Thirteen years ago, a 29-year-old government contractor named Ed Snowden gave a reporter proof that the U.S. government was secretly collecting the phone records of millions of ordinary Americans.
Snowden considered himself an American patriot. His parents both worked for the government, and he proudly traced his American ancestry all the way back to the Mayflower. He had a solid salary, a serious girlfriend, and a house in Hawaii. But on June 6, 2013, he flew to Hong Kong with a stack of classified files, sat down with journalists, and tried to explain to them why he was blowing up his whole life.
He said he didn't want to live in a world where everything you say and everyone you talk to and every expression of love or friendship gets recorded.
The story sent shockwaves, but not necessarily the kind Snowden had anticipated. It told, among other things, how the NSA had a program called PRISM that gave it direct access to the servers of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple. A secret court had ordered Verizon to hand over the phone records of millions of its customers.
To simplify: the government had built a mass-surveillance machine to watch its own people, and hadn't told anyone.
Uncle Sam was not happy.
Long story short, Snowden was charged with espionage. They canceled his passport while he was in the air, stranding him at a Moscow airport for five weeks. Russia eventually gave him asylum, and he's been stuck there ever since. He's actually a Russian citizen now, which is exactly what he never wanted, and the exact thing his critics have never let him hear the end of.
And his critics are many.
Most Americans didn't thank him. Instead, they called him a traitor. A coward. A narcissist who ran off to an enemy country with state secrets. It was a big argument for a few months, and then everybody just kind of moved on. The programs he exposed got tweaked a little around the edges but mostly kept running.
The American people were told, as plainly as you can be told anything, that they were being watched, and for the most part they just shrugged and asked what was for dinner.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about Flock—the company with the license-plate cameras on something like a hundred thousand poles, in six thousand communities around the country. You remember… the one whose CEO called the people mapping his cameras "terrorists."
Flock's line has always been that “these are just license-plate readers,” and that all the hullabaloo is just anti-law-enforcement hysteria. They read plates. That’s all. They can't recognize or identify or track an actual person.
Well, this week WIRED reporters found more than 450 of Flock's own files that tell a very different story. They definitely don't describe a license-plate reader company. They describe an AI system (Flock first called it Nightshift, then renamed it OS Investigate) that the company's been quietly testing inside police departments.
It comes preloaded with 69 ready-made prompts an officer can run with one click. One of them finds "witnesses" by pulling up whatever cars drive through a neighborhood the most. Another one takes a single license plate and finds that person's "associates" (the other cars that keep showing up near theirs). One prompt tells the system to list everybody in an area who's been arrested more than twice in two years, map where they live, and build full write-ups on the top three offenders.
But wait! There’s more!
The code pulls from commercial databases full of Social Security numbers, birth dates, phone numbers, email addresses, and lists of your relatives. You can even run a search by physical description alone—the pre-filled example is, "male, ~6ft, black hoodie, forearm tattoo."
So a cop draws a box on a map, types in a description or a driving pattern, and the “license plate reader” returns a list of real people, with their Social Security numbers and their family members attached.
There's a real fight coming about why Flock built this, and whether running it through police terminals is a way to sidestep the federal laws about who's allowed to pull your financial (and other) records. Flock says the product's still in development and might change before they sell it.
But I don't have to know why they built this to know what's going on, because I’ve already watched this happen before.
Somebody builds a system in the dark, somebody else drags it out into the light, and most people—busy, tired, figuring somebody responsible must be keeping an eye on all this—just shrug.
It isn’t aimed at me.
I've got nothing to hide.
If it catches a bad guy, great!
Of course that’s exactly what the surveyors are counting on.
These systems never get stopped by the people they're aimed at, because those people believe the lie that if they aren’t doing anything wrong then they won’t be targeted.
Right. I wonder what this lady has to say about that?
Systems like this get stopped (when they get stopped at all) by people who object to them on principle. And sadly, there just aren't a lot of those people anymore. The bad guys don’t win these battles by force anymore—they win because people are bored or busy or misinformed, and figure it's not their problem.
It’s pretty much the same shrug Snowden got in 2013.
That's actually why we put a chapter on Edward Snowden in our Tuttle Twins Guide to Courageous Heroes. Because he's about as clear an example as you'll find of the hardest kind of courage there is: doing the expensive, unpopular thing to warn people who might not even want to hear it, who will likely never thank you for it, and who might even be mad at you for telling them.
Our kids are going to grow up with more of these infringements, not fewer.
Cameras that know their car, software that maps their friends, databases that tie everywhere they go to everything they are. Whether the technology exists isn't even up for debate. It does. The only real question is whether they turn out to be the kind of people who notice, care, and ask who's watching and why, or the kind who assume somebody else has it handled, or worse, who believe the official narrative.
That kind of critical thinking is best built into a child early. That way, by the time they’re old enough to have to make hard decisions, they’ve already had a lot of practice in discerning truth from propaganda and actual freedom from meaningless slogans.
Our Back to School sale's still going—it’s the biggest one we run all year, with up to 70% off our best-loved resources— and Courageous Heroes is in there with the rest of the teen guidebooks.
It won’t last much longer, so check it out soon:
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Back to School Bundle — $119.88 (total value $419.44). All 14 children's books, plus every workbook, parent guide, and audiobook.
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Family Starter Pack — $229.95 (total value $870.72). Everything above, plus all three volumes of America's History with the full curriculum.
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Mega Bundle — $529 (total value $1,371.20). The whole library, including the teen guidebooks and Choose Your Consequence novels.
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Business Basics Grade 3 — $39. The new financial literacy and entrepreneurship course for 8–9-year-olds.
In 2013, Edward Snowden lit his entire life on fire to tell us we were being watched. A whole lot of people called him a traitor and then just forgot about him.
Thirteen years later, they're selling the watching by the truckload and trying very hard to convince us that it's for our own good.
We have to raise kids who know better, because there’s no way this ends well for any of us if we don’t stop it.
— Connor
