Guess Who Ran Into Technical Difficulties This Week?

Oh man, is this embarrassing.

Our January 16, 2026, episode is finished, but it has a few audio problems. I haven't uploaded it just yet. We're working to fix those problems and will get it online as soon as possible. I am hopeful it will be up this weekend.

Why the delay? It happened because of a comedy of errors.

Starting with my getting sick after helping to organize a protest that saw almost 700 attendees (pictured above), followed by Andrew traveling at the same time and being unable to work on the episodes as he usually does. As far as the protest goes, both the organizers and the Chester Village Police came up with the 700-attendee figure independently of each other, counting about 150 inside the Chester Village Board meeting and another 400 outside at the rally. I was live streaming some of the rally before the meeting started and made the fatal mistake of not wearing gloves. After a solid hour outside, I couldn't feel my hands; hence, I got sick.

What were we protesting? An ICE concentration camp that's within spitting distance of my parents' house. Special thanks to the Mid-Hudson DSA for the photo and their help. Many different groups came together over a few days to organize that protest. I was happy to play a tiny part in it and in the future actions planned, for what has now become national news. (I was the one who broke the story last week that Carl Icahn is the owner of the former Pep Boys facility that is being converted into an ICE facility.)

We'll talk more about the protest in a minute.

This week's episode is another panel discussion—like our previous one with our friends at Clemson University's Human Assisted Technology Lab, which you can listen to here. The panel discussion episodes are fun to do but also very difficult in terms of editing because there are multiple participants. So, between my being sick and Andrew traveling, it was difficult to put together as planned.

We've tried our best to be two to three weeks ahead of where our listeners are. But adding to our comedy of errors, I swapped next week's episode with this week's episode to help our friends at StopGenAI.com launch a Kickstarter for Haven. Haven, in short, protects your face from facial recognition databases like PimEyes and protects your original art from being stolen by generative AI art models. It's a project we're really excited about, and we hope you'll check it out while we're waiting to get the new episode up. You can learn more about Haven in the video above.

We also want to give a shout out to Kim Crawley, and her book, the Technofascism Survival Guide, which you can — and should — check out here on Kickstarter.

So, all those things sort of conspired together to land us here. I suppose it happens, but it's no less embarrassing. As I write this, Andrew is reviewing the audio to help repair it.

We both apologize for the inconvenience.

Now, about that protest ...

You'll notice on the Privacy Tips page there is a hashtag for #Activism.

Originally, I was planning to do this whole thing with OSINT for Privacy Tips, but given the proximity of the concentration camp to my parent's house, and that its existence is a national news story along with the existence of other mini "processing sites" throughout America, I'm going to switch gears and focus on protest and activism for a while.

Then, I'll move to OSINT and some of the other categories you see on there for our sister show, Privacy Tips.

I hope you don't mind much. I was excited to do the OSINT stuff because I'm an investigative reporter, and I also love teaching people how to do things. But that will have to wait for now.

This is a long way of saying, starting next Tuesday, if you want to protest peacefully and non-violently, but you're not sure how to get started or what to do, we'll give you some ideas on Privacy Tips.

We already covered how humor is the best weapon against fascism here.

And how storytelling is an effective tool you can utilize in part 1 and part 2 here.

We know things are crazy out there. They are likely to get crazier still. So I want to close by reminding you of something that's become a cliche, but no less true: You have more power than you know. Even if it's just picking up your phone and calling your elected officials, that's powerful. Everyone can help win the fight to make our planet a safer, welcoming, and friendlier place to be.

-BJ