Full transcript
[music]
A popular police surveillance tool used
to catch violent criminals can now also
be used to track innocent people. And it
begs the question, who's watching the
watchers? Welcome to Behind the
Investigation on Atlanta News First
Investigates. I'm investigative reporter
Andy Pierotti. Joining me now is chief
investigative reporter Brendan Keefe.
Brendan, this is a really fascinating
series that you've been doing that I
think a lot of people have been talking
about. I know I've been reading about it
online. Bring us up to speed on this
part of the investigation.
Well, first it has to be said that this
technology is incredibly powerful. It's
incredibly powerful to catch suspects
and to convict criminals of crimes. It's
used every single day and it's so
powerful, it's actually changing the way
policing is conducted. It is allowing
investigators to generate leads and then
follow up on those leads to quite
literally catch rapists, murderers, uh
and then to convict these suspects of
those crimes. But it's powerful in
anyone's hands. It's powerful in the
hands of a good cop and it's powerful in
the hands of a bad cop. And this isn't
hypothetical. They're getting arrested
virtually every week there's a new case
where they're using it to stalk their
exes or a love interest and even going
back in time to track their movements uh
using their official police login to
this database.
Flock safety cameras [singing] continue
to pop up around town to ensure that car
thieves and violent criminals have
almost no chance to escape.
They've been helping catch suspects
quickly.
We're just trying to keep you safe.
Flock cameras have revolutionized local
law enforcement.
The system has helped them arrest
[music] violent offenders and recover
stolen cars.
An advantage they say is priceless.
Just helped them get a dangerous man off
the street. They tracked his car down
using Flock camera.
The cameras take a picture of every car
that drives by.
The cameras are designed to catch
criminals, but they also create a
searchable database of every car that
passes.
All day it's just reading tags.
They're continuously recording.
It's just a tool to help us catch
criminals. [music] We're going to catch
everyone.
We have cameras everywhere in that town.
You can't get a breath of fresh air in
or out without us knowing.
Crisanna Elzer learned the power of
Flock first hand.
You were in town from 11:52 until 12:09.
Exactly. Like I said, nothing gets in or
out of the town without us knowing.
When a Colorado police officer showed up
at her door holding Flock snapshots of
her truck.
And here's when you left
at 12:09. That's when you left town.
To get
No, to stop at Ridge Trail.
Wait a minute.
And take a package. Well, there's no
shushing. I don't need to be
I need to know where this is.
The first thing he pulled out on the
body cam is that Flock picture, the
clear photograph of your car.
But here's your vehicle in the
neighborhood many, many times apparently
casing houses cuz you just can't drive
through for work or visit other
businesses. You can only be casing
houses.
It is her. It is 100%. It is locked in.
There is zero doubt. I wouldn't have
come here unless I was 100% sure. 100%.
It is certain. It is on video. You're
obviously welcome to go to court.
Crisanna was charged with stealing a
package, but it wasn't her. The porch
pirate was somebody else.
Multiple times you tried to show him
your video evidence, he didn't want to
see [music] it.
Even when I called him back, he said,
"That's not my job."
You looked at a time of a crime. You saw
my vehicle entering in the Flock camera.
No, no. What I did was I did an
investigation.
You called my wife a liar. You claimed
this is black.
I have video evidence. I don't know what
you want me to say.
The charges were dropped after Chrisana
spent weeks trying to get the police
chief to look at her evidence,
[music]
time-stamped video from her truck, and a
neighbor's doorbell camera showing she
wasn't at the scene of the crime.
What does it say about where we are that
you feel you have to have more cameras
than the police have in order to make
sure you can prove yourself innocent?
It sounds like it flipped the script to
you're guilty until you prove yourself
innocent.
Without a Flock camera, that detective
would not have been at her door. By his
own admission, he pulled out the Flock
picture of her car. Do you want to
apologize to Chrisana Elzer for what
happened to her?
misusing the tools?
I I don't think that I have to apologize
for
a crime. He wasn't I mean, other than
being reprimanded for his attitude.
Sure. But I would tell you that like
should I apologize for somebody misusing
a tool? I don't think so.
Flock Safety Chief Communications
Officer Josh Thomas.
Who's watching the watchers in these
cases?
Well, uh the city council, the city owns
the data, so city council would have the
appropriate responsibility in that case.
Our our point of view has always been
that um it is not Flock's job to police
the way police do their work.
Flock license plate readers don't just
scan tags looking for stolen cars or
vehicles on a hot list. The cameras take
a photo of every car that passes,
stamped with the precise time and
location. The more cameras you pass, the
clearer the picture of your movements.
All of that data is saved in a database
for 30 days, shared with connected
police departments, allowing the
government to go back in time to see
where your car was and when. No warrant
required, whether you're suspected of a
crime or not.
Why not just do hotlist alerts? It's
because the investigative value here is
an is immense. Otherwise, you're going
back to the old way of policing, which
is an eyewitness saw something. They're
going to call in and report it, and a
police officer has to go stop every
yellow Jeep that looked like that, or
every person who's described a certain
way. Instead, with an LPR, you can
actually find the objective data you
need. It's the new way of policing,
which is precise. Instead of dragnet, it
actually becomes precision policing. So,
I would challenge back that same notion
and say, "Flock listing is not the way
to go."
Because police departments not only save
typically 30 days of every vehicle that
passes every one of their cameras,
investigators also have access to the
same data from every department or
private business [music] that shares
cameras with them.
Well, well over a thousand cameras that
we have access to right now.
Flock says 6,000 [music] local
governments use its cameras, many
sharing data with each other.
Flock becomes more powerful, not just
more profitable, the more agencies who
are part of the network.
That's their entire business model.
That's what why they're worth seven and
a half billion dollars.
The whole idea is crowd-sourcing, right?
But, it's crowd-sourcing with agencies
rather than the crowd. And the crowd is
actually being surveilled by the
agencies who are then crowd-sourcing
with each other.
Yeah, the crowd's the product. We are
the product.
Jason Huynh lives in Dunwoody, Georgia.
The Atlanta suburb was an early Flock
customer with cameras all over town.
Dunwoody shares with uh over a thousand
external agencies all of our data.
So, he filed records requests with the
city for Flock's audit logs.
Despite 30 records requests, you don't
know who's watching you and your family
in Dunwoody in other agencies and what
they're looking for.
Correct.
Every time somebody logs in and tries to
perform a search in Flock, it is
cataloged. And that's there in an audit
log that's immutable. So, you
there's public accountability in this.
They gave you an estimate of over a half
million dollars for you as a resident of
Dunwoody to see records of the system
they're using to surveil you.
Yes. Yes. Just to see
just to see who is looking at our data.
Who monitors the camera footage?
Huynh went to city council with the
limited Flock audit records Dunwoody
gave him.
And there's two agencies that are on
there that are literally labeled delete
and do not use.
Nobody from Flock Safety is accessing or
monitoring your footage. Once again, I
have evidence of Flock employees looking
at parks, schools, playgrounds.
The audit logs also showed Flock
executives watching private cameras
inside the city's Jewish Community
Center, which the mayor confirmed.
Members of the Flock sales team
were using it as a demonstration.
Why didn't Flock find those
vulnerabilities?
Why did it take a season to start that
up?
We actually can't talk about the JCC
by name.
So, we can talk about it with someone
else then.
Well, why can't you talk about the JCC?
Because we work with their team and we
we're not going to talk about that.
A Flock PR person stopped our interview
twice when we tried to ask about Flock
employees viewing cameras inside the
Jewish Community Center.
Did the people in those videos give
permission to be part of a demo?
We're not going to answer questions
about JCC. We're not going to answer
questions about it.
But, any partnership goes
to ask the question. However, you guys
want to answer it. If you want to say
you can't answer it, you can't answer
it. That's fine. But, I have to ask the
question. I can't It's not a PR video.
This isn't like a promotional video.
It's a It's a I mean, this is
I think it's pretty clear that this is
not a PR video. We're good though.
I think that people from the community
are raising appropriate concerns about
who has access to what cameras.
I think it's appropriate to ask those
questions. I think it's appropriate for
us to also say that we have permission
from the cities to demonstrate how these
cameras work.
I'm here to express my support for
Flock.
At Dunwoody City Council, one resident
spoke up in favor of renewing the Flock
contract.
I believe they're practical and
effective tool to help keep our
neighborhood safe.
Did you know that family members of
Flock employees were going to city
council meetings speaking positively
about the product without disclosing
that their family member makes their
living off of Flock?
I did not know that, no.
The speaker did not disclose that his
son works for Flock as the senior
director of growth.
These cameras assist law enforcement.
Should employees family members disclose
that their son makes their entire living
off of Flock when speaking positively to
a government body of about a contract
that's pending with your company?
think that's a fair request.
Dunwoody ultimately voted to renew its
Flock contract, but with new
restrictions on the company.
So, we will no longer be a demonstration
location for Flock. That keeps them out
of places they should not be.
You told me you weren't in the town of
Bomar. I have you roughly roughly 20
times this month alone.
Chrisana Elzer lives just yards from the
same Flock camera used to falsely accuse
[music] her of a crime.
It's hard to drive that way and then
look up and see it pointed right at you
and and wondering, "Did you put my
license plate in a system and now it's
tinging at you every time [music] it
reads it and now you're just kind of
watching me or taking note because
you ended up being embarrassed you were
wrong?"
Every technology comes with a cost. In
your view, the benefits [music] outweigh
those costs.
There's no question about it. I think
that crime is too easy to go unsolved
today.
Horrible violent crimes.
And I think that when cities remove
technology, they remove tools from the
ability to solve those crimes, it
actually has a uh
a negative cycle that impacts those
cities. [music]
Watching everyone to find the criminals
among us, but who is watching the
watchers?
Flock cameras are expanding even as
we're talking about this. More Flock
cameras are getting installed across the
country. But, not just the cameras that
are stationary, they're developing
drones.
Oh, yeah. They have drones on the top of
the Fulton County Sheriff's office, for
example. There are police departments in
DeKalb County that have these drones.
They're not autonomous, they're actually
flown by a pilot within the usually
their command center. It's launched from
the roof, it's in a weatherproof
housing, opens up, and look, Dunwoody,
Georgia has used them
to deploy to actual crimes
in progress at the Perimeter Mall, for
example. It's been very helpful, very
powerful. But it's interesting sort of
Flock had initially said, "We're just a
license plate reader camera." Well, now
many of those license plate reader
cameras actually can do live video. They
say, "Oh, we're not tracking people,
we're only tracking cars, or at least
recording cars." Well, now they're also
recording people.
The Condor cameras, which are those
tracking cameras, those are designed
specifically to track a human being
walking down the trail, for example. And
then there's gunshot detected detectors,
those are Raven, they call them, they're
microphones. And then there's some
publications that Flock is saying that
can also be used to pick up distress
voices. That's concerned people, because
wait, now you're listening to speech,
or at least the AI is listening to
speech to determine what's distress
speech versus a gunshot. So, they keep
adding these new technologies. Really
what's happening is it's kind of a
classic Silicon Valley story, but it's
happening here in Atlanta, and they're
moving fast and breaking things. And I'm
using that term loosely, that's the the
Silicon Valley term, but you know,
they're growing so fast that, you know,
last week's denial becomes next week's
feature.
In Boulder, Colorado, inside a small
coffee shop
The brighter areas are where the really
high density of Flock cameras are.
Will Freeman [music] runs the largest
police camera tracking system in the
nation.
If you click on any of these police
departments, it'll show you who they're
sharing with. So, the lines going
outward are the agencies that can access
their data directly.
It's called D-Flock. The app shows
[music] where the cameras are and which
way they're pointed.
How many cameras have you mapped?
88,970
cameras at the moment.
Why did you want to do this?
The main reason is to to show people how
invasive this is.
Flock license plate readers take [music]
a timestamped photo of every vehicle
that passes every camera. Police can
search your historical travel
information for 30 days.
This creates a searchable database of
everyone, not just the suspects of
crime.
Security researcher Ben Jordan.
And it's like if you were to build a
graph of that sheet, you know, and and
plot it to a map, now it's as if you've
had a GPS on your car for an entire
month.
By your own publications, 700,000 crimes
a year are solved with Flock?
Flock Safety Chief Communications
Officer Josh Thomas.
Reported crimes in America. Yeah, so
there's a lot more that probably are
being helped that aren't being reported.
Um, but yes, we have about 700,000
crimes that we are aware of that are
being solved in part with evidence
that's derived from a Flock Safety
device.
In order for that historical data to be
of investigative value, you have to
track every car for 30 days.
You Again, I would challenge on the word
track. Tracking the whole of your
movements is very different than knowing
that you passed by one specific camera,
24 specific cameras. Those are different
things.
And then the examples of tracking that
vehicle from location to location to
location.
But Flock's own webinars talk about its
license plate readers' ability to track
vehicles and people.
And we were able to track him all the
way over to another state in Kentucky.
And you're able to track your suspect's
movements.
You're saying Flock does not track
people, correct?
Track people. That's right. And the
whole of their movements like you asked.
We're not tracking people.
But what do the Condor cameras do? They
literally are designed to track a
person, aren't they?
Not to track a person, no.
This is a Flock camera known as a
Condor. Unlike the Falcon license plate
reader camera, you'll notice this does
track the movements of people. Whether
or not it was designed to specifically
track a person, you can see right now,
in real time, no matter which way I
move, the camera moves with me. And this
video is sent right back to the police
department.
to alert you when it sees human
movement. And it will actually acquire
and track that person as they walk or
people
When I walked down the path and I moved,
the camera followed me.
There's an object detection feature that
you can set up. It's called guardian
mode that allows the camera to just know
if there's a movement from a person in
the screen. It is not tracking where
you're going to go, where you're going
to leave, where you're going to start
and stop.
These started popping up weeks after
hearing Flock say these only record
license plates, they don't take pictures
of people.
That security researcher Ben Jordan
found the same Condor camera streaming
openly [music] online.
No password required.
And they quite literally use AI to zoom
in and follow you around whether you're
a person of interest or not.
At one point, I think we had found over
70 cameras.
I watched a man leave his house in the
morning in New York. I watched [music] a
woman jogging alone on a forest trail in
Georgia.
And I was able to read the CEO's
statement about having never been hacked
in front of a camera and then access
that footage later.
If a person [music] 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.
This wasn't the dark web. This was
openly streaming to anyone who could go
on a specific search engine and scan
open ports. Was that an accident?
Yes. Verizon sent us the wrong SIM cards
that had a public IP address. We have a
lot of sensors in the world that don't
have that. Roughly 60-70 devices had a
public-facing IP address. Second we
learned about it, we fixed it.
What if a police officer
uses Flock cameras to stalk their ex?
What if an abusive partner uses it to
to, you know, stalk their ex-girlfriend
and her new boyfriend?
[music]
It's already happened.
A police officer was arrested accused of
misusing the system to track someone.
There have been multiple incidents where
police officers, even a police chief,
were arrested for using LPR cameras and
specifically Flock to stalk or harass
their exes.
It's a horrible use of the technology.
Tools aren't designed to do that. This
is why we built an audit log and we work
with the appropriate democratically
elected governing bodies to hold those
people accountable.
You have to consider human nature when
you implement things like this. Um, no
one's perfect. People are going to abuse
it.
Back in that Boulder coffee shop
Let's see, director out four cameras and
that's just to go 1.7 miles.
Will Freeman added a special feature to
De Flock.
It also allows you to route around these
things. Yeah, it goes from 5 minutes to
14 minutes, but it avoids all the
cameras.
And there's an epidemic, as we all know,
of mass killings in America. And if
there's an opportunity to stop that, I
want to be on the side of the people who
[music] are fighting to stop those
things, not the people who are trying to
we're fighting to stop the proliferation
of technology to stop crime.
Actual killers have been caught with
this technology. Would you want to take
that away from the police?
Considering everything, I would want to
take that away from the police, at least
in the current state that it's in. A
feature that you can't turn off is that
it's logging everyone else. So,
[music]
if they can get rid of that logging
everyone else part, I think it would be
a lot better.
Will Freeman is still tracking the
trackers [music] because he says no one
is watching the watchers.
Brendan, let's bring it back full circle
to Will, who runs deflock.com.
Does he make money off of his website?
Like, how is this his full-time job?
No, no. In fact, he has a full-time job
as a basically a software engineer. When
he started seeing these cameras and
somebody said, "Oh, these are
surveillance cameras." He said, "Well, I
wonder if we can track those." And it's
basically crowdsourcing. His app and his
website asks people to report the
cameras and which way they're pointing.
Um other than open records and public
record searches, he doesn't actually
verify those locations. Um he runs this
really on pennies. Um it's fascinating
and he was doing that in the coffee
shop. That's basically how the coffee
shop he goes to where he maintains the
website. Um he's doing this in his spare
time and he relies on donations and as
far as we can tell it's a nonprofit
situation
um and and really doesn't cost very much
because he's relying on the crowd not
only for funding, but also for
crowdsourcing the information.
And let's talk about Ben Jordan, that
security researcher. Um
I was fascinated to see him reading
basically Flock's policy in the camera.
How did he get that video and where was
that video taken?
Yeah, what's interesting is that
initially uh
he was reporting these cameras and
Flock's initial reaction was sort of
like, "Oh, well, you know, the these
must have been hacked into." Um but
that's not what happened at all. These
were readily available, not on the dark
web, uh but rather
openly available on the internet if you
know where to look. Now, there was a
website, it's really a search engine for
essentially open camera ports. Uh these
have been around for a very long time
where you can go on and just search for
cameras that are openly streaming to the
internet. Some people do this as a
hobby. Um that's we did a story uh
a decade ago on this where we found
local daycares, for example. Their
cameras were just openly streaming to
the internet. Um so using a search
engine like that, he was able to just
search for Flock or Flock admin without
entering any password, no credentials at
all, he was able to see 60, 70, 80
cameras
um all over the country including that
one in Brookhaven, Georgia. And [snorts]
when he noticed it was moving and
tracking the movements of people, he
decided to read the statement on that
camera. We went out and verified it.
That's the camera that was tracking me
when I was doing my stand-up on camera.
And how was he able to get that video?
Was he just going and like screen
recording from his home or did he have
to file records request and get that
video?
Great question, Andy, because actually
what he did was he was able to go back
and look at the cache on the camera. Uh
there was a large amount of data that's
stored on the camera before it's
uploaded to the to the cloud, up to 30
days on the camera itself. And because
these cameras at the time were
unsecured, they have since been secured
by Flock,
but [snorts] because they were insecure,
he could essentially go right into the
database on the camera or the the you
know, the data on the camera. And he was
able to download the footage of him on
that camera or anyone else.
Let's talk about solutions, I guess.
Like you if the issue is who's watching
the watchers, who's watching the the law
enforcement agencies using this, like
what's the solution if there needs to be
if their argument is we need to do a
better job at making sure law
enforcement are using is using this
technology appropriately.
Well, I mean, they're doing an audit
trail. They have been for a very long
time. But just Dunwoody for example had
11 million plus entries for a period of
time. How can any supervisor go through
11 million searches of their cameras?
Not only their agency, but external
agencies viewing and searching
Dunwoody's cameras. And how do you hold
an external agency accountable? Flock
has responded to that by creating this
audit assistant tool. Essentially, it's
AI that goes through the audit logs and
looks for things that might be out of
policy or at least questionable, and say
needs review. So, now there's a
dashboard that the supervisor gets to
review that. But, it's the police
policing themselves, and you and I have
both seen in our investigative reporting
departments that do that incredibly
well. And then there are other
departments that don't take it as
seriously. Uh, you know, the chain is
only as strong as its weakest link. And
if police police officers are getting
caught by this audit process and are
getting charged with crimes, but how
many are getting through that sort of
filter, if you will? Um, on the flip
side though, again, they're catching
people in extraordinary ways. Early in
this process, even before Flock was a
company, uh, I did a story on these, uh,
guys who were essentially following and
murdering
uh, the people who fill ATMs with cash.
And police were able to not just search,
they weren't searching suspects' plates,
they were searching the victim's plate,
and then looking for other plates that
were scanned within three or four passes
of that camera.
They were able to actually find the
crew, the gang that was chasing down
these people, and there was no other way
to catch them.
So, it's important to to balance this,
that this is incredibly powerful
technology. And when police departments
don't have it anymore,
you know, they're feeling like they're
losing this incredibly powerful tool.
But, on the flip side, as Will pointed
out, in order for that tool to be as
powerful as it is,
you're not just scanning people
suspected of crimes, you're actually
scanning every single car that passes,
and in some cases every single person
that passes, in order for that database
to be so powerful.
Fascinating series, and I know, I just
know that there will be more
to tell about this issue as the
technology expands. Brendan Keefe, thank
you so much for this incredible
reporting.
Thank you for tuning in to Behind the
Investigation with Atlanta News First
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