June 19, 2026 • 54 mins
In less than a decade since its formation in 2017, Flock Safety has exploded across the United States, with thousands of surveillance cameras in every state except for Alaska. Fans of Flock praise its potential for preventing crime -- but critics are seriously concerned this is just one more step toward a surveillance state. In the first part of this two-part episode, Ben, Matt and Noel explore the great dilemma (and alleged conspiracies) surrounding Flock.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Hello, what are you doing? Welcome back to the show.
My name is Matt, my name is Noel.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
They call me Ben. I'm just letting you check out
the sick hat folks. We're joined as always with our
super producer Dylan to Tennessee pal fake and most importantly,
you are you. You are here. That makes this the
stuff they don't want you to know. This episode has
been a long time coming. Let's start this way. Guys,
(00:52):
when's the last time you blocked a camera at your
local stoplight?
Speaker 4 (00:56):
You know, I think guys just stopped looking a long
time ago. I just assumption of that assumption of non
surveillance evaporated from me long ago.
Speaker 5 (01:05):
I'm not saying it's a good thing or a bad thing.
It just is.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
But it's a it's a real thing.
Speaker 4 (01:12):
But yeah, I just assume they're everywhere, Like you know,
getting these robotickets in the mail.
Speaker 5 (01:17):
That's not fun.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
But I'm like, I always feel like the traffics clock.
Speaker 5 (01:23):
I wasn't out in the world. I guess I did
it to myself.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Guys. You know, it's crazy how far we've come since
we started this show. When we were in awe at
the city of London and the number of CCTV cameras
that were up around that city, and how it was
it was newsworthy to talk about how many cameras were
in that one town, right.
Speaker 5 (01:43):
British murder mysteries that we were very worried.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Yeah, yeah, Well then now if you drive around here
in the suburbs where I am, guys, every single intersection,
every single school zone, every single business, like a parking
lot where there are several businesses together, like there's a
big mall near here. It is insane. And I think, remember, Ben,
do you remember when we did that thing a long
(02:08):
time ago where we asked people to count the number
of advertisements.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
They saw, Yes, the dangerous game, let's do it again camera.
I mean that's another question too, guys. Like we come
from Atlanta traffic which is somewhat legendary on the internet,
and one one thing that you might talk about with
your buddies and our fair metropolis is how close you
(02:33):
will push a yellow light before it turns red. Right,
you might be somebody like my girlfriend who always does
a little kiss to the ceiling when she pushes a
yellow But if you have you guys, ever made a
slight traffic error and then thanked your stars and garters
that the cops weren't around to see you. I mean,
(02:53):
I love the points that we're making already here because,
like you said, Noel, if we live in a law
or city, we have almost certainly been surveilled in some
way or another, in a way that doesn't require a warrant.
So take that fourth Amendment. We talked about companies like
(03:14):
shot Spotter in the past and their murky involvement with
taxpayers supported law enforcement and how they spy on you.
Check out that episode.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Yeah, and shot spot are just a reminder, right if
you don't remember that one. In particular, it's it's instead
of cameras, it's microphones that are constantly listening and attempting
to do things like differentiate between fireworks, a car crash,
and an assault.
Speaker 4 (03:39):
Right, crazy parabolic type microphones like the Kye Seepy movies.
These arrays of microphones that don't just pick up what's
immediately around them, but can pick up stuff from far
away and then try and ilgulate them and use them
to determine positions of the supposed the alleged fireworks and
or gunshots, which is a game we like to play
here in Atlanta.
Speaker 5 (04:00):
It's called fireworks or gunshots.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
Yes, it is we do. That is actually a game
that we play sometimes non consensually. Tonight we are focusing
on another iteration of something similar to shots Spotter. You've
probably heard about it if you've been on the internet
lately or live in a city. It's outfit called Flock Group.
(04:23):
They're doing business as Flock Safety and just like you know,
it's a weird, better minehoff thing because as soon as
you start paying attention, you're going to see flock cameras everywhere.
Let's get into it. Here are the facts. Okay, shout
(04:49):
out to Georgia Tech. We have to do it. It
is my alma matter as well. Flock Safety is a company,
per their website, focused on manuf factoring, deploying and operating
security hardware and software, specifically video surveillance and gunfire locators
(05:09):
like shot Spotter, and then importantly automated license plate recognition technology.
Those three things already existed before Flock became a thing.
But Flock has integrated all of this aggregate data in
a seamless, easily accessible, easily understandable way. That's all thanks
(05:31):
to three folks from Georgia Tech back in twenty seventeen,
Garrett Langley, Page Todd and this is Matt's favorite.
Speaker 5 (05:39):
Matt Fury.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
Oh yeah, they co founded flock.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
I'm looking at a picture of the three of them
right now from the Sheller College of Business website. And
do you guys ever get that thing when you look
at someone's face, you don't know anything about them necessarily,
but you can see something with their eyes is just off.
I don't get this at all with these three folks.
These look like three Georgia Tech students that I had
(06:08):
some good ideas or something or you know, like figured
something out. When I'm looking at their faces and specifically
their eyes, they just look like good people, the good lads.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
Well right, right, young chess.
Speaker 5 (06:21):
And you know I mean that, don't we know?
Speaker 4 (06:24):
This is always how it goes, or often how it goes,
where a real good idea, a stroke of genius pretty
quickly gets co opted and turned into the bad thing.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
I love their origin story, you guys, and admittedly unbiased here.
I have to be upfront about that because in the beginning,
this is a side hustle where these students the founders,
instead of going to Rocky Mountain Pizza shout out Rocky
Mountain Pizza, the founders literally got together at Langley's house
(06:54):
in his dining room and built their first cameras by hand.
The official story tells us that Langley and yes that's
his real last name, Langley and his co founders would
put these handmade cameras around the Atlanta area, around communities
in our metropolis, and their goal was always to prevent crime.
(07:16):
If you are familiar with Georgia Tech or similar institutions
like Virginia Tech or MIT, you know it's far from
unusual for students to have any number of interesting side projects.
These institutions are incubators, and these places love it. It
makes them look good when a couple of students get
(07:38):
together and have a bright idea. The rate of attrition
is super high in brainstorming, but the reality of it
is that for every nine failed attempts at a shiny
new thing, those nine failures can be justified by that
tenth attempt becoming a success.
Speaker 5 (08:00):
SAME's true places like Mit.
Speaker 4 (08:01):
And it's not for nothing that Atlanta is, i think
now by more recent metrics, considered the most surveiled city
per capita in the United States.
Speaker 5 (08:11):
It's because of the whole.
Speaker 4 (08:12):
You know, testing ground for this technology right here in
our back care, which we're gonna get.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
To and the end of course, of course, dude isn't
nowhere to think you have the idea, Hey, everybody is installing.
This is because it's twenty seventeen when Flock is founded, right,
they we're seeing all of these ring cameras go up
on people's homes and all these other corporations you know
that have their own version of cameras and security that
(08:37):
is just home personal home security. They're seeing that happen.
But they want to build something that specifically will protect
a neighborhood, right, not individual homes, but the neighborhood as
a grid of human beings that live together in a community.
And you you have these ideas, you begin, you know,
getting twenty five thousand dollars from a neighborhood's hoa to
(09:00):
install cameras, and you start doing this whole thing. But
then what you're if you really think about it. I imagine
the movie Get Out and that that feeling of driving
into a suburban neighborhood and driving around and realizing, wait,
like I'm maybe I'm not supposed to be here, and
also I think I'm being watched. We'll get into it,
(09:23):
but just the thought that every came, every car that
goes into a neighborhood now that has one of these
systems set up is being surveilled as though they're an
intruder or an outsider or you know other that shouldn't be.
Speaker 4 (09:35):
For sure, But it also goes much bigger and beyond that,
and that now the intent of protecting one little region
or one little you know, community then gets plugged into
this massive system outside of the original intent. So you
can sell this idea as safety, you know, for your community.
(09:56):
Let's keep our neighborhoods, keep our streets safe, and then
before you know it, it's all run amuck and you're
part of this mass surveillance state.
Speaker 3 (10:03):
Yeah. I oh, that is excellent foreshadowing, Noel, We also know, Okay,
there's a pivotal watershed moment for Flock. It starts as
a side project, right where three kids who are very
smart we're doing cool stuff. But in a conversation on
a podcast with the Atlanta Business Chronicle, the CEO of
(10:25):
Flock Langley talks about how he realized he and the
crew were onto something big when a Decab County detective
reached out personally to thank the students for their work
and they said, look, Flock has played a huge role
in helping us solve a home break in just yesterday.
(10:49):
And as soon as Langley gets this news, he calls
his cohort and he says, I can't do the quote correctly,
but he says, as we see in the doc here,
you all need to quit your jobs.
Speaker 5 (11:02):
This is what.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
We're going to spend the next decade of our lives
working on. So it's kind of like the moment where
we realized podcasting could be a career. And this, okay,
it hasn't been a decade just yet. We're recording on Friday,
June twelfth, twenty twenty six, so next year it will
have been a decade. And even in just the past
(11:27):
nine years, folks, Flock has seen breathtaking growth. By twenty
twenty four, their cameras were placed in over four thousand
separate cities, across forty two states. That same year, still
twenty twenty four, the company grew from a team of
three people to a team of well over nine hundred people.
(11:51):
I don't have enough fingies to show you how many
nine hundred is unless I get a bunch of people
hanging out here. So the next year's twenty twenty five,
Flock has raised nine hundred and fifty million dollars in
venture funding, along with a total seven point five billion
(12:12):
dollar valuation on the market. There's no other way to
say it. Business is booming. Maybe we talked about the
statistics and the growth a little bit more, Let's do
it again.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
You have to understand, first of all, that Flock can
be a bunch of different things. It can be just
these cameras that have license plate readers that are meant
to look at vehicles and that's what they do. It
can have that sound detection system also plugged into it.
It can have several other integrated versions of itself, including
(12:47):
these things called mobile security trailers, which is like kind
of an add on thing. You can also get. Now
their drone systems set up and in order to make
any of those systems work. Depending on which ones you buy,
and you know the various different packages you can get
from Flock, you have to get access to the software
(13:10):
systems that make them function, that actually capture all of
the data from these devices, and those people end up
becoming users of any other software that you can imagine, right,
like an Adobe customer that has a certain amount that
they have to pay every month to have access to
that thing, and then know that they have one hundred
(13:30):
and forty thousand current subscribers at least that's according to Flock.
So if you're talking about booming business, you've got one
hundred and forty thousand subscribers to these systems, right to
the software. And then you have to understand that buying
each piece of equipment, we're talking about hundreds and thousands,
(13:52):
if not tens of thousands, if not millions of dollars
depending on how deep you go into the Flock system.
If you get to the drones and some of the
you're in the millions of dollars. So just when we're
talking about business, good lord, they've got a lot going.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
On, especially for a company that has officially not turned
to profit yet. They're focusing on growth, but they're.
Speaker 4 (14:14):
So sorry to hearing about companies like that that are
that are valued at like a trillion dollars but have
yet to turn a profit. I get there's calculations that
go into that kind of stuff that are deeper than
I understand.
Speaker 5 (14:26):
But I also think that sometimes it's bs.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
It's totally BS no ed. That's part of why I
love it. I find if it. If it, if this
strange religion we call the economy was not hurting so
many people, I would find it endearing because think of
a company startup as a kid and you're like, oh,
my little guy, you know what. I know, you're not
(14:51):
making money with your lemonade stand yet, but you look
like a seven point five billion dollar kiddo to me.
Speaker 4 (14:58):
Well, and not to derail us, but I mean whole
SpaceX ipo, Like there's this whole I mean, we should
talk about that separately.
Speaker 5 (15:04):
But the way they've been.
Speaker 4 (15:06):
Able to circumvent rules and get it immediately added to
like these bundled stocks that go into people's four oh
one k's, so basically you're like forced.
Speaker 5 (15:15):
To own their stock whether you want to write not.
That's wild. So I'm sorry, just being like the stock market,
what's up with that?
Speaker 3 (15:23):
This SpaceX episode, stock Market episode. We've got to do those.
We we also know, you know, Flock wasn't the first
to market with any necessarily unique technology, right. The big
thing is the AI, the machine learning, the integration of
existing tech. And there are other businesses in this space.
(15:46):
One of the biggest ones, the coke to the PEPSI Flock,
would be the multi billion dollar police tech giant Axon Enterprise.
Look them up and have some fun. But like, by oh, okay,
we're in twenty twenty four, right, so we're going to
twenty twenty five. And by last year, Flock was operating
(16:09):
in over five thousand I think it's six thousand now
probably more cities, towns, and communities across forty nine of
the fifty US states. In case you, like us, are wondering, hey,
what's that one weird holdout, It is predictably Alaska for
(16:30):
a number of reasons that we don't have to get into.
Speaker 5 (16:33):
But you guys know what Alaska's is very grizzled and setting.
Speaker 3 (16:36):
Their ways, you know, and very very privacy oriented.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
The company says five thousand law enforcement agencies. Think about that,
five thousand law enforcement agents, and.
Speaker 5 (16:50):
I know we're going to get more into the nuts
and bolts of it.
Speaker 4 (16:53):
But how many of those five thousand law enforcement agencies
can just dip into the system and get things a
gander whenever they feel like it.
Speaker 3 (17:02):
Pretty much all of them, if they pay their if
they pay their fees.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
And maybe stock their exes. As we talked about on strength, that.
Speaker 5 (17:09):
Is the thing that would happen reasonably.
Speaker 3 (17:12):
Oh surely not. But we can say for the most part,
with actually with few but growing exceptions, law enforcement loves Flock.
It makes it easier to track people even if they're
not criminals. Flock's innovations go way past our basic machine
learning or data vacuuming, which we all know from you know,
(17:35):
Edward Snowden and PRISM and the nssay. Their marketing strategy
is also genius because they don't just market to Johnny Law.
They also work with hoa's that can afford them. They
work with local civilian community organizations, and Flock does have
(17:55):
We're being totally objective, Flock does have a lot of
stuff to brag about. There is no denying that their services,
which a get our for profit, have genuinely helped solve
and even prevent primes. Break ins, robberies, auto theft, especially
acts of domestic violence, assault, and even murders. So if
(18:17):
we if we look at the bright side of the statistics, guys,
flock doesn't just feel like a good move for public safety.
It feels like a combination of technology that was genuinely inevitable.
If it wasn't this specific dream team at Georgia Tech,
it would have been somebody. And honestly, other countries are
(18:40):
streets ahead, as they'd say on community with this China
mostly of.
Speaker 4 (18:44):
Course, Yeah, no, I can only imagine, and that makes
perfect sense, Ben, But it's one of those things where
it's like been predicted in sci fi for ages and
more recently, most recently.
Speaker 5 (18:55):
Probably in the Dark Night with this whole we can't
allow this technology.
Speaker 4 (19:01):
It shouldn't exist, you know, turning every the cell phone
in the world into a you know, reverse listening device.
Speaker 3 (19:08):
And this is beautiful, unethical, dangerous. You've turned every cellphone
and Gotham into a.
Speaker 5 (19:13):
Like this genius.
Speaker 4 (19:14):
And there's part of me, and I'm sure there's part
of a lot of people that hear those crime statistics
and think about the good uses for this kind of technology,
and I'm like, Okay, I could be on board with that.
I already don't really have any you know, illusions of
privacy when I leave my home and I'm not doing
anything wrong.
Speaker 5 (19:32):
But then you start to think.
Speaker 4 (19:33):
About, like, you know, all of the crackdowns on illegal immigration,
on legal immigration, on people who could be targeted using
this technology because if they haven't done anything, or this
technology getting into the hands of an oppressive regime, oppressive government.
I mean, then you start to you start to be like,
(19:53):
is it worth it? Is there a trade off?
Speaker 2 (19:56):
It's a really good point because you could see in
the like the case of a person or someone, let's
say the general that went missing, right it had if you,
yeah mcaslin, if you had these cameras set up around
where he lived at the time, and they were all
ubiquitous throughout that whole region, then you could find it, right,
(20:17):
even if he didn't want to be found, right for
reasons of personal safety perhaps or whatever. You know, we
imagine that could be. That could be really great. You
imagine the stories we've talked about in Strange News before
where neighborhoods were being broken into remember the tourism, the
crime tourism thing that was, it didn't sound. It didn't
seem real. It seemed like some kind of propaganda for
(20:39):
anti immigration, but it was actually happening, at least to
some small extent. Then it gets blown up, right, But
there is a danger because it would be great to
have those flock cameras to capture people who are doing
something terrible like that, you know, home invasions like that.
But you can so easily get in the slippery slope
on this, right, the fallacy of the slippery slope, because
(21:02):
I find myself there, I find myself going, oh God, no, no, no,
we can't do this, what are we doing? This is
gonna get so bad, This is gonna get so bad inevitably.
But I wonder if that I wonder how much of
that is me being tuned into the sci fi stuff
you're talking about their Nola, the visions of this the weel.
Speaker 4 (21:21):
And just tuned into the corruptibility of people in power,
and just knowing that when something like this exists, even
if there is a really you know, benevolent use of it,
that could be a great benefit to society.
Speaker 5 (21:34):
There's always going to be that.
Speaker 4 (21:37):
But we got to have more. We got how can
we make that, how can we turn ourselves into gods
with this power.
Speaker 3 (21:43):
Yeah. This is the country that looked at cocaine and
said I need a little more pen. This is the
country that looked at conventional munitions and said, what if
we could build a bomb that could blow up the
flop everything? Right? Yeah, like, let's let Syner size everything.
Flock is supersizing surveillance. I didn't have the notes, but
(22:04):
I'm like super committed to this idea now. And we
can't be blamed, you know, like you're saying, Matt, I
think that's a universal thing. We can't be blamed for
pointing out that slippery slope. It's inevitable that something like
Flock would happen. It's also inevitable that something like Flock
is going to get a huge backlash from an increasingly
(22:26):
concerned public, a lot of controversy. But as our pal
Alfred E. Newman from Mad Magazine likes to say, what
me worry you should? You should be worried, even if
you're not Alfred E. Newman. There's so many legal battles
that are happening with Flock right now. We've talked about
it on a weekly Strange news program. The same sort
(22:49):
of legal beagles and activists and ACLU types who are
opposed to shot Spotter. They take aim at flock, and
they do it with a pretty good legal basis, especially
the Fourth Amendment. We've got to do the quote you guys,
who has the best founding father of voice today? Whose feeling?
Speaker 5 (23:11):
Jeez, let's see, I can do it.
Speaker 6 (23:15):
The right of the people to secure in their persons, houses, papers,
and affix against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated,
and no warrants shall issue but upon probable calls supported
by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to
be searched and the persons of things to be seized.
Speaker 4 (23:37):
I know that was all over the place. It went
from Colonel Sanders to you.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
Know, huge claps for the Senator and.
Speaker 4 (23:44):
The the what is it, the right honorable Rooster Senator
from Louisiana.
Speaker 3 (23:50):
There we go. Yeah, he's he's he's a real cappired
seat on that in plain English, and thank you again,
that's the perfect depiction of that. In plain English. This
means that you as a person, as a human being
in the US, who have broad rights to what we
(24:11):
call reasonable privacy. So in theory, no government or police
entity can rock up to your home and just say like, hey, Dylan,
you got a weird vibe. We're checking everything and we're
taking your computer. They have to have a reason for
seizures and searches, and that reason has to be solid
(24:32):
enough again in theory, for a court of law to
agree and issue that warrant. But where does mass surveillance
fall when it comes to the Fourth Amendment. Believe it
or not, that's something the courts are still working out,
and they're getting really weird vibed about it. Weirdly vibed
about it.
Speaker 4 (24:51):
First all I can I just say that no one
would ever clock Dylan's vibes as being off. They're impeccable
at times. You can sense good vibes from a mile away.
So Dylan, you have nothing to worry about. But that
doesn't mean that there aren't tons of other folks that
do this.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Is but have you seen his sweet ride?
Speaker 5 (25:07):
He's got a sweet ride.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
I think they might find that to be what we're
talking about. I think Dylan, because they're not even They're
not going to see Dylan, They're going to see us.
Speaker 4 (25:14):
They're gonna see a sweet ride. They're going to see
his quirky collection of bumper stickers. Even if he's riding
dirty with no license plate or the license plate obscured,
that doesn't even matter, because it can I still build
a profile based on you know, his uh what coexist stickers?
Speaker 3 (25:31):
You know, bumper damage, any slight bumper damage. Also, I
saw a I saw one of the I don't love bumper.
Speaker 5 (25:39):
Stickers and does not have a one on his.
Speaker 3 (25:42):
Ride for the record, but he's a classy guy. But
what what I gotta tell you, guys is I was
driving in a heavily surveiled area of Atlanta and I
saw the bravest Toyota Camry. They had to deflock bumper
stickers like test bumper stickers, so that every time the
(26:02):
camera got their license plate, it also got a clear
picture of some pretty harsh words for flock. And I
was like, man, you are the bravest little camera that
I have seen in three a little dumpster.
Speaker 5 (26:17):
I love that.
Speaker 4 (26:18):
Yeah, I know this maybe isn't quite the right time
to bring this up, but it's just a question that
popped into my head. Like I know, there are technologies
that exist to make your face harder to discern when
you're in public, like sort of ring light kind of
things that will sort of scramble cameras. You got to wonder, uh,
is there going to be a backlash against this technology,
and you know people will start rolling out, you know,
(26:40):
the modern equivalent of like radar detectors and things like
that that will counteract this kind of stuff.
Speaker 5 (26:46):
Well, maybe save that for the end, but.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
It's just did you know that it's technically illegal to
wear a mask, like a full face mask, if you're
driving and you're or over the age of sixteen in Georgia?
Speaker 5 (26:58):
I didn't know.
Speaker 4 (27:00):
I guess I found the hard stop. It was it
your Batman mask.
Speaker 7 (27:04):
Wearing your skeleton. It was it could obscure your peripheral
I guess. But let's argue that obscure it was a
different turf.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
I don't think that happened.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
So it did happen, but I didn't get in big trouble.
I just got a what are you doing man from
from a very friendly police officer. And we know that
the more cynical of us may recall that in the
wake of the September eleventh attacks of two thousand and one,
everything changed with the US stance on individual privacy Edward
(27:41):
Snowden proved it years and years ago. Certain government agencies
have and do routinely violate the Constitution through any number
of loopholes, legalistic parkour, quasi legal rationalizations, all these appeals
to the greater good. So FLOCK is not completely original,
(28:04):
and supporters do champion it. We've talked to people who
are proponents of FLOCK who genuinely believe this is the
this is the next sliced bread for law enforcement. So
critics are going to argue, this is, like we were
saying earlier in tonight's episode, it's one more slide into
(28:25):
an no Rwellian surveillance state. And they're going to tell
you if we don't collectively make some serious changes now,
things are going to be pretty nasty, not just in
the present moment, but for generations to come. So maybe
our question is what exactly is FLOCK doing? Why are
these criticisms growing at the same pace as the cameras.
(28:49):
We'll be right back. Here's where it gets crazy. This
guy Langley fascinating. He's he's thirty eight, right, is that correct?
He's still pretty young.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
I don't know. He looks like a baby in the photograph.
I was looking at like just a young well, I
guess it was when he was a.
Speaker 5 (29:10):
Young soft hands and everything.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
Soft feet, Yeah, soft hands and do eyes? Just a
baby play the comina. Sorry, that's been stuck. Nobody ever
will get that reference.
Speaker 3 (29:25):
Okay, thank you to the twelve of you out there,
Thanks for tuting. I think a lot of people are
getting that, and it's an ambitious reference, and Flock is ambitious.
Langley definitely is, because he said Flock's mission is to
ultimately prevent all crime ever in the United States, maybe
(29:47):
even in Alaska. But I think our question is at
what cost? You know, we talked about the license plate thing,
we teased a court case. Can we talk about the
twenty twenty four Virginia case. Why do I say Virginia
like that? I think Rooster got my head.
Speaker 5 (30:05):
Yeah, you know, for Rudy Giuliani.
Speaker 4 (30:09):
Sorry, it's sound more like a New New Yorker would
say Virginia. I don't know why I evoked the name
of Rudy Giuliani. In my mind, he's just the quinn
essential New York accent guy.
Speaker 5 (30:20):
But he's canceled, probably because yeah, yeah he was, he
was a mayor.
Speaker 4 (30:24):
I know what it was it was The dough Boys
did an episode about a fast food brand, I don't
know what it was, Firehouse Subs, and talked about how
Rudy Giuliani used to be considered Americas mayor and then
you know he kind of backslid from there.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
Hey, and that was right after the Patriot Act.
Speaker 5 (30:39):
That's exactly right.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
He becomes exactly what the mayor.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
And in June of twenty twenty four, still reeling from
the influence of the Patriot Act, a judge in Virginia's
Circuit Court in Norfolk, Virginia, Norfolk, how do New Yorkers say.
Speaker 5 (30:57):
I don't know, but the but the southern gentleman would
say no, So I think you.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
There, we got yeah, yeah, put a w on.
Speaker 5 (31:03):
I don't know. New Yorkers never even talk about Norfolk. Frankly,
it's potentially Yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
So this judge made a pretty pretty groundbreaking ruling and said, look,
if you're in Norfolk, Virginia, flock, you're one hundred and
seventy two automated license plate readers or ALPRs. They do
count as a search under the Fourth Amendment. They cannot
(31:31):
be used as evidence in a criminal case. If you
collect all that stuff without a warrant. They said, these
are basically like tracking devices.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
Which is weird though, right because if you if you
aren't going to use if you aren't going to use
it as evidence in a case, you can still use
it as real time tracking, right, So you can apprehend
someone using the thing, and then you just it's it's
(32:00):
interesting that difference between being able to use that image
of that car in a location where a crime was committed.
You can't use that, but you can use this thing
to go pick that person up and then generate your
you know, different evidence somehow or find probable causes.
Speaker 4 (32:18):
You can probably if anyone's like, you know, seeing the
excellent HBO series the wire, you know what a legal
pain in the butt it was for them to get
that wire up, aka, you know, bug people's phones and
listen in and there are all kinds of rules around
how long you can listen and how much you can record,
all these very specific things stuff like this. When you
look at it the way you're describing it, Matt, as
(32:39):
a tracking devices, it throws all that stuff out the window,
because it's another example of technology outpacing some pretty antiquated
laws and regulations and procedures that are on the books
and have been for a long time.
Speaker 5 (32:54):
Now, this stuff doesn't even apply anymore. A wire that's
like quaint.
Speaker 3 (32:58):
Yeah, think about it this way, folks. Even if you
are one of the few Americans who doesn't have a
cell phone, right, and you are smart enough to take
care of a car that doesn't have a bunch of
Big Brother stuff in it, no GPS, even without your smartphone,
driving around in your old Zuzu or whatever, the proliferation
(33:20):
and ubiquity of flock camera cities renders all your privacy
precautions irrelevant and moot. You know, anybody with the right
access to flock, not just law enforcement, right that person
you don't like at your hoa, for instance, They can
vicariously follow your path around town from point A to
(33:40):
point Z, just like those old family Circus comic strip maps.
If we want to see how it really works, I
think we got to go to Forbes. There's a journalist
named Thomas Brewster who last year wrote an excellent article
about how this network of more than eighty thousand AI
(34:01):
powered cameras work together.
Speaker 5 (34:04):
Oh that's right.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
We got to mention that the cities also speak to
each other. Right, So the flock cameras in Atlanta can
also pull data from the flock cameras in Baltimore. It's
it's one ring to rule them all. So our journalist
Brewster puts us in the scene immediately. He is talking
(34:25):
about the experience of a police lieutenant in Dunwoodye, which
is a community a little bit north of Atlanta proper.
And this lieutenant, Tim Fect, is responding to a nine
to one one call about a shoplifter at a mall nearby,
and as the journalist is observing, the lieutenant launches a
(34:46):
drone used by Flock, a Chinese manufactured drone from a
company called Dji. It comes off the big one. Yeah,
that's the big Boy, and it comes off from the
station's roof. And so in real time, just like in
the dark night, this lieutenant is able to zoom in
with the drone on individuals in the area, and we
(35:09):
don't know which one is the shoplifter. So he gets
a shot of a guy who's just like checking his phone,
you know, laying octurtle or something, and then he zooms
in on a bunch of people who are just standing
around waiting for the next Marta train. And if you've
been through Marta, you know they were waiting for a while. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (35:29):
Not the most efficient public transit system. But they're working
on it, guys.
Speaker 5 (35:33):
They're working on it.
Speaker 3 (35:33):
They're working on it, guys.
Speaker 2 (35:35):
But also beware of all the crime on Marta right now,
according to the the City of Atlanta.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
Right, Yeah, what better rationale for Are there flock cameras
in being deployed in subway stations for example? Yes, because that.
Speaker 5 (35:52):
Seems like a whole other level of it.
Speaker 4 (35:55):
Like, I guess we're thinking of it mainly in terms
of vehicle tracking, but once you you know, drilled down
another layer literally underground, you start to be able to
track movement of people. I mean in cities where cars
are less of a prominent form of transportation than say Atlanta,
it's more about tracking people on foot or on bicycles.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
Well let's let's guys. The police officer launched a drone
in Dunwoodie to go check out people near a Marta station.
This is this is a part of Flock's first drone
as first responder program, Right, that's what we're talking about.
Speaker 3 (36:36):
Yeah. Yeah, and it's not the drone alone. It's like
how you know, aircraft carrier never travels by itself. It's
a stew of different technologies. Right, he's got the camera feeds,
he's got other cameras coming in, he's got that gunshot
detection data. He's got a bunch of maps that show
(36:56):
you in real time where all the other police vehicles
are in area. And then AI is transcribing every nine.
Speaker 4 (37:05):
Is it weird that I keep getting an image in
my head of the ravens that act as harbingers and
sort of spies for the Night King and Game of Thrones,
Like I just that's what I'm picturing here.
Speaker 5 (37:19):
It's becoming very sinister the more we dig into this.
Speaker 3 (37:23):
They didn't even find the shoplifter, by the way, guys, spoiler.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
Wow, whoops. But just really really picture that in your mind.
A nine to one one call goes in, right, you say,
where the caller says, I am near this intersection and
this is happening, and that moment the thing we just
described where a drone goes off the roof of a
local station nearby. The drone gets their way before any
(37:47):
other first responders, and he's just looking around trying to
find what's like, what's going on? Maybe the description of
a vehicle or a person the way we're talking about here.
That's I mean amazing. Maybe you catch somebody way easier
that way, somebody who did something truly terrible or violent,
you know, or depraved. But also there's just drones coming
(38:13):
out now going who are you, m you check out?
This vehicle's weird?
Speaker 3 (38:20):
You got any games on your phone? Right? That's what
they're doing. And also an important point there, Matt. They're
not expunging the data they collect, so they didn't find
the shoplifter in this case at the time the article
was written. But Flock doesn't throw anything away. They use
every part of the Orwellian buffalo.
Speaker 2 (38:42):
Yeah, oh my god, let me pull off this just
to do an article with an article Ben from CBS
News June ninth. It's talking about a county sheriff department
that is looking at these Flock drones and they got
the full flop safety show off the drones kind of thing,
(39:03):
like here, we're gonna put on a clinic and show
you exactly what's gonna happen. And they're saying that the
call comes in, the pilot, who is a part of
the police department, drops a pin on a map. The
drone flies there and then is live streaming to other
first responders who are on their way to the scene
(39:24):
and are sitting back at the department watching everything go down.
They can fly sixty miles per hour and travel up
to four miles from their starting point.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
It is literally objectively amazing and it could save lives.
You know, the folks cited in the Forbes article from Dunwoodie,
they are all big fans, true believers in Flock, and
they don't hesitate to name multiple examples of how Flock
(39:55):
made a real difference in fighting prime. They said, Look,
we caught Yang that was knocking off pharmacies and stealing
from ATMs across the East coast. Flock nailed one of
their getaway vehicles. We identified a criminal via drone because
we saw a tattoo on his neck, and we apprehended
(40:18):
him before he could commit a crime. We found a
woman who pulled a gun on her neighbor. They're also
pre crime, right we're talking about sci fi. Internally, law
enforcement is a big fan of Flock. They're grateful for
its ability to monitor those large public gatherings. We talked
(40:38):
about the big speeches, the parades, the protest they are
hoping that flock can help the law identify bad actors
before they take that shot, or stab that child, or
detonate that bob. It's already been as I think we
can all admit, it's already been grossly misused like every
(40:58):
other government database.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
Well yeah, or before that person drains the water from
the data center. The thing that I'm worried about, guys,
is that the things these are going to protect are
generally massive corporate interests, right, the corporations that have the
big profits. And that's why the It's not why the
law enforcement agency exists. You can argue the law enforcement
(41:24):
agency exists to protect the public.
Speaker 3 (41:27):
My only the property.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
My only worry is that when it is heavily aimed
toward defending the corporate interests and the profits, the thing
it's it is defending against will be us, the human beings,
the public, the ones who are trying to stop the
thing from happening because it's become too big and too dangerous.
(41:53):
But now you've got these systems, they can track you
everywhere here what you're saying, in any part of the city,
no matter which public park you go to, to try
and have that quick little meeting, we kind of drain
the water from the data centers. That can't happen anymore
without everybody ending up in a detention center somewhere.
Speaker 3 (42:13):
Right, and we're still using the euphemism detention center. History
will not look kindly on that one. We got to
talk a little bit about how easy this is to
deploy the nuts and bolts. I know, we've got a
lot of avy gear heads in the crowd. The license
plate reader camera from flock depend on the model you get,
(42:36):
it's going to run you between three thousand to thirty
five hundred dollars a pop, which is expensive for an individual,
but not necessarily expensive for a department, depending on how
much taxpayer money they get. Oh and then you got
to get flock os. How about we pause for a
word from our sponsors and we'll be right back. So
(43:01):
this is another thing we talked about ownership, right, you
kind of don't really own it because it's like, oh gosh,
what's that exercise thing that you have to have? Is
it starts with a pat you go, please still let
(43:24):
George keep the whole face from the love of God.
Speaker 2 (43:27):
Complete paralysis of human agency.
Speaker 3 (43:31):
I mean, that's the thing, right, Like your peloton is
most effective when you also have that subscription fee. Correct.
The flock stuff is a similar system. You've got to
have flock os. This makes all the data that flock
hoovers up accessible via not just a browser, but a
(43:52):
mobile app, which seems kind of casual to me for
all that information. Like you're hanging out with someone and
they have flock Os, they have the app on their phone,
I would judge them, would you? Would you trust well
somebody who had that on their phone.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
Well, it's weird again, it's so normalized. I have an
app on my phone that's a security camera app. We
talked about a couple episodes ago, guys from my place
where I live, And it feels weird opening it up
and looking around and I can see portions of my
you know, the street right outside my house, and the
neighbors cars when they come and go, and some of
(44:30):
my neighbors activities in the yard. That makes me feel
really weird and uncomfortable. But it's aimed in a way
that is going to protect my home or catch somebody
if something happens here. And then you just imagine that
these officers through flock Os, through things like they have
a tool they have called free Form that lets you
it's like an AI tool like any of these other ones.
You just you give it a prompt, a description of
(44:52):
a person in a place, a thing, a time, anything,
and it's just like, here's everything. It's just especially if
you put in let's say an ex's license plate number again,
which officers have been caught doing.
Speaker 3 (45:06):
Like yalla, right, yeah it.
Speaker 2 (45:11):
Sorry, it's very troublesome.
Speaker 3 (45:13):
It is. Everybody who is tuning in should be very worried,
especially you know, if the Orwellian stuff doesn't bag your badgers. Folks,
please consider this is taxpayer money. That police department in Dunwoody,
they pay five hundred thousand dollars a year for their
specific deal. They got one hundred and five cameras, they
(45:36):
got the drone, they got the gunshot detectors. Most importantly,
they've got that OS coordinating all of it.
Speaker 2 (45:43):
Dude, can we ben Did you find that Omnia list
of prices? Oh?
Speaker 3 (45:49):
Oh yeah, we got to get into that. Yeah yeah, yeah, I.
Speaker 2 (45:52):
Kick it just for everybody out there. Search it's a
little weird Omnia Omnia Flock Safety price list and you
will find I found it on the web, a giant
document well, it's several pages long, and it has a
(46:12):
price list for every individual thing that might end up
on like a transaction with flock. If you're a police department,
you're gonna get these kinds of things on there, like
a condor professional services charge, which would come out to
only seven hundred and fifty bucks. But when you're talking
about the price, what did you say been five hundred
thousand dollars for the enterprise access or whatever it is?
Speaker 3 (46:35):
Yeah, per year? Yeah, yeah, yeah, per anum.
Speaker 2 (46:37):
Dude, you can get a federal subscription to flock os
and it only costs you four million dollars.
Speaker 3 (46:45):
Guys, what are we doing? Is today the day? Can
we I sound like a guy saying should we all
get fries for the table if I get some flock
or you guys gonna have some flock too?
Speaker 2 (46:55):
I think we should Look. If I get flock, you're
gonna have to get flock because some of the people
in my flock zone might get into your You have.
Speaker 5 (47:02):
To speak it out of my head.
Speaker 4 (47:04):
I can't stop thinking about the eighties banded flock of Seagulls.
I just have to put it out there so stop
relentlessly running through my skull.
Speaker 2 (47:13):
What if what if we required by law every flock
piece of equipment had to make seagull sell so you
would always know what if.
Speaker 4 (47:22):
We ran, we ran so far away where the flock
cameras can't find us.
Speaker 2 (47:28):
Hey, good luck.
Speaker 5 (47:30):
We couldn't.
Speaker 4 (47:30):
We couldn't get away as the problem from the flock
cameras because they're everywhere.
Speaker 3 (47:34):
Never Oh and we should say that too. Yeah, Flock
has one of those things that's pretty common in tech startups.
They've got the marketing on brands who hurt us describe
different products as like the condor cameras. They they name
all that stuff after birds.
Speaker 4 (47:51):
Yeah, even is there the night King image that's partially Yeah,
it's happening.
Speaker 3 (47:59):
The Flock is their gunshot detector. It's their answer to
shot spotters, so it records audio and these little five
second clips. It uses AI to play Atlanta's favorite game,
fireworks or firearms, and then it will alert police. These
we should mention these things are all usually going to
(48:21):
be solar powered with rechargeable batteries, so they don't have
to be plugged into the utility grid's It's another small
but pretty fascinating innovation, and it.
Speaker 2 (48:33):
Is why is fully wireless, right, so like, yeah, even
the data goes without any wires.
Speaker 3 (48:39):
Yeah, cellular networks right to centralized servers. Yeah, and this
is not your typical, Like, these cameras are not your
typical grab that license plate and send that guy a
ticket in the mail kind of cameras. They are used
for surveillance and criminal investigation. The two biggest cameras are
(49:00):
going to hear about in your neck of the global
Woods are going to be the falcon and the Sparrows.
So they photograph the butt of your car. They look
at the rear of your car, and they get the
license plate. And if you got a couple of like
edgy bumper stickers, they'll get that too. But they also
(49:20):
snag what we mentioned earlier, a vehicle fingerprint. This is
super loose and murky. So if you've got a bad
paint job on your car that makes it look unique,
they got youa If your Honda Civic still has that
flame painting you did on the side from the nineties,
(49:41):
then they've got that. They look at the dents, like
we were saying, they look at temporary plates. They can
do this very well. Even if a car is traveling
one hundred miles an hour, seventy five feet away.
Speaker 4 (49:54):
See, and it makes me think back again to how
quaint it used to be. Remember, there's a plot point
and I think the movie where Brad Pitt's character has
to like lean on an old Palavis from the FBI
or something like that to pull library records for a
particular or maybe it was the you know, Morgan Freeman's
character pull public library records of Dante's Inferno and various
(50:17):
types of books, and that's what leads them to the
dude's apartment. But it's a big deal because it was
totally illegal what they did, and they can't really have
a reason to show up at the guy's place. Now,
it just seems like all that stuff is just a
thing of the past.
Speaker 3 (50:30):
You know. Yeah, because of the integration. Again, that's the
best innovation because when when Flock clocks you, you get
flocked vehicle. When you get flock clocked, that's perfect. When
you get flock clocked, it doesn't matter if you're breaking
a law. It instantly goes to Flock's database, and then
that goes to something called the NCIC, the National Crime
(50:53):
Information Center, which is the bad Boy List, and then
it also goes to state or local bad boy list
any car reported stolen or anything that the local authorities,
for whatever reason say is of interest to them. And
it could be as specific as a make, model, even
(51:15):
a vend number, license plate number. It could also be
as general as a person who looks like this is
driving a blue van. I mean it's dangerous.
Speaker 2 (51:27):
Flock clock and two smoking cameras.
Speaker 3 (51:29):
Sorry, there we go, perfect, perfect, I mean it's it's
it's clever. But they've also got these condor cameras that
can pan, tilt and zoom you get a better picture
of somebody's face like very up like very I'm not
gonna messing with the focus, very up put.
Speaker 2 (51:48):
Oh god, that's the London CCTV stuff that I've seen
in all those.
Speaker 4 (51:53):
And also like, have we talked about integration or how
this figures into stuff like Palanteer and they're doing.
Speaker 3 (52:01):
Ooh, we absolutely must. That's a great call, folks. How
about this. You can tell that we are all extremely
interested and in no small part concerned about Flock. We
have been talking off air, decided that this is actually
going to be a two part series, just like Peter
Teel Pallenteer and the anti Christ. So we'll be back
(52:23):
with part two of the Flock episode, now the Flock series,
assuming we don't get hot in the meantime. But in
that meantime, we would love to hear from you. Please
give us, give us a shout on the lines. You
can always call us on a phone, you can always
send us an email, you can do.
Speaker 5 (52:40):
All those things. And you can also join us on
Version voyages.
Speaker 2 (52:44):
What's true? What does that mean?
Speaker 4 (52:46):
No whole thing that's boat related, a maritime adventure at sea,
and I know that's redundant with us, the stuff they
don't want you to know, boys, along with our pals
Sam and Annie from Stuff Mom Never told You, and
the real headliners Josh and Chuck from Stuff should know
it's going to be a good time. Check out Virgin
voyages dot com to book your cabin today. It leaves
off from New York City and goes to Bermuda sometime
(53:09):
in early October. I'm only I'm bad at dates, guys.
Speaker 2 (53:12):
With the second to the fifth, no to the seventh, seventh, Yes, yes,
now I'm remembering. I feel like we did this before.
I'm having flashes of some some kind of mirrored hallway. Guys,
that we walked down at some point that was crazy.
It was almost like finding a secret place within the ship.
Speaker 5 (53:33):
A lot of those little secret passageways on the Valiant Lady.
It's a good time. We're not just saying that we was.
Speaker 4 (53:39):
I think all of our first cruise and definitely did
not personally consider myself a cruise boy, but I sure
do now, So do join us.
Speaker 5 (53:47):
It'll be a good time.
Speaker 4 (53:47):
We'll be hanging, we'll be doing shows all the things,
and as far as other things and other ways to
reach out to us. Virtually you can do so by
checking out the handle conspiracy Stuff or Conspiracy Stuff Show,
depending on which social media plase platform you prefer.
Speaker 2 (54:01):
Oh hey, you can call us. Our number is one
eight three three STDWYTK. Give yourself a cool nickname and
let us know if we can use your name and
message on the air. If you want to send us
an email, you can do that too.
Speaker 3 (54:13):
We are the entities that read each piece of correspondence
we receive. Be well aware, yet I'm afraid sometimes the
void writes back. If you work with flock, or if
you've used a flock database, let us know conspiracy at
iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (54:47):
Stuff They Don't Want You to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
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learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Hello, what are you doing? Welcome back to the show.
My name is Matt, my name is Noel.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
They call me Ben. I'm just letting you check out
the sick hat folks. We're joined as always with our
super producer Dylan to Tennessee pal fake and most importantly,
you are you. You are here. That makes this the
stuff they don't want you to know. This episode has
been a long time coming. Let's start this way. Guys,
(00:52):
when's the last time you blocked a camera at your
local stoplight?
Speaker 4 (00:56):
You know, I think guys just stopped looking a long
time ago. I just assumption of that assumption of non
surveillance evaporated from me long ago.
Speaker 5 (01:05):
I'm not saying it's a good thing or a bad thing.
It just is.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
But it's a it's a real thing.
Speaker 4 (01:12):
But yeah, I just assume they're everywhere, Like you know,
getting these robotickets in the mail.
Speaker 5 (01:17):
That's not fun.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
But I'm like, I always feel like the traffics clock.
Speaker 5 (01:23):
I wasn't out in the world. I guess I did
it to myself.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Guys. You know, it's crazy how far we've come since
we started this show. When we were in awe at
the city of London and the number of CCTV cameras
that were up around that city, and how it was
it was newsworthy to talk about how many cameras were
in that one town, right.
Speaker 5 (01:43):
British murder mysteries that we were very worried.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Yeah, yeah, Well then now if you drive around here
in the suburbs where I am, guys, every single intersection,
every single school zone, every single business, like a parking
lot where there are several businesses together, like there's a
big mall near here. It is insane. And I think, remember, Ben,
do you remember when we did that thing a long
(02:08):
time ago where we asked people to count the number
of advertisements.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
They saw, Yes, the dangerous game, let's do it again camera.
I mean that's another question too, guys. Like we come
from Atlanta traffic which is somewhat legendary on the internet,
and one one thing that you might talk about with
your buddies and our fair metropolis is how close you
(02:33):
will push a yellow light before it turns red. Right,
you might be somebody like my girlfriend who always does
a little kiss to the ceiling when she pushes a
yellow But if you have you guys, ever made a
slight traffic error and then thanked your stars and garters
that the cops weren't around to see you. I mean,
(02:53):
I love the points that we're making already here because,
like you said, Noel, if we live in a law
or city, we have almost certainly been surveilled in some
way or another, in a way that doesn't require a warrant.
So take that fourth Amendment. We talked about companies like
(03:14):
shot Spotter in the past and their murky involvement with
taxpayers supported law enforcement and how they spy on you.
Check out that episode.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Yeah, and shot spot are just a reminder, right if
you don't remember that one. In particular, it's it's instead
of cameras, it's microphones that are constantly listening and attempting
to do things like differentiate between fireworks, a car crash,
and an assault.
Speaker 4 (03:39):
Right, crazy parabolic type microphones like the Kye Seepy movies.
These arrays of microphones that don't just pick up what's
immediately around them, but can pick up stuff from far
away and then try and ilgulate them and use them
to determine positions of the supposed the alleged fireworks and
or gunshots, which is a game we like to play
here in Atlanta.
Speaker 5 (04:00):
It's called fireworks or gunshots.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
Yes, it is we do. That is actually a game
that we play sometimes non consensually. Tonight we are focusing
on another iteration of something similar to shots Spotter. You've
probably heard about it if you've been on the internet
lately or live in a city. It's outfit called Flock Group.
(04:23):
They're doing business as Flock Safety and just like you know,
it's a weird, better minehoff thing because as soon as
you start paying attention, you're going to see flock cameras everywhere.
Let's get into it. Here are the facts. Okay, shout
(04:49):
out to Georgia Tech. We have to do it. It
is my alma matter as well. Flock Safety is a company,
per their website, focused on manuf factoring, deploying and operating
security hardware and software, specifically video surveillance and gunfire locators
(05:09):
like shot Spotter, and then importantly automated license plate recognition technology.
Those three things already existed before Flock became a thing.
But Flock has integrated all of this aggregate data in
a seamless, easily accessible, easily understandable way. That's all thanks
(05:31):
to three folks from Georgia Tech back in twenty seventeen,
Garrett Langley, Page Todd and this is Matt's favorite.
Speaker 5 (05:39):
Matt Fury.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
Oh yeah, they co founded flock.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
I'm looking at a picture of the three of them
right now from the Sheller College of Business website. And
do you guys ever get that thing when you look
at someone's face, you don't know anything about them necessarily,
but you can see something with their eyes is just off.
I don't get this at all with these three folks.
These look like three Georgia Tech students that I had
(06:08):
some good ideas or something or you know, like figured
something out. When I'm looking at their faces and specifically
their eyes, they just look like good people, the good lads.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
Well right, right, young chess.
Speaker 5 (06:21):
And you know I mean that, don't we know?
Speaker 4 (06:24):
This is always how it goes, or often how it goes,
where a real good idea, a stroke of genius pretty
quickly gets co opted and turned into the bad thing.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
I love their origin story, you guys, and admittedly unbiased here.
I have to be upfront about that because in the beginning,
this is a side hustle where these students the founders,
instead of going to Rocky Mountain Pizza shout out Rocky
Mountain Pizza, the founders literally got together at Langley's house
(06:54):
in his dining room and built their first cameras by hand.
The official story tells us that Langley and yes that's
his real last name, Langley and his co founders would
put these handmade cameras around the Atlanta area, around communities
in our metropolis, and their goal was always to prevent crime.
(07:16):
If you are familiar with Georgia Tech or similar institutions
like Virginia Tech or MIT, you know it's far from
unusual for students to have any number of interesting side projects.
These institutions are incubators, and these places love it. It
makes them look good when a couple of students get
(07:38):
together and have a bright idea. The rate of attrition
is super high in brainstorming, but the reality of it
is that for every nine failed attempts at a shiny
new thing, those nine failures can be justified by that
tenth attempt becoming a success.
Speaker 5 (08:00):
SAME's true places like Mit.
Speaker 4 (08:01):
And it's not for nothing that Atlanta is, i think
now by more recent metrics, considered the most surveiled city
per capita in the United States.
Speaker 5 (08:11):
It's because of the whole.
Speaker 4 (08:12):
You know, testing ground for this technology right here in
our back care, which we're gonna get.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
To and the end of course, of course, dude isn't
nowhere to think you have the idea, Hey, everybody is installing.
This is because it's twenty seventeen when Flock is founded, right,
they we're seeing all of these ring cameras go up
on people's homes and all these other corporations you know
that have their own version of cameras and security that
(08:37):
is just home personal home security. They're seeing that happen.
But they want to build something that specifically will protect
a neighborhood, right, not individual homes, but the neighborhood as
a grid of human beings that live together in a community.
And you you have these ideas, you begin, you know,
getting twenty five thousand dollars from a neighborhood's hoa to
(09:00):
install cameras, and you start doing this whole thing. But
then what you're if you really think about it. I imagine
the movie Get Out and that that feeling of driving
into a suburban neighborhood and driving around and realizing, wait,
like I'm maybe I'm not supposed to be here, and
also I think I'm being watched. We'll get into it,
(09:23):
but just the thought that every came, every car that
goes into a neighborhood now that has one of these
systems set up is being surveilled as though they're an
intruder or an outsider or you know other that shouldn't be.
Speaker 4 (09:35):
For sure, But it also goes much bigger and beyond that,
and that now the intent of protecting one little region
or one little you know, community then gets plugged into
this massive system outside of the original intent. So you
can sell this idea as safety, you know, for your community.
(09:56):
Let's keep our neighborhoods, keep our streets safe, and then
before you know it, it's all run amuck and you're
part of this mass surveillance state.
Speaker 3 (10:03):
Yeah. I oh, that is excellent foreshadowing, Noel, We also know, Okay,
there's a pivotal watershed moment for Flock. It starts as
a side project, right where three kids who are very
smart we're doing cool stuff. But in a conversation on
a podcast with the Atlanta Business Chronicle, the CEO of
(10:25):
Flock Langley talks about how he realized he and the
crew were onto something big when a Decab County detective
reached out personally to thank the students for their work
and they said, look, Flock has played a huge role
in helping us solve a home break in just yesterday.
(10:49):
And as soon as Langley gets this news, he calls
his cohort and he says, I can't do the quote correctly,
but he says, as we see in the doc here,
you all need to quit your jobs.
Speaker 5 (11:02):
This is what.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
We're going to spend the next decade of our lives
working on. So it's kind of like the moment where
we realized podcasting could be a career. And this, okay,
it hasn't been a decade just yet. We're recording on Friday,
June twelfth, twenty twenty six, so next year it will
have been a decade. And even in just the past
(11:27):
nine years, folks, Flock has seen breathtaking growth. By twenty
twenty four, their cameras were placed in over four thousand
separate cities, across forty two states. That same year, still
twenty twenty four, the company grew from a team of
three people to a team of well over nine hundred people.
(11:51):
I don't have enough fingies to show you how many
nine hundred is unless I get a bunch of people
hanging out here. So the next year's twenty twenty five,
Flock has raised nine hundred and fifty million dollars in
venture funding, along with a total seven point five billion
(12:12):
dollar valuation on the market. There's no other way to
say it. Business is booming. Maybe we talked about the
statistics and the growth a little bit more, Let's do
it again.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
You have to understand, first of all, that Flock can
be a bunch of different things. It can be just
these cameras that have license plate readers that are meant
to look at vehicles and that's what they do. It
can have that sound detection system also plugged into it.
It can have several other integrated versions of itself, including
(12:47):
these things called mobile security trailers, which is like kind
of an add on thing. You can also get. Now
their drone systems set up and in order to make
any of those systems work. Depending on which ones you buy,
and you know the various different packages you can get
from Flock, you have to get access to the software
(13:10):
systems that make them function, that actually capture all of
the data from these devices, and those people end up
becoming users of any other software that you can imagine, right,
like an Adobe customer that has a certain amount that
they have to pay every month to have access to
that thing, and then know that they have one hundred
(13:30):
and forty thousand current subscribers at least that's according to Flock.
So if you're talking about booming business, you've got one
hundred and forty thousand subscribers to these systems, right to
the software. And then you have to understand that buying
each piece of equipment, we're talking about hundreds and thousands,
(13:52):
if not tens of thousands, if not millions of dollars
depending on how deep you go into the Flock system.
If you get to the drones and some of the
you're in the millions of dollars. So just when we're
talking about business, good lord, they've got a lot going.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
On, especially for a company that has officially not turned
to profit yet. They're focusing on growth, but they're.
Speaker 4 (14:14):
So sorry to hearing about companies like that that are
that are valued at like a trillion dollars but have
yet to turn a profit. I get there's calculations that
go into that kind of stuff that are deeper than
I understand.
Speaker 5 (14:26):
But I also think that sometimes it's bs.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
It's totally BS no ed. That's part of why I
love it. I find if it. If it, if this
strange religion we call the economy was not hurting so
many people, I would find it endearing because think of
a company startup as a kid and you're like, oh,
my little guy, you know what. I know, you're not
(14:51):
making money with your lemonade stand yet, but you look
like a seven point five billion dollar kiddo to me.
Speaker 4 (14:58):
Well, and not to derail us, but I mean whole
SpaceX ipo, Like there's this whole I mean, we should
talk about that separately.
Speaker 5 (15:04):
But the way they've been.
Speaker 4 (15:06):
Able to circumvent rules and get it immediately added to
like these bundled stocks that go into people's four oh
one k's, so basically you're like forced.
Speaker 5 (15:15):
To own their stock whether you want to write not.
That's wild. So I'm sorry, just being like the stock market,
what's up with that?
Speaker 3 (15:23):
This SpaceX episode, stock Market episode. We've got to do those.
We we also know, you know, Flock wasn't the first
to market with any necessarily unique technology, right. The big
thing is the AI, the machine learning, the integration of
existing tech. And there are other businesses in this space.
(15:46):
One of the biggest ones, the coke to the PEPSI Flock,
would be the multi billion dollar police tech giant Axon Enterprise.
Look them up and have some fun. But like, by oh, okay,
we're in twenty twenty four, right, so we're going to
twenty twenty five. And by last year, Flock was operating
(16:09):
in over five thousand I think it's six thousand now
probably more cities, towns, and communities across forty nine of
the fifty US states. In case you, like us, are wondering, hey,
what's that one weird holdout, It is predictably Alaska for
(16:30):
a number of reasons that we don't have to get into.
Speaker 5 (16:33):
But you guys know what Alaska's is very grizzled and setting.
Speaker 3 (16:36):
Their ways, you know, and very very privacy oriented.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
The company says five thousand law enforcement agencies. Think about that,
five thousand law enforcement agents, and.
Speaker 5 (16:50):
I know we're going to get more into the nuts
and bolts of it.
Speaker 4 (16:53):
But how many of those five thousand law enforcement agencies
can just dip into the system and get things a
gander whenever they feel like it.
Speaker 3 (17:02):
Pretty much all of them, if they pay their if
they pay their fees.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
And maybe stock their exes. As we talked about on strength, that.
Speaker 5 (17:09):
Is the thing that would happen reasonably.
Speaker 3 (17:12):
Oh surely not. But we can say for the most part,
with actually with few but growing exceptions, law enforcement loves Flock.
It makes it easier to track people even if they're
not criminals. Flock's innovations go way past our basic machine
learning or data vacuuming, which we all know from you know,
(17:35):
Edward Snowden and PRISM and the nssay. Their marketing strategy
is also genius because they don't just market to Johnny Law.
They also work with hoa's that can afford them. They
work with local civilian community organizations, and Flock does have
(17:55):
We're being totally objective, Flock does have a lot of
stuff to brag about. There is no denying that their services,
which a get our for profit, have genuinely helped solve
and even prevent primes. Break ins, robberies, auto theft, especially
acts of domestic violence, assault, and even murders. So if
(18:17):
we if we look at the bright side of the statistics, guys,
flock doesn't just feel like a good move for public safety.
It feels like a combination of technology that was genuinely inevitable.
If it wasn't this specific dream team at Georgia Tech,
it would have been somebody. And honestly, other countries are
(18:40):
streets ahead, as they'd say on community with this China
mostly of.
Speaker 4 (18:44):
Course, Yeah, no, I can only imagine, and that makes
perfect sense, Ben, But it's one of those things where
it's like been predicted in sci fi for ages and
more recently, most recently.
Speaker 5 (18:55):
Probably in the Dark Night with this whole we can't
allow this technology.
Speaker 4 (19:01):
It shouldn't exist, you know, turning every the cell phone
in the world into a you know, reverse listening device.
Speaker 3 (19:08):
And this is beautiful, unethical, dangerous. You've turned every cellphone
and Gotham into a.
Speaker 5 (19:13):
Like this genius.
Speaker 4 (19:14):
And there's part of me, and I'm sure there's part
of a lot of people that hear those crime statistics
and think about the good uses for this kind of technology,
and I'm like, Okay, I could be on board with that.
I already don't really have any you know, illusions of
privacy when I leave my home and I'm not doing
anything wrong.
Speaker 5 (19:32):
But then you start to think.
Speaker 4 (19:33):
About, like, you know, all of the crackdowns on illegal immigration,
on legal immigration, on people who could be targeted using
this technology because if they haven't done anything, or this
technology getting into the hands of an oppressive regime, oppressive government.
I mean, then you start to you start to be like,
(19:53):
is it worth it? Is there a trade off?
Speaker 2 (19:56):
It's a really good point because you could see in
the like the case of a person or someone, let's
say the general that went missing, right it had if you,
yeah mcaslin, if you had these cameras set up around
where he lived at the time, and they were all
ubiquitous throughout that whole region, then you could find it, right,
(20:17):
even if he didn't want to be found, right for
reasons of personal safety perhaps or whatever. You know, we
imagine that could be. That could be really great. You
imagine the stories we've talked about in Strange News before
where neighborhoods were being broken into remember the tourism, the
crime tourism thing that was, it didn't sound. It didn't
seem real. It seemed like some kind of propaganda for
(20:39):
anti immigration, but it was actually happening, at least to
some small extent. Then it gets blown up, right, But
there is a danger because it would be great to
have those flock cameras to capture people who are doing
something terrible like that, you know, home invasions like that.
But you can so easily get in the slippery slope
on this, right, the fallacy of the slippery slope, because
(21:02):
I find myself there, I find myself going, oh God, no, no, no,
we can't do this, what are we doing? This is
gonna get so bad, This is gonna get so bad inevitably.
But I wonder if that I wonder how much of
that is me being tuned into the sci fi stuff
you're talking about their Nola, the visions of this the weel.
Speaker 4 (21:21):
And just tuned into the corruptibility of people in power,
and just knowing that when something like this exists, even
if there is a really you know, benevolent use of it,
that could be a great benefit to society.
Speaker 5 (21:34):
There's always going to be that.
Speaker 4 (21:37):
But we got to have more. We got how can
we make that, how can we turn ourselves into gods
with this power.
Speaker 3 (21:43):
Yeah. This is the country that looked at cocaine and
said I need a little more pen. This is the
country that looked at conventional munitions and said, what if
we could build a bomb that could blow up the
flop everything? Right? Yeah, like, let's let Syner size everything.
Flock is supersizing surveillance. I didn't have the notes, but
(22:04):
I'm like super committed to this idea now. And we
can't be blamed, you know, like you're saying, Matt, I
think that's a universal thing. We can't be blamed for
pointing out that slippery slope. It's inevitable that something like
Flock would happen. It's also inevitable that something like Flock
is going to get a huge backlash from an increasingly
(22:26):
concerned public, a lot of controversy. But as our pal
Alfred E. Newman from Mad Magazine likes to say, what
me worry you should? You should be worried, even if
you're not Alfred E. Newman. There's so many legal battles
that are happening with Flock right now. We've talked about
it on a weekly Strange news program. The same sort
(22:49):
of legal beagles and activists and ACLU types who are
opposed to shot Spotter. They take aim at flock, and
they do it with a pretty good legal basis, especially
the Fourth Amendment. We've got to do the quote you guys,
who has the best founding father of voice today? Whose feeling?
Speaker 5 (23:11):
Jeez, let's see, I can do it.
Speaker 6 (23:15):
The right of the people to secure in their persons, houses, papers,
and affix against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated,
and no warrants shall issue but upon probable calls supported
by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to
be searched and the persons of things to be seized.
Speaker 4 (23:37):
I know that was all over the place. It went
from Colonel Sanders to you.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
Know, huge claps for the Senator and.
Speaker 4 (23:44):
The the what is it, the right honorable Rooster Senator
from Louisiana.
Speaker 3 (23:50):
There we go. Yeah, he's he's he's a real cappired
seat on that in plain English, and thank you again,
that's the perfect depiction of that. In plain English. This
means that you as a person, as a human being
in the US, who have broad rights to what we
(24:11):
call reasonable privacy. So in theory, no government or police
entity can rock up to your home and just say like, hey, Dylan,
you got a weird vibe. We're checking everything and we're
taking your computer. They have to have a reason for
seizures and searches, and that reason has to be solid
(24:32):
enough again in theory, for a court of law to
agree and issue that warrant. But where does mass surveillance
fall when it comes to the Fourth Amendment. Believe it
or not, that's something the courts are still working out,
and they're getting really weird vibed about it. Weirdly vibed
about it.
Speaker 4 (24:51):
First all I can I just say that no one
would ever clock Dylan's vibes as being off. They're impeccable
at times. You can sense good vibes from a mile away.
So Dylan, you have nothing to worry about. But that
doesn't mean that there aren't tons of other folks that
do this.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Is but have you seen his sweet ride?
Speaker 5 (25:07):
He's got a sweet ride.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
I think they might find that to be what we're
talking about. I think Dylan, because they're not even They're
not going to see Dylan, They're going to see us.
Speaker 4 (25:14):
They're gonna see a sweet ride. They're going to see
his quirky collection of bumper stickers. Even if he's riding
dirty with no license plate or the license plate obscured,
that doesn't even matter, because it can I still build
a profile based on you know, his uh what coexist stickers?
Speaker 3 (25:31):
You know, bumper damage, any slight bumper damage. Also, I
saw a I saw one of the I don't love bumper.
Speaker 5 (25:39):
Stickers and does not have a one on his.
Speaker 3 (25:42):
Ride for the record, but he's a classy guy. But
what what I gotta tell you, guys is I was
driving in a heavily surveiled area of Atlanta and I
saw the bravest Toyota Camry. They had to deflock bumper
stickers like test bumper stickers, so that every time the
(26:02):
camera got their license plate, it also got a clear
picture of some pretty harsh words for flock. And I
was like, man, you are the bravest little camera that
I have seen in three a little dumpster.
Speaker 5 (26:17):
I love that.
Speaker 4 (26:18):
Yeah, I know this maybe isn't quite the right time
to bring this up, but it's just a question that
popped into my head. Like I know, there are technologies
that exist to make your face harder to discern when
you're in public, like sort of ring light kind of
things that will sort of scramble cameras. You got to wonder, uh,
is there going to be a backlash against this technology,
and you know people will start rolling out, you know,
(26:40):
the modern equivalent of like radar detectors and things like
that that will counteract this kind of stuff.
Speaker 5 (26:46):
Well, maybe save that for the end, but.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
It's just did you know that it's technically illegal to
wear a mask, like a full face mask, if you're
driving and you're or over the age of sixteen in Georgia?
Speaker 5 (26:58):
I didn't know.
Speaker 4 (27:00):
I guess I found the hard stop. It was it
your Batman mask.
Speaker 7 (27:04):
Wearing your skeleton. It was it could obscure your peripheral
I guess. But let's argue that obscure it was a
different turf.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
I don't think that happened.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
So it did happen, but I didn't get in big trouble.
I just got a what are you doing man from
from a very friendly police officer. And we know that
the more cynical of us may recall that in the
wake of the September eleventh attacks of two thousand and one,
everything changed with the US stance on individual privacy Edward
(27:41):
Snowden proved it years and years ago. Certain government agencies
have and do routinely violate the Constitution through any number
of loopholes, legalistic parkour, quasi legal rationalizations, all these appeals
to the greater good. So FLOCK is not completely original,
(28:04):
and supporters do champion it. We've talked to people who
are proponents of FLOCK who genuinely believe this is the
this is the next sliced bread for law enforcement. So
critics are going to argue, this is, like we were
saying earlier in tonight's episode, it's one more slide into
(28:25):
an no Rwellian surveillance state. And they're going to tell
you if we don't collectively make some serious changes now,
things are going to be pretty nasty, not just in
the present moment, but for generations to come. So maybe
our question is what exactly is FLOCK doing? Why are
these criticisms growing at the same pace as the cameras.
(28:49):
We'll be right back. Here's where it gets crazy. This
guy Langley fascinating. He's he's thirty eight, right, is that correct?
He's still pretty young.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
I don't know. He looks like a baby in the photograph.
I was looking at like just a young well, I
guess it was when he was a.
Speaker 5 (29:10):
Young soft hands and everything.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
Soft feet, Yeah, soft hands and do eyes? Just a
baby play the comina. Sorry, that's been stuck. Nobody ever
will get that reference.
Speaker 3 (29:25):
Okay, thank you to the twelve of you out there,
Thanks for tuting. I think a lot of people are
getting that, and it's an ambitious reference, and Flock is ambitious.
Langley definitely is, because he said Flock's mission is to
ultimately prevent all crime ever in the United States, maybe
(29:47):
even in Alaska. But I think our question is at
what cost? You know, we talked about the license plate thing,
we teased a court case. Can we talk about the
twenty twenty four Virginia case. Why do I say Virginia
like that? I think Rooster got my head.
Speaker 5 (30:05):
Yeah, you know, for Rudy Giuliani.
Speaker 4 (30:09):
Sorry, it's sound more like a New New Yorker would
say Virginia. I don't know why I evoked the name
of Rudy Giuliani. In my mind, he's just the quinn
essential New York accent guy.
Speaker 5 (30:20):
But he's canceled, probably because yeah, yeah he was, he
was a mayor.
Speaker 4 (30:24):
I know what it was it was The dough Boys
did an episode about a fast food brand, I don't
know what it was, Firehouse Subs, and talked about how
Rudy Giuliani used to be considered Americas mayor and then
you know he kind of backslid from there.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
Hey, and that was right after the Patriot Act.
Speaker 5 (30:39):
That's exactly right.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
He becomes exactly what the mayor.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
And in June of twenty twenty four, still reeling from
the influence of the Patriot Act, a judge in Virginia's
Circuit Court in Norfolk, Virginia, Norfolk, how do New Yorkers say.
Speaker 5 (30:57):
I don't know, but the but the southern gentleman would
say no, So I think you.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
There, we got yeah, yeah, put a w on.
Speaker 5 (31:03):
I don't know. New Yorkers never even talk about Norfolk. Frankly,
it's potentially Yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
So this judge made a pretty pretty groundbreaking ruling and said, look,
if you're in Norfolk, Virginia, flock, you're one hundred and
seventy two automated license plate readers or ALPRs. They do
count as a search under the Fourth Amendment. They cannot
(31:31):
be used as evidence in a criminal case. If you
collect all that stuff without a warrant. They said, these
are basically like tracking devices.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
Which is weird though, right because if you if you
aren't going to use if you aren't going to use
it as evidence in a case, you can still use
it as real time tracking, right, So you can apprehend
someone using the thing, and then you just it's it's
(32:00):
interesting that difference between being able to use that image
of that car in a location where a crime was committed.
You can't use that, but you can use this thing
to go pick that person up and then generate your
you know, different evidence somehow or find probable causes.
Speaker 4 (32:18):
You can probably if anyone's like, you know, seeing the
excellent HBO series the wire, you know what a legal
pain in the butt it was for them to get
that wire up, aka, you know, bug people's phones and
listen in and there are all kinds of rules around
how long you can listen and how much you can record,
all these very specific things stuff like this. When you
look at it the way you're describing it, Matt, as
(32:39):
a tracking devices, it throws all that stuff out the window,
because it's another example of technology outpacing some pretty antiquated
laws and regulations and procedures that are on the books
and have been for a long time.
Speaker 5 (32:54):
Now, this stuff doesn't even apply anymore. A wire that's
like quaint.
Speaker 3 (32:58):
Yeah, think about it this way, folks. Even if you
are one of the few Americans who doesn't have a
cell phone, right, and you are smart enough to take
care of a car that doesn't have a bunch of
Big Brother stuff in it, no GPS, even without your smartphone,
driving around in your old Zuzu or whatever, the proliferation
(33:20):
and ubiquity of flock camera cities renders all your privacy
precautions irrelevant and moot. You know, anybody with the right
access to flock, not just law enforcement, right that person
you don't like at your hoa, for instance, They can
vicariously follow your path around town from point A to
(33:40):
point Z, just like those old family Circus comic strip maps.
If we want to see how it really works, I
think we got to go to Forbes. There's a journalist
named Thomas Brewster who last year wrote an excellent article
about how this network of more than eighty thousand AI
(34:01):
powered cameras work together.
Speaker 5 (34:04):
Oh that's right.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
We got to mention that the cities also speak to
each other. Right, So the flock cameras in Atlanta can
also pull data from the flock cameras in Baltimore. It's
it's one ring to rule them all. So our journalist
Brewster puts us in the scene immediately. He is talking
(34:25):
about the experience of a police lieutenant in Dunwoodye, which
is a community a little bit north of Atlanta proper.
And this lieutenant, Tim Fect, is responding to a nine
to one one call about a shoplifter at a mall nearby,
and as the journalist is observing, the lieutenant launches a
(34:46):
drone used by Flock, a Chinese manufactured drone from a
company called Dji. It comes off the big one. Yeah,
that's the big Boy, and it comes off from the
station's roof. And so in real time, just like in
the dark night, this lieutenant is able to zoom in
with the drone on individuals in the area, and we
(35:09):
don't know which one is the shoplifter. So he gets
a shot of a guy who's just like checking his phone,
you know, laying octurtle or something, and then he zooms
in on a bunch of people who are just standing
around waiting for the next Marta train. And if you've
been through Marta, you know they were waiting for a while. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (35:29):
Not the most efficient public transit system. But they're working
on it, guys.
Speaker 5 (35:33):
They're working on it.
Speaker 3 (35:33):
They're working on it, guys.
Speaker 2 (35:35):
But also beware of all the crime on Marta right now,
according to the the City of Atlanta.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
Right, Yeah, what better rationale for Are there flock cameras
in being deployed in subway stations for example? Yes, because that.
Speaker 5 (35:52):
Seems like a whole other level of it.
Speaker 4 (35:55):
Like, I guess we're thinking of it mainly in terms
of vehicle tracking, but once you you know, drilled down
another layer literally underground, you start to be able to
track movement of people. I mean in cities where cars
are less of a prominent form of transportation than say Atlanta,
it's more about tracking people on foot or on bicycles.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
Well let's let's guys. The police officer launched a drone
in Dunwoodie to go check out people near a Marta station.
This is this is a part of Flock's first drone
as first responder program, Right, that's what we're talking about.
Speaker 3 (36:36):
Yeah. Yeah, and it's not the drone alone. It's like
how you know, aircraft carrier never travels by itself. It's
a stew of different technologies. Right, he's got the camera feeds,
he's got other cameras coming in, he's got that gunshot
detection data. He's got a bunch of maps that show
(36:56):
you in real time where all the other police vehicles
are in area. And then AI is transcribing every nine.
Speaker 4 (37:05):
Is it weird that I keep getting an image in
my head of the ravens that act as harbingers and
sort of spies for the Night King and Game of Thrones,
Like I just that's what I'm picturing here.
Speaker 5 (37:19):
It's becoming very sinister the more we dig into this.
Speaker 3 (37:23):
They didn't even find the shoplifter, by the way, guys, spoiler.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
Wow, whoops. But just really really picture that in your mind.
A nine to one one call goes in, right, you say,
where the caller says, I am near this intersection and
this is happening, and that moment the thing we just
described where a drone goes off the roof of a
local station nearby. The drone gets their way before any
(37:47):
other first responders, and he's just looking around trying to
find what's like, what's going on? Maybe the description of
a vehicle or a person the way we're talking about here.
That's I mean amazing. Maybe you catch somebody way easier
that way, somebody who did something truly terrible or violent,
you know, or depraved. But also there's just drones coming
(38:13):
out now going who are you, m you check out?
This vehicle's weird?
Speaker 3 (38:20):
You got any games on your phone? Right? That's what
they're doing. And also an important point there, Matt. They're
not expunging the data they collect, so they didn't find
the shoplifter in this case at the time the article
was written. But Flock doesn't throw anything away. They use
every part of the Orwellian buffalo.
Speaker 2 (38:42):
Yeah, oh my god, let me pull off this just
to do an article with an article Ben from CBS
News June ninth. It's talking about a county sheriff department
that is looking at these Flock drones and they got
the full flop safety show off the drones kind of thing,
(39:03):
like here, we're gonna put on a clinic and show
you exactly what's gonna happen. And they're saying that the
call comes in, the pilot, who is a part of
the police department, drops a pin on a map. The
drone flies there and then is live streaming to other
first responders who are on their way to the scene
(39:24):
and are sitting back at the department watching everything go down.
They can fly sixty miles per hour and travel up
to four miles from their starting point.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
It is literally objectively amazing and it could save lives.
You know, the folks cited in the Forbes article from Dunwoodie,
they are all big fans, true believers in Flock, and
they don't hesitate to name multiple examples of how Flock
(39:55):
made a real difference in fighting prime. They said, Look,
we caught Yang that was knocking off pharmacies and stealing
from ATMs across the East coast. Flock nailed one of
their getaway vehicles. We identified a criminal via drone because
we saw a tattoo on his neck, and we apprehended
(40:18):
him before he could commit a crime. We found a
woman who pulled a gun on her neighbor. They're also
pre crime, right we're talking about sci fi. Internally, law
enforcement is a big fan of Flock. They're grateful for
its ability to monitor those large public gatherings. We talked
(40:38):
about the big speeches, the parades, the protest they are
hoping that flock can help the law identify bad actors
before they take that shot, or stab that child, or
detonate that bob. It's already been as I think we
can all admit, it's already been grossly misused like every
(40:58):
other government database.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
Well yeah, or before that person drains the water from
the data center. The thing that I'm worried about, guys,
is that the things these are going to protect are
generally massive corporate interests, right, the corporations that have the
big profits. And that's why the It's not why the
law enforcement agency exists. You can argue the law enforcement
(41:24):
agency exists to protect the public.
Speaker 3 (41:27):
My only the property.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
My only worry is that when it is heavily aimed
toward defending the corporate interests and the profits, the thing
it's it is defending against will be us, the human beings,
the public, the ones who are trying to stop the
thing from happening because it's become too big and too dangerous.
(41:53):
But now you've got these systems, they can track you
everywhere here what you're saying, in any part of the city,
no matter which public park you go to, to try
and have that quick little meeting, we kind of drain
the water from the data centers. That can't happen anymore
without everybody ending up in a detention center somewhere.
Speaker 3 (42:13):
Right, and we're still using the euphemism detention center. History
will not look kindly on that one. We got to
talk a little bit about how easy this is to
deploy the nuts and bolts. I know, we've got a
lot of avy gear heads in the crowd. The license
plate reader camera from flock depend on the model you get,
(42:36):
it's going to run you between three thousand to thirty
five hundred dollars a pop, which is expensive for an individual,
but not necessarily expensive for a department, depending on how
much taxpayer money they get. Oh and then you got
to get flock os. How about we pause for a
word from our sponsors and we'll be right back. So
(43:01):
this is another thing we talked about ownership, right, you
kind of don't really own it because it's like, oh gosh,
what's that exercise thing that you have to have? Is
it starts with a pat you go, please still let
(43:24):
George keep the whole face from the love of God.
Speaker 2 (43:27):
Complete paralysis of human agency.
Speaker 3 (43:31):
I mean, that's the thing, right, Like your peloton is
most effective when you also have that subscription fee. Correct.
The flock stuff is a similar system. You've got to
have flock os. This makes all the data that flock
hoovers up accessible via not just a browser, but a
(43:52):
mobile app, which seems kind of casual to me for
all that information. Like you're hanging out with someone and
they have flock Os, they have the app on their phone,
I would judge them, would you? Would you trust well
somebody who had that on their phone.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
Well, it's weird again, it's so normalized. I have an
app on my phone that's a security camera app. We
talked about a couple episodes ago, guys from my place
where I live, And it feels weird opening it up
and looking around and I can see portions of my
you know, the street right outside my house, and the
neighbors cars when they come and go, and some of
(44:30):
my neighbors activities in the yard. That makes me feel
really weird and uncomfortable. But it's aimed in a way
that is going to protect my home or catch somebody
if something happens here. And then you just imagine that
these officers through flock Os, through things like they have
a tool they have called free Form that lets you
it's like an AI tool like any of these other ones.
You just you give it a prompt, a description of
(44:52):
a person in a place, a thing, a time, anything,
and it's just like, here's everything. It's just especially if
you put in let's say an ex's license plate number again,
which officers have been caught doing.
Speaker 3 (45:06):
Like yalla, right, yeah it.
Speaker 2 (45:11):
Sorry, it's very troublesome.
Speaker 3 (45:13):
It is. Everybody who is tuning in should be very worried,
especially you know, if the Orwellian stuff doesn't bag your badgers. Folks,
please consider this is taxpayer money. That police department in Dunwoody,
they pay five hundred thousand dollars a year for their
specific deal. They got one hundred and five cameras, they
(45:36):
got the drone, they got the gunshot detectors. Most importantly,
they've got that OS coordinating all of it.
Speaker 2 (45:43):
Dude, can we ben Did you find that Omnia list
of prices? Oh?
Speaker 3 (45:49):
Oh yeah, we got to get into that. Yeah yeah, yeah, I.
Speaker 2 (45:52):
Kick it just for everybody out there. Search it's a
little weird Omnia Omnia Flock Safety price list and you
will find I found it on the web, a giant
document well, it's several pages long, and it has a
(46:12):
price list for every individual thing that might end up
on like a transaction with flock. If you're a police department,
you're gonna get these kinds of things on there, like
a condor professional services charge, which would come out to
only seven hundred and fifty bucks. But when you're talking
about the price, what did you say been five hundred
thousand dollars for the enterprise access or whatever it is?
Speaker 3 (46:35):
Yeah, per year? Yeah, yeah, yeah, per anum.
Speaker 2 (46:37):
Dude, you can get a federal subscription to flock os
and it only costs you four million dollars.
Speaker 3 (46:45):
Guys, what are we doing? Is today the day? Can
we I sound like a guy saying should we all
get fries for the table if I get some flock
or you guys gonna have some flock too?
Speaker 2 (46:55):
I think we should Look. If I get flock, you're
gonna have to get flock because some of the people
in my flock zone might get into your You have.
Speaker 5 (47:02):
To speak it out of my head.
Speaker 4 (47:04):
I can't stop thinking about the eighties banded flock of Seagulls.
I just have to put it out there so stop
relentlessly running through my skull.
Speaker 2 (47:13):
What if what if we required by law every flock
piece of equipment had to make seagull sell so you
would always know what if.
Speaker 4 (47:22):
We ran, we ran so far away where the flock
cameras can't find us.
Speaker 2 (47:28):
Hey, good luck.
Speaker 5 (47:30):
We couldn't.
Speaker 4 (47:30):
We couldn't get away as the problem from the flock
cameras because they're everywhere.
Speaker 3 (47:34):
Never Oh and we should say that too. Yeah, Flock
has one of those things that's pretty common in tech startups.
They've got the marketing on brands who hurt us describe
different products as like the condor cameras. They they name
all that stuff after birds.
Speaker 4 (47:51):
Yeah, even is there the night King image that's partially Yeah,
it's happening.
Speaker 3 (47:59):
The Flock is their gunshot detector. It's their answer to
shot spotters, so it records audio and these little five
second clips. It uses AI to play Atlanta's favorite game,
fireworks or firearms, and then it will alert police. These
we should mention these things are all usually going to
(48:21):
be solar powered with rechargeable batteries, so they don't have
to be plugged into the utility grid's It's another small
but pretty fascinating innovation, and it.
Speaker 2 (48:33):
Is why is fully wireless, right, so like, yeah, even
the data goes without any wires.
Speaker 3 (48:39):
Yeah, cellular networks right to centralized servers. Yeah, and this
is not your typical, Like, these cameras are not your
typical grab that license plate and send that guy a
ticket in the mail kind of cameras. They are used
for surveillance and criminal investigation. The two biggest cameras are
(49:00):
going to hear about in your neck of the global
Woods are going to be the falcon and the Sparrows.
So they photograph the butt of your car. They look
at the rear of your car, and they get the
license plate. And if you got a couple of like
edgy bumper stickers, they'll get that too. But they also
(49:20):
snag what we mentioned earlier, a vehicle fingerprint. This is
super loose and murky. So if you've got a bad
paint job on your car that makes it look unique,
they got youa If your Honda Civic still has that
flame painting you did on the side from the nineties,
(49:41):
then they've got that. They look at the dents, like
we were saying, they look at temporary plates. They can
do this very well. Even if a car is traveling
one hundred miles an hour, seventy five feet away.
Speaker 4 (49:54):
See, and it makes me think back again to how
quaint it used to be. Remember, there's a plot point
and I think the movie where Brad Pitt's character has
to like lean on an old Palavis from the FBI
or something like that to pull library records for a
particular or maybe it was the you know, Morgan Freeman's
character pull public library records of Dante's Inferno and various
(50:17):
types of books, and that's what leads them to the
dude's apartment. But it's a big deal because it was
totally illegal what they did, and they can't really have
a reason to show up at the guy's place. Now,
it just seems like all that stuff is just a
thing of the past.
Speaker 3 (50:30):
You know. Yeah, because of the integration. Again, that's the
best innovation because when when Flock clocks you, you get
flocked vehicle. When you get flock clocked, that's perfect. When
you get flock clocked, it doesn't matter if you're breaking
a law. It instantly goes to Flock's database, and then
that goes to something called the NCIC, the National Crime
(50:53):
Information Center, which is the bad Boy List, and then
it also goes to state or local bad boy list
any car reported stolen or anything that the local authorities,
for whatever reason say is of interest to them. And
it could be as specific as a make, model, even
(51:15):
a vend number, license plate number. It could also be
as general as a person who looks like this is
driving a blue van. I mean it's dangerous.
Speaker 2 (51:27):
Flock clock and two smoking cameras.
Speaker 3 (51:29):
Sorry, there we go, perfect, perfect, I mean it's it's
it's clever. But they've also got these condor cameras that
can pan, tilt and zoom you get a better picture
of somebody's face like very up like very I'm not
gonna messing with the focus, very up put.
Speaker 2 (51:48):
Oh god, that's the London CCTV stuff that I've seen
in all those.
Speaker 4 (51:53):
And also like, have we talked about integration or how
this figures into stuff like Palanteer and they're doing.
Speaker 3 (52:01):
Ooh, we absolutely must. That's a great call, folks. How
about this. You can tell that we are all extremely
interested and in no small part concerned about Flock. We
have been talking off air, decided that this is actually
going to be a two part series, just like Peter
Teel Pallenteer and the anti Christ. So we'll be back
(52:23):
with part two of the Flock episode, now the Flock series,
assuming we don't get hot in the meantime. But in
that meantime, we would love to hear from you. Please
give us, give us a shout on the lines. You
can always call us on a phone, you can always
send us an email, you can do.
Speaker 5 (52:40):
All those things. And you can also join us on
Version voyages.
Speaker 2 (52:44):
What's true? What does that mean?
Speaker 4 (52:46):
No whole thing that's boat related, a maritime adventure at sea,
and I know that's redundant with us, the stuff they
don't want you to know, boys, along with our pals
Sam and Annie from Stuff Mom Never told You, and
the real headliners Josh and Chuck from Stuff should know
it's going to be a good time. Check out Virgin
voyages dot com to book your cabin today. It leaves
off from New York City and goes to Bermuda sometime
(53:09):
in early October. I'm only I'm bad at dates, guys.
Speaker 2 (53:12):
With the second to the fifth, no to the seventh, seventh, Yes, yes,
now I'm remembering. I feel like we did this before.
I'm having flashes of some some kind of mirrored hallway. Guys,
that we walked down at some point that was crazy.
It was almost like finding a secret place within the ship.
Speaker 5 (53:33):
A lot of those little secret passageways on the Valiant Lady.
It's a good time. We're not just saying that we was.
Speaker 4 (53:39):
I think all of our first cruise and definitely did
not personally consider myself a cruise boy, but I sure
do now, So do join us.
Speaker 5 (53:47):
It'll be a good time.
Speaker 4 (53:47):
We'll be hanging, we'll be doing shows all the things,
and as far as other things and other ways to
reach out to us. Virtually you can do so by
checking out the handle conspiracy Stuff or Conspiracy Stuff Show,
depending on which social media plase platform you prefer.
Speaker 2 (54:01):
Oh hey, you can call us. Our number is one
eight three three STDWYTK. Give yourself a cool nickname and
let us know if we can use your name and
message on the air. If you want to send us
an email, you can do that too.
Speaker 3 (54:13):
We are the entities that read each piece of correspondence
we receive. Be well aware, yet I'm afraid sometimes the
void writes back. If you work with flock, or if
you've used a flock database, let us know conspiracy at
iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (54:47):
Stuff They Don't Want You to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
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Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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