Flock Came to My Town. Here’s What I Did

0:01This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. frankly i'm more scared of stuff like this the idea that you can walk around you have no idea if you're being filmed i hate it and it's terrifying and it's going to change how we all act and behave in public it sucks

0:42hello and welcome to the 404 media podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to both online and irl 404 media is a journalist-centered company and needs your support to subscribe, go to 404media.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Get access to that content at 404media.co. Also, do remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel where you can watch all of our episodes, including this one. Subscribe at youtube.com slash at 404media.co. I'm your host, Joseph, And with me are 404 Media co-founders, Sam Cole.

1:24Hey. And Jason Kebler. Hello. And we also have regular contributor, Matthew Gull. Hello. Before we get to this week's stories, this week on Thursday the 30th at 1pm Eastern, we are hosting our latest FOIA forum. This is a hour, probably two hour, realistically live stream where me and Jason walk 404 Media subscribers through how to get records from the government. We've done this for emails, body camera footage, audio, Slack chats, all sorts of things. Jason, what are we going to talk about this time? Yeah, I think we're going to focus on how to watch city council meeting, which is not necessarily a hard thing to do, but sort of like conceptually how to think about them, how to search information on them because city council meetings are often three hours long or more.

2:27There is usually a lot of throat clearing. There's usually a lot of discussion about whether to approve a permit for an apartment complex or cut a tree down. A lot of stuff that is relevant to the local community but might not be relevant if you're a journalist or if you're someone looking for a specific thing. So we're going to talk about how we approach it. There's also So every city has a different system that it uses for uploading and archiving them. So how to search them and then also how to take things that happen at city council meetings and then file public records requests based on the back of that.

3:04So there's a bunch of different systems. We'll go through a few recent articles that we've done and some general thoughts about how to do this. Yeah. And we show you how to file public records requests. We'll probably go through some previous ones we have going. And if you are a 404 Media subscriber, you'll also get access to the whole archive of FOIA forums where we've spoken about court records or getting police emails or anything like that. We have ideas for other ones in the future, focused on fusion centers and then some other stuff as well. So if you want to join that, again, that is Thursday, July 30th at 1pm Eastern.

3:44Check the website and it'll be in the show notes for the link to the live stream. And if you can't make it for whatever reason, you can watch the video later. But speaking of city council meetings, that brings us to this first story that Matt wrote. The headline is, what happened when flock came to my town? So I'm going to ask you, Matthew, about the specifics of your particular town and how it impacted things there and what you did. and then I'll throw to Jason for some of the broader context. But first of all, just describe your town. How big are we talking here? Or how small are we talking?

4:24It's pretty small. It's 12 ,000 people. And it's one of these places, I think there's a lot of these kinds of places in America where it's kind of in a ring of other suburbs in suburban sprawl. So kind of on the edges of Columbia, which is the capital city of South Carolina. and it's basically like a couple of major streets and a bunch of suburbs kind of all linked together and called a town. And the unincorporated area is kind of around it. And yeah, it's only 12 ,000 people. But it has a mayor, it has a city council. We have an okra strut every year. I mean, that's the most important part. The okra strut is, we get a guy in an okra costume and there's a parade down one of the major streets and people strut because okra is one of the major agricultural products.

5:19I just cooked okra for the first time on Friday. How did you do it? I sauteed it for a while and then I turned it into a coconut curry with cod. That's good. And then put over rice. I think it was pretty good. I never made okra. I didn't know it was slimy, but I also didn't mind that. I thought it was good. I mean, if you cook it right, you don't mind the slime so much. I like okra. Well, this okra parade, or however you described it... Strut. It's a strut. Sorry, sorry. The okra strut is presumably why your town needs automatic license plate reader cameras, which constantly gain the license plate of all the people in okra costumes walking by them.

6:03So your town already has flock cameras. 11. Right. In the context of this story, they wanted more. Can you just give us sort of the beforehand? You said they had 11. Like, when did they first come in? And like, what were they being used for sort of before this meeting that we're going to talk about? They came in about two years ago. You know, it's the same thing that flock cameras are used for everywhere, which is tracking the movements of people coming in and out. And I actually looked through the audit logs. It's a little bit of everything. There's like domestic disturbance cases. They're tracking somebody that's leaving different scenes.

6:43There's traffic violation stuff. I saw that there were flock searches involved in like an embezzlement case. I mean, it really is just kind of everything. Yeah, right. And now they want more, which brings us to this city council meeting where the city council has a vote, right? And if it passes, they'll install these cameras or something. So you went to this meeting just recently. And we'll get to what you said in a little bit. But first of all, just what was the vibe of the meeting, both from other residents who were there, but then the city council itself? What was the vibe when you went in?

7:21Combative. Bad. I will say there was one resident, it was an older woman, who was the last person to speak during public comments, who was pro-cameras and seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of all of the police calls that she had made over the past five years. But other than that, and there's like more than 10, were people very, very, very angry about block cameras being installed. Did not want the previous 11, did not want the 22 new ones that were being installed, and had fairly decent working knowledge of how these things work, Fourth Amendment questions around them. Does this constitute an unlawful warrant or a lawful search and seizure?

8:08And had been watching the Supreme Court cases and spoke to that and kind of just understood what Flock was about and why they didn't want it. And I mean, I don't expect you to go through all of these people's particular criticisms or issues with Flock, but generally, why did they not want this stuff? Was it like what they perceived as a waste of money? Was it a privacy issue? I mean, it sounds like the latter. It was the latter. I don't think I heard one person. I mean, maybe like one or two were like, why are we spending money on this? But overwhelmingly, it was, this is a violation of my privacy.

8:44This is part of a long thing that we've seen in this country where there's more cameras and we're being monitored more and more. And some of it we've opted into with our phones. But if we know about it, if we know about it. But a lot of this is like governments putting up cameras in places that they don't trust. And a couple people also made the point of like, our town isn't very violent. It's 12 ,000 people. Why are we doing this? This is crazy. It's so many cameras. It would be 33 cameras. I think with the total number of cameras, wasn't it that there would be more cameras than police officers?

9:21Is that right? Yeah, there's 29 officers. Right. And so there would be 33 cameras. So there'd be more cameras than officers, about one camera for every 300 residents in the town. And I think the police chief went on to say, or maybe they said this at an earlier point, that these new cameras, if they were installed, would mean that all of the entrances and exits to the town would be covered, which is something that's very attractive to law enforcement with Flock, of course, because it's not just monitoring movements of people and vehicles inside the town, but if you see anybody coming or going, that's going to be useful information to them.

10:00And that's the same sort of thing where homeowners associations buy these cameras as well, sort of for their private use. And of course, they may share data with law enforcement after the fact. But that was sort of the reasoning from the police chief, right? Yeah. He said this in interviews before and during the meeting, that explicitly he wanted to be able to cover all of the entrances and exits of the town, which is really... And again, I can't stress this enough, that it's like a couple of major streets and some suburbs going off of it. So when I look at the map, there's one of them that is across the street from a CVS that is part of the town just by dent of like, it happened to be a piece of it that was incorporated.

10:48And so they put a flock camera there. It is really one of these places where when you cross the road, suddenly you're in a different town. You know what I mean? Right. you're kind of in this urban sprawl area and you're putting a bunch of lock cameras around your little section of the urban sprawl. Yeah. Suburban sprawl rather than urban sprawl, which kind of makes it sillier to me. Gotcha. So you also signed up for this local city council meeting. I think you spoke first, actually. I did because I signed up. I sent them an email telling them I was coming beforehand, so they put me on the list first.

11:25Do people usually just rock up and sort of just like get in line and you're like the only one who like bothered to email? Yeah, I mean, this is my first city council meeting that I've attended or done anything like this in person. And I was thinking about it when I heard the thing was coming along. I was like, do I have a responsibility? Should I do this? Right, because we've covered it a bunch. Right, we've covered it a bunch. I know this information. I know more than the average person about this stuff. This is the place that I live. Should I do this? And I was like, yeah, I guess I should. I can't expect other people to fight if I'm not willing to do the basics of giving people information.

12:07So I signed up. And yeah, apparently, everyone else just walked up and put their names on the sign-up sheet. And I emailed and called because I'm a nerd and got on the list. And so I walk in and they've got the sheet printed up with my name printed up on it. And everyone else is just signing in below. So yes, I was the first to go up. And what stuff did you talk about? Because you threw to some of our... Well, a lot of our reporting over the years at this point. What were some of the things that you thought was worthwhile residents knew about? Because not everybody in your town is going to read for media, presumably.

12:46No. What I did was Flock had a closed door meeting with the city council on the 7th of July. And there were some of the minutes from that had published basically like a summary of what they had talked about. And I knew that one of the concerns for one of the city council members was like data security. And so that's kind of what I really, you know, I wanted to highlight data security. and so I kind of went in at the beginning with the story from earlier this year that y 'all did with the access to the Condor cameras being exposed and people being able to jump in and kind of watch them just by looking in a web portal and I went through the audits and was just like, look, it's very easy to pull up and I went and looked and I was like, here's our searches in June.

13:37Here's what they were looking for. Here's exactly when they happened and just wanted them to be very aware that the data security around this stuff is not super tight. Then my plan was to then transition to how they make mistakes. And I had written a little thing, but my presentation was about five minutes, but they only gave me three minutes. So it's kind of cutting in the moment. At which point you were arrested and escorted from the building. No, obviously you weren't. But I know that there's a non-zero chance of that when, of course, I'm referring to what you reported a bunch when that farmer was escorted from speaking ever so slightly over his allotted time about a data center.

14:16They were very polite. There was, they had a timer up on the wall. I went over and I think she was, a woman sitting next to the police chief turned around and was like, your time is up. I was like, okay. Sure. So you do that of a resident speak. What was the vote? What did they vote to do? Well, they voted four to one to install the cameras. And it's kind of a contingent. It was interesting because the mayor made a big speech about why they need the cameras. And he opened the speech with being very mad at... He says he's being bullied on social media a lot about this topic. And people are posting comments that are mean to him on Facebook.

15:02And he knew some of those people were in the room. But it's going to take more than that to get him to back down. The guy that voted against also talked at length and kind of explained the stuff about, he's like, I know that people are being tracked on their phones and their purchases and all this stuff, but he's like, at least there's a sense of like opting into that. Like, you can find out that information. If you don't want to be a part of that, there's ways that you can work around it. Like, this is like we're taking people's choice away. And he was also concerned about, there's two plans on the books.

15:34One is just the 22 cameras. Another is if the city gets some money from the state, it's also going to buy one of Flock's drones for a drones as first responder thing. And the city councilman that voted against was concerned about how the footage from that drone might be used and if that would be a privacy violation. Yeah, I mean, we haven't covered the drones, Flock's drones, a ton. I have spoken to Flock current and former employees about it. And they do have some concerns about it. But yes, essentially that when there is an emergency call, a law enforcement agency or some sort of first responder can deploy this drone or go out there and provide live footage and then recorded footage as well.

16:26And of course, this is a big push of Flock to provide not just the license plate reader stuff, but sort of an all-in-one suite of tools where they love to use, and I mean the industry broadly, loves to use the term sort of single pane of glass where you'll have your license plate reader data there. You'll have information from the 911 call. And with Flock, you'll have this drone, the footage as well. So as you say, they're planning on purchasing one of those as well. If they can get money from someone else to pay for it. Yes. Gotcha. That's the plan. So that vote happens. I guess not surprising given some of the comments from the mayor and the police chief and that sort of thing.

17:07But the reason that I think this is interesting and important is that this is a snapshot of what is happening all across the country, right? This is like a microcosm of what is happening all over the place. Jason, you've watched a ton of these meetings. You've read transcripts from them. You've reported on them. give us some sense of like, what's the scale of this around the country? Is this like a constant, the sort of meetings that Matthew went to? These meetings are happening every single day at this point. They are happening in essentially any town that has flock or is considering flock, which is good and is a change.

17:50I mean, it's hard to quantify because one thing I've learned reporting on all of this is that there's a lot of towns in the United States of America. It's like... It is crazy. I say this all the time. It's just like... It's a big country. Yeah, you've never heard of this town, but people are having this exact same conversation there. It is crazy to me. Yeah, I mean, it's obviously like this conversation is being had in big cities that have millions of people. But then also, this sounds probably very obvious, but if you don't live in the United States, and also just like if you live in a big city or like have your head in the sand, don't really know how things work.

18:29It's like the United States is made up of like unincorporated places and townships and like, of course, like cities and villages and things like this. And so when we were talking earlier about their, like about our FOIA forum, it's like in some places, the county is buying the FLOC cameras. In other places, the town is buying the FLOC cameras. In other places, it's like the state highway patrol, like so on and so forth. And each of these government bodies has some sort of meeting. And sometimes there is a meeting about how to appropriate funds and whether to buy flock cameras or any surveillance device.

19:11But then in other places, the police have what's known as a discretionary fund where they are able to just buy technology that they want, usually with no public oversight whatsoever. And so a lot of flock cameras were installed around the country without any sort of meeting. But what has happened over the last few months, as people have learned more and more about this company, they've been demanding meetings about the contracts and about flock cameras. And so you're starting to see a lot more cities and towns and villages and counties have these meetings about whether they should buy flawed cameras in the first place.

19:52But then you're also seeing a lot of cities have meetings about whether they should renew the contract, whether they should cancel the contracts, whether they should renegotiate them to have different protections, things like this. And so there have been... There's meetings like this happening constantly, essentially. It's hard to quantify because doing any sort of study of what cities are doing is really difficult because we have a good sense of how many cities have FLOC. And there's this open source effort through DFLOC to determine where the FLOC cameras are and all this. But again, the United States is vast and is a complicated mix of state, city, local, and federal governments.

20:42And so figuring out who owns a FLOC camera, who approved it, why it's up can be difficult. And so that's why it's important that this movement has been so decentralized and that it's been local residents organizing to figure out who the contract is with and then push back against them. And so these are happening all the time. People are showing up as an overall percentage of the population. Of course, it's not that much. But again, I've watched a lot of city council meetings. Basically, my mom used to videotape city council meetings for a small city in Maryland for decades. And so as a seven-year-old, I would go to these meetings sometimes if she didn't have a babysitter, if my dad wasn't home or something.

21:34And I would sit there and I got a sense for how these things work just through osmosis, basically. And so when I say I've seen a lot of city council meetings, I mean, I've seen a lot of city council meetings over the course of my life. You're not exaggerating. Yeah. And so usually no one shows up to these. A standard city council meeting, there will be... It's like an episode of Parks and Rec, if you've ever watched Parks and Rec. And there will be an old man who comes to every single one and complains about a crosswalk not being put in place or something like that. Really esoteric stuff. And they'll beef about it.

22:19But for the most part, these things are not usually well attended. They're super long. They're super boring. Usually there's a public comment period for anything that's happening in the city. And you'll have a handful of people who show up, like two, three, four, something like that. Even in bigger cities. unless there's some sort of hot button issue happening. And it's not always Flock. Sometimes it's something like, we're going to build a pickleball court. That's an early story that we did on 404 Media. It was like, pickleball has become quite controversial. And so people will come up and shout at each other about the noise and things like that.

22:59But Flock has become one of those hot button issues where when they do a meeting, it's not like one or two people show up. It's like 50 people show up and a lot of them talk and many of them use up all their time. And sometimes there's special meetings being called just for this issue. So this is something that's happening over and over and over again. And it's something we've been covering because often these meetings go off the rails where you You have people who are mad, understandably so. But then you have varying levels of politicians either taking... Crashing out. Either crashing out or voting down Flock.

23:46It is a mixed bag. A lot of cities have canceled the contracts. And so they have city council members who have informed themselves on the privacy concerns, on the concerns of this data filtering up to ICE, things like that. And then you have cities and towns that are just really flock-pilled. They're just like, this can be used to find stolen cars. This can be used to find criminals. And they are the ones who tend to crash out because they are like, we don't understand why all of our residents are mad at us. We're keeping this. Fuck you. Goodbye. And so it's really been a mixed bag in terms of how these meetings go.

24:25I would say largely the experience is similar to what Matt had, I think, where all of the residents who come to speak are mad about this. And then the politicians are like, oh, that's nice. We're getting them anyway. That's what happened in Dunwoody. And it's like, it will be very... Dunwoody is in Georgia, which we covered quite recently. But basically, they've had a flock for a really long time, and the residents are really outraged. And the city council is like, we don't care. We're keeping them. But basically, it will be interesting to see whether the politicians who ignore this issue, who are like, hey, we're keeping them anyway, whether they face consequences the next time they're up for re-election.

25:14Because this has become such a hot button issue. I'm curious if we're going to see a bunch of people run on sort of like a pro-privacy, anti-surveillance platform around the country. I think we're starting to see it already. I have a small anecdote to follow up on that. So afterwards, in people milling about outside of the city hall, the guy that voted against, the city councilman that voted against the flock cameras was doing some direct-to-camera stuff with somebody. And the mayor came up and was like, you're not authorized to speak on behalf of Vermo about this. They got into a little bit of a fight.

25:57And then another resident who was filming it yelled at the mayor and said that we should have a recall election. And now that guy who's running for city council has set up pages. It is like doing a push to get on the council as part of an anti-flock agenda. Jason, I was just going to say, have you heard of paddle ball? It's the thing that's going to replace pickleball. I've heard of paddle tennis, which is you use a paddle and a tennis ball instead of a pickleball. But this new one I've seen rumblings of, I feel like it's going to be the new thing. we need to send a bunch of public records requests on.

26:35Wait, what's it called? Maybe I'm mispronouncing it. P-A-D-E-L. Paddle. Yeah, I know paddle. I've seen this. I've seen this. It's in like a glass container. And the construction is obviously a lot more invasive and single use than a tennis court or a pickle court. So I think it's going to piss off a lot more people. You see what I mean? Because if you build that, you can't use it for anything else. Yeah, I think this is paddle tennis. Like as in, I think it's not called paddle tennis. I think it's called paddle, like you are correct. But I just call it paddle tennis because there's like a tennis ball involved.

27:14Yeah. Yes. Interesting. Can I ask a stupid question just because I don't know. Why is pickleball worse than like a tennis court? Jason? It's louder is the thing. It's like basically what happened, I mean, we did a whole episode about this, which is like long ago. But basically the sound of the like hard paddle, like a solid paddle hitting a wiffle ball, like it makes just like a loud noise and it happens all the time because as in it's like a shorter court. So it's like constant kind of, and you can also fit more pickleball courts in a smaller spot. And so basically, it's like NIMBYism gone wild, where it's like people living really close to these things are like, I can't sleep.

28:08My kids can't sleep. We had anecdotes of people taking decibel readers, sound readers out into their backyards being like, oh my God, this is so loud. And it's not that loud. And it's also... It's funny. I mean, this is not an episode about Pickleball, but it has just quickly become one. I'm going to put it in the show notes. It'll be fun. It's popular with older people for the most part, although younger people are getting into it. But basically, it's wealthy homeowners versus other wealthy homeowners. And so you have the NIMBY wars. And it's been quite funny. I haven't kept up on it. This is something we did soon after we launched 404 Media.