Flock cameras are watching you

0:00People are big mad about data centers in the United States this summer, but don't sleep on how mad people are about Flock.

0:10Flock cameras, if you haven't noticed them, don't worry, they've noticed you. You may have heard about them in your reels or on Flock Talk. I have never in my life been as pissed at the government as I am now that Flock cameras exist. Americans are going to war against Flock AI surveillance cameras and people are going around and literally sawing them down, absolutely destroying them. An AI surveillance apparatus goes against the very essence of freedom and the core values of our country. It's not right, it's not conservative, and it sure as hell ain't American. Flock surveillance cameras have popped up all over the nation, every state but Alaska, but this year, dozens of cities and counties across the country have cut ties with Flock.

0:52And on today's Explain from Vox, we're going to tell you why.

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1:35This is Today Explained. My name is Drew Harwell. I'm a reporter at The Washington Post and I cover technology. What the flock is flock, Drew? Yeah. Flock is like the cop's new favorite dream crime fighting tool. Safety isn't just a priority. It's a necessity. It is a license plate reader. Flock license plate reader cameras provide 24-7 protection. These are sticks on the side of the road that you've probably driven by a million times. But they're cameras. They're AI cameras at the top of a pole. They scan every passing license plate into a database. It can capture license plates and create a unique vehicle fingerprint, recognizing make, model, and key details with precision.

2:22And then it gives cops a way to search the location of any car they want to. And because there are 120 ,000 of these cameras across America, you can get a really detailed map of where people go just by virtue of these cameras being everywhere. Help protect your neighborhood or business before crime happens. Now, reading about these cameras, Drew, it feels like, you know, people are probably familiar with red light cameras, with speeding cameras that they get a little photo in the mail of themselves breaking the law. And they're like, oh, this sucks. Now I have to pay this huge fee. But these sticks are pretty fancy.

2:53What is different about Flock technology? They are all about criminal investigation. Yeah, speeding and red light cameras only get you if you're speeding or crossing a red light. But you can be completely innocent, suspected of nothing, and still go into this giant Flock database. And Flock is a private company. It's, like, beloved by these Silicon Valley investors. And they very quickly, you know, like within a decade, gotten all these relationships with 7 ,000 police departments across the country. And so the issue is that it takes pictures of everybody. It takes, like, videos, no matter whether it's, you know, heavy rain, middle of the night.

3:30It captures your license plate into a database. Basically, everybody listening to this, if you are in the U.S., you are in a Flock database somewhere. And the cops can use it at any point. Like, they can look up, you know, they can just put your plate in and see where you have gone. So we've seen a lot of cases of abuse of this, and it's a huge problem. And how long has this problem existed? I mean, how long have Flock cameras been recording all of us driving around this country? Yeah, so Flock's first camera was in 2017. team. Before that, there were license plate readers and they were, you know, they were on the sides of highways.

4:05They were even used for criminal investigations. But Flock came around and basically made it a household name. Like they were very aggressive in sending sales people out to police departments and city halls to really give the sales pitch that you can be, you know, state of the art, have the best cameras, get the most images. And so a lot of, you know, even small police departments, even, you know, neighborhood watches, HOAs, strip malls, school campuses are turning these things on so they can get as much data as possible. And is it working? Has it made the United States a safer, better place? So Flock says yes.

4:46Flock says their cameras have been used in a million criminal investigations a year. They're helping solve somewhere between 800 ,000 to a million crimes every calendar year. So roughly about 20 to 25 % of all reported crime in America is being solved in some way or another with flock technology. They are always rolling out stories, like positive anecdotes of bad guys who have been caught by cops who were using flock, you know, kidnappers, thieves, the worst of the worst. My son got kidnapped, so I got out of the car to pick up my son. I was like, he was sick and sleeping. You stole your car with the baby inside?

5:22Yes! Yeah, I got the child in the parking lot. And they say, you know, cops are able to use this and get this like superpower that they never had before because they really have like detailed location tracking of anybody. And so from their perspective, these are solving crimes. Anything bad that is related to them is worth the squeeze, basically, because of how much more cops are able to do now. and we all know that woke one was crazy but what's wrong with giving cops superpowers yeah so yeah a lot of good cops use these in a good way to catch the bad guys um as we have found in our reporting there are a lot of bad cops who are using them in bad ways and you know as you see with any surveillance tool it is very alluring it's like the ring from lord to the rings.

6:12Like once you get that power, some of these cops are going onto their phones in the middle of the night, they're getting drunk and they're looking up exes and their wives and their current girlfriends and their ex-girlfriends, new partners. And they're getting a ton of information about those women, mostly women, that they can use to stalk them. And we've seen cases where like very domestically controlling men are manipulating these women or sending them these menacing messages with information about like, I saw you drive to this place. I know you went here. Why were you there? And it's really unnerving because, you know, the cops could have been abusive before, but now they have this extra weapon that the police departments have effectively given them through some Silicon Valley help that gives them that much more power to control and demean and manipulate.

7:01I mean, you said these cameras are basically all across the country. How widespread is the stalking, is the abuse of flock footage? So we did some reporting. We found at least 50 cases of cops who have misused this thing. Some have been charged. Some have been convicted and thrown in jail. 717 times. That's the amount of searches. Haines City Police says Officer Christopher Goodson used these flock cameras across the city he was sworn to protect to keep virtual eyes on his ex-wife. A former Menasha police officer will serve six months in jail for using flock cameras to track a woman's car for personal reasons.

7:40That story was a couple of weeks ago. We've seen even more, like more than a dozen even since then. So the count is constantly going up. There are a lot of cops in this country, so it's not like a majority of cops are misusing this. But that's still dozens of cases where these women have been preyed upon, basically, by this tool. And these are just the ones we know about. Flock doesn't, like, aggressively go out and find cases. They don't report cases. These are cases we had to basically find ourselves or through local media reports or through the police departments announcing them, victims finding out this happened.

8:10So we don't even really know the size of the abuse, but we know that a lot of cops are doing this and a lot of women are being, you know, preyed on in this way that they never expected, you know, when they got in the relationship with these people to begin with. Is there like a specific story you can tell us about a woman who was stalked by her ex or current boyfriend cop? Yeah, so I spent time with a woman named Marcy Bakley. She's this single mom in northern Georgia. She's an Air Force veteran. She dated the police chief of this small town called Brazelton in Georgia. Had a good relationship, but then it turned sour.

8:47They broke up. And he started sending her these creepy messages about why did you go to this place? He would text her about dates and doctor's visits she would go to. She never understood like how he even knew any of this stuff. She basically thought he had like put a tractor on her car. And then one time he just told her like he had been using flock cameras on her. Horrifying. Yeah. And she was horrified. She didn't even know what flock was at the time. You know, it later came out and through our reporting, we were able to find out she was stalked by this guy more than 500 times. He put in the plate for her, for her teenage daughter.

9:22He was getting, you know, he was searching tens of thousands of cameras for her data. And the cop was ultimately investigated by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. He was charged with a license plate reader misuse. He was supposed to go to trial, but he committed suicide earlier this year. And yeah, and he's just one of like many cases we have found. But in this case, you know, Marcy was like horrified because to understand that you were being watched this whole time, that you had no idea. and for it to be a cop doing it. You know, she really felt like powerless. Like, who am I supposed to report this into?

9:58Like, who am I going to call? Like, if it's a chief of police. How easy is it for a police officer to just search flock records for anything they want if a buddy of theirs says, hey, you know, this guy flipped me off last night on the highway. Here's his license plate. Find out what his name is, where he lives. Can they just do that? Is the system that ripe for abuse? Yes. I mean, Flock says, you know, they suggest all of these rules. They create these training guides. They only want it to be used for legitimate criminal investigations. But they also say they don't want to police the police. They want the departments to basically set their own rules.

10:39And, you know, from the Flock and police department perspective, they say, you know, these are often cases where time is of the essence. If somebody's just been kidnapped, we really need to find them. So we need to be able to search for them immediately. But you can also see how that leads to abuse because it can just take one bad cop misusing the tool in the dead of night or when they're feeling desperate or drunk or whatever. And you see kind of how this abuse happens. What does Flock have to say about this level of abuse of their technology? Yeah, so Flock's answer to this is kind of interesting.

11:14I mean, they say obviously they think any abuse is horrible. They are creating these tools. They call these audit logs that record every search, and they offer them to the police departments so the police departments can check the abuse. But they also basically say, like, this is going to happen. They say they can't control human nature. Bad cops are going to do bad cop stuff. And so their argument is, like, don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Think of the positives. but I think, you know, the reality of it is that these women are really being abused and they're just, you know, the knife's edge of these problems.

11:50If we're all being surveilled in this way, you can imagine how bad this really could get.

12:04Flock around and find out when Today Explained returns.

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15:51Today, Explain is back. Drew Harwell from The Washington Post is gone. But don't worry, because Jason Kebler from 404 Media is here to tell us more about how Flock is being used and abused. Yeah, so I've been reporting on Flock for a few years now, and there's been several high-profile cases and trends that we've been reporting on. Last year, we learned that local police were helping ICE surveil undocumented immigrants using the Flock network. A recent report found that more than 15 ,000 searches may have been linked to immigration enforcement activity. Last summer, the nonprofit newsroom CalMatters found that LAPD and other Southern California law enforcement agencies broke the law by illegally sharing automated license plate reader data with feds more than 100 times in a one month period alone.

16:43There was also a case in Texas where a woman's partner reported that she had a self-administered abortion and more than 80 ,000 cameras across the entire country were searched for that woman. Last week, we received disturbing news that police in Texas illegally accessed data from automatic license plate readers used throughout Illinois. They did so to track down a woman regarding an abortion care related matter. The problem here is, is that if they went for an abortion related case, they will go for absolutely anything. And that is what worries me, right? Which is, you know, what is it going to be tomorrow?

17:23So this isn't just cops and their domestic relationships or former relationships. This is ICE. This is abortion. This is invasive, is the long and short of it. How are people responding to this new era of surveillance that no one signed up for? People are really mad about it. Lock up our campus now! Lock up our campus now! And I feel this violates my right to privacy. Mass surveillance is what is going on. And in my opinion, it has nothing to do with politics. It's about safety. And I think that there are a lot of communities that signed on to this technology because they thought it would primarily be used to recover stolen vehicles or to find missing children, maybe for property crimes, things like that.

18:13And what we've seen is a real mission creep. And people are really mad about it. They think that this is the surveillance state. And so there's been a political backlash to it, and there's also been a vigilante backlash to it. Tell me about the vigilante backlash first. It sounds more fun. Yeah, the vigilante backlash is very crazy in that basically people are putting masks on and they are cutting flock cameras down. These videos have racked up millions of views showing a man damaging flock cameras in Minnesota. These are mounted on poles, and so they are basically buying pole saws, and they're cutting the poles down.

18:52This is a flock camera, and some terrorists believe that these infringe on our liberties. I'm not here to comment on that, but I'm here to show you guys the most efficient way to cut aluminum pipe. Hey, I'm replacing this flock cam with the American flag. This one's for the moon. In some cases, flock cameras have been shot with shotguns. Police in the town of Maquanago believe someone shot a street sensor with a shotgun, thinking it was a flock camera. Tonight, a candidate for Congress in East Tennessee is sitting in a Blount County jail. He is accused of shooting four flock cameras around that county.

19:29I've seen cases where this, like, industrial foam has been sprayed on the lens of flock cameras. A pair of flock cameras sprayed, covered, and compromised. It appears to be covered in a foam sealant. I also got an email from a man who was arrested for what he said was changing the angle of a flat camera. And what he meant by that is he drove his truck into the pole of a flat camera and had it, like, face the sky. All I did was change the angle with my truck. Yeah, he was like, I made it, you know, not able to surveil people. Now it's surveilling the sky.

20:10There's something called DFLOC, which is a crowdsourced map to track all of the FLOC cameras in the United States. And this map has become incredibly popular. And so what we're seeing are people forming these groups to talk at city council meetings to determine, like, is this a technology that we want in our town? Get the FLOC out of Troy. Thank you very much. We are asking for the flock contract to be terminated in full. Your community is telling you that we don't want this. I think we should completely remove them. The political spectrum of the backlash here is everything you can possibly imagine.

20:50You know, there have been towns in Silicon Valley that have banned flock cameras. There was a town in Texas called Bandera that is like a Wild West tourism town that banned flock cameras. And so this is happening across the political spectrum. Conservatives will say, this is invasive government. This is Big Brother. Don't surveil me. I don't want you seeing where I drive my car or my truck. The left is saying much the same thing, but they're saying this is being used to surveil black and brown people. It could be used to surveil women seeking abortions. It could be, and has been used to surveil undocumented immigrants.

21:31And so the backlash is coming from all angles at this point. So this is many, many towns. There have been dozens that have canceled their contracts. Los Angeles allowed its contracted flock to lapse. Denver canceled its contracted flock. And so some of these have been quite large cities. And then you've also seen pretty small towns cancel their contracts as well. I mean, this is a billion-dollar company, multiple billions of dollars it's worth. they don't want to remove cameras. They want to install more cameras. Are they doing anything meaningful to address the concerns of people who might want to throw a bag on top of one of these cameras or change the angle of one of these cameras with their truck?

22:20The backlash has been so strenuous that Flock has started to say that it will proactively flag anomalous searches. We introduced a new tool called Audit Assistance, which detects abnormal activity and flags it for review by the ALPR administrator. So if like a police officer searching the same license plate over and over again, it might automatically flag an audit for the police department to see like, hey, is this police officer abusing the system? They also are changing the default retention time from 30 days to seven days. That means every image our cameras capture is by default purged from the customer's database after one week, unless it becomes evidence in an active criminal investigation, in which case it enters evidence mode and is retained as the law requires.

23:10Organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union say that these are like window dressing, that these changes are not super meaningful and that the main requirement that that most people are asking for would be a requirement for police to get a warrant before they search the system, which would take these searches from being like extremely routine. I think it's very important to stress that there are hundreds of thousands of searches done on this system every single month to something that, you know, maybe there would be a higher bar where a judge has signed off like this is a crime that warrants this type of search.

23:48If Flock goes down, or if the backlash grows to the point where they're at least, you know, far less relevant in this field, are there just like a dozen other companies doing the same thing, ready to take its place? This technology is really old. It's been around for decades. And what Flock has done is networked it and added AI to it. But there are other companies that offer similar technology. Motorola is in many cities in the United States. They make similar tech. Axon, which makes taser and body cameras and cameras for police cruisers, also has an ALPR product. And some of the cities that have ditched Flock have actually just replaced it with an Axon contract, meaning they've ditched one surveillance vendor and they've added a different one.