We asked Flock’s CEO about surveillance abuse. Here’s what he said.

In 2017, Flock Safety began as a side project in an Atlanta garage.

Today it’s a multi-billion dollar company running more than 120,000(nova janela) automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras across 49 US states, reading 20 billion plates a month for more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies.

Flock bills itself as a provider of public safety technology. Critics, however, call it a venture-backed surveillance network rife with abuse and weak oversight.

Dozens of cities and agencies have dropped Flock in the past year, Los Angeles let its contract lapse(nova janela) over civil rights concerns, and a California police department shut its cameras off(nova janela) after federal agencies accessed its data without notice.

During the making of our latest Proton documentary on Flock cameras, Flock’s own CEO, Garrett Langley, agreed to an interview with our host, Richie Koch.

Below is a transcript of the full conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity.

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Richie Koch: So first question. Across the Flock platform, not just the license plate readers. Is it possible for police to search for a person?

Garrett Langley: So we sell multiple products focused on doing two things right. Providing safety. Providing privacy. Driving accountability. That’s like that’s the goal for us, right? We have some products that are focused on vehicles, our license plate readers. We have some products that are focused on audio, gunshot detection. And then we sell what your viewers might be familiar with called Pan, tilt, zoom cameras. And those are traditionally deployed in places where pedestrians go.

Richie: Okay. Yeah. And I’ve heard about the Condor cameras. 

Garrett: That’s a PTZ. 

Richie: Yeah. Okay. And then I was wondering, I didn’t necessarily get a firm”yes” or “no” there. So I was wondering if you could perhaps expand upon a little bit what the condor PTZ’s do”? 

Garrett: Here’s a great example. Oftentimes these cameras, whether they’re from us or there’s probably a couple hundred large camera manufacturers globally that build pan, tilt zoom cameras. So whether it’s us or someone else. Cities will often deploy these at parks. Right. The city spends tens of millions of dollars to build a beautiful park. The last thing they want to do, is have that park become a place where drug transactions happen, people get hurt, etc.. And you look at my own hometown, Atlanta, just five years ago, there was a horrible, horrible incident. You can read about it. A woman was walking her dog in the middle of the night, violently killed, Cold Case. You know why? There were cameras there, but they weren’t working. If their cameras were there and working, I’d like to think pretty confident that that case would not be cold. And so more often than not, our customers deploy our products in that case to keep their people safe, whether it’s at a park or whether it’s on a public road.

Richie: Could you explain a little bit how the search works? Like we’ve established that these cameras exist, that the ability exists. What does a search look like? 

Garrett: For which product? … They’re very different, because we draw a very big line between our ALPR cameras. You cannot search for people. They are designed specifically to read a license plate to detect attributes of a vehicle. Now, our pan, tilt, zoom cameras are focused on people. Because people typically go to parks, they typically go to parks. 

Richie: Could you just explain how the pan, tilt, zoom; how the search would work?

Garrett: So really there’s two main ways to search. There’s call it the traditional search which you know, like I have on my, you know, cameras at home. Or I can just look at a timeline and go back and forth. Right. And that’s a pretty traditional scroller. And then the second one is we have a product called Freeform. And Freeform allows you to search for things in plain text. Now what I would add to that which is important. And I think that it’s not just unique to us. It’s consistent across the industry. You can’t just provide that type of search without representation of what we call the Constitution, right? We have rights, we have certain restrictions. And so there is a moderation policy built into that search to prevent any type of abusive search.

Richie: Can Flock Change deployed, a deployed products capability through a software update without a city council or a public approving that new capability?

Garrett: Hmmm. I mean, at the core of our business relationship, right. Whether, whether it’s with a neighborhood or a business or a city, as you can look at our contracts, it’s a, it’s an annual contract, right. And every year we need to prove our value. And so there is an expectation from our customers that it’s getting better every single day.

Richie: Right. However, you can see how this would lead to mission creep. There was a recent report in 404 media where briefly, your ALPR cameras were turned into live feed cameras. There was another report in the EFF where your acute acoustic gunshot monitoring system was used briefly to monitor for screams for human distress. In both of these cases, it appears as though these features were added without any addendum to the contract. Without any new kind of consultation with the City Council.

Garrett: Yeah, yeah. So I think more broadly, if you zoom out, two things I think are true. One, right. We do have to continue to build a better product, a better product being both more safety, more privacy, more accountability. But what we’re not in the business of doing though, is mandating to our customers what they use and what they don’t use. And so as an example, you know, we launched our audit assistance tool about a month and a half ago, right. It’s an additional functionality to detect potentially abusive or nefarious behavior in our system. We don’t require that today. Now, more than a third of our customers have turned it on and we push our customers. You should use this. You should use this. But I believe it’s City Council’s job, Commissioner’s job, to push them to drive for more accountability. And I’d say the same on the safety side. So it is rather rare that we would force something on our customers versus build something, let the world know about it, like free form as an example. And then if a city chooses to adopt it, that’s on, that’s on them to make a decision of what is appropriate to either share with city council or just move forward.

Richie: Not to get in. I don’t want to keep it broad, not get into specifics, but the instances reported, it seemed less that there was consultation from city representatives, city council, city government and more simply, that the police department decided to check the box to turn on the feature. This seems to not necessarily jive with your local governance principle.

Garrett: Was there a question? 

Richie: I would say…

Garrett: Sorry. 

Richie: Would you support requiring explicit, explicit public approval before a material, materially new surveillance capability can be enabled on a technology that’s already been implemented in the community? 

Garrett: 100%. Like I feel quite strongly that, that police departments are simply one part of a local government, and those local governments have policies, and most of those local governments have policies around not just surveillance but budgetary items too. Right. And so when I look at it, I go, there is a system in place, and we should continue to rely on our locally elected officials to make these trade offs of how we keep the community safe. 

Richie: Okay. So that would, not to put words in your mouth, but it would appear as though you would. If you’re willing to support this, it would mean potentially going to city council before introducing a new feature and not simply rolling it out. Pushing it out. Is that correct?

Garrett: Here’s the way I think about it. If a department, if a police department chooses to add a feature, I also have to rely on that customer to understand their community values, their policies, their procedures. And you know, we have, we have almost 7000 police departments at this point, cities that we work with. They’re all very unique. Cleveland is very different than Cincinnati, than Toledo. And we haven’t even left Ohio yet. You move to my home state of Georgia or California or Washington. And the whole point is that they all have different procurement rules. They have different policy reviews, all of that exist at a very local level. So at a high level, 100%, I don’t think that police departments should adopt really any new policy, remove whether it’s my products or one of my competitors, or it’s even a uniform change like that, that should be up to the city to decide what level of, of kind of review is necessary at a city by city basis. 

Richie: There have been multiple cases of police officers allegedly abusing Flock to stalk people. When that happens, what responsibility does Flock itself take?

Garrett: Any level of abuse greater than zero is unacceptable and makes me sick. We built a product. I started a company to make people safer. I’ve got three little kids. I view it as my primary obligation as their father is to keep them safe. And so when I see individuals make very bad decisions to use our products in a way it wasn’t intended. It’s frustrating. And we knew this was a risk nine years ago. That’s why we, that’s why we came up with audit logs. You know, if you go back to before Flock, let’s talk about LPR. LPR existed forever. There’s no data retention. 

Richie: Yeah. 

Garrett: Right? It was sold commercially. Still is. Right. Repo trucks drive around and sell the commercial data. And then there was no accountability built into it. And so it’s no surprise to me that as we’ve moved this forward. Right. And as we’ve now added audit assistance, like we will continue to push harder on this. Like for me, I view it as our job to build a product that is near impossible, so difficult to use outside of its intended purpose. And I think I actually this might be counterintuitive. I think it’s great when I see the level of media attention, because I want officers to know that if you try to use Flock, you will be held accountable if you try to use it in an abusive way. And there are other systems that you know that aren’t tracked. And I think that’s bad.

Richie: You seem to feel very strongly about this. So how many contracts with police departments has Flock suspended or terminated because of systemic abuse? Rampant abuse by officers and your system? 

Garrett: Yeah, I think that’s a really, really interesting question. And it’s interesting because every day, as an example, I see at least three, if not for success stories of an abducted child being returned home. I see hundreds to thousands of crimes being solved. If I lived in a town that had a police department that was abusing Flock, the last thing I’d want to do is rip out this system that’s so effective at actually solving crime. And so the abuse you’re talking about is exceptionally rare. Now to  my point. Anything greater than zero is unacceptable. But you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of police officers who use Flock every single day in single digit number, dozens that are, are potentially abusing it. I don’t think you should hold the entire city accountable for just the bad decisions of a few. 

Richie: If I can infer from that answer, I would say the number is zero.

Garrett: I don’t want to misrepresent an answer, so I didn’t answer. I don’t want to tell you one thing and then it’s… 

Richie: Okay. That’s fair. We’ll, we’ll save it as it is an exceptionally rare instance and move on. 

Richie: Is there a level of abuse that would cause you to decide an agency, an agency should no longer have access to your technology. Is there a threshold?

Garrett: Yeah. So I think what you’re describing is in an event where, let’s call it, the entire police department is proven guilty of being abusive and probably not just Flock, but many other things. And in those cases, there’s a federal process for handling this. The federal government typically steps in, the state government steps in. And in those situations, it’s unlikely they’re keeping Flock because they’re probably tearing down the entire police department. So I don’t think I’d ever be presented with that, that problem or that decision. 

Richie: Okay. So again, simply to just infer a little bit, put a cherry on it, it would be an exceptionally high threshold. Yeah?

Garrett: Yeah. What do you think? I’m actually curious? Do you have a point of view on that when a technology company should…

Richie: My opinion doesn’t really matter. You’re the CEO here. I would love to tell you over beers. You say one of Flock’s safeguards is local control, but multiple towns in California claim their data was shared with outside parties, sometimes with the federal government, without their permission. How is this consistent with your claim that customers control their data? 

Garrett: I disagree with those statements. 

Richie: Okay, I can tell you that I got this from a claim from Mountain View, California. They claim that Flock enabled nationwide search with police departments without their permission, and federal agencies then access the data. And similarly, South Pasadena cited inadvertent data sharing as a reason why they canceled its contract. One was reported in the Guardian, the other was simply a from the city. You…

Garrett: So, customers control their data, they control what checkboxes are selected. If anything, we misunderstood our obligation to our customers to make it impossible for them to make mistakes. And so if you take someone like California, their state legislation that LPR data should not leave the state. We didn’t view it as our job to codify that into our product two years ago. Now, as we’ve heard from customers who inadvertently either clicked a button or someone clicked the button and said, hey, we actually want to turn on National Lookup. We made that too easy for them. And so now in the state of California and the state of Washington, state of Virginia, where there is clear legislation that LPR data cannot leave the state, we make it impossible for that to happen. There’s not even a checkbox. And so if anything, Richie, the way I would describe it is Flock’s obligation in this conversation has gone up. I view our responsibility greater, which is why I’m such a big fan of regulation in general. Because now in a place like Washington, you know, there’s a bill that says this is how we think LPR should work in Washington. And when those bills are well written, not necessarily on the, on the substance, but in the enforceability, I think that’s a great thing. And so in a place like California, we’ve now changed and increased our stature such that it is impossible for that to even happen.