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Story: Protesters Confront Ripple Co-Founder Chris Larsen Over $9.4 Million Surveillance Investment

By Dan Saada

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What happened. Activists from the Sunrise Movement showed up outside Chris Larsen's San Francisco home.

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The historical context. Protests over surveillance tech aren't new. When Edward Snowden's documents dropped in the early…

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Why it matters. The implications here run in a few directions at once.

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What to watch. A few things worth tracking from here. The Flock camera network's expansion is the obvious one —…

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Activists from the Sunrise Movement showed up outside Chris Larsen's San Francisco home. They came with flyers, a mock surveillance camera, and pointed questions.

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Larsen, co-founder of Ripple, contributed $9.4 million to support the San Francisco Police Department's Real-Time Investigation Center. That's not a rounding error.

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The flyers and the mock camera weren't subtle. That was the point.

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Protests over surveillance tech aren't new. When Edward Snowden's documents dropped in the early 2010s, they set off a global reckoning about how much data governments were…

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What's different about the Larsen situation is the source of the funding. It's not a government agency pushing this through a budget process with public votes and oversight…

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The implications here run in a few directions at once. On one side, law enforcement gets expanded capability without having to fight for it in public budget debates.

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Related: South Korean Lawmakers Propose Bill to Empower FIU in Crypto Investigations

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But the people who live in the neighborhoods where those cameras point didn't get a vote either.

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It's a genuine disagreement about what public safety even means. Not a simple one.

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The Larsen situation also puts a spotlight on how much influence private wealth can quietly buy in shaping city policy. He's not an elected official. He didn't run on a platform.

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The Sunrise Movement's broader argument — that tech-driven surveillance is being sold as a solution to problems that are fundamentally social — probably won't land with everyone.

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