Police Are Using Flock to Stalk & Abuse Women

0:00 So, the surveillance state. Not Flock. Everybody goes, "Oh, Flock this, that." Flock is not the issue. It is an issue, but it's not the issue. Deflocking isn't going to stop the surveillance state that is being installed before our very eyes. In fact, it already exists. And in fact, it's actually existed in one form or another for decades. And for all of that time, police officers have been harassing and abusing women because they have access to these types of tools where they can locate anybody at any time.

0:46 And we will see today that this isn't a new phenomena. This has been going on for many years because the surveillance state already exists. See, the Flock thing, they make you think that well, it's being installed. And sure, there's tons of Flock cameras out there, but that's nothing compared to what we could have. So, we think that we're fighting the surveillance system by fighting Flock. And I'm not saying to not fight Flock. Fight Flock. It's a great cause to have. But if you think that that is the totality of the work that needs to be done so that we can escape some dystopian

1:31 surveillance state hellscape, well, you'd be mistaken because there's a lot of work to be done. There are many, many, many companies out there that are just as bad if not worse. So, unfortunately, because all of the attention is on Flock, a lot of what I'm going to talk about today is going to be Flock-centric. But out the gate, I just need everybody to understand that Flock is a issue, but it is not the issue. Okay? Flock is just one piece, one arm, one tentacle, if you will. And I want people to understand that. So, whenever I say Flock, I'm really talking

2:16 about surveillance in general, but Flock is what gets all of the attention. Now, why is this important, Kevin? I mean, Flock and Axon all of these cameras, they make us safer. If a crime happens, we can see, potentially, the crime being committed. We can follow the perpetrators of that crime anywhere. Knowing that a camera could be pointing you at any time will deter the criminals. I don't know about you, but I live in a little country called the United States. And in the United States, we have all sorts of documents. And those documents provide us, the American people, protection. And one of those little

3:02 documents is the Fourth Amendment. You ever heard of it? You familiar with the Fourth Amendment? The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. Now, that is a whole bunch of jargon. I get it. Let's go to something a little bit more simplified. The Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution protects people from

3:49 unreasonable search and seizures by the government. It requires law enforcement to have a warrant based on probable cause detailing the specific place to search and items to take balancing personal privacy with public safety. Balancing personal privacy with public safety. That is important. It's not just about safety. It's also about sovereignty. You as an American are afforded sovereignty, reasonable protections from the police and the government. You have the right to take up arms to protect yourself from the government. You have

4:34 the right to speak openly and freely about any of this or anything else in the world that you may want to talk about. It's a pretty good system. I think they got it right. The first time. Or sure, there's some amendments there, but let's be honest. They got it right right from the beginning. 250 years later, they're still pretty right. Now, maybe some of this some of this verbage maybe doesn't make a lot of sense to today because they didn't know what a camera was or a camera system. They didn't understand the concept of a surveillance state, but they did a really good job of explaining all of the different ways that you could

5:19 be exploited, all of that. Okay, so the Fourth Amendment protects us from the surveillance state. Now, the perpetrators, the investors, the owners of the companies, the lever pullers of the surveillance state and of our government, they want to exploit the loopholes. They do. They do. You also have to ask yourself, why is Flock the company that has all of a sudden become the bad guy? Who is likely going to take that place and take it further? Well, that'd be a company called Axon. Was there potentially a president of the

6:05 United States that is invested in that company, Axon? Maybe, possibly, potentially? I don't know. You might want to look that up yourself, but I'm pretty sure a certain president is an investor. Quite sure of it, in fact. But anyway, this isn't about Flock, and I'm certainly not defending Flock, and I'm certainly not telling you to not be against Flock, to not de-Flock. Whatever that means, whether it means you go to your local municipality, your local leaders, and you say, "I do not want this in my area." Some people are going out, and they're they're they're stealing them, they're

6:51 sawing them down, they're taking the copper and the gold, they're doing all sorts of things to them. I'm not telling you what to do. What I am saying is that it's totally okay for you to oppose and put pressure on the Flock camera system, but do not think that that is the work that needs to be done in totality. It's just not. Because when Flock goes down, there's a dozen or more other companies just like them who are already putting in hundreds or thousands of cameras already. So, if you think you go into to look at uh de-flock.org, and you think, "Wow, if we can get rid of Flock, we can get rid of all of this." How many more do you

7:37 think are out there that are not Flock? Again, it's It's about Flock. Everybody focuses too much on Flock. We need to be against the entire surveillance state as it exists. So, the AP actually did an article in 2016 all about this. Okay? Across US, police officers abuse confidential databases. And this is 2016. This is 10 years ago. Compiling records via public records requests from more than 50 agencies and state systems, the AP documented that officers and civilian staff who misuse confidential databases were fired, suspended, or forced to resign more than 325 times between 2013 and 2015. And they were reprimanded or counseled

8:22 more than 250 additional times with 90 plus more receiving unspecified discipline. So, essentially, for anybody who's caught doing this, they will at worst get a slap on the wrist. And at best, the entire thing gets swept under the rug. It's pretty bad. Okay, the single most striking data point comes from Minnesota's legislative auditor. In 2013, more than half of the state's 11,000 law enforcement users of the driver license database showed suspicious query patterns. They have 11,000 officers and more than half, that's more than 5,500 officers in one state, [snorts]

9:08 had searched and made really weird queries, searching themselves, people who who shared their surname, or disproportionately one sex. Tell me in the chat, what sex do you think is disproportionately watched, monitored, harassed, and abused? I'll give you a second. Let me know. For those of you saying women, you are right. California's experience, tracked annually by the Electronic Frontier Foundation via public records requests shows both the scale and the enforcement failure. Okay. This is just in California. Violations in just 2017, 143. Nine fired, 13 resigned, 18 suspended, and

9:53 four charged. Out of 143. 143. So, that's 31, 40, 44 out of 143. Got any sort of reprimand whatsoever. Okay? So, in 2017 in the state of California, 143 people. How many do you guys think, let me know in the chat, how many do you think, how many violations were there in 2023 in the state of California? Do you think it's is double? Do you Do you think it's it's maybe maybe triple? Because it was 7,275. Yeah, I don't know if you heard me right. 7,000

10:38 275 in 2023. And I don't know if you know, there's a lot more cameras out there now in 2026. A lot more cameras. There is a lot more cameras, guys. So, automated license plate readers, so you may hear about ALPRs. That's a better term, I think. Flock cameras, at least the ones that we know of, like there are drones and there are other things out there, but the Flock cameras, like the typical Flock cameras that we see the people are deflocking and all that, they are ALPRs. Also, I just like to say surveillance systems as the more blanket term because, I mean, there's drones and there's, you know, I mean, there is all sorts of cookie stuff and we could

11:23 do a whole live stream just about all of the different types of surveillance technology that are being implemented, but the main one right now are ALPRs, and those it's even kind of misleading because current Flock ALPRs are able to read so much more than license plates. So, so much more, but it's not really what this is about. ALPRs are where the largest volume of documented personal misuse is now live. Flock Safety operates a network of 100,000 plus roadside cameras capturing roughly 20 billion license plate scans per month. These are their numbers. I actually think it's a lot higher than that. Okay, so capturing roughly 20 billion license

12:08 plate scans per month, searchable by 5,000 plus law enforcement agencies with no warrant required, and critically a national lookup feature that lets an officer in one state search plate data collected in another. This is a problem. A single deputy can sweep tens of thousands of cameras in seconds. Okay? Now, I don't know if you guys heard about this one, but this one is in Saint In the state of Texas, they used 83,000 Flock cameras across this country to find a woman who got an abortion. Remember, women, when I said that you are the ones

12:54 that are disproportionately abused by these systems? It's pretty crazy. It's pretty crazy. It's a lot. It's It's It's nuts. Okay? So, in May 2025, 404 Media revealed that a deputy at the Johnson County Sheriff's Office in Texas Texas had queried Flock's nationwide network to find a woman connected to a self-managed abortion. The reason typed into the search log was verbatim, "Had an abortion, search for female." That's the prompt that he used. Now, why did she have to administer a self-abortion? Probably because she lives in a state that outlawed that stuff. At some point, we need to have a reckoning in this country

13:40 about how we treat our women and our children. We say women and children first and you know, protect your women, protect your family, protect your children. We don't do that as a country, do we? Our law enforcement certainly doesn't, okay? So, an initial search hit 17,684 cameras and expanded May 9th, 2025 search swept 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks nationwide including cameras in Washington, Illinois, and California. All states that legally protect abortion. See, you can't sit there and say that the states are allowed to choose their laws and how they want to, you

14:26 know, enforce those laws and then create systems that they have to put in everywhere that circumvent the laws of that state. That is messed up. That is messed up. Chat, do you think that's messed up? Cuz I certainly do. Sheriff Adam King and Flock Safety public publicly framed it as a welfare check for a woman her family feared would bleed to death. But an October 2025 EFF investigation by Dave Maass and Radala Alazhaji, I nailed that by the way. I nailed that name, okay? It surfaced the lead detective's sworn

15:12 affidavit describing a death invest- investigation of a non-viable fetus. Yeah, because she lives in a state that would rather her die than to get the medical care that she would need so that she can live and get the dead baby inside of her out of her. That's killing her. Pretty crazy. Investigators had consulted prosecutors about charging the woman. A medical examiner later determined the fetus was a blood clot. No charges were filed against her. It was a blood clot. Now, I don't know if it was actually a blood clot or that was a doctor or an examiner with some modicum of of power in that situation doing the right thing.

15:58 And either way, the manhunt happened. This happened. Now, people have been hearing about it over the last couple of weeks, but this was actually last year. This was over a year ago this happened. And again, over a year ago, we had far less cameras out there. But we still had enough cameras out there for 83,000 of them to be checked so that we could go after a woman who tried to save her own life because the state won't allow doctors to save her life for her. And if that doesn't piss you off, we can't be friends. And if you don't like that I'm talking about this and I'm defending the women out

16:44 there, then you can leave. You can leave. I implore you to leave, actually. Leave. Unfollow me on everything. Please. I beg of you to do that. If you think that I'm an for talking about this, okay? Now, there are thousands, quite literally thousands of cases of police officers using Flock to stalk women. We're going to talk about a few of them. The Johnson County case was not an outlier. That means the the the Texas one. A Washington Post investigation published August 3rd, 2026. So, this was 2 days ago, found at least 50 law enforcement officers

17:29 charged with or accused of using ALPRs for unauthorized purposes in 26 of those cases investigators concluded officers used the technology specifically to spy on wives, girlfriends, exes, ex's new partners, or women they wanted to meet. Officers used Flock systems in 46 of the 50 cases. The rest involved Axon and Motorola products. Yeah, Motorola actually has quite a few products out there, surveillance technologies out there. Uh the Institute for Justice, which maintains a running tally, counted 24 such cases by mid-2026 and stresses these are floors not ceilings because nearly all surfaced

18:14 only when a victim noticed. Floors not ceilings, guys. Okay. So, in Riverside County, that's California, Alexander Vanni, and I'm going to say these people's names because I think that they need to have their names spoken into the public. And the it also needs to be connected to what they've done and what they're doing. And so, I'm going to say their names. I'm going to say where they're from. I'm going to say what they did. I'm going to say what is likely going to be the abysmal outcome that will happen because of this. Alexander Vanni out of Riverside County, California, ran a plate through the sheriff's Flock system as part of a stalking campaign against his ex-fiancée. Also hid a bathroom camera. He was

19:01 convicted on 10 counts, 6 years in state prison in February. The harshest sentence to date. This is actually the harshest sentence we have seen anywhere. And something tells me it probably has more to do with the fact that he hid the bathroom camera in her place than it was him using the surveillance systems to track her down. Michael Stephman out of Braselton, Georgia. Search ex-girlfriend Marcy Blakeley's and her teenage daughter's plates 600 times. He was arrested and he was and he resigned. Wow. He lost his job. My heart bleeds for the guy.

19:47 Jezu Ayala out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. That is not a Milwaukee name, but okay. 179 searches tracking a woman he dated and her ex. He, oh my god, resigned. He pled guilty, got probation, and a $500 fine. And you'll notice that most of the men that get tracked in these things, it's only because of their proximity to the women that they're tracking. Rongie Chapman out of Milwaukee again, the internal affairs detective, so he was IA, the IA detective assigned to investigate Ayala, the person that I just told you about, ran his own 20 unauthorized searches and

20:34 attached a GPS tracker to a victim's car. He was charged with felony misconduct. Demaris Brown out of Orange City, Florida. He ran ex-girlfriend's plates 69 times, her mother's 24 times, and her father's 15 times. Again, the man who was tracked and harassed, and that's harassment, was only harassed because of his proximity to the woman he was tracking. He was arrested and charged. Great. Fantastic. Lee Nygaard out of Sedgwick County, Kansas, ran an X and her new boyfriend's plates 200-plus times. Guess what happened to him? Oh, he resigned. He

21:19 resigned. And see, the thing about resigning is I'm pretty sure that you could still be a police officer somewhere else, maybe in another county or maybe in another state. But resigning from your position does not mean that you are going to be exempt from being a police officer ever again. Lamar Roman out of Monroe County, Florida, catcalled a woman on the Bad Monkey TV set. I actually saw that show, and it was not that good. He chained David and DMV and the ALPR hot list. Okay, so David is the Florida It's like a Florida list. And then obviously you know what the DMV is, and then ALPR flock, whatever. So, he he he chained

22:05 all three lists together to identify this woman that he met on a TV set, then executed a 70-plus mile per hour pursuit to pull her over. He was arrested on three felony counts, and he was fired. Now, this is actually the case that made me want to do this um this live stream. Interesting enough, and I [snorts] didn't look super hard, but I tried to find the clip cuz there's actually a a police car clip that it went out on socials, and I could have swore I shared it on X. I don't know if this has been scrubbed because I cannot find it. I can't find it.

22:50 But in this video, it's it shows him he flags her, he gets the call that, you know, the the person that he was tagging was near him and he was weaving through traffic going at high rates of speed to pull this woman over. I believe to ask her out on a date. And if that doesn't creep you the out as a man or a woman, I mean I just don't know I don't know how to take that. If that doesn't creep you out a little bit. And last is Robert Josette out of Costa Mesa, California used Flock and Cleats, which is uh a California system, uh to track his mistress, her boyfriends, and his own wife, and harassed her by

23:37 calling her 100 plus times a day. He pled guilty, got probation. Okay, a parallel cluster in Georgia between June and July of 2026 saw 20 officers disciplined or arrested after an AI audit tool flagged suspicious searches, including officers in Cherokee County felony violation of oath arrest, Albany, Green County, and Fayetteville who ran themselves, family, and acquaintances with no law enforcement purposes. The problem here is that they get free reign of these systems, and they don't have to justify how they're using it or why they're using it. And none of these are like a

24:24 crime is happening right now and I need to access this right now and I can't get to the bureaucraticness of like me getting to look up this license plate or whatever. But that's That's You should have a reason, a documented reason as to why you're searching for a certain plate. You should. You should have to at least do that. But the fact that they get free reign open, completely open for you to stalk people across state lines even. I I that's craziness. It's craziness. Okay? So, beyond individual stalking, the same lack of controls enabled mass misuse. In May 2025, uh For Four Media attained logs showing

25:10 local and state police ran over 4,000 Flock lookups for immigration reasons between June 2024 and May 2025. That's less than a year, and that was before we had all of these Flock cameras that we have now. Okay? Using reason codes like immigration, ICE, and ICE warrant. So, you see, when they they they have to they do they do put a reason down in some of these places, not all, some of these places, but they could just be single words like immigration. Cuz we live in a world we live in an America where just the suspicion of immigration status is enough for you to trample all over somebody's rights. Mind you, our rights

25:57 are extended to everybody here in the United States regardless of their citizen status. I didn't write those rules. Smart, compassionate people wrote those rules. They used immigration, ICE, and ICE warrant despite ICE having no direct contract with Flock at the time, cuz they do now. Federal agencies reached the data by asking local police to run searches or by sharing passwords, audits later found. In Dayton, Ohio, cameras searched 7,100 times for immigration enforcement by outside agencies. The city covered its cameras with trash bags. So, they're literally the ICE guys

26:42 were going to local police and be like, "Yo, log in and and look this up for me." Illinois Secretary of State audit in August of 2025 concluded Flock violated Illinois law by allowing US Customs and Border Protection access. Flock was made to block 62 out of state agencies. San Francisco, where I just was, an audit found federal and out-of-state analysis ran 299 improper searches. The chief cut off access. Mountain View, California, not far from San Francisco, a state-wide lookup setting left on by default produced an estimated 600,000 unauthorized searches

27:27 of the city's plate data by 250 plus agencies with no agreement. They can't even keep their systems straight. Which brings up a whole other point. If you look at Ben Jordan with two N's, Ben Jordan successfully hacked into many Flock systems and put YouTube videos out about it. He went to municipalities and was like, "Bro, what are you doing here?" Because the problem is is that their system is weak sauce. I could probably with Claude code break into a Flock camera. And I don't know a single thing about hacking. That's how simple it is to break into these things. So, not only is it that we're giving this very powerful tool to police officers to search and abuse women, but

28:14 now anybody who wants to break into these systems can, probably pretty easily. And they, too, can anonymously track and harass women, predominantly, with the police officers. Remember they said it's a floor, not a ceiling. This is just what we know of. It's very difficult for us to actually know how much abuse of these systems are happening, and that's on the police level. Do you think they're tracking hackers and how they're using these systems? Probably not. Probably not. So, you got to ask yourself, do these systems provide a net positive, a net benefit to us in society?

29:00 Or do these systems leave us all vulnerable to harassment and abuse on our Fourth Amendment rights? So, now we have a little bit of an understanding of what's going on here, a little bit, kind of, right? We have seen a string of alleged crimes involving officers with access to the Flock system. Just yesterday in Green County, a deputy was arrested and fired. Investigators say Quanesha Goss accessed Flock data for personal reasons multiple times over the course of 3 months without law enforcement justification. A similar story in South Georgia. Five Albany officers were arrested on Monday. You see their names listed there. The GBI says an internal audit found that the officers used the Flock system

29:46 multiple times for non-law enforcement purposes. All of those officers have been fired. And just a few weeks ago in Cherokee County, a man Again, fired for breaking Americans' Fourth Amendment rights, for going against their oath as police officers. Tell me in the chat, do you think losing your job is enough? What kind of example are we giving here? Are we deterring police officers from doing this again? Or we encouraging it by saying that the worst that's going to happen is basically nothing. Planet News First Investigation found these three deputies have been fired for allegedly misusing Flock. Sergeant Mike

30:31 Creeden, Lieutenant Chris Ryan, Deputy Cynthia Cynthia Jodicey were all charged earlier this week. We spoke with a Flock executive who says the company built-in safeguards to flag issues. It's a horrible use of the technology. Tools aren't designed to do that. This is why we built an audit log and we work with the appropriate democratic But like also this guy. this guy. Like you know what you're doing, bro. You know what you're doing, bro. You do and you're just a yip-yapper mouthpiece for the surveillance state. You're an and I hope you live the rest of your life understanding completely that you're an and everybody who knows what you've done

31:16 will also know that you're an I think we elected governing bodies to hold those people accountable. We built a tool that uses AI to flag for the city if there might be uh a suspicious search of some reason or one that just maybe might be out of policy for the city. Now that same official stressed that while Flock has built-in safeguards, it's up to local governments to decide how police use the technology. Yeah, that's where we're at, guys. But listen, it's not all just men. As you saw, there were some women there that was misusing these Flock systems. This one came out today. A police detective is arrested after using Flock cameras 47 times to spy on her husband's ex-wife. So even the women are abusing women

32:02 with these systems. Fancy that. Would you fancy that? And that's why I don't say it's all men just abusing women. But it is predominantly men abusing and harassing predominantly women. That's where we're at with that. Cuz I want to watch this this video. across the country use AI-powered cameras to scan billions of vehicles each month, often without drivers even knowing they're being recorded. Supporters say the technology helps solve crimes. Critics warn its rapid expansion is creating a nationwide surveillance network, raising questions about the balance between public safety and personal privacy. Paul Solomon dives into that debate.

32:47 A quiet Saturday afternoon last September, Denver resident Chris Elser gets an alert from her doorbell camera. A nearby Columbine Valley police officer has come calling. Do you know why I'm here? No. He pulled out a picture of my truck and accused me of stealing a package. We have cameras everywhere in that town. You can't get a breath Did you guys ever see this? Police operated Did you guys ever see this? It was like maybe like a month or two ago. This is a crazy story, guys. Insane story. Cameras had recorded her driving near the scene of the crime. Only problem, she had nothing to do with it. They caught me 20 times driving through the neighborhood that we drive through to go to work every day.

33:32 Police had simply matched their video with doorbell footage of the theft, showing a blonde like Elser. Well, can I see this video? If you go to court, you can. If you're going to deny it, I'm not going to extend you any courtesy. If you're going to lie to me, I am not going to extend you any courtesy. It was shocking to have somebody come in so strong and rely on the digital evidence. Small black cameras mounted on utility poles began appearing around the neighborhood in 2024. But so what, says Elser? I took the stance that everybody else takes that big deal. It's up there. If I'm not doing anything wrong, then might why am I worried about it? Guys, I'm not saying anything wrong. So why do I need freedom of speech? I don't

34:17 say anything wrong. Turns out these cameras extend far beyond Denver. Today, more than 100,000 are installed across all 50 states, according to crowdsourced data from anti-surveillance organizations. The vast majority owned by security tech company Flock Safety. Let's shape a safer future together. We build hardware and software that helps cities solve crimes. Oh, look at that again. other devices to detect gunshots, for instance. But, our bread and butter product is a license plate reader. We are pinpoint focused on the back of a vehicle to identify the Yeah, but except you're not. As Ben Jordan has spent many videos getting hundreds of

35:03 thousands, if not millions of views exposing that that is not true. Make, model, color, the license plate, the state of the license plate, timestamps, locations. But, Flock's AI-powered cameras also record bumper stickers, dents, to match against local and national law enforcement hot lists. So, when there's a wanted person, an outstanding warrant, a hit-and-run, a missing person, they will add those license plates to the list. So, in real time, if one of those vehicles drives by a Flock Safety device, we'll send an alert to local law enforcement. The data And you got to wonder, if these cameras are this advanced,

35:48 that in local reporting. But, it's rare, says Thomas. What's far more common, he says, the technology helps solve crimes. They're helping solve somewhere between 800,000 to a million crimes every calendar year. So, roughly about 20 to 25% of all Yeah, where's Where's Where's the log of that? You've got to You You do the audit logs. Oh, we This is why we have audit logs. Where's like their website that says, "This is every crime that we've solved. This is every crime that we've prevented." You can't do it. Because it's not happening. of in some way or another with Flock technology. You can always take the stories of the worst case scenario, but

36:35 what's unfortunately and doesn't seem to get hit a lot are the stories of the best case scenario. Todd Chamberlain, chief of police in Aurora, Colorado. And there are some stories where lives have been changed through the use of this technology. As in Denver last December. A woman had put her child, a 14-month-old baby into her vehicle. She had her car idling. Uh somebody came along, saw an opportunity to steal that car, and that mother was basically left watching her car drive away with her 14-month-old baby in it. Flock tracked the car, reunited mother and child. Thank you guys so much for finding This is one good story. Oh, amazing, incredible. Flock is saying that they're doing hundreds of thousands of these

37:20 things. Flock saves millions of orphans every day. Well, if ICE has a partnership now with Flock, uh Flock is creating thousands of orphans every day probably. We might not have found that for two or three days later. That technology saved that 14-month-old baby's life. So, on balance, technology for the good? Uh it'll work Well, Creanna Elser for one might disagree. And Flock allows search data to be shared with police nationwide, potentially tracking Creanna Elsers anywhere. When you have a national database of these cameras that can be queried by law

38:06 enforcement without a warrant, that qualitatively shifts something about the surveillance. Joseph Cox is a journalist with 404 Media. This isn't a small beat local police officer on the beat. Media cuz they have been actually doing a lot of great work reporting on this. I've talked about, you know, so much of what I'm talking about is directly from their reporting. So, shout out 404 Media. cool crimes necessarily. You can have an officer on the other side of the country search for vehicles on the other side of the country as well. On behalf of ICE, for example. And that has clearly worried a lot of people who are now having a conversation about do we actually want these cameras in our community? A few weeks ago, using a commercial

38:52 search engine, I very easily found the administration interfaces for dozens of Flock Safety cameras. And last December, YouTuber Ben Jordan gained access to over 60 Flock video feeds in cities across the country. All this is relying on is knowing where exactly to look. And with that, we were able to see just how powerful some of these cameras are. But Flock's Thomas says the leak was caused by cameras mistakenly configured to be public-facing rather than private feeds. Sure. hundreds of thousands of sensors out in the world, a very, very small number had a public-facing IP address. He did find those. And the second we found those, within 48 hours, all of those were changed. Which is either reassuring or not. Is it reassuring? Or is it that

39:42 you've left cameras open for another 48 hours that anybody can hack into to harass, abuse, follow likely women. I can teach you how to hack these cameras and Meanwhile, opposition is growing. If this camera sees you, you will be put on a database alongside every other law-abiding resident of this city. We are asking for the Flock contract to be terminated in full. In the past year, dozens of cities have canceled contracts following public backlash. And Flock now says it's willing to talk about how its tech should be regulated. There's kind of no denying that it has clear benefits to cities. But the question I think is a very real one, which is what's the trade-off we're making in

40:27 society? Are we comfortable with that level of trade-off? And I think these are fair questions to ask. Back in Denver, Kristanna Liser parried the charges against her with surveillance tech of her own. I gave them a Google map of where I was. I gave them the video from my truck that showed where I drove. Gave them the video of the business I was at. She spent real money on tech defense. Why? That if there's digital evidence out there that somebody has of you, you should have your own digital evidence. You mean this is like spy versus spy or It was all kind of like what do I have in my arsenal to prove myself innocent? Her own digital evidence ultimately cleared her, which is why she suggests that you, me, and everyone should have

41:14 an arsenal of our own. But that's assuming, of course, that we can afford it. For the PBS NewsHour, Paul Solomon. And I don't know know if you guys have seen this, but uh there's this uh dispensary chain out of I forgot what state, but they're called Jars. And all of a sudden, they had all these Flack cameras in their parking lots. Now, they don't own the property, but all of a sudden now all these Flack cameras are going up around dispensaries, flagging who's going where. They're in schools or looking into schools where children are playing. How is that making us safe again? How is targeting people who are buying

41:59 legal cannabis and watching children who are playing? How is that protecting us? What's real real question. Yeah, gymnastics centers, daycare centers, yes. And these businesses largely have no say in where these things go. They have no say in that. So, JARS, what they do is they started putting signs in front of the Flock cameras, and then their city goes and says you have 30 days or something or 24 hours or I forget how long it was. But you have a certain amount of time to take these signs down. And so now, JARS has to come out and make a statement and say, "Listen, we have Flock cameras like four of our locations, but we have another 20 locations that don't have

42:45 Flock cameras right now. So, if you don't feel safe going to either one of these locations, we understand. We implore you to go to one of our other locations." This is a legal business. This is a completely 100% legal business that pays taxes, and now their customers are being driven away from them because people don't want to be surveilled. They do not want to be surveilled, and this is what's happening. It's like it's actually it's actually getting insane, guys. In my city of Milwaukee, where police officer Jose Ayala obsessed to cover how Flock cameras have the potential to be abused, I have to look no further than my city of Milwaukee, where police officer Jose Ayala obsessively used Flock 180 times over a 2-month span to stalk his ex-girlfriend. And in McHenry

43:30 County, Illinois, where I grew up, the same story played out where a police chief used Flock to creep on three separate exes and was later charged with multiple felonies. And there are countless stories like this. For example, earlier this year in Florida, a sheriff who was working a side security job for a film set started hitting on an actress and repeatedly approached her even after she told him that she had a boyfriend. Other extras on the set noticed this and intervened. So, he used the police database to find her vehicle's information and added it to the hot list so he would be notified every single time that she passed a Flock camera. He then followed her for miles and then pulled her over telling her that he had hoped her boyfriend was with her so he could give him a hard time. He then allegedly used the police department's investigative tools to find her on Instagram and continue stalking her there. Folks, this makes me think of the famous

44:15 Kanye West line. And let's be real, this is not a police problem. To me, this is just people not being able to handle this level of power problem. It's easy to say all cops are bastards when you hear stories like this, but let's be honest, could you be trusted with this power? Think of a time in your life when you maybe thought that you were being cheated on by your partner. Do you think you'd be strong enough to resist being able to confirm if it were true? There's a very good reason that the Fourth Amendment exists, and there's a reason that up until these cameras started popping up everywhere, a cop needed to explain to an elected judge why they needed a warrant to give them the power to track someone. Sir, there's no company logo on their building. To cover how Flock cameras have the potential to be abused, I have to look

45:01 no further than my city of Milwaukee where police officer Jose A. Ayala obsessively used Flock 180 times over a 2-month span to stalk his ex-girlfriend. And in Mc So yeah, I'm not crazy. I'm just not trying to be a doomer here. I'm not trying to be an alarmist, but I am trying to get you and anybody else who will watch or see a clip from this or anything like that to understand the full scale of what we are entering into or what we're in right now. I still think that we have the power to stop this. The alleged misuse of the city's Flock cameras by two officers who have since resigned from their position.

45:48 In both cases, a lieutenant reported his concerns after he was doing an audit of how officers are using Flock and found dozens of searches for license plates that had nothing to do with police investigations. The first officer at the center of these allegations is officer Mark Nichols. He's been with the Reynoldsburg Police Department for a little over 3 years now, but he's been on administrative leave since March because he's suffering from a terminal illness. A copy of the internal affairs investigation says that officer Mark Nichols had searched for the same license plate on flock cameras 46 times since December and that license plate belonged to someone that at one point he was in a domestic partnership with and they know that because that person was involved in a domestic dispute that officers had Twitter and I

46:35 saying that we can one day not be in a surveillance state. I have no idea. But what I do know is this. I have never been more convinced of the power that we have as a collective people, a unified people, than I am right now because if we didn't have the power, they wouldn't be going to the lengths that they're going to to hide things and to mislead us and all of these other things. So, I am convinced of our power, convinced of it. Question is, what do we do with that power? I don't know. I don't know how far we can take it, but what I do know is is that we all can kind of get on somewhat of the same page, at least on the same page going like,

47:20 yeah, we don't want to be surveilled like this. Well, that's a start. That is a start and that's what I'm here to do is to stoke that little ember of power, that little ember of a start by imploring you guys to go out there and to talk to the people that you care about, to talk to people that think differently than you, get on the same page with people because we still have the power. If we didn't, things would be looking a lot different. responded to back in 2022. That person's name is redacted from the report. Now, officer Nichols was supposed to meet with the police chief to discuss these allegations, but he resigned the day before that meeting in mid-July. Now, the second person involved is Alyssa Burkhimer. She'd been

48:05 an officer with Ronaldsburg Police since 2016. An audit showed that she was searching for the same license plate 53 times using the city's Flock cameras, and the audit showed that that license plate had nothing to do with any police investigations she was working on at the time. In some cases, she had put in various reasons that she was searching the license plate. One of them says a missing person's investigation, but that license plate did not connect to any of the missing persons investigations that she was working on around that same time. Now, she too was supposed to meet with the police chief, but she resigned the day before. The documents in Alyssa's case do not share any information about who she may have been using Flock to search for, and the person who that license plate belonged to has their name redacted. I did talk

48:50 to the city's mayor about these allegations. He says that it's important that people in this community can trust their police officers and have trust in the Flock system. He says the city conducts random audits of the Flock system and how officers are using it to try to identify any misuse like this. Now, he says that the city has referred the incidents involving Officer Burkhimer over to BCI for further investigation. The city does not plan to further investigate Officer Nichols due to his terminal illness. Aw. Well, he's got a He's got a little turmy. I guess he can just abuse people cuz he's got a little turmy. Like, what the actual dude? Three police officers in Fair County are off the job tonight. An internal

49:36 investigation revealed the officers have allegedly used Flock cameras for their benefit. Atlanta News First Brit Dispenser in Midtown Atlanta tonight. I know you've been speaking with civil rights organizers on how this could erode the public's trust in the police department. Well, chances are if you've driven around What public trust in the police department? What was left of the trust of the police died in 2020, like more or less. around metro Atlanta, you have noticed cameras that look just like these. Now, questions I've been getting from advocates are questions like, where does that line go between invading privacy and protecting the public? Flock cameras, many metro Atlanta counties are using them, and police say they help solve major crimes like kidnapping and helping catch offenders.

50:22 But over the last few weeks, Atlanta News First has reported on officers from several North Georgia counties accused of abusing the technology. And most recently, three Fayetteville police officers were fired for allegedly running their own relatives in a criminal But have you noticed that all of a sudden now, all of a sudden now, all these mainstream media news outlets are reporting on this. I'm showing you guys multiple reports here from mainstream news, local news, things of that nature, but they're all affiliates of the mainstream news, and they're all talking about Flock. Sure, they might throw in police officers abuse here and there, but they're talking about Flock. Why? point to this plate numbers through the

51:07 Flock system. We know that the audits are happening, but we have no idea what the protocols are for what these audits audits look like. The ACLU of Georgia is skeptical of some surveillance systems like Flock, arguing that they could be dangerous in the wrong hands. The the larger issue here is the misuse of surveillance technology and the ways that these technologies are being deployed. No, it's not about the misuse of these technologies. The problem is that these technologies exist and are infiltrated into every corner of our society. That's the problem. They want you to think that the problem is the occasional thing. And it is a problem. I mean, this whole live stream

51:52 is about that problem, but I'm using that as a means to get us to talk about the entire surveillance state as a whole and its existence being the problem. You guys get that yet? Because that's really what I'm trying to do here. I think a good place to start was to talk about the abuse of these surveillance systems and how women are disproportionately abused more than anybody else because of it. And I think that part of the reason why I wanted to do that was to remind the men who watch the show that women are always always potential victims, especially in this country. But also, I think that we need women to take this seriously because it

52:39 is the way and and yes, I'm getting into gendered here. sue me. But we need good women who understand what's going on here so that they can influence the men in their lives as nobody else could do like them to understand what's going on here. I'm going to tell you directly why I'm doing this and I'm I'm going to tell it to you because I'm not trying to trick you guys. I'm trying to wake everybody up to this so that they can start having those discussions. And one of the best ways that I could reach the men is to reach the women in their lives. So ladies, I'm going to put out a clip about this on YouTube. I will implore you to share this. Please

53:26 share it with the women of your life so they they can understand what kind of threat they're actually under every time that they leave their home. So like that that's what I would do. Yeah, tell your mans if he got a man. But tell the other men in your life, you know, tell your fathers about this if you have if you're lucky enough to have one in your life. Tell your co-workers about this. And men, be aware of this so that maybe you can protect a woman later. Maybe one day you might be faced with actually having to protect a woman from another police officer, and maybe that's a position to be in, but it's kind of your duty. It's kind of our duty to protect our women, man. Same as it is to

54:11 protect our children. And so, we need to understand, and I didn't focus on it as much, but there are our children are also directly threatened by these systems, directly. If this is the lengths that predominantly men will target predominantly women, what happens when Sure, it would be a smaller amount, but when some people with access to these systems who have proclivities for children use it to stalk, abduct, abuse children. What then? What if somebody out there hacks into finds another vulnerability in the Flock systems or the surveillance

54:56 systems, and that person is a PDF file. Now, that person has access to everybody's child or the child of that town or that city or that county. If we do not take this seriously, then we will not be on alert about it. And if you are not on alert about it, then you leave yourself open to being abused. And not only that, as we've seen through the reporting, that not being aware of what's happening leaves it so that the abusers don't get found to be the abusers. Everybody who's been caught, everybody who has faced any sort of consequence whatsoever, even if it was just minuscule as losing their job.

55:43 The reporting says that every one of them was found because of the noticing by the victims. If we want to prevent this from happening to us, we need to be aware of it. We need to keep our heads on a swivel. I'm not saying this to scare anybody, but I am saying this to implore all of you, men, women, and child, to be aware to whatever degree you are able to be aware about this. Spread awareness. Please share this video when it's on YouTube. Go look to people like Ben Jordan and any other content creator that's putting out great content about this stuff like Tommy G. There are much better content creators out there, much

56:28 better journalists out there that are going to do a much better job than I'm going to be able to do, but at least I'm trying to do my part. With that said, it's not all so bad. Things are good. We still have the power. We just need to do our job, which is to remember our power and to remind others of our power. Then maybe if we do that and we talk to each other and we come to a consensus of what we certainly don't want or do want, well, we can exercise that power. The power that's given to us by the founding documents, by our founding fathers. We do not need to take this. The Fourth Amendment exists for a reason and all of this is a clear violation of our Fourth Amendment and we need to let them know that we know that. And that's what we should be

57:13 doing.