Behind the public backlash against Flock cameras

0:00In the US, there's a break in every 26 seconds, but when intruders step near, simply safe home security steps up. Stop. This is Simply Safe. Police are on the way. Using AI alerts, US-based live agents help deter break-ins, simply safe no-long-term contracts. Safe 60% on a new system with professional monitoring during our 20th anniversary sale at SimplySafe.com-slash-spotify. Outdoor deterrence requires a Simply Safe Active Guard outdoor protection plan starting at 4999 a month. Visit SimplySafe.com-slash-licenses for alarm-licensed information, 10-seater-2012. Hey, it's Willis, a producer here at OnPoint. One of my favorite parts about being a producer here is hearing from you, our listeners about the show. What you like, what you thought of our guests, what you thought of what they had to say, and what topics you hope will cover. And what I love about the new OnPoint Club is that we're going to have more opportunities to share what's behind the scenes and how we put the show together for you. If you're not a member of the OnPoint Club yet, click on the link in the episode description to sign up.

1:03For $7 a month, you'll get first access to the jackpot each week, other exclusive content, and you'll be the first to know about special live events. Now stick around for today's show. WBR podcasts. Boston. This is OnPoint. I'm Magna Chacrabardi. And this is the story of a little Texas town that fought back. Bandera itself is small. It's about 900 people that live there. It's called the Cowboy Capital of the world. That's what they like to proclaim. And I have to agree with them. They still have old Western buildings. There's cowboys. It's a very conservative little town, tiny. Very close knit community. Veronica Rector reports for the local bandera Bulletin.

2:03Bandera is about 50 miles northwest of San Antonio and the town boasts sweeping hill country views. It claims to be the home of the last great cattle drives of the 1800s. A town where gunfights regularly break out. And I mean on the regular every Saturday at Raddlesnake Ridge, not quite at noon, but at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. through reenactments by the bandera Texas gunfighters. Well, it was to this little town where a new sheriff strolled in, sort of. Flop cameras installed at the bay bridge alerted detectives to a hair of armed robbery suspect. Violent crime is down to lows not seen since the 1950s. Safety should not be a privilege. Safety should just be a right. Flop safety cameras. You've probably heard of them. These are the AI networked automated license plate readers that upload all their data to the cloud.

3:08Enabling, according to the company, law enforcement to fight crime faster and more effectively than ever before. You just heard a company add that claims that crime has fallen by more than 40% in San Francisco since flock cameras were installed in the city in 2024. Well, in May of 2025, the bandera Texas City Council decided that maybe they should give the flock cameras a try. Let's go back to Veronica. The council actually voted on it. And that's when they said, okay, we're going to do a year contract with flock and see how it goes. So that's how it initially started. There was no one there that went to go speak about it at that time. By October, flock safety and the city council had agreed to pursue a motor vehicle theft grant from the state that would help cover the $17,000 cost for a one year contract. Well, here comes 2026 and the city council changes in January.

4:10And the newly elected officials moved to get the cameras installed. Flop was only able to install one camera within the city limits and that immediately got vandalized. So they were like, we're going to put a pause on this and not pursue installing others until we can get a town hall, which is what they did to get more information. There was a flock representative that came to that town hall, Karen McCormack, and he came and answered questions from residents. I feel so bad for him. He got torn apart during that meeting. Oh, it was so brutal. Kind of a person that, you know, we're not believing big government. I don't believe things like this. You may put up, you know, for whatever reason, it is always a misuse of this kind of a system. And I don't like it. It's like big rather or it's the all this stuff. Maybe having these additional cameras in town feels a little bit disproportional to the local crime rate and also to the essence of this community and our spirit, our cowboy capital way,

5:14our restate of bandera, high level of surveillance feels contrary. Nobody is pro murder. So pro criminal or pro violence or pro drugs or pro human trafficking. But how much power are we going to give to a government who be able to stop every crime? But at the end of the meeting, you know, after you hear countless residents being like, we don't want this. One resident was like, I just want to make sure like, do you get what we're saying? We don't want it. Like, is there any questions? And I couldn't help the laugh. I was like, I think we get it. And even the city secretary was like, no, we get it. We hear you. Well, they did hear them. And yet the townspeople still found themselves on the outs because even before bandera, Texas received that full state grant, the city secretary paid flock safety. That's $17,000. They will not be getting reimbursed for it. So they're out $17,000. And obviously they're not going to get that grant because they're not using it for what the grant

6:15was intended for. So people were pretty upset about that because it was again a month after the explosive town hall. And they thought they had made their opinions very clear. And also within that time frame, a month after the town hall, the mayor actually gave flock that go ahead to continue installations. Well, you can imagine how that felt to the city counselors. They were still feeling really burned by that heated January meeting. They had said, we hear you. They told that to residents. And yet the camera still went up. So the city council asked the city's legal team for more information. After the town hall, they asked the city attorney like, hey, bring the contract so we can understand the terms of cancellation because that's where we're leaning. And at that meeting, the attorney was like, yeah, I don't have the contract to go through it. So the city had to delay a meeting all the way until May. And I believe it was May 12th that they cancelled the

7:16flock contracts with a three to two vote. And with that, the cowboy capital of America rode flock cameras out of town. I promise that is my last cowboy pun for the day. But residents there in Banderra are still keeping an eye on their local officials. I have never seen city council so packed. Now there's residents constantly showing up to be heard because they're like, we just want to make sure you're actually listening to what we're saying. So it's been very heated politically. We could not do this show. We couldn't actually even have an America, I would say, if it weren't for local reporters like Veronica. Now things are getting very heated politically, as she said, in Banderra Texas. But this is also happening in cities and towns across the country. Flock safety cameras are popping up in municipalities in order to protect public safety. But they have quickly become public enemy number one, even in places that traditionally profess almost unquestioned support

8:18for law enforcement. So this is highlighting an age old tension between safety and privacy. And it's a tension that has become so much more urgent in the age of AI. So let's turn to Jason Kebler for more on this. He's co-founder of 404 Media and he's followed surveillance technology for years. He joins us from Los Angeles. Jason, welcome to on point. Hey, thank you for having me. Okay, so when Veronica said that the one flock camera that had gone up in Banderra, Texas was vandalized, I think a more accurate way of putting it is someone shot at it. Is that right? I believe it was shot by a shotgun. And yeah, Veronica did such excellent reporting on that. But I I went back and watched a lot of the city council meetings in Banderra and it's a microcosm of what's been happening, like the type of rhetoric that you just heard, the vandalism. This is happening in dozens of towns all throughout the country. Let's get the backstory on flock safety, the company itself, because if memory serves, it was founded what just in 2017. Is that right, Jason?

9:19It was, and it was founded as an automated license plate reader company. It really didn't blow up on the scene until like 2021 or so, which is when flock announced this product called Tallinn, which is a nationwide network of these flock cameras that do license plate reader tracking. That's what really separates this company from a lot of its competitors. Automated license plate readers have been around for a really long time. There's a lot of different companies that offer it. But what flock did was they said, we will network these all together. So if you are a one town, you can search for the license plate of not just people in your town, but also people one town over other places in your state and eventually the entire country. So just to be clear, it means that someone, a member of law enforcement say in Duluth could theoretically see people moving around or track someone in San Francisco.

10:19Exactly right. And that has led to a lot of really interesting and quite complicated cases. Last year, I reported that cops in Tennessee and Texas and South Carolina were partnering with ICE to do immigration enforcement using this technology, not just in their towns and states, but they were also searching in Illinois and in California where there are laws that actually prohibit the use of this technology for immigration enforcement. You had like various cases of police searching these cameras for stolen vehicle in some cases, but also for maybe protesters. And they were searching not the dozen cameras that were in their town, but they were searching 80,000 cameras nationwide. Wow. I want to ask you Jason a little bit about Fox decision to actually market directly to municipalities, right? Because if the attraction is well eventually you're going to join this national network. Why did they decide to go local at the start? There is a playbook where surveillance companies will go to one or two small towns. They will say like, hey, we have this really

11:24interesting technology. You can be seen as a really innovative player in the space if you pilot the tech. Flak is from Georgia. And so a lot of police departments in Georgia tried this technology out. And once they got a hold of it, they said, hey, this is really interesting. And so police officers talk to each other. They have all these different conferences where they demo technology. There's all these different listservs where police officers talk about new things that they are trying. Basically, it spreads by word of mouth. And so you have maybe like one town that's piloting it, the town, you know, two towns over. We'll try it. And suddenly it spreads throughout the state. And this is exactly what happened with Flak. When I wrote this story about immigration and cooperation with ICE last year, it was in 5,000 towns. Now it's in about 10,000 towns. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice. Beautifully produced audio has

12:29the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from city-space productions, the Creative Studio from WBUR's Business Partnership Team. Become a thought leader. We're a Cretan New Talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at www.org-creative-studio. It's Ben Brock Johnson, Director of Digital Audio at WBUR. You've probably been following our consistent coverage of the Lindsay Clancy case, along with people around the country and around the world. Well, if you want to hear even more from WBUR's own veteran reporter Deborah Becker, who has been covering the story for three years, we're putting deep dive podcast episodes and analysis about the Clancy case in a podcast feed. You can listen by searching beyond all repair wherever you get your podcasts. We started our show today with the story of what happened in tiny

13:30Banderra, Texas, and how residents there said they did not want those flat cameras. Well, trickle up again to the state level, and here's Texas Governor Greg Abbott, the Republican, who frequently stresses his unequivocal support for law enforcement. But he said in a press conference late last month that he doesn't back flock. I cut off any funding from the state for flat cameras. Most of the money for flat cameras actually comes from the federal government and is used at the city level and things like that. And so it's going to be up to city officials that to unplug the flat cameras. However, what has already been observed is that cities across the state are already unplugging from flat cameras. Over in Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis, also Republican, said last week that he also does not support the use of flat cameras. So I think it's out of control. And this is something that in Florida, our highway patrol, we have readers for like tolling by plate and things like that. Now, I've never supported the

14:35automatic tickets being sent if you're speeding. I think a human being has to do that. And so I've never, I've never embraced that. Well, by the way, just this week, the state of Florida banned flat cameras on state highways in Florida. So Jason, I'm wondering if you could give me, you know, what you think is another good example or two of how individual resident feedback and opposition to the flat cameras has led to what now we're seeing is in some places even sweeping statewide change. Yeah, and there's this it's called the deflock movement, which actually grows out of this project to map the flat cameras in the United States. So it's an open source map, meaning anyone can walk around. If you see a camera, you take a photo of it, you upload it to this map. And over the last few years, people have documented like roughly a hundred thousand of these. And as people start documenting them, they started learning more about them. And, you know, as we've been discussing,

15:35people have very serious issues with them. And so there has been a backlash like at city council meetings, primarily where people will say, Hey, we didn't know that this technology was in our town. Now that we have this map, now that we see them on the street, we're wondering when were they approved? Did we miss a meeting? And in some cases, they did. In other cases, the cameras were using police discretionary funds, meaning police just decided to buy them, or they came in through a grant program or a pilot program. And this has led to like a couple of high profile incidents, like in Georgia, there has been this town called Dunwoody, where the residents there learned that their town was being used as essentially a sales pitch for flock, where flock employees were going into the the town's cameras and were demonstrating what was possible with this technology, which included tapping into cameras that were at a pool, at a children's gymnasium. And the residents there were furious. And so this has been now a month's long saga, where, you know,

16:37residents are getting public record showing all this sort of collaboration between the city and flock and saying, we don't want this here. Yeah. Well, so let's get back to what I think is at the core of this, which is as I said earlier, this now AI inflamed attention between public safety and, you know, personal privacy. And I flock would say and has said that, look, in places where our cameras have gone up, I pointed to the San Francisco example a little earlier, it has been incredibly useful tool in the reduction of crime. I mean, for example, Flock CEO Garrett Langley was on ABC News just last week. And here's what he said. We helped in over a million crimes last year over 10,000 missing people. Jason, does that seem accurate, according to your reporting? There have been high profile anecdotes of Flock network being used to solve crimes. There's also high profile anecdotes of flock cameras being abused. What there hasn't been is really good,

17:38strong studies showing this either reduces crime or helps to solve crime. Flock has tried to do this a few times. They have paid for various studies to kind of show, you know, this technology is useful. I think eventually we will get more and better data. I mean, there's no doubt that it has been used to find missing children, to find stolen cars. The question is just whether, you know, the privacy trade-off is worth it. Okay. So Jason Kebler with 404 Media, hang on here for a little bit, because I'd like to bring in Charles Fein Lehman into the conversation. He's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. And in the August issue of the Atlantic magazine, he wrote an article titled in defense of Flock. Charles, welcome to On Point. Thanks for having me on. So tell me a little bit more about what evidence you see that Flock cameras, those license plate readers are actually doing what the company says and have become an important tool for law enforcement. Yeah. You know, I disagree with the characterization, although I understand, you know, how we got to

18:41the sense that there was a lot of research because the research is moving very quickly. Basically, we have three different kinds of studies. We have one very recent study done by a couple of criminologists at the University of South Carolina where they exploit what researchers call a natural experiment. They look at the staggered rollout of Flock cameras in 216 jurisdictions. And what they find is an 11% reduction in motor vehicle thefts and then suggestive evidence for reductions in other kinds of property crimes. So that to me is sort of the strongest evidence that is available to us that says, yeah, Flock or LPR is more generally almost certainly reduces crime. Then there's a second bucket of studies, which are similar quality studies on cameras per se. We have four or five of those, which look at things like putting a camera in Montevideo, Uruguay, or putting cameras in the Stockholm subway system. And those pretty consistently show reductions in crime on the order of 20%. The question there is how analogous cameras are to ALPRs. The third bucket of study is

19:46is sort of earlier research that is lower quality but that looks at fixed ALPRs. So we've research in Charlotte, in Buffalo, in Atlantic City, all three of which can be read to imply at least some crime reducing effects. But none of their studies is sort of optimally designed for doing what we talk about this causal inference. They don't have good control groups. And so there's a lot of limitation. We don't have perfect signal, but we have increasingly high quality signal and most of the signal points in the direction of crime is reduced when you implement these things. And that is consistent with the prior theory that says if you put a camera in a place, all it's equal people commit fewer crimes in that place. Yeah. Let me give you another example and tell me what you think, because I did reference it at the top. And that is San Francisco, right? Because look, for years, San Francisco became infamous, I should say, for the amount of vehicular-based crime, like vehicle theft, smash and grabs, things like that to the point where people in San Francisco, when they're parking their cars, they were leaving their windows rolled down and their trunks

20:46open so that people wouldn't smash their cars to steal a backpack. Well, you know, we have the mayor of San Francisco is saying, well, that era is over now. That that kind of crime is so far down we haven't seen those levels since 1950. I'm just wondering what you think of that example. I'm not, I mean, over next door in Oakland, there's a really big pushback against flock cameras. But what do you make of what happened in San Francisco, Charles? You always have to be careful with an example like that. There was a major surge in motor vehicle theft nationwide, 2021, 2022, 2023. It's come down a lot in a lot of places. And so I'm always wary of going in this one city it's working. That doesn't tell me a huge amount, but it tells me a little bit, right? The fact that SFPD thinks that the technology is helping. There was an interview that got surfaced with San Francisco based rapper with what I've described as an extensive alleged criminal history. And so therefore some knowledge to speak on the topic who said, if you're a car thief in San Francisco, you just don't operate anymore. There's just no point in being in the business because of the

21:46large part of the ALPRs. I've got the license plate readers. So that is part and parcel of a broader base of evidence that says they are likely to have some crime-reducing effect. Okay, so let's get straight to the concerns that people across the country have raised about having so many more cameras. And I think as Jason very accurately pointed out, they aren't just local. They are able to be networked nationally. And the privacy concerns that it raises. I mean, you know of all the examples of police surveilling people who aren't even suspected of any crime. And Jason talked about cooperation with ICE, etc. Do you feel or not that this is sort of a new level of mass surveillance that we haven't seen in the US before? You know, I'm wary of making that characterization for a couple of different reasons. One is that what the conversation is new, ALPRs really aren't. You know, 67% of large police agencies use license plate readers in 2020.

22:48It's not a new technology. It's not a technology people have found, particularly intrusive until recently. The second point I would make is the expectations of privacy here are different. The Supreme Court has been very clear. You don't have an expectation of privacy as to the exterior of your vehicle, as to your movements on public thoroughfares. As to what you're doing with your license plate, which you don't even technically own, the expectation is very different in that context versus in my own private home. Where the court has talked about this is in cell phone data, for example, right? Where they've analogized your cell phone to basically be like an ankle monitor. But I question the idea that most LPR networks as they currently exist look like that, right? The story that started the show is talking about a single LPR. You can't do mass surveillance with a single camera. But it's not a single camera, right? The whole point is that it can, it's network nationally or both eventually be. It's networked nationally. But if you want to talk about nationally, then you should talk about the total area nationally, right? There are four million miles of roads in the United States. There are 120,000 flat cameras. They

23:52cover 75 feet. That's less than half a percent of all the roads in the United States. But then again, if you're looking within PDs, I mean, Tempe Arizona just tore down its flat cameras for what I think were not very good reasons. So 40 square mile city, they had 33 cameras. I don't think you can do mass surveillance in the city of Tempe with that kind of structure in place. So, you know, can I imagine a scenario where our nation is blanketing with cameras? Yeah, and I'd be very alarmed by that. But I don't actually think that's what most implementations factually look like. Okay, Charles, I wonder what you think about this because as I've been sort of exploring more the tension over these flawed cameras, it kind of got me wondering about if Americans are being kind of hypocritical because in my early days of reporting, I've been here in the Boston area for a long time. I had to report on crime in certain neighborhoods and those neighborhoods, let's be frank, low income, largely people of color, they have had surveillance in their neighborhoods for a long time. Cameras on multiple corners, shot spotters, things like that in order to reduce crime.

24:57It's a fact of life in those neighborhoods. Lots of people want that stuff. Some people don't. But I kind of get the feeling that right now a lot of the pushback against flock, especially from the populist right, you know, like Tucker Carlson has called it the encroachment of the coming slave state. It's coming from white people in the suburbs who are like, well, I'm not a black person who lives in the inner city. I'm not a criminal. Why should I be surveilled? But on the other hand, they're completely okay with surveillance because well, there's ring cameras on people's doors, law enforcement can ask for those videos at any time. You talked about cell phones. We walk through TSA every single day, et cetera, et cetera. There seems to be something, as I said again, a little, you know, I'm white, I'm safe. Don't put the cameras up in my neighborhood. Yeah, you know, I'd say a couple of things. One thing that you often hear is basically we know who the criminals are. Why do we need this? And my response is if I wanted to interpret that maximally charitable, I would say we often don't know who the criminals are. And even

25:58if we do, it matters a lot that we can construct a case against them that can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they engaged in crime. There's a lot of virtue to doing that. You know, the second thing I would say is like I am not for not imposing regulation on these cameras. I think that some people do have reasonable concerns. I'd like to see rules about auditing. I'd like to see penalties for abuse. But you know, I think that our taste for surveillance is actually quite high. We all carry around these tracking devices in our pie. I have a lot of people on my Twitter saying to me, well, I can turn off the location data on my phone. I'm like, but you don't. You are tracked all day every single day. And the police can use that data against you and they do on a regular basis. But our reveal preference is that basically we're okay with that. We don't find living in that society, particularly upsetting or loving. There are exceptions that will absolutely. And I think that there are real risks of abuse, which is why you want to regulate an intelligent fashion. But you know, I think the freaking freak out is selective. It's about what's in people's field of view. It's about what's blowing up on social media. What's coming to their attention. In a way

27:02that's counterproductive for a nuanced conversation about how do we optimize safety while preserving people's privacy? Well, Charles Fein Lehman at the Manhattan Institute who wrote in defense of flock in the Atlantic, thank you so much, Charles. We'll be right back. This is on point. Support for AI coverage in on point comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software to design and develop engineered systems. Accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science, learn more at mathworks.com. It's Ben Brock Johnson, director of digital audio at WBUR. You've probably been following our consistent coverage of the Lindsay Clancy case, along with people around the country and around the world. Well, if you want to hear even more from WBUR's own veteran reporter Deborah Becker, who has been covering the story for three years, we're putting deep dive podcast episodes and

28:05analysis about the Clancy case in a podcast feed. You can listen by searching Beyond All Repair, wherever you get your podcasts. Jason earlier had mentioned about the fact that there is this very robust online pushback against flocks. So let's listen to some of the many, many TikTok reels that show vandalized flock cameras. Oh my god, enough when he's trying to hold it, he's trying to hold it, and another one is, oh my god, terrible. Now, for the cops watching this or the feds watching this, I did not cut it down, but I fully support whoever did. This is one of the eight cameras that would know to police say were cut down by vandals. I think it's wild that people have to take matters into their own hands. I mean, I wish people didn't have to do that, but I mean, I do think it's nice to see people find back. Bye bye, flock camera.

29:07Unexplosion there. Okay. By the way, I want to be abundantly clear that by playing this tape, we at On Point are not saying that we support in any way the destruction of public property. So Jason, though, let's talk more about what you heard. First of all, Charles Fane, Lehman, say about what he sees as people actually in the United States are not entirely opposed to mass surveillance, but there's something specific about flock cameras that's really getting under folks skin. Your thoughts? Yeah, I think that's a really important point that he brought up, because over the last few decades, we have been kind of the frog boiling in the surveillance soup, if you will, where social media tracks us, our phone tracks us, and it feels very often like there is nothing that you can do to push back against this. This is like either the federal government is doing it or huge tech companies that kind of impose this system upon us without us being able to meaningfully push back unless you are willing to essentially drop out of society.

30:09And I think with flock cameras, people feel like there actually is something that they can do about it because often the people who have brought these cameras to town are their mayor, their local police chief. They have a place to kind of go and yell about this, which is the city council meeting. And then what we're seeing with these vandals is, frankly, it's another kind of prison of our own making where the social media algorithms are promoting this type of thing. It's like this is not like a small movement. These videos that you played, I mean, I didn't know exactly which ones, but I log on to Instagram, and these have not 5,000 views. They have millions and millions of views. And so these are resonating with people and it's kind of being amplified by all of the types of big tech products that this is actually a bit of a backlash against. Yeah. And also, what do you think about the fact that the flock cameras, by virtue of them having to be able to see license plates, they're not hidden behind in trees or camouflage in some other way?

31:13I mean, do you think that's part of it that neighborhoods or cities and towns that aren't used to having such overt official surveillance? It's quite a shock to see these kinds of cameras wherever they are. Yeah. I mean, if you walk down the street in New York City, you're going to see tons and tons of cameras outside of businesses at intersection, et cetera. If you are in a small town in Oklahoma, you probably aren't going to see tons of cameras on the side of the road. And what flock has done is they install their cameras on a bespoke individual pole that sits alongside an intersection or alongside the street. So it is a very kind of like in-your-face new addition to a town. And so it is a very kind of visceral thing that people can see. And I think to Charles Point that it doesn't encompass a huge amount of land in the United States. I think these are placed at intersections that are popular. And so it is getting difficult to drive any meaningful distance in the United

32:16States without driving past one of these. And I think people realize that and they know that. So let me ask you also about the legal point that Charles made. I would argue that we have accepted for a long time that federal law enforcement can track people across the country, right? Like the FBI does that through various means. And sometimes they have to get a warrant to do it other times they don't. There have been a lot of legal cases. I have to say that that do question and push back on federal law enforcement's ability to do that kind of surveillance. But as you said earlier, Jason, the big difference here is we're talking about local law enforcement being able to cast in this new panopticon across the country and without a warrant. I mean, that does actually feel distinctly different from other kinds of national surveillance that we have had before. Is it or is it not? I do agree that when you were in public, you do not have an expectation of privacy. This is a tenant that we have in the United States where that allows me to do my job. I can take

33:20photos in public and not expect to get sued for it. But I think that difference here is the automation of it and the fact that it is a persistent database that lasts for it. It was 30 days. Lock announced that they're going to hold the data for seven days before deleting it in response to some reporting by the Washington Post by us by other journalists. And I think that the law is behind here. It's behind technology. I think that it's not just that a police officer can sit on one intersection, take a photo of your license plate. It's that we have this network of 100,000 cameras passively doing this and talking to each other with artificial intelligence. So we'll get back to the law in a second, but you made an important point about the AI factor here. Can you tell me a little bit more about how these cameras use AI? Like what does the AI do? Yeah, so there's something called a hot list which allows a police officer to enter a license plate into the system. And anytime that license plate dries past the

34:22flock camera, the police officer will get an alert saying this car was seen in this place. Flok is also introduced something called free form search where instead of just typing in a license plate, you can type in something like black SUV and search for all of the black SUVs that have been seen in an area. This happened in Florida about a year ago after a hidden run crash, the flock system detected a black SUV after this fatal hit and run crash. The police pulled the the woman over. It was the wrong black SUV and this woman spent 13 days in prison for, you know, crash that she wasn't involved in. And so there's a lot of kind of cases like this. I think that proponents will say in a perfect system, this will lead to fewer innocent people getting pulled over randomly by the cops, but sort of where the tech is right now. There are all sorts of instances where there's a mistake and identity where there's a typo in the license plate that a cop puts into the system and innocent people are pulled over. So, you know, we're kind of being asked to deal with

35:26the growing pains of this technology and it has very serious impacts on people who have sort of caught up in this. And I think this is another major reason why people have this increasing discomfort with the fact that the way tech is launched these days, we are the guinea pigs as these companies work out the kinks, you know, in their new systems. I mean, that's basically what you're saying. We are not living in that perfect world. Flalk, like other tech companies has launched a product. It is not ideal just yet, but the way to get it there is to feed it more and more and more and more data. And the only way to get that more and more data is for the cameras to watch us. I mean, this seems again like it's like a deal that people did not sign up for and yet they're forced into in order to make a product better. Yeah. So the CEO of Flalk is this guy named Garrett Langley. And if you listen to him talk, his goal is to stop all crime in the United States. That, you know, Flalk could reasonably stop. And, you know, on its face, this is a lot of goal, but this is his

36:32goal. And he wants to accomplish in his way by, you know, making a lot of money selling cameras to cops. And again, like we don't really have a say in how this is deployed or at least many cities have not had had a say or residents feel like they haven't had a say because the cops have bought it under the guise of a pilot program or an experiment or under a grant or using discretionary funds. And suddenly they have these cameras that are surveilling them and they feel like they haven't really been had that conversation about, you know, what is the tradeoff here? Like this technology can be used to solve crimes. That is a very good thing. It can be regulated, but it hasn't been regulated in any meaningful fashion. And when you listen to the company talk, now that there's a backlash, they say, oh, we're just taking static photos using our cameras, but they have launched all sorts of products saying, well, pair your automated license plate reader cameras with live video. They're adding AI features. They're bringing in data from other sources as

37:35well to help cops do this. And the question is like, how much of this do we want? And what should the guard rails be? Yeah. Well, let's go back to what Florida governor Ron DeSantis has said. Again, he emphasized his support for law enforcement and having tools that will help police officers do their work. But he said he draws the line somewhere. I'm not sure exactly where, but he doesn't want to live in a quote surveillance state. I don't want to be in a situation where these tech companies, a handful of tech companies know everything about you and know where you're going. And I know they collect a lot as it is, but I think it's going to get a lot worse unless we have some protections for the people in Florida. And so, but the only way it could be dealt with is legislatively. So Jason, I mean, has there been active legislation proposed specifically about the flock cameras? It's been a real patchwork. I mean, there's been some proposals to ban this technology nationwide. That's not going to happen. I don't think like these are sort of,

38:38I mean, forgive me, but politicians grandstanding with legislation that's not going to go anywhere. Cities have banned the tech or have gotten rid of their contracts. The state of Illinois says, you know, you can't use this for immigration enforcement, for example. So there's been restriction on what it can be used for. Crucially, flock will say, oh, well, we want regulation, like we want to be part of a national conversation. The thing that privacy expert one is a requirement for a warrant. And that it seems to be an on starter. There's been several lawsuits against flock saying that already this should be a violation of the Fourth Amendment and that police should have to get a warrant. And flock has fought those lawsuits vehemently when they're against, you know, the local police, flocks, lawyers will also file amicus briefs saying we disagree. And I think that this is the big question. Like, is there going to be a warrant requirement at some point? And I think that would solve a lot of problems because it would require a judge to sign off on whether this technology it should be used for any individual crime. I think there is then the

39:42question of, well, can it be fast enough? Can the system be fast enough with a warrant requirement to actually solve those crimes? Or does that just ruin the technology entirely? Right. Exactly. Because if you have to wait 24 hours to get the warrant, the utility of the flock cameras ostensibly goes down. But Jason, one last question for you in the last minute that we have. I keep thinking about how it's no accident that AI is part of this picture because at the same time, we have this massive pushback grassroots pushback against flock cameras. We also have people pushing back against AI data centers. It's one more aspect of this new and all-encompassing technology really pushing in physically into people's lives in a way that are making people not just uncomfortable, but to downright angry that they don't want it. They're not ready for it. I'm wondering if you see kind of a comparison there. Absolutely. I mean, city council meetings used to be the most boring thing in the world. I used to watch a lot of them. I'm watching a lot more of these days. People are sort of realizing that they can go and push back against these two very physical

40:47things that they feel are intruding in their lives that maybe are not the thing that they're actually mad about in some cases, but represent greater unease with artificial intelligence, with surveillance. Flock is not the only company that's doing surveillance for police. It's just a very prominent one. I think made the mistake of being very public and sort of going to these city council meetings and saying by this technology. It has become this thing that people are pushing against in the same way that data centers have become that for the broader AI community or industry. Well, Jason Kebler, co-founder of 404 Media. I should say that even though a lot more people are talking about flock right now, Jason has been following this creeping mass surveillance issue for many, many years. So Jason, thank you so very much. Yes, thanks a lot. I'm Agnachakrabardi. This is on point. Where does wastewater from the oil and gas industry go? Into what's called injection wells

41:53deep underground, but when those wells leak toxic byproducts can bubble into drinking water aquifers and to the surface, and it's happening across the country, we'll take a look at how one small Ohio community is trying to deal with the fracking waste beneath their feet. That's on the next on point.