Full transcript
Last week, we talked about the camera at
your front door. The one you bought, you
installed, or had installed. The one you
wanted, the fine print you'd probably
hate if you actually read it. And the
way being watched changes how you live,
even when you have nothing to hide. That
was the opt-in version. This episode is
about the other kind.
You don't get a say. You can't opt out.
Frustration is growing in Richmond as
the fate of flock license plate reader
cameras remains uncertain. Council
member Caesar Zapeda argues the cameras
could have helped police tracked down a
missing minor believed to be a victim of
human trafficking.
Flock license plate readers are
everywhere. You've probably driven past
one without even knowing it. A little
box and a pole outside a school at a
trouble spot. Blink and miss it. The
pitch for these things was super simple.
Catch stolen cars. Solve crimes. keep
neighborhoods safe. Scan a plate, run it
against the database, yada yada yada.
Then they introduced AI cameras that can
zoom in on your phone and read it
literally.
Others, they can listen for gunshots,
screams.
Picture this. Cameras popping up all
over your neighborhood, quietly snapping
license plates 24/7.
They come preloaded with constitutional
concerns. I call them violations, but
I'm not a lawyer.
Police say federal agencies gained
access to their cameras without their
knowledge.
They're called flock cameras, and
they're used by cops across the country
to hunt down bad guys and to find
missing people. And of course, they're
being used to commit crimes by the all
too human people sworn in to enforce the
law.
New tonight, a Milwaukee police officer
charged with using police equipment to
track a romantic partner appears in
court for the first time. It works until
you start asking questions wondering
who's watching me.
Last week, you told us this data was
accessed by law enforcement outside of
California, which is against state law.
The Institute for Justice called the use
of flock cameras warrantless mass
surveillance and has concerns that
police are abusing the ease of access
the system provides.
Privacy and surveillance are opposites.
And and for most of history,
surveillance was reserved for a specific
thing.
to keep tabs on criminals and for law
enforcement. Well, you know, and they
were connected. J. Edgar Hoover wasn't
shy about bending those use cases for
political ends. And I'd argue that's
still happening. But for most of us,
surveillance wasn't personal. It wasn't
aimed at us. Now that's changed. flock
and the companies behind them built a
network of around a 100,000 devices
right now, maybe more. It's not just
spies and bad guys anymore.
It's everyone. Flock itself markets is
explicitly calling it, and I'm quoting
them, the only network powered by
cities, neighborhoods, and businesses
all working as one. But here's the
thing, you can't opt out of that.
Today we're going to be talking about
what it actually means to live inside
that surveillance system. You're already
living it, but you never agreed to. Now
that you know, it's going to feel
different. Now, who built it? We're
going to talk about that and who profits
from it. Same people. Whether it works
and if anyone's actually making sure
it's safe.
I'm Bo Freedellander and this is What
the Heck? The podcast that asks, "In a
world where your data is everywhere, how
do you stay safe online?
We're going to jump right in. I I I
reached out to you because of your
coverage on Flock and
Yeah. I mean they
This is Ben Jordan who makes music and
breaks things on YouTube. He became
interested in flux safety the way a lot
of people uh have recently. The cameras
showed up in his area and he got
curious. That curiosity turned into one
of the most watched investigations into
a company anywhere on the internet. You
know, I don't really know where to
start, but I'm going to start with
license plate readers just because I
I don't know. That's where I'm going to
start. So, according to to Flock's own
site, right, they're built to capture
vehicle details, not just footage.
Yeah.
With the caveat that they're able to do
a lot of stuff that's like really really
beyond what an LPR does.
Lewis Rossman did a really good job of
like a lot of times I hear people sort
of mimicking what Lewis Rossman said
about it when he first did his video,
which he said, "Stop calling them LPRs.
Let's call them AI cameras cuz that's
what they are. If it makes people see
them and say, "Okay, what actually ask a
question like what does this capture and
what what is this saving and and where's
this data going?" Which which is the
question that, you know, I I initially
started asking which begun my research.
So yeah, I mean they could get license
obviously license plates but also like
vehicle damage, bumper stickers, color.
They have patents for I mean everything
from detecting people's race and you
know things like that. like they have
the but you know a patent doesn't mean
that it's being put in use and then
their Condor cameras can detect dogs,
people it could detect some different
characteristics about people and then it
the cameras themselves track you. They
literally move and they like make noise
when they move. Like they're actually
incredibly dystopian. Like they're way
worse than than you would imagine. From
a distance they look like a normal
security camera. But yeah, I mean, you
walk past them and they go like like
follow you around and it's it's actually
like what is happening? This is crazy.
Flock Safety was founded in 2017. They
sell themselves as a public safety
company. But here's what they actually
are, data brokers with cameras. Drive
past one of their devices, your license
plate gets photographed, location, and
time and fed into a database. That's the
functional equivalent of a GPS tracker
if you pass enough of these things,
right? But it doesn't stop with your
car. Flocks pan, tilt, zoom cameras are
showing up in public parks, pointed at
running trails, pointed at playgrounds.
Flock says they don't use facial
recognition. And that's technically true
today, but they've already built a
product called Free Form that lets a
police officer or, you know, a law
enforcement officer type in man in blue
shirt and cowboy hat and get visual
matches instantly across thousands of
cameras. That's not facial recognition.
That's worse. appearance-based tracking
with no warrant, no limit on who gets
searched, a vague parameter. Cowboy that
that almost ensures mistakes will be
made. It it ensures it.
You're looking at Redmond Police drone
video of an arrest that happened in
August. They're handcuffing Thor Andrews
Senior, whose Ford Fusion was pinged by
flock cameras in the area. Thor Senior
says police didn't verify his identity
until after he was in handcuffs, despite
him telling them that they had the wrong
guy multiple times. Police say they
followed Flock's alert and followed
protocol and said Thor Senior became
hostile during the arrest, but police
narrative shows PD knew the Ford Fusion
was registered to Thor Senior and not
Junior.
Thor Senior says he wanted to share this
video and his story to show that Flock
cameras can make mistakes.
Now, Flock holds a patent for a way to
track humans by race, gender, height,
weight, and clothing across their entire
network. adding capabilities like this
don't require new hardware. You know, if
they want to add facial recognition
later, it's just a software update and
you again never agreed to any of it.
There's no terms of service, no opt out,
no delete me.
So, basically, Flock has this this like
huge network of cameras. Something like
8,000 towns have Flock cameras. This is
Jason Kebler, co-founder of 404 Media.
Before that, he spent a decade at Vice's
motherboard. Jason's one of the most
cited technology reporters in the
country, and he's been covering Flock
for a while. In order for these cameras
to be effective at finding where license
plates have gone, and therefore people
have gone, their cars have gone, their
time, you know, you you need to network
them together in some way so that when
you search it, there could be a hit. And
the way that it works right now is if
you want to search Flock's network, you
have to reciprocally give access to the
network. So Flock is not going to let
you search a national network of all
their cameras unless you are giving
access to the cameras in your town. Law
enforcements pay to access these
databases. So do businesses. So do
homeowners associations. The more people
who do that, the better the service in
theory. And so they they've created this
incentive for police to basically opt
themselves into this network.
It doesn't matter where they are. In
theory, a a Connecticut cop can flag
your license plate and until it's unfl
flagged, every time a flock camera sees
your car anywhere in the network, it
will generate an alert. No warrant, no
suspicion required. The data that Flock
is collecting should not be collected.
This is Jay Stanley. He's a senior
policy analyst at the ACLU where he
spent more than two decades writing
about surveillance, AI, and what happens
to civil liberties when technology moves
faster than the law. If you've read a
serious policy argument against this
kind of technology, there's a very good
chance that Jay wrote it. We think that
if a license plate reader scans your
license plate, like any officer sitting
there can call it in and your car is not
wanted, it's not on any legitimate watch
list. And there are big questions about
how the watch lists are created too,
then that data should be flushed right
away. Why are they keeping track of you
on where you're going if you're not
suspected of involvement in wrongdoing?
And so the flocks database should not
exist at all. But it is true that they
are have become a very powerful entity
because of that. They're sitting on
enormous amounts of information to
reveal things about lots of people's
lives.
Now, you might be thinking, "Okay, but
but at least it works, right?" The viral
video recorded by a witness shows four
children crying face down on the
pavement. Two of them in handcuffs being
detained by police. The youngest is 6
years old.
I don't give a damn what nobody say.
That's police brutality. Britney Gilliam
says she took her daughter, sister, and
nieces out to a nail salon Sunday
morning when officers with the Aurora,
Colorado Police Department arrived.
And next thing I know, the police pulled
up silently behind them and had guns
drawn on the children.
Police say they were responding to
reports of a stolen vehicle, but soon
discovered it was not the family's blue
SUV that was reported missing. Rather,
it was a motorcycle with the same
license plate number from a different
state.
Okay. Well, you make an omelette, you're
going to break some eggs. Like, it's
it's known surveillance stops crimes. At
least that's right.
I guess like I'm very agnostic about it.
Like, because of the research that has
been done. Like, I can't say they do
work. I can't say they don't. I I can
find examples where crime went up after
flock was installed or where crime crime
went up after LPRs were installed or I
could find examples where it went down.
Ben Jordan. Again,
most of the examples the crime went
down, but that's because crime went down
nationally between, you know, 2020 and
2025 and so and that's when flock
started getting installed everywhere. So
that's uh that phenomenon is what their
paper that they wrote that they
continuously site uh points to is the
national drop in crime rate, but they
just, you know, put their logo in front
of it and say that we did this. Flock
says their cameras reduce crime. What
they don't mention is that some of that
data pre-exists the cameras, the crimes
they're supposedly stopping. But there's
a deeper problem. Crime isn't a natural
category.
It's a decision. It's a cultural thing,
right? It's a decision about whose
behavior gets counted. White collar
crime costs Americans more every year
than every street crime combined. And I
bet you the number is like every street
crime combined over a period of 10 years
compared to a year. You don't see
cameras going up on Wall Street or uh
all over private islands in the
Caribbean. Yeah. I I mean Oh, yeah. That
too. They're a little leaky with the uh
with the actual dates of of when they
start and Yeah. And they've claimed in
Oakland, for example. Yeah. They claimed
that they reduced crime in a period
before they even even installed the
cameras. But, you know, the reality is
is that like lowering crime, like
technology that lowers crime, like it's
almost impossible to find data that that
actually suggests one way or another
because like we haven't even figured out
if like increasing or decreasing police
helps crime that much. So, like when you
think of like crime down to like the
macro level and then down to the micro
level, it's like it's so different
everywhere and and it's just it it's and
it it like I I even say this like I grew
up in South Chicago and then I moved
down here to Georgia and like crime is
almost like it might as well be two
different words cuz like the types of
crime are so different. Like I don't
have any gangs here. That's not
something I worry about. But like there
still is crime but it's like people
dumping their garbage on the ground. So
those it's so many different it's like
completely different worlds. But I think
like one of the one of the common things
that you'll hear either a police officer
or even just like somebody who's just,
you know, wants a a safer world, they'll
say, "Okay, well, if you install a
security camera uh on any given street,
then car breakins, it'll it'll lower the
amount of car break-ins and it'll lower
the amount of car theft or, you know,
assaults on that street." And it's like
it it won't lower them in the city
though. Like it won't lower them
generally. Like like it gets down to a
point where it's like yes, if you put a
bunch of surveillance in one area, then
people will just commit more crimes, you
know, the next block over where there is
no surveillance. It's not like they're
just going to say, you know what, I'm
I'm going to I'm going to become a
doctor instead. Instead of dealing
drugs, I think I'm just going to, you
know, become a neuroscientist. Um like
it that's just generally generally how
it works. And so when you fill an entire
city full of surveillance, like one
would just assume that what would happen
is criminals would then just modify the
way that their enterprise is running by
obiscating the way that they're
committing the crimes. So it's actually
harder for things like community
policing to take place. So it again,
it's like I can't say it makes it worse,
but I can't say it makes it better. Like
it's it's very very complicated. And I
think it's like if somebody claims one
way or another, it's like they're
they're just kind of that's their own
opinion and that's not based on any sort
of data,
right? I think Mark Twain said there's,
you know, three kinds of uh lies. Lies,
damn lies, and statistics. It's just
however you want to twist it. Um you
know, but you know, we're also not
looking at a situation like Shing Jang,
uh China, where the weaguer population
lives and there's a camera literally
every 100 feet or 50 feet everywhere.
everywhere.
So, Flock doesn't really work the way it
says it does. The data is shaky. The
errors are real, and the people paying
for it are you and me. That's not even
the part that should keep you up at
night because everything we just talked
about assumes the system is working as
intended. It assumes the data stays
where it's supposed to stay, that the
cameras are doing what Flock Safety says
they're doing, and that the only people
watching are the ones with badges and on
the job, not to check out somebody they
saw at a pharmacy or a supermarket or
anywhere. It assumes that there is some
rhyme or reason to this and and it's
been checked out and vetted by lawyers
and it's in keeping with the
constitution and yeah, it's all on the
up and up. That's what it assumes.
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What time is it, Ben?
It's time.
So surely a private company selling this
kind of infrastructure to law
enforcement
has security that matches the
sensitivity of what it's handling.
Right? Flock is known for having uh
machines that are running on outdated
software. Most of the cameras are on
Android 8 things. So, so it's not even
Android 8, it's Android 8 things, which
is like a separate version of the OS
that was made for headless devices when
the Internet of Things started becoming
popular. So, it's like even worse, they
never made another version. It was like
it was like a one-off, one of Google's
many one-offs that they just abandoned
immediately.
Um, so Condor actually are I'll be
annoying about it.
This is John Gaines, who goes by Gain.
He's an independent cyber security
researcher, red team security guy. That
means he finds vulnerabilities for a
living. And what he found in Flock
Systems was so extensive, so damaging
that he published a formal white paper
documenting the most serious of the
vulnerabilities.
Condors are actually pretty dumb
cameras. They connect to uh compute
boxes, which is the black box above my
head. That's like the latest thing. Um,
Falcon Sparrow Flex cameras are the the
all-in-one license plate readers. Uh,
both of them run Android. I think the
chipset's like 12 13 years old now. Um,
so like and it's running an operating
system that doesn't exist. Android
things. So yeah,
here's the thing about 100,000 cameras
running on software no one patches
anymore. Somebody's already in
statistically, mathematically, how it
would be stranger if nobody was.
Somebody's in there. If a company like
Flock wants to do business in the United
States with a certain piece of
technology, they should have to pay for
all the research to make sure it's safe.
Like
Arby's has to do this, right? Like they
have to pay a fee. They pay a license
fee and then a an inspector comes and
make sure that they're not serving
rancid meat to people. Your hair stylist
has to do this. They have to pay a
license fee and make sure that it's
clean and that they're not cutting off
people's ears or, you know, whatever
they they check for in that place. Like
your home inspector, like literally
everything has this. Why would we not
apply the same system to Fox Safety? A
great absurd example is that if I got
into my car right now, at least my van,
and I drove past a Fox Safety camera, I
have to get emissions test on it. I have
to get a driver's license. I have to get
a a test when I get the driver's license
to make sure that I know how to drive
the car. I have to take a written exam
to make sure that I know all the ins and
outs of driving on the road. So, that's
regulated and I have to pay for that
either through my taxes or my license
fee. And then I have to have a plate
with that I renew every single year so
you could make sure that you could you
could keep tabs on me so I'm not doing
anything crazy. And that way and yet
this camera that is collecting all of my
information every single time I pass it
doesn't have to do any of that. like
they have absolutely no inspection
process whatsoever and and no test to
pass to get there. So that's like I feel
like that is the easiest argument to
sell in this entire debate over mass
surveillance. Like it's just like why
would you not regulate them to some
degree to just a basic degree to the
same one that you would you would
regulate any any other business. Um and
I think it's just laziness.
I'm not sure it's laziness.
I think I think cuz I think I think
we're talking about an ecosystem a
business ecosystem where it's business
first and all the other questions later
and it's you know move fast and break
things and so when it comes to a company
that is claiming to provide a resource
to law enforcement that is so poorly put
together that it actually invites
people to break the law.
Yeah. I I think it's when I say
laziness, I mean, I think I think move
fast and break things is is kind of
laziness. Like I feel like it's it's
laziness in like, you know, like really
it's just a race to get to this business
model where everyone is supplying you
with the the labor or the thing that
you're selling and the money for that.
And so it's like very similar to like
you know Uber Eats or Door Dash or
something where it's like I mean this is
the way that I've been explaining it to
police departments who want to know more
about the business model. It's like,
okay, well, just look at any tech
business model. Like, let's say Door
Dash, you are paying a third party to
pay a driver much less, and then that
person's picking up food from a
restaurant that is also paying the same
third party, and they're just collecting
money from everybody without having any
actual employees or without having uh
with having very few actual employees to
manage these autonomous people or AI or
whatever it is. And I mean, so with Fox
Safety, you have one city, they're
renting a bunch of cameras. They're
supplying data to the system that then
shares it to the next city over and
they're renting the cameras. And the
reason those cameras are so valuable is
because the data from city A is going to
them. And then you just expand that in a
big old mesh across the United States.
And so you end up with this fast growing
system that is incredibly recklessly
scaled. And the reason I can say that is
because that because of the security
posture because like we were able to
find things that we feel like we
shouldn't have been able to find. I
mean, yeah, cuz it's running Android,
right? Like that that's a great example
right off the bat. Like why is this not
running its own OS? Why is it not just
running Unix? Like what? There's so many
like this isn't hard. It's not like that
difficult to to set something like that
up. Um it's just that they did not
pause. you know, when they're developing
the product. Hey, CEO, you should have
built the privacy and the security and
when you were thinking about the thing
you wanted to build, it should have been
like on the drawing board and it wasn't.
And so, you screwed up and now here's
the deal. There's five more just like
you behind you. Y
So, flock goes away tomorrow. There's
going to be there's other people who
want to to have what you've got.
Yeah. Really? Yeah. And I mean as could
coming from a touring musician at some
point I stopped playing any shows that
weren't at legal venues and yeah I mean
a lot of these shows are like electronic
music shows and stuff so illegal venues
are very popular in that world and and I
mean without being hyperbolic I I I I
witnessed the situations at my shows
where where people died like because
there because of these like that one of
them was an illegal party up on like a
mountain in Washington and somebody od
and an ambulance couldn't get there. And
it's like, yeah, that's why you don't
have parties on on top of mountains in
Washington. That's why it's not allowed.
A helicopter. Yeah.
Right. Exactly. Like, and so, uh, I
mean, so it's like, okay, well, yeah,
this is risky. I'm putting putting my
audience at risk by doing this in even
simpler ways with like there's a lot of
like warehouse parties that had fires or
a bunch of people died. One in Oakland
that was like horrific. Anyway, but
point being like I I guess I learned
over time by as much as I want to say,
you know,
No rules. No rules when it comes to
having a good time. Like, well, yeah,
burning to death is not a good time. So,
that's the business. Move fast. Don't
ask for permission. You know, I guess
apologize, but no one's asked for an
apology yet. Worry about the
consequences later. Unless, of course,
there are consequences pretty much right
away. Now, you watched a Condor camera.
You were what? You did you hack into the
Condor camera? No, you didn't. It was
publicly accessible. It was not
protected by password or anything. And
and and you watched a person through
that camera who was looking at a video
on his phone. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I was
able to actually watch his uh I mean, it
zoomed in enough to where I could read
the text on the screen. It was it like
it it zoomed right in. I mean, they have
they have pretty remarkable zoom lenses,
which you know, props. I guess they're
Yeah. which it's kind of funny to like
see the new tech be like kind of kind of
good camera quality and stuff like that
because the old ones are actually pretty
abysmal like the the ones that you
usually see the Falcon cameras they're
the tech in them is is quite terrible
for an LPR and so that's sort of been
the running joke for the the people that
I've sort of been working alongside in
the research is like yeah at least
they're garbage like it would be worse
if they were really good but yeah it
seems like the new ones are have a lot
more power and and a lot more
capability.
A few weeks ago, using a commercial
search engine, I very easily found the
administration interfaces for dozens of
flock safety cameras.
This is from Ben's YouTube video titled,
"This flock camera leak is like Netflix
for stalkers."
I'm not exactly sure how he got into
this other than there were flock cameras
by his house and he was annoyed by it
and started looking into it.
Jason Kebler again,
none of the data or video footage was
encrypted. There was no username or
password required.
But he did a few really great videos
about Flock and he reached out to me
after some of our reporting and said,
"Hey, I have something else I want to
work on. Let's work on it together."
Whether you wanted to watch this footage
live in real time or look at footage
from a month ago, you could just point
and click your way to it like you were
watching Netflix. These were all
completely public facing for the world
to see, and some of them still are. And
what he had found was using Showdan,
which is an internet of things search
engine, he found that there were maybe
like 60ish flock cameras that were left
exposed to the internet.
And with John Gain's help, that number
quickly grew to nearly 70.
So these were Condor cameras, and these
were just streaming directly to the
internet with no login whatsoever.
You don't have to be an expert to find
and gain access to this. you don't even
have to type anything in to see every
single person, vehicle, and activity
that took place in these locations in
the last 31 days.
And he's like, can you like help me
figure out what's going on here and do
some of the reporting on your end? What
happened was I was able to geollocate
some of the exposed cameras by doing a
lot of Googling. Okay, so I've driven up
to Bakersfield, California from Los
Angeles to check out this flock camera
that Ben Jordan gain and myself found
streaming directly to the internet. The
video got and the reporting got a lot of
attention. But I think that it really
was a moment where it's like this
company is not just a license plate
reader company. It's kind of a holistic
surveillance operating system for police
and they are deploying a lot of this
technology in a relatively haphazard
way.
And basically what we've found is that
this is streaming unencrypted, totally
insecure, no password required directly
to the internet.
This is not what you would want from a
surveillance tech company. You don't
want this stuff just like streaming
where anyone can watch it.
And so I'm going to go out there and
walk my dog. I'm going to record this
camera recording me and then I'm gonna
watch myself on the internet because
this is streaming directly to the
internet insecure. I can literally walk
up to a camera, read Flock's statement
about how they've never been hacked, go
home to my personal computer, download
it off of Flock's ecosystem, show it to
the world, get get media attention
worldwide for this, and they will still
stand up in a hearing and say, "Flock
has never been hacked." Flock is
committed to continuously improving
security. If a person were able to gain
physical access to the device leased to
the city, which is illegal, they still
would not be able to gain access to the
footage as the data is only stored for a
very limited time duration on the device
following its transmission to the cloud.
None of these vulnerabilities affect our
cloud platform where the vast majority
of all evidence and metadata is stored.
They were just exposed to the internet.
So if you knew or you found the data
connections IP, right, you can just like
directly browse to it and it was a a
nice little web application.
Here's Gain sec again.
The compute boxes or the license plate
readers or or the the the computing
devices that were connected to them in
the in the newer instances all have this
hard-coded debug sequence where if you
push the button less than a handful of
times, it would activate it hotspot. And
it happened that the hotspot had uh uh
the same password across all the devices
as well. hardcode password uh which was
not um secure.
There's a button on the back of these
cameras. Get the push sequence right and
the cameras broadcast their own Wi-Fi
signal. I'm not going to say more, but
there's more. A lot more.
When I listened to Flock CEO, it's a
38-year-old guy named uh Garrett
Langley. He actually said, "We're not
forcing Flock on anyone in a Forbes
interview." might be my favorite quote
of his. But
I mean, can we opt out?
Yeah. My favorite quote of his like I I
can't
Ben Jordan again.
Yeah. I mean, I literally can't go to
the store without passing a flaw camera.
If I touch it, I I I I get arrested if
if I so much as like lay a finger on it,
right? I I can't know what data of mine
is being sent is being sent off or is
being kept. I don't know who's accessing
it. the per it's likely that whoever's
operating it doesn't completely
understand who's accessing it and then
and I mean it's just a web of
like and it it just never stops. So,
like, you know, you can hack right into
this thing. So, you you you can't go to
the store without passing a flock
camera. And you don't know if I'm in
there, right?
Cuz I might be, but I might be like,
"Well, what when does Ben go to the
store?" Cuz I'm a huge fan and I want to
meet him and it's the beginning of a new
adaptation of Misery. You know, you're
screwed. My initial flock safety video
idea, like the initial rendition of it,
was to work with John Oaf, who's a
Georgia senator, and uh the one and only
Marjgery Taylor Green, who I you know, I
I don't want to spend time with Marjorie
Taylor Green for many reasons, but I I
did want to be on both sides of the
platform, and she is somebody who seems
to be pretty skeptical about tech and
surveillance, so it was like and she's
also, you know, 30 minutes away or 45
minutes away from
her district. But uh the idea was can I
track you both for a week? Just track
all of your locations using the flock
ecosystem. And uh you know what? Could
we make that possible? And you know,
could I get your consent to do that? And
uh I I I spoke to one of their teams and
one of their teams is like I think we
can make this happen. And you know, I
was working on it and then my attorneys
were like there is no way to do this
without going to jail like because
you're going to be touching Fox
ecosystem on their cloud. So, no, even
if it's senators, even if it's, you
know, Congress people, no matter who it
is, it could be the president himself,
unless you think you're going to get
complete immunity or something that
there's no way you can avoid going to
jail and you will be guilty. And so, it
from there it kind of like boiled down
to all right, well, let's just talk
about like all the security
vulnerabilities in this camera and and
get John Gaines here to talk about it.
These cameras aren't offging something
that you can just freerange grab. I
mean, we found the credentials to get
into the still touching their system.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, I can't we
can't go there, but we have them. And
And I mean, they weren't hard to find.
It turns into like almost like a Fermy
paradox type of thing where it's like to
imagine that nobody's doing it is kind
of impossible. It's like very
statistically impos unlikely that nobody
is in the ecosystem using it
nefariously. And and I would I would
actually be sheepish about saying that
for legal reasons if Senator Widen and
Christian Neory, Representative
Christian Neory didn't send a letter to
the FDC saying the exact same thing,
saying this is a national security risk,
a massive one, and we need to deal with
it right now, which of course fell in
deaf ears as far as I'm aware. Like a
lot of people have asked me since these
videos come out, they like, "So could
you just track anyone?" And it's like,
"Yes,
I haven't though. So, I cannot tell you
with 100% I can't give you a 100% yes,
but I can tell you that every single
piece of information that I have
suggests that I could if I wanted to. I
just don't want to cuz I don't want to
go to jail.
Here's what we know. Flock cameras have
had serious security vulnerabilities.
And for a stretch of time, live feeds
from at least 60 of their devices were
streaming openly to the internet. No
password, no login required. Anyone who
knew where to look could watch. And some
of what they could watch was kids on a
playground. That's the accidental part,
the part that they can and presumably
will fix. What we haven't talked about
yet is the part that's working exactly
as intended. And a lot of this is
because the move to cloud services,
which is a big part of the story here.
This is Jay Stanley from the ACLU.
Again, cloud services are centralizing.
That means that it's more central power.
It gives them the power, for example, to
ban review of their products. Flock
won't let this company iVPM, which is
sort of like a consumer reports for for
security products, won't let them review
it. And they can do that because they
have the centralized control and it and
it gives them
it makes them a monopolistic company
because they have this giant network. It
makes it very hard for competitors to
arise and to to fight them. When you
build something this big this fast, the
tools stop being about stolen cars. Law
enforcement used to need a warrant to
track your movements. That check exists
for a reason. a judge, someone
independent saying, "Yeah, there's
enough cause here to follow this
person." Flock found a workound. The
data comes from a private company
collected on public streets, sold to
police as a service. No warrant needed,
just a subscription. The Supreme Court
hasn't ruled on whether any of this is
constitutional yet. And what has
happened is there is a program that
allows local police to work with federal
law enforcement on immigration
enforcement.
Here's Jason Kebler again.
And so what's happening is local police
are searching for license plates
basically at the behest of ICE and then
sort of giving them information about
you know where a specific car has been
and a person has been and the history of
their movements. And when we showed this
and we started talking to the police
departments that were doing it or that
they're having their cameras searched,
they were saying, "We had no idea this
was happening. They had no clue that
that any of this was happening." And
that's just like an example of how you
can kind of accidentally end up doing
surveillance for the feds in in a
situation like this. Edward Snowden
hasn't had much to say publicly in a
while, but he he was the one who
revealed more than a decade ago that
apps like Angry Birds were leaking
personal data, location, user IDs,
political preferences straight to
intelligence agencies because I guess
even people working in that line uh play
games. At the at the time, it felt like
the quiet part, staying quiet. Now, the
quiet part is being said out loud.
That's that's like this is the era of
that and ICE is using stingrays.
Palunteer is involved. Add Pen Link,
Paragon, Celbrite, Smart Link, Mobile
Fortify, facial recognition tools that
can identify you from a phone pointed at
your face on the street. These aren't
separate programs. They are, but they're
what I'm trying to get at is they're an
ecosystem. And when you start connecting
that ecosystem to a network of 100,000
flock cameras, you're not looking at
crime prevention anymore. You're looking
at something that doesn't have a good
name yet in democracy. I mean, it's
never going to have a good name, but it
has plenty of names in places that
aren't one.
Yeah. So, what I would say is that if
you can imagine a vector for
surveillance, ICE has also imagined that
vector and they found a contractor that
will provide that sort of software, that
sort of capability to them. The the list
is endless. I mean, we we don't need to
go into all of them, but it's things
like location data that they're buying
from third parties. The the the location
data comes from your phone, you know, it
comes from apps that you may have given
your location data to sometimes through
the advertising industry. I think that
because they're buying so many different
capabilities from disperate companies,
and honestly, a lot of these companies
have just kind of like popped up in the
last few months, I don't think that
they've integrated this all into some
sort of master database. Although there
there is a lot of fear that that may be
happening.
I I mean everything gets to a breaking
point, right?
Ben Jordan again,
like everything eventually gets there.
And I mean this is even in the under the
microscope of just flock safety, it's
like yeah, you know what? At some point,
if you piss people off enough and if you
make them uncomfortable enough, they're
just going to shoot the things, right?
I'm surprised that's not happened
already. And I'm glad that's not
happened already. like it. As as much as
I want to be like, "Yeah, get him off
the polls." I'm really glad that in this
situation, there's a good guy and a bad
guy, there's one side that's been
misleading people and saying things that
aren't true and citing facts that aren't
real, and that antagonist side has been
making lots of money handover foot. And
then there's another side that's been
paying money out of pocket for legal
resources. So they could do everything
by the book and and work with cities and
with law enforcement agencies that they
don't necessarily align with at all and
with politicians that they don't align
with at all to make sure that the public
is safer and that they have some
expectation of privacy or at the very
least so they understand
what it is that is connected to the pole
that's pointed at their house. And so,
thank you to all of those who haven't
shot the cameras off the P. Like, I
think that's actually really important
right now because, but I do think that
at some point if Yeah, sure. If like ICE
starts accessing these through the
police departments that they're sort of
gobbling up in Georgia, for example, and
it leads to massive arrests and the
Trump administration starts arresting
people who are already illegally here. I
mean, I think that's already happened.
But if let's say that continues even
worse, then like, yep, you can expect
people to start, you know, hitting them
with baseball bats or spray painting
them or whatever it is.
You know, there was sort of an
interesting side note on this when I
have this older video where the
University of Chicago said that they had
invented an AI algorithm that or AI
model that could predict crime in in
particular areas of Chicago with a 90%
accuracy rate and they could do it down
to the city block. And so I went to
University of Chicago and met with the
sociology professor who who was
spearheading the project and then some
of his developers. And I I asked them
randomly. I was like, "How often have
you gone to this neighborhood?" This
neighborhood was Anglewood. And I grew
up in West Anglewood. So it's this it's
one of the worst neighborhoods in the
country. It was then, still is now. And
so I asked him like, "How often are you
going over there? Like are you familiar
with this or this?" And they none of
them had ever been there. And I was
like, "Wait a minute. Wait, whoa. It's
literally 15 minutes away. You've been
studying the statistics of this
neighborhood for years and you never
drove 15 minutes away. I can't believe
you've never been there in your life.
And so, oddly enough, the the same day I
had a meeting with a nonprofit there
called Purpose Over Pain. And Pam
Mosley, I believe is her name. She's the
woman who runs it. But it it's run by a
group of mothers who lost children to
gun violence. and they started this this
nonprofit that more or less has a a
hotline that you can call if you feel
like something's going to happen, a
murder is going to happen, somebody's
going to get hurt, somebody just was
hurt. And it was so interesting cuz like
visiting Pam, she was like, "Oh, I I
could do better than their 90%." And and
I was like, "How?" And she's like, "I
talk to people. It's very easy actually.
It's not that profound." The solution to
a lot of the problems that we face are
community, like sticking together as a
cohesive group of concerned individuals
and acting as a a as a group. And I
think one of the one of the reasons why
things like flock bother me is because I
believe that in a perfect world, the
police are very few cops would be armed.
You would have your like, oh force
for like really really bad situations.
But like I want a cop to be welcomed
like to to I want a cop to be able to
solve problems. I want a cop to to be
trained in dealing with somebody
overdosing and I want other cops
escalation too, right?
Oh yeah. Yeah. And like not to like bust
out another I'll tell this very fast. My
my father used to be a cop and I didn't
meet my dad until I was later in life.
He didn't raise me but he he used to be
a police officer and he told when the
whole George Floyd thing was going on.
He told me a quick story where he was
like when Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was a
cop in the middle of nowhere in Georgia,
rur rural Georgia. My next backup was 30
to 45 minutes away by radio. I got a
call with a guy who was going to kill
his wife, like he was threatening to
kill her. He had a gun. I had to go up
there by myself. And I had to I knew him
by name, you know, I knew him afraid. He
was like somebody who lived in the area.
And I talked to him, talked to him about
his life, talked to him about the
consequences, what would happen if he
shot her and if he shot her, you know,
that he didn't need to end his life over
it. That everything is resolvable. And I
had a good 30 minutes out there in the
in you know the hot Georgia evening
being bitten by mosquitoes talking to
this guy and and talking to him out of
his tree and getting put the gun down
and then you know we had him arrested
and you know whatever went on from that
that opposed to that happening in a
place like Los Angeles or you know uh in
a Houston or some place where like you
can immediately get a 100 cops if you
need it. they can just put on the riot
gear and and arm themselves and come in.
That's the difference. Like a bunch of
people pointing a gun and saying, "Get
on the ground." And like versus one guy
coming out who's familiar to that person
and saying, "Yo, you're having a crisis.
Let's talk about it right now." Like
I've never unless it was a car accident
where I needed a report. I've literally
never called the police in my life. Like
I've never done it. And and it's it's
because anytime I've seen the police
called, it makes things worse.
The only research I've seen out of out
of looking through criminology research
forever, the the only research I've seen
that like really does suggest that a
certain thing does improve crime rates
or improve this catching crime or
solving crime and whatever it is that
you want to that you want to call it.
The the only thing that that actually
improves crime that is uh community
policing. That's dudes with bicycles
being like, "What's up?"
Yep. Yeah. And I mean, that's like you
could you could go through tons of
research papers finding stuff that
heavily suggests that community policing
reduces and and increases the solving of
crime. And so it's like if police are so
concerned about these statistics that
that you know that they're looking for
from flock that are that are so dodgy,
there it is. There's your statistic.
Now it's time for the tinfoil swan. Your
paranoid takeaway to keep you safe on
and offline. If you're feeling helpless
right now, that's probably the right
instinct and uh realistic. You can't opt
out of this. You drive past one of these
things, you're in the system. But you're
not powerless either. At least not yet.
Write to your local and state lawmakers.
Tell them you want standards. Tell them
you want them to pass laws and you want
these systems tested and you want the
companies to pay for that testing and
you want accountability. And keep
listening. We'll try and and get into
some of the smaller, more practical
things you can actually do. But right
now, right now, the only thing you can
do is get in touch with your lawmaker
and and then, you know, if you hear us
talking about this topic again on this
podcast, which I promise you, you will
write to them again.
Okay, that's it. Uh, we'll see you soon
and thanks so much for listening.
This episode of What the Hack was
produced by me and Andrew Steven, who
also did the editing. Our theme music is
by Andrew Steven. If you think you heard
Ben Jordan's music in the mix, you're
right. There's some other stuff, but
there's some Ben Jordan, too. Check him
out on Band Camp or wherever you get
your stuff. What the Hack is a
production of Delete Me, which was
picked by the New York Times wire cutter
as the number one personal information
removal service. You should be using it
already. If you're not and you want to,
well, you can. Here's what to do. Go to
joindeleteme.com/wtth.
That's jointdeleteme.com/wth
and get 20% off. I kid you not, 20%. 20%
off. That's joined me.com/wth.
Now, stay safe out there. See you
around.
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