Ronald W. Chapman II, Esq., LL.M. | Nobody Disappears Anymore: 90,000 Cameras, a Vanished General, and the Lawyer Who Beats the Feds | Part 1 of 2

On the morning of February 27th, a retired two-star general walked out of his home in Albuquerque and vanished inside 54 minutes. He left his phone. He left his glasses. He left every device that could have tracked him. More than 700 homes were canvassed. Drones, dogs, helicopters, infrared, the FBI. No sighting. No direction of travel. Nothing.
The man who ran the Air Force Research Laboratory disappeared into a gap that nobody has closed.
Chapman has spent his career forcing the most powerful government on earth to prove itself. In the federal system, fewer than one out of every 100 defendants is acquitted. By age 40 he had won roughly 150 of them. A federal judge called him the most talented trial attorney seen in 20 years on the bench. He once defended a physician accused of causing 11 deaths, and won by exposing the man who decided what killed them.
Tonight he takes us somewhere harder. Into a private network of more than 90,000 cameras that scans 20 billion vehicles a month without a warrant, and the officer who used it to hunt one woman across 83,000 of them. Into a government program to record the whole of a human life, shut down on the exact day a college website launched and quietly did it for us. Into the money that sat inside an off campus Harvard laboratory studying how belief spreads through a crowd.
And into something rarer than any of it. A truth seeker who took a story his own audience desperately wanted to believe, and dismantled most of it on camera, because the evidence would not hold.
He draws a line between a pattern and a collage. A pattern is built from real repetition. A collage is just things laid side by side until your eye invents the rest.
Somebody out there is counting on you never learning the difference.

This is Part 1. Part 2, and all 886 interviews going back to 2008, are at https://veritas7.com/subscribeveritasplus.php