Why Flock Cameras Are Facing Backlash

"Hey, it's Ryan. Our colleague Amani Moe uses here to guest host today's episode. Here it is." "No flux in it, no flux in it, no flux in it, no flux in it, no flux in it." Last night, protesters in Atlanta rallied against a new street surveillance technology. Flop cameras. "We don't want a flux in it, right? We don't want a flux in our city, we don't want a flux in our town." Demonstrations like this one are happening across the U.S. this week. "When I say flop, you say off, flop, flop, flop, flop, flop." "This company really has become a lightning rod, it's become such a focal point for opposition." Our colleague, Chris Marr, was there in Atlanta, reporting on the backlash to these subtle little cameras. "They're very inconspicuous initially, but once you start seeing them, you'll see them pretty frequently." Flop cameras are essentially the next generation of traffic light cameras, with one big difference. Their abilities are supercharged by artificial intelligence. Supporters say, "Flop cameras have helped police keep communities safe." "They say these are extremely powerful tools that help them solve crimes, all kinds of crimes from, you know, car thefts to missing persons' cases, to violent crimes, robberies, homicides, and they're highly effective." Solving homicides and robberies sounds like a good thing, which you mentioned that there are nationwide protests against flock right now. What is the central concern that people are voicing about the technology? So mostly, it's privacy concerns, and that these cameras are starting to enable what people call a surveillance state. You know, I think people are becoming aware of how powerful these technologies are, and they're starting to question how much do they want them in society and their lives. And, you know, how transparent the people want their lives to be to organizations, whether it's a corporation, or the government, or the police department. Welcome to the journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Imani Malise. It's Thursday, August 20th. Coming up on the show, Flop's AI cameras are leading to arrests, and backlash. [MUSIC PLAYING] Block safety, the company behind the cameras, has been around for almost a decade. It was co-founded by a man named Garrett Langley. The eye living in a city called Atlanta, and I was frustrated. Crime felt too easy to get away with. That's Langley giving a TED talk earlier this year. Langley, an electrical engineer by training, was fed up with crime happening in his own neighborhood. Here's Chris again. He was seeing break-ins to houses and cars, and he said the next day, the police would show up and sort of shrug their shoulders and say, "There's not much we can do." You know, we don't know who did this, and we don't have leads, and he said, "I'm going to do something about this." So I did what engineers did. I built a license plate reading camera. It sounds simple, but I called two of my best friends from Georgia Tech, and we built this camera. Langley set up that camera near his home. And about two months later, he said another wave of break-ins happened this time they had a camera, and they were able to see that the previous night there had only been one car traveling through the neighborhood. They gave the information to the police, and they put out a bolo, be on the lookout for this car, and they found it, and they found the stolen materials. We solved our first crime, and that was the beginning of the flock. At first, flock customers were mostly homeowners associations and neighborhoods, but as AI became more advanced, so did flock's products. And that's made the cameras more appealing to more customers, like retailers, schools, and even police departments. During about 6,000 communities, and today they have 12,000 customers. Flock cameras are now in 49 states in the US. You can often find them at intersections, hovering above the street on a metal pole. One of the tell-tale signs that you're looking at a flock camera is that it has a solar panel attached to it. Flock cameras are part of a whole category called ALPRs, or automated license plate readers. But Flock has pretty much become the face of these types of cameras. What makes these cameras different from traffic-like cameras, some of the other cameras that we've gotten used to seeing out on the street? Yes, true. I mean, these cameras are different because they're capturing every single vehicle, and they're license plate trackers technically, but they really do capture more than just license plates. They're capturing the making model of the car, the color, bumper sticker, whether it has a dent or a ski rack or a bicycle or a gun rack. Any kind of identifying markers are also captured by these cameras. Flock says its cameras take billions of photos of cars each month, and all of them are uploaded to a database that clients can search through. These AI tools make it very searchable very easily. It can also be searched across state lines if the local jurisdiction opts into that. And most searches don't require a warrant. Recently, Chris got a demo from a flock executive on how the cameras and AI work together. He showed how he could do a search without a license plate or a full license plate, and just using some characteristics of a car like a white pickup truck was the actual search he did. The executive typed the words "white pickup truck" into flock software system. Then he added a filter for an exact time and location. And then you start getting these hits, these images of cars start populating on the screen, and you can kind of go through them. They zeroed in on one car in particular. He showed me how you can track a particular car over a time period, like say 15 days. This is what privacy advocates and critics are concerned about. Think of all the places you may have driven over the last two weeks. What kind of picture would be painted of who you are? You can sort of start to piece together somebody's life, I think, you know. You can tell maybe where they go to work, if they're dropping their kids off at school, who they're associating with, their religious affiliation. All sorts of things can start to be inferred that way. So, Chris, what do you think flock knows about you based on where you've been driving recently? Uh, you know, that's such a good question. I don't know, it might know how many times I go to the giant eagle to crush his sword, or to the gym. To the wawa? Yeah, well, we have sheets out here, so. Even better. Yeah. All this tracking has helped police solve some serious high profile crimes. We're interrupting regular programming with an update on the mass shooting at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. In December, a suspect shot and killed two Brown University students and an MIT professor. At first, police were unable to locate the suspect's vehicle. Then the tech company Flak was able to provide advanced search features to find the car and flag that the plates had been switched. Police were then able to track the car based on its making model and find the suspect. And you can imagine how this tech would be helpful to police in other cases too. Typically, eyewitnesses aren't remembering license plate numbers. They're calling basic details what the car looked like if it had a bumper sticker. Flak says the cameras led to one million arrests just last year. But there have also been mistakes and police have come to the wrong conclusions based on flock data. Like in Denver last year. Denver woman says that she was wrongly accused of a crime after police told her they tracked her car using flock cameras. Police showed up at the woman's house saying they had photos of her car in the area where a package was stolen. But it wasn't her car. It just happened to look a lot like it. Lucky for her, she was able to prove her innocence using dash cam footage from her own car. In other cases, the data being collected by flock cameras aren't just behind police mistakes, but purposeful misuse. This week, three Georgia police officers were added to a growing list of cops accused of misusing the camera technology to allegedly stalk citizens, including ex-wives and girlfriends. There are also concerns that flock's database is being used by immigration and customs enforcement or ICE. Flak says it does not have any contracts with the Department of Homeland Security. It does work with other federal agencies, and there have been cases where cities have found that immigration searches have been done into their systems. Flak said how clients use camera data is up to them. As evidence of mistakes and misuse proliferate, so do the cameras and the backlash. That's next. A big question you might have about flock cameras given all the data they're collecting is, are these cameras even legal? To get into the legal side of this, the courts have ruled that people and drivers don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy when they're out in public. Legal experts told Chris, "Flock doesn't violate privacy rights or for-the-medment protection." against unreasonable searches. - But the groups like the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, other privacy advocates, both on the left and the right side, do say that once you start using the technology to aggregate things and come up with searchable databases, you're really going far beyond what the laws originally intended or considered. - More lawsuits are pending. With some plaintiffs arguing the law just hasn't caught up with the technology yet. In the meantime, some people are taking the matter into their own hands and vandalizing cameras. - People shooting cameras with shotguns, covering them with stickers, cutting them down with saws. So it really has stirred some strong emotions. - Online videos promoting destruction of the cameras have gone viral. ♪ If you got a fuck on your box, break that thing ♪ ♪ With the glass, peep peep ♪ - If you see these and you could do something about them, move them if they're in your neighborhood, get rid of them, do whatever you can to get rid of these. - Like we're headed towards a mass surveillance 90 police state. ♪ If you got a fuck on your box, break that thing ♪ ♪ With the glass, peep peep ♪ - Some vandalism cases have resulted in felony charges. But there are also more law abiding approaches. Groups like D-Flock are fighting data with data. Chris spoke with its founder, a software engineer named Will Freeman. - He started spotting these cameras on a cross-country trip from the West Coast to Huntsville, Alabama, where he's from. And started putting together this kind of crowdsourced map and it grew into this pretty detailed map and website. And they're tracking about 130,000 ALPRs or automated license plate readers. About 82% of those are owned by Flock Safety. - D-Flock is behind many of this week's protests. Part of what they're calling a national week of action against ALPRs. There are also websites called FlockHopper and have I been Flocked, where citizens can see where ALPRs have been set up and if their vehicle has been looked up by police and Flock's database. Flock CEO Langley said he respects criticism and legal challenges from privacy groups. The pushback has led some communities to limit the tech in their area. At least 50 cities and counties have canceled Flock contracts or deactivated cameras since early last year. And some states have changed regulations to address how long Flock data can be stored, shared or accessed. And these communities span the political spectrum. Here's testimony from a town hall in right-leaning Lockhart, Texas. - Frankly, I don't think anyone in this town wants to be looking at their shoulder constantly wondering who might be watching them. - If you trade away all of your privacy to gain security, you end up with neither. - What is the need for it? We do not need them. We don't need them at the cost of violating everybody's rights. - Lockhart City Council ultimately decided to reject proposals to enter contracts with Flock. - I like to make a motion to not to go forward with the Flock cameras due to the community outpour of how negative they can impact our community. - Motion passes six, one. Okay, so we will not proceed. - Earlier this week, President Trump joined the debate. Saying that Flock is, quote, "being studied right now by the federal government." And all of that attention is putting pressure on the company. In a recent interview with CBS, Flock CEO Langley addressed how Flock has been used by police officers to stock ex-partners. - Can you put yourself in those women's shoes? - No, it's horrible and I apologize. - Did you take enough responsibility soon enough? - I think hindsight is a brutal tool. Of course, we could have done more earlier and we lesson and we learn and we'll continue to move forward. - Last week, the company announced that it would cut the default amount of time Flock data is stored from 30 days down to seven. And they initiated new safeguards to address police misuse. - They're saying by the end of the year, police departments will have to have this tool that detects a suspicious activity and can even shut down the system if it detects something that's amiss. - Have those changes satisfied critics so far? - No, not at all. So the critics I've talked to have said that they see this as a victory. They see this as Flock being on the defensive and they want to keep pushing. I mean, they especially want to win in the courts but they also want to win in the court of public opinion as well. And that's why I think why these protests are happening this week. - Does it seem like the backlash is slowing down the company's growth at all? - Not that I've seen so far. They continue to barrel forward from everything I can see and from talking to the CEO. You know, the adoption is growing quickly. There have been cities that have canceled or deactivated their Flock cameras but the company says the number that are adopting the cameras and signing new contracts is far outpacing that. - Langley recently said in a podcast that another Flock product surveillance drones have become the company's fastest growing business. - The image you painted with people actually shooting these cameras, it reminds me of the industrial revolution when we saw the Luddites breaking into factories and destroying the machines. But then you fast forward to today and factories still exist, automation still exists. Do you see this as a growing pains or is something else going on here? - I do see this as like a sign of things to come as people grapple with AI in particular and surveillance technology. It's very hard to see it going away as it is with other technologies that get developed. So I'm really interested to see where this goes over the next few months because the clashes seem to be so intense at the moment and it's just seem to be tracking along the same lines as fights over data centers and AI generally, I think it's just such an interesting time where we have this still really fairly new technology that's so pervasive, so suddenly and then we have people across the country responding to it so strongly. - For now, the question remains. - How much of our privacy do we want to give up or do we want to put innocent people's information at risk to solve certain crimes? (upbeat music) - That's all for today, Thursday, August 20th. The journal is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal, additional reporting in this episode by Victoria Albert. (upbeat music) Thanks for listening, see you tomorrow.