Full transcript
In Boulder, Colorado, [music] inside a
small coffee shop
The brighter areas are where the really
high density of Flock cameras are.
Will Freeman runs the largest police
[music] 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 De-Flock. The app [music]
shows 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 [music] plate readers take
a time-stamped photo of every vehicle
that passes every camera. Police can
search your historical travel [music]
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 you 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 duration 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
[music] over 70 cameras.
I watched a man leave his house in the
morning in New York. I watched a woman
jogging alone on a forest trail in
Georgia. And I was able to read [music]
the CEO's statement about having never
been hacked in front of a camera and
then access that footage later.
If a person were able to gain physical
access to 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
[music] 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. Uh roughly 60-70 devices had
a public-facing IP address. The second
we learned about it, we fixed it.
What if a police officer [music]
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? 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 [music] Boulder coffee
shop,
Let's see, directory of four cameras,
and that's just to go 1.7 miles.
Will [music] Freeman added a special
feature to DeFlock.
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 [music] killings in America. And
there's an opportunity to stop that. I
want to be on the side of the people who
are fighting to stop those things, not
the people who are trying to who are
fighting to stop the proliferation of
technology to stop crime.
Actual [music] 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 [music] that you can't turn off
is that it's logging everyone else. So,
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.