Flock is Tracking People, Not Just Cars

0:29This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. another car and caused three people to die. And it had not a scratch on it, but they still arrested her. This woman spent 13 days in jail because she was falsely arrested.

1:00is also get access to additional episodes where we respond to the best comments. Gain access to that content at 404media.co. Also, 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 the other 404 Media co-founders, the first being Sam Cole. Hey. Emmanuel Mayberg. Hello. And Jason Kebler. Hi. All right. So we are having, well, not just one event, two events to celebrate our third anniversary coming up. Sam, what are these two events? And of course, there will be a link directly to get tickets and the descriptions in the show notes.

1:47But what are we talking about, Sam? What are we doing? Yeah, we are throwing down in NYC in September. So we're turning three, end of August, early September. So we are going to throw two events. One of them is a live taping of the podcast. It's going to be talks. We're going to have Becky and Matthew Galt from The Abstract and 4-4 come and speak. So you get to meet them and hear them talk about their coverage areas, which are like science and data centers and all that kind of good stuff. So that'll be on September 3rd at the Green Space, which is a WNYC event space. It's in like the Chelsea area, if you're interested.

2:24That'll be September 3rd. And then on September 4th, next night, which is a Friday, we're going to go to Three's Brewing and have a big party. So come get a drink on us, come hang out. That's just going to be like a more casual hangout to celebrate three years. So subscribers get half off their ticket to 4For Media Live. If you're a subscriber at the supporter level, you can check your membership at 4formedia.co slash membership. 50 % off the live taping. For the party, you get into the party for free if you're a supporter level or subscriber. But there's various ways you can get into this party.

2:57You can pay full price if you want to also. But all of that information is at 4formedia.co slash three dash years. And you also just go to the website and find it. But yeah, it'll be in the show notes, all the info that you need. But we love doing these. It's a good chance to meet you guys in person and to see what's going on with you and what you're interested in and get some good FaceTime. Even though we're constantly in cyberspace, we do miss seeing you in real life. And we'll all be there. The whole gang will be there, which is a very rare treat. We're never all in the same city, so... Yeah, we're usually only in the same place ever for these parties, basically.

3:40Let me just stress, you said, come have a drink on us. You can probably have more than one. It's an open bar for several hours. Yeah, please have more than one drink. Yes. It's at a brewery. Drink the beer, please. Yeah, it's an open bar party for paid subscribers of 404 Media who get them for free. I don't know how much more attractive you can make it. And then if you're not a subscriber, you can also just pay for the ticket and you get access to an open bar. But yes, link to more details below. You should probably get tickets as soon as you can. Because I mean, I imagine especially as we get close to it, they're probably going to fill up.

4:17But yes, thank you, Sam. And we'll definitely keep people updated on that. For this first story, Jason, do you want to take us through it? Yeah, so we're continuing to talk about Flock, which over the last few months has really had quite a lot of opposition to it. We're starting to see a lot of people cut down Flock cameras. I guess there's a lot of discussion about what Flock cameras can and can't do, which is what this story is about. So this story is called How Cops Use Flock to Track People, Not Cars. Joseph, most people think of Flock as license plate reader cameras, but they do more than that.

5:00So what else do they do? Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, they absolutely do track people as well. And it's not so much specific people. There isn't facial recognition and Flock will always stress that. There's no facial recognition on our cameras and that sort of thing. You can't type in a name and bring up somebody. But Flock cameras that police have access to can be searched as like a search engine. I think that's how you pull it in your edits to my article, Jason, which I think is a really good way to pull it. So they can just type in something like male with tattoos, Caucasian woman with Ugg boots or something like that, or any sort of permutation or combination of these words.

5:46And they can instantaneously search a bunch of these cameras, sometimes with stretches into the hundreds and hundreds of cameras at once to look for a specific person. Obviously, even if they're not typing in a name, they're clearly still looking for a specific person because they have this description, right? And I just think that's something that's been really, really overlooked in the flock debate and the flock conversation. And I feel like there's enough evidence to write about it now and like enough dialogue to bring it up as well. But yeah, they are constantly tracking not just license plates that go by, but all of the people as well.

6:29And it does depend on the specific sort of camera, and we'll get into that. Yeah, I mean, these are called freeform searches. What is a freeform search? Yeah, so a normal search for Flock is like when you just enter a license plate, right? There's a little dialog box where the cop can enter a license plate and that's it. Freeform is a product that Flock released, I think in early 2025. And I really paid attention to when it was launched because it sounded very, very interesting. And that Flock was saying, you can now type in natural language searches. Obviously, this is kind of getting on like the AI hype as well, right?

7:10Where, oh, I can ask the LLM to do this. I can ask ChatGPT to do this. Well, I can ask Flock's system to surface footage that may contain people that I'm interested in. So at the time when Flock announced freeform searches and freeform language searches, it was focused on vehicles. So you could type in stuff like red Ford pickup with a green sticker on it or something like that. Something that is descriptive of the vehicle but wouldn't fit into a license plate sort of search box. And this was how they were advertising it. But as this piece shows and as we'll go into in some of the examples, it's not just looking for vehicles.

7:55You can use those freeform searches to look for basically anything. And I just happen to focus on people because obviously, that's probably the most important part when you're talking about a privacy invading technology. How did you go about finding these? How did you obtain these searches? Was this different than the process of figuring out how Flock is being used otherwise? So when freeform searches were first announced, again, in 2025, I started doing a bunch of public records requests to various law enforcement agencies who I suspected might soon be using Freeform or might already. I can't remember exactly how, but often when a surveillance company will come out of a new product, they will include a testimonial from a specific law enforcement agency.

8:45Maybe they were testing it out. Like I've done this with Axon before when they introduced Draft1, which uses AI to provide summaries of body cam footage. So I did a bunch of FOIAs against law enforcement agencies that said they were demoing the technology. I did the same here with Flock and Freeform. I asked specifically, I want your records and databases related to Freeform searches. For whatever reason, those were denied at the time. So I kind of put it to the side. I thought, well, I'll come to this later then when maybe it's more widespread and maybe there are softer targets to send public records requests to.

9:23and then I'll get like some of these freeform searches. Then I was looking around haveibeenflocked.com, which is a very, very interesting website, which basically aggregates the results of a bunch of other people's public records requests against Flock for the license plate searches that we've done to show local cops who are looking up cameras for ice and tracked a woman who was seeking, who sought an abortion and, you know, All of the data that's contributed to this nationwide conversation on Flock, Have I Been Flock, aggregates and maybe not centralizes, but puts as much as it can in one place.

10:02I was going through there and very handily, Have I Been Flocked already has a section for free form searches because they're actually just included in the ordinary network audit as well. when we've sent these requests and when researchers who have acted as sources for us, they've done these requests as well. You ask the police force, I want the network audit of your flock searches and now bring up, here's all the license plates that were searched. This is when they were done. This is how many cameras were queried either in the town or potentially across the country. And this was the reason why.

10:36It turns out actually, very conveniently for us, the freeform searches are just in there as well. I think it's the column text underscore prompt. So thanks to Have I Been Flocked, I was able to just start going through those records and go, oh, okay. There's already a bunch of freeform searches out here. And now I can start seeing what sort of people searches police are doing through flock cameras and not just the license plates. So what were some of the searches that you found in there? As you mentioned, often when Flock is doing a search, or rather when a police is searching Flock, they'll just type in a license plate.

11:15But with this, they can get creative. It's essentially like using Flock as a Google search, more or less. So what are cops typing in? Yeah, there's kind of like two brackets of searches. Either they are quite specific, where it will be somebody searching for, for example, Atlanta Falcons, referencing the NFL team. So presumably looking for like a jersey or a shirt with that. Maybe it'll be cops searching for a man wearing a black t-shirt and shorts, which I guess isn't super specific, but it still has some characteristics there. American flag shirt, Dodger shirt came up as well. They're sort of more specific search terms, right?

12:02And then you have ones which are just incredibly vague, like tall man. Please search all of the cameras for tall man. And look, I mean, I'm sure authorities would say that, well, we have this piece of information that this missing person or the subject of investigation that we're trying to track down quickly was a tall man. That's all the information we have. Maybe we'll do that. And then maybe we'll get more solid information after that. there's a lot of tall men, presumably walking past cameras. So as some of the experts I spoke to, including Beryl Lipton at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, these are probably going to sweep up innocent people as well.

12:46Arguably even more so than the license plate stuff, right? I mean, Jason, you've been tracking this closely. There's been a lot of mistakes recently, right? Yeah, yeah. So I wanted to bring up one. This is actually... It's a freeform search, but it's a freeform search for car. So as you mentioned, this can be used to track people and we'll get back to that in a second. But it can also be used to track cars when the police are not sure of a license plate. So we've seen searches that are just like black SUV in Florida, things like this, very vague terms that are going to necessarily catch a bunch of different cars rather than just a specific license plate.

13:29you can type in red Acura and it will pull up all of the examples that they have of something like that. And so in Florida, this happened in October of 2025. There was a hit and run collision in which a black Dodge Durango hit another car and three people died. And the driver of that car drove off. And so the Florida Highway Patrol put in black Dodge Durango because some witness said, oh, it was like a black Dodge Durango. And they pulled over this woman named Lindsay Isaacs, who was driving a black Dodge Durango. And they arrested her and they put her in jail for 13 days. But she wasn't... It was the wrong car.

14:21It was the wrong person. Very interestingly and very insanely, they pulled her over in this black Dodge Durango that allegedly hit another car and caused three people to die. And it had not a scratch on it, but they still arrested her. And it turned out that a different black Dodge Durango had hit the family and killed them. And so this woman spent 13 days in jail because she was falsely arrested. And so, I mean, this is like an example of a freeform search gone wrong. They can do that for cars. And then as Joseph has been talking about, they can also put in people descriptors in there. And so we've seen both types of searches where they are searching like a vague term for a car, or they're searching for, as Joseph said, tool man, like protesters.

15:15Like I've seen searches for signs, like people holding white signs is like a search that we have seen. And so these are like the types of things that can go in there. I mean, just because you mentioned like political stuff as well. I contacted the Center for Democracy and Technology, you know, this good organization who have their finger on these issues. So they're very reliable when you're like trying to work on a story quickly. Please, I need an expert comment on this. And I pinged them about it. And they were already looking into something similar because they sent me a link on Have I Been Flocked to some of the results.

15:55And one was very explicit in Nature where it said, one police department searched 198 networks for, quote, white Jeep with Trump flag, end quote. Now, I don't know the context beyond that, but it shows that clearly they can look for a vehicle with a certain political symbol on it, a political flag on it, like no matter what it might be, right? So that was very, very interesting. Again, that was a vehicle search, like the one you're talking about, Jason. But then the people searches do show, you can look for somebody with a certain branded t-shirt, maybe a sports jersey, something like that. So I know these searches can get pretty narrow when you're not typing in like black SUV and arresting the wrong person.

16:42yeah and just on that like like i said um of course these cameras are networked together as we've reported many many times as people know now but sometimes like the search is both vague and they're searching a lot of different networks meaning a lot of different cities or like across an entire state things like this and so if you're doing a vague search and you're searching tens of thousands of cameras, it's going to pull up people who have nothing to do with the incident that's being investigated. Joseph, does this mean that every flock camera is also tracking people? Or what did you see in these freeform searches?

17:22Yeah, that's probably the one bit of nuance that people really should take away from it. Because yes, people should understand that flock cameras are also searching for people and cops are using that based on the searches we've seen but it's not every single flock camera right so ordinarily when you think of a flock camera and you see it on like a lamppost or whatever or the intersection or wherever you're seeing it that's probably a license plate reader just in that i think there are more of those cameras right these ones are well one type they can be are these condor cameras which they are explicitly for people tracking where somebody will walk past them and the camera will automatically pan and zoom on that person because that way that's what it's looking for these are not strictly the same as the license plate ones i think that you can also see this in some of the data where when you look up a search on have i been flocked or if you have the original spreadsheets yourself it will also say how many cameras were searched and how many networks were searched When we look at license plate data, when we get that, and I think we've had untold number of those results at this point, I can't keep track.

18:38It is often like 88 ,000 cameras or something like that, or thousands of networks. And when you see that, I feel like you and I, Jason, and you especially, Jason, have got a feel for just like, oh, that's a nationwide search. Because it's around 80K, 80 ,000, something like that. So that shows they searched basically every camera on the National Flock Network for a certain license plate. That doesn't seem to happen with these freeform searches. You'll look at them and like that white Jeep with a Trump flag one, that was 198 networks. Still a lot. That's probably not the entire country, right? or even some of them are just like 100 cameras, which are probably Condor or other people tracking cameras installed in that single town.

19:27Or as you say, Jason, maybe in that single state, something like that. So in the data, it doesn't say the type of camera. You kind of just have to extrapolate that from looking at the status so much over the past, like more than a year at this point. So I would just stress that, yes, Flock cameras are tracking people, as we show, but it's not necessarily the same one that's on your street corner. It's kind of hard to tell because they look a little bit different to the Condor ones. But we know they track people because throwing back to an earlier story, Flock left a bunch exposed, right, Jason?

20:02Yeah, they left a lot exposed. Basically, we were able to find the... I don't know. It was like a testing situation where a testing server that Flock was leaving these Condor cameras open on. And we did a story back in December on this that you should check out. We also did a video with Ben Jordan on this, who's a YouTuber who's done a lot of work on Flock. And basically, you could see how the cameras work, where the cameras would follow people as they were walking by. I drove up a few hours from where I live and in front of some of these exposed cameras and tracked myself. I was able to see myself as I was walking around, things like this.

20:45And so Flock has been really marketing the Condor cameras as extremely powerful, like very high resolution. They're called PTZ cameras, pan, tilt, zoom. So they can basically zoom in on a situation and on people in any given scene, which is quite concerning. I think the other thing, and I only learned this the other day, I just missed it when it happened. I don't know if you saw this or not, Joseph. But Condors are the main video cameras that Flock has been promoting. And for a while, they were saying that the license plate readers were just basically taking static images of cars that they pass by.

21:35but last year uh flock added video capabilities to all of its alpr cameras as well um and so these cameras are and can film video as well uh they're not as like high resolution as the condor cameras and they're not um they're basically like not as powerful as the condor cameras they're not really intended to look for humans in a scene, but they are filming video. And Flock went and told all of its customers that they're pushing this as a free upgrade to all of the license plate reader cameras out there last year. And so I would just check that out if that's something you didn't know. I'm not sure if they can search people on these based on the information that you found.

22:32It seems like the number of cameras that were involved in any given search suggested that they're probably Condor cameras because there's not as many Condor cameras out there. And a lot of these searches were not as wide as we've seen with the ALPR cameras, where there's sometimes like tens of thousands of cameras in any given search. But I think that's something that people should know that these can film video. And in the promo materials, they basically say, you get the license plate from our reader, but then you can go back and check the video to see which way a car turned at an intersection, for example.

23:13Yeah, I didn't know that. Yeah, I didn't know that. And yeah, it's just very funny. And this isn't even a flock specific thing, although it very much is here, but just like, oh yeah, we're not doing this thing. Surprise, we're doing the thing now, actually. And pushing it as a free update is very, very kind to its customers. But obviously that does set the groundwork potentially for making those into more people search as well, if they're high enough resolution, I guess. All right, we'll leave that there. When we come back after the break, we're going to talk about Emmanuel's new story about how AI companies are buying a ton of books.

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