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This week on Privacy Tips, Ohio State University professor, Dr. Viet Trinh, joins BJ to talk about Flock Safety cameras, how everyone is basically under surveillance all the time by the police thanks to them, and what we can do about it. No book excerpt this week, we'll be back doing those next Thursday!
Creators and Guests
What is Stupid Sexy Privacy?
Stupid Sexy Privacy is a miniseries about how to protect yourself from fascists and weirdos. Your host is comedian Rosie Tran, and the show is written by information privacy expert B.J. Mendelson. Every episode is sponsored by our friends at DuckDuckGo. Tune in every Thursday night βor Friday morning if you're nasty β at 12 am EST to catch the next episode.
BJ Mendelson (00:01)
Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Privacy Tips, the sister podcast for Stupid Sexy Privacy. I'm your host, BJ Mendelson. Today's show is made possible by our friends at DuckDuckGo. So if you enjoy what we do, check out their DuckDuckGo subscription. It comes with a simple and easy to use VPN, identity theft protection, data removal service, and more. Additional information can be found at DuckDuckGo.com/subscribe. And some features and offerings will vary based on your location.
Now my friends, Stupid Sexy Privacy has wrapped, and you can find all of the episodes online at stupidsexyprivacy.com. All you have to do is click or tap on where it says episode. The purpose of Privacy Tips is to give me an opportunity to read from my version of how to protect yourself from fascists and weirdos. The book will be on sale later this month. Now, I tell you that, but this week, instead of doing the book excerpt, we're gonna go right into the interview with Dr. Viet Trinh, a professor at Ohio State University.
Like some of you, I saw Dr. Trinh's viral comments through a More Perfect Union video that were made at a recent municipal meeting in Ohio concerning Flock safety cameras, and I was so intrigued by what Dr. Trinh had to say that I invited him on the show to expand on that. We will pick up our book excerpt next week, so for those of you who are following along, it's the last third of the checklist in chapter two. We will do that next week. Enjoy the interview, and I will see you real soon and hopefully next week.
I'll have an on-sale date to share with you as well for when the book is available to buy.
BJ Mendelson (02:33)
Viet, would you like to take a moment just to introduce yourself to our listeners?
Viet (02:37)
Absolutely. My name is Viet Trinh. I'm an assistant professor of Black Studies and Ethnic Studies at Ohio State University. At Ohio State University I work on policing, surveillance, and abolitionist politics. I also teach some of my classes on campus, and I teach some of my classes at a local prison.
BJ Mendelson (02:57)
And that's one of the things I wanted to ask you about first: tell us about the work you've done with the prison programs, first with Yale and then with Ohio State.
Viet (03:05)
Absolutely. So in my fourth or fifth year of grad school, my eventual boss, Zelda Roland, launched the Yale Prison Education Initiative, which originally was only offered at one prison, but the idea was that incarcerated people in Connecticut can enroll in accredited Yale courses, get a Yale transcript, and over time work their way towards a degree. And when I started doing that, it really reinvigorated my work. And it's some of the most exciting teaching I've done. So when I finished the Ph.D., I looked around for a long time for another university that could employ me and that would allow me to continue that kind of work. And I've been very fortunate, very lucky to have gotten hired at Ohio State, where I am now closely affiliated with the Ohio Prison Education Exchange Project, also known as OPEP. And on behalf of OPEP, I occasionally teach classes and I also run a science fiction study group called the Department of Deep Discussions, also known as Utopias and Dystopias, at a local prison in London, which is about 45 minutes west of Columbus.
BJ Mendelson (04:17)
How does that work inform the research that you do?
Viet (04:19)
The way I think about the work is that as a scholar, as an academic, I'm deeply concerned about the culture of surveillance that seems to have pervaded our society. There's the culture of punitivity and I think those two kind of go hand in hand. And prisons are exceptional places in many ways.
But I don't think it's really a difference of kind. I think it's a difference of degree, right? That in prisons, there's an extreme concentration of punishment and of surveillance of restricted civil rights. And I see that outside of the prison. If you go anywhere in the United States, there is still β we still have those same problems, they're just less extreme. So I see working in the prison, teaching in the prison has really taught me about the various ways that our society criminalizes, punishes, spies on people. And it's taught me how to recognize some of those same patterns in my day to day life.
BJ Mendelson (05:20)
What's one of those things that you could point to in your day to day life and say, "OK, well that came from my experience?"
Viet (05:26)
Yeah, that's a great question. The thing that I think about often is when we go through the TSA security line.
In most of the prisons where I've taught, and I think most of the prisons in the United States, anytime you enter a prison, you go through a metal detector. Anything that you have that is not on your person, like your clothes, or if you bring in a book or a backpack or a computer into the prison, it has to go through an X-ray machine. And actually, whenever I have a guest or a sort of colleague or somebody who I'm training to teach in the prison for the first time, the way I kind of acclimate him to it is that: "Hey, the first thing you're gonna go through is a metal detector and an X-ray machine, and you'll have to give your ID to the guard.
The guard will look at your ID. It'll be a photo ID just like at an airport. They'll look at it, they'll make sure that your face matches the ID. Then you put everything you have in the X-ray machine, then you walk through the metal detector." And the way I train them, the way I train newcomers to the prison, is: if you've been through a TSA line, which anybody who's flown in a plane has, the first step of entering the prison is actually very familiar and you can kind of figure it out right away. If you set off the metal detector, they'll pat you down. And one of the things that the TSA now does that most prisons I've been to do not do is that they take your photo and that's how they check your ID. And at the prison they do it the more old-fashioned way where they visually, with their own two eyes, look at your ID and check to make sure that it looks like you.
BJ Mendelson (07:01)
Right.
Viet (07:01)
There are look at your ID and check to make sure that it looks like you.
BJ Mendelson (07:05)
I want to ask you real quick: you have a book that has come out yet, the one on Los Angeles?
Viet (07:10)
It has not come out yet. I have recently β about a month ago β I sent the first draft to my editors, so it's a few years out.
BJ Mendelson (07:19)
Would you like to just tell us real quick a little bit about what that is?
Viet (07:23)
I really wanted to think about law and order policing. So my book is about how Los Angeles's multiracial left confronted the rise of law and order policing as it was happening, right? And the way I think about it is that in 2026 we kind of live in sort of the age of mass incarceration. We live in the age of law and order policing. Like the thing has already kind of happened. It's still happening, but we kind of live in a moment where we understand what it is. And the thing I really wanted to communicate to my readers is that it wasn't always that way. Like there was a moment when the law and order project, the project of massifying the prison system started.
And I really wanted to think about the ways that different radicals, different lefty groups, different activists on the ground and even everyday people, the way that β what did they see? What did they witness? What did they understand?
How did they realize, like what was the moment that they realized that something very profound was changing in the way that American politics worked?
The book is about different groups, especially radical, left-wing groups, that had to confront β that were sort of the test subjects for what we now know as law and order policing, right? They were the first ones to get hit with SWAT-style raids, with these sort of paramilitary assaults. They were the first ones to kind of have their civil rights eroded, especially the First and Fourth Amendment rights eroded in sort of these dubiously β like in sort of these police operations of very dubious legality, right? And so through their confrontations with this emerging, this new kind of policing, they start to realize that their older vision of lefty politics, right? They used to call themselves communists, they used to call themselves anarchists or socialists, but over time they come to realize that there's this new thing that is this very immediate threat to their safety and it is this very immediate threat to their rights. And they start to reformulate this kind of older version of lefty politics and they come to kind of imagine themselves as abolitionists for the first time because of their firsthand encounters with the police and the prisons. And I'm looking at Los Angeles in particular.
Because I think the LAPD is in many ways on the cutting edge of some of these kinds of counterinsurgency tactics and strategies.
BJ Mendelson (10:05)
When I saw that I immediately was like, "I need to buy this" because I devour anything on the culture and history of the city of Los Angeles. And I think people don't realize how β we don't really talk a lot about the civil rights history in Los Angeles, right? Like most of the time, in pop culture, when we talk about Los Angeles, we think Hollywood, right? But we don't think about the Watts Riots. You know, when I was a little β that was the Rodney King β that was that whole deal, right? But there's an entire extensive history going back to when the city became a boom town and just some of the racial segregation that was going on there and the deprivation of rights and all these different groups that had to come together and fight. And I just think it's a beautiful story. I mean it sucks to have to have gone through that, of course. But today I can't think of a better story than one of a multiracial group coming together against essentially authoritarian policies from the police department.
Viet (11:08)
Absolutely.
BJ Mendelson (11:08)
Which is what brought us together.
So before I get to Flock though, I did want to ask you about this myth with technology like Flock. And you know, like when I worked in marketing, I heard it too in advertising and marketing where you're doing stuff the old-fashioned way, but the tech can do it better. And I'm just curious, given your background and research, if you could say the same about some of the modern policing technologies like Flock versus what we had beforehand.
Viet (11:37)
I think with Flock there are some similarities and there are some differences. And I think β this sounds like an on-defense wishy-washy answer, but I'm gonna explain exactly what I mean. So one example of what I mean is that, for instance, there was a time when our phones could not geolocate us, right? So the earliest sort of Supreme Court case that I know of that has to do with phones was Olmstead v. United States, where this alleged bootlegger was wiretapped without his knowledge or consent. And then based on that he was like arrested and the Supreme Court essentially decided in 1928 that wiretaps are not a violation of Fourth Amendment rights, that the government can wiretap you without a warrant. And that was overturned about 40 years later in Katz v. United States, right? And so for roughly the past 60 years it has been the law of the land that if the government wants to listen in on your phone conversations, legally they need a warrant to do that. But now your phone can geolocate you and if you have any sort of smartphone and you walk around, your phone is tracking where you are and reporting it to whatever company manufactured or runs your cell phone. And so now there have been over the past 10-ish years a new slate of Supreme Court cases determining whether or not it's appropriate for the police to look at your location data on your phone without a warrant. And thankfully the Supreme Court has more or less held firm on the idea that if the police want to look at your location data, that is a Fourth Amendment search and that does require a warrant. But all of this is to say that the technology has changed and it is more advanced in many ways.
But I think some of the principles stay the same. And what I'll say about Flock is that I think the thing that is different about Flock is kind of similar to the difference between geolocation data versus wiretapping, right? Where your phone is constantly geolocating you at all times and the police need permission to access that geolocation data. Like they need a warrant to access that geolocation data. And I think Flock is the same thing where it's recording you at all times.
And the question is whether the police should have uninhibited access to that data. And I think the other thing that is a little different about Flock is that unlike geolocation data, which ostensibly has many purposes, right? Like if you're on a date and you're worried about your safety, you might send your geolocation data to a friend, right?
BJ Mendelson (14:41)
Right.
Viet (14:41)
But with Flock, it is marketed and it is understood to exist primarily to surveil you and to track you for any suspected crimes that you may be committing.
# REVISED TRANSCRIPT
BJ Mendelson (14:54)
Right. And so I have a couple of points here that you raised about Flock that I thought people should hear. But before we get to them, I just wanted to say, for people that don't know, I'll include a link to the More Perfect Union clip. So you had a viral clip that was filmed at a city council meeting? Can you tell us a little bit just about what the meeting was that was sort of clipped and captured by More Perfect Union?
Viet (15:17)
Absolutely. So a few years ago the city of Columbus, Ohio, signed a contract with Flock, and Columbus is one of the many cities in the United States that has sort of flock contracts. And I think at the time it was signed, there was not a big hullabaloo from the public. But I think over the past several months, maybe the past year, there's been this growing understanding that hey, Flock is this kind of dangerous technology.
So regular people in Columbus have kind of been in uproar about whether or not Flock is kind of violating the privacy and violating it in this way that they find very objectionable. So a little bit more than a month ago, Columbus City Council held a public hearing to determine whether or not it would renew its Flock contract.
And at that meeting, roughly 60 people from the city of Columbus signed up to give testimony at the city council meeting. The city council also consulted, for instance, the ACLU. They also had a representative from Flock itself come speak. But I signed up to speak as a regular citizen, a resident of Columbus.
Thankfully, a few weeks ago, based I think on the very loud public outrage about Flock, the Columbus City Council is currently not renewing its Flock contract and it seems like fingers crossed, Columbus will no longer have any relationship.
BJ Mendelson (16:46)
Yeah.
Viet (16:47)
With Flock.
BJ Mendelson (16:54)
That's awesome. That's fantastic news. So there were these three points that I thought were so well said that I wanted to ask you if you could expand on them. The first was that you said Flock was a dystopian violation of our rights, and I was hoping you could speak to that just a little bit.
Viet (17:12)
So when I say it's a dystopian violation of our rights I'm alluding to what I said earlier about our Fourth Amendment rights, right? Which is that, you know, in the old-fashioned sense, if the police wanted to enter your house and search your house for incriminating evidence, in an overwhelming majority of cases they would need a Fourth Amendment warrant β they would need a search warrant. And new technology has kind of created a lot of gray areas, right? And I talked about wiretapping phones, right? And for 40 years it was perfectly legal for the police to wiretap your phone without a warrant. But in the roughly 60 years since that, it has become illegal. Now the police need a warrant to wiretap your phone. And I think what we're seeing is that Flock is kind of similar in the sense that it's this new technology that represents this new frontier. And because it's a new frontier, there's not a lot of legislation around it. There's not a lot of case law. But the case law that does exist seems to suggest that you should still need to have a warrant to be able to track where people are digitally, right? Just like you would need a warrant to track somebody's geolocation data, it would make sense that you would need a warrant to track people's location, their movement throughout the city, right? Especially if that movement is being tracked because they're ostensibly under suspicion of a crime. And so because it's a relatively new technology, and there's a lack of clear legislation and case law, functionally the police's understanding is that they can just access that data however they like.
And there is only just now certain departments, certain cities are installing policies to restrict police access to that data. And what I imagine and what I hope will eventually happen is that searching people's movements through a technology like Flock will be understood to be a Fourth Amendment search, just like a wiretap, just like a geolocation search.
But when I say it's dystopian, part of what I mean is that I think logically it is a Fourth Amendment search, but legally at this point it's not. And the other thing that makes me quite uncomfortable is that because Flock is a private company that contracts with city governments, there are gray areas about who is responsible for this data and who is responsible for securing this data, right? For instance,
BJ Mendelson (20:06)
Right.
Viet (20:07)
I am aware of certain people who have attempted to file Freedom of Information Act requests on their own private Flock data. And Flock has essentially responded saying that because Flock is a private company, they cannot, they will not reveal that data. But according to federal law, you have a right to access any government information about yourself so long as that information does not violate other people's privacy and does not pertain to any sort of classified information or any ongoing investigation. But as long as those three conditions aren't met, legally the government has to give you any data that it has on you that you request. And Flock, being functionally a government subcontractor, should be beholden to these laws, but it seems like they're not. So the fact that they're a private company contracting with the government has created these sorts of gray areas where it becomes easier to ignore our rights, exploit our rights, erode our rights.
BJ Mendelson (21:12)
Another point that you made, which is that Flock, referring to the company, cannot be reformed or managed.
Viet (21:17)
Yeah, so when I say that, part of one of the many things that people love to say with Flock is that you know, we just need guardrails, right? That this is still a technology that is fundamentally good, that will make people safer. And the understanding is that it's true that some bad apples in the police department might use that technology to stalk somebody, stalk an ex-girlfriend, stalk a love interest, to harass somebody that they personally do not like. And the understanding, the sort of party line of many city council members in Columbus has been that we just needed to install these guardrails. We just needed to install these protections. We just needed to get better at clarifying what are legitimate versus illegitimate uses of Flock. And my position on this is that Flock is collecting this data, whether or not it's being used legitimately or illegitimately. And the fact that the data exists and that it is in a massive database that is searchable by law enforcement creates opportunities for abuse that kind of can't be reformed in that way. And what I mean by that is that when I know that my privacy has been violated and that my data exists somewhere out there, obviously part of the concern is that some bad actor is gonna access that data. But it's a violation of my privacy that that data exists at all, right?
BJ Mendelson (23:03)
Right.
Viet (23:03)
And that is what I mean when I say that it can't be reformed, which is that the issue is not, to use kind of a metaphor, the issue is not that a gun might be used on me. The issue is that there's a gun in the room at all. And that's kind of how I feel about Flock in particular.
BJ Mendelson (23:26)
I think it's well put. It's sort of like a living Chekhov's gun almost. And this is the last point that you made that I think we've touched on a little bit, but I just wanted to repeat it, which is you said that Flock is not a tool for investigating crimes.
Viet (23:40)
So when I refer to it as pre-crime, I'm of course referring to kind of Philip K. Dick in "Minority Report." But Flock as a technology does not really distinguish between suspects and non-suspects, right? Everybody who drives by one of the license plate readers, right? It records everybody who drives by the cameras. And then only after the fact, the police, using the Flock tools, they essentially filter out whatever information they find relevant. But kind of everybody's data is being collected.
Traditionally, the police ostensibly are supposed to have the crime happen first and then the police investigate, right? Then they collect data, then they identify suspects. They say, "This person has a motive" or "this person owns a weapon that could have been used," right? Or what have you. And what we see with Flock is that the police functionally don't have to do that investigative work because everybody has already been investigated. Everybody's movements are already being tracked. And so what has happened is that everybody is under investigation all the time. And the police then make decisions about which investigations are actually relevant once the crime has been committed. But the concern of course is that effectively what this means, what Flock implies β the existence of this technology and its use implies β is that we are all under investigation at all times and then once the crime actually does happen the police have already conducted a pretty significant portion of their investigation through Flock.
BJ Mendelson (25:28)
Is there anything that I didn't ask you on this that you want people to know?
Viet (25:32)
The thing I would like to say to the public, if you are listening to this and you're concerned about Flock: There are sort of two ways to tackle any sort of political problem. And Flock is this political problem. And there are sort of these individualistic solutions, which is like, you know, drive less or like figure out where the Flock cameras are and avoid them. And in more extreme circumstances, some people have resorted to kind of vandalizing these Flock cameras or destroying them. And I'm not endorsing that behavior, but these are all kind of individual people who are attempting individual solutions. And what I like to say is this is one of those problems that individual solutions will only take us so far.
BJ Mendelson (26:13)
Yes.
Viet (26:13)
And that if you feel like your privacy is being violated and if you feel like Flock is a threat to your civil liberties, which I think it is, then the best way to fight against it is to get organized, to work with other people, to collaborate with other people, and to build robust political movements that are committed to protecting everybody's privacy, everybody's safety, and everybody's civil liberties.
BJ Mendelson (26:49)
Today's episode of Privacy Tips was recorded in Hollywood, California, sponsored by DuckDuckGo, is written, produced, and hosted by me, BJ Mendelson. Before we go, I want to give a shout-out to the production team at "Stupid Sexy Privacy: They Shall Return," which includes Andrew Van Vooris, Rosie Tran, and Amanda King, my co-author. And of course, our friends at DuckDuckGo.
If you enjoyed today's show, we hope you'll take a moment to leave a review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you may be listening. This won't take more than two minutes of your time. You see, we have this crazy goal, and we need your help to achieve it. We want 5% of Americans to be 1% better, just 1% better, at protecting themselves from fascists and weirdos. Leaving us a review can help make that happen. That's because your reviews will help other people find this show.
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