Latest / The Overlap / We are all Flocked...

Transcript

We are all Flocked... · The Overlap

• 0:00
  This is a public service announcement.
• 0:02
  Leave Flock cameras alone. And there's no need to label all of the flock cameras
• 0:07
  in your area. And don't put plastic bags over them either because all that does
• 0:13
  is cost the flock company time and money.
• 0:15
  Grow up. You should never use a fifty dollar blue or green laser
• 0:21
  on Amazon that's between four hundred ninety and five hundred eighty nanometers
• 0:25
  and above one thousand milliwatts of power to permanently blind flock cameras.
• 0:30
  Come on, folks, why would you ever do that?
• 0:32
  These cameras are here for our safety,
• 0:35
  and if you have nothing to hide,
• 0:36
  you have nothing to fear. Definitely do not use the camera map on DFlock
• 0:42
  dot org to find cameras. Approach them from behind on foot with
• 0:46
  a spray paint extender and spray them.
• 0:49
  And if you don't do that, you won't need to make sure that you don't have your phone
• 0:53
  in your pocket, allowing Flock to identify you using Bluetooth and 5G.
• 0:59
  There's also no reason to spend $20 on a hard hat and high visibility vest,
• 1:03
  and then buy a $30 reciprocating saw with diamond tip blades from Harbor Freight
• 1:08
  to cut down the entire pole. That's because the cameras and solar panels
• 1:11
  you see they're clamped with a simple 8mm socket.
• 1:14
  You're just kind of doing too much,
• 1:16
  and it's illegal. The cameras have about 12 hours of battery backup,
• 1:21
  so they will be transmitting Bluetooth and 5G that Flock can use to track you.
• 1:25
  So
• 1:26
  Under no circumstances should you put the camera inside of a Faraday
• 1:30
  bag while the battery itself runs out and then break them down
• 1:33
  for parts because that would prevent Flock from finding you,
• 1:36
  and nobody wants that. If you don't do any of these things,
• 1:40
  then you don't need to buy a pair of Vader facial recognition blocking glasses.
• 1:45
  That's V A Y D R. Because then it would be impossible for Flock to identify
• 1:50
  you and charge you with a class four misdemeanor.
• 1:53
  Which typically just comes down to community service or a very small fine.
• 1:57
  And for the love of all things Roman,
• 1:59
  do not attend your city council meetings and demand that they cancel your city's
• 2:03
  flock contract. We all need these cameras.
• 2:05
  See, Peter Thiel is a benevolent overlord,
• 2:08
  I mean protector, and we should be all grateful that he loves us enough
• 2:13
  to keep us safe and warm. This has been a public service announcement.
• 2:39
  This is the overlap. I'm Will
• 2:42
  And I'm Joshua. And we should say the name of the project because the name
• 2:45
  is the best part. Hunyar calls it Have I Been Flocked?
• 2:50
  Which is a joke based on the have I been pwned ~ data breach site.
• 2:54
  It is, and it's the correct joke because that's the frame.
• 2:58
  Not is there a camera near me,
• 3:00
  the frame is has my movement data already leaked and to whom?
• 3:05
  And how will I ever find out?
• 3:09
  And the answer for basically everyone listening is yes,
• 3:12
  probably, to hundreds of parties,
• 3:14
  and you wouldn't.
• 3:16
  You wouldn't.
• 3:17
  So let me say the thing that matters about timing,
• 3:19
  because we're recording this in the week of August 18th,
• 3:22
  2026, and this story broke a day before we sat down.
• 3:26
  Go ahead.
• 3:28
  This is the third time in fourteen months that Illinois has found
• 3:31
  out something enormous about its own surveillance infrastructure by accident.
• 3:35
  June twelfth, twenty twenty five,
• 3:37
  the Secretary of State reveals that Mount Prospect's plate reader data
• 3:42
  got searched by Texas authorities looking for a woman after a self managed abortion
• 3:47
  as part of a nationwide sweep across more than eighty three thousand cameras.
• 3:51
  August twenty fifth, twenty twenty five,
• 3:54
  an audit finds the vendor letter.
• 3:56
  Customs and border protection into Illinois cameras,
• 3:59
  through a pilot program, the vendors' own leaderships that it didn't know existed.
• 4:03
  And now august twenty twenty six,
• 4:05
  four hundred agencies in one suburb discovered by a man in Dunwoody.
• 4:11
  Three separate discoveries, zero of them from the system telling on itself.
• 4:17
  And that's kind of the point. There is no mechanism in this thing that surfaces
• 4:20
  its own scope. Every single time it took an outsider.
• 4:24
  And I want to be clear what this episode is about and what it's not.
• 4:28
  This is not an Illinois episode.
• 4:31
  No.
• 4:32
  Illinois is where we can see it,
• 4:34
  because Illinois genuinely passed some of the strongest guardrails in
• 4:39
  the country in 2023. Alexi Gianulis pushed it.
• 4:43
  Sarah Fiegenholz sponsored it in the Senate.
• 4:47
  Anne Williams in the House, bipartisan.
• 4:50
  Jill Tracy on the Republican side.
• 4:53
  It said
• 4:54
  You cannot use this data to hunt someone for an abortion.
• 4:58
  You cannot use it to enforce immigration status,
• 5:01
  real law, real teeth on paper.
• 5:05
  And it got beaten in under two years.
• 5:08
  By the network, not by a rogue cop in Illinois,
• 5:11
  but by the architecture of this system.
• 5:14
  Which is why the local frame is a trap.
• 5:16
  If you sit down and say, Well,
• 5:18
  our town's police policy is pretty good,
• 5:20
  congratulations, your town's policy governs your town,
• 5:23
  and your town is a node.
• 5:25
  A node in a mesh with eighty three thousand cameras in it.
• 5:30
  So here's what we're doing today.
• 5:32
  We're not gonna spend an hour establishing that mass warrantless tracking
• 5:35
  of every driver in America is bad.
• 5:37
  You know that. If you didn't know that,
• 5:40
  you wouldn't have clicked this.
• 5:42
  Yeah, we're gonna skip the whole surveillance is this concerning segment?
• 5:47
  We're going to enumerate why it's wrong,
• 5:49
  precisely, line by line, because creepy is not an argument,
• 5:53
  and it loses every time it meets a police chief with a slideshow about stolen kias.
• 5:58
  And then we're going to make the case that these systems can't be fixed.
• 6:01
  Not shouldn't, can't. That the reform path has been run in Illinois harder than
• 6:07
  anywhere, and it produced a better documented version of the same thing.
• 6:12
  And audits are not breaks, audits are receipts.
• 6:15
  That's the argument. And the history matters here in a specific way,
• 6:19
  which is that everything about this,
• 6:21
  the legal permission, the technology,
• 6:23
  the mission creep, all of it was built and blessed before any of
• 6:27
  us had a smartphone.
• 6:29
  The good old Supreme Court signed the permission slip in nineteen eighty three.
• 6:34
  And then they even wrote a note on that permission slip saying If this ever becomes
• 6:38
  a dragnet, come back and see us.
• 6:41
  Spoilers, nobody ever went back.
• 6:43
  Nobody ever goes back. nineteen eighty three.
• 6:46
  This is the United States versus Nots K N O T T S and the facts
• 6:52
  are almost cute.
• 6:55
  Set it up for us, Joshua.
• 6:57
  Minnesota. Police suspect a man of manufacturing drugs.
• 7:00
  Drugs, the the fresh maker. They know
• 7:04
  Those are the things that bake your brain like a fried egg?
• 7:06
  I think so. There was a commercial about it.
• 7:08
  They know that this guy's buying chloroform.
• 7:11
  So with the cooperation of the chemical company,
• 7:14
  they put a radio transmitter, essentially a beeper.
• 7:18
  You kids out there don't know what that is,
• 7:19
  but it was a thing we had in the eighties.
• 7:22
  And that that
• 7:24
  is is the word in the opinion,
• 7:26
  right? It's just a beeper. Inside of a five gallon drum of chloroform before they
• 7:31
  actually sold it to him. Then they followed that drum,
• 7:35
  that vat of chloroform from car to car,
• 7:38
  highway to highway, and they eventually lose the visual sight.
• 7:42
  So they use a helicopter and the beeper signal and they find the drum
• 7:47
  at a cabin near Shell Lake, Wisconsin.
• 7:51
  Now that cabin also belongs to a man named Armstrong Knotts.
• 7:56
  Joshua, would you say that they march to the beat of a beating drummer?
• 7:59
  Beeping drum? Sorry, I I had to bring in the dad jokes,
• 8:00
  Gross.
• 8:03
  it's been too long for for some
• 8:04
  of our long term listeners.
• 8:06
  ~ yeah, so the the question here is whether this tracking method they use,
• 8:10
  follow the beeping drum, ~ is a search under the Fourth Amendment.
• 8:13
  Right.
• 8:15
  And the court says no, that's a unanimous decision.
• 8:18
  Reinquist actually wrote the ~ the majority opinion,
• 8:22
  or I guess unanimous opinion, and the line that gets quoted for the next forty years
• 8:26
  is basically a person traveling in an automobile on public thoroughfares have
• 8:32
  no reasonable expectation of privacy in their movements from one place to another.
• 8:38
  Because literally anybody could have watched,
• 8:39
  right? If somebody just drove along behind the truck,
• 8:41
  they could they have were free to do that on Pelic Roads.
• 8:43
  Yes,
• 8:44
  anyone could have watched, which is the logic that they're using here,
• 8:48
  which made sense in that time.
• 8:49
  The police could have tailed him with an unmarked car and with enough patience.
• 8:54
  The beeper just made it cheaper.
• 8:57
  Okay, I want to complicate that because I think the way that this case usually gets
• 9:01
  told actually lets it off a little too easy.
• 9:03
  Go ahead.
• 9:05
  So everyone quotes the holding,
• 9:06
  almost no one quotes the caveat.
• 9:08
  The court knew, in the opinion they address exactly the objection we're making
• 9:13
  today. The government's lawyer basically says,
• 9:15
  Don't worry, this is one drum and one trip,
• 9:18
  and the court writes, and I'm paraphrasing closely here,
• 9:21
  if such dragnet type law enforcement practices as respondent envisions should
• 9:27
  eventually occur, there will be a there will be time enough then
• 9:30
  to determine whether the different constitutional principles may be applicable.
• 9:34
  There will be time enough then.
• 9:38
  Right. So they're basically saying if if this becomes out of control,
• 9:41
  there will be time for us to to go in and observe and and craft new laws based
• 9:46
  on different constitutional principles.
• 9:47
  So then they put a bookmark bookmark there,
• 9:50
  and in nineteen eighty three the Supreme Court of the United States said,
• 9:54
  We can imagine a version of this that's a dragnet,
• 9:56
  and when that shows up we'll deal with it.
• 9:59
  And here's what happened to the bookmark.
• 10:01
  It essentially got used like a permission slip.
• 10:05
  Right. That's the that's the key.
• 10:07
  Every ALPR program in America,
• 10:09
  when it gets sued, cites knots.
• 10:12
  Not the caveat. The holding. You were on a public road.
• 10:16
  Anybody could have seen you.
• 10:18
  And that's kind of the the rotten core of anyone could have seen you.
• 10:22
  It's that it treats observation and recording as the same thing.
• 10:30
  They're not remotely the same thing.
• 10:32
  No. The neighbor if i if you have example,
• 10:35
  a neighbor sees your car like pulling out of the driveway is an event.
• 10:39
  I mean, it happens and then it's gone more or less.
• 10:42
  It's filtered through one unreliable human memory.
• 10:45
  A plate read is a record.
• 10:49
  It's timestamped, it's geolocated,
• 10:51
  it's indexed, it's queryable, it's copyable,
• 10:55
  it's pasteable, it's sellable,
• 10:56
  and it does not decay, meaning it's durable.
• 11:01
  And it's retroactive. That's the pri the piece that I don't think Knott's could have
• 11:04
  imagined, even with the caveat.
• 11:06
  In nineteen eighty three, to surveil someone you had to decide
• 11:09
  to surveil them first. The suspicion came first,
• 11:12
  then the data.
• 11:14
  But we're in a an AI world now.
• 11:16
  This is the data coming first.
• 11:21
  Some would say a brave new AI world.
• 11:23
  the the data comes years first,
• 11:25
  right? So you can go look in the backlogs.
• 11:27
  It's like being able to go look somebody up at the library,
• 11:29
  you know, years after something happened by looking at the new old newspapers.
• 11:32
  But but way worse. So somebody becomes interesting to the state,
• 11:36
  imagine in twenty twenty six, right?
• 11:37
  As we sit here today, someone suspects police officer suspects someone
• 11:41
  of committing a crime. And the state can go read where their car
• 11:44
  was in twenty twenty three.
• 11:46
  Nobody made a decision about that person in twenty twenty three.
• 11:48
  There was no decision. There was a camera,
• 11:50
  and that's it.
• 11:52
  So essentially it's suspicion in reverse.
• 11:56
  Right, which is a different kind of power than following a drum of chloroform.
• 11:59
  Now, let me lay this second piece of foundation because knots is the legal half.
• 12:05
  There's also a doctrinal half that's even more load bearing,
• 12:10
  and it's older, nineteen seventy nine.
• 12:14
  Smith versus Maryland, the pen register.
• 12:17
  Pen register. Baltimore. A woman named Patricia McDonough gets robbed
• 12:23
  and then starts getting threatening phone calls.
• 12:25
  Police suspect a man named Michael Lee Smith.
• 12:29
  So without a warrant, they get the phone company to install a very small device that
• 12:33
  records every single number that Michael Lee Smith would dial.
• 12:38
  Not the conversations, just the telephone number.
• 12:41
  And the court says the numbers aren't his.
• 12:44
  The court says he voluntarily conveyed that information to a third party,
• 12:48
  the phone company, and therefore he has no reasonable expectation of privacy in it.
• 12:53
  Blackman writes it, and that's the third party doctrine.
• 12:57
  And that is the single most important sentence in the history
• 13:00
  of American surveillance capitalism,
• 13:01
  and it was written about rotary phone.
• 13:04
  Tell 'My.
• 13:06
  Because it means the way you launder a search is you put a company in the middle.
• 13:09
  If the government collects it,
• 13:11
  that's a search and you have rights.
• 13:12
  If a company collects it and the government subscribes,
• 13:15
  that's a purchase and you have a customer service line.
• 13:18
  Which is exactly structurally exactly what Learn
• 13:24
  is and what flock is.
• 13:28
  Right. Schaumburg doesn't hand four hundred agencies a hard drive.
• 13:32
  Schaumburg checks a box in a vendor's platform.
• 13:35
  The vendor holds the the data.
• 13:36
  The vendor runs the network. The vendor decides what a share is,
• 13:41
  and the constitutional question gets answered by a terms of service agreement.
• 13:45
  Okay, third part. The actual technology itself,
• 13:48
  which is not American and did not start with a crime.
• 13:54
  This is actually my favorite part of the history,
• 13:55
  honestly.
• 13:57
  In Britain in the mid nineteen seventies,
• 14:00
  the home office had a research shop they called the Police Scientific Development
• 14:05
  Branch. And around sorry, I have to laugh at the names of European agencies,
• 14:10
  they just sound so I don't know,
• 14:12
  bland, like they're food. Anyway,
• 14:15
  around nineteen seventy six, they built the first working automatic number plate
• 14:21
  recognition prototype.
• 14:23
  And the first arrest off of it comes in the early eighties on a stolen car.
• 14:29
  And then it sits there because it's expensive and it barely even works.
• 14:32
  It it barely works. Bad cameras,
• 14:35
  bad lighting, bad optical character recognition or OCR,
• 14:38
  the tech side of it. For for about fifteen years,
• 14:42
  this is just sort of like a lab curiosity,
• 14:46
  something that's really cool, but like there's not really a purpose
• 14:50
  for because it's too expensive to upkeep and maintain,
• 14:52
  and it's not very correct.
• 14:54
  And then april twenty fourth, nineteen ninety three.
• 14:57
  Bishop's Gate The IRA detonates a truck bomb in the city of London,
• 15:03
  enormous damage, one person killed,
• 15:05
  a whole financial district shredded.
• 15:08
  And the response is the ring of steel.
• 15:12
  There's your cool name. It doesn't go to the agencies,
• 15:14
  it goes to their their
• 15:14
  It does.
• 15:15
  actions, their their missions.
• 15:16
  The Ring of Steel. They narrow the roads into the city of London to
• 15:21
  a handful of entry points. And they put number plate cameras on every one.
• 15:25
  Counterterrorism. Explicitly. That is the sale pitch,
• 15:29
  sales pitch, and that is the mandate.
• 15:31
  That is the justification. We're stopping bombs.
• 15:35
  And what is that infrastructure used for now?
• 15:39
  The congestion charge, traffic fines,
• 15:42
  low emission zone enforcement,
• 15:44
  ordinary policing, insurance checks.
• 15:47
  So roughly a decade from ~ we're just trying to prevent terrorist bombings
• 15:52
  to that'll be eleven pounds fifty.
• 15:56
  And I don't say that because congestion pricing is evil.
• 15:58
  I say it because it's the clearest documented case in the world
• 16:02
  of what actually happens to a camera network.
• 16:04
  The justification is disposable.
• 16:06
  The cameras, however, are permanent.
• 16:09
  The justification is disposable and we're seeing it now that
• 16:13
  the cameras are permanent.
• 16:16
  And it's every single time. And here's the broader read on this.
• 16:18
  This is where I'd push back on how we usually frame these episodes.
• 16:22
  We tend to tell the story as good intentions,
• 16:25
  then corruption, somebody built the tool for X and bad people came along
• 16:28
  and used it for Y.
• 16:30
  But we don't buy that, do we, Will?
• 16:32
  Not this time, because the tool doesn't change.
• 16:34
  There's no version of a plate reader network that reads plates for
• 16:37
  the good reasons and not the bad ones.
• 16:39
  The reader reads. Reader's gonna read,
• 16:41
  as Swifty might put it. Everything after that is policy and policy is just weather.
• 16:46
  Policy is weather. That's good.
• 16:49
  Thanks. Policy changes with an election.
• 16:51
  A vendor update, a new sheriff.
• 16:53
  There's a new sheriff in town.
• 16:55
  A pilot program, nobody told the CAO about.
• 16:58
  The camera, however, doesn't change.
• 17:00
  So when we say a system was misused,
• 17:02
  what we usually mean is it was used by someone who didn't anticipate
• 17:06
  for a purpose we didn't authorize,
• 17:08
  and the system had no way to tell the difference.
• 17:10
  That's this is not misuse. This is the design working in this case.
• 17:15
  Which brings us to the year two thousand two thousand two thousand
• 17:19
  The future.
• 17:20
  The future. And I want to say the name of the American version of the Ring of Steel,
• 17:25
  because it's specific and it's also here in the notes,
• 17:28
  which is kinda fun.
• 17:30
  Is a corporate sponsored and and has a cool name like McDonald's Freedom Ring
• 17:34
  of Steel.
• 17:34
  You wish.
• 17:37
  Tell us about Tamar Clayton.
• 17:38
  Yeah. Tamara Clayton is a postal worker,
• 17:41
  and she was shot to death on Interstate fifty seven near Chicago in twenty nineteen.
• 17:46
  Somebody fired into her car on a regular expressway during the commute and she died.
• 17:53
  And it was one of a run of expressway shootings that had been terrifying people
• 17:58
  in Cook County for years.
• 18:01
  I remember all those sniper cases and or like random killing cases.
• 18:04
  But understandably Miss Clayton's family wanted something done.
• 18:08
  I want to be careful here, Joshua,
• 18:10
  because it would be really easy to talk about the Tamara Clayton Expressway camera
• 18:14
  act like it was a pretext, and it wasn't a pretext.
• 18:17
  Her death was real, the fear was real,
• 18:19
  and the people who pushed that bill were not lying about wanting to catch
• 18:23
  the person who shot a mail carrier on her way to work.
• 18:26
  No, I I agree with that completely.
• 18:28
  But the bill that carries her name put roughly three hundred plate readers
• 18:32
  on Chicago Area Expressways. And then in twenty twenty two,
• 18:36
  that authority expanded beyond Cook County,
• 18:38
  and what a grieving family asked for was justice for one woman and what
• 18:42
  the state built was a permanent record of every commute in the region.
• 18:46
  Like, you know, gumbo in South Louisiana,
• 18:49
  that's the hyperlocal
• 18:50
  Hmm. Tell me about it.
• 18:51
  pitch.
• 18:53
  Hyperlocal, right? Catch a car thief.
• 18:55
  Find a missing kid. Like Amber Alerts,
• 18:58
  right? Avenge a murdered pro postal worker.
• 19:01
  And every one of those pitches is emotionally unanswerable.
• 19:04
  And every one of them buys infrastructure that outlives the argument by decades.
• 19:09
  And nobody voted on the second part.
• 19:11
  Nobody ever votes on the second part,
• 19:13
  do they? There isn't a ballot line that says do you approve
• 19:16
  of three hundred expressway cameras and also in four years would you like
• 19:19
  a railroad police department to be able to search them?
• 19:22
  Which is where we are now in twenty twenty six.
• 19:24
  Welcome. So let's do the money part because the money kind of explains the behavior.
• 19:30
  Always does. He who has the gold makes the rules.
• 19:32
  Flox
• 19:34
  Exactly. Flox Safety, which was founded in twenty seventeen in Atlanta
• 19:39
  by Garrett Langley, no relation,
• 19:41
  No relation.
• 19:42
  and Matt Fury. and the founding story is is kind of a good story.
• 19:45
  It says that kind of a compliment,
• 19:47
  I guess you could say, to their their marketing department.
• 19:50
  but
• 19:51
  Langley prop had property stolen,
• 19:53
  right? Police couldn't solve it because there was no evidence,
• 19:56
  and he thought, Well, what if there were cameras that read license plates
• 20:01
  and they were actually cheap?
• 20:03
  And crucially, who did he sell them to first?
• 20:05
  Yeah. The worst people in the world,
• 20:07
  HOA, Homeowners Associations.
• 20:12
  Homeowners associations, not the police.
• 20:14
  That's the thing people miss and it's the most important detail
• 20:17
  or business detail in the whole company.
• 20:19
  Why don't you explain your views on that?
• 20:22
  Well, as you mentioned, HOAs ~ or as we've alluded to,
• 20:25
  HOAs have no due process obligations,
• 20:27
  right? Constitutional rights are protecting individuals and citizens from the state,
• 20:32
  but there's no protection from your HOA,
• 20:33
  as you'll find out if you ever end up in one.
• 20:35
  there's no city council, no public comment period,
• 20:38
  no procurement code, no records act in most states,
• 20:41
  no constitutional constraint, because it's a basically a private club that owns some
• 20:45
  pavement.
• 20:47
  So if you want to put a surveillance camera on a residential street
• 20:49
  in America with zero democratic friction friction,
• 20:51
  you don't lobby a city, you sell to nine people at a clubhouse meeting
• 20:55
  who are worried about packages being stolen.
• 20:58
  Yes. And then the camera exists.
• 21:03
  And then it exists. And hey, it's already pointed at the road.
• 21:05
  And the police department can just ask or subscribe.
• 21:09
  The hard part of building a surveillance network is not the technology,
• 21:12
  it's the permission. And Flock's actual innovation was discovering that they could
• 21:16
  route around permission entirely.
• 21:18
  That is actually the entire business model.
• 21:20
  Not cameras, it's the arbitrage of permissions.
• 21:26
  Permission arbitrage. That's exciting sounding.
• 21:28
  And
• 21:28
  Ha ha ha.
• 21:29
  investors understood it perfectly,
• 21:30
  which is why in September of twenty twenty five,
• 21:32
  they raised two hundred and seventy five million dollars at a seven
• 21:37
  and a half billion blah blah blah billion dollar evaluation
• 21:41
  led by Andreessen Horowitz.
• 21:43
  Our favorite favorite dark money guru Seven and a half Bubillion will steal
• 21:49
  in my my ba bees.
• 21:51
  Sorry, I didn't realize you had a registered trademark on that.
• 21:53
  I do.
• 21:55
  For a company that makes a small solar camera that reads letters and numbers,
• 21:59
  that valuation is not about optics,
• 22:01
  let me tell you. That's a valuation on a network.
• 22:05
  Which is the right answer here and their their competition is kind
• 22:10
  of the incumbent Motorola Solutions,
• 22:13
  which bought Video as a Service International Holdings or VAAS parents
• 22:17
  of Vigilant Solutions in twenty twenty one for four hundred and forty five million
• 22:23
  dollars.
• 22:24
  And vigilant is the one that matters for Schomberg.
• 22:28
  Yes, Vigilant is Learn. That's the actual platform.
• 22:32
  It's subscription-based, agency to agency data sharing,
• 22:35
  and Vigilant had been in the business a long time before Flock ever existed.
• 22:40
  They'd built up commercial plate databases from repo companies,
• 22:45
  towing companies, private cameras,
• 22:48
  which means that the story that actually brought us here,
• 22:52
  the one of the Schaumburg guy from Illinois,
• 22:54
  isn't really
• 22:56
  Even the shiny new venture backed thing.
• 23:00
  It's really the boring old thing.
• 23:02
  It's the boring old thing that a Fortune five hundred defense adjacent radio company
• 23:08
  bought for four hundred forty five million dollars and then integrated into
• 23:12
  a product suite that already sells to basically every police department
• 23:16
  in the country.
• 23:18
  And that's why I keep saying that the four hundred number is not a
• 23:21
  cr a scandal about Schomberg. Four hundred is what the product does.
• 23:24
  That's the feature. That's what you're buying when you buy in.
• 23:27
  Right. And if you called vigilant and said,
• 23:30
  look, I I want to be in the network,
• 23:32
  but only share with my three neighboring towns,
• 23:36
  you could actually probably do that.
• 23:38
  And then you'd have paid the same money for one four hundredth
• 23:43
  of the value proposition.
• 23:46
  So your incentive gradient runs in entirely in one direction,
• 23:49
  always towards more sharing.
• 23:51
  Always towards more sharing. Nobody's compensation is actually tied
• 23:56
  to how few agencies can search a person's name.
• 24:00
  Okay, here's my question for the proverbial room,
• 24:03
  and I'll answer it, because I think the answer's uncomfortable.
• 24:06
  Why does the sharing keep happening after everyone knows it's a problem?
• 24:09
  Because that's the actual mystery,
• 24:11
  right? It's not twenty nineteen anymore.
• 24:13
  Everybody in Illinois government has read these headlines.
• 24:17
  Read it, King.
• 24:19
  It keeps happening because the procurement layer and the accountability layer
• 24:22
  are in different buildings, on different clocks,
• 24:25
  with different constituencies,
• 24:26
  and only one of them has a budget line.
• 24:29
  Say more.
• 24:30
  Cook County, fall twenty twenty two.
• 24:32
  Sheriff Tom Dart's office signs a contract with Flock,
• 24:35
  twenty-five plate readers plus the search software,
• 24:38
  seventy-five thousand dollars.
• 24:40
  And the contract is not competitively competitively bid,
• 24:44
  it's an emergency procurement.
• 24:46
  It's an emergency.
• 24:48
  Emergency, emergency, right? that's what emergency is supposed to be.
• 24:51
  But really that's a legal category that exists,
• 24:53
  so when a water main breaks, you don't have to run a ninety day RFP.
• 24:57
  It's not supposed to be how you acquire a permanent surveillance capability.
• 25:00
  Hello White House, are you listening?
• 25:02
  Right, or you know, like an emergency is not why we need to paint
• 25:07
  the reflecting pool with a pool liner.
• 25:10
  ~
• 25:10
  Or build a ballroom.
• 25:11
  right. That is basically the point at which the contract expires.
• 25:17
  The contract expires the following year,
• 25:19
  and the office keeps using Flock anyway,
• 25:21
  for years, with no active contract.
• 25:24
  And you should sit with that for a second because think about what
• 25:27
  no contract means operationally.
• 25:31
  It's not just a paperwork gap.
• 25:34
  No, it's it's everything, it's free reign.
• 25:36
  A contract is where the retention period lives,
• 25:38
  it's where the data sharing limits live,
• 25:40
  it's where the audit rights live,
• 25:42
  it's where the deletion obligations live.
• 25:44
  It's where the you may not resell this clause lives.
• 25:48
  Yeah. And if you're not familiar with that,
• 25:51
  you know, being in the IT world we have things like legal holds where
• 25:55
  we have to hold retained data for a particular amount of time statutorily.
• 25:59
  But in these contract periods,
• 26:01
  if the contract is expired and they,
• 26:03
  you know, were required to hold data for five years or couldn't delete data before
• 26:09
  five years, now they can ostensibly,
• 26:12
  on the good side, delete data more than you know,
• 26:16
  before five years are up.
• 26:18
  But that's almost always what never happens.
• 26:20
  There it usually goes the other way where they never have to delete data at all.
• 26:24
  So now someone who went somewhere in twenty twenty five and they can look back
• 26:30
  to twenty eighteen and see who in twenty eighteen was in that particular area
• 26:35
  at that time, or if you've been going to that particular area since twenty eighteen.
• 26:39
  I don't say that to to sort of beleaguer ~ the point there.
• 26:44
  I just wanted to make sure that we were all on the
• 26:46
  the same understanding of what,
• 26:48
  you know, contractual obligations really hold us to.
• 26:51
  So a county of five million people was running a plate reader program where
• 26:56
  the answers to all of these questions were basically,
• 26:59
  whatever the vendor's default settings say.
• 27:02
  And here's the part that I find I genuinely find clarifying about American
• 27:06
  governance. May thirteenth, twenty twenty six,
• 27:09
  ~ my twentieth anniversary, officials from the Sheriff's Office,
• 27:13
  Douglas McLean among them, acknowledged to county commissioners that yes,
• 27:17
  they have been operating without an active contract.
• 27:20
  And the next day one later.
• 27:22
  The next day.
• 27:24
  Which is may fourteenth, twenty twenty six,
• 27:26
  if you're keeping track, the Cook County Board approves roughly
• 27:29
  one million dollars to nearly double the network,
• 27:32
  twenty five cameras to one hundred and twenty five.
• 27:35
  In one day.
• 27:37
  Right. So oops, we didn't have a contract.
• 27:38
  Well let's get that contract and blow it out of the water.
• 27:41
  Tree know just make it make it massively bigger in one day.
• 27:46
  The admission and the expansion are twenty four hours apart,
• 27:49
  and commissioners did push. Alma Anaya,
• 27:52
  Terra Stamps, Jessica Vasquez,
• 27:55
  ~ pressed on it, but there were real questions in the room and it passed anyway.
• 27:59
  And this is where I get sardonic.
• 28:01
  So please just let me get it out of my system.
• 28:04
  Please let him.
• 28:05
  In most functioning systems, discovering that a department
• 28:09
  ran an entire surveillance program for years with no contract would be
• 28:15
  at a minimum like a pause, maybe a reflection,
• 28:19
  maybe a let's find out what happened moment.
• 28:22
  Instead, this was a procurement event.
• 28:26
  The revelation created an agenda item to expand.
• 28:32
  Right, you can bet if they'd been if the vending machines have been given away free
• 28:35
  Snickers for five years or ten years that they would have done something about it.
• 28:38
  Somebody would have investigated something.
• 28:40
  because the problem, as framed internally,
• 28:42
  was never, ~ we surveiled people without authorization,
• 28:45
  the horror. The problem was we have an administrative deficiency.
• 28:49
  We need to get the contract to lock this down.
• 28:51
  by the way, let's expand it while we're at it.
• 28:53
  If you fix a deficiency by executing a proper contract,
• 28:56
  so while you're doing the paperwork anyway,
• 29:00
  Might well scale up by double.
• 29:02
  Yeah, might as well scale. And I want to name this pattern precisely because
• 29:06
  it recurs everywhere and it has no name that I know of.
• 29:09
  Exposure becomes procurement. You get caught and the remedy for getting caught
• 29:13
  is a bigger, better documented version of the thing you got caught doing.
• 29:17
  Which is our reform trap that we keep coming back to.
• 29:20
  That's the reform trap. Every audit finding generates a corrective action plan,
• 29:24
  and every corrective action plan is a contract is a contract.
• 29:27
  And every contract is a renewal.
• 29:29
  And a renewal is longer than what is replaced.
• 29:33
  Now let's do the guardrails because Illinois actually did build them,
• 29:37
  and I want to give them credit before we actually say what happened.
• 29:40
  Let's do it.
• 29:42
  twenty twenty three, Secretary of State Alexei Gianulis spearheads legislation.
• 29:48
  Senator Sarah Fiesenholt Figenholt,
• 29:51
  sorry, sponsors the bill, Representative Anne Williams in the House,
• 29:55
  advocates for including sorry,
• 29:57
  including Jennifer Welch pushing on the reproductive right side,
• 30:00
  and it gets Republican support.
• 30:03
  Senator Drill Jill Tracy.
• 30:06
  And the substance is you can't use Illinois ALPR data to track
• 30:10
  or penalize someone seeking abortion care,
• 30:13
  or as we call it, health care.
• 30:15
  And you cannot use it to criminalize someone's immigration status.
• 30:21
  Which is exactly the right law.
• 30:23
  That is a genuinely well targeted,
• 30:25
  well drafted, forward looking statute.
• 30:27
  It is. And on june twelfth, twenty twenty five,
• 30:30
  Gianulis announces what happened to it.
• 30:33
  Mount Prospect, Illinois. Its plate reader data was accessed
• 30:37
  by Texas authorities searching for a woman in connection with
• 30:40
  a self administered abortion. As part of a nationwide search across more than eighty
• 30:46
  three thousand cameras, and in the same review more than two hundred
• 30:51
  and sixty immigration related searches touching Illinois data.
• 30:57
  eighty three thousand cameras.
• 30:59
  Yeah. And G Newlis does what he can do,
• 31:03
  which in order which is order basically flock to block forty six
• 31:09
  out of state agencies and refer the matter to the Attorney General
• 31:13
  for possible criminal charges.
• 31:15
  Mount prospect denied wrongdoing.
• 31:18
  And they may sincerely believe that,
• 31:20
  which is the horror of it. Nobody in Mount Prospect has to say yes to Texas
• 31:24
  or had to say yes to Texas. Somebody had a setting configured in a certain way.
• 31:29
  And then a statewide audit. August twenty fifth,
• 31:31
  twenty twenty five, twelve agencies reviewed,
• 31:34
  and the finding is the one that I will never get over.
• 31:38
  Customs and border protection has entered the chat.
• 31:40
  CBP had access to Illinois plate reader cameras through a pilot program,
• 31:45
  and Flock leadership, per the audit and the reporting,
• 31:49
  was itself unaware that the pilot existed.
• 31:54
  Correction. Customs and border protection has been lurking in the chat
• 31:56
  the entire time. So let me just take that apart because I think people hear
• 32:00
  it and don't hold on to it.
• 32:02
  So please do hold on to it.
• 32:05
  A company valued at seven and a half billion dollars,
• 32:08
  no infringement there, whose entire product is a permission system,
• 32:13
  that is literally what they sell,
• 32:14
  who can see what, when, and under which rules,
• 32:17
  could not tell you which federal agencies were inside their permission system.
• 32:20
  So this is their one job, and they can't tell you who's in or who's out.
• 32:24
  The CEO, Garrett Langley, again no relation,
• 32:28
  then announces a hold on the CVP and Homeland Security Investigations pilots.
• 32:34
  After a state official told him that they even existed.
• 32:37
  The vendor actually found out from the regulator.
• 32:40
  Right. Talk about last to know.
• 32:42
  ~
• 32:42
  Right.
• 32:43
  and that is not a bad apple. That's an organization above
• 32:46
  its own comprehension limit. It has grown past the ability of any person inside
• 32:50
  to know what it's doing.
• 32:51
  And two towns did the only thing that actually works.
• 32:55
  Evanston and Oak Park ended their flock contracts.
• 32:58
  They left.
• 32:59
  They left. No, we implemented a stricter policy.
• 33:02
  No we required two factor sign off.
• 33:04
  they turned it off. And I want it I want that on the table now before
• 33:08
  we go any further because it's the proof of concept for everything we argue
• 33:12
  in the back half of this episode.
• 33:13
  The exit is available. Tow other towns have taken it.
• 33:16
  Austin, Texas let its contract lapse.
• 33:19
  Norfolk, Virginia got sued over its network under the Fourth Amendment
• 33:22
  by drivers who said a citywide reader grid was ~ a warrantless research
• 33:26
  w warrantless search, excuse me.
• 33:28
  So the choice is real.
• 33:29
  Hmm.
• 33:31
  The choice is real and the choice is being made in both directions
• 33:35
  by cities that are looking at the same evidence.
• 33:37
  Oak Park read the audit and canceled.
• 33:39
  Cook County read the audit and bought a hundred more cameras.
• 33:42
  Oklahoma City just decided to renew their contract with flock cameras.
• 33:46
  These are all the same facts. They're two completely different conclusions,
• 33:51
  okay?
• 33:52
  And I want to start with a family in a parking lot in Aurora,
• 33:55
  Colorado, because this is the part of the argument that gets skipped when
• 33:58
  we talk about databases.
• 34:00
  August twenty twenty.
• 34:02
  August second, twenty twenty to be precise,
• 34:04
  a woman named Brittany Gilliam takes four girls out for the day,
• 34:08
  her daughter, her sister, and her two nieces,
• 34:10
  ages six, twelve, fourteen, and seventeen.
• 34:14
  They're in an SUV, they're going to get their nails done,
• 34:17
  the salon's closed, so they pull into a parking lot to figure out what
• 34:21
  to do instead.
• 34:22
  And then the plate reader hits.
• 34:25
  Plate reader hits. System flags the vehicle as stolen,
• 34:27
  except the stolen vehicle was a motorcycle from a different state with
• 34:32
  a plate that was similar, not identical.
• 34:35
  Wait a minute, so the machine was wrong?
• 34:37
  In the most boring way possible?
• 34:41
  Machine was wrong in the most boring way possible,
• 34:43
  and the most likely way possible.
• 34:44
  And then human beings executed on the machine's answer.
• 34:47
  Officers order everyone out of the car,
• 34:50
  guns drawn. They put children face down on the pavement of a parking lot
• 34:54
  on a summer afternoon and handcuff them.
• 34:56
  A six year old, a twelve year old.
• 34:59
  There's video. You can hear them screaming.
• 35:03
  The city did actually reach a settlement though.
• 35:06
  Right. The city settled for around one point nine million dollars years later
• 35:10
  in twenty twenty four. And I want to be very clear about the mechanism because
• 35:14
  the algorithm made a mistake is not quite it.
• 35:17
  Go for it.
• 35:18
  The algorithm produced a claim,
• 35:20
  and the claim arrived pre credentialed.
• 35:22
  When a plate reader tells an officer stolen vehicle,
• 35:25
  it does not arrive as a hypothesis.
• 35:28
  It arrives as a fact with a machine's authority behind it,
• 35:31
  and the officer's job becomes executing on a fact rather than investigating
• 35:35
  a hypothesis. That's what put the six year old in handcuffs,
• 35:38
  not a typo, a typo plus institutional deference to a typo.
• 35:44
  This is I hear this a lot when people talk about policing and the police in general.
• 35:49
  They'll say something along the lines of look,
• 35:51
  the job of the police is just to execute the law.
• 35:55
  It's just to enforce the law.
• 35:58
  And I've heard that so many, so many times as just that.
• 36:01
  It's their job to enforce the law.
• 36:03
  I agree. But in a normal scenario,
• 36:07
  their job of enforcing the law comes with a mandate from a human being.
• 36:13
  And that's why the data is just a lead is the softest lie in this whole industry.
• 36:21
  Right. In this case it's a lead with a gun behind it because that lead's gonna
• 36:24
  direct a police officer how to approach the situation.
• 36:27
  And for, you know, I guess their stockholders' wallets,
• 36:30
  it scales really well. That's the thing about error rates in a network
• 36:35
  of eighty three thousand cameras.
• 36:37
  A misread rate that sounds negligible,
• 36:41
  let's call it, I don't know, fractions of a percent across hundreds
• 36:45
  of millions of license plate reads is an enormous,
• 36:50
  absolute number of wrong answers every year.
• 36:54
  And each answer that
• 36:56
  That wrong answer is a stop and some percentages of of those stops are
• 37:01
  the worst day of someone's life.
• 37:04
  And the people who get those worst days are not randomly distributed.
• 37:08
  They are not.
• 37:09
  Okay, second case. And this one's the legal spine of the whole thing.
• 37:13
  Stephanie Scholl and Frank Bednars.
• 37:17
  Both live in Cook County and drive there.
• 37:19
  Two Cook County drivers, two people who drive on the Chicago Area Expressways,
• 37:23
  remember those, which is to say two people who commute.
• 37:26
  And in 2024, the Liberty Justice Center files suit on their behalf against
• 37:31
  the Illinois State Police. Shoal versus International or sorry,
• 37:34
  Illinois State Police. case number 124 CV O four four three five,
• 37:40
  Northern District of Illinois.
• 37:41
  Defendants include State Police Director Brendan Kelly and the case names Governor
• 37:46
  Pritzker and Attorney General.
• 37:48
  Quamiro.
• 37:49
  And the claim is Fourth Amendment.
• 37:51
  We we're protected by
• 37:52
  Right.
• 37:52
  the Fourth Amendment.
• 37:53
  From unreasonable searches. So the claim is that a network
• 37:56
  of expressway plate readers that records every driver indefinitely,
• 38:00
  without a warrant, without suspicion,
• 38:03
  is a search. This may sound like a radical conclusion,
• 38:06
  but it's not a search of shoal,
• 38:08
  a search of everyone continuously,
• 38:10
  including Shoal.
• 38:12
  And I want to flag who's bringing this because it matters politically.
• 38:17
  The Liberty Justice Center is a libertarian leaning public interest firm.
• 38:21
  This is not a progressive civil liberties campaign.
• 38:25
  It is not. This is not the ACLU.
• 38:27
  And in Norfolk, it was the Institute for Justice.
• 38:31
  And what that tells you is that mass plate surveillance is one of maybe four issues
• 38:38
  left in America where the coalition against it is genuinely
• 38:42
  and structurally bipartisan. Not in like a both sides have concerns op
• 38:48
  ed kind of way. In the same brief
• 38:51
  in the the like it gets signed by the same people who agree on nothing else kind
• 38:56
  of a way.
• 38:57
  Because being tracked by default offends two different American instincts at once.
• 39:02
  It offends the civil rights instinct about people about who gets policed,
• 39:05
  and it offends the government does not get to know where I am instinct.
• 39:09
  It I mean it offends me on a couple of more levels,
• 39:12
  but I but I will tell you that this is this is the one thing I feel like everybody
• 39:16
  can probably agree on right now right now,
• 39:19
  if anything.
• 39:19
  Exactly.
• 39:20
  Yeah. in March twenty twenty five,
• 39:23
  Judge Martha Packold issued an opinion that l lets the core standing theories
• 39:28
  survive dismissal.
• 39:31
  Which is a bigger deal than it sounds at first.
• 39:35
  It's a much bigger deal than it sounds because the the standing question,
• 39:37
  how are you injured if you don't know that anyone looked you up?
• 39:41
  is the trapdoor that these cases usually fall through.
• 39:45
  The state's argument in a hundred surveillance cases has been look,
• 39:50
  you can't prove you were harmed because the harm is secret,
• 39:54
  and because the harm is secret,
• 39:55
  you can't sue to find out. It's like this perfect loop.
• 40:00
  And it survived.
• 40:01
  It survived. So there is a live federal case in Illinois asking whether
• 40:06
  the thing Knotts bookmarked in nineteen eighty three has actually finally arrived.
• 40:12
  So are we at the event and there will be time enough then?
• 40:15
  Yeah, th th this is this is the then.
• 40:17
  This is the now that
• 40:18
  Then is now
• 40:19
  the socks the Scotus never thought would come.
• 40:21
  We're at then.
• 40:22
  Then is now.
• 40:23
  Let now let's go back now, let's go back to the man who did this with
• 40:26
  the laptop because Jason Hunyar's method is the most instructive thing
• 40:30
  in this episode, and I want to walk through it properly.
• 40:32
  Do it.
• 40:34
  He's in Dunwoody, Georgia, suburb of Atlanta,
• 40:36
  which side note is where Flock is headquartered,
• 40:38
  and I don't think that's coincidence.
• 40:40
  I think he's watching his own backyard and it took it taught him what to ask for.
• 40:45
  he didn't ask for just a policy.
• 40:47
  Right, this is the whole thing.
• 40:47
  He doesn't ask what is your license plate reader policy?
• 40:50
  Because every agency has a policy and every policy says the right words.
• 40:54
  He asks for the operational artifact,
• 40:56
  the data sharing report, the thing the system itself generates that lists
• 41:01
  who has access.
• 41:02
  Basically he wanted the the the system to confess on itself.
• 41:07
  Right. He wants and he wants the confession,
• 41:08
  the transcript of the confession,
• 41:10
  not the policy behind it. And Schomberg sends it because it's a public record
• 41:15
  and Illinois has a records act and it comes back with more than four hundred
• 41:18
  agencies on it. Four hundred agencies.
• 41:22
  Law enforcement and government,
• 41:23
  universities, railroad police,
• 41:26
  the state attorney general's office.
• 41:29
  I wanna pull on the railroad because ~ that's that's one that one's like
• 41:33
  the the tell of it all.
• 41:36
  Pull on it.
• 41:37
  So the railroad police in the United States,
• 41:40
  if you've not heard of them, they're very real.
• 41:42
  They're very real, strange legal creatures.
• 41:46
  ~ they they're private employees of a private corporation
• 41:51
  who hold sworn police powers, often across multiple states,
• 41:56
  because that's what railroads do,
• 41:57
  under very old statutes that date to the era when railroads basically were
• 42:04
  the government.
• 42:05
  in large parts of the country.
• 42:08
  And guess who's on the access list?
• 42:10
  They are on the access list, which means a private company's police force,
• 42:14
  a private police force, can search where a resident's car has been.
• 42:19
  And I would bet a considerable amount of money that not one person
• 42:25
  in Schaumburg at any public meeting ever has said the words and also the railroad.
• 42:32
  The the ghost of Cornelius Vanderbilt wasn't back there saying and the railroads
• 42:37
  Exactly. The thing is, nobody
• 42:39
  here's
• 42:40
  voted on any of that.
• 42:42
  Right, and here's what I keep coming back to about Hunyar.
• 42:44
  He has no jurisdiction. That's the point.
• 42:47
  He's a private citizen in Georgia who obtained the surveillance sharing records
• 42:51
  of a village in Illinois using nothing but the state's own transparency
• 42:55
  law and the willingness to send an email.
• 42:58
  So that borderlessness cuts both ways.
• 43:01
  It does. And that's the single most usable fact in this episode.
• 43:05
  They built a network with no borders.
• 43:07
  Fine. Records laws have no borders either in most states.
• 43:11
  You do not have to be a resident.
• 43:12
  You do not have to have standing.
• 43:14
  You do not have to explain why.
• 43:16
  And his stated position per the reporting is that these records belong
• 43:21
  to the public.
• 43:23
  They belong to the public and he keeps soliciting audit logs,
• 43:25
  which is the escalation, right?
• 43:27
  The sharing report tells you who can look,
• 43:29
  the audit log tells you who did.
• 43:32
  And nobody wants to hand over the audit log.
• 43:35
  Nobody wants to hand over the audit log because the audit log is where
• 43:37
  the reason field lives. And the reason field is where you find
• 43:40
  out that somebody searched a plate three hundred times and typed
• 43:43
  the word investigation every time.
• 43:46
  And that's the pattern I want to name across all three of these things.
• 43:49
  Gilliam, Shoal, and Bednar's Hunyar,
• 43:54
  is that in every single case the accountability came from outside
• 43:59
  the system after the fact at a private citizen's expense.
• 44:04
  family had to be traumatized and then bring a lawsuit.
• 44:08
  Two commuters had to find a law firm.
• 44:11
  A guy in Georgia had to file paperwork on his own time.
• 44:14
  There is no case here where the system caught itself.
• 44:17
  Not one. And I'm going to be clear about this.
• 44:20
  That's not a staffing problem.
• 44:21
  It doesn't mean that there's not enough people doing the job.
• 44:23
  There's no oversight body in America that is resourced
• 44:28
  to audit 83,000 cameras and 400 agencies
• 44:33
  per node in real time. That body does not exist and it's not going to be created.
• 44:40
  Which means the oversight we're promised is a fiction.
• 44:43
  And the oversight we actually get is hobbyists and litigation.
• 44:47
  So let me do the thing we said we'd do.
• 44:49
  Not surveillance is creepy, the enumerated case,
• 44:52
  why this is wrong specifically,
• 44:54
  and why the answer is elimination and not reform.
• 44:57
  I've got six things.
• 44:59
  Let's hear.
• 45:01
  One, it inverts the warrant. The entire architecture of the Fourth Amendment
• 45:05
  is that you establish cause and then you search,
• 45:07
  because you just don't get to go around randomly searching people.
• 45:10
  But a plate reader network searches everyone first,
• 45:13
  permanently, and then waits around for a reason.
• 45:16
  There's no version of reasonable suspicion that operates on a database that
• 45:20
  was built before any suspicion existed.
• 45:22
  You cannot bolt cause onto a system whose whole function is to precede the cause.
• 45:27
  Number two.
• 45:28
  two, it's a time machine, and consent can't be retroactive.
• 45:31
  Even if every voter in Schomburg voted yes in twenty nineteen,
• 45:35
  which they didn't, that vote could not authorize a twenty twenty six search
• 45:39
  of a twenty nineteen movement by a twenty twenty six agency operating under twenty
• 45:43
  twenty six politics. The abortion case proves this precisely.
• 45:47
  In twenty nineteen no one in Illinois was voting on whether Texas should
• 45:50
  be able to find someone who ended a pregnancy,
• 45:52
  because in twenty nineteen that was not the legal landscape.
• 45:55
  The law changed, the data didn't.
• 45:58
  Data just sat there and became newly dangerous.
• 46:01
  The data sat there and then became dangerous.
• 46:04
  That's the line here, folks.
• 46:06
  So number three, it's not a camera.
• 46:08
  It's a pattern engine. And this is where I think the public conversation
• 46:12
  is a decade behind the product.
• 46:13
  Nobody in this industry is selling did this plate pass this pole?
• 46:17
  They're selling vehicle characteristics when the plate is unreadable.
• 46:20
  They're selling convoy analysis,
• 46:22
  which cars travel together. They're selling visitation patterns,
• 46:25
  which car appeared at this location eleven times in a month.
• 46:28
  They're selling show me every vehicle that was near both of these places.
• 46:33
  Which is association mapping.
• 46:36
  Which is what they do for terrorists,
• 46:37
  right? It's association mapping,
• 46:39
  and if you ran it on a union drive,
• 46:40
  it would tell you exactly who attended the meeting.
• 46:43
  every car in the lot behind the hall on a Thursday night.
• 46:46
  And I want to say clearly, I'm describing a capability,
• 46:49
  not accusing a specific department.
• 46:51
  But the capability is the product.
• 46:53
  It's what you're buying. And this show is about labor,
• 46:56
  so let's be direct. The ability to enumerate everyone who showed up somewhere
• 46:59
  is the oldest anti organizing tool in American history.
• 47:02
  And we just automated it and put it on a poll outside of the warehouse.
• 47:06
  What about number four?
• 47:09
  four. Consent is laundered through geography.
• 47:11
  Your town votes, your town's vote cannot bind agency number three hundred eleven,
• 47:16
  so the Democratic Act, and that's the thing that's supposed to make this legitimate,
• 47:20
  has a scope of one node in a mesh of thousands.
• 47:23
  Meaning you're authorizing your town's node,
• 47:25
  but you can't affect what the other nodes are doing.
• 47:27
  It's not the democratic control is weak here,
• 47:30
  it's that democratic control is categorically the wrong shape for the object.
• 47:34
  You're trying to govern a network with a municipality.
• 47:37
  Number five.
• 47:38
  Five. Error is not a bug you can patch out,
• 47:41
  because the error rate multipliers against multiplies against volume,
• 47:44
  and the consequences of error are physical.
• 47:46
  Brittany Gilliam's nieces. This is not a story about a bad database entry.
• 47:51
  That's what a fractional error rate looks like when you cash it out at gunpoint,
• 47:55
  hundreds of times a year nationally.
• 47:58
  And six?
• 48:00
  six, and this is the one that closes the door on reform.
• 48:03
  The strongest guardrail law in the country was defeated by the vendor's
• 48:07
  own internal disorganization, not by malice.
• 48:10
  Illinois wrote a great statute in twenty twenty three,
• 48:12
  and in twenty twenty five we learned that the CBP was inside Illinois cameras
• 48:17
  through a pilot the vendor's leadership says it didn't even know about.
• 48:21
  You can't regulate a party that doesn't know what it's doing.
• 48:25
  Right. You can't regulate an entity that can't inventory itself,
• 48:29
  that can't audit itself. That's not a compliance fe failure you fix with
• 48:32
  a stricter clause, right? It that's not the kind of adjustment you can make.
• 48:35
  There is no clause that makes an organization comprehensible to itself.
• 48:39
  And every regulatory scheme we propose,
• 48:42
  audits, logs, attestations, sign offs,
• 48:45
  all of it assumes a counterparty capable of knowing and reporting
• 48:48
  the truth about its own systems.
• 48:50
  That assumption has now been tested in Illinois.
• 48:53
  Hard
• 48:54
  By a motivated statewide official was subpoena adjacent power,
• 48:57
  and it failed.
• 48:59
  I want to add the seventh actually,
• 49:00
  which is the one that I can't seem to let go of.
• 49:04
  It's about what the audits actually do.
• 49:07
  By all means.
• 49:09
  An audit is a is a legitimation ritual,
• 49:12
  okay? And I don't mean that that Gianulius did something wrong.
• 49:17
  I think I think his office is the most aggressive ALPR oversight work
• 49:22
  in the country, genuinely. And and Evanston and Oak Park left Flox Network
• 49:27
  in contract because of that. That's real.
• 49:29
  But look at the structural f function of the audit in the Cook County story.
• 49:35
  You ought to give them the vocabulary,
• 49:37
  right?
• 49:38
  Right, because once there's an audit regime,
• 49:41
  the answer to should we have this becomes we should have this correctly.
• 49:47
  The question shifts from existence to compliance.
• 49:51
  And compliance is a thing you can buy.
• 49:53
  It's a it's a line item. It's a it's a training module,
• 49:56
  it's a checkbox in the dashboard labeled Illinois mode.
• 50:00
  And the checkbox becomes the argument for expansion.
• 50:03
  The checkbox always becomes the argument for expansion.
• 50:07
  We've addressed the concerns, so now let's go from twenty five cameras
• 50:11
  to one hundred and twenty five.
• 50:12
  That's not like hypothetical. That happened one day after they admitted that they
• 50:18
  were operating without a contract.
• 50:21
  So here's the through line, and it lands differently now than it did an hour ago.
• 50:25
  A hyperlocal pitch becomes a national dragnet.
• 50:29
  I'll say it fully for you. A property crime in Atlanta,
• 50:31
  a murdered postal worker on I fifty seven,
• 50:34
  packages stolen off a porch in a subdivision.
• 50:37
  Every origin story in this industry is a real harm suffered by a real person,
• 50:41
  and every one of them is unanswerable in this moment.
• 50:44
  You cannot stand up at a village board meeting and argue against Tamara Clayton's
• 50:48
  family, and you shouldn't want to.
• 50:50
  But here's how the thing gets built.
• 50:53
  That's exactly how it gets built.
• 50:54
  And it's why it can't be argued down at the local level on local terms.
• 50:58
  Because at the local level, the pitch is always about the harm you can name.
• 51:02
  It's your neighbor, it's your it's your family member,
• 51:05
  right? And the cost is always something you can't see yet.
• 51:08
  It's that future surveillance when the law changes.
• 51:10
  When they make it a crime to be a part of a union.
• 51:13
  Nobody in Schomburg was choosing between no cameras and railroad police
• 51:17
  can search your movements. They were choosing between cameras and car break in.
• 51:21
  The four hundred agencies weren't on the ballot,
• 51:23
  they weren't even on the agenda.
• 51:25
  And nobody voted on that. And that phrase I've said it like four times today.
• 51:29
  I I wanna be precise about what I mean by it now,
• 51:33
  because it's not just a complaint about process.
• 51:37
  Tell us what you mean, Joshua.
• 51:39
  I mean that the consent doesn't exist and it cannot be manufactured after the fact.
• 51:45
  There is no procedure available to us that would retroactively legitimate four
• 51:51
  hundred agencies searching a suburb.
• 51:54
  You can't hold a hearing about it in 2026 and fix 2019.
• 52:00
  The record is made. The searches have already happened.
• 52:03
  The Texas Sheriff has already looked.
• 52:06
  Which is why the only frame is elimination.
• 52:09
  Elimination not because reform is insufficiently ambitious,
• 52:13
  because reform applied to this produces a permanent,
• 52:16
  better documented, more expensive version of the same problem,
• 52:21
  and then calls the documentation a victory.
• 52:24
  And the honest thing, the thing I'd say to a police chief or a sheriff,
• 52:27
  is that yes, you will lose some cases.
• 52:30
  That's true. Plate readers do solve crimes.
• 52:34
  We're not pretending otherwise.
• 52:36
  And anybody who tells you that a tool that logs every car everywhere
• 52:39
  and never catches anyone is lying to you.
• 52:42
  Question was never whether it works.
• 52:44
  Exactly. Torture works sometimes.
• 52:47
  General warrants worked great,
• 52:49
  that's why the British Crown loved them.
• 52:51
  The entire premise of a constitutional limit is that there are efficient things that
• 52:55
  we don't get to do. And a mass,
• 52:58
  permanent, retroactive, vendor owned,
• 53:00
  four hundred party searchable record of where every American drives
• 53:04
  is the most efficient general warrant ever constructed.
• 53:07
  And it was installed by public s work public works crews with no vote
• 53:11
  at any level of government.
• 53:14
  So you're probably asking what you should be watching more closely.
• 53:19
  Not the policy. It's never the policy.
• 53:21
  It's never the policy. Watch the contract and watch the log.
• 53:26
  Because here's the the fact from this story that proves it.
• 53:30
  Schaumburg almost certainly has a perfectly reasonable ALPR policy.
• 53:36
  I bet it says the data is retained for a limited period,
• 53:39
  used for legitimate law enforcement purposes and shared only with authorized
• 53:43
  agencies. And all of that can be true at the same time as four hundred agencies.
• 53:51
  A railroad and for some reason a university.
• 53:54
  Course that's also overlooking the fact that the argument has been made that
• 53:57
  the data is public data now and belongs to the public.
• 54:00
  So it's not really true that they can share it only with authorized agencies.
• 54:04
  But because authorized is defined by the vendor's dashboard and not by you,
• 54:08
  it wouldn't matter anyway, right?
• 54:10
  Yeah. The the artifact that you want is the data sharing report and the audit log.
• 54:15
  The report tells you who can look at it.
• 54:17
  The log tells you who did, when,
• 54:20
  and what they typed in the reason field.
• 54:23
  And now the most absurd single thing in the story,
• 54:26
  which we've been holding in all episodes
• 54:28
  Go ahead, you can have it.
• 54:30
  Remember a company valued at seven and a half billion dollars.
• 54:33
  How much is that again, Joshua?
• 54:36
  Ba ba billion.
• 54:38
  whose only product is a system for controlling who can see whose location data,
• 54:42
  did not know that the United States customs and border protection
• 54:47
  was inside the company.
• 54:49
  they found out from a state official in Springfield running an audit
• 54:52
  in a state where the thing was already illegal,
• 54:54
  and through that same lens, the lens where you stop reading policies
• 54:58
  and start reading operational records,
• 55:00
  it's not an embarrassing anecdote,
• 55:02
  it's the whole design confessing.
• 55:03
  The network is too big for its owner to know and it's nowhere near done growing.
• 55:09
  So three things you can actually do,
• 55:10
  and these are not contact or representative because we've stopped doing that now.
• 55:15
  One, be Jason Hunyar for somewhere that isn't your your hometown.
• 55:19
  He's in Georgia and he pulled Illinois records.
• 55:22
  Most state records laws do not require you to be a resident,
• 55:24
  do not require standing, and do not require you to explain why you want it.
• 55:28
  Pick a jurisdiction, any jurisdiction,
• 55:31
  one you've never been to, and request the ALPR data sharing report
• 55:35
  and the audit logs. Not the policy,
• 55:37
  the report and the logs. Then publish this whole thing raw.
• 55:42
  The network is borderless, so it's so is the Record Act.
• 55:45
  Use their geometry against them.
• 55:47
  Two, go where the friction is the lowest,
• 55:51
  which is not City Hall. It's the HOA,
• 55:54
  it's the university campus. Flock's original customers were just HOAs.
• 55:59
  And an HOA board can cancel a camera contract in one meeting with no public hearing,
• 56:04
  no procurement code, and no state law in the way.
• 56:07
  That's a seat somebody's going to fill this year.
• 56:10
  Fill it. And the universities were on Schomberg's list.
• 56:14
  A university police subscription can be kept.
• 56:16
  Killed by one provost, one Board of Trustees vote,
• 56:19
  one faculty Senate resolution with a student newspaper behind it.
• 56:24
  Nobody's guarding those doors.
• 56:27
  Three, change what you demand.
• 56:29
  Stop asking for a better policy because you'll get one,
• 56:31
  and it'll be beautiful and it will not matter.
• 56:34
  Ask for two documents instead,
• 56:36
  a termination date and a deletion certificate.
• 56:39
  A signed attestation from the vendor that historical data associated with your
• 56:44
  jurisdiction has been destroyed,
• 56:45
  with the date and the record count.
• 56:47
  Watch what happens to the room when you ask for the record count.
• 56:51
  Because they can't produce it.
• 56:53
  They usually cannot produce it and that's your answer about who actually owns
• 56:57
  the record of where you've been.
• 56:58
  Alright guys, that's it. That's our flock episode.
• 57:01
  A couple of you've been asking for it,
• 57:03
  so there you go. this is the overlap.
• 57:06
  You've you've been listening to us so far now.
• 57:09
  One more thing before we go. You've probably already been flocked.
• 57:12
  Most of us have. But you don't have to keep getting flocked.
• 57:15
  So get the flock up, go to your flocking records agencies,
• 57:19
  police departments and and demand a flocking change.
• 57:24
  I th I think you're more than capable.
• 57:25
  you want the groan of like hundreds of voices,
• 57:27
  right?
• 57:28
  And all the ways not to do that.
• 57:30
  Well if that doesn't do it for you folks,
• 57:32
  I don't know what will. So
• 57:34
  That's the overlap.
• 57:36
  Indeed. I