Latest / Art of the Question / The Dystopian Rise of Flock Cameras - Prof. Steven Keener - #65

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The Dystopian Rise of Flock Cameras - Prof. Steven Keener - #65 · Art of the Question

• Julius Moorman: Steven, thank you so much for coming on the show. You are an assistant professor in criminology at the Christopher Newport University, and you're actually one of the few people that has done extensive research into flock cameras, which is the topic of our discussion today. We're going to learn what they are, what happens with all the data they are collecting, and we're trying to understand where this is all going. So thank you so much for taking the time to discuss it because I think it's a very, very important topic that me and probably many other people want to learn more about. So I think a logical start would be to kind of understand what these cameras are. We hear this term being thrown around everywhere, but I believe Flock is a company, right? Correct. Yeah. So T the best way to refer to these are automatic license plate reader cameras, so ALPRs. and Flock. The reason they're most commonly known as Flock cameras is because Flock is the company that dominates in this space. but they are not the only one. Like Motorola and Axon also are pretty big players. In fact, where I'm at in Virginia in the US, we're seeing quite a few localities that are doing some performative things where they're canceling their flock contracts, but they're switching the vendors to a different company like Axon. So they're still doing the same form of surveillance. It's just diff with a different private company. Yeah. So we're not using flaw cameras anymore, but then still they're using the same technology. It's similar to Tupperware, right? So we use Tupperware for a certain piece of plastic. there's different brands who make top Tupperware because it's the most popular one we just end up using the word t Tupperware which started out as a brand. Yep, exactly. Yeah. So can you take me back into these types of cameras? Because Flock is a company, I believe they were founded in 2017 or something. but this is presumably not the first time that the US was deploying similar cameras like this, even though probably as technology advances, they get more and more sophisticated. And now with AI in the picture, the things that they record can be analyzed in much more intrusive ways than was previously possible. Yeah, I mean, just in general in the US, post 911 is where we really see the acceleration of the surveillance state as we know it. And and this particular form of surveillance, these automatic light automated license play reader cameras, while Flock was founded in 2017, they existed before then. Like, for example, like I do a lot of public talks on this. And one of the things that comes up quite often in these talks is, well, this is something that's cutting across the political spectrum here in the U.S. people on the left, the right, the middle part of the, you know, the political spectrum are have a lot of issues with these cameras or are calling for outright bans. And one one of the times that actually first like kind of showed its showed up was in 2008. so that was when President Obama was running for for the office of president. And these cameras were being used to track people going to Sarah Palin rallies and then it was used to track people going to President Obama's inauguration. So this technology goes back, you know, as far as then. However, like these cameras they existed then, but they didn't exist at the rate in which they do today. And so there are far more of these cameras. In fact Like if you go to like I'm in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia, we're across the bridge from Norfolk, Virginia, which is a uniquely highly surveilled city where driving around that city at any time, you're looking at 150 plus of these cameras that are just publicly owned. And that doesn't include those that are privately owned by businesses like Home Depots and Lowe's and small businesses. but where the reason Flock became the dominant company in the space. It's really around pandemic times. And so when they were founded, they largely focused their advertisement or their their business was largely focused on selling to like homeowners' associations, private businesses like your Home Depots and Lowe's. And during the pandemic, they pivoted to really focus on local police. And the one of the reasons they did that was here in the US, when the world shut down for the pandemic. Congress passes the American Rescue Plan Act, otherwise known as ARPA. And this was stimulus funding. So it was a significant amount of funding that came from the federal government and public entities like us at universities, as well as local police, local governments got money that it was non-renewable and it had to be used within a certain timeframe. And so that's where a company like Flock gets creative and says, Well, all of a sudden, local police has money they need to spend. What if we start targeting the like low police departments to sell our tech? And that's what they did. And that's really when they go from being kind of just one of these surveillance companies in the ALPR space to being the dominant company. So 2017 there found it, but the proliferation at the as we know it today is really starting during the pandemic. Right. And when we are talking about ALPR. ALPR. Automatic license plate reading, yeah, that's correct. ALPR technology. So that seems to imply that it's it's mainly tracking cars. So it's not just people that are walking down the street, for example. So these particular cameras, yes. so the way this works is if you drive by one of the cameras, it's your license plate initiates a series of images that are taken. and so you drive by these the images are taken. shortly after within seconds, those images are then sent to a database that is so if you're a if you're a city using flock cameras, that data is immediately sent to the flock database that's accessible to your local police department. it also is timestamped, it's geolocated, but something that makes this data set particularly different from previous forms of surveillance here. Is this data is shared widely across departments. So it doesn't just stay within that local department. Your local police department can share it across the state, across the country. and this is what we can get into this later, but that's been like where a lot of abuses have happened. It's happened because of how expansive this data is being shared. The other part of this is in the US, a lot of big cities have real time crime centers now. And these real time crime centers are, if you go into one Like Cop City in Atlanta got really famous. But essentially what they're doing is they're they're doing a lot of things in these spaces, but one thing they're doing is they're integrating all the surveillance footage from their city into one place. And this includes those flock images. It also like in some cities with like a good example would be in Denver. So Denver you've got you've got ALPR cameras. You also have a lot of cameras around like sports stadiums. They're sharing into this day, they're sharing into that real-time crime center, like CCTVs, red light cameras, all of that is being sent. And so at that point, you have really, at any given time, a real-time look at at your whole city. but one thing it's important to note, well, two things are important to note. I I've had a lot of advocacy meetings over the last I would say six to ten months. and a lot of meetings with local officials, police leaders on this tech. And I heard at one of these meetings, I heard this referred to as, well, this is just a boring, this is a boring list of license plates. Why do you all care about this so much? And that's not what this is, because when those images are taken, it's not just your license plate that's captured, it's the make and model of your car, it's the color of your car. It's your bumper stickers, your additions, if you have dents. And the reason that's really important is you can search within the database. You don't just have to have somebody's license plate to search. You could search for like blue sedan with dents, or you can search for bumper stickers, right? And like I always say this a lot in our talks. Like, think about what a bumper sticker tells, you know, somebody about who we are. Like it can give a it can give pretty some intimate views into. our faith into our politics, the sports scenes we root for that make us sad every week. Right. Like all of that is captured in this data. and the other thing that's really important is well, actually before I move on from that, I've so I've seen a number of these pictures that are taken by these cameras. And you'll often hear from the companies or police, like, well, you know, it's not capturing people. But in reality, these cam these images during the day, you can tell like, there's Two people in that car, you can make assumptions about race. And so like that I yes, while it's not a high definition look at their face, you can clearly start to make assumptions on who's in the vehicle. The other thing we need to add is while these ALPRs are tracking vehicles, companies like Flock are have other surveillance cameras now that also track people and they track people walking. like somebody recently in the cybersecurity space is like, yeah, the tech is good enough where it can recognize your gait when you're walking and know that it's you. And in cities like Newper News, where I'm at, these co we now have first responder drones from companies like Flock. And so these drones are flying around and they are providing, you know, real time live footage of wherever they're observing. and so all of that is starting like that is where we're heading. We can talk about that more, but like The license plate reader cameras are just the start of this. Like there is much more that's coming or is already here. Yeah, and that's what's so interesting or or scary, even about this whole thing, right? Because I'm sure you're familiar with Snowden's work about X-Key Score, how X Keyscore feeds into the systems of of Pellantir, presumably. And it's not just about the single data. It's about the entire image that a government can create about a specific person. It's just the bank entries, it's just the phone records, it's just where you go with your car. But combining all of that gives you a really sophisticated picture about everything, basically. And you hear a lot, and this argument kind of frustrates me sometimes when I hear it, because you hear people say, Yeah, I'm not a criminal. I've I've nothing to hide. But I think that's kind of a naive point of view. And I mean, of course, I'm not a criminal either, but I think the government no like constantly having some sort of find my friends on on me is just not something I'm I'm very open to. D would you agree that it's just having systems like this in place opens the door for for mass surveillance? Yeah, a hundred percent. Like I mean, like this technology alone, like to me is clear. It's warrantless surveillance. It's a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Like the fact that this and like they like I said across the political spectrum, more and more leaders are agreeing with that. They're seeing this as a clear violation of of civil liberties. And like so, you know, something you said a minute ago is important. And I I get frustrated as well. Like I get frustrated with how numb we become to surveillance and we just kind of the assumption, I'm not doing anything wrong. I have nothing to hide. Why should I care? Well, I can point to you multiple examples where people have been wrongfully accused of crimes using this tech and they didn't do anything wrong. And they like there was one example in Colorado, and it was the camera, the the the LPR camera put this woman at the quote unquote scene of the crime. She was innocent. They didn't believe her. They were prosecuting her, and she had to gather her own evidence to exonerate herself, and she had dash cam footage and things like and she admitted, she said, you know, I had the resources and time to be able to go and and defend myself, but like what's gonna happen when somebody's not? Like this and we've had multiple people not only wrongfully accused, but they sat in jail pretrial on lost days and time of their life because these cameras supposedly made them a suspect and put them at the scene and they had done nothing wrong. and so like that is something that's no longer hypothetical. It's happened and continues to happen. the you know, and the other part of like I I think and we c you know, we we should talk more about these state guardrails bills and how flawed they are. but something else that comes up a lot that frustrates me is like, well, we get that like like I have had leader local leaders tell me to my face like Well, I'm a progressive person. I'm a progressive X, Y, and Z, and I do not trust these companies. I don't trust Flock. I don't trust Palantir. I don't trust these companies. But our local police are doing the right thing. So I'm okay with it. But in reality, what they're failing to understand is this data does not stay contained to their local police, right? Then and not only is our local police actively sharing it with other law enforcement, this data is being stored on the, you know, web services, on Amazon Web Services. This data It can be used by these companies. It's in the contracts. They can retain they retain the rights to the data to use it to improve their tech. Like these companies have this data and they are not in the quote unquote crime fighting business. They are in the money-making business. the other part too that and I think you did a good job pointing this out, and I I think it's important to emphasize if we, you know, this data gets referred to as a crime-solving database, a crime fighting database. that's not what this is. This is a database of our movements, our patterns. This is a database of our living our daily lives. Like the vast majority, almost every scan that's made, every almost every vehicle fingerprint that is becomes part of this database is somebody driving to work, somebody driving to school, taking their kid to childcare, going to the gym, going to places of worship. And like that's what this is. And like you're saying, not only is like once we start to collect this in a in the aggregate, store it over long periods of time. Like we look, and this is partly what we've done in the research, we look a lot at where these cameras are being placed. They're commonly by places of worship. they're commonly near medical facilities, women's health clinics. And all of a sudden, like you can, if you have access to this data, you can start to connect the dots and really build a pretty in-depth profile of of who you are, where you worship if you went to seek reproductive health care in one state because it's illegal in your state, like all of that can be accessed in this data, even though you were doing nothing wrong. Yeah, I completely agree. And I wanna ask you about the Fourth Amendment and why these cameras are there in the first place or which law allows them to be placed and I want to share a story about the Netherlands, which I think is very relevant for our discussion today. I have a background in tax law. So I study tax law and I did an internship at a company that was specialized in criminal tax law. So our clients, we defended people who were accused of tax crimes and not paying their taxes, sometimes more nefarious, sometimes just a little less nefarious. Anyway, the company that I did my internship in, they won a huge combined case of thousands of people, which was about the following. So in the Netherlands and many other countries, we have cameras above the highway, right? And these cameras are placed for safety reasons. It's so we can see whether there are any accidents. Whether there are traffic jams happening and if something does go wrong that we know exactly where to send the ambulance or the police cars or the the the fire department. So the tax authorities looked at those cameras and said, hey, that might be interesting for our job as well. So what they did is they requested that information without asking any permission or or a law to be made. They just asked for the camera footage, they received it from their other government organ and they built a tool. And this tool was able to track license plates and they could understand where people were moving. And why is this relevant? Well in the Netherlands you can drive your car completely private, you can drive it completely commercial for your company or which is very common a combination of both, right? So therefore you have to say, well I use my car around 50 50 personal, 50 50% for the business, and then all the costs related to that car w are 50% deductible from the business. And usually this is just between your home and place of work. And what the tax authorities did is they had this algorithm that scoured through all this footage and was looking for anomalies. So When someone pretended to just drive the car ninety percent commercially or even a hundred percent commercially, it's like, hey, you went to France last week while you work in the Netherlands. I saw some some holiday photos of of you there on on your Instagram profile, and I think you are fooling us. this was a big case in the Netherlands and In lower courts the tax authorities won, but luckily in the very highest court they lost and and the judge ruled that this is was illegal and that there was no base for these cameras to be used. And basically the ruling was these cameras aren't meant to be used for tax purposes. If you want to use them for tax purposes, that's fine, but we need to pass a bill first for you to to do so. And I believe the bill has never passed because apparently politically we are not looking for it. But I think it really illustrates what happens when there are no guardrails in place, what the government tries to do with the information that is available to them, right? Because they didn't ask permission, they just did it. And then once they started prosecuting, we had to go to the highest court in the Netherlands to reverse it. Which cost thousands of dollars and and is was only possible because all these people pulled grouped together and and finally won their case. So this was just a story to to kind of illustrate the problem, but also to ask w how is this allowed in the US? Is there any base for it? Yeah, at this point, so there's a lot of ways, because thinking about this like on the on from the other direction. There's lots of pathways to where this could be shut down. And and the reason is like it can be shut down through state legislation, through federal legislation. To be honest though, I don't see it happening at the federal level. If you've been following American politics, it's it's hard to get a something like a I mean, there and there have been congressional leaders calling for a national ban of ALPRs, a warrant requ requirement, like things of that nature. but I think really where it's going to happen is at the state and local level. And that's that's partly because our system is very decentralized, especially as it relates to our our justice system, is extremely decentralized. And where so where I'm at in Virginia, this has been pretty heavily debated in our General Assembly for a few years. And it was as these cameras are really starting to p proliferate in numbers. there was a question around, well, can these be put up on our state highways? And in in Virginia, technically the state highway is under jurisdiction of the state lawmakers. And so the state legislature would have to give explicit approval for those cameras to be put up. That's what our attorney general at the time, he he had that and he made that interpretation of the Virginia Code. And so in a bipartisan in a bipartisan basis, the General Assembly rejected that. They said, Okay, we're not gonna allow for expansion to the highways. However, they left it up to localities to decide whether they wanted to continue to use them or not. we our state not there's some states like us, but we are a part time legislature. So our state legislators are they're in session anywhere from Jane usually January to March. And so now's the time where they're preparing bills for the session. Like Bills are being filed, there's discussions among advocacy groups, like all that's happening right now. And there's a lot of discussion around what is the future, what is gonna happen, because there's too much energy at the local level here to ignore it. Like if you go to a city council meeting now across the US, flock usually comes up. there's rallies happening, there's meeting with low, like this is really taking on a life of its own at the local level. And so I think it's the energy is too much to ignore. And I think well I don't know this for sure. I'm just hearing rumblings, but I think we're gonna see a series of proposals in a state like Virginia where there's gonna be a proposal to ban this technology outright. Then there'll be a proposal that says, well, we can leave the tech, but put up stronger guardrails, or we can require warrants or things of that nature. And so that's kind of where we're at. And so that's really like one area of discussion. But the other ways, the other way we can change this here is through the courts. And there was a pretty high profile case here in the Hampton Road, Schmidt v. Norfolk, that was questioning whether these cameras are a Fourth Amendment violation. at this point, the court ruling, the initial court ruling was we haven't gotten to that point yet. And so the judge essentially left the door open and said, Well, Once we get to a certain point of saturation of these cameras where it really is constant real-time surveillance, then that will meet the requirements of a Fourth Amendment violation. That case has been appealed and is in the Court of Appeals now. I've also been aware of a number of other cases that are challenging this on Fourth Amendment grounds. I think at some point this is going to be ruled a Fourth Amendment violation. Like and like I I think that's going to happen. It's just gonna have to be the right case that make and it's gonna it's probably gonna end up as a Supreme Court case at some point. And I would make the argument that in a pla like I'll I'll give you a good example of how like what we're doing is connected to this. so we've done research on how these cameras have where they've been deployed at in the Hampton Roads. And we were the first we were the first researchers to do a full geospatial analysis of the deployment of these cameras. And one of the places that we we had data on, so we analyzed was the city of Norfolk. Well, City of Norfolk is at the center of that cage case Schmidt v. Norfolk that's now in the Court of Appeals. And we just saw the brief for the case in the Court of Appeals. And they spent about three to four pages like describing our study and what we found. And so like we've talked amongst us as researchers, and we like, we think there can be a c case made that If you look like in these high density surveillance neighborhoods, it's truly real like constant surveillance. There is no escaping it. You cannot move about your daily life without being a part of it, which would then rise to the level of a Fourth Amendment violation. so yeah, so there's a number of ways in which this is being discussed, but I think in practice, what we're going to see is some states are going to pass a state ban, but most states are gonna leave it up to localities and they're gonna pass guardrails bill. But At some point I w I'd like to today, whenever we're the time makes sense, to talk about why these guardrails bills are are failing. Like we have one in Virginia and it's just it's toothless. It's not working. And so I'm one of these people that like I and there's many people I work with that are on the same page. We don't think there's any safe version of these cameras existing. Like the only safe version is to ban them because the guardrails don't work and the guardrails are only applying like often don't apply to the private vendors, the companies that are doing it. Like there's just a number of flaws to where this, you know, no matter how good of a guards bill we're passing, like the data's still being abused and it's being misused. Yeah. And it's I I follow American politics quite a bit and it seems to be a bipartisan issue. Yeah. Luckily, I would say. it it was really I mean I I I couldn't see why this how you could spin this and turn this into a a partisan issue. It seems that both parties have people that are against it. I I recently saw, for example, Republican candidate James Fishbeck use this in his campaign to I I think he lost the the elections there for for Florida governor, but he was actively campaigning on flock cameras and and is if you vote for me I will ban it outright and remove any of the the existing cameras. And I'm sure there are democratic counterparts to to such campaigns. but yeah, I w I wanna get into the guardrails and why it seems difficult to really prevent the government from abusing this data because it's very opaque, right? It it like how how do we even know? Should we just trust you, given the entire history with X Key Score and and everything Snowden revealed? Like how would we even know what actually happens with the data? To this point with these guardrails bills, like it's the police policing themselves. And like so I'll give for the Virginia example. So we have a bill, so it's House Bill 2724. It went into effect July one, 2025. And this was part of those negotiations I was talking about earlier. Do we expand to the highways? Do we not? And so what they came what they decided on is all right, no expansion to the highways, let localities decide whether they want the cameras. But if you're gonna use the cameras, here are the here are the things you have to do, right? And it laid out that it there's a twenty-one day retention max. So after twenty one days, if you're not part of an active investigation, your data's supposed to be deleted. it also said you can't share this data out of state, you can't share with the federal government, and it required like public awareness measures. Like you had to let you have to let the public know, like, hey, these cameras are in your community and this is what they are. So that goes into effect July one. That following February, a report comes out from the Virginia Crime Commission. And this report was based on it was just a survey of departments. And they surveyed police departments and essentially asked them like, Are you following the law? And departments just admitted they weren't. Like they just weren't. They were continuing to share it out of state. They were keeping the data longer than twenty one days. They were sharing it with the federal government. And like over a third didn't even do any the public awareness measures. And immediately people like myself and others say, well, what are the repercussions? Like, I mean, they're they're actively violating the law. And the last I heard that those departments were getting a strongly worded letter. that was their that was their repercussions. And like some other things that have come up since then on this that just is like really frustrating. and so I was in a meeting with a police chief and this police chief is is saying, like, hey, we have this guard, because this this happens a lot. You go and sit in in a meeting with a mayor or a police chief or a city council member, and they'll point to this bill now and they're like, We understand your concerns, but we have this guardrails bill. So, you know, your concerns should be alleviated. And then I'll bring up, well, like the law's not being followed. But I with this police chief, I asked him, like, okay, you like I I'm I'm assuming you know the departments that admitted that they weren't following the law. So you can like stop sharing the data with them, right? Like that would make sense. And he said no. He's like, no, the state will not tell us who was and who was not following the law. He's like, I have no idea. So and he basically was sharing it like across the whole state. Every department in the state he was sharing it with. And so the reason that matters is because this data is all shared, you know, even if, you know, a city like let's say Norfolk, let's say the city of Norfolk is not sharing it with the federal government, the second they share it with the department that is, that department has side door ac the federal government has side door access now to their data, whether they want them to or not. And that's how ICE and Department of Homeland Security has continued to get access to data in cities that aren't giving them approval. They're just getting side doored through another department. And so like that's really frustrating. Another part is like even as written, the law was already pretty weak. Like that twenty one day retention plan, if you're if you are if there is reasonable suspicion of you committing a crime, then that does not you're exempt from that. They can store the data on you longer. And if they put you on a hot list, they can store the data longer as well. The problem with that is reasonable suspicion is a super low thr legal threshold. And we're talking any kind of crime, right? Everything from nuisance crimes to property to violence, anything. The other part of this is I got to see, I was looking at like how the hot lists are being used. And so what a hot list is, is they if they put you on a hot list, then they can get active real-time alerts when you're passing cameras. And also the second you're on a hot list, then that data can be stored and it doesn't have to be deleted after 21 days. So my assumption was, as I assume we all would, like, like if you're on a hot list, like there is you're part of an active investment, like something high level, high profile. There's this arson case I was looking at, and it was an arson case, and the suspect was on the hot list. They put their whole family on the hot list, including in-laws. And so like this person's in-laws are now now are exempt from the state guard rails. They're getting police on and off duty were getting real time alerts when everybody on this hot list were passing these cameras. And like when you start, and that's just one case. So you start thinking like, man, we start extrapolating this across the state, across the country. Like, how many people are on these? And they don't know. Like you don't get a notification you're on a police hot list. You just are on one. and like that is like when I saw that I I remember looking through that and I kept like rereading. I'm like, I can't be right. Like, imagine your in-laws like being on a hot like I can't imagine like a mother-in-law being like, Yeah, police are getting real-time alerts somewhere I go because my son-in-law did something stupid. Right, right. Like, that's like what we're talking about here. And so that's one piece of this. But also with the state guardrails bill, like you can say all you want in in the US, like you can say, don't share with the federal government. The federal government is not like They're not subject to our state laws. Like the federal gu federal laws trumps state law. And so the federal government could always go to flock headquarters in Atlanta and subpoena for this. And they could get it whenever they want it. but to be honest, they're getting it through the side door access. So why would they jump through all the legal loopholes and that's gonna take time when they can just find a friendly department that's gonna give them access to it? And that's really what's happening. And so that's these guardrails, like the the strictest guardrails bill I've seen, I think it was Somewhere in the northeast. but they did one where it was just essentially the only data that was stored, it was a stored for a couple minutes, was if you were on like a if somebody was on like an Amber Alert or something of that nature, right? Like, so that's like a really strict version of the guardrails. Most of like what it the laws are being passed are like what Virginia did, and it's honestly like straight out of like the flock playbook. Like it's it's it like the and you know, you it's not surprising, but you start looking across the states, they almost are copy and paste. They just debate whether it's seven days, fourteen days, twenty-one days. But at the end of the day, they all have the same f the same flaws. Yeah, and it also seems unfair, right? Because if a civilian commits a crime, there's often a very clear and you can look up, okay, this is the law you broke. And this is the range of of penalties you may get when you are facing a judge. In any of the these guardrails legislation, are there any repercussions for for the people doing it? Or is it just you shouldn't do it, but there's no nothing that states what should happen when you in fact breach the guardrails? In Virginia it's a class one misdemeanor. and so like that's kind of the most common, but in reality, like with all this, it's discretion over like I'm actually I'll even give you a I'll give you a better example of this. and so there was a a report that was done to the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism. Like, to be honest, like thank goodness we have journalists doing really good work on this because like these companies are not transparent. Law enforcement isn't being transparent with how they're using this. Like we're having to scratch and claw for everything we're getting. But the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism did this really good report last year and and they did FOIA Freedom of Information Act. They requested how the data was being searched and and what kind of queries were showing up in Virginia departments, like how because when you search the Flock database, you have to put a reason why. You have to say, you know, was it for an active investigation, right? Some some kind of detail. So they do this, the city of City of Norfolk again, because Norfolk has a ton of cameras. They they published this story, and this was from July to October of 2025. they listed all of the reasons that Norfolk searched the Flock database. And a lot of the reasons are way too vague. Like there's stuff like CJ in there and stuff, but and so that's bad enough. But the fourth most searched reason in the database was one, two, three. And that was the official reason they put they searched, right? And so like and it was over twelve hundred times. Over twelve hundred times in that in that span, they put one, two, three as the reason they searched. So clearly, you know, they're just filling out a form. And it just goes through. Yep. It just goes through. And so r right away, like and those twelve hundred searches, like they could be legitimate. They could have been like somebody was just in a rush because something was pressing, or it could have been twelve hundred times officers were searching where their ex was going. Or they were searching where their ex's new partner was going, right? Like so we we'll never know. Like we have no idea why those searches were made. number one. Number two is I talked to a high-level official in that city about like we were meeting about other s other flock related things, but I brought up this story because I know this person I was meeting with, they love the cameras, they're gonna defend them, like not gonna change their mind. But I wanted to know more procedurally, like what happens when a story like this comes out. Cause like I would assume as much distrust as there is right now with these cameras that like that would have like shaken City Hall to be like, we have to get this under control. We have to get this under wraps, like we can't let this go on, or clearly we got to shut this all down. I brought this up and that local official, I'm not exaggerating, he said to me, he was like, Yeah, that's a that's a terrible story. I'm glad it didn't happen here. Like it di he didn't even know about the story. Like, and it was in his own city. And this was like pr like pretty widely dispersed. Like this wasn't like a like a story in like the back corner of the internet. Like this was like the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism, funded by d the MPR. Like this is like legitimate reporting. and to me, that just like that was really eye-opening just to think like no wonder the repercussions aren't coming. Like, right. And like, or it has to be like the most egregious example of stalking for them to do something about it. Like that's and that's the other part of this too, which like the amount of like the amount of stalking we already know about using this data is terrifying. Number one. But number two, some of these victims of the stalking, the reason that they knew they were victims was because they also worked in law enforcement. So they saw themselves being quote unquote flocked. And they would say, like, and they were trying to figure out why they're being searched. it's because my ex is trying to see if I'm going to dinner or going on a date, right? And that kind of stuff. And you see these cases, and in some cases, it's police chiefs. And you see it and you're like, man, how can this continue to happen? And then a story like that comes out and you realize how there just was no follow up like, of course this is why it's happen. Like it it's it's it's too it's that easy to do it and just the repercussions don't happen unless it becomes just absolutely egregious. That's insane. And people just entering one, two, three. Can you see which officer used one, two, three? Or is it just on department level, like this specific department had to look up this information, not not the particular officer? From the FOIA request, the FOIA request that I've seen of those audlogs, we can't see it, but in theory, the police chief should be able to. and But that's also part of this too is like audit logs are a big deal in this, like how the audits are being done. And once again, lots of people that are in this space that are doing a lot of advocacy work in data security. And they are just always like so flabbergasted by how weak the data security standards are. And one of these examples was so a a guy, really good local advocate, he was getting he was FOI requesting audit logs. And they sent him one of the audit logs and it was the bare bone, just like number of searches in this month, like five lines basically. Like no and he and he said he was like, if I produce this at work, I would get fired. Like this is like legitimately like there's no a way to there's no possible accountability, but it would be it should be able you should be able as police leadership to see who's searching what and how much. But in terms of like the public, we have not been able to get access to that. Yeah. It's that's worrying. And I wanna talk about your your research specifically as well, because you you've done a few r investigations into Flock, where they were placed and and what some of the results were. Can you can can you maybe share some of your work? Yeah. so the so I mentioned before like the state level advocacy happening in Virginia has been happening for a couple years. And So I'm a board member of Justice Fort Virginia, which we're a nonpartisan, nonprofit criminal justice reform organization. and we write and advocate for state level CJ reform. And so as part of that, like we to be honest, like surveillance hadn't really crept into our portfolio and it it's become to dominate what we're doing. and that was largely because of the state level debate on these flock cameras. so from an advocacy standpoint, I've kind of been, you know, connected to this for a couple of years. But from a research standpoint, we just we weren't able to get data. Like we did not have data to truly do a good analysis of like what's actually going on in the space. the reason that changed, so this was in October of last year. I guess no, it was November of last year. So that case I mentioned earlier, Schmidt v. Norfolk, as part of the, and this was a federal case, as part of this case, the federal judge said, well. Some of these legal arguments cannot be properly made if we don't know where the cameras are at, how many cameras there are. Like, and so what he did is he forced the release of every publicly funded ALPR camera in the Hampton Roads region, which is the region in which we sit. that sounds like pretty simple, right? Just hey, the geographic coordinates, where are these things at? But this was the only, this was the first major release of its kind in the country. This hasn't happened anywhere else because in theory, Every locality could put up tomorrow on their website where they put all their look their cameras, but they're not doing it. every now and again a city will, but it's very, very rare. And I've asked in meetings why that is, like, why won't you? Because like people, once you see one of these cameras, you know where like you see them. I I I've done some of these talks where I've had like a friend come who kind of half pays attention to this. And the second you put up one of those one of the cameras, you know, they'll text the next day and be like, my God, I I didn't realize how many I passed every day. Like I didn't know that's what that was. And now I I had somebody the other day literally said, Since that talk you've got, you've ruined my life. Now all I can see is how many flock cameras I pass every day. And but anyways, so like people know them, people can see them, right? But cities were cities are not releasing their coordinates. And when we've asked, like in multiple localities why that is, it's the same response. We are worried about vandalism. Right. Which happens, to be fair. Yeah, which which happens. but like the reason I don't buy that argument is like the people that are taking the cameras down, they ain't waiting on the coordinates from city government to go take them down, right? They when they see them, they take them down. and so, anyways, but but so to this point then, we just the only way we've largely known where these cameras are at is through DFLOC, which is a crowdsourced map. And the DFLOX maps are great. But the problem is with crowdsource, you sometimes we'll have people misidentify. They'll think like we I've heard people like think a bus like a school bus camera is a flat flock camera, right? It's like people are conflating different things. But also the the crowdsourcing is always gonna be underreported. There's always gonna be more cameras than have been identified and logged, right? And so like to that point then, like so flack deflock was really helpful. But we just you know there's more out there. And and so once this release happened, once the judge forced this release, my geography colleague, Dr. Johnny Finn, who's the chair of our department here, chair of department of s sociology, anthropology, and social work here at CNU, I had been kind of like keeping him up to date on the advocacy stuff. And he texted me right away because he started he's GIS to start mapping the locations with the cameras. And right away he said, like, there's something here. We need to talk. And this was in November. So we looked, the maps he produces, like I'll talk about them in second, but it's the patterns are obvious. and then we brought on our colleague, Dr. Andrew Baird, who he's a sociologist and he's really a s a social science statistician. He's a brilliant statistician. And we essentially asked him, like, will you run every model you can think of and make sure like what we're seeing to our eye is also like being upheld in the data? And he did, and what what we found consistently over and over again is in the Hampton Roads area that if you want to know where these cameras are at, you need two variables and it's race and class. And the more black residents in a neighborhood, the more cameras there are, and the higher the poverty rate, the more cameras there are. And it's not just more, the more like segregated a neighborhood gets, the higher the concentration of cameras in a smaller area. And in particular in the Hampton Roads, The census tract that has the most cameras is where Norfolk State is located. Norfolk State is the only public historically black college and university in the region. And the cameras completely encircle their campus. You cannot get on or off their campus without going by flock cameras. Whereas like where I work at CNU or at Old Dominion University, we're predominantly white institutions and the only cameras around us are on major thoroughfares, like a major street near a campus. so racing class, it was the patterns were obvious and like to the point that you're looking at like bl predominantly black communities are getting surveilled at seven times their population share compared to pro predominantly white communities. And if you live in a majority black neighborhood, the default in Hampton Road to your default is surveillance. Like it is nearly impossible in those neighborhoods to go anywhere in a car without being clocked by these cameras. So we found that and so we wrote we wrote our first paper and one other piece of that too. So Dr. Finn, my colleague, a lot of his work is on the history of racial redlining, which in the US, racial redlining, there's a long history around it. We don't have time for today. But racial redlining is a r the reason it's applic these these maps, they're they're now illegal, but the reason that they're helpful from a historical perspective is these are the neighborhoods that have historically been underinvested in and disinvested in. And so if you grow up in a neighborhood that was formerly racially redlined, You're more likely to go to underfunded schools, you're more likely to be exposed to environmental toxins, you're more likely to be in a food desert, not have affordable groceries, you're more likely to have a family member or close friend who was incarcerated during the mass incarceration era, like all of this kind of stuff, right? And so if you look at the formerly racially redlined map of the in Norfolk in particular by the Hampton Roads, the cameras are heavily concentrated in those neighborhoods. And in a meeting, I had a police chief tell me, he goes, Well, I see these cameras as an investment in these communities. And like to me, that's such like a perverse way of thinking about this idea that these are the neighborhoods we've always under or disinvested in, and now we're spending millions of dollars to surveil them. and like kind of what you're alluding to earlier with with the story on the cameras on the highway in the Netherlands, like these cameras are gonna be really good at getting fines and fees up for things like expired tags, expired registration. Drivers most likely to have those are drivers that live in high poverty neighborhoods, right? And then it becomes essentially a tax on the poor. so anyway, so we produced this r paper, it gets some media attention. And my my co-authors asked, like, well, what do you think? What's the public response going to be or the official response? And I told him, I was like, the response is gonna be this isn't about race and class, it's about crime. Like it's we put the cameras where the crime is at. We didn't think about race in class. And that's what Police leaders said, including our local police chief here in Newport News. And he specifically said, he's like, this is just all about violent crime for us. We put the cameras up where violent crime is at, right? the reason we didn't have crime measures in our first models is because the way crime is recorded in the US, first we record it very poor poorly. but also the way it's recorded, it's not at the census tract level that was our unit of analysis. So we couldn't just like nicely map out the like various crime data onto our maps. And so our Dr. Baird, the statistician, I think he took this as a challenge where he's like, I'm going to figure it out. And so he figured it out. He realized that the CDC keeps data on homicides and overdoses at a tract level that we can measure, we could do our mapping on. And so he lay so we lay it out. And to our surprise, homicides, which is homicides is the best violent data we have. It's like our most accurate violent data because For most if a homicide happens, more often than not, most of the time police find out about it. So we have really good data on homicides. when we added homicides to our model, homicides were actually a negative predictor where if you only had homicides, it would take you to the wrong neighborhoods. Like the cameras weren't there. In fact, that our model got weaker when we added homicides and the but overdoses were positively correlated. It was weaker than race in class. And I think that's really important because. Especially like during the opioid epidemic here in the US, the communities most ravaged by overdoses are also the communities that have had they have least less access to adequate affordable health care, mental health care, social services. Once again, kind of continuing that story of we have disinvested in these communities and now we're sticking these cameras up to surveil them, which is gonna be a pathway to criminalization. and so like so that's what so we found that and now like so that has been like there's I've gotten I've had people a number of people just this week reach out and they're trying to replicate this study elsewhere because our assumption is like when you look at the D flock maps, the patterns look pretty similar in most other metropolitan areas, but we really need this verified coordinates to be able to do it. But now that we've done it, like you can essentially copy and paste what we our model into any other major geographic area to see this deployment. But I think it's I think our our results are really important in a number of ways. One is because like I think there's questions around like, does this is this violation of civil rights legislation, right? This idea, especially if we're talking Fourth Amendment violation, predominantly impacting communities of color. number one. But number two, we're in this era of predictive policing where the idea is, we can find crime before it happens and we can go and intervene. And predictive policing has a lot, tons of false positives. It's always been kind of a flawed concept. But one of the major things feeding into these model, predictive policing models, is surveillance data. And if we selectively put the cameras up in communities that were historically over policed, you know what the data is going to say? Keep going there, right? Keep focusing our attention on those. And so that's obviously concerning because we're doing the same thing we've always done in the US. We're just now doing through surveillance. But I think what's really concerning is the tech washing element of this, because when things are data driven, the assumption is it's free of bias. And that's just not true because the data comes out's only as good as the data we collect. And if we're collecting it in a way that's racialized, it's gonna have racialized outcomes. And that's something I think long term it's really concerning. The other part of this is all of the abuses that we've seen happen across the country, the people most at risk are the communities most surveilled, right? When it comes to like like both the actual abuses as well as like where we're talking about now, like let's when this gets turned into a mon a money making process, like how can we do how can we find and feed people with related to this, those communities are going to suffer the most. Yeah. And it's like saying, the hospital is such a dangerous place because so many people die there, right? I mean Yeah. Yeah. I mean it just Yeah, where you look, you're going to find find cases. We'll go back to the conversation in just a second, but first I have an important announcement to make. 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Is there any way to do like a a freeom of information act to kind of see into these discussions and what the decision making was behind the scenes on why these cameras were placed in those specific locations? Yeah, we've tried to figure that out. We don't have solid concrete answers yet because we're very specific in our work that we we we have no idea why they were put there. We just know this is where they're at and here's the impacts of that. And so our our work is not about intention, it's about impact. now I have just asked anecdotally in meetings like because so there's one there's a city in Virginia in particular. We've we've met with people there and in leadership, and I've used D Flock to kind of do basically the same thing we did here. And the patterns are almost like word for word the same. Like it's almost like it's scarily similar, right? And the city leaders know it. Like they they know. I could bring up in a meeting, they they know that they put them up in predominantly black neighborhoods and and around public housing and things of that nature. and so when I brought it up, one of the questions is well, well, why? Like w what went into that decision making? And so this is just anecdotal, but we have heard this in multiple places. They've said, well. These private companies like Flock offer to help them make those decisions. And so they're offering to help decide where to put them because they have these quote unquote models about where their high risk areas are, right? So like I we I don't know how much they I don't know how much the localities considered that when they made the decision, but that was made available as an option. It was something that I know at least some places explored. Yeah. And if we play devil's advocate for a moment, like are these actually is this good technology to fight crime? Yeah, it's a great question. actually, this is something I focused a lot on a talk I did this week, because that's one of the things our city council members keep asking. from a research standpoint, we don't have the research to support that they are. Like maybe someday that'll change. But like, so for example, I one one thing we do know from the research, these cameras are really good at identifying vehicles and things related to vehicles quicker than the an a human officer could, right? Like Like studies have found that if you stuck an officer on the corner and a camera on the corner, the camera can record more information quicker. And so because of that, there is a essentially like any kind of investigations involving cr cars, these cameras can be helpful in providing a lead. When it comes to actually solving the crimes, that's where things tend to fall apart. and like for example, there is one study gets pointed to that tried to make an argument that, well, these cameras are helping clear or solve cases. that study was co-authored by multiple flock employees. It was not peer-reviewed, it was not so like take that for what it's worth. but in terms of like a clearance, like I think that I think there's a future where we could do actually a really good clearance analysis and see like how much because it's not just is your clearance rates going up or down, right? Because the clearance rates in your city might go up because the community trusts you more, so they're willing to provide evidence to you and call as a witness, right? Like We deal with this all the time in the US. Historically, the communities with the most violence trust the police the least. And so because of that, a lot of times when police go looking for information and investigations, like people don't want to participate. They don't trust them. and so like in theory, clearance rates might improve year to year because the community just you built community trust and they're willing to work with you, right? And so like there's in to do this correctly, you'd have to really tease all that out. Like what actually led to the case being solved. And something I think that's important and a couple things. The first thing is like we're here in the US, like we're in the midst of a record crime decline. Like we are like our our violent, our property crime has been going down since the early nineties. We had an uptick during the pandemic, and we're back down. Like these are record safe times here in the U.S. And crime was going down long before these cameras existed, and crime has been going down in places with them and without them. So we do know that, right? So crime's been going down. But, you know, I've been hearing a lot, and is it's because these companies and police are getting defensive and they're they're crediting these cameras with making communities safer. but and like but in like just one quick aside, just like to show how flawed that idea is, like most violent crime is committed by teenage boys and like most like and it's typically unplanned, it's part of pri prior beefs, it's arguments that escalate. A lot of people in the US have guns. And so like that's that's how stuff becomes particularly violent. A 16 year old in a fight with a 17 year old over something that spilled over from school, like I don't think flock cameras are really impacting their rational calculus because it's not a rational calculus, right? Like that's not why they're getting in fights. That's not why they're pulling their guns, right? So like there's already that part of it. But I always what I want to see is if these companies, if police want to give the credit For crime being down to these cameras, like crime will go up at some point. We will have a year when crime goes up. I hope there's that same energy for these cameras not working anymore, right? And in reality, whether crime is going up or down, the cameras weren't really impacting it. Like it was other things. and so I think that like when it comes to the impact on crime and clearance rates, there's just not the empirical research to support that. There is the research to support that this tech does help track down cars, right? It's really good at that. And then I think you start to get into question. It's like, well, for every recovered stolen vehicle, if we also have a stalking victim, like is that a trade we're willing to make? Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say. Because is there a version of this where we can make it work? Because let's assume that somebody gets kidnapped, right? The little girl gets kidnapped, and flock seems like the perfect technology to quickly assess where did she go? Who took her? Where did the car go? And and produce some very interesting leads very fast. Now, of course, we've discussed all the the failing guardrails for for multiple reasons, but is there a version of this that that that is potentially feasible where we do have the upside of when we need it to have quick surveillance very specific? But when we don't need it that stalking doesn't happen and that these cameras aren't being fed into this gigantic system that also knows your your your bank statements, phone calls, emails and and can can paint this very accurate picture of what we're all doing, or is it should we just simply say this technology cannot be trusted in the hands of the government and therefore we should accept the Unfortunately, sometimes that a kid never gets away. I think that there could have been a version of what you're saying. There could have been a version of like a strictly contained technology that's only used in very select situations. Like I do think that was possible. The reason I don't believe we can get there now is because the guardrails bills are always toothless, right? And to be honest, these companies abdicated their duty. They could have built in guardrails in the tech themselves. Like they could have been better stewards of this data. They could have been advocating for these kind of strict restrictions, but they don't want that, right? Because they just need more cameras, more like more light like that. They like said they're in the the profit making game. And so like I think there could have been, but at this point, I think the toothpaste is out of the tube and we just like the only safe thing to do is to shut them down. Now, on the rever in the future, well, I think that the way this should have happened and it didn't happen, but where we could do this in the future is. I think the future is if we're gonna put up new surveillance tech, there has to be public input and public awareness. So, like for example, let's say a future version of these cameras came. The public should be able to decide, like, all right, these are the guardrails we're comfortable with. This is like what these are the very specific situations in which they could be used. Cause you're right, there could be there could be state code that says only for a child abduction case or only for an amber alert could this be used, right? Now I'm sure the companies wouldn't like that because then they would be used far less and they're gonna be making less money. but and then like so did the like I think that if there's public input from the beginning and if it's a true democratic process, we could we could get there. But what happened with these, it happens all the time. These cameras were put up without public consent and public approval. They just showed up in people's community and All of a sudden, like when people start to figure out what they were and people got concerned and they go to s this happens all the time. Advocates, you know, they work together, they go to city councils or they go to their state legislators, and the response is always, Well, yeah, but we understand there's concerns, but the cameras are here now, so we just have to regulate When in reality, if they would have gone to public input from the get go, maybe they don't ever get put up, right? But that and I think that's intentional by companies like Flock and Axon and them because they know it's much harder to remove something than it is like once it's up. and I think that like I said, this tech clearly could do these very tailored things you're talking about and it if they were strictly regulated. And but all that would have to not only go through public approval, the regulation should be done on the front end. Like I am constantly frustrated that the way we operate surveillance, at least here is new surveillance shows up and then the state lawmakers like three years later are like, I guess we should put some guardrails around this. It's like, why didn't we do that to begin with? Like why there should have been like initi this had should have gone through state regulation from the get go. and I just think that like our the process of this is construed. And I think if we did it in a truly democratic way with strict regulations, we we could do it. Yeah, it's so true what you say about it's so hard to to remove something once it's already there. It's like a Trojan horse, right? It's it's w who doesn't want less crime? I mean, who doesn't want safer streets? Everyone wants safer streets and then they're there and then they can use for a variety of reasons. So I I guess I'm also interested to know where this is all going because guardrails don't really seem to work or have an impact. even investigative reports, journalism doesn't seem to have an impact. In the meantime, the technology is only getting better, AI is getting more sophisticated to analyze the data as well. You mentioned camera technology that is also able to recognize the human. It's literally something that we make fun of China about. About China the big surveillance state and and the social credit score and and all all the things they have that we in the West consider to be so dystopian. But it seems that we are going in their foot in their footsteps in in a very fast way if it continues to evolve like this. So w what is your intuition here? Is it This isn't the l the last we we've heard about it. If anything, it's it's probably getting worse. I tend I tend to be a pessimist on this around like I I do fear the worst and I do think that like like and at the end, like especially I can't speak for for all Western countries, but especially here, like it's just the the the the profitization. It's like the power of these companies, like you know, the Peter Thiels of the world and these tech billionaires, not only are they rich and powerful, But they are actively donating to the lawmakers that are supposed to regulate them, right? Like they are like and in some cases, some of these tech billionaires are more powerful than any of our politicians. And and to thinking about that, like that's what always I'm concerned about is because these companies are always gonna find new versions of this and they have the like the tech's evolving, right? and it's going to be sold. Cause I and I I do believe a lot of police departments at a local level using this. I do they think I do think that a lot of them are are trying to do the right thing. Like they think that they think they're doing it correctly. They think that they're following the law. I think that's the case, but they just don't fully understand how this data cannot be controlled locally and the fact that these private companies always are gonna be the ones that have it at the end of the day and they control our move like they are the ones that are building these kind of profiles of who we are. So where we're going, I think it's going to continue to be a fight. and to be honest, because these companies tend to be pretty rich, like they can offer sweetheart deals. This happened a lot with the flock cameras. They'll come to locality, offer them a sweetheart deal for the first two years of a contract, and then when they have to go get the second renewal from city council, and then once again, the tech is here. So, you know, we it's gonna stay, right? And so, like, I I tend to be a pessimist on that, but I will say this. Something has struck a chord with this. and 'cause I've always been worried about us becoming too complacent with surveillance. I think that, you know, especially in the post 911 era. But if you go into these local communities, like it's not just that people are fired up and they're tired of this. It's people from different parts of the political spectrum, different organizations, people historically that haven't been involved in advocacy are showing up on this. And I I think that's really encouraging and inspiring that like. Yeah, these companies are going to continue to try to shove surveillance down our throat, but like people are pushing back. And and so I I do think that's something that I think that like the democratic engagement being developed right now at the local level, I think is going to be really important going forward. And I I'll give a quick example of that. in Harrisonburg, which is a s a sm a smaller s town in Virginia, they canceled their flock contract this year. And the reason they canceled their contract. So we went out, did an info session, went back a couple of times, met with them and mayors, city council members, the whole deal. but the reason their contract was canceled was it was just like truly local democracy. It was a bunch of local leaders and groups from different parts of Harrisonburg coming together and just working relentlessly on this. Just like just on like we'd have a meeting one night with a city council member. The next day they're meeting the meeting that person for coffee. They're sending them links, right? Like I just constantly staying on top of it. And Harrisonburg canceled their contract, which was awesome. They then like were on top of city council to not only cancel, to take the cameras physically down, because sometimes they continue to operate after the city canceled their contract. and then they've now have been they passed an ordinance where any new surveillance tech has to do what I talked about before. It has to go through public input and public approval. And like They and that to me is like I think like the I think the and partly it was because it was really good local leaders there. But like the city council and the mayor, like the mayor, I the meeting we were at with the mayor, she looked at them and she goes, Hey, if you all are serious about this, I don't want you to stop here. Like I want you to like if we're gonna do this right in the future, we can't just take the flock cameras down and then new cameras show up a couple of years later. And so I do think that like at like there's a a lot of this democratic engagement is leading people to realize like you can't this isn't the start of this, this is the end of this, you have to stay on top of it. And so I am I'm more encouraged than I was before the start of all this. Now, one other thing is here in the US, there's a huge local fight over data centers. not just in the US. Yeah. And and so like and these are like In it's weird. In Virginia, it used to be concentrated to like two counties. Now it's all over. Like everywhere is getting these data centers, right? And we know about all their environmental impacts. But what's interesting is the anti surveillance groups are kind of like melding with the data center groups because they're seeing, like, why do we need to store all this data? maybe it's because we like one of the reasons is all these surveillance cameras, right? And so like I think that that's once again, more of these groups coming together and working is setting a model up for the future that We can hold our officials accountable and stop this stuff from happening. Yeah, and it's I agree with you that it is th that those stories are are positive and I've seen it being used like I mentioned before as political points that people run on. And again, this seems to be a very bipartisan issue. I I don't see being anti flock as being more for for Democrats or Republicans. I think everyone yeah can can form their own opinions about it. it doesn't re require a party or a certain ideology, if you will. So I think if politicians also keep running on on those those promises and actually go through with it once they are in fact elected, I think that's probably a good way to to go about it and hopefully prevent more of these cameras being placed in the future and also from escalating because I think number plates is one thing, but as soon as you have facial recognition, then that's a whole different game. Bluetooth scanners as well. another example of this, which I'm really concerned about, I think we need to be focused on, is we have there are these camera they're called tsunami cameras. And they essentially are like 24 7, they have 24 access law enforcement has 24 seven access, but in the US, they're primarily around public housing complexes. And in some cases, there was a case here in Virginia where police were scanning social media and looking for suspicious things and then accessing the closest camera to that person's apartment and just watching them all the time. And like that's obviously like a clear vi I think civil liberty violation, right? But what I'm concerned about is that's largely affecting pup people in public housing. That's a group that's had little political power. They often are ignored by people in power. And like I hope this is I hope our anti surveillance energy stays for not just these licensed reader cameras, but for like what you're saying, the facial recognition, the Bluetooth scanner, and the surveillance is happening all the time in in poorer communities. Yeah, I agree. And we've discussed a lot of things today. Is there anything you feel we should still touch on while we're on the topic of flock cameras? Anything we we haven't discussed? I think we covered really all of it. but like you know I I will s I I will emphasize again that like there this is some like it is like you said it it's cutting across the political spectrum. This is something that people are really engaged on. And I I think that that's something that's inspiring that I think It's showing more and more people that like you truly can make a difference. Like when we're talking about these surveillance cameras, sometimes it's just convincing three city council members. And those three city council members live in your neighborhoods. They may have similar backgrounds that you may grow up with them, right? And so like this isn't like these are fights that are winnable. I hope at some point federal governments and the courts outlaw this stuff. But in the meantime, like the w the fights can be won. And it's because they're hyperloc and it truly is like. And a lot of these meetings we've had, so a lot of times the officials don't really fully understand the tech. Like your part of your job is also to educate them and say, like, hey, this is why we're concerned about this. And because they've only heard the police side and they haven't heard from the concerned citizens. And once they do, a lot of them to their credit, they change their stance on this. And I think that's inspiring. Yeah. And that I agree. And is there anything Because this is an ongoing story, ongoing research. Is there anything you're currently working on regarding flock? Yeah, we're just kinda we're we're our next our next goal. So like right now we've obviously w we focus heavily on where the cameras have been deployed, but now it's stepping into like how is the data being used. And I think that is the real like I what something I'm concerned about and I really I'm hoping we can figure out in research. There's this famous study in criminology Driving Wild Black from the 1990s, early two thousands, somewhere in that time frame. But I I wonder I'm I'm suspicious that these cameras are like creating a tech wash version of this. And that's something that once again, we need the data on how it's actually being used, but that's kind of where we're pushing forward next is we know where the cameras are at now, but how is this data being actively used once it's collected? Yeah, that seems like a very difficult but meaningful meaningful task. Where can people go if they want to keep up with your work and and yeah following your research? That's that's a good question. so historically I have been bad at having like a central hub for all the work that we're doing. Okay. so but my my email is stephen.keener at cnu.edu. If you'd like to keep up to date, I'm trying to come up with like, you know, some kind of sub stack or email like just to keep people up to date in our work. And so if that's something you'd want to follow along, please please do that. Please email me. And like I'm in the midst of putting that together because like this is something that like while it's academic research, we think it has major policy impacts and we want it to be in the hands of advocates, communities, policymakers. so yeah, so please please shoot me an email if you listen to this and are interested and I'll get you added to the list and you'll be one of the first you'll get the first email on whatever new version of this is. Yeah, ple please do, because I think that would be a great way of of doing it. A sub stack or or a website, anything that really keeps people up to date that they can subscribe to and and follow this story. I think many, many people would be interested in in following that. So please do. I will put it in the show notes, your your email for now. And as soon as you have everything ready, I will update the description to make sure we can all follow along. Thank you so much, Steven, for for having this discussion with me today. It was incredibly interesting and yeah, bit bit worrying as well, but also I think we kind of ended on an optimistic note there. So thank you so much. And yeah, maybe if there are some huge developments, we can run it back someday. Sounds good. Thanks, Julius. I really enjoyed the talk.