There are currently over 82 million surveillance cameras in the United States. Add in 100,000 Flock Safety automated license plate readers (ALPR), millions of Ring doorbells, and municipal CCTV networks, and it is mathematically (?) impossible to leave your house without being logged into a database.

So in order to learn about them, I spent 7 days trying to avoid them.

This required abandoning my car, walking through Minneapolis with a bedsheet over my head, and eventually strapping a live-streaming flat-screen TV to my back to become completely invisible to facial recognition software. It worked on the cameras. But it did not make me invisible to my neighbors.

The youtube video above explores the rapid, unchecked expansion of America's mass surveillance grid. We look into how Flock cameras actually operate, how local police departments justify ALPR data collection, the reality of false arrests from AI tracking, and how these local neighborhood databases are quietly being utilized by federal agencies like ICE.

I also address the aftermath of my last video, where I used a drone to map North Oaks, Minnesota... the only city in America to scrub itself from Google Maps. I had to make a decision about the future of those images, which I explain at the end of this video.

This whole story started when I was 23, living in Los Angeles, doing research for a documentary series that I was about to film.

The show was called “Off the Cuff,” and each episode was a short doucmentary that explored an interesting, strange, or fascinating community in America. My co-creator and I went to the World’s largest role-playing festival in Pennsylvania, we explored a town of people that live in these beautiful houses made of garbage (check out Earthships, they are pretty cool), and even rode along with Chicago’s underground street racers.

At the time, I was sharing a one-bedroom apartment (sleeping in the living room on what was essentially an army cot) and was barely (I mean, BARELY) scraping by financially.

So, the idea of filming this exclusive, private city in the north suburbs sounded enticing. We added North Oaks, MN to our list of over 1,000 places we’d hope to someday film.

It also helped that both the co-creator of Off the Cuff and myself are from Minnesota. Had we heard of North Oaks when we grew up… sure, but didn’t think much of it until it was framed as a potential documentary topic.

OMG I’m telling this in SUCH a long-winded way… whatever. Let’s keep going.

The idea sat on the Google doc untouched for a few years. Maybe it was the fact that we WERE from Minnesota, made it less alluring?

Regardless, I moved back to Minnesota, got married, had a kid, and eventually slowly (and I mean SLOWLY) got back into making Youtube videos… this time under my own channel called Chris the Producer (a character I had made in college, oh man I should make a post about this sometime).

At the same time, I was helping John O’Sullivan out with his fast-growing social media company called One Minute Tours (oh man, I should make a post about THIS sometime). One Minute Tours was the largest social media channel in Minnesota ABOUT Minnesota. We did what we called “virtual map tours” where I recorded his computer screen and recorded him talking to the camera about various geographic oddities in Minnesota.

His video about North Oaks was the most viewed tiktok, by far.

I assume you’re reading this having already watched my video about North Oaks…

But in case you haven’t (and don’t want to watch that link right there ^ … here’s a quick recap… North Oaks is the only city in America that is not on Google maps Streetview. This is because it is an entirely private municipality, believed to be the only city like it in the country.

The land, purchased by James J. Hill, a railroad magnate from Minnesota (and the Elon Musk of the 1800s), was his hobby farm.

Through generations the land got passed down until it Hill’s grandchildren took ownership of the land. They created a subdivision that was to be a city unlike any other, designed to combat urban sprawl, preserve nature, and be a model for residential communities across the country. Pretty cool, right?

As a result, the property was structured in a way where there was NO public easement. In other words, there was no public access… via roads, water or sidewalks.

So, in 2008 when Google put the entire country onto Google Streetview… North Oaks’ mayor sent the tech company a cease and desist, citing that the Streetview vehicle had trespassed. And it’s true, they did, which they acknowledged by removing the Streetview images.

This is such a good story. It sets up North Oaks as the underdog who defeated a billion dollar tech giant.

I had tried to convince John (the One Minute Tours guy) to make a video about North Oaks, but for whatever reason my pitch didn’t stick with him.

So I set off to tell this story. And it wasn’t until I had started writing a script for the video that I had the idea to attempt to put North Oaks onto the map myself. I had realized that anybody like you or I can add 360 photosphere images to Google maps. Basically, Streetview.

I figured, this would be the perfect vehicle to tell North Oaks’ story.

Then, a professor I was interviewing brought up that oftentimes, airplanes, helicopters, or drones capture 360 images to put onto Google maps.

I had a bit of knowledge of drones over the years, and truth be told, had been studying to take my FAA part 107 drone test for quite some time, but didn’t have a concrete reason to fully commit and sign up to take a test to become a licensed drone pilot.

Until now.

If I could pass the test, I could launch my drone from outside of North Oaks, then fly into the PUBLIC airspace above the city, because the airspace above North Oaks is regulated by the FAA, not by the city below.

So that’s just what I did.

It took me an entire day to do this, stopping at several spots along each of the 4 main roads (public roads, btw) that border North Oaks.

Then found a website called moomoo.me where I could upload the images to Google Streetview. It took a few days for the images to get vetted (?) by Google until they appeared on the map.

Finally, the Streetview map was complete.

I scrambled to finish the video to post onto my Chris the Producer Youtube channel.

The reason I scrambled is because I got my first Youtube sponsor for this North Oaks video… Flexispot, a standing desk company. They legit make nice desks. I took the sponsor because I gave the desk to William, a friend of mine, in exchange for his drone (I can’t believe I’ve never said that before, that’s hilarious). Anyway, I promised Flexispot I’d post the video on January 15th.

The deal I arranged with Flexispot was that they’d pay me $600 to insert an ad (that I had to make) into my video about North Oaks. AND they would pay an additional $800 if the video received 100,000 views in the first 90 days.

I promise this is going somewhere.

One week after posting, the video had 4,000 views. It wasn’t going to make it to the $800 bonus.

I felt I had made a compelling video… it just wasn’t grabbing for whatever reason. In order to not get into the ins and outs of the Youtube algorithm… nobody knows why things go viral, and why things DON’T go viral.

But, I had an idea… actually my brother had an idea. He was telling me FOREVER to make vertical content (I hate that word but whatever), you know… tiktoks, youtube shorts, instagram reels. A condensed version of the long-form video.

So I took an entire day to rewrite the story to fit into one minute, and recut the video to be vertical.

Then, posted it to Youtube.

You ever see movie scenes where someone posts something and the views take off? The numbers tick up and up and up exponentially, reaching millions and millions of people? Yeah, that didn’t happen. At least right away.

Slowly but surely, the video got served to more and more people.

And again, nobody knows why things go viral. Sure there’s tricks you can do, story structures you can follow, and motion graphics that make things visually appealing… but at the end of the day, you just never know.

But in this case, I can pinpoint one fact that sold this video… it was the fact that North Oaks is the wealthiest town in Minnesota. I included that in the video because I thought it was a unique fact about North Oaks. Simple as that.

What I didn’t realize is that would be the very thing that attracted thousands and thousands of comments. Comments advocating we ‘eat the rich’ and gave me sympathy for doing something ethically questionable, in mapping this city with a drone. This (I think?) is was made the video take off and receive tens of millions of views.

And yeah, I got my $800 bonus from Flexispot.

In the aftermath, I was kind of waiting for a response from the city of North Oaks. After all, I had tried pretty hard to get an interview with a city official but they ultimately declined all of my requests.

Finally, a few weeks after publishing, I got a legal letter from the law firm representing the North Oaks HOA (the city is managed by an HOA). It was 2 pages long, reading like an academic paper (this is how lawyers write, I guess… it was my first time receiving a legal letter so I wouldn’t know), which cited a trespassing law and basically said ‘don’t come back.’

I didn’t plan to. But I was a bit worried, because they demanded I respond within 10 days of notice.

So I scrambled to find a lawyer. And yeah I called around different law firms INSIDE of North Oaks… I thought that’d be funny.

And maybe it was, but what really sold it was when “North Oaks Law” returned my call and quoted me a $10,000 retainer. The guy obviously didn’t know I was working with a $1500 budget (thanks again, Flexispot).

Eventually I got ahold of a family friend, who requested that I not share his name (thanks ***** ********). I was back and forth on how to respond, and frankly a bit concerned. I’d never been in this situation before and didn’t want to risk the removal of these videos.

After a long call, we mutually decided to draft and send a simple letter in response that literally just said “Sounds good.”

Because, I didn’t want to provoke them… I didn’t want to escalate things… I just wanted to satisfy their demand for a response. So that - to me - was the perfect way to respond.

Oh, I also made another ‘short’ video all about this. And honestly, that was strategic… I wanted North Oaks to know that my greatest defense against them wasn’t a lawyer (they’d win that fight), it was public opinion. And my greatest tool was a youtube video.

That video also got millions of views.

And I haven’t heard from them since. And honestly, I like North Oaks, I think they do a lot of things right. They have a great trail system, they did defeat the largest technology company at the time, and Walter Mondale (he lived there for a bit) is pretty cool I think.

But one thing stood out to me about North Oaks… which I discovered only from the Youtube comments, was that they had these things called Flock cameras.

I actually had never heard of these before, but after a quick google search, I found out that they are cameras that feed images to the police department, can be hacked super easily, and also you can legally obtain data via a public record request.

You can’t make this up… a city that prides themselves on privacy… has Flock cameras set up at every major entrance and exit to their city, quite literally invading their own privacy.

So, I made a video all about Flock cameras… which is in another post on this Substack and on my youtube channel. And also here ⌄

The process of learning about America’s surveillance system shook me. Yeah, I did a stupid stunt by trying to evade these cameras for a week. But I did learn a lot about the dangers that we will almost certainly encounter in the coming years.

And I realized that maybe I WAS in the wrong. Even if I wasn’t, it was up for debate. And I don’t want to be on the wrong side of this mass surveillance debate. So I didn’t want to take any chances… I removed the Streetview images of North Oaks from Google maps (except one photo of my flying my drone).

And I immediately reuploaded them to this site called mapillary, an open source mapping project (free from Big Tech!). So if you really want to, you can go view images of North Oaks. But honestly, it’s pretty boring.

And I guess that’s the end of the story… for now.

But can wildlife and the DNR keep up with the increase in fish being caught as a result of fishing most game-changing innovation ever: forward facing sonar? To answer this quesiton, I investigated our obsession with fishing funds the very system that keeps it possible and the infinite loop of fish, tech, and taxpayer dollars… and my father-in-law caught a huge Musky (the fish of 10,000 casts) while doing it.

After watching, you’ll never walk through the MN State Fair the same way again.

And yeah, the Minnesota State Fair is bigger than Texas’s.

There’s one state that hasn’t won a championship (actually hasn’t even participated in a finals/championship) in 127 seasons.

127 SEASONS without winning it all.

Any guesses who it is?

It’s Minnesota.

Home of the MN Vikings (0 Superbowls), the MN Timberwolves (0 Finals as the Lakers moved out of Minnesota to a city without lakes), the MN Wild (0 Stanley Cups as the North Stars moved to the furthest state in the South) and the MN Twins (who were the last Minnesota sports team to win anything, a World Series in 1991).

If you take skill out of the equation and calculate at random all 4 teams missing the championship… there’s a 1 in 6,416 chance of this happening 127 times in a row.

That’s a 0.0015% chance.

I’m a Minnesota sports fan (go Wild) so I wanted to get to the bottom of this. 

So… I hired a psychic. Her name is Ruth Lordan and funny enough she’s already had some sports experience. She once gave the coach of the Vikings a crystal globe and they won 6 games in a row.

Her take surprised me. She claimed that Minnesota hasn’t won a major championship because the venues that these capitalist entities sit on are on stolen native land. Or in other words, the land is not blessed. So Idid what any fan would do and tried to break the curse, by contacting the team owners to arrange a Native American blessing.

Anyway I made a video all about this. It’s called Americas record sports curse. And maybe this is the year it finally ends (seriously, go Wild).