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Flock, Palantir & the Caribbean Boat Strikes: Due Process in 2026

  • Writer: Jeff Kellick
    Jeff Kellick
  • 5 days ago
  • 2 min read

I Built Surveillance Systems for a Living. This Should Scare You.



Four scenes, four machines, one thing missing from all of them. A man held on a London street because a camera misread his face. An American officer using a police camera network to track an ex-partner. A man in China arranging his expression for a lens that reads emotion. And a small boat in the Caribbean, everyone aboard killed by a missile — no warrant, no charge, no trial. What connects them is the thing a defeated king was forced to concede in a wet English meadow eight hundred years ago: that power may not simply reach out and take you — your privacy, your property, your liberty, or your life — without a process it does not own.


This episode takes Magna Carta's clause 39 and holds it against the modern machinery of deprivation: China's emotion-recognition experiments, London's unlegislated live facial recognition, Flock's twenty-billion-scans-a-month license-plate dragnet, Palantir's data integration, and finally the 2025–2026 boat strikes that have killed more than two hundred people with no trial. Midway through, the host does something these episodes rarely do — he tells you he spent decades building this technology, and explains exactly where he believes the line runs. The strongest counterargument — necessity — is then stated at full strength and answered with the medieval hammer: necessity is the eternal argument, the exact one every king made for suspending the law.


This is Episode 4B of "Self-Evident: The Road to 1776," the Tuesday contemporary-application companion to Saturday's "Higher Law — Medieval Foundations."


The question underneath all of it: did this leave Americans more free, or more governed?


⏱️ CHAPTERS

[00:00] Prologue: The Cost of a False Positive

[04:16] Introduction: Due Process Then and Now

[06:48] Defining Due Process: A Mechanism, Not a Feeling

[08:40] Bracton's Legacy: The Law Makes the King

[15:45] The Modern Temptation: Reversing the Flow of Authority

[20:32] The Surveillance State: A Hypothetical That Isn't

[30:30] A Different Kind of Check: Process Standing Between Individual and State

[34:48] The Danger of Necessity: The Oldest Argument for Tyranny

[41:14] The Consequential Choice: Law Over the Apparatus

[52:00] Outro


📚 Companion — Article 4 and Saturday's Episode 4.


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