Big surveillance, Flock and ICE

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1:09The documentary home of the best documentaries from the BBC World Service Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Ellie House on assignment in Houston, Texas oh wow that is completely severed in half there's a black pole and the bottom half is still stuck in the ground and then about a third of the way up it's just been sliced in two oh there's a sign on it what does it say notice 24 7 video recording flock safety this is one of four flock cameras cut down in this neighbourhood alone. But it's been happening all over Houston and increasingly all over the US. Flock can't keep getting away with it.

1:58I'm going to take change to all these Flock cameras. That looks slightly more illegal. Technically, we are currently detecting this Flock camera via Bluetooth. But before Flock started trending, before vigilantes across America started filming themselves vandalising the company's distinctive licence plate reader cameras, something happened in US cities. High-tech, increasingly interconnected surveillance networks have been growing year on year. Here in Houston, I could be watched by the cameras legally mandated at businesses like petrol stations or monitored by the county's facial recognition software.

2:38Perhaps I could be heard by the sound detection devices used to spot gunshots or looked down upon from on high by police drones. And then there's Flock Safety, the biggest company making automatic license plate readers. Founded in 2017, Flock has today become a byword among the American public for surveillance. I'm Ellie House, and for assignment, I'm in Houston, Texas, looking at big surveillance in US cities.

3:15My name is Christopher Rivera. I work with the Texasal Rights Project. I'm Jasmine Kedem-Gonzalez, and I'm an immigrant rights organizer with the Houston Democratic Socialists of America. Christopher and Jasmine are part of a network of campaigners opposing flock in their city. They think that all these cameras are an invasion of privacy. It's really building out this mass surveillance network that's from coast to coast. They take me on what they call a flock walk designed to raise community awareness. We stroll through a neighborhood on the lookout for cameras. So we are coming up on it right now.

3:47It's right in front of us. You can tell it's a flock camera because of the way that the camera is kind of shaped and also because of the solar panel. This is what we're fighting against. This is the automated license plate reader. But this one is powered by AI. When it takes the photo, it clears up the image and then it reads the license plate and then it pretty much transfers this information into a database. But they also take more than just your license plate, the whole back of your car. So if you have any identifying bumper stickers or dents or anything, that's something else that police officers are able to search in the Flock database.

4:19It's just a license plate reader though, no? It's not the issue itself with the license plate reader, right? We've had these sorts of cameras that exist for a long time, but the real problem is the mass database that all of these kind of pictures go into. Flock's selling point is its centralized network, where its customers can search for footage not only from cameras they own, but from other flock cameras that have opted into sharing. That could mean a police officer here in Houston has access to pictures from tens of thousands of cameras across the US. And what we've seen is a lot of police officers themselves are using this database to stalk their ex-partners or their current partners.

4:56Around 50 officers have been accused of misusing this system. One police chief looked up his ex and her teenage daughter, roughly 600 times. In another case here in Texas, police searched for a woman who had an abortion, even though there was no criminal case against her. In a place like Houston, where we are an extremely car-dependent city, almost everybody needs a car to just get around, it becomes a much more of a safety issue when you can tie any individual to their vehicle and everywhere that they go here in Houston. They show me another camera, this one higher up, a white frame above a bulbous black lens.

5:33And then across the street, I want to show you the other condor. And that one's actually a live stream camera. So that one is actually... Christopher believes it to be a condor, a broader purpose surveillance camera that has a growing footprint in the flock network. Most flock devices are named after birds. The license plate readers are falcons. This one's a condor. So that one is actually filming us as we move. And they're just much more sophisticated and they have AI as well. So it's like, if they typed in black pants, gray shirt, it would pretty much pull us up. It would be able to spot you because that's what you're wearing.

6:06Yeah. OK. All right, so we keep going? Yeah, let's keep walking. Jasmine's going to lead us to the next location. And Jasmine actually used the D-Flock app to figure out this route. D-Flock is a crowdsourced app designed to track and map automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs. Really, it should be up to our city governments to release the maps, right, of where all of these cameras are, just to be transparent to the community. I mean, our tax dollars are going to that. But we have to instead rely on this kind of open source software to see where all of these cameras are.

6:49This is one of the big unanswered questions. Just how many of these cameras are there and where? It's a difficult number to pin down with so many different agencies in Houston, each with their own contracts and data-showing agreements. I filed 19 different Public Information Act requests to try and work it out. Many said it's sensitive security data. Some referred the issue to the Texas Attorney General. But what I have worked out, one school district alone, Galena Park, has 11 flock cameras, as well as a brand new AI weapons detection system integrated into its other security cameras. The city's metro owns 35 flock cameras and has access to around 20 ,000.

7:36The city of Houston, of which the police department is a part, owns 840 cameras, but documents from the flock data sharing network show nearly 1 ,300 devices linked to Houston police. And the picture keeps expanding. In the space of three years, Harris County Precinct 2, an area that wraps around southeast Houston, appears to have bulked up its surveillance from 30 flock license plate readers to 100, and from three flock gunshots detection devices to 129. Honestly, they're on almost every street corner, it seems like, when you're driving around, especially... And in a city like Houston, one of the most diverse in the United States, close to the border with Mexico, There's another issue that's at the forefront of many people's minds when it comes to surveillance.

8:24Immigration. Another thing is that if ICE goes to a police department and they say, hey, we have these license plates that we'd like you to look up in your database, then a police officer in Georgia can be like, okay, yeah, sure, look up that license plate and then track them and share that information with ICE. That's the Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It's one of the most controversial U.S. agencies, expanded under President Trump, with a goal to detain 3 ,000 people a day. And then the result is that our families here are getting targeted and being put into that deportation pipeline.

8:59I would say fear is overwhelming right now. There's a large impending doom and paranoia. Maria is in her late 20s, a second-generation immigrant and a lifelong Houstonian. She's a U.S. citizen, but her partner is undocumented. which means the government would class him as an illegal immigrant eligible for deportation. She asked us not to use her real name. My main concern is that they're going to start pulling over people or tracking them through FLOC and passing over that information to ICE, detaining them and deporting them. To put FLOC's argument to you, they say they don't have any contracts with ICE.

9:42They provide technology, they sell it to law enforcement agencies, and what those law enforcement agencies do with that data is down to them, down to their local laws. Well, if they say that, I don't believe them. And I really don't trust if it's the local agency problem to use that information. Houston Police Department called ICE over 100 times between April and June, according to a compulsory audit. And a person was transferred to ICE custody on 19 of these occasions. I really don't trust the police or ICE right now, and I never have. But specifically right now, because of the murder of our community member, Lorenzo Salgado Arajo, I genuinely do believe that this is an act of profiling.

10:29And I think that the flock cameras are an incredible way for them to do that. In July, Lorenzo Salgado Arajo was fatally shot by an ICE agent at a traffic stop. The officers involved said the shot was in self-defence after Salgado Arajo weaponised his vehicle. This has been disputed by the other men who were in the car. An investigation is ongoing, but there's currently no suggestion from authorities that FLOC devices were used in the operation that ended in the shooting. FLOC says that ICE doesn't have direct access to its network. But Maria doesn't feel reassured. I definitely still feel fearful.

11:12I do limit my outings and outings with my partner. We do have to be very strategic and intentional about where we drive to. It's heartbreaking. It's sad because we have, like, we deserve to leave our homes and feel safe and at least go to the park or go on walks. but that's specifically why the flock cameras are so scary and it feels like this sinister presence flock says that it's their name is flock safety they are trying to prevent crime is there not some element of that that's that's that's good that makes you possibly feel safer i'm sure there have been some success stories of like we were able to track down this car that got stolen, like woohoo.

12:07But I think that the overwhelming fear that it has instilled just isn't worth it. And frankly, we don't think this is fixing the crime. I think the root of these issues are lack of access to certain resources, the inflated cost of living. Like these are the real issues and these cameras feel like a band-aid. I remember this memory from probably six years ago. It was a town in Atlanta called Chamblee, Georgia. It's a predominantly immigrant community. It's a mixed community. This is Garrett Langley. He's the founder and CEO of Flock Safety. I'm speaking to him at his Atlanta office. And this little boy was kidnapped from his mother's hands of a stroller and we were able to find the vehicle, get on the highway.

13:02And by the time that vehicle pulled into their house, the GBI and local police department were there ready to safely get that kid returned home. And I'd asked the chief, you know, why did this happen here? I said, Garrett, the problem with this community is criminals, bad people victimize the immigrant community because they're afraid to call 9-1-1. And I bring that up because I sympathize for the people you're describing in Texas. And I think it's important to denote that for the last nine years, we've operated under this right that everyone has a fundamental right to be safe. And I still think that's true.

13:49Can ICE or federal immigration enforcement access Flock cameras? Not through us. So federal immigration enforcement can't access the Flock network through you directly, but it can access the Flock network should a local police officer choose to share their access. So that would be near impossible. They would be either breaking our contract with them, or they would probably be breaking a policy internally. But it does happen. We've seen on audit logs ICE being put as the reason for such. Yeah, and some police departments have standing agreements with federal law enforcement to work together. And in that case, as long as it's a lawful investigation, we're not going to tell cities what laws they should or should not enforce.

14:38And in the U.S., there are a lot of different local law enforcement agencies. You know, it's a really interesting phenomenon in America. and there's 18 ,000 police departments. And so it used to be before Flock that if I stole a car in one city and drove to the next, I did not exist. So in the Flock world, some of our customers, very much against immigration enforcement and they might want to still solve homicides with a city next door that wants to support immigration enforcement. And so we built these controls so they can say, look, on homicides, on stolen cars, on missing peoples, we want to work together.

15:12But on these types of crimes, we disagree on the societal benefit of that law. And it might sound confusing, because it is, because there's 18 ,000 cities, and we support, you know, 7 ,000 of them. In terms of the number of cameras, how many do you have in the US ballpark? You know, we are a leading provider, but by no means the only provider in the country. But can you give me numbers? We don't typically report on like specific numbers. Okay, okay. I saw 100 ,000 approximately. Is that like ballpark? I think it's reasonable. Last year, we helped solve about a million crimes, over 10 ,000 missing people.

15:47And what matters to us is it becomes so difficult to commit a crime that people choose not to. And so you're going to do that through kind of a large surveillance network? I wouldn't call it that. So you don't like the word surveillance, but I saw your patents. There are three different patents that say surveillance. So you are a surveillance company. Still wouldn't choose those words. It's because there is a conception with the word surveillance of Big Brother, of someone hiding behind a screen secretly watching you. And that's not what we do, because we have transparency, right? Our cameras are in public spaces.

16:24Our products have incredible guardrails built into them. These sorts of reassurances haven't stopped the anti-flock backlash, and it's escalated further than vandalism. A Houston man is facing federal charges in Georgia for allegedly leaving a message on Flock's voicemail threatening to kill its employees, along with anti-Semitic abuse. Threats of violence, it's just, whether it's based off of your religion, whether it's based off of your race, like, where you work, to me it's just, it's horrible. This is the documentary from the BBC World Service.

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17:39I'm Ellie House on assignment in Houston, Texas. There are 63 different law enforcement agencies in Houston alone, ranging from the big dogs, the sheriff of the county or the Houston police, through smaller police departments to law enforcement of school districts or universities. Now those big dogs didn't want to talk to me but I'm on my way to meet Chief Ray Schultz of the Memorial Villages Police Department on the northwest corner of Houston. People live here for the quality of life. Most of the properties are at least a half an acre if not larger. We're an independent group of cities that were created back in the 1970s and basically the city of Houston has now grown all the way around us.

18:30So we're a city within another city. Some Memorial Village's residents are celebrities or sports stars. It's regularly ranked as one of the safest communities in the US and it was one of Flock's early adopters. We started off in 2019 with one single camera because I had to do a proof of concept. Within days we had a burglary occur and the perpetrator had entered in through a doggy door in the back of the house. A receipt had must have fallen out of one of their pockets when they were crawling through the door. The receipt was from about an hour prior to the burglary occurring at a fast food restaurant.

19:14So we looked at the number of vehicles that had gone through the ALPR. We went up to the restaurant, we pulled their CCTV video footage, and guess what we found? One vehicle that was in that parking lot at the same time that the items were purchased. It was the same vehicle that drove by our ALPR that's on the street to where the burglary occurred. How much more difficult would that investigation have been without that ALPR camera on that road? Probably impossible. Ray says the community welcomed this technology, and seven years later, his police department owns 34 of these cameras. He's been surprised to see the nationwide backlash now.

19:57Well, first of all, the cameras don't follow anybody. There's nobody sitting there watching the ALPR cameras, and I can use it myself as an example. We read 4.2 million license plates last month. There's nobody watching those license plates. Every search that we do, it has to be for a reason. And you still have to do your homework. All it tells us is that this license plate was at this location at this date and time. But I want to know who that plate belongs to. Now I have to go into a different database. That is not in the Flock system at all. But there are, I mean, Flock Nova is one of their kind of newer platforms.

20:38And it's a software that overlays reads from its cameras. with public information such as public social media, credit histories, advertising IDs. That, I think, is one of the concerns that if an agency subscribes to that in addition to having the cameras, then it can kind of make broader connections about the individual's driving. It can. So law enforcement, we have a lot of databases that we use to help solve crimes. Systems like NOVA, what it does is it will check the databases that you have access to that's part of your operating procedures and tell you if there's any commonality. Chief Schultz doesn't use NOVA, and he also doesn't share his flock data with federal immigration agencies.

21:32I don't think it's good for local law enforcement because we are that very first line between the community and public safety, and we need to keep that trust in place. Every profession, there's bad actors. Law enforcement has their own as well. I've seen that in my 44 years. We have to hold those people accountable. But don't throw out a tool that is valuable that can help recover a missing child.

22:06Unfortunately, some of these quests that are going on right now to get law enforcement not to use some of these tools, that's just another way to defund law enforcement. Some of the anti-surveillance backlash comes from the left, including police abolitionist campaigners. But there's a remarkable bipartisan element to this story. On the right, some conservatives see America's massive surveillance network as an attack on their freedom. A Republican congressman, Keith Self from Texas, has recently proposed the so-called Privacy Act, which would require federal agencies to obtain a warrant before accessing data collected by surveillance systems like Flock.

22:50This is a surveillance state that Americans just don't like. Congressman Self isn't the only one using the democratic process to take on surveillance.

23:02In the city of San Marcos, about three hours west of Houston, I meet 29-year-old city council member Amanda Rodriguez. I was blessed to be elected in November of 2024. Amanda says the police union campaigned against her. I will be honest, I very much align myself with police and prison abolition. One of Amanda's first moves was to challenge a proposal to more than double the city's flock deployment, from 14 automatic license plate readers to 33. Mind you, we're a town of, the last census was 67 ,000, I think we're 50 square miles, and you know, you do the math, that's a large net. You've got a background in police abolition work.

23:46Is there an argument that you wouldn't accept any technologies that would support law enforcement? Some would call you a radical. Many people call me a radical. I'll say that already. I would argue, despite my personal opinions, when I get on this body, I have to be pragmatic. And I do have to represent people. I think in a digital age that we live in today, as policing continues to exist as an institution, to think that there is not going to be some incorporation of tech within that institution, I would be quite ignorant, right? After several months of debates and policy changes, not only did the proposed expansion fall through, but the council let the whole FLOC contract end.

24:34Okay, so the city no longer has a contract with FLOC. So that means there are no flock cameras in San Marcos at all now? There are none on city property. There are still cameras here. And this is the part of the story that's often missed. It's not only public bodies, agencies subject to democratic oversight, that have access to surveillance technologies. It's private companies too.

25:00Amanda takes me to a nearby housing block to see some of the ALPRs that are still up in San Marcos. So we're walking up to one of the apartments here. It's where lower income housing tax credit property, so more affordable units. You'll see that there's only one way in, one way out. And the reason that's important is right as you turn in, there are two cameras facing in and out. And both right now have been spray painted with red spray paint, blocking their ability to scan license plates. This is really stark. Like, there's massive splatters of red paint just over the camera lens on both of them.

25:39I was going to ask, do people know that there are still Flock cameras here despite the city ending its contract? But evidently they do because it has been spray painted. They do, but there is still a misconception that these cameras should be subject to the decision that the city made. And the misconception does cause a bit of outrage by people. And unlike city-owned devices, Amanda has no idea who has access to these cameras. How does it make you feel that this has been vandalised? For me personally, I don't feel a sense of rage. Because it is a crime. Right. The destruction of property is a crime.