FLOCK Cameras - Security Measure or Privacy Invasion

I have used FLOCK and similar programs extensively.  Today I will cover what it is (briefly), how it's used and how to keep systems like this from creating a police state.  We do not want to be North Korea.

-LEO

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Good morning. It's Leo. Happy Tuesday. Welcome to the end of July. It's going to be a great August. It's going to start cooling off earlier than we expected. Let's get into Flock. Flock is a hot topic right now. It's the license plate reader system. Any of us that have touched investigations have likely used either it or vigilant LPR or both. Kind of depends on the city you're in, but we'll just we'll call it all Flock for now. So, first off, what is it for any listeners that just don't know? There are cameras that read tags. Different systems use different cameras. Some use stationary, some pull from tow trucks that are driving around. So on those, you tend to get more hits on cars that are in like apartment parking lots, things like that. And it can help law enforcement to find vehicles. It creates this database. Let's say I'm looking for a stolen car. It gets stolen on Wednesday. Its tag is ABC123. And I start looking for it on Friday. For whatever reason, let's say this car was involved in a shooting Wednesday night and Thursday, different shootings after the theft. So now they're like, hey, Leo, we need you to find this car because they're shooting people all the time. So I get this Friday, and one of the first things I'm going to do is put that tag into flock. And I may get a hit. I may get hits Wednesday or Thursday morning at 3 a.m. Wednesday morning at 3 a.m. It hadn't been stolen yet, but Thursday morning at 3 a.m. and more at some apartments on the west side of town. And I can see that. I can see where it was before. It was always at the owner's home. And now it's popping up. You know, I'm getting hits at random red lights. And then I'm getting hits at this apartment in the middle of the night, indicative that they were probably sleeping there. And I can go over there and catch this shooter so they don't shoot more people. That's generally what Flock is. It reads tags randomly around cities, counties, and then puts it into a database that cops can access. So it brings up the age-old debate of security versus privacy. And most cops that I know lean security. When I start throwing around words like, oh, so you want a police state, what you're saying is a police state. You want AI-powered surveillance systems to do facial recognition everywhere people go. That's a police state. You're describing mass government surveillance. So it's just how much do you want? There are almost limitless tools to provide absolutely bulletproof statewide security where there will be almost zero violent crime. We could do that, absolutely. And you would have no privacy. And if we put cameras in everybody's house, I mean, you look at some of these police states, real police states, North Korea comes to mind, obviously. If you've ever read 1984 by George Orwell, Big Brother is watching, police state stuff. Pretty good prediction of what the future could become and has in some places. How much of your privacy are you willing to sacrifice? And you think of flock cameras, you don't think of it being a massive sacrifice of privacy because it's only when your car is out in public. It's not opening your garage, stuff like that. But the problem comes from this. If you give a human a tool, some of the humans are going to misuse that tool. There was just a recent conviction and sentencing of a Memphis area gynecologist that misused the Medicare, Medicaid billing tools. He was doing millions of dollars of fraud because he was doing unnecessary surgical procedures. His tool that he chose to misuse was Medicare, a tool that is designed to help people that don't have the insurance they need to get what they need. It's there to help them, Tennessee care, all this stuff. And he found a way to exploit it and get money by misusing that tool. I did a recent release on Eric Stubbs, the chief of Ottawa-Canada police, and he did a pretty public exposure of officers on his department misusing technology. There was an officer, I'm not sure, I don't think he got indicted, but he was in the Atlanta area misusing Flock became big news. And you know, he's like meeting girls with Flock and just, you know, he sees a tag, and then I'm assuming this is what he did. I don't, I didn't read that case, but here would be the obvious way to misuse Flock for that purpose. See a girl out, you mistakenly think you share a moment, but she didn't give you her number, so it wasn't that good for her. And then you punch her tag into Flock, and you know where she's at. You don't want to run it because you know NCIC has audit trails, but you choose to use Flock, and then he got caught. And he basically was getting her address. Her it's creepy. He was establishing her pattern of life using it. So he was sa he completely sacrificed her privacy. That's a total invasion of privacy for his personal gain. So the next question, I guess, would be well, first off, is it a useful tool? Let me just say yes, it's a fantastic tool. And I'll give you a couple scenarios that I've personally used flock, and it has helped my investigation. Fugitives, using it as a no-brainer. Does a murder perp that's in a gang tend to own a car in his name? No. Does he have a car that he uses regularly? Yes. A lot of these guys are not switching cars every day. So once you get onto his girlfriends or his ex-girlfriends or his baby mama's car and you find out the tag, you punch it into flock and you start seeing it at some hotel, suddenly you've got him and you catch a murderer. Missing people, you know, we always get the amber alerts on our phone. You know, those that are that don't know better think that that's some kid getting snatched off the street. Generally, it's not. Generally, it's a non-custodial parent. It doesn't really matter if they have custody or not. You know, most custody agreements are split. So whoever's supposed to be turning the kid over refuses. Let's let's just say, you know, it's a dad that gets every other weekend and he loves his kid. So he hits the bricks out of town with the kid. He doesn't think he's getting enough time. One, you know, two weekends a month is not enough for Daddy O. And so he takes the kid. So Flock is a great way, you know, you get that, that comes through. Hey, kid's supposed to be at school Monday, and kid is gone. Like that's concerning, right? So you punch that tag into Flock. Let's say you're in Atlanta and you have hits. You get one on I-16 East, and then you get one entering Savannah, and then you call Savannah police and be like, hey, I'm looking for this car. This guy has a kid that he's not supposed to have, the kid's missing school in Atlanta. Uh, we need you to go find that kid and you put them onto it. It gives you a direction for the investigation. Another time that I've used it is if you're doing buys from unknown people, if you're in some kind of narcotics or proactive investigative unit. Let's say you do a buy. Let's say you have a buy set up. You're supposed to buy some heroin, and they show up to do the deal, and the guy you think you're buying from is in the passenger seat, and there's another guy driving. And so your informant goes and gets in the back seat and makes the deal with the driver. So the guy that your informant knew is just kind of a middleman. He could, he's not a heroin dealer. He could get heroin from the actual dealer. So boom, the deal goes, CI gets heroin from this unknown target who's in the driver's seat, gets out, car drives away, you don't have surveillance ready, or you lose them or whatever. You run the tag, it comes back to whatever. You ride by the house, it's not, it's a vacant house. So you're like, okay, they don't live here. So you're kind of at a dead end, right? You bought from an unknown dude, the tag is bad. Where is it? You punch it into flock and you see it hitting in some apartments. So now you have a lead. There's a million ways you can figure it out. You can go over and, you know, get the car pulled over. You can go to the rental office and show them a picture of the guy if you think you can get away with that, try to find out who it is, blah, blah, blah. You can do another deal, and the next time you can expect it to come from there and, you know, follow it, have surveillance ready. There's a lot of options for how you manage this. But it's a great tool for identifying people and for furthering investigations. Or if you're watching a dealer and there's cars coming and going from that guy, punching those tags into flock and seeing where the customers are. Again, a lot of time tags are bad. People don't update their registration, they're moving frequently, they may be living in a hotel, but then you want to go grab a customer and get them to flip on the dealer. You know, it's it just gives you a direction for investigations. And it's absolutely great at helping you find people, people with warrants, people that are you just need to talk to. Shit, it might be a witness, homicide detectives. Let's say if you've been a homicide detective for more than a couple of years, you've had key witnesses. You've gone to trial because a lot of homicide, a lot of murder cases go to trial because the guys are looking at life. So why not? And you have an eyewitness that was great and you can't find. And Flock can help you find that person. Okay, so it's useful to cops, is the bottom line. To the government, it is a useful tool. So, how do we not overly infringe on the privacy of our citizens? As I don't want the government putting cameras in my house. Am I doing anything nefarious? No. But do I want cameras in my house? Absolutely not. I do not. So how do we keep, you know, if a cop gets mad at me on a traffic stop or just, you know, a random cop doesn't like me, even if I don't know him through work, he just doesn't like me. How do I keep him or her from misusing Flock? How do we keep us dudes from being creepy on women? Well, the answer is consequences and accountability. And it's just like any other tool. If you misuse a taser, if you misuse a gun, I mean, one of the easiest ones to misuse is just general police databases. Everybody knows NCIC. There's logs and it's a crime and you take this training. But for your local police database, for Flock, there aren't those kinds of warnings. There's not that kind of training. So to me, I don't know many people that have, or know of many people that have misused NCIC. Running criminal history, running background checks. You know that is you're liable to get flagged for that. That's that's an understood thing in law enforcement. It should be the same for all of these. So sticking with Flock, it's a great tool. Whatever they're gonna do with it is what they're gonna do. If they're gonna wash it out and replace it with something similar, because you know, the people that want a police state and no secure no privacy and value security more are gonna keep pushing for some variant of it. You know, these companies that uh, you know, make flock and maintain flock, there's gonna be some variant with the age of AI going on. But whatever comes next, how do we keep that from being misused by police, by whoever has access, by federal agents, by state investigators? How do we keep them from misusing it? I think we all agree that we don't want cops using technology to meet girls. And I'll stop picking on us, to meet cute guys, ladies. Don't be stalking us with these systems. So how do we do it? The answer is audit trails. We do random audits. We look at why they're doing it. You can you can say to treat it as sensitive information, which it should be. It's citizens' private info. So there should be regular audits of those databases. And what was the need to do this? Not a witch hunt. Uh, you know, a lot of the cops right now are probably rolling their eyes and clicking on that shut it off button. But if you're not doing anything wrong, you should never even be approached about it. But there should be some audits of the logs. And generally, nothing's gonna, nothing should come of these audits because the fact that there are audits being done will make people only use them for work. And as somebody that's been in law enforcement a while, as many of you have, I've been asked to misuse databases before. I've had people say, hey, my daughter's dating this dude. Can you do a criminal history on him and just see what he's about? They don't think it's a big deal. Or my daughter's dating this dude. She's in high school. Can you background her parents? I get it. I think dad's been to prison. Can you see? Like I got his name. And I have to be like, no, I can't do that. That's illegal. I can't just background people. I can't do any of that. I can't use those databases for personal use. And so there's kind of this understanding, but there's no teeth. And there should be teeth. Because if you misuse a taser or a gun or a police car or a flock, there should be a consequence for that. This is stuff we can use at work not to infringe upon the privacy of our people. So I am a supporter of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. I don't believe in infringing. I do believe in following it. I think the exceptions to the Fourth Amendment are reasonable. You know, all the ones that I've covered in the past, search warrants, exigency, consent, all these things seem reasonable to me. But there did need to be a change. I hope that all flock systems don't go away in every shape or form, and it transitions to holding individuals accountable instead of punishing the system. Just wash them out of law enforcement. Get them out if they're looking people up that they don't need to be. You should have a need to know. It's just like handling any kind of sensitive information. If you don't have a need to know and you're looking at it or you're distributing it, you're wrong and you're in trouble and you're in violation. And there should be more aggressive training about any of these secure databases. Just like we train tasers and guns and how to do it and use of force, there should be training for misuse of collected intelligence, the collection process and the use of that Intel product, which is what this is. It's an intel collection technique. And an understanding that this is just as serious as misusing your gun, I would argue. Because it's harder to catch and can lead to similar stuff if in the hands of a crazy person. So that's my take on Flock. I hope you all have a great taco Tuesday. Go fry you up some tacos in the fry pan tonight, throw some parmesan on top, and have a great night. Bye.