Get the Flock OUT!!

You know those little solar powered boxes that are like bolted to the poles around town? They're they're black. They look like a like a birdhouse designed by your paranoid HOA president who like binged watched too many Stazzy documentaries and took notes. Yeah, those are flock cameras. And if you drive past one, congratulations. your license plate, car make, model, color, direction of travel, exact time, location, and even unique little details like your roof rack, bumper stickers, dents that you still swear wasn't your fault. The faded political sticker, the bike rack, or the aftermarket exhaust. All of that just got logged into a searchable cloud database. I'm your host, Nicole Rios, and this is I've Got Opinions. [music] Today's opinion is simple, non-negotiable, and grounded in the Constitution. It's a basic incentive analysis, and the receipts are already piling up. I don't want them. Not in my town. Not in your town. Not quietly expanding into a de facto national vehicle tracking network while everyone nods along because it's just cars. And think of the stolen vehicles. And what about the missing children? Spoiler alert, it's never just the cars. It is a warrantless movement tracking web, which is a slippery slope already greased. a system where back doors are very easy for the people who control it and a direct collision with our bill of rights and the realworld examples keep confirming it. If you're new new here, the deal is straightforward. I like to dig into something that's in the news. I start basic so nobody feels lost. And then I build the case with specific evidence and references. And I throw in a little personal story or stake just to highlight the ugly mechanics like back doors and mission creep. And then I'll land on an actual opinion instead of the usual both sides. Um I like to use humor and sarcasm. Uh and you get that benefit for free. And so today we are going to go long on Flock Safety, their automated license plate reader cameras, uh, which I'll use ALPR as the acronym, uh, which honestly doesn't do it justice, but I've got them around my town. Um, I drive past them all the time. I'm starting to realize there are way more than I realized initially. Um, and I just talked to a a friend who's an insurance adjuster and her company has a subscription to Flock. They use Flock cameras to tap into the database in order to check uh vehicle damage claims and the timestamps for when people argue uh when the damage occurred or when the accident occurred. Uh, I feel like that little detail still matters and it's like exhibit A for the function creep for these things. Okay, we're also going to talk about where these things come from, how trivially easy the back doors would be, uh, the documented misuse already and the constitutional train wreck that these cameras are and why the slope is already slippery as hell. So, first, what the hell is a flock camera? Actually, flock cameras are automated license plate readers made by a company called Flock Safety, which is a US company headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. They take still photos of vehicles as they pass by. They record the plate number, the make, the model, the color of the car, which direction you're traveling, the timestamp and location for that picture. plus extra visual identifiers like dents, like I said, the roof racks, aftermarket parts, tints on the windows, bumper stickers, unique damage. Okay. The company is very proud to tell you, however, that they do not do facial recognition. So, no biometrics on the driver, just information on the vehicle. That data then goes into a cloud database. By default, it's supposed to delete after about 30 days unless it's tied to an active investigation or a hot list. Okay. The plates get checked against stolen cars, missing persons reports, amber alerts, um drug trafficking, similar lists related to crime. The police departments love them. Um and it's also actually being used in private neighborhoods and HO HOAs. Who can buy them? Um, businesses have started putting them in parking lots. Uh, universities, apartment complexes, commercial properties. Uh, they're all starting to integrate them into their into their properties. And because they're solar powered and they use cellular data data, you can basically just bolt one to a pole and in a few hours with almost no infrastructure work, you can have full camera feed in that area. Um, and it it barely has any public debate. Okay, it sounds tidy and clean and efficient, you know, modern public safety. Except logging every car that drives by and making that log then searchable across a growing network is not public safety infrastructure. It's a movement tracking system. Um, ironically, the ACLU has been screaming about this year for years with campaigns like get the flock out because these networks create an unvetted tracking web on everyday people. You don't need like the facial recognition side of it when you can reconstruct where a specific vehicle went, when it was there, how often it travels certain routes, and what other cars it tends to be near. And your car is a very good proxy for you. Okay? Just like in your iPhone when it you hop in the car and it auto suggests on maps where you might be going to your next location. Eight times out of 10 it's probably right. These things build patterns. They build on patterns. It's AI related. Okay. And you know, the claim that it's just license plates visible in public is doing some pretty heavy lifting because visibility has never meant that the government and its corporate partners get a persistent and queryable historical record of your movements without a warrant. So here's the interesting well and interesting side of this, okay? Because I feel like all of a sudden they popped up everywhere. How did this happen so quickly? So, their business model um is is based specifically for ease of use. Okay? They didn't win solely on independent long-term effectiveness data. They won on the fact that you can pay a subscription. It's convenient. It markets on the emotions and it has this cumulative network effect. Okay. Flock mostly runs on a subscription model which means that towns, HOAs and companies can pay annually which gives a low barrier to to um start. They don't have to necessarily put out all of this money for infrastructure and equipment. That subscription covers all of the actual cameras and installation. Not to mention that the cameras are run by solar. So you don't need it to be wired electrically. It doesn't need any attachment to fiber optic cables or anything like that because it also runs on cellular. So it can be rapidly deployed sometimes before the residents in the area realize that there should have been a fight or a conversation about it. And once enough agencies and private owners are on the system, they all share together. It creates a natural network. So the more cameras that get put up, the larger the network is. And all of those subscribers then have more coverage because of that network that network viability. And that lets departments follow a vehicle across city and state lines almost instantly. There was just a case yesterday that showed they tracked a guy crossing state lines into a state that had uh recreational legal marijuana. He bought marijuana at a dispensary in a legal state, then drove back across state lines with that marijuana into a state where it was not recreationally legal, and they pulled him over and used that information from the Flock camera to do a a search on his car and were able to find the find the marijuana and charge him with possession. Okay, that is how some of these things can be used. And they they marketed hard to the police and to homeowners associations and commercial properties which helped create this like dense partly privatized surveillance footprint that now law enforcement can tap in and share information on. It's basically like crowdsourcing tracking, okay, with a corporate middleman who's making tons of money on it. Um, so Flax Materials and 2025 impact census, they lean hard into big numbers, saying that hundreds of thousands of investigations have been assisted, that stolen cars have been recovered, that missing people have been located, and it claims like massive clearance for helping um solve these crimes. And it's got the it's got the brochure, right? All all decked out. when you look at independent studies on how this is actually um applying across the field, it's a lot more mixed. Okay, the the ALPRs can help with autotheft recovery and some property crime and in cases where there's something that happens in the camera's direct view. Okay. The the violent crime impact is it's weaker or unclear once you once you get out of the main press releases. And some marketed successful towns showed that their their long-term trends in crime rate are flat. They haven't really reduced crime in in a significant way. So assisted in investigation is not a close case, a clean conviction or no abuse. Okay. The corporate antidotes are not like rigorous proof that the tradeoffs are worth it. I'm not saying they never help because recovering a stolen car or finding a missing person is real. I'm just saying that like sometimes useful for some property crimes does not justify a persistent searchable sharable record of ordinary Americans movements on a momentto moment basis. Okay. So now I want to talk about the equipment, specifically the hardware of this. Okay? Because Flock Safety is a US company. It's based out of um Atlanta, Georgia. It's American founded and focused on the US market. The design, the software, the firmware, the cloud backend, and the integration are US controlled. But like virtually all modern electronics, the hardware sits on a global supply chain. the sensors, the processor, the cellular modules, the solar components, the circuit boards, um they're all commonly sourced from Taiwan, South Korea, the US and um contract manufacturers in Asia, including China. Okay. Full like every component mined, fabricated, and assembled only in the USA is rare and expensive for this class of device. So, public materials do not claim pure vertical domestic production. So now I have this backdoor question that I looked into because for the manufacturer or anyone who controls the firmware, software and the update pipeline, it's extremely easy, right? These are closed source cloud connected devices. Flock controls the firmware on the camera, the cellular connection and the imaging processing, the plate reads and and everything else upload to the cloud. So the backdoor doesn't have to be in the hardware. It can be like undocumented network functionality or a hidden command channel in the in the copy. It can be a special authentication bypass or remote management feature. Uh it could be that you know the user on the back end that's accessing cloud the cloud the subscriber all of these um compromised like update mechanisms or usage me mechanisms can bleed into this opportunity for their this data and this uh these databases to be used uh maliciously. Okay. The cameras are designed to phone home constantly. the uh like covert channels can hide in plain sight, right? We're not necessarily worried as much about the supply chain risks like the components, the the manufacturers, like all of that. But I'm more I'm more worried about hackers. I'm more worried about deep fakes. I'm more worried about people putting in information and taking out information they shouldn't have access to because we are literally just talking about requiring a corporate or or LLC company to have a subscription and all of a sudden you get all of this mind data movement data on regular Americans. Listen, all you have to be all you have to be is a rogue employee that is paid a certain amount of money to provide an interesting amount of information on a single person. Okay? Like customers are rarely getting like the the you guys this whole situation is crazy to me. I'm sorry I'm like stumbling over myself right now, but the idea that just other other private citizens of the United States with a subscription to flock cameras can track my daily movements, that is like mind-blowing to me. Okay, what we hold on a second. Americans, we're about our privacy, y'all. We have we have laws for this stuff. This is crazy. and thinking about the fact that there there is like long-term network monitoring on my movements in my vehicle for like my HOA. Why should they have that information? Um, this is like the nosy neighbor that watches you leave your garage every day like 10xed. Like imagine that neighbor could just track you across town and see where all of where you went. So, I don't know. That's a little crazy to me. So, but Flock does publish security and privacy claims. Okay. They say they have encryption, access controls, um customer controlled sharing, retention defaults, no facial recognition, da da da da. Okay. They um they have to s face certain law enforcement procurement standards. So, there's no widely verified public evidence of a secret nation state back door and flock. Okay. But I still feel like the whole idea is trust the model, trust the company um and our employees and our update infrastructure and our cloud and our partners. Uh and I just feel like that's a lot of trust for a system that's logging the movements of millions of people. So uh the the documented problems so far have been like abuse of the legitimate legitimate access not confir confirmed exotic implants. Okay. So it's it's people people in the US that are misusing it. Not that it's being hacked from other nation states but again I wouldn't push that beyond the bounds of possibility. Okay. It just makes it like an extra layer of risk on top of an already expansive surveillance system, right? Like the misuse problem is not theoretical. We have specific cases where like trust us, there are policies collapses anyway. Okay? For instance, the Savannah Police Department just fired six of their employees over misuse of the Fox safety system. Okay. Savannah, Georgia, which is really pretty close to Atlanta, Georgia, where this all started. Um they were using the the the well at least one of them. I don't know about all six, but they were one one woman was using it to track her boyfriend across town to make sure that he was going where he was saying he was going. Okay. Like these people were treating the tool like a personal toy or using it as a shortcut. And Georgia has had multiple additional cases, officers and deputies fired or arrested in connection with flock misuse. Okay, departments have scrambled to launch transport transparency portals after the public push back and that's like a barn door after the horses security theater with a press release. Okay, you do [snorts] not need every user to be corrupt. You need a handful of credentials plus a grudge, a romantic obsession, political curiosity, family drama, boredom, or just sloppiness and you can go down the wrong path. Okay? Because a system is so easily searchable and often shared. Listen, you can you can search by the car maker model. You can search by the VIN number. You can search by the license plate. You can search by the area. You can search by the camera or the time. There's so many different factors that you can search for. So, it doesn't matter if you're not looking. You can look for somebody specific or you can look on an area and do surveillance on a certain area specifically. What I saw a story about this flock camera that was put in and the range of the camera included this guy's front front front of his house. So every time he walks out of his house, the flock camera is tracking him. Every time he has somebody come to his house, the flock camera is tracking him. Every time he sits on his porch, he's being watched by this camera. So it's not just about the vehicles. Okay. Yeah, there's no facial recognition, but would you feel comfortable? I wouldn't feel comfortable if I had a a a socially um accessible camera that was tracking on my front door. Okay. And the problem is like this information is a network. It can be shared. It's it's more than just your local police department having access to this. And there's been more patterns in local reporting of firings or accounts documenting that in there has been um cyber privacy issues, data risks, they and they all keep showing the same thing that powerful tools get misused by some percentage of humans who have login. Okay. When a technology needs constant auditing, repeating firing, sudden dashboards, and reassurance campaigns just to limit the worst abuses, the default posture of the technology is the problem. Okay. And mission creep is a slippery slope. We're already we're already sliding. Okay. Flock and customers say sharing is customer controlled, which is often off by default, encrypted, and not sold by Flock as a classic data broker. Okay. Private owners can see their own data. Police see contracted and shared data. And federal access is all just like a flash point. Flock has stated it doesn't have direct ICE contracts. Yet, civil liberties groups document concerns about indirect access via local partners, task forces, and the network itself. And defendants can sometimes get data and discovery. In practice, the slope is greasy and we're already like like careening down it. Okay? Because we start with we're going to use it to catch car thieves and find missing kids and then we're going to investigate this specific crime more efficiently and then we're going to share it with the next department so the suspect can't just drive 10 miles and then the private entities discover it like my insurance adjuster friend's company that uses flock data to verify damage claims and timelines. Oh, that hitand-run dent supposedly Tuesday at 3 PM. Oh, we'll check those cameras. Listen, it's convenient for fraud. It saves the insurance company a lot of money to not have to drive out the adjuster have to drive out and actually check the car, but at the same time, it's a perfect example of function creep for the original pitch that's not it's not actually being used for. And then we've got the HOA. Like, as if HOAs don't have enough freaking power and enough, you know, fragility. I mean, this whole idea that the HOA is going to use it for their rule enforcement, which is going to help them track you going three miles an hour over your 15 minute 15 mph speed limit. All right. Uh and and and you want your HOA president having access to all that data cuz I surely don't. They again, they've got enough power in their head as it is. We all have heard the crazy HOA president stories. Okay. So what we're talking about is that person now has a login and a creative justification that they can search the data on those cameras and then those cameras again are built into this larger network where it has denser coverage and longer retention through these shares and copies to more secondary users which puts more pressure to expand just this once for the next emergency. Okay. So, suddenly your ordinary driving, your commute, the kids' school, doctor, church, the gun range, the clinic, a protest to the therapist, a late night drive. It's raw material. Okay. The New York Times actually just covered how these systems enable uh massive scale vehicle tracking. The Hill the other day ran a piece with maps showing neighborhood density. And then Politico just posted this morning um the backlash, the contract reviews, and the cancellations when the residents realize what's going up in their neighborhoods. Okay. Density turns a few cameras at problem intersections into general population movement logging. Okay. And this is the slippery slope in action. Each step feels like reasonable and isolation. Stolen cars are bad. Missing kids are bad. Sure. Sharing with the next town is efficient. Insurance fraud is bad. The next use will also sound reasonable because it's meant to. The end state is a corporate mediated government acceptable historical record of where everyone goes. Normalized as infrastructure. No dramatic coupi required. Just subscriptions, polls, and what's the harm? Okay. History is littered with surveillance tools sold for the narrow good case that expanded from there. Okay, this is that pattern with better marketing and solar panels. Um, this is why we should not want them. The architecture fights the bill of rights. Okay, we have the fourth amendment to secure in persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures. Warrants require probable cause and particularity. Okay. A casual glance at a plate is one thing. A dense, persistent, retrospective,worked, queryable database of nearly everyone's movements is another. Okay. The Supreme Court has actually already flagged this. In the United States versus Jones in 2012, there was a GPS tracking of a vehicle um was designated as a Fourth Amendment search. Okay. Concurrences stress that the privacy evasion from aggregated location data over time went against the Fourth Amendment. uh and Carpenter versus the United States in 2018 was uh historical cell site location information. It requires a warrant. So to be able to track where somebody's cell ping cell phone pinged, you need a you need a warrant for that. So long-term location records reveal like the privacies of life, associations, medical trips, political activity, religion, relationships, and in ways like short-term public observation does not. So the third party doctrine does not give government free reign. APLR networks are the vehicle version of that tracking. You have enough cameras plus the retention plus the sharing plus the easy shirt search and you get a mosaic of your life that can be queried later with far less process the carpenter requires for phone data. Plates are public is the new the phone company has the records. Okay. Courts are still sorting exact ALPR boundaries, but the Jones of Carpenter Carpenters trajectory is hostile to a warrantless mass historical vehicle tracking. Okay. Bulk logging first, um, suspicion later. And that just inverts the Fourth Amendment. Okay. Hot lists for hits for stolen cars are narrower, but fishing in the archive of ordinary people is not. All right. All I think about this is this being flipped on its head. Okay. If we have a government that comes in and starts to decide that we aren't allowed these liberties, we can't we can't practice our our chosen religion anymore and we're being tracked going to a church or we're being tracked visiting a certain person that becomes an enemy of the state somehow. That that is just how I see these things morphing. Okay, we have we have freedoms. You can't track us unless there's already some suspicion or some reasonable cause. Okay, not to mention that we have the first amendment. Okay, we have the freedom of speech, assembly, association, religion, petition, and these require the ability to move and meet without automatic logging. Okay, we're allowed [snorts] to attend a protest, a rally, a controversial church, a union meeting, a gun, a gun club. Okay, I just saw another video today about there's two cameras set up at the entry to this guy's gun range. Why do they need to be there? Why are you tracking people coming in and out of the gun range? um you know going to your going to your therapist or like any other gathering that the authorities of the day dislike. Okay. Your car creates the trail. Detailed movement data chills the ability for free speech and association. If people begin to self-censor when a searchable record exists that they could be subpoenaed, leaked or misused by a dirty cop like some of these cops in Savannah or in in the other instances in Georgia like I was there was another one where a police officer showed up to a woman's door [snorts] said you are you are um uh fa at fault for this crime. I think it was a shoplifting crime. And he whipped out of his uh folder a picture of her truck and said, "This was you driving." And she's like, "What? When? When are you telling me that I was?" He was like, "We know for a fact you were in town. This is your truck. We know exactly what time you came into town and exactly what time you left." And she was not at fault for the crime. They had to backtrack that. So again, this like ALPR coverage makes public roads a place where you are you are more of a target than you are free. Okay? And however you choose to express yourself or who you would choose to associate with in your life, you it leaves a government adjacent paper trail by default. Okay? And that is not it's it's not freedom. Okay, we are we are given due process, equal protection, and accountability with the right to travel under the fifth and the 14th amendment. Okay, we we are already seeing abuse cases that show accountability lacking across these areas. um you know, these contracts, the fact they're being put up before there's any any chance for public debate, the fact that both public and private uh companies and police departments can have access to the same information. The fact that there's all these secondary uses popping up like citizens should not have to hope that every user has some angelic purpose behind their use. Okay? Americans have a right to travel and you can't turn the movement itself into a heavy lo heavily logged like easily queried activity which rewrites the citizen state relationship. Okay. The founders hated general warrants and bulk suspicionless collection. Okay. Solar birdhouses phoning a cloud do not get a free pass because the pitch mentions missing kids. When HOAs and businesses feed the same network, police use, okay, you can get a public private hybrid where state can pull constitutional limits and once government relies on our data, it doesn't stop there. Okay? Even pure private use normalizes the infrastructure. And I'm just saying you guys, we have a we have a beautifully sometimes flawed system, but the United States Constitution has provided us rights and freedoms that no other country has the benefit of. Okay? And all of a sudden, we see across the map all of these insidious, pitched as well-meaning technologies and and ideas that are being pushed on us as if we don't have the best system. Okay? And like I said, it's not perfect, but we already have, you know, six police officers who are supposed to uphold the law being fired for using it improperly, proving that the access is already being abused. Okay, we have mission creep out here in the wild with these insurance claims, with insurance companies using these to confirm insurance claims. Like, that's not solving I mean, I guess you could pitch it as solving a crime. Uh, we have like the the network effects of turning local polls into wider wider tracking networks. Okay, the density maps are crazy. The the scale of the backlash is increasing because people are realizing, hold on a second, this isn't just being used for what you say it's being used for. And you can claim it's no biometric data, but my my car is pretty much an extension of me. Okay? And just like this lady on some level, uh, she had to prove she wasn't the one driving that truck or that truck wasn't hers. Okay, so there is fault there. Not to mention, I mean, gez, not that I'm the biggest fan of the ACLU, but when it comes out in opposition and there are community cancellations and now there are tons of people going out and getting arrested because they're cutting these these cameras down. Um, not to mention the Supreme Court precedents that basically detailed there's like historical location data as deeply sensitive and requiring of a warrant. You can't you need a warrant for this information. Okay. We have this emotional marketing of uh help the children get your stolen car back overriding our constitutional rights. Okay. the the opinion of my I don't love crime. Okay, it's that sometimes helps with crimes is not a repeal of the fourth and first amendments and it's not a license for bulk movement logging and not a reason to ignore how easy back doors are or how fast the slope slides from car thieves to everyone's patterns are raw material. Okay, I don't want flot cameras and systems like them as default infrastructure. the architecture, the the bulk connection, the network sharing, the easy search, the closed vendor controlled stack with a with a backdoor potential, proven misuse, uh active mission creep, and and the collision with the Supreme Court mandates and our First and Fourth Amendment is a bigger long-term threat to a free society than the crimes it partially addresses. Okay? contracts, sharing agreements, the retention details, the audit logs, the secondary use rules. I want a full public pro process before there's installation. Okay? And I want hard answers on how this squares with the constitutional limits on location tracking because when you look at police officers being fired and the insurance use and you look at the maps and how how populated they are in certain areas like you can see the slope in real time because it's it's never just cars. It's a record of where free people go. Free people when and with what patterns. Okay, that record should be difficult for the state and its partners to compile and search. Not easy, not subscription driven by anybody who has a viable LLC and can pay for it and not bolt it up overnight, just trusting on a cloud server for all our movement data. I mean, you guys, imagine a terrorist group. Okay, I'm not to I'm just trying to help you see my vision here. [snorts] Imagine a terrorist group being able to use this data to track how where the police are at a certain time to track where the biggest group of people are at a certain time of day so they could plan a terrorist attack. Okay? When when they notice all the police are on one side of town, they go to like y'all. I'm I'm not trying to be crazy. I'm trying to be honest. Okay? There is always an unintended consequence or an unintended use for something that I is meant to be um helpful or a positive addition to society. Okay. I think that the the guys that started Flock, I'm pretty sure something happened. Their sister went missing or something and that's what started them on this path to developing this this company. Okay, listen. I'm sorry about that situation. I understand the idea that this should be helping police, but I can tell you right now, the police in my town already have cameras and scanners on four sides of their car, and they're scanning everybody within the car's vicinity already. You're telling me I I I have to have flock cameras everywhere also? No. I don't want them. I don't want them in my town. I don't want them as the new normal. Okay. The Constitution read honestly in the digital age doesn't want them either. That That's my opinion. So, watch the polls, okay? The database remembers. Start noticing around your town. They're only about 8t high, maybe 9 ft high, black, got a little solar panel on it, and the camera's pointed at you. And keep your eye out for the news uh stories and the articles that are coming about out about this because I can tell you what the fight is not over. Peace.