Transcript of How Flock Cameras Took Over America

I'm Katrin Benhold, host of The World, a daily newsletter from The New York Times. I spent 20 years reporting from more than a dozen countries, and it occurred to me one day, what kind of newsletter would I like to read? I don't live in the U.S. I want something especially for a global audience. The World is just that. Each weekday morning, we bring you the biggest stories, dispatches from my colleagues on the ground, and a few surprises with video too. The World newsletter. Read the latest and sign up at nytimes.com/theworld.

Let's get the sunshade out of the way. Above the furthestmost.

See it up there?

Yeah.

That's one of them.

Interesting.

And so—

from The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily.

And there's one over there too.

Yeah.

I guess once you start to see them, you just start to see them. I guess I've never paid that much attention to it. You will be aware of them after today.

Earlier this summer, my Times colleague Fernando Alfonso got in a car with a man named Philip. He didn't want us to use his last name. They drove around the suburban streets of Dallas searching for traffic cameras.

You see the white pole up there?

There's a camera kind of sticking down flat.

That's one?

That's one.

They were on the lookout not for a red light camera or a speed trap camera, but something totally different: an automatic license plate reader made by a company called Flock.

And that's a flock?

That is a flock.

Okay.

Yeah. Law enforcement agencies say that these cameras are essential in fighting crime. But Philip and people like him, who've identified the locations of 100,000 flock cameras all over the country, see them as something else: the beginnings of a surveillance state. Today, I speak to my colleague Kashmir Hill, About the company behind the cameras and the mounting backlash against them. It's Monday, August 31st. Kashmir Hill, welcome back to The Daily.

Good to be here.

So Kash, you've covered so many different types of surveillance at this point. I know a lot of Americans are aware that they are being watched in sort of one form or another, whether it's online or in public spaces. So can you just start off by explaining what is so different about this particular kind of surveillance and why it's prompted people to finally say, like, enough is enough?

So these are cameras that take photos of cars and read their license plates. If you start looking around as you're driving, you might see them on a pole by the road. solar panel, camera looking down your way. And they're in places where people maybe aren't used to being surveilled. You know, they're in rural roads, just in communities that don't necessarily have a lot of other cameras around. Also, people do have this kind of privacy attachment to their cars. And so I think Americans kind of think of your car as this kind of symbol of freedom, this thing you can get away from everyone, but now you can't because there are gonna be cameras tracking it.

Mm-hmm.

And so my colleague Fernando, Alfonso and I found that people were just getting really upset about these cameras. And it was a level of uproar over privacy that I haven't seen before, or at least haven't seen in a very long time.

So what is the camera capturing exactly? Just the license plate, or is it something more complicated than that? Because on its face, a license plate reader, that sort of sounds a bit benign.

Yeah. So the cameras take photos of cars as they pass, they get the license plate, but you can also use system to search other things like the color of the car, the make of the car, whether it has a bumper sticker or visible damage or a toolbox on the back. And this gives police more visibility into our movements than they've ever had before.

Mm-hmm.

This company called Flock is the industry leader. They're kind of the name that everybody knows because they're the biggest. Flock alone has 120,000 of these cameras across the country in every state but Alaska.

Hmm.

law enforcement agencies have contracts with Flock, which is about 40% of all law enforcement in the country.

Okay.

So a lot, very ubiquitous.

A lot.

They have really achieved market penetration quickly. They only started working with police in 2020, and the company is now valued at over $8 billion.

Wow.

Okay. So $8 billion, 40% of police departments. Let's talk about the company for a minute. How did its cameras get Everywhere so quickly.

So Flock was founded by a serial entrepreneur named Garrett Langley. Hi, Garrett. Nice to meet you. I'm Kashmir. I actually met with him a few weeks ago.

Nice to meet you, Kashmir. You're in New York, right?

I am. He said he got the idea because he lived in Atlanta, Georgia. That's where the company is headquartered.

I started the company 9 years ago knowing nothing about law enforcement, public safety. There's this, like, confusion as an engineer of why it was so easy to get away with crime in America.

And in his neighborhood, people kept breaking into cars on the weekends.

And we kept having the same group, seemingly the same group, come in on a Friday night.

And he said taking guns out of the glove boxes.

Oh my God!

It was happening every weekend. He was really frustrated.

And so when I was talking to our zone commander, I was like, Major, I— Why can't you catch these people? Like, do something about this.

And so he called the police department.

And he was like, what do you expect me to do? We're not the CSI on TV. I'm not gonna, like—

I'm one guy.

And I was like, well, but they're stealing guns. Like, this is crazy!

And he said that the person he talked to said that they needed their license plate numbers.

I was like, what? What are you talking about? What would a license plate do in this situation? How would it help? He was like, trust me, a license plate is the most actionable piece of evidence we can get. And I said, fine. And I called Paige and Matt, and I was like, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna build license plate reading cameras for neighborhoods.

So he decided to create this product along with 2 of his classmates from Georgia Tech.

This is literally, like, we were just messing around conceptually of, like, what is—

They wanted to make cheap license plate readers. Basically put a phone together with a solar panel. Hooked up to an old Android with solar power and That you could put on street poles, and it would just get photos of cars that were driving past.

And so we built a bunch, we put them up in a couple neighborhoods. And for the first probably 2 or 3 years, we were only selling to neighborhoods.

Flock first started selling these to homeowners associations, kind of like an automated neighborhood watch. So you could, you know, see who was coming and going. If there was a package theft, you could see, well, what car was there and drove away. Mm-hmm.

And, like, 2 months into the business, we made our first arrest.

And just a few months after they start installing these devices, Langley said that he got a call from the police telling him that it was helping to solve crime.

And I was like, oh my gosh! Like, it works! This major wasn't lying to me. They actually just need evidence. And if they have evidence, they will prosecute a case.

Wow.

Okay, so in this moment, this is, like, basically his proof of concept.

Right.

How do things go from there? How does the company grow from there?

So in 2020, the company starts working for the first time with a police department in Jersey Village, Texas. And this kind of changes the business model. Instead of putting it on private streets, you're starting to put it on public roads. And the business really exploded from there.

And they see a ton of success. And so that police chief is telling his friends, that mayor is telling her friends.

They started working with police departments around the country.

You need to get this in your town. Like, we're safer now. And that word of mouth, you know, spread quite quickly.

And with that expansion has come a kind of growing backlash as communities are discovering that these cameras are there and how they're being used.

I wanna talk about the backlash, but before we do, I just wanna understand what the police departments are actually using these cameras for and how they are being used. So can you just describe a little bit the mechanics of this?

So what these cameras allow police departments to do is essentially to track cars. Most of the departments keep the photos of the cars for 30 days. That's the default that Flock has in place. And So if somebody goes missing, or if there is some kind of crime that is committed, and you know the car associated with the crime, you can go looking for it. You can see where it's been. You can see where it's gone. You can also set up alerts. So if there is a car you're looking for, it'll shoot up an alert to any police that are using this network, whether it's in your community or in a different community.

Basically, any crime that's committed using a car, this system might be helpful with, which is a lot of crimes. A lot of crimes use cars.

Yeah. I mean, it's helpful for tracking down stolen cars, finding a missing person. I mean, we've all gotten those Amber Alerts on our text messages where it says, you know— Right.

I was thinking of that.

Yeah.

Like, look around for this random Nissan Altima with this license plate. It's a lot more effective just to send that message out through a bunch of cameras that have their eyes on the road to find that car.

Okay.

So by this point in the story, These cameras are everywhere. The company's grown super fast. I just wanna make sure I understand the legality of this. Does Flock need anybody's permission to put these cameras up on streets, or do they just put these things up and then sell the data?

This is actually an issue for the company, and I talked about that with the CEO. You know, in the early days when they were working with neighborhood associations, it was private streets. They could just put them up. As they started working with police, they still had this kind of move fast and break things Silicon Valley approach where they would just go out and throw these cheap cameras up. And that got them in trouble with departments of transportation where you are supposed to get a permit to be, you know, putting cameras in poles up on public roads. And so Langley told me, yes, they made some mistakes, but now they have figured out the right way to do this.

It's so interesting to think about how fast this company's grown when this is effectively just like a camera on a stick.

Yes, it is just a camera on a stick, but now it's 120,000 cameras on sticks, and they're all connected. And And that is really what makes Flock so valuable. It's that they're building this network. It's eyes on the road across the whole country. And that's something we really haven't had before at this scale. And that's why police wanna work with this company.

Okay, so this isn't just about necessarily your local police department being able to track your car. This is about one camera— I don't know what— talking to another camera? Like, just talk about that network for a second so we can understand why that makes this different than just something that might only affect an isolated So local police departments, when they sign up for Flock, essentially set their privacy settings.

They can decide if they want their network of cameras to only be available to their department, or if they want to be able to make it available to the whole state or the whole nation. And it's reciprocal. If you want to be able to search all the cameras in your state, or all the cameras in the whole country, you have to grant access to your cameras.

Mm-hmm.

I asked Ling Li about this, and he said the vast majority of their customers opt in for the national network. Like, that is what's appealing, that you have eyes on the road everywhere, not just in your community, but in your whole state, in your whole country. Because as they put it, you know, crime doesn't respect borders.

Mm-hmm.

And Flock gave me an example of why this is useful. In one case, there was somebody who had made a threat against an event in New Orleans. And for some reason, police had a car associated with this threat. And the person was based in North Carolina, but when they picked him up, he in Florida. And so this involves, you know, 3 different communities, 3 different states. And the only way they said, you know, you can really solve this crime is with these cameras that are everywhere.

So basically a big difference, it sounds like what you're saying is that pre-Flock or without Flock, some police chief in one district might have to figure out who to call in another district, ask them to run a report. And presumably that takes longer than going to a database on your computer and typing in a license plate in this case, right?

Exactly. And this is really fast. They said, you know, it basically comes off their cameras and within seconds it's in the database.

Hmm.

And it really is a pretty simple tool. You know, there is a search page where you are supposed to enter the case number, the crime that you're looking into, and then you can either put in the license plate number or you can put in a description of the car, you know, the color or if it has damage or bumper sticker. Then you hit search and it will pop up A grid of photos of the backs of people's cars. It will say where the photo was taken, when, and which agency's cameras took it. It's pretty simple, but police say it makes their jobs much easier. The CEO of Flock says that the company helped solve more than a million crimes last year. I don't have the reporting to back that up, but police chiefs did tell us that it is really A useful tool for solving crimes. But this makes it really easy to track Americans. And, you know, we're all in the database if you're driving cars in the 49 states where they have their cameras. And it's not just people who have committed crimes. And that is just making people very, very uncomfortable that this is too powerful a tool that Is surveilling too many of us.

We'll be right back.

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Okay, so Kashmir, I understand from what you're saying that people are upset about these cameras and have a lot of different privacy concerns, but I wonder how much of these concerns are theoretical at this point, or are critics saying that there's already evidence that these cameras have been misused?

Yeah, one of the cases that has gotten the most attention, and it was originally reported by 404 Media, was a woman who was suspected of self-administering an abortion in Texas, and an officer searched flock cameras to see where she had traveled if she was out of state to try to track her down. There have been examples of police officers abusing their access to these systems to track exes or love interests or romantic partners.

Oh my God!

And one of the kind of big concerns has been how immigration officers are using these cameras for immigration enforcement.

You mean like ICE, like trying to track down people they're trying to deport?

Yes. ICE trying to track down people that they want to deport. And it's not just civil libertarians that are criticizing this. Cities themselves have been surprised that their cameras have been accessed for immigration enforcement. So some cities have paused or canceled their contracts with Flock after discovering that, because they basically didn't realize that when they were making it available nationally, that meant they were making it available to federal— Mm-hmm.

That feels a little bit surprising, though, Kashmir, because you said earlier that they signed something saying, like, their databases are searchable. So were you surprised that they were surprised? I don't know. That just feels a little bit strange.

Yeah. I mean, Flock says that they don't have a contract with ICE, for one. And the way that this is happening is actually ICE agents are partnering with local police departments and then searching the networks of cameras that they have access to.

So it's not necessarily the police department that they're partnering with that is upset over this. It's the police department in another city that is learning that ICE is using them.

Yes. This is kind of a concept called networked privacy, where it's hard to protect your own privacy since they're sharing it with others. They have to trust that other agencies are using the cameras appropriately. And this actually comes up on the sign-in page. There's kind of this popup, there's a click-through screen where you have to say, I acknowledge that in these I can't do searches related to reproductive care. And in these other states, I can't do searches related to immigration.

So it sounds like a little bit of an honor system. I mean, I'm curious what else the company has told you about the safeguards it has in place to prevent misuse, because I don't know, I just can't imagine how effective that actually is if you're a bad actor and, you know, operating in bad faith.

Flock says that they only allow abortion-related searches in states where abortion is illegal.

Mm-hmm.

They also say that they have an audit system in place that alerts departments if officers are doing unusual searching that doesn't look like it's related to an official investigation. So they do say they have some safeguards in place. But at the end of the day, it's up to the police departments to use this tool appropriately.

Hmm.

Flock doesn't consider itself the one that should make the rules for how these cameras should work. It says, you know, it's just a technology company offering a service, and it's up to the United States to decide how these cameras should be used.

Why should we put restraints on our own growth when there's no law preventing us from growing as fast as we can?

Right. They're just a company offering a service, and it's not up to them to make the rules. That's up to lawmakers. That's up to regulators.

Okay.

I'm really starting to get a sense, Kashmir, from the picture that you're painting of why people are maybe upset. I mean, this company really does not seem to be doing a ton to block bad actors from abusing its platforms. I mean, I'm sure that it would say that it is and it has popups, but as you described, this is an honor system with no government intervention or regulation. It seems like the government has not caught up to this technology, and that sounds like something that would be concerning for people.

Yes, there is this growing backlash from citizens. One of the first ways this manifested was in the form of a website called Deflock. Deflock, like D-E-flock. It's a crowdsourced map of where these cameras, these license plate readers are that anyone can contribute to. And the idea is that you should know how many are in your community and where they are. And now they've mapped over 100,000 cameras made by Flock and other companies. And you started seeing some people cutting down cameras. A vandal cut down a Flock pole, spray-painted the lens black, and cut the wiring. Like, spray-painting them, vandalizing them.

Several cameras were ripped from their mounts and smashed. Allegedly using a shotgun to take out Flock cameras. Both cameras were later found in a nearby canal.

There have been videos of people demonstrating how to, like, get rid of the cameras, how to destroy them.

With their saw wrapped in a trash bag, they approach from behind the camera's line of sight and tear right through this black aluminum alloy post.

People have showed up at city council hearings.

In free America, where I go during the day is my business.

Saying, I am not happy about this.

We want everything out of our city. Get out of our police state. We're being tracked everywhere we go, and y'all are just saying, you're being tracked anyway.

There was another super viral video of this one guy in San Diego who went to the city council hearing dressed up as Darth Vader.

The Emperor is a fan of Flock.

Saying how much he loved Flock cameras. Oh my God!

And we must continue utilizing flock technologies so that we can follow and surveil the rebel scum.

Some citizens have sued their cities or their towns saying that these cameras are unconstitutional.

Oh, wow!

They're unconstitutional because...?

Because they are capturing everyone's movements.

Mm-hmm.

Even if you've done nothing wrong. For most places, it's capturing the last 30 days of people driving around on the roads, and that this is something that the Fourth Amendment is supposed to protect us against.

The Fourth Amendment, that is the amendment that prohibits unlawful searches and seizures. Just explain one beat farther, Cash, why that is relevant to these cameras, this network, this idea of capturing people who haven't done anything wrong.

Yeah. I mean, the idea behind the Fourth Amendment, if we go back to the Founding Fathers, is that they didn't like—

Please.

That You know, royal officers would just go through everybody's houses, rifle through their drawers, looking for evidence that they were involved in treason or rebellion. The Fourth Amendment was created so that police have to have a reason to think that someone has done something wrong before they collect information about them. But that's not what these cameras are. They're everywhere. They're collecting data on hundreds of millions of people. They get billions of license plate reads. And so some of these lawsuits have said, you can't do this. And so far, those lawsuits have not been successful. But in some of the rulings, the judges have said, well, if these cameras were more ubiquitous, then yes, there would be Fourth Amendment concerns. Basically, they're not widespread enough yet.

Wait, that's so interesting though. Like, who Who gets to decide what the threshold is for ubiquity for these cameras? Like, who gets to decide, okay, this is the level of penetration that would be violative of the Fourth Amendment?

Yeah, I mean, judges decide. Maybe one day the Supreme Court will decide. When I talk to attorneys in the civil liberties space, they say, we're already there. Judges just don't understand how many of these cameras there are and how networked they are.

I'm just so curious what evidence the judges are looking at to say, no, this is not actually broad enough. As you said, 40% of police departments are using this. of hits a day. What is the standard that they're using?

So in Norfolk, Virginia, where one of these lawsuits was filed, the city now has 172 flock cameras installed around the city. And the judge said, that's not enough. But the judge didn't say, what is the number where it's too much? Is it, you know, every block? Is it every street? What level of coverage? hits that threshold, that hasn't been spelled out yet.

It sounds a little arbitrary at this point.

Welcome to the law, Rachael. Especially around privacy. I mean, privacy is so hard to define. What is an unreasonable search? That is something that is always getting worked out. But what the court has found in the past is that police can't just put a tracker on someone's car, for example, even though they're on public roads and a police officer could follow them, that this idea of using automated means to track somebody continually violates the Fourth Amendment. And what lawyers I talk to argue is, well, we're doing the same thing now, but instead of putting trackers on people's cars, we're just putting these cameras everywhere on the roads.

We have talked a lot in this conversation about people who are worried about privacy, but there are also a lot of people in this country who are really worried about crime. Like, I don't even know to the extent that these 2 groups of people are distinct, which one of them is bigger. So I wonder how we're supposed to think about Flock when we hold up these 2 kind of competing concerns against one another, right? People who are really worried, maybe more so about getting their license plate readers read versus people who are like, I don't want crime in my communities. I'm more worried about crime than I am of somebody taking a picture of my car.

I mean, that is the legal question here and kind of the societal question. What degree of liberty do we want to give up for Security. We'll never have perfect liberty. We'll never have perfect security. What has struck me about the reaction to flock cameras is just how bipartisan it is. People on the left and the right have objections to these cameras. It's kind of across the board. And so that's been really striking. One of the experts I talked to said there is a version of this where we could just have the cameras give alerts and not be tracking us for 7 days or 30 days.

Right.

Or 5 years in the case of some states that say you have to retain, you know, the photos of these cars for that long. I mean, this is a question of every surveillance technology, right? If you had perfect surveillance, we could live in a country with very little crime, but it would certainly violate some of our constitutional principles.

I feel like most of my adult life, which has existed mostly in the post-Edward Snowden era, people have been talking about privacy and surveillance. And for all of those concerns though, technology just marches on. Like, it feels like even though we might be worried about this kind of stuff, we've given up a lot of privacy in exchange for convenience. Like, that does feel like the world we are living in. But I do feel like this issue with Flock, it feels like it is hitting a different kind of nerve. And part of me wonders why that is. Like, is it because of the physicality of being able to see a camera, knowing that it is tracking my car, my person, I guess, like the fact that you can go out and break one. How much of that, Cash, do you think is part of why we're seeing so much anger about this system?

I think the physicality does play a role here. You know, so many of our privacy concerns are around invisible tracking and data collection that happens online, and this time you can actually see it and how and where it's happening. But I also think there are bigger Part of it is that private companies have stepped in to do surveillance that previously the government would've been forbidden from doing. And I saw this before covering Clearview AI, this company that scraped everybody's photos to build a facial recognition app that police could use to identify people.

Sure.

It's the same thing with Flock. You know, they've created this huge database, and then they sell it to law enforcement so they can just use it without getting a warrant. And it's also just this growing amount of technology. There's so many new ways to track us, to observe us, to create these running databases that are so huge. And I think this one kind of Very slowly crept up on us. It was like people weren't paying enough attention to Flock, and then all of a sudden we realized there's 120,000 cameras across the country. And as one source put it to me, we're just sleepwalking into this surveillance state where it's just too easy to know everything about us.

Kashmir Hill, thank you so much.

You're welcome. We'll be right back.

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Here's what else you need to know today. The U.S. struck Iran on Sunday for the first time in a month. According to U.S. Central Command, American forces attacked 2 Iranian rocket launchers on an island in the Strait of Hormuz. It appeared to be a limited attack rather than a large-scale bombing, but Iran has stated it will retaliate, raising the risk of continued military Today's episode was produced by Jack DiZodoro, Shannon Lynne, and Eric Krupke, with help from Adrienne Hirst and Alex Stern. It was edited by Chris Haxall, with help from Michael Benoit and Brendan Klinkenberg, and contains music by Pat McCusker and Dan Powell. Our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Thanks for listening. That's it for The Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.

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