SPEAKER_01 0:00

B B H D, the Frequency.

SPEAKER_02 0:08

Hey, hey, Boulder Valley Frequency Listeners. It is Friday, May 22nd. Memorial Weekend is always fun in Boulder. Check out the Boulder Creek Festival and support local artists and musicians. Oh, and there's a little road race happening on Monday, Memorial Day. It's called the Boulder Boulder. A lot of you will be running in it, best of luck, and enjoy the Bacon Pit Stops by Combine Elementary, where I used to live. Alright, for today's show, Flock has been getting a ton of press. You've probably heard about it. If you haven't, we're gonna teach you about it. But before the interview with Shay and Andrew Gentry, I found something on threads this week that was pretty potent and uh I wanted to play that first. And despite all this, let's just try to have some fun. Having hope is very powerful.

SPEAKER_00 0:59

My name is Brett, and I've been a Corona resident in District 4 for 15 years. I'm here to introduce uh DFLOC Corona, a community coalition asking this council to cancel the city's contract with Flock Safety and remove the cameras that have been deployed throughout our city. Our website is dflock-corona.org. I'm here because new flock cameras were recently installed between my home and my daughter's school. So now every time I make that drive, my family's being photographed and logged into a giant corporate database. I want to be clear what these cameras actually are, and I say that with somebody with 20 years of experience in IT. I've served as the chief network architect for Fortune 500 companies. I've designed data centers, and today I work on cloud infrastructure for one of the largest loan origination companies in the country. I'm not speculating on how this technology works. I've read their patents and I know how it works. Um advertises these cameras as simple license plate readers. Their own patents tell a different story. They're AI-powered surveillance machines that capture every passing vehicle in person and transmit that data to a private corporate cloud, making it queryable by a multitude of state and federal agencies. The city of Corona does not control that database, and Corona residents have no public record rights against the private company servers. Our daily movements are being harvested by a $7.5 billion corporation that only answers to venture capital investors, not to us. Flock did not reach that valuation on their per camera subscription fees. That math doesn't add up. The city council should also understand who they're doing business with. Flock CEO is asked whether the company had any federal contracts. He said no. That was a lie. Public records revealed that Flock had been secretly running a pilot program giving the U.S. Border Patrol access to local police camera data without the knowledge of the cities that paid for the cameras. Now consider who's behind the company and where your data flows. Flock uh integrates directly with Palantir, a data fusion platform with a $30 million contract with ICE. Peter Thiel, the founder of Palantir, is also one of Flock's primary investors. These are not separate companies with separate agendas. They're connected actors that are building a connected infrastructure. Uh Palantir's own CEO stated publicly just this month that his technology is being used as a political instrument to uh designed to reduce the political power of certain voters. And that's the ecosystem that our Corona uh cameras are feeding into. Um we're not anti-police at all. We're against mass surveillance of innocent residents by a company with a documented record of deception built by investors with a stated political agenda. We're asking the city council to start auditing the queries made against Floch's database to disclose any data sharing agreements and to take a vote to cancel the Flock safety contract.

SPEAKER_01 3:56

In recent weeks, a bill to regulate Flock and its fleet of automatic license plate readers died in the Colorado Senate. Sponsor Judy Amabile of Boulder said her fellow lawmakers wouldn't vote for even the simplest regulations amid harsh opposition from law enforcement. After this development, we're releasing our full interview with Andrew Gentry, a golden-based cybersecurity professional who founded EyesOff Colorado. The nonpartisan organization is working to place limits on how Flock and similar technologies can be used. Learn more and get involved at eyesoffcolorado.org. A portion of this interview was originally released February 18th.

SPEAKER_03 4:58

Yeah, um, my name is Andrew Gentry. I'm a Colorado native uh that's had a background in technology and not really a lot of background in activism or um surveillance types of things, but as somebody that's in technology, I've grown a lot more interested in some of the discussions that have been happening lately around ALPRs and block safety and etc. So yeah, tech enthusiasts, Colorado Native, love my state, love technology. I think it's really interesting, and I've done a lot of stuff in data and security and privacy, and that's why it interests me.

SPEAKER_01 5:43

And ALPR, just for folks who don't know, is automatic license plate reader, right? Or automated license plate reader.

SPEAKER_03 5:50

Automatic, automated, I think it's interchangeable, but the point is it's a license plate reader that happens automatically.

SPEAKER_01 5:57

I think you kind of already touched on this a little bit with like your love of tech and your growing concern. But can you talk about how a little bit more, if there is more to say, on how you came to be interested or involved in specifically the flock issue locally?

SPEAKER_03 6:11

Um yeah, I think there's a lot of things that come up in my newsfeeds or online that catch my interest. But the flock problem in particular uh was really motivating to me because uh I noticed them install the flock cameras in my neighborhood. Um I drive by them every single day. And as somebody who enjoys tech, I enjoy hardware, I have a background in that, I look at those things and go, what is that? I I wonder what that is. And when those thoughts caught connected with the cameras being on my road and actually seeing it online and some of the um nefarious underpinnings of the technology, I I immediately became interested in in what people were talking about, what people were doing about it, um how how it all worked.

SPEAKER_01 7:03

You're a resident of Boulder?

SPEAKER_03 7:05

I live in Golden now, but I went to school in Boulder.

SPEAKER_01 7:08

Gotcha. Um and so Golden has these cameras. That's that's the neighborhood you're talking about.

SPEAKER_03 7:13

It's yes. Um Jefferson County has them installed. Um there's about 15 cameras in Golden. Um, but almost every city in Colorado has them at this point. They're they're extremely prevalent.

SPEAKER_01 7:25

And what was was there a particular piece of information that you learned or incident that that went from like idle curiosity to like, okay, now I need to like take some action and and organize?

SPEAKER_03 7:37

Well, one of the things that really got my blood boiling about it was that I actually responded to a LinkedIn post from Flock Safety um about some of their drone technology. Um, my comment on LinkedIn was somewhat critical, but mostly informational or information seeking. And the comment actually just got deleted by their uh PR team, which signaled to me that they didn't want me talking about it or didn't want to uh answer my questions. Um, that's the type of behavior that I also heard from a lot of people that I talked to about flock safety that is commonplace for Flock as a company. And that motivated me to dig my my teeth in a little bit further into what's the motivation here? Why why is this not uh uh transparency and accountability and information forward by default? Um being in the cybersecurity field, that's usually a default of people that are on the high stewardship range of uh security and transparency and protection is people are very forward about what their vulnerabilities are or what possible uh cracks in the system there might be, and they crowdsource information. They look for help on making them stronger. And so when companies are um actively trying to hide um their flaws or silence people asking questions, that's usually a sign that there's some kind of other interest involved or negligence or laziness or some combination of the three.

SPEAKER_01 9:32

You sound like a journalist there. If people are open and honest with me about things, I'm like, okay, okay. But the moment they are cagey, I'm like, all right, what are you what are you hiding here?

SPEAKER_03 9:42

Yeah, it's it's one of those things where you you you can tell when it's happening. It it it tastes a little icky. And uh all of the uh honest and forward communication I've tried to have with Flock or with uh departments, police departments or um uh legislators about Flock have tended to be in that icky, suspicious range. And um that's that's why I'm I'm curious and why I'm I'm involved in uh the things I've been doing since uh late last year.

SPEAKER_01 10:21

So tell me a little bit about some of the things you've been doing. I don't know if you want to talk specifically about the March 7th event or if there's there's other stuff you want to bring up as well.

SPEAKER_03 10:30

I think w one of the things I noticed uh very quickly was that interest in this subject was very niche. Um maybe it was because I'm a technologist and I'm especially curious about surveillance and privacy and digital freedom. But I I noticed a lot of people have no idea about Flock or the implications of Flock or what the technology really means, especially in the age of uh artificial intelligence, which is another facet of this whole story that we can talk about maybe later. But um I just wanted to get more eyes on the subject. Um I'm not a lawmaker, I have no background in uh legal matters, so my talents aren't really helpful there, but I do know how to make a website and I do know how to organize people and talk to people and communicate things um somewhat clearly. So I wanted to try to get people talking about the issues. I wanted to try to collect people together into the same room to discuss what's going on and why aren't people being transparent about this technology. So um I started uh organization, you could call it called Eyes Off Colorado, which aims to bring some of that transparency to cities around Colorado. Um there's a lot of scattered information um that is often not very uh transparent to the public. And I've been working with people that are also interested in Flock and ALPRs and surveillance in general to bring a sort of surveillance report card or picture of what your city, Colorado, currently scores in terms of the responsibility and the transparency and the accountability in their use of Flock.

SPEAKER_01 12:32

You specifically said maybe we want to talk later about AI. I don't have an intelligent question around that, but like what do you want people to know about it? How is it um changing the way things might have operated in the past? Like what impact is it having?

SPEAKER_03 12:48

A lot of people are starting to understand more about how AI works and what's the engine behind AI. And um, to put that in the most simplest terms, AI runs on an enormous amount of data. Um, it needs to understand how people behave or how people talk so that it can uh reliably uh pretend to do that right back to you. If anyone's used Chat GPT, that's how it works under underneath it. It has a ton of data about how people talk, and that's how it mimics talking back to you like a human. Um in the case of Flock, uh there's a massive amount of information being collected by these cameras, um, including facial recognition, including race recognition, including rape age recognition. Um there's a ton of information that most people don't know is being collected every single time you pass one of these cameras. And what most people don't know is that all of that information is actually being sent overseas to companies that are helping train AI models on that data. Um, the way that people move through cities, the types of people that other people talk to, the locations that people spend time in. Um general habits and behaviors of anyone that passes these cameras are being trained by private AI models. Um that should be concerning to anyone that hears those words. Um our government doesn't have any control over what those AI models do or how they're being trained or how they're being biased. Um, they're just giving all that information away to a private company to train their AI models to produce new products in the future. Some of those products claim to be able to solve crime with the click of a button, um, which is an extremely scary statement for anyone that's worked in public safety or law enforcement. Taking human decision making out of policing is very trouble.

SPEAKER_01 15:00

I could see the appeal of some people if you weren't uh super informed on it, because human decision making and policing leads to a lot of bias, but we know that there is bias baked into algorithms and technology as well.

SPEAKER_03 15:14

The people don't decide how that AI model gets trained or what that AI model decides to uh consider as a more important factor or a less important factor when deciding if you're guilty or not. So if we don't have oversight or if we don't have input into how those models are being trained, we are putting all of our trust in Flock safety to train that AI model correctly and then hand that tool over to our police officers to decide whether or not somebody is guilty or not. I'm sure you're familiar of the with the story uh that happened, I think last year. Um I I I want to say it was in Littleton or Aurora, um, where a woman was wrongfully accused of stealing a package. Um and the siding evidence was flock safety system uh that had made a mistake, but she had to grab all of her own data, all of her own video recordings from her car in order to prove herself innocent when the system had already proved her guilty.

SPEAKER_01 16:22

And if she didn't have all that, she wouldn't have been able to prove her innocence.

SPEAKER_03 16:27

Correct.

SPEAKER_01 16:28

Your involvement shows that it's an issue way beyond what maybe the public conversation is right now, which is primarily around um law enforcement's use of flock and sharing of that data with federal immigration authorities. So it seems like it's a much more widespread, I don't want to say the word nefarious. I'm not much of an alarmist, but this feel this feels um like a bigger issue than maybe people are aware of.

SPEAKER_03 16:52

It's something that deserves a lot of a lot more attention than it has because it it has a lot of different aspects to it. There's the face of the discussion that's related to how is data shared across state lines and with the federal government. That's where we see conversations happening about the justification of flock and the sharing of data with agent agencies like ICE or uh Homeland Security or other federal agencies that may or may not deserve the data of our uh you know citizens' locations everywhere they go. But but then there's also just general privacy and Fourth Amendment uh constitutional rights conversations happening about it. Um there have been Supreme Court decisions in the past that say tracking somebody's continuous GPS location is not constitutional. However, these flock cameras paint almost exactly the same picture and in a lot of cases provide a lot more um than even just that. There are also aspects of this that are around just the technical competency of flock safety as a company. There are security researchers online that have pointed out a shocking number of security vulnerabilities in the systems that the company has chosen to ignore, making the flock safety system vulnerable for people to misuse it. Um hackers to take all of the data that they're collecting and use them for their own purposes. So yeah, there's a lot of different different aspects of this of this conversation, and that's why my role in it all is just to get more people talking about it, get more attention on it, because I can't possibly be an expert in all of those areas. So the one thing I can do is try to get more people thinking about it, having conversations about it with their friends and family coworkers.

SPEAKER_01 19:04

So that's your role. What is our role as ordinary listeners? I'm listening to this on a Wednesday morning, I'm scared and motivated to act. What do I do? How can I get involved? How can I help?

SPEAKER_03 19:16

Well, there's a lot of good information online about Flock and the benefits of Flock and the problematic aspects of Flock. I would encourage everyone to read a little bit of both and see where your heart lands when you understand that these systems have been added to our communities very aggressively and very um discreetly. And then also wonder about what ways these pieces of technology could be productive for society if they were used responsibly or if the companies that were installing them had a higher level of stewardship to the communities that they are surveilling. Furthermore, just understanding the constitution is is kind of uh it's it's an important thing, I guess, like in in terms of the Fourth Amendment, which is not usually one of the amendments that gets a lot of attention and you don't think about a lot, but um reviewing what your rights are as an American and recognizing that they are protected, and if we start installing loopholes to the Fourth Amendment, that those rights will slowly start to evaporate if we don't stand up and say something about it. If you want to like take more uh actionable uh measures, uh talking to your state senator is also a uh a good first step. Um there are some conversations happening, um, some big bills being drafted around government access to historical location information through systems like Flock. Um, but like anything legislation-wise, which I am not an expert on, it requires a lot of attention and a lot of conversations and um it it requires some momentum from the people that these senators represent to actually follow through on. So um just because bills are being drafted doesn't mean that bills are being passed. And um, if you care about getting things passed, now is the time to um say something about it to the people that represent you because things like Flock and things like ALPR surveillance technologies are starting to come up as things that legislators are talking about and thinking about. And if the first

SPEAKER_01 22:00

gut reaction to those um to those bills as an overwhelming we don't want them or we think we need more guardrails around them then i think it'll set a good precedent for any any of these issues to come if you watched the or participated in the longmont city council recently um had a discussion about what to do with their flock cameras and i i find those really interesting to watch um and this can be said of almost any public safety measure that is taken the police make an argument for hey well we wouldn't be able to solve this crime or this crime or this crime without this tool and I'm someone who likes to um kind of blame the system not the people in it uh that's that's my ML um and so I I understand where they're coming from but I do think as always with any public safety decision we have to decide for ourselves as citizens like sure we could use all the tools we want and solve every crime um but we're gonna give up a lot of the rights along the way so to me I try to frame it with to people like that of like sure you you might be losing the the solving of this crime but you have to weigh that against the losing of your rights and the potential harms that are there. So I I always like to present things in that sort of way. There's probably not a question in there, but I just wonder like is that how people are talking about it? Is that how they're thinking about it? Like what's the conversation look like because you mentioned earlier that no public safety folks that you ever talk to um I forget what your phrase was but I'm just wondering if you had conversations with police and law enforcement about the tools that they're using.

SPEAKER_03 23:46

Yeah I I was at the Longmont City Council meeting um that resulted in the city of Longmont deciding to pause their contract while they did some more research on vendors. And one of my biggest takeaways from that meeting was that there's this um sort of wolf in sheep's clothing situation happening with ALPRs. ALPRs by the way are not brand new technology we've been using them for for decades even I mean the uh any system that checks uh license plates to uh hand out parking tickets or even highway cameras uh that monitor license plates and uh you know send you toll bills or um act or check crime databases to see if you're in a stolen vehicle those have existed for a long time and in in particular I don't have much issue with using license plate readers to try to help prevent crime but the wolf in sheep's clothing thing that I'm I'm seeing going on right here is that the flock safety systems are being marketed to police departments as a sort of upgraded version of these license plate readers but in reality they have uh 10 other different pieces of technology also latched on that the public isn't having conversations about we're not talking about the facial recognition we're not talking about the AI portion of it we're not talking about the data sharing and the social network of police departments uh giving data back and forth to each other we're not talking about the um federal data access implications um the product is being sold to police departments as uh a slightly better license plate reader you already have them so we don't need to think about them we don't need to really get into the weeds there but the reality is that there's a lot of dangerous technology underneath the hood that we haven't had conversations out about as a community and now everybody is in this scenario where we're realizing they're already there they've already been installed and now we have to do all the hard work in rolling them back because it turns out there is a whole baked potato of features and technology and uh uh difficult questions hiding underneath the firmware also part of that longmont discussion they talked about you know alternatives to flock are there alternatives that you know don't have some of these security vulnerabilities or the ethical concerns or is it really the technology itself so it really doesn't matter who's providing it or is it a little bit of both finding an alternative is is hard because um we keep talking about flock but there's 10 other companies that are trying to uh replicate the flock business model and are waiting in line for cities like Longmont to just uh move to a different uh a different frying pan so to speak I guess I would I would go back to what to what I was just talking about which is that ALPR technology has been a part of the police tool belt for a while now um we've seen a lot of cities adopt flock as an upgraded tool but that doesn't mean the tools they were using before have just disappeared if we had it my way we just would have never introduced these high-tech AI enabled ALPR clone type of systems um in the first place we had ALPRs that were scanning license plates and checking them against amber alerts and stolen vehicle registries those existed already we never needed to upgrade to an AI system at all the conversation does sort of feel like well what do we replace it with and my answer is we should have never had it in the first place. So replace it with nothing or use the tools that you were using before to to solve uh these crimes or check vehicles against uh crime databases anything else that we should be talking about that we're not I know we're coming up on time here but um anything else you think is crucial a crucial part of this conversation that we are leaving out also I know 30 minutes is not long enough for this conversation but no I mean it's uh once again it's it's a it's a big deep long issue to talk about and to think about I spent many nights you know going back and forth about well maybe there is efficacy in using these types of systems to help fight crime I personally believe that we do need to continue to use technology and provide our police departments with advanced tools to make policing uh more affordable it's hard for police departments to afford adding more members to their force so um I can see the reasons why departments are adopting this technology but I just really really really wish that people would talk with their community about what they're using them for and what kind of guardrails that we want around the use of of this technology because right now it's completely unfettered access to the location and personal privacy of every Coloradin.

SPEAKER_01 29:46

Okay two bonus questions first one do you opt out of facial recognition at the airport?

SPEAKER_03 29:52

I do not I I believe that my face is in every kind of database that there possibly is so I I'm not the type of person that's trying to fight it. I acknowledge that these tools are a part of of our world what I have an issue with are the entities that own that data and how they're using it.

SPEAKER_01 30:15

Okay second bonus question and this can be related to what we're talking about this issue or topic or it can be related to anything else but I'm trying to ask this of all my guests is what's something that is giving you hope or inspiring you right now well sometimes the world can seem pretty dark um especially these days but I think something that's giving me hope is that there's a lot more access to understanding what these technologies can do.

SPEAKER_03 30:47

These things are a lot easier to research uh with the tools that we have today. We have AI on our side too and we can learn about how Fox safety works or how AL part PR systems work. We can understand security vulnerabilities and we can do a lot more as people that want to have activism types of conversations about it. We can do a lot more today than I think we could in the past um it just takes a little bit of uh you know effort from everyone a little bit of organization but we have tools too and I I see a lot of people uh getting fired up and organizing and putting their minds to trying to stand up and say something about it. So that that gives me hope that that people are out there and they're impassioned and that they have tools to communicate and spread the word themselves