In short
The episode argues that the US is building an “Orwellian” mass surveillance state using automatic license plate readers and facial recognition, especially via Flock Safety, and that this expansion is driven by profit and political/government partnerships rather than public safety.
Guests and backgrounds
Ben Jordan is presented as an investigator/researcher who has studied where surveillance data goes and how Flock contracts are marketed and implemented. Garrett Langley (Flock founder) is discussed via an interview clip. “D-Flock” is discussed as an activist group that maps Flock/ALPR camera locations.
Key claims
Surveillance is pervasive (cameras that “listen” and analyze biometrics/gait/face), lacks meaningful legal safeguards, and can be used without warrants. Flock’s system allegedly supports “hot lists” and ongoing tracking like GPS. The episode claims crime is not reduced despite expanded coverage, and that communities had little democratic input. It also claims companies market to police, with revolving-door ties between government and private industry.
Notable examples
Harris County, Texas (3,000+ ALPRs) allegedly had 500+ murders in 2025. A cited case: Javon Martinez destroyed three Flock cameras and faced charges. A Dunwoody, GA example: Flock employees allegedly viewed footage inside a Jewish community center (including daycare/gym areas) over 1,000 times with no arrests.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOExploring Orwell's 1984 and Surveillance
0:15 to 3:05
Discussion on the prescient themes of Orwell's 1984 and its relevance to modern surveillance.
“If you're over 40, you probably were assigned the George Orwell novel 1984, not written in 1984, written in 1949, right after the Second World War.”
The Consequences of Lost Privacy
3:05 to 6:06
Examining how the loss of privacy affects intimacy and personal freedom.
“there's a scene in there where the protagonist in the novel, without being boring about it, a guy called Winston Smith, meets another person and has a kind of low-grade love affair with this woman called Julia.”
The Rise of Surveillance Technology
6:06 to 9:24
Investigating the rapid increase of surveillance technology and its implications.
“And there's really no legal safeguard in place to let us know or to protect us from the misuse of that information, information about us.”
Safety vs. Privacy in Modern Society
9:24 to 14:00
Analysis of the trade-off between safety and privacy in contemporary governance.
“The problem is it hasn't worked that way because safety has never been a priority of this ruling class.”
Surveillance vs. Crime in Harris County
14:00 to 14:59
Explore the paradox of increased surveillance and high murder rates.
“You would think it would be the safest place in the United States.”
Privacy as a Prerequisite for Freedom
15:00 to 16:19
Understand how privacy is essential for freedom and independent thought.
“Because that is not a relevant component to the formula.”
Public Reaction to Surveillance Measures
16:20 to 17:27
Learn about citizens' frustrations with surveillance and their calls for accountability.
“Do you go to your city council meeting and complain?”
Destruction of Surveillance Cameras
17:28 to 18:48
Discuss a case of vandalism against surveillance cameras and the motives behind it.
“There's no law preventing other people from stealing your conversations and your image in the most intimate moments of your life, like in your car, and sending it to anybody or selling it to anybody.”
Understanding Citizen Resistance to Surveillance
18:49 to 19:59
Examine the motivations of citizens taking action against surveillance technology.
“She wanted my name, but I have a right to not bear testimony against myself.”
Corporate Perspective on Surveillance Activism
20:00 to 21:55
Review the corporate viewpoint on citizen groups opposing surveillance.
“They don't think it's to make them safer.”
Show all 28 chapters
D-Flock: Tracking Surveillance Cameras
21:56 to 24:29
Learn about D-Flock, an organization focused on tracking surveillance devices.
“Here is the founder of Flock Safety, Garrett something.”
The Asymmetry of Surveillance Laws
24:30 to 27:16
Explore the unfair dynamics of surveillance laws and citizen rights.
“But what they really do is keep track of where the monitors are, where you're being surveilled.”
Future of Surveillance Technology
27:17 to 28:00
Discuss the implications of advancing surveillance technology and drone use.
Surveillance and Its Implications
28:00 to 29:16
Discusses the risks of surveillance technology, especially drones and cameras.
“But pretty soon it won't matter because they're going to be in drones.”
The Dangers of License Plate Readers
30:12 to 37:58
Ben Jordan explains the risks and concerns surrounding license plate readers and surveillance technology.
“So Ben Jordan has thought a lot about this, knows a lot about it, knows a lot of the details about where the data from these cameras are going, which is worth knowing.”
Understanding Flock Cameras
42:12 to 42:38
Learn how Flock cameras operate and their implications for privacy.
“So where do the images and the sounds go?”
Surveillance and Law Enforcement
42:38 to 46:20
Explore the relationship between surveillance technology and law enforcement practices.
“And so not only your license plate, the police can just search brown car, broken window, and then they'll be able to find every single time that you've passed a camera.”
Community Surveillance Concerns
46:20 to 49:16
Discover the potential dangers of surveillance in communities during crises.
“But in the end, everything that you're talking about, the things that you're scared of, absolutely could happen.”
Data Privacy Issues with Flock
49:16 to 51:19
Examine the implications of Flock's data practices and lack of regulations.
“Nobody had to answer any questions about it.”
Data Privacy Issues with Flock
51:22 to 52:08
Examine the implications of Flock's data practices and lack of regulations.
“Well, there's never been a better time to sign up for Dutch Pet.”
The Moral Implications of Surveillance
52:37 to 56:00
Discuss the ethical concerns surrounding surveillance and personal freedoms.
“Are there any laws governing what Flock, and Flock is not, of course, the only surveillance company out there.”
Whistleblower's Experience with Surveillance Technology
56:00 to 58:30
Learn about the whistleblower's journey and concerns regarding mass surveillance technology in policing.
“You were at one point a police officer in Rhode Island, and you no longer are.”
Consequences of Speaking Out
58:30 to 1:01:10
Explore the repercussions faced by the whistleblower after revealing surveillance practices.
“I spoke with a lot of my local representatives to try to let them know that got me in trouble.”
Health and Lifestyle Impact
1:01:10 to 1:02:33
Understand the health implications of poor diet and the role of liver health.
“And definitely now that I'm doing this interview, I won't be able to find a job in the entire country.”
Community Reaction to Surveillance
1:03:43 to 1:10:00
Discusses public and police responses to the implementation of surveillance cameras.
“I've got a lot of questions, but the main one is why was the Pawtucket, which used to be a pretty tough town as I remember it, It's still a tough town.”
Courage to Speak Up Against Surveillance
1:10:00 to 1:12:28
A whistleblower discusses the risks of revealing truths about surveillance and integrity.
“You know, I tried, you know, but when I was getting, it was in a two-year period I was getting suspended, suspended within two years.”
Gratitude for Courage
1:12:28 to 1:12:38
A heartfelt acknowledgment of the whistleblower's bravery and its impact on society.
“Well, I, for whatever it's worth, nothing really, but I just want to say it.”
Closing Remarks and Farewell
1:12:38 to 1:13:15
The host wraps up the discussion with thanks and a sign-off.
“and I think you did that for everybody in this country and I'm really grateful you did it and last thing, you were very articulate so that was not your problem You know what it is?”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00And we're live on Match Day as Doug reaches for a buffalo wing. He's got it! Oh, and he's gone for a can of Pepsi, too! What a finish! There's no doubt about it. It just tastes better. Match Days deserve Pepsi. If you're over 40, you probably were assigned the George Orwell novel 1984, not written in 1984, written in 1949, right after the Second World War. And it is famously a picture of the dystopian future where the state controls everything. And if you can think back, the novel, not quite as widely assigned now. Your kids are probably not reading it. If you're under 40, you may not know exactly what it is, except it's like a synonym for the state being overbearing.
0:46Big Brother is watching you. But it's worth remembering what 1984 describes because it is so, so prescient. It does not describe a lot of physical repression by the state. In the end, there is torture and there are allusions to killing. But the state in 1984 doesn't spend a lot of time putting gun barrels in people's faces. It doesn't need to. What it does instead is spy on them. There are cameras everywhere in 1984. Something called the telescreen, which when the novel came out in 1949 seemed very space age. It was a screen, and it listened while you spoke. It eavesdropped on you, and it bombarded you with prerecorded propaganda messages.
1:33And again, when this came out, it was impossible to imagine, say, the iPhone, which is listening to you at all times, or one of those seatback screens on Delta Airlines that's yelling at you without your permission about some credit card deal. no one reading 1984 when it first came out had any reference point for this level of surveillance there was famously a guy called jeremy bentham who was a liberal reformer in the 19th century who had the greatest idea in the history of human progress called the panopticon and the idea was we're going to build prisons with a round design so one officer can see everybody in the prison.
2:13All the cells will be open, and one guy can see everybody. And of course, he can't see everyone at once, but inmates will never know when he's looking, so they'll know at all times that they could be under surveillance, and that will compel them to obey. They'll be a lot more obedient once they suspect we're watching. That was the whole idea of the panopticon, meaning see anywhere. So apart from that kind of kooky, supposedly well-meaning, but actually totalitarian theory of Jeremy Bentham's, nobody had really constructed a state capable of watching or listening to everything that people did because the technology wasn't there.
2:53You just couldn't do it until 1984. And it painted, once again, a pretty accurate prediction, as it turned out, of what the future was going to look like. But what's interesting, there's a scene in there where the protagonist in the novel, without being boring about it, a guy called Winston Smith, meets another person and has a kind of low-grade love affair with this woman called Julia. And the reason this is notable in the book is because there are very few love affairs in 1984 or in a world with this kind of surveillance because they're impossible. One of the things you learn when you lose your privacy is that you can't have intimacy without it.
3:33Intimacy is by definition exclusive. It is a relationship between a very small number, are usually two people. You can't have an intimate DMV line or concert. Your bedroom, you hope, is intimate, and that's because not everyone's invited. So without privacy, there is no intimacy. People can't say what they really think. People are afraid that everyone can hear what they're saying, and so they don't say it, and after a while, they don't think it. So the main takeaway from the novel is you don't need to beat people or shoot them to get them to comply. You only need to spy on them and then tell them that you're spying on them, and they will know that they have to constrain their own behavior.
4:19They will be so terrified and alone, so completely isolated, that after a while they won't be capable of having revolutionary thoughts. They will accept whatever you tell them. So stripping people of their privacy is the key to enslaving them. So in the novel, Winston Smith and Julia decide we're going to try to have a normal conversation. So they go to Paddington Station in London and they take the train out to the countryside and they stand in a pasture and they have a conversation. And that's the kind of extent of their intimacy, but it's thrilling within the context of this dystopian privacy-free world.
4:57They go out into the countryside and there they can talk freely. There they can be truly themselves. There they can be honest and be intimate with another human being, break out of the prison of solitude that the state has cast them in. What's interesting, if you think about it, is that even Orwell, who died months after finishing the book, his last book, even Orwell couldn't have imagined the world that we live in now in the United States in 2026, where even driving to the countryside, much less taking the train to the countryside is no escape from nonstop surveillance because cameras are everywhere and cameras aren't simply recording you they're listening to you and analyzing your biometrics your gait your face there is almost if you live in a metropolitan area in the united states no place you can go from your bedroom to the grocery store to the sidewalk in front of your house or apartment where you're not being surveilled at all times 24 hours a day.
6:05And who knows what's happening to the images and sounds those cameras are capturing, that data, who actually don't know. And there's really no legal safeguard in place to let us know or to protect us from the misuse of that information, information about us. Remarkable. how did this change so fast and were you consulted on the change did your local lawmaker ask you would you like to be spied on 24 hours a day no of course no one asked in fact until very recently most americans were not even aware this was happening there's been an explosion in surveillance in one specific area which is misleadingly named automatic license plate readers so the idea is that a camera either affixed to a pole or bolted the side of a building or increasingly in a drone takes pictures of a license plate and runs that information back to police headquarters presumably or corporate headquarters and that information can be used to track down the fabled child traffickers everyone in charge is so upset about child traffickers there's not a single member of congress who isn't very exercised about the existence of child traffickers even the ones who opened up the southern border and led in tens of thousands of child traffickers.
7:25They're very upset about child traffickers. And because child trafficking is America's most pressing problem, everybody in the country, all 350 million, need to be spied on at all times, but just your license plate. Well, it's become clear in recent months that these license plate readers are doing a lot more than reading license plates. In fact, there's no law that says they have to constrict their spying to people's license plates. They can spy on people and cars, and they can do facial recognition, and they can listen to what you say. And indeed they are. So there are a lot of companies that provide this service.
7:58The biggest and certainly the most famous is called Flock, Flock Safety. The idea behind Flock Safety is police departments will use its product, its drones or its cameras affixed to poles in their towns to reduce crime. And from the perspective of the police department, it's a pretty good deal. And it's a good deal because it's a whole lot cheaper than police officers. Police officers are very expensive. It costs over$100 ,000 a year on average to employ a police officer. Over the course of an entire police career, through recruitment and training and sick days and, of course, salary and then retirement, it can cost$7 million to a city for a single police officer.
8:44But if you were to switch, if you were to automate the process, if you were to get a machine to do what people once did, it cost you about$2 ,500 under the Flock contract. So you can certainly see the incentive. Of course, lost in this is any privacy or even interaction with the human being with whom you might relate in some way. Personal interactions becoming far too expensive in the new digital economy. But you can certainly see why city councils and mayors and police chiefs would be incentivized, would have great incentive to use flock cameras instead of people. The problem is. It's not clear what the rest of us are getting in return.
9:26So the promise, and it's inherent in the name Flock Safety, is that if you give up your privacy, your pre-existing, you thought, right to kind of walk around without having your face analyzed and sent to headquarters somewhere in this or another country, if you were to give up all privacy, you would in exchange get what? Safety. Of course, and that's the trade always. The problem is it hasn't worked that way because safety has never been a priority of this ruling class. There was a time when big city mayors and police chiefs and governors and even presidents said explicitly, look, we're going to crack down.
10:08but in return you're going to get the kind of country that is clean and orderly safe for your daughter or grandmother to go to the store no one's getting raped in my country and we may need to crack a few heads but you will get safety and for years a bipartisan republican and democrat agreement remained in place that the first order the first job of government was to provide safety for its citizens because without that what else do you have doesn't matter what your gdp is if I don't know the downtowns of your biggest cities are open air drug markets or hundreds of people are getting shot to death it doesn't matter so you first have to provide safety but somewhere around 30 years ago that part of the deal ended and big city mayors governors members of congress sort of forgot that their number one duty is to provide safety to the population and this kind of reached its most obvious and hilarious point five years ago when those same people members of congress governors big city mayors even police chiefs were calling for some version of defunding the police how about no police at all oh you think it's dangerous now how about we just don't enforce any law how does that sound and they told us that they were not embarrassed at all opposing funding the police was a prerequisite to being anti-racist so it was really a kind of moral test.
11:29Anyone who's for the police hated black people, obviously, in case you weren't here when that happened, but this was a widely understood principle. And every channel, including Fox News, told you about this. Anyone who's for the police, particularly white police, is just a racist. First cousin to a Nazi. What's interesting is that some of those exact same people, literally the same people, are now telling you that you have to have cameras everywhere in drones, on light poles, in buildings. In fact, now, even in your car, thanks to an act of Congress, a law passed recently by the United States Congress, mandates cameras in all new passenger vehicles that assess the face of the driver.
12:12Whether he's eating or yawning or who knows what he's doing, having a private conversation. Well, there are no more private conversations, even within the confines of your own vehicle. Why? Because safety. there are drunk drivers out there. Of course, it was only two years ago that Joe Biden explained, well, actually, drunk driving is not a big deal when illegal aliens do it. Somehow that standard has been revised. Drunk driving is such a big deal that you can't have a private conversation in your own car anymore, according to the U.S. Congress. And in fact, that is a law and it's going to happen.
12:47so how exactly has this brand new but already incredibly widespread phenomenon flock cameras license plate readers in virtually every city in the united states what has it done to crime well it has not eliminated it despite what they may tell you so one of the cities that has the most license plate readers in the United States is Houston, Texas. Harris County, Texas, which is a huge place, about 4.7 million people in Harris County, Texas. It's about the size of Oman or New Zealand. It's a lot of people. And it also has a famously high murder rate. Lots of different kinds of crimes, but murder is the most straightforward because almost all murders are accounted for because there's a body and a missing person sometimes.
13:37So murders go reported. So we know pretty much precisely how many murders a city has. Harris County, Texas has over 3 ,000 license plate readers in it, in the county. So you would think, think about 3 ,700 actually. So you would think with 3 ,700 license plate readers all over the city, when you look at a map of where they are in Harris County, I mean, there's nowhere you can go where you're not being watched. You would think it would be the safest place in the United States. But weirdly, Harris County, Texas had over 500 murders in 2025. The murder, the aggregate number of murders, the total murders in Harris County, Texas has risen dramatically over the past 10 years.
14:20Even as surveillance has become so intense, there is literally no place to hide. Now, how does that work exactly? How is it that we increase the surveillance past what 1984 describes and we still have 500 murders in one U.S. county? Hard to know how that happened. But one conclusion we can draw confidently is at the point of the license plate readers and the facial recognition software, which are integrated, probably not to keep you safe. So if you're looking for a shortcut to decode everything that you're hearing about almost anything, discount the part where they say it's good for you. Because that is not a relevant component to the formula.
15:04Should we do this? Well, let's see. Does it save us money? Does it increase profit? Is it good for us? Those are the three main criteria. What it does to you and your family, it's kind of not on the list. It's not a variable in that equation. so it is clear in fact it's proven that if you turn a city into a panopticon you still have well in the case of harris county texas hundreds of people getting murdered but you have no more privacy which is to say you have no more intimacy which is to say you have no more freedom because privacy is a prerequisite for freedom you cannot be free unless you can have independent thoughts and privacy.
15:46And independent thoughts are impossible without privacy, which is why when the U.S. military wants to train its pilots on what life in a prison camp must be like, very often it puts them in a glass box naked in the center of the faux prison camp. That is a form of torture because you are stripped entirely of privacy. There is nowhere to hide. Everyone can see you at every moment. And what does that do to people? Well, it tends to drive them insane. And yet the U.S. government, state, federal, and local has now constructed exactly that, a glass box at the center of a prison camp, and we all reside in it.
16:24So what do you do about that exactly? Do you go to your city council meeting and complain? That's been tried, and if you're interested, go online. You can see video after video of concerned and very kind of forthright and reasonable citizens asking their city council members, like, why are we doing this? Why am I paying for this and what about my fourth amendment right that prevents search unreasonable search and seizure without a warrant by the government and in every single case we could find they're just blown off like some annoying crank oh shut up safety safety eliminate cigarette smoking we'll live forever it's not like the life expectancy is going to go down if we do that oh but it did so the point is license plate readers are safe and effective and if you don't believe that you're obviously anti-science shut up science denier what are you for the drug cartels oh no that would be the government they're in business with the drug cartels but normal people cannot get a hearing on this question congress has made no effort to ban it or even regulate it to protect say images of you or your conversation with your wife and or girlfriend or anyone else from being sent anywhere.
17:37There's no law preventing other people from stealing your conversations and your image in the most intimate moments of your life, like in your car, and sending it to anybody or selling it to anybody. Now, some of these companies like Flock claim they don't. Okay, hope that's true. Is it? We don't know. And how would we know? so it's not an endorsement of vigilante justice or vandalism of course which we are not for the record endorsing but is it out of the realm of possibility that if you set up a system like the one just described that some people will say i've got no option but to take these cameras down myself well in fact that's exactly what a lot of people will conclude including this man watch Do you have plans to continue to take down these flock?
18:28Absolutely. Absolutely. They are a clear and present threat to public safety. 44-year-old Javon Martinez is facing larceny property damage and tampering with evidence charges after police say he destroyed three flock cameras, costing Rio Rancho thousands of dollars in damage. You know, you call me, but I am here. I'm right here. I stood up. I walked up there. She wanted my name, but I have a right to not bear testimony against myself. Giving my name consults as testimony. And so I just chose to remain silent. Oh, guy in an American flag shirt quoting the Constitution. He must be a dangerous radical.
19:05Better kill that guy. He knows his rights. That's not acceptable. So there are a lot of people like that. And if you go on the Internet, at least as of yesterday, and this may change in the age of AI, who knows? but as of very recently there are dozens maybe hundreds of similar videos of people destroying license plate readers cutting down the poles running into their cars spray painting them their how-to videos and how to disable them with high-powered lasers you can buy on amazon.com which apparently fried their circuits we're not endorsing that of course but their videos in other words of people who don't feel they have any other recourse whatsoever making one last-ditch attempt to preserve the one thing that makes them free in this or any other country, their birthright, by the way, and it's called privacy.
19:55They don't have it. They'd like it back. They think the Constitution guarantees it to them. Their lawmakers don't care. Their leaders don't care. Their police departments don't care. They don't think it's to make them safer. They understand that it's to strip them of their most basic humanity, which it is. And so they're doing the only thing they can imagine doing, the only thing the powerless really can do in a situation like this. They're taking matters into their own hands, and some of them are being punished for it. So you don't have to endorse vandalism, of course, and we're not, to understand the impulse behind it.
20:34And if that guy is any measure of who's doing it, and judging by the videos we saw, he definitely is a measure of exactly who's doing it. It's not the malcontents. It's not drug-addicted kids knocking down flock cameras for fun. It's sober, decent, patriotic Americans who believe the promises of their country. They're mad not because they're trying to get something from flock, but because they want to be left alone by flock. Because flock was not part of the country they signed up for. No one asked their permission to steal their images and to spy on their conversations, to read their license plates.
21:17So any person with any capacity for reasoning and with any empathy for other human beings may not endorse that behavior, but can certainly understand it. And enlightened people might work to some kind of compromise. Maybe there are ways we can use technology to lower crime and make it safer for your grandmother to go to the grocery store. That would be good. But maybe we can do that without eliminating your humanity by taking away your privacy. But that's not, of course, the posture of the billionaires who run Flock Safety. Safety. Here is the founder of Flock Safety, Garrett something. Doesn't look like he's even 40.
22:05this is garrett the billionaire flock guy describing how he feels about anyone who disagrees with his project watch corporate wars um looking at citizen projects where citizens concerned about the rise of flock and flock cameras going up everywhere and increased surveillance everywhere there's an organization called d flock who uh semi-well-known now i guess if you're interested in this stuff, who take a fairly aggressive approach in terms of counting the number of cameras and having a Discord channel where they talk about potential, you know, activities to move against Flock and stop it expanding.
22:42What do you think of that organization and the way they go about their business? Yeah. So, I mean, I think there's really two groups of activists. You've got organizations like the ACLU and the EFF who take an above-a-board approach to fight for their point of view. And thankfully, we live in a beautifully democratic, capitalistic country where we can fight in court. And I have a lot of respect for those groups because they have reasonable debates and we follow the law. And then unfortunately, there's terroristic organizations like DFLOC, whose primary motivation is chaos. They are closer to Antifa than they are anything else.
23:15And that I think is unfortunate because we don't want chaos or I don't want chaos. I like law and order. I like a society that has a bedrock of safety. It'd be interesting to know where the douchebag factory is that turns out billionaires in t-shirts who run our most powerful companies what what who is that guy he's a billionaire where'd the money come from oh from state and local governments that's it's tax dollars mr t-shirt guy garrett garrett langley or something he just described a group called defloc as a quote terroristic organization well what's defloc well if that's the only knowledge you have of defloc you probably think it's as he said it's like Antifa.
23:55Guys in black masks spray painting things and beating people over the head with flagpoles and shooting bear spray into the faces of cops. Antifa. They want chaos. Uh-huh. Well, actually, unlike Antifa, D-Flock has a website, so you can just kind of go there and assess for yourself. What is D-Flock? Well, the answer was in the question and it was accurate. D-Flock is a group on the internet that tells you where the Flock cameras are. That's what they do. They have a map. for flock cameras or any license plate readers. They think they're a violation of the Fourth Amendment. They think they're an invasion of your privacy.
24:31They think they're dehumanizing. All true, by the way. But what they really do is keep track of where the monitors are, where you're being surveilled. And you can go on the map. It's deflock.com and find out where they are in your neighborhood. And by the way, it's overwhelmingly likely that you have them in your neighborhood, that you're being watched. You didn't even know it. That's because the people are supposed to be protecting you, actually protecting you, like the mayor of your town, the chief of your police department, or your member of Congress, your governor. They should be telling you, but they don't because they don't care at all about you or your privacy.
25:06And so D-Flock steps in and says, maybe you'd like to know where these cameras are. And in some cases, because the information is out there, the guy in the American flag shirt and the sombrero may disable the camera. Okay. But most people would like to know and so providing that information is terrorism really so think about what the t-shirt douchebag guy is saying the billionaire that got rich on your tax dollars is saying to you he's saying we get to know everything about you everything well you don't even know we're here actually we have a drone overhead that at the distance of hundreds of yards can see everything about you just like a military drone and that information is going well we're not going to tell you where it's going.
25:48I mean, it's proprietary information that's going to the client, but what's he doing with it? He could be selling it to insurance companies, to other governments, to companies, to data brokers who can sell to all the above. That's not happening? I don't know. Mr. T-shirt billionaire, is it happening? Shut up. But in other words, he's reserving the right to use tax dollars to know everything about you. But if you want to know anything about their company, flock safety you're a terrorist oh you're a terrorist it's a terroristic organization are they committing acts of terror no they're actually disseminating knowledge that he's not contesting is factual he's not saying it's wrong it's it's accurate that's why he calls them terrorists how dare you you get to know everything this is sort of the deal the government has with us or federal law enforcement has with us you lie to an fbi agent any federal agent go right to jail and if you live long enough you'll know people who do go to jail for doing that so of course the fbi can't lie to you right oh yes they can so in other words your employees that you pay who work for you an fbi agent works for you hey get me a cup of coffee son that's the posture he works for you he's your employee he's your housekeeper with a gun you're paying his salary but if you lie to him you go to jail but he is absolutely allowed to lie to you and does all the time and faces no penalty because there's no law against it well that's called asymmetrical that's called unjust and that's been true for a long time but now you have a so-called private sector company a defender of what he described the t-shirt kid billionaire described as capitalism capitalism capitalism oh it's really it's capitalism huh taking money from the public without their consent spying on them and then if they try to even know what's going on they're terrorists like antifa who are against order yeah so that's not a sustainable system by the way and across the country these very obvious and clearly identified on dflock.com god bless them for doing that cameras are under assault it's hard to know how many flock on their website says not many.
28:03Well, it seems like a lot. But pretty soon it won't matter because they're going to be in drones. And unless you're an extremely good shot with a tightly choked 12 gauge, you're probably not going to knock one down. And if you do, you're going right to jail. Just charging a firearm. So they get to like hover over your bedroom window if they want. There's no law against it. Watch you and your wife and listen. But if you take any action at all or even complain too loudly or tell other people that it's happening, you're a terrorist. Okay, now. So while we can, in other words, while these surveillance devices, this whole North Korean setup that we're building here in the United States is still visible to us before it's all airborne and there's literally nothing you can do about it.
28:49You might not even know it's there at that point. There'll be no way to identify it. There'll be no deflocked for drones because they're mobile. So during this moment, we can talk about it. It seems like maybe it's worth talking about it. We're not big on debt, but there are times when you have to take a loan. Can't put it on your credit card and pay 30 % interest. You got to go to a bank. But going to a big bank is a very unpleasant experience. That's why we recommend Cardiff. Cardiff is a small business lender. America's favorite and for good reason. 20 years of experience,$12 billion loan. Cardiff has a simple way to secure capital for your business without the endless bureaucracy you're going to get at a massive bank in New York.
29:31The process is fast. The application just takes three minutes. Approvals can happen just as quickly. The barrier to entry is low. If you've been in business for at least one year and make at least$20 ,000 a month in revenue, that's revenue, not profit, just money in, you could qualify for up to$500 ,000. Those funds could hit your account the day your loan is approved. Small business is the American economy. Always has been. We hope it always will be. So if you want to build something real, you need a partner who wants to help you succeed. Cardiff could be that partner. Apply today at cardiff.co slash Tucker.
30:07Cardiff, two Fs,.co slash Tucker. Real growth, fast funding. Cardiff, borrow better. So Ben Jordan has thought a lot about this, knows a lot about it, knows a lot of the details about where the data from these cameras are going, which is worth knowing. And he joins us now. Ben, are you there? Yeah, I'm here. How are you? I'm great. Thank you for the work that you've done on this. So why are you concerned about license plate readers flock cameras? I mean, we're told that, look, it's for your safety, okay? And unless you want to be a terrorist, you should probably shut up about it. And there's nothing to be worried about at all if you're not doing something wrong.
30:47So I'm not doing anything. wrong, why should I be worried about it? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of reasons to be worried about it. One, one pushback I always get is people saying I have nothing to hide. And I feel like that is one of the most inaccurate statements ever. When somebody says that to me, I always ask them to hand me their phone and unlock it and let them go into the other room for a while. And just, you know, why do you got something illegal on there? Let me look at it. But yeah, anybody who's ever been stalked, who's been falsely accused of a crime, anybody who's ever have been hacked, who's had their identity stolen, they all have stuff to hide.
Read the full transcript
31:18And it's when those terrible things happen to you when you realize, oh, I actually have a lot to hide, and this is really important. As far as the first thing that I always, when I talk to like a police chief or something like that, the first thing I always tell them is that this is a third-party tech startup. They're not even a public company. It's a private company that has venture capital investors, but one of which is on the hook for Cambridge Analytica, by the way. And they have one job, and that job is to make as much money as possible. So they're going to tell you whatever it is that you need to hear to put as many cameras in your community as possible.
31:51They're going to tell you that it helps solve crime, that it'll increase your clearance rates. And the fact is, is that they don't have any evidence of doing any of that. So the crime thing, it does seem like, we tried to find the numbers, crime stats are complicated, cross-referencing them with what we know about these cameras and where they are. it didn't seem like they well they certainly had an eliminated crime in like oakland or houston or places that have a real problem with crime but it seems intuitive that like if you spy on everyone all the time there'll be less crime like that doesn't seem like a crazy claim yeah well i mean criminology and sociology are incredibly chaotic we actually as a society don't even know if increasing police reduces crime right like that can go either way depending on what city yes um One of my favorite studies was actually on dog ownership, like does having a security dog or having a lot of dogs in a neighborhood reduce crime?
32:48And it actually did. And the reason was because people walk their dogs and they walk around and they get to know their neighbors and they might even get to know their police more. You know, if they have police on foot walking around the neighborhood and that makes everybody safer. Like the only thing that we truly know that lowers crime is community policing, is people trusting their police officers and saying, hey, there's a gang member that all of a sudden bought a gun. I think something's going to go down. I saw this. They'll have that conversation with their police department and then they could actually reduce crime and they could prevent victims from happening.
33:24So it's not a matter of getting somebody's license plate and then arresting them down the road. You don't have a victim in the first place. And I feel in most of the communities that I've visited, and I'm literally on the road right now visiting communities, talking to city council members and stuff like that. In most of these communities, the public feels like the license plate readers, specifically from Flock, are betraying the relationship that they have with police. They're actually violating that social contract where people expect privacy and they're not being given. Well, I mean, if surveillance created safety, then prisons would be very safe, but they're very dangerous.
33:59So I guess that's obvious, right? Now that I think about it. One thing that I, the thing that a lot of people also don't think about, one of my favorite analogies, and this is used by the ACLU often, is if you're driving somewhere and a cop pulls behind you at a stoplight, you immediately change the way you behave. You start, you know, you might be really into a song you're listening to. Now you're distracted by the cop. You might be in a conversation. For some reason, the flow of that conversation changes, even if you've done nothing wrong. We all just have that weird feeling where this person who is able to, I don't know, handcuff us, pull us over, write us a ticket, shoot us, whatever they want to do.
34:38When that person's behind us and surveilling us and looking in and saying, oh, what's that guy up to? Is he up to no good? we start behaving differently. And so when you put cameras in front of playgrounds, and there's plenty of flat cameras in front of playgrounds, which is baffling to me. Nobody's saying, hey, doesn't this affect the way kids play? Like when I learned how to do a cart wheel the first time when I was a kid, or when I learned how to play the guitar, I didn't have anybody watching me. I had to be alone to do that. I needed my privacy to be able to find my own identity and find what I'm so good at, which isn't cartwheels, by the way.
35:13It's a really, no, I think that's such a wise point and a deep point. So to what extent did communities have a say in this? Barely any. Most people, up until we started releasing big videos on this and that started going in the news, most people didn't even know what the cameras were. They didn't realize that they were storing their data every single time they passed it for 30 days. So every single so it's as if in my neighborhood, for example, in Atlanta, it's as if I had a GPS unit on my car. I can't go to Chick-fil-A or a grocery store or do anything without the police knowing about it, despite having not I'm not suspected of committing any crime.
35:56so i mean shouldn't there be like a period where the town the city of atlanta in your case says to the public you know we're gonna put north korea style surveillance posts all around the city like are you for this are you against it like here's the trade-off that we're thinking about what do you think there was no democratic input that you're aware of no it's very and most people i've been out of pocket i've been paying for polling to find out you know, how many people are for this, how many people are against this. And overwhelmingly, Americans are against it. And one thing that I find interesting is, you're seeing a lot of people on both sides of the political aisle be against it at the same time, which it's like the only issue in America right now, where everybody's kind of getting along and being like, yeah, we don't want that.
36:44We hate it. And I think that's, that's really important. Because as you had just shown that video with the Garrett Langley interview. He's very quick to say the word Antifa. After some of my videos came out, he emailed police chiefs around the country, his client, from his personal email address, telling them that they were under attack by lawless activists who want to defund the police. And I'm like, I've never wanted to defund the police. That's never been a stance of mine. And just the other day, he did an interview saying that people like Flock, they don't hate Flock, they hate the Trump administration.
37:24He literally said this in an interview, and he just seems to be trying so hard to act like conservatives are aligned with him and that it's the left that's against him. But I'm trying to make it very clear that one of the reasons I'm here right now, conservatives are not aligned with him. Conservatives have classically always been anti-surveillance and pro-pricing. Of course, starting at Orwell, who was famously a socialist, sometimes identified as a communist, but whose views are like beloved by every conservative I know. So it's like, I don't even know what those terms mean. If you're for America, if you're for human dignity, if you're for privacy, you oppose this.
38:01And that partisan crap is not applicable on questions like this. These are human rights. They're not political rights. So I have to assume that kid, Garrett, whatever his name is, just put my teeth on it. I think it's actually three 12-year-olds dressed on top of one another in an adult human costume. That's so good. That's so exactly. I figured it out, Garrett. I know what's going on. That is so good. Okay, exactly. And I hate to be mean to this one kid, but it's like, what's his, I mean, he's getting rich from this, from tax dollars, by the way, and then lecturing the people who are being abused by it.
38:39There's something about that combination that infuriated me. But he said, well, you know, there's the ACLU. Now, as someone who grew up admiring, sincerely admiring the ACLU, I wish the ACLU were leading the fight on this, but you don't work for the ACLU, do you? Who do you work for? No, but I just met with the ACLU yesterday with somebody from the ACLU. They're a little bit less public on this, but they are supporting people who are filing suits. They are involved in it, but much less publicly, which is part of the reason I was having a meeting with them is because they're like, hey, you're kind of the face of this right now.
39:12do you want to maybe we'll give you some resources to help and so um yeah the aclu the eff the electronic frontiers foundation they've also been um they actually the person who uh made the flock his name's will um flock sent him a cease and desist and they stepped in and said we have a legal team we'll check this out and you know told flock to pound sand so um they've been very helpful in that regard home ownership has always been at the center of the american dream it is an actual asset, a place people work their entire lives to build, a place of stability and security and real value. Right now, though, too many homeowners are stuck swiping credit cards to cover groceries.
39:54There's basically a survival tax of 20 % interest or more. So why keep handing your money to the banks when you could keep it for your family? Interest is what kills you. Our friends at American Financing have a better way. They're helping homeowners use their hard-earned equity, and they're supporting Americans looking to fulfill the dream of owning a home with mortgage rates currently in the fives. American financing saves its customers an average of$800 a month. That's about$10 ,000 a year. It's not just a loan, it's a true financial reset. We recommend American financing. They're called America's home for home loans for a reason.
40:29So get out of credit card debt. I mean, it is just crazy to borrow money. No judgment, but it doesn't make any sense to borrow money at that rate. If you want out, call 800-685-5696, 800-685-5696, or visit AmericanFinancing.net. Imagine if every time Inverse Kramer or another top investor bought a stock, you bought it too, in your own brokerage account, automatically. Well, that now exists, and it's called Autopilot. Built by the team behind the viral Pelosi stock tracker, Autopilot lets you browse their marketplace of strategies run by proven investors or AI driven models. Just find one with a high return, connect your personal brokerage account like a Schwab or Robinhood, and every trade they make, you make automatically.
41:17Your money never leaves your own account. Autopilot just mirrors the moves. So now no more guessing, no more staring at charts, and no more checking the market between meetings. With over 1.3 billion dollars already invested, you can find Autopilot on the App Store or go to joinautopilot.com. That's joinautopilot.com. Investing has risks like the loss of principle. Why are men coming to a urologist to talk about their marriages? I'm Dr. Justin Human, a urologist practicing in Beverly Hills. And the answer is because ED doesn't stay in the bedroom. I get it. This isn't just physical, it's personal.
41:54That's why I recommend Rougiet Ready, a three-in-one treatment that works on your body and your brain. Fast acting, long lasting, prescribed by a licensed physician. Get started at rougiet.com slash Justin today. That's R-U-G-I-E-T dot com slash Justin. Slash Tucker. So where do the images and the sounds go? Where does the data go? So typically what happens with your standard Flock camera, like the black ones that you see, they're called like Falcons. That's the model name of them. They will see a license plate. They'll take a picture and then they'll send it to the flock servers where the police can access it whenever.
42:34So if the police, let's say you had a brown car with a bumper sticker and maybe a broken window, the AI actually picks that up. And so not only your license plate, the police can just search brown car, broken window, and then they'll be able to find every single time that you've passed a camera. But it gets worse than that because they have something called a hot list where they could put your license plate on a hot list. And then every single time that you pass a license plate, the police get a notification saying this person is here, this person's here, this person's here. And they don't need a warrant to do this, which is the most staggering part.
43:09It's just, this is no different than putting a GPS on somebody's car functionally, if you have a lot of flat cameras around and pinging somebody beyond one cell phone tower. The Supreme Court had not that long ago actually decided that that was unconstitutional. So I just don't see how this is. What's the status of the drones? Flock is saying publicly, you know, we have a drone fleet, we're expanding our drone fleet. How big is that fleet? Do you know? And that does seem to change the calculation. I had just done an interview next to, not on the property, but next to the property of their secret drone facility, which has a construction company name on it.
43:54It doesn't have the flock safety name. And they called the police and had me detained for doing an interview across the street for it. They, yeah, they have a drone facility. Their idea is to have drones that are persistently in the air. That's what some flock employees have told me as of like a year ago. So they do have something called emergency responder drones that I don't really have a huge problem with. Like if my house is on fire, I kind of want a drone to fly by really fast and let the fire department know how many trucks to send. But what they're doing is a lot different than that. They want drones that are persistently in the air.
44:33And then, you know, when it runs out of batteries, one will go down, one will go back up, and it'll be able to surveil every single person under it. You're describing a war zone. I mean, there are a couple hot war zones in the world, right? to several and there are permanently drones in the air so why would the why would our government be using we're not enemy combatants we're americans why would they be treating us like we're the enemy um i mean so the true i i want to joke and say because it makes us safer but um i think uh that the truth is is that all up all flock has spent hundreds of millions billions of dollars on their product and marketing, but their marketing has been towards police.
45:16And they market, they have studies that they wrote themselves that they point to saying, look how good this is for, look how much safer this makes your community, how much better it makes your job. They have conventions where they invite the police officers and give them freebies. And then there's also a really large revolving door effect where if you even go down LinkedIn, in, go down like flock employees, you'll find, you know, the head of communications happened to be a police officer in Dallas a year before. And he happened to be the person in the police department who signed the surveillance contracts or recommended the surveillance contracts.
45:53Same thing with city hall members, things like that. And so you have something that really, I mean, I call it corruption. I don't know if it's legally corruption, but a revolving door between government and private industry, to me, sounds a lot like corruption. So I think that's why you have this massive expansion. And that's why you have police saying, we need this, otherwise we can't do our job. And city council members saying, OK, well, we're going to have a quick little meeting and then vote this in before anybody hears about it. But in the end, everything that you're talking about, the things that you're scared of, absolutely could happen.
46:26Like, I think back to COVID, you know, just five, six years ago. imagine flock cameras, you leave the house to go pick up food during quarantine or something, and flock cameras are now, you know, you could be arrested for violating quarantine or get a ticket, or facial recognition cameras are the cameras that they have in retail stores, sending you a ticket because you didn't wear your mask properly, because your nose was sticking out the top. Like, I think that these affect people across the board from every political aisle. And I think it's really important that people speak to their city council members and their local politicians now and let them know how you feel.
47:00And what I'm doing, I know you talked about people taking flak cameras down themselves. What I'm doing is I'm trying to take down the politicians who signed the contract to enable this. And that's literally what I'm doing is I'm interviewing politicians on the local level to find out who's running against the person who threw their community under the bus by signing this contract. I mean, it's very easy to see how military technology, and this is military technology, these are weapons of war, could be used as tools of political repression. Let's say the war in Iran continues. This is not a partisan point.
47:34It's just an obvious observation. The war continues. The strait remains closed. We drain the SPR. And we have an actual energy crisis at that point, like an actual one. And the government says, well, we're instituting a work-from-home order. We did that during COVID. We're doing it now. And a lot of people like me would be like, buzz off. I'm going where I want to go. It's America. And then drones are deployed to make certain that the sheep are being herded correctly. Like, that's not a crazy scenario at all. No, no. And I mean, it's one of the most outrageous things that we've discovered. A friend of mine, Jason Huniar, he lives in an Atlanta suburb, Dunwoody.
48:15He has been just volunteering his time. He's not a professional investigator. He's not a journalist. He's been volunteering his time pulling audit reports through FOIA requests of, you know, what these things have been used for, where they're located, what they've been searching. And there's a place there called Marcus Jewish Community Center. It's a private, large community center that's kind of beloved by the community. And they have cameras on the wall there that aren't flat cameras. They're like the standard cameras you would have in any sort of business. And the community center said, OK, well, we're a little worried that there might be some sort of anti-Semitic attack.
48:50So we want to share our footage with police in case they need it, in case there's a shooting or something terrible happens. And by doing that, they shared it with Flock. So what Jason had discovered is that over a thousand times Flock employees viewed those cameras inside this private community center, including but not limited to the pool, the daycare center, the children's gymnastics room. And nobody had been arrested. Nobody had to answer any questions about it. In fact, they actually made it harder for Flock to collect an audit or to collect a record of who was looking at the camera internally from the company.
49:28Wait, just to be clear, it was Flock employees who were not licensed law enforcement officers. All grown men. Yes, yes. All Flock employees over a thousand times and they were all grown men. And they were looking at these cameras at the daycare center, the children's gymnastics room. And their defense to this was that it was a product demo for another client. And I'm thinking to myself, if I had a business and I wanted a flock hammer, if I had a police department and somebody pulled up a laptop and said, look how good this works, and then it was a children's gymnastics room, I would call the police or hit them.
50:02I'm not sure what I would do, but that's an outrageous explanation. That's just delusional. How many flock employees were fired after that? None. Not one. they uh they took down their linkedin though and deleted their one of them was in a band and removed his band page on facebook so yeah they pretty much got scrubbed from social media because you know i put i released a video about it on instagram and it had made the news a little bit and so they immediately just scrubbed their profiles what has congress done um so i had found some flock law enforcement um flock law enforcement accounts on the dark web from a russian vendor and it didn't have multi-factor authentication you know when you sign into netflix and then you have to like say yes i signed in from netflix on my phone or type in a code they didn't have that and not all flock cameras have that and or not all flock accounts have that and i found it for sale on a russian vendor and so i actually started talking to some senators, Representative Krishnamurti and Senator Wyden from Oregon.
51:05They wrote a letter to the FTC saying, hey, these need to be investigated immediately. There's a massive national security risk here. And the FTC, I assume, printed it out and threw it in the garbage. I'm not sure what they did, but they certainly didn't open an investigation. And this was almost a year ago. Well, there's never been a better time to sign up for Dutch Pet. That's because we have news in the world of dogs, which we follow closely. The return of new world Screw Worm has shelters debating whether they should euthanize, kill thousands of cats and dogs. The New World Screw Worm is a parasitic fly that feeds on warm-blooded animals, and public health authorities are searching for ways to contain the disease as it spreads.
51:45One of the story's main takeaways is that now is a good time to bring your dog to the vet, but a lot of people can't because vet bills are totally out of control because private equity is buying up all the local veterinarians. Prices have doubled. We did a whole podcast on this. Dutch is the solution licensed veterinarians telehealth unlimited visits as a listener of the show you can start for just $82 a year total$82 visit Dutch.com slash talker to sign up the good news is that a Dutch vet can prescribe flea and tick medication that can also prevent life-threatening new world screw worm again that's a 10 minute call no waiting room no clinic markup free shipping on products not owned by private equity up to 5 pets $82 a year Visit dutch.com slash Tucker.
52:31Use the code Tucker for up to$50 off. That's dutch, D-U-T-C-H dot com slash Tucker. Are there any laws governing what Flock, and Flock is not, of course, the only surveillance company out there. There are a lot. But are there laws governing what they can do with the data, with your data, pictures of you and your family?
52:52In Illinois, maybe in California, there's some states that are starting to try and mimic data privacy laws that they have in like the EU or any other country, really, like they have data privacy laws that are superior to ours right now. And the problem is, is that if it's only in one state, then they could just send it to a server in another state and then sell the data elsewhere. Flock claims to not sell your data, but I've literally seen PDF price sheets with an amount on how much they sell data for. So it makes sense of that. Oh, so you think they're lying about not selling data? It's almost as if they have a financial interest in lying to the public to get their company to IPO as quickly as possible.
53:40Oh, cynical, cynical. I don't think t-shirt guy would do that. And last, the most obvious question, why are you doing this? Why are you devoting so much time to this? I'm going to be honest with you. I hate it. I'm so tired of Flock. I'm so tired of it all. But it's been the last year. I mean, we've discovered massive security vulnerabilities and reported on them. But the reason I'm doing it is because it's making a difference. You're seeing communities across the country and some big cities canceling their Flock contract or refusing to renew them. And I think that everybody needs to be concerned about this.
54:15And I feel like there's very few people in America who want to be tracked everywhere they go. And now is the time when you need to let your local city council, mayor, county, whatever it is, senators, governors, you need to make a big stink about it and let them know that they're not going to be running for office anymore if they continue to allow this to happen. You actually are making a difference. That's the amazing thing. You know, everyone wants to make a difference. I think you're actually succeeding. So thank you. Thank you for taking the time. It's wild to imagine that there's a possible thing.
54:47It's so great. It's so affirming. Thank you very much for doing this. Thank you. Have a wonderful day. Thank you. So as you hear stories like that, you've got to wonder, like, who would participate in this? A lot of good people are cops, for sure. Many more than they tell you. On the other hand, police departments across the country are participating in the dehumanizing of entire populations by stealing their privacy. You can't go anywhere without being watched. So you're not actually a citizen anymore. You are, to some real extent, enslaved by the government. So most people involved in this process, gathering the information, enforcing the laws, probably don't think about it too much.
55:23But some of them aren't stupid and probably reflective, and they probably have thought of it, and yet they still work there. And what's that? So it's interesting that there have been people who refuse to participate in them. And one of them is a former police officer from Rhode island a decorated police officer called noel pachardo who said well i'm actually not going to do this because it's wrong and you hear that so seldom anywhere for any reason people voluntarily giving up a good job because they think it's immoral that we thought it'd be worth talking to him and he joins us now noel thanks very much for doing this hey it's okay how you doing thanks for having me so can you just tell us your story so you're a you're a cop in rhode island correct Oh, no, I was.
56:04Yeah. I resigned. Yeah. I'm sorry. Figure of speech. You were at one point a police officer in Rhode Island, and you no longer are. So what happened and why? So back in 2021, my department was the Pawtucket Police Department over here and a lot of other police departments across the state. They started doing these trial periods with the flock. So they were introducing to our police chiefs, our city councils, and said, hey, we have this new technology. It's going to help you solve crimes, crash criminals. And I was trained on it along with my other coworkers. And even the captain at the time who was tasked with training us, he was already very uncomfortable with it.
56:41He said, look, I was tasked with training you guys on a user's, but I don't know. This seems a little sketchy, but this is how it works. This is how you get it on your computer. This is how the system works. This is how you find a vehicle on Hotlist. And there you go. So when we first were introduced to training, I was already uncomfortable with it. And then when I finally had it in my vehicle and I saw how it worked and how it basically tracked vehicles in real time, I knew that it was a complete mistake. I believed at the time and I still believe now that it's a Fourth Amendment violation, including the ACLU and the Institute for Justice who agree on that.
57:13And thankfully, my city was too poor to afford it at the time, so they struck it down. So when I got involved and I got in trouble was back in 2023. I'm driving in my district and I see them up in my community. and I'm a patrolman and I wasn't notified that we were getting these cameras. So I was like, if I'm a police officer and it's my business to know when things like these are introduced in my department, the public doesn't know. And that was the case. The public wasn't notified. The other cities in Rhode Island were not notified. Like Ben was saying to most cities across the country, they were not notified.
57:49It was just something that Flock had a conversation with the city council and the police chief, and they were put up without notifying the public. And so, you know, after a couple months of having a hard time looking my wife in the eye, I spoke with a local reporter. I spoke with the Valley Breeze, and I told him this is what's going on. This was put up without the public's knowledge. It needs to be addressed. He asked if he could use my name, and because I'm an idealist and a bit romantic and a bit stupid, I guess, I told him to give him my name because I knew people hopefully would pay attention if they knew a police officer felt this strongly about what was happening.
58:24And so once he did the article back in October, 2023, I got in a lot of trouble. I spoke with a lot of my local representatives to try to let them know that got me in trouble. One of our representatives, who's a really good guy, his name is Joe Solomon. He invited to speak at the Government Oversight Committee in April, 2024. That got me in trouble. So because I was doing all this, I got suspended a total of four times, 72 days without pay. So I lost about$20 ,000 worth of pay because of all those suspensions. I was supposed to get promoted to detective. I got that denied twice. I was banned from taking the sergeant's exam.
58:59Every time I was suspended, they would do things like have me hand in all my gear and all my equipment, which is not a thing that we do anymore. That's kind of an old custom. The only time they have a police officer who needs to spend a hand in their gear is when they're arrested for a crime. And I wasn't charged with any crime. I was just being suspended for, well, they will lie and say, no, we're actually suspending you because you missed a municipal court date, or we're suspending you because, you know, you didn't take this report on a road rage incident. We don't take road rage incident reports in Pawtucket.
59:28That's a lie. So they would say that's why they suspended me, but everyone in my department, all my coworkers, knew that they were suspending me because of my opinion and because I was trying to address the problem as best as I can. so um uh eventually what happened was in july of 2025 so last year they wanted to terminate me and it was based one of them was literally based on a lie one of the reasons why they wanted to terminate me um so i wanted to challenge it in leobore which is like our version of a trial when you go to leobore said no this is wrong i'm fighting for my job it was going to cost me thirty thousand dollars my union was only going to pay ten so i needed to come up with twenty grand to defend myself.
1:00:05I couldn't afford that. So I had to resign. It wasn't my choice. I couldn't afford it. And so since my resignation, you know, I decided, you know what, I gave it my best shot. I tried to address this problem best I can. Maybe I'm not articulate. Maybe I'm not diplomatic enough. I don't know. Maybe someone like Ben should be dealing with this instead of me. So I decided to let it go. I said, you know, I'm going to let it go. I'm going to try to get hired somewhere else. Maybe I can get a job working campus security somewhere. I couldn't even get that because they wanted me to sign. And it was probably because they wanted me to sign an NDA before I left, which I wasn't even knowing the thing you can do with police departments.
1:00:41But they wanted me to sign an NDA and I refused. And the deal was if you sign this NDA, that bars you from saying anything about your experience here. But in return, we'll keep you on our health insurance. You'll stay on the city health insurance until you find another job. And the chief will promise not to say anything about you when you're looking for another job. I thought about that. It's not a bad deal. But I decided not to do that. I didn't sign the NDA. And that's why I haven't been able to find a job in my field. And definitely now that I'm doing this interview, I won't be able to find a job in the entire country.
1:01:17That's even, but even, no offense, I mean, I used to live in Rhode Island, so I can say this, even by Rhode Island standards, that is very corrupt. I mean, you just described corruption. That's ridiculous. And your behavior was, in my view, heroic. So thank you. eating right is pretty important, but it's hard if you live here. About half of the American diet is ultra-processed foods, and that hurts you. Fake food harms your body, your mind, and especially your liver. So people think that feeling sluggish and foggy and bloated is just what it is to be older, but that's not true. Eating crap makes you feel that way.
1:01:54Well, our friends at Dose have a solution. It's called Dose for Your Liver. This doctor-approved plant-based liver supplement is clinically proven to promote liver function and lower liver enzyme levels. That means you're less bloated, less tired. You feel more like yourself. All you need to do is take a daily two-ounce shot. It tastes like orange juice. An easy shot of liquid is not the Vax. People we know use Dose for your liver, and they have seen rapid results in their blood work, and they feel much, much better. The difference is very obvious. Lots of brands claim to support liver health, but do so before their products have gone through testing.
1:02:29This has been tested. Everything checks all the boxes. Visit dosedaily.co slash Tucker. Use the code Tucker for 35 % off. That's dosedaily.co slash Tucker. Code Tucker. 35 % off. Hey there, it's Wayfair here, where delivery and setup are as easy as a few taps on your phone. You're relaxing in an old hammock, scrolling Wayfair's app when you spot it. a brand new patio set. Next thing you know, Wayfair delivers it right to your patio and sets it up. Oh, you need a new grill too? All right, Wayfair's got you covered. With Wayfair's room of choice delivery and fast experts set up on qualifying orders, life gets a little easier.
1:03:09Visit Wayfair.com or the Wayfair app. Wayfair, every style, every home. Traditional home security only alerts you after a break-in. And that's too late. SimpliSafe is changing that. Stop, this is SimpliSafe. Police are on the way. We don't just alert. We stop crime before it starts. SimpliSafe, plans starting around a dollar a day. Save 50 % on your new system with professional monitoring at simplisafe.com slash Spotify or with promo code Spotify. Outdoor deterrence requires a SimpliSafe Active Guard outdoor protection plan starting at$49.99 a month. Visit simplisafe.com slash licenses for alarm license information.
1:03:42Tennessee 2012. You're going to love it. I appreciate it. I've got a lot of questions, but the main one is why was the Pawtucket, which used to be a pretty tough town as I remember it, It's still a tough town. Yeah, it's a tough town. Big project there and tough. Why were they so wedded to these cameras? Why was it so important for them to have these cameras? I actually don't know. I asked to speak with my chief because, you know, she dehumanized me. So I was like, you know what, maybe if she speaks to me. Because the only time I had a conversation with my chief is when I got hired eight years ago.
1:04:18I'd never spoken to her since I got hired. so she's putting all these punishments on me and like you know what maybe maybe i could have gone about this in a better way maybe um you know maybe if i had a conversation with her first before i spoke with the reporter before i spoke the government oversight committee maybe it would have made this you know it would have made this back and forth a little more cordial so i asked to speak with her and she refused to speak with me or they told me that to not even bother so i don't know i mean i i asked some of the city council members in paatucket i was like look don't you think it's a bit of a problem that the public hasn't been notified about this like that doesn't concern you and you know their response was the same response that jordan was saying was like well it's for their safety so what's what's the problem so i i don't know i i don't you know look and you know that we're dealing with a battle of extremes in our country right now is like you mentioned in your monologue you know there's the fun police thing going on three years ago.
1:05:19And now there's this another extreme of mass surveillance. So which one is it? And I, and I think that's where we're in a battle of extremes, you know, as they say, hurt people, hurt people, you know, you know, we put body cams on our officers. And when I had a body and look, whatever you think about body cams, it is a bit dehumanizing to have a video camera put on your chest. I bet. I say, go do your job. It's a bit dehumanizing. So it's not surprising to me that now when the police or the city now have the opportunity to return the favor to the public, that they're not going to think much about it.
1:05:50Yeah, like you put body cams on us. That's such a smart point. Yeah, you put body cams on us because we're a scumbag because some guy did something to Minnesota. Well, now it's your turn. So I think there's a Freudian thing going on there where you do it to us, now we do it to you. So, you know, and to defend my old coworkers, you know, it's a mix. Some of them think this is wrong. This is immoral. Some of them think it's a good idea and some of them just don't care. They just want to finish their job and go home and get their pension without getting shot. So it's not a monolith. I want – if there's one thing I can add to this that's useful other than trying to warn people as best I can, is not people to be too angry with their local police officers.
1:06:34They're getting bombarded with things all the time. Some of them are in union fights right now where some of their health insurances are being threatened. So I don't think it's crazy. I don't think every police officer who feels the way I feel should be as idealistic as me. Maybe they should. I don't know. I mean, if people want to be courageous, instead of expecting it from others, they should just do it themselves. Yeah. Well, it's only a small percentage of people are willing to do that, I've noticed, like a tiny percentage. So did it make Pawtucket as safe as Little Compton, for example? Oh, you've been a Little Compton.
1:07:07You've been around, Tucker, huh? Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, I know Rhode Island very well. But no, but what I'm saying is Pawtucket, as you just said, is like kind of famous is nice town, but there's some definitely very rough parts of it. Are they now totally safe with these cameras? Oh, no, nothing changed. Nothing changed. Really? Yeah, because no. Well, yeah, the thing is, too, you know, it's like Ben, you and Ben were talking about. If you treat people like prisoners, they act like that. Right. Right. You know, if people is like you said, a prisoner should be ideally safer because of all the surveillance.
1:07:42But it's not. It's the most dangerous place in the world. Yes. So and criminals, too. Criminals, no matter what you do, no matter what you input, they're going to they're going to break the law. You know, they're going to try to find a way around it. Like things like this, they only hurt the law abiding citizen. You know, criminals will find out a way to try to get around it. You know, instead of driving one car through all these cameras, you know, maybe we're going to do stop points and switch cars like sophisticated, Halfway sophisticated criminals are going to figure out a way to try to get around this.
1:08:10But the dumb criminal and the law abiding citizens are not. They're going to be tracked everywhere that they go. And this is what it is. It's kind of a geofence for vehicles. It tracks vehicles everywhere that they go. And I've heard some really juvenile arguments where they say, well, we're not tracking people. We're just tracking cars. And I'm trying to figure out how that's any different. Sounds the same to me, especially in a place like Rhode Island or Minnesota or wherever. everywhere except New York, every state doesn't really have a proper subway system. So if you need to get around in every state in America, you need a motor vehicle.
1:08:39You need a car in order to get around. So if you're tracking people's cars, you're tracking people. So that's a really stupid argument that was trying to be argued that. And like I said, I don't know how that's any better. We're not tracking people. We're tracking cars. Well, especially if they haven't done anything wrong. So it's sweeping up everybody into this dragnet. It seems like by definition, unconstitutional. I mean, I don't want to, I'm not alleging any specific crime because I have no knowledge of a specific crime, but given everything you've said, is it possible that members of the city council or law enforcement officials are making money on this?
1:09:20Yeah, I don't know. I mean, the reaction to me made me very suspicious. Yeah, it was very suspicious because I was the only officer in my state and at the country at the time that was publicly giving my objections. So the smart thing to do would just be ignoring me and say, you know, he's just some crazy guy in the wilderness eating over some honey or something. Exactly, exactly. But they beheaded John the Baptist. Didn't work for him. Yeah, so I thought, you know, because, you know, the chief, she's pretty smart. I thought what she was going to do was to ignore me. Yes. I thought that's what she was going to do.
1:09:58I thought she was going to punish me once, suspend me once, you know, and I take that hand. I just move on with my life. You know, I tried, you know, but when I was getting, it was in a two-year period I was getting suspended, suspended within two years. It was in the two-year periods I was dealing with all that. So I did get suspicious of what's happening behind the scenes that I may or may not know. of why they're trying so hard to get rid of me. I just thought maybe it was just a tribal impulse that was kicking in. But now that Ben is sharing, what Ben is sharing is the first time I'm hearing it, that there are some backdoor ideas that look like that happened.
1:10:35Maybe, I don't know. I mean, it is Rhode Island, so who knows. What was the reaction from your wife and your family, people you know, your neighbors, were they on your side? So my wife was on my side. good um my wife was on my side she supported me from the beginning she was worried i mean this was a sad thing everyone when i was telling my family and all my friends and my co-workers who um who really care about me and i and i still care about them very much they all told me they all read the same script they pulled me aside and they said well if you if you go this route and you talk about this they're gonna make they're gonna make sure that you lose your job and they're probably gonna make sure that you don't work again they all told me this my family told me this.
1:11:17My coworkers told me this. They all said the same script. So it was really sad that as Americans, we've accepted this idea that if you speak up, you're just going to get hammered. That was really sad that everyone just accepted that. So no one really spoke against what I was doing. Their argument was, what you're doing is noble, but leave that for some other idiot to do. You have two kids, you have a wife, you have bills to pay. Let somebody else put the neck on the line. Like that was the advice that everyone was trying to give me. And I thought about it. And like I said, I know after a couple of months, you know, I had trouble sleeping.
1:11:57You know, my first son was born right before I spoke up. And then when you become a father, I'm sure you understand this talk. You're like, oh man, like I'm responsible for who this person becomes. That's right. So, you know, one day I'm going to have to have a conversation with my sons about integrity. And when I have that conversation with them, I want to be able to look them in the eye when I have that conversation. So I knew if I ignored, I knew if I ignored this problem and I pretended that it didn't exist, you know, I wouldn't be able to do that. So I thought it was worth the risk. I paid the price for it, but I'm doing all right.
1:12:28So. Oh, you made me emotional saying that. Well, I, for whatever it's worth, nothing really, but I just want to say it. I hope you are richly rewarded for your courage and decency. and I think you did that for everybody in this country and I'm really grateful you did it and last thing, you were very articulate so that was not your problem You know what it is? It's my Rhode Island accent it's disgusting so if anybody who's never been to Rhode Island, don't worry we don't all talk like this, just blue collar just blue collar Latinos black guys and Italians, we're the only ones who talk like this It's the best, I miss it Noel, thank you for taking the time it's great to talk to you appreciate it thank you tucker thank you and thank you for watching tonight we'll see you next wednesday
From the publisher
If surveillance makes us safe, why are so many people murdered in prison? Flock cameras and the coming slave state.
Noel Pichardo is a former police officer, husband, and father born and bred in Rhode Island. Now working as a caregiver, he is also an amateur filmmaker and writer who turned to YouTube to share his perspective and tell stories he felt weren’t being heard.
Benn Jordan is an musician, scientist, and investigative video essayist who manages the popular YouTube channel @bennjordan. While previously recognized for his extensive music career, Jordan's work is heavily grounded in his scientific credentials, which include specialized research into acoustics, macroeconomics, and the physiological mechanics of light, radio, and audio waves. Leveraging his expertise in signal analysis and reverse-engineering, Jordan has also established himself as a formidable cybersecurity researcher.
Paid partnerships with:
Cardiff: Get fast business funding without bank delays—apply in minutes with Cardiff and access up to $500,000 in same‑day funding at https://Cardiff.co/TUCKER
American Financing: NMLS 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org. APR for rates in the 5s start at 6.327% for well qualified borrowers. Call 800-685-5696 for details about credit costs and terms. Visit http://www.AmericanFinancing.net/Tucker.
Dutch: Use code TUCKER for $50 off your vet care at https://dutch.com/tuckerDose: Daily supplements for the systems that support you. Use code TUCKER for 35% at https://dosedaily.co/tucker
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
