Surveillance technology is advancing faster than the laws meant to govern it. Across the United States, police departments are deploying automated license plate readers, facial recognition tools, and predictive systems that quietly log the daily movements of millions of people. These tools promise efficiency and safety, but critics argue that they represent a form of warrantless mass surveillance, and raise deep constitutional questions about privacy, accountability, and the limits of government power in the digital age.
Michael Soyfer is an attorney at the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit public interest law firm focused on defending individual rights. His work centers on the Fourth Amendment and the growing use of surveillance technologies by local governments. Michael joins the show with Kevin Ball to discuss the rise of Flock Safety cameras, the Institute for Justice’s lawsuit against the City of Norfolk, how decades-old legal precedents struggle to keep up with modern technology, and what citizens, technologists, and policymakers can do to protect privacy in an era of pervasive data collection.
Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsors
You’re a developer who wants to innovate—instead, you’re stuck fixing bottlenecks, and fighting legacy code. MongoDB can help. It’s a flexible, unified platform that’s built for developers, by developers. MongoDB is ACID compliant, Enterprise-ready, with the capabilities you need to ship AI apps—fast. That’s why so many of the Fortune 500 trust MongoDB with their most critical workloads. Ready to think outside rows and columns? Start building at mongodb.com/build.
If you’re using AI to code, ask yourself: are you building software, or are you just playing Prompt Roulette?
We know that unstructured prompting works at first, but eventually leads to AI slop and technical debt.
Enter Zenflow.
Zenflow takes you from “vibe coding” to AI-First Engineering. It is the first AI Orchestration layer that brings discipline to the chaos.
It transforms free-form prompting into spec-driven workflows and multi-agent verification—where agents actually cross-check each other to prevent drift.
You can even command a fleet of parallel agents to implement features and fix bugs simultaneously. We’ve seen teams accelerate delivery 2x to 10x.
Stop gambling with prompts. Start orchestrating your AI.
Turn raw speed into reliable, production-grade output at zenflow.free
When things go wrong in production, do you know why in minutes… or hours?
AppSignal is the application performance monitoring tool designed for developers who want clean, actionable insights without a huge observability bill.
You get all the tools you need to fix issues before customers notice, like error tracking, performance monitoring, log management and more.
AppSignal works for teams of all shapes and sizes, from start-ups and side hustles, to SMEs and enterprise, and is especially great for teams that build with Ruby on Rails, Elixir, Node.js, and Python.
Try it free for 30 days and get 10% off your yearly plan with SED10 at www.appsignal.com/sed.
