Ed, co-founder of SASSI (Southerners Against Surveillance Systems & Infrastructure), speaks to The Final Straw Radio about the proliferation of surveillance infrastructure in the South (and more broadly in United States), methods of researching and a little into resisting them.
We speak about topics such as the increasing cooperation between the state and corporate surveillance companies, the desire of these companies to extract ever-increasing amounts of data from the public, the way the state uses private databases to sidestep traditional warrant processes, some of the specific technologies that cities in the south have contracts with and their efficacy. We also touch on how folks at SASSI investigate these topics, and what can be done to help with this effort and ways to think about individual and community safety.
Also of interest to listeners may be our prior episode, Pushing Back On Flock Cameras with Kate Bertash, which Ed references during the chat.
The following links provide more information about topics we briefly touch on in the chat.
- https://www.404media.co/were-suing-ice-for-its-2-million-spyware-contract/
- https://www.404media.co/home-depot-and-lowes-share-data-from-hundreds-of-ai-cameras-with-cops/
- https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/ring-cameras-are-about-to-get-increasingly-chummy-with-law-enforcement/
- https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/flocks-gunshot-detection-microphones-will-start-listening-human-voices
- https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/11/rise-police-advertiser
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Featured Track:
- Push by Liquid Liquid from Discography (1981-1984)
Transcription
Ed: Hey, friends and comrades, I’m Ed. I use he/him pronouns, and I am one of the co founders of Southerners Against Surveillance Systems and Infrastructure, also known as SASSI.
TFSR: Would you like to tell us a little more about SASSI, how it all started, what you do and so on?
Ed: SASSI came together through a long conversation with a small group of comrades across the South as we were thinking about what sort of infrastructure could be useful to build more interrogation of the growing surveillance apparatus across the region. There are a lot of surveillance tools in use on a local level across the South, but often not a lot of awareness and not a lot of organizing against these tools. And so, I initiated a conversation with this group of folks- seasoned organizers- and we developed the concept for SASSI. We’re a collective of people in different cities across the South, different communities across the South, who are focused on (at this point in time, as we launched at the beginning of the year) making the problem legible, as we usually say. What that looks like, is a lot of research and mapping of the tools that are in use by local police departments and other agencies, tracing how these tools were acquired, who’s using them, what they’re using them for, how the data is being shared with other police agencies, and how it all feeds up to the feds and the broad national surveillance apparatus that we all know is in place.
TFSR: How do you do a lot of that research? Like where are you finding or getting this information?
Ed: We do a lot of open source intelligence work of what is already just available online via Google Dorking kind of tools, as well as using records that are publicly available from meeting minutes and meeting agendas from local governments. We also use a lot of public records requests, and we document the system in place via those requests. Then, you know, we come across documents in other ways as well. We like to be nosy. We like to be nosy, and we also like to be intentional about not focusing on a singular tool, but really about developing and mapping off the apparatus.
TFSR: Thanks for that. Would you want to talk a little more about the FOIA and FOIA process? I know from your website, and just chatting a little bit with you before this, that that’s a big part of it. Then I’ve looked at some local FOIA request responses for Nashville, and not only were they useful for knowing what was around, but also they were pretty funny. I might be wrong. I don’t know if it was a city council member or just a rich guy who was involved in getting these license plate cameras installed, who was followed to his apartment, and someone pointed a laser pointer on his wall. There were all the emails back and forth about this happening, and speculating if it was the street racing kids that did it (laughs). So I’d love to hear a little bit more about that process and how it looks on your end.
Ed: Yeah, that is very funny. Public records requests can be confusing, intimidating or just opaque to a lot of people. It’s sort of like, “how do I do this? How do I have this right to request records? How do I actually submit the request” and whatnot. The actual process of doing it is fairly easy. Every government entity has some sort of process in place. They have a person who is supposed to take the request, facilitate the request, and complete the request. You know, a FOIA officer or Public Records Officer of some sort. And, you know, there are tools out there, like MockRock is a great tool for seeing the kind of language and requests that people send. I think the part that is the difficult aspect, to a certain degree, for public records requests, is knowing how the government works. Knowing how the government works, how the system works, is key to being able to identify who has the records you want. You know what office they’re located in, who manages the system that you’re interrogating. That kind of thing. So how the government operates, how that agency operates, how decisions are made, what their policies are- it’s a very tedious process of understanding that and learning that. The better you know how the system is structured, the easier it is to identify where the records are and how to get them and what you need to say in order to get them, how you formulate your request. So I think the fun part, of course, is always getting records, but the process of actually doing the research to be able to make the precise request that you need to make, isn’t that fun, necessarily.
TFSR: Is a lot of that research just FOIA’ing back and forth, or FOIA’ing different agencies or different parts of the agency?
Ed: Yeah. When I think about public records requests, I think about trying to map out how power is flowing and operating within an agency. I’m always interested in looking at money, how money is flowing, whether it’s a grant, whether it’s a payment for a technology, whether it’s money, or it’s the presence of a lobbyist of some sort, right? So I’m always thinking about how money is present as one form of power. Then there’s also decision making, in terms of who has the authority to make decisions around whatever it is that I’m investigating and researching. I always find it interesting to get their communications, emails, to get text messages. Those often offer a lot of insights into what police officers, police chiefs, procurement officers, are thinking when it comes to surveillance tech; what they’re thinking when it comes to purchasing a technology- why they’re using it, why they like it. Maybe they don’t like it. What problems they see with it. All of that. When you’re looking at communications, it’s always interesting to see who is in communication with whom. That kind of network analysis also elucidates how power flows. There’s oftentimes, informal structures around how decision are made that don’t necessarily follow the processes that are laid out in government documents.
TFSR: This may be somewhat tangential, but are you seeing or are you researching also, the end results of this in terms of arrests and how it affects policing on the local level?
Ed: To a certain degree. Yeah. It depends on the location and the technology. I will do that in some cases. I don’t always focus on that, because sometimes that leads to a situation where there is a fight about the efficacy of a technology. So going and requesting and seeking data around arrests and how the government, and the police have demonstrated its use, is going to be very much biased.
TFSR: Yeah, you don’t want to wind up doing marketing for Clearview.
Ed: I’m not trying to do propaganda but that’s a really good question. Oftentimes in cities across the country, especially in the South, when there’s a debate over whether or not a city should be using a technology. That’s where people go to first is does it work? In SASSI, we believe that these technologies are violent. They always intensify police power. Our concerns are more than privacy. Our concerns are really about how these are tools of violence, how these are tools of the intensification of police power. So we try to avoid those kinds of debates around, does it work or not? Because we would also say that but even if these technologies “worked,” we still shouldn’t have them.
TFSR: I have heard some anecdotal stuff, mostly from graffiti writers (since graffiti writers hobby is strictly crime) and some of it is folks saying, “Oh, I was on a Flock camera, and then they followed me to point A to point B.” Rather than stopping them, they were able to do this case building, which is getting so much more common for shoplifting. They know someone’s doing a crime and instead of stopping them, as they would have in the past, they’re using this technology to put people in situations where they’re getting wrapped with super gnarly felonies. It’s like “you saw this guy spray painting. Why didn’t you just go stop him if you cared that much?”
Ed: That’s an excellent point about how they intensify police power, right? It’s not about actually preventing crime per se, right? It’s about punishing people, especially in that case.
TFSR: Well, to go back to your site you mentioned on there, your focus is not only police technologies, but all technologies that perform a policing function, what do you mean by that? And can you give some examples of some of the stuff you’re looking at?
Ed: Yeah, definitely. The harms of police technologies tend to be pretty clear, probably pretty clear to the listeners of this. The point about all technologies that perform a policing function is that, when we think about what these technologies are, they’re tools, right? They’re just the tool. It’s a digital tool of some sort, a computational tool of some sort. They are tools for the people that have control over how they want to use them. So they are a tool for whomever has power. In the case of a government that is focused on cutting its budget, a government that sort of has an austerity budget situation, a government that is focused on providing more support for businesses than residents, and cutting public benefits, that kind of thing- it’s always going to be a tool of violence. We see this when we look at the different technologies that are used in other public agencies that when they are instituted. They oftentimes have different impacts than what was discussed during the procurement process.
One example a few years ago, during the peak of Covid-19, school districts across the country were adopting something called student activity monitoring technologies. These technologies are tools that monitor what a young person is doing on their school-issued device, what they’re typing into an email, what they’re sending to a friend, how they’re searching the internet- that kind of thing. They were sold to school districts as a tool that would alert school administration teachers if a student typed in something that was of concern regarding their mental health, or a number of different concerns that were raised during the peak of Covid. The questions around the well-being of young people at that point.
There has been some research into what these tools have been used for, and it turns out that it’s more likely that in response to a student activity monitoring alert, an administrator would refer a young person to the police than to a counselor. Surprise, surprise. This broke down on racial lines (as we would expect, in terms of criminalization), as well as on gender for students that were trans or non binary. So everything was, sort of the way in which punishment and criminalization comes through. As it operates broadly in society, it was seen in that technology. So schools are a perfect place to evaluate this and see that oftentimes, technologies used in schools actually have more of a punitive function than they have a benefit. As well as the fact that technologies used in schools often are designed, really to scrape as much data possible without providing any education or pedagogical benefit. Another one that I actually think is really interesting, that I’ve looked into more and more recently, and is a big industry for Palantir: hospitals.
TFSR: Can we say what Palantir is, real quick, in case anyone listening is not familiar?
Ed: Palantir is an evil, evil company. Palantir is a large data mining company that provides products to militaries across the world, especially to the US defense system industry. They are closely aligned with the fascists that are now operating this country. Peter Thiel and that crew of folks played a significant role, are tied into DOGE with Elon Musk as well. So the product that they offer is industry agnostic. It depends upon a large amount of data in order to be able to do the data mining and analysis that the company promises to its customers. That’s why they’re such a perfect partner with for the defense industry. But one of their industries that they work in are hospitals. I’ve unfortunately watched some of their marketing videos recently, and they talk about how their product that they sell to hospitals is an excellent tool for doctors (medical professionals who have a patient who has a complex health situation) and the ability for their product to mine extensive medical research in order to offer some sort of supporting information and analysis to a doctor in terms of making a diagnosis or making some sort of care plan, whatever it might be. It seems like this is actually a really good use, potentially, for AI and Palantir’s product. It seems like it could provide a benefit to people who have a complex health situation and they need support that maybe the doctor can’t provide alone.
The difficulty, of course, is that health care is never about how we can actually treat people. It’s about how we can not treat people. How do we cut costs, and how are hospitals profitable? So a lot of what Palantir offers in terms of their tool, in terms of doing this kind of analysis, is actually less focused on treatment, and it’s more about a cost/benefit analysis of treatment and doing this deep dive to determine if it’s actually worth the cost of treating someone based upon the complexities of their health situation. I could talk about other industries, but thinking about policing broadly, when tech is deployed, it’s all about who has control over its use and what they’re using it for. It could be potentially used for the benefit of people, but in capitalism and in a political moment (austerity, neoliberalism) that is not going to be the case. A lot of technologies have punitive outcomes rather than outcomes that are life-giving.
TFSR: You’ve got a whole list of various technologies on your site that I think you’ve filed a lot of FOIAs and done research. I mentioned Clearview earlier. If folks didn’t catch that reference, that’s facial recognition primarily. I don’t know if they do other stuff. I think it’s mostly only facial recognition technology.
Would you want to talk about some of the other notable surveillance technologies that you’re seeing get purchased by cities and police departments and their functions, both as police technologies and as data mining companies or data brokers?
Ed: When it comes to police technologies, we can start with the hardware that folks are familiar with, and think about the cameras that are in place. That kind of thing. Folks are probably well aware of closed circuit television cameras, CCTV cameras. Those are growing in use. There are consumer products like Ring (that folks are probably familiar with). There is a company based in Atlanta that is growing very fast, called Fusus. It was actually purchased by Axon in 2024 but they also offer a product that is focused on, really, converting and integrating privately owned cameras into a police surveillance network. There’s also Automated License Plate Readers, which folks might be familiar with. I know there’s been another interview with Kate Bertash about Flock Safety, which is now the largest license plate reader vendor in the country. Flock has caught a lot of heat this year after some researchers in May, proved that Flock was being used as a tool for immigration enforcement as well as abortion monitoring. There are other vendors besides Flock, but Flock is probably the most notable. It has the widest reach across the country. There are also gunshot detection products, as they’re called. These are really just microphones that detect loud sounds. If some sort of algorithm and human reviewer decides that it’s a gunshot, they alert police and police dispatch in response to these systems. The most well known one is ShotSpotter, which is sold by a company called SouthThinking. Flock Safety also has their own gunshot detection tool called Raven.
Those are the more prominent hardwares that are out there that folks might be aware of. What folks might not be as aware of, that is maybe less visible (and this is part of what we say when we were trying to make the problem legible) is that a lot of the softwares and tools that police have access to. New companies, new products are just coming out all the time. These are anything from like Clearview AI and facial recognition technology, which is a tool that maps a person’s face and compares it against a database of images to identify a person, and other biometric tools like that. There are cell phone extraction devices like Cellebrite, which is an Israeli company. There’s other, similar products. Magnet Forensic sells a similar tool to Celebrate. That’s a tool that allows police, basically, to hack a phone and copy everything that’s on a phone. Another software called Callyo. That is a software that allows police to disguise their number when they’re calling someone. They can covertly call someone without disclosing who they are. It allows them to record the conversation without making that known to the person they’re speaking to. It also allows them to get the exact location of the person that they’re speaking with as well.
TFSR: Based on cell towers, or more precise than that?
Ed: More precise than that. But [sarcastically] don’t worry! Police only use that when they have a warrant. Don’t worry.
Then some other tools. There’s, a similar tool to the mobile forensic device that is a vehicle forensic device that can extract data from cars. I don’t know if folks are aware, but when you drive your car, you produce a lot of data. More or less all new cars have a system that collects that data and sends it back to the manufacturer. Berla is probably the most common company. They sell software that can basically hack into a car and copy all the data from a car. There’s also a lot of databases out there. Folks might be familiar with things like LexisNexis, CrimeTracer. They have just a vast amount of data- law enforcement data, other data that police can search. The data sets are drawn from all over. Public records, but also data that’s purchased from data brokers, data that’s scraped from the internet in different ways. Maybe the last one to touch on, in terms of software, are these OSINT and social media monitoring tools. There’s a lot of them: it’s probably the fastest growing product that police can purchase in terms of the number of products and the number of companies selling the products. Essentially, what these tools do, is they scrape and aggregate data from all levels of the internet in different ways. Whether it’s scraping, purchasing, whatever it might be, they are just aggregating as much data as possible and tying it to social media profiles of people, as well as other public information about individuals, to build profiles and dossiers on people, to do network analyzes around people and to map out relationships in that way. Those are really common. There’s tons of them.
One thing to name is that the cost for getting access to these tools is actually really cheap. It’s maybe only a few thousand dollars to get a user license or to sign an initial contract. So a lot of local police agencies have all of these. There have been news stories about how ICE signed this contract, or ICE is using this tool, and a lot of local police departments are using them as well. In a lot of ways some of these news reports sensationalize things. These tools are really powerful but this isn’t just a tool that ICE taps into. That’s something to keep in mind, in terms of thinking about how the surveillance apparatus operates in different places.
One thing I didn’t mention, in terms of the hardware that’s becoming more and more common, are drones. So I just want to name drones as well. Drones as first responders is a growing industry to have for police, to sign contracts for drones and to use drones as part of their dispatch.
TFSR: Use them just to fly out there, monitor stuff, record, gather data?
Ed: That’s what they say.
That’s a quick overview, a bit of a taxonomy in some of these tools. A lot of these tools blend in with each other. They do multiple things, so they’re not always easy to set into different categories. But that’s a rough attempt at trying to give a bit of an outline.
TFSR: It seems like it’s a realm in which companies are still figuring out where they can reach. There was just a news announcement about a Ring and Flock partnership last week.
Ed: Yeah, this Ring and Flock partnership. What this is enabling is for Ring users to have their data shared inside the Flock app, for police to access it. That’s another example of the trajectory of the industry. Companies like Flock are trying to become the platform where different technologies, different data, different footage, all integrate so that police don’t have to sign into multiple tools to get to access different databases or footage or whatever it might be. They can just sign into Flock and everything is there. So that’s part of this wild west, per se, of the growing police surveillance industry and the efforts by some of the larger companies to exert dominance in the industry.
TFSR: I get a sense from reading some of the news that they’re all out there to gather up the most data, as quickly as possible. Like Palantir made a contract recently with some Bolt Payment processor to do who knows what.
Ed: That’s exactly it. They’re trying to gather up as much data as possible and use that data to develop new products and to sell more products to every police agency.
TFSR: Or, like you were saying with the hospitals. Maybe they’ll use it in some other dystopian way to let people figure out how much income someone has and base online pricing on all this data they collect from their checkout carts.
Ed: A lot of these companies are also moving into selling their products to more industries and customers than police. We don’t have the exact information on this, but it’s believed that Flock Safety’s largest customers are Home Depot and Lowe’s
TFSR: For the little towers that they have out front?
Ed: Yeah, all the cameras that they have in the parking lots. There is a significant private market for all these tools, and it’s very difficult to get insight into that from public records requests. Public records requests don’t apply to private companies.
TFSR: If people do get data or insights, where does it come from? Is it mostly from employees that decide to step forward, or someone sneaking on to a Microsoft Teams call for the company and taking pictures?
Ed: Yes. There are whistle blowers out there that are doing great work in terms of sharing information. There are very astute hackers out there that are also getting their hands on different information and making it available. It’s coming from different sources. Hopefully we can get some more employees of these companies doing that.
TFSR: Well, just to change gears a little bit, we’ve talked a lot about these private companies, but can you talk a little bit more about fusion centers?
Ed: All of the these technologies collect a lot of data. There are a few key infrastructures in place for how this data then gets shared across police and the fusion center network. The National Network of Fusion Centers is one key piece of infrastructure for this data sharing. The National Network of Fusion Centers was started by the Department of Homeland Security, after 9/11. This was a response to what many in the national security industry say was the reason that 9/11 happened, which was the lack of sharing intelligence. They thought that the intelligence was there that could have stopped 9/11 from happening, but it didn’t get shared to the right agencies to prevent it from happening.
After 9/11, corporations worked fairly closely with the Bush administration as they developed the Department of Homeland Security, then as they developed this infrastructure called the National Network of Fusion Centers. A fusion center is a hub where all levels of police, from local police all the way through the Feds, are present together in a space. They do three things, more or less, that they say they do. They collect data, they analyze data, and then they disseminate intelligence based upon that data and information. So they will send out bulletins or memos regarding what they have found in their use of or their analyzing of data from local surveillance tools. Something that is a common tool that fusion centers use, are these suspicious activity reports, SARS. These “if you see something, say something” kind of campaigns that folks are probably familiar with.
There’s more than 80 fusion centers across the country. In the US territories, at this point, there’s basically one in every capital city, in every state, as well as one in every major metro area. These are funded through DHS grants every year, for the most part. They have built up a significant infrastructure for surveillance in each of these cities and communities. Every fusion center looks different. As the folks that have done the most research on fusion centers say: “if you’ve seen one fusion center, you’ve seen one fusion center.” So they all operate different. They look different, but they all sort of have the same function in terms of the those three points I named earlier. They’ve evolved over the years too. I mean, they’re still supposed to be a tool of counter-terrorism, but their language now is more broad than that in different ways. One key thing to understand about fusion centers is, when I say that they’re hubs for all police, that means that the idea of a sanctuary city is oftentimes impossible because ICE is already present because of the fusion center. So in Chicago, for example, the fusion center is at the Chicago Police Department headquarters. It’s called CPIC, the Crime Prevention and Information Center. It’s run by the Chicago Police Department. The Cook County sheriff is present there. The Illinois State Police are present there. the DEA ATF, FBI, ICE- they all have a presence in this and are active in the fusion center there. This is one of the main tools for how the data gets shared and intelligence gets disseminated. The exact number is more than 25 billion in funding since the National Network of Fusion Centers was created in 2004 or so.
Akin to the fusion center network, something else that’s growing rapidly across the country are Real Time Crime Centers. What police envision them as, is the scene in any sort of dystopian scifi police movie, where they cut to a dark room where all these police officers are, and they’re all staring at this map of the city that they’re in. Someone says “look at camera nine.” They expand camera nine and see someone running. It’s this futuristic, scifi idea of being able to monitor everything happening in real time in the city. It’s a Real Time Crime Centers in that respect. They’re centers that have Situational Awareness software, as they call it, that is more or less a map of the city, the community, whatever it might be. All of the different surveillance technologies that police have in that area are integrated into it. So all the cameras are integrated. The license plate readers are integrated. The gunshot detection is integrated. Alerts will come up on the map, and the analysts and the staff will be able to monitor what’s happening locally via the Real Time Crime Centers. This is growing rapidly.
The first Real Time Crime Centers, supposedly, in the United States, was the New York Police Department. It was started with $10 million or roughly that, via funds that came from the New York Police Foundation. Since then, as a lot of these technologies have become cheaper to produce, cheaper to manufacture, Real Time Crime Centers have become more accessible to smaller police departments across the country. Now, small communities have a Real Time Crime Centers and are acquiring a lot more surveillance technologies, because the Real Time Crime Centers is an invitation for that. If you have this map, you want to populate it with as many tools as possible. It opens the door for growing the local surveillance apparatus. These are hubs where data plays a similar function in terms of how data gets collected, analyzed and disseminated and then also shared to different levels of policing. This is not via having staff from different police agencies on site, necessarily, but via the softwares that are in use, being able to share data in that way.
TFSR: When you say shared data is this like in cases like we’ve seen with Flock? Where, because there’s a corporate middleman, it removes this process of having to legally request a warrant from another state. Am I understanding that?
Ed: Flock is a good example in that one of their data sharing mechanisms within their software, is this database. Customer data gets added, all license plate scans get added, and then other agencies can search them if they have access to the database. That is a good example of this in terms of being able to do the mass data sharing. In a lot of ways, these companies are acting as data brokers and are brokering the access to the data. For example, Flock Safety long said that they didn’t work with federal immigration enforcement agencies. They were insistent on that, especially after news came out that their tools were being used for immigration enforcement, where a lot of local police were searching on behalf of ICE and CBP. They were insistent that they didn’t partner with and work with federal immigration agencies. But then they said, “oops, actually, we have two pilots going with CBP and Homeland Security Investigations.” So they admitted that they lied, that they in fact were actively working with those agencies. Companies are very happy to play this role as a broker and support DHS agencies, because if they have a relationship to the DHS, that is unlimited funding into perpetuity. The Department of Homeland Security’s budget only goes up, unfortunately.
TFSR: You haven’t got any more communication from them have you? Have you been getting weird FOIA denials for nonsense reasons?
Ed: It appears to me that they realized what was contained in those records after they sent them. Since (then), they have been giving me the run around and putting different obstacles in my way and making it difficult to actually get those records. So it’s been a little frustrating. It’s worth folks in Houston- elected officials, community members- applying pressure to the Metro for them to release not only these records, but essentially all records related to the agency’s use of Clearview. That contract needs to be canceled. Period. I mean, they should have never had it. All these contracts should be canceled. What their use of it demonstrates, is that it’s actually impossible for these tools not to be used in a way that is going to be in violation.
TFSR: We are coming up on our end of time. Is there anything else you’d want to share about the project, how you hope folks would engage with it, stuff that they might want to follow up on?
Ed: We’re always looking to build with folks. No need to be a technologist, to be a lawyer, to have any sort of expertise or skill or training. Part of what we want to do is build more capacity for this kind of research and understanding of the surveillance apparatus that’s in place, as a part of our efforts to challenge the growing use of surveillance. We’re trying to ensure that every organizing body or issue-focussed group is thinking about questions of surveillance. Because surveillance is part and parcel of everything at this point. That goes back to the earlier point about technologies being used for policing function. We want to build with folks, and we want to partner, and we very much are coming at this from an abolitionist lens. We don’t believe that these tools should be used, and we want to help support local efforts in challenging their use.
TFSR: Thank you. If you are up for it and have time, I can ask a couple more questions that we could include on the longer version. Then maybe some of these other questions, I can just keep if you’re interested on coming back on the show at a later point in time.
Do you have some strategies of resistance that you have seen working? What can folks do to try and retain some privacy as an individual or community, given the ubiquity of some of these technologies, and how can they fight back against their being instituted in the towns, cities or communities that they live in?
Ed: It’s a great question. It’s a complex question. One thing to be very clear about for people on an individual level, is how you personally use your devices and tools and the data trails that you are creating. Part of that is thinking about having good security with your tools, but not only thinking about your personal security. The data that is created via your tools, your devices, especially when you’re doing any sort of organizing movement work, is usually not just your own. It’s not just your data, it’s usually shared with the people that you’re building with. So having good practices around digital security, having good practices around digital hygiene, is really an act of solidarity with your comrades. If you have good practices, you’re also keeping them safe. It’s important to think about it in those terms. We’re often told that our devices are very individualistic, but rarely is that data just your data. So being clear about that, and also being clear about how cell phones are the perfect surveillance tool. A lot of the data that is used by different police agencies, it often originates with our phones. Keep that in mind.
The other thing I would say is, it’s also important to have a really strong, critical analysis around how we use digital tools in the internet as a part of our work. There’s probably a lot that we can learn from movements that’ve won and movements in general that didn’t have all these digital technologies. Maybe we need to start practicing more analog efforts at building power and get off of Signal, get off of (of course) any Google products. Try to move into being in close relationship with our comrades not using devices. There are also other recommendations to take and other things to think about in terms of if you are going to a protest and all that, of course. There are good guides out there that folks can probably search for and find.
Safety and security is not going to be provided by a tool. It’s not going to be provided by using the right VPN necessarily. You can improve your hygiene and safety, but that’s not going to be the deciding factor. What keeps us safe are people, our relationships, our communities. Building relationships with people that can help keep you safe in different ways is really important to consider and think about. In the training that I give- my digital security training- I recently added a component that is focused on power mapping, building out the relationships that we have and identifying the people that we can rely on as helping us strengthen our digital security and our habits and practices. So I think it’s really important to just keep that in mind too. What keeps us safe? We keep us safe.
TFSR: I will come back to the point you made about your trainings in a second. But I also want to just generally say thank you to anyone that might be listening that makes these digital security tools really user friendly. I got my mom using Signal because it sends higher quality images than the SMS originally. Now she just messages on Signal which is really nice. And Graphene OS, which is a security focused Android variant. It’s almost a disappointingly easy install (laughs). It’s really amazing and great that people are out there doing this work and actually making really functional tools. It’s maybe not quite so fun if you love troubleshooting your open source technology, but there are super functional alternatives to some of these more “cop in your pocket” type applications or programs.
Ed: Yeah, thank you all for that.
TFSR: You mentioned doing the training in the past. When we were preparing for this interview, you mentioned that SASSI does activist workshops? Does that include information that is not already on your site? And what does that look like when you all do it?
Ed: We offer different trainings- in person, digitally, digital security trainings. We also offer public records request trainings. We will offer workshops and teach-ins around the different technologies and tools that we’re finding. We want to be responsive to what folks need in the cities where we have members, and the cities where we’re trying to build relationships. So it very much is dependent upon what the local community identifies as their needs. Then we try to build from there. We can also do multiple trainings and workshops depending on what the needs are and sequence things out.
TFSR: If folks are interested in that, can I just contact you via the website?
Ed: Yep. SassiSouth@proton.me is probably the best way to get in touch.
TFSR: When you are looking into these technologies, are you noticing that they have certain blind spots? Are you getting enough information on the actual functioning of these technologies to get a sense of that? Be that “AI hallucinations” or social media monitoring that maybe gets tripped up if it’s trying to surveil people that are communicating in less spoken languages or in a different dialect or something?
Ed: Yeah, that’s a great question. It can be very difficult to get access to information on different technologies and different products. Things have changed recently with how some of these companies operate where they don’t release more information. Whether it’s training materials or whether it’s manuals and other documentation, they don’t release that to their customers, which means we can’t request it. So we’re trying to find new ways to get our hands on it and get a better understanding of how some of these tools operate. You can learn a lot, obviously, from just seeing an interface and seeing how it’s structured and whatnot. It’s even more difficult to get information on the limitations of a tool if it is “hallucinating” and things like that. The company is not going to release that information. They oftentimes will do whatever they can to ensure that that kind of information is not made public. So that requires some really deep and probably long term investigations and a bit of luck. Sometimes you stumble across something, and sometimes you have somebody share something with you.
One of the things that I also think is really important in terms of doing this work is that it’s important to not do it alone, usually. If you’re doing the investigation in a group, you have multiple people, you’re able to come across different documents. People having multiple eyes can lead to different inquiries that can open up different doors. I don’t know if that answers the question, but I will say that it’s much easier for the surveillance tools (the hardware that’s installed in the wild, per se) for getting our hands on that and doing analyzes on it.
TFSR: Yeah, I think that answers the question. I mean, it’s totally reasonable that they want to keep the deficiencies of the technologies as secret as possible. If I recall correctly, over the course of some of your research, ShotSpotter got some contracts canceled. After some news came out that it was not doing so great at its job.
Ed: Yeah. In terms of ShotSpotter, and a lot of organizing around ShotSpotter, there have been multiple studies in different cities regarding ShotSpotter’s ability to do anything that the company claims it can do. Whether it’s preventing gun violence, whether it’s having police and first responders arrive at the scene of a shooting faster, whether it’s saving the lives of gunshot victims, that kind of stuff. The company has kind of moved from talking point to talking point regarding how ShotSpotter is beneficial, as they’ve received more and more pressure. There’s been research in a variety of cities that have shown that it really doesn’t do anything the company claims it does.
Some research that garnered more attention was that a study in Chicago a couple years ago found that when police were dispatched on a ShotSpotter initiated deployment, roughly 90% of the time they did not find any evidence of a gun crime. That was corroborated with another study as well. That’s pretty consistent. The numbers change from city to city, but it’s pretty consistent that the claim that ShotSpotter makes that that ShotSpotter is 90% accurate (it’s hard to know exactly what that even means), it’s pretty been pretty well refuted by these other studies, like the one out of Chicago. Those are useful to a certain degree. Part of the difficulty with some of the work around ShotSpotter has been people wanting to argue and fight over whether or not it works, it’s efficacy. Even if it was 100% accurate, it still would be a tool of violence. There are better ways to spend public funds that are focused on preventing and ending gun violence, than actually just having microphones placed in black and brown communities and poor communities across the country. So if we were serious about ending gun violence and addressing gun violence, we would be investing public funds in different ways.
TFSR: I’m assuming that the hardware was a bit more expensive than some of these social media monitoring things that you said are fairly cheap, right?
Ed: Yeah. ShotSpotter is actually pretty expensive compared to some of these other tools. Flocks License Plate Readers are $2,500-3,000 a camera. They’re really cheap. Flocks hardware is not significant. It’s more or less like an Android phone. The origin story for Flock Safety was that the prototype that they built was using an Android phone. The hardware, the sophistication of the camera, and all that- most of the cameras that are still in use are pretty cheap. People could search for it. There have been a number of researchers, technologists, who’ve gotten their hands on Flock cameras. There are some people that have gotten their hands on ShotsSpotter microphones and perform autopsies, and disclose all that information online so everyone can see the specifics of what the hardware is. So that’s pretty easy to come across, if folks are interested.
TFSR: Much better than the alternative of finding out the hard way. I had a friend many, many years ago that was in Chicago, riding the Metro. He paid in cash, did everything right, because he had a big plan to do graffiti. Then at the end of it, he got caught, and was fairly certain that the camera had read his name off his ID, because he did everything else right. It was pre-Flock. But after that, people were very careful about waving their IDs around on the Metro.
Ed: Yeah, better to avoid that.
TFSR: If y’all are up for coming back at some point, that would be amazing- for an episode with a more international focus on history and how some of these technologies interconnect. If you, or anyone you know, knows more about how folks that are outside of the US could navigate some of this open source research, I think it would be very interesting.
Ed: Definitely happy to come back and with that kind of focus. I might have some folks that actually might be interested potentially in joining to talk about some of the international resistance.