Do Americans Still Have Privacy (10 Tips)

You're listening to PBN. Your path back to stability. PBN family, let's kick the week off with a doozy. One very simple question, 10 tips to follow up and a little conversation about a great company, Mark 37, who we've had on the podcast, I don't know, a lot. I carry one of their devices and sort of the breakdown in the background of privacy in the United States. This topic, Largely brought on by a machine that was installed, I don't know, a couple years ago, something like that. Probably about a couple years, maybe one year ago. And it was designed just to capture people speeding in a school zone. I was captured a couple times. We don't have to go into the details. But all that said, Obviously part of a money-making scheme and a surveillance apparatus that is growing without, as far as I know anyway, without anyone's consent, without anyone's impact, without anyone's feedback. When I think about these sort of the flock craze that has hit the United States, it's hard not to think of the word or the phrase private-public partnerships. It's a lot of big money to be made in surveilling you and your vehicle. What's most interesting about the cameras that capture license plates in school zones is that we're led to believe, like we're always led to believe things. And we're going to talk about a company today called Axon that we're led to believe is we're going to talk about Axon, we're going to talk about Flock, and Flock, which we are led to believe is the big scary monster. I just heard about this company, Axon, a few days ago, and hey, the reality is it's just like sleight of hand. You know what I mean? It feels a lot like sleight of hand because it It's like watch the flock in my left hand while I manage the axon in my right. And we'll get into all that. But in one area of town, we put in speed bumps. And speed bumps do a really good job at controlling speed. And we're led to believe that the cameras are designed to keep people, you know, slowing down in school zones. It's good. It's a good thing, right? It's for the kids, which is one of my favorite phrases that politicians use. I love it. I think it's one of the most hilarious things a politician can say is for the kids. It has that old sort of connotation of like you can't argue with it, right? We're going to tax you, but don't worry. It's for the kids. We're going to surveil you, but don't worry. It's for the kids and the safety of the kids. And whatever it is that they have to get through, whatever secret thing behind the scenes they actually want to get through, Rather than actually protecting the kids, they'll tell us that that's what it's for. Meanwhile, well, don't get me started. I don't want to get too far afield on my talking points because it's just a lot at the end of the day. You know I can go down those rabbit holes and we lose the meat of the story, right? So I've got some great research in front of me. I've got 10 tips that were pulled from some of the best in digital privacy and security. And some information that's kind of hard to believe, right? Did you know that your car's location is logged every time you pass a camera? If you pass one of these flock cameras, if you pass one of these license plate capturing speed cameras... then your location is logged and it can be logged up to, depending on where you live, 47 times per day. Now, that might also include things like your E-ZPass or your automated toll system, right? Your automated toll payment system. Clearly, right, you can be all along the road if you're on the road. But that's an impressive one. I mean, that that right there is an impressive one. It's flock safety cut retention from 30 days to seven after August, 2026 backlash. So in there, I guess enough of these flock cameras have been cut down, right? By people spray painted, lasered, whatever people are doing to them. I don't know that on August 13th, was that half a month ago? Um, They significantly cut down the amount of time that they're holding on to video, 30 days to seven days, and adding mandatory audit controls. This followed sustained public criticism. The policy change is real but limited. Seven days still captures a full week of travel patterns and audit trails. Add accountability without restricting who can search or request access under interagency agreements. Everybody, I think, by now has seen the whole situation with you know, the police officer who was searching or following the exes of their significant other. And that's the fun of the human element in AI-powered sort of, you know, surveillance. It's pretty impressive what we'll do. So I talked to you guys in the intro here about Axon and about Flock. this information is counter to what I read, but I think it's a good way to sort of wrap your head around the systems. Axon is installed currently in police cruisers, patrol cars, right? And flock cameras are fixed, right, to poles or are standalone poles themselves. Now, what I read about the Axon in the future of the Axon is that it's not going to be uh vehicle mounted well i mean we'll still have the vehicle mounted but it's also going to be fixed and it's going to be harder to find smaller more effective than the flock which is what that's sort of the one hand watch the left hand while the right hand you know is hiding the coin there i mean really what we probably need is like or or someone needs to write is the playbook for how you and i are managed You know what I mean? We all have a pretty good idea of how it works. Not just from a surveillance standpoint, but, you know, period. We have to do a thing as a government, manage the people as follows. Start a war. Drop a UFO disclosure. You know what I mean? Whatever kind of, like, sleight of hand they have to do in order to get the actual thing done that they want to do. We've all, like, you know. I laugh when I say it, and we're supposed to laugh when we say it. But I do feel like the laughing is coming to an end, don't you? Right? Like the punchline of like, oh, the corrupt government's doing their silly things again. That's coming to an end. Accountability is rising. Well, let's just leave it with that. Accountability is rising. I think that's an important thing to mention, right? I think the future of politics, successful politics anyway, lies in that, really. You give me an accountability candidate who's going to lock people up and not grill them on the floor of Congress like it's some kind of reality TV show. That's the opposite of accountability and justice, in my opinion. It's the worst. It's the worst. It's Let's make some TikTok videos that the people of the United States can share around and feel like something happened today, feel like their representatives did something. You know what I mean? You have these guys who couldn't get somebody in Congress. How many people have we seen lie with no repercussions, right? The gotcha moment, the hot take moment, I think, is nearing its end. It was fun while it lasted, and it was good for a laugh. But we're rapidly reaching a point where, like I said, these are no longer laughing matters. So fixed cameras create travel logs for your vehicle, for you on foot, for anybody really, not just incident snapshots. That's a big piece of the flock creation, right? The DHS did an automated license plate reader market survey. And it, you know, all of this technology has long been in operation and is documented widely in the DHS automated license plate readers market survey report. So I don't know when it started. If you know when it started, I'd be interested to know. But just know that it's been, you've been being, uh, Photographed for a long long time Your license plate Your vehicle Your movement Did you get an email? Did you get a memo? Phone call? Text? Maybe one of those political texts That you get all day and night long You know Do you want to take a poll On the issues? Nothing's better than living in A city like Richmond, Virginia As a conservative person And getting a poll Sent to you Like What good is this doing? You know I'm going over sort of the highlights of what's happening behind the scenes. Audit trails mean searches are logged, not that searches are limited. This is a critical distinction. The public coverage often blurs. Mandatory audit controls require a record of who searched and why. I mean, that's not bad, right? You don't get to see it. Somebody can see it. You don't get to see it, right? That adds accountability and creates a paper trail for abuse. It does not restrict the scope of searches. One thing you could do to get people on your side right away, Flock and Axon, is just give us all access. Just give us access to our vehicle history. That's all, right? I want to be able to go to a website. I don't want to have to log in. You know what I mean? Or maybe for security purposes. But I want to be able to go to a place and just see... not only where my vehicle's being photographed, but also who's searching it. Is that not fair? I mean, that seems common sense, right? It seems pretty commonsensical. If there's a database being built about your life, your movement, and so on, and there's audits about who can search it, well, I feel like you're one of the people that should be able to go see and go audit your vehicle history in terms of, you know, When police are following you and tracking you, when flock cameras are following you and tracking you, like, yeah, probably should know. Probably should be able to see. But more importantly, who's searching? Who's searching and when? You should probably get an alert. Because if you think everybody's a good guy and they're just like, oh, I think you might have been breaking a rule. Let me double check the footage. So... I think the important thing here is axon flock surveillance at large and the larger surveillance apparatus that we don't even, you know, where's it go beyond here, right? What makes sense to me is the next insane step is you just build it into the vehicle. And I think that Tesla already is doing that, right? You can't opt out of this stuff. It's built into your city. You can opt out maybe of where you live, right? But again, that's that old, you know, sure, we can all run. You know what I mean? We can all run away. But for how far can you go and for how long? You know that's not the right answer, right? You know the right answer is not just keep running. We'll just keep running until we're completely surrounded and the robot dogs with machine guns are walking through our woods. I see a lot of that. I see a lot of that weird stuff, man. I see a lot of weird videos of guys on pickup trucks shooting drones out of the sky one at a time, right? As in some weird fantasy that like you're not going to like if a drone takedown was to occur, it wouldn't happen with 50 or more drones at one time. I don't know. So I want to talk about these. These tips we have, I think they're good. I think they're good. They're a good takeaway. It's, you know, you have to build this sort of knowledge up. You also have to, when you get into lists of tips, right, you got to definitely wrap your head around the idea that some of them I like, some of them I don't like, right? Some of them I can employ, some of them I'm not. I think it's a good reminder, tip one, assume every main road logs your plate. right? Assume that if you're going through some long-term sort of drive and you're on some kind of main road that somebody's following, somebody's tracking at least, right? Images are being taken and that sort of big giant book of your movement. One of the biggest reasons I got a ghost phone was because of the Google tracking that used to send me a report, and I know you could turn the report off, but you can't turn the report off. But they used to send me a report all the time and tell me, here's your favorite places. In other words, here are the places you go the most. And when you see what they know about where you go the most, it's terrifying. Because where do you think you go the most? Just think about it, especially if you're a parent. Where do you think you go the most? Where is most of your time spent? You know what I mean? If you have a child in school, let's just go with that. So, you know, it all depends on how deep down the rabbit hole you want to go. Me personally, I'm not going to be changing my route to and from places to avoid cameras. You know what I mean? Because, again, we're at a point where it's like, How much avoidance can the average person do, right? So you got to figure out sort of where you're willing to avoid and where you're not willing to avoid. This is a tough one too. This is, again, the world of convenience, right? Tip two says use cash for toll roads and parking when possible. The trouble here, at least in Richmond, is that cash tolls are dying. No, they're dead. The cash tolling is over. They send you a bill now. They capture every toll, at least in the Richmond area. I don't know. You get up there to Maryland. I'm not sure if they have the cash option still or not. I'd have a hard time believing it. But yeah, use cash for toll roads and parking when possible. Cash is going away. It's a big problem. We really need to bring it back. Or we need something on the other end, right? Something on the other side. I don't know if that's going to be crypto. We push towards that or not. I'm not a big fan. So I don't know how much I like that one. Disable location services on apps that don't need them. Raise your hand if you know how many of your apps follows you. Seriously. Like, do you know which apps on your phone follow you and which don't? The key to this is making sure that your phone doesn't know your location. Then the apps can't. Now, some of the apps won't work. You can toggle your location on a phone like my ghost phone from Mark 37. You can toggle that location. But what you can't do is take a phone that's powered up by Google and tell it to stop following you. Because even when you tell it to stop following you, I don't think it's actually going to do it. But being aware of how many. What happened to my cool screen here? Being aware of how many of these apps ask for your location is the beginning. Like that really is the beginning because there's I mean, there's it's crazy, really. we used to download games and stuff for our kids on cell phones. It'd be like, you know, a reading game or like a numbers game or an addition game or something weird like that. I'm talking, this could be like 12 years ago. And no, it was probably like nine or so, eight or nine years ago. And I'd always see that. We need your location. We need your contacts. I'm like, The kid's making fake food on a phone app. What does he need my location for? So you probably aren't aware. And nowadays, I feel like things happen even quicker. Use of a VPN on public Wi-Fi. I try to avoid public Wi-Fi. I usually just hotspot from my own phone, which is password protected. I think that's a better route to go, but I get it. There are times, right? Public Wi-Fi is unencrypted by default. A VPN encrypts your traffic, for those of you who don't know. A lot of people use them now. I feel like a lot of people use them, and that's a good thing. Turn off ad personalization in Google and social accounts. Dude, you've got to get off of it altogether. Look, aside from the tracking and that kind of thing, Google will ruin your internet experience. It ruins the joy of the Internet because it turns you into you inside its little algorithmic box and serves you bullshit. Bullshit that's like low hanging fruit. You know what I mean? And I'm not just talking about ads. I'm talking about content in general. Tip six, use a password manager and unique passwords everywhere. This one's hard, man. This one is hard. It is. It's hard, especially when you're busy. You know what I mean? You're like, dude, I don't have time to have 17 different passwords for 17 different logins. All I can tell you is write them in a book. It makes a huge difference, particularly when you lose them. I used to be way better at it. I've been kind of lax with the writing down lately, and it kind of messes things up. 2FA works, no doubt about it. Two-factor authentication. It works. Not only do I have to have control of your computer, I have to have control of your phone, or I have to have your passkey or something along those lines, and I think it goes a long way. I don't know anything about this tip number eight, opt out of data broker sites manually. Data broker aggregate and sell personal information sites like Spokio, White Pages, and People Finder allow opt out requests, but you must submit them individually. I need more. I need more here. I need more on this. Where are we at? Let me see if I can drill down on this because I don't quite understand this one. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, like everything is grabbing and selling your personal info, right? Use encrypted messaging for sensitive conversations, Signal and WhatsApp. Just get used to using them. When you switch over to a Mark 37 ghost phone, you're going to use Signal anyway for a lot of things. You're going to get out of that sort of monitored messaging, the SMS. And the SMS isn't encrypted. It's a big difference, right? And you know, this whole conversation about privacy, you have to figure out, you know, again, what you're willing to give up, what you're willing to keep, you know, what you want to keep, what you don't, what lengths you're willing to go to achieve that privacy. And just know that, you know, in some instances, there are things that we have to fight for. And we're just at that point, you know, we are at that point. Ten. Ten. 10 is pretty simple. Understand that there are operating systems outside of what the big guys have to offer you, you know, in terms of like Windows and in terms of Google. There are, what's it, Linux? Linux is old news, man, ancient, right? And then you have Graphene, which runs on the ghost phones. They don't require you to tell your whole life story and to gather data on your whole life for eternity. You know, sort of like this weird, I mean, how's this stuff going to look years and years and years and years from now? It's all going to be held up in some data center. Your whole existence, every search, everything you've ever searched, whether you think you have not been watched while you're searching it or not, right? It's all going to exist someplace. It's going to be sold. It'll probably be sold back to your own family. You know what I mean? They'll probably be like, oh, let's get some old pictures and data on grandpa. You know what I mean? And some big data center will sell it back to your people. I don't like it. So in all transparency, right, when I started with this thing, This is the Pixel 7a, right? Mark37. com. Down in the show description is a link. There's two links, actually, down in the show description. One is sort of a breakdown of why I use this phone, how I switched it over, what it can do for me, and how to get your own, basically, right? There's also a link to all their other products at Mark 37 because they have all kinds of stuff. They got laptops, they got tablets, and they got cell phones. And they got way better cell phones than mine. You know what I mean? I have an old one. This is an old one. It still does everything. You know what I mean? But the whole idea there was when I began, I carried around two phones for like five months, four months, something like that. Because I was... scared to switch all the way i didn't know exactly what i was going to lose and what i wasn't going to lose and it was just one of those things it was you know it can live as a secondary device for you it can't i don't think you should do it that way it'll be alluring you'll be like oh maybe i can keep one ghost phone and one regular phone if you do that then you just have to understand you're kind of defeating the purpose right i think you're defeating the purpose You could buy a prepaid phone in cash, get a separate number, do that kind of thing, go that kind of spy way, right? You could do that. I don't know if I like that. Again, it goes back to the running and hiding. It goes back to the, like, really quantify how many inconveniences we're supposed to take on for a surveillance state. How many? How many inconveniences? How many inconveniences are we supposed to– so we're supposed to drive in the back roads, encrypt everything we do, VPN, buy burner phones. By the way, once you start calculating all that, once you start understanding all that we are doing there, you realize, oh, you know what I'm doing now? I went from living like an American citizen to living like a criminal. That's exactly what it is. That's exactly what it is. You're being asked to live like you've done something wrong, although you've done nothing wrong. Though the state is what's doing the wrong, right? And they're building the communist apparatus that is, find me the man and I'll find you the crime. That's it. I mean, what else is it? What else is all this information being saved for? It's to know that should you step out of line, no problem. No problem, because I've got 20 years of footage of you driving. I've got 20 years of you talking and texting on the internet, on your phone, searches, this, that, every comment you've made on social media, everything you've done. I've got it all. It's been subpoenaed by the U.S. government, and good luck. beating the rap that's what it is that's what it is at its at its peak you know what i mean now if you were doing that to i don't know a fauci if you were using that for good maybe we'd be less worried about it but we all know the people with the money the people with the influence they don't that they subpoena whatever you want we had hillary clinton with with She deleted her entire email, which, you know, doesn't really exist, right? It's not like you can actually delete your emails. Somebody can find them somewhere. But, oh, yeah, she deleted them all. Now we don't know what happened to them. I don't know. I guess they're all gone. Nothing to worry about. It's Hillary Clinton anyway. You know, she's a saint. Keep that keep that in your head. You know what I mean? Never link the ghost phone to existing accounts. The failure mode, logging into your regular email or social media from secondary device, that cross contaminates the identities. The ghost phone is only useful if it stays genuinely separate. No app knows your real name. So there's some caveats there. Okay. You can go that route. You can go that route for sure. What you have to understand about your ghost phone and, and one of the biggest ways to use it, one of the best ways to use it is through the browser. So rather than having the apps, right? The apps that are going to ask for everything, right? You download a Facebook, you download a, Anything like that, having that app on your phone, it's going to say, I need all of this information about you, right? Fair enough. That's how apps work. Sean Patrick Tarrio from Mark 37 was pretty clear on it. He was like, dude, just use the browser. If you want to log into X, just log into X through the Brave browser, through a good browser, right? That is also working with your privacy in mind. You can log in to everything. Almost everything you have as an app on your phone right now that you think like, oh, there's no way I can live without it. You can log in through your browser. It's pretty much that simple. You know what I mean? It's pretty much that simple. It's not that complex a situation. The other thing that's really cool about the ghost phone is you get access to a bunch of apps that you don't even know exist. And they don't exist for a lot of you. Because you don't access the F-Droid. So apps like. Arita. Apps like. Magic Earth. Apps like Next Cloud. Apps like New Pipe. That's a pretty cool app right there. I'm not going to tell you what it does. But it's a pretty cool. Lecter is a great one. Joplin is. I'm pretty sure that's a messenger. I used to. What was the name of this? We used to collectively as a network do running challenges on an app. But I'm sure it tracked the hell out of you because it tracked your run, right? I use an app now that is privacy-minded called FiddoTrack, and you turn your location on and off when you run so that the GPS can find you and track your run and then turn it off. Like I said, it's not my... My sort of slate is not particularly spotless, right? But that is what it is. It's my decision, right? In this world, we want to be able to make our decisions, right? We don't want to say, I want to be this privacy, privately proactive or whatever. But the F-Droid is cool. You still have access with your ghost phone to what is called the Aurora store. And the Aurora store is basically the Google store. I don't know if you can see that. Where the hell is it? There it is. It's next to my Bamboo Labs app. The Aegis is a cool app. Antenapod is awesome. Where's the radio app I used to use? Antenapod, you can listen to all your podcasts. There's a ton. Oh. Broke the AI. The AI was like, where'd he go? Stop following me. How about that? Let's start with that. So like I said, there's alternatives to everything in there. And if it's essential, essential, then you just put it in the browser. You know what I mean? Of the phone. So in the show notes down below, guys. You can get your hands on the links. One link that describes exactly what I use, how I got my ghost phone, what I use it for, what it really truly is, what it can do for me, what I struggle with, which isn't a lot anymore now that I'm a year in, and where to get it. I have the direct link to my affiliate link for mark37. com. You can go in there and just go to the shop tab. You'll see my 7A. is still available. It's like $ 495, right? $ 495. The other thing they do at Mark 37 that's phenomenal is they do services to get you completely... I mean, if you're looking at this thing and going like, I have no idea what I'm doing, they will help you. They have priced out services to help you switch phones seamlessly, like with a phone call. It's really not that hard. I did it all myself without help. Largely, it was a matter of switching SIM card right out of the phone into the ghost phone. Primarily, that's it. Right. But you can also switch contacts. You can switch messages. And that's a big help. Right. That's those things go on to the ghost phone. And now you feel like, oh, this this is my phone. So Mark 37, use the link in the show description to get. Your. Cell phone, tablet, laptop, if you're interested in those, not running on Google software, Microsoft, that kind of thing. They run on the graphene operating system and protect your privacy at large. The whole reason that... Maybe not the whole reason, but one of the big triggers that brought me to this topic today was Axon, the company Axon. Because I'd seen... so much about flock, right? There's so many things going on related to flock and the deflocking of America, and you're not hurting my feelings. I'll just go with that, right? But to round out the show, I wanted to talk about sort of Axon a little bit and their ALPR, which is integrated into patrol vehicle systems, captures plates during enforcement activity, traffic stops, patrols, responses, incident driven. So, so the axon fleet three in patrol cars is incident driven and not blanket coverage. So it's a reactive, basically reactive surveillance system, right? I don't know what triggers it in a patrol car, but there's probably, you know, you turn the lights on, you could mention pursuit or something along those lines that it triggers. Uh, The flock is different. The flocks is a fixed camera. Axon is feeding a searchable database. This is... Privacy through Axon. What I don't see, and now we're going to have to do further investigation to find out, right? Axon also makes tasers, by the way. That's pretty interesting. I didn't know that. I did not know that. Let's see what people are thinking. Let's see what the people might be thinking. If you're interested in knowing whether or not you've got axon cameras or flock cameras, there's no way that that's happening right now. Let me just check this camera. There's a fly on my camera. You can't see it, thankfully. Um, Yeah, so if you want to know where the flocks are, what they are, if Axon is in operation in your city, it's a good recommendation to start with your city council meeting minutes and police department budget documents. I use the area study map. The area study map has a literal flock section, a flock overlay onto any map. anywhere in the United States. You just click the flock overlay on and they all populate. And it's great, man. It's awesome. It's actually kind of unnerving when you see them all. So at the end of the day, just using common sense, right? Do you think that this move away from from privacy will increase or decrease with time and technology? Because we know that technology is going to rapidly improve over the next year, five years, 10 years. How do you think that's going to look in 10 years? In home? I mean, how much work? See, we already willingly, a lot of people put cameras in the home, which is always crazy to me, in the house. You know what I mean? Sort of like handing over that right of privacy right then and there. But I think more importantly than looking at it as somebody is viewing me when I don't want to be viewed, it's important to understand that the caseload is being built, right? On your name, on your day-to-day activities, purchases, searches, the whole nine yards. That's the thing. That's the whole thing. How much of it is used for your benefit? Right? I mean, if you're going to be a lab animal, shouldn't some of it be to your benefit? But largely it's ad-driven, right? The selling of all that information that's being... gathered on you. I'm sure Flock and Axon make no money whatsoever on that. In the same way that an Amazon or a Google gathers up your information and sells it, tries to figure out who and what you are, So that it can serve you the right ads, the right videos, right articles, right? When I say right, I mean the most alluring, the most tempting, the ones that will get you to click and read and watch and then initiate on that call to action, whatever it might be. Whatever some unknown entity is paying Google to make you or try to make you do, right? I can guarantee you this is not a thing that will clear up on its own. It's not a thing that's going to clear up just because. There's no way. We have a lot of battles to fight. And we most certainly have a lot of battles to fight. And I guess on my end, for you guys, I've probably got to figure out what the blueprint looks like. I actually have a resource for that. A fellow prepper camper, Paul Vallone. Paul Vallone has kind of mastered and he's written a great book on how to win elections. Local as well. So I bet you that that framework is probably pretty similar to how to win in-city council and those kind of things. It's all just a lot, man. To me, it feels like this is like inevitable path that i'm going to wind up on anyway but with everything else going on it just seems like so much and then to you know to wind up wading through the muck and the filth of that world god i'll need one of those mirror safety decontamination tends to walk through at the end of every day all right folks a lot of information Spread it around. Share it around best you can. We appreciate it. The downloads all count, right? They all count. They all make a big difference for us here at PBN. I guess I'm going to have to do another show entirely on National Preparedness Month, which starts tomorrow and will be a 30-day absolutely bonanza of daily live streams. I'm going to test out a live stream right after this on Instagram. But just suffice it to say, man, look for us at 9 a.m. or 9 p.m. every single day for a special National Preparedness Month broadcast. You're going to meet some amazing people, some amazing services that are out there, products that are out there. And that's our big project for you. No prepper camp this September, so I can buckle down on this thing. Use the links down below, folks. Mark37. com, okay? Use my affiliate link in particular. Pay really good commissions. Makes a difference. Talk to you guys soon.