Full transcript
from the security vulnerabilities that
we found, where I was able to get into a
camera without a password, and I was
able to delete footage. I was able to
replace footage. How is that usable in
court? How can Flock prove I I know that
their system can't that at least from
the cameras that I've I've gotten into
and and that John Gaines have gotten
into, I know that they can't prove or
can't figure out if it's been if
somebody's been hacking it or not.
[music]
I am recording this introduction from a
hotel near Memphis, Tennessee. Last
night I held my first Brushfires of
Freedom tour stop on my 19-city tour
across 16 Western states. Over the next
week, I will be speaking at these free
live events. So, if you live in the
area, please come out and join me. Last
week, when I was in Georgia, I sat down
with fellow YouTuber and privacy
advocate Ben Jordan, and we had a great
conversation. I will play that
conversation for you in just a moment.
But first, if you want to support my
work creating educational videos and
fanning the flames of freedom through my
live free speaking events that I'm
holding around the country, I invite you
to buy me a coffee or join my Patreon.
Now, onto the video.
Welcome to Business Reform. I am Dr.
John Padfield, an engineer turned state
representative turned business
professor. And joining me today is Ben
Jordan from the Ben Jordan YouTube
channel.
Hello.
Ben, you have uh
you were one of the first YouTubers to
start making videos about Flock. And I I
watched uh all of them.
Your your first video that I saw was uh
I think it was called we hacked 80,000
Flock cameras in a couple of hours.
But that that has millions of views on
it. I've talked to so many people who
have watched that video. And I's just
wondering if you could
uh
talk to me and my audience about what
has happened since you have made these
videos.
Sure. Yeah, that first the first video I
made was just kind of about Flock in
general. It was kind of about the
business model and um
very opinionated, but it was also
explaining like what the cameras do,
what their function is, and then some
problems that have that have
risen as a result. And while I was doing
that video, I started looking into the
security
a little bit deeper, and that's when I
found a lot of John Gain's research and
and some Joshua Michael's research, and
then did some of my own as well. Um
And in the first video also I did like
an adversarial noise attack that could
block the plates so AI couldn't see
them, but human eyes could or you know,
if a cop looking at a camera could see
the plates, but AI couldn't read them.
Um
Yeah, and so then the third and last
Flock video that I did was
when I found a bunch of open cameras
that I could view 30 days of retention
around the country without needing a
password. So it was kind of all those.
Um I mean, since then it's it's been
pretty crazy. Like it seems like every
city that's voting on Flock has people
asking me to come speak to the city
council, but it's like having a YouTuber
come to your city that doesn't live in
the city. Just
I'm not sure how effective that is. Um
I've I've worked with a lot of
politicians, a lot of police officers,
and law enforcement agencies have
reached out um with questions not only
about the security, but just some of
them are actually reaching out almost
philosophically. Like, you know,
how much is this helping us really? You
know, how can we how can we navigate
everything that's going on to to do
what's best for our citizens? Like
there's a lot of police departments that
actually are are very well-meaning and
and are having second thoughts about
using uh
connected networks of ALPRs like Flock
Safety or Axon.
Um
And then, yeah, it's kind of exploded um
on the internet, right? Or it's it's
just it's been a big deal. It's on the
nightly news constantly. I'm I'm
constantly doing those little short
nightly news interviews saying the same
thing over and over again.
But yeah, I mean, personally, I'm sick
of it, right? Like personally, I I would
love to be doing anything else, but it's
so important right now to uh
before these pop up in every single city
around America. I think it's very
important to highlight the the actual
pros and cons and more so now get to the
bottom of the efficacy claims and find
out,
you know, what crimes are actually being
reduced, not not not solved where
somebody's being put in prison, but what
crimes are actually being reduced when
you spend a ton of taxpayer money on
something like ALPRs in general, um
versus spending it on community policing
or increasing uh wage and benefits for
existing police or increasing their
training and things like this. And so,
when doing this, I've just seen a very
large exploding industry of police
technology that are are just very happy
to get as much taxpayer money as
possible.
I I think that's a really important
point to make. I have started trying to
answer that question about just how much
positive impact do we get from all of
this surveillance gear?
When you go on Flock's website, they
make it sound like it's an open-and-shut
case. Uh Garrett Langley has made
definitive statements. We know cameras
reduce crime. Or I believe he actually
used the word cameras prevent crime.
Yeah.
And I've started digging into the data.
I have not finished my analysis, but I
went to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report
looking at Atlanta and then the 10 next
biggest cities and the 10 next smallest
cities. Atlanta's is
biggest city in the the country.
Yeah.
And when I started looking at
uh FBI uniform crime report breaks it
down crime by crime, so I started with
homicide
and compared the 20 nearest size cities
to Atlanta, what is their homicide rate?
Atlanta is 30% higher and that is an
average over the last 5 years.
Yeah.
Atlanta has been the most surveilled
city since 2019.
And so when you're 30% higher homicide
rate and the most surveilled city
that
cast doubt on the claims about just how
effective they are.
The other thing that surprised me
I I've heard some people say, "Well,
they may not prevent the crime, but at
least they help solve the crime. We we
can figure out who did it." And I'm not
finding evidence for that either. When I
compare the average closure rate meaning
somebody is either arrested or they
determine who it is, but they're
either deceased or they fled the
country. What is the closure rate for
homicide in Atlanta versus the average
of the 20 nearest size cities?
The closure rate is lower in Atlanta in
spite of 60,000 networked cameras going
into a real-time crime center.
Yeah. The I I've seen that
I've seen that in Asheville, North
Carolina. I saw
randomly I was in Asheville talking to
people about you know doing an event
there and then talking to some
politicians and randomly I had even
looked at the closure rate and it had
yeah, the closure rate had gone down by
I think a third since they had invested
all this money in the surveillance
infrastructure. And
I I mean I I think there might
the problem with looking at any sort of
crime data is just sociology and
criminology are incredibly chaotic and
complicated. And so it's So when Flock
says we reduce crime, I'm shaking my
head. I'm just like, "You won't know
that for 40 years." Like to know that to
actually be confidently know that you
won't know cuz we don't even know if
increasing police reduces crime. Like
well, we haven't figured that out as a
society yet. We've uh the only thing
that we've
that that evidence in sociology research
has proven or or is strongly suggested
at least is that community policing
reduces crime.
Yes.
And community policing, an interesting
thing about that is that it really is
surveillance. When when you are if you
have a city block in like South Chicago
or something and they like the police
and they talk to the police about
everything, they're going to tell you
that somebody is uh
they saw somebody with a gun who may be
in a gang and then the cops can go
investigate that and get information.
They'll tell you that uh
what car and license plate drove down
the street and when when a shooting
happened. Um they'll do the job that
that flock cameras are are attempting to
do because they want a safer community
and they trust law enforcement. But when
you have cities
showing up to these city council
meetings and saying we don't want
surveillance everywhere. We don't want
to be tracked and then the police and
the city says, "No, we're going to get
it anyway." Like what is that that's
breaking a social contract. Like that
that's to me that's actually going to
make crime worse because you're going to
have less people wanting to work with
the police in any regard.
I I think that's an excellent point. The
I I am a big advocate for the community
policing. I'm I'm not anti-police.
Yeah.
But it needs to be a partnership, a
cooperation and one of the things that
that strikes me I agree completely.
We don't know that cameras are doing any
good.
And I'm being very careful in my wording
saying I have not found evidence. That's
different than saying they don't work.
I I'm willing to admit
like you said it's a very complex issue.
The reason I started focusing on
homicide is
homicides are pretty black and white.
Either a person's dead or they're not.
When when into something like domestic
abuse, so many instances go unreported.
Some sexual assaults go unreported. And
so if you see a decrease in the numbers,
did the actual incidents go down or did
the reporting just go down? And we don't
know.
If you look at the audit logs, like
if Flock and Axon and all all these
services, if they're effective at
criminals being arrested for the crimes
they committed, it's overwhelmingly
things like car theft, uh somebody
stealing something from a grocery store
and they're they have an LPR in the
parking lot and then that gets put on
the police hot list and they get, you
know, popped three three blocks down.
Something like that. It's crime but like
the thing that bothers me so much about
it is it's always crimes that have
solutions. Like that there's easy
solutions to prevent them from
happening. Like if somebody's stealing
food from a grocery store, pretty easy
solution. You just need to make a bridge
to social services with that program or
or, you know, put tax taxpayer money
into social services that would would
help them not have to rob a grocery
store to get food. Um
in the cases of car theft, it's sort of
the same thing. Like that those are like
addiction problems. Those are
young children, like teenagers,
behavioral problems. So but and these
are all like plights on our life as
citizens. But there's ways to actually
prevent them from happening, whereas
Flock it is more geared towards just
spanking the person who did it, which
doesn't help me as a citizen that much.
It just increases the amount of money I
have to pay in taxes and and decreases
the amount of money that would go to
things that would actually make
communities better to live in in general
as well as safer.
I I made a video a couple of months ago
about crotch cams. These are cameras
that are over the road. They look down
through your windshield as you drive
under them to see if you have a cell
phone on your lap.
And what what really struck me about
that, the company promoting these, they
published a study that said from the
time these went into effect in a trial,
I believe the trial was in North
Carolina,
but they compared the 3 months before to
the 3 months after,
they did not say one word about how many
accidents were reduced, but they talked
about tickets went up 9x.
Yeah.
And I thought, okay, this is not about
public safety, this is about revenue
generation cuz you're bragging about we
wrote nine times as many tickets, you
didn't say a word about how many
accidents were reduced.
Yeah, I mean,
in this industry especially, there's a
lot of
studies and white papers and for some
reason a lot of this industry seems to
write white papers even though they're
not involved in any science whatsoever.
They're not involved in writing papers.
Um they're not peer-reviewed. Like it
generally like the the paper that Flock
always points to was written by Flock
employees. Their names and Flock email
addresses are on the the the paper. Um
and then the only person wasn't a Flock
employee, I think he was with some
university in Texas, that person
actually came forward and said, "Yo,
this data is not good. Like I I don't I
don't I don't actually want my name on
it." Um the fact that we are looking at
studies conducted by companies that are
for-profit like should just be one of
those common sense things. Like that
that's something that I've been saying
to so many city councils and and stuff
like that when I talk to them is like
Flock is a $7 billion company give or
take how you know how many billion
between today and the last time I looked
at the number.
Um they want to make as much money as
possible. That's their ex- that's the
reason for their existence. They're
incorporated, right? But I I own a
company. I understand.
Right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I understand I
understand why businesses exist and it
it's okay that they exist, but in this
case where it's becoming a government
service that your tax dollars are paying
for, that gets a little bit skewed. And
so sort of
when it's looked at in in in that regard
and then I say, "Okay, now from my
perspective, I've spent six figures
trying to get to the bottom of these
things and trying to do journalism on
this stuff and I'm not making that back
because I don't have a business that
makes money off of off of Nobody's
paying me to do this research. I'm doing
it because I'm sick of seeing these
cameras everywhere and the people who
are subscribed to my platform are really
upset about them. And so I think that's
like tried
I always try and start the conversation
there because it's like when you're ever
going to bring up research, you have to
at least understand the motive of the
research. Doesn't matter who's doing it,
but you have to understand what the
motive is. And
in the abstract or in in any part of
that research, it it doesn't even really
bother telling you that there's a lot of
motive to, you know, Flock isn't going
to pop to publish or self-publish a
paper that says that their license plate
readers don't work. Like they would
never do that.
There have been academic studies looking
at the source of research versus the
conclusions of the research. And it is
so lopsided, it's it's virtually 100% of
the research
is in favor of the organization that
paid for the research. It's it's almost
a given that that's what's going to
happen.
[snorts]
In science, we have this thing called
the repro reproducibility crisis or
replication crisis where
it's always some crazy number like 80%
of scientific papers can't be
reproduced. And and it sounds like
there's this big foundational problem in
truth. Like we're running into this
issue like, "Oh my god, there's so much
of this is fake." When the reality is is
that an oil company will
pay a million dollars for to prove that
a certain
shale is safe or something like that.
And I'm not going to go there and do
that same one cuz A, I don't have a
million dollars to do it, and B, I've no
interest in that. And like I'm not
financially interested in making it. But
that's a huge problem in science is that
so much research If somebody wants to
say something like, "Hey, that Flock
paper doesn't really check out." They
have to fund it themselves, or they have
to get a university to fund it that
you know, if I went to Georgia Tech and
said, "Hey,
uh will you find will you help me make
this video about it?" They would say,
"Well, Garrett Langley, the CEO of
Flock, is actually on our board of uh
he's on their
uh investment board or whatever." And
and so, they would tell me to go get
flocked, I guess. But, yeah, I mean,
that's that that is like a problem in
general that stems outside of this um
that I you know, more people should know
about.
[snorts]
I have graduate students I've um
mentored and been the dissertation chair
for several doctoral students,
and we have this conversation very early
in their doctoral journey.
When I see a proposal,
I want to do a study to prove blah blah
blah, and I stop them right there.
That's not
Yep. [laughter]
You got a flawed premise if you want to
do a study to prove something. Uh we
we're we're there to find the truth, and
the truth may support this, the truth
may contradict this, but we don't start
a a study to prove something.
Yeah, that's that's something I always
keep in my head, too, is if I'm if I'm
even if I'm not writing anything down,
if I'm just playing around with with uh
computer program or microscope or
whatever it is, whatever I'm doing, if
if I'm disappointed by a result, if I'm
thinking like, "Oh, I hope this doesn't
happen," then I need to take a break. I
need to stop. I need to come at it from
a different way cuz like science is
always rewarding because even if you
don't find anything, you still found
something because you tried something
and didn't find anything, if that makes
sense.
Exactly.
Like and so, the like one example I
always like to use is that if I made a
coffee that could uh
cure some form of disease, um if it
could cure psoriasis, I made a type of
coffee that could cure psoriasis, and
you drink it with 80% of people, and
then a study in Japan does that same
study, and they find out that that
actually doesn't happen. Like, I'm not
upset about that because we just
actually zeroed in what was going on so
we could either refine the thing that
was curing the psoriasis or we could
find out that it was some fluke caused
by something else. It always opens up a
new pathway. And so, it's
Yeah, it it's
it is discouraging to to see how much
research out there, especially when it's
done by companies, is like, "We we need
some research showing that these cameras
work."
Go make some.
It's kind of
Exactly. [laughter]
But, in the Flock case, uh what they did
was they just compared the numbers from
uh COVID era to now where crime
nationwide went down. And so, they
happened to have a lot lot more cameras
installed in that period. And so, they
take credit for
bringing crime down by 30% or whatever
it was. But, I mean, that's nationwide
in the FBI's statistics. It's whether
you had Flock in your city or not.
[snorts]
That's what I
frequently hear people referring to as
the rooster taking credit for the sun
rising.
Yes.
[laughter]
We we
cherry-pick our start point, we
cherry-pick our finish point. Hey, look,
the the numbers came down, we're taking
credit for it.
Well, one thing that yeah, like, so
first of all, I'm always wondering, I
and I've asked many police officers
this, like, do you ever get mad that
Flock just more or less taking credit
for that they're saying, you know, we
helped solve this crime when really they
supplied a license plate that was part
of a 6-month investigation and and they
were such a small part of it that you
could you could have thrown that away
and it still would have been
a prosecutable case. Or, um
the other thing, a
[gasps]
it's it's so hard to describe,
but like, I
I I think about like from the security
vulnerabilities that we found where I
was able to get into a camera without a
password and I was able to delete
footage. I was able to replace footage.
How is that usable in court? How can
Flock prove I I know that their system
can't that at least from the cameras
that I've I've gotten into
um and that John Gaines have gotten
into, I know that they can't prove or
can't figure out if it's been if
somebody's been hacking it or not or if
somebody's been been going around in the
file system. And so, how could that
possibly be used as evidence? Like
all of it even a uh
it [snorts] it even even a a day one
defense attorney could just say, "Can
you prove that this evidence wasn't
tampered with?" And you can't. And so,
The the thing that really struck me,
Jason Homewood published a Substack
article probably been a couple of weeks
ago.
But it was about the opt-out of Flock
cameras.
And this was a letter written [snorts]
by Garrett Langley to a sheriff's
department. And in the letter, Garrett
Langley said, "For ethical and privacy
reasons, there is an opt-out list so
that Flock won't record the license
plate."
Yes.
And I thought, "Whoa."
Um
So, if someone
puts a license plate on the safe list
and Flock cameras ignore it, and now
we're looking for a suspect,
however many cars are on that safe list
may have been there and we wouldn't have
record of it. To me, it's it's like if
you want to use this for police work,
there shouldn't be a safe list. Um
Yeah, there should
It's like saying we're we're not even
going to consider that these people
might have done something illegal. We're
just going to focus on you.
I mean, in a if we were to keep this
type of system around, which which I'm
not an advocate for, but if we were to,
um
I would actually prefer that everybody
except for people who are suspected of
crimes or or people who have a warrant
out to serve to to track them, um I
would prefer that everybody was on that
safe list. And then the ones who weren't
the the actual license plate data that
was being tagged constantly,
um and the footage from the cameras.
Like I I think if you're going to have
them, they should be public. They should
be available to the public. Um, and and
I think that we would have a lot less of
them if they did that. People would say,
"Okay, um, I realize that this camera
pointed at this swing set in this park
is a little insane cuz anybody could
view it. Um,
rather than only the police and Flock
employees being able to view it. Uh, I
think that that would make the
conversation
uh, a little bit more productive is it?
But, I mean, Washington state sort of
did this where they they argued that uh,
all ALPR
government ALPR data, which whether it's
going through Flock or whoever, um,
should be public information. And people
kind of freaked out. Now, and then
cities started getting rid of the the
system because it was it was too
invasive.
Yeah.
Well, Ben, it's been a pleasure talking
with you. Um, look forward to doing it
again sometime. But, thank you so much.
thanks for having me.