comment, like, share this video. It helps so much. And please, please support my work on Patreon via the link below or by buying a paid subscription to my substack newsletter at usermag.com. I'm so grateful to Dave for joining me today. Dave, welcome to Free Speech Friday. Happy to be here.

So you just got back from the border on a trip that sounds pretty cool and interesting, but also slightly horrifying. Can you tell me what you're up to there? Sure. About three times a year, I head down to the border to document surveillance technology. And so I get a hopefully if the rental car gives it to me a nice four-wheel drive vehicle. And we drive the whole border. We set a position in this week.

It was from San Diego all the way to San Luis, Arizona. And so we document the locations of surveillance towers. We document what are called covert license plate readers, which are these hidden plate readers usually in like cones that they put by the side of the road. And we'll look out for trail cameras and these surveillance trucks called mobile surveillance capabilities. We'll just basically look for how things are changing at the border year to year. And then we have a map that we have online that we keep showing how all of this stuff

comes together to create the so-called virtual wall. And then we meet with people. We meet with people and see how all this stuff is impacting that. Tell me a little bit about what you found, and let's talk about the technology first. What are some things that you noticed have changed this year? What were some new things that you spotted on the border? The big thing is the change in the Anderal Surveillance Tower. So a few years ago, they started installing Andrel Industries AI powered towers.

And typically these are these 30-foot-high towers that you see swiveling around because they're controlled by an AI. And they're indexing everything. But they can only see for about 1.5 miles. So regularly you'll see one every one and a half miles. And as you move out of range of one to the other, it continues to track you. But now, to compete with some of the other companies, Anderall has unveiled an extended range century tower. And these can see five to seven miles. And so I saw some of those for the first time.

They had replaced two of them at the border. Now, all of this is a little bit worrisome because while up until now they've only had about 300 of these at the border, CBP recently announced that it wants to have 2,300 of these at the border. That is a huge increase. And so driving the border, we're going to have to do this regularly to see how quickly these start going up. The thing that's wild about is these towers cost about $1.2 million a piece. On top of that, the contract for just maintaining these towers is about half a billion dollars over five years. And yet, one of the things we notice at the border that just makes us roll our eyes is that you'll often see these series of tires strapped together, strapped to an axle, and then these things are pulled on the back of an ATV.

They're called drag tires because they drag the road clear so the dirt roads are nice and blank, and then they just come back to see if their footsteps across it. And that might cost like, what, $100 at a Home Depot? But that seems to be the number one thing Border Patrol uses. And then you have these useless million dollar towers everywhere that are just gathering up data on everyone who lives at the border. I'm wondering about that, especially if they can surveil five to seven miles around the towers. Does this mean that these Andrewel towers are surveilling people that live in these border towns as well? that seems like a significant amount of reach.

I mean, the number one population being surveilled are people who live at the border, both on the U.S. side and the Mexican side. You go someplace like Laredo, Texas. There's one of these in almost every public park along the Rio Grande, watching children. There's 360 degrees, and they're indexing everything. And I don't think they know the difference between a migrant coming across and a Mexican American from Laredo.

If you go to Mission, Texas, I think it's called the Chimney Park RV Park, You have this tower right next to this RV park, and it can't even see the border. All it can do is surveil the people who are living in this RV park. I think that the public has this concept of the border is this barren wasteland where there isn't anybody except drug smugglers and human traffickers. And they don't fully realize that there are lots of people who live at the border on the U.S. side. But all of the cities on the Mexican side are like the biggest cities in their respective states. So it's surveilling all sorts of innocent people in Mexico who have nothing to do with any criminal activity. You mentioned that these towers are powered by AI now.

Can you talk about that? Because I feel like AI is helping to enable so much mass surveillance. What sort of AI technology is being integrated into these towers? And how, aside from just being able to surveil farther, how have these towers evolved over the years past that they've sort of been upgraded with the rise of AI? So before even CBP exists, remember, that's an entity that was only created in the Patriot Act era. The long-term dream has been to have these cameras that can automatically identify somebody, crossing the border and then alert law enforcement. Hey, go intercept this person. And what we see is this pattern every three to five years where Border Patrol rolls out one of these programs and

gives it a cool name like America Shield Initiative or the Secure Border Initiative or Autonomous Surveillance Tower Program. Like, does these are ridiculous names? But every three to five years, they do it. And then there's a government accountability office report, Inspector General report, a House Oversight report that finds that it's sending officers out on false positives, the time. It's not having any impact. It's wasting money. They're breaking all the time. And then Border Patrol is like, oh, our bad. Okay, we'll cancel the program. And then the next year, they roll out the same strategy with a different cool name. And that's been the process for like more than 25 years now. Finally, now they're doing the same thing, but they're like, well, we're going to

put AI on it. And what this means is that the AI is constantly scanning, constantly indexing everything it sees. Is this a person? Is this a dog? Is it somebody on a bike? And then it alerts border patrol when there's somebody that they think they should intercept. Thing is, there's no independent auditing of this. We don't know what it's doing. We know it's tracking people on video and continues to track them on radar, but we don't know how it tells the difference between somebody who's a hiker and somebody who's a migrant. We don't know how it tells the difference between a drug smuggler and a farmer.

We don't know how it looks at a kid of a kids like a Guatemalan refugee or a kid's a Mexican-American Laredo resident playing basketball. I don't think it can do that. And no administration has released any data or had any independent check on how this technology works. But my general theory about all of this is that it never has worked and it's never going to work, that it's just a big show that is collecting data on people at the border, but has actually no impact whatsoever. And I think that if you're somebody who is a border hawk who a top issue is locking down the border,

you should be really pissed off about this. If you're somebody who's for open borders and human rights, you should be pissed off about this. It doesn't serve anybody except political theater. And I know I'm kind of rambling on right now, but one thing I like to say is that people will ask me, well, is this effective? And I'm like, effective at what?

We have an administration's like, we're being invaded. There's no invasion at the border. It's like asking questions like, are these towers good at repelling dragons from entering the United States? And the answer is either they're 100% effective because dragons haven't entered the United States or they're zero percent effective

because dragons don't exist. That's kind of my feelings on all this. Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly.

If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor. Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. In addition to these Andrew Towers, you mentioned that there's a lot of these license plate readers. And this has been such a big topic online. I'm making a whole separate video and all the flock discourse. But suddenly there's been this trend online where people are starting to notice these cameras more and more and get angry about them.

Are cameras like flock and Axon, Motorola, whatever? Are they also part of this border surveillance scheme? Or is that more for like the local police departments? So the answer is yes. But if I may, I want to derail for a second and tell you something that I found fascinating. I was on a panel at San Diego Comic-Con over the weekend about this video game called Watchdogs 2. It's 10 years old. It's about a bunch of hacktivists taking on tech bros in the government.

And during the panel, I was asked this question, what technology do you wish had stayed in fantasy land? And I said, has anybody heard about this company, flock safety? The audience booed, like 2,000 people just booed flock safety at Comic-Con. And you never hear booze at Comic-Con. And I was just blown away. I was blown away. That the movement on this is for real. It's not just a bunch of us civil liberties folks who've been yelling about this for 12 years,

but it's huge. I was so blown away. The one thing that seems to be uniting our country right now is this anger against flock. Flock, of course, they're putting it all on Axon. Like if you talk to the flock comms person, which is ironically the old Netflix comms person, they're like, oh, this is just a sci-op from Axon. And it's true that a lot of the contracts are being canceled for flock and replaced by Axon, which is just as evil of a company if not more, although it's publicly traded.

So there's a little merchants fancy. But it's like really heartening to me that people are getting angry about it. To hear that people are booing about it, I just think it's really good that even if these companies are paying clippers online to smear each other, ultimately what you've done is raised people's awareness of mass surveillance. And I think that that's generally good. We should cancel all these contracts. That's cool that people were so mad.

I think it's rich for flock because in 2016, 2017, everything that you're hearing now was being directed at a company called Vigilant Solutions that was by Motor Oilersers. They were selling data at ICE. They were enabling ridiculous sharing. They were being abused. And Flock jumps in, sees this moment to be like, we're the ethical ALPR company. We've got a 30-day retention period. We've got more robust auditing controls.

We're fantastic. So places started switching. People were canceling their Motorola vigilant contracts and switching to Flock. And now Flock starts sharing with Customs and Border Patrol. They start pushing wide-scale sharing. They start acting irresponsibly. And then they're like, oh, this is a SIEOP. And I'm like, no.

You knew this was going to happen to you. You saw this happen. You capitalized on it. And then you just did the same practices. And now you're surprised. Also, you're putting them up everywhere in people's communities. There's one I can see from my backyard. Every day I have to go outside and look at this freaking flock camera from my backyard when I'm drinking my coffee.

And you're telling me you're surprised. People are mad that they're now seeing it throughout their communities. No, it's not shocking. And, you know, Axon is just as bad. We criticize Axon. People are criticizing Axon. Motorol is bad. El-Sag's bad.

Pips is bad. all bad. But to your question about whether this feeds into the network, yes, the network being used by ICE and Border Patrol predates whatever we see with flock. I have seen agreements where there's this entity called HIDA, the high-intensity drug trafficking area. It's like part of the White House Office of Drug Policy. They give money to Hidda these quasi-governmental nonprofits, and then they give money to local agencies. And we've seen, particularly in border areas, the Hidda will give money to, like, say El Centro Police Department in Southern California and say, in exchange for these flock cameras you're going to buy with this money, you have to share this data with the National Hiddle Law

Enforcement Database or the Drug Enforcement Administration's national license plate reader system. There's this trade that's been going on for a long time. Customs of Board Protection briefly has a period where they access the flock network. No, I mean, this is baked into the whole system. But in California, it's illegal to do that. In California, it's illegal for law enforcement to share with ICE. Have they done it before? Yes.

But the attorney general is cracking down on that. And so one of the things that Border Patrol does to get around that is they install their own license plate readers. And you have them at all the checkpoints. They've been there for a long time. But now over the last few years, you see these traffic cones. I did a video on this. It's so shady. And when I drive around L.A. now, I feel like I look at all of them twice where I'm like,

is that secretly a camera? Because they really do blend in so much. Oh, yeah. So we drive around. We've been identifying them. Sometimes they're just these nondescript white trailers. They leave by the side of the roads. The ones that you're probably most likely to see within a city are things that look like speed limit 25. You're going whatever. Those are not there to tell you to slow down. They're not there to remind you of the speed. They're there to disguise the fact that they're collecting your license plates as you drive past. You know, I live in Reno and you can't drive from Reno into California without passing one or vice versa. And those also were paid for by federal entities and require the sharing of federal deal. data with the feds. In addition to video AI surveillance, what other technology is being deployed in invasive ways and what other surprising things did you come across in your recent trip? Oh gosh. So they have these two different kinds of trucks, one called a mobile vehicle surveillance

system, but now they've changed it to like a modular mobile surveillance to an M2S2, which also has AI attached to it. God, they put AI in everything. Yeah, everything is AI now. And these are just Chevy pickups with these telescoping masts that come up. And then somebody just sits inside watching the video. You have ones that are similar that have long-range thermal imaging. One of the things that blows me away are these trail cameras.

They're often called Buckeye cameras. There's another brand called Briconics. But they were designed for wildlife professionals to put them next to a stream to get motion triggered to identify every wildcat in the area. But they use these to track people now. And oh my gosh, I've never seen one of the super disguised ones. I saw one in a tree once in Arizona. We did see them attached to all kinds of poles on our trip,

like electrical poles, but there are humanitarian groups who just text me photos all the time every time they find one, and they will put glue on them and then cover them with dirt and stick them against a rock. They will put up a stack of tires that look like somebody dumped tires by the side of the road, but then they'll secretly cut a hole in it and put one in there. One time they put up a falling rock sign, and if you looked really carefully, they'd cut holes in it and put a camera in the back of it. It's just wild. And these aren't necessarily ones that are in urban areas, but ranchers have found them on their land. And multiple times I've heard a story where a rancher or a farmer will find one on their property,

they'll call up customs and border protection and say, hey, are these one of yours? And border patrol will be like, we can neither confirm nor deny. And they're like, okay, I'm going to destroy it. And then they're like, oh, no, no, no, we'll show up and get it. Don't destroy it because they're thousands of dollars or something. So we'll find those all over the border. And they're usually attached to where called unattended ground sensors. These are things that detect footsteps.

So there's so much weird little things that have been at the border. And it's not like the Trump administration put it up. It's a trajectory across administration, administration, administration, of the strategy of let's just throw stuff at the border and see if it works. Well, I feel like the border is also just such a testing ground for technology that ultimately makes its way further into our national surveillance systems. It seems like a lot of this technology is ultimately used against American citizens. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Are they testing a lot of technologies here that are deployed domestically? Yeah. So for me, the general trajectory, and it doesn't always work this way, is war zone, border, inside cities in the border, and then inside cities in the interior of the country. That's a very clear thing that we see over and over again. And not like metaphorically, like literally, you will see these giant aerostat, these giant spy blimps that can see for 15 miles. And those literally were in Afghanistan and Iraq. The military is like, oh, we're going to upgrade to the new model. We'll hand it down to our little brothers at the border.

and then they just hire veterans who worked on those abroad to be contractors to run them in the Rio Grande Valley or in Southern New Mexico or in Arizona. And then they just use that to surveil supposedly the border. But 15 miles at the border is 15 miles inland and 15 miles across the border. And you see that with license plate readers. You see that with face recognition. The infamous one is drones. The predator drones abroad, the predator drones at the border. And then suddenly you see medium-sized drones handed down from the Department of Defense.

And then you see the small drones. And then suddenly Chula Vista, a border city, is the first city to have what's called the drone's first responder program. This means drones are just flying around in response to 911 calls all the time. Plock released a marketing video about one of their new first responder drones. And those are just flying surveillance devices. I want to say it's like a first responder, but really it's just a pretext to start collecting more data in different ways on the public. So it's definitely the trajectory. If you're watching this video and you like my work, please support me on Patreon via the link below

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Can you go a little bit deeper on these AeroStat balloon? because that sounds so dystopian. I feel like I see the good year blimp in L.A. sometimes, but that sounds like something out of a sci-fi novel with giant balloons that would surveil over our cities. I mean, historically, there have been these giant aerostats. They're called tethered aerostat radar systems. They've been there for decades that just do long-range radar. But in the mid-2000s, they started installing these smaller tactical aerostats that do long-range video.

We had four at the Rio Grande Valley, but now they're expanding everywhere. There's a new one in Sanderson. There's three in southern New Mexico. There's one in Arizona. There's one in South Padre Island. They've proposed one to be in San Diego sector, probably in San Clementi. And these things can see for 15 miles. In 2022, if you are a resident of Nogales, Arizona, you woke up one day and one of these

was just flying over your city. And Border Patrol gave no warning whatsoever. So everyone was freaked out. CBP didn't tell them, this is what we're doing, this is why we're doing. it was just suddenly up in the air and they didn't tell them what their capabilities are. But remember, if you can see 15 miles and you're above the city, that means you can pretty much zoom in on somebody's window for one of these aerostats. And it was freaky, freaky, freaky.

But in terms of border strategy, the thing that boggles my mind is that happened in 2022, but just the year before, they said they were going to end the program. And then in 2022, when the one in Nogales went up, they said, well, actually, we're going to quintuple the program. And then the next year, they said, well, we don't need these anymore. We're going to decommission them all. And then the next year you saw more installed in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, and Columbus, New Mexico, and then we're seeing ones in Sanderson.

And I'm like, well, how do you reverse yourself four times in four years? And then the really wild thing is the one in South Padre Island last year broke free from its tether, flew like 400 miles and landed on somebody's property outside of Dallas. But Congress on both sides will just green light this stuff because they all want to see good on border security because of this ongoing propaganda that the border is something. how the most dangerous place when any border city is going to be way chiller than any major urban area. There's just so much scaremongering and it's bipartisan. Both parties love mass surveillance. The only other thing that comes to mind that I would like to hear these checkpoints at the border,

which are just the biggest farce. There are checkpoints, dozens of them everywhere and you have to pass through them, but it's just blatantly instant racial profiling. Do you mean like checkpoints to get over the border? No, those are ports of entry. I'm talking about the ones that are set up on highways. So if you're driving from, you know, I live in LA, if I'm driving down to Mexico, I would imagine going through a checkpoint at the border, because again, you have to give your passport over at some point. But are there any other impediments before then that people are being stopped for? So throughout the border, they set up these checkpoints and some of them are permanent and some of them are just tactical and temperate. Like where people are crossing or? No, these are just like, you're

driving from San Diego to El Centro, you're driving from Las Cruces to Albuquerque, they are inland and often 50, 60, 70 miles inland. And you have to go through. You have to line up where your car passes a license plate reader system that captures the front, back side of your vehicle, the passengers in there. Stores that data for 15 years, by the way. 15 years of your travel patterns are sitting on their servers. And then you go through and you see that they've got these X-ray trucks parked, there's cameras everywhere. And then you roll up on a Border Patrol. officer who just kind of looks at you and goes, okay, go through and you're just being instantly racially profiled. They don't ask if you're a U.S. citizen. They just look at you and like,

yeah, you're not a migrant worker. Then they just wave you through. But part of it also is that this is just a data collection point these days. They don't even want to see your papers because they just want to collect data on you. And it's funny for a long time for a lot of them were closed on Sundays, as if drug smugglers don't work on Sundays. They just take the day off. They're just like, we're just going to shut them down. But they still made you drive through it because because they really wanted that data on you. And people do get stopped there. People do get searched there.

There's this one Instagram dude who I just love his videos of him just talking back to them every time. Very polite way, just being like, no, sir, yes, sir. And they're like, can I search your video? Like, no, can we bring the dogs out? He's like, no, because your dog scratched my car once, sir, so I don't want the dogs coming out. And he must be like 20 or 22 or something. It's just great seeing him talk back.

But these systems were breached in 2019 and face recognition data and license plate reader data on regular people just made it onto the dark web and I tell people with ALPR systems, if Border Patrol, which until last year was the best funded law enforcement agency in the United States, if they can be breached, then any agency can be breached. And obviously, ICE is now the largest law enforcement agency, but they've got license plate readers as well. So you also talk to people that actually live and work and exist in this system. When you were down there on this trip and previous journeys, what did you learn from actually speaking to the communities there? Two things come to mind. One is we talked to this guy named Sam Shul.

His family owns the Desert View Tower, which is an infamous tourist trap since the 1920s. This is this beautiful stone tower that you can see the entire valley. And then there's these bolder sculptures that were carved by some random artist during the Great Depression. But that was for a period one of the most heavily trafficked crossings on migrants' routes. It's actually called Smuggler's Gulch over there. But there's an Andral Tower just right across from its property. You can't go on the road without passing a license plate reader every day. And it does have a chilling effect on him.

He doesn't know what they're collecting on him. He doesn't know where it's going. It's just a constant level of feeling under suspicion and also just uncertainty about what the government is collecting and when they're going to act on it against it. And that really struck pretty deeply with me. And we talked to somebody in Imperial County as well. And I don't want to go into too many details about who this person is, but they had talked about their grandmother who also has gotten stopped multiple times because of license plate readers,

but also had ice show up at her house the other day because some vehicle, 20 years ago was associated with an undocumented person, and they, for lack of a better lead, showed up to her house to see if that person was still there. And it was just so surprising, especially since that information was so old. Yeah. Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMDM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly.

19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone, close to you. Please contact connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor, free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. That's horrifying. A lot of people, you know, when you hear about this, and I feel this sometimes, too, it feels so overwhelming, and you almost feel like a conspiracy thirst driving around and

being like surveillance camera, especially when they hide so much, right, and they harvest so much data on all of us. And I debunk this idea that we have nothing to hide a lot. But have you seen this misused frequently? Because when you go to these companies and you talk to their comms, people, they'll be like, we're really catching criminals. This is almost never used against innocent people. Of course, we know that that's not really true. But have you seen any real concrete examples where this stuff is used to chill speech or harm innocent people? With the flock cameras, we absolutely see in the search logs that this data has been used to go after protesters. It's very clearly in there. They actually literally say, no kings. They'll be like,

what was the reason for the search? No Kings protest. They'll just put that in there. We've seen them explicitly name an animal rights group called Direct Action Everywhere. Their initials are DXE. We see them put DXE in there quite frequently. But keep in mind that Flock has encouraged police to search the entire nation for every single possible thing. And so they're going to come in and say, well, this was used in X percent of crimes. Being used versus solving the crime are two very different things. And if you're telling police that no matter what the crime is, if it's a loud muffler on a vehicle or it's a kidnapping, you should use it no matter what.

Well, then, yeah, it's going to be used in everything. You might as well say was your iPhone used in 100% of crimes because every officer is walking around with a smartphone. It doesn't mean anything. It's meaningless. The most horrifying case that I covered was about the way that ALPR cameras was used to track a woman getting an abortion. It was in Texas, and I think they searched 83,000 cameras to track down and surveil this woman.

And we're seeing a lot more of these systems leveraged against people for protesting for all sorts of things. And I imagine that the border tech will also be weaponized in that way. Well, I mean, L.A. Taco had a really great cartoon that illustrates something I've said a lot. It was the other day where it's a panel with one person on the left saying, I have no problem with master balance because I'm not doing anything wrong. And the other person says to them until they change the definition of what's wrong. And I think people don't fully appreciate it. When flock comes in and says, we're on a mission to end all crime, nobody asks, well, what crime are you talking about? Because people think automatically crime, stolen vehicles, carjack is, kidnappings, rape, that kind of thing.

But what a crime is is a very political thing. It is decided by elected officials who decide what is a crime and what's not a crime. And things very dramatically between California and Texas. In Texas, it's against the law to assist somebody in getting an abortion. In California, it is against the law to impede somebody trying to get an abortion. Those are polar opposite things. So if we can't agree on what a crime is or isn't, that undermines this idea that everybody should be sharing data freely and searching all the time.

And it's not just abortion. It's cannabis. I live in Nevada. It's prostitution. It's gun ownership. Gun ownership changes dramatically from state to stay. And that's, I think, one of the reasons we see a lot of people on the right making a lot of noise on this. In 2013, CBP was found putting a license plate reader outside of a guns show in

Carl's Bad. Now, Rand Paul is going to say that as a Second Amendment issue. I see it as a First Amendment issue. We have a right to congregate no matter what thing it is you care about. I don't really care about gun ownership, but I do recognize that if you are a fan boy of guns, then you have a right to congregate with other fan boys of guns. And I shouldn't gender that because there's plenty of fan girls and fan vays for guns as well. But nevertheless, it was a first one. Amendment issue to me. But yeah, people should be pissed about that. And I would say that people should recognize that this is not like a new thing. This is how it has always been. It is inherently a technology that is used to go after innocent people. People think that,

oh, this is used for criminals, therefore it's only collecting data on criminals. No, the only reason it works is that it collects data on all of us and essentially builds these dossiers on all this. And then they start adding generative AI to it. And you're able to say, hey, somebody driving a red Toyota was involved in a crime. Show me every red Toyota in the city. And then you start going down the list and looking up people's personal lives for nothing other than the fact that you thought a red Toyota Corolla would be cool. I cover the influencer industry a lot, and they are some of the most surveilled people on earth, collectively surveilled. They are surveilling themselves by live streaming themselves all day. And I think what's so interesting is

reporting on these influencer dramas and controversies, which are like fundamentally celebrity news. These streamers will get involved in some controversy and they'll be like, here's all the footage of me. They literally live their life 24-7 on stream. And yet, the more footage you have, the more people can just make up any narrative about you because there is any footage out there to support it. And I mean, it's ultimately a story about mass surveillance, but it's obviously true when you talk about these non-influencer people that get targeted by the ALPR cameras. One other thing, I just want to ask, you're such an expert in the border security space. And I know at the EFF, you guys put together this massive document of all of the Homeland Security border vendors. We all know the name of some of these companies flock.

And I guess Andrel is one that some people have heard of. But what are some of these other companies that you think have flown under the radar that people should know about doing nefarious things? I guess I should say that should be on people's radar. Well, I mean, the first one that comes to mind is a company called cobwebs that does a couple of things. One is it sells phone location data that it just buys off the open market. I think people don't realize that when you're downloading your game app or your Bible app or your dictionary app or your weight tracking app or whatever it is.

And it asks for your location data, it isn't necessarily doing that because it wants to help you. It's also doing that because it wants to sell ads to you. But the company itself doesn't want to sell ads. They want to sell that to a data broker who's then going to sell to ad buyers. But at some point, one of these companies, and in several of them I think maybe at once, realized that they could just do the same thing, but then sell the location of phones to law enforcement. So you have a company called FogData doing it, but you also have Cobwebs. But Cobwebs doesn't just do that. They also mine social media and then sell social media data to law enforcement. And some of that is predictive, some of that is

analytical, but an officer can do that and say like the Tucson Police Department purchased this data and you might be like, oh, well, they're at a border region. Maybe they're going to be using border security funds and human trafficking funds that they use to buy this stuff. You'd be like, oh, well, clearly they're going to use this for something serious. But no, they were using it on Kamala Harris rally. It was just going to research what people were doing on social media. You know, we don't fully know whether they were tracking phones or not, but they would do that around a gem show. And they will claim there's a lot of prostitution going on, or around these events, which I'm sure is the case, but not all prostitution is human trafficking.

In fact, most is not human trafficking, and I don't know. To me, this is not the crime that we should be prioritizing and invading everybody's privacy in the entire United States because a consensual sex worker wants to have a business relationship with a visiting businessman or whatever, a visiting gem trader. But you see them using it for that kind of thing. And the thing that, like I mentioned with that L.A. Taco cartoon, you suddenly see the administration trying to demonize people and brand them as terrorists or terrorist elements because they oppose data centers or because they oppose AI or because they're Antifa or what have you. They are just trying

to set up the pretext for claiming that this is doing something wrong and therefore we're going to be able to mind your social media, mine your phone data, mine your background histories, go into the LexisNexis system and look up every car that you've ever been associated, every roommate you might have lived with. It's that kind of thing. And that's one of the things that's really worrisome is not just this trajectory of things from going war zones border internal. It is, let's justify it with Amber Alerts, Terrorism Attacks, and Murderers. And then next thing you know, it's moved all the way down to going after people for dissent.

And then also even further to people for the lowest possible. I mean, we've seen using flock data to check whether somebody is in the right residency district for a school district. Using it again for like your mufflers too lot for a house party. So it really is this very clear trajectory to a society of control. It isn't about public safety. It is about public control at the end of the day. I think that's a really good way to put it.

There's also a company that comes up a lot in conversation called Elbit Systems. Can you talk about what they do and are they playing a big role in this mass surveillance operation these days? So Elbit Systems is an Israeli surveillance company that has been very involved in the conflicts over the years between Israel and Palestinians. But where they come into play is they were heavily involved in the Secure Border Initiative around 2010 or so, and then actually got the contract to do a program called the Integrated Fix Tower Program. So they've installed all these surveillance towers around Southern Arizona, particularly on the Thana Offum Nation's land. So they are actually surveilling this indigenous population because these towers can see for seven miles

and they're throughout this nation's land. And so you often see indigenous people expressing solidarity with Gaza. And I would say that this is not just an empathetic thing that's happening. There's actually a literal technological connection going on because it's the same company installing the same oppressive technologies. Another company that comes to mind is a company called Teledyne Fleur. And this one is under the radar all the time. They are operating at the border, but they are operating within domestic cities.

And their main product is thermal imaging. And so there are these trucks at the border that have that. The Department of Defense under Heg-Seth has moved military tech into the border, and one of those is a FLUR system. But also, you'll see that in New York City, you'll see often attached to helicopters that are frying around the city are these FLURR cameras. And one of the things that really drives me nuts about FLURR

is that they go to cities and they say, hey, we know about this federal grant that you can use to buy our technology. Let's help you process that grant. Let's help you write that grant. Let's help you apply so you can buy our tech. They've just gained the procurement system in order to have police buy things

and they probably didn't want ahead of time, but somebody else is doing the work and the money is free, then maybe we're going to do this and we're going to adopt it. And I think the way this manifests the most is that you'll see these things called sky towers. They kind of are like these on stilts and then they're at the top, there's a little control room for somebody to sit up there. And you see these everywhere in the country. And yet you almost never see somebody in them. They just kind of place them in a parking lot or place them by the side of the road and they're just there to kind of scare people. But I never see anybody actually inside them.

But the control of surveillance isn't just the, collecting data on people. It's putting it out there to have people feel like they're being watched. Yeah, I think of that Larry Ellison quotes so much when he's excitedly, like, in the future, everyone will be surveilled and everyone will be on their best behavior because they'll be watched. And it's like, oh, that's dystopia. It's such a sad thing, but I point to the Uvaldi shooting. And one thing you can say with certainty about Uvaldi is that there was no shortage of surveillance. There was cameras throughout the school.

There was cameras on police officers. The only thing the surveillance was good for in the end was showing us how incompetent and cowardly law enforcement was in that situation. It didn't stop anything. There were cameras at the Gilroy shooting a few years back. There hasn't been a mass shooting where there hasn't been some sort of surveillance foot. It doesn't deter the terrible nature of human beings and it doesn't deter the fact that guns are so easily available in the United States and that we have a toxic culture that somehow keeps producing this in the United States but nowhere else in the world. And those aren't EFF positions that just want to be.

be clear. Those are just my observations on being a human being in America in 2026. But I was having a conversation with some police in Texas the other day about their flock system and they were like, oh, you know, we're solving these crimes about it. I'm like, it's going to be short-lived. You solve a few crimes this week, crime always finds a way. Surveillance is not going to iron out greed and quarter-cutting and it's definitely not going to get rid of poverty and inequality that sometimes drive crime. But all it's going to do is criminals are going to be clever and they're going to find a way around it and you're just going to have to shift to something else, particularly with license plate readers where they depend on the belief that everybody has the license plate associated

with your car. And if you're a criminal and you want to pin a crime on somebody else, all you have to do is steal that person's plate and put it on your car and the police are showing up at their house, not yours. And we were talking to an expert in San Diego who's been tracking drug cartels for years and years and years and also human smuggling. And he was like, you know, before human smuggling was like a mom and pop operation. He had some specialists who knew how to get people across the border and you go and you pay them a little bit money and they'd get you across. The advent of the wall and the surveillance towers hasn't ended any of that. It has just put a higher premium on it, which means the cartels come in and they're like

where it wasn't profitable before. Now it is profitable because it requires more resources to get people across. And so they've taken over and made it more dangerous because the cartels are as technologically sophisticated as anything in Customs and Border Protection. All they're doing is creating a space race of who's going to have the higher tech and who's going to get around the adversaries tech first. That is very dystopian and bleak. Is there anything that any of us can do to stop this machine? I feel like public sentiment around some of these companies is changing, but the contracts are not getting canceled on a mass level. You're saying it's so important

to stop this stuff at the border before it makes its way in. So what can people do to stop any of it? If you had asked me three years ago, I would have been super depressed about license play readers. I mean, This is an issue I've been working on since my first day at EFF in 2013. And you say the term automated license plate reader to somebody in 2020, just roll their eyes. Like, oh, that sounds so boring. And then I'm like, but it's like scanning your license plate. I mean, in a database. You're like, oh, God, can you put this in person of interest terms for me?

But now I'm so energized because I am seeing places cancel contracts. And even the ones that aren't, you still have movements. I live in Reno and I've been doing work on this. And I'm seeing in my Instagram feed locals who've never talked to me who don't know I exist showing up at city council and yelling about it. And it inspires such hope that people are caring about not just this technology. It's opening their eyes to all the other things that are now out there. And you're seeing elected officials getting worked up about it.

I want to see that raise up to levels of Congress. But I would say, I think in the past you'd be like, uh, clickivism, that's just garbage. Don't do clickivism. That's just virtue signaling or whatever. But let me tell you, The one great thing about all these crappy social media algorithms is that if you are a pro-flock person, if you are a police department who just happened to be Googling, what does flock do these days? You are being flooded with flock stuff.

I don't know about you, but I open up Instagram. I kind of want to just see comic art and tattoo art. I don't want to have to deal with my day job at night and bed, but I am being flooded with people talking at city council. I'm flooded with people pointing out all of the abuse by officers. So that's like a big deal. And I do think people need to keep sharing it because That's why Flok's getting so mad is that it is messing up Flok's algorithm these days. But at top of that, there used to be just me filing public records requests.

It was like me and a guy named Mike Katzakabe and some people at Lucy Parsons Lab. We'd be finally public records requests. Now everyone is. And what is happening is that when you file public records requests for, say, like the audit logs or the data sharing with your local jurisdiction, that forces the police department to look at. Often for the first time, they just have been too lazy to look. at what their system is doing. But once you put in that request, then they're like,

oh, we have to review this for redactions. And then they have an, oh, shit, moment. There's a story that came out about Chico, California, where they hadn't looked, but they got a public records request. And as soon as they started reviewing, they realized that they were sharing with ICE. And they had no idea because they had misconfigured their system and they'd been stupid about it.

And in general, even if you are pro-public safety, you should be mad that they are not doing the diligence with these systems. So I do think that even small things about just resharing something, liking something actually has much greater impact than it did in the past. I do think showing up and doing your public comment at City Council is having a huge impact. And I do think filing public records requests, which for my money, the greatest right you have in this country. Like, you can vote. Your votes are going to make a difference if you're 50% plus one on the thing. But you file that public record. They have to respond to you. They have to give you information. You are forcing them to

do their jobs. So I would say all of that is worthwhile. And I feel so positive about the way we're seeing a movement build up against surveillance that is not just the left wing. It is anybody who cares about anything in society. I can't make the people who just don't vote, care about surveillance, because they don't care about current events or public or anything. I can't make them. But if you care about gun rights, if you care about abortion in either direction, you should care about this. And I think people are starting to see that the issue is not necessarily politics, is the issue of having government that has so much power and giving them, more power with our data.

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Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement. with Eye Gaming, Ontario. Absolutely. The online sentiment is so powerful. I've reported on the internet for a long time. It is the most powerful political organizing tool that we've ever seen. And I just want people to also understand that that's why the government is currently

enacting mass identity verification for the internet. And you're not going to be seeing those flock videos so much in your feed if the government is able to exert more and more power over these algorithms, which is literally what they're trying to do under the guise of social media addiction. and making it safe for kids or whatever nonsense they've sort of come up with. So we should fight the offline surveillance and we should be loud online. And we also need to fight the online surveillance laws because I think sometimes that gets a little lost. I get why people are concerned about social media addiction and their worry.

I mean, I have a small child. Don't say this, Dave. That's not what they care about though. That's not what they care about. No, I know. But I mean, your average person, your average person who hears that there's a bill and they don't understand the particulars of it and they don't stand the impact of it. but they understand the sentiment. And I can kind of get that because I put on YouTube kids.

And within minutes, I see her not even being able to focus on something and scrolling through. And I'm like, well, that pisses me off. That's between me and YouTube. That is not something where I want. The government coming in and demanding my ID. But also my child is under five at the moment. But I discovered Stephen King when I was 12. And, you know, that's got some stuff in there that's pretty sexual, pretty gory.

But it definitely formed who I am as somebody who has an imagination, who has their own graphic novel, who goes to Comic-Con and enjoy stuff. And I think when I talk to audiences at Comic-Con, whether it's my Comics versus Authoritarianism Panel or the Watch Dogs panel, one thing I raise is, hey, keep in mind that when they say they're going to be cracking down on Facebook, what they're actually doing is cracking down

on your ability to access all of the content that when you were a kid formed you. None of us were only exposed to, quote, age-appropriate material. None of us were just like, oh, well, I'm not listening to Metallica until I'm 18. It's the same thing with immigration, right? Just stop falling for these narratives. because if they cared about protecting children, there are a slew of policies that would be enacted in this country prior to mass surveillance laws.

You know what I mean? This is not going to keep any children safer. We know that these policies endanger children, especially young people seeking abortions, teenagers, LGBTQ youth, right? None of these policies are about helping people. It's a way that we understand that, oh, just because there are workers outside Home Depot, that doesn't mean that we're in the midst of a mass immigration, assault or something. It's the same thing just because you see a bad thing online does not mean that we need mass surveillance. People need to pay attention to the definitions on things and actually think when you say you're going to ban social media, what does that mean? So a wake up call for me was, I want to say about eight, nine years ago, we were looking at bills that were introduced to ban prisoners from being on social media because there have been some inmates who could post it either music videos that they made inside jail with contraband phones to like YouTube or they were having Facebook accounts. So they were using, again, from contraband phones, they got into.

So the idea was, we're going to make it a crime for you to be on social media. But then when you looked at the definition of social media, it was so broad that you were basically saying that any system with a messaging capability was social media. And I was reading it, I was like, this means they can't have bank accounts anymore. Before you go into prison, you have to shut down your bank account. You have to shut down your my chart health account. You can't even have an email anymore. They're essentially written it so badly that it was erasing your ability to function. in society.

But Dave, that's the point, right? This is how they define social media in the Mexico lawsuit that just, again, social media addiction, nonsense, slop lawsuit. They include WhatsApp. Telegram could fall under this definition. Signal can fall under this definition. The goal is to break encryption as well. I just need people to stop falling for this.

And so many people on the left for whatever reason, not for whatever reason. It's good to be skeptical of these tech companies. These tech companies are so bad faith. They're so evil and stupid and bad. But these laws do not crack down on them. The biggest red flag is these laws are terrible. and then you see a social media company endorsing it. And then you're like, well, basically this is a law that's going to lock us into that particular social media company that is clearly failing and is making a last ditch effort to get its product codified into law.

And that's what we're seeing across tech in general. Even with border surveillance, Anderol was somehow able to get jammed into the one big beautiful bill act, a provision that essentially said surveillance tower money could only go to Anderrol. Finally, another company got approved for AI towers, but it said at the time, this money can only go to towers with autonomous capabilities and have been approved by CBP. At the time, only one company had been approved by CBP. It was a total cash grab for a particular company. And so I think when you see like Facebook jump on the bandwag with something, I think it's just there's something in there that is good for their bottom line because they suck. And everyone knows they suck. And they've ruined their entire business model.

I really used to like to be on Facebook. I don't anymore. My favorite endorser of the Kids Online Safety Act is Elon Musk. But we can stop these laws and we can break these contracts. And I'm so glad that public sentiment is changing. And I think a huge reason for that is also the work that you're doing. It's so vital and so amazing. And so I'm just so grateful for you taking the time to physically go out and document all of this stuff.

It is really important to me. I mean, I think something that connects me to the work I do is that I'm not just sitting and looking at FOIA documents. I mean, I'm doing that. but I'm not just doing that. It's important part of my practice to go down there and look people in the eye and hear what their concerns are and what their experiences are. And sometimes they don't even know. This guy in Tijuana who works at SDSU but has an office at Tijuana.

And he's like, I don't know what to tell you about surveillance technology. I don't really have any experience with that. You're wasting your time here. And then he's like, oh, yeah, in the 80s, one day I found a bug attached to my phone. And I'm like, what are you talking about? One of the things about violations of civil liberties in a surveillance age is that you don't always know it happened. Like, you know if you got hit by a cop.

You know if you were imprisoned illegally. But if you're being stopped regularly and you don't know why, and that's because somebody improperly added you to a watch list, you're just not going to know. You don't necessarily have a paper trail of what happened. And I'm looking at a case right now where in 2021 in California, in San Diego County, a guy pulled into a little alcove called 52 cuts to pick up two migrants. and some sort of surveillance. All we know from the record, all of the lawyers working on this, all they know is that surveillance was used. We don't know if it was drone, a tower or what.

Whatever it was, triggered Border Patrol to come out, turned into a high-speed chase where he pulled into a gas station and law enforcement says he was going to injure them with their car and they shot him dead. The threat of a car, and this is not something that I believe in good faith anymore. I don't believe that you can look at and say, oh, well, they felt feared for their life, especially after we've had multiple shootings where that was claimed that was clearly not an actual threat. But I don't know how surveillance triggered that out. It never showed up for the lawyers filing a wrongful death suit. DOJ never did it.

I will say that we asked a couple of humanitarians to go check out that spot to see if there was anything. And within two minutes of them pulling in, they were surrounded by Border Patrol. And so we still don't know. We think it was a ground sensor. But this is the kind of thing where you just don't know where surveillance is triggering something that results in somebody being injured. or killed. Well, Dave, thank you so much. Thanks for joining me. You have to come back on and chat more about everything you're doing. I feel like we could talk for hours, but I really appreciate your time today.

It's great to be here. I really had a good time. All right, that's it for this week's episode of Free Speech Friday. Once again, if you like my work, please, please, please, via a paid subscription to my newsletter at usermag.co. That's usermag.com. You can also support me on Patreon via the link below. I have zero long-term brand partnerships. I do get a few one-off ad deals now and then, but it's certainly not enough to keep this series going. My work is effectively 100% funded by supporters like you. So every single dollar of your support ensures that I can continue to report on this stuff and remain an independent journalist. Thank you so much. And I'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Free Speech Friday. See you then.