Ben Jordan on Complaints, Privacy, and New Regulatory Reactions

Today, I'm speaking with Ben Jordan, musician, YouTuber, researcher, and investigative journalist. You may know Ben from his first two titles. He has a prolific discography of experimental music spanning several decades. But over the past few years, he has become a prominent figure in creator and media spaces for his research work.

Today, I'm talking to musician, YouTuber, researcher, and investigative journalist Ben Jordan. You may recognize Bannon from those first two titles—he has a prolific discography of experimental music dating back decades.

But in the past few years, he has become a prominent figure in the maker and media spaces for his work at Flock Safety Research, maker of automatic license plate readers and the software that powers them.

Ben recently testified before Congress at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee's Crime and Terrorism Subcommittee on Flock and other ALPR systems. The meeting seemed to be the culmination of months and months of growing criticism and bipartisan backlash against Flock — all of which is shaping up to be a similar backlash against AI data centers.

So I certainly wanted to explore all of this with Bannon, not just because he played a role in it, but because he's kind of become the face of a new front in the broader debate about surveillance and privacy.

The point Bannon makes is that he doesn't actually hate Flock as a company — he thinks its stance against critics has been a major public relations failure that has made it a lackluster outcome, while rivals like Axon and Motorola quietly build similar networks. Instead, it now talks directly to Flock, including its CEO Garrett Langley, and reports to the company when it finds security vulnerabilities. (As a side note: we've also invited Flock's CEO on the show; Garrett, if you're listening, we'd love to have you.)

Bannon says his connection to the company is an olive branch he's extended to Flock as part of his goal to work toward real, tangible solutions to over-surveillance, rather than part of a crusade to take down a single company.

This is a real theme throughout our conversation: that Flock and other big names in surveillance are only part of the problem—our real focus should be on the tangled relationship between private industry, government, and law enforcement that prioritizes secrecy over transparency.

We never voted for a network of unsecured cameras on every street corner, and we certainly don't question whether access to that network is easy for police officers willing to abuse. So Ben sees his work at YouTube and other researchers, civil rights groups, and journalists as a function of accountability that brings this conversation to the forefront. And so far, it's working.

OK: Ben Jordan on the herd, privacy and the new regulatory backlash. Here we go.

This interview has been slightly edited for length and clarity.

Ben Jordan, you are a musician, YouTuber and researcher. Most recently, you have been an investigative journalist. You are witnessing the Senate hearings. Welcome to Decoder.

I am your big fan. It is a pleasure to have you here. A lot of the Verge audience knows you as a musician, but lately you've been relentlessly focused on Flock cameras, which are automatic license plate readers (ALPR). You recently testified before a Senate hearing about those cameras and the surveillance they enable.

Give us a sense of your background. For people who don't know you or haven't been following you for years, where did Ben Jordan come from and how did you end up making videos about Flock?

I've been a musician all my life, pretty much. I've also always been kind of a hacker or someone who is always taking things apart. If I get a product that asks me to pay for a service that's already in the product, that's a puzzle I want to solve and I get excited about it. But often this is combined with investigative journalism.

With the Flock stuff, it's just that I live in Atlanta, which has more Flock cameras per square mile than anywhere else. I noticed them about two years ago. I thought they were traffic cameras or something. Then I started looking at what they actually do and then I started looking at things like security vulnerabilities. More than anything, everything that's happening in the public eye right now, in the news, is about people just realizing that these have been there all along.

My focus right now is on the lack of government transparency, because companies are always looking to make money and try to make as much money as they can, especially if it's taxpayers' money. But in this case, I feel our government has lost it. And this is where we are.

The whole time we were having what I call the privacy and modern surveillance debate, I had a question running through my head.

When I say "modern," I mean it feels like we woke up sometime last year and everything is constantly recording us and everything is watching us and glasses have cameras and Mark Zuckerberg says phones don't have lights, and that means ending a conversation.

That's it. This is the argument. Phones don't have lights, they don't have other questions. The Apple Watch is going to start doing automatic transcription, and everyone said, "Wait, wait. No thanks. We actually don't want that to happen." But my personal experience of this is that my political coming of age was the Iraq War and the Patriot Act.

This is what people were talking about twenty-five years ago—don't do warrantless wiretapping, don't force databases to all connect to each other so you can grab metadata and anonymize people at will.

What is it about this time that has everyone so angry? Because we could have been angry twenty five years ago.

I can't say, "I have these Flock cameras or Axon cameras tracking my movement and giving it to law enforcement." I have no option for this. I was never given the option to vote for them or to vote for anyone in their favor. It kind of happened and you know people weren't told about them. It's the first thing you can still install a separate OS on an Android phone, or you can turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, or just leave your phone at home. Whereas now you can't go to the grocery store without someone tracking your vehicle.

The second thing is—and this is kind of opt-in and opt-out—I can pay for a new AI smartwatch or I can pay for an Amazon Echo device or something like that, or I can't. Whereas this way I'm already paying for this. It's just my property taxes that are going up and I'm paying for monitoring.

It's like the NSA in some ways, but I feel like it's much more localized now.

You can't go to a city board meeting and yell at the NSA. Although maybe you should. Frankly, this might be good for everyone. There is some part of it, and you've certainly been to a bunch of local town board meetings. I have watched many videos of you talking and helping others to express their concerns.

I think this is one of the most fascinating aspects of all of this. Flock was a company that sold cameras to everyone, and the idea that adding Flock cameras would increase the safety of your city came from everyone. But the assumption is, "Wait, we all have a lot of questions," and now the company is in a bit of trouble. They are losing contracts, they are retrenching, their communication strategy has changed.

What do you say about that? Is this just the power of local democracy at work, or is there something else?

Democracy is definitely in action. This is good news. The best news of everything that's happened is that both with Flock and in data centers, those two things have gotten people to actually see their mayor and their city council members and show up at meetings and then get involved in those local politics.

Because those local politics affect your life more than national politics. They don't just make headlines. We're not that involved. Your day-to-day tracking of what Donald Trump is doing probably won't make a big difference other than what you're discussing on Thanksgiving. While local politics will directly affect your life in the coming year.

People are getting involved, and then in cases like Asheville, North Carolina, that's really changing the political landscape. People are so unhappy with the regulatory policies of their local politicians that it looks like they may have a new mayor as a result, who also comes with a bunch of other interesting and progressive ideas that will probably help the city a lot more than the current mayor.

It's big deal there. The other part that discourages me a little bit, or the part that I think is a little disappointing, is that Flock has become this buzzword, but a lot of people don't look past it. I just heard in the gubernatorial race in Georgia yesterday that the Democratic candidate talked about getting rid of Flock cameras and anti-herd, when this is the guy who welcomed Flock as mayor of Atlanta. You see a lot of this happening now, where they just say "Flock bad" and then go sign an Axon contract or put Verkada or Motorola cameras all over the place.

In my research, Flock has been the low hanging fruit simply because they were the loudest and most defensive, while every other company would just take a step back and cash the checks.

One piece of the puzzle here that's just fascinating is that Flock is essentially a startup. They are a new company, they have a new strategy to enter the market. They talk a big game about what AI can and can't do and what it should and shouldn't enable as a platform. Your Axon and Motorola are government contractors. They are not companies that are supposed to have personality.

There's something about Flock that CEO Gareth Langley had a personality for. He would go on TV and deride any critics as left-wing terrorists, and it wouldn't work. There's something about surveillance where that strategy doesn't work. There's something about data centers where that strategy just doesn't work.

We just ran a big piece about people in Utah pushing back against Kevin O'Leary, who they all called a Chinese agent, and they were like, "What are you talking about?" which cut across party lines. Again, you've been there. I know you've talked to a lot of people who reject surveillance.

Is it just that Flack had a personality and that caused bipartisan pushback? Or is it more general monitoring?

In terms of media attention, Flak had a lot of personality and was very defensive. I've met a lot of people from the Flock who are very vicious and don't look at all like they do in the clips I've covered in my content. It is very different. You assume there's an advertiser behind a lot of this stuff.

Especially in a law enforcement case, where you might have a publicist who's used to dealing with Republicans and right-wing stuff, they're just telling you to repeat the same thing over and over and take a stand and dig your heels in. Most people who aren't Donald Trump are destroyed when they do. The herd broke. They kept saying things and denying security vulnerabilities and using clever ways to reframe or redefine words and people picked up on that and now they're evil.

While companies like Axon are not attractive to a journalist. They just aren't, and that's probably intentional on their part. Any company that takes your tax dollars or tries to get your government to give them your tax dollars probably wants to stay out of the spotlight.