Transcript: Tucker Carlson Interviews Benn Jordan on the Coming Slave State

Remarkable.

How did this change so fast, and were you consulted on the change? Did your local lawmaker ask you, “Would you like to be spied on twenty-four hours a day?” No. Of course no one asked. In fact, until very recently, most Americans were not even aware this was happening.

License Plate Readers and the “Child Trafficker” Excuse

There’s been an explosion in surveillance in one specific area, which is misleadingly named: automatic license plate readers. The idea is that a camera, either affixed to a pole or bolted to the side of a building, or increasingly in a drone, takes pictures of a license plate and runs that information back to police headquarters — presumably — or corporate headquarters. That information can be used to track down the fabled, fabled child traffickers everyone in charge is so upset about. Child traffickers! There’s not a single member of Congress who wasn’t very exercised about the existence of child traffickers — even the ones who opened up the southern border and let in tens of thousands of child traffickers.

They’re very upset about child traffickers. And because child trafficking is America’s most pressing problem, everybody in the country — all 350 million — needs to be spied on at all times. But just your license plate, right? Well, it’s become clear in recent months that these license plate readers are doing a lot more than reading license plates. In fact, there’s no law that says they have to restrict their spying to people’s license plates. They can spy on people and cars, and they can do facial recognition, and they can listen to what you say.

And indeed, they are. There are a lot of companies that provide this service. The biggest, and certainly the most famous, is called Flock — Flock Safety. The idea behind Flock Safety is police departments will use its product — its drones or its cameras affixed to poles — in their towns to reduce crime. From the perspective of the police department, it’s a pretty good deal.

The Economics of Surveillance

It’s a good deal because it’s a whole lot cheaper than police officers. Police officers are very expensive. It costs over $100,000 a year, on average, to employ a police officer. Over the course of an entire police career — through recruitment and training and sick days and, of course, salary, and then retirement — it can cost $7 million to a city for a single police officer. But if you were to switch, if you were to automate the process, if you were to get a machine to do what people once did, it costs you about $2,500 under the Flock contract.

So you can certainly see the incentive. Of course, lost in this is any privacy, or even interaction with the human being with whom you might relate in some way — personal interactions coming far too expensive in the new digital economy. But you can certainly see why city councils and mayors and police chiefs would be incentivized, would have great incentive, to use Flock cameras instead of people.

The problem is it’s not clear what the rest of us are getting in return. So the promise — and it’s inherent in the name Flock Safety — is that if you give up your privacy, your preexisting right, you thought, to kind of walk around without having your face analyzed and sent to headquarters somewhere in this or another country — if you were to give up all privacy, you would, in exchange, get what? Safety. Of course. And that’s the trade, always.

The Broken Promise of Safety

The problem is it hasn’t worked that way, because safety has never been a priority of this ruling class. There was a time when big city mayors and police chiefs and governors and even presidents said explicitly, “Look, we’re going to crack down, but in return, you’re going to get the kind of country that is clean and orderly, safe for your daughter or grandmother to go to the store. No one’s getting raped in my country, and we may need to crack a few heads, but you will get safety.”

For years, a bipartisan Republican and Democrat agreement remained in place that the first order — the first job of government — was to provide safety for its citizens. Because without that, what else do you have? It doesn’t matter what your GDP is if, I don’t know, the downtowns of your biggest cities are open-air drug markets, or hundreds of people are getting shot to death. It doesn’t matter. You first have to provide safety.

But somewhere around thirty years ago, that part of the deal ended. Big city mayors, governors, members of Congress sort of forgot that their number-one duty is to provide safety to the population.

Defund the Police, Then Demand Surveillance

This kind of reached its most obvious and hilarious point five years ago, when those same people — members of Congress, governors, big city mayors, even police chiefs — were calling for some version of defunding the police. How about no police at all? Oh, you think it’s dangerous now? How about we just don’t enforce any law? How does that sound?

And they told us that they were not embarrassed at all. Opposing funding the police was a prerequisite to being anti-racist, so it was really a kind of moral test. Anyone who’s for the police hated black people — obviously, in case you weren’t here when that happened, but this was a widely understood principle. Every channel, including Fox News, told you about this. Anyone who’s for the police, particularly white police, is just a racist. First cousin to a Nazi.

What’s interesting is that some of those exact same people — literally the same people — are now telling you that you have to have cameras everywhere: in drones, on light poles, buildings. In fact, now even in your car, thanks to an act of Congress — a law passed recently by The United States Congress — it mandates cameras in all new passenger vehicles that assess the face of the driver. Whether he’s eating or yawning or who knows what he’s doing, having a private conversation — well, there are no more private conversations, even within the confines of your own vehicle. Why?

Because safety. There are drunk drivers out there. Of course, it was only two years ago that Joe Biden explained, “Well, actually, drunk driving is not a big deal when illegal aliens do it.” Somehow that standard’s been revised. Drunk driving is such a big deal that you can’t have a private conversation in your own car anymore, according to the US Congress. And in fact, that is a law, and it’s going to happen.

Houston: A Case Study in Surveillance Without Safety

So how exactly has this brand-new but already incredibly widespread phenomenon — Flock cameras, license plate readers in virtually every city in The United States — what has it done to crime? Well

The Panopticon City

So it is clear. In fact, it’s proven that if you turn a city into a Panopticon, you still have, well, in the case of Harris County, Texas, hundreds of people getting murdered, but you have no more privacy, which is to say you have no more intimacy, which is to say you have no more freedom.

Because privacy is a prerequisite for freedom. You cannot be free unless you can have independent thoughts and privacy. And independent thoughts are impossible without privacy, which is why when the US military wants to train its pilots on what life in a prison camp must be like, very often, it puts them in a glass box naked in the center of the faux prison camp.

That is a form of torture because you are stripped entirely of privacy. There is nowhere to hide. Everyone can see you at every moment. And what does that do to people? Well, it tends to drive them insane.

And yet the US government, state, federal, and local has now constructed exactly that, a glass box at the center of a prison camp, and we all reside in it. So what do you do about that exactly? Do you go to your city council meeting and complain? That’s been tried. And if you’re interested, go online.

You can see video after video of concerned and very kind of forthright and reasonable citizens asking their city council members, “Why are we doing this? Why am I paying for this? And what about my Fourth Amendment right that prevents unreasonable search and seizure without a warrant by the government?” And in every single case, we could find they’re just blown off like some annoying crank. “Oh, shut up.”

“Safety” as the Excuse

Safety. Safety. Eliminate cigarette smoking while we live forever. It’s not like the life expectancy is going to go down if we do that. Oh, but it did.

So the point is license plate readers are safe and effective. And if you don’t believe that, you’re obviously anti-science. Shut up, science denier. What are you for, the drug cartels? Oh, no. That would be the government. They’re in business with the drug cartels.

But normal people cannot get a hearing on this question. Congress has made no effort to ban it or even regulate it to protect, say, images of you or your conversation with your wife and or girlfriend or anyone else from being sent anywhere. There’s no law preventing other people from stealing your conversations and your image in the most intimate moments of your life, like in your car, and sending it to anybody or selling it to anybody.

Now some of these companies, like Flock, claim they don’t. Okay. Hope that’s true. Is it? We don’t know. And how would we know?

So it’s not an endorsement of vigilante justice or vandalism, of course, which we are not, for the record, endorsing. But is it out of the realm of possibility that if you set up a system like the one just described, some people will say, “I’ve got no option but to take these cameras down myself”? Well, in fact, that’s exactly what a lot of people will conclude, including this man. Watch.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Do you have plans to continue to take down these f*ers?

JAVON MARTINEZ: Absolutely.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: No?

JAVON MARTINEZ: Absolutely. They are clear and present threat to public safety.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: 44-year-old Javon Martinez is facing larceny, property damage, and tampering with evidence charges after police say he destroyed three Flock cameras, costing Rio Rancho thousands of dollars in damage.

JAVON MARTINEZ: You know, you call me, but I am here. I’m not here. I stood up. I walked up there. She wanted my name, but I have a right to not bear testimony against myself, giving my name, self-incriminating testimony. And so I just chose to remain silent.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

Oh, guy in an American flag shirt quoting the Constitution. He must be a dangerous radical. Better kill that guy. He knows his rights. “That’s not acceptable.”

The Rise of DeFlock

So there are a lot of people like that. And if you go on the Internet, at least as of yesterday, and this may change in the age of AI, who knows, but as of very recently, there are dozens, maybe hundreds of similar videos of people destroying license plate readers, cutting down the poles, running into them with their cars, spray painting them.

There are how-to videos on how to disable them with high-powered lasers you can buy on Amazon.com, which apparently fry their circuits. We’re not endorsing that, of course. But they’re videos, in other words, of people who don’t feel they have any other recourse whatsoever, making one last-ditch attempt to preserve the one thing that makes them free in this or any other country, their birthright, by the way, and it’s called privacy. They don’t have it. They’d like it back.

They think the Constitution guarantees it to them. Their lawmakers don’t care. Their leaders don’t care. Their police departments don’t care. They don’t think it’s to make them safer. They understand that it’s to strip them of their most basic humanity, which it is. And so they’re doing the only thing they can imagine doing. The only thing the powerless really can do in a situation like this, they’re taking matters into their own hands, and some of them are being punished for it.

So you don’t have to endorse vandalism, of course, and we’re not, to understand the impulse behind it. And if that guy is any measure of who’s doing it, and judging by the videos we saw, he definitely is a measure of exactly who’s doing it, it’s not the malcontents. It’s not drug-addicted kids knocking down Flock cameras for fun. It’s sober, decent, patriotic Americans who believe the promises of their country.

They’re mad not because they’re trying to get something from Flock, but because they want to be left alone by Flock. Because Flock was not part of the country they signed up for. No one asked their permission to steal their images and to spy on their conversations, to read their license plates.

So any person with any capacity for reasoning and with any empathy for other human beings may not endorse that behavior, but can certainly understand it. And enlightened people might work toward some kind of compromise. Maybe there are ways we can use technology to lower crime and make it safer for your grandmother to go to the grocery store. That would be good. But maybe we can do that without eliminating your humanity by taking away your privacy.

The Billionaire Behind Flock

But that’s not, of course, the posture of the billionaires who run Flock Safety. Safety. Here is the founder of Flock Safety, Garrett something. Doesn’t look like he’s even 40. This is Garrett, the billionaire Flock guy, describing how he feels about anyone who disagrees with his project. Watch.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Corporate wars, looking at citizen projects where citizens are concerned about the rise of Flock and Flock cameras going up everywhere and increased surveillance everywhere. There’s an organization called DeFlock who are semi well-known now, I guess, if you’re interested in this stuff, who take a fairly aggressive approach in terms of counting the number of cameras and having a Discord channel where they talk about potential activities to move against Flock and stop it expanding. What do you think of that organization and the way they go about their business?

GARRETT LANGLEY: Yeah, so I mean, I think there’s really two groups of activists. You’ve got organizations like the ACLU and the EFF who take an above-the-board approach to fight for their point of view. And thankfully, we live in a beautifully democratic, capitalistic country where we can fight in court. And I have a lot of respect for those groups because they have reasonable debates, and we follow the law.

And then, unfortunately, there’s terroristic organizations like DeFlock whose primary motivation is chaos. They are closer to Antifa than they are anything else. And that, I think, is unfortunate, because we don’t want chaos. Or I don’t want chaos. I like law and order. I like a society that has a bedrock of safety.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

It’d be interesting to know where the douchebag factory is that turns out billionaires in t-shirts who run our most powerful con companies. Who is that guy? He’s a billionaire. Where’d the money come from? Oh, from state and local governments. That’s it, tax dollars.

Mister t-shirt guy, Garrett Langley or something, he just described a group called DeFlock as a, quote, “terroristic organization.” Well, what’s DeFlock? Well, if that’s the only knowledge you have of DeFlock, you probably think it’s, as he said, like Antifa. Guys in black masks spray painting things and beating people over the head with flagpoles and shooting bear spray into the faces of cops. Antifa, they want chaos. Uh-huh.

Well, actually, unlike Antifa, DeFlock has a website. So you can just kind of go there and assess for yourself. What is DeFlock? Well, the answer was in the question, and it was accurate. DeFlock is a group on the Internet that tells you where the Flock cameras are. That’s what they do. They have a map.

They’re not for Flock cameras or any license plate readers. They think they’re a violation of the Fourth Amendment. They think they’re an invasion of your privacy. They think they’re dehumanizing. All true, by the way. But what they really do is keep track of where the monitors are. Where are you being surveilled? And you can go on the map, it’s deflock.com, and find out where they are in your neighborhood.

And by the way, it’s overwhelmingly likely that you have them in your neighborhood, that you’re being watched. You didn’t even know it. That’s because the people who are supposed to be protecting you, actually protecting you, like the mayor of your town or the chief of your police department or your member of Congress or your governor, they should be telling you, but they don’t, because they don’t care at all about you or your privacy.

And so DeFlock steps in and says, “Maybe you’d like to know where these cameras are.” And in some cases, because the information is out there, the guy in the American flag shirt and the sombreros may disable the camera. Okay. But most people would like to know. And so providing that information is terrorism? Really?

Who Gets to Know Everything

So think about what the t-shirt douchebag guy is saying. The billionaire that got rich on your tax dollars is saying to you, he’s saying, “We get to know everything about you. Everything.” Well, you don’t even know we’re here. Actually, we have a drone overhead that at the distance of hundreds of yards can see everything about you just like a military drone.

And that information is going, well, we’re not going to tell you where it’s going. I mean, it’s proprietary information that’s going to the client, but what’s he doing with it? He could be selling it to insurance companies, to other governments, to companies, to data brokers who can sell it to all the above. That’s not happening? I don’t know. Mister t-shirt billionaire, is it happening? Shut up.

But in other words, he’s reserving the right to use tax dollars to know everything about you. But if you want to know anything about their company, Flock Safety, you’re a terrorist. Oh, you’re a terrorist. It’s a terroristic organization. Are they committing acts of terror? No. They’re actually disseminating knowledge that he’s not contesting as factual. He’s not saying it’s wrong. It’s accurate. That’s why he calls them terrorists. How dare you? You get to know everything.

The Asymmetry of Power

This is sort of the deal the government has with us, or federal law enforcement has with us. You lie to an FBI agent, any federal agent, go right to jail. And if you live long enough, you’ll know people who do go to jail for doing that. So, of course, the FBI can’t lie to you, right? Oh, yes, they can.

So in other words, your employees, that you pay, who work for you, an FBI agent works for you. Hey, get me a cup of coffee, son. That’s the posture. He works for you. He’s your employee. He’s your housekeeper with a gun. You’re paying his salary. But if you lie to him, you go to jail, but he is absolutely allowed to lie to you and does all the time and faces no penalty because there’s no law against it. Well, that’s called asymmetrical. That’s called

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The Problem with “Nothing to Hide”

TUCKER CARLSON: So Ben Jordan has thought a lot about this, knows a lot about it, knows a lot of the details about where the data from these cameras are going, which is worth knowing. And he joins us now. Ben, are you there?

BENN JORDAN: Yeah. I’m here. How are you?

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m great. Thank you for the work that you’ve done on this. So why are you concerned about license plate readers, Flock cameras? I mean, we’re told that, look, it’s for your safety. And unless you want to be a terrorist, you should probably shut up about it. And there’s nothing to be worried about at all if you’re not doing something wrong. So I’m not doing anything wrong. Why should I be worried about it?

BENN JORDAN: Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of reasons to be worried about it. One pushback I always get is people saying, “I have nothing to hide,” and I feel like that is one of the most inaccurate statements ever. When somebody says that to me, I always ask them to hand me their phone and unlock it and let me go into the other room for a while. And just, why do you got something illegal on there? Let me look at it.

But yeah, anybody who’s ever been stalked, who’s been falsely accused of a crime, anybody who’s ever been hacked, who’s had their identity stolen, they all have stuff to hide. And it’s when those terrible things happen to you when you realize, oh, I actually have a lot to hide. And this is really important.

Flock Safety: A Private Company with No Accountability

BENN JORDAN: As far as the first thing that I always — when I talk to a police chief or something like that — the first thing I always tell them is that this is a third party tech startup. They’re not even a public company. It’s a private company that has venture capital investors, one of which is on the hook for Cambridge Analytica, by the way. And they have one job, and that job is to make as much money as possible.

So they’re going to tell you whatever it is that you need to hear to put as many cameras in your community as possible. They’re going to tell you that it helps solve crime, that it’ll increase your clearance rates. And the fact is that they don’t have any evidence of doing any of that.

TUCKER CARLSON: So the crime thing, it does seem like — we tried to find the numbers. Crime stats are complicated, cross referencing them with what we know about these cameras and where they are. It didn’t seem like they — well, they certainly hadn’t eliminated crime in, like, Oakland or Houston or places that have a real problem with crime. But it seems intuitive that, like, if you spy on everyone all the time, there’ll be less crime. Like, that doesn’t seem like a crazy claim.

BENN JORDAN: Yeah. Well, I mean, criminology and sociology are incredibly chaotic. We actually, as a society, don’t even know if increasing police reduces crime. Like, that can go either way depending on what city.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

BENN JORDAN: One of my favorite studies was actually on dog ownership — like, does having a security dog or having a lot of dogs in a neighborhood reduce crime? And it actually did, and the reason was because people walk their dogs and they walk around and they get to know their neighbors and they might even get to know their police more, if they have police on foot walking around the neighborhood, and that makes everybody safer.

But the only thing that we truly know that lowers crime is community policing — is people trusting their police officers and saying, “Hey, there’s a gang member that all of a sudden bought a gun. I think something’s going to go down. I saw this.” They’ll have that conversation with their police department, and then they could actually reduce crime and they could prevent victims from happening.

So it’s not a matter of getting somebody’s license plate and then arresting them down the road. You don’t have a victim in the first place. And I feel in most of the communities that I’ve visited — and I’m literally on the road right now visiting communities, talking to city council members and stuff like that — in most of these communities, the public feels like the license plate readers, specifically from Flock, are betraying the relationship that they have with police. They’re actually violating that social contract where people expect privacy and they’re not being given it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I mean, if surveillance created safety, then prisons would be very safe, but they’re very dangerous. So I guess that’s obvious. Right? Now that I think about it.

Surveillance Changes Behavior

BENN JORDAN: One thing that a lot of people also don’t think about — one of my favorite analogies, and this is used by the ACLU often — is if you’re driving somewhere and a cop pulls behind you at a stoplight, you immediately change the way you behave. You might be really into a song you’re listening to. Now you’re distracted by the cop. You might be in a conversation. For some reason, the flow of that conversation changes, even if you’ve done nothing wrong. We all just have that weird feeling with this person who is able to, I don’t know, handcuff us, pull us over, write us a ticket, shoot us, whatever they want to do.

When that person’s behind us and surveilling us and looking in and saying, “Oh, what’s that guy up to? Is he up to no good?” We start behaving differently. And so when you put cameras in front of playgrounds — and there’s plenty of Flock cameras in front of playgrounds, which is baffling to me — nobody’s saying, “Hey, doesn’t this affect the way kids play?”

Like, when I learned how to do a cartwheel the first time when I was a kid, or when I learned how to play the guitar, I didn’t have anybody watching me. I had to be alone to do that. I needed my privacy to be able to find my own identity and find what I’m good at, which isn’t cartwheels, by the way.

TUCKER CARLSON: I think that’s such a wise point and a deep point. So to what extent did communities have a say in this?

No Democratic Input

BENN JORDAN: Barely any. Up until we started releasing big videos on this and then started going in the news, most people didn’t even know what the cameras were. They didn’t realize that they were storing their data every single time they passed it for thirty days.

So every single — it’s as if in my neighborhood, for example, in Atlanta, it’s as if I had a GPS unit on my car. I can’t go to Chick-fil-A or a grocery store or do anything without the police knowing about it, despite not — I’m not suspected of committing any crime.

TUCKER CARLSON: So, I mean, shouldn’t there be, like, a period where the town — the city of Atlanta in your case — says to the public, “You know, we’re going to put North Korea style surveillance posts all around the city. Like, are you for this? Are you against it? Here’s the trade off that we’re thinking about. What do you think?” There was no democratic input that you’re aware of?

BENN JORDAN: No. It’s very — and most people, I’ve been out of pocket. I’ve been paying for polling to find out how many people are for this, how many people are against this, and overwhelmingly, Americans are against it. And one thing that I find interesting is you’re seeing a lot of people on both sides of the political aisle be against it at the same time, which — it’s like the only issue in America right now where everybody’s kind of getting along and being like —

TUCKER CARLSON: Good. Yeah. We don’t want that. We hate it.

BENN JORDAN: And I think that’s really important because, as you had just shown that video with the Gareth Langley interview, he’s very quick to say the word Antifa. After some of my videos came out, he emailed police chiefs around the country — his clients — from his personal email address, telling them that they were under attack by lawless activists who want to defund the police. And I’m like, I’ve never wanted to defund the police. That’s never been a stance of mine.

And just the other day, he did an interview saying that people like Flock — they don’t hate Flock, they hate the Trump administration. Like, he literally said this in an interview, and he just seems to be trying so hard to act like conservatives are aligned with him and that it’s the left that’s against him. But I’m trying to make it very clear that one of the reasons I’m here right now — conservatives are not aligned with them.

TUCKER CARLSON: Conservatives have classically always been anti-surveillance and pro-privacy. Starting at Orwell, who was famously a socialist and sometimes identified as a communist, but whose views are like beloved by every conservative I know. So it’s like, I don’t even know what those terms mean. If you’re for America, if you’re for human dignity, if you’re for privacy, you oppose this. And that partisan crap is not applicable on questions like this. These are human rights. They’re not political rights.

So I have to say — that kid, Garrett, whatever his name is — I think it’s actually three 12-year-olds dressed on top of one another in an adult human costume.

BENN JORDAN: Oh, good. So good. That’s so exactly it. Out, Garrett. I know what’s going on. That is so good.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. And I hate to be mean to this one kid, but it’s like — I mean, he’s getting rich from this, from tax dollars, by the way, and then lecturing the people who are being abused by it. There’s something about that combination that infuriated me.

But he said, well, you know, there’s the ACLU. Now as someone who grew up sincerely admiring the ACLU, I wish the ACLU were leading the fight on this. But you don’t work for the ACLU, do you? Who do you work for?

The ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation Weigh In

BENN JORDAN: No. But I have — I just met with the ACLU yesterday, with somebody from the ACLU. They’re a little bit less public on this, but they are supporting people who are filing suits. They are involved in it, but much less publicly, which is part of the reason I was having a meeting with them. They’re like, “Hey, you’re kind of the face of this right now. Do you want to — we’ll give you some resources to help.”

And so, yeah, the ACLU, the EFF — Electronic Frontier Foundation — they’ve also been involved. The person who made dFLOC, his name’s Will — Flock sent him a cease and desist. And they stepped in and said, “We have a legal team. We’ll check this out.” And told Flock to pound sand. So they’ve been very helpful in that regard.

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Where Does the Data Go?

TUCKER CARLSON: So where do the images and the sounds go? Where does the data go?

BENN JORDAN: So typically, what happens with your standard Flock camera — like the black ones that you see, they’re called Falcons, that’s the model name of them — they will see a license plate, they’ll take a picture, and then they’ll send it to the Flock servers where the police can access it.

Whenever — so if the police — let’s say you had a brown car with a bumper sticker and maybe a broken window, the AI actually picks that up. And so not only your license plate, the police can just search “brown car broken window,” and then they’ll be able to find every single time that you’ve passed a camera.

But it gets worse than that because they have something called a hot list. They could put your license plate on a hot list, and then every single time that you pass a camera, the police get a notification saying, “This person is here. This person’s here. This person’s here.” And they don’t need a warrant to do this, which is the most staggering part, because this is no different than putting a GPS on somebody’s car — functionally — if you have a lot of Flock cameras around, and pinging somebody beyond one cell phone tower.

The Scale of Flock’s Drone Operations

TUCKER: The Supreme Court had, not that long ago, actually decided that was unconstitutional. So I just don’t see how this is… What’s the status of the drones? Flock is saying publicly, “We have a drone fleet, we’re expanding our drone fleet.” How big is that fleet? Do you know?

BENN JORDAN: That does seem to change the calculation. I had just done an interview next to—not on the property, but next to the property of their secret drone facility, which has a construction company name on it. It doesn’t have the Flock Safety name. And they called the police and had me detained for doing an interview across the street from their drone facility.

Their idea is to have drones that are persistently in the air. That’s what some Flock employees have told me, as of like a year ago. They do have something called emergency responder drones that I don’t really have a huge problem with. Like, if my house is on fire, I kind of want a drone to fly by really fast and let the fire department know how many trucks to send. But what they’re doing is a lot different than that. They want drones that are persistently in the air, and then, when it runs out of batteries, one will go down, one will go back up, and it’ll be able to surveil every single person under it.

TUCKER: You’re describing a war zone. I mean, there are a couple of hot war zones in the world.

BENN JORDAN: Right. Several.

TUCKER: And there are permanently drones in the air. So why would our government be using… we’re not enemy combatants, we’re Americans. Why would they be treating us like we’re the enemy?

Flock’s Marketing and the Revolving Door with Law Enforcement

BENN JORDAN: I want to joke and say “because it makes us safer.” But I think the truth is that Flock has spent hundreds of millions, billions of dollars on their product and marketing, but their marketing has been towards police. They have studies that they wrote themselves that they point to, saying, “Look how good this is, look how much safer this makes your community, how much better it makes your job.” They have conventions where they invite police officers and give them freebies.

And then there’s also a really large revolving door effect, where if you go down LinkedIn, go down through Flock employees, you’ll find the head of communications happened to be a police officer in Dallas a year before, and he happened to be the person in the police department who signed the surveillance contracts or recommended the surveillance contract. Same thing with city hall members, things like that.

And so you have something that I call corruption. I don’t know if it’s legally corruption, but a revolving door between government and private industry to me sounds a lot like corruption. So I think that’s why you have this massive expansion, and that’s why you have police saying, “We need this, otherwise we can’t do our job,” and city council members saying, “Okay, well, we’re going to have a quick little meeting and then vote this in before anybody hears about it.”

But in the end, everything that you’re scared of absolutely could happen. I think back to COVID, just five, six years ago—imagine Flock cameras. You leave the house to go pick up food during quarantine, and Flock cameras, or facial recognition cameras like the ones they have in retail stores, are now sending you a ticket because you violated quarantine, or because you didn’t wear your mask properly, because your nose was sticking out the top.

I think these affect people across the board, from every political aisle. And I think it’s really important that people speak to their city council members and local politicians now, and let them know how you feel. What I’m doing, I know you talked about people taking Flock cameras down themselves—what I’m doing is I’m trying to take down the politicians who signed the contract.

TUCKER: Yes. Good.

BENN JORDAN: To enable this. That’s literally what I’m doing—I’m interviewing politicians on the local level to find out who’s running against the person who threw their community under the bus by signing this contract.

A Hypothetical Turned Real

TUCKER: It’s very easy to see how military technology—and this is military technology, these weapons of war—could be used as tools of political repression. Let’s say the war in Iran continues. This is not a partisan point, it’s just an obvious observation. The war continues, the strait remains closed, we drain the SPR, and we have an actual energy crisis at that point—like an actual one. And the government says, “Well, we’re instituting a work-from-home order.” We did that during COVID, we’re doing it now. And a lot of people like me would be like, “Buzz off, I’m going where I want to go, it’s America.”

BENN JORDAN: Right.

TUCKER: And then drones are deployed to make certain that the sheep are being herded correctly. That’s not a crazy scenario at all.

Cameras in a Children’s Gymnastics Room

BENN JORDAN: No, no. It’s one of the most outrageous things that we’ve discovered. A friend of mine, Jason Hooniar, lives in an Atlanta suburb, Dunwoody. He has been volunteering his time—he’s not a professional investigator, he’s not a journalist—pulling audit reports through FOIA requests of what these things have been used for, where they’re located, what they’ve been searching.

There’s a place there called Marcus Jewish Community Center. It’s a private, large community center that’s kind of beloved by the community, and they have cameras on the wall there that aren’t Flock cameras—they’re like the standard cameras you would have in any sort of business. The community center said, “Okay, well, we’re a little worried that there might be some sort of antisemitic attack, so we want to share our footage with police in case they need it, in case there’s a shooting or something terrible happens.” And by doing that, they shared it with Flock.

So what Jason discovered is that over a thousand times, Flock employees viewed those cameras inside this private community center, including but not limited to the pool, the daycare center, the children’s gymnastics room—and nobody had been arrested, nobody had to answer any questions about it. In fact, they actually made it harder to collect an audit, or to collect a record of who was looking at the camera internally from the company.

TUCKER: Wait, just to be clear—it was Flock employees who were not licensed law enforcement officers.

BENN JORDAN: Yes.

TUCKER: All grown men.

BENN JORDAN: Yes. All Flock employees, over a thousand times, and they were all grown men. And they were looking at these cameras at the daycare center, or the children’s gymnastics room. And their defense to this was that it was a “product demo for another client.” I’m thinking to myself, if I had a business and I wanted a Flock camera, and I had a police department, and somebody pulled up a laptop and said, “Look how good this works,” and then it was a children’s gymnastics room—I would call the police, or hit them. I’m not sure what I would do, but that’s an outrageous explanation.

TUCKER: That’s just delusional. How many Flock employees were fired after that?

BENN JORDAN: None. Not one. They took down their LinkedIn, though, and deleted—one of them was in a band and removed his band page on Facebook. So they pretty much got scrubbed from social media because I released a video about it on Instagram, and it had made the news a little bit. So they immediately just scrubbed their profiles.

Congress and a National Security Risk

TUCKER: What has Congress done?

BENN JORDAN: So I had found some Flock law enforcement accounts on the dark web from a Russian vendor, and it didn’t have multi-factor authentication—you know, when you sign into Netflix and then you have to say, “Yes, I signed in from Netflix on my phone,” or type in a code. They didn’t have that. Not all Flock cameras have that, and not all Flock accounts have that. I found it for sale on a Russian vendor.

So I actually started talking to some senators—Representative Krishnamoorthi and Senator Wyden from Oregon. They wrote a letter to the FTC saying, “Hey, these need to be investigated immediately, there’s a massive national security risk here.” And the FTC, I assume, printed it out and threw it in the garbage. I’m not sure what they did, but they certainly didn’t open an investigation. And this was almost a year ago.

Data Privacy and Flock’s Denials

TUCKER: Are there any laws governing what Flock—and Flock is, of course, not the only surveillance company out there, there are a lot—but are there laws governing what they can do with the data, with your data, pictures of you and your family?

BENN JORDAN: In Illinois, maybe in California, there are some states that are starting to try and mimic data privacy laws that they have in the EU, or any other country really. They have data privacy laws that are superior to ours right now. And the problem is that if it’s only in one state, then they could just send it to a server in another state, and then sell the data elsewhere. Flock claims to not sell your data, but I’ve literally seen PDF price sheets with an amount on how much they sell data for.

TUCKER: So make sense of that. So you think they’re lying about not selling data?

BENN JORDAN: It’s almost as if they have a financial interest in lying to the public to get their company to IPO as quickly as possible.

TUCKER: Oh, cynical. Cynical. I don’t think T-shirt guy would do that.

Why Benn Jordan Keeps Going

TUCKER: Last thing, most obvious question—why are you doing this? Why are you devoting so much time to this?

BENN JORD

A Police Officer’s Stand Against Surveillance

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: So back in 2021, my department was the Pawtucket Police Department over here and a lot of other police departments across the state. They started doing these trial periods with the Flock. So they were introducing to our police chiefs, our city councils, and say, hey, we have this new technology. It’s going to help you solve crimes, track criminals. And I was trained on it along with my other coworkers.

And even the captain at the time who was tasked with training us, he was already very uncomfortable with it. He said, “Look. I was tasked with training you guys on how to use this, but I don’t know. This seems a little sketchy. But this is how it works. This is how you get it on your computer. This is how the system works. This is how you find a vehicle on hot list. And there you go.”

So when we first were introduced to training, I was already uncomfortable with it. And then when I finally had it in my vehicle and I saw how it worked and how it basically tracked vehicles in real time, I knew that it was a complete mistake. I believed at the time and I still believe now that it’s a Fourth Amendment violation, including the ACLU and the Institute for Justice who agree on that. And thankfully, my city was too poor to afford it at the time, so they struck it down.

Suspended for Speaking Out

So when I got involved and I got in trouble was back in 2023. I’m driving in my district and I see them up in my community. And I’m a patrolman, and I wasn’t notified that we were getting these cameras. So I was like, if I’m a police officer and it’s my business to know when things like these are introduced in my department, the public doesn’t know. And that was the case.

The public wasn’t notified. The other cities in Rhode Island were not notified. Like Ben was saying, in most cities across the country, they were not notified. It was just something that Flock had a conversation with the city council and the police chief, and they were put up without notifying the public.

And so, after a couple months of having a hard time looking my wife in the eye, I spoke with a local reporter. I spoke with the Valley Breeze and I told him this is what’s going on. This was put up without the public’s knowledge and needs to be addressed. He asked if he could use my name. And because I’m an idealist and a bit romantic and a bit stupid, I guess I told him to give him my name because I knew people hopefully would pay attention that they knew a police officer felt this strongly about what was happening.

And so once he did the article back in October 2023, I got in a lot of trouble. I spoke with a lot of my local representatives to try to let them know — that got me in trouble. One of our representatives was a really good guy. His name is Joe Solomon. He invited me to speak at the government oversight committee in April 2024. That got me in trouble.

So because I was doing all this, I got suspended a total of four times — seventy-two days without pay. I lost about $20,000 worth of pay because of all those suspensions. I was supposed to get promoted to detective. I got that denied twice. I was banned from taking the sergeant’s exam.

Every time I was suspended, they would do things like have me hand in all my gear and all my equipment, which is not a thing that we do anymore. That’s kind of an old custom. The only time they have a police officer when he’s suspended hand in their gear is when they’re arrested for a crime. And I wasn’t charged with any crime.

I was just being suspended — well, they will lie and say, “No, we’re actually suspending you because you missed the municipal court day,” or, “We’re suspending you because you didn’t take this report on a road rage incident.” We don’t take road rage incident reports in Pawtucket. That’s a lie. So they would say that’s why they suspended me, but everyone in my department, all my coworkers knew that they were suspending me because of my opinion and because I was trying to address the problem as best as I can.

Forced to Resign

So eventually what happened was in July 2025 — so last year — they wanted to terminate me, and it was based, one of them was literally based on a lie. One of the reasons why they wanted to terminate me. So I wanted to challenge it in LEOBOR, which is like our version of a trial, where you go to LEOBOR and say, “No, this is wrong. I’m fighting for my job.”

It was going to cost me $30,000. My union was only going to pay $10,000, so I needed to come up with $20,000 to defend myself. I couldn’t afford that. So I had to resign. It wasn’t my choice. I couldn’t afford it.

And so since my resignation, I decided, you know what? I gave it my best shot. I tried to address this problem as best I can. Maybe I’m not articulate. Maybe I’m not diplomatic enough. I don’t know. Maybe someone like Ben should be dealing with this instead of me. So I decided to let it go. I said, I’m going to let it go. I’m going to try to get hired somewhere else. Maybe I can get a job working campus security somewhere.

I couldn’t even get that, and it was probably because they wanted me to sign an NDA before I left — which I didn’t even know was a thing you can do with police departments — but they wanted me to sign an NDA and I refused. And the deal was: if you sign this NDA that bars you from saying anything about your experience here, in return, we’ll keep you on our health insurance. You’ll stay on the city health insurance until you find another job. And the chief will promise not to say anything about you when you’re looking for another job.

I thought about that. I was like, it’s not a bad deal, but I decided not to do that. I didn’t sign the NDA. And I haven’t been able to find a job in my field. And definitely now that I’m doing this interview, I won’t be able to find a job in the entire country.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s even — but even — I mean, I used to live in Rhode Island, I can say this. Even by Rhode Island standards, that is very corrupt. I mean, you just described corruption. That’s ridiculous. And your behavior was, in my view, heroic, so thank you.

Why Were They So Wedded to the Cameras?

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve got a lot of questions, but the main one is: why was Pawtucket — which used to be a pretty tough town as I remember it —

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: It’s still a tough town.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. It’s a tough town. Big projects there and tough.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Mhmm.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why were they so wedded to these cameras? Why was it so important for them to have these cameras?

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I actually don’t know. I asked to speak with my chief because, she dehumanized me. And maybe if she speaks to me — because the only time I had a conversation with my chief is when I got hired eight years ago. I had never spoken to her since I got hired. So she’s putting all these punishments on me, and I thought, maybe I could have gone about this in a better way. Maybe if I had a conversation with her first before I spoke with the reporter, or before I spoke to the government oversight committee, maybe it would have made this back and forth a little more cordial.

So I asked to speak with her and she refused to speak with me. Or they told me not to even bother. So I don’t even know if they asked or not. So I don’t know. I mean, I asked some of the city council members in Pawtucket. I was like, “Look. Don’t you think it’s a bit of a problem that the public hasn’t been notified about this? Like, that doesn’t concern you?” And their response was the same response that Jordan was saying. It was like, “Well, it’s for their safety. So what’s the problem?”

So I don’t know. And, you know, we’re dealing with a battle of extremes in our country right now. It’s like you mentioned in your monologue — there’s this whole “defund the police” thing going on three years ago, and now there’s this other extreme of mass surveillance. So which one is it? And I think that’s where we are. We’re in a battle of extremes.

Body Cams, Surveillance, and a Freudian Thing

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: You know, as they say, hurt people, hurt people. We put body cams on our officers, and when I had a body cam — look, whatever you think about body cams, it is a bit dehumanizing to have a video camera put on your chest.

TUCKER CARLSON: I bet.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: And say, “Go do your job.” It’s a bit dehumanizing. So it’s not surprising to me that now when the police or the city have the opportunity to return the favor to the public, that they’re not going to think much about it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Like, put body cams on us.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Smart point.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: You put body cams on us because we’re scumbags because of some guy that did something in Minnesota. Well, now it’s your turn. So I think there’s a Freudian thing going on there, where you do it to us, now we do it to you.

And to defend my old coworkers — it’s a mix. Some of them think this is wrong, this is immoral. Some of them think it’s a good idea, and some of them just don’t care. They just want to finish their job and go home and get their pension without getting shot. So it’s not a monolith.

And if there’s one thing I can add to this, that’s useful other than trying to warn people as best I can, is for people not to be too angry with their local police officers. They’re getting bombarded with things all the time. You know, some of them are in union fights right now where some of their health insurance is being threatened. So I don’t think it’s crazy. I don’t think every police officer who feels the way I do should be as idealistic as me. Maybe they should. I don’t know.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, if people want to be courageous, instead of expecting it from others, they should just do it themselves. Yeah. But only a small percentage of people are willing to do that. I’ve noticed, like a tiny percentage.

Did the Cameras Make Pawtucket Safer?

TUCKER CARLSON: So did it make Pawtucket as safe as Little Compton, for example?

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Oh, you’ve been to Little Compton.

TUCKER CARLSON: You’ve been around, Tucker. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I know Rhode Island very well.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: But no, what I’m saying is Pawtucket, as you just said, is kind of famous. It’s a nice town, but there are some definitely very rough parts of it. Yeah. Are they now totally safe with these cameras?

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, no. Nothing changed.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Nothing changed.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. Because — well, yeah, the thing is, it’s like Ben — you and Ben were talking about. If you treat people like prisoners, they act like that.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Right. If a prison should be ideally safer because of all the surveillance, but it’s not — it’s the most dangerous place in the world.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: And criminals too. Criminals, no matter what you do, no matter what you input, they’re going to break the law. They’re going to try to find a way around it. Things like this, they only hurt the law-abiding citizen. Criminals will find a way to try to get around it. Instead of driving one car through all these cameras, maybe they’re going to do stop points and switch cars. Sophisticated — halfway sophisticated criminals are going to figure out a way to try to get around this.

But the dumb criminal and the law-abiding citizens are not. They’re going to be tracked everywhere that they go. And this is what it is. It’s kind of a geofence for vehicles. It tracks vehicles everywhere that they go.

And I’ve heard some really juvenile arguments where they say, “Well, we’re not tracking people, we’re just tracking cars.” And I’m trying to figure out how that’s any different. Sounds the same to me, especially in a place like Rhode Island, or Minnesota, or wherever — everywhere except New York — every state doesn’t really have a proper subway system. If you need to get around in every state in America, you need a motor vehicle, you need a car in order to get around.

Tracking Cars, Tracking People

So if you’re tracking people’s cars, you’re tracking people. So that’s a really stupid argument that was trying to be argued, that… I don’t know how that’s any better. “We’re not tracking people, we’re tracking cars.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, well, especially if they haven’t done anything wrong.

NOEL: So it’s sweeping up everybody into this dragnet.

TUCKER CARLSON: It seems like, by definition, unconstitutional.

NOEL: Mhmm.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, I don’t want to— I’m not alleging any specific crime because I have no knowledge of a specific crime. But given everything you’ve said, is it possible that members of the city council or law enforcement officials are making money on this?

NOEL: Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, the reaction to me made me very suspicious of why, because it was very suspicious. I was the only officer in my state, and in the country at the time, who was publicly given my objections.

So the smart thing to do would just be ignoring me and saying, “He’s just some crazy guy in the wilderness eating goats and honey or something.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly, exactly. But they beheaded John the Baptist. So, you know, didn’t work for him.

The Two-Year Ordeal

NOEL: Yeah. So I thought— you know, because the chief, she’s pretty smart— I thought what she was going to do was ignore me.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

NOEL: I thought that’s what she was going to do. Thought she was going to punish me once, suspend me once, you know, and I’d take that and just move on with my life. I tried, you know? But it was in a two-year period I was getting suspended, suspended, and suspended within two years.

It was in that two-year period I was dealing with all that. So I did get suspicious of what’s happening behind the scenes that I may or may not know, or why they’re trying so hard to get rid of me. I just thought maybe it was just a tribal impulse that was kicking in. But now that Ben is sharing what Ben is sharing, this is the first time I’m hearing that there are some backdoor ideas that look like that happened.

Maybe. I don’t know. I mean, it is Rhode Island, so who knows?

Family and Community Reaction

TUCKER CARLSON: What was the reaction from your wife and your family? People, you know, your neighbors—were they on your side?

NOEL: So my wife was on my side.

TUCKER CARLSON: Good.

NOEL: My wife was on my side. She supported me from the beginning. She was worried. I mean, this was a sad thing.

Everyone—when I was telling my family, all my friends, my coworkers who really care about me, and I still care about them very much—they all told me the same thing. They all read the same script. They pulled me aside and said, “Noel, if you go this route and you talk about this, they’re going to make sure that you lose your job, and they’re probably going to make sure that you don’t work again.” They all told me this. My family told me this. My coworkers told me this. They all said the same script.

So it’s really sad that as Americans, we’ve accepted this idea that if you speak up, you’re just going to get hammered.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.

NOEL: That was really sad, that everyone just accepted that. So no one really spoke against what I was doing. Their argument was, “What you’re doing is noble, but leave that for some other idiot to do. You have two kids, you have a wife, you have bills to pay—let somebody else put their neck on the line.” That was the advice that everyone was trying to give me.

The Decision to Speak Up

And I thought about it. And, like I said, after a couple of months, I had trouble sleeping. My first son was born right before I spoke up. And when you become a father—I’m sure you understand this, Tucker—you think, “Man, I’m responsible for who this person becomes.”

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s right.

NOEL: So, you know, one day I’m going to have to have a conversation with my sons about integrity. And when I have that conversation with them, I want to be able to look them in the eye. So I knew if I ignored this problem and pretended that it didn’t exist, I wouldn’t be able to do that.

So I thought it was worth the risk. I paid the price for it, but I’m doing alright.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, you made me emotional saying that. Well, for whatever it’s worth—nothing, really—but I just want to say it: I hope you are richly rewarded for your courage and decency. And I think you did that for everybody in this country, and I’m really grateful you did it.

And last thing—you were very articulate, so that was not your problem.

NOEL: Was not?

TUCKER CARLSON: You know what is?

NOEL: It’s my Rhode Island accent. It’s disgusting. So if anybody who’s never been to Rhode Island—don’t worry, we don’t all talk like this. Just blue-collar Latinos, Black guys, Italians—we’re the only ones who talk like this. It’s the best. I miss it.

Closing

TUCKER CARLSON: Noel, thank you for taking the time. It’s great to talk to you. Appreciate it.

NOEL: Thank you, Tucker.

TUCKER CARLSON: Thank you. And thank you for watching tonight. We’ll see you next Wednesday.

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