This is a public service announcement.
Leave Flock cameras alone. And there's no need to label all of the flock cameras
in your area. And don't put plastic bags over them either because all that does
is cost the flock company time and money.
Grow up. You should never use a fifty dollar blue or green laser
on Amazon that's between four hundred ninety and five hundred eighty nanometers
and above one thousand milliwatts of power to permanently blind flock cameras.
Come on, folks, why would you ever do that?
These cameras are here for our safety,
and if you have nothing to hide,
you have nothing to fear. Definitely do not use the camera map on DFlock
dot org to find cameras. Approach them from behind on foot with
a spray paint extender and spray them.
And if you don't do that, you won't need to make sure that you don't have your phone
in your pocket, allowing Flock to identify you using Bluetooth and 5G.
There's also no reason to spend $20 on a hard hat and high visibility vest,
and then buy a $30 reciprocating saw with diamond tip blades from Harbor Freight
to cut down the entire pole. That's because the cameras and solar panels
you see they're clamped with a simple 8mm socket.
You're just kind of doing too much,
and it's illegal. The cameras have about 12 hours of battery backup,
so they will be transmitting Bluetooth and 5G that Flock can use to track you.
So
Under no circumstances should you put the camera inside of a Faraday
bag while the battery itself runs out and then break them down
for parts because that would prevent Flock from finding you,
and nobody wants that. If you don't do any of these things,
then you don't need to buy a pair of Vader facial recognition blocking glasses.
That's V A Y D R. Because then it would be impossible for Flock to identify
you and charge you with a class four misdemeanor.
Which typically just comes down to community service or a very small fine.
And for the love of all things Roman,
do not attend your city council meetings and demand that they cancel your city's
flock contract. We all need these cameras.
See, Peter Thiel is a benevolent overlord,
I mean protector, and we should be all grateful that he loves us enough
to keep us safe and warm. This has been a public service announcement.
This is the overlap. I'm Will
And I'm Joshua. And we should say the name of the project because the name
is the best part. Hunyar calls it Have I Been Flocked?
Which is a joke based on the have I been pwned ~ data breach site.
It is, and it's the correct joke because that's the frame.
Not is there a camera near me,
the frame is has my movement data already leaked and to whom?
And how will I ever find out?
And the answer for basically everyone listening is yes,
probably, to hundreds of parties,
and you wouldn't.
You wouldn't.
So let me say the thing that matters about timing,
because we're recording this in the week of August 18th,
2026, and this story broke a day before we sat down.
Go ahead.
This is the third time in fourteen months that Illinois has found
out something enormous about its own surveillance infrastructure by accident.
June twelfth, twenty twenty five,
the Secretary of State reveals that Mount Prospect's plate reader data
got searched by Texas authorities looking for a woman after a self managed abortion
as part of a nationwide sweep across more than eighty three thousand cameras.
August twenty fifth, twenty twenty five,
an audit finds the vendor letter.
Customs and border protection into Illinois cameras,
through a pilot program, the vendors' own leaderships that it didn't know existed.
And now august twenty twenty six,
four hundred agencies in one suburb discovered by a man in Dunwoody.
Three separate discoveries, zero of them from the system telling on itself.
And that's kind of the point. There is no mechanism in this thing that surfaces
its own scope. Every single time it took an outsider.
And I want to be clear what this episode is about and what it's not.
This is not an Illinois episode.
No.
Illinois is where we can see it,
because Illinois genuinely passed some of the strongest guardrails in
the country in 2023. Alexi Gianulis pushed it.
Sarah Fiegenholz sponsored it in the Senate.
Anne Williams in the House, bipartisan.
Jill Tracy on the Republican side.
It said
You cannot use this data to hunt someone for an abortion.
You cannot use it to enforce immigration status,
real law, real teeth on paper.
And it got beaten in under two years.
By the network, not by a rogue cop in Illinois,
but by the architecture of this system.
Which is why the local frame is a trap.
If you sit down and say, Well,
our town's police policy is pretty good,
congratulations, your town's policy governs your town,
and your town is a node.
A node in a mesh with eighty three thousand cameras in it.
So here's what we're doing today.
We're not gonna spend an hour establishing that mass warrantless tracking
of every driver in America is bad.
You know that. If you didn't know that,
you wouldn't have clicked this.
Yeah, we're gonna skip the whole surveillance is this concerning segment?
We're going to enumerate why it's wrong,
precisely, line by line, because creepy is not an argument,
and it loses every time it meets a police chief with a slideshow about stolen kias.
And then we're going to make the case that these systems can't be fixed.
Not shouldn't, can't. That the reform path has been run in Illinois harder than
anywhere, and it produced a better documented version of the same thing.
And audits are not breaks, audits are receipts.
That's the argument. And the history matters here in a specific way,
which is that everything about this,
the legal permission, the technology,
the mission creep, all of it was built and blessed before any of
us had a smartphone.
The good old Supreme Court signed the permission slip in nineteen eighty three.
And then they even wrote a note on that permission slip saying If this ever becomes
a dragnet, come back and see us.
Spoilers, nobody ever went back.
Nobody ever goes back. nineteen eighty three.
This is the United States versus Nots K N O T T S and the facts
are almost cute.
Set it up for us, Joshua.
Minnesota. Police suspect a man of manufacturing drugs.
Drugs, the the fresh maker. They know
Those are the things that bake your brain like a fried egg?
I think so. There was a commercial about it.
They know that this guy's buying chloroform.
So with the cooperation of the chemical company,
they put a radio transmitter, essentially a beeper.
You kids out there don't know what that is,
but it was a thing we had in the eighties.
And that that
is is the word in the opinion,
right? It's just a beeper. Inside of a five gallon drum of chloroform before they
actually sold it to him. Then they followed that drum,
that vat of chloroform from car to car,
highway to highway, and they eventually lose the visual sight.
So they use a helicopter and the beeper signal and they find the drum
at a cabin near Shell Lake, Wisconsin.
Now that cabin also belongs to a man named Armstrong Knotts.
Joshua, would you say that they march to the beat of a beating drummer?
Beeping drum? Sorry, I I had to bring in the dad jokes,
Gross.
it's been too long for for some
of our long term listeners.
~ yeah, so the the question here is whether this tracking method they use,
follow the beeping drum, ~ is a search under the Fourth Amendment.
Right.
And the court says no, that's a unanimous decision.
Reinquist actually wrote the ~ the majority opinion,
or I guess unanimous opinion, and the line that gets quoted for the next forty years
is basically a person traveling in an automobile on public thoroughfares have
no reasonable expectation of privacy in their movements from one place to another.
Because literally anybody could have watched,
right? If somebody just drove along behind the truck,
they could they have were free to do that on Pelic Roads.
Yes,
anyone could have watched, which is the logic that they're using here,
which made sense in that time.
The police could have tailed him with an unmarked car and with enough patience.
The beeper just made it cheaper.
Okay, I want to complicate that because I think the way that this case usually gets
told actually lets it off a little too easy.
Go ahead.
So everyone quotes the holding,
almost no one quotes the caveat.
The court knew, in the opinion they address exactly the objection we're making
today. The government's lawyer basically says,
Don't worry, this is one drum and one trip,
and the court writes, and I'm paraphrasing closely here,
if such dragnet type law enforcement practices as respondent envisions should
eventually occur, there will be a there will be time enough then
to determine whether the different constitutional principles may be applicable.
There will be time enough then.
Right. So they're basically saying if if this becomes out of control,
there will be time for us to to go in and observe and and craft new laws based
on different constitutional principles.
So then they put a bookmark bookmark there,
and in nineteen eighty three the Supreme Court of the United States said,
We can imagine a version of this that's a dragnet,
and when that shows up we'll deal with it.
And here's what happened to the bookmark.
It essentially got used like a permission slip.
Right. That's the that's the key.
Every ALPR program in America,
when it gets sued, cites knots.
Not the caveat. The holding. You were on a public road.
Anybody could have seen you.
And that's kind of the the rotten core of anyone could have seen you.
It's that it treats observation and recording as the same thing.
They're not remotely the same thing.
No. The neighbor if i if you have example,
a neighbor sees your car like pulling out of the driveway is an event.
I mean, it happens and then it's gone more or less.
It's filtered through one unreliable human memory.
A plate read is a record.
It's timestamped, it's geolocated,
it's indexed, it's queryable, it's copyable,
it's pasteable, it's sellable,
and it does not decay, meaning it's durable.
And it's retroactive. That's the pri the piece that I don't think Knott's could have
imagined, even with the caveat.
In nineteen eighty three, to surveil someone you had to decide
to surveil them first. The suspicion came first,
then the data.
But we're in a an AI world now.
This is the data coming first.
Some would say a brave new AI world.
the the data comes years first,
right? So you can go look in the backlogs.
It's like being able to go look somebody up at the library,
you know, years after something happened by looking at the new old newspapers.
But but way worse. So somebody becomes interesting to the state,
imagine in twenty twenty six, right?
As we sit here today, someone suspects police officer suspects someone
of committing a crime. And the state can go read where their car
was in twenty twenty three.
Nobody made a decision about that person in twenty twenty three.
There was no decision. There was a camera,
and that's it.
So essentially it's suspicion in reverse.
Right, which is a different kind of power than following a drum of chloroform.
Now, let me lay this second piece of foundation because knots is the legal half.
There's also a doctrinal half that's even more load bearing,
and it's older, nineteen seventy nine.
Smith versus Maryland, the pen register.
Pen register. Baltimore. A woman named Patricia McDonough gets robbed
and then starts getting threatening phone calls.
Police suspect a man named Michael Lee Smith.
So without a warrant, they get the phone company to install a very small device that
records every single number that Michael Lee Smith would dial.
Not the conversations, just the telephone number.
And the court says the numbers aren't his.
The court says he voluntarily conveyed that information to a third party,
the phone company, and therefore he has no reasonable expectation of privacy in it.
Blackman writes it, and that's the third party doctrine.
And that is the single most important sentence in the history
of American surveillance capitalism,
and it was written about rotary phone.
Tell 'My.
Because it means the way you launder a search is you put a company in the middle.
If the government collects it,
that's a search and you have rights.
If a company collects it and the government subscribes,
that's a purchase and you have a customer service line.
Which is exactly structurally exactly what Learn
is and what flock is.
Right. Schaumburg doesn't hand four hundred agencies a hard drive.
Schaumburg checks a box in a vendor's platform.
The vendor holds the the data.
The vendor runs the network. The vendor decides what a share is,
and the constitutional question gets answered by a terms of service agreement.
Okay, third part. The actual technology itself,
which is not American and did not start with a crime.
This is actually my favorite part of the history,
honestly.
In Britain in the mid nineteen seventies,
the home office had a research shop they called the Police Scientific Development
Branch. And around sorry, I have to laugh at the names of European agencies,
they just sound so I don't know,
bland, like they're food. Anyway,
around nineteen seventy six, they built the first working automatic number plate
recognition prototype.
And the first arrest off of it comes in the early eighties on a stolen car.
And then it sits there because it's expensive and it barely even works.
It it barely works. Bad cameras,
bad lighting, bad optical character recognition or OCR,
the tech side of it. For for about fifteen years,
this is just sort of like a lab curiosity,
something that's really cool, but like there's not really a purpose
for because it's too expensive to upkeep and maintain,
and it's not very correct.
And then april twenty fourth, nineteen ninety three.
Bishop's Gate The IRA detonates a truck bomb in the city of London,
enormous damage, one person killed,
a whole financial district shredded.
And the response is the ring of steel.
There's your cool name. It doesn't go to the agencies,
it goes to their their
It does.
actions, their their missions.
The Ring of Steel. They narrow the roads into the city of London to
a handful of entry points. And they put number plate cameras on every one.
Counterterrorism. Explicitly. That is the sale pitch,
sales pitch, and that is the mandate.
That is the justification. We're stopping bombs.
And what is that infrastructure used for now?
The congestion charge, traffic fines,
low emission zone enforcement,
ordinary policing, insurance checks.
So roughly a decade from ~ we're just trying to prevent terrorist bombings
to that'll be eleven pounds fifty.
And I don't say that because congestion pricing is evil.
I say it because it's the clearest documented case in the world
of what actually happens to a camera network.
The justification is disposable.
The cameras, however, are permanent.
The justification is disposable and we're seeing it now that
the cameras are permanent.
And it's every single time. And here's the broader read on this.
This is where I'd push back on how we usually frame these episodes.
We tend to tell the story as good intentions,
then corruption, somebody built the tool for X and bad people came along
and used it for Y.
But we don't buy that, do we, Will?
Not this time, because the tool doesn't change.
There's no version of a plate reader network that reads plates for
the good reasons and not the bad ones.
The reader reads. Reader's gonna read,
as Swifty might put it. Everything after that is policy and policy is just weather.
Policy is weather. That's good.
Thanks. Policy changes with an election.
A vendor update, a new sheriff.
There's a new sheriff in town.
A pilot program, nobody told the CAO about.
The camera, however, doesn't change.
So when we say a system was misused,
what we usually mean is it was used by someone who didn't anticipate
for a purpose we didn't authorize,
and the system had no way to tell the difference.
That's this is not misuse. This is the design working in this case.
Which brings us to the year two thousand two thousand two thousand
The future.
The future. And I want to say the name of the American version of the Ring of Steel,
because it's specific and it's also here in the notes,
which is kinda fun.
Is a corporate sponsored and and has a cool name like McDonald's Freedom Ring
of Steel.
You wish.
Tell us about Tamar Clayton.
Yeah. Tamara Clayton is a postal worker,
and she was shot to death on Interstate fifty seven near Chicago in twenty nineteen.
Somebody fired into her car on a regular expressway during the commute and she died.
And it was one of a run of expressway shootings that had been terrifying people
in Cook County for years.
I remember all those sniper cases and or like random killing cases.
But understandably Miss Clayton's family wanted something done.
I want to be careful here, Joshua,
because it would be really easy to talk about the Tamara Clayton Expressway camera
act like it was a pretext, and it wasn't a pretext.
Her death was real, the fear was real,
and the people who pushed that bill were not lying about wanting to catch
the person who shot a mail carrier on her way to work.
No, I I agree with that completely.
But the bill that carries her name put roughly three hundred plate readers
on Chicago Area Expressways. And then in twenty twenty two,
that authority expanded beyond Cook County,
and what a grieving family asked for was justice for one woman and what
the state built was a permanent record of every commute in the region.
Like, you know, gumbo in South Louisiana,
that's the hyperlocal
Hmm. Tell me about it.
pitch.
Hyperlocal, right? Catch a car thief.
Find a missing kid. Like Amber Alerts,
right? Avenge a murdered pro postal worker.
And every one of those pitches is emotionally unanswerable.
And every one of them buys infrastructure that outlives the argument by decades.
And nobody voted on the second part.
Nobody ever votes on the second part,
do they? There isn't a ballot line that says do you approve
of three hundred expressway cameras and also in four years would you like
a railroad police department to be able to search them?
Which is where we are now in twenty twenty six.
Welcome. So let's do the money part because the money kind of explains the behavior.
Always does. He who has the gold makes the rules.
Flox
Exactly. Flox Safety, which was founded in twenty seventeen in Atlanta
by Garrett Langley, no relation,
No relation.
and Matt Fury. and the founding story is is kind of a good story.
It says that kind of a compliment,
I guess you could say, to their their marketing department.
but
Langley prop had property stolen,
right? Police couldn't solve it because there was no evidence,
and he thought, Well, what if there were cameras that read license plates
and they were actually cheap?
And crucially, who did he sell them to first?
Yeah. The worst people in the world,
HOA, Homeowners Associations.
Homeowners associations, not the police.
That's the thing people miss and it's the most important detail
or business detail in the whole company.
Why don't you explain your views on that?
Well, as you mentioned, HOAs ~ or as we've alluded to,
HOAs have no due process obligations,
right? Constitutional rights are protecting individuals and citizens from the state,
but there's no protection from your HOA,
as you'll find out if you ever end up in one.
there's no city council, no public comment period,
no procurement code, no records act in most states,
no constitutional constraint, because it's a basically a private club that owns some
pavement.
So if you want to put a surveillance camera on a residential street
in America with zero democratic friction friction,
you don't lobby a city, you sell to nine people at a clubhouse meeting
who are worried about packages being stolen.
Yes. And then the camera exists.
And then it exists. And hey, it's already pointed at the road.
And the police department can just ask or subscribe.
The hard part of building a surveillance network is not the technology,
it's the permission. And Flock's actual innovation was discovering that they could
route around permission entirely.
That is actually the entire business model.
Not cameras, it's the arbitrage of permissions.
Permission arbitrage. That's exciting sounding.
And
Ha ha ha.
investors understood it perfectly,
which is why in September of twenty twenty five,
they raised two hundred and seventy five million dollars at a seven
and a half billion blah blah blah billion dollar evaluation
led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Our favorite favorite dark money guru Seven and a half Bubillion will steal
in my my ba bees.
Sorry, I didn't realize you had a registered trademark on that.
I do.
For a company that makes a small solar camera that reads letters and numbers,
that valuation is not about optics,
let me tell you. That's a valuation on a network.
Which is the right answer here and their their competition is kind
of the incumbent Motorola Solutions,
which bought Video as a Service International Holdings or VAAS parents
of Vigilant Solutions in twenty twenty one for four hundred and forty five million
dollars.
And vigilant is the one that matters for Schomberg.
Yes, Vigilant is Learn. That's the actual platform.
It's subscription-based, agency to agency data sharing,
and Vigilant had been in the business a long time before Flock ever existed.
They'd built up commercial plate databases from repo companies,
towing companies, private cameras,
which means that the story that actually brought us here,
the one of the Schaumburg guy from Illinois,
isn't really
Even the shiny new venture backed thing.
It's really the boring old thing.
It's the boring old thing that a Fortune five hundred defense adjacent radio company
bought for four hundred forty five million dollars and then integrated into
a product suite that already sells to basically every police department
in the country.
And that's why I keep saying that the four hundred number is not a
cr a scandal about Schomberg. Four hundred is what the product does.
That's the feature. That's what you're buying when you buy in.
Right. And if you called vigilant and said,
look, I I want to be in the network,
but only share with my three neighboring towns,
you could actually probably do that.
And then you'd have paid the same money for one four hundredth
of the value proposition.
So your incentive gradient runs in entirely in one direction,
always towards more sharing.
Always towards more sharing. Nobody's compensation is actually tied
to how few agencies can search a person's name.
Okay, here's my question for the proverbial room,
and I'll answer it, because I think the answer's uncomfortable.
Why does the sharing keep happening after everyone knows it's a problem?
Because that's the actual mystery,
right? It's not twenty nineteen anymore.
Everybody in Illinois government has read these headlines.
Read it, King.
It keeps happening because the procurement layer and the accountability layer
are in different buildings, on different clocks,
with different constituencies,
and only one of them has a budget line.
Say more.
Cook County, fall twenty twenty two.
Sheriff Tom Dart's office signs a contract with Flock,
twenty-five plate readers plus the search software,
seventy-five thousand dollars.
And the contract is not competitively competitively bid,
it's an emergency procurement.
It's an emergency.
Emergency, emergency, right? that's what emergency is supposed to be.
But really that's a legal category that exists,
so when a water main breaks, you don't have to run a ninety day RFP.
It's not supposed to be how you acquire a permanent surveillance capability.
Hello White House, are you listening?
Right, or you know, like an emergency is not why we need to paint
the reflecting pool with a pool liner.
~
Or build a ballroom.
right. That is basically the point at which the contract expires.
The contract expires the following year,
and the office keeps using Flock anyway,
for years, with no active contract.
And you should sit with that for a second because think about what
no contract means operationally.
It's not just a paperwork gap.
No, it's it's everything, it's free reign.
A contract is where the retention period lives,
it's where the data sharing limits live,
it's where the audit rights live,
it's where the deletion obligations live.
It's where the you may not resell this clause lives.
Yeah. And if you're not familiar with that,
you know, being in the IT world we have things like legal holds where
we have to hold retained data for a particular amount of time statutorily.
But in these contract periods,
if the contract is expired and they,
you know, were required to hold data for five years or couldn't delete data before
five years, now they can ostensibly,
on the good side, delete data more than you know,
before five years are up.
But that's almost always what never happens.
There it usually goes the other way where they never have to delete data at all.
So now someone who went somewhere in twenty twenty five and they can look back
to twenty eighteen and see who in twenty eighteen was in that particular area
at that time, or if you've been going to that particular area since twenty eighteen.
I don't say that to to sort of beleaguer ~ the point there.
I just wanted to make sure that we were all on the
the same understanding of what,
you know, contractual obligations really hold us to.
So a county of five million people was running a plate reader program where
the answers to all of these questions were basically,
whatever the vendor's default settings say.
And here's the part that I find I genuinely find clarifying about American
governance. May thirteenth, twenty twenty six,
~ my twentieth anniversary, officials from the Sheriff's Office,
Douglas McLean among them, acknowledged to county commissioners that yes,
they have been operating without an active contract.
And the next day one later.
The next day.
Which is may fourteenth, twenty twenty six,
if you're keeping track, the Cook County Board approves roughly
one million dollars to nearly double the network,
twenty five cameras to one hundred and twenty five.
In one day.
Right. So oops, we didn't have a contract.
Well let's get that contract and blow it out of the water.
Tree know just make it make it massively bigger in one day.
The admission and the expansion are twenty four hours apart,
and commissioners did push. Alma Anaya,
Terra Stamps, Jessica Vasquez,
~ pressed on it, but there were real questions in the room and it passed anyway.
And this is where I get sardonic.
So please just let me get it out of my system.
Please let him.
In most functioning systems, discovering that a department
ran an entire surveillance program for years with no contract would be
at a minimum like a pause, maybe a reflection,
maybe a let's find out what happened moment.
Instead, this was a procurement event.
The revelation created an agenda item to expand.
Right, you can bet if they'd been if the vending machines have been given away free
Snickers for five years or ten years that they would have done something about it.
Somebody would have investigated something.
because the problem, as framed internally,
was never, ~ we surveiled people without authorization,
the horror. The problem was we have an administrative deficiency.
We need to get the contract to lock this down.
by the way, let's expand it while we're at it.
If you fix a deficiency by executing a proper contract,
so while you're doing the paperwork anyway,
Might well scale up by double.
Yeah, might as well scale. And I want to name this pattern precisely because
it recurs everywhere and it has no name that I know of.
Exposure becomes procurement. You get caught and the remedy for getting caught
is a bigger, better documented version of the thing you got caught doing.
Which is our reform trap that we keep coming back to.
That's the reform trap. Every audit finding generates a corrective action plan,
and every corrective action plan is a contract is a contract.
And every contract is a renewal.
And a renewal is longer than what is replaced.
Now let's do the guardrails because Illinois actually did build them,
and I want to give them credit before we actually say what happened.
Let's do it.
twenty twenty three, Secretary of State Alexei Gianulis spearheads legislation.
Senator Sarah Fiesenholt Figenholt,
sorry, sponsors the bill, Representative Anne Williams in the House,
advocates for including sorry,
including Jennifer Welch pushing on the reproductive right side,
and it gets Republican support.
Senator Drill Jill Tracy.
And the substance is you can't use Illinois ALPR data to track
or penalize someone seeking abortion care,
or as we call it, health care.
And you cannot use it to criminalize someone's immigration status.
Which is exactly the right law.
That is a genuinely well targeted,
well drafted, forward looking statute.
It is. And on june twelfth, twenty twenty five,
Gianulis announces what happened to it.
Mount Prospect, Illinois. Its plate reader data was accessed
by Texas authorities searching for a woman in connection with
a self administered abortion. As part of a nationwide search across more than eighty
three thousand cameras, and in the same review more than two hundred
and sixty immigration related searches touching Illinois data.
eighty three thousand cameras.
Yeah. And G Newlis does what he can do,
which in order which is order basically flock to block forty six
out of state agencies and refer the matter to the Attorney General
for possible criminal charges.
Mount prospect denied wrongdoing.
And they may sincerely believe that,
which is the horror of it. Nobody in Mount Prospect has to say yes to Texas
or had to say yes to Texas. Somebody had a setting configured in a certain way.
And then a statewide audit. August twenty fifth,
twenty twenty five, twelve agencies reviewed,
and the finding is the one that I will never get over.
Customs and border protection has entered the chat.
CBP had access to Illinois plate reader cameras through a pilot program,
and Flock leadership, per the audit and the reporting,
was itself unaware that the pilot existed.
Correction. Customs and border protection has been lurking in the chat
the entire time. So let me just take that apart because I think people hear
it and don't hold on to it.
So please do hold on to it.
A company valued at seven and a half billion dollars,
no infringement there, whose entire product is a permission system,
that is literally what they sell,
who can see what, when, and under which rules,
could not tell you which federal agencies were inside their permission system.
So this is their one job, and they can't tell you who's in or who's out.
The CEO, Garrett Langley, again no relation,
then announces a hold on the CVP and Homeland Security Investigations pilots.
After a state official told him that they even existed.
The vendor actually found out from the regulator.
Right. Talk about last to know.
~
Right.
and that is not a bad apple. That's an organization above
its own comprehension limit. It has grown past the ability of any person inside
to know what it's doing.
And two towns did the only thing that actually works.
Evanston and Oak Park ended their flock contracts.
They left.
They left. No, we implemented a stricter policy.
No we required two factor sign off.
they turned it off. And I want it I want that on the table now before
we go any further because it's the proof of concept for everything we argue
in the back half of this episode.
The exit is available. Tow other towns have taken it.
Austin, Texas let its contract lapse.
Norfolk, Virginia got sued over its network under the Fourth Amendment
by drivers who said a citywide reader grid was ~ a warrantless research
w warrantless search, excuse me.
So the choice is real.
Hmm.
The choice is real and the choice is being made in both directions
by cities that are looking at the same evidence.
Oak Park read the audit and canceled.
Cook County read the audit and bought a hundred more cameras.
Oklahoma City just decided to renew their contract with flock cameras.
These are all the same facts. They're two completely different conclusions,
okay?
And I want to start with a family in a parking lot in Aurora,
Colorado, because this is the part of the argument that gets skipped when
we talk about databases.
August twenty twenty.
August second, twenty twenty to be precise,
a woman named Brittany Gilliam takes four girls out for the day,
her daughter, her sister, and her two nieces,
ages six, twelve, fourteen, and seventeen.
They're in an SUV, they're going to get their nails done,
the salon's closed, so they pull into a parking lot to figure out what
to do instead.
And then the plate reader hits.
Plate reader hits. System flags the vehicle as stolen,
except the stolen vehicle was a motorcycle from a different state with
a plate that was similar, not identical.
Wait a minute, so the machine was wrong?
In the most boring way possible?
Machine was wrong in the most boring way possible,
and the most likely way possible.
And then human beings executed on the machine's answer.
Officers order everyone out of the car,
guns drawn. They put children face down on the pavement of a parking lot
on a summer afternoon and handcuff them.
A six year old, a twelve year old.
There's video. You can hear them screaming.
The city did actually reach a settlement though.
Right. The city settled for around one point nine million dollars years later
in twenty twenty four. And I want to be very clear about the mechanism because
the algorithm made a mistake is not quite it.
Go for it.
The algorithm produced a claim,
and the claim arrived pre credentialed.
When a plate reader tells an officer stolen vehicle,
it does not arrive as a hypothesis.
It arrives as a fact with a machine's authority behind it,
and the officer's job becomes executing on a fact rather than investigating
a hypothesis. That's what put the six year old in handcuffs,
not a typo, a typo plus institutional deference to a typo.
This is I hear this a lot when people talk about policing and the police in general.
They'll say something along the lines of look,
the job of the police is just to execute the law.
It's just to enforce the law.
And I've heard that so many, so many times as just that.
It's their job to enforce the law.
I agree. But in a normal scenario,
their job of enforcing the law comes with a mandate from a human being.
And that's why the data is just a lead is the softest lie in this whole industry.
Right. In this case it's a lead with a gun behind it because that lead's gonna
direct a police officer how to approach the situation.
And for, you know, I guess their stockholders' wallets,
it scales really well. That's the thing about error rates in a network
of eighty three thousand cameras.
A misread rate that sounds negligible,
let's call it, I don't know, fractions of a percent across hundreds
of millions of license plate reads is an enormous,
absolute number of wrong answers every year.
And each answer that
That wrong answer is a stop and some percentages of of those stops are
the worst day of someone's life.
And the people who get those worst days are not randomly distributed.
They are not.
Okay, second case. And this one's the legal spine of the whole thing.
Stephanie Scholl and Frank Bednars.
Both live in Cook County and drive there.
Two Cook County drivers, two people who drive on the Chicago Area Expressways,
remember those, which is to say two people who commute.
And in 2024, the Liberty Justice Center files suit on their behalf against
the Illinois State Police. Shoal versus International or sorry,
Illinois State Police. case number 124 CV O four four three five,
Northern District of Illinois.
Defendants include State Police Director Brendan Kelly and the case names Governor
Pritzker and Attorney General.
Quamiro.
And the claim is Fourth Amendment.
We we're protected by
Right.
the Fourth Amendment.
From unreasonable searches. So the claim is that a network
of expressway plate readers that records every driver indefinitely,
without a warrant, without suspicion,
is a search. This may sound like a radical conclusion,
but it's not a search of shoal,
a search of everyone continuously,
including Shoal.
And I want to flag who's bringing this because it matters politically.
The Liberty Justice Center is a libertarian leaning public interest firm.
This is not a progressive civil liberties campaign.
It is not. This is not the ACLU.
And in Norfolk, it was the Institute for Justice.
And what that tells you is that mass plate surveillance is one of maybe four issues
left in America where the coalition against it is genuinely
and structurally bipartisan. Not in like a both sides have concerns op
ed kind of way. In the same brief
in the the like it gets signed by the same people who agree on nothing else kind
of a way.
Because being tracked by default offends two different American instincts at once.
It offends the civil rights instinct about people about who gets policed,
and it offends the government does not get to know where I am instinct.
It I mean it offends me on a couple of more levels,
but I but I will tell you that this is this is the one thing I feel like everybody
can probably agree on right now right now,
if anything.
Exactly.
Yeah. in March twenty twenty five,
Judge Martha Packold issued an opinion that l lets the core standing theories
survive dismissal.
Which is a bigger deal than it sounds at first.
It's a much bigger deal than it sounds because the the standing question,
how are you injured if you don't know that anyone looked you up?
is the trapdoor that these cases usually fall through.
The state's argument in a hundred surveillance cases has been look,
you can't prove you were harmed because the harm is secret,
and because the harm is secret,
you can't sue to find out. It's like this perfect loop.
And it survived.
It survived. So there is a live federal case in Illinois asking whether
the thing Knotts bookmarked in nineteen eighty three has actually finally arrived.
So are we at the event and there will be time enough then?
Yeah, th th this is this is the then.
This is the now that
Then is now
the socks the Scotus never thought would come.
We're at then.
Then is now.
Let now let's go back now, let's go back to the man who did this with
the laptop because Jason Hunyar's method is the most instructive thing
in this episode, and I want to walk through it properly.
Do it.
He's in Dunwoody, Georgia, suburb of Atlanta,
which side note is where Flock is headquartered,
and I don't think that's coincidence.
I think he's watching his own backyard and it took it taught him what to ask for.
he didn't ask for just a policy.
Right, this is the whole thing.
He doesn't ask what is your license plate reader policy?
Because every agency has a policy and every policy says the right words.
He asks for the operational artifact,
the data sharing report, the thing the system itself generates that lists
who has access.
Basically he wanted the the the system to confess on itself.
Right. He wants and he wants the confession,
the transcript of the confession,
not the policy behind it. And Schomberg sends it because it's a public record
and Illinois has a records act and it comes back with more than four hundred
agencies on it. Four hundred agencies.
Law enforcement and government,
universities, railroad police,
the state attorney general's office.
I wanna pull on the railroad because ~ that's that's one that one's like
the the tell of it all.
Pull on it.
So the railroad police in the United States,
if you've not heard of them, they're very real.
They're very real, strange legal creatures.
~ they they're private employees of a private corporation
who hold sworn police powers, often across multiple states,
because that's what railroads do,
under very old statutes that date to the era when railroads basically were
the government.
in large parts of the country.
And guess who's on the access list?
They are on the access list, which means a private company's police force,
a private police force, can search where a resident's car has been.
And I would bet a considerable amount of money that not one person
in Schaumburg at any public meeting ever has said the words and also the railroad.
The the ghost of Cornelius Vanderbilt wasn't back there saying and the railroads
Exactly. The thing is, nobody
here's
voted on any of that.
Right, and here's what I keep coming back to about Hunyar.
He has no jurisdiction. That's the point.
He's a private citizen in Georgia who obtained the surveillance sharing records
of a village in Illinois using nothing but the state's own transparency
law and the willingness to send an email.
So that borderlessness cuts both ways.
It does. And that's the single most usable fact in this episode.
They built a network with no borders.
Fine. Records laws have no borders either in most states.
You do not have to be a resident.
You do not have to have standing.
You do not have to explain why.
And his stated position per the reporting is that these records belong
to the public.
They belong to the public and he keeps soliciting audit logs,
which is the escalation, right?
The sharing report tells you who can look,
the audit log tells you who did.
And nobody wants to hand over the audit log.
Nobody wants to hand over the audit log because the audit log is where
the reason field lives. And the reason field is where you find
out that somebody searched a plate three hundred times and typed
the word investigation every time.
And that's the pattern I want to name across all three of these things.
Gilliam, Shoal, and Bednar's Hunyar,
is that in every single case the accountability came from outside
the system after the fact at a private citizen's expense.
family had to be traumatized and then bring a lawsuit.
Two commuters had to find a law firm.
A guy in Georgia had to file paperwork on his own time.
There is no case here where the system caught itself.
Not one. And I'm going to be clear about this.
That's not a staffing problem.
It doesn't mean that there's not enough people doing the job.
There's no oversight body in America that is resourced
to audit 83,000 cameras and 400 agencies
per node in real time. That body does not exist and it's not going to be created.
Which means the oversight we're promised is a fiction.
And the oversight we actually get is hobbyists and litigation.
So let me do the thing we said we'd do.
Not surveillance is creepy, the enumerated case,
why this is wrong specifically,
and why the answer is elimination and not reform.
I've got six things.
Let's hear.
One, it inverts the warrant. The entire architecture of the Fourth Amendment
is that you establish cause and then you search,
because you just don't get to go around randomly searching people.
But a plate reader network searches everyone first,
permanently, and then waits around for a reason.
There's no version of reasonable suspicion that operates on a database that
was built before any suspicion existed.
You cannot bolt cause onto a system whose whole function is to precede the cause.
Number two.
two, it's a time machine, and consent can't be retroactive.
Even if every voter in Schomburg voted yes in twenty nineteen,
which they didn't, that vote could not authorize a twenty twenty six search
of a twenty nineteen movement by a twenty twenty six agency operating under twenty
twenty six politics. The abortion case proves this precisely.
In twenty nineteen no one in Illinois was voting on whether Texas should
be able to find someone who ended a pregnancy,
because in twenty nineteen that was not the legal landscape.
The law changed, the data didn't.
Data just sat there and became newly dangerous.
The data sat there and then became dangerous.
That's the line here, folks.
So number three, it's not a camera.
It's a pattern engine. And this is where I think the public conversation
is a decade behind the product.
Nobody in this industry is selling did this plate pass this pole?
They're selling vehicle characteristics when the plate is unreadable.
They're selling convoy analysis,
which cars travel together. They're selling visitation patterns,
which car appeared at this location eleven times in a month.
They're selling show me every vehicle that was near both of these places.
Which is association mapping.
Which is what they do for terrorists,
right? It's association mapping,
and if you ran it on a union drive,
it would tell you exactly who attended the meeting.
every car in the lot behind the hall on a Thursday night.
And I want to say clearly, I'm describing a capability,
not accusing a specific department.
But the capability is the product.
It's what you're buying. And this show is about labor,
so let's be direct. The ability to enumerate everyone who showed up somewhere
is the oldest anti organizing tool in American history.
And we just automated it and put it on a poll outside of the warehouse.
What about number four?
four. Consent is laundered through geography.
Your town votes, your town's vote cannot bind agency number three hundred eleven,
so the Democratic Act, and that's the thing that's supposed to make this legitimate,
has a scope of one node in a mesh of thousands.
Meaning you're authorizing your town's node,
but you can't affect what the other nodes are doing.
It's not the democratic control is weak here,
it's that democratic control is categorically the wrong shape for the object.
You're trying to govern a network with a municipality.
Number five.
Five. Error is not a bug you can patch out,
because the error rate multipliers against multiplies against volume,
and the consequences of error are physical.
Brittany Gilliam's nieces. This is not a story about a bad database entry.
That's what a fractional error rate looks like when you cash it out at gunpoint,
hundreds of times a year nationally.
And six?
six, and this is the one that closes the door on reform.
The strongest guardrail law in the country was defeated by the vendor's
own internal disorganization, not by malice.
Illinois wrote a great statute in twenty twenty three,
and in twenty twenty five we learned that the CBP was inside Illinois cameras
through a pilot the vendor's leadership says it didn't even know about.
You can't regulate a party that doesn't know what it's doing.
Right. You can't regulate an entity that can't inventory itself,
that can't audit itself. That's not a compliance fe failure you fix with
a stricter clause, right? It that's not the kind of adjustment you can make.
There is no clause that makes an organization comprehensible to itself.
And every regulatory scheme we propose,
audits, logs, attestations, sign offs,
all of it assumes a counterparty capable of knowing and reporting
the truth about its own systems.
That assumption has now been tested in Illinois.
Hard
By a motivated statewide official was subpoena adjacent power,
and it failed.
I want to add the seventh actually,
which is the one that I can't seem to let go of.
It's about what the audits actually do.
By all means.
An audit is a is a legitimation ritual,
okay? And I don't mean that that Gianulius did something wrong.
I think I think his office is the most aggressive ALPR oversight work
in the country, genuinely. And and Evanston and Oak Park left Flox Network
in contract because of that. That's real.
But look at the structural f function of the audit in the Cook County story.
You ought to give them the vocabulary,
right?
Right, because once there's an audit regime,
the answer to should we have this becomes we should have this correctly.
The question shifts from existence to compliance.
And compliance is a thing you can buy.
It's a it's a line item. It's a it's a training module,
it's a checkbox in the dashboard labeled Illinois mode.
And the checkbox becomes the argument for expansion.
The checkbox always becomes the argument for expansion.
We've addressed the concerns, so now let's go from twenty five cameras
to one hundred and twenty five.
That's not like hypothetical. That happened one day after they admitted that they
were operating without a contract.
So here's the through line, and it lands differently now than it did an hour ago.
A hyperlocal pitch becomes a national dragnet.
I'll say it fully for you. A property crime in Atlanta,
a murdered postal worker on I fifty seven,
packages stolen off a porch in a subdivision.
Every origin story in this industry is a real harm suffered by a real person,
and every one of them is unanswerable in this moment.
You cannot stand up at a village board meeting and argue against Tamara Clayton's
family, and you shouldn't want to.
But here's how the thing gets built.
That's exactly how it gets built.
And it's why it can't be argued down at the local level on local terms.
Because at the local level, the pitch is always about the harm you can name.
It's your neighbor, it's your it's your family member,
right? And the cost is always something you can't see yet.
It's that future surveillance when the law changes.
When they make it a crime to be a part of a union.
Nobody in Schomburg was choosing between no cameras and railroad police
can search your movements. They were choosing between cameras and car break in.
The four hundred agencies weren't on the ballot,
they weren't even on the agenda.
And nobody voted on that. And that phrase I've said it like four times today.
I I wanna be precise about what I mean by it now,
because it's not just a complaint about process.
Tell us what you mean, Joshua.
I mean that the consent doesn't exist and it cannot be manufactured after the fact.
There is no procedure available to us that would retroactively legitimate four
hundred agencies searching a suburb.
You can't hold a hearing about it in 2026 and fix 2019.
The record is made. The searches have already happened.
The Texas Sheriff has already looked.
Which is why the only frame is elimination.
Elimination not because reform is insufficiently ambitious,
because reform applied to this produces a permanent,
better documented, more expensive version of the same problem,
and then calls the documentation a victory.
And the honest thing, the thing I'd say to a police chief or a sheriff,
is that yes, you will lose some cases.
That's true. Plate readers do solve crimes.
We're not pretending otherwise.
And anybody who tells you that a tool that logs every car everywhere
and never catches anyone is lying to you.
Question was never whether it works.
Exactly. Torture works sometimes.
General warrants worked great,
that's why the British Crown loved them.
The entire premise of a constitutional limit is that there are efficient things that
we don't get to do. And a mass,
permanent, retroactive, vendor owned,
four hundred party searchable record of where every American drives
is the most efficient general warrant ever constructed.
And it was installed by public s work public works crews with no vote
at any level of government.
So you're probably asking what you should be watching more closely.
Not the policy. It's never the policy.
It's never the policy. Watch the contract and watch the log.
Because here's the the fact from this story that proves it.
Schaumburg almost certainly has a perfectly reasonable ALPR policy.
I bet it says the data is retained for a limited period,
used for legitimate law enforcement purposes and shared only with authorized
agencies. And all of that can be true at the same time as four hundred agencies.
A railroad and for some reason a university.
Course that's also overlooking the fact that the argument has been made that
the data is public data now and belongs to the public.
So it's not really true that they can share it only with authorized agencies.
But because authorized is defined by the vendor's dashboard and not by you,
it wouldn't matter anyway, right?
Yeah. The the artifact that you want is the data sharing report and the audit log.
The report tells you who can look at it.
The log tells you who did, when,
and what they typed in the reason field.
And now the most absurd single thing in the story,
which we've been holding in all episodes
Go ahead, you can have it.
Remember a company valued at seven and a half billion dollars.
How much is that again, Joshua?
Ba ba billion.
whose only product is a system for controlling who can see whose location data,
did not know that the United States customs and border protection
was inside the company.
they found out from a state official in Springfield running an audit
in a state where the thing was already illegal,
and through that same lens, the lens where you stop reading policies
and start reading operational records,
it's not an embarrassing anecdote,
it's the whole design confessing.
The network is too big for its owner to know and it's nowhere near done growing.
So three things you can actually do,
and these are not contact or representative because we've stopped doing that now.
One, be Jason Hunyar for somewhere that isn't your your hometown.
He's in Georgia and he pulled Illinois records.
Most state records laws do not require you to be a resident,
do not require standing, and do not require you to explain why you want it.
Pick a jurisdiction, any jurisdiction,
one you've never been to, and request the ALPR data sharing report
and the audit logs. Not the policy,
the report and the logs. Then publish this whole thing raw.
The network is borderless, so it's so is the Record Act.
Use their geometry against them.
Two, go where the friction is the lowest,
which is not City Hall. It's the HOA,
it's the university campus. Flock's original customers were just HOAs.
And an HOA board can cancel a camera contract in one meeting with no public hearing,
no procurement code, and no state law in the way.
That's a seat somebody's going to fill this year.
Fill it. And the universities were on Schomberg's list.
A university police subscription can be kept.
Killed by one provost, one Board of Trustees vote,
one faculty Senate resolution with a student newspaper behind it.
Nobody's guarding those doors.
Three, change what you demand.
Stop asking for a better policy because you'll get one,
and it'll be beautiful and it will not matter.
Ask for two documents instead,
a termination date and a deletion certificate.
A signed attestation from the vendor that historical data associated with your
jurisdiction has been destroyed,
with the date and the record count.
Watch what happens to the room when you ask for the record count.
Because they can't produce it.
They usually cannot produce it and that's your answer about who actually owns
the record of where you've been.
Alright guys, that's it. That's our flock episode.
A couple of you've been asking for it,
so there you go. this is the overlap.
You've you've been listening to us so far now.
One more thing before we go. You've probably already been flocked.
Most of us have. But you don't have to keep getting flocked.
So get the flock up, go to your flocking records agencies,
police departments and and demand a flocking change.
I th I think you're more than capable.
you want the groan of like hundreds of voices,
right?
And all the ways not to do that.
Well if that doesn't do it for you folks,
I don't know what will. So
That's the overlap.
Indeed. I