Hello, friends and enemies. Last week, I made my debut appearance at the Elk Grove city council. They were voting to expand the city’s use of Flock, a company that operates automated license plate readers. Elk Grove already has a lot of Flock cameras, but the city wants to add more, even though Flock has been found to share data with federal agencies, like the Department of Homeland Security (that is, ICE). In the previous city council meeting, the council was discussing an audit of Flock, but in this meeting, they voted on moving forward with expanding Flock without waiting for the audit.
I found the DeFlock Elk Grove group on Instagram and saw that they were calling for people to show up to the meeting and ask that the city council wait to vote on this until after an audit by the California Department of Justice, which is a very reasonable request. Seven people came to speak out against expanding the surveillance system, which is a lot for a weeknight city council meeting! Unfortunately, the city council looked uninterested and like they already had their mind made up on this issue, despite appeals from a variety of angles. After the public comments, the council invited the chief of police (the same man who is currently being sued for being inappropriate at work) to make a rebuttal. He said that Elk Grove does not share information with federal agencies, and maybe other cities do but we aren’t them, so our data are safe. This is, at best, an incredibly naive response. I don’t think that the company that built a nationwide surveillance machine really gives a shit about whatever security protocols you think you have. Just say you don’t know how computers work.
The city council voted on expanding Flock, which sucks but is unsurprising. I wrote out my comments before the meeting, and I’m publishing them here too. I didn’t share the citations when speaking in the meeting for obvious reasons, but you know your girl always has a citation, and I’ve included them here. I made sure to look them in the eye on that last paragraph. The mayor and city council may be in denial but I refuse to mince words about what these cameras are ultimately being used for. There’s also a video of the meeting online. You can see me beginning around the 52 minute mark.
I am against the city expanding the Flock contract and I am asking you to pull this item from Consent and wait to continue it until after the California DOJ has completed an independent audit of the data to verify no federal agency access has occurred.Please suspend the Flock Safety ALPR contact pending that investigation and research alternative ALPR vendors with proven local control and a record of complying with California law.
Although California Senate Bill 34 prohibits state law enforcement agencies from sharing license plate reader data with out-of-state public agencies or federal entities, and Flock itself claims it does not share data with ICE, many California cities have shared information with federal agents. Whether or not Elk Grove intends to share data is irrelevant; our data become part of a national database that has proven to be highly insecure. Flock maintains a national lookup tool for law enforcement agencies to reference and they typically don’t even need a warrant to search. Additionally, many federal agencies have access to Flock, and there is evidence of ICE and the Secret Service accessing the camera network.
Flock has been used to wrongfully accuse people of theft, Flock has left livestreams of its AI-powered cameras exposed to the open internet, and other police departments have failed to redact searches when responding to FOIA requests, inadvertently releasing data about surveillance targets. Flock has claimed that case studies show installing Flock cameras decreases crime, but independent analysis found that crime stayed flat or increased.
It is reckless to increase surveillance during this era of expanding authoritarianism. Surveillance does not make us safer, although it may provide the illusion of safety. Expanding Flock in our current political climate sends the message that only white people have the right to be in public. Our family, friends, and neighbors are afraid of being disappeared by ICE. There is no reason to invest in a tool that makes it easier for DHS to surveil us. Elk Grove can and should do better.
The next day I was surprised to learn that the local news covered this story (I was also surprised to learn that Elk Grove has a local news outlet). They quoted me in the article’s lede and again in the body of the article. A few friends have told me, in response to all this, that I should run for office. To which I say: no I shouldn’t. People in a political office can’t get on the internet and say whatever they want. I would lose my jester’s privilege!
Books and Other Words
Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability by Emily Apter made me think and I mean that literally. I saw the title and I guess focused more on the “untranslatability” and less on the “politics of.” I did appreciate this book but it was a somewhat outside of my typical academic milieu, so I was really fighting for my life through some chapters. Apter also assumes readers are familiar with French and German and my three years of college French are not all that firmly fixed in my mind, to say nothing of how little German I know, so that was hard. Although I did note that the author did not assume familiarity with Spanish or Arabic, both of which I have and did come up at various points. All that said, this book was interesting, especially in chapters that were a little more in my wheelhouse. I was particularly intrigued by the chapter Kilito’s Injunction: “Thou Shalt Not Translate Me”, which refers to a lecture by Abdelfattah Kilito who discusses the strangeness of hearing foreigners speak his mother tongue, Arabic, using phrases like wallahila, which do technically refer to god but Arabic learners just pick up as a way to season their speech (consider people online lately saying inshallah). Apter discusses how, despite the “apparent neutrality of translation,” there are always power differentials at play that “complicat[e] the politics of ethical translation and bilingualism.” I took some good bits of information from the book but I, unfortunately, would have a hard time tell you what it’s about on the whole.
Meanwhile, on the internet:
- The Incel Global Order via Hegemon. This is an insightful article explaining the connection between rising right-wing populism worldwide and male grievance. The author writes that, for men in the manopshere and in MAGA, “the natural hierarchy has been overthrown by a corrupt establishment and only the reassertion of dominance, personal or national, can set things right. The manosphere says feminism stole your birthright; MAGA says globalism stole your country. Whether it’s Andrew Tate or Donald Trump, the emotional logic is the same: you’ve been humiliated and I will make you powerful again.”
- FBI Extracts Suspect’s Deleted Signal Messages Saved in iPhone Notification Database via 404 Media. If you’re using signal, make sure you turn off the message previews, just in case.
- Clowns Are Everywhere. Is It a Sign of the Apocalypse? via Cultured. This is an interview with Michelle Tea, author of the forthcoming anthology Clowns, which I am now very much looking forward to reading. I really recommend reading this article because it’s so good. I’ve been seeing clownery in the zeitgeist a lot lately and wondering what’s drawing so many of us toward this brand of buffoonery. Do we all yearn for jester’s privilege in a time of fascism? One reason might be that “satire might not be a useful comedic mode in apocalyptic circumstances. Sartre famously distinguished between rebels, who want the system to remain the same so they can continue rebelling against it, and revolutionaries, who are willing to risk their own obsolescence in the service of genuine change. Where a satirist might rebel, clowns—the ultimate failure artists—manage to enjoy getting flamed by the society that their revolution galvanizes.” Such a brilliant description of what’s happening now. Satire isn’t doing shit for us anymore, but clowning (jestermaxxing, if you will) is highlighting the absurdity of daily life in a way that traditional forms of commentary cannot.
Moving It
Here are the last two weeks of stickers! I have been keeping busy and I am happy to report that my knee is doing a little better. I think it took a little time for those gel injections to work, but I’m very happy to have less pain now and I hope it lasts. Both this week and last week I made it to ballet class so that is exciting, though I’ve realized that, to keep myself from aggravating my knee, I can’t really do anything in relevé (on my toes/ball of the foot) without potentially tweaking my knee so I have to take it a little easy. Still, I do think the ballet is good for me overall in terms of stability and doing something I like even if I can’t do everything. I do long to jump though. Alas.
Kitchen Witchery
My run of energy for making food has continued and I made some good stuff this week. First, I did a bean and potato chowder. The latest Rancho Gordo bean club installment recommended making this with scarlet runner beans, but I had some tiger’s eye I wanted to use, so that’s what I did and we had no complaints. The bean club mailer also had a recipe for a new bean, zipper cream peas, with rice and broccolini. I liked these beans a lot! They kind of smell like peanuts. Of course, they’re not crunchy but they do have a bit of a nutty taste. For some extra vegetables, I made the Smitten Kitchen zucchini parmesan crisps. They were good and I want to make them again but I think I’ll cut them longwise with the mandoline because breading 100 tiny zucchini coins is not how I want to spend my time in this one wild and precious life. For a snack, I made oat muffins with the addition of butterscotch chips because the idea came to me and sounded good. I’ve been enjoying them. Finally, I made the pink cookie bars from the Snacking Bakes cookbook. This is basically a shortbread cookie with a little cardamom and almond extract. The topping is cream cheese frosting with almond extract and food coloring—I doubled the frosting but only needed about one-and-a-half times the recipe. That’s okay because I had extra frosting to snack on.
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.
