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Michael Soyfer

Michael Soyfer

Aug 11, 2026

2:52
When people say, well, look, what's the big deal? If you're not doing anything wrong, who cares if they're monitoring you?
2:59
I think that gets it exactly backwards.
3:01
The people who aren't doing anything wrong should care the most because their movements, without any suspicion of wrongdoing, are being compiled and collected in a huge government database that officers are searching potentially thousands of times per day.
3:18
I'm suing the city of San Jose on behalf of some residents there.
3:23
And when we looked at their search data, we discovered that all of the people that they had granted access to their database were searching it 15,000 times per day.
3:33
With that volume of searches, there's just no way to make sure that they're all legitimate.
3:39
And we never know how in the future the government might use or abuse these types of databases that are collecting information indiscriminately about law-abiding people.

5 MINS LATER

9:16
I know that you said you're suing one of the cities for people being swept in this So what's being done when it comes to lawmakers of either prohibiting, putting some constraints on this, if anything, across the country?
4:15
There was something nefarious about how they couldn't just walk out of there the way they walked in.
4:21
Right.
4:22
You can check out of the Blackhawk County Jail anytime you want, but you can never leave.
4:27
Unless you sign a confession of judgment, which is what they both did.
4:32
And the confession of judgment sort of operates like a cheat code for state debt collection cases where...
4:39
Instead of having to file a lawsuit and slog through all of the defenses and actually litigate the case and do discovery, they can just file the confession of judgment.
4:50
The confession of judgment says, yeah, I owe this amount of money.

5 MINS LATER

10:02
I guess that's what the district does.

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