Why we’re all being watched

0:00Hey, everyone. You're listening to Code Switch from NPR. I'm B.A. Parker. And I'm Gene Dunby. All right, so, Parker. Yeah? I know you're a private person, so I'm going to try not to blow up your spot too much with this opening here. But I was going to ask you, like, how frequently do you think you are caught on video or just recorded during a typical day in Brooklyn? Oh, you mean, like, going about my day, minding my own business? Yeah, you know, doing your laundry, toting around your banjo, doing crumbs, you know, regular Parker stuff.

0:32Well, in that case, I don't know. That's a good question. I mean, probably, I mean, there's security cameras in my building, the buildings around me, the bodegas. On my way into the studio today, I know that I was in the background of someone's fit check, so I'm probably going to be on someone's TikTok. Somebody's IG or something, yeah. This might be a New York problem. But yeah, I mean, cameras are just, like, ubiquitous with the city.

1:08I've been thinking about this because I've been seeing a lot of stuff lately about the surveillance state. You know, the kind of constant police monitoring that we've all gotten used to as part of our daily lives. But lately, something else has been bubbling up, right? Especially around this company called Flock. Flock cameras are helping police crack cases, but they're also raising a serious question about privacy. Agencies across the country use AI-powered cameras to scan billions of vehicles. Automated license plate readers made by Flock are being targeted and vandalized.

1:42So Flock is this private company that was founded not even a decade ago. It was in 2017. And they make automated license plate readers. And the company likes to tout the fact that they have 120,000 of these cameras that capture billions of license plates every single month. And police departments across the country are buying all this data that Flock is collecting. And it is freaking a lot of people out. The emperor is a fan of Flock. And we must continue utilizing Flock technologies so that we can follow and surveil the rebel scum.

2:16I don't like this. What is that? So this is from a viral video of a dude at a city council meeting in San Diego. And he's dressed up like Darth Vader to chastise the city for having this contract with Flock. They are following children. They are following children in parks and gymnasiums. And we need this. I need this so I can stalk my ex-girlfriend. I'm sorry. I know his intention is very earnest. And I appreciate that. But that is not going to get the reaction that he wants.

2:48Apparently this dude has showed up a bunch of times complaining about Flock. And no one paid attention until he did this. All right. So he got the desired effect. Okay, okay, okay. But I have heard those recent news stories about police officers using those license plate readers to follow their exes or stalk women. And also the software on these cameras has been getting it wrong, just IDing the wrong people. Yeah. And so Flock is getting a lot of the heat, but they're just the most well-known player in this larger tapestry of surveillance.

3:21You know, surveillance by the state, by private companies, and surveillance by other members of the public. So, okay, let's back up a second. Let's go back to your theoretical commute again, right? Oh, this is a fun game. Yeah. So, especially if you're in an urban setting, you are going to go past probably some police CCTV cameras, probably some other government agencies as well. Is it a fun game? Because I'm, like, I'm low-key freaking out. But, okay, who is this? Oh, yeah, Parker, Parker, let me introduce you to Matthew Gorriglia.

3:52I'm a historian of policing and technology and race and ethnicity in the United States. And I'm a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. So he's looking at the ways the police are looking at us? Yeah, basically. And Matthew says, like, on a typical day for most people, there are eyes everywhere. The Department of Transportation often has cameras that are up on public transit or at intersections. You're definitely these days going to pass automated license plate readers, which are reading your plates.

4:24Fine, I'm staying home then. I mean, yeah, you're right, Parker, we can stay home, but they watching us there too. There's the social media surveillance, which is scraping tweets and looking for geotags on your posts. The geolocation of your phone, which police can buy from data brokers and map how many phones were in a location. So there is a spectrum of surveillance, both seen and unseen. So they're watching me, us, walk down the street.

4:56They're watching us if we're under the street on the subways. They're watching us if we're in a car. They're watching us at home. I don't love this. But, like, why would anyone want to follow me around Brooklyn with my banjo? Like, it is a pretty boring reality show. Oh, come on. Give yourself some credit, Parker. But I feel you. And as privacy advocates have pointed out, you know, there are so many criminal laws on the books that if you just follow anybody for long enough,

5:29you could probably catch them doing something in their daily life that breaks a law, that constitutes a felony even. And this technology is being used by local police departments that partner with ICE to track down immigrants. The AI from those cameras is being used to identify people at protests. Okay, fantastic. Fantastic. I'm going to go hyperventilate in the back for a minute. And they're going to know you did that. And so, y'all, that's what we're getting into today. We're looking at how we invited the Panopticon into our neighborhoods and towns and what folks are trying to do now to root it out.

6:01Oh, boy. Take it away, Jean. All right, y'all. So, how did we get here? Like, it's tempting to peg our current surveillance state to September 11th in the aftermath in which Americans were broadly cool with the government and law enforcement ramping up its capacity to surveil people all around the country. I asked Matthew Garriglia how he defines the surveillance state. I think the surveillance state is the government impulse to collect information on people who are either suspicious or guilty or not.

6:39And in some ways, the surveillance state is a, like, a technologically backed system that is designed to invert individualized suspicion, right? The legal system is supposed to work by police finding individual suspicious. They have evidence that they might have committed a crime, and then they're supposed to go out and spy on them. And usually they do this by going to a judge, right? They present evidence to a judge. They say, this person, we have reason to believe they committed a crime.

7:09Please sign this piece of paper, a warrant that says we can collect data so that we can build a case. The surveillance state is all of this technology in our lives that enables police to invert that system so that they're collecting evidence. They're collecting information all the time on all of us and then figuring out who's suspicious after the fact. So they can just pretty much decide who the population of guilty people or people who have contact with the criminal legal system are going to be because you can say, oh, these are the public behaviors that we can see on the camera that we want to go after, like emphasizing jaywalking in a certain neighborhood is going to get a bunch of people on the dragnet and maybe not other people on the dragnet.

7:49Yeah, I mean, I think this is, you know, taps into the long history of surveillance to think about. Police have an idea of who is predisposed to commit violence or criminal acts. And those people get put under a microscope. And if you are living in one of those communities, if you look like one of those people, you find that surveillance contributes to the self-fulfilling prophecy of policing. That if you put anyone under a microscope or any community under a microscope, you're going to find reasons to harass people or to ticket them or to arrest them.

8:25And then once you have- So like if you put up cameras everywhere, you're going to find jaywalkers. You're going to find people who are driving around without their seatbelts on. You're going to find people who are smoking weed outside. You're going to find them because you're looking for it, right? Yeah. And then once you like can put that through the process of making it data, once it looks like it's cold, hard facts, you know, how can math be racist? Then you can say like, listen, the numbers don't lie. This neighborhood, these types of people commit more crimes than others. Therefore, it just justifies more surveillance and more police harassment.

8:58Yeah. Surveillance is a permission structure. It is something that if you want to harass a community, if you want to bust up a protest, if you want to spy on protesters, you watch them like a hawk until somebody knocks over a trash can. You say, oh, littering has been committed. This protest is destroying property. And that gives you the green light to do what you've been wanting to do all along. And the same thing is true in communities writ large. So in your mind, could you could you think of any legitimate uses for this massive tapestry of surveillance that we've built up over the last two decades or so?

9:38I mean, police can always roll out their like stock answers for when this stuff gets, you know, like somebody is kidnapped and a senior citizen with Alzheimer's walks away from their house and forgets where they are and goes missing. And can't tell people where they belong. Like there are all of these scenarios where actually surveillance would be quite useful in solving that problem.

10:08The problem is many of those scenarios are actually quite rare. They don't happen very often. And yet police use those special and extreme cases to justify putting up all the surveillance. The problem is the 99.999% of times in between kidnappings or shootings or bank robberies. It's not like the surveillance is turned off waiting for one of those extreme incidents to happen. They're still collecting data and police are still using it.

10:39So, yeah, I mean, you can imagine a world in which, you know, we have more trustworthy police or we have a more benevolent government. Or the cameras get turned off when they're not being used for extreme crimes. But it's just really not the world we live in. Right, right. I remember, especially during the pandemic, you see all these videos of like a bunch of kids going into like a Sephora and running out of the Sephora with all this stuff. And that was like all over the news all the time. I was like, oh, yeah, it makes it less abstract to people.

11:09And it's like the surveillance technology is like, oh, it's a kind of news and a kind of thing that people know how to respond to. I often think I think that's so funny because I often think the more video surveillance we have of crime happening, the more undermines the reason for surveillance to exist, which is so many police say, like, we're going to put up these cameras and crime is going to go down. And then what you end up just having is infinite amounts of footage of crime happening, because I don't really think there's a lot of evidence that people are going to commit a crime. And then they see a camera and they decide not to.

11:42And so police say we're going to put up cameras and crime is going to go down. And you have to say, like, OK, why? How? And ultimately, once pressed, they'll say, well, you know what? It doesn't prevent crime, but it allows us to build cases. And then you have to ask again, like, OK, is there a lot of evidence that individual convictions garnered with footage lowers crime rates in a city or makes people less safe? Because ultimately, when it comes to, like, who's actually interested in public safety, is it the people who want to wait till after the crime is committed who care about crime and safety?

12:18Or is it the people who want to prevent it in the first place? Can we talk about the Fourth Amendment implications of all this? Yes. How is this even constitutional? I mean, that's a really basic level. Like, how is any of this the sort of, like, just wide, drag net looking at people's run in their plates? I know cops do this already, right? Like, they do it in their own vehicles. But, like, how is any of this not against the law? Yeah. So, I mean, the Supreme Court has said that a person's geolocation, tracked over time, is a sensitive enough piece of information that police need to get a warrant to get it.

12:53And this is based on, like, your cell phone or, like, a GPS device under your car. And the justification is that because you're driving past multiple different cameras, somehow that doesn't apply. But it really is more helpful to think of license plate readers as having the net effect of a GPS under your car and not, like, driving past individual surveillance cameras. Because if you drive past 15 cameras at different places and it's able to map your entire route, and then, in fact, police can use AI to infer which route you took based on what license plate readers you drove past, that is basically the same thing as having a GPS device in your car.

13:33So I would very much argue that it is unconstitutional, that it is a violation of your Fourth Amendment rights, because where you are at any given time throughout the course of a day is a very sensitive piece of information. And police absolutely should be required to get a warrant before they have access to it. There's been a lot of pushback to this kind of surveillance from all over the political spectrum, right, Matthew? Like, the ultra-conservative governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, he wants to defund Flock. Like, you got Ron DeSantis in Florida who called for a ban on these automated license plate readers.

14:05So what do you think of somebody like Ron DeSantis in his opposition to this kind of surveillance technology? Yeah. He's not exactly anti-cop. No, he's definitely not anti-cop. He's definitely not anti-cop. I think there is a libertarian strain to the anti-surveillance movement. There always has been. But I think there is an understanding growing on the right as well that just because you trust the people in power now to use the surveillance in a way that you like doesn't mean that they will always be in power.

14:37So, you know, some people on the right might be four Flock cameras now because Republicans are in charge, but they don't know that 10 years from now there isn't going to be a Democrat in charge who wants to, you know, go after people with high-capacity magazines on their rifles or want to do more public health initiatives that involve social distancing that could utilize this technology. So I think they're wising up for the fact that this is infrastructure that's going to outlast any one specific political regime.

15:12Yeah. That makes me wonder about how much of this current pushback against the surveillance, you know, towards Flock and towards all this sort of police tech is because the people who are now experiencing it are not used to being watched and over-policed in this way. I mean, I guess to put it more plainly, like how much of this anti-surveillance energy that we're seeing is because now upper-middle-class white people are sort of being like in the field of vision of the Panopticon? I think that's absolutely right.

15:43I mean, I think people who for years have been saying they don't care about surveillance don't understand that there are already places in America where people in their day-to-day lives feel the effects of that vulnerability that's created by surveillance. Which is funny because in many ways there's been such a large buildup of surveillance technology in mostly white suburbs in part because they are so worried about people from cities getting in their cars and driving into the suburbs.

16:13Okay. So what is the relationship between Flock and like the other competitors in this sector, like Axon, right? And ICE and immigration enforcement. Yeah. Flock will be very quick to tell you that they have no contracts with ICE. And that is true. But the loophole has been that ICE will go to friendly local police departments who do have Flock contracts and they will say, hey, run these plates for us. And not only has that not like really raised any red flags for the company, they don't seem to mind that.

16:48They say like, hey, listen, what our customers want to do with the data and with the tool is not our problem. But when they are searching for specific plates, one of the designations they could click on, like they have a list of crimes they can be investigating, one of them is immigration. So they can even say this is a search specifically for immigration and they can do it on behalf of ICE. And even though ICE is not a formal customer of Flock, that's how they get around it.

17:20Other companies like Axon do have contracts with ICE. And that is in part because Axon provides a lot of different products like body cameras and like tasers. And Axon is infamous for bundling their products. So you hire Axon because you need body cameras and they upsell you more and more and more different add-ons, including tasers, including software that uses AI to write your police report for you. And now including license plate readers.

17:52Wow. So you get the whole, you know, deluxe package. You get the bananas. Yeah, exactly. Wow. Yeah. So we want to talk a little bit about the sort of money trail of the surveillance state. There are so many, I would say, increasingly shocking ways that police departments get money to buy this stuff. A lot of it is public money, is municipal dollars. But increasingly, you know, these companies understand that they might be approaching small police departments with small budgets who can't afford their tech.

18:25And they think that should not preclude them from buying the technology. So a lot of times these companies will have like grant writers who will write the grant for local police departments to state governments, the federal governments, to help them get the money to buy their technology. So we need like $800,000 for these cameras. Can you help us out here? Yeah. We have somebody on staff at our tech company who will write the grant for you. Wow. And also- And the tech company will just dispatch them to like, oh, wow, that is bananas.

18:57Yeah, they have grant. Absolutely. Yeah. And they have ways of finding money. And the other big way we're seeing spread, especially in large cities, are police foundations. And these are semi-private entities whose goal is to be the fundraising arm for the police department. So the city doesn't want to cough up a lot of money for a lot of tech. These police foundations get money from rich people and corporations and use that money to buy technology for the city. Which means that our privacy, our comfort levels of how much surveillance we want to be under is not decided by public officials or elected officials.

19:36They're decided by rich people in the town based on what they're willing to pay for. Wow. Okay. So Flock is getting a lot of attention right now. They're getting a lot of smoke. But they're just one player in this growing business sector that you just said is like actively doing the grant writing for their own products. But where did this huge surveillance industry come from? Because I think we have a decent understanding of where the sort of government imperatives were, right? But where did this sort of like private outsourced almost like we can give you the tech and we can make the tech for you?

20:09Where did that come from? Yeah. I mean, I guess it begins with security cameras and the industry that popped up between like the 70s and the post 9-11 period. You know, license plate readers have a history going back to around the 1980s as well. But it just became such a big industry in part, I think, because it is so easy to throw money at the problem of crime. If you think about it, surveillance technology for policing is a no – it's like it is a – there's a no – it's a no downside industry.

20:48Because if crime goes up, you say you got to throw money at the problem. You got to put up more cameras. If crime goes down, you say, guess what? The cameras are working. The cameras are working, yeah. Yeah. So crime goes up, crime goes down. Either way, the answer is always throw up more cameras. And it's hard to address the root causes of crime. It's hard to address housing and education and, you know, joblessness and economic inequality. It's a lot easier to spend money on cameras. So when people say to politicians like, hey, I don't feel safe in my neighborhood.

21:22I got mugged. I'm unhappy about crime. It's really hard to address the root causes of crime. And it's really easy for politicians to say, we heard you. We know you feel unsafe. We're doing everything we can. And what we're doing is we're reaching out to the most high-tech Silicon Valley companies who are providing crime-fighting technology. So it really is an industry that, like, it doesn't need to prove it works. Oftentimes, it doesn't need to work. It just needs to allow politicians to say, we're doing something about the fact that you feel unsafe.

21:55Okay. So this tapestry of surveillance that is all around us is relatively new, both because the technology wasn't there for it, but also, like, we are in a very different cultural place than we might have been, like, 30 years ago. So if we just back up a little bit, can you walk us through specifically the post-9-11 moment in which Americans at least seemed broadly cool with more surveillance, you know, because of, you know, the supposed threat of Islamic terrorism? And walk us through that moment to this current kind of freak-out over flock.

22:30Like, what's changed? How did we get here? Yeah, I mean, that's a really dense question that honestly goes back in many ways before 9-11 to the, you know, the war on drugs, the war on crime, the supercharging of American policing and funding for policing. And kind of culminates in this 9-11 moment in that, one, you get this kind of, if you have nothing to hide, then don't worry about surveillance talking point, which becomes omnipresent, right?

23:04That is the kind of talking point of the national security apparatus after 9-11. It justifies mass surveillance at, you know, the federal level with, like, things like the NSA and looking at all of our call records or the mass surveillance of the internet. But it also trickles down to the street level. After 9-11, you get this really intense and sped up fusion of national security and crime fighting. That you get this sense that all crime is kind of a threat to national security.

23:38And this kind of culminates in, like, trying to declare fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction, right? Like, thinking about all crime as a threat to national security that justifies a national security level response. So this is why you end up seeing, you know, NYPD officers that say counterterrorism unit on their jackets handling turnstile jumpers at the subway. It is the supercharging of policing with the kind of justifications and money and technology that usually goes into, like, fighting terrorism or fighting wars.

24:16What do you think is, like, you know, the science fiction dystopia worst-case scenario for this kind of tech and surveillance? And what are the sort of mundane, everyday worst-case scenarios? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, so I think people misunderstand the Minority Report, at least the movie, the Tom Cruise movie. Tom Cruise movie. You know, I mean, there is the element of it, like, if you can predict crime, which police, by the way, try to use statistics to predict crime all the time.

24:47If you could predict crime, is there such a thing as free will, right? Like, do police actually know for a fact that somebody is about to commit a crime? And to the extent that they have permission to arrest that person.

25:00But I think the real lesson of Minority Report is that when you have a system that is so cloaked in the justifications of science and math, like, this is unimpeachably right. This is so high-tech and so advanced that we really can't question it, that the people who run it can abuse that system. Because what happens is the person who runs the Minority Report system in the movie commits a murder and hides it because he controls a system that can't be questioned.

25:33And I think that's one of the things we see when police get access to, like, really high-tech technology is they go out and they make arrests based on faulty face recognition IDs or on falsy license plate readers. And they say, listen, the computer spit out this name. Who am I to question the computer? And they end up arresting the wrong people. And this happens all the time. So I think that's the kind of sci-fi version. The everyday version, which people live with all the time, is you live in communities where every single thing, large and small, gets enforceable.

26:11You know, like we were talking about jaywalking. I've heard stories about, like, police harassing a person long enough that eventually they found their teenage son smoking a cigarette on their porch and arrested the father. For, because eventually, after checking in every single day, they found a reason to arrest that person.

26:36When we come back. Your ring camera is one or two permissions away from allowing police to request and access the footage as if your front door camera is part of the surveillance network. Stay with us, y'all. Thank you.

26:56Gene, just Gene for this part, CodeTwitch. So we're talking to Matthew Griglia, who is a privacy policy analyst, about the backlash towards surveillance tech companies like Flock and Axon. Matthew is a historian by training. And he said who the police decide to watch plays a big role in how racial categories have been built and maintained. The rise of surveillance technologies as we understand them, so things like fingerprinting and things like mugshots, these early ways of collecting information on people and storing them that could be used again to try to track people down, is infinitely tied with race.

27:37In part because a lot of these technologies were incubated in empires. The British Empire really spent a lot of time developing fingerprinting in part because colonial officials needed a scientific way to tell one person from the next without being able to speak to them or understand the language. And fingerprinting travels back from the British Empire to police departments in England. They bring over fingerprinting to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, where police departments see it like a kind of magic.

28:11And from there, it spreads throughout the US and then, in fact, into the American empire, into places like the Philippines. And mugshots have a very similar history as well. And so police use mugshots as a way to help define who is suspicious. So there's this understanding that like once a person commits a crime or not even commits a crime, once a person gets arrested, they fit a category of person that is always deserving of suspicion.

28:43And this has a lot to do with belonging and race in America and deciding who gets more police scrutiny and who gets less. Okay, this is an aside, but I feel like I remember reading somewhere that the publication of police mugshots was a kind of like racial propaganda tool. Yeah, I mean, so the mugshots were originally displayed, not necessarily in like a folder trapped away in a filing cabinet somewhere, but they were called, it was called the Rogues Gallery. It was this big cabinet with outward facing photographs.

29:15And it kind of served the function of a lineup. You know, you would say, hey, I got mugged. And they'd bring you from the Rogues Gallery and then say, do you see your mugger on this wall? And of course, if they're already only arresting, you know, like immigrants and black folks, those are the people they're going to have to compare their memory to. So we've been talking about Flock and Axon and those kind of companies that have like specific business relationships with police departments. And you mentioned this before, but like, what about the Amazon ring of it all?

29:45Like, this is how we members of the public surveil each other. Like, when my wife and I moved into our house, there was a ring camera already installed on the property that we deactivated, of course. But like, where does that technology that people love, right, fit into this conversation? I mean, this is where we are now. Where we are now is that ring has a relationship with Axon, one of the largest providers of police surveillance in America. Axon has a, like, platform on which they can fuse all of the surveillance that the police department has.

30:24They can see the Flock data from here. They can see CCTV camera. But one of the things they can also do is see ring cameras. And if you are opted in to the system, police can click and request on their little map access to your footage with like one or two clicks. Wow. So your ring camera is like one or two permissions away from allowing police to request and access the footage as if your front door camera is part of the surveillance network.

30:59And I think one of the interesting things is there was this huge backlash to the ring commercial at the Super Bowl.

31:14They had this new program called Search Party where you could upload a photo of your dog and it would tap into your neighbor's ring cameras and it would search through them to see if any of them could see your dog. And they put up a map of like, here's your neighborhood, here's all the ring cameras. And I think people didn't like seeing that all of the ring cameras were connected and that people could potentially look through your camera for a purpose other than what you put it up for. And I think this really reflects the growing anger around Flock as well is this understanding that like surveillance is infrastructure.

31:49And you might have agreed to put it up or put it up for a specific purpose, but because they're all connected, you can't always control how it's used. Yeah, this is actually something we were curious about. It's like how much of the current backlash is about that part of it, right? It's about like, I'm like, it might be broadly okay with surveillance, right? But like, not okay with not having agency over how your surveillance tech is working, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think people have this understanding when they go into a store and buy something that it's theirs.

32:25And increasingly with technology, just because you are in charge of and maybe own the physical hardware, doesn't mean that you have any control over the back end. And we see this is as true with Ring as it is with, you know, smart vacuum cleaners or smart refrigerators. And let me tell you, I've been to some of these police conventions where I've seen people talk about what data streams their, you know, police surveillance platforms have access to.

32:56And some of them are buying data from smart home appliances. That is data that's getting funneled into these platforms that police have access to, where it's not just cameras and license plate readers. It's a lot more data streams than you realize. Huh. Okay, so there's obviously, we just talked about this, but there's this big pushback to Flock. Obviously, they're like the name brand in this sector. There's these big organizations pushing back on this. D-Flock is probably the most well-known one. And D-Flock in particular, they're creating maps of these automated license plate readers around the country.

33:31Other people are just getting a vigilante on and just defacing the cameras, obstructing the cameras, just messing with them. So it seems like this anxiety around this kind of tech and privacy has not always been this pronounced. You mentioned the Super Bowl ad and that particular strain of it. But is there something else going on right now that is contributing to this becoming a mainstream concern? Yes. I mean, I think a few things are happening. I think there is a general distrust of tech companies right now.

34:02And I think that's aided by some of the anger around AI and how it's being rolled out. And especially in the surveillance space, how AI is generally seen as being able to increase the capacity of the state to like sift through a tech of a lot of data. I think there is a understanding that any kind of surveillance infrastructure or policing infrastructure even that people put up in their neighborhoods can be utilized by ICE or by the enforcement of the criminalization of abortion in some places.

34:38And people don't want their towns and people don't want their towns and their states to be complicit in that sort of investigation. I think overarching all of this is the increasing understanding that surveillance infrastructure is an opponent of all of these disparate movements who are united basically in the fact that surveillance undermines all of them. So like if you are in the fight for immigrant justice or racial justice or the fight for reproductive rights or the right for protest rights or if you're against gendered violence.

35:16If you think about how police have been using this technology to stalk people, no matter what movement you're in, I think people are coming to the understanding that like everybody has to together oppose surveillance infrastructure.

35:32Matthew Gerviglia is a historian and a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Thank you, Matthew. Thank you. By the way, we reached out to Flock for comment, and they did not get back to us by our deadline.

35:48And y'all, that is our show. But please follow us on Instagram at NPR Code Switch. That's all one word. This episode was produced by Jess Kung. It was edited by Jasmine Romero and Courtney Stein. And we would be remiss, right, if we didn't shut out the rest of the Code Switch Massive. That's Christina Kala, Xavier Lopez, Daya Mortada, Leah Dinella, Kayla Lattimore, Nora Gill, Barton Girdwood, and Yolanda Sanguini. As for me, I'm Gene Demby. And B.A. Parker. Be easy, y'all. Hydrate.