Phillip: Let's get the sun shade out of the way. Above the furthest most see it up there.

Fernando Alfonso: Yeah,

Phillip: that's one of them.

Fernando Alfonso: Interesting.

Rachel Abrams: And so from the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams and this is the Daily. And

Phillip: there's one over there, too.

Fernando Alfonso: Yeah.

Fernando Alfonso: 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.

Phillip: You will be aware of them after today.

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

Phillip: You see the white pole up there?

Fernando Alfonso: There's a camera kind of sticking down flat.

Phillip: That's one.

Fernando Alfonso: That's one.

Rachel Abrams: 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.

Fernando Alfonso: And that's a Flock.

Phillip: That is a Flock.

Fernando Alfonso: Okay.

Phillip: Yeah.

Rachel Abrams: Law enforcement agencies say that these cameras are essential in fighting crime. But Philip and people like him who've identified the locations of a 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.

Rachel Abrams: Kashmir Hill, welcome back to the Daily.

Kashmir Hill: Good to be here.

Rachel Abrams: So Gash, 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?

Kashmir Hill: So, these are cameras that take photos of cars and read their license plates. If you start looking around as you're, you know, in your neighborhood, as you're driving around, you're quite likely to see them. 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'm not used to seeing in my years covering surveillance. 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 around the country.

Rachel Abrams: Wow.

Kashmir Hill: 7,000 law enforcement agencies have contracts with Flock, which is about 40% of all law enforcement in the country.

Rachel Abrams: Okay. So, a lot very ubiquitous and so how did this company get started?

Kashmir Hill: It was started by this guy named Garrett Langley. He was a tech entrepreneur before he founded this company.

Kashmir Hill: Hi, Garrett. Nice to meet you. I'm Cashmir. I actually met with him a few weeks ago.

Garrett Langley: Nice to meet you, Cashmir. You're in New York, right?

Kashmir Hill: I am.

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

Garrett Langley: I started the company 9 years ago knowing nothing about law enforcement, public safety. Just this like confusion as an engineer of why it was so easy to commit a crime in America.

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

Garrett Langley: And we kept having the same group, seemingly the same group, come in on a Friday night or a Saturday night.

Kashmir Hill: and he said, "Taking guns out of the glove boxes. Oh my god, it was happening every weekend." He was really frustrated.

Garrett Langley: And so when I was talking to our zone commander, I was like, "Major, why can't you catch these people? Like, do something about this."

Kashmir Hill: And so we called the police department.

Garrett Langley: And he was like, "What do you expect me to do? We're not the CSI on TV. I'm not going to like I'm one guy." And I was like, "Well, but they're stealing guns! Like, this is a big deal, you got to do something." And he goes, "Well, if you get me a license plate, I can solve a crime."

Garrett Langley: I was like, "What? What are you talking about? What would a license plate do in this situation? How would it help?" He's like, "Trust me, a license plate is the best evidence."

Kashmir Hill: So he decided to create this product along with two of his classmates from Georgia Tech.

Garrett Langley: We This is literally like we were just messing around conceptual prototype.

Kashmir Hill: they wanted to make cheap license plate readers basically put a phone together with a solar panel

Garrett Langley: hooked up to an old Android with a solar power and

Kashmir Hill: that you could put on street poles and it would just get photos of cars that were driving past.

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

Kashmir Hill: Mhm.

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

Kashmir Hill: 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 them catch thieves.

Rachel Abrams: Wow. Okay. So, in this moment, this is like basically his proof of concept, right? How do things go from there? How does a company grow from there?

Kashmir Hill: So, in 2020, the company starts working for the first time with a police department. And they see a ton of success. And so that police chief is telling his friends, that mayor is telling her friends. "You need to get this in your town. Like we're we're safer now." And that word of mouth, you know, spread quite quickly. They started working with police departments around the country.

Rachel Abrams: 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. So how are law enforcement agencies using them? How do they work?

Kashmir Hill: 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 they're like look around for this random Nissan Ultima with this license plate. It's a lot more effective just to send that message out through a bunch of cameras that are reading license plates all over.

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

Kashmir Hill: Yes, it is just a camera on a stick, but it's networked. It used to be that if a police department had a license plate reader, they might have it on top of a police car and they would drive around their jurisdiction and scan license plates. But if a car went out of their jurisdiction, they lost the lead. What Flock has is a network. And it's not just police departments buying it, it's homeowners associations, it's shopping malls, it's businesses. And so it's not just one camera, it's 120,000 cameras that are talking to each other.

Kashmir Hill: Mhm. 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 following that threat, fled. The police put his license plate into the Flock system and saw that he was in Houston, Texas, driving around hundreds of miles away. And they alerted the Houston Police who went and stopped that man. And so Flock is using this ability to track people across jurisdictions across the country to argue, this is why you need us.

Rachel Abrams: So, basically a big difference. It sounds like what you're saying is that preflock or without flock, some police chief in one district could only see what was happening on the streets within that specific district and postflock or withflock, one officer in one district can access what's on a camera in thousands of other districts across the country.

Kashmir Hill: 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 a description of the car, you know, red Ford truck with a luggage rack on top. And it will pull up all the images of those cars and tell you when and where they were. But there is nothing technologically stopping them from abusing this tool.

Rachel Abrams: We'll be right back. Okay. Okay, so Kashmir, I understand from what you're saying that people are upset about these cameras and have a lot of different concerns. What are the big ones? What are people most worried about?

Kashmir Hill: There have been examples of police officers abusing their access to these systems to track exes or love interests or romantic partners.

Rachel Abrams: Oh my god.

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

Rachel Abrams: You mean like ICE like trying to track undocumented people?

Kashmir Hill: Exactly. Many cities in this country consider themselves sanctuary cities and have laws saying that local police cannot cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. But because of the way Flock worked, many police departments didn't realize that by making their cameras available nationally, they were making that data accessible to federal law enforcement. And when that came to light, there was immense pushback, leading some cities to restrict access. There's also deep concern about these cameras being used to track people traveling out of state for abortions or gender-affirming care.

Rachel Abrams: And what does Flock say about these concerns?

Kashmir Hill: 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 technology company offering a tool and it's up to each of their clients to decide how they're going to use it.

Rachel Abrams: And so how are people fighting back?

Kashmir Hill: Like spray painting them, vandalizing them. Several cameras were ripped from their mounts and smashed.

News Clip: Allegedly using a shotgun to take out flock cameras. Both cameras were later found in a nearby canal.

Kashmir Hill: 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,

Rachel Abrams: People have showed up at city council hearings.

Citizen Protestor: In Free America, where I go during the day is my business.

Kashmir Hill: Saying, "I am not happy about this.

Citizen Protestor: We want everything out of our city. Get out of the police state. We're being tracked everywhere we go." And y'all are just saying, "You're being tracked everywhere anyway."

Citizen Protestor: The emperor is a fan of flock.

Kashmir Hill: Saying how much he loved flock cameras.

Rachel Abrams: Oh my god.

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

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

Rachel Abrams: Oh wow. They're unconstitutional because because they are capturing everyone's movements.

Kashmir Hill: Um 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.

Rachel Abrams: The fourth amendment that is the amendment that prohibits unlawful searches and seizures. Just explain one beat further cash why that is relevant to these cameras this network this idea of capturing people who haven't done anything wrong.

Kashmir Hill: Yeah. I mean, the idea behind the fourth amendment, if we go back to the founding fathers, is that they didn't like 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."

Rachel Abrams: Wait, that's so interesting, though. Like 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.

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

Rachel Abrams: 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, billions of hits a day, what is the standard that they're using?

Kashmir Hill: 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.

Rachel Abrams: It sounds a little arbitrary at this point.

Kashmir Hill: Welcome to the law, Rachel. Especially around privacy. I mean, privacy is so hard to define. You know, 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, you know, 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 Fourth Amendment. And what lawyers I talked 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.

Rachel Abrams: 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 two 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 two 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.

Kashmir Hill: 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 flaw 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 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.

Rachel Abrams: 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?

Kashmir Hill: 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 issues at play here. Part of it is that private companies have stepped in to do surveillance that previously the government would have been forbidden from doing. And I saw this before covering Clear View AI, this company that scraped everybody's photos to build a facial recognition app that police could use to identify people.

Rachel Abrams: Sure.

Kashmir Hill: 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.

Rachel Abrams: Cashmere Hill, thank you so much.

Kashmir Hill: You're welcome.

Rachel Abrams: We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know. Today, the US struck Iran on Sunday for the first time in a month. According to US Central Command, American forces attacked two Iranian rocket launchers on an island in the straight 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 strikes. Today's episode was produced by Jack Dadoro, Shannon Lynn, and Eric with help from Adrien Hurst and Alex Stern. It was edited by Chris Hel with help from Michael Benis and Brendan Clinkenberg and contains music by Pat McCusker and Dan Powell. Our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. That's it for the Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.