Edge of the Story
True stories of overlooked witnesses at pivotal moments in history and the events they quietly observed.
Edge of the Story
Season2 Final - The Alert
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Four squad cars. A parking lot. A weapon drawn, and the words "Get out of the car" — and then we leave it there, because what happens next isn't the point yet. This week, Darrell and Julia close out Season Two by walking through an entirely ordinary day: your alarm, your front door, the car you pass on the street, the coffee you grab on the way to work — and every camera, sensor, and system quietly logging it, most of which you've never thought twice about. Flock isn't the beginning of a surveillance state, they argue. It's just the newest, loudest member of one that's already fully built.
By the time they circle back to that parking lot — and to the driver who was never actually a suspect — the episode has walked through twelve episodes' worth of "the architecture is a choice, not a necessity," a real wrongful stop with a name and a face attached, and the actual scale of the network doing the watching: a hundred-thousand-camera company, half a billion voice assistants, tens of millions of doorbells, and a number of data centers, megawatts, and gallons of water that nobody has ever been asked to vote on. Plus: a full season in review, including where Vice President Vance's fraud task force landed, and a look ahead to what Season Three is actually asking.
Every source is in our show notes. We're not investigating the headline — we're investigating how the headline got in the room.
show notes
● How Flock Cameras Wrongly Tracked Me for Days Over ‘Stolen’ Plates and Sent Police After Me – The Drive — https://www.thedrive.com/news/how-flock-cameras-wrongly-tracked-me-for-days-over-stolen-plates-and-sent-police-after-me
● Flock Says Its Cameras Worked "Correctly" When Police Tracked and Ambushed Me for No Reason – The Drive — https://www.thedrive.com/news/inside-the-flock-dragnet-how-systemic-errors-led-to-police-ambushing-me-for-no-reason
● Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop – The Drive (podcast) — https://www.thedrive.com/podcast/flocks-ceo-wants-zero-wrongful-stops-i-wasnt-the-first
● Flock camera error leads to Minnesota car reviewer being swarmed by cops – FOX 9 Minneapolis-St. Paul — https://www.fox9.com/news/minnesota-car-reviewer-flock-camera
● A Flock Camera Error Ended With An Auto Journalist Detained By Police Over A "Stolen" Range Rover – Jalopnik — https://www.jalopnik.com/2211127/flock-camera-error-auto-journalist-detained-police-stolen-range-rover/
● QuickFacts: Plymouth city, Minnesota – U.S. Census Bureau — https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/plymouthcityminnesota/PST045225
● Flock Safety Crosses 100,000 Cameras as 53 Cities Cancel Over Unauthorized Federal Data Access – Tech Times, June 29, 2026 — https://www.techtimes.com/articles/319317/20260629/flock-safety-crosses-100000-cameras-53-cities-cancel-over-unauthorized-federal-data-access.htm
● Alexa-enabled devices surpass half a billion devices sold globally – IGD (reporting Amazon's May 2023 announcement) — https://www.igd.com/learning/articles/alexa-enabled-devices-surpass-half-a-billion-devices-sold-globally/21150
● Video Doorbell Adoption Rises to 20% in U.S. – Parks Associates, 2023 — https://www.parksassociates.com/blogs/in-the-news/video-doorbell-adoption-rises-to-20-in-us
● How Many EVs Are in the US? – Experian, 2024 data — https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/how-many-evs-are-in-us/
● US video surveillance rivals China's, report says – Fox News (2019 camera-density estimate) — https://www.foxnews.com/tech/us-video-surveillance-rivals-chinas-report-says.amp
● Flock Planned to Use 350,000 Uber, Lyft, and Delivery Drivers as Mobile License Plate Cameras – Breitbart, Aug 7, 2026 — https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2026/08/07/flock-planned-to-use-350000-uber-lyft-and-delivery-drivers-as-mobile-license-plate-cameras/
● 5 Taxpayer Wins From Vance’s Fraud-Fighting Task Force – The Daily Signal — https://www.dailysignal.com/2026/07/01/taxpayer-wins-fraud-task-force/
● Vance: Federal Government Has Identified $230 Billion in Fraud Since March – The Epoch Times — https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/vance-federal-government-has-identified-230-billion-in-fraud-since-march-6071767
● Aimee Bock files appeal of conviction, sentence in Feeding Our Future fraud case – MPR News — https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/06/17/aimee-bock-files-appeal-conviction-sentence-feeding-our-future-fraud-case
● Feeding Our Future ringleader Aimee Bock challenges conviction and 500-month sentence in federal appeal – CBS Minnesota — https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/feeding-our-future-aimee-bock-conviction-appeal-eighth-circuit/
● McKinsey wins $17M CMS Procurement Spend Optimization support contract – OrangeSlices AI — https://orangeslices.ai/mckinsey-wins-17m-cms-procurement-spend-optimization-support-contract/
● Connected vehicle data "can have intelligence value" to adversaries, warns federal document – Canada’s National Observer — https://www.nationalobserver.com/2026/06/01/news/connected-vehicle-data-can-have-intelligence-value-adversaries-warns-federal
● With some Canadians ready to embrace Chinese-made autos, experts note there are security risks – CBC News — https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canadians-chinese-electric-vehicles-9.7087040
● Spy cars or affordable EVs? China-built vehicles spark security debate in Canada – GlobalChinaEV — https://www.globalchinaev.com/post/spy-cars-or-affordable-evs-china-built-vehicles-spark-security-debate-in-canada
● BYD Canada Confirms Late 2026 Retail Push: Chinese Intelligence Law Applies to Owners – Tech Times — https://www.techtimes.com/articles/318029/20260608/byd-canada-confirms-late-2026-retail-push-chinese-intelligence-law-applies-owners.htm
● BYD Might Spy on Its Owners? – Right to Repair (Canada) — https://right-to-repair.ca/byd-might-spy-on-its-owner/
● Truck maker BYD rejects suggestions of espionage – FreightWaves — https://www.freightwaves.com/news/truck-maker-byd-rejects-suggestions-of-espionage
● Tesla Vandals Keep Running Into The Same Problem … Cameras – IJR — https://ijr.com/article/tesla-vandals-keep-running-into-the-same-problem-cameras
● FBI launches Tesla threats task force: "This is domestic terrorism" – CNBC — https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/24/fbi-tesla-elon-musk-task-force-threats-trump-doge.html
● Individuals Target Tesla Vehicles and Dealerships Nationwide with Arson, Gunfire, and Vandalism – FBI — https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/cyber/alerts/2025/individuals-target-tesla-vehicles-and-dealerships-nationwide-with-arson-gunfire-and-vandalism
● Special Report: Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars – Reuters (via KSL) — https://www.ksl.com/article/50616379/tesla-workers-shared-sensitive-images-recorded-by-customer-cars
● It’s Official: Cars Are Terrible at Privacy and Security – Mozilla Foundation, "Privacy Not Included" — https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/articles/its-official-cars-are-the-worst-product-category-we-have-ever-reviewed-for-privacy/
● Data Privacy and Compliance Considerations for Samsara Cameras – Samsara Help Center — https://kb.samsara.com/hc/en-us/articles/360023755812-Data-Privacy-and-Compliance-Considerations-for-Samsara-Cameras
● Fleet Dash Cam Data Sovereignty: In-House Footage Storage – Dash Cam Insight — https://www.dashcaminsight.com/fleet-data-sovereignty-compliance/
● Lytx Biometric Information Privacy Policy — https://www.lytx.com/legal/biometric-information-privacy-policy
● Biometric Data Collection and Retention Policy for Employees – Hirschbach Motor Lines — https://hirschbach.com/biometric-data-policy-for-employees
● Security – Netradyne — https://www.netradyne.com/legal/security
● Fedex VEDR Camera Systems & ELD – Motive — https://gomotive.com/vedr-eld/
● Truckers sue AI dash cam company over "mass surveillance on a massive scale" (Dean v. Motive Technologies) – CDLLife — https://cdllife.com/2026/truckers-sue-ai-dash-cam-company-over-mass-surveillance-on-a-massive-scale/
● Inside The AI Dash Cam Biometric Data Lawsuit: Joshua Lewis v. Maverick Transportation LLC and Lytx, Inc. – Carey & Associates — https://capclaw.com/inside-the-ai-dash-cam-biometric-data-lawsuit-transforming-workplace-privacy-joshua-lewis-v-maverick-transportation-llc-and-lytx-inc/
● UPS using AI surveillance cameras from Lytx to monitor drivers – World Socialist Web Site — https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/12/29/qtfu-d29.html
● UPS Installs On-Truck Surveillance Cameras – Teamsters for a Democratic Union — https://www.tdu.org/ups_installs_surveillance_cameras
● FTC and DOJ Charge Amazon with Violating Children’s Privacy Law by Keeping Kids’ Alexa Voice Recordings Forever – Federal Trade Commission, May 31
Have you ever been in a room where something shifted—but no one said it out loud?
Share your story at www.edgeofthestory.com/heard
.
If we feature it, we’ll send you an Edge of the Story notebook—because some observations are worth writing down.
Cold Open Stolen Car Alert
SPEAKER_00On June 26, 2026, a flock safety camera in a Minneapolis suburb read a passing vehicle's license plate, checked it against a national law enforcement database, and returned a match stolen, reported out of California.
SPEAKER_01Two days later, June 28th, a Sunday. The same plate rolled past another camera in the same network. A second alert. This time, officers moved.
SPEAKER_00They kept losing it. It kept vanishing somewhere the cameras couldn't see.
SPEAKER_01Sunday morning it reappeared. A camera caught it turning into a shopping center parking lot. Officers set up at a distance and watched.
Why Headlines End Up In Rooms
SPEAKER_00I'm Daryl Best. We're not investigating the headline. We're investigating how the headline got in the room. In this episode, we're investigating 12 of them and one alert that isn't finished yet.
SPEAKER_01Three weeks ago in the Consensus Nobody Checked, we spent an entire hour on automated license plate cameras. What they are, who approves them, and the harder question of whether there's an expectation of privacy in public at all. We're not relitigating that hour in this episode, but the alert we just described to you didn't happen hypothetically. It happened three days before this recording to somebody. It's a real event, a reported stolen car and the takedown of the driver. More on that in a few minutes.
SPEAKER_00But first, we visited 12 rooms in season two, and this is the last episode of the season. Let's walk through the doors of each episode because it is important in context on how we wrap up the season with this episode.
Season Two Doors And Architecture
SPEAKER_01Episode 1. The word was medically necessary. The room was autism therapy. The diagnosis triggered the reimbursement. The therapy didn't have to work. The payments came anyway.
SPEAKER_00Episode 2. End of life care. The room was hospice. A hundred percent live discharge rate was the marker nobody was supposed to notice.
SPEAKER_01Episode three didn't give us a word. It gave us a picture. A sweet door in Columbus, Ohio, with no doorknob, and an unopened notice from the Attorney General sitting on the floor behind it. 288 shell companies, one Botox Doctor's 17th-century Florentine crossbow, and a line we still think about. The crossbow gets the press conference, the system that paid for the crossbow is still running.
SPEAKER_00Episode 4 gave us four words for the price of one safety net, national security, patient care, transparency, four different institutions, four different rooms, one pharmaceutical pricing spread running underneath all of them.
SPEAKER_01Episode 5. Deloitte builds the eligibility platforms, half the country's Medicaid runs on them, and when the platform fails, the firm that built it gets hired again to fix it.
SPEAKER_00Episode six was the hardest room to find all season. We'll say that plainly because we don't hide our work, but they do. Evidence-based treatment and behavioral health roll-ups, where the word describes a standard nobody was required to meet.
SPEAKER_01Episode 7. That's the phrase the trade associations used for 10 years to keep electronic visit verification sitting in the box instead of running. $14.5 billion, one state, one year, before Texas pulled the lever and finally turned it on to turn off the payments. Episode 9 gave us three words because we never fully cornered the room. Best practices. Advisory, transformation. That research thread is still open, which is exactly why the McKinsey headline in this episode matters.
SPEAKER_00Episode 10, Victim Advocacy in Immigration Legal Services, where a law firm allegedly fabricated the paperwork of the very people it claimed to be protecting.
SPEAKER_01And episode 11 broke the pattern completely. No federal program, no billing code, no reimbursement rate. Just a word we don't usually put in this list: consensus. A hundred people can believe the same thing about a security camera company, and if none of them checked with their neighbor, that's not consensus. That's something wearing its clothes.
SPEAKER_0010 programs, one picture, one company town, 11 rooms, 11 doors, and the architecture is the same for every single one.
SPEAKER_01Here's the architecture. Stated the way we've stated it all season. A federal benefit program, or in Episode 11's case, a private company operating in a legal gray zone creates a payment stream or a data stream with a noble purpose behind it. The verification mechanism is weak, or it's never built at all. An intermediary positions themselves between the source and the person the program was supposed to serve. The intermediary captures value from the gap between what's paid and what's actually delivered. Money in 10 of our rooms, data and market position in the 11th. And the architecture functions exactly as designed by the people who designed it.
SPEAKER_00We've said this before, and we're going to say it one more time, because it's the whole season in one sentence. The architecture is a choice. It is not a necessity.
SPEAKER_01And the corollary from episode five that we've carried through every episode since, the verification existed. The enforcement was optional.
SPEAKER_00Every operator this season, Sandy Jenkins at the Fruitcake Company, Carrie Tolstedt at Wells Fargo, Violetta Malian, and her crossbow, Alexander Lozano's firm, Amy Bach, walked through a door that was left open on purpose by people who are mostly not the ones facing sentencing. That's not a conspiracy theory. It's a documented pattern 12 times over. Which brings us to the alert from the cold open and to something bigger than that one car.
An Ordinary Day In Surveillance
SPEAKER_00We want to walk you through an ordinary day, not anyone's day in particular, just an ordinary one.
SPEAKER_016 40 in the morning, an alarm goes off. Except it's not really an alarm anymore. It's a smart speaker. Alexa or Google Assistant tells you the time, reads your first email, runs through your calendar. In May 2023, the FTC and the Department of Justice fined Amazon $25 million for keeping kids' Alexa recordings indefinitely and training its own algorithm on data parents had asked to have deleted. That's not a hypothetical risk. That's a settled case with a settled fine. The alarm isn't local. It resides in a data center which tells Alexa it's time to wake you. Your calendar is in the data center, your emails, all in a data center, all available for AI.
SPEAKER_00You get up, get dressed, walk out the front door, past a doorbell camera. If it's a ring, and it very well might be, since ring is the dominant name in the category, two things about it are worth knowing. Last October, Ring announced, then this past February canceled. A partnership with Flock Safety itself that would have routed police footage requests straight through the Ring app. It fell apart after public pushback, not because a law required it. And last December, Ring rolled out familiar faces nationwide. Facial recognition that quietly builds a face profile of your regular visitors and stores it on Amazon's own servers. Amazon's servers are in a data center.
SPEAKER_01Back out of the driveway, and there's a Tesla parked at the curb a few houses down. Exterior cameras always recording, watching everyone who walks past, whether they're doing anything wrong or not. Tesla stores the video in a data center.
SPEAKER_00Merge onto the road and a ride share car pulls up next to you. Dash cam mounted on the windshield. That's not incidental. Last August, Flock Safety pitched Georgia's attorney general on a partnership with Dash Cam maker Nexar that would have folded in, in the pitch deck's own words, 350,000 Uber, Lyft, and other delivery vehicles into its plate reading network. Flock says that partnership was never executed. The pitch document, obtained by public records request, says otherwise about the plan.
SPEAKER_01A commercial delivery van passes going the other way, camera mounted over its own windshield. A semi-truck downshifts into your lane on the highway, a second lens above its mirror, watching both the road and the driver. Four companies dominate that market. Samsara Licks, NetRodyne, and Motive. And Motive alone is currently being sued in federal court by drivers alleging its cameras function as a license plate reading network across nearly 100,000 customers and 1.3 million drivers. FedEx requires that exact platform for its delivery contractors. UPS runs a competitor, Licks, instead.
SPEAKER_00Every drive-thru does, and has for years, mostly for security and quality control. We want to be straight with you here. We could not confirm that any specific coffee or fast food chain, Starbucks, Chick-fil-A, or anyone else, is currently running that footage through a license plate or face matching system. The technology to do exactly that exists and is being piloted at drive-thrus industry-wide, but naming a specific chain is already doing it would be saying more than we can back up. What we can say for certain, there is a camera pointed at your car and your face at every drive-thru window in the country right now.
SPEAKER_01Same honesty on the next stop. The gym. A lot of fitness chains have moved toward biometric check-in, fingerprint, or face instead of a swipe card, and that trend is well documented industry-wide. We couldn't confirm one specific chain running facial recognition at its front desk as of this recording, but the direction is clear, and it's the same direction as everything else on this list. The swipe card is being replaced by your face.
SPEAKER_00On through lunch, another drive-through, another camera, same caveat. Into work, through a lobby that may check you in with a badge, or increasingly with your face at the door.
SPEAKER_01And on your way home, when you check out at the grocery store and scan your card, you are videoed again and somewhere in that whole day, without you ever noticing, you drove past a flock safety camera. Maybe more than one. There are 120,000 nationwide.
SPEAKER_00That's the ordinary day. Nothing in it is illegal. Nothing in it, on its own, is even unusual anymore. And that's exactly the point Flock keeps proving, episode after episode of this season. It isn't the beginning of a surveillance society. It's the next iteration of one that's already fully built. The architecture's there. Flock is just the latest room.
False Hit And Gunpoint Stop
SPEAKER_01Which brings us back to the alert, June 26th. A camera reads a plate. A match comes back. Stolen, four squad cars, a weapon drawn. Are you armed? Get out of the car.
SPEAKER_00Here's what we didn't tell you at the top of the show. The driver's name is Joel Feeder. He's the director of content at the car journalism outlet, The Drive. And the vehicle Plymouth, Minnesota police surrounded at gunpoint in a Cole's parking lot on June 28th was his own Range Rover, which had never been stolen, not once, by anyone.
SPEAKER_01The plate Flox camera matched against had been entered into the FBI's National Crime Information Center database with digits missing after a plate was reported lost during a Land Rover photo shoot in Los Angeles. A truncated string, a partial match, a system built to move fast on exactly that kind of match.
SPEAKER_00Feeder later learned he wasn't the first person this had happened to. When he confronted Flock's CEO, Garrett Langley directly, Langley told him plainly that Feder wasn't the first and that less than one in a million alerts get flagged by an officer as questionable. Flock's own public statement on the incident, the cameras had worked correctly.
SPEAKER_01Sit with that word for a second. Correctly. A truncated plate matched a partial string, alerted a database that doesn't handle confidence levels well, and sent four armed officers to a parking lot over a man returning something to Kohl's. And the company's own word for what happened is correctly.
SPEAKER_00So let's talk about scale because Plymouth is one town and there are 120,000 flock cameras.
Scale Of Hits And Errors
SPEAKER_01Plymouth, Minnesota has an estimated population of 78,942 people, according to the Census Bureau. Its 18 flock cameras read over 580,000 license plates in 30 days. More than seven reads for every single resident of the town in one month. Of those 580,000 reads, nearly 15,000 came back as hot list hits. Matches against a wanted or stolen listing. That's roughly one hit for every five residents. Plymouth's own transparency data will tell you that much. It will not tell you how many of those nearly 15,000 hits were right.
SPEAKER_00And Plymouth is 18 cameras. Nationally, Flock crossed 100,000 cameras deployed at the end of June this year. Nearly 800 new city contracts signed in 2026 alone, even as 53 cities canceled theirs over concerns about who else can query the data. According to the company, the error rate is less than one in a million. Plymouth has 18 cameras, 580,000 reads in 30 days, and one known error.
SPEAKER_01That's one company. Now count everything else on the walk we just took you through. Amazon's own numbers from 2023 put Alexa-enabled devices at well over half a billion sold worldwide. Google has said its assistant runs on more than a billion devices. An older figure, and the only one either company has put a number on publicly. Video doorbells are now in roughly one in five American households, according to 2023 research. Call it somewhere north of 25 million doorbells. Most of them ring, most of them capable of the same face matching Fetters story raised questions about.
SPEAKER_00None of this is one villain. It's not one company's plan. It's a hundred thousand flock cameras, half a billion Alexa's, a billion assistants, twenty five million doorbells, four million EVs, and a truck camera market nobody's even finished counting. All built for perfectly reasonable, mostly unconnected reasons by companies that mostly don't talk to each other, but many store the video in data centers. Data centers run AI.
SPEAKER_01Flock isn't the surveillance state arriving. Flock is just the newest, most visible piece of one that is already finished being built. Flock is not the danger, but the next step could be, and the future is now.
SPEAKER_00Which is why we want to end this thread with where it goes next. Because there's already a preview of it, and it isn't hypothetical. It's a live trade decision in real time.
BYD And The Legal Data Trap
SPEAKER_01BYD, the world's largest EV maker based in China. This past January, Canada cut its tariff on Chinese-made EVs from 100% down to 6.1% in exchange for an import quota. BYD is opening roughly 20 dealerships in Canada year one.
SPEAKER_00A connected BYD collects the same categories of data as a connected Tesla. Location, driving behavior, paired phone data. The difference is what happens to it after. China's 2017 National Intelligence Law, Article 7, requires any Chinese organization to support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work, if asked. Legal analysts researching this for Canadian outlets say that obligation applies to BYD regardless of where the data physically sits.
SPEAKER_01BYD disputes it, says its data stays regional, that only anonymized diagnostics leave the vehicle. And six in ten Canadians in a January poll said they'd welcome the cars anyway, mostly over price. We're not telling you that's wrong. We're telling you what the mechanism is. Every piece of the surveillance architecture we just walked you through was built by private companies for private reasons, with no government mandate anywhere in the chain. BYD is the first instance this season where a government mandate is the documented legal reason the data has somewhere to go.
SPEAKER_00Flock is a choice a city council made. A ring doorbell is a choice a homeowner made. A BYD, if China's laws ever actually invoke the way its critics fear, isn't a choice at all. It's a legal obligation sitting quietly inside a car in a driveway. That's the next step. That's the direction all of this points if nobody ever decides to point it somewhere else.
SPEAKER_0112 stops before you clock in, a hundred thousand cameras in one company's network alone, and one clear preview of what happens when a private choice becomes a legal requirement instead.
Exits Built By People
SPEAKER_01And every single time this season, we found someone who built outside it.
SPEAKER_00No spread, no intermediary, capturing the gap between list price and what a patient actually pays. Generic iMatNib for $14 a month instead of up to $9,657.
SPEAKER_01Bob McNutt at the Collins Street Bakery in Corsicana, Texas, lost $17 million over nine years to a trusted CFO before anyone checked the books. His line, and it's become this season's second closing argument. Start with trust, then double check.
SPEAKER_00Texas's Health and Human Services Commission chose to enforce an 80% EVV usage score when federal law made enforcement optional, and every other state chose latitude. That's not a founder or a nonprofit. That's a state agency deciding to make the system do what the system was built to do.
SPEAKER_01And we should say plainly what we said in episode five. The architecture is built by institutions. The exits are built by individuals, and the individuals aren't always outsiders. Sometimes they're the person inside the meeting who keeps saying turn it on for years, long after everyone else in the room has agreed to revisit it in 12 months.
SPEAKER_00We think that's the whole choice this season has been describing. You can refuse to build the room, or you can be standing in a room that already exists and decide today to check the lock. Both are the same decision. One's just cheaper if you make it first.
The Seven Release And Tease
SPEAKER_01Last week we told you about the Seven, Daryl's new historical fiction release, a fictional account of the real 1957 All-Star ballot stuffing scandal in Cincinnati. We held one thing back on purpose. The main character in the book is Red Edwards, a sports writer.
SPEAKER_00Red Edwards started life as one of twin brothers, Ron and Peter, born to a Dutch immigrant farm family in Ohio. The Dust Bowl broke that farm the way it broke thousands of others, and the family rebuilt in Texas down in the Rio Grande Valley. Peter didn't survive that stretch of the story. Ron did, and then went to war. He came home from World War II with an ankle injury that ended any future he might have had as an athlete. And with it, for a while, the future he thought he was going to have at all.
SPEAKER_01He fell for a woman named Maria. And somewhere in the years after that, Ron Edwards became Red Edwards, a Cincinnati sports columnist. The man who, a few years later, found himself writing about seven of his own hometown red legs and watching his community stuff the ballot box for the 1957 All-Star game without ever imagining he'd become part of that story himself.
SPEAKER_00How he becomes part of it is the rest of the book. We're not going to give away more than that in this episode. We did enough plot holding back last time to know we like it that way. The seven is released in podcast form at edgeofthestory.com or anywhere you find your favorite podcasts. Normally, this is where we do a listener moment. This episode we're using that time differently because there's a season to close out and one headline too big to leave in a paragraph.
SPEAKER_01Start
Fraud Takedowns And The Cost
SPEAKER_01with the headline. Vice President J.D. Vance has spent the month since March chairing the task force to eliminate fraud, with FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson as vice chair. In late June, the task force reported a national health care fraud takedown, 460 criminal charges, $6.5 billion in alleged false claims, $127 million in seized assets. The FBI added names to a most wanted fraudsters list, including Herbert Leon Kimball, arrested in the Philippines in connection with $1.2 billion in alleged Medicare fraud, and Said Abdulli Eareg, arrested in connection with the Feeding Our Future scheme we've referenced all season. Vance's own cumulative number, as of late June, $230 billion in fraud, identified across federal programs since March.
SPEAKER_00We're not going to tell you whether that number holds up in a courtroom the way it held up in a press release. We don't have that documentation, and we don't editorialize on numbers we can't verify ourselves. What we can document is the cost. Vance referred Minnesota's governor and attorney general to the Department of Justice, alleging they knew about fraud in federally funded programs for years and didn't act. A state Medicaid fraud unit in Hawaii, which received $12 million over three years and produced zero indictments, lost its funding entirely.
SPEAKER_01Pulling a lever this size doesn't happen for free. Somebody loses every time it moves. That's the sentence this whole season has been building to. This year, for the first time in 12 episodes, we watched that trade happen at national scale, in real time, while we were still recording the season it belongs to.
SPEAKER_00That's the season in the numbers that matter. Cost plus drugs, the Collins Street Bakery learning to double check, Texas turning on a verification system every other state left in the box, a fraud task force proving the lever can be pulled, and what it costs when it is. And now, a hundred thousand cameras, a Coles parking lot, and a man named Joel Feeder who did nothing wrong.
SPEAKER_01If any of this is the word over your own door, the phrase in your industry, your job, your town, that does the work medically necessary did in episode one. We want to hear it. Edgeofy dot com slash heard. We read everything.
SPEAKER_00Twelve rooms. Twelve words, or in two cases, no word at all. Just a picture or a consensus nobody checked. And this episode, a thirteenth thing that isn't a room at all, an ordinary day, your kitchen, your front door, the car at the curb, the driver beside you, the truck on the highway, the coffee window, the gym door, the camera at the light, a hundred thousand of them in one company's network alone, and millions more everywhere else.
SPEAKER_01The architecture is a choice. It is not a necessity.
SPEAKER_00The verification existed. The enforcement was optional.
SPEAKER_01Those are season two's two sentences.
Season Three Who Holds The Lever
SPEAKER_01We're not retiring them here. We're handing them to next season. Because season three isn't asking whether the lever exists anymore. We spent twelve episodes proving that it does. Every time, in every room. And this episode proved it one more way. The cameras exist. The network exists. The only question left is who's holding it and what they decide to do with it next.
SPEAKER_00Season three asks the harder question. A hundred thousand cameras sit in one network right now, mostly pointed at nothing in particular. Somebody built it. Somebody funded it. And somewhere, someone is already deciding what it gets pointed at next, the way a trade deal quietly decided it for BYD.
SPEAKER_01The only question left is the one we're carrying into next season. Once the architecture is finished, who decides what it's for?
SPEAKER_00We're not investigating the cameras anymore. We're investigating who decides what they're for. That's season three. One more number before we go.
The Data Center Water Bill
SPEAKER_00When I wrote the gap as I interviewed people, there was one clear refrain. Why are they building so many? Nobody's published this one, so we built it ourselves to answer the question. We took the approach, conservative on one end, aggressive on the other. In today's episode, we started counting at 100,000 flock cameras. We added ring doorbell and Alexa-type devices. We added the Teslas parked on the street, the Uber drivers and the delivery drivers that we passed by. We added the commercial delivery trucks and 18-wheelers on the highway, the fast food drive-up window, the checkout line. They all have one thing in common: modern convenience and a data center server. We calculated upward of 240 data centers to store the video. Upwards of a thousand megawatts of power running around the clock every day of the year. Upwards of 4 billion gallons of water spent cooling the machines themselves, and as much as 8.5 billion gallons more consumed at the power plants generating the electricity to run them. Nobody voted on that, nobody held a hearing on it. It's just running right now while you're listening. Burning power and drinking water so a camera can watch you pull through a drive-thru for a cup of coffee. Why are they building so many? The answer is clear, they are building them for you and me. Remember that the next time you ask Alexa to tell you a funny joke, you just used water and electricity to get the answer. See you next season and remember part two of the seven drops tomorrow.