The Pure Dystopia of Flock Camera Surveillance | PREVIEW

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This is a preview of a payboard episode to listen in full go to patreon.com/popularfront sign up there's hundreds of exclusive episodes extra video access to the popular front network all sorts The last year or so I've been seeing all of these headlines about flock looking at it and I looked at it and I was like wow like we have kind of already had this for a long time in the UK and the UK and the UK and nobody really batted an eyelid but you guys have been very active over there like Americans as a whole seem to be you know very against this understandably so I was thinking can you first before we really go into the nitty gritty can you just explain what is flock for anybody that hasn't heard of it what is flock and what are these cameras they implemented yeah I mean like you said we've actually had cameras like this in the United States for a long time they're automated license plate reader cameras called ALPRs for short they basically take photos of card license plates when they drive by but a flock has done differently is they have made this national network of these cameras so previously like if you were in Washington DC and you were the DC police you might have these cameras and you could search the 50 cameras that were in Washington DC what flock has done is they've gone from town to town city to city across the entire country and sold these cameras to small governments and then network them all together and so what's possible now is a town can search their own cameras but they can also search the cameras one town over you know across an entire state or across the entire country and this has become super popular in the United States with police they're now in 40 percent of all cities in the US and there's more than 100,000 cameras across the country so it's becoming very difficult to drive really anywhere without possibly being tracked I think it's also important to mention that flock is constantly adding features so they kind of announce this as being like a license plate reader camera system but they also sell live video cameras like surveillance cameras they also sell this thing called flock OS which is basically like a piece of software that allows police to add not just their ALPRs but other types of surveillance cameras including from private businesses and they can access those all in real time and they're kind of like AIing the whole thing like you can start searching for individual people you can do things like predict where a car will drive this sort of thing and so I think that's what a lot of people are objecting to is not necessarily just this license plate reader technology but the fact that it's all like networked together with artificial intelligence right and there's been already quite a few scandals and misuse of this technology which I think is a big big issue I mean on the face of it I disagree with it anyway due to my own personal beliefs in personal autonomy privacy but very quickly they have already themselves the authorities broken the law it seems in using this technology haven't I yeah I mean the big first big reporting we did on it was basically local police were searching flock for ice like they on behalf of ice they were searching for undocumented immigrants and what was happening was police in the south were searching the national network of flock cameras kind of through these formal and informal partnerships with ice we have something here called the 287G program that allows local police to do immigration enforcement and so they were searching this national network of cameras which included cameras in sanctuary states where it's illegal to do that there was like this secretary of state investigation in Illinois that determined that these searches were illegal there were there are thousands of them to be clear like lots and lots of cops were doing these searches they've also been used to surveil protests here we had like the anti-Trump no kings protest and there were a bunch of searches on flock cameras for those protesters it's been used to search for a woman who had an abortion in Texas and so there's been like all these cases of misuse and then like over the last few months we've learned that cops have been using this system to search for their ex-wives and current partners and just stock them with no lawn like no plausible law enforcement reason whatsoever so there's actually been like dozens of arrests at this point a lot of cops been fired for doing this but basically like one of the big problems here is that you can search this system if you're a cop as though it were Google like there's basically no there's no warrant requirement there's it's kind of become like the first step in an investigative process like you can just log into it and search for anyone or anything for any reason and that's become like really controversial here yeah that's really scary is there any real punishment for the company when this stuff happens like are they a tool responsible for the misuse of this stuff I mean there's been no legal repercussions whatsoever even when their tools been used to break the law the repercussions have been like a big hit to their kind of like PR standing and then there's been I don't have the numbers in front of me because it's quite hard to actually know but there's been more than a hundred cities that have cancelled their flock contract since we began this reporting about two years ago and so that includes like a bunch of small towns like Banderra Texas is like a really tiny like wild west town in Texas that basically had like three of these cameras but then just this week like Boston cancelled its its contract and that's a huge company or a huge city Los Angeles has cancelled its contract so there's been this backlash you know from cities dropping the company and I think that's been hard to measure but is very real impact and there's also been quite a few connections between flock and like the pet like department department security national security border forces they seem to be getting involved in that side of things which for me is really scary yeah so flock does have contracts with the feds it has I mean the federal government here as it is everywhere it's like really complicated it has a lot of different departments weirdly like the US Postal Service Inspection Agency does tons and tons of flock searches they have worked with DHS before in a formal capacity after there was quite a lot of backlash to that they cancelled that like flock kind of proactively cancelled its work with DHS directly and now how it works with DHS is through these local partnerships so basically like random local cops will have a partnership with DHS or with ICE or with Border Patrol and the local cops will run the searches and then pass the information to the feds and it's like a little bit convoluted but it's actually quite concerning because it's really hard to keep track of that like if it were just flock working directly with the feds then kind of the transparency aspect there would maybe be a little bit easier because of the way that flocks network works it's like the reason that we know any of this stuff is happening is because each time the system is searched it creates a record of that and then that record can be obtained using a public record request and like if you just have like a bunch of random local cops doing DHS is bidding it's kind of hard to parse that out and that that's what's like I mean that's one of many things that concern me it sounds like it's purposely opaque like they want it to be hard to understand to get around laws or whatever I don't know maybe it's not that insidious but it feels like in the time we're in now as well that that kind of behavior is almost normal now yeah I mean I think it also creates like a wider attack surface for people who oppose this it's like on the one hand it's easier to convince an individual town to cancel a flock contract on the other hand to resist this you need to convince a thousand different cities and towns that they should cancel their contract and so it it's like a big sprawling complicated company that has you know a thousand different entities that it works with and that makes it very ripe for abuse because it's been rolled out so widely that you have like frankly a bunch of like you have so many cops using it that there's bound to be people who are I've been calling it creative but basically who are you know willing to do whatever the hell they want with the system and they're so So if you proactive checks on it that, you know, the system will usually do what that cop is trying to do, whether it's legal or not. It sounds to me like it could very quickly get out of control, maybe it has. I think it is out of control. I think it's been out of control, you know, for most of this year. To listen to the rest of that episode, go to patreon.com/popularfront. We are completely independent, this is how we keep moving forward. patreon.com/popularfront