Flock is just the beginning...

Did you know there's a whole industry of tech companies making billions by collecting, exposing, and selling our personal data to advertisers and sammers? Seriously, try googling yourself sometime. I have.

And I found my own address, phone number, all kinds of things I don’t want floating around the internet.

Which is exactly why I removed that data using AURA, who have also sponsored this video.

AURA finds companies — known as data brokers — who are selling your information online and submits requests to take this information down, because thankfully there are some laws that give us that power over our own information.

AURA sends hundreds of takedown requests, and they watch for that data going back up, and keep sending until it’s taken down.

Plus, AURA has tools that monitor for data breaches like password leaks, and a VPN that helps keep your internet activity secure on public or shared networks. I use this one whenever I’m traveling or working in a coffee shop.

So if you want to protect your data and your privacy, click the button below.

Every signup supports our work.

Get Two Weeks Free

Watch The Video →

Intro

I’ve been hearing a lot about Flock cameras lately.

Various News: Flock cameras. | Concerns grow about Flock cameras. | Flock has a network of automatic license plate reading cameras, taking pictures of passing vehicles and putting that information into a database.

About how they let police track anyone they want, without cause or warrants,

News anchor: Police department is trying to figure out if one of their officers was using the Flock camera system to track her ex-girlfriend.

And about how all that tracking data is totally insecure,

Benn Jordan: We hacked them. You can press a button a few times on the back of these cameras and within a few minutes turn them into your own personal spy device.

And how everyone agrees this is a disaster for privacy.

Tucker Carlson: They're violation of the Fourth Amendment. They're an invasion of your privacy.

And yes, it is really bad. But, I’ve been doing some research on something a lot worse. Take a look at this map.

It’s map of something the government calls Integrated Surveillance Towers, and they make Flock look like child’s play. Because Flocks are just regular cameras taking pictures of license plates. But these are 80-foot-tall steel towers, built by American and Israeli weapons companies, armed with high powered cameras, thermal vision, lasers, radar, and AI, designed to watch and track everything and everyone around them. And right now, they’re all along the southern border.

The government says they’re vital to securing it. But there are a few problems.

They don’t help secure the border. They’re mostly used to spy on normal Americans and to train secretive AI algorithms to enhance government surveillance. And deep in this obscure government report, I found a plan. A plan to make this map look like this.

A plan to spend billions building these spy towers all over the country. A plan that's already begun. And I think it’s important we figure out why.

So today, we’re going to look at government reports, budget plans, tech sheets, and even hear from an expert who’s spent years studying these towers.

Dave Maass: I would say it's a civil liberties and human rights crisis. Like it absolutely is. And the more it grows, the worse it gets.

And this is all gonna help us answer a few questions. First, what even are these towers, like what are they capable of? Who’s getting rich building them? And what do they mean for the privacy of ordinary Americans? Then, I think we can answer the question — why are they doing this?

What are these things?

The Three Towers

So, we’re looking at some pretty scary towers here, and soon we’re going to take a look at this report, at how the government plans to build these all over the country. But before we can make sense of that, we need to know what these things actually are. Like what are they called? Who makes them? And what sort of equipment are they packing?

IST Program

The best place to start is back at this map. Officially, all these towers are part of a program run by Customs and Border Protection — that’s the government agency that polices the border, part of Homeland Security, we’ll just call them CBP.

These towers towers are part of a program CBP calls IST — the Integrated Surveillance Towers program. [B] It’s CBP's attempt to make their agency high tech. And it isn’t the first time that they’ve tried to do that. This is actually a spin-off from a similar, failed program from the 2010s; which was a spinoff from a similar, failed program from the 2000s; which was also a spin-off from a similar, failed program from earlier in the 2000s. [A]

But I’m getting ahead of myself. We will talk plenty about CBP's many failed tech programs later, because they’re really important to understand what’s going on here.

But for now, we’re talking about these, the latest program: Integrated Surveillance Towers. Surveillance and tower — those are pretty obvious. But they’re called Integrated because there are really three different kinds made by three different companies.

These ones are made by Anduril. That’s an American weapons startup founded by the guy who, like, invented VR. Also a big investor is Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire who isn’t a big fan of humanity.

Ross Douthat: You would prefer the human race to endure, right?

Peter Thiel: Uh...

Douthat: You're hesitant.

Thiel: Well, I- Yes, I don't know. I- I would- I would- um...

Yeah, concerning.

The second type of towers are made by Elbit Systems. They’re Israel’s lead weapons manufacturer, and they developed this techonology originally to spy on Palestinians. Pretty bad.

RVSS

But first, I want to talk about these towers. They’re called Remote Video Surveillance Systems, or RVSS, and they’re built by General Dynamics.

This is an American company that's been making military equipment since the 1950s. Today, they’re the third largest government contractor — just behind Lockheed Martin and Raytheon and just ahead of Boeing. They build things like tanks, submarines, miniguns, bombs, and the RVSS.

According to General Dynamics, these towers use "advanced wide-area electro-optical and infrared multi-sensor camera systems to provide Border Patrol agents with persistent ground-surveillance and real-time video analytics to effectively detect, track, identify, classify and respond to missions along U.S. borders.” [C]

That’s a fancy way of saying they are big steel towers with two main tools. They have wide-angle cameras. And they have thermal cameras. Those are the black and white cameras that can see body heat, like the ones you often see in drone strike footage.

That means these towers can detect a person from over seven miles away, even at night and through tree and brush cover. And everything it sees is streamed back to CBP control centers across the American southwest. If an officer notices something, he can dispatch someone check it out. [B]

Okay, so three types of towers, and the first one is pretty powerful. But it’s also what it sounds like… a Remote Video Surveillance System. It’s got fancy cameras. But they are still just cameras.

IFT

Tower type two is a little different. These are Integreated Fixed Towers built by Elbit Systems.

In addition to normal and thermal cameras, they also have radar designed to detect even the activity those cameras might miss. But the main thing here isn’t the radar. It’s the company. Elbit Systems is Israel’s leading weapons maker.

When they aren’t building guns for Netanyahu, they’re building him spy equipment that can even intercept phone calls and text messages and remotely load your phone with spyware — all from 15 miles away. [D]

And sure, that’s over there. But the US government just inked a $370M deal to buy more surveillance tools from Elbit Systems. So far, we don't what they've ordered, but we do know one thing. It won’t be for more of these same old towers already in Arizona. [E]

Sentry

And we know that because of these. This is the third type of tower, known as Sentries, built by Anduril. On its face, this tower is a lot like Elbit Systems’ — it’s got cameras, thermal cameras, and radar. But there’s one important difference.

This one has AI.

No, seriously. Unlike the other towers that stream their videos back to human CBP officers, the Anduril Sentries watch on their own. When their radar systems detect movement, the cameras pivot to watch. Then AI software analyzes and categorizes objects and activity as far as seven miles away. If it seems important, CBP gets an alert, and they can tune in. [F]

Why AI Matters

Now, you might be thinking — what does this matter to me? I’m not an illegal immigrant. That’s who these things are spying on, right? Well, not quite.

Dave Maass: People have this vision of the border as this empty wasteland where there's nothing but desert and you know coyotes and cartels and drug smugglers and what have you. But that's just not the border. The border is a very populated place. … And so when they place these surveillance towers at the border … they're being placed in communities, either literally over people's backyards, literally in public parks, and they are then surveilling first and more foremost the people who live at the border.

That’s Dave Maass, he’s the head of investigations for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization dedicated to

Dave Maass: Make sure that our rights are enhanced as technology grows in our society. I specifically focus on our deep dive investigations into surveillance technology.

He’s spent years studying these towers and all kinds of other government surveillance programs just like them. He sat down to help us understand what’s really going on here. And when it comes to these AI-powered spy towers, there are a few problems.

AI means more money for Anduril, more power for the government, and, yes, a lot less privacy for the rest of us.

First, let me explain the money. You see, last summer, Trump signed a very important law. It was a tax and spending bill he called Big and Beautiful.

And on top of tax cuts for rich people and tax hikes on poor people, the bill also gave Customs and Border Protection more than six billion dollars to spend on new surveillance equipment.

There was just one catch, buried deep inside the law.

Right here: "None of these funds may be (spent on) surveillance towers (unless they) deliver autonomous capabilities.” [G] Now, not all of the six billion is set aside for towers, but anything that does go to them can only be spent on one: the Sentry.

And according to this report, that we’ll be coming back to later, CBP expects to spend about a billion on them.

So Trump basically set a billion dollars of taxpayer money aside and wrote Anduril’s name on it.

This might be a good time to mention that Anduril's founder Palmer Luckey, and its lead investor Peter Thiel have been very loud about their support for Donald Trump.

Palmer Luckey: Hey, you know, and I not just in this election, I supported him last time around, and I supported him in 2016, and — I don't know if you know this — I actually wrote a letter to Donald Trump in 2011 telling him that he should run for president.

Now, since the bill was passed, General Dynamics and Elbit Systems have started working on their own autonomous systems. But the upshot is still more AI and more money maybe not only for Anduril but for the billion-dollar companies that make stuff that kills people.

Dave Maass: It is just a handout. … Whoever is whispering in the ears of the federal government saying everything should be AI, everything should be AI when it's unproven, it's untrustworthy, but they're still going for it anyway.

So, that’s the money component. But from the government’s perspective there is actually some good reason to be buying AI towers. Because they give the government more power.

Think about it, Anduril’s tower can make decisions all on its own about what to pay attention to. It can detect activity, then observe it, then analyze and classify it to decide whether it’s a problem. The old Elbit towers couldn’t do that. The old General Dynamics towers definitely couldn’t. Both these old systems needed people to watch the video feeds and to make decisions.

As Anduril brags on their website, "One operator can manage 10+ towers.” [H] That just wasn’t possible before.

In industry jargon, this is called a “force multiplier.” Right now, CBP surveils an area around the border home to about 15 million Americans. But if tools like Sentry mean instead of managing one tower, each officer can manage ten, the same number of people who watch 15 million Americans already, could watch an area ten times that size. [I]

That’s why AI means more power for the government.

It also means that power is unchecked, because there’s no moral conscience. If the government asks a human being to do something evil, they can say no, leak it to the public, or sabotage their efforts from the inside. AI won’t do that.

What does this mean for our privacy?

Five Points

So we know that Trump is going to line Anduril’s pockets with a billion taxpayer dollars — and maybe General Dynamics’ and Elbit’s too. And we know that this technology will give the government more unchecked power.

But we still need to see what this means for our privacy.

After all, these things are supposed to be spying on illegal immigrants. And maybe that doesn’t bother you quite the same way as if they were spying on us. But buddy lemme tell you. They are going to spy on the rest of us.

And we have six very simple pieces of evidence that prove it. First is a physical reality that we can just see. Second is the testimony of the people who already with these things. Third is the CBP’s plan to bring these to cities all over the country. Which should all be concerning, because the agency has a long track record of abuse, misconduct, and failure that don’t look like they’re changing anytime soon.

Physical Reality

So let’s start with that physical reality. Take a look at these pictures.

What do you see? They’re CBP towers. But they have something else in common. Let’s zoom out. They’re all in communities, sometimes miles from the border.

And this makes sense, if you’re trying to stop immigration with big spy towers. People are going to make it through the first line of defense. Placing them in the nearby communities — that’s the logical thing to do.

But think about this for a minute. How many people who’ve done nothing wrong, then become subject to constant government spying, simply because they live near the border?

This is exactly how surveillance went from targeted to general, how the rights of ordinary people became collateral damage in a war on immigration.

Dave Maass: It's basically people who live at the border are paying the price for all this technology with their human rights and with their dignity, with their privacy.

That’s a physical reality. We can see how these towers spread like weeds.

Testimony

And that physical reality has real consequences — normal people caught up in this surveillance, in an atmosphere of fear. As many as 15 million people already live — sometimes literally — in the shadow of these towers.

Like Ophelia Rivas, whose home in the Tohono O’odham Nation reservation, sits under the watchful eye of an Elbit Systems tower. She laments repeated harassment by border officers of Tohono O’odham people and says,

Ophelia Rivas: It is apartheid here… We have to carry our papers everywhere. And everyone here has experienced the Border Patrol’s abuse in some way … Now we won’t be able to go anywhere near here without the big US-Israeli eyes monitoring us, watching our every move. [J]

The council for the district of the reservation where she lives passed a resolution to oppose the towers. But it hasn’t done anything to stop them.

Another member of Tohono O’odham was so disturbed by the experience she went on to write a dissertation on border surveillance at the University of Arizona. In her words,

Nellie Jo David: I don’t feel safe with them taking over my community, especially if you look at what’s going on in Palestine — they’re bringing the same thing right over here. [J]

Expansion Plans

And they might be bringing it to your city.

I wanna show you something I found buried deep in an obscure government report. This is an audit by the Government Accountability Office — or, GAO. [K, p98-99]

That’s an arm of Congress that audits agencies like CBP and makes sure money is being spent how it’s supposed to. It came out this summer and it talks a lot about Customs and Border Protection.

But it’s these two pages that really matter for us: the audit of the spy tower program. And in here, the report says that CBP expects to receive about a billion dollars to spend on autonomous towers. But they expect they'll actually need about $1-point-4 billion to reach their target of… 2,300 towers.

Remember this map. Right now there are only 800 towers, built over the last twenty years. And now, they want to triple that number. That’s a lot of towers.

It’s so many there isn't anywhere left to put them. At least, not on the Mexican border. Which is why the report mentions something else.

It says that the CBP is planning to deploy "1,497 new long-range autonomous towers in coastal and maritime domains."

At first, I wasn’t quite sure what this meant when I read it. But then I saw this quote from one of the senior directors at Elbit Systems, Bobby Brown. In his words, the objective of the IST program is to build a “layer” of surveillance across the entire country.

Bobby Brown: Over time, we’ll expand not only to the northern border, but to the ports and harbors across the country… There’s a lot to be done. [J]

That means we should expect to see these AI spy towers in every major port in the country: Houston, New York, Los Angeles, Long Beach, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Baltimore, St Louis and more. And those are just big water ports, because the GAO audit mentions “coastal and maritime” domains. But tomorrow, this could include any international airport in the country, too.

Dave Maass: When it comes to border surveillance, there's a finite amount of the border. … And so they're like, well, where can they expand to?

And remember that pattern from before. What starts at the border — what will start at the port… it spreads to nearby communities faster than you think. Imagine that pattern with this expansion plan.

We don’t have to imagine. CBP is trying to do this in one California town, San Clemente. They want an Anduril tower on a hilltop, a mile and a half inland, where the tower can detect, watch, analyze, and track anything going on not just on the ocean but in tons of residential neighborhoods. [L]

Apply this to bigger cities like New York or Los Angeles or any of the ones I mentioned, and it means towers not just at the port, but in all kinds of surrounding areas.

AI powered spy towers sensing, watching, recording, and deciding 24/7, looking over the shoulders of millions and millions and millions of ordinary people.

Abuse

And we don’t have to imagine what that will be like either. We’ve heard from people who live with these things. But CBP’s history of abuse goes far beyond these towers.

There’s a good reason people like Nellie Jo David don’t feel safe with CBP towers around.

In 2023, Border Patrol agents from the nearby Ajo Station shot and killed Raymond Mattia, a US Citizen and member of the Tohono O’odham. Nine bullets, for holding a phone. This August, the agents were denied qualified immunity, which typically protects law enforcement from wrongful death prosecution. Their fate is still uncertain. [M]

But Mike Banks, their former station boss, now Donald Trump’s hand-picked head of Border Patrol, is excited about the future.

Mike Banks: While the previous administration rode over the Border Patrol, this administration is riding with us. … Nothing motivates agents more than knowing that if they go out there and do their job, they’re not going to be tried and prosecuted. [M]

And beyond the Tohono O’odham lands, the trouble continues. All the way back in 2017, CBP deployed a General Dynamics RVSS to spy on political opposition to Donald Trump. The tower stayed up for eight months in San Diego, on account of the “emerging threat of demonstrations.” [J]

The only thing that happened was one anti-Trump rally when he came to take pictures with the border wall. And it’s not just their towers, either.

In just two months in 2017, CBP spent 300 flight hours using drones to spy on Americans. Not illegal immigrants. Not criminals. [J] People who were using their first amendment rights, like protestors against the Dakota Access oil pipeline. [J]

Misconduct

So there is a very clear pattern of abuse of power with the CBP. But that goes a little beyond the towers — and well beyond just concerns for privacy. But here there’s a clear history of misconduct, too.

And to get an idea, I’ve got another GAO audit I want to dig into. [N, p27-28] It’s from 2024, and it’s all about privacy.

By the way, if you made it this far, it’s probably safe to say you care about stories that matter to democracy. That’s all we've done here at Spectacles for four years now. So why not subscribe so you don’t miss our next one. We’ve got a deep dive on Anduril coming later this year. And a super thanks, member signup, or grabbing a tee shirt is always a great help, too. But back to that report about privacy.

It’s actually about whether agencies like CBP are handling Personally Identifiable Information the right way. That’s data like names, birthdays, ID numbers, addresses, pictures of you — stuff you don’t want just being collected or shared around.

And it turns out the government actually has six key guidelines for this stuff.

First, agencies are only supposed to collect this data if it’s relevant to their work. The agency should be clear about how the data will be used. The agency shouldn't share that data unless they have good reason to, from the first two guidelines. They should keep the data secure and only store it as long as they need it. And they should have a clear chain of accountability to make sure when bad stuff happens, we can know who to hold responsible.

Okay — collection, purpose, sharing, security, retention, and accountability. These are the six guidelines.

And what did the report find about these high tech spy towers? Surprise, they fail all six of the tests!

Because the AI towers are always watching and analyzing what they see, they’re collecting data constantly, sometimes without any cause other than movement.

Collection and purpose — failed.

Then there’s sharing. With Anduril’s towers, all this data gets passed through their private ‘Lattice AI’ systems. So CBP isn’t in control of the data, and it’s all getting shared with a private company who’s doing…who knows what with it. [H]

Sharing — failed.

The report doesn’t clarify how the data is insecure, so we can’t be sure exactly what the problem is there, but with retention and accountability, it’s obvious. CBP stores all these video feeds, so they can rewind and review, in case they end up needing to go looking for evidence.

Say goodbye to probable cause. Oh, and Anduril also stores it forever, so they can train their AI models on us. [L]

Dave Maass: With the Anduril Towers, they're just collecting data, training data on everyone. And they're holding on to it indefinitely. We don't know what data they're collecting. We don't know what they're doing with it.

So retention — failed.

And on accountability, remember, with the Anduril towers, AI systems are making decisions all on their own. There’s no human to hold accountable when — not if — things go wrong.

Dave Maass: I think that with the previous towers when there was a human operator looking at people, the human operator would get to make a decision. … There's no real evaluation going on about whether it's even able to identify a person at the border. We just don't know.

Accountability — failed.

But we don’t just have to take this report’s word, either. A representative for the Department of Homeland Security said he concurred with its findings and promised they’d try to do better with AI and privacy practices. I’ll believe that when I see it.

Failure

So where do we stand? The government wants these spy towers in major cities across the country, where they’re certain to watch everyone… not just criminals. Because we’ve seen how they build them. We know that the people who live with them already live in terror. And we know that the CBP loves to abuse its power and to violate Americans’ privacy.

And you just have to stop and wonder, what is this all for? I mean these are some serious costs we’re paying here, not just in money but in our freedom.

Maybe…maybe you could say this is worth it, if it achieved something. Maybe, if it made us safer, and I’m still not sure about that. But the thing is… there’s no reason to believe it will make any of us safer.

I mentioned at the beginning of the video that CBP has a long history of failed tech upgrade campaigns. And that is really important here.

In 2001, after 9/11 the agency started ISIS. I know, yes really. But not that ISIS.

ISIS stood for Integrated Surveillance Intelligence System. The idea was simple. CBP needed a billion dollars or so, and they could buy a bunch of high-tech spy equipment and build a virtual wall across the border. It was key to catching terrorists, they said.

By 2005, the program got renamed to America’s Shield Initiative, but the rebrand didn’t fix the problems.

Just listen to what GAO had to say about it in their 2006 audit. [O]

After five years, of 47 positions in the program, CBP had defined roles and responsibilities for just 3. And they had no means to track and audit contracts.

In other words, they were just spending money with no idea of where it was going or what it was actually getting them.

So the government shut ASI down, and CBP launched a new tech upgrade program called the Secure Border Initiative. And when GAO audited this one in 2010 they found the same thing. After five years and three-point-seven billion dollars spent, CBP had no evidence that this program had improved border security. [P]

So the government shut it down, and CBP launched new tech upgrade programs. This time, they started buying towers known as IFTs and RVSSs. That’s right, these towers from our old friends at Elbit Systems and General Dynamics.

But when GAO audited these towers in 2017, after nearly a decade and more than a billion dollars spent, they found CBP was "not yet positioned to fully quantify the impact of these technologies.” [Q, p34]

Dave Maass: The General Dynamics towers, you know, there was a report that came out that a minimum of 30% of them were broken. And then General Dynamics gets a whole nother contract for them.

Time and time and time again, tons of money poured down the drain with no idea of what it achieved. And now, they want to do the same thing with Anduril’s towers. What do we expect to happen? One thing’s certain. Some people are going to make a lot of money off taxpayer dollars.

Why are they doing it?

So hopefully you know a lot more about this than when we started. You know about the three different types of towers at the southern border. You know about how they’ve cost us billions of dollars and even CBP admits they have no idea how they’ve made anyone any safer. And you know that, instead of stopping illegal immigration, they’re actually being used to spy on normal people without cause and, thanks to AI, without any human accountability.

Which means we now have the tools, I think, to try to answer the most important question. Why does the government want to build AI-powered spy towers all over the country?

And I think there are four theories here.

Theory 1

The first is the one the government has been trying to sell us all. These things are about making us safer, securing the border.

But we’ve already seen time and time and time again, that that doesn’t happen. Every time CBP tries to do a big tech upgrade to secure the frontier, it fails miserably.

So, at best, this could be true. It could be a motive. But you then have to wonder, is it a good one? Because if they keep trying to make this happen, and it keeps failing, well then, what’s the problem? Trump insists that country is a mess because the border isn’t secure.

Donald Trump: They're eating the dogs! They're poisoning the blood of our country, that's what they've done.

And he’s not the first. Back in the 2000s and 2010s, the threat was terrorism. There’s always some terrifying monster lurking in the dark just beyond our reach. If only we had some night vision and thermal cameras we could see it and catch it.

And yet every time we get the tools, we don’t find anything. And when they admit these programs aren’t securing the border, and the promised terrible threat still never comes, you have to wonder whether we should be so terrified after all, whether this isn’t all just a scary story meant to get us to sign off on a plan that’s really about something else.

Dave Maass: What we see with this technology is it often starts in war zones. … Then it moves to the border, then it moves to cities at the border, sort of domestic law enforcement at the border, and then it moves to the interior of the country.

So theory one is out. This isn’t about safety or security.

Theory 2

The second theory is pretty cynical. This is about handing money to billionaire tech elites who have stood by Trump.

And I think there’s some good reason to think this has something to do with it. Remember, Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill basically set aside a billion taxpayer dollars with Anduril’s name on it. And this is par for the course for Trump. The rest of that bill was chock full of big tax breaks for big businesses and wealthy Americans.

Donald Trump: You guys are rich as hell, and we're gonna give you tax cuts.

That’s just what he does, even his supporters admit that.

Which is actually why I think this theory can’t be the whole answer. There are plenty of ways to make the rich richer. You don’t have to buy their AI spy towers and build em all over the country. So there has to be more to this story.

Theory 3

The third theory is even darker. Maybe these towers are all part of a plan to build a surveillance state that spies on our every move.

Tucker Carlson: The state in 1984 doesn't spend a lot of time putting gun barrels in people's faces. It doesn't need to. What it does instead is spy on them.

And that’s pretty compelling. I mean, they are big towers designed to spy on people. And we know there’s a reason why surveillance is so crucial in every sci-fi and cyberpunk depiction of a dystopia. It’s the reason totalitarian regimes like the Nazis and the Soviets encouraged people to report on their own neighbors, even their own families.

And if your child or your phone or the tower down the street is sensing, listening, watching your every move, what’re you gonna do when they start rounding people up? Nothing. You’re going to do nothing.

That is the point of surveillance. And maybe it’s the point of these towers. But I think this theory suffers from one big flaw. Remember, every time CBP gets a billion dollars to burn, they completely waste it. These people for lack of a better term are idiots. Corrupt, yeah maybe that too. Evil intentions… it could be. But incompetent… that one is for sure.

So I still think there’s more to this story.

Theory 4

Which brings us to what I call the “duck” theory, because if it walks like and it quacks like a duck… it’s probably a duck.

By that I mean there’s a lot to be said, a lot I have said, about what these towers could do, how they could be useful, how they could be dangerous, how they could be a waste of taxpayer money. But I think we need to focus on what they are, what they do achieve. Because that’s probably what they’re meant to do.

And we’ve seen the answers to that. We’ve seen they're a massive waste of money.

We’ve seen where that money goes — into the pockets of the already fabulously wealthy. And we know where it comes from: out of your pocket and my pocket.

And we’ve seen what these things can do, and how their AI systems amplify government power. We’ve seen how they enable abuse and instill terror.

So maybe it’s not one of those three theories. Maybe it’s all of them. Because if it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it’s probably a messy, poorly constructed ad-hoc plan to funnel billions of our dollars to the richest people in the world and keep watch on all of us, to make sure we don’t do anything about it.

And you don’t need a conspiracy theory to explain that. There’s no long-term masterplan here.

The rich and the powerful will take opportunities to give themselves more power when they see them. That’s how they got rich and powerful — through narcicissm and opportunism. And that’s why democracy is so important — why normal people have to keep watch about stories like this and speak up when we want to stop something. They know that watching us gives them power. That’s why we have to watch them too.

This video was made possible by the incredible work of Dave Maass and everyone at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and by financial support from AURA. If you the government’s many projects to spy on us, or do what you can to secure your privacy, visit their websites, linked below.

This has been a story that matters to democracy, brought to you by Spectacles. Thank you for watching.