Wildlife Cops Are Searching AI Cameras for ICE

0:00Emanuel:The pace of change today can be overwhelming. What's most important to pay attention to if you want to be creative, successful, innovative? I'm Bob Safian, host of Rapid Response. Rapid Response is a podcast that cuts through the noise, featuring candid conversations twice a week with top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. From the team behind the award-winning Master's of Scale podcast comes Rapid Response. Search wherever you get your podcasts to listen and subscribe.

0:34Emanuel:I'm very worried that this is maybe the last batch of transparency reports that we're going to get that are going to be useful because Flock keeps reducing the amount of information that's available.

0:48Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist-founded 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. gain access to that content at 404media.co. I'm your host, Joseph. And with me are all of the 404 Media co-founders. The first being Sam Cole. Hey. Emmanuel Mayberg. Hello. And Jason Kebler. Hello, hello. All right, let's get straight into it.

1:30So this first one is from Jason. And it's, I mean, on one hand, it's something of an update or a continuation of coverage we've been doing. But on the other, I mean, a very sizable and significant news story in its own right, and we'll get into it. The headline is Wildlife Conservation Police are searching thousands of flock cameras for ice. There's definitely going to be some recapping in this because, you know, maybe not everybody's familiar with flock or not familiar with our earlier reporting. We'll get to that in a minute. But first, what is this Wildlife Conservation Law Enforcement Agency?

2:08Literally, what is this agency and what do they usually do, Jason?

2:13Emanuel:Yeah, so they're called the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission Police. And most states, maybe all states have something like this. And what they do, and most of them have law enforcement as well. What they do is they enforce hunting laws for the most part. So making sure that people have licenses, making sure that people are hunting during the correct season, that they're hunting the correct type of animal. They do endangered animal protection, anti-poaching, things like that. And it's usually a fish and wildlife. So that's the same here where it's like, they also are making sure that people are not catching too many fish, that boats are licensed and things like that.

3:03Emanuel:I assume, I mean, that's most of what they do. They may do some other things as well. But that's the majority of what they're supposed to do. Yeah. And they are state police. Florida has something like 900 police officers who work for this agency. So it's a pretty sizable agency. And it's also like, you know, Florida is a big state, has a lot of fish and a lot of wildlife. Lots of, you know, they have like the Everglades there. They have like a lot of state parks, things like that. Yeah. So this agency, you think would already be pretty busy with, as you say, Florida's a big place and a lot of wildlife.

3:40I'm going to use the acronym FWC, because no way am I going to remember to say the full name every single time. So FWC, well, why on earth are they then doing lookups for ICE in these AI-enabled cameras made by Flock? Why on earth are they doing that then?

3:58Emanuel:Yeah, so, I mean, this is Ron DeSantis, like Florida governor, has basically turned all state police, for the most part, all state police into extensions of ICE. And he did this very soon after Trump was reelected. It was February 2025. And he basically signed a legal document with the Department of Homeland Security, under which Ice Falls, for the state police to join the 287G program. And what the 287G program is, is a federal government program under the Department of Homeland Security that allows state and local police to do immigration enforcement. And so this is like normally local police are not allowed to do immigration enforcement.

4:54Emanuel:It's strictly the purview of the federal government. But under this program, basically, I believe there's a training of some sort. I'm not exactly sure, but I believe there's a training. And so ICE then is like, here's how you do immigration enforcement. We will work with you. You can do immigration enforcement on your own as well. You can ask people for their proof of citizenship or whatever at a traffic stop, things like this. Yeah. And so a lot of red states have been signing up for this program under Trump. And Florida has gone a step further and has basically signed up its entire state police force for this.

5:39Emanuel:So all of the Florida Highway Patrol is part of this, which is the state troopers who enforce traffic laws on the highways. And then also the Florida Department of Agricultural Law Enforcement also is a part of this. And then notably the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission police, which is what we're talking about here. And so this happened last February. There was a press release about it. There was some reporting from local news in Florida about this. and yeah, I guess quickly, the press release states this will give the state police the power to interrogate any suspected alien or person believed to be an alien as their right to be in the United States, arrest and detain any alien attempting to unlawfully enter the United States, deliver detained illegal immigrants for examination by immigration enforcement, enforce felony arrests, which are cognizable under whatever regarding immigration enforcement.

6:44Emanuel:And I'm just reading this. These are like direct quotes. Have the power to serve and execute warrants of arrests for immigration violations and be authorized to administer oaths and to take consider evidence to complete required alien processing. So basically it's like to do all the things that ICE does. And I'm not exactly sure, but I would speculate that a lot of the ICE pushes that we've seen have happened in blue states, California, Illinois, Minnesota. Largely, actually, I think none of those states are participating in the 287G program. And so what we have here is ICE is doing these big pushes in blue states, but then in more red states, you have the state and local police who are just kind of like running wild with this program.

7:40Yeah, a little bit more on 287G. I'm looking at the ICE website now and there are task force arrangements or agreements, sorry, with 976 agencies in 32 states and two US territories. So that's a lot. You mentioned like, I think a jail warrant there and some other stuff as well. There are like different models for the 287G program and an agency can sign up for sort of one or all of them or a combination. There's like the jail enforcement model, which will help ICE find people already incarcerated and that sort of thing. The warrant service officer, I think you touched on as well. Probably the most important one is the task force model, which gives some of those powers you laid out, which like you can just ask somebody for their status or traffic stop, or you can do much more active immigration enforcement.

8:35And we have seen the number of agencies participating absolutely go up. I'm kind of not sure what's happening with it now, but when we reported on the DHS facial recognition app getting rolled out to local agencies, that was explicitly for 287G participating law enforcement agencies. So not only do they get given these legal powers to perform immigration enforcement-related duties, depending on what bracket they're in, they may also get technical tooling as well, which I guess kind of brings us to the flock story. Let me mention one more thing real quick

9:14Emanuel:because the ACLU did a report on the expansion of 287G and they found that Florida has the most participation in this. They say, quote, Florida appears to have devoted more state and local law enforcement resources to immigration enforcement than any other state, resulting in numerous cases of harassment profiling of US citizens and non-citizens alike, a climate of extreme fear in communities, and reports of serious civil rights violations. So this is explicitly like a strategy that Ron DeSantis has employed in Florida. And I believe there's the ACLU as well, I think in that same report, said essentially that if you are a member of 287G, you are in essence an extension of ICE.

9:57So actually, I think that was the New York Civil Liberties Union that said that. I've quoted that several times because just encapsulating it like that is very helpful when there are all these different models and you know ice may split hairs over that but the end of the day they're working for ice and that's the important thing so to bring it back to the flock cameras let's just have a very very quick recap for those who don't know what are flock cameras exactly and what do they scan and what do they do yeah so flock cameras are automated license plate reader

10:30Emanuel:cameras. They take pictures of cars as they drive by on street corners, entering and leaving different parking lots all over the country. They're now in thousands and thousands of communities around the country. And notably, they are all connected and AI-powered. So basically, if you drive from one city to another city, that all goes into the flock network if you pass through these. And cops can look up different license plates to get a history of where a person or a person's car drove over time. And then they also have this thing called a hot list where police can proactively put a license plate into the flock system.

11:20Emanuel:And if that car is detected driving by a Flock camera, the police will get a ping as to where that car is. So this, I mean, we've talked about this many times, but it's like Flock has really exploded in popularity among state and local police over the last few years. last year in May, we reported that ICE was gaining access to FLOC data, not directly, not because ICE has a contract with FLOC, but because through these 287G programs and sometimes through other sorts of task forces, just cops, they were asking local police to run license plates for them. And then the cops were giving them information on different license plates that they were looking for.

12:14Emanuel:We also then did a follow-up story at some point that showed how loosey-goosey some of this is. Some of it was happening over text message, like email, where ICE was just saying, like, hey, look up this for me. Or There was also password sharing happening in some cases. And so you had a local cop who just gave their login to a federal official, and then the federal official could use the system. So yeah, basically, without having a contract to use FLOC, federal law enforcement has been gaining access to it. after our reporting last year, Flock started to add some safeguards to prevent this from happening to some extent.

13:04Emanuel:But Flock has largely taken the position that the data collected by the cameras is owned by the local police who own the cameras. And therefore, if they want to share that information with the feds, they are allowed to. um so we did that first round of reporting like back in may we did like some follow-ups but basically what we have learned now is that through this florida fish and wildlife commission uh like they are doing dozens of lookups for ice on a monthly basis and they're they were doing them as recently as january of this year that was just the most recent data that we have but there's no reason to think that that has stopped.

13:50Emanuel:I asked the Florida governor's office for comment on this story, and their comment was that this is totally normal under the 287G program, and that there's no indication that they have any interest in stopping this. Yeah. The recency of the searches is the other really interesting part of that. I mean, the first, obviously, is that you have this, I would say, unusual agency participating in immigration enforcement rather than looking for people without a hunting license. They're now looking for allegedly undocumented people or something like that. And then you have the recency of it as well, which as you said, we did all that reporting last year.

14:34There was this seismic shift nationwide when it came to flock and cities ripping out the cameras, community saying we don't want this, a big push for warrants to be introduced and that's still going through the courts and you know realistically that's probably not going to happen but maybe we'll see all of this sort of impact and then still there's the fwc doing searches as recently as january um as you said so there is this doc or there's this type of document which has informed a lot of our reporting especially the early ice stuff and then also the stuff we did about um you know an abortion or a woman who self-administered an abortion being searched for on flock as well and it's called a network audit and it's basically a spreadsheet that you can obtain from the police through a public records act request and it will show sort of who performed the search or rather this is what the document did show before flock made some changes it would show the officer who made the search the date the number of cameras searched the number of networks searched as in you know these individual clusters all around the country um potentially the plate scanned as well and then the given reason now there are some nuance around that because sometimes they're very very vague sometimes they're very very detailed sometimes they are entirely blank and police are not providing any reason or any stated reason why they did the lookup so we got a network audit for fwc what were they searching or rather what reason were they given for searching flat cameras in that column?

16:09Emanuel:Yeah, I mean, not a lot of ambiguity here. The stated reasons ranged from, quote, like immigration, civil slash administrative ICE, immigration, general criminal investigation, and immigration criminal ICE. And so there were like dozens of these searches that happened in January of 2026. And they seemingly happened for a variety of different immigration-related reasons. I don't know what a general criminal investigation for immigration means, but then also a civil-slash-administrative search for ICE sounds kind of concerning, as does criminal investigation for immigration because it's like, well, what does that mean?

17:05Emanuel:And to be clear, for a flock reason in these reports that we get, it's pretty detailed because often they just say investigation or they're just really vague. And one of the reasons is because police officers have learned that these are public records that can be gotten by transparency. I hate to say even activists, but people interested in government transparency as well as journalists. And so the FBI a few months ago, in response to some of our reporting and some work by other transparency folks, told police to be as vague as permissible in what they're putting down there. And so over time, these have gotten even less useful.

18:01Emanuel:It's also worth noting that the number of networks that were searched for these immigration searches by the Florida Fish Police... Let's use that name. I like the Florida Fish Police. Yeah, the Florida Fish Police were searching immigration cameras in more than 5 ,000 and nearly 6 ,000 communities across the country. And so if you look at Flock's website, Flock has published a blog post that's called Does Flock Share Data with ICE? And the answer that it gives is no. Flock does not work with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement or any other sub-agency of the Department of Homeland Security. And then they basically say this doesn't happen unless, quote, the agencies that control their data expressly and deliberately allow it.

18:56Emanuel:Well, we know that Flock is only in, I don't know, we've seen about 9 ,000-ish different networks on these different audit reports. And here... Like ACK cameras or something, right? Something like that. Something like that. Unfortunately, these didn't say exactly how many cameras were being searched. That data was left off, but the number of networks was on there. and we're seeing nearly 6 ,000 networks. And so out of a total of, I don't know, 9 ,000-ish, upper bound, at least according to the most recent data that I've seen. And so this means that more than half of these networks are sharing with an agency that's then sharing with ICE.

19:47Emanuel:And so we also know that no longer are California or Illinois or Virginia or I believe Oregon cameras on this. And so, I mean, the indications are that like most communities continue to share this sort of data with ICE. Yeah. And the reason for the Illinois stuff and the California stuff and each state is going to be slightly different. But after our reporting, it's sort of revealed to these individual states that, wait a second, we don't want that sort of data being shared indirectly with immigration enforcement. Or, you know, in the case of, I believe, Illinois, there's a much more fundamental law, and in California as well, where that sort of data cannot be shared out of state, really for any purpose, right?

20:39and a fundamental problem we came across, which I think is maybe addressed somewhat now because our reporting is being very loud and other people have followed it and being very loud as well, in that a lot of these law enforcement agencies and individual officers had no idea that they were sort of providing this access to ICE or other outside agencies. Because it's one thing for the Florida Fish Police to search cameras in one place, But the cameras in that place, they may not realize they are indirectly or inadvertently providing that access as well. I think just to wrap it up, Jason, what's your main takeaway here?

21:19Is it that ICE continues to get access? Is it that it was a novel agency? What's your main takeaway?

21:27Emanuel:Yeah, I mean, I think that I talked to Jay Stanley, who is a privacy expert with the ACLU. and I think he summed it up pretty well by saying that basically like there's this big debate across different like cities as to like should we have flock like who will it be shared with how will it be shared like all that sort of thing and a lot of that has focused on like well, we don't want to share information with ICE. But what is happening here? He said, quote, I doubt there were many cities that were debating the Florida Fish and Wildlife Services doing search for ICE when they were talking about whether they should get flock.

22:14Emanuel:It shows these searches can come from really any direction. And I think basically it's just like, you don't know who is going to access these cameras and under which circumstances and who they are then going to share it with. So if you're collecting that data at all, and if you're sharing it at all, there is the potential for misuse. And we've seen that this has happened over and over and over again. And so I think that that's very important here. I think that in this case, it's almost worse than when the local police were doing it because this is now a political project of Ron DeSantis and it's a state police force that is presumably better resourced.

23:03Emanuel:has changed its mission to be more aligned with the administrations versus a small, tiny police force that has three or four cops doing this. There's 900 police officers with FWC who presumably could be involved in this in some way. And so I think that's concerning. And then I guess the last thing is, I'm very worried that this is maybe the last batch of transparency reports that we're going to get that are going to be useful. Why? What makes you think that? Well, because Flock keeps reducing the amount of information that's available on these reports because when these stories are published, it's embarrassing for them and there's political blowback for them and all that sort of thing.

23:54Emanuel:And so these audit reports, less and less information is available each month. And I don't think we have time to get into all of the details of why and how that's happened. but our reporting has shown this, that Flock is reducing the amount of information that it collects from police about why they are using the system, how they're using the system, all that sort of thing, because that is then accessible to journalists. And so, yeah, I mean, we'll see. We're going to keep trying to report on this, but I have seen more recent audit reports and there's just like less info on them. Yeah. And Flock also giving more awareness to police in the same way that the FBI was telling them to be vague.

24:49I mean, Flock isn't saying be vague, to be clear. At least I haven't seen that. But they are giving police more tools to filter out what they may not want to be public. All right. We'll leave that there. When we come back after the break, we're going to talk a bunch about Wikipedia's AI ban. We'll be right back after this.

25:19Emanuel:A lot of language apps are designed to keep you busy. Streaks, points, little rewards, and you feel like you're actually making progress. But then you try to speak the language and it just doesn't come out. That's why I like Babbel. Babbel is not built around keeping you hooked. It's built around actually helping you communicate. You're learning words and phrases you'll use in real situations, not just tapping through exercises. The lessons are short, about 10 minutes, so it's easy to stay consistent. And everything is designed by over 200 language experts, so there's a real structure behind what you're learning.

25:54Emanuel:I've been using it to work on my Spanish, and what stands out is how practical it feels. You're practicing conversations step by step. Things like ordering food, asking questions, or just holding a basic conversation. and you can actually feel that progress building. Babbel has also got podcasts and different ways to learn depending on how your brain works. Listening, speaking, reading. So it adapts to you instead of the other way around. It's really about small steps, real progress, and confidence that builds over time. Babbel has over 25 million subscriptions worldwide, offers 14 languages, and every course comes with a 14-day money-back guarantee.

26:31Emanuel:Make fast, lasting progress with Babbel, the science-backed language learning platform that actually works. Here's a special limited-time deal for our listeners. Right now, get up to 60 % off your Babbel subscription at babbel.com forward slash 404. Get up to 60 % off at babbel.com forward slash 404. Spelled B-A-B-B-E-L.com forward slash 404. Rules and restrictions may apply. Every now and then, you find a piece of clothing that completely replaces everything else in your closet. For me, it's been this alpaca hoodie from Paka, spelled P-A-K-A. I'd heard people talking about it, but I didn't really get it until I actually tried Paka.

27:10Emanuel:It's softer than cashmere, warmer than wool, but somehow still breathable. It doesn't feel heavy or bulky, just really comfortable. What makes it different is the material. Paka uses alpaca fiber, which is one of the most sustainable natural fibers out there. And the hoodie is built for real life. It's thermoregulating, odor resistant, and durable enough that it actually holds up over time. I've been wearing mine pretty much everywhere. At home, traveling, even just out running errands. And it's become the one thing I always grab without thinking. And there's a cool story behind Paca hoodies too.

27:41Emanuel:Each one is made start to finish in Peru and comes with an Inca ID that's hand woven by artisans. So you're actually connected to where it came from. Over 250 ,000 people have already picked one up and I get why. I've actually gone beyond Paca hoodies and I now have a couple Paca t-shirts. I have Paca boxers and Paca socks. And I really like all of them so far. To grab your Packah hoodie, go to www.packahapparel.com. That's www.packahapparel.com.

28:23All right, and we are back. Emmanuel, you wrote this one. Or rather, sorry, it's two stories. We'll start with this. Wikipedia bans AI generated content. That's a pretty self-explanatory headline. But what specifically has Wikipedia banned here, Emmanuel? Yeah, it is a rather big piece of news, but I've been following it very closely. So it's also quite iterative. But basically, Wikipedia, like every other internet platform, has been dealing with a flood of AI-generated content that they're having to deal with. It is a particularly bad problem for Wikipedia because the entire point of the platform is to provide reliable information with volunteer editors, volunteer contributors.