Police, Surveillance, Technology, Transcribed, U.S. South, United States, zine

Discussion on Organizing Against Surveillance in the US South

a photo of Will Smith looking up through a car window from the film "Enemy Of The State" viewed from a surveillance satellite, plus “TFSR 8-9-26 | Discussion on Organizing Against Surveillance in the US South”
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This week, you’ll hear a discussion with Ed from Southerners Against Surveillance Systems and Infrastructure / DeFlock, Ben of Communities Against Mass Surveillance in Asheville and Kelly from Nashville Community Safety Network others who share more about their local organizing to counter the nationwide push for interconnected surveillance networks. The push for increasingly more data on the public and the funneling of that information into police fusion centers has been most visible recently in struggles against Flock. We speak about spy cameras, the connections between private companies and the state surveillance apparatus, local organizing tactics and more.

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Transcription

TFSR: Can y’all introduce yourselves and tell the audience your names, pronouns, and any affiliations that you’d like to share?

Ben: My name is Ben. I use he/him pronouns. I’m based in Asheville, North Carolina, and I’ve been working with a local group that started up here called “Communities Against Mass Surveillance,” that’s been working to try to fight some of the expansions of the surveillance state on a local level.

Kelly: I’m Kelly, I use she/her pronouns. I’m in Nashville, Tennessee, and I’ve been doing this kind of organizing work for a few years with a small group of friends called “Nashville Community Safety Network.”

Ed: I’m Ed, I use he/him pronouns. I’m in the South. I’m a member of a group called “Southerners Against Surveillance Systems and Infrastructure,” also known as SASSI, and I’m also a member of “De-Flock.” It’s good to be here.

TFSR: So, we’re here to talk about real-time crime centers and the recent growth of resistance to surveillance infrastructure within the U.S., as well as the growth of that surveillance infrastructure. Would y’all mind giving us a bit of a background on where y’all live, how policing looks there, and anything else that you might think would be relevant to this talk?

Ben: Here in Asheville, policing ends up being quite a large chunk of our budget. They just recently passed our new budget here, which includes continued expansion for the police department’s local funds here.

At the same time, for the past several years, since the George Floyd uprisings, approximately, they’ve actually been having quite a bit of difficulty filling those positions they have budgeted for.

There’s quite a bit of local displeasure, let’s say, with the police department in general. So they’ve had a hard time staffing. They’ve been bringing a lot of people in from out of town, people who don’t even live here in the community, and along with with that, they are still expanding the surveillance systems that they use here in Asheville.

They’ve not only got the Flock cameras, they’ve got their in-car license plate camera readers, and they’ve also got drones that they fly around to surveil folks.

Asheville was one of the first places that received a waiver for their police department to violate aviation rules, where the operator has historically had to be in line of sight of the drone they are operating.

So they got that waiver, and now they can fly their drones further and out of sight, and surveil more easily.

Kelly: So in Nashville, our work resisting surveillance technology definitely is building off of the work that many folks, particularly Black communities in Nashville, have done before us, in terms of resisting the violence of policing.

Just to speak to the past decade or so, we had a report that was the work of local organizations called the “Driving While Black Report,” and that kicked off a new wave of calls for accountability and talks about how inherently racist policing is.

That was a few years after Michael Brown was killed (Brown was killed in 2014), and also a few years before George Floyd was murdered (2020). However, that was kind of a pivotal moment.

And then after that, when the calls for a community oversight board started coming, and there was a lot of resistance over how unaccountable the police were, there was a referendum vote for police an oversight board, and about 135,000 people in Nashville voted for it.

That was a big win at the time. Unfortunately, our state legislature has pretty much defanged that board, and has taken away a lot of the powers of it. But even through that, there is and continues to be growing resistance, especially around what Ben talked about, to the massive amounts of money put into policing. We know that does not stop harm from happening. It is pretty much the norm across the country.

In Nashville we just had our budget season as well, and about 10% or a little more of our budget went to the police department alone.

About a sixth of our budget in total is spent on carceral solutions such as policing, courts, the sheriff’s department, jails, and so on. But there’s definitely a lot more conversation around that type of funding since George Floyd’s murder, especially since we are constantly talking about how we don’t have money for anything else, but we seem to have unlimited funding for policing.

I’ll get into more of the surveillance tech maybe in a second, unless you want me to talk about it now.

TFSR: If we want, we could offer the audience that hasn’t listened to the first SASSI interview kind of a big picture overview of what that kind of looks like in the South, and what the recent growth of surveillance infrastructure and the push toward real-time crime center looks like.

And for folks who are interested in that topic, listening to our previous episode is a good way to find out more specific details on the individual technologies that police are employing or want to employ.

Ed: Over the last 25 years, there has been a significant build out of surveillance technologies used by local police, sheriffs, and all the way up to federal police bodies. These technologies have sort of evolved over time, with increasing capabilities in terms of the scope of surveillance and sort of the power of the tools for different analytics they can offer law enforcement.

The last 10 years have been interesting, because prior to 2020, there was significant pushback in terms of challenging different surveillance that was being used in some communities; like predictive policing and facial recognition technology.

There were efforts in different cities that were led by organizers that also included some nonprofits. That also included researchers and academics discrediting these technologies and challenging them. But then when 2020 hit and after 2020, in a lot of ways the floodgates opened up, and now there’s much more surveillance technology.

There’s been an expanded adoption of different technologies in a lot of cities as well as smaller cities and communities as a lot of the technologies have gotten cheaper to produce. So the contracts are less expensive. As a result, smaller cities and communities can sign contracts, and we are seeing more of these kind of off-the-shelf products that different companies are offering, and this is really growing out the surveillance apparatus.

Flock Safety is a perfect example of this. When they were founded in 2017, the largest license plate reader vendor in the country at the time was Motorola Solutions, and they charged something like $25,000 per camera. Flock Safety came on the scene and they started charging $2,500 per camera. So license plate readers quickly expanded across the country.

Flock Safety is now in 6,000 communities and cities across the country, and they have been able to rapidly expand because of how cheap their product is compared to their competitors. Similarly, with the growth of real time crime centers.

Another company, Fusus, which was founded in 2020 and is now owned by Axon, is the largest real time crime center situational awareness software provider. Situational awareness software is sort of the industry term for it. It’s the map that provides the sort of foundational software for real-time crime centers.

Real-time crime centers, to kind of situate this more broadly, are one type of spy center as folks doing this organizing call them. Other kinds of spy centers are fusion centers, or oftentimes centers where different task forces including federal task forces operate in different ways.

Generally, these are hubs where a lot of surveillance data and surveillance technology is integrated to provide local police through the feds with “intelligence” for different purposes. We can go into greater detail on what all that looks like, but license plate readers and the advent of Fusus and real time crime center software have really expanded the scope of surveillance across the country.

There’s a lot of attention right now on Flock Safety, and a lot of attention on license plate readers. While license plate readers sort of get the focus, drones as first responders is a hot new innovative product in the police surveillance industry. Drones as first responders are also sort of getting embedded and becoming almost as common as ALPRs (Automated License Plate Readers) have been.

TFSR: Any more comments, or should I go the next question?

Ed: I could keep going all day.

Ben: It may be worth mentioning the rise of integration with AI and smart search features as well. That’s something we’ve seen more recently. Some stuff has come out with Flock already being used to search for people by description instead of just vehicles. So as this kind of AI expands and gets rolled out more, it’s also getting kind of joined with and inserted into existing surveillance technology.

TFSR: I also recently saw an article that Flock was considering integrating with Bluetooth-sensing technology, so that when devices pass by Flock cameras, if you were always with your cell phone, that cell phone could be identified to be with you. Then if you were in your friend’s car, you could be identified to be with your friend, which is truly nightmarish.

I don’t have any more updates on if that contract is going to go through because I know they’ve kind of walking some stuff back a little bit. Notably the CEO walked back his comment on calling De-Flock “terrorists.” But I feel like even if Flock is walking it back, maybe their competitors are going to go for it.

This all kind of ties into one of the next questions I wanted to ask, which is about Flock and more broadly just ALPR tech. This has been a very hot topic in the country recently and is very unpopular with citizens.

In spite of this, localities keep adopting contracts with companies such as Flock. Although my personal “favorite” is Sky Cop, out of Memphis, which I believe is in Bell or maybe Brentwood. I know the Warner Parks have it near one of the entrances. If you’re in Nashville, you can go check out the Sky Cops.

But have your respective cities entered into contracts with automated license plate reader companies, and has there been popular resistance to that?

Kelly: So in Nashville, we have had kind of a protracted fight over years against automatic license plate reader technology. I’ll try to be precise when I talk about it now, because calling them license plate readers kind of feeds into the PR from these companies that they just scan your license plate, but that is not how they work.

If folks listening are unaware, they film everything. They are not only scanning license plates. They’ve actually gotten this technology down to the precision of what they call a “fingerprint of a car.” So any unique identifying stickers, dents, scratches, or anything like that stuff is filmed when you drive past one of them.

But with saying that, we are fighting against license plate readers, license plate reader technology, and so on in Nashville.

The conversation started in 2020, and after a couple years of back and forth discussion and community pushback, we ended up having a six-month pilot program in 2023. The results of this just further proved many of the points that we raised.

When we talk about police departments using this technology, I should say that, one, it’s not neutral technology, and two, it is part of the very racist system of policing that exists. So while these cameras were allegedly spread across the city in an equitable manner, once the pilot was over and there were maps about where all the cameras were, it was very clear that these were deployed most primarily in areas that had high concentrations of brown and black residents, and also socioeconomically low-income areas.

Due to the outcry around that, and it also being an election year, we did not have a permanent program implemented at that point. The enabling legislation for a permanent ALPR program was passed, but since then we have not had a contract brought for permanent stationary ALPRs.

Most recently, in May during budget season, our police department requested nearly $3 million to implement this permanent program, and that included hardware, software, and seven personnel. This is notable because one of their arguments for why we need this technology is because we don’t have enough manpower. Seven personnel seems to be a lot of manpower as well.

So our mayor, who was very vocally anti-ALPR when he was on council, is not anti-surveillance technology to be clear, and we can get into that later. But he has seemed to not want to be a complete hypocrite on his stance of when he was on council, at least around ALPRs. So he didn’t fund that, and the police department actually didn’t ask any council members who were able to put forth amendments about funding things to do so. They didn’t ask any of our 40 council members to do that either. That’s kind of indicative of the amount of pressure we’ve collectively been able to bring. At this point they are kind of cautious around their asks and around what they put forward because in Nashville we have had a number of wins in the past few years against surveillance technology.

Ben: Here in Asheville, they’ve also made use of the ALPRs, both Flock and Axon. They’ve got a number of flock cameras around town. I believe there’s currently 11 city-operated cameras. This doesn’t sound like a ton of cameras, but that allows them to access and tap into the flock cameras that are on private businesses and gives them access to a much larger network.

They do also have patrol car mounted cameras through a contract with Axon that function fairly similarly. In terms of local resistance here, it’s interesting. The contracts for both Flock and Axon for the patrol-mounted cameras were kept pretty quiet as they came through.

I don’t know of anybody in Asheville who was aware that the city had entered into a contract with either Flock or Axon for these license plate reader cameras ahead of time. It didn’t come up as a proposal for City Council to just approve. It came through the police department funding requests. Just a very opaque process where it kind of got rolled into other operating expenses, which allowed it to get approved without even a conversation with the community. There was not even a conversation on council about what that means for our communities here in Asheville.

Since then, there’s been quite a lot of public backlash to that. One of the tactics they’ve used quite a bit here on City Council is misconstruing the public resistance to kind of focus it all onto Flock as a scapegoat. They continually kind of make comments about how “Oh yeah yeah, Flock is what people don’t like, but let’s still roll out all of these other surveillance technologies. Let’s roll out these Axon cameras and shift to that.” This is largely just because Flock is the one that’s grabbed the most attention in the media.

But really, these companies all have the same kinds of problems. They function much in the same way, and really lead to the same negative results for the community here. One of the things that came up recently in the public conversations around the real time crime centers, which we’re going to get into soon, was when City Council members proposed cutting back the Flock contract, but not completely. They proposed just cutting it back to a singular camera, which some of them have even suggested could be faced towards a wall, so it’s not spying on people. But they’re doing that potentially just to maintain access to all of the private flock cameras and to the massive security surveillance network across town and beyond.

So it’s really a disingenuous proposal to do that and trying to assuage some of the public backlash while really not changing anything functionally about the amount and types of surveillance going on.

Ed: Echoing that point about Axon and other vendors, this is the pattern that we’ve seen across the country.

Roughly 80 cities have either canceled a contract, blocked a contract, removed cameras, or lent some weight towards ending the use of Flock over the last year.

Axon is sort of the lead culprit in this, but other companies are doing it as well. Axon is moving in very quickly to try and get a contract signed for their stationary ALPRs once a Flock contract is canceled. Axon is notable because they already often have a relationship with most of these cities. Either they have an existing contract for body-worn cameras or a contract in place for tasers. Axon was previously founded as a taser company and then rebranded about a decade ago.

So they already have contracts with police, and relationships with the police departments and elected officials in these cities. So they’re able to move in pretty quickly and introduce their contract and get something signed.

Notably, they introduced their stationary ALPRs last year, so they’re brand new. A lot of this pushback against Flock has been because of the research that people across the country have done; getting documents showing how flock is being used for immigration enforcement, abortion monitoring, etc.

Axon, since their project is new, has been sort of touting themselves as a great alternative because there’s no evidence that their tool is being used for this. This is something that we need to be thinking about in our organizing. It’s very clear that we’re going against the technology, not the vendor, and the harms of these technologies are more or less the same across all vendors.

So Flock is the national leader in license plate readers, but other are Axon, Motorola Solutions, Rekor, Verkada, or Leonardo, which is headquartered in Greensboro, NC. They are the company selling Signal Trace that was referenced earlier with the tool that can essentially detect Bluetooth beacons and whatnot as people drive by.

So there are a lot of other vendors in the ecosystem selling very similar products, Sky Cop being another one of course. One thing to note with all of these is that how the software is designed is not going to be uniform from vendor to vendor, but the business model is the same.

The business model is about mass data collection and mass data sharing. That’s what the police want, and that’s what the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) wants. Because all of this is sort of being driven by the Department of Homeland Security in terms of trying to build out a surveillance apparatus that collects a significant amount of data under sort of the auspices of national security concerns. So the business model is essentially the same across vendors.

Furthermore, once these tools are then get integrated into other tools and all of this gets compounded, that’s when a lot of the differences can also sort of be less meaningful because of the integration process. For example, I know the Greensboro Police Department last year stopped using Flock cameras. They’re now using Verkada cameras, but all these cameras are integrated into Fusus in real time.

TFSR: Before we move on to talking about these integrated surveillance networks, could y’all share a little bit about how you are researching and learning about these technologies and contracts? I know a big way these companies work is by moving quickly and obscurely, so things get put into motion before people really know. We’ve seen that a lot with data centers. Could y’all share a little bit about how things look in your local context and the ways you are researching, and the ways the general public is getting informed?

Kelly: For Nashville, I would say a lot of folks rely very heavily on public records requests allowed through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

I would say we use that a little bit, but honestly, not intentionally. We have used that less so than folks in other areas. A lot of our organizing has been reading everything that comes out locally.

I already had been, due to some of my other organizing, paying very close attention to what goes on our metro council level, and then developing some sort of relationships with council members has been helpful.

A few years ago, it was much easier for us to have folks on council who we may consider to be an ally in this specific way when it comes to getting information ahead of time. But the police department, lobbyists, and the mayor’s office have gotten much more tight-lipped and savvy around letting that information out to anyone who might be anti-surveillance on the Council.

So another thing that I very carefully watch are our local lobbyist registrations. Right now, we do have a registered lobbyist for Flock, although we do not have any contracts with that company. We do still have one for Axon, and they added lobbyists for Axon a couple years ago around their attempt to get a new contract for Fusus after it was discovered it was illegally implemented, which we can talk about more when we get more into real time crime centers.

Paying close attention to council agendas, paying close attention to lobbyist registrations, and then developing relationships with at least a couple folks on council who are willing to reach out and let us know when something is happening have been some strategies.

I will say that a lot of our fights have had to have very fast turnarounds, usually less than two weeks. There have been multiple things over the past couple years that have been filed and don’t become publicly available until the Friday before a holiday.

So I have missed a lot of holidays over the past couple years due to surveillance tech in our city. That’s because they realize how close of attention we’re paying. Yeah, we just had the start of an illegal trial program for Skydio drones that was announced on a Friday at 4 p.m. going into Memorial Day weekend.

Another example would be in a December after a Thanksgiving weekend, we had some surveillance technology that they were trying to privatize. One of them was LEO sites, similar to Fusus. It’s a situational awareness platform that was originally developed for special forces, and then the other one was called FiveCast, which is an OSINT (open-source intelligence) tool that basically scrapes all publicly available information.

So on holiday weekends, I’m on high alert usually at this point. But overall, just really paying close attention, developing relationships, and reading any press releases or news articles that may be coming from the police department, even on very short notice, is how we tend to operate

Ben: Here in Asheville, a lot of the ways we found out about these things are really as it’s being implemented. Unfortunately, the city’s been fairly successful at kind of sliding things in under the radar, rolling things up into other budgets that get approved, or introducing things with kind of a strange, opaque naming convention in order to kind of avoid triggering any sort of public awareness.

Fortunately, we do have one council member, Kim Roney, who’s actually running for mayor in the upcoming election, and she’s really been one of the main ways that the public has been able to find out about some of this stuff.

She’s drawn public attention to things when it’s come up before council, and that’s been very useful in at least having information to organize to try to resist this.

Similarly to what Kelly said, a lot of this stuff council members will mention to the public a week or two before it gets in front of City Council. It’s amazing how quick the turnover on this stuff is from being publicly available to being approved and rolled out.

I can compare this to the street that I live on having a sidewalk going in now, and it’s been a 12-year process for this sidewalk to get approved just from initial approval to starting the construction on it. But these camera contracts can be pushed through and rolled out almost instantaneously.

The public records requests for this area, at least, have been useful for kind of gathering information after things are implemented. The records may help offer potential abuses, as well as some of the various players supporting it. But unfortunately, we’ve not had a lot of success, that I’m aware of, of being able to use records to find out about things ahead of their implementation.

Ed: I’d add that the broad pattern of companies and the police using the system as it’s designed towards their goals is very common. There’s really no democratic process, no transparency, or no community input into any any of these processes.

The ways in which police and the vendors move are really intended to try to remove any sort of public agency or any sort of public input. The goal is to remove the agency from the community in terms of being able to shape “what public safety means.”

I would describe it as an obstruction of democracy or what we should expect out of public agencies. Communities have been engaging in democratic channels in ways police won’t. The limited ways in which communities can respond and engage, in terms of using democratic channels, are going to public meetings, offering public comment, using public records requests. Things like that are really just some of the limited avenues people use to engage and fight back.

The other thing that is notable, in terms of other ways of identifying technologies, also sort of rests with the community. Community knowledge is a good one. Folks that are criminalized often times know how they got picked up or why they got picked up. They know there was a camera. They know there was other technology in use. Public defenders and lawyers often have a lot of information around how different technologies are being used.

Those conversations between community members and lawyers or public defenders have been really fruitful in terms of identifying software tools that are used behind closed doors and that don’t necessarily have a public presence in terms of trying to document that they are being used. These are things like gang databases – Kelly mentioned Fivecast earlier – and tools you know no one would know are being used unless you have some insight into what’s going on behind closed doors.

TFSR: I would like to add one other thing for our international listeners, because I know we’ve got some folks in the EU. We see these same kind of things happening internationally with very similar tactics. For example, Chat Control was just pushed through on a Monday when almost everyone was out on vacation. So there weren’t enough votes to vote against it. It’s actually failed twice at least. In Greece, there was a recent EU-funded contract for wildfire detection with a company called Aurora Tech, but it wasn’t reported in Greek press interestingly. In an AP article I read, it reported that the state was very open about its intent to use this for fire suppression. But they were interested in using it for controlling the borders later, and other sort broadly worded surveillance applications. I’m sure there are many more examples that I’m not informed on, but would y’all want to talk a little bit more about how all of this data can get used by real-time crime centers to form that broader network that you mentioned before?

Ed: So real-time crime centers are these hubs where all the different technologies that police are using locally get integrated, and analysts monitor the different technologies. They monitor what’s happening in real time, and when the situation, the intelligence, or whatever is happening locally rises to a certain level of concern, it gets shared with police, or other federal officials. That kind of thing. So it kind of gets sent through the existing channels.

What the police think a real time crime center looks like, I usually describe it as the scene from a dystopian police film. They’re in the dark room and all the monitors are on the wall and somebody says “zoom in on camera 12,” and they do and then you see the hero running.

This is what police think they have in their real-time crime center

Oftentimes there is a big map on a wall, and all of the different hardware, such as the cameras, the license plate readers, the gunshot detection microphones like Shot Spotter, or drones. All of that is integrated into this map, so that if there is a “crime” or some incident happening in a certain area, the police can pull up the live camera view.

They can get the scans of license plates going by a certain license plate camera reader, they will be notified if there’s a loud sound heard by the Shot Spotter microphones they think are gunshots, and so on. All of this gets integrated into that map, and all of this ties into sort of the CAD (Computer Aided Dispatch System) so the police are able to sort of route their units that are on patrol to go to different places.

What happens with all of this software is that they all operate as different databases that allow different police to access datasets in them. Flock is the example that people are most well aware of at this point.

So Flock’s database just collects all the different scanned cars across the country, and then police across the country can search it. This also happens with something like Fusus, where all the license plates get integrated into Fusus, and police can search license plate numbers within Fusus, even if they’re Flock cameras.

So it all gets integrated into the different softwares, and I talk about how sort of the data gets laundered in different ways. So Fusus also has different data sharing mechanisms with other police. The data can flow into Evidence.com, which is the largest database of evidence data across the country that Axon also sells. Police can share data across Evidence.com, so everything has a sharing capability built into it.

Police at all levels have different logins and sharing infrastructure in place to access all this information. All these different data sets can live in different places simultaneously and can be accessed by different police in different ways at different times.

Broadly, the public has sort of learned a lot about how this works within a single product like Flock over the last year, but this compounds when you add additional softwares and additional databases in, and how the data then kind of moves in different directions in ways that can’t be contained.

Ben: One of the other things about the real-time crime centers that’s pretty disturbing is the ability to integrate privately owned cameras into that same network. Here in Buncombe County, the sheriff’s department has been operating a real-time crime center for I believe two years now, and they have private cameras from homeowners, neighborhood associations, and businesses that are all integrated into those same feeds that allow them to plug into various tools.

So it really represents an exponential growth of what kind of things can be done, even from from just the Flock network, where local individuals, landlords, apartment complexes, and neighborhood associations all have these cameras that the Sheriff’s Office can have direct access to.

I believe currently the Sheriff’s Office network has access to somewhere around 1,800 private cameras.

Kelly: I would also add, kind of going off of both Ed and Ben’s points, that we killed our Fusus contract in Nashville, but that was after it was being used, unbeknownst to the public and most if not all elected officials.

It went into use under one mayor, kind of as he was leaving, and then the next mayor, allegedly, was surprised to find out when it was exposed by what was formerly our community oversight board and the general public. In that transition period from when it was discovered it was an illegal use until they brought the new contract, which we did end up killing by one vote, the police department was soliciting individuals at community meetings to hook their ring cameras up to Fusus.

The backlash on that became so great that they not only stopped soliciting that, but that actually became part of this sort of guardrails bill. While I’m talking about guardrails, I will just say for listeners, guardrails are not our friends. Nashville’s guardrails have kind of been touted in a couple different ways for being strong, and that’s why we don’t have such a level of proliferation of surveillance tech as other cities.

What I would say to that, is that it has been community organizing that has prevented as much of a proliferation of surveillance tech as other places, and then the other thing I would say is that guardrails are often a way to manufacture consent for electeds to vote for these technologies. They give them an out by saying, “Oh, but we have these guardrails in place.”

And two, I would say, if you are someone who thinks that guardrails or any kind of policy around data sharing or data retention of who can access these networks works, I would say that there is a wealth of information that just shows all the ways where guardrails do not work. Any retention or sharing policies that may exist on the end of your locality and your police department may help people better, but we have absolutely zero control of what happens with that data once it is entered into a Flock database or a real-time crime center.

That’s something to keep in mind as folks are organizing against this technology. This is often pushed as some sort of compromise, some sort of protection, not only by some national nonprofits who advocate for civil liberties, but also by the elected themselves. Because to them it does feel like a compromise.

I don’t think that we are fighting for a compromise. Largely people across the political spectrum in this country are fighting for the end to the use of this technology completely, not policy recommendations to make it seem safer.

Ed: I want to add to Ben’s point about the private use. Atlanta is a really good example of this. Atlanta gets a lot of coverage as being the most “surveilled city in the U.S.” Atlanta has a contract with Fusus. Fusus is based in Atlanta, and Atlanta has 28,000 privately owned cameras integrated into this Fusus network.

To this conversation around democracy, this is a really good question of “what is democracy?” When there’s no means for input from the public in terms of deciding or giving direction if privately owned surveillance technologies can be integrated into the police network.

What this does is expand the police budget through private means. This is something that we know has been used extensively in Atlanta with the Atlanta Police Foundation being the source of funding for a lot of police tech, including Fusus and the Video Integration Center there.

This adds another layer in terms of demonstrating that these tools are really authoritarian in practice. Oftentimes, the debate or conversation is around how can these tools be used legitimately or how can they be used with guardrails or safety measures around them in different ways. Not only how they’re used in practice, but how they are adopted demonstrate that these are actually authoritarian in practice.

Kelly: I’m going to jump in and say one more thing off that. Expanding on Ed’s point about the private funding, a lot of times when these are funded by our municipalities, we are completely circumventing any notion of democracy. When you bring the private funding into it, that pretty much completely takes away our control.

Not to say we shouldn’t organize against it, and we do, but that kind of takes away everyone’s voices in a way that is very difficult to fight. Ed mentioned the Atlanta Police Foundation. We also see in New Orleans, Project Nola, where essentially there is a huge network of cameras and surveillance tech that NOPD actually does not own, but they have complete access to.

In Nashville, a couple years ago we saw at the behest of the police chief an “independent nonprofit” established called the Nashville Police and Public Safety Alliance. One of the first things they did was try to donate an Israeli AI scraping software to our police department, and they said it was for community engagement, which is a term that has been co-opted by police departments.

That is kind of the road that some of these big tech companies are going down, where they’re pretending they’re getting any kind of community feedback, or taking that into consideration, and using that as a way to manufacture consent.

The last thing I’ll say about kind of the privatization of the surveillance tech is we had a recent fight that I mentioned, where legislation was introduced the day before Thanksgiving break. This fight stretched into January, where there was a state grant that was originally provided by the DOJ (Department of Justice), and it’s actually the same grant that is funding the task force occupying Memphis right now.

It was $15 million that was going to be given to a private downtown entity, and they were going to then purchase LeoSight, Five Cast, a SWAT vehicle, a bunch of replacement cameras for downtown, and then simply donate that to our police department.

Luckily, we were able to mount enough resistance and public backlash to that, alongside quite a few council members who opposed this. So they did take the two software platforms, LeoSite and FiveCast, out of that legislation, but that is something that folks really need to keep an eye on. These kind of very deeply ingrained relationships between the private sector and our local governments, not just with the big surveillance tech companies but local relationships as well. Those have an enormous influence, and kind of also tie into how some of these surveillance tech companies have in-house lobbyists. What they do is go to municipalities and they hire local lobbyists who already have established relationships with elected officials, and that does increase the likelihood that they will be able to get these things passed.

That also really ties into keeping a close eye on the local ecosystem, not just what Flock, Axonm, Skydio, or any of these companies are doing on a higher level, but also the local relationships are important to watch.

Ben: I wanted to speak too about one of the common things that we’ve seen from police departments, municipalities, or counties to try to quell public outrage over these technologies. This is the insistence that they will be transparent, that they will be honest, they’ll review things, then they’ll publish transparency figures in order to kind of inform the public that they’re being used properly. Here in Asheville, the police have been promising a transparency dashboard for their drone program since it was implemented in 2024. We still have not seen that come to fruition. They have a transparency page for their Axon ALPRs here in Asheville. Looking at that transparency page about a month ago, they’ve got categories for their search reasons, for their hot lists, and their searches. On those categories, they kind of list a number of different reasons for the search.

The second highest category, the description of that category is “unknown category.” So it’s really not giving any information to the public when 30 percent of the searches are deemed “unknown category.” it’s just farcical.

Furthermore, I did bring that up at one of the city council meetings there, and I can’t tell you exactly when, but between May and July here (2026), they actually removed the categorization information with the statistics from their transparency page.

So the promise of transparency is not really something that anybody should take seriously as a guardrail at all.

TFSR: Are there tactics that you would recommend to folks that want to do this kind of organizing locally? Are there things that you’re seeing that are working well? Things aside from guardrails that are not working. Are there any words of wisdom you might have for folks that are aware of some of the stuff that might be going on locally but need to get researching and figuring out how to address it.

Kelly: For me, a couple of things. One thing is that I don’t really have the ability to shut it off. So I am constantly having these conversations in every single space I’m in, whether intentionally or not. So one thing I would say is to talk your neighbors and friends about this stuff, because you are not the only person who is concerned about it.

You may not have found other people who are concerned about it yet. But people are very concerned about it because of the insidious nature of this technology – it’s in of course prisons and jails, but also is used in schools. This kind of technology is often used in hospitals. This kind of technology is used quite a bit in public housing areas. So many people are aware of and experience it, and a lot of people just don’t know what to do. I understand why, right? These are companies that are worth billions and billions of dollars. It’s also us fighting the state. Our entire government is pretty bipartisan, pretty pro-police and pro-surveillance technology. But like Ed said, over 80 municipalities have just blocked, canceled, or had Flock contracts withdrawn, mostly in the past year or year and a half.

We’ve had major successes in Nashville with a relatively small group of us, which brings me to my next point. We have focused a lot on playing defense and blocking legislation at the City Council level. It has been effective, but the other thing I would caution is to not put all of your eggs in that basket, Make sure you’re doing the community outreach and education, as well as learning from community members.

As Ed said, there are so many people who have experienced the violent nature of this who may not yet be connected to organizing around it. It’s great to be able to block things on a City Council level, but that only works for so long without a mass movement of folks.

So I would encourage people to just have the conversations and have events.

The other thing I would say is that this is how government operates in many ways. This is not just how they operate with surveillance technology in regards to blocking or skirting democratic processes. A lot of people think that if I get involved in surveillance-tech organizing, I need to know a lot about the tech, and that is just not true.

If folks have been organizing in other arenas, you have already seen some of the same tactics of how these things operate in your area. That is valuable knowledge to bring to the table.

You don’t have to have a high level of technical knowledge. That’s great, but personally, I don’t have a high level of technical knowledge. I’ve been doing this work for about five years, and we have had some major wins. So everyone has something to bring to the table on this, and that in a time when things feel scary, and things feel really overwhelming, this is a concrete way where you can protect your neighbors, protect yourself, and make things better for your community.

We’re going to experience losses, right? We have experienced losses, Ben has experienced losses, but those losses also can help catalyze and bring folks together to keep fighting for the next thing. So yeah, don’t give up if you experience a loss in this either. We’re up against a very well-funded machine, but I think we’re doing pretty well.

Ben: One of the things that has been really heartening to see is while they try to slide all this through under the radar, when word does get out, the public backlash is massive. It’s massive, and it spans the political spectrum. You know, leftists are against it. Your average Democrats are against it. A lot of the Republicans in town are against it as well.

It’s something that connects to so many different issues and impacts so many other causes that people care about. If you’re having a discussion with anybody who cares about their community, anybody who cares about abortion access or immigration or homelessness, anything, this technology really impacts those issues.

So, tailoring those conversations that you have in your communities to find common ground with people you may disagree with on tons of other issues is really useful to help build that public resistance to try to fight back against some of this.

One other thing that’s been helpful for us down here is really utilizing the undemocratic nature by which this stuff gets passed and gets through to help mobilize opposition against it. A lot of people have been told their whole lives to do your civic duty, get involved with a democratic process, especially on a local level. To see public input just ignored or in some cases outright canceled really makes a lot of people angry.

And if they were on the fence about the surveillance systems that are getting passed, when they see it shoved through against public opposition with no care in the world, they tend to be a little bit radicalized by that and against the technology as well.

That they passed something through over public opposition can be seen as a loss, but it can also be mobilizing. It can be used to help build further opposition and build community resistance.

One of the other things I think is useful in these conversations and in building these relationships is to discuss what public safety actually can mean. This technology is all inherently reactive. It’s all after the fact. You know, it doesn’t prevent somebody from committing violence. The best it can do is to punish afterwards. So, what what can we do as a community? What can we do as individuals to actually build real community safety? How can we prevent violence from occurring in the first place? How can we expand the scope of what public safety looks like? You know, homelessness, is a public safety issue. Poverty wages is a public safety issue. Lack of access to food, medical resources, or shelter are public safety issues which impact the community.

When you can expand that conversation to what safety actually looks like, and start thinking about what we could actually do to take care of each other and keep each other safer, that’s helped build some some positive aspects into the conversation.

While we’re against this surveillance stuff, we are very pro public safety. I want to live in a community where everybody is taken care of, everybody is safe from harm, and everybody is able to access resources. That’s what a safe community looks like. It doesn’t look like cameras on every block. It doesn’t look like your face being repeatedly run through AI software. It doesn’t look like being monitored from drones in the sky and microphones at your local convenience store.

Kelly: Ben is exactly right. A lot of times those of us resisting this technology get framed as being pro-crime, or not caring about people who are harmed. That’s kind of the exact opposite.

A lot of us who fight against this technology have experienced some type of harm or violence, or love people who have experienced some type of harm or violence. In my case, I have some pretty close relationships with folks whose family members are on death row or incarcerated. When we talk about these things, a lot of the conversation is centered on what types of things could have prevented the result that we see right now. A lot of those things are like kids having their basic needs met.

So many people I know who are incarcerated or on death row or experiencing homelessness, experience none of their basic needs being met as kids, experience high levels of trauma, and cameras and policing do not change or address either of those things.

That’s a natural part of this conversation. We don’t want surveillance tech. So what do we want? When we see the massive amount of funding poured into it versus the relatively small amounts of funding that can really change things. That is certainly a conversation that we need to continue having and pushing for because we do actually have all the answers in community to what we need to do to keep harm from happening. It’s really basic, unsexy stuff, and it’s a lot cheaper than living in a mass surveillance state.

The one thing I want to say before we go to Ed, is the last thing I would encourage folks to do when they are organizing against this type of stuff is make this into an election issue. I am not necessarily someone who engages much in electoral politics. I don’t canvass for politicians or donate money, but there are a lot of elected officials who are not necessarily passionate about surveillance technology. It’s kind of the status quo to pass things that the police department wants. But then they realize that folks will campaign against them over this issue and that folks will turn out in numbers to vote against them because they are pushing surveillance tech on our communities. We have seen quite a number of folks who were not necessarily anti-surveillance tech, but they weren’t very passionate about it. When they saw the amount of resistance, were educated on concerns and really felt pressure that this was going to be a problem for them next election, they decided it’s not worth them voting for it.

Ed: I would say that it’s important to keep in mind, in terms of sort of thinking about an abolitionist approach to this, that engaging with local government, city government, municipal government, or county government is one aspect of dismantling these systems of violence. I also think that it’s important to address what community safety looks like or what does public safety look like. It’s also important to think about how we build those counter-institutions of care outside of state control.

What are we doing that can build infrastructure that meets people’s needs outside of state control? I will also add that when it comes to challenging the use of technologies, it’s also important to be in touch with neighboring cities, towns, or counties, because the sales model that these companies have is to move from one town to the next and just kind of keep covering a geographic area. The more work that we can do to keep a certain company, a certain technology out of our region – that is a way we can support our neighbors and other cities and towns and counties. That’s going to help us in our own communities to prevent technologies from coming into them.

Kelly: One thing I will say to that, and then I’ll be done, is that we just talked about with the geographic kind of model of how these companies operate. We in Nashville have experienced a tremendous amount of pressure on us because we were until last year the largest city in the country without having and operating stationary ALPRs. We are experiencing right now another round of extreme pressure from elected officials and police departments in neighboring counties, and also from our own “local media” and that “independent nonprofit” that was established. Because we are such a big city in the area that does not have this technology, and we are completely surrounded by it.

That point is crucial about knowing what’s going on in your neighboring counties, because every news article now is just about how “Why is Nashville such an outlier?” or “Why doesn’t Nashville have this?” Those kind of talking points can put a lot of pressure on elected officials. We do need to be making sure we’re supporting each other and working with each other, because when you are a dot surrounded by all this stuff, there’s a lot of pressure on the local elected officials coming from outside as well.

Ben: One last thing to add on this topic about the kind of regional aspect here. We’ve also been seeing a lot more of these techs, technologies of surveillance, pushed out and trying to roll out into more rural places, smaller communities. It’s important to note it’s not just a big city issue. This affects smaller towns, people living out in the country as well, and it’s important to support our more rural neighbors in their struggles against this as well.

TFSR: One other thing I’d like to add with all of this is that we see all of these fairly high-profile data breaches all over the place, and there are so many different companies that are collecting all this data. Aside from the fact that I don’t want the government to have all that information about me, I also don’t want SkyCop to have all that information about me, or any other company that might just be a handful of software engineers getting worried about getting laid off and maybe cutting some corners. Maybe not. Maybe they’re doing a great job and they’re just unlucky. But the more places your data is in, the more chance that information can get out there.

For those of you that have heard about the T app, you’ll know there can be pretty serious implications. The T was a dating app that required women to upload, or acted like a gossip app about dating. So you’d go and talk about people that you had dated on there. So you could say, “Oh, this guy on Tinder is a red flag. Don’t go on a date with him. He’s gonna lie to you. He’s gonna do X, Y, Z.” So this app required users to upload selfies and IDs, and there was a big data breach.

When you hear about these technologies that have all of the details of your personal travel schedule – they’ve seen when your car is passing by – it’s a huge red flag that someday someone could just screw up a little bit. If all that data were leaked, it could be a huge, huge safety risk to all of the people that existed in that area that have their whole lives on display. Or it could just be a huge hassle if more and more of your data is getting leaked everywhere with regards to concerns about identity theft and other things.

Whenever I see that stuff, like this random company is gonna take care of your data, no they’re not. They’re gonna hire some other company, and they’re gonna misconfigure. I don’t know. I hear about things happening at the big tech companies that are kind of jaw dropping. Then just imagining what’s happening at little ones that aren’t so invested in doing a good job of keeping their surveillance data safe. So that’s my thoughts on this.

Kelly: Well, when we have a whole separate economy based on data brokers, where what their goal is just to scrape as much data as possible and sell it to the highest bidder, that’s horrifying. There have been a lot of examples exposed within Flock of just how your vehicle being identified can result in you being stopped. This has happened in many cases recently, where a law enforcement officer has accessed data about a partner or an ex-partner. There was a situation where a law enforcement officer was working off duty on a movie set, and he ended up stalking and pulling over a woman.

The best case scenario at this point is probably identity theft. Worst case scenario is yes, your life is in danger, and for adults that’s scary enough. Some adults may subscribe to “I’m not doing anything wrong. So why do I care if my data is shared or if I’m recorded?” I also think we need to think a lot about what we are doing to children and what they are not able to be aware of or opt out of.

So, of course, I’m concerned about everyone. When people think, “Well, this doesn’t really impact me,” which is not true, people also need to be thinking about their children, kids they live and the foreseeable consequences of this much data being collected. People need to be think about what other tech companies or nefarious other actors can do with this information. As Ed says, and as a lot of people say, the only way to keep data secure is to never collect it in the first place.

Ed: Are there any outstanding questions that you want to go over, or do you feel good about what we got?

TFSR: Well, before we wrap up, do you want to take a second to share with us about how data centers tie into all of this? We didn’t really get a chance to talk about it, but I’m sure folks that have been following the news have seen the massive public outcry pretty much everywhere about are trying to put them in, and also that various states and localities that have been trying to force them through.

Ed: I can give a quick kind of snapshot: the fights against data centers, the fights against surveillance, the growth of data centers, the growth of AI, or the growth of surveillance- are all deeply interrelated and interconnected. A clear example, of course, are the different data sets that are housed at data centers that are police data. What we should also understand is that the relationship of the growth of data centers and AI is deeply connected to the growth of surveillance in terms of building out a political project that has been in formation for over 100 years, but really took root and grew rapidly after 9/11. The federal government, in creating the Department of Homeland Security, wanted to create an entity that would prevent another 9/11 from happening. The way in which DHS has facilitated the growth of the surveillance apparatus is towards building out a web of surveillance and the infrastructure needed to make sort of any “national security threat legible.”

When DHS was formed after 9/11 happened, how this all transpired also was done in conjunction with big tech. Big tech with federal officials. They worked closely together to create DHS and to create the mechanisms that would sort of facilitate the growth of the surveillance apparatus that we’re now fighting. This was beneficial to big tech at the time because big tech was reeling from the dot-com bubble bursting a couple years before, and this gave big tech sort of a soft landing spot with having a huge growth of federal funding.

What has grown since then is DHS creating a marketplace for the growth of surveillance, which requires significant data sets, which requires the data economy, which requires building out and moving towards things like AI. Because the goal of all of this, as it deeply connects to policing, is always going to be related to prediction.

AI as a marketing term, not even the tools, is always about prediction. For the last 100 years, police have been really focused on building out infrastructure for prediction. That is a very quick snapshot. Very quick snapshot that we could go on for hours, but I’ll stop there.

TFSR: Do you have more information about that on the SASSI website?

Ed: I can share something that we wrote that kind of talks about some of this. Yeah.

TFSR: Okay. Great. We’ll link in the show notes some of the technologies and relevant articles for folks that are interested to read more. Thanks y’all, for coming on.