1308: Benn Jordan | The Surveillance State Stalking You Without Consent

You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation.

“Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new-age cults, wellness,”

grifters, and conspiracy-med yogis. Basically, the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the "conspiracy reality podcast." The hosts, a journalist-called researcher and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads from Project 2025

and the heritage foundations dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies. An interesting episode to check out is called "Speaking Truth to Goop" where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening.

It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which, if you listen to the show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the "conspiratuality podcast" will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics.

Find conspiratuality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the show, I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people, and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.

Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker,

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Today on the show, imagine a company putting a GPS tracker on your car.

Now imagine they tell you it's for public safety, and the cops get access to it, and private companies get access to it, and the database quietly mixes your driving history with consumer data, social media activity, photos, criminal records, whatever else they can buy. Now, imagine the system is so poorly secured that hackers can get into it in under 30 seconds. Tonight's guest discusses exactly that. Ben Jordan is a technologist.

That's the term we're using these days, I suppose, for hackers. Musician and security researcher, all euphemisms, except for musician, I suppose. Who decided to take a closer look at the massive network of automated license plate readers spreading across the United States? Cameras designed to track our cars, log movements, and feed everything into a giant searchable database.

What he found is unsettling. From stalkers using the system like Netflix for surveillance, to police departments relying on technology that's easier to break into than your Disney Plus account, to the strange way this data can be merged with everything else about your life to quietly shape what you're allowed to do. This episode asks a pretty uncomfortable question.

“When somebody says I have nothing to hide, are they thinking about the world we're actually building?”

Because depending on who's in power, what counts as suspicious behavior can change overnight. This is a story about surveillance, hacking, data brokers, and why the most dangerous technology isn't the stuff we don't know about. It's the stuff that's already everywhere. Here we go with Ben Jordan. We met through two friends, actually two of my closest friends, and it turns out that I actually knew you before trying to book you for the show because we were at my friend Tim's wedding,

and you got choked by Ash's mom because she was training MMA, which yeah, quite memorable for everyone at the wedding, to have a guest choked out. She still does jujitsu, I assume. Maybe, I don't know, she might be too old now. She's probably going to hear that and choke me again. I've done jujitsu forever, and she started doing jujitsu, and I was like the only other person in the room who was doing jujitsu at the time. Maybe Ash was starting to get into it or something.

And yeah, she just came behind me while sitting at a table and put me in a rear naked choke. And then, but the funny thing is, naturally, when you get put into a rear naked choke, like from that position, the thing you do is answer the phone, you put your hand up really fast, and so it was funny, like I was actually a little proud of myself, like putting my hand up, and like, I caught it. All right, so I didn't have to tap. Totally appropriate wedding

wedding stuff. Just walking down the aisle, maybe the band hits the dj, starts the dance floor, and somebody gets choked out by one of the groom's men's moms. It's just a thing, a thing that happens at weddings. His mom is, you could write like an entire book series, somebody's mom, or a Netflix documentary or something like that. She's such a fascinating person. Tim, he made a documentary about her called "Milf," mother I'd like to fight, which I thought was excessively creative title.

I should have had him name this show, so that I wouldn't have just made it my name. Anyway, I want to talk about flat cameras, because these are crazy. I've seen them.

“I can't remember where, but other people have posted them,”

subreddit will be like, "What is this thing?" And people are like, "This is a flat camera, you haven't seen these?" They're like, "No, there's 20 in my neighborhood, but I just, I don't know, what are they speed cameras?" So what are these and what do they do? I know that's a massive

monitoring traffic. I knew that LPRs existed or licensed plate readers, and so I figured that they were maybe just doing that monitoring traffic, maybe even similar to what a toll road one does. There's something which some people could argue is invasive, other people don't, I'm sort of in the middle

on that. What they do, it's a third-party company that leases the cameras and the technology to

cities and police departments, and every single time that you pass the camera, it logs your license plate, and then it also logs some of your cars that dent in it, bumper stickers, color, things like that, and then that technology just gets a little bit more advanced as the cameras

“get newer, but most of the ones that you see, and that's what they're doing. They're just using”

a mixture of AI and license plate readers, and they're putting into a massive database. So your police if they want to get a notification every single time that you pass a camera, they could find out everywhere that you've been over the last 30 days, sometimes it's 15 days, apparently, sometimes it's longer, too, like in Texas, they have some sort of legal loophole, and that's about it, and the bigger issue for a lot of people is that they found that police officers in Texas

were tracking the license plate movement of women who they suspected were going out of state to have abortions. That's crazy. You had people in Texas searching for people in California, you've had a lot of cops just being asked by ICE to use it, but now this is a story that I'm literally going through the details now to do a short video on it. A lot of police departments in Georgia here are literally partnering with ICE. They're getting the duties of an ice agent,

and if they don't, they don't get funding. And so now they can make immigration arrests, they can

“do investigations on immigration, and they use Fox safety. So these cameras in that sense are pretty”

much, you can see the data going directly or indirectly to ICE. Where do we even begin tearing

this apart? Because it's basically a GPS on your car, not really because it's not connected to your

car, but if you cross one of these things every 200 yards or whatever sort of space, and I have, the effect is the same, right? Maybe they don't know you made a right here instead of a right on the next block, but they basically kind of do, and they can narrow it down, and then if they really need to look and find you on that specific block, they could probably look at people's ring cameras, which we've also found out that law enforcement is using the data on. So this is

crazy to me. So like with that, used to be a point of contention, and I believe it's 2018 or 2019, there was Carpenter v United States in the Supreme Court. And what that was about is, without a warrant, they were tracking someone with Carpenter, whoever Carpenter is. They were tracking Carpenter with cell phone towers. And basically the Supreme Court said, they made a pretty easy decision on it.

They said, if you're tracking somebody beyond one cell phone tower, then you could find out information

about their sex life, about their religious life, all of the things that the fourth amendment

“protects you from handing over to the government. And yes, you need to want to do that. So”

how is that any different than this? Like if a cop can just find out your daily behavior. So yeah, like a lot of people wonder if it's constitutional, and I don't see a way that it can be, but also with like our administration right now with our Supreme Court right now. I also just feel like the like justices and happening anywhere. So well, they don't care. Yeah, it's like we'll unwind this later, just kidding. It won't be my problem later, right? Or we won't unwind it later,

because we'll figure out a reason to justify it. And people might say, who cares? I don't have anything to hide and we'll kind of get into that exception, because that's what people said about, what was the Patriot Act? And all the, all the same people who complained about the Patriot Act actually, many of them are going to be totally okay with this for reasons, because reasons. I do feel like a lot of like super conservative people or Maga people or whoever,

they can look back five years and they could say, okay, imagine if this camera gave me a ticket because I didn't wear my mask in Walmart or because I left my house during a lockdown or something. So it's pretty easy for them to envision that over each. And then secondly, for the people to say, of course, in my YouTube comments, I, you know, people saying, what do you some kind of sexual predator, and you don't want people tracking you? And it's like, I did just hand me your phone

and unlock it and let me go into the other room with it for a while. If you're that comfortable, because I guarantee you wouldn't let me do that. And beyond that, it's like one of the things that we found when I got into the cameras and was able to just look at 30 days of like the behavior on a forest trail or what was parking lot or a playground and things like that. It's like I ended up being able to just get these really advanced profiles on people that if I wanted to rob them,

I would now know when they were home. I would know the kind of stuff that they have in their house, even to some extent, you could even zoom in on somebody's front door when they're putting the code in. And so just because you don't have any secrets doesn't mean that you don't have anything to hide. Like your personal data is actually very valuable. Right. Yeah, just yeah, exactly. The other thing that was crazy is I know people are going, okay, but like the FBI,

if they wanted to get in your house, they would just go into your house. But you were able to just

found that these things have security that's outdated by half a decade and was able to look at the videos. That should scare people. There was sort of innocuous throwaway clip on your channel where you were

“looking at the footage. It was like, hey, that girl, she jogs on this trail every day. How do I know?”

Every clip from this camera at the same time basically has her and oh, look, it's zooming in on

the kid's faces from the family behind her. Nameless live in the area, too. Oh, here's one that's a playground. It shows where the kids are when. If you look at a live feed of that, you're a bad actor. It's Netflix for stalkers, like you said. Right in the beginning, when we first found the security vulnerabilities. And when I first realized how bad it was, it was during the first government shutdown when that happened. It was like right as a shutdown that started or the first one in 2025.

And I basically went to some senators and was like, hey, we have a national security problem. Like above all things, like if we're banning TikTok because we're worried about like China getting people's data from their phones, this is 10 times worse than that. This is actually a major problem and Senator Widen in Oregon, who's apparently the only senator who works when there's a government

shutdown or who cares about national security, when there's a government shutdown, his team looked

“further into it and they actually wrote a formal letter to the FTC for an investigation on”

national security. So it's definitely not one of those things where it's like, I actually found accounts for sale on the dark web that like from hackersites where people do like facilitating to get people into systems and stuff. And they were from Russia. It's very much already a thing. It's not even one of those. This could be a problem. It is. So to clarify what you mean by that, on the dark web, so where people buy often illegal things on the internet, you found,

hey, I have an administrative account, what you can log into these flock cameras that are all over the United States and you can look at the footage along for a cement account. It was for a one for some person to be able to, essentially some of their clients, like, were one for some agencies, don't want to use to a multi-factor authentication. And so literally you could log in from anywhere. It had none of that. And so anybody could just sign in and then get hopped updates or whatever.

Two-factor or multi-factor authentication. This is where you try to log into Disney Plus and it says, hey, we're going to text you because we don't recognize the film that you're logging in from and you go, okay, whatever. And it says type in the six-digit code, they don't have that on these law enforcement accounts, at least not all of them. You can log in from Uzbekistan and you can spy on Americans using that. In these videos, I would assume a law enforcement account. It's not just for one

camera, right? It's for all of the cameras, maybe in a specific area, possibly all the cameras in the United States. It depends which because some of them share two other agencies around the entire country. Other ones, they've come under fire for that like Denver. For example, they found out that ice was using it. They found out that people out of state were using it to track people in Denver. And so that created a whole bunch of turmoil. And now they're canceling their law contract

entirely, but for the last six months, they cut off generally everybody outside of Denver. Furthermore, you can use this data that tracks your car or your face as you're jogging by or your kids faces as they play outside. They can mix that with other data, right? Because you get these data brokers that are like, oh yeah, we know Jordan spends a lot of money at coffee shops because we have as American Express data or as credit card data as Apple pay data,

whatever it is. And we know he goes to the Westgate mall and he buys stuff there. So then they have like your location, your shopping habits, the stores you like, I mean, it just it starts to mix all this with consumer data. So you don't have like, hey, it's just a guy. He's maybe middle age. He maybe lives in this area. He's there like, no, this is Jordan Harbinger. And this is where

“he was yesterday at 905 AM period. Yeah, it all adds up. I think when people install an app or”

when they it's subscribed to a service or something, they take all of the data that they're sharing, like the people actually care about privacy a little bit. They say, okay, well, this isn't that bad. Of course, I have to give it my location access if I wanted to connect to this Bluetooth thing. I just bought and whatever else. But when all of that is mixed together, when you have an entire hotge pod you're able to connect all those dots, then somebody's straw of a map from when they're biking

is directly connected to what time they're passing a flock camera and where they're spending their money and you know, what other accounts they've had. And so when you actually have that entire profile. I mean, that's called Ocent Open Source Intelligence. When you have that entire profile in front of you, you generally know everything about a person. And a lot of these things are breaches too. So you have passwords and all of the other things that you wouldn't expect to have.

But you can generally find that I'm just about anyone. One thing that was crazy, you did this

on your channel willing to a bunch of these in your videos in the show notes. But first of all,

there's like 80,000 of these cameras nationwide, right? Something like that. Over a hundred now. Over a hundred thousand. Okay. So they're pretty much everywhere. I mean, that's just so many. Okay. And now that goes to that saying, but that's enough to make a complete picture of millions of people's lives in many ways when you mix it with other data. And on your channel, you did something crazy, which was, you saw a couple, like, I don't know if they were in a farmer's

market or something. And they were clearly having a heated conversation. And you're like, oh, look,

this is the couple. Wow. They have a recent credit issues. Ah, they made a big purchase. Looks like maybe they were fighting over the fact that they are in debt in somebody wanted to buy the expensive strawberries. And that was the last, you basically just found out so much personal info that that couple has probably not told their best friends and parents, the things that you found out about them, and they don't know you. I didn't want to give enough information to where

somebody else could identify them to good friends or family members. So I just use ambiguous things. Like, I very quickly found out that the woman had irritable bowel syndrome and was suffering from it. And it was based on something like an old post where some doctors office said, hey, could we have a quote about our services? And that was harmless enough, but it was attached to an email that was attached to her real name. And so you could very quickly find out that this person's dealing

with this chronic illness. But in terms of that, that was able to find out a whole lot at a disturbing amount. Most of, you know, that I didn't think it would be ethical to even share in a video. And you spot them fighting in a farmer's market. And it's like, now I know you're fighting about

“you bought a car you can't afford. And you have to poop. I'd be able to foul mood myself. I understand.”

It's scary. It's a data broker play. This is not a, it's not just, hey, let's make our community safer. And you've said this on your channel. And I want to say it again here publicly, law enforcement officials, the ones I know, sure I probably know some bastards. But most of them are genuinely interested in making their communities safer. And the people that like these things or have developed these things are also generally interested in making their community safer.

The problem is the people who have access to this data or controlling this, they're not really

only interested in that. They want all of this data so they can sell it. And they're doing that because that's where the money is. When you look at the VC firms that are funding these things, they're like, yeah, it's going to make community safer. But you know what, it's also going to give us data on millions, hundreds of millions of people that we can sell to companies. And that's where the money is. Yeah, I mean, in this in Fox case, they say they don't sell data. But they literally sell

open source intelligence data. Like it's on their price sheet. But there's a lot of discrepancies between like what they say in a PR standpoint and what they actually do. But they are more or less leasing data between law enforcement agencies. One of the things that I've tried to tell a lot of

“cities and city councils and police departments that I've spoken to, you have to understand that”

that that is their business model. So if you want to say, nobody can access our data. It's only ours. It's staying with the police department or city or whatever. There is incentive for them to try and make it available to the police department next to you because that makes their entire service more valuable. So if everybody didn't share it, then they might as well just have normal ALPRsated by an Amazon and just save it that way and go look at it. If you need something,

they wouldn't have to pay higher prices for this subscription service. And that echoes into rain and Google and everything else. These are data companies like that's how they make money.

No matter what privacy settings you have, they're always going to be trying to figure out a new

way to make money off of it. So it's better to just not have them. What if I'm a police officer, law enforcement, whatever? Or just a concern citizen, and I go, look, Jordan, fine. But this is going to make crime lower and fine criminals. So it's kind of like, this is just what's happened. I mean, look, I don't want murderers in the community. So sorry you found out your neighbor had ideas, but come on, we're going to catch criminals. It's funny

because when you actually show many decades of solid research suggesting that community policing drastically reduces crime, nobody seems to care. But when attack companies write a paper that their own employees write a research paper saying, "Flock cameras make cities safer." And no peers, you know, review it, nobody sites it, and they just point to that over and over again,

“everybody eats it up and hands over the money. Like that's what's amazing to me. Because I feel like”

most of the police officers that I know that either people who are in the family or people that I've just grown up with, there's something like that that became police officers. Like you said, like they really do care about making the community safer. And a lot of them, especially in Chicago, I knew a lot of them who would like bring lunches to like kids that like were routinely on the route and stuff. And they were actually a really compassionate people who cared a lot about the

people that they were seeing day in and day out. And that's not being utilized. So it's always

interesting to me when like community policing is ignored for this colder system of just tracking everyone. Because it's like, well, the system of tracking everybody has not been shown to reduce crime. I can say this as somebody who reads research papers all day, it's not suggested that. What it has done is it's existed during a time when the national crime rate plummeted. If that's the case, then my music that I've released has also decreased crime by 30 percent.

It's pretty amazing. Yeah. So another thing is the efficacy of them in terms of like how many license plates do they actually pick up, for example, right here I have the same cameras that

wait, let's look at all the cameras. Let's see how many cameras she has surrounding her subdivision.

“And you can't get out of the subdivision without passing an LPR camera. And so it was like, okay,”

there is fog all over the place, but there's also Verkata and Axon, which is a different company is more or less trying to do the same thing. And it's like, wait, how did not one of these pick up any license plate that could be used for this? And yeah, the reason I had this is I wanted to test the efficacy. I wanted to literally put it on a bridge and see how many things it actually gets and how many

it doesn't. Because I never actually thought to do that. Can I ask, did we find anything in the

cameras around Nancy Guthrie's neighborhood? No, nothing. It's not helped anybody. Wow. Yeah. And I mean, it's like two sounds crazy. Like, they have cameras all over the place, every intersection, and then in the surrounding areas, they have tons of plot cameras as well. Like, I was just there a few weeks before that happened. And I remember, because I was in Death Valley before that. And some other places, and I was kind of like, oh, it's nice to not be tracked everywhere.

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day. A little bite from the show past episode from us to you, something you could apply right away. It's an under-two-minute read in jordanherbanger.com/news is where you can find it. Now, back to Ben Jordan. This is crazy to me because those cameras are everywhere. Nothing picked up the people who abducted Nancy Guthrie, and for people who are not following the news

“or are not in the US, this is a super high-profile missing person case. Is it Nancy Guthrie?”

Is that the name of the missing person or is that? Yeah, that's the name of the person on TV's name is Megan Guthrie. Okay, because I always can feel something Guthrie. Yeah, I don't watch the show, but I also don't follow this too closely, because I have kids in a business and a life, and I don't want to follow the news. It's so sad. I thought this is the perfect use for flat cameras, right? We're going to find the guys that took her, they're going to find the car here.

Okay, it parked in this house. You're staying taxpayers paid for this massive surveillance state around Tucson to resolve issues just like this one. Oh, it doesn't work. And then another thing that caught my eye, I remember initially thinking about this from the perspective of a surveillance researcher, you know, which is what I've been doing almost accidentally for the last year. And I was like, wait, certainly, she had a ring camera or something, and it was like,

okay, she had a nest camera, but she wasn't paying the subscription, so they couldn't find

wait a minute, hold on. Like, it wasn't being stored on the server. She wasn't paying the subscription. That's part of the agreement is like, it's not being stored on Google server,

“and I believe Cash Patel and the FBI said that it was, oh, what did they call it? Like,”

residual data was the word that they used. And it was like, that's not a thing. Like, that's not a thing. So what they mean is you're not paying your subscription. It's not being stored on the server that you can access, but it's still being stored on the server for purposes of training,

the doorbell, technology, yaddy, basically the FBI can get it if they needed because it's on the

server. You just can't look at it because you're not paying $10 a month. That to me was just like, okay, this is the time when you remove the cameras that are connected to any third party club. It's time to downgrade or whatever your surveillance system to one that isn't actually watching your kids in your yard, or whatever, you know, people had these cameras pointed at their kids in their bedroom, still like monitor them itself. But one thing I was able to do, which is oddly enough

like going through this, I had ring cameras all over the place, which I was already kind of uncomfortable with. It was like on my list, take them down, and I contacted Amazon and was like, hey,

“this Super Bowl ad where you're using AI to detect lost dogs with dog facial recognition”

at the time they had an agreement with Fox safety, like they were partnering with Fox safety and then a couple other things. I was like, yeah, I looked at your last terms of service that I didn't agree to yet, and I want to return every ring device that I have, which is like $800 worth of stuff. After about an hour of chatting, they were like, okay, just throw it all on a box, send it back, we'll give you your money back, and I was like, okay, that's great. Two days later, they ended up

getting rid of their partnership with Flock. That's interesting. I will say that that got some notification in my ring app that was like, hey, do you want to participate in the lost dog thing because your camera can do that? And then it was like, if you want upgrade to no like when your nanny comes in your housekeeper or your parents or somebody comes in and drops off the mail or the Amazon, we can do facial recognition. And I was like, no, I don't need that. It's an additional

fee and I don't really want to deal with that. And then they're like, oh, okay, but you just reminded me of this. It's like, oh, so facial recognition is off. No, it's not off. I just can't access it, but ring slash Amazon slash Google, they still know when my housekeeper comes in because that is on that camera is doing that. It's just that I can't utilize that to get a notification that tells me about it. Mine, I still had the app installed on a tablet. I got notification saying, hey,

we found a lost dog on your property. It was a dog that was on not on my property in the little image until I agreed to the new terms of service and whatever else it wouldn't let me see the entire image, but it was like a dog that kind of looked like one of mine. I was like analyzing it. I'm like, I don't have a gate that looks like that's not my property. So they're just like at this point, what are they doing just sending weird images of something that looks like my dog for me to go,

oh, no, let me agree to this really fast on my way to checking it out. It's insane. A lost dog, this is the equivalent of the tricky subject line that I wanted to use in the newsletter where it's like, hey, saw your name in the Epstein files. And then when they open it, it's like, just kidding, I just wanted you to open this email and my teams like, don't do that. And I thought, God, it's so funny,

“though. But that's what Amazon's doing to you. Like, hey, we found a lost dog on your property. Like,”

all right, all agree to it. Oh, nope. This is just a literal spam image that's been sent to a million

people who didn't approve the terms of service to see if they would agree to it. So that they could see the dog is a stock photo or some AI created thing or just a random photo from their network. Oh, oops. But thanks for accepting the terms of service. I'm sure a word portion of your viewers have a ring camera somewhere on their property. And listen to that and look at that camera and ask yourself, are these your friends or enemies? Is this a good or a bad thing? Does this company actually

care about you? Because they're tricking you into things. I think a lot of people don't realize, again, now we've figured out the data's not really anonymous when it's all mixed together. But they don't really see how this is going to affect them. Like, okay, so what? So some guy who's a hacker type can find out I have IPS big deal. What if they use your old Facebook, your Instagram, you're driving record from the flat cameras and your DMV record photos of you from social media, plus your

criminal record. You know, that thing that you did in college that's not really that bad and kind of got swept under the rug that doesn't matter to you. Plus your consumer behavior, plus your credit card payment stuff. Now, this bank buys access to this data that's quote unquote anonymized and says, you know what, Jordan's high risk for a mortgage. We're not going to tell you why because that would be illegal. But we're going to tell you that he is a little bit higher risk with a mortgage. In fact,

even if you sued that company and you went to discover and you went, hey, we want your AI to say why they're not letting guys like Jordan get mortgages. AI's not going to go, well, we notice his phone batteries typically below 50% which is one of a 10,000 indicators we use and his consumer behavior says this and he was laid on a payment and he peed in public in 2008 and got arrested for it and he drives like a maniac and blah, blah, blah. So we're just going to say that he's high risk

for a mortgage that just deny him or give him a terrible interest rate and you will never find out

flock stuff like that's already a thing where it's like you leave bread crumbs about health events and that affects how much your insurance costs and things like underwriters use open source intelligence all the time. Like it's standardized at this point, but they use AI now. Yeah, that was like part of the United Healthcare scandal where they were using an AI model that was denying healthcare to people just based on like what it was scanning based on like their health

records plus what it was finding online. But also like it does make me concern too like when this much data is being used by police or when it's being used by law enforcement, whether it's

federal or state regional. I really start to worry, I guess like when I grew up the rule was always

like don't talk to police ever. Like don't if they ask you a question don't talk to like you make yourself a mark in the neighborhood or yeah, I grew up in like a pretty high crime neighborhood name so like don't ever talk to cops you literally say for talking to a gang member then a police officer here. Then growing up you kind of realize if a cop comes to your front door and says hey could we look at your camera footage there's a house a bit somebody broke into a house down the street and

if you give that to him you may have to go to court and be in that criminal or gang or whatever well then look at you and you're just getting yourself involved in something that like is going to take a bunch of your time and you're not actually going to be a compensated anything for it and so it's generally best to just say no thanks goodbye but when you think about like all of those bread crumbs that now when you have something like a Nancy go through situation or you have like a

high profile case where they're just combing through things like they found out that the person had like a Walmart backpack or whatever right and so Walmart was like oh here's all of our data here's all of the data of everybody who bought this backpack and so now you have a bunch of innocent people who may have bought this backpack being investigated by the FBI but it's like not only a really bad thing for innocent people but it's also like a huge waste of resources in my opinion

how many murders have there been since Nancy got three's disappearance that that FBI could have been involved with it's just a totally messy the security on these cameras I mentioned earlier that it's outdated by a half decade I don't know maybe you can sharpen this point a little bit

“I believe you said some of the cameras that you tested were running on in a version of”

Android that had been deprecated in 2021 or really old so there's no security updates for these particular OS and you're like oh well I'll just look at all the footage on here which to me is yeah incredibly they're running on Android things so it's Android 8 things which is something that Google made for one year where it's meant for really like lower power devices that don't have a display now it is funny because these original flop cameras like the older ones that came out pre 2020

3 when opening them up they actually inside they have like little volume controls and things like that because it's literally acting like a phone so you have that input so they have the volume up volume down power like you know stuff which is ridiculous but these all run from everything I've seen they all run on an Android operating system of some sort most of the ones that you see inside of the road are running on an outdated one they can't be updated anymore that you can route

relatively easily and then the newer ones they run on a more recent version of Android but it's still Android it's not like a closed system for surveillance it's literally Android I think the problem with that above all things is that Android does a million things it opens ports for a bunch of things it's also run by Google who needs user data so I mean there's so many reasons why wouldn't use Android for a security camera and in this case it's just my opinion would be just from

“spending a year walking at these things they started with that that's how they made their prototypes”

their prototypes literally used to run on modified phones and then they ordered hardware for it

and they just blitz scaled the company to raise value and never actually paid attention to changing

that to actually harden it and so they're still running phone OS's it's shocking to me because this company has a multi-billion dollar valuation yeah 7.5 last year was 7.5 no idea there's been a lot of controversy with them so it might be less but let's just say enough where they could hire a team of pretty good software developers and engineers to go we need an OS for these things that is security forward because this has a ton of sensitive data on it maybe we shouldn't

use something that is designed for a thermostat most tech companies generally all tech companies but most big companies have chief internet security officers like it's an executive that's a very important position that sort of lead security they haven't even had one from most of 2025 like when we're doing our research there was nobody to report to for them there was nobody in charge

“I think their security team was like one or two people at the worst of it and they like want”

people and senior positions who could actually find these things themselves that was what was

really alarming and now they've I mean they hired a CSO and they've also hired a third party company

but the issue with that is that when you hire a third party company formally there's generally I can't speak for every agreement but generally the way it works is they have non-disclosure

old ones then flock decides whether they tell the public about it and as a company that really

“would like to launch an IPO they're probably not going to do that then people like me will continue”

to find it but I'm getting exhausted of making videos about it and so like any new vulnerabilities that myself or other people have found we've just been like okay I assume they've been very thankful to you for finding all these vulnerabilities and telling them about it correct yeah the security researcher that I worked with John Gaines he's probably responsible for

80 to 90 percent of them would assume he knows more about flock safety cameras and ecosystem

than literally anybody on earth just because the security research is incredibly deep two days after my video launched the first video I made exposing the vulnerabilities he got fired from his job he had a senior level position at a infosacurity firm he got mysteriously fired but didn't make any sense he wasn't like working on this at work he was doing all his duties at work and he was doing all this at home on his own time and expense and equipment and then of course

when we're doing that video we start seeing people parked in front of the house like I live on kind of like a farm so it's but down the driveway we see people parked and then finally one day managed to have my phone in my hand when somebody was like pointing a camera at me recording video and so we were like okay and okay so we have private investigators outside some days they're here some days they're not and that still happens they're still here sometimes they might even be out there

right now to the point where it gets funny okay like I feel bad for these people because I'm not doing anything that interesting out in the open and so the most boring PIG ever right yeah like wow you get to watch me but carrying a wheelbarrow full of chicken poop that's really cool like one time I actually brought a coffee down for them I like put a coffee in a little plastic thing and went

down and they drove away since I got near them so well guess I'm having a second coffee today

“yeah I think it was Christmas Eve or something and I was like gosh bring them a coffee he's coming”

to poison us no dude I'm just wondering why you're filming me rollin' a spliff on my porch you're trying to what you're doing it's so silly because it's such a waste of money for example John Gaines he initially had reached out to flock he had reported this to that me for the most part like up until my videos came out everything was being done through like standard response bolts disclosure guidelines where you give 90 days for remediation before you make something public it's

very strange I didn't understand it at first until I saw some of the CEOs behavior of calling people terrorists he sent out an unsolicited email to law enforcement agencies around the country saying that I was attacking police by me attacking flock I was also attacking police I was a wall was activist he didn't say Ben Jordan but he was referring to a youtuber who made youtube videos with false claims and things like that that narrows it down a guy talking about flock cameras

if that gets millions of views who could that be that's not me yeah and fortunately in Virginia there was a police chief who just said yeah this is crazy and just canceled the contract

“after reading that email I think he responded to the CEO being like yeah what we're seeing”

is democracy in action I wouldn't call them lawless activists they're just concerned citizens and we're gonna cancel the contract now because even now convinced us that you're in your responsible tech company not somebody who's actually dealing with responsibilities that a normal company would being cage with security is bad good security is robust and transparent because if you're creating a tech product and you wanted to be secure you would love it if hackers

take that thing down to the studs and then email you all the vulnerabilities giving you 90 days to fix them because you're saving hundreds of thousands of dollars on research and development yeah it's funny in hindsight because it's still going on there's still losing contracts it's like a massive issue and it's funny because like in hindsight John Gaines is not like an anarchist he's not like somebody who hates surveillance obviously uncomfortable with it which is why

he got involved in researching and on his own time but they could have just reached out to him and hired him as CSO like when those videos came out I would have had a lot of ethical issues with continuing to do the research myself because now like this research I worked for is now with the company so now there's all this conflict of interest that would have shut me up that would have ended the whole thing but it's just ego yeah we want to ruin this guy for

pointing out a flaw it's crazy because this company they have to know hey we made a product that's pretty much that very basic security is not really there oh somebody pointed out the flaws we can either get upset about it or we can fix them let's get upset about it and ruin people's

lives just so that we can say don't mess with us we're never trying to mess with you we're trying

to show you the flaws so that you can fix this so that they're less dangerous to society and they're just like no thank you we'd rather take this personally totally insane yeah when the CEO sent those emails I was just like at what point do you just grow up and remediate the security issues I've formally in a public letter offered to fund security research additional another thing that they'll do or they were doing is they were saying the cameras he had access to were different he

doesn't actually have access to the flaw ecosystem because once it's a flaw ecosystem then

prove you wrong but you know that if I go up to the flaw camera a couple hundred feet away from my house and press the button three times on the back and type in a curl command and root the thing like you know that then I'll go to jail then you'll be able to put me in prison immediately but right now I've managed to equip myself with good attorneys and stay on the right side of the law so there's nothing you could do in that department they still do that but unfortunately I found

illegal way to get into their ecosystem and watch people it's crazy to me that you can get that footage I know I keep harping on this but you don't even have to have crazy technical knowledge this is not I need this three hundred thousand dollar device that can read the signal going through the

wire that's highly sensitive no you basically just went oh they don't have really any sort of decent

security on here oh look there's all the footage they said something like oh we get rid of the footage after seven days or 15 days or 30 days and you know like here's a camera that has footage

“from the factory where it was manufactured when they tested the recording capability that's what”

three years ago or five you're like that's still on there yeah still there yeah it's funny to see like the goalpost moving around they're like no no no we deleted it from the server but it might stay on the device or another thing I have no idea if it still says it's on their fact but they said we don't take pictures of people and it's like okay well a that's not true like your open source intelligence has a bunch of personal information beyond vehicles but also

like I am looking at files of me from walking past the camera when I had a power now my tool desk or something like that like it's just why after why from my perspective crazy crazy the license plate reader thing the video where you make one yourself they used to call us nerds

then that was incredible I mean you're like a very skilled impressive technical mind in many ways

but I don't want people to think okay so you got to be a Ben Jordan to get footage off this thing if you're not as technically skilled as you you could just rip one of these things off the post illegal don't do it and plug it into your computer and copy the files the highly technical skilled part is what allows you to do it legally if you're just a bad actor in China Russia another hostile state you just hack into this thing and suck all the footage off and go

come at me bro and nobody can do anything about it it's funny because there are people out there I've explained to them that they're breaking a law and that I can't have anything to do with them due to my position but there are people out there who have like access cameras and the questionable means and but I'm still like what are you trying to do now there's an interesting thing that's happened here where like you can't really own the system any more than it's already

own if you wanted to break the law you have course you could use the API keys and use the credentials that are on the hardware to get into the cloud service and go around in there but it's just one of the things where it's almost not even worth researching for me because it's like I can't think of anything else we could do with it I've literally I ran doom on it when you could root a device you think about it like you could install malware that could install malware on other devices

you could have it what the battery overheats so it starts on fire explodes it's like how much further could you possibly hack it a device beyond that geez I hadn't even thought about that the fact you could install malware probably on the whole network do I just forcing a bad update and that would shut all of these things down I'm not trying to give anybody any ideas I'm just saying a bad act or could do something like that or a nation state that wanted to take down our capability

or flocks capability to do that or just some domestic terror type I'm worried about even saying this is a hypothetical because it came now it comes out like I'm recommending it I'm just saying somebody could do terrible things with these like a lot of people have reached out to me being like okay so infrared lasers what if we shoot them at the sensor and do the okay so you're going to set up a laser for an hour in front of a camera that's recording you and sending it to police

and then you're going to turn it on and for like at that point while you just shoot the camera

“but like the important thing these are very easy to shoot off of polls or spray paint or to hit”

with the baseball bat or whatever I mean a lot of these are like below my head level around where I live like I literally just jab it and it'll come off the pole and break on the ground but instead we're doing this the right way because it's really important to me that when a law enforcement agency or the government or whoever an attorney looks at the posture of both sides of this like there's flock who's saying this and then doing another thing and then they're saying

this and then there's national security risk and they're ignoring it and they're paying a bunch of money in SEO to make sure that if you type flock safety vulnerability in Google you won't find any of the thousands of articles about it they at this point unless you use duck duck go or something else like that like they're putting in so much work in my opinion being dishonest to their clients who are law enforcement agencies and I am putting so much work in money into not doing that

into actually being as straight arrow as I possibly can and following all the rules for probably

the first time in my life and paying like exorbit attorney fees to be able to do so that's really

“important that like when you look at that entire situation at that point you can say okay who is”

the good guy in the bad guy here who's the person who's spending money to try and make people say

safe. If you're thinking Jordan I've got nothing to hide cool but history shows that what counts as nothing to hide tends to change every four years depending on which direction the political wind is blowing so while we all process that comforting reality let's take a quick break and thank the sponsors that keep the show running we'll be right back this episode is sponsored in part by Delete Me. Delete Me makes it easy quick and safe to remove your personal data online

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can't find a code email me we are happy to service codes for you it is that important that you support those who support the show now back to ben jordan so if they're able to track car locations essentially in real time using the system can you track all the police cars in a city using the system they have license plates yeah you definitely could and there was even one of the breaches that Joshua Michael found who's another one the scary researchers I worked with so there's something

called arch GIS it's basically a cloud service that kind of gets check-ins from different devices to tell them for example if you have a flock camera a lot of them know how close the nearest police officer is you know they catch somebody who it's just stolen a car they believe did something dispatch knows what cop to send on them and try and find them or for a lot of more routine reasons oh there's a bad accident here we need to find the closest cop to come make sure basic

and so because of that police cars have GPS units in it that give their data to arch GIS and then our arch GIS and gives it to dispatch and a flock and so on and so forth so we found over 100,000 api keys for arch GIS and that was just Josh found those on google explain briefly what an api key is for people who don't know oh yeah for in this sense a good analogy would be like your credentials your username and password so you can access data but it doesn't have a GUI with buttons that

you click and stuff it's like a very quickly for computers to talk to and each other basically it's

just like a way that a computer can visit a website and get the data that it needs without the overhead of everything else and so in this case it was an api key I mean they had the location of all the police officers in these areas and so you just had a nonstop a few of her one to figure out what the cops were in 10 seconds you could have a eye build an app that just pings the api so this is

“where I'm going with this right because I think there's a lot of people cops included again good”

people who are trying to do good work let's give them a maximum benefit of the doubt I wonder if now that they know these security bugs allow citizens and criminals to find out where they are at all times when they are on duty working do they feel safer knowing that that is out there because

to protect you that's all right I'm only using this officers I just want to know where you are

“so that if a friend of mine commits violent crime he doesn't have to shoot you he doesn't know”

sure too far away do you feel this again obviously hypothet do you feel safer knowing that a criminal can find out where you are you're parked somewhere eating lunch okay every gang member who has technical access which even this the slightest modicum of technical access or the ability to hire somebody with technical access can now get data that says every day officer Jones takes his squad car and he eats lunch at this place at one PM or one AM when his shift is on break when he's

on lunch does that make you feel safer because that's kind of how all of us are feeling right now yeah and it's funny too because when I found out about that yeah when I talked to Josh like the thought in the back of my head was like shouldn't we already know that though because it's a public service I understand the safety but yeah we should not know where cops eat lunch of what I am yeah whether I should if we should not know that no but yeah it's like I'm sure

upon finding that out a lot of police officers we're not happy to find out that they know

“that they have GPS's in their car like their boss and other police should know where they are just”

like for citizens people should be able to find out where I was if I'm suspected of a crime but I don't want I don't know a random youtuber no offense to know where I was yesterday and what I was doing because that's not your fucking business Ben of course yeah well not only that yeah somebody who might actually just be using that system to find people to rob that have just bought the Christmas gifts that the store that has the camera out there and then they could just find

the address through their license plate through like a park mobile data breach or something like that and then off to the races I guess maybe an analogy that I often use is bumper stickers sometimes I'll be like driving and I'll see somebody with a bumper sticker that like brags about their kid being in a private school and they have a bunch of kayak paraphernalia all over it nice bike racks on the top and okay this person probably has 10 thousand

hours worth of stuff in that garage it's like you tell the public so much and if you have a bad actor but we do that times a hundred in the digital world when we just visit websites and too so I mean we end up with this massive profile of our behavior but obviously when it gets involved when that open source intelligence when a company like flock turns it into this organized system that law enforcement can access it's just really bad there's a lot more bad things that could

happen than good things with that I want to double clarify that I want citizens and police officers to stay safe while they're out and about the whole thing about hey now we can find out where cops eat lunch I want to just highlight I'm saying that is scary and we should plug that hole that allows people to do that because it's a bad thing because I know that there's people who are like you're trying to get cops killed no actually I'm trying to make sure that

people can't find us on a whim and do something bad with the information it's like funny how polarizing it is anytime you talk about police and I feel like growing up in that atmosphere

or like you've never talked to police you don't trust police it's interesting because usually

like if I were asked like how I would do things if I were king or whatever like cops would be paid a lot more and they would be trained a lot better and you would have cops that dealt with things like narcotics and you would then have cops that dealt with things like mental illness and not all of them would need guns not all of them would need to be this crazy thing to be reckoned with you militarized policing yes you'd have like your OShit cops in case

things went down and then the rest of them would be highly trained in specific areas that would actually help people and then you would have people you wouldn't have this bad relationship that you have right now with people in police well yeah people in the UK are like I can't believe you guys are not on this what is wrong with you for people who don't know the UK has armed police and they come when there's a bank robbery where people are throwing grenades or whatever the rest of the

cops they don't need guns they don't need guns they call the people with guns you need guns to write a parking ticket it's insane or to investigate something and it's a different environment

“yes but also like there's a reason for that and our data I think we touched on this before”

quite a bit but our data is super vulnerable to being grabbed by foreign actors spies criminals but does it make us safer a lot of people are going yeah but how many criminals that they

caught using this stuff must be millions been yeah the problem is researching what solves crime is

actually incredibly difficult and it takes a very long time like researching how to make crime go down you have so many variables and like crime goes up and down based on so many different things and in so many different areas and you could literally have a gain leader getting out of prison and that either making crime go wildly up or down like simple things like that can change like an entire neighborhoods profile and so an interesting thing that happened to me a couple of years ago

I read this paper from I believe it was the University of Chicago and they had this AI system that could predict crime with over 90% accuracy down to one given block and I like read the paper

I already lived in Atlanta at the time but I went back Chicago and I visited the professor sociology who like led the project and some of the developers and interviewed them and stuff for a video and it was like really interesting because like the first thing they were studying in neighborhood that was in Angeloid which I grew up in West Angeloid so it was right next to the neighborhood that grew up in Angeloid's California and so I was like okay this train and so I asked them

that not even like it was like a gotcha question I was like how often do you go there and they're like oh

we've never been there and I was like wait a minute wait a minute this is 15 minutes away from your campus

and you've been spending years training in AI model on the data that you get from this neighborhood but you never thought to fucking drive through it are you kidding me that's insane are you that scared of black people what do you think's gonna happen it was mind-boggling that day I had another thing in that neighborhood I was interviewing and working with a nonprofit called Purpose Ober Pain which is literally a nonprofit founded by mothers who have lost their children to gun violence so it's very

hard to find anything but empathy for what they're trying to do and that nonprofit they basically have a help line that you could call if somebody close to is died or do you think that somebody's in trouble they don't really work with police if there's a murder in the neighborhood if there's a drive by if there's something like that they generally they know who's in the gangs they talk to them they just try to make sure that there's not a retaliatory wander that if there is a retaliatory

one they make sure that it's not somebody in the neighborhood they make sure that it's not somebody

innocent they basically talk to people and work with them and it's essentially people voluntarily

doing community policing and it was really interesting because the person who leads that pan mostly she said to me I can predict crime with a higher accuracy rate than that and I was like when you mean though I how and she was like I just talking to people I guess with all of its

“absurdity the best way to predict crime is to commit a crime right and so it's like the closer you”

are to the actual thing and I think that just made me realize how ridiculous a lot of tech and a lot of anything with AI obviously but just in general like how technology doesn't really solve problems like that like a claim it does and it could like cherry pick stats and stuff like that but to say if license plate readers have made things safer there are cities in California where car theft's doubled after they installed flat cameras or ALPR cameras or other and then there

are places where it's dropped there are places where no things happen there's just not been a study on it and even if there was it would probably take two decades before you actually had an answer because we don't even know if increasing police solves crime like we have no idea that goes both ways sometimes you increase police you have more crime sometimes you increase police you have less crime it depends on so many things there's a good concept in the video that I want to

have you take us through the Hawthorne effect where behavior changes when observed tell me

about this I'd never heard of this and I think it's a really interesting phenomenon yeah we take

for granted the things that we do in private which are like generally if you're singing really loud dancing things like that something for the first time that's one of the important things like I learned how to play music instruments I learned how to solder I learned how to do so many different things that I do constantly by myself without judgment of other people and it's actually really fascinating to me to think about how close closely connected you can become to something

“if you don't have judgment involved that's what a child needs to practice a cartwheel”

appropriately or there's so many things where it like you just need a judging person to not be watching you and your brain doesn't really see the difference between somebody who's just very judgmental or security camera it's like somebody who's watching you you're vulnerable you have that vulnerability so you're not going to act the exact same way that you would if you didn't have anybody and like a weird crossover from that is people who've had a pet die a lot of times you'll

hear people saying like when they have a pet die that they were actually more upset than when they had a family member die or something like that and yeah that doesn't make any sense it's like yeah but your pets are incapable of judging you your mother judges you your kids judge you pets don't you can act completely organically in front of your pets and as long as you're not making them scared or something they're not going to go tell the other dogs about it they're not going to give you

less social value and that makes you love them and that makes them love you unconditionally that's just

“a good metaphor for how important it is to actually have time and be able to do things that are”

completely devoid of judgment and a surveillance state makes that close to impossible. In fact having ring cameras around your house makes that impossible because your significant other or another family member or the cops or whoever might be able to see you scratch your balls in the driveway or whatever it is but whether you're doing something that stupid or they might be able to see you practicing archery for the first time when you're super embarrassed for anybody to find out

that you shot your foot within arrow or whatever sure there's so many different things but especially

to be like a grown man just swinging out of swing by himself for a while and it was like this is something I do like I actually do this I've gone to parks and I've just gone out of swing because I

“want to because I remember going out of swing when I was younger and I see a swing and I go I”

really want to do that but I only do it if I'm the only one around because I'm a grown man and me walking into a playground and going on a swing looks weird so it's like one of those things where I feel like out of all the footage that I went through in those few weeks that was the one that really drove at home for me because it was like this person would have not done this if they knew this camera was it. Yeah that's true so the hot thorn effect where behavior changes one observe

might be good with respect to crime like you know you go to a store it's a smiley on camera and that weird corner where the clerk can't see you and it's because people steal crap that's on that shelf and it's like oh you're being watched oh maybe I won't you know the casual shop left there might be like maybe I won't do that but this is bad with respect to hey I'm being observed in my own neighborhood all the time this is TMI but I have a hot tub in the back and sometimes I'm like

I want to jump and hear totally naked but the problem is it's on a deck right it's on a deck

“and I got to get up on the deck to get into the tub and when I get up on the deck I can clearly”

see my neighbor's catcher went over here neighbor's catcher went over here and the other day when I was like I can do this because it's getting dark there was a guy in the roof across there putting them solar panels and I was like nope that guy can see me really clear so I just don't do it and I've got a neighbor who's thankfully my brother in law where his bathroom window is huge and looks directly down in there and I'm like one day his fiance is going to go I saw Jordan

naked as the day was born jumping into the hot tub and oops and it's fine because it's like relations but you don't want your whole life everywhere you go having that same effect where you have to go I know people at home are going oh I don't care I'll do whatever no you won't the hot thorn effect literally proves that your behavior will change yeah there's like simple a weird thing that I do around here is we have coy wolves which are like coyote wolf hybrid dogs

down here in Georgia and I have chickens and so there are always very interested in my chickens and

one way that effectively gets rid of them is pissing all of your property like they smell huming urine and they go maybe not I'm able to check something else out I can see where you're going with this continue yeah quite frequently I'll be like I gotta pee I'm gonna go outside yeah don't waste a good piss on the toilet yeah go outside but yeah a grown man whipping it out to a third person who might be watching through a security camera or something like that like very different

or you know could just be an inconsiderate person who's just urinating over them you know whatever it is people tend to judge when they don't know the whole story which kind of goes back to that but also when you mentioned about it having surveillance everywhere could reduce crime that does happen on a micro level like you mentioned a store they have an area where like things are constantly being stolen they put a camera in front of it and then yes it is true that those

things might not be stolen as much but that doesn't mean that the person who was stealing those things is going to reform become like a preacher instead and not stealing anymore like they're just going to go to another place and find a different victim or they're going to figure out a way to adjust how their committing crimes to obfuscate it from happening which makes it more complicated to solve from I guess general policing way and so when you end up with like areas where

that would actually come into play with something like a flock camera where he's like okay well we have one on the block and we don't want any of these cars broken into it's like that just means that cars are going to get broken into more often on the next block in most cases because people are not just going to immediately not want money anymore not whatever reward they're getting for breaking cars and so it's like one of those things especially crimes like that like

petty crimes like theft and like the things that like a lot of like homeowners associations they'll sign a contract with flock because they want to reduce things like that like having a surveillance camera is such a band aid like rather than an healing and actual problem but it just requires everybody to be on board it is one of those things where it's guess what crime and poverty are really closely connected when you have people who are desperate the petty crime goes way up like

that's plenty of research proves that so maybe looking at the problem a little bit more pro actively speaking at that what we do put signs to tell crackheads that there's copper in the cameras and have the meth community take all these things down again hypothetical just joking

“you know it's funny to me I remember maybe it's during the George Floyd thing or something like”

that when everybody's talking about defunding the police or getting rid of police and I remember some Texas senator or something his entire platform was like you know what cops find call a crackhead and that was his whole thing and it was like his like edgy little stick and it was so funny because I could think of multiple times in my life where a crime had been committed like on my product I used to run a nonprofit music school somebody broke in stole all the bikes you go to a

crackhead and you ask who took the bikes who steals bikes around here who do you see here you're

always outside waiting for crack to drop off the back of the truck or whatever it is that you're

he's a guy who steals bikes and they sell them up at this flea market and without police we're

“able to get it back and so it's funny because the idea here is not like crackheads save the day”

all the time the idea is that crackheads aren't scary first of all like their crackheads I don't understand why so many Americans right now are like terrified of homeless people in crackheads like these are generally harmless people it's probably more harmful to like approach a frapp boy or something like that's like way more dangerous in my eyes statistically I would love to see the data on that yeah that would be interesting exactly but also that is what community policing is I saw

the crackhead every day because I walked by him and so it was familiar and he was happy to tell me

where my bikes went when somebody stole it where the cops would have never found it because it was

Chicago and how are you gonna find yeah they're just like yeah sure we'll fill it a report I swear but yeah I mean it kind of goes back into that where it's like if you actually have some level of community policing and if if your community trusts the people who are enforcing the law and are receptive to them I think that goes a longer way than just installing them just surveillance cameras everywhere and then arresting everybody who does something wrong in front of

them we now live in a world where your car or your phone and half the street lights around you are probably generating a permanent record of your day but don't worry the people in these systems assure us that everything is totally under control which historically has been a rock-solid promise before you throw your phone into the nearest lake use it to support our sponsors we'll be right back

this episode is also sponsored in part by better help financial stress isn't always just about

not having enough sometimes it's about feeling like no amount is enough it's comparison pressure

“and that voice in your head telling you that you should be further along by now that stuff can”

wear on you even when from the outside everything looks fine even if I fall victim to that I look what I built instead of thinking like this is great my brain goes to yeah well why didn't you build something even bigger Jordan why isn't the show 10 times larger that's the trap and therapy can help you sort through that not because it's gonna tell you how to make more money but because it'll help you deal with the stress and anxiety that come from tying your value to achievement better

help matches you with a license therapist based on the short questionnaire and if the fit is not right you can switch anytime I've done it myself a couple of times they have over 30,000 therapists they've helped more than 6 million people worldwide and live sessions have an average of 4.9 out of 5 based on over 1.7 million client reviews when life feels overwhelming therapy can definitely help sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/jordan that's betterahlp.com/jordan

verwandel deineleiden shop with shoppefine and business and snuck us at the record with the checkout with the world world best conversion the legendary checkout from shoppefine for just the shoppe noch deiner website bis hin zu social media and uber eiderts vision that's a music for your orn virus of release and vendist mid shoppefine can't sit to item ashten hip band started on test na hoi to tune I'm an oil with Ben Jordan the blowback for you is crazy I mean you're being tracked by private investigators

here and there for I can only assume intimidation purposes because they're not actually delivering

“any important data to their client are you being threatened by the companies at all like are they”

saying hey season deceased and you're like well and not doing anything so fly kite surprisingly no I haven't but I know people who have other people that have worked to have been like directly threatened by the company and have gotten season to sister the person who runs deflock.org for example which tries to map out where flock cameras are got a season deceased of really frivolous and stupid one in my case I assume that they probably know that I have legal representation and that I'm

also pretty closely tied in with the ff the electronic frontiers foundation which is essentially a bunch of lawyers and also some part of them has to understand the strysan effect is a real thing and that like the number one video that I could release on my channel is flock safety sued me and then going over everything that happened and it would just make them look worse. hey that this guy he's followed it he's overstating the problem we're also doing him because

we don't want him to say anything anymore not because he's right or anything but just because anyway let's change the subject I mean their lawyers are probably like chomping at the bid and then somewhere somebody with more than two brain cells firing said yeah no he would love it if we sued him. I feel like it's the other way around I feel like the maybe the executives and like the investors and CEO are chomping at the bit and lawyers are like actually he's doing everything

appropriately. We can sue him and it's not going to work and he's going to make a video about it and he's going to have a right to go into discovery and grab a bunch of documents from us

that you guys don't want to release. When I do stuff about Scientology this is always what it is.

I'm like or culture something people call are you worried about getting sued and I go yeah but that don't go to discovery and I'll be like hey so all these things we said were true and now we have it on public record in your own writing so sure do it they send a season to system. I'm like

and everything where you talk about how I'm saying something that's totally true and you just want me to be quiet let's do it let's dance they don't want to do that they don't want to dance they want to scare you and when that doesn't work that's it man yeah there's been moments like I've

“had cops come here and do weird things and stuff like that at one point I think it was the”

morning when the video came out about the security vulnerabilities a cop randomly went to my neighbor's house and then came on my property and at this point there had already been private investigators and stuff and I didn't know why they were here I just saw them in the dogs I was like keeping the dogs in the house so they didn't get shot and I was literally taking off my belt getting rid of my valuables and like taking you know I you're not allowed to have a belt and custody and so you

know stuff like that and I was just like all right yeah here's my attorneys number here's this person blah blah and then yeah other things where it's making sure that if the cops came or if there's some sort of frivolous thing or something happened because honestly if the cops did come here and rest me it would be over a made-up charge if not done anything illegal in regards to this and making sure that like the animals could be cared for and stuff like that in that sense it's been

stressful and then people in my family and then even people who visit or like had people pet-sit and stuff like that like they're genuinely freaked out just because you

“have private investigators and yeah they're just like just people would are watching the house and yeah”

sucks that's crazy to me I find it unbelievable speaking of EFF I've worked with them before because I gave a talk at Defcon which is a hacker conference 15 plus years ago and I basically had to expose how I was using LinkedIn to trick people who should know better and to give me confidential slash potentially classified information about projects at defense contractors

and the lawyer was like here's what you can do and here's what you definitely should not do it's

like you want to expose this so they can fix the problem but then you don't want it to be like and here's all the information that got exposed and they're like oh we want to nail somebody across this guy just committed a crime let's embarrass him and then nobody will do this again make an example out of this guy there there's also like the dead man's mechanism which I'm not going to say that I have one and I'm not going to say one that I don't but it's one of the things

or yeah if I went to jail on a frivolous charge there is a chance that like an exploit go up on GitHub or there's a chance that other people in the media would release information that they've not released so far and up to use that in videos before like in videos right felt like I might get frivolously sued or something like that but I left somebody tails out but it would be a big deal if they were known on things like that let their imagination run

wild with a like oh what's he going to do from prison yeah nothing but the guy who was on the dark web potentially buying law enforcement accounts and found 400 open access API keys to our entire back end that guy yeah all that has to happen is he has to not click a button on his desktop for three days and then maybe something happens and let your imagination run wild on what that could possibly do like pick the worst case scenario and then double it because he's

“been thinking about this and we haven't and that's what might happen or we just let the guy do the”

thing and fix the problems in this software yeah that's the thing is like this is all within the legal bounds I mean let's just talk about like John Gaines rather like than just me like a imagine if he was a black hat hacker imagine if like he got pushed to the point where man he just wanted to do this for his own gain and not for public safety imagine the damage that would have been caused I truly do believe that if we were acting outside of that like

flock maybe would have already not existed like it would have been bad enough when you just think about what could have happened had we gone under the servers and rooted around there and actually would have been a much bigger issue you know it would have been disruptive for all of the clients I thought about this and I was like why hasn't that happened yet the reason is because if China and Russia are in that back end they don't want to take down flock this is the

best spy network that they've had in possibly all of history where they can look at everything in all these cameras and get all the footage like the last thing they want to do is dismantle it you have a hundred thousand tiny spy satellites in every urban area in the United States

what are taking this thing down we're going to use the crap out of this they're the first in

line to buy this data think about like people thinking that the drones were like Chinese spy drones and so like that drone thing we had a year and a half ago or whatever yeah it's funny to think about that when we had like the flock cameras everywhere and Tik Tok and everything else yeah like DJI drones are spying on you cool there's two in every neighborhood of ash maybe less there's a hundred and twenty thousand flock cameras you don't need drones my

little conspiracy theory with that buddy year ago I worked for about six months on the it was like basically a private contract with a group that is employed by Ukraine like basically Ukraine set it up and it's part of their defense and it was essentially for drone defense in civilian areas like how could you prevent drones from exploding on a school things like that and usually they are DJI drones like those are like the ones that are being eased in their conflict

right off the bat it immediately threw me into the world where it's a holy shit drones are

a really powerful weapon that is what modern warfare looks like it doesn't look like what we think

it looks it is 100% automated drone shit happening all over the place and then people like scrambling to remediate the issues and so some of this stuff was like adversarial noise attacks

what we were doing with it where we were essentially like setting up a goal post for DJI to say okay

we're scared we're giving you this much info and then just not actually allowing them to do it and then just banning their drones from being imported. I thought about that and it's like happening at the same time when we're sending national guard into cities and we have ice agents all over the place and yeah I mean it's particularly when you have like groups of national guards in city a drone is way more powerful than a gun to somebody who's actually trying to fight that system if you

actually had a second civil war or even if you had a small insurgency drones are the number one tool that the little guy could have in that it still checks out to me like it actually is really concerning and it's concerning me that two A people aren't more on to that or they're like for actually protecting ourselves against a government that might take over and get rid of democracy and everything else done we probably should have drones more than guns actually is a bigger threat

“to the military than just a dude with the AR it's funny you should mention this because last night”

it was watching the purge which is a masterpiece of modern cinema and if you haven't seen

one of the 10 purge movies because I've never seen them and I was thinking like wow what would

I do in this situation first of all I would absolutely get the hell out of here but let's say I couldn't I would fly my drone around I want to see what's going on and I would use it to defend myself I probably have 50 of them and then I just be zooming these things around all of the plays and I don't know drop in grenades on gangs of people in crazy scary clown masks that are headed towards my house that's what I would be doing it's so interesting I love the premise of

that movie because the thought experiment that comes after for everybody my take on it is that I feel like nobody would do anything everybody would just stay in like even the most hardened criminals I don't want anything to do with this I thought about that too unless you are like armed to the teeth drug cartel love and then you're just defending your grow house or whatever

you're not running around the city like I'm to shoot some random people no yeah if you're a drug

cartel member or something like that like you just want to keep your income coming in like that's sort of the funny thing is like most of the hardened criminals that we think of like they're involved in it so they can make money they're just going to become like capitalists protecting their

“capital right if it only like mentally old people would be outside to be fair that's what the”

purge looked like it was guy standing on the corner like I am god I choose to live a new dies and then they get merged by like an old lady with an aka 47 who's like a middle aged woman or like it's a wife lighting her husband on fire and then singing nursery rhymes next to him while in a rocking chair on the street corner of Manhattan here like whoever wrote this is both genius and absolutely brain dead at the same time like I don't understand yeah definitely a person who

thinks of society in a very bizarre way that the people who think that we need security cameras everywhere at kind of is how they probably see society I have friends who live outside of Atlanta and just like I have a friend who does like a jujitsu thing and sometimes visit them in South Carolina I hope you like so what's it Lano like now is it really bad there and it's like what are you talking about it's not it's not true yeah like it's actually it's obnoxious how

gentrified it is that's how I would describe Atlanta right now I'm not sure what you think it is it's not a war zone it's crazy to me that I don't know I mean not to get like too political but like I do think that a lot of people especially on that side of the aisle on like the right side of the aisle it's just like why are you so scared of everything why are you so scared of immigrants why are you so scared of crackheads of homeless people just go outside it's fine I promise you

yeah there's a meme I saw the other day I think my buddy made it I'm not sure I have to ask him but it was essentially like New York what people think New York it and people he met like his crazy right wing relatives and it's like escape from New York right it's Mad Max and Brooklyn is like this war zone between gangs shooting each other and throwing each other off the balcony and then the reality of it is eleven dollar pistachio espresso drinks like you can't afford your rent because

it's six thousand dollars a month to live in a glorified walking closet and it's the cities definitely have issues with unhoused people and crime but it's not even remotely close to what it was even a few years ago and it's nothing like you see on the news like you see a lot of homeless people at Hollywood or something like that but if you look at crime stats they're way down that's a whole different show I think it was just in LA a month ago and I was taking infrared photography

of Waymo's like just see the light that comes off of them the invisible light spectrum and I was like in downtown LA all might do in it so many people who lived in LA they're like oh do your crazy don't go over there don't bring your camera over there's in that and it's like no one person even asked me for money not one person even was like Yoda you haven't extra dealt like I ran into plenty of unhoused people and some of them asked me they saw the screen on the

camera and they're like whoa what's that and I was like oh it's like invisible light and then other ones just talked about the weather and I can't grasp it help scared people are of poor people yeah

“really that's what it is to be fair I looked at running a place down there and outside the building”

a guy with no shirt on who is sweating profusely in the middle of winter said yo man you want some batteries and like held out a handful of batteries that he had found and I was like I don't want to live

morning that's why he was sweating he's running on batteries and he is an unlimited amount of

batteries but you're right I've got friends who are youtubers that go through these areas where it's a intensity and I'm like wow that's a really dangerous and I'd be worried about getting stabbed with a needle and they're like man can you just come with me on one of these you're not going to get stabbed with a needle people are going to offer you a smoke or a drink or they're going to ask what you're doing or they're going to ask why you're filming or they're going to say

hey can you not film me because I'm in the throws of the worst year of my life and I don't want to be in your video that's all that's going to happen or people are going to chat you up because you're a new face and they're sick of seeing their neighbors who they've lived with for the last three like it's that's kind of it man so I did go with them because I was curious was like all right

I got to get some exposure therapy here and get like a reality check before we wrap here I'd love

“to talk about this malware for music that you create because I think it highlights your technical”

ability and the kind of fun unique way yeah the adversarial noise attacks yeah I mean essentially I was doing a lot of research into I just thought it was really interesting how AI hears things differently than humans do obviously and it's sort of been on the AI music thing since probably 2016 when the Google's magenta project for started and I'm not a fan of the generative AI stuff I think that's you'll soon find out why I did this but I started looking into technology where like

for example I could play a bird sound or you know whatever sound effect but an Amazon echo or Alexa would hear it as a command to open the garage door or something like that so these are called targeted adversarial noise attacks and so then I thought to myself like oh wow you could just put

this on my music and then when AI tries to train off of it it'll just make it really inefficient

and it'll just be like it won't be able to figure out what's going on and then I met with Jan Liu he's a researcher who initially was at University of Tennessee but now he's here in Georgia and he was working on something similar that like up-escated harmony if AI tried to hear a chord progression which is here nonsense and so in both of those cases the training just is super inefficient and it actually has the capability of then making the overall model because it

learns from its training like it's just like this feedback thing it actually as it scans more content like this it actually becomes less and less efficient on its own because it's a learning off of the wrong thing and so it's almost like a poison pill just sort of like poisoning the AI model

“and why do this so that it can't take your music and create other music based on that?”

Yeah so for me I'm almost an IP abolitionist like I like it when people steal my music I think it's fine I don't see a reason in preventing somebody from listening to my music or watching I content if they can't afford it otherwise it go nuts have fun but a lot of people aren't and a lot of people are a lot of musicians are just really tired of being treated this way by the music industry initially and now by the tech industry not sort of like dull teaming between both of them but

they're just so tired of it that like a lot of musicians just aren't releasing music anymore and some of them aren't even making it they're just this business sucks like live and do this and I think that's actually a much bigger problem than copyright issues with AI I think that like the amount of people contributing to culture lowering is a massive problem you know I'm not saying that it's necessarily happening in droves but like it's something that you would want to prevent

and so it was in more so than that it was just like there's all this tech shit going on right

“now we have facial recognition we have our ring cameras giving data to police we have the”

flock safety cameras we have Amazon Echo and all these devices that are constantly listening to us and using our data for one purpose and another and now we have any music that we put out there AI is training off of it any graphics or photography that we put out there AI is training off of it and then reselling it and so guess what you can actually fight back with technology you don't need a senator to hear your case you don't need anybody to feel sorry for you and make a law you can

actually fight back organically with technology the same way that they're oppressing you and so that was the reason why I did that was actually a much stronger statement in general I hope that a lot of people start thinking more like that and that's sort of DIY way of figuring out a way to protect themselves against things like this yeah this is interesting so it's essentially to put it in practical terms if I play or music I hear music but if I play or music AI shizam whatever listening

just here's like or something like that yes mine actually can do targeted or on targeted so for example if I played music that had a guitar solo over it it could make the AI hear a harmonica or something like that and then the harmony cloak version that could do targeted as well where you hear like the wrong chord progression but that also could just make it like a lot of in harmonic tones that don't make any sense and then it's okay this is the country song that we scanned so

we learned how to do that so let's move on to the next artist and at that point it actually may have become less efficient as a model overall and they're going to have to go in there and write an algorithm to unlearn all of that and that's going to be very different but yeah it's just

you very much really interesting conversation I love your videos I watch a ton of them and it's

not just technical flock camera stuff I watched one the other day on why you can't get ADHD medication I had no idea about that all kinds of cool investigative journalism I guess I don't know can I call it that yeah now it is yeah it is that at this point so I'm and it's a miracle that you're not sued into oblivion slash in prison but hey they're still time yeah well if I am you know fight with me you got it good whoever sets up the go fund me to that's right yeah

“think you need top secret clearance to catch war criminals in this preview Elliott Higgins shows”

how everyday citizens with nothing but Wi-Fi and curiosity are uncovering global crimes that governments tried to bury. Burning Cat does something called open source investigations thanks to smartphone technology social media and the wealth of information we have online stuff like Google Maps give you satellite imagery, ship tracking websites, plane tracking websites all kinds of information that's accessible to you now I started doing this in 2012 as a hobby

I just tried to figure out how can you prove your video is filmed somewhere and I realized that you could compare landmarks visible in the video with satellite imagery and do a kind of spot the difference for it now that's a technique known as geolocation but pat then it was just me playing

“adult spot the difference on social media platform. I think when we live in an era where the”

truth is constantly contested especially on the internet it's good to have something where you can not only point to the evidence but the actual process you used to come to your conclusions and open it up for debate because there is a tendency for people just to read stuff that reinforces what they ought to believe and that causes a lot of problems if we're going to have a debate about something it should be on actual facts not just the opinions of a new newspaper columnist you just read

what we do is important it's not just about allowing people to see our working but giving them the ways to actually do it themselves and if we let the world just be run by people we want you to shut up then it's going to be a very dark way to do for me it's really about taking open source investigation and guessing as many people as possible to use it yeah I would just say give it

“go if you're interested because that's what I did and like turned out quite well to hear how”

Belling Cat is using open source slew thing to expose war crimes and rewrite the rules of intelligence check out episode 1192 of the Jordan Harbinger Show if there's one take away from

this conversation it's that surveillance technology almost never shows up as something scary it shows

up as something helpful something efficient something convenient something that promises to make us all safer and sometimes it does but the real issue isn't whether the technology works it's who controls it who secures it and what happens when enormous databases about our lives are built faster than anyone bothers to protect them because once systems like this exist they don't go away they just get bigger so next time somebody says hey I've got nothing to hide it might be worth asking a better

question who gets to decide what counts as suspicious five years from now all things Ben Jordan will be in the show notes at Jordanharbinger.com advertisers deals discounts ways to support the show all at Jordanharbinger.com/deals please consider supporting those who support the show don't forget about six minute networking as well it's over at six minute networking.com I forgot to show it this

episode but you've heard me do it a million times so there it is I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both

Twitter and Instagram you can also connect with me on LinkedIn in this show is created an association with podcast one my team is Jen Harbinger, Jason Sanderson, Robert Fogaddi, Tata Sadlowskuss, Ian Beard and Gabriel Mizrahi remember we rise by lifting others the fee for the show as you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting in fact the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about if you know somebody who's interested in the

hacking and tech angle the privacy angle definitely share this episode with them in the meantime I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn and we'll see you next time [BLANK_AUDIO]