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- [00:00]
Rachel Toback
In today's world, data breaches happen all the time. And even the most secure companies can't always protect their employees personal information from ending up in the wrong hands. That's where DeleteMe comes in. DeleteMe is a service that removes your employees sensitive information from hundreds of data broker websites, sites where hackers can find phone numbers and emails within seconds. Rachel Toback, CEO of Social Proof Security.
- [00:27]
Sam Cole
Says attackers use this data to target.
- [00:29]
Rachel Toback
Employees with phishing messages and AI powered phones. But Deleteme makes it harder for these bad actors by scrubbing your employees details regularly. It's simple. Attackers are lazy. If it's too hard to find contact info, they'll move on to easier targets. Deleteme takes care of this for you, doing the heavy lifting so you don't have to. And over time, they keep removing the information so it stays down, protecting your team from constant exposure. If your business has a social presence or deals with clients, you need DeleteMe. Visit DeleteMe.com 404Media and start safeguarding your team's information today. That's DeleteMe.com 404Media.
- [01:18]
Joseph
Hello and welcome to the 404Media podcast where we bring you unparalleled access, hidden worlds, both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist founded company and needs your Support to subscribe 404 Media co. As well as bonus content every single week. Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content at 404 Media co. I'm your host Joseph and with me are all of the 404 Media Co founders. The first being Sam Cole.
- [01:48]
Sam Cole
Hey.
- [01:49]
Joseph
Emmanuel Mayberg.
- [01:50]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Hello.
- [01:50]
Joseph
And Jason Kebler.
- [01:53]
Sam Cole
Hello.
- [01:53]
Joseph
Hello.
- [01:55]
Sam Cole
We have new Doom. Oh yeah. This is on the document. I should have waited for you. You were about to say it. You're about to bring it up and I preempted you. We have a tank top for order up for presale on our Shopify page. This is by huge request. Lots of people actually emailed me asking for a tank top. I think it's really cool. It features the actual code from doom. It's a 404 ASCII art. Sam, you want to talk about it? Because I feel like you were the sort of originator of this, this design.
- [02:33]
Jason Kebler
It was me and Ronan Wood, who's our designer of most of our merch or he's the one who puts the cool logos onto the shirts and hats and things. It was like weirdly hard for us to find. Just like the raw Doom code, which is probably fully a skill issue, but he and I both were like hunting for days, being like, where the fuck do they put just like the regular ass code that is in everything? Apparently it's running on like refrigerators and toothbrushes and stuff. Um, but yeah, we. He. I think he found it, or one of us found it without having to run Python or something. It was, it was a weird process.
- [03:10]
Sam Cole
It's been open Source since like 1999 or something like that. But however, I also went to go fact check this after we had already placed the order with the printer, and I was like, where is the Doom code? What does it say? And it's on GitHub. There's many files. So I wasn't actually sure, like, which one to grab.
- [03:32]
Jason Kebler
It looks good. It looks good on the tank top. It looks fantastic. So check it out.
- [03:36]
Sam Cole
Yeah, they put Doom on a shirt.
- [03:39]
Joseph
That's good. And it's open source, as you said. So id, please don't sue us. I mean, they're not going to do that and I'm just going to cover our asses now. Doom, the Dark Age is really, really good game. See, now they can't be mad at us, you know.
- [03:51]
Emmanuel Mayberg
4 Media endorses the Dark Ages.
- [03:54]
Joseph
Yeah, we don't usually do endorsements, but that's like the one we're probably going to do. All right, Emmanuel, do you want to take this first story?
- [04:04]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Yeah. So our first story is from Jason and Joe. The headline is ice Taps into Nationwide AI enabled Camera Network. Data shows you guys worked on this for quite a while. And the camera network in question here is Flock. It's a service called Flock, which we've covered several times over the years, but I'm sure not everyone is familiar with it. Maybe let's start with what is Flock? How does it work? How common is it?
- [04:41]
Sam Cole
Yeah, so Flock is an automated license plate reader camera. It basically like sits at different intersections or just different places on a road, and it scans the license plates of cars as they drive by. And Flock, I believe it's the most popular one. It's at least the, like, it's. It's one that's used by different homeowners associations and neighborhood watch groups. Um, you know, there's also a Motorola one that is extremely widely used, but Flock is sort of like a Silicon Valley startup whose CEO has said that he wants to, like, use these to get rid of crime everywhere. And so, like, that's the pitch is like, put these in and over time we will completely eliminate crime, which Is obviously like a very, very, very lofty claim. And so over the last few years, they've kind of gone state by state, city by city, trying to sell these both to, like, neighborhood watch groups and shopping malls and places like that, but then also, of course, to the police, to local police. And so over time, there has become a very large network of flock cameras. So it's not just, you know, the city of Dallas that has access to flock cameras. It's like, once you're in it, you can query the cameras of other states and municipalities. You can do either a statewide search or you can do a nationwide search. And so in some cases, you can, like, say you're a local police department. You can say, hey, I'm looking for this license plate of a stolen vehicle. And you're not just searching the cameras that you have personally bought and, like, paid the subscription fee for. You can search all the ones in your state, all the ones in the country, if you want to. So it's become this massive network of tens of thousands of devices, and you really, like, can't drive in many major cities and small, Even some small towns at this point without driving by one of these things.
- [06:59]
Emmanuel Mayberg
The AI of it is that the ability to find and identify the license plates. Is that the AI portion of it?
- [07:09]
Sam Cole
I think it's that. I think it's the fact that it's all sort of, like, connected in one of these larger networks. And then also in the second half of this show, spoiler alert. Joseph will talk more about features that are being added to flock that are going to make them smarter and more, I guess, more like AI ified.
- [07:31]
Joseph
Well, it's that. And you can. You can be like, I want to search for all red cars that were in this area, and there's some sort of object recognition there. And like, yeah, some people may be like, oh, that's not really AI. It's like, well, yeah, it's not chatgpt, but it is AI or machine learning, I guess, you know.
- [07:51]
Emmanuel Mayberg
So what is this data that we got?
- [07:54]
Sam Cole
Yeah, so very crucially, there is something that cops who have flock are able to look up themselves, and it's called an audit report. And basically, this audit report allows the cops of any given city city to find out how many times their cameras have been searched. So as I said, you can either opt into a nationwide network or a statewide network. And in this case, the danville, illinois police department has opted their own cameras into both a statewide network and a nationwide network of flock, Meaning that any. I don't Know if it's any but many, many, many different police departments from around the country, when they are searching for a license plate or searching for, like, whatever they're doing, like, when they're doing a flock query, they are pinging the Danville police department's flock cameras. They're pinging their database of, like, whatever cars have driven by them. And so this is, like, this is a feature that flock cameras have that allow police to do, like, compliance stuff to basically, like, if they're. If someone says, like, like a city council member says, like, show me all the times that our flock cameras are accessed, they can go in and download this data. And so some researchers filed a public records request with the Danville police department and got all of the times that their cameras had been queried over the last year, I believe. And it was like 6 million times. And so this just means that they were effectively grabbing what we believe to be a pretty comprehensive picture of how police are querying flock cameras all around the country. And in these, like, basically, there's a massive CSV spreadsheet file. And, like, for each individual entry, it says the police department that searched flocks network, it says the. It shows, like, how many devices were searched in. In this case, it was sometimes like, 40, 50,000 different devices across the country, which we believe means like, 40 to 50,000 different cameras across the country. And then crucially, they need to put a reason for doing that search. And for many of these, just. Just says like, stolen car, property theft, things like that. But for a lot of them, for between 4 and 5,000 of them, it says immigration, or it will say HSI, which is Homeland security investigations, which is division of flock, or sorry, is a division of ice. Sometimes it just says ice. Sometimes it says immigration. And then sometimes it says ice plus ero, which is enforcement removal operations. I believe I don't have it in front of me right now, but it's basically the division of ICE that does deportations. Crucially, there was, like, some searches from the Dallas police department that were doing that. So basically, this shows that local cops around the country were searching flock cameras to do immigration enforcement. And crucially, they were doing it on behalf of the department of homeland security, HSI and also ice.
- [11:41]
Emmanuel Mayberg
So if I'm the FBI and I'm doing an investigation of Sam, Sam has committed some horrible crime, and I want her call records. I can go to AT&T with a warrant and be like, show me Sam's call records. That is not exactly what we're seeing here with flock. Like, how Would you describe the process by which ICE or other police departments are getting this license plate data?
- [12:14]
Sam Cole
Yeah, so a few things. One, ICE does not have a contract to use Flock. Like, neither does the Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is a part. So right now the feds supposedly do not have the software that allows them to do these queries directly. So they can't go. They can't like, open up a Flock dashboard and say, show me all the license plates that drove by this specific intersection or whatever. Like, they don't have that ability. They haven't procured that. They haven't procured Flock, which has, you know, a process where they're like, taking bids and they're purchasing the software and they're. They're like, kind of legally allowed to use it because they bought it. What's happening here is local police are doing these searches for ICE and, or the Department of Homeland Security. And we talked to, like, I emailed, I think like 25 different police departments. Joseph emailed probably like 20 of them. And what they're saying is in some cases, these are like formal requests from the Department of Homeland Security. Like, the feds are saying, hey, look this up. We're trying to solve this crime, or whatever, and they're doing that. In other cases, they said it was, quote, informal, meaning someone just like, asking for a favor. And what's notable is that police feel like they don't need to get a warrant to search Flock because it's something that they're like, it's a service that they're paying for. And we see this with a lot of surveillance technology where, like, if you're buying it from a private company, they feel like they don't need to get a warrant. There's like various court cases right now from people saying, like, arguing that they should need to get a warrant, but currently cops are not getting warrants. And so what's happening is basically like, the feds are getting either backdoor or side door access to Flock system without paying for it. I say backdoor, side door because, like, experts I talked to both called it both of those things. There's no real, like, distinction here. But basically they're getting like, unofficial access to this incredibly powerful surveillance network through local police. And there's like, no oversight of this whatsoever. There's like, no meaningful oversight. And so, like, sure, I. I believe that ICE could probably enter a contract with Flock and get direct access to this. Like, there's nothing that I know of that would stop them from doing that. But they haven't done that yet. And this is a really powerful network, and they have access to it through this, like, pretty unofficial mechanism.
- [15:03]
Emmanuel Mayberg
So what do you think? Why do you think it matters that ICE has this access? Is there, like, a legal implication for them being able to do this? Like, isn't the fact that they're getting this informal access indicate that they're unable to. To do it officially at the moment? Like, you go in the story, you talk quite a bit about, like, what ICE is or not ice, like, local agencies are able or not able to do in terms of helping ICE with immigration enforcement.
- [15:36]
Sam Cole
Yeah. So a few things, one I've learned over the last. I mean, a lot of people probably have known this for a while, but I've learned, reporting on this and the massive blue story that we did a few, like, a month ago, that generally local and state police do not have jurisdiction over immigration matters. Like, they are not allowed to say, hey, you're in the country illegally. We are going to detain you. Like, that is specifically a federal function. But what Trump has done and what Trump has become very, like, obsessed with is the idea of empowering local police to enforce immigration laws. And they've done that through this program called 287, which is. It's just like an ICE program that different police departments have to apply to. And then ICE says, okay, we are empowering you. It's like a delegation is what it's called. We're delegating you to you, the authority to conduct some, like, immigration enforcement type stuff. So the concern here is that, like, this incredibly powerful nationwide network of license plate cameras is going to be used to pick up people for ice, but also that this surveillance network has been built, this apparatus has been built largely by going community to community and saying, we're going to use this to find stolen cars, or we're going to use this to, you know, help prevent or solve really violent crime, things like that. And a lot like Flock is in a lot of liberal neighborhoods, like, largely according to both what we've reported on, but also the experts that I spoke to, like, a lot of them were saying it's like rich people trying to protect, protect their homes and stuff like that. And by and large, like, at city council meetings where they discuss, like, should we buy this, should we not? They're like, oh, we're going to use this to solve violent crimes. And it seems to me, based on talking to different police departments, that a lot of them don't really understand that they have, like, accidentally opted themselves into this large surveillance Network that is being used by cops all over the country for all sorts of things, and they don't even know what it's being used for. In many cases, like, I talked to some of the cops about different searches that they ran, and they were like, oh, yeah, like that someone on our force did that search, but we don't like, exactly know why.
- [18:21]
Emmanuel Mayberg
So can you talk? Because you point out the legal issue with them helping ICE and federal agencies with immigration stuff. You're pointing out that the reason field in the searches very clearly says that these are immigration or ICE issues. And they say what? What are the responses to that contradiction?
- [18:53]
Sam Cole
Yeah, I mean, sometimes. So it ends up being like a quite a complicated story in some ways, because this came from Illinois, which is one of the few states that actually explicitly bans their police from working with ice. They have a law that basically makes it like a sanctuary state. And so all the cops there are like, oh, no, no, that wasn't for immigration. We're not allowed to do that. We comply with Illinois law. But then I show them like a spread, a spreadsheet thing that says, well, it says here that you did this for immigration violation or something like that. And they'll be like, oh, yeah, but that was like a specific criminal case. And yes, the person might have been illegal or undocumented or whatever. They might have had, like a not legal immigration status, but that's not what it was for. And in many cases, they weren't able to tell me what it was specifically for either because they didn't know. Like, some of them said straight up, like, we actually don't know why this search was run and we don't know why it said immigration there. Because, like, I believe it's because access to Flock is just, like, so widespread. It's like it was described to me by some of the experts we spoke to as like a Google search engine for cars. So it's like, oh, I'm doing this case. Gonna go on Flock. And like, type in what I'm looking for. And because there's, like, very few restrictions on how it's used, cops are just using it for, like, whatever. And it's like, if. If I asked you why did you Google that thing three weeks ago, you might not be able to tell me specifically what it was for. Or maybe even more to the point, if someone asked me why Sam or Joseph Googled something, I'll be like, maybe it was for this story, but I have no idea what it was actually for. And so it seems like access to this like, massive surveillance network is now so commonplace that the cops don't even know, like, why they are searching it half of the time. And I just. I think that that's, like, very notable, actually, because we've built a system that can track the movements of anyone with a car in the United States, which many of these communities are unlivable without a car. Like, you need a car to go anywhere. And at first, this was a technology that was built for local police to, you know, again, find stolen cars, to find people who, like, find robbers and, like, murderers and stuff like that. And now it's being used in this way to help the feds under an administration that has become obsessed with undocumented immigrants. And so we've, like, built this, like, surveillance apparatus, and it's just being used in, like, a really commonplace way, in a way that I find to be, like, really concerning, I think. I don't know if that answers your question. I don't even remember what your question was. But, like, that's why I think the story is. Is important.
- [22:00]
Emmanuel Mayberg
The comparison to Google, I think, is very good and a good transition into the next story we're going to talk about. But I guess just before we go to that, back at Motherboard, we did a bunch of stories, most of them from Caroline Haskins, who is now at Wired, about Ring. And I see a lot of parallels with Ring in the sense that it is a device that is sold to groups or individuals. And as the product is getting popular and widespread, people don't realize that they're building out this network that can be accessed by cops. How would you say this compares to Ring in terms of, like, the surveillance dystopian aspect of it? Like, better, worse, comparable?
- [22:57]
Sam Cole
I think it's very. I think it's a. I think it's an apt comparison in terms of, like, the business model and sort of how it works. I think Ring didn't ever have a. Like, they haven't sold tons and tons of Ring devices to cops directly. Like, that was something where they were selling it to homeowners, and then homeowners were opting into this system where cops could access it. And.
- [23:20]
Emmanuel Mayberg
But cops were, like, pitching Ring to communities.
- [23:23]
Sam Cole
Yeah, yeah, because cops were basically trying to get this, like, ad hoc network of just like, thousands of Ring cameras in an individual community. And that was, like, sold originally, as we will use this to make sure that people don't steal your Amazon packages. And then it became something larger than that, and there's been all sorts of privacy concerned with Ring security concerns. With the ring, we don't need to get into it, but basically it started out as something that was like, for consumers and then was used by cops. What Flock is, it was initially pitched to again, like neighborhood watch groups and homeowners associations, and they can share that information with cops. But now I believe. I'm not positive that this is the case, but I believe that the vast majority of RING cameras are sort of like bought and operated by cops. So it's become more of a specific police technology. But the nationwide network thing is really very important and very, very similar. I think Flock is actually maybe more concerning than ring because all of the systems interconnect. So like, I don't know, you could track a person across the entire country if they were to drive across the country and you could track their movements and things like that. And it's funny because a lot of the cops say, well, we're not tracking people, we're just tracking cars. And it's like, well, who do you think is in these cars?
- [24:58]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Cars that specific people own?
- [24:59]
Sam Cole
Yeah, yeah. And that'll. That'll go directly into Joseph's next story. But it is like, it is very much like you cannot move around this country without being tracked passively. And I should have said this at the top because every time we talk about Flock, I feel like most people understand the prob. The issue or like what is being built here. But it's like these are not speed cameras. They have nothing to do with speed cameras. They have nothing to do with red light cameras. They catch every single car that drives by the camera and they add it to their database and with a timestamp and all that sort of thing. It has nothing to do with like, oh, well, just don't speed or just don't run a red light and you'll be fine. It's like there's a database of your movements if you drive by one of these. And we've written about it before, but there's an open source project called DFLock that is trying to track where these are. And if you look at that, you'll see they're. They're in a lot of like every mid sized city, tons of suburbs, lots of big cities. They're in many, many, many U.S. cities.
- [26:15]
Emmanuel Mayberg
So we'll leave that there, as Joe says, and we'll take a break and then we'll come back with the other Flock story.
- [26:33]
Sam Cole
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- [28:19]
Joseph
Hey, it's Joseph again. If you're a new listener to the 404 Media podcast, or even a longtime one, you might not be aware of all of the impact our journalism has had recently or how we even got here in the first place. In 2023, the four of us quit corporate media to go independent. We were sick of working for a VC backed company that put profits before journalism that gave birth to 404 Media. Since then, we've stopped the spread of AI books and public libraries, triggered class action lawsuits against AI companies, got Congress to pressure big tech in various ways, and we've even shut down surveillance companies. This real world impact is only possible because of our paying subscribers. As a journalist owned business, they are the engine that powers our Journalism and where the vast, vast majority of our revenue comes from. So please consider signing up today for $10 a month or $100 a year at 404 Media Co membership and get bonus content every week and access to all of our articles. Thank you and enjoy the rest of the podcast.
- [29:43]
Sam Cole
And we are back with a story that Joseph did that's extremely related. This is a Flock mega episode. We should have said that up top, but license plate reader company Flock is building a massive people lookup tool leak shows. So this, this leads on to some of the things we were talking about in the first segment. Segment about tracking people versus cars. Tracking cars versus people, the AI parts of Flock and things like that. Joseph, this story is about Nova, which is a new tool from Flock. What is it and how are they marketing it to Cops?
- [30:24]
Joseph
Yeah, so Nova is this new product which I believe they're rolling out or at least advertising and marketing to Cops at the moment. And it's almost like an add on to the Flock network. So if you thought that automatic license plate reading technology, as you say, following cars and by extension drivers all across the United States was invasive enough or maybe should require a warrant or whatever, this is now going to add additional information to those searches. And I'm looking at the Flock website now with a, with a page about Nova and it says you can see the full story. Connect people, vehicles and locations across agencies. NOVA helps you solve crime and prevent the next one faster. And it's supposed to bring all of your agency's data in one place. So video and 911 calls and of course the Flock automatic license plate reader networks as well. But scrolling through this page like I am now, as I said, it's kind of all marketing speak. It doesn't actually really talk about.
- [31:40]
Sam Cole
What.
- [31:41]
Joseph
The Nova tool is or what data it uses. And that is what this story is about, which is based on a leak that we got from Flock.
- [31:47]
Sam Cole
Yeah, so I actually was the Nova page up by the time we did this article.
- [31:53]
Joseph
It was. I'm not sure if we actually quoted it explicitly. Maybe we did an earlier draft.
- [31:58]
Sam Cole
Well, there's almost nothing about it, as you said, like what a next gen public safety data plan platform actually is wasn't known. And so you, you know, h had a source who leaked you information about what it is actually some information from within Flock and the problems that people had with it at the company. So I mean, what sort of data is included in Flock or sorry, in Nova? And what, what, so what is this product?
- [32:27]
Joseph
Yeah, so as you say, the marketing material is really sparse. But then when you go through the leak, I mean, there's some, I would say incredibly interesting and illuminating stuff in there. The first being that Nova plans to at least use hacked data. So that is data from breaches that's being published online and that could be then married with the automatic license plate reader data as well. And one concrete example they give is Park Mobile, an app that was hacked a while ago. You actually use Park Mobile, right. Jason, what is it?
- [33:11]
Sam Cole
Park Mobile is a smartphone app that you use to park mobily off your mobile device. No. So a lot of, a lot of states, a lot of cities have replaced their parking meters with Park Mobile. So basically you put in your license plate and then when you park in a specific spot that would normally have a parking meter or like a publicly owned parking lot, you say, hey, I'm parked here, I'm parked in this spot. Give me an hour, give me two hours. And you pay with Apple pay or whatever. Some places also, like people don't have coins anymore. So a lot of like the coin operated parking meters will have an option to use Park Mobile instead of that. It's extremely common. It's very, very, very common. I see it all the time at. As a driver. As a driver.
- [34:03]
Joseph
And when you sign up, you presumably have to tell them about your car, right?
- [34:07]
Sam Cole
Yeah. They need to know what car it is because otherwise you're going to get a parking ticket. Like someone is going to come by and give you a parking ticket. So you have to put in the make, model and the, usually the color and the license plate.
- [34:22]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Right.
- [34:22]
Joseph
Which is all information, which is very, very interesting to Flock. Right.
- [34:28]
Sam Cole
I want to highlight here, you just said it, but this is hacked data. Hacked data from Parkmobile. It's like Flock didn't go and buy this from Park Mobile, did they? From what we can tell, I'm not.
- [34:43]
Joseph
Exactly sure where the Park Mobile breach was, but given the date, which was 2021, that was the date of the breach itself. It was probably on breach forums or one of these other pretty low level hacking forums where stuff gets often published publicly. So there's this 2021 breach of ParkMobile. That data includes people's email addresses, phone numbers and mailing addresses. Now Nova, this new add on from Flock, is planning to marry that data with the automatic license plate reader information. So let's say you type in a plate number, you look it up and you're like, okay, that car drove all across Chicago or whatever. Well, maybe the talk of return, actually who that car belongs to instantly. And maybe cops can go figure that out themselves. And they do that all the time, Right. They'll get a plate and they'll go off and they'll go to the DMV and figure out, well, who's that vehicle register to? And that sort of thing. But this is allowing Flock Nova users to do it basically instantaneously, at least.
- [35:52]
Sam Cole
Well, it also has, like, your email address and things like that as well, because you have to make a Park Mobile account. So, I mean, I don't actually know because we haven't seen Nova in action, but I could imagine it correlating your car not just with your identity, but also with, like, your contact information, which could be very valuable for police who are investigating you.
- [36:15]
Joseph
Yeah. And I mean, again, you stressed it, but I will do that as well. It's a trend of companies taking hacked data from, I mean, I hate to say it, the dark web or it's just posted online or something. They then maybe clean it up, if necessary, they bundle it together with other data, and then they sell that to law enforcement. We did a story years ago back at Motherboard when we were there. I'm looking at it now from July 2020, and that was some company, I think, called Spy Cloud. And they would have breached passwords and all of that sort of thing. And then they were selling access to that, to that tool, to law enforcement as well. And that was, I think, more for uncovering people's identities, probably online, you know, maybe in cybercrime or in child abuse investigations, that sort of thing. This is way more physical because you are marrying somebody's movements, their vehicle, with their identity. And of course, there's lots of other data that I'm sure we'll talk about as well. It's not just the hack stuff.
- [37:18]
Sam Cole
Right. So what else is in here, though? Because it's not just Parkmobile, it's other things, too.
- [37:23]
Joseph
Yeah, there's two other main types, and one is commercially available data, and that comes up a lot, especially when we've written about location data over the past several years, and there's all of these data brokers out there where you can just go and buy information from them, essentially. And the leak we got specifically mentioned Equifax and TransUnion. And I'll say straight away, Equifax didn't respond to a request for comment, and TransUnion denied having any business relationship with Flock. That being said, this tool is still being developed and worked out. Right. The sort of data you would get from an Equifax or a TransUnion, like a credit bureau is that in the United States, when somebody opens a credit card or a line of credit, they provide their physical address, their contact information, their name, all of that sort of thing. This is called the credit header. It's like the PII bit of your credit report that then gets sent to TransUnion, Equifax, et cetera. And sometimes they then rebundle that and then sell that or transfer that to other people. One example is TransUnion's tool TLOXP, which they sell to, like, PIs and sort of stuff like that. So you can see definitely how that sort of information would be very useful to NOVA or a Nova like tool where, okay, I have the license plate. I figured out the identity. Now I can get their mailing address or this other personal information that they handed over to TransUnion. And then the third one, which we didn't really get into much in the piece because it's sort of mentioned in passing in the material we got. But it's public records, and that's stuff like marriage licenses, property records, even campaign finance records. So you look at somebody's vehicle and then what you're saying, who they're married to. And I mean, that's explicitly the goal is to get not just the driver, but the people they are associated with as well.
- [39:29]
Sam Cole
Yeah, I think that's an important point because this administration in particular has been really obsessed with, like, figuring out networks of people and who they've associated with and things like that. Okay, so you also, besides, like, figuring out what this is, you also, you know, had some people inside Flock talking about how they felt about it. You had, I believe it was leaked Slack messages. That's right, isn't it?
- [40:04]
Joseph
Yeah.
- [40:05]
Sam Cole
What are people inside Flocks saying about this?
- [40:07]
Joseph
Sure. Yeah. It was leaked slacks. And there was also audio of a meeting. And this meeting, I think, was Ray Ray telling, because it really crystallized what Flock imagines this product could be. Because it's all fine to say, oh, we're going to take data from here and marry it to this data. And that's like, a little bit technical, and maybe it's not really on the nose enough for people, but some of the quotes from this audio is you're going to be able to access data and jump from LPR license plate reader to person. So it's incredibly explicit in its goal in that we're not just tracking vehicles anymore, we're tracking people. And that is the entire thinking behind this tool. And then in some of the Slack chats, I don't think I'd go into them in particular detail, but there were people worried about what exactly this tool is, what it's going to be capable of, and especially the hacked data stuff. There are people talking about like, well, if Flock got hacked, would it be okay for then another company to use our data? You know, like, you can't really take hacked data from the Internet. And then if it happened to you, complain about it as well. Because as you said, you know, it's just wild that a company is taking hacked information in the first place at all.
- [41:31]
Sam Cole
Right. And I think that brings us to the last question that I have for now, which is basically like we have these cops saying, this actually just tracks cars. It's not anything more than that. And yet here you have Flock saying publicly it's a next gen public safety data platform and it's really making this network much more powerful, I believe. So. I mean, is this more invasive than just having ALPR data on its own?
- [42:05]
Joseph
Yeah, I think one of the hard things about covering automatic license plate reader cameras is that people will often default to, well, it's just my car. And like, as you said in the previous segment, some people think it's just about speeding or running a red light or something, which is crazy to me. I hadn't actually heard that complaint. So do people actually say that to us, Jason? Do people write in.
- [42:31]
Sam Cole
I mean, I see it a lot on social media, just as in like, I'll publish a story about Flock and then people will like, quote, tweet it and say like, oh, well, just don't run a red light. Then like, people don't understand.
- [42:45]
Joseph
Right.
- [42:45]
Sam Cole
What they are still, even though this technology has now been around for like quite a long time and we've written about it a lot, but still have a lot of other outlets as well.
- [42:55]
Joseph
Yeah. And I think that's a challenge of covering it because people might think that, or they'll think, well, it's just tracking my vehicle or other people's vehicles. You know, you could, you could just take a bus or something. I don't know. But I disagree.
- [43:10]
Sam Cole
The other argument is that like, well, don't own a car, bike everywhere and walk everywhere, which is completely impractical. I mean, it's just like I'm, I'm pretty anti car, like in concept, but it's just like it's not possible in many, many, many suburbs. Cities like the United States is not designed for that at this moment. And like that's, that's one of the reasons car culture is bad, et cetera. But it's like people have cars because they need them to get to work and things like that because they live in places where it's impractical to take public transit or bike.
- [43:46]
Joseph
Yeah. So I already think that license plate reading technology is incredibly invasive. We did a story back at Motherboard where a source had access to a different tool used actually I think by federal law enforcement and private investigators. And they looked up, with consent, a specific person and it mapped out their entire movements. It really, really was incredibly invasive. So I already believe that. Now you add on something like Nova, which is taking all of this different data from around the web and potentially other sources as well, and marrying it with the license plate reader data. I mean, it's absolutely more invasive. And I think it does bring up the question again of like, should authorities get a warrant for this? Because in the vast majority of cases they don't. And as you said, there are lawsuits going on arguing that's unconstitutional. And if that's already unconstitutional with just the license plate reading data, maybe it's more significant with this stuff as well.
- [44:50]
Sam Cole
Yeah. All right, should we leave it there and I'll give it back to you to read the. To say the end parts? Because I don't remember what they are, of course.
- [44:58]
Joseph
No, I'm happy to do that. If you are listening to the free version of the podcast, I will now play us out. But if you are a paying 404me subscriber, we're going to talk about Civitai, the AI platform. That manual has covered an absolute ton and some truly radical changes. It has made much of it in response to our reporting and the action that of payment processes as well. You can subscribe and gain access to that content at 404 Media co. As a reminder, 404 Media is journalist founded and supported by subscribers. If you do wish to subscribe to 404 Media and directly support our work, please go to 404 Media co. You'll get unlimited access to our articles and an ad free version of this podcast. You'll also get to listen to the subscribers only section where we talk about a bonus story each week. This podcast is made in partnership with Kaleidoscope. Another way to support us is by leaving a five star rating and review for the podcast. That stuff really helps us out. Here is one of those from Booger Maroney. I can't say enough good things about this crew and their reporting. Surprisingly even handed given the content and the nature of their coverage. A take on things I wouldn't have reached for by default. And a lack of reverence. That is very refreshing. Thank you. This has been four or four media. We will see you again next week.